They're Not Even Trying to Hide It Anymore

Readers of this blog won't be surprised, but if you're looking for an in-depth yet concise explanation of the GOP scorched-earth policy, you won't do better than Robert Perry's piece at alternet:

Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available, from challenging the legitimacy of opponents to spreading lies and disinformation to sabotaging the economy.

Over the past four decades or so, the Republicans have simply not played by the old give-and-take rules of politics. Indeed, if one were to step back and assess this Republican approach, what you would see is something akin to how the CIA has destabilized target countries, especially those that seek to organize themselves in defiance of capitalist orthodoxy.

SNIP

But the concept remains the same: Control as much as possible what the population gets to see and hear; create chaos for your opponent’s government, economically and politically; blame if for the mess; and establish in the minds of the voters that their only way out is to submit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.

Today’s Republicans have fully embraced this concept of political warfare, whereas the Democrats generally have tried to play by the old rules, acquiescing when Republicans are in office with the goal of “making government work,” even if the Republicans are setting the agenda.

Unlike the Democrats and the Left, the Republicans and the Right have prepared themselves for this battle, almost as if they are following a CIA training manual. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in a propaganda infrastructure that operates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit missteps by political enemies.

This vertically integrated media machine allows useful information to move quickly from a right-wing blog to talk radio to Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to conservative magazines and book publishing. Right-wing propagandists are well-trained and well-funded so they can be deployed to all manner of public outlets to hammer home the talking points.

Read the whole brilliant thing. Print it out, and give it to everybody who wonders why the repugs, even out of power, always seem like winners, and the Democrats, even when winning, always seem like losers.

Republican Death Panels Are Real: If You Are Not Filthy Rich, You Will Die In the Street

Ignore the shutdown kabuki over what's left of the 2011 budget - the real fight over the 2012 budget is just starting, and the theme is clear: if you're not filthy rich, report to your neighborhood "Killing Social Security to Save It" euthanasia station immediately.

The Ryan Plan is far worse than we imagined: so bad, in fact, that it might let the only-slighly-less-horrible Bowles-Simpson Cat Food Commission plan slide through.

Don't fall into this trap. Both Ryan and Cat Food are expressways to a serfs-and-Lords economy, so far over the Reichwingnut cliff they cannot be seen from Reality World.

Reality demands massive tax hikes on the rich and corporations, massive spending on infrastructure to create 10 million jobs, massively tough re-regulation of Wall Street, Big Oil/Coal/industry, and telling the Deficit Crybabies and Austerity Vultures to fuck off and die.

Don't believe it's that bad? Read it for yourself.

Here's Steve Benen on Tuesday:

RYAN'S RADICAL, RIDICULOUS, RIP-OFF ROADMAP.... While the process of crafting a budget plan for this fiscal year implodes under the weight of GOP intransigence, today also happens to be the day next year's budget fight begins in earnest. And if you think the current fight is a mess, prepare to have Republicans take your breath away.

And if you're a disabled senior on Medicaid, relying on an oxygen tank, that expression should probably be taken literally.

Today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveils his plan for fiscal year 2012. He promised a truly radical approach to our entire system of government, and he wasn't lying -- Ryan's budget is based on his radical "roadmap" and effectively rewrites the American social contract.

Medicare would be eliminated and replaced with a voucher system. Medicaid would be gutted and sent to the states as a block grant. The Affordable Care Act would be scrapped, tax rates on corporations and the wealthy would be slashed, and all told, Ryan's plan intends to slash roughly $6 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years.

This is madness.

Think he’s exaggerating? From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The Ryan Budget's Radical Priorities

Provides Largest Tax Cuts in History for Wealthy, Raises Middle Class Taxes, Ends Guaranteed Medicare, Privatizes Social Security, Erodes Health Care

Kevin drum nails it:

A plan dedicated almost entirely to slashing social spending in a country that's already the stingiest spender in the developed world, while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich in a country with the lowest tax rates in the developed world — well, what could be more serious than that?

I think I'm going to be sick.

Steve M. refers us to this:

Booman Tribune's Steven D and his wife are also just under 55, though a lot less fortunate in matters of health than my wife and I have been. Read Steven's heartbreaking post to learn what's really going to happen to a lot of people if Ryanomics prevails.

But it will eliminate the deficit and slash the debt! Sadly, no:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's initial analysis of the House GOP budget released today by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is filled with nuggets of bad news for Republicans.

In addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, the CBO finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.

Here's Kevin Drum on how Ryan is the polar opposite of "courageous."

In case you needed yet more proof that Ryan-style budget austerity kills economies, Zandar has it.

And no, of course the dems and the White House won’t accept it. They will, however, use Ryan’s extremism to make everybody lap up Simpson-Bowles cat food and love it.

Digby:

With all that reasonableness and thoughtfulness, It's hard to recall that the Fiscal Commission non-report was a trainwreck. It's only by comparison to the Von Ryan Express that they are able to portray it as moderate middle ground. If I were a conspiracy type, I might even think the catfood salesmen on the commission cooked this whole thing up sometime last December when it was obvious that the liberals weren't going to sign on. But I'm not a conspiracy type so I'd imagine that this is just something they all fortuitously and individually stumbled into on their way to a big donor meeting. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy --- it's just part of the culture. Look at how the Village greeted Ryan today. Cleopatra would be jealous.

Anything that will screw average folks and reward rich ones is automatically very, very "serious." They love being serious. And if it happened to benefit their benefactors well --- sometimes life really is fair.

If the Democrats don't take this plan and wrap it around every teabagging Republican in the congress in the fall of 2012 they don't deserve to win. Just on a purely primitive political basis, whether they secretly love the idea of death panels or not, their competitive spirit alone should be enough to make Paul Ryan and his cronies the poster boys for Soylent Green and decouple them from the aging baby boomers until we've all shuffled off our mortal coil.

From this moment on, the Democrats have the opportunity to reclaim their position as the party trusted by senior citizens. Over the next 15 years a gigantic number of them are going into the system --- and they vote. If the Republicans don't have them, they have nothing. (You know how badly they fare among younger people and racial and ethnic minorities.)

There should be a price to be paid for the kind of heartless abstraction we are seeing from the wealthy mandarins and starry-eyed Randians who are running things these days. The seniors are the ones who can make them pay it.

Steven Benen gets the last word:

Those in the media who are gushing over this plan as if it has something to do with fiscal responsibility aren't just wrong, they're missing the point on a fundamental level.

It matters that this budget plan's numbers don't add up. It matters that it would hurt working families that need help, deliberately targeting low-income Americans. It matters that Medicare would no longer exist if this proposal was somehow approved.

But as the debate gets underway in earnest, what really matters is getting observers to understand what we're fighting about. Congressional Republicans don't care about the deficit; they care about shrinking government to a size in which they can drown it in the bathtub, satisfying an ideological dream.

Florida Repugs Are What's Really Offensive

It's everywhere, but Steve M. nails it:

WHAT OFFENDS REPUBLICANS, AND WHAT DOESN'T

This offends Republicans in Florida:

Democrat chastized for saying 'uterus' on House floor

During last week's discussion about a bill that would prohibit governments from deducting union dues from a worker's paycheck, state Rep. Scott Randolph, D-Orlando, used his time during floor debate to argue that Republicans are against regulations -- except when it comes to the little guys, or serves their specific interests.

At one point Randolph suggested that his wife "incorporate her uterus" to stop Republicans from pushing measures that would restrict abortions. Republicans, after all, wouldn't want to further regulate a Florida business.

Apparently the GOP leadership of the House didn't like the one-liner.

They told Democrats that Randolph is not to discuss body parts on the House floor.

"The point was that Republicans are always talking about deregulation and big government," Randolph said Thursday. "And I always say their philosophy is small government for the big guy and big government for the little guy. And so, if my wife's uterus was incorporated or my friend's bedroom was incorporated, maybe they (Republicans) would be talking about deregulating.

"It's not like I used slang," said Randolph, who actually got the line from his wife....
My compliments to Representative Randolph's wife, by the way -- it's a great line.

This offended Florida Republicans -- but I can't find any evidence that any of them complained about this event involving pictures of bloody aborted fetuses, at a state-run institution:

Florida State University College Republicans invited the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform to FSU to set up a display comparing abortion to genocide. The demonstrators belonged to a group called the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), which travels the country displaying their murals. The demonstrations were set up Wednesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., with counter-protests springing up around it.

Mark Harrington, executive director for the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, explained how abortion could be compared to the genocides experienced by Jews in Nazi Germany, African-Americans in the Jim Crow south and Native Americans in the early days of United States....

(See a picture here.)

The FSU College Republicans went on to deny having invited GAP to mount its display on campus -- but the group did say it reserved space for GAP (freedom of speech, don't you know), and members of GAP say that, yes, they were invited by the College Republicans.

In any event, I see no evidence that any Republican, on campus or off, objected to this display. Huge blow-ups of bloody abortions? Hey, it's not like uttering the proper name for a body part in the state legislature, is it?

Ezra: Your Beltway Bubble is Showing, and Boy Is It Ugly

I have never been a fan of Ezra Klein, but jesusfuckingchocolatechristonapogostick, this idiocy proves he's one of three things: totally in the tank for rethuglicans and bucking for a gig on Fox, too stupid to live, or a motherfucking liar.

Kevin Drum:

Ezra Klein writes today about Republican Party priorities:

I’m not saying that congressional Republicans don’t care about poor people.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't say that, but whatever. Onward:

But they really care about rich people. So far, the policy agenda they’ve pushed has been a mixture of very expensive tax cuts for the very wealthy and very deep cuts to a lot of programs that focus on the very poor. It’s . . . curious.

....Now they’ve moved onto deficit reduction, or at least spending cuts, and their priorities in the 2011 budget are telling. Their cuts are coming from non-defense discretionary spending. That’s a category of spending, as you can see here, that tends to focus on services to the poor, the jobless and children. Among other cuts, they’ve proposed slicing more than $1 billion off Head Start, $1.1 billion off the Public Housing Capital Fund, $752 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, and $5.7 billion from Pell Grants.

I could, of course, go on. Democrats have tried to widen the cuts out to other
categories so their impact falls less heavily on the disadvantaged, but so far, Republicans have refused. If we’re going to cut spending, we’re going to do it on the backs of the poor.

In other words, congressional Republicans don’t care about poor people. But then, that's hardly anything new. They never have before, so it's hardly surprising that they still don't.

Guys, guys, guys. Honestly. Saying republicans don't care about poor people is - in the immortal words of Molly Ivins - like calling a dwarf short.

Get this straight: republicans live to make life more miserable for poor people. If Barack Obama gave rethuglicans the choice of eliminating taxes completely for rich people but also doubling food stamps, unemployment compensation, housing subsidies and welfare for poor people OR eliminating the social safety net entirely but also doubling taxes on the rich, the rethuglicans would take the latter in a heartbeat.

Ezra got it backwards: republicans may or may not love rich people, but they really, REALLY love sticking it to poor people.

Tell ya what, Ezra: you name one thing - ONE - that republicans as a party have done specifically to help poor people in the 102 years since Teddy Roosevelt left office and I will admit that it's remotely possible you are not a Village mouthpiece destined for the Politico shithole.

Ignore the Facade of Moronic Over-Reaching: The Repugs Are Winning, and Winning Big

Yes, Democrats in Congress and the administration suck giant hairy warthog balls at negotiating, but that's not the real problem here.

The real problem is that Democrats in Congress and the administration are perfectly fine with eliminating every last dime spent on helping the non-rich.

I mean, c'mon: it's not like the poor and working-class vote in enough numbers to matter, and even the ones who do are easily swayed by the expensive television commercials paid for by the dems' BFFs on Wall Street.

Dems take care of corporations by transferring the nation's wealth from the middle-class to the obscenely wealthy, and in return corporations give them lots and lots of campaign cash.

Not as much cash as the corporations give to repugs, of course, but that's not something discussed in polite Beltway conversation.

And those Dirty Fucking Hippies screaming that dems are surrendering any chance to survive as a viable political party after they do the repugs' dirty work for them - well, dear, they're just too, too tacky.

Really now, if tens of millions of people really cared about how dems in Congress and the administration are ass-fucking them into penniless servitude, they'd be marching in the streets, wouldn't they?

Wouldn't they?

Zandar:

John Boehner's professional hostage game is now working perfectly, and Dems are falling for it hook, line, and stinker.

A top Senate Democratic aide says there's been a key thaw in discussions between Senate Dem leaders and House Republicans to avert a government shutdown.

The aide said Republican negotiators are once again willing to meet Democrats in the middle, to cut a bit over $30 billion from current spending -- just about half the $61 billion House Republicans have proposed.

Crucially, the idea of drawing from mandatory spending areas -- including the big entitlement programs -- is back on the table, according to the aide.

"Part of the thaw is that we think we can get some of the cuts we need to add up to this number from areas outside of discretionary," the aide said.

Another source familiar with the discussions says, "The appropriations committees in the House and Senate have been tasked to work on a bill that achieves cuts betweenw 30 and 36 [billion dollars]."

"That's just on [overall] spending cuts," the second source added, "and they'll have to hash out how much mandatory, how much discretionary."

SNIP

But you see, now the GOP has gotten their opening proposal as the minimum of what they are going to receive from the Dems. The Dems have basically folded from day one.

All this talk about government shutdowns and Eric Cantor and his threats are just hiding the reality that the Dems have given the Republicans their original proposal without so much as a fight. Orange Julius has gotten a 100% win here and the Dems, the Village, and everyone has fallen for it. The Republicans started with $32 billion in cuts and the Democrats' pushback lasted less than a week. It is still possible that the Tea Party could go into complete revolt. But the real power behind the GOP will put them in their place, as always, and the GOP will take yet another complete win.

Democrats in Washington and the administration are not fighting for us. That's partly our fault for not holding their feet to the fire. But we'll never get the Democrats to do what we want if we kid ourselves that they're automatically on our side.

They'll only do what we force them to do.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

The Real Price of Slashonomics

Let's play Slashonomics! The latest rage sweeping the country is a rethuglican budget game for the whole family. It's easy: find federal programs that provide real-world benefits greater than their cost. When you cut them from the budget, you actually lose more money that you save. The player who destroys the economy fastest wins!

Katrina vanden Heuevel in The Nation:

An important new initiative from Half in Ten, a national campaign to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years, and the Coalition on Human Needs, is putting a face on irresponsible “slash and burn” deficit reduction by showing how it would damage real lives. The organizations are collecting people’s stories so that the cruel consequences of draconian cuts to key federal programs are plain to see.

Consider the story of Carolyn, who was in her 40s when her husband of 25 years left her with two daughters. She had never received any kind of assistance and describes turning to her local community action agency as “the hardest thing I had ever done.” Her fears were quickly allayed as she “was treated with respect and was never made to feel like a drain on society.” She enrolled in a workforce development program that helped her with tuition and books while she attended community college.

“I went to college five days a week and spent the weekend working, so I never had a day off,” writes Carolyn. “When I graduated I became a Registered Nurse, able to support myself and my family. I couldn’t have done it without the Federal Workforce Development Program and the supportive services the local Community Action Agency provided.”

But the Boehner-led “so be it” Republicans would nearly eliminate funding for Community Service Block Grants (CSBG) for the remainder of 2011, and President Obama proposes cutting it in half in 2012. The cuts would disrupt the antipoverty services provided by 1,065 community action agencies nationwide to over 20 million low-income people, including 5 million children, 2.3 million seniors and 1.7 million people with disabilities. What makes the cuts even more insane is that the agencies generate $6.54 from state, local, and private sources for every federal dollar received, according to the Coalition on Human Needs.

People like Carolyn would be hit doubly hard—not only would the community action agencies reach fewer people, but the kind of workforce development programs that allowed her to change her life would also be slashed by Republicans. In fact, at a time when 14 million Americans are out of work, more than 8 million adults and youth would lose access to job training and other employment services. Job training under the Workforce Investment Act programs for adults, youths, and dislocated workers would essentially be shut down until July 2012.

The examples go on forever - the false economies plus the missed opportunities to eliminate genuine waste like farm subsidies and corporate welfare make it seem as if rethuglicans are deliberately trying to create a feudal lords-and-serfs economy.

Read the whole thing.

Plutocracy of the Rich, by the Rich and for the Rich

Masocchio at Firedoglake explains that our government is incompetent because it does everything for the rich:

The people who run our political economy, the rich and their tools in Congress, have adopted utterly incoherent policies: spending money on things they like and demanding cuts in everything they don’t like. The things that matter to the rich are completely different from the things that matter to the middle class and the poor, the only two classes that polite society admits exist. Even millionaires are middle class now, and the discussion in public spaces, like newspapers, television, radio and big internet sites, never points out that the very rich, the top few thousands of wealthy people, constitute a class with identifiable interests.

In September, 2008, they demanded trillions of dollars in direct and indirect bailout subsidies. Millions of Americans lost their jobs in the ensuing crash. When the Tea people began screaming about deficits, the rich explained that “we” had to bail out the economy, and that such deficits were natural. Somehow, the screamers didn’t notice that the cause of the problem was the greedy rich whose utter incompetence produced the Great Crash. The rich don’t want to pay for their disastrous management of the political economy, and that causes incoherent government policies.

SNIP

How can we as nation survive this utterly incoherent management of the political economy by the rich?

Read the whole thing.

This Explains Everthing

Heather at Crooks and Liars:

Bill Maher took a shot at Republicans in his New Rules segment for showing us that they have absolutely no interest in governing and instead just trying to whip their base up into a frenzy fear mongering over the latest faux outrage of the day.

MAHER: New Rule – Fantasies are for sex, not public policy. When you go down the list of useless distractions that make up the Republican Party agenda; public unions and Sharia law, anchor babies and a mosque at ground zero, ACORN and National Public Radio, the war on Christmas, the New Black Panthers, Planned Parenthood, Michelle Obama’s war on desserts…

…you realize that one reason nothing gets done in America is that one of the political parties puts so much more into fantasy problems. Governing this country with Republicans is like rooming with a meth addict.

You want to address real life problems like when the rent is due and they’re saying “How can you even think of that stuff when there’s police scanner voices coming out of the air conditioning unit?”

Republicans are deadbeats on meth - pass it on.

Spread Your Legs, Bitch - We're the IRS

Sometimes I truly believe that voting republican should get you listed for life as a sex offender.

Steve Benen:

POLICING ABORTIONS THROUGH THE IRS.... In January, Nick Baumann took a closer look at the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," and highlighted an outrageous provision that would redefine rape. The language was ultimately removed after the ensuing controversy.

This week, Baumann put the spotlight on another problem with the same law, and this one may be tougher for proponents to change.

Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans' "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops -- that is, during an audit, they'd have to determine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion.

The proposed law, also known as H.R. 3, extends the reach of the Hyde Amendment -- which bans federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake -- into many parts of the federal tax code. In some cases, the law would forbid using tax benefits -- like credits or deductions -- to pay for abortions or health insurance that covers abortion. If an American who used such a benefit were to be audited, Barthold said, the burden of proof would lie with the taxpayer to provide documentation, for example, that her abortion fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.

So, on the one hand, the House GOP wants to undermine the IRS's ability to actually collect revenue -- ostensibly, the agenda's purpose -- but expand the IRS's power to determine whether specific abortions meet the standards of tax law's exclusions for rape or incest.

Americans can take some solace in knowing this legislation, while certain to pass the House, has no chance whatsoever of becoming law, at least not in this Congress. But that doesn't change the fact that House Republicans are not only pushing this odious bill, they've also made it one of their top priorities of 2011.

The real-world effect of this insane bullshit is, of course, to push the Overton Window yet further over the Radical Reichtard cliff, and inure people to the fundamental precept of rethuglicanism: creatures who are not male, white, straight, Dominionist rethuglicans are sub-human.

If Obama Were Like Republican Governors

Steve M. finds yet another way to describe the failure of Democrats to wield power effectively:

When you look at the insane things in some of the Year Zero bills in newly Republican states -- the privatization of power plants by fiat in the Wisconsin "budget repair" bill, or the dissolution of local governments permitted in a bill that could soon be headed for the desk of Michigan governor Rick Snyder -- you'd have to go much further to imagine analogous acts by President Obama in his first days in office.

At the very least, we needed a stimulus that made up for a $2.9 trillion shortfall in economic activity, as Paul Krugman argued all along -- though, since we're imagining proposals that are analogous to what Republicans are doing right now, I suppose we should have gone for $50 trillion, as this guy recommended.

A Democrat analogous to Walker/Scott/Kasich/Snyder would have slapped handcuffs on dozens of bankers in the first hundred days; he'd have broken up the banks and restored Glass-Steagall. He and fellow Democrats would have repealed the Bush tax cuts on the rich by Groundhog Day '09, and would then begin restoring Clinton -- or even Reagan, or pre-Reagan -- tax rates on the wealthy. (And, of course, the economic team would be heavy on folks like Reich and Krugman and Warren, rather than Geithner and Summers.)

I could go on. For example, regarding Gitmo, the prisoners who were to be tried stateside would have been flown to the U.S. in the dead of night and shipped to Supermax prisons before any wingnut crybaby knew what was going on.

None of this could have happened, of course, because the Democrats we elect don't believe in doing this stuff, don't have the guts to do it, or both. But it would be analogous.

Read the whole thing.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

"Tackle the Debt"? Easy - Soak the Rich and Hire 10 Million Unemployed

UPDATE Below

It's amazing, the straight lines the rethuglicans keep handing Obama.

Senate Republicans will not support an increase to the federal debt limit unless the president vows to tackle the nation's debt, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Friday.

But not as amazing as the way Obama keeps letting them clunk to the ground without even trying to respond.

You know what he's going to do: offer to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Because total capitulation is how our president negotiates with rethuglicans.

Here's what he should say:

"Tackle the debt? GREAT. The fastest and easiest way to get our debt down to where it was when Bill Clinton left office is to ... wait for it ... raise revenue.

"And the two fastest and easiest ways to raise revenue are, first: to restore the top tax rate that President Eisenhower maintained during the Golden Era of the 1950s that Speaker Boehner misses so much. That's 90 percent on all income over $1 million.

"Second, get our 10 million unemployed citizens paying taxes again. Their new jobs will be rebuilding the nation's infrastructure and creating the infrastructure of the future. They will be getting paid by the federal government while working for the nation, both through their own labor and through the multiplier effect of spending their incomes throughout the economy.

"I wish to thank Minority Leader McConnell for making our choice so stark: either we raise revenue through high taxes on the rich and a new Works Progress Administration, or we default on our national debt.

"I pledge to Senator McConnell, to members of Congress, and to every American: I will do everything in my power to hike taxes on the rich and put Americans back to work, thus slashing our debt and restoring our national credit."

Let the rethuglicans shut down the government. Let them take the blame. Make your offer and stand firm on it.

Cave yet again, and you may very well win re-election. But you'll do it at the price of turning the United States of America into Haiti.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

UPDATE, 3:25 p.m.: Senator Bernie Sanders is already there.

Well, at least one member of the United States Senate is listening to the people on where this "shared sacrifice" should be coming from to reduce the deficit and it's not the working class.

Release: Sanders Introduces Emergency Deficit Reduction Act:

March 10, 2011

Bill to Create a Millionaires Surtax and End Tax Breaks for Big Oil

WASHINGTON, March 10 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today introduced The Emergency Deficit Reduction Act that would establish a surtax on millionaires and eliminate tax breaks for big oil and gas companies.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Republican Deficit Cutting: Give $4 Billion to Oil Companies; Take $75 Million Away from Homeless Veterans

Zandar:

One oil company cleared over $9 billion in profit in one quarter last year. Half a billion a year to a company that earns $40 billion a year is kinda, well, chump change. Even if Exxon Mobil got all $4 billion plus in federal subsidies, and it lost them, the company still would have made more than twice that in just the last three months on the year. And Joe Barton wants you to think that if your taxpayer money doesn't go to Exxon, they will go out of business.

Now, I'm not The Donald or anything, but if we ended oil and gas subsidies tomorrow, I think every oil company in America would be 100% fine. Joe Barton on the other hand thinks you're too stupid to check his math. He wants you to feel sorry for Exxon Mobil and its fellow oil giants in an industry that made over $100 billion just in profit last year. He says if you don't give them $4 billion, they'll go out of business.

SNIP

Meanwhile, because we're giving $4 billion a year in tax dollars to an industry that doesn't need it, we have to cut $75 million from a program to give homeless veterans a place to live because we can't afford it as a country.

SNIP

To recap, $4 billion in tax money to energy companies earning tens of billions a year in profit, vital national interest. Not wasteful at all. Putting Afghanistan and Iraq veterans out on the street because we can't afford to help them as a result? We can't afford to help them, sorry. Got to cut waste.

Joe Barton got $1.5 million from oil companies and he's got to earn it. And many rethuglicans are plain stupid enough to think that cutting all spending to non-corporations and cancelling all taxes for the obscenely wealthy really will lead to a Randian utopia.

But whatever the personal excuse, the bottom line is that all rethuglican budget plans, arguments, policies, bills and amendments accomplish the same single goal:

Taking money away from everyone who is not filthy rich and giving to everyone who already is filthy rich.

That's their one measuring stick, their two-branched decision tree: Does it make rich people richer? If yes, do it. If no, don't do it.

Here are two people who explain it much better than I can:

"The Consequences of GOP Success"

I've neglected to post a thorough description of just what the rethuglicans are doing with their budget destruction, mostly because it's both too massive and too depressing.

But Steven D. at Booman tribune has done it, and brilliantly:

The Republicans in Congress, and in states across the country are making no bones about their agenda: they desire to kill unions and worker's rights. They desire to kill the EPA, and kill any regulation regarding worker safety, drug safety, food safety, environmental safety -- you name it. They want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and healthcare reform with a thousand cuts until nothing is left but private accounts managed by by their buddies at Wall Street to which you are forced to contribute. They want to privatize prisons and schools.

They want an end to financial assistance to college students and their families (except football and basketball players, of course). They want to kill any investment in alternative fuels and public transportation. They desire the awarding of no-bid contracts to their "friends," i.e., the people who contributed the most to their political campaigns. Oh, and they want to make it ever more difficult, if not impossible, for innovative small businesses to compete with the corporate behemoths that dominate our political landscape. Indeed, without a middle class how can small businesses not dedicated to serving the desires of the rich survive?

In short, the goal of the New and Improved Tea Party Republican Governors and Legislators is to drive a stake through the heart of anyone who still believes he or she is a member of the middle class. As one of their own recently remarked those of us "slobs" in the middle class are a "different breed" the implication being that we are parasites on the body of corporate wealth and power rather than the collective engine of human labor and productivity that made that wealth and power possible.

Let us stop for a moment, now that the Republican "game plan" to dismantle the government and protect their wealthy benefactors at all costs has been exposed in all its naked infamy, and consider what type of country the realization of their goals would create. Imagine a world where there is no safety net. Imagine a country where wages and salaries are steadily decreased. Imagine a country where financial panics and "great recessions" are a regular occurrence every few years. Imagine a country where the water and the food are not fit to drink and eat, and the air isn't fit to breath. To take the lyrics from a popular John Lennon song lyrics out of context, "It isn't hard to do."

Read the whole incredible thing.

Everything They Do and Say Just Provides More Proof

It would be a lot easier to deal with both the teabaggers and their groupies in the Village if more people acknowledged who and what they really are.

Digby:

I'm wondering when people are going to recognize that not only is the Tea Party socially conservative and uhm ... racially uncomfortable, their antipathy to taxes and government actually stems from those attitudes. It's not a coincidence or even a sympathetic constellation of various positions on the issues. They don't like government because they believe that government should not protect and support people they don't like.

It's not even a matter of not liking the constitutional principle of "majority rule, but protect the minority" because they think it's undemocratic. When they are in the majority, they resent the protection of the minority, to be sure. But when they are in the minority they equally resent majority rule. The "principle" is simply that they believe they are superior and more deserving and that people they don't like, whether they are in the majority or the minority, do not deserve to have any say in how the world is organized. They just do not believe their opposition is legitimate in any way. It's not really any more complicated than that.

Later, Digby makes the same point on teabagger demands for forced birth:

I think it's adorable that so many of our Village scribes continue to insist that the "new conservatives" are just a bunch of fiscal hawks trying to cut the fat, but it's wishful thinking. they are the same old same old, and as I wrote in the previous post, the reason they are fiscal hawks is the same reason they are social conservatives: to stop people they don't like (in this case pregnant women who want to exercise their constitutional right to abortion) from doing things they don't like.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

Your Repug Congress Critters at Work

It's gotten to the point that you don't even have to check the roll call - if the bill adds to the deficit, kills jobs, hurts the middle class, handicaps the military, damages education, poisons the water and air or just generally makes life worse for everyone who is not obscenely wealthy, House republicans voted for it.

In Kentucky, that's Brett Guthrie, Geoff Davis, Ed Whitfield and Hal Rogers. A Democratic majority in the Senate keeps the worst of these abominations from coming to a vote, but for the ones that do, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul love them too.

Steve Benen:

A BOLD STAND IN SUPPORT OF SUBSIDIES FOR BIG OIL.... Before the House approved a measure to keep the government open until March 18, Democrats took full advantage of their motion-to-recommit power. Indeed, they're getting better at this.

Two weeks ago, before a vote to extend the Patriot Act, Dems used this maneuver to get nearly every Republican in the House to vote against a measure that said, "When investigating American citizens, the government must comply with the Constitution."

Yesterday, it was another motion that may very well end up in some 2012 campaign ads.

Democrats are committed to fiscal responsibility and to ensuring that government lives within its means. With Big Oil raking in record profits, House Democrats offered a Motion to Recommit to the House Republican short-term spending bill this afternoon making a responsible cut to the budget: putting an end to taxpayer-funded subsidies to large oil companies. [...]

Rep. William Keating (D-MA) offered the motion on the House floor saying "let's stop sending taxpayers' money to the most profitable companies in the world."

Republicans voted unanimously against the motion, defeating it by a vote of 176-249.

Here's the roll call on the vote. A total of 236 Republicans voted, and all of them opposed the effort to end public subsidies for oil companies.

For the typical American, I suspect this will seem hard to understand. In the face of fiscal challenges, Republicans are ready to slash funding in education, health care, job training, and national security, but they're not willing to end taxpayer subsidies -- our money -- for the oil industry? An industry that's already enjoying extraordinary profits?

Also note, ending the subsidies would save the federal government tens of billions of dollars, making a significant dent in the deficit-reduction campaign that Republicans pretend to care about. It's a reminder that the GOP's commitment to fiscal responsibility is shaped in large part by who'll suffer as a result of the cuts -- working families can feel the brunt of the budget ax, under the GOP vision, but ExxonMobil can't.

Every time Americans go to the pump -- which is becoming more painful all the time -- Democrats want consumers to remember, "You're not only paying higher prices for gas, your tax dollars, thanks to Republicans, are also subsidizing the oil companies themselves."

Just a few weeks ago, former Shell Oil CEO John Hofmeister acknowledged reality, conceding that his industry doesn't need the government subsidies. Regrettably, congressional Republicans disagree.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

UPDATE: I'm losing my touch. Completely neglected to note that one of the 85 Blue Dog/DINOs who voted with the repugs and Big Oil was everyone's favorite repug cocksucker - Ben Chandler, Traitor-KY6.

Quote of the Day

Digby:

" ... there is no "common ground" with people who want to criminalize miscarriage. They have declared all-out war."

Stand-Up Guy Tony Weiner Calls Out the Cowards

Never fails to amaze me - the willingness of conservatards and freakazoids to reveal their existential terror of female sexuality.

Especially when liberals like Tony Weiner are there to point out the cowardice and hypocrisy.

Heather at Crooks and Liars:

Thank you Congressman Weiner for calling out these hypocritical Republicans for their so-called conservative views. As Anthony Weiner pointed out here, Republicans are all for less government regulation, unless it means the right to regulate a woman's uterus. They don't want government to get between a patient and their doctor unless it means making sure that poor women don't have access to a legal procedure.

The EPA is more popular than Congress or the President

Not that the rethuglicans give a flying fuck about what actual Americans think about repug efforts to destroy the nation, but here's yet more proof that they are not doing "what Americans want."

Down With Tyranny:

Nancy Pelosi cited another nonpartisan poll that shows American are hugely in favor of the EPA's efforts to update air pollution efforts and opposed to Boehner's efforts to weaken clean air standards.

69 percent of Americans say they favor the EPA updating standards with stricter limits on air pollution. 26 percent oppose-- a 43 point difference.

68 percent believe Congress should NOT stop the EPA from updating these standards. 28 percent say Congress should stop the EPA-- a 39 point difference.

79 percent support stricter limits on the amount of Mercury that power plants and other industrial facilities can release. 18 percent oppose-- a 61 point difference.

77 percent favor stricter limits on the amount of smog that power plants, oil refineries and other industrial facilities can release. 21 percent oppose-- a 56 point difference.

77 percent favor stricter limits on the amount of carbon dioxide that power plants and other industrial facilities can release. 21 percent oppose-- a 56 point difference.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

UPDATE: Also: Scientists didn't lie, Inhofe is a goat-fucking moron, and climate change is real.

And Unions Are the Thing That Brings Us Democracy

Rachel explained it last night: The desperate attacks on public-sector unions are the last stage in a 70-year war to destroy the Democratic Party.

Crooks and Liars has the video:



And it's coming to a statehouse near you soon. Brian Buetler at TPM:

But just across the Great Lakes in nearby Ohio, where Republicans swept control of government in November, a similar fight is brewing.

There, the state senate is holding hearings on Bill 5, which would end collective bargaining for state workers and severely limit those rights at the local level.

The legislation is similar in many ways to the rollbacks being debated in Wisconsin. And just as in Wisconsin, they have the support of the state's newly elected Republican governor, John Kasich.

But unlike Wisconsin, this fight didn't erupt out of nowhere. In Wisconsin, governor Scott Walker introduced his plan and days later it's hit the floor of the state Senate.

In Ohio, the process is playing out more slowly, and the opposition has been creeping with it. Thursday, over one-thousand public sector workers showed up to protest the legislation.

But the situations in Wisconsin and Ohio are not isolated incidents. There are similar efforts in nascent stages just about everywhere Republicans took control of one or more branches of government: Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, and to a lesser degree in Maine and Pennsylvania.

What happens in the states like Wisconsin leading the anti-union fight will have a tremendous influence on whether similar efforts are successful in other states.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

"We Don't Have a Set of Shared Values"

Greg Sargent, via Digby:

Nancy Pelosi's extremely blunt assessments of the true motives of Republicans are why her supporters love her and her enemies hate her with equal passion, and on a conference call with bloggers just now, she unleashed a slashing attack on the House GOP's new anti-abortion push that may churn up emotions on both sides.

Pelosi -- who promised a huge fight against House Republicans over the issue in the days ahead -- didn't hold back one bit, claiming the new legislative push by Republicans "disrespects the judgment of American women."

"I don't know if they ever give that a thought," she added.

Pelosi described the GOP push as the "most radical assault" on women's reproductive rights "in our lifetimes." And she was equally blunt in her assessment of right-wing assaults on family planning.

"They are at a different philosophical place," she said, characterizing their view as: "all engagement has to result in a child." Pelosi noted that contraception and family planning is "not consistent with their belief that it's all about procreation."

Digby comments:

That's right. And it's why there is no "common ground" to be found on this issue. I know that's uncomfortable for many good liberals who just want more than anything to not have a fight with Republicans on ... well, anything. But it's either fight or get rolled over.

I feel fairly confident that the progressive House Democrats are not going to falter on this. But the Senate is where this kind of deal making really happens and if it gets there, I'm not entirely sure that it won't pass. So Pelosi is calling for liberals to man the barricades.

She has good reason to be worried. It's going to be very difficult for the GOP to deliver the kind of government the Teabaggers are demanding. The Democrats are likely to cave, of course, on some things that we hold very dear. But Obama will not let them do too much damage to his signature health care plan and the planned cuts in social security won't manifest themselves for some time. They need to give these people something they really, really want and I would guess that, as usual, female sacrifice will fit the bill. It's not like it's "important" and selling out women always sends a positive "signal" to all those independents and Villagers who must be appeased with a constant stream of nonsensical bullshit, that the Democrats are in tune with Real America.

More of this please:

Pelosi added that the unreconcilable philosophical differences between Republicans and Dems on abortion left Dems no choice but to adopt a scorched-earth approach to the war ahead. "We don't have a set of shared values," she said. "We have to fight this out in the public domain, so when we move to the Senate it has no popular support."

You can't compromise with people who want you dead.