Author: digby

The Highest Broderism

by dday

David Broder’s paean to bipartisanship yesterday was pretty funny. Funny in an “what version of Earth in the DC multiverse is this guy living on” fashion.

Some consider Obama’s wooing of Republicans a rookie mistake, a measure of his naivete. Others focus on the Republicans and fault them for obduracy in denying Obama all but three of their votes on the stimulus bill. The critics agree that the effort at bipartisanship should end.

I hope Obama isn’t listening. It’s the worst advice he has received.

It starts from a false premise: that the stimulus bill proves the failure of outreach to Republicans. In fact, had Obama not negotiated successfully with Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter and met most of their terms, his bill would have died. This was a success for bipartisanship, not a failure.

Morone’s history also is false. To prove that bipartisanship has never existed, he has to skip over Harry Truman’s success with a Republican Congress on the Marshall Plan, Lyndon Johnson’s forging the great civil rights acts with Sen. Everett Dirksen and Rep. Bill McCulloch, and Ronald Reagan’s steering his first budget and tax bill through a Democratic House.

But the real reason Obama should ignore this advice is that he will need Republican votes to pass the remaining parts of his program. When it comes to energy, regional and commodity interests will inevitably divide the Democrats. They always do. Oil, coal, natural gas and consumer groups will exert their will. If Obama writes off the Republicans in advance, he will end up with a watered-down bill — or nothing.

It’s useless to argue with Broderella, but nevertheless…

Never mind the fact that he has to go far back in history, when Dixiecrats still existed and the parties were ideologically jumbled, to prove his fantasy. He really manages to define bipartisanship in this one, doesn’t he? Meeting most of the terms enforced by conservatives is the new working definition. And he demands that the President give in to the terms of Republicans in the same way to pass his agenda.

Is Broder aware of the modern conservative rump faction that includes about 90-95% of elected Republicans in Washington? Their spiritual leader Rush Limbaugh said yesterday that trying to understand a Democrat is like trying to understand a murderer or a rapist. Their favorite son Jim DeMint’s plan for economic recovery is to do nothing, stand still and hope everything magically bounces back. Their top legislative agenda consists of cherry-picking pieces of stimulus spending to prove that the entire bill is wasteful, a project they have ANNOUNCED TO THE MEDIA IN ADVANCE.

The parties disagree. These days they violently disagree. And the public has pretty much made their decision on who to support.

According to a new AP poll, voters are assigning blame to gridlock — and they’re blaming Republicans. Asked whether Obama was doing enough to cooperate with the Republicans, 62 percent said he was. Asked if the Republicans were doing enough to cooperate with Obama, 64 percent said they weren’t.

Republicans now run the risk of being blamed for their own irrelevance. The stimulus bill passed without their votes and that’s being seen as evidence of their intransigence, not Obama’s. Bipartisanship is being measured by through the evident intention’s of the players, not the final tally on the bill. If this normalizes — if Americans begin to expect that the GOP won’t cooperate and so Obama can’t be expected to win their votes — you’ll have a situation where Obama can reach out to them on entirely on his terms because it doesn’t matter if the outreach actually succeeds. If the President asked Mithc McConnell to help him pass Medicare-for-All, it’s hardly the President’s fault if McConnell refuses. And that will lead the GOP totally, and unsympathetically, marginalized.

In fact, Republicans are starting to actually be blamed for their own policy ideas, and are desperately trying to run away from them. Jim Tedisco, the candidate in the New York Congressional special election to replace Sen. Gillibrand, refuses to answer the question of whether or not he supports the stimulus even though the answer is obvious. Rep. Joseph Cao, who beat Dollar Bill Jefferson in Louisiana, is now facing a potential recall as a cause of his vote against the stimulus. This is not a function of whether one side or the other is bipartisan enough, it’s that the public has generally discovered that they really don’t like Republicans.

Parties disagree. They have a particular platform and they are expected to uphold it. The electorate looks at each side and makes a decision. If they don’t like the results they can choose the alternative later. It’s called democracy. I don’t think David Broder believes in it.

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War Games

by digby

The press is even punking the press these days. This time it’s not coming from the intelligence community, but rather the Pentagon the other hostile conservative bureaucracy.

Joe Klein:

[News of the new troop deployment to Afghanistan] comes two days after the usually reliable David Cloud of Politico reported that Obama was holding off on a troop decision. I linked to that story and feel foolish for doing so. In fact, there’s been a steady stream of unreliable leaks coming out of the Pentagon–about troop levels, about the Defense budget–that seem to be emanating from a cadre that opposes the Obama Administration…

As predicted, factions within both the CIA and the Pentagon want to continue Bush policies. They also want to put the new president off balance. (They do that with Democrats.)

From the looks of things, the intelligence bureaucracy has at least partially succeeded. I would guess that if you look at the specific issues on which they’ve already compromised or hedged, you’ll see where the spooks feel most vulnerable. (I’m guessing the extraordinary rendition is one such policy, considering the administration’s startling reversal on the use of state secrets.)

The Pentagon, however, is different kettle of fish. I can’t imagine that the administration is going to allow themselves to be manipulated. There can’t be a person there who isn’t aware of the pitfalls of such folly. But it does mean that we are going to have to question everything, including that coming from the administration, since there is obviously a battle going on behind the scenes regarding the escalation.

Klein is properly skeptical:

The President’s decision send 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan is troubling on several grounds:

1. We don’t have a policy there yet. We don’t know what the goal is–or how we’re going to deal with the Pakistan part of the equation (which is where the more serious military issues lie), or the corruption of the Karzai government.

But I think he should write a story about this Pentagon faction that’s trying to undermine the president, don’t you?

Update: Speaking of lessons learned, this commentary by Joseph Galloway is sobering: Afghanistan has the smell of South Vietnam in 1965.

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The Return Of The Silent Majority

by dday

This video of Rick Santelli ranting at the Chicago Board of Trade about how hard-working Murcans have to pay the price for those “losers” facing foreclosure has been making the rounds. It was obvious that this would be the conservative response to Obama’s housing plan. Since the bubble popped, the intimation has been that the government put a gun to the head of the banks to lend to poor people (just say the word, why don’t you) who then made bad decisions with their money, and now the responsible people have to bail them out.

The government is promoting bad behavior… I’ll tell you what, I have an idea. The new Administration’s big on computers and technology. How about this, President and new Administration, why don’t you put up a Web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the loser’s mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people who might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people who actually carry the water instead of drink the water…

He gets a standing ovation from the traders at that point, and then he asks them if they want to pay for their neighbor’s mortgages, and they boo. Then he goes off about how Cuba used to have mansions and when they went “from the individual to the collective, they started driving ’54 Chevys.” It’s right-wing backlash stuff at its absolute best.

Lost from this complaint is the plain fact of predatory lending, that lenders got cash rebates to put people in crappy, high-interest mortgages, that they hid terms of the agreement and denied disclosure, and that all of those hardworking folks are seeing their property values plummet as a result of millions of foreclosed homes glutting the market. To the tune of $6 trillion dollars in home value.

But I digress. The more interesting part of the video is the part where he calls his buds on the trading floor part of “the silent majority.”

These guys are pretty straightforward, and my guess is, a pretty good statistical cross-section of America, the silent majority.

This is all starting to sound very familiar. Paging Rick Perlstein…

It’s also obvious that traders on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade are clearly the new face of the average lunch-pail working stiff, isn’t it?

The revolution has begun. These workaday stock traders are going to take back this country for the laissez-faire capitalists who are entitled to it.

…more from Ryan Chittum.

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Clevah

by digby

Hamsher has an update about the “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” that indicates to me that the administration is working on the fly. I think that the stuff we heard about the plan being the result of a small group within the White House operating without input in changing circumstances is the most likely explanation for why this thing is such a train wreck. Apparently, the story is changing from minute to minute, even about who’s speaking at this thing and who is attending.

There’s a big summit on “fiscal responsibility” happening on Tuesday that nobody knows almost anything about. Yesterday numerous sources in the health care policy world confirmed that the administration told them (again off the record) that Pete Peterson and Laura Tyson would be keynote speakers, and now both are saying they won’t be speaking. According to the WSJ Obama told the Blue Dogs they had his permission to pursue legislation to create a panel whose recommendations on “long term deficit strains” would be subject to an up-or-down vote of Congress, and after Congressional leadership pitched a fit, that seems to be off the table too. But what are they going to talk about at this summit, and who is invited?

On a conference call today arranged by Campaign for America’s Future that included Roger Hickey, Jamie Galbraith, Nancy Altman and Dean Baker, Roger said that several of them had been told they might be invited to the summit, but no formal invitation had been issued yet (though Pete Peterson has his invitation). And while they had initially been told that the summit would address Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (which Ezra claims Orszag is desperately trying to separate), now they’re hearing from administration sources that nobody is sure.

This is not the circumstance under which you want to meet with billionaires who have spent decades organizing for just such a moment. They know what they want down to the last penny. They have their marketing slogans all worked out. They have their “bipartisan” advocates. They have the villagers and the media, all believing one, simple thing: that the government is going broke because of “entitlement” spending. You don’t face people like this not knowing exactly what it’s about and what you hope to get out of it. It’s not a friendly game of Twister. It’s a death match.

Changing the term “entitlement reform” to mean “health care reform” may seem very,very clever I speculated that was their plan weeks ago. But I wouldn’t count on it working. This is an extremely complicated thing to do and I can’t say that I have seen any indication that the White House is prepared to carry out something so clever just yet. There’s still quite a big learning curve there. Indeed, from the way it looks to me, there is a far better chance they are about to get punk’d by the Blue Dogs and the Fiscal Scolds into making a “Grand Bargain” that cuts the safety net just a tiny bit less than Pete Peterson wants them to. That doesn’t seem too clever to me.

As Jamie Galbraith indicated, we are looking at a full-on economic meltdown right now and the last thing they need to do is start talking about “entitlement reform,” whatever they want the word to mean. To any sentient person over the age of 40 it means cutting social security and that’s the last thing they should be talking about in the middle of a recession. It’s not good economics and it isn’t good politics. Fuggedaboudit.

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No More

by digby

Somebody, please, please stop these idiotic little twerps from writing this crap. I just can’t stand it any more. Here’s Jamison Foser at County Fair:

Politico’s Glenn Thrush, seeing a news report that Hillary Clinton said she likes the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, “decided to fact-check.”

What would make him decide to fact-check the unremarkable statement by a baby boomer that she likes the two most popular band in the history of the world — bands that took the world by storm during her teen years?

Thrush explains:

We decided to fact-check, remembering the ambiguities that swirled around Yankees vs. Cubs, Dubai Ports World and Bosnian snipers.

Look at that first example: “Yankees vs. Cubs.” Let’s be clear here: The only “ambiguities” that swirled around Hillary Clinton’s comments about the Yankees and the Cubs came in the form of reporters and political opponents lying about Hillary Clinton.

Anyway, because a bunch of people lied about Hillary Clinton, Glenn Thrush — who doesn’t indicate that the Yankees/Cubs flap was a made-up smear perpetrated by his colleagues — decided to “fact-check” Clinton’s claim to like the Stones and the Beatles.

Thrush’s fact-checking is an absurd waste of time, premised on previous lies about Hillary Clinton. And it isn’t even an original absurd waste of time. We’ve been down this road before. And it doesn’t go anywhere good.

Foser goes on to remind us a previous sickening case of the trivia police hounding Clinton over her musical tastes, insisting that should couldn’t possibly listen to both the Beatles and the Stones. She’s “calculating” dontcha know. (I’m sure you all recall that the bitch is so calculating that when she calculates how much cleavage she needs to show to pass legislation.)

I don’t know what Hillary Clinton ever did to you boys, but get over it. There’s lots to write about these days. Knock it off.

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Skin Game

by digby

I agree with Jane on this. When did the “liberal” position become “modest tax hikes and benefit cuts on social security” are necessary? That’s just not true. In fact, according to most progressive economists, social security benefits need to be raised. (And after watching this rather huge loss of retirement wealth in the past year, I would think that it’s politically unthinkable to even whisper about lowering benefits at this point.)

I have been saying for some time now that I guessed the administration was going to try to use “entitlement reform” as a way to get to health care. I just don’t think they’ll succeed. The whole point of the villagers “Grand Bargain” is for liberals to have “skin in the game” and the Blue Dogs and Fiscal Scolds want that skin to be the wrinkled epidermis of the social security retirees. They are committed, with many millions of dollars behind them to the destruction of social security. Buying into their “entitlement” theme in any way is playing with fire.

I wrote yesterday that I think this may be a hangover from the transition before they realized the full extent of the economic meltdown — or the political opposition. Let’s hope they realize now just how out of step this is and rethink the idea of using “entitlement reform” as their frame for health care reform. There are better ways to do it that doesn’t put social security on the table as part of the bargain.

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Needs

by digby

Matt Yglesias makes an excellent argument today for the necessity of government spending right now on things that only the government does. I hadn’t thought of it in his exact terms, although I intuitively understood that people need a break from the consumer buying binge of the past few years, which means that we probably aren’t going to find our religion any time soon. There’s too much debt and frankly, people have just shopped themselves out. This hangover is overdue.

And the ramifications of that are stark. Yglesias illustrates this with a comment from The Atlantic:

There’s the rub. My company’s bank loan officer has called frequently asking if we need to borrow. They are begging to lend money. For what? We could buy a nice new machine tool at a good price, but why do that when sales are falling? Put an extension on our building? Buy some failing competitor and strap oneself with debt? Unless you absolutely need a new car or a new television or a new roof, the big ticket discretionary purchases paid for by loans aren’t going to be made. The loans the banks are making now are companies rolling over existing debt, not new debt. Given the “stuff” out there that is discretionary purchases, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see unemployment hit 20% before a bottom is reached.

That makes sense to me and it argues for a long and very unpleasant downturn if we depend upon consumer spending to bring this economy back. As Yglesias explains, the government needs to put people to work doing the things that only government can do and which the anti-government experiment of the past few decades have starved in favor of hysterical consumption of disposable goods.

He writes:

It’s not just that we’re prosperous enough that people aren’t starving to death, but over and above that compared to anyplace else in the world we just have a ton of consumer goods stockpiled such that even if purchases of new goods slowed enormously for years we could keep on keeping on at a high standard of living.

But that’s not to say that things are perfect. Compared to other times and other countries, there are a lot of scores on which we’re doing extremely well. But there are other respects in which we’re falling well behind what we know is achievable by contemporary societies.

We have a smaller proportion of our population graduating from college than do some other countries, and we’re making no progress. Relatedly, our K-12 education system could perform better. Our intercity passenger rail offerings are much worse than they could be, and none of our non-NYC metro areas have really top-notch mass transit offerings. We have substantially more violent crime than do other countries or historical periods in the United States. The level of prenatal health care our pregnant women are receiving is substandard, as is the physical fitness of our children. Public libraries are generally worse than they were a generation ago. America’s streets and sidewalks are, in general, not especially clean or well-maintained. And though our highways are plentiful, they’re not well-maintained either.

This all adds up to a lot of fields in which it would be plausible to say that we could enhance human welfare by expending more funds. But these are basically all things in which the private sector could realistically only have a secondary role.

And all of these things are feeders to the private sector in the long run — a well-educated, healthy population and an efficient modern infrastructure are the foundation for private sector wealth. Without these things it’s hard to see how the private economy ever truly recovers.

People have lots and lots of stuff, all the gadgets they can use for a while and a serious case of consumption fatigue. What they don’t have are these important necessities that have been neglected for so long. It’s perfectly logical that this is where spending should go for a while. Indeed, it seems to me that modern capitalism requires it. If its purpose is to fulfill needs, then these are the needs that require fulfilling. And the only entity capable of efficiently and quickly delivering such large scale necessities is the government.

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What’s Happenin’, Blood?

by dday

This reminds me of my dad coming to my room to “hang” with me and check out what “the kids” are into:

Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele plans an “off the hook” public relations offensive to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party’s principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”

The RNC’s first black chairman will “surprise everyone” when updating the party’s image using the Internet and advertisements on radio, on television and in print, he told The Washington Times.

Does Clifton Davis from That’s My Mama write Steele’s lines? “Off the hook?” “We are going to cut the capital gains tax, can you dig it to the max, jive turkeys?!?!?” If you want an RNC Chair to relate to youth, it might be good to offer them, and I know this is crazy, policies they like, instead of references ripped off from “The Taking of Pelham 123.”

I think this article was written so TBogg could make fun of it.

…On the flip side, here’s the Attorney General of the United States treating the nation like adults and showing more respect for African-Americans than using a catch phrase.

Every year, in February, we attempt to recognize and to appreciate black history. It is a worthwhile endeavor for the contributions of African Americans to this great nation are numerous and significant. Even as we fight a war against terrorism, deal with the reality of electing an African American as our President for the first time and deal with the other significant issues of the day, the need to confront our racial past, and our racial present, and to understand the history of African people in this country, endures. One cannot truly understand America without understanding the historical experience of black people in this nation. Simply put, to get to the heart of this country one must examine its racial soul.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and given our nation’s history this is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us. But we must do more- and we in this room bear a special responsibility. Through its work and through its example this Department of Justice, as long as I am here, must – and will – lead the nation to the “new birth of freedom” so long ago promised by our greatest President. This is our duty and our solemn obligation. read on….

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Principled Obstructionism

by digby

Here’s some good news: according to Jane Hamsher, the Democratic leadership has balked at this nutty White House plan to force a “base-closing” style up or down vote. Jane quotes an unnamed source saying:

“Reid and Pelosi sent back word that Congress doesn’t get bypassed just because Peter Orszag says it does.”

No kidding. Did they really believe that Democratic politicians were going to sit still for social security cuts getting rammed through the congress without amendment during a recession? While they are being asked to repeatedly bail out billionaires on Wall Street? It’s political dynamite of the worst kind.

Still, social security terminator Pete Peterson is going to be the big star at this thing and both Obama and Biden are going to speak,so there will be super high level validation of the notion that “entitlement reform” is on the agenda to “pay” for Bush’s misbegotten wars and Obama’s necessary stimulus. Why they want to do this, I still cannot fathom. It’s a zombie theme they are very stupidly reanimating and it’s going to take precious political energy to put it back in the ground.

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High Wire Act

by digby

A handful of Republican governors are considering turning down some money from the federal stimulus package, a move opponents say puts conservative ideology ahead of the needs of constituents struggling with record foreclosures and soaring unemployment.

Though none has outright rejected the money available for education, health care and infrastructure, the governors of Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska, South Carolina and Idaho have all questioned whether the $787 billion bill signed into law this week will even help the economy.

“My concern is there’s going to be commitments attached to it that are a mile long,” said Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who considered rejecting some of the money but decided Wednesday to accept it. “We need the freedom to pick and choose. And we need the freedom to say ‘No thanks.'”

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In fact, governors who reject some of the stimulus aid may find themselves overridden by their own legislatures because of language Clyburn included in the bill that allows lawmakers to accept the federal money even if their governors object.

He inserted the provision based on the early and vocal opposition to the stimulus plan by South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford. But it also means governors like Sanford and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal — a GOP up-and-comer often mentioned as a potential 2012 presidential candidate — can burnish their conservative credentials, knowing all the while that their legislatures can accept the money anyway.

I guess these people are placing their political bets on the economy not being sobad that they get blamed, but still bad enough that they can blame Obama. It’s quite tight rope they’re walking.

If the Democrats were as ruthless and reckless with other people’s lives as the Republicans are, they wouldn’t have put that clause in the legislation and would have let the Republicans pay the price for this nonsense. You know if the shoe were on the other foot, the GOP kamikazees would have forced the Dems to bear the brunt of such a decision. But then, that’s the reason why the country is in this catastrophic mess in the first place isn’t it? The Republicans just don’t give a damn about the people they are supposed to be representing.

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