Cynthia Tucker

Is the earth a sphere? Or is it flat? Common sense — the observations of your five senses — tells you it’s flat, right?

That’s the same common sense that tells you that, in the midst of an unusually cold and snowy winter on much of the East Coast, the planet cannot be warming. But it is.

Still, neocon pundit Walter Russell Mead argues that the climate change movement is dead.

The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.

The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad …

Continue reading Climate change movement dead? »

It might not be popular, but at least Rep. Paul Ryan, the highest-ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, has had the honesty to make a solid proposal to bring down the deficit. He wants to eliminate Medicare and Medicaid. He also proposes deep cuts to Social Security.

But he claims the “Democratic attack machine” is distorting his proposal and creating controversy around it. He needs to look more closely. His Republican colleagues are running away from his budget proposal because they know how unpopular it will be with a key voting bloc — the elderly.

It’s subscription-only, but Roll Call has a nice little piece by Steven T Dennis about how House GOP budget chief Paul Ryan’s plan to balance the budget by eliminating Social Security and Medicare is putting some of his colleagues on the hot seat:

For the past year, Senate Republican leaders have largely avoided putting forward alternative visions to the major bills Democrats have offered, preferring to …

Continue reading GOP runs from a Republican budget »

Maybe the good doc, who represents Georgia’s 6th district in Congress, can present his health care plan now. At the House Republicans’ retreat, Price, an orthopedist, claimed that Republicans had come up with a health care plan that would insure millions for practically nothing. Obama, rightly, dismissed that as fantasy.

UPDATE: Tom Price’s office has e-mailed with to say that price never claimed his plan would cost nothing. Instead, he said,

Though the President has repeatedly twisted Rep. Price’s words around, he never said we could expand coverage “for free” or “at no cost.”  What he said was it can be done “without raising taxes.” That’s an important distinction, but one that the President has done a great job to blur, as did your post this morning. The Republican Study Committee (RSC) legislation pays for its costs largely through 1% annual reductions in non-defense discretionary spending over the ten year window.

But now Obama has invited Republicans to come present …

Continue reading Paging Dr. Tom Price on fantasy health care »

To my regulars: This column interweaves two incendiary issues — race and gay rights. I hope you’ll work with me to keep the conversation civil. You can criticize me; you can even invoke the old trope claiming I “always write about race.” But please, no “idiot,” no “redneck,” no faux sub-standard English. Thanks.

WASHINGTON — Last month, Lt. Col. Lee Archer, the only confirmed “ace” among the Tuskegee Airmen, died at the age of 90. His obituary reminded me of the ugly racism that he and his colleagues faced as they struggled for the right to die for their country. The story noted a 1925 Army War College study that had concluded black men lacked the courage, intelligence and leadership skills for combat, so training them as pilots was out of the question.

I thought of Archer’s obituary last week when Saxby Chambliss (R), Georgia’s senior senator, rattled off his objections to allowing gays and lesbians to serve their country openly.  A member of the Senate Armed Services …

Continue reading “Don’t ask, don’t tell” harkens back to segregated military »

Americans already pay more for health care than any other country on the planet. (Check out the chart at the bottom of this post.) And we don’t have the best health to show for it, either. Without health care reform, costs will soar. In California, some consumers have already gotten word that their premiums are going up by 39 percent.
The US Chamber of Commerce fought health care reform with gazillions of dollars and harsh rhetoric, but some wiser business executives are beginning to understand the costs to the economy of the failure to pass health care reform.
According to The Wall Street Journal:

Barring a political miracle, we’re going to learn the cost of doing nothing—nothing significant to restrain health-care cost increases, nothing to prod the health-care system to produce more benefit for each dollar it takes, nothing to expand health-insurance coverage.

This, too, will be ugly and unpopular.

“Failure to enact health reform will result in increasing numbers of …

Continue reading Love your health care? Good because you’re gonna pay more »

Among the conservative faithful, one of the fundamental tenets of the faith is that government regulation is bad; it chokes business and harms the economy. But a lack of regulation results in toys with lead, baby beds that choke children and Toyotas that run amok. Literally.

Trans Sec Ray LaHood has said that Toyota was recalcitrant every step of the way. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration officials had to go to Japan to warn Toyota to take the problems seriously. But many car-owners have complained that NHTSA dismissed their complaints, believing Toyota instead.

From the WaPo:

The deluge of complaints about Toyota cars, first over floor mats, then over sticky pedals and recently over Prius brakes, has aroused criticism that federal regulators compromised vehicle safety by too often trusting carmakers’ explanations.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is charged with protecting the nation’s drivers, has long relied on automakers to help …

Continue reading Toyota: risks of not-enough government »

Many conservatives believe the budget can be balanced without raising taxes. But even if it cannot, they’d rather keep the deficit and cut taxes. Now, don’t shoot the messenger, folks. This comes from a Rasmussen poll, and he leans right. (BTW, this particular messenger has to go to the grocery store for the requisite milk, eggs and bread because DC is expecting another big snow storm. Please try to remember the rules while I’m gone.) Here are sample answers from the poll:

Fifty percent (50%) of conservatives are comfortable with a budget deficit if taxes are cut versus 63% of liberals who favor a balanced budget with higher taxes. But then 50% of conservative voters also think the federal budget can be balanced without a tax increase. Sixty-one percent (61%) of liberals say that’s impossible.
The partisan differences on the questions are notable. While 50% of Republicans would rather see a budget deficit with tax cuts, a plurality (46%) of Democrats favor the opposite …

Continue reading Fiscal conservatives and voodoo economics »

What the president had to say was just commonsense, using Las Vegas as an easy metaphor for foolish spending:

When “times are tough, you tighten your belts,” President Obama explained to a carefully screened “town hall” audience in New Hampshire on Tuesday. “You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.”

Still, I suppose if my town paid its bills off tourism, I’d be inclined to be peeved at the prez, too. So the Las Vegas Review-Journal gave him a dressing down today:

The little lecture in home economics came not quite a year after a speech at an RV factory in Elkhart, Ind., in which Mr. Obama warned bankers whose companies had received federal bailout money, “You can’t take a trip to Las Vegas or down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime.”

The irony of a president who just proposed the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world then assuming the mantle of a budget-cutter and lecturing everyday Americans on the need to “tighten …

Continue reading Vegas is mad at Obama »

Contrary to Republican claims, Abdulmutallab, who tried to blown up a Detroit-bound jet on Christmas Day,  has been cooperating with federal authorities, answering their questions about his connections to al-Qaida. Experts on interrogation have long known that torture — and even extreme duress — can lead to false confessions. The best information is gleaned when interrogators take the time to try to establish a relationship, as they seem to have done in this case.
From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit on Dec. 25, started talking to investigators after two of his family members arrived in the United States and helped earn his cooperation, a senior administration official said Tuesday evening.

Mr. Abdulmutallab, 23, began speaking to F.B.I. agents last week in Detroit and has not stopped, two government officials said. The officials declined to disclose what information …

Continue reading Undie-bomber talks without torture »

You won’t hear nearly as much about this retreat as you did about Obama’s visit to the House Republicans last week, but Obama has just finished giving the Dems a little pep talk.

President Obama urged Democrats not to be defeatist about the loss of their supermajority in the Senate, declaring: “If anyone is searching for a lesson from Massachusetts, I promise you, the answer is not to do nothing.”

He urged them to pass health care, and here’s a practical political reason for doing so: They’re going to get blamed for it anyway! Republicans have already started to make the ads to run against Dems over health care in November; both houses of Congress passed a health care bill with mostly Democratic votes. Dems will be whacked over the head will health care, so they might as well be whacked for something they actually accomplished.

Continue reading Obama tries to cheer the Dems (and give them a spine) »