(If Sen. Udall votes to "spread the pain" to the Big Three, will Democrats re-elect him? - promoted by WeatherDem)
Colorado Senator Mark Udall complained on the senate floor late last year about the nation's short-term memory loss wrt our budget situation. This was about the time Bush's tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires were extended at the behest of a hostage-taking Republican Tea Party:
"We are suffering from the worst possible case of collective short-term memory loss. During the past decade, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans didn't lead to job creation and instead helped cause a skyrocketing deficit. Why would we believe it will be any different this time around? As I've said many times, instead of borrowing more money to pay for tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, we should focus our attention on reducing our national debt, stabilizing Social Security for the long term, and finding common-sense ways to create jobs."
That's real purty, and the fact this statement was meant for public consumption goes with the inclusion of contacts for Udall's spokes-ghost* Tara Trujillo at (303) 650-7820.
I'm thinking Udall is counting on our memory loss to have us forget he actually had the proper answer for our budget problem. By now the Esteemed Senator has changed his tune on Social Security and is prescribing "pain" for all of us that will come in varying forms: the pain for Udall would be undoing the Udall legacy while having to read some nasty blog posts about how he has lied to Colorado's citizens; the pain for us would be in the cuts to Social Security and Medicare that he now feels are absolutely necessary but which will won't fix a thing but how Lawrence Kudlow thinks of Mark Udall. I would describe the pain as more like a medieval treatment with leeches.
As many of us know, Colorado House Democrats lost their majority after the 2010 election by one member. Among other goals for 2012, regaining the majority in the House is a priority. I want to do my part in helping Democrats regain the majority and one way to do that is to work with my House District to elect a Democrat. House District 29 has a Democratic challenger to a Republican incumbent: Tracy Kraft-Tharp. My intention in this post is to introduce the Democratic activist community to Tracy - an introduction that is real, not rumor. I will do so by writing about topics I discussed with Tracy earlier this week.
Tracy's message is simple: she is running so that HD29 has someone representing everybody. Her focus will be on supporting the community. She has experience crafting solutions with multiple stakeholders in a number of jobs and endeavors. She is familiar with the legislative process. Tracy is well situated to start making a positive impact early in her role as a Representative.
I have not been talking about the insanity around the debt ceiling and debt and deficit and the efforts of Republicans to drive us all off the cliff, but I am today - and I'm going to do it by allowing you to grab ahold of this problem and see for yourself just how unbelievably bad this manufactured crisis is going to be.
You will hear a lot of conversation about the consequences from others; today, however, you are going to get the chance to be both the President and the Secretary of the Treasury, and you will get to decide for yourself exactly what bills the Federal Government should and should not pay as the cash runs out if a deal is not made by the time borrowing authority runs out.
At that point you'll be able to see what's coming for yourself - and once you do, you won't need me to tell you what ugly is going to look like.
(FNS - Washington, New Germany, April 17, 1947) America's new Führer, Adolf Hitler, announced today that his official War History would in fact acknowledge that one of the biggest contributing factors to the defeat of the Allies was the insistence of the former United States of America on sticking to its Balanced Budget Amendment, which left them unable to fund the wartime conversion of the US economy for the benefit of the Alliance.
"All those ideas Mr. Roosevelt spoke of", said Hitler, "Lend-Lease, modular shipbuilding, War Bonds, secret weapons...in the end, all of them were just words, since the Americans' Congress was never willing to allow the country to fully fund its war effort."
This, from House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is decent, but rare:
"The American people get it. They are weary of the theater and the political drama because they understand that it is their pensions, their savings, their mortgages and their 401Ks that the Republicans are playing with. This shouldn't be about who's going to be the next President or who's going to control Congress, it should be about who's going to protect their savings, their mortgages and their 401Ks in this crisis. Republicans continue to hold in disregard Americans true needs: jobs and financial security.
"For the sake of the nation, it's time to forget the politics and vote a clean debt ceiling increase, as was done seven times for President Bush."
The sheer incompetence of our employees on our side is staggering. It adds insult to injury, and I hope it leads to a massive refudiation of the Democratic Party Establishment, because they are failing massively before our very eyes.
Like Lucy taking the football from Charlie Brown's poised kicking toe, Republicans have once again punked Democrats on the budget process. Will our side ever learn that they are congenital liars and that Republican leaders cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith?
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor pulled out of bipartisan negotiations to raise the nation's debt limit, according to multiple reports.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Cantor indicated an impasse over taxes prompted his exit from the budget discussions for now. A GOP aide close to the talks told The Huffington Post that the disagreement could only be settled by President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.
The aide said that Cantor was open to returning to the table, but that they've come to an impasse over "not so small tax increases" that Democrats are insisting on. "We can't go there, so until Boehner and Obama resolve that, it doesn't make much sense for Eric to keep going to the meetings."
Here again Democrats have demurred on making the case for fairly taxing the rich and corporations to resolve current budget and deficit issues. Cowards like Michael Bennet continue to neglect the fact that taxes are the lowest in generations, and those who aren't paying their fair share are banking trillions of dollars as our economy continues to piddle.
Democrats had better go on the offense, had better figure out how to make tax increases an inevitable occurrence and prepare themselves for the onslaught of lies until the economy turns around.
President Obama could lead the way to sound progressive policies on the budget "crisis". He will certainly have to change some of his assumptions and tactics. Senator Bennet might have the nerve to follow. But now the issue is being kicked down the road again thanks to another strategic win by Republicans and the continuing inability of Democrats to propose common-sense solutions that the public wants and needs. In order to truly kill this ongoing recession - a recession and debt that Republicans are mostly responsible for - Democrats will have to take the heat during the next election cycle and do what's right, maybe even fight for some "not so small" tax increases........something they've been unwilling to do even after given a clear mandate in 2008.
After taking control of the House of Representatives last November, congressional Republicans came up with a surefire way to cut government spending and shrink the federal deficit - ban earmarks.
U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, who represents Colorado Springs, wrote an editorial supporting the ban, and targeted what he called "an important first step toward fundamentally changing the way taxpayer dollars are spent in Washington."
By the time he threw his support behind the ban, Lamborn had requested at least $156 million in earmarks, much of it for military bases in his Colorado district, but also tens of millions in contracts for companies that had donated to his campaign.
From the 2008 through 2010 fiscal years, Lamborn got the second-highest amount of earmark money of the 10 Colorado House members who served during those years, including three who were in the House for a part of that time - Reps. Marilyn Musgrave, Tom Tancredo and Sen. Mark Udall.
It's never a surprise to me that Republicans can lie about, and get away with, their love of family values, their hatred of earmarks, their concern about the (Democratic) debt, their disgust with (Democratic) wars. Dougie-boy says he's a good Christian. In Colorado Springs that means funding a perpetual war machine to make sure we can kill our enemies, sending our young off to fight at a moment's notice, and making sure our major corporations never want for a profit.
Forty-nine percent of registered voters said they would choose Romney over Obama if the election were held today, compared to 46 who would reelect Obama, the poll found. While that lead was small enough to be considered within the margin of error, the pair are still tied at 47 percent among all Americans.
The president's political weakness appears to be driven by Americans' dissatisfaction over the state of the economy. On Monday, veteran Democratic strategist James Carville warned the president's reelection could be "very rough" if job growth doesn't rebound. And to that end, dissatisfaction with Obama's handling of the economy and the federal budget deficit is at an all-time high in the ABC/Post poll.
Barack Obama has done this to himself: his vow to look forward, not back, has let Republicans off the hook for a multitude of bad policies and most of our Trillion$ of debt; his willingness to nogotiate with himself, then let Republicans drive the debate even further to the right, has left Americans feeling he has not upheld his quite clear campaign promises and his electoral mandate.
President Obama might be proud of disasters averted or incremental improvements, but Americans are in no mood, nor position, to reward such meager accomplishments; 2010 should have told him at least that.
As Mario always says, the election isn't being held today. But all this equals one thing, at least, for now:
The Mad Men 1960s America - where average families dominated the consumer market - has totally disappeared, this Ad Age New Wave of Affluence study details. And Madison Avenue has moved on - to where the money sits.
And that money does not sit in average American pockets. The global economic recession, Ad Age relates, has thrown "a spotlight on the yawning divide between the richest Americans and everyone else."
Taking inflation into account, Ad Age goes on to explain, the "incomes of most American workers have remained more or less static since the 1970s," while "the income of the rich (and the very rich) has grown exponentially."
Billie Holiday summed up our situation with profoundly simple lyrics and a deep sadness in her voice:
The Koch Brothers, their little helpers on the right and the populist phonies on the left, will all sleep well tonight.
In America, today, there are three kinds of drivers: those who look at the other gas pumps down at the ol' gas station and think: "Oh my God, I can't believe how much that guy's spending on gas", those who look at their own pump down at the ol' gas station and think: "Oh my God, I can't believe how much I'm spending on gas" - and those who are doing both at the same time.
Naturally, this has brought the Sarah Palins of the world back out in public, and once again the mantra of "Drill, Baby, Drill" can be heard all the way from the Florida coast to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
But what if those folks have it exactly backwards?
What if, in a world of depleting oil resources, the last thing you want to do is use yours up?
To put it another way: why isn't all our oil part of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
Bennet's Bipartisan Budget Buddies II: Mitch McConnell and Tom Coburn
Michael Bennet wanted to be a United States Senator. And he wanted the full imprimatur of voters to a full six-year term to an institution that he repeatedly stated was "broken". He even employed his three daughters to gain sympathy and help drive home his campaign's message:
I agree with the Senator that Washington, DC is a cesspool of too-close relationships and shop-worn rules rituals. Yet why does Bennet time and again endorse those failed habits? Why does he enable the phony bipartisanship loved only by The Denver Post's Editorial page and DC's most elite, and usually conservative, pundits?
When you do something together, the result is that it's not usable in the election. I think there's an understanding that if there's a grand bargain, none of it will be usable in next year's election.
And this, I'm afraid, is the most likely explanation for Bennet's insatiable quest for bipartisanship in Congress' guerrilla war over how to fund and pay for government. Even as each attempt at bipartisanship fails, Bennet plaintively wails that it really will work, Toto:
Talks among a bipartisan group of senators to try to solve the nation's fiscal woes seem to have stalled in recent weeks, with a separate set of talks led by Vice President Joe Biden taking a larger share of the spotlight.
But senators continue to root them on. On ABC's "Top Line" today, we featured an interview with Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo. - who is not among the so-called "Gang of Six" - where he praised their talks and said they are continuing to make progress.
"It's not dead," Bennet told ABC's Jonathan Karl, in the latest installment of the "Subway Series."
They tell us we're dropping about $10 billion a month in Afghanistan so we can catch that Bin Laden guy...but eventually, we're gonna catch him, and as soon as we do you can imagine that folks will be wondering why we're still over there - and I gotta tell ya, I'm one of those people.
I mean, we're over here talking about how we're so broke that we have no choice but to cut a couple of billion from heat assistance for the poor, and a billion-and-a-half from the Social Security operations budget, and money from food stamps and childcare assistance and tornado forecasting in Alabama...but every single month, just as regular as clockwork, we seem to be able to find another $10 billion to spend in Afghanistan, even as we have an economy that could badly use another round of truly productive stimulus.
And I don't think y'all even realize just how much money $10 billion really is - but today we're gonna see if we can't fix that with a bit of a thought exercise.
Imagine if we set up a program that took that Afghanistan money and spent it right here at home for a year or two - and it was spent in the form of a lottery, where we stimulate the larger economy, help fix the mortgage crisis, and create a more energy-independent nation, all at the same time.
I got all we need except a catchy name; with that in mind let's move on to the description of how the Happy Super Fun Day Peace Lotto Stimulus Thingy works.
With all of the focus on the killing of Osama bin Laden over the last few days it is easy to get distracted from some serious issues that are running on their own clock and don't look like they are getting resolved, at least not yet. Specifically there is the issue of the debt ceiling that the Untied States will reach in another 12 days.
On May 15th we are going to be statutorily unable to borrow any more money as a nation. This is more than a bit of a problem in that we have just passed a budget that spends more than we will receive for the rest of this fiscal year and we are going to do the same next year, no matter if we adopt the Ryan budget or the Presidents budget or the one we should really be talking about the Peoples budget.
However there is a small ray of sunshine in all this gloom. Yesterday the Treasury Department announced that there had been higher than expected tax revenues recently, which means that the real "drop dead" date for the US government is now set at August 2nd.
Why is there a buffer zone between the day we hit all the money we can barrow and the day that we start to default on our debts and cause a world wide depression? It is because like any large organization the United States can move money around for a while. Which is not the same as saying that we can do this indefinitely or that there will not be affects from doing so, just that we don't run our finances on a completely ragged edge.
We are continuing a recent theme here today in which two of my favorite topics are going to converge: Social Security and in-your-face political activism.
I have been encouraging folks to take advantage of the recent Congressional recess to have a few words with your CongressCritter about the proposed Death Of Medicare and all the proposed cuts to Social Security...and you have, as we'll discuss...and now we have an opportunity to do something on a national scale, just as we did a few weeks ago in support of Social Security.
This time, we're going to concentrate on fighting the idea that retirement ages should go up before we become eligible for Social Security and Medicare (and elements of Medicaid, as well), and that Americans should just keep right on working until the age of 67 or so-which isn't going to be any big problem...really...trust us.
Now that just makes no sense, and to help make the point we have a really cool video that you can pass around to all your friends-and your enemies, for that matter, since they'll also have to worry about what happens to them if they should ever make it to old age.
I am having a problem with a word, it is one that we're hearing a lot lately, seriousness. Now having been 'round the block a few times I have come to the conclusion that when I hear Right Wing talkers like Robert Samuelson and Republicans using a word over and over then I tend to think they are in the process of redefining it.
Today's little nugget of nothing from Samuelson is all about the false equivalence between the supposed lack of seriousness on both sides. Of course La Samuelson goes after the Dems first insisting that we look at cutting entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare and then conflating those two expensive and troubled programs with the much more solvent and non-deficit producing Social Security.
He does take a half hearted swipe at the Republicans and their abject failure to even consider increasing taxes at all to bring down our deficits. But Samuelson has a point that he wants to make in this "A pox on both your houses" column. Here, I'll let him make it:
Our budget problem is conceptually simple. Government's spending commitments, driven by more retirees and uncontrolled health costs, vastly exceed the existing tax base. There is an argument about how fast changes should be made to protect the economic recovery.
He is right as far as he goes. The problem is that Samuelson is not really, um, err, serious about this issue himself. Yes we do have a problem that we don't have enough money for our commitments and yes health care costs are going up and that is squeezing the budget more as we keep our commitments to the poor and elderly to provide them with health care.
However, the solution is not finding a way to slash these programs so that they provide less care and do nothing to control costs. The solution is to fix the underlying problem, that our health care markets are fundamentally flawed.
There is an apocryphal quote from the Vietnam War "We had to destroy the village to save it". I call it apocryphal because its attribution is murky and it has been distorted from the original quote over time. However it is still a powerful idea that leaders can get so close to their immediate goals that they lose sight of the bigger picture of what they are trying to achieve.
The quote comes from the story of Ben Tre , a provincial capital in the Mekong Delta. The United States Army made the decision to shell and bomb the town, even though there were large numbers of civilians in it, in order to break the Viet Cong hold on the town. They destroyed the town to deny it to the enemy. Not exactly a productive thing to do when you are fighting a counter insurgency.
It sees that this kind of thinking has infected the Congressional Republicans. Yesterday Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Dr. Evil -VA) said that he and his caucus, who control the House of Representatives, will not take up the issue of raising the debt ceiling until after it actually is hit. Right now the Treasury department estimates this will happen no later than May 15th.
Why is the House Majority Leader going to wait? Because he sees political advantage in playing with the nations credit rating. You see even when we a prevented by law from borrowing any more money there are ways that the Treasury department can shift dollars around for a few weeks to keep paying for things. They think they can get us through June and into July before those emergency measures run out.
But today I see a lot of black clouds on the horizon. The way that the budget fight played out makes me very concerned for the next big issue, the debt ceiling. As important as not shutting down the government was and is, putting the United States in a position where we even look like there is a question of defaulting on our debt is incredibly dangerous.
We owe a lot of money in the form or Treasury bonds. Right now we pay a very, very low rate of interest on that debt. Part of the reason that we do so is that everyone in the world is confident that the U.S. is not going to default on that debt.
The reason that we must raise the debt ceiling is that we just passed a budget that will spend more than we take in this year. That combined with the maturing of previously sold bonds means that we must borrow more money in the form of bonds to meet these obligations. The problem is that the amount we can borrow is limited by law and would have to be raised by Congress.
If they do not raise that limit then someone, somewhere is not going to be paid the money they are owed by the United States. That brings up the question of how safe any of those bonds are. When that happens the amount of interest that bond buyers require to loan us money will go up and everything the government does becomes more expensive. That is before we get into the follow on problems for the global economy where the United States represents 40% of the total.
There are many ways to fall into bad habits, but the easiest is when one tries a vice and then is rewarded for having done so. This is where the nation is with the Congressional Republicans. Their vice has been economic hostage taking, and like all successful hostage takers, when they want something they look around of the nearest economic crisis to grab a hold of and insist that they get their way.
Which is exactly where we are with the impending, and probably inevitable, government shut down; their least reasonable members, newly elected (thanks midterm voters) have been signaling for months that if they did not get every little mean spirited and economically moronic thing they wanted, they would shutter the Federal Government.
Now with Speaker Boehner (Putz-OH) reneging on his privately agreed to cuts, there is little chance that there will be an agreement and a vote. In fact there would have to be a bill published today in order to be able to follow the new House rule of 72 hours before a vote, for there to be anything to vote on by the deadline on Friday.
It is not like the Republicans think that the public is going to be kind to them on this issue. Their leadership remembers how it played out in 1995 and they don't want to go into another presidential election with weak candidates and a sour taste for their party in the mouths of the electorate.
Which is why they are trying to do everything they can to pin this on the Democrats. Too bad the facts are all against them. Today they are going to introduce another Continuing Resolution that would extend spending for another week. Sounds good until you hear what the price tag is.
It seems like a never ending story. We're on the brink of a government shut down, due to the complete and utter intransigence of the Republicans (you can't call it anything else when the Dems have caved and caved again and there is still no deal) to take anything but the completely arbitrary 61 billion in cuts and the riders that would defund EPA's control of greenhouse gasses (which Congress refused to make legislation on) and Heads Start and Planned Parenthood and public broadcasting (both NPR and PBS).
They insist, loudly and contrary to the facts, that this will improve our economy by reducing the deficit. When confronted with the fact that it this budget would cost between 200,000 and 1 million jobs, this year, Speaker Boehner (Spray Tan, OH) said "So be it".
Before this fight is even done the Republicans, in the form of Rep. Paul Ryan, are introducing their budget resolution. It would cut4 trillion ($4,000,000,000,000,000)in federal spending over the next 10 years.
Take a minute to think about that. We are talking about draconian cuts to programs that really help the middle class at an annualized rate of 100 billion this year (that is what the 61 billion the Republicans want to cut would be over a full year), and this guy wants to cut 400 billion a year in spending over the next 10 years.
Of course, this is the same Rep. Ryan who last year proposed a deficit reduction plan that was spread over 50 years and at the end of that time would not have balanced the budget. It is hard to understand how anyone can take someone like this seriously. I guess it comes down to the fact that he is the highest ranking Republican in budget matters so when he speaks, even if it is gibberish, it is news.
Bondeism started as a way for me to highlight the nitwittery of the Republicans in the 111th Congress. They say and do really gob smacking things and I post about comparing them to that gormless but loveable hillbilly Jethro Bodine. But I have to wonder if I have actually, through some unintended and accidental sorcery called this disease into reality (I'm probably taking too much on myself with that, still)?
It is one thing to misinterpret the Constitution, it is open for interpretation and people can be honestly wrong, but it is quit another for a Member of Congress in a leadership position to propose action that is completely outside the boundaries of the Constitution. Which is exactly what Eric Cantor is doing.
He is proposing and will force the House to bring to a vote a measure he is calling the "Government Shutdown Prevention Act". What this Act will say is that if the Senate does not pass a budget measure by April 6th, then HR 1, the Republicans draconian and job slaughtering bill (which, by the way the Senate has already voted down) will become the law of the land.
I hear you all going "But, but, but... Doesn't the Senate have to pass a bill and the President sign it for it to be law?" Why, yes, yes it does. It seems that the raven haired, square jawed Virginia Republican who is the House Majority Leader does not understand how the body he has been part of for a decade now works.
If there were an "All Time Jethro Bodineism Award" it is certain that Rep. Cantor would be earning himself a place in the nominees. It is easy to dismiss this as insane and a stunt, but I see a bigger picture emerging among Republicans nation wide.
The lawless behavior of Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin has shown that he and his Republicans have a shocking disregard for the laws of their state. They have broken and bent the rules to pass their union busting bill and have even defied a court order in the implementation of the law.
