Two thoughts

 

Happy Sequester Day! 

- SCOTUS is hotly engaged in issues involving a suit brought by Shelby County, Alabama regarding the designation of particular jurisdictions in the United States as past and present sinners in the matter of voting discrimination directed at African-Americans.  The crux of the matter is the ability of the Congress to imply by designation that some Americans are more racist than others and that this proclivity is a feature of geographical and cultural concentration mainly in the South.  This is a notion dear to the hearts of many in the North who continue to think of the South as a conquered land that is inhabited by primitives who must be firmly "guided" towards virtue.  I think of this as the Thaddeus Stevens theory of American Salvation.  Not surprisingly many Southerners resent this paradigm.  SCOTUS may well overturn part of the law.  I actually think that would be unfortunate.  There HAS been widespread voter dicrimination in parts of the US.  Indeed, there are places in the North that are covered by the strictures of the present act.  IMO, the best remedy for the problem of differential application of the law would be to make the law applicable to all jurisdictions within the US.  "What is good for the goose is good for the gander."

- In the context of the sequester DoD needs to have authority to transfer funds from one designated appropriation account to another as needed to make sure that DoD has the ability to make rational reductions of expenditures rather than blindly applying funds to categories that Congress happened to put money in during more hopeful times.  pl

Comments

[William R. Cumming]

The Voting Rights Act should be applied nation-wide for all federal elections!

[Basilisk]

You are so correct in your observation about the requirement for flexibility between and among DoD accounts, and, I would add, the IC accounts.

Such a provision makes all the sense in the world. Unfortunately, the sequestration provision was purposely designed to be such a big, dumb meat axe that no one on either side would ever be so clueless as to let it fall. Well, guess what. We have sown the wind, now we wait to see how much stupider the whirlwind will be.

[r whitman]

With reference to your second thought on the DoD, can you imagine the political payback with allocations to the states where the Senators stiffed Hagel during the confirmation process.

[Alba Etie]

Col Lang
Yes the Voting Rights Act should apply to all fifty states .
What my poor hapless party of record the GOP does not want is SCOTUS overturning Section 5 - and then having to reauthorize the statute in the context of the 2014 mid terms . Senator Cruz has been quoted as believing that there is no more election laws being written that are racially biased If we set aside whether that is true or not - I cannot imagine a more galvanizing issue for the BHO /Democratic base then some of the right wing miscreants in Congress not supporting passing a new Voters Rights Law. This intra party fight over voting rights would only add to the discord within the GOP - such as the Southern Lawmakers voting against Super Storm Sandy relief . My party of record really needs some adult supervision - unfortunately as it stands now a Jeb Bush would never make it through the Mad Max GOP primaries . ( For the record many of us in Texas always said Poppy should have put up Jeb first - he is the smart Bush Scion ) .

[Will Reks]

I agree with your remedy to both problems.

However, if its true that the crux of the voting rights matter is the issue that northerners think southerners (white) are more racist than others then was it also true in 1965 when southerner LBJ pushed it through Congress? I wonder if he was championing the interests of white northerners.

I do think that the Supreme Court will strike down Section V of the VRA.

[turcopolier]

Will Reks

IMO Johnson was a strange president. He was manifestly anti-Southern at times like that. The law should have been made to apply to the whole country from the beginning. To do it this way was to invite a forever war to repeal it or get it thrown out. And then there was his strange reaction to things like the Liberty attatcks. pl

[Medicine Man]

I would say you're definitely right about point #1. The most brazen attempts at vote rigging of late have been in the Midwest, not the South.

[Charles I]

Gee Basilisk you crossed my mind just yesterday wondering how you are doing three months out from your Christmas. Regards.

[Charles I]

For me its an unhappy day. The markets, having regained their 2009 levels courtesy of the taxpayers just in time for IRA season, have finally stopped reacting to Washington, and now apparently just permanently discount it. They are less responsive to serial Eurozone miniicrises and deaths-of-athousand-cuts.

This is not a good thing. We have been discussing deleveraging here, which has barely occurred, for some time.

This tells me that they will only ultimately correctly respond to a very acute - and precipitous - crisis. Mind the drop.

[Jose]

This is Gore v. Bush all over again, Gore wanted to apply the voting recount only to Southern counties that trended Democratic. His case collapsed when a different standard was being applied to Republican and Cuban districts in Miami-Dade County. IMHO, this is going down.

When BSHO raised the payroll tax 2%, the top 75% of Americans were forced to pay their fair share. Never mind that 2% is serious money for a family of four making $50,000 a year. Think of the sequester as making the government pay its fair and never mind the consequences.

The real battle is coming up in a few weeks concerning the debt limit increase.

[walrus]

Economically speaking, we are in very dangerous waters at the moment. The sharemarket is disconnected from reality.

[scott s.]

I don't see any reason why this can't all be fixed when the 2013 continuing resolution gets finalized in a couple of weeks (assuming the parties want to fix it).

[Fred]

"When BSHO raised the payroll tax 2%, " You mean when he let the idiotic cut to SS withholding expire? $19.22 per week is serious money? That's not how it was portrayed when BHO pushed that one through Congress. It does fit into cutting SS revenue so that a few more years down the road our Congress can declare yet another 'crisis' and try and give a big payout to Wallstreet by making SS a giant 401K, with all the associated fees, commissions and risk. Personally I say no thanks.

[Tyler]

Jeb Bush is another neocon invade the world/invite the world/in hoc to the world type.

The last thing the Republican Party needs is more RINOs who think Marco Rubio is somehow going to turn Mexican peasants into Republican voters because his last name ends in a vowel.

[Tyler]

Gold has a swing back and forth of $100 in 24 hours. Madness!

Personally investing in metals. Gold, silver, and lead.

[Tyler]

Wait until the government decides to 'protect' all retirement accounts by mandating they invest at least 50% of the account in Treasury bonds.

[Alba Etie]

Col Lang
FYI New York & New Hampshire also are under federal VRA supervision - this really does need to be applied to all states .

[Charles I]

Scott, its already been "fixed". This is why no action was deemed necessary by either half of the Money Party.

[Alba Etie]

Tyler
From what I have read and listened to I did not think that Jeb Bush would be another neocon patsy .
I will keep do my homework regarding Jeb . My across the dry gulch neighbor out here in the Texas Hill Country still has his Ron Paul signs up . What do you think about Rand Paul ?

[Tyler]

I don't like Rand based off his "nation of immigrants" shenanigans, but at least he's willing to challenge Brennan about killing US citizens on US soil, something this Administration and Brennan seem to have no problem with.

Say what you will about Ann Coulter, but she pointed out correctly that too often libertarians are too concerned with justifying themselves to liberals (we think pot smoking is AOK! gay marriage is cool too!) without realising the broader societal ripples that those policies cause.

I'm personally waiting for the rise of a traditional nationalist populist who's concerned about America and her problems. One who isn't afraid to use tariffs, put a stake through the heart of free trade, tell Israel to go it alone, and give the finger to the racial greivance lobbies before starting up Operation Wetback II: Deportation Boogaloo.

That, or we get to see a Yugoslavia like breakup in our own backyard as the Democrats carefully nutured ethnic greivances (the source of their power, that YT owes them something) blows up in their face.

[Alba Etie]

What evidence is there that Brennan & this administration supports killing Americans on American soil ? I took some time to watch the C-span Brennan confirmation hearings & the hearings regarding oversight of the targeted killings overseas - and one of the conditions cited for killing al Alawaki was that there was no chance for capture. It seems to me that there would always be chance for capture if the American in question was in these United States.
In the Yugoslavia style break up in these United States would Texas be Kosovo or Serbia ?
Tyler we may have to agree to disagree again .

[Harper]

Such discretionary sanity as Col. Lang suggests, to allow DOD to move funds around to meet sequestration with some degree of management of the military mission is not in keeping with what the Obama team intended with sequestration. Under their theory, which is part of their "behavioral economics" obsessions, only by creating a draconian situation would the Republicans be forced to bow to White House demands on how to conduct the cuts and increases in revenue. Under the logic of this behaviorist wing-ding, the GOP would cave at the last minute. To make things all the more absurd, Obama launched a public campaign to blame the Congress for the sequestration idea, an idea he found personally deplorable and dangerous to our national and social security. Well, hold on a minute! Jack Lew and rob Nabors of the White House devised the scheme and Obama signed off on it, before it was taken to Harry Reid on July 27, 2011, for his approval and action.

When Watergate fame Washington Post senior writer Bob Woodward blew the whistle that it was Obama who "invented" sequestration, he was threatened by Gene Sperling that terrible things would befall him and the WAPO if they persisted in blaming Obama. Things went downhill from there as the Obama-Woodward blame game made it that much more impossible to avert sequestration.

The geniuses at the White House and in Congress ought to look at the mess in Europe, where the same exact recipe of money-printing to bail out the banks (which refuse to issue credits for any economic activity) and vicious austerity have led to a bigger and deeper hole, a hole that Italy just joined. In Europe, the third and fourth largest economies in the eurozone are now in bankruptcy under supervision of the ECB, the EU and the IMF. Now the US is planning to jump in the same hole. Sane people in Congress, at the Fed and at the FDIC are pushing for a return to Glass Steagall and some strategy for actual economic growth and job-creation at home.

After four years of a free ride of lying to the American people and getting away with it by cheap intimidation tactics, the Obama White House is finally getting a little push back. It's about time!

As far as sequestration goes, Col. Lang is absolutely right that the mandatory across-the-board cuts cannot work at the Pentagon or at the civilian Federal agencies. The game plan of Obama, Lew and Sperling is to get the American people so angry at the sequestration as it hits their lives that the Congress will cave in within a few weeks. More behavioral economics at work.

[William R. Cumming]

Reference DoD and the sequester! There has estimates that DoD has over $100B in obligated and unspent funds. Could they deobligate to cover the sequester?

[Clifford Kiracofe]

It has been my experience in Latin America that Cubans are perceived with some negative feelings.

I am not sure how an abrasive Cuban-American is going to automatically appeal to Mexican-Americans. There are cultural differences and so on here.

Anglos often stereotype so-called "Latinos" or "Hispanics". It has been my experience that folks south of the border are quite proud of their individual cultures and countries. And even within countries there can be strong local and regional identity. Oaxaca is not Queretero is not Chihuahua is not Zacatecas is not Leon, and so on...not Havana either...

Jeb is definitely a Neocon fellow traveler and endorsed the PNAC stuff out of the gate...he in Florida is at the intersection of the Zionist Lobby and the Cuban Lobby...like Rubio.

[Tyler]

If Republicans took a step back, they'd quickly realise what you and I know: that a Mexican is not a Cuban is not a Guatemalan is not a Chilean, but because the census lumps them all under "Hispanic" they must all be the same.

The idea that everyone who grew up on arros con chile is the same is one the racial greivance lobby (La Raza, MeCHA, etc) has no intention of dispelling. In the meantime we get blond haired, blue eyed Mexicans lecturing us about "racism" on Univison while the Meztecas are still relegated to the lower rungs of society.

Let's starting sending the Oaxacans back with a rifle, ammo, and rations. They know who the real enemy is.