For all of you who flamed me last week for being a bad Democrat or being played by the media or whatever because obviously Harry Reid would never do something so stupid, eat a bag of dicks:
The White House worked closely with liberal House Democrats last week to torpedo a tax deal that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was negotiating with Republicans.
The unusual move to kill a Reid-backed proposal has raised suspicions among Senate negotiators about the White House’s motivations. They believe President Obama’s team is eyeing a broad corporate tax reform deal in 2015, when Republicans will control the Senate and the House.
“It might indicate less about the merits of the package and more about the White House using progressives to kill a deal now in order to pave the way for a deal with Republicans next Congress that progressives will absolutely loathe,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide.
The administration joined forces with the House Democrats with one thing in mind: making sure a possible veto wouldn’t be overturned.
“Clearly the White House calculated that the House Democrats could sustain a veto,” said another Democratic aide. “The White House had conversations with a slew of House Democrats on Tuesday. It was furiously trying to assess how much opposition there was in the House. They were very upset.”
A White House spokeswoman declined to comment.
The Reid-GOP deal would have indefinitely revived both the popular credit for business research and a tax break for small-business expensing, a pair of proposals that House Republicans have been pushing for months.
Democrats would have gotten a long-term extension of a tax break that helps families pay for college costs, while Reid — who is up for reelection in 2016 — would have scored a permanent extension of a tax break for state and local sales taxes that’s especially important to Nevada.
But Democrats wouldn’t have gotten long-term extensions of expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which some in the party had called their top priority in the tax discussions.
Republicans balked at that idea in the wake of Obama’s decision to shield millions of illegal immigrants from deportation.
We need a new minority leader ASAP.
Belafon
So, liberal Democrats joined with Obama to kill a deal with Republicans so Obama could negotiate with Republicans next session and get a worse deal? I wonder if that senior aide worked for Reid?
Holden Pattern
1) It’s too early to raise a fuss about that thing. It’s just a rumor.
2) Don’t raise a fuss about that thing. You’ll queer the negotiation, and you don’t want to undermine leadership. They’ll do the right thing. They got this.
3) It’s too late to raise a fuss about that thing. You should have raised a fuss earlier. Now it’s a done deal and you’ll just depress turnout in the next election, you stupid purist emoprog.
Villago Delenda Est
For every good thing Reid has done, he’s done at least two bad things.
Frustrating Warren and Merkley’s filibuster reform efforts chief among them. There’s too much old boy network shit going in the the US Senate. McConnel and the GOP caucus are simply evil. There is no way to collaborate with them. To do so sacrifices too much for our side.
NCSteve
In Republicanworld, it totally makes sense that the best way, and only way, really, to punish Obama for making deportation priorities less random is to punish poor Americans. Hell, if they could have arranged mass floggings, they would have.
Just Some Fuckhead
Bipartisanship means doing Republican shit (basically serving our moneyed class.) I’m surprised you never noticed this when you were a Republican.
As it ever was, so shall it ever be,
beltane
@NCSteve: It’s a win-win for the Republicans. Not only can they punish the poor, white rural Americans who vote for them, they can attribute the resulting pain on immigration and “those people”.
Ella in New Mexico
So THIS was the best 11th Dimensional Chess Game Reid could play? Dang, we DO need a new minority leader, ASAP. Hopefully, it won’t be Schumer.
Villago Delenda Est
@beltane: Prezactly. The White Trash base is frankly too stupid to know they’re being played.
They deserve to be enserfed.
Cacti
Of course.
It’s all just a ruse so that slippery Obama can really stick it to the left.
…sigh…
Just Some Fuckhead
That’s two posts in a row, John. You should go lay down and recover.
askew
Obama was never going to sign off on something that doesn’t extend the Earned Income Tax Credit… I don’t know what Reid was thinking in working on a deal that didn’t include that. It was never going to happen.
Personally, I think Obama has no more fucks to give about helping Senate Dems passing shitting legislation. They ran away from in 2014 and lost and then turned around and blamed their bad campaigning on Obama anyway. They bitched that he shouldn’t issue the EO on immigration before the election and then bitched that he didn’t do it earlier or that he did it too soon after the election. Senate Dems want to do absolutely nothing while in office or pass bad GOP bills and are offended that Obama isn’t content to play along.
JGabriel
The Hill:
The GOP wants to punish working class parents and their children because of the President’s executive branch decisions regarding the entirely unrelated issue of undocumented immigration?
That pretty much tells you all you need to know about the modern Republican Party.
Mnemosyne
@Belafon:
Remember, Obama has always pre-betrayed us, even if it hasn’t actually happened yet.
Villago Delenda Est
@JGabriel: Prezactly.
They are evil.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mnemosyne: .. and everyone else is always failing Obama.
beltane
@Villago Delenda Est: The American working class has been locked in a dark room to be punched around by an invisible fist. Instead of pointing out whose fist is doing the punching, the media has flooded the room with loud, distracting music with the constant refrain of “both sides do it”. Yeah, these people are dumb, but they are not measurably dumber than the totebagger idiots who fall for the same toxic shit on NPR and PBS.
@Ella in New Mexico: Tax credits to pay offset college costs are a program that mostly benefits the relatively affluent, not families without the means to afford college tuition in the first place. Why can’t Democrats run on increasing the Pell Grant or some other program that directly helps people go to college. This Thirs-way stuff is so lame and off-putting to those who are trying to reach the middle class but find themselves slipping further and further behind with each passing year.
Woodrowfan
salted? unsalted? BBQ? Ranch? Puffed? Fried? Gluten-free? You got be specific dude.
NotMax
OMG, it’s Reidghazi!
/turning snark to 11
Woodrowfan
@Villago Delenda Est:
insane with hatred….
beltane
@askew: Obama now has the opportunity to be a virtual third-party president. Harry Reid may be a political survivor, but he has always reeked of fail.
SatanicPanic
@Just Some Fuckhead: well kind of.
WereBear
Geez, they welcome it!
CONGRATULATIONS!
I have a great idea – let’s cut Reid loose, along with the other insufficiently pure Dems we cut loose this cycle, and make sure Republicans control the chamber forever.
Who’s with me?
BBA
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Don’t you remember 2010? The Republicans always control the Senate, even with a minority.
kindness
@Woodrowfan: fify:
cahuenga
Being a true Democrat is more important than being a mindless team cheerleader.
SRW1
Fer Christ sake, Harry, 2016 is a presidential election year! Even if your opponent isn’t as insane as Sharron Angle, the playing field doesn’t appear to warrant pre-emptive pant shitting.
Holden Pattern
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I remember turfing those fuckers out in the primaries — splitters, wets, moderates! And then the few of us pure souls remaining sang a rousing chorus of The Internationale, celebrating our success with Russian vodka, Cuban cigars and North Korean tree bark kimchi.
Oh, wait, no. That’s not what happened. The New Coke Dems had their asses handed to them by the general election voters because (1) angry old white people vote, (2) the Dem leadership classes aren’t as a group interested in running permanent outreach to people who aren’t banksters or angry old white people (remember how many Dems voted to fuck ACORN?), and (3) “I’m conservative, really I am, but not as conservative as that guy” is not much of a platform.
NonyNony
@beltane:
??
Why would you expect that the people doing the punching would advertise that they’re punching? Especially when they’ve gone to so much trouble to make their fists invisible?
I think a whole lot of problems in this country boil down to people thinking that the media is “supposed to be” on the side of the average person. Or is at least supposed to be neutral. The media in this country is and has always been owned by rich people and operated for their interests.
Where you see times in history where the media seems to be working to provide information to citizens it is always – and I mean ALWAYS – because it aligns with the interests of the rich people who run the media.
When papers were overtly partisan and you had Republican and Democratic papers in a city, one paper had a vested interest in outing the bad faith and mistakes of the other political party. It isn’t that they wanted informed voters – it’s that they wanted voters who were informed about the bad stuff the other guys were doing.
Later as media moguls were buying up papers they presented their interests, but up until fairly recently the elites in this country were strongly divided and at odds with each other – at first for economic reasons because of the divide between the slave owners in the south and the factory owning proponents of “wage slavery” in the north. Then later due to the threat of Communism – with some looking to embrace Socialism to stave off Communism and others looking to embrace Fascism for the same purpose.
These days the elites don’t fight so much amongst themselves – there isn’t an existential threat to their way of life anymore the way the abolition movement was in the 19th century and Communism was in the 20th. Where they fight now is over who gets the most pie amongst themselves, and so their media ownership has turned towards getting them the most pie. It’s probably going to continue this way until some new existential threat to their money bins comes into the world, and then when that happens they’ll start fighting again about the best way to respond to it. But until they can be provoked into fighting amongst themselves again we’re going to keep getting just one side of the story – the side that lines their pockets the most.
Mnemosyne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Yes, why can’t President Superman do everything himself? Why does he expect Congress to do their fucking jobs and actually pass legislation? It’s like he thinks there are three co-equal branches of government or something.
Mike E
@Just Some Fuckhead: There’s great footage of FDR campaigning for reelection in ’36, mocking the Repubs for trying to adopt his New Deal initiatives…[paraphrasing] “They say, ‘we will do these programs, trust us to do it better than the president, we’ll do more of them, cross our hearts, hope to die, and we’ll do all of this without any costs to you!’ Don’t you believe them!” He delivered this with total glee. The Repubs, seeing their political error, then went after him as a total unrepentant socia1ist. He won by a landslide.
Yep, same as it ever was.
eta The correct word would be ‘co-opt’
trollhattan
I love the little scam the Republicans are trying to pull: “We’d TOTALLY have worked with the president had he not done his Imperial Presidency Dictator Free the Mexicans thingie.”
Republican actions and intentions before the president acted on immigration = Republican actions after the president acted on immigration. Any assertion of something different is a lie.
Mnemosyne
@NonyNony:
I actually wish we could go back to the days of partisan newspapers, because at least there would be someone out there taking the Democratic side. As it is, the MSM is 90 percent Republican and 10 percent Both Sides Do It.
Emma
@Cacti: Yeah. SSDD. And we fall for it every time.
I am as bloody tired of democrats as I am of republicans. 2010?! WE HAD A MAJORITY! Of course, they never count the Blue Dogs that would commit seppuku rather than vote for a progressive plan. GITMO?! The President should just order the armed forces to stand down, laws or no laws. Of course, if a Republican president did that, we would correctly call it a dictatorship.
And so on. And so on. Ad infinitum.
p.a.
@Villago Delenda Est: unfortunately they are too stupid to know they’re being played, but they are smart enough to know they’re being dissed.
Frankensteinbeck
Okay, I went and read the article. First, an article that leads with a theory that Obama wants even more Republican-friendly legislation is being written by someone with a serious agenda, his head up his ass, or most likely both. Second, the deal described here is not the deal described when you panicked. This deal has give and take, and is not the simple giveaway in your original post. So like we told you, that rumor was wrong. I can’t say I like this deal much, but too-bad-to-be-believed deal was, indeed, too bad to be believed. Third, buried way the Hell down in this article, the non-conspiracy theory is that Reid failed to get any deal agreed to by enough Democrats, and the whole thing is bullshit gossip.
Yes, Cole, you were and still are being played.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne:
Damn. I wish that weren’t an accurate appraisal of the current state of journalism.
bemused
Someone mentioned the Dunning-Krueger effect in a recent thread. There’s a very interesting piece by Paul Rosenberg in Salon, “Why Are These Clowns Winning? Secrets of the right-wing brain” with links to a 2010 essay series on Dunning effect by Errol Morris and a recent piece by Dunning “We Are All Confident Idiots”. I’m just digging into those links but fascinating so far.
beltane
@NonyNony: I agree. Virtually all media outlets are the propaganda organs of the billionaires who own them. They do not exist to inform the public, or even to entertain the public, but to confuse, disorient, and mislead the public. In the old days, it was possible for parties representing the non-elite to publish broadsides, etc. to get their message out, but no way can this ever happen in a cable news dominated world. Americans are now just as brainwashed as other brainwashed peoples of the world. Those of us who have been insufficiently indoctrinated are allowed to vent our frustrations in out-of-the-way parts of the internet no one can hear us.
MikeInSewickley
Jay Gould the robber baron at the beginning of the last Gilded Age said about his striking railroad workers, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
This is where we are at.
I agree with anyone who is tired of Repubs and Dems alike.
The Dems give Elizabeth Warren a near ceremonial position to appease the liberals but the Dem leadership knows who signs their checks and it isn’t the middle/lower class.
I think that the Ferguson Protests and Occupy Wall Street have a common enemy and, if the powers don’t start to try and at least pretend to listen, we might start seeing some real torches and pitchforks popping up in a lot more places.
SatanicPanic
@p.a.: Are they being played? Or are they even white trash? (a term I frankly don’t like, because there’s nothing wrong with being poor). The Republican base is older, wealthier racist white people and I don’t think they’re being played. I’m pretty sure they know exactly what they’re doing. They might bring a few working class dummies along, but that’s because those people are racist too. And while I agree those are stupid priorities, that’s not really proof they don’t know what’s going on.
Keith G
@Frankensteinbeck: Oh come on. Why are you expecting the facts to be correctly sussed after the first
readskim through?That would be very….unusual.
burnspbesq
@askew:
Which is somewhat bizarre, as the current expansions of the child credit and the EITC don’t sunset until 2017, while most of the other extenders expired at the end of 2013.
beltane
@MikeInSewickley: The way the authorities reacted to the harmless OWS drum circles made me realize that any kind of organized protest against the plutocracy would result in a full-fledged Tienanmen style response.
Tone In DC
@Frankensteinbeck:
Personally, I just shook my head at the article’s sourcing. Every so often, a decent news article will use anonymous sources. The vast majority of the time, as you point out here, it’s someone with an axe to grind throwing their particularly rancid brand of bullshit out there. This kind of journalistic fertilizer was positively ubiquitous during the reign of Dubya.
Just more Senate shenanigans. The Washington two step, version MMMXXXIV.
NonyNony
@Mnemosyne:
Well we do have partisan news sources. Or at least openly Republican ones. We don’t get openly Democratic ones and I suspect it’s partially because the people with lots of money who vote Democratic and like the Democratic agenda don’t like the idea of spending their money on a propaganda engine. They’d rather do something noble with the money like dig wells in Africa or open domestic abuse shelters in major US cities.
Also I think it’s the gatekeeper effect – a Democratic network would have to tone themselves down to keep the money men happy or would get torpedoed. MSNBC’s unwillingness to embrace a status as a “liberal network” counterpoint to Fox News is exactly this in action – to go full-on Fox News for liberals means either saying things that the guys that own and operate the network don’t want to hear OR it means doing it half-assed such that the viewers would inevitably be unhappy with it. So instead they keep with their attempt at being a mushy centrist network and try to make money off of that.
SatanicPanic
@beltane: that’s a little bit much. OWS was going on for weeks before they really started cracking down.
skerry
I’d like to see Reid retire in 2016. He was born in 1939. Get some younger people in the Senate.
BR
@beltane:
Do folks remember the UC Davis student occupy protests? (This was the one where the students got pepper sprayed by the UC police while sitting down.)
I remember thinking the smartest thing they did was that they did a silent protest. It’s hard for the media to make them out in a bad light when they met the university chancellor with indomitable silence. I remember thinking the video of it was powerful, and wonder why there haven’t been more such silent protests.
jibeaux
Always nice to remember in these contexts that Reagan was a huge champion of the EITC. Just another sign of how far they’ve marched right.
KG
Two thoughts, neither of them particularly serious:
1. In addition to having an age minimum to run for federal office (25 in the house, 30 in the senate, 35 for president), maybe we should have an age maximum, like if you qualify for social security you can’t run again.
2. They use to call Washington Hollywood for ugly people. I’m starting to think it’s more like professional wrestling for the unathletic. Just fewer chair shots and people being thrown through tables (which is to say, you’re probably getting worked, bro)
CONGRATULATIONS!
@beltane: Hence MRAPs going to all police departments and most major school districts.
Obama says “he’ll look into that”.
burnspbesq
@jibeaux:
Of course he was. The EITC is an alternative to actually paying people a living wage. It shifts the burden of ensuring that people have enough money to live on from employers to the taxpaying public at large.
Nick
So some dumb motherfucker (Reid) who belongs to a space cult (LDS) has bad ideas??? WHO KNEW???
max
eat a bag of dicks
Since I agreed with you, Cole, I must decline your generous offer of a package of salted penii.
We need a new minority leader ASAP.
Ah, but see, do you know who the heir apparent to Reid is? It would would be fucking Chuck Shumer. Now if you wanna see someone continuously roll over for rich people and Republicans, Chuck’s your man.
max
[‘So, gonna stick with Reid for now.’]
Marc
@Belafon: Yes, exactly. Obama killed a Republican-friendly tax deal so he could cut them an even friendlier tax deal next year.
Also, he’s totally going to gut Social Security and Medicare this time. I just know it!
Fucking unnamed sources.
gvg
John. I have no real idea what you are trying to say but you sound like you are over reacting again. Please reread your source document, then rewrite.
I am more skeptical of anonymous source in Washington political journalism than almost anything else on earth. That doesn’t make Obama or Reid saints but I am not going to give much credence to that kind of rumor. Someone is always saying something like that these past few years and it just hasn’t been happening. If they ever do double cross us, we won’t get warning from the same old “insiders”.
LAC
@Frankensteinbeck: I hope Cole can hear you over the salted dick popping machine. He is getting that batch ready to serve.
Goblue72
@SatanicPanic: white working class voters went strongly GOP this last election. White unionized working class voters are slightly different but they are a minority of white working class voters.
cckids
@SRW1:
Harry is not particularly popular in NV right now. If our current gov (Sandoval) runs against him, as it is rumored he will, Reid will lose.
kc
Ah, forget it.
Frankensteinbeck
@gvg:
The last unsourced rumor said that Reid was actively working to pass a package that contained all of the tax breaks Republicans wanted and nothing whatsoever for Democrats. I proposed that journalists deliberately spread rumors to make Democrats panic. Cole is now claiming that this unsourced rumor validates his belief in the last unsourced rumor.
Tripod
@NonyNony:
Maybe we can’t have nice things because progressive squishes loose their fucking minds every time they get a glimpse inside the sausage factory.
SEE… I told YOU, not a dimes worth of difference, the whole damn SYSTEM is out of ORDER!
kindness
Call me an Obot but I don’t think Obama sank the Reid plan so he could sign an even more Republican friendly plan come January.
Really? The FDL contingent is leading with this as if it is real?
I admit, Obama scares me sometimes. But I have learned that Obama’s deals are more favorable over time than anything Harry Reid or Chuck Schumer would negotiate. Fox News uses fantasy narratives to further their cause. Don’t be Fox News!
Johnny Coelacanth
@SatanicPanic: “Or are they even white trash? (a term I frankly don’t like, because there’s nothing wrong with being poor)”
I was raised by my grandmother, old country East Texas style; she dropped out of school in the fifth grade to help her family work through the Depression, and we were no strangers to food stamps or SSI. As she would remark on the folks in our neighborhood who couldn’t be bothered to clean themselves or their homes: “We may be poor, but we ain’t trash.” The two are not synonymous.
J R in WV
@Johnny Coelacanth:
Exactly so. We have many neighbors who are poor, working hard to get along, and taking care of their lot and trailer. Keeping things picked ujp and organized, the lawn mowed, the broken down car and spare parts organized off to one side.
Then there are neighborhoods where each trailer is surrounded by every tool and toy ever procured, strewn with abandon, left to oxidize in the sun and the rain.
One friend said that you can tell when you drive from Kentucky into West Virginia. In WV the yard trash was in neat small piles, while in KY it was randomly strewn around. This even holds between neighborhoods. As you drive up the creek, you will pass from well kept homesteads into messy ones, and then back to neatly kept ones.
Trashy is not a financial status, it is a mental status.
AxelFoley
@beltane:
It has been ever thus.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Marc:
That claim can certainly be attributed to many of our Progressive Betters on this very site.
Lee
I’m getting to the point where I’m not going to give a shit about the idiots that keep voting against their best interests.
They have to be willfully that stupid. Maybe they deserve to be fucked over.
Death Panel Truck
When Reid said on 60 Minutes years ago that he would not use LBJ as a role model in his job as majority leader, I knew we were in trouble.