Republicans apologize to top 1.5%

By Andy Borowitz
 
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In the aftermath of the fiscal-cliff deal, Republicans in Congress issued a heartfelt apology to the top 1.5 per cent richest people in America, offering “messages of profound condolence” for allowing their taxes to increase slightly.

“Our hearts go out to them,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), still teary-eyed after hanging up the phone with a multimillionaire in Orange County, California. “We came to Washington to do the work of 1.5 per cent of the American people, and we didn’t get it done.”

The House Speaker said that he had spoken to several members of the top 1.5 per cent who were “understandably despondent” over seeing their taxes rise marginally as a result of the deal: “Some of them were so upset they even considered moving to Canada, until they found out the taxes were higher there.”

Mr. Boehner said that he tried to offer the wealthy consolation by reminding them that because of an increase in payroll taxes, millions of middle-class and working-class Americans would be suffering more than they would: “That usually put them in a better mood.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) assailed the fiscal-cliff legislation today, calling it “a classic example of putting 98.5 per cent of the American people ahead of the rest of the country.”

Offering words of hope to the top 1.5 per cent, Mr. Cantor said, “In a few months we’ll have the next debate about the debt ceiling. As God is my witness, we will try to do a better job of bringing this nation to the brink of Armageddon.”

But to billionaires such as Harland Dorrinson, a longtime super-donor to the G.O.P., such assurances ring hollow: “If the fiscal-cliff deal is the kind of performance we can expect from Republican politicians, what’s the point of owning them?”


Photograph by Mark Peterson/Redux.

Water for CP golf course must be challenged

By Jim Keyworth
Gazette Blog Editor

Just to keep the issue of the town selling Chaparral Pines water for its golf course alive, here is a comment that a reader recently posted on the blog:

"I believe when Chaparral (Pines) was approved way back when, they were to dig wells and bought a ranch to water the golf course. Why is the town selling water when they don't even have a pipeline yet? So many questions and so few answers. Thank heavens a mayor can only have 2 terms."

We need to make sure we don't miss the meeting when this murky deal comes to a vote.  I doubt that this council will do the right thing when so much money is at stake, but what they are doing - selling potable water for a rich man's golf course for 49 years at cost - cannot go unchallenged.

We understand a town councilor has asked Payson water guru (who knows what his title is these days) Buzz Walker what percentage of the water dumped on the golf course can actually be pumped out of the ground and resold.  No answer yet.  Payson Mayor Kenny Evans says all of it.  

The Roundup bought that ridiculous assertion hook, line and sinker.  Or at least the editor lacks the cojones to stand up and challenge the mayor.

Meanwhile, town hydrologist Mike Ploughe has bailed.  He's down the road.  Please stay tuned. 

P.S. If I'm not mistaken, Kenny is on his third term already.  At least it sure feels like it. 

An ugly deal

By Robert Borosage 
| January 1, 2013 |
Campaign for America's Future
ourfuture.org

 
Early this morning, the Senate passed the fiscal cliff deal by 89-8, a margin virtually guaranteeing that it will survive in the House (which it did late Tuesday night, 257-167).  The deal has some good parts.  It lets the Bush tax cuts expire on the wealthy, raises the estate tax marginally and increases taxes on capital gains and dividends a bit.  Unemployment benefits are extended for a year.  Tax boosts for the low paid workers – the child tax credit, expanded earned income credit, refundable tuition tax credits – are extended, if only for five years.  Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are not touched.

But no one should be fooled.  This is an ugly deal, with foul implications for the coming months.
 
1.  Setting Up the Next Extortion
The most ominous part of the deal is what was left out.  The deal makes no provision for lifting the debt ceiling.  It postpones the sequester (automatic cuts in domestic and military spending) for only two months.  It is a smaller deficit reduction package than that originally sought by the president.  It therefore sets up the right-wing House zealots to hold the economy hostage once more, while demanding deep cuts in public services (known as cuts in domestic spending), backed by a media frenzy about deficits.  And while Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid escaped unscathed in this deal, they will be the prime targets in the coming debate.
 
2.  Hiking Taxes for Working Americans; A Million Jobs Lost  
By allowing the payroll tax cut to expire, every working American gets a tax hike of 2% of their income (up to about $113,000 in income).  A worker making $50,000 a year will pay an extra $1,000 in taxes.  Payroll checks will be cut.  Belts will have to be tightened even more.  That will lower demand, producing job loss totaling up to an estimated million jobs.  (Taxes on the wealthy go up also, but those have only marginal effects on jobs).
 
3.  Compromising the Compromising President
President Obama sensibly told Republicans that he would not sign any bill or agree to any deal that extended the Bush tax cuts on those making over $250,000.   He had stumped on that across the country on this pledge and received a mandate from the voters.  Polls showed the majority of Americans were with him.  With all the Bush tax breaks due to expire, Republicans were faced with letting taxes go up on everyone just to defend tax breaks for the richest Americans.  The President began the negotiations saying this was not negotiable.  He could not have been in a stronger position.
 
But he chose to compromise.  The Bush tax cuts will be allowed to expire on couples making over $450,000.  This costs about $150-200 billion in revenue over 10 years.  The president argues he got the important extension of unemployment insurance and the working poor tax credits in return.  But these could have been folded into a package after going over the cliff.  And the cost to the president is significant.  Once more Republicans have learned that obstruction works, that the president will always blink.
 
The next extortion – the debt ceiling, automatic sequester – in the next eight weeks makes this a big deal.  The President says sensibly that he will not negotiate over lifting the debt ceiling.  Period.  And now there is even less reason for the Republicans to believe him than before. This encourages extreme demands rather than discouraging them.  This was the time to draw the line.
 
4.  Feeding the deficit distraction
The deal is already being denounced in the mainstream media as “too timid,” offering too little in deficit reduction.  It guarantees the next eight weeks will be fixated on the debate about what to cut and how much to cut headed into the debt ceiling.
 
But this entire debate is wrong-headed.  You can’t fix the debt without fixing the economy.  And deficit reduction won’t fix the economy.  The recovery is too slow and too skewed to put people back to work.  Deficit reduction can only slow it further.
We need a big and bold debate about fundamental reforms needed to make this economy work for working people.  That includes making big investments vital to our future at a time when we can borrow for virtually nothing – rebuilding and modernizing our decrepit infrastructure, funding R&D, doing at least the basics in education.  We need to balance our trade, and revive manufacturing, beginning with capturing a leading role in the global move to clean energy.
 
We need to address inequality frontally.  That requires much more than small marginal increases in taxes for millionaires.  It includes raising the minimum wage, empowering workers to organize and bargain for a fair share of the profits they help to generate, limiting perverse CEO compensation schemes.  It includes a financial transaction tax that might curb Wall Street gambling.
 
We need to continue health care reform, taking on the entrenched lobbies — the drug and insurance companies, the private hospital complexes — that drive up our medical costs.  If we paid per capita what other industrial countries pay for health care, we’d project surpluses as far as the eye can see.  We have to fix our broken health care system.
 
But Washington is talking about none of this.  Instead the Congress and the President are going to continue to debate how much more to cut from public services as if that would fix the economy.   That debate is likely to turn foul.  Republicans use the debt ceiling to demand structural cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  They’ll likely be willing to repeal or dilute the sequester as an incentive to focus on the core security programs.  And they’ll be convinced that the president will fold once more.

Americans are struggling with mass unemployment, declining wages, increasing insecurity, Gilded Age inequality.  Trimming the deficit addresses none of these, and is likely to slow growth, making things worse.
 
We’ve had an ugly debate leading to a wretched agreement.  And that agreement only insures that the debate will get uglier.

Perspective on the deal

New York Times

January 1, 2013, 8:48 am 

readersupportednews.org

To make sense of what just happened, we need to ask what is really at stake, and how much difference the budget deal makes in the larger picture.

So, what are the two sides really fighting about? Surely the answer is, the future of the welfare state. Progressives want to maintain the achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society, and also implement and improve Obamacare so that we become a normal advanced country that guarantees essential health care to all its citizens. The right wants to roll the clock back to 1930, if not to the 19th century.

There are two ways progressives can lose this fight. One is direct defeat on the question of social insurance, with Congress actually voting to privatize and eventually phase out key programs — or with Democratic politicians themselves giving away their political birthright in the name of a mess of pottage Grand Bargain. The other is for conservatives to successfully starve the beast — to drive revenue so low through tax cuts that the social insurance programs can’t be sustained.

The good news for progressives is that danger #1 has been averted, at least so far — and not without a lot of anxiety first. Romney lost, so nothing like the Ryan plan is on the table until President Santorum takes office, or something. Meanwhile, in 2011 Obama was willing to raise the Medicare age, in 2012 to cut Social Security benefits; but luckily the extremists of the right scuttled both deals. There are no cuts in benefits in this deal.

The bad news is that the deal falls short on making up for the revenue lost due to the Bush tax cuts. Here, though, it’s important to put the numbers in perspective. Obama wasn’t going to let all the Bush tax cuts go away in any case; only the high-end cuts were on the table. Getting all of those ended would have yielded something like $800 billion; he actually got around $600 billion. How big a difference does that make?

Well, the CBO estimates cumulative potential GDP over the next decade at $208 trillion.So the difference between what Obama got and what he arguably should have gotten is around 0.1 percent of potential GDP. That’s not crucial, to say the least.

And on the principle of the thing, you could say that Democrats held their ground on the essentials — no cuts in benefits — while Republicans have just voted for a tax increase for the first time in decades.

So why the bad taste in progressives’ mouths? It has less to do with where Obama ended up than with how he got there. He kept drawing lines in the sand, then erasing them and retreating to a new position. And his evident desire to have a deal before hitting the essentially innocuous fiscal cliff bodes very badly for the confrontation looming in a few weeks over the debt ceiling.

If Obama stands his ground in that confrontation, this deal won’t look bad in retrospect. If he doesn’t, yesterday will be seen as the day he began throwing away his presidency and the hopes of everyone who supported him.

Michael Moore's New Year's resolutions

Portrait, Michael Moore, 04/03/09. (photo: Ann-Christine Poujoulat/Getty Images)

By Michael Moore, Open Mike Blog

01 January 13

readersupportednews.org

appy New Year! Have you made your resolutions for 2013? Here are mine:

1. Learn the names of the people two doors down from me and invite them over for dinner.


2. Learn how to make dinner.


3. Buy a gun. Stroke it. Squeeze it. Hold it. Love it. Shoot it! Ahhhh... Buy more guns... Stroke them...


4. Stop saying "I support the troops." I don't. I used to. I understand why so many enlisted after 9/11. Sadly, many of them were then trapped and sent off to invade Iraq. I felt for all of them. I understood those who joined because of a lousy economy. But at some point all individuals must answer for their actions, and now that we know our military leaders do things that have nothing to do with defending our lives, why would anyone sign up for this rogue organization?


5. Apologize for #4. I have enormous respect for anyone who would offer to sacrifice their life to defend my right to live. Is there any greater gift one can give another? It's not the troops' fault they're sent to invade other countries for dubious reasons and outright lies. It's OUR responsibility to prevent this, to elect representatives who believe in peace, and to only put our troops in harm's way when it's absolutely necessary. My uncle was killed in World War II. Today would have been his 90th birthday. My dad still misses him. Our family has served this country in the military since the Revolutionary War. None of them watch Fox News.


6. Drink more water.


7. Wear color.


8. Find the best person who can run for and WIN the governor's chair here in Michigan in 2014. Work every day to win back the Michigan House and Senate from its Republican majority.


9. Read more fiction. Support my local indie bookstore. Help people create Little Free Libraries and put one up in front of our theater in Traverse City. Don't use glowing screens to read books. Write the next one.


10. Keep walking, dude!

That's my list. Send me yours via Twitter and Facebook. Click here to join me on the walks. Let's be kind to each other in the coming year. And let's encourage Obama to ACT, to make history, and to be remembered as one of our greatest presidents.

Here's hoping for a peaceful 2013.

How to avert a self-inflicted crisis

By Andy Borowitz
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Official Washington was in celebration mode on New Year’s Day after kind of averting a completely unnecessary crisis that was entirely of its own creation.

“This deal proves that if we all procrastinate long and hard enough, we can semi-solve any self-inflicted problem at the very last minute in a way that satisfies no one,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky).

But even as Sen. McConnell basked in self-congratulation, he warned Congress against the complacency that could come with having sort of fixed its own completely avoidable mess.

“This is a new year, and much work remains to be done,” he said. “It’s up to us to concoct entirely new optional disasters that we will have to undo at some later date in a more or less half-assed way.”

In a related story, an arsonist received an award for putting out his own fire.

Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty

POETRY: Holiday verse by Bruce Wales

Happy New Years to my Christmas Tree

By Bruce Wales

There's always that eve when I sit with the tree

with its ornaments, lights, and new orbs

when I feel I have missed the season's best dish

of holiday's meanings and forms.

I collar the dog to sit near its base

and trigger their photo for sure,

a memory to save for me and mine

to prove it was Christmas again.

I've taken some sips of some sherry or wine

to lighten, yet savor the time

of recurring hist'ries and meanings of times,

when childhood was life's biggest lens,

And hopes were the fuel that burned in my breast

before there was feint or deceit

and life would be nothing but what I would plan

and love would come without behest.

So, New Years Eve, it happens this year

that we sit alone with the tree,

Morose a bit, alone a bit,

even needles are drying alone.

I will stand up tall ignoring the toll

and brazen my life till it's gone,

and walk up the hill to get my life's fill

long after this evergreen's gone.