Quotes of the day

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) released the following statement today regarding ongoing debt limit discussions with the White House:

“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes. I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.”

***

“I got this from a GOP congressional source later in the afternoon:

“WH is demanding major, unambiguous tax hikes. To get spending caps & entitlement tweaks, greater economic pain appears to be the WH’s asking price. It is increasingly likely that we aren’t going to see a ‘big’ deal if the WH doesn’t budge. Speaker looks to be holding strong…

“[Update 7:39 PM] Appears that the basic framework for future tax reform could not be resolved.

“The bipartisan consensus on tax reform (broader base & lower rates) was championed by President’s fiscal commission, and yet now is being rebuked by the President. Lowering top rates that would help make America more competitive was too large a leap for a true class warrior.”

***

“Tax reform is a worthwhile policy goal, and Mr. Boehner is right to pursue it. But the only way he can avoid being taken for a ride by Democrats is if all parts of any deal are negotiated, voted on and then implemented immediately. Two men, one deal, once. Promises of future action aren’t credible.

“Even if Mr. Obama is sincere on tax reform, he can’t guarantee he can deliver Senate Democrats who are desperate to keep their majority in 2012, much less Nancy Pelosi. We’re told that in Thursday’s White House meeting, Mr. Obama promised to veto any short-term debt-limit deal to give the two sides more time to negotiate. If that’s true, then the President isn’t serious. It means he is using the pressure of the August 2 deadline to bull-rush Mr. Boehner into a bad deal.

“If Mr. Obama is sincere about a long-term spending and tax reform agreement, he’ll take the time to get it right. If he insists on issuing ultimatums, then House Republicans would be better off passing a debt-limit ceiling for a few months with comparable spending cuts and letting Senate Democrats do the same. Mr. Boehner shouldn’t bet his majority on Mr. Obama’s promises.”

***

“In the latest salvo in their campaign to portray Republicans as extremists for not wanting to accept tax increases as part of a budget deal, liberal bloggers led by Ezra Klein have been promoting a chart showing that in the past, the GOP has been willing to accept deals that are far less generous than what President Obama is supposedly offering them. Yet as Conn Carroll pointed out earlier, there’s a big difference between budget deals as negotiated, and budget deals as implemented. The reason why today’s conservatives are much less tolerant of deals that include tax hikes is that they’ve learned from history that the reality of such agreements is that taxes go up as negotiated, but Congress doesn’t deliver the promised spending cuts. No past deal poisoned the well more than the 1990 budget pact, in which President Bush infamously broke his ‘no new taxes’ pledge…

“Back in 1990, the establishment was saying the same things about the need for a ‘balanced approach’ in which all sides sacrifice something to reduce the deficit. Yet what we ended up with in reality was a deal that raised taxes and slashed military spending (in other words, the liberal approach) while entitlements and non-defense discretionary spending rose by an even higher amount than was projected before a deal. Is it any wonder that today’s conservatives are deeply suspicious of budget deals in which Republicans agree to raise taxes in exchange for promised spending cuts?”

***

“The media will initially be all excited about the deal, but will turn almost instantly towards declaring it has no chance to pass, seizing on every criticism of the package or declaration of opposition as sure-fire signs the proposal is dead. The outcry against the package (both before and after the details are known) will be intense on both the left and the right. Interest groups from all quarters will denounce the measure as unacceptable. National security conservatives, for example, will declare that the Pentagon cuts will eviscerate America’s ability to defend itself; liberal groups will deem the entitlement reductions unacceptable. Thumbs down will also come from Paul Krugman, Rush Limbaugh, and every Republican running for president in 2012…

“As the House prepares to vote, the media will declare again that there is virtually no chance of passage. Strange-bedfellow allies, including prominent elements of Big Business and Big Labor – plus, inevitably, Bill Clinton – will make the ‘don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good’ argument in public and in private. As the measure’s details become more known, there will be another round of fly-specking from webizens of the left and the right, declaring the package the worst thing ever considered by Congress in American history. Obama will give some blockbuster speech explaining why the bill must pass. The measure will appear dead both before and immediately after his speech. Then a handful of liberal and conservative House members will come off the fence and declare themselves in favor (some might even flip from declared opposition)…

“And, then, the bill will heart-stoppingly pass the House, with some secret backroom deals and lobbying that will be revealed (if ever) only long after the fact. Reps. Bachmann and Pelosi will vote against. And then it will fully dawn on Boehner and McConnell at the White House signing ceremony (likely as Obama is handing them their souvenir pens) that they were part of history, including part of the part where Obama was able to take off the table the single most damaging issue that could be used against him in 2012.”

***

“Politicians have always postured in public and played poker in private, but as both sides dithered over the debt ceiling, even grizzled veterans grew disgusted. ‘My side’s just as guilty. I think we’re going to have a crisis because politics is going to trump the good of the country,’ says Republican Sen. Tom Coburn. ‘It doesn’t sound like there are any real adults any more, including in the White House.’”

Report: DeMint, Jim Jordan nix McConnell’s debt-ceiling plan; Update: Dems are considering it, says Durbin

DeMint’s opposition isn’t confirmed yet but Robert Costa of NRO has it on good authority. That might not be an insuperable obstacle to passage in the Senate given the fact, per Bret Baier below, that Reid seems open to the idea. If he can bring the Dems into line then all they’d need is the usual suspects — Brown, Snowe, Collins, Murkowski, and a few others — and they’re golden.

But Jordan’s kiss of death in the House will make things hard for Boehner:

Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, tells NRO that while he hasn’t review all the details of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R., Ky.) “contingency plan,” he doesn’t see much of a future for it in the House.

The RSC has 175 members. If all or most walk away, Boehner would need practically the entire Democratic caucus plus 50-60 Republicans who are willing to break with conservatives and lock arms with the left in the name of ceding control of the debt ceiling to Obama. They’d be doing it in the name of averting a default and boxing in The One as the candidate of debt next year, but I doubt that’d save them from primary challenges. How does Boehner get McConnell’s bill through the House under those circumstances? No wonder he seems so noncommittal about it; watch his reaction when Baier presses him on it at 1:30 of the clip below.

The key here, as is increasingly the case, might be Cantor. Whether there’s a rift between him and Boehner or not, he’s banked enough conservative cred by holding the line on taxes throughout the negotiation that he might be able to pry away some RSC members if he backed McConnell’s plan. Has anyone heard his reaction to it yet? If so, please tip us and I’ll update the post. I’ll leave you with a link to this brief but must-see vid (via NRO), which contains what must be one of the most ominous pauses in modern political history. No wonder McConnell’s thinking about Plan B.

Update: The Senate might be ready to play ball:

A back-up plan proposed by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell that would keep the U.S. government from defaulting on its debts next month is viable and under consideration by Senate Democrats, according to Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber.

“We’re talking about it as one of the options, yes,” Durbin said in response to a question about whether the McConnell plan is viable.

Update: Still no word on Cantor vis-a-vis McConnell’s plan, but this quote from earlier today speaks volumes:

Across the Capitol, a closed-door caucus of House Republicans broke up with the leadership conceding that it’s frankly at a loss about getting the votes before Treasury’s Aug. 2 deadline.

“Nothing can get through the House right now,” Cantor said after the White House meeting. “Nothing.”

wait

“Sister Wives” clan to challenge constitutionality of Utah’s polygamy law

Who’s angrier about this? Traditional marriage activists, or gay rights activists who don’t want to see the debate about same-sex marriage dragged down the slippery slope when they’re trying to build on momentum from New York?
Nationally-known constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said the lawsuit to be filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City will not call for plural marriages to be recognized by the state. Instead, it asks for polygamy between consenting adults like his clients, former Utahn Kody Brown and his wives, to no longer be considered a crime.

“We are only challenging the right of the state to prosecute people for their private relations and demanding equal treatment with other citizens in living their lives according to their own beliefs,” Turley said in a press release. The Browns star in the TLC network show “Sister Wives.” There is no word yet on whether they will appear in a press conference scheduled for Wednesday…

The complaint to be filed Wednesday, Turley said, presents seven constitutional challenges to the state’s bigamy law. It is largely based on the right to privacy.

“In that sense, it is a challenge designed to benefit not just polygamists but all citizens who wish to live their lives according to their own values—even if those values run counter to those of the majority in the state,” said Turley, a member of the faculty at George Washington University.


If the distinction between decriminalization and state recognition seems confusing (which it did to me at first), it helps to know that Utah’s bigamy statute includes cohabiting with one person when you’re legally married to another. And in fact, this guy is only legally married to one woman; the other three are, er, “sister wives.” Basically, he’s arguing that he doesn’t care if the state recognizes them as legal spouses or not, just that he doesn’t want the cops to come knocking and lock him up when they find out. In that sense, his court claim mirrors the current legal regime in most states where gay marriage is banned but gay sex is constitutionally protected.

So, no lawsuit to legalize polygamous marriage — yet. But legal precedents have a funny way of building on each other:

The lawsuit is not demanding that states recognize polygamous marriage. Instead, the lawsuit builds on a 2003 United States Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy laws as unconstitutional intrusions on the “intimate conduct” of consenting adults. It will ask the federal courts to tell states that they cannot punish polygamists for their own “intimate conduct” so long as they are not breaking other laws, like those regarding child abuse, incest or seeking multiple marriage licenses…

The questions surrounding whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry are significantly different from those involved in criminal prosecution of multiple marriages, Ms. Pizer noted. Same-sex couples are seeking merely to participate in the existing system of family law for married couples, she said, while “you’d have to restructure the family law system in a pretty fundamental way” to recognize polygamy.

Professor Turley called the one-thing-leads-to-another arguments “a bit of a constitutional canard,” and argued that removing criminal penalties for polygamy “will take society nowhere in particular.”


Ah, but they’re not asking to change family law, just to take polygamy out of the penal code. The family law case will be the next lawsuit. FYI, the Supreme Court already upheld laws against polygamy — 130 years ago, rejecting a Mormon challenge based on the Free Exercise Clause. So there’s precedent here if SCOTUS wants it when it eventually hears a case along these lines. Two important footnotes, though. One: The Court’s language in Lawrence v. Texas, a decision authored by Anthony Kennedy, was famously broad in its implications (a point noted by Scalia in dissent at the time), so there’s no telling whether that earlier precedent is still good law. And second, Lawrence itself overruled a much more recent precedent in Bowers v. Hardwick to arrive at its holding. So yeah, there’s quite a fair chance that the Brown clan might pull this off.

Exit question: Speaking of people who aren’t eager to watch this court/media battle play out, how excited do you think Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are right now?

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Quotes of the day

“Former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., the GOP co-chair of President Obama’s deficit commission, told ABC News that ‘The American people are disgusted at both parties’ for not being able to agree on a measure to reduce the deficit…
“‘Reagan raised taxes,’ Simpson said. ‘We’ve never had less revenue to run this country since the Korean war.’
“Contrary to some Republicans expressing skepticism about the Aug. 2 default date, Simpson said that Treasury Secretary ‘Tim Geithner ain’t fooling.’”***
“[M]any Congressional Republicans seem to be spoiling for a fight, calculating that some level of turmoil caused by a federal default might be what it takes to give them the chance to right the nation’s fiscal ship…

“Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Budget Committee chairman seen as the voice of fiscal authority among House Republicans, said that he believed an agreement leading to a debt limit increase would eventually be reached, but that the impasse could extend beyond the administration’s Aug. 2 drop-dead date.

“‘Let’s say we go past Aug. 2,’ he said in an interview. ‘As time goes on, the situation deteriorates, so I do believe there will be something.’ He pointed to ‘macroeconomic circumstances and credit markets — and also paying the bills — Social Security, Medicare, the troops.’

“‘I think there ultimately will be something,’ he said. ‘I really honestly don’t know what it’s going to be. I really don’t.’”

***
The hotter precincts of the blogosphere were calling [McConnell's proposal] a sellout yesterday, though they might want to think before they shout. The debt ceiling is going to be increased one way or another, and the only question has been what if anything Republicans could get in return. If Mr. Obama insists on a tax increase, and Republicans won’t vote for one, then what’s the alternative to Mr. McConnell’s maneuver?…

“The tea party/talk-radio expectations for what Republicans can accomplish over the debt-limit showdown have always been unrealistic. As former Senator Phil Gramm once told us, never take a hostage you’re not prepared to shoot. Republicans aren’t prepared to stop a debt-limit increase because the political costs are unbearable. Republicans might have played this game better, but the truth is that Mr. Obama has more cards to play.

“The entitlement state can’t be reformed by one house of Congress in one year against a determined President and Senate held by the other party. It requires more than one election. The Obama Democrats have staged a spending blowout to 24% of GDP and rising, and now they want to find a way to finance it to make it permanent. Those are the real stakes of 2012.

“Even if Mr. Obama gets his debt-limit increase without any spending cuts, he will pay a price for the privilege. He’ll have reinforced his well-earned reputation as a spender with no modern peer. He’ll own the record deficits and fast-rising debt. And he’ll own the U.S. credit-rating downgrade to AA if Standard & Poor’s so decides.”

***
“Most people don’t care about the deficit, much less the debt ceiling. They care about jobs and the economy–which is the real advantage Republicans have in the coming campaign.

“If McConnell actually proposes to pull an Emily Littella and say ‘Never mind’ about the debt ceiling, the President can pocket this inadvertent gesture of sanity, sign the debt ceiling extension…and then come right back with an economic package reducing the deficit $2.4 trillion over the next ten years, including the budget cuts that both sides have agreed upon plus the loophole closing revenue raisers–corporate jets, oil and ethanol subsidies, and hedge fund manager tax breaks–that 80% of the American people favor. Let the Republicans vote that one down, or refuse to consider it at all in the House of Representatives. Barack Obama would have a lovely issue to run on.

“But I don’t believe for a moment that McConnell is going to do this. He’s desperate, facing a deal that either includes revenue increases or doesn’t happen at all. He’s blinking as fast as he can.”

***
“There is no constitutional authority for the legislative branch to surrender its clearly delineated duty to write bills for raising revenue and borrow money on the credit of the United States.

“Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently employed a clever but easily falsifiable argument, which cites Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to claim that the president can override the separation of powers…

“McConnell’s enthusiasm for this unconstitutional gimmick is disheartening, but it does not change the law. Congress has no more right to give up its authority than the president has to confiscate it.”

***
“Despite intense lobbying of Congress by President Obama, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and others in the administration about the economic urgency for raising the nation’s debt limit, fewer than one in four Americans favor the general idea of raising it. Also, Americans are significantly more concerned about the budgetary risk of giving the government a new license to spend than they are about the potential economic consequences that would result from not raising the debt limit. Both of these findings put Americans more on congressional Republicans’ side of the debate than Obama’s — at least in terms of political leverage as the two sides negotiate a deal.”

“I can guarantee you, Mark, that planis going nowhere.” Click the image to listen.owhere.” Click the image to listen.

To Play With Giants, App Devs Risk Getting Squashed

 
Hot-selling mobile apps have earned some independent programmers hundreds of thousands of dollars. But one of the greatest risks of developing apps for a platform controlled by a large corporation, such as Google or Apple, is that you can easily get crushed.

Take for example Mike Jacobs, a developer of software startup Hello, Chair. For nine months, his team of three has been working on an iPhone app called Appsaurus, which makes App Store recommendations based on the apps you already own. So it was very bad news for Hello, Chair when Apple in September introduced a free App Store recommendation tool called App Store Genius.

“That’s one of the scariest things: If Apple moves an inch, they crush a bunch of little developers,” Jacobs said in a phone interview.

With giants dominating Silicon Valley, start-ups and independent programmers are fitting in between the cracks by developing apps for corporations’ mobile platforms. Apple’s App Store, which launched July 2008, is the largest to date with 100,000 apps and counting. Google’s Android platform is second largest, serving roughly 14,000 apps. In the case of the App Store, a lucky bunch have struck it rich with soaring sales, while others have suffered at the mercy of the giant they’re developing for.

More often, Apple is scrutinized for its questionable approval policy. The company has rejected some developers’ apps for unclear reasons, which often puts them in financial hurt (in severe cases, a six-digit loss).

But stories like Hello, Chair’s — where the corporation inadvertently competes with its developers — are a bit rare. Jacobs said his company was striving to provide something the iPhone was missing in hopes to make the platform even better. However, Apple, too, is thinking of ways to improve its products — and with a considerably larger team of in-house programmers and billions of dollars in resources, the Cupertino, California company beat a small start-up to the idea of an App Store recommendation tool.

Hello, Chair submitted Appsaurus to Apple this week and nervously awaits Apple’s approval. The team is hoping it does not face the same outcome as Podcaster, an app Apple rejected in September 2008. The Podcaster app enabled the iPhone to download podcasts and listen to them on the fly. Apple rejected Podcaster, saying it “duplicates the functionality” of the iPod. However, the iPhone didn’t have this feature when Podcaster was submitted. Only after rejecting Podcaster did Apple introduce a podcast downloader through its iTunes app.

Alex Sokirynsky, who developed Podcaster, said he had spent four months learning the iPhone’s programming language, and he was “heartbroken” by Apple’s rejection of Podcaster.

“Apple has a very tight hold on everyone in the App Store,” Sokirynsky told Wired.com. “They could pull any app for any reason, and the developer has no say. This could ruin a new company.”

This Goliath-stomps-on-David scenario isn’t unique to Apple, either. Etienne Baratte, a software engineer, was developing an app for the Google Android platform called Jamdroid, which would provide real-time traffic information anywhere on the globe. Baratte entered Jamdroid in Google’s Android Developer Challenge, a contest inviting developers to submit app prototypes for a chance to win awards. Jamdroid received an honorable score in the competition — but Google in August 2009 announced it was working on almost the exact same traffic-analysis tool.

Baratte was dismayed: He’d been working on Jamdroid since November 2007 with a few partners. He killed his project when Google rolled out its traffic service in August.

“There’s no competition possible at all,” Baratte said in a phone interview. “I can’t say they stole my idea. They’re in their right to implement such a service, and in fact, in a way I am quite happy that they did so…. But I spent all my free time on this.”

Hello, Chair hasn’t given up on Appsaurus, however. When Apple introduced App Store Genius, Jacobs and his team proceeded to add more features to Appsaurus to make it better than Apple’s recommendation system. When making recommendations, App Store Genius only takes into account the apps currently installed on a user’s iPhone. Appsaurus, Jacobs said, will use an interactive algorithm that allows users to rate and modify suggestions in real-time. The app will also make app recommendations based on other apps people have purchased, similar to Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature.

Record Highs Far Outpace Record Lows Across U.S.

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

Results of the research, by authors at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO, Climate Central, The Weather Channel, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have been accepted for publication in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States," says NCAR scientist Gerald Meehl, the lead author. "The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting."

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's sponsor, the U.S. Department of Energy, and Climate Central.

"This intriguing study provides new evidence of climate change," says Steve Nelson, NSF program director for NCAR. "And it's change that's affecting our daily lives."

If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even. Instead, for the period from January 1, 2000, to September 30, 2009, the continental United States set 291,237 record highs and 142,420 record lows, as the country experienced unusually mild winter weather and intense summer heat waves. A record daily high means that temperatures were warmer on a given day than on that same date throughout a weather station's history.

The authors used a quality control process to ensure the reliability of data from thousands of weather stations across the country, while looking at data over the past six decades to capture longer-term trends. This decade's warming was more pronounced in the western United States, where the ratio was more than two to one, than in the eastern United States, where the ratio was about one-and-a-half to one. The study also found that the two-to-one ratio across the country as a whole could be attributed more to a comparatively small number of record lows than to a large number of record highs.

This indicates that much of the nation's warming is occurring at night, when temperatures are dipping less often to record lows. This finding is consistent with years of climate model research showing that higher overnight lows should be expected with climate change.

In addition to surveying actual temperatures in recent decades, Meehl and his co-authors turned to a sophisticated computer model of global climate to determine how record high and low temperatures are likely to change during the course of this century. The modeling results indicate that, if nations continue to increase their emissions of greenhouse gases in a "business as usual" scenario, the U.S. ratio of daily record high to record low temperatures would increase to about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100. The mid-century ratio could be much higher if emissions rose at an even greater pace, or it could be about 8-to-1 if emissions were reduced significantly, the model showed.

The authors caution that such predictions are, by their nature, inexact. Climate models are not designed to capture record daily highs and lows with precision, and it remains impossible to know future human actions that will determine the level of future greenhouse gas emissions.

The model used for the study, the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model, correctly captured the trend toward warmer average temperatures and the greater warming in the West, but overstated the ratio of record highs to record lows in recent years. However, the model results are important because they show that, in all likely scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions, record daily highs should increasingly outpace record lows over time.

"If the climate weren't changing, you would expect the number of temperature records to diminish significantly over time," says Claudia Tebaldi, a statistician with Climate Central who is one of the paper's co-authors. "As you measure the high and low daily temperatures each year, it normally becomes more difficult to break a record after a number of years. But, as the average temperatures continue to rise this century, we will keep setting more record highs."

The study team focused on weather stations that have been operating since 1950. They found that the ratio of record daily high to record daily low temperatures slightly exceeded one to one in the 1950s, dipped below that level in the 1960s and 1970s, and has risen since the 1980s. The results reflect changes in U.S. average temperatures, which rose in the 1950s, stabilized in the 1960s, and then began a warming trend in the late 1970s.

Even in the first nine months of this year, when the United States cooled somewhat after a string of unusually warm years, the ratio of record daily high to record daily low temperatures was more than three to two. Despite the increasing number of record highs, there will still be occasional periods of record cold, Meehl notes.

"One of the messages of this study is, you still get cold days," Meehl says. "Winter still comes. Even in a much warmer climate, we're setting record low minimum temperatures on a few days each year. But, the odds are shifting, so there's a much better chance of daily record highs instead of lows."

The study team analyzed several million daily high and low temperature readings taken over the span of six decades at about 1,800 weather stations across the country, thereby ensuring ample data for statistically significant results. The readings, collected at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, undergo a quality control process at the data center that looks for such potential problems as missing data, as well as inconsistent readings caused by changes in thermometers, station locations or other factors.

Meehl and his colleagues then used temperature simulations from the Community Climate System Model to compute daily record highs and lows under current and future atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.