Craig Cheslog

The California Budget Project's Jean Ross offers this outstanding list of resolutions. Her fourth resolution responds to a budget-related idiocy which drives me particularly crazy.

Don't promise to cut taxes and balance the budget. I have the cover of an old New Yorker magazine on the wall of my office. It is a take-off of Dante's Inferno. At the center ring of hell? Politicians that promise to cut taxes and balance the budget. It's a good reminder that the impossible is, well, impossible.

You can see the New Yorker cover here. It's an Edward Sorel illustration from the April 21, 1997 issue. I lost my copy years ago, much to my chagrin.

Digby is right: this is a "very, very very important observation" by Devilstower at Dkos:

Don't forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. You want unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Man, we handed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented -- with a side order of Freedom Fries.

They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I'd be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past, everything that they've claimed for forty years would make America "great again". They didn't fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.

What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world. There's no doubt that Republicans want you to forget the last decade, because if you remember... if you remember when you went down to the water hole and were jumped by every lunacy that ever emerged from the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney, well, it's not likely that you'd give them a chance to do it again.

Because they will. Given half a chance -- less than half -- they'll do it again, only worse. Because that's the way conservatism works. Remember when the only answer to every economic problem was "cut taxes?" We have a surplus. Good, let's cut taxes. We have a deficit. Hey, cut taxes even more! That little motto was unchanging even when was clear that the tax cuts were increasing the burden on everyone but a wealthy few. That's just a subset of the great conservative battle whine which is now and forever "we didn't go far enough." If deregulation led to a crash, it's because we didn't deregulate enough. If the wars aren't won, it's because we haven't started enough wars. If there are people still clinging to their rights, it's because we haven't done enough to make them afraid.

Forget the naughts, and you'll forget that conservatives had another chance to prove all their ideas, and that their ideas utterly and completely failed. Again.

The naughts were the apotheosis of radical conservatism. So, our radical conservative friends have every incentive to rewrite that history. Such attempts have already begun. They must be opposed every time it is tried and with all the strength we can muster.

They have lectured to us about accountability moments. We really must make sure they have one.

Capital Games and Gains' Andrew Samwick links to a Wall Street Journal story by Holman Jenkins examining what the recent foiled terrorist attack says about Al Qaeda and our nation's response:

Considering the ease with which a suicide bomber could stroll into a Starbucks in any American city and kill a dozen people, you have to wonder at al Qaeda's obsession with targeting commercial airliners.

If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn't happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn't have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks. That it continues to pour what little resources it can command into lame airliner attacks, like shoe bomber Richard Reid's failed attempt to blow himself up in 2001 and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed attempt on Christmas Day, tells you something else:

Al Qaeda may be incapacitated, but its leaders aren't dumb. So what if their hapless messengers only embarrass themselves and burn their legs? Al Qaeda can still count on the sizeable damage we will inflict on ourselves through an airport security apparatus that specializes in expensive political displays of barn-door closing that seldom have any real security payoff.

The few people who actually remember the fear created by the anthrax attacks or the D.C.-area sniper cannot doubt the potential effectiveness of the strategy Holman outlines.

I think the conclusions Holman reaches about Al Qaeda, our national battle against it, and our domestic security situation, have significant merit. His article is worth reading.

Please don't be alarmed. The non-existent disturbance in the force you didn't actually feel was the Earth reaching the closest point in its orbit around the sun. Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait has all the gory details.

Calculated Risk links to a Washington Post story and graphic highlighting just how bad the 2000s were for U.S. workers.

As the Post's Neil Irwin writes:

There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 -- and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.

And the net worth of American households -- the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts -- has also declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since data were initially collected in the 1950s.

Heck of a job, President Bush. Thank God for those job producing and revenue producing tax cuts!

Oh. Never mind.

KQED Radio's John Myers provides a handy list of nine story lines Californians should watch as the 2010 political season begins.

The one part of the story that shall drive many of the others, of course, is the 2/3-vote hypermajority required to pass a budget. A requirement allowing Republicans to have veto power over the state budget even though they hold fewer than 40 percent of the seats in Sacramento.

Actually, if it were just veto power over the state budget, that would be bad enough. But it's more. As Myers writes:

Democrats decry the two-thirds mandate as an invitation for legislative extortion from the GOP legislators who they must cajole; Republicans defend it as the only way they ever get their issues heard in a statehouse where Dems often seem to dismiss GOP proposals out of hand.

You know, there is another way the GOP could get its proposals seriously heard in Sacramento.

Hmmm....what was that again? It's right on the tip of my tongue. Oh yeah, how about winning some elections?

The hypermajority requirements ensure our government cannot function and cannot solve problems. For the radical anti-government factions within the GOP, isn't that a feature and not a bug?

From Urban Cartography, we see that Jesus Diaz has taken Nate Silver's data on airline terrorism over the past decade and put them in graphical form.

Rachel Maddow's takedown of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the other Republicans who are politicizing the foiled terror attempt on Northwest 253 is a must watch segment.

As she asks throughout the piece, where was Vice President Cheney's outrage when the administration in which he was serving had a similar reaction to the shoe bombing in December 2001? And, as Maddow notes at the end of this piece, members of the media have a choice, they can "just copy down what the Republicans and Vice President Cheney are saying, and click send, and call it journalism, or you can actually fact check those comments and put them into context."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver does the math.

Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Atrios is right. Sigh.

And if you haven't read Charlie Pierce's Idiot America yet, which expands on how dangerous this celebration of ignorance is, you should.

Professor Brad DeLong on his blog today included a link to the U.S. Senate reference page on cloture motions.

Looking at the chart will show you just how much things have changed as the filibuster has morphed from being a tool to ensure everyone has time to make all of their arguments in a debate into a weapon to obstruct debate and action.

Let's put it this way: 25.7 percent of all successful cloture motions in the history of the U.S. Senate have happened since the Democrats retook control of the Senate in 2007.

Yes, you read that right. More than one-quarter of all successful cloture votes in the history of our Republic have happened in just the past three years. And the 2000s have seen particular abuse of the system that is accelerating.

This is nothing less than an amendment of our system of government without public debate and without going through our Constitutional process.

For how much longer must we tolerate it?

Climate Progress offers a sampling of the best cartoons of the year about the climate crisis. It's worth a look, even if one of them includes the inaccurate boiling frog metaphor the Atlantic's James Fallows has been trying to stamp out.

The Transportation Security Administration has so far comprehensively failed in its first public test in the aftermath of the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253.

Alas, it's just the latest failure in the history of an awful decision to merge a group of agencies in response to the September 11 attacks.

It's not just the pathetic, and all-too-predictable, security theater response (Steve Bruce Schneier has a good initial take-down of this latest round of TSA feel-good-but-not-making-us-any-safer ridiculousness). We need to know how someone about whom there were credible warnings (including from his father) was apparently able to get on a plane to the United States.

Frankly, it's inexcusable. People must be held responsible.

Not letting people use laptops or read books or use the restroom in the last hour of a flight isn't going to make us more secure. The Obama Administration needs to do better. And quickly.

Note: Edited to correct the Bruce Schneier's name above. Thanks for catching that error, ZDR.

The Los Angeles Times' recaps the list of names readers supplied when he asked for their opinion about who were the best and worst politicians of 2009.

After recapping the typical stereotypical blather from those who wrongly think all politicians are awful, Lopez highlights Brandon Ruiz's observation:

"We pass ballot initiatives with no method of funding," wrote Brandon Ruiz. "We put our legislature in a straitjacket with a 2/3 vote requirement on budgets and then ask them to fix our state's problems. We make it easy to cut taxes, but impossible to raise them, meaning that a small majority can deprive the state of needed revenue. . . .

"We killed the dominant school funding mechanism by passing Prop. 13 and then demanded that the state fix it and fund our schools. . . . We want to protect OUR programs and cut THEIRS. . . . We are our own worst politician and our own worst enemy. We, the short-sighted, instant-gratification seeking, detail averse, California public. We refuse to see the difficult choices, nuance, and complicated details of public policy, yet we give ourselves the power to make laws that can virtually never be repealed."

Lopez remarks that Ruiz "nailed it." I agree.

We have created a system that cannot work with our 2/3 vote hypermajority requirements, a dysfunctional initiative system, and insanely strict term limits among the provisions exacerbating our state's problems and making it virtually impossible to resolve them.

We have created a system that cannot work and pathetically act surprised when it does not. We see reform efforts that are trying not to touch some of the elements I list above. We see tax reform commissions with Governor-appointed leaders who have reached conclusions outside of the promised transparent process.

California's system does not work. It cannot under the present rules. And anyone who says that California can be reformed without touching the hypermajority rules, initiative process, and term limits is selling the same tonic which lead to our current failed system.

James Fallows has a round-up of U.S. Senate filibuster commentary, including a note by a lawyer friend that sheds some light on what the framers of the Constitution might think of the 60-vote rule.

As Fallows' friend notes, one of the few defined responsibilities given to the Vice President is: "The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided."

Of course, if 60-votes is the new requirement to do anything in the 100-member body, the Senate shall never be equally divided. The filibuster robs the Vice President of one of his or her few actual Constitutional responsibilities!

This Constitutional travesty is just one of many reasons the filibuster should be eliminated.