Good news?

The debate to raise the federal government's debt ceiling has exposed, or shone a spotlight on what was already obvious, namely, the incompetence and ideological intransigence of Democrats, Republicans and the President. No one looks good, and the bad of it is that we the people are the ones suffering; these jerks get to keep their jobs – for now, at least. One idea that died quicker than ethics do in Washington was a grand bargain.


After all, who really wants a deal struck by one of the most inept bargainers-in-chief ever to live in the White House and a Republican leadership trapped by the ideological intransigence of right-wing extremists?

Obama looks awful. He would have a difficult time convincing a baseball player to spit. The Republican dog is wagged by the right-wing tail.

We don’t need a grand bargain — not now, or six months from now, or ever. What we need are responsible politicians who understand a little bit about economics and who are willing to work in the public interest day after day, year after year. Even a short-term debt-ceiling reprieve that kicks the can down the road would be preferable to an ill-advised grand bargain that locks in harmful spending cuts for a decade.

Obama has caved in to the right wing. The Republican party has caved in to the right wing. So we have the nation's politics dominated by a hundred right wing nuts who actually believe that it is better to have the nation lose its credit rating than to compromise.

any spectacle that sees McConnell and Reid emerge as the heroes is a sorry one, indeed. 

Indeed. Those two have to be some of the most mediocre politicians in modern US history. Where is Roman Hukstra when we need him?

it’s important to have no illusions going into an election year. Obama, as noted, has confirmed his reputation for ineptitude. Voters may choose to return him to office, but they will have to adjust their expectations downward.

What a disappointment, too. So much promise, so much hope, and so little done.

House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, meanwhile, can continue their internecine warfare, and congressional Republicans can bicker their way out of majority control of the House.

That used to seem exciting, but what would be the alternative? Democrats in control? They're as bad.

It would be sad if the Republicans, who have shown themselves willing to sacrifice the welfare of the American people in order to sabotage the Obama presidency, succeeded in their plan.

They will do everything to sabotage Obama, including screwing the country, arrogant in their belief they will get into power and fix things.

But Obama, who suffers from the hubris of thinking always he’s the smartest guy in the room, walked right into their trap in accepting the debt-ceiling debate on their terms instead of exercising leadership and keeping the focus on unemployment.

His idea of leadership is to wait, wait some more, and see what happens.

It would be a long shot for Bloomberg or anyone else to step up as a third-party candidate and a much longer shot for such a candidate to capture the White House. It’s never happened since our two-party system became the norm, but then the U.S. has never defaulted before, either. 

Bloomberg? I just don't see him appealing to enough voters. I think he's arrogant, self-centered, aloof, and convinced he is about as smart and effective a leader as is possible. But, hey, who knows?

It depends in the end on how severe the political backlash to this debacle will be. At present, regardless of the actual outcome of this nauseating debate, it looks like the public frustration and disgust with Washington that has been simmering for some years is ready to boil over.

It would be nice if there was some public anger, but it ain't gonna happen.

GOP faces voter ire

In central Florida, a Congressional town meeting erupted into near chaos on Tuesday as attendees accused a Republican lawmaker of trying to dismantle Medicare while providing tax cuts to corporations and affluent Americans. At roughly the same time in Wisconsin, Representative Paul D. Ryan, the architect of the Republican budget proposal, faced a packed town meeting, occasional boos and a skeptical audience as he tried to lay out his party’s rationale for overhauling the health insurance program for retirees. After 10 days of trying to sell constituents on their plan to overhaul Medicare, House Republicans in multiple districts appear to be increasingly on the defensive, facing worried and angry questions from voters and a barrage of new attacks from Democrats and their allies. The proposed new approach to Medicare — a centerpiece of a budget that Republican leaders have hailed as a courageous effort to address the nation’s long-term fiscal problems — has been a constant topic at town-hall-style sessions and other public gatherings during a two-week Congressional recess that provided the first chance for lawmakers to gauge reaction to the plan.

Predictable, and welcome, results.

On the other hand ...

Budget antics more theater than reality show. As if it were difficult to predict, the Republican radicals have a bigger bark than bit. Hours after taking control of the House of Representatives, Republican lawmakers were already rolling back pledges to slash spending -- a rollback that may actually be the best thing they can do for the economy. It's very different to govern than it is to campaign. The wonder is that people are stupid enough to believe the lies that politicians spew during political campaigns: change, leaner government, no earmarks, lower taxes, bipartisanship. Hooey.


I did see a bozo that is a new Represenative from Florida, Allen West, last night on the LawrenceO'Donnell show, The Last Word. West, whom LO quoted making disparaging and acrimonious remarks about the President, criticized President Obama for flying into Afghanistan in a darkened Air Force One. West believes that troops deserve bold leadership, and flying in a darkened airplane is not bold leadership. This minnow is a wingnut, a whacko, an amazing example of an idiot rising above his level of competency by appealing to people's baser instincts. He's a Tea Bagger, to boot. Yet when LO pressed him on details of his budget cutting proposals, this newly-sworn-in representative sounded as if he'd been in politics a long time. He is a retired military, a colonel, or something. Bozo.

More a party hack than revolutionary

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has become a hero in the Republican Party because he talks a blunt message about state government deficits.

He has scored early, and easy, points by showing a combative style and an unwillingness to let things continue as they have been. Well enough.

Christie, who sends his own children to Catholic parochial schools and like any good Republican supports school vouchers, clearly has it in for public schools.

He has been combative with teachers, and has seized on the parochial (pun intended) view of civil servants as overpaid, underworked, undeserving louts.


The Christie view, again solidly Republican, is that public employees have accrued too many benefits and enjoy financial security superior to those in the private sector — the ones who pay their salaries! This ignores a key point: Public employees also pay taxes. It also ignores the fact that when the economy was booming and private-sector employees were getting raises, bonuses and perks well beyond what teachers and police and firemen were getting, these same put-upon taxpayers didn’t hesitate to look down their noses at the “losers” who opted for the stability of government employment.

Those who can, do; those who can't teach is a favourite refrain of the corporate crowd. Heard it many times.

It’s inevitable that some of the benefits negotiated over the years by public-service unions in New Jersey, California and other states will have to be rolled back, and governments and unions will have to negotiate in good faith to that end. But it should be equally certain that state-level deficit problems won’t be solved by spending cuts alone. Voters will not let public services be cut to the bone: Even the well-to-do cannot isolate themselves completely from inadequate fire and police protection, crumbling infrastructure and dysfunctional government services.

Instead of castigating and insulting, and, yes, lambasting public employees, he and his ilk might start a dialogue and stop with the attacks and lectures. But the combative style is a calculated political ploy.


The most reasonable solution would be for the federal government to provide loans to tide over state governments until the economy recovers and restores state revenues. But while it was all right for Washington to rescue Wall Street bonuses, it seems to be politically anathema to provide the same support for such minor goods as public safety and our children’s education. Republican king-maker Rush Limbaugh has anointed Christie as “gutsy,” and numerous Web sites celebrate the “Christie Revolution” as a harbinger of America’s future. But Christie, appointed U.S. attorney in New Jersey in 2001 on the basis of his successful fundraising for the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign despite a lack of experience in criminal law, appears to be nothing more than the blunt-speaking Jersey version of a party hack.

This article appeared in MarketWatch. To say that that surpirses me does not begin to express how much it indeed surprised me.

Dr. No's Yes roils GOP

Looks funky with that beard.s the Senator from Oklahoma going counter-culture?

Kamikaze Capitalism: GOP out to destroy

I am not sure, at all, who this person is, but he has a column today in Marketwatch.com with this title.


Yes, Sen. McConnell, the drama’s unfolding, powered by your vow that the GOP’s “No. 1 priority” is destroying the Obama presidency. Not creating jobs … not economic recovery … not even national security.

Where will we be in twelve months? Eighteen?

Get it? America’s losing. And we better reinvent our Kamikaze Capitalism soon. Because the New Beijing Capitalism is winning the 21st century economic race, and we’re helping them beat us.

It doesn't take much imagination or perspicacity to see that the "Western" capitalist model is damaged. The right wing's response is to prescribe more of the same failed policies, to denigrate their opponents as unAmerican, America-haters or socialists, and promise bright days ahead for those that believe.

Friedman’s Disaster Capitalism peaked under Bush, adding trillions of new debt to pay for two costly wars, huge tax cuts and an increasingly privatized government. Today even Reagan’s Budget Director David Stockman warns “his GOP has destroyed the American economy.” Yet, even as GOP bullies keep adding insult to injury telling the world that their No. 1 goal is destroying Obama’s presidency, the gutless Dems continue talking compromise, failing by refusing to stand on principle and fight dirty on GOP turf, using their weapons against them, in a ruthless political war.

President Obama will have to make a choice in about four months, and no matter how many times he calls for bipartisanship, it will be a choice between caving in to the Republicans, or fighting them head-on.

Boehner’s Army

John Heilemann, who co-wrote Game change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the race of a lifetime with Mark Halperin, a book that created quite a stir earlier this year, writes a political column for New York magazine. This one is subtitled The Republican revolutionaries have problems with authority—and that may provide Obama an opening.

John Boehner: “We must remember, it’s the president who sets the agenda for our government,” he said. And though two days later he suggested that Barack Obama was in “denial” about the meaning of the midterms, Boehner offered that he and Obama “get along well,” that maybe they could hold a Merlot Meeting (rather than a Slurpee Summit). “I don’t want gridlock,” he insisted. “I don’t want squabbling.” Mitch McConnell would never go that far, for fear that his pants would catch on fire.


But McConnell's stated primary goal is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.

That 1994 is much on the minds of Boehner and McConnell comes as no surprise—since for any politically sentient being, the analogy is inescapable. Most often, of course, the parallels are drawn to illustrate the challenge that Obama faces: Can he pull a Bill Clinton, tacking back to the center, triangulating his way to reelection? Yet as the two maximum Republicans are evidently aware, the historical antecedent raises an equally urgent question for the GOP: Can Boehner and McConnell avoid the sort of grievous errors that their forebears made, which opened the door to Clinton’s revival—and yet might do the same for Obama?

It's a big question. After his election, Team Obama seemed poised not quite invincible as much as on a winning streak, yet even with legislative accomplishments, it mired down in the politics of an angry opposition and a lost spin war. Now the President seems to be floundering, to be back on his heels. It remains to be seen how things will play out.

Comparatively speaking, Boehner and McConnell are peas in the proverbial pod. Both are Establishmentarians to their core, who see politics and their role in promoting Republicanism in similar terms.  They are not firebrands or visionaries, but they are bone-deep partisans. For the past two years, they have demonstrated enormous discipline and skill in working side by side in the exercise of obstructionism. And for the next two, they will both be afflicted with the same headache: managing the tensions not between their caucuses but within them, as each is simultaneously energized and roiled by the infusion of a new crop of members more populist and hard-line than the guys who ostensibly command them.

Both have to appear to be mindful of the tea party rhetoric, Boehner more so.

It’s this cadre to which Boehner was catering last week when he stated flatly that “we are going to repeal Obamacare”—an obvious impossibility given the remaining, if reduced, Democratic majority in the upper chamber and the president’s veto pen. This kind of talk will only get Boehner so far with the tea-partyers, however. His allegiance to their cause will be tested early, thanks to Michele Bachmann, who announced that she intends to seek a post in her party’s leadership: that of GOP-conference chair. Leadership fights are never pretty, but this one may be especially charged, as the hot-eyed lady from Minnesota (and Tea Party Caucus founder) campaigns among her colleagues on the grounds that the new majority needs a genuine “constitutional conservative” in its top ranks—an argument containing the implicit suggestion that Boehner does not qualify as one.

There are few developments that would please me more than to see Bachmann get a leadership position in the Republican caucus. That wingnut would alienate more moderates than just about anyone else, whilst simultaneously throwing red meat to her extreme constituency.

the pressure on McConnell from his party’s anti-Establishment flank may in some ways be greater than that on Boehner—because of the presence of Jim DeMint. More than anyone, the junior senator from South Carolina is the animating spirit of the tea party. Having broken with long-standing tradition and encouraged primary challenges this year to sitting members of his own party, he has already made clear that he has no intention of backing away from his crusade for ideological purity.

How luck y can the Democrats get? Enforced ideological purity in the Republican party gives the President a chasm wide enough to drive the proverbial truck through the middle. Especially if the left insists on its own ideological purity.

In the likely event that a stalemate arises between the White House and Republicans over the budget, many tea-partyers are already champing at the bit for a government shutdown; but Boehner and McConnell, recalling how well that worked out for Gingrich and Dole, will be loath to let it happen.

Intra-party bickering; too bad we won't get to see it play out in all its gory glory.

In all of this, Obama will find opportunities to exploit. If he and his team handle it adroitly, they stand a chance of forcing the Republican leaders into a series of devil’s choices between, on the one hand, making compromises that exacerbate intra-party tensions and, on the other, satisfying the appetites of the ascendant wing of the GOP by coming across as ideological extremists to the vast American middle. The degree of adroitness required will be enormous, to be sure. Unlike Clinton, Obama will not be blessed with a foe as prone to massive overreach—and to indiscipline, messianism, and just plain silliness—as Gingrich was in 1995. The president will need to be clever, flexible, patient, and tough in roughly equal measure.

O, but he well might: the teabags will push the extreme, and will not be silent if denied. Can't wait to see the first firebrand speech Rand Paul makes.

Let 'em do the math

Let the spending cuts begin.

I am looking forward to seeing what the Republicans propose, other than repealing the health care law.

That was, after all, what Republicans campaigned on. Ohio's John Boehner, soon to be House speaker, promised "a new approach that hasn't been tried before in Washington—by either party. It starts with cutting spending instead of increasing it." Retiring Sen. Evan Bayh (D., Ind.) says Democrats should back a freeze on federal hiring and pay. Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) says, "We're going to be giving on spending."

Now he says that?

But as Republican spending cutters move from wooing voters to legislating, they confront two realities: Cutting government spending in general is popular; specific, substantial spending cuts are not. And bringing down the deficit by spending cuts alone, particularly cuts in annually appropriated domestic spending, is, well, arithmetically challenging.

Opposites

Two different stories on opposite pages in today's Wall Street Journal tell two different, indeed opposite, stories.

After Orszag, Red Ink and Hard Choices: The OMB director is resigning, and the deficit and national debt are being discussed in this story on page A4.

Mr. Orszag's decision to resign as director of the Office of Management and Budget comes as the Obama administration—and the Democratic Party—begin to confront disagreements between those who believe near-term deficit reduction poses too much risk to the fragile economic recovery and those, such as Mr. Orszag, who say the deficit itself may be a more profound economic threat. Behind that economic argument is a political one: The steps that might be taken to reduce red ink—such as tax increases or spending cuts to Medicare and other popular programs—will be politically perilous, especially given the magnitude needed to make any real impact.

The headline and subheading of a story on page A5 are: States Face New Pinch as Stimulus Ebbs. Tax Receipts Aren't Rebounding Quickly Enough to Offset Declining Federal Aid; Push for Additional Medicaid Help Stalls

States have long known stimulus funds sent their way early in the recession would taper off in the first half of 2011. But many hoped a rebound in tax receipts would close the gap.

Who knows better?

Lawmakers from both parties, including the top two House Republicans, are pressing in a vote Thursday to add $485 million to the defense budget for a fighter-jet engine that the Pentagon says it doesn't want. The White House and Defense Secretary Robert Gates say the backup engine for the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter is a waste of money that will deplete funds for military priorities.

Provincial concerns cloaked in national defense rhetoric show that "It's another classic example of politics being local," said Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who opposes the engine spending. Mr. Flake said supporting the spending undermines Republicans' description of themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility. "If we can't rein in this type of spending now, how are we going to do it later?" Mr. Flake asked.

Ain't.