Lessons, learned and unlearned

The New York Times hasn't learned from Whitewater to close its mouth to the puke funnel, lest shady right-wing operatives funded by wealthy wingnuts, force feed them anonymous bullshit from web sites with no integrity:

The inquiry began with an incendiary tip — unproven and vehemently disputed by Mr. Menendez — that Dr. Melgen had helped procure prostitutes, some of them underage, for Mr. Menendez, after flying the senator repeatedly on his private plane to the Dominican Republic, where Dr. Melgen has a home at a seaside resort. This information was put forward by an odd array of self-interested characters, including the right-leaning Web site The Daily Caller and someone — his identity remains a mystery — who claimed to be an American citizen who frequented the Dominican Republic.

Remember the Arkansas Project, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Drudge?

The VRWC, for its part, has learned. Spice up your libels and slanders with sex, and the media will line up on their knees for a taste. (Remember Media Whores Online? "The site that set out to bring the media to their knees, but found they were already there.")

The combination of allegations, of misuse of public office and of sexual misconduct, helped propel the story into the headlines and onto television, and set tongues to wagging at cocktail parties across Washington.

Do we really give a shit what tongues wag at Washington cocktail parties? Reporter Eric Lipton cares. It's not good enough that he reports the sourcing. The content doesn't meet any standards of responsible journalism.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-idle threats) hasn't learned that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-fuck Reid) can never be trusted to honor the spirit of a deal. I mean, seriously, after all these years. Reid and President Obama should refrain from giving each other negotiation tips.

McConnell, for his part, has learned that his continued douchebaggery has no adverse consequences for him or his pasty band of obstructionists:

In the spirit of the bipartisan, but toothless rules reforms the Senate passed last week, Senate Minority Mitch McConnell and over 40 of his members are vowing to block confirmation of a permanent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director unless Democrats agree to pass legislation dramatically weakening the agency.

Yet here's something that will never ever happen:

McConnell’s renewed filibuster threat seem to have caught him by surprise somehow. But if at some point later this year it becomes clear Republicans will continue to block Cordray past the end of his recess appointment, Reid could in theory revisit the filibuster reform fight.

Stop negotiating. Use the power you have. Impose your will.

Na ga happen.

Sheldon Adelson is the tip of the iceberg

At least we know his name. At least we know who David and Charles Koch are. At least we know the names of Barack Obama's 2008 Wall Street contributors.

In this election cycle, we will never know, thanks to Mitch McConnell (R-double talk) and, yes, Scott Brown (R-whenever you need me, Mitch).

(h/t Salon)

Unemployed, tough luck

The Republican view is that unemployment doesn't matter at all:

“We have serious concerns that further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy,” said the letter, signed by four of the top Republicans in Congress: Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader; Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate Republican whip; House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia.

As they were during the debt ceiling hostage crisis, all the Republican "leadership" is willing, eager, even happy to sacrifice America for the sake of their power.

And they call stimulus treason.

Life of the party

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Fooled you twice, America

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Reality bites

Why would Republicans even consider saying yes when no has worked so well? When so many extremists from their hard right wing were elected on a platform of HELL NO by wingnuts who might settle for more obstruction if they can't refight the Civil War?

Republican Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, who is expected to become the new House majority leader in January, questioned on "Fox News Sunday" whether there was any benefit to compromising with President Barack Obama.

The question was not whether Obama was willing to work with Republicans, as he stated last week, but, "Are we willing to work with him?" Cantor asked.

"I mean, first and foremost, we're not going to be willing to work with him on the expansive liberal agenda he's been about," Cantor said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, told the CBS program "Face the Nation" that agreement exists on some specific provisions, but he refused to signal any willingness to compromise.

Big media, for its part, will no doubt continue to expect President Obama to compromise without any corresponding expectation of the GOP.

CNN will continue to screw up the most basic facts about, for example, the debate over keeping the rich from paying progressive taxes:

Obama wants to extend the lower tax rates for income above below $200,000 a year for individuals and $250,000 a year for families, saying that means 98 percent of Americans won't be subject to a de facto tax increase.

Yes, they printed it without the strike-through.

And Mitch McConnell will prove over and over and over again that Republicans only pretend to care about the deficit when caring about it hurts those of us who are non-rich:

McConnell, however, made clear that Republicans believe no one should have their tax rates return to the higher levels of the 1990s.

"We don't have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem," McConnell said, repeating a line parroted by Republicans on other shows.

Note of course the thoroughly Republican framing: no one should pay more (never mind the trillions saved by the rich and the corresponding crumbs the rest of us get).

And big media will never, ever notice that Republicans are hysterically hypocritical on deficits. Noticing the bullshit is against the rules of the reigning kleptocracy.

Waking up

The good news is that even a reflexively centrist conciliator such as President Barack Obama has limits to the bullshit he'll tolerate from the ignoramus caucus of the Party of No:

"It doesn't matter who he chooses, there is going to be a big 'ol fight over it. So he doesn't have to get sidetracked by those sorts of concerns," the official told me. The GOP has attempted to obstruct "anything of consequence" put forth by the Obama administration since he took office, the official said. "The president is making this decision with a pretty clear view that whoever he chooses is going to provoke a strong reaction on the right," the official added.

My recommendation:

• On John Paul Stevens's replacement, fight visibly and without bending with the Senate Republicans, win or lose.
• If they succeed at their filibuster, no need to go nuclear. Make a recess appointment at the first opportunity.
• On January 3, 2011, get whoever is the Senate Majority Leader to kill the filibuster, not to mention the unconscionable system of secret holds. Through overuse, they've outlived their function of caution and become the obstructive tool of a bunch of two-year-olds throwing tantrums.
  
• Gain Senate confirmation of your recess appointee with fifty-whatever votes you have.
• Call Mitch McConnell and sweetly tell him to go fuck himself. With a chainsaw.
  

The Republican way

It's not surprising that a Senator from a tobacco state, Mitch McConnell (R-better keep your KY handy if you're not a corporation), would use obfuscation, denial, and bullshit to fog his true objectives. Paul Krugman:

It’s a truly shameless performance: Mr. McConnell is pretending to stand up for taxpayers against Wall Street while in fact doing just the opposite. In recent weeks, he and other Republican leaders have held meetings with Wall Street executives and lobbyists, in which the G.O.P. and the financial industry have sought to coordinate their political strategy.

And let me assure you, Wall Street isn’t lobbying to prevent future bank bailouts. If anything, it’s trying to ensure that there will be more bailouts. By depriving regulators of the tools they need to seize failing financial firms, financial lobbyists increase the chances that when the next crisis strikes, taxpayers will end up paying a ransom to stockholders and executives as the price of avoiding collapse.

Paul Krugman (and I, here and here) can tell that the Republicans are bullshitting, but the teabaggers go right on screaming that they pay too much in taxes, never mind that their taxes have gone down during the Obama administration.

The teabaggers are the Republicans' target demographic because they're easily fooled into believing nonsense that keeps them serfs to the feudal lords of Republican crony capitalism.

The problem with Bunning

It's not the fact that Jim Bunning (R-No KY) is an asshole that makes him unpopular with his fellow Republicans. Being a scrupulously cruel and unfeeling asshole is very common, even highly esteemed on the right - witness Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, Malkin, Robertson, Coulter. In Congress, as well, there are plenty of Republican assholes.

If I might digress for a moment, being an asshole is not a blindly partisan affliction. There are Democratic assholes, that's for sure. From time to time, I catch myself being an asshole. The difference is that we tolerate our assholes, that we try to reform our own moments of assholery, where they are proud of their asshole compatriots and their own petty cruelty and unfeelingness.

Bunning's real sin, in the eyes of his estranged Republican colleagues, is that he has been too visibly an asshole. Bunning has been out front with his cruelty, failing to hide it even behind the usual thin bullshit.

Of course, his real transgression in the eyes of the press, is not that he blocked small care for the unemployed. No, it's that he had the temerity to curse at them. That gave them the middle school news hook they needed to hang Bunning. Mitch McConnell, a Potemkin village of bland over a flinty heart of savage asshole? The press will never notice.

Diagnosis

The problem: Nearly all Republicans and many blue dog Democrats are opposed to health care reform. They are unwilling to do anything that might provide universal health care. The Republicans' opposition stems from the fear that people might actually like the public option. The conservative Democrats' from the fear that their constituents might vote them out of office before they find out they like it.

This loose coalition of conservatives can't come right out and say they oppose reform, but their every behavior shows it. Without a real public option, anything labelled health care reform is fakery. Mitch McConnell knows what he's doing. So does Jim DeMint.

As Nancy Pelosi says, insurance companies have had long enough. They have provided no progress toward universal coverage at all. Paul Krugman argues that the market fundamentally cannot provide universal coverage (although you'll notice he does not say that market mechanisms are completely useless).

Unfortunately, the prognosis is starting to look grim. There doesn't seem to be a working majority for any significant reform, so we may get a few portability fixes and big giveaways for the insurance industry.

If we're replaying the past

Mitch McConnell says the threat of a Republican filibuster against Sonia Sotomayor is just payback.

So he wouldn't mind if the Democrats in the Senate threatened to go nuclear.

Sure he wouldn't.

Whatever happened to Amy Carter?

I know CNN is out pounding the hustings and looking under rocks for the new leadership of the Republican Party. Heck, I'd get sick of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, too. (Side snark: I know all the wingnuts think Nancy Pelosi has had botox, and it's pretty clear that nothing short of a jowlectomy would help McConnell, but isn't it obvious that Boehner has work done?)

Meghan McCain I understood as some kind of cross-promotion, even though I don't know for sure that there's any shared ownership between CNN and the Daily Beast. The corporate media is so incestuous, though, that it's a plausible theory.

Now Liz Cheney (no, not Lynne) has her audition. It's awful enough that Darth Cheney himself is basking in the very spotlight he avoided when the media might have held him accountable for the power he wielded in such frequently criminal ways. Vain hope, I now, but the press's watchdog role is one I still honor in the breach. But I wonder why a beneficiary of nepotism in government, such as the Worst Veep Ever's daughter, should get our attention at all.

It's not as though any such privilege has ever been accorded a Democrat, at least not a non-Kennedy Democrat.

(Who would've thought that jowlectomy would be in Firefox's dictionary!)

Update (8/1/2010): It appears that Chelsea Clinton's wedding has provoked interest in whatever happened to Amy Carter? As a random Internet oddity, Google has led a few of them here. I have no idea where she is or how she's living her life. I just wish that Liz Cheney were living as quietly.

My point above was, of course, that the big media cares more about scions of Republican dynasties than about Democratic ones. No, check that, it's not the whole picture. Big media does care when a Democratic son or daughter does something scandalous.

They just don't care what Democratic kids think when they've grown up.

Of millstones and McConnells

For Mitch McConnell (R-Squirrel Brains, KY), it's all Duhbya's fault that the Republican Party is unpopular. Mitch himself? Didn't screw up at all.

Never mind that McConnell worked in lockstep with Duhbya for his entire disastrous reign, that he believes in the exact same platform as Duhbya, and that he even forgot his jealously guarded Senatorial prerogatives by dropping even the pretense of Congressional oversight of the Executive. McConnell's not going to take responsibility. He's from the party of everyone else's personal responsibility.

Instead, here's what we'll hear from Tobacco Mitch:

• He's disappointed that Obama's not so "bipartisan" that he agrees with the Republican right. Y'know, like Joe Lieberman. Or David Broder. I applaud anything that disappoints McConnell.
  
• Republicans do, too, have a budget, just not one that requires any liberally biased arithmetic. They can call it a blueprint all they want; you still couldn't build a house from it, not even a house of cards. What it really is is a cocktail napkin dressed up as a ... fancy cocktail napkin.
  
• He's proud to lead the party of no. He'd filibuster anything. Continuing resolution? Isn't it time to try Newt Gingrich's excellent adventure again and shut down another Democratic government?
• The Republicans in Washington are not going to change their ossified minds about anything.
  

John Boehner on the Republican side in the House is even worse. You'd think since the votes he controls are impotent that he'd at least have time to put together a more plausible wingnut budget.

Except that there's no way to get Republican bullshit to add up without repealing the math facts that grade schoolers learn before the fourth grade...

Rush week

Since this is the week a big fool Rushed in to lead the Republican devolution, I can't restrain one more good gibe:

When it comes to disability pensions, you ought to include congressmen, especially these remarkable Republicans who, in the midst of a serious banking crisis, are recycling Herbert Hoover and decrying socialism and paying homage to a fat sweaty guy living alone with his cat in a five-mansion compound in West Palm Beach. At the moment, he seems to be steering the Republican Party like it's his personal power boat and Mitch McConnell is the girl in the bikini on water skis.

Can I just say: YUCK!

Skinny pasty liberal that he is, Garrison Keillor is funny throughout, even when he's not smacking around fat, pasty Republicans.

Be prepared

The Republicans don't care about comity. They'll fuck you up for the sheer fun of it. Or to establish that they can pitch a hissy any time they like.

If the Democrats don't fight back, they're going to encourage a lot of tantrums. I suggest that screaming fits be met with a swift slap to the diaper-clad buttocks of Mitch McConnell.

If he doesn't like it, move his damn office to a public restroom in the Capitol. See how much he likes urine-soaked marble.

Screw Mitch McConnell

Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are what's wrong with America. The economy needs a large stimulus, and it needs it now, if not three months ago. Republicans like the Congressional "leadership" only benefit if the economy really goes awful and they can succeed in pinning it on Barack Obama.

Screw them. The horse they rode in on is an innocent victim. Let them screw the horse - and they will.

No one, no one should listen to confirmed and unrepentant assholes like these Congressional Republican obfuscators who oppose anything that might actually help us avoid 25% unemployment and widespread poverty.

There have to be consequences

Harry, tell Joe Lieberman he can start rebuilding his Democratic cred by keeping his mouth shut and voting with you until 2010. Otherwise, he can go kiss Mitch McConnell's tobacco-stained ass.

Oh, and change the filibuster rule to 55. Put McConnell in the position of needing to win support across the aisle instead of simply saying nyet to everything.

At every moment, remind the Republicans that they are the ones who screwed collegiality. But don't let them screw you, too.

Politics 101

Harry Reid has not been as big a disappointment as Nancy Pelosi, simply because I didn't expect much from him. I had great hopes that she would bring some liberal sanity to Washington and, more important, that she would have the guts to make some things stick. Reid, I hoped, would at least tame the Bushist penchant for appointing extremists to Federal offices. Even with those low expectations, he has been underwhelming, though I was thrilled at his pro forma sessions.

Now, Mitch McConnell is dictating budget terms to the Senate Democratic majority! McConnell says:

I think we are being consistent here against higher taxes, consistently against greater regulation, consistently against creating new causes of action in bill after bill after bill...

Consistently against democracy, I'd say. Doesn't he remember who lost in 2006? Doesn't he remember his own anti-filibuster rhetoric in the previous years. Of course he does. His principle is winning, not consistency. He's playing hardball, while the Democrats play blind man's bluff.

The proper response to McConnell is not quite a Cheneyism, "Mitch, we're going to let you f--- yourself on C-SPAN every evening until you're too sore to go on. Have at it."

Then Reid has to do something besides sending tallies to the press about how many things the big bad mean Republicans have filibustered. He and the Democrats have to provide the media with pictures and sound bites. Make the smug and doughy face of McConnell represent the GOP's intransigence. Make them vote against cloture on TV every damn day. Put together a cogent video press release about it every day. The media are about as lazy as Duhbya - you've got to give them something that goes down easy.

Have a Democrat make a reasonable but obviously frustrated speech every day. Make the Presidential candidates do some of them. Tell them all to keep it short so you can control the message that winds up in the news. Podcast and Youtube the speeches. Tell the American public that the Democrats have a bill ready to negotiate but that the Republicans' position is that they'll hold their breath until they turn blue unless they get everything they want, even after losing in 2006.

If you have to twist some arms in your own caucus, do it. Tell Joe Lieberman his fucking furniture will be out on Constitution Ave. if he defects.

What's amazing is that the Democratic "leadership" has spent their adult lives in politics and yet have managed not to learn even the most basic facts about it. When your opponent is playing a vicious game, you have to show the electorate that in colorful, memorable, and sometimes vicious ways.

Let the Republicans shut down the government again. Just make sure the voters know who's doing the shutting. What you want is for Duhbya to veto the omnibus spending bill because it has something in it he doesn't like. That's what McConnell is protecting him from. So, tie the two of them together and pin the blame on them. They deserve it.

Shit, this is politics, not needlepoint.

True Republican colors

How is it that the Republicans can oppose a responsible, revenue-neutral fix for AMT and expect the voters not to punish them for it? It's been working for years.

When push comes to not even shove but excuse-me, the GOP puts the richest of the rich - a few hedge fund managers and their even better-heeled clients - ahead of millions of middle class wage earners, not to mention fiscal sanity. They know the press won't call them on it.

Really, is there anything that comes out of Mitch McConnell's mouth that's not flavored with bullshit? When he says "a lot of other Americans", he means a very small number of overpaid financial manipulators - many of the same people who gave us the credit crisis.

The Democrats, if they had a lick of sense, would make the Republicans filibuster this openly and visibly and for a long time. Have the Democratic Senators who are running for President come back to D.C. every few days for another cloture vote and issue a zillion press releases about what's at stake.

Update: Of course, the Democrats have already caved again (and the Times has changed the story under my original link).

A good case of kiss my ass

So, Mitch McConnell and Tony Snow are outraged, outraged that MoveOn.org would smack Gen. Petraeus around in print. Oh, and John Boehner, too. And, of course, Joe Lieberman (I-I), who never saw a Bushist talking point he wouldn't, caaaww, mimic.

CNN even quotes John Kerry as calling the ad "over the top", and Kerry's a guy who has actually seen over the top. Why he mistakes this slightly juvenile play on words for excess, I can't say. (Of course, now I could be quoted as calling MoveOn's ad "juvenile".)

Yesterday, CNN also had Harry Reid dissing the ad, though they've "corrected" it to say "a member of the Democratic leadership, speaking on background".

What real Democrats need to say is this, "I've looked at the ad, and only a very small child would think there's something wrong with it. No, I'm not going to condemn our allies at MoveOn for unveiling the truth, and tobacco-money bagman Mitch McConnell can kiss my ass."

That last part, maybe not, but a guy can dream, can't he?