That's what it means to be a Democrat

The president laid out a vision of optimism and equal opportunity that made Paul Ryan and the GOP look small

BY JOAN WALSH

AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Paul Ryan

I'm glad I waited for President Obama's heralded budget speechWednesday before criticizing it (such a novel idea); there was much to praise in it and little to challenge. The best news: Obama laid out the kind of sweeping "story" of American democracy, and the bold vision of how we grow together, that I thought was too much to ask for even yesterday. He even talked about the scariest fact of American inequality: The dangerous hold the top 1 percent of Americans has on wealth, income and (he didn't say this) politics. He pushed back on the cruel GOP deficit plan, made his toughest case yet for tax hikes on the richest, and stayed away from the worst ideas floated by his own deficit commission. The devil will be in the deficit-cutting details, and frankly, there weren't a whole lot of them in the speech. But the president came out fighting with firmness, and with a rhetoric of social justice and equality, that I haven't seen enough of these last two years.

Obama acknowledged our American history as "rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government." But he quickly identified "another thread running throughout our history":

A belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. We believe, in the words of our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves. And so we’ve built a strong military to keep us secure, and public schools and universities to educate our citizens. We’ve laid down railroads and highways to facilitate travel and commerce. We’ve supported the work of scientists and researchers whose discoveries have saved lives, unleashed repeated technological revolutions, and led to countless new jobs and entire industries. Each of us has benefited from these investments, and we are a more prosperous country as a result.

 Part of this American belief that we are all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us. "There but for the grace of God go I," we say to ourselves, and so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, and those with disabilities. We are a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further – we would not be a great country without those commitments.

So far, so good. It got even better when Obama took direct aim at Paul Ryan's cruel and ludicrous budget plan. He laid out its many cuts, and concluded:

These are the kind of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America we believe in. And they paint a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them. Go to China and you’ll see businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean children are outpacing our kids in math and science. Brazil is investing billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on high-priced gasoline, but biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a vision that says the United States of America – the greatest nation on Earth – can’t afford any of this.

Then he attacked the Gilded Age social inequality and tax cuts that have helped create our troubles:

Think about it. In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.

Indulge me here, because this is how Democrats should be talking, and rarely do:

 The America I know is generous and compassionate; a land of opportunity and optimism. We take responsibility for ourselves and each other; for the country we want and the future we share. We are the nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness. We sent a generation to college on the GI bill and saved millions of seniors from poverty with Social Security and Medicare. We have led the world in scientific research and technological breakthroughs that have transformed millions of lives.

 This is who we are. This is the America I know. We don’t have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit investments in our people and our country. To meet our fiscal challenge, we will need to make reforms. We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in. And as long as I’m President, we won’t.

That's the president I voted for.

On the meat of the president's plan to cut the deficit: He deserves credit for rejecting Medicare vouchers, for turning aside specific talk about Social Security (even though it has nothing to do with the federal deficit, the privatizers and Obama's friends on his deficit commission wanted it thrown on the table in a grand bargain that can only be bad news for Democrats and working people; Obama seemed not to be willing to do that); for promising that reforms and innovations already part of the Affordable Care Act will bring down the costs of Medicare and Medicaid; and for saying we need bigger defense cuts than so far proposed.

(Small point: I liked the way Obama trashed Ryan without mentioning him -- you don't fight down -- but I wish he'd been a tiny bit more confrontational on exactly what Ryan's "Medicare vouchers" would do; if seniors could afford insurance at all, which is debatable, they'd certainly be at the mercy of privatized "death panels" refusing care over its costs. I say that because I'm sure some GOP prevaricator will bring back the "death panel" lie now that Obama has committed to curbing costs in Medicare. I hope I'm wrong.)

My quibbles? I'm still concerned that Obama has agreed to freeze the 12 percent of the budget that goes to "discretionary spending." And I'm assuming that freeze includes the cuts made this week. I don't like his promise of $3 in spending cuts for every dollar raised in revenue via tax hikes. In a statement, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka praised the speech but added: "President Obama does not yet have the balance right between spending cuts and new revenue." I also never like it when Obama undermines himself by saying things like:

I don’t expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach I laid out today. I’m eager to hear other ideas from all ends of the political spectrum.

I know, I know, he thinks it makes him sound reasonable to independents; I worry he sounds weak to Republicans. If Obama thinks the plan he laid out is as far to the left as Ryan's plan is to the right, and that the answer is to meet in the glorious middle, we're all in trouble.

But for today, I'll take him at his word. After the speech, pundits called it the opening salvo of the Obama 2012 reelection campaign, as though there was something wrong with that. If these are the founding principles of the president's 2012 campaign, Democrats and the country will be better off than we've been in a while.

Black by Choice

Melissa Harris-Perry

April 15, 2010   |    This article appeared in the May 3, 2010 edition of The Nation.

President Obama created a bit of a stir in early April when he completed his Census form. In response to the question about racial identity the president indicated he was "Black, African American or Negro." Despite having been born of a white mother and raised in part by white grandparents, Obama chose to identify himself solely as black even though the Census allows people to check multiple answers for racial identity.

This choice disappointed some who have fought to ensure that multiracial people have the right to indicate their complex racial heritage. It confused some who were surprised by his choice not to officially recognize his white heritage. It led to an odd flurry of obvious political stories confirming that Obama was, indeed, the first African-American president.

When Obama marked his Census form, he offered another lesson in what has been an intensive if unintentional seminar on the social construction of race. In just a few years, decades of multiple racial formations have been projected onto him at hyperspeed; it's a bit like watching those nature films that show the growth of an apple tree from a seed in just thirty seconds. When Hillary Clinton held a significant lead among black voters, media outlets regularly questioned if Obama was "black enough" to earn African-American electoral support. When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright dominated the news cycle, the question shifted to whether Obama was "too black" to garner white votes. By the final months of the campaign, Obama's opponents charged that he was a noncitizen, a Muslim and a terrorist. In less than two years a single body had been subjected to definitions ranging from insufficiently black, to far too black, to somehow foreign and frightening.

But Obama did more than disrupt standard definitions of blackness; he created a definitional crisis for whiteness. Imagine for a moment that a young American falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1960. He awakens suddenly in 2008 and learns that we are in the midst of a historic presidential election between a white and a black candidate. He learns that one candidate is a Democrat, a Harvard Law School graduate, a lecturer at the conservative University of Chicago Law School. He also discovers that this candidate is married to his first wife, and they have two children who attend an exclusive private school. His running mate is an Irish Catholic. The other candidate is a Republican. He was an average student who made his mark in the military. This candidate has been married twice, and his running mate is a woman whose teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock.

Now ask our recently awakened American to guess which candidate is white and which is black. Remember, his understanding of race and politics was frozen in 1960, when a significant number of blacks still identified themselves as Republican, an Ivy League education was a marker of whiteness and military service a common career path for young black men. Remember that he would expect marriage stability among whites and sexual immorality to mark black life. It's entirely possible that our Rip would guess that Obama was the white candidate and McCain the black one.

By displaying all these tropes of traditional whiteness, Obama's candidacy disrupted the very idea of whiteness. Suddenly whiteness was no longer about educational achievement, family stability or the command of spoken English. One might argue that the folksy interventions of Sarah Palin were a desperate attempt to reclaim and redefine whiteness as a gun-toting ordinariness that eschews traditional and elite markers of achievement.

Obama's whiteness in this sense is frightening and strange for those invested in believing that racial categories are stable, meaningful and essential. Those who yearn for a postracial America hoped Obama had transcended blackness, but the real threat he poses to the American racial order is that he disrupts whiteness, because whiteness has been the identity that defines citizenship, access to privilege and the power to define national history.

In 1998 Toni Morrison wrote that Bill Clinton was the first "black president" because he "displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas." Ten years later the man who truly became America's first black president displayed few of these tropes. Instead he was a scholarly, worldly, health food-eating man from Hawaii. In this sense, Obama was the white candidate in 2008, and a substantial portion of white voters preferred Obama's version of whiteness to that of McCain and Palin.

Which brings us back to Obama's Census choice. Despite his legitimate claims on whiteness, he chose to call himself black. As historian Nell Painter documents in her new book The History of White People, white identity was a heavily policed and protected border for most of American history. A person born to an African parent and a white parent could be legally enslaved in America until 1865. From 1877 until 1965 that person would have been subject to segregation in public accommodations, schools, housing and employment. In 1896 the Supreme Court established the doctrine of separate but equal in the case of Homer Plessy, a New Orleans Creole of color whose ancestry was only a small fraction African. President Obama's Census self-identification was a moment of solidarity with these black people and a recognition that the legal and historical realities of race are definitive, that he would have been subject to all the same legal restrictions had he been born at another time. So in April, Obama did as he has done repeatedly in his adult life: he embraced blackness, with all its disprivilege, tumultuous history and disquieting symbolism. He did not deny his white parentage, but he acknowledged that in America, for those who also have African heritage, having a white parent has never meant becoming white.

Melissa Harris-Perry

Are We All Black Americans Now?

Melissa Harris-Perry

In the months following September 11, my colleague Cornel West offered this insight: national political elites used the devastating attacks to promote the “niggerization of the American people.” West understood that long before 9/11, African-Americans were intimately familiar with terrorism. Through the Jim Crow century, they were routinely and randomly brutalized and murdered by well-organized groups of whites acting beyond the confines of the official state but with the tacit consent of their society. Under the shadow of lynching, black Americans learned what it meant to feel, as West describes, “unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated for who they are.” After 9/11 far too many Americans, unaccustomed to this sense of collective intimidation, felt helpless to halt an unjustified war or the erosion of civil liberties. Thus, whether or not they were black, Americans were “niggerized” by the attacks.

Author

 

Melissa Harris-Perry

Melissa Harris-Perry, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is...

We Can't Win the Fight if We Can't Tell the Story (Barack Obama, Conservatives and the American Right)

Whatever one thinks of the foreign and domestic policy outcomes of the past two years, it is clear that the Obama administration has stumbled in its ability to tell a compelling story.

Melissa Harris-Perry

 41 comments

The Great Wells of Manning Marable(Education, Racism and Discrimination)

Manning Marable did more than encourage us. He made a way for us.

Melissa Harris-Perry

In recent months, I have been reminded of Professor West’s analysis because one way to read our current moment is as a blackening of America. The social, economic and political conditions that have long defined African-American life have descended onto a broader population, and it has been instructive to watch how the nation has responded.

Initially, conservatives argued that Tea Party activists had every right to be disgusted with national leadership and to demand swift economic intervention to combat the near 10 percent unemployment rate. Since the mid-1970s, except for a brief dip between 1998 and 2002, unemployment among African-Americans has routinely exceeded 10 percent, yet African-Americans were rarely encouraged to blame systems or organize collectively. Instead blacks were stereotyped as lazy and undeserving. This characterization has been an effective ideological tool for politicians intent on limiting social programs, cutting welfare, ignoring cities, slashing job training and neglecting housing.

Within months, the Tea Party shifted its focus to the deficit. As it did, policy debates about the poor and unemployed came to mirror decades of discourse about black Americans. Extensions of unemployment insurance were decried as “creeping socialism.” Echoing theories of dependency leveled against African-Americans for decades, one conservative blogger suggested that extending unemployment benefits would create “a permanent entitlement and would perpetuate unemployment.” Perhaps, in this moment, Americans understood how dangerously corrosive the characterization of the poor as “idle” is for black people.

This past November the TSA introduced screening procedures that many Americans—liberals and conservatives alike—deemed intrusive, random and demeaning. But for decades urban police forces have regularly employed race-based traffic stops and pedestrian stop-and-frisks in African-American communities. These policing practices have done little to make neighborhoods safer, but they have contributed to massive incarceration rates for black men. Justifying their racially punitive behavior as a reasonable response to potential crime, police forces have acted largely with the consent of white Americans, some of whom later decried the TSA’s new procedures. Perhaps, for a moment, they felt the stinging humiliation that routinely accompanies black life.

Few events more clearly demonstrated the blackening of America than the standoff in Wisconsin. Like the nineteenth-century leaders of Southern states who stripped black citizens of voting rights, public accommodation and civic associations, Wisconsin’s Republican majority dismantled the hard-won basic rights of Wisconsin workers. Like those Confederate leaders, the Wisconsin GOP used intimidation, threats and even the police against demonstrators and rival officials. As the saga unfolded, many Wisconsin citizens felt stunned that their once-secure rights might be eliminated. For a moment, perhaps, they glimpsed the experience of black men and women who watched the shadow of Jim Crow blot out the promises of emancipation.

The 1880s were also the decade when efforts to create corporate personhood were initiated by wealthy railroad barons. In a 2010 article, James and Tomilea Allison (psych professor at Indiana University and former mayor of Bloomington, respectively) traced how these corporate interests misrepresented past cases so that the Supreme Court eventually relied on nonexistent precedent to twist Fourteenth Amendment protections intended for newly freed slaves to instead offer shelter for profiteering corporations. More than a century later, these arguments were crucial to the Citizens United decision, which putatively endowed extraordinarily wealthy corporations with an “equal” right to electoral influence but in practice gave them breathtakingly unequal representation. Perhaps, as they are reduced to a fraction of a citizen, other Americans now catch a glimpse of what it means to be codified as only three-fifths of a person.

Today corporate greed, conservative ideology, manufactured right-wing populism and progressive complicity are making more and more Americans into, as Professor West might characterize them, “niggers.” Rather than try to escape the pain of experiencing some small familiarity with blackness, Americans could choose to learn from generations of African-Americans who resisted dehumanizing processes of domination and inequality. During the 2008 election Obama’s detractors tried to smear him by suggesting that “Hussein” was a terrorist’s moniker. As a demonstration of solidarity, thousands of Americans informally declared that they too would be known by the middle name Hussein. It was purely symbolic, but it rested on a belief in the power to change meaning by embracing rather than eschewing that which is labeled subordinate, alien, dangerous and shameful. By embracing our collective blackness, perhaps we can find the fortitude and creativity necessary to face the continuing erosion of our national social safety net in the face of a persistent economic crisis.

Melissa Harris-Perry

March 30, 2011   |    This article appeared in the April 18, 2011 edition of The Nation.

CBO Says Budget Deal Will Barely Cut Spending

April 13, 2011

A CBO analysis of the budget deal -- which will be voted on Thursday -- finds that the spending bill advertised as containing some $38.5 billion in cuts, will only reduce federal outlays by $352 million below 2010 spending rates, National Journal reports. 

CBO also projects that total spending is actually some $3.3 billion more than in 2010, if emergency spending is included in the total.

Politico: "It's not clear how big a worry CBO numbers will be for Republicans, but as the estimates gained more attention, the whip operation grew more concerned Wednesday night."

CBO Says Budget Deal Will Cut Spending by Only $352 Million This Year

By Tim Fernholz

Wednesday, April 13, 2011 | 11:40 p.m.

Luke FRAZZA /AFP Photo

Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has boasted that the spending deal provided the biggest budget cuts in history.

A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the fiscal 2011 spending deal that Congress will vote on Thursday concludes that it would cut spending this year by less than one-one hundredth of what both Republicans or Democrats have claimed.

A comparison prepared by the CBO shows that the omnibus spending bill, advertised as containing some $38.5 billion in cuts, will only reduce federal outlays by $352 million below 2010 spending rates. The nonpartisan budget agency also projects that total outlays are actually some $3.3 billion more than in 2010, if emergency spending is included in the total.

The astonishing result, according to CBO, is the result of several factors: increases in spending included in the deal, especially at the Defense Department; decisions to draw over half of the savings from recissions, cuts to reserve funds, and mandatory-spending programs; and writing off cuts from funding that might never have been spent.

Also from National Journal …


10 Years, 10 Broken Debt Ceilings

National Journal previously reported that after removing rescissions, cuts to reserve funds, and reductions in mandatory-spending programs, discretionary spending would be reduced only by $14.7 billion. CBO’s analysis, which takes into account the likelihood that certain authorized funding will never be spent, suggests that the actual cuts will be even smaller.

With some conservatives already opposing the deal for not going far enough to meet the GOP campaign pledges to cut $100 billion, the news could complicate House Republicans' efforts to pass the bill. The minimal effect on current government spending, however, could improve macroeconomic forecasts that predicted lower economic growth if government spending was drastically reduced.

"This bill will cut $315 billion in Washington spending over 10 years, $78 billion compared with the President's request this year alone," said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. "Democratic spin and arcane budget jargon doesn't change that."

The CBO did confirm that budget authority would remain $78.5 billion below what President Obama requested in his fiscal 2011 budget request, and Republicans can point to long-term savings as a result of lowering the government’s spending baseline, including some $40 billion from cuts to Pell Grants. 

“It is kind of crazy to have come to the brink of shutting down the government over a $350 million difference,” said Scott Lilly, a former staff director at the Appropriations Committee under Chairman David Obey, D-Wis.

Boehner: 'I'll get there' on budget By: David Rogers April 13, 2011 08:06 PM EDT

Speaker John Boehner brings his White House budget deal to a floor vote Thursday, predicting success but still battling worrisome new cost estimates and awkward relations with President Barack Obama, who chose to deliver a partisan-tinged deficit-reduction address on the eve of the debate. Congressional Budget Office data, posted Wednesday morning, credit the Boehner-Obama deal with capping appropriations at a level nearly $38 billion lower than when Republicans took charge of the House in January. But this will have only a minimal impact on outlays or direct spending before the 2011 fiscal year ends Sept. 30. And once contingency funds related to Afghanistan and Pakistan are counted, the news gets worse: The CBO now says that total appropriations outlays for 2011 are higher — not lower — by about $3.3 billion than it had estimated in December. “I’ll get there,” the speaker told POLITICO. And given the level of Democratic support, Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) felt bold enough to predict: “I don’t see any chance that this fails unless the bottom falls out with the House Republicans.” But that’s exactly the nightmare for Boehner, and much as he dismissed any notion of doing the vote count himself, the speaker took time Tuesday to meet with and fortify those lawmakers charged with doing the whipping for the GOP. The leadership is betting heavily on loyalty to Boehner and a desire to move on to larger budget battles to hold together the rank and file. “This fight is over, move on to the next one,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.). But Obama’s speech at The George Washington University fed into a new round of partisan sniping, and Republicans were privately baffled that the president gave no heads-up to Boehner when the two men were negotiating the final deal last week on 2011 spending. Late Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee was preparing its own critique of the deal and, citing the CBO outlay projections, freshman critic Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) dismissed the bill as a “Dollar Store” deal. “Right now, I’m undecided. I thought I was for it, but I’ve got to find out more of what’s in it,” said Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.); and Rep. Joe Walsh, an Illinois freshman, described himself as “genuinely as undecided as a human being can possibly be.” “You can make a very compelling argument on either side,” Walsh said. “Look, Boehner and the Republicans won when it comes to the straight negotiation. Obama didn’t want to cut, period, and we’re getting cuts. … It’s like we made it this high up the mountain, let’s gather right there, and let’s get ready for the next fight.” “That’s a compelling argument. But on the other hand, we should’ve made it a lot further up the mountain. On the other hand, that number should be a lot bigger, because the crisis is so big. So in a way, it’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough.” On the Democratic side, there has been little evidence of the White House helping round up votes, and that task has been left more to Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, who hope to deliver as many as 70 votes. But much as it irritated Republicans, Obama’s deficit speech did help among Democrats, and leadership liberals like Michigan Rep. Sander Levin, ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, told POLITICO he felt more comfortable now backing the deal. “The president’s speech will allow me to vote for it because he made clear that Medicare and Medicaid will not be destroyed on his watch,” Levin said. “He drew a larger picture, and I think it was critical for him to do that. … When he paints the larger picture, it makes it possible to vote for a piece about which I have some worries.” It’s not clear how big a worry CBO numbers will be for Republicans, but as the estimates gained more attention, the whip operation grew more concerned Wednesday night. Outside conservative bloggers picked up on the issue and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, now running for the GOP presidential nomination, weighed in against the deal. By any measure, the budget deal still represents a significant shift in government policy. And while the news coverage tends to focus on a few high-profile give-and-takes, the fact is that billions in long-term spending are being taken out of the mix, especially affecting federal aid to state and local governments. Whether Republicans will be patient enough to have made this change is the real question behind the outlay projections for the next six months. The decision to increase Pentagon appropriations — together with the mix of spending that produces higher outlays — is clearly a major factor. But even if the Pentagon portion of the budget is entirely discounted, the net outlay reduction is just $8.2 billion from the CBO forecast at the end of last year. Given the GOP’s famous “$100 billion cut” rhetoric of the 2010 campaign, the influence of tea party conservatives and projections now of a $1.4 trillion-plus deficit, this is a problem for Boehner — so much so that the Ohio Republican may be forced to borrow a phrase from Obama and try to sell the deal as an “investment in the future.” From this standpoint, the CBO numbers put the speaker on stronger ground. The new appropriations cap of $1.0498 trillion represents a $78.5 billion cut from earlier CBO estimates of Obama’s 2011 budget requests and will significantly alter the CBO’s own spending baseline going into the future, especially for nondefense spending. Indeed, separating out increased Pentagon appropriations, the CBO numbers confirm that the rest of the government will be cut $42 billion from the level when Boehner became speaker. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) is clearly betting on this point to win support from his caucus. “I think they will look at the big picture,” he told POLITICO in a brief interview Tuesday prior to the release of the CBO numbers. “This is a historic event, the biggest cut in history, the biggest nondefense cut in history.” That said, CBO’s low outlay-savings estimates show the agency is unconvinced by some of the alternative mandatory spending changes that were substituted for appropriations cuts in the final package. The White House and Senate Democrats had insisted on this strategy, especially to protect health and education programs. But in scoring the giant labor, health and education chapter of the bill, CBO credits few real savings to what look on paper like billions of dollars in reductions. The chief exception is reforms in the Pell Grant aid program for low-income college students. Here, CBO projects modest outlay savings of $133 million in 2011 growing into big multiyear outlay reductions of more than $8 billion in the next decade. But the budget agency is very dubious about any large outlay savings materializing from other mandatory spending cuts in this section of the bill. For example, $3.5 billion is cut from performance bonus payments to states to expand Medicaid coverage for the children of working-class families just above the poverty line. Because the money has not already been used, CBO appears to conclude that cash-strapped states won’t soon come back for it, and thus no real deficit reduction will result. The one-page table released Wednesday includes no specific commentary on the deficit impact, but it is possible to make comparisons with CBO tables from before the new Congress took office and a rapid-fire series that have followed throughout the budget debate this year. To be sure, there is always a time lag between appropriations cuts and immediate savings. A $1.143 billion across-the-board cut in the budget deal yields just $688 million in outlay reductions before Sept. 30, according to CBO — an almost 2-1 ratio. Republicans themselves sought to avoid deep cuts in fast-spending salaries and operations accounts. As a result, many of the reductions are from state and local grants and capital accounts — such as EPA water and sewer projects — which spend out at a lower rate. And the fact that the budget fight has dragged on for two months also creates disparities, because there is that much less time for the cuts to take effect. Nevertheless, when CBO estimated the initial House bill in February, it projected that the $61.3 billion in nonemergency appropriations cuts would result in $9.2 billion in outlay reductions by Sept. 30 when measured against comparable outlay estimates two months earlier, on Dec. 20. By comparison, the precise appropriations cut now, $37.7 billion, translates into a vastly smaller sum, $352 million, using the same standard. A more accurate picture can be drawn by separating out the annual Pentagon portion of the bills. When this is done, the House bill in February can be seen as having truly proposed to cut more than $68 billion from largely domestic and foreign aid appropriations. The resulting 2011 outlay reduction forecast by CBO was about $18 billion — a roughly 4-1 ratio. By comparison, the deal now cuts $42 billion from non-Pentagon accounts, but the outlay reduction is about $8.2 billion — a 5-1 ratio. Jake Sherman contributed to this report. CORRECTION: The headline on an earlier version of this story misrepresented Boehner's statement as "I'll get there on budget."

Strike One

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APRIL 13, 2011 7:00 P.M. Listen to the Audio Version We initially supported the deal House Speaker John Boehner cut with the White House to cut $38.5 billion from the rest of the fiscal year 2011 budget. It was only a pittance in the context of all of Washington’s red ink, but it seemed an acceptable start, even if we assumed it would be imperfect in its details. What we didn’t assume was that the agreement would be shot through with gimmicks and one-time savings. What had looked in its broad outlines like a modest success now looks like a sodden disappointment. All the cuts in the deal aren’t equal. The ones that matter most are the cuts in discretionary spending that reduce the budget baseline in future years. Even with more the details of the deal released early yesterday morning, the exact numbers are still shrouded in confusion, but it is clear the cuts are much less than meets the eye — the gimmickry is not merely around the edges. The $38.5 billion includes real cuts, but also a dog’s breakfast of budgetary legerdemain. According to the Associated Press, the deal purports to save $2.5 billion “from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation.” It gets another $4.9 billion by capping a reserve fund for the victims of crime that also wasn’t going to be spent this year — a long-standing trick of appropriators. The Washington Post reports that a notional $3.5 billion cut from the Children’s Health Insurance Program “would affect only rewards for states that make an extra effort to enroll children. But officials with knowledge of the budget deal said that most states were unlikely to qualify for the bonuses and that sufficient money would be available for those that did.” And so on. There’s realism and then there’s cynicism. This deal — oversold and dependent on classic Washington budget trickery — comes too close to the latter. John Boehner has repeatedly said he’s going to reject “business as usual,” but that’s what he’s offered his caucus. It’s one thing for Tea Party Republicans to vote for a cut that falls short of what they’d get if the controlled all of Washington; it’s another thing for them, after making so much of bringing transparency and honesty to the Beltway, to vote for a deal sold partly on false pretenses. As they push a bargain that is still not fully understood, Boehner and the leadership have put their members in an awful fix with another deadline to keep the government open fast approaching. We’d vote “no,” even if we understand the impulse to move on to more important matters and to avoid a leap into the dark that might include a politically damaging shutdown. At the very least, freshmen and other conservatives should be frank about the deal’s shortcomings, refusing to exaggerate its merits as their leadership often has. The episode is strike one against the speakership of John Boehner.

Utah Criminal Miscarriage Law Back in the Spotlight

By Robin Marty, RH Reality Check

April 13, 2011 - 9:05pm

Published under: Abortion | Abortion restrictions| criminal miscarriage | Utah | News | Real Time Blog

In 2010, a pregnant teen in Utah was prosecuted over paying a man to beat her until she miscarried.  The case brought about a change in state law that made it illegal for a mother to intentionally induce a miscarriage, a frightening new law because all women who miscarried could potentially be seen as criminals.

Now that case is being reviewed by the state Supreme Court.

Via Fox News:

In court, the attorneys for Harrison and J.M.S. claimed that Utah's abortion law essentially stated an abortion was a procedure to terminate a pregnancy. The Utah Attorney General's Office is seeking to have the judges rulings overturned. The justices of the Utah Supreme Court zeroed in on the law as it was written at the time and the teenage girl's intent.

"It seems to me that one could make the argument that a distinguishing characteristic between an abortion and a killing of an unborn child is that in the case of an abortion, it's the desire of the woman who is pregnant to terminate the pregnancy," Justice Jill Parish asked assistant Utah Attorney General Christopher Ballard.

"The distinguishing factor in the way that the legislature has laid out Utah statutory scheme is whether it was a medical procedure to terminate the unborn child," Ballard replied. "That is the distinguishing factor between abortion and murder."

Only recently has Utah law changed to explicitly state "medical procedure." Lawyers for Harrison and J.M.S. argued that the state should not get another shot.

"We can't go back in and retroactively make the statute tighter than what it was," Humiston said.

The question in front of the court is whether the teen and her accomplice should be tried for murder for inducing a miscarriage, or whether it should be treated as an abortion.  But the question that should be being asked is why abortion is so difficult to obtain that a girl or woman would be so desperate she would be reduced to paying someone to beat her just so she did not have to have a baby.

Majority of Women Use Contraception Irrespective of Religious Affiliation

By Martha Kempner on April 15, 2011 - 1:22am | 1 comment

A report released by the Guttmacher Institute yesterday shows that while religious affiliation may play some role in decisions regarding sexual behavior, it has little to do with whether women (married and unmarried) use contraception. 

The Hypocrisy of "Informed Consent" Abortion Laws

By Angi Becker Stevens on April 15, 2011 - 1:37am | 1 comment

This language of “informed consent” merely serves as a thinly veiled attempt at shaming women who seek abortion, a shaming made all the more hypocritical when carried out in the supposed name of women’s health and safety.

Weekly Pulse: The Republicans' War on Women

By Lindsay Beyerstein on April 13, 2011 - 9:27pm | 1 comment

Last week the fate of the entire federal government revolved around birth control. Yes, birth control. Analysis of the ongoing war against women being waged in Congress and in state legislatures nationwide.

The Anti-Choice Movement: "Not Intended to Be Factual"

By Jodi Jacobson on April 13, 2011 - 10:55am | 10 comments

Little did Senator Jon Kyl's office realized that when they said his lies about Planned Parenthood on the floor of the Senate were "not intended as factual statements," they were describing the entire basis of the anti-choice movement.

It's a Rainy Day in Texas for Women and Children

By Andrea Grimes on April 12, 2011 - 9:27pm | 1 comment

Texas lawmakers are spending warm Texas weekends deciding whether autistic kids or poor women deserve more resources, while they pay crisis pregnancy counselors more than registered nurses.

 

 

 

 

How Far We've Fallen: Planned Parenthood, Michele Bachmann and Geraldine Ferraro

By Rebecca Sive on April 12, 2011 - 2:35pm | 0 comments

Tragically for the women of this country, in the years since Ferraro's nomination, the nation's view on the requisite qualifications for a woman presidential or vice-presidential candidate has radically shifted.

 

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Beck: We Are All Hookers

By Jodi Jacobson on April 11, 2011 - 8:59pm | 25 comments

Dear Mr. Beck: I understand it is your contention that "only hookers go to Planned Parenthood." There must be a lot of hookers out here.  I am one of them.

Budget Showdown Casualties: D.C. Women as Bargaining Chips

By Antoinette Bonsignore on April 11, 2011 - 3:27pm | 0 comments

How D.C.'s women were sacrificed and the implications for future policy.