Democrats in the House passed a resolution Thursday telling the president not to bother bringing his compromise extension of tax cuts for the wealthy to their chamber. Nancy Pelosi said Democrats would continue to work with the White House, and, if history is our guide, the White House will continue to work with Republicans to get the bill passed.
Continue reading …The Tea Party platform was all about smaller government and less spending. Now that they helped Republicans sweep into the House and Senate, the deficit is all but forgotten. Let’s see how the mainstream Republican party is adhering to Tea Party values. Hint: not closely at all. Cutting a deal on tax cuts while extending unemployment insurance It seems everyone hates the deal President Obama cut with the Republicans on tax cuts, but it’s a toss-up as to whether progressives hate it quite as much as the Tea Party. Jim DeMint and the Club for Growth came out against it with some of the most cynical, hypocritical reasoning I’ve ever seen. They want the top tax rate to be made permanent with no offset, but insist that the middle class tax cuts and unemployment extensions must be paid for. All that talk about the deficit is just that. Talk. Leadership positions and earmark spending Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) has been appointed chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Rogers is one of the biggest earmarkers in Congress, earning the title of “Porker of the Month” in August. Not only that, but true to hypocritical form, Rogers requested funds appropriated as part of the Affordable Care Act while swearing during his campaign that he would move to repeal or defund it. This one may be a little tough for the Tea Party to attack too hard, since Ron Paul is one of four Republican Congressmen to request earmarks . Defense spending Tea party purists like Ron Paul and presumably his son Rand oppose both wars and advocate cuts in defense spending. This is one area where I happen to agree with them, as do many others who oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And once again, Republicans have betrayed those core Tea Party values by putting Buck McKeon in charge of the Armed Services Committee. Mother Jones: McKeon’s views on such issues as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (he’s against its repeal) and defense spending put him directly at odds with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He has described Gates’ thinking on defense reform as “shortsighted and the wrong path,” arguing that the US should spend whatever it takes to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan, while simultaneously investing to prepare for future wars. “The word ‘tradeoff’ hasn’t really been in McKeon’s vocabulary,” observes the Center for a New American Security’s Travis Sharp. The differing philosophies of McKeon and Gates on defense spending are likely to produce some confrontational hearings. Sharp also predicts that the California lawmaker will attempt to make an issue of the Obama administration’s plans for a gradual pullout from Afghanistan by hauling top commanders before the committee to testify about the wisdom of setting a date to begin withdrawing troops. McKeon, for his part, has said that a deadline undermines US efforts in the eyes of its NATO allies and Afghans, and gives the Taliban every reason to sit tight and pounce when the time is right. McKeon’s defense spending zeal is no surprise. Since his election in 1992, the defense and aerospace industries have practically bankrolled his political career. And over the years, he’s returned the favor, directing millions in pork-barrel projects to defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. So many betrayals, so little time. Will the Tea Party rebel against the Republicans? Stay tuned…
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Media mogul Ted Turner, who founded cable networks CNN and TBS, wants a global child-bearing “cap and trade” system to combat climate change. He has thought up a bizarre take on China's one-child policy: let poor people sell credits for children they don't have! At the ongoing climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico, Turner told attendees : …environmental stress on the Earth requires radical solutions, suggesting countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. He added that fertility rights could be sold so that poor people could profit from their decision not to reproduce. read more
Continue reading …From CNN’s Political Ticker : Defying President Obama, House Democrats voted Thursday not to bring up the tax package that he negotiated with Republicans in its current form. “This message today is very simple: That in the form that it was negotiated, it is not acceptable to the House Democratic caucus. It’s as simple as that,” said Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen. “We will continue to try and work with the White House and our Republican colleagues to try and make sure we do something right for the economy and right for jobs, and a balanced package as we go forward,” he said. The vote comes a day after Vice President Biden made clear to House Democrats behind closed doors that the deal would unravel if any changes were made. “Wow did the [White House] mishandle this,” a senior House Democratic Source told CNN. “Breathtaking. Members have major substantive concerns and they should have gently guided people to the finish line.” Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon said: “They said take it or leave it. We left it. This is a non-binding resolution, but sources say Speaker Pelosi will follow the wishes of the caucus. According to Roll Call, the vote was “virtually unanimous”: “The House will not take it up in its current form,” Defazio said after the Caucus decision. The voice vote was virtually unanimous, according to DeFazio. Meanwhile, TPMDC quotes a House source calling it a “vote of no confidence”: A House Democratic aide characterized the rebuke as a “vote of no-confidence” in the package — a ratification of the anger Dems expressed to Vice President Joe Biden at a meeting yesterday evening about the details of the plan and the fact that House Democrats were closed out of the negotiations. The vote itself does not scuttle the deal, which most Dems predict will pass with overwhelming support from House Republicans, and a small but significant amount of support from Dems. However, if Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuses to bring the bill to the floor, the calculus changes dramatically. Thus far, Pelosi has made no indication that she plans to thwart the President.
Continue reading …Fox ‘straight news’ reporter James Rosen raises laughable Obama ‘security’ concern, lies about Obama’s promises
December 9, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media One of the favorite pretenses at Fox News is to pretend that there is some magical barrier of objectivity between their “opinion” anchors and their shows and their “straight news” hours featuring “real” reporters — guys like James Rosen. ‘Course, it’s all a farcical facade — their news segments are only marginally less biased than their opinion shows. Though they sure whine loudly enough whenever someone points it out. Just the past couple of days, Rosen has coughed up a couple of real hairballs demonstrating (once again) just how “fair and balanced” Fox News really is. First, on Bill O’Reilly’s show Tuesday, Rosen argued, with a perfectly straight face, that President Obama had raised some serious concerns about national security because he had described Republicans in Congress as “hostage takers” with whom he had negotiated: Rosen: One other point, Bill, if I may, and this should concern a broader spectrum than just the president and his supporters. And that is the potential national security implications of a president of the United States broadcasting to the world that he is willing to negotiate with hostage takers if he believes the hostage is being harmed. O’Reilly actually burst out laughing, assuming that Rosen was kidding. He wasn’t. Then yesterday, on Happening Now, Rosen followed up with a segment about Obama’s record regarding how well he’s keeping his promises. It featured a clip of Obama saying, “Look at what I promised during the campaign. There is not a single thing that I said that I would do that I have not either done or tried to do,” and “And if I haven’t gotten it done yet, I’m still trying to do it.” Rosen then told his audience: “That leaves little terrain as ground for contradiction, and yet the Pulitzer Prize winning website PolitiFact.com lists more than 500 broken Obama campaign promises. ” But as Simon Easter at Media Matters observes, that’s a far cry from what PolitiFact actually reports — namely, that of the 506 campaign promises they’ve monitored, Obama has actually broken only 24 of them : enlarge And the best part is that, because he said all these things on Fox News, Rosen will never have to run a correction. And Bill O’Reilly can keep laughing at his absurd “concerns”. Y’see, at Fox, spreading misinformation and lies and wild conjecture isn’t cause for correction. It’s the job description.
Continue reading …The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies. The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to: Shutting down Wikileaks servers, starting with the Amazon server Stopping domain name server propagation Paypal refusing to send payments VISA and Mastercard refusing to process payments The Swiss Bank PostFinance shutting down Assange’s account Senator Lieberman pressuring firms over Wikileak s The odd behavior of prosecutors in the Assange rape accusations/case Wikileaks and Assange have now been made in to cause celebres. If corporations and governments can destroy someone’s access to the modern economy as they have Wikileaks, without even pretending due process of the law (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, etc… were not ordered by any court to cut Wikileaks) then we simply do not live in a free society of law, let alone a society of justice. Ironically the Wikileaks files reveal that the British fixed their inquiry into the war, and that the US pressured the Spanish government to stop a war crimes court case against ex-members of the Bush administration . Assange and Wikileaks are subject to extreme judicial and extrajudicial sanctions, but people who engaged in aggressive war based on lies, tortured people and are responsible for deaths well into the six figures, walk free. To be just, law must be applied to both the big and the small. Thousands of executives at banks who engaged in systematic fraud were never charged, out and out war criminals are actively protected, and Wikileaks and Assange are hunted like animals? This has enraged, in particular, the Hacktivist community, with Anonymous forming Operation Payback and shutting down both Mastercard servers and the Swiss Bank PostFinance’s website. As they themselves say, what enraged them was multiple companies attempting to shut Wikileaks down, both on the web, and financially. While there is no comparison between what Assange has done and what happened on 9/11 (his actions are those of a free press), the rabid and indiscrimant overreaction of the the US in particular and the West in general is similar. And what it has done is make Assange into a martyr, an icon for freedom of speech and a symbol of politically motivated repression. It has done the same for Wikileaks and made Wikileaks a cause celebre. It has proved that the West is run by authoritarian thugs with completely twisted priorities. Kill hundreds of thousands of people and engage in aggressive war? No big deal. Cause the greatest economic collapse of the post-war period sending millions into poverty? We couldn’t possibly prosecute the people who did that, but we will give them trillions! Reveal our petty secrets and lies, and that we know the war in Afghanistan is lost, have known for years and continue to kill both Afghanis and our own soldiers pointlessly? We WILL destroy you, no matter what we have to do. Which leads us to the rape charges against Assange. Given what we know right now about the case against him, it appears that is going to come down to he said/she said. Unless the Swedish prosecutors have a smoking gun, even if Assange is convicted, most of his supporters will never believe the case wasn’t at the least heavily tainted by political pressure, and at worst, a set up. And if he is extradited from Sweden to the US to face some sort of charges, the howling will reach the high heavens. He will be a martyr for the cause. The more he is persecuted, the more many will rally around both him, and his child, Wikileaks. Because of the massive overreaction to Wikileaks, the case against him is completely tainted. He might be guilty as sin, but justice can no longer be seen to be done, because it is far too evident that too many powerful people, corporations and governments want him taken out. And so he has won. Whether he winds up free, in prison in Sweden or the US, or winds up dead, he has won this round. He will be a martyr and an icon, and his child, Wikileaks, whether it lives or dies, will become a rallying point and a symbol of how corrupt and unjust western society is.
Continue reading …All Bets Are Off. Without A Real Unemployment Benefits Extension, This Tax Cut ‘Compromise’ Isn’t Worth Crap.
December 9, 2010 No Comment(H/T to maymay ) In the words of Emily Litella, “Never mind.” Never mind that I thought the rest of the tax cut deal was worth swallowing, because that was when I thought there were 13 months’ additional unemployment benefits in the picture. There aren’t. It only maintains the status quo. According to Calculated Risk , this is just the same kind of “bridge” legislation we’ve seen before, in which people who were eligible for the next level of extensions (but couldn’t get them because they expired) are now eligible to move on to the next extension level. It’s not another tier. There are no new benefits . You still can’t collect any more than 99 weeks. All it does is maintain the same system that was already in place. This deal isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit, as my mother used to say. Arthur Delaney at Huffington Post: The programs provide up to 73 weeks of federally-funded benefits for workers who exhaust 26 weeks of state benefits . The average weekly benefit is about $300, and the total cost of a yearlong reauthorization is roughly $60 billion. Republicans and conservative Democrats ostensibly concerned about the deficit impact of the benefits have blocked several attempts to renew them in the past couple weeks, but they’ve signaled they will relent if the benefits are attached to the even-costlier tax cuts for the rich. Some 800,000 laid off workers have already received cutoff notices, and another 1.2 million will stop receiving benefits by the end of the month unless Congress reauthorizes the recently-lapsed programs. . In other words, please curl up in your cardboard box and die. We wouldn’t want to upset the bond market, would we? It’s simply amazing that the White House is allowing the press (and the voters) to think otherwise. I mean, does Obama think they won’t notice when their checks are shut off? This is the same trick they pulled back in March. The 99ers weren’t able to rally the troops because the media (and the general public) thought Congress had approved additional aid, when all they did was fund the existing extensions. Yes, it preserves the existing benefits. Well, why the hell shouldn’t they? Obama expects applause for this? In the name of common decency, this shouldn’t even be an issue. And in exchange for this emergency support, basic humane aid, we’re supposed to give away the store so that millionaires and billionaires can make even more money? All this money for war, for banks, for big business, and nothing for the people getting buried by the economic fallout. Bah, humbug.
Continue reading …The NY Times Finally Slips in Some Unflattering Facts About ‘Dream Act’ Amnesty
December 9, 2010 No CommentNew York Times reporter Julia Preston provided her predictably pro-amnesty slant in Wednesday story on the apparently deathless Dream Act, a bill up in the lame-duck session of Congress (it passed the House Wednesday night) that would provide amnesty for illegal immigrant students: “ Illegal Immigrant Students Await Votes on Legal Status .” With both houses of Congress set to vote this week on a bill that would give legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students, one of those students will wait for news of the outcome at an immigration detention center in Arizona. The student, Hector Lopez, 21, was deported to Mexico in August after having lived with his family in Oregon since he was an infant. After two months of trying to find his bearings and a job in Mexico City, Mr. Lopez, who does not speak Spanish, traveled to the border last month and turned himself in to the immigration authorities, requesting asylum in the United States. read more
Continue reading …Anthony Weiner Shoots Down Megyn Kelly’s Assertion That the Estate Tax is Double Taxation
December 9, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media Rep. Anthony took Megyn Kelly to school when she tried pushing the lie that the estate tax is double taxation. This woman has a law degree so I’m sure she knows what she’s saying isn’t true as well, but facts don’t seem to matter much if you want a job at Fox News. From Think Progress — Rep. Weiner: ‘You Aren’t Paying’ Taxes On Your Estate ‘Because You’ll Be Dead’ : President Obama this week announced a tentative deal with congressional Republicans to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for all Americans for two years in exchange for a 13-month extension in unemployment benefits. While the deal included other popular tax credits and incentives, one provison in particular has drawn fire from progressives and Democrats in Congress: reinstating the currently-expired estate tax. In what the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein called an “ugly surprise” in the deal, Obama and the GOP agreed to exempt inheritances up to $5 million and to set the tax rate at 35 percent instead of an exemption at $3.5 million and the tax rate at 45 percent, which the House passed last year. Also today, Fox News host Megyn Kelly defended the estate tax deal in an interview with Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) — who has also been critical of it — saying that these Americans shouldn’t be taxed twice. Weiner pointed out the obvious flaw in that line of thinking: KELLY: I don’t have a five million dollar estate, I’d like to someday, but if I work all my life and I pay my taxes on my income and then I die and I want to pass on what it would be great if it were a $5 million estate to my kids, why should I pay the government again? Why should there be a 35 or 45 or 55 percent tax on that again? WEINER: You aren’t paying anything in that case because you’ll be dead . … Do you know how much this adds to our debt? It adds an enormous amount. No one can be in favor of that and then come on your show and say, “Oh I’m so concerned about the debt!” As Congressman Weiner rightfully pointed out, the tax is on unearned income which heaven forbid Republicans don’t want to tax in the same manner they tax wages.
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enlarge If the last week has taught us anything it’s that nobody in Washington actually gives a damn about the deficit. That’s because a bipartisan consensus has emerged that we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year to extend the Bush tax cuts. If these tax rates are kept in place over the next decade they’ll add around $4 trillion to the national debt. The bond markets have noticed this, for what it’s worth. The yield on the 10-year t-bill closed at 3.27% today, although as Krugman notes this is still very low from a historical perspective. All the same, let’s remember that when I started this here feature a mere two weeks ago the yield on the 10-year t-bill stood at 2.8%. And you can bet that if such a quick rise in bond yields over a two-week period had occurred because Obama decided to triple unemployment compensation or lower the retirement age or just write a $383 billion check to Mumia, the shrieking from the Washington Post editorial page would have be deafening. But because it involves tax cuts for rich people they give it a big thumbs up . So we’ve learned that nobody actually cares about the deficit. Which is just as well since it’s daft to enact deficit reduction during such horrible economic conditions. But it would be nice if we could all stop pretending, wouldn’t it? In other news: So who’s going to benefit the most from the Obama tax deal? Do you even have to ask ? Households with two paychecks each topping $100,000 stand to be the biggest winners from a proposed payroll tax cut under the agreement between the White House and congressional Republicans. The proposal to reduce the Social Security payroll tax for employees by 2 percentage points for one year means that those households would get as much as $82 more each week in after-tax income. By contrast, a single worker earning $10,000 would pocket less than $4 a week. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!!!! Almost four whole bucks!!!!!! And hey while we’re at it let’s extrapolate these figures out for a year: Households earning $200,000 will get $4,264 in extra income while lucky duckies earning $10,000 in annual income will get $208. Everybody wins and everybody has a share! Bank of America has ponied up $137 million in “Oopsie!” Cash to settle big rigging in the muni bond market. So why is this a big effing deal, you ask? Check out this classic Matt Taibbi piece for a more detailed explanation but it basically boils down to this: Many big banks like BofA and J.P. Morgan rigged bids for municipal bond contracts. Once these banks “won” their bids, they sold municipalities some truly toxic interest rate swaps that blew up on them when the housing market started to deteriorate. The result is that counties around the country have gone completely belly up. “So someone’s gonna go to jail for this horses*** right?!!?!!” you ask. HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA! No : Bank of America won’t be prosecuted as long as it continues to cooperate with the government. And that’s largely how Wall Street rolls: They swindle the hell out of everyone, leave a trail of ruin in their wake and then pay a little bit of “Oopsie!” Cash to make up for it. We live in a deeply corrupt and sick system. And lastly, we have this wonderful and charming statement from Citigroup’s Chairman Richard Parsons: Citigroup remains too “interwoven” to fail even after the government has plowed billions into rescuing the banking titan and Congress has passed laws taking aim at financial behemoths, Citi Chairman Richard Parsons told CNBC. “It’s not a question of too big to fail,” Parsons said in a live interview. “It’s a question of too interwoven in the fabric of the global financial life to fail.” Parsons said allowing Citi to fail previously or in the future would be akin to having “the heart, the pump of the economic system fail because then everybody else dies.” “It’s probably the most important private financial institution for maintaining our economic strength and presence around the world. You can’t let an institution like that go down,” he said. Some 95 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are clients of Citi, he added. “We can meet the needs, satisfy their needs and provide services to them in any country in the world in which they are operating. You have to have scale to be able to do that,” Parsons said. “You don’t have to be an enormous colossus to be deemed too big to fail. It’s the interrelatedness of your business to the global economy that matters.” This sounds… somewhat scary. Why hasn’t anyone come up with a financial reform bill that would break up some of these way-too-powerful megabanks? Oh right, some people did. And it failed . Democracy sucks. Have a super rest-of-your-day, friends!
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