Obama Fighting Back

Is anyone helping him?

President Obama sought to keep Congressional Republicans on the defensive Monday, calling an extension of the payroll tax cut necessary for middle-class Americans and questioning why Republicans who opposed paying for tax cuts in the past now say they won’t continue the payroll tax break unless it is offset with other revenues.

“When they took over the House the beginning of this year, they explicitly changed the rules to say they don’t have to pay for tax cuts,” Mr. Obama said, striking a consciously puzzled tone. “So forgive me a little bit of confusion when I hear folks insisting on tax cuts being paid for.”

The payroll tax cut expires at the end of the year. The White House says that taxes on the average family will increase by $1,000 if the cuts are not extended. While some Republicans in Congress say that they support the extension of the tax cut, the two parties have significant differences over how to pay for it.

“Now I know many Republicans have sworn an oath never to raise taxes for as long as they live,” the president said in remarks to assembled reporters in the White House briefing room. “How can it be the only time there’s a catch is when it comes to raising taxes on middle class families?”

At some point the lies and hypocrisy of the GOP have got to get the media’s attention.

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President George Gun Walker Bush

The silliness that is the effort to turn the  “Gun Walker/Operation Fast and Furious” poutrage from the right into Eric Holder’s head on a pike (and a space reserved on the GOP Lannister clan’s ramparts for President Obama) is nothing more than the usual selective amnesia, considering the program to “walk” firearms across the Mexican border in order to track their routes through the drug cartels started with…you guessed it…Dubya and friends.

TPM has obtained the documents relating to another Bush-era ATF operation (on top of Operation Wide Receiver) which deployed the “gun walking” tactic. The development was first reported by Pete Yost of the Associated Press.

In fact, ATF officials wrote in 2007 that the gun walking tactic had “full approval” of the U.S. Attorney’s Office being run by an interim Bush appointee and that the U.S. Embassy in Mexico was “fully on-board.”

Under DOJ policy, illicit arms shipments are supposed to be intercepted whenever possible. But the emails show that just like in Operation Fast and Furious, official planned to allow guns to “walk” across the border and into Mexico in an attempt to identify traffickers higher up in the operation (rather than low ranking “straw purchasers,” who are difficult to prosecute thanks to the lack of an anti-trafficking gun law).

On Sept. 27, 2007—when the Justice Department was reeling from the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales—ATF agents in Phoenix and Mexico were conducting partial surveillance of suspects who purchased numerous weapons at a federally licensed firearms dealership.

After they watched the group purchase 19 weapons on Sept. 21 and 24 and additional weapons on Sept. 27, they watched as the weapons crossed the border into Mexico.

So yeah, the Bushies did this not once, but twice:  once with Wide Reciever under Gonzo, and now with this second program under interim AG Pete Keisler and Gonzo’s replacement, Michael Mukasey.  It was only under Holder some 3+ years later did people come forward to say that all of a sudden the program was somehow an issue, and it was only after the GOP took control of the House earlier this year.  Now, the same program that was run by the ATF with no problem for years suddenly turned into President Obama’s Katrinagatewhatever (the same exact argument can be made for Solyndra).

Republicans didn’t care when the program was running under Bush.  All of a sudden, House Republicans are spending all their time building idiotic politics like this into “Obama scandals” when they should be working on improving the economy and creating jo…you know I can’t even type that with a straight face anymore, they just hate President Obama so much they’ll try to throw Bush-era federal employees and law enforcement under the bus to target the President.

Even worse is our lovely “liberal” media which has really dropped the ball on both Solyndra and Fast and Furious.

Worthless assholes, all of them.

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Is Our President Learning?

Hallelujah:

This last summer, President Obama had an epiphany: Republicans are not going to negotiate with him. One might say that this realization came a little late. (And in fact, I did say that.) It’s not exactly clear why Obama thought he could persuade Republicans to compromise when Republicans had been saying that they wouldn’t compromise, that any bi-partisan support they provided would only make him more popular, and that their top goal was to defeat him. But he tried nonetheless, even offering House Republicans an absurdly generous deal to reduce the long-term deficit by $4 trillion, locking in most of the Bush tax cuts and reducing tax rates to low, low levels.

Republicans walked away from Obama’s Crazy Eddie Budget Sale, with tax rates so low he had to be crazy to offer them, and Obama saw his approval rating plummet in the process. He’s not trying to cut a deal any more. He’s trying to clarify his positions to the public.

I guess better late than never.

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Now That the Charade is Over

This is the least surprising thing you will ever read:

House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job.

In a memo to GOP lawmakers that was also issued publicly and reprinted in The New York Times, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and other Republican leaders also objected to the president’s proposal for a temporary reduction in payroll taxes, in order to boost consumer spending and increase demand.

The GOP leaders say such a temporary reduction means taxes will go up later when the reduction expires in 2013.

“While employees would see an additional temporary benefit from this proposal in 2012,” they wrote, “they would experience a larger effective tax increase 12 months later when the payroll tax reverted back to its full level.

“There may be significant unforeseen downsides to large temporary tax cuts immediately followed by large tax increases,” they added.

Boehner and his GOP colleagues also say that Mr. Obama’s move to tax the wealthy claiming itemized deductions will hurt churches and other nonprofits.

The memo says Mr. Obama’s proposal to spend $50 billion to repair and improve infrastructure and to create a $10 billion national infrastructure bank is “adding more money to the same broken system,” and is “more likely to produce waste and inefficiency than meaningful results.”

This is playing out pretty much as I expected. Up next, the manic progressive wing starts screaming about Obama not just making his job plan law by waving a magic wand, the “bully pulpit” chorus begins, all while the media completely ignore Republican intransigence and instead focuses on the “rift” inside the Democratic party while having concerned and excited chats about Obama’s sagging popularity.

No one could have predicted.

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This is the story of the hurricane

Nate Silver has an interesting run-down of hurricanes that have hit near New York.

Who will be the first to call this Obama’s Katrina?

Consider this a hurricane open thread.

Update. Forget it, a million people have already called this Obama’s Katrina?

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Why Obama’s Compromises Suck

Freddie made a number of different points yesterday, but I want to concentrate on one:

But mistermix—those “messy compromises” that you associate with virtue is why our country is the way it is. Because every messy compromise is at least 80% for the wignuts, you end up with a corrupted country. How long do you keep playing that game until you realize it’s rigged? I told you how I think liberal politics can be restored. There have been liberal grassroots movements in this country before and there can be again. But it can never happen if the party leadership forever cuts liberals off at the knees. It cannot happen if we have a messaging machine that refuses to listen to the left wing. It can’t happen if blogs like this one associate our own ideas and our own values with shame rather than with pride.

Let’s set aside for another time all the disappointing things that Obama has or hasn’t done that are in his purview as executive, and concentrate instead on the compromises that have come out of the legislative process, because long-term progress towards liberal goals will come primarily through legislation. I don’t see how lack of liberal messaging, or the party cutting liberals off at the knees, or shaming, led to those compromises. In the last Congress, Obama was faced with veto players in the Senate. In this Congress, those players are in the House. In the last Congress, those holding the veto were slightly more amenable to negotiation, plus a few procedural tricks could be used, so we got mediocre healthcare reform, a too-small stimulus, and a few other pieces of somewhat watered-down legislation that arguably advanced the liberal agenda at least slightly. This session: absolutamente nada. We’re essentially trying to avoid an apocalypse brought on by the Tea Party.

If Obama had a Democratic Congress, is there any doubt that we’d have better legislation? So let’s look at how we get that done. If Freddie is right and Obama was elected as a liberal, by liberals, then the 2008 election was something of a referendum on liberalism. Here’s how that shook out (click to embiggen).

If Democrats won both Senate seats in every state Obama won, we’re at 58. Of course, right now we’re not there, and a lot of the Senators we do have are from very red states, and they’re constantly jumping around trying to prove that they’re not real Democrats. Given that we had a Democratic Congress in 2008, we’re obviously underperforming there, but the 2008 Congress also had a good number of blue dogs who were elected from districts where the majority of voters aren’t down with the liberal program.

So, here’s my long-term vision for fewer compromises: In the Senate, we need to either get rid of the filibuster, or we need to settle for less liberal legislation and more blue dogs. In the House, we need fewer 80/20 or 90/10 blue districts, so we can have more competitive, winnable Democratic districts, or we need to settle for more blue dogs.

Of course, I don’t agree with Freddie that Obama was elected purely as a liberal—all my liberal friends were supporting Edwards, not Obama, in the early primaries. But if you take his premise, when people voted the liberal into office, they didn’t do so with enough votes to guarantee liberal legislation.

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One and Done

Not to be all gloomy, but Obama better pray to the FSM that the Republicans nominate a grade A wingnut like Bachmann, or I simply do not see how he gets re-elected. This has nothing to do with the worthless gasbags who have nominated themselves our progressive betters, but everything to do with the economy. Now that we have bought into the bullshit austerity solves everything/government is always the problem mantra, there ain’t no going back:

Sixty five percent approve of deal’s spending cuts. But it gets worse. Of the 30 percent who disapprove, 13 percent think the cuts haven’t gotten far enough, and only 15 percent think the cuts go too far. One sixth of Americans agree with the liberal argument about the deal.

Yes, the poll also found that 60 percent disapprove of the deal’s lack of high-end tax hikes. Yes, approval of the GOP is lower than that of Obama or Dems. Such findings have led many, myself included, to conclude that Dems were winning the P.R war in this fight in particular.

But the public disapproves of everyone’s handling of this mess. And while the public wanted the rich to kick in more, the poll finds that a plurality (49-42) believes the deal will help the economy, meaning a plurality believes the Republican argument that spending cuts are good economic policy.

You might argue that the public doesn’t really care about deficits; only jobs will dictate the 2012 election. You might also hold out hope that ultimately the public will prefer a Dem balance between spending cuts and public investment, rather than the extreme GOP vision. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the public is reflexively disposed to agree with the GOP’s economic worldview, and is all-too-willing to blame government for our economic doldrums.

So we’re all in on austerity and drowning the government in the bathtub, and the public has gotten the message, even if it is bullshit. I’m told by my twitter machine that he White House immediately “pivoted” to jobs now that the debt limit crisis is solved. Pivoted to what, exactly? There will be no additional stimulus. There will be no unemployment benefits extensions. None of that crap is going to get through the wingnut house, and the wurlitzer will start to scream about the invisible bond vigilantes and the deficit eating your babies if anyone even thinks about government spending (unless, of course, we need to bomb the fuck out of someone in the middle east or if the Koch brothers need another tax cut). So what can they do to spur economic growth, other than bad trade deals which will alienate key Democratic constituencies?

Basically, in 2008 Obama ran on Hope and Change. In 2012, it looks like it will be PLEASE LORD, I Hope Things Change.

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Jobs Report

One of our trolls yesterday was spamming every thread claiming I was ignoring the excellent news of the jobs report (because I hate Obama or I am a libertarian or something- like most trolls, his gibberish is indecipherable). So here you go, rejoice with the good news:

U.S. employers added 18,000 workers in June, the fewest in nine months, and the unemployment rate unexpectedly climbed, indicating a struggling labor market.

The increase in payrolls followed a 25,000 gain that was less than half the rise initially estimated, Labor Department data showed today in Washington. The median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey called for a June gain of 105,000. The unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent, the highest level this year. Hiring by companies, which excludes government agencies, was the weakest since May 2010.

Stocks plunged and Treasuries rose as the absence of stronger job growth caused earnings to stagnate, posing a threat to consumer spending that accounts for 70 percent of the economy. The second-quarter slowdown in hiring underscores a recovery that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said is “frustratingly slow.”

It could be that I am sober and not an insane crazy person, but I’m not seeing why we should be breaking out the champagne.

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What He Said

Good piece by Sullivan:

Some now want this president to be Andrew Cuomo, a heroically gifted advocate of marriage equality who used all his skills to make it the law in his state. But the truth is that a governor is integral to this issue in a way a president can never be. Civil marriage has always been a state matter in the US. That tradition goes all the way back; it was how the country managed to have a patchwok of varying laws on miscegenation for a century before Loving vs Virginia. The attack on this legal regime was made by Republicans who violated every conservative principle in the book when they passed DOMA, and seized federal control over the subject by refusing for the first time ever not to recognize possible legal civil marriages in a state like Hawaii or Massachusetts. Defending this tradition is not, as some would have it, a kind of de facto nod to racial segregation; it is a defense of the norm in US history. And by defending that norm, the Obama administration has a much stronger and more coherent case in knocking down DOMA than if it had echoed Clinton in declaring that the feds would dictate a national marriage strategy.

More to the point, until very recently, if we had had to resolve this issue at a federal level, marriage equality would have failed. The genius of federalism is that it allowed us to prove that marriage equality would not lead to catastrophe, that it has in fact coincided with a strengthening of straight marriage, that in many states now, the sky has not fallen. That is why a man like David Frum has changed his mind – for the right conservative reason. Because there is evidence that this is not a big deal and yet unleashes a new universe of equality and dignity and integration for a once-despised minority. Obama’s defense of federalism in this instance is not a regressive throw-back; it is a pragmatic strategy.

I’ve been saying this for a while, so it is no real shock I agree with him.

I know it would make people feel really good for a brief moment if he got out and USED THE BULLY PULPIT and pounded his fists and REALLY FOUGHT THOSE REPUBLICANS, but it wouldn’t accomplish anything. This, too, is spot on:

One more thing. A civil rights movement does not get its legitimacy from any president. I repeat: he does not legitimize us; we legitimize him. As gays and lesbians, we should stop looking for saviors at the top and start looking for them within. We won this fight alongside our countless straight family members, friends, associates and fellow citizens. As long as Obama has done due diligence in the office he holds – and he has – he is not necessary to have as a Grand Marshall for our parade.

Exactly. But it is much more fun and profitable to scream “OBAMA HATES THE GAYS AND BETRAYED US AND OH BTW HIT THE TIP JAR SO I CAN CONTINUE MY IMPORTANT WORKS LOLZORS,” so expect it to continue.

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You Forgot Job Killing, America-Hating, Muslim, and Elitist

You just know this pissed off the wingnuts:

Rep. Paul D. Ryan, architect of a Medicare overhaul aimed at slashing the cost of the popular entitlement program by reducing the government’s open-ended commitment to seniors, accused Obama of “mis-describing” his plan and implored the president to ease up on the “demagoguery.”

In reply, Obama said he was no stranger to cartoonish depictions, reeling off a list of conservatives’ favorite attack points: “I’m the death-panel-supporting, socialist, may-not-have-been-born-here president,” Obama said, according to people familiar with his remarks.

Absolutely nothing infuriates Republicans more than being held accountable for the things they’ve said and done, and this was a twofer. They’re being rejected by the public for trying to end Medicare, and now they had to have their own words about Obama thrown back in their faces. Accountability and reality really, really makes them mad, so I bet they were seething after this meeting.

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Eyes wide shut and running with scissors…

I found the above map in an old world atlas I have from 1949. The then newly created state of Israel was mentioned in the current events section of the atlas and as one of the countries mentioned in the name of this map. And yet, on the map there is only one state where Israel should be and it is called Palestine (which is also one of the countries mentioned in the map’s name).

In the 60 years since this map was published the default position to end the generational conflict has been a Two-State Solution—somehow dividing the land that the map marks as “Palestine” into Israel and Palestine. The borders for Israel were firmly established in 1949 and have been expanding ever since. OTOH, the borders for Palestine are still in flux and everyday the possible size of a future Palestinian state shrinks and becomes more fragmented by design.

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Only Real Men Torture Folks…

In wingnutnopia heads explode and reconfigure and then explode anew over and over again. It is a byproduct of dealing with a Black man as President and the stone cold fact that he is smarter than they are.

A week ago it was all Donald Trump and yada, yada, yada as the beltway prepared for the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. The right—as usual—was in full flame Obama mode. Folks were lining up to get the Donald’s back while others took a phrase out of context from an 8,000 word New Yorker piece on Obama’s foreign policy to paint The President as weak and cowardly when it comes to protecting America and being a Leader. Naturally this wingnut meme had to be expressed with an illustration from the Jim Crow art school of scared big-eyed Negroes:

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One way out

Commenter Davis X. Machina nails today’s speech:

Too little, too late.

He needed to resign. Preferably after ending all three wars, and an abject apology, but a flat-out resignation would have been o.k., too.

Let Biden or Boehner do the job—they have no souls, they’re politicians.

Power corrupts, with great power corrupting greatly. Resignation is the only way to show that you’re unwilling to be complicit in your own corruption. Think of the message that would send to power—that you refuse to play along.

A real progressive Obama would have resigned as soon as he was inaugurated—that way his complicity would have been strictly limited. O.K., you need to make the point that America is moving forward, by electing a person of color, but that’s made the day you’re sworn in—then you immediately resign, and go into the opposition.

But not in opposition in Congress—they’re complicit too.

Opposition in the streets.

And then BJ could go back to swapping recipes, cat photos, and dog-behavior-modification tips.

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Some Moderately OK News

Unemployment down slightly:

The waiting game still is not over, but it may be soon.

The nation’s employers added 192,000 jobs on net in February, up from a gain of 63,000 jobs the previous month, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

While February’s number represented the fastest growth in nearly a year, it was partly the result of a bounce back from unusually depressed hiring in January, when winter weather shuttered offices and factories around the country. Taken together, the job growth for the first two months of the year has not been much better than it was last fall.

Still, economists are hopeful that the pace will soon pick up.

“Economic recoveries can be like a snowball rolling down a hill, in that it takes time to get some momentum,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “People hesitate until they feel that the recovery’s durable enough, and then they have a tendency to jump in. Maybe we’re finally getting to that jumping-in moment.”

The unemployment rate ticked down to 8.9 percent, falling below 9 percent for the first time in nearly two years. This rate, which comes from a separate survey and is based on the total number of Americans who want to work, has remained stubbornly high in the last year despite payroll growth. Altogether 13.7 million people are still out of work and actively looking.

Economists say the unemployment rate may rise temporarily in the next few months, as stronger job growth lures some discouraged workers back into the labor force. Right now the share of working-age population that is actively involved in the work force — that is, either in a job or actively looking for one — is at its lowest level in 25 years, an indication that many Americans are waiting for hiring to get better before resuming the job hunt.

At this rate, we should be back to pre-crash unemployment rates by about Obama’s 4th term. Clearly Congress can now rest from their jobs creation efforts and focus on what really counts- gays and what women do with their private parts.

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The final betrayal

Just words:

The Obama Justice Department has decided that part of the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and will not defend it in court.

“After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the President has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

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