“The Right’s Rekindled Affection For Russia’s Putin”: Back To Drawing Hearts On Their Pictures Of Putin
It was early last year when Republicans decided Russian President Vladimir Putin was an autocrat worthy of their gushing affections. In March 2014, Rudy Giuliani (R) said of Putin, “That’s what you call a leader.” The same month, Mike Rogers, at the time the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, expressed his own admiration: “Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles, and I don’t think it’s even close. They’ve been running circles around us.”
At one point last summer, a Fox News personality went so far as to say she wanted to see Putin serve as “head of the United States,” at least for a little while.
By late last year, however, Republicans were no longer drawing hearts on their pictures of Putin. Russia’s economy was deteriorating quickly; Putin was isolated on the international stage; Russia’s standing and credibility around the world was in tatters; and the sanctions President Obama helped impose on Russia were making a real difference.
Suddenly, the U.S. conservatives who’d enrolled in the Putin fan-club fell quiet, realizing that their contempt for the American president led them to praise the wrong foreign leader.
As of this week, however, many Republicans have apparently come full circle.
One day after President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin made little headway in their standoff over Syria at their first formal meeting in more than two years, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump is agreeing with Putin on his backing of Syrian President Bashar Assad. […]
“I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, [Putin’s] getting an ‘A’ and our president is not doing so well,” he said.
Jennifer Rubin, a conservative voice at the Washington Post, added this morning, “In taking this action just days after meeting with President Obama, Putin is delivering one more finger in the eye of a president whom he continues to out-wit and out-muscle.”
Yes, we’ve apparently reached the point again at which Republicans once more see Putin as some kind of strategic mastermind.
As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman explained yesterday, [T]oday’s reigning cliche is that the wily fox, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has once again outmaneuvered the flat-footed Americans, by deploying some troops, planes and tanks to Syria to buttress the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and to fight the Islamic State forces threatening him. If only we had a president who was so daring, so tough, so smart…. Putin stupidly went into Syria looking for a cheap sugar high to show his people that Russia is still a world power.”
For Republicans, the response seems to be, “At least Putin is going after targets in Syria.” What the White House’s GOP critics have refused to acknowledge for the last 14 months is that President Obama has launched thousands of airstrikes against ISIS targets.
There are two main differences between Putin’s engagement in Syria and Obama’s. The first is that the size of Obama’s military commitment is vastly larger. The second is that Russian lawmakers actually authorized Putin’s mission, while the Republican-run Congress in the United States has done literally nothing since the American military offensive began in August 2014, preferring to watch developments unfold on TV while Obama’s mission continues.
Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum added this morning, “Do you know how many military bases the US has in the Middle East? Nearly two dozen. Plus the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. Plus a whole bunch of close allies. And we’re supposed to be quaking in our boots because Putin hastily upgraded a single aging base in Latakia under pressure from his sole remaining ally? You’re kidding, right?”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 1, 2015
“Thoughts And Prayers Are Not Enough”: Obama, Yet Again, Calls For Gun-Control Laws
In what he acknowledged has become a familiar event, the president once again spoke to the nation after a mass shooting.
President Obama was blunt and unequivocal in his response to the shooting Thursday at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon that left 10 dead, “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough.”
“It’s not enough,” he continued. “It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel, and it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted somewhere else in America — next week or a couple of months from now.”
He was explicit: In order to stem this “continuing cause of death for innocent people,” America needed to pass new laws.
The president said that this had become a dispiritingly routine event: The reporting is routine; his remarks, standing at the podium, were routine; the national conversation in the aftermath was routine; and the response from the guns-rights lobby, loudly balking at even the most modest regulations, was routine.
“We have become numb,” he said.
“It’s fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds,” Obama said, addressing the specter of mental illness, another typical motif of our national post-shooting conversation. “But we are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.”
He asked that the media report on the numbers of Americans killed by terrorism as compared to the number killed by gun violence. He lamented that the nation could spend over $1 trillion, and devote entire agencies and reams of campaign rhetoric, to the fight against terrorism, but the most common-sense gun-control legislation can’t even make it through a filibuster.
Anticipating critics who would accuse him of politicizing the tragedy, Obama fired back: “This is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.”
When people die in mining accidents, he said, we make mines safer. When people die in car accidents, we enact seatbelt laws. When roads are unsafe, we fix them. “The notion that gun violence is somehow different, that our freedom, that our Constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon when there are law-abiding gun owners all across the country… It doesn’t make sense.”
States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths, he noted. Claims by anti-gun-control opponents are “not borne out by the evidence.”
He enjoined voters who felt that gun control could and should be enacted to elect representatives who shared those beliefs and were prepared to act on them.
He reached out to law-abiding gun owners, whom he claimed polls showed supported background checks and closing the so-called gun show loophole, and asked them “to think about whether your views are being properly represented by the organization that suggests it’s speaking for you.”
He invoked the names of cities, towns, and schools marked by massacres, which have become bywords for gun violence: Columbine, Blacksburg, Aurora, Newtown, Tucson, Charleston.
And now Roseburg.
By: Sam Reisman, The National Memo, October 1, 2015
“Moneyed Elites Get Richer The Old-Fashioned Way; Stealing”: Preferential Tax Treatment For The Narcissistic Money Manipulators
With the 2016 presidential campaigns in full swing, the burdens of the working middle class have taken center stage. And believe it or not, there is bipartisan support from the frontrunners on a key issue brought up over and over again. Donnie Trump is for it. Hillary Clinton is for it. Jeb Bush is for it. Bernie Sanders is for it. Even Barack Obama is for it. And the American people are overwhelmingly for it.
The “it” that’s drawing such broad support is the idea of ending a ridiculous tax loophole that was written by and for the richest, most pampered elites on Wall Street. An obscurely titled “carried interest” tax break allows billionaire hedge-fund hucksters to have their massive incomes taxed at a much lower rate than the one retail workers, Main Street businesses, carpenters, and other modest-income people must pay.
Keep that carried interest tax loophole in mind when I tell you this number: 158,000. That’s the number of kindergarten teachers in America. Their combined income in 2013 was $8 billion. Here’s another number for you: 25. That’s the number of America’s highest-paid hedge fund operators whose combined income in 2013 was $21 billion. Yes, just 25 Wall Street greedmeisters hauled off $13 billion more in pay than was received by all of our kindergarten teachers — the people we count on to launch the education of the next generation.
Which group do you think is rewarded by law with the lowest rate of income tax? Right: the uber-rich Wall Streeters! Incredibly, Congress (in its inscrutable wisdom) gives preferential tax treatment to the narcissistic money manipulators who do practically nothing for the common good. Even flamboyant celebrity narcissist Donnie Trump sees through the gross inequality of this tax scam: “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” The Donald recently barked. “These are guys that shift paper around, and they get lucky. The hedge fund guys are getting away with murder.” Indeed, while dodging through this loophole, they pay about half the tax rate that kindergarten teachers are assessed. In effect, Wall Street’s puppets in Congress let this tiny group of moneyed elites steal about $18 billion a year that they owe to the public treasury to finance the structure and workings of America itself.
This privileged treatment of pampered paper- and money shufflers over people who do constructive work in our society adds to America’s widening chasm of inequality. It’s so unfair and unpopular that even Donald, Hillary, Jeb, Bernie and others are saying that it has to go. So it’s bye-bye, loophole, right?
Ha — just kidding! Trump can mouth all he wants, but no animal hath such fury as a hedge funder whose special tax boondoggle is threatened. Trump had barely gotten the word “unfair” out of his puffy lips before the tax-loophole profiteers deployed battalions of lobbyists, PR flacks, and front-group operatives out to defend their precious carried-interest provision. One group, with the arcane name of Private Equity Growth Capital Council, rushed a dozen Gucci-clad lobbyists to Capitol Hill to “inform” lawmakers about the virtues of coddling Wall Street elites with tax favors.
Of course, “informing” meant flashing their checkbooks at key members of Congress. After all, even the loudest blast of political talk is cheap — and it’s the silent sound of a pen writing out a campaign check that makes Washington World keep spinning in favor of the rich.
Sure enough, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) , the two lawmakers who head Congress’ tax-writing committees, quickly announced that — the will of the people aside — there would be no repeal of the hedge-fund loophole anytime soon. The inequality that is presently ripping our society apart is not the result of some incomprehensible force of nature, but the direct result of collusion between financial and political elites to rig the system for the enrichment of the few — i.e., themselves — and the impoverishment of the many. There’s a word for those elites: thieves.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, September 30, 2015
“Obama Facing The World As It Really Is”: A Smiling Pope, A Fallen Speaker And Two Tough Guys — Obama’s Crazy Week
The week began with President Obama on the tarmac of a military base in Maryland, waiting to welcome a global celebrity far more popular than he. It ended with him raising a toast to a hard-nosed world leader who has repeatedly challenged American interests and Obama’s resolve.
Along the way, the president’s most frequent legislative sparring partner in Washington relinquished his post on Capitol Hill, finally surrendering to the sharp polarization that has come to define American politics in the past five years. And abroad, another of Obama’s persistent antagonists — the Russian president — suddenly wanted a face-to-face chat about Syria and Ukraine.
The week’s events seemed like political surrealism. When Pope Francis arrived at the White House on Wednesday, the weather was so gorgeous it put Obama in a hopeful, reverential mood.
“What a beautiful day the Lord has made,” he said.
Two days later, Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived on the South Lawn to a much stiffer, more martial ceremony, complete with a 21-gun salute and lengthy remarks read from thick binders. Behind the scenes, the two leaders grappled over questions of economic hacking and Beijing’s military adventurism in the South China Sea.
But amid the piety of the pope and the provocations by China loomed the potential of another government shutdown. The surprise announcement by House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday that he would step down provided the week’s surpassing piece of political drama.
In Obama, Boehner has faced a determined adversary, but it was a mutiny within his own caucus that finally drove him to the exit. And as tempestuous as the Obama-Boehner relationship has been, the speaker’s departure signals that Obama may face an even more fractious GOP majority Congress in the remaining months of his presidency.
More than some of his predecessors, Obama is acutely aware of the contrast between his lofty ideals and the reality facing him. He talks about it all the time.
“Ultimately, global leadership requires us to see the world as it is, with all its danger and uncertainty,” the president told graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in May 2014. “But American leadership also requires us to see the world as it should be — a place where the aspirations of individual human beings really matters ; where hopes and not just fears govern; where the truths written into our founding documents can steer the currents of history in a direction of justice.”
The past week was a single lens into both those worlds, with their maddeningly uplifting complexity.
In Francis — and his progressive message on inequality, immigration and climate change — Obama saw the world as he wanted it to be. In everything else — Xi’s visit, Boehner’s resignation and a decision to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the upcoming U.N. General Assembly session in New York — the president faced the world as it really is.
The president has had only a modest impact on three of the protagonists who dominated the week, although he has sought to engage all of them at different points. Xi and Obama have found a common cause in tackling climate change, but on many other important policy issues, they are at odds. Putin, like Xi, has joined the United States in pressuring Iran to scale back its nuclear program. But he defied American calls to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and has ignored the U.S. push to sideline Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as part of a political solution to the ongoing Syrian civil war. Obama sought to enlist Boehner’s help in forging fiscal and immigration reforms, but the GOP leader was never able to bring along enough members of his party to make the deals happen.
Still, Obama was at the center of all of the action over the past week.
Stanford University’s Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia for three years under Obama, returned a few days ago from Beijing. He said he was struck by the massive coverage in China of Xi’s visit to the United States, as he was by Putin’s desire to speak with Obama during the U.N. meeting. China’s and Russia’s dealings with the United States rank as each of those countries’ “most important bilateral relationship,” he said.
“It seems to me [Obama is] still pretty engaged in international affairs, and people want to engage him,” said McFaul, who directs Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “We’re still the central power in the international arena.”
During a news conference with Xi in the White House Rose Garden on Friday, Obama delivered a brief lecture on the many responsibilities that accompany China’s rise from the “poor, developing country” it once was to its current status.
“It is now a powerhouse. And that means it’s got responsibilities and expectations in terms of helping to uphold international rules that might not have existed before,” the president said.
But on several issues, Xi asserted that China would not mimic other world powers. “Democracy and human rights are the common pursuit of mankind,” he said. “At the same time, we must recognize that countries have different historical processes and realities, and we need to respect people of all countries in the right to choose their own development path independently.”
Although the White House has emphasized the value of the time Obama and Xi have spent “outside the glare of the klieg lights,” in the words of press secretary Josh Earnest, experts cautioned that that sort of schmoozing has its limits.
Patrick M. Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said there’s an “American tendency to believe in the personalization of relations.”
“It’s all generally true, but the president of China doesn’t come as a person,” he said. “He comes here as the leader of the Communist Party, and the leader of China.”
Obama’s exchanges with the pope were less charged.
Obama and Francis chatted amiably as the choir of Washington’s St. Augustine Catholic Church sang “Total Praise” on the South Lawn, and in their public remarks, the president and the pontiff emphasized their common values.
The pope said he found it “encouraging” that Obama was cutting carbon emissions linked to climate change. Meanwhile, the president not only praised Francis’s vision of “empathy,” but also said his “unique qualities as a person” gave the world “a living example of Jesus’s teachings, a leader whose moral authority comes not just through words but also through deeds.”
On Friday, after word of Boehner’s resignation became public, Obama said he hoped lawmakers would “really reflect on what His Holiness said,” especially the idea “that we listen to each other and show each other respect, and that we show regard for the most vulnerable in society.”
Seven decades ago, with Eastern Europe in turmoil, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin dismissed the Vatican’s influence in the world with this question: “How many [military] divisions does the pope of Rome have?”
Michael Ignatieff, a professor at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, described Obama as “a realist and a pragmatist” with reasons to align himself with Francis.
“A ‘realist’ fact about the modern world is Pope Francis has divisions,” said Ignatieff, who led Canada’s Liberal Party in opposition between 2008 and 2011. “He has articulated a longing for justice, the care of nature, the care of the poor — that’s very powerful stuff.”
By: Juliet Eilperin, White House Bureau Chief, The Washington Post, September 26, 2015
“Almost Giddy”: Religious Conservatives Celebrate John Boehner’s Downfall—And Pray Mitch McConnell Is Next
This morning, when Senator Marco Rubio interrupted his address to the Values Voter Summit in Washington to break the news that House Speaker John Boehner was resigning, the crowd of conservative Christian activists immediately rose to their feet, breaking into cheers and shouts of “Amen!”
“The time has come to turn the page,” Rubio declared to raucous applause. After the speech, the overjoyed activists described Boehner as the emblem of all that’s wrong with Washington today: too weak, too moderate, and unwilling to listen to the conservative base. “Mr. Boehner has no backbone when it comes to standing up for principles that Christians believe in,” said Ron Goss, an activist from Locust Dale, Virginia.
“It’s absolutely best news I’ve heard in months,” said Judith Neal, a Christian activist from San Dimas, California.
“I am delighted because he’s been there too long,” said Gary Frazier, a Christian organizer from Colleyville, Texas. Like the other conservatives assembled from around the country for the weekend summit, Frazier has said that conservatives expected big things after the 2014 midterms and Republicans took full control of Congress. Instead, he continued, “it’s been a year and a half of nothing.” Nobody on the religious right has been fooled by the current Republican threat to shut down the govenment over Planned Parenthood funding, he said, calling it “nothing but political posturing.”
The moment they heard about Boehner, the mood among the activists—so long frustrated by electing Republicans who didn’t carry out their agenda effectively—became almost giddy. “I’m just a little overwhelmed,” Neal said, holding her hand to her heart. “He’s held back Congress from doing all the right things.” But he’s not the only one, she said. Like many activists, Neal immediately began hoping that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would be next, adding that she was now feeling more hopeful that the Republican establishment was finally—finally!—starting to listen.
There was no consensus among activists as to who the next speaker should be, but they expressed confidence that it would be someone from the GOP’s right flank who’d be more friendly to their social agenda than Boehner. Shak Hill, a Ted Cruz supporter and Virginia-based activist, said that the new speaker should force President Obama to veto more bills. “We’re not putting forward enough issues to show [Obama’s] true colors,” Hill said. Tammi Wilson, 51, a conservative activist from North Carolina, agreed: She’d specifically like to see the next Speaker bring up bills that challenge funding on a line-by-line basis, as opposed to the omnibus spending bills that have kept the government open. Republicans like Boehner, she said, haven’t done so because “they’re afraid of Obama.”
The right flank of the GOP has been calling for Boehner to resign for years, but the shadow of the 2016 elections seems to have done him in. In the short term, Boehner’s resignation could conceivably help Republican candidates convince disillusioned and frustrated GOP voters that change is possible after all, that there’s renewed hope of their agenda advancing. But those hopes could also backfire on the Republican establishment, precisely because of the renewed optimism that evangelicals were reveling in this morning: Cynicism and frustration with Washington have hurt the candidates who already hold office. But what happens when the frustrations set in again, and activists want the insurgents to flex their muscles and topple the establishment again?
Senator Ted Cruz, who’s counting on the religious right to be a cornerstone of his campaign, wasn’t worrying about that for now: Taking the stage shortly after his presidential rival, Rubio, broke the news about Boehner, Cruz used the speaker’s resignation as a rallying cry. “You want to know how much each of you terrify Washington?” Cruz asked, clearly feeling the buzz of unexpected optimism in the crowd. “Yesterday, John Boehner was speaker of the House. Y’all come to town and all of a sudden that changes. My only request is that you come more often.”
By: Suzy Khimm, Senior Editor, The New Republic; September 25, 2015
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