At the end of February 2004, when (Democratic Sen. John) Kerry locked up the nomination, (President George W.) Bush’s approval rating was at 44 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls....The election (of 2012) is going to be a choice -- and merely being an acceptable alternative to a failed incumbent won’t be enough for the Republicans to win the White House....from Polarized Electorate Suggests Obama Win in 2012 by National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru

Politico reports:

Impeaching President Barack Obama “needs to happen,” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) told a local tea party group, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Tuesday. Burgess spoke, the paper said, in response to an attendee’s suggestion that the GOP-controlled House use impeachment to stop Obama from “pushing his agenda.”...Last month, Iowa Rep. Steve King said Obama “would be impeached” if he allowed the nation to default.... In April, former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein drafted articles of impeachment in hopes that House Republicans would introduce them.

I thought these tea party fanatics loved the Constitution. Where in it do they find license to impeach a president over policy differences?

The crazy just keeps on coming.

Veteran Chicago commentator Dennis Byrne is a weekly contributor to the Tribune's commentary pages and the proprietor of The Barbershop, a ChicagoNow blog. In Wednesday's Tribune he joins me in The Rhubarb Patch to discuss how to reform the Federal budget

 From Dennis, to Eric:

We've lived through the devastating bursts of the housing and dot.com bubbles. Now, welcome to the debt bubble burst, the wrenching end of our blissful federal borrowing.

Whoever is to blame for this financial debauch, which started with Ronald Reagan, the first of a line of presidents who borrowed our way to prosperity, the recent political and market convulsions should convince even the most flagrant borrower that we've reached the end of the line.

 Raise taxes if you will, but it won't get to the heart of our problem: profligacy that requires Washington to borrow 40 cents for every dollar it spends. We can only hold our breath that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, sired by last week's political turbulence, can come up with enough cost cutting to make a difference. Meanwhile, we can kick off the debate by agreeing that something consequential has to be done about spending.

I'll start.

Cut military spending by $1 trillion over the next decade.

Actually, that wasn't my idea. Give credit to Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., someone who liberals imagine to be one of the bigger right-wing knuckle draggers. It's a highlight of his "Back in Black" proposal unveiled a couple of weeks ago to save more than $9 trillion over 10 years. Look at his detailed report -- full texts (pdf). summary (.pdf) -- and discover a multitude of reasonable cuts, running from major slices in expensive weapons systems to consolidating military health care and commissary functions.

The military has done fine work, but as a wartime veteran who never got closer than half a world away from the actual fighting, I highly doubt the military needs every cent it gets.

From Eric, to Dennis:

Defense cuts! Gee, to maintain the traditional left-right political balance of these exchanges of ours, I feel I should, in turn, call for eliminating funding for PBS, NPR and Planned Parenthood.

By request I'm taking this excahnge in a different comment thread and putting it up here for general discussion:

MCN: Business are taxed on profits regardless of whether they are reinvested in the company or dividended. ... One of the exceptions is that they are NOT taxed on overseas profits until they are repatriated to the US, at which they are subject to the usual corporate tax rates. The US is one of the very few countries that taxes income earned abroad.

There is a lot of cash sitting overseas because confiscatory US corporate tax law discourages repatriation. For my part, one of the necessary solutions is to meaningfully reform the corporate tax code by eliminating many deductions while reducing the tax rate.

In addition, there should be no tax on dividend income.

ZORN: You can really get yourself wrapped around the axle if you try to discern perfect logic in the tax code or, in fact, to apply logic to it.

Basically, as I see it, taxation at every level is about drawing enough money out of the system -- transactions and holdings -- to run that system, and doing so in a way that puts the least friction on the system.

We could, after all, simply divvy up the total cost of government equally among every citizen and levy bills -- federal, state, county, local -- accordingly. Completely fair but of course unthinkable.

At the other extreme we could tax every dollar earned over a certain amount to the extent necessary to run things. That might be $300,000 a year, say. Not fair and, again, unthinkable.

Tax systems ultimately meet between these extremes, and the "right" answer depends on what you perceive as desirable and most fair. I'm sure you have a theoretical argument to make for eliminating taxes on dividend income ... it incentivizes investment or something like that.

But why should that income of Sandy Trustfund be favored over the income of Pat the bricklayer?

Source documents on competing proposals to get the federal budget back in shape:

Choosing the Nation’s Fiscal Future-- (Jan, 2010) "This report represents the outcome of a joint and shared effort between our two organizations: the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)" summary (pdf) Full report (pdf)

Back in Black-- (July 2011) report from Sen. Tom Coburn, (R-Oklahoma) detailing $9 trillion in proposed savings.  full report (pdf). summary (.pdf)

Simpson-Bowles --(November, 2010)  Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairs of President Obama’s Bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,  released their Co-chairs' proposal (pdf) draft report outlining their plan to reduce the federal deficit.

Gang of Six --(July, 2011) Recommendations from a bi-partisan group of senators that are based on Simpson-Bowles--  summary (pdf)   full text (pdf)

Ryan Plan -- (April, 2011)  FY 2012 budget resolution from the House Committee on the budget, Chairman Paul Ryan. The Path to Prosperity, Restoring America's Promise (pdf) (Congressional Budget Analysis of the Ryan Plan (pdf))

Wyden-Gregg --(Feb. 2010)  the Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act of 2010 from Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.)  Summary (pdf) Text of Bill (pdf)

Toward Common Ground: Bridging the Political Divide to Reduce Spending --(Oct. 2010) -"The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) and National Taxpayers Union (NTU) have joined together to propose a list of 30 specific recommendations to reform our future spending commitments"   Summary--   Full report (pdf)

 Useful historical data: US Federal Deficit Current – Historical – As Percent GDP from U.S. Govt. Spending.

---

React: Bowles-Simpson Plan Commendably Puts Everything on the Table But Has Major Deficiencies Because It Lacks an Appropriate Balance Between Program Cuts and Revenue Increases -- The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 11/16/10

The Daily Herald reports:

Just when Lake County Fielders officials thought their troubled season couldn't get any worse, they are left trying to explain the early-inning suspension of a home game (Friday) over claims they provided inferior baseballs for the players...

 The recreational baseballs purchased at a sporting goods store were not the ones officially manufactured by Rawlings for professional play, (team owner Richard) Ehrenreich said, but they weren't so bad as to cause the sudden suspension of the game....

Teams typically purchase baseballs in bulk. However, Ehrenreich said, the uncertainty about the Fielders' future is why the team didn't place its usual order for the Rawlings professional model last week.

 See earlier:

Lake County ballclub may walk --Fielders threaten to disband in stadium dispute with Zion

Fielders cry foul--Financial troubles have Zion's minor league baseball team enduring anything but a dream season

Via The WGN AM Morning Memo

ABC yesterday blasted a British newspaper report that the network is sitting on an explosive treasure-trove of Jacqueline Kennedy audio recordings that have her blaming President Lyndon B. Johnson for her husband's assassination and admitting to extramarital affairs.... New York Post

It's been a while since I last appeared on "Public Affairs," the first TV show to give a young Barack Obama sustained exposure to the viewing audience. Host Jeff Berkowitz and I mixed it up for nearly half an hour on a recent afternoon:

If we decided to build a couple of new carriers, thousands of workers would be hired for the shipyards.  Thousands of employees would be hired for the steel mills that would provide the steel for the hull and various sub contractors would hire thousands.  Do you know what that means? It means they would receive paychecks and go out and spend that money.  That would help a recovery....Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation, quoted in the Economist.

The Economist writer goes on to note:

The tea-party movement has spent the past year arguing that stimulus doesn't work and cannot, by nature, create more jobs or economic activity. The idea that a major tea-party figure can turn around and make a bog-standard argument for defense spending on Keynesian grounds testifies to a startling capacity for cognitive dissonance.

Just asking: Do you suppose Texas Gov. Rick Perry's prayer rally over the weekend in which he called on Jesus to help America "through unprecedented struggles" will work out any better than his call in April for Texans to pray for rain worked out?

Newsweek's cover photo this week has conservatives unhappy:

I suppose it's possible that this was the most flattering of the the lot of studio portraits taken of Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann for the magazine's big story this week on her presidential aspirations. Evidence that I can relate can be seen at the top of this blog where you see the best of more than 100 efforts by a top-notch studio photographer. Some of us just don't pose well.

If that was the problem, the artistic director ought to gone to other sources and pulled a photo that made Bachmann look a little less dazed and Stepford-y, such as the photo to the left snagged from a conservative website.

The cover headline calls her "The Queen of Rage," but the photo makes her look like the Queen of Ditz, which ultimately does more damage to Newsweek's reputation than to Bachmann's.

Sexist, though? I don't know. This recent Newsweek cover image of Mitt Romney shows they can make guys look goofy, too.

And though they aren't photographs, these National Review cover cartoon of Barack Obama show that the left isn't alone in using unflattering images to defame:

I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that....Mitt Romney, 1994

Salon is reporting the details about this "close family relative" and analyzing Romney's opportunistic flip on this issue.

A 1983 Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Knotts, set a clear precedent that tracking is legal without a warrant. In that case, Minnesota law enforcement officers used a "beeper" tracking device to help them physically follow a barrel of chloroform being transported from the Twin Cities to Wisconsin, where it would be used to manufacture illegal drugs....from Big Brother is Tracking You: GPS and the Fourth Amendment by Jordan Smith, Inside Criminal Justice

Smith's story is a curtain-raiser on the U.S. Supreme Court's upcoming consideration of a case concerning a law-enforcement task force's use of GPS technology in nabbing  suspected drug trafficker Antoine Jones.

The GPS data provided a 24/7 record of all of Jones' movements in the jeep over the next month―including, at times, the movements of his wife and family―and helped the government tie Jones to a suspected stash house in Maryland. In October 2005, agents executed search warrants for several locations, including the Jeep and the Maryland stash house. They recovered large amounts of cash, and large quantities of both powder and crack cocaine. Jones was eventually convicted on a charge of conspiring to sell drugs and was sentenced to life in prison. Jones appealed his conviction, arguing that the prolonged GPS surveillance by the government, without a valid warrant, constituted an illegal search.

The government argues that the GPS devices merely emulate the sort of legal surveillance that, theoretically, could have been conducted the old fashioned way by a 24/7 team of police officers tailing the suspect wherever he went on public roads.

The defense argues  that, because it would be “infeasible" for law enforcement to conduct such surveillance the old fashioned way, doing it with GPS violates a person's  “reasonable expectation of privacy” and constitutes a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Previously, an appellate court agreed with this view:

 Judge Douglas Ginsburg, a Reagan appointee, in his summation of the D.C.court’s unanimous  decision (favoring Jones), said the panel was persuaded that in fact Jones’ movements during the month he was tracked by GPS were “not exposed to the public."

"First, unlike one's movements during a single journey, the whole of one's movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil," he wrote.

"Second, the whole of one's movements is not exposed constructively even though each individual movement is exposed, because that whole reveals more―sometimes a great deal more―than does the sum of its parts."

There's a larger question here, one that society is still grappling with: How much law enforcement do we really want?

It would be possible -- it is possible -- to use cameras and tollway transponders to detect speeding and issue the same sorts of automatic citations that now come in the mail if you blow through a toll plaza without paying.

If you pass checkpoint A at noon and then pass checkpoint B 8 miles away at 12:06, a computer could easily spit out a ticket charging you with driving 80 mph, no human necessary.

Even rule-of-law absolutists tend instinctively not to like that idea. We want there to be some social wiggle room in the law.

Republicans, normally staunch on law and order, openly favor enabling tax cheats.  From an AP story in March:

Every dollar the Internal Revenue Service spends for audits, liens and seizing property from tax cheats brings in more than $10, a rate of return so good the Obama administration wants to boost the agency's budget. House Republicans, seeing the heavy hand of a too-big government, beg to differ. They've already voted to cut the IRS budget by $600 million this year and want bigger cuts in 2012.

The Freakanomics guys puzzled over this in 2006:

Unless you are personally cheating by one-fifth or more, you should be mad at the I.R.S. -- not because it's too vigilant, but because it's not nearly vigilant enough. Why should you pay your fair share when the agency lets a few hundred billion dollars of other people's money go uncollected every year?

But I digress. GPS "surveillance." Your view:

From a Crain's editorial:

To [Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's] no-tax pledge, we say “good luck,” and we hope that he can keep making it....[But] the mayor has yet to outline exactly how the sacrifices will be made and who will share in the pain that's to come.... 
Very quickly, the math—no tax hikes and no cuts in the city's biggest expenditures—falls apart. Unfortunately, we've seen too many times what happens when officeholders back themselves into a corner.