Ignorant Redneck Hicks Running Congress

April 5, 2011

The Budget Battles: Prosperity for Whom?

If the House Republican budget blueprint released on Tuesday is the “path to prosperity” that its title claims, it is hard to imagine what ruin would look like.
The plan would condemn millions to the ranks of the uninsured, raise health costs for seniors and renege on the obligation to keep poor children fed. It envisions lower taxes for the wealthy than even George W. Bush imagined: a permanent extension for his tax cuts, plus large permanent estate-tax cuts, a new business tax cut and a lower top income tax rate for the richest taxpayers.
Compared to current projections, spending on government programs would be cut by $4.3 trillion over 10 years, while tax revenues would go down by $4.2 trillion. So spending would be eviscerated, mainly to make room for continued tax cuts.
The deficit would be smaller, but at an unacceptable cost. Health care would be hardest hit, followed by nonsecurity discretionary spending — the sliver of the budget that encompasses annually appropriated programs. Those include education, scientific research, environmental preservation, investor protection, disease control, food safety, federal law enforcement and other areas that bear directly on the quality of Americans’ daily lives. The proposed cuts in such programs are $923 billion deeper than President Obama called for in his 2012 budget, which pushed the edge of what is politically possible.
Another big cut — $715 billion over 10 years — comes from mandatory spending other than Social Security and the big health care programs, a category that includes food stamps and federal retirement.
The blueprint does not call for any specific changes to Social Security, but, without explanation, it assumes a reduction of $1 trillion over 10 years in the program’s surplus. That would weaken the program by hastening the insolvency of Social Security.
When he unveiled this plan, Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin and the chairman of the House Budget Committee, declared, “This isn’t a budget. This is a cause.”
There is much truth in that. The blueprint is not a serious deficit reduction exercise for many reasons, the most important of which is that serious deficit reduction requires everything to be on the table, including tax increases. The plan released at the end of last year by the Obama deficit commission was one-third tax increases and two-thirds spending cuts. President Obama’s budget calls for a mix of tax cuts and tax increases, among the latter, letting high-end Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012. The Republican plan calls only for tax simplification. It would get rid of loopholes and reduce rates in a way that would not raise overall revenues but would invariably cut the tax bill of wealthy taxpayers for whom lower rates are more valuable than assorted loopholes.
The deficit is a serious problem, but the Ryan plan is not a serious answer. With its tax cuts above all, and spending cuts no matter the consequences, it is a recipe for more loud talk about the deficit but no real action.

The Dove of the Devil.

April 2, 2011

Koran-Burning Pastor Unrepentant in Face of Furor

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — His church’s membership is down to just a few of the faithful. He is basically broke. Some of his neighbors wish him ill. And his head, he said, carries a bounty.
Yet Terry Jones, the pastor who organized a mock trial that ended with the burning of a Koran and led to violence in Afghanistan, remained unrepentant on Saturday. He said that he was “saddened” and “moved” by the deaths, but that given the chance he would do it all over again.
“It was intended to stir the pot; if you don’t shake the boat, everyone will stay in their complacency,” Mr. Jones said in an interview at his office in the Dove World Outreach Center. “Emotionally, it’s not all that easy. People have tried to make us responsible for the people who are killed. It’s unfair and somewhat damaging.”
Violent protests against the burning continued on Saturday in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where 9 people were killed and 81 injured. The previous day, 12 people were killed when a mob stormed a United Nations building in Mazar-i-Sharif, though on Saturday the top United Nations official in Afghanistan blamed Taliban infiltrators for the killings. He said the victims had been deliberately murdered rather than killed by an out-of-control mob.
“Did our action provoke them?” the pastor asked. “Of course. Is it a provocation that can be justified? Is it a provocation that should lead to death? When lawyers provoke me, when banks provoke me, when reporters provoke me, I can’t kill them. That would not fly.”
Mr. Jones, 59, with his white walrus moustache, craggy face and basso profundo voice, seems like a man from a different time. Sitting at his desk in his mostly unadorned office, he keeps a Bible in a worn brown leather cover by his side and a “Braveheart” poster within sight. Both, he said, provide spiritual sustenance for the mission at hand: Spreading the word that Islam and the Koran are instruments of “violence, death and terrorism.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Jones said, he had received 300 death threats, mostly via e-mail and telephone, and had been told by the F.B.I. that there was a $2.4 million contract on his life.
For protection, his followers — the 20 to 30 who are left — openly carry guns (they have licenses, he said) and have become more rigorous about checking their cars and visitors’ bags. Police protection is sometimes required when members travel, he said.
Mr. Jones’s rustic church sits on 20 acres of land, up a long driveway that is dotted with Australian pines. There is a small aboveground pool, and three police cars idled nearby on Saturday.
“I don’t right now feel personally afraid,” he said. “But we are armed.”
Mr. Jones said the decision to hold the mock trial of the Koran on March 20 was not made lightly. “We were worried,” he said. “We knew it was possible. We knew they might act with violence.”
There were similar predictions last year when Mr. Jones threatened to burn the Islamic holy book on Sept. 11. While that decision was being discussed, throngs of reporters descended on the church, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates personally called and asked Mr. Jones not to do it. President Obama appealed to him over the airwaves.
This time would be different — and not just because the event would be held in relative obscurity, before only a small group of sympathizers. This time, Mr. Jones said, there would be a trial, a fact that he said added heft to his decision.
He teamed up with The Truth TV, a satellite channel out of California that is led by Ahmed Abaza, a former Muslim who converted to Christianity and who, Mr. Jones said, sympathizes with the church’s message.
The pastor said The Truth TV reached out to him last year after he canceled his plan to burn the Koran, and a partnership of sorts has since flourished. Mr. Abaza helped provide him with most of the witnesses and lawyers for the mock trial, Mr. Jones said.
“I was not the judge,” said Mr. Jones, who also said he had read only portions of the Koran and not the entire text.
There was a prosecutor and a defense lawyer for the Koran, an imam from Texas. There were witnesses — although the defense did not call any — and a jury.
Yes, he said, he knew some of the jurors, and others came to the event after learning about it through his group’s Facebook page. (“People were afraid, so not many volunteered,” he said.) And yes, perhaps, his Facebook followers made up the majority who sentenced the Koran to burning in an online poll.
Still, he said, “it was as fair a trial as we could have.”
The Truth TV streamed the mock trial live in Arabic but chose not to broadcast the actual burning. Video of the trial can be found at the church Web site.
Mr. Jones’s mission is not a popular one in these parts. The Dove World Outreach Center’s membership evaporated after his preaching began to focus on what Mr. Jones said are the dangers of Islam. “We don’t have any members,” he said. “It’s not something your average person wants to do.
“People want to hear the good news. But the church has a responsibility to speak about the word of God. But it also has to speak out about what is right — be it abortion or Islam. Churches and pastors are afraid.”
He said he was no longer welcome in Gainesville — which he considers too small and unenlightened to understand his message — and is seeking to move.
First, though, he has to sell the church’s property, which is not easy in Florida, which is one of the nation’s foreclosure capitals. And as his personal stake in his mission grows deeper, his bank account is running dry. (One source of income comes from his eBay sales of antique furniture, some of which he stores in the church.)
“Things are not easy at this particular time,” said Mr. Jones, a Missouri native whose first career was as a hotel manager. “This has not been a moneymaking venture.”
Residents in this city, home to the University of Florida, are also less than thrilled.
Out in front of the church, signs that read “Islam Is of the Devil” have been edited by outsiders to say “Love All Men.” In a housing complex across the street, some of the residents said they could not wait for Mr. Jones to leave.
“Why are they trying to incite hatred and anger?” asked Shawnna Kochman. “They are mean. God is meant to have loved everyone. It’s a cult.”

The More Republicans You Add - The Stupider It Gets!

March 31, 2011

The Mellon Doctrine

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” That, according to Herbert Hoover, was the advice he received from Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary, as America plunged into depression. To be fair, there’s some question about whether Mellon actually said that; all we have is Hoover’s version, written many years later.
But one thing is clear: Mellon-style liquidationism is now the official doctrine of the G.O.P.
Two weeks ago, Republican staff at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee released a report, “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy,” that argued that slashing government spending and employment in the face of a deeply depressed economy would actually create jobs. In part, they invoked the aid of the confidence fairy; more on that in a minute. But the leading argument was pure Mellon.
Here’s the report’s explanation of how layoffs would create jobs: “A smaller government work force increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs.” Dropping the euphemisms, what this says is that by increasing unemployment, particularly of “educated, skilled workers” — in case you’re wondering, that mainly means schoolteachers — we can drive down wages, which would encourage hiring.
There is, if you think about it, an immediate logical problem here: Republicans are saying that job destruction leads to lower wages, which leads to job creation. But won’t this job creation lead to higher wages, which leads to job destruction, which leads to ...? I need some aspirin.
Beyond that, why would lower wages promote higher employment?
There’s a fallacy of composition here: since workers at any individual company may be able to save their jobs by accepting a pay cut, you might think that we can increase overall employment by cutting everyone’s wages. But pay cuts at, say, General Motors have helped save some workers’ jobs by making G.M. more competitive with other companies whose wage costs haven’t fallen. There’s no comparable benefit when you cut everyone’s wages at the same time.
In fact, across-the-board wage cuts would almost certainly reduce, not increase, employment. Why? Because while earnings would fall, debts would not, so a general fall in wages would worsen the debt problems that are, at this point, the principal obstacle to recovery.
In short, Mellonism is as wrong now as it was fourscore years ago.
Now, liquidationism isn’t the only argument the G.O.P. report advances to support the claim that reducing employment actually creates jobs. It also invokes the confidence fairy; that is, it suggests that cuts in public spending will stimulate private spending by raising consumer and business confidence, leading to economic expansion.
Or maybe “suggests” isn’t the right word; “insinuates” may be closer to the mark. For a funny thing has happened lately to the doctrine of “expansionary austerity,” the notion that cutting government spending, even in a slump, leads to faster economic growth.
A year ago, conservatives gleefully trumpeted statistical studies supposedly showing many successful examples of expansionary austerity. Since then, however, those studies have been more or less thoroughly debunked by careful researchers, notably at the International Monetary Fund.
To their credit, the staffers who wrote that G.O.P. report were clearly aware that the evidence no longer supports their position. To their discredit, their response was to make the same old arguments, while adding weasel words to cover themselves: instead of asserting outright that spending cuts are expansionary, the report says that confidence effects of austerity “can boost G.D.P. growth.” Can under what circumstances? Boost relative to what? It doesn’t say.
Did I mention that in Britain, where the government that took power last May bought completely into the doctrine of expansionary austerity, the economy has stalled and business confidence has fallen to a two-year low? And even the government’s new, more pessimistic projections are based on the assumption that highly indebted British households will take on even more debt in the years ahead.
But never mind the lessons of history, or events unfolding across the Atlantic: Republicans are now fully committed to the doctrine that we must destroy employment in order to save it.
And Democrats are offering little pushback. The White House, in particular, has effectively surrendered in the war of ideas; it no longer even tries to make the case against sharp spending cuts in the face of high unemployment.
So that’s the state of policy debate in the world’s greatest nation: one party has embraced 80-year-old economic fallacies, while the other has lost the will to fight. And American families will pay the price.

Evil, Nasty Prosecutors - Supreme Court Upholds Dirty Tricks and False Prosecutions

March 31, 2011

Failure of Empathy and Justice

When President Obama listed empathy as a valuable trait for a justice during his 2009 search to replace David Souter, the idea drew scorn from some conservatives who saw it as an excuse for being soft. But a Supreme Court ruling this week provides evidence of how useful empathy is, and of how not using it can lead to glaring injustice.
Connick v. Thompson is about the wrongful conviction of John Thompson for robbery and murder after prosecutors in New Orleans withheld evidence from Mr. Thompson that would have cast serious doubt on his guilt. He spent 18 years in prison and came close to being executed. He was exonerated after a prosecutor fessed up.
After Mr. Thompson sued, a federal trial court found the office liable for failing to train its prosecutors about their constitutional duty to turn over evidence favorable to the defense and awarded Mr. Thompson $14 million in damages. Now, by a 5-to-4 vote, the conservative majority of the Roberts court has overturned that ruling, saying the office can’t be held liable for a sole incident of wrongdoing.
The important thing about empathy that gets overlooked is that it bolsters legal analysis. That is clear in the dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her empathy for Mr. Thompson as a defendant without means or power is affecting. But it is her understanding of the prosecutors’ brazen ambition to win the case, at all costs, that is key.
After detailing the “flagrant indifference” of the prosecutors to Mr. Thompson’s rights, she makes clear how critically they needed training in their duty to turn over evidence and why “the failure to train amounts to deliberate indifference to the rights” of defendants.
The district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., acknowledged the need for this training but said he had long since “stopped reading law books” so he didn’t understand the duty he was supposed to impart. The result, Justice Ginsburg writes, was an office with “one of the worst” records in America for failing to turn over evidence that “never disciplined or fired a single prosecutor” for a violation.
For the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas asserts that Mr. Thompson failed to prove that the office “disregarded a known or obvious consequence” of its inaction. That doesn’t reckon with the “culture of inattention,” as Justice Ginsburg calls it, which made deplorable breaches far too predictable. Justice Ginsburg’s dissent is the more persuasive, focused on the problem at the heart of the case and at the heart of a legal system that too often fails to see defendants, guilty or not, as human beings.

Veggie Burgers Hit The Mainstream

March 22, 2011

Masters of Disguise Among Meatless Burgers

By JEFF GORDINIER

THEY were the four syllables that had the power to make both carnivores and vegetarians cringe: veggie burger.
For meat-lovers, the veggie burger was long seen as a sad stand-in that tried to copy the contours and textures of a classic beef patty while falling pathetically short of the pleasure. And for meat-refusers, the veggie burger served as a kind of penitential wafer: You ate this bland, freeze-dried nutrient disc because you had to eat it (your duty as someone who had forsaken the flesh) and because at many a restaurant or backyard barbecue, it was the only option available.
If that has been your mental framework since the days when Jerry Garcia was still with us, it might be time to take another bite. To borrow a phrase from the culture that produced it, the veggie burger seems finally to have achieved self-actualization.
Across the country, chefs and restaurateurs have been taking on the erstwhile health-food punch line with a kind of experimental brio, using it as a noble excuse to fool around with flavor and texture and hue. As a result, veggie burgers haven’t merely become good. They have exploded into countless variations of good, and in doing so they’ve begun to look like a bellwether for the American appetite. If the growing passion for plant-based diets is here to stay, chefs — even in restaurants where you won’t find the slightest trace of spirulina — are paying attention.
“I just think it’s important to accommodate everybody,” said Josh Capon, who opened Burger & Barrel in SoHo last fall and quietly slipped a chickpea-based veggie burger onto a menu heady with pork chops, charcuterie and carpaccio. “And I don’t think somebody should feel like they’re eating an inferior burger. If you’re going to do a veggie burger, it should have that richness and mouth feel and overall texture. When you pick it up, it should eat like a burger.”
He will get no argument from Adam Fleischman, the owner of the expanding Umami Burger chain in Los Angeles. Even though his Earth Burger includes no meat, it offers the taste buds a gooey, decadent tradeoff by dandying up a mushroom-and-edamame patty with ricotta, truffle aioli and cipollini onions.
At Cru, a largely vegan and raw-food-focused cafe in that city’s Silver Lake neighborhood, the dietary and structural restrictions only seem to open up pathways of metamorphosis. Cru’s South American sliders are made of sprouted lentils and cooked garbanzo beans pulsed with garlic and spices. They’re deep-fried, dressed with a mojo sauce of blood orange and paprika and Peruvian aji amarillo chilies, and served on leaves of butter lettuce instead of a bread bun.
“We’re trying to stay away from that dry, tasteless veggie burger thing,” said Cru’s chef, Vincent Krimmel. “We have a lot more to play with now.”
Sometimes that sense of play leads to accidental discovery. The three Westville outposts around Manhattan serve a daily array of fresh vegetables. One day about four years ago, Sammy Victoria, a Westville chef, had an impulse to combine some of that garden produce into little cakes. “It went over amazingly well,” said Jay Strauss, an owner of Westville. “And Sammy said, ‘Let’s try this as a veggie burger — the exact same ingredients, just larger.’ ” Westville’s deep-fried blend of corn, cauliflower, broccoli, roasted red pepper and other ingredients now sells out on a regular basis.
Gone are the days, it seems, when the veggie burger was almost a source of shame. Sure, some restaurants fixed their own, from scratch, but many others served a dry mass-produced patty — one that might well have been made of natural ingredients like mushrooms and oats and black beans and brown rice, but which nevertheless had been gathering ice crystals in the freezer for an unknown period of time.
Tal Ronnen, 36, the author of the 2009 cookbook “The Conscious Cook,” has seen the frozen versions, too, gradually improve in the ensuing years. (Lately he has collaborated with Gardein in creating the food company’s new Ultimate Beefless Burger patties.) “When I first started eating this way, they came in a box,” said Mr. Ronnen, a chef who signed on this month to create vegan choices for the restaurants in all of the Wynn and Encore hotels in Las Vegas. “You had to add water to it. It was embarrassing to eat it around anyone. Imagine showing up to a backyard barbecue with a box and saying, ‘Hey, can I have a little bit of water to form a veggie burger?’ ”
If there is a primary reason they are improving, it comes back to the force that drives just about anything in the marketplace: demand. According to Mintel, a market research firm, there was a 26 percent increase in menu items labeled vegetarian or vegan between the last quarter of 2008 and the same quarter in 2010.
With more and more people pledging themselves to vegan and vegetarian modes of dining, it seems self-defeating for restaurants to ignore them — or to pretend that those diners will be satisfied with yet another droopy grilled-vegetable platter. The signs are clear enough that two high priests of the global burger gospel, Burger King and McDonald’s, have for years given veggie burgers a run, although only Burger King currently has one on menus in the United States.
“It is really awesome to see a lot of places starting to make their own patties from scratch, instead of simply stockpiling premade ones in the freezer,” said Joni Newman, the author of a cookbook, “The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet,” which Fair Winds Press is to publish in May.
But with thousands of flora-based recipes in the world, why the compulsive return to the burger genre? “There’s something really satisfying about a hand-held food that’s served on a bun,” said Lukas Volger, the author of “Veggie Burgers Every Which Way,” a cookbook that was published last year. The patty-bun-condiments format of a burger holds sway over us the same way the dependable verse-chorus-bridge structure of a perfect three-minute pop song does.
That said, there is vigorous debate over how closely a veggie burger should ape the look and taste of beef.
“I never like to tell people that this is going to taste exactly like ground beef, because you’re setting yourself up,” Mr. Ronnen said. “It’s its own thing.”
Chefs might adhere to the architectural limitations of a burger, but within that framework, the challenge of trying to make a veggie burger that tastes good (and doesn’t fall apart) seems to free up their imaginations.
At Blue Smoke, the barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, the team creates patties out of French lentils, quinoa, carrots, onions and cauliflower and smokes them over hickory. If they seemed like a fluke when they were introduced in 2008, they now feel like a perennial. “It’s one of those items that I wouldn’t take off the menu because there’d be some kind of backlash,” said Kenny Callaghan, the executive chef.
At 5 Napkin Burger, another joint unapologetically devoted to meat, you’ll find a veggie option that derives a loamy richness from mushroom duxelles while getting its ballast from sunflower seeds, wheatberries and brown rice.
When the 5 Napkin team originally tested contenders in their kitchens about three years ago, they found themselves pondering the Zen koan of veggie-patty enlightenment: If a burger is not a burger, how do you make it stick together? “They were falling apart,” said Andy D’Amico, a chef and partner. “They would just kind of collapse in the roll.” The solution was something familiar to the home meatloaf maker: seal the mix with eggs and panko crumbs.
The veggie-burger pendulum of peril swings between too dry and too wet, and sometimes, achieving the right balance of moisture and texture has to do with knowing which seeds, nuts and vegetables to mash and which ones to leave whole.
There are other challenges. A patty made of puréed vegetables may be healthy, but “you might say it doesn’t have much tang to it,” said Mr. Strauss of Westville. To give it flavor layering, Westville tops the patty with mushrooms and a spicy tartar sauce. (With a successful veggie burger, Mr. Ronnen observed, “so much of it is the condiments.”)
If you need extra evidence that this hippie-town mainstay is venturing into territory that once might have been seen as hostile, look no further than Shula Burger, a chain scheduled to open this summer in Florida. Shula Burger is the latest food enterprise from the family whose patriarch is Don Shula, the legendary football coach. One of his sons, Dave, said in a telephone interview that Shula Burger’s test kitchens were in the midst of “trying a lot of different versions.”
The root conundrum of a veggie burger, he said, comes down to its “bite profile” — or what happens at the moment of impact between teeth and patty. And what bite profile does a restaurant want to avoid? “Picture taking a bite out of a hockey puck,” said Mr. Shula, also a former N.F.L. coach. “And the other end of the bite profile to avoid is when it’s really squishy and mushy.”
Mr. D’Amico wanted his version, in keeping with the 5 Napkin mission, to have the traditional cheek-smeared pleasure of a beef burger. But sometimes it seems as if he’s been almost too successful with that, thanks in part to the incorporation of beets, which give the patty a color reminiscent of rare steak. “I have to tell you that my veggie burger has freaked out some vegetarians,” he said. “They’ve been put off by the color of it. They feel like it looks too much like meat.”
Brian Stefano, the chef at the Hillstone branch on Park Avenue, has had similar moments with the restaurant’s lauded griddled, crispy-exterior version. If you eat one, it’s hard to miss the presence of beans, rice and beets. What’s less obvious is that another ingredient — the one that gives the mix a touch of sweetness and stickiness — is prunes. “We’ve had vegetarians think that it is meat and send it back,” Mr. Stefano said.
Apparently most just chow down, though. The Park Avenue Hillstone, previously known as Houston’s, sells 400 to 500 veggie burgers a week.
“I give them a lot of credit,” Mr. Capon, the chef at Burger & Barrel, said of Hillstone. “Their veggie burger has a little bit of a cult following. I know people who go there just for that.”
Still, Mr. Capon zagged in a different direction. He found inspiration during a Saturday night “family meal” with his cooking crew when Ryan Schmidtberger, the chef de cuisine at another of Mr. Capon’s restaurants, made falafel for the team. In converting the chickpea fritter to a burger, Mr. Capon amped up the herbs, smeared on plenty of tzatziki sauce and chose a coarser, crunchier grind.
Ultimately, how a restaurant rises to the challenge of a veggie burger can be a telling sign of its cooks’ core values.
“It gives you a lot of room to create,” said David Burke, the chef behind New York restaurants like Fishtail and David Burke Kitchen. At Fishtail, Mr. Burke eventually went with the tried-and-true pleasure-delivery system of a portobello mushroom with roasted peppers, basil mayo and mozzarella. “We treat it like an Italian sandwich without the meat,” he said.
Talking about the topic sent Mr. Burke into something of a creative reverie on the phone. “Falafel makes a good burger,” he started musing. “A corn risotto cake. Even a potato pancake, because a good burger has a little crunch, a little snap.”
That led him to think about creating an altogether different twist on an American icon: something perfect for the summer.
“A veggie lobster roll,” he said. “I’m going to try that.”