Re: The Story to Watch Today

Jay Newton-Small:
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Does this mean that we don’t have enough money to occupy two countries indefinitely?

Physicians’ Payment Rates. A proposed change in the calculation
of the rates paid to physicians under Medicare
would result in additional outlays totaling an estimated
$285 billion over the next 10 years. Under current law,
Medicare’s payment rates for physicians’ services will be
reduced by about 21 percent in 2010 and by about 6 percent
a year for most of the rest of the decade. The President’s
policy would freeze those payment rates at the
2009 level through at least 2019.
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Yes, change we CAN believe in…Now there will not be a doctor to go to even if you have Universal (Socialist) Healthcare paid by the government. All of the Physicians will now become engineers.
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“Eat Cheese” says President Obama!
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CBO’s Short Term Forecast
In CBO’s forecast, the decline in output continues until
the fall. But the rate of decline slows after the first quarter,
in part because the effects of ARRA begin to take
hold. Reduced tax-withholding rates and increased aid to
low-income households in the form of expanded unemployment
insurance and payments from the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program will support consumer
spending in 2009, as will lower prices for energy. And the
stimulus legislation will also contribute to growth via
purchases of goods and services by the federal government
and averted reductions in spending or increases in
taxes that would have otherwise occurred at the state and
local levels. However, CBO expects that high unemployment,
tight credit conditions, and the declines in wealth
will restrain the growth of consumption.
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Since January, CBO has lowered its estimates of inflation
for all of the projection period. The expectation of a
deeper recession and slow recovery implies high unemployment
rates and a great deal of excess capacity for
many years. Those factors make it likely that the United
States will experience very low inflation for a long time.
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Yes Ladies and Gentlemen, this is great news! Great news because by April 30th, we should have enough evidence to IMPEACH this idiot and get him out of office once and for all!

Given the way that the non-military public sector has been starved of discretionary funding since 1980, and the inevitably resulting crumbling infrastructure in this country, and given the economic cluster#@ck bank deregulation has brought upon us, 4% to 6% of GDP for a decade sounds about right.

And, of course, this number could be significantly reduced if we were, instead of spending considerably more than the sum total of the rest of the world’s nations on our military, we reduced that spending to only 50% of the sum total of the rest of the world’s nations.

We could do that easily without endangering our national security one whit, though we might have to give up some level of hegemony.

Seems like a fair exchange to me.

Jay Newton-Small:
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…and, BTW, notorious assclown @jaketapper became a total tool today by actually blocking @TPMMedia from following him –in addition to @jayackroyd, @adamserwer and other members of the now growing list #badgeofhonor.
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@jaketapper tweets: “if blog comment board is bile-filled and obnoxious, isn’t the blogger’s job to keep it clean? ”
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Obviously he hasn’t been near a blog’s commentary ( like @swampland ) in his life. Pretty incredible for a supposed member of the modern press corps.
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What planet does this guy live on?

Poor rusty can’t read. The paragraph he quotes states that Obama’s proposal revokes existing scheduled rate reductions for physicians — yet he draws from that statement that Obama plans to reduce rates paid to physicians, the exact opposite of the facts.
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Hey, rusty, whose talking points e-mail did you cut-and-paste that from?

rustyreturns:
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Under current law, Medicare’s payment rates for physicians’ services will be reduced
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The President‘s policy would freeze those payment rates
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Got that, Rustydog?
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Here it is in caveman-Tarzan-Frankenstein-Tonto language:
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CURRENT LAW REDUCE PAYMENT…OBAMA NOT LIKE
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PRESIDENT KEEP PAYMENT SAME INSTEAD…HE CHANGE LAW
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Did you not actually read what you posted?

*Sigh*
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Read this and tell us why deficits are “the story to watch” this day or any other for the next 20 years. Because you and your peers say so isn’t cutting it anymore, in case you haven’t seen the memo.

SZ, I found myself fishing for my twitter grammar guide, but I think I mis-constructed a tweet that you construed as Tapper’s. Here is the actual exchange:

jaketapper: enough bile out there that i dont need it here on twitter.dialogue, yes. insults no. blog comment board and bathroom walls still avail 4 all

joyomama: @jaketapper if blog comment board is bile-filled and obnoxious, isn’t the blogger’s job to keep it clean? I suppose you’ll block me now, too

jaketapper: @joyomama It’s a good point – but when ABC monitors try to keep it clean, folks complain of censorship.i used to love to read the comments

jaketapper: @joyomama @teribeau the alternative is 2 not block anyone and not read the comments, as is more or less case with bile-y blog comments

joyomama: RT @jaketapper the alternative is 2 not block anyone and not read the comments. RIP Web 2.0 so sad. (tear trickles down my stoic visage)

Is twitter some kind of lame instant messenger? For godsakes.

OMG!
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joyomama:
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I apologize for mis-copying your tweet. Thanks for clarifying.
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His actual tweet makes @jaketapper sound like even more of a douche than my mis-copies, however!
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What a colossal tool…

Sorry to be a Luddite, but remind me why it’s important for everybody to be able to grok Jake Twit’s Tapper, or whatever?
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Somebody that can still Tap Twit’s Tweet will just have to pass the pap along to the rest of us, which is apparently what’s already happening?

I’ve said it before – this stuff is just burning the heck out of the CPM cartridge in my COmmodore 64.

Thanks to Jay Newton-Small for the summary.
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I started pulling together a comparison to show the January report, the pre-budget estimate, and the estimate, but then I remembered this from Justin Fox (posted Wednesday):

The big news of the week isn’t that the deficit is big, but why the next CBO defict estimate will be bigger no matter what. The recession we are in is so ridiculously huge that Ben Bernanke is figuratively throwing money out of a helicopter. The Fed is going to start buying up to $750 billion worth of mortgage securities and up to $300 billion worth of long-term Treasuries for the first time since World War II.
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Seriously, read this post at The Curious Capitalist. (Just trying to add some context.)

gunny: Perhaps it is a “lame instant messenger”, if you just look at form. Content quality varies, just like books and newspaper. And blogs. pourmecoffee’s haiku translates well, though, and there is a voyeuristic element to twitter that is completely different from IM. Clearly, like fashion, it is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Is twitter some kind of instant messenger?

Yes. That is all it is.

Is twitter some kind of lame instant messenger?

Aren’t they all?

Query: is Jake Tapper and his twitterers now reducing their discussions to 140 letters at a time. Must make for really lucid commentary. Sounds very third dimension to me.

Sorry, FT.
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ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper is responding to people’s polite, valid criticisms of his work by blocking access to his twittering.
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Basically, if there’s anything valuable he has to say from the White House, he’s not willing to share it with you unless you always say good things about him.
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It’s an enormous breech of the honor code, and the kind of thing real pricks do. It corrupts the whole idea of Twitter. Only the authors of truly and chronically abusive messages should be literally blocked access.
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@TPMMedia is Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo twitter account. The fact that Tapper blocked access to TPM –another news organization– really hammers home how pernicious this kind of bad behavior is, and how it destroys the value of the whole system.
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There’s now a growing search list called #badgeofhonor whose members are blocked by Tapper. Basically, everybody should try to get tapper to block them, so that he has a choice: block everybody, and have no value at all, or block nobody who isn’t abusing the system, and participate the way the thing was intended.
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It’s incredible what kind of egomaniacs these media celebrity-wannabees are, FT.

“The recession we are in is so ridiculously huge that Ben Bernanke is figuratively throwing money out of a helicopter. The Fed is going to start buying up to $750 billion worth of mortgage securities and up to $300 billion worth of long-term Treasuries for the first time since World War II.”
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And any functioning press, worth a bag of warm snot, would be reporting on the imminent disaster we are facing and what still needs to be done to try to avert catastrophe. Instead, their “conservative” masters easily convince our air-headed press corp that “the story” is about deficits and what Tim Geithner knew and when did he know it. We are absolutely screwed.

Thanks, SZ, both for the information and the correct assumption that I wasn’t ragging at you.
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Egomania is legion.

SZ: Tapper and Twit are interchangeable.

Here’s more on the Tapper Twitter Toolism.
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Now Tapper has walked back by unblocking @TPMMedia, apparently.
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So if you’re just you and me little guys, he’ll be completely dishonorable with no thought about it.
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If you write for a major blog like TPM, then he’ll think about it, unblock you, ignore screenshots of it, and try to pretend that it didn’t happen.
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What an assclown.

I shall wear my #badgeofhonor proudly

http://phd9.blogspot.com/2009/03/which-of-these-are-too-insulting.html

This is more fun than a soap opera.
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yellowduc @jaketapper lets talk about transparency jake
jaketapper @yellowduc ok lets- what’s up?
jaketapper @yellowduc tpm is unblocked. My bad.

Example of a tweet (from @jryanlaw ) that gets Jake Tapper to take the proactive step of blocking you:
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@jaketapper I’m also preparing 4 a day of hiprocrisy when some journalists act lk S.O. remark is a story & focus on that rather than economy

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, unless you write for a huge blog, and his wrongness gets exposed, in which case he’ll say “My bad”.
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OK, sorry about this, folks.
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I’ll get back to reading that CBO report PDF at the link Jay Newton-Small was totally cool enough to provide for us.
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I apologize for hijacking your thread, Jay Newton-Small.

Jay Newton-Small:
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What’s scaring you is the big drop total deficit to gdp, but what should scare everybody is the big drop in gdp potential to real output, and how long they’re projecting that climb back up to take.
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This is the story of the deficit:
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Largely as a result of the enactment of recent legislation
and the continuing turmoil in financial markets,
CBO’s baseline projections of the deficit have risen by
more than $400 billion in both 2009 and 2010 and by
smaller amounts thereafter. Those projections assume
that current laws and policies remain in place. Under
that assumption, CBO now estimates that the deficit
would total almost $1.7 trillion (11.9 percent of gross
domestic product, or GDP) this year and $1.1 trillion
(7.9 percent of GDP) next year—the largest deficits as
a share of GDP since 1945. Deficits would shrink to
about 2 percent of GDP by 2012 and remain in that
vicinity through 2019.

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That’s not really what’s chilling about the report.

2% of GDP is about where you want a gov’t deficit, isn’t it?

Do yourself a favor and watch this!
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http://video.aol.com/video-detail/the-second-american-revolution-we-the-people/2305843009889548063/?icid=VIDURVNWS01

The big story this week among the people I work with was the “Obama raise’ everyone got. The main office was swamped with people asking why there was extra money in their paycheck this week. Interesting how this got no coverage by the press. Were we the only ones who got a tax cut? The media was all over the stimulus checks Bush sent out but silence on this. Tweety was just talking about all of the tax increases Obama is planning but reality flies in the face of that.

“2% of GDP is about where you want a gov’t deficit, isn’t it?”
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At the moment, with a tanking job market, frozen credit, flattened real estate values and retirement accounts and financial nukes possibly buried all around the globe, I could give a flying f*ck what the gov’t deficit is. Not that you’d know it from listening to the people who are employed to inform us about what is important but, for the foreseeable future, deficits are the least of our problems.

Because Tweety is in the bracket that will get a tax raise. Forget the peons, who cares.

Actually that’s not right. I would very much like to see enormous government deficits for at least the next 3-5 years.

Shepherd: Yes – larger deficit spending now. But assuming we’re out of the mess by 2012, I thought 2-3% was approx what economists say is reasonable. (However, I base that entirely on my own faulty memory of various Economist articles, so I could be way off!)
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Also, as I understand, our wiggle room during this crisis is less than it might have been, because the previous administration ballooned the debt.
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I suppose the media could analyze this stuff.

Also maybe 2012 is too optimistic! I sure hope not.

I note Halperin gives McCain’s statement prominent play…
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McCain: Obama’s Budget A “Threat to the Nation”
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Note to Mark Halperin: the campaign is over. Obama won.

I was just watching the teevee and learned of one of the AIG incompetents named Joseph Cassano, guru of the London office, stuffing away millions in compensation all the while taking unheard of risks until he flushed $62 billion down the sewers.
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Everybody is always focused on criminal behavior and locking these people up. Obama said last nite that the sad part is that there was little actual illegal activity. But you can sue in civil court anybody for anything. Gross negligence and incompetence is one thing you can sue for. I suggest that some stimulous money be devoted to a special team of civil attorneys to pursue suit against every penny these bastards possess. A big, big, team to recover as much as possible from the gang of idiots. Let them sleep in cardboard boxes. I’ll bet that a not insignificant sum of money could be recovered.

formerlyjames
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Joseph Cassano, guru of the London office…
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…is actually Joseph Cassano, of the disgraced junk bond criminal enterprise Drexel Burnham Lambert.
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James Lieber makes the case for RICO-style fraud prosecutions in his must-read piece.

BTW, my proposal would be teams of lawyers on salary. Not the common class actions attorneys who take the booty and give each litigant a penny on the dollar.

Thanks, sz.

No Art, I think you’ve got it right. Trouble is, nothing that went before looks like it will be of much use going forward.

sz, I’ve only read the first page and am laughing and crying at the same time at the “Market Masters” title. I don’t know how you keep all of your sources straight, but it is to our benefit. Thanks again. Before this thread goes dead, I urge everybody to check sz’s link at 6:59 pm.

Let them sleep in cardboard boxes.
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This is the reason why so many ordinary American are upset about this.
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Everybody saw Randolph and Mortimer Duke lose all of their money and status in Trading Places, and we had the severity of their just rewards confirmed when we saw them again five years later huddled together in rags on skid row in Coming to America.
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Everybody knows that charismatic, talented Eddie Murphy characters are supposed to prevail over the dishonest, establishment financier class when he finds out that they’ve been playing with our lives.
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Everyone knows that the Eddie Murphy protagonist pays the old money guys back for their hubris by separating them from the the thing they love most in the world: their money.
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How can Obama not put the world right? How can he let the Dukes keep everything? How can the bright Eddie Murphy character be suckered by the clubroom/boardroom guys? How can this be?
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Everybody knows that the Dukes end up sleeping in cardboard boxes. Something must indeed be wrong with the world –something deeply, disturbingly wrong– if the Eddie Murphy character ends up being the one laughed at.

Here you go my “librul” loons. Feast your eyes on the thousands upon thousands of comments on this site.
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http://theglennbeck912project.com/
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“Take back America, starts now!”

Do you mean hundreds upon hundreds? Because the three articles I clicked on had 121, 27, and 150 comments.

“Take back America, starts now!”
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Let’s make this easy. Make us an offer.

Spread The Word
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Follow the discussion Login Comments (4,069)
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Oh Cliffy the little liberal. Just one article has over 4 THOUSAND comments.

I suppose you are to stupid to follow links other than those here at Swampyland.

[...] at news numbers that confirm the Obama budget is irresponsible? So it was jarring news Friday, when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its preliminary analysis of Obama’s plans for the nation. In one of the first non-partisan, independent reviews of his administration’s [...]