Posts tagged teaparty
The most revealing moment in either Republican response, though, came from Ryan, who, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, implicitly threatened another government shutdown, or catastrophic fiscal meltdown, if the House majority doesn’t get its way. “The president is now urging Congress to increase the debt limit,” he said with distaste, referring to the vote required possibly as soon as March to allow the Treasury to keep paying its bills. Should the House majority hold that vote hostage to its vision of the budget, it will throw the markets into turmoil and upend our still-embryonic recovery.
It tells you all you need to know about Ryan’s tilt to the right that, for all his professed disapproval of increasing the debt limit during an Obama administration, he voted to do so twice himself during the gushing deficits of the Bush years. Funny he didn’t mention that Tuesday night. It tells you all you need to know about the G.O.P.’s overall tilt to the right that not just the Tea Party is making barely veiled threats to play dangerous political games with the debt limit. Mitch McConnell and Cantor did so last weekend, as have a plethora of potential 2012 presidential candidates, from Tim Pawlenty to Gingrich. The Bachmann-Beck-Palin tail is now firmly wagging the Republican dog.
Budget talk. Tasty.
Click through the photo for Washington Post’s detailed coverage.
President Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget proposal for fiscal year 2011 includes billions to put people back to work and imposes new fees on some of the nation’s largest banks.
via Kurt White
Pkrugz: Addicted to Bush
This may be the best piece I’ve read yet about the politics of 2010. Krugman’s column in today’s Times. 50 hot ones, comin at ya.
For a couple of years, it was the love that dared not speak his name. In 2008, Republican candidates hardly ever mentioned the president still sitting in the White House. After the election, the G.O.P. did its best to shout down all talk about how we got into the mess we’re in, insisting that we needed to look forward, not back. And many in the news media played along, acting as if it was somehow uncouth for Democrats even to mention the Bush era and its legacy.
The truth, however, is that the only problem Republicans ever had with George W. Bush was his low approval rating. They always loved his policies and his governing style — and they want them back. In recent weeks, G.O.P. leaders have come out for a complete return to the Bush agenda, including tax breaks for the rich and financial deregulation. They’ve even resurrected the plan to cut future Social Security benefits.
But they have a problem: how can they embrace President Bush’s policies, given his record? After all, Mr. Bush’s two signature initiatives were tax cuts and the invasion of Iraq; both, in the eyes of the public, were abject failures. Tax cuts never yielded the promised prosperity, but along with other policies — especially the unfunded war in Iraq — they converted a budget surplus into a persistent deficit. Meanwhile, the W.M.D. we invaded Iraq to eliminate turned out not to exist, and by 2008 a majority of the public believed not just that the invasion was a mistake but that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. What’s a Republican to do?
You know the answer. There’s now a concerted effort under way to rehabilitate Mr. Bush’s image on at least three fronts: the economy, the deficit and the war.
Analysis: How 2 million lost jobless benefits
Truly depressing. The Washington Post offers some good analysis on how jobless benefit extensions have fallen apart. Apparently, our Congress is prepared to let them (us) eat cake. Excerpt below. Unforgivable.
WASHINGTON — Keeping unemployment benefits flowing for millions of workers whose jobs were eaten by the recession should have been a slam dunk in an election year.
But until this month, Senate Democrats have been unable to bring themselves to pass a simple bill that just does it. Instead they’ve demanded a series of unrelated and often controversial tax and spending add-ons that have enabled Republicans to mount successful filibusters.
Now that the legislation has been shorn of all the extras, the bill could win final passage soon. It can’t come soon enough for more than 2 million people whose checks have been cut off in a five-month impasse in which there’s plenty of blame to go around:
- Democrats and their leaders made several decisions that in retrospect look like miscalculations, like pulling the rug out from under a bipartisan measure launched back in February and loading a subsequent bill with $24 billion for governors - guaranteeing that most Republicans would vote against it.
- Republican moderates voted one way in March to help the bill pass but changed their minds just weeks later, having gotten religion from GOP leaders and tea partiers on the budget deficit.
What Would A Maverick Do? John McCain, Still At War
I wrote about JMac’s transformation from potential bridge-builder to partisan shill over the course of the last decade a couple months ago. NYMagazine has an excellent profile on the causes and effects. If you used to be a McCain fan, this is a genuinely sad article. Maybe the biggest favor he could do himself would be to walk away, while he still has some shred of dignity still in the bank.
In the end, it’s the middle-aged housewife who gets to him. On a blistering June day north of Phoenix, John McCain, short and sprightly in a baby-blue gingham button-down, has been harangued repeatedly by an antiwar demonstrator during his town-hall meeting. A couple of hours earlier, he’d had to stand red-faced while a transsexual woman made a speech about a nondiscrimination bill in Congress (“I’ll go back and review it again,” he said stiffly).
Then, during an event in a YMCA recreation facility in the suburb of Carefree, he can’t hold it together anymore. A woman takes a paper from her purse and begins reading McCain’s own concession speech from the 2008 election. After he was beaten by Barack Obama, the senator from Arizona promised “to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences.”
“That was your words,” says the woman. “I was very heartened when I heard these words, and my question is: ‘What happened?’ ”
Blinking rapidly, McCain develops an expression like a grenade about to detonate.
“Simple,” he snaps. “This administration has decided to govern from the far left without any consultations or negotiations or any compromises to be made with the other party!”
His supporters applaud, and McCain’s face twitches. “You know how many times I’ve been asked to go over to the White House to negotiate on any issue?” he asks, not waiting for an answer. “Zero,” he says with a huff. “Zero.”
McCain ends the exchange with a starkly disingenuous “Thanks very much,” the smirk on his face doing nothing to conceal his annoyance. “Next time,” he says, “please bring another speech.”
It has been a very strange season in the political career of John McCain. The former maverick who once fought his own party on everything from tax cuts to torture, who built a reputation as a prickly independent, now marches in lockstep with his party, from his objection to Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court appointment to his support of a draconian new immigration law in Arizona that would have repulsed him three years ago. When Newsweek asked him whether a maverick would take such positions, he responded that he’d never considered himself a maverick. It all seemed to defy logic.
Riveting. Like a train wreck, you can’t look away. Enjoy your lunch.
Ahahahahahahhahaha. We’ll get the government/republic/leaders we deserve.
Mike Allen:
SARAH PALIN’S SARAHPAC is out with a powerful new video, “Mama Grizzlies,” the term she’s been using for female 2010 candidates she’s been endorsing. The 1 min. 50 sec. video posted on her Facebook page this a.m.: “This year WILL be remembered as the year when common-sense conservative women get things done for our country. [Applause.] All ACROSS this country, women are standing up and speaking out for common-sense solutions. These policies coming out of D.C. right now, this fundamental transformation of America: A lot of women who are VERY concerned about their kids’ futures say, ‘We don’t like this fundamental transformation, and we’re going to do something about it.’ It seems like it’s kind of a MOM AWAKENING in the last year and a half, where women are rising up and saying, ‘No, we’ve had enough already.’ Because moms kinda just know when something’s wrong. Here in Alaska, I always think of the mama grizzly bears that rise up on their hind legs when somebody’s coming to attack their cubs, to do something ADVERSE toward their cubs. You thought PIT BULLS were tough, well you don’t MESS WITH THE MAMA GRIZZLIES. [Applause.] … Look out, Washington, because there’s a WHOLE stampede of pink elephants crossin’ the line and the ETA — stampeding through — is November 2nd, 2010. Lotta women, comin’ together.” YouTube http://bit.ly/dfOGxZ
THE FACTS OF LIFE: This shrewdly choreographed montage may help yank Palin back toward the mainstream, and certainly will inspire some second looks from those unimpressed by her off-the-cuff moments. The emphasis on women could help expand Palin’s appeal toward the center, helping the Republican Party with its demographic peril. The elegant video should score with voters who liked Palin’s message but were cool to the messenger.
“Morning” Mika points out that the video has an EMPOWERING message for Palin herself — no longer portraying herself as a victim of the media, which rarely works.
Meet Senator Lindsey Graham (R- South Carolina).
Another NYT Mag preview. Enjoy. Consider this your late lunchtime read, NY.
This piece’s tagline calls Graham “This Year’s Maverick”. I would call him “the most cynical brand of opportunist”. His shape shifting over immigration, climate change, and a host of other issues has completely destroyed his credibility in my eyes. But you can make your own call…
Graham is not a morning person, but at that hour in May he was thoroughly revved up, despite eating only a pack of crackers for breakfast. (Graham does not cook; it is widely believed by those close to him that he is incapable of manipulating a coffee machine, an oven, a toaster or a can opener.) Big issues rattle from his brain and out of his inert, somewhat glassy-eyed face as if dispensed by a gum-ball machine. Among these was the Kerry-Lieberman climate-change bill — or “energy independence” bill, as he preferred to call it for the sake of attracting conservative support. (“To me, it is about jobs, not polar bears!”) After attending 183 meetings and devoting more than 120 hours of scheduled Senate time to the matter, Graham dropped his co-sponsorship of the legislation when the Senate majority leader, the Democrat Harry Reid, disclosed in late April that his priority would be passage of an immigration bill. (Reid later reversed his decision.) Graham promptly called Reid on the phone and accused him of shifting the legislative calendar to woo Hispanic voters in Reid’s uphill re-election struggle, and then, according to Graham, the two exchanged “a few F-bombs” before hanging up.
In Graham’s view, the visceral nature of immigration politics combined with the BP oil spill fouled the waters for debate on a comprehensive energy bill — “a huge lift in good circumstances,” he told me in May. Still, in June, he added his name to the more modest energy bill of Senator Richard Lugar, another Republican, and expressed hope that it might attract “Democrats and Republicans alike.”
In years past, Graham’s deal-making forays typically featured his close friend, Senator John McCain of Arizona, as the frontman. Nowadays McCain has shucked his maverick ways in order to court his state’s G.O.P. primary voters, while Graham’s reflexive displays of bipartisanship have made him something of a scourge among South Carolina Tea Partiers. Harry Kibler fingered Graham as major prey in Kibler’s “RINO hunt” (Republicans in Name Only). The South Carolina chapter of Resist.net warns constituents that Graham “is up to his old reach-across-the-aisle tricks again!” Among the conservative activists who have called for censuring Graham as a quisling of the right is the state’s G.O.P. gubernatorial nominee and Tea Party favorite, Nikki Haley.
Also, if you don’t get The Weekender, we’d strongly advise you to try it. It’s great!
UPDATE (7/1/10, 11am PST):
1. Lindsey Graham tells Tea Partiers in this piece that he expects their movement to “die out.”. Walkback imminent, I’d guess. But he’ll still be crucified.
2. He voted against extending emergency unemployment benefits yesterday. Compassionate conservatism at its finest.
S.F. Lunchtime Read. Enjoy.
To say that the Greene situation is an enigma would be a major understatement.
(via nicksummers)
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