The Senate Republicans have just filibustered the third nominee, Cornelia T L Pillard, for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This raises the obvious question that I’ve been asking for years: how long are we going to allow this to go on? No amount of handshake agreements and temporary armistices are going to solve this problem. The Republican Party is long past the point of respecting institutional norms.

As I showed back in January, Republicans Caused All Filibuster Abuse. Since 1960, each time the Republicans were in the minority, they increased the use of the filibuster. When the Democrats were in the minority, they abided by the new norm that the Republicans set. In some cases, they actually reduced it to a new norm, only to have the Republicans push the number of filibusters to unprecedented levels.

Folks, this is very simple: when the Republicans are in the majority they will at least stop the filibuster for nominations. Democrats who think otherwise are living in some fantasy land where everyone is fairies and elves, the the Republican Party doesn’t even exist. Does my own dear Senator Dianne Feinstein really think her support for the filibuster is going to save it as a Senate tradition after the Republicans take over again? In the 20 years she has served, she’s watched as the Republicans, and the Republicans alone, have caused the number of filibusters to go up almost 400%. She’s a cynical old slumlord; she can’t possibly be blind to what is really going on.

Chuck Grassley is egging us on. He said, “Go ahead. There are a lot more Scalias and Thomases that we’d love to put on the bench.” The problem with this logic is that neither Scalia nor Thomas were filibustered. But you can be sure that if Obama nominated someone even half as liberal as Ruth Bader Ginsburg today, the Republicans wouldn’t just filibuster her, they’d charge that the president had nominated something that was vomited right out of the rotting corpse of Stalin.

Implicit in Grassley’s comment, of course, is the idea that only the Democrats would get rid of the filibuster. I’m tired of talking about this, but the Republicans were the first ones to get rid of the filibuster. As I wrote in July, “And the only reason [the Republicans didn’t end the filibuster] was the Gang of 14 made a deal that turned out to mean, ‘As long as the Democrats never filibuster judicial nominees, the filibuster stays.’ And doncha know, as soon as the Republicans were in the minority, the filibuster was being used more than ever but the Gang of 14 quietly disbanded. Funny that!”

So let’s do it! Let’s end the filibuster at least on nominations and get a little more balance on the federal court. The way it is now, it is tipped way too far to the right. This one is simple for me and it should be simple for all liberals. I’m willing to let the conservatives do as they want when they are in power as long as liberals get to do the same. The reason is that our ideas are better. In a fair fight, we win hands down. The current situation just allows the conservatives to make everything worse without ever getting blamed for it.

End the filibuster now!

The Des Moines Register reported yesterday, Palin Compares Federal Debt to Slavery at Iowa Dinner. And you may well ask why I care. After all, Sarah Palin is always saying something stupid and she is always somewhere. This weekend, it was Iowa.

But I think it is important. I don’t care about the slavery bit and all her racist talk. What does bother me is this, “Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China.” There are two things wrong with this sentence. First: China. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about this, so I think it is worth bringing up again. As I discussed in China Owns America! In Republican Ads, only 32% of our debt is owed to anyone outside the country; only 8% is owed to China. The vast majority of American debt is owed to ourselves.

I see this kind of fear that we are going to bury ourselves in debt—especially from conservatives. But it is based on an extremely poor understanding of finance. Consider this example. When I was 5-years-old, my parents bought a house for $17,000. It is now 44 years later. Imagine that they had kept that house all this time and had only paid the interest on it. Let’s also assume that their mortgage rate was 8%, which is actually kind of high. That would mean that today, they would be paying $113 per month in interest. Clearly, they would be better off having paid off the principle—$113 per month better off. But it’s not the case that they would be buried in principle. What’s more, they would now have a house that is worth about a quarter million dollars.

That brings us to the second problem with Palin’s sentence. We aren’t taking money away from our children by borrowing money today. That is especially true if we are using the money we borrow to invest in infrastructure, health, and education. College graduates are having a hard time finding jobs right now. And that will hurt them into the future. Having a low paying job or no job at all will be a big problem compared to that modest $113 mortgage we are supposedly saving our kids from.

The real concern about our “debt problem” is that in the future, the government will have to raise taxes on the rich. That’s why conservatives care about the issue. But I’m not sure that’s the reason that Palin cares about the issue. She seems more like the base of the conservative movement—someone like Amy Kremer. These kinds of people seem to have just decided to join the conservative movement and so they repeat the talking points without even understanding them. Of course, that makes them really dangerous if they ever get power. You can depend upon someone like Karl Rove to not do anything really crazy. He knows that most of the Republican talking points are nonsense. But if Palin were president, she really would allow the government to default. There would be no convincing here. She believes in conservative principles the same way she believes in Jesus.

Sadly, this is the legacy of the modern Republican Party. And as I’ve written about a lot here, it is wrong to think that a crazy Republican can’t become president. All it takes is a bad economy.

I got this picture from Wikipedia. The caption reads, “Joseph Ambrose, an 86-year-old World War I veteran, attends the dedication day parade for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, holding the flag that covered the casket of his son, who was killed in the Korean War.” This is not just how I think about Veterans Day; it is how I think our country should think about it. Let us honor veterans but let us also regret that we have them.

In most countries, today is Armistice Day: it marks the armistice that ended World War I in 1918. It is also referred to as the more appropriate Remembrance Day. It is a day to remember those who have died in our wars. It is a solemn occasion. And it should be. Even the “good” war, World War II, should not be looked back on as a great adventure. It was a tragedy for the world. Over 60 million people were killed in that war. And for what? A bad economy that allowed a megalomaniac to gain power in Germany?

It’s my opinion, based upon nothing but a fair insight into human nature, that most people just want to live their ordinary lives with their families and friends and the occasional barbecue and backyard party. And that’s as true of people in the army as anywhere else. I put the number at 95%. It’s that 5% of the population that fucks everything up. And I’m not just talking about Hitler here. Why did we started the Iraq War? It certainly had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction—that was just a cover. And I don’t think it had to do with oil either, but that doubtless played some role. I think it was just another example of a small group of men who thought it would be super keen to take out big bad Saddam Hussein.

In the United States, of course, we celebrate Veterans Day. The idea of it is not bad. We need to honor our veterans, although I think better than a single day would be an everyday approach to providing them their earned benefits. But it seems that Veterans Day to most people is just another day to celebrate what a kick ass country the United States is. Except because it references veterans, there is more explicit jingoism. To most people, it is a time to celebrate the fact that the United States spends 46% of what all the 171 countries of the world spend on military. It ought to be our great national shame, especially when even the Democrats want to cut food stamps for the poor.

But back to that picture. That’s how we should think of Veterans Day: an old veteran from one of our many useless wars with a symbol of his son who died in another of our useless wars. To call the wars useless is not to disrespect the veterans. It is no disrespect to Achilles and Hector to note that the Trojan War was useless and tragic. To see wars clearly is a reminder of what a precious thing life is and how we should value it just as much before the war as after it.

Have a safe and thoughtful Veterans Day.

For decades, I’ve wondered just why we have credit ratings agencies. They clearly aren’t good at their jobs. There is no real reason that we should listen to them. There is a real chicken and egg aspect of it. We seem to invest confidence in them because we invest confidence in them. Of course, over the last decade it has been so much worse. First, they all gave AAA ratings to garbage mortgage backed securities. After the financial crisis showed them for the useless institutions they are, they all sat in front of Congress saying that it wasn’t their fault; they were just expressing an opinion. Fair enough. But then everyone went back to pretending that they actually knew something and weren’t just exercising their First Amendment right to talk out their asses.

The second big event was in August 2011, when S&P downgraded the US federal government’s credit rating. It was a funny thing, because at first it was based on some bad math by S&P. When the government pointed out the error, S&P decided to downgrade the credit rating anyway. It showed that the downgrade wasn’t about reality so much as S&P sending some kind of a message to the world. But here’s the funny thing about that downgrade: it didn’t seem to change the cost of borrowing for the US — at all. It is as though bond buyers — who have actual money on the line — knew that S&P was full of shit.

Well, as you may have heard, last week, S&P downgraded France. Paul Krugman wrote an excellent article about this on Friday. He argues quite convincingly that the issue here is not economics at all, but rather politics. Looking at France’s economy, all he sees is that it is doing rather well — better than countries that have a AAA credit rating with S&P. In fact, France has also brought down its deficit. The problem, for the standpoint of S&P and others, is that France didn’t do it the right way:

He even quotes the S&P justification and, although it is written in finance jargon, it says the same thing. Not that it matters. Again bondholders don’t seem to care. The French government can borrow at pretty much the same rate as they could before.

But I have a broader question. All the credit ratings agencies seems to be useless. S&P in particular seems to have some kind of conservative ax to grind in addition to being useless. Actual buyers of bonds indicate that they know the credit ratings agencies are useless. So why do we still grant them any respect? Why do we allow banks to use them to justify their actions? And most of all, and to the point, why is a ratings change from S&P given any more credence than an RNC announcement?