Month: July 2011

Gripers and groaners

by digby

Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates in the NY Times at his best, speaking with authority on a subject he knows well:

In sum, it’s true that the Proclamation was a compromise. But hailing it merely as such is akin to hailing “Moby-Dick” for being a book — technically correct, if painfully thickwitted.

Likewise, a pedantic focus on the document itself conveniently omits the work of abolitionists and radicals whose tactics, encompassing jailbreaks, treason and shootouts, far outstripped anything ever concocted by MoveOn.org. But Lincoln understood their relationship to the larger cause. “They are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally,” he once said of the Radicals. “They are utterly lawless — the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with — but after all their faces are set Zionward.”

Obama, too, stands atop the work of a coalition of unhandy devils. In the fall of 2002, Chicago’s own professional left organized a rally to oppose the Iraq War and invited Mr. Obama to join them. He accepted, and the first unwitting steps to the White House were taken. It is considerably harder to imagine Mr. Obama’s path through the Democratic primary had he been just another pro-war Democrat insisting that the base activists stop whining.
[…]
Obama has been much praised for the magnanimity he shows his opposition. But such empathy, unburdened by actual expectations, comes easy. More challenging is the work of coping with those who have the disagreeable habit of taking the president, and his talk of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” seriously. In that business, Obama would do well to understand that while democracy depends on intelligent compromise, it also depends on the ill-tempered gripers and groaners out in the street.

The Party of Lincoln, whatever its present designs, has not forgotten this.

He also points out that contrary to the president’s arch comment that the Huffington Post would condemn Lincoln for “compromising” on the Emancipation Proclamation, the progressive leaders of the day, such as Frederick Douglass, were hugely supportive.
And his larger point is exactly right. It’s intrinsic to democracy — and progress — that there be people out there holding fast to the first principles that bring us together as a political faction in the first place.

The President’s public irritation with the left and conscious triangulation (recall that the campaign sent that video of Obama putting down the Huffington Post to their email list)gives the impression that he believes only his face is set Zionward and the rest of us are simpletons who don’t understand the way the world works. But gripers and groaners are part of the system. Without them, progress doesn’t get made and the other side’s radicals completely overwhelm the system. We’re getting an inkling of how that works out.

Update: This from Michael Tomasky, formerly a strong adherent of Obama’s style, is also good.

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Here We Go Again
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Conservative PACs are attacking Democrats for hurting Medicare again:

The conservative American Action Network is launching a large-scale mail and newspaper ad campaign, targeting a long list of House districts to shore up Republicans on the issue of Medicare.

The campaign, which includes both mail pieces and newspaper ads, charges Democrats with attempting to “balance the budget on the backs of seniors” with a proposal to amend Medicare Part D.

All told, the AAN message offensive will cost about a million dollars, according to officials with the group, and also includes some web advertising. That’s a significant investment in the Medicare debate, which Democrats have dominated so far this year.

The issue has to do with forcing drug manufacturers to pay Medicaid-style rebates for drugs needed by those covered by both Medicaid and Medicare Part D, making yet another needed good government fix to the massive fuckup that was George W. Bush’s signature budget-busting healthcare item.

Keep in mind that the context for the debt ceiling hostage negotiation is the desperate need for Republicans to distract and take the stench away from their deeply unpopular vote for the Ryan budget. They need to dirty the water on this issue as much as possible, particularly since seniors are their key voting demographic, and because their success in 2010 was largely predicated on lying to seniors that the Affordable Care Act would end Medicare as we know it. The Affordable Care Act was a deeply flawed bill that did a lot of things wrong, but hurting Medicare was not one of them. Nor will Waxman’s bill that is currently being attacked hurt Medicare, either.

But that’s not going to stop conservative groups from lying about it, because they know they stand a good chance of losing the House if Dems can make a strong counterattack on protecting Medicare. The GOP already had a casualty of the Ryan budget earlier this year in New York’s 26th district.

The GOP urgently needs Dems to take votes to cut Medicare so that they can negate the issue of their arrogant vote on the Ryan budget heading into 2012.

Good thing, then, that the White House has been pushing for cuts to…Medicare. Makes sense. That should work out fabulously.

Balance!
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Ladies and gentlemen, the centrism cult in action, courtesy of Dana Milbank at Fred Hiatt’s rag:

The time has come in the debt-limit fight for all Americans to declare their loyalties: Are you with the bank robbers, or are you with the dirty old men?

This unpalatable choice is as good a way as any to frame the debate in these last days before the default deadline.
On one side are House Republican leaders who, facing a rebellion of Tea Party conservatives, appealed for party unity by screening for members a clip of the 2010 film “The Town,” in which Ben Affleck’s bank-robber character tells the Jeremy Renner character: “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people.” Renner replies: “Whose car we takin’?” The clip ended before the shooting and beatings that followed.

On the other side are House Democratic leaders, who had to decide how to handle Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.), accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward a teenage girl (he claims it was consensual). Wu, who previously attracted attention by sending staff members photos of himself in a tiger costume,had no choice but to resign. But leaders accepted his plan to stay on the job for the debt standoff, thereby giving them one more vote against Speaker John Boehner’s debt plan.

It’s hard to decide which wins the craven crown: Exhorting colleagues by playing for them a call to criminal violence? Or trying to thwart the opposition by tolerating a 56-year-old colleague accused of forcing himself on a friend’s daughter?

On one side, an entire caucus watching a film about violent thieves going to “hurt some people” for inspiration. On the other, a political party with one Congressman involved in a sex scandal, temporarily holding off a resignation while we deal with an important vote on a (trumped up) fiscal crisis.

Milbank gets a two-fer here: claim that Democrats, who are overwhelmingly favored by women at the ballot box and passed the Ledbetter Act in the face of conservative opposition, are somehow the party of dirty old man misogynists, and claim that a sex scandal involving one Congressman that may or may not rise to the level of criminal activity is somehow on a par with an entire political party holding America hostage and fetishizing criminal violence while promising to “hurt some people.”

Of course, Milbank is considered one of the “liberal” columnists at the Post.

The American press establishment isn’t just dead weight in failing to expose the corporate takeover of the country’s politics and the sheer lunacy of its right-wing flank. As with the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, it is playing an actively complicit, damaging role in our democracy. The entire industry might as well shrivel up and die for all the good it does in informing the public.

They’re Not All Wall St. Tools
by David Atkins (“thereisnsopoon”)

In case you were wondering about that zombie death cult thing:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said today that some members of his own caucus who are refusing to agree to a compromise debt ceiling deal are hoping to unleash “chaos” and thus force the White House and Senate Democrats to make bigger concessions than they’re already offering. As many as 40 House Republicans, especially Tea Party members and freshmen, have demanded nothing short of changing the Constitution to include a balanced budget amendment before they would vote to raise debt ceiling, even though that has zero chance before the U.S. faces potential default on Aug. 2.

Speaking on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show this morning, Boehner agreed that failing to raise the limit before the deadline would be devastating, and said the “chaos” plan won’t work when asked by Ingraham what’s motivating the recalcitrant Republicans:

BOEHNER: Well, first they want more. And my goodness, I want more too. And secondly, a lot of them believe that if we get past August the second and we have enough chaos, we could force the Senate and the White House to accept a balanced budget amendment. I’m not sure that that — I don’t think that that strategy works. Because I think the closer we get to August the second, frankly, the less leverage we have vis a vis our colleagues in the Senate and the White House.

These folks aren’t in the business of doing Wall Street’s bidding. They’re in the business of bringing the system down to create their own new order, no different from a Maoist or Leninist revolutionary on the other side of the aisle. It’s a market fundamentalist cult. They are a sizable and growing minority of the Republican caucus, and the ones who don’t toe their line are terrified their heads will be the next to fall before the Tea Party guillotine.

Digby wondered earlier whether the Tea Party were more political construct or real grassroots movement. I guess the best answer is that it doesn’t really matter. The Tea Party has always been fear-based mobilization of the ignorant on whatever issue Rove, DeMint, Limbaugh, the Kochs, etc. wanted it to be about. It doesn’t have to be grassroots movement for rank and file Republicans to fear a primary challenge if they step at all out of line.

As much as there has been “good cop, bad cop” bipartisanship played over austerity (and there has been), there can be no doubt that the GOP is transforming from a corporatist entity slowly hollowing out America’s middle class, to a truly malignant revolutionary entity.

Meanwhile, the pundit class continues to whistle past the graveyard and act as though this is all partisan politics as usual. One would think that David Brooks and George Will would know enough history to realize that when revolution hits, people like them are usually the first ones to be culled, both politically and physically.

Yes, I’m Sure That Will Work
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

As if the White House couldn’t get any more dense, members of President Obama’s text message feed received the following today:

Join President Obama in calling on Congress for a balanced approach to reducing the deficit. Contact your House representative at 202-499-4009.

You’ve got to be kidding. Since the Grand Bargain is pretty much dead, there are only two plans on the table, and they’re pretty similar: Harry Reid’s right-wing austerity approach that counts savings from reductions in spending on the wars overseas while shifting the need to take up this argument again until after the 2012 election, and John Boehner’s even farther right-wing austerity measure that doesn’t count those savings, while forcing everyone to go through this fight again early next year. President Obama has already vowed to veto Boehner’s plan, even though Boehner may not even be able to get it past his own caucus. Reid’s plan is dead in the water in the House–after all, they may yet reject Boehner’s plan.

And President Obama is asking his supporters to call Congress and ask for a “balanced plan?” What balance? Those of us who have been calling this a kabuki ritual play have known for a long time that the final deal would be medium-level austerity measures for the rest of us, with no significant revenue increases from the wealthy who are still making out like bandits. The only question has been whether a market panic of sorts would be necessary, or whether Wall St. would manage to corral their little minions into doing their bidding first. Both Reid’s and Boehner’s plans fit the bill, albeit with different political implications. But there’s no “balance” in either plan.

This approach from the White House has shades of OFA’s push to “support the President’s plan” during the healthcare reform imbroglio, even though no one could figure out exactly what the President’s plan even was. If I were a member of Congress getting calls to my office asking for a “balanced approach”, I’d studiously ignore them, and assume that whatever organization was pushing the calls was filled with abject morons.

Best I can tell, this isn’t an attempt by the President to lobby Congress. It’s an attempt to con his own supporters who don’t know better into thinking that the President is advocating “balance” and “moderation” in the face of a deadlocked partisan Congress. Given the lack of awareness of the average voter, and the tendency of the media to continue to play a “both sides do it” game, I have no doubt the con will work.

Dodging a bullet

by digby

I’ve had a few inquiries about when my abject apology can be expected since I had been predicting a Grand Bargain, but I think that’s a misinterpretation of what I’ve been writing about on this topic.I didn’t predict a Grand Bargain. I said that the debt ceiling “deal” could have been prevented if the Democrats, especially the President, hadn’t seen this as an opportunity rather than the dangerous game of chicken it clearly was. The Republicans made it known very early on that they were going to do this and by trying to finesse them rather than outmaneuver them, we’ve come to this crisis point.

As for the kabuki — I feel quite sure that if the President and John Boehner had their way, we would have a Grand Bargain and the president would have whipped to get it passed. And it would have been very bad:

In what may be one of the most under-reported stories of the debt ceiling talks, Politico’s Jen Haberkorn notes that before negotiations broke down on Friday evening, President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner tentatively agreed to gradually raise the Medicare eligibility age as part of a “grand bargain” to increase the nation’s borrowing limit:

Details of the plan were not yet finalized before the Obama-Boehner talks collapsed on Friday. But in general, the agreement called for very gradually increasing the eligibility age from 65 to 67 over about two decades, according to administration and Republican congressional sources.

One pathway would call for increasing the age by one month per year beginning in 2017 until it reached 66 in 2029. In 2030, it would increase two months per year until it hit 67.

The administration’s willingness to entertain the idea may have given “a controversial idea more legitimacy and high-profile support than it’s ever gotten before,” Haberkorn observes, and it is likely to rile progressives who question the wisdom of the compromise.

Yeah. That was the Boehner and Obama kabuki dance in which they were allegedly fighting tooth and nail, but actually coming to an agreement over the fundamentals of the Grand Bargain. And that baseline isn’t going away. And sadly, no matter what happens with this debt ceiling debacle, that position now has legitimacy with the Very Serious People and will form the basis of future “compromises.” We dodged a bullet on that one, but I don’t think it will be the last time we hear about it.

The Democrats may end up winning the dubious honor of presiding over the biggest budget cuts in history. But they have stymied any hope of being able to move on jobs and have trampled on the third rail of Social Security and Medicare hard enough to short it out. It’s on the agenda to stay.

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Portents of trouble

by digby

Pollster Celinda Lake tweeted these messages this morning:

New gallup poll shows more americans saying economy getting worse than in previous 5 months. Our focus groups echo the same.

New polls show independents rate both parties even on soc sec, but give republicans +12pt advantage on jobs. Bad formula for 2012

But Democrats are hell on deficits so that’s good. Or it would be good if anyone really gave a damn about that.

The plan is that as soon as this mess is wrapped up, there will be a big “pivot” to jobs. I’ll be curious to see what it will be, however, since they’ve just inculcated in the public the idea that the country is broke and pretty much blown whatever political will there ever was (and it wasn’t much) to do anything about anything. I think the plan must be to hope for a magical recovery and pray for a Bachman nomination. If I had to guess I’d say that we will probably see some scandal or trivia emerge soon to capture the imagination of the beltway media and provide some distraction.

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Corralling the kooks

by digby

Oh my. Who could ever have predicted that as they come down to the wire, this would happen?

On Tuesday, conservative Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) predicted defeat for House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) plan to raise the debt limit.

“I am confident as of this morning that there are not 218 Republicans in support of the plan,” he said.

He was counting on the opposition of dozens of House conservatives who have in the past pledged not to raise the debt limit on terms that compromising with Democrats would require.

Twenty-four hours later, after taking a beating from the GOP establishment and party leadership, and after watching Democrats grow more and more confident in their ability to split the Republican coalition, those conservatives are reconsidering their rebellion.

“I think Jordan was probably counting me originally, but I’ve moved a little bit,” Rep. Blake Fahrenthold (R-TX), a freshman conservative, told reporters in response to a question from TPM.

Fahrenthold joined the GOP caucus for a morning meeting Wednesday, after which several undecided members, and opponents of Boehner’s bill, streamed out to tell reporters they’re undergoing a change of heart.

“The risk of sending this country into uncharted territory with a default is really concerning me,” Fahrenthold said.

Obviously, at this point, I have no more idea of what’s happening in these negotiations than what the upper reaches of the Chinese government is talking about. I’m not sure anyone does. But I do still believe that the notion that the Tea party members of the House GOP caucus was such a powerful monolith and so intransigent that there was no way they could ever agree to anything was a tad overblown.

It makes sense that both sides would do that, for different reasons. But in the end, it’s still likely that Boehner will be able to cobble together the votes he needs. Even the jihadist Club for Growth is merely saying that voting for the Boehner plan “could have consequences.” It’s not exactly a war cry. (And who knows? Some Democrats could even come over to make up the difference. Armageddon’s on the line, after all.)

Obviously, when you elect a whole bunch of fanatics and fools to the congress all at once, you’re going to have problems like this. But I suspect there’s been a tremendous amount of “educational outreach” being done over the past few days to try to calm the confused and agitated Tea Partiers. I don’t envy the teacher.

And while I hate to be cavalier about this powerful political faction, it’s just possible that they are more of a political construct than a grassroots powerhouse on this issue.

Courtesy Dave Weigel, here’s Louis Gohmert addressing today’s “Hold The Line” tea party rally:

At this point, I guess we’re all supposed to be rooting for it to fail so that everyone will be forced to rally around the Reid plan. At least that’s what I hear. For some reason that doesn’t sound like a plausible plan to me, but I guess we should hope for it anyway. I’m just not sure why anymore.

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I for one welcome our idiot overlords
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

I’m not talking about Congress or the White House. I mean the ratings agencies. Much to the delight of right-wingers everywhere, S&P has released a report demanding $4 trillion in cuts to government spending, or else the hostage gets it else they’ll downgrade the nation’s credit rating.

We expect the debt trajectory to continue increasing in the medium term if a medium-term fiscal consolidation plan of $4 trillion is not agreed upon. If Congress and the Administration reach an agreement of about $4 trillion, and if we to conclude that such an agreement would be enacted and maintained throughout the decade, we could, other things unchanged, affirm the ‘AAA’ long-term rating and A-1+ short-term ratings on the U.S.

As Digby rightly points out, having the nation’s credit downgraded despite raising the ceiling on time was never one of the issues before, and would have questionable impact on the nation’s ability to sell treasuries regardless.

But beyond that, there are two ways of looking at this move by S&P. One is that they’re putting the screws on the United States on behalf of their Wall St. pals in a conspiratorial extortion scheme. That is certainly an easy conclusion to draw, until you realize that they’re also demanding an end to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, a point emphasized by Fred Bauer over at David Frum’s place:

However, digging into the S&P report reveals some details that might be more problematic for many seeming “deficit hawks.” Though this report does suggest that $4 trillion in cuts/increased revenue over the next ten years would be enough to keep an AAA rating, it also says that its baseline for savings assumes the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2012. Will many of these “deficit hawks” abandon those tax cuts in order to appease S&P and keep an AAA rating?

So let’s get the S&P position straight: unless Congress and the White House enact a whopping $4 trillion dollars in spending cuts and repeal the Bush tax cuts, they’re going to downgrade our credit rating.

Ultra-wealthy Wall St. bankers definitively do not want the Bush tax cuts to expire. So collusion and extortion on behalf of the likes of Goldman Sachs seem to be excluded as a motive. Which leaves the other way of looking at it: the “analysts” at S&P are just plain stupid.

In what political universe are these people living that they think both cutting spending by $4 trillion and killing the Bush tax cuts can actually happen given today’s political climate? It’s insane. Even Democrats are too afraid of wealthy donors and anti-tax attack ads to actually let the Bush tax cuts expire–to say nothing of Republicans–but no way in hell do even the most morally compromised Democrats go along with $4 trillion in spending cuts. Neither of those has a real prayer of happening, much less both.

Bauer lists several other more subtle reasons that S&P is out to lunch on their analysis and prognostication, and Kevin Drum points out that there’s no real reason that the market should be getting nervous about buying treasuries, anyway. But we don’t even need to go there. These people are idiots. They got so burned by their total failure to rate mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps as the dog vomit they were, that they’re desperate to overcorrect by downgrading other bonds wherever they can. As they say, never chalk up to malevolence what can best be explained by incompetence.

Reading stuff like this brings to mind the points made by Matt Taibbi and Michael Lewis that the ratings agencies are basically chock full of lesser lights who couldn’t make it actually playing with the big boys on Wall St. And yet they seem to have the duly elected government of the world’s largest economy dangling by a string.

We’re in for a long, long ride.

Wall St. Starts to Twitch. But Will It Matter?
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Josh Marshall says that Wall St. is about to bring down the curtain on the kabuki play:

I mentioned before that it’s not clear whether John Boehner even has the votes for his own plan in the chamber he runs. In other words, will House Republicans even support Boehner’s plan, the plan of their nominal leader, let alone anything that would pass the Senate or garner the president’s signature?

At that point everyone should be able to see there aren’t two sides here to tango, we’re listening to the sound of one hand compromising.

The scenario being floated informally now by a lot of observers is that if and when we come to that point Republicans in the Senate, Wall Street and just a lot sane people in general who haven’t come off the sidelines yet or haven’t really been paying attention just say: Dude, you don’t have a full deck, this is over.

Color me unconvinced. I’ve said before that it would take actual negative effects in the market for enough Republicans to get off their high horse, and enough Congressional Democrats (particularly in the Senate) to cave enough, to push through a default ceiling increase, albeit with very significant cuts to discretionary spending. But I don’t see any outside forces coming in to really sway things before then.

One must remember that while the Tea Party caucus in the House is a useful tool of the financial sector, and promotes economic policies that Wall St. finds highly useful, they don’t actually like Wall St.. These are the sort of people who got elected by promising never to vote for anything like TARP again, who campaigned on Barack Obama’s being a tool of New York bankers and in cahoots with them. Right wing blogs are just as full of conspiracy theories alleging that Obama is in bed with the ratings agencies to needlessly downgrade America’s credit, as some left wing blogs are, though the rationales for the theories are obviously quite different. These people aren’t going to do squat that Wall St. says unless there’s a significant real-world market effect, because they don’t really respect Wall St. or believe anything that a bunch of socially liberal bankers from New York say. And even then the question is iffy.

Right now these folks are having to watch inspirational movie clips just to stir up the “courage” to vote for Boehner’s whacked out plan that is too far right for Reid’s Senate or Obama’s veto pen. Tim Geithner’s friends aren’t going to change that equation much.

In order for enough Republicans to be willing to face up to Tea Party challengers for voting on anything to the left of Boehner’s latest proposal, they’re going to need the cover of a crisis. So far, we aren’t there yet.