Month: September 2015

“That’s just the way it is”

by digby

Why in the world does anyone think this man is a good politician? Or that any of these stale, dull tropes are selling points?

“The simple fact is 1 percent of people pay 40 percent of all the taxes,” Bush said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Of course, tax cuts for everybody is going to generate more for people that are paying a lot more. I mean that’s just the way it is.”

Fox Host Chris Wallace noted in the interview aired Sunday that economists assessing Bush’s proposal have found that while middle-class Americans would get a 2.9 percent boost in income, the top 1 percent would get an 11.6 percent boost – and Bush himself would save $3 million. “Does Jeb Bush need a $3 million tax cut?” Wallace asked.

“Look, the benefit of this goes disproportionately to the middle-class,” Bush responded, adding, “Because higher income people pay more taxes right now and proportionally, everybody will get a benefit. But proportionally, they’ll pay more in with my plan than what they pay today.”

Under Bush’s plan, tax deductions would be capped at 2 percent of gross income, with an exception for charitable donations. He’d also couple that with a sharply lower corporate tax rate. And he’d simplify the tax code by enacting three tax brackets – 10, 25 and 28 percent. And Wallace pointed to analysis that Bush’s plan would raise the deficit between $1 trillion and $3 trillion.

Bush argued the cuts would stimulate growth and said similar cuts enacted by his brother, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan have been underestimated by “static thinkers on the left.”

“They created a dynamic effect of high growth. And that’s what we need,” Bush said. “If people think 2 percent growth is OK, then we’ll have more people living in poverty and disposable income for the middle class will continue to decline. We have to jump-start the economy so that people can have more money to make decisions for themselves.”

I think I finally understand why the GOP is so enamored of Trump and Carson and the rest of the clown car and why they hate the professional Republicans with a passion. They’ve been hearing this Bush tripe from their GOP leaders for over three decades and it’s never delivered anything to them. Year after year after year, they’re told that all they need is a little tax cut and their lives will be transformed. Sure, the wealthy need bigger tax cuts but “that’s just the way it is.”

Trump is a loon but he’s at least promising something other than this moldy BS they’ve heard a thousand times before. I get it. If I were a Republican and really believed that Democrats were the tribal enemies of all I hold dear, I’d be looking for something different too. Unfortunately, all the GOP’s got on offer is this or the clown car.

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She. can’t. handle. the. truth.

by digby

Fiorina just hangs tough and refuses to admit she was wrong. She was on Meet the Press this morning:

At issue here was Fiorina’s description at the most recent GOP debate about one of the Planned Parenthood videos showing “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

Todd said there’s “no evidence that the scene you describe exists” and asked, “Are you willing to concede that you exaggerated that scene?”

Fiorina insisted she didn’t and clashed with Todd, who said “the footage you describe at best is a reenactment.” Fiorina asked, “Do you think this is not happening?”

Then she said Planned Parenthood defending itself was a distraction from its crimes. Ms Moderate still wants to shutdown the government if necessary and is now calling Planned Parenthood a “Democrat Party slush fund.” Those Ted Cruz funders who threw her some cash are getting their money’s worth with this one.

Burning down the House
by Tom Sullivan

It is my habit to refer to the extremists as the T-party (not tea party or Tea Party), but I never explained why. It comes from the Sam Neill line from Jurassic Park.

Dr. Alan Grant: “T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed. He wants to hunt.“

In John Boehner, T-party just claimed another kill. If Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is any indication, T-party is still hungry:

“That’s one down, that’s 434 more to go,” said Jindal, a former congressman. “Folks, it is time to fire everybody in D.C.”

Frank Bruni comments on John Boehner’s conflict with his “pathologically self-destructive party” over his reluctance to force another government shutdown has led to his demise as Speaker of the House:

Boehner’s looming departure and the rabid right-wing forces that led to it are part of a longer story, developing for years now. His exodus was foreshadowed and even foreordained by the political demise of Eric Cantor, who served under him as the House majority leader until someone more conservative toppled him in a Republican primary in 2014.

One of our two major political parties is hostage to an extreme subgroup that won’t brook compromise, values theatrical protests over actual governing and is adolescent in its ideological vanity.

Republicans, Bruni writes,

… have become the party of brinkmanship, the party of imminent credit defaults, the party of threatened shutdowns, the party that won’t pass a proper transportation bill, the party that is suddenly demonizing the Export-Import Bank, the party of “no,” the party of ire, the party that casts even someone as unquestionably conservative as John Boehner in the role of apostate, simply because he knows the difference between fights that can be won and those that can’t, between standing on principle and shooting yourself in the foot.

In one sense, Republicans are like the dog that caught the car. Catching it, they don’t know what to do with it. A panelist at the Daily Kos Connects Asheville conference yesterday observed that Democrats had controlled the North Carolina legislature for 140 years until the T-party sweep in 2010. Democrats are still figuring out how to act as the minority party. Republicans, having finally caught the car, are in disarray. They don’t know how to lead.

So it is, too, on the national stage, where the T-party has ousted Republican after Republican for not being conservative enough. But other than eating their own and throwing sand in the gears of government, what else have they accomplished?

Bruni continues:

Republicans were supposed to show themselves to be grown-ups, but the current leader of the pack, Trump, does a dead-on impersonation of a defensive, insecure schoolyard bully.

There is a lot of wishful thinking among the Beltway press and less-insane GOP members that Trump will fade, but maybe he won’t. Trump is still dominating the GOP field. For a T-party that wants to fire everybody, Mr. “You’re fired!” seems like just the man for the job.

That’s why when people ask me who I support for president, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, I tell them I don’t care. So long as the T-party controls state legislatures and the Congress, who Democrats elect as president won’t matter. If it’s Bernie, a GOP-led Congress will stonewall. If it’s Hillary, a GOP-led Congress will stonewall. Just as they have done with Obama. I care deeply that someone from the saner side of the aisle gets the next three Supreme Court picks. (Good luck getting them past a T-party Senate.) Other than that, I can’t get excited about who will do the picking, so long as the candidate sends lawyers, guns and money to North Carolina. That is where my fight is.

A Bernie Sanders supporter asked yesterday, but what about coattails? Coattails, I cannot quantify. State legislative seats and U.S. House and Senate seats I can count.

It seems the GOP’s base knows that long-term demographic trends are against them. Here, it seems the T-party legislature is determined to ram through every piece of fringe, ALEC, tax-cutting, privatizing, education-slashing, and voter-suppressing measure it can before the public turns against them. I have long said that the Republican Party is acting out one of those dreary murder ballads with America. If they cannot have America for their own, they just might burn it down. John Boehner can relate. That is why Digby quoted Rick Perlstein yesterday: “Take demagogues seriously. Voters love them. And they’re only a joke until they win.”

I took her by her lily white hand

And dragged her down that bank of sand

There I throwed her in to drown

I watched her as she floated down

“Was walking home tween twelve and one

Thinkin’ of what I had done

I killed a girl, my love you see

Because she would not marry me

– from “Banks Of The Ohio” (traditional)

They love their country — it’s THEIR country — and if they can’t have her, nobody can.

Inside Beltway salons, that simply doesn’t compute.

Zombie Border wants to eat your brains

by digby

I just can’t …

What is Boehner’s legacy?

— No grand bargain as Speaker: “Boehner never landed the really big deal he craved,” Post congressional reporter Paul Kane writes. “Not the $4 trillion tax-and-entitlement deal he reached for in 2011, not the repackaged version a year later and not the immigration overhaul he sought in 2014. He most clearly learned the limits of his power midway through his nearly five-year tenure when he scaled down his ambitions for ‘Plan B’ — a tactical gambit aimed at forcing Democrats to preserve Republican tax cuts. Conservatives rebelled because those making more than $1 million would have faced tax increases … That utter defeat left him unable to ‘go big,’ as he liked to say, his effort to find a legacy-defining piece of legislation coming largely to a close. In the three years since, he mostly has been treading water.” “Boehner’s personal highs and lows often personified the conflicts inside the larger House Republican conference as it approached the task of governing,” Politico’s David Rogers writes in his analysis.

— Obama arguably deserves as much or more blame for that failure as Boehner. The President has also struggled to stand up to the far left. “Fairly or not, Obama and Boehner, as much captives as leaders of their respective parties, will be indelibly identified with the dysfunction of their times,” The Post’s White House bureau chief, Juliet Eilperin, explains in her own look at the relationship between the two men. Like PK, she focused on the failed grand bargain of 2011 as a turning point the duo never recovered from. “But it was Obama, the one who felt stranded at the altar in the past, who decided to move on. At the start of 2014, the president decided to pursue a strategy that emphasized executive action … The moves came with political costs — and a lawsuit, filed by Boehner, challenging Obama’s authority.” The only time they really cooperated this year was on trade promotion authority.

Utter and complete bullshit.

What they are saying is that Obama should have just kept kissing GOP ass and getting absolutely nothing for it — selling out everything he and his party ever stood for — because to do otherwise is a sign that he’s capitulating to the “far left”.

That is the Village folks. It’ doesn’t get any more High-Broder than that. They cannot see a world in which the “far left” isn’t the great enemy of bipartisanship even in the face of a White House that put its party’s most precious legacy on the table and was shown the back of the hand by the far right. According to this it was supposed to humbly submit to even more of that and say “thank you sir, can I have another.”

It doesn’t get any worse than this. If they cannot see that the party whose front runner for the presidency is a xenophobic racist freakshow and which chased John Boehner out of the speaker’s chair because they want to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood is the cause of DC gridlock then there is no help for them. None.

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A little advice from Rick Perlstein

by digby

Rick Perlstein says “take demagogues seriously. Voters love them. And they’re only a joke until they win.”

That’s at the end of this sobering look back:

In January of 1965, when Reagan, a conservative Hollywood actor, began exploring a run for governor of California, the incumbent, Democrat Pat Brown , sent out a young aide on a scouting trip. The scout reported back that Reagan would “fall apart when he gets attacked from the floor….His attacks on [Lyndon B. Johnson] and Governor Brown won’t make it with those who don’t think the President is a dictator.” Nevertheless the lightweight announced he would run, and a columnist in the Washington Star recorded an “air of furtive jubilation down at Lassie for Governor headquarters.”

Reagan’s 1965 Republican primary opponent was judged a political superstar by the New York Times, easily “matching oratorical skill” with the former actor. When Reagan visited Redwoods National Park, and reporters quoted his immortal words, “a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?”, the San Francisco Chronicle reported his campaign would soon “bottom out.”

“The Republican Party isn’t bankrupt, or isn’t that bankrupt that it has to turn to Liberace for leadership,” Esquire observed at the time. “‘Bring him on’ is our motto,” a Brown aide said—and Reagan was brought, winning the nomination in a landslide, and eventually winning the general election.

But the jokes only continued. When Reagan entered the 1968 presidential race, the TV comedy revue Laugh-In made “Ronald Reagan is running for president,” an unadorned punchline—that was the whole gag. He ran again in 1976, challenging an incumbent president in his own party, and taking for the nominating contest all the way to the convention, an almost unheard of feat in modern American politics. That this was a historic accomplishment largely escaped the media, however; it didn’t matter, for instance, to the author of the syndicated comic strip Dunagin’s People, who depicted a TV announcer explaining, “Now that the conventions are over, we can get back to our regular program—old Ronald Reagan movies.”

As preparations began for the 1980 race, Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s late advisor, noted that Team Reagan didn’t discourage the belittlement. In fact, they came to rely on it as part of their campaign strategy: being underestimated only made their man stronger. Liberals fell right into the trap: in the week running up to the election against Jimmy Carter, Doonesbury ran a series where the strip’s indefatigable TV reporter, nature documentary-style, took “a fantastic voyage through…the brain of Ronald Reagan.”

“Unhappily, the brain stops growing at age 20, and thereafter, neurons die off by the millions every year,” the comic reported. “What this means is that the brain of Ronald Reagan’s has been shrinking ever since 1931.”

This was a fairly accurate portrayal of how Carter’s aides saw their opponent. Carter speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg has related that the campaign’s strategists were confident that if they only could get Reagan side by side on the debate stage with the incumbent, the public would finally realize that the Republican candidate and former star of Bedtime for Bonzo was just stupid.

Well, they got their wish: A debate between Reagan and Carter took place the weekend before the voting. Reagan wiped the floor with the president, and a race that had been virtually tied turned into a Reagan landslide.

Trump is a very different figure from Reagan, who had governed America’s most populous state, and rather successfully, before he ever ran for president. They are similar, however, in that they both top-rated TV stars for years before they ever sought office, Reagan as host of G.E. Theater anthology programs, and Trump as the billionaire host on 14 seasons of The Apprentice. Because of this, both men had a profound head start over their opponents, having already imprinted themselves in voters’ minds exactly as they wished to be seen—Reagan as the genial curator of stories that always had happy endings, Trump as the omni-competent boardroom warrior before whom weaker mortals can only grovel.

It’s possible that as times have changed, having someone with actual political experience as Reagan did truly is less important to the people who would vote for someone like Reagan. Respect for government is way, way down from those days. Older voters are now composed of silent generation and baby boomers for whom those kinds of credentials never mattered as much and the younger folks who like Trump see him as an example of American success far greater than any mere politician.

It’s not the polls that have gotten my attention about Trump. It’s those TV ratings. Maybe it’s just a trainwreck phenomenon. But maybe it’s not.

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A window into their thinking

by digby

Here you go:

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Making heroes

by digby

Bill Maher’s riff on right wing heroes is interesting:

Why does the right wing always create these “average Joe” heroes? And why doesn’t the left do it too?

I think the difference is that average lefties figure that life is short and it’s not worth it to take on right wingers. Think about what happened to Sandra Fluke with major media figures calling her a slut and a whore. Maybe there are just more average folks who enjoy that sort of fight on the right.

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QOTD: Peter King, stopped clock edition

by digby

I suppose it takes one to know one …

House Speaker John Boehner’s sudden resignation Friday “signals that the crazies have taken over the party,” New York Republican Peter King said Friday.

“I think it signals the crazies have taken over the party, taken over to the party that you can remove a speaker of the House who’s second in line to be president, a constitutional officer in the middle of his term with no allegations of impropriety, a person who’s honest and doing his job. This has never happened before in our country,” King said in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Friday afternoon. “He could have stayed on.”

Boehner has done “an outstanding job,” King said, adding that he was “extremely disappointed” upon hearing the news of his resignation.

“There was actually, I thought, like a hush in the room for a few seconds where no one — people like looked at each other — they couldn’t believe it. And then he read the prayer of St. Francis, which was very moving,” King said of the moment when Boehner told fellow lawmakers that he was leaving office.

“I’m not a psychologist but I think John probably pretty much decided that the more he did, the more friction would be caused, and that he probably thought it was best for him to leave soon anyway, which I think is wrong,” he said. “But having the pope here yesterday just sort of put John in the frame of mind [that] it’s time to leave.”

Boehner’s decision to resign is “like throwing raw meat” to more extreme factions of the caucus who are trying to “hijack and blackmail the party,” King said. “They’re not going to see it as a gesture of peace, they’re going to just look for more.”

That’s so weird because I was assured by Luke Russert and all the pundits that this means Kevin McCarthy, an allegedly moderate conciliator was a shoo-in for the speakership and everything was finally going to be ok.

Let’s assume that McCarthy becomes speaker with Democratic votes making up for the loss of the hardcore crazies who will not want to vote for a California immigration squish.The assumption that those crazies will just buckle under and do what they’re told seems … unlikely. But waddo I know. Luke Russert is “the sage of Capitol Hill.”

But this, from King, is hilarious:

“I think whoever runs for speaker should make it clear that he’s not going to give in to these people. We’re not going to appease them,” he concluded. “The time for appeasement is over.”

The war has come home.

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A Strange Editorial 

by tristero

I don’t disagree with this editorial but the language in which most of it is couched is quite bizarre.

The assumption is that there is a right wing to the Republican party on the national level to which Boehner and his ilk do not entirely ascribe. This assumption is false, built on the entirely spurious trope – still common among mainstream journalists –  that there is something resembling rational thinking in the GOP. As the editorial says towards the end, by no stretch of the imagination can Boehner be considered remotely close to a moderate. What he and his cronies are disagreeing on are means to the very same racist, homophobic, fellate-the-rich end.

Distinctions among the extreme rightwing are truly distinctions without a substantial difference. A failure to recognize that helps perpetuate an extremely dangerous imbalance in American politics.