Some unknown but alarming number of ultra-rich Americans are now basically totally delusional and completely divorced from reality. This is now an inescapable fact, confirmed by multiple media accounts of billionaire thought and an entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Here’s a brief list of insane things that are apparently common knowledge among the billionaire class:

• That President Obama and the Democratic Party have treated wealthy finance industry titans maliciously and unfairly.
• That the fact that they are perversely wealthy and growing richer during a period of mass unemployment and staggering debt is a sign that the economy is functioning correctly.
• That poor people, and not the finance industry, are responsible for the financial crisis and subsequent recession.
• That the ultra-wealthy are wealthy because they are smarter and work harder than everybody else, and that they are resented for their success.
• That the ultra-wealthy in general, and finance industry executives in particular, are the victims of widespread prejudice akin to that faced by ethnic minorities.

There can be no reasoning with people this irrational.

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama. With Ron Paul out of it and warmongering hedge fund hustler Mitt Romney the likely Republican nominee, the GOP has defined itself indelibly as the party of moneyed greed and unfettered imperialism.

In the face of an expected recall election targeting Gov. Scott Walker and four Republican state senators, the Wisconsin state Assembly voted Tuesday to amend the state constitution to make it more difficult to toss an official from office.

The measure, which still faces major hurdles before taking effect, would allow officeholders to be recalled only if they have been charged with a serious crime or if there is a finding of probable cause that they violated the state code of ethics.

Under current law, no grounds are needed to seek a recall.

We can laugh all we want to about the Republicans being an insane party, but the truth of the matter is that the GOP is a force for moving the USA to the right while the Democrats won't even defend their own legacy or the base of their party. The Democrats gave up the ghost during the Clinton administration when they started courting the same exact corporate money as the Republicans. Before that, the Democrats were more dependent on people and organizations that did things like get out the vote: labor unions, community organizations, liberal activists. The Democrats have turned their backs on labor. They did nothing for Union Card Check, next to nothing for public workers in Wisconsin and other states where they are under siege, and Obama even signed a new law into the books making it harder for Railroad and Airline workers to unionize and easier to de-unionise them. Obama, the president we all know got his start as a community organizer, didn't bother to say a single kind word in defense of ACORN when it was defunded. Obama and the rest of the Democrats are afraid of their own shadows, lest they get called liberals. Job number one for this feckless bunch of losers is cutting the deficit during a recession and weak recovery. They are hardly a party that seeks power anymore. They are merely a place holder for when the public gets tired and fearful of the GOP.

You don't believe me? Read up on how likely it is that the Democrats will make any headway in congress come November 2012. Most likely, they will lose their thin majority in the Senate and lose additional seats in the House. If Obama gets to appoint anymore justices to the SCOTUS, he will be moving the court further to the right.

Sorry, my fellow liberals, progressives, and democratic socialists but the time for denial is over. We placed our faith in Obama, but he showed up just in time to bury rather than to praise liberalism -and with it - the Democratic party.

Nice looking family, though.

Ten years ago John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that a variety of demographic trends spelled doom for the Republican Party. Unfortunately for Judis and Teixeira, Republicans ignored their demographic doom and won a convincing victory in 2004. But hey, that was due to 9/11 and Iraq and the war on terror, and who could have predicted that? Then Democrats chalked up big wins in 2006 and 2008 (whew!), but in 2010 Republicans came roaring back. But hey, that was because of an epic recession, and who could have predicted that? Any day now, those demographics are going to kick in and Republicans will be doomed once and for all. Honest

Digby sends us to Chris Mooney on how conservatives become less willing to look at the facts, more committed to the views of their tribe, as they become better-educated:

For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.
…

But it’s not just global warming where the “smart idiot” effect occurs. It also emerges on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased more among better-educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less-educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.

The same effect has also been captured in relation to the myth that the healthcare reform bill empowered government “death panels.” According to research by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Republicans who thought they knew more about the Obama healthcare plan were “paradoxically more likely to endorse the misperception than those who did not.”

On February 14, President Obama quietly signed into law the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, which will provide $63.6 billion for the agency’s programs between 2012-2015. The House had passed the bill on February 3, and three days later the Senate voted for the conference agreement. 157 House Democrats and 18 Senate Democrats opposed the bill, while Hill Republicans supported the bill only after forcing the adoption of controversial provisions that will make it more difficult for airline and railroad workers to form unions.

After 5 years of uncertainty and 23 short-term extensions, there’s no question that a long-term solution to FAA funding was overdue. There’s also no question that the unprecedented inclusion of the anti-union provisions in the legislation demonstrates the GOP’s determination to destroy unions. As its labor critics have stated, the bill is a compromise in name only, and the President should have vetoed it.

On Tuesday President Obama signed a bill that will make it harder for workers to form a union.  This bill, the FAA Reauthorization Act, passed Congress last week despite an outcry from major unions.  Dozens of House Democrats voted for it, as did most Democratic senators.

Another reason why Obama sucks! Would rather shoot myself than vote for that A-hole again. No different than a rightwing reactionary Republican. (Not much difference anyway.) Dems & GOP just different factions of the same bought & paid-for crew  of muleteers  whose only job is hauling water for a corrupt cannibalistic yet ultimately cowardly Masterclass. They all must be replaced. ASAP! BAMN!

They really are evil, our friends over there running the Catholic church.  Then again, we are talking about people who coddle pedophiles and actually enabled the serial rape of young children.  So the notion of being surprised by how nasty the Catholic leadership can be is somewhat naive, I suppose.

In USA Today, the Catholic bishops admit that it never was about whether Catholic hospitals would have to cover contraceptives in their health insurance plans. They don't want any Americans, anywhere, to have contraceptives covered in their health care plans.

    Consider, then address specific arguments and ideas put forth by others, intelligently, rather than taking the easy route and attacking them personally. A "personal attack" is defined as directly or indirectly insulting another user (or group of users), oftentimes by name-calling, labeling, making sweeping generalizations or putting words into their mouth.Examples    •    "You are a racist..."    •    "Your ideas are idiotic..."    •    "[insert political affiliation]s are stupid."Warning that "all comments with name calling will be deleted. Comments with party names altered to insults (teabaggers, libtards, repukes) will be deleted."Name calling as :Obozo, moron, Obumbo ect. will also be deleted.  Use The Governor, Rick Perry, Perry, The President, Barrack Obama, Obama.
    The topic is not whether the seed is good or bad or even my opinion or "logic".

Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled for the world, are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year's presidential election, whose outcome will turn on which party's super PACs gets the most generous bribes from billionaires? The Republicans, enabled by decisions of a Supreme Court they still control, were the first out of the gate and are far more culpable in destroying our system of popular governance. But the Democrats, no less committed to winning at any cost to political principle, have now jumped in.

The generally reserved New York Times editorial page responded to the Obama campaign's decision to seek Super PAC funding with a scathing editorial headlined "Another Campaign for Sale." The Times reminded that Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech two years ago, called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits.

Are racists dumb? Do conservatives tend to be less intelligent than liberals? A provocative new study from Brock University in Ontario suggests the answer to both questions may be a qualified yes.

The study, published in Psychological Science, showed that people who score low on I.Q. tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and socially conservative politics in adulthood.

I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

When the polls closed in South Carolina on Saturday, I happened to be in a Charleston hotel lobby where elegantly dressed couples were filing past on their way to a black-tie event. A woman stopped and asked whether I had heard anything about the results.

“Newt’s winning big,” I said.

The woman’s face fell. “But if Newt wins,” she lamented, “then Obama wins.”

With the caveat that there are no guarantees, she has a point.

WASHINGTON — Baby boomers take note: Medicare as your parents have known it is headed for big changes no matter who wins the White House in 2012. You may not like it, but you might have to accept it.

Dial down the partisan rhetoric and surprising similarities emerge from competing policy prescriptions by President Barack Obama and leading Republicans such as Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.

Limit the overall growth of Medicare spending? It's in both approaches.

Squeeze more money from upper-income retirees and some in the middle-class? Ditto.

Raise the eligibility age? That too, if the deal is right.

The GOP is engaged in a wholesale effort to redefine the government help that Americans take for granted as an effort to create a radically new, statist society. Consider Romney’s claim in his Bedford speech: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing—the government.”

Obama believes no such thing. If he did, why are so many continuing to make bundles on Wall Street? As my colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Krugman have been insisting, Romney is saying things about the president that are flatly, grossly and shamefully untrue. But Romney’s sleight of hand is revealing: Republicans are increasingly inclined to argue that any redistribution (and Social Security, Medicare, student loans, veterans benefits and food stamps are all redistributive) is but a step down the road to some radically egalitarian dystopia.

Obama will thus be the conservative in 2012, in the truest sense of that word. He is the candidate defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal, and that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush dismantled. The rhetoric of the 2012 Republicans suggests they want to go far beyond where Reagan or Bush ever went. And here’s the irony: By raising the stakes of 2012 so high, Republicans will be playing into Obama’s hands. The GOP might well win a referendum on the state of the economy. But if this is instead a larger-scale referendum on whether government should be “inconsequential,” Republicans will find the consequences to be very disappointing.

...The problem for Republicans after the welfare reform law passed was that, having achieved the victory, they no longer had the issue: The specter of the non-working poor could no longer be reliably evoked, and nothing with a similar power to divide voters has emerged to take its place.

They tried going after the “lucky duckies,” those people who pay no federal income tax, but that hasn’t really caught on.

Affirmative action has faded as an issue.

But now they seem to have found it, in the most unlikely of programs: Unemployment Insurance.  The legislation to extend the payroll tax cuts that passed the Republican-controlled House on Wednesday brings the full arsenal of welfare reform gimmicks to the UI program: Time limits; drug tests; requirements to seek work or enter an education program.

None of these changes are intended to repair any serious problems within the Unemployment Insurance system.

People are unemployed for long periods of time at the moment because there are four job-seekers for every one opening, not because they are happier collecting Unemployment.

There’s no reason to think that UI recipients are more likely to use or abuse drugs than other adults.

And, as anyone who’s ever been on Unemployment, or even watched the Vandelay Industries episode of “Seinfeld,” knows, there are already strong requirements to be looking for a job.

If organized labor were to list the three worst things that could happen to it, one of them would surely be having the National Labor Relations Board close up shop. Yet, as critically important as the NLRB is, there's a chance it will be put out of business come 2012.

I noted in February that John Kenneth Galbraith and Marriner Eccles explained 50 years ago that inequality causes crashes, and that many modern economists agree.

I just found a slighter older statement saying the same thing.

Specifically, the well-known Greek historian Plutarch – who died in 120 A.D. – said:

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Given that the level of inequality in America today is one of the greatest in history, it is not surprising that the republic is ailing so badly.

Come on, you've got an (alleged) 13-year affair with a woman who, by her own admission, is as broke as the Ten Commandments, and with your wealth you're not MackDaddy enough to at least keep her quiet—if not ecstatically happy?

The Senate held two votes on extending a payroll tax cut for more than 160 million Americans, most of whom are middle class. As expected, Republicans killed them both. What was unexpected, though, was the vote totals on the proposals.

We’ve been at war for decades now—not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed—until now.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

By making Wall Street its symbolic target, and branding itself as a movement of the 99%, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the “morals” issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behavior, or the personal behavior of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp.

What’s been missing in the Obama presidency is the productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson with the civil rights movement. Both pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries.

The question for the left now, says Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future, is whether progressives can “establish independence and momentum” while also being able “to make a strategic voting choice.” The idea is not to pretend that Obama is as progressive as his core supporters want him to be, but to rally support to him nonetheless as the man standing between the country and the right wing.

Well, this is a bit unexpected. OMB Director Jack Lew strolled into the White House briefing room and laid out the plan to pay for the American Jobs Act, and it’s entirely from ending tax breaks for rich people and corporations.

Had a friend send me this article by former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren under the subject line, "Informative reading for tonight's Republican showcase." I'm probably late in seeing it, but Lofgren's piece raises fascinating and terrifying questions about the future of our political system and the increasing possibility that we are headed toward something like a civil war, or a constitutional crisis.

Lofgren, in describing the reasons for his defection from the Republican party, describes a Republican camp that increasingly acts not like a traditional peacetime political organization, but more like an apocalyptic cult or one of the authoritarian movements from early 20th century European history.

All cloying appeals to the Obama administration to use stimulus money to build public works such as schools, libraries, roads, clinics, public transit and reclaiming dams, as well as to create jobs, are about as effective as writing heartfelt appeals in the era of the old Soviet Union to Uncle Joe Stalin. The trolls have gamed the system. There is no economic, political or environmental reform, from campaign finance to environmental controls, that can be implemented to impede the march of the corporate state. The rot and corruption at the top levels of our financial and political systems, coupled with the increasing deprivation felt by tens of millions of Americans, are volatile tinder for revolt. And the trolls are prepared for this too. They have put in place draconian state controls, including widespread internal surveillance, to silence our anemic left. They know how to direct the rage of the right wing toward the last pockets of the cultural, social and political establishment that cling to traditional liberal values, as well as toward the most vulnerable among us including Muslims, undocumented workers and homosexuals. They will make sure we consume ourselves.

A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control.

President Obama has only one option as he ponders a world economy teetering on the edge: He needs to go big, go long and go global.

Obama should not be constrained by what the tea party might allow subservient Republican leaders in Congress to do. He should state plainly, eloquently and in detail what he thinks needs to happen. Neither history nor the voters will be kind to him if he lets caution and political calculation get in the way.

Perhaps it would have been inappropriate for the president to involve himself directly in a campaign against state officials. But whether he ought to have spoken out or not, there are still two profound lessons for him in this outcome.

The first lesson is that bipartisanship seems to be encouraged among Republicans these days only when they suspect that voters may be sick of their extremism. Just as Walker is now worried about his future, so is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has suddenly realized that he prefers cooperation to confrontation over collective bargaining—evidently because he fears the results of a potential repeal referendum on the issue in November.

The second lesson is that there is only one way to instill such fear among Republicans, in Wisconsin or Washington: By demonstrating the will to push back, as hard as necessary, on behalf of the principles Democrats have always promised to uphold.

What a year. Rage in London, Egypt, Athens, Damascus. All real. Just a metaphor in the new “Planet of the Apes” film? No, much more. Warning: More rage is dead ahead. Across our planet a new generation is filled with rage. High unemployment. Raging inflation. Dreams lost. Hope gone. While the super -rich get richer and richer.

Listen to that hissing: The fuse is rapidly burning, warning us. Wake up before the rage explodes in your face. This firestorm is endangering America’s future. From forces outside, yes. But far more deadly, from deep within our collective psyche. We have lost our moral compass. We are self-destructing.

Crackpot warning? No. This warning comes from the elite International Monetary Fund. A recent IMF report looked at “the causes of the two major U.S. economic crises over the past 100 years, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2007,” writes Rana Foroohar, an economics editor at Time magazine. 

“There are two remarkable similarities in the eras that preceded these crises. Both saw a sharp increase in income inequality and household-debt-to-income ratios.” And in each case, “as the poor and middle-class were squeezed, they tried to cope by borrowing to maintain their standard of living.”

But the rich “got richer, by lending, and looked for more places to invest, bidding up securities that eventually exploded in everyone’s face. In both eras, financial deregulation and loose monetary policies played roles in creating the bubble. But inequality itself — and the political pressure not to reverse it, but to hide it — was a crucial factor in the meltdown. The shrinking middle isn’t a symptom of the downturn. It’s the source of it.” Today the consequences of the meltdown still haunt us — there’s more to come.

The next bubble

There’s a new bubble blowing. No one can stop it ... soon it will explode.

Get it? There’s enormous “political pressure not to reverse” inequality till it “explodes in our faces.” We deny the inequality between rich and the other 99%. The rich are addicts. More is never enough. They thrive on greed, blind to the needs of others. Worse, they have no commitment to America as a nation. From Forbes billionaires and signers of “no new taxes” pledges, to Mitch McConnell’s un-American willingness to sabotage the economy to deliver on his main promise to make Obama a one-term president.

There will be no magic potion, no instant formula for Democrats and progressives struggling to come back from their disastrous 2010 election losses.

They had hoped that Tuesday’s recall elections in Wisconsin would provide a narrative-changing breakthrough, proof-positive that the overreaching conservatives who now dominate the Republican Party had ignited a middle-of-the-road voter rebellion and inspired a legion of labor and liberal activists who would offer a definitive riposte to the tea party.

What happened instead was not without promise for Democrats, but it was also a sign of the resiliency of conservative activism—and the power of conservative money.

The whole thing is nuts. The economy is a shambles, saved from a free fall only by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented promise of free money for banks for at least two years. That’s how long a seven-member majority of the Fed’s Open Market Committee expects it to take for significant relief to take hold for the 25 million Americans who can’t find full-time employment.

The so-called analysts at Standard & Poor’s may not be the most reliable bunch, but there was one very good reason for them to downgrade U.S. debt: Republicans in Congress made a credible threat to force a default on our obligations.

This isn’t the rationale that S&P gave, but it’s the only one that makes sense. Like a lucky college student who partied the night before an exam, the ratings agency used flawed logic and faulty arithmetic to somehow come up with the right answer. No, life isn’t always fair.

Of all the ways President Barack Obama tried to rationalize his surrender to the Republicans, none was more infuriating than when he said the deficit deal would lead to the “lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.”

Since Eisenhower was president? That was half a century ago—before the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and federal aid to education, including Head Start.

“These programs defined America as a decent, yes, a Great Society,” Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said Monday during the debate on the so-called compromise debt settlement. What President Obama supported, he said, was “tantamount to repeal of the Great Society.”

The die has been cast. Obama’s “nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists,” as an editorial in the normally sedate New York Times described the deal to raise the debt ceiling, is a disaster in the making. It rules out a vigorous government response to the persistent economic stagnation in which joblessness, housing foreclosures and an ever-widening gap between the top 2 percent and the rest of Americans have become the norm.

But to use the word “capitulation” is too kind, since this president, as was Bill Clinton before him, is clearly one of those “New Democrats” who welcomes the opportunity to jettison the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as outmoded political baggage. Otherwise, why would Obama have reached for a “grand bargain” in which he even put Social Security and Medicare cuts on the table before the Republicans rolled him?

President Barack Obama touted his debt ceiling deal Tuesday, saying, “We can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession.” Yet that is what he and his coterie of Wall Street advisers have done.

In the affairs of nations, Alexander Hamilton wrote in January 1790, “loans in times of public danger, especially from foreign war, are found an indispensable resource.” It was his first report as secretary of the treasury to the new Congress of the United States. The country had borrowed to fight the Revolutionary War, and Hamilton proposed a system of public debt to pay those loans.

The history of the U.S. national debt is inexorably tied to its many wars.

It’s supremely galling. It’s unbalanced, unfair and mostly unwise. For President Obama and the Democratic Party, it’s a comprehensive defeat. But it’s not the end of the world.

The deal struck Sunday to free the U.S. economy from its Republican hostage-takers is impossible for progressives to love. It gets all the big things wrong, starting with the most fundamental: Obama never should have acquiesced in linking a routine hike in the debt ceiling—necessary to pay bills Congress has already incurred—with all the difficult spending questions that should be dealt with in the budget process.

Obama’s starting point was a demand for a “clean,” unencumbered bill to raise the ceiling; House Speaker John Boehner said no. What would have happened if Obama refused to budge? We don’t know because that’s not his style. It would be nice, someday, to find out.

At this desperate hour, Barack Obama surely has to be thinking hard about invoking Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, unilaterally raising the debt ceiling, and getting on with it. With the House Republicans now rejecting a proposal (Harry Reid’s) that is 100 percent cuts and no revenues, there can be little question in the minds of most non-Kool-Aid-swilling Americans about the identity of the unreasonable party. Indeed it could be argued that acting unilaterally now is the only responsible move. Bill Clinton, well-versed in dealing with Republican implacability, told Joe Conason’s National Memo that he would pursue this course. And yet one senses the president is highly reluctant to do it. Why?

 

Three explanations strike me as plausible, although none of them is particularly defensible at this point,

...

The first reason would be the straightforward and obvious one that he and his handlers fear the political repercussions. Some Republicans, and certainly the right-wing noise machine, will crow for impeachment. Obama and his White House are not exactly a group that itches for a fight.
...

The second reason Obama probably won’t act alone has more to do with his political philosophy. He apparently really believes—still!—in civic-republican notions of government as an arena for reasoned deliberation. That he could still think this is akin to a child believing in Santa Claus until he’s 15—but apparently he does.
...

The third reason the president probably won’t do it is related to the second, but it’s more personal. Unilateral action would be at odds with Obama’s image of himself. In his article, MacGillis defined thoughtfulness Obama style as “the notion that the leadership of the country should be entrusted not on the basis of résumé and platform, but on the prospect of applying to the nation's problems one man's singularly well-tempered intelligence.” This is pretty obviously a dead-on description of Obama’s view of himself and his potential as president.

This phony debt crisis has now passed through the looking glass into the realm where madness reigns. What should have been an uneventful moment in which lawmakers make good on the nation’s contractual obligations has instead been seized upon by Republican hypocrites as a moment to settle ideological scores that have nothing to do with the debt.

Hypocrites, because their radical free market ideology, and the resulting total deregulation of the financial markets, is what caused the debt to spiral out of control this last decade. That and the wars George W. Bush launched but didn’t have the integrity to responsibly finance. The consequence was a banking bubble and crash leading to a 50 percent run-up of the debt that has nothing to do with the “entitlements” that those same Republicans have always wanted to destroy. 

Even Barack Obama has put cuts in those programs into play,

Most observers assume reason will eventually prevail in the debt debate. But Michael Tomasky asks if GOP rhetoric has made compromise unthinkable for the right.

So much for the meritocracy. Despite an elite education, effusive charm and brilliant wit, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has ended up betraying his humble origins by abjectly serving the most rapacious variant of Wall Street greed. They both talk a good progressive game, but when push comes to shove—meaning when the banking lobby weighs in—big money talks and the best and the brightest fold.

The defining moment of Clinton’s capitulation was his destruction of Brooksley Born, the one member of his administration with the courage and prescience to warn him about the unregulated derivatives trading that ultimately led to the housing collapse. For Obama, it is his decision not to nominate Elizabeth Warren to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she fought so hard to create.

The smoking ruin that is the the Obama White House, and the rotting corpse that is the Democratic Party, have, incredibly, together been boxed into a corner by, of all things, the certifiably insane Republican Party.

This amazing situation has resulted not through any brilliant strategy on the part of the Republicans, but by the self-inflicted wounds of the Democrats.

Faced with a collapsing economy that is at serious risk of performing a reprise of the Great Depression, Congressional Democrats and President Obama were in a perfect position to grab the flag and run home with it by declaring war on unemployment and on the party that has unequivocally declared itself openly to be the standard bearer of the wealthy and powerful.

The bottom line is that most of the considerable economic growth of the last several decades has gone into the pockets of a tiny percent of the population. As a result, wages and consumer buying power have stagnated, and consumers don't have the money to buy the new products and services upon which economic growth depends.

For good reason, there has been serious hand-wringing over what to do about the ethical lapses of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The fact that Supreme Court justices are exempt from the code of ethical conduct which applies to the rest of the federal judiciary; the problem of bringing a sitting justice before the Congress to question the conduct of a constitutional co-equal; the reality that justices cannot easily defend themselves against news media charges; the defiant, in-your-face posture of Thomas—the list goes on but it need not. There is clear precedent for how to deal with the justice. Thomas could be forced off the bench.

Specifically, we were upset that one of the few Democrats in Congress with the nerve to consistently speak out against bad Republican proposals -- and, more importantly, for traditional Democratic ones -- had done something so colossally foolish, reckless and arrogant that he had undercut his position as a champion for good policy. The importance of the role that Weiner played in the political battles of the last several years seems to have been lost in a sea of stories on the more prurient and strategic aspects of the brouhaha.

To me, in the wake of Weiner's foolishness, the big question is: How will the Democrats proceed without one of their most steadfast and articulate spokesmen in Washington?

At a press conference last week, someone asked Chris Christie for his views on evolution vs. creationism. "That's none of your business," the New Jersey governor barked in response.

This minor incident, which barely rated as news for a few political blogs, offers a glimpse of Christie's personality, which seems increasinglygrumpy and snappish. But it says even more about the current state of the national Republican Party, where magical thinking trumps rationality, and even to acknowledge basic realities about the world we live in runs the risk of damaging one's political future.

 

For the longest time, a certain admirable, independent senator from Arizona disappeared from public life, replaced by an irresponsible, opportunistic and occasionally demagogic figure, who seemed to have been warped by his presidential ambitions and his disappointment in losing. But John McCain has now returned, just in time to refute the sinister attempt by his fellow Republicans to justify torture as the instrument of Osama bin Laden’s demise.

As if our political system was not having enough trouble already, we now confront the possibility that a highly partisan judiciary will undo a modest health care reform that is a first step toward resolving a slew of other difficulties.

As you watch the suits against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act work their way through the courts, consider that what you are really seeing is a great republic tying itself into as many knots as possible to avoid facing up to a challenge that every other wealthy capitalist democracy in the world has met.

Yes, all the others have decided that it’s both more just and more efficient for all its citizens to have health insurance.

The instance that Maddow cited is just the tip of the iceberg. I would love for someone in the mainstream media to explain to me why 100,000 protesters in Wisconsin were ignored by all three cable networks, including Maddow’s bosses at the supposedly liberal MSNBC.

While we are on the subject, let’s talk about how the media completely ignored tens of thousands of progressives at the One Nation rally in October. Remember watching hundreds of thousands of Americans protest the invasion of Iraq? The reason why you don’t is because it wasn’t televised.

In response to years of wails of liberal bias from conservatives, the media has developed a conservative bias.

President Obama has finally decided to take his own side in the philosophical struggle that is the true engine of this nation's budget debate.

After months of mixed signals about what he was willing to fight for, Obama finally laid out his purposes and his principles. His approach has difficulties of its own, and much will depend on execution. But the president was unequivocal in arguing that the roots of our fiscal problems lie in the tax cuts of the last decade that we could not afford. And he raised the stakes in our politics to something more fundamental than dry numbers on a page or computer screen.

So far, our nation's budget debate has been a desultory affair focused on whether a small slice of the federal government's outlays should be cut by $33 billion or $61 billion, or whatever.

But Americans are about to learn how much is at stake in our larger budget fight, how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.

And you wonder: Will President Obama welcome the responsibility of engaging the country in this big argument, or will he shrink from it? Will his political advisers remain robotically obsessed with poll results about the 2012 election, or will they embrace Obama's historic obligation—and opportunity—to win the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal?

Republican and Democratic governors in state after state claim they have no choice but to impose drastic cuts on the wages, health benefits and pensions of public employees, as well as slashing funding for education, health care and other vital social services. The states face intractable budget shortfalls, the argument goes. They have to cut because "there is no money."

This is the main theme sounded by Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, who is snatching $300 million from state workers' pockets and eliminating most of their collective bargaining rights as part of a $3.6 billion deficit reduction program. As he said in one television interview, "The bottom line is we are trying to balance our budget and there really is no room to negotiate on that because we're broke."

Democratic and Republican politicians in Washington, from House Speaker John Boehner to President Obama, agree with this diagnosis. "We're broke," Boehner declares on a regular basis to justify demands for more cuts. In his State of the Union speech, Obama said, "We have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in. That is not sustainable."

The corporate-controlled media parrots these claims, never questioning the unstated premise behind all these declarations of bankruptcy: the uncritical acceptance of the vast social polarization in America, with the piling up of untold riches by the financial elite and the accumulation, at the other pole of society, of unemployment, poverty and unmet social needs.

***

The problem is the entrenched power of the capitalist ruling class and its total domination of the political system. The two established parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the financial elite. Both parties defend the profits and property of the owners of the banks and giant corporations.

The working class, as Wisconsin demonstrates, is ready to fight to defend jobs, living standards and social services. But the old trade union organizations are thoroughly rotten. They are unshakably committed to the Democratic Party and the defense of capitalism, in which the unions are themselves sizeable shareholders, with the union leaders raking in six-figure salaries and perks.

Workers should reject the fraudulent claims that American society can no longer—in the 21st century!—afford decent schools, health care, housing and other necessities. The resources exist, produced by the labor of hundreds of millions of working people and appropriated by a tiny layer of exploiters at the top. These resources must be reclaimed for social use, to serve the needs of the working people who are the vast majority of the population.

This is a political fight, requiring a break with the Democrats and Republicans and the building of a mass socialist movement. The Socialist Equality Party, World Socialist Web Site, and International Students for Social Equality are sponsoring a series of conferences throughout the country in April to discuss the organizational forms and political program needed to conduct this struggle. We urge all our readers and all those who want to carry out a serious fight against the policies of the ruling class to make plans to attend today.

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Organized labor's catastrophic decline has paralleled—and, to a disputed but indisputably substantial degree, precipitated—an equally dramatic rise in economic inequality. In 1980, the best-off tenth of American families collected about a third of the nation's income. Now they're getting close to half. The top one per cent is getting a full fifth, double what it got in 1980. The super-rich—the top one-tenth of the top one per cent, which is to say the top one-thousandth—have been the biggest winners of all. What is always called their "compensation" (wage workers lucky enough to have a job simply get paid) has quadrupled.

Over the same period, the composition of the labor movement, as it still defiantly styles itself, has radically changed. A few weeks ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that, for the first time, more union members are government workers, not private-sector employees. The Times quoted an official of the United States Chamber of Commerce as pronouncing himself "a little bit shocked," and he wasn't the only one. Yet this development has nothing to do with some imagined spike in public-sector unionism. It is entirely a function of the collapse of organized labor in the private sector. For the past four decades, the portion of the public workforce belonging to unions has held remarkably steady, at a little more than one in three. In the private sector, just one worker in fifteen carries a union card.

Will Texas school kids get new texbooks? It could depend on a roll of the dice.

Staring down the barrel of a two-year, $15 billion budget gap, state lawmakers offered up a no frills funding proposal this week. How no frills? Well, it offers no funding for new textbooks—this, in a school system where before 2009 students were using 12 year-old science textbooks. The budget situation has grown so desperate that state Democrats are floating the idea of legalizing casino gambling to address the shortfall.

Last week, Lori Montgomery reported in The Washington Post that a bipartisan group of senators think a sensible deficit reduction package would involve raising the Social Security retirement age to 69 and reforming taxes, purportedly to raise revenue, in a way that would cut the top income tax rate for the wealthy from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Only a body dominated by millionaires could define "shared sacrifice" as telling nurses' aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people. I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don't get why Democrats—"the party of the people," I've heard—would come near such an idea.

The media are full of commentary on President Obama's "failure of leadership." There is some truth to the critique but not in the way the charge is typically made.

Obama is not at fault for his budget proposals. But any fair examination of the news suggests that he is in danger of losing control of the national narrative again, just as he did during the stimulus and health care battles.

In its expensive, high priority campaign to get Congress to approve the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the AFL-CIO made important strategic blunders that virtually assured that EFCA would end up as still-born legislation.
Its initial mistake was to inform members of Congress that unless it received government assistance by passing EFCA, it could not organize millions of workers who wanted to join unions, but were afraid that their boss would take revenge and probably fire them.
To make their case, union leaders displayed workers who had been fired for trying to join a union. They publicized the many ways that employers could intimidate their workers, from the minute they were hired and throughout their day at the workplace.
The net effect of the campaign was to display unions as weak, and no match for powerful corporate employers without government assistance. Tons of leaflets were distributed and countless rallies were held to convey this twin image of corporate power and labor feebleness. (One wonders what the AFL-CIO's self-abasement had on unorganized workers.)

As we mark the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth, one of our major political parties has become imbued with the Gipper's political philosophy and governing style. I mean the Democrats, of course.

The Republican Party tries to claim the Reagan mantle but has moved so far to the right that it now inhabits its own parallel universe. On the planet that today's GOP leaders call home, Reagan would qualify as one of those big-government, tax-and-spend liberals who are trying so hard to destroy the American way of life.

It's fitting that with only a week until Valentine's Day, President Obama is focused on romance -- the political kind. Next Monday, the commander in chief is set to present his budget to Congress. Before he delivers it, he's making every effort to woo conservative critics -- taking to previously hostile airwaves and microphones to deliver, Cupid-style, verbal arrows dipped in bipartisan rhetoric, aimed at the nearest naysayers. Will they fall for him?

Beginning with his prime-time interview with Fox news anchor Bill O'Reilly on Superbowl Sunday and followed by an appearance at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Monday morning, Obama addressed the two groups with which he has had the most fraught relations

With increasing vehemence since the midterm elections, pundits and journalists have recommended Barack Obama move to the right--and now are citing recent polling to suggest that the president has benefited from following their advice. But there is little evidence that Obama's current approval ratings have anything to do with a rightward shift, and the entire conversation rests on the premise that Obama was governing from the left in the first place.

This is nothing new; there is a long corporate media tradition of urging Democratic presidents to move to the right in order to capture the "center." After the midterm elections, many pundits were encouraging Obama to "pull a Clinton"--based on the dubious notion that a liberal Bill Clinton, chastened by defeat in 1994, moved to the right and found success (Extra!, 1/11).

The moral outrage of the liberal class, a specialty of MSNBC, groups such as Progressives for Obama and MoveOn.org, is built around the absurd language of personal narrative—as if Barack Obama ever wanted to or could defy the interests of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or General Electric. The liberal class refuses to directly confront the dead hand of corporate power that is rapidly transforming America into a brutal feudal state. To name this power, to admit that it has a death grip on our political process, our systems of information, our artistic and religious expression, our education, and has successfully emasculated popular movements, including labor, is to admit that the only weapons we have left are acts of civil disobedience. And civil disobedience is difficult, uncomfortable and lonely. It requires us to step outside the formal systems of power and trust in acts that are marginal, often unrecognized and have no hope of immediate success.

The liberal class' solution to the bleak political landscape is the conference. This, along with letters and cries of outrage circulated on the Internet, is its preferred form of expression. Conferences, whether organized by Left Forum, Rabbi Michael Lerner's Tikkun or figures such as Ted Glick—who is touting a plan to lure progressives, including members of the Democratic Party, into something he calls a "third force"—are where liberals go to feel good about themselves again. These conferences are not fundamentally about change. They are designed to elevate self-appointed liberal apologists who seek to become advisers and courtiers within the Democratic Party. The conferences produce resolutions no one reads. They build networks no one uses. But with each conference liberals get to do what they do best—applaud their own moral probity. They make passionate appeals to work within systems, such as electoral politics, that have been gamed by the corporate state. And the result is to spur well-meaning people toward useless and ultimately self-defeating activity.

The headline "Obama to Press Centrist Agenda in His Address bore very little resemblance to the content therein. Maybe I expected something far worse, and am judging the results thusly, but I'd say that the President calling for new investments and staying silent on the Bowles-Simpson cat food recommendations is pretty darn good, all things considered:

Jon Chait and Matt Yglesias are kicking around the idea that the passage of the Affordable Care Act fills the final major hole in the American safety net and means, as Matt says, that "the era of big government liberalism" is over and "future public policy has to be about ways to maximize sustainable economic growth, and ways to maximize the efficiency with which services are delivered."

I'd rephrase that slightly: I think the era in which the government's major commitments are the dominant issue is (largely) over. The Affordable Care Act doesn't make the government much larger as a share of GDP. Rather, it commits the government to guaranteeing something close to universal health care, even if the relevant transactions occur between individuals and private insurance companies. The reason the GOP talks about "repeal and replace" is that they don't think they can persuade Americans to undo that underlying commitment. If they did, they'd just go for repeal.

Americans want to know what happened to the economy and how to fix it. At least Republicans have a story -- the same one they've been flogging for 30 years. The bad economy is big government's fault, and the solution is to shrink government.

But what exactly is President Barack Obama's story or the Democrats'?

That Wall Street screwed up big time and the solution is to fix the Street? That Americans have lived beyond our means and now we have to tighten our belts? That our trade imbalance got too big and the Chinese have to spend more and we have to save more? That American companies have been outsourcing jobs abroad and must be deterred?

Without a clear story, there's no competition. Republicans win.

The only reason we still have a payroll tax is because it's been specifically used to fund the two most successful and progressive social programs in American history: Social Security and Medicare.

Otherwise, we would have gotten rid of it ages ago. On its own, it's the most regressive tax imaginable: 12.4% of your salary (typically split between you and your employer) no matter how little you make, and capped at an annual salary of $106,800.

So for a millionaire, it's nothing; for the working poor, it's an enormous wallop. And worst of all -- especially in a period of widespread joblessness -- it is literally a tax on employment.

LAS VEGAS -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid branded Chinese President Hu Jintao a "dictator" on a local TV talk show on Tuesday night, a remark likely to make the start of Hu's first state visit to Washington, D.C., awkward for President Obama at a moment when the U.S. is trying to ease tensions with the Asian power.

Reid, Obama's top legislative ally and Congress' most powerful Democrat, was responding to a question from "Face To Face" host Jon Ralston about the December compromise that extended the Bush-era tax cuts. The recently reelected Nevada senator veered off on a tangent intended to compare the American and Chinese systems of government to give a roundabout defense of the importance of legislative compromise.

The GOP's drive to repeal health-care reform is an uphill battle, given the program's renewed popularity. But the White House can't be bothered to defend its achievement.

"Casino Jack," the movie about crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff, portrayed anti-tax demagogue Grover Norquist as just another member of the Washington fixer's club. But the filmmakers greatly underestimated him.

Abramoff went off to prison while Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform, has stayed around to twist the arms of legislators in every state in an effort to make them sign no-tax increase pledges. Those pledges, if honored, would result in reductions in already dwindling appropriations for education and social welfare programs and many other needed services in states with huge deficits. "My goal," Norquist famously said, "is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Recent decades have seen a massive redistribution of wealth, imposing the cost of successive crises on the poorest. Enough!

The end of 2010 brought renewed Washington rhetoric, media hype and academic me-too declarations about the US economy "recovering". We've heard them before since the crisis hit in 2007. They always proved wrong.

But recovery noises are useful for some. Republicans claim that government should do less since recovery is underway (of course, for them, government action is always counterproductive). Likewise, Republicans and many centrist Democrats claim that income redistribution policies are no longer needed because recovery means growth, which means everyone gets a bigger piece of an expanding economic pie. Recovery hype also helps the Obama administration to claim that its policies succeeded.

In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they've earned.

But now the right is going after public employees.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats.

The junior Democratic senators are fed up, understandably so, with the institution's glacial pace. Liberal activists are demanding filibuster reform—now.

They should be careful what they wish for.

The reforms under discussion make complete sense. But they also wouldn't do much to address the fundamental complaint about the filibuster: that it effectively imposes a supermajority requirement for any Senate action. And as a pure matter of partisan politics, these changes could end up causing more problems for Democrats than they would solve, now and in the future.

I see that the Washington Post editorial board is shocked, shocked to discover that the incoming Republicans aren't serious about deficit reduction. Who could have suspected?

I was going to be snarky all the way here, but actually let's be serious: the gullibility of much of the media establishment on all this amounts to journalistic malpractice..

Republicans have, after all, been the party of fiscal irresponsibility since 1980;

Republicans are telling Americans a big lie, and Obama and the Democrats are letting them. The Big Lie is that our economic problems are due to a government that's too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.

The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928, combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us.

Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4 million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted, his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore.

I said on Countdown back on Monday that I didn't think this new class of GOP governors would need to be dragged kicking and screaming into screwing public employees out of jobs and benefits. They practically campaigned on it, after all, and the full-scale demonization campaign against "greedy government workers," financed by the malefactors of great wealth, puts the wind at their backs. So governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker will clearly work to break existing contracts, add furlough days or basically do whatever possible to please the base by bashing public workers.

Here's a few quotes from this article:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called on President Obama and the Senate on Friday to solve what he called "the persistent problem of judicial vacancies."

"We do not comment on the merits of individual nominees," Chief Justice Roberts wrote on Friday. "That is as it should be. The judiciary must respect the constitutional prerogatives of the president and Congress in the same way that the judiciary expects respect for its constitutional role."

But he identified what he called a systemic problem.

"Each political party has found it easy to turn on a dime from decrying to defending the blocking of judicial nominations, depending on their changing political fortunes," he said.

The upshot, he said, was "acute difficulties for some judicial districts."

Sam Seder filling in for Keith Olbermann on Countdown talked to former C&L contributor, FDL's Dave Dayden about his recent article at the News Desk -- In Unfolding War on Public Employees, State Lawmakers and Media Likely to Do the Work Themselves:

There's no question that Republicans have introduced a bill which would require more transparency on state public pensions, and that they hope this would provide a road map in the states for where they can cut budgets; namely, on the backs of public employees. That doesn't mean it will happen in exactly that way, however. And the idea that the next Congress will overhaul the 30s-era law allowing states to go bankrupt seems fanciful to me.

But I don't think states or municipalities need much help from the federal government in their desire to rewrite public employee union contracts. There has been a concerted effort for years to demonize and delegitimize public employee unions, from both Republican pols and the media in general. This has left a distorted impression about greedy union contracts and well-paid government functionaries.

America is on a collision course with itself. This month's deal between President Barack Obama and the Republicans in Congress to extend the tax cuts initiated a decade ago by President George W. Bush is being hailed as the start of a new bipartisan consensus. I believe, instead, that it is a false truce in what will become a pitched battle for the soul of American politics.

As in many countries, conflicts over public morality and national strategy come down to questions of money. In the United States, this is truer than ever. The US is running an annual budget deficit of around $1 trillion, which may widen further as a result of the new tax agreement. This level of annual borrowing is far too high for comfort. It must be cut, but how?

For a man who said he suffered a "shellacking" at the polls and an elbow to the lower lip in a basketball game, President Barack was standing tall yesterday. The "lame duck" session of the 111th Congress will go down as one of the most productive sessions in history, but this just may be the calm before the storm.

The president's legislative accomplishments this past month are truly remarkable. Many initiatives thought to be beyond reach passed in a legislative flurry. The START Treaty, repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell", which the president signed today in an emotional ceremony at the White House, a continuing resolution to extend government financing to March 4, the extension of unemployment benefits, and compensation for the 9/11 survivors were among the measures pushed through Congress at the end of their term. Many members of Congress deserve credit, but the brightest light shines on President Obama.

This is a wonderful narrative in which the bad guys (government) are revealed to be the cause of the crisis that has affect the good banks and the very very good bankers. The fairies, as well as the invisible hand, are all behind the curtain, where they belong.

Obama's proposed tax cut deal, dubbed "bailouts for billionaires," effectively ends the Build America Bonds program. That’s the program which makes it easier for states to borrow money to cover their budget shortfalls—estimated at $140 billion just next year. When the credit of states dries up, the states won't be able to meet their obligations, such as retirement benefits to public sector workers. As Laura Flanders writes in the Nation, “public employee retirement benefits will probably be the first to go — estimated at $750 billion to more than $3 trillion.”

Reuthers' Pethokoukis notes that legislation amending bankruptcy law is in the works, possibly permitting states to declare bankruptcy. “That’s why,” says Pethokoukis, “the most intriguing aspect of President Barack Obama’s tax deal with Republicans is what the compromise fails to include — a provision to continue the Build America Bonds program.”

Flanders reports that a former Wall Street trader, Bruce Krasting, called the failure to renew a huge oversight and wondered how legislators “could have blundered on this?”

“It’s not a blunder,” writes Flanders. It’s intentional union-busting pension-theft that will first be felt in the states. “We’ve seen this strategy from the right before — move the action to the states, in the media dark,” she writes. “And typically it works.”

A very finely tuned Republican strategy to bust the states, bust the state unions, and leave state pensioners without any pension. All so billionaires can benefit from $600 billion in tax cuts and the Republicans can put us back into the 1920s and the beginning of a great depression.

Please call your Congressperson. At least insist that whatever emerges from Congress includes the Build America Bonds program. Or better still, tell her or him to fight to stop extending tax-cuts for the very wealthy.

"Take your bow, Mr. Obama. The top 1 percent of Americans possess better than 90 percent of the nation's assets. More Americans are working longer hours for less pay. When was the last time that the minimum wage was increased?

So you sell out on what you had presented as a stark litmus test during your 2008 run for the presidency. You said then that you would never sell out the interest of Americans on such dangerous policy making as the Bush tax cuts and the harm they visited upon America, beginning with sharply increasing the nation's debt."

...something doesn't compute.

Isn't a nearly $1 trillion bill full of tax cuts and industry giveaways what Republicans do? Isn't a bill with an absurdly generous inheritance tax break what Republicans write? Aren't Democrats the "party of the people?" Aren't they the party that believes government programs and policies have a role to play in leveling the playing field, or at least giving everyone a fair chance? Aren't the Democrats worried that all of this tax cutting now will starve the social programs they supposedly cherish? Do they know that they won't be able to push through a change in taxes in 2012 over GOP objections if the economy in fact improves?

In labeling Republicans "deficit hawks," I think the Times probably means to suggest that Republicans are the ones who are rhetorically more committed to reducing the deficit. But if you are going to go on actual policy ideas, it seems germane to note that Obama and Dems -- and not Republicans -- are the party who wants to end the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which would of course be better for the deficit than continuing them.

Yes, I know that Obama's tax deal, which is likely to pass with significant support from Senate Dems, continues the high-end tax cuts. But no matter how many times conservative pundits assert otherwise, the deal does not mean Obama and Dems endorse tax cuts for the wealthy.

The Wall Street Journal reports that an estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office pegs the cost of the tax cut deal at $858 billion, a figure that would make the deal more expensive than the 2009 stimulus, which cost $787 billion.

In the short term, Obama did get more than most liberals expected. It is good news that he's focused on the need to give the economy another jolt, even if some of the measures the accord includes are not very stimulative.

The rest of the package delivers tangible benefits to the unemployed and to lower- and middle-income taxpayers. For roughly $100 billion to the rich, Obama got $197 billion in benefits he sought for the non-rich, $146 billion in business tax cuts to push job creation, plus an extension of the $280 billion middle-class tax cut. Many Democrats insist the Republicans would have eventually given in on relief for the middle class; the administration is not so sure.

These substantial concessions have led many liberal policy leaders—among them, Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress and Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute—to support the deal, partly on the theory that any next deal would be worse. Other liberals would go along if the estate tax cut could be made less munificent.

And at least these negotiations have had the benefit of proving conclusively that the only people for whom conservative Republicans will go to the mat are the country's best-off citizens—and deficits be damned.

The White House has announced a deal on extending tax cuts for the rich, in exchange for restoring unemployment benefit extensions for those out of work more than 26 weeks. They are also going to cut the Social Security tax and give more tax breaks to businesses. I think this is a mistake.

President Obama's "deficit commission" failed, but it did make some terrible suggestions that would gut the middle class if implemented. Saying that the country is on an unsustainable budget path, the co-chairs suggested cutting Social Security benefits and raising the retirement age, getting rid of home mortgage deductions, higher Medicare premiums, getting rid of the Earned Income Tax Credit and other things. Cuts: $4 trillion. Claim: absolutely necessary to save the country from bankruptcy.

After subjecting the country to a months-long fight over a "deficit crisis" the White House is brokering this deal on cutting taxes --cutting taxes -- which only makes the claimed problems worse!

Bill Scher makes the case that we should embrace Obama's deal on the Bush tax cuts for the following three reasons.

1. The bill's value as economic stimulus
2. The bill bumps deficit hysteria off the stage in favor of the economy
3. The bill's political consequences are unclear, but its consequences for the jobless are not

So is this a good deal? It's a lot better than I would've told you the White House was going to get if you'd asked me a week ago. There's some new stimulus in the form of the payroll-tax cut and the expensing proposals. The older stimulus programs that are getting extended -- notably the unemployment insurance and the tax credits -- probably would've expired outside of this deal. The tax cuts for income over $250,000 are a bad way to spend $100 billion or so, and the estate tax deal is really noxious.

It's bad news for the deficit, though the White House and Congress are right to make the deficit less of a priority than economic recovery. And speaking of that economic recovery? This isn't enough, and it's not well targeted. The deal amounts to the White House throwing some bad money after good. But the end result is between $200 and $300 billion more in tax breaks, tax credits and unemployment insurance than there would've been if not for this deal (I say $200-$300 billion because of the uncertainty over what would've been extended in the absence of this package). That's better than nothing -- or to be more specific, better than backsliding.

Now these same people who have been screaming about the deficit for the past two years are scrambling to add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit to give tax cuts to those making over $250,000 a year -- the very last people who need help in this economy.

If Republicans want tax cuts for the wealthy, we should demand that they explain how to pay for them right now. We know how they will be paid for in the long run -- once Republicans are in the majority and flip-flop back to caring about the deficit, they will insist on "deficit reduction" legislation that slashes important programs that help working families -- all to pay down the deficit that this proposal creates.

Ben Bernanke may or may not succeed in saving the economy, but at least he has the courage to try—and the honesty to tell the truth. The same cannot be said of our elected officials. Congress is buried under a crushing surplus of cynicism, while the White House seems paralyzed by a deficit of courage.

An expert on the Great Depression, Bernanke is determined not to be the Federal Reserve chairman who allows the nation to plummet into Great Depression II. Since our political leaders can't be bothered to do what urgently needs to be done—stimulate the fragile economy before it sputters out—Bernanke is using a rare bit of legerdemain called "quantitative easing" to pump $600 billion into the financial system.

Fed chairmen are usually as silent as the sphinx, except in official testimony. But Bernanke, facing criticism for his action, went on "60 Minutes" to explain why he's prepared to do even more.

Based on what The New York Times describes as President Obama's "substantial concessions to Republicans," Democrats in Congress have reason to fret. Not only did Obama agree to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but he caved in to Republican demands to neuter the estate tax. 

Bernie Sanders, the only avowed socialist in the United States Senate, has hinted that he will filibuster the tax cuts extension deal President Barack Obama struck with Republicans on Monday.

In an appearance on MSNBC's Ed Schultz Show, Sanders, the junior senator from Vermont, said, "I've got to tell you, I will do whatever I can to see that 60 votes are not acquired to pass this piece of legislation."

Harry Truman strongly identified with a New Deal philosophy of government and took the Republicans head on by promoting a vision for the country that became known as the Fair Deal. Bill Clinton campaigned for president in 1992 as a "New Democrat" and sought to govern by pursing a "third way." Americans knew the governing philosophy they were getting.

Barack Obama campaigned as an aspirational candidate, which was enormously successful as a campaign approach but left people with different ideas about the direction he would lead the country and the strategies he would use. As a result, every time he faces a choice that might require a compromise with the opposition, the public doesn't have a sense of why one path is picked over another.

Washington lawmakers and President Obama seem pleased that they are close to reaching an agreement to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for two years and the unemployment benefits for up to 13 additional months. Unfortunately for the country, it was deals like this that got us into the fiscal mess we're in. Neither governments nor individuals can cut revenue and increase outlays without either taking on more debt or going bankrupt.

In Washington, bipartisan compromise is often necessary. But it ought to come at the end of a political fight -- not before one. President Obama, in the instance of this apparent tax cut compromise, seems to be settling without waging a principle-driven battle, and that is puzzling many of his progressive loyalists...

...His reasons for eschewing a showdown remain a mystery. There doesn't seem to be a grand and savvy political calculation at work. (Since the Nov. 2 "shellacking," there have been no public signs of a White House master plan.) Though Obama managed to push through the stimulus, health care reform, and the Wall Street bill, it appears that he doesn't fancy a down-and-dirty brawl. And that could end up being costly for him.

Voters tend to reelect presidents known for their belligerence as much as vision. Ronald Reagan in a blustery indictment declared "government is the problem" and set about the task of limiting its social impact. After a slippery start, Bill Clinton let the government shut down to wrestle the mantle of leadership back from Newt Gingrich; and George W. Bush pushed through the deficit inducing tax cuts political leaders are wrestling over today with no hesitation despite losing the popular vote and assuming the presidency in a cloud of controversy.

Barack Obama won most of his political fights before Election Day, but the lack of public swagger Americans are used to seeing from their president has hurt him. The time has come for the president to give voters his vision for reclaiming the American Dream and to draw a few lines in the sand.

Although this administration has tolerated anger from the left on a variety of other issues over the last two years, the likely agreement on tax policy that the White House has come to with Congressional Republicans has created the most significant political challenge that Barack Obama has faced since taking office.

...But the fight over tax cuts seems to have unleashed the left's deepest anger, as candidate Obama's pledge represented not only a fundamental aspect of his 2008 platform and a repudiation against the agenda of his predecessor. The anti-Bush animus that still motivates Democratic foot soldiers makes this a much more bitter pill to swallow.

No modern-day president who has faced a legitimate primary opponent in his re-election campaign has won a second term in office...

...After the dust has settled and the new Congress has been sworn in, look for this White House to move quickly to assuage their base before the brewing revolt gathers steam.

Out of America: Tax cuts for billionaires, and bankers with more clout than ever – nothing has changed. Amid the turbulent craziness of American politics, there is one constant: money rules. And never more so than in the closing weeks of this sour and eminently forgettable year of 2010 – when the recession never really went away, the Tea Party marched into Washington, and the presidency of Barack Obama shrivelled before one's eyes.

New York Times columnist David Brooks debated Republican Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) at an American Enterprise Institute forum Thursday and, amid a large degree of back-patting, the writer came to the conclusion that the GOP, in its current legislative form, is exhibiting a sort of obstinate "rigidity" that is damaging to the political process.

Here's what Brooks had to say about the current debate over deficit control by cutting taxes and spending (transcript via ThinkProgress):

There they go again. Economic meltdown. Higher consumer costs. Massive job losses. These are among the predictions of doom surrounding EPA's current and forthcoming round of clean air protections. If they sound familiar, they should. Time and again, from the enactment of the Clean Air Act in 1970 to today, prophets of doom have predicted that disastrous consequences would flow from cleaning the air we all breathe. And time and again, those dire predictions have been wrong. The Clean Air Act has protected American health and our environment for decades while our economy has grown. It is a legislative success story that continues today.