Month: June 2011

Paul Ryan refuses a Bible

by digby

Check it out:

Rep. Paul Ryan spoke this morning at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference; afterwards James Salt of Catholics United caught up with the Congressman to offer him a Bible on behalf of Faithful America, which is running a campaign encouraging Ryan to put down Ayn Rand and pick up the Bible. James also asked Ryan a pointed question about Ryan’s radical federal budget plan, which reflects Ayn Rand’s love of greed and contempt for the weak by giving huge tax breaks to millionaires while making deep and harmful cuts to programs that protect seniors, struggling families and the middle class:

He’s got a very thin skin and didn’t like being confronted about this at all. I wonder why?

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Faith And Freedom Hitmen

by digby

Dave Wiegel is at the Faith and Freedom Conference and caught James O’Keefe holding court. That’s right. This James O’Keefe:

The latest bizzaro hidden camera stunt orchestrated by conservative filmmakers James O’Keefe and Ben Wetmore has, by all accounts, epically failed.
According to CNN, O’Keefe planned to lure correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat riddled with all sorts of romantic props — dildos, condoms, handcuffs — and make sexual passes in an attempt to embarrass her. If gone as planned, the whole incident would have been secretly video-taped.

Of course this whole “faith and freedom” conference is a bit of joke considering that the organizer is none other than Ralph Reed, most recently famous for behaving more like a Spanish Conquistador than a 20th century Christian.

It’s worth considering Reed’s resurgence as we go into the 2012 campaign. He lost his bid for elective office in Georgia because voters were disgusted to find out about his corrupt dealings as a lobbyist:

For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal–a hypocrite. He had once called gambling a “cancer” on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn’t help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington’s system of “honest graft” was eager to be part of it. “I need to start humping in corporate accounts!” he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.

To Reed, it sometimes appeared, Christian voters were pawns in a game of power swapping. The Journal-Constitution reported that the man who had once condemned China for its one-child policy and its persecution of Christians had created a “grass-roots” Christian group to lobby for freer trade with the superpower–an effort quietly financed by major U.S. corporations like Boeing that were the Georgian’s true clients. The profits Reed collected from such dealings were not, by any indication, the wages of illegal behavior. But to some they were the wages of sin. “He got nailed for being a phony,” says a fellow G.O.P. operative in Washington, with more than a little schadenfreude.

Old corporate sponsored GOP operatives never die, they just lay low for a little while and let media amnesia do its work. He’s back because he does good work for the power structure. As does O’Keefe. That they are also looked upon favorably by the Christian Right says everything you need to know about this whole corrupt scheme.

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Keep your eye on Mitt

by digby

He may unaccountably make people’s skin crawl, but his message is the one that stands the best chance of giving Obama a run for his money in 2012:

Romney was one of the few speakers to mention Friday’s jobs report, and he wielded it like a cleaver to attack President Obama before a rapt audience in downtown DC.

“Hear what he said today?” Romney asked the crowd. He criticized Obama for calling the unexpectedly high jobless numbers “bumps on the road to recovery” in an Ohio speech earlier in the day.

“No, Mr. President, that’s not a bump,” Romney said. “That’s Americans.”

Romney called the continuing unemployment rate “a moral crisis that we face in this country,” that he says Obama has ignored.

“I don’t see it’s possible to solve a crisis, if you can’t see a crisis,” Romney said.

Can anyone really disagree with that? Obviously, you and I know that conservative austerity “solutions” to the problem are making things worse. But do the people understand that? I’m not sure they do. In fact, I would guess that most people think that the government is causing this continued high unemployment by not cutting spending rather than failing to raise it. Certainly, nobody is telling them what Matt Yglesias does in his piece linked above:

The private sector’s not being held back by the grasping arm of big government. Government is shrinking. And the shrinking of the government sector isn’t leading to any kind of private sector explosion. It’s simply offsetting meager private sector growth. Indeed, I’d say it’s holding it back. Fewer state and local government layoffs would mean more customers for private businesses and even stronger growth on the private side.

That’s right. What might have been just a slow, disappointing climb out of recession has become a jobless recovery of such epic proportions that it’s pushing the economy back down. It’s bad enough that Washington couldn’t find the gumption to stimulate the economy properly to begin with, it’s been laying off so many people in the public sector (often for purely ideological reasons) that it’s contributing heavily to the stall.

Yglesias again, in a different post, explains:

The federal government should have stepped in when the recession hit with generous bailouts to states and municipalities to help stabilize their budgets. Instead, an austerity-minded congress has been letting state governments sink. Then a new crop of budget cutting governors came to office determined to slash spending while trying to avoid responsibility for unpopular cuts. The result was to push a lot of budget pressure downward onto local government, where we’re seeing huge cutbacks even thought he population continues to grow.

I wrote about the Republican Orange County California wrecking crew the other day.I can hardly wait to see how that works out. But it’s happening all over the country both because of ideological insanity and sheer necessity and it’s dragging down the whole economy. And i don’t think even the smallest fraction of the country understands this.

Watch out for Mitt. He’s on to something. If he can get past the Tea drinking lunatics in his own party (and his own flip-flopping) he has a chance to make this a race. If they had a truly viable candidate to carry this message it would be politically dangerous to Obama. Sadly, I’m not sure it would make much difference in terms of economic policy.

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False Idols

by digby

Finally:

Four members affiliated with the religious group Faith In Public Life held a brief press conference during FFC’s afternoon intermission to denounce the GOP’s adherence to the philosophies of anti-government, anti-religion author Ayn Rand. The leaders — Rev. Jennifer Butler, Jim Wallis, Rev. Derrick Harkins, and Father Clete Kiley — asserted that the GOP efforts to cut funding from many anti-poverty programs while balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest Americans were not in line with Christian values

I don’t know why it’s taken Christian leaders so long to see that so many of their alleged allies are under the influence of a “philosopher” whose work is actively hostile to their fundamental beliefs. These particular Christian leaders aren’t social conservatives, of course, so their views probably don’t weigh heavily among the GOP faithful. But then Rand wasn’t a social conservative either, was she?

Howie’s been writing about this for a long time, particularly in the case of Rand’s most important current acolyte, Paul Ryan. If you’re interested in more on this subject, he’s got the goods.

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Poker face

by digby

Crooks and Liars tells me that the new conventional wisdom is that the president would pay the political price for the failure to raise the debt ceiling:

Via Politico:

“Of course, it’s dangerous,” a House Republican close to Boehner said of the politics of a government default. “But it’s dangerous for everybody, especially the president. At the end of the day, [Obama] will have to give in.”“Who has egg on their face if there is a sovereign debt crisis, House Republicans or the president?” asked another senior GOP lawmaker.

As Matt Yglesias notes, history seems to point toward sitting Presidents taking the hit for recalcitrant Congresses, particularly when they’re Republican obstructors:

That said, the evidence from political science does appear to suggest that if Republican intransigence destroys the American economy, that the voters will respond to this by punishing the incumbent President and electing a Republican.

I assume that Yglesias has all the data from the political scientists that say this is true. But I have to remind everyone that the most famous example of this kind of brinksmanship took place not that long ago and the people didn’t blame the president. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom — and the president did win re-election.

I’m speaking of the government shutdown of 1995, of course. Now it’s possible that the data shows that people blamed the president but they voted for him in 1996 anyway. But until about five minutes ago it was written in stone among the Villagers that the GOP had overreached and paid the price. Somehow I doubt that the House Republicans have been pouring over exit polls from ’95 and figured this all out. They’re bluffing.

Optics

by digby

I can’t think of a better way to show the American people that the government cares about jobs and the economy, can you?

President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will finally hit the links for a round of golf – and al fresco negotiation – on June 18, a White House official told POLITICO.

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Just beat it

by digby

I was sitting at my computer with the TV on in the background and thought I’d heard Monsignor Tim Russert arisen from the dead:

… he’s using a tactic we’ve often seen politicians use. When they’re boxed in a corner just shut down and hope that the storm will blow over. Now it’s not uncommon for congressmen to miss committee hearings, they do it all the time and certainly congressman Wiener is within his right. What is uncommon is when they cancel the week-end speeches. He was supposed to address the Democratic Party convention in the state of Wisconin this week-end he will not show up …. blah, blah blah.

I get that Lil’ Luke is a chip off the old block. But this channeling of his father as if he’s been on Capitol Hill since the days of Johnson and Rayburn is annoying. He looks like the Campbell soup kid and it sounds ridiculous coming from his lips.

However, I heard someone else talking about how Wiener made a huge mistake by talking to a tough interviewer like Luke Russert so I guess he’s now a member of the club. He owns the penis beat, as it were.

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A President is not the Fed Chairman

by digby

I think we’ve figured out why so many of us are dismayed by the administration’s obscure economic policy and it’s not what we thought. Yesterday, Obama was reportedly “testy” when congressional Democrats begged him to be be more forceful with the Republicans, snapping “I know how to negotiate.” But then he said this:

“He said, ‘There’s a difference between me and a member of Congress,'” another lawmaker said, paraphrasing the president as saying: “When I say something the markets react, all of society reacts, other countries react. I’ve got to be careful with what I say. I can’t just say it for brinkmanship. I’ve got to say it in a way so that I get what I want said, but I don’t upset markets and so on.”

That’s very odd since countries, markets and all of society knows that he’s a political figure. moreover, he’s going to be running for re-election which would seem to require him to be willing to engage in hyperbole. Does he believe that fierce campaigning will cause the markets to collapse because if he does it’s going to be a long campaign.

No, I think what’s happened is that he’s confused himself with Ben Bernanke. It’s the Fed chief whose every utterance causes countries and markets to flutter, not the president, whose political identity is well factored in. This could explain a lot, particularly his apparent comfort with the current state of the economy. Perhaps like Bernanke he doesn’t acknowledge unemployment as a part of his portfolio and is mainly concerned with inflation and the health of the financial sector, both of which are doing fine.

I’m being facetious, obviously. But Obama’s excuse for not being more aggressive is nonsense. The president is a political leader and everyone knows it. Nobody in the world would be surprised if he were to confront the lunatic opposition.

His job, along with the congress, is to produce good policy for the nation and whatever they’re doing economically isn’t working very well. A little humility is called for.

Update: And what exactly does this mean, do you suppose?

Obama responded that he has to be more careful and more considered than that, and that he is executing an existing plan.

I find it fairly hard to believe that 9.1 unemployment in June of 2011 is part of his plan. But hey, maybe it’s some more of that 38 dimensional chess thing.

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C’mon GOP, really?

by digby

“He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.”

This is embarrassing. Even to me. As an American, as a woman, as a human being.

How can it possibly be that even one person in this country considers this person qualified for the presidency.

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