How This Particular Game Is Played

As much as I would love to believe this is yet another instance where the President has outsmarted the GOP (and in a fair would it would be) his proposal for legislation allowing him fast track authority to consolidate federal trade and commerce agencies is precisely the sort of thing that has zero chance getting through our awesome 9% approval rating Congress, and it’s easy to see why.   Politico sees this as a smart move, on the other hand my inner cynic says this is good tactics, bad strategy.

Obama’s plan would merge the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, the Office of the U.S. Trade representative and other independent business agencies into a new, unnamed Cabinet agency.

The president would need congressional approval to consolidate the agencies, and he virtually dared Republicans to vote against it, putting the GOP on the defensive for the second time in a month. The payroll tax cut fight forced Republicans lawmakers to choose whether to support the president or a tax increase. This would force them to support the president or the status quo — a tangled web of regulatory agencies that Republicans have held up as a barrier to job creation.

“This is an area that should receive bipartisan support because making our government more responsive and strategic and leaner shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” Obama said as he announced the initiative at the White House. “We can do this better. We can provide taxpayers better value.”

Not only will Republicans vote against it, I foresee they’ll propose legislation eliminating those agencies instead and daring the President and Democrats to vote against that instead.  Meanwhile, we’ll be treated to the theory that the President should probably be impeached for daring to ask Congress for anything and that because he’s not serious about dismantling the entire Executive Branch and handing everything over to Orange Julius that he’s really a tin-pot Chicago Way dictator who is nothing like the Republicans.

Meanwhile, at the same time we’ll hear that this proposal means President Obama has abandoned unions, working-class Americans, and the idea of any government oversight over trade and commerce, making him a job-killing Wall Street puppet who never really liked American workers anyway, and that he’s precisely the same as the Republicans.

It’s about this point, when the Village is pushing both these theories on the news as “President loses union base” and “Why can’t Obama reach an agreement with Republicans?” that everyone else will turn off their brains to avoid the headache and this idea will get quietly shelved.  There’s just nothing to be gained by trying to make a common sense proposal to even look at doing something like this during something as clinically insane as an election year.

 

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President Obama Plays The GOP Yet Again

Republicans are preparing to go into full OUTRAGE MODE over the Obama Administration’s request to the Treasury to raise the debt ceiling another $1.2 trillion.  The debt ceiling deal worked out earlier this year gives the Republicans a chance to pass a resolution of disapproval, but the President would have to sign the resolution after it somehow passed a Democratically-controlled Senate in order to stop the debt ceiling hike.  In other words, there’s nothing the Republicans can really do other than complain loudly.

Except President Obama has outfoxed the elephants once again:  the GOP may not even get the chance to do that much, because they’re on winter break until January 17.  Brian Beutler explains:

The key issue is the 15-day deadline Congress has to vote on a resolution of disapproval of the President’s request to raise the debt ceiling. The timing of the administration’s planned certification implies that the 15 days would be up before Congress returns in January from its holiday recess. Whether this was an accident or not, we’re told that the calendar issue created a behind-the-scenes mess — with Republicans threatening to return early from recess — and that the administration is trying to figure out a way to keep it from spilling out into the public.

I’ve reached out to the administration for further guidance on both questions. It’s still unclear whether this was a hardball political move, a dumb mistake, or just a misunderstanding — or what, if anything, can be done to avoid a public clash with the GOP over the timing.

The size of the debt hike—easily getting the country through 2012 without having to bring it up during the election—and the timing seems to indicate to me that A) this was done on purpose, B) it was done to pants the GOP, and C) most importantly the Obama administration understands full well that raising the debt ceiling was going to be portrayed by the GOP as an impeachable offense no matter what the President actually did about it.   So the White House is looking to get this out of the way.

Pretty sure this was the plan all along, and the GOP is now facing having to blow their vacation or miss their big chance at portraying the President as the most vile of all villains when of course previous Presidents jacked up the debt limit all the time, including Dubya’s seven times and Reagan’s 18 times.   Your move, Republicans.  You already lost that fight once.

If you ask me, President Obama’s got them by the short hairs.  Again.

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They Knew Exactly Which Buttons To Push

So I wonder what the deal is behind this story, but that’s not the interesting part.

Late Tuesday evening, a press release went out to numerous political journalists with stunning news. Mega-union SEIU had voted to withdraw its recently bestowed endorsement of Barack Obama. That’s certainly not unimaginable — SEIU often takes its own path and has a conflicted relationship with the Democratic party establishment.

Only it wasn’t true.

It was a pretty real looking hoax press release that managed to snare a number of reporters who posted the news on twitter.

The interesting part is not who is behind it, the interesting part is the fact that whoever did it knew that a professional beltway type like Josh Marshall finds the notion of a massive union withdrawing its endorsement of a Democratic president plausible and almost irresistible, and would miss the irony of how that little piece of conventional wisdom completely fooled a number of “journalists” last night who couldn’t resist the notion that THE LEFT HATES OBAMA ZOMG.

Exactly who else would SEIU endorse, Josh?  Newt?  Ron Paul?  Mittens?  Bachmann?  People so openly hostile to organized labor they want them eliminated completely, who regularly call them thugs and criminals and blame them for the state of the American middle-class?

Especially after already declaring for the President?  Are we that certain inside the beltway of the conventional wisdom that everyone secretly hates President Obama and that SEIU would pick up its ball and go home, knowing that the only real alternative to the President is people who want to see them utterly annihilated?  SEIU completely backs the President.  Is that more or less plausible?

So very eager for those emoprog stories, aren’t we, liberal media.  It’s to Josh’s credit that he didn’t fall for it, but he certainly thought long and hard about running with it, didn’t he.  Whoever pulled this little stunt knew exactly how it would fall out, and just how successful it would be.  They got Politico’s Ken Vogel, National Journal/Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, and more than a few other people to bite on it.

But even after debunking the story, the beltway types admit “Yeah, this was still plausible”.  And that’s all the proof you should need to know that our brave Village betters need a long, long vacation out in Actual America for some much needed perspective.

[UPDATE]  Well, judging from the comments, suggesting that Josh Marshall showed his ass by implying that a major union would abandon the President three weeks after giving their endorsement (itself a completely ludicrous implication) makes me an errant schoolchild that needs to be corrected by his betters for starting food fights on our loveable, traditional blog.

So sorry to have ruined anyone’s day with the opinion of mine.  Having said that, I believe a break is in order.  See you cats down the road.

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We’re not at the end of the beginning, but perhaps the beginning of the end

Something huge happened today.  The kind of thing that changes the nature of the economy, and Americans’ relationship with their government, and with the corporations that seem to rule so much of our world.

Today is the day that a significant part of the Affordable Care Act took effect.   Today is the day that companies that sell and provide health insurance have to start spending 80% to 85% of their income from insurance premiums actually delivering the services for which they charge their customers.  Overhead like office space and supplies, marketing expenses, salaries, and yes, profits have to come out of the remaining 15-20%.  The rule is called the the medical loss ratio, and in an important decision recently by the Department of Health and Human Services, the insurance companies cannot count the sales commissions that they give out to the people who sell you your insurance plan against the medical loss ratio.

The MLR can ONLY be allowed expenses, which must be actual costs of coverable medical expenses.  This is huge.  This means no more nonsense like refusing your mother’s cancer treatment because she forgot about that prescription skin cream she had for acne when she was fifteen when she was filling out the application.  Hell, the insurance companies are going to be scrambling to pay for coverable things because any part of that 80-85% they don’t spend on allowables will have to be refunded to the policy holders.

Simply put, this is the end of the beginning of the long track to single payer health care.

So, can private health insurance companies manage to make a profit when they actually have to spend premium receipts taking care of their customers’ health needs as promised?  Not a chance-and they know it. Indeed, we are already seeing the parent companies who own these insurance operations fleeing into other types of investments. They know what we should all know – we are now on an inescapable path to a single-payer system for most Americans and thank goodness for it.

Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice—Martin Luther King

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Afternoon Open Thread Type Thing

College football appears to be happening around the country, also some sort of localized winter death storm in the Northeast where brimstone and/or razor sharp obsidian is falling from the skies.

TNC on Up with Chris Hayes this morning was a nice change of pace, but then Mort Zuckerman showed up to blame everything economic, social and political on Obama not having enough meetings with Turtle Man and Orange Julius.

Commence discussionary activities, and such.

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Legalize It

New polls that show that marijuana legalization has the support of over half the nation leads Radley Balko to quip:

Legalization is also at the top of the White House’s “We the People” petition site, and it isn’t even close. Next time Obama laughs off the question—and he will—I’d love to hear a White House reporter ask him if he’s aware that a higher percentage of Americans now support legalizing marijuana than think he’s doing a good job as president.

I don’t expect Obama to do ANYTHING but continue to enforce our insane drug laws in his first term. In his second term, there might be more freedom for movement. However, given how conservative even a “liberal” congress is on drug laws, regardless of the post-2012 congressional make-up, should Obama do anything, I fully expect Congress to cock-block (ala Gitmo) him so everyone can show their “tough on crime” bonafides.

*** Update ***

I meant to include this great segment by Lawrence O’Donnell from the Last Word last night:

I’ve been really liking the work LO’D has been doing lately, and can not figure out why he does not get more buzz. His shows have been consistently good, as good as anything KO ever put out on Countdown- fact-based, emphatic, clear, concise, and forceful, and almost always on the right side of things, yet he gets none of the love that KO got. Why is that?

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Your Liberal Media

Via the Benenator, this unsurprising chart:

One man running for president has suffered the most unrelentingly negative treatment of all: Barack Obama. Though covered largely as president rather than a candidate, negative assessments of Obama have outweighed positive by a ratio of almost 4-to-1. The assessments of the president in the media were substantially more negative than positive in every one of the 23 weeks studied. In no week during these five months was more than 10% of the coverage about the President positive in tone.

If the only thing you ever read was the comments section here, where a dozen or so disaffected loudmouths are constantly reminding us that Obama is the worst President ever and that everyone in the universe was an OBOT, this would be surprising to you. The reality, of course, is quite the opposite. This President has received a sustained drumbeat of criticism on blogs and in the media that is unlike anything I’ve seen. So, brave progressive truth tellers busy speaking truth to power because no one dare criticize the President, get over yourselves. If you paid attention to this weekend alone, where the President was flayed alive by some for sending 100 people to track down a murderous cult leader in an action authorized by Congress and begged for by HRW, this would be no shock.

The fact of the matter is that the outliers in the national conversation are the few people who say anything nice about Obama, not you highly principled misanthropes.

BTW- who will be the first to claim that JOHN COLE CAN NOT HANDLE DISSENT? My money is on Corner Stone.

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No Comparison

I was a little concerned about Libya. I hate our use of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and most everywhere else. But I’m with Tbogg on this one- the LRA is a murderous cult, and if sending 100 guys into the jungle to hunt them down and wipe them off the planet works, I say why not make it 200 and get it done faster. I’m not sure people fully understand the evil that we will be addressing (this isn’t the LRA, but this is basically what they do):

There’s simply no question whether this is the right thing to do. IF you still are not convinced, watch this. Or this:

The only question we should be asking is why it took so long.

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I Liked This Movie Better When It Starred Hal Holbrook

This is just nuts. It’s un-American, surely illegal, and a real mark on the Obama Presidency. Just fucking nuts. And evil.

This really is a situation in which Obama is worse than Bush.

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Telling to the Revolution

The sound is crappy and hard to understand at times, and I generally have reservations about people who want to throw themselves into the abyss that is YouTube stardom* – even when it’s a devastatingly cute serviceman from Alabama who still calls his dad “Sir” and says “Oh my lord”.

Nevertheless, this made me cry:

ETA: It’s the moment about 5.14 where he says “Yes, sir” and the look on his face, like a little boy who has finally told the truth and been told in turn that he is loved, that chokes me up every time. More »

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CAUTION: Geniuses at work…

There are a group of people who sell themselves as “progressives” who have proven over the years that they are complete fools. These are folks with a serious strategic thinking problem. Time after time all they do is rack up failure after failure. Worst of all, they provide wingnuts everywhere perfect foils who can be presented as proof that all folks who believe in progressive goals are idiots.

The damage these clowns do day in and day out is substantial. Like Upper Class Twits from a Monty Python sketch, they just keep walking into the same wall over and over again with gusto. All the while, their comic failure works to make any effort at progress all the more difficult. These fools regularly repeat whatever wingnut talking point they are fed and then think they are having an original thought. Even racist framing is OK if they think it will help them hit the same wall with a little more force. These fools would be worthy only of derisive laughter if they hadn’t proven to be such effective tools for destruction.

ABL wrote about the latest gathering of these dopes over the weekend. It seems that Ralph Nader, Cornell West and a group of other easily manipulated egos have decided that President Obama MUST face a primary challenge. They are so serious about this that they have sent out a press release!

Some Emo-bloggers have picked it up, but not many. The effort is so silly that even FDL has yet to jump on the bandwagon (but to be fair, FDL is slow on the uptake, so I guess they’ll get excited about this effort by October). The effort is getting far more attention on wingnut blogs and wingnut media. The Washington Times proclaims:

President Obama’s smooth path to the Democratic nomination may have gotten rockier Monday, after a group of liberal leaders, including former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, announced plans to challenge the incumbent in primaries next year…

And Fox News is all over the story as proof that President Obama is a failure.

This Nader/West effort to marginalize the left is just another example of the progressive death wish. This recent editorial from The Nation is another. I’m 56 years old. I’ve watched the so called leaders of the Left do this dance of self-destruction over and over and over again. The results have never been good.

Humphrey had to pay a price for LBJ. They had to “punish” Carter to teach him a lesson, even if it gave us Reagan. Gore had to be disciplined for the sins of Clinton and these fools claimed there was no difference between Al and Bush. Kerry never “excited” them and also required election year chastisement. Now it is President Obama who is the target of these strategic geniuses.

Nader, West and these other fools always function as the reliable Left flank of wingnutopia. Without these useful idiots the GOP and their ideas would always be defeated. With them to serve as comic foils, vote sponges, and advocates of apathy, the GOP can get close enough to steal any election.

And here they come again, right on cue—ready to compete for the Upper Class Twit 2012 Title. They will talk up anybody as a “progressive” or “populist” alternative to President Obama. Hell, Ralph is already celebrating Palin as a populist diva. I guess they’ll do what damage they can in the Primaries and then support some wingnut assisting 3rd party effort. I’m guessing a Palin/Nader 2012 Third Party ticket would really excite these mental giants.

What a bag of useless dicks.

Cheers

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Post Speech Reaction

I’m happy to note that the reaction to Obama’s speech has been much more positive than I could have ever imagined. K-thug even gave it high praise:

First things first: I was favorably surprised by the new Obama jobs plan, which is significantly bolder and better than I expected. It’s not nearly as bold as the plan I’d want in an ideal world. But if it actually became law, it would probably make a significant dent in unemployment.

Of course, it isn’t likely to become law, thanks to G.O.P. opposition. Nor is anything else likely to happen that will do much to help the 14 million Americans out of work. And that is both a tragedy and an outrage.

***

O.K., about the Obama plan: It calls for about $200 billion in new spending — much of it on things we need in any case, like school repair, transportation networks, and avoiding teacher layoffs — and $240 billion in tax cuts. That may sound like a lot, but it actually isn’t. The lingering effects of the housing bust and the overhang of household debt from the bubble years are creating a roughly $1 trillion per year hole in the U.S. economy, and this plan — which wouldn’t deliver all its benefits in the first year — would fill only part of that hole. And it’s unclear, in particular, how effective the tax cuts would be at boosting spending.

Still, the plan would be a lot better than nothing, and some of its measures, which are specifically aimed at providing incentives for hiring, might produce relatively a large employment bang for the buck. As I said, it’s much bolder and better than I expected. President Obama’s hair may not be on fire, but it’s definitely smoking; clearly and gratifyingly, he does grasp how desperate the jobs situation is.

That’s high praise for Krugman. And he was right- Obama’s plan and speech were great. Every time he talks, I remember why I voted for him. In other post speech reaction, the Politico reports the following:

A top economist says President Barack Obama’s job plan will likely add 1.9 million jobs and grow the economy by 2 percent.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, also said Obama’s $447-billion plan would likely cut the unemployment rate by a percentage point, United Press International reported on Friday.

Now again, this is a ratings agency, so you might as well be polling random crackheads and asking them who will win the Super Bowl in 2027. But still, it at least it sounds positive and can be used to bludgeon Congress into doing something.

I didn’t watch any of the bobblehead reaction, and I have refrained from turning the boob tube on today (it’s too nice a day and I’m in a good mood), so I have no idea how the reaction was among the walking dead the DC Press Corps, but I haven’t seen any primal screams on twitter, so I’m imagining it was pretty positive.

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The Modern Negrophobists reaction to the President’s speech…

This cartoon from 1862 could run in the papers tomorrow as an example of the typical Republican/Wingnut reaction to President Obama’s speech (it would also cover the reaction of more than a few firebaggers as well). This has been the reaction to everything President Obama has done so far, so I see no reason why it would stop tonight.

Cheers

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Speech Livestream Open Thread

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OzoneGate

Matt Osborne offers a different take:

First of all, let’s stop with the stupid sports metaphors. Really. If you need an analogy, smog regulations are a low card in a high stakes game, and Lisa Jackson is the queen of hearts when Obama needs spades. If you insist on baseball, smog reduction is a run, and Ray LaHood is Obama’s designated hitter. But really, let’s kill the sports metaphors.
One way to lower the amount of smog in American cities comes with through thick binders of all-powerful EPA regulations. Another way involves transportation spending priorities and vehicle emissions standards — policies — that also form a thick set of binders. Either way involves policy in binders. Either way reduces pollution.

Friday’s progressive freakout over nixed EPA smog rules is not really about fighting smog, but the myopia of issue focus in the blogosphere and the inflated currency of online outrage. Transportation is a wonky subject that often flies below the radar. It is not sexy or cute. Much of its advocacy is local. But federal transportation policy is also crucial in reducing smog levels as well as achieving other progressive ends.
The ingredients of smog come from tailpipes. The way to reduce the impact of modern civilization on the environment is to make those tailpipes better and cleaner. To accomplish that, the president has leveraged his opportunity to force change on the auto industry.
Big Auto has successfully fought higher mileage standards tooth-and-nail for decades. But industry lobbyists recently caved in to the administration — for the second time. Automakers must raise their fleets to a genuine average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. That is not nothing. What was that about bad negotiating and selling out?

Roland Hwang at the National Resources Defense Council calls this “the single biggest step the president can take” to lower American carbon emissions. It will also reduce the tailpipe pollutants that form smog because less fuel will be burning to keep Americans on the roads and rails and pavement we can build.

Meanwhile, the number of zero-emission electrified vehicles on American roads will go up 4,500 percent in the next six years. That’s nearly one million cars that won’t create any smog at all, thanks again to administration policy. It’s a start on the greener America we need.

To be sure, there is room for other policy changes to effect emissions reductions. The American semi truck fleet is woefully inefficient, for example, getting about six gallons to the mile. A mere ten percent increase in efficiency would save as much oil as eight Deepwater Horizon disasters — a point that brings us to another set of progressive freakouts over energy and pollution.
Obama is a transportation progressive. Why should the White House choose to fight costly battles over EPA regulations, tar sands pipelines, or offshore drilling when they can win policy battles that reduce consumption? This is not eleventy-dimensional chess. It is not apologetics. It is solid policy.

(read the rest, including internal links)

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