Tag: obama

I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table.

Nancy Pelosi.  I wonder if we will be so fortunate with Speaker Boehner.  (via jonathan-cunningham)
I’d say it’s actually more important to recall that Pelosi was fairly literally dragged in front of cameras and forced to make this statement before it was even entirely clear just how many laws the Bush/Cheney trek to the DarkSide had broken or denied the existence of. Has Boehner even been asked? Of course he hasn’t. And won’t be. After all, Obama sets the agenda, and the GOP is certainly now pursuing a life of diligent Broderism.

This year, though, right-wingers barely even pretended to have [a serious agenda]. Their main talking point about health reform was that it would cut Medicare benefits. They railed about TARP and the auto bailout, but the former originated in the Bush administration, and they will not attempt to repeal it. They talked about creating jobs by reducing the deficit, which is economic nonsense. Moreover, not one of the policy plans the Republicans produced would reduce the deficit by a penny. Tea Partiers ranted about constitutional and economic schemes that they probably won’t even introduce, much less pass.

Mark Scmitt, writing for The American Prospect.
I’d say that about sums it up. To me, the most breathtaking one is that recurrent bit about Medicare: keep your government claws off of it, and/but don’t cut a penny; we are, however, against any and all forms of government intrusion by you filthy socialists.
That the core concept in that piece of “reasoning” was never challenged (successfully or otherwise) is precisely why last night happened. Now they’ll gridlock the government, sit on their hands, default on the debt, and then blame Obama, Our Agenda Setter in Chief, for all of it.

If Obama stood there and said ‘Republicans lied to you and now we’re going to put those lies to the test" would it be any worse for him?

Peter Daou
Nope. In fact, this is the one and only way to defeat them over the next two years. A few tweaks around the edges on Daylight Savings Time start dates and such aren’t going to pull voters any more than a year long sausage making festival over a bill that won’t enact until 2014 did.
Issue one had better be “Extend the Tax Cuts for Bottom 99%, but Not Top 1%.”

One More Thing…

John Boehner, amidst his tear strewn recitation of the robotically, preternaturally, hypnotically exact four things that he and all of his GOP cronies claim to believe the election results told them, accidentally let slip the next great product we can expect from the GOP:

While our new majority will serve as your voice in the people’s House, we must remember it’s the president who sets the agenda for our government.

There you have it. Where in their beloved Constitution is the establishment of a parliamentary system in which the Congress (either house) takes its marching orders from the President? But that’s what we’ll be told as they sit on their hands and do nothing other than obstruct, obstruct, obstruct: the President is the one with a problem. His agenda doesn’t meet with our approval. So, more in sadness than in anger, we’re required to shut the government down and default on the debt. Sorry, but Obama made us do it by not “heeding the public” and installing a full, far-right GOP agenda (that Obama’s own overwhelming electoral majority also wanted, apparently. Or did that election not deliver any cogent message from the public?). Because, you know, the President sets the agenda. Nobody else can or will, because that would be wrong.

Democrats, they’re teeing it up for you, and have been for a long time. History will call them the Tee Klan. Well, they will if you’ll just take a swing.

The Republican leader of the House actually said that ‘this is not the time for compromise.’ And the Republican leader of the Senate said his main goal after this election is simply to win the next one.
I know that we’re in the final days of a campaign. So it’s not surprising that we’re seeing this heated rhetoric. That’s politics. But when the ballots are cast and the voting is done, we need to put this kind of partisanship aside – win, lose, or draw.
In the end, it comes down to a simple choice. We can spend the next two years arguing with one another, trapped in stale debates, mired in gridlock, unable to make progress in solving the serious problems facing our country. We can stand still while our competitors – like China and others around the world – try to pass us by, making the critical decisions that will allow them to gain an edge in new industries.
Or we can do what the American people are demanding that we do. We can move forward. We can promote new jobs and businesses by harnessing the talents and ingenuity of our people. We can take the necessary steps to help the next generation – instead of just worrying about the next election. We can live up to an allegiance far stronger than our membership in any political party. And that’s the allegiance we hold to our country

Barack Obama. Nice dream. Never going to happen. Plan accordingly.

The public’s real anxiety is about values, not economics: the gnawing sense that Americans have become debt-addicted and self-indulgent; the sense that government undermines individual responsibility; the observation that people who work hard get shafted while people who play influence games get the gravy.

David Brooks, positing (apparently without irony) that all those long-term unemployed folks are really just concerned about the nation’s long-term moral footing. Is there anyone more out of touch than this man who, it’s important to note, is Obama’s preferred “conservative.”

On Consensus

President Obama: [Democrats need to have an] appropriate sense of humility about what we can accomplish; [to that end, I pledge to] spend more time building consensus.”
Mitch McConnell, (R, KY): The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

In a New York Times/CBS News Poll last month, fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans. Half of those polled said they thought that their taxes had stayed the same, a third thought that their taxes had gone up, and about a tenth said they did not know. As Thom Tillis, a Republican state representative, put it as the dinner wound down here, “This was the tax cut that fell in the woods — nobody heard it.”

What if a president cut Americans’ income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?(via southpol)

OR:

This is why they fail.

Source: The New York Times