Walking Away From The Truth: GOP Playing With Matches On The Debt
Just ignore Tuesday’s vote against raising the debt ceiling, House Republican leaders whispered to Wall Street. We didn’t really vote against it, members suggested; we just sent another of our endless symbolic messages, pretending to take the nation’s credit to the brink of collapse in order to extract the maximum concessions from President Obama.
Once he caves, members said, the debt limit will be raised and the credit scare will end. And the business world apparently got the message. It’s just a “joke,” said a leader of the United States Chamber of Commerce, and Wall Street is in on it. Not everyone found it funny.
No matter how they tried to spin it, 318 House members actually voted against paying the country’s bills and keeping the promise made to federal bondholders. That’s an incredibly dangerous message to send in a softening global economy. Among the jokesters were 236 Republicans playing the politics of extortion, and 82 feckless Democrats who fret that Republicans could transform a courageous vote into a foul-smelling advertisement.
The games that now pass for governing in an increasingly embarrassing 112th Congress are menacing the nation’s future. It was bad enough when Republicans threatened to shut down the government to achieve their extreme and extremely misguided spending cuts, but that threat would have caused temporary damage. The debt limit is something else altogether. If the global credit markets decide that the debt of the United States will regularly be held hostage to ideological demands, it could cause significant harm to investment in long-term bonds and other obligations. That, in turn, could damage domestic credit markets and easily spark another recession.
To prevent this from happening, 114 Democrats in April asked for a “clean” vote without conditions. But Republicans were not about to set their hostage free. Knowing that the clean vote would not pass — and imposing a two-thirds majority requirement to ensure its failure — House Republicans gave the Democrats what they requested. They then voted it down, sending their reckless message to the world.
But there was no excuse for so many Democrats to go along with that message, including the leadership. Steny Hoyer, the minority whip, urged his members to vote no so they would not “subject themselves to a political 30-second ad attack” with all Republicans voting no. Apparently Mr. Hoyer did not trust voters to understand what a dangerous and dishonest game the Republicans are playing.
The exercise has prompted the White House to convene talks to discuss the Republicans’ scattershot demands, which have ranged from trillions in spending cuts to the outright dismantling of vital safety-net programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Democrats have hoped to get an increase in revenues out of any deal, but House Republican leaders emerged from a White House meeting on Wednesday spouting the usual discredited claims that higher taxes on the rich would impede job growth.
What Republicans seem unwilling to acknowledge is that the debt-limit debate is not about future spending. It is about paying for a deficit already incurred because of two wars and tax cuts approved by both Republicans and Democrats at the behest of a Republican president. Tuesday’s vote was a chance to do the right thing and educate the public on why it was necessary. Instead, too many lawmakers walked away from the truth.
GOD To The GOP: “I Don’t Endorse”
Dear Politicians,
Permit me to explain my reluctance to endorse. As the All-Powerful, Benevolent Deity I have a certain responsibility to non-partisanship among my constituents. Of course, I do prefer those among you who are moral, kind, compassionate, good and gracious. I have, however, noticed a certain tendency for these qualities to be diminished upon entering office. Next time around I intend to tinker a bit with the mix, and see if I can make My creation a bit more consistent. The first batter is always lumpy.
The problem is that in times past I did intervene in elections. When Moses and Korach were, in a sense, running against each other, I took clear sides. So certain was I of the proper outcome that I resorted to the simple expedient of having the ground swallow Korach and his cohorts. That severely cut into their base. Some people thought this an extreme form of censorship, but I believed it was unworthy of the Ruler of the Universe to simply stuff ballots. If I am going to endorse, it will be in biblical measure. I don’t do leaflets. I do pronouncements. (For those of you who have not read My book in a while, check the 16th chapter of Numbers.)
There were times when I was sorely tempted to raise My right hand for a candidate for office. A parade of villainy has passed before My all seeing eye, but I left the choice up to you. Some of the people whom I most favored – dear old honest Abe comes to mind – had to win on their own. I could have delivered a key county or two. But Korach’s indignant plea as he caromed off the canyon wall reminded me that I tend to push a bit too hard. Moses had some electoral deficits – a speech impediment, a certain impatience, and an alien upbringing – but he probably could have carried the pivotal Sinai districts even without My help.
So please, I ask you in My Name – don’t use My Name. You haven’t any idea whom I endorse. I don’t tote up church attendance like a celestial accountant and award the election to the one with the best record. I see inside hearts, remember? Watch out. While I am very, very patient, sometimes I snap. When I do decide to turn My countenance to you, if you have been tossing My name around like a cheap ticket to the Oval Office, I could be very put out. You don’t want that, trust Me. Just ask Korach.
Blessings,
God
By: David Wolpe, Rabbi of Sinai Temple, Los Angeles; The Washington Post, June 6, 2011
The GOP’s Hezbollah Wing Is Now Fully In Control
I have a guest column at the Daily Beast about the Republican Party’s self-destructive decision to support the Paul Ryan budget and, faced with the disastrous consequences, to dig in deeper. For an example of digging in deeper, check out Marc Thiessen’s column today. In the face of clear evidence to the contrary, he asserts that Kathy Hochul won in New York only because a third party spoiler split the Republican vote.
Having assigned to the Republican 100% of Jack Davis’s third party vote, Thiessen proceeds to argue, “Democrat Kathy Hochul won only a 47 percent plurality — just one point more than Barack Obama got when he lost the district back in 2008. As national referendums go, that is not terribly convincing.” It’s not? If House Democrats beat Obama’s 2008 vote by one percentage point in the next election, who does Thiessen think will control the House? You could argue that Hochul is just one data point and probably an outlier, and I’d agree. But it is a data point with clear negative implications for Republicans.
After asserting that the race proved almost nothing about Medicare, Thiessen then, arguing in the alternative, suggests a solution for Republicans to fight back anyway:
[T]he lesson of the New York special election is that if Republicans want to win in 2012, they need to stop playing defense and go on the offensive.
Why on earth have Republicans allowed Democrats to define the Ryan proposal as a plan to “end Medicare” when it is the Democrats who risk ending Medicare though a policy of neglect? Even the New York Times editorial page warned after the New York vote, “Sooner or later, Democrats will have to admit that Medicare cannot keep running as it is — its medical costs are out of control, and a recent report showed its trust fund running out of money in 2024, five years earlier than expected.”
Democrats have put forward no plan to deal with this fiscal crisis. Quite the opposite, they made it worse by taking $500 billion out of Medicare to help fund the president’s health-care law — robbing Medicare to pay for Obamacare. The time has come for the GOP to take the gloves off. When liberal groups put up an ad showing Ryan pushing Grandma off of a cliff, Republicans need to counter with an ad showing Obama, Pelosi and Reid pushing Grandma off the cliff — because that is where Medicare is headed if we follow their policy of inaction. The message should be: If we do nothing, Medicare will collapse — and millions of retirees will be left without health coverage. Democratic neglect will kill Medicare; Republicans are trying to save it.
Next, Republicans need to expand the debate. The Medicare proposal is just one element of a broader GOP plan to reduce our ballooning debt — which, in turn, is one element of a larger plan to restore economic growth and create jobs.
So, accuse democrats of letting Medicare go bankrupt, promise that you just want to save it, and then try to persuade voters that preserving the Bush tax cuts that have been in place for a decade will stimulate growth. Wow, why haven’t Republicans thought of this plan before?
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, May 31, 2011
No Brains In The Head: Truly The Dumbest `American Exceptionalism’ Attack Yet
I didn’t think the right’s “American exceptionalism” attack on Obama could get any dumber, but Sarah Palin has now outdone them all. She’s now faulting Obama for insufficient praise for our armed forces:
She also made a slight dig at President Obama for saying Monday at Arlington National Cemetery that his “most solemn responsibility as president [is] to serve as commander in chief of one of the finest fighting forces in the world.” Answering a question about Memorial Day, Palin said, “This is the greatest fighting force in the world, the U.S. military. It’s not just one of the greatest fighting forces. And I sure hope our president recognizes that. We’re not just one of many. We are the best.”
As it happens, the reporter got Obama’s quote a bit wrong. This is what Obama actually said: “It is my most solemn responsibility as President, to serve as Commander-in-Chief of one of the finest fighting forces the world has ever known.” But this isn’t good enough for Palin: If Obama doesn’t say that our armed forces are the bestest, baddest, most ass kicking-ist fighting forces in all of human history, he’s subtly denigrating the troops.
This is a reminder, if you needed one, that the charge that Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism — which has taken literally dozens of forms now — will be central to the 2012 campaign. It’s also a reminder, though, of what this attack line is really about. It’s impossible to imagine that a significant number of voters could hear Palin’s latest attack and come away thinking there’s something to it; her claim is just too dumb for people to take seriously. But these sorts of attacks aren’t about the actual claims themselves.
Rather, they are part of a much broader effort to insinuate that you should find Obama’s character, story, motives, identity, cultural instincts and intentions towards our country to be alien and fundamentally suspect. The idea is to keep piling various versions of this charge — no matter how ludicrous — on top of one another, like snow piling up on a roof.
Mitt Romney has already made it completely plain that various versions of this insinuation will be a major feature of the 2012 GOP nominee’s argument against Obama. Donald Trump’s experiment in birther hucksterism — even though it crashed and burned — confirmed this beyond any doubt. Now Palin is at it, too.
Hearing this kind of thing from Palin actually makes me want her to run. Who better than her to reveal how vacuous, childish, jingoistic and unbecoming of the presidency this sort of nonsense really is?
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, May 31, 2011
Are Members Of Congress Engaged In Insider Trading?
When Congress isn’t sending billions in taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street firms, some of its legislators appear to be using information unavailable to the general public to personally profit on stock trades.
So says a study just published in Business and Politics. A portfolio that imitates the stock purchases of House members outperforms the market by more than 6 percent in the course of a year, its authors found. “A previous study of the stock returns of U.S. Senators in a leading finance journal indicates that their portfolios show some of the highest excess returns ever recorded over a long period of time, significantly outperforming even hedge fund managers,” they wrote. “Until now, there has been no similar study of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Now we know that from 1985 to 2001, the specific interval used to generate the data, senators do the best, House members follow, and the average American investor brings up the rear. In defense of Congress, however, most legislators weren’t exploiting their advantage: on average only 27 percent of senators and 16 percent of House members bought and sold common stock. Interestingly, in the House “by far the most successful traders were those Representatives with the least seniority.” The authors acknowledge that result is counterintuitive, and posit this explanation:
Whereas Representatives with the longest seniority (in this case more than 16 years), have no trouble raising funds for campaigns, junkets and whatever other causes they may deem desirable owed to the power they wield, the financial condition of a freshman Congressman is far more precarious. His or her position is by no means secure, financially or otherwise. House Members with the least seniority may have fewer opportunities to trade on privileged information, but they may be the most highly motivated to do so when the opportunities arise.
So what should be done?
It’s presented as a thorny problem. “To restrain Members from taking personal advantage of non-public information and using their positions for personal gain, Congress has decided that such unethical behavior is best discouraged by the public disclosure of financial investments by Representatives and the discipline of the electoral process,” the authors point out, but “to form a reasonable opinion of a Representative’s conflicts of interest, voters must familiarize themselves with their Representative’s personal asset holdings, the details of each law under consideration in the House and the voting record of the Representative. This could be difficult for any voter.”
That’s why faster disclosure would work best here. Forget filing periodic reports. Just force Members of Congress to be transparent about their stock trades in real time. Voter oversight wouldn’t even be needed — the idea is that self-interested traders would closely monitor the buying and selling of stock by legislators, who’d thereby lose a lot of their ability to get a jump on other investors.
Right?
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, May 27, 2011
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