Gabby Giffords: sept mois plus tard elle vote pour l'entente!

Retour surprise à la Chambre pour voter sur l'entente!

"Seven months after she was shot in the head by a gunman in Tucson, Arizona, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) made a surprise and emotional return to the House floor on Monday, casting a vote in favor of a bill to raise the nation's debt ceiling.

Giffords entered the chamber to sustained, standing applause, shaking hands with colleagues whom she had not seen since that January day. Her vote, a sideshow to the far more important and compelling personal drama, was in favor of the bill, which passed through the chamber by a margin of 269 to 161.

“I have closely followed the debate over our debt ceiling and have been deeply disappointed at what’s going on in Washington,” Giffords said, in a statement from her office. “After weeks of failed debate in Washington, I was pleased to see a solution to this crisis emerge. I strongly believe that crossing the aisle for the good of the American people is more important than party politics. I had to be here for this vote. I could not take the chance that my absence could crash our economy.”

Giffords' office tweeted word of her return to Washington after the vote had begun. And as she showed up on the floor -- smiling and with her hair cut short -- the attention of lawmakers drifted from the vote tally to her presence. Her office, in a statement, noted that in December 2009 and again in February 2010, she had objected to raising the nation's debt limit. This vote, the statement added, "was substantially different, with the strength of the U.S. economy hanging in the balance."

After the vote was cast, Giffords received multiple additional rounds of applause, as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) called her "the personification of courage."

"Her presence here in the chamber as well as her service throughout her career in Congress, brings honor to this chamber," Pelosi said. "Thank you, Gabby.""

Loving baseball

J'attire votre attention sur un bel article de Joe Posnanski dans le dernier numéro du Sports illustrated. Pour les amateurs...

"Baseball is a game out of time. This is the sport's defining quality, its badge of honor. The people who love baseball—the poets, the stat geeks, the bleacher bums, the second-guessers, the former pitchers, the collectors—we love baseball for its timelessness. It is a game without a clock. "Keep the rally alive," the marvelous Roger Angell wrote, "and you have defeated time."

The people who do not love baseball feel its timelessness too. They lampoon a game that feels ... so ... yesterday. They mock baseball for not having a clock, for its interminable pauses, for sparking so little violence and motion, for struggling to adapt (No replay? Really?), for being measured by numbers well to the right of decimal points. "You made me love baseball," Lisa told Bart on The Simpsons. "Not as a collection of numbers, but as an unpredictable, passionate game beaten in excitement only by every other sport."

Baseball is a game out of time. And that's what started me on this trip. Think about this for a moment: What else but baseball connects us to America of, say, 1891? What else has burned so long in our consciousness? The American population in 1891 was less than one quarter of what it is now. That was before movies, before television, before radio, before Hershey bars, before Wrigley gum, before even Brett Favre. America the Beautiful had not been written. Dracula did not exist, no Roosevelt had yet been president. Football, under different rules, was played only at a few colleges, there was no golf U.S. Open and until the end of that year basketball was a game bouncing around in the fertile mind of a YMCA instructor named James Naismith. The Olympics, more than 1,500 years since their last staging, would not resume for another five years.

But ... America had baseball. Cy Young was not an award but a 24-year-old kid who won 27 games. Sliding Billy Hamilton stole 111 bases. Cap Anson led a segregated National League in RBIs for the eighth time at age 39. A light-hitting but speedy outfielder named Billy Sunday quit baseball to begin a new life as an evangelist. Attendance soared and salaries skyrocketed, leading The New York Times to lament that baseball was "no longer a sport, but a business.""

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1188482/index.htm

L'image des États-Unis...

La dette américaine pour les nuls!

Caricature Oncle Sam: célébrons les coupures!

The bad, the good and the ugly: analyse de l'entente sur Talking points memo.

Voici les principales faiblesses du plan adopté hier soir selon le site Talking points memo:

"Domestic discretionary cuts

The first part of the budget to take a hit -- and that will be hit for at least a few years into the future -- is the one part of the budget that hasn't grown particularly fast over the last decade. And it's also the part that matters the most for regular people: Health programs, education, clean energy, and transportation. It will be cut and capped, in a way that the Congressional Budget Office forecasts will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars less spending for these crucial programs.


What it lacks

Late last year, President Obama struck another big deal with Congressional Republicans -- one that extended all of the Bush tax cuts for two years, but also included a payroll tax holiday for employees, and a one-year extension of unemployment insurance. As the Recovery Act has phased out, those concessions are now the only two things providing the economy with billions of dollars a month of extra juice -- juice that will run out at the end of 2011. Earlier in this debt limit fight, when Obama was aiming for a "grand bargain," he was also pushing to include a year long extension (and possibly a widening) of both of these measures. They didn't make the final cut. And if they don't get extended sometime between now and December 31, the resulting economic contraction will be significantly larger than the contraction caused by the initial spending cuts, which in the early years are relatively small.


What it isn't

Of course, this austerity plan could be worse. Cuts could be heavily frontloaded and larger, and aimed more squarely at the poor and middle class. Defense is a real target here, as are Medicare providers, as opposed to Medicare beneficiaries. In the base deal, veterans and Social Security and Medicaid beneficiaries are walled off from immediate cuts. But at the end of the day, this is still an austerity plan. What the country really needs is a large stimulus -- aid to states, big infrastructure programs and so on -- with an eye toward fiscal consolidation later in the decade. The White House argues that budgetary concerns so dominate the political landscape that new deficit spending right now is out of the question, and only possible in the future if preceded with consolidation measures like this one. But part of the reason Washington is so primed for austerity now is that the White House let that faction of the establishment seize the initiative. It didn't necessarily have to be so.


What it doesn't do

Literally nothing about this plan will do anything to slow the growth of health care costs -- the true driver of the country's structural deficit. A future deficit plan, one that includes entitlement and tax reforms, might do that, but there's really no guarantee. In the end, this plan assures that most of the savings will come from programs that don't really need, and can't easily afford, to be cut. It doesn't change the nature of government, as conservatives want, and it doesn't take the "deficit" issue off the table, as battle-weary liberals would like. In that way, it's just sort of mean. It also contains zero guarantees that we'll see any fresh sources of federal revenues. The down payment on deficit reduction comes entirely from discretionary cuts, defense and non-defense. The committee process it sets up doesn't forbid tax increases, but Republicans will fight them vigorously. And if that fight turns into gridlock, and the statutory enforcement mechanism kicks in, it'll be all cuts. By the time everything called for in this bill takes effect, Treasury could still be taking in historically low levels of revenues."

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/the-four-big-problems-with-and-four-silver-linings-around-the-debt-limit-deal.php?ref=fpa

Caricature Tea party: la sagesse?

Caricature Obama: a-t-il perdu les négos?

Caricature Oncle Sam: doit-il en rire ou en pleurer?

Plafond de la dette: une mauvaise entente (NYT)

C'est un peu ce que j'affirmais hier soir sur les ondes de LCN... Dans un monde idéal, certaines décisions ne seraient pas laissées entre les mains des politiciens. Le tribut de la démocratie est parfois particulièrement élevé...

"There is little to like about the tentative agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House except that it happened at all. The deal would avert a catastrophic government default, immediately and probably through the end of 2012. The rest of it is a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists. It will hurt programs for the middle class and poor, and hinder an economic recovery.

It is not yet set in stone, and there may still be time to make it better. But in the end, most Democrats will have no choice but to swallow their fury, accept the deal and, we hope, fight harder the next time.

For weeks, ever since House Republicans said they would not raise the nation’s debt ceiling without huge spending cuts, Democrats have held out for a few basic principles. There must be new tax revenues in the mix so that the wealthy bear a share of the burden and Medicare cannot be affected.

Those principles were discarded to get a deal that cuts about $2.5 trillion from the deficit over a decade. The first $900 billion to a trillion will come directly from domestic discretionary programs (about a third of it from the Pentagon) and will include no new revenues. The next $1.5 trillion will be determined by a “supercommittee” of 12 lawmakers that could recommend revenues, but is unlikely to do so since half its members will be Republicans."

À lire au complet:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/opinion/to-escape-chaos-a-terrible-debt-deal.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Capitaine America et la dette...

Pas certain que le compromis annoncé hier soir lui permette de retrouver la ligne...