The Congressional Budget Oafs SOP

Debt, Economy, Healthcare

“Obamacare’s A Marketplace In The Same Way The Knockout Game Is A Game” offered this assessment of the modus operandi of the CBOafs (The Congressional Budget Oafs):

[Like] the pundits who bestow them with the “non-partisan” adjectival, the CBOafs (The Congressional Budget Oafs), protect the status-quo. This federal agency is as “independent” as the country’s columnists, who might as well register as lobbyists for the RNC or DNC respectively.
Typically, the CBO will first confirm government predictions of the great savings that will accrue due to this or the other wastrel, welfare program. Later, when it’s safer, they adjust their statistical sleight of hand.
Yes, getting reliable data out of the CBO is like frisking a wet seal.

Zero Care will impose $1 trillion in tax increases and $2 trillion in subsidies. Yet, the CBOafs initially scored the program positively. Only a day ago, not untypically, the CBOafs were touting the increasing (alleged) affordability of the Affordable Care Act (not for me). Right away, the CBOafs then pivot to warn of the “Heightening Risk of Fiscal Crisis.” Via Breitbart.com:

CBO Director Douglas Elmdorf testified that debt will exceed 100% of GDP within 25 years and continue to rise, a “trend that could not be sustained” and would eventually heighten “the risk of a fiscal crisis” before the House Budget Committee on Tuesday.

“Although the deficits in our baseline projections remain roughly stable as a percentage of GDP through 2018, as I noted, they rise after that. The deficit in 2025 is projected to be $1.1 trillion, or 4% of GDP, and cumulative deficits over the 2016 to 2025 period are projected to total $7.6 trillion. We expect that federal debt held by the public will amount to 74% of GDP at the end of this fiscal year, more than twice what it was at the end of 2007, and higher than in any year since 1950. By 2025, in our baseline projections, federal debt rises to nearly 79% of GDP. When CBO last issued long-term budget projections in the summer, we projected that, under current law, debt would exceed 100 percent of GDP 25 years from now, and would continue on an upward trajectory thereafter. That trend that could not be sustained. Such large and growing federal debt would have serious negative consequences, including increasing federal spending for interest payments, restraining economic growth in the long term, giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to unexpected challenges, and eventually heightening the risk of a fiscal crisis” he stated.

According to a copy of his prepared remarks released by the CBO, the revised economic projections “do not materially change” predictions that debt will exceed 100% of GDP in 25 years and “CBO’s current projection of debt as a percentage of GDP in 2024 is quite close to that used as the starting point for the projections in The 2014 Long-Term Budget Outlook [where the CBO also predicted that debt will be 100% of GDP in 25 years.]”

Not The Latino Look Again

Aesthetics

Judging by the winner of the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, the Latino look is not going away anytime soon. I wish it would. The winner, Paulina Vega, pales compared to the exotic Miss Jamaica, Kaci Fennell. An irate viewer puts down the choice of Miss Colombia over the sublimely exquisite Miss Jamaica to a competition held in “a Latino place” coupled with a “jury that was Latino.” The common Latino look has dominates for some time, no matter where the competition.

Miss Jamaica:

‘Oh What A Tangled Web We Weave When First We Practice To Deceive’

Foreign Policy, Iran, Islam, Terrorism

The dilemmas faced by “a mulish military power which doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola” are enormous.

The Yemeni president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, resigned on Jan. 22, “after Houthi rebels seeking greater political power effectively seized control of the capital, Sanaa.” (Foreign Policy)

For years, Yemenis had felt the brunt of “U.S.-trained units of elite Yemeni special forces” combined with CIA drone strikes from above. Now the superpower must decide “whether, and how, to cooperate with the Houthis — who are widely seen as an Iranian proxy force — in the fight against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemeni-based group that claimed to have orchestrated this month’s attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo.”

The Houthis hate al Qaeda, which is “a Sunni militant group that sees the Houthis and the Iranian as apostates.” So do we, the Americans, hate al Qaeda. But we also hate the Iranians (principally because Israel is threatened by Iran, which is no threat to the US).

Another dynamic is at play besides the Sunni-Shia dynamic. It is that between the forces of centralization, with which the US generally sides (witness Iraq), and the forces of decentralization, with which the Arab people with whom we meddle generally side, given the tribal, familial focus of their societies.

The Houthis are demanding greater regional autonomy (like the Kurds of Iraq); the US is inevitably looking to empower another puppet central power like Hadi’s so as to lord it over its Yemeni client state.

In the words of Sir Walter Scott, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

UPDATED: Fun In The Sun @ 64°F (Breaking No-News)

Media

While the media-political complex focuses exclusively on the storm engulfing the Northeast, the temperature is 64°F in our neck of the woods, in the great Pacific Northwest. Look out for each other; the political elites of Sodom and Gomorrah will surely look out for themselves.

UPDATE (1/27): BREAKING NO-NEWS. Yes, but is wicked weather a legitimate topic for non-stop “breaking News” coverage?! Only in America.