Tag Archives: Tea Party

April 13, 2011 · 10:38 pm

Budget Deal Only Actually Cut $14.7, Not $40 Billion. Does Boehner Realize This Yet?

Looks like the President pulled a fast one on Speaker Boehner…

And good for him!

Actual budget cuts were “only” $14.7 billion, as opposed to the GOP’s bragging about almost $40 Billion.

I haven’t had time to dig into today’s speech yet, but I’m hoping he’s on his way to taking control of the debate and protecting the middle class, seniors and other from the hatchet wielding GOP.

It should be a piece of cake.  President Obama is a very smart man.  Boehner is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  Paul Ryan is delusional.  ‘

This could be fun….

Or it could be a disaster.

It all depends on President Obama….

From the National Journal:

The meat of the spending deal struck between the two parties late Friday night was revealed in a legislative omnibus released early Tuesday morning. The specifics show that finding nearly $40 billion in cuts during the 2011 fiscal year required clever accounting and, for the White House, a willingness to concede on rhetoric to find gains on substance.

For example, the final cuts in the deal are advertised as $38.5 billion less than was appropriated in 2010, but after removing rescissions, cuts to reserve funds, and reductions in mandatory spending programs, discretionary spending will be reduced only by $14.7 billion.

White House officials said throughout the process that the composition of the cuts was more important than the top-line number, and that including mandatory cuts allowed that top line to grow while limiting the immediate impact of the cuts.

The move also keeps the 2011 discretionary baseline slightly higher, a terrain advantage for the Democrats heading into the 2012 spending process.

via NationalJournal.com – Budget Cutting Ain’t Easy – Wednesday, April 13, 2011.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics, Tea Party, The Economy

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

April 13, 2011 · 9:51 pm

Poll: Budget deal wins support, but Americans wary

Interesting numbers from USA Today/Gallup Poll…

In summary, the “public” is okay with the budget deal from last week, but most don’t want anymore cuts to Domestic spending…

They also want to rescind the Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich…

And no one wants to cut Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security…

I hope President Obama is willing to go to the mat for those programs…

I’m not yet convinced he will…

In the public’s view, so far so good.

By more than 2-to-1, 62%-25%, those polled say they approve of the deal, and few see it as a partisan victory. Three of four say it was a victory either for neither side (56%) or for both sides (20%).

There is less consensus on what to do next, though, and little encouragement for policymakers such as House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan who are urging bold action to control the exploding costs of Medicare.

“Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” says Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “People want a balanced budget … but they really don’t like the cuts that are involved.”

He questions whether it will be possible for the White House and Congress to strike a grand bargain that calls on both to take some political hits. “I’m not sure there’s enough mutual trust possible in Washington these days for that kind of deal to be made.”

In the poll, those surveyed:

• 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.

Still, the divide on the issue could make Republicans less likely to compromise on it. While 78% of Democrats favor higher taxes on top earners, 60% of Republicans oppose it.

via Poll: Budget deal wins support, but Americans wary – USATODAY.com.

Leave a comment

Filed under Elections, Politics, The Economy

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

April 12, 2011 · 11:48 pm

150 Years Later, Tea Partiers Still Aren’t Over The Civil War

Unbelievable….

But not really…

I could have guessed this of the Tea Party and most of the GOP…

More like sad, but true….

From ThinkProgress.org:

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginning, when secessionists fired on Union troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. According to a new poll from CNN, the Civil War’s legacy remains unresolved. The poll finds that Republicans and Tea Party supporters are more likely to support the Confederacy and confederate leaders than Democrats or Independents.

According to the poll, nearly one in four Americans sympathize with the Confederacy more than with the Union. That number grows to nearly four-in-ten among white Southerners. Among Tea Party members, 26 percent sympathize with the Confederacy more than the Union, and that number grows to 28 percent among Republicans.

via ThinkProgress » 150 Years Later, Tea Partiers Still Aren’t Over The Civil War.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics, The South

Tagged as , , , , ,

April 12, 2011 · 10:40 pm

Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom | The Nation

Another great article from The Nation…

The Conservatives really are PR geniuses.  They also have Street Smarts.

The Democrats have to look to history to frame their arguments in ways that have worked before.  This article has some good advice….

They also have to get over their fear of the GOP yelling “class warfare.”  The Class War is already on and the Middle Class is losing….

We must also change the argument about government. Government need not be a source of constraint, as conservatives claim. Nor is it designed to protect citizens from the vagaries of the market, as many liberals claim—a formulation that depicts citizens as needy and passive and opens liberals to the charge of paternalism and condescension. When government is aligned with democratic movements on the ground, as Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. understood, it becomes the individual’s instrument for liberating herself from her rulers in the private sphere, a way to break the back of private autocracy.

In forging his realignment, Roosevelt was careful to identify the enemy not as a political party but an economic aristocracy. Throughout the 1936 campaign, he barely mentioned Alf Landon. Instead, he denounced the Liberty League and the businessmen it represented. Realignments in America are like that: Jackson railed against the Bank; the Republicans ran against the slaveocracy; Reagan campaigned against the liberal elite. Part of this is strategic: it’s easier to peel away voters from the opposition if you can show that it is not their party you oppose but the interests it represents, which are not theirs. But part of it is substantive, reflecting a conviction that the task at hand is not simply to defeat a party or win an election but to free men and women from a malignant social form. If we hope to forge a comparable realignment, we must stop talking about the Tea Party or even the Republicans and start talking about the business class that stands behind them.

via Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom | The Nation.

Leave a comment

Filed under Elections, Politics

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

April 12, 2011 · 10:28 pm

In the Next Round of Budget Talks, Big Cuts for Health Research Are Coming | The Nation

This Congress- and Washington in general- has no foresight….

Their current budget cutting mania is leading us down the path to becoming a Third World Country.

We have fallen behind the rest of the world in so many areas and they seem intent on pushing us back even more…

From The Nation:

But the real damage will come after the proposed cuts take effect. The NIH is comprised of twenty-seven institutes and centers with particular focuses, including the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Heart Lung and Blood Institute; each will decide how to manage their individual cuts. The NCI will prioritize funding the same level of new grants (they currently fund 14 percent of new grant applications), but will have to cut funding from cancer centers. Others will have to choose between new and existing grants. When ongoing grants aren’t renewed, work may simply stop. “University departments will do their best to support promising research during a dry spell,” explains Riggins, “and there are a few foundations that provide bridge grants, but these resources aren’t abundant either.”

In the long term, funding scarcity will make it hard to attract top research scientists. Many have already left for more stable careers in industry. And US labs will continue to lose people not just to other fields but to other countries as well. Kelly Ruggles, a microbiologist at Columbia, says, “It used to be that people would come here to get trained in the sciences. Now, people are leaving for better opportunities in Singapore or China. There’s just more science than money right now.”

Of course, this is a difficult funding environment, but the proposed NIH cuts are based in part on ignorance. Legislators who understand the NIH tend to give it full-voiced support. When retired Representative John Edward Porter chaired the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the NIH, he held hearings with each of the twenty-seven institutes so members could hear directly from the researchers why they needed money and what they were doing with it. When, during the mid-’90s, the House Budget Committee proposed cuts to the NIH budget, Porter brought a troupe of Nobel laureates, esteemed scientists and business leaders in to meet with then-speaker Gingrich. The result? Instead of cutting the budget, Congress doubled the NIH budget over five years, because they saw that the funding was working. “I certainly learned that the money going to the NIH was money that was being tremendously well spent,” recalls Porter, “making a difference in the lives of human beings all over the planet.”

via In the Next Round of Budget Talks, Big Cuts for Health Research Are Coming | The Nation.

Leave a comment

Filed under Education, Politics, The Economy

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

April 12, 2011 · 9:53 pm

Budget debate was fought entirely on the GOP’s turf

Greg Sargent, at The Washington Post, makes some good points here…

First of all, it’s all about the 2012 Elections, not about what is best for the Country or what the Democrats core beliefs may be…

We know the Republicans have no core beliefs…

Sadly, given what happened in 2010, this approach might be necessary to deal with an uneducated, stressed out, results oriented electorate.  Obama’s strategy may be to try to protect the American electorate from themselves…

This might be smart, but it’s also very scary….

And it sacrifices good policy on the altar of political necessity….

And Americans have no one to blame but themselves…

President Obama’s advisers apparently believe that his best route to reeelection is to acknowledge the need for more fiscal discipline, while picking a fight with the GOP over the need for targeted government investment in our future and painting the GOP’s cut-at-all-costs vision as out of the mainstream. In fairness, his advisers, as Paul Krugman noted recently, may very well be right about this.

But it’s still worth appreciating how far to the right the debate has shifted, in part because of Democratic acquiescence. The idea that government spending should be a job-creation tool in our arsenal was entirely marginalized, to the point that it was simply not part of the discussions; meanwhile, the insane conservative demand for $100 billion in cuts was treated as a kind of outer right-wing boundary of legitimate discourse. The result: Giving Boehner more than he originally asked for in cuts became the stuff of middle ground compromise.

via Budget debate was fought entirely on the GOP’s turf – The Plum Line – The Washington Post.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics, The Economy, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

April 11, 2011 · 11:30 pm

Conservative Economists Criticize ‘Off The Deep End’ Republican Budget

This crazy budget proposal from Paul Ryan and the GOP is already in serious trouble.  It both cuts Medicare and Taxes for the Rich while increasing Defense spending.  That’s just crazy….

Now some of the old line Conservatives are coming out in agreement that it’s not a serious, much less “courageous” proposal….

I’m hoping this is another example of smoke and mirrors where the smoke is starting to clear, the mirror’s are breaking and Toto has pulled back the curtain to reveal the Koch Brothers and their fellow wealthy friends, who now own the GOP, are the wizards behind the curtain….

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

“It doesn’t address in any serious or courageous way the issue of the near and medium-term deficit,” David Stockman told me in a Thursday phone interview. “I think the biggest problem is revenues. It is simply unrealistic to say that raising revenue isn’t part of the solution. It’s a measure of how far off the deep end Republicans have gone with this religious catechism about taxes.”

Stockman, who directed Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, approves of Ryan’s entitlement proposals, but breaks faith over taxes and the GOP’s unwillingness to slash defense spending. And he laughs off the notion that the plan will do anything about unemployment, let alone dramatically reduce it, which Ryan and his plan claim it will. “This isn’t 1980. It’s not morning again in America. it’s late afternoon, or possibly even sunset.”

On this score, Doug Holtz-Eakin — a former McCain and George W. Bush economic adviser — told Huffington Post Ryan’s plan is “implausibly optimistic.”

The libertarian economist Tyler Cowen wrote up a point-by-point critique of the plan. His principle objections are that the plan doesn’t do anything to control health care costs, and cutting Medicaid is neither good policy, nor urgent. Indeed, he notes, “Medicaid should be one of the last parts of the health care budget to cut.” Emphasis in the original.

via Conservative Economists Criticize ‘Off The Deep End’ Republican Budget | TPMDC.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

April 11, 2011 · 10:10 pm

4 ways we’re still fighting the Civil War – CNN.com

This article gave me a lot to think about.  Since Americans don’t know, don’t care about and don’t learn from their history, it’s also rather scary.

Some amazing parallels here in this article.

I encourage you to click the link and read the entire thing on CNN.com:

But you don’t have to tour a battlefield to understand the Civil War. Look at today’s headlines. As the nation commemorates the 150th anniversary of its deadliest war this week, some historians say we’re still fighting over some of the same issues that fueled the Civil War.

“There are all of these weird parallels,” says Stephanie McCurry, author of “Confederate Reckoning,” a new book that examines why Southerners seceded and its effect on Southern women and slaves.

“When you hear charges today that the federal government is overreaching, and the idea that the Constitution recognized us as a league of sovereign states — these were all part of the secessionist charges in 1860,” she says.

“Living history” on Civil War battlefields

These “weird parallels” go beyond the familiar debates over what caused the war, slavery or states’ rights. They extend to issues that seem to have nothing to do with the Civil War.

The shutdown of the federal government, war in Libya, the furor over the new health care law and Guantanamo Bay — all have tentacles that reach back to the Civil War, historians say.

They point to four parallels:

via 4 ways we’re still fighting the Civil War – CNN.com.

1 Comment

Filed under History, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

April 8, 2011 · 11:41 pm

Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class; or, Paul Ryan Has Balls: Matt Taibbi

Great article in Rolling Stone from Matt Taibbi.

I love is snarky tone and accurate facts…

Here is a brief excerpt and I encourage you to click the link to read the rest of it…..

Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.

The reason for this is always the same: the Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.

The problem, of course, is that to actually make significant cuts in what is left of the “welfare state,” one has to cut Medicare and Medicaid, programs overwhelmingly patronized by white people, and particularly white seniors. So when the time comes to actually pull the trigger on the proposed reductions, the whippersnappers are quietly removed from the stage and life goes on as usual, i.e. with massive deficit spending on defense, upper-class tax cuts, bailouts, corporate subsidies, and big handouts to Pharma and the insurance industries.

via Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class; or, Paul Ryan Has Balls | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy.

1 Comment

Filed under Politics, Tea Party, The Economy

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

April 8, 2011 · 4:31 pm

GOP Budget Proposal: Ludicrous and Cruel

Excellent analysis of Paul Ryan’s GOP Budget proposal by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in today’s New York Times:

And then there’s the much-ballyhooed proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers that can be used to buy private health insurance.

The point here is that privatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care.

And that neither should nor will happen. Mr. Ryan and his colleagues can write down whatever numbers they like, but seniors vote. And when they find that their health-care vouchers are grossly inadequate, they’ll demand and get bigger vouchers — wiping out the plan’s supposed savings.

In short, this plan isn’t remotely serious; on the contrary, it’s ludicrous.

And it’s also cruel.

In the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. And by repealing last year’s health reform, without any replacement, the plan would also deprive an estimated 34 million nonelderly Americans of health insurance.

So the pundits who praised this proposal when it was released were punked. The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness.

via Ludicrous and Cruel – NYTimes.com.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics, The Economy

Tagged as , , , , , , ,