Category: Bipartisan Wet Dream

Losing the fig leaf

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Support from CAP was critical to “grand bargain” credibility, so it’s great news that they’re walking away:

WASHINGTON — The Center for American Progress, a pillar of the Democratic establishment in Washington is walking away from the broad negotiations aimed at reaching a “grand bargain,” the pursuit of a deficit-reduction deal that has dominated the political agenda since mid-2010.

The idea of a grand bargain had little backing from organized labor and the progressive flank to begin with, but maintained institutional support from establishment forces in the party. CAP’s exit from the stage sends a powerful signal to the White House, leaving the president to craft a deal largely on his own, should he continue to pursue it.

The move has been in the works for some time, say senior CAP officials, and emerged publicly Wednesday in the form of a report by Michael Linden, the center’s managing director for economic policy.

“It’s time we reset economic policy in Washington to focus on growth instead of deficit reduction,” CAP President Neera Tanden told HuffPost.

Via Karin Porter.

Rahm Emanuel Is Sending Rich, Dumb Dems To Christie

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

From Down With Tyranny’s Howie Klein:

Frank Lautenberg died Sunday night. He was, at 89 the oldest member of the Senate, had been ill for a long time and his death doesn’t surprise many. Now Obama’s BBF, Gov. Chris Christie gets to appoint a successor. Lautenberg was a dependable progressive across the board. His ProgressivePunch crucial vote score was 94.05, just between Barbara Boxer and Tammy Baldwin. Although, like many of his wealthy liberal colleagues, he sometimes joined with the Republicans to pass corporate-friendly policies, there were no issues he wasn’t one of the best in the Senate on. Christie is not likely to pick someone nearly as good– on any issues.

Today is primary day in New Jersey, although neither Republican incumbent Christie nor Democratic challenger Barbara Buono has any real competition. Buono’s problem is that– largely thanks to Obama and a superficial media– Christie has an undeserved reputation as a moderate. His record is that of a hard core right-winger, far out of step with most New Jersey voters. Buono has been having a hard time raising money and Christie is busy defining her before she can define herself. So far Christie has raised $6.6 million and Buono has raised $2.3 million. The Newark Star-Ledgerreported yesterday that Christie has been reaping a great deal of money from Democrats, many sent his way by Rahm Emanuel, a conservative with many of the same pro-Wall Street policy agendas as Christie. I know it isn’t politically correct to say “retarded,” but that’s probably the best way to describe the “Democrats” writing big checks to Christie.

Christie’s partnership with New Jersey [super-corrupt] Democratic leaders and his warm relationship with Obama after Hurricane Sandy could be enticing donors who don’t often give to GOP candidates, even if they are closer ideologically to Democrat Barbara Buono, Christie’s lesser-known challenger, political scientists and Democratic fundraisers say.

“While I do not agree with his stance on every issue, he is one of the best political leaders I have talked to in a long time,” said Ken Rosen, a UC-Berkeley professor who cut a $3,800 check to Christie after chatting with him at two events. “He is willing to take on tough issues such as pension reform, education reform, mental-health issues, even if his views are not politically correct.”

…Tim Mullen, a Chicago investor who gave more than $100,000 to Emanuel’s campaign for mayor in 2011 and bundled from $200,000 to $500,000 for Obama in 2008, has also sent Christie a maximum donation, as has his wife Alice. Mullen was already a Christie donor in 2009, state records show.
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Drone base for Willow Grove Air Force Base

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

http://youtu.be/p4viZczeyRI

Yeah, of course this is what passes for a jobs program from a lifelong Republican toady like Pat Meehan, who doesn’t even wipe his ass without checking with his betters. Why the hell would we (or any other town, for that matter) want this walking bad karma here? Dave Lindorff writes:

Although I have been a journalist now for 40 years, I have, by design, never sought an assignment as a war correspondent. The idea of dodging enemy bullets, avoiding mines, and of course “friendly” fire, has never appealed to me. And yet, even as President Obama is claiming to be having second thoughts about the drone slaughter he has been overseeing from the White House, I find that I am now a war correspondent in a combat zone in spite of myself.

A month ago I learned, courtesy of my congressional representative, Republican Pat Meehan, that my neighborhood, the Upper Dublin and Horsham area of Montgomery County, PA, is being made into a front-line battle zone in the Afghanistan War.

Not that Rep. Meehan put it that way. No. His announcement was that Montgomery and Bucks County were going to get 250 new jobs thanks to a decision by the Pentagon to set up a new piloting facility for killer drones at the currently mothballed Willow Grove Naval Air Station. This new drone piloting facility, like the ones in Nevada and upstate New York, will be flying drones not from the Willow Grove facility’s huge airfield, but in Afghanistan, Pakistan and wherever else America is fighting the so-called War on Terror.

With this decision, the war has literally come home. Two miles from my house, to be exact.

According to a report in the Lansdale Patch, a local weekly, the US Air Force “has chosen the Pennsylvania Air National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing, located at the 238-acre Horsham Air Guard Station, adjacent to the shuttered Willow Grove air base to take on a new Remotely Piloted Aircraft mission.”

Effective October 1 the Air Force will have established, in already existing buildings on the currently unused base, a ground-control station for the MQ-9 Reaper. This is one of the two drones (the Predator is the other) that have been responsible for most of the drone killings during the Obama administration’s over four-year expanded use of drone warfare, and that has, according to the organization Drones Watch, been responsible for the documented deaths of over 172 children.

Col. Howard “Chip” Eissler, commander of the Pennsylvania National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing, which had been flying A-10 Warthog ground attack jets from the base on training runs for years until the base was shut down, issued a press release saying, “This is an exciting time for our wing, and our airmen are energized to embrace this new mission.”

Two-person military teams control each Reaper from a virtual cockpit, with one serving as pilot and the other as a sensor operator. The drones, which carry deadly high-density explosive Hellfire missiles, would not be flying locally, but rather in war theaters or on missions in countries where the US is not at war, but where the Obama White House deems “enemies” to be located.

Left unsaid in the hoopla over the supposed 250 new jobs (only 75 of which would be full-time), is what it means to have combat personnel responsible for killing operating in a densely populated suburb of a major city like Philadelphia.

“I’ll get back to you on that,” a press spokesman for Rep. Meehan said, when I asked him about whether the congressman had thought about the security issues involved in locating a drone piloting operation in Horsham. He never did return the call, or a second one leaving a reminder message.

John Braxton, a leading local peace activist and founding member of US Labor Against the War (USLAW), said “We need jobs, but we need jobs for a sustainable world, not drone piloting jobs. I’m sorry to learn that our region has to play a part in illegal and immoral operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He added, “Morality aside, it certainly doesn’t make sense to put one of these operations in a populated area. If someone decided to retaliate against the drone strikes here, it could cause a lot of injuries and deaths.” Braxton also speculated that while the Pentagon is stressing that no drones will be flying locally from the base’s airfield for domestic purposes, “These things do tend to get out of hand once they get started.”

Charles Rossi, president of the Philadelphia chapter of Veterans for Peace, said, “This is really sad. One of the things that bothers me is that they’re bringing this operation into a very populated area. That’s a major mistake. It’s a terrible, terrible idea. I’m not surprised that Pat Meehan thinks it’s great, but what a lousy idea!”

Big Money Obama

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

That should be his new rap name, don’t you think?

Obama retains the support of most progressive interest groups, which are working furiously to help him advance immigration reform (generally favored by big business and also supported by some Republicans) and gun control. But his chief claim to liberal greatness since passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 is probably the policy “evolution” that led him to support marriage equality—and that position is also supported by most major corporations. After all, the Defense of Marriage Act causes a lot of bureaucratic problems as well as moral ones, and Wall Street donors have been instrumental in pushing gay marriage into the political mainstream. So Obama’s personal progress on that issue has been consistent with changing corporate mores as much as any concept of justice.

“In 2008 you could sort of hope [Obama] was not going to be phenomenally corrupt,” said another Democratic congressional aide. But, “He believes corporations should run the world. Obama was hired to destroy liberalism and he succeeded.”

The big argument taking place among Beltway reporters and bloggers in recent weeks has been over how much power Obama has when it comes to the gridlock besetting the government. But the genuinely challenging politics of advancing big-ticket items like immigration in the face of unprecedented partisan polarization should not obscure more troubling—and personal, rather than institutional—facts. The growth of income inequality has worsened under Obama, no one has been put in jail for destroying the economy, and cash is sloshing around elections more than ever before. While the mildly redistributive impact of his health-care overhaul remains admirable, getting rid of the one part of the sequester that only affects rich businessmen by restoring funding for air-traffic controllers is not.

So while it is true that our political system is dominated by a bunch of conservative old white men from sparsely populated states and a Senate that probably shouldn’t even exist, Obama isn’t necessarily part of the solution. So far in his second term, he’s beginning to validate the left-wing caricature of himself as a technocrat tool of financial elites intent on earning a shitload of money after he leaves office.

Continue reading “Big Money Obama” →

Permission

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Yep. This is exactly what Obama has been up to:

This “permission structure” business illuminates the centrist Democrats approach to revoking the New Deal.  Bi-partisan commissions, historic presidencies, hostage-taking, tribalism are all tools for obtaining permission to violate core values that poll really, really well.

I told you before that I know for a fact that the White House was working with the Petersen people to push Social Security cuts. But they’re not as clever as they think they are, because they’re having a lot of trouble convincing the tattered remnants of our economy to complete the job and slit their own throats.

The hounds of austerity

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

So people really are that stupid:

Austerians have had their worst week since the last time GDP numbers came out for a country that’s tried austerity.

But this time is, well, different. It’s not “just” that southern Europe is stuck in a depression and Britain is stuck in a no-growth trap. It’s that the very intellectual foundations of austerity are unraveling. In other words, economists are finding out that austerity doesn’t work in practice or in theory.

What a difference an Excel coding error makes.

Austerity has been a policy in search of a justification ever since it began in 2010. Back then, policymakers decided it was time for policy to go back to “normal” even though the economy hadn’t, because deficits just felt too big. The only thing they needed was a theory telling them why what they were doing made sense. Of course, this wasn’t easy when unemployment was still high, and interest rates couldn’t go any lower. Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna took the first stab at it, arguing that reducing deficits would increase confidence and growth in the short-run. But this had the defect of being demonstrably untrue (in addition to being based off a naïve reading of the data).

Countries that tried to aggressively cut their deficits amidst their slumps didn’t recover; they fell into even deeper slumps.

Enter Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They gave austerity a new raison d’être by shifting the debate from the short-to-the-long-run. Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged austerity would hurt today, but said it would help tomorrow — if it keeps governments from racking up debt of 90 percent of GDP, at which point growth supposedly slows dramatically. Now, this result was never more than just a correlation — slow growth more likely causes high debt than the reverse — but that didn’t stop policymakers from imputing totemic significance to it. That is, it became a “fact” that everybody who mattered knew was true.

Except it wasn’t. Reinhart and Rogoff goofed. They accidentally excluded some data in one case, and used some wrong data in another; the former because of an Excel snafu. If you correct for these very basic errors, their correlation gets even weaker, and the growth tipping point at 90 percent of GDP disappears. In other words, there’s no there there anymore.

They’re baaaack

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles:

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the deficit-reduction duo, are trying to rekindle congressional interest in a $2.5 trillion package of spending cuts and tax increases with new details showing how it could work.

The updated plan, to be released today in Washington, includes $740 billion in increased revenue over the next decade that Republicans have deemed unacceptable and a higher eligibility age for Medicare that President Barack Obama has rejected.

The bipartisan pair are seeking to outline the elusive middle ground between the parties’ positions on deficit reduction, and continue to refine an alternative federal budget that few lawmakers have endorsed. Bowles said in an interview that they are trying to demonstrate what’s possible and absorb criticism so they can catalyze a deal.
Continue reading “They’re baaaack” →

Surprise! Republicans want to support Obama’s Social Security cuts

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

So I guess this is the part where people explain to me that the Republicans are only pretending to support Social Security, and it’s all eleventy dimensional chess and nothing to worry about. But see, I just don’t believe that, and I think the Obama administration will use his budget as the basis of a September sequester deal. (You know, the same sequester he practically begged them to impose, so he would have cover for cutting our safety net?)

Call your Congress creatures. Congressional switchboard: 800-998-0180

President Obama’s offer to trim Social Security benefits has perplexed and angered Democrats, but GOP leaders are embracing the proposal and rushing to jump-start a debate that will delve even more deeply into the touchy topic of federal spending on the elderly.

This week, two House subcommittees plan to hold hearings on “reforms to protect and preserve” programs for retirees, starting with Obama’s proposal to apply a less generous measure of inflation to annual increases in Social Security benefits.

Also on the table are higher Medicare premiums and reduced benefits for better-off seniors, and a higher Medicare eligibility age.

At the same time, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said he has moved to tamp down criticism of Obama’s proposal, which quickly bubbled up from GOP lawmakers in swing districts, such as Rep. Chris Collins (N.Y.), who accused the president of cutting spending “on the backs of our seniors.” And Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.), the chairman of the House Republican campaign arm, called Obama’s plan “a shocking attack on seniors.”

The developments signal an important shift in the budget battle as party leaders nervously prepare again to raise the federal debt limit. After more than two years of talking about taxes and “wasteful” government spending, policymakers appear ready to move into the more serious and sensitive realm of entitlement programs.
Continue reading “Surprise! Republicans want to support Obama’s Social Security cuts” →

In the weeds

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Digby gets into the details of the rest of Obama’s budget proposal here.

Hey, don’t worry about it. We’re going to close those loopholes and raise tons of money because Americas corporate tax lawyers and lobbyists will never, ever, ever be able to open new ones. They just aren’t very good at what they do compared to the congress. So that’s good.

From watching TV this morning, let’s just say I’m feeling the love from the Village for this budget. I’m going to guess that every wealthy, celebrity centrist and liberal pundit would vote for it, so all the congressmen and Senators from DC should definitely support it.

Here’s the full text.