For his next act, President Obama has made a replacement for former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel appear, and it’s none other than William Daley, another member of Chicago’s Daley political dynasty—and one with close ties to Wall Street.
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enlarge Credit: CBO Today is shaping up as a very bad day for the quixotic GOP effort to repeal the 2010 health care reform law. Even as the number two House Republican Eric Cantor was telling the CBS Early Show that the Affordable Care Act is full of “budget gimmickry” that “costs over $1 trillion,” the Congressional Budget Office was making a liar out of him. As the new CBO analysis revealed, the GOP’s repeal effort wouldn’t merely deny health care coverage to 32 million Americans, over the next decade Republicans would add a staggering $230 billion to the national debt. As ThinkProgress summed up the findings from the CBO , the GOP’s H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act would not only lead to higher out of pocket costs, reduced benefits and saddle employers with higher premiums. Over the next 10 years and beyond, budget-busting Republicans if successful would unleash a flood of red ink: “Consequently, over the 2012-2021 period, the effect of H.R. 2 on federal deficits as a result of changes in direct spending and revenues is likely to be an increase in the vicinity of $230 billion, plus or minus the effects of technical and economic changes to CBO’s and JCT’s projections for that period…” “Correspondingly, CBO estimates that enacting H.R. 2 would increase federal deficits in the decade after 2019 by an amount that is in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP, plus or minus the effects of technical and economic changes that CBO and JCT will include in the forthcoming estimate. For the decade beginning after 2021, the effect of H.R. 2 on federal deficits as a share of the economy would probably be somewhat larger.” For his part, Rep. Cantor remains unencumbered – and undeterred – by the truth. On Wednesday, Cantor tried to brush off the CBO’s inconvenient truth . “About the budget implications, I think most people understand that the CBO did the job it was asked to do by the then-Democrat majority, and it was really comparing apples to oranges,” Cantor said. “It talked about 10 years’ worth of tax hikes and six years’ worth of benefits. Everyone knows beyond the 10-year window, this bill has the potential to bankrupt this federal government as well as the states.” Today, as CBS reported, he doubled down : Cantor also disputed the claim, put forth by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, that the health care reform bill passed by Congress last year will actually reduce the deficit by $143 billion, calling the figure “budget gimmickry .” “I think what we do know is the health care bill costs over $1 trillion,” Cantor told Hill. “And we know it was full of budget gimmickry. And it spends money we don’t have in this country.” Even before the CBO published its latest report pulling the rug out from under the Republicans’ bogus budget claims, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post responded, “Repealing health-care reform would cost hundreds of billions of dollars — and Eric Cantor knows it.” Republicans are aware that this looks, well, horrible. So they’re trying to explain why their decision to lift the rule requiring fiscal responsibility is actually fiscally responsible… What’s important about Cantor’s argument is not that he’s wrong. It’s why he’s saying something he knows to be wrong. There are plenty of reasons to oppose the health-care reform bill. You might not want to spend that money insuring people, or you might not think the legislation goes far enough in reforming the system. But as a matter of arithmetic, using the math that Congress always uses, the bill saves money. It cuts enough spending and raises enough taxes to more than pay for itself, both in the first 10 years and in the second 10 years. But Cantor and the GOP know full well that the bill is unpopular largely because people think it increases the deficit. Polls have shown that only 15 percent of Americans know that CBO said it will reduce the deficit. If, in the repeal fight, it becomes widely understood that the bill reduces the deficit, it will become more popular. So it’s crucial, as the repeal effort goes forward, for Republicans to become much more brazen in falsely asserting that the bill doesn’t really reduce the deficit, and that even if the CBO does say it reduces the deficit, that they’re saying that because they’ve been tricked somehow. But CBO wasn’t tricked. If it were, Cantor, who has a staff dedicated to figuring these things out, would have a better argument than the one he’s offering. Which is exactly right. As the CBO report makes clear, the Republican repeal campaign is unhealthy for Americans – and the truth. (This piece also appears at Perrspectives .)
Continue reading …Greta takes a bite out of David Dreier over already breaking promises made by Republicans
January 6, 2011 No CommentWatch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Republicans made many promises to their Tea Party base, and as you would expect they have already started backtracking on most of them. One was that amendments would be allowed to be added to bills and Greta Van Susteren was none too happy with Rep. David Dreier last night about it, as she immediately bit down on his neck over the broken promise. She then beat him up over not proposing a bill to repeal health care reform Greta: But you promised. This is what you promised so right out of the box you’re not doing it. Why don’t you do it? — Frankly, I’m not impressed when you make a promise… Greta kept at him for a while and then moved on, but did she and her Tea Party pals really believe all the promises that the GOP made during the run-up to the midterms? Howard Fineman has already reported that Republicans can’t come close to cutting $100 billion out of the budget, as Boehner promised in his idiotic Pledge to America. The GOP “budget cut” numbers are getting squishier by the minute. At least it seemed that way in the hallways of the Capitol on a ceremonial first day of swearing-ins, family photo ops and back-slapping goodwill. Republicans campaigned coast to coast on, among other things, a promise to cut $100 billion out of the federal budget. But now they are talking about cuts as slim as $30 billion, blaming the change on the fine print that no one read — or if they read, did not understand. It turns out the $100-billion figure meant $100 billion from a budget that President Barack Obama proposed, which was never passed. And now that the fiscal year is nearly half over, well, there’s just no way … And then there’s the very nutty Rep. Louis Gohmert from Texas, who stripped out transparency from the rules. BUT – the health care repeal legislation, the first major bill that will move through Congress, will be a closed rule – meaning no one will be able to offer an amendment. When asked about the this contradiction Tuesday night, Boehner said, “it’s not like we haven’t litigated this for years.” And, finally, the initial rules package that House Republicans will pass Wednesday had a provision to make committee attendance public. But the House GOP conference voted last night to strip that out (a move by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas). The goal had been transparency – who is at these hearings? But making that public will no longer be a requirement. The reason? Some GOP lawmakers say they were concerned about getting slammed for missing hearings when they may have extenuating circumstances, like a death in the family. I do hope right-wing pundits continue to hold the GOP accountable for their promises. I imagine if they are too hard on them, though, then another Fox News memo will come down from Bill Sammon telling them to tone it down .
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President Obama has taken an admirable stand for fiscal austerity, and blasted attempts to yet again raise the debt ceiling, which currently stands at $14.3 trillion (with a T) – or roughly the GDP of the United States. Said the president: The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. Just kidding. That was Senator Obama in 2006 , when debt was apparently a far larger problem – even though the ceiling was only(!) $9 trillion at the time. read more
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On Thursday's CBS Early Show, congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes derided Republican efforts to repeal ObamaCare: “On Friday, they begin their assault on health care reform, with a vote to repeal the law scheduled for next week.” Cordes noted how repeal “will hit a wall in the Senate,” observing: “That legislative reality will force both sides to work together on some issues, something Speaker Boehner promised to Democrats.” However, moments later she touted Democratic accusations of GOP partisanship: “Democrats are already crying foul, saying that that vote to repeal health care is being held without holding hearings first, without allowing amendments, a move that they argue flies in the face of all those promises of openness.”
Continue reading …Arizona Death Panels Rack Up Their Second Victim. Gov. Brewer Says Feds Need To Send More Money!
January 6, 2011 No Comment
enlarge So Arizona Gov. Jan “Death Panels” Brewer and her death panels are saving money by denying needed care . The wingnut irony deficiency is, as usual, in full flower: Brewer is saying the feds need to send her more money: PHOENIX — A second person denied transplant coverage by Arizona under a state budget cut has died, with this death “most likely” resulting from the coverage reduction, a hospital spokeswoman said Wednesday. University Medical Center spokeswoman Jo Marie Gellerman said the patient died Dec. 28 at another medical facility after earlier being removed from UMC’s list for a liver transplant needed because of hepatitis C. Gellerman cited medical privacy requirements in declining to release any information about the patient. Arizona reduced Medicaid coverage for transplants on Oct. 1 under cuts included to help close a shortfall in the state budget enacted last spring. Officials at the Tucson, Ariz., hospital said the patient’s death “most likely” resulted from Arizona’s scaling back coverage for transplants, she said. It’s impossible to say with 100 percent certainty whether the patient would have died anyway, Gellerman said, “but we do know that his condition has gotten more severe since he was taken off the list.” The patient’s worsening condition would have elevated his place on the list, she added. A Phoenix-area man, Mark Price, died Nov. 28 of complications from preparation for a bone-marrow transplant that was to be privately funded. That funding was provided anonymously after The Associated Press and other media outlets reported that he was notified of two possible donors on Oct. 1, the same day the coverage was reduced. The second person’s death was reported by KOLD-TV in Tucson and the Arizona Guardian. Democrats and other critics have slammed Republican Gov. Jan Brewer and the Republican-led Legislature for the transplant coverage reduction, and incoming Senate Minority Leader David Schapira called on them to restore the approximately $1.4 million of funding. “Failure to restore this funding is a death sentence for people who have committed no crimes,” he said.
Continue reading …Baffled Vieira to Bachmann: Why Vote to Repeal Obamacare If It’s Going to Get Vetoed?
January 6, 2011 No Comment
NBC's Meredith Vieira seemed baffled by the concept of taking a principled stand against Obamacare, as she repeatedly pressed Michele Bachmann, on Thursday's Today show, why Republicans would bother to vote to repeal the health care bill in the House if it wasn't going to get passed in the Senate or signed by the President? Vieira's very first question to the Republican Minnesota Congresswoman set the aggressive tone for the entire interview as she demanded: “Given the fact that the Democratic-led Senate will never go for that and the President has veto power, why make that the first big thing on your plate?” For her part Bachmann attempted to explain to the Today co-anchor that health care was “the issue that people really reacted against” in the midterms and “were very upset that very few members even bothered to read the health care bill.” However Vieira found that to be an insufficient response as she rebutted: “But if you have no chance to repeal it, why go through this exercise?” (video after the jump) read more
Continue reading …Click here to view this media The US government is guilty of allowing nuclear materials and intelligence to proliferate among to some of the most dangerous regimes in the world for more than 30 years, a new book alleges. In Fallout , authors Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins charge that the CIA waited until it was too late to stop the A.Q. Kahn network from disseminating nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran. “They could literally have stopped him in his tracks [in the 1970s],” Franz told NPR’s Fresh Air Tuesday. “It would have done an enormous amount to delay Pakistan building its own nuclear weapon, to delay the arms race on the South Asian continent and to stop Iran from getting where it is on the nuclear front.” “You know, so this is something that the CIA has been, in our view, guilty of for more than 30 years now,” he added. In 1974, Kahn, who was working at a centrifuge production facility in the Netherlands, approached Pakistani officials with offers to help them with their nuclear program. The Dutch security service first notified the CIA after they discovered Kahn in 1975, but US officials asked the Dutch to let Kahn go free so they could secretly monitor him. “In the subsequent years and decades, Khan became clearly the most dangerous proliferator in history,” Franz noted. In 2004, Kahn was finally arrested and put under house arrest in Pakistan. President George W. Bush hailed the arrest as a victory for his administration. Fallout details the way the CIA recruited the Tinners, a family of Swiss engineers, to spy on Kahn beginning in the 1970s. The Tinners supplied Kahn with the techniques and materials to make gas centrifuges, which were later sold to Libya and Iran. The CIA has spent the last seven years trying cover up their role in recruiting the Tinners, and putting halt to a Swiss attempt to prosecute the family. “Senior CIA and Bush administration officials argued that stopping the Tinner inquiry and destroying the evidence was necessary to protect US intelligence operations and keep nuclear information away from terrorists. But our research uncovered more sinister motives,” Franz and Collins wrote in an article the Los Angeles Times . By stopping the investigation, the CIA had hoped to protect the Bush legacy by covering up evidence showing the true volume of nuclear secrets traded by the Kahn network. Documents uncovered by the authors show that in February 2008, “the Swiss succumbed to US pressure and destroyed a huge cache of evidence seized from the Tinners. Among the material shredded, crushed and incinerated under CIA supervision were plans for two nuclear warheads from Pakistan’s arsenal, blueprints for uranium enrichment plants and producing nuclear weapons, and decades of records detailing network transactions.” In the end, the destruction of evidence came too late in stopping evidence from ending up in the hands of criminals. “Copies were found in Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa; no one is sure where else they may have gone in what we regard as the world’s first example of cyber proliferation,” the authors observed. The CIA was also successful in stopping a Swiss prosecution of six CIA officers that may have violated Swiss law by recruiting the Tinners and breaking into their house. Last month, a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the Tinners with trafficking in technology for making nuclear weapons. The New York Times reported that in defense of the Tinners, lawyers could expose CIA secrets and tarnish the Bush legacy. “The lesson here is clear: Leaders must set aside national interests and work cooperatively to stay ahead of nuclear traffickers,” Franz and Collins concluded. “What’s needed is a new multilateral legal regime that puts trafficking in nuclear, chemical and biological weapons on a par with crimes against humanity. This won’t be easy, but blind adherence to narrow national objectives increases the risk to all of us.”
Continue reading …Sawyer Forwards Charge of Tea Party Hypocrisy as Couric Frets: ‘Is There Danger’ Budget Cuts ‘Will Be Too Deep?’
January 6, 2011 No Comment
ABC’s Diane Sawyer hit a group of incoming freshmen House and Senate members about presumed Tea Party hypocrisy in accepting farm subsidies and not refusing to accept federal employee health care while CBS’s Katie Couric, with three House members, despaired over the “danger” that budget cuts might “be too deep?” Forwarding liberal talking points, in the pre-recorded segment aired on Wednesday’s World News, Sawyer relayed: The Democrats have a challenge for the Republicans, saying, if you're going to cut spending, go ahead and start close to home. Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler of Missouri got more than $750,000 in taxpayer subsidies for her farm. Are you ready to vote against all farm subsidies? Sawyer continued: “And on the promise to repeal health care reform, Democrats ask: Will they be giving up their new taxpayer-subsidized insurance? Only two of them said they would.” On the CBS Evening News, Couric noted “Republicans say high on their priority list is deficit reduction, starting with major cuts in domestic spending this year. Fiscally conservative freshmen say everything’s fair game.” She then fretted: “But is there danger in your view, Congressman West, that the ax will be too sharp, that the cuts will be too deep?” read more
Continue reading …In the first House vote of the 112th Congress, the new Republican majority voted to take away the small pittance vote given to Washington DC, Guam, the North Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico. There’s some populist policy for you right there. Is it any surprise that the people in these territories are, by a large margin, people of color? Louise Slaughter has some things to say about the new rules. She was pretty blunt about it, too. Actually, my head is somewhat spinning because not 20 minutes ago the new Speaker of the House of Representatives stood where you are and said he’s going to be listening to people but the first order of business before the House came from the delegates who this rule disenfranchises, not only the delegate of the District of Columbia but of all the territories, they didn’t get to say a word, so my head is spinning at that point. And we hope they can get unanimous consent so they can get some message into the record. The talk about deficit reduction is simply thrown out the window so they can free themselves and hand out more tax credits for their friends and corporations. Under these proposed rules, notes The Washington Post, tax cuts of the wealthiest are helpful but those at the other end of the income spectrum, forget about it. What is crystal clear to me is that they have double downed. Dick Cheney responded to the 2002 mid-term elections by advocating more than $2 trillion in tax cuts. Quote, deficits don’t matter. We won the mid-term elections. This is our due. End quote, said the Vice President. The other side now wants to adopt the posture of budget cutters. They want to make sweetheart deals without having to pay for them. And just this week, Republican new members ushered in the new Congress with a $2,500 fundraiser at the W Hotel in downtown Washington. And lobbyists and political action committee members and other exclusive guests were treated to a night of drinks and singing by country singer Leann Rimes. Those who donated up to $50,000 were treated to a VIP suite at the W, along with the rest of the night’s entertainment. Last month, the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services committee offered his own assessment of Republican oversight. He told Birmingham News in Alabama, in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated. My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks, end quote. And according to Politico, the incoming House Government Oversight and Government Reform Committee, big oil, big pharma and big health. Instead of all this business as usual and we are headed right back into where we were before 2006. What I’d like to see is an honest attempt to create a set of rules that provide for openness, transparency and good government. This set of rules is not that document. And I hope the other side, although I believe have good intentions, will join us in supporting this effort and I reserve the balance of my time.” As I write this, I am listening to David Dreier spew nonsense all over the House floor about the wisdom of the new “cutgo” rules and how ‘bipartisan they are’. Oh pulease. Give us a little credit, even if way too many of the people in this country are influenced by FOX News. It’s disgusting to think that the House of Representatives is wholly owned by lobbyists, bankers and insurance companies , and even with that, they couldn’t allow these representatives from the territories to even have a small voice in legislation or the budget.
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