Last Call

Maybe the Blue Dogs aren't complete idiots.

The one Democratic member of Congress endorsed by the Tea Party Express formally rejected the endorsement on Monday, citing disgust with a satirical, racist letter penned by a spokesman for the group.

Rep. Walt Minnick (D-Idaho) announced his rejection of the endorsement in a letter to the co-chair of the Tea Party Express on Monday -- roughly three months to the date after he became the sole Democrat to earn the group's backing. The congressman cited a fake letter (since removed from the web) that Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams wrote pretending to be a "Colored" person denouncing Abraham Lincoln for offering welfare to slaves.

The reprehensible blog post by your spokesman was clearly in poor taste. Whatever his reasons for writing it, his words reflect on all of those associated with the Tea Party movement. The proper response to his perceived slight on the issue of race was not to use inflammatory sarcasm. Rather, I would have expected your organization to instead highlight the Tea Party I know, the one with good, decent folks who care very much about the serious financial issues facing our nation and who themselves would find Mr. Williams' blog post distasteful.
Instead, the Tea Party Express has apparently decided to stand by Mr. Williams and support him in his own contention that he did nothing wrong. I cannot agree with that course of action. Since the Tea Party Express refuses to reject and rebuke Mr. Williams, I have no choice but to decline your endorsement.

I thank you very sincerely for your kind words about my work as a Congressman, and hope that your group can see the error of its ways.

A Tea Party endorsement for a Democrat is about as useful as a  Derek Jeter endorsement for a Boston pol, or teats on a boar, or a screen door on a submarine, or...well, you get the point.  Minnick's still a Dem.  He's not about to cross THAT big fat red line.

Not yet, anyway.

It Taxes The Imagination

Or in this case, it's imaginary Democratic tax increases from Republicanland. Exra Klein:

The new Republican line is that there's a “Democrat tax hike" on the way. And it's a big 'un: "An unprecedented $3.8 trillion increase" that will affect -- and this is their bold and underline, not mine -- "every American who pays income taxes!"

To understand what's going on here, you need to go back 10 years to the passage of the Bush tax cuts. In order to maximize the size of the cuts, Republicans had to minimize the influence of minority Democrats on the package. So they chose to run the bill through the reconciliation process.

But that posed some challenges. Budget reconciliation had never been used to increase the deficit. In fact, it specifically existed to decrease the deficit. That's why one of its rules was that you couldn't use it to increase the deficit outside the budget window. Republicans realized they could take that very literally: The budget window was 10 years. So if the tax cuts expired after 10 years, they wouldn't increase the deficit outside the budget window. They'd also have the added benefit of appearing less costly in the Congressional Budget Office's estimates, as the CBO duly scored them as expiring after 10 years, which kept the long-range budget picture from exploding.

In other words, ten years ago Bush and the Republicans actually did everything they accused Obama and the Democrats of doing on health care in order to get GOP tax cuts for the wealthy through reconciliation.  Then they waited, figuring the Democrats will now have to keep all the tax cuts or risk losing the American political landscape forever...or make massive spending cuts and do the same.

Pretty good plan.  After all, almost half of Americans now believed Obama signed the TARP bank bailout into law, not Bush.  If Americans can't remember who was President in 2008, what makes you think they remember who it was in 2001 that wrecked out economy with a deficit double whammy of trillions in tax cuts and trillions in Medicare drug spending?

Does anyone think the Village is going to correct the ignorance?  I didn't think so.

Republinomics

Things we cannot afford to pay for because of the deficit, according to Republicans:

Roads
Teachers
Police Officers
Firefighters
Cities in general
Unemployment benefits
Broadband internet infrastructure

Things we have to pay for even if it increases the deficit, according to Republicans:

Tax cuts for those making over $250,000 a year
Blowing things up in Iraq
Blowing things up in Afghanistan
"Accidentally" blowing stuff up in Pakistan
Apology/bribe money to Pakistan when we "accidentally" blow stuff up
Huge bloated Homeland Security apparatus
Gitmo

Class dismissed.  I have a headache now.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

It's a good thing Bill Clinton campaigned for Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas to give her that four point win over that nasty ol' progressive Bill Halter back in June.  Bill Halter of course being a Dirty F'ckin Hippie had no chance in hell to beat Republican John Boozman.

You know, not like Blanche Lincoln's much better chances against Boozman.

A new Talk Business Poll in Arkansas shows Rep. John Boozman (R) with a 25-point lead over Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) in the U.S. Senate race, 57% to 32%. 

Yep, good thing the Big Dog stopped those Dirty F'ckin Hippies from losing that Senate seat in Arkansas.

Welcome to Useful Idiot territory, Bill.

Irish Eyes Are Crying

Hey Emerald Isle, how's that austerity working out for you?

The Moody’s agency cut Ireland’s credit rating Monday, citing the country’s swelling national debt, the unpredictable cost of its bank-bailout plans and its weak growth prospects for the next three to five years.

Shares on the Irish Stock Exchange slumped after Dietmar Hornung, Moody’s lead analyst for Ireland, announced that the New York-based agency was dropping its credit-worthiness rating one notch to Aa2. Moody’s previously cut Ireland’s rating to Aa1 from the top grade, Aaa, in July 2009 as Ireland plunged into its worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But but but but austerity fixes everything! Ireland's reducing its debt!  Irish workers tightened their belts and the Irish government did along with them and cut spending!

And since nobody's buying anything, Ireland is now crashing into a deflationary spiral.  That'll be us pretty damn soon if this path continues.  Ireland has done exactly what the deficit hawks want us to do, and as a result their economy is imploding.

But Very Serious People want us to cut the deficit in the middle of a recession.

Marco Rubio's Straw Maddow Argument

A strange ad out from Marco Rubio in Florida that basically says he's completely and 100% right on his GOP boilerplate economic plan because "Rachel Maddow says it's wrong."

No really, that's his entire argument.

Florida GOP Senate candidate Marco Rubio is out with a new web video laying out the argument that his recently released "12 simple ideas to grow the economy and create jobs" are smart simply because MSNBC host Rachel Maddow disagrees with them.

"How can you know the plan is right?" text reads in the video. "Rachel Maddow thinks it's wrong."

The ad then highlights a few staples of Marco Rubio's economic platform:

Marco Rubio Supports:
Extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.
Cutting taxes for American businesses.
Ending double taxation.
Repealing and replacing Obamacare.

The video concludes with the implication that if you "think Marco's ideas are wrong," you should just go ahead and watch Rachel Maddow. If you agree with Rubio however, you can donate to his campaign.

How did Rachel Maddow end up the bogeyman in 2010?  Rubio's got nothing better to do than to run against a TV news host?  Hey Waffles, you writing political ads for people?

No wonder Rubio's losing.

The Kroog Versus The Unbearable Lightness Of Midterms

Paul Krugman lays out the next six months.

The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.

In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.

Republicans, by the way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Mr. Obama took office, they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.

Can Mr. Obama do anything in the time that remains? Midterm elections, where turnout is crucial, aren’t quite like presidential elections, where the economy is all. Mr. Obama’s best hope at this point is to close the “enthusiasm gap” by taking strong stands that motivate Democrats to come out and vote. But I don’t expect to see that happen.

What I expect, instead, if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal — when his real mistake was doing too little to create jobs. 

Not much to say here, other than Kroog's pretty much got the right of it.  The only question is how close the GOP will come to taking back the House and Senate.  Obama decided his constituency was the Village, not the American people.  As a result he did what the Village wanted, not what the country needed.  There's a difference, of course...but the result is all the same.

In the end, the Villagers exist to turn on a Democratic President.  Why Obama didn't know better, well perhaps it was because he was surrounded by Villagers.  In the end of course Obama made his own bed, and now we're all getting thrown out of it.

The True Name Theory Of Legislation

AKA the Ezra Klein Rule: 

You can't pass what you can't say.

More specifically:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid played dumb last week when a reporter asked him if the energy and climate bill headed to the floor would come with a “cap” on greenhouse gas emissions.

“I don’t use that,” the Nevada Democrat replied. “Those words are not in my vocabulary. We’re going to work on pollution.”

If you can't say cap and trade, no cap and trade bill will pass.  So, as Ezra says, there will be no cap and trade bill.  If you're searching for a new phrase to call the bill, your influence over the bill is dead.  That works both ways (see Republicans trying to call heath care reform "Obamacare" and the financial regulation bill "The Permanent Bailout Authority") but if Dems are floundering for a new thing to call Cap and Trade, well that's dead too.

Harry Dresden said it best:  There's power in something's true name.

National Insecurity Apparatus

Hey, Tea Party smaller government guys?  Where were you when the Republicans were demanding all this after 9/11 -- and getting all of it?

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], but for any individual, for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

850,000 plus people with top secret or higher security clearance, all redundantly not finding Osama Bin Laden and putting 5 year olds on flight watch lists.  All this new security stuff created by your friend George W. Bush here.  The right hand not only has no idea what the left hand is doing, it can't find the left hand because there are a couple hundred of them all doing slightly different things, and none of them know the full picture.

Now here's some government that I agree needs to be made smaller.  You know, so we can afford unemployment and roads and schools.

Do read through that WaPo special report on our national insecurity apparatus.

Crystal Balling It

Doug J at Balloon Juice ponders what happens if the GOP takes over the House, a government shutdown...or worse?

The government shutdown was a political failure for Republicans—it did no damage to Clinton, who sailed to victory in 1996. The trouble with a government shutdown, from the Republican perspective, is that it generates too many stories about people who couldn’t visit public parks that week and that it focuses attention on actual budgetary details; it’s a battle fought on reality-based turf, and that terrain is not favorable to Republicans.


Endless investigations are another story. While Republicans did suffer losses in 1998, the fact that they won the White House in 2000 means that impeachment must be viewed as something of a political success. Moreover, modern Republicans excel at destroying their opponents personally, and personal destruction was the end goal of the various investigations of Clinton.

There are those who say that Republicans won’t be able to do this with Obama, because there is nothing significant to investigate. I would ask them to remember that Gingrich-era Republicans took 140 hours of testimony about the Clinton’s Christmas card list.

Here’s how it plays out, I think…if Republicans take the House, they’ll launch endless, pointless investigations of Obama. At least some of these will have a nasty, racial tinge, a la the New Black Panther Party stuff. Establishment media will take all of these investigations very seriously and start hankering for a president who “can bring the country together”. This sets the stage for a Republican nominee who is a uniter, not a divider (who knows if the GOP will succeed in nominating a candidate who can dupe Villagers into buying this line—EDIT: I think Villagers will buy it from John Thune or Mitch Daniels, they won’t but it from Sarah Palin, with the other possible nominees, I’m not sure one way or the other).

I disagree with him partially.  Impeachment wasn't a success, the whole Florida fiasco was something else and it wasn't Clinton on the ballot.  I actually think we'll see both a government shutdown AND impeachment in the next two years if the GOP gets the House back.  Americans have stopped giving a damn altogether about infrastructure in this country.  They've stopped caring about schools and stopped caring about roads and stopped caring about maintenance altogether and as a result, the vocal Teabagger minority is absolutely trying to shut the government down.

So yeah, you thought it was bad before, America?  Put the Republicans back in charge. Obama Derangement Syndrome every day of the week, all you can eat poutrage, and the economy will burn, burn, burn.

Running The Numbers

Nate Silver's latest Senate update is here, and it's not good news for the Dems.

The model gives Republicans a 17 percent chance of taking over the Senate if Charlie Crist caucuses with them, up significantly from 6 percent three weeks ago. If Crist does not caucus with them, their chances of a takeover are 12 percent. However, the model does not account for the contingency that someone like Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson could decide to switch parties, which makes their chances slightly better than we suggest here.

Democrats' chances of gaining a net of one or more seat and re-claiming a 60-seat majority are 7 percent, down from 12 percent three weeks ago. If they could persuade Charlie Crist to caucus with them, however, their chances would improve to 10 percent.

That's the bad news.  The somewhat better news?

Rasmussen now accounts for ~55% of the raw polling data we use in our Senate model. We have lots of ways to counteract this, but still --

So yeah, depending on Nate's model's corrections, control of the Senate may or may not be in play.  But Nate's numbers on a 59-41 Congress right now have a better chance of the GOP picking up ten seats and getting to 51 than the Dems picking up one seat and getting to 60.  If everything goes the GOP's way in Nate's chart, it's entirely possible that Charlie Crist could decide which party controls the Senate. 


Food for thought.

We're Disinclined To Acquiesce To Your Request

Mitch McConnell was on the Sunday shows yesterday proudly telling America that the GOP really doesn't have any other plans other than to say NO to everything.

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, McConnell ticked off a litany of Democratic agenda items that his party has opposed.

“Look, what we are proud to say no to, and I think what the public wants us to say no to, are things like the government running banks, insurance companies, car companies, nationalizing the student loan business, taking over our health care,” McConnell told CNN Chief Political Correspondent Candy Crowley.

McConnell also pointed to the recently passed financial regulatory reform bill, the growth of the federal workforce, action by the Federal Communications Commission to assert authority over the internet, and the possibility that the National Labor Relations Board will change the law regarding how unions can be formed.

“Yes, we are opposed - let me make it clear, we are absolutely opposed to all of those things, and proudly so,” McConnell said.

But the GOP leader quickly added that his party agrees with the president on other issues and is willing to work on passing some legislation the president says he wants.

Like what, Mitch?  Unemployment benefits for Kentucky that you and all the other Republicans keep voting against?  Kentucky unemployment has been hovering between 10% and 12% for the last 18 months, and you think the deficit is more important?

You know they told me back in 2008 that if I voted for the Democrats, they wouldn't have any solutions to the problems, but the Republicans did.   Those GOP solutions appear to be saying no and watching the country burn while doing it.

Good plan, huh?

StupidiNews!

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has unveiled a new aid package to Pakistan, $7.5 billion over 5 years for power plants, dams, hospitals and more.
• Rising seas from melting polar ice caps are beginning to swamp islands across the globe.
• Fidel Castro's numerous public appearances over the last week have perplexed America's experts on Cuba.
• The US is demanding to see BP's plans to remove the cap as pressure tests are indicating a major leak near the well.
• The FCC says is has compelling evidence that wireless companies are dropping major unexpected increases -- "bill shock"-- on customers.

Last Call

Me, Friday night on the BP oil "cap":

 In other words, unless you believe that the oil under the ocean is depleted to the point where the pressure's gone (and yet had enough pressure to spew tens of thousands of gallons of oil, 24 hours a day for 87 days) there's another leak out there somewhere in the pipeline.  Odds are very good now that by capping this wellhead, that pressure is now be transferred to the leak point or points, and it's in the process of ripping them open wider too, meaning all the oil being capped here is coming out, we just can't see it because it's under a mile of ocean somewhere.

Adm. Thad Allen, tonight:

Tests relating to the recently recapped oil well in the Gulf of Mexico have detected a "seep a distance from the well," Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said in a letter to a BP official.

And with that, I bid you all good evening.

Tea Bag Time Machine

The main difference between Liberals and Conservatives, or at least what passes for each group today anyway, is that Liberals believe that the conservative policies of the last 30 years are a failure and that they coutry should move forward from them.  Conservatives on the other hand think the last 80 years of liberal policies, including civil rights, are failures and want to take the country back to before the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Civil Rights Movement.

Case in point:  the Raleigh, NC school board believes Brown vs. Board of Education has now outlived its usefulness.

Immediately after taking office, the new 5-4 majority began dismantling the old diversity plan. The response was equally immediate. In February, Superintendent Del Burns - who started as a special education teacher in 1976 and had led the district since 2006 - resigned.

"It is clear to me that I cannot, in all good conscience, continue to serve," he said.

Supporters of the old assignment policy sued to have the board's March 23 vote overturned, alleging open meetings violations. A judge dismissed the suit, but the plaintiffs have appealed.

On June 15, when the board rejected Barber's demand for 45 minutes to address the full panel, he and three others occupied the board chamber. The only way they would leave, they said, was in handcuffs.

Police obliged.

Following their release, the newly dubbed "Raleigh 4" published an open letter titled "Thoughts While we were Being Handcuffed, and Processed at the Wake County Jail on June 15 after Engaging in an Act of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience" - a direct allusion to Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

"There is a tragedy unfolding in Wake County, but it is not confined to Wake County ... ," the letter read. "The shadow of resegregation is falling across the state of North Carolina and the nation."

The Teapublican argument goes like this:  since taxes pay for schools and all schools (except my child's school) are complete failures, and teachers are all incompetent parasites (except for my child's teacher) with corrupt unions, and the school district has no authority to tell my child what they should or should not learn, why should we pay for busing to integrate schools anymore?  Screw it.  Let them rot in their own urban hellholes!

Seems to me busing is more important that ever since the white flight out of the urban centers into the suburbs, and even more so since the second white flight from the suburbs to the exurbs.  But that requires money, and of course since government is purely evil (except for roads, cops, firefighters, schools, and the military) why should we care?

It's the Entitlement of the Taxpayer.  We've got a whole bunch of crazy loud people who disagree that government should be doing anything, frankly...so let's stop them from doing it.  There's no racism in 2010 (except for those people saying there's racism, I mean where's the National Association for the Advancement of White People?) so we don't need civil rights and busing and affirmative anything and I am a taxpayer and you work for me dammit!  LOUD NOISES!

More and more people have decided that since government doesn't do 100% of what they believe it should be doing (or not doing) then it shouldn't work for anybody.

Busing is too hard.  Let's cut taxes!  That's government...conservative style.

Republicans Still Think You're A Moron

BooMan:

On Tuesday, Carte Goodwin, of the coal-rich state of West Virginia, will be seated as the 100th U.S. Senator. On the same day, the Senate will pass an extension of unemployment benefits, utilizing Goodwin to break a Republican filibuster. Now, you might think that the fact that all but one Republican in the Senate has been supporting a filibuster of this bill means that the Republicans oppose it. You'd be wrong.

On CNN's "State of the Union," the leader [Mitch McConnell] beat back comparisons of deficit spending in the George W. Bush administration. 

"They've taken the deficit as a percentage of GDP from 3.2 percent to almost 10 percent in a year and a half," McConnell said of the Obama administration.

"Somewhere in the course of spending a trillion dollars, we ought to be able to find enough to pay for a program for the unemployed," he said.

"If we can't pay for a program like extension of unemployment insurance that virtually every member of the Senate -- I think, in fact, every member of the Senate wants to extend, then what are we going to pay for? When do we start?"

Republicans think you're not paying attention to them blocking this bill not once, not twice, but 3 times.  Republicans think you're stupid enough to believe them when they say the deficit is causing all of our problems and the deficit is 100% Obama's fault.  And the best part is our "Liberal Media" refuses to call the Republicans out when the go on air and lie like fiends.

Republicans think you're stupid, you're not paying attention, and that you're too depressed to vote or even to give a damn about your country anymore.  They're counting on it.

Real Unemployment, Surreal Numbers

One of the real dangers of the Dems sitting on 9.5% unemployment and acting like it's the new normal is that nobody believes the unemployment rate is just 9.5%.  The reality of the workforce is that with the millions of underemployed who are being forced to cut hours, work contract jobs or work just part time, and the long-term unemployed who have "left the workforce" and have "stopped looking for work" the reality is much, much worse than 9.5%.  It's really more than twice that.

Raghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed.

"Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.

However, Mayur's polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who's unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department's jobless numbers.

Now this fiddling with Labor Department numbers has been going on for a long time now.  It's not just Obama, but Bush and Clinton too.  The Labor Department changed its formula back in 1994 to do more mathematical modeling and less actual counting. 

 

The Labor Department does have an estimate of all this, and it's called the U-6. (The official unemployment rate is called U-3.)  That U-6 number, the "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" still only comes out to 16.5% for June.  Now, that's bad enough, but Mayur's polls here are showing that the real U-6 is 22% or more, maybe 40% higher than it really is.

Americans instinctively know something is very, very wrong.  The more people you know, the more worried you are.  Your sister's kids can't find a summer job.  The guy across the street's been looking for a job for nine months and is taking care of the kids and doing carpool now while he prays his wife doesn't get downsized.   Your best friend dodged yet another layoff wave downtown.  Cousin Jane's been out of work since last summer when they closed the plant.  The Andersons left the neighborhood three months ago and have moved back in with her mother, their house joining the other six for sale signs on the block.  Chuck from school joined the military because nobody else was hiring, and he just hit 40.  You don't feel guilty when Paula from church tells you she was at the food bank (because you were there last week) but you do feel a twinge when she apologizes for not having you over because "the apartment they live in now is a lot smaller than the house was."

Needless to say, nobody's buying that 9.5% number anymore.  Subconsciously they know it's much, much worse.  

And they know that Republicans are telling them "Sorry we can't help you, we need to cut the deficit.  We're broke too."  And they know that the Democrats are nodding their heads sadly and saying "Gosh they're right, we have to tighten our belts too."

And they ask themselves "Why did I vote for Obama and the Democrats again, anyway?"

With Friends Like These...

Well, you know how the rest of it goes.

Netanyahu is speaking to a small group of terror victims in the West Bank settlement of Ofra two years after stepping down as prime minister in 1999. He appears laid-back. After claiming that the only way to deal with the Palestinian Authority was a large-scale attack, Netanyahu was asked by one of the participants whether or not the United States would let such an attack come to fruition.

“I know what America is,” Netanyahu replied. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in their way.” He then called former president Bill Clinton “radically pro-Palestinian,” and went on to belittle the Oslo peace accords as vulnerable to manipulation. Since the accords state that Israel would be allowed to hang on to pre-defined military zones in the West Bank, Netanyahu told his hosts that he could torpedo the accords by defining vast swaths of land as just that.

“They asked me before the election if I’d honor [the Oslo accords],” Netanyahu said. “I said I would, but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue.”

Smiling, Netanyahu then recalled how he forced former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to agree to let Israel alone determine which parts of the West Bank were to be defined as military zones. “They didn’t want to give me that letter,” Netanyahu said, “so I didn’t give them the Hebron agreement [the agreement giving Hebron back to the Palestinians]. I cut the cabinet meeting short and said, ‘I’m not signing.’ Only when the letter came, during that meeting, to me and to Arafat, did I ratify the Hebron agreement. Why is this important? Because from that moment on, I de facto put an end to the Oslo accords.”

President Obama, and anyone else concerned about Israel’s commitment to the peace process, may watch the tape online here.

Nine years later, Bibi's back in charge, and nothing has changed.   The only truly bipartisan thing our Congress can agree on is telling Obama to sit the hell down, shut the hell up, and know his place before Israel.

It's almost funny if you think about how much power Netanyahu has over us.  That's a small tail to be wagging a big dog, for sure.  But that's the way it works.  There's no chance to fix the Palestinian-Israel relationship until we fix the Israel-United States relationship.  But that's not going to happen anytime within our lifetimes

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Why pretend you have any solutions at all for voters in 2010 when you can just blame Obama?  Even the Villagers see the obvious benefits in the GOP plan now.

Behind the scenes, many are being urged to ignore the leaders and do just the opposite: avoid issues at all costs. Some of the party's most influential political consultants are quietly counseling their clients to stay on the offensive for the November midterm elections and steer clear of taking stands on substance that might give Democratic opponents material for a counterattack.

"The smart political approach would be to make the election about the Democrats," said Neil Newhouse of the powerhouse Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, which is advising more than 50 House and Senate candidates. "In terms of our individual campaigns, I don't think it does a great deal of good" to engage in a debate over the Republicans' own agenda.

Others are skeptical that any Republican policy proposals will have much of an impact. "They really still have to have a sharp contrast with the Democrats," said John McLaughlin, another leading Republican pollster whose firm counts both the House and Senate campaign committees among its clients. "They really need to drive that home before people will be willing to listen to what Republicans stand for."

It's not that Boehner (Ohio) is arguing for a cease-fire. The debate among Republicans comes down to this: The speaker-in-waiting, for all his love of political combat, thinks that voters will not trust GOP candidates if their attacks don't also provide at least some substance. The consultants argue that public anger, if properly stoked, alone can carry the party over the finish line. In their view, getting bogged down in the issues is a distraction and even a potential liability. 

The lesson the GOP spin machine has taken away from 2006 and 2008 is "specifics don't matter, stoking anger against Obama does."  That's all they've got under their thin cloak of populist Teabagger rage.  "Throw out the hated Dems!  Throw out the people taking away my country from me!  Those people and their allies are ruining my country and I'll be damned if I let people like them be in charge!"

The problem is, this inchoate rage is almost certain to work.  All the Republican consultants want to do is eliminate the jumping through hoops and contortions of twisted logic that Republican candidates and members of Congress have to go through.  If they all just agree that they hate hate hate hate President Obama then they're on the same page.

All this is...this is honesty about the Republican party in 2010.  They have no solutions.  They have no coherent plan.  They have no pretense anymore of being anything other than the last gasp of the most broken and diseased parts of 20th century culture.

They don't need any other platform other than "We Hate Obama".  And if we ignore them, they won't go away.

They'll win.

Time to fight back.  The Republicans certainly plan to.

More Useful Idiocy

Maha's analysis of Russ Feingold, Useful Idiot, is spot on.

I like Russ Feingold, but I think Mark Kleiman makes a good point about Feingold and the financial reform bill. Feingold was the only Democrat who voted with the Republicans against cloture. He did this because he didn’t think the bill was good enough, and I suspect I would agree with all of his objections.

However, Mark says, because Harry Reid had to compromise with some “moderates” so the bill could be voted on, it was watered down even more. Mark writes,

With the W.Va. seat still vacant, that meant that Reid needed Snow, Collins, and Scott Brown, as well as Ben Nelson. … The bill as passed exempts at least three major sources of consumer maltreatment in the financial market: car loans, payday loans, and check-cashing services. It omits the $19B bank tax to pay for bailouts. It has a very weak form of the “Volcker rule,” thus leaving the country exposed to future meltdowns. Those concessions were the price of those last four votes.

Mark goes on to say that Feingold suffers from “integrity narcissism,” which is a great phrase. It’s a syndrome I normally associate with Dennis Kucinich, but if the shoe fits …

And there's a lot of this integrity narcissism going around.  Feingold's a politician, after all.  But Maha brings up the much larger and much more important point that by refusing to compromise on the fact the bill wasn't good enough, the Dems had to then turn to the Republicans who made the bill worse.

And someone needs to beat Russ Feingold and in fact all the Firebaggers over the head with that salient point until they understand.  It is one thing to say "I will not support this bill because it's not good enough."  But when that intractable refusal to compromise becomes an abdication of legislative responsibility, and that loss of a vote in our hyper-partisan Senate means that Republicans can then work to strip out the provisions they don't like, your integrity doesn't mean a damn thing.

Russ Feingold made the bill worse by not voting for it, which was the complete opposite of what Feingold's stated intent was.  This is what I mean by "useful idiocy" for the GOP.  How did Feingold's opposition make the legislation more progressive in any way?  It failed miserably in that respect:  the Dems then courted Scott Brown, who had his own list of demands.  His demands were met.

“I’ve spent the past week reviewing the Wall Street reform bill. I appreciate the efforts to improve the bill, especially the removal of the $19 billion bank tax."

So again, what did Russ Feingold accomplish other than being a useful idiot?