Hank Kalet

The Defense of Marriage Act was just dealt a major blow.

A federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled on Thursday that the federal statute defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman unlawfully discriminates against same-sex married couples by denying them equal federal benefits.

As The New York Times points out, it is the second time a federal appeals court has ruled against DOMA.

But this decision on Thursday is the first time that an appeals court has subjected the law to a relatively tough test for constitutionality that, in effect, elevates issues of sexual orientation to the constitutional level of cases involving sexual discrimination.

Think Progress described the decision this way:

This is a really big deal. Jacobs is not simply saying that DOMA imposes unique and unconstitutional burdens on gay couples, he is saying that any attempt by government to discriminate against gay people must have an “exceedingly persuasive” justification. This is the same very skeptical standard afforded to laws that discriminate against women. If Jacobs’ reasoning is adopted by the Supreme Court, it will be a sweeping victory for gay rights, likely causing state discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to be virtually eliminated. And the fact that this decision came from such a conservative judge makes it all the more likely that DOMA will ultimately be struck down by the Supreme Court.

I decided to have a little fun with the debate transcript (did I actually just say that?) and pulled a few, select comments from the debate, edited them and arranged them in lines so that now we have a found poem from the debate.

Comments are desired, including variations on my theme (maybe a found poem of Obama, or Biden or Ryan?):

He actually got the first question.
So I get the last
question — last answer —
Candy, Candy —

Is it Loraina?
Lorraine.
Lorraine?
Yes, Lorraine.
Lorraine.

But gosh to tell our kids
that before they have babies,
they ought to think about
getting married to someone,
that’s a great idea.

Read Greg Sargent’s Plum Line blog today, which links to what he calls a brutal dissection from David Stockman on The Daily Beast of Romney’s reason for running — his business experience at Bain Capital. Stockman says:

Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way — out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale — the faster the better.

Romney did was aleveraged-buyout specialist, and in an “honest free-market economy,”

there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance. So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise.

So, Romney’s vast experience is in the kind of work that got us into the current economic mess — which raises questions about why he should be the guy to get us out of it.

Paul Krugman offers this today in his column, as succinct a summary of the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan healthcare position as I’ve seen:

The Romney-Ryan position on health care is that many millions of Americans must be denied health insurance, and millions more deprived of the security Medicare now provides, in order to save money. At the same time, of course, Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan are proposing trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy. So a literal description of their plan is that they want to expose many Americans to financial insecurity, and let some of them die, so that a handful of already wealthy people can have a higher after-tax income.

From Think Progress, more on what we’ll call the big lie on Social Security. In a piece on the “24 myths” told by Paul Ryan in last night’s debate, it addressed the Medicare and Social Security question:

“Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.” [T]he possibility of Medicare going bankrupt is — and historically has been — greatly exaggerated. In fact, if no changes are made, Medicare would still be able to meet 88 percent of its obligations in 2085. Social Security is fully funded for another two decades and could pay 75 percent of its benefits thereafter. There is also an easy way to ensure the program’s long-term solvency without large changes or cuts to benefits.

And it links back to a simple fix that I’ve been advocating, one that will not hurt current or future retirees:

They also ignore an easy way to ensure the program’s long-term solvency without large changes or cuts to benefits. Payroll taxes that finance Social Security are only collected on income up to a certain level ($110,100 in 2012), creating a regressive system that puts an undue burden on low- and middle-income workers. Eliminating that cap would allow Social Security to pay full benefits for the next 75 years, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

So, to reiterate my tweet from last night:

Medicare and SS are not going bankrupt. That is Washington BS.