Tag: GOP

Health care is another matter. That has to be taken very methodically because people’s lives are affected. Nobody’s life is affected by NPR. Nobody’s life is affected by Planned Parenthood. These are options.

Bill O’Reilly, apparently believing the notion that Planned Parenthood is merely the place one goes for on-demand partial birth abortions and the like.
Pop quiz: Number of federal dollars used by Planned Parenthood to fund abortion?
That would be ZERO. The Hyde amendment way back in 1976 made that illegal.
The right wing that increasingly makes up and already makes all important policy decisions for the GOP is after contraception. Always has been, always will be. In their world women are chattel who cannot and should not be allowed to make decisions about their own fertility, especially since all sex should be reproductive and within a “traditional” marriage. Anything else is a threat to the GOP approved sanctity of marriage and inevitably results in men marrying box turtles and the like.

Ryan’s Motivations (or: Pie-O-My)

Kevin Drum wonders what drives Ryan to produce such a uniquely partisan budget document:

I don’t know what motivates Ryan, but it’s certainly not a genuine search for plausible grounds for negotiation. Instead, he’s produced a document carefully crafted to produce a universally negative reaction from Democrats, presumably because he thinks that will make Democrats look intransigent while the Beltway press is praising Ryan for his courage.

Sorry, but that’s just wrong. Ryan crafted his document to produce a Beltway press that praises him for his courage and demand that The Democrat must now compromise based on that starting point. This is why the Democratic party needs to come out with its own pie-in-the-sky progressive budget. Then you could compromise in a way that would represent a legitimate compromise of opposing ideas and not just yet another rightward lurch at the hands of the ever-triangulating Democrats.

Instead, what seems likely to happen is the Democrats will counter with the deficit commission document and then compromise to the right of that. Which is precisely the outcome Ryan likely considers “worst but acceptable.” The sad reality, of course, will be that in the absence of a GOP President, a GOP Senate, and with only a fractionally lunatic GOP House they will have delivered the biggest far-right reshaping of American budgetary priorities (and politics) ever achieved in anyone living’s lifetime. And the Democrats will have only themselves to blame.

Tax Increases and Giveaways to Big Banks

Ryan’s view of an ideal America on the Path to Prosperity really is a winning combination; aside from the top line items of eliminating Medicare, Medicaid, and (ultimately) Social Security, the GOP Vision of an America they want to live in includes:

…lurking in the plan is a giant giveaway to Wall Street […]. Specifically, Ryan wants to repeal two key provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill that allow regulators to identify systemically important financial institutions and unwind them if they go bankrupt. This means that in a future financial crisis, regulators will face a Hobson’s choice between letting the financial system collapse and replaying the ad hoc and unjust bailouts of 2008.

[…]

[Ryan’s plan also] promises to raise the same quantity of tax revenue as the government got during the George W Bush years, but he wants to push marginal tax rates on the rich even lower than they were at that time. He doesn’t spell out how, exactly, he plans to make up the lost revenue and that’s because he wants to obscure the fact that it’ll have to come from the middle class.

Who can possibly argue with that entirely sensible approach? Why, unemployment will be almost certainly be at negative eleventy percent by 2014 under policies like those.

Tax Increases and Giveaways to Big Banks

It’s Courageous To Go Die in the Streets

David Brooks:

Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes….His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion….This budget tackles just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts….Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

Kevin Drum responds:

Courageous. Serious. Gutsy. I imagine that within a few days this will be the consensus view of the entire Beltway punditocracy. A plan dedicated almost entirely to slashing social spending in a country that’s already the stingiest spender in the developed world, while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich in a country with the lowest tax rates in the developed world — well, what could be more serious than that?

I think I’m going to be sick.

He’s right, but it didn’t take a few days and it’s not just Our Punditocracy; here’s the generic Democrat legislator last night on Hardball (sorry, no transcript yet):

[it was] “courageous” [for Paul Ryan to put up a plan to abolish Medicare and other federal social programs]

This is deadly serious. It’s easy to say we drugged bloggers out here are simply another example of the smelly hippies flying off the handle on something. Rest assured: We are not. You are going to be fighting 100% of the GOP caucus, some non-zero percent of the Democratic caucus (exactly 100% of the Democrat caucus), the entire Beltway elite media, and the do-nothing defensive crouch of the President and his administration heading into 2012. Keep in mind where that “sensible compromise” is going to land when the Overton Window has been set far, far to the right. Every possible outcome other than status quo within the current frame of the debate is going to be a major GOP win, far beyond anything that’s happened in recent political history. And that’s with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President faced with a politically daunting 87% public approval of either continuing or increasing Medicare coverage relative to today’s levels. This is why they fail.

There Is No Third Thing

Ezra Klein, on the tepid reaction to the President’s energy policy:

This brings up one of the toughest questions in punditry: What is the right thing for the president to do on an issue that’s 1) morally urgent and 2) absolutely dead on arrival in Congress?

He forgets one thing:

3) and which his political opposition will be allowed to argue both sides of?

Libya is only the latest example, but there are many, many others. As soon as the President is for it, the GOP is categorically and irrevocably against it regardless of where they stood in the millisecond before Obama made a decision. This is how Obama went from “dangerously disengaged” or “timid” on Libya and missing his big chance to remake the region to dangerously over-aggressive and missing his big chance for peace in our time in the course of approximately 36 hours.

This is precisely why Obama needs to start inveighing against the perils of windpower, the tyranny of train-based transportation, and making demands that every US citizen above the age of 14 be required to carry at least one gun with its safety off at all times.
I’m only half-joking here. Any rational policy decision will have to be couched in, at best, seeming disinterest on the part of Obama. And this is why many issues are currently hung with the “why isn’t Obama saying anything about…” rubric. Once he takes up a position, even if it is the GOP position, you’re going to face instant and intransigent opposition to whatever Obama says. Even if they were the ones promoting it yesterday. On really sticky issues like Libya, you’ll have the Serious Person dream situation: categorical GOP opposition coupled with strong attacks “from the President’s left.” And just how it’s possible to be “to the left” of a radical socialist community organizer is left as an exercise for the student, as these are questions that the MSM simply will not ask. Shrill.
Progressives angry that their pet issue isn’t receiving enough facetime from Obama should frankly count their lucky stars. Once he weighs in, your issue is over. It is only in the face of Presidential disinterest that even incremental policy progress can actually be made in this environment.

Until such time as the GOP gets significant push-back on this form of rampant and entirely political flip-floppery, it will remain the only game in town. Since such push-back would require research and preparation on the part of the MSM, I wouldn’t hold my breath. That this cycle happens to be a game that is measurably and inexorably killing the country is yet another of those facts that do not matter.

…you just need to be really brazen about your flip-flops. Sure, sites like ThinkProgress or Politifact with catch you, and the first few times that happens maybe you’re a little worried about what’s going to happen. But then it dawns on you: nothing is going to happen. Your base doesn’t read ThinkProgress. The media doesn’t really care and is happy to accept whatever obvious nonsense you offer up in explanation. The morning chat shows will continue to book you. It just doesn’t matter.

Kevin Drum, yesterday, on Newt’s ridiculous flip-floppery re: Libya (last week: bomb ‘em into the stone age!; this week: we can’t just go around bombing countries willy nilly!). I thought Drum was being a bit overwrought with this, but then the sad spectacle this morning of NPR doing exactly this…they presented a smorgasbord of GOP talking points about the GOP House not being “consulted” sufficiently pre-bombing.
Of course, these same GOP House members were screaming “bomb! bomb! bomb!” every day of every week leading up to bombs falling, but their opinions were apparently unheeded. As soon as the first bomb fell, though, those opinions did a 180. Now intervention was out of the question. The whole “Obama dithers too much!!!” meme: down the memory hole forever.
NPR uncritically reported this new GOP position, paying zero heed to the old GOP position (of last fucking week), larding it with a “he fools around too much running about in Latin America” and only then stamping the whole moldering package with a fig leaf in the form of a “some say” from an administration flack.
But yes, NPR is clearly a liberal hellspawn that must be destroyed if we’re ever to have any semblance of balance in reportage.

Strikers and their families: Go Die in the Streets

one section buried deep within [H.R. 1135] adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer

No need to talk about this kind of stuff at the national level. Shrill. Just let all those troublemakers and their families starve to death already. Christ, it’s their fault we’re in this mess to begin with. GOP to striking workers and their families: Go die in the streets.

Strikers and their families: Go Die in the Streets

A person, company or nation would be defined as ‘broke’ if it couldn’t pay its bills, and that is not the case with the U.S. Despite an annual budget deficit expected to reach $1.6 trillion this year, the government continues to meet its financial obligations, and investors say there is little concern that will change.

David J. Lynch repeating that which cannot be repeated enough. We have a ~$16 Trillion economy and the lowest tax burden in half a century. And, miracle of miracles, the beloved market realizes this because, as the linked article also notes, we can borrow at historically low interest rates, paying 0.68 percent on a two-year note, down almost 5% from what we were paying on that back in 2007.
Clearly, though: time to panic.
Source: bloomberg.com