Rift between Boehner and Cantor on debt negotiations? And Obama gets snippy (in a good way)

Wash Post:

Since pulling the plug on the deal, Boehner has been largely silent in the meetings, leaving House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to present details of the House’s position. On Tuesday, people in both parties said, Obama tried to reestablish Boehner’s primacy.

Cantor, who is advocating a smaller deal, at one point demanded that Obama offer the details of his vision for a “grand bargain.”

“Where’s your paper?” he asked angrily.

Obama snapped back: “Frankly, your speaker has it. Am I dealing with him, or am I dealing with you?”

Snap! Read the rest of this post...

Murdoch's News Corp received nearly $5 billion in tax refunds

Why are US taxpayers giving News Corp a free ride? Taxpayers shouldn't be supporting the filth that is produced by that company.

Over the past four years Murdoch's U.S.-based News Corp. has made money on income taxes. Having earned $10.4 billion in profits, News Corp. would have been expected to pay $3.6 billion at the 35 percent corporate tax rate. Instead, it actually collected $4.8 billion in income tax refunds, all or nearly all from the U.S. government.

The relevant figure is the cash paid tax rate. This is the net amount of corporate income taxes actually paid after refunds. For those four years, it was minus 46 percent, disclosure statements show.

Even on an accounting basis, which measures taxes incurred but often not actually paid for years, News Corp. had a tax rate of under 20 percent, little more than half the 35 percent statutory rate, company disclosures examined by Reuters show. News Corp. had no comment.

Read the rest of this post...

Mormons are seeking the right to polygamy

NYT:

Kody Brown is a proud polygamist, and a relatively famous one. Now Mr. Brown, his four wives and 16 children and stepchildren are going to court to keep from being punished for it.

The family is the focus of a reality TV show, “Sister Wives,” that first appeared in 2010. Law enforcement officials in the Browns’ home state, Utah, announced soon after the show began that the family was under investigation for violating the state law prohibiting polygamy.

On Wednesday, the Browns are expected to file a lawsuit to challenge the polygamy law.

Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: "Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity"

The Professor (my emphasis):

The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. Yes, there are huge political obstacles to action — notably, the fact that the House is controlled by a party that benefits from the economy’s weakness. But political gridlock should not be conflated with economic reality.

Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity — a choice rationalized by an ever-shifting set of excuses.

And his list of those excuses (read for the explanations):

Excuse No. 1: Just around the corner, there’s a rainbow in the sky.
Excuse No. 2: Fear the bond market.
Excuse No. 3: It’s the workers’ fault.
Excuse No. 4: We tried to stimulate the economy, and it didn’t work.

None of those excuses is remotely true, as his article explains. Most are 180 degrees wrong.

But I'm saving my fire (and his) for the conclusion:

Listening to what supposedly serious people say about the economy, you’d think the problem was “no, we can’t.” But the reality is “no, we won’t.” And every pundit who reinforces that destructive passivity is part of the problem.

The "we" is pretty much everyone, including the administration.

"No we won't" — that pretty much says it. Or, in the vernacular, he's just not that into you. (More on that here.)

GP Read the rest of this post...

Matt Taibbi: "Obama doesn’t want a progressive deficit deal"

I'm not posting this because it's Taibbi (though there's that added great-prose benefit). I'm posting this because he's right — and everything in Obama's behavior points to it.

Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone (h/t David Sirota; my emphases):

That Republicans are holding up what should be a routine, if unpleasant, decision to raise the debt ceiling in order to portray themselves as the uncompromising defenders of the budget-balancing faith (a howling idiocy in itself, given what went on during the Bush years) is obvious to most rational observers. It's the obvious play for the lame-duck party entering an election year, and they're playing it, with the requisite hysteria.

But what is becoming equally obvious, to both sides, is that the Obama White House is using this same artificial calamity to pitch its own increasingly rightward tilt to voters in advance of the 2012 elections.

It has been extremely interesting in the last weeks to see observers on both sides of the aisle make this point. Just yesterday, the inimitable New York Times conservative Ross Douthat listed Obama's not-so-secret rightward push as a the first in a list of reasons why the Republicans should dig in even more, instead of making a sensible deal[.]

And what is Mr. Douthat saying? Stuff like this:

Barack Obama wants a right-leaning deficit deal. For months, liberals have expressed frustration with the president’s deficit strategy. The White House made no effort to tie a debt ceiling vote to the extension of the Bush tax cuts last December. It pre-emptively conceded that any increase in the ceiling should be accompanied by spending cuts. And every time Republicans dug in their heels, the administration gave ground.

The not-so-secret secret is that the White House has given ground on purpose. ... Obama’s political team wants to use the leverage provided by those cra-a-a-zy Tea Partiers to make Democrats live with bigger spending cuts than they normally would support.

That's Ross Douthat speaking, not Taibbi.

Matt thinks Douthat thinks that the Right should hold out for an even-more-rightward deal than Obama wants, in a game that could be called "Are you more Conservative than this? How about this? Now how about this?" (my formulation), with each side upping than ante until (Douthat presumes) Obama is dragged too far right for even his political team, or election chances.

In the meantime, Taibbi notes that Paul Krugman is saying much the same thing, but from the left:

Some of what we’re hearing is presumably coming from the political team, whose members seem to believe that a move toward Republican positions, reminiscent of former President Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” in the 1990s, is the key to Mr. Obama’s re-election.

(Our post on that article will be up shortly.)

In other words, Obama's mask is slipping, and the scales are falling rapidly from increasingly perceptive eyes. After an excellent mulling of these thoughts, Taibbi concludes the obvious, by saying what's finally obvious:

The blindness of the DLC-era "Third Way" Democratic Party continues to be an astounding thing. For more than a decade now they have been clinging to the idea that the path to electoral success is social liberalism plus laissez-faire economics – in other words, get Wall Street and corporate America to fund your campaigns, and get minorities, pro-choice and gay marriage activists (who will always frightened into loyalty by the Tea Party/Christian loonies on the other side) to march at your rallies and vote every November. They've abandoned the unions-and-jobs platform ... That [Democrats] won't do these things [support unions, wages, fair taxes, and the health & safety net] because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that they want to go into that briar patch.

That's Taibbi — color him unconfused and fully de-scaled (ocularly speaking).

But wait, maybe Team Smarter Than You is onto something. Maybe that Third Way, get-the-undecideds thing will work like it did with Clinton. What do you think?

Sorry, that answer's too easy. (1) Clinton rode a bubble; Obama's riding a bust.

(2) These are your discerning undecideds, courtesy of Chris Hayes, writing about his experience canvassing for voters in Wisconsin in 2004:

Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We're giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn't have much luck.

Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics. Political junkies tend to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don't care enough to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, "relatively low-information, relatively disengaged," the lack of engagement wasn't a sign that they didn't care. After all, if they truly didn't care, they wouldn't have been planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics, or at least judged it to be important; they just didn't enjoy politics. ...

Most undecided voters ... seem to view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always eventually get it done, I'll never do it before every last piece of clean clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible.

Not the brightest, most discerning beasts in the forest.

Obama's gearing up his $1 billion ad campaign (sorry, "2012 Democratic Presidential Reelection effort"), all aimed at these attentive, distinguishing minds. And, sorry to say, like most Democrats, he's aiming at their minds.

Reread that Hayes piece. Would you aim at their minds? The Republicans, should they acquire a real candidate, will aim a touch lower down.

GP Read the rest of this post...

McConnell and Boehner adopt new tactic: Claim debt ceiling increase is superfluous thing Obama wants but isn’t really necessary

Prepare for the markets to take a nose dive.  Senate GOP leader McConnell and House GOP leader Boehner are now claiming that the debt ceiling increase is President's Obama's problem, not theirs.  They're treating it as if it's some optional thing, like going into Iraq, that Obama is asking Congress to do, but it's not really necessary. Thus, if Congress is to pass the debt ceiling increases, the President should cuts lots and lots of programs, with no tax increases, because the President already got what he wanted, a debt ceiling increase.

As you may have noticed, John Boehner has now taken to claiming that the debt ceiling is Obama’s problem alone. It’s “his problem,” Boehner claimed today. He also suggested that the GOP’s willingness to discuss raising the debt ceiling is in itself a major concession, and that a hike is necessary only because Obama has asked for it.

“Most Americans would say that a balanced approach is a simple one: The administration gets its debt-limit increase, and the American people get their spending cuts and their reforms,” Boehner said (emphasis mine). Mitch McConnell has adopted a similar tack, claiming this weekend that the need to raise the debt ceiling is the result of a “request that the president made of us.”

The GOP knows its mark. The President is being played. And he has a history of caving. And the Republicans know it. So the Republicans are going to move the goal post as far to the right as they can, going so far as to claim that even talking about possibly raising the debt ceiling is some major concession on their part, to run out the clock and force the President to cave again.

President Obama is being played. How he responds will tell the public a good deal about whether he's the man for the job when November 2012 rolls around. America admires strength. Let's hope we see some. Read the rest of this post...

Ezra Klein: More on Obama’s "compromising"—Cut Social Security, cut Medicare, extend many of the Bush tax cuts

Reporters have started digging into what Obama put on the table as part of his $4 trillion "Grand Bargain" offer to Republicans. First, we heard from Sam Stein at Huffington Post that Medicare was on the table and the knife was poised to cut it. All Boehner needed to do was say Yes.

Now there's more from Ezra Klein. Stunning what Obama tried to give away (h/t Digby and Matt Stoller; my emphasis):

I knew the White House wanted a compromise on the debt ceiling. I just didn't expect them to do quite so much, well, compromising.

Here's what appears to have been in the $4 trillion deal they offered the Republicans: A two-year increase in the Medicare eligibility age. Chained-CPI, which amounts to a $200 billion cut to Social Security benefits. A tax-reform component that would raise $800 billion and preempt the expiration of the Bush tax cuts -- which would mean, for those following along at home, that the deal would only include half as much revenue as the fiscal commission recommended, and when you add the effect of making the Bush tax cuts a permanent part of the code, would net out to a tax cut of more than $3 trillion when compared to current law.

That last bit apparently killed the deal. But it was actually the biggest concession on the table. ... The deal Obama offered Boehner would've traded away the option to force much more in revenues later in order to get slightly more in revenues now. And it would have thrown in a slew of entitlement cuts and spending cuts as a sweetener.

Note the word "sweetener." Never thought of catfood as a sweetener, but maybe I don't shop at those dollar stores enough.

Klein's piece is titled "Why Liberals Should Thank Eric Cantor". Indeed. As I tweeted yesterday, "Are we counting on Repubs to defeat O for us?" Seems Klein is on board with that.

About those Bush tax cuts, Digby adds:

Ezra mentions in passing that the administration has no intention of letting all the Bush tax cuts expire, which seems to set off alarms. But I'm fairly sure he's talking about the middle class tax cuts. The problem in 2012, as it was last winter when they faced this last time, is that the cuts needed to be decoupled when the Democrats held congress and had some juice during the early days of the economic crisis. Had they been smart enough to permanently extend the middle class cuts at the time and leave only the tax cuts for the wealthy n a temporary basis, the Republicans would be in a much weaker position. As it is, they'll hold the middle class tax cuts hostage in the next lame duck just as they did before.

I'll take issue only with the bolded phrase. I'm becoming cynical enough to think that they were smart enough — to fool us into thinking they were dumb enough to do it wrong.

I think the failure to de-couple the two chunks of Bush tax cuts was deliberate. After all, Occam's Switchblade says he's doing it because he wants to. Paul Krugman agrees.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Why does the Senate Chaplain make $150k and have staff making $129k, $86k, and $52k?

Legistorm, annual salaries:

Chaplain: $150,698
Chief of Staff: $129,223
Director of Communications: $86,056
Executive Assistant: $52,828

I've often wondered why God doesn't answer all my prayers. And now it's hit me: I don't have an $86,000 a year communications director helping me grease the celestial wheels.

I get that that religious politically correctness won't permit the Congress to entirely phase out the Chaplain's office, but give me a break.  The guy opens up the day with a prayer and he's getting $150k a year, and need a chief of staff, a publicist, and a secretary to pull it off?  One of the more pious members of Congress could simply offer the prayer themselves.

Check out the "other" responsibilities of the Senate chaplain:

In addition to opening the Senate each day in prayer, Chaplain Black’s duties include counseling and spiritual care for the Senators, their families and their staffs, a combined constituency of six thousand people. Chaplain Black’s days are filled with meeting Senators about spiritual and moral issues, assisting Senators’ staffs with research on theological and biblical questions, teaching Senate Bible study groups, encouraging such groups as the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, and facilitating discussion and reflection small groups among Senators and staff.

Let's walk through this a moment.

1. He offers spiritual counseling to Senators, their families, and staff. Why? They don't have their own priests, preachers, rabbis and mullahs? Seriously, how many Americans get, need, a priest on the job because they can't just pick up the phone and call the head of their church if they have a question?

2. What do you mean he's helping staff research theological and biblical questions? If the research is for the staff's own personal religion then the taxpayers shouldn't be paying for it. And if the research is to influence legislation, then that's just creepy.

3. Bible study? Because, again, Senators and staff can't just go to church on Sunday like everybody else?  If they want to hold a bible study at work, they can pay for it themselves.  No one is subsidizing my personal bible study on the job.

4. "Encouraging the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast." At $150k a year, that had better be a lot of encouraging.

This office seems superfluous at best.  But this is America, and we dare not suggest that the line item for God be cut.  God forbid. Read the rest of this post...

Arizona state senator points loaded gun at journalist

Did she say "cute" or "clueless"?

"Oh, it's so cute," Klein said, as she unzipped the loaded Ruger from its carrying case to show a reporter and photographer. She was sitting on a leather couch in a lounge, just outside the Senate chamber.

She showed off the laser sighting by pointing the red beam at the reporter's chest. The gun has no safety, she said, but there was no need to worry.

"I just didn't have my hand on the trigger," she said.

Read the rest of this post...

Another lawsuit against News Corp

The shareholders are furious and now an English detective is suing the Murdoch paper for harassment. Expect a lot more of this in the near future.

A former Scotland Yard detective plans to sue publishers of the News of the World for harassment and hacking his phone while he was investigating a high-profile axe murder, their lawyer said on Tuesday.

Mark Lewis, a lawyer for the policeman, Dave Cook, and for his wife Jacqui Hames, told Reuters he believed the planned suit against News Group Newspapers would be the first action against the now-defunct weekly for the physical trailing and electronic surveillance of a police officer by journalists working for it.

The case is particularly sensitive for the paper, since the man accused of the axe murder, in 1987, later worked for the News of the World as an investigator.

Meanwhile, News Corp has lost $7 billion in four trading days due to the scandal. It's an interesting turn of events that News Corp is now the story as opposed to the sleazy trash that they normally produce. Read the rest of this post...

Keith Olbermann: "I was blackmailed" by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp

Last night, Keith Olbermann finished his show by mentioning he was blackmailed by News Corp.  It's at the very end of this clip, at around the 15 minute mark. More tonight apparently.

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Obama headlined as "compromiser" and "centrist" (but, we’re reminded, he always was)

No doubt, there are lots of high fives around the White House today. Their crack communications team finally, finally got the headlines they wanted. A couple of examples:

LA Times: At news conference, Obama portrays himself as compromiser in chief

NY Times: Obama Grasping Centrist Banner in Debt Impasse

Centrist. Compromiser. Those words are like gold to Team Obama, designed to help with outreach to independent voters -- with the assumption that the Democratic base will just suck it up.

And, we get confirmation from the top political adviser, via the NYT, that this is the real Obama -- and is not based on "repositioning":

“There was never a discussion of, ‘Let’s sit down and reposition ourselves.’ There were discussions of returning to first principles and the things that motivated him to run,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior political strategist. “This is what he talked about all through the 2008 campaign — that we need to put solving problems ahead of scoring political points, and we have to think about not just the next election but the next generation.”

This is who he is. Now.

The next meeting of the President and Congressional leaders will take place at 3:45 PM ET today. Read the rest of this post...

Murdoch’s News Corp may face federal investigation over bribery laws

The Democrats really need to start making noise about a full investigation of News Corp in the USA. News Corp allegedly tried to bribe a NYC police officer. There is too much that suggests this scandal was only limited to the UK. It would be fair and balanced to investigate. If they have nothing to hide, there should be no need for concern, as they so often like to say.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp could face probes by U.S. authorities for possibly violating bribery laws, compounding the media mogul's problems after a phone-hacking scandal in Britain.

The Obama administration has significantly stepped up enforcement of anti-bribery laws in the last two years, winning big settlements from the likes of Daimler AG and BAE Systems Plc by focusing on bribes they paid to foreign officials to win lucrative contracts.

Bribes for business have represented the bulk of these anti-bribery cases brought by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is unclear whether U.S. authorities would use scarce resources to probe News Corp over bribes allegedly paid to British police and other officials for information that became news scoops.

Read the rest of this post...

EU coming to grips with Greek default, now look to Spain and Italy

The euro took a fast tumble yesterday and the EU has finally recognized that the Greek bailout is not going to work. The much larger issue now is the declining situations in Spain and Italy. There is not enough money to bailout either, let alone both. Bloomberg:

European finance ministers revived the prospect of bond buybacks to ease Greece’s plight and declined to rule out a temporary default, struggling to contain the debt crisis as investors pounded Italy, the continent’s third-largest economy.

Prodded by investors and the European Central Bank, the euro’s guardians said a bailout fund set up last year may be used to buy bonds in the secondary market or enable Greece to retire its debt at a discount. They offered another cut in rates on its emergency loans.

As exploding bond yields in Italy and Spain brought the crisis closer to the heart of the euro area, Europe’s search for answers took it back to proposals that were scuttled by Germany earlier this year. After a nine-hour meeting, the 17 euro ministers issued a six-paragraph statement pledging to flesh out details of a new strategy to end the 21-month-old crisis “shortly,” without setting a timeline.

Read the rest of this post...

PM Cameron wants to privatize public services

Only a Teabagger or clueless blue blood like him could possibly think that another money grab by private industry is what the world needs. Sheesh. Has this horses ass paid for a train ticket in England lately and compared it to the rest of Europe? Somehow I doubt that he has. The shocking prices of previously privatized programs should be a warning of what is to come but when you have never opened your wallet or used those services, you have no idea. But people like Cameron do have friends who are eager to open shop. It's just another money grab by those who want more.

In a speech in east London, Cameron said that the provisions in the Open Public Services white paper would mark the first step on the road to a "better, fairer country" in which people enjoy more choice, less bureaucracy, improved services and equal access for rich and poor.

The prime minister promised to loosen "the grip of state control" by bringing in a "big society" approach and putting "power in people's hands". The contents of the white paper would be felt in "every state school, hospital and prison, by every doctor, teacher, parent, patient and citizen", he said.

Cameron made clear he was "absolutely determined" to see through changes which he said were not just about improving schools and hospitals but represented a "vital part of building a bigger, stronger society that is so central to my vision for our country".

Read the rest of this post...

Exxon cleanup of Yellowstone River spill incomplete

To be fair to Exxon, they've only had 10 days to work out a plan of action that should have been ready before the pipeline was even installed. Some environmentalists are so demanding.

Federal regulators said on Sunday they want Exxon Mobil to retool its preliminary plan to clean up oil spilled into the Yellowstone River in Montana from a ruptured pipe at the start of July.

A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official, Steve Merritt, said three elements of the plan were incomplete. He said Exxon must revise how it will capture spilled oil, remove the broken pipe without causing pollution downstream, and restore the wildlife habitat and private property.

Merritt, the EPA's on-scene coordinator for the spill, said officials wanted Exxon to finish the revisions by "one week from today".

Read the rest of this post...