Obama seeking "partners" for 2012 campaign - only big money need apply

Again, Wall Street showered him with campaign contributions in 2008 and he's been having private fund raising dinners with the CEOs of Wall Street this year. His campaign and staff can say what they like about that, but you would have to be a fool to miss the connection between the meek financial reform that the White House promoted and his campaign contributions. Also, let's think for a moment about the extension of tax breaks for the wealthy. If you are not part of the deep pocket crowd, you're really not very important to this administration, but I'd like to be proven wrong. Bloomberg:

Donors who pledge $75,800 to the Obama Victory Fund will be named “Presidential Partners” and will be invited to quarterly campaign briefings that are sometimes attended by the president, said a Democratic official who wasn’t authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The program secures two years’ worth of a supporter’s allowable donations. Presidential Partners contribute $5,000 to the Obama campaign, $61,600 to the Democratic committee and an additional $9,200 to a committee that the campaign and the national committee use in statewide races.

The big-money fundraising program is the latest weapon in a campaign-financing arms race. It was reported by the Los Angeles Times. The 2012 election may dwarf previous races with the campaigns, party committees and independent political groups projected to raise and spend a combined $2 billion before Election Day.

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Let’s all cut Medicare since it’s like our only winning issue against the GOP

From HuffPost Hill:

Because the good lord knows Democrats don't want a winning campaign issue, the party is desperately trying to hand back its Medicare advantage to Republicans. Joe Lieberman today teamed with Tom Coburn to push legislation that would cut Medicare by $640 billion over the next ten years by reducing benefits and making old people pay more for their care. That's called courage in Washington. President Obama, meanwhile, is floating heavy Medicare cuts in his talks with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, meaning that Lieberman and Coburn's proposal could become the basis for some type of bipartisan knifing of grandma any day now.

That would be the Joe Lieberman who helped kill the public option, thus ensuring that when seniors get their Medicare benefits cut they won't be able to afford this country's exorbitantly expensive, and ever-growing, medical costs.

But hey, I was getting tired of Democratic control of the congress and the White House anyway. [/snark] Read the rest of this post...

China rolls out high speed train as US sells off infrastructure

The Republicans have done an impressive job of blocking modernization of the US infrastructure system. They are the party of "no" after all. The rest of the world is not sitting still and they are investing. Five years after giving away the highway toll roads to foreign investors, GOP hero Mitch Daniels is somehow popular among his crowd for the short term cash hit. Drivers are now being blistered with outrageous toll increases and for the next seventy years, Indiana will get nothing. Brilliant. Unfortunately there are too many stories like this from around the US.

Before Gov. Mitch Daniels leased the Indiana Toll Road to private investors in 2006, professional trucker Randy Nace would occasionally use the tollway even though it carried a $14 toll. Several toll increases later, with truckers set to pay $35.20 starting Friday, July 1, residents like Nace are reminded of why they fought so hard against the privatization deal.

“I still think it was the wrong thing to do,” Nace said from his truck on Monday. He says he’s managed to survive cost increases and the economic downturn in part by avoiding the Indiana Toll Road.

Five years ago this week, on June 29, 2006, Gov. Mitch Daniels leased the tollway to Cintra of Spain and Macquarie of Australia in exchange for $3.85 billion in cash. To date, it’s still the largest privatization deal involving a U.S. roadway and certainly one of the most controversial.

Isn't it time we shut down the wasted money funnel from Iraq and Afghanistan and start rebuilding US infrastructure? Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: If Obama concedes to Republican blackmail now, it’s "the end of the presidency"

In a short post, Paul Krugman gets it just right.

First he details the fat-cat benefits the debt-ceiling discussions are stalled on — for example, business's ability to undervalue inventory to lower taxes, the hedge fund loophole that hands them a 15% nominal tax rate (before deductions and other loopholes kick in), tax treatment of private jets, and so on.

Then he says:

Think about it. There’s a significant chance that failing to raise the debt limit could provoke a renewed financial crisis — and Republicans would rather take that chance than allow a reduction in tax breaks on corporate jets.

What this says to me is that Obama cannot, must not, concede here. If he does ... he’s setting himself up for endless blackmail. A line ... should have been drawn last fall; but to concede now would effectively mean the end of the presidency.

I assume he means Obama's presidency (I would concur). Because the presidency is always safe in Republican hands. When they have the power, they actually use it.

Update: Joan McCarter says there are "already cuts to Medicare on the table". Cripes.

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TSA denies they forced elderly traveler to remove diaper

They really are a bunch of idiots over there. OK, sure, they did give the elderly, dying woman the choice of not removing the adult diaper but that also meant not flying. Did they ask Bill Clinton for that ridiculous fine line of truth or did they come up with it on their own?

The woman's daughter, Jean Weber, told CNN on Monday that the TSA agents acted professionally and never ordered the removal of her mother's diaper. However, Weber said the agents made it clear that her mother could not board the plane unless they were able to inspect the diaper.

According to Weber, it was her idea to remove the diaper so it could be inspected and they could make their flight.

"They were doing their job according to the instructions of the TSA and their policies," Weber said, later adding that the options offered them were to remove the diaper or "she was not going to get on the plane."

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Chris Hayes: The Republicans are waiting for Obama to pull the trigger on the social safety net

I'm going to start writing about the Debt Ceiling issue; it's smelling more and more like Cave Week 2 and we're going to have to work hard to keep the administration's hands off Social Security & Medicare. In the context of the Ryan plan, Krugman calls this "Obama's defining moment."

I doubt that they, Repubs & Dems, will try the Ryan plan now, but it wouldn't surprise me if they weakened the underpinnings of both programs as much as they can get away with. Remember this?



Sure Paul, give me a call too while you're at it. As I read that exchange, those two are new best buds and they're lining up against us.

Now comes Maddow, and a fine segment on Republican plans to crash the debt ceiling talks. After a long intro (which I trimmed off; the whole segment is here), she ask how should we understand what Republicans are up to?

She has two answers. The "kind way" is as "shameless craven unprincipled partisan hackery." (Shades of Amy Winehouse.) The "less nice way"? They are trying to "guarantee bad economic outcomes" on purpose and with full knowledge of what they're doing.

Then she asks, if the latter, why? The only answer she offers is the obvious — beating Obama in 2012. (If you're really being cynical though, you have only to look to the Shock Doctrine and the billionaires who benefit whenever it's applied.)

All this to set up Chris Hayes, who gets it almost exactly right, in my opinion. As he says, now that they (Grover Norquist's Movement Conservatives) have starved the beast and gotten everyone in a deficit panic, "the welfare state is in their sights."

A fascinating analysis until the very end. Watch:



This segment makes me very optimistic about the new Chris Hayes show that's under development. Excellent analysis by Chris, and for my money, just cynical enough — mostly.

My only addition is that it's not just the Republicans that have the welfare state in their sights, and Chris implies as much. They're need Obama to pull the trigger, since they can't do it themselves. ("Like Nixon to China", right? I wrote that over a year ago.)

Will he do it? Will Obama pull the trigger? I disagree with Hayes in his reading of Obama's goals and motives. Rewatch that Clinton–Paul Ryan exchange again. This looks like the cross-party elites when they think they're unwatched, and they've joined hands.

Obama's been signalling for a long time that he wants to damage the safety net. Cave Week 1 — a Barack Obama special, mind you — was surrendering on the Bush tax cuts, thanks to which the government has no money. Cave Week 2, I think, is being "forced" to fill that revenue hole with middle-class money and benefits, plus a few war dollars / tax loopholes for cover.

If I'm right, winning will take a lot of work. To succeed, we'll have to play chicken with Obama — by threatening the one thing he wants more than neo-Reagan cred, and that's 2012. Team Where else you gonna go? thinks you'll back down.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Honey I shrunk my negotiating position in the deficit talks

Cross posted from Matt Browner Hamlin's blog "Hold Fast":

Back when the austerity (I mean, fiscal responsibility) debate was starting, it was pointed out that the United Kingdom went with a 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases. The result has been disastrous for the UK economy and painful to working people there.

When President Obama kicked off his push, he proposed a 3:1 cuts to revenue plan:

Balance Between Spending Cuts and Tax Reform: The President’s framework would seek a balanced approach to bringing down our deficit, with three dollars of spending cuts and interest savings for every one dollar from tax reform that contributes to deficit reduction. This is consistent with the bipartisan Fiscal Commission’s approach.

Amazingly with the GOP walking away from talks, we now find out that a devastating 5:1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases was not good enough for them. Ezra Klein reports:

A bit more information has trickled out over the last few days detailing the exact state of the budget negotiations when they collapsed. Both sides, as they often said, were shooting for about $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. They’d already agreed on around $1 trillion in spending cuts and were making good progress on the rest of it. But Democrats insisted that $400 billion — so, 17 percent — of the package be tax increases. And that’s when Republicans walked.

This is bat shit insane. I hope someone on the Democratic side is pointing it out…

So basically, the Republicans keep saying "no" and the White House keeps offering them more and more cuts to programs, and fewer and fewer tax increases, while the Republicans simply keep saying "no."

Heck of a negotiation. The White House is simply negotiating with itself at this point. Lowering its bid, lower and lower, while the GOP does nothing. Guaranteeing that any final deal that is reached starts at a point so low that we're screwed no matter what the details.

Now, I'm sure the White House thinks it's going to win the battle by showing the American people how earnest the President has been in these talks, while the Republicans have been intransigent.  Yeah, fat chance.  That is all a matter of spin.  And the White House folks, and Dems generally, don't spin very well.  They need to hire someone who does, and empower them to win, rather than tying their hands in a never-ending desire to be nice to people who want to destroy you. Read the rest of this post...

DREAM Act got its first ever hearing in Senate today

Finally. The first hearing ever on the DREAM Act just concluded in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Background from Van Le at America's Voices:

[T]he DREAM Act is getting its first-ever Senate hearing tomorrow [June 28], despite having been first introduced in 2001 and being reintroduced multiple times since then.

The DREAM Act would offer talented young people who came to the United States as minors a chance to earn legal status and a path to citizenship – if they meet a set of stringent criteria that involves attending college or serving in the U.S. military. The DREAM Act has consistently enjoyed overwhelming public support, and is favored by nearly 70 percent of voters according to a poll conducted by Opinion Research Corporation for First Focus in June 2010.

When it was up for a vote in December of last year, the DREAM Act fell just five votes short of becoming law -- though it did pass the House with majority (bipartisan) support and won a majority 55 votes in the Senate. Earlier this year in May, the DREAM Act was introduced by a bi-partisan group of Representatives in the House and by Democrats in the U.S. Senate.

For some more great background, here's Rachel Maddow on the DREAM Act:



She puts the case very succinctly; a good short segment. Good luck, DREAMers. And thanks to all the advocates working in their behalf!

GP Read the rest of this post...

Obama and the filibuster canard; how Cuomo overcame something worse than a filibuster

Nate Silver has a stellar piece in the NYT that crystallizes why liberals are so upset with President Obama's management style. Silver explains that the issue isn't that Obama didn't get everything in health care reform, for example, that he promised us, but rather whether Obama exhausted all the resources he had for getting all he could. Below, I quote a bit of Nate, then write much more about this on AMERICAblog Gay.

But one point about Nate's piece that needs to be mentioned. In it, he notes that ThinkProgress blogger Matthew Yglesias criticized Nate for not acknowledging that NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, unlike Obama, doesn't have to deal with a 60-vote filibuster in the NY Senate. In the NY Senate, all you need is a simple majority to pass legislation, no filibuster needed. So Yglesias' point is that it's unfair to talk about all Cuomo did for getting gay marriage passed in the state, and at the same time knock Obama for not endorsing marriage equality at the federal law.

Wrong.

In the NY state Senate they have a super filibuster. It's called the Republican Majority Leader. He has absolute discretion about what legislation he wants to bring up for a vote. If he didn't want to bring up the same-sex marriage bill, he didn't have to - regardless of how many votes we had. But he did permit the legislation to come up because of the masterful job Cuomo, and the groups, did in lobbying the Republicans - even though the GOP caucus was 28-4 against the bill's passage.

So, in fact, Cuomo's obstacle was even bigger than Obama's - and bigger than any politician in the country apparently. But he won anyway, with no excuses.  Sometimes politics is simply about showing up.

More from Nate's piece:

The question, rather, is why Mr. Obama didn’t have the votes for something like the DREAM Act. Or more to the point: are there alternate strategies that Mr. Obama might have pursued under which he would have had the votes? (Even the filibuster, although it has become a significant part of the Senate’s culture, isn’t written into the Constitution: there are options to overcome it. They may be neither feasible nor wise options, but there are options.) [emphasis added.]

Hallelujah. Someone finally gets it.

The point is not that this is the right strategy or the wrong strategy. It might well have been the right strategy — I don’t come to a conclusion about that. But I do think it’s fair to characterize it as a risk-averse strategy. And that, at the core, is what bothers some liberals about Mr. Obama’s approach to the presidency. Fairly or not, they want him to push the envelope more than he has and to take a few more chances — to expand the realm of the possible, as Mr. Cuomo seems to have done in New York.

In a nutshell, we're looking for change and someone willing to be a vehicle for it. Is that really asking so much? Read the rest of this post...

Goldman Sachs shifting high paying jobs to Singapore

Whether it's for real or nothing more than political posturing to avoid paying their fair share to protect tax payers from the next crisis, go for it. Asia (thanks to China) will have a very bumpy ride in the next few years as the bubble in China bursts so if Goldman wants to move into that, great. More power to them. If only they have moved into the Middle East when they made that threat a few years ago. Imagine how much fun that could have been now that the region is in turmoil. Business Insider:

Goldman Sachs is going to fire employees in the U.S. and some other countries so that it can hire 1,000 in Singapore, where it's cheaper.

Charlie Gasparino heard the news from people who were briefed on the hiring in Washington. He says Goldman gave Washington the heads up because hiring offshore is likely to cause a backlash.

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Obama talks business tax break cuts

If we're all in this together, tax breaks for those least in need have to be more than just on the table. They need to be part of the plan. Unfortunately we have a president who wobbles and concedes before most fights even begin. The Democrats have to stand firm on handouts for the industries that are sitting on $800 billion of cash. A blank check to those businesses is irresponsible. Bloomberg:

Barack Obama’s proposal to end a business tax break worth $72 billion is among the tensions the president may confront as he meets today with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in an effort to revive bipartisan talks over reducing the debt.

Ending the so-called last-in-first-out, or LIFO, provision, a method of accounting for inventory costs, was among options offered by White House officials for raising $400 billion in revenue over 10 years during seven weeks of negotiations led by Vice President Joe Biden, three persons familiar with the issue said on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to comment publicly.

“We think this is part of simplifying the tax code” and leveling the playing field for companies, White House press secretary Jay Carney said today. He used the example of an oil company that bought oil when prices lower and sells it when the price is higher, declaring its profit based on the higher price. “We just don’t think that’s right,” he said.

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48 hour general strike starts in Greece

Whether this will impact the decision to buy into the latest bailout/austerity plan is up for debate. What's less debatable is the issue of the bailout actually working. The bailout is only pushing the problem out for another day and giving hope that the country won't default. BBC News:

Trade unions in Greece have begun a 48-hour general strike, hours after PM George Papandreou urged parliament to back an austerity package.

Huge crowds of protesters are expected on the streets of Athens, while public transport is set to grind to a halt.

On Monday, Mr Papandreou said only his 28bn-euro (£25bn) austerity programme would get Greece back on its feet.

If the government loses, the EU and IMF could withhold 12bn euros of loans and Greece could run out of money in weeks.

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UK public sector to strike over pension reform

It comes as no surprise that the union has not made progress negotiating with the government over changes. Think about how serious any of the US unions were when they tried negotiating with the right wing governors. The Guardian:

Two hours of talks left the unions and government still fundamentally divided with major unresolved gaps in opinions, according to Brendan Barber, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress.

Unions said they had made no progress on the most contentious proposals – to increase public sector workers' contributions, change the system of uprating schemes, and raise the pension age for government employees.

PCS, the civil service union, called the talks a farce and, along with three other unions collectively representing 750,000 teachers, lecturers and civil servants, confirmed Thursday's walkout will go ahead. But the biggest public sector union, Unison, indicated the government had given enough ground to delay their strike ballot until later in the summer, in the hope of further concessions.

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Olbermann on the Paul-Frank bill to decriminalize marijuana

Back on TV, here's Countdown host Keith Olbermann on the Ron Paul–Barney Frank bill to decriminalize marijuana.

Following the news (and fun cultural references — don't miss Jack Nicholson in one of his earliest roles), there's a fine interview with Janeane Garofalo (h/t Blue Texan).

This came out just prior to the marriage equality victory in New York. Enjoy:



Welcome back, Keith.

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