Jon Stewart on Romney's taxes

This may be Jon Stewart's best opening monologue yet.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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I still think that Romney will be the Republican candidate for President, Adelson's $10 million (so far - in about a month) to Gingrich notwithstanding.

Republicans Don’t Care About Deficits! They are a political club.

Deficits? Republicans don't care about deficits. They are the ones who CREATED the deficits. Ezra Klein complains, Paul Krugman explains:

Ezra Klein:

There are two very different tax-policy conversations playing out in the Republican Party right now. In Washington, House Republicans are arguing with each other over how small of a temporary tax cut to give the middle class. Out on the primary trail, the Republican presidential candidates are arguing over how huge of a permanent tax cut to give the wealthy.

All of which leaves the Republican Party in an odd place: skeptical of a temporary tax cut for the middle class that carries a price tag in the low hundreds of billions of dollars and is fully paid for but apparently enthused over permanent tax cuts for the rich that cost trillions of dollars and aren’t paid for at all.

But it’s not odd at all, once you realize that the GOP is not now, and never has been (at least not since the 1970s) concerned about the deficit. All the fiscal posturing of the last couple of years has been about using the deficit as a club to smash the welfare state, with the secondary goal of frustrating any efforts on the part of the Obama administration to help the struggling economy.

The entire debate has been fake. If you don’t understand that, or can’t bring yourself to admit it, you’re missing the whole story.

Two interesting comments from Greg Sargent

Here are two interesting comments from Greg Sargent's Plum Line.

• GOP leaders to Fed: Don’t act on economy: GOP leaders send a letter to the Fed chairman, urging him not to adopt any further stimulus to help the economy — on the grounds that more action could hurt it by weakening the dollar, even though many economists think a weakened dollar would be good for the country.

  Ezra Klein sense a threat in the public pressure. Steve Benen suggests we’re seeing the latest sign of active GOP sabotage of the economy. And Matthew Yglesias says this should be the story of the day.

• Obama is tanking among independents: All that said, there’s no sugar-coating the fact that Obama’s overall numbers are terrible with indys. A new McClatchy-Marist poll finds that indys plan to vote against him by a whopping 53 to 28.

  This could be a referendum on the current economy, and Obama’s challenge is to change this by somehow leveraging the fact that indys approve of the actual fiscal policies he’s currently championing. Hence the newly aggressive approach.

So the Republicans, with nothing else to run on for 2012, are in the process of sabotaging the economy. Is there any doubt? They are doing it in public now. They aren't even trying to hide their efforts.

Well, apparently there is doubt among the independent voters. Remember that a major characteristic of "independent" voters is that they do not follow politics and have little in-depth information. They are probably reacting to the poor economy and blaming the President. Will they even hear of the letter from the Republican leadership to the Fed? If they do, will they understand what it means?

That reaction by the independent voters is exactly the one the Republican leadership is depending on.

Remember the Republican hissy fit when Alan Grayson said their health care plan was "Let them die!"?

Alan Grayson famously said on the floor of Congress that the Republican health care plan was to simply let the sick die. The quote is:

The Republican health care plan for America: “don’t get sick.” If you have insurance don’t get sick, if you don’t have insurance, don’t get sick; if you’re sick, don’t get sick. Just don’t get sick. … If you do get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: “die quickly.”

The Republican response was "He can't say that about us!!"

Now we have both Ron Paul and the studio audience of conservative Republicans confirming Grayson's statement.



Here is a transcript of the question and of Ron Paul's full response.

An interesting exchange in tonight's CNN Republican debate was prompted by the question to Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex., about who should pay for medical care of the uninsured.

"A healthy 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, you know what? I'm not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I'm healthy, I don't need it. But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it. Who's going to pay if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?" asked host Wolf Blitzer.

Paul, a medical doctor, first responded by saying American society is primed to believe government would pay for it.

"Well, in a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him,' he said.

When pressed on the question, Paul responded: "That's what freedom is all about, taking your own risks," to applause from many tea party backers in the audience.

"But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" asked Blitzer, to which several voices in the audience cried out, "Yes!"

"No. I practiced medicine before we had Medicaid, in the early 1960s, when I got out of medical school. I practiced at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, and the churches took care of them. We never turned anybody away from the hospitals," said Paul to additional applause. "And we've given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves. Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it. This whole idea, that's the reason the cost is so high. The cost is so high because they dump it on the government, it becomes a bureaucracy," he added.

This small exchange is the key to a major debate going on with regards to health care, both President Obama's health reform law and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's own health reform law that is under attack by his Republican opponents.

Congressman Paul is wrong to assume that "they" simply decided to dump indigent health care on the government and as a result the cost of health care shot up. The fact is that the cost of health care shot up so high that individual hospitals could not continue to bear the burden without help. The result of the increase in health care cost was that the government had to step in and save the hospitals from bankruptcy. Who should fund the costs of someone in a coma kept alive for years? Who should provide the funds to give someone chemotherapy for follicular lymphoma? That costs $50,000 to $60,000 per month for six or seven months, and if successful can provide a person with many years of productive life after that.

No hospital can handle those costs today without assistance, and employers cannot continue to bear the costs of the employer insurance and remain competitive in the international market against foreign employers who have a workforce ensured by their governments. One or two very expensive cases can bankrupt a hospital and shut it down, and there are no health insurers with a large enough risk pool to handle such cases on their own. If hospitals are to be reliably funded and not risk being closed down by one or a few very expensive cases they are going to have to go to the government for financial assistance. There is no other organization large enough to bear the costs of some modern health care treatments.

Apparently Dr. Paul's medical training did not include understanding of insurance principles.

Congressman Paul and the teabaggers live in the fantasy that America is still in the 1950's. Everything that has changed since then has been a mistake and should be erased. But in those days sulfa drugs were a brand new miracle, the only treatment for depression was psychotherapy or electroconvulsive shock treatment and a diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence. Yeah, I guess that hospitals could deal with telling most of their patients there was no cure for their illness and sending them home to die at low cost to the hospital. Medicine has changed. Apparently, though, Dr. Ron Paul's medicine has not changed.

No wonder Congressman Dr. Paul had to change careers and get into politics. There are no malpractice lawsuits for incompetence against Congressmen.

Republican Whoppers last night.

Republicans simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Alex Wagner from the Huffington Post explains.

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Here's some more of the same:

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Rick Perry is lying about Social Security being a Ponzi scheme. At it's core Social Security Retirement is a term insurance plan in which the money paid in during the current year pays the benefits paid out the same year. That is exactly the same plan as term life insurance, and it is a financial model of the reality. The working people this year much provide sufficient goods and services to support all workers and all non-workers together. Remember, non-workers include non-working spouses, children, retired individuals and wealthy investors who don't do anything real for the economy.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The best description of modern American politics yet written

"As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself." This is quoted by Steve Benen this morning. He also adds:

There is one great overwhelming dilemma that dominates American politics in this early part of the 21st century. It is not the extent to which President Obama has failed to meet the expectations of the progressive base, though this matters. It is not the lazy, negligent, and incompetent establishment media, though this matters, too. The issue that should dominate the landscape is the radicalization of the modern Republican Party and the effects of having one of two major political parties descend into madness.

What brought Steve to write this? It is an article entitled "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult" by long-time Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren. Lofgreen recently retired after 28 years of working with Republicans on the Hill. Here are some excerpts:

Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

[...]

A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

[...]

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation.

[...]

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

[...]

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

[...]

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

[...]

I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink.

[...]

I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate.

Then he lets loose on the failures of the political Democrats. And he is dead right!

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

He then explains what really matters to the Republican Party of 2011. I list here only his three categories.

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors.The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public.
2. They worship at the altar of Mars.While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries.
3. Give me that old time religion.>Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP.

There is a lot more in this great article. And it is written by a man who has been on the inside with the Republican leadership for nearly thirty years.

Remember "a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself." This article explains how it is happening to America right now. It is a process of the Republicans attacking to destroy American democracy and the hapless Democrats simply failing to defend democracy when it is under attack.

2012 is going to be a pivotal election for America, probably one as important as the election in 1860.

Does the economy now need government stimulus or austerity?

Is the current economic set of problems the result of Democratic policies as implemented by Obama, or is the economy sputtering because the Republicans who control the House of Representatives refuse are doing their free market fundamentalist austerity policies? David Shorr writes on that issue:

The heart of the Republican argument is the claim that government spending and taxation is "job-destroying" and otherwise harmful to the economy. Well, this view among Republicans (and sympathetic deficit-hawk Dems) put limits on the 2009 stimulus package and ruled out the possibility of a subsequent injection of stimulus. So if the economic disaster brought about by Bush policies wasn't proof enough, we are tragically getting another demonstration of what happens when free market fundamentalist policies win out over J.M. Keynes' time-tested, Great Depression-taming approach.

The real problem with Republican obstructionism isn't its rigid refusal to compromise or cynicism in wishing for the president's failure. What we have here is a grand experiment for our grand debate over government expenditure, regulation and the provision of public goods, i.e. whether they are necessities or threats for the economy. We should take the GOP at Grover Norquist and Ayn Rand's word; cuts in budgets and the public sector is the job- and prosperity-creating tonic for what ails our economy. Republicans have succeeded in sidelining the government and preventing it from propping up weak demand. It's not a stretch, therefore, to say this is the Republicans' economy -- not because of George Bush, but because of Paul Ryan, Michele Bachman, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, the Koch Brothers, Richard Viguerie...

The scorekeeper on this experiment can be considered to be the bond market. When the policies begin to work then businesses will begin to expand and they will need funds. Investors will invest in the companies and in the stock market rather than in the bond market. Demand for safe government bonds will drop, requiring bond issuers to offer higher interest rates.

In other words, low bond interest rates means that the economy is still doing poorly, higher bond interest rates will indicate that the economy is improving.

The Republican led charge into cutting government spending has resulted in the lowest bond interest rates since the 1950's. The markets are speaking very loudly. Why aren't the Republicans in the Congress listening? Or do they have other purposes rather than improving the American economy?

2012 Election has started - Repubs working to paralyze government

The recent Pew poll clearly states two things - independents want Democrats to confront Republicans and Democrats are unhappy with Democratic leadership. The latest AP poll confirms this result, but also points to the fact that the public still blames the republicans for the Great Recession.

Essentially the Republicans are practicing a slow motion shutdown of the US government in order to prevent Obama from being able to claim any success as President. Yet even while holding the government hostage and shutting down as many government functions as they can get away with, the Republicans are trying to blame Obama for not getting things done.

The slow motion shutdown of government is an effort by the Republicans to conduct a political coup and retake the Presidency in 2012 even though the voters don't like them and disapprove of what they propose government does. Following the creation of a false crisis over the government debt that has damaged the financial markets worldwide while tying up the Congress and preventing it from acting to ameliorate the real jobs crisis. The Republicans will not permit the government they don't run to function. That is the message presented by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor When he told Brian Beutler that when Hurricane Irene hit his own Virginia Congressional District that he would hold the disaster relief that the government needs to provide hostage to force an equal amount of spending cuts from the rest of the federal budget.

So what does this have to do with the polls that show that the Republicans are unpopular but that Obama needs to lead? We know the Republicans are unpopular. THEY know they are unpopular. Why are they going out of their way to show why they are so unpopular? And why isn't Obama stepping up and leading America anyway?

It's a high-stakes gamble by the Republicans that the American voters will vote in 2012 based on the economic conditions in 2012 and blame Obama because he is the face of the federal government. The Republican leadership is betting that we voters will on average forget the crap the Republicans are pulling to prevent government from functioning and instead blame the guy who is in charge for the previous three years.

The Republicans can (possibly) make this work because the Constitution created a Presidential system with shared powers. The President can tell Congress what he wants to do, but nothing gets into the budget that does not have the approval of the leadership of House of Representatives - currently John Boehner (R - OH.) And John Boehner is currently be led by the nose by the extremist social conservatives who call themselves the tea party who were elected in the 2010 election. Hey! American voters can't blame the Republicans if they are being forced to cater to extremist crazies, can they? No, the Republicans are betting that the American voters in 2012 will blame the bad economic conditions (caused by Bush and the Republicans) on the man who cannot get the House of Representatives (under Republican leadership) to pass a budget that includes programs that will actually increase employment in America.

This Republican high-stakes gamble is based on the idea that the (illegitimate foreign-born Muslim Black) President Barak Obama has failed to make things better for the average Americans in spite of the total obstruction he faces from the Republican Party, FOX News, and Rush Limbaugh.

Why do I call it a high-stakes gamble for the Republicans? Because they are betting the future of their party on the ignorance, stupidity and short memory of the average American voter. The Republican Party is already at low levels of disapproval never before reached by an American national party in the history of approval/Disapproval polls. But they have 14 months until the 2012 election and they have control of an amazing propaganda machine here in America (centered on FOX and on the right-wing talk shows of the Limbaugh type.)

The Republicans are also depending on the fact that Obama's polls are not that great right now, either. Again, they think that their efforts to neuter the effectiveness of government between now and the election and their propaganda machine can together drive those polls much lower by the time of the election.

At lot of liberals/progressives/Democrats probably agree with the Republicans about how low Obama's polls are and will be at the time of the election. But what is happening is that the Obama White House is doing two things. First, they are not having Obama stand up, present major policies that he has to have passed, and draw the automatic fire that will come from the Republicans. Obama simply cannot champion any program because it will automatically be vetoed by the Republicans, even if it was one they previously championed themselves. Second, Obama is doing his job as President, especially in foreign policy. The death of Osama bin Laden (which Bush found so difficult that he publicly abandoned the effort) and the overthrow of Ghadaffi based on a NATO coalition that Obama put together have clearly demonstrated that Obama is doing his job extremely well when no obstructed by the Republicans.

There will be no jobs bills or anything else of significance getting through the Republicans in Congress before the 2102 election. The Republicans cannot afford to let Obama succeed in anything. As I have said, this is high-stakes for the Republicans. They are going to have to respond to Obama by getting even more extreme right-wing.

Obama's high-stakes gamble is that the voters will recognize that the Republicans are the source of American failure. Obama has been and continues to let them prove that.

So we see a pair of political high-stakes gambles being played out between now and the 2012 election. The Republicans are doing everything they can do both legislatively and propaganda-wise to stop Obama from succeeding as President and then blaming his for his failure, while Obama is doing everything he can do to govern effectively in spite of Republican obstruction and working to force the Republicans to expose their anti-American anti-governance policies to the voters.

If this were a high-stakes poker game being played on TV it would be fun to watch. As it is the results in 2012 may well determine if America continues as a major industrial and political power in the world in the 21st century or is reduced to a secondary nation run by self-centered wealthy corporate and banking thugs who finance a proto-fascist political system.

"Debt Crisis" was actually long-planned power grab by conservative Republicans

The Washington Post recently published a well-researched article which clearly establishes that the so-called "Debt Crisis" which resulted in the S&P downgrade of US treasury debt is the direct result of a long-term plan ram-rodded by Eric Cantor recover the power the Republican Party lost under the Bush administration.

This was not the tea partiers-gone-wild. This was not the Republicans reacting to disaffected voters as a result of the poor economy. It started before the economic collapse in fall of 2008 but was intended to take advantage of the economic conditions. This has been a long-term centrally-coordinated power grab by the national conservative Republicans.

This article was reported by Lori Montgomery, Paul Kane, Brady Dennis, Alec MacGillis, David Fahrenthold, Rosalind Helderman, Felicia Sonmez and Dan Balz. It was written by Dennis, MacGillis and Montgomery.

In mid-January, newly installed as the GOP House majority leader, Virginia’s Eric Cantor rose to the podium inside a spacious hotel ballroom to deliver a message to his troops, including the 87 newcomers who had given the party control of the House.

A vote to increase the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt limit was coming soon, he told the caucus members who had gathered at the Marriott in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for a closed-door retreat less than 10 days after taking power. Think of it as a “hidden” opportunity, he implored them, a chance to achieve their goal of reining in the federal government and its spending habits.

“I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us,” said Cantor, one of several new House leaders who detailed the game plan for the coming months. “Either we stick together and demonstrate that we’re a team that will fight for and stand by our principles, or we will lose that leverage.”

The frantic showdown that followed, bringing the nation to the brink of default, looked like the haphazard escalation of a typical partisan standoff.

It wasn’t.

It was the natural outgrowth of a years-long effort by GOP recruiters to build a new majority and reverse the party’s fortunes. That effort began before the economy collapsed in 2008, before the government bailouts that followed, before the tea party rose in response to push its anti-tax, anti-spending message.

With the backing of the GOP establishment, Cantor and two colleagues banded together as the “Young Guns,” drawing their nickname from a magazine feature anointing them rising stars. They scoured the country for like-minded conservatives who shared their uncompromising commitment to shrinking the federal government. They showered these Young Gun recruits with money and support and exhorted them to maintain a laser-like fiscal focus.

By early 2010, talk of the “debt ceiling” began to creep into the lexicon of some Young Gun candidates, first as a reaction to Congress yet again giving the nation the authority to borrow more money. But in time, it became a shorthand, their synonym for all that was wrong with Washington.

How the shorthand of 2010 grew into the showdown of 2011 is the story of a Republican resurgence that brought immense advantage to the leadership but also created immense expectations among this new breed of lawmaker. Having built a majority on ideology, the GOP leadership found itself struggling to control a rambunctious rank and file determined to live up to the bold rhetoric that had brought it to Washington.

The newcomers took Cantor seriously when he urged them in January to see the debt ceiling as leverage. Democrats called the GOP irresponsible for gambling with the economy and the nation’s flawless credit. Republicans countered that an epic clash over the debt limit was inevitable, given the outcome of the election and widespread anger with runaway government spending.

When the deal was finally done and the threat of an economy-rattling default averted, the newcomers’ disdain for compromise had proved effective. They got most of what they wanted and gave little ground.

The new majority emerged emboldened — and hankering for the confrontations to come — even as the financial markets and much of the country reacted with unease about what had just happened.

This account of the party’s transformation, and its impact on the nation’s economic course, is drawn from interviews with the leading participants during this summer’s drama and from earlier interviews, some of them recorded, at various points during the past 21 / 2 years.

The story can be read in full here.

There are a lot of questions that flow from this story. One important question is why in Hell the media did not report it earlier. But if you had the feeling throughout the Debt Crisis discussions that the Republicans were doing their best to advance the cause of the Republican Party and to Hell with the needs of the United States, this story makes it completely clear that they were doing exactly that.

The prospects of Perry for President

Romney is running primarily based on his supposed electability (which is why the amount of money he brings in is so very important), but that ignores the fact that he is unnominatable. It really is the Sharon Angle dynamic. The social conservatives simply will not vote for a mormon cult member. It's not a political decision to them, it's a religious one.

That leaves Ron Paul and Bachmann as Perry's only significant opponents. Neither can get over 20% of the Republican nomination voters. I think we will see Perry for President with a veep who is attractive to the money Republicans. It'll be interesting to see if Perry can bury the hatchet with Karl Rove and the Bush people. The Republican desire to win over Obama is going to be one of Perry's strongest selling points.

Perry's shift to the center after locking up the nomination is going to be eye-ball jarring, but the right-wing media will facilitate it by burying all his pandering to secessionists and to the tea partiers. Anyone who dares bring those things up will be attacked.

Perry locked up the social conservatives with his christian "renewal" service last week. And as a Democrat who changed parties to the Republicans he has crafted an image that he will never be out-flanked to the right.

Sneer if you will, but from what I have seen Perry is probably the most talented, determined and well-organized politician on the Republican national stage. He will give Obama one hell of a run for his money.

And remember, I say this as a Texas Democrat. Do not underestimate what Perry brings to the table. John Henry at 12:58 PM has the right idea.

I do not know if there is enough "Texas Fatigue" outside of Texas in the colonies ... uh, the rest of the US ... to be a barrier to a Perry win for President.

Here, from Redstate, is a conservative view of Rick Perry. This is, of course, during the primary season, though, and may not last beyond that time.

An older article on Rick Perry. Burka was quite prescient.

Here is an excerpt from a February 2010 Texas Monthly article on Rick Perry. Don't ever forget that Rick Perry started out in politics as a Democrat and supported Al Gore for President in Texas in 1988. The media image you see of him today is carefully crafted to get him elected to office.

Remember, this article was published early in 2010. Much of what Rick Perry anticipated in politics appears to have occurred, and he is set to take advantage of those changes.

by Paul Burka

One year ago, I wrote a story about the upcoming Republican gubernatorial primary between Governor Rick Perry and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. At the time, Hutchison had recently announced her intention to form a committee to explore a race for governor, and her campaign had released a poll showing her 24 points ahead of Perry, 55 percent to 31 percent. The governor’s political career appeared to be in deep trouble. Among Hutchison supporters, 58 percent had a “very favorable” opinion of her. Only 30 percent of Perry supporters felt the same way about him. She led him in every geographical section of the state.

What a difference a year makes. Since then, their fortunes have gone in opposite directions. Perry has held a lead, typically in the low double digits, in almost every poll taken since early summer, and now it is Hutchison’s political career that is in peril: Her Senate term expires on January 1, 2013, and she has said she will not seek reelection. Meanwhile, Perry’s prospects have never been rosier. Just a year after it appeared that he was on the brink of his last race, he is poised to become one of the leaders of his party. His travel schedule, speaking engagements, and television appearances in recent months give every indication that he and his team of advisers are looking beyond Texas to national politics. If Perry defeats Hutchison in the March 2 Republican primary and goes on to win a third full term in November, he will immediately join the crowd of potential presidential aspirants in 2012—if he hasn’t done so already.

Throughout his career, Perry has always benefited from an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time, and once again, his luck seems to be working. The Republican field for 2012 is not deep. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are the leftovers, Mark Sanford self-destructed, Sarah Palin is too polarizing, Newt Gingrich is old news, and that leaves . . . well, why not Rick Perry? Who among the contenders has a better conservative record? Who better expresses the anger of the average Republican voter? Who has a more robust fundraising base? Of the governors commonly mentioned—Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota; Haley Barbour, of Mississippi; Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana; Mitch Daniels, of Indiana—whose state has weathered the recession more successfully?

Most people who follow Texas politics know by now the conventional wisdom about Perry: that he is an accidental governor who inherited the job when George W. Bush became president; that he is “Governor Goodhair” or “Governor 39 Percent” or some similar appellation of mild disrespect accompanied by a twist of humor; that he doesn’t really do anything well except win elections, which he has done with regularity. There is truth in the conventional wisdom, but there is also blindness. Perry has been so often viewed as a caricature that many Texans have failed to recognize his talent. The fact is that no Republican has so ably surfed the wave of populist anger that has swept through the party in the past year.

That Perry has both the potential and the plan to aim higher than the Governor’s Mansion is underscored by the contrast between his campaign and Hutchison’s. Last fall, I attended events at which each candidate appeared. In October, I watched Perry address the Texas Association of Realtors in a banquet room on the second floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in central Austin. TAR is one of the largest and most politically active trade associations in the Austin lobby and one of the biggest financial contributors. Its members are exactly the kind of folks a Republican candidate for governor would want in his corner—individual entrepreneurs and hustlers offering the good life in the suburbs to those who seek it, for a 6 percent commission. And Rick Perry has them in his corner.

As I watched him speak I could appreciate the skills that he has acquired during what is now nine years in office, foremost among which is his ability to connect with his constituency. Early in his remarks, he began an anecdote by saying, “I don’t know how many of you watch Fox News,” before adding, in a knowing tone, “but I suppose most of you do.” Later in the speech, he interrupted himself to urge the people in the audience to take out their cell phones. In an instant he transformed himself into the Aggie yell leader he once was. “Put in that you’re fed up,” he prodded them. “No, put in that you’re fired up. Then text it to 956-13. It comes directly to me.” And, of course, there was the inevitable jab at Washington: “It’s frustrating to deal with the federal government. They are supposed to provide a strong military, secure our borders, and deliver the mail.” He paused for effect. “Well, one out of three ain’t bad.”

Several weeks later, I drove to San Antonio, where Hutchison was making an appearance at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy to talk about education, following an earlier stop in Houston, where she spoke on the same subject. The academy is part of a promising but controversial educational experiment—single-sex public schools for girls—that some women’s and educational advocacy groups have condemned as discriminatory. The person who made schools like this possible was Hutchison herself, through an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act, in 2001.

The event took place in the library. Hutchison spoke from a lectern on the floor, surrounded by girls from the school. Most of them were black or Hispanic. They wore uniforms of white blouses, pleated plaid skirts, and blue cardigans. The rest of the people in attendance were from the school and the school district. No Hutchison supporters were in evidence; no refreshments were provided. This was not a rally; it was a media event, the object of which was to get free airtime in the state’s third-largest TV market. The most important people in the room were not the school officials but four television reporters with tripods.

Hutchison has been critical of Perry’s record on public education—a dropout pandemic, stagnant test scores—and her remarks were primarily about her support of more innovations. “Single-sex schools are very close to my heart,” she said. She also embraced charter schools, magnet schools, and accelerated high schools. She wants the state to switch to electronic textbooks and provide students with a hybrid device similar to the Amazon Kindle.

The two campaign events seemed to have been part of entirely different races. Perry’s speech to the realtors evoked national themes and aimed to tap into a powerful feeling of discontent toward Washington. Hutchison’s appearance in San Antonio, on the other hand, was designed to portray her as a smart policy maker on an important state issue. She did it well. If you didn’t know they were in the same race, you might conclude that they were running for different offices, Perry for president (or perhaps the second spot on the national ticket), Hutchison for governor or lieutenant governor. The problem for Hutchison is that the energy in the Republican party today is not directed at how to make government work better. It is directed against government, and no one channels that anger better than Rick Perry.

That Perry has his sights set on Washington, the place he professes to loathe, would explain a lot—for starters, why he decided to seek four more years as governor, despite rumors that he had told many of his key supporters that if they stuck with him in 2006 (when Hutchison was openly considering running against him) he wouldn’t run again. Hutchison declined to challenge him, no doubt expecting a clear field in 2010, and Perry became Governor 39 Percent after a four-way race. Following this poor showing, most people, myself included, thought there was no way he could face the voters again. He would become Texas’s longest-serving governor, take a victory lap, and make easy money on the boards of companies that had benefited from his governorship.

But that is not how events played out. Perry’s inner circle, particularly his consultant Dave Carney, has believed that he has had national potential at least since 2006. Carney made that point during an interview I had with the Perry team that summer for a story about the upcoming governor’s race. Carney is from New Hampshire, the incubator of presidential ambitions, and he knows what it takes to succeed on a national level. The rest is my hypothesis: Sometime in 2007, after Perry had been sworn in for his second term, his team surveyed the Republican field and the wreckage of the Bush presidency and recognized that 2008 was destined to be a Democratic year. They saw no one in the GOP field who was capable of defeating Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. (Best not to mention John Edwards.) But they also saw that the two leading Democrats were destined to be unpopular with older white males, the core constituency of the Republican party. The Democratic winner in 2008 was at risk of being a one-term president.

Will Perry's talent for identifying voter blocs, separating them and catering to those blocs which will make a difference transfer to the national stage?

Obama spent at least six years making those calculations and we can see the results. Rick Perry may well be the person the Republican Party has been looking for to defeat Obama in 2012 and if it looks like he is, nothing is going to stop him from getting the Republican nomination for President and taking a strong run against Obama.

Democrats need to learn the true lessons about Rick Perry

Perry is one of the finest politician working in America today. Most of what you have seen in the media is Perry catering to the key voters groups he needed for his next election. Do NOT underestimate the man!

Here is a revealing article on Perry in today's Houston Chronicle. It's called "5 lessons Perry learned in his political career." I have no doubt at all that Perry is the sharpest politician and the best placed one in the running for the Republican Presidential nomination today.

The second element "Trust your Team" is going to be important after he goes far right to get the nomination and then has to move to the center for the election. I am certain they already have that planned out as neatly as they planned his announcement to suck the wind from the sails of all the other Republican candidates during Iowa. If the very professionalism of that announcement does not just leave you with a feeling of strong admiration then you are not a true political junkie. Perry and his team have repeatedly demonstrated that level of skill here in Texas.

A second element stands out in the Houston Chronicle article. Like Obama, Perry has quickly become adept at using social media to campaign extremely effectively below the level of the MSM. Political wonks don't see this level so the results often come as a nasty surprise as the votes are counted.

The Republicans don't particularly like any other of the candidates for the nomination either. As soon as they see Perry is serious and moving on the nomination they are going to coalesce around Perry like salt crystals on a string in a supersaturated solution. (Do they still do that experiment in high school chemistry these days?)

One element of the coalescing is going to be to bury the embarrassing secessionist and similar statements in a mass of FOX and Limbaugh verbiage. It was done for "Shrub" and it'll be done again for "Good Hair" - but smoother and more effectively.

Don't plan on "Good Hair" making a major misstep on the national political scene. His reputation for being stupid is a self-defeating lie spread by his (very many) political enemies, much as Bill Clinton's Arkansas political enemies spread lies about him. If you believe it you'll never take the actions needed to defeat him. Unlike the other potential Republican Presidential nominees, to defeat "Good Hair" the Democrats will have to bring their A-game.

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Addendum 1:44 PM CDT
I just discovered Red Dirt & Sand. It's a blog on Texas politics, and the blogger has been focusing on Rick Perry.

I'd like to do a similar focus but with a family member undergoing chemotherapy I simply do not have the time I need. Right now I am more likely to spend time posting on care of the Central Venous Catheter, changing dressings and flushing. Nursing was not one of my preferred occupations, but you do what you need to do.

Go read Kenneth Franks blog. We are all going to need to know more about Rick Perry quite soon.

S&P downgrade of US debt not a financial decision - it's a rebuke of Republican national politics

S&P has essentially stated that while the GOP remains significant in national US politics S&P no longer trusts the US government to pay its bills. So they downgraded US government debt to AA+. Now S&P itself has rather dubious credibility but who could have followed the tea party-inspired Republican idiocy of the last month or so and still question S&P's decision?

The US is still the wealthiest nation in the world. It still CAN pay its bills. But with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell in Congress being whipsawed by the idiot teabaggers like Allen West there is reasonable doubt that the US WILL pay its bills. The S&P downgrade is an indictment of America's current politics.

It is also a total indictment of the Republican Party. Here is Steve Benen's timeline of major US financial decisions over the last 30 years.

1980: Ronald Reagan runs for president, promising a balanced budget

1981 - 1989: With support from congressional Republicans, Reagan runs enormous deficits, adds $2 trillion to the debt.

1993: Bill Clinton passes economic plan that lowers deficit, gets zero votes from congressional Republicans.

1998: U.S. deficit disappears for the first time in three decades. Debt clock is unplugged.

2000: George W. Bush runs for president, promising to maintain a balanced budget.

2001: CBO shows the United States is on track to pay off the entirety of its national debt within a decade.

2001 - 2009: With support from congressional Republicans, Bush runs enormous deficits, adds nearly $5 trillion to the debt.

2002: Dick Cheney declares, “Deficits don’t matter.” Congressional Republicans agree, approving tax cuts, two wars, and Medicare expansion without even trying to pay for them.

2009: Barack Obama inherits $1.3 trillion deficit from Bush; Republicans immediately condemn Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.

2009: Congressional Democrats unveil several domestic policy initiatives — including health care reform, cap and trade, DREAM Act — which would lower the deficit. GOP opposes all of them, while continuing to push for deficit reduction.

September 2010: In Obama’s first fiscal year, the deficit shrinks by $122 billion. Republicans again condemn Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.

October 2010: S&P endorses the nation’s AAA rating with a stable outlook, saying the United States looks to be in solid fiscal shape for the foreseeable future.

November 2010: Republicans win a U.S. House majority, citing the need for fiscal responsibility.

December 2010: Congressional Republicans demand extension of Bush tax cuts, relying entirely on deficit financing. GOP continues to accuse Obama of fiscal irresponsibility.

March 2011: Congressional Republicans declare intention to hold full faith and credit of the United States hostage — a move without precedent in American history — until massive debt-reduction plan is approved.

July 2011: Obama offers Republicans a $4 trillion debt-reduction deal. GOP refuses, pushes debt-ceiling standoff until the last possible day, rattling international markets.

August 2011: S&P downgrades U.S. debt, citing GOP refusal to consider new revenues. Republicans rejoice and blame Obama for fiscal irresponsibility.

Unless you are a Republican partisan practicing Tobacco Industry Executive-level blindness to facts this timeline clearly shows that the Republican Party is the party of profligate spending and refusal to pay government debts.

How long can America afford to accept Republican politicians as a legitimate American political party?

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Addendum 1:13 PM CDT
This is from Daniel Gross, Economics editor at Yahoo Finance

S&P, which covered itself in a substance other than glory during the mortgage crisis, may have a poor record and strange methodology when it comes to sovereign ratings. France, which has a far higher debt per capita ratio than the U.S., still enjoys a AAA rating. And a downgrade, alone, doesn't mean U.S. interest rates will spike -- on Monday or at any time in the future. Japan's credit rating was downgraded several years ago, when the interest rates its government paid on bonds was already extremely low, and they've generally trended lower in the years since.

Market conditions, the trajectory of economic growth and relative value can play as big -- if not a bigger -- of a role in determining interest rates than a rating.

But that doesn't mean we should ignore S&P's Friday evening shot across the bow. In downgrading the U.S.'s credit rating, S&P points out what has long been obvious: Washington's inability to come to an agreement on how to close the large fiscal gaps that have emerged since the recession began is troubling. Recent events have sapped the agency's confidence that the government can and will do what is necessary to align revenues with spending commitments. And it's difficult to escape the conclusion that America's credit rating was intentionally sabotaged by Congressional Republicans.

The decision was more than just S&P's opinion of the politics, though. This was a clear political statement BY S&P itself!

Steve Benen points this out.

Officials from Standard & Poor’s provided documents to the Treasury Department, explaining the downgrade. Obama administration officials noticed a problem: the S&P numbers didn’t add up.

On Friday, the company notified the Treasury that it planned to issue a downgrade after the markets closed, and sent the department a copy of the announcement, which is a standard procedure.

A Treasury staff member noticed the $2 trillion mistake within the hour, according to a department official. The Treasury called the company and explained the problem. About an hour later, the company conceded the problem but did not indicate how it planned to proceed, the official said. Hours later, S.& P. issued a revised release with new numbers but the same conclusion.

Got that? S&P prepared an analysis to justify a specific conclusion. The analysis was off by $2 trillion. Treasury explained to S&P that the analysis wasn’t even close to being accurate, which led the ratings agency to concede they’d made a mistake.

And a few hours later, S&P decided to reach the same conclusion anyway. The agency wanted to proceed with a downgrade; whether its numbers added up was irrelevant.

That certainly inspires confidence in the integrity of Standard & Poor’s decision making, doesn’t it?

S&P makes its evaluations supposedly on the financial records of the organizations issuing debt. If this were the case, then France would have a lower rating than the US, but France still as an AAA rating. S&P was incompetent during the mortgage crisis and it once again proved itself to be financially incompetent and a collection of wealthy political hacks.

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Addendum II 5:38 PM CDT
If you have any doubt at all that the S&P debt rating downgrade is totally a political act by an incompetent financial rating agency, then go read the analysis by Dean Baker. S&P's "justification" simply doesn't pass the smell test. There is no possibility at all that Social Security will contribute to the deficit in the future and the claim that out of control Medicare costs will effect the budget in the future overlooks the fact that Medicare has a great deal more control over medical costs than the private market does.

America's minority party, the Republicans, are "governing" by Extortion

Steve Benen puts into words what we have recently seen from Republican politicians in America. They can't get their policies voted in by majorities, so they have resorted to a form of politics not ever seen from an American major party before - Extortion Politics.

Republicans aren’t just radicalized, aren’t just pursuing an extreme agenda, and aren’t just allergic to compromise. The congressional GOP is also changing the very nature of governing in ways with no modern precedent.

Welcome to the normalization of extortion politics.

Consider, for example, the Republican decision to reject any and all nominees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, regardless of merit, unless and until Democrats accepted changes to the agency’s structure. Traditionally, if the GOP wanted to alter the powers of the CFPB, it would write legislation, send it committee, bring it to the floor, send it to the other chamber, etc. But that takes time and effort, and in a divided government, this “old fashioned” approach to policymaking probably wouldn’t produce the desired result.

Instead, we see the latest in a series of extortion strategies: Republicans will force Democrats to accept changes to the agency, or Republicans won’t allow the agency to function. Jonathan Cohn wrote a good piece on this a couple of weeks ago, noting the frequency with which this strategy is utilized.

Republican threats to block nominees to the consumer board are of a piece with their opposition to Don Berwick, Obama’s first choice to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services; to Peter Diamond, whom Obama tapped to sit on the Federal Reserve Board; and most recently to John Bryson, Obama’s nominee to take over the Commerce Department. It’s nothing short of a power grab by the Republican Party — an effort to achieve, through the confirmation process, what they could not achieve through legislation. And it seems unprecedented, at least in modern times.

Republicans effectively tell the administration, over and over again, that the normal system of American governance can continue … just as soon as Democrats agree to policy changes the GOP can’t otherwise pass.

The traditional American model would tell Republicans to win an election. If that doesn’t work, Republicans should work with rivals to pass legislation that moves them closer to their goal. In 2011, the GOP has decided these old-school norms are of no value. Why bother with them when Republicans can force through policy changes by way of a series of hostage strategies? Why should the legislative branch use its powers through legislative action when extortion is more effective?

The Great America that the Republicans are working so hard to destroy became great because it was operated democratically with legislation passed through majority votes. Today's Republicans are destroying America by destroying America's democratic process in which the nation is governed through rational legislation passed by majority ovtes.

The endgame on the debt ceiling games.

This is the best description of what the idiots in Washington have really accomplished - nothing.

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Fineman and O'Donnell agree that it is going to come down to August 1 and we'll get an increase in the debt ceiling on a clean vote.

I really suspect that is too optimistic. I think it'll be a stalemate even at the end, with both sides blaming the other and the economy going to hell as they are paralyzed.

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Bill Maher is less optimistic. I agree with him.

In the meantime no one is doing a damned thing to increase jobs. That's the accomplishment of the Republicans with Obama's help. As Bill Maher says, in Nov ember 2012 the economy will have gone to crap (even worse than now) and the voters will have forgotten the lost Summer of 2011. Instead they are going to say "We elected a Democrat as President and we got a disaster."

I'd rather not be right on this.

Truthout exposes how 2004 vote was hacked for surprise Bush win

It looks very much like the electronic vote counting in Ohio in 2004 was hacked in order to change a Kerry win to Bush win. This is from Truthout based on documents provided to the court in a lawsuit.

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not."

Spoonamore explained that "they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want."

Arnebeck specifically asked "Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function." Spoonamore replied "Yes."

Spoonamore concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is a deliberate computer hacking setup, which allows a third party to sit in between computer transmissions and illegally alter the data. A mirror site, by contrast, is designed as a backup site in case the main computer configuration fails.

Spoonamore claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston where he was giving a seminar in data security. "Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it long before I met you," he wrote to Arnebeck.

Read the email correspondence here [pdf].

The conservative Republicans are a voting minority. Any win they have on a mass basis probably involves a stolen election. This is another indication of their criminal behaviors.

A Man-in-the-middle attack is a classic method of hacking into a system and changing or stealing data.

The Republicans are the know-nothing party and are proving it

Speaking with ThinkProgress today, Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) offered a take on the reasons behind House Republicans’ obstinacy on the debt ceiling. Describing it as the “the party of denial,” Moran compared the current GOP to the historical, nativist “Know-Nothing party” that, incidentally, wanted to restrict types of immigrants and have daily bible readings in public schools. Moran said Republicans “don’t know enough to know what they don’t know,” including “how serious lifting the debt ceiling it,” or “the results of any of their own actions.” “They just don’t know, they don’t care,” Moran said, adding that “a majority of the House Republicans ran on the basis that government doesn’t work. And now that they’re elected they’re determined to prove it.





This is from Think Progress.

Congress has damaged America's international reputation badly already

There is talk that the Congressional idiots are getting close to a solution to the fake debt crisis, but as Reuters reports it is already too late to protect America's reputation as a reliable nation that can get things done.

The base-case scenario is, still, that the debt ceiling will be raised, somehow. But already an enormous amount of damage has been done: the US Congress has demonstrated clearly that it can’t be trusted to govern the country in a responsible manner. And the tail-risk implications for markets are huge. Think of the speed with which the Egyptian government collapsed earlier this year, or the incredible downward velocity of News Corporation right now. When you build up large stocks of mistrust and ill will, nothing can happen for a very long time. But when something does happen, it’s much quicker and much worse than anybody could have anticipated. The markets might not be punishing the US government at the moment. But the mistrust and ill will is there, believe me. And when it appears, it will appear with a vengeance.

This fiasco, created by Republican intransigence over what is really a routine Congressional non-event (raising the debt ceiling) is going to come back and bite America big time and all the idiots in the Republican Party are going to be saying "No one could have predicted this outcome!"

But as usual, anything a Republican politician says is a lie. They screw stuff up out of ignorance and venality and then blame others for the outcome. It's happening again. Plan on it.

The Republican Party can no longer be considered competent to govern.

The top Democrats who attempting to negotiate with the Republicans to resolve the fake debt "crisis" are stating publicly that Eric Cantor cannot be dealt with because he does not negotiate in good faith. The utter failure and total incompetence of the conservative-dominated Republican Party has come out into the open. The Republican Party cannot any longer be considered a party capable of governing even if it can win elections.

This history of failure and incompetence is quite clear. After stealing the Presidential election in 2000 the Bush/Cheney administration proved the incompetence of the party to govern, most clearly in the failed reaction to the Katrina disaster and on the utterly stupid invasion of Iraq for no sane reason. Their failure to govern led to the loss of the Presidency in 2008 to Obama. Their reaction was to double down on the idiocy 2010 by taking desperate actions to "rebrand" their most extreme elements as tea baggers (they screwed up the naming on that, too) and by convincing the credulous media that the social conservatives were a thing of the Republican past. The tea party bunch was given control of the party using Koch money through Dick Armey's Koch funded Freedom Works. Using the threat of Republican primaries against any Republican who voted against the Koch - Norquist libertarian ideology they have now had six months to prove their utter incompetence, uselessness and their dangerousness. The result has been that they manufactured the debt crisis in order to create a fake shock and apply the "Shock Doctrine" to America. To do that they have totally ignored the massive unemployment crisis the conservatives earlier created when they let the Banks destroy America’s productive businesses and the unionized middle class which bought the goods and services that the economy worked to create. All that the fake debt "crisis" the Republicans has manufactured has accomplished is to totally expose the failed nature of the conservative movement and the Republican Party by proving they cannot govern a modern industrial nation.

Face it. The Republican Party has nothing left now except to descend even further into desperate measures. Will anyone take them seriously as their current partner in corruption and incompetence the Murdoch crime family "news" is exposed even to the rest of the media for what it is?

The House of Representatives is not functioning

This is really scary.

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