Bachmann has made it official:
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.) said Monday that she had formally become a Republican candidate for president.
Ms. Bachmann’s announcement had been expected, though the forum was not. It came while she was participating in a CNN-televised debate for Republicans seeking to challenge President Barack Obama.
Somewhere, Jon Stewart is rejoicing, and Stephen Colbert is beside himself with glee.
As a result of the train wreck that is Newt Gingrich, his entire campaign staff resigned.
The proximate cause was his decision to go on a cruise ship vacation while everyone else in the race is hitting places like Iowa and New Hampshire.
I’m beginning to think that this is all just a variation of his “Gingrich, Inc.” scam which Rachel Maddow had detailed, and he’s doing this because his little money making operation pretty much demands that he eventually run.
It raises a kind of a meta-media question: The standard narrative for the Washington Press whores corps about Gingrich is that he an intellectual colossus of the conservative movement, a meme which the beltway bozos continue to push, but we are seeing increasing evidence that he’s just a self serving clown.
In any case, I find the clown show, and the contortions of his fans in the media, an amusing show.
Because Newt’s campaign co-chair is Zell Miller, who was last seen challenging Chris Matthews to a duel. (No, really, watch the Vid)
I think that Newt confused the words bipartisan and bipolar.
Pass the popcorn.
After getting nothing but feeble lip service from national Democrats on labor issues, and even less on the Republican state-level jihad against unions from the national Dems, labor unions are pulling back on donations to national democrats:
Some of the nation’s largest labor unions are cutting back dramatically on their financial support to the Democratic Party, saying they are highly frustrated with the failure of Democrats to put up stronger resistance to Republican proposals opposed by labor.
The unions have cited what they see as Democrats’ tepid response to Republican efforts to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, cut Medicare funding and require voters to show identification at the polls.
“It doesn’t matter if candidates and parties are controlling the wrecking ball or simply standing aside,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, in a speech Friday. “The outcome is the same either way. If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, working people will not support them.”
…………
Labor’s threats to Democrats follow a major push in last year’s midterm election, when unions spent $8 million backing a liberal challenger to former senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.). The challenger, then-lieutenant governor Bill Halter, lost to Lincoln in a runoff, and a weakened Lincoln went on to lose the general election to Republican John Boozman.
Trumka trumpeted the outcome of that race in a question-and-answer period after his speech Friday. A moderator asked what was different about his latest rhetoric given that unions have threatened to withdraw support for Democrats in the past.
“Ask Blanche Lincoln,” he replied.
This is really the point that should be made, that there are a lot of Democrats who have little or no interest in protecting the average American worker, or of supporting organized labor, the distinguished gentlewoman from WalMart being one of the more prominent examples, and making an example of them is a good thing.™
I would also note that Lincoln was down by double digits to any Republican before the primary challenge.
I’m not a big fan of some of his tendencies to draw by crayon Libertarianism, but when he suggests that the most viable Republican candidate for the primaries, where one appeals to the the base, is that chimpanzee that tore his keeper’s face off, he effectively uses humor to express a very deep truth.
Because I hadn’t realized just how entertainingly insane Newt Gingrich can be.
In response to the sh%$storm that he unleashed for telling the truth about the Paul Ryan plan to kill Medicare, he has been engaged in a series of obfuscations that are as delusional as they are epic.
His campaign’s latest press release is a true work of art, to such a level that Stephen Colbert felt the need to bring in John Lithgow to make a dramatic reading of it on his show.
I had forgotten what a complete pratt he was.
Press release after the break.
The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding,” Tyler wrote. “Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.
Yep, it’s that misbegotten bastard child of Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Barack Obama*, the Home Affordable Mortgage Program, HAMP, where the Treasury has finally decided to require a single point of contact for homeowners participating in the program:
Mortgage servicers must provide a single relationship manager to borrowers being evaluated for a Home Affordable Modification Program trial by Sept. 1, according to guidance released by the Treasury Department Wednesday.
The guideline is required of the 20 largest servicers participating in HAMP, and it is one of the largest adjustments to the program since its inception in March 2009. Since then, more than 670,000 borrowers received a permanent loan modification, and more than 1.8 million trials have been extended.
“Over the past two years, two of the biggest complaints we received from borrowers were servicers are losing documents and they can’t connect with anybody who can actually track them down. Every time they call they can’t get a hold of someone with access to their case,” Laurie Maggiano, director of policy at the Treasury’s homeownership preservation office, said in an interview with HousingWire Wednesday.
The relationship manager must be an employee of the bank and cannot be a contractor. This manager will be assigned when the servicer makes successful contact with the delinquent borrower. The borrower must meet the initial criteria of the program, such as owner-occupancy and a 31% debt-to-income ratio.
The program has been in place for about 2 years, and since day 1, the complaints have been about no one being a point of contact, meaning that you had repeatedly lost paperwork, changing conditions, dual tracking, where when you were talking with one bankster, another was in the process of foreclosing, etc.
People have been screaming about this.
The press has been screaming about this.
Congress has been screaming about this.
But nothing was done until the 2012 election loomed, because, after all, this was not a program to help people, it was a program to cheat people, and help the banks.
*Who knew that bad programs were conceived by three beings? For the rest of nature, it’s either parthenogenesis (Amoeba, lobbyists) or some sort of sexual reproduction involving only two participants. There are echos here of the Asimov novel The Gods Themselves.
Newt Gingrich is slamming Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate Medicare:
Presidential contender Newt Gingrich took a potshot Sunday at Republican House Budget Chairman Paul D. Ryan’s proposal to reform Medicare, becoming the most prominent Republican to distance himself from the plan.
Ryan’s proposal, which was passed by the GOP-controlled House in April, would have people 54 and younger choose from a list of coverage options and have Medicare make “premium-support payments” to the plan they chose.
“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” Gingrich scoffed in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
House Republicans, including Speaker John A. Boehner, have stood behind Ryan’s plan, which was the subject of fierce debate at town-hall meetings nationwide. Other Republican presidential contenders have praised Ryan’s political courage without going so far as to endorse the budget blueprint.
Let’s be clear here: We know just what Newt is, an opportunist, so his condemnation is not a mark of any real problem with the idea of selling seniors to insurance companies to be ground up into Soylent Green, after all, he pretty much proposed that in the 1990s.
Instead, it is an acknowledgment by Gingrich that the proposal is a complete political loser, and so he thinks that by joining its condemnation, he will be able derive political advantage.
Yes, the “disgraced former Speaker of the House” Newt Gingrich is officially running for President:
Newt Gingrich is entering the 2012 presidential race as a familiar face — a 20-year veteran of Congress who served a polarizing turn as House speaker before assuming a career as a prolific political commentator and author.
But Gingrich, who officially announced his White House bid Wednesday, is bringing a decidedly different approach to this contest than he did to his previous stint in public office.
In his speeches and campaign appearances, Gingrich is expected to lay out a political vision that intertwines fiscal and social conservatism, drawing from a newfound interest in religion he has infused into his work in recent years.
It’s a message he’s expected to make Friday at the Georgia Republican Party convention in what advisors are billing as his formal announcement speech, an address that will marry the concept of American exceptionalism with an emphasis on God-endowed rights.
“American exceptionalism with an emphasis on God-endowed rights” appears to mean sleeping around on your wife and dumping her when she gets cancer, or MS, while attempting to impeach Bill Clinton for getting a blow job in the white house.
I’m beginning to think that I need to add a tag, Clown Show to my list of standard tags to descripe the ‘Phant Presidential field this year.
*Credit goes to JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for coming up with this bon mot.
The New York Times has an editorial excoriating the Obama administration for deregulating foreign currency swaps:
A loophole in the law — which the bankers and their friends, including the administration, fought for — allows the Treasury secretary to exempt the instruments. The arguments in favor of exemption, beyond a desire to please the banks, were always unconvincing. They still are. The Treasury Department has asserted that the exempted market is not as risky as other derivatives markets, and therefore does not need full regulation.
That claim has been disputed by research, but even if it were true, it would be a weak argument. For instruments to be relatively safer than the derivatives that blew up in the crisis, necessitating huge bailouts, hardly makes them safe. Worse, dealers could probably find ways to manipulate the exempted transactions so as to hedge and speculate in ways that the law is intended to regulate.
……
The department has also said that because the market works well today, new rules could actually increase instability. That is perhaps the worst argument of all. It validates the antiregulatory ethos that led to the crisis and still threatens to block reform.
The Treasury’s plan will be open for comment for 30 days. Count us opposed.
(emphasis mine)
There can be a fine line between regulatory capture and corruption, and I am not sure on which side this falls.
In a way, this is worse than Bush and His Evil Minions™, because W was (correctly) perceived as a radical, but the actions of “Team Geithner” now firmly entrenched this thinking on both sides of the aisle.
H/t Paul Krugman for the graph pr0n.
I’ve read it, and it was much better than I expected.
It is not what I would want in a perfect world, it’s pretty much a 3rd way center right prescription, though it was rather stronger that I expected.
He did not sell out Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, and he did not hippie punch, and he framed the Republican plan as a transfer from poor to rich.
The fact that he actually presented a moral argument here stuns me.
My only problem here, and I agree with Paul Krugman:
I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no — better to pursue the zero option of just doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts as a whole expire.
This is clearly a first shot in the 2012 campaign, though I hope that is more than that.
His statements about needing reforms in the social safety net toward the end of the speech worry me though.
I’ll take what I can from him.
Well, the good folks at Google™ Adsense™ have done it again.
The put up an ad from right wing lunatic asylum Newsmax, redirecting to a poll asking what the reader thinks about the concept Donald Trump as president.
Somehow or other, I do not think that my blog is fertile ground for the brain damaged hackery that is Newsmax, but to the degree that I get paid (a fraction of a penny) for someone seeing the ad, better my pocket than Joseph Farah’s.
Of course, if they did something better suited to my rantings, I might get a few more click throughs, and hence a bit more filthy capitalist lucre.
In any case, my apology to my reader(s) for your having to see “The Donald” and his hair.
My standard Google™ Adsense™ disclaimers below:
Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.
Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.
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.
A while ago, I demanded that my email be removed from the OFA list, so I did not get the email blast announcing the fact that Barack Obama is officially running for reelection.
I’m just glad that I live in Maryland, because if my vote counted here, I might have to vote for him again.
Thankfully, my vote does not matter, so I don’t have a moral dilemma: I can write in Howard Dean.
Specifically, Jurassic Port of Brilliant at Breakfast is brilliant in his (or her) assessment of the current Republican crop of Republican Presidential candidates.
It’s a rundown of the top 10 candidates in the race, and you should read it.
A pearl to get you started, about Sarah Palin, “She does to the English language what Catholic priests do to 12 year-old altar boys,” but you have to read the whole thing.
We were watching the Ed Show, and they had a preview about Michele Bachmann’s plans to establish a Presidential campaign exploratory committee, and my wife said, “She’s about as bad as Sarah Palin!”
I replied, “That’s not fair to Sarah Palin.”
I cannot f%$#ing believe that I fucking just f%$#ing said that.
F%$# Me!
Tim Pawlenty has formally announced the formation of an exploratory committee for the 2012 Presidential campaign.
Let the games begin.
If you don’t believe it now, just wait until Obama tries to sell gutting Social Security and Medicare in his State of the Union speech.
I could be wrong, and if I am, I will issue a correction, but I think that it is clear that embracing right wing talking points is more important to Barack Obama than is good policy, and driving the “first stake through the heart of Social Security” is clearly seen as a big plum by Obama and most of his administration.
We will know one way or the other in 5½ days.
That is what Haley Barbour is doing now.
First, he lauds the white supremacist Citizens Councils, and now he’s saying that he was just commenting on the lack of violence in his home town.
He is dog whistling to racists in his putative white house run.
It might not pick up votes in New Hampshire, but it will in South Carolina.
There is a lot of hand wringing and out rage over Haley Barbour’s comments supporting the activities of the white supremacist White Citizens’ Councils in the 1960s.
I think that this misses the point.
Not only does Barbour have a long tradition of appealing to bigots, but it is clear that he wants to run for president, and a not so veiled appeal to the tradition of white bigotry in the South goes a long way towards appealing to that demographic in the primaries.