Everyone has noticed by now the non-laugh laugh of Mitt Romney, a kind of half-stifled barking. But what does it mean? It is blurted out as abruptly as it is broken off. Is it a kind of punctuation, part comma, part full stop, part interrogatory mark? What, if anything, is it trying to convey? Why does it seem more like coughing or burping than laughter?
Does it mean: “I know you are saying something critical about me, and I don’t know how to answer it, so I’ll just pretend that you did not mean it seriously”?
Or: “I want to show I am just a regular fellow, so I’ll try out my regular-fellow laugh”?
Or: “I hope you will take what I just said as something humorous, though I doubt it, but I’ll see if I can start a laughing chain reaction”?
Or: “I want to change the subject, but there is no natural way to do that, so I’ll just throw in this comic rictus as a non-sequitur”?
Or: “The Cheshire Cat could evanesce by leaving just a smile behind, so maybe I can avoid attention by disappearing away from my laugh”?
James Lipton has some ideas how Mitt can "fix" it:
So Willard lost a donor, very publicly, over his embrace of "one man/one woman" marriage as the only one he'll accept:
"I feel that I no longer wish to support your presidential campaign and ask you that you please return the maximum contribution that I gave to you last year," Bill White wrote in a letter to Romney, according to a report by CNN. "You have chosen to be on the wrong side of history and I do not support your run for president any longer."
White, a registered independent who runs a New York-based consulting firm, had given $2,500 to the Romney campaign.
White made his decision following Obama's announcement last week that he supports same-sex marriage. While he clarified to CNN that he does not agree with the president on fiscal issues, White said that Romney's speech during Liberty University's commencement on Saturday led him to believe that Romney would press for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage -- a position that White simply cannot support.
"I feel like [Romney has] declared war on my marriage," White said. "And I could just sit back and not say anything. Or I could do something about it. And I've chosen to do something about it."
“I’ve always thought it as something that was still holding the country back,” Jay-Z said, referencing the fact that same-sex marriage is not recognized nationwide. “What people do in their own homes is their business and you can choose to love whoever you love. That’s their business. It's no different than discriminating against blacks. It’s discrimination plain and simple.”
Though he was in Philadelphia to appear alongside Mayor Michael Nutter and announce a two-day music festival in early September, Jay-Z sat down with CNN's Poppy Harlow to chat about broader issues. When he was asked if he felt Obama's decision to come out in favor of the right of same-sex couples to marry would cost him votes (particularly with the African-American community), he shrugged. "It's really not about votes," he said. "It's about people."
Hopefully Jay-Z's influence will be felt far and wide on this issue.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign - NOT a surrogate PAC - released this ad straight out of Karl Rove's handbook, attacking his opponent's supposed strength:
Ju-jitsu, Mr. Rove. And nice branding for Mr. Romney.
President Barack Obama took on the Paul Ryan GOP budget, which defunds services to the middle class and needy Americans to fund still more tax cuts for the rich without specifying where budget deficit reduction will actually come from, in a strong speech today:
Chiding Republicans for not learning anything from the failure of trickle-down policies that defined the last decades, Obama attacked the GOP budget head-on. “They have proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract for America look like the New Deal,” he said. “In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget radical. He said it would contribute to right-wing social engineering. … This is now the party’s governing platform. This is what they are running on. One of my potential opponents, Gov. Romney, has said he hopes a similar version of this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill on Day One of his presidency.”
...
“There’s oftentimes the impulse to suggest that, if the two parties are disagreeing, they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle,” Obama cautioned the room full of reporters. “And an equivalence is presented, which reinforces people’s cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there is an equivalence.”
The president noted that a similar theme has played out on other key issues, including cap-and-trade and Obama’s own health care law, both of which were first proposed as conservative alternatives to liberal approaches to environmental and health care reforms.
“Suddenly, this is some socialist overreach,” Obama joked.
“It is important to remember that the positions I’m taking on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, it would have been considered squarely centrist positions,” Obama said. “What has changed is the center of the Republican Party.”
By no coincidence, on the very day of the Michigan primary, where Romney and Santorum battle to see who will lose to President Obama in November, the President spoke to the United Auto Workers with a refreshing barnburner of a speech that calls out the arguments made by the GOP candidates that we should not have bailed out the auto industry in the crash they helped create. (Or maybe that we should have done it their way, or maybe we did do it their way -- depending on the day that these guys, particularly Romney, are speaking.)
I sure hope to hear more like this as we close in on November:
Willard or Rick or some non-declared GOP candidate? It only matters to the Party itself -- the Party of Failed Ideas.
“There’s no shrimp,” explained Grant Bundy, 38. The dock should smell like a place where 10,000 pounds of shrimp a day are bought off the boats. Not this year. In all of September, Bundy’s Seafood bought around 41,000 pounds.
White shrimp season began in late August, and two months in, the shrimpers here say it is a bad one, if not the worst in memory. It is bad not just in spots but all over southeastern Louisiana, said Jules Nunez, 78, calling it the worst season he had seen since he began shrimping in 1950. Some fishermen said their catches were off by 80 percent or more.
“A lot of people say it’s this, it’s that, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s BP,” Mr. Nunez said. “We just don’t know.”
Jimmy Breslin, 10 years into retirement, comes out to cover #occupywallstreet:
This was the start of a moving day that has not been seen in this city in a great many years, back when the unions were large and nasty to those who opposed the war in Vietnam back in the '60s and '70s.
Now yesterday, they joined hands with the young, and people were mostly orderly and all for the idea that the troops be pulled out of Afghanistan and that we need jobs for the young unemployed around here.
They were angry, and they shouted about the injustice of a tiny percentage of the rich getting richer, while the middle class endures foreclosures, dwindling savings and sudden losses in employment with the jobs going to places like China.
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, on people finally standing up after the banks destroyed the economy in 2008:
Amanda Knox should never have been tried in the first place, and the prosecution's allegation of motive was Medieval and misogynistic, literally something out of a 14th Century witch trial. I'm sure it must be as hard to believe that she's finally free after nearly four years - 20% of her life -- but the relief must be epic as well. Great thanks to the Italian legal system, where the appeal is something more of a do-over than here in the U.S. Of course, in Rick Perry's Texas, she'd be executed already:
As one of the prosecutors in the case, Manuela Comodi, no friend of Knox, implied last week in his remarks: were Knox being tried in the United States, she might well be on her way to an execution. The case of Troy Davis, killed by the state of Georgia last month despite the fact that most of the witnesses in his case later recanted their testimony, should linger as the Knox saga is reviewed.
Speaking of Gov. Perry, I don't think the news about the name of the ranch leased by his family means that he's a racist. As our President would say, it's a distracting sideshow. But it does reinforce my prediction that an Obama-Perry duel would look very much like the aged battle for Abolition, and would expect to see rhetoric surrounding the candidates on all sides that mirrored that. I do like the discussion of language that's sprung up around this, like a rather unusual and admirably frank discussion today on The View.
What I do think is that he's a mindless corporatist who, like Bush from Texas before him, thinks the government treasuries are meant for the rich. Which takes us to Wall Street where a very articulate young man, Jesse LaGreca, makes the #occupywallstreet viral video of the day as he takes down Fox News to its face and lays out the real issues:
For example, the ultra-Right Koch Brothers seem to be getting away with having violated the Iran trading embargo. Because they can? Isn't that...treason?
And want to see the opposite of the guy in the above video? Isn't rich, aggrieved, entitled Hank Williams, Jr., born lucky like the Koch Bros albeit with less talent, just the Id of their rightwing Super-Ego:
Ha ha ha his theme song was cut from Monday Night Football tonight and hopefully forever.
Here's the actual passage from the S&P downgrade announcement:
Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said it best himself today:
"I believe this is without question the Tea Party downgrade," he said. "This is the Tea Party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered the will of even many of Republicans in the United States Senate who were prepared to do a bigger deal."
Kerry intimated that the "grand bargain" that President Obama initially negotiated with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), a package of larger spending cuts and revenue increases, was scuttled by a smaller group of Republicans who were unwilling to negotiate at any cost.
"There were some people in the Republican party - and Mitch McConnell even admitted this - who wanted to default," Kerry said. "He said there were people in his party who were willing to shoot the hostage. In the end they found that the hostage was worth ransoming."
The meme is spreading: It's The Tea Party Downgrade. Next comes the Tea Party Recession, hopefully not Tea Party Depression.
If arch-Conservative and Tea Party opportunist Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is somehow the winner of last night's Republican Presidential debate in New Hampshire, that's kind of all you need to know.
The debate was filled with lies and ideology masquerading as "fact" most heinously about our very tame and considered healthcare reform legislation (and I promise to take a positive look at the first GOoPer candidate who calls it by its proper name, the Affordable Care Act, and eschews the manufactured misnomer, "Obamacare"), and just plain surreal candidates positions for 2011:
You want to know what's really going on that these clowns aren't addressing with any real programs, new thinking, anything other than platitudes and service to the wealthy:
Are any of these GOoPers serious about anything other than their own lust for money or power? Because they are not acting like they want to advance civilization, they want to firmly ensconce it in corporate feudalism, enforced with a layer of religious legislation.
And don't talk to me about Romney. He brings up jobs to bash Obama but admits he has no ideas or programs in mind of his own. He's just the CEO with the privatization mantra, that worked so well under Bush. Hey, he'll do Bush and Brownie one better.
Wisconsin state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) is standing by the state GOP's new strategy of recruiting fake Democratic candidates for the state Senate recalls -- which have been launched as a Democratic counter-attack on Gov. Scott Walker's anti-public employee union legislation -- in order to force Dem primaries and delay the general elections.
Contradicting GOP lawmakers who have suggested a US default would not lead to economic disaster, a bipartisan group of budget officials warned on Tuesday that even a brief lapse in payments could trigger a crisis. Among them were Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former CBO director under President Bush and a frequently cited Republican economic advisor.
"It's a bad idea," Holtz-Eakin said at a panel discussion of former CBO heads in Washington. "Little defaults, big defaults; default's a bad idea period and there should be no one who believes otherwise."
Holtz-Eakin has supported the GOP's efforts to secure cuts in exchange for raising he debt ceiling, but made clear that at the end of the day it had to be raised. He cited numerous dangers from a default scenario, such as its effect on the bond market.
"The idea that somehow it's a pro-growth strategy to raise interest rates on a permanent basis in the United States is just crazy," he said. "We need to grow at this point more than anything else."
Let's face it, today's GOoPers are anything but adults:
Robert Reischauer, CBO director under Presidents Bush Sr. and Clinton, said while he could envision a scenario in which a sudden plunge in the stock market shocked both parties into compromising on a deal, it was too unstable and dangerous an approach to trifle with.
"Do I advocate that? No," he said. "Do I think that's risky? Yes. But we're looking for adult behavior here and seeing none. "
The Tea Party may never have been the political force the Faux media built it up to be and the mainstream media swallowed, but now they seem to be diminishing in activism:
This is coming at the same time that Republican overreach in Wisconsin and other states, and especially with the Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) Reverse-Robin-Hood Budget ending Medicare, is causing them to take unexpected heat:
It's August, 2009 again. Except this time the disgruntled town meeting attendees aren't teabaggers, they're everybody. And the targets are now Republicans. Here's Rep. Pat Meehan (R-PA), at a town hall meeting facing constituents over a broken campaign promise to not privatize Medicare. An angry constituent confronts him: "If you voted to abolish Medicare, how would you explain that to people in their 50′s out of a job?!"
There are more examples in the link above. Could this be the turning point that wins the 2012 election for Obama -- and maybe weakens the GOP hold on the House, if not outright flipping it again?
"Of course, there will be those who disagree with my approach. Some will argue we shouldn't even consider raising taxes, even if only on the wealthiest Americans. It's just an article of faith for them. I say that at a time when the tax burden on the wealthy is at its lowest level in half a century, the most fortunate among us can afford to pay a little more. I don't need another tax cut. Warren Buffett doesn't need another tax cut. Not if we have to pay for it by making seniors pay more for Medicare. Or by cutting kids from Head Start. Or by taking away college scholarships that I wouldn't be here without. That some of you wouldn't be here without. And I believe that most wealthy Americans would agree with me. They want to give back to the country that's done so much for them. Washington just hasn't asked them to."
The speech is not his most eloquent, just super smart and super refreshing:
Reacting to Obama’s Wednesday speech on deficit reduction, Ryan said that he was first “excited,” then “naively optimistic,” then “disappointed,” then “sad” and finally, in the end, “sincerely disappointed.”
“I was excited when we got invited to attend his speech today,” Ryan, who authored the Republican budget proposal unveiled last week, said just hours after returning from George Washington University where he was given a front row seat for Obama’s address. “I thought the president’s invitation…was an olive branch. Instead, what we got was a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our countries fiscal challenges.”
• Are split over whether there should be significant additional cuts in domestic spending: 47% say no, 45% yes. On this issue, there is a yawning divide between the parties. Democrats by 2-to-1 oppose more cuts; Republicans by 2-to-1 support them.
• Overwhelmingly oppose making major changes to Medicare. By 2-to-1, they support minor changes or none at all to control costs, rather than major changes or a complete overhaul. Even a third of Republicans say the government should not try to control the costs of Medicare.
• Favor imposing higher taxes on families with household incomes of $250,000 and above, as Obama has endorsed: 59% support the idea, 37% oppose it.
So with President Obama set to speak about the deficit on Wednesday night and recommending rescinding the ruinous Bush tax cuts -- the very cuts that got us deeper into debt doing nothing to stop the Bush economy from cratering, the very cuts that seems to have rescinded the Clinton Era prosperity -- House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has, predictably, called this return to sensible taxation of income above $250k/year "unacceptable and a non-starter."
While only 28 Republicans voted against the bridge plan to keep the money flowing until Thursday’s vote, it is highly likely that some of the Republicans who supported that measure were looking to avoid a government shutdown and will vote nay on the bill to finance the government through the rest of the fiscal year.
In a meeting with reporters, the House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, while saying it was his understanding that the bill had “strong Republican support,” conceded Tuesday that he was not certain the bill would pass without support from Democrats. “Certainly we’ll always ask for them,” he said about Democrats.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) suggested Tuesday that Congress will allow the country to hit its debt ceiling, and continue to hold out for dramatic spending cuts while the nation approaches a genuine default.
"I think Treasury has, if I'm not mistaken, has put ... out a notice that there is a window within which we have to act in order to avoid the eventual default of this country on its debt," Cantor told reporters at his weekly Capitol briefing. "And I believe that that outside deadline is early July."
"That that's like playing Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun. I think that gun's actually pointed at the Republican leadership's head, not so much at the White House," John Podesta told me after a presentation at his think tank, the Center for American Progress. "I think they will find soon enough that if they try the same tactics they used in the 2011 [spending] battle with respect to the debt limit, you're going to see markets react to that in a very, very negative way and there's going to be a lot of pressure on them to get realistic, and at least with respect to the debt limit, to move forward in a more cooperative way."
It turns out that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is less popular than when he was elected just this past November - in fact, he'd be defeated today:
...if voters in the state could do it over today they'd support defeated Democratic nominee Tom Barrett over Scott Walker by a a 52-45 margin.
We try to warn voters about these crony capitalist Republicans, but sometimes Voldamort has to rise again before enough people take the threat seriously. Per the Center for American Progress:
The chart below compares the 10 safety-net programs slated for deep cuts with the cost of the tax breaks that should also be considered for reduction or elimination to bring the budget into balance. The column on the left is a list of safety-net programs that have already been targets of the House leadership’s budget ax. The column on the right is the cost to specified tax breaks:
Now get ready for the loss of another three-quarter of a million jobs...thanks to the GOP House of Representatives, from Talking Points Memo:
According to Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi -- who the Washington Postreports "has advised both political parties" -- Republican plans to slash government spending will impact the GDP in such a way that would eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs this year and the next.
From the report:
The House Republicans' proposal would reduce 2011 real GDP growth by 0.5% and 2012 growth by 0.2 percentage points This would mean some 400,000 fewer jobs created by the end of 2011 and 700,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2012.
Republicans were nonplussed by the findings.
Of course they were. They don't care, as long as that Koch Family cash keeps rolling in.
BTW, Americans support the right of public unions to collective bargaining by almost 2:1.
And Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) blocks journalists from following his tweets. Not quite at the level of a Middle East dictator blocking the Internet, just somewhere on the spectrum. Who can't handle the truth?
General Motors, which nearly collapsed from the weight of its debts two years ago before reorganizing in a government-sponsored bankruptcy, said Thursday that it earned $4.7 billion in 2010, the most in more than a decade.
It was the first profitable year since 2004 for G.M., which became publicly traded in November, ending a streak of losses totaling about $90 billion.
In addition, G.M. said 45,000 union workers would receive profit-sharing checks averaging $4,300, the most in the company’s history.
Hopefully they are running their business smarter all the way up and down the line.
So much for Tea Party principles. Rand Paul has flipped his flop for earmarks, as any politician interested in re-election will do from the day they're sworn in:
One Tea Party hero, Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY), jumped on the anti-earmark bandwagon early, making “a ban on wasteful earmark spending in Washington D.C. one of the key points of his campaign” in March. Lambasting lawmakers who opt for “photo-ops with oversized fake cardboard checks,” Paul vowed to “dismantle the culture of professional politicians” even if he “ruffled a lot of establishment feathers” while doing it.
But after joining the GOP flock on Election Day, Paul is singing a different tune. In a Wall Street Journal profile this weekend, Paul signaled an about-face on his earmark position, committing to “fight for Kentucky’s share of earmarks and federal pork.”
Texas faces a budget crisis of truly daunting proportions, with lawmakers likely to cut sacrosanct programs such as education for the first time in memory and to lay off hundreds if not thousands of state workers and public university employees.
Texas' GOPleaders, their eyes on the Nov. 2 election, have played down the problem's size, even as the hole in the next two-year cycle has grown in recent weeks to as much as $24 billion to $25 billion. That's about 25 percent of current spending.
The gap is now proportionately larger than the deficit California recently closed with cuts and fee increases, its fourth dose of budget misery since September 2008.
Maybe if Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) can somehow (as he's asking) succeed his state from Social Security and Medicare, he can finish turning it into a Third World state. The potential upside: illegal immigrants fleeing across the border back into Mexico. With plenty of Texans following.
The best thing may have happened -- best for President Obama and the future Democratic Majority. Now he can even get tough on Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal.
Now with an opposition force screwing up in the House daily, he's got everything he needs to run against in 2012.
Here's some interesting writing on the mid-term election. First off, Jonathan Chait, on policy vs. politics (in response to Ross Douthat):
Which is to say, if Douthat is correct about his political premises, both parties had to choose between politics and policy. Democrats could have minimized their losses at the cost of sacrificing the health reform they wanted. Or Republicans could have minimized the scope of health care reform, at the cost of minimizing their potential wave. Democrats chose the best policy, and Republicans chose the best politics. I'm happy with the choice. Mitch McConnell won his election, and Democrats won health care reform. The latter is going to around a lot longer than the former.
And I would agree. However, I also agree with The New York Times that Obama needs to do more than legislate, he has to lead, and this is where he failed in the two years leading to yesterday's debacle:
Mr. Obama, and his party, have to do a far better job of explaining their vision and their policies. Mr. Obama needs to break his habits of neglecting his base voters and of sitting on the sidelines and allowing others to shape the debate. He needs to do a much better job of stiffening the spines of his own party’s leaders.
He has made it far too easy for his opponents to spin and distort what Americans should see as genuine progress in very tough times: a historic health care reform, a stimulus that headed off an even deeper recession, financial reform to avoid another meltdown.
Mr. Obama has a lot of difficult work ahead of him. The politics in Washington will likely get even nastier. Before he can hope to build the minimal bipartisan consensus needed to move ahead, Mr. Obama will have to rally more Americans to the logic of his policies.
Finally, the most brutal piece of all, from John Judis, on how Obama deserved the beating (for the reasons above) but the damage of the GOP tide to our economy could last decades:
The Republicans may not have a mandate to repeal health care, but they do have one to cut spending. Many voters have concluded that Obama’s stimulus program actually contributed to the rise in unemployment and that cutting public spending will speed a recovery. It’s complete nonsense, as the experience of the United States in 1937 or of Japan in the 1990s demonstrated, but it will guide Republican thinking in Congress, and prevent Obama and the Democrats from passing a new stimulus program. Republicans will accede to tax cuts, especially if they are skewed toward the wealthy, but tax cuts can be saved rather than spent. They won’t halt the slowdown. Which leads me to expect that the slowdown will continue—with disastrous results for the country.
And that’s only what one can expect over the next few years. Like the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, this slowdown was also precipitated by the exhaustion of opportunities for economic growth. America’s challenge over the next decade will be to develop new industries that can produce goods and services that can be sold on the world market. The United States has a head start in biotechnology and computer technology, but as the Obama administration recognized, much of the new demand will focus on the development of renewable energy and green technology. As the Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans understand, these kinds of industries require government coordination and subsidies. But the new generation of Republicans rejects this kind of industrial policy. They even oppose Obama’s obviously successful auto bailout.
Instead, when America finally recovers, it is likely to re-create the older economic structure that got the country in trouble in the first place: dependence on foreign oil to run cars; a bloated and unstable financial sector that primarily feeds upon itself and upon a credit-hungry public; boarded-up factories; and huge and growing trade deficits with Asia. These continuing trade deficits, combined with budget deficits, will finally reduce confidence in the dollar to the point where it ceases to be a viable international currency.
Buckle up, America. Because unless there's a potent political force either invigorated or reinvigorated to beat this back, the very citizens who voted this GOP wave to power will be recipients of an even greater wealth disparity that we've already achieved, as America drives towards Third World status. Because Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY), bless his Galtian heart, has made the Republican economic policy perfectly clear:
"We all either work for rich people, or sell things to rich people."
And the 21st Century New Feudalistic Era is hereby official.
Why won't the Tea Party candidates -- Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Sharon Angle -- appear on mainstream news shows? Why are they following Sarah Palin's advice to "speak through Fox News," which is about as bald-faced an admission that it is simply a propaganda machine, nothing like news in the real world -- before Fox News boss Roger Ailes' former employer, Ronald Reagan, had the Fairness Doctrine conveniently repealed (1949-1987 -- a parting gift of the Reagan Administration and their FCC to the moneyed rightwing interests in America and, with Rupert Murdoch, Australia.
Coincidence? Fox News would have been illegal in 1986. Why the hell do you think they revoked the rule?
So when say President Obama is "The Other" and smear him without either listening to what he says or snipping and twisting his meanings for their own political or emotional satisfaction, I hope non-Beckified Americans turn it around and ask who these Teapublicans really are, beyond their most recent stint as a Faux commentator or self-certified dentist or hypocrite living off her husband's federal pension.
Thank goodness we're seeing the President everywhere now, after a summer of well-timed underexposure, battling it out in the marketplace of actual ideas, explaining his Party's accomplishments over the past eighteen months and taking on self-aggrieved Wall Street greedmeisters like this one:
Does this particular hedge fund manager have any social conscience? A friend of mine in a similar position told me, prior to Obama's election, that he knew his taxes would go up, but it had to be Obama. We needed a smart, determined, persistent adult at the top of the nation. I haven't polled him recently, but after what could have been, Wall Street should be thanking Obama -- maybe earning less millions and even billions, but not suffering like an unemployed auto worker with a re-fi and a family in Detroit.
"The problem that I've seen in the debate that's been taking place and in some of these Tea Party events is, I think they're misidentifying sort of who the culprits are here," said Obama. "As I said before, we had to take some emergency steps last year. But the majority of economists will tell you that the emergency steps we take are not the problem long-term. The problems long-term are the problems that I talked about earlier. We had two tax cuts that weren't paid for, two wars that weren't paid for. We've got a population that's getting older. We're all demanding services, but our taxes have actually substantially gone down."
"So the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify, specifically, what would you do?" he added. "It's not enough just to say get control of spending. I think it's important for you to say, I'm willing to cut veterans' benefits or I'm willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits or I'm willing to see these taxes go up. What you can't do, which is what I've been hearing a lot from the other side, is we're going to control government spending, we're going to propose $4 trillion of additional tax cuts, and that magically somehow things are going to work. Now, some of these are very difficult choices."
But we know their platform. Dismantle the government. No social safety net. The establishment GOP has only one platform: less taxes and less regulation = prosperity, no matter the evidence to the contrary. The Tea Party is even more extreme. And in the end it would just provide huge openings for the type of exploitation by private interests that would hearken back to the 1890's, the Robber Baron era, the forces of which which all of the progressive legislation of the 20th century was designed to blunt.
I'm looking forward to the repeal of child labor laws.
Administration officials said the transportation plan's initial $50 billion would be the beginning of a six-year program of transportation improvements, but they did not give an overall figure. The proposal has a longer-range focus than last year's economic stimulus bill, which was more targeted on immediate job creation.
The plan calls for rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads; building and maintaining 4,000 miles of rail lines and 150 miles of airport runways, and installing a new air navigation system to reduce travel times and delays.
Obama also called for a permanent funding mechanism, an infrastructure bank, to focus on paying for national and regional infrastructure projects. Officials provided few details of how the bank would work.
Obama said the proposal would be fully paid for. In an earlier briefing for reporters, administration officials said Obama would pay for the program by asking lawmakers to close tax breaks for oil and gas companies and multinational corporations.
Best of all, the attack begins:
Bottom line is, these guys refuse to give up on the economic philosophy they peddled for most of the last decade. You know that philosophy: you cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires; you cut rules for special interests; you cut working folks like you loose to fend for yourselves. They called it the ownership society. What it really boiled down to was: if you couldn't find a job, or afford college, or got dropped by your insurance company - you're on your own.
Well, that philosophy didn't work out so well for working folks. It didn't work out so well for our country. All it did was rack up record deficits and result in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
I'm not bringing this up to re-litigate the past; I'm bringing it up because I don't want to re-live the past. It would be one thing if Republicans in Washington had new ideas or policies to offer; if they said, you know, we've learned from our mistakes. We'll do things differently this time. But that's not what they're doing. When the leader of their campaign committee was asked on national television what Republicans would do if they took over Congress, he actually said they'd follow "the exact same agenda" as they did before I took office. The exact same agenda.
So basically, they're betting that between now and November, you'll come down with a case of amnesia. They think you'll forget what their agenda did to this country. They think you'll just believe that they've changed. These are the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class and drive our economy into a ditch. And now they're asking you for the keys back.
Don't give up, Dems. Labor Day has now officially passed.
