Poor Reasoning

Many Republicans and some pundits are starting to point to President Bush’s very public faceplant when he tried to partially phase out Social Security after his reelection in 2004. The analogy is poor for two reasons.

First, what tripped up President Bush was that getting rid of Social Security was deeply unpopular. That was the key fact. A supposed ‘mandate’ couldn’t change that. Bush had also scarcely mentioned the issue during the campaign.

The contrast with President Obama should be clear. Hiking taxes for dollars made over $250,000 a year enjoys near overwhelming public support and it was the centerpiece of the president’s campaign.

Foreboding

TPM Reader GR doesn’t like the feel of this …

While I don’t agree with Gergen’s reasoning, I think that he is on to something. Krugman’s blog post today is closer to what I think is going to happen - nothing but a tantrum.

Gergen Taking Full Advantage of Pot Legalization?

David Gergen says that John Boehner is being surprisingly reasonable. Democrats and the President are overplaying their hand and their recalcitrance may poison relations between the parties.

There Will Be Hilarity

Having declared ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations essentially dead last week, John Boehner went on Fox News Sunday in something like tantrum mode, bewailing the President’s lack of a ‘serious’ plan or any plan or something.

Hiring: Designer/Developer (NYC)

TPM is hiring a Designer/Developer for our New York City headquarters (we’re a Ruby shop). Details here.

Troubling, Par for the Course

In the aftermath of the UN vote to recognize ‘Palestine’ as a non-member state, top Netanyahu government officials are delivering a major FU to the United States. Not only deciding to build new residential housing in a critical area near Jerusalem, which they had earlier agreed not to do, but essentially telling the White House tough luck and you shouldn’t be surprised.

Boehner Goes Full Tantrum

Speaker John Boehner goes into full tantrum mode on Fox News Sunday.

Boehner Pledges Future Hostage Taking

John Boehner pledges a hostage/credit rating drama each time the debt limit is raised. “It’s the only way to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would if left alone.”

It’s quite a spectacle to see this since Boehner seems to be promising increasing numbers of reckless grandstanding that will probably lead to more and more credit-rating drama.

Data Visualizations

There’s no way to understand the jousting and positioning over the ‘fiscal cliff’ without understanding the following facts: Both President Obama and congressional Republicans are moving right along to the edge of the cliff. Both say they’re ready to go over the edge. Only President Obama is gliding along in a hot air balloon and John Boehner and co. are on foot. So the repercussions over going over the edge are quite different. And both sides know it.

Yet More Thoughts on the Benghazi Gotcha

TPM Reader EL takes things in a different (or perhaps deeper) direction entirely …

Regarding the Republicans and Benghazi, you write

Is Susan Collins Pining for the Clinton Days?

TPM Reader EW has more on ”dingbat oversight” …

Josh Marshall in his piece today, reflected on the Republicans obsession with sensational rather than substantive investigations. He was also right to point out that it isn’t just time and money they are wasting. These investigations function like a magician’s slight-of-hand deflecting the interest of the public from real issues.

Dingbat Oversight

Let’s start with the fact that our entire system of government and economics – in some sense our whole culture – is based on the idea that adversarial relations create social goods. Competition between parties, competition between businesses and so forth. And much of what keeps everyone in government on their toes is the impulse of partisan advantage. It’s a feature not a bug.

By and large that’s all true. But it’s also true that Congress can play its role in such a nonsensical and histrionic way that it not only wastes all sorts of time on bizarre conspiracy theories, it also neglects real, actual oversight, which is one of Congress’s key functions.