;)
The Commentariat -- Nov. 28, 2012
NEW. Bryon Tau of Politico: "President Barack Obama will host Mitt Romney at the White House on Thursday for their first meeting since the election. 'Romney will have a private lunch at the White House with President Obama in the Private Dining Room,' White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement."
Jake Sherman of Politico: "After a day of meetings closed to the public, the House Republican Steering Committee announced an all-male slate of committee chairs.... The chairs for the House Ethics Committee and House Administration Committee have yet to be chosen.... Rep. Paul Ryan was the only lawmaker to obtain a waiver to bypass House GOP rules to remain as a chairman for a fourth term. He will lead the Budget Committee again. House Democrats are likely to have five women as ranking members committees." CW: make that all white men. I'm not sure, but I think that's all Christian white men. Hallelujah, brothers. You look just like America. If about 4/5ths of us would self-deport.
Paul Kane of the Washington Post: "For a second straight day Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) opened the chamber by engaging in a nearly hour-long feud over Reid's emerging proposal to eliminate some filibusters.... Reid's proposal, which he has only sketched out briefly in public, would eliminate the filibuster vote that is needed to formally begin debate on legislation. He would allow for a final filibuster vote, thus making the chamber run more efficiently.... A still-undefined portion of his proposal would mandate that if legislation does not get the required 60 votes to end filibusters, the 40-something senators in the minority would have to maintain a 'talking filibuster' akin to the version of the 1939 classic 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.'" ...
... Greg Sargent: "... what really matters is that Reid stepped way out on a limb in the direction of exercising that nuclear option"; that is, changing the rules by majority vote. "Reid lambasted McConnell for a newly unearthed quote from 2005 in which McConnell endorsed -- in principle -- the [nuclear option].... What happened today is that Reid, in effect, put his finger on the nuke button. It's hard to see how he pulls back now." ...
... CW: Remember that Reid opposed filibuster reform in 2010, perhaps because he believed the convention wisdom that Democrats would lose their Senate majority in 2012. What a difference an election makes. Thank you, Sen. Patty Murray. ...
... Jonathan Bernstein in the Washington Post: "Mitch McConnell has a theory of why there are so many cloture petitions these days. It's ... that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has been using obscure procedures to deny Republicans the right to offer amendments, leaving them no option other than to avail themselves of the right to filibuster.... Republicans do have some legitimate complaints about amendments. But that has nothing to do with their 1993 decision to force cloture votes on all major issues, or the 2009 decision to shatter Senate norms and insist on a full 60-vote Senate." ...
... Harry Reid is really showing some spine -- finally. Seung Min Kim of Politico: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid laid down a firm marker Tuesday: raising the debt ceiling has to be part of a deal on the fiscal cliff." ...
... More Good News from Sargent: "I'm told that representatives of major unions and progressive groups met privately this morning with senior Obama administration officials at the White House -- and were pleased with what they heard.... One person at the meeting ... came away convinced that the White House would ultimately prove willing to go over the fiscal cliff if necessary.... White House officials also signaled in the meeting that they are going to insist that Republicans agree to resolve the need to raise the debt ceiling as part of the fiscal talks -- and won't abide a separate fight over it...." ...
... On the Other Hand ... Kate Madison sends this horrible news from Robert Reich: "... leading those negotiations for the White House is outgoing Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner." CW: Reich has insider knowledge of Geithner, and -- like me with my outsider knowledge -- Reich has a low opinion of Wall Street's Man in Washington. Quelle surprise! Looks like the post-election Obama is just like pre-election Obama. ...
... More Bad News. Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "Ladies and gentlemen, coming soon to your city or town (if they have not been there already, and maybe even if they have) are the latest odd couple of politics: the 67-year-old Democratic straight man, Erskine B. Bowles of Charlotte, N.C., and his corny 81-year-old, 6-foot-7 Republican sidekick, Alan K. Simpson of Cody, Wyo." CW: besides calling these two an "odd couple," Calmes ledes with a sentence calling them an "improbable buddy act." There's nothing "improbable" or "odd" about two old self-righteous, attention-seeking deficit hacks hawks going on the road with their fear-mongering dog-and-pony show. And they are mostly preaching to the converted: when they come to my neck of the woods, they're speaking on Sanibel Island -- where the swells keep themselves safe from us riffraff via a $6 toll bridge. If Bob Reich's news isn't bad enough, we learn through Calmes that "On Tuesday, Mr. Bowles and corporate executives he helped recruit to a 'Fix the Debt' campaign met privately at the White House with six senior administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner." See this report (also linked Monday) by the Institute for Policy Studies on Fix the Debt a/k/a "a Trojan horse for massive corporate tax breaks." ...
... BTW, President Obama & Republicans are also going on the road to promote their visions of Fixing the Debt. The problem is that none of these road shows -- including the President's -- is a strong advocate for saving social safety net programs & two of them openly favor cutting them to the quick. ...
... A Short Course on the "Fiscal Cliff" a/k/a the "Austerity Crisis" by Washington Post bloggers. ...
... Stephen Ohlemacher of the AP: "Deep divisions among Senate Democrats over whether cuts to popular benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid should be part of a plan to slow the government's mushrooming debt pose a big obstacle to a deal for avoiding a potentially economy-crushing "fiscal cliff," even if Republicans agree to raise taxes." ...
... CW: The best reason to go over the cliff: the Senate in particular, & to a tiny extent the House, will be more liberal come January. Not only will there be more Democratic Senators, they will be, on average, more progressive: think Kent Conrad v. Elizabeth Warren, Ben Nelson v. Tammy Baldwin.
Ed Kilgore: "The remarkable ability of conservatives to drag American politics to the Right by taking extremist positions and then offering to 'compromise' by accepting policies deemed conservative the week before last is hardly a new thing.... But the MSM keeps taking the bait, which is why we now have Lindsay Graham and Saxbe Chambliss being lionized for making fake concessions to stop America from plunging over a fake 'fiscal cliff.'" ...
... CW: Kilgore essentially backs up my critique of Frank Bruni, which appears in today's New York Times eXaminer. ...
... DITTO Michael Tomasky of Newsweek: "The 'compromise' [Republicans] are offering is no compromise at all, really. And what they want in return from Democrats -- which they are keeping intentionally vague -- shows very clearly that they haven't yet quite accepted the idea that elections have consequences.... The party that lost the election ... doesn't get to dictate terms.... [Obama had] better not forget, and he'd better not let the Republicans forget, that he just won an election in which the American people were given a clear choice -- and they made it." ...
... AND now, Bruni's own newspaper. New York Times Editors: "True flexibility means acknowledging that tax rates for the rich have to go up, and then negotiating how much and which ones. But, so far, Republicans have been just as closed to that reality as they have been for years, ignoring both the election results and the plain arithmetic of deficit reduction."
** Mark Bittman of the New York Times: "The Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program, better known as SNAP and even better known as food stamps, currently has around 46 million participants, a record high. That's one in eight Americans.... as it stands, the number should be higher: many people are unaware that they're eligible for SNAP, and thus the participation rate is probably around three-quarters of what it should be." In a footnote, Bittman writes: "... it's cuts that are on the agenda, not expansion. Cuts ... are not only cruel but counterproductive." Bittman goes on to explain how food banks work & what they're doing. An excellent, informative piece.
** Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post: "... the very essence of the Wal-Mart system is to employ thousands upon thousands of workers through contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, who are compelled by Wal-Mart's market power and its demand for low prices to cut corners and skimp on safety. And because Wal-Mart isn't the employer of record for these workers, the company can disavow responsibility for their conditions of work.... Tens of thousands of American workers labor under similar arrangements." ...
... Jon Stewart comments:
** Jonathan Chait of New York: "The Republicans' long-term dilemma has generally been framed in racial terms, but it's mainly a generational one. The youngest generation of voters contains a much smaller proportion of white voters than previous generations, and those whites in that generation vote Republican by a much smaller margin than their elders. What's more, younger voters supported President Obama during the last two election cycles for reasons that seem to go beyond the usual reasons -- social issues like gay marriage and feminism, immigration policy, or Obama's personal appeal -- and suggest a deeper attachment to liberalism. The proclivities of younger voters may actually portend a full-scale sea change in American politics." ...
... More on our numb and dumb MSM from Kevin Drum of Mother Jones: "From House Speaker John Boehner, on President Obama's request to raise the debt ceiling: 'There is a price for everything.' ... It's gobsmacking. Ever since the election, Republicans have been acting as if financial catastrophe is purely a problem for the president.... If he doesn't want markets to panic, then he needs to cough up some goodies. What's even more gobsmacking is that nobody in the press seems to find this at all out of the ordinary.... Remarkable."
Elisabeth Bumiller & Scott Shane of the New York Times: "Two and a half weeks after Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta announced an inquiry into e-mail exchanges between Gen. John R. Allen of the Marines and a Tampa socialite, some 15 investigators working seven days a week in the Pentagon inspector general's office have narrowed their focus to 60 to 70 e-mails that 'bear a fair amount of scrutiny,' a defense official said."
AP: "Hundreds of millions of dollars from Kabul Bank were spirited out of Afghanistan -- some smuggled in airline food trays -- to bank accounts in more than two dozen countries, according to an independent review released on Wednesday about massive fraud that led to the collapse of the nation's largest financial institution. The report, which was financed by international donors, offers new details about how the men at Kabul Bank and their friends and relatives got rich off $861 million in fraudulent loans in what the International Monetary Fund has called a Ponzi scheme that used customer deposits and operated under nascent banking oversight in the war-torn country."
News Ledes
Guardian: "US Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday that it has temporarily suspended BP and its affiliates from new contracts with the federal government, citing the oil company's 'lack of business integrity' associated with the disastrous 2010 Gulf oil spill. Two weeks ago, BP agreed to plead guilty to charges involving the deaths of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which exploded and sank in April 2010, setting off the nation's largest offshore oil spill. BP will also plead guilty to lying to Congress about how much oil was spewing from the blown-out Macondo well."
New York Times: "The European Commission on Wednesday approved a payment of €37 billion, or $48 billion, from the euro zone bailout fund to four Spanish banks on the condition that they lay off thousands of employees and close offices as part of their restructuring."
Guardian: "Richard O'Dwyer, the university student who created a website which linked to programmes and films online for free, has reached an agreement to avoid extradition to the US over copyright infringement allegations.... The 24-year-old Sheffield Hallam undergraduate has signed a draft "deferred prosecution" agreement in the past two days which requires him to travel to the US and pay a small sum of compensation but will mean he will not face a trial or criminal record.... In June, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launched a campaign with the Guardian in defence of O'Dwyer...."
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Reader Comments (10)
Nathaniel Patterson of "Causes" reports that "President Obama is the target of more than 30 potential death threats per day and is being protected by an increasingly over-stretched Secret Service. Since 2008 there has been a 400% increase (in death threats). He is clearly the most threatened President in history."
This is sad. In fact, this is outrageous! I am sure Obama knows that he is being threatened constantly. How could he not--even though the Secret Service maintains that they do not tell him? How are we citizens to deal with living in a country where our leader has more than 30 death threats every day? That is more than one an hour! (It is as bad as some banana republics and Middle Eastern hot spots.) I am sickened. And ever more outraged about the pathetic racist elements in our population. To say nothing about the racist, obstructionist Republicans in Congress.
When Reagan was President, my husband saw a patient who threatened to shoot both him and Nancy, before Reagan actually was shot. The Secret Service were at our office within the hour after they were called. They found this bozo, put him under immediate surveillance, and even took the precaution of tapping our home phone line, since I learned it is not unusual for potential assassins to threaten the person who "turns them in." He was brought for questioning, determined to be a "mental patient"--by the Secret Service, not by my husband--and put in a locked facility downstate. Strange thing is that we got phone calls in the middle of the night for several months afterwards, but only silence when picking up the phone. We were asked to keep the person on the line as long as possible, so the Secret Service could trace the calls. I know I was terrified that this bozo would break out, come to our house and shoot us both. I can only imagine what Michelle Obama goes through every day.
It does seem impossible that this terrible stain of racism and violence will ever end. Not in our lifetimes, for sure. More is the sad.
Maureen Dowd is digging in her Louboutin pumps and shoving her red soles in everyone's face. She must know the overall reaction to her columns and the sharp critiques that are out there (go git-'er again, CW!) - but, is determined to piss everyone off once more. Now she has a love fest going on with the 'terrible three' - McCain, Graham, & Ayotte...who continue to drum up the Benghazi biz...and Susan Collins, has serious 'questions'. Of course, Rice is the totally unreasonable one! (Sarcasm, here.)
Then there's dear old Tom Friedman. Tom with his high school prom picture (don't you jus' luv the clasped hands under the chin?) with his idea to name Arne Duncan, Sec. of State...because we need to bring education & enlightenment the Middle East! Oy!
Re: what is it Lassie? Timmy has fallen in the old well? No? Off the cliff? Good.
I would like to see one "deal" that makes the bankers squeal, just one. They can have it their way 99% of the time; just one, Mr. Geithner.
They won't; you can bank on it.
Kate,
The sickening rise in death threats against the president can be laid at several doors. First and foremost, the never-ending plume of hatred flushing out of right-wing media world originating in the slimy laboratories of hatred run by the usual suspects, Fox, of course, any newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, and the all-hate, all-racism, all-misogyny all the time crazy-talk radio stations run by all-pigs all the time companies such as ClearChannel (owned, in turn by Mitt Romney's company, Bain Capital--such nice people those Romneys. Too bad they're such hate spewing racist fucks).
Second, hate groups like the Teabaggers, and the assorted super pac management teams like Karl Rove's groups, the Koch sponsored hate machines, and astroturf groups run by people like Dick Armey.
Third, Republicans. All of them. If you don't speak up against the racism and hatred of your party leaders, you're just as bad.
The four year long orgy of vicious hatred and racism hosted by the Grand Old Pricks has been a siren call to white supremacists and anyone else who now feels emboldened by the overt racial enmity expressed and supported by Republicans, and those people are dangerous assholes.
But then again, Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh are dangerous assholes too, so what's the difference?
In the end, it's the despicable, hypocritical, misanthropic, racism fostered and used by the Republican Party for its own electoral purposes that has fanned the flames of out of control hatred.
To say that they couldn't care less is giving them far too much credit. That means that they have the capacity to care.
They don't.
I did a cursory internet search: "GOP amendments blocked by Reid because I was curious about the "legitimate complaints" cited in Bernstein's opinion piece but not enumerated. Cursory search not exhaustive. Three of those amendments; repeal ACA, extend Bush tax cuts, Hatch tax amendment were attached to an insourcing bill "Bring Jobs Home Act". http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/238931-reid-blocks-gop-amendment-to-repeal-affordable-care-act.
The Blunt amendment was another one that the GOP wanted to attach to a highway funding bill. Two others blocked were an immigration amendment and one blocking federal funding to ACORN attached to the extension of unemployment benefits after weeks of debate.
I understand that this technique of attaching amendments to unrelated bills is likely used by both the GOP and Dems. However, I suspect that Bernstein opining that the GOP complaints are legitimate bear further scrutiny.
Just a comment on Chait's piece. The 20 something generation doesn't need to be as vocal about racism as older generations. Demographics and some legal / social mores have changed the focus. I think the 20 somethings have a perspective on civil rights that encompasses a broader perspective that is 2nd nature. my son is a 20 something and since he was in HS, I have been surprised at how insignificant a part race plays for his generation.
Several years ago, my ingrained assumptions slapped me in the face when my son mentioned something about a friend's cornrows. My son is Mexican / white. My assumption was that all his friends were either Mexican or white. I said "Matt has braids?" He looked at me like he didn't understand the question and then he walked away. Over his shoulder, "he's black mom." My husband laughed at me and commented that I wasn't quite as progressive as I thought.
Jeebus, I am hearing Simpson blathering on the TV in the background. He is not helpful nor pithy - pissy maybe- but not pithy.
Well,well,well Timmy( who can't remember to pay his taxes) Geithner will lead negotiations for the White House on dealing with the fiscal "cliff". How nice. Deja Vu all over again, as Yogi Berra observed.
Bend over working class, Obama is not your grandfathers Democrat.
Saw Doris Kearns Goodwin on one of the dopy panel shows this weekend. She is stuck in Lincoln mode, was blithering on about how Obama must get leaders from big business into his cabinet as Lincoln did to cross the ideological divide. Same crap she was peddling four years ago. Didn't seem like it worked so well for Lincoln's second term.
@Marie: Call me naive, but I'm not as worried as you appear to be about Social Security or Medicare being cut: AARP may be something of a scam; but one thing it knows is critical to its continued existence is to defend SS and Medicare to the death. And they sure know how to lobby. Now, Medicaid, on the other hand, could really be in trouble.
In the crush by certain members of the "press" and McCain and the two knuckleheads fused to his rear pocket, to demand answers to the burning questions (already answered, by the way) surrounding the mystery of what exactly happened in Benghazi and just when, exactly, did Susan Rice know about it, makes me wonder, if such a non-issue has Dotard, Hick, and Granitehead in such a snit, how come an actual scandal--in fact, one of the biggest in US history--the lies told by Bush and Cheney to force us into a war of choice, never even produced a single beep on their jerry-rigged ethico-meters.
How come a fake, non-existent, light as air piece of GOP manufactured threadbare gossamer, barely visible to the naked eye kind of non-scandal, demands such furious firebranding and alarums when a real scandal of epic proportion (fully supported by McCain and Graham, who, by the way, demands that we stay there pretty much in perpetuity) registered on their personal grief scale several meters below the point recorded when they discovered that the local Piggly-Wiggly was out of their favorite brand of marshmallow fluff?
But then I don't really need to answer that, do I?
It's one thing, however, when Stupid and Co. want to trumpet their idiocy. It's quite another when the "press" regurgitate their every gurgle as if they had just intercepted and translated the fucking Zimmermann Telegram.
Dante should be around to create specialty (boutique!) rings of hell for these mewling mountebanks.
Ak: I only got a third grade educakion, but I think all of us little people of the 47 pursent know that the Shrub and Chainy wars were
to make tuns of $ for there frinds in low places, and it worked because
the 99 pursent of us know exactly zip about what is going on in this
kuntry so we leave it up to the 1% to tell us how to get rich like they are. (sorry, not actually 99% of us, lots us are very intelligent
liberal, progressives, who care about our fellow man & woman).
2013 will be better!!!
Remind me why I voted for our prez. Oh, yeah--he was running against Romney. Now I remember.