It’s obvious to any informed observer that we have fiscal and economic crises in going on in this country.  Whether it’s the deficit or it’s unemployment, the writing on the wall is clear:  unless we have structural changes in our economic system, there will be a day of reckoning coming.  The Washington Post had a great editorial yesterday on the state of Washington.  I implore people to read the entire thing, but here is a snippet.

Dangerous is the path we seem to be headed for: leaving in place all or most of the Bush tax cuts; patching the alternative minimum tax and averting cuts in Medicare reimbursements for physicians; and suspending the automatic spending reductions triggered by the failure of the debt reduction supercommittee. Under this path, by 2022 public debt would be nearly 100 percent of the gross domestic product, a level not seen since just after World War II….

President Obama has called for a balanced solution but has neither proposed serious tax reform nor adequately outlined the ways in which he would get entitlement spending, particularly Medicare, under control. The position of most Republicans, on the presidential campaign trail and in Congress, is wildly less responsible. They imagine a world in which the debt can be tamed by spending cuts alone; indeed, as we pointed out earlier this week, the Republican presidential candidates call for trillions in additional tax cuts beyond extending the expiring ones.

The cost of President Bush’s policies to raising the deficit:  $5.1 trillion.

The cost of President Obama’s policies to raising the deficit:  $983 billion.

I’d love to hear more mindless Republican bumper stick talking points about how they are fiscally responsible.  If you vote Republican, you’re supporting much bigger government than if you were voting Democrat.

Remember Richard Gere’s character, Edward Lewis, from Pretty Woman?  Clearly the character had a lot in common with Mitt Rommey:

Vivian: You don’t actually have a billion dollars, huh?

Edward: No. I get some of it from banks, investors… it’s not an easy thing to do.

Vivian: And you don’t make anything…

Edward: No.

Vivian: … and you don’t build anything.

Edward: No.

Vivian: So whadda ya do with the companies once you buy ‘em?

Edward: I sell them.[Viv reaches for his tie.]

Vivian: Here, let me do that. You sell them.

Edward: Well, I… don’t sell the whole company, I break it up into pieces, and then I sell that off, it’s worth more than the whole.

Vivian: So, it’s sort of like, um… stealing cars and selling ‘em for parts, right?

Edward: [sighs exasperatedly] Yeah, sort of. But legal.

So seeing that today is my birthday, I’m requesting a simple gift from each of you.

Drop the rigid, mindless ideology and read a policy book.  As a nation, we won’t be anywhere if we continue the mindless and misinformed babble that currently substitutes for political discourse.  I will suggest “Back to Work” by Bill Clinton, “Aftershock” by Robert Reich or “The Benefit and the Burden” by Bruce Bartlett.  I’m not endorsing everything written in those books — hell, some of the ideas in those books are contradictory.  I’m merely asking people to become informed.  Read intelligent, fact based, policy driven books and use your own judgement.  Stop mindlessly spewing uninformed bumper sticker vomit like “Government is always the problem” or “Corporations are always bad.”  The world is not black and white.

The day we start allowing certain medical procedures and not others, or covering certain medications but not others based on morality is the day we take a step back in our progress as a society.  There is no excuse for denying medical coverage for birth control.

It was good news that the Obama administration withstood pressure from Roman Catholic bishops and social conservatives to deny contraceptive coverage for millions of American women who work for religiously affiliated employers. Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, rejected broad exemptions from a new rule requiring all health plans to cover birth control, without a deductible or co-payment….

The administration’s commitment to affordable birth control is welcome at a moment when women’s access to reproductive health care, including contraceptives, cancer screenings and abortion services, is under assault in the courts, state legislatures and Congress, as well as on the Republican campaign trail.

We often forget that it was not long ago that some states made all forms of birth control illegal.  We can not allow social conservatives to roll back the progress that society has made.

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who rarely ever speaks much in public, held a forum at my alma mater last week and got into some issues that have been ignored for a long time — namely the problem with state pensions.  Underfunded Illinois pensions are one of the most significant problems with the Illinois economy, and  Rich Miller of CapitolFax sums up Madigan’s argument in his latest Sun-Times column:

Madigan didn’t officially endorse the plan to ease the state’s ongoing budget strain by passing pension obligations down the governmental food chain to school districts and public colleges and universities, but he did indicate that he was strongly leaning in that direction.

The “normal arrangement,” for pensions, Madigan said, was that the employee and the employer both pay into the pension system. But school districts pay just 0.054 percent of payroll into the Teachers’ Retirement System, Madigan noted (and when he has it down to the decimal like that, you know he’s focused on the issue). He also said the universities pay “zero” toward employee pension costs.

“And let’s understand,” Madigan said about public school employees, “these are people who never got a payroll check from the state of Illinois.”

The speaker went on to note that the state paid $4 billion this year into its five pension funds, half of which went to the Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS).

“So over one half of our obligation to pensions, which is the subject of great public debate today, is for people (teachers) who never worked for the state of Illinois,” Madigan said.

Madigan also correctly pointed out that the Chicago Public Schools has its own pension fund and pays its employer share.

“You’re never going to read this in a newspaper article. … They’re never going to put a paragraph in there talking about that,” Madigan said, echoing others who’ve wondered for years why Chicago taxpayers fund the schools’ pension fund while they and the rest of Illinois taxpayers pick up the tab for suburban and downstate school districts.

“Even I don’t remember why that happened,” Madigan said jokingly. “I’ve never found anybody who can tell me why the state of Illinois stepped up one day and said, ‘OK, school districts, we’ll just pick up all your pension costs.’”

I haven’t studied the issue or the numbers for myself so I’ll reserve judgment until I can look at the numbers, but if true, it certainly looks like a fair way to ease pension costs.

John McCain has an ingenious way for Republicans to gain traction again:  just have people stop listening to them at debates.

He expressed serious concerns on Capitol Hill Tuesday, claiming the debates have taken on an “inordinate influence” that was absent in 2008. “I think it’s very harmful to Republicans, because instead of the candidates presenting their views and their policies and their proposals, it’s all gotcha,” he said, according to USA Today. “And disapproval ratings go up when they spend an hour or two insulting each other. So I think it’s very damaging.”

Let’s just hope we can replay all the Republican primary debates fully when the general election comes around — nothing could be better for President Obama’s reelection chances that people just watching those debates.

We all saw the picture of Arizona Governor  Jan Brewer wagging her finger in the face of President Obama.  Of course, Jan Brewer is typical of many Southern Republicans.  She uses thinly cloaked bigotry to push a regressive and backward thinking ideology.  Most of that can be attributed to the fact that she’s not very educated, informed or experienced in the real world  - she is a career politician who has never actually done anything in her life other than run for office.  She’s never had a real career.

She also has a history of outright lying.  She claimed her father died fighting Hitler when in fact he died ten years after the war ended from cancer.  She claimed headless bodies had been found in the desert when in fact later it was shown that she was lying.  The pattern of lying is disappointing from someone who is the Governor of an important state like Arizona.

Obama supporters shouldn’t feel too threatened by her.  Brewer talking about policy is like a paraplegic trying to compete in a triathlon.

 

Still unsure how anyone can take this guy seriously…

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorumexplained his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape during an interview Friday, saying that women who face such circumstances should “make the best out of a bad situation.”

Asked by CNN’s Piers Morgan what he would do if his own daughter approached him, begging for an abortion after having been raped, Santorum explained that he would counsel her to “accept this horribly created” baby, because it was still a gift from God, even if given in a “broken” way.

 

I’ll come right out and say it:  President Obama gave one of the best speeches of his career and the Congress heard one of the best State of the Union addresses in recent memory.  Financial pragmatism and responsibility were main themes.

A tax code that allows for millionaires to pay less of a percentage of their income in taxes than the lower and middle class is a broken tax code.  The middle class needs a tax cut while the wealthy need to pay their fair share.

Republicans want badly to return to the regulatory code that helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.  We cannot allow a return to the way things were before, because otherwise we risk another financial crisis and recession.

The bankers who caused the crisis are going to be held responsible for their actions.  The success of the Attorney General is imperative in creating a strong future – not a single banking executive went to jail for his role in the financial crisis, yet we’re prosecuting people like Martha Stewart and Roger Clemens.

President Obama effectively laid out a third way of American politics last night.  He’s gone beyond liberal or conservative and managed to start a national conversation toward the real goal:  solving problems.

Will you go beyond ideology to solve our country’s problems?

Mitch Daniels stated last night that President Obama was trying to form a middle class using government jobs, but he fails to mention that President Obama has cut government jobs while creating more net private sector jobs in his first three years in office than President Bush did during his entire eight years.

Tell me again why George W Bush’s budget director, the man directly responsible for taking a surplus budget and turning it into a deficit budget, is lecturing us on austerity?

Never mind that the unemployment rate in Indiana has risen above the national average on his watch recently.  Never mind the fact that his support for right to work legislation threatens to kill even more jobs by forcing companies like BP out of the state.

Save it for people who aren’t paying attention, Mitch.

Tonight, President Obama delivered a strong, assertive State of the Union address that had specific policy proposals and solutions for how to solve problems in our country moving forward.

If anyone can claim that they disagree with the President moving forward, feel free to let me know why.  I’d love to understand your delusion.

Mitt Romney said a few years ago, “The older I get, the smarter Ronald Reagan gets.”

It doesn’t take a political nerd to understand that Romney is speaking directly about ideology — namely rigid anti-government ideology.  We all know what that means:  sticking to rules of ideology will guide policy, not viewing problems and deciding upon solutions that work based on history of what has worked and what hasn’t.  At it’s core, Romney is specifically opposing pragmatism.

Pragmatism is the opposite of ideology.  With ideology, you create a rule — for example, ‘government is bad.’  Then, when deciding policy, you look to your ideology and would oppose any measure by the government, because ‘government is bad.”  It’s not relevant whether the policy has been successful in the past.  Whether it could be successful is irrelevant also.  Unless it fits the ideological rule, it will be opposed.  This is the way modern conservatives think.

Pragmatism, then, is the belief that when deciding policy, we should look at history.  We should study what has worked in the past and what has been unsuccessful in the past and keep doing the things that work and stop doing the things that don’t.    That is not to say we shouldn’t have core beliefs and standards — but that we need to pragmatically view solutions for the betterment of the American people.

Pragmatism is that middle ground between ideology and being wishy-washy, which is just as dangerous.

We need to demand that our public servants view data and history as factors of whether a policy is a good idea, not whether it would jive with a generic quote by Ronald Reagan.

South Carolina is a well known haven of conservative, evangelical Christians.  Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary yesterday.

The three men who lost, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, have all been faithfully married to their wives for decades.

Newt Gingrich, who won among the evangelicals, is a serial adulterer who has made a career out of cheating on his wives.   He has been married three times, and each time has married his mistress after divorcing his wives.  He criticizes Obama for being “secular” yet has lived his life the complete opposite of the way the Bible tells you should live.

What do these results say about the evangelical Christian vote?