For Current TV, Al Jazeera > Glenn Beck

I'm no Glenn Beck fan (though I used to be), but this is pretty outrageous:

Glenn Beck’s The Blaze approached Current about buying the channel last year, but was told that “the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view,” according to a person familiar with the negotiations.

So according to Current TV executives (see: Al Gore), Glenn Beck isn't "aligned with [their] point of view" (obviously), but Al-Jazeera, a network that uses questionable methods to be a primary source for terrorist propaganda, is?

It could be that A-J just offered them more money than Beck did, and they're using the ideology argument to bolster their progressive audience while they're in the news. But if they truly did mean it, and "point of view" was one of the criteria used to reject Blaze and select A-J, it adds a whole new level to the red-green (or in this case, black-green) alliance to undermine Western institutions.

Senate fiscal cliff deal in numbers

Let's take a broad look at what 40 Senate Republicans voted for last night to avert the fiscal cliff deficit reduction they passed over the last few years.

Biden-McConnell Plan:
$620 billion revenue - mostly from tax increases on $400,000+ incomes
$30 billion in new spending - unemployment extension not offset
$15 billion in cuts - mostly military and healthcare tweaks
Postpones automatic sequester cuts of $1.5 trillion for 2 months 

Those sure do seem like small numbers. To see just how small, consider that they're spread out over 10 years, then compare them to 1 year of the budget itself.

$3.8 trillion total spending
$2.9 trillion total revenue

But let's compare apples to apples: 1 year of the budget to 1 year of the deal.

$3.8 trillion spending to start
$3 billion new spending
$1.5 billion cuts
end with ... wait for it ... $3.8 trillion spending

$2.9 trillion revenue to start
$62 billion new revenue (assuming economic growth doesn't slow...)
end with ... wait for it ... $2.9 trillion revenue

In broad terms of the budget, absolutely nothing was accomplished either in revenue or spending. Next, let's take a look at the previous proposals to really judge where we ended up.

Geithner Plan
$1.6 trillion new revenue - increase taxes, eliminate deductions over $250k income
$50 billion new spending
$350 billion cuts

Boehner counteroffer
$800 billion new revenue - eliminate deductions over $250k income
$1.2 trillion cuts

Obama outline
$1.2 trillion new revenue - increase taxes, eliminate deductions over $400k income
$80 billion new spending
$1.2 trillion cuts

Boehner "Plan B"
$1 trillion new revenue - increase taxes, eliminate deductions over $1M income
$1 trillion cuts

So instead of $350 billion to $1.2 trillion in cuts, we got $15 billion. Instead of $800 billion to $1.6 trillion in new revenue, we got $620 billion. Over 10 years.

This is not compromise, it's surrender.

Let it burn: Syria edition

Graphic video: Free Syrian Army has child behead Assad loyalist with sword israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2012/12/graphi…
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) December 10, 2012

Ok, that's it. I've been mulling Syria for as long as the civil war has been raging. The knee-jerk answer was that Assad has to go, and we should help him do it, through any means necessary. He started this by assaulting peaceful demonstrators over a year ago. Then, it was an easy thing to oppose.

Now that the "rebels" have either been transformed into or entirely replaced by radical jihadis, we should not and cannot support them in any way, even by the deposing of Assad. We should instead lend only humanitarian support to the people, not fighters, where necessary, and let the regime and jihadi forces kill as many of themselves as possible. Two vile, inhuman birds; one stone.

(Full disclosure: I did not actually watch the video linked above, nor do I intend to or suggest you do.)

Two things certain: Taxes and death, in that order

If Republicans agree to raise taxes to avoid the fiscal cliff, the 2014 elections will be a massacre. We should put our plan on the table, walk away, and let the chips fall where they may. Any surrender on the issue will result in a much worse outcome for the party in the next election.

Democrats (in the media) are giving us poll numbers in an attempt to convince us that the public wants taxes on the rich to go up as part of a deal. While this is true, they're not providing us this information for our own benefit. If Republicans agree to raise taxes this year, everyone who does so will be challenged by more conservative candidates in the 2014 GOP primary. Some of those challengers will win their primary, unseating longstanding and virtually unbeatable representatives. Some of those primary winners will turn around and lose the general election.

We need look no further than Richard Mourdock in the race this year for the Senate in Indiana to see how well that turns out. Sure, we occasionally get a Marco Rubio out of the deal, but at what cost? If poor candidates like Angle, O'Donnell, Buck, Akin, and Mourdock hadn't lost seats in the last two elections, Republicans would have at least a 50-50 tie in the Senate right now, if not a majority.

Caving on taxes ensures a 2014 GOP primary civil war, which is a strategic goldmine for Democrats, giving them a chance to get back a supermajority in the Senate and a majority in the House. We cannot let that happen, especially for the last two years of the Obama administration.

"Necessary" revenues?

In the ongoing "fiscal cliff" negotiations (read: public gamesmanship; there have been no actual negotiations yet) to avoid the expiring tax rates and automatic budget cuts previously enacted by Congress, the White House has created an arbitrary requirement for a certain amount of revenue that it says it must reach for any meaningful proposal. From a response to Jake Tapper in the White House press briefing today:

"[We] have not seen and no outside independent economist has seen a credible proposal that says you can achieve the kind of — the kind of revenues that are necessary for a balanced approach just by closing loopholes or capping deductions."

Who decided what amount of revenues are "necessary" for a "balanced approach"? One might think he means (and a good approach would be) the revenue necessary when combined with complimentary spending cuts to reduce the deficit to $0 and balance the budget. However, the total amounts we're talking about in any potential deal are literally fractions of the annual deficit. President Obama's proposal is $2 trillion, Speaker Boehner's proposal is $2.2 trillion, Bowles-Simpson is $4 trillion, but these are all spread over 10 years, where the deficit every year has been over $1 trillion for each of the last four years. So what is this unspecified target that the amount of new revenue must reach? Assuming the White House likes their own proposal and thinks it is itself "balanced" and meets the targets "necessary", this appears to be roughly 1/5 of the annual deficit. Why is that the proper goal? Why not 1/4 of the deficit? Why not 1/2? Why not the whole thing?

The Obama proposal includes $1.4 trillion in revenue from tax increases and $600 billion from spending cuts. Given the White House's reliance on the "balanced approach" trope, are we to assume that they think the numbers 1,400 and 600 are somehow balanced? Do they even know the meaning of the word? Actually, the House proposal of $800 billion in revenue (from deduction elimination, not rate increases) and $1.4 trillion in cuts is numerically more balanced than the White House proposal. However, in the real world neither of these proposals is actually balanced or even comes close to repairing the enormous fiscal damage done over the last six years.

UPDATE: During the budget/debt ceiling talks in 2011, President Obama suggested that $1.2 trillion in tax revenue could be raised by elimination deductions and credits without raising rates (or even with lowering them). Why isn't that possible anymore? And assuming he thought $1.2 trillion was a "balanced" amount of revenue then, why is $1.4 trillion balanced now and $800 billion not?

Recriminations 2012

It was a tough night. Much tougher than I expected. I was wrong, terribly, terribly wrong. Led astray by faulty premises and errant data. Gallup and Rasmussen found a country made up of either even numbers of Republicans and Democrats or more Republicans. I expected GOP enthusiasm to match that. It didn't. Final exit polls make the national electorate look like D+6, only one point down from the D+7 in 2008.

If the GOP can't do better than flipping two states (IN, NC) after four years of the most hated President in decades on the right, it's got a lot of soul searching to do. Go moderate? Go libertarian? Go more socially conservative? I obviously have a preference there, but we don't really know what the electorate will want in 4 years.

Some other quick takeaways:

• GOP holds the House (and even pick up a few seats), Democrats hold the Senate. Gridlock goes on.
• Obamacare and Dodd-Frank are now permanent law.
• Mitt Romney is a great man who deserved better than this. I wish him all the best.
• President Obama ran a hell of a campaign. Democrats should be congratulated.
• We still desperately need tax reform, entitlement reform, and immigration reform. Those are all much less likely to happen now.
• No one should blame third party candidates like Gary Johnson, even if his total is bigger than the margin in places like Florida. We don't know where those votes would have gone, or if they would have shown up at all.
• The 2016 GOP primary starts tomorrow.
• The incredible WI-centrism of the GOP of the last two years (Priebus, Ryan, Johnson, Walker) was for naught.
• Paul Ryan retains his House seat. Unclear if he retains his leadership within the party now.
• Obama is the first candidate since FDR to win reelection with fewer electoral votes and states than his initial win.
• I would say the auto bailout securing OH was the price we paid for Obama's reelection, but that doesn't explain FL, VA, IA, CO.

On to the next one...

Gutcast 2012

In the real world, polling is more art than science, otherwise we'd already know who was going to win the US Presidency next week. I've looked at lots of data over the last few months, seen ground reports, consulted my tea leaves and entrails, and here's what I think we'll see at the end of the day (or, god forbid, week or month):

I think the polls are seriously overestimating Democrat turnout in their models, by between 2-8 points per state. The GOP base is more motivated to vote than they've been in 25 years. While I don't think the map will look like it was back then (80, 84, 88) because of demographic changes, it damn well won't look like 2008 either. Then-Candidate Obama was blessed by a convergence of a handful of factors that led to his big win last time. But there are lots of disappointed and disaffected people who voted for him who won't again, and almost no one who didn't vote for him last time who has been so convinced by his political prowess that they will now. His 2008 victory is his absolute ceiling. The tide has turned. 2010 was either a foreshadowing or the high point.

On the off-chance that even I am underestimating GOP turnout, we could wake up to a massacre of this scale:

But back down to earth (or below it, depending on your perspective)... If the polls are actually, miraculously right (they can't all be, since they vary wildly), Obama will win, and it will look like this. A smaller margin than 2008 (ironic given most polls give his party a bigger share of the electorate), but still a decisive victory:

If some of the more mid-line polls are right, but GOP turnout still improves, Romney might eek it out with a painfully small margin (for both legal challenges and political capital post-inauguration).

I hope I'm right and we wake up on Wednesday to at least a 300 electoral vote win, so President Romney can get started in correcting our nation's course without controversy. Anything less and we're likely to see Florida 2000 in at least one state, probably more. The psychological damage to our republic would be more devastating than the last four years.

Donate now to help make sure that doesn't happen. Time is running out!