American Politics Thread 2013: I'm a cool Rodham grandma in the USA

I can't think of an administration in my lifetime that didn't really want a fawning state media

I think the point of his column was that Obama ran on transparency.

FYI, picked that up off of Glenn Greenwald's twitter jizzstream.

Oh I didn't read the column, I was just reacting to the title posted here

shout out to scahill

good piece re warren and the shifting democratic party http://www.salon.com/2013/12/09/economic_populism_isnt_just_about_elizabeth_warren

more context:

im Kessler, senior vice president for policy and a co-founder of Third Way, said Friday morning that Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) backing of a plan to expand Social Security compelled him and the president of the group to hit back with a Wall Street Journal op-ed lambasting the plan and economic populism.

"The impetus was really -- we saw after the most recently, this push that okay, it's time to really move the national Democratic Party to a much more liberal agenda, in this case, Senator Warren was the standard bearer -- she's on the cover of a lot of magazines," he said in an interview on Sirius XM with Ari Rabin-Havt. "We were a bit alarmed by that."

He added that Warren was an excellent senator from Massachusetts but questioned whether she could be good for the party nationally.

"That Social Security plan was the final moment for us," he said. "That Social Security plan had been out there but really languishing -- because Senator Warren has such a powerful compelling voice, she started talking about it, and it suddenly it became much more talked about and viable alternative."

He rejected the idea that the Monday op-ed was a way to take Warren "down a peg."

"She is a very compelling elected official and national figure," he said. "Her involvement in that particular bill, we just looked at it and said 'okay, this seems to be starting to get out of hand.'"

weve spent a long time convincing politicians to support this nonsensical bullshit and now this lady ffs

the funny thing is for all their years of work i dont think ss reform really ever had any chance, its so wildly unpopular, recall what happened when bush took a crack at it

Looks like they're gonna settle for now on voting for a package that cuts federal workers pensions, raises fees on airlines, doesn't touch tax loopholes, and a bottomline budget package amount lower than Paul Ryan once proposed, and maybe not extend jobless benefits/unemployment insurance. No chained cpi SS cut.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/12/08/durbin-jobless-benefits-not-a-budget-deal-breaker/

And they'll still have a raising the debt limit vote drama in February.

So Obama and Castro shook hands? Tsk tsk, taking advantage of Fidel's senescence.

raul

oh well, at least he might live to see HavanaDisney.

no, wait, not enough space -- DisneyGuantanamo!

Where do you come up with this stuff

Detention Land

this stuff only has to meet the ILX criterion of "shit flung against the wall," try n meet it sometime wawa

Political stagnation is so bad now in the usa that even the ilx us politics threads are stagnant.

dont be a zing lawyer morbs

The only proposed SS "reform" I am interested in seeing is removing the income limit on SS tax.

man it sucks that I can't hear Cuban talk radio at work!

im am interested in seeing ss extended to all people regardless of age

a guaranteed minimum income, then? wouldn't be such a bad idea if there was a resonable revenue stream to support it.

yup, tax the rich nbd

atm, tax financial transactionsat $0.001 per transaction, so as to capture revenue from all those fully-automated computer trades by hedge funds., et. al.

a guaranteed minimum income is a great idea imo

we seem to have a good-sized surplus of labor in the pool right now, with no prospect of the unemployed or underemployed getting boosted up to full time, or the underpaid getting a substantial raise. a guaranteed income of ~$10,000/year per adult would go a long way toward stabilizing lives without removing all incentive to work, imo. but with tea party controlling one chamber of congress that is a hyperfantasy.

you have to start building consensus now then in like 30 years maybe you get it, it shd be set at just above the poverty line and pegged to inflation thereby eliminating poverty

i like the way u think

;)

god bless Nixon for wanting a living wage.

lol yes, different times

apparently even milton friedman wanted one!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/business/23scene.html

“What’s the point?” McCain said when asked by AFP if Obama should have made the gesture.

“Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler,” he said.

You know who else shook hands with Hitler? Goebbels.

and uh I know we're supposed to be happy because the Granny Starver helped reach a bipartisan budget deal but look what the NYT buried in the penultimate graf:

Democrats gave up their demand that the deal extend unemployment benefits that expire at the end of the month, but they hope to press for an extension in a separate measure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/11/us/politics/party-leaders-indicate-deal-is-reached-on-budget.html?ref=politics&_r=0

hungry ppl easiest to throw under the bus

and how exactly are they going to get get scrooge grinch boehner to bring that "separate measure" to the floor for a vote?

Ryan protected all the corporate and individual tax loopholes, and Dems well, uh --no SS cuts at least and instead of agreeing to go after pensions of current federal employees they limited it to new hires (plus got Ryan to agree to one little thing about young military retirees)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/house-senate-negotiators-reach-budget-deal/2013/12/10/e7ee1aaa-61eb-11e3-94ad-004fefa61ee6_story_1.html

excerpt:
Another large chunk of savings — $12 billion over the next decade — would come from reduced contributions to federal pensions, split evenly between military retirees and new civilian workers who start after Dec. 31.

For those in the military, the reduction would take the form of lower cost-of-living increases for retirees between the ages of 40 and 62, many of whom take other jobs while collecting their military pensions. New civilian workers, meanwhile, would be required to contribute an additional 1.3 percent to their retirements.

Current federal workers would not be affected, said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the lead budget negotiator for House Democrats. The impact on pensions, one of the last major issues to be decided, was hammered out during a weekend of talks between Van Hollen and Murray, who persuaded Ryan to spread the pain to the youngest military retirees.

Spread the pain around! (Except rich people, banks, defense contractors, etc.)

i love how they're increasing taxes on flight fees, but close the tax loophole on the purchase of private planes? socialism!

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/patricia-millett-dc-circuit-court-of-appeals-100944.html

New DC Circuit judge Millett now that prior filibuster rule is gone. 56 to 38 vote with 2 Republicans voting yes--Murkowski and Collins

Dems got rolled, Ezra Klein sez.

8. Democrats flatly got beat on sequestration. Republicans are keeping -- and increasing -- the deficit reduction without ever giving up a dime in taxes. And many Republicans don't want to alter sequestration at all. Ryan entered the negotiations with a much stronger hand than Murray.

9. “I’m proud of this agreement,” Ryan said in a statement. “It reduces the deficit—without raising taxes. And it cuts spending in a smarter way. It’s a firm step in the right direction, and I ask all my colleagues in the House to support it.”

10. This deal is possible only because there are many Republicans who really hate the defense cuts. But there are fewer of those Republicans than there were in the past. There are many fewer of them than Democrats thought in 2011.

11. Whether this deal can be a model for future deals is an open question. The core principle of this deal is that Democrats didn't have to touch entitlements and Republicans didn't have to touch taxes. But a lot of the policies that made that possible got used up in this deal. It's not clear another deal like this would would work in 2016.

basically, dems lost this when they agreed to the sequester. In fairness, defense cuts seemed like a much stronger threat at the time.

yup

if you felt like trying to see some silver lining in this its maybe that republicans are more amenable than they have been in the past to defense cuts

also fees lol http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/12/11/tax_metaphysics_everything_is_a_fee.html

only cuz it's DEFICIT DEFICIT DEFICIT all the time.

xpost

i think too w libertarians gaining more power there is legit more openness, obvs this trend would have to grow for a while before you saw real change but who knows

dems are the washington generals to the GOP's harlem globetrotters