Emergency relief is getting to only a small percentage of those in need, says the Red Cross: 3.7 million Somalis still need food Significant amounts of food aid is being distributed in Somalia’s famine zone for the first time since the crisis became acute, according to aid agencies, though more will be required in the coming months. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said 3,000 tonnes of food has been given to 162,000 people in southern and central Somalia, the drought- and violence-racked areas controlled by Islamist militia groups. Around 24,000 people in Lower Shabelle and Bakool, the two regions worst affected by the famine conditions, have been given a month’s supply of rice and beans. However, the UN has warned that the rest of southern Somalia is likely to be officially declared a famine zone within the next two months. The response to the disaster has been difficult and slow owing to security concerns and restrictions placed on aid agencies by the militia group al-Shabab, who banned some organisations from working in their areas, including the UN World Food Programme which would normally lead the relief effort. The group has accused the UN of distorting local markets and being anti-Muslim. A few humanitarian organisations, including the ICRC, have been allowed access to the controlled areas, though their relief work has been hampered. The Somali Red Crescent is also helping severely malnourished children in remote rural areas. Last week an Al-Shabab spokesman claimed there was no famine in Somalia , but the scale of the current food distribution suggests an increasing recognition of the seriousness of the situation. Nevertheless, emergency relief is getting to only a “small percentage of those in need”, the ICRC said. “More aid will be required to help the population bridge the gap until the next harvest in December,” said Andrea Heath, the group’s economic security co-ordinator for Somalia. According to the UN 3.7 million Somalis, about half the population, need food aid. Most are in the al-Shabab-dominated south, including 1.5 million who face famine. A further 8.2 million people require food aid in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti, which have also been hit by the severe drought in the Horn of Africa, compounded by soaring crop prices. The situation in Somalia is more acute because of the fighting between al-Shabab and other militias, the absence of effective government and lack of humanitarian access. The UN estimates that tens of thousands of Somalis may have died due to lack of food. Hundreds of thousands more have trekked vast distances to refugee camps in Kenya, Ethiopia and the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The Somali government controls a little more than half of Mogadishu due to the presence of some 9,000 African Union (AU) peacekeepers. AU troops last week embarked on an offensive against the rebels, capturing territory during fierce battles. The insurgents retaliated yesterday when two peacekeepers were killed by suicide bombs. Famine Somalia Kenya Africa Xan Rice guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Roll Call ‘Political Wire’ Features Cartoon Depicting Nazis Winning World War 2 If U.S. Had Balanced Budget Requirement Then
August 1, 2011 No Comment
Roll Call “Political Wire” editor Taegan Goddard selected a drawing by liberal Arizona Daily Star political cartoonist David Fitzsimmons for his August 1 “Cartoon of the Day.” The cartoon (embedded after the page break) depicts a battle-scarred U.S. Capitol and White House in 1942 outside of which Nazi and Japanese Empire flags fly in lieu of the Stars and Stripes. A speech balloon coming from the Capitol dome reads, “At least we didn't go into debt,” while the caption reads “If Congress had passed the Tea Party's Balanced Budget Amendment in 1940.” Liberals may be fond of that talking point, even though it's patently false and Goddard should know it. From the Republican Study Committee website : One proposed balanced budget amendment sponsored by RSC member Rep. Joe Walsh (IL-08), H.J.Res 56, would require the President to submit and Congress to enact a balanced budget, cap federal spending at 18% of GDP, and prevent future federal tax increases. Congress could only waive these provisions by a two-thirds vote, except in times of declared war or by three-fifths majority during times of military conflict. It would also require a three-fifths majority to raise the federal debt limit. Congress swiftly declared war on Japan and Germany in December 1941. If Walsh's amendment were in effect then, the declaration of war would negate the peacetime need for a two-thirds vote to spend over 18% in GDP, raise taxes, or balance the budget. Fitzsimmons has had more outrageous cartoons, however. On July 27, Fitzsimmons fantasized about President Obama sending in a Navy SEAL team to assassinate Tea Party Republicans:
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Former Labour MP jailed for 16 months for expenses fraud in March is released after serving a quarter of his sentence Jim Devine, the former Labour MP jailed for 16 months in March for expenses fraud has been released after serving a quarter of his sentence. Devine was freed early, from Standford Hill Prison in Kent, under the home detention scheme. He will remain tagged and spend the last eight months of his sentence on probation. Devine, who had been MP for Livingston, was found guilty of a gross breach of trust for claiming over £8,000 in parliamentary expenses, some for cleaning and stationery. The trial judge Mr Justice Saunders said Devine had been “lying in significant parts of the evidence he gave”. But critics saidhis release would do little for confidence in the criminal justice system. Emma Boon, from The TaxPayers’ Alliance, said the early release “makes his sentence look like a hollow gesture and will do nothing to help restore public faith in parliament”. Devine, a former psychiatric nurse and union organiser, has since been declared bankrupt. He is the third former MP jailed over the parliamentary expenses scandal to be released, following Eric Illsley and David Chaytor. A fourth former MP, Elliot Morley, a one-time climate change minister, remains in prison, along with Conservative peers Lord Taylor and Lord Hanningfield. Illsley, 56, who was jailed for 12 months in February after pleading guilty to £14,000 in expenses fraud, was released in May after three months behind bars. Chaytor, 61, served four-and-a-half months of his 18-month sentence after falsely claiming over £22,000 of taxpayers’ money. Devine was election agent to Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary and one of the Labour party’s leading thinkers. Devine was best man at Cook’s wedding to second wife Gaynor and he then went on to succeed him as MP for Livingston when the Cook died from a heart attack in August 2005. Devine used his maiden speech in the Commons to pay tribute to the Labour politician as “the outstanding parliamentarian of his generation” and admitted he had “big shoes to fill”. Devine had told his Southwark crown court trial that he was acting on advice given with a “nod and a wink” by a fellow MP in a House of Commons bar but his defence was rejected by the jury. MPs’ expenses Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
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Lawyers for firm contracted to NI said it deleted emails on nine occasions since May 2010: there was ‘nothing abnormal’ Senior MPs want to question further one of News International’s technology suppliers, after the firm responsible for overseeing its day-to-day emails revealed that hundreds of thousands of them had been deleted on a total of nine occasions from the newspaper publisher’s server since May last year. Lawyers acting for HCL, the firm contracted to oversee News International’s email system, told the home affairs select committee that it was aware of “nothing which appeared abnormal, untoward or inconsistent with its contractual role” – but went onto to advise MPs to direct further questions to News International. The law firm, Stuart Benson, acting for HCL, said: “It is entirely for News International, the police and your committee as to whether there was any other agenda or subtext when issues of deletion arose and that is a matter on which my client cannot comment and something you will no doubt wish to explore direct with News International.” Keith Vaz, chair of the committee, said he was most surprised by the deletions and added that the MPs would be seeking further details from HCL, the firm contracted to oversee the News International’s ‘live emails’, typically those less than 15 days old. Meanwhile, Labour MP Chris Bryant, an active campaigner against phone hacking, said: “All these dubious deletions prove yet again how much better it would have been if the Metropolitan Police secured the whole system back in 2006. “It certainly looks as if, in the words of one Metropolitan Police officer to the Commons culture select committee, that News International were deliberately thwarting their investigation.” HCL said it had been aware of discussions around at minimum nine separate episodes of email deletions – part of the internal company archive which the Met are using to examine the extent of phone hacking at the News of the World. HCL’s lawyers also noted that a second unnamed supplier had been responsible for emails more than a couple of weeks old, and at times HCL had co-operated with this vendor in deleting material. HCL identified three sets of email deletions in April 2010, including a deletion of a public folder of a live email system that “was owned by a user who no longer needed the emails”. A further 200,000 emails “stuck in an outbox” were deleted in May 2010 to restore email functionality. In September 2010 a further pruning of historic emails occurred to help stabilise the email archival system, which had been having “frequent outages” since November 2009. In January 2011, HCL was asked about its ability to “truncate” a particular database in the email archival systems. HCL “answered in the negative and suggested assistance from the third party vendor”. In February 2011, emails were deleted in an older version of the software. Finally, in July 2011 HCL deleted emails from the live system as “relocation errors” had occurred when the systems were moved. News International sources indicated that the email deletions were part of sensible housekeeping of an email system that had been unstable, and at one point had gone down for three days. The company says it has a good working relationship with police investigating the hacking crisis, although last month it emerged that Scotland Yard investigators were unhappy about the scale of the deletions . Separately, a firm of solicitors drawn into the News International phone-hacking scandal is expected to reply shortly to the home affairs select committee as to how it came to write a key letter to the newspaper group that was then used by the company to contend that phone hacking had not been widespread at News of the World. The firm, Harbottle and Lewis, is consulting the Metropolitan police before deciding how to reply to requests from the select committee to spell out how it came to write a letter taken to mean that only one reporter was aware of phone hacking at the paper. The New York Times reported at the weekend that the letter sent by Harbottle and Lewis to the culture, media and sport select committee was redrafted more than once. The firm had been hired to review the email of the tabloid’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, who had pleaded guilty to hacking the mobile phone messages of royal household staff members. The letter said “no reasonable evidence” had been found that senior editors knew about the reporter’s “illegal actions”. A News International spokesman said: “NI keeps back-ups of its core systems and, in close co-operation with the Operation Weeting team, has been working to restore these back-ups.” Phone hacking News of the World News International Newspapers & magazines National newspapers Newspapers Patrick Wintour Dan Sabbagh guardian.co.uk
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Embattled Congress party further weakened as upper house forced to shut on opening day of new parliamentary session Long-awaited laws in India to fight corruption, protect farmers from unscrupulous developers and boost economic growth look less likely to be passed after tumultuous scenes in the national parliament on Monday. Within minutes of the start of a new parliamentary term, opposition politicians forced a shutdown of the upper house, an indication that the bitter partisan politics of recent months are set to continue. The lower house was adjourned after the death of a member of parliament during the recess. The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and other senior figures in the ruling coalition government, which is led by the Congress party, had appealed for calm and co-operation. Singh, 78, said he hoped the five-week session would be “constructive and productive”. However the opposition has smelled blood in recent months, with an already fragile government weakened by a series of corruption scandals, runaway inflation and the recent terrorist blasts in the commercial capital, Mumbai. “The government is on the back foot,” said Sushma Swaraj, a senior politician with the rightwing Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). Vinod Mehta, editor of the news magazine Outlook India, said the coming weeks would see “a lively parliamentary ding-dong”. “The opposition has a great deal of ammunition. Every day there is more trouble for the government. But it still has a comfortable majority and so will limp on,” Mehta said. Parliamentary work has ground to a virtual standstill this year amid acrimonious battles over graft and other issues. Many of the 32 laws to be debated in the coming term are deeply controversial, including allowing foreign investment in supermarkets, cutting subsidies and restructuring loss-making state-run utilities. One crucial measure tackles land rights, the source of often violent protests. Congress party strategists see other proposed laws – such as proposals to share mining royalties with local communities and to expand a scheme to give cheap food grains to the poor – as critical to their chances of consolidating traditional support among hundreds of millions of rural voters before national polls in 2014. Also the subject of bitter argument is a proposed anti-graft bill that would establish a new watchdog independent of the government. Campaigners cite polls apparently showing that the government’s version of the bill is seen by most voters as watered down. In recent days, a senior Indian economic advisory panel has warned of slowing growth and cut the annual growth forecast to 8.2% from 9%. India Jason Burke guardian.co.uk
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Newsnight and World at One off air as NUJ labels claims that ‘six out of seven staff’ were working as ‘absolutely ludicrous’ Newsnight and The World at One were among the programmes forced off air yesterday as journalists at the BBC walked out for the second time in three weeks – and management and unions argued about how well the action was supported. Radio 4′s Today programme ran but was an hour shorter than usual, while a string of unknowns led by a former ITV regional news presenter led the news bulletins. Gavin Grey, who used to work for ITV Meridian, fronted the 1pm bulletin, while the Six O’Clock bulletin was presented by Chris Rogers, a BBC News stand-in. Lucy Adams, the BBC’s director of business operations Lucy Adams said “six out of seven staff” were working with “all our services on air” and “limited changes to planned programming” with the BBC’s 24 hour news channel remaining on air. Michelle Stanistreet, the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, said it was “absolutely ludicrous” to suggest such a high level of staffing, which she said was “completely untrue”. “The NUJ has several thousand members at the BBC and there have been only a handful of reports of people crossing the picket lines,” said Stanistreet, who suggested BBC management was living in “fantasy land”. The strike followed an earlier 24-hour walkout on 15 July in protest at compulsory redundancies at the BBC World Service and BBC Monitoring, where the corporation is looking to axe 387 posts because of cuts in government funding. Explaining his decision to come in, Radio 5 Live’s Nicky Campbell said he had consulted widely with colleagues but could not find anyone who supported the strike, and felt a responsibility to licence fee payers to come into work. “I supported the pension strike and I supported this strike last time round [on 15 July] but ultimately we have a responsibility to the people who pay us,” said Campbell. Picket lines were lightly staffed, with six people outside White City, the home of BBC Television, at lunchtime, and three at Broadcasting House, where the radio stations transmit from. However, the mood outside the World Service’s Bush House HQ – where the dispute is centred – was more defiant. A 20-strong picket line held a giant sheet with the words, “BBC kills World Service”. Martin Plaut, Africa editor at the World Service, said: “I’m furious to be on strike today. I’m really not happy at all. In all my time at the BBC – I joined in 1984 – I’ve never seen the BBC in this state.” The strike was due to end at midnight on Monday, and will immediately be followed by an “indefinite” work to rule by NUJ members. All broadcasting unions are due to meet BBC management on 11 August to discuss the corporation’s stance on redundancies in the light of further impending cuts as a result of director general Mark Thompson’s Delivering Quality First initiative, which is aimed to make cost savings of 20%, as the corporation contends with a flat licence fee settlement. BBC BBC World Service Radio industry Television industry Radio 4 Radio 5 Live Nicky Campbell BBC1 BBC2 Trade unions John Plunkett Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The United States has now experienced more than 3 years of an economy worse than anything Japan experienced in its “lost decade” of the 1990s, and we are still dead in the water economically. The real unemployment rate, when you include discouraged workers and part timers/short-term temporary workers desperate for a full time job, is hovering frighteningly close to 20%, with any marginal progress in the private sector being more than wiped out by government sector cutbacks. The American middle class is being crushed by flat or declining wages, higher prices on most essential items like energy and groceries, and declining value in home prices. And the deal on the default crisis agreed to last night, combined with a continued weak response to the housing crisis, will (absent a major reversal in the next Congress) lock us in to a spiral even more destructive to the middle class. It will be a lost decade on steroids. Our government’s focus should be on how to rebuild, expand, and strengthen the economic position of working and middle class Americans. We will not get out of the hole we are in without most Americans being able to spend more, save more, and make sure their kids are well educated. Without a little more economic standing and security, most people who want to start new businesses won’t have the ability to get their new enterprise off the ground. Without customers who have the ability to spend a little more money, small businesses won’t be able to survive and expand, and won’t have the confidence to hire new workers to help them grow. Without seniors being able to afford to take care of themselves economically through Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, already stressed middle class families will have even less to spend in their local communities. Unless the number of foreclosures and underwater mortgages start to decline, tens of millions of homeowners who should be building economic equity will have no confidence to buy new products, start new businesses, or do anything else to grow the economy. In order for our economy to get on the right track, more Americans need to have money to spend, save, and invest- it is as simple as that. Hoping that rich people suddenly start creating more jobs, hoping that cash-flush big businesses suddenly starts investing in expansion when their customers don’t have the money to buy anything, hoping that the confidence fairy suddenly spurs millions of new jobs: it is just a crock. When you hear generalized talk about more government cutbacks, it can all sound harmless in theory. And there is of course some wasteful government spending out there- subsidies to millionaire farmers, poorly written government contracts that allow contractors to make money even when they screw things up, subsidies for oil companies that make plenty of money, etc- but most of the cuts that will be made aren’t even in these areas of obvious waste. They’ll cut money for education and Pell Grants; they’ll cut the R and D spending that could produce important new technological breakthroughs; they’ll cut investments in green jobs that are key to the future; they’ll cut spending on badly outdated infrastructure projects; they’ll cut money for social service agencies that are helping people create productive lives for themselves. I wrote a few weeks back that whatever deal would be cut would be a bad deal, and I was right. When the President didn’t push to make the debt ceiling extension part of last year’s lame duck session deal, and then waded into these negotiations instead of announcing that the only default deal he would accept would be a clean bill, he set himself up for this kind of unbalanced deal that has turned into an attack on the middle class. This deal, of course, could have been far worse: defense spending could have been off the chopping block, and Social Security could be on it. But it is still a terrible bill. This country needs to fundamentally re-align its policies and its priorities. The engine of our economy, and our only hope for the future, is a strong middle class. We need to put that middle class back into the center of our economic policy.
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Bombing campaign destroys Gaddafi tanks, rocket launchers, ammunition dumps and command centres Libyan rebels have entered the town of Zlitan after a weekend of heavy fighting in which Nato escalated its bombing campaign in the runup to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. RAF planes dropped 16 Paveway laser-guided bombs in two days around the town, destroying government tanks, rocket launchers, ammunition dumps and command centres, and clearing a path for the rebels. The Ministry of Defence said RAF jets also attacked a railway construction site at Bani Walid, south-west of Zlitan, commandeered for use as a military fuel distribution facility. Opposition fighters said the town, which they have struggled to capture for eight weeks, was quiet on Monday, with no sign of government troops. We are in the town centre and we have the hospital,” said rebel fighter Yunus Al-Haq. “It’s good for the spirit.” But securing the town for the opposition depends on clearing one final obstacle – agreement from the elders of the town’s Fowater tribe that Misratan fighters can be “invited” to occupy Zlitan. After that, rebel commanders expect government forces to pull back to Al Khums, 22 miles to the west. Despite the capture of tanks and heavy artillery over the weekend, rebel units are too lightly armed to contemplate a headlong rush to Tripoli. They have evolved a strategy of pressing against government lines, forcing Muammar Gaddafi to deploy forces in concentrations that provide inviting targets for Nato. Nato bombing returns show that 54 military targets around Zlitan were destroyed since 25 July, one of the heaviest bombing concentrations of the war. The bombing appears to have caused government lines to crumble over the week, with rebels reporting that loyalist troops offered little resistance to their advance. Forty government troops gave themselves up on Sunday in the biggest one-day surrender of the war. RAF Tornado and Typhoon aircraft were particularly active over the past few days, bombing of three satellite dishes used by Libyan state television. “This strike was an attempt to disrupt the broadcast of Gaddafi’s murderous rhetoric, which has repeatedly sought to incite violence against fellow Libyans,” said the chief military spokesman at the Ministry of Defence, Major General Nick Pope. But British defence officials said the Nato campaign was likely to be scaled down during Ramadan, which started on Monday. They suggested that targets in Tripoli in particular would be avoided. The fall of Zlitan also poses problems for Gaddafi in finding new troops to hold the expanding front line around Misrata without drawing off other forces needed on the eastern front and in the Nafusa mountains to the west. Both fronts were reportedly quiet on Monday, the eastern front still disrupted by confusion caused by Thursday’s murder of army commander Abdul Fatah Youness and the Nafusa brigades massing for an attack on the town of Tiji, 150 miles south west of Tripoli. The onset of Ramadan saw Misrata go into semi-hibernation, and residents are hoping the capture of Zlitan will finally put Gaddafi’s rockets out of range of a city that has been under bombardment since March. France announced on Monday that it was releasing $259m (£159.14m) in frozen Libyan funds to the opposition and allowing the rebels’ new ambassador to use the country’s mothballed embassy in Paris. The French foreign ministry said the money frozen in French banks must be used for humanitarian purposes, in accordance with European law. The announcement came after the foreign finister, Alain Juppe, met Mansour Seyf al-Nasr, the Libyan opposition’s ambassador to Paris. Libya Arab and Middle East unrest Nato Ramadan Chris Stephen Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Bombing campaign destroys Gaddafi tanks, rocket launchers, ammunition dumps and command centres Libyan rebels have entered the town of Zlitan after a weekend of heavy fighting in which Nato escalated its bombing campaign in the runup to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. RAF planes dropped 16 Paveway laser-guided bombs in two days around the town, destroying government tanks, rocket launchers, ammunition dumps and command centres, and clearing a path for the rebels. The Ministry of Defence said RAF jets also attacked a railway construction site at Bani Walid, south-west of Zlitan, commandeered for use as a military fuel distribution facility. Opposition fighters said the town, which they have struggled to capture for eight weeks, was quiet on Monday, with no sign of government troops. We are in the town centre and we have the hospital,” said rebel fighter Yunus Al-Haq. “It’s good for the spirit.” But securing the town for the opposition depends on clearing one final obstacle – agreement from the elders of the town’s Fowater tribe that Misratan fighters can be “invited” to occupy Zlitan. After that, rebel commanders expect government forces to pull back to Al Khums, 22 miles to the west. Despite the capture of tanks and heavy artillery over the weekend, rebel units are too lightly armed to contemplate a headlong rush to Tripoli. They have evolved a strategy of pressing against government lines, forcing Muammar Gaddafi to deploy forces in concentrations that provide inviting targets for Nato. Nato bombing returns show that 54 military targets around Zlitan were destroyed since 25 July, one of the heaviest bombing concentrations of the war. The bombing appears to have caused government lines to crumble over the week, with rebels reporting that loyalist troops offered little resistance to their advance. Forty government troops gave themselves up on Sunday in the biggest one-day surrender of the war. RAF Tornado and Typhoon aircraft were particularly active over the past few days, bombing of three satellite dishes used by Libyan state television. “This strike was an attempt to disrupt the broadcast of Gaddafi’s murderous rhetoric, which has repeatedly sought to incite violence against fellow Libyans,” said the chief military spokesman at the Ministry of Defence, Major General Nick Pope. But British defence officials said the Nato campaign was likely to be scaled down during Ramadan, which started on Monday. They suggested that targets in Tripoli in particular would be avoided. The fall of Zlitan also poses problems for Gaddafi in finding new troops to hold the expanding front line around Misrata without drawing off other forces needed on the eastern front and in the Nafusa mountains to the west. Both fronts were reportedly quiet on Monday, the eastern front still disrupted by confusion caused by Thursday’s murder of army commander Abdul Fatah Youness and the Nafusa brigades massing for an attack on the town of Tiji, 150 miles south west of Tripoli. The onset of Ramadan saw Misrata go into semi-hibernation, and residents are hoping the capture of Zlitan will finally put Gaddafi’s rockets out of range of a city that has been under bombardment since March. France announced on Monday that it was releasing $259m (£159.14m) in frozen Libyan funds to the opposition and allowing the rebels’ new ambassador to use the country’s mothballed embassy in Paris. The French foreign ministry said the money frozen in French banks must be used for humanitarian purposes, in accordance with European law. The announcement came after the foreign finister, Alain Juppe, met Mansour Seyf al-Nasr, the Libyan opposition’s ambassador to Paris. Libya Arab and Middle East unrest Nato Ramadan Chris Stephen Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk
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A deal on raising the US debt limit has been struck – but will it hold up in Congress? Follow the negotiations and votes live 3.43pm: Boehner now speaking, flanked by Eric Cantor and his posse. Talking up the deal, Boehner says: “It gives us the best shot, in the 20 years I’ve been here, to build support for a balanced budget amendment.” Hmm, that’s not exactly shouting from the rooftops. “The House will vote on a measure today that although not perfect will begin to change the culture of Congress,” says Cantor. “I’ve said the bill is not perfect, and it’s not.” The big win, according to Cantor, is that there are no tax hikes in the deal. Now Jeb Hensarling, the number four in the GOP House leadership, is talking up the balanced budget amendment as well. 3.37pm: Still waiting on John Boehner to appear at his press conference. There are reports that he has told ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer that he has the votes to pass the deal. Nate Silver is now forecasting a comfortable margin of victory, 258-173, in the House. 3.30pm: A gropup of protesters have been expelled from the gallery of the House chamber by the Capitol police, with chants about raising taxes. 3.25pm: “This bill is a baby that only a mother could love,” says Peter Welch, a Democratic representative, on cable news. What’s that old JFK quote? “Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.” 3.20pm: House vote on debt ceiling could be nail-biter, according to USA Today : As groups on the political left and right urge “no” votes on the proposal, meetings are being held to get the rank-and-file of both parties behind the deal reached Sunday night between President Obama and congressional leaders. Asked if Boehner has the votes yet, freshman GOP Rep Tom Reed of New York said: “We’ll know over the next two to three hours.” 3.15pm: It’s a nervous time in the House of Representatives right now, says MSNBC’s Chuck Todd : Lots of nervousness about this House vote right now; A tad bit of finger-pointing between two sides about who needs to fill in gaps for 216 On Fox News, commentators are getting nervous about the automatic triggers that cut spending – especially from military spending – if there’s no agreement by the “super committeee” on savings. 3.08pm: Obama for America has distributed this video from the president to its supporters. In it, Obama talks about the “cloud of uncertainty” over the economy as a result of the debt ceiling limit. 3pm: Should we all relax? Uber-blogger Nate Silver now reckons the deal will pass the House by 227-204, with a caveat : Bottom line: if Pelosi whips votes for bill, almost 100% certain to pass. If she leaves Dems to own devices, maybe a 60/40 favorite. Or Pelosi could whip votes against, in which case passage is unlikely. She has a LOT of power. But not clear what her endgame is. Meaning if Nancy Pelosi aggresively lobbys Democrats against the deal, it might fail. 2.50pm: Two of the hardline Tea Party favourites in the House, Republican representatives Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, tell ABC News they are voting no: Chaffetz told us that he “can’t support it,” while Duncan said his “analysis of the plan is something I can’t support.” Significantly, Chaffetz says he thinks the bill will pass the House. 2.40pm: Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney weighs in and he’s against the deal: While I appreciate the extraordinarily difficult situation President Obama’s lack of leadership has placed Republican Members of Congress in, I personally cannot support this deal. You want a Republican weather-vane, there it is. 2.37pm: Nancy Pelosi, Democratic minority leader in the House, asked if there are enough votes to pass the deal: “You’ll have to ask the Speaker. He has the majority.” Ouch. 2.25pm: Here’s a bad sign: House Speaker John Boehner was going to hold a press conference sometime after 1pm. It got delayed and delayed, and now it’s supposed to happen at 3.30pm. Why the delay? Maybe Boehner realised he was going to miss his sunbed tanning session. More likely, he hasn’t got the votes and needs the time to do some Republican arm-twisting. 2.15pm: The best short analysis of the debt deal cuts themsleves that I’ve seen has come from Josh Barro at the Manhattan Institute: The deal includes a lot of spending cuts, but it’s important to understand how backloaded these cuts are. The headline figure is $2.5 trillion in cuts over ten years, but less than 1 percent of those cuts will come in FY 2012. The near-term fiscal changes are so small that they will matter very little for the economy. The long term changes will be subject to revision by future Congresses and will hopefully come when the economy is healthier—and the parts that do go into effect will probably not be that different from whatever fiscal adjustment we were going to have to enact sooner or later. There are two parts of the spending cuts in this package that really do matter. One is the cuts that will apply in Fiscal Year 2012. There probably won’t be very big; there will be $22 billion in spending cuts compared to the baseline for 2012, or about 0.15 percent of GDP. (That’s out of the $1 trillion in cuts that will be agreed upfront.) A “Super Committee” will be charged with finding a further $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, and we can expect that the cuts it recommends will again be backloaded. (Indeed, if the Super Committee deadlocks, we will go to an automatic “trigger” process which involves no cuts at all until FY 2013). Discretionary spending cuts that come out of the Super Committee process will again be subject to the whims of future Congresses. Any changes to mandatory spending that come out of the Super Committee are more likely to be sticky — that’s the second part of the cuts that matters — but I’ll believe we’re getting meaningful entitlement reform when I see it. Barro concludes: “So, liberals who are upset that this deal is destimulative, or who expect it to tank the economy, are off base.” 1.54pm: Yikes: Nate Silver has just tweeted : My latest extrapolation from @thehill ‘s whip count: R’s approve 153-87, D’s against 59-132, bill FAILS 212-219. Blimey. Excuse me while I call my stockbroker. And if anyone from the accounts department is reading this, I’d like to be paid in Swiss francs from now on. 1.42pm: Nate Silver of the New York Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog is trying to talk Paul Krugman down from the ledge: If Democrats read the fine print on the debt deal struck by President Obama and Congressional leaders, they’ll find that it’s a little better than it appears at first glance. That’s not to say that the deal is a good one for them. It concedes a lot to Republicans, and Democrats may be wondering why any of this was necessary in the first place. But the good news, relatively speaking, has to do with the timing and structure of the spending cuts contained in the deal. First, the timing: the cuts are heavily back-loaded, so the deal is unlikely to have much direct effect on the economy in 2012. That’s what I said last night. 1.31pm: Dean Baker, a Guardian contributor and a director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research , has a strong attack on the debt deal from the left: At a time when growth has slowed to a near halt and unemployment rate is again rising, it is tragic that the nation’s political leadership has spent the last few months crafting a deal that is likely to slow growth further and take away supports from the people who have been hit hardest by the downturn. 1.26pm: Guess which Republicans are opposing the deal? Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. According to TP Carney , the Republican uberhawks like Frum and Kristol (neocons, if you will) really don’t like the proposed cuts on military spending: Assuming this debt deal becomes law and its super-committee is formed, defense cuts could create serious divisions on the right. The Tea Party generally rates budget cuts above the need for military spending, so its easy to see why there might be tension between the two camps. 1.20pm: The Hill is running updated whip counts [warning: contains toxic levels of politics geekery] on the vote in the House and Senate: The debt-limit deal announced on Sunday night is expected to attract more than 60 votes in the Senate, but its outlook in the House is much more cloudy. Speaker John Boehner will need Democratic votes to clear the bill through the lower chamber. How many remains unclear. It doesn’t really matter since there will be enough Democratic votes in play to pass the deal, unless the House Republicans have a full-blown civil war. Which would be entertaining but unlikely. 1.10pm: There’s a House rules committee meeting going on now that will decide the timeline for the vote on the deal. There’s a suggestion that the House will vote at 6pm this evening, and that the Senate will have to vote tomorrow, unless Harry Reid can get unanimous consent to hold the vote tonight. All it takes is one senator to say no and we wait another day. (I’m looking at you, Rand Paul.) 1pm: Here’s the current state of US politics: influential liberal bastion MoveOn.org is against the debt deal. Also: influential conservative bastion the Club for Growth is against it. Both are advising “no” votes. In conclusion: Um. 12.44pm: With DeMint saying he won’t try and block the deal in the Senate, satirical radio personality Rush Limbaugh appears to be on the same page. On his radio show today, it’s reported that Limbaugh announced: I don’t know the budget battle has been won. I’m undecided about it. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t have an opinion on something. In other news, September will be composed entirely of Sundays. 12.38pm: Here we go: the godfather of the Tea Party, Republican Senator Jim DeMint, says : “I’m not going to filibuster.” That’s significant. Jim DeMint is a hugely significant figure on the US right/Tea Party faction, far more than the likes of Sarah Palin. If DeMint is not trying to block the deal, then it’ll pass the Senate, and it means that enough of the Republican head-bangers in the House will also vote for it. So, it’s a done deal. 12.32pm: White House press secretary Jay Carney has held a briefing for the media, and was mainly concerned with defending the deal. He says its not true that the White House or Democrats got “nothing” from the deal. Carney says the White House “fully expects” that new tax revenue can be added to the deficit reduction plan drawn up by the “super committee” created as part of the debt limit deal. Let’s wait and see who the Republicans appoint on their side of the committee. Rand Paul? Jim DeMint? 12.24pm: Is there a Democratic revolt in the House? Maybe. Reuters reports that Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi says she’s undecided on voting for debt limit bill, saying she’s concerned about lack of new revenues. Pelosi runs a tight ship: if she’s “undecided” that gives carte blanche to Dems in the House to vote against it. Interesting. 12.12pm: Paul Krugman joins hands (sort of) with his opponents in the Tea Party and says he would vote to blow up the US Treasury . In a blogpost entitled “If I were in the House”, Krugman writes: “Sure, it’s risky. But the whole situation is immensely risky, thanks to the extremism and bloody-mindedness of the right.” Here’s the guts of his post – read the rest of it here : I guess I have to be explicit at this point: yes, I would vote no. What about the catastrophe that would result? Several thoughts. First, what I keep hearing from people who should know is that Treasury won’t actually run out of cash tomorrow, that it still has a few more days. Second, the people who claim that terrible things would immediately happen in the markets also claimed that there would be a big relief rally once a deal was struck. Not so much: the Dow is down 121 right now. Third, the idea that a temporary disruption would permanently damage faith in US institutions now seems moot; if you haven’t already lost faith in US institutions, you’re not paying attention. As a political columnist, Paul Krugman makes a great trade economist. 12.05pm: How much will the current debt deal actually save? According to the Congressional Budget Office, it will cut deficits by $2.1tn over 10 years. Of that, the CBO says $917bn in deficit reduction comes from caps on discretionary spending, with $1.2tn more from either the “super committee” savings or the automatic spending reductions – the triggers – that come into effect if the super committee fails. All the wonky details in PDF format here . Preamble: So there’s a deal on raising the US debt ceiling . The deal, struck between the White House, Democratic and Republican leadership in Congress, will now have to be passed through the House of Representatives and the Senate before the deadline of 2 August after which the US Treasury predicts that the $14.3tn limit on government borrowing will be hit. As deals go, this is one in which neither party seems happy with the outcome . In both the Democratic and Republican party their are wings that remain deeply unhappy with the result – and all eyes are now on them as the deal moves from smoke-filled rooms to the chambers of Congress. Will the Republican right – the Tea Party-inspired, the fiscal hardliners, the swivel-eyed – continue to fight against the deal and demand more? Will the Democratic party’s left say enough is enough and revolt when it comes time to vote. Meanwhile, the details of the detail remain frighteningly vague – beyond the comprehension of members of Congress, let alone voters. The headline figures – themselves disputed – of budget savings between $2tn and $3tn involve a complex series of assumptions over a decade, and include the results of an as-yet unborn “super committee” to identify cuts. Debate is now starting in the House of Representatives – so follow all the action right here. US economy Obama administration Republicans John Boehner US Congress US politics US economic growth and recession United States Economics Richard Adams guardian.co.uk
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