Pete Peterson's 'Grand Bargain' Hoax
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by American Dream » Sat Oct 12, 2013 8:33 am
by Carol Newquist » Sat Oct 12, 2013 9:16 am
That’s a separate deal. No, this money goes to Afghanistan’s government – known for being crooks, criminals, heroin dealers, and terrorist breeders. ***
by justdrew » Sat Oct 12, 2013 6:32 pm
by Forgetting2 » Mon Oct 14, 2013 6:24 am
by justdrew » Mon Oct 14, 2013 3:46 pm
by Nordic » Mon Oct 14, 2013 4:23 pm
by justdrew » Tue Oct 15, 2013 4:18 am
"Businessweek reports on some not-so-subtle commentary from China's official Xinhua News Agency on the U.S. budget showdown: 'It is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.' Key among its proposals: the creation of a new international reserve currency to replace the present reliance on U.S. dollars. 'The cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising the debt ceiling has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized,' the authors write. 'The world is still crawling its way out of an economic disaster thanks to the voracious Wall Street elites.' The commentary calls for a greater role for developing-market economies in both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, adding 'the authority of the United Nations in handling global hot-spot issues has to be recognized. That means no one has the right to wage any form of military action against others without a UN mandate.' The commentary concludes that 'the purpose of promoting these changes is not to completely toss the United States aside, which is also impossible. Rather, it is to encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs.'"
by seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 15, 2013 2:10 pm
Unbelievable ... Really
DAVID KURTZ – OCTOBER 15, 2013, 11:45 AM EDT11889
A remarkable morning on Capitol Hill even by recent standards. The quick rundown is this:
With the Senate nearing finalizing a debt limit/shutdown deal, House GOP leaders convened a meeting of their members and unveiled to them a counteroffer to the still-emerging Senate plan. Similar in key respects, but with additional demands that were designed to appeal to the conservatives in the House.
While that meeting was still going on, House leadership aides began briefing reporters on what the bill would contain. The White House quickly rejected the plan. But meanwhile, disenchantment among conservative members quickly began to brew in the conference meeting.
By the time Boehner emerged from the two-hour meeting to speak to reporters, he was very oblique about what the GOP plan would be, almost to the point of suggesting there still wasn't a plan yet. So it appears the House leadership's strategy has imploded almost as soon as it was unveiled.
by conniption » Tue Oct 15, 2013 3:45 pm
The Politics Blog
Oct 15, 2013
We Have A Deal (Sort Of)
By Charles P. Pierce at 9:51AM
So, it appears that we all may be turning handsprings later today because Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell have struck a deal that will get us through the holidays without the entire economy's crashing to the point where Santa stays on the roof with the toys unless all of us sign a loan at 29 percent interest and, come January, get our legs broken by the elves.
continued
by justdrew » Tue Oct 15, 2013 3:57 pm
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MA) recently revealed that House Republicans had changed a rule effectively allowing only Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) to end a looming government shutdown — but two weeks ago, it was Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) who had the foresight to grill the Rules Committee chairman for what she called an “atrocity.”
In a clip that turned up online on Monday, Slaughter takes on Rule Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) after sensing that something didn’t smell right with the rule change.
The new rule allowed only Cantor or his designee to bring up Senate legislation for a vote if the Senate rejected a motion to work out the two chambers’ differences in conference committee.
A GOP aide told CNN that the rule “basically prevents [Minority] Leader [Nancy] Pelosi from hijacking the floor since the Senate refused to go to conference.”
Session responded to Slaughter by saying that Republican leadership had made the change “to get our people together… We’re trying to actually have a conference.”
He added that under the old rule, “there could be a privileged motion at any time.”
“I think you’ve taken that away,” Slaughter observed.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Sessions agreed. “We took that away.”
“Oh, Mercy,” Slaughter sighed. “It just gets deeper and deeper. I want to tell you the resolve that I think you’ve got. And despite the fact that every one of you said, over and over ad nauseam, that you didn’t want to shut the government down, we spent some time down in my office watching so many of your members — right after they were elected in 2010 — saying how much they would like to shut down the House to great applause.”
“I think it is really shortsighted, I think it is an atrocity to the Rules of the House,” she added. “And I think you’re putting the whole country through this angst and this aggravation that we did not need to go. This one we could have done without.”
“And I must tell you that I’m more and more angry now that I understand what you have done is take away our ability is to really make a motion for that Senate vote.”
As it turned out, Slaughter’s instincts were correct because Republicans shut down the government the next day. And 15 days later, the government remained shut down and the Senate bill had still not been brought up for a vote in the House.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 16, 2013 10:32 am
Lindsey Graham (R-SC) Admits GOP Went Too Far - Pleads for Mercy
byAlyoshaKaramazov
No, this is not snark or satire. It's not an Onion article either..........
Whilst GOP aides are taking the lead and throwing Ted Cruz under the bus, at least one of their Senators is following their lead.
Buried deep in a TPM article on the debt deal, we have this little nugget:
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he was "proud" of Boehner's handling of the crisis. Then within moments he pleaded with Democrats to bail out the GOP, which he admitted has "screwed up" and "really did go too far" in the shutdown and debt limit standoffs.
"We won't be the last political party to overplay our hand," he said. "It might happen one day on the Democratic side. And if it did, would Republicans, for the good of the country, kinda give a little? We really did go too far. We screwed up. But their response is making things worse, not better."
"would Republicans, for the good of the country, kinda give a little?"
He'll be lucky if he doesn't wake up tomorrow morning with a bloody horse head in his bed.
Beyond that, I'm...........................speechless. So much wrong with what he said. Not least the claim that the GOP would show ANYONE mercy.
Not America, not the world.
by Ben D » Sat Oct 19, 2013 11:23 pm
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/18/us-debt-jumps-400-billion-tops-17-trillion-first-t/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
U.S. debt jumps a record $328 billion — tops $17 trillion for first time
U.S. debt jumped a record $328 billion on Thursday, the first day the federal government was able to borrow money under the deal President Obama and Congress sealed this week.
The $328 billion increase shattered the previous high of $238 billion set two years ago.
The giant jump comes because the government was replenishing its stock of “extraordinary measures” — the federal funds it borrowed from over the last five months as it tried to avoid bumping into the debt ceiling.
Under the law, that replenishing happens as soon as there is new debt space.
In this case, the Treasury Department borrowed $400 billion from other funds beginning in May, awaiting a final deal from Congress and Mr. Obama.
Usually Congress sets a borrowing limit, or debt ceiling, that caps the total amount the government can be in the red.
But under the terms of this week’s deal, Congress set a deadline instead of a dollar cap. That means debt will rise by as much as the government spends between now and the Feb. 7 deadline.
Judging by the rate of increase over the last five months, that could end up meaning Congress just granted Mr. Obama a debt increase of $700 billion or more.
by conniption » Sun Nov 03, 2013 3:36 pm
New Yorker
October 30, 2013
Ted Cruz: The Mask of Sincerity
Posted by David Denby
Photograph: Tom Pennington/Getty
When Ted Cruz lies, he appears to be praying. His lips narrow, almost disappearing into his face, and his eyebrows shift abruptly, rising like a drawbridge on his forehead into matching acute angles. He attains an appearance of supplication, an earnest desire that men and women need to listen, as God surely listens. Cruz has large ears; a straight nose with a fleshy tip, which shines in camera lights when he talks to reporters; straight black hair slicked back from his forehead like flattened licorice; thin lips; a long jaw with another knob of flesh at the base, also shiny in the lights. If, as Orwell said, everyone has the face he deserves at fifty, Cruz, who is only forty-two, has got a serious head start. For months, I sensed vaguely that he reminded me of someone but I couldn’t place who it was. Revelation has arrived: Ted Cruz resembles the Bill Murray of a quarter-century ago, when he played fishy, mock-sincere fakers. No one looked more untrustworthy than Bill Murray. The difference between the two men is that the actor was a satirist.
Cruz is not as iconographically satisfying as other American demagogues—Oliver North, say, whose square-jawed, unblinking evocation of James Stewart, John Wayne, and other Hollywood actors conveyed resolution. Or Ronald Reagan—Cruz’s reedy, unresonant voice lacks the husky timbre of Reagan’s emotion-clouded instrument, with its mixture of truculence and maudlin appeal.
Yet Cruz is amazingly sure-footed verbally. When confronted with a hostile question, he has his answer prepared well before the questioner stops talking. There are no unguarded moments, no slips or inadvertent admissions. He speaks swiftly, in the tones of sweet, sincere reason. How could anyone possibly disagree with him? His father is a Baptist, and Cruz himself has an evangelical cast to his language, but he’s an evangelical without consciousness of his own sins or vulnerability. He is conscious only of other people’s sins, which are boundless, and a threat to the republic; and of other people’s vulnerabilities and wounds, which he salts. If they have a shortage of vulnerabilities, he might make some up. When the Senate Armed Services Committee was discussing Chuck Hagel’s fitness to be Secretary of Defense, last February, Cruz, who had been in the Senate for about a month, said that Hagel was weak on Iran, adding, “It is at a minimum relevant to know if that two hundred thousand dollars that he deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea.”
His strategy is universal aggression, aimed at everyone. Well, not quite everyone—lately, his popularity with the Tea Party cohort has increased. And at a recent rally at the convention of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, he was greeted with heated adoration. But normally Cruz resembles one of those war chariots with blades flashing from the wheels; he tries to cut up everything in his path. When things go wrong, he only sharpens the blades. From the Senate, he urged House Republicans into a government shutdown and a sustained threat not to extend the debt ceiling. When the President held firm and the Republican leadership backed down, the fallout included collapsing poll numbers for the Republican Party and the possibility, mentioned by nonpartisan political analysts, that the Democrats could pick up a serious number of seats in the House in 2014.
But, rather than acknowledge any responsibility, Cruz told Dana Bash, from CNN, that “the single most damaging thing that has happened to Republicans for 2014 is all of the Senate Republicans coming out attacking the House Republicans, attacking those pushing the effort to defund Obamacare, and lining themselves up opposite the American people.” He has repeated this charge—the betrayal, the stab in the back—in many forms. He has been wronged, his cohort has been wronged, the American people have been wronged, traduced by weaklings and cowards in the ranks. In Cruz’s rhetoric, the American people are always being wronged.
Last February, when he questioned Chuck Hagel, some senators suggested that his insinuating manner—the bullying slurs, the implication of treason—reminded them of Joseph McCarthy. Since then, comparing him to McCarthy has become commonplace. Physically, though, there is little resemblance. McCarthy had a heavy, rounded head, a dark-shadowed jaw, and thick eyebrows. He spoke in an amazing strangled feverish whine, which now seems almost a put-on. There was a “network of professors and teachers who are getting their orders from Moscow, from an organization that wants to destroy this nation, that wants to corrupt the minds of youth,” and so on. It was the sound of fear: Communism was taking over the country imminently, and he was the only one capable of preventing capitulation. The conspiracy was so vast (it included the United States Army and perhaps President Eisenhower) that he couldn’t actually describe it. He could only imply its extent—his voice, with its elongated vowels and lengthened final consonants, told us that evil, unless it was stopped, would go on and on, consuming everything.
Cruz speaks crisply. Still, like McCarthy, he evokes a menace that is destroying the nation: Obamacare, which is killing jobs, obliterating businesses, demoralizing everyone. Obamacare is his Communism, a conspiracy that is the main impediment to economic growth. It is a malaise that is particularly hurting “single moms, Hispanics, African-Americans”—a brazen touch on Cruz’s part, since it is exactly those three groups whose interests Republican policies tend to ignore. It takes a certain ingenuity to suggest that an attempt to insure the powerless is rendering them powerless. One of Cruz’s tricks is to turn his enemies’ words back on them so that they stand accused in their own language. Meanwhile, he remains, at least rhetorically, invulnerable behind a mask of sincerity.
Cruz voted no on the bipartisan immigration bill, no on the farm bill, no on the continuing resolution; he voted against the confirmations of John Brennan, Chuck Hagel, John Kerry, and Jack Lew. He makes extreme demands, then accuses the other side of being unwilling to compromise, then calls his own party members cowards, and so on. The refusal to extend the debt limit endangered the American government and economy. What does Cruz want? What is he up to? The naïve may believe that all of these obstructionist moves are part of a principled opposition to Obama, the President who, in the past, inspired greater and greater outrage in Republicans in proportion to how conciliatory and mild he became. But Cruz seeks more than the humbling of the President. There are plenty of other Republicans around eager to accomplish that.
He seeks the Presidency, of course. And he appears to be doing it by sowing as much confusion and disorder as possible—playing the joker in a seemingly nihilistic charade whose actual intent is a rational grab for power. Does he have a chance? One wonders about his supporters. Are they in on the joke, aware that his concern is a mask? Or do they take him literally, as a truth-teller and a prophet? Are they cynics or true believers? If they are cynics, he will fail; if they are true believers, he could go very far, expanding his support in a messianic crusade, a quest to purify and redeem the nation.
Prior to the next election, Democrats can’t do much to deter him. They may hope that he continues his rampage, turning off big money and more and more of the electorate. His immediate threat, obviously, is to moderate Republicans. If he continues to blaze, they will be consumed. Then again, there is another side to the Joseph McCarthy story. After going too far—attacking the Army, in 1953 and 1954—McCarthy was censured by the Senate, in December, 1954. (He died less than three years later, of liver problems, at the age of forty-eight.) When the mask of sincerity gets smashed, the man wearing it may break apart, too.280 comments
Kenji1 3 days ago
@dbroome Post normally draw between 10 and 40 responses. This one must been hyperlinked at some red-meat asylum, sending all the inmates here last night. (In the frenzy, you even called me a troll!) But yes, forced subscriptions would be a worthy outcome of that crazitude.
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