Boehned Again

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) can't get his own debt ceiling bill to add up, and he's getting major tea-fections in his fractured yet intransigent Republican Party as the clock ticks down and Wall Street gets ticked off at the GOP.

Comin' up empty or passing a piece of legislation that gets amended away in the Senate?

Showdown approaching. I'm betting on the threat of the 14th Amendment growing stronger the longer the GOP have the legislative edge. But if their edge evaporates, then the question is whether the Dems can peel off enough GOP votes to support their own bill.

Otherwise, Mr. President: The Constitutional Option.

Crashing Their Party

Tonight President Obama gave the first speech of his Presidency that had a direct call to contact your Congressional Representative and tell them to compromise. It's been his message all along against a the Tea Party-driven GOP anti-tax fever and the greatest concerted effort yet to dismantle or privatize risk in Social Security and Medicaid. Those advances that has saved America from the type of geriatric poverty it suffered prior to those great American civilization advances.

And he reportedly crashed the House servers.

Will it keep Boehner from crashing our economy?

Back to Black

I fell hard for Amy Winehouse in 2007, documented here. Since her death by overdose earlier this weekend I've been in Facebook status update arguments over her talent, that although she died at age 27 like Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and probably a few others I've missed, she's not worthy to share their bandstand in the afterlife. It's enough to put me off taste wars for life.

Here's the woman who kicked off the nouveau soul revolution, who blew open the radio doors for Joss Stone, Duffy, Sharon Jones (they shared the same band, The Dap-Kings), Adele and, up next, Haley Reinhart. She had two less albums than Janis and maybe didn't have the cultural impact, but what recording star does these days, with pop music so fragmented? She was the subject of much tabloid journalism and chased by paparazzi, which means enough people were interested, but more importantly, she set a direction for her music early on, talking in interviews how she found pop music so flat and bland, and brought some earthy retro values with up-to-date lyrics.

Tragically, she wasn't bright enough to escape her addiction, instead letting it take her to an early grave. Since she was such a mess it's fodder for dark comedy, like when her mother (Janis, whoa, a pharmacist, ouch!) is quoted as saying, "She seemed out of it."

I thought her breast augmentation a year or so ago was the real beginning of the end. A pop star who has already made it doesn't need them for her career, unless she is pathologically insecure. But Amy rarely looked healthy in body, at least not after the music videos for her breakthrough Back to Black album. And I'm sure make-up and lighting helped.

It seems almost triumphant that Lindsay Lohan has survived Amy Winehouse, but she doesn't seem to be an opiate addict, so unless there's a heart problem found by the cocaine or a drunken car crash (which will probably kill others and leave her alive), she may be looking at a much slower demise. In any case, it seems only fitting to post a link (embedding disabled) to the poor little Jewish girl from London's most popular tune, pleasurably defiant, but in the end contradicted by life itself, Rehab.

Shoulda gone.

Yes, yes, yes.

Back in Red

Sorry for the vacation break -- had some sign-on issues while I was away. Thanks to all regular readers who were checking, hope the lack of posts did not drive you away forever.

While the News Corp scandal is a blast and there's other interesting news, the Debt Limit Crisis is #1 with a bullet, and unfortunately that bullet is aimed at the heart of America and the global economy. If there was ever a reason to despise tax-pledge false god Grover Norquist or one-track Teabagger thinking, this is it. No matter what Reps. Bachmann or Gohmert might say or actually believe, they are wrong -- there's no way to successfully prioritize government spending under default, and no way that it won't raise interest rates through the room and further decimate the job market. Per a real economist:



As Norm Ornstein says, this group of Tea Partying freshmen Representatives have created, arguably, the Worst Congress Ever (or at least since the Civil War):

That brings us to the 112th Congress. House Republicans are adamant about refusing to compromise with the president, and are able in most instances to make good on the threat. When they are not able to maintain this unity, they are simply unwilling to bring up or pass measures that would lose significant GOP votes and require as many or more Democrats in support. This is a formula for gridlock, or worse. is the Republicans are simply declining to govern.

We have seen problems emerge on more issues than the fiscal issues now before Congress. For instance, the painful effort to find broad bipartisan support for three significant trade agreements that are clearly in America's national interest, including its economic and diplomatic interest (and which first had to overcome substantial Democratic opposition), have been thwarted of late by Republicans' refusal to negotiate with the president over a much more minor issue of implementing trade adjustment assistance.

Political tactics to provoke confrontation, during a time when the permanent campaign reigns supreme and the competition for majorities in both houses is fierce, have combined with the rise of partisan media, one with far more reach and immediacy than the partisan press that thrived in the 19th century. When a phalanx of conservative media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to talk radio and blogs, chimes in that breaching America's debt limit would at worst be benign and at best could actually do the country some good, and are joined by presidential candidates like Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty in those messages, it encourages the confrontationalists to ignore the reality that damaging the full faith and credit of the United States will cause long-lasting economic turmoil at home and abroad.

Know Nothingism lives.

Dinklage for the Win

With the 2011 Emmy Award nominations today, is there any doubt who is the greatest sentimental favorite in the bunch? Peter Dinklage (per my reading) is the only member of the Game of Thrones cast to win a nomination, as Best Supporting Actor in a Dramatic Series, and as Tyrion Lannister, the witty, nay brilliant dwarf son hated by his father (the richest man in the Seven Kingdoms), disliked by his sister (the Queen), loved by his brother and wrongly accused of murder, he steals every scene in which he appears.

As his role is expected to grow in future seasons, this is the perfect time to give him the award. A full list of reasons come from People's website, and if you haven't yet seen him in the role or just want to enjoy some great moments again along with some smart actor commentary, here you go:



C'mon, justice of the Gods.

"Don't call my bluff."

Eric Cantor overplaying his hand against the man who killed Bin Laden:

"Eric, don't call my bluff. I'm going to the American people on this," the president said, according to both Cantor and another attendee. "This process is confirming what the American people think is the worst about Washington: that everyone is more interested in posturing, political positioning, and protecting their base, than in resolving real problems."

Cantor, speaking to reporters after the meeting, said that the president "abruptly" walked off after offering his scolding.

Or, as someone else who was in the room put it:

“He (Obama) lit up Eric Cantor like he’s never been lit up,” said one in the room.

Light him up, baby. And the rest of the Tea-rants with him.

Mitch McConnell at least has the good sense, a day after revealing his hand, to go full weasel. Admitting abdication of governance for pure Party politics, admitting it in public, no less:

Watching silently was McConnell, who had used a conservative radio interview earlier in the day to bluntly warn his party it was setting itself up for a fall at the polls in 2012.

“I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy,” McConnell told his host, Laura Ingraham. “The reason default is no better an idea today than it was when Newt Gingrich tried it in 1995 is that it destroys your brand and would give the president an opportunity to blame Republicans for a bad economy.”

He's already (and often) said that thwarting President Obama's reelection is his single goal as Senate Minority Leader, so McConnell admits he is only concerned with making the President look bad, not with getting America back to work, not with putting guardrails on the greed that caused our most recent financial meltdown, not with saving the planet from destruction. Not even bringing peace to the Middle East.

That not governance, that's certainly not statesmanship.

That's simply sabotage.

Punks

The best debt negotiation quote yet:

Since pulling the plug on the deal, Boehner has been largely silent in the meetings, leaving House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to present details of the House’s position. On Tuesday, people in both parties said, Obama tried to reestablish Boehner’s primacy.

Cantor, who is advocating a smaller deal, at one point demanded that Obama offer the details of his vision for a “grand bargain.”

“Where’s your paper?” he asked angrily.

Obama snapped back: “Frankly, your speaker has it. Am I dealing with him, or am I dealing with you?”

It was all revealed today. At the highest level, it's House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) doing his "young guns" power-grab over House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) fueled by the Tea Party he's grabbed onto. His PPT was leaked today, no compromise on revenue generation at all:

Eric Cantor July Slides

Today the business leaders hit back. At the GOP:

The message, sent in a letter to President Obama and every member of Congress, puts pressure on GOP lawmakers, who have staked out an uncompromising stance against raising taxes in the partisan wrangling over the country’s borrowing limit.

Republicans rely heavily on corporations for political support and have regularly cited the opinions of these “job creators” in their opposition to new tax revenue. Many of the House GOP freshmen most opposed to a compromise were swept into office with the help of financial support from groups behind the letter.

But the business community, which has largely kept quiet on the issue until now, does not uniformly share the Republican orthodoxy on taxes, according to some lobbyists who helped craft the statement.

The letter conspicuously avoided any mention of tax revenue partly because of differences of opinion among executives over whether to compromise on taxes to get a deal done, said a senior industry lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the internal deliberations were private.

“The debt default would be exponentially more painful than anything else,” said another senior executive at a major business lobbying group.

Obama has won the war of governance. The GOP is my way or the highway, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) found himself squeezed between the idiot Tea Party faction that thinks defaulting on the debt won't lead to world economic depression the loss of global American currency dominance that keeps us on top of the world, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, normally their biggest ally. No sane business in the country wants the U.S. to default and interest rates shoot through the roof -- if you can even get a loan.

So McConnell releases his Plan Z, panic mode, where they'd just keep holding short term votes to raise the debt without any cuts truly tethered. The idea is they keep the U.S. from defaulting but keep their members from having to vote on a Grand Bargain with any tax revenues, whether through closing loopholes or raising marginal rates on high income.

The result: his own party turns on him:

"It's Time to Burn Mitch McConnell in Effigy," read the headline on a post by Red State's Erick Erickson. He later changed it, writing "I decided to make the title less incendiary."

The new version? "Mitch McConnell Just Proposed the 'Pontius Pilate Pass the Buck Act of 2011.'" A sample:

So fearful of being blamed for a default, McConnell is proposing a compromise that lets Barack Obama raise the debt ceiling without making any spending cuts at all. Consider sending McConnell a weasel as testament to his treachery.

The generally more polite Heritage Foundation took aim at McConnell's plan as well.

"The plan that we are reading reports about today is a serious walk back," Heritage blogger Ashe Schow wrote, "and would seemingly trade the leverage needed to achieve reforms in return for political gains."

The NY Times is already capitulating to McConnell's plan (hang it on Obama through the election), which I don't think Obama wants but might be able to live with if he can a Grand Bargain separately. But it appears we're in an interesting Obama-jitsu moment, where he's used his opponents own weight to create a reversal on them.

They wanted cuts, he's brought the cuts. They wanted to lower the deficit, he's offering a huge deal to do it. They wanted to use the leverage of the debt limit, their threat to let the U.S. slide into fiscal default for the first time in our history, after raising the debt limit 19 times for their own El Presidente George W. Bush and his wars which we are still fighting; he's got the leverage now, at least for the moment.

Either Boehner comes out of this strengthened for letting Cantor play out, or there's going to be total civil war in that party. They're paying the devil's price for having the ranking extremists, the tea-ideologues with their pitchforks, and the most stratified capitalists in the same Party. It's only a hatred of taxes -- and government spending that doesn't just go directly to them in the form of Medicare, Social Security, big government project spending or tax credits. They don't even agree on "values" issues.

Is this the granddaddy of all teachable moments?

Really?

President Obama is doing a Tina Fey/Seth Meyer routine on the GOP, as is the majority sane side of the country, those for whom nation is more important than party. Damned if Obama didn't put more on the table than any reasonable man should have had to, and the prissy Republicans turned down what they and their Teafaction had always said they wanted -- to cut the deficit. Only they refuse to return to the Clinton Prosperity levels of income taxation because it mean more of it would come from the rich. As if that's a bad thing.

The wealthy sometimes create jobs. Sometimes here, sometimes overseas, sometimes they just buy more T-bills, which the GOP is holding hostage to default on. Default on money already spent. By them 2000-2008 and the lower revenue levels through 2012.

The twin lies of their economic narrative fall flat now that our nation's President has publicly admitted that the compromise he seeks, the Grand Bargain to cut $4 trillion over the next whatever years, will cause trouble for him with members of his own party. But he's willing to take the heat -- as long as the other side takes theirs go.

"I will not sign a 30-day or a 60-day or a 90-day extension. That is just not an acceptable approach. And if we think it's hard now, imagine how these guys are going to be thinking six months from now in the middle of election season when they are all up. It's not going to get easier, it's going to get harder. So, we might as well do it now. Pull off the band-aid. Eat our peas. Now is the time to do it. If not now, when? We keep on talking about this stuff, and we have these high-minded pronouncements about how we've got to get control of the deficit, how we owe it to our children and our grandchildren. Well, let's step up. Let's do it."

The GOP aren't negotiating. It's beyond hostage-taking. It's their own Dr. Strangelove Doomsday Machine, their impossible logic of having drawn in the most extreme rightwing elements of political America in order to win elections, only to end up fearing for their primaries.

The question is whether they have a jujitsu move to somehow make a deal while screwing the other 80% of America who say Tax the Rich, or at least eliminate their private aircraft deduction. But if they don't, per Jonathan Rauch (subbing for Andrew Sullivan), this is Obama's moment and the Democrats to come:

I'll always remember the moment in 1995 when I realized that Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolutionaries had gone too far. As you recall, they, like the current bunch, were freshly elected hotheads who thought they had a mandate to get tough with Big Government and believed they could hammer a weak Democratic president into submission. One day my father, a conservative independent who until then had shown little sympathy for Bill Clinton, looked up from his paper, having just read about House Republicans' musing that they might default on the national debt if Clinton didn't knuckle under. "These people," he said, "are dangerous."

Republicans ought to remember that nothing would whisk them back to long-term minority status faster than being perceived by the broad middle as unfit to govern. Obama clearly understands as much and is doing everything in his power to broadcast tough reasonableness. He's setting the Republicans up for another Hurricane Katrina moment—but one of their own making.

I think when all the state layoffs hit, particularly in the new GOP governorships, there will be hell to pay. Layoffs is layoffs, and they did it so fast, they'll still be in office for two or four years while the state is hurting.

Somebody game this out for me -- if the GOP don't raise the debt and the economy tanks, maybe the world economy collapses, what could possibly be their strategy for winning in 2012: Obama didn't assent to our demands, so we shot the hostage?

Really?

Betty

Per my father's maxim that you have to be at least slightly insane to want to be President of the United States of America, Gerald Ford may be the rare case of a "not insane" President. Maybe not considered the smartest and certainly not the most successful and actually getting elected, he was essentially appointed President-in-waiting by Richard Nixon, on the verge of impeachment and, ultimately, resignation. One of the finest characteristics of President Ford was, of course, his wife Betty Ford, my kind of Republican, which is to say, smart and sensible and not insane. She passed away a little over a day ago at age 93.

There are three reasons I admired Ms. Ford in particular, two of which are fairly well known. One is how she opened up regarding the breast cancer she suffered while First Lady, the radical mastectomy and chemotherapy, the first time I can recall a public figure sharing such a common condition with the public. This led to a huge influx in women going to get tested themselves.

Second, she revealed her own alcoholism and pill addiction, leading to founding the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs. Again, her own private battle, after having gone public, led to a de-stigmatization of what had historically been something hidden, secret, shameful.

Lastly, or perhaps first, there was the Ford's White House bed. It was a something of a deal at the time that this was a Presidential couple that actually slept together, rather than the twin beds (separate bedrooms?) of Richard and Pat Nixon, possibly going back further than that as well. The Fords had a lot of kids, who were smart and sometimes a little too outspoken themselves, but they sure looked like they were still in love. That queen-sized bed they brought into the White House was noted by my parents, and while I don't think they voted for Gerald Ford in the ensuing election (his pardon of Richard Nixon sealed his own fate), they approved. Nobody really hated Jerry Ford.

And everybody admired Betty.

Graffiti6 Made My Night

So I've got a new musical obsession. British Northern Psychedelic Stroke Soul band Graffiti6, led by the impressive and enlivening Jamie Scott. I found out they were doing a free gig at the Hammer Museum here in Westwood, started in on "Annie You Save Me From the World" and have since learned the guitar chords. Addictive:



Jamie Scott started as a songwriter and had a solo career in the UK with a couple albums, then he hooked up with Tommy D., a producer who's worked with guys like Jay-Z and Kanye West, and the rest is the songs they create together and the pick-up musicians they put together depending on the needs. Tonight was five-piece -- Jamie and Tommy on various acoustic, hollow-bodied and electric guitars, a bassist who has quite awesome and into it, keyboards and those super-steady drums. Yesterday on KCRW they did this (with another of their mini-hits):



Check out their cover of "No Diggity". Jamie pulled a young woman out of the audience to hold the lyrics for him, very loose and funny, then the killer rendition, slow and hard-rocking.

Tour dates here. Official single release of "Stare into the Sun" here for your listening and dancing pleasure:



That falsetto he just whips out, the harmonies, wow.



Easy prediction: this will be the last time anyone in LA sees Graffiti6 for free.

Humor of the Macabre

I didn't follow the Casey Anthony case and don't know if justice failed Caylee, but I do love this one specific tweet:



Oh, and Alan Dershowitz is right, something I can't always say.