The People’s House passes super-important legislation

The Republican-led House of Representatives yesterday overwhelmingly (395-27) voted to pass a bill that would prohibit those on welfare assistance from using their government-sourced largesse at strip clubs, liquor stores and casinos.

House Republicans introduced and promoted the proposal as a way to eliminate government wasteful spending. It has passed the House before, and they re-introduced it again hoping it will become part of a bill to extend the payroll tax credit, which both the House and Senate is expected to debate this month.

A solid move yet again by the House Republican leadership. That’ll solve all—er—none of the country’s problems, while cutting exactly zero dollars from total government spending. But nice work at passing a pointless bill that does nothing other than call out poor people for being poor.

Virginia State Senator Janet Howell tries to attach rectal exam amendment to anti-abortion bill

Virginia is close to passing a bill that would require women seeking abortions to get an ultrasound first. It’s an absolutely unnecessary procedure, relatively expensive, and absolutely a cynical ploy to force women to possibly rethink their decision. What they call “see, look, it’s alive” really is a “haha, now it’s too expensive, enjoy being forced to birth a child.”

The bill will probably pass easily in the Republican-controlled Virginia legislature. On its way to passage, though, at least some folks are trying to bring gender equity to the debate:

Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax County, was dismayed enough by the bill’s progress that she tried to amend it so men seeking prescriptions for erectile dysfunction medication such as Viagra would be required to undergo a rectal exam and cardiac stress test.

She said that’s “only fair, that if we’re going to subject women to unnecessary procedures, and we’re going to subject doctors to having to do things that they don’t think is medically advisory.”

Her proposed amendment failed Monday, leaving Vogel’s bill on the verge of Senate approval.

Well, this is not how a university should handle sexual harassment

Balayla Ahmad was a Muslim student at the University of Bridgeport (a school that since went bankrupt and is now run by the bat-shit crazy Church of Unification—progress!). In 2009, she complained that she was being sexually harassed by a male student. Here’s how you, as a university, completely mangle this:

When she complained to a teacher, she was told that the university generally doesn’t get rid of students right away over such incidents, the lawsuit said. Another teacher asked her if she were married and asked her not to report it to the dean because he would speak with the harasser, the suit said.

Ahmad then reported the harassment and fears for her safety to the university’s president and dean, who promised to meet with her. But she said when she met with the dean, he said, “My hands are tied. What do you suggest I do?”

Well, you could, you know, treat is seriously. Anyways, what happens next is fucked up:

After reporting the sexual harassment in April 2009, Ahmad said she was approached by two university security directors who told her someone had made allegations against her and they threatened to call the FBI and have her arrested.

Later, two FBI agents knocked on Ahmad’s apartment door, questioned her and left a business card, according to the lawsuit. She said she learned that her harasser or his associates had fabricated a story falsely accusing her of being a terrorist in apparent retaliation for having made a sexual harassment complaint against him.

Primary Day

People talk about how Iowa is not a good predictor, but New Hampshire is actually pretty terrible in its own right. The following people did not win the New Hampshire primary (their first time around):

President Barack Obama

President George W. Bush

President William Jefferson Clinton

The following people have won the New Hampshire primary:

Hillary Clinton

Paul Tsongas

Gary Hart

Edmund Muskie

Pat Buchanon

Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

(Fine, true, there are plenty of people who have won and gone on to win either the nomination or the presidency. So what.)

In any case, I guess there are a few things to look at today. First, it’s almost certain that Mittens Romney will take the trophy. That doesn’t say much, however: he was the governor of neighboring Massachusetts, has run before, so the people of New Hampshire know him far better than the other candidates. So, less important is his win than by how much. It’s expected he’ll get between 30-40% of the vote. In 2004, he got away with 32% (and still less than John McCain). If he gets less, that’ll be his story.

Second place, however, will be more telling. Ron Paul will get a significant chunk of the vote again, in part because he’ll always get about 20%, and in part because there is a significant libertarian faction in the New Hampshire Republican Party. However, the real question is whether Jon Huntsman will have made up enough ground to overcome a Ron Paul second place. If Huntsman comes out with the silver, it may be the AED paddles his campaign needs.

Some will say that the fourth and fifth place finishes between (probably) Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum will be a story. It probably will be, but it will be a purely uninteresting one. Neither candidate has much to offer the Granite State, and they’re (along with Perry) looking beyond to South Carolina to lock up potential support.

It’s also becoming clear that Gingrich is only staying in to throw bombs at Romney and say nice things about Santorum. Is anybody else wondering if he’s now just a stalking horse for Santorum?

Unsurprisingly, Perry will finish in last place. You’ll probably see write-in candidates with higher vote counts.

Meanwhile, last night in tiny, tiny Dixville Notch, Romney and Huntsman both won two votes, and Gingrich and Perry got one.

Iowa: What we learned

Well, so last night they had some caucuses. Mittens Romney won by a landslide of eight votes. Eight votes. Rick Santorum’s surge proved to have been at the exact right moment, as he finished just behind. Ron Paul’s surge was just a moment too soon and finished fourth. Everybody else sucked.

Here’s some things we learned:

- Not a goddamn one of the Republican pack can deliver a nationally-televised speech.

- Corollary: Somebody give Michele Bachmann a teleprompter.

- Corollary: I like Newt’s voice the best of them.

- Corollary: Perry’s was the most heart-felt, although that probably had something to do with getting out.

- Corollary: Santorum and Romney had the sharpest contrast—Santorum was calm, rambling things off the top of his head, and clearly out of his element, yet came closer to succeeding in getting the tone right; Romney was the clearly the most comfortable on stage, but he was far too frenetic, like a salesman trying so hard to sell you, that the speech just didn’t click.

- Corollary: Romney was the only one who went after the president.

- This race is down to two: And one of those two is Rick Santorum.

- Corollary: With Perry seemingly bowing out, and Bachmann living in a fantasy land where she keeps going, Santorum actually has a chance of winning this nomination.

- Corollary: The Republican Party, for maybe the first time ever, is about to nominate somebody who is not a Protestant Christian (Romney’s LDS, Santorum’s Catholic).

- In 2004, Romney won 30,021 votes, which got him second place; in 2008 he got 30,015, which got him first. That’s what happens when there are like eleventy billion candidates. That’s about to change.

- But, it was enough to secure McCain’s endorsement for Romney.

- It’s pretty clear that Gingrich is going to spend the rest of his 15 minutes bashing the hell out of Romney and loving the bejesus out of Santorum.

Some people gonna be voting today

Holy shit—today’s the Iowa caucuses.

At about 7:00 p.m. CST (8:00 p.m. EST because we’re east-coast-elite-centric here), at 1,774 precincts across the state of Iowa, Republicans (and, actually, Democrats too, but we already pretty much know who’ll win that one) will begin to select their choice for the Republican nomination for president.

Polls in the past week have pretty much shown a three-way statistical tie between Mittens Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Santorum has surged very recently, the latest in the series of second/third-tier candidates. It’s pretty clear that about half the Republican constituency finds Romney unappealing as a candidate and is exploring each of the other options.

I was telling Ghost this past week that I was surprised that Santorum hadn’t surged yet.  In the past hundred-or-so years, we’ve selected candidates who have come from one of the three following places: the vice presidency, a governorship, or the senate (the most rare). This race has several sitting or former governors, but only Romney has been capable of gaining any support while not making any mistakes. Yet, the other candidates who’ve had their time in the sun are congressmen or businesspeople—two paths that do not historically find their way to the White House. Meanwhile, Santorum is the only senator, and he’s generally affable and very conservative. So, I’m only a little surprised that Santorum’s campaign has picked up some traction.

Now, the results of tonight will mean a lot less than the spin. Keep note that the only Republican since Nixon who has won Iowa and the nomination was George W. Bush—and that’s because he an extremely early frontrunner (who still managed to lose New Hampshire, but that’s neither here nor there). However, in order to maintain his relevancy in the race, Santorum needs to win. If he does, I really do think he becomes a major force, and maybe even the favorite in South Carolina. He’s not going to pick up more than a third-place ribbon in New Hampshire, though: it’s electorate, while conservative, is substantially less evangelical. Meanwhile, Romney (more than not as a local governor) is the odds-on favorite while Ron Paul has a substantial constituency. Additionally, if Romney does not win first, he won’t be able to make the inevitability case after winning New Hampshire, which would give one of the other candidates a chance after New Hampshire to lock up the conservative support.

One thing I did not know about the Republican Iowa caucuses: They don’t do it like the Democrats. There’s no 15% viability, there’s no reshuffling, and no second rounds. It is just a quick poll. This should give Romney a slightly bigger advantage than I’ve been suspecting, because I had thought that once the third-tier candidates were considered nonviable, their supporters would go to “Anybody But Romney,” cementing an anti-Romney coalition.

In the end, I guess, one of these folks is going to win an election today, which is kind of unfathomable if you think about it.

Nobody will give a fuck about Ron Paul in a month. Seriously.

For all the money we’re spending, we may as well give it away

Mike Konzal at Rortybomb:

Let’s take the case of student debt and the tax code. How much would it cost to make public colleges and universities free? Rough estimates (quoting Jeffrey Sach’s latest book) put the price of free public higher education at $15-$30 billion, which fits other estimates I’ve seen.

Now what are the costs of how we subsidize higher education through the tax code? There’s already the $1.4 from the interest exemption. Also from subsidyscope, there’s the exclusion of employer-provided educational assistance ($1.1 billion), exclusion of interest on student-loan bonds ($0.6 billion), exclusion of scholarship and fellowship income ($3.0 billion), exclusion of tax on earnings of qualified tuition programs: savings account programs ($0.6 billion), the HOPE tax credit ($5.4 billion), the Lifetime Learning tax credit ($5.5 billion), parental personal exemption for students age 19 or over($3.4 billion), and state prepaid tuition plans ($1.75 billion). There’s also the stimulus’s American Opportunity Tax Credit($14.4 billion) and some part of the deductibility of charitable contributions (education) ($4.9 billion).

Even without the last two, that’s $22.75 billion we are paying through the tax code to make college tuition and student debt more manageable. This amount is in the middle the range of the cost of just making public high education free. Now these aren’t equivalent — much of what is spent through the tax code will be biased more towards private and professional schools, which are more expensive. But this also isn’t anywhere near the full extent we subsidize student debt (a government creation from 1965).

Basically, like many programs that we subsidize through some mixture of taxes and spending, we could just provide it free to the public.

But, of course can’t do that—free markets!

Finally, some good news from the House

CC photo from the Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections

Holy shit, I can’t believe the Capitol doesn’t have a bust of Winston Churchill to show off. Sure, there’s one in the Ways and Means Committee hearing room, but that doesn’t count. Somebody get the fuck on this!

Oh, somebody has. Sure, while the House can’t pass a payroll tax cut extension, or anything worthwhile (except a resolution proclaiming that “In God We Trust” is still the national motto—take that commies!), it has taken up, and passed, a resolution demanding a bust of the British prime minister be erected. It’s the fourth bill that Speaker Boehner has sponsored since he became speaker.

This is awesome! Who needs jobs when we have old Winston?

In any case, it is fitting, since it was Churchill who once did say of his best friends the Americans: “We can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.”

The payroll tax cut extension: Where are we?

The House just rejected the Senate compromise bill that extends this year’s payroll tax cut for two months into 2012. Well, they didn’t so much reject it. Okay, this is complicated. Let’s see where we started, where we are, where we’re going, and how we got here.

First, let’s make one point clear: This whole mess has almost nothing to do with the payroll tax cut itself. Both sides agree it should be extended. The hullabaloo is over additions that Republicans want made to the bill. Riders, as many people call them. Most of them are completely unrelated to tax policy at all. But, we’ll get to that in a moment.

Remember last December’s lame-duck Congress? The one where a huge number of deals were made, mostly because everybody involved realized that with a radicalized Republican House about to take power, it would be the last chance for any deals? Well, among the many deals made was that payroll taxes (different from income taxes—yes, this shit is complicated—payroll taxes are what you pay out of your paycheck for Social Security and Medicare; you may see this as “FICA” on your pay stub) were cut by 2%. Not enough to really hurt the programs for which they fund (they tend to run surpluses—bet you didn’t know that!). But, enough to put a small amount of extra money in people’s pockets, especially since a lot of people were not getting raises in the new year.

The tax cut was made temporary, with the hope that the economy would rebound enough in the next year that everybody could easily go back to business as usual. Sadly, the economy didn’t pick up as much as hoped. You can pretty much blame Europe and a year full of Republicans shutting down the government/forcing default for that.

Regardless, at the end of the year, the payroll tax cut expires. So, the President and Congress decided that it should probably be extended for another year. Again: it’s not that much money in aggregate, but a small cushion for those out there who still aren’t getting raises, or at best getting small ones.

Watch how your small cost-of-living raise will go away if the cut expires. Using this calculator from the White House website, I plugged in a standard $45,000 salary for a married couple. They will pay $900 extra next year if the cut is not extended. If that salary is the result of a (generous) 2% cost-of-living raise, the raise ($900) is gone.

So, if everybody agrees that it should be extended, why isn’t it? Because Republicans in the House are demanding a number of additional pieces be added to the bill. For one, they’re obsessed and enamored with the Keystone XL oil sands pipe project, a pipeline that will go from the oil sands in Canada to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration has delayed permitting the project, citing the enormity of it and the potential environmental hazards, and the need for more research. Republicans claim it should be fast-tracked, claiming that the project will create a large number of jobs. In addition, they’re demanding that the extension be paid for by making cuts to discretionary spending, even though Congress just finally passed an appropriations bill this weekend. The problem, other than that, is that stimulus spending (whether it’s spending or chopping taxes: both are technically spending) should by its very nature not be immediately paid for.

Despite the impasse, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate worked this weekend to craft a compromise, which basically admits that some parts should be paid for and there maybe could be an early decision on Keystone, in exchange for two more months of payroll tax cut. Basically, to give it all some breathing room so a better compromise could be reached. It passed handily—89-10—and went to the House, where most leaders (including Speaker Boehner) expected it to also quickly pass.

Here’s some procedure: In order for it to pass by the end of the year, the House would have had to just plain accept the bill as passed by the Senate. Any amendment would send the bill to conference, where it could take weeks to work out: staffs have to be chosen, language needs to be ironed; it’s a sticky process.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum, though: House Republicans were vehemently against the bill. Citing it’s short-term nature, they shot it down today. But, of course, the way they shot it down is also complicated.

See, no Republican wants to actually vote against a tax cut. So, this is what they did instead. Originally, it would be a standard “motion to concur,” which would pass the Senate bill as written. Instead, they voted on a “motion to reject,” which immediately sends the bill to conference. So, a “yes” vote is effectively a “no” vote. Indeed, they didn’t even vote on the bill, but a motion to reject the bill.

Confused yet? That’s what they’re hoping for.

What happens now is the House calls a number of votes on what they want out of the conference negotiations (if there are any). The House and Senate then appoint members to the conference committee, which would theoretically meet over the holiday recess, during which time members would just go home. However, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has suggested that Senate Democrats may not take part in the conference unless the House passes the two-month extension.

Isn’t Congress fun?

Louis CK headling next year’s RTCA dinner

Louis CK, the great comic who’s currently on top of his game, has been selected to headline next year’s Radio and Television Correspondent’s Dinner. Awesome.

You wrote some good plays,

David Mamet, but we’re done:

In abandonment of the state of Israel, the West reverts to pagan sacrifice, once again, making a burnt offering not of that which one possesses, but of that which is another’s. As Realpolitik, the Liberal West’s anti-Semitism can be understood as like Chamberlain’s offering of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, a sop thrown to terrorism. On the level of conscience, it is a renewal of the debate on human sacrifice.

Rick Perry used to love him some sausage

Here’s a pretty awesome old ad for Rick Perry from his agriculture commissioner days. Sausages create jobs. Delicious jobs.

Your V+V POWER RANKINGS: Fourth Edition

1. Willard “Mittens” Romney

Yes, Newt Gingrich has surged in the polls, and people are calling him the front-runner. Yes, Romney’s numbers have flagged a little. Yes, nobody really likes him.

And, yes, in fewer than 30 days, one of these guys is going to win the Iowa caucus, and it may not even be Romney.

But look further into the race. The first several states will apportion their delegates proportionally (for the first time), but all the later states are winner-take-all. Therefore, the contest this year is to stay relevant through the first several states, and have the money and organization to start taking the later states. Romney has both of those. Gingrich doesn’t have the money (although that could change) or the organization (I find it highly unlikely this would change).

On the other hand, it seems Romney’s still playing prevent defense. He had one “news” media interview, and it went poorly. Remember, you always get burned when you’re playing prevent. He’s going to have to start really making the case why he should be the nominee and eventually president. He hasn’t started doing that yet. A shitty ad that misquotes President Obama is not going to do that.

Over/Under: 20.0 (-)

Prediction: Over.

His number have stagnated and even dropped in many cases, but wait until everybody remembers who Newt Gingrich is.

Numbers 2-7 after the fold.

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“It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.”

Holy shit, you have to read this.