Month: October 2013

President Obama: “It’s the Republican budget. That’s a pretty significant compromise.”

by digby

So the president went to FEMA today and laid down the gauntlet to the Republicans. Well, in a way. He called for a vote on the clean CR, indicating that he knows there are enough votes if only Boehner will allow it. And then he said this:

“I’m happy to talk to Republicans about anything related to the budget,” Obama said. “There’s not a subject that I am not willing to engage in, work on, negotiate and come up with compromises.” But, the president added, “We’re not going to negotiate under the threat of further harm to our economy and middle class families.”

Obama added that Democrats effectively already have compromised in the budget debate by agreeing to a budget bill that has lower spending levels reflecting Republican priorities. “It’s the Republican budget,” Obama said. “That’s a pretty significant compromise.”

This is true. But that’s not all he said. Here, I’ll let Chuck Todd, Andrea Mitchell and Chris Cilizza explain it to you. Here’s their conversation right after the president spoke today:

Chuck Todd: … I found a couple of things very interesting about  the president seemed to go out of his way to emphasize. Number one, the Democrats have already compromised. This has been a case that they have been making a lot but it’s not been a forward case, talking about that this is already a Republican budget, this is reflecting Republican priorities when it comes to spending levels and sequestration etc. 

And then the idea that he is not willing to negotiate, in which he says “no, I’m perfectly willing to negotiate after the shutdown threat and the debt ceiling issue is no longer there,” so he’s trying to shift the rhetoric so it is not as the Republicans are trying to frame it as “hey, the president won’t negotiate” well, the president pushing back on that saying hey, I’m willing to negotiate just not under these pre-conditions that Republicans want.

So I think it’s notable that you see a different tone and a little bit different emphasis on this second week. It tells me that perhaps some of the Republicans talking points beating him up collectively on the idea that he’s not willing to negotiate is something they thought they needed to push back on.

Andrea Mitchell: And Chris Cilizza, the logical negotiation would be to accept the sequester levels or something close to the sequester levels, for more than just 6 weeks. To accept the sequester levels going forward which is what Republicans want., and to put something on the table on entitlement reform which the president has already put on the table in his own budget. So to adjust that sequester level and the entitlement reforms to come up with some budget savings, long term budget savings that could get the Republicans off of their demand regarding Obamacare.

Chris Cilizza: Yeah, I think you’re right there Andrea. I think Chuck is on to something in that the president … you know, John Boehner just kept saying over the week-end “I want to have a conversation.  Who ever heard of not negotiating” except I think the president  and his team is aware that without context and the right push back there that is something that can gain some ground, which is John Boehner saying “look I’m being reasonable, I want to talk”, Barack Obama saying , as you heard, look this the sequester is a compromise  what’s in place right now, if we just extended the sequester it would already be a compromise by Democrats, trying to reset the calculus there.

I continue to believe that this is about when and how the White House, if the want to — they don’t have to — if they want to give John Boehner a way out here, whether it’s Chained-CPI, whether in some form of entitlement reform, whether it’s extending the sequester cuts beyond that six week window as you point out Andrea. John Boehner is in a position where he needs to get something to go back to the Republican house conference where he can say, “see, here’s what I got. We fought we fought we fought and now’s the time to give in.” He can’t do that without something on the White House end. Well, he could but he’s not willing to do it yet.

I have no clue if they know anything. Probably not. But I have to say I’m a little bit shocked by Mitchell’s notion that the Democrats might be required to not only give in on entitlements, but must also agree to extend the sequester cuts indefinitely.  Up until now the village gossip has had it that the Dems would get a pullback on the sequester in exchange for entitlements cuts, not that they would have to throw permanent sequester cuts into the deal as well.

Let’s hope Mitchell was confused about that because otherwise, the end result of this would be that Democrats adopt the GOP budget and agree to cuts to Social Security in exchange for keeping the government open and raising the debt ceiling. That means the hostage strategy will have worked out better than the Republicans ever could have imagined.

Update:  I was on Majority Report this morning and Sam Sedar mused that the main the White House would want to achieve from all this is a procedural agreement that would preclude anyone using the debt ceiling in this manner in the future. I haven’t head anyone else offer that as a possibility, but it certainly does make sense. This is the big issue as far as the WH is concerned. The problem, as always, would be what the Republicans would demand in return for their great sacrifice. I shudder to think …

Update II: This is the procedural rule Sam was talking about:

Back in 1979, the Democratic House Speaker, Tip O’Neill, handed the unhappy job of lining up votes for a debt-ceiling raise to Representative Richard Gephardt, then a young Democratic congressman from Missouri. Gephardt hated this, and, realizing he’d probably get stuck with it again, consulted the parliamentarian about whether the two votes could be combined. The parliamentarian said they could. Thereafter, whenever the House passed a budget resolution, the debt ceiling was “deemed” raised.

The “Gephardt Rule,” as it became known, lasted until 1995, when the new House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, fresh from the Republican triumph of the 1994 midterms, recognized the same thing that Tea Party Republicans recognize today: The threat of default could be used to extort Democratic concessions. Gingrich abolished the Gephardt Rule, and within the year the government had shut down.

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QOTD: Justice Scalia



by digby

“I don’t even know whether Judas Iscariot is in hell. I mean, that’s what the pope meant when he said, ‘Who am I to judge?’ He may have recanted and had severe penance just before he died. Who knows?”

“I even believe in the Devil.”

“If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.”

“In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot.”

“What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.”

Among conservatives that man is considered to be a genius.

Testing GOP resolve

by digby

This should be interesting. Greg Sargent:

Senate Dems will move their own clean debt limit bill, rather than wait for the House GOP to hold its own vote on either a clean CR funding the government (which Senate Dems have already passed with broad bipartisan support) or on a debt limit hike. Dems would be challenging Senate GOP moderates to vote for or against averting default and economic havoc outside of any set of conditions House Republicans insist must be attached to any measure raising the debt limit.

Senator John Cornyn is claiming no clean debt limit hike can pass the Senate, but Dems believe there may be at least half a dozen GOP Senators who would be willing to support one. A vote would put that to the test.

The move might also increase pressure on House Republicans. Kevin Smith, a spokesman for John Boehner, tweeted today: “POTUS & his advisers keep calling for a clean debt hike. So when will his party in the Senate pass one?”

This prompted a response from Harry Reid aide Faiz Shakir: “Will you if we do?”

Sorting out the allegedly “moderate” GOP Senators is a good place to start the week. The dynamic may very well be different from the House, where certain Republicans are snarling to teporters about how much they hate Ted Cruz, but when push comes to shove don’t seem to be rushing to end the shutdown. Let’s test this in the senate too.

It’s a shame they brought back all the furloughed Pentagon workers however. That was probably the best leverage the Democrats had against the Republicans on this shutdown. They are, after all, pretty much the only government workers the GOP really values. (Of course, they are the most valued among many Democrats as well. The difference is that Democrats value most other government workers too.)

And so we go into yet another week of furious speculation 24/7 about what’s really going on — something which none of knows or can know and which will only be revealed when it’s revealed. Fun times for a blogger. Not so much for the country.

Update: Last week we wrote here about the Williamsburg Accord and the right wing strategy to defund Obamacare.  Today the New York Times reveals even more on that subject. It would appear that this happened in plain sight but nobody paid attention, took them seriously or knew what to do about it. And yes, it is funded by huge money, hundreds of millions from the usual suspects.  Things go better with Kochs.

The housing “recovery” that isn’t

by David Atkins

While Republicans and shutting down the government, threatening the full faith and credit of the United States, and generally wreaking havoc on consumer confidence and the economy in general, it’s worth a reminder that the economy is still broken.

You know that housing “recovery” we’re supposedly seeing? About that:

Josh Rosner recently released the astonishing statistic: that sales of owner-occupied properties showed only a 1% gain in the last 12 months. The gains that have been driving the indexes were all in investor owned properties. Some flipped to other investors. In hot markets, local investors have been doing “mini-bulks,” acquiring small portfolios to sell to private equity investors, some without renovating them, others with modest fix-ups. Others sold them to homebuyers.

Around half of these purchases driving up housing prices are cash sales as well.

Also, there’s this:

Of the 87,062 foreclosures in the last five years that were bought by corporate investors and have been flipped, about a quarter were sold for at least $100,000 more than what the investor originally paid, according to [an online real estate listings site] Redfin (Although it’s impossible to know how much investors spent on upgrades or renovations.)….

The boom-bust-flip phenomenon is just one of the most obvious ways that research suggests the financial crisis has benefited the upper class while brutalizing the middle class. Rents have risen at twice the pace of the overall cost-of-living index, partly because middle-class families can’t get the credit they need to buy. That means “landlords can raise rents with impunity,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin. And according to a report by David Autor, the M.I.T. economist, job losses during and after the recession were concentrated in midskilled and midwage jobs, like white-collar sales, office and administrative jobs; and blue-collar production, craft, repair and operative jobs.

In case all of these numbers make the head spin, it’s really a very simple equation.

Wages haven’t gone up in forty years. Some people were lucky to buy houses early; others bought in late. Then the economy crashed, and a lot of people were underwater. The economy is still fragile. So where is the housing “recovery” coming from? Who can afford to buy all these houses at higher prices?

The answer is investment banks, and people who bought in early with equity to spare looking to trade over or buy a second home. Where it isn’t coming from is actual normal people who live in houses. The housing market among normal people who live in the houses they buy has only gone up by 1% in the last year.

So if housing prices are going up dramatically, who is raking in the money? Certainly not regular people trying to put a roof over their heads. Those people are getting hosed. Investment firms and lucky older homeowners cashing out 401Ks and homes purchased 10-20 years ago, on the other hand, are doing quite fabulously in the new market.

And it’s in this environment that the entire Republican Party has decided its top priority is to shut down the government in order to stop people from getting access to health insurance, while both parties are doing their level best to increase home prices without doing a damn thing about wages.

It’s collective madness. One of these days, some years down the road, the Democratic Party will start to question whether inflating asset values without concomitant wage growth is really a good idea. But once the “serious” people figure that out, it will already have been years too late to act.

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They’d rather be jerks than win

by digby

For those who think it’s just a matter of time before Republicans learn their lesson and start to act like decent human beings again,  consider California Republicans, who’ve been in the wilderness for a couple of decades now:

Popular buttons at @CAGOP convention already take on @hillaryclinton #2016 in a big way… Ouch!! pic.twitter.com/3SdIqZs7GG
— Carla Marinucci (@cmarinucci) October 6, 2013

These really are the worst people in the world. They just can’t help themselves.

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“They weren’t all plots, and they weren’t all foiled”

by digby

Not that anyone seems to care about this, but it’s worth noting anyway:

During Wednesday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy pushed Alexander to admit that plot numbers had been fudged in a revealing interchange:

“There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots,” said Leahy. The Vermont Democrat then asked the NSA chief to admit that only 13 out of a previously cited 54 cases of foiled plots were genuinely the fruits of the government’s vast dragnet surveillance systems:

“These weren’t all plots, and they weren’t all foiled,” Leahy said, asking Alexander, “Would you agree with that, yes or no?”

“Yes,” replied Alexander.

If you are up for a rally against surveillance, there’s a big one planned for DC on October 26th.

Musing on the end game

by digby

This entire segment from Up With Kornacki is interesting, but if you start watching at 8:35 you’ll see him and the rest of his panel talk about the end game in terms that I think are probably correct. Listen especially to former GOP congressman Tom Davis who very likely represents the Republican position (which is that if democrats think Republicans are going to walk away with nothing, they’re dreaming…)

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Life in the alternate United States of America

by digby

Democracy Corps has done a fascinating study of the right wing that’s really worth reading if you want to understand exactly why we are in this ridiculous place. This tells the tale in shorthand, but you really should read the whole thing.

While many voters, even some Democrats, question whether Obama is succeeding and getting his agenda done, Republicans think he has won. The country may think gridlock has won, particularly during a Republican-led government shut down, but Republicans see a president who has fooled and manipulated the public, lied, and gotten his secret socialist-Marxist agenda done. Republicans and their kind of Americans are losing.

[They believe] that big government is meant to create rights and dependency and electoral support from mostly minorities who will reward the Democratic Party with their votes. The Democratic Party exists to create programs and dependency – the food stamp hammock, entitlements, the 47 percent. And on the horizon—comprehensive immigration reform and Obamacare. Citizenship for 12 million illegals and tens of million getting free health care is the end of the road.

These participants are very conscious of being white and valuing communities that are more likeminded; they freely describe these programs as meant to benefit minorities. This is about a Democratic Party expanding dependency among African Americans and Latinos, with electoral intent. That is why Obama and the Democrats are prevailing nationally and why the future of the Republic is so at risk.

If you have some time today, listen to this radio interview by Joshua Holland with pollster Erica Seifert, who conducted some of these focus groups.

 I wish I knew the answer to this alternate universe problem but I honestly don’t have one. It seems to me that this is the natural result of 30 years of propaganda perpetuated by a bunch of professional movement shysters and a huge Republicans infotainment infrastructure that has created a very profitable industry around stoking this paranoia. It’s so thoroughly permeated this corner of the culture that I’m not sure what it will take to back it out.

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The most disturbing thing I’ve seen all week

by digby

And that’s saying something:

I always knew Boehner would be a good dancer …

Still Cruz-ing

by digby

This guy is amazing:

On CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) argued that provisions “mitigating” the Affordable Care Act should be attached to a vote to raise the debt ceiling, a sign that the Senator who helped engineer the current government shutdown over ObamaCare is willing to take the fight to the next level.

“Number one, we should look for some signifiant structural plan to reduce government spending,” Cruz said in response to host Candy Crowley’s question about what he would seek in return for the raising of the debt limit. “Number two, we should avoid new taxes. Number three, we should look for ways to mitigate the harm from ObamaCare.”

This stopped Crowley. “You think that some facet of the president’s health care plan should be attached to an increase in the debt ceiling?”

“The debt ceiling historically has been among the best leverage that Congress has to rein in the executive,” Cruz replied. “There’s great historical precedent. Since 1978 we’ve raised the debt ceiling fifty-five times. A majority of those times, twenty-eight times, Congress has attached very specific and stringent requirements, many of the most significant spending restraints, things like Gramm Rudman [i.e. the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act], things like sequestration, came through the debt ceiling.”

“So the president’s demand, jack up the country’s credit card with no limits and no constraints, is not a reasonable one,” Cruz said.

You understand that when he says “came through the debt ceiling” he doesn’t mean a direct deal from the debt ceiling, right? Sequestration was the result of a deal to raise the debt ceiling in return for a “super-committee” with triggers if they couldn’t come to an agreement. The result was the drastic cuts to government we’ve seen over the past year, the overall levels of which have now been accepted by Democrats as the bottom line.

I do believe the White House and the Democrats recognize that there’s not really any difference between agreeing to raise the debt ceiling in direct exchange for “some significant structural plan to reduce government spending” without any new taxes and a little something for the rubes on the hated Obamacare, and agreeing to some procedural device that will accomplish the same thing at a later date. Even the most fervent Obama supporter now agrees that 2011 was a big mistake. But they are very focused on the fundamental problem of the Republicans using the debt ceiling to achieve their agenda and upset the balance of power as long as Democrats hold the White House. What we don’t know is if the Democrats have also convinced themselves that the optics of holding fast while dealing behind the scenes is sufficient to control this beast.

Cruz reveals what the crazies might settle for in a deal. The question remains how they could all get there while claiming to be victorious. It would be very hard to see yet another “significant structural plan to reduce spending” along with a symbolic gesture on cutting Obamacare as anything but a victory for the Republicans. Of course, the Dems could always call it a “balanced approach” and pat each other on the back for being grown-ups. It wouldn’t be the first time.

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