What is The Cha-Cha?

Sylvia Fay, “Goodfellas” Extras casting director: We’ll give you a part in the movie.
Johnny “Cha Cha” Ciarcia: Read my lips. I don’t give a shit about a part in the movie. At ten bucks a head [for the extras used in the Copa scene], I figure you owe me $4,000. Just give me the $4,000 and I’ll be happy. And a casting credit.
Sylvia Fay: I can’t give you a casting credit, I can’t give you the $4,000, but I could give you a part in the movie.
Johnny “Cha Cha” Ciarcia: I says “As long as it pays $4,000, we got a deal.” Two weeks later, I get my check in the mail. It was $1800. I called up Warner Bros., I said, “My deal was for $4000. If I don’t get the balance of my money, I’ll be on set tomorrow and I’ll break all the cameras.”
Warner Brothers: Mr. Cha Cha, we apologize. You’re right! Accounting made a mistake.

Squashed: Don’t worry about the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell vote

squashed:

Today the Republican’s defeated a Democratic effort to bring a defense authorization bill to the floor that included a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Now both sides can use it as an election issue.

This did not remove the repeal from the defense authorization bill. […]
[It] is a critical bit of legislation. It will make it to the floor before the end of the year. Somebody will introduce an amendment to get the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell out of the bill. The amendment will fail. The bill will pass. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed.

It’s not so much about whether the package will squeak through (with DADT and DREAM intact), it’s about deflating the effect of said (inevitable) passage. Now it will pass post-midterms, and nobody but nobody will even know it happened.
This was never about the policy, it was about denying The Democrat a win, no matter how incremental, that might give the base even the least bit of wind in its sails. And, once again, rather than fight or force the GOP to eat a massive shit sandwich while winning the day (see: Troops, why does John McCain want them to die?), the GOP is handed this victory entirely without cost, while the democratic base sees yet more fecklessness and one more reason not to bother come November.

It is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right. This is why they fail.

Squashed: Don’t worry about the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell vote

Why Does John McCain Want To Kill Soldiers?

Why does Susan Collins hate the military so much that she wants them to starve to death while those brave men and women are out there fighting and dying in harms way? How dare she endanger funding for even a second over procedural concerns.

These and other simple frames are things you will never hear from the mouth of The Democrat. They, after all, have the facts on their side. Why, this amendment doesn’t actually even end DADT at all, it simply creates a mechanism by which [blah de blah de blah blah blah]. Why, those little devils actually used the same mechanism to pass DADT when [blah de blah de blah blah].

Repeat after Lemkin: The Facts Do Not Matter.

John McCain hates soldiers. Period. There is no other possible explanation.
When asked to apologize, up the ante (not only does John McCain hate soldiers, I’m fairly sure he is committing an act of treason by blocking this legislation).

It’s this ceaseless inability to identify whatever policy the Democrat prefers and fight for it, whatever may come, that really poisons the electorate. As The Big Dog himself once said:

When people are insecure, they’d rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who’s weak and right

“Weak and right” so perfectly sums the modern Democrat that it really should have made the exciting new website redesign and bumper-sticker that we’re all so pumped up by.
And nothing, nothing depicts the modern Tea Klan GOP’s limbic politics more perfectly than “strong and wrong.”

Here’s an idea: MAKE THEM VOTE

…the best way for Dems to nationalize the elections right now is for Congress to hold a vote on whether to extend the middle class tax cuts. If Dems did this, it would reinforce the national strategy that Dems already have in place: Making the case that a vote for the GOP is a vote to return to the Bush policies that ran the economy into the ground.

Indeed, we’re finally seeing polling evidence that voters are beginning to buy the core Dem message that the GOP wants nothing more than a rapid restoration of Bush’s policies. Is it an accident that this is happening right when the debate over the Bush tax cuts is dominating the news? Doubtful. And holding a vote on whether to extend the middle class tax cuts would dramatize the contrast between the national parties even more cleanly, forcing lawmakers to go on record choosing between Obama tax policy and Bush tax policy. Put simply, there is no better way of driving home the Dems’ core message than to hold this vote.

Here’s an idea: MAKE THEM VOTE

Blood Oath

[Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)] said the problem in 1995 wasn’t the government shutdown under President Bill Clinton – which occurred after Republicans attached Medicare cuts and other items to spending bills – it was that Republicans blinked when they feared the polls were turning against them.

“We must not blink,” he said, noting that money cannot be spent without the House voting to pass it. “If the House says no, it’s no.”

Their new tea party backers won’t tolerate anything less than a full repeal of the health care law, he said.

“They will leave us if we go wobbly,” he said. “I am worried about that, but that’s why I think it’s got to be a blood oath.”

First off, what form of whistle-speak is this whole “not blinking” or “you can’t blink” thing? It comes up with alarming regularity and has the unmistakable ring of that ever popular, not-actually-in-the-Bible-but-definitely-coming-soon The Rapture (what, you think the Tea Klan’s most sophisticated eschatologists have actually read the Bible? Or know who Cotton Mather was? They haven’t, don’t, and won’t).

Secondly, and much more importantly, government shutdown will be Job One of any new GOP majority in the House. Carve it in stone. This will be immediately followed by repeated articles of impeachment (regardless of what the Senate does with said articles, should the Senate remain Democratic, of course), based on said shutdown: e.g., the GOP will shut the government down, then blame Obama for said shutdown’s effects, and then accuse him of “high crimes and misdemeanors” relating to the ontogeny of said shutdown (he made us do it, more in sadness than in anger! We are the Patriots here! And we mustn’t blink. Ever. No blinking.). Watch and see. Preferably without any blinking.

[Steve King quote courtesy of the Washington Monthly]

To the Mondale-Phone!

Ezra Klein, 2010:The argument for taxing people who make more than $250,000 isn’t that they’re bad people, and it isn’t that they won’t notice the tax increase. It’s that we’ve got a very large budget imbalance, and we’re going to need to do a lot of things to correct it. Taxes on the rich have dropped even as the incomes of the rich have skyrocketed. So one of the obvious things to do is update the tax code to correct for that drift. But eventually, we’ll need to do much more than just increases taxes on the rich, and though politicians have tried to sell this one as a change that most Americans won’t notice and needn’t worry about, eventually, they’re going to have to start talking about changes that people will notice, and should worry about.
Walter Mondale, 1984: By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds. Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.
Lemkin, 2010: Oh for those heady, brutally honest days of the first Mondale administration.

Bait and Switch

agreatnation:

“Second, this is obviously — obviously — a setup. The whole point is to avoid a vote on the middle-class tax cuts while Democrats control the House; when and if Republicans regain control, they can refuse to let anything but a full extension reach the floor. So the goal is actually permanent extension; what they’re offering isn’t a compromise, it’s a trap.”

— Temporary Tax Cuts For The Rich? No. – NYTimes.com

Which is why I fully expect Democrats to start talking up the many benefits of compromising and offering a temporary extension of the tax cuts for the rich.

A truly crafty Democratic leadership would realize the fiscal exigency of letting all the tax cuts expire as soon as possible. Thus, you hit the GOP with stalling it now (while steadfastly offering your own package of middle class relief), and then let them block these same measures from the floor because of their desire to please the richest of the rich. A two-fer. Once the outcry reaches sufficient heights, you allow the GOP to allow a middle-class-only tax plan to reach the floor.

Naturally, this means that we’ll get full extension of everything forever and give it to the GOP using terms such as “compromise.”

[An] increasing share of national income [has] gone to the top 1 percent of earners since the 1970s, when their share was 8 percent to 9 percent. In the 1980s, it rose to 10 percent to 14 percent. In the late-’90s, it was 15 percent to 19 percent. In 2005, it passed 21 percent. By 2007, the last year for which complete data are available, the richest 1 percent were taking more than 23 percent of all income.
The richest one-tenth of 1 percent, representing 130,000 households, took in more than 11 percent of total income in 2007.
That does not leave enough spending power with the rest of the population to sustain a flourishing economy.

Bob Herbert discussing Robert Reich’s book Aftershock.
Generic GOP response to everything but the last line: So what?
Generic Democrat response to everything: If we just move those deck chairs to this side, and these to that…
Generic Population response, living it, far too busy to read about it: inchoate blood rage.
Making the current situation any clearer?