It is hard to believe we are heading into another Holiday season with unemployment at 10%, and no one seems to give a shit. The DOW is up, Wall Street is fat, corporate profits are up, so I guess DC thinks there is no problem. I think that is part of the reason Obama is grudgingly supporting the tax cuts for the rich, because other than unemployment insurance extensions, what else is there that can get done? Congress certainly isn’t going to do anything, the Fed is out of ammo, and I can’t think of much the President can do other than make speeches. Sure, when it gets her some good face time, Mary Landrieu will get up there and rail against income disparity. But just try and get her to actually vote for anything that lowers unemployment. Does the administration have any authority they are not using?
And I suspect it is going to stay that way. The GOP solution is tax cuts for the rich, and that is about all that will get through the house next year. And then they will sit back and probably gain more seats in 2012, because they’ve made sure the economy hasn’t recovered. The whole thing is depressing and you just feel so helpless.
BGinCHI
Thanks Mr. Cheerful.
joe from Lowell
The tax cuts to the non-rich are several times larger than the tax cuts to the rich. As you move down the income scale, tax cuts become more an more stimulatory. The payroll tax holiday, for instance, or the cuts at the lower income levels.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
O.T.
Here’s a photo of Obama meeting with Glenn, Jane, Kos, Arianna, Atrios, Aravosis, etc. at the White House
http://tinyurl.com/2fhkcqv
beltane
I’m not one of the people who feels that Obama is a secret Republican who plotted to take the White House like some kind of sleeper cell. However, I am starting to think that the office of the president doesn’t matter much anymore. We really do have a shadow government made up of the big banks and multinational corporations. The powers behind the throne do not even pretend to have the interests of the United States at heart, and I have no idea what it would take to dislodge them.
jibeaux
I’m pretty dispirited, too, plus they’re just calling for more cold-ass weather all week and my skin and I HATE the cold, and all I can think of to do about it is try to keep in perspective what I can control. I guess that’s the serenity prayer. Going to make “cookies in a jar” for Christmas gifts tonight and try to be cozy.
wsn
HAMP to deleverage underwater homeowners, who can then spend money consuming things instead of deleveraging themselves.
General push to stop foreclosures for the same reason. I doubt the Prez has much formal power, but I suspect that if Holder starts poking around the proceedings would slow way down.
Joe Beese
Yeah, that’s pretty much the extent of his skill set.
Rick Massimo
When I was in school, there were certain periods of American history that we covered where you just sat there in open-mouthed wonder and thought, “What the $%^& were they thinking?!” I never thought I’d live through one of those periods; indeed, I thought we’d never have one of those periods again.
Wrong again.
Omnes Omnibus
Assuming this is true, it is probably time for perfect bill kabuki. Have the House Dems start launching bill after bill, not one’s pre-compromised to ensure passage, but full throated liberal solutions to problems. Then, if anything goes wrong in the economy, point at those bill and say “If only you had passed these….” Go into 2012 campaign mode now.
Sasha
@Joe Beese:
You forgot to add the snark tags.
Martin
@joe from Lowell: While that’s true in general, I’m not convinced it’ll help much in this case. Corporate profits are at an all-time high. They have everything they need to hire, and yet they aren’t doing it. Dumping more money in their coffers clearly isn’t having much effect.
Stimulus in this environment can’t be these secondary effects. It’s got to be primary – either directly create jobs, or at least dump money on the unemployed so they don’t all fucking starve to death.
I’d like to see the straight gambit played out. Obama in a national address praises corporate America for registering all time high profits. Given that they have the cash on hand, he calls for a corporate tax increase proportionate to what it will take to extend unemployment benefits for everyone over a natural 5% unemployment rate. Business can either hire people and get work out of them, or pay directly through taxation. Their choice. We’re done fucking around the edges of the stimulus formula.
Chyron HR
@Joe Beese:
With his teleprompter, amirite? MEGADITTOS!
Culture of Truth
Go out and buy something made in America!
.
I dunno, food or something
jl
It is depressing situation. The elites of this country are so corrupt, and so entranced by failed social and economic paradigms (that coincidentally favor their interests), and so powerful, that they can block any useful reform, or action.
I am struck by the fact that the majority of ordinary voters this country favor good policy on many issues, including ending Bush tax cuts for rich and public option. I hope in the next election this majority speaks loudly and puts some good people in office, but I am naive and foolish.
dms
I refer you this this post:
Here.
Elizabelle
To Cole:
There there. Yeah, it looks that way, but often the situation improves in a manner we don’t see yet. Except when it doesn’t.
Now: where’s Lily? On with some pet therapy.
While we can all still afford pets.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: I concur. I think it fits with my suggestion above.
beltane
@jl: Even if the majority puts good people into office the outcome will be the same. Maybe we need someone who’s not so good to flush all the lobbyists out of DC with a water cannon.
Culture of Truth
If only Congressmen’s tears created jobs
Elizabelle
@Joe Beese:
That you, Doug J?
With a play on obese and Joe Lieberman?
Time for a Joebituary. (Slate coined the term.)
IrishGirl
@beltane: I would agree with you except for the fact that the 8 years of G.W. prove otherwise. It all depends on how far out the officeholder is willing to stick his neck. I mean, Pres. Shrub and Darth Cheney, were willing to risk the charge of war crimes!
The office of the Presidency is inherently weak if used as it was intended by the Founding Fathers. Which is exactly how Pres. O uses it. Too many on the left have been wanting him to act more like Pres. Shrub and be a little bit more dictatorial. And I’ve never been certain how I feel about it.
@John Options? I honestly don’t think there are any arrows left in the presidential quiver. 2012 may be a different though.
Tom Hilton
Or as Steve Benen asked opponents of the deal: what is your Plan B? Still haven’t seen a plausible answer.
Sometimes a really crappy deal really is the best deal you can possibly get. This is one of those times.
dms
I refer you to this post.
And if that link doesn’t work, here’s the URL:
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2010/12/mandate.html
PeakVT
the Fed is out of ammo
Not until inflation goes over 4%. Will the Fed act? Not boldly, that’s for sure.
Maxwel
Don’t think anybody will pay attention until the plutocrats start getting thrown from their top floors.
Morbo
@Culture of Truth: Beer.
freelancer
TEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAM Whiplash!
joe from Lowell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Amen.
In 2009-2010, I didn’t want a bunch of perfect-bill posing. I wanted actual legislation to actually pass, even at the cost of perfection, and damned if I didn’t get it in spades. The most productive, most progressive, most significant session of Congress since FDR’s first term is what I got. I couldn’t disagree more with those who said Obama should waste that Congress and hold out for ponies.
But now, it’s time for ponies. Nothing is going to pass anyway, so it’s time to draw contrasts.
beltane
@IrishGirl: Bush/Cheney really didn’t risk anything. They are not brave men, they are men who knew perfectly well that there was zero chance of facing war crimes charges.
FlipYrWhig
@Tom Hilton: Plan B for most blogosphere progressives is letting all the tax cuts sunset as planned. I’m not sure why that’s a political winner (even if it might be solid policy), but it’s basically the consensus view.
cat48
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
Thank you for that. My first laugh of the day.
I found something in Obama/McConnell to love w/Education €TaxCredit Extenders…..it will help my son/in/law continue to attend college part-time while he works at a mid level job & advances.
I’m not even sure the Govt could do anything anymore w/Infrastructure programs, etc. I’ve made this judgment based on watching the partisan pingpong match that’s developed with highspeed trains & smaller construction jobs. It is indeed depressing.
beulahmo
John,
Aw. If I could, I’d give you a glass of premium scotch and a back/scalp massage. Instead, this is the only thing I could find on short notice that’ll fit through the intertubes. Here you go, darlin’.
Sue
‘I can’t think of much the President can do other than make speeches’
Ah, but the speeches he can make, if he chooses. I would like to see way, way more of the hostage speeches, where he lays out exactly why he’s doing what he has to do to move forward just an inch or so, and way less of the kumbaya speeches, where he appears to be folding/caving/giving in or whatever it is he’s accomplishing with those things.
Hammer the Republicans from now on using their own words and actions and we might stand a chance, and I don’t mean a chance to get re-elected.
joe from Lowell
@Martin:
But what does your argument have to do with mine, which was about mid- and lower-income tax cuts? Those aren’t actions that involve dumping more money in corporate coffers?
What corporations needs to start putting money into expanding capacity – whether we’re talking about hiring employees or buying more stuff – is consumers with money to spend, and lower- and middle-income tax cuts do that.
Cat
The only good news is that the Republican’s don’t have a “supr top secrit plan” for the economy they have been saving incase they actually do win the 2012 elections.
We’ll have to suffer through till 2014 for some turnover back to Dems in congress and then in 2016 we’ll be back to Dems in power.
The real question is will the Dems have shed enough Corporatists that in 2016 they can actually do something about the Economy to fix income disparity and thus get the economy back on track?
Susan S
Some years ago I saw on some investment newstory that inflation was the huge problem..one which we could solve if unemployment rates just went up to 5% plus. So, they have. Is it possible that many archconservatives simply don’t want the rates to come down..after all, they have their billions. President Obama has at least turned the ship around; the unceasing tidal wave of criticism will not shift, because he is calm, quiet, and brilliant. We don’t value such traits in a President…well, actually, most of us do value those traits; the nasties just have to perpetuate their jabs. Thank you John, for a delightful blog. Tomorrow I shall be 64; your blog gives me hope. Happy Day, sir!
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
for the bloggers who want ALL the tax cuts repealed, what will you do with your unwanted refund?
send it back to the government?
donate it to charity?
dare I say, keep it?
FlipYrWhig
@joe from Lowell: Agreed. I think you have to play things differently when it is possible, or close to possible, to get a majority in the House, 60 votes in the Senate, and actually fucking enact stuff. You have to be careful not to squander any one person’s support; you have to walk on eggshells and kiss everyone’s ass. I’d prefer to see that stop now.
ItAintEazy
If this is true, then this is why I find it very hard to support him nowadays. Because he’s facing seemingly insurmountable challenges he should just quit, try to get along and eke out some crumbs? Yes, I might be stuck in Rainbow Pony Land, but some of us are sick of eating shit sandwiches and wish we had someone who’s a little more of a fighter and a bulwark against the moneyed interests. And freezing federal wages as a peace offering to repugs does not cut it.
The Moar You Know
@Elizabelle: Possible but unlikely; Beese was a prolific poster over at the GOS before he was kickbanned for openly advocating Republican rule. He is more careful here, if it is indeed the same person.
I did notice that he started shitting on the lawn here after he got the banhammer over at Kosville, so I think it’s the same critter.
Calouste
@Martin:
__
You assume that the powers that be care if the unemployed starve to death. I think they only care if the unemployed riot, and unlike in Europe, where protests are happening (but are supposed to be “peaceful” *), Americans don’t protest at all.
*) Like peaceful protests ever work. If no one had hit the car of Charles and Camilla the students protests in the UK would have been page 7 news instead of a front page feature.
Tom Hilton
@FlipYrWhig: If that were all there were to it, I could see some sense in that. What they’re missing is that it isn’t just letting all tax cuts expire–it’s also no UI extension, no START, not even the slim hope for DADT repeal that we still have, no economic stimulus of any kind for the foreseeable future.
Elizabelle
@Martin:
I like your idea at comment 11.
May it be done. Win all around. (Probably longterm for the plutocrats too. People with jobs and money, you know, buy things.)
Mike Goetz
To get some bread for the hungry, you have to throw some cheese to the rich. Way of the world.
Obama swallowed hard and got a lifeline to desperate people who need it now. I voted for him to do things like this.
Dennis SGMM
@Susan S:
Bingo! The rich have between eighty and ninety percent of the wealth of the nation. The last thing that they want is to have it go down in value.
jibeaux
@FlipYrWhig:
One thing I wonder is this. Let’s say we had some Dem senators with cojones. I know, but stay with me here. Who were willing to let all the tax breaks expire if we couldn’t get a decent compromise. And that happened, and we head into January with the tax breaks expired. (Which is better policy, but has definite political problems in that the mean parent who takes the free candy away may be doing the right thing, but in this family we vote on parents.) So in 2010, the tax levels revert to their Clinton levels. At which point, if we wanted to, it seems to me we can still talk about them again. But no one ever seemed to talk about whether or not we might be in a better bargaining position that way.
FlipYrWhig
@Tom Hilton: Yes, but think of all the contradictions that will be heightened and the sense of integrity that will be validated!
JZ
@BGinCHI: Seriously. Cole has been super bitchy of late. You’d think the Stillers were 3-10 instead of the other way around.
jeffreyw
Options? Hmm…I think with sesame seeds, please.
joe from Lowell
@Joe Beese:
Yeah, that’s pretty much the extent of his skill set.
Republican write this about someone who is 1) a law school professor, 2) a bestselling author, and 3) an organizer who directed a drive that registered 100,000 people. All of that was before anyone had ever heard of him.
For some reason – some unfathomable reason – Republicans take one look at this person and decide he’s all show. Not much of a skill set.
For some reason. Whatever could it be?
El Tiburon
Time to face reality, my plebeian and slave friends.
We are ruled by social and financial elites who just don’t care about you. You are not part of the equation. You do not compute. You are all nothing more than a fetcher of His Masters goods and services. And you are no different than a Chinese worker or Mexican worker.
This country is no longer for you, Middle America. You only exist to pave the roads and gas up the jets and fill their safes with treasure.
While many of you worry about becoming homeless; they worry about if there will be nice weather to whatever home they jet to this weekend. While many of you eat Top Ramen again; they fret over the vintage of bordeaux to compliment their five-star meals served upon pristine table cloths with sparkling silverware by dutiful and obedient staff.
Your President has made this abundantly clear. There is no longer any ambiguity in his intentions. Record bonuses for those who could not spend all of their money if they tried; continued suffering for those who just want to get by.
It was an exhilarating ride there for a bit, I must admit. I fell for it myself. I began to believe. I allowed myself to be taken in. My mistake, to be sure. No one to blame but myself.
Never again. Never again. Never again.
MattR
@joe from Lowell:
And this is why supple side economics is bullshit at its very heart. You can give them all the money you want, but corporations are not going to invest it in the business unless they think the investment will return a profit. And if they do think that the investment is profitable, they will be willing to spend their existing money (or take out loans).
Buck
@jeffreyw:
Those look good!
Tom Hilton
@ItAintEazy:
This is precisely why I have come to despise most so-called ‘progressives’: because they value aggressive posturing (“some of us…wish we had someone who’s a little more of a fighter…”) over actual results. The indisputable reality is that this deal is absolutely the best anyone could have gotten from the Republicans, and that the alternative is nothing at all (i.e., none of the things I enumerated above)…and yet some people would still rather have the nothing, because aggressive posturing by the President would validate their fee-fees.
Anoniminous
Tax cuts for “the little guy/gal” is the Magic Pony Pixie Fairy Dust being sprinkled around so those who have a mortgage can continue to meet the payments so the (estimated) $300 trillion Collaterized Mortgage Obligation market doesn’t come crashing down, bankrupting J. P. Morgan & Co., Goldman-Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and all the other banks and financial institutions that have caused this mess; bringing the global economy (and us) down with ’em.
In the long run, it won’t work.
In the short run it gives an excuse for the wanker bankers to give each other hundreds of millions in bonuses.
FlipYrWhig
@jibeaux:
I think that’s true, but I’m not sure I see how the bargaining position would in fact be better that way. I just keep envisioning people who don’t follow politics closely realizing that their taxes just went up, and understanding it was Obama and the lame-duck Democrats who were responsible. I don’t think the idea that it only happened because Republicans were playing games and being unreasonable is going to penetrate enough minds — especially when the Republican House takes over and passes a tax-cut bill as its first order of business.
Now, I didn’t think the Republicans had _any_ incentive to deal, and if I were a Republican I’d be one of the ones howling that Boehner and McConnell got played. But they really did strike a deal. So there’s quite possibly something I’m missing.
beltane
@Calouste: Peaceful protests accomplish nothing other than making protesters feel like they’re doing something. All societies are built on some degree of fear. Fear of the police keeps the poor from rioting, while fear of mob violence is what keeps the rich from pushing the poor too far into destitution. America is more complicated than some other countries because we have been raised on the myth of the rugged individual. Unfortunately, it is far easier to subdue a rugged individual than it is to pacify an angry mob.
jcricket
Last time around it was like 4 years into what became the Great Depression before there was any action. And even then, FDR cut back on that action after a few years, listening to the deficit hawks in his party, before finally kicking the spending into really high gear. During this time people were literally starving to death in the street.
So yeah, basically, the old people have to literally starve in the street and unemployment apparently has to get to 20% before actual things that fix things take place.
I think this bill is the best we can get given the Dems waited this long. If they learn anything from these elections, it’s that majority is fleeting, and when they are in control, Dems should get their shit together and pass shit quickly. But I doubt that’s what we’ll learn. We’ll just keep moving to the right and hoping that someday, maybe someday, Republicans will like us.
cyntax
Something interesting, in ABC/WaPo’s poll on the taxcuts, the least popular provision (across Dems, Repubs, and Indies) is the payroll tax holiday for Social Security, the next least popular thing being the increase of the expemption for the estate tax (Indies like it less than Repubs and Dems).
PDF here.
joe from Lowell
@Tom Hilton: There is a place for “aggressive posturing to validate their fee-fees” in politics. A big place.
Just not when you have to get something through the US Senate.
Personally, I want to see a whole hell of a lot of aggressive posturing to validate my fee-fees in 2011 and 2012. I want Chris Matthews-esque thrills to run up my leg. I want 2-color posters and giant fucking puppets. As soon as the lame duck ends.
Woodrowfan
time for more cute pet blogging.
gene108
@Martin: Don’t you know the reasons corporations aren’t hiring and investing create jobs is because of Barack Obama’s anti-business attitude, especially his anti-Wall Street rhetoric, and all the uncertainty the Democratic Congress, especially the House, created by passing huge new regulation after huge new regulation.
The above isn’t snark. It’s what I’ve been told by serious people.
Part of it I, can really believe. If you have new rules on what you can and cannot do, you need time as a business to figure out WTF to do next. If there are newer rules on top of the new rules that just passed, it will just take that much more time to work some things out.
This doesn’t mean you freeze all of your business activity and plans to expand and hire, once you made sure you are profitable. You can budget in extra costs for the areas that are effected by any new regulations. But I can buy that there may be some short term indecision.
On the other hand, CEO’s seem like liberal bloggers, who get totally pissed off, if the President criticizes them. I don’t get the emotional reaction from the business community towards President Obama. He’s not at all anti-business, in any meaningful way that’d change the way corporations operate here.
The CEO’s don’t like being called heartless bastards, when they lay off 10,000 people right before Christmas, which the financial meltdown of 2008 made it seem like a good idea at the time.
Cain
@The Moar You Know:
Wow.. really? You can get kickbanned for that? Seems kind of a dumb thing to get banned over. I mean, you’d think people would just mock him out of the site.
cain
Tom Hilton
@joe from Lowell: I think there may be some tactical value to aggressive posturing in some cases, and the upcoming session is likely one of them.
But it has to be considered solely on the basis of the tactical value–not as a matter of validating anybody’s fee-fees.
So-called ‘progressives’ keep forgetting that there is no place for emotion in politics except as a weakness to exploit in other people.
burnspbesq
@Susan S:
Thanks to Paul Volcker, who was appointed by Carter and retained by Reagan, inflation hasn’t been a serious problem for the United States in at least 25 years. Which is why Bernanke has the option to run the printing press in an effort to stimulate the economy. There are no bond market vultures, and anyone who says there is, is either lying or stupid.
Frankly, I worry more about deflation than inflation. A little inflation could be just what the middle class needs; pay off those HELOCs and credit cards with dollars that are worth less in real terms than the dollars you borrowed in the first place.
MattR
@Tom Hilton:
I think this misses the real issue which is the idea of drawing a line in the sand and of not constantly rewarding bad behavior with appeasement. You are focused on the short term benefits of this deal without looking at the long term problems it may cause.
(EDIT: Though I can see this was already brought up and addressed in the time it took me to write my comment)
MTiffany
IDK? They could urge “the liberal blogosphere” to bypass a press obsessed with Palin’s latest tweets and bring the Prez’s message directly to their readers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhTzXqh7rvk
The above video about the tax cuts was posted a week ago and it’s received only 350,000 views. If you think his message is worth hearing over all the shrieking and bitching from the manic progressives, you should help get it out there.
FlipYrWhig
@Tom Hilton: I think there’s one additional component, though. It’s not only that being a “fighter” is emotionally validating to a certain kind of progressive. I have the sense that they also have a conviction that when a president acts like a “fighter” it also galvanizes public support for what he’s fighting for. That’s why the “fighting” or _show_ of fighting is sold as such a win-win proposition. It’s a decision to ignore that putting on a show of fighting that results in no success is worthless, and can cost you the partial success that non-fighting could bring.
Everyone loves a fight that delivers 100% of what you want.
Which do you like better, (a) a spectacular fight that delivers 0% of what you want or (b) a grudgingly-struck deal that delivers 40% of what you want? Some people honestly answer (a) to that. I’m not wired that way.
I think the “hard fight” strategy is likely to fail, while the “accept a deal” strategy is likely to succeed _partially_. That’s why I gravitate towards (b), over and over again.
BGinCHI
@JZ: I’d prolly be grumpy too if I had a blown head gasket.
Rural WV with no wheels.
How can he possibly impress the ladies?
Michael
@MTiffany:
Ha ha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahah…
Like “the liberal blogosphere” would ever do that.
Three decades of epic EmoProg fail, heading straight into a fourth decade.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@cyntax: That really puzzles me. Are they opposed to the payroll tax holiday because they’re worried about Social Security’s fiscal solvency? I thought no one cared about that. Or is there some other reason? I thought that the holiday was one of the best pieces of the deal.
burnspbesq
@MTiffany:
The liberal blogosphere is irrelevant. Compare blog traffic stats to TV ratings and blog traffic stats of sites attached to traditional media outlets, and you’ll understand.
The liberal blogosphere is a giant exercise in preaching to a very small choir.
Keith G
@Woodrowfan: Indeed.
Cole needs to get his car fixed so he can find another lost pup hiking down a country road in West Virginia.
Hmm. That rings a bell.
Brachiator
@jibeaux:
Just. Not. Possible.
The Democrats left a number of tax items on the table which had to be resolved because they affect 2010 income taxes. If you left them on the table and waited to fix them in 2011 you would create all kinds of problems.
This does not mean that the Democrats had to accept the compromise deal. But by waiting until after the mid term elections to deal with all this, and by not having any kind of unified strategy, they backed themselves into a corner and made it easier for the Republicans to play Obstructionism Chicken.
Bulworth
Well, we must extend all the tax cuts and start getting serious about the deficit.
Anoniminous
@joe from Lowell:
If you’ve got a, measly, $50 million to play around with you can:
1. Put it into the boring task of producing goods or services and make, if you’re REALLY lucky, 6% year
2. Put it into financial “investments” and make 12- 300% a year
We’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where “making stuff” is sucking hind teat to “making stuff up.”
jeffreyw
@Buck: And you are today’s winner! A coupon for a free fried fillet-o-fish sammich with tartar sauce and fries!
FlipYrWhig
@MattR:
I don’t think that this qualifies as “the real issue.” That’s another part of the dynamic. A lot of people believe what you say here, so they like taking stands and drawing lines. Not everyone sees the value in that, or, put another way, not everyone sees the value in that as trumping the immediate effect of getting some kind of positive outcome from bad-behaving people who have no incentive to give you any _good_ behavior.
gene108
@IrishGirl:
In terms of military matters, foreign policy and national security policy, the office of the President has huge unilateral powers, which Congress has given the President, when the Cold War began in the late 1940’s.
In terms of economic policy power…the Presidency really doesn’t have that much it can do independently of Congress…
All the “dictatorial” powers Bush, Jr. used as President were in the realm of national security, where the Presidency already has broad unilateral power.
On economic decisions, Bush & Co. really didn’t do much independently from other branches of government.
Sure some regulations may not have been enforced as rigorously as a Democratic administration would’ve done it, but that’s par for the course with our political system.
The Moar You Know
@Cain: Beese, as you have seen, is unmockable. He just doesn’t care, because he’s here to do a job. The nature of that job should be obvious to all by now.
As far as getting smacked out by the banhammer, if you get “troll-rated” over at the GOS – and that means posting anything that any of the large subgroups over there don’t like – you get automatically banned by their software. Beese piled up a lot of ill-will over there, and his lethal mistake was pissing off more than just one of the factions there.
Tom Hilton
@MattR:
Which is also known as “aggressive posturing”.
I am focusing on actual benefits of this deal (which happen to be short-term) and discounting the entirely hypothetical benefits of aggressive posturing (which, if they should happen to materialize, would do so in the longer term). Generally speaking, I value the actual over the hypothetical; YMMV.
bemused
@Martin:
Corps aren’t going to hire more people if they don’t have more customers to buy their stuff. Until then, they will sit on their assets.
FlipYrWhig
@burnspbesq:
What’s happening, though, is that a small number of the big liberal bloggers are bubbling up into the pundit scene. So some of them really do get to punch above their weight.
General Stuck
Nothing much to do, but buckle up and save a pair of clean underwear for the coming clown car crash. You can run away and join the circus, and sometimes the circus runs away and joins you. And remember, There are many ways to serve spam, so don’t squeeze the Charmin. Ain’t that right Mr. Whipple?
I think BJ needs to start an Apocalyptic Poetry night. Dougj could get er done, if you could peel his eyeballs away from the sordid Village soap opera long enough.
cat48
@Susan S:
Happy Birthday and many more to you.
srv
The issue here is that we aren’t in a recession. We are still in the ditch, and trying to press the accelerator harder.
Employment isn’t the problem. There are plenty of low-end and part-time jobs. The problem is jobs capable of sustaining the lifestyle we are accustom to. They’ve been leaving for awhile, will continue to, and there is no plan to change that.
Nowhere in all of this tax debate is there any discussion of targeting all tax breaks to investment in the US. There’s NO incentive, anywhere, for anyone in any class to invest in changing our direction.
So we aren’t fixing bad investments, we aren’t solving problems with real assets – we’re passing regs to allow them to be “marked” to fantasy and trying to prop up toxic investments.
What tax cuts and liquidity people are willing to risk is going to go into new bubbles, like the current stock market. If McCain was President, the talking heads would be referring to it as the “McCain Boom.”
BGinCHI
It amazes me that the punditry or the talking heads can’t just pit “supply side” (GOP) against “demand side” (Dems), lay out the economic arguments, get the stats from CBO or someplace nicely neutral, and see what works better.
Trickle down or investment in work and infrastructure (including education)?
fasteddie9318
Ah, speeches:
I know, he can’t give that speech. But I can dream, right?
Tom Hilton
@FlipYrWhig: I think you’re right about how they perceive the ‘fighter’ thing. Not surprisingly, I tend to make the same choice as you.
Buck
@jeffreyw:
SUPER COOL!
MTiffany
@burnspbesq:
A very small choir not well versed in taking direction from the choir director. (Sorry all, couldn’t resist).
But seriously, it couldn’t hurt to try… could it?
fasteddie9318
@FlipYrWhig:
Unfortunately, it’s mostly the ones who are prepared to go on the teevee and say “ZOMG OBAMA IS HITLER AND BUSH AND POL POT HE SOLD US OUT FUCK HIM GODDAMNIT” who bubble up, not unlike what happens when somebody passes gas in the tub.
Jody
Why any rightwinger would bother trolling any lefty website anymore baffles me. We do a fine job throwing massive piles of shit at our own.
cyntax
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
Well, it’s putting money in people’s pockets which generally makes people happy. But the most popular part of the deal is extending the UI benefits so it could be that people do like social safety nets (despite Repub rhetoric) and are worried that this cut could endanger the solvency of Social Security. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any follow-up questions on SS to answer why people don’t like the it [payroll tax holiday].
MattR
@FlipYrWhig: I see what you are saying and largely agree. In fact I think that pretty well describes how people decide whether they support this deal or not. But I think that also reinforces the point I was trying to make – that those who oppose this deal and wanted to see Obama fight for something better did not do so out of some desire for validation or hurt fee fees as Tom Hilton was suggesting. Instead it is because they think that there is a long term tactical gain to be had that is more important than the short term pain that (other) people will feel.
@Tom Hilton:
If you consider the long term harm to the Democratic party from constantly over-compromising to be entirely hypothetical, then it is no surprise that we have completely different ideas of what strategies should be employed.
FC
Some people just want to watch the world PUDDI.
srv
@BGinCHI:
John needs to get a roommate or move back with his parents, if they’ve got room in the basement.
fasteddie9318
@FlipYrWhig:
Or it makes him look like a leader, and I can kind of see where that might be true. Lots of independents seem to respond well to whoever appears to be be in control of the situation, so a forceful, fighting president might look good to them. The problem is, the theater of that kind of “fighting” has to be performed on an issue about which you’re prepared not to get anything done. Unemployment extensions isn’t that issue, not for me at least.
agrippa
@beltane:
The president is not king of the hill. He is the head of the executive branch. There are practical and constitutional limts to what a president can do.
Anoniminous
@bemused:
Wage rate in the US is (around) $35k a year.
Wage rate in China is (around) $2,700 a year.
You can buy labor in China, lower the consumer cost of a good by 50%, and STILL make a killing.
One problem we face is wage rates heading towards Chinese levels while most people have a Cost of Living (necessary claims on personal income) at US levels. With consumer discretionary money supporting 70% of the economy shrinking wage rate means the economy MUST shrink.
FlipYrWhig
@Tom Hilton: You know who’s been making a lot of sense to me lately, which I was a bit surprised to realize? Noted curmudgeon Bob Somerby.
Here’s his piece today: RETURN OF THE TEACH-IN! Bernie Sanders (finally) got it right! But so did David Brooks. And here’s one from last Friday: KRUGMAN GOES (SEMI) TRIBAL! It’s bad for the world when our MVP sounds like Rachel and KO.
Beej
Here’s a part of the problem I don’t see many people discussing. A whole bunch of those jobs that have gone away? They’re gone for good. They won’t be coming back. They’ve been shipped off to India or China or Bangladesh. The kid who could graduate from high school and count on being able to walk into a manufacturing job that paid $18/hr. is fast finding out that those jobs don’t exist anymore. They’re being done by someone in India or China for one-third of that $18/hr. or even less. Why should corporations pay for U.S. labor at high rates when they can get the same labor, often better educated, for far less with no penalty or downside? If we don’t want to become a third-rate country with a permanent underclass comprising upwards of 20% of the population, we’d better start thinking about how to kick-start green innovation and manufacturing, how to use tax policy to encourage capital investment inside the U.S., and how to educate for the future instead of the past. Thoughts?
terraformer
@wsn:
Right. There’s about $50 billion of HAMP money just sitting around. And every cent of it is available to the Executive to use. I’d think that a carrot and stick approach to lenders would result in some much-needed relief for homeowners.
But I forgot. The banks own all the pols, can’t use sticks with them. Might as well just give them the money instead.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@jcricket:
Except the old people won’t starve. The GOP will attack future recipients, but not current ones, who are their SoCon base. The will drive their Medicare scooters over the starved bodies of the workers who support them.
Buck
@srv:
Oh man (snickerz) I thought he did! I don’t how I got that impression.
Sorry.
Maody
John Cole, I bought a BJ Pet Calendar today. Okay, so that doesn’t help, but I can offer you some magic ponies!
heh heh
Cat
@fasteddie9318:
Seriously, we couldn’t get FDR elected in 2012. No way the press would over look him being wheelchair bound.
I will goto my happy-place and pretend his populist agenda would be welcome in the Democratic party.
fasteddie9318
@Omnes Omnibus:
This is probably the best strategy for the next session, but I’ve never seen Democrats engage in it. Republicans do it all the time: “defense” of marriage, English as the national language, flag-burning amendments, etc., but Democrats as usual don’t do so well with those kinds of games.
The Republicans should have to cast at least one vote a month protecting obscenely low tax rates for the super-rich and for large corporations. Put them on the record opposing tougher regulations on businesses. Make them try to match their rhetoric to the logical impact of that rhetoric on Medicare and Social Security. Challenge them to repeal some of the really popular parts of HCR.
Suffern ACE
@Calouste: If you are going to have unpeaceful protests these days, I’m thinking that you have to start fight club. But don’t tell anyone about it.
LM
People keep raging that Obama is dissing us by forgetting that “you dance with them that brung ya.” I agree with the adage, but I think it’s Obama that brung us, not vice versa. Any of several other Dem could have won in ’08, thanks to W & Rep failures. But Obama was a brilliant candidate with coat tails long enough to turn red states blue: he brung us. And how long was it before we became too huffy to dance with him? Showing a level of disrespect that rivals Fox News imo ensures we’ll keep losing elections. Beyond a certain point, “holding feet to the fire” is just torturing a person till he hates you.
policomic
@beltane:
You have hit the nail on the head.
Buck
@agrippa:
Tell that to W.
BGinCHI
Senate tax cut vote already past 60.
Now we can be sure it’s terrible.
/snark, sort of
FlipYrWhig
@fasteddie9318:
True. I’ve never really “gotten” the idea of “leadership,” myself. I think I’ve said around here before that I feel like it’s similar to “team chemistry” in sports, where if you’re winning you have it, and if you’re losing you don’t, because it’s basically a kind of tautology: leaders lead, winners win; a bunch of guys who clown around have “good chemistry” if they win games (they’re loose, they have fun) and “bad chemistry” if they don’t (they need discipline, they’re out of control). I don’t think “leaders” do much. But I’m in a lot of ways a technocrat who trusts experts rather than leaders and prefers boring facts to blustery theatrics.
BGinCHI
Gillibrand voted against. Wow.
agrippa
@joe from Lowell:
They find it expedient to believe it.
Anyone ever pause to consider that the GOP did not want to win in 2008?
FlipYrWhig
@Beej:
Yes — we need to figure out how to “in-source” and track people into doing jobs that can only be done nearby. Tangible work that starts with money and turns out stuff, better stuff, lasting stuff.
I think a lot of what you’re describing intersects with the way so many smart kids decide to work in investment banking and other imaginary bullshit because, well, that’s where the money is.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@Cat: but FDR was constantly attacked by populist like Huey Long and Labor for being too…. wait for it… centrist.
Buck
@agrippa:
Sure seems like they tried every which way not to.
cyntax
@Beej:
We’ll need to stop the Repubs from taking the Build America Bond program hostage then, or the education part of that equation will get even harder for the states to fulfill. Might help to ratchet up the rhetoric of education as a common good and not simply a means of increasing an individual’s wealth.
Tom Hilton
@MattR:
The assumption embedded in your use of the term “over-compromising” renders your logic circular. There’s no value in reaching a conclusion you assume to begin with.
Now, if you want to argue that this particular deal is in fact “over-compromising”, then go ahead and make that argument. Absent an argument that directly addresses the merits of this deal, any point about the supposed future harm of “over-compromising” is entirely irrelevant.
FlipYrWhig
@BGinCHI: Hey, remember when DailyKos was all upset at Gillibrand, for weeks, for being insufficiently progressive?
srv
@Maody: Can someone check if their BJ calendar is made in the US of A?
Martin
@joe from Lowell:
No, they are – but that’s my point – it’s not going to result in jobs. It’ll result in GDP expansion, which is what those stimulus formulas focus on, with the assumption that jobs will follow, but jobs aren’t following. Which is my point.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@LM:
the thing they’re not recognizing is that they never supported obama.
They all supported edwards.
Obama won the nomination WITHOUT any help from labor (who endorsed others) and WITHOUT the vaunted blogosphere who threw all their support and cash behind the groupie-fucker-son-of-a-mill-worker.
jibeaux
@Brachiator:
Yeah, I agree with that. It comes down to, as it always does, the Max Baucuses and the Evan Bayhs and whoever else is taking their turn in the rotating blue dog designated asshole game, screwing things up for everyone and not getting anything passed by the midterms. I guess what I wanted to see somewhere was like a flow chart of plan B, where plan B is letting the tax cuts expire — what are the different ways that could play out in 2011?
Martin
@gene108:
If the stock options go up, they get over it fast. We just suffered through a few months of ads showing Carly Fiorino gleefully defend her outsourcing of HP jobs as good for America. Trust me, they get over it really damn fast.
FlipYrWhig
@Tom Hilton: Right. “Over-compromising” will always be bad. “Compromising” won’t always be bad. The issue is sussing out when compromising has gone too far, and some of that has to do with the time horizon: both “could you get a better deal?” and “how _soon_ could you get a better deal?” — not to mention “what is the upside of the better deal?” against “what is the downside of a worse deal or no deal?” That’s the terrain to fight about these things, IMHO.
WereBear
I’m beginning to think I’m a step behind; that’s so oldschool. Now, you just rig things so that the normal things everyone has to do, like eat and breathe and find someplace to live, can suck money out of them whether they have it or not.
Debtor’s Indentured Servitude, here we come!
catclub
@Tom Hilton:
“…that the alternative is nothing at all (i.e., none of the things I enumerated above)…and yet some people would still rather have the nothing.”
If this were a one-off event I agree with you. But instead it forms the basis for all further negotiations.
“Here is something you want that formerly was agreed to on a bipartisan basis. (START approval, Unemployment insurance when unemployment rates are at historically high levels.)
Now, if you agree to further tax cuts for the rich, we will
consider it.”
I am confident the filibuster will not be substantially changed on January 5. I hope I am wrong.
bemused
@Anoniminous:
Even as I wrote that, I thought the chances of this economy improving much isn’t gonna happen for a long time, if ever, as long as the stalemate of what you said and more continues.
Bob Loblaw
Actually, the deal explicitly does nothing for those who have been unemployed the duration of the recession (the fabled 99ers), aka the genuinely weakest and worst off of us.
But since that fact is at odds with the propaganda effort surrounding the tax cut agreement, it’s ignored. But please, continue to argue amongst yourselves who the most dazzlingly compassionate brand of progressives, or whatever you’ve decided to call yourselves this week, really are.
Maody
@srv: yes. did you like the ponies?
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@Bob Loblaw: what will you do with your unwanted tax refund?
surely, you won’t keep the blood money
fasteddie9318
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
Which tells us two things: there have always been populist cranks out there, and the definition of “centrist” has shifted so far to the right in the past 80 years that it’s a little frightening.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
Exactly. They swooned over Mr. Goodhair then, while loudly dissing Obama. The only thing that has changed is that they are now trying to erase that past and pretend like they have good judgement, while they continue to bash Obama.
BGinCHI
@FlipYrWhig: No good deed goes unpunished.
Martin
@bemused: They have more customers. But rather than go to a high-service retailer for your stuff, people are more than happy to go to Costco, which moves the retail train along with as few people as possible, or to Amazon that does it with even fewer. On the production side, swapping out manual labor for automation is a natural activity to perform when you just laid off workers due to a weak market. You’ve already taken care of half the cost of the switch, so it’s now easier to justify than ever. Amazon now sells more e-books than paper ones. What do you think requires more labor – building and shipping ebook readers one time, or printing, binding, and shipping books? If you’ve already closed half of your retail outlets and convinced people to shop online, why reopen the retail outlets?
FlipYrWhig
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century): There used to be a pretty solid understanding on the blogs that even the original standard-bearer, Howard Dean, wasn’t a down-the-line liberal. At some point there arose this new view that the only right way to advance the goals of liberalism was to make the largest possible demands and always fight for every inch of ground. I think activists can keep that up, but actual professional Democratic politicians aren’t always able to, because they have to try to make the world a slightly better, fairer place in the amount of time they have, which might not be much. Faulting Democratic politicians for not making everything a crusade, to the point where you’re getting demoralized by that, is a prescription for eternal dissatisfaction.
Chyron HR
@Bob Loblaw:
Why bother? It’s clear that YOU are the Princess of Pure Progressivity, at least in your own mind.
P.S. Stop shitting on a great show every time you post. What did Ron Howard ever do to you?
blahblahblah
Another view on the situation:
http://i.imgur.com/knb3Q.png
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@MattR:
Here’s what bothers me about statements like this: it’s an ass-backwards way of negotiating. The key to successful negotiation is always to hide your “line in the sand” from the other side.
Until they cross it.
Bob Loblaw
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
I’ll continue to invest in my 401(k) to reap the continued rewards of the ill-gotten equities rally, just as any Real American should. Dow 13,000 here we come, bitches!
This action will produce zero new jobs for the economy.
Sanka
Clearly the answer is another hundred, thousand gazillion bazillion stimulus package because, you know, the first one was like, um…too small, and stuff. Hell, even Krugman said so, so it must be true.
And maybe the government can double the middle class tax cut that Obama gave, you know the one nobody noticed, and double it to THIRT-TWO DOLLARS a paycheck. Clearly the first $16/paycheck tax cut that you were bloviating about last year wasn’t big enough. Clearly.
Yep, thank goodness we’ve had government-loving Democrats in office these past few years. They really look after the middle class.
Stupid Republicans.
BGinCHI
Greg Sargent on where the tax bill goes now and how it can pass (or not) the House:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/12/senate_votes_for_tax_cut_deal.html
srv
@Maody: Yes, but why isn’t there a white pony?
Cat
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
I’m not sure what your point is? Who cares what value judgments people from 80 years ago made about peoples politics, I’m pretty sure they’d call me a centrist and I’m pretty well on the fringe left.
Suffern ACE
@Ozymandias, King of Ants: Of course, it is hard to do that when you are a public figure and everyone asks you to give your line in the sand during the election.
PurpleGirl
@Beej: You’re right. We need new kinds of jobs that aren’t low-wage service jobs. At the same time we need office jobs, too. Computers/technology have changed the face of office jobs. There are many less receptionists, secretaries and administrative assistants. Many of those jobs aren’t coming back either. It’s something to needs to be talked about. But I don’t know what an answer could be.
John O
It’s all easier to handle if you look at it through the arc of history.
The rich and powerful have ALWAYS tried to acquire more wealth and power and for great swaths of time they’ve been successful.
There has always been a “bell curve” (even if wildly skewed rightwards) of wealth, and the MIDPOINT in this country right now is $50K, as in 50% above, 50% below, and if we don’t spend big New New Deal boatloads of money on making the country an all in all better place to live (greener, cool SUPERTRAINS, fewer moats, et al) the next generation is going to be sniffing China’s ass for the entirety of their lives.
And so you look to the places that have gone through this themselves, say, western Europe, and figure out what to do. We’re too early in the process.
On the upside, it’s been a great time to be part of an Empire.
Brick Oven Bill
It appears that Michelle has melancholy feelings, similar to those of the Balloon Juice community. Emerging as an inspirational leader for the new youthful generation of Americans, she provides the people with one sensible answer:
Open the refrigerator and start eating.
Now, we in the Teabagger community often wonder what our First Lady is eating. One report indicated the smell of mayonnaise on her breath. But this is relatively meaningless, as people in general, and likely Michelle in particular, can put mayonnaise on nearly anything. So we have to speculate, as it would be irresponsible not to.
WereBear
@PurpleGirl: One answer is doing things that need to get done. Things like taking care of people, infrastructure, and boosting education so people come up with new things to do.
Since Reagan, it’s decided that this money should go to goat milk ice cream served in a solid gold dish.
brendancalling
senator casey told me he voted for the cuts because rich people create jobs.
yeah, his staff really said that and got mad when i pushed back.
djheru
@fasteddie9318: That sounds like a very unserious person you are quoting there…
fasteddie9318
If Cole wants to start banning people, wouldn’t Prick Oven Fail be the place to start?
fasteddie9318
@brendancalling:
Please elaborate: mad how? What was your push-back?
ETA: I used to live in PA, so I know Casey is a douchebag, but maybe my favorite vote ever was the one I cast for him against Santorum.
soonergrunt
@fasteddie9318: I thought he did that very thing once for a while. Maybe I’m mis-remembering it.
FlipYrWhig
@brendancalling: And Casey isn’t even close to being one of the most conservative Democrats. You see what Obama’s dealing with?
PurpleGirl
@Bob Loblaw: I’ve written it before, so people please note: Not everyone got 99 weeks of UI. There is an interaction between federal law and state law and state levels of unemployment. Many states only went to Tier 3; some states restrict a person to one year of benefits, no matter what; some states stop extending benefits if the state rate of unemployment drops below a certain point (and that could be as little as .2% of a percent). There are already millions of people who have dropped off UI benefits roles and this extension does nothing to help them.
beltane
@brendancalling: If that’s the case, we need to ship our rich people overseas and exchange them with the type that actually create jobs because our current crop of rich people is defective in this regard. All they do is gobble up tax cuts and sh*t out poverty in return.
Taylor
@Bulworth:
In case it isn’t obvious, that is exactly what is going to happen.
The “getting serious” part will happen when the debt limit has to be raised in April.
I mean, is there really anyone here who doesn’t see how this is going to play out?
fasteddie9318
@beltane: Well, many of them did get rich doing shit in China, so it’s probably no surprise that they’re defective.
Brachiator
@ItAintEazy:
RE: I think that is part of the reason Obama is grudgingly supporting the tax cuts for the rich, because other than unemployment insurance extensions, what else is there that can get done?
Then you better get yourself a better class of Democrats in Congress, because Obama can’t do anything by himself.
It’s not just about tax cuts for the rich. Because the Democrats (including Obama) did not get their shit together and come up with some intelligent strategy to use against the Republicans, they backed themselves into a corner. Here’s a clear warning from the IRS Commissioner about what would happen in 2010 (2011 would be an entirely new problem):
Is this OK with you? Because it would have meant higher taxes and delayed refunds in 2010, before you even got to the impact of the expiring Bush tax cuts in 2011.
Yeah, I wanted the Democrats to fight, too. But they pissed away all their advantages and refused to make an intelligent case to the voters, who might well have backed them.
But the fault is not just Obama’s. Not by any stretch. And if you want to avoid a replay of this crap in 2012, we have all got to back some stronger Democrats.
agrippa
@Buck:
It looks like win by losing to me. let the Democrats take the blame and we will win by default.
Mainstream – orthodox – economics does not have any solutions for a recession. It never has had any solutions.
Heterdox economics – the loony ones like Krugman and Stiglitz – have good ideas that would work. But, they are not taken seriously in Washington.
That is why I said — go long!!
Play the long game. Go for the big stimulus, and pass a strong financial reform bill.
Then, do the HCR reform the simple way — expand medicare to age 55. That is where the costs come in – after age 55. Don’t write a bill that you need a Philadelphis lawyer to understand.
You see, Congress is a weak organization; it cannot do very much. It, especially, cannot do much that involves the rarest commodity of all — political courage.
In the time of FDR, the the country and Washington were up against it. There were no other options. A politican will do what is right, when all other options have been exhausted. There is a good chance , not even then.
The Dems should have realized to gravity of the situation, and realzed that time was short. They were going to be punished. No matter what.
So, go long!!
Going short will get you beat, and the country will pay for it.
The country will pay for it.
We are facing years of stagnation; a state of almost but not quite depression.
Pangloss
@beltane:
Just goes to show you the decline in American manufacturing…. we can’t even make quality rich people anymore.
PurpleGirl
@WereBear: Care jobs are generally low-paying. We would have to decide as a society that those jobs should be higher paid. When you say education, what type of education do you mean?
Ruckus
@beltane:
Is a water cannon enough? Me thinks not.
And this answers your first post about not knowing what to do. Unfortunately explosives, cannons, hell force of any kind is frowned upon when seeking to adjust the banks/government. Highly frowned upon. So we protest, we write sternly written letters, we vote for people who mostly are the lesser of two evils, and we get shit upon again, for we are those who are not worthy, and we shall suffer needlessly for that.
Another Bob
What’s really depressing is to see what suckers and stooges the major part of the mainstream media are, as are their idiot viewers. It’s almost unbelievable to me that the massive fraud that is the entire Republican agenda can be perpetrated in broad daylight, as it were, and they not only get away with it, they get rewarded for it. God, what a stupid country this has become.
Tom Hilton
@catclub: I think this is just another way of overestimating the importance of posturing in the outcome of negotiations. And I’m not saying it isn’t a factor at all; I’m just saying that it’s minimal. If you have more leverage than the other party you’ll likely get a pretty good deal, and if they have more leverage you’ll get a crappy deal.
Republicans have a built-in advantage in that two of their secondary goals are a) not getting anything done and b) wrecking shit. Democrats start from a weak position because their goals include a) getting stuff done and b) fixing shit. From a Republican perspective, threatening to wreck shit if they don’t get what they want is a win-win. Democrats can’t plausibly make the same threat because in their view wrecking shit would actually be a bad thing.
The frustration many feel at starting from an inherently weaker position gets channeled, predictably (if illogically), into the perception that Democratic politicians are ‘appeasers’ and ‘weak’ and all that. I don’t find that sort of meme particularly useful.
MattR
@Tom Hilton: Here’s the thing. I don’t know for sure how I feel about this specific deal. And I can certainly understand how people could feel differently when analyzing the sides from a cost-benefit perspective. But none of that has anything do with requiring their fee fees being validated.
jman
The tax breaks are not all that effective compared to infrastructure spending. Much of the compromise is anticontractionary rather than stimulative. Not that it makes a big difference, but creating jobs would be a more effective stimulus than extending existing tax breaks. Obama placing a hiring freeze on the federal government for three years means there will be fewer jobs at a time when we need all the jobs we can get. Obama unilaterally froze discressionary spending which could have been used to increase jobs. Maybe he could change his mind?
I am going to take my FICA tax break and route it into my retirement savings account. How stimulating is that?
Drive By Wisdom
Somewhere in Texas, George Bush is smiling.
fasteddie9318
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/incoming-gop-chairman-congress-exists-serve-banks/
Incoming chair of House Banking Committee thinks that Washington and regulators exist to serve the banks, not to regulate them.
agrippa
@Anoniminous:
yes it does.
We face years of stagnation.
With the ‘third world’ [ an obsolete term ?] – China, India, Vietnam, etc, etc – entering the world economic system, the USA cannot compete on wages. The USA will have to gain advantage on other factors.
There are reasons why Economics is called ‘the dismal science’
Hawes
If you want some GOOD news, check out Bondad’s blog on the latest economic indicators.
http://bonddad.blogspot.com/
There are some decent suggestions that much of the economy really IS beginning to turn around. Ironically, manufacturing is doing well.
Lagging behind are retail, construction and non-education governmental jobs. If retail perks up, that will help that large section of non-degree holding people who have the “stickiest” unemployment.
There is a mild recession for the college educated.
There is a depression for the GED crowd.
Which is why “The GOP is the party of redistributing this country’s wealth to the rich” (aka the Sanders Gambit) should be on the lips of every Democrat for the next two years.
lol
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
The Leftie Blogosphere was advocating a payroll tax holiday as a stimulus measure for months.
But now that Obama is for it and might actually implement it, they reflexively have to be against it and portray it as the worst thing ever.
Not unlike the individual mandate that was so important during the primary when it was part of John Edwards’ (and Hillary Clinton’s) health care plan… but became the devil incarnate once Obama incorporated it into his plan.
FlipYrWhig
@Tom Hilton:
Total agreement from me on this. And it’s true that that means Republicans have more ways to threaten and wreak havoc, and it’s also true that it sucks for Democrats to be put in the position of always cleaning up Republican messes.
But it’s like –humor me here — you’re a woman partnered to a slob. If you pick up his mess you’re making yourself a doormat, but if you don’t pick up his mess you’re living in mess, and if you yell at him for not picking up his own mess, he’ll probably be even less likely to do it, plus he’ll tell everyone you’re being a bitch. There aren’t a lot of good options there, unless you’re prepared to walk, but what if you can’t afford your own place? The real solution is to make him realize that he’s being a dick, and he shouldn’t be doing that, because he should care about you. Now think of how long it would take a Republican to arrive at that conclusion. You might as well sigh and pick up the damn socks, because “caving” is actually coping, and refusing to cave is bringing on a crisis you might not win.
Observer
@Cat:
That’s probably because in any other society most of the “fringe left” would be considered centrist.
Consider: every other rich country has some form of single payer/universal healthcare. Truman proposed one back in 1945.
That’s 65 years ago. Today, nobody proposes one, even after seeing more healthcare for less cost in all those other countries. (and let’s not focus on bogus Canada or UK comparisons for a change. how about Japan? or France or Australia)
The “left” over the past 70 years has failed the US citizenry and failed them badly. All this so-called centrist “pragmatism” b.s. that some others seem to take glee in.
BGinCHI
@Hawes:
Nicely put. And we wonder why the media aren’t really covering it? They don’t understand it. And part of the Tea Party genius was getting this anger and anxiety to flow somewhere (downhill).
Edit: block quote missed highlighting the second sentence. Sorry, can’t fix.
FlipYrWhig
@lol:
That has me vexed. It was Robert Reich’s pet stimulus idea, for chrissakes!
OK, he had a second part where to pay for it you raise the payroll taxes on incomes over $250K, but, still, no one _used_ to find the very idea of a payroll tax holiday to be an abomination before the Prog Gods.
I wrote to Steve Benen and asked him to take it up, but he hasn’t yet.
Brachiator
@jibeaux:
Sorry, it’s not just the Blue Dogs. Obama and the Congressional leadership screwed the pooch by not coming up with better contingencies. Some of this may have been to help the Blue Dogs, some of whom ended up being defeated in the mid-terms anyway.
The dirty little secret is that the 2011 Bush tax cuts are small cheese. Tax and Accounting Journals and sites have been churning the numbers for months. The mainstream media is only recently getting up to speed.
A recent WSJ article notes the following:
And a kind of a chart on the impact of letting the Bush tax cuts expire can be found here.As far as I can see, Obama felt he had to deal in order to get unemployment compensation extended and because some 2010 items had to be resolved.
And maybe he thinks he can get some votes for START, DADT and other items.
At this point it really doesn’t much matter. Some kind of deal always had to get done. Anybody, anywhere, who says that the Republicans and the Democrats could just kick the ball into 2011 is smoking crack.
Pat
Let’s ask why THIS unemployment extension was so critical to get passed when the other two or was it three? were not???? The Bush tax cuts were meant to expire. He should have let them expire. That’s what Obama being the damn president could have done!The unemployed have been suffering going on years now; one more denial of an extension would not have been the end of the world. We are managing somehow. So why was it so critical that unemployment benefits get extended this time when it wasn’t so critical to the recovery the last two or three times? He gave the filthy rich the perfect opportunity to get their tax cuts permanent in exchange for a lousy thirteen months of relief for American families. He has broken one too many promises for this old bird. I know when I’ve been had. Wake up! John Cole!
Observer
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s better to pick his shit up so long as the bargain is that he lets some of your bad habits slide too. I can’t vouch for everyone but that’s what a lot of couples do.
See, that’s a compromise in that it goes both ways.
The fact that you can’t see this even in a hypothetical of your own imagination is why you and @Tom Hilton don’t really have good standing to criticize so-called progressives. You guys have the stink of letting too many loser arguments from loser Dems get inside your head.
MattR
@FlipYrWhig: I like the analogy but I would modify it to note that you don’t necessarily have to convince the guy that he is being a dick if you can convince someone else (your parents/the voters) that this guy is a dick so they provide you with an alternate, better place to stay.
@Observer: But what if he won’t pick up his shit or let your bad habits slide?
FlipYrWhig
@Observer: Homogeneous countries love their social-welfare states; heterogeneous ones like ours seem to have “I got mine fuck you” reactions where they believe someone, somewhere, is getting a free ride from The Gummint and it’s just eating them up inside. That has nothing to do with centrist pragmatism. It has to do with how herculean a task it will be to do a course correction and solve the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” problem.
WyldPirate
@Tom Hilton:
What you are talking about here is likely to play out very badly for the Democrats and Obama.
If you think about it, many people on the “left” who keep up with the political machinations in DC are going berserk over the fact that the Dems look “weak” and are “appeasers” in their eyes. How do you think this plays out there in independent land of middle america amongst those 20-25% of the fence-sitting “independents” in battleground states?
The Rethugs will certainly fan the flames of the meme. The will also flame the “meme” that Obama agreed with them that “tax cuts will stimulate the economy”. If the economy improves, Obama will get a little credit–the Rethugs will get more. If it does not improve, the Rethugs have the “Obama drove us deeper into debt” card to play.
In the meantime, the Rethugs have countless ways to sabotage as much as they can over the next two years. With the passivity of the Dems and their leadership, the “Dems are weak” meme will sell well and the Rethugs excel at selling lies.
Irony Abounds
People seem to forget that the only real tax cut that will occur under the deal is the payroll tax cut. Maintaining the tax rates at 2010 levels isn’t lowering anyone’s taxes, it is just avoiding tax hikes that were set to take place. So the discussion about the stimulative effects of income tax cuts is kind of silly. There are no stimulative effects, and there wouldn’t have been any even if only the rates for the $250k and under income folks had been retained at 2010 levels. Getting the payroll tax cut for a year, along with the extension of unemployment benefits for 13 months is the stimulus, which is badly needed. Half a loaf, hell, one-quarter a loaf is better than no bread at all.
Tom Hilton
@MattR: If it’s a matter of dispassionately analyzing the costs and benefits of the deal, then no, it isn’t about validating anyone’s fee-fees.
If it’s framed in terms of lines in the sand or being a fighter or any of that nonsense, then it is entirely about validating people’s fee-fees.
See the difference?
cyntax
@lol:
Just to be clear, the poll was showing broad disapproval for this among Dems, Repubs, and Independents. So it might be worth considering that people generally just don’t like the idea of underfunding Social Security, and aren’t trying to be mean to the President.
Martin
@FlipYrWhig: You’re missing an obvious solution – burn everything that doesn’t get picked up without warning. If he complains about you not warning him, tell him you didn’t want to nag him. If he complains about burning it instead of putting it away, remind him that burning shit is cool.
My daughter (9) made a good observation recently. If you want to get a boy to stop talking about something, start talking about bacon or Star Wars (or better yet, how would a Jedi cook bacon) and the conversation is guaranteed to shift. Boys are easy once you break out of the box. (That conversation technique works for boys from 9 to 99 by the way.)
lol
@Irony Abounds:
It’s easy for the left to play chicken with unemployment benefits when they’re not the ones in the car.
lol
@cyntax:
I’m talking about the fucking bloggers who have been advocating a payroll tax holiday for months but are now portraying it as an attack on Social Security. None of them are talking about how it polled.
I guess since their “catfood commission” wet dream didn’t pan out, they have to make something up.
CircleSquared
@cyntax: I heard that also from another source. The pity is, what difference does it make?
People don’t vote like they poll. And that says something interesting about what it really means to “stay on message.”
FlipYrWhig
@Observer:
No way, man, all compromise is complicity!
Remember, it’s an analogy. The Republican guy doesn’t really have to do anything, because he’s not really part of a couple. He just lives here and wants to make our lives miserable, and we can’t move out because for some reason it’s the only house.
Anyway, I think you’re making the mistake of reading my statements about _why_ things happen politically as though I was saying what I’d _like_ to happen politically. Sure, all kinds of things _could_ happen, _could_ be tried. Would they work? Well, convince me. Usually I haven’t found the “fight”/no-compromise positions to play out any better than the “appeasement”/compromise ones.
PurpleGirl
@Hawes: I didn’t see anything about the employment of people over 50.
Cain
@Tom Hilton:
But what end, if they break everything they in the end have to own it and the American people will then expect them to fix stuff. (stuff they caused in the first place) So what are they going to do? You can’t keep giving tax cuts because people will want to see something from thing.
I suspect at the same time they give tax cuts they’ll use the crisis to dismantle medicare and medicaid. I doubt highly they’ll be able to do that. Still they’ll claim that they can use personal accounts or whatever, and then create a cottage industry of charlatans who will try to part people from the money in those accounts.
I’m tempted to let them do that because we know that one these old folks give all their money to Rush Limbaugh, churches and what not they’ll have nothing left. You’ll bankrupt your base!
God I hate being a liberal… I’d probably fight the plan regardless.
cain
MattR
@Tom Hilton: I see what you are trying to say, but IMO it is a false dichotomy. It seems that we have a fundamental disagreement about the role of what you call “aggressive posturing” on future negotiations between the same two parties. I believe that sometimes you have to reject getting $20 out of $100 even if that means that both sides get $0 because that improves your chances of getting $50 the next time (and the time after that, …), but that doesn’t mean that I would necessarily advocate rejecting $45.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
But this doesn’t work, not even on special episodes of Oprah.
The Republicans said, “let’s cut taxes and cut back on government regulation.” The economy tanked, the GOP lost the 2008 presidential election, and what is their solution to the economic crisis?
“Let’s cut taxes and cut back on government regulation.”
They’re worse than delusional. But at this point, I don’t want to indulge the pointless navel gazing on whether this compromise is a good deal. At some point, the Democrats are going to have to deal with clear Republican failure with respect to the economy.
And this probably will include the failure of this proposed compromise to accomplish much of anything for the economy.
FlipYrWhig
@Martin: Burning things might work if your goal is to have the upper hand, but I’m not sure it works if your goal is to have mutuality and cooperation. But, again, that’s the problem with the analogy: by saying it’s a couple I’ve already made a mild conceptual mess, because you’d think that couples have some kind of feeling for one another. Republicans don’t have that kind of feeling, they just want the house. If they drive us out, they win, and if they make us do what they want, they win, and they refuse to do what we want, but we can’t move. I don’t think there are many human interactions like that, which may be why it’s hard to figure out a solution.
cyntax
@lol:
Actually, if you look at Digby’s write-ups of it, she handles it pretty fairly and brings in experts outside of blogistan, so limiting your critique to some people you’ve already decided are wrong doesn’t really get at why this may not be a good idea, or why most of the country doesn’t seem to like it. You’re exhibiting the same type of myopic knee-jerk reaction you’re criticizing.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator:
Yeah, I know, that was supposed to be the point. It doesn’t really work. You’re stuck.
Yes, at some point Democrats are going to have to deal with clear Republican failure/sabotage. I worry about how that’s going to happen. That’s why what I long for is a winning anti-obstruction strategy. I don’t know if anyone’s come up with one yet. I hope it happens soon.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin:
A Jedi would cook bacon by holding his lightsaber just close enough to it to fry it, but not so close as to burn it. The Force would inform him just how close that would be.
lol
@FlipYrWhig:
Divorced couple fighting over a house?
FlipYrWhig
@cyntax: Benen had a germane post today: TAX DEAL ENJOYS PUBLIC SUPPORT.
WereBear
@PurpleGirl: Yes, certain jobs should certainly be valued more than they are.
But I see a lot of people seeking jobs of any kind, and a lot of things needing to be done.
If we, as a society, said it is worth it to tutor children having trouble learning, worth it to fix a bridge that’s about to fall down, worth it to get a bunch of people out caulking windows this winter… we will be better all the way around.
But we, as a society, are not saying that.
Joe Beese
@joe from Lowell:
1. For a Consitutional law professor, he seems to have an awfully hard time with the 4th Amendment.
2. Glenn Beck is a bestselling author.
3. You know who else mobilized masses of followers? (I kid. I kid the President.)
Observer
@FlipYrWhig:
No, your hypothetical accurately describes the mindset of Dems today and their supporters sitting beside us in the peanut gallery: every description of every scenario results in a “loss” and every alternative suggestion is derided as “wanting a pony”.
I shouldn’t have to convince you (or Tom Hilton or Cole or anybody) of anything; the historical record is there for all to see. The US is the only rich country without universal healthcare. The guy who started Social Security “welcomed their scorn” etc. Universal healthcare was proposed in 1945 by Truman and the left backed down. FDR wouldn’t have backed down. Just sayin’.
Your way hasn’t worked real well for 65 years and you’re asking me to convince you to try a different strategy?
How about “Get mad as hell, get your people out on TV and start making your case for liberalism and get a spine, when some other left winger gets mad in a way you don’t approve DON’T PISS ON THEM, and don’t compromise with weasels”.
FlipYrWhig
@lol: But somehow there’s no other house to move to.
cyntax
@CircleSquared:
Well I imagine that staying on message is a very important way of influencing what people remember when they’re in the polling both.
Omnes Omnibus
@Joe Beese: The Fourth Amendment tends to be covered in Criminal Procedure not Con Law.
WereBear
@PurpleGirl: That was kind of the stimulus, actually. We do need more of it; people who don’t know how it works in the first place think it didn’t work.
Martin
@FlipYrWhig: If mutuality and cooperation were a shared goal, he’d already be picking his shit up. It sounds like you know your goal and either he has a different goal, or has forgotten what his goal is.
And that’s my good news. Congress is like 1000x worse than that.
CircleSquared
@gene108: @gene108: That’s exactly why they’re heartless bastards. Lloyd Blankfein STILL thinks he’s doing “God’s work.”
Welcome to Hard Times, 21st century version. Just like Dickens, with the plot blown all over the blogosphere.
cyntax
@FlipYrWhig:
And it does, though it’s the UI benefits that have the most support (D-88%, R-55%, I-73%) and payroll tax holiday that enjoys the least (D-37%, R-42%, I-38%). With the tax cuts floating in the break even territory.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, but I’m thinking that there’s a very high falloff of heat from light sabers as a function of distance – not unlike magnetism – given that they can melt through blast doors and yet not seem to affect objects just a slight distance from them (remember Anakin with two lightsabers at Count Dooku’s head – no sunburn going on there). That leaves a very narrow window in which to put your bacon – particularly if you have a crispy/chewy preference. And what about spatter? And does the color of the lightsaber make a difference? Are blue sabers hotter than red ones? And what of that freaky Canadian bacon? What the fuck do you do with that shit?
(See how effective this is)
Scamp Dog
@General Stuck: I nominate this Wire song, Reuters, as theme song for the event.
BGinCHI
Jed Lewison kicks the ass off the media frenzy around one judge’s ruling on HCR in VA:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/12/6/925954/-Big-story:-HCR-ruled-unconstitutional.-Little-story:-14-judges-disagree.
AP has this headline up right now:
“Big legal setback for Obama’s health care overhaul”
Assholes.
FlipYrWhig
@Observer:
Sounds great, but you’d have to have all Democrats do that all at the same time, and most of them don’t want to. You can have a president who does that, and he’d be pilloried in the media and tagged as a strident partisan. You can have a candidate who does that, and he’ll never get elected, because he’ll get a very enthusiastic 25% of the vote.
That’s the problem, in a prisoners-dilemma kind of way: it would work really well for all Democrats if all Democrats did it, but there are going to be some individuals who benefit more by not playing along, which diminishes the chances for success of the ones who do it.
For that to work, you’d probably have to suffer through multiple cycles of Goldwater-esque blowouts as you bring fighting progressives into the fold and re-brand Democrats as the fighting progressive party. There are a lot of “centrists” who flipped to the D side in the past 20 years. (Incidentally, I’m not one, not at all.) You’re going to piss them off, deliberately.
I think you need to nurture the fighting progressives _while at the same time_ accepting that there aren’t yet enough fighting progressives to implement fighting progressivism as the law of the land.
jack
@Anoniminous:
Uh, $300 trillion estimated CDO liability?
The world economy is estimated at about $70 trillion.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you don’t know anything about this particular topic.
Also too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vohNUTTx3A
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig:
Me too. I hate to say this but if Barak Obama was actually Bill Oliver, a 40 something Democratic white male veteran overtly Christian, we would be dealing with it now successfully.
The GOP is holding down the working class of America while the corporate rich rape them. The only way the GOP gets away with this is by confusing the working class as to where the real danger is:
“No, we aren’t holding you down! We are helping you up so those other guys don’t get a chance to mug you.”
How much more suffering has to happen before white working class American figures out who has them by the throat?
Mnemosyne
@Observer:
He also created a Social Security program that predominantly covered white men. At the time, the NAACP was stridently opposed to it because almost 2/3rds of African-Americans nationwide were left out in the cold, with the numbers even worse in the South.
FDR also would have created it so it primarily benefited white men, the way he created Social Security and the New Deal.
Just sayin’.
FlipYrWhig
@Observer: And you’ll probably say to my comment, well, what we’re doing now isn’t working, so we have to try something different. I have a lot of sympathy for that view. The problem is how much worse things can get while we figure out the something different that works. I think it can still get much, much worse, not only ideologically but materially.
Ross Hershberger
I see the proof every day that the employment picture sucks. My employer has about 80 local employees. Maybe 60 of those spots could be filled by people whose only skills are showing up consistently and a little spoken English.
Instead of the single parents and GED crowd that these jobs were designed for we’re getting Engineers, Financial Consultants, former teachers, Realtors, etc. What’s really depressing is that some of them have been at it for several years without moving on. I see those skills going to waste and it depresses me far more than knowing some bond trader just added a third floor to his other vacation home.
Brighton
Obama has the whole executive branch – lots of power. While the repugs are sitting on their hands and weeping, he can use tax policy, antitrust, EPA carbon regulatory authority, some other stuff. It does however, take political will . . .
Here’s a post on how he can do an end run around Boner
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
But actually, people are rarely stuck. They just don’t want to do what might be unpleasant.
In my ideal world, the House Democrats would stick to their guns, let the Bush tax cuts expire, and demand that the Senate resolve the lingering 2010 tax issues. They could even give ground on the estate tax and some other issues.
But in any case, the Democrats may have just kicked the can into 2012.
But here is the odd thing, the extra burden that the Democrats have taken on. A “compromise” now ties them to this new mixture of Bush tax cuts and payroll tax holiday. In 2008, the Democrats could make the case that the Republicans screwed up. In 2012, if the economy does not improve, it will be both party’s failure. And even if they try to say that the Bush tax cuts should now expire because they don’t work, the obvious reply will be “Then why did you agree to extend them?”
I’ve seen posts hear and in other threads voicing concerns that the Democrats don’t know how to counter the Republicans. I don’t see how it makes anything better by yoking themselves to Republican policy.
But maybe this returns to an earlier idea, that the Democrats need to push their own plans, even if the GOP dominated House shoots them down at first.
FlipYrWhig
@cyntax: I think it’s another sign that, contrary to what keeps being said around the blogosphere, everyday people _really do like_ things that appear to be “bipartisan agreements.” They liked the provisions of HCR, but not the bill, because the bill was the work of Democrats ramming it down our collective throats. They don’t like all the provisions of this tax cut deal, but they like the totality of it, because it was the work of Democrats and Republicans settling their differences on common ground.
I’m telling y’all, as much as WE all mock Broder/Brooks paeans to the spirit of bipartisanship, the public digs it, time after time.
And that, to me, is why Obama uses bipartisan and compromise _rhetoric_ as much as he does, and why highlighting Republican obstruction could be a potent counterstrike _if_ someone could come up with a way to do it without seeming like arcane whining over process.
Observer
@FlipYrWhig:
problem numero uno right there.
To do that you need people who aren’t actually ashamed to
a) be liberal and
b) discipline those who stray and
c) organize singular talking points like the Repubs do.
But that would mean you need smart people in the Dem party and there is little evidence of that right now. If there were smarter people in charge then a half term senator would never have been elected POTUS because stronger smart players would never have let an establishment rookie vie for the prize in the first place. Showed how weak the Dem establishment is.
CircleSquared
@Beej: Not just those jobs, either. Value of jobs that actually care for people seems to be dropping–not that it was that high to begin with. Why teachers, nurses, hospice staff, social workers, school counselors, and the like are worth so little, while people who arguably add no value to society are worth so much, is an utter mystery to me.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_cassidy
BGinCHI
@Ross Hershberger: Maybe we were better off with the USSR and China as communist monoliths. Capitalism post-cold war style is kicking our asses.
Oh, unless you’re rich.
Still and all, compared to everyday life for many in the 3rd world, we don’t know how good we have it.
SectarianSofa
@Joe Beese:
Moron. You’re why Usenet died.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: For what it’s worthy, I give you tons of credit for articulating both views of the problem and outlines of possible solutions that are both well-considered and plausible — rather than further refinements on the bully pulpit / schoolyard bully / negotiation 101! material that so often crops up in the blogosphere.
PurpleGirl
@Ross Hershberger: They aren’t moving on because they can’t get jobs in their own fields. Somehow they managed to get the job at your company and they can’t move on, they are hugging the job for dear life because it’s a job and a paycheck.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig: Thanks much for your kind remarks. I appreciate your concerns as well.
FlipYrWhig
@Observer: OK, but solving the root causes of why Democrats aren’t very far left as a party is a decades-long project, and in the meantime we need to use our paltry welfare state to help people.
Basically what needs to happen is the cultivation of a voting public comprised of at least 40% liberals and at least 20% more open to liberalism under certain conditions. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that yet, and meanwhile we’re dealing with a voting public that already has at least 40% conservatives and at least 25% more open to conservatism. My figures are all made up, but that’s how it feels from the viewpoint of southeastern Virginia.
jl
@FlipYrWhig: If true, then I think Obama could deliver better policy by starting out with strong Democratic positions that he is only willing to weaken if the GOP makes similar concessions.
In my view, the Broder bipartisanship stuff is a lot posturing, with mostly bad ideas on the substance.
If the administration could posture a la Broder and start the negotiations from a position that preserved more good policy at the end, then I would have less objection to genuflecting to Broderism.
Ross Hershberger
@PurpleGirl:
Exactly. And tomorrow at 3:00 pm they’ll be joined for the first time by my wife, a genius 3D CAD designer. She could stay on UE but the jobs in her field are probably just gone.
Time to start over at age 50, at the bottom.
And with that I shall sign off. I’ve really depressed myself now.
chopper
@FlipYrWhig:
this is basically the fundamental salient point in american politics and culture. when people ask me why european countries are able to function so much better in terms of a social safety net, i point this out.
joel hanes
@Tom Hilton:
Tom :
Is it possible that the tax-break extension/FICA holiday/etc compromise isn’t a good example of Democratic “over-compromising” but that other, better examples exist ?
For example, it seems to me that the Congressional Dems needlessly gave away the store with the “Gang of 14 compromise” that safely ushered Alito and Roberts into SCOTUS.
cyntax
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t think you’re reading that poll accurately. With a 50+1 process you get a 50+1 product. People support it, but not strongly. Overall people are pretty “meh” about this tax-cut deal.
Now if that’s the best you can do in this situation–fine. But it’s worth thinking about how a better product could be made next time, since strong support and approval for the product the President is producing should translate to strong support for him at the polls. And when you dig into the poll you see that the UI benefits are supported across the board, the payroll trax holiday is unpopular across the board, and extending the estate tax is approved by a minority of independents.
So in terms of crafting a strategy about how to prepare for this fight two years from now, following Broders/Brooks isn’t a good idea. You’d be better off trying to succeed at a more progressive version of this bill.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig:
I think that might be one of the problems surfacing on this blog. Some of us are concentrating on the help people now aspect of liberalism. Others are focused on effort to move the discussion, the Democratic Party, and the country to the left. Both are laudable goals. Unfortunately, I think they conflict at times, and this is one of those times.
BGinCHI
@Ross Hershberger: My friends in the architect biz are hurting bad too, and scrambling to find things they can do that make sense for them.
Best of luck to you and your wife.
dogwood
@fasteddie9318: It’s Cole’s site so he can do what he wants, but I wouldn’t let that in my home.
agrippa
@Observer:
It may, also, indicate how few people want the job.
It is not just the Democratic establishment.
I do not think that very many people wanted the job.
I was not alone, amoung ordinary people, who saw a meltdown coming.
Surely, people in Washington and New York City saw it coming.
Those three points of yours are on the mark. All need to be done.
SectarianSofa
@FlipYrWhig:
I usually blame the general increase in anti-intellectualism coupled with the toothless, feckless media for part of this. Except for where liberalism intersects with some existing populist strain, it seems like a very uphill battle to change minds/win hearts.
Montysano
Spencer Bachus laid it out for us:
I’d like to think that he then thought “Did I just say that out loud?” In any event, folks, there it is. As Beltane said up top: “We really do have a shadow government made up of the big banks and multinational corporations.”
My only hope is that the whole fucking mess can crash just enough to bury Wall Street, but just short of relegating all of us to barbecuing sparrows under an overpass.
Martin
@Mnemosyne:
Good God, when haven’t Democrats been douchebags?
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@Suffern ACE: Then you either (a) refuse to answer, or (b) lie. The other side does all the time.
Of course, you’ll have to put up with the predictable butthurt from Broder et al., but you’ll have that anyway, so where’s the problem?
johnny walker
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century): That’s a nice right-wing talking point ya got there. Straight outta the, “Anyone who thinks taxes need to be raised can feel free to write Washington a check” playbook it is.
—
Also I notice some building/resurgent meme about the demonstrated wisdom of Edwards supporters. Turns out they would’ve supporter a philanderer! Ok, the Edwards candidacy wouldn’t have worked out so well, granted. Now is that a policy critique or were people who preferred his platform supposed to have known he’d have a personal issue? “Hmm, I prefer his healthcare plan but man he just has the hair of an adulterer…” Help me out here.
Tom Hilton
@joel hanes:
Absolutely, and I think the Gang of 14 may be a good example. (Then again, from the perspective of the Democrats as a whole it’s also an example of a fundamentally weak negotiating position: because their coalition includes people like Nelson and Lieberman, whose incentives run crosswise to those of the liberal caucus, they simply don’t have a lot of leverage regardless of how aggressively or passively they behave.)
PurpleGirl
@Ross Hershberger: I wish you and your wife luck and cheer for the New Year. (CAD was one of the areas I thought about taking training in but then I saw that even it wasn’t showing a lot of jobs and I figured at 58, I couldn’t do the entry level thing there.)
DPirate
Does it occur to anyone that one reason for wanting to deny extensions on unemployment for people is so we can claim a mere 10% unemployment rate? I wonder what the real unemployment rate is. If we took all people above 18 and made a ratio of how many had fulltime jobs, I suspect we’d see something more like 30+%. We don’t count people who have to work at less than 8/40, or those whose benefits have run out, or those who do not file, or illegals, or those who don’t work but for whom there would not be a job if they wanted one, or welfare recipients?
BTW, when is the next physics post? Here is an article from NYT dismissing the Big Bullshit, er, I mean, Big Bang.
“highlycontroversial” hahahah Don’t you dare step on my grant!
Martin
@Ross Hershberger: Sorry to hear that.
If she’s creative, has she considered the game and movie industries? Neither one pays particularly well (other than my friend who is looking to pick up his 2nd Oscar for the effects for Tron Legacy) but they’re areas with some demand for that skillset and there’s a fair bit of contract work out there.
DPirate
@Montysano: Western civ needs a reboot. All the files are corrupted.
WereBear
Damn, I really feel for her. And that’s the point I’ve been making in this thread; she could do things. Great things!
And we need great things.
But in my very town we have people who don’t get that at all; like the way they don’t even get that Wal-Mart is ripping them off. They whine that they wish they had a WallyWorld closer to them, because they are driving fifty miles away every six months because the cheap crap they bought is falling apart, again.
You can tell them over and over again not to buy cheap crap and they will tell you it’s so cheap; they can’t afford buying better.
And that’s just it. Until more people wise up and see the game being played down the road, they will aspire to cheap crap.
nancydarling
“The whole thing is depressing and you just feel so helpless.” John, we have to keep believing as MLK said that the arc of the Universe bends toward justice.
To atone for something ugly I said to the Pirate in the last thread, I give you all a Youtube video my daughter made for me a couple of years ago. It’s my Christmas present before heading off to CA tomorrow. I really believe that the Christmas story is the best of all the stories in the Bible. That said, all my years of hauling my kids to Church on Sunday morning produced two pantheists. Their mother has become one too. It is still a great story,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdYJjEYtTlw&feature=related
Keith G
@Omnes Omnibus: We have a Bingo.
FlipYrWhig
@cyntax: I think you’re reading it in terms of policy preferences and I’m reading it in terms of optics. I think it indicates that when something, anything, emerges from Washington that can reasonably be called “bipartisan,” people will say they like that thing. They have a lot of faith in the idea that if sufficient numbers of Democrats and Republicans come together to support something, it’s probably pretty good. We see that working the other direction all the time, where people will report much more support for something as a policy than they will after being told it’s the “Democratic” or “Obama” policy. I just think the “bipartisanship” notion runs extremely deep in American society, probably even more so among people who don’t pay that much attention to politics, because it’s a proxy for “reasonable compromise.”
My view is that a lot of Republicans’ success in the last election arose from tagging _Democrats_ as uncompromising partisans, thereby making Republicans look like they were just standing up for their views, as opposed to what we all saw, which was Republicans being uncompromising partisans and Democrats continually making gestures towards bipartisan cooperation.
WyldPirate
@FlipYrWhig:
Flip, I get accused an awful lot of advocating things that “won’t work”, or “if only Obama would use his bully pulpit”, or “you just want Obama to fail”. This is all bullshit.
I’m doing it for the very reasons you are lamenting–something else has to be done. Doing what has been done has not worked and is dragging the country further to the right.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity.
FlipYrWhig
@Tom Hilton:
Yup, this is a big reason why Democrats get all jacked up when they try to implement liberal policy. Republicans just decided to see what would happen if they got reduced to nearly the minimum size they could possibly have and acted with near-total unison. And they found out that it actually _worked_! That’s ominous. It’s really not supposed to. It’s really not supposed to be the case that a tiny minority can shut down just about everything without _at least_ being put on the defensive for it. But that’s not what happened. They did it anyway and never apologized, and the public barely noticed. That sucks.
agrippa
@FlipYrWhig:
I was barely aware that the Democrats were campaigning at all. It seemed to me that they were, essentially, AWOL.
The campaign was worse than their mediocre law writing.
goblue72
The Washington elites don’t care because in their world, everything is rosy. I was recently in DC and it truly is a bubble – with the federal government ever more involved in the economy and other areas of our lives (whether the Democratic version through Obama’s stimulus or the Bush version through No Child Left Behind, or both version through endless wars), there’s plenty of slop for the pigs to feed at the trough – lobbyists, lawyers, “consultants”, think tanks, national organizations, and the federal bureaucracy. The money just keeps flowing.
Now, out here in the Real World ™, where its just one crap sandwich after another, its a different story. And unfortunately, its a story where the liberals in the story have lost their balls.
Liberals need to take their cue from the unions, who aren’t above doing things the Chicago Way from time to time. You’d be surprised how quickly a condo developer agrees to use union carpenters and plumbers in a union-town when they know that if they don’t, a mysterious fire will burn their building to the ground halfway though construction.
I had a conversation recently with a friend who sees himself as a fairly left-wing guy. I said we need put the fear of god back into the rich. That there needs to be consequences to breaking the social contract. Consequences like what recently happened in the UK when Prince Charles car got attacked. Consequences like the rich find themselves facing a rash of mansion burnings. Consequences like old fashioned bread riots in the streets with bricks and molotov cocktails.
Now, I was probably exaggerating a bit – but not by much.
FlipYrWhig
@WyldPirate: OK, fine, something else has to be done, but IMHO you need to accept that in the course of testing out that something else to see how well it works, Republicans are going to do a hell of a lot of damage. Someone might say, “Pfft, they do plenty of damage now.” It could be much, much worse.
I think it must be like having a sick child, and the standard treatment lessens his pain but isn’t curing the underlying sickness, and there’s a new treatment that _could_ work, but it could also hasten his death. Do you choose the continued life with reduced pain, maybe buying time for something else to emerge, or roll the dice on an untested longshot? Neither one is obviously right.
It’s maudlin to frame the discussion in terms of sick children, I know, because it isn’t that, but these are the kinds of choices politicians face: certain harm-reduction now vs. uncertain methods that could mean a cure or even faster decline.
FlipYrWhig
@goblue72:
Well, many modern unions seem to take their cue from the Democratic party, accepting various shitty deals because the alternative is everyone losing their jobs. As happens with Democrats, when unions strike these days sympathy tends not to be with the union. It’s a very similar dilemma. Redeveloping that strength we all want is a long-term process, and symbolism and gestures might feel good but don’t bring it into effect.
cyntax
@FlipYrWhig:
Well, then the Dems need get better at optics and framing or we’re totally screwed. As opposed to now when we’re mostly screwed. This is my glass half full perspective, it might need some more work…
dogwood
@johnny walker:
The far left ignored the vast disparities between Edward’s rhetoric during the campaign and his actual voting record in the Senate. He voted with the Republicans on most major policy both domestic and foreign. From the get-go they didn’t like the way Obama talked about policy and politics, disregarding the fact that his record was reliably liberal. Obama is a liberal president who doesn’t have enough votes in Congress to pass his agenda. What he isn’t is a populist.
Dee Loralei
@nancydarling: Your daughter has a beautiful voice.
Anoniminous
@jack:
Market includes the “at risk” amounts. CDOs are an integral part of the total derivative market which was estimated in 2008 to be (somewhere) between $596 trillion and $1.4 quad-trillion (tho’ I have a hard time buying the latter figure) representing a 5.96 to a way-too-much leveraging of the total (estimated) globally held stock and bonds.
Rip the ‘tipping point’ fraction of direct CDOs out and the whole Ponzi Scheme they support (mathematically) comes crashing down.
Yes global GNP is only (estimate) $72 trillion. THAT’S WHAT MAKES THE SITUATION SO INSANE! The idiots started playing mathematical games with financial instruments, leveraging out to the max.
goblue72
@FlipYrWhig: I’m not talking about symbolism – I am literally talking about physically burning things to the ground.
Case in point (which I referenced above but was probably not clear enough on) – in several large West Coast cities (and even some not-so-large cities out here), its pretty much accepted as fact, that if you are building a condo or apartment project of a significant enough size, then you are going to be using unionized-trades for at least your major trades (carpenters, plumbers, electricians).
Its not out of great concern that you’ll get a picket line or other type of formal action. (there some concern, but its not the biggest one). No, the reason big developers out here just go “yup, we’re going union on this job” is because they literally fear their buildings would get burned to the ground. (its happpened) Or all their plumbing lines have been stripped out overnight. Or that their non-union workers would get physically harassed so much that they stop showing up and it forces a work stoppage.
Its not something people like to talk about in polite company, but historians of the labor movement will admit if pressed, that the threat of violence was one tool in the toolbox of the labor gains that were made in the early part of the last century.
I see a lot of apologists running around going “but look, in his day, FDR was criticized as a centrist!”. Which true, only in the complete absence of context. And in the context of his day, FDR could go the plutocracy and point to real life anarchists, communists and socialists who organized in large numbers to literally fight for a revolution and say “See – what I’m offering is keeping THOSE people at bay from you.” So yeah, to an early 20th century leftist, FDR WAS a centrist. Today, the GOP would call him a terrorist.
FlipYrWhig
@cyntax: That’s why, to Corner Stone’s chagrin, I keep holding out hope that eventually Obama is going to come out roaring about how many times he has played ball and gone along with deals he didn’t like and tried to be reasonable… but now _this_ — something; maybe the debt limit/government shutdown? — has gone too far.
Tom Hilton
@FlipYrWhig: Again, I think the Republican advantage is a function of their agenda. You can get by with an ideologically pure irreducible minimum if and only if your goals are obstruction and destruction. If you have any constructive goals, you have to have a broader-based coalition. Which is to say, a coalition that’s harder to hold together.
Anoniminous
@bemused:
The near future is going to be a wild ride, that’s for sure.
@agrippa:
Well, I’m not an economist! (I don’t go around insulting YOU … do I?)
LOL
I work with artificial intelligence systems “dealing with” Information in Real Time complex, noisy, and uncertain environments. I use economic and financial data as test benches to validate models, tools, and techniques for finding the nugget in a mountain of cruft.
Suffern ACE
@agrippa:
Perhaps a bit too much time on our side was sent raising the national profile of republican candidates for such offices like Alabama State Ag Commissioner or Random Ohio County Republican Treasurer or Republican Governor of South Carolina, but otherwise, I think a lot of Democrats were also running. It was hard to notice them.
agrippa
@Suffern ACE:
That was – sort of – a smart aleck remark.
But, not really
agrippa
@dogwood:
I agree.
Those people in Congress were,and remain, a real disappointment.
A sad spectacle.
LM
This is brilliant! The children of others here will be voting your daughter into office in twenty or thirty years, I’ll bet.
mclaren
There are at least four different realistic practical options Obama could use — and I’ve pointed out these four different options over and over and over again.
Option 1: Obama can sign the tax cuts for the rich and then use a signing statement to sequester the funds, leaving only the unemployment extension to go through. Don’t tell me “the president doesn’t have the authority to do this!” because you’re lying and recent history proves you’re lying. Bush and Reagan used signing statements in exactly this way. People in congress and the media screamed and pulled their hair and tore their clothes, and in the end, it stood up. If Obama used this option people in congress would howl and tear their hair, and the beltway pundits would shriek and gibber in horror…and in the end, it would hold up.
Option 2: Obama could have threatened to unleash IRS hell on everyone who makes more than 10 million a year if the senate tries to force him to sign that tax-cuts-for-the-rich part of the bill. Don’t tell me “Nixon did this, it’s a targeted IRS audit” because you’re lying. The president has the authority to instruct the IRS to start auditing the living sh*t out of everyone who makes more than a certain amount of money per year if he wants to. The IRS hasn’t got enough auditors to audit 110 million taxpaying adults do all audits must be targeted — Obama would simply change the targets slightly. It’s legal, and when you claim it isn’t, you’re lying and no one will pay attention to you.
Option 3: Obama could threaten to unleash DOJ hell on every rich person in America if they try to force him to go through with tax cuts for the rich. Does anyone doubt that everyone who makes more than 10 million a year would present a juicy target for the DOJ? I guarantee you these rich people are hiding money overseas, employing undocumented underpaid immigrant nannies, they’re using drugs, they’re violating the law in countless ways, and all Obama has to do is inform Boehner that the DOJ will start strictly enforcing the law on everyone who makes more than 10 million a year. Show Boehner a great big stack of pending indictments and then tell Boehner “You want these indictments to go away? Don’t make me sign that tax cuts for the rich horseshit.” Don’t try to tell me enforcing the law is illegal, you’re not only lying, you’re ignorant.
Option 4: Obama could declare a national emergency and set up something like the Depression-era CCC and sequester monies from the Pentagon budget to pay for it. That would get millions of people who can’t find work government work — if necessary,resurfacing highways, repainting rusting bridges, whatever, anything to get those peoples working again even if it’s just digging ditches for new sewer lines and then filling ’em up again. Doesn’t matter, get people working again, kick-start aggregate demand, pay for it by taking the funds from horseshit Pentagon scam projects like the worthless unworkable anti ballistic missile system. Don’t tell me this is unconstitutional, you people are the kooks who swoon with delight at Obama flagrantly violating the constitution to order the murder of U.S. citizens without a trial.
If Obama can do that when it’s not an emergency, then Obama can sure as hell sequester and redirect funds after he declares a national emergency. When you claim this is “unrealistic” and “impossible” and “unworkable,” you’re lying, and history shows you’re lying because FDR did essentially the same exact thing during the Great Depression.
And if you people don’t think we’ve got a national economic emergency on our hands, you need to wake up and look around.
Each of these four options is entirely workable and completely practical. They just require a president with some balls. Obama has none. The problem isn’t that Obama is stupid — he’s plenty smart. The problem isn’t that Obama can’t read the economic stats — he’s well aware that America is in deep trouble economically. No, the problem is that Obama just does not give a shit at a deep level. Obama is not willing to go out on a limb and enter a gray area that would cause controversy — not if the end result is lowering unemployment and getting America’s economy back on track.
Weirdly, Obama has no problem grossly violating the law if the end result is murdering U.S.citizens without even charging them with a crime — and neither do most of you. Most of you, like Obama, smile and beam with delight at the prospect of torturing U.S.citizens or kidnapping them and throwing them into dungeons forever without a trial or charges. But Obama, like most of you, shrinks with horror and shrieks in terror at thought of doing anything that enters even the slightest legal gray area if it means lowering unemployment.
Explain that to me, people. Explain why none of you will even consider urging Obama to add a signing statement to the tax cut bill that eliminates the tax cuts for the rich…but you love it when Obama crassly violates the constitution by ordering torture, extrajudicial murder, kidnapping, every possible gross violation of the fifth and sixth and eighth amendment.
You scream with rage at the suggestion that Obama should bend the law to help starving unemployed families, yet you swoon with rapturous delight at the suggestion that Obama should tear up the constitution and wipe his ass with it by ordering the murder of U.S. citizens without trial.
Explain that to me, kooks. Go ahead. Try and explain your weird incoherent thought processes.
Explain to me why you people keep claiming “Obama can’t do anything” and “the president has no authority” when I’ve just explained clearly and specifically exactly how Obama could bypass the Republicans, eliminate those tax cuts for the rich, and create new jobs and drastically lower unemployment.
Congress certainly isn’t going to do anything, the Fed is out of ammo, and I can’t think of much the President can do other than make speeches. Sure, when it gets her some good face time, Mary Landrieu will get up there and rail against income disparity. But just try and get her to actually vote for anything that lowers unemployment. Does the administration have any authority they are not using?
mclaren
The last paragraph in my comment should obviously be in blockquotes — but, of course, wordpress gives me the error “YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO EDIT THIS COMMENT.”
Typical.
General Stuck
@mclaren:
Option 5- ignore Mclaren
mclaren
@General Stuck:
The typical thoughtful contribution we expect from this commenter: no ideas, no policy recommendations, no logic, no facts…just insults.
And you people wonder why the general level of debate on this forum has degenerated?
I give you Exhibit A, the posts of General Stuck.
matoko_chan
And it will continue this way until the demographic timer goes off.
Then the Geek will inherit the Earth.
:)
General Stuck
@mclaren:
Somebody needs a hug, come over here big guy, let stuck make it all better.
mclaren
John Cole says:
Very seldom do I criticize Cole, but this is one of those times. There’s a theory in animal psychology called Learned Helplessness. And I think it applies here.
Cole and the rest of you need to break out this cycle of learned helplessness. You’re not powerless. You’re not impotent. Everything isn’t hopeless. It’s not futile to try to do anything.
And Obama isn’t powerless, and the Democrats aren’t impotent. All they need to do is get some spine, and they can fight back and change things.
I’ve explained specifically how Obama could change things. I’ve cited four separate detailed policies Obama could implement. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everything I’ve said is nonsense — and in that case, think of some other options.
But don’t tell me no options exist. Don’t try to convince me everything is hopeless and action is futile. That’s just learned helplessness, and I refuse to buy that.
Pull up your socks, people. Stand tall. Get some spine. Act, and demand your leaders act on your behalf.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: and you are the penultimate dumbass.
we are subjected to the Tyranny of the Stupid until the demographic timer goes off.
the right has an unimpeachable argument.
Conservative “elites”– we will give you taxcuts, benefits, and selfesteem for your cherished but retarded ideas like creationism, homophobia, racism, fetal personhood and climatology denial, and you will never have to say you’re sorry for fucking up the country.
and we will painlessly balance the budget.
Liberal elites– but it is mathematically impossible to give tax cuts, benefits AND balance the budget.
Conservative “elites”– LOOK! the libruuls think you are stupid.
that is a “foolproof argument”, and i use the systems definition of foolproof as “inaccessible to the user”.
agrippa
@matoko_chan:
For the Democrats in Washington, it is not learned helplessness at all.
It is far worse than that – it is a lack of moral and political courage which arises from a fundamental lack of seriousness. The Democrats are, in a word, dilletantes.
Nothing will happen until those people are replaced by people with a real sense of purpose and resolve. People who live by: “Determine what is right, then, go ahead”.
To wrong person, meant for mcclaren.
Suffern ACE
@Omnes Omnibus: I think we should have a thread devoted to Jedi bacon recipes, or ninja beers. We probably could use that, but I wonder if the result would be the same as the fights we’re having now.
mclaren
@matoko_chan:
“Penultimate” means next to last.
I think you mean “ultimate dumbass,” not penultimate.
And this is the best anyone on Balloon Juice can come up with? You guys don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with this discussion when everyone chimes to explain that it’s all futile, it’s hopeless, it’s useless, it’s pointless, we’re all doomed — and the only response to someone who points out some options for fixing things is “ignore him” and “you’re a dumbass”…?
LosGatosCA
With the passing of the tax cut bill Tony Perkins has officially declared the Tea party Rapture ready.
Where is Hale-Bopp when you need it?
chopper
@mclaren:
this list is stupid.
1) no, you can’t ‘sequester the funds’ for a tax cut with a signing statement. this isn’t some bit in an appropriations bill where the president says ‘with regard to congress’s request for 500 million for giant laser space frisbees i’m going to make sure the money is somewhere else’. this is a tax cut. you can’t ‘defund’ a tax cut. a tax cut is itself a defunding, a reduction in revenue.
the only way obama could use his pen to effectively strike out the rich-guy tax provision is if he had a line-item veto.
and no, neither bush or reagan used signing statements ‘in exactly this way’.
2) this is legally dubious, but more importantly completely ineffective. the uber rich have some bad-ass accountants, and the crazy shit they pull off is legal. in terms of PR, it’s a dud, and it’s a threat against the same people who help keep the president’s own party afloat in elections.
3) this is really legally dubious. having the FBI target a specific group of people for fishing expeditions just to shake a stick at a political party is moronic and nixonian, and certainly illegal.
this is especially stupid. first, it would take a hell of a long time to get these investigations rolling to the point where you have a ‘stack of pending indictments’, far longer than they’ve had to work this deal out. remember, the tax cuts expire at the end of the month.
second, do you really want a president who comes up with a stack of indictments and makes them ‘go away’ just to work out a deal with the GOP? that’s some hardcore illegal shit right there, and dictatorial as hell to boot.
you’re not ‘enforcing the law’ if you make a bunch of indictments ‘go away’ to get a political favor. in fact, i would say that action itself is illegal and probably an impeachable offense.
4) sorry, but 10% unemployment is not a ‘national emergency’ that allows the president to just take dictatorial powers. no sane person in this country thinks that high unemployment should give the president broad emergency powers over the budget and everything else. this is stupid and would start a fucking civil war.
i find it ironic that a guy who flips out at the idea that the president gave the green light to a military maneuver that may kill an american citizen who works and lives with al qaeda overseas also thinks the president should just declare an emergency and take over the entire budgetary process and have the DOJ create indictments so he can ‘make them disappear’ for political favors.
in short, if these are your solutions, the ‘obama has no real options’ crowd really is right.
chopper
how about this:
option 5) obama sends the military to surround congress and shell the capital until congress relents and appoints him ‘dictator for life’. he can put on a military uniform and call himself ‘generalissimo el baracko’. then he’ll certainly get the tax cuts for the rich stopped.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: but i dont think you are the Last Dumbass.
the ultimate dumbass is still on his way.
you are a minor dumbass.
and im not saying dont fight.
AMG, Obama passed HCR.
im saying O is doing his personal best, hes thoroughly explored the gamespace, and we need to be patient and grateful for what he can push through.
His goals may be discontinuous from yours.
That doesnt mean he will be wrong in the long run.
agrippa
@chopper:
“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! ”
Cromwell to the Long Parliament
That will work. He can the use the 3rd Regiment [ the Old Guard] to storm the capitol.
News Reference
“Does the administration have any authority they are not using?”
Lots.
See: WPA Executive Order for starters.
Obama’s right-wing choices have helped the Republicans cripple our country:
From Obama’s political choices of asking for an inadequate stimulus, pushing to make about 1/3rd of the ‘stimulus’ knowingly unstimulative, to handing billions to Banksters while protecting those predators from the legal “pitchforks” their frauds deserved….
Add Obama’s political choices of using his authority to appoint Republicans like Ben Bernanke and right-wingers like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner to run the Executive Branch….
That’s a teaspoon sample of the buckets of “authority” Obama has failed to use.
THE
@matoko_chan:
You might like this link to a Swedish documentary on Wikileaks.
matoko_chan
@THE: you know….that just fucking infuriates me.
you stupid cudlips dont even see what is actually going on.
The real drama is the Founders and Framers system design going up against Julian Assanges system-killer.
will the judiciary step in to prevent Assange being prosecuted for espionage on trumped up charges?
the american judiciary was previously suborned by the Bush Torture Presidency.
Fucking freedom of speech….how does it work?
THE
Understand matoko, I am a lot less US-focused than you.
Also I am not opposed to everything WL does, if you read my past comments.
It is the diplomatic leaks that I fear may be damaging to the global order.
joe from Lowell
@burnspbesq:
Not to mention, bring their underwater homes back above the water line.
joe from Lowell
@mclaren:
You’re babbling. I don’t think you understand all of the words you’re using.
Sequester the funds for a tax cut? That doesn’t mean anything. There are no “funds” for a tax cut. “Sequester” means to take an appropriation – an actual pot of money – and not spend it.
You have made humanity collectively stupider with that comment. Please, for God’s stake, stop.
chopper
@joe from Lowell:
yeah, i’m still trying to figure that one out. defund a tax cut? what planet is this dude on?
McJulie
@El Tiburon: What is this “never again” business you are on about? You’ll never again hope for better? Work for better? Expect better? Congratulations! Your corporate overlords couldn’t be happier. You didn’t matter to them before. You matter even less now.
It sucks, but checking out completely is not an option. And it does not actually make you a better person, either. You don’t “win” if you get everyone else to join in your dispirited parade of despair.
To all of you “we’re totally screwed, system is broken, no way out, blah blah” people out there, unless you are, personally, ready to lead the torch-bearing mob that drags the Koch brothers/house Republicans/Fox news anchors from their mansions to Le Guillotine, shut up. Maybe we do need a revolution. But if I were willing to lead one, I guess I’d already be doing that. Heck, if you were willing to lead one, maybe you’d already be doing that too.
So I’m stuck with the Democrats. Half-measures, half-right, messy, irritating, frustrating as all hell.
On a side note: I think we need more left wing gun nuts.