Debt burden continues to decline under profligate Democrats

First, household debt:

(Image from Quartz, via Barry Ritholtz)

Now, that’s pretty easy. If the bank forecloses on your house, your debt is extinguished. This is not really the kind of debt decline we’d like to see. But actually the federal deficit has been falling since the end of the recession.

(image from FRED)

So, yes, at 8.6% of GDP as of 2011, the deficit is too high. As more people go back to work, the payroll tax holiday goes away, and the wealthy are cajoled into paying a little more in taxes, the deficit should drop swiftly… it’s already down from the 10.1% of GDP achieved by Dubya Bush in fiscal year 2009 (ending in October 2009, and therefore preceding almost all of the stimulus spending, contrary to what James “Dow 36000” Glassman thinks, only 22%–$33B– had been spent, most in the form of a special payment to Social Security recipients).

The magic number is about 3% of GDP. As long as the deficit remains under that limit, the debt burden will not rise, since it will be within population + productivity growth. Notice which presidents achieved that level of deficit or better.

Wise Words on John Edwards

Scott Horton:

The Edwards prosecutors may well win their case, but not because any crime was involved. Rather, they’re likely to win because John Edwards is one of the most reviled politicians in the United States, and so a choice target. No doubt his affair, undertaken while his heroic wife was dying of cancer, makes him the definition of a cad, but while he may be morally unsuited for high office, that is not the question in this trial. If Edwards can be imprisoned for using campaign funds to try to cover up his flaws, then few politicians could fairly escape prison. The Justice Department appears instead to be engaged in statutory vandalism, and it is awarding itself exceptional power to intrude into the electoral process—a power that is ripe for abuse, as the Edwards case demonstrates.

One more partisan Bush U.S. state attorney is allowed to apply a wrecking ball to the legal system by one of the most cowardly Attorney Generals the USDoJ has even had. In support of which claim, two words: Don Siegelman.

Duck Soup/Updated

Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly (via t/o):

Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.

Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.

In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

Harman declined to discuss the wiretap allegations, instead issuing an angry denial through a spokesman.

So NSA wiretapping is ultra hushhush top secret unless it traps a powerful Democrat. Jane Harman is one of my least favorite Democrats, and the ability of AIPAC to affect American policy is worrisome, but using wiretaps in this manner is just.plain.wrong.

Added: Emptywheel notes that the wiretap was legal under the original FISA and says that Harman is not a victim. Look: if what Harman did was illegal, charge her. Do not spill the story into the newspapers.

Also: A key element of the story has been refuted. Since it’s Bill Keller doing the refuting, I’ll wait for confirmation, but this story smells wrong.

Updated, 4/22: Via FDL, we learn from Laura Rozen has also raised some doubts, suggesting that this story may be an attempt to shift the conversation from torture to Democratic complicity in Bushco misdeeds. Glenn Greenwald, noting Josh Marshall’s reporting, cautions that Harman’s guilt should not be assumed. Stein himself has no idea who the “agent” is; it could be Britney Spears for all anyone knows. And Harman has issued a strong denial.

Even if you don’t care about the law or the Constitution, ask yourself who is benefiting from the turmoil created by this story?

Your Murdoch Media

“Economists Give Obama a Failing Grade”. That was the headline generated by a Wall Street (Murdoch) Journal story that was of course trumpeted by FOX (Murdoch) News and found its way to legitimate mainstream outlets.

However, an alert TPM reader drilled down into the WSJ’s poll, and found that even with it designed to provide the headlines they wanted, the reality is a bit different than advertised:

Well, look at the survey: 49 economists polled using a 0-100 scale. The catch is that the WSJ put that into a “school grade” mechanism, meaning that anything less than a 60 is FAILING.

Even with that skewed waiting toward failure, still 58% of economist gave Obama a passing grade!

That pretty much mirrors the non-rich investor class of regular Americans in the Gallup survey of 62% approval.

And of course, none of the economists were identified, so don’t be surprised if we later find out that most of them worship at the altar of Frederich Hayek and/or the Mises Institute.

Nazi Appeaser

In response to Bush’s comparison of Democrats to those who appeased the Nazis, Atrios reminds us how Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power.

Fruit Of The Poison Tree

Isn’t it interesting that the only times Billo lets Democrats onto his shows is when they’re bashing other Democrats? That’s what happened last night, when former Kossack “alegre” apparently went onto O’Reilly’s show to tell everyone how evil Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is.

Ok, scanning through TV channels there on Fox was a stunning sight. A Hillery [sic] supporter whining to Bill O’Riley [sic] about blogging on Kos and explaining the so-called “strike”.

Not much for a diary and yet something needed to be said.

Are these people just totally insane? First, the idea of a strike happening in a voluntary non-paid situation, on a board in which they are arguable guests being permitted an opportunity to talk without paying a fee.

That alone shows they do not understand their situation, nor the purpose of a strike. One who claims to be a Democrat ought to take the labor movement with a enough seriousness to understand work stoppage and collective bargaining.<

That they carried tales of the situation to an channel that works against Democrats in general, and in particular to a program hosted by one who is not friends to Democrats or bloggers is amazing.

Hillary it seems should worry about friends like this as much as the opposition.

Another Kossack saw the same program, and noticed that a top Clinton advisor, Jehmu Greene, was on the show dissing Daily Kos as “liberal elitism at its worst” — and Clinton supporters at MyDD applauded this. Repeatedly.

Democrats and progs in general are letting cons like O’Reilly use them just to attack other Democrats.

Hillary fans are using garbage from WorldNetDaily and NewsMax — sites that got their start bashing the Clintons! — to attack Obama. Obama fans are mindlessly reciting long-debunked lies about Whitewater.

Stop it. Stop it now.

Scott Says It. I Believe It.

That settles it.

The key grafs:

In today’s New York Times, a New Jersey Republican politician and former prosecutor, John Farmer (whom the Times inexplicably fails to identify by his political badge—an issue that the Public Editor needs to address), counters concerns that the investigation that brought down Eliot Spitzer was politically motivated. In Farmer’s presentation, concerns about the way the prosecution was brought are being raised by “supporters of Spitzer” as part of a “strategy” in his “defense.”

Farmer’s analysis is feeble and unconvincing, and his premises are false.

[…]

The key questions that need to be asked go to the extraordinary allocation of resources and manpower for this operation and the application of level standards. Here again, the Bush Justice Department has one set of standards when Republican officials fall into a prostitution ring, and an entirely different set when the target is a Democrat who is threatening the Republican Party’s power base in Albany. We just need to look over the “D.C. Madam” case, which caught in its snare a high-level official of the Bush Administration and a Republican senator. But the Bush Justice Department’s attitude towards that case couldn’t be more different. It is deferential towards the customers and has shown no interest in bringing charges against any of them. It has also engaged in extraordinary somersaults to keep the names of the Republicans caught up in the case out of the media. The two cases, compared with care, point convincingly to a partisan political double standard.

The Bush Justice Department complains it has no resources to investigate or deal with the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, a woman from Houston who was gang-raped, brutalized and held hostage by American contractors in Iraq. It claims it has no resources to deal with dozens of similar cases involving rape and assault by or against U.S. citizens. It has no resources to deal with hundreds of cases involving massive contract fraud, tallying into the billions of dollars, in Iraq. Its prosecution of white-collar crime across the country has fallen through the floor. But this same Justice Department allocates millions in resources to ensnare a prominent Democratic politician in a sex tryst at the Mayflower Hotel. This evidences an extremely curious set of priorities—priorities which are suspiciously driven by a partisan politics, not a sober and responsible interest in law enforcement.

Hypocrisy: IOKIYAR

One of the reasons the news media is all over the Eliot Spitzer story — at least the sex part of it, as opposed to looking at the questionable means used to nab him, or the fact that his antagonists had a target before they had a crime to hang on him — is because of the “hypocrisy angle”: “He busted hookers, so he should really pay hard for paying for them!”

Which would be all well and good, but somehow the press never got around to applying that same standard to another political john, Diaper David Vitter — who was not only not hounded out of his Senate seat, but staunchly defended by the same cons now attacking Spitzer. This comparative gentleness towards Vitter is why the man who was well-known in the DC and Canal Street sex-worker industry is still in the Senate pushing legislation like this:

Who needs fiction when you’ve got politics? You really can’t make this stuff up.

As Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s (D-NY) political career comes to an end for his involvement with a prostitution ring, Sen. David Vitter, (R-LA) of “DC Madame” fame, plans to amend the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to reinsert the 33 percent abstinence-only earmark.

Sen. Vitter, not exactly a model for abstinence, or being faithful, has the audacity to put his hypocritical ideology ahead of evidence-based public health strategies that tell us abstinence-only should be removed from PEPFAR. He puts ideology ahead of his own reality in the ultimate paternalistic perversion of “do as I say, not as I do.”

And need I point out that the only reason the Republicans made even a half-hearted attempt to shame Larry Craig into retiring after his arrest in the airport john hit the news was because he was caught propositioning a man? If he’d stuck to women like Diaper Dave, they’d have closed ranks around him immediately like they did with Diaper Dave. Once again, It’s OK If You’re A Republican!

A Tale Of Three Johns

If you Google “David Vitter prostitute“, you get around 30,000 references to the sex scandal that broke last July involving a sitting Republican Senator known for his straight-arrow “family values” image. Senator Vitter has yet to resign.

If you Google Larry Craig prostitute, you get just under 48,000 references to the sex scandal that broke last August involving another sitting Republican Senator known for his straight-arrow “family values” image. Senator Craig has yet to resign.

But if you Google “Eliot Spitzer prostitute“, you get over 261,000 references to the sex scandal involving a sitting Democratic governor with a straight-arrow image, and that scandal isn’t even 48 hours old yet.

Clearly, Spitzer could be free and clear right now if he’d only been a Republican. It’s really the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free card. Just ask Don Siegelman.

Pounding The Table

The old lawyer’s saw goes something like this, if I recall it correctly: “If the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. If the facts are not on your side, pound the table.”

A new shadowy wingnut-welfare group is out there and buying a lot of table-pounding and oppo-flinging:

Stepping up the pressure on House Democrats, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has launched a national ad campaign criticizing Democrats for not passing the Senate’s surveillance bill.

According to the group’s press release, the ad “will be seen on cable and satellite stations throughout the country and is also seen locally in 17 media markets across the United States.” The ads target 15 House Democrats, such as Rep. Tim Walz (D-MN). Brian Wise, the spokesman for the group, told me that the group had chosen the 15 because they were Dems “who we believe understand the issue and who would be the most effective to pushing the House leadership to vote on this.” He added: “politics really has nothing to do with it.”

Uh-huh. Then why is it that your little group is lying out its ass about the bill, won’t disclose its donors, and is run by Clifford D. May, who in addition to being a fixture at the National Review and other wingnut-welfare outlets, was the RNC’s Communications Director during the late 1990s?

Recovering Republican Ron Amundson has a great idea for a counter-ad. Kudos to Ollie at BSP for pointing me to this. By the way, considering that Tim Walz has resisted the Fear Factor crapola surrounding FISA, maybe it might be time for Open Left to consider taking him off their Enemies List? It might be something to show that, in the wake of the primary-endorsement fiasco involving Al Franken, the national netroots isn’t as clueless and ham-handed as they can sometimes seem when intervening in local politics.

UPDATE: Ollie at BSP says that Rep Eliot Engle (D-NY), one of the token Democrats on the FDD masthead, has apparently decided to leave the group as a direct response to their targeting Democrats with their FISA-fear ads. Oh, and somebody might want to ask Tom Scheck why he cites the Owatonna People’s Press instead of Bluestem Prairie on the FDD-Walz flap, even though the OPP has no RSS feed and it’s not a paper he seems to visit regularly, whereas he’s been familar with BSP since at least December of 2006.