Kyle Wingfield

Liberals’ new favorite Republican is Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor who this week slammed House Republicans for delaying action on a bill with aid for those affected by Hurricane Sandy. (They’ll be back to hating him the next time he goes on an anti-union rant or some such.) As I’ve said before, the real problem lies with those who lard up such bills with extra spending because they know those pet projects have a better chance of passing when attached to such an urgent measure.

Apparently that can be clear even to a politician in the storm-ravaged area, as long as that politician is not a moderate Republican running for re-election in a blue state. From Politicker.com:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who previously declined to slam House Speaker John Boehner over Congress’ stalled Hurricane Sandy aid, took his argument to the next level this morning and suggested federal lawmakers are partially to blame for the delay in the vote on the package because they insert “things …

Continue reading About the hold-up in the Sandy relief bill/pork-fest »

Ira Stoll notices a timely little nugget in the New York Times’ story about the sale of Current TV, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, to Al Jazeera:

Al Jazeera did not disclose the purchase price, but people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1, according to several people who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But the deal was not signed until Wednesday. (emphasis added)

Hmmm. Does this mean Gore is not one of the “well-to-do Americans, patriotic Americans, who,” according to President Obama in a campaign speech back in August, “… are willing to do the right thing, willing to do their part to make this country strong” by paying higher taxes? One of those people who has “made enough …

Continue reading Al Gore: Another guy who’s not ‘patriotic’ by Obama’s standard »

Only in Washington, D.C., do people raise taxes and fail to cut spending from what they were just a day earlier and call it the “American Taxpayer Relief Act.”

That more or less summarizes what I think about the itsy bitsy deal struck in the Senate earlier this week to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff.

I’m not going to rehash all the details of the deal. Nor do I plan to argue about whether we should consider the deal a) a tax cut for most people, because income tax rates were scheduled to go up this year and now will not, possibly resulting in a lower tax bill than many Americans were set to face in 2013 even after payroll taxes rise by 2 percentage points; or b) a tax increase, because the deal does not mean anyone will actually pay less in taxes in 2013 than they did in 2012, and many people will pay more.

It’s a rather stupid debate to have — not least because some of the same people who argue it’s a tax cut because taxes would have gone up anyway are also trying somehow …

Continue reading Fiscal cliff ‘deal’ represents everything wrong with Washington »

“I’m a skeptic, and I want to protect taxpayers.”

Keith Parker spoke those words toward the end of his first visit to the AJC’s offices as MARTA’s new general manager, earlier this month. He was voicing his understanding of Georgia Republicans who view the transit agency with skepticism and the interests of taxpayers in mind.

Much of Parker’s broader message of working to find efficiencies and earn the trust of taxpayers, customers and skeptical state leaders could have been spoken by anyone. That’s no knock on Parker; he’d been on the job just one week when he met with us.

In fact, after listening to Parker, I found two reasons to think he just might have a fighting chance of doing at MARTA what hasn’t been done there before.

The first is that he has done it in politically similar states before. He has worked in Charlotte and, most recently, as head of the transit agency in San Antonio.

In the latter, he said, he persuaded Texas’ GOP-dominated state …

Continue reading A new year’s note to MARTA’s new chief »

Get ready for snow on Christmas, everyone. It’s coming, says … my 3-year-old.

Without snow on Christmas, he posits, how will Santa Claus be able to come and deliver our presents?

The unestablished correlation between frozen precipitation and flying reindeer notwithstanding, I’ve tried to explain to him that we live in Atlanta, where the climate is warm and he has a better chance of hearing Santa up on the rooftop than of seeing snow on the ground. It doesn’t help my argument that it did snow on Christmas Day 2010 in Atlanta — and more heavily in Dalton, where we were that day — which is one of the two Christmases he can at least kind of remember. Nor does the phrase “first time that’s happened since 1882” mean much to him.

Based on that one time, I would love for it to be traditional here to have snow on Christmas (and only on Christmas; family and employment aren’t the only reasons we live in the South). It proved to me a white Christmas is truly worth dreaming …

Continue reading A Christmas musing on snow, man and a snowman »

Here’s how I see Speaker John Boehner’s failure to pass his own Plan B tax plan in the House last night:

Some people liken these fiscal-cliff negotiations to playing chess or checkers, as one unnamed, senior House Republican did in this excellent write-up of the post-failure mood in the House by National Review’s Robert Costa. Assuming I understand correctly why and how that metaphor is being made, I think it’s inapt because it suggests this debate is proceeding in isolation from everything else Congress has done in the past and will do in the future.

I think it’s much more like one hand in a game of Texas Hold ‘Em, with the chips representing political capital. With both poker chips and political capital, having more means you have more leverage — because those who have less than you don’t have as much margin for error. They have to play it a bit safer.

This particular game of poker, in which House Republicans face President Obama and the Senate Democrats, has been going on …

Continue reading Why the fiscal cliff debate is like a poker hand — and the GOP is losing a lot of chips »

As the father of two small boys, I’m as haunted by last week’s massacre in Newtown, Conn., as anyone who didn’t know personally the victims or their killer.

I have the same fears as all parents anticipating the long, potentially treacherous path ahead of their children in this broken world of ours. My fears are only multiplied by my doubts there are many real options for thwarting future slayings in other unsuspecting towns.

The two primary questions we ask after mass killings are: Why do some people act so heinously? And how can we keep others from doing so?

The first question invariably draws answers like: madness, isolation, social awkwardness or marginalization, familial dysfunction, a craving for fame (or infamy), the prevalence of violence in our popular culture, and evil pure and simple.

The second question typically brings suggestions for treating these mental illnesses and social failures. That, and gun control.

Guns typically don’t make the list of answers to …

Continue reading Why the same old gun-control answers aren’t comforting »

A federal appeals court said Tuesday it will hold the Obama administration to its promises to change Obamacare’s controversial contraceptives mandate for certain religiously affiliated employers such as colleges. I guess the judges are now part of the “war on women.”

If so, they are joined by the Obama administration itself — which, as the court noted in its Tuesday order:

represented to the court that it would never enforce [the rule] in its current form against the appellants [Wheaton College and Belmont Abbey College] or those similarly situated as regards contraceptive services. … There will, the government said, be a different rule for entities like the appellants …

But promises aren’t enough. The court said it took the administration’s pledge during oral arguments to create a different rule for the colleges and similar organizations to be “a binding commitment,” and it ordered the administration to provides updates about progress made toward the creation of the new rule …

Continue reading A tentative win for religious liberty in Obamacare lawsuit »

Reports from Washington vary on how close President Obama and Speaker John Boehner are to striking a deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. But the emergence of Boehner’s apparent back-up plan in case they don’t reach an agreement caught my eye.

This morning, Boehner said his “Plan B” is for the House to extend all the rates for taxpayers earning $1 million or less per year while raising them on those who make more than that, and leaving the broader discussion for next year. Hmmm … who has suggested just such an approach?

[T]o, to Obama, this clearly is more about good politics than good policy. The House GOP should respond in kind.

It should pass the “Buffett Rule” bill that failed to pass the Senate in April, amended to include an extension of all current tax rates through 2013, as a down payment. While the Buffett Rule is projected to raise $47 billion during the next decade if the current tax rates for high earners are not extended, I’ve seen projections of more …

Continue reading House GOP offers a familiar ‘Plan B’ for dodging the fiscal cliff »

I have deliberately waited to comment on the horrific mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., for a variety of reasons. Not least was the abundance of wrongly reported “facts” early on that made it difficult for someone hundreds of miles away from the story to feel confident about even the basics of the case; this story was not exactly the news media’s finest hour.

Still more important is the impropriety, in my view, of too soon devoting words at a time such as this to anything other than the victims and their families. They deserve better than to be gathered up as evidence for a policy debate within mere hours of their terrible deaths.

Eventually, though, those of us outside Newtown have to grapple with whether there is something we can do to prevent the evil and the insane among us from committing other such acts of wickedness.

As someone who is generally opposed to making our gun laws stricter, and who believes proponents of gun control have spent years making their case to the …

Continue reading Facts, not emotions, must guide post-Newtown debate »