Because John Bolton can't be everywhere silly.

If Cornyn's time as head of the RSCC is marked by a disastrous loss of seats any future ambitions he has are dashed. I don't think he is worried about his own seat as such, he just is not willing to sacrifice a half dozen or more other Republican Senate seats on the alters of Newt's Presidential ambitions or Rush's ratings.

It wasn't part of Liz Dole's plans to be sitting around her fancy Watergate Apartment thinking 'what the Hell happened?'. I suspect strongly that Big John doesn't want to spend 2011 trying to figure out how he and his got run over by the truck.

First there is no such program as SocialSecurityMedicareMedicaid. All of the efforts to lump them together in some sort of concocted 'entitlements crisis' is cover for the seventy-four year campaign to kill Social Security. Alf Landon ran specifically against it in 1936 and the mainstream Repubican Party has continued running against it ever since. And it hasn't been about the money, neither the financing or the profits from privatizing, the argument over Social Security is not at heart an economic one.

THEY HATE SOCIAL SECURITY FOR WHAT IT IS.

Until we get that straight there never will be an advance in this debate. Some people want to kill Social Security and there biggest nightmare is that it will prove to be solvent over time. Which is why they never actually put 2017 in numeric context. How much money are we talking about? Odds are about 100% that you don't know because people like Samuelson always use words like 'bankrupt' to describe what is initially in actual budgetary context quite small amounts of money. True the sums get bigger if you extrapolate them as the crisismongers do to HEAT DEATH OF THE SUN, which is after all what 'PV over the Infinite Future Horzion' implies.

But President Bush formed his Commission to Strengthen Social Security he took the simplest means of doing so right off the table. He would not even allow discussion of an across the board payroll tax, which left most people under the impression that this would require some crippling economy crushing sum. Instead the reason is that he didn't want people to do the math.

Well too bad. Using the Trustees own Intermediate Cost assumptions you can fix Social Security with an initial 0.20% tax increase in 2010, another 0.10% in 2011 and then another series of 0.20% increases from 2026-2036. That's it, done, fixed.

Make the median household income? Don't particularly want to work until you are seventy? You think you might be willing to pay an extra $1 a week starting in 2010 and then an extra 50 cents in 2011 and then hold your FICA rate steady until 2026 instead? You can read back through a decade or more of mainstream coverage of Social Security and never have it expressed in terms of actual impact on the average paycheck. Because some one doesn't want the guy moving cement for $12.50 cents an hour being asked if he chose paying an extra 50 cents a week to avoid three extra years of work. No instead the Samuelson's of this world insist "Hey you'll be living longer! Why not spend it out on the construction site?"

$1 a week for the median income household. Then maybe we can move on to something important. Like maybe the disfunctioning health care system. Really it is time for the heirs of Alf Landon to just get over this one. FDR won, you lost, let's insert a minor fix to Social Security and Move On.
NW Plan for a Real Social Security Fix: DI and OAS Triggers

I am not an observant anything but I happened to read Joshua awhile back and found in it an apologia for Greater Israel.

The Chosen People enter the Promised Land and proceed to conquer every city and kill their entire populations except for the one city whose population they enslave to be drawers of water and hewers of wood.

I mean it is not just about trumpets making the walls of Jericho fall down or God making the sun stop in the sky. All of that is just prelude to murder on a massive scale.

I found the whole thing chilling particularly in light of modern parallels. Operationally what distinquishes Joshua from Hitler? After all each was just creating some Liebensraum for the Master Race.

From my distant vantage point it seems that the more radical elements of the Settler Movement are using Joshua as an operations manual and figuring that God gave the green light for eliminationism thousands of years ago. Meaning this probably won't end well.

As to the growth question, the Trustees present three different growth models a more optimistic Low Cost, a more pessimistic High Cost and a supposedly median Intermediate Cost. If the economy does slow to 1.5% you will get results very close to High Cost which has the OAS (retirement) component of Social Security going to depletion in around 2032 and the DI (disability) component around 2016.

In order for SS to fully self-fund without changes we need productivity at 2.0%, Real GDP at 3.0% and Real Wage at 1.5%. Those are not crazy numbers.

Social Security is mandated to target having one year of reserves at all times. Those reserves are routinely held in the form of Special Treasury bonds. If Social Security projects to have one year of reserves in the Trust Fund in each of the next ten years it is said to be in Short Term Actuarial Balance. If it projects to have one year of reserves in each of the next 75 years it is said to be in Long Term Actuarial Balance. The measure used is called Trust Fund Ratio which is the ratio of projected balance to projected cost, meaning that a 100 TF ratio represents different dollar amounts but still the same relative solvency.

Social Security combined TF balances fell below 100 in 1971, despite some corrective measures in 1977 they continued to fall until Reagan entered office at which point the TF ratio was down to 25. Without some interfund borrowing in 1983 the TF ratio would have hit 0.
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2009/VI_cyoper_history.html#159726
The 1983 compromise was designed to get the TF back to a 100 ratio which it ultimately did by 1993. Neither Reagan or Bush 1 did anything wrong to Social Security, instead they built it back to minimal actuarial soundness using the legally mandated instrument to do that, i.e. Treasury Bonds.

Friends think. What happens when you or the Chinese Bank buys a regular Treasury? The government takes your money and spends it on whatever the hell it wants. All you get is a promise to repay it with interest. That is not theft, that is not diverting money to inappropriate purposes, that is called 'Buying a bond'.

This isn't Raiders of the Lost Ark or Gringott's Bank, there never was supposed to be a huge warehouse or vault with your excess FICA contributions tucked away, you all have just fallen into some false framing crafted by people hostile to Social Security.

Every penny ever paid to Social Security is precisely where it is supposed to be. You need to break the spell that Cato has been casting for the last 25 years.

Which is also true for the banknote in your wallet. It has no more intrinsic value than a Special Treasury Bond in the Trust Fund. You simply are counting on the government operating in a way that will preserve that piece of paper's exchange value.

In the end the value of almost anything is dependent on, wait for it, True Faith and Credit of the United States. Why people think that promises by the FDIC make bank account dollars real, but promises by the SSA don't make Special Treasuries real is pretty much the result of not thinking about what money means since we came off various metal standards.

I am not suggesting rushing out and joining the lunatics of the Austrian School and converting all your Benjamins to gold. But maybe that is because I still believe in the True Faith and Credit of the United States. Those Special Treasuries in the Trust Funds are as good as Money because they have the same backing.

It took some work to track down but it turns out that the Treasury only credits Social Security for accrued interest twice a year: in June and December. It also only credits Social Security for tax on benefits four times a year, in January, April, July, & October. And since Social Security is paid in equal amounts monthly while February is a short month and so collects less from hourly workers it turns out that the combination understated February's actual share of annualized earnings by $9 billion dollars.

Maybe it was a pure accident but if so they happened to pick the month which is structurally always the weakest of the year. You can see the whole story with snapshots of the relevant official tables here:
http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2009/04/vanishing-surpluses-yet-again.html

When it comes to opponents of Social Security I don't believe much in coincidence, this has all the hallmarks of cherry-picking.

Irresponsible that is if I hadn't signed my own name and cited my source,

It is one thing to commit a piece of political hackery just to make your own contribution to the right wing noise machine, Christ we are used to that by now. But the idea that Rosen might have used his brother-in-law as an anonymous source to possibly secure his brother-in-law's promotion while in the process smearing a sitting Appeals Judge, well that should beyond the pale even by the barely existent journalistic ethics standards of DC.

Can I prove this? Well no, But it stinks to high heaven. And there are probably people who have been indicted on lesser circumstantial evidence. All three elements are there: means, motive, and opportunity.

The loss of the White House actually means 17 votes lost for a filibuster. When you take in the dynamics.

Republicans in the last Congress used the filibuster as a stand-in for the veto with the argument running as follows:
"If you can't get 60 votes to bust a filibuster you certainly can't get 67 to override a veto, so drop the political posturing and make a deal on our terms"

Which worked. And this whether you consider it to be simple pragmatism or cowardice. Because it was broadly speaking true, any 34 Senators could sustain a veto, meaning Reid needed to bust 16 R's out of 49. That wasn't going to happen.

Now the veto pen is lost, meaning that instead of having an ultimate 16 vote cushion they have 0. There is a hell of lot of difference between McConnell saying "Me and the President can guarantee you I won't lose more than 16 defectors" to "Me, myself, and I can guarantee you I won't lose any defector, any time". Where the veto threat gave Senate moderates cover in that even if they defected en masse there still would not be enough votes to override, now they are exposed. Instead of being just a theoretical one in a theoretical gang of sixteen, they are an actual one in a gang of one preventing legislation going forward.

I see this as a total different kind of pressure on the moderates, they no longer have the political cover supplied by the mouth-breathers. Is Olympia Snowe really willing to be the key vote blocking a public option? For the sake of a Party whose antics cost the Northeastern/Rockefeller branch just about everything?

I live on Puget Sound and along with our big ports of entry in Seattle and Tacoma we also have an oil terminal, any number of fishing ports, a bulk cargo port in my City of Everett and more marinas then you could think of complete with plenty of ocean ready boats. I have friends that routinely sail up to Canada or make any annual trip to Mexico, if they happened to come back with something other than filleted halibut in their cooler no one would be the wiser..

I have friends who keep their boats in covered storage at a local marina a couple of miles up the river. When they want to take the boat out they call ahead and the marina people will have it in the water. When they come back the marina people will pull their boat out of the water and put it in storage. There is nothing that would stop you from meeting up with another boat out at sea or in the Sound and trading Coleman coolers. That Marina is kind of out of the way while still being right on a major Interstate, making you one truck rental from having that cooler anywhere in the country in a couple of days. There is simply no way to police this combination of pleasure boats and private and commercial fishing boats. And this even before the introduction of Google Maps, a couple of hours exploring the shorelines around here from the aerials and the State Shoreline series makes identifying places of entry a breeze.

And if anything the situation is worse on the East Coast. Lease a mansion on the waterfront in South Florida, make a habit of taking out your yacht on a weekly or daily basis, then when the neighbors are used to you being just another wealthy guy from the Mid East, make that one special run to a tourist port to pick up that special package. When you sail back and moor to your private dock sometime Sunday afternoon what are the odds somone would actually stop Mr. Millionaire's yacht? And still less search it with radiation detectors?

Atomic weapons can only be controlled at their point of origin. At least once you consider the length of American shorelines and the high level of freedom we offer to private boaters. Probably hundreds, certainly dozens of private boats pass by Naval Station Everett and so when it is in port the aircraft carrier U.S. Lincoln en route to the Port Marina next door. You can't approach the ship itself, but you can get close enough to detonate a tactical nuke. Or instead take it up River to Dagmar's or to private moorage on isolated Ebey Island.

Look at an aerial of San Diego Bay. See where the various bases are in relation to private boating marinas and cargo operations. From a port security and force protection standpoint it is a freaking nightmare. Meaning the fences and protections we need to be concerned about are those around facilities in Pakistan and Russia not those in Fort Lauderdale and San Diego. About the only nations really safe from a one time attack on their seaports and river ports are Chad and Switzerland.

Etzioni apparently has never been to sea and certainly not around Asia and Africa.

Ever seen those maps the TV stations occasionally put up showing every airplane currently flying? That is what your surface radar looks like when sailing close to these coasts. At any given time their might be hundreds to thousands of boats out and about, mostly fishing boats but also dhows or junks depending on where you are. They may or may not have running lights. Are we expecting these crews to jump to action every time they pass by some fishing boat?
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Hmm Zeno? If it was just a matter of tracing bills the cocaine cartels would be out of business.

As to hijacking a tanker from a small boat. You have to remember that at any given time a third or more of an ocean going ship are liable to be asleep and of those who are awake most are likely to be down below working in the engine room or galley. They simply don't have the crew to patrol and monitor the often very long very low-riding ships.

As to the insurance companies. Only a tiny fraction of ships are being attacked. It is easy to say 'well just install safety equipment' but when the bill per ship starts rising into the tens of thousands of dollars per ship you rapidly get to the point where it makes monetary sense just to pay off the pirates or reroute your shipping.

As to protecting the side of the ship you would have to find some way of doing that that would still enable to you load and offload the ship.

Plus you have to wonder about the reliability of the crew which are typically made up with men from low wage countries with not much willingness to risk their lives so that the Names at Lloyd's don't have to payoff some Spanish or Indian shipping magnate. The Maersk ship was an aberration, relatively few ships have all American crews flying under the American flag because the shipping companies can't afford them or the regulations they bring with them.

I read in the paper that about a third of all merchant sailors world wide were Filipino. How would you like to be the guy hiring if you knew the new crew member would have access to ships defenses? How do you know he is not a member of the AQ affiliated MILF? If every ship in the world was be presumed to be armed and ready you effectively make every sea-port world wise an open door for infiltrating armed terrorists or running guns.

You want a couple dozen Mumbai massacres going forward? Just make sure every merchant ship afloat has guns on board. And don't engage in fantasies that they could be kept locked until needed. By the time you know they are needed it would be too late. When I was in the Navy we always had one armed guy patrolling the ship backed up by an on call security patrol of six to eight guys. But I don't think we could have kept a small group from getting aboard the ship and taking over the bridge. They wouldn't be able to hold it, or actually take control and wouldn't get away. But the odds of being able to repel them initially would be vanishingly small on any overcast night given the normal amount of fishing boats in those waters.

In my view Cheney and crew just viewed oil as another necessary element to be used in the course of gaining their true goal. Which was American economic and military hegemony backed at home by an Arbitrary Executive himself buttressed by a Permanent Majority.

One of Hitler's first strategic moves was to gain control of Romanian oil fields, just as Tojo made sure secure those of then Dutch East Indies. Because the establishment of empire crucially depends on securing vital war supplies while denying them to your opponents. Which doesn't mean that Tojo was an oil man. To say that Iraq was just about oil is to confuse means and ends.

In Jan 1998 the Project for a New American Century sent a Letter to President Clinton urging regime change via military action. Among the eighteen signers are the following names:
Elliott Abrams
Richard L. Armitage
John Bolton
Zalmay Khalilzad
Richard Perle
Donald Rumsfeld
Paul Wolfowitz
R. James Woolsey
Robert B. Zoellick

This letter followed up on the PNAC's 1997 Statement of Principles which advocated using American military force to "shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests". This statement was signed by (among other prominent neo-cons from academia and the media) these names:
Elliott Abrams
Dick Cheney
Frank Gaffney
Fred C. Ikle
Zalmay Khalilzad
I. Lewis Libby
Donald Rumsfeld
Paul Wolfowitz

From all appearances the entire Bush war-making team was assembled years in advance and inserted as a whole at the top decision making levels at the Pentagon and elsewhere by Dick Cheney when he self-selected himself as VP and so defense policy manager.

It is also interesting to see that while George W. Bush was not on the list that JEB Bush was. Which opens the interesting suggestion that as early as 1997 there was a plan to insert a Bush in the WH backed by a Cheney led military team already intent on invading or otherwise attacking Saddam's Iraq at the earliest opportunity. Due to circumstances beyond Cheney's control he seems to have ended up with the wrong Bush.

So I would agree that the war on Iraq was not directly about oil except that control of oil was a necessary element if you were planning to 'shape a new century favorable to American principles and interest'.

This isn't Tin Foil Hat territory, the links are from the PNAC website. The Statement of Principles is a straightforward argument for American hegemony and the Letter shows that the starting point was planned to be Iraq. 9/11 just facilitated a strategy and tactical plan established and PUBLISHED four years before. As far as I am concerned these two documents and their combined signatories constitute the smoking gun on Iraq.