Month: December 2011

Insider Trading

by David Atkins

Color me shocked:

When Senate Democrats finally brokered a compromise over the proposed health-care law, a group of hedge funds were let in on the deal, learning details hours before a public announcement on Dec. 8, 2009.

The news was potentially worth millions of dollars to the investors, though none would publicly divulge how they used the information. They belong to a select group who pay for early, firsthand reports on Capitol Hill.

Seeking advance word of government decisions is part of a growing, lucrative—and legal— practice in Washington that employs a network of brokers, lobbyists and political insiders who arrange private meetings.

Consider this another in a long line of reasons by the public is fed up with both Congress and Wall St. The institutions of American government work almost entirely on behalf of the 1%, and much of the most appalling aspects of it are still perfectly legal.

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I love Bo, the first dog. Not only that, I’m a post-partisan first animal lover. I loved Bush’s dogs Barney and Miz Beasley too. They were the only good things about the administration. My main gripe is that the Obamas don’t show Bo off enough.

Today the president took him to Pet Smart to shop for a Christmas present.(Naturally, the jerks at FoxNation apparently think he should have been hunkered down in the White House running spread sheets on the payroll tax rather than shopping for his daughters’ Christmas presents.)

Whatever. It’s a cute picture of Bo and that’s what it’s all about for me:

The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario…

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack. He’d built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

Then Romney put his boys on notice: He would be making predetermined stops for gas, and that was it.

The ride was largely what you’d expect with five brothers, ages 13 and under, packed into a wagon they called the ”white whale.”

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ”Dad!” he yelled. ”Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

I’m not normally one to base my opinion of politicians on anecdotes. But I just can ‘t ignore this. It’s horrible. I think most people who aren’t psychopaths can see why that is so. It isn’t “crisis management.” It’s robotic insensitivity at best and conscious cruelty at worst.

It’s true that George W Bush was nothing if not bloodthirsty and “you know who” famously loved dogs and children. But based on this behavior, I have to believe that Romney must be capable of even worse. It’s one thing to be an animal lover who is also violent. Being cruel to animals is a baseline behavioral concern.

Rhetorical Sloppiness

By tristero

It’s very simple: As long as the right’s language is the default language used to describe the world in the mainstream discourse, the extremists win. That’s why no liberal should accept the right’s terms for their objections to the science of evolution, let alone safe, legal reproductive choices.

But it requires vigilance. For example:

[Gingrich’s] latest manifesto, which should have been addressed “Dear Iowa Fundamentalist Caucus-goers,” states: “As litigants demand that courts and judges intervene to create new ‘rights’ out of whole cloth, such litigants and their supporters seek to limit the freedom of others to express their deeply held religious commitments to, for example, the value of every human life and to marriage as between one man and one woman.”

As opposed to one man and three women? Nobody is forcing Christians to marry anyone they don’t want to marry; they’re preventing gays from marrying people they want to marry.

MoDo probably knows better: she almost surely realizes that you most certainly can be Christian AND gay. But religious nuts have so succeeded in characterizing their addled beliefs as Christian (while anyone professing to be Christian who disagrees with them is considered to be just pretending to be a Christian) that Dowd, or her copy editor, unforgivably let this one slip by. There”ve been a lot of these kinds of slips in the past 30 years.

Until the rhetoric of liberals, moderates, and even center-right Americans is more precise and does not, for an instant, buy into any of the language of extremism, the far right will continue to exercise undue influence.

Helping out John Boehner

by digby

Dave Weigel deconstructs the GOP strategy in the payroll tax fight and sadly, despite my earlier hopeful post, I think he’s probably got it right:

The cynic’s bet is that the story of GOP dysfunction won’t matter, so long as there’s eventually some compromise. Eyes on the prize: If the other side blinks, and it always does, what can Republicans get out of them?

They want a few things. The House’s version of the one-year extension included reforms that Republicans plan to stick to. On unemployment, the GOP wanted to cut the maximum duration from 99 weeks to 59 weeks and add in some new requirements. Beneficiaries who didn’t have GEDs would have to try to get them. States implementing unemployment insurance could require drug tests. These and other reforms were necessary, according to LaTourette, because “you couldn’t get 218 votes that extended unemployment benefits without reform.” In his district, employers were tired of having jobs open but lacking workers with the skills to fill them. Here was a chance to fix that.

They need to do this to validate the GOP in their belief that “those people”, the lazy-good-for-nothings who haven’t earned their benefits, are the ones who must pay the price for this bad economy. The “jaaahb creators” certainly aren’t to blame — they’d love to hire if it weren’t for all the “urban youth” and “illegals” and “drug users” and “hippies” who can’t or refuse to fill the good jobs they are offering. “Welfarizing” unemployment is very important to keep the rubes focused in the right direction.

Weigel also points out that they want to give the EPA a big fat finger and jam the President on Keystone (although they explain it as “job creation,”) and concludes:

Yes, the Republicans are coming off as intransigent. But Democrats want to re-elect the president, so they’ll ultimately give up a lot to extend a tax cut and unemployment benefits. In the meantime, Republicans can figure out what leverage they have to weaken the welfare state. Despite how it looks right now, it doesn’t make sense to doubt them. After all, they’ve had a lot of practice at this.

Indeed they have.(Read the whole piece to see just how often this has worked.)

It’s always possible that it really will blow up in their faces this time and they will capitulate to the Senate compromise and just come back in two months and do it all over again. What looks most likely to me that that the Dems will end up giving them a little something now with a promise for more later. (I’m surprised there isn’t another women’s rights issue in there to bargain away, but maybe after Plan B, they figure they’ve played that out.) But however it goes down, Weigel is right: they are showing their usual willingness to ride out any short term bad press to get what they want in the long run.

When you see things like this, you can see why:

Nice

An awful lot of things are screwed up right now, but this is one thing we can all be grateful for.

The Unemployment Insurance Extension that isn’t

by digby

Arthur Delaney brings up a little known fact about the bipartisan Senate bill we are all cheering so loudly:

Republicans and Democrats have clashed frequently over federal unemployment insurance ever since the unemployed first became eligible for 99 weeks of benefits at the end of 2009.

Despite the high-profile disagreements, which have repeatedly led to lapsed benefits for millions of people, Republicans and Democrats broadly agree on what to do next: reduce the duration of benefits and make sure their cost isn’t added to the federal budget deficit. But unless Congress reaches a compromise in the next week or so, federal unemployment benefits will lapse again for nearly 2 million people come January.

In December, Republicans proposed reducing the number of weeks available by 40. Democrats are willing to meet them halfway by cutting 20 weeks, albeit in a backdoor fashion: Congress would reauthorize the two federal unemployment programs, but the second would automatically phase out in one state after another over the course of 2012.

So part of the great bipartisan compromise to extend UI before Christmas is to only cut extended benefits by 20 weeks instead of 40. Huzzah. I guess those green shoots are sprouting again. And this provision applies beyond the “two month” place holder:

Although the Senate legislation would keep the federal programs in place for just two months, the second Extended Benefits program would phase out in 11 states during that time. It’s a “wholly inadequate” outcome, said Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the committee overseeing unemployment, because “with very little warning, tens of thousands of long-term unemployed Americans will be cut off unemployment insurance.” Levin did not say, however, that he opposed the bill…

As Republicans have noted, the Obama administration was the first to suggest letting Extended Benefits dwindle in 2012.

Merry Christmas.

And remember that’s the allegedly good bill, passed by the Senate. It could actually get worse.

By the way:

Quote Of The Day

Cornered Tea Partiers are dangerous

by digby

I think this says it all:

This is how they roll. They just don’t believe in voting:

House Republicans blocked a Democratic attempt Wednesday to call up the Senate payroll tax bill by quickly gaveling today’s pro forma session to a close.

Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) presided over the brief pro forma session, and after the pledge of allegiance closed the session and said the next pro forma would be on Friday. But as he walked away, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) protested the move.

“You’re walking out, you’re walking away, just as so many Republicans have walked away from middle class taxpayers, the unemployed, and… those who will be seeking medical assistance from their doctors.”

Fitzpatrick never recognized Hoyer, and gaveled the session closed.

“We regret, Mr. Speaker, that you have walked off the platform without addressing the issue of critical importance to this country,” he added.
Hoyer then yielded to House Budget Committee Ranking Member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who began to speak to a chamber that had no presiding officer. C-SPAN’s coverage of the floor ended moments after Van Hollen started speaking.

This is crazy stuff even for them. Dday speculates that they really are trying to “fix it in conference” despite the fact that conferences have gone the way of the dodo bird. Why? Because they have backed themselves into a corner and this is their only way out.

The Republicans may have finally gone too far. If the Democrats don’t blink and bail them out they may finally have to face some consequences for their radicalism.

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Republicans Divided

by David Atkins

As much as we progressive bloggers are fond of pointing out “both sides do it” journalistic malpractice, sometimes even the traditional can’t help but notice how bizarrely discombobulated Republicans have become lately. Case in point: the L.A. Times.

Facing that unpleasant reality, Republicans fell into an angry family feud over their strategy. Several GOP senators who face reelection next year accused their House colleagues of acting irresponsibly. The House voted to disagree with the bipartisan bill the Senate had passed to preserve the tax cut for two months so Congress would have more time to work on a full-year extension.

Democrats, meantime, were happy to accuse Republicans of voting to block a tax cut and leaving town without finishing their work — the same argument Republicans planned to use on them.

“The issue right now is this: The clock is ticking; time is running out,” President Obama said in a statement at the White House after the vote. “And if the House Republicans refuse to vote for the Senate bill, or even allow it to come up for a vote, taxes will go up in 11 days.”

This was not a fight that seasoned Republican lawmakers, most prominent among them House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, would have chosen. They see no value in having Americans think Republicans are allowing a tax increase, a message the White House continues to broadcast daily. Senate Republicans calculated that it was better to agree to an imperfect compromise, one that extends the tax break a couple of months and buys more negotiating time, than to try to argue otherwise.

But as has happened so many times this year, those voices were drowned out in the House by hard-charging conservatives and their newly arrived tea party partners, who pushed the GOP to instigate one last round of brinkmanship as the year ends. Boehner took up their cause, and is now withstanding grumbles from within his ranks and the arrows of Republican allies in the Senate who view this as a no-win battle.

It’s increasingly clear that Boehner isn’t in control of his caucus, and that no one is really driving the ideological train in the Republican Party except maybe Rupert Murdoch and Grover Norquist, who themselves don’t always see eye to eye.

And speaking of ideological train wrecks, there’s the whole Ron Paul Goes to Iowa problem:

Conservatives and Republican elites in the state are divided over who to support for the GOP nomination, but they almost uniformly express concern over the prospect that Ron Paul and his army of activist supporters may capture the state’s 2012 nominating contest — an outcome many fear would do irreparable harm to the future role of the first-in-the-nation caucuses.

In spin rooms, bar rooms and online forums, the what-to-do-about-Paul conversation has become pervasive as polls show him at or near the top here just weeks before the January 3rd vote.

Paul poses an existential threat to the state’s cherished kick-off status, say these Republicans, because he has little chance to win the GOP nomination and would offer the best evidence yet that the caucuses reward candidates who are unrepresentative of the broader party.

If the shoe were on the other foot, the traditional media would be predicting the end of the Democratic Party as we know it.

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So much funnakah