Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No Justins, No Peace

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

… among the most cringeworthy communications in the history of the alphabet!

Battle won, war still ongoing.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

This fight is for everything.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

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Reader Interactions

67Comments

  1. 1.

    Mnemosyne

    As I’ve said before, the media isn’t demanding to know what Obama’s plan to fix the deficit is. He’s said that boring shit a million times. They want to know what his plan to kill Medicare is, and until he gives them one, he’s not “serious.”

  2. 2.

    cathyx

    I think the hair on the right should be so long it’s down to the floor. Then that would be accurate.

  4. 4.

    arguingwithsignposts

    You have to give them credit – Ryan’s little Unicorn Pony coloring book kept the Villagers from keeping their eyes on the game of chicken that’s been going on all week wrt the gov’t shutdown.

  5. 5.

    Poopyman

    Except Ryan won’t be getting any kind of a haircut from his plan — he’s set for life. The pic should be him shaving a little old lady in a scooter.

  7. 7.

    Ruckus

    “Serious” is code for bullshitter.

    If you don’t like that,

    “Serious” is code for con artist.

    Which in the end is the same thing. It just sounds nicer.

  8. 8.

    hrprogressive

    Now, show the couple dozen million people with half-shaven heads, pissed off at Fucking Loser’s “Decimate America” plan.

    I refuse to give that assclown any credit, I will not name him.

    There’s naked power grabs, and then there’s all of this crap.

    300/130 Dem/Rep split? Yes? Let’s hope so.

  9. 9.

    Brain Hertz

    Well I hope he will consider my very serious proposal to fix the budget by abolishing the defense department and replacing it with a scheme to send every citizen a voucher to purchase a handgun.

    $7.3 trillion over 10 years, without needing a tax increase! It’s courageous! And very serious!

  10. 10.

    General Stuck

    Such a conversation starter!

    It is one of the tools in the wingnut book of flammery. Start a debate with some really wild shit to the right, which is one type of tactic for negotiations to hopefully move a final compromise further in your direction when the bartering is completed.

    I think Ryan is cut from the same true believer cloth as Walker, in that this would be his final position, and no doubt signed onto by a majority of House wingers in advance, or all of them.

    It is not a negotiation, but a ransom demand, and Boehner is only the messenger of the monster running the House of Reps right now, AKA The Tea Party. It is a call for unconditional surrender of the democratic party. The only problem is, Ryan and his plundering hordes, unlike Walker, are not the governor of anything more than half of one branch of the federal government.

    They could have likely extracted some pounds of flesh from a dem president concerned about a moribund economy now with a pulse and some movement in it’s legs, to take back to the tea party as bounty, or booty for the benefactor plutocrats.

    These are the kinds of republicans every democratic party and president needs for credibility. Unless these nihilistic fools are really willing to burn it all down from not getting everything they demand. The jury is still out on that. But I get this funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, that what the winger govs are doing with unions and other liberal icons, and now in the House, is not so much a bold charge, but a premeditated kamakazi run. Divine Wind with an R by it’s name.

  11. 11.

    MattF

    Just two more sentences on the subject. If Ryan had said “Fuck the poor and make them permanently in debt to their betters on Wall Street,” Sullivan would (I think) object. But that’s exactly what Ryan’s plan says— but in English, not in funny looking symbol-economo-number-talk.

  12. 12.

    El Cid

    One of the most asshole moves of the entire Bush Jr. administration: [via Popular Science]

    Who Killed The Deep Space Climate Observatory?
    __
    Nearly a decade ago, NASA built an Earth-monitoring satellite that could have observed global warming in action. Then the agency stashed it in a warehouse in Maryland, where it remains to this day.
    __
    It all began so hopefully. Al Gore proposed the satellite in 1998, at the National Innovation Summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    __
    Gazing skyward from the podium, the vice president described a spacecraft that would travel a full million miles from Earth to a gravity-neutral spot known as the L1 Lagrangian point, where it would remain fixed in place, facing the sunlit half of our planet. It would stream back to NASA video of our spherical home, and the footage would be broadcast continuously over the Web.
    __
    Not only would the satellite provide “a clearer view of our world,” Gore promised, but it would also offer “tremendous scientific value” by carrying into space two instruments built to study climate change: EPIC, a polychromatic imaging camera made to measure cloud reflectivity and atmospheric levels of aerosols, ozone and water vapor; and NISTAR, a radiometer. NISTAR was especially important: Out in deep space, it would do something that scientists are still unable to do today directly and continuously monitor the Earth’s albedo, or the amount of solar energy that our planet reflects into space versus the amount it absorbs

    Wow. Sounds pretty good, right?

    Rather than cobbling together data from many different satellites and trying to best coordinate the different locations and times of measurement, you could have a single observatory which could take the main measures to understand global warming: how much solar energy does the Earth take in, how much is reflected etc., and how much does it re-emit to space. And if that rate of re-emission slows, then the planet’s energy budget increases.

    Oh, right. We don’t want no damn ‘sinetists’ and their damn ‘rocket stuff’ to look at the damn Urf and tell us that we got to give up our cars and shit because Al Gore made up a bunch of shit about ‘global warming’ by faking a lot of e-mails and making it cold in the winter.

    …[I]n 2001, just a few months after the inauguration of George W. Bush, Triana’s launch plan was quietly put on hold. “We were preparing to transport it to the launch site when we heard,” Rosanova says. Instead, they wheeled the $100-million satellite into storage.
    __
    The mission entered a state of bureaucratic limbo. Around 2003, NASA renamed Triana the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, but the satellite remained on the ground. During the Bush administration, it became politically vulnerable, largely because of its association with Gore.
    __
    Dick Armey, then a Republican congressman from Texas, said of the satellite, “This idea supposedly came from a dream. Well, I once dreamed I caught a 10-foot bass. But I didn’t call up the Fish and Wildlife Service and ask them to spend $30 million to make sure it happened.”

    How’s that, you buncha damn Al Gore NASA fagz? How ya like them damn apples, huh? Where’s your god-damn Al Gore Jesus now! Hell, if he wants it in space so bad, he ought to get it up there his damn self, he thinks he’s so smart.

    And we don’t need none of you trouble-makin’ types sniffin’ around, neither.

    Warren Wiscombe, a senior physical scientist at NASA, blames a Bush-era “hostility” to earth science at NASA. “As to who ordered the axing of the mission,” he says, “we’ll never know, but the word we got was that Dick Cheney was behind it.”
    __
    Mitchell Anderson, a Vancouver-based reporter who has obsessively covered the DSCOVR story, also suspects Cheney’s hand, citing an unnamed NASA informant.
    __
    Over the course of three years, Anderson filed five Freedom of Information Act requests for documents related to DSCOVR. After querying NASA in 2006, he waited 11 months to receive the documents. “They told me they were consulting with their lawyers,” says Anderson, who was then writing for desmogblog.com.
    __
    “When they finally e-mailed me the documents, they were scanned sideways. I couldn’t read the top and bottom of the pages.” The 70-page packet contained mostly letters that prominent scientists had written in defense of DSCOVR. All correspondence relating to the mission’s mothballing was excluded.

    How’s about freedom of my a$$, huh? Heh heh.

    Wiscombe doesn’t buy it. He says DSCOVR was stigmatized: “People called it GoreSAT, and NASA found people who would be the most hostile toward DSCOVR for the workshop. They handpicked the assassins.”

    GoreSAT? They shoulda damn called it GoreFAT! ‘Cuz he was!

  13. 13.

    Stillwater

    @Mnemosyne: This has prolly been said on some of the other threads, but all this Obama {{crickets}} stuff really is nonsense. I remember not only that he objected (STRENUOUSLY!) to extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, he even gave an argument: that it was a handout to the wealthy and would put the country further into debt. I mean, that’s a pretty clear statement of a plan to reduce the deficit.

    Fucking media-heads are just like my dog – their hearing comes and goes in direct relation to their distraction level.

  14. 14.

    The Thin Black Duke

    Meh.

    This is the political equivalent of “New Coke”. Sure, the Republicans are selling it hard, but nobody’s buying.

    Well, nobody except teabaggers, Ayn Rand’s zombie disciples, and the obedient parrots of the media, of course.

    It’s a good thing they’re outnumbered this time.

  15. 15.

    Zifnab

    Sure, the Republicans are selling it hard, but nobody’s buying.

    November ’10 called and says you’re wrong.

  16. 16.

    RosiesDad

    @Stillwater:

    I remember not only that he objected (STRENUOUSLY!) to extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, he even gave an argument: that it was a handout to the wealthy and would put the country further into debt. I mean, that’s a pretty clear statement of a plan to reduce the deficit.

    Right. I remember it too. And immediately after, he agreed to extend the cuts for two more years. Some line in the sand.

    What he should have done, at that moment, was say, “No, this is wrong and we can’t afford it. And until you Republicans are willing to allow these temporary tax cuts to expire–just as they were planned to expire when they were enacted–as part of any deal, we are going to shut the mother fucker down and it is all on you.”

    That’s hardball. Which Obama does not play. He gets very offended right before he caves.

    Change you can believe in? Hardly.

  17. 17.

    JAHILL10

    @Zifnab: November ’10 was people voting on a completely different line of bullsh*t. Namely that “Obama is gonna attack Medicare!” They should have added, “Unless we destroy it first!”

  18. 18.

    Ruckus

    @General Stuck:
    a premeditated kamakazi run

    Agreed on this. They are going all in, hoping to win, tank the economy, blame Obama and win in 2012. Then they can lie about how this is a conservative country. By the time it goes to complete shit they hope to have stolen everything, tied down or not. They don’t have a clue what will happen when/if they get done, except they will have won.

    Assholes.

  19. 19.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @RosiesDad:

    Well, you know, “shutting the motherfucker down” is really shitty for a whole lot of people who depend on it for income, so I can see why he’d rather not raise the stakes immediately that high.

    @Zifnab:

    After screaming at Democrats about cutting medicare and saying “Where are the jobs” for months. Now they’re actually in power and they can’t wait to cut medicare and haven’t done shit-all about jobs. That’s not what people voted for, and enough of them will notice to make a difference. There’s a reason that all the past attempts to get rid of medicare have gone down in flames.

  20. 20.

    Judas Escargot

    I see ‘mortgage deduction’ on Ryan’s smock.

    Doesn’t taking that away Punish the Successful?

  21. 21.

    RosiesDad

    @Spaghetti Lee: Yes, it is really shitty for a whole lot of people who depend on it. But when you are fighting zealots who *would* shut it down regardless of how much pain it inflicts on the same whole lot of people, you need to draw a line. To call their bluff or to have the fight. Because if you cave today, you’re only going to be in the same predicament tomorrow.

    And here we are.

  22. 22.

    RosiesDad

    @Ruckus:

    They don’t have a clue what will happen when/if they get done, except they will have won.

    I believe they don’t actually care what happens as long as they win. Because they will blame any bad outcomes on the Democrats anyway.

  24. 24.

    FlipYrWhig

    @RosiesDad:

    What he should have done, at that moment, was say, “No, this is wrong and we can’t afford it. And until you Republicans are willing to allow these temporary tax cuts to expire—just as they were planned to expire when they were enacted—as part of any deal, we are going to shut the mother fucker down and it is all on you.”

    This works if you think that people respond to Democrats drawing lines in the sand. They don’t. Even Democrats, when polled, say they prefer compromise to standing on principle. Here’s a discussion from Matt Yglesias about it, citing Ezra Klein.

    IMHO if Obama tried this, the Beltway would erupt in dismay, Democrats would go whine to the media about how awful a decision it was, and the whole thing would play as “Has Obama gone too far?” People who are willing to vote for Democrats like to see Democrats making compromises. It sucks, but that’s what these poll results say, and I remember Benen featuring similar poll results a few months ago about the tax-cut deal.

    Your gambit would be cathartic, but there’s not a lot of evidence that it would win the future the day. It’s too bad, but that’s where Democrats get stuck.

  25. 25.

    General Stuck

    @RosiesDad:

    And here we are.

    And where is that? exactly. Haven’t seen an Obama cave to kill medicare yet, nor PP.

    And you are aware that ending all of the Bush tax cuts, which was the only option available to Obama, other than extending them all, would have taken roughly 800 billion out the economy and worked as a reverse stimulus in this critical stage of recovery.

  26. 26.

    tworivers

    probably this has been discussed in a previous thread, but the fact that Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus “found” 7500 previously uncounted votes for Prosser doesn’t pass the smell test.

    I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this, but I’ve read on DKos that these extra 7500 votes are just enough to put Prosser over the .5% margin, thereby making a recount possible only if Kloppenburg pays for it. Convenient that Nickolaus “found” these votes, isn’t it?

    The clerk in question is a Republican with a some definite sketchiness in her past:

    http://www.jsonline.com/news/waukesha/114014589.html

    According to Mary Spicuzza of Wall Street Journal:

    “Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was the subject of an Ethics Board inquiry in 2002 after she bought lists of registered voters with state money.”

    “Kathy Nickolaus worked for Assembly Republican Caucus when Prosser was Speaker. Caucus is controlled by speaker, so he is her former boss.”

    http://twitter.com/#!/mspicuzzawsj

  27. 27.

    PurpleGirl

    I few years ago I saw a sign painted on the side of a factory in Brooklyn. It said:

    CONservative
    GovernMENt

    I wonder if it’s still there. You could see it from the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

  29. 29.

    RossInDetroit

    I actually think the GOP could get away with this. They lied their way into at least one war and that was a pretty big feat. And they got enough people to swallow Trickle Down Economics to get us into this mess.
    We’re not dealing with ordinary bullshitters here, but qualified, professional, experienced and committed bullshitters. Lots and lots of Americans are defenseless against that. Or voluntarily disarmed, in the case of the Tea Party supporters.

  30. 30.

    WaterGirl

    Sadly, for those of us who want Obama to call their bluff and beat them at this game of chicken, Obama always takes the long view, and he says that shutting down the government would destroy the economic recovery that is starting to pick up steam. So a big F-you would be satisfying in the short run, but the long-term result might come under the heading of “be careful what you wish for…”

    Government shutdown is bad in the short run, particularly for those closest to the edge -> economic downturn -> lost election in 2012 if the economy is in the crapper.

    So he’s got to be the grown-up in the room who keeps his eye on the ball. (Which is how he won in 2008, by the way.)

    And I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t choose to look weak or give away stuff he cares about if he thought there was another way that would also preserve the ability to preserve our economic stability and remain our president after 2012, because if he doesn’t, then I am about out of hope for this country’s survival as a democracy.

    Happily, I believe Obama is also the smartest guy in the room, which still gives me some hope.

  31. 31.

    ppcli

    What’s your alternative?

    Oh, oooh, oooh! I’ve got one. Here goes: We raise taxes back to Clinton-era levels. Remember, when we were getting surpluses and stuff? And then all the rich people will get magic fairy gold and will be so happy that they won’t mind paying the extra taxes, and everybody will get a job making pretty figurines out of the fairy gold.
    Then, poof:
    Unemployment at 2.8 percent (no, no, *less* than 2.8%) and the deficit vanishes.

    That’s my plan. A bit more likely than Ryan’s, and at least it’s a conversation starter.

    Maybe it could use a few more numbers in there, but I can add them later. I was a math major. That means I can be Serious. Cool integral signs and brace brackets and subscripts too because I write with LaTeX.

    So where do I get my big cheque from a Soros – funded institute the way those Heritage guys did from Koch and their ilk?

  33. 33.

    RosiesDad

    @General Stuck: We are back to the threshold of a government shutdown because the GOP doesn’t think they have to deal; they know Obama will give them more than they will have to give up.

    It won’t be Medicare yet; that will be the next round. This go-round, we’ll lose funding to Planned Parenthood and the EPA. Because who needs family planning if you don’t have clean air or clean water.

    I don’t think there is broad consensus on the short term cost of increasing tax rates back to Clinton-era levels for all taxpayers vs. the benefit of increasing taxes on the wealthy. But I think there is more consensus (and maybe I’m pulling this out of my ass) that increasing tax rates back to 1990’s levels in the mid to long term would be a good thing.

  34. 34.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @Zifnab:
    I respectfully disagree.

    Why? This isn’t one of those treacherous “wedge” issues which divide people like abortion, gay marriage, or gun control.

    Because when you’re talking about killing Medicaid, it’s not something that’s only going to impact the lives of African-Americans, latinos, gays, muslims, DFHs and all the usual suspects cast out in the margins of America.

    It’s gonna fuck up white people, too, and whenever that happens, it isn’t business as usual anymore. I think what’s happening in Wisconsin is proof of that.

    Unfortunately, as proud as I am of the ongoing populist struggle in Mr. Walker’s Neighborhood, there’s a snake in the garden that won’t go away. And the sharp-fanged truth is that white people in Wisconsin voted for Republicans, and they’re pissed because this time was the first time that they realized how Republican policies fuck over people because it affected them personally.

    Whoa. Republicans don’t like non-rich white people either? What a bitter epiphany, huh?

    As Martin Luther King observed, “We might have come here on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”

    Thank God for enlightened self-interest. That might be what saves Medicaid.

  35. 35.

    Calouste

    I don’t think Ryan is looking for a haircuts. I think he is looking for scalps.

  36. 36.

    Gravenstone

    Bully pulpit, bitches! Obama just now called out the looming shutdown as a potential trigger for a double dip recession. Nothing like ratcheting up the pressure and giving people a tangible view of what might result

  37. 37.

    RosiesDad

    @FlipYrWhig: It worked out pretty damned well for Bill Clinton in 1995. Not that today’s circumstances are exactly the same.

    Democrats and Independents want to see *both sides* compromise. If the Democrats make it clear that they bent over backwards offering compromise but a deal could not be reached because the GOP demanded more at every turn, the Democrats can win the PR war. But first they need to act like they’ve got a spine.

  38. 38.

    General Stuck

    @RosiesDad:

    I stopped arguing with people having an obsessive lack of faith in Obama on about every crisis issue that comes along, and the Obama fail when the expected caving doesn’t materialize. And you didn’t address my question about the bush tax cuts visa vi taking money out of the economy in the middle of a recovery, nor acknowledged that either way, Obama would have broken a campaign promise. Plus, the extension was temporary.

    The ideal would have been to extend the middle class cuts to keep that money in the hands of those who will spend it, and create stimulus, and letting the rich ones expire. But that choice was not on Obama’s desk. If you believe he did it as a cave, then think what you will. I personally don’t think we need better democrats in office so much, as having better supporters, who seem to look for any sign of the imperfection to bash our dems in office. But that is just me I guess.

  39. 39.

    RosiesDad

    Van Hollen is on with Rachel now and making the case:

    The Republicans are using the threat of a shutdown as a vehicle for passing their social agenda. The House bill has over 50 riders attached that do everything from defunding Planned Parenthood, the CPB (including NPR), any medical service relating to abortion, the EPA, and so on and so forth.

    And that’s the argument: This is what they are going to take now and they are coming for Medicare and Medicaid next. All so they can give more tax cuts to the wealthy and to corporations.

    It this is not a winning argument, this country is truly fucked and it is time to start packing this weekend.

  40. 40.

    Ruckus

    @RosiesDad:
    I don’t want to see compromise. We have been compromising with assholes for the last 60 years and look where it’s gotten us.
    OK now that that’s off my chest and reality is back, compromise is what our form of government is supposed to be about. We are supposed to work out our differences of opinion and do what is best for the majority and those that can’t subsist without help. But that has never been the conservative view. They see everything, to butcher an old term, in dark and white. They have worked decades to get where we are and they are not about to back down now that they see a possibility of winning. The Ryans and Bachmans are the front line troops, the Kochsuckers are 5 star generals. Sometimes generals send front line troops on suicide missions because they are expendable.

  41. 41.

    General Stuck

    @Ruckus:

    Not to mention that compromise is what excites our swing voters in this country, makes them all warm and fuzzy with kumbaya. So what is happening is largely for that audience, and always the coming or next election. The art is only giving up what you can afford politically to give up, which for dems is usually about taking care of the poor and mc. I don’t see what dems have offered as dipping into that well very deep.

  42. 42.

    RosiesDad

    @General Stuck: The original tax cuts were temporary. By law, they would have expired at midnight on 12/31/10. By agreeing to extend them for two years, Obama made it that much more difficult to go away. Especially if he is defeated in 2012 or if the GOP holds the House and wins back the Senate.

    I don’t have an obsessive lack of faith in Obama on every crisis issue. I think his moral compass is probably pretty good but his willingness to get up and FIGHT for what he believes is right is lacking. He has the bully pulpit and he does not use it. I was disappointed when he kept Bernanke at the Fed and appointed Geithner to Treasury because it meant that the Bush policy of making sure the bankers were taken care of first would be continued. And so it was.

    As to the issue of the taxes: Using the NY Times Interactive Budget Graphic, returning the estate tax, capital gains and dividends taxes and income taxes on all taxpayers to Clinton era levels reduces the deficit by over $300B by 2015. Sparing tax increases in income below $250K reduces deficit reduction to $130B. That said, there is no hard and firm evidence one way or the other that increasing taxes at all levels would stall an economic recovery.

    In the 1980’s, Reagan instituted tax increases that mostly impacted lower income taxpayers (overt taxes plus eliminating tax deductions that mostly benefited lower income taxpayers–credit card interest, student loan interest, etc.) and the economy recovered from a deep recession and unemployment that was in double digits in 1981-82 fell back to more acceptable levels in the following years. Was it the tax cuts or just the business cycle? I don’t know. But the fact is, raising taxes did not slow/eliminate recovery from recession. (And let me say that I was not then nor am I now a Reagan fan. But his admirers who like to point to his tax cuts as the reason the economy recovered always manage to ignore all the tax increases he imposed which may very well have played a more important role in that recovery.)

  43. 43.

    Ruckus

    @General Stuck:
    poor and mc

    Either I’m slow today or my awareness of all internet traditions has been run over by a truck but what does mc mean? I get poor, hell I get it pretty good and hard these days.

  44. 44.

    Corner Stone

    @RosiesDad:

    The original tax cuts were temporary. By law, they would have expired at midnight on 12/31/10. By agreeing to extend them for two years, Obama made it that much more difficult to go away. Especially if he is defeated in 2012 or if the GOP holds the House and wins back the Senate.

    Obama could have also tried not promising the one thing he was tied to was an MC tax cut.
    Just let those fucking budget busters expire. We will live through the disaster that results from the Bush Tax Cut Extension.

  45. 45.

    RosiesDad

    @RosiesDad:

    Was it the tax cuts or just the business cycle?

    I meant to say “Was it the tax increases or just the business cycle?” and edit wouldn’t let me fix it. FYWP.

  46. 46.

    RosiesDad

    @Corner Stone:

    We will live through the disaster that results from the Bush Tax Cut Extension.

    Yes we will. But the hole we need to climb out of will be that much deeper, and it didn’t have to be.

  47. 47.

    Ruckus

    @Ruckus:

    So the answer is slow today. Ok ease up on the everyday talk.

    mc=medicare

    @RosiesDad:
    It may have been both but I remember that the commercial side of business got going again and pulled consumers along. That’s what happened to my business (commercial, not consumer based at the time) anyway.

  48. 48.

    General Stuck

    @RosiesDad:

    The original tax cuts were temporary. By law, they would have expired at midnight on 12/31/10. By agreeing to extend them for two years, Obama made it that much more difficult to go away. Especially if he is defeated in 2012 or if the GOP holds the House and wins back the Senate.

    Nope, the new extension expires at midnight on Jan 1, 2013/ If Obama is defeated, he will still be president when they expire, and I suspect this was by design.

    And I agree, and personally wished they would have all expired. But the the “cave” bullshit is that, bullshit. He promised to extend the Middle class cuts, and had to do the rich ones also to keep that campaign promise. That is the reason, and I am only arguing about the cave charges you made, and they seem quite obsessive to me, and I can read about the same comment on any left wing blog, in numbers, any time day or night.

  50. 50.

    OzoneR

    @RosiesDad:

    And immediately after, he agreed to extend the cuts for two more years. Some line in the sand.

    If by “immediately after” you mean two months later after the Democratic Congress decided not to vote on it despite his urging then lost control of the House.

  51. 51.

    OzoneR

    @General Stuck:

    He promised to extend the Middle class cuts, and had to do the rich ones also to keep that campaign promise. That is the reason, and I am only arguing about the cave charges you made, and they seem quite obsessive to me, and I can read about the same comment on any left wing blog, in numbers, any time day or night.

    i read somewhere that a staffer for a Dem Congressman who was defeated said Democrats punted on the tax cut bill cause a lot of them knew they were going to lose and didn’t want to take away their own tax cuts. Pelosi thought she could round them up to vote on it like she had in the past, but with defeat impending, they abandoned her in droves.

    Obama might have been able to win the argument if he had never promised to keep the middle class cuts in the first place, but then he might have ever gotten elected, and he would have been promoting a bad plan economically (which is tax cuts for poor/middle class, hikes for the rich)

    It wasn’t a “cave,” it was a loss…liberals would be well advised to learn the difference.

    In the end extending them all was the “right” thing to do politically and economically, though not fiscally.

  52. 52.

    RosiesDad

    @General Stuck: I don’t think he had to do the tax cuts for the rich to preserve those to the mc. He could have allowed them to expire and blamed it on the GOP. And his explanation would have been the truth: “I wanted to temporarily extend tax cuts on income under $250K but the GOP would only allow it if we continued the tax cuts for the wealthy that we cannot afford.” And most reasonable people would have accepted that because it was true.

    The Republicans are serial hostage takers. At some point someone has to look them in the eye and say, “Fine, shoot the hostage and see how well that works out for you.” I keep hoping Obama will do it but he hasn’t yet. (Except when he appointed Elizabeth Warren, which was the single best thing he has done for the mc since taking office.)

  53. 53.

    PIGL

    @General Stuck: ending the tax cuts would have taken $800 bazillion out of the ecomomy? how’s that? By having the government spend it instead of private citizens spending or hording it? Or having spent the money anyway, but borrowed it, by which means tax cuts are an 11-dimensional deficit?

  54. 54.

    OzoneR

    @RosiesDad:

    He could have allowed them to expire and blamed it on the GOP. And most reasonable people would have accepted that because it was true.

    Reasonable people eh? What about the other 60% of the country?

  56. 56.

    OzoneR

    @PIGL:

    ending the tax cuts would have taken $800 bazillion out of the ecomomy

    It’s not like that money was going to go to a jobs program or something. The Republicans would have thrown it away in subsidies to oil companies or the Pentagon.

  57. 57.

    OzoneR

    @RosiesDad:

    If the Democrats make it clear that they bent over backwards offering compromise but a deal could not be reached because the GOP demanded more at every turn, the Democrats can win the PR war.

    This is what they ALWAYS do and ALWAYS get shit for doing.

  58. 58.

    RosiesDad

    @OzoneR: I somewhat agree. But the White House should have anticipated this in early summer and Biden should have gone up to the Hill and twisted arms until it was done. I don’t have a problem apportioning blame between Obama, Reid and Pelosi but if it is the responsibility of the White House to lead, they came up short.

  61. 61.

    RosiesDad

    @OzoneR: It’s because they don’t define what they have given up to reach a compromise.
    The Republicans ALWAYS define what their objectives are and are unwavering. The Dems rarely define what they won’t give up or sell out to make a deal.

    I thought Van Hollen did a good job on Maddow tonight. The Dems would be well-served by following his lead:
    “We met the Republicans halfway on the issue of the money and now they’ve made their entire social agenda a precondition to a deal and we are not going there.”

    If the Dems lose that argument, the country gets what it deserves.

  62. 62.

    General Stuck

    @PIGL:

    Allowing the tax cuts to expire would have meant that money would have come out of peoples pay checks and into the US treasury. Which would have meant it wouldn’t have been spent, which is the definition of stimulus money. The only way to get it back into the economy would have been a new stimulus from congress and signed by the president. Not much chance of that.

  64. 64.

    FlipYrWhig

    @RosiesDad:

    And his explanation would have been the truth: “I wanted to temporarily extend tax cuts on income under $250K but the GOP would only allow it if we continued the tax cuts for the wealthy that we cannot afford.” And most reasonable people would have accepted that because it was true.

    That’s what he did say, almost literally. The problem is that Democrats, especially in the Senate, even including liberal stalwarts like Boxer and by some reports Feingold, didn’t agree with that approach and refused to go along with it. They were afraid of the negative ads they’d be hit with about how they raised taxes, and they didn’t want to explain that the only people whose taxes would be going up were the people who were already doing well.

    He did exactly what you wanted him to do. He even used the rhetoric you wanted him to use.

    And a huge chunk of the rest of his party wouldn’t fucking play along. They thought, “I’ve seen the numbers, and this is gonna be a close one, and the last thing I need is to have my name on a billion-dollar tax increase. I don’t care if it’s good policy, it’s gonna kill my chances. Let’s just punt, I’ll try to eke out a win, and then we can revisit it in the new session.”

    Obama can’t stop that. He can’t bang and/or twist heads and/or arms to prevent it. He can make a strong case, which he did, and he can present why it’s a winning hand, which he did, and they wouldn’t do it anyway.

  65. 65.

    FlipYrWhig

    @RosiesDad:

    the White House should have anticipated this in early summer and Biden should have gone up to the Hill and twisted arms until it was done

    You’re presuming that “until it was done” is a foregone conclusion. Just twist enough arms and “it’s done.” Well, it wasn’t. The Democrats wouldn’t make it “done.” They wouldn’t listen to reason.

  66. 66.

    RosiesDad

    @FlipYrWhig: And that’s why I don’t lay all the blame at Obama’s feet. When they fail, it’s almost always a group effort.

  67. 67.

    OzoneR

    @RosiesDad:

    If the Dems lose that argument, the country gets what it deserves.

    Van Hollen’s argument is not new. I have seen it made over and over again and get lost in the chatter. The Democratic Party makes the same case, even stronger, on their Twitter and Facebook feeds.

    The Dems DO lose that argument, repeatedly, and I think some of you ignore that reality because it would mean that the country gets what it deserves.

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