It's pretty clear at this point that the Republican Guaranteed Presidency ducks are rapidly forming a nice row consisting of a toxic stew of disenfranchisement of anyone who might not vote for the Money Guys' Designated Plunderer. But just in case it doesn't work, and Barack Obama is re-elected, there's always Plan B: Impeachment. Obama is a man of such personal restraint that they'll never get anything as titillating as lying about a blowjob, but that doesn't mean the Republicans won't try to go The Full Clinton on him.

The "high crime and misdemeanor" that's going to be deemed far more heinous than deliberately ignoring the threat of an imminent terrorist attack just because the information had been passed on by the Clinton Administration and then lying us into an unrelated war under false pretenses to enrich your oil buddies, is going to be a botched program that started under the Bush Administration.

Barbara over at Mahablog explains:

If you aren’t seeing an Obama Administration scandal here, you must not be a rightie. Fast and Furious combines two rightie obsessions, guns and the Mexican border. Oh, and the Obama Administration, never mind that the program began during the Bush Administration. Righties are certain that the Obama Administration planted guns in Mexico as part of a scheme to undermine the Second Amendment. Recently House Oversight Committee member Rep. John Mica (R-FL) said,

“People forget how all of this started. This administration is a gun-control administration. They tried to put the violence in Mexico on the blame of the United States. So they concocted this scheme and actually sending our federal agents, sending guns down there, and trying to cook some little deal to say that we have got to get more guns under control,” Mica said, a theory that is supported by absolutely zero evidence. “That’s how this all started.”

According to everything I can find, “all of this started” in 2006, three years before the Obama Administration took office. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped the wingnuts from working themselves into a frenzy over Fast and Furious. House Republicans, Darrell Issa in particular, have striven mightily to jack Fast and Furious up into Obama’s Watergate.

To make a long story short, the House Oversight Committee chaired by Issa, has worked up a nice constitutional crisis by holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt because he didn’t give them evidence confirming what they wanted to believe. This is basically all about destroying the Obama Administration by any means necessary. The President’s evoking executive privilege may be less about a cover up than about rope-a-dope.

It's not hard to believe that the Republicans would turn this into something that feeds into their paranoia about Barack Obama being a secret Islamoterrorist who's going to take their guns away as part of his Evil Master Plan® to obtain dictatorial control over everyone. Last night Rachel Maddow attempted to make sense of this lunacy, including a nice little reprise of her trip to Alaska (heh) during the Lisa Murkowski/Joe Miller primary battle of 2010, in which a young man told her to look at Eric Holder's "voting record", even though Eric Holder has never held elected office.



It's a wonderful piece of video, because it perfectly embodies the right's utter refusal to allow pesky things like FACTS get in the way of their preconceived notions, which have been pre-digested by Fox News, World Nut Daily, and other screaming, frothing nutjobs of the Fantasy Right and vomited into their hungry mouths like a mama bird feeding its young. The difference is that mama bird feeds her young so they can grow up and fly free, whereas the right wing noise machine wants the gaping mouths into which they spew their predigested God-knows-what remain enslaved to their propaganda in perpetuity.

I disagree with Barbara, however, that the executive privilege invocation is part of the mythical 17-dimensional chess game that far too many on my side of the fence seem to think is the Obama modus operandi. This president and the people around him have proven far too inept to pull this kind of Nixonian foot-putting-down. I think it's more a case of the Obama Administration paying far too much attention to the screaming from the right and thinking this is what it has to do in order to make the screaming stop.

And I wonder what it's going to take for them to realize that the screaming will never, ever, ever stop -- not when the Republicans have removed Obama from office through election shenangans or impeachment; not even decades from now, when the Republicans have achieved their Randian dream and may have resorted to mowing down American citizens in the street to try and stop the violence once even the Fox Newsbots can no longer delude themselves that the Job Creators Are Going to Ever Create Jobs. Even then, the right will be blaming Obama. Because after all, he was the Communist Fascist Homosexual Islamic Terroristic Secretive Corrupt Megalomaniac whose fault this is. And oh yeah, he was also a black Democrat, which automatically meant he was all of the above.

They will hound him until the day he, like all of us will inevitably do, leaves this mortal coil. And then they will dig him up and hound him some more.

Labels: gun nuts, House Republicans, impeachment, right-wing hatemongers, wussy-ass Democrats

There have always been stories of government for sale, but in the aftermath of Citizens United, it can now be done blatantly. But is it really all that simple?

Democratic Party ineptitude was on full display last night, both in Wisconsin and in the less-visible races here in New Jersey. It's tempting to attribute Scott Walker prevailing in Wisconsin just on the huge sums of money poured into his coffers from out of state, but Chris Cilizza in the Washington Post cites other reasons for the debacle in the cheese state last night:

* The Democratic primary: To hear those who worked in the trenches of the recall tell it, the fact that Democrats had a contested primary between Barrett and former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk bears considerable responsibility for Walker’s victory.

Not only did the primary take place less than a month before the general recall election but organized labor spent millions in support of Falk (and against Barrett), spending that many Democrats believe weakened the eventual nominee. Democratic pollsters insisted that Walker was languishing in the early spring but rebounded as Barrett and Falk fought amongst themselves in the primary.

* Money: As of Monday, more than $63 million has been spent on the recall fight with Walker and his conservative allies vastly outspending Barrett and other Democratic-aligned groups.

Walker himself had raised in excess of $30 million for the recall campaign while Barrett collected just under $4 million.

Being outspent 10-1 (or worse) is never a recipe for success in a race. Democrats cried foul over Walker’s exploitation of a loophole that allowed him to collect unlimited contributions prior to the official announcement of the recall in late March. Of course, Democrats also pushed the recall and Walker played by the rules of the game — making what he did strategically smart rather than underhandedly nefarious.

* 2010: There was considerable internal discussion and disagreement between Washington and Wisconsin Democrats (and organized labor) about whether to push for a recall election this summer or wait until 2014 for a chance to unseat Walker. (Washington Democrats broadly favored the latter option, Wisconsin Democrats and labor the former).

As the recall played out, two things became clear: 1) There were almost no one undecided in the race and 2) those few souls who were undecided tended to resist the recall effort on the grounds that Walker had just been elected in 2010.

There's also the fact that the President of the United States, in his continued quixotic and delusional quest to "rise above it all", refused to get his manicured hands dirty in Wisconsin, and the national party refused to put any skin in that particular game until it was already too late.

I would add to this also that Americans have really grown to dislike and distrust labor unions, especially public sector unions. The reality that without the history of labor unions, there would be no 40-hour workweek and no minimum wage and no paid vacation has been completely obscured by high-profile battles over teacher contracts and hundreds of thousands of accumulated sick time payouts. When an ever-increasing number of Americans have been bumped from the full-time-permanent-job model and into non-guaranteed contract work that offers lower pay, no paid time off, and makes them completely dispensable at a moment's notice, it's difficult to get them to put together that part of the reason for this is that we turned our back on labor unions long ago after winning many of the perks for which they fought for decades.

It doesn't help that all too often, being in a labor union is like working for two sets of management, neither of which has your best interests in mind. My two experiences with being in a labor union are not exactly the stuff of which strong support is made either. In the mid-1970's, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen had me on strike for an entire summer, lest I be blacklisted from working at the A&P the NEXT summer. And in the 1980's, the Newspaper Guild blocked my promotion into a non-union management position even though I would be replaced by a union employee. But if you want to know what a society without labor unions and the wage protections they represent looks like, you need only to look at Gilbert & O'Bryan, a Boston law firm:

The BBJ received an emailed tip this week from someone who says they’re an employed, Boston College Law School (BC Law) graduate. The tipster sent screen grabs of a job listing on BC Law’s career site. The post advertises a full-time associate position at a small Boston law firm, Gilbert & O’Bryan LLP, paying just $10,000 per year. (That's $10K, it's not a typo.)

Larry O'Bryan, one of the firm's partners, said he's received about 32 applications for the $10K per year job, since posting it one week ago. He said that while the pay is low, the lawyer who is eventually hired will gain valuable experience. "What we emphasize is that we do provide the opportunity for new associates to have their own case load right from the start," said O'Bryan. Workers working full-time with four weeks' vacation at Massachusetts' minimum wage of $8 would be paid more than $15,000. At the federal minimum wage of $7.25, a worker would earn nearly $14,000 in a year. Maybe BC Law grads should take a look at a slide show published by Boston Business Journal earlier this month: 50 Boston jobs under $50K.

The job post reads: “Compensation is mainly based on percentage of work billed and collected ... We expect an associate to earn $10,000 in compensation in the first year.”

Ouch.

Here’s what the BC grad has to say about the job post he found:

"I keep an eye on the Boston legal market for openings, because I work outside of MA, and hope to eventually return. Logging onto BC Law Symplicity today, I was shocked to see my alma mater is advertising a full-time job at a small Boston firm where the compensation is expected to be $10,000 per year. Assuming a 40 hour work week, 52 weeks per year, that’s less than $5 per hour by my calculations. To be exact, $4.81 per hour, which is a fraction of minimum wage. For a school that pays cafeteria workers a "living wage," I find it astonishing that BC Law permits a listing for such an unconscionably low salary."

Or, you could look at Wisconsin.

But as Rachel Maddow has pointed out in the past, labor unions, as diminished as they are, still provide a sizable amount of money for Democratic political races. And if all the billionaires are going to pour unlimited sums into Republican races, the funding differential, combined with a lazy and craven press, Republican candidates like Willard Rmoney who are willing to baldfacedly lie (and know they can get away with it), and an inattentive and incurious American public willing to believe anything they see in a TV ad, and you essentially sound the death knell to anything approaching elections that offer a real choice.

Another example of what happens when the public doesn't pay attention is right here in New Jersey's 5th Congressional District. This is a highly-gerrymandered district that includes some of the most affluent parts of Bergen County, some of its more blue-collar areas, and the rural areas of Sussex and Warren Counties. For 25 years, this district was represented by Marge Roukema, a moderate Republican who would probably be drummed out of the party now. Scott Garrett ran against her twice, gaining the name recognition that made him the logical heir apparent when she retired. Voters in this district are so inattentive that when an independent candidate who was known in Republican circles ran in 2006 -- four years into Garrett's tenure in Congress -- he was asked, "Why are you running against Marge?"

Over the last decade, the Democrats have run candidates of ever-decreasing credibility against Garrett. Actually, that's not entirely true, because both the national and state parties have simply given up on this district, essentially allowing Garrett to become Congressman-for-life and disenfranchising all non-Republicans in the district. This year, Steve Rothman's district was eliminated, and the party offered him $2 million to run against Garrett in the 5th. Rothman is a bulldog of a candidate, not the kind of nobodies, blind rabbis, milquetoast Rotarians, and converted Republicans that have tried for this seat during Garrett's tenure. The 5th may be Republican, but it's not batshit crazy Republican, and Rothman could have had a very real chance to win this year. But instead he decided to run a primary challenge to another Democrat, Bill Pascrell, in the 9th. Last night Pascrell supporters smacked away Rothman like the annoying little fly the latter had chosen to become. So now, instead of a real challenger in the 5th, Rothman is gone from Congress, and running against Garrett is a crony of the old, corrupt, Bergen County Democratic Organization who couldn't even be bothered to show up to a debate against his primary challengers.

Oh, I'll go through the motions of voting this fall, in the last ever U.S. election that has even the slightest resemblance to an actual election. But I'm under no illusions anymore that democracy works here anymore.

Labels: 2012 election, Democratic sellouts, R.I.P. American Middle Class, wussy-ass Democrats

There is nothing on which this President will not cave to Republicans. NYT:

President Obama will ask Congress to scrub the corporate tax code of dozens of loopholes and subsidies to reduce the top rate to 28 percent, down from 35 percent, while giving preferences to manufacturers that would set their maximum effective rate at 25 percent, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.

[snip]

The administration plan to revamp a corporate code that is widely derided as inefficient and anticompetitive has been in the works at Treasury for two years, and is a priority of Mr. Geithner. Yet he has been preoccupied with crisis management, and is unlikely to see the project through since he plans to leave office after this year.

The proposed overhaul “will help level the playing field for businesses and allow the government to collect needed revenue while promoting economic growth,” Mr. Geithner told a Congressional committee last week, without details.

Republicans and business groups complain that the 35 percent corporate tax rate is among the highest in the world, leaving American companies at a competitive disadvantage. They typically seek a 25 percent rate, with many of them saying that the current tax breaks should be kept in place as well.

Nonpartisan tax analysts consistently find that corporations here on average pay just slightly more than their competitors in other developed countries after exploiting the many tax breaks and loopholes. Recent news accounts have highlighted the low effective rates paid by companies like Google, Boeing and General Electric.

One analysis concluded that 115 of the 500 companies in the Standard and Poor’s stock index paid a total corporate tax rate — federal and otherwise — of less than 20 percent over a five-year period. A study by the Government Accountability Office in 2008 found that 55 percent of American companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven-year period it studied.

“Under the current tax system, the United States will soon have the highest statutory corporate tax rate among developed countries, within a system that features a large number of tax expenditures for special interests,” said a senior administration official, who did not want to speak ahead of Mr. Geithner except on condition of anonymity.

“This puts American businesses — especially those in areas like manufacturing that are subject to more intense international competition — at a disadvantage. And this system is also unnecessarily complicated for America’s small businesses.”

Notice that this "senior administration official" said "highest tax rate", not "highest tax." Does Obama actually think that a plan that will result in higher net taxes on corporations will pass muster with Republicans?

And can we please stop this talk about America's small businesses? Mitt Romney is out on the stump referring to small businesses as "America's job creators". But the reality is quite different:

The problem is that not all small businesses are created equal. Businesses just getting off the ground contribute most of the country's job growth, but older small businesses cut as many as they add.

Think Bill Gates and Paul Allen huddled together late nights developing Microsoft, not the corner liquor store.

"I don't want to pick on dry cleaners and restaurants and small manufacturing firms, but they're not a big source of job creation," says John Haltiwanger, an economist at the University of Maryland.

Politicians like to say that small companies create two of every three jobs in a given year. That's less impressive when you consider that almost all the 6 million companies in the U.S. — 99.9 percent of them — are small businesses, with fewer than 500 workers.

What's more, two-out-of-three masks the fact that most small businesses eliminate more jobs than they create in a given year, either through layoffs, closings or bankruptcy.

And many of the rest, the ones that don't shrink or shut down, don't offer much hope for the millions of Americans looking for jobs.

Many small companies — outfits like florists, hardware stores and barbershops — tend to grow with the U.S. population, not faster. So they don't speed the economic recovery the way an exploding new industry might.

According to an August study by two University of Chicago economists, most small business owners just want to be their own boss and never expect to hire more than a few employees.

In fact, the more you study the numbers, the more you wonder what the politicians are getting so excited about.

Haltiwanger and two other economists showed, in a study of millions of companies over 30 years, that small businesses no more than five years old — that's about 40 percent of them — are the only ones that create more jobs each year than they cut.

In 2005, for instance, more than 99 percent of the 2.5 million net new private-sector jobs in the United States came from these startups, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But the 60 percent of small businesses that have been around more than five years act as a slight drag on the number of jobs available in the United States. They have cut about 0.5 percent more staff than they have added in a typical year, according to Haltiwanger.

By contrast, big businesses, the ones that get all the headlines for layoffs, have hired more than they have cut — about 0.1 percent in a typical year.

Economist Charles Kenny of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group, goes as far as suggesting that Washington should stop offering certain incentives to small business owners, such as loan guarantees and write-offs on taxes for home offices. He says the money would be better spent subsidizing research and development.

This corporate tax rate has nothing to do with the "small businesses" that evoke images of the small-town lunch counter, barber shop, and candy store. Small businesses these days are the couple in a nearby town who, both unemployed, now run an errand service, or the petsitter who makes an exception and takes care of our cats when we're away because we're longtime customers and I give her an extra five bucks a visit for her trouble. Small businesses are the unemployed tech guy who'll defrag your hard drive for twenty bucks. They're the fourteenth gyro joint to open in the area in the last six months that won't be around in a year because there's just too much competition. Economic recovery doesn't come from these kinds of mom & pop businesses for whom success means you hire two kids to carve up the souvlaki after school for minimum wage.

You've got to love the author of the above article talking about Bill Gates and Paul Allen huddled in the garage, even though he's obviously thinking Steves Jobs and Wozniak. He could just as easily gone back a generation and evoked Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. Those entrepreneurs were able to develop and sell their wares and grow their companies into an America that wasn't racing to the bottom in terms of worker compensation.

And it's into this fantasy, which mistakes Norman Rockwellian and lightning-in-a-bottle success for some kind of norm, that Barack Obama, who has never found an issue in the last three-plus years on which he won't cave to the Republicans eventually, has decided in this election year that the Republicans are right. He's fallen into the notion that if you just let Meg Whitman and Sumner Redstone and Jeff Immelt (who has Obama's ear anyway) pocket ENOUGH MORE CASH, they'll magically trickle it down to us peons in the form of "job creation."

And that gyro joint on the corner? That errand service? That tech guy? They're S Corporations and LLCs. and t sure as hell aren't going to be affected one iota by a corporate tax cut.

I can't wait to see what Obama decides when the Republicans start screaming about how this ocntributes to the deficit. Because he's forgotten. Tax cuts instituted by Democrats? Bad. Only tax cuts instituted by Republicans have the requisite magic fairy dust.

Labels: Barack Obama, corporatism, greed, spinelessness, taxes, wussy-ass Democrats

This is what happens when you do the bidding of Republicans. You can outdo even THEIR presidents and they still treat you as if you're Karl Marx.

Eleanor Clift:

Obama has invested so much time demonizing the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich that he has obscured the true narrative of his presidency. Class-war rhetoric aside, Obama is one of the most prolific tax cutters in recent history, with a record that puts him squarely alongside that of George W. Bush.

Crunching the numbers at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, analyst Michael Linden found that if one compares the cost of tax cuts in just the first four years of Bush’s term (2001–04) to the first four years of Obama's (2009–12), Obama’s tax cuts are bigger. The value of the Bush tax cuts were about $475 billion in those first four years, or about 1.1 percent of GDP. Obama’s total about $1 trillion, or 1.6 percent of GDP.

Obama has cut taxes to lower levels than Bush did, says Linden. This is because, of course, Obama thus far has extended all of the Bush tax cuts and then cut taxes on top of that. His original stimulus bill in 2009 had $290 billion in Making Work Pay tax cuts. His speech Thursday night before Congress advocated for another $175 billion in payroll tax cuts, which come on top of $110 billion from last December’s budget deal. Speeded-up expensing for business adds another $10 billion or so.

All in all, Obama is responsible for many billions in tax cuts, yet the popular perception is that he has raised taxes.

Because he has sat silently by while allowing Republicans to call him whatever they want. But of course he can't fight back, that would be unseemly and not in the spirit of Washington comity.

The logical response to this is that obviously tax cuts don't work as economic stimulus and it's time to stop doing it. But that would require courage.

Labels: Barack Obama, taxes, wussy-ass Democrats

Check out this screencap, from the front page of Rush Limbaugh's web site (red box added by me, for emphasis):



Yesterday Randi Rhodes played the clip of Limbaugh screeching about how John Boehner has to "put the guy in his place" about the timing of his speech on jobs. When you talk about putting someone in his place, and the person you're talking about is black, it is a racial remark, no matter how red faced and sputtering Limbaugh may be in denial of that fact. But if you still don't believe it, look at the graphic. Look at the photograph, which deliberately depicts the black President of the United States supplicating himself before a white (well, ok, orange) man.

So what does this president do when faced with a lying, hatemongering right-wing radio host demanding that the Speaker "put him in his place"?

He caves, of course (NYT link, emphasis mine):

In a surreal volley of letters, each released to the news media as soon as it was sent, Mr. Boehner rejected a request from the president to address a joint session of Congress next Wednesday at 8 p.m. — the same night that a Republican presidential debate is scheduled.

In an extraordinary turn, the House speaker fired back his own letter to the president saying, in a word, no. Might the president be able to reschedule for the following night, Sept. 8?

For several hours, the day turned into a very public game of chicken.

By late Wednesday night, though, the White House issued a statement saying that because Mr. Obama “is focused on the urgent need to create jobs and grow our economy,” he “welcomes the opportunity to address a joint session of Congress on Thursday, Sept. 8.”

The president had sent in the first volley with his request for a speech next Wednesday night, when Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is scheduled to debate his fellow would-be Republican presidential nominees for the first time.

“No, of course not,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, replied when a reporter asked if the timing of the president’s speech had been meant to play havoc with the Republican debate plans. He said that “one debate of many was no reason not to have a speech when we wanted to have it.”

Mr. Boehner was not budging.

“As the majority leader announced more than a month ago, the House will not be in session until Wednesday, Sept. 7, with votes at 6:30 that evening,” the speaker wrote. “With the significant amount of time, typically more than three hours, that is required to allow for a security sweep of the House chamber before receiving a president, it is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.”

Mr. Boehner did not specify what votes were scheduled for 6:30 that evening that could not be moved. The House calendar shows that members are expected to vote on the “suspension calendar,” generally minor bills like naming a post office.

Congressional historians said Mr. Boehner’s move was unprecedented.

“The Senate Historical Office knows of no instance in which Congress refused the president permission to speak before a joint session of Congress,” Betty K. Koed, associate historian with the Senate, said in an e-mail.

But then, we've never had a black president before, never mind one who has demonstrated over and over and over and over again that there is NO fight with Republicans from which he won't shy away.

Meanwhile, certain corners of the sizable Democratic base that this Administration threw under the bus very early in this presidency have stopped rumbling that perhaps it might stay home in 2012 and like Pavlov's dogs, are already falling for the same "We Suck But He's Crazy" card that Democrats have been playing for two decades:

Perry panic has spread from the conference rooms of Washington, D.C., to the coffee shops of Brooklyn, with the realization that the conservative Texan could conceivably become the 45th president of the United States, a wave of alarm centering around Perry’s drawling, small-town affect and stands on core cultural issues such as women’s rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the separation of church and state.

“His entry in the race is a signal and a wake-up call,” the Rev. Al Sharpton told POLITICO.

Perry, Sharpton said, “is looking to go to the O.K. Corral and start shooting. … Rather than the left get caught sleeping, we better load up, because he is bringing it.”

For Democrats, the pre-Perry GOP primary process was hardly for the faint of heart, as the other candidates have jockeyed to show who dislikes Obama the most. But even as the primary is fought on conservative turf, liberal leaders say they and their constituents see Perry as far worse than your average, hated Republican, and indeed as bad — if not worse — than his hated predecessor in Austin, George W. Bush. And progressives who might have had a hard time getting worked up about Mitt Romney find themselves struggling for superlatives with which to express their fear of a President Perry.

Oh, get real, people. Seriously. Does anyone actually see Barack Obama as some kind of bulwark against the kind of oligarchical theocracy that Rick Perry represents? The entire Republican Party has decided that an oligarchical theocracy is what it wants, and this president can't even stick to his guns about his own Constitutional right to call together a joint session of Congress? And people are looking to him to stop this relentless march backwards to the 13th century that Republicans now represent?

Idiots. They don't even realize that it's already a done deal. The only issue remaining is what the Obama Administration is going to say to try to tell us that massive tax increases on the poor and mandatory conversion to the teachings of R.J. Rushdoony are a GOOD thing.

Labels: American Oligarchy, Barack Obama, spinelessness, theocracy, We Are So Screwed, wussy-ass Democrats

It's too bad guys like Fareed Zakaria and Joe Nocera, the latter of whom is the latest pundit to recognize out loud that the Tea Party members of Congress are nothing but economic terrorists bent on the destruction of this country in their lust for power, weren't talking like this two years ago, when a very small but vocal minority of Americans, whipped into a frenzy by Rick Santelli and the Koch Brothers, went to rallies dressed up in 18th century costumes spouting nonsense about a Constitution they didn't understand and about keeping the government's hands off their Medicare. The Tea Party was loud and shrill and "colorful", so the media elevated an ignorant fringe to the status of Major National Movement, and now here we are. While I'm glad it isn't just Krugman anymore, there does seem to be an element of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped to Nocera's column today (NYT link):

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. After this latest agreement was finally struck on Sunday night — amounting to a near-complete capitulation by Obama — Tea Party members went on Fox News to complain that it only called for $2.4 trillion in cuts, instead of $4 trillion. It was head-spinning.

All day Monday, the blogosphere and the talk shows mused about which party would come out ahead politically. Honestly, who cares? What ought to matter is not how these spending cuts will affect our politicians, but how they’ll affect the country. And I’m not even talking about the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class. I am talking about their effect on America’s still-ailing economy.

America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

Last night we heard that Obama WAS willing to play the 14th Amendment card if no deal was reached. How true that is, I don't know, because apparently this came from Joe Biden rather than out of the mouth of a president whom I have become convinced has wanted draconian cuts of benefits to the elderly and the poor all along, the better to ingratiate himself with the Wall Street masters who will offer him a nice chunk of change and a cushy job when he leaves office. Because after all, what must seem more appealing right now, an eight-figure Wall Street job or enduring another four years of this? Because at this point, there's nothing to do but paraphrase Walter Mondale and the 1984 Democratic Convention again (for the second time this week): The Republicans will screw you over and so will the Democrats. The Democrats won't tell you. The Republicans will. At least with the Republicans we know what we're getting, while Nancy Pelosi makes pretty speeches and then votes "Yes" on cutting Medicare.

Yesterday I received the most disgusting piece of political mail that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has ever sent. It has Al Franken's name on it, which I guess is designed to target the "professional left" for whom the party has such contempt, and it exhorts me to "stop the radical right." Contained in the letter are the following postcards:



Who the hell do they think they're kidding?

Labels: closing the barn door after the horse escapes, economic death watch, icepick meet forehead, irrelevant has-been pundits, We Are So Screwed, wussy-ass Democrats

Today's honoree: Who else but Matt Taibbi, who needs no introduction.

Money quote (one of many):

So the debt deal has finally been reached. As expected, the agreement arrives in a form that right-thinking people everywhere can feel terrible about with great confidence.

The general consensus is that for the second time in three years, a gang of financial terrorists has successfully extorted the congress and the White House, threatening to blow up the planet if they didn't get what they wanted.

Back in 2008, the congress and George Bush rewarded Hank Paulson and Wall Street for pulling the Cleavon-Little-"the-next-man-makes-a-move-the-n---er-gets-it" routine by tossing trillions of bailout dollars at the same people who had wrecked the economy.

Now, Barack Obama has surrendered control of the budget to the Tea Party, whose operatives in congress used the same suicide-bomber tactic, threatening a catastrophic default unless the Democrats committed to a regime of steep spending cuts without any tax increases on the wealthy.

Labels: American Oligarchy, bloggers, truth, wussy-ass Democrats

Despite what the generations that follow the post-World War II baby boom think, most boomers in my circle have always had the fatalistic notion that Social Security would not be there for us. I've posted before about a Tom Toles cartoon from the 1980's called "The Reading of the Will" which is rife with boomer resentment at our parents' generation because of their defined benefit pensions and guaranteed Social Security payments and leisurely retirements. Somehow we always knew. Even when, in the 1980's, what is now called the "Social Security Trust Fund" was set up specifically for the purpose of beefing up the system for baby boomer retirement, we knew. We knew that whatever stores were built up were replaced with IOUs that we knew the government had no intention of paying.

Those of us who did not want children and have been lucky enough to have not been completely jettisoned from the job market are better off than many. We've been taking advantage of 401(k) match and putting away as much as we can afford. Whether we'll be OK remains to be seen, once Medicare is gutted (and it WILL happen, whether Barack Obama is re-elected next year or not, since he's shown himself to be at best a rubber stamp for Republican policies. But friends of mine who are trying to put kids through college and seeing them into adulthood are scared to death -- not just of their own futures, because who can put away money for retirement when a low-end college is $25,000 a year, but of that of their children, many of whom are unable to get a toehold in the job market. What good does it to do graduate with a degree in marketing when the only job you're going to be able to get is to be re-hired as a cart boy at the Stop & Shop?

Work longer, they tell us. People are healthier longer, so it doesn't make sense to retire at 65 the way it once did. That's all well and good, but is it healthy for a society that is hemorrhaging jobs for older people to clog up the workforce? And there's no sign that the job market is ever going to get any better. Anything done on a PC can be done more cheaply overseas. Anything requiring special skills can be done by hiring immigrants on work visas. I have a friend who's a production editor at a publishing company. She's fifty, she has two kids to put through college and who's going to be the one to tell her that her job may very well not even exist in five years?

I've spent all of my adult years in the Age of Corporatism. I graduated high school into the first Arab oil embargo and graduated college with a degree in sociology into the second one. I started out in a retail management training program that was the catch-all for liberal arts majors at the time. But at least I was graduating into a society that hadn't yet been completely taken over by greed. That happened later, after Ronald Reagan took office, and while I myself have done well, our society hasn't. Oh sure, we have gewgaws and toys and electronics and two flat-screen TVs and 200 channels of nothing you'd want to watch on TV. People have pulled their kids out of school for Caribbean vacations paid for on home equity loans and people in Section 8 housing have smart phones. All of this is cited as examples by Republicans of how well off we are. But are we? And what about tomorrow?

I work in an industry that is rapidly consolidating, with tens of thousands having been laid off in just the last two years. The web development I used to do is dead too, replaced by templates and do-it-yourselfers. When I was in high school and college there was always a "hot industry" that was hiring. If engineers weren't in demand, then marketers were. If there was a glut of marketers, the accounting field was begging for people. Now there is no "hot industry". There is no path to upward mobility for the poor, there is no path towards staying in the middle class for those who were born into it. Only those with inherited money are able to prosper.

Social Security was implemented in the depths of the Depression, and Republicans have been trying to get rid of it ever since. Whatever faults the Democrats may have had, what with Ted Kennedy's scandals and Tip O'Neil's tippling and Hubert Humphrey's often preposterous optimism, they could always be relied on to be the protectors of the middle class and the poor. Whether it was Social Security, Medicare, Pell grants, nutrition programs, or education, the Democrats were the party of the little guy.

Something happened along the way. I suppose you could say it started with Jimmy Carter, who was the first conservative Democrat to hold the White House. Carter, a Southern Baptist, paved the way for the relentless Christianism that has pervaded our political discourse in the years since then. Ronald Reagan started his presidency by busting the air traffic controllers' union and accelerated the path towards elimination of the middle class. Reagan recognized the religious fervor in the southern states and the midwest, and he recognized the residual racism in the south, and used it to pit the middle class against the poor while screwing over both. The patrician George H.W. Bush similar knew nothing about the struggles of middle class people as he marveled over a supermarket scanner. Bill Clinton used his charm to win over crowds of middle class and minority voters while implementing NAFTA and eliminating Glass-Steagall and insisting that he was one of them. The advent of the internet led to $100,000 programming jobs and new media and lots of opportunities for the middle class to start to afford the trappings of the wealthy, and Americans embraced them. They leased BMWs for the kind of payments you used to have to buy a Chevrolet. They took adjustable-rate mortgages that allowed them to make lower payments on bigger houses. They bought houses for 3% down. They took equity loans for akylit soaring-ceilinged great rooms and dream kitchens and summer-long cruises with their kids.

Then George W. Bush came along, and the first thing he did was look at the surplus that Bill Clinton and the internet boom had left him and said, "Let's cut taxes." But to paraphrase the man himself, the have-mores were his base, so they got most of the spoils. Then he ignored a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001, and a month later almost 3000 people died in a terrorist attack that should have been thwarted had he been doing his job. And what did he tell people? Go shopping. He put us into two wars, one of them completely unnecessary, kept the tax cuts in place, and anyone who dared question him was called un-American and traitorous. A right-wing echo chamber that had been developed during the Clinton years to obsess over his sex life was now firmly in place, and Judith Miller canoodled with Scooter Libby, and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq became conventional wisdom, and if you questioned it, you could very well find your house firebombed by an increasingly frightened and angry population.

Fear was a potent weapon during the Bush years, with color-coded terror warnings and a convenient tape by Osama Bin Laden issued every time Bush's approval ratings dropped. People in flyover states sat up nights worrying about Scary Swarthy Men doing things to the local Wal-Mart, and all the while, while Bush's Washington was warning of terrorist plots and Americans were hiding under the bed clutching a roll of plastic sheeting in one hand and one of duct tape in the other, the guys at the top were rifling through the dresser drawers where Americans kept their spending cash and filled their pockets, then crept off and joined the Be Afraid Chorus.

This is really the point at which the Democratic Party became completely undone. Faced with a McCarthyite White House, and saddled with the baggage of Vietnam amti-war protests, Democrats fell silent as they gave George W. Bush blank check after blank check after blank check to cut taxes for his friends and to feed more and more American kids into a Middle East meatgrinder. This is where it became obvious that this was a party completely unable to frame an argument. A half-million ordinary citizens marched in New York City in early 2003 because we knew that the Iraq claims were bullshit, but the Democratic Party could not even be bothered to study the readily-available evidence out there. It was easier to just listen to the Washington pundits and go along.

Then in mid-2002, a virtually unknown governor from Vermont appeared on Meet the Press and miracle of miracles, was showing that he HAD read the evidence, and he KNEW what was going on. Here was a guy I could vote for.

Howard Dean became so much of a threat to the Washington narrative that not only did Democratic presidential rivals pool resources to tag-team him in Iowa, where it was starting to look like he just might be able to take his campaign of truth to the nomination, but the media got in on the pile-on, deliberately turning down the crowd noise at a rally for campaign workers following his defeat in Iowa so that his exhortations to the disappointed crowd sounded like the ravings of a madman. Later on, after Howard Dean was safely out of the way, ABC, the network that perpetrated this journalistic crime, admitted that they had turned down the crowd noise. Horse, barn door, etc.

So John Kerry, the party's anointed one, the guy who couldn't possibly be attacked because he was a war hero, became the nominee....and was promptly attacked as a war traitor. John Kerry made two fatal mistakes. The first was believing that the American people are too smart to believe demonstrable untruths, and the second was believing that he was working with good-faith operators. Yet despite the willingness of the public to believe the claims of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (a group financed by a Bush and Tom DeLay campaign contributor), Kerry still came within Ohio's electoral votes of defeating George W. Bush in 2004. Kerry, displaying now-typical Democratic gutlessness, didn't even wait till all the Ohio votes were counted before taking his $14 million in campaign cash and going home, but it has since been well-demonstrated that Republican-initiated electronic voting shenanigans really DID tilt the scales for Bush.

So fast-forward to 2008. George W. Bush is acknowledged by all but about 20% of the population to be the miserable failure that those of us with gray matter in our crania knew all along. The financial crisis of 2008 has, depending on what you believe, put us within a hair's breadth of global economic collapse. The Democrats' presumed front-runner, Hillary Clinton, who in a room full of netroots activists at Yearly Kos 2007 said that "Lobbyists are Americans too", lost the nomination in the face of the charisma of Barack Obama, his transformative potential, and a desperate hunger in the population for someone as different from George W. Bush as possible.

I had supported John Edwards in the primaries. Of course we had no idea then what was going on in his private life, and we knew that people in his home state regarded him as somewhat of a phony, but at least he was SAYING the right things about how Americans were already suffering in a diminishing job market and a contracting economy. Edwards turned out to be as bad a messenger for "The Two Americas" as Ralph Nader is for "There Is No Difference", but at least on the stump he was the only guy paying any mind to what was happening. I took no end of shit from Obama supporters in those early days of the 2008 Democratic nominating process because I did not believe that he was the progressive dreamboat they did. I remember paraphrasing Walter Mondale's 1984 convention speech to a gay friend who was offended by John Edwards' "struggle" with accepting gay marriage. "You make John Edwards feel icky and you make Barack Obama feel icky. Obama won't tell you. Edwards just did."

And I was right.

But still -- what was an American in search of a president with a brain in his head, vote for a once-proud American Senator whose stock had fallen so far that he had to choose a bubble-headed beauty queen for his running mate, or a guy who could string together coherent sentences and show that he recognized we live in a complex world? McCain was so inept on the campaign trail that Obama hardly had to break a sweat. McCain seemed old, out-of-touch, and cantankerous. And even the priapic sexual fantasies of the pundit corps at the mere mention of Sarah Palin didn't change the fact that this dimwitted, theorcratic End Of Days-er was potentially one cancer survivor away from the nuclear football.

Even if you didn't support Obama all that much, there was a palpable aura of change in the air on January 20, 2009. It was an aura that diminshed quickly, as Obama filled his Cabinet with hacks, Clinton retreads, and corporatists. And now, thirty years after the I Got Mine And Fuck You doctrine took over the Republican Party, and one summer after the shrill ravings of barely 19% of the American people were treated as a massive new movement, here we are, with a Democratic Party capitulating to a gutting of the American social contract, and not even a request to ask billionaires to throw even one more nickel...one penny...into the pot.

I ask you: Who do these people, these Democrats represent? It isn't these people:




So who is it? And just whom do they think is going to keep them in office? Obama's political people think that "They Have No Place Else To Go" will keep the Democratic base in the fold. They think they're appealing to "a wide swath of voters":

Mr. Obama, seeking to appeal to the broad swath of independent voters, has adopted the Republicans’ language and in some cases their policies, while signaling a willingness to break with liberals on some issues.

That has some progressive members of Congress and liberal groups arguing that by not fighting for more stimulus spending, Mr. Obama could be left with an economy still producing so few jobs by Election Day that his re-election could be threatened. Besides turning off independents, Mr. Obama risks alienating Democratic voters already disappointed by his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, end the Bush-era tax cuts and enact a government-run health insurance system.

“The activist liberal base will support Obama because they’re terrified of the right wing,” said Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future.

But he said, “I believe that the voting base of the Democratic Party — young people, single women, African-Americans, Latinos — are going to be so discouraged by this economy and so dismayed unless the president starts to champion a jobs program and take on the Republican Congress that the ability of labor to turn out its vote, the ability of activists to mobilize that vote, is going to be dramatically reduced.”

Borosage is dead wrong. Maybe the dead-enders at Daily Kos, and the commenter here who insists that if you don't cheerlead for Obama it means you really want Mitt Romney to be president, will show up no matter what. But this particular voter is being tired of being told by a bunch of at best inept, lazy, spineless Democrats that no matter how many times they capitulate to the most insane Republicans we've ever seen, we have to vote for them because we have no place else to go. This particular voter is tired of being shown pictures of Michele Bachmann and being told, "ooh, SCARY!"

I am 56 years old. I can't say I want to be subject to torture because I'm not a Christian. I can't say I want to see a hastening of global thermonuclear war because some lunatic that a bunch of inbred ignorant hicks decided was a good person thinks it's his or her calling by God to accelerate the End of Days. I can't say I want a world in which my friends' kids are pushed down into poverty because the oligarchs find any semblance of the middle class frightening. I'd like to believe that I have 20 or 30 or, given the longevity of my family, even more good years ahead of me. I'd like to believe that I'll have time to do something other than just work, eat, and sleep before I die. But I'll tell you this much: If the rest of the middle class in country doesn't care that its government -- both parties -- hates them and is out to eliminate them at the beck and call of their oligarchic masters, then what the hell is the point? Let Michele Bachmann become president. Let's have a Supreme Court that always sides with corporations. Let's have creationism be taught in every school in the country. Let's head down this road towards a new dark ages. If Americans don't care enough to do something to stop this relentless decline into ignorance and hate and fear and loathing, why the hell should I, with my best years already behind me, bust my ass?

Labels: america R.I.P., despair, spinelessness, Teabag America, we ar, wussy-ass Democrats

Driftglass has an idea for allowing Obama to cave on a no-revenue, all-cut deal to raise the debt ceiling:

Well, everyone has an imaginary scenario, so here's mine.

The Obama Administration announces next week today that since the GOP refuses to participate in good faith in the actual work of governing the United States, in order to avoid defaulting on our national debt and sending the world into a global financial meltdown, the Administration would accede to Republican demands that all deficit reduction be accomplished solely by making radical cuts to existing government programs with no increase in taxes.

However, in the spirit of the Time Honored Conservative Principle of Federalism, the President adds that the cuts would not be allocated programmatically, but geographically by state.

[snip]

Under the Obama Administration's proposed "Reward Wealth Producers and Penalize Moochers American Value Re-alignment" Act, "wealth producing" states such as New York, California, Illinois who have traditionally received less than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes would be exempt from any budgetary cuts, and would qualify for across-the-board tax cuts since wealth-producing states should always be accommodated and encouraged in every way possible, regardless of circumstances.

On the other hand, the "welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking" states such as Kansas, Arizona, Kentucky and Alaska who have for years gotten away with parasitically looting their wealth-producing neighbors by receiving more than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes will now assume 100% of the responsibility for eliminating the federal budget deficit. Each of these welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking states will be given a block rescission amount representing the percentage of the federal deficit for which they will be now be help legally responsible.

I'm on board. Let's get moving with it.

Labels: debt, deficits, Greedy Republican Bastards, wussy-ass Democrats

In 2003, we saw a president who wanted to prove something to his father to resolve his childhood conflict take us into a completely unnecessary war, one which has cost us trillions in national wealth and thousands of lives.

Today we have a president so invested in proving he is no threat to the mainstream that he is going to inevitably allow the nation to succumb to a renewed recession -- or worse, simply because of his own need to belief that he can somehow transcend deep-seated differences.

Krugman, in the New York Times today:

The federal debt limit is a strange quirk of U.S. budget law: since debt is the consequence of decisions about taxing and spending, and Congress already makes those taxing and spending decisions, why require an additional vote on debt? And traditionally the debt limit has been treated as a minor detail. During the administration of former President George W. Bush — who added more than $4 trillion to the national debt — Congress, with little fanfare, voted to raise the debt ceiling no less than seven times.

So the use of the debt ceiling to extort political concessions is something new in American politics. And it seems to have come as a complete surprise to Mr. Obama.

Last December, after Mr. Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts — a move that many people, myself included, viewed as in effect a concession to Republican blackmail — Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic asked why the deal hadn’t included a rise in the debt limit, so as to forestall another hostage situation (my words, not Mr. Ambinder’s).

The president’s response seemed clueless even then. He asserted that “nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse,” and that he was sure that John Boehner, as speaker of the House, would accept his “responsibilities to govern.”

Well, we’ve seen how that worked out.

Now, Mr. Obama was right about the dangers of failing to raise the debt limit. In fact, he understated the case, by focusing only on financial confidence.

Not that the confidence issue is trivial. Failure to raise the debt limit — which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt — could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

But confidence isn’t the only thing at stake. Failure to raise the debt limit would also force the U.S. government to make drastic, immediate spending cuts, on a scale that would dwarf the austerity currently being imposed on Greece. And don’t believe the nonsense about the benefits of spending cuts that has taken over much of our public discourse: slashing spending at a time when the economy is deeply depressed would destroy hundreds of thousands and quite possibly millions of jobs.

So failure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.

Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.

So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

And the reason Republicans are doing this is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again. They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.

This fits nicely into what Bernie Sanders was saying on the Randi Rhodes Show the other day -- that the moneyed interests that have taken over our government really do not care what is left behind after their pillage, because they are already looking ahead to China and India. The notion that if the U.S. defaults on its debt, Wall Street will suffer too has been held up as a talisman against the assured destruction being held over our heads by the Republicans. Believe me, the big investors have already taken care of this in regard to their own interests...and investors who have less than billions of dollars don't even figure into this equation. Your 401(k)? Of no importance to these people whatsoever. Families being tossed into the streets? Old people dying in the gutters? Trivial. Because when people are as evil as those who currently dominate the Republican Party and their billionaire masters, it's impossible to fight them until you at least recgnize them.

In his 1983 book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, the late M. Scott Peck referred to scapegoating as the primary manifesation of evil:

A predominant characteristic, however, of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because they consider themselves beyond reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to serve their self-image of perfection.

It's easy to see why people like this take Ayn Rand as their political guru, for Randian Objectivism reinforces their sense of "specialness."

Peck goes on:

Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault.

[...]

Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat...

Look at the the Koch Republican Party's scapegoats are: Women, especially women who want reproductive autonomy. Immigrants. Liberals. Black people. George Soros. Gays. The list goes on and on. This is the Peck model made real -- evil people scapegoating others so as to pass the "hot potato" of evil onto someone else.

What Peck didn't address in his analysis was greed. The book's primary example of evil is the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre, so he thinks of evil primarily in terms of war. He presumably would make the same connection of evil with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. But the kind of evil that would deliberately destroy the economy of a once-great nation purely out of greed, because there's another emerging market just across the sea that is just waiting for exploitation is something of which even Peck never dreamed.

Nor, apparently, has Barack Obama.

Even in his speech the other day, the one that prompted the hacktacular Mark Halperin to call him a dick, Obama still remained hopeful that the Republicans would ultimately step back from the brink and compromise. When one is simply misguided, but not evil, it's impossible to fathom party leaders who would destroy an entire country at the behest of the people who finance their campaigns. But that is what Barack Obama is dealing with, and that is why if he doesn't recognize pretty damn soon that what he is dealing with is not simple political differences, but a particularly vile form of evil, then we are all completely fucked.

I think we know already how this will play out.

Labels: Barack Obama, economic death watch, evil, wussy-ass Democrats

Who needs Republican fearmongering when you have a grandstanding moron like Chuck "Where's the Camera?" Schumer:

A senator on Sunday called for a "no-ride list" for Amtrak trains after intelligence gleaned from the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound pointed to potential attacks on the nation's train system.

Sen. Charles Schumer said he would push as well for added funding for rail security and commuter and passenger train track inspections and more monitoring of stations nationwide.

"Circumstances demand we make adjustments by increasing funding to enhance rail safety and monitoring on commuter rail transit and screening who gets on Amtrak passenger trains, so that we can provide a greater level of security to the public," the New York Democrat said at a news conference.

U.S. officials last week said evidence found after the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan indicated the al Qaeda leader or his associates had engaged in discussions or planning for a possible attack on a train inside the United States on September 11, 2011.

Schumer, citing U.S. intelligence analysts, said attacks were also considered on Christmas and New Year's Day and following the president's State of the Union address.

He called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to expand the Secure Flight monitoring program, which cross-checks air travelers with the terror watch list in an attempt to prevent anyone on the "no-fly list" from boarding, for use on Amtrak.

Such a procedure would create an Amtrak "no-ride list" to keep suspected terrorists off the U.S. rail system, he said.

What a fucking moron. Hasn't he ever seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?

Now, in fairness, Paul Newman and Robert Redford DID get on that train, not just put a bunch of dynamite on the tracks. But do you think a "no-ride" list would have stopped that train robbery? Hardly. And it wouldn't stop a terrorist from putting a piece of C4 explosive on a train track either. So what purpose exactly does Chuckie Cheese think a "no-ride list" would serve?

It's enough to drive a person mad. I have family in North Carolina, and I'm running out of ways to get there. I don't like to do a 10-hour drive alone in a car with eighty thousand miles on it. I don't like the idea of flying in a tin box piloted by someone who gets paid less than an assistant manager at Abercrombie & Fitch. Now if Chuck Schumer has his way we'll go through the same pointless bullshit at Penn Station that we do at the airports. So what's left? Greyhound buses?

And yet, I'm sure there are people out there, the same frothing morons out in God's country who have lived the last ten years terrified that Muslim terrorists are going to blow up the local Hardee's while they're in there enjoying a Monster Thickburger and a caramel crunch hand-scooped ice cream shake, who are going to be shown on the evening news saying, "Well, if it makes us safer....".

So what's next? Backscatter scans in order to pick up a bottle of White Citrus lotion at Bath and Body Works at the mall? Checkpoints at state borders on highways? Strip searches in order to pick up a venti skim vanilla latte at Starbucks at the Molly Pitcher Service Area? How far are we going to take this? And for God's sake, why is a fucking Democrat advocating this?

What Glenn Greenwald said:

So Al Qaeda breathes the word "trains" and Schumer jumps and demands the creation of a massive, expensive and oppressive new Security State program to keep thousands and thousands of people off trains.  The "no-fly" list has been nothing short of a Kafkaesque disaster: with thousands of people secretly placed on it without any explanation or real recourse, oftentimes causing them to be stranded in faraway places and unable to return home.

To replicate that for trains -- all because some documents mentioned them among thousands of other ideas Al Qaeda has undoubtedly considered over the years -- is hysteria and ludicrous over-reaction of the highest order. Trains can obviously be attacked without boarding them (indeed, these documents apparently discussed tampering with the rails, which wouldn't require boarding the trains at all). And if there's a "no-ride" list for Amtrak, why not for subways and buses, too? If Al Qaeda is found to have discussed targeting restaurants, will we have a no-eat list? If Al Qaeda is found to have discussed targeting large intersections or landmarks, will we have a no-walk list? How about a no-shop list in response to the targeting of malls?

But this, more or less, encapsulates the U.S. response to Terrorism since 9/11: the minute Al Qaeda utters a peep about anything, the political class collectively jumps to restrict our freedoms, empower the Government, and bankrupt ourselves in self-destructive pursuit of the ultimate illusion: Absolute Security. Al Qaeda has caused us to do more harm to ourselves than it could have ever dreamed of imposing on its own. And even in death, Osama bin Laden continues to serve as the pretext for all of this.

Word.

Labels: assholes, Chuck Schumer, just another outrage, security theatre, Teh Stoopid, wussy-ass Democrats

This is what happens when you think that "appeasing" psychopaths like James O'Keefe is the way to get him to stop:

Of course, the real story is never what it seems with O'Keefe. From the selectively edited Acorn videos to his abortive efforts to "take down" Senator Mary Landrieu (Democrat, Lousiana), which resulted in criminal charges, to his sophomoric attempts to get a CNN reporter in a room with him and a variety of sex toys, the mainstream media has had plenty of warning about his love of "truthiness" and disregard for actual facts. And, as with most of O'Keefe's videos to date, releasing selectively edited, embed-friendly clips got him exactly the coverage (and notches on his Flipcam) that he wanted – even as the full footage showed that almost everything he claimed to have discovered was untrue.

In the end, though, it wasn't the "liberal" media that jumped to NPR's defence, or even the mainstream media that O'Keefe and his followers decry as biased. It was Glenn Beck's conservative site, the Blaze, that thoroughly debunked the videos long after the mainstream media had breathlessly and largely uncritically reported their existence with the exact framing O'Keefe intended: NPR caught on tape defaming conservatives! Given the maelstrom of the 24-hour cable and internet news cycle, and in the midst of a pitched battle over Republican budget cuts, NPR's board waved the white flag and offered up its sacrificial CEO to the outstretched claws of the partisan attack machine.

Of course, after the videos have been debunked, NPR remembered to do the due diligence it should have done before and decided the videos were "inappropriately edited". Unlike former agriculture department employee Shirley Sherrod, who was fired in haste by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and later got an apology after her misleadingly edited video was debunked, there's not likely to be much absolution for either of the hastily-booted NPR executives. Despite some navel-gazing by reporters who shouldn't have swallowed anything from O'Keefe without a massive grain of salt to accompany it, the sad truth is that O'Keefe's reputation hardly had further to fall when they bought his story once again.

So, for all the evidence that should lead to the contrary, the great likelihood is that O'Keefe's headline-baiting videos will continue to claim victims. And reporters and editors will vow to learn, and then be unable to resist a good, truthy story – even if it's not the actual, you know, truth. After all, they can always run a correction – without losing their jobs.

And this is what happens when we run from a fight where we know we are right. Wingnuts are more married to their ideology than they are to their spouses -- and nothing, not even actual truth right in front of their eyes, will sway them. The media have become lazy cost-cutters doing whatever they have to in order to emulate Fox News (*cough* HuffPo *cough*). Facts don't matter. "Balance" means giving the same credence to demonstrable fact on the one hand, and utter horseshit pulled out of someone's ass on the other. It's disgraceful that it was a web site owned by Glenn Beck, of all people, to shed light on James O'Keefe's NPR shenanigans. Because NPR was too fucking lazy, or too fucking genteel, to do its own due diligence.

Ask President John Kerry what happens when you let lies go unanswered. Or President Al Gore.

Labels: NPR, spinelessness, wussy-ass Democrats

When the hell are the Democrats going to start hammering in "Deficit-Exploding Tax Cuts" or "Budget-Busting Tax Cuts" the way the Republicans are hammering "Job-Killing Health Care Bill" (and everything else, despite the fact that however meager it is, and however low-paid, there is actually some job growth going on in the private sector, which is more than could be said about the Bush Administration, which left us this mess)?

Yes, I know, the answer is "When hell freezes over", but when the Republicans are this ripe for the picking, a party with the political savvy of your average high school student council president would know to make hay of this:

U.S. House Republicans, who swept into power promising to rein in the federal deficit, have proposed policies in their first week that would make the shortfall worse.

Moves to repeal President Barack Obama’s health-care law and promises to extend Bush-era tax cuts and offer other breaks would add more than $1 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, based on reports from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation.

In one of their first votes, Republicans changed anti- deficit rules to allow for tax cuts that aren’t paid for by savings elsewhere in the budget. New spending would have to be offset with cuts elsewhere, though tax increases to fund new programs would be prohibited.

“They are willing to increase the deficit if it comes as a result of things they want to do, specifically tax cuts,” said Stan Collender, a former congressional budget aide and now managing director of Qorvis Communications in Washington. “It’s a little disingenuous at best.”

The new Republican exemptions to the so-called pay-go budget rules will be “dead on arrival in the Senate,” Senator Charles Schumer a New York Democrat, told reporters yesterday.

Extending tax cuts for the highest-income Americans for just two years, as Congress did last month, will cost about $81.5 billion, according to a December report by the Joint Committee on Taxation. Extending lower rates on most capital gains and dividends will cost $53.1 billion over two years. A reduced estate tax rate will cost $68.1 billion. Over a period of 10 years, the cuts would add more than $1 trillion to the deficit, combined with a repeal of the health-care law.

The Republican mantle of "deficit hawks" simply does not hold up to scrutiny. Here is a chart showing the relationship of revenue to spending under administrations from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush:


(A larger version of this chart, and an analysis of the U.S. national debt over this time, can be found here.)

Republicans have succeeded in convincing Idiot America that the deficits we now face are caused solely by the stimulus and by the health care reform law, not by the fact that George W. Bush started two wars and instead of paying for them, told people to go shopping and gave huge tax cuts to "the haves and the have mores", silencing Idiot America with a few hundred extra bucks in their pockets.

The Republicans' triumphant reign over the House of Representative is off to as rocky a start as George W. Bush's was. If you recall, until the 9/11 attacks saved his bacon, the story of Bush II: Electric Bugaloo, was one of continuing controversy over the Florida recount, the U.S. spy plane that was taken in China, and when a military submarine containing moneybag Bush campaign donors, one of whom may have been at the controls, struck a Japanese fishing vessel. House Republicans may be marching in lockstep to the "job-killing' talking point, and they may believe that THEIR members don't have to adhere to House rules, but anyone who still thinks that this nation hasnt' just handed the keys to the legislative equivalent of an unrepentant angry drunk should wake the hell up.

Labels: deficits, hypocrisy, It's OK if You're a Republican, wussy-ass Democrats

I'm on short sleep rations these days because of a timetable that must be met, and I can't afford to expend any energy talking about fecklessness, dicklessness, betrayal, the growing plutocracy, and the handing of America over to the corporatists today. So I'll let others do it.

Draftglass: "America is currently too fucking stupid, spoiled and hateful to make good, long-term decisions." (You MUST read this one.)


Ezra Klein, who used to be a cute progressive kid blogging at Pandagon, has joined the Borg.

Digby, as usual, says what I lack the time or discipline to say.

Skippy notes that for people like our own jurassicpork, the 13 month extension doesn't include any benefits for those who have already exhausted all tiers of unemployment. If you are about to become a casualty of the Stuff the Rich Nation, you will have a year and a half to find another job for when these rich people who have had eight years of these tax cuts and have not created jobs, decide to create some (despite the fact that no one can afford anything they make). If you are already one, not one person in our government other than the outgoing Congressman from Florida's eighth district and Sen. Bernie Sanders gives a shit about you.

Michael Stickings wonders whether "something is better than nothing" is our new standard of achievement.

Greg Sargent explains why we're angry.

E.D. Kain, the resident conservative over at Balloon Juice, thinks it was a pretty good deal on a page which features an ad by the Progressive Change Committee, about which Angry Black Lady has some interesting and cogent observations.

And finally:

Yesterday the sad news came across that it seems Elizabeth Edwards is reaching the end of her cancer journey.

Every day, for 8, 10, 12, and sometimes more hours, I'm steeped in the conduct of cancer trials. For me it's about how to collect data, and once the data collection mechanism is done, I'm pretty much done until they either need a system change or there's a problem. In the latter case, I may have to take a cursory look at actual data. When I see what we call "The death form" completed, it means that an actual person that someone cared about has succumbed. When I see someone with liver cancer who's still alive after six, eight, twelve cycles of treatment, it's a sign of hope. That's what drives home for me that what I do, as removed from actual patients as it is, is about hope -- not the hope that's based on blind faith, but hope for small victories like time measured in days and months, if not years.

Yes, it's appalling that a half-century into serious cancer research we are still all about cut, irradiate, and poison. But for now that's what we've got. And if it gets someone through to his daughter's wedding, his son's graduation, just one more summer of watching the sun set over a Caribbean beach, it's a victory, however small. And for those who get that time, it FEELS like a victory, in the way getting relief for the hundreds of thousands of new unemployed in return for stuffing the pockets of the wealthy doesn't.

In 2007 and 2008, John and Elizabeth Edwards were the only ones on the campaign trail talking about the America in which people now find themselves -- people who thought it would never happen to them. Back then the rumblings of economic collapse were only starting. And those who had succumbed to trickle-down economics over the last thirty years were still forgotten.

In 2008 August 2007 I offered to hold a fundraiser for the campaign at my house. You have to realize that my house is a money pit -- a 1950's POS cape in which nothing had been updated since 1975. We've been updating very slowly, mostly on the outside where it shows. My living room has the same ugly red carpet it did when we moved in. My kitchen is still a work in progress three years after I started refacing the cabinets. Our basement family room still had ugly dark paneling and ugly rust-colored carpet.

Over fifty people showed up to schmooze with Elizabeth Edwards for a couple of hours. She was as kind and gracious in person as she seemed on television and that my house was not ready for prime time didn't seem to matter. When she left to go to a book signing, I said "This is the coolest thing I have ever done."

Of course we all know what happened next, and as more came out about exactly what Elizabeth knew even as she was taking donations for a campaign that we knew even then would go nowhere, and that would have been an utter disaster had it succeeded in making it through the primaries, I found myself utterly disgusted with her. She KNEW, and yet she carried on as if she and John were the couple we all thought they were. She continued to take the donations even as she must have known in her heart it was for naught. She took advantage of me, my friends, my neighbors, and the others who came and paid over a hundred dollars to schmooze with Elizabeth Edwards.

Later on, we read in the book written by those loathsome hacks John Heilemann and Mark Halperin that she was a harridan to John Edwards' staff, that she would get hysterical, that she was impossible.

Wouldn't you be? And if you were faced with a recurrence of breast cancer in the middle of a presidential campaign and found out that your husband had thrown away not just your marriage, but a cause you both had supposedly believed in -- for a fling with an aging New York party girl who was the inspiration for a character in a 1980's Jay McInerney novel? Wouldn't you try to Act As If everything was normal?

In the Showtime series The Big C, the protagonist played by Laura Linney explains her unwillingness to tell her family about her Stage IV cancer diagnosis, "I just wanted a little more time where it's not about me being sick." I think that's what motivated Elizabeth Edwards too -- that and kicking the can of deciding what to do down the road -- putting it off because it's just too painful to deal with now.

I still feel angry at how we were sold a bill of goods about John Edwards, but I do understand why she did it. I understand why she thought that the bigass North Carolina house that he built her would somehow compensate for SOMETHING. I understand why she felt the need, after probably hundreds of house fundraisers like mine, to get out into the media and punishing her no-good dog of a husband for what he squandered.

But at this point, all that is behind us. What we need to keep in mind about Elizabeth Edwards is how she stayed out there, looking marvelous for a long time, trying mightily to sound the alarm about health care in this country. While she was out in public, she was a living rebuke to the "I Got Mine and Fuck You" doctrine -- someone with pots of money who still remembered that there are people out there dying because their insurance will not cover the cancer treatments that allowed her to stay out there fighting long after others with recurrent breast cancer have succumbed.

I wish Elizabeth Edwards a peaceful passing with no pain. I wish her children well. I thank her for what she tried to do to call attention to the inequities in our health care system.

And I hope that the image of this brave woman's last battle tortures John Edwards every single fucking day of the rest of his life.

UPDATE: Elizabeth Edwards died this morning at the age of 61.

Labels: capitulation, Elizabeth Edwards, taxes, unemployment, wussy-ass Democrats

Come on, admit it. The fact that Senate Democrats are caving to Republican demands that the top 1% keep their tax cuts doesn't even make you shriek with frustration anymore. I don't know about you, but I shrugged my shoulders when I read this:

White House officials and Congressional Republicans said Sunday they were closing in on a deal to temporarily continue the Bush-era tax cuts at all income levels, while bitterly frustrated Democratic Congressional leaders began exploring whether they would have the votes for such a package.

[snip]

Senior Democrats on Sunday said that they were resigned to defeat in the highly charged tax debate, and they voiced dismay.

“We’re moving in that direction,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat said dejectedly when Bob Schieffer, host of “Face the Nation” on CBS, asked him if the 2001 and 2003 tax rates would be extended even for the wealthy. “And we’re only moving there against my judgment,” Mr. Durbin added.

In meetings with administration officials after the Senate votes, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and many other House and Senate Democrats voiced deep unhappiness at the prospect of extending all the tax cuts and also expressed their belief that the White House did not appear to be getting enough for such a big concession, officials said.

What makes Nancy Pelosi think that this president even WANTS anything else? At this point, it's pretty clear that lip service to working Americans is all this guy does, while he amasses chits with Wall Street to be cashed in for a fat Wall Street paycheck when he leaves office. What's hilarious is that in return for a seven-figure windfall for Rush Limbaugh, Republicans "probably" would vote to extend unemployment benefits.

No guarantees.

Does anyone actually believe that an extension of unemployment benefits will be part of the final package?

Meanwhile, Wall Street multimillionaires are so concerned that they might have to buy one less Maserati that they're planning to move bonuses into 2010:

Worried that lawmakers will allow taxes to rise for the wealthiest Americans beginning next year, financial firms are discussing whether to move up their bonus payouts from next year to this month.

At stake is a portion of the hefty annual payouts that are a familiar part of the compensation culture on Wall Street, as well as a juicy target of popular anger. If Congress does not extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the highest income levels, a typical worker who earns a $1 million bonus would pay $40,000 to $50,000 more in taxes next year than this year, depending on base salary.

Goldman Sachs is one of the companies discussing how to time bonus season, according to three people who have been briefed on the discussions. Pay consultants who work with major Wall Street companies say that just about every other large bank has also considered such a move in recent weeks.

With tax politics in Washington unpredictable, bank executives have spent months sketching out several options for their bonus plans, including the possibility of an earlier payout. Lawmakers have been trading accusations across a partisan divide, but after this weekend, it appears likely that a compromise will extend the tax cuts for all income levels.

Even so, the banks’ discussions about bonus timing underscore how focused the industry is on protecting every dollar of pay.

Isn't is nice that Goldman Sachs and other banks are so concerned with protecting every single little dollar of their employees' pay, while other industries are still hemorrhaging jobs? Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy that the people who got us into this economic mess, the people WE THE TAXPAYER bailed out are going to have their bonuses protected come hell or high water while the rest of us are going to work every day wondering if today is the day we're going to get called in to find out we don't have a job anymore?

The fix was in from the beginning under the previous president, as Krugman notes today. Bush was an instant-gratification kind of guy who has always been able to evade any kind of responsibility:

Back in 2001, former President George W. Bush pulled a fast one. He wanted to enact an irresponsible tax cut, largely for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans. But there were Senate rules in place designed to prevent that kind of irresponsibility. So Mr. Bush evaded the rules by making the tax cut temporary, with the whole thing scheduled to expire on the last day of 2010.

The plan, of course, was to come back later and make the thing permanent, never mind the impact on the deficit. But that never happened. And so here we are, with 2010 almost over and nothing resolved.

[snip]

Bear in mind that Republicans want to make those tax cuts permanent. They might agree to a two- or three-year extension — but only because they believe that this would set up the conditions for a permanent extension later. And they may well be right: if tax-cut blackmail works now, why shouldn’t it work again later?

America, however, cannot afford to make those cuts permanent. We’re talking about almost $4 trillion in lost revenue just over the next decade; over the next 75 years, the revenue loss would be more than three times the entire projected Social Security shortfall. So giving in to Republican demands would mean risking a major fiscal crisis — a crisis that could be resolved only by making savage cuts in federal spending.

And we’re not talking about government programs nobody cares about: the only way to cut spending enough to pay for the Bush tax cuts in the long run would be to dismantle large parts of Social Security and Medicare.

Yes, but this is what Americans WANT, isn't it? They really truly care about deficits to the exclusion of all else, right? They WANT the wealthiest one percent to have big tax cuts continued because Rich People Create Jobs™, right?

Wrong:

According to a new CBS News poll, however, Boehner is off-base in his claim that Americans "want us to stop all the looming tax hikes."

The poll finds that 53 percent of Americans want the Bush-era tax cuts extended only for households earning less than $250,000 per year. That roughly matches the proposal put forth by the White House, which wants to extend the cuts only for incomes less than $250,000 for families and $200,000 for individuals.

Just 26 percent of Americans say they support extending the cuts for all Americans, even those earning above the $250,000 level, which is the GOP proposal.

Doesn't that make you feel great about America? And doesn't that just INSPIRE you to continue to elect the kind of people who allow this to happen?

Labels: despair, Greedy Republican Bastards, wussy-ass Democrats