Boehner Demands That Someone Else Shoot a Hostage for Him

John Boehner will never be described as a Profile in Courage.

Yesterday, Boehner issued a statement following a senate cloture vote to advance an extension of unemployment benefits. "One month ago I personally told the White House that another extension of temporary emergency unemployment benefits should not only be paid for but include something to help put people back to work," a written statement reads. "To date, the president has offered no such plan. If he does, I’ll be happy to discuss it, but right now the House is going to remain focused on growing the economy and giving America’s unemployed the independence that only comes from finding a good job."

So basically, Boehner says he wants another hostage shot before he'll release this particular hostage. "There’s quite a bit wrong with this," says Steve Benen. "For example, Boehner knows jobless Americans need these benefits and knows cutting off aid will hurt the economy, but insists on spending cuts to offset the costs. Why? He didn’t say. What needs to get cut? He didn’t say. Why have Republicans supported previous extensions without offsetting cuts, only to change course now? He didn’t say."

He wants something cut. He knows there are no popular cuts to make. So he demands that someone else do the dirty work. Choose what gets cut for him or the long term unemployed get it. He wants an unpopular slashing of something or other -- simply for the sake of appearances -- and he wants to be able to walk away with the appearance of clean hands. He wants the extension paid for, but he wants someone else (preferably the White House) to take the blame for that offset.

As I said, no Profile in Courage here.

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Reality Drives the GOP Off the Rails

The House Republican caucus went fullblown clown show yesterday, as they tried -- and failed -- to fit their ideological square peg into reality's round hole. At issue was the THUD bill -- a bill to fund both the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. This resulted in utter failure and the bill was pulled. It this was a tremendous embarrassment for the House GOP.

What happened was simple: House GOP applied their fiscal flateartherism to a bill that would genuinely affect their own constituencies. It's fine when the cuts are to abstract groups in other people's districts -- welfare queens and lazy jobless folks and those leeches living the sweet life on food stamps -- but when the big sequester-level cuts have to be applied in terms of anything other than empty rhetoric, they look all too real and all too suicidal. Brian Beutler explains:

...In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it.

But these aren’t normal times. Republicans have refused to negotiate away their budget differences with Democrats, and have instead instructed their appropriators to use the House GOP budget as a blueprint for funding the government beyond September.

Like all recent GOP budgets, this year’s proposes lots of spending on defense and security, at the expense of all other programs. Specifically, it sets the total pool of discretionary dollars at sequestration levels, then funnels money from thinly stretched domestic departments (like Transportation and HUD) to the Pentagon and a few other agencies. But that’s all the budget says. It doesn’t say how to allocate the dollars, nor does it grapple in any way with the possibility that cutting domestic spending so profoundly might be unworkable. It’s an abstraction.

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Tape Shows Benghazi 'Scandal' Kept Artificially Alive by Far Right Activists

About a week ago, President Obama mentioned "phony scandals" that were drawing attention and effort away from the real work Washington needs to do to rebuild the economy. "With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals," he said in a speech on the economy at Knox College, "Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop... Our focus must be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you -- the people we represent."

Those remarks became a minor scandal in itself, the daily worst thing ever! we've all become so familiar with. The unceasingly outraged right were outraged at the outrageousness of this latest outrage. "It is dismissive. It is insulting. It is minimizing. It's not validating the concerns that people have," Rep. Michele Bachmann said, as if validating unfounded concerns was something anyone should be interested in doing.

A lot of critics ran to the Benghazi story -- although the president didn't mention it directly. People died, they said, did they make those deaths up?

Well, no. They didn't make up the deaths, just the controversy over them. New evidence shows a concentrated effort between GOP leadership and conservative activists to turn a foreign policy tragedy into a "scandal" that was supposed to rock the presidency.

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GOP's Brand of Fiscal Restraint is Really Expensive

House Republicans are all about saving taxpayers' money, right? Right? Well, actually not so much. It would be more accurate to say House Republicans are all about talking about saving taxpayers' money, while doing nothing but collecting it in the form of congressional paychecks. And what they don't pocket themselves, they blow on boneheaded fiscal ideas.

There is a cost to a do-nothing congress. And this is definitely a do-nothing congress. Oh sure, they pretend to accomplish things, but mostly they just dick around with PR stunts that even they know are doomed. And they don't pay for their own PR -- you do.

Take for example the repeated votes to repeal Obamacare. Those bills go nowhere in the Senate -- they aren't even brought up for a vote -- yet John Boehner has wasted 80 hours worth of taxpayer money on these election year stunts. That ain't free and that ain't hay.

Huffington Post:

According to a report by CBS News, these efforts, widely viewed as symbolic political maneuvers, come with a high price tag.

CBS' Nancy Cordes reported Wednesday that Republicans' many fruitless attempts at repealing the Affordable Care Act have taken up at least 80 hours of time on the House floor since 2010, amounting to two full work weeks. As the House, according to the Congressional Research Service, costs taxpayers $24 million a week to operate, those two weeks amounted to a total cost of approximately $48 million.

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Logically Speaking, the War on Women Must Be a War Without End

I think I've narrowed down the reason for the War on Women -- this whole childbirth thing freaks conservatives right out. Watching the video above, I can't come up with a better explanation. In it, Republican consultant Alex Castellanos denies that women are paid less than men, despite the plain, indisputable fact that they are. As always, Republicans hate math and math hates them right back.

But Castellanos backs up his assertion with creative accounting -- women run off and do crazy things like have babies, so if you count that time off, the pay gap disappears. Therefore, women should take the hit for their frivolous hobby of, you know, perpetuating the human race. You don't see men running off and having babies. Because men are serious and grown up.

This is all about as silly as it gets and it demonstrates how weak the conservative arguments are in defense (and denial) of their War on Women. But consider this argument in relation to the other fronts in the war -- abortion and contraception. In Conservative World, women should be punished by law for avoiding childbirth and punished economically for engaging in it. Republicans are busy reinforcing a no-win situation for women, where both pregnancy at its avoidance have negative -- but in their minds, completely justified -- consequences. We've already established that women who use birth control are sluts. The less said about women who seek abortions the better. And women who get pregnant are bad workers. I guess the logical conclusion to all this is that women are just naturally bad people.

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Are Republicans Finally Done Apologizing to Limbaugh?

You have to wonder why Rush Limbaugh holds such an exulted position in the Republican pantheon. Not only did Republicans put him in their top three "least favorite" news personalities in a recent Harris Poll, but he's frequently more trouble than he's worth. Yes, he's the top-rated talk radio host in America. Yes, his audience is nearly entirely Republican. And yes, that audience are proudly "dittoheads" who do whatever Limbaugh tells them to. But all of that means jack. No one listens to talk radio. The local classic rock station probably has a bigger audience than Limbaugh in any given market. In any sane world, he would be nobody. The vast, vast majority of Americans -- and even of Republicans -- don't hang on Rush's every word. In fact, that majority doesn't listen to him at all. Color me perplexed.

Maybe it's Limbaugh's position as a corporate mouthpiece that frightens the GOP. It's not who he speaks to that's important, but who he speaks for. His market share isn't really the result of popularity, it's the result of Clear Channel's desire to get Limbaugh's voice heard. If Rush were left to live or die on ratings, he would've been cancelled long, long ago (as his ratings-dependent TV show was) and talk radio in general would be a dead medium. He's like Glenn Beck before Fox News finally tired of him -- a revenue hole, but useful as a propaganda tool.

Which is why it's hard to get extremely excited by this news:

Politico:

One of the advertisers on Rush Limbaugh’s popular conservative radio show Friday announced that it is pulling its ads in the wake of the host’s controversial “slut” comments this week.

“We don’t condone negative comments directed toward any group. In response, we are currently pulling our ads from Rush with Rush Limbaugh,” the company Sleep Train Mattress Centers announced on its Twitter account early Friday.

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Reducing the Price of Gas, the Republican Way

Say what you like about George W. Bush, but his policies -- with the aid of Republicans and feckless Democrats who followed him blindly -- managed to bring gas prices down to $1.81 a gallon. We could do it again if you want. Here's how: you just blow a great big smoking hole in the global economy. It's that simple. It probably wouldn't surprise you to learn that I don't recommend going this route.

The price of gas, like all things retail, is the product of supply and demand. When demand is high -- i.e., a good or recovering economy -- the price is high. But when demand is low -- i.e., a Bush-style global economic meltdown -- the price of gas is low. It's not just consumers at the pump that drive the demand for oil, but consumers everywhere in the retail chain. Those Fritos don't climb up on the shelf all on their own, you know. When you start buying more of pretty much anything, you're increasing demand for oil. Goods travel.

It's hard to argue that rising gas prices are a good thing, but they are a good sign. And that's a difficult argument to make. Which probably explains why President Obama didn't make it when he was speaking about energy yesterday.

But the truth is that, even if we could somehow sustain a static, unchanging economy where the needle on the demand meter never so much as quivered, the price of gas would never go down. Ever. It would only rise. Again, it's supply and demand. Supply is shrinking. If you doubt that, consider the XL pipeline and the Canadian tar sands. We're now so desperate for oil that we'll literally squeeze it out of rocks. This isn't the sort of thing you do when there's plenty of the stuff lying around. The Oil Age is winding down, whether we want it to or not

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GOP Flateartherism Strikes Again

At this point, I have to ask, what do Republicans have against demand? I get that they like this pie-in-the-sky supply-side stuff, but it's "supply and demand," not "supply or demand." At every turn, Republican economic policies have consumers reducing spending, as if a stagnant economy and slow to non-existent growth is the best thing ever.

Case in point:

The Hill:

GOP leaders hope to build momentum for an end-of-year tax package with sweeping reforms to federal unemployment benefits.

The Republican proposal is expected to reduce the total number of weeks unemployed workers are eligible for aid by as much as 40 weeks and tighten rules for eligibility.

Such a reduction would significantly reduce the cost of extending federal unemployment benefits, making it easier to secure GOP support for a measure that will also include an extension of a payroll tax cut many conservative Republicans dislike.

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GOP Disaster Relief Hostage Scheme Backfires

It's all but official; the House Republican Caucus is in a state of leaderless chaos.

The Hill:

The House stunned Republican leaders Wednesday by rejecting a temporary spending bill that would have funded the government through Nov. 18.

The vote failed, 195-230, after Democrats pulled their support for the bill and Republican leaders were forced to scramble for enough votes entirely within their own ranks. Four dozen conservatives voted against the bill because it left spending levels for 2012 higher than the cap set in the House GOP budget.

The defeat hands leverage to congressional Democrats in a dispute over federal disaster funding. Democratic leaders objected to a GOP provision cutting funding from a Department of Energy manufacturing loan program to offset additional money for disaster relief.

The House and Senate must pass a spending bill by Sept. 30 to keep the government running into the next fiscal year. Both chambers are scheduled to be out on recess next week.

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A Washington Scheduling Conflict is Not the Most Important Story Ever

One of the things I like to do with what I think of as my "long form" posts is kill two or more birds with one stone. It's often the case that when you look closely at an issue or story of the day, it relates to other stories and other issues. So many things are interconnected and politics (as much as politicians like to pretend otherwise) is a complex and faceted thing. It's nearly always the case that you can grab a story and make it at least two stories; "Man, this is dumb -- and the media sucks!" And yes, media suckage figures into this particular post.

So let's begin with that. Yesterday, President Obama announced that he wanted to address a joint session of congress on September 7. This wasn't going to work, there was a big Republican debate that night and we can't have the president dominating that news cycle. Of course, House Speaker John Boehner didn't put his refusal that way, but no one on Earth believes there was any other reason. The President pushed his case, but later dropped it. He'd address congress on the 8th.

OK, now here's where we get to the "and the media sucks!" part; this is the big story today. A scheduling disagreement. Yes, the GOP looks petty and self-serving. "Remember, this is just about picking the date for the speech. It's like arguing about the shape of the table before sitting down for negotiations. What possible chance is there for Washington to approve meaningful economic legislation if there’s a dramatic showdown over scheduling?" writes Steve Benen. "That's a rhetorical question; the chances are zero." But the bigger story -- that President Obama is going to unveil a major jobs plan -- is lost in the coverage of this minor palace intrigue.

Worse, it turns out we have a good idea what's in the plan the President will outline and media's ignoring this knowledge.

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Can Democrats Blow the Upcoming Payroll Tax Fight?

It's hard to see how Democrats could lose this one -- at least, in a PR sense. As Democrats prepare a push to extend a payroll tax break, Republicans oppose it. All of a sudden, tax breaks add to the deficit. They didn't used to, but they do now. Republicans are consistent only in their disregard for logical consistency. When the tax cuts benefit the very rich, they don't add to the deficit. When they don't... Well, that's a different story. And, of course, there's the fact that President Obama is for extending these particular cuts, which -- by the reactionary reasoning of the party -- means they must be bad.

New York Times:

It is hard to find a tax cut that Congressional Republicans dislike. Unless it is a tax cut pushed by President Obama.

In a turning of the tax policy tables, Democrats are increasingly hammering on Republicans who oppose the president’s proposal to extend for a year a payroll tax cut passed last year with bipartisan support.

That tax cut -- which reduces workers' contributions to Social Security this year to 4.2 percent of wages, from 6.2 percent -- expires in December. The White House would like to extend it for another year. But Republicans in Congress are balking, arguing that such a cut adds needlessly to the nation’s budget deficit, and should be replaced with an overhaul of tax policy instead.

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The Economy as an Issue is Now 90% Republican-Owned

Last night, Robert Reich made a decent point. Writing about the debt limit deal and yesterday's market sell-off, Reich wonders if Republicans are ready to take ownership of the problem.

John Boehner said Tuesday the Republicans got "90 percent of what we wanted" from the budget deal. So presumably he and his colleagues are willing to take responsibility for some 450 points of today's mammoth 513-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I'm being a bit facetious -- but only a bit. It's always dangerous to read too much into one day's move in the stock market.

Of course, there are a lot of factors that figure into the ongoing dive -- economic uncertainty in Europe, for example -- that have nothing to do with the US. But jitters about jobs and the threat of a double-dip recession are driving a lot of it. If Republicans got 90% of what they wanted from the debt limit deal, then Republicans now own 90% of responsibility for the economy.

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Say it With Me; John Boehner is Just Wasting Everyone's Time

Seriously, what the hell is Sir John of Orange doing? Last night, Boehner finally had to abandon his attempt to get his debt limit bill passed, because he couldn't get enough votes in the House to push it through. But that's OK, because there was no way in hell the Senate was going to pass it anyway. Metaphorically speaking, he was gunning the engine in a desperate attempt to run straight into a brick wall before the clock ran out.

Now, he's actually taking the zero chance his bill had of surviving in the Senate and moving it into negative territory, by tying his bill to a Balanced Budget Amendment to please the crazies.

Politico:

House Republican leaders will tie a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution to their two-step debt-ceiling bill — a move that is all but certain to clinch the necessary votes to pass Speaker John Boehner's proposal a day after it stalled...

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Republicans Call to Rally the Base, But the Base is a No-Show

Yesterday, the farthest-right congressional Republicans decided it was time to call in the troops. Facing criticism from all sides that they've been too extreme, too irresponsible, too unyielding, and too crazy in the debt limit fight, they decided that a show of force was necessary. What they got instead was a sad little metaphor for their own delusions of popularity.

Politico:

It had all the makings of a big time tea party rally: Presidential candidate Herman Cain, conservative Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah all showed up outside the Capitol Wednesday to urge members to “hold the line” against a deficit reduction compromise.

The only thing missing? A big audience.

At the start of the rally, which was organized by the American Grassroots Coalition and Tea Party Express, there were roughly 15 attendees waiting to hear the conservative lawmakers speak. By the time the senators had spoken there were still fewer than 50 tea partiers in attendance.

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Yes, the Public Would Blame Republicans for a Default

In the debt ceiling debate, there are no political winners. That's one message you could take away from a new CBS News poll showing that, of all the players in the debt negotiations, a majority of Americans approve of none. On this issue, it's disapprovals across the board.

But another message you could take away would be that, of all the political losers in this fight, the Republicans are the biggest -- by a wide margin. From the polling report itself (pdf):

More Americans disapprove than approve of how President Barack Obama is handling the negotiations with members of Congress about raising the debt ceiling, but Democrats and Republicans in Congress fare even worse. 43% approve of how the President is handling the talks, and 48% disapprove. Approval drops to 31% for the Democrats in Congress. Just 21% approve of the Republicans’ handling of the negotiations, while 71% disapprove.

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GOP Playing Chicken With an Oncoming Train

The US hit the debt ceiling Monday. As things stand right now, we can stretch dollars until about August -- and then we go into default. I don't think people have a good understanding of what raising the debt ceiling means. It doesn't mean we're borrowing money to spend more money, it means that we're borrowing money to cover money we've already spent. It means meeting our obligations. If we don't raise the debt ceiling, we will default on payments. Social Security checks may stop going out, paychecks to soldiers may stop being cut, grants to states will evaporate, and bond holders will find themselves in possession of nearly worthless pieces of paper.

Meanwhile, Republicans are playing on people's misconception of the debt limit. They've got everyone freaked out about spending and are counting on people equating the debt ceiling with new spending. It's a suicidal game of chicken, because one player is on rails -- it can't swerve. The GOP is playing chicken with an oncoming train.

Speaker of the House Boehner is demanding "trillions" in cuts or he says he'll let the crack-up happen. This is typical for the Orange One, whose political strategy playbook seems to consist only of a single page marked "Hostage Negotiations," with his party as the hostage takers. But, in this case, Boehner offers a Hobson's choice -- as economist Mark Thoma puts it, "Republicans are threatening to blow up the economy if they don't get budget cuts big enough to blow up the economy."

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Press Largely Ignores John Boehner's Gibberish

What if the Speaker of the House gave a speech that was just all wrong? And what if the Speaker gave that speech to a bunch of people who knew it was all wrong? Throwing out crazy statement after crazy statement, to the bewilderment of his audience, lecturing those who make their living, in part, by knowing better? Would that be a scandal?

Apparently not. John Boehner did just that, giving a speech filled with economic mumbo-jumbo to a group of Wall Street executives. Relying on GOP talking points, Boehner spoke to Economic Club of New York Monday, and received "a cool reception," according to The Hill.

"The Speaker's stand drew little reaction from the banquet hall of Wall Street executives," the paper reported, "who offered polite applause at the end of Boehner's speech but sat in silence through his demands on the debt limit."

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John Boehner (Almost) Creates One Job

Republicans have their eye on jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. You know this because they keep saying it. Which is good, because if they didn't keep saying it, you'd never know. Apparently, creating jobs comes after firing everyone at NPR and Planned Parenthood on the big list of GOP priorities. And beginning to privatize Medicare in 2012. So 2013, I guess, after the elections. That's when Republicans plan to work on getting people jobs.

One person who won't have to wait to get a new job is a former Bushie, who Speaker Boehner thinks employing right now is the most important thing ever.

ThinkProgress:

Earlier today, Speaker John Boehner’s (R) office announced that American taxpayers would pay former Bush Solicitor General Paul Clement to defend the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. Clement, a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, is widely viewed as one of nation’s leading appellate attorneys. He is also one of the most expensive...

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The Great GOP Wealth Redistribution

Over the last two years since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs. And if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it. We're broke. It's time for us to get serious about how we're spending the nation's money.
-House Speaker John Boehner

All told, we find that Boehner’s 200,000 number is way off. We rate it False.
-Politifact

At this point, it should be abundantly clear that Republicans are about as interested in jobs as they are in the truth. Likewise, the math suggests that they aren't really all that interested in the deficit, either. After all, in demanding that the tax cuts for the richest 2% of Americans be extended, they've committed to adding $36 billion to the deficit. Yet, now that those tax cuts have been extended, Republicans insist on paying for them after the fact. So they propose taking things away from you. It's a massive redistribution of wealth, from the middle class to the wealthy. And, in the mainstream media, almost no one is pointing this out.

Remember during the healthcare debate, when Republicans posed as defenders of Medicare? Yeah, they aren't doing that anymore. In the name of appeasing the Almighty Deficit, while preserving the Sacred Tax Cuts, Republicans now demand cuts to entitlements -- meaning Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The term you're looking for right now is "bait and switch."

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For Republicans, a Coming Dose of Reality

Part of the problem I have with Republicans is that they refuse to live in reality. For most, the cause is the fact that they don't have to. Former lobbyists, PAC folks, wealthy vanity campaigners, CEOs, and various and sundry political hacks, the closest many have come to hardship is finding out the club is out of topshelf scotch. They still have nightmares about that awful, awful rail booze.

But for others, there's a self-inflicted ignorance. Many of the fresh new GOP faces in Washington represent the first generation of lawmakers whose entire adult lives were spent under the spell of conservative talk radio. They were probably introduced to politics by Rush Limbaugh in the '90s and they haven't moved that dial since. If they don't live in the real world, it's because they no longer know where it is.

Regardless of the reason that reality is a strange neighborhood to them, when Republicans take a walk through it, it comes as something of a shock.

Politico:

Ask any House Republican about repealing President Barack Obama's health care law, and you'll get the same fiery, self-assured talking points about tearing down what Speaker John Boehner has called a "monstrosity."

But talk to some of the 16 freshman lawmakers who have declined their government health benefits, and you'll hear a different side of the story -- about tough out-of-pocket expenses, pre-existing conditions and support for health reforms that would help those who struggle with their coverage. As they venture into the free market for health insurance, these lawmakers -- many of whom swept into office fueled by tea party anger over the health care law -- are facing monthly premiums of $1,200 and fears of double-digit rate hikes.

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