Tag Archives: Congress

April 27, 2011 · 8:36 pm

Cagey Obama Sets an Election Trap for Paul Ryan and the Koch Bros. | | AlterNet

Very smart Politics….

From Alternet.com:

By baiting Ryan to present his budget plan before the administration unveiled its own, Obama deftly played Ryan’s own star-pupil, parent-pleasing nature against the eager Wisconsinite. When the president unveiled his own budget plan at a televised speech two weeks ago in Washington, he invited Ryan as his guest, and then issued a broadside against Ryan’s plan, saying it was “less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.”

“There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” Obama continued, as Ryan looked helpless on. “And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. That’s not a vision of the America I know.”

The Republican was clearly taken aback. “When the president reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch,” Ryan told McClatchy Newspapers. “Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief; we heard a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.”

Since then, Obama has continued to hammer away at Ryan. On the campaign trail in California, Obama used the words “fairly radical” to describe the Ryan plan.  “I wouldn’t call it particularly courageous,” Obama said.

via Cagey Obama Sets an Election Trap for Paul Ryan and the Koch Bros. | | AlterNet.

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April 27, 2011 · 8:28 pm

GOP Reps Ryan, Webster face furious voters at town halls | Raw Replay

Yep, Political Suicide….

I’ve said before that over-confidence and over-reach would do them in…

I just hope this builds….

In the words of MSNBC host Rachel Madddow, House Republicans are in the midst of a “collective freakout” over the public’s reaction to Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget plan, which cleared the House right before Congress went on vacation.

Among other items, Ryan’s budget would significantly cut Medicare spending, eventually phasing it out in exchange for a coupon program that would only cover a small percentage of seniors’ medical bills.

Four Republicans voted against it, and not a single Democrat voted for it.

Now, Republicans are starting to catch the anger that Democrats caught in 2009 in the midst of their push for President Obama’s health care reforms. In two of the most recent examples, Reps. Ryan and Webster (R-FL) were confronted by angry crowds demanding to know why they had voted to cut Medicare.

A recent Gallup poll found that the majority of Republicans do not want Medicare to be cut.

via GOP Reps Ryan, Webster face furious voters at town halls | Raw Replay.

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April 27, 2011 · 8:18 pm

Black Unemployment At Depression Level Highs In Some Cities

Another under-reported story….

From The Huffington Post:

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In the decade leading up to the Great Recession, Wanda Nolan grew accustomed to steady progress.

From an entry-level job as a fill-in bank teller, she forged a career as a commercial banking assistant, earning enough to become a homeowner. She finished college and then got an MBA. Even after the recession unfolded in late 2007, her degrees and her familiarity with the business world lent her a sense of immunity to the forces ravaging much of the American economy. Nolan was an exemplar of the African American middle class and the increasingly professional ranks of the so-called New South.

But in September 2008, everything changed.

A bank human resources officer called her into a private conference room. “All I heard was, ‘Your position has been eliminated,’” says Nolan, 37, who, despite being one of the more than 13 million officially unemployed Americans, still spends most days in her self-styled banker’s uniform of pearls and pants and practical flats. “My mind started racing.”

More than two years later, Nolan is still looking for a job and feeling increasingly anxious about a future that once felt assured. Her life has devolved from a model of middle class African American upward mobility into an example of a disturbing trend: She is among the 15.5 percent of African Americans out of work and still looking for a job.

For economists, that number may sound awful, but it’s not surprising. The nation’s overall unemployment rate sits at 8.8 percent and the rate among white Americans is at 7.9 percent. For a variety of reasons — ranging from levels of education and continuing discrimination to the relatively young age of black workers — black unemployment tends to run twice the rate for whites. Yet since the Great Recession, joblessness has remained so critically elevated among African Americans that it is challenging longstanding ideas about what it takes to find work in the modern-day economy.

via Black Unemployment At Depression Level Highs In Some Cities.

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April 27, 2011 · 8:12 pm

Debt proposals: The Courageous Progressive Caucus Budget | The Economist

I’m glad to see this proposal finally getting some attention….

This is the one that makes real sense and has the right priorities….

And this is from “The Economist” which is not exactly a left-wing publication…

Mr Miller’s column notes that “the  Congressional Progressive Caucus plan wins the fiscal responsibility derby thus far; it reaches balance by 2021 largely through assorted tax hikes and defense cuts.” Which is pretty interesting. Have you ever heard of the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget plan? Neither had I. The caucus’s co-chairs, Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Keith Ellison of Minnesota, released it on April 6th. The budget savings come from defence cuts, including immediately withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq, which saves $1.6 trillion over the CBO baseline from 2012-2021. The tax hikes include restoring the estate tax, ending the Bush tax cuts, and adding new tax brackets for the extremely rich, running from 45% on income over a million a year to 49% on income over a billion a year.

Mr Ryan’s plan adds (by its own claims) $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, but promises to balance the budget by sometime in the 2030s by cutting programmes for the poor and the elderly. The Progressive Caucus’s plan would (by its own claims) balance the budget by 2021 by cutting defence spending and raising taxes, mainly on rich people. Mr Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not.

I’m not really sure what “courage” is supposed to mean here, but this seems precisely backwards. For 30 years, certainly since Walter Mondale got creamed by Ronald Reagan, the most dangerous thing a politician can do has been to call for tax hikes. Politicians who call for higher taxes are punished, which is why they don’t do it. I’m curious to see what adjectives people would apply to the Progressive Congressional Caucus’s budget proposal. But it’s hard for me to imagine the media calling a proposal to raise taxes “courageous” and “honest”. And my sense is that the disparate treatment here is a structural bias rooted in class.

via Debt proposals: The courageous Progressive Caucus budget | The Economist.

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April 27, 2011 · 8:18 am

House Republicans Under Attack on Medicare Overhaul – NYTimes.com

Hopefully, the GOP has just committed Political suicide….

It’s starting to sound like it….

In central Florida, a Congressional town meeting erupted into near chaos on Tuesday as attendees accused a Republican lawmaker of trying to dismantle Medicare while providing tax cuts to corporations and affluent Americans.

At roughly the same time in Wisconsin, Representative Paul D. Ryan, the architect of the Republican budget proposal, faced a packed town meeting, occasional boos and a skeptical audience as he tried to lay out his party’s rationale for overhauling the health insurance program for retirees.

In a church theater here on Tuesday evening, a meeting between Representative Allen B. West and some of his constituents began on a chaotic note, with audience members quickly on their feet, some heckling him and others loudly defending him. “You’re not going to intimidate me,” Mr. West said.

After 10 days of trying to sell constituents on their plan to overhaul Medicare, House Republicans in multiple districts appear to be increasingly on the defensive, facing worried and angry questions from voters and a barrage of new attacks from Democrats and their allies.

The proposed new approach to Medicare — a centerpiece of a budget that Republican leaders have hailed as a courageous effort to address the nation’s long-term fiscal problems — has been a constant topic at town-hall-style sessions and other public gatherings during a two-week Congressional recess that provided the first chance for lawmakers to gauge reaction to the plan.

via House Republicans Under Attack on Medicare Overhaul – NYTimes.com.

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April 23, 2011 · 9:48 pm

Donald Trump: The President We Deserve

God, I hope we don’t get what we deserve.  That should be everyone’s fear…

Still, this is an illuminating article from Salon:

So it’s best to be prepared. I spent Tuesday speed-reading “TrumpNation,” in the hope that it would help me imagine what a Donald Trump presidency might be like. The experience has been illuminating. I’m a changed man, and I’m here to tell you, Donald Trump is everything Americans deserve as a president.

I didn’t expect to think this. I thought that a review of a business career marked by, to borrow O’Brien’s summation, “repeated failures, flirtations with personal bankruptcy, sequential corporate bankruptcies, [and] the squandering of billions of dollars” would provide grist for a thorough denunciation of the Donald. As the political analysts have been quick to point out, Trump’s career should be a gold mine for opposition researchers — and not just because of the multiplicity of political views he has expressed. Let’s not forget that in the early 1990s, the Trump brand meant failure. He had fatally overextended himself by wasting billions of dollars of borrowed money on a spending spree that included, among other things, casinos, airlines, ridiculously overpriced hotels, and luxury yachts unloaded by bankrupt Middle Eastern arms sellers.

He dumped his first wife for a younger trophy, and then dumped her for another trophy, shrugging off the tabloid chatter by telling a reporter “You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write when you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” He made a habit of buying property when the price was high, and then being forced to unload it at a huge loss when the real estate market crashed. He has proved comically inept as an Atlantic City casino owner — really, it’s one thing to imagine a gambling mogul in the White House, but an incompetent one? In the course of his career, he’s been bailed out by his father, by his siblings, and by the banks to whom he owed hundreds of millions of dollars. By any rational standpoint, his disasters are far more spectacular than his successes. He’s a reality-television star, for crying out loud!

More:   Donald Trump: The president we deserve – How the World Works – Salon.com.

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April 20, 2011 · 7:29 pm

Medicare Cuts Proposed by Republicans Face Broad Opposition in ABC News Poll – ABC News

I have two big concerns:

  1. Republicans don’t care about what most Americans think and will ram their agenda through anyway.
  2. People will forget this by Election Day next year and vote against their interests again

This should just kill the GOP if everyone pays attention, remembers and votes to protect their own interests instead of those of the Rich, Big Corporations and Tea Party fanatics.

Americans strongly reject Medicare cuts and broadly support higher taxes on the wealthy, underscoring the political risks in Republican debt-reduction plans. And on one key factor in the debate — protecting the middle class — President Obama retains the upper hand.

Those and other results from the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll underscore the hazards of the federal spending debate for Republicans as well as for Obama. As poorly as the president is rated for handling the deficit — just 39 percent approve — the Republican leaders in Congress do a bit worse, with just 33 percent approval on the same issue.

Similarly, while just 42 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the economy overall, fewer still, 34 percent, approve of how the Republicans in Congress are dealing with it. And the public by a 12-point margin trusts Obama to protect middle-class Americans, a theme he’s likely to sound loudly and often as the 2012 election campaign warms up.

via Medicare Cuts Proposed by Republicans Face Broad Opposition in ABC News Poll – ABC News.

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April 19, 2011 · 9:07 am

How the GOP Is Committing Political Suicide

Great article on the GOP Budget Madness from AlterNet…

I just hope the electorate is paying attention next year and not fooled by the usual Republican Smoke and Mirrors Campaign that hides their true agenda…

It’s going to be kind of hard to run and hide from this one, though….

At first blush, it’s difficult to grasp why all but four Republicans in the House would go on record endorsing a budget plan that would cost the economy millions of jobs, effectively end Medicare and result in deep cuts to Social Security, roll back new regulations on Wall Street and raise taxes on the middle class while slashing the rates paid by big business and the wealthy. It’s especially tough to understand given that we’re entering the 2012 campaign season, and their budget has no chance of becoming law.

But that’s what happened last week when the GOP-controlled House passed a budget outline based on the radical plan hatched by Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin.

A poll conducted last week found that, “when voters learn almost anything about [the Ryan plan], they turn sharply and intensely against it.” And why wouldn’t they? According to an analysis by the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the Republicans’ “roadmap” would “end most of government other than Social Security, health care, and defense by 2050,” while providing the “largest tax cuts in history” for the wealthy.

Not wealthy yourself? Well that’s too bad, because the plan would also “place a new consumption tax on most goods and services, a measure that would increase taxes on most low- and middle-income families.” According to the Tax Policy Center, about three-quarters of Americans — people who earn between $20,000 and $200,000 per year — would face tax increases if the GOP’s scheme became law.

via  AlterNet.com

http://www.alternet.org/story/150664/how_the_gop_is_committing_political_suicide_with_ryan%27s_extremist_budget_plan_?akid=6853.275643.V7k7NW&rd=1&t=3

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April 16, 2011 · 10:43 am

GOP Budget Plan Very Unpopular

The Republican War on Medicare just might be their Waterloo….

A new Democracy Corps poll finds the Republican deficit reduction plan gets only 48% support, “but when voters learn almost anything about it, they turn sharply and intensely against it.”

Key findings: “When the budget is described — using as much of Paul Ryan’s description as possible — support collapses to 36% with just 19% strongly supporting the plan. The facts in the budget lose people almost immediately — dropping 12 points. Putting the spotlight on this budget is damning. A large majority of 56% oppose it, 42% strongly. The impact is much stronger with seniors where support erodes from 48% to just 32%, with 57% opposed. Support with independents drops from 55% to 43%.”

via GOP Budget Plan Very Unpopular.

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April 15, 2011 · 9:01 pm

The Republican Medicare Masacre

This is a very clear summary of the Republican Budget plan that they voted on today…

Basically, it ends Medicare for anyone currently under age 55.

Do you want to be old and at the mercy of insurance companies?

Do you have enough money saved to pay the additional $7000 per year it would cost you to pay for this insurance?  That is if the insurance companies will even offer it…

Think long and hard, folks…

Elections have consequences….

From the NY TImes:

Representative Paul Ryan and the House Republicans are portraying their budget proposal for the next fiscal year as a courageous effort to finally bring federal spending on Medicare under control. An analysis issued last week by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office finds that the Ryan proposal would sharply reduce federal spending — but at the price of shifting more of Medicare’s costs onto beneficiaries and their families.

How much more? Calculations derived from the C.B.O. analysis show that in 2022, when the Ryan plan would kick in, the typical 65-year-old would pay $6,400 to $7,000 more per year than would be paid for comparable coverage under traditional Medicare.

Mr. Ryan’s proposal would change Medicare from an entitlement program in which the government pays for a defined set of medical services into a “premium support” program in which the government would give beneficiaries money to help them buy private insurance. He contends that competition among health care plans and more judicious use of health care services by beneficiaries can help bring down the cost of health care and reduce the federal government’s burden.

But the C.B.O. says a private plan offering comparable benefits would be a lot more expensive than traditional Medicare because the private insurer would have higher administrative costs, would need to make a profit and, in an extrapolation of current trends, would pay hospitals, doctors and other providers substantially more than Medicare does. Beneficiaries would have to pay higher out-of-pocket costs or buy skimpier policies.

The Ryan plan has no chance of becoming law while the Democrats still control the Senate and the White House. But if health care becomes a defining issue in the 2012 elections — as it should — everyone under the age of 55 is on notice that Mr. Ryan’s plan would impose heavy costs on them when they reach age 65.

via The Republican Medicare Reshuffle – NYTimes.com.

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