Remember why we came out in '08, and ask yourself if you'll really be better off with a GOP majority

We need to take a serious look back at the absolute disaster that was the Bush Administration and the mess that it created - a mess that we're still trying to deal with today.

This leads to a question for the progressives like Jane Hamsher and FireDogLake that spent the summer leading a charge against the president because he didn't go far enough... do you really think that rallying the troops against Obama has had a positive effect? Do you think that the causes that you care about are going to benefit from the GOP surge? Do you really think, now that the Bushies are on their way back in to power, that Obama is "just like Bush"? Do you think that you'll make gains under a GOP Congress?

To the middle... watch and remember. And think.

Bush "tax cuts" will represent a HIKE in taxes for those making under $300K in 2011

via Cesca

This graphic needs to be seen by everyone. From the pages of the Wall Street Journal - read that again... the Rupert Murdoch-owned WALL STREET JOURNAL - comes this graphic showing taxes in 2011 if the Bush "tax cuts" were still in place, versus a 2011 under the Obama plan, with the tax cuts for the wealthy being allowed to expire while middle-class tax cuts (for those making under $250,000) are extended.

Read very carefully. The Bush "tax cuts" are only a tax cut if you make over $300,000. For anyone under that line, these "tax cuts" are actually a tax increase.

As the GOP - and it's house organ Fox News and it's lunatic fringe the Tea Party - attempt to flog the Bush "tax cuts" as a tax cut for anyone other than the wealthy, remember this graphic. As Fox trots out commercials for their Sunday programming that suggest that everyone is talking about the Bush "tax cuts" as a way to stimulate the economy, remember this graphic.

Also remember that when it comes to direct injections into the economy in the form of unemployment benefits that are immediately spent, they oppose it. When they scream about fiscally responsible policy that must be paid for before it goes into effect, they don't mean the Bush "tax cuts" for the wealthy. They're perfectly OK with that.

When they yell about deficits, they don't take into account the effect that the Bush "tax cuts" will have (see graphic at right) at ballooning the deficit.

This is a microcosm of how Fox and the Tea Party and the GOP work hand-in-hand-in-hand. Fox has spent a decade setting up strawmen to strike fear into the hearts of Great Americans everywhere, so that like Pavlov's dogs, they react whenever Fox tells them to. Then Fox trots out a meme, such as "the Bush Tax Cuts will spur the economy that the Kenyan Messiah has wrecked". And respond they do. Never mind that the economy went under during Bush 43. Never mind that whatever gains we've had have come as a result of Obama and the stimulus. If Fox says Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest are good, the fearful will respond.

How do I know this? It's obvious. Look at Fox's viewership in terms of the commercials they run. Gold. Diabetes supplies. Senior insurance. HoverRounds (go, go, go). Home security. Their viewers are, by-and-large, older white people. Older white people who are scared, of death, illness and Kenyans wrecking the economy, seeking reparations and Islamicizing their grandkids. They're so scared that they'll vote against their own economic self-interest because Fox News tells them that the Black Kid is bad.

Look at the chart again... the majority of Fox's viewers are not making over $300,000 a year. So why would they push for policies that hurt their pocketbook? Because they're scared of what the Tea part and the Tea Party mouthpiece that is Fox News tell them to be scared of.

The politics of killing the tax breaks for the wealthy while maintaining the middle-class breaks is a risky one. It shouldn't be, but given the climate in the country right now where the right wing can make up their own facts while ignoring the real ones (about the impact of the deficit, for example) this threatens to be the key issue of the midterm elections.

And while the Democrats are finally starting to try to tie the GOP in to the more extreme beliefs of the Tea Party candidates they support, they're not doing enough. This is bareknuckle politics and the Democrats have to become far more aggressive in not letting the GOP/Tea Party/Fox News dominate the conversation with half-truths.

There might not be a "W" in germophobe, but there is a germophobe in W

Visiting Haiti with Bill Clinton, notorious germophobe George W. Bush gets caught wiping his hands on Clinton's shirt after having shaken hands with some Haitians. Check out the WTF? glance from Bill. :13 in.

7 years, thousands dead Americans, hundreds of thousands total dead, tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of billions spent, no safer.... all for a lie

Brave New Foundation

Reconciliation schmeckinciliation

MSNBC

Republicans argue that reconciliation is a partisan tactic that would limit their ability to offer amendments and limit debate to 20 hours in what's considered "the world's most deliberative body." They also say it's inappropriate to use a fast-track budget process to craft health care policy.

But Democrats are quick to point out that the process has been used by both parties — more than 20 times since 1980 — on things like tax cuts, student loan programs, children's health insurance, and welfare reform.

"They should stop crying about reconciliation as if it's never been done before," Reid said last week. "It's done almost every Congress, and they're the ones that used it more than anyone else."

This is why Democrats suck: they don't frame issues well.

They're letting the GOP frame this issue as "Democrats going to extraordinary lengths to ram health care through". And the Democratic response is "well, you did it too".

While that is true, that's not the issue. The issue is that the GOP has turned the Senate from a body that operates on majority rule to a body that needs a supermajority of 60 votes to get anything done. That was NOT the intent of the Framers. The intention was that 1 vote more than half would pass legislation.

The filibuster is being used as a parliamentary tactic (superbly, I might add) to stop passage of anything that might reflect positively on this president. They're paralyzing the nation to score political hits.

Why the Democrats have not noted this - the fact that the Republicans are trying to change the rules of the Senate to require 60 votes for almost anything - is beyond me.

It used to be that to filibuster, one has to have continuous floor speeches until and unless cloture is invoked. Now, it's not necessary - which is ridiculous. If you're going to stop the business of the country, you should at least have to hold your pee for it. Here's the big unless...the Senate Majority Leader may require an actual traditional filibuster if he or she so chooses. That's always an option.

On the subject of reconciliation (and liars), Paul Krugman contributes this:

So, on the This Week panel today I didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the biggest whopper from Sen. Lamar Alexander, who told Elizabeth Vargas that reconciliation — I don’t have the exact transcript — had in the past been used for small things and “to reduce the deficit”.

In fact, reconciliation was used to pass the two major Bush tax cuts, which increased the deficit — by $1.8 trillion.

And there’s no penalty for this kind of deception.

Update: Brad DeLong has the transcript, including my final lament.

Here's Rachel Maddow taking on the latest lie regarding reconciliation. How do we allow these Republicans to lie and contradict their own statements and votes.



Then there's Jim Bunning, the retiring senator from Kentucky who used to pitch for the Phillies and is likely suffering from some form of dementia (I'm not joking). He decided to throw a hissy-fit and... let's let Jon explain. My only reaction is: if a Democrat did this, the outrage would be legendary. THIS is why Democrats suck. Bunning got a way with this and the very serious media was never forced to deal with it.

NYT Poll: Bush still blamed for economy

At least this NYT poll shows there's SOME measure of reality operating.

(CNN)

More than a year after President George W. Bush left office, more Americans continue to blame his administration over any other entity for the nation's economic woes, according to a new poll.

In a New York Times/CBS News survey out Friday, 31 percent of Americans said the Bush administration is at fault for the current state of the economy while only 7 percent pointed their finger at President Obama and his team.

An additional 23 percent said the fault lies with Wall Street institutions while 13 percent assign the blame to Congress. Nearly 10 percent said the blame lies with all of them.

Lawrence O'Donnell tears into Bush speechwriter over torture

(HuffPost)

Fireworks erupted on the set of "Morning Joe" Friday, after MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell took umbrage with former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen's claim that President Obama is inviting a domestic terrorist attack.

Things started off rocky after Thiessen -- in the process of justifying the coercive counter-terrorism techniques used under the Bush administration and condemning Obama for "eliminating the CIA's interrogation program" -- insisted that his former boss was required to essentially start from scratch.

"You gotta think back to the period after 9/11," he said. "We didn't even know who hit us. We didn't know that Khalid Sheik Mohammad was the mastermind of 9/11 or the operational commander of al Qaeda. And then we started rounding up these terrorists..."

O'Donnell responded quickly, barking out his bewilderment with Thiessen's assertion that there was no pre-9/11 warning that an attack was coming.

"Isn't it true that the president you worked for invited the first attack by having no idea what was going on with al Qaeda? You just admitted that when you were hit on 9/11, you just said, 'We didn't know who hit us'. You were told who was going to hit you before 9/11. And your administration invited the first attack, for which you should live in shame."

Those charges were some of the milder in the heated exchange. Later in the segment, O'Donnell told Thiessen that he was hopelessly ill-equipped to talk about terrorism or torture.

"Marc, I'm wondering about your own personal experience with torture. I know you grew up in the richest zip code in America, in the Upper East Side. You went to the only boarding school in all of Connecticut that I know of that has its own golf course... And then you went to Vasser. And like all the torture-mongers in the Bush White House, the Cheney family included, you never served a day in the military. Never considered that. I'm wondering, with that background, what is it that gives you an expertise on torture? What makes you love it so much?"

Thiessen replied: "First of all, one, it is not torture. Second of all, [the New Yorker's] Jane Mayer said the other day I never had a security clearance... I had a security clearance. I was read into the CIA program. When President Bush did a speech in December 2006 to reveal this program, I was taken into a secure room in the National Security Council. I was given access to all of the intelligence this program produced. And I actually met with the actual interrogators who interviewed Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and got the information to stop attacks."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

About those GOP promises: is this what you want to go back to?

Maybe wartime taxcuts for the rich and deregulation of the banking industry and business sectors AREN'T so good. However, I'm sure Mary Matalin and the excuses crowd will find a way to blame this on Clinton or Obama.

This piece from the Washington Post lays much of the blame on the housing bubble, which was partly a result of Bush's Ownership Society plans.

For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different.

The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.

...
"The problem is that we mismanaged the macroeconomy, and that got us in big trouble," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight. "The big bad thing that happened was that, in the U.S. and parts of Europe, we let housing bubbles get out of control. That came back to haunt us big-time."

...
The first decade of the new century was an experiment in what happens when an economy comes to rely heavily on borrowed money.

"A big part of what happened this decade was that people engaged in excessively risky behavior without realizing the risks associated," said Karen Dynan, co-director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. "It's true not just among consumers but among regulators, financial institutions, lenders, everyone."

What color is the sun in wingnut world?

Are you shitting me?

This is more of the 'if we say it long enough, the sheeple will fall in line' theory of politics that the right-wing is basing their hopes on. No solutions, no answers, just lies and misdirection.

"I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history. And President Bush dealt with it and within a year of his presidency within a comparable time, unemployment was at 5 percent."

Mary Matalin suggesting that Bush inherited 9/11

DougJ at BalloonJuice asks why Republicans aren't held to the same standards as Democrats?

It’s an outright lie and not just because they didn’t “inherit” 9/11—unemployment was actually 5.7% December 2001, as compared with 4.2% when Bush took office, and it rose to 6.3% by 2003.

At what point does America stop taking these clowns seriously? Why does the media pander to their lies? How do the "serious journalists" at CNN not call her on the obvious baldfaced lie she told?

U.K. envoy: U.S. was 'hell bent' on Iraq war

(AP)

The United States was "hell bent" on a 2003 military invasion of Iraq and actively undermined efforts by Britain to win international authorization for the war, a former British diplomat told an inquiry Friday.

Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003, said that President George W. Bush had no real interest in attempts to agree on a U.N. resolution to provide explicit backing for the conflict.

The ex-diplomat, who served as Britain's envoy in Iraq after the invasion, said serious preparations for the war had begun in early 2002 and took on an unstoppable momentum.

As diplomats frantically attempted in early 2003 to agree upon a U.N. resolution approving a military offensive, Bush's key aides grew impatient — criticizing the process as an unnecessary distraction, he said.

Grumbling from Washington "included noises about 'this is a waste of time, what we need is regime change, why are we bothering with this, we must sweep this aside and do what's going to have to be done anyway — and deal with this with the use of force,'" Greenstock testified before the inquiry into the Iraq war.

Several nations had hoped to stall the invasion of Iraq to allow U.N. weapons inspectors more time to search for evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — the key justification for the war. No such weapons were ever found.

Yet Bush's inner circle cared little about what international allies thought and refused to halt plans to invade in March 2003, Greenstock said. He said even Blair was unable to persuade Bush, winning only a brief hiatus of two weeks.

"The momentum for earlier action in the United States was much too strong for us to counter," Greenstock said in a written statement to the inquiry, provided alongside his live testimony.

In the Loop indeed:


But it's not funny. George W. Bush and his advisors are responsible for deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Try to justify that to your God.

Senate report: Bin Laden was ‘within our grasp’

(AP)

Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden's escape laid the foundation for today's reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.

The best comment on this comes from Rainn Wilson via Twitter:


And the typical reaction is, well, typical. These 2 Tweets tell you about all you need to know. When confronted with truth, the right wing yells 'shut up!". Or "you lie".


Side note: Whether it's Wilson or Stewart or Colbert, why is it that the only real commentary on today's issues is coming from comedians? Why is the Serious Media playing every issue as if it's not a matter of fact, but opinion?

Perino: no terrorist attacks during Bush's term

(Huff Post)
Dana Perino (former spokesperson for G.W. Bush), recently nominated by President Obama to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, made an odd claim Tuesday night.

On Fox News, the former press secretary suggested President Obama was playing politics by refusing to describe the massacre at Fort Hood as a terrorist attack. "We should call it what it is," she said.

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term," she told Sean Hannity. "I hope they're not looking at this politically. I do think that we owe it to the American people to call it what it is."

No terrorist attacks? Really? Short memory. Or blatant revisionist liar.

Re-Tweet

David Shuster of MSNBC had an excellent re-Tweet last week about the outrage over Obama's bow to the emperor of Japan. The Tweet asked why the outrage over Obama, but none over W. kissing and holding hands with the Saudi king. The answer is highlighted in yellow....

Did someone say "indoctrination"?

Someone call Michelle Malkin. The proprietors of Jesus Camp are teaching children to worship the president. Literally.

Tom Ridge: Bush Pressured To Raise Terror Alert in '04 Election

US News and World Report
Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

The Bush Tax Cuts

I referenced these figures from Citizens for Tax Justice regarding the Bush Tax Cuts in another post, and then started looking more.

In June of 2001, Bush signed a bill cutting taxes by $1.3 trillion - more than the cost of the House Health Care Bill and less than the Lie In Iraq has cost. Here are some really interesting figures.

Although everyone's taxes went down, look at the percentages. Look at whose dropped the most. The upper 1%'s taxes dropped by almost double the next closest demographic.

Next, look at the change in share of total taxes paid. The Top 1% paid 2.4% less. Those in the top third of wealth (upper middle class, from 61-99) paid more.

But it's the true middle and lower classes that interest me the most. Their share didn't change much at all. They still carry the same amount of burden. The truly interesting part is that these are the people being duped by the GOP. These are the Palin-ites. These are the teabaggers. These are the people who have been fooled into thinking that the Republicans represent their issues, are fighting for their tax dollars.

It's all bullshit. They're fighting to protect the interests of the very, very, very wealthy.

It's all a con and still some people are dumb enough to buy it.

Questions I have, part 1: when is a trillion not a trillion?

When Bush signed his $1.3 trillion tax cut in June of 2001, a cut that largely benefited the super-wealthy, who screamed and complained?

When Bush took us to war with an unknown price tag, who wondered 'how will we pay for it'?

So now, why does the right wing get so breathless about a health care plan that provides what should be a basic human right, and according to the CBO, will generate a surplus?

Why are wars and handouts to the rich preferable to basic health care for all?

** benefits of the Bush tax cuts here (Center for American Progress) and here (Citizens for Tax Justice)

George W. on how to fix the economy

"I know it's going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we're in. You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money." - George W. Bush

(Bob Cesca)
Really, Mr. Bush? Are you suggesting that Wall Street corruption, credit card spending, bad mortgages, massive consumer debt and your administration's encouraging of all four aren't what got us into this mess in the first place -- and that somehow the people responsible will rescue the economy? That's rich.

Adding... Wasn't TARP passed by George W. Bush?

Obama releases Bush terror memos; Bush legacy shatters

The ACLU has posted a link to the memos here, and Andrew Sullivan has written a brilliant piece about them here.

Suffice it to say that Bush has proven himself to be a liar when he said he was "shocked" by some of the torture methods being used. He couldn't have been shocked, he signed off on them.

Read the above graphic, taken from the memos. Read the ten forms of "treatment" used to get someone to "cooperate". Insects? I thought my country was better than this.

Obama restores science to it's rightful place

(Huff Post)
President Barack Obama urged researchers on Monday to follow science and not ideology as he abolished contentious Bush-era restraints on stem-cell research. "Our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values," Obama declared as he signed documents changing U.S. science policy and removing what some researchers have said were shackles on their work.

"It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda _ and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology," Obama said.