So they managed to cut a “deal”, where he made bigger cuts than Boehner originally wanted, forbade abortion funding in Washington, DC, among other idiocies, including high speed rail. (You can see a more complete list and an impassioned critique here)
Seriously, how can someone be such an incompetent negotiator (Reid and Obama together, but Obama is where the buck stops) that you give more than he initially asked for?
Yes, it’s from a week ago, but it’s a must read:
TWO and a half years ago, Congress passed the legislation that bailed out the country’s banks. The government has declared its mission accomplished, calling the program remarkably effective “by any objective measure.” On my last day as the special inspector general of the bailout program, I regret to say that I strongly disagree. The bank bailout, more formally called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, failed to meet some of its most important goals.
From the perspective of the largest financial institutions, the glowing assessment is warranted: billions of dollars in taxpayer money allowed institutions that were on the brink of collapse not only to survive but even to flourish. These banks now enjoy record profits and the seemingly permanent competitive advantage that accompanies being deemed “too big to fail.”
Though there is no question that the country benefited by avoiding a meltdown of the financial system, this cannot be the only yardstick by which TARP’s legacy is measured. The legislation that created TARP, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, had far broader goals, including protecting home values and preserving homeownership.
These Main Street-oriented goals were not, as the Treasury Department is now suggesting, mere window dressing that needed only to be taken “into account.” Rather, they were a central part of the compromise with reluctant members of Congress to cast a vote that in many cases proved to be political suicide.
Just go read the it.
But all we have is the Democratic Party, so now that the Republican Party has formally proposed abolishing Medicare and Replacing it with vouchers, so I expect that they, and Barack Obama in particular, will spend the next few months negotiating with themselves before capitulating.
E.J. Dionne asks a question:
And you wonder: Will President Obama welcome the responsibility of engaging the country in this big argument, or will he shrink from it? Will his political advisers remain robotically obsessed with poll results about the 2012 election, or will they embrace Obama’s historic obligation — and opportunity — to win the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal?
They will shrink from their responsibility, even though it fighting for Medicare is an unalloyed political winner for them.
This has been another answer of simple answers to simple questions.
We have a couple of new laws making their way through the Knesset, and they are both pretty contemptible:
The Knesset is scheduled to vote Tuesday, in second and third readings, on two highly controversial bills: the first would deprive organizations of state support and fine them if they undertake activities that deny Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, and the second would allow small towns to screen applicants for residency.
The Knesset is scheduled to break for spring recess next week.
Critics of the first bill, the Nakba Law, which was sponsored by MK Alex Miller (Yisrael Beiteinu), maintain that it infringes disproportionately on the freedom of expression and the right of Israel’s Arab citizens to tell their own historic narrative.
About 20 recipients of the prestigious Israel Prize, along with distinguished intellectuals, yesterday issued a public statement expressing their opposition to the Nakba Law. “The principle of separation of powers is an essential principle of democracy,” they wrote. “Neither the Knesset nor the cabinet is a judicial branch empowered to punish. Under this law, politicians would be able to judge and punish those who make statements not to their liking.”
All you really need to know about the “Nabka law” is that it’s sponsored by the Yisrael Beiteinu party, who are basically Israel’s equivalent of the Dixicrat segregationists in the 1940s and 1950s.
The law itself is much like the flag burning laws that we periodically see courts strike down in the US, a lot of political opportunism based on the sort of loud faux patriotism that is the refuge of scoundrels.
The second law is more complex, as it is sponsored by two Kadima MKs, and one Ysrael Beiteinu member, Shai Hermesh and Israel Hasson,and David Rotem respectively, and there does appear to be a real problem that needs to be addressed here.
The problem here is that language (added after the bill was originally proposed) that “an admissions committee will not refuse to accept a candidate purely on grounds of race, religion, nationality or physical handicap,” (emphasis mine) is very weak tea, and so would almost certainly be used to exclude Arabs from these communities.
Certainly the language, at least as translated by Haaretz, seems to indicate this:
The law would empower admissions committees to reject candidates for residency if they are minors, if they lack the economic means to establish a home in the community, if they have no intention of basing their home life in the community, if a professional evaluation indicates that they are ill-suited to the community’s way of life, or if they do not suit the community’s social-cultural fabric.
Those last two clauses seem to leave a lot of room for some sort of Jim Crowism.
What’s more, it’s not just Arabs caught up in this net, you could see it applied to, “immigrants, single-parent families or same-sex couples”.
On the other hand, the phrase, “If hey have no intention of basing their home life in the community,” does reflect a real problem, one that with Arabs, or Sabras, and everything to do with rich Americans.
In many places in Israel, particularly in Jerusalem, you have large numbers of rich absentee apartment owners who are in Israel for perhaps 4 weeks a year, with the apartments remaining vacant, or rented, for the rest of the year.
The communities down in the Negev and the Galilee, which is where the law would apply, would likely be far less expensive that Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, or Haifa, and so you could see a similar phenomenon involving more middle class Americans engaging in real estate speculators/part time Aliyah.
But you could craft a bill that would just cover that problem, by allowing an evaluation of a person’s intention to make the community their permanent and primary residence, with the ability to levy fines and/or evict those who don’t.
Of course, we aren’t seeing such a limited law, because someone wants to slip in discriminatory provisions.
Just when I think that the Republican party cannot get any more contemptible, they do something that makes me sit there with a stunned expression on my face that resembles nothing more than a cow that just stepped on its own udder.
Case in point, the Republicans are trying to pass a law that would take away food stamps from the children of strikers:
However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer:
I understand that Republicans hate labor unions, but taking it out on their children??
You have to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld with the f%$#ing white Persian cat on your lap in order to be that evil.
Of course, I’m sure that Barack Obama will find a way to compromise on it.
The legislature has now passed the bill, which would give the governor the power to declare any government or school district in the state and take it over, hand it to a crony, and dismiss elected officials he did not like.
Background here.
The lower house of the legislature passed it today.
There are some real questions as to whether this is is legal, so the Wisconsin Supreme Court, currently 4-3 Republican, may very well have the final word.
The reason that this is important is that Wisconsin elects its supreme court justices in partisan elections, and there is an election on is April 5 with Democrat JoAnne Kloppenburg facing incumbent Republican David Prosser.
Given that this is generally a low turnout sort of election, and that liberal groups are flooding the zone generally right now, the Dem has a real chance of winning, particularly because Prosser was one of the people who chose to ignore the US Supreme Court ruling and let a fellow state Supreme Court judge off for not recusing himself when a major donor to his campaign appeared before him.
Recall time!So, the Wisconsin State Senate just pulled the anti-union provisions out of the budget bill, and then, since they did not require a quorum, since they were non-budgetary, they passed it with an 18-1 vote.
I will note that the motion appears to be in violation of the state constitution:
The measure approved Wednesday forbids most government workers from collectively bargaining for wage increases beyond the rate of inflation. It also requires public workers to pay more toward their pensions and double their health insurance contribution, a combination equivalent to an 8 percent pay cut for the average worker.
Those savings would appear to be budgetary to me, and hence subject to the state constitution’s quorum requirement.
Firedog Lake’s invaluable David Dayen has some more of the finer points, and it appears that this is definitely headed to court, though the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is heavily Republican.
If you want to donate to the recall efforts, you can go to my Act Blue Page. There is a link there for donations.
Also note that in the middle of the most important fight for ordinary working Americans in decades, the Obama administration has decided that they don’t want to be involved:
Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.
Administration officials said they saw the events beyond Washington as distractions from the optimistic “win the future” message that Mr. Obama introduced in his State of the Union address, in which he exhorted the country to increase spending for some programs even as it cuts others so that America can “out-innovate and out-educate” its global rivals.
I guess that someone in the administration finds unions, and ordinary working people to be icky. After all, they expect to spend a billion dollars in 2012 on the Presidential election, and the working man just does not have that kind of money.
Barack Obama is very lucky that the Republicans are as awful as they are, because otherwise, as awful as he is, he’d have a serious primary challenger right now.
What can I say, when Mitt Romney is the class act in the room, you have a very scary political party.
In Michigan, the governor is pushing a bill through that would grant Governor Rick Snyder the powers of a dictator.
Basically, he can declare a financial emergency for any municipal government or school district, and then he can assign an “Emergency Manager”, who could, without any review cancel any contracts (including labor contracts), dismiss elected officials, disincorporate towns, and dismantle school districts.
What’s more, the Senate version of the bill allows the emergency manager to be assigned to a corporation, like Blackwater (now Xe) or Halliburton.
There is no criteria for such a declaration, but even if there were, they are also gutting local aid, which pretty much means that they are creating fiscal crises anyway.
Basically, any elected official, and any semblance of due process is to be wiped away, in a bill that really does resemble the Emergency Laws that Mubarak used to rule Egypt with an iron fist for all these years.
This is about a corporate takeover of civil society, and the vesting of near absolute power in the executive.
I think that this makes it 13 states that have abolished the death penalty, which is a good trend.
And here he is tweeting his support a month agoWhen Maryland Delegate Sam Aora (D-Silver Spring) ran for office, he said that he supported gay marriage.
He’s one of the cosponsors for the bill that provides for recognition of Gay marriage in Maryland.
Well, now that it’s passed the state Senate, and looks like it is going to pass , he says that he is going to vote against it.
This isn’t just about a politician lying. This is about a politician making the issue the core of his campaign, and then betraying the people who supported him because of it.
It was at the core of his campaign.
He campaigned on in, and raised money on it.
Unsurprisingly, there is now a drum beat of people who are asking for their campaign contributions back, particularly since it looks like his vote will kill the bill.
This guy might be the biggest slime ball in Maryland, and that says a lot!
In response to the prank call that pwn36 (owned) Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a law has been proposed in Wisconsin to criminalize prank calls.
Un dirty-word believable.
So, the Republicans got a 2 week extension on the debt ceiling, just long enough to make them sound reasonable, and short enough that they can try to destroy the economy for the 2012 elections with stupid budget cuts.
It’s like the Democrats are playing to lose.
If Obama had any guts, he would make sure that it was Republican oxen were gored by a shutdown, canceling things like the farm aid, etc., but since he doesn’t, you can be sure that the cuts when a shutdown occurs, and it is when, not if, will fall disproportionately on the poor and the Democratic base.
While I expect to see some continued efforts by GE, Rolls Royce, and their supporters, I think that this is the death knell for the F136 engine:
The U.S. House of Representatives today voted to kill funding the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter backup engine made by General Electric Co. and Rolls Royce Group Plc.
By a vote of 233-198, the House voted to cut $450 million for the engine from legislation funding the Pentagon for the remainder of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
It is the first time in more than four years of votes that the House has come out against the GE-Rolls Royce engine for the F-35, the stealth fighter made by Lockheed Martin Corp. In May, 2010, the House voted 231-193 to continue the program.
This is important for a number of reasons.
First, with this defeat on the table, the onus now falls on the supporter of the F136 to bring the engine back, which is hard.
Second, and more importantly, House Speaker John Boehner, whose district, and neighboring districts, directly benefit from the engine, could not whip the votes necessary to support the engine.
Like I said, the engine is toast.
In the long run, this is a bad thing, because leaving Pratt & Whitney as a monopoly supplier for the engine is likely to increase costs, and reduce performance, a lot down the road.
That being said, I do experience no small amount of amusement because Boehner got seriously served on this.
As part of their continuing resolution, the GOP have voted to defund planned parenthood, the healthcare law, gutting the social security administration, and forbidding the EPA from regulating mercury pollution.
This was all pretty standard. Obama has threatened a veto, and Reid has said that it will never see the light of day, so they can get in their votes, and not see much blowback.
What surprises me though is that they lost on a vote to defund the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):
Sixty House Republicans joined with every Democrat to beat back an anti-union amendment on Thursday that would have defunded the National Labor Relations Board, a New Deal-era independent agency that arbitrates labor disputes. The sixty defections come as the Midwest GOP governors in Wisconsin and Ohio are launching direct assaults on public employee unions.
Nine high-ranking Republican members of the Education and the Workforce Committee broke with their party to support the agency, including the chairman, Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.). GOP hostility toward organized labor is not a new phenomenon, but the hostility has intensified since Republicans took control of the House; the party went so far as to rename what had been called the Education and Labor Committee, replacing “labor” with “the workforce.”
The fact that, “piling up losses in a chamber where the majority party typically rules with an iron fist,” is telling.
The Republican Party has been anti-union since Abraham Lincoln. Support for organized labor one of the things that (used to) distinguish between conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans.
Still the fact that Boehner, and Cantor could not successfully whip the vote on this is telling.
Boehner is clearly the weakest house speaker in decades, possibly since Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil 1981-3.
My guess is that the nut job in Wisconsin is spooking some of the Republicans in Wisconsin, and neighboring, states.
Wisconsin is beginning to look a lot like MacArthur’s assault on the bonus army, and some people on the ‘Phant side realize that this will not end well.
Republicans in South Dakata are pushing a law to legalize the murder of abortion providers:
A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state’s GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.
Jeebus.
I don’t mean to state the obvious, but it’s pretty clear that there no middle ground here to negotiate. You would sooner get meaningful consensus from Osama bin Laden.
I’m not sure how it happened, but the Republicans in the house failed to pass an extension of some of the more contemptible parts of the Patriot Act:
Too clever by half, the House GOP leadership allowed only 40 minutes of debate on the extension of the PATRIOT Act today, and brought the bill up for a vote under a rule allowing no amendments and requiring two-thirds of the body to vote YES.
Well, that didn’t happen. Apparently, the Tea Party Congresscritters discovered their love for the constitution, Amendments One and Four inclusive, while taking the opportunity to stand up to their leadership’s lackadaisical attitude toward the Act’s extension.
I believe that the Republican House leadership may have a much deeper appreciation of just the deeper meaning of the exclamation that Dan Castellaneta created as the voice of Homer Simpson.
Heh.
It was such a good idea for some moron to leave out a severability clause from the bill, huh?
A second federal judge ruled on Monday that it was unconstitutional for Congress to enact a health care law that required Americans to obtain commercial insurance, evening the score at 2 to 2 in the lower courts as conflicting opinions begin their path to the Supreme Court.
But unlike a Virginia judge in December, Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., concluded that the insurance requirement was so “inextricably bound” to other provisions of the Affordable Care Act that its unconstitutionality required the invalidation of the entire law.
“The act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker,” Judge Vinson wrote.
The judge declined to immediately enjoin, or suspend, the law pending appeals, a process that could last two years. But he wrote that the federal government should adhere to his declaratory judgment as the functional equivalent of an injunction. That left confusion about how the ruling might be interpreted in the 26 states that are parties to the legal challenge.
And here is the money quote, which has since been removed from the online article:
The Florida plaintiffs ensured they would draw a Republican-appointed judge by filing the lawsuit in Pensacola.
I believe that the operative phrase here is, “Forum shopping for an activist judge.”
It’s all going to be down to Anthony Kennedy, because the other 4 reactionaries on the court are hyper-politicized assholes who have already made their mind based on partisan considerations.
He gives a “half time update” of the Republican repeal efforts.
You can tell that he once roomed with Jon Stewart, and he is now on my list of, “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off”.
The New York Times describes how Jon Stewart pretty much single handedly saved the Zagoda from a Republican filibuster:
Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?
And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart — despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism — the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?
Simply put, the policy here, medical care for 911 first responders, and the politics here, blocking medical care for 911 first responders would be seen unequivocally evil by the bulk of the American electorate, but somehow or other, the Democrats could not be bothered to hammer the Republicans with this, because, I guess, little Barry Obama doesn’t want Republicans to think that he’s mean.
This is something that Bill Clinton would have hammered every single day.
I do understand that it’s tough to get the attention of the press on this, what with, as Stewart observes, “it’s not every day that Beatles songs come to iTunes,” but this is absolutely pathetic.
