Hmmm….Dick Morris is offering classes..

Really, only 1700 dollars per person (or 2000 per couple):

We will cover polling, advertising, fund raising, grass roots activism, the Internet, scheduling and a host of other topics. I will conduct all twelve lectures myself. The fee — including “tuition”, two nights hotel, and two lunches and dinners (and signed photos and books) — is $1700 per person and $2,000 for a couple. You can reserve a place now with a $250 nonrefundable deposit.

And…for the first ten who ask, I will conduct a one-on-one hour long consulting session on your particular political situation. That will cost $5,000 extra.

Why I thought of this I have no idea….

17 February 2011 (pm)

Workout II 4 x 25 sit ups, rotator cuff (shoulders felt great afterward), 5 mile treadmill walk. 14:20 first mile; then did some 600 m at 12 min/mile, 200 at 14:20 then a 11:50 mile, then some more 600 on, 200 off, 800 on. Total: 5 miles in 13:55.

Then more stretching.

Note to the ladies: if I am laying down to stretch and you walk right over my head (not stepping on me), I will check you out as you pass over my face. Really.

Posts
Republicans: are they really as crazy as they appear? Some are and:

An interesting exchange between John Quiggin and Jonathan Chait on right-wing agnotology — that is, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt. The specific issue is birtherism, the claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or anyway not in America, which polls indicate is a view held by a majority of Republican primary voters.

Quiggin suggests that right-wingers aren’t really birthers in their hearts; it’s just that affirming birtherism is a sort of badge of belonging, a shibboleth in the original biblical sense. Chait counters that much of the modern right lives in a mental universe in which liberal elites hide the truth, and in which they, through their access to Fox News etc., know things the brainwashed masses don’t.

My view is that Quiggin is right as far as right-wing politicians are concerned: for the most part they know that Obama was born here, that he isn’t a socialist,that there are no death panels, and so on, but feel compelled to pretend to be crazy as a career move. But I think Chait has it right on the broader movement.

Budget stuff The Republicans will not compromise; it isn’t in their political interests to do so. Dick Morris writes:

So what happens if the cuts proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) prove unacceptable to the Senate and the president? What if there is no compromise? What if nobody gives in?

A budget deadlock, played out over months, will doom Obama and assure his defeat. But an easily won compromise will help him get re-elected.

The central question in Obama’s bid for a second term is: Will the issues that doomed his party in 2010 still be the key questions in 2012? If they are, we already know how the election will come out. If they are not, Obama can win.

When the president says he does not “want to re-fight the battles of the past two years,” he means that he embraces this reality. He doesn’t want Obamacare, high spending, huge deficits, cap and trade, card check and the like to be the items in discussion in the 2012 election.

But he has failed to put forward a compelling agenda for the next two years. That was the essential defect of his State of the Union speech — nobody is going to storm any barricades for high-speed rail and more R&D spending.

If the Republicans hold firm in demanding huge spending cuts and Obama does not give in, the question of whether or not to cut spending will dominate the nation’s political discourse for months on end and will spill over into the 2012 election.

To assure that it will, the Republicans should hold firm to their budget spending cuts without surrender or compromise. If necessary, it is OK to vote a few very short-term continuing resolutions to keep the government open for a few weeks at a time, always keeping on the pressure.

When the debt limit vote comes up, they should refuse to allow an increase without huge cuts in spending. If the debt-limit deadline passes, they should force the administration to scramble to cobble together enough money to operate for weeks at a time.

If Obama offers a half a loaf, the GOP should spurn it for weeks and months. Then, rather than actually shut down the government, let them accept some variant of their proposed cuts but only give in return a few more weeks’ time, at which point the issue will be re-litigated. Don’t go for Armageddon — just keep fighting the battle.

Can it be any clearer?

17 February 2011 am

Yoga class in the morning; I am going to have to do more of this on my own. I tend to have an “all the time” stiffness; when I stand after sitting I am tight, tight, tight.

Economics Robert Reich explains what is going on with Social Security:

In a former life I was a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. So let me set the record straight.

Social Security isn’t responsible for the federal deficit. Just the opposite. Until last year Social Security took in more payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits. It lent the surpluses to the rest of the government.

Now that Social Security has started to pay out more than it takes in, Social Security can simply collect what the rest of the government owes it. This will keep it fully solvent for the next 26 years.

But why should there even be a problem 26 years from now? Back in 1983, Alan Greenspan’s Social Security commission was supposed to have fixed the system for good – by gradually increasing payroll taxes and raising the retirement age. (Early boomers like me can start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 will have to wait until they’re 67.)

Greenspan’s commission must have failed to predict something. But what? It fairly accurately predicted how quickly the boomers would age. It had a pretty good idea of how fast the US economy would grow. While it underestimated how many immigrants would be coming into the United States, that’s no problem. To the contrary, most new immigrants are young and their payroll-tax contributions will far exceed what they draw from Social Security for decades.

So what did Greenspan’s commission fail to see coming?

Inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain ceiling. (That ceiling is now $106,800.) The ceiling rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

Back in 1983, the ceiling was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of all wages covered by Social Security. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Commission assumed that, as the ceiling rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.

Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 84 percent of total income.

Raise the cap. Period.

Budget Here is a look at the budget spin:

Democrats and Republicans disagree strongly about elements of President Obama’s 2012 budget, but they are alike in one respect: Both sides are misrepresenting important facts.

* Obama claimed that by the middle of this decade his budget “will not be adding more to the national debt.” But that’s not true. The debt will continue to grow by more than $600 billion even in 2015, the year with the least red ink projected.
* The president also claims that the “discretionary” budget is only 12 percent of the total. It’s actually 36 percent. Obama, like President Bush before him, is referring to “non-security” spending that excludes not only the Pentagon but the Department of Homeland Security and veterans’ benefits.
* Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee, repeated a false claim that Obama has increased domestic discretionary spending by 84 percent over the last two years. He hasn’t. That spending went up 27 percent, even counting stimulus spending, according to the official tally from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
* Ryan’s committee also claims that Obama’s budget contains $1.6 trillion in “new taxes.” Actually, 44 percent of that total is made up of increases scheduled under current law, not proposed in the budget. And one big proposed increase is offset by Obama holding down a scheduled rise in the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Note: later in the article, it explained that the President was not counting payments toward paying down the national debt but rather just spending on other items.

More Republicans
The Republicans won’t take on their lunatic base. Why? Easy: they don’t win without their loons.

Internet
Don’t get a group of hackers angry with you, especially if you are a computer security company:

Today, the website ArsTechnica ran a piece that details how Anonymous methodically went after HBGary Federal’s digital infrastructure. Earlier this month, HBGary Federal’s CEO Aaron Barr said the company, which specializes in analyzing vulnerabilities in computer security for companies and even some government agencies, had undertaken an investigation of Anonymous and had used social media to unmask the group’s most important people.

The Financial Times reported:

Of a few hundred participants in operations, only about 30 are steadily active, with 10 people who “are the most senior and co-ordinate and manage most of the decisions,” Mr. Barr told the Financial Times. That team works together in private internet relay chat sessions, through e-mail and in Facebook groups. Mr Barr said he had collected information on the core leaders, including many of their real names, and that they could be arrested if law enforcement had the same data.

Barr said an HBGary representative was set to give a presentation at a security conference in San Francisco, but as soon as Anonymous got wind of their plans, it hacked into HBGary’s servers, rifled through their e-mails and published them to the web. The group defaced HBGary’s website and published the user registration database of another site owned by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary.

Amazingly, reports ArsTechnica, Anonymous managed all this by exploiting easy and everyday security flaws. First, it found that the content management system — a program that allows for easy publishing to the web — had a security vulnerability. The group was able to get into the usernames and passwords from the database and, as ArsTechnica puts it, HBGary employees did not follow Internet best practices and used the same passwords over and over on different sites including their e-mail accounts, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

Religion and Woo

Jon Stewart on Glenn Beck (satire)