What's Wrong With The Republican Party?

I know... it would take too long and it's all been said before. And whatever it is, let's all hope they choke on it and writhe around in pain before finally expiring. But let's look at it from the perspective of people who don't want to see piles of congressional Republicans on the floor screaming in agony and begging God for their own deaths to come as fast as possible. Bob Dole, who was the Senate Republican Leader for what seems like decades long before he was either the GOP presidential nominee or a Viagra salesman, doesn't wish any ill on his GOP colleagues and friends. But he was on Fox News Sunday tearing them a new one this past weekend. "I doubt [I could fit in with the modern party],” Dole said. “Reagan wouldn’t have made it, certainly Nixon wouldn’t have made it, because he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it." Fact of the matter is, no one who puts country over party-- or, more precisely, crackpot, extremist ideology, can possibly make it in today's Republican Party. You want to find "your father's Republican Party?" That's now called the New Dems and the Blue Dogs.

Anyone with any ideas of appealing to a national mainstream might as well do what conservatives like Florida Republicans Charlie Crist and Patrick Murphy did-- quit the GOP and started working to make the Democrats more conservative.

And Tuesday morning on MSNBC, former Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) explained why she agrees with Dole that the Republican Party should be "closed for repairs" before they seriously run any national races again. "I certainly do agree with the former majority leader, Bob Dole, with whom I worked when I first entered the Senate and who was a consensus builder and understood what was essential and important for the Republican Party brand-- what was important for America and that unfortunately has been lost today on Capitol Hill... The Republican Party is undergoing some, you know, significant and serious changes and they are going to have to rethink their approach as a political party and how they are going to regroup and become a governing majority party that appeals to a broader group of Americans than they do today."

But do they even care about becoming a governing party again? The power inside the party has shifted to the nihilists, fascists, ignorant teabaggers and radicals and Greg Sargent says the whole "governing thing" isn't something they take seriously. Wrecking the government... that they're good at. But working for the betterment of ordinary American families? That's antithetical to the interests who finance their plush careers.

I’m not sure anyone could consciously create a headline that more perfectly captures the current GOP’s fundamental unseriousness about governing than this one from The Hill:

Senate GOP feels jilted after being wined and dined by Obama on deficit talks

As Jed Lewison points out in a good post, it’s stunning that Republican Senators actually feel no sense of embarrassment about making this self-refuting claim. Their complaint, per The Hill, is this:

Senate Republicans who shared laughs with President Obama over dinner at the Jefferson Hotel in March are grumbling there has since been little follow-through from him on deficit talks. [...]

Some Republicans think the president has become distracted from the deficit by intensified public controversies over the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups and the Justice Department’s investigation of the Associated Press.

Of course, Republicans themselves are the ones that are working feverishly, often in the face of clear and unequivocal evidence to the contrary, to tie Obama to these “public controversies.” What’s more, the GOP leadership has said that no budget compromise is possible if it involves any concession on revenues, which is to effectively say that no compromise is possible unless Democrats make 100 percent of the concessions. And not only that, but as Steve Benen notes, Obama has already offered Republicans the entitlement cuts they claim they want as part of a larger deal, only to have Republicans suddenly decide they no longer want those cuts, after all.

Yet for Republicans, the problem continues to be that Obama isn’t sufficiently wooing them adequately. As The Hill puts it, paraphrasing one senator who remained anonymous but whose sentiments echoed many others: “The lawmaker said Obama needs to sit down regularly with about five or six GOP senators to begin making substantial progress toward a deficit-reduction deal.”

Yeah, that’ll work.

Even as Senate Republicans call for Obama to woo them harder, their leader, Mitch McConnell, is absurdly claiming that Obama’s plan to nominate people to fill vacancies on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals amounts to an effort to “stack the court.”

And we can't just blame Miss McConnell-- all 45 Senate Republicans, every single one of them, who have been obstructing the president's appointments since the day he took office-- signed a brief to the Supreme Court calling Obama's recess appointments an unconstitutional abuse of power. Unhinged right-wing sites are drumming up a "stacking the courts" jihad to help raise money for reactionary nihilists.

President Barack Obama is planning to simultaneously push through the appointments of three judges to what has been called the second-most-important court in the country, in a move seen by Republicans as an attempt to stack the court toward a liberal agenda.

...McConnell and other GOP lawmakers reportedly are preparing to challenge the appointments. One plan involves shifting the three empty slots from the court to other parts of the country. Failing that, Senate Republicans could filibuster the nominees if they can pull together 41 of their 45 members.

...Democrats say that if Republicans move to block Obama's three nominations in close succession, the public will take notice and disapprove. With a tide of public opinion in their favor, Democratic leaders argue, they could try to change Senate rules to prohibit filibusters on judicial nominations, even though Democrats themselves have blocked Republican judicial nominations in the past by using the filibuster.

Read More

What Happens When Voters Just Eliminate The Nihilist Republicans From Government?

Puppet Pat might want to call Jerry Brown and get a lesson in being a governor

California has no statewide Republicans in office. Many of the Democrats in the legislature are conservative corporate whores but at least the Republicans are relegated to the sidelines and can't even obstruct the smooth functioning of government any longer. In 2012, the Democrats won 2/3s majorities in each house of the legislature. They won 4 more seats in the state Senate, for a total of 29 to the GOP's 10. The Dems gained 3 Assembly seats, bringing the partisan split to 55 to 25. Republicans can no longer block anything in either body. Two years earlier the state elected Jerry Brown over big-spending Meg Whitman, who managed to get a mere 40.9% for the $140 million she spent out of her personal fortune.

So while in DC, anti-government ideologues on the far right-- particularly Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-DL) and Rand Paul (R-KY)-- are working, with a great deal of success, to gum up the workings of government functionality and to prevent an economic recovery, in Sacramento, the shriveled nihilist faction can... talk darkly among themselves and watch the state move forward. I hope you read the collection of IMs last night by economist Umair Haque on the nature of conservatism. It helps explain why the federal government is such a mess while California is thriving. California is kind of the opposite of what's happening to the people in North Carolina, who elected an all-Republican government which is failing miserably and making the state unlivable and the legislature veers off the ideological cliff.

Haque's Sunday follow-up

The state’s hard turn to the right comes less than five years after people took to the streets here to celebrate the 2008 victory of Barack Obama, the first Democratic presidential candidate to capture the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976. The win prompted Obama’s supporters to crow about the growing influence of progressive and minority voters not only in North Carolina but across the South.

But that euphoria is now a distant memory. Since the recession hit, North Carolina has been saddled with one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates. The bad times helped prepare the way for a carefully executed strategy, with big financial support from a major conservative activist, that helped the GOP win control of both chambers of the state General Assembly in 2010.

Those victories were capped last year when Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor, giving the party control of all levers of state government for the first time since 1870.

The victories were aided by the strong financial support of Art Pope, a multimillionaire who spent heavily in support of the state’s GOP candidates. The Institute for Southern Studies, a North Carolina-based research organization, said Pope’s advocacy network spent $2.2 million on 22 legislative races, winning 18. Overall, conservative organizations largely supported by Pope accounted for three-fourths of the outside money spent in North Carolina legislative races in 2010, according to the institute.

One of McCrory’s first acts after being elected governor was to install Pope, a former legislator, as the state budget chief. (The governor’s office declined to make Pope available for an interview.) And now, GOP lawmakers are moving swiftly to enact a long list of legislation they say is largely aimed at limiting government debt and snapping the state’s economy out of a years-long malaise.

Legislators have slashed jobless benefits. They have also repealed a tax credit that supplemented the wages of low-income people, while moving to eliminate the estate tax. They have voted against expanding Medicaid to comply with the 2010 federal health-care law. The expansion would have added 500,000 poor North Carolinians to the Medicaid rolls.

...Lawmakers are also considering proposals to reduce and flatten income tax rates while expanding the sales tax, perhaps to even include groceries and prescription drugs-- which some advocates see as a first step toward eliminating the state income tax.

North Carolina is in a hole and the GOP has shovels digging deeper, much, much deeper. Instead of looking to Art Pope's plans for plutocracy, it should be looking at the way California Democratic voters got rid of Schwarzenegger and taken the ability to block progress away from the Republicans and then went on to turn a $60 billion deficit into a $4 billion surplus.

The debate reflects uncertainty about whether the revenue is a one-time event, a result of state taxes on wealthy residents selling off investments at the end of last year to avoid increased costs as the Bush-era federal tax cuts expired. But it also illustrates philosophical differences about the role of government, about spending versus taxes and about the need, as Mr. Brown argued, to learn lessons from a decade in which many states saw the bottom fall out from their revenue collections.

“We’re seeing a change in conversation in state legislatures this year,” said Todd Haggerty, a policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures. “They’re not talking about how to close a budget gap anymore, which is a welcome relief after years of that during and after the Great Recession. Rather, states are having conversations about how to allocate increased revenues.”

Nowhere does that battle promise to play out with more force and intricacy than in California, the state that underwent perhaps the most severe retrenchments in the country.

[Governor] Brown, a Democrat who has always had a fiscally conservative streak, is leading the don’t-pop-any-Champagne-corks brigade, saying that he would oppose significant increases in new spending and that the money should go into a rainy-day fund. His administration put out the lower $1.2 billion estimate.

Voting nihilists and crazed ideologues out of government makes government more successful for the citizens. North Carolina would do well do defeat every Republican on the ballot next year and get back on the road to prosperity.

Read More

Mainstream Republican Conservatives Battle Tea Party Nihilists In The U.S. Senate

Miss McConnell lays down with the GOP's 3 nihilist psychopaths

A few days ago, television personality Bill Maher was musing about the idea of Texas teabagger Ted Cruz running for president. Maher is certain that it's inevitable, pointing out that Cruz has "Newt Gingrich's ambition and ego mixed with the steely-eyed focus of a serial killer." Good description! And he added that Cruz has been "totally unwilling to compromise with liberals on anything, including eating with a knife and fork." NY Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman, might agree, but he takes Cruz more seriously and honed in on how he and a few other Tea Party Senate freshmen are gumming up the works in that body and forcing people concerned with the smooth function of government to confront deranged right-wing ideological nihilism that veers frighteningly close to outright fascism. And this is all inside the Senate GOP caucus!

In full view of C-Span cameras trained on the floor this week, Senators John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine jousted with a new generation of conservatives-- Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky-- over the party’s refusal to allow the Senate to open budget talks with the House despite Senate Republicans’ long call for Democrats to produce a budget.

It was the Old Guard versus the Tea Party, but with real ramifications, as Congress careens toward another debt limit and spending crisis this fall with seemingly no one at the steering wheel. The newer members say negotiations should go forward only with a binding precondition that a budget deal cannot raise the government’s statutory borrowing limit.

“I have tremendous respect for this institution,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview on Friday. “But I’m not all that interested in the way things have always been done around here.”

Republicans made the failure of Senate Democrats to pass a budget a central talking point in the 2012 campaign, going so far this year as to pass legislation withholding Congressional pay if budgets were not approved this spring. Now, some Republicans say the fact that members of their own party are standing in the way of a House-Senate conference committee undermines their fiscal message.

“This to me is an issue of integrity,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. “We’ve pressed for a budget. We ought to go to conference.”

But the budget hawks have not budged, and they have even taken aim at their party in strikingly critical language.

“Here is the dirty little secret about some of those on the right side of the aisle,” Mr. Cruz said of his fellow Republicans. “There are some who would very much like to cast a symbolic vote against raising the debt ceiling and nonetheless allow our friends on the left side of the aisle to raise the debt ceiling. That, to some Republicans, is the ideal outcome.”

Mr. McCain called the demands of his Republican colleagues “absolutely out of line and unprecedented.” The Senate passed the budget before dawn on March 23 after a grueling all-night session, he noted, saying it was time to try to reach a final deal with the House in a negotiating conference.

“Will this deliberative body, whether it is the greatest in the world or the worst in the world, go ahead and decide on this issue, so we can at least tell the American people we are going to do what we haven’t done for four years and what every family in America sooner or later has to do-- and that is to have a budget?” he asked. Although few of Mr. McCain’s colleagues took to the floor to join him, many have expressed similar views.

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership, said that at this point, resistance had to give.

“I suspect senators have held back long enough on the decision to go to conference,” he said.

...House Republicans had envisioned a plan to reach a comprehensive deficit reduction deal predicated on a showdown in July over the debt ceiling. That showdown was supposed to drive both sides back to the bargaining table, but a rapidly falling deficit, rising tax payments and huge infusions of cash from the newly profitable, federally controlled home financing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have scrambled those plans. Now, the debt ceiling may not have to be raised until October or November, in the next fiscal year.

Before then, unless a budget deal can be struck, Congress must pass bills to finance the government based on very different guidelines in the House- and Senate-passed plans. The House Appropriations Committee will have to draft a bill financing labor, health and education programs at $121.8 billion, a 19 percent cut from current levels even after the across-the-board cuts took effect. The bill to finance the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency cannot exceed $24.2 billion, down 15 percent from the current levels after the cuts.

“There is not a member of our committee, Republican or Democrat, who is happy with these numbers,” said Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the committee.

The Senate has no intention of swallowing those cuts, so unless budget negotiators can meet and reach a deal, Congress will be headed back toward a crisis come Sept. 30, said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the Senate Budget Committee chairwoman.

“They could create crisis by having a government shutdown or holding everything back until November and threatening a debt default. That would be to their political detriment,” Ms. Murray said. “I think the American people have had it with that kind of hostage-taking.”

Cruz may be the ringleader of mindless nihilism but his rivals for the worthless 2016 presidential nomination, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio can't cede the far right fringe of the party-- which completely controls the nominating stage in most states-- to get out ahead of them on the crackpot ideas the Hate Talk Radio-brainedwashed base loves so much. Rubio, in fact, claims he could be the last man standing on preventing a majority in the Senate to move forward. “I’m not sure this is an issue I can ever change my opinion on,” he said. Already grievously damaged in the eyes of the extremist for his collaboration with Democrats on comprehensive immigration reform-- which is vehemently opposed by the Canadian-borm Cuban from Texas, Cruz and which the Hate Talkers only refer to as "amnesty"-- Rubio is looking for an opportunity to be seen taking a kamakazi-like stand on behalf of... Alex Jones and Glenn Beck fans. He'll find Ted Cruz and Rand Paul already have those folks sewn up. Their grandstanding is pushing Harry Reid towards a Senate rule change that would allow for a majority vote-- something so detested by the demented Cruz-- which would deflate the Senate Republicans' ability to obstruct government to further their ideological and narrow partisan agenda.

Read More

Boehnercare Passes The House

Thursday there were 3 votes leading up to Boehner's 37th attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and allow the big insurance companies to pick the pockets of every American who needs a doctor once again. This time Boehner gave the dubious honor of introducing the waste-of-time bill to Tea Party queen Michele Bachmann, who also has the dubious honor of being the first Republican incumbent so certain she's going to lose her reelection that she's already started running TV ads in her district. Pelosi was still disparagingly calling the bill Boehnercare.

There were 3 votes leading up to Bachmann's repeal rollcall. First was for ordering the question to agree to bring it up for consideration. It passed 228-193 every Republican + reactionary Blue Dog Jim Matheson of Utah voting YES and every Democrats except reactionary Blue Dog Jim Matheson of Utah voting NO. I should mention at this point that when you see a million e-mails from the DCCC castigating the Republicans for this repeal circus, Matheson is not just on their Frontline list of priority incumbents to be protected, he's been promised between two and three million dollars for his campaign. Matheson has the worst voting record of any Democrat in Congress. His crucial vote score as tracked by ProgressivePunch is 21.74 for the 113th Congress, identical with Georgia sociopath Phil Gingrey. There are a dozen Republicans that vote more frequently for progressive positions this year than Matheon (but Steve Israel isn't spending $2 million to help any of them win reelection).

The second vote, 10 minutes later, was another procedural one to basically just agree to the first one. This one passed 226-192, the change being another DCCC top priority Frontline reactionary Democrat, this time Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, voting with the GOP and Matheson. McIntyre has amassed as nearly a far-right voting record as Matheson. His ProgressivePunch crucial vote score this session is a putrid 40.91, right between Republican Mafioso figure Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm (R-NY) of Staten Island (42.11) and craven and cowardly Arizona New Dem Ron Barber (39.13). Last November enough discouraged Democrats stayed away from the polls in Matheson's and McIntyre's districts so that they both these mangy Blue Dogs came closer to losing than any other Members of Congress. McIntyre's margin was 654 votes and Mathson's was 768.

Next up was a Motion to Recommit by Lois Capps (D-CA), which would have at least preserved benefits of the Affordable Care Act for women and children by excluding from repeal: (1) elimination of cost sharing for preventive health services, including breast cancer screening, screening for gestational diabetes, and screening for domestic abuse; (2) access to health care coverage for those with preexisting conditions (children and adults); (3) medical loss ratio requirements that ensure consumers receive good value for their premiums; (4) elimination of lifetime and annual limits on benefits; and (5) dependent coverage of adult children until age 26. It failed 190-230. McIntyre hid in the toilet while the vote was taking place, but Matheson was joined by right-wing Democrats Collin Peterson (MN), Dan Lipinski (IL) and Nick Rahall (WV) on the Republican side of the aisle. McIntyre flushed-- though unfortunately not himself-- and came back in time for the final vote on the bill, which passed with all 229 Republicans (+ Matheson and McIntyre) voting YES and 195 Democrats voting NO.

A few minutes after the vote, I spoke with three Democratic challengers running against high-profile Republican backers of the bill. Ohio steel worker Andy Hounshell is taking on Boehner himself-- with no help from the DCCC, of course, who needs all that money to prop up Matheson and McIntyre-- and like many of us, he would like to see the Affordable Care Act improved, not destroyed. "At a time when our country needs good leadership," he told me, "we are stuck with a Speaker of the House who's idea of moving our country forward is having the House vote to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act for the 37th time. While I don't agree with the entire Act, it provides health care coverage for millions of Americans who otherwise would not have it. Instead of trying 37 times to repeal or defund it, imagine if the House would have tried 37 times to improve it. This blatant disregard for the millions of uninsured Americans who have picked up coverage under the act highlights the differences between our beliefs. This is not the leadership we need in Congress. We need job creation in this country and that is what our Representatives should be doing, not voting, once again, to repeal the Affordable Care Act."

John Mica, the Orlando-area Boehner puppet is being taken on by progressive Democrat Nick Ruiz, who agrees with Hounshell that Obamacare has a lot of room for improvement. He's a Medicare for all, single-payer advocate. And he's eager to take the battle to the voters. "It's time to replace John Mica. He voted to kill overtime. He voted against minimum wage. He voted to cut Social Security. Mica just introduced a measure Tuesday to stymie the federal Environmental Protection Agency as it relates to the Clean Water Act permitting process; what is he thinking-- that coal pollution helps American families? The measure, called the 'Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2013,' would place limits on the EPA’s ability to reject bad mining practices. And his position on universal healthcare is that America should not have it. We'll all be better off without John Mica in Congress-- and that's why I'm running against him in 2014." The DCCC isn't helping him either.

Although they undercut his race in 2012, the DCCC has come around on one candidate we spoke with, Jim Graves, the Minnesota Democrat taking on Bachmann again. And, of course, he sees right through her tired circus act. "Once again, Bachmann is using tax payers' money to put on a show. Her actions exemplify the wasteful government spending which she claims to decry. It is worse than Einstein’s definition of "insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"-- it is dereliction of duty and an insult to the public."

Read More

Water, Water Everywhere-- And An Obstructionist Senate Who Won't Allow It To Be Cleaned Up

This morning I was going over the Senate votes from Tuesday and I found a strange one. The Republicans successfully filibustered an amendment by Bernie Sanders to Boxer's Water Resources Development Act of 2013, which is co-sponsored by Louisiana Republican David Vitter. And in fact, Vitter was one of just 3 Republicans who broke with Miss McConnell's filibuster machine on Sanders' amendment. The amendment would essentially allow FEMA to rebuild bridges and other infrastructure to the state's high standards, so that they don't collapse in the next storm. It was interesting the Texas obstructionists John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are both asking for money to ameliorate the catastrophe in West-- which may well have been another right-wing domestic terror attack-- but refuse to help New Englander's who suffered at the hands of Tropical Storm Irene.

Aside from Vitter, the other Republicans who crossed the aisle and voted with the Democrats were Susan Collins (R-ME) and Roger Wicker (R-MS), who, like Vitter, understands about the need to turn to the federal government for help after big storms. Florida Senator Marco Rubio was another NO vote, thinking less about the folks who live in hurricane-ravaged Florida and more about Tea Party presidential primary voters.

Before they got around to voting on the overall bill-- which passed Wednesday 83-14, there was also a successful vote on Jeff Merkley's and Sherrod Brown's amendment to require the use of American iron, steel, and manufactured goods for these projects. Although the Export-American-Jobs-To-China Caucus, which is led by McConnell, Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) tried killing it with a filibuster, enough Republicans in states where these products are made-- particularly Alabama, Illinois and North Carolina-- abandoned the GOP's anti-Made In America insanity, allowing Merkley to get the 60 votes he needed. Amazing to me that right-wing Republicans would oppose Made-in-America efforts like this. Merkley tried appealing to them by reminding them that “if we don’t make things in America, we won’t have a middle class in America. American manufacturing companies create good, living wage jobs. We all benefit when our tax dollars go to create more jobs and success in America.”

They just DO NOT CARE. And although Rob Portman (R-OH) voted against it, Sherrod Brown was jubilant when it passed: “This is great news for Ohio workers and manufacturers. When we invest in American infrastructure, we should also invest in American manufacturing. We know how to make things in this country and should use American taxpayer dollars to bolster domestic manufacturing as much as possible.”

Merkely also pointed out that "for many years, Buy America provisions have established the basic principle that when we spend federal taxpayer dollars on public infrastructure projects, American businesses and workers should do the work. Backed by an open, competitive market-driven process, Buy America rules have provided the foundation for millions of miles of roads, bridges, light rail, and subways, and millions of good-paying jobs. The amendment expands those current standards for roads, bridges, and rail to cover WIFIA (Water Infrastructure Financing Innovation Act) federally financed water infrastructure projects."

Kentucky voters should remember that McConnell led this filibuster against American jobs when they go to the polls in 2014. And, by the way, Merkley is one of only 3 Senate incumbents endorsed by Blue America for 2014.

Read More

Fired, shmired -- isn't it time we started having "the appropriate person" KILLED?

New State Dept. spokesperson Jen Psaki -- joking on the job?

by Ken

On the theory that at times like this the White House will embrace good, or good-ish, news wherever it can find it, Al Kamen titles today's WaPo "In the Loop" column "What's going right for Obama," and what's going right turns out to be that so far among his second-term cabinet appointments, not a one has had to withdraw. By contrast, going into the first term we saw withdrawals by commerce nominees Bill Richardson and Judd Gregg and HHS nominee Tom Daschle. Al notes:

Even though Obama's most recent nominees -- Tom Perez for labor secretary, Penny Pritzker for commerce secretary -- may face a tough go of it in the Senate, so far the president is ahead of his first-term effort.

As we know, the Obama administration has been the first to operate fully under the new rules for what used to be executive appointments, but are now made in the event of a Democratic administration, that is, by the Senate Republicans (whether majority or minority) from names suggested by the president. More generally, all executive-branch appointees serve at the pleasure of the House and Senate Republicans, again whether in majority or minority.

The system as it has initially been put in place gives essentially any Senate Republican to tell any job candidate proposed by the president to go f**k him/herself, and he/she has to do it. The question, though, is why the Republicans' dispatch power should be so limited. Shouldn't they have the power to decree that any such prospective jobholder be told to rot in hell and he/she has to do it.

Which may explain why some of the attendees at new State Dept. spokesperson Jen Psaki's first official briefing yesterday were a little slow on the uptake. Here's Al's account.

Best we can tell, while [Psaki] seemed maybe a bit nervous, she did a fine job. She also learned a very important lesson: State Department reporters at the briefings can at times be a bit humor-deprived. You have to help them.

Take, for example, this exchange with a reporter who complained that he had raised a question last week "and I'm still waiting for an answer." It was a request for State's account of a meeting officials had last week with a group of South Asian human rights activists.

"Your side of the story, please?" the reporter asked.

"Yes, I apologize," she said. "I don't have anything new for you on that today. I will -- I'm happy to check on it. And we'll make sure the appropriate person is fired."

There was a moment of confused silence.

"Just kidding," Psaki said.

Some reporters started to laugh.

"That's a joke," she explained.

More laughter.

Note to Psaki: No kidding from the podium.

Of course this involves extends the principle that executive branch employees serve at the pleasure of Republican demagogues to the infotainment noozemedia, but that seems fair, no? The only thing is having these people fired just may not be good enough going forward. Killed is what's called for, I think.

#

Read More

Is Sabotage A Crime Punishable By Something or Other?

Has the whole media signed an agreement to avoid the word "obstructionism" when reporting on the Republican Party policy agenda in Congress? Because I never see the mainstream media using that word-- and there is virtually no other way to describe what Boehner, Cantor and Miss McConnell have been doing for the past 5 years. Last week, the National Memo ran a bang-up post of the 5 ways the Republican Party has sabotaged our economic recovery, Republican Party sabotage being a direct outgrowth of Republican Party obstructionism.

The GOP "made a conscious decision to slow the economic recovery the moment the president took office in the hopes of denying him a second term. They made that decision before he was even inaugurated. And they haven't slowed down now that he has won a second term!

To deny Obama a second term, they knew they had to slow the recovery. And their plan worked in 2010. The unemployment rate was rising as the GOP swept to the largest congressional landslide in the last half-century. However, their plans were thwarted as they paused their most aggressive efforts for the 2012 campaign and job growth continued at a steady pace of around 160,000 new jobs a month.

The Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens and Andrew Fieldhouse summarized how the congressional GOP actively smothered the economic recovery. But the effort to cut spending and spread destructive myths about the economy united the entire party and could have easily caused a recession, if it had only been more effective.

...The stimulus-- along with the auto rescue-- should go down in history as the most effective government interventions for long-term job growth since the New Deal. But it could have been so much more effective.

Because three Republican votes were needed in the Senate to pass the American Recovery Act, the total cost of the bill had to be kept under $1 trillion, when $1.8 trillion was needed. Those Republican senators made specific changes to the bill that ended up killing as many as one million jobs, EPI’s Bivens and Fieldhouse explain:

The price tag of getting these votes was nearly $30 billion in school construction funds stripped out of the bill at the insistence of Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), one of the three GOP votes in the Senate. These funds would have supported roughly 250,000 additional jobs. Further, the final version also included the nearly $70 billion cost of a one-year extension of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) ‘patch’-- a provision that provided no stimulus at all, since it was done literally every single year, but which was included to woo another GOP senator, Olympia Snowe. If this amount could instead have been spent on productive stimulus, it could have created roughly 750,000 jobs. In short, just luring the minimal GOP votes needed to pass ARRA in the Senate likely kept it from supporting or creating nearly a million more jobs than it did.

What Republicans did after the stimulus passed was even more destructive. They coordinated their messaging and began calling it “the failed stimulus” before it even went into effect. That talking point was supplemented by millions in political advertising calling the stimulus “failed” and “reckless.”

...In March of 2013, the Wall Street Journal‘s Phil Izzo estimated that federal, state and local governments employed 950,000 fewer Americans than in June of 2009. Without those cuts, he estimated the unemployment rate would be .6 percent lower, meaning today it would be a flat 7 percent. A Brookings study suggests the unemployment rate could be as low as 6.1 percent if not for cuts.

Yale University’s Ben Polak and Peter K. Schott confirm that we’ve experienced “unprecedented austerity at the level of state and local governments, and this austerity has slowed the job recovery.”

...No Republican president has balanced a budget since Dwight Eisenhower. A Republican president and Congress took a budget surplus and grew the deficit at a startling pace-- Bush Jr.’s final year in office left a deficit of well over a trillion dollars. Despite all this, Republicans decided they were the voice of fiscal reason and President Obama, who grew government at a slower rate than any president since Eisenhower, was busting open your grandchild’s piggy bank to buy beers for Solyndra.

Overwhelmed by impressive message discipline, Democrats bought into the “family budget” analogy Republicans used to justify cuts: What’s the first thing your family does in a crisis? Cut back! But I might cut back on my family’s nuclear weapons first.

And then there were the GOP shenanigans with the debt ceiling and the Sequester. It's the kind of thorough and independent reporting I've come to depend on the National Memo for-- what a lot of people used to think Huffington Post would be all about before they were all about... well, you know. Anyway, I was more than a little surprised to see an editorial in the NY Times over the weekend finally making many of the same points-- that congressional Republicans are sabotaging the efficient and orderly functioning of government-- even if Andrew Rosenthal choses not to speculate on their transparently ugly motives.

Filibuster Abuse: The practice of halting Senate deliberation is an old one, practiced by both parties, but the current Republican caucus has taken it to new heights. They have filibustered an unprecedented number of President Obama’s nominees. The District Court for Washington, D.C., perhaps the most important appeals court in the land, has four of its 11 seats vacant. The last time the Senate confirmed a judge was in 2006. The Republicans have filibustered all of Mr. Obama’s nominees because Republicans simply don’t want him to appoint any judges to a currently conservative court, which rules on appeals involving federal regulatory agencies, and which has exclusive jurisdiction over national security matters.

Boycotting: Also known as taking your marbles and going home, the most recent example came on Thursday, when Republicans refused to attend a meeting of the Environment and Public Works Committee, thereby blocking the nomination of Gina McCarthy as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. They claimed they were not completely satisfied with her answers to the more than 1,000 questions they dumped on her in the confirmation process. In addition to stymying Mr. Obama, holding up her nomination has the great virtue of hamstringing the E.P.A., which the right thinks shouldn’t exist in the first place. And that leads us to the next G.O.P. tactic:

Denial of services: Some government agencies require a certain number of members, or a permanent chief, to operate. If the Republicans don’t like those agencies, they simply make sure those positions never get filled. For instance, the National Labor Relations Board, which Republicans loathe because it protects workers, requires a quorum to take action. So the Republicans refused to confirm Mr. Obama’s nominees. Then they held fake pro-forma sessions during their vacations to try to prevent him from making recess appointments. He did that anyway and the Republican-packed D.C. appeals court (see above) ruled that the appointments were illegitimate-- which could invalidate scores of decisions. The Republicans are playing this same trick with the Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in response to the wildly reckless actions that led to the financial collapse of 2008.

Investigate again and again and again: When Darrell Issa, took over the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform after the G.O.P. won the House majority in 2010, he said he wanted to hold “seven hearings a week times 40 weeks.” His supposed reason was that Mr. Obama is “corrupt.” That’s a frequent Republican talking point, but it’s so obviously ridiculous that I wonder if they actually believe it. In any case, the real reason is that endless “investigative” hearings cause trouble and distract administration officials from their actual jobs. The hearings on Benghazi, for example, have revealed none of the impeachable offenses that Republicans claimed would come to light. They have kept Congress and the administration focused on what happened in Libya eight months ago, which was awful, rather than on what is happening there today, which is awful.

Refuse to negotiate: Republicans in Congress used to complain that the Senate Democrats hadn’t produced a budget in the last four years. But recently the Democrats did just that. So the Republicans abandoned their old talking point and are now refusing to form a conference committee to reconcile the Senate budget with the House budget.

Read More

Will Immigration Reform Go The Same Way As Gun Safety Reform?

Have you noticed that Congress isn't going along with some of the broad preferences of the American people lately. Something between 86 and 91% of Americans-- depending on which poll you prefer-- support background checks on arms purchases in order to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, criminals, wife beaters and the mentally ill. Perhaps because most Republican legislators are terrorists, criminals, wife beaters and/or the mentally ill, they were able to filibuster the law to death. The House was able to duck voting on it altogether but 46 NRA shills were able to use a procedural tactic to thwart the majority in the Senate and thwart the will of the American people-- for now. The very right-wing co-sponsor of the amendment, Pat Toomey (R-PA) made a startling admission one week ago during an interview at the Times Herald in Norristown, PA: "In the end it didn’t pass because we're so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it." [When's the last time you heard a TV anchor use the word "obstructionist?"]

A similar scenario could be playing out again in the battle over comprehensive immigration reform. First off, in another bipartisan poll, this one published yesterday-- while the GOP refuses to discuss anything, just shout nonsense about "Benghazi"-- an overwhelming majority of Americans, right across the partisan spectrum, voiced support for the Senate's Gang of 8 proposal, which includes a pathway to citizenship, increased border security, and employer verification requirements. 78% of liberal Democrats and 74% of conservative Republican respondents back the plan, as do 68% of "swing voters."

Pollster Jeff Pollock points out, perhaps ominously for some, that "supporting the proposal is a net positive for Congressional candidates. "Four in ten voters (42%) are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports comprehensive immigration reform, while just 12% say they are less likely to support a candidate who supports it. Among swing voters, a candidate’s support for the measure produces a similarly positive effect."

And yet right-wing extremists in Congress, primarily neo-Know Nothings from the ultra-gerrymandered ex-Confederate states, are determined to block comprehensive immigration reform, whatever it takes. Reactionaries in the Senate-- led by KKK Senator Jeff Sessions (AL) and Ted Cruz (TX) will attempt to load the bill up with poison pill amendments. But the real hope for killing the bill rests in the House, where sociopaths and fringy crackpots Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Lou Barletta (R-PA), Steve King (R-IA), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), domestic terrorist Steve Stockman (R-TX), and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) are working full time spreading their poison. King: “The meetings of the Gang of Eight and the secret meetings in the House of Representatives-- the people who have been standing up for the Constitution and the rule of law haven’t been invited to those meetings." Paranoid and off-balance, former drug addict Dana Rohrabacher added, "We’ve got all the rich guys and the elitists talking to each other. Unfortunately us regular folks don’t have that kind of coordination."

Republicans are caught between a rock and a hard place on this. Their racist, xenophobic Tea Party base hates immigrants and people of color and fears the sound of a foreign language-- conservatives fear that when they hear a foreign language, the speaker is talking about them or plotting against them-- but the Big Business interests that finance the careers of Republican politicians, insist on immigration reform and access to cheap labor.

Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) got badly burned in the fight over background checks. He doesn't want to see that happen to himself again and he was one of the first Republican electeds to call out the crazy Heritage Foundation report yesterday. Even the Cato Institute is laughing in DeMint's face over this.

What’s remarkable about this whole spectacle is that no one is even bothering to pretend that the Heritage study isn’t simply a last ditch effort to kill the bill. That’s widely, publicly, explicitly acknowledged to be the case. Indeed, a Heritage study back during the last immigration reform battle is widely credited with giving the right the ammo they needed to scuttle that proposal, and opponents are openly discussing today’s study as providing the chance of a rerun of that glorious moment.

In this case, though, the response from Republicans to the study has been swift and aggressive. Reporters were sent a whole list of Republican Congressional aides and conservative think tank types who are prepared to push back on the study-- a measure of just how much the GOP establishment wants reform to pass this time.

Ultimately, the prospects for immigration reform have always turned on whether enough Republicans are willing to swallow hard, cross the citizenship Rubicon, and accept the consequences for the right. This report doesn’t change that basic dynamic. It will give an army of talk show hosts and bloggers opposed to reform plenty of ammunition to kick up a whole lot of noise against the proposal, to be sure.

...If far right Republicans in the House kill reform, that would be the worst possible political outcome for the GOP. The noise from the far right may have just gotten a bit louder, but the consequences for Republicans of allowing the noise to kill reform haven’t changed at all.

Meanwhile, President Obama has stayed in the background-- more or less-- so as to not give Republican racists and hate-mongers another gratuitous excuse-- "Obama wants it"-- to vote no. The only Senate Republicans up for reelection in 2014 whop are considered vulnerable are Susan Collins (ME) and the two closet cases, Lindsey Graham (SC) and Miss McConnell (KY). Collins is likely to support comprehensive reform, McConnell will count on a strong Know Nothing base in his state to have his anti-immigrant back, and Graham... well, he'll just twist in the wind, wanting to be on the right side of history but fearful that haters and Know Nothings who dominate his state's GOP will defeat him. In the House, most Republicans will count on gerrymandered districts to keep them safe if they vote NO. The two dozen House Republicans who could most easily be defeated if they vote against immigration reform are:

• Mike Rogers (MI)
• Charlie Dent (PA)
• Pat Meehan (PA)
• Mike Turner (OH)
• John Kline (MN)
• Buck McKeon (CA)
• Richard Hanna (NY)
• Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm (NY)
• Erik Paulsen (MN)
• Paul Ryan (WI)
• Frank Wolf (VA)
• Tom Reed (NY)
• Fred Upton (MI)
• Scott Rigell (VA)
• Michael Fitzpatrick (PA)
• Rodney Davis (IL)
• Joe Heck (NV)
• Jeff Denham (CA)
• Tom Latham (IA)
• Mike Coffman (CO)
• Chris Gibson (NY)
• Frank LoBiondo (NJ)
• David Valadao (CA)
• Gary Miller (CA)

Even though Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is in a Florida district that Obama won by 7 points, I didn't mention her because Debbie Wasserman Schultz has persuaded Steve Israel to help protect her vulnerable seat and to prevent a viable Democratic candidate from challenging her.

Read More

What To Do About A GOP That Has Devolved Into Intransigent Extremism?

Joe Conason takes on the moronic Beltway adage that "everyone is equally at fault" for the nation's problems by pointing out that the most salient fact in American political life is (and for some time has been) the intransigent extremism of the Republican Party.

Whatever the punditocracy may imagine, there is no way for Obama to force his agenda on the Republicans in the House and the Senate, who range from scheming partisans like Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor to Tea Party zealots like Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann. Unlike Abraham Lincoln or Lyndon Johnson, the two brilliant manipulators with whom he is sometimes compared and found wanting, the president is not equipped to bribe, blackmail, or herd in the style of those Machiavellian chief executives. If he were so equipped-- and indeed used his power as ruthlessly as Lincoln or Johnson-- the same pundits who now complain that he isn’t controlling the agenda would shriek about his misuse of power.

...What Obama evidently doesn’t understand, despite years of bitter experience, is the significance of that right-wing extremism for someone like him, whose nature is to accept differences and seek compromise. Unable to negotiate with a reasonable counterpart on either side of the Hill, he too frequently negotiates with himself-- whether over Obamacare, the debt ceiling, the budget, deficit reduction, taxes, or “reforming” Social Security.

Yet whenever he discards a progressive position, such as the public option in health care, or adopts a conservative position, such as reducing Social Security cost-of-living increases, he only succeeds in demoralizing his base. Meanwhile, rejection by the Republicans is preordained.

So what is left for President Obama to do if he wishes to see any of his second-term agenda enacted? By now he ought to have noticed that when he speaks out firmly on behalf of progressive principles, in support of working families, his polling numbers improve and his power increases. (And whenever he vacillates, his numbers diminish and his authority weakens.)

Yesterday we saw a resurgent fascist party in England, UKIP, make huge headway against the political Establishment, primarily by capitalizing on crude nationalism and rabid anti-immigrant sentiment. When David Cameron, whose Conservative Party lost big, was asked by a journalist if he regrets referring to the fruitcakes and clowns who ran on the UKIP ticket as fruitcakes and clowns, he responded, “It’s no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for. Of course they should be subject, and they will be subject, to proper scrutiny of their policies and their plans. But we need to show respect for people who've taken the choice to support this party. And we're going to work really hard to win them back." Cameron finds himself in a situation not unlike the hapless John Boehner. When you start feeding the beast of hatred and bigotry some red meat, the beast is never satiated. The beast will inevitably eat you as well. And that brings us to Timothy Eagan's OpEd in yesterday's NY Times, about how the crazies-- the U.S. version of the UKIP-- have taken over the House of Representatives. Appropriately enough, he starts with Gohmert, certainly one of the craziest of the lot, right up there with Broun, King, Bachmann and Stockman.

Not long ago, the congressman from northeast Texas, Louie Gohmert, was talking about how the trans-Alaska oil pipeline improved the sex lives of certain wild animals-- in his mind, the big tube was an industrial-strength aphrodisiac. “When the caribou want to go on a date,” he told a House hearing, “they invite each other to head over to the pipeline.”

Gohmert, consistently on the short list for the most off-plumb member of Congress, has said so many crazy things that this assertion passed with little comment. Last year, he blamed a breakdown of Judeo-Christian values for the gun slaughter at a cinema in Colorado. Last week, he claimed the Muslim Brotherhood had deep influence in the Obama administration, and that the attorney general-- the nation’s highest law enforcer-- sympathized with terrorists.

You may wonder how he gets away with this. You may also wonder how Gohmert can run virtually unopposed in recent elections. The answer explains why we have an insular, aggressively ignorant House of Representatives that is not at all representative of the public will, let alone the makeup of the country.

Much has been said about how the great gerrymander of the people’s House-- part of a brilliant, $30 million Republican action plan at the state level-- has now produced a clot of retrograde politicians who are comically out of step with a majority of Americans. It’s not just that they oppose things like immigration reform and simple gun background checks for violent felons, while huge majorities support them.

Or that, in the aggregate, Democrats got 1.4 million more votes for all House positions in 2012 but Republicans still won control with a cushion of 33 seats.

Or that they won despite having the lowest approval rating in modern polling, around 10 percent in some surveys. Richard Nixon during Watergate and B.P.’s initial handling of a catastrophic oil spill had higher approval ratings.

But just look at how different this Republican House is from the country they are supposed to represent. It’s almost like a parallel government, sitting in for some fantasy nation created in talk-radio land.

As a whole, Congress has never been more diverse, except the House majority. There are 41 black members of the House, but all of them are Democrats. There are 10 Asian-Americans, but all of them are Democrats. There are 34 Latinos, a record-- and all but 7 are Democrats. There are 7 openly gay or lesbian members, all of them Democrats.

Only 63 percent of the United States population is white. But in the House Republican majority, it’s 96 percent white. Women are 51 percent of the nation, but among the ruling members of the House, they make up just 8 percent. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side.)

It’s a stretch, by any means, to call the current House an example of representative democracy. Now let’s look at how the members govern:

To date, seven bills have been enacted. Let’s see, there was the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship act-- “ensuring the stability of the helium market.” The Violence Against Women Act was renewed, but only after a majority of Republicans voted against it, a rare instance of letting the full House decide on something that the public favors. Just recently, they rushed through a change to help frequent air travelers-- i.e., themselves-- by fixing a small part of the blunt budget cuts that are the result of their inability to compromise. Meal assistance to the elderly, Head Start for kids and other programs will continue to fall under the knife of sequestration.

On the economy, the Republican majority has been consciously trying to derail a fragile recovery. Their first big salvo was the debt ceiling debacle, which resulted in the lowering of the credit rating for the United States. With sequestration-- which President Obama foolishly agreed to, thinking Congress would never go this far-- the government has put a wheel-lock on a car that keeps trying to get some traction.

Meanwhile, not a day passes without some member of this ruling majority saying something outrageous. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, for example, has endorsed the far-side-of-the-moon conspiracy theory that the government is buying up all the bullets to keep gun owners from stocking their home arms depots. As for Gohmert, earlier this year he nominated Allen West, a man who isn’t even a member of Congress (he lost in November) to be Speaker of the House. Harvey, the invisible rabbit, was not available.

Gohmert, like others in the House crazy caucus, has benefited from a gerrymandered district. He can do anything short of denouncing Jesus and get re-elected.

The Beltway chorus of the moment blames President Obama for his inability to move his proposals through a dunderheaded Congress. They wonder how Republicans would be treating a silken-tongued charmer like Bill Clinton if he were still in the White House. We already know: not a single Republican voted for Clinton’s tax-raising budget, the one that led to our last federal surplus. Plus, they impeached him; his presidency was saved only in the Senate.

Listen to how conservative Republican Senator Pat Toomey explained it:

Read More

EPA Director Confirmation Hearings Turn Into A Debate On Climate Change

The video above exemplifies why Bernie Sanders (I-VT) thanked John Barrasso (R-WY) for his ignorant, ostrich-like behavior during the Senate Environment Committee hearings on Gina McCarthy, president Obama's nominee to head the EPA. The cameo by Climate Change denier Jim Inhofe is hilarious. It's worth pointing out that Miss McConnell put 8 anti-Science, Climate Change deniers on the committee, David Vitter, Jim Inhofe, John Barrasso, Jeff Sessions, Mike Crapo, Roger Wicker, John Boozman and Deb Fischer. Thursday the 8 clowns howled like a pack of wolves instead of asking serious questions of the nominee and made it clear they're against... well, the EPA. The L.A. Times characterized their behavior as "a clear signal to the White House that they will continue fighting environmental regulations as vigorously as they did in the first term."

As head of the EPA's air pollution branch, McCarthy oversaw the promulgation of the most sweeping and controversial regulations during Obama's first term, including reducing carbon emissions from cars and light trucks and cutting mercury from power plant emissions.

"I'm not sure whether the nominee before us today is personally aware of so many folks who have actually lost their jobs because of the EPA and the role that I believe it is taking now, which is failing our country," said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo). "How many more times, if confirmed, will this EPA director pull the regulatory lever and allow another [coal] mining family to fall through the EPA's trap door to joblessness, to poverty and to poor health?"

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said McCarthy wants to pursue a "radical" agenda, but Senate staff members say the minority is unlikely to block her confirmation.

Though the decline in coal-fired power plants is driven largely by cheap natural gas, air pollution rules hit fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, hardest because of their high level of dangerous emissions. Obama has said that if Congress doesn't pass legislation to address climate change, he would get his agencies, including the EPA, to move on the issue.

Senators of both parties pressed McCarthy on how the EPA would tackle climate change, but she declined to give specific answers. Instead, she asserted unequivocally that climate change would be a priority for the EPA.

"This is one of the greatest challenges of our generation and our great obligation to future generations," McCarthy said. "I am convinced that those steps can and must be pursued with common sense. And I firmly believe they can produce not only benefits for public health, but also create markets for emerging and new technologies and new jobs."

Democrats defended McCarthy, pointing to her long record of working with politicians of both parties before she arrived at the EPA in 2009. McCarthy served as a key environmental official for three Republican governors in her native Massachusetts, including Mitt Romney, before leading Connecticut's environmental protection office under Republican Gov. Jodi Rell.

Under McCarthy, Connecticut entered a greenhouse-gas emissions trading market that spans the Northeast. If confirmed, she said, reducing greenhouse gases on a national scale would be one of her goals. McCarthy also pledged to clean up water sources and to revise "antiquated" chemical safety rules.

Efforts by Congress to stymie measures similar to those implemented by McCarthy in Connecticut were beaten back by the Obama White House. But the administration itself played a role in thwarting some important pollution rules. And it's clear that McCarthy, like her predecessor, Lisa P. Jackson, is outside the tight-knit circle around Obama that sets administration policies.

Maybe the Republicans could call Joe "Oily Joe" Barton (R-TX) in to explain how right-wing crackpots need look no further than Noah's Ark to know exactly what's up with climate change.

Read More