(The President and Vice President announce a blitz two-day national tour in support of visits by the First and Second Ladies in support of military families. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images North America.)
It is great to be out of the Beltway. People are nicer. Nothing is quite as crazy as it is back there in the capital; the gulf between us out here is not so deep and implacable.
Accordingly, I was a little startled to find that Washington followed me right out to the Front Range of the Rockies and occupied the entire ninth floor of the Marriott.
The whispers started Wednesday night, at the smoker’s station outside the smoke-free hotel. I saw the K-9 unit was at the hotel, the support truck pulled up almost to the entrance of the towering red-brick building that is an architectural quotation on the Red Rocks formation just to the south of here.
Michele and Jill were supposed to be at Coors Field yesterday to honor military families. It is a little bizarre. The Rockies-versus-Mets game will be shown on the jumbo-tron screens, since the team is out of town and the Rockies are in New York playing the Mets.
Singer Jessica Simpson is set to perform for the fans. It is sort of bizarre, a sort of high-tech version of the Oak Drive In, but nothing really surprises me anymore.
Today the Ladies will visit the National Math and Science Competition at Fountain-Fort Carson High School in Southside Colorado Springs, which is where we should all be staying. The Marriot stands in lonely isolation on the Northside, and is apparently the hotel of choice for the Air Academy boosters, since there are ominous signs in the all the elevator lobbies about making noise after 10:30 at night and getting evicted on the second warning.
I have been quiet as a mouse, and the more so once I realized that there were celebrities in residence with heavily armed escorts.
Their trip is part of a five-city tour to showcase communities and nonprofit organizations that support military families.
It is such complete horseshit that one is tempted to snort in amazement, but it certainly explains why the Vice President nodded off during President Obama’s deficit reduction address yesterday. With Jill on the road, he might have partied a little too hard Tuesday night.
We are on our own blitz national tour to support military families; in this case, our own. We were over on the base, talking to people who are dealing with the war on the border. I won’t say who or why, but the upshot of all this is that there has been a third war in progress for a decade or more on the border with Mexico.
The are just digging up more than a hundred compesenos who were executed and thrown in mass graves there in the unconstrained violence, and that is just business as usual on the border. Mexico is spinning out of control, tourism is being destroyed, and who knows where this is going.
If you consider whatever the hell our military forces have been asked to contribute in the skies over Libya, it is a fourth. We have an incredibly expensive military machine, and that is one of the things that the President wants to cut while his wife and Jill are out here to explain how they are supporting the kids who actually have to fight the wars.
SECDEF Gates already did this, promising the Service Chiefs that if they could make his target reductions in the budget, they would be free to re-invest additional savings to promote efficiencies. I thought that was bullshit at the time, and it turns out I was right, since when the President finally announced that there was a little problem with the budget yesterday, he wacked defense $400 billion more than what Secretary Gates had told Congress was safe or prudent.
Now, hold your horses and don’t start yelling at me.
I think we all realize how serious this is, even if the President seems to have only realized it yesterday. I think we all know that taxes are going to have to go up a little. I suppose I could live with a return to the Clinton-era rates, though what is actually going to happen will doubtless be worse.
There were times in history when the marginal tax rates for we alleged plutocrats was 90%, and the expiration of the Bush tax rates will coincide precisely with my decision to go off the grid and retire.
Oh well. My progressive pal summed it up in a quick note this morning:
“The President is fixed on addressing the problem by looking at both revenue and spending. The Right always takes the revenue side off the table. The left may be full of shit on a lot of things, but on these two budget proposals, Paul Ryan’s Tea Party plan wins the bullshit war hands down.
The Congressional Budget Office analyzed the proposal using Ryan’s assumptions and found most savings from spending cuts would go to pay for tax cuts, not to reduce the deficit. The right has given us more versions of Voodoo economics than Microsoft has given us versions of Windows. Put the social issues aside. Maybe we do want to stop taking care of the old and we really do want to reduce their health coverage by 70% (Ryan plan). Not a country I want to call mine, but we can have that discussion. In the meantime, we know one thing going forward, there is simply no evidence that decreasing taxes increases revenue. Zero, zip, squat.
And so distilled to its bottom line, Ryan’s plan shreds most of the health care safety net of some little old lady in Pasadena in order to give the benefits of a tax cut to some cigar smoking, Maserati driving, Bank of America douche bag whose “retention bonus” (they had to quit calling them performance bonuses for obvious reasons) was in the millions.”
There is a lot there that I don’t disagree with. I mean, when Barry Bonds is getting more punishment from the Government than Goldman-Sachs, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
I got the other view from a more conservative pal who pulled the plug and went off the grid to get ready for what is coming, which he views as something as profound as the Tsunami that smacked Japan. He forwarded the Wall Street Journal analysis of the speech:
“The immediate political goal was to inoculate the White House from criticism that it is not serious about the fiscal crisis, after ignoring its own deficit commission last year and tossing off a $3.73 trillion budget in February that increased spending amid a record deficit of $1.65 trillion. Mr. Obama was chased to George Washington University yesterday because Mr. Ryan and the Republicans outflanked him on fiscal discipline and are now setting the national political agenda.”
You know, this ought to be a discussion about saving America, and both sides are off to the races on their own agendas. I say, a pox on both of their houses.
Smokin’ Joe Biden was tasked by the President to unscrew things. I hope he can stay awake for it.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com