A few weeks ago, Alan Greenspan got in front of the Senate Budget committee and told them that at current levels of taxation and expenditure, the country was headed towards unsustainable budget deficits. Now it seems that big thinkers on both ends of spectrum are joining the doomsday bandwagon. Yesterday, in a briefing on Capitol Hill sponsored by the Brookings Institution, Stuart Butler, head of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, and Isabel Sawhill, director of the Brookings Institution’s economic studies program, sat down with Comptroller General David M. Walker to lay out what they see as an impending budget crisis.

The Washington Post mentioned one interesting tidbit:

With startling unanimity, they agreed that without some combination of big tax increases and major cuts in Medicare, Social Security and most other spending, the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest rates that collapsed Argentina’s economy and caused riots in its streets a few years ago.

That’s right, big thinkers from the left and the right agree that left untouched, our economy is headed the way of Argentina. The Argentines are still struggling to restart their economy. Comparisons have also been made to the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s and its drastic effect on shares around the world.

– Theo LeCompte

Today on the Senate floor, Sen. Bill Frist made his distorted and manipulative case that it’s an abrogation of a Senator’s duty not to confirm each and every one of President Bush’s judicial nominees.

FRIST: “The American people elect their Senators for a reason. It’s to represent them. And they expect us to do our job. The Senate is a deliberative body. We are a proudly deliberative body. But we also have certain responsibilities, which include giving advice and consent on the President’s judicial nominees. When a judicial nominee comes to this floor and has majority support, but is denied a simple up-or-down vote, Senators aren’t doing their job.”

Senator Frist and the right-wing establishment aren’t happy with receiving 95 percent of their judicial nominees. They want them all. Make no mistake about it, calling for approval by a simple majority vote is in essence calling for a Senatorial rubber-stamp. Senator Frist needs a history lesson from the decidedly conservative Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

In 1987, Chief Justice Rehnquist said it was “extraordinarily shrewd” of the Framers to have structured the advice and consent powers as they did because the conflicts over judicial appointments ensures both a balance of power and quality candidates. From a 9/17/87 article in UPI:

Rehnquist also touched on the importance of the Constitution’s appointment clause, which allows presidents to nominate officials for certain government posts but requires the Senate to confirm them.

“This seemingly simple clause has been a bone of contention between the president and Congress and between the president and public officials at various times in our history. These conflicts and their resolutions show that the framers were extraordinarily shrewd in protecting one branch of the federal government from the unwarranted incursions of the other,” Rehnquist told a Monroe County Bar Association gathering in Rochester.

Protecting the Legislative Branch from incursions of the Executive Branch — a novel idea that Frist and right-wingers see as an annoying obstacle in their quest for more power.

The same congressional session that aims to bring us the elimination of the Estate Tax and the dismantling of the Section 8 voucher program for families on the edge of homelessness (in some perverse way, I suppose these two policies fit hand in hand…”Estate for me…The Street for you!”) is probably not going to bring us real minimum wage legislation. The minimum wage is $5.15 per hour, it isn’t indexed for inflation, and it hasn’t been increased since 1997.

Fortunately, the minimum wage is one of those issues (unlike say, Iraq) where state legislatures and governors can step in where Washington has failed us. Sixteen states have a minimum wage that is set higher than the federal level.

Progressives working in states across the political spectrum (Nevada, Florida, New York, Maine, Rhode Island) successfully won minimum wage increases–whether by legislation or constitutional amendments approved by referendum. Minnesota increased its minimum wage this month. Hawaii, Wisconsin, and Maryland have moved forward and hope to have legislation passed and signed by summer. Read more

The Free Enterprise Fund (a right-wing group directed by CNBC’s Larry Kudlow and supply-side hack Jack Kemp) has purchased “well over $100,000” in television ads to defend Tom Delay. They say the ads will target the “liberal media and government” who “have been attacking free market principles and DeLay,” a great supporter of those principles.

ThinkProgress could not be happier.

For weeks we’ve been trying to get the media to pay attention to DeLay’s greatest free market accomplishment — what DeLay calls his “perfect Petri dish of capitalism. It’s like my Galapagos island” — the Northern Mariana islands. There, human “brokers” bring thousands of mostly young girls to work as sex slaves and in festering sweatshop garment factories (clothes there can be made with a misleading “Made in USA” tag since the islands are U.S. territory). And for years DeLay has “helped lead the fight” to keep it that way.

This is Tom DeLay’s free enterprise dream — sweatshops, exploitation, and zero employee rights. When he visited the islands in ’97, DeLay toasted the sweatshop owners as a “ shining light” who represented “everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free market system.” Last week DeLay said the workers there are “beautiful people who are happy about what’s happening.”

So, Free Enterprise Fund, please, please share this dream with America. Go to the Marianas and visit the sweatshops and show America how “happy” the workers are. You’re our last hope.

(202) 421-9693 or info@freeenterprisefund.org if you’d like ask them yourself.

Speaking on the Senate floor today, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) put the filibuster fight in context:

Through blue slips and holds, seventy of President Clinton’s nominees were blocked.

When it became clear that the Republican-controlled Senate would not allow the nominations to move forward, President Clinton withdrew 12 of those nominations and chose not to renominate 16.

Much of the fury over the Newsweek article seems to be indignation at a reputable news outlet being sloppy over a source. Yet this indignation wholly forgets President Bush’s Castro misquotation last year, where he was so blinded by an anti-Cuba agenda that he wasn’t going to let a little thing like proper sourcing stop him:

A 7/16/04 speech by President Bush:

“We also face a problem only 90 miles off our shores, where the regime of Fidel Castro has turned Cuba into a major destination for sex tourism…The regime in Havana, already one of the worst violators of human rights in the world, is adding to its crimes. The dictator welcomes sex tourism. Here’s how he bragged about the industry. This is his quote, ‘Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world.’ He said that because sex tourism is a vital source of hard currency to keep his corrupt government afloat.”

On 7/20/04, only four days later, the Los Angeles Times did some investigating…

Inquiring into the White House’s source:

“Asked about the source for the quote, White House officials provided a link to a 2001 paper, written by [Charles] Trumbull, on the website of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy…Trumbull says the quote was probably a paraphrase of comments the Cuban leader made in 1992…But regardless of the exact wording, Trumbull says the president’s speech misconstrued the meaning, which he says should have been clear from his paper. ‘It shows that they didn’t read much of the article,’ Trumbull said in a telephone interview.”

The White House’s defense:

“[A]dministration officials acknowledged that they did not have a source for the wording of the president’s citation other than Trumbull’s paper. A White House spokeswoman defended the inclusion, arguing it expressed an essential truth about Cuba. ‘The president’s point in citing Castro’s quote was to highlight Castro’s morally corrupt attitude to human trafficking,’ White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said. She pointed to two other instances in which Castro boasted of the education level of Cuba’s prostitutes; in neither case was the context a direct promotion of sex tourism.”

Read more

This morning on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer asked Majority Leader Bill Frist a simple question:

SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?

Here was Frist’s response:

The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination — we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe — a point — and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.

So, Frist is arguing that one filibuster is OK. His problem is that several Bush nominees have been filibustered. This position completely undercuts Frist’s argument that judicial filibusters are unconstitutional. (Which is, in turn, the justification for the nuclear option.) If judicial filibusters are unconstitutional there is no freebee. But Frist digs his hole even deeper:

The issue is not cloture votes per se, it’s the partisan, leadership-led use of cloture votes to kill — to defeat — to assassinate these nominees. That’s the difference. Cloture has been used in the past on this floor to postpone, to get more info, to ask further questions.

When Frist voted to filibuster Paez’s nomination it had been pending for four years. It’s hard to believe he couldn’t get all the info he needed or ask all the questions he had during that time. Make no mistake about it: Bill Frist was trying to kill the Paez nomination. A press release issued the following day by former Sen. Bob Smith, who organized the filibuster effort, read “Smith Leads Effort to Block Activist Judges.” All the details about Frist’s hypocrisy here.

Note: Transcripts via Tivo recording

UPDATE: Watch the video.