Author's posts
Jul 13 2011
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here:
Jul 12 2011
Punting the Pundits
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Eugene Robinson: Something to Squawk About
Washington has many lazy habits, and one of the worst is a reflexive tendency to see equivalence where none exists. Hence the nonsense, being peddled by politicians and commentators who should know better, that “both sides” are equally at fault in the deadlocked talks over the debt ceiling.
This is patently false. The truth is that Democrats have made clear they are open to a compromise deal on budget cuts and revenue increases. Republicans have made clear they are not.
Put another way, Democrats reacted to the “grand bargain” proposed by President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner by squawking, complaining and highlighting elements they didn’t like. This is known throughout the world as the way to begin a process of negotiation.
Republicans, by contrast, answered with a definitive “no” and then covered their ears. Given the looming Aug. 2 deadline for default if the debt ceiling is not raised, the proper term for this approach is blackmail.
John Nichols: If Obama Hikes Medicare Eligibility Age, That Will Be A Twelve Percent Benefit Cut
The word in Washington is that President Obama has, in negotiations with congressional Republicans, offered to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.
A report in the Washington Post quoted “a Democratic official familiar with the discussions,” while other media outlets quoted multiple unnamed sources with knowledge of the talks the president and congressional leaders have been engaged in with regard to raising the debt ceiling. All the reports suggest that Obama would trade the change in the eligibility age for a Republican agreement to accept some new taxes.
Obama essentially acknowledged as much Monday, when he said: “I’m prepared to take significant heat from my party to get something done.”
And rightly so.
The Euro is crashing today to record lows against the Swiss Franc, and interest rates on Italian and Spanish bonds have hit record highs. This latest episode in the Eurozone crisis is a result of fears that the contagion is now hitting Italy. With a two-trillion dollar economy and $2.45 trillion in debt, Italy is too big to fail and the European authorities are worried. Although there is currently little basis for the concern that Italy’s interest rates could rise high enough to put its solvency in jeopardy, financial markets are acting irrationally and elevating both the fear and the prospects of a self-fulfilling prophesy. The fact that the European authorities cannot even agree on how to handle the debt of Greece – an economy less than one-sixth the size of Italy – does not inspire confidence in their capacity to manage a bigger crisis.
The weaker Eurozone economies – Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain – are already facing the prospect of years of economic punishment, including extremely high levels of unemployment (16, 12, 14 and 21 percent, respectively). Since the point of all this self-inflicted misery is to save the Euro, it is worth asking whether the Euro is worth saving. And it is worth asking this question from the point of view of the majority of Europeans who work for a living, i.e., from a progressive point of view.
James M Cypher: Nearly $2 Trillion Purloined from US Workers in 2009
In 2009, stock owners, bankers, brokers, hedge-fund wizards, highly paid corporate executives, corporations, and mid-ranking managers pocketed-as either income, benefits, or perks such as corporate jets-an estimated $1.91 trillion that 40 years ago would have collectively gone to non-supervisory and production workers in the form of higher wages and benefits. These are the 88 million workers in the private sector who are closely tied to production processes and/or are not responsible for the supervision, planning, or direction of other workers.
From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the benefits of economic growth were broadly shared by those in all income categories: workers received increases in compensation (wages plus benefits) that essentially matched the rise in their productivity. Neoclassical economist John Bates Clark (1847-1938) first formulated what he termed the “natural law” of income distribution which “assigns to everyone what he has specifically created.” That is, if markets are not “obstructed,” pay levels should be “equal [to] that part of the product of industry which is traceable to labor itself.” As productivity increased, Clark argued, wages would rise at an equal rate.
George Zornick: Will Eric Cantor’s Financial Backers Allow Him to Kill a Debt Ceiling Increase?
House Democrats are circulating a resolution accusing majority leader Eric Cantor of a salacious conflict of interest: he owns shares in a fund that takes a short position on long-dated government bonds, which in layman’s terms means Cantor stands to profit if the government defaults on its debt, and so probably shouldn’t be such a prominent negotiator in the ongoing debt ceiling talks.
It’s a juicy bit of meat, but the attack is actually pretty silly. According the resolution, which was obtained by the Huffington Post, Cantor’s shares in that fund total $3,300, and it’s quite a stretch to imagine that someone who is worth as much as $7.7 million would tank the US economy in order to profit on such a paltry investment. (As Cantor’s spokesman also pointed out, his $263,000 government pension means he would lose more than he would gain if the government defaulted anyhow).
Cantor is a good target for Democrats, as he is now back in the driver’s seat of his party’s debt limit talks after House Speaker John Boehner was unable to win a large-scale deal. However, if one is to examine Cantor’s finances in search of a motive-and the finances that really matter, his campaign account and leadership PAC-a different story emerges. Cantor, much like the GOP as a whole, is so thoroughly beholden to Wall Street firms it’s hard to imagine he won’t agree to a deal by August 2.
Robert Weiner and John Horton,: End Trickle Down Economics to Pay Off Debt
President Obama has given speech after speech calling on Congress to reduce tax breaks for the wealthy to balance the budget. When President Clinton left office, the budget had been balanced for four consecutive years with surpluses projected through 2011. The tax rate for the wealthiest 2 percent of wage earners was 39.6 percent. President George W. Bush, however, chose to pursue the system of so-called “trickle-down” economics through tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
The result: surplus turned into deficit. By the end of Bush’s second term, the United States was embroiled in the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Trickle-down economics has not worked since Herbert Hoover tried it. It is a myth that adding money to the wealthy through tax cuts stimulates jobs and grows the economy. Under Democratic presidents since 1930 who have emphasized people programs and resisted tax breaks for the richest, annual growth in GDP has averaged 5.4 percent, according to Commerce Department and Office of Management and Budget statistics.
Mike Farrell: Extremely Unctuous
Raised in the Catholic Church, I was a pretty confused kid. Father O’Reilly, one of the priests at St. Peter’s, the church our family attended most of the time, spoke with such a pronounced brogue that I couldn’t follow him. But I didn’t understand the Mass either, so I smiled and pretended he made sense, just accepting him on faith along with the rest of it.
But at some point it all began to itch. Ours was the “One True Faith” and everyone else was damned to hell. Really? That was tough to think about, because some non-Catholics we knew seemed like pretty nice folks-well, most of them, anyway. And what about the people in Africa and other places who maybe never even had a chance to know about Jesus and Peter, The Rock Upon Which He Built His Church?
Hell for everybody but us? It clearly made some feel special, but I couldn’t make it sit right.
Jul 12 2011
On This Day In History July 12
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
Click on images to enlarge
July 12 is the 193rd day of the year (194th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 172 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day in 1862, the Medal of Honor is created.
President Abraham Lincoln signs into law a measure calling for the awarding of a U.S. Army Medal of Honor, in the name of Congress, “to such noncommissioned officers and privates as shall most distinguish themselves by their gallantry in action, and other soldier-like qualities during the present insurrection.” The previous December, Lincoln had approved a provision creating a U.S. Navy Medal of Valor, which was the basis of the Army Medal of Honor created by Congress in July 1862. The first U.S. Army soldiers to receive what would become the nation’s highest military honor were six members of a Union raiding party who in 1862 penetrated deep into Confederate territory to destroy bridges and railroad tracks between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia.
The first formal system for rewarding acts of individual gallantry by American soldiers was established by George Washington on August 7, 1782, when he created the Badge of Military Merit, designed to recognize “any singularly meritorious action.” This decoration is America’s first combat award and the second oldest American military decoration of any type, after the Fidelity Medallion.
Although the Badge of Military Merit fell into disuse after the American Revolutionary War, the concept of a military award for individual gallantry by members of the U.S. armed forces had been established. In 1847, after the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, a Certificate of Merit was established for soldiers who distinguished themselves in action. The certificate was later granted medal status as the Certificate of Merit Medal.
Early in the Civil War, a medal for individual valor was proposed by Iowa Senator James W. Grimes to Winfield Scott, the Commanding General of the United States Army. Scott did not approve the proposal, but the medal did come into use in the Navy. Senate Bill 82, containing a provision for a “Medal of Honor”, was signed into law (12Stat329) by President Abraham Lincoln on December 21, 1861. The medal was “to be bestowed upon such petty officers, seamen, landsmen, and Marines as shall most distinguish themselves by their gallantry and other seamanlike qualities during the present war.” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles directed the Philadelphia Mint to design the new decoration. Shortly afterward, a resolution of similar wording was introduced on behalf of the Army and was signed into law on July 12, 1862. This measure provided for awarding a Medal of Honor, as the Navy version also came to be called: “to such noncommissioned officers and privates as shall most distinguish themselves by their gallantry in action, and other soldier-like qualities, during the present insurrection.”
As there were only two medals that could be issued until the World War I including the Purple Heart, the Medal of Honor was sometimes awarded for deeds that would not later merit that distinction. In 1917, when other medals were created for bravery, a recall was requested for 910 Medals of Honor that had been previously issued, but no longer considered that noteworthy. Thereafter, and until the present day, the Medal was awarded for deeds that were considered exceptional.
Jul 12 2011
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here:
Jul 12 2011
Obama: “Die Quickly”
We are doomed and so are our future generations.
President Obama at today’s (7/11) press conference:
As for Social Security, which he acknowledged is not the source of any deficit problems, he basically said that, as long as we’re doing a big deal, we might as well throw that in. “The reason to include that in this package is, if you’re going to take a bunch of tough votes, you might as well do it now,” Obama said.
Obama Offered To Raise Medicare Eligibility Age As Part Of Grand Debt Deal
by Sam Stein
According to five separate sources with knowledge of negotiations — including both Republicans and Democrats — the president offered an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare, from 65 to 67, in exchange for Republican movement on increasing tax revenues.
The proposal, as discussed, would not go into effect immediately, but rather would be implemented down the road (likely in 2013). The age at which people would be eligible for Medicare benefits would be raised incrementally, not in one fell swoop.
snip
A proposal to raise the eligibility age for Medicare — which was part of a budget plan put forth by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) — would face steep opposition from within the Democratic Party. The amount of money it would save is also relatively small, as the vast majority of Medicare funding is spent on more elderly populations. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that if the Medicare eligibility age was increased from 65 to 67, the federal government would save $124.8 billion between 2014 and 2021.
Paul Krugman, Conscience of a Liberal
That’s a truly cruel idea; as it happens, I know several people who are hanging on, postponing needed medical care, hoping that they can make it to 65 before something terrible happens. And if I know such people in my fairly sheltered social circles, just imagine how widespread such stories must be.
But beyond that, think about what it means to move people out of Medicare into private insurance, if they can get it.
Medicare has its problems – but all the evidence says that it is substantially more cost-effective than private insurance. Partly this is because it has lower administrative costs; partly it’s because Medicare is able to use its market power to negotiate lower prices. And the international evidence is overwhelming: single-payer systems are much cheaper than systems centered on private insurance.
So think of this as a national interest thing rather than a budget thing: Lieberman is proposing that we move a substantial number of older Americans into a worse, more expensive health care system. Why would you want to do such a thing, as opposed to raising enough additional revenue to keep them on Medicare?
Where is the outrage?
Jul 11 2011
Obama: Progressives, “Eat Your Peas”
Catfood is made out of peas? Who knew? lambert
This press conference tells us that the austerity crap isn’t some bit of political posturing, it’s a belief. We’re doomed. Atrios
The right wing Republican talking points that were spewed by President Obama at his press conference were so thick that it has left no doubt the president is about to sell out the middle class and poor.
President Obama said Monday that he had “bent over backwards” to forge a compromise with Republicans on a debt limit deal – and that it was time for them to “budge.”
“I am prepared to take on significant heat from my Party to get something done and I expect the other side to be willing to do the same thing,” he said. . . . .
“We have to pull off the Band-aid — to eat our peas,” he said.
I don’t often agree with NYT Columnist Russ Douthat but his analysis of the “madness” cuts to the point:
Barack Obama wants a right-leaning deficit deal.
The not-so-secret secret is that the White House has given ground on purpose. Just as Republicans want to use the debt ceiling to make the president live with bigger spending cuts than he would otherwise support, Obama’s political team wants to use the leverage provided by those cra-a-a-zy Tea Partiers to make Democrats live with bigger spending cuts than they normally would support. . . .
Why? Because the more conservative-seeming the final deal, the better for the president’s re-election effort. In that environment, Republicans have every incentive to push and keep pushing. Since any deal they cut will be used as an election-year prop in 2012, they need to make sure the president actually earns his budget-cutting bona fides.
The problem is that voters don’t care about the deficit. They care about jobs and the economy. Spending cuts, tax cuts and austerity programs do ot create jobs. Even Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, now admits that Reaganomics and the Bush tax cuts are a major cause of the current “debt crisis” and takes Obama and Rep. Paul Ryan to the “woodshed”
“In attacking the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent of taxpayers, the president is only incidentally addressing the deficit,” he writes. “Mr. Obama is thus playing the class-war card more aggressively than any Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt – surpassing Harry S. Truman or John F. Kennedy when they attacked big business or Lyndon B. Johnson or Jimmy Carter when they posed as champions of the little guy.”
“On the other side,” he continues, “Representative Ryan fails to recognize that we are not in an era of old-time enterprise capitalism in which the gospel of low tax rates and incentives to create wealth might have had relevance.”
Eat your peas, we are doomed.
Jul 11 2011
Punting the Pundits
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Paul Krugman: No, We Can’t? Or Won’t?
If you were shocked by Friday’s job report, if you thought we were doing well and were taken aback by the bad news, you haven’t been paying attention. The fact is, the United States economy has been stuck in a rut for a year and a half.
Yet a destructive passivity has overtaken our discourse. Turn on your TV and you’ll see some self-satisfied pundit declaring that nothing much can be done about the economy’s short-run problems (reminder: this “short run” is now in its fourth year), that we should focus on the long run instead.
This gets things exactly wrong. The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. Yes, there are huge political obstacles to action – notably, the fact that the House is controlled by a party that benefits from the economy’s weakness. But political gridlock should not be conflated with economic reality.
As things stand today, the US is hurtling toward a budget showdown in less than a month. Either President Obama will once again capitulate to extreme Republican budget-slashing demands, making Democrats seem as much of a threat to Medicare as Republicans, and virtually ensuring a GOP electoral sweep in 2012, or the US will default on its debt for the first time in its history, most likely plunging the world economy back into another five-continent recession, also costing Democrats the 2012 elections. These are the options left for a president and a political class completely divorced both from reality, and its own history of how one of the three greatest US presidents of all time steered the country from the brink of collapse eight decades ago
Entirely forgetting the real history of how Franklin D Roosevelt used activist government to save American capitalism from itself, the entire US political establishment is instead hypnotized by the false history woven around its most over-hyped president of all time: Ronald Reagan. Idolatry of Reagan’s supposed tax-cutting wonders propels the now widespread economic belief that up is down, that cutting government spending is the way out of – rather than into – a severe recession. At the same time, idolatry of Reagan’s supposed political wonders propels GOP extremists to ignore all other considerations.
Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980s until 2007, US-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world.
Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.
Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt.
I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government.
Alas, that has not been the case.
Eugen Robinson: A little more revenue could go a long way
Do progressives care about reducing the national debt? Of course they do, no matter what the White House might believe.
“We think that obviously there are some Democrats who don’t feel as strongly about deficit reduction as [President Obama] does,” senior adviser David Plouffe said Wednesday at a breakfast with reporters and columnists. But that’s not obvious at all. It isn’t even true.
There’s no dispute about where we need to go. The question is what path to take.
Clearly, the federal government cannot continue spending at a rate of 25 percent of gross domestic product while taking in revenue that equals less than 15 percent of GDP, as is the case this year. We would reach the point where debt service crowds out health care, education and other priorities dear to progressives’ hearts. Major investments the nation desperately needs to make – for infrastructure and energy research, for example – would be impossible. Decline would be inevitable.
Steven J. D’Amico: Trade Deals are No Deal for US
LONG BEFORE 2008, when Wall Street’s unchecked greed brought the world’s economy to its knees, we in the middle class could feel our future slipping away. We knew that we were working longer and harder – we could see that even with two salaries, most families had less disposable income than families did in the 1960s and ’70s when one income was the norm. We knew that good quality jobs were harder to find and hold. And we knew that a big reason we were falling behind was a flawed trade policy that shipped many of our jobs overseas.
Yet even after losing 682,000 jobs to NAFTA since it took effect in 1994, and 2.4 million to China since it joined the World Trade Organization, Washington continues in its blind faith that somehow these trade deals are good for us. This summer Congress is expected to take up three new trade deals – with Korea, Panama, and Colombia. These trade pacts are bad for American workers, bad for our domestic economy, and bad for democracy.
New York Times: An Aggressive Ruling on Clean Air
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday issued a welcome and overdue rule compelling power plants in 27 states and the District of Columbia to reduce smokestack emissions that pollute the air and poison forests, lakes and streams across the eastern United States. The regulation reflects the E.P.A.’s determination to carry out its mandates under the Clean Air Act despite fierce Congressional opposition, and bodes well for progress on a host of other regulatory challenges the agency faces.
The rule, which takes effect in 2012, would cut emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain, and nitrogen oxide, a component of smog, by more than half by 2014 compared with 2005 levels. The E.P.A. administrator, Lisa Jackson, said the rule would improve air quality for 240 million Americans in the states where the pollution is produced and in areas downwind.
Caroline Arnold: How Much Blame Do We Share for Our Leaders’ Failures?
Six years ago, in the wake of the botched management of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, a friend warned me against blaming Republicans.
I replied flippantly that as an unrepentant progressive, I quite enjoyed blaming Republicans, though I recognized that even the GOP, PNAC, and all their associated think-tanks and trained media rescue-dogs couldn’t have single-handedly created a disaster of that magnitude. I added that if the Republicans had planned Katrina, they probably would have directed it to Ohio. Of course there aren’t any hurricanes in Ohio, but heck, there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq, either.
Another friend who had volunteered in the cleanup of Katrina running a ham radio operation observed that among the agencies and organizations trying to help, the farther up the hierarchy of any institution, public or private, the worse prepared the people were, the more out of touch, the more incompetent, and the more their efforts were downright damaging.
… sounds like The Peter Principle to me. And an interesting corollary would probably be that the higher the hierarchy, the greater the level of incompetence.
Jul 11 2011
On This Day In History July 11
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
July 11 is the 192nd day of the year (193rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 173 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day in 1789, Jacques Necker is dismissed as France’s Finance Minister sparking the Storming of the Bastille.
Necker was seen as the savior of France while the country stood on the brink of ruin, but his actions could not stop the French Revolution. Necker put a stop to the rebellion in the Dauphiné by legalizing its assembly, and then set to work to arrange for the summons of the Estates-General of 1789. He advocated doubling the representation of the Third Estate to satisfy the people. But he failed to address the matter of voting – rather than voting by head count, which is what the people wanted, voting remained as one vote for each estate. Also, his address at the Estates-General was terribly miscalculated: it lasted for hours, and while those present expected a reforming policy to save the nation, he gave them financial data. This approach had serious repercussions on Necker’s reputation; he appeared to consider the Estates-General to be a facility designed to help the administration rather than to reform government.
Necker’s dismissal on 11 July 1789 made the people of France incredibly angry and provoked the storming of the Bastille on July 14. The king recalled him on 19 July. He was received with joy in every city he traversed, but in Paris he again proved to be no statesman. Believing that he could save France alone, he refused to act with the Comte de Mirabeau or Marquis de Lafayette. He caused the king’s acceptance of the suspensive veto, by which he sacrificed his chief prerogative in September, and destroyed all chance of a strong executive by contriving the decree of 7 November by which the ministry might not be chosen from the assembly. Financially he proved equally incapable for a time of crisis, and could not understand the need of such extreme measures as the establishment of assignats in order to keep the country quiet. Necker stayed in office until 1790, but his efforts to keep the financial situation afloat were ineffective. His popularity had vanished, and he resigned with a broken reputation.
Jul 10 2011
Rant of the Week: Rachel Maddow
The Republicans “crazies” are flooding the primary field with felons, the head of the KKK and the religious fanatics that make the Westborough Baptist Church members sound sane.
GOP candidates court crackpot constituency
Rachel reviews the role of the social conservative fringe in 2012 Republican politics.
Jul 10 2011
Congressional Game of Chicken: GOP Smells Success
I think the GOP is smelling success in their goal of making President Obama a one term president. Even bloggers like the Rude Pundit doubt Obama:
At some point, Obama has to squash McConnell and Boehner like bugs (although he probably won’t)
Now that Boehner has once again walked away from the negotiating table, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear on Fox News Sunday that his top priority is stopping Obama’s re-election:
Even with the country on the brink of default, the Senate’s highest ranking Republican says his “single most important” goal is to make Barack Obama a one-term president.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told National Journal’s Major Garrett in October.
Fox News’ Bret Baier asked McConnell Sunday if that was still his major objective.
“Well, that is true,” McConnell replied. “That’s my single most important political goal, along with every active Republican in the country.”
“But that is in 2012,” he added. “Our biggest goal for this year is get this country straightened out and we can’t get this country straightened out if we don’t do something about spending, about deficit, about debt and get the economy moving again. So our goal is to have a robust vibrant economy to benefit all Americans.”
McConnell told Baier that a “Grand Bargain,” where Republicans agree to tax hikes in exchange for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, was likely off the table.
“I think it is. Everything they told me and the Speaker is to get a big package would require big tax increases in the middle of the economic situation that is extraordinarily difficult with 9.2% unemployment. We think it’s a terrible idea. It’s a job-killer.”
Priorities aside, what all these politicians don’t seem to understand is that austerity is the “job killer”, especially with the the job market and wages sinking like a rock. President Obama’s grand plan of $4 trillion in deficit reductions with cuts to vital social safety nets as the carrot and minuscule revenue increases, is even worse. This is all about maintaining the status quo for the wealthiest who have proven since the Bush tax cuts that they will just keep the money and screw the masses.
John Aravosis sums up this debacle quite succinctly:
Someone’s being played. First the Republicans walked out of the Biden talks. Now Boehner is refusing the President’s more than generous offer to cut Social Security and Medicare as part of a larger deal absurdly skewed towards GOP goals. It’s those pesky tax increases, you see. It’s just not enough that the President caved on a clean debt ceiling, caved on having an additional stimulus instead of spending cuts, caved on postponing spending cuts until the economy is well again, caved on at least making spending cuts equal to tax increases, and caved on keeping cuts to Social Security and Medicare out of this.
Mind you, it’s not entirely clear what the Republicans have even agreed to here in terms of any tax increases.
So the GOP walks, and Obama will just have to sweeten the deal to “save the hostages.” Did anyone else see this coming?
Someone is being played alright, the American people.
I have no hope for any rational solution that is going to improve the economy and the job situation for Americans. It makes no difference who is in the White House at this point, or in 2012. Obama will never stand up to McConnell and Boehner simply because he agrees with them. They are playing Russian Roulette with a loaded gun at the American people’s head.
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