I hope everyone understands that when Paul Ryan said they were going to leave "entitlements" alone and the sequester would take place that it was a form of political trash talk before the negotiation, right? Nobody really believes that either side will allow defense cuts of that magnitude to take place. Nobody. And the domestic cuts would cause havoc too, so they aren't going to do that either. I'm sure there are a few Tea Partiers who would be fine with all that, but they no longer have the hold on the caucus John Boehner might have once wanted us to think they do.
But just because the looniest Tea Partiers aren't in charge doesn't mean the Republican majority in general is suddenly a nice bunch of Rockefeller Republicans who are eager to put all this ill will behind them and work with the Democrats to preserve the welfare state. There all nuts you know, even if they aren't all kamikazes.
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Last week, 11 European nations forged ahead to create a new tax while American Republicans walked backward into a no-new-tax trap. On Jan. 22, the European Union gave 11 member countries – including economic giants Germany and France – permission to institute a financial transaction tax, a tiny fee charged on trades of stocks, bonds [...]
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MORNING MESSAGE: Smart Talk On The Next Austerity Disaster OurFuture.org’s Robert Borosage and Richard Eskow: “Mass unemployment, declining wages, and faltering growth suggests the United States has already suffered too much austerity, too soon. And yet the political debate is focused on how much more to impose. … Now Congress has created an even more [...]
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Tim Geithner left office on Friday and the revisionism's already underway. By any objective measure except one, Geithner's tenure failed to achieve its goals. And that one success, in rescuing the mega-banks of Wall Street, may prove to be the undoing of Obama's legacy. If bank misdeeds cause another crisis, which is very possible, he may be remembered for little else.
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The United States is in the midst of the most protracted unemployment crisis in modern history, and for vast segments of the population, the recession has never ended. Wages are still sinking; more than 20 million people are in need of full-time work. Yet, the national debate is fixated on fixing the debt rather than [...]
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It now looks like the Senate on Wednesday will pass the "no budget no pay" version of the debt ceiling increase that has already been adopted by the House.
This will be the third GOP budget miscalculation, misstep and mistake in a row.
The problem with the no budget no pay plan is that, while the Senate will likely pass its own version of a congressional budget resolution because of the law, will not spur any real action on budget issues. The ultimate result, therefore, will be that the GOP talking point will be gone -- after all, the Senate will have adopted a budget -- but Republicans will have gotten nothing real for allowing the debt ceiling to rise.
Here's why.
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Chris Bowers caught the Very Serious Man of Integrity Paul Ryan in a slick little sleight of hand. Now it does sound as though Ryan is outright lying doesn't it? But he isn't exactly. In fact, both times he's actually just being cleverly misleading but in different ways, misdirecting the listener into thinking he's saying something different than he is. Today he wants the audience to think the president only says deficits are caused by health care spending because he wants to further expand government programs in order to deny people their health care benefits. (This is bizarre but seems to have some internal logic to the right wing brain.)
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We needed heroes after the financial crisis. Instead we got bureaucrats, compromisers, and perhaps something much worse. Federal law enforcement officials, our "thin gray line" against banker crime, were charged with restoring the balance of justice and reducing the threat of future crises. Seems they had other things on their minds.
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It was, of course, to be expected that Republicans would not like President Obama's inaugural address no matter what said. In fact, it's safe to say that the only speech Republicans would have been happy to hear from President Obama is one that began with "I here by resign..."; thereby handing the GOP a big win on the "top priority" they set for themselves on the day of his first inauguration.
Boiled down to gravy, all the conservative complaints about Obama's inaugural address can be boiled down to this: He didn't talk to them. As usual, Republicans are missing a bigger, more important reality: Obama didn't spend much time talking to or reaching out to Republicans, because he may not need to anymore. This three part series examines the possibility that Obama doesn't even need to pretend to reach out to Republicans anymore, what that means for the GOP, and the country.
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MORNING MESSAGE: As Federal Prosecutors Cash In, Big Bankers Go Unpunished OurFuture.org’s Richard Eskow: “We needed heroes after the financial crisis. Instead we got bureaucrats, compromisers, and perhaps something much worse. Federal law enforcement officials, our ‘thin gray line’ against banker crime, were charged with restoring the balance of justice and reducing the threat of future [...]
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