Indefinite Detention? But I Have Soccer Practice at 4: U.S. Politics 2012

Whether or not Boehner keeps his speakership is really not a big deal one way or another, but here's how I see it. Even if the Republicans were to take a whipping in November, while still retaining a much-diminished majority in the House, Boehner probably wouldn't fall to Cantor as a result, because the most likely R-reps to lose their seats in such an election would be the freshman tea-partiers, undercutting Cantor's core of support.

imo, the most likely way for Boehner to lose out to Cantor would be a very mixed election where 95% of the tea party R-reps came back, but about an equal number of "moderate" R-reps lost their seats, but Obama wins and the Senate stays Democratic. Then Cantor might-could assemble an insurrection and grab the speaker's chair. Not likely, tho.

he most likely R-reps to lose their seats in such an election would be the freshman tea-partiers

what are you basing this on

tea party's appeal undiminished in the GOP if the prez primary is anything to go by

i'm basing it on history. freshmen reps are always the most vulnerable segment of a congress. a big loss of seats is almost certain to include a large number of first timers whose seats flipped back. but, if you notice, i wasn't predicting a large loss of R-rep seats in november, only speculating on boehner's security in a couple of scenarios.

just asking cuz I was wondering if there was some recent polling data or something. no disputing that freshmen seats are the most vulnerable, they always have less money/fewer backers/weaker infrastructure

it's not their freshman-ness that's the vulnerability, it's that most districts are safe.

yeah there's a difference between a freshman who fits w/ a district's politics and flipped out the outlier and a freshman who won in a wave election

right

A little more on the Agenda 21 fite, this is funny:

http://blogs.knoxnews.com/humphrey/2012/03/rep-womick-wrong-about-murfree.html

"It's kind of like children have imaginary friends, and Republicans have imaginary enemies," House Democratic Caucus Chairman Mike Tuner of Nashville told reporters after the floor session.

Actually the lead sentence is pretty great too:

A state lawmaker was mistaken about the facts of a restaurant's zoning issues when he used the case of Papa's Butts and BBQ Hot Sauce Store as an example of the creeping influence of the United Nations in Tennessee, a city official said.

"It's kind of like children have imaginary friends, and Republicans have imaginary enemies"

^love this. somebody slap that on a bumper sticker.

It tells you how desperate the White House is to show its pro-business bona fides that it has thrown its support to this crappy piece of legislation. To her credit, the controversy-shy chairman of the SEC, Mary Shapiro, last week penned a letter to the Senate with a warning that the JOBS bill will undermine important investor protections. And on Thursday, a more reasonable alternative was offered in the Senate by Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat whose investigations subcommittee was the first to shine light on the financial antics of “Fabulous Fab” and his Goldman colleagues

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wall-street-credo-ripping-out-their-eyeballs/2012/03/12/gIQAakrPJS_story_2.html

With the so-called JOBS bill, on which the Senate is due to vote Tuesday, Congress is about to make the same kind of mistake again -- this time abandoning much of the 1930s-era securities legislation that both served investors well and helped make the US one of the best places in the world to raise capital. We find ourselves again on a bipartisan route to disaster.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johnson/fiscal-affairs-a-colossal_b_1362060.html

Liberal economists and some Dem Senators versus Steve Jobs, Boehner, Obama and bipartisan types

Steve Jobs supported earlier draft

This above bill has not received much critical attention except for the few blogposts listed above. Some are just assuming that the Senate will clear up the House mess of a bill. But with techie and Obama support for the bill, it will be up to Dem senators to go against the tide.

pfft, fat chance of that ... Dem congress-critters spread their legs even wider for Sillicon Valley than they do for Wall Street.

so it's like a robot-bestiality sorta deal

om/politics/obamas-evolution-behind-the-failed-grand-bargain-on-the-debt/2012/03/15/gIQAHyyfJS_story.html

So Pelosi was gonna "reluctantly" accept this, before it blew up

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-evolution-behind-the-failed-grand-bargain-on-the-debt/2012/03/15/gIQAHyyfJS_story.html

The piece does not have the details re whether anyone in the White House said maybe we should not propose increasing the Medicare eligibility age and instituting chained CPI, which would cut Social Security cost-of-living increases, in exchange for a minor amount of tax increases.

Ugh. Boehner -- a prisoner of his caucus. Obama -- a feeble negotiator.

Speaking of the caucus, Paul Ryan is gonna try again today with another House budget plan that whacks at entitlement programs and the tax system in order to uh, grow the economy. Yeah, right. It may be a dead on arrival plan with the current Senate, but unfortunately it will encourage the media elites, blue-dog Dems, and other bipartisan types to say "but don't we have to cut those programs, maybe not to the extent Ryan is proposing but blah blah blah". Meanwhile none of those 'reasonable adults' will discuss just letting the Bush tax cuts expire; making hedge fund managers pay income tax rates rather than reduced capital rates; getting rid of corporate loopholes, raising the Social Security payroll tax cap, etc. But you all know that.

x-post re W. Post article looking back on Grand bargain failure:

The Post is making the case that there was a potential deal, and Obama blew it by failing to properly handle the easily-spooked Republican caucus. What the story actually shows is that Obama’s disastrous weakness in the summer of 2011 went further toward undermining liberalism than anybody previously knew.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/how-obama-tried-to-sell-out-liberalism-in-2011.html

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, per his nature and views, is less bothered by Obama's role, although not crazy about it

It was a lousy deal; the revenue increases were dubious; it got derailed after the Gang of Six released its plan and Obama asked Boehner for more revenue; and it got scuttled completely when Boehner refused to accept Obama's offer to go back to the original deal.

Ironically enough, we need to thank the Gang of 6 for coming up with a plan with a much larger amount of tax income. It's existence accelerated the unraveling of the weaker Obama/Boehner plan. Obama and then chief of Staff Daley had been so desperate to try to get a deal that they seemingly would have agreed to anything (and for some reason did not realize that Boehner's caucus would never agree to any tax revenue)

I just posted Obama cheerleader's surprising about-face: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/how-obama-tried-to-sell-out-liberalism-in-2011.html

*Jonathan Chait

oh duh

the comments to the Chait article are, um, interesting ... shoot the guy who wanders off the Obama wagon trail, apparently.

the problem with being dismissive of Obama, sadly, is that the people in opposition to him are actively championing things like the laws that led to the shooting of Trayvon Martin

seems weird to me that anybody cares about this deal anymore. it's a deal that's basically going to be ignored/rewritten, and the debt ceiling got raised - so who cares

that being said I don't dispute Alfred's basic calculus re: Boehner and Obama's roles

I think Obama has to be judged on the outcome of the negotiation - not on things he offered or promised in the course of it. I think at some point he might have been offering the moon just to see how stubborn the GOP was willing to be. That doesn't mean that he wouldn't have started piling on conditions or caveats if he got a bite. We don't really know what his strategy was. In any case he succeeded in making the GOP look pretty extreme.

The issue may come up again at election time and in a lameduck session after the election, and Obama's strategic decision to try to come up with a Grand Bargain on the deficit by giving up certain liberal ideals (re Medicare, Social Security) to get a certain amount of tax revenue, may be brought up again when some Dems try to campaign on the idea that Republicans want to take away your Medicare and Social Security. By offering to give up those things, Obama arguably hurt the Dems message.

lol the dems don't have a message

may be brought up again when some Dems try to campaign on the idea that Republicans want to take away your Medicare and Social Security.

I don't think so. these are arcane details of the negotiations for most of the electorate, nobody is going to care. soundbites can't encapsulate this kind of complexity.

A Dem campaigning on preserving Social Security and Medicare isn't going to be damaged by some GOP attack dog saying "but Obama once offered, behind closed doors, in negotiations that were eventually unsuccessful, to maybe alter those programs!"

not gonna happen

Dems message: we've fallen and we can't get up!

also would just like to say this Ryan plan is hilarious, awesome that he didn't learn his lesson the first time.

sigh i never know quite what to think about the daily grind/outrage/kulturkampf kind of stories.

so deniro made a white woman joke at a fundraiser?

haha wait, people are up in arms because De Niro said "America isn't ready for a white woman to be First Lady"?

must be a slow news day

idgi every First Lady has been a white woman except for Michelle

thank you, Lex

x-post -I think the lesson Paul Ryan learned was to go after poor people under age 65, rather than over 65, in his latest budget proposal

Ryan prides himself on making tough choices. But where such choices need to be made for politically powerful constituencies — say, the tax breaks offered to the wealthy and the middle class, or the benefits offered to current seniors — Ryan punts. Changes for seniors don’t begin for a decade, the tax breaks Ryan will close to pay for his tax cuts go unnamed, and, of course, there are no tax increases at all. When such choices need to be made for programs that the poor depend on, however, Ryan is considerably more specific, and considerably more willing to inflict real budgetary pain on current beneficiaries

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/paul-ryans-budget-should-the-poor-pay-for-deficit-reduction/2011/08/25/gIQAxawWPS_blog.html

Greenwald in his item 6 update on Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Chait discussions of Obama (in an earlier paragraph Greenwald notes, what was mentioned upthread, that till today Chait used to criticize those who criticized Obama from the left):

Meanwhile, Chait’s primary competitor for supreme Obama media defender, Andrew Sullivan, has spent this week doing what he often does: insisting that President Obama is a True Conservative, and that the Right is therefore irrational for not adoring him the way that Andrew does. Notably, Andrew is equally fond of attacking liberals who fail to adore the President as much as Andrew does, on the ground that Obama has achieved more progressive goals than any President in decades. In other words, Andrew’s core defense of the President — set forth most comprehensively in his Newsweek cover story declaring the President’s critics on both the right and the left to be basically stupid and crazy – amounts to simultaneously claiming that: (1) conservative critics of Obama are dumb because Obama is a Real Conservative; and (2) liberal critics of the President are dumb because Obama’s presidency is a bonanza of progressive successes. As Guy Saperstein put it: “The fact that these two critiques are internally inconsistent has somehow managed to escape Mr. Sullivan.”

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/20/ironies_in_american_justice_and_political_cheerleading/singleton/

andrew sullivan c/d

hey gets more "liberal" shit done precisely b/c he isn't a "liberal" ... it's some Jedi Mind Trick (a subfolder in the "3d chess" directory, i suppose) -- that seems to be the gist of andrew sullivan's take on Obama (at least according to Greenwald) amirite.

We live in crazy times.

A Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives who once posted a comment on Facebook about shooting at police officers accidentally dropped one of his guns on the floor at the start of a committee meeting Tuesday morning.
State Rep. Kyle Tasker (R-Nottingham) explained to onlookers that he had donated blood that morning and the effects caused him to drop his gun at the start of a House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee meeting. The committee was meeting to amend an abortion bill pending in the Legislature. The gun did not fire.

State Rep. Steve Shurtleff (D-Concord), a member of the committee, said that he was sitting three seats away from Tasker in the committee room when he heard “a clang” and saw that the gun was on the floor. Shurtleff said Tasker routinely wears two guns in a shoulder holster to legislative meetings.

Shurtleff said Tasker routinely wears two guns in a shoulder holster to legislative meetings

...and has a penis that struggles to reach an inch and a quarter when fully erect.

outlaw giving blood

http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/03/20/reid-pulls-jobs-act-bill-after-amendments-fail/

The bullet has been dodged for now. But I would expect Senate Republicans to claim that Reid went back on his word on a deal to trade a vote on the JOBS Act for judicial confirmations. No doubt they’ll start filibustering those nominations now. Conversely, 40 of the 54 members who voted for the strengthening amendments could simply filibuster the underlying JOBS Act and block the bill, upholding the bargain of allowing it a vote. And so it’s a test of wills between the parties to see what will happen next.