Trump Praises Putin at National Security Forum

Last night's National Security Forum seems to have revealed little new other than a re-enforcing of the Trump-Putin bromance and that Trump wants to sharply increase military spending - at the unspoken expense of social and infrastructure spending.  Trump again lied about his support for the Iraq War notwithstanding recorded evidence to the contrast.    With respect to Putin, I suspect Trump would love to emulate Russia's corrupt and oppressive regime, particularly Putin's control of the press and airwaves, the murder of Putin's political opponents and the manner in which Putin cronies rape and pillage Russia to enrich themselves at the expense of the Russian people. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the events at the forum.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump defended his admiration for Russian President Vladi­mir Putin at a forum here Wednesday focused on national security issues, even suggesting that Putin is more worthy of his praise than President Obama.

The Republican presidential nominee said that an alliance with Russia would help defeat the Islamic State, and when asked to defend some of Putin’s aggressions on the world stage, he asked, “Do you want me to start naming some of the things Obama does at the same time?”

Trump also said he appreciated some of the kind words Putin has had for him. “Well, I think when he calls me brilliant, I think I’ll take the compliment, okay?”

Clinton offered herself as a model of “absolute rock steadiness” on foreign policy, and Trump promised to be a disruptive force for improvement, saying that under Obama even the military’s generals have been “reduced to rubble.”

He reaffirmed his view that having men and women serve alongside one another is the root of the military’s sexual-assault problem. He said recent intelligence briefings have convinced him that Clinton and other Obama administration officials did not heed the advice of experts. And he praised Putin, noting among other things the Russian president’s “82 percent approval rating.”

Ahead of Wednesday’s forum, Trump delivered a speech in Philadelphia in which he called for a robust expansion of U.S. military capabilities and an end to budget sequestration on defense spending.

Trump said he was not a fan of the Russian system of government but predicted continued good relations with Putin, saying: “I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin, and I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Russia.”

Trump denied that mutual admiration between him and the Russian leader would benefit Russia in its dealings with the United States. 

Trump leads Clinton by 19 points — 55 percent to 36 percent — among voters who are serving or have served in the U.S. military, according to the NBC News/SurveyMonkey tracking poll.

The demographics of military veterans align closely with Trump’s strongest sources of support. More than 9 in 10 are men, and about 8 in 10 are white. In 2012, among military veterans, Republican Mitt Romney bested Obama by about 20 points, according to exit polls.

On Tuesday, Trump announced that he has been endorsed by 88 retired senior military officials. Not to be outdone, Clinton released a list Wednesday showing the support of 95 retired generals and admirals, more than any recent nonincumbent Democrat, her campaign said. Meanwhile, Clinton noted that Trump’s endorsement figure was more than 400 shy of the last Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

The Myth That America's Military Has Become Weak

click image to enlarge

Living in a region with a huge U.S. military presence, it is difficult to take Republican claims that America's military has become second rate during the Obama presidency for anything other than untrue sound bites aimed at the uninformed and ignorant.  In fact, America's 2012 military spending budget was equal to the combined spending of the next 10 nations' military spending.  That's right, equal to then next 10 largest military budgets.  Our navy continues to dwarf other navies and has 19 of the 31 aircraft carriers in the world.  Business Insider piece from two years ago - little has changed in the interim - looks at the lies that the likes of Marcobot, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are now using to dupe the ignorant and uninformed.  Here are excerpts:

American military might is beyond question.  This chart [above] from April 2013, which is making the rounds again, shows that America's 2012 defense budget surpassed that of the next 10 countries combined.

Another example of American military dominance is all of the world's aircraft carriers: The U.S. has 19 aircraft carriers (including 10 massive ones), compared to 12 operated by other countries.

Fear Won the GOP Presidential Debate

Overall, there seems to be any consensus as to who won the Republican Presidential debate last night.  Yes, Jebbie Bush got in a few licks against The Donald and reminded the audience that the Geneva Conventions still exist (not that his idiot brother and Dick Cheney let that bother them), but seemingly there is little movement to be seen in polling numbers.  But, as a piece in Politico, there was indeed one winner: fear or perhaps more accurately, fear mongering.  And the overall solution the GOP clown card offered is belligerence, calls for "troops on the ground," and, of course, killing Muslims.  In the process, the would be commanders in chief showed most were not ready for prime time.  Ted Cruz may hay released classified information, Chris Christie talked about talking face to face with the king of Jordan who has been dead for 16 years, and as noted in a prior post, Ben Carson advocated for killing women and children in the fight against ISIS.  Sadly, the mainstream media is doing its best to whip up fear and anxiety and, thus are aiding the GOP.  Here are highlights from the Politico piece:

[I]t’s accurate to say that the debate was all about terrorism—how to fight it, how to keep Americans safe from it, and how much Americans should be freaking out about it. CNN’s panelists asked no questions about jobs, wages, the impending Fed rate hike, health care, energy, infrastructure, the federal budget, the federal deficit, the Supreme Court, financial reform, abortion, race, or any other domestic issue unrelated to homeland security. “Americans are more afraid today than they’ve been at any time since 9/11,” Wolf Blitzer declared, and the main theme of the debate—from the candidates, but arguably from the network as well—was that they ought to be even more afraid.

Immigration was a prominent topic, but mostly in the context of keeping jihadist refugees out of the U.S. Energy came up, but only in the context of reducing U.S. dependence on oil from terror-supporting nations. Guns came up, but only in the context of Obama’s proposal to deny guns to Americans on the terror watch list. The economy barely came up, although Kasich did say strengthening the economy would help defeat ISIS. Rand Paul brought up the federal debt in his closing statement, calling it the greatest threat to U.S. security.

Polls after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks have found that terrorism has become the most pressing issue for the public. It’s a complex issue, worthy of debate, and last night’s focus on terror produced several interesting disagreements among the Republicans—over regime change and foreign entanglements, over domestic surveillance, over Syrian refugees and border security. But CNN’s implicit assumption was that non-terror issues are no longer as important for 2016. “You all have different strategies for keeping America safe and that will be the focus of our debate tonight,” Blitzer said at the outset.

There was little acknowledgment during the conversation that Americans have anything to fear from anything other than terrorists, or that the terrorist threat could be anything but dire. In fact, since 9/11, more Americans have been killed by lightning strikes than by terror attacks—and way more Americans have been killed by car accidents or preventable diseases. But that doesn’t mean Americans feel safe, especially when cable news is wall-to-wall terror coverage. There’s a fine line between covering anxiety and creating it.

Rand Paul also suggested last night that Americans shouldn’t overreact, that “we defeat terrorists by showing them we don’t fear them.” But that was a minority view on the Republican stage, as the candidates generally agreed that our military is in shambles, our president is weak, and ISIS is an existential threat. There was no sense that the U.S. spends more on its military than the next seven countries combined, and little mention of the thousands of bombs the U.S. and its allies are already dropping on ISIS.

Nobody really explained how all that belligerence would defuse a threat that can manifest itself in homegrown Americans, like the health inspector who killed his colleagues in San Bernardino. And there wasn’t much discussion of the potential for military action abroad to create unintended consequences. But near the end of the debate, Trump complained that more than a decade of U.S. intervention in the Middle East has achieved nothing, while costing trillions of dollars that could have been spent upgrading U.S. roads, bridges and airports.

It was a profound attack on the interventionist Republican foreign policy of the 21^st century; Carly Fiorina immediately pointed out, correctly, that Trump’s rhetoric echoed the Democrats. And needless to say, it was the only time anyone mentioned infrastructure.

In truth, other than waging endless war and ignoring huge domestic problems, the GOP clowns offered no real solutions - which is par for the course.

Memorial Day - How to Truly Honor the Fallen

Arlington National Cemetery

On Memorial Day we honor those who died defending our country in the nation's military.  As Wikipedia notes the holiday arose as follows:

Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the people who died while serving in the country's armed forces. The holiday, which is observed every year on the last Monday of May, originated as Decoration Day after the American Civil War in 1868, when the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans — established it as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. By the 20th century, competing Union and Confederate holiday traditions, celebrated on different days, had merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service.

It is truly right that we remember those who gave their lives for defending the country.  However, it is also right that we remember that some gave their lives needlessly in wars that should never have occurred but for politicians and generals who sought political gain and/or to satiate their egos or to justification for military spending.  The most recent of such wars being, of course, the Iraq War fiasco.  A war that was based on deliberate lies and misinformation by the Bush/Cheney regime.  A war that Republicans for the most part refuse to admit was a terrible mistake that threw away thousands of American lives.

The take away for all of this?  That if we truly honor or war dead, we should make we do not allow sleazy,dishonest politicians, the vast majority of which have no military experience and have no family members in the military to  send more of our military to their deaths needlessly.  As a piece in the New York Times notes, the current members of Congress have little connection to the military despite their swaggering and bellicose blather:

As for the current Congress, as the “PBS NewsHour” noted in November: “In all, 97 members of the next session of Congress will have served in the U.S. military. That means less than 18 percent of the new congressional delegation served in the armed forces. 

[Only] 0.4 percent of the American population is active military personnel.”

Furthermore, we are moving toward a society in which the rich and powerful avoid service while those of fewer means sometimes see it as one of only a few options.

We don't need more lives wasted.  Yet the current GOP as always stands ready to rush to war.  A piece in Salon stresses the need to avoid such efforts.  Here are highlights:

The American empire is dying, and the economy is declining. Dysfunction and disrepair define the sick status and mechanized failure of educational, medical and governmental institutions. One in 10 Americans take antidepressants, unemployment and underemployment soar, poverty blights and obliterates inner cities and rural villages alike, 45 million adults are functionally illiterate, and anyone with all but the lowest lucidity can see clearly that the political system operates as bribery for the highest bidder. Given that the top 1 percent own 40 percent of the wealth, it is likely that the extortionists who purchase political representation all shop at the same clothing store.

In an America suffering from increasing infirmity, anything that allows for denial of reality and comforts delusions of superiority becomes essential and central to the national identity. The United States military, with its garish parades and idolatrous rituals of uniform and flag consecration, functions as the final and fading echo of its country’s creed: “We are better than the rest.”

The real religion of America is America, but as the old gods of economic triumph, middle-class stability and cultural achievement begin to die, chances for sacrament become slim. Commentators and Senators were aggrieved to learn that one of America’s favorite ceremonial rites was nothing more than the slick synthesis of public relations and propaganda.  The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that from 2011 to 2014, the Department of Defense paid 14 NFL teams a total $5.4 million, while the National Guard paid 11 teams $5.3 million, to “honor America’s heroes” before football games, and during halftime shows.

[R]arely have I seen any opening or halftime ceremony include veterans in wheelchairs or vets struggling to stand on prosthetic limbs. Living and breathing human beings who come to represent the cold and callous consequences of war are not convenient symbols for American greatness or military adoration. The fact that what many citizens believed was an attempt to celebrate sacrifice was merely moneymaking stagecraft captures the vacuity of “support the troops” slogans. The fact that on the stage those veterans who most need attention and assistance – the wounded, traumatized, homeless – almost never appear captures the hypocrisy.  

[W]ar is now an abstract pride stimulator for Americans. All the troops are heroes, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are fought for freedom. It is fun to watch Chris Kyle kill people. The long-term consequences of death, and destruction of American and Middle Eastern lives are irrelevant. War, like football, is now entertainment, and the entertainment is an anesthetic for the pain of American failure. As the late George Carlin said, “We can’t educate our young people, can’t feed our poor people, can’t take care of our old people, but we can bomb the shit out of your country.”

Joseph Stiglitz calculated the cost of the war in Iraq at $3 trillion. The war in Afghanistan’s bill totals $1 trillion. As the cruelty of American foreign policy makes more veterans with disabilities and psychological trauma, it is medically and morally necessary to continually increase funding for the VA.

Save for Dwight Eisenhower’s too little and too late farewell address in which he warned of the dangers emanating from the “military-industrial complex,” few national officials, Republicans or Democrats, have shown a willingness to confront the cannibalistic Pentagon. So, it proceeds to eat through all the money and resources that might otherwise go to quaint, weird things like schools, hospitals, libraries, trains, buses, and bridges.

If Americans were not so easily frightened by Muslim monsters underneath the bed, and not so eager to celebrate itself with a vision of military supremacy, it might exert enough political pressure on Washington to truly memorialize its dead soldiers by committing itself to not making any new ones. Instead America will settle for bloated and bombastic tribute ceremonies at football games. The Department of Defense is cynical and savvy enough to take advantage of the apathy and ideology of Americans. Otherwise, they would not have offered the NFL millions of dollars.

 I nearly lost a son-in-law in the Afghanistan debacle, so yes, this is very personal to me.  We were lucky that he survived and has healed bodily and mentally.  Far, far too many families were not so lucky.  Meanwhile, think what might have been done with the $3 trillion squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

House GOP Budget Departs from Reality

The House Republicans have passed a proposed budget that departs from both economic and political reality.   Like everything the House Republicans do, the budget demonstrates that the GOP is incompetent at governing and that the only concern is pandering to the lunatic party base.  The budget continues the GOP reverse Robin Hood agenda by slashing programs that help low- and middle-income people, and cutting taxes on those with high incomes, capital gains, and multinational corporations.  This policy of harming the poor and less fortunate is applauded by the Christofascists in the party base that underscore that greed and hatred of others are what it means to be a conservative Christian in today's America.  Here are excepts from a Washington Post column:

The policies put forth in this document suggest that America’s main problem is that the poor have too much and the wealthy, too little. The budget plan “corrects” this perceived imbalance by deeply cutting programs that help low- and middle-income people, and cutting taxes on those with high incomes, capital gains, multinational corporations and “pass through” business income.

Programs that provide affordable health coverage for the middle class (Obamacare, which they repeal) and the poor (Medicaid, which is “block granted”) face large spending cuts. Future elderly persons do not escape unscathed, either, as Medicare is “voucherized” beginning in 2024. The budget includes more than $1 trillion in unspecified cuts that would appear to fall on nutritional support for the poor and tax credits for low-income, working families.

These cuts are inevitable in the following sense. The budget plan purports to balance spending and tax revenue in 10 years. Meanwhile, the Republican caucus will not raise any tax revenue, though it does, as I’ll show in a moment, propose tax cuts (or at least such cuts are implicit in the plan). The one area where the Republicans boost spending is defense.

What’s left to cut? All the low- and middle-income programs noted so far, along with “non-defense discretionary” spending: the annual appropriations for many education and training programs, research, infrastructure, and investments in less advantaged kids.

Though cuts in top tax rates are largely unspecified — Republican budget writers have learned over the years to leave out specifics — the budget does include cuts in taxes on capital gains and stock dividends (through the repeal of Obamacare), along with cuts for business income and the foreign earnings of multinational corporations.

The only way to get there [to balance] — and we’ve seen this in all the previous House budgets written by Paul Ryan — is the magic asterisk that assumes extra revenue comes from somewhere (i.e., somewhere other than higher tax rates): Don’t ask, they won’t tell. 

Based on demographics alone, the plan departs from reality:The share of elderly Americans is expected to rise from about 15 to about 20 percent over the next 20 years. According to economist Larry Summers, about a third of the federal budget is spent on those above age 65.

I don’t believe you could find majoritarian support for this sort of a budget in America. In fact, I doubt you’ll see much support for it even among partisans on Capitol Hill. We’ve already seen Senate Republicans, particularly those running for office in swing states, expressing discomfort with the non-reality of the plan.

With the GOP clowns in Congress, the last thing we need is a Republican in the White House. 

Why Obama’s New Budget Will Pressure Republicans

Today, Barack Obama will release his proposed budget.  A budget that the GOP obstructionists will say is "DOA" - dead on arrival.  In terms of actually being adopted, the GOP obstructionists may be right, but that doesn't mean the proposed budget won't have a strong political role that will live on.  If the GOP rejects the proposals, then - God forbid - the Congressional Republicans will have to submit a counter proposal that will show their hand to voters.  It's easy to just say "no," but fashioning something that can be passed and survive a veto threat is something all together different.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality.  Here are excerpts:

When President Obama releases his budget Monday, the words “dead on arrival” will be widely incanted because they are part of a quasi-religious Beltway ritual.  This year, those words will be misleading.

No one expects Obama’s budget to be enacted as he proposes it. Republicans responded even to early outlines of his plan with a wall of opposition. But this time around is different because, paradoxically perhaps, the fact that Republicans control both the House and Senate makes Obama’s role more rather than less important.

Now, Obama’s plan will be the main public alternative to whatever the Republicans decide to do.

Moreover, the Republicans are responsible for passing a budget through two houses of Congress, so differences within the GOP that could be finessed in the past will have to be dealt with openly.

The most obvious will be on whether to continue cuts in the defense budget prescribed under the so-called sequester enacted in 2011. GOP defense advocates want to raise Pentagon spending substantially, libertarians want to keep both domestic and military spending low, and many mainstream conservatives will try to cut domestic spending even more to accommodate defense increases.

Obama has declined to offer premature concessions to the Republicans in his own proposal, which further clarifies the stakes. At the same time, he has made things trickier still for his opponents by putting many of his ideas in a form that Republicans have supported in the past. That’s true even of some of his tax proposals.

The president will call this bluff by putting $1.8 trillion in long-term deficit reduction on the table. But most of it will come on the revenue side. His argument here is straightforward: The bulk of the deficit reduction in the deals reached since 2011 has come from cuts in discretionary spending — that is, almost everything except the big retirement programs — which is now at its lowest level, as a share of gross domestic product, in decades. 

The deficit hawks who aren’t part of the ideological assault on the public sector know that the basic functions of government have already been cut too much and that some new domestic spending, particularly for infrastructure, is essential.

[T]he biggest challenge to Republicans may be whether they are willing to go along with Obama on ideas that are plainly in their wheelhouse. One small but significant hope: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) have been pushing the idea that we need more evidence-based policy making, and Obama is joining their campaign.

Republicans have tried hard to tout their concern about income stagnation and an increasingly frozen class structure. Obama will be pushing for a new initiative, “The Upward Mobility Project,” to provide more flexibility to local officials in a set of government programs if they can show how their efforts will help people climb occupational and income ladders. Projects of this sort are exactly what we should be thinking about.

Obama’s opening bid ought to be the start of a back-to-basics debate — an argument that will extend into the 2016 campaign — over what we want government to do and how we propose to pay for it.

Failed GOP Policies: Mothballing Aircraft Carriers A Distinct Possiblity

Aircraft carries at the Norfolk Naval Base

No one blathers more about supporting - dare we say worshiping - America than the Republican party, including the blithering idiots in the Tea Party.  Yet because of GOP intransigence and the  budgetary sequester that has occurred because the Congressional GOP refused to conclude a deal with the Democrats and the Obama White House, very real threats to national security and military readiness are looming.   Virgina could be hit very hard, especially because under the dominance of the GOP controlled House of Delegates and Messrs. McDonnell and Cuccinelli, Virginia has made itself anathema to many progressive and innovative businesses.  A vote for the GOP is a vote for economic suicide in Virginia and Tidewater in particular.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at the growing possibility that air craft carrier battle groups could be mothballed.  Here are excerpts:

Really? Mothballing aircraft carriers?   The idea floated last week by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel seemed particularly shocking in this Navy town – home to half the nation’s fleet of nuclear flattops, where carrier deployments and homecomings routinely lead evening newscasts.

But defense analysts say people shouldn’t roll their eyes at Hagel’s warning or other drastic changes described last week in the Pentagon’s first formal attempt to detail the long-term effects of sequestration.

If Congress does nothing to mitigate $500 billion in across-the-board defense cuts planned over the next decade, several analysts say, reducing the number of carrier strike groups from 11 is more than just a possibility – it’s almost assured.

“Given the size of the cuts, it’s hard to imagine a scenario that wouldn’t involve cutting carriers,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

[A]nalysts from three other Washington-based think tanks developed plans for how they would deal with sequestration. Every group said it would eliminate at least two carrier strike groups; one analyst said he would cut four. Even if Congress reduced the budget cuts by half, each team of analysts still recommended cutting at least two carrier strike groups.

Aircraft carriers are widely considered America’s best weapon for projecting force across the globe. They’re also the most expensive piece of military equipment ever – one that typically deploys with seven squadrons of multimillion-dollar aircraft, a cruiser, two or three destroyers or frigates and about 5,500 sailors.

“It’s not that carriers aren’t important, it’s that perhaps other systems in the force, even in the Navy, are of a higher priority and deliver more bang for the buck,” said Harrison, noting that he would rather invest in stealthy Virginia-class submarines and unmanned aircraft. “You can try to maintain 11 carriers, but if you don’t have money to deploy them, they won’t be very useful.”

[W]ould aircraft carriers be decommissioned and destroyed, or would the plan involve defueling the nuclear reactors and placing the ships in long-term storage? Huntington Ingalls Industries CEO Mike Petters addressed the hypothetical question Wednesday during a quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts. The most efficient way to cut the fleet, Petters said, would be to inactivate the next few carriers slated to come into Newport News Shipbuilding for their midlife nuclear refueling.

That would place the aircraft carriers George Washington, John C. Stennis and Norfolk-based Harry S. Truman in the crosshairs.

However you slice it, said retired Vice Adm. Peter Daly, the chief executive officer of the U.S. Naval Institute, fewer aircraft carriers is bad news for Hampton Roads and for national defense.

“Given the level of cuts, I’m not surprised they’re looking at this,” said Daly, the former deputy commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk. “That doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea.”

The irony is that the GOP leaning voters in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake would see the local economy pummeled and their property values drop significantly.  But for the fact that others would be harmed in the process, I'd almost like to see it happen.  Then these cretins and bigots would be reaping what they had sown.

Republicans Against Reality

One of the Republican Party's biggest hurdles in the coming years is overcoming the control of the party grassroots by those who live in an alternate universe from objective reality.  Yes, once again I am talking about the Christofascists and Tea Party nutcases who now make up much of the GOP base.  Science and knowledge continue to advance and the demographic make up of the country continues to change, yet the GOP base wants to return to a 1950 world when minorities were subservient (and segregated in the South), gays were invisible, and unwarranted deference to religion was perhaps at its height.  Paul Krugman looks at this GOP disconnect from reality in a column in the New York Times.  Here are excepts:

Last week House Republicans voted for the 40th time to repeal Obamacare. Like the previous 39 votes, this action will have no effect whatsoever. But it was a stand-in for what Republicans really want to do: repeal reality, and the laws of arithmetic in particular. The sad truth is that the modern G.O.P. is lost in fantasy, unable to participate in actual governing. 

I may believe that Republicans have their priorities all wrong, but that’s not the issue here. Instead, I’m talking about their apparent inability to accept very basic reality constraints . . .

Am I exaggerating? Consider what went down in Congress last week. 

First, House leaders had to cancel planned voting on a transportation bill, because not enough representatives were willing to vote for the bill’s steep spending cuts. Now, just a few months ago House Republicans approved an extreme austerity budget, mandating severe overall cuts in federal spending — and each specific bill will have to involve large cuts in order to meet that target. But it turned out that a significant number of representatives, while willing to vote for huge spending cuts as long as there weren’t any specifics, balked at the details.

Then House leaders announced plans to hold a vote cutting spending on food stamps in half — a demand that is likely to sink the already struggling effort to agree with the Senate on a farm bill. 

Then they held the pointless vote on Obamacare, apparently just to make themselves feel better. (It’s curious how comforting they find the idea of denying health care to millions of Americans.)

In other words, Republicans, confronted with the responsibilities of governing, essentially threw a tantrum, then ran off to sulk. 

How did the G.O.P. get to this point? On budget issues, the proximate source of the party’s troubles lies in the decision to turn the formulation of fiscal policy over to a con man. Representative Paul Ryan, . . .  What’s happening now is that the G.O.P. is trying to convert Mr. Ryan’s big talk into actual legislation — and is finding, unsurprisingly, that it can’t be done. Yet Republicans aren’t willing to face up to that reality. Instead, they’re just running away. 

When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. . . . . For a long time the Republican establishment got its way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People. Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.

At this point, however, the establishment has lost control. Meanwhile, base voters actually believe the stories they were told. . . . .  And the party establishment can’t get the base to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to those base voters that they were lied to.

What makes this frightening is that Republicans do, in fact, have a majority in the House, so America can’t be governed at all unless a sufficient number of those House Republicans are willing to face reality. And that quorum of reasonable Republicans may not exist.

The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan

The Congressional Republicans whine and carry on about the supposed big spending ways of Barack Obama and act as if they had no role in exploding the nation's budget deficit.   A new report out of the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University indicates that somewhere between a quarter to one-third of the budget deficit is directly attributable to the unfunded fool's errand missions launched by Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney with full GOP support.  Thus, to say that current Republican concerns about the budget deficit is disingenuous is an understatement.   Calling it an outright lie would be more on target.  Especially since the main targets of the GOP are elements of the social safety net that protect the nation's least fortunate.  Here are highlights from the report which need to be thrown back in the face of every Republican who voted for the irresponsible missions launched by Bush/Cheney:

One of the most significant challenges to future US national security policy will not originate from any external threat. Rather it is simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This legacy is debt - promises and commitments that extend far into the future. The years of conflict have left America still burdened with heavy costs, even with the ground combat phase drawing to a close. These costs include the immediate requirements to provide medical care for the wounded, as well as the accrued liabilities for providing lifetime medical costs and disability compensation for those who have survived injuries. Long-term costs also include structural increases to the military personnel and health care systems; depreciation on military equipment and weaponry; restoring the military, Reserves and National Guards to pre-war levels of readiness; and maintaining a long-term military and diplomatic presence in the region.

The US has already spent close to $2 trillion in direct outlays for expenses related to Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation New Dawn (OND). This includes direct combat operations, reconstruction efforts, and other direct war spending by the Department of Defense (DoD), State Department, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Social Security Administration.

However, this represents only a fraction of the total war costs. The single largest accrued liability of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the cost of providing medical care and disability benefits to war veterans. Historically, the bill for these costs has come due many decades later.

There are substantial social-economic costs that accompany these statistics. If fatalities are accounted for in the same way that that US civilian agencies value a life, the value of lives lost adds $44.6 billion to the cost of the wars.

The Pentagon also faces the task of replacing years of worn-out equipment, which will cost more than the amounts appropriated for this purpose. Equipment, materiel, vehicles and other fixed assets have depreciated at an estimated 6 times the peace-time rate, due to heavy utilization, poor repair and upkeep in the field, and the harsh conditions in the region. Even the logistics and cost of transporting equipment out of Afghanistan is predicted to cost billions.

Finally, the decision to finance the war operations entirely through borrowing has already added some $2 trillion to the national debt, contributing about 20% of the total national debt added between 2001 and 2012. This level of debt is thus one of the reasons the country faces calls for austerity and budget cuts  .  .  .  .  This does not include the interest payable in the future, which will reach into the trillions.

[I]t is unprecedented in US history that we pay for a war entirely from debt, and actually cut taxes repeatedly during wartime (as we did in 2001 and 2003). The only previous episode that is at all comparable occurred during the Revolutionary War, when the US colonies borrowed from France.

It is important to note that this borrowing has not been used to invest in the capital stock of the country.    For example, investing in education, infrastructure and knowledge (R&D) benefits the nation, so this is debt for a helpful purpose. By contrast, the war debt has been especially unhelpful. Large amounts have been spent on things that clearly did not benefit the United States - for example, $87 billion in reconstruction funding for Afghanistan, and $61 billion in Iraq, much of which has been squandered according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) respectively. Moreover, the war spending diverted resources that might otherwise have been available to help stimulate  the economy during 2008-2009, when the US endured the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.
 

We have therefore saddled the nation with the debt for the operational costs of the wars, in addition to future costs associated with veterans that were described above.

By the most conservative reckoning, the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts will cost $4 trillion  .  .  .  What did we buy for $4 trillion? The U.S. still faces a perilous international security situation and a fragile economy. Today as the country considers how to improve its balance sheet, it could have been hoped that the ending of the wars would provide a peace dividend, such as the one during the Clinton administration that helped Americans to invest more in butter and less in guns.
Instead, the legacy of decisions made during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts will impose significant long-term costs on the federal government, and in particular, on the consolidated national security budget.

In short, there will be no peace dividend, and the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan wars will be costs that persist for decades.

Remember, it was the GOP that brought the nation this disaster even as it slashed taxes for the wealthiest Americans.   The GOP needs to be held accountable.  And the public needs to be reminded who brought about the debacle and the mushrooming of the national debt.  It wasn't Barack Obama.

Thousands of Lost Jobs: The Cost of Sequestration

Barack Obama appeared today at Newport News Shipbuilding and made a strong case locally for demanding that the Congressional Republicans stop playing games with the lives of thousands  - if not millions nationwide - of American families.  Also in the cross hairs of the GOP saboteurs is the nation's military.  Yes, the GOP blathers about "supporting our troops" even as they have sent our service members to their deaths and serious injury in needless wars that were paid for on the equivalent of a credit card.  Now, defense spending will be cut in a meat cleaver manner as opposed to a surgeon's scalpel.  How anyone in the military or the defense industry still believes a word coming out of the GOP noise machine is dumbfounding.  The Virginian Pilot looks at the local impact of the GOP effort to destroy the economy and leave thousands of Americans unemployed.   Here are highlights:

Thousands of blue-collar jobs will be lost if federal lawmakers don't strike a deal by the end if the week to avoid sweeping budget cuts, President Barack Obama told a crowd of about 3,000 shipyard workers this afternoon.

Standing in front of a massive propeller in a cavernous facility used to build submarines, Obama called on Congress to compromise or risk harming the economy in Hampton Roads.

"The main reason I'm here is to call attention to the important work that you’re doing on behalf of the nation’s defense, and to let the American people know that this work, along with hundreds of thousands of jobs, are currently in jeopardy because of politics in Washington," Obama said.

"These cuts are wrong. They're not smart, they're not fair. They're a self-inflicted wound that doesn't have to happen," Obama added at a shipbuilding site in Virginia.

The White House has warned the $85 billion in cuts could affect everything from commercial flights to classrooms to meat inspections. The cuts would slash domestic and defense spending, leading to forced unpaid days off for hundreds of thousands of workers.

At Newport News Shipbuilding, Virginia's largest industrial employer, Obama renewed his effort to warn of the dire consequences the cuts could have on military readiness and local economies. He spoke in front of a massive submarine propeller, with workmen and the few female employees watching up from the cavernous assembly floor and down along railings from three open levels above.

"The threat of these cuts has already forced the Navy to cancel the deployment and delay the repair of certain aircraft carriers," Obama said.

Mike Petters , president and CEO of factory parent company Huntington Ingalls, said in an interview that the company will probably "throttle back" plans to hire between 10,000 and 15,000 workers over the next five years because of the budget uncertainty. He said his biggest headache in running the business is the continuing resolution.

Echoing Obama's warnings about the military repercussion were the five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who traveled to Capitol Hill to say the cuts could impart a serious blow to military readiness. Their appearance marked the fourth time in the last three weeks that top Pentagon leaders have testified before Congress about the cuts.

Yes, you read that right - 10-15,000 workers at Newport News Shipbuilding alone.  Not surprisingly, GOP extremist Congressman Scott Rigell opted to accompany Obama since he likely knows that if sequestration happens and is rightfully blamed on the GOP, he may well not be re-elected in 2014. 

Hampton Roads Faces Economic Blow Due to GOP Obstruction

UPDATED: Per a new Virginian Pilot story, ship repair employees could be amoung the first to be laid off:

BAE Systems Ship Repair sent letters Wednesday to employees in Norfolk and four other states saying that they may have to lay off more than 3,500 people if the Navy cuts $4.6 billion in ship repairs and other expenses this year.  As many as 1,625 BAE workers in Norfolk could be laid off. The layoffs would affect skilled ship workers as well as administrative staff.

Who voted for sequestration? Virginia House of Representatives members who voted "YES" to SEQUESTRATION:
Rep. ERIC CANTOR (R)
Rep. Scott Rigell (R)
Rep. Rob Wittman (R)
Rep. Robert Hurt (R)
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D)
Rep. Frank Wolf (R)
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R)

Somewhat belatedly people in Hampton Roads are beginning to wake up to the reality that the region is about to take a severe economic hit if, thanks to the GOP obstructionists and economic saboteurs in both houses of Congress allow sequestration to begin on March 1, 2013.  Senator Tim Kaine and Congressman Bobby Scott were in the region yesterday meeting with the military and major employers like Newport News Shipbuilding to address the likely impacts which will harm thousands of workers who face furloughs or worse.  When interviewed, the always despicable Scott Rigell - one of the three local GOP saboteurs in the House (the others are Randy Forbes and Rob Wittman) - Rigell sought to blame the impending economic harm on the U. S. Senate, conveniently omitting the fact that its due to his GOP cohorts Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and other members of the GOP in the Senate that no solution to sequestration has been reached.  Like most GOP religious extremists, Rigell has no problem lying through his teeth on a constant basis.  Here are excerpts from the Virginian Pilot on the approaching economic harm:

With Congress in recess while two deadlines draw near for the start of major federal budget cuts, including deep defense reductions, two of Hampton Roads’ federal lawmakers were telling constituents Tuesday that significant consequences loom.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott warned constituents during a forum in Newport News that the automatic cuts that begin March 1 would hurt the region’s defense industry and lead to significant cuts in a range of federal services – from meat inspectors to special education programs to air traffic controllers.

Scott argued that new sources of revenue have to be found or Americans will receive fewer government services and the region’s defense-based economy is going to suffer.

The Navy has said it will have to cut $4.6 billion, including ship repair and construction projects, if the budget isn’t increased.

Leaders of the Virginia Ship Repair Association told Kaine on Tuesday that the cuts could result in thousands of layoffs in Hampton Roads and damage a local economy that relies on military spending for almost half its revenue.

Craig Quigley, executive director of the Hampton Roads Military and Federal Facilities Alliance, told Kaine and the ship repair executives who met at a Portsmouth hotel that most residents don’t understand how hard the cuts will hit.  “When real people start getting pink slips in the not-too-distant future, then I think it will finally hit home,” Quigley said.

Scott noted there are several sources of new revenue that could be considered to avoid the cuts, including taxing capital gains and dividends as income, levying an extra tax on those with annual incomes larger than $1 million and getting rid of some tax breaks. Scott has long argued that people would rather support new revenue than cutting favored federal programs and national security.

“Everybody is talking about how bad sequestration is, but if you replace sequestration with $1.2 trillion in other cuts, you have different damage,” he said.  “You can’t cut $1.2 trillion of the budget without cutting Social Security and Medicare.”

One can only hope that as furloughs begin at Newport News Shipbuilding that the cretins who had  Romney and Rigell signs in their yards in neighborhoods near the shipyard are among the first to receive their pink slips (ironically, most of the higher end homes in these very same neighborhoods had Obama signs in their yards).  People need to be calling and e-mailing Messrs. Rigell, Forbes and Wittman and reading them the riot act.

Has the GOP Set A Sequestration Trap for Itself?

While the members of the Congressional GOP continue to prostitute themselves to the ugliest and most greed driven elements of the party base by remaining insistent that taxes increases of any kind are off the table in any deal to avoid sequestration, they may in fact be playing directly into Barack Obama's strategy.  Oh yes, the GOP mouth pieces are bleating and whining that sequestration was originally the White House's idea, but by refusing any deal involving even one dollar ($1) of tax increases - even by closing truly egregious tax loopholes - it is the GOP, not Obama, that looks irresponsible and responsible for sequestration if it takes place.  It goes without saying as well, that it will be the GOP rather than Obama and the Democrats that will be the target of the public - and negatively impacted lobbying forces - wrath.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the GOP's potential self-inflicted head wound if sequestration kicks in a little more than a week.  Here are excerpts:

Let’s grant that this [that sequester was the Obama administration’s idea} is true. But it’s true only because the Republicans were holding a gun to the administration’s head—and besides, the Republicans immediately voted for it. In any case the important thing now is that outside of Fox News land, it’s an unimportant fact whose “idea” it was. The Republicans are partial owners of this idea, and as the party that now wants the cuts to kick in, they deserve to—and will—bear more responsibility for the negative impacts.

[T]hey [the GOP] almost crashed the economy. And they were also clearly the side pushing for drastic spending cuts. Let’s go back quickly over a partial 2011 timeline. In April, Obama spokesman Jay Carney said it was the president’s position that raising the debt limit “shouldn’t be held hostage to any other action.” On May 11, Austan Goolsbee, then Obama’s chief economic adviser, said that tying a debt-limit increase to spending cuts was “quite insane.”

On May 16, the United States went into technical default, but the Treasury Department was able to string things along a few more weeks. Tim Geithner made it clear that the real problem would hit August 1. A key moment, as Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress wrote in The Huffington Post, came on May 31. That’s when the GOP-run House voted on Obama’s request for a “clean” debt-limit increase. It failed, and all 236 Republicans voted no.

All this time, and right on up to August 1, Republicans were screaming for deep budget cuts, and the administration was saying no. But the Republicans had the leverage because it actually seemed plausible they were crazy enough to push the country into default.

So fine, the White House proposed it. It did so only after months of Republicans publicly demanding huge spending cuts and refusing to consider any revenues and acting as if they were prepared to send the nation into default over spending. In other words, this was the administration’s idea in much the way that it’s a parent’s “idea” to pay ransom to a person who has taken his child hostage. There was a gun to the White House’s head, which was the possibility of the country going into default.

[W]hen it was all put into legislation, it was the Republicans who passed the Budget Control Act of 2011 in the House, with 218 of them voting yes..  .  .  .  Republicans agreed at the time that the sequestration trigger was a good thing—that it would force everyone to get together and agree to a path forward and a long-term budget deal.

But the majority of the people are onto them. And it sure isn’t going to be looking very responsible to people, as the March 1 sequestration deadline approaches, for Republicans to be going before the cameras and saying that the cuts are unfortunate but necessary medicine, or whatever formulation they come up with. They’ve wanted these spending reductions for two years. It hardly matters much who invented the mechanism for the cuts. What matters, as the Republicans will find out, is that the people don’t want them.

My former law school classmate and former Chairman of the GOP, Jim Gilmore sees that the GOP is heading to potential suicide as noted in a Daily Kos post.  Here are highlights:

Republicans who think it's a brilliant political move to refuse to compromise on the sequester are nuts. Don't ask me, ask former Virginia governor and Republican National Committee chairman Jim Gilmore. He says:

“That’s the biggest problem with the Republicans” on Capitol Hill, Gilmore, a former Virginia governor, said this morning over coffee and a ham-and-egg biscuit in Alexandria. “They think spending is the most important thing. It’s not.”

He says he has urged GOP leaders to back down and compromise to prevent the so-called sequester spending cuts from going through – “I keep telling them, you’re going to lose this” – and he has strong words for congressional leaders’ focus on deficit reduction as their primary economy goal.

“Above all things,” he says, “they shouldn’t be talking about debt and deficits. Because the left’s got an answer for them.

That answer would be, raise taxes, which Gilmore says is the opposite of what the economy needs right now – and he’s quite critical of Democrats for pushing tax increases. But spending cuts won’t help the economy either, he says.

Personally, I hope the saboteurs in the GOP suffer fatal self-inflicted wounds.  I also hope that Obama uses the pulpit of the presidency to remind the public that it is the members of the Congressional GOP who made sequestration happen if it indeed happens.

The Immense Economic Cost of the GOP's Intransigence

While I could not stomach watching Eric Cantor on Meet the Press - I feared losing my breakfast if I had to listen to his disingenuous lies - the show did start out with references to the looming economic catastrophe about to hit the Hampton Roads region thanks to the GOP controlled House of Representative's intransigence and willingness to allow sequestration budget cuts to begin in less than a month.   Tens of thousands will lose their jobs in this region alone.  What is perhaps even more disturbing is that the GOP no longer cares about average Americans.  In its quest to destroy the economy so as to harm Barack Obama - a quest driven frankly by racism in the GOP base - millions of Americans will suffer economic harm at the hands of the GOP.  And your rank and file GOP congressman (and congresswoman)?  They simply do not care.  Today's Virginian Pilot lets loss with a blast about what the economic costs may be in the region, but sadly fails to sufficiently lay the blame at the feet of the GOP.  Here are editorial highlights:

The Department of Defense euphemistically calls 2013 "a year of budgetary uncertainty."  That bureaucratese sugarcoats the number-crunching at the Pentagon, which is slashing training, maintenance, technology and temporary employees - and last week delayed deployment of the Truman carrier strike group -as it waits to see whether Congress can find a deal to reduce the deficit.
It doesn't begin to capture the panic in families across the region, staring into their own budgets for 2013 and seeing much worse than uncertainty. Or the worries of their friends and neighbors, their employers and the merchants who depend on their business.

It understates the apprehension of city leaders bracing for municipal layoffs, hiring freezes, furloughs and canceled construction projects.

Absent remarkable progress on budget negotiations in Washington, D.C., in the next two weeks, the Pentagon will cancel maintenance on its ships and planes, lay off tens of thousands of workers from shipyards and bases, furlough 800,000 civilian employees, delay the four-year overhaul of the carrier Lincoln and defer construction of another carrier.

In a region defined and supported by the military, the job losses - Old Dominion University economists predict between 28,700 and 42,300 jobs directly and indirectly lost in Hampton Roads - will translate to a regional recession or worse: a glut of houses on the market, falling property values, high unemployment and people moving away.

Military spending has kept this region's economy humming as long as people have called it home. The portion of the local economy dependent on defense now hovers near 47 percent, a fact that allowed this region to endure the recession better than much of the nation.

With the Truman's deployment to the Persian Gulf delayed, the Navy reduces its military presence in that region to one carrier group. Navy brass say the Eisenhower will be deployed there later this month, as scheduled, possibly to be replaced in the summer by the west coast-based Nimitz. The George H.W. Bush deployment is delayed; deployments of fast-attack submarines would be canceled. Flying hours would be cut in half. Operations in the Caribbean and around South America would be eliminated.

Hampton Roads would lose $271 million in ship repair business. Sailors would lose tuition assistance. All training operations except for sailors about to be deployed would cease. Every civilian would be furloughed for up to 22 days without pay. Air shows featuring the Blue Angels would be canceled.

The drastic reductions, Rear Adm. John Kirby told Federal News Radio, make it "harder in 2014 to preserve readiness." The ships that were supposed to be repaired and refurbished won't be able to deploy on schedule. Cancellation of training means sailors aren't as prepared as they should be. The cuts in technology mean military equipment will grow outdated.

On a parallel track, localities are looking at cuts to their construction budgets. They, too, are considering furloughs.  And, once again, leaders are wondering how to diversify the region's economy to limit the impact of sequestration.

That means improving the transportation system, he [Virginia Beach mayor Will Sessoms] said. It means luring alternative energy development and technology research to complement NASA's and ODU's modeling and simulation work. It means expanding medical centers to include research and rehabilitation facilities. It means making the city and the region inviting for entrepreneurs.

The ripple of lost military spending, especially on the scale of the sequester, means foreclosures, empty storefronts, empty houses. It's hard to think about growing and thriving when the immediate future is nothing but uncertain.  That is Congress' fault.

I'm sorry, but it is the GOP controlled House of Representatives' fault.  Let's place blame where it belongs.  As for helping the region to diversify, one of the first steps is to revolt against the Virginia GOP's 19th century social agenda which tells countless individuals and businesses that bigotry and discrimination are still the name of the game in Virginia and that progressive entrepreneurs need to look elsewhere to thrive and build their businesses.  That gay employees of the Commonwealth of Virginia can still be fired for their sexual orientation and that the Virginia GOP is actively disenfranchising minority voters send this message loud and clear to anyone observant.