AlchemyToday

I’m late to this, but apparently it’s becoming vogue to say that a revote is a likely, not to mention fair, next step in the Minnesota Senate election.  Perhaps this has something to do with Coleman pulling for a new election.  Here’s a reporter at the Post (h/t Balloon Juice):

Baltimore, Md.: Speaking of junior senators, do you see Al Franken being seated anytime before 2010?

Shailagh Murray: Perhaps, but it seems more and more likely that the Minnesota race will wind up as a re-vote. At this point it seems like the quickest way to resolve the situation.

In a later chat, Shailagh’s buddy Paul Kane gets it right before he gets it wrong:

Paul Kane: COIN TOSS!!!!!

 

That’s how you settle a tie. I personally love that option. Anyone here see “Friday Night Lights” the movie? I loved how Odessa-Permian got into the state playoffs by winning a 3-way coin toss.

 

Maybe they do the same in Minnesota? I’m mostly kidding. 

Don’t play, Paul!  The thing is, a coin toss is absolutely the fairest way to decide an election that’s within the margin of error.  If a time machine took you back to November 5th and you stepped on a butterfly in Minnesota before the polls opened, the outcome would be 50/50.  This was the expressed intent of the voters.  A revote is inevitably advantageous to one candidate or the other, and the issues at hand have evolved in the intervening months.  A coin-flip would give each candidate the same 50/50 shot at coming out ahead that they had on election day.  Conveniently, a recount is essentially a coin flip in this instance (assuming that it’s done objectively; I haven’t seen any legitimate complaints about the MN judiciary here), and I suppose it has the advantage that it feels fair in your gut even if it’s at best equally as fair as a coin flip.

A few alternatives that are unquestionably more fair than a revote:

1. Halfsies – Coleman and Franken have joint custody of the Senate office; every other weekend; that sort of thing.
2. Who’s pig latin is better?  I don’t think this was at issue in the election so it’s probably a toss-up.
3. Chug-off.

Today, Marc Ambinder noted that even though Obama’s projected budget halves the deficit by 2013, it starts to rise again through 2019:

As Obama noted two nights ago, he intends to cut the federal budget deficit from $1.75 trillion in 2009 to $533 billion by the end of his first term.

But what’s projected for 2014? A slightly higher deficit — $570b. For 2015? $583b. By 2016, the deficit exceeds $636b again; by 2019, it’s up to about $712b.

The budget projects that the national debt will increase nearly two-fold over 10 years, from $8.3 trillion in 2009 to $15.3 trillion in 2019.

However, if you add the (not particularly troubling and very well predicted) fall in the Social Security surplus into the equation, you see that in dollars, Obama’s projected deficit is essentially flat from 2014-2019:

Further, if you plot the deficit as a percentage of GDP, a more appropriate measure of the severity of a deficit, it holds steady when you include Social Security outlays and revenue and even decreases if you look at the budget independent of Social Security:

Ambinder noted this in his post and was then castigated by Greg Anrig at TPM for laying the blame at the feet of Social Security:

Marc Ambinder just wrote a short post raising alarms about how Social Security is going to cause the national debt to explode over 10 years, even though the numbers he’s looking at show no such thing.

Well, the numbers do show exactly that, and nothing about his post is particularly hysterical although I suppose people inclined to think Social Security’s bankrupt might look at it that way.  Pointing out that the Social Security surplus is declining quickly (the yearly surplus, not the amount accrued over time) and will soon turn into a deficit isn’t alarmism.  If he also warned folks that their checks would never come, that would be undue alarmism.

What I’d really be interested in seeing OMB whip up is a projected deficit vs. current law deficit projection through, say, 2050 that takes health expenditures into account.  Also, a projection through 2019 that includes an extension of the 2001 tax cuts for the top 2 brackets would be a good number to have on hand once folks started complaining about it.

Over at The Corner, Mark Levin writes:

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has now been politicized.  This is institutionalized corruption of the worst kind.

He says this is “DOJ, Now.”  Going back to Isikoff’s original reporting, it’s clear that this institutionalized corruption occured under Bush’s watch:

H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos “was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.” According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

But then–Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy, Mark Filip, strongly objected to the draft, according to the sources. Filip wanted the report to include responses from all three principals, said one of the sources, a former top Bush administration lawyer. (Mukasey could not be reached; his former chief of staff did not respond to requests for comment. Filip also did not return a phone message.) OPR is now seeking to include the responses before a final version is presented to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “The matter is under review,” said Justice spokesman Matthew Miller.

In fact, H. Marshall Jarrett’s inquiry was first reported in February 2008.  I believe this is long before it was clear who would become either party’s presidential candidate, let alone President.  According to Jarrett’s testimony in early 2008, the inquiry had already been going on for some time.

The only politicization of the report is refusing to release it on the grounds that folks who’ve been discussing these very issues for years require weeks to formulate a response.

It looks like 215 House and Senate Republicans are going to have to explain voting against a tax cut that rivals the 2001 Bush tax cut (”the largest tax cut in history”) in its effect on the income of 80% of Americans.