"Barack Obama is a lot smarter and better-informed than his antagonists. A lot. He very calmly and coolly dismantled them." - Matthew Yglesias
Obama's bipartisanship highlights the difference between disagreement and obstruction. With cameras rolling, this kind of transparency is not a friend of the GOP. Fox News cut away before the event was over it got so bad.
"Larison, as always, is worth reading:
Republicans have been treating temporary, tactical political victories as if they were far more significant, strategic victories, when, in fact, they have no political strategy worth mentioning. This is how many Republican hawks have approached problems in Iraq and Afghanistan. Especially in Iraq, the strategy has always been unclear, unrealistic or even non-existent, so there is great emphasis on finding tactics that “work” to make a basically incoherent policy seem successful on the surface.
On every single major issue of the day, they are incoherent. They have no workable plans to insure the uninsured and no practical way to contain healthcare costs; most deny climate change even exists; most seek to prolong wars because ... er, we have to be tough; their response to the massive debt is to defend Medicare and call for tax cuts; their position on civil rights is that gay people need to go to Jesus; their position on terror suspects is to detain them and torture them, violating domestic and international law; their position on immigration is to round up millions and force them to go home.
My worry, however, is that there are enough Americans perfectly happy to live with this nihilism indefinitely, and to perpetuate the policies of spend-and-borrow and invade-and-occupy that any serious attempt to address our problems is impossible. And their response to that will be to blame all those problems on a Democratic president, if there is one; and if there's a Republican president, to simply deny that any of the problems exist at all."
Well said. Perspective has been lost by the Right. They mock science and despise intellect. They use words like "elite" as insults.
Their race to the bottom mindset is simply not good enough anymore.
PAYGO.... In case we needed additional evidence that bipartisanship is pretty much impossible, we got some yesterday.
The Senate took a vote on extending the federal debt ceiling -- without which the United States would go into default. All 40 Republicans voted no.
The Senate took a vote on requiring Congress not to pass legislation that it can't pay for. All 40 Republicans voted no.
The Senate took a final vote on passing the overall plan. Thirty-nine Republicans voted no. The 40th, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), skipped the vote.
The paygo vote was especially ridiculous. The idea is to "impose a requirement that key parts of the budget must be paid for with spending cuts or tax increases to prevent the federal deficit from increasing." It's known as the pay-as-you-go approach, or "paygo" -- if policymakers are going to increase spending or cut taxes, they have to figure out a way to pay for it at the time.
A similar rule was in place during the Clinton era, when the deficit was eliminated altogether. Republicans -- you know, the ones who claim to have the high ground on fiscal responsibility -- scrapped paygo in 2002. Soon after, GOP policymakers stopped trying to pay for their policies, and Republicans quickly added $5 trillion to the national debt, and left a $1.4 trillion deficit for Democrats to clean up.
As part of the effort to address the GOP's mess, Democrats have embraced paygo as a matter of common sense. President Obama, in his State of the Union address, urged Congress this week to "restore the pay-as-you-go law that was a big reason for why we had record surpluses in the 1990s."
Just a few years ago, a handful of Senate Republicans -- Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, George Voinovich, and John McCain -- argued that paygo should be brought back. They were unsuccessful in persuading their Republican colleagues at the time, and yesterday, they voted with their Republican colleagues to reject the idea that they'd already embraced.
And that, in a nutshell, is why the notion of bipartisanship with a failed and discredited minority is so hard to take seriously. GOP lawmakers are so reflexive in saying "no" to everything, they end up opposing ideas they support, and at that point, reason has no meaning.
—Steve Benen 8:35 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (28)
GOP = Fiscal Insanity. Fiscal Responsibility was always a complete farce for Republicans. Why their followers believe it ever existed is consistent with the conservative myth psyche: just keep pushing the same talking points regardless of reality or truth.
Don't worry, I'm sure McCain will be grilled on the obvious inconsistency the next time he's on a Sunday talk show.
Charlie Booker on Newswipe on BBC4 in the UK. He breaks down the inanity of the typical "news" segment. Spot on.
"The Commerce Department said GDP grew at an annual rate of 5.7 percent during the fourth quarter, easily topping economists' forecast of 4.5 percent."
How will Republicans and Fox spin this news?
With the economy getting richer with fewer workers, now is the time to add that Jobs Bill and get things moving forward. The private sector can't do this alone.
His right-wing mask off. Alas, the politicized and intemperate Republican stands before you. Sober judicial reasoning or apolitical restraint were never there, it's just sad when you see out in the open.
"There's a reason that Supreme Court Justices -- along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- never applaud or otherwise express any reaction at a State of the Union address. It's vital -- both as a matter of perception and reality -- that those institutions remain apolitical, separate and detached from partisan wars. "
Another lowlight in the Conservative movement.
Once the pride of Fox News, now, not so much.
Conservatives have zero respect for Democrats in office. The general Teabagging "real Americans" meme, the "you Lie" bullshit screamed at the President. The off-handed comments routinely used at Fox. You play to your low-brow crowd's infantile intellect. Yayy!
Add a little objectivity and you get in trouble. You think you're above civility and the law, well, the law won.
"If we just make fewer investments in our people,
extend tax cuts including those for the wealthier Americans,
eliminate more regulations,
maintain the status quo on health care,
that our deficits will go away.
The problem is, that is what we did for eight years"
On the tone in Washington:
"Just saying no to everything may be good short term politics, but it is not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions."
Can you imagine anyone else making that speech?
All you haterz take the night off, Obama delivered.
"Alleging a plot to tamper with phones in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O'Keefe, 25, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group's credibility."
Live by the new media scandal, die by the new media scandal.
"Democrats can be assured that Republicans will attack them, regardless of what they do. Democrats could eliminate the estate tax permanently, slash the capital gains tax, repeal the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, invade Iran, and pass a Constitutional Amendment outlawing abortion, and Republicans would still attack them -- with exactly the same vehemence and vigor that Republicans have now. That's politics. It's how partisan politics is played. It is absolutely impossible to avoid attacks from one's opponents; nothing you do gives them license to attack, because they will attack whatever you do. Oh, and this isn't partisan; Democrats are going to attack Republicans, whatever the Republicans do.Don't believe me? Republicans are attacking Democrats for taking away people's guns, even though the Democrats basically surrendered on that issue fifteen years ago. They are attacking Democrats for cutting Medicare and for allowing Medicare to grow so fast that it'll bankrupt the nation -- sometimes in the very same speech (I've seen it in the same paragraph). Republicans have, repeatedly, attacked Barack Obama for not using a word he uses all the time. Last I heard, they were still attacking the Democrats for bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, something that as far as I know not a single elected Democrat has any interest in doing. No, it didn't make sense, but if they don't have attacks ready that make sense, they'll use ones that don't."
Vote for the Bill because it will help your constituents. The attacks from the Right will always be there no matter what you do.
"Hope for Haiti Now" will air across ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, BET, The CW, HBO, MTV, VH1, CMT, PBS, TNT, Showtime, Comedy Central, Bravo, E! Entertainment, National Geographic Channel, Oxygen, G4, CENTRIC, Current TV, Fuse, MLB Network, EPIX, Palladia, SoapNet, Style, Discovery Health, Planet Green, CNN en Español, HBO Latino and Canadian networks, including CBC Television, CTV, Global Television and MuchMusic. The event will be live streamed online globally across sites including YouTube, Hulu, MySpace, Fancast, AOL, MSN.com, Yahoo, Bing.com, BET.com, CNN.com, MTV.com, VH1.com and Rhapsody, and on mobile via Alltel, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and FloTV. "Hope for Haiti Now" will also air internationally on BET International, CNN International, National Geographic and MTV Networks International, which is available in 640 million homes worldwide. "Hope for Haiti Now" will be available non-exclusively to all terrestrial radio stations around the globe and SIRIUS XM Radio as a one-time-only radio broadcast via the MTV Radio Network and Westwood One.
The January 22 benefit concert was on virtually every network, except Fox News. Compassionate Conservatism was always a joke, Now you know.
