I'm starting to think we may have to eat the shit sandwich again after all

In case you thought that we might be able to survive four years of Mitt Romney:

Speaking at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s annual meeting, Mr. Romney said his plan would cap spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product by 2016, and would require $500 billion a year in spending cuts. To accomplish this, Mr. Romney explained, he would eliminate all nonessential government programs, including Amtrak, return federal programs like Medicaid entirely to the states and improve the productivity and efficiency of the federal government. He would also immediately cut all nonsecurity discretionary spending by 5 percent across the board.

Mr. Romney’s proposal for Medicare is similar to the hotly debated plan that Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, introduced in April. Mr. Ryan’s plan would replace Medicare and offer payments to older Americans to buy coverage from the private market.

Mr. Romney’s proposal would give beneficiaries the option of enrolling in private health care plans, using what he, like Mr. Ryan, called a “premium support system.” But unlike the Ryan plan, Mr. Romney’s would allow older people to keep traditional Medicare as an option. However, if the existing government program proved more expensive and charged higher premiums, the participants would be responsible for paying the difference.

He presented his plan as offering more choice — though younger Americans would need to be prepared to possibly pay more, for instance, depending on which plan they selected.

“Younger Americans today, when they turn 65, should have a choice between traditional Medicare and other private health care plans that provide at least the same level of benefits,” he said. “Competition will lower costs and increase the quality of health care.”

He concluded, “The future of Medicare should be marked by competition, by choice, and by innovation, rather than by bureaucracy, stagnation and bankruptcy.”

Yes, because health insurance companies are stumbling all over themselves to get your business, each one offering a better plan than the one before. And they're so innovative -- like the way they fight every claim just to see how long it'll take to wear you down before you stop fighting.

I've had a pretty decent health plan for Mr. Brilliant and I the last few years. We get it through my employer, so we're "only" paying about $3600 of the annual premium. It's got a $20 co-pay for preventive care, a $250 per person deductible, and covers 90% of "usual and customary" after that. Now "usual and customary" seems to be based on medical fees back in the days when Don Draper was taking little Sally to the pediatrician, but this plan has worked out OK for us.

So of course 2012 is the last year we'll have it.

After 2012, we'll be offered two plans -- an 80% plan with a low deductible, 80% coverage in-network and only 60% outside; or an high-deductible plan with an HSA. The difference in employee premiums is about $2000, so perhaps if I put that $2000 into the HSA along with the $500 the company will kick in, it'll offset most of the $2700 deductible for two people...assuming of course that we could pay for all $225 of your standard office visit out of the HSA, rather than the sixty bucks that in Insurance Delusionland is "usual and customary."

This is the world into which Mitt Romney wants to spill all the elderly. Oh he's making noise now about how there'll be a choice, but what senior citizen in his right mind would choose to try to buy an individual insurance policy instead of Medicare?

Keep in mind that Mitt Romney is worth a quarter of a BILLION dollars, and a health insurance premium is like lunch money to him.

And yet he and his buddies just can't kick even one more nickel apiece. Good heavens, no. After all, Mitt Romney worked so hard to get his money -- working hard to buy up companies, dismantle them, and throw their employees in the trash can. And the Koch brothers certainly shouldn't be asked to kick in anything else. After all, they're billionaires, which means they worked harder than we do, right? And the fact that they inherited their business from their father means nothing, right? How about the Walton children? They have $87 billion. And they made it by starting out as greeters, right? Hardly -- they inherited it from old Sam Walton. But they can't kick any more, can they? Not without extreme hardship.

After all, America has to be kept safe for the Walton children, and Prescott Bush's children, and George Romney's son, and Fred Trump's son, and so on.

And if that means that the poor and the sick and the elderly have to lay down and die, so be it.

So where does that leave us? Do we hold our noses and vote again for a President who's already shown that his futile, quixotic quest to be liked by a bunch of greedy, racist bigots is more important than anything to him? Do we stick with a bunch of corporatist Democrats who give lip service to the middle and working class but behind the scenes know full well that it's all over, and they're going to get their piece of the pie before it all goes to shit and the rest of us start killing each other for cans of baked beans?

In the past we could rely on Democrats to at least be the guardians of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, even if they sold us out on everything else. But thanks to the so-called "supercommittee", and Obama's willingness to let mandatory cuts kick in if this small group of intransigent Republians and sellout Democrats can't come up with a compromise (as if that were even possible), and this tendency they have to learn all the wrong lessons when they get clobbered and move even further to the right, it's hard to have any faith in them either.

So we're left with a choice -- we either let it all go to shit now, or have a few more tolerable years before it's all Mad Max.

Hardly what we had in mind in 2008, is it?

What does the U.S. look like if the Tea (Republican) Party wins?

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about the Obama Administration's political people thinking that they know best in the face of all evidence that their boss' presidency is crumbling around him is how vulnerable we all are to this Administration's blind hubris.

Ian Milhiser at Center for American Progress writes about what this country will look like under Tea Party doctrine, and even Americans who support the Tea Party now will be in for a very rude and unpleasant awakening when they see what it looks like:

In the Tea Party’s America, families must mortgage their home to pay for their mother’s end-of-life care. Higher education is a luxury reserved almost exclusively to the very rich. Rotten meat ships to supermarkets nationwide without a national agency to inspect it. Fathers compete with their adolescent children for sub-minimum wage jobs. And our national leaders are utterly powerless to do a thing.

At least, that’s what would happen if the Tea Party succeeds in its effort to reimagine the Constitution as an antigovernment manifesto. While the House of Representatives pushes Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to phase out Medicare, numerous members of Congress, a least one Supreme Court justice, and the governor of America’s second-largest state now proudly declare that most of the progress of the last century violates the Constitution.

It is difficult to count how many essential laws would simply cease to exist if the Tea Party won its battle to reshape our founding document, but a short list includes:

• Social Security and Medicare
  
• Medicaid, children's health insurance, and other health care programs
  
• All federal education programs
  
• All federal antipoverty programs
  
• Federal disaster relief
  
• Federal food safety inspections and other food safety programs
  
• Child labor laws, the minimum wage, overtime, and other labor protections
  
• Federal civil rights laws
  Indeed, as this paper explains, many state lawmakers even embrace a discredited constitutional doctrine that threatens the union itself.
  

What’s at stake

The Tea Party imagines a constitution focused entirely upon the Tenth Amendment, which provides that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”—which is why their narrow vision of the nation’s power is often referred to as “tentherism.” In layman’s terms, the Tenth Amendment is simply a reminder that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers—such as the power to regulate interstate commerce or establish post offices or make war on foreign nations—and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress’s authority.

Social Security? Gone. Medicare? Gone. Medicaid? Gone. Education? Subject to the whims of communities, some of which will send a generation of children out in a world of technological advancement believing that a giant man in the sky created the world in six days and refusing all evidence to the contrary. E coli in your child's hamburger and salmonella in his lettuce and unregulated pesticide residue in the tomato slice?? All A-OK in Tea Party America. Hurricane destroy yourself? It's your own fault for not living in a stronger house. You're on your own. You don't get your paycheck this week? Tough luck. Neighbor leaving threatening letters in your mailbox because he doesn't like people of your religion or race or sexual orientation? Too bad, you have no federal protection, and if the local police hate you too, you are shit out of luck.

That's Tea Party America -- a mean-spirited, venal, hateful, place of raw social Darwinism; a highly ironic condition given the penchant of Teabaggers to call themselves "Chritians" -- so-called Christians who have obviously never read the Sermon on the Mount.

And yet here we are, with a Republican frontrunner who makes George W. Bush look like Mother Teresa by comparison, and an incumbent Democratic president and a campaign team who utterly refuse to look at how dispirited the people who voted for him are. And so it is highly likely that on January 20, 2013, we will be living in a nation that even those who profess to support the Tea Party agenda won't even recognize. And it will be too late.

So here we are, those of us still living in the reality-based community, with a choice of voting for an inept, out-of-touch president who has sold us out to the Republicans at every turn, or a very dangerous theocratic sociopath. Just how dangerous remains to be seen.

Fear and terror and angry speeches, oh my!

There was one election year in which Mr. Brilliant and I were so fed up with electroal politics that we planned a Jamaican vacation for that week. Oh, we finally succumbed and watched a little bit of the election returns on our tiny TV while ensconced in a beachfront room at the old and alas now defunct T-Water Beach Hotel in Negril, but we managed to escape most of it.

I kind of feel that way about the approaching anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but unfortunately I'm stuck here in New Jersey. It almost seems as if politicians and the nation's security apparatus are happy about this opportunity to once again fan the flames of fear and war once again. Yesterday we heard rumblings of, and today lots of mediaflogging about an "unconfirmed credible threat" against New York City bridges and tunnels this weekend, accompanied by the same footage we see over and over again of guys wrapped in what look like rags, "training" on children's monkeybars. It's astounding that after a decade and over a trillion dollars spent on wars that we were told were an integral part of the so-called "war on terror", we're still in a situation where a bunch of bewildered-looking cops with rifles are going to be posted all around the city looking for...what, exactly? Unless we're prepared to stop and search every vehicle using every bridge and tunnel in the city, how do you stop something?

And again -- a bunch of guys in rags training on monkeybars are going to be whipping people into a panic.

It probably won't be the denizens of the city itself. After all, they don't have the luxury of being afraid. What we ARE going to see, I suspect, is another rush of rhetoric in the flyover states and the south against sharia law, and probably a few anti-Muslim hate crimes as well. But in some ways, these dead-enders who still insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist and that the few hundred Muslims in their state are somehow going to turn their entire state into a caliphate, aren't all that different from the terrorists they fear. The world to which they want to return, the world symbolized by the conspicuous and radical Christianity of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, is gone and can never return. It won't be long before every suburban neighborhood has a gay couple raising their children and a house co-owned by five young people who aren't coupled off and a multigenerational immigarnt family living in it. They can promise to return us to their never-existed TV vision of the 1950's, but unless a Rick Perry is prepared to run the entire country by executive order of forced conversion and incarceration/massacre of those who do not conform (and I'm not saying he wouldn't), the forces of a freedom that isn't represented only to corporate greed are already in play.

Andrew Sullivan has a long essay in Newsweek this week that's part of his ongoing mea culpa about having been such an ardent Bushflogger in the early days after the 9/11 attacks. We can grant him his absolution or not as we please, but one tiny excerpt struck me:

From the streets of Tehran to Cairo, it appears that the young Muslim generation does not want to withdraw from the modern world into a cultural and intellectual blind alley forever. They are too busy on Twitter.

There have always been mass movements. Tiananmen Square took place in 1989, long before anyone even thought of something like Twitter. But social networking has certainly made it easy, and the things we viddy on a computer or iPad screen are a window to a different kind of world. In 2001, the web was still largely a "push" medium; today it's participatory and immediate. When young people can see a different world in front of them, it becomes more difficult to talk them into sacrificing themselves for a vague promise of 72 virgins after death. The terrorist dead-enders are still out there, but if we as a nation can just keep from fucking it up, it's just possible that we might be able to help the protesters and fighters in Egypt and Libya and Yemen and every other country that's trying to shake off the despots we've tolerated in the name of oil to pull their nations, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the present. And then our task will be to keep our own from slding back to the past.

I'm not going to be opining much about the 9/11 anniversary, other than just a comparatively dispassionate piece I'll put up on Sunday about my own experiences on that day, because frankly, after a decade of living in a nation governed by one party that is willing to use fear and terror to further its own agenda and another so terrified of that party that it refues to call the sky blue if the other one says it's yellow, I just don't want to relive the last decade. And while New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has taken a lot of crap for limiting the invited guests to Sunday's memorial to the families of those lost, Sunday really should be for them, not for those of us who only had to watch it on TV and then get on with our lives.

And in the midst of all this, President Please-Like-Me was on the teevee again last night, doing another one of his quasi-populist bellowings in front of a Congress that predictably either sat on its hands of applauded furiously depending on which party they represent. The aforementioned Andrew Sullivan is so far into penitence mode that he actually used the name "Harry Truman" in his critique of the speech, so desperate is he to find something strong and resolute in this president. This was Obama's time to say, "You guys fucked this up, I've spent three years trying to fix it, and you've blocked me every step of the way. I'm sick of dealing with you, now here's what we're going to do." But instead he patronized the crowded under-bus crowd with a few crumb-words like "union" and "polluters" while talking about starving Social Security with "payroll tax cuts" (the better to gut it later in his quest to be Nixon in China) and making sure that already highly-skilled unemployed Americans have NO time to go on interviews for jobs that might pay a living wage by making them work for private companies for the pittance that unemployment pays. But hey, at least American companies will have access to cheap labor....and we'll see how many of them actually hire these people at even one penny more than unemployment pays.

Sullivan isn't the only one sold on the speech, but we know this guy gives good speechifying. But as Digby notes, after a bit of lip service paid to liberal ideals, the rest of it was all about cutting spending, making Medicare unavailable to people between the ages of 65 and 67, and tax cuts that are unlikely to get enough fuel into the demand side of the economy to get this stalled-out engine going again.

Happy Friday, everyone.

Why am I not surprised?

Via Americablog comes this little tidbit that won't be reported in the media:

The Keystone XL pipeline, awaiting a thumbs up or down on a presidential permit, would increase the import of heavy oil from Canada's oil sands to the U.S. by as much as 510,000 barrels a day, if it gets built.



Proponents tout it as a boon to national security that would reduce America's dependence on oil from unfriendly regimes. Opponents say it would magnify an environmental nightmare at great cost and provide only the illusion of national benefit.



What's been left out of the ferocious debate over the pipeline, however, is the prospect that if president Obama allows a permit for the Keystone XL to be granted, he would be handing a big victory and great financial opportunity to Charles and David Koch, his bitterest political enemies and among the most powerful opponents of his clean economy agenda.

Because maybe if he shovels a couple more billion dollars into the Koch brothers' pockets they'll be nice to him.



There is no longer anything this President can do to convince me he represents me one tiny iota.

Mr. President, good luck getting enough disaffected whie males to make up for this

It's REALLY crowded under this bus:

Whites and women are a re-election problem for President Barack Obama. Younger voters and liberals, too, but to a lesser extent.



All are important Democratic constituencies that helped him win the White House in 2008 and whose support he'll need to keep it next year.



An analysis of Associated Press-GfK polls, including the latest survey released last week, shows that Obama has lost ground among all those groups since he took office. The review points to his vulnerabilities and probable leading targets of his campaign as he seeks to assemble a coalition diverse enough to help him win re-election in tough economic times.

He had such a coalition in 2008. And the minute he took office, he threw us all under this bus so he could pursue his love for conservative white people.



How's that working out for him?

White independent voters, who divided their support evenly between Obama and McCain in 2008, may be the president's biggest challenge now. Just 3 in 10 white independents say Obama deserves to be re-elected and only 41 percent say he understands the problems of people like them.



Obama didn't win the largest share of white voters in 2008, when they made up 74 percent of the electorate. Still, his inroads were enough to beat McCain.



Fifty-six percent of all whites approved of how he was doing his job in the first three months of his presidency. But that support has fallen, with only 36 percent now liking how he's doing his job, while 59 say Obama deserves to be voted out of office.



In 2008, Obama won the backing of most whites in the Northeast and was competitive in the Midwest and West, outperforming the previous two Democratic nominees. Now, majorities of whites in every region but the Northeast say he deserves to lose in 2012 and that he is not a strong leader.



The outlook is negative for Obama among white voters in the Midwest and West, regions where so many electoral votes are at stake.



More than 6 in 10 white voters who did not graduate say the president deserves to be voted from office, while 53 percent of white college graduates say as much.

Real high-percentage move there, dude.

Head, Desk, =Thunk=

So which is it: Stupidity, laziness, or just plain venality:

Senate Democrats, who are desperate to stimulate the economy but don’t have the money to pass traditional stimulus legislation, will turn to cutting business taxes when they return to Washington this fall.



In doing so, they will try to drive a wedge between business interests and the GOP leadership, who has tried to block almost every element of the Democratic agenda, by pushing a round of corporate tax breaks, say Senate Democratic aides.



The strategy has appeal on two grounds.



The legislation would stimulate the economy at a time when many economists argue the government must step in to revive demand despite it not being politically feasible to pass traditional infrastructure spending bills. It would also force Republican leaders to either endorse the Democratic agenda or block proposals that are popular among corporate leaders and domestic manufacturers.



But the plan is not without pitfalls. Democratic leaders could find centrists and liberals within their caucus divided over how to structure the tax cuts and whether they must be paired with infrastructure spending programs, as some liberals might demand.



Democrats have found themselves at odds with the business lobby for much of their reign in the majority, fighting over healthcare, cap-and-trade and other regulations. And they were disappointed businesses did little to help them in their standoff with House Republicans over raising the debt limit, even though business leaders saw the mere threat of a default as dangerous.



Their new plan could net them the support of groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which traditionally supports Republicans — both politically and financially.



Their first tax proposal is to make the corporate research and development tax credit permanent. The second is to pass an Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit. This would create a 30 percent tax credit for companies that manufacture new clean-energy technologies, which Democratic aides say would help create thousands of new jobs around the country.



A third idea is to extend the payroll tax cut Congress enacted in December and expand it to employers, reducing the cost of labor. And a fourth option is to give employers tax breaks for hiring new employees, an idea Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee panned in 2009 but now seems more attractive.

Corporations are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash and enjoying record-setting profits. What on earth makes these Senate Democrats think that more tax breaks are going to encourage them to open their coffers are hire people? Again, Democrats are buying into Republican memes, in this case the discredited one of supply-side growth. Companies do not hire people out of the goodness of their hearts, they hire people because said people can make them more money. How do comppanies make money? By selling goods and services. To whom do they sell goods and services? To the masses of people who right now aren't buying because they're either unemployed or terrified of losing their jobs. If people aren't buying the goods and services that companies produce, there's no reason to hire people. I don't know why this is so difficult for Senate Democrats to understand.



Or perhaps it isn't, and instead the Democrats in the Senate are just cheap whores, willing to be bought off for far less campaign cash than corporations traditionally shower on Republicans. In the post-Citizens United era, and with all this cash sitting around corporate coffers, there's certainly a lot of cash available to those willing to do the corporations' bidding.



So remind me again: Outside of Dominionist theocracy and scientific denial, what is the difference between Republicans and Democrats where the middle class is concerned?

We can't say we weren't warned

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest, November 2007.

Angry Black Lady over at Balloon Juice is taking the White House's denials at face value, but if you want to say that the White House's position on Social Security is unchanged, I have to ask: Unchanged from when? 2007?

Remind me again why we're supposed to support Democrats

Here in my little town in Outer Whitelandia, a populace that's been asleep for thirty years is finally waking up to the reality of the one-party rule that's been running the town for the last three decades. The primary intersection in town is a bottleneck every single day at rush hour. There are nights when it can take me twenty five minutes to go twenty miles, and another twenty minutes to go two. This intersection is in a residential neighborhood, but a small gas station on the corner has been grandfathered in, and there is a large catering hall on another corner, owned by a guy who has over the last decade been quietly buying up houses on the main drag and letting them fall apart. For the last five years, the first thing you see when you come into town is a house with boarded-up windows and a hole in the roof. There have been rumors that the catering hall puts up its undocumented workers in these hell houses, but they are just rumors.

Now the owner if the catering hall and the owner of the gas station have simultaneously come up with grand plans to turn the gas station into a Wawa-like convenience store/gas and diesel station complex and the dilapidated houses into a strip mall containing a CVS with a drive-thru, a hair salon, and a coffee shop -- while a quarter mile down the road, there is already a half-empty strip mall with plenty of parking on site that has a Rite-Aid, a hair salon, a Dunkin Donuts, and a bagel shop. And finally the citizenry has awakened, even though the local government refuses to allow the public to talk at the zoning board meetings that are supposed to be where people can be heard.

In 2008, the town held its first contested election in thirty years -- and the sheeple in this town voted back in the same people who had been giviing crony contracts to their friends for years. Part of the problem was that in New Jersey, we vote not office-by-office, but on a giant screen where each candidate is in a party's line. So if you tend to vote Republican, as most people in this town do, you are not going to jump around the ballot. It of course didn't help that the Democratic candidate, who had lived in town barely two years, was the brother of one of the biggest Democratic Party hacks in he state.

It's like that in Democratic Party politics. Not a month goes by when someone doesn't tell me to run for office in town, but believe me, you do not want to touch these people or play their game. Every two years, they either refuse to run a candidate to run for Congress against the odious teabagger Scott Garrett, who was a teabagger long before the Tea Party kooks even existed; or else they run a weak candidate and then refuse to support that candidate with money. The New Jersey State Democratic Party, like the natonal party has been under everyone except Howard Dean, is only interested in fighting battles it knows in advance it can win.

And so the stage is set for the travesty that happened in Trenton yesterday, where Governor Gasbag, Chris Christie, succeeded in getting bipartisan support in the state Assembly for a law to gut public worker benefits and remove their ability to collectively bargain, with the help of Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex), who had shepherded the bill through the state Senate on Monday.

Everyone knows that the state pension system is dramatically underfunded, after being stiffed for decades by governors of both parties, What most people don't understand is that the police, firefighters and teachers who receive these pensions also pay in. So when politicians decide to gut these benefits, it's money paid out to these workers that's stolen for other needs -- mostly to keep from having to raise taxes on the wealthiest people in the state.

If the Democrats on the national stage won't stand up for people who pay into Social Security and Medicare all their lives and are then told not to depend on it because they stole all the money; if Democrats won't stand up for the rights of all Americans to be the same under the law; if Democrats won't stand up for the rights of workers; then why on earth should we reward them with our votes?

We know what Republicans are -- greedy, venal, hateful, cold-hearted and devoid of empathy. Republicans will do what Republicans do. We know this. Our problem is not them; it is the Democrats -- the party that increasingly pisses down our backs and then tells us it's raining.

Twitter roundup of reaction to the massive Democratic capitulation budget deal

Via Joe Sudbay:

@ezraklein: The resolution includes rider prohibiting dc from using own $ to help women access abortions. So pp escaped, but dc didn't.

@chrislhayes: Wow. This is bizarro world. LET'S JUST KEEP CUTTING! LET'S CUT IT ALL! LET'S SEE WHAT THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE THINKS ABOUT IT!

@ezraklein: Shorter dems: these cuts we've been resisting and denouncing for months are historic and we're proud to be passing so many of them.

@ezraklein: Listening to this speech, you'd think Obama was the one arguing for larger cuts.

@ezraklein: Boehner's the political winner here. Managed his caucus. Got dems to agree to more than expected. Averted a shutdown. He was very effective.

@MSignorile: It all went exactly according to GOP plan: Demand super super extreme agenda, then settle for merely super extreme agenda.

@marcambinder: Boehner may have caved, but Obama and Reid are now celebrating a budget they roundly trashed months ago.

@mbrownerhamlin: RT @davecatanese: So did Obama just take credit for the "largest annual spending cut in our history"?

@brianbeutler: RT @speechboy71 Obama bragging about largest annual spending cut in history is maybe lowest moment of his presidency

@SamSeder: Millions of Americans asking how long after the start of austerity until the confidence fairies make them rich!

@DavidCornDC: If spending cuts are good/historic--per Obama & Reid tonight--why not have more? Can Ds escape this simplistic take-away? What's the pivot?

@fshakir: On senate floor, harry reid thanks u.s. chamber's tom donahue by name for making budget deal happen.

@ddayen: It'll be fun when job growth reverses over next few months, and GOP blame it on not cutting spending enough, and Dems go grumble grumble

@JC_Christian: rt @speechboy71 At a time of 9% unemployment both parties are working together not to create jobs but to reduce spending & cut econ growth

@GloriaFeldt: RT @blogdiva: the abused wife syndrome befits the Democrats

It makes me wonder if they weren't all in it all along: throw Planned Parenthood out there to give the Democrats cover for capitulating on everything else.

Ezra Klein, who's shown too many signs recently of having gone from being another passionate progressive kid to a measured establishment suckup (not that I blame him, after all, we all sell out sooner or later if we have something someone wants to buy), finds his mojo in his response to this debacle, and what it means for even the short-term future:

The final compromise was $38.5 billion below 2010’s funding levels. That’s $78.5 billion below President Obama’s original budget proposal, which would’ve added $40 billion to 2010’s funding levels, and $6.5 billion below John Boehner’s original counteroffer, which would’ve subtracted $32 billion from 2010’s budget totals. In the end, the real negotiation was not between the Republicans and the Democrats, or even the Republicans and the White House. It was between John Boehner and the conservative wing of his party. And once that became clear, it turned out that Boehner’s original offer wasn’t even in the middle. It was slightly center-left.

But you would’ve never known it from President Obama’s encomium to the agreement. Obama bragged about “making the largest annual spending cut in our history.” Harry Reid joined him, repeatedly calling the cuts “historic.” It fell to Boehner to give a clipped, businesslike statement on the deal. If you were just tuning in, you might’ve thought Boehner had been arguing for moderation, while both Obama and Reid sought to cut deeper. You would never have known that Democrats had spent months resisting these “historic” cuts, warning that they’d cost jobs and slow the recovery.

[snip]

So why were Reid and Obama so eager to celebrate Boehner’s compromise with his conservative members? The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.

And policy defeats are what will matter.

Weak weak weak weak weak.

As usual, Jon Stewart nailed it last Wednesday:

That's worth hanging up on the wall in counted cross-stitch:

Sometimes I think Democrats couldn't get laid -- if they lived next door to a hospice where whose patients' only hope, according to their doctors, would be the laying of Democrats.

Time to stop giving your eyeballs to Huffington Post

I suppose we should have known, given how effortlessly Arianna Huffington went from being a right-wing conservative to being a liberal. We thought it was the persuasive powers of Al Franken, from the "Strange Bedfellows" bit that they did on the old Craig Kilborn-helmed Daily Show. But no, it was just opportunism.

From Veracity Stew:

Bloggers have been coming and going very rapidly over at Huffington Post since Arianna Huffington sold out to AOL last month. There has been mounting speculation about the death of the once liberal-leaning HuffPo in light of editorial changes. Well, we can now confirm that the old HuffPo is dead and something hideous is sprouting in its place. We know this because of the revelation today that right-wing extremist Andrew Breitbart is now blogging for Huffington.

And what has Breitbart chosen to write about in is premiere post? His friend James O’Keefe.

The latest James O’Keefe success story against NPR has taken a predictable pattern — panicked press releases and firings, followed by denunciation of O’Keefe in a belated attempt to discredit him. Naturally, conservatives are crowing about it, but I wanted to give a little perspective to those Huffington Post readers — whatever your political stripe — who share my passion for free speech, honest debate, and fairness in the media.

Yes, folks -- this is what HuffPo has come to -- giving Andrew Breitbart a podium to defend a sniveling little rat-faced git who ought to right now be a prison bitch for a 350-pound mass murderer.

I vowed to stop linking to HuffPo when it was sold to AOL. Now I refuse to even read it.

(via Melina)

Anything...ANYTHING to try to make Republicans like him

This is really getting pathological:

President Obama’s budget will propose cutting in half the program that helps low-income families and senior citizens and disabled pay their heating and air conditioning bills, according to U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who signed a letter Friday urging the president to change his mind.

The cut would drop about 500,000 New Jersey residents from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program program that assisted nearly 1 million state residents last year, Menendez said in a statement released Friday.

"It defies common sense to shut off the heat to seniors and low-income families,’’ Menendez said. "Cutting these resources is colder than this winter. We need to get our fiscal house in order. But we should do it responsibly.’’

It wasn't that long ago that Barack Obama signed off on continued tax cuts for billionaires. And now he wants the poor to freeze in the dark. No sacrifice is too great for Barack Obama's need to have Republicans like him. He appears to care not one whit about the people who actually voted for him, it's all about the Republicans.

I'm about to send an extra $200 to the fuel oil company because we've gone through a lot more oil this year than usual because of this year's cold and snow...and we need the tank filled about three weeks earlier than in most years. I'm lucky in that I can absorb it. But there are many families in this country who can't. And now a Democratic President is about to pull the rug out from under them.

From the "Closing the Barn Door After the Horse Leaves" file

From Barack Obama sitting down with Bill O'Reilly to Blue Dogs, we are now seeing the fruits of the labor of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organizatino founded from the brilliant idea that instead of reminding Americans that most of the government programs they LIKE are liberal ones, Democrats should be more like Republicans. Because being an ersatz Thing B is so much better than being a real and true Thing A.

It took a long time; it took Bill Clinton and NAFTA and Evan Bayh and Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln and the odious Bart Stupak and countless other sellout whores, but the DLC finally realized that given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.

So good riddance to bad rubbish:

The Democratic Leadership Council, the iconic centrist organization of the Clinton years, is out of money and could close its doors as soon as next week, a person familiar with the plans said Monday.

The DLC, a network of Democratic elected officials and policy intellectuals had long been fading from its mid-'90s political relevance, tarred by the left as a symbol of "triangulation" at a moment when there's little appetite for intra-party warfare on the center-right. The group tried -- but has failed -- to remake itself in the summer of 2009, when its founder, Al From, stepped down as president. Its new leader, former Clinton aide Bruce Reed, sought to remake the group as a think tank, and the DLC split from its associated think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute.

But Reed left the DLC last year himself to serve as Vice President Joe Biden's chief of staff, leaving Ed Gresser, a trade expert, to lead the group in the interim. Since then the board "hasn't been able to find someone who wanted to come on in a permanent capacity," a person familiar with the group's woes said, with the central problem the difficulty of raising money for a Democratic group that isn't seen as an ally of the White House.

"With its CEO Bruce Reed joining the Administration, the DLC Board of Directors has decided to suspend operations while it considers what the next phase of the DLC will be," From said in an emailed statement. "The issues the DLC has championed continue to be vital to our country and the DLC will continue to impact them in its next phase. The Democratic Leadership Council has had an historic impact on American politics over the past 25 years. We’re convinced that it will continue to have that impact in the future."

I don't know about you but sites are loading more slowly for me already

Right now, as I sit here, I have Americablog in one tab sitting and waiting for "widget.linkwithin.com". Vagabond Scholar is in another one, waiting for "i4.ytimg.com". The article in the New York Times on how the so-called Democratic majority at the FCC sold us out on net neutrality yesterday won't run at all. It's waiting for "graphics8.nytimes.com". Ah, there it goes...after about a full minute. Wired.com's home page is waiting for "syndication.jobthread.com." CNBC.com took forever to load, waiting for a graphics server.

That didn't take long.

Because it's going to be a different internet from now on, one that belongs to the corporations instead of the people:

Internet providers - WINNERS
* Cable companies like Comcast Corp, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems Corp and big landline providers like AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc

* The rules will not stand in the way of usage-based pricing, allowing cable and other fixed line companies that also serve as high-speed Internet providers to increase rates for subscribers that do bandwidth-heavy tasks.

* Cable subscribers considering dropping their TV service to watch television and movies online may think twice if new pricing schemes push up the cost of streaming content.

* Cable companies are also better off than when the FCC was considering reclassifying broadband under the stricter regulatory regime of existing phone rules.

Wireless carriers - WINNERS
* Verizon Wireless (joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc, AT&T, Sprint Nextel Corp, T-Mobile (U.S. unit of Deutsche Telekom AG

* Wireless carriers would be granted added flexibility under the rules, which acknowledge the tighter bandwidth-constraints mobile broadband faces.

* They would be subject to a looser version of the no-blocking policy, which only bans the blocking of websites and competing voice and video services.

* Mobile broadband could still discriminate against bandwidth-heavy content.

* CTIA, the trade association for the wireless industry, continues to say the rules are unnecessary, but commended the FCC for recognizing the need to regulate mobile broadband differently from landline services.

Content providers - LOSERS
* Google Inc, Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com, Facebook, Netflix Inc

* Video content providers may lose some of the edge they were building over cable companies if downloading content becomes more expensive under usage-based pricing.

* Mobile broadband is not subject to as many network management restrictions as wireline services, creating fewer protections for mobile applications.

Internet users/consumers - MIXED
* Public interest groups Free Press, Public Knowledge and the Media Access Project all complained that the rules would give Internet providers too much power over Internet users.

* This is particularly worrisome, they said, for the poor and minorities who use their cell phones as a primary tool to access the Internet.

* But some industry analysts say the rules will prevent network congestion and allow companies to make sufficient money to invest in upgrading their networks.

* FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said consumers would not see significant changes as the rules are intended to preserve the current openness of the Internet.

So unless the giant corporations who provide content can find a way to say "screw you" to the giant corporations that provide the bandwidth and offer their own distribution networks (which in turn will no doubt discriminate against competetitors in their industry), the internet, which was developed by DARPA for the Department of Defense using OUR taxpayer money, will be solely the province of Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, and the like. If Amazon, Google, Facebook and the like build their own networks, they will favor their own content. From now on, no matter what happens, what we see on the internet is a function of how it contributes to the profits of the corporations who carry the ones and zeroes across the wires and through the air. And government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, continues.

I don't know why they hate him so much, he's doing exactly what they want

I really don't know what this right-wing jihad is against President Obama. He's attempted to be the agent of a health insurance industry shakedown of every American citizen (until a Federal court in Virginia struck that down yesterday). He's kept all of the worst offenses of the Bush Administration in terms of the so-called war on terror and also on civil liberties, he's given massive sums of cash to the banking industry so they can pay huge bonuses to banking executives. He's keeping us in Afghanistan, probably indefinitely (despite the literal last admonition of the late Richard Holbrooke), while the true Bush/Cheney agenda there begins.

And best of all, he's bound and determined to do what no Republican could do -- gut Social Security:

OBAMA: And so the payroll tax provision that is included in this package is going to help spark economic growth that will help. Now, it doesn't solve our medium- and long-term problems, so we're going to still have to make some very tough decisions — and these, too, are going to be unpopular.

And I promise, I'm going to get criticism from Democrats and Republicans throughout the year in terms of the choices that I am going to be forcing Congress to take a square look at. Because, look, the fact of the matter is that for a decade now, we have had the tendency to think that we can keep on having all the services we want and we keep them — can keep cutting taxes as much as we want and that somehow things are going to magically balance out.

The American people understand that's not the case, and so we're going to have to be responsible about thinking: What are the programs we don't need, that don't contribute to growth, don't contribute to competitiveness, don't make sure our kids are — aren't contributing to making sure that our kids are learning and able to compete in this 21st century economy, and which things are vital investments that we have to make?

And that conversation is going to be one that can't just happen in Washington; it's going to happen all across the country. And I'm looking forward to leading that conversation.

INSKEEP: Won't Republicans argue — and, in fact, won't reality argue that any cuts will have to be even deeper because this package that you're pushing for now will mean there's even less government revenue?

OBAMA: Actually, I think that if you talk to economists, both conservative and liberal, what they'll say is the problem is not next year. The problem is, how are we dealing with our medium-term debt and deficit, and how are we dealing with our long-term debt and deficit? And most of that has to do with entitlements, particularly Social Security and Medicaid.

We've made some progress as a consequence of my health care bill in identifying areas where we can start bending the cost curve on health care. But we're going to have some more work to do across the budget.

I think there's going to have to be a fundamentally different approach to things. And I described earlier what I think that approach has to be. It's not an issue of big government versus small government. It's an issue of smart government.

But there are very few people who think that we would be better off if we've got a contracting economy or economy that's growing very little over the next year — that that somehow is going to be good for our deficit.

INSKEEP: Let me ask you about two or three years out. I'm thinking of the 1990s when President Clinton famously said, "The era of big government is over."

Because of the medium- and long-term need to restrain or cut spending, are you going to be in a position where the era of big government is going to be over again; there's going to have to be a fundamentally different approach to things?

OBAMA: I think there's going to have to be a fundamentally different approach to things. And I described earlier what I think that approach has to be. It's not an issue of big government versus small government. It's an issue of smart government.

You know, when — when families sit around the kitchen table, they say to themselves, what are the things we have to have? College education for our kids. Paying our mortgage. Getting the roof repaired. A new boiler. What are the things that would be nice to have? A vacation. Eating out. Some new clothes. And if they can afford it, they'd buy things that they'd like to have. But the first thing they do is take care of the things that we have to have.

And under that category, I'd put things like research and development, education, making sure that we're sending our kids to college, rebuilding our infrastructure to compete on the 21st century, making sure that this country is safe.

The other stuff, then, we have to debate and figure out, can we get by with a little bit less in some of these other spending categories? And that's going to be a tough discussion, but it's one I’m confident we can have.

You'll — when — when we look at the deficit and the debt, I — I think it's important to understand this doesn't need to be Armageddon. This — this is not a situation where we've got to slash and burn everything. It does mean we've got to make choices. And it means that discussions have to be serious and they've got to be based on fact.

We — we're not going to be able to deal with our deficit just by eliminating foreign aid, for example, which some people suggest. Well, you know what? That only accounts for 1 percent of our budget. It's not going to happen just because we eliminate earmarks. I happen to think that that's a bad way of doing business, but earmarks account for 1 percent or less of the federal budget.

We've got to look at a whole range of things — where the money goes. And that includes entitlements; that includes defense; that includes a whole host of discretionary spending where we can probably do more and do it smarter with less money, if we are actually making some tough choices.

If anyone actually believes that defense is going to take this hit, guess again. The defense industry puts too much money into the pockets of Washington politicians to take a hit. And isn't it funny how Social Security is now called an "entitlement" -- as if no one pays into it but expects a handout.

Tell you what: Give me the almost $200K that I and my employers have put into Social Security over my working life, with accumulated returns according to the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1975, and I'll shut up about Social Security.

I wonder what the teabaggers would do if Obama actually WERE a socialist...

...instead of the cowardly corporatist tool he is:

A quest to get Barack Obama to shout his commitment to solar power from the roof tops - by re-installing vintage solar panels at the White House - ended in disappointment for environmental campaigners today.

Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, had led a group of environmental activists to Washington in a bio-diesel van hoping to persuade Obama to re-install a set of solar panels originally put up by Jimmy Carter.

The actual Carter-era solar panels - which weigh in at 55 kilograms and are nearly 2 metres long - are out-dated now. But campaigners had hoped that the White House would embrace at least the symbolism of going solar - much like Michelle Obama kicked off her healthy food movement by planting a vegetable garden.

"Clearly, a solar panel on the White House roof won't solve climate change - and we'd rather have strong presidential leadership on energy transformation. But given the political scene, this may be as good as we'll get for the moment," McKibben said in a Washington Post comment this morning.

A California company Sungevity had offered to equip the White House with the latest technology.

But the White House declined - twitchy perhaps about inviting any comparison to one-term Democratic president Carter in the run-up to the very difficult mid-term elections in November.

Pathetic. Just fucking pathetic. Here, folks, is Democratic ineptitude in full flower. God forbid we should point out that it isn't 1980 anymore, we've just had the hottest summer on record, even former climate change skeptics are coming on board, and those who aren't are either Christopaths or guys like Limbaugh and Beck making millions of dollars a year off of the willfully ignorant and the terminally stupid. Because that would require EFFORT, and it would require LEADERSHIP, and oh, no, we can't have any of THAT. Because it's SO much more important to try to win over people who will NEVER, EVER, EVER IN A MILLION YEARS VOTE FOR YOU.

Goddess almighty, would someone please send this man a SPINE?

What makes you think they will use this money for hiring?

So President Doing The Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting a Different Result still thinks that more business tax cuts are going to spur hiring:

With just two months until the November elections, the White House is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks - potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars - to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

Among the options under consideration are a temporary payroll-tax holiday and a permanent extension of the now-expired research-and-development tax credit, which rewards companies that conduct research into new technologies within the United States.

Administration officials have struggled to develop new economic policies and an effective message to blunt expected Republican gains in Congress and defuse complaints from Democrats that President Obama is fumbling the issue most important to voters. Following Obama's vacation and focus on foreign policy in recent weeks, White House advisers have arranged a series of economic events for the president next week, including two trips to swing states and a news conference.

"We'll continue to do everything we can, understanding that recovery will require persistent effort. There are no silver bullets," senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said in an interview Thursday. "At the same time, we have to make clear our ideas and theirs, and the fact that the Washington Republicans, having helped create this recession, have attempted to block our every effort to deal with it."

And they will continue to do so. From the very beginning, the Administration has implemented economic policy designed to try to ward off Republican criticism (which comes anyway) and which relies on Republican arguments that if you just shovel enough cash into the pockets of already ridiculously wealthy corporate executives, that they will share it by hiring people. What on earth makes them think this? Certainly not the world of reality:

Anyone wondering where all the economy's jobs are might want to look into piggy banks of the world's biggest companies.

Cash is gushing into companies' coffers as they report what's shaping up to be the third-consecutive quarter of sharp earnings increases. But instead of spending on the typical things, such as expanding and hiring people, companies are mostly pocketing the money and stuffing it under their corporate mattresses.

Non-financial companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 have a record $837 billion in cash, S&P says. That's enough to pay 2.4 million people $70,000-a-year salaries for five years. For context, 2.2 million to 2.8 million jobs were saved or created by the $862 billion stimulus that President Obama signed into law in February 2009, according to a report released in April from the Council of Economic Advisers.

Rather than investing in their future, companies are piling up cash and collecting practically zero interest on the money, hoping there will be a better time to invest later.

Barack Obama could come up with a plan to cut business taxes to zero, eliminate the Department of Education, the FDA, the EPA, and every other government agency that Republicans say "stifles business", and they would STILL call him a socialist communist Muslim terrorist. For nearly two years we have seen an Administration completely in thrall to Wall Street in the form of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, to the worst elements of the Republican Party, and to ConservoDems who care more about keeping their government paycheck than about doing what's right. The tragedy is that he's going to pay a heavy price for selling out the middle class this November, and the even worse tragedy is that he's going to respond by shoveling even MORE cash into the pockets of already rich corporate executives.

The slogan of the Democratic Party and this president this season is "We suck but they're crazy." Sorry, but that just won't cut it. Perhaps it's time to just sit back, figure we had a good, if too-short run, grab the popcorn, and watch as it all falls apart. Because there is no one in power who will stop it.

Same shit, different guy

It really astounds me the way the teabaggers are painting Barack Obama as some kind of Marxist, eager to remake America into a collectivist paradise.

We should only be so lucky.

Instead it seems we have yet another figurehead, doing the business of his corporate masters, no doubt with visions of eight-figure paychecks in the future dancing in his head.

Do with this what you will:

Indeed, PhD toxicologist Ricki Ott noted in a New York Times Op Ed that dispersants like Corexit can persist in the ocean for decades:

[Dispersants] can linger in the water for decades, especially when used in deep water, where low temperatures can inhibit biodegradation.

Some experts have also said that the use of Corexit has prolonged by decades the presence of toxic crude oil, because the dispersant sinks the oil beneath the ocean surface, where it cannot be quickly broken down by sun, waves and microbes.

And the head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Ecology Department - Terry Hazen - argues that the use of dispersants can delay recovery of ocean ecosystems by decades:

Hazen has more than 30 years experience studying the effects of oil spills. He says the oil will be damaging enough; toxic dispersants will just make it worse. He points to the 1978 Amoco Cadiz Spill off the coast of Normandy as an example. He says areas where dispersants were used still have not fully recovered, while areas where there was no human intervention are now fine.

As Hazen has noted:

"The untreated coastal areas were fully recovered within five years of the Amoco Cadiz spill," says Hazen. "As for the treated areas, ecological studies show that 30 years later, those areas still have not recovered."

Admittedly, chemicals other than Corexit were used in the Amoco Cadiz spill. But the precautionary tale still holds: chemicals should not be applied to oil spills unless scientists are positive that they will provide a net long-term benefit.

Disturbingly, Corexit is apparently still being sprayed in the Gulf. See this, this and this

But here's what's interesting: For all the hue and cry and rending of garments that's going on among the denizens of Wingnutistan about Barack Obama over things that are demonstrably not true, we have an increasing number of scientists willing to speak out about the still-unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (claims by the Administration notwithstanding), and there's not a peep out of them about the poison being unleashed by Obama's current Head Corporate Boss, BP. Of course to join the outcry would be to acknowledge that there is no "invisible hand" making corporations ultimately do the public good and that the free market doesn't always work for the benefit of all. And we mustn't have anything get in the way of our ideology.

Meanwhile, here in Sanityville, it looks like Mr. Brilliant was right all along: elections are only here to make you THINK you have a choice.

Barack Obama really, really, really, really WANTS to destroy Social Security

I always knew that he wasn't the raging leftist he was painted to be. I took a lot of flak from a lot of people during the primaries for not seeing Barack Obama as the progressive savior we'd been waiting for. That the guy I supported turned out to be a personal trainwreck doesn't change the fact that we found out everything we needed to know about Barack Obama in 2004, when he sat on his hands when the late, great Stephanie Tubbs-Jones needed a Senator to co-sign her objection to certifying the highly suspect Ohio election results, and then selected the odious sellout Joe Lieberman as his mentor.

Oh, I had some hopes about him; not the "hopey-changey" stuff that Sarah Palin likes to mock, but some hope that perhaps he would feel the responsiblity that accompanied the work of the people who got him elected. When he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act, that hope was enhanced somewhat. But by the end of his first year in office, it became clear that Barack Obama was always going to be more concerned with being conciliatory towards those who hated him and would never regard him as a legitimate president than with the concerns of those who got him elected.

But despite my doubts about Barack Obama, even I never dreamed that he'd be so bound and determined to be the guy who presided over the destruction of Social Security. How else to explain why he not only named the known Social Security opponent Alan Simpson to HEAD up his "deficit commission", but plans to keep him even after Simpson's "macaca moment" the other day?

Krugman:

When you have a commission dedicated to the common good, and the co-chair dismisses Social Security as a “milk cow with 310 million tits,” you either have to get rid of him or admit that you’re completely, um, cowed by the right wing, that IOKIYAR rules completely.

And no, an apology won’t suffice. Simpson was completely in character here; it was perfectly consistent with everything else he’s said, and with his previous behavior. He has to go.

The White House, predictably, won't have it:

At the White House Wednesday deputy communications director Jennifer Psaki, said, “Alan Simpson has apologized, and while we regret and do not condone his comments, we accept his apology and he will continue to serve.”

And so, we are left with only one conclusion: Barack Obama is keeping Alan Simpson, a known opponent of Social Security, whose disrespect for a group of women also shows him to be a misogynist, on the Comission because he agrees with Simpson's goals.

Barack Obama: Destroyer of Social Security. It's obviously what he wants. And if he doesn't, he'd damn well better start showing with DEEDS, not speeches, that it isn't. Or else the hell with it -- let Sarah Palin become president, with Sharron Angle as her #2. I'll grab the popcorn, watch the end game, and figure I've had a good run. At least with the Republicans I KNOW how badly they're going to fuck things up.

The real question is why the Democrats refuse to point this out

Robert Creamer outlines just what Republicans plan to do if they regain control over Congress. Not one of these plans is supported by the American people, but with a media apparatus that is perfectly willing to hammer over and over again that the sky is really green in the form of Fox News, and a larger media environment that seems to want to emulate it, we can't rely on media to expose the Republican agenda for what it really is -- to return us to the halcyon days of 1900, when the rich were rich and everyone else was left to either serve them, or scramble for scraps in filthy streets.

Here's what we have to look forward to:

* Meet Congressman Paul Ryan. Ryan is the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee. If the Republicans once again take control of the House, he will be the Chair of the Budget Committee. Ryan believes -- and says out loud -- that Medicare, one of the most popular Federal programs in history, should be abolished and replaced with vouchers for private insurance. Let's recall that one of the ways Republicans stirred up opposition to health insurance reform was by falsely accusing Democrats of wanting to cut Medicare. They convinced some unwitting seniors that "Government" should keep its hands off Medicare -- which is, of course, a "Government" program. Democrats need to make it crystal clear in this campaign that Republicans -- who opposed Medicare from its inception -- actually want to abolish the program and hand over control of health care for America's seniors to the same private insurance companies responsible for driving up rates three times faster than wages while their profits have exploded.

* Congressman John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, has endorsed another Ryan proposal to raise the retirement age of Social Security to 70 years old -- a proposal that might go over fine with a guy like Boehner who makes speeches for a living. But it won't be very popular at all with someone who has laid bricks, or run an earth mover, or waited tables for forty-five years.

* The whole Republican crew wants to resurrect the failed Bush proposal to "privatize" Social Security. The defeat of Bush's privatization plan was the turning point in the Bush Presidency. It was all downhill from there. Yet -- whether it's to pad the investment accounts of their friends on Wall Street or because they are "private markets uber alles true believers" -- the Republicans want to try it again. Only this time retirees won't have to work very hard to imagine what it would have been like if their Social Security checks had plummeted in value the way their 401K's did when the market collapsed just two years ago.

* The Republicans want to weaken and repeal the new law to rein in the recklessness of the big Wall Street banks. Most Republicans and Democrats voted to bail out the big banks to prevent a 1930's style market collapse. The difference is that Democrats supported legislation to rein in their recklessness -- that had cost 8 million Americans their jobs -- and assure that a bailout was never allowed to happen again. But with very few exceptions, the Republicans voted to a person against holding Wall Street accountable. Given a chance, they plan to team up with their pals on Wall Street to free them to return to their reckless ways at will. In fact, they told the titans of Wall Street as much in fundraising meetings, where those "masters of the Universe" were asked to ante up. Republicans claim to oppose more Wall Street bailouts, but they refuse to support legislation that would prevent one in the future and hold Wall Street accountable. That -- coupled with those big contributions from Wall Street -- is a position that is very difficult for average voters to swallow. In fact, the polling says it's down right toxic.

* Republicans have consistently voted against extending unemployment benefits to workers who have been laid off because of Bush-era policies and the recklessness of Wall Street. Remember, people who get unemployment benefits -- by definition -- are looking for jobs that the economy doesn't provide. In addition, many Republicans actually believe that the best way to spur employment is to lower the minimum wage.

* Finally, meet Congressman Joe Barton. If the Republicans win back control of Congress, he would once again most likely serve as the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee -- the Committee that oversees the oil industry. Congressman Barton has never met an oil company he doesn't like. In fact, he's the guy who actually apologized to BP when they were forced by the Obama Administration to take economic responsibility for the disastrous Gulf oil spill. As a political matter, that's like apologizing to Jack the Ripper.

Now that last one is probably a lost cause already, since Idiot America has already moved on to newer shinier objects like Mel Gibson's meltdown now that tar balls washing up on beaches and dead wildlife and parts of the Gulf of Mexico no longer supporting life are yesterday's news. But when Ron Smallcomb of Mountaintop, PA finds out that he now has to work until he's seventy, and the young worker in his thirties finds out in ten years that his "privatized", "invested" Social Security "account" has only gained 2.91 percent over the last decade BEFORE fees, they might think differently. But it will be too late then.

I'm really starting to believe he's just in it for a cushy job after leaving office

Look, I get that Barack Obama is no liberal. I've gotten that for a long time. I've also gotten for a long time that he wants desperately for the people who will hate him no matter what he does to change their minds, and doesn't give a shit about those of us who put him in office. I get that. But there's no other explanation other than sheer opportunism for even considering this:

A leading big-business group, responding to a request from top White House aides, last month submitted to President Obama's Office of Management and Budget a 54-page hit list that takes aim at regulations protecting the environment, workers, consumers and investors.

Having asked the Business Roundtable for its advice, the White House was then faced with the question of what to do with it.

Discussions between the two parties are ongoing, the White House says. And their conclusion may depend on who wins the ongoing power struggle between the president's top political gurus and his policy apparatus.

The push to placate business leaders is being led by Obama's political team -- in this case, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

But just like the advice the White House politicos are giving Obama about pressing forward with deficit reduction in the midst of a jobs crisis, the idea of loosening the reins on big business -- at a time when the cost of deregulation has been so viscerally on display in the Gulf of Mexico -- strikes some observers as spectacularly tone-deaf. Not just bad policy, but bad politics.

"What we're in the middle of is a string of regulatory failures that the Obama administration seems very insensitive to," said Rena Steinzor, a law professor at the University of Maryland and president of the pro-regulation Center for Progressive Reform. She cited the financial crisis, the Massey Energy mine disaster, and of course the BP oil spill.

Steinzor told the Huffington Post she suspects Obama's political team is not motivated by the optics in this case, nor by an overwhelming devotion to the free market -- but rather by money.

"They want campaign contributions. They want to win," she said. "I think they definitely are trying to make sure that they don't fall behind in the fundraising race. I think they're quite worried about that," she said.

"If I were them, this isn't what I'd be worried about. I'd worry about people being so angry about BP that they wouldn't vote for the president."

If he continues to throw his base under the bus, there won't be enough money in the world to get him re-elected.