Month: May 2011

What does Dr Tom Really Want?

by digby

So, according to Lil’ Luke on Dylan Ratigan earlier it’s all the Democrats’ fault that Coburn left the Gang ‘o 6 because they refused to cut Social Security and Medicare when the Republicans Coburn and Chambliss were willing to raise taxes. This is nonsense. The Republicans want to cut Medicare and Social Security in exchange for pretending to raise taxes (and even that is off limits apparently.)

Remember this?

Yellin: Senator Chamblis do you believe that Senate Republicans will agree to a package that includes any sort of tax changes?

Chambliss: Well, the fact of the matter is that you can’t solve this debt problem just with reductions in discretionary spending. You can’t solve it just by attacking and reforming entitlements. You’ve got to look at the revenue side also.

What we are looking at proposing is actually a reduction in corporate rates and personal individual income tax rates, which will put more money in people’s pockets and we’re going to do that with the reduction in tax expenditures. Every time we’ve done that in years past whether it was under President Reagan or president Bush we have seen revenues increase. And we’ve got to have an increase in revenues if we are going to retire this debt… revenues have to be on the table if we’re serious about attacking that debt.

I think you can see the bait and switch there, can’t you?

Furthermore, it appears at this point that the Democrats have been willing to cut Medicare and Medicaid and go along with that “revenue” nonsense, but Coburn wouldn’t take yes for an answer. He came back and demanded more. Greg Sargent reports on what the Democrats are saying happened in the Gang:

“Coburn came in on Monday and said, `I want $130 billion,’” the aide says. “The conservation was heated. There was yelling. Durbin said, `I am not doing this. That destroys Medicare. That goes even further than Paul Ryan. We’re not doing it.’”

The conversation went on for three hours or so, the aide says, but the senators could not break the impasse. “Because Coburn couldn’t get his way, he walked,” the aide says. Coburn called Durbin on Tuesday to tell him he was pulling out.

Now that account doesn’t say that they have already agreed to 400 million in cuts as other accounts have, so it makes Durbin sound much more like he’s taking a hard line.And even if he isn’t, I still have to think this is a poison pill.

And again, here’s that notion of “releasing the plan” from Coburn’s aide this time:

I’m not going to comment on his private conversations with his colleagues. Dr. Coburn had numerous concerns with the state of the Gang of Six proposal. As the Trustees recently concluded, Medicare is going bankrupt and will be destroyed if we do nothing. If the group wants to release their proposal to save Medicare and achieve long-term deficit reduction they are certainly welcome to do so.

And yes. I still love the the logic that say because Medicare will not have enough money in the future we need to cut it. I seem to be the only one who finds that odd, so I guess it’s just me.

Obviously, I have no real idea what’s going on. But it isn’t just a straight-up disagreement about suddenly slashing more of Medicare than previously agreed. Coburn has a reason for doing this. Maybe that Ensign thing is more of a problem than we know.

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“Tell me, or I will make you do terrible things”

by digby

You probably already saw this, but just in case you haven’t, here’s Newtie’s spokesman earlier today:

“The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding,” Tyler wrote in an e-mail. “Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world.”

He continued: “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.”

As for Gingrich’s role in this drama, Tyler cast him as a fantasy hero straight out of Arthurian legend.

“But surely they had killed him off,” he wrote. “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 intimidated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.”

TPM notes that this is fitting considering the novels his boss has been writing for years. Some of you oldsters will recall this passage, which was later deleted from his novel 1945 when people realized that the leader of the Family Values Republicans probably should keep his turgid … prose in his pants.

‘Suddenly the pouting sex kitten gave way to Diana the Huntress. She rolled onto to him and somehow was sitting athwart his chest, her knees pinning his shoulders. ‘Tell me, or I will make you do terrible things,’ she hissed.’

‘Even though it had been only minutes since their last lovemaking, John Mayhew was as ever overwhelmed by the sight of her, the shameless pleasure she took in her own body and its effect on him. Since he wasn’t sure what to say, he made a production out of lighting up and enjoying that first, luxurious after-bout inhalation.’”

She teased the panther.

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Default Madmen

by digby

If you didn’t know better, you might think he was back on the Little Blue Babies:

On his radio program yesterday, Rush Limbaugh blasted the Politico piece, proudly embraced the “default denier” label, and then went a step further — by claiming that not raising the debt limit would actually improve the nation’s credit rating:

LIMBAUGH: Today I claim the mantle. I proudly and honestly come to you today as the Mr. Big of the default deniers. We will not default on anything. And moreover, it is more likely that the country’s creditworthiness would go up around the world since we would finally be doing something to address our out-of-control spending and indebtedness if we were not to raise the debt limit. We would be perceived around the world as serious for a change, and responsible for a change. Otherwise we are headed for junk bond status.

Limbaugh proceeded to suggest that Democrats are trying to destroy the country by raising the debt ceiling. “The only people who want that…are the people who seek to fundamentally transform this country as it was founded.” Additionally, he said “Keynesian economics doesn’t work unless destruction is the objective.”

But you do know better, right? He’s not freelancing. How do we know this? Because Ryan and Toomey and the Republican study group are spouting the same bullshit.

They’re bluffing, but they’re doing a good job of it. With the Tea Party threatening to primary John Boehner because he can’t eliminate the debt in a year and the media increasingly sounding panicked, I would guess that the Democrats will have all the cover they need to make a deal. I’m sure we’ll all be told that they had no choice. After all, these Republicans are just that crazy.

Years ago I wrote a piece called Nixon’s Babies, positing that the modern conservative movement was much more attributable to his various strategies than Reagan’s ideology. I have to say, however, at the time I didn’t see them using the Nixon Madman Theory on the debt ceiling. My bad.

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Tommy Can You Hear Me?

by digby

I have always felt that Tommy Thompson was one of the least likely of the GOP’s perennial Governor saviors, but this post by Howie makes me realize that he’s even more pathetic than most:

No one took that seriously and he backed away without more than a whimper but not before making it clear that he hates gay people… or at least that if an employer hates gay people that’s enough of a reason to permit them to be fired. In fairness to Thompson, once he realized what a boo-boo he made, he went crying to CNN and claimed he had terrible diarrhea and that’s what made him do it; no really:

“I’ve been very sick… I was very sick the day of the debate. I had all of the problems with the flu and bronchitis that you have, including running to the bathroom. I was just hanging on. I could not wait until the debate got off so I could go to the bathroom.”

He told Bill Maher it was a hearing-aid malfunction:

This is the reason why someone like Sarah Palin can wind up on a presidential ticket. She’s the rule, not the exception.

I have a feeling that Russ Feingold would not have any problem beating this guy.

Gang Crack-uphttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

by digby

Who knows what’s really going on with Tom Coburn’s departure from the Gang of Six. For all we know he’s about to be indicted in the Ensign scandal. But the reports sound right to me. Basically, he’s demanding that the Democrats agree to immediately slash Medicare spending in what I assume to be an exchange for some elimination of “tax expenditures.” (At least that’s what’s been reported as the source of his disagreement with Norquist who’s calling all such eliminations tax hikes.)

Here’s what Huffington Post is reporting:

The aide said that Coburn had been extremely close to agreeing to a deal before a recent two-week recess, but returned with five new demands that hadn’t been discussed before. On Monday, the aide said, Coburn asked for an immediate $130 billion in cuts to Medicare, on top of the $400 billion that had already been agreed to. Democrats refused and Coburn left the talks as a result, said the aide.

A Republican aide close to the talks said that Coburn’s additional Medicare demand stemmed from the program’s trustee’s report, which was issued Monday morning and showed it running out of money by 2024, five years sooner than had previously been forecast. But he said that characterizing the demands as new missed the point of the talks, which explicitly put everything on the table.

Call me a skeptic, but that doesn’t scan for me. Something else happened to make him (or them) decide to deep six the gang. This is a poison pill not a serious proposal.

Who knows why he really dropped out? The article does give at least one hint:

Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) — one of the six members — announced he’d start moving ahead with his own proposal. Conrad said Tuesday he’d announce plans to proceed soon.

Coburn’s departure could all-but deep-six the Six, since Conrad’s budget plan could overtake it. And Vice President Biden also has been leading bipartisan talks aimed at conquering the deficit impasse, talks that Senate Republican leaders think are more likely to lead to Democratic concessions, said a Democratic aide close to the talks.

(Gee, I wonder where they’d get that idea?)

Coburn may have realized that he was about to go out on a limb with what Norquist will call a tax increase when the Biden group would probably get Republicans a lot more for a lot less. Why take that kind of risk?

Andrea Mitchell wondered earlier if the Gang would release some sort of report that would form a baseline for other negotiations. (Sound familiar?) If so, this would have to be somewhat alarming:

Coburn asked for an immediate $130 billion in cuts to Medicare, on top of the $400 billion that had already been agreed to.

Good to know.

Here’s a little reminder, which I’m sure is unnecessary, about the campaign the Republicans ran just six months ago:

It is truly a sick and dysfunctional political system that allows a party to run on that message and just six months later insist on even more cuts and nobody calls them on it. But that’s where we are.

The Republicans still insist that they want to repeal the ACA which made “half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts” and are now trying to make another half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts. I’m guessing the bipartisan hope among the deal-makers was to cut just shy of a trillion dollars total from the program. (You’ll recall how they arbitrarily insisted on 900 billion in the stimulus debate — perhaps this is the magic number here as well.) But they have to “jump over the cliff together” in order to get it done. Maybe they think Biden has the clout to make that happen.

The Democrats will pay the political price for doing this, however, since their only real rationale for existence at this point is protecting the safety net from the rapacious Randroid Republican vision. Republicans are just being Republicans, doing what’s expected. Many people will actually admire them more for sticking with their principles. I guess the Democrats think they’ll get credit for making the hard decisions and demanding sacrifice from their own constituents.

Is that how the world really works?

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The GOP’s Dilemma

by digby
The GOP’s dilemma
Mike Allen is reporting that the Republican Villagers are depressed. It seems they have a problem: no decent candidates. When Mitch Daniels has become your dream candidate you know you’ve got trouble. But one out come is far worse than others:

There is one other scenario, and it terrifies Washington Republicans. That is the possibility that some very conservative, insurgent candidate will become the Romney alternative: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum or former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, if she defies conventional wisdom and winds up going for it.

“Republicans could have the situation that Democrats did in 1972, when the base of the party was so far outside the mainstream,” said one top Republican. Back then, George McGovern was the Democratic nominee and lost 49 states to President Richard Nixon.

Could be. I know I’m looking forward to the GOP Tea Party convention anyway.

But here’s their problem. And it’s not the nuts in the field, it’s the extreme policy positions to which they’ve apparently wedded themselves:

Gingrich’s campaign, however, seemed in danger this week after he referred to Ryan’s Medicare proposal as “radical change,” drawing sharp criticism from a number of top Republicans. He apologized in a telephone call to Ryan on Tuesday afternoon.

Gingrich is certainly a nut and a terribly divisive figure. But he was positioning himself in the race very intentionally as the guy who didn’t want to destroy Medicare. That should be a legitimate position in the Republican party and one that you’d think would have quite a few adherents in the political class considering the fact that it’s a third rail and polling terribly. But evidently there’s not going to be daylight allowed between the candidates and the Randroids and the Tea Party, so I guess they’re worries about this “insurgency” are purely cosmetic. Sarah and Michelle and Newtie’s ideas aren’t the problem, it’s just that they don’t sound very smooth delivering them. If that’s the case then their problems are bigger than they think.

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Cyborg legacy

by digby

I was going to write about the Arnold and Maria soap opera but I just don’t care enough to do it. And anyway, Kevin Drum has written the definitive post on the subject as far as I’m concerned and makes the most salient point I’ve seen all day:

His megawatt-smile denials were pure pap, and if knowledge of his affair had been public it’s almost a dead certainty that the recall would have failed and Gray Davis would have remained governor. The car tax would have stayed in place, no bonds would have been issued to make up for it, and California’s deficit problems would have been less than half as bad as they turned out to be under Schwarzenegger.

The Republicans, Darrel Issa in particular, brought that circus to town but you can’t blame it all on them. Californians made utter imbeciles of themselves during that ridiculous campaign all because Gray Davis was “boring” and they wanted a totally kewl Movie Star to be the Governor. It was an American Idol election of the silliest variety and it had very serious consequences for this state. But hey — it’s not like we didn’t deserve what we got.

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Billboard Patriarchy

by digby

I would hope that people are keeping an eye on this guy. There’s something truly demented about him:

Right to Life New Mexico was attempting Monday to have an endorsement removed from a pro-life billboard on White Sands Boulevard between First Street and Second Street. The billboard went up sometime during the weekend.

The billboard depicts an Alamogordo businessman, GEFNET owner Greg A. Fultz, holding what appears to be an outlined baby in his arms as he is looking down at it. Next to the picture, in large print, is the statement, “This Would Have Been A Picture Of My 2-month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To Not KILL Our Child! [sic].”

Fultz, 35, said he created the organization, National Association of Needed Information (N.A.N.I.), to dispense his pro-life message.

“It’s to do my pro-life work under,” he said. “It’s nothing official. I created a Facebook page for this group (N.A.N.I.). I haven’t officially made it an organization. I am that gentleman (pictured on the billboard). It’s merely a statement about anti-abortion and pro-life. They (RTLNM) originally did agree to endorse it. With the pressure of the people against it, they decided to pull their endorsement. I am pretty upset about knowing that.”

Right to Life New Mexico president Betty Eichenseer said she was attempting to have the endorsement removed, but she had not heard back from the billboard company as of Monday evening.

The nut says that he told them up-front about everything on that billboard. I’m guessing this is what he left out:

Fultz said he was inspired to create N.A.N.I. by an event that happened to him.

“All organizations have a meaning behind them,” he said. “I do not deny that she (a woman named Nani) was the catalyst behind creating this organization. The letters of her name are there for the meaning of value for the reason it was created. It was not created out of spite or out of attack. It’s a meaning for a story for the reason why the group was created.”

Fultz said he was in a relationship with a woman about 1 1/2 years ago.

“There was a pregnancy, then there wasn’t,” he said, “with a woman named Nani. I started my pro-life work because I don’t know if it was a miscarriage or an abortion. If it was an abortion, my work is set out to prevent this from happening to somebody else. My goal is to try to change one person’s mind when it comes to abortion and let the baby live. The billboard stands alone. There are no names of people; just an organization.”

It turns out that his agenda is to give men (specifically) the right force women to give birth against her will. But then I wonder why the Right To Life people would have had a problem with it? It’s not like they don’t want to do the same thing — they just want the state to have that right instead of the men who impregnated the individual woman. In fact, this whole thing actually clarifies the issue doesn’t it?

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Cuts now, taxes later

by digby

So Jon Kyl is publicly spinning about the debt ceiling talks and claiming they’ve already found 150 billion to cut and are all in agreement that they will have to find “a lot more.” He says everything is being discussed, including “entitlements” and defense although they haven’t yet gotten to the health care portion of their program.

Whatever. His job is to pretend like they are getting what they want, so who knows what’s true and what isn’t?

But this sounds like a new construction of their usual “no new taxes” pledge, which I think is kind of interesting:

Echoing other Republicans, Kyl said tax measures will not be part of the debt deal because it would “be too complicated to deal with that at the same time that we’re dealing with the debt ceiling.”

Oh boy. I really hope this isn’t the way they’re going to go with this. Cuts in exchange for “future tax reform” means that there will be no tax increases. I have absolutely no faith at all that they will do anything like that — even the “tax expenditure” gambit — close to the election. And unless Obama wins with a gigantic majority and a filibuster proof senate in 2012, I’m fairly skeptical that they will be able to do it then — and that includes the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which the two parties will use as major campaign themes.

We know that if the Republicans take control the Democrats will scramble to see who can sign on to the Republican “mandate” first. But the opposite will not happen. If the Democrats win, it’s hardly likely that the Republicans will sign on to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Why would the dynamic be any different then than it was before? After all, Obama ran on that issue in 2008, he had 58 Senators allegedly backing him at the time and they held him hostage. They don’t need to have control of either house to obstruct it. They will — and the Democrats, including the president, will probably “let” them.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that this kabuki debt ceiling fight results in something as totally meaningless as the “negotiation” already is. And let’s further hope that the looming budget fight scares the Republicans about “entitlements” as much as taxes scare the Democrats and they end up doing nothing substantive at all. At the moment gridlock is our friend.

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Red “Potatoe”

by digby

A very thick young GOP politician talking about oil companies at time of high gas prices:

CONSTITUENT: I’d like to know why you’d like to do this on the backs of seniors, and of women. All the cuts are going to hurt seniors, future seniors, and women! Your attacks on Planned Parenthood are hurting women who need healthcare. […] And why are you are choosing that way rather than cutting oil subsidies […]

QUAYLE: In terms of the oil subsidies, if we’re going to address it, can you just tell me what oil subsidies you’re talking about so I could have better information on what to expand on it?

CONSTITUENT: Why were the oil companies coming to defend their subsidies in front of the Senate? Those subsidies, anything in which we give them money when they’re making billions off of us every day.

AUDIENCE: That’s right!

QUAYLE: The things they were talking about were actually tax deductions that corporations across all sorts of sectors take in terms of R&D, in terms of equipment deductions, the life of the equipment, those were the deductions that they were talking about and it’s not specific to the oil industry […]

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

He’s just an idiot who doesn’t know how to deliver his talking points. But they are tough ones to deliver. The Republicans are trying to set the stage for the protection of “tax expenditures” for their favored industries and this is obviously the line they are going to use — these subsidies and loopholes are “deductions” just like the ones you took on your income tax returns last year for those books and old clothes you gave to the Salvation Army.

The Dems are taking the tack that the massively profitable oil companies are the designated bad guys on this who are doing something uniquely evil. In that sense, Quayle is perfectly correct — they aren’t. There are hundreds of corporations taking advantage of the tax code to boost their profits without offering anything in return to the country. It will be interesting to see how that plays out in the coming budget battles. Already we are seeing the oil patch Democrats like Begich and Landrieu are backing away from the oil company critique.

This is the problem with agreeing to cut “tax expenditures” in exchange for cutting the so-called “entitlements.” The politicians are probably all willing to do this in the abstract. After all, the Republicans can call them spending cuts and the Democrats can call them tax increases — what could be more perfect? But it’s far more complicated to do it in reality. It’s pretty to think that they really will take a balanced approach to revenue and spending, but it’s probably a good idea to keep an eye on what they actually do.

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