Political Ruminations

Koch Brothers Alert

Now they want to hoard the reserves released by President Obama in order to force you to pay more at the pump.

Story at Think Progress:“JP Morgan, Koch, Other Oil Traders May Buy Discounted Strategic Petroleum Reserve Oil And Simply Store It”

Obama Administration Proposed Cuts to Entitlement Programs

According to a report by The New York Times, the Obama Administration is prepared to agree to a total of $340 billion in cuts to entitlement programs over a ten year period if Republicans will agree to revenue increases.

Last week President Obama asked for $600 billion in revenue increases, which caused Republicans to walk out of the debt ceiling talks, because, hey, those poor rich people just can’t afford to give up things like favorable tax treatment for their corporate jets.

The proposed cuts would purportedly not increase costs to beneficiaries, instead, they would focus on reforming the inefficiency in the programs.

Administration officials and Republicans say the cuts would come from hospitals and nursing facilities and wouldn't directly add costs to beneficiaries or completely overhaul the programs.

Not to worry. Republicans are going to sink the ship with their refusal to burden poor rich people with increased taxes.

Count on it.

Quote of the Day

I rarely agree with Conservative pundit, David Brooks, but in this case, well, it would be difficult not to. Emphasis added.

“If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

And they will be right.”

Via

Adding.........Krugman gets his 2 cents in.

“My colleague David Brooks seems close to realizing what I realized a decade ago.

But I’m unreliable and shrill, of course — you weren’t supposed to realize that the GOP had gone off the deep end that early in the game.”

Awesome Image

President Barack Obama greets children at a day care facility adjacent to daughter Sasha's school in Bethesda, Md., following her 4th grade closing ceremony, June 9, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

How cute is that?!

Thomas Jefferson – Rational Deist

For all those right wingers who hate it when we [anyone, Liberals especially] bring this stuff up. Simon Schama, on Newsweek:

He may have written the Declaration of Independence, but were he around today Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. It wouldn’t be his liaison with the teenage daughter of one of his slaves nor the love children she bore him that would be the stumbling block. Nor would it be Jefferson’s suspicious possession of an English translation of the Quran that might doom him to fail the Newt Gingrich loyalty test. No, it would be the Jesus problem that would do him in. For Thomas Jefferson denied that Jesus was the son of God. Worse, he refused to believe that Jesus ever made any claim that he was. While he was at it, Jefferson also rejected as self-evidently absurd the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection.

Jefferson was not, as his enemies in the election of 1800 claimed, an atheist. He believed in the Creator whom he invoked in the Declaration of Independence and whom he thought had brought the natural universe into being. By his own lights he thought himself a true Christian, an admirer of the moral teachings of the Nazarene. It had been, he argued, generations of the clergy who had perverted the simple humanity of Jesus the reformer, turned him into a messiah, and invented the myth that he had died to redeem mankind’s sins.

All of which would surely mean that, notwithstanding his passion for minimal government, the Sage of Monticello would have no chance at all beside True Believers like Michele Bachmann. But Jefferson’s rationalist deism is not the idle makeover of liberal wishful thinking. It is incontrovertible historical fact, as is his absolute determination never to admit religion into any institutions of the public realm.

UPDATE: Recall Rick Snyder Michigan Governor

The recall effort for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) is at the halfway point in terms of time to collect the 800,000 plus signatures required to put the recall of Snyder to the voters on the November ballot. They need volunteers, but most of all, they need cash money to fund the recall effort, according to the Detroit Free Press.

But the recall effort appears to be practically penniless. A fund-raising appeal at ActBlue.com (a tool for online fund-raising for liberal causes and candidates) had attracted $15,143 as of Thursday afternoon. And it shows few signs of having developed the infrastructure critical to a statewide campaign and imperative for a statewide recall.

Mark Grebner, a longtime East Lansing political consultant, said the Snyder recall, like every gubernatorial recall campaign before it, is destined to run aground.

"There's just a lot more to doing something like that than people realize," Grebner said. "If someone asked me how much it would cost to run a statewide recall campaign, I would say, 'Probably $10 million ... no less than $5 million.' "

Okay. If we really want this guy gone, and I know that I certainly do, we need to put some money in to it. Go here to donate. Be as generous as you can afford to be. Remember. We only have until August 5 to accomplish this.

Morning Quote: Grover Norquist

From the article by Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA) “How Grover Norquist hypnotized the GOP”, emphasis mine:

“At our 25th college reunion in 2003, Grover Norquist — the brain and able spokesman for the radical right — and I, along with other classmates who had been in public or political life, participated in a lively panel discussion about politics. During his presentation, Norquist explained why he believed that there would be a permanent Republican majority in America. One person interrupted, as I recall, and said, “C’mon, Grover, surely one day a Democrat will win the White House.””

Grover Norquist’s response:

“We will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.”

And isn’t that exactly what they’re working so hard to accomplish now? To the point where they are willing to cause an economic collapse. 

Morning Quote: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, from the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable Rights; that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Morning Quote

Olbermann called out Jessica Yellin, CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent (hard to believe she is that) for this utterly stupid comment, emphasis mine:

“If this is as dire as the White House says it is, and as it would seem the capital markets are suggesting it is, why not just give the Republicans want they want? Why not just cave and say, "you know what? You want only cuts, fine. To save America and save the economy, we'll give you cuts, we'll raise the debt ceiling, and we'll fight another day on the other issues that matter to Democrats.”

Watch:

VIDEO: President Obama on Cutting the Deficit and Creating Jobs

President Obama’s weekly address: Cutting the Deficit and Creating Jobs.

Watch:

FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT: Remarks of President Barack Obama

Morning Quote

@steveweinstein on Twitter:

“Amazing that the 14th Amendment which made freed slaves citizens also will allow our first black president to save country from Confederates.”

GOP Economic Terrorism Contd.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) brings the notion of Republican economic sabotage/terrorism in to the open, emphasis mine:

“We need to start asking ourselves an uncomfortable question. Are Republicans slowing down the recovery on purpose for political gain in 2012? Let's not forget, Senator McConnell made it clear last October that his number one priority, above everything else, is to defeat President Obama.
And now it's becoming clear that insisting on a slash and burn approach may be part of this plan. It has a double benefit for Republicans. It's ideologically tidy, and it undermines economic recovery which they think only helps them in 2012.”

Stupid Quote of the Day

Rush Limbaugh:

“There is a revenue stream called tax cuts.”

Quote of the Day

Mike Huckabee on the current state of the Republican Party, emphasis mine:

“I’m not sure a guy like me can win in the atmosphere of the current Republican party. We’ve become a party of such fractured purity. It’s all or nothing, now or never. It’s not whether the government functions, it’s whether the government is ideologically pure.”

GOP Economic Terrorism Contd.

Another old school Conservative weighs in:

“We’re at 15 percent revenue, and historically it’s been closer to 20 percent. We’ve never had a war without a tax, and now we’ve got two. Absolute bullshit.” Debt Commission Co-Chair Alan Simpson 

Via Bob Cesca

Is the GOP Engaging in Intentional Economic Sabotage - Terrorism?

The reason they would do this is more than clear. They want to defeat President Obama, and what better way than to screw with the economy. I think we could easily define them as sociopaths.

There is strong evidence to support intentional economic sabotage, some of which is being touted by old school Conservatives themselves. Andrew Sullivan in a piece entitled “Boehner's Economic Terrorism”:

We have a potential catastrophe of national default, an event whose consequences are unknowable but which could quite easily wreck the US and global economies, profoundly damage people's savings, raise interest rates and destroy jobs for a very long time.[…]

Sullivan on the options available to the president:

[…..]It seems to me there are two options the president can take. The first is what you are told to do when a criminal or terrorist holds a gun to your head. You surrender.

The point of economic blackmail is that it works. If you have a scintilla of public responsibility and you hold public office, you cannot allow default. And so you give them everything they want. You announce this while declaring you abhor the package but have to back it for the sake of the national interest in preventing catastrophe. You detail and expose the Republican priorities far more aggressively than in the past. You blame the performance of the economy entirely on them from now on out. And you run on a platform of shared sacrifice - of revenue-enhancing tax reform and tax hikes for millionaires. Then you run against the Republicans as hard as you can.

The second option is to bypass them, invoke the 14th Amendment, and order the Treasury to keep paying its debts because an extraordinarily reckless faction wants to destroy the American economy in order to save it (and pin the subsequent double-dip recession on Obama). Bruce Bartlett outlines the mechanism here. He has some other ideas for coping here.

What does this say about not only the modern GOP, but our system itself?

What you probably cannot do is negotiate with [the] economic equivalent of terrorists. What Cantor and Boehner are doing is essentially letting the world know they have an economic WMD in their possession. And it will go off if you do not give them everything they want, with no negotiation possible. That's the nature of today's GOP. It needs to be destroyed before it can recover.

These people need to be defeated, and in my opinion, charged with something akin to treason.

Morning Quote: Jonathan Chait

Jonathan Chait on the reasons to wage a constitutional fight over the debt ceiling conundrum, emphasis mine:

“……a constitutional fight that establishes the Treasury's ability to pay its already-committed debts without a separate vote from Congress -- that is, to do what every other advanced country does -- seems rather tame. Indeed, even aside from the prospects that these particular negotiations succeed, it seems to me that the existence of a debt ceiling vote in Congress is itself a large, ongoing risk factor. The debt ceiling vote was always a stick of dynamite lying around, but as long as the opposition party used it only to embarrass the president, it contained little systemic risk. The novel practice of the debt ceiling as a threat to force other parties to accept otherwise-unacceptable policy goals is completely new, and itself a kind of Constitutional crisis.”

It makes perfect sense to me. After all, it seems to me that no matter which party controls what, our ability to pay our debts and avoid economic collapse should not be held hostage to politics.