Comes The Dawning: Updated

(Editorial cartoon published by Mike Luckovich for the Atlanta Journal Constitution 3/29/11.  Click on image to enlarge.)

I've been waiting for the wackaloons in Congress to wake up to the fact that while they've got nothing when it comes to Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!, they might have something with respect to an IRS targeting of 501(c)(4) groups prior to the last election.  Those groups are registered with the IRS as "educational" entities and don't have to report where they get their funding as long as they don't go over a certain limit in political advertising.  In that regard, see my post here.

Early last week, the IRS issued an apology for targeting those groups with certain key words in their name to check to see if they were going beyond their allowable limit on political work.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The Internal Revenue Service improperly screened applications from conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status, a senior IRS official said Friday.

IRS staffers selected for more review the applications that included the words “tea party” or “patriot,” Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations, said in a conference call with reporters.

“That’s absolutely inappropriate and not the way we should do things,” Lerner said.

The staffers also requested information the IRS does not normally ask for, including donor lists.

Lerner first disclosed the improper screening in response to a question she received at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Assn. in Washington earlier in the day. In the conference call that followed, she said that of 300 applications staffers selected for additional review, about a quarter were selected solely because of the flagged words. The rest were selected for a “broad spectrum” of reasons, Lerner said. She could not elaborate on the other groups’ purposes or politics. ...

Lerner said the staffers selected the applications with “tea party” and “patriot” in them for expediency, not out of political bias.   [Emphasis added]

Now, I tend to believe the IRS spokeswoman when it comes to the issue of expediency, as did Libby Spencer in her take on the issue:

I'm also remembering the IRS has been hit by austerity fever same as every other federally funded agency. Also, the applications for this particular status by politically motivated individuals has exploded in that time frame. So you have fewer workers reviewing umpteenth more applications and they took a shortcut to meet their quotas.

Have to agree with Think Progress here. The real problem is they used the wrong keywords. While it's true a lot of these Tea Party groups are fleecing the gullible rubes, they're just the grifters. It's the deep pocket front groups who are cheating on the codes.    [Emphasis added]

 Like I said, the IRS apology was made public on Friday, but it wasn't mentioned by the GOP players until Sunday.  Sen. Collins (R-Maine) and Rep. Issa (Wackaloon-CA) both mentioned it on the bobbleheads on Sunday.  And the Benghazi issue continues to take up most of the oxygen.

Of course, the White House response played along, stating that the Inspector General's report will be reviewed carefully and implied that heads would roll if the IRS was playing politics.  Apparently it hasn't occurred to our president that far more Republicans were abusing the system than Democrats, probably because the Democrats hadn't figured out how to make the system work.

This one is going to be fun to watch.

UPDATE:

From Josh Marshall at TPM:

Marco Rubio just called on President Obama to fire the Commissioner of the IRS. Small problem: the Commissioner in place when all this happened was Bush appointee Douglas H. Shulman. He left just after the November election and there’s an acting Commissioner currently in place.  [Emphasis added]

Like I said, this one is going to be fun.

Meeeeeee-chele

(Cartoon by Steve Sack and published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune 4/4/13.  Click on image to enlarge and then hustle back.)

Generally, when the home town newspaper publishes a story setting forth the lack of veracity of a politician, that politician is in some kind of hot water.  Michele Bachmann is about to find out whether that holds for her as well.

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Congressional ethics watchdogs are looking into allegations of financial misdeeds in her presidential campaign. Separately, a former Bachmann Iowa campaign worker has sued over her campaign's use of an email list. That matter has also resulted in a criminal investigation.

In answer to a question about the concerns, Bachmann said on Tuesday that none of the allegations are true.

"There’s political motivations that are involved because I've been named as the number one target (for) defeat by the Democrat Party, by Nancy Pelosi and also by SuperPACs so, you know no one can know anyone’s thoughts or intents, but clearly it looks like it’s politically motivated. And they’re not true," she said. "I’m working very closely with the people that are involved to make sure that we answer all the questions and we get to the bottom of it and I’m thoroughly convinced that I'll be cleared."

Despite Bachmann’s assertions to the contrary, the legal and ethical charges that have been leveled against her have all come from members of her own presidential campaign staff.

On Tuesday, Bachmann denied that the questions about her campaign have come from Republicans, not Democrats.   [Emphasis added]

Michele, Michele, Michele.  Never lie about something that can be checked out or easily verified, especially if there are court records involved.  Waffle a little, but don't categorically deny.

And here's the sad part for the rest of us.  The Democratic Party decided not to spend money to support the Dem running against here in 2012.  If it had funded the campaign, Bachmann would not be sitting in the House of Representatives right now and wouldn't be gearing for another presidential run in 2016.

Oh, well.

H2 Uh-Oh

Poor Marco Rubio.  The shining light of the GOP, the one many hope will lead the party out of the desert, didn't fare so well in his delivery of the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address.  And for good reason (as David Horsey pointed out):  he was stuck of the old rhetoric, the one that cost them the 2012 election.

It is no wonder Florida Sen. Marco Rubio needed to grab a bottle of water in the middle of delivering the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address. The speech he was given to recite was like a hunk of stale, dry sourdough and it surely caught in his throat.

For 30 years, Republican aspirants to the presidency have been giving variations of the same speech. It sounded fresh and bold when Ronald Reagan first spoke the words as a candidate in 1980. At that point, the liberal era that began with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 had pretty much run out of gas. Democrats had grown too comfortable with their seemingly permanent lock on the House of Representatives, while their ideas about the creative use of government had devolved into a system of doling out federal dollars to clamoring interest groups.

Reagan declared that government was the problem, not the solution, and that taxes were too high and regulations on business too onerous. It was a winning message and helped bring blue-collar men and the South firmly into the Republican fold.

Rubio spoke the same language on Tuesday night but it sounded like a talking-points memo left over from Mitt Romney’s losing campaign. Rather than looking like a young man with new ideas, Rubio looked like a novice with no thoughts of his own.   [Emphasis added]

As Horsey pointed out in the rest of his column, the country has changed since Reagan in all sorts of ways.  And the economy has changed in drastic and disheartening ways.  The problems and issues we face are real, yet the GOP is still quoting Reagan, and, sadly enough, the failed candidate Mitt Romney.

It's like I said earlier in the week.  The GOP is going with the "Lipstick On A Pig" approach.  That can't work much longer, even in the South.

Small Blessings

(Editorial cartoon by Steve Sack and published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune 7/20/12.  Click on image to enlarge and then return.)

We've heard a lot from right-wing women like Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin on Fox or the social media since the November election.  One person we haven't heard from, however, is Michele Bachmann.  The Tea Party Queen has held no press conferences on the Capitol steps, nor has she appeared on the Sunday Talk Shows.  What is up with that?  Her home state paper of record noticed the same silence and provides some possible answers.

Now the Minnesota Republican is hardly heard from anymore, barely uttering a word in public during the simmering build-up to the "fiscal cliff" deal in Congress, which she opposed.

Gone are the boisterous rallies opposing Obamacare, the rousing church testimonials and the controversial TV utterances about Islamist moles in government that raised money even as they rained down critical headlines.

Since her wafer-thin re-election in November in the state's most solidly Republican district, Bachmann has sharply dialed down her national profile, staying off television and remaining in the background of a raging congressional debate over taxes, her signature issue as a former IRS attorney and deficit hawk.

"She's been focused on her district," said Bachmann spokesman Dan Kotman, adding that the silence is deliberate. "She's doing listening sessions and reaching out to business folks and community leaders."

The silence also comes as a weakened Tea Party movement has been fractured by in-fighting and recrimination over reverses at the polls, not the least of which was the reelection of Barack Obama, Bachmann's political nemesis. ...

Her opponents acknowledge that Bachmann's new low profile is an astute political move.

"I think she learned that her quest for the presidency really cost her a lot of political capital in her district," said Minnesota DFL chairman Ken Martin. "She saw in her own polling -- as we did -- that something was going on in her district. So she doubled down and did what she needed to do to win the election."  [Emphasis added]

Imagine that:  after a year of ignoring her constituents in Minnesota and ignoring her duties in Washington DC, she almost lost her seat to a liberal, a seat in a very conservative district.  That had to get her handlers' attention, if not hers.  And while I'm not so sure that the Tea Party is on its last legs (most Republican congress critters are still scared to death by that group), it isn't difficult to believe that many of the conservatives in her district are tired of the clown show.

Do I think this silence will last?  Nope.  Michele Bachmann loves the limelight too much.

Do I think she will start behaving herself?  Nope.  Michele Bachmann won't be able to restrain herself when the vote on the debt ceiling and the votes on reducing the deficit.

In the meantime, however, I'm enjoying the silence.

Apparently She Got A Better Offer

In a move reminiscent of the one Jane Harmon (D-CA) made several years ago, a Missouri congresswoman has announced one month after her re-election that she will be resigning in February to take a different job.

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), freshly reelected to her ninth term in Congress, announced Monday that she would resign in February and become the president and chief executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Assn., the top donor to her campaigns during her congressional career.

Emerson, who was elected to her late husband Bill Emerson’s seat in a 1996 special election and was the first woman to represent Missouri in the House, handily won reelection earlier this year over Democratic rival Jack Rushin with nearly 72% of the vote. One of the few women to hold Republican leadership positions in Congress, Emerson was chairwoman of the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee and sat on the House Appropriations Committee. ...

In paperwork filed Monday, Emerson’s office said that negotiations for her new job began Nov. 19, after the election. House ethics guidelines on what sorts of negotiations for post-congressional employment are permitted are nebulous.   [Emphasis added]

 A Democratic spokesman hinted that she probably left because she didn't get the committee assignments she wanted (what Republican woman did?) because she was too moderate.  That may be the case, but that's hardly an acceptable excuse.  She chose to run for re-election and the people of her district turned out for her.  Now those voters have to go through the whole process all over again (and at some expense) because she got a better offer.

Our elected officials aren't even pretending anymore.  "Public service" is just a stop on the way to more money and more prestige. 

One Fewer Excuse, But Only One

(Editorial cartoon by Ted Rall and published 11/29/12 by the Los Angeles Times.  Click on image to enlarge and then please return.)

I really have been giving Ted Rall short-shrift here.  It's not that he's doing crummy cartoons, far from it.  But he has been assigned California as the focus for his work, and the results are skewed to issues primarily affecting this state.  This cartoon, however, elucidates just what is wrong with Democrats everywhere, and not just California where they have all of the constitutional offices and the kind of super-majority in the state legislature that can pass any bill, including those affecting the budget without challenge by the Republicans.

Here's what Rall had to say about this state of affairs:

Having a two-thirds legislative supermajority for the first time in more than a century, California Democrats are facing intense pressure from the left to use their new powers, which they always said they wanted and needed -- before they got them.

And yet ...

Just about every newspaper and network news outlet keep saying that the Democrats can't be running amok.  The state can't afford it.  We have a deficit to fix.  It wouldn't be fair to the minority to ignore their concerns.  The legislature has to exercise discipline, fiscal discipline.  It can't go about raising taxes or closing tax loopholes or ending subsidies to in-state industries to keep them fat and happy and here.  Instead, the draconian cuts to education, health care for the poor, and infrastructure like public transportation will have to stand.  Or something like that.  And legislative leaders happily nod their nods and say, "Yes.  This."

Sound familiar?  It should.  On the national level, we are seeing some of the same bovine excrement being flung around over that damned "Fiscal Cliff."  As I said yesterday, most of our Democrats are only too happy to go along with the program to shred every decent and humane safety net to protect the budget of the Pentagon and to keep regulators away from oil companies and Wall Street.

Our current crop of Democrats in the 112th Congress will have their collars tweaked by our owners, as will the President. Social Security will suddenly be on the table, as will Medicare/Medicaid, all before Christmas. 

The same corporations and big-money players operate at the state level as they do at the national level, and they are wise enough to spread the money around enough so that everybody is happy, everybody but the 99% of us stuck with the results.  At the state level, at least in California, the lobbyists have the additional benefit of term limits so they can be especially helpful to the newcomers who just want to get along.

So I've added my state senator and state representative to my speed dial system.  I'm not too optimistic, but it beats giving up to the monsters.

Tyrannus Rex

So, has Grover Norquist reached his use-by date, like Karl Rove?

I don't think so, but David Horsey does, and so do many others.  This is one of those times I'd love to be wrong.

Norquist has never been elected to anything. Nobody ever said he should be in charge of the GOP’s true religion (although he claims President Ronald Reagan urged him to found his lobbying group, Americans for Tax Reform). But he certainly has been the Republicans’ key political theologian, making opposition to tax increases the party’s central tenet for more than 25 years.

He got 95% of Republican candidates for Congress, the presidency and state offices to sign a pledge never to raise taxes and he enforced it by getting retribution at reelection time on anyone who failed to keep the promise. Now, though, he is facing a dramatic rebellion in the ranks. The country is teetering on the so-called fiscal cliff thanks to Republican-backed legislation from 2011 that will automatically begin slashing the federal budget and raise taxes on Jan. 1 if an alternative plan is not adopted by Congress. This has everyone a bit freaked out, including quite a few GOP senators and representatives who have expressed a willingness to consider revenue increases for the sake of making a budget deal with the Democrats.   [Emphasis added]

I do understand the logic.  Republicans are suddenly faced with a problem of their own making, a big one.  In fact, it's a very big one.  They've just lost an election and, while they still hold the House, they've lost ground in both houses of  Congress and the electorate appears to be in a very pissy mood when it comes to tax breaks for the 1%.

And President Obama, who has that second term Mitch McConnell was determined to deny him, has suddenly gotten a little surly.  He seems to think that he has a little political capital to spend so he's whipping that out against the GOP on the fiscal cliff issues.

House Republicans said on Thursday that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, an immediate new round of stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits.

The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, was likely to meet strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other entitlements, to be worked out next year, with no guarantees.

He did propose some upfront cuts in programs like farm price supports, but did not specify an amount or any details. And senior Republican aides familiar with the offer said those initial spending cuts might well be outnumbered by upfront spending increases, including at least $50 billion in infrastructure spending, mortgage relief, an extension of unemployment insurance and a deferral of automatic cuts to physician reimbursements under Medicare.

This is a great opening gambit, one that should have been used four years ago when the Democrats had control of both houses as well as the presidency.  It would have made a difference then.  But, no, Mr. Hopey-Changey was all into bipartisanship, and the Democrats for all sorts of reasons played along.  That's why a single payer system or even a public option system for health care were never on the table. 

Gitmo is still open.  We are still operating under Bush rules for reading our emails and checking our library habits.  Oil companies are still drilling in sensitive areas, even after a catastrophic spill in the Gulf Coast.  Our use of drones has been expanded.  Wall Street is still calling the tunes.  No change, and for most of us, no hope.

 So, is the opening gambit a sign that times have changed?

I tend to think not.  Sometime before Christmas, a deal will be reached.  Our current crop of Democrats in the 112th Congress will have their collars tweaked by our owners, as will the President. Social Security will suddenly be on the table, as will Medicare/Medicaid, all before Christmas.  And we know what that means.  In 2014 both Karl Rove and Grover Norquist will be back in action.  With a vengeance.

Like I said at the start, I'd love to be wrong, so I called the DC offices of Senators Boxer and Feinstein and Congressman David Dreier and made my wishes clear.  I figure one for three is the best I'll do, but maybe that will be enough to get us to the 113th Congress.  Maybe we'll have better luck there.

A Nod And A Wink

(Editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich and published 11/27/12 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  Click on image to enlarge and then please come back.)

Most of the news concerning the lame-duck Congress these days has to do with the looming "fiscal cliff" and the apocalypse which will happen if something isn't done RIGHT NOW.  But some of the cannier Republicans, mindful of the solid trouncing they just took in the election, have finally decided their party needs to reach out to the Hispanic vote.  Of course, they are not proposing anything substantive right now, just making noises as if they were.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Three Republican senators introduced an alternative to the Dream Act on Tuesday that would give legal status to young immigrants brought to the U.S. unlawfully as children.

Later this week, the House is expected to vote on a bill that would increase the number of visas for technology jobs, while reducing other legal immigration.

But these efforts are unlikely to become law and amount to little more than political showboating. ...

Retiring Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) introduced the Achieve Act on Tuesday. The bill, also sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), appeared to be an attempt to take some heat off Republicans on immigration.

In a news conference, Hutchison said she believed it would be better to tackle small pieces of immigration reform one at a time because agreement on a large package had proven too difficult.

Fewer young immigrants would qualify under her proposal than would have been eligible under the Dream Act. Unlike the Dream Act, the GOP bill would not guarantee a pathway to citizenship.

Under the Republican proposal, applicants who were brought to the U.S. before age 14 could apply for student visas if they are under 29 and enrolled in a college-degree program in the U.S. Applicants under 32 would qualify if they already held a degree from an American college.

After college graduation, immigrants could apply for work visas that would be renewable every four years for the rest of their lives. Unlike the Dream Act, the bill doesn't guarantee permanent residency. If an employer or a family member sponsored them, they could get in line for a green card and eventually apply for citizenship.   [Emphasis added]

How very serious a proposal.

Of course, it is made by two senators who are retiring and have nothing to lose and one senator who will still be on Sunday talk shows leaking at the mouth no matter what happens for the rest of his life.  But it is intended to show the public that the GOP cares, it really cares about Hispanics.

Yeah, right.  And my real name is Marie and I'm the Queen of Rumania.

To be fair, as the article points out, there has been some bipartisan conferencing about immigration reform, but it is clear that any such reform will come in the 113th Congress, not the 112th.  And the parties to that discussion are keeping the talks confidential, so it's hard to tell just how far the GOP will bend on the issue of what its members keep referring to as "amnesty" for the millions of undocumented Hispanics already here.  We will just have to wait to see what that involves.

We continue to live in interesting times.

Things That Make You Go Wow!

The people of a district in Illinois have elected a real hero, a profile in courage, if you will, to be their congresswoman:  Tammy Duckworth.  She beat the incumbent like a drum even though he whined incessantly that she kept referring to her military service.  It would be pretty hard to ignore her service, what with having her legs blown off after which she managed to land the helicopter she was piloting in Iraq.

And then, after a long stint of rehabilitation for her injuries, she entered politics, first as a gadfly and then as a successful candidate.  She's made it clear that her new job doesn't intimidate her (via):

When Tammy Duckworth steps into Congress this January for her first term, she’ll be carried by two prosthetic legs – and the potent notion that if she can survive a grenade blast while piloting a chopper, she surely can endure any political flak on Capitol Hill.

“The worst day for me in Washington on the floor of the House is never going to be as bad as me getting blown up. So bring it,” said Duckworth, a Democrat who represents Illinois’ 8th Congressional District, the suburbs north of Chicago.

One of the first women to fly combat missions in Iraq, Duckworth’s Black Hawk was hit by enemy fire in November 2004 as the aircraft skimmed tree tops at about 135 miles per hour. The explosion vaporized her right leg, smashed her left leg into the instrument panel, sheering it off, and tore away most of her right arm. Before losing consciousness, she used her remaining arm to try to land the sputtering chopper. On Nov. 6, she won election to the U.S. House.

“There’s nothing anyone can say to me or do to me — short of actually pointing a gun and shooting at me — that’s going to be as bad as it was in Iraq and that year I spent recovering. So it’s really freeing,” Duckworth told NBC News. “Had you talked to me 10 years ago, before I served and got hurt in combat, I would not have the courage to do what I’m doing now.”   [Emphasis added]

And if you want to see the picture of self-confidence, click on either of the links above:  it's a photo of Congresswoman Duckworth in a skirt and shoes which almost highlight those remarkable metal prosthetic legs which enable her to walk into her new duties.  The smile on her face should warm even the hardest of hearts.  And it also should scare the crap out of her foes.

You go, girl!

A Bump In The Road

(Click on image to enlarge and then be kind enough to return.)

I have to admit, I am not too terribly worked up about the looming, dooming "fiscal cliff" so many people are concerned about.  Yes, yes, I know:  if Congress doesn't act by the end of the year, there will be drastic cuts to some of the programs I would just love to see cut, but also to programs I don't want to see cut any further.  And I appreciate that some of those cuts will add to the economic problems we currently face.  It just seems to me that it's about time Congress and the President face the music for their joint refusal to take care of business, and the rest of us face the music for letting them get away with it.

David Horsey's cartoon and column makes the same point, although he is far more concerned than I am.

The reason we are where we are is because our elected leaders put us here. The fiscal cliff -- a set of automatic draconian budget cuts and tax increases that will start taking effect on Jan. 1 -- was purposely created as a way to force the squabbling Congress and president into a budget deal. It is part of the Budget Control Act of 2011 that grew out of the near-disastrous debt ceiling showdown between President Obama and House Republicans.

The idea was that Republicans and Democrats would finally put differences aside and reach a budget compromise because both sides would be motivated by dread of automatic across-the-board cuts and tax hikes that would almost certainly hit the U.S. economy like a wrecking ball. ...

Many folks who claim to be political experts say this is mere posturing and that both sides will give up something to get a deal done -- with Republicans giving up more because the president is in a commanding negotiating position having just won reelection. Perhaps they are right, but the kind of hardheaded political calculation that used to get deals done in the days of Lyndon Johnson or Tip O’Neill has given way to ideological purity.

Congress is now filled with people like tea party cheerleader Michele Bachmann who has said that maybe it would not be such a bad idea to let the country go over the fiscal cliff. Boehner will have a tough enough time cajoling Ryan into any kind of compromise; he is unlikely to ever get crusaders like Bachmann and her hyper-conservative compatriots to give him an inch or a vote.

Hard-line liberals will also be difficult to move, especially if a proposed deal threatens the status quo in Social Security or Medicare. What is needed in the House and Senate is a bipartisan effort of folks in the center. That's where all the work used to get done in the old days, but it has been a long time since anyone has pulled together a coalition of rational compromisers.

While I agree that it is lamentable that our elected officials cannot seem to get any kind of deal done, I disagree with Horsey that it's because both far ends of the spectrum are to blame.  I mean, c'mon, David:  the "hard-line liberals" haven't had any kind of voice for over 20 years at least.  Our two parties keep moving further and further to the right thanks to the DLC, Blue Dog, and Third-Way Democrats who are perfectly happy keeping our owners perfectly happy.  The rest of us, all 99%, have been hung out to dry for a long time because we can't write the big checks come election time.

And it's not like THE DEFICIT is such a big deal.  Really.  It wasn't a big deal in 2000 when the GOP took power with the SURPLUS Bill Clinton handed it.  It didn't take long for the Bushies to run through that surplus in various ways, including fighting two wars off budget.  Deficits surely didn't matter then, and, truth be told, it really doesn't matter now.  Adjust a few things and we can offset a lot of the damage.

First of all, we should damned well take Social Security and Medicare off the table.  Social Security has absolutely NOTHING, zero, zip, nada, to do with the deficit.  It is a user-funded program which for too long has been used as an ATM by Congress.  If folks are so concerned that 35 years from now Social Security will go into red-ink, then raise the payroll tax from its current level.  Cap it at $130,00 or remove the cap entirely.  Medicare has the potential for being a drag on government spending, but there are ways to short-circuit that, including adding funds to the DOJ for slamming the fraudsters who are ripping the program off.

Next, end the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy.  It finally looks like President Obama and the Dems got the message from the election that the rest of us are tired of that 1% getting more breaks than they are entitled to.  Michele Bachmann and Paul Ryan may throw a snit-fit, but both had a harder time than expected in returning to Congress.  And the rest of the GOP, smarting from the last election, is hardly in any position to object too vigorously if it wants to continue as a viable party.

I'd also end the "middle class" payroll tax break.  All that did was undercut Social Security and Medicare funding.  Instead, provide real tax breaks for those of us with incomes below, say $250,00.  Avedon Carol has an excellent idea, one that hadn't occurred to me: raise the standard deduction from the laughable $3,800.  Go read what she has to say about that.  And then put real money into people's pockets by lowering rates.

Then tax all income, regardless of the source and regardless of the recipient.  Make corporations actually pay taxes.  To those who say that would affect job creation I would reply "Bovine Excrement!"  I didn't see any jobs being created by those tax breaks.  All I saw was outsourcing and offshoring.  The only "trickle down" we've seen has been of the decidedly urine-based  fluids raining down on all of us.  Those corporations who object and threaten to move out of the country can pay for their own damned security.  I'm sure Eric Prince and whatever his mercenaries are called these days will be happy to oblige.  We, then, can apply tariffs to the imports.

And that's just for openers.  I don't have any hard and fast rules for cutting "the fat" out of government programs, but, then, neither does the GOP beyond killing Big Bird and FEMA.  I do think cutting the junk contracts of the Pentagon is long over-due, as are outsourced programs in Homeland Security and the State Department.  Let government do the job the Constitution gave to it.

But I'm not sure we have enough stiff-necks and strong spines to accomplish this.  If not, there's always 2014.

That River In Egypt

Poor Mitt Romney.  I almost feel sorry for him.  He's being consigned to the GOP "black hole" like George W. Bush was, and Romney never even got to be president.  Like I said, though, I almost feel sorry for him.  If he'd have kept his mouth shut after the election, say, for about a month, he might not have been the target of barbs from the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bobby Jindahl.  He might even have achieved some respectability like John McCain has, crazy as he is, and been invited regularly to the Sunday Morning Bobbleheads.  But, alas, no.  Romney had to keep yapping to his buddies, as David Horsey pointed out in this column, giving ammunition to those in his own party and the Democrats.

As many pundits have noted, Romney's characterization of government programs as gifts was an echo of his earlier disparaging remarks about the 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes. On both occasions, he was speaking privately with a bunch of fat-cat contributors and reinforcing their demeaning stereotypes of less fortunate Americans. It seems that Romney cannot help but be himself when he is around rich people.

The so-called gifts Obama gave included partial forgiveness of student loans, a provision of Obamacare allowing young people to stay on their parents' healthcare plans to age 26, suspension of deportations for immigrant children who have grown up in the United States and healthcare for people who otherwise do not have it or cannot afford it.

What Romney calls gifts, others call lending a hand -- no different than helping people hit by a hurricane. They are programs aimed at providing opportunities for people struggling to get a start in life or rise up from chronic poverty. They are a means to end dependency and create more productive citizens. Other Republicans apparently understand this. As Los Angeles Times reporter Morgan Little described in a Sunday article, several prominent GOP leaders have taken hard shots at Romney’s elitism in recent days.

It's quite clear that Romney's elitist comments really were a turn-off  to a lot of Americans during the campaign, and several of his wife's comments (like "You people ...) grated on folks as well.  The fact that he kept changing the message to fit the audience didn't help either, because the American voter isn't always as stupid as Republicans think.  And that's the part that fascinates me right now.

The Morgan Little article cited by Horsey (see the link in the quote) is really quite telling in a lot of ways.  The GOP has decided that Republicans need to make nice to the electorate, or at least sound like it.  They are now willing to at least talk about immigration reform.  Apparently someone shoved a census report in front of party leaders and coughed loudly.  But as far as I can tell, that's about all that's been changed in the rhetoric.  Black people, the poor, the elders, gays, even the Middle Class are still not terribly important. 

The reports on the "fiscal cliff" and how the lame duck session and even the next Congress will deal with it makes it clear that Republicans are still only interested in keeping the fat cats fat and on a weight-gain program.  Fighting the Democrats on every issue and fighting the President on every appointment is still uppermost in the Republican plans.

Of course, it doesn't help that at least at this point the Democrats haven't unsheathed their swords and probably won't.  Social Security and Medicare are still being talked about as "entitlements" and compromise is still the word of the day. 

I guess I'll just have to wait for the 113th Congress and the 2014 campaigns to see what changes are possible.  I hope I have the stamina and the popcorn for that.

Sometimes The Truth Will Surface

I thought about titling this post "Keep Digging, Mitt" but I decided that since his political career as a candidate is effectively over, that wasn't necessary.  Still, however, Mitt Romney isn't quite ready to exit, even though he's made several brave exit speeches, the latest of which was to his real supporters, the ones he really cared about.

James Rainey captured the tone and intention of that speech (which was actually apparently a conference call) quite well with his post/column in the Los Angeles Times.

 The onetime private equity magnate would have an “optics” problem if he wanted  to run for office ever again. But since he’s done with politics, his latest moment of unintended public candor goes down, instead, as testament to how little Romney understood politics and the American people.

“The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people,” Romney told hundreds of donors during a telephone town hall. “In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups.” ...

Romney couldn’t be expected to acknowledge that he offered up “gifts” of his own: extended tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, a shredding of the regulations that would keep big investors from running amok, unfettered access for big energy companies to America’s wildlands.   [Emphasis added]

The problem is that more than those groups voted overwhelmingly for Obama; the rest of the 47% decried by Mitt as "takers" did as well, primarily because they believed that Obama represented them more than the rich, entitled, white boy who made his living flipping companies and raiding their pension plans.  They trusted Obama more than the guy who kept changing his spiel, depending on the audience.  They wanted more than a guy who used his etch-a-sketch rather than his brain and his heart.  They rejected his cold and uncaring dismissal of them as useless.

Rainey nailed it in his conclusion as to why Romney lost and lost so decisively:

Romney’s best self—the one that gave tirelessly and deeply to his fellow parishoners in the Mormon church and who worked with opponents to make progress in Massachusetts—made an appearance now and then. But that Mitt Romney didn't seem, often enough, like the one who was running for president.

So in what may be one of his final words on campaign 2012, the candidate explained how he understood the price of everything. And ended up looking like he knew the value of very little.

Rainey is much kinder than I am.

Stupid. Crazy. Evil.

(Click on image to enlarge and then please return.)

It's been amusing on some levels to hear the weeping and wailing of those unhappy with the election results.  On other levels, however, it's been downright spooky.  I mean, suddenly the world is askew because the election didn't turn out the way it was promised by Fox and the GOP.  David Horsey took a look at some of the whining in Monday's column.

President Obama’s reelection has caused right-wingers to become completely unhinged. They are purple-faced and apoplectic, convinced that an ignorant horde of government-dependent social leeches has destroyed traditional America and banished God from the country. ...

All of this doomsday blather hearkens back to Romney’s infamous characterization of 47% of Americans as “victims” who only want to be coddled by government. As it was when Romney said it, this portrait of America is not only demonstrably false, it is a scurrilous slander with a racist tinge.

The most numerous voters dependent on government to keep them economically afloat are retirees who receive Social Security and Medicare benefits. This was the cohort that went most heavily for Romney. The people who put Obama over the top in the electoral vote, on the other hand, were autoworkers in Ohio; not exactly a dependent bunch.

They were also young people who do not grow faint at the thought of gays getting married or women using birth control. They were middle-class white Americans – as many as voted for Bill Clinton, by the way – who think it is unfair that all the economic benefits in this country flow to the richest 1%.

From Ted Nugent to Sarah Palin to Franklin Graham to Rush Limbaugh:  all see a future in which America slips into a Godless-Communist state run by storm troopers rushing to herd most of us into death camps and/or gay marriage and forced pot-smoking.  This once proud hard-working Christian nation is now being run by takers who simply want something for nothing.  What's worse, they are not White.

Still living in their reality-defying bubble, the Right Wing cannot handle what happened.  That their idols were rejected is inconceivable.  Horsey's conclusion suggests the reason this is so.

Right-wingers will not let go of their own misleading mythology. They have a constricted vision of who the “real Americans” are and who they are not. Until election night, they still believed that people like themselves constituted a majority in this country. Now that they are faced with the truth of their own diminishing numbers, they are rejiggering reality. Incapable of accepting that the millions of people who voted for Obama are overwhelmingly hardworking, family-loving, patriotic Americans, they have to imagine them as the “takers” that Ayn Rand warned them were coming.

This is a necessary self-deception. Otherwise, conservative crazies would have to face an inconvenient truth: On election day, a majority of real Americans rejected them.

Rainbows

(Editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich and published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution 11/11/12.  Click on image to enlarge and then return.)

Republicans (at least some of them) have done a little analyzing of the results of the election and are suddenly making noises about some changes in their approach.  Given the overwhelming vote for Obama in the Hispanic community (he tied for the Cuban vote in Florida which traditionally votes Republican) and given the rising number of Hispanic voters, some are even moving towards the idea of an immigration reform bill.

The first hint of this movement came surprisingly from the punditocracy.  Amazingly, Fox News appears to have shifted gears, as noted by Media Matters.  I must say that hearing Sean Hannity call for a new look at immigration reform rather stunned me, especially since he also said his new view is an "evolved" one.  Shocking!

But some elected Republican officials have chimed in as well, as noted by The Hill (via The Impolitic):

...Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said a “comprehensive approach” on the issue was “long overdue.” ...

 The comments from Boehner and other Republicans suggesting movement on immigration reform reflect broad fears within the party that it is cutting itself off from the fast-growing constituency.

Warning signs for Republicans in terms of its future with Hispanic voters could be found not only in the election’s results but in exit polls that found Romney tied Obama even among Cuban Americans in Florida, who have traditionally been a strong GOP constituency.

Further, on yesterday's bobblehead shows, another Republican spoke to the issue and even suggested some details to get around the "amnesty" objection.  From the AP:

Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who promoted similar proposals on separate Sunday news shows said that no path to citizenship would be available until the country's borders were secure.

Only then could those in the U.S. without authorization "come out of the shadows, get biometrically identified, start paying taxes, pay a fine for the law they broke," Graham told CBS' "Face the Nation." ''They can't stay unless they learn our language, and they have to get in the back of line before they become citizens. They can't cut in front of the line regarding people who are doing it right and it can take over a decade to get their green card."

Is this just talk or are Republicans serious?  It's hard to tell.  A couple of Republicans in California have been screaming for some movement on the issue since 2010 when the Republicans were shut out of all constitutional offices.  Things didn't fare any better for them in this last election.  It appears the Democrats have won super-majorities in both houses of the state legislature, which makes raising taxes possible.  Another blow-out election on the national level in 2014 could result in the loss of the House and further losses in the Senate for the GOP.  The fear of that happening might be enough to get things moving.

It's almost enough for me to go out and buy some popcorn.

Almost. 

A Planet Where The Sky Is Yellow

There is still a lot of election postmortems being churned out, probably justifiably so.  One of the most perspicacious is that of David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times.  He notes that not only is the GOP bedeviled by crazies and extremists, it still persists in believing that if Republicans just keep repeating a phrase often enough a new reality is created.  This election gave the lie to that belief.

Here is what the facts turned out to be:

• Romney predominated only among older white men; Obama won 55% of women, 93% of African Americans, 71% of Latinos and 60% of voters ages 18 to 29.

• Rather than there being an enthusiasm gap, Obama pretty much replicated his winning 2008 coalition.

• The Obama campaign gurus in Chicago were not lying; they had the money, time and energy to get all their voters to the polls.

• The “enthusiasm” of the tea party and the religious right proved to be a detriment to the Republican cause. Their wacky candidates, including Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Akin in Missouri, were disasters and their demand for ideological purity turned the GOP primaries into a clown show and their eventual nominee into a pandering hypocrite.

• The Republicans’ silly scare stories about voter fraud were used to justify restrictions on voting that black Americans, in particular, perceived as a threat to their hard-won right to vote. As a result, those folks were willing to stand in long lines for hour after hour in states such as Ohio and Florida so that their voices could be heard. And what they said was “four more years for Barack Obama.”

Will this change the GOP in time for the next election?

I doubt it, especially since both Senate Minority Leader McConnell and House Speaker Boehner have already signaled their intention to obstruct any plan to raise taxes on the wealthy.  Congressman West of Florida, defeated in Florida by Democrat Patrick Murphy, is still pursuing a law suit to sequester the ballots and voting machines in an attempt to delay Murphy's swearing in (reminds me of what the GOP did to keep Sen. Al Franken out of his seat for months), even though his first law suit was thrown out.

It's probably going to take the election in 2014 to convince the still-sane members of the GOP (assuming there are any left by that time) that it might be time to return to consensual reality.

I'm Not So Sure

(Political cartoon by Matt Wuerker and published at Daily Kos.)

There's a very interesting article up at the Los Angeles Times on the effect of super PAC spending in the 2012 election.  The authors seem to be indicating (at least from their lede) that the outrageous sums spent during this election really didn't make a difference when it came to the outcome.

In the end, the old truism held: Money isn't everything.

Deep-pocketed "super PACs" and other independent groups dumped more than $1 billion into the 2012 election, largely on behalf of Republicans, injecting a harsh tone into races across the country and driving record spending. But they failed to have the dramatic impact both sides anticipated after such intense saturation of the airwaves.

Tuesday's results challenged the notion that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney had a strong edge because of heavyweight allies such as Americans for Prosperity, Restore Our Future and the two Crossroads organizations that were cofounded by Karl Rove, the political strategist and former advisor to President George W. Bush.

In fact, groups allied with President Obama claimed more success, even though they were outspent. Unions gleefully noted that they exceeded the number of voter contacts made in 2008 — one result of the Supreme Court decision that allowed corporations and unions to spend money on direct political activity. ...

The election exposed a limitation of super PACs and tax-exempt advocacy groups: Prohibited from coordinating with candidates, they served primarily as a weapon to mow down opponents, rather than a means to communicate a positive vision. And the preponderance of groups working on Romney's behalf may have overloaded voters.   [Emphasis added]

I would be willing to accept that conclusion but for the fact that President Obama also availed himself of super PAC  money even after he claimed he would eschew it.  Still, however, there's an argument to be made that the super-saturation of television, radio, and the internet caused voters' eyes to glaze over.  I think what won the election for Obama and down-ticket Democratic candidates was the spendid ground-game of the Democrats, something the GOP failed to do this time around, apparently counting on the ads to rouse their base and basest-base to show up.

That said, the L.A. Times article notes that and suggests, albeit implicitly, what we can expect in the future (presumably in 2014):

Even as they reflected on their losses, top conservative groups said Tuesday's results would not slow them down.

"We are not about just one year or one election or one issue," said Tim Phillips, president of the nonprofit advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, which spent more than $190 million in the two-year cycle — a large share on ads pummeling Obama on the debt and his energy policies. "It's about building for the long haul, and that's what we're committed to doing."

AFP's contributors are not discouraged, he said. "They tell us this is a long ballgame."   [Emphasis added]

So, the super PACs and 501 (c) 4 groups will be back, presumably with a little more discipline and a little more coordination.  We're not there yet.

And the Republican governors and state legislatures will continue to try to suppress the vote.

The president better do a better job over the next two years.

Blinders

David Horsey's recent column makes some salient points on President Obama's victory on Tuesday.  I'm not so sure, however, that the GOP is quite ready to take them into consideration.

The people have spoken. President Obama has won a chance to move beyond the stunted progress of his first term and, perhaps, become a historic president. On the losing side, the Republican Party remains shut out of the White House and has blown a chance to take over the U.S. Senate, largely because it catered to the narrow concerns of tea party zealots and social conservatives who imagined themselves as the only authentic Americans but who are, in fact, way out of step with most of the people in this country.

If Republicans fail to learn the lesson of this election they are fools. If they continue to let Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity set the angry, extreme tone for their philosophy; if they continue to let anti-science religious fundamentalists dictate their social agenda; and if they think Mitt Romney fell short because he was not conservative enough when, in fact, he only began to catch on with moderate voters when he suddenly veered from his self-proclaimed “severe conservatism” and transformed back into a Massachusetts moderate; then they are doomed to become a party of the past.   [Emphasis added]

The problem is that the GOP still controls a number of state houses and legislators.  I anticipate continuing efforts to suppress the vote via voting list purges and draconian identification card requirements.  I also think that voter intimidation and voting machine tampering will continue.  Unless and until stiffer laws are drafted and enforced on vote suppression, intimidation, and fraud, the GOP figures it will still have a shot at keeping the control of country in the hands on the white male 1%.   Convicting some of these yahoos and giving them hard time might make a difference we all can live with.

Until then, the GOP will continue with the likes of the Tea Party and Mitt Romney.

Mental Health Day, Sorta Kinda

I pretty much stuck to my promise not to get all wound up in election day/night fervor, so I really don't have any serious commentary at this point.  What I do have is a couple of cartoons which I thought caught some of the highlights of the past couple of days.

(Editorial cartoon by Kevin Siers / The Charlotte Observer (November 6, 2012) and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge.)

(Editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich and published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on 11/07/12.  Click on image to enlarge.)

More tomorrow.  Maybe.

Kingbirding

(Photograph by Steve Creek and published at his wonderful blog, which is filled with great photography and worth a visit or a hundred.)

The big day has finally arrived.  I've decided to spend most of the day away from the internet and the newspapers and the radio.  This evening I'll check in to see just what things look like, but I don't intend to stay up all night following all the details closely.  At least at this point.  I just hope that the outcomes are decided by Wednesday morning, although I have a hunch not all of the races will be.

I don't anticipate any major changes, even if President Obama is re-elected.  The Democrats will probably hold the Senate (with one or two new progressives), and the Republicans will probably hold the House (again, with a few new progressives).  The 113th Congress will be pretty much like the 112th, which means little will get done.

Unless.

Unless we do a little kingbirding on our elected officials' backsides.

For those not familiar with kingbirding, it's a term I coined back in June.  Let me reprise a few of the salient sections from that post.

"Nature notes: Watched a tiny eastern kingbird assail a bald eagle who must have done some nest robbing. Irate little bird actually surfed the back of the eagle furiously pecking his head for about 1000 feet. Saw similar outrage directed at a raven. Tough day for nesting kingbirds."

I consider that an excellent metaphor for the very least we can do, so much so that I've created a new label, "Kingbirding." I suggest that as often as we can, we peck mercilessly at the heads of the rapacious thieves stealing from our nest for as long as we can. If nothing else, it will annoy them, causing them to spend their oh-so-precious-time trying to shake us off. Faxes, letters, emails, telephone calls, vigils, letters to the editors: they may be just momentary distractions, but at least we are doing something.

 And that's what I intend to do for the next two years.  I'd really love some company on the journey.  If you need persuasion, maybe Marge Piercy's poem will do the trick.

Money Money Money

I seriously considered taking a mental health day today, but I need to vent a little more on the outrageous amount of money being poured in elections.  On Saturday I posted on the Open Secrets summary of expenditures for the national elections.  Yesterday I read Michael Hiltzig's report on the money pouring into the campaigns for and against the various propositions on the ballot in California.

As I've mention before, the California legislators are apparently incapable of doing their jobs when it comes to making hard decisions.  They don't want to risk making their owners or the voters unhappy, so the tough issues wind up on the ballot in one form or another.  Additionally, special interest groups, understanding the legislators reluctance, figure if they can get enough signatures and money, they can bypass elected officials completely.  Either way, it's a lousy system.  That's unfortunate because the initiative process wasn't designed for this kind of manipulation.

Michael Hiltzig would agree, I believe:

No one today can overlook that it's California's self-indulgent initiative process that's attracting the big political bucks into the state, the way a magnet attracts scrap iron. Year in, year out, the torrent of spending on initiative campaigns swamps the money spent on traditional candidates.

Tuesday's ballot, with 11 propositions attracting $350 million in campaign spending, is another data point. Not even Meg Whitman's gubernatorial campaign in 2010, in which the candidate spent $144 million of her own money on her way to a $160-million bottom line, comes close — and that exercise in futility set a spending record. ...

The typical initiative campaign today consists of flagrantly misleading TV commercials produced by companies or wealthy individuals intent on concealing how the passage or defeat of a given measure will line their pockets with gold. With the exception of Steyer's Proposition 39, Gov. Jerry Brown's Proposition 30 tax initiative and a handful of non-economic measures, Tuesday's lineup mostly involves narrow corporate goals on one side or another.   [Emphasis added]

 Given those corporate goals, it's really no mystery where a lot of the money is coming from.

Looking at contributions of more than $1-million among the top contributors on each initiative (thanks to Maplight.org for crunching the data from the California secretary of state's office), we find that about $80.5 million came directly from corporations. Most of that was spent by Monsanto, DuPont, PepsiCo and other food mega-marketers to defeat Proposition 37, which mandates the labeling of foods prepared with genetically modified ingredients (some foods, not all, which is a major problem with the measure).

But that's just $80.5 million on one proposition.  There are many more, and money has been pouring in on both sides of each issue.  Hiltzig examines some of the other big spenders, including unions which are bitterly fighting Prop 32, which effectively bans unions from making political contributions to all kinds of election matters yet does not include a similar ban for other special interests including corporations.

That points us to the principle that initiative spending often begets more initiative spending: None of that money would have to be donated if not for the $60 million in influence on the other side devoted to stripping unions of their political voice.

So, that's why this election has turned out to be so expensive.  It shows just what the priorities of the corporate interests, i.e., our owners, actually are.  The state of California and 99% of its citizens are far down the list of the priorities, if they are there at all.  With understated eloquence, Hiltzig provides a gauge:

...What would $350 million buy out in the cruel, cold world? It would cover 10%, maybe even 15%, of the cost of American Red Cross relief for East Coast residents battered by Hurricane Sandy. It would cover four years' tuition and fees (at current rates) for 2,760 students at the University of California, or 14,657 students at Cal State.

Or it could reverse almost all of Gov. Brown's budget cuts for CalWORKS, the relief program for families with dependent children, including restoration of the exemption from work requirements for parents with a child at home under the age of 2. It could lessen by two-thirds the impact of budget cuts on the state's community colleges if Brown's Proposition 30 tax increases don't pass. If your social empathy lies elsewhere, it could make the investment bankers at Swiss-based UBS entirely whole on their losses from the botched initial public stock offering of Facebook.

Amen.