Rachel Maddow shows exactly why the Teapublicans were never, ever, ever going to back down from shutting down the government.
There's no reason whatsoever to think they'll change their minds (such as they have).
There's also no reason for confidence that they will shrink back from default when we soon bump up against the debt ceiling.
The Republicans are interested only in their own power. Yet another faux scandal, this time the IRS's so-called targeting of teabaggers, has crumbled:
Terms including "Israel," ''Progressive" and "Occupy" were used by agency workers to help pick groups for closer examination, according to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press.It was obvious from the beginning that the IRS personnel in Cincinnati were using search terms - the way anyone facing a large backlog of work would - to screen for high-priority work. If you don't do this, you're not getting the right work done. You're treating every task as equal in priority and equally likely to pay off. In short, you're an idiot piece-worker.
Karl Rove wanted a permanent Republican majority. How passé!
Republicans have long known how to cripple the Senate with a minority of votes, exploiting the filibuster in complete departure from tradition and custom. They've taken a tool of respect and politesse and rendered it as a pillory on the Capitol lawn for ideas they don't like - that is, most of them.
Republicans have figured out how to win the House of Representatives without winning a majority of votes.
The report credits gerrymandered maps in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with allowing Republicans to overcome a 1.1 million popular-vote deficit. In Ohio, for instance, Republicans won 12 out of 16 House races “despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.” The situation was even more egregious to the north. “Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.”Republicans are now working to exploit their successful 2010 gerrymandering in the 2016 Presidential election:
Earlier this week, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus endorsed a Republican plan to rig the next presidential election to make it nearly impossible for the Democratic candidate to win the White House, no matter who the American people vote for. The election-rigging plan, which would allocate electoral votes by congressional district rather than by states as a whole in a handful of states that consistently vote for Democratic presidential candidates, would have allowed Mitt Romney to narrowly win the Electoral College last November despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.If you think the GOP won't try their damnedest to make this happen, despite the obvious likelihood of perennial "victories" by the minority of voters over the majority, you really haven't been paying attention. Were you living in an alternate universe with President Gore?
It sure as hell isn't the deficit:
The tax reform plan that House Republicans have advanced would sharply cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and could leave middle-class households facing much larger tax bills, according to a new analysis set to be released Wednesday.If the Teapublicans came right out and admitted that they want whatever benefits the wealthy and the huge corporations they own, would that be enough to dope slap the teabagger base off its stupid self-abuse?
... that's not really so great. Gabrielle Giffords's aide Ron Barber won a special election to serve out her term. This doesn't change the balance of power in the House one whit, so it's merely emotional solace after the defeat in Wisconsin.
Emotional solace matters, though. I have a strong feeling of doom about 2012, and I know that foolish adoption of the Teapublican agenda would be disastrous for America. A win, even a small, brief one such as this one by a Blue Dog, replacing another Blue Dog, is still a win, especially in a place as wild and woolly as Arizona.
So what's next?
... and they're succeeding:
[T]he House Appropriations financial services subcommittee voted along party lines to prohibit the FCC from implementing their proposal to add another layer of transparency to the political ad process. Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-KY) argued that fiscal matters are private and should remain that way.
House Republicans: "We'd rather live in a fantasy than deal with facts."
The Peters Amendment would not have altered H.R. 3582 in any functional manner, it simply would had added the following factual findings section:Which is more embarrassing, denying brute incontrovertible facts or acknowledging them when your entire
(1) On January 8, 2003, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said that President Bush believed that the tax cut package enacted in 2001 and expanded in 2003 would “create additional revenues for the federal government and pay for itself.”
(2) Before the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were enacted, the Congressional Budget Office projected gradually rising surpluses, from 2.7% of gross domestic product in 2001 to 5.3% of gross domestic product by 2011, with the federal government operating debt free by 2009.
(3) The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have added over $2 trillion to budget deficits from 2002-2011.
(4) Despite signing the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 into law, President George W. Bush’s administration had, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records” in 1939.
(5) From 2001 to 2009, gross domestic product grew at the slowest pace for any eight-year span since 1953.
(6) Median household income declined during the Bush Administration for the first time since 1967, when this data began to be tracked.
Another Republican doesn't want an open town hall meeting. That's because they understand these meetings as theater for the cameras, not for the attendees. The people who go and ask questions or simply listen are extras in the production of stage-managed news.
Democrats may believe that facing flesh and blood voters of all political stripes exhibits their virtues in a democracy. Republicans know that having nameless people shout down Democrats in public perversely harms the Democrats. Even if those nameless shouters are obvious teabagger wingnuts.
So Republicans pack the house so that they can pack the House. It worked in 2010.
It's the President's fault that the House Republican caucus won't compromise on anything.
In a letter sent out earlier to House lawmakers, [Speaker John Boehner] blamed Obama for the deterioration of the talks, saying that the president insisted on including tax increases.Holding one of our federal government's three main political institutions, the Republicans want to make radical changes in an 80-year-old vision of the country. And they'll hold their breath until they turn blue to do it, ignoring the damage to the economy that they will do.
“It became evident that the White House is simply not serious about ending the spending binge that is destroying jobs and endangering our children’s future,’’ Boehner wrote. “A deal was never reached and was never really close.’’
“In the end, we couldn’t connect,’’ he added. “Not because of different personalities, but because of different visions for our country.’’
Republican claims of transparency have nothing at all to do with any principle more noble than their own power:
Republicans have also pledged to have an open rule on all spending bills, which means that members of both parties will be able to offer more amendments and have more debate, which in theory would lead to more scrutiny for each government agency seeking financing.
A big exception will be the bill to repeal the health care law that House Republicans plan to bring up next week. That bill will not be subject to amendments, nor will Republicans have to abide by their own new rules that compel them to offset the cost of new bills that add to the deficit; the health care repeal and tax cuts are not subject to this new rule.Majoritarian rule is the nature of the House, no matter how much they may dress up a sow's ear.
When I say Republicans don't care about the deficit, this is what I mean:
This is just one key feature of the GOP's playbook: CUT/GO. Under CUT/GO, all new spending has to be paid for, but tax cuts do not. Additionally any new spending must be paid for with parallel spending cuts elsewhere in the budget -- not with tax hikes. So unemployment benefits couldn't be paid for by closing a corporate tax loophole. But a corporate tax loophole could be widened without requiring any offsets.You think the teabaggers will scream about this? Of course they won't. They are just as insincere as the Republicans, for whom they are the extremist wingnut base.
John Boehner (R-consistent hypocrite) decides that ethics might be useful in the House. Finally.
His plan, I'm sure: Take credit for the investigations that Democrats started of other Democrats.
Republicans promise they'll hold hostages in April. They're fighting total war, while Democrats still think everything is negotiable.
The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.The Senate Democrats need to find unexpired statutes of limitations and hold hearings on the Bushist abuses that compete with the House Republican kangaroo courts.
"I will not yield."
Words we need to hear from Democrats much more often.
Now that health care reform has passed, that's what the Republicans will say. For them, the word socialist is a vicious slur, but it's almost a content-free slur, since they have no clear idea what it means.
From conservatives' use of the word, I interpolate that they mean any government program that helps people (as opposed to businesses) and that they think will require any taxation at all.
The irony is that this health care bill is transparently centrist - too centrist for me to be thrilled, in fact. Yet not one single House Republican voted for it.
We Democrats will immediately set out to improve this reform, with or without the Republicans. Their frankly insane rhetoric suggests that the entire task will fall to us. O.K., we're strong enough to handle that.
"We are still a people capable of doing big things," said President Barack Obama.
And each new President no longer is limited to the first hundred days to get something large done.
Something I heard last night from a friend who happens to be my state rep: The Boston Herald drives what happens on Beacon Hill, especially in the House. I have to admit that I was shocked by this. I almost never read the Herald. Hardly anyone except hardcore wingnuts out here in the 'burbs reads the Herald. It's the paper for people who find the Globe too hard to read.
Conservative media outlets like the Herald relish propaganda. They don't see their role as objective. They see it as a counterbalance - against outlets like the Globe that do actually provide op-ed balance to their political ideology. By contrast, today the Herald has two conservative editorials (no surprise), three conservative op-eds, and Howie Carr for a clean sweep.
Maybe that's not representative. It looks as though I'll have to add the Herald to my news stack for a while to gather more data.
One of the op-eds comes from my bête noire Eric Fehrnstrom (professional Romney shill). He analyzes the 2010 Massachusetts gubernatorial race with the goal of electing Republican Charlie Baker. Former Democrat Tim Cahill, says Fehrnstrom, stands in the way, and the GOP needs to co-opt him.
Get this, Fehrnstrom's analysis is right (heh) on target. Another three-way race greatly benefits Deval Patrick.
The Democratic side of the aisle will have to clean up its own mess. There aren't enough Republicans in the House to matter. But three indicted Speakers in a row ought to be a wake-up call that there's a systemic problem that makes corruption too easy and tempting.
Reform, revenue, regressivity, and recessions.
Taxation is always difficult. No one loves it. Those of us who believe in active government recognize its necessity, even if the yahoos on the right continue to scream for starting with cuts long after the budget has already been seriously slashed. Their thinking is a Markov chain - they can't remember any cut as long as there's something, anything left that might conceivably be cut.
Massachusetts is considering three ways to raise transportation and other revenues:
Boehner calls the name of a Democratic bill "disingenuous". That's rich! He's a firm supporter of the PATRIOT Act, speaking of bullshit names.
He attacks the bill's beneficiaries as "scam artists, speculators, and those who knowingly made bad decisions," but the bill is about cramdown for primary residences only.
The Republican Party: Love for corporations. Tough love for people, oh, and forget the love. More like tough shit.
