I was commenting on another thread, and I took the time to research how bad the Republican Party’s record on electing African Americans really was. It’s far worse than I thought. In the last 110 years (in other words Post Reconstruction), there have been 4 elected black Republicans in Congress (5 if you count the non voting member of the US Virgin Islands). There are now 93 African American Republicans elected to office at all levels of government, from School Board Vice President to Mayor or State Senator. On the plus side, that’s up from 57 (I think) last time I checked. On the other hand, there are still so few African Americans representing the GOP’s elected preference that Red State would be able to treat every one of them to a steak dinner with their own bottle of Caymus (a restaurant will charge 2-3 times that by the way) for the amount of money they are asking.
Kiss My Black Ass
KMBA Watch
U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced today that they are introducing legislation that will effectively end the current military mission in Iraq and begin the redeployment of U.S. forces. The bill requires the President to begin safely redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq 120 days from enactment, as required by the emergency supplemental spending bill the Senate passed last week. The bill ends funding for the war, with three narrow exceptions, effective March 31, 2008.
That’s the right response to threats from Bush to veto his own Iraq money. Passing a watered down bill would send a message of weakness to the administration and just intensify its attacks on the will of the American people.
Snark aside, that last point is the clincher. Congress unquestionably stands with the bulk of the American people when it moves to get America out of Iraq. If anything most Americans blame Democrats for not moving aggressively enough. George Bush has, what? He can count on the support of Hannity and Limbaugh’s more diehard fans. The president has the voices in his own head, which (unless you subscribe to a fringe sect of protestantism) he thinks is God. Dittoheads and Hannityites have run so far to the fringe that any pol who follows their soothing voice will find himself dashed on the electoral rocks, and the voices in Bush’s head can’t vote. If anybody stands on a sandy cliff edge when it comes to intransigence over Iraq, it isn’t Harry Reid.
KMBA Watch
Bush’s spending plan would make his first-term tax cuts permanent, at a cost of $1.6 trillion over 10 years. He is seeking $78 billion in savings in the government’s big health care programs — Medicare and Medicaid — over the next five years.
The president’s budget would also reduce spending for Medicare and Medicaid, the federal government’s health programs for the elderly and the poor, by about $100 billion over five years. And it would provide insufficient extra cash to maintain coverage for poor children currently enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
A more moderate series of proposals failed to pass the 109th Congress, which had a Republican majority. I will let the readers guess what the hell the president was thinking.
via Steve Benen.
Cynicism Works
Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month.
Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
Democrats unveil massive spending bill
WASHINGTON – Democrats have unveiled a massive spending bill combining the budgets of 13 Cabinet agencies with increases in aid for lower-income college students, while cutting President Bush’s funding requests for foreign aid and closing military bases.
Contrary to popular opinion it turns out that Republicans are good at something. Too bad it isn’t governing.
Plenty Of Fingers To Go Around
It strikes me that the president’s determination to throw more troops into Iraq or as I call it, break the army requires giving the finger to a remarkable number of different groups of people. Start with the new Democratic majority, who the president has maneuvered to shut out entirely from Iraq decisionmaking. That might mean more if anybody could come up with an instance when the President has not given Democrats the finger. It’s just who he is. More interesting to me is the number of folks who are unaccustomed to getting flipped off by the C-in-C.
* The Joint Chiefs.
* The American people. Only 11-12% support the troop buildup that the president is proposing. Mark Foley polled better than that.
* The ISG. Considering poppy’s influence on this group via Baker, we should take this as the President reiterating his position that dad can pound salt.
* Think that the president’s own party wants to re-fight 2008 on the same strategic ground as ’06? I don’t.
Josh Marshall asked a while back, “who’s for this exactly?” John McCain and Joe Lieberman should count for something. The rightwingosphere will hang on for awhile if only because libruls want the opposite. Laura and Barney, and Barney is open to debate.
Eventually true statesmen recognize that their historical moment has passed and subsume their ego to the good of the country. LBJ did it. Sadly, I think that we can all acknowledge that Bush is not LBJ. Recognizing failure is not in his lexicon. The idea of Bush subsuming his ego to anything is laughable. The fighting will go on, the army will break and the political ground will continue getting worse for Republicans until they find some way to pull the plug.
Particularly note that last bit – when it comes to personal gratification versus the good of his own party the President has no qualms about choosing the former over the latter. Ask any ex-Congressman whether he or she would have preferred to see Rumsfeld gone sooner.
I have no doubt that Bush was dead serious when he said that he would go on with nobody but Laura and Barney at his back. So what does his party plan to do about it? There is really only one option at their disposal and it ends with president Pelosi. Stipulated that things that can’t go on generally don’t, nonetheless my money says that America can limp through at least two more years of a Potemkin occupation, broken army and all. Then a massive Democratic majority can define Pyrrhic victory while cleaning up what Bush broke.
Comity Watch
Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month.
Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare, the federal health-care program for the elderly and disabled.
Funny how our national guardians of the civility chalice tend to ignore spiteful behavior that actually has an impact on how our country runs. Is this crap really that much harder to comment on than society-page gossip about Nancy Pelosi disliking Jane Harman? Paging Atrios…
Comity Watch
Bush seems determined to get some real mileage out of the waning weeks of his Congressional majority. First it was John Bolton and the domestic wiretapping acts, not it’s a panel of judges so far out there that even Republicans have their doubts:
After calling for bipartisanship, President Bush surprised Senate Democrats with plans to renominate a controversial list of judges – some of whom may be unacceptable even to a few Republican senators. “It’s an unfortunate signal,” said one senior Democratic Senate aide.
[…] Lawmakers and others had been waiting to see whether Bush would renominate four particularly controversial appeals court candidates whose nominations had expired without Senate action. He did. The four include two nominees to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond: Terrence Boyle, a district court judge in North Carolina and a former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, and Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes, who became a symbol of the Bush administration’s policies on terrorism, interrogations and other wartime powers. In addition, William Myers, a lobbyist and critic of environmental rules, was renominated for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, and Michael Wallace of Mississippi, rated unqualified for the appeals court by an American Bar Association panel, was renominated for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
Looks like last Wednesday’s open hand of bipartisanship really was a finger. Fortunately these gestures mostly amount to one angry has-been raging, raging against the dying of his light. With Trent Lott now #2 in the Senate GOP the president won’t find many friends in either caucus, in either house. Sad times for a guy whose image begins and ends with projecting strength.