About Face

And forward, march . . . until February 29.  House Speaker John Boehner succumbed to bipartisan pressure from the Senate and allowed the payroll tax cut to go through for the first two months of the new year.  Although it's only a temporary cut, and a one-year extension would be just as temporary (albeit longer) Boehner's attempt to play politics with a tax cut affecting the rapidly shrinking middle class backfired miserably, and he was forced to admit defeat.  Good grief, even Mitch McConnell and Scott Brown were flabbergasted with his attempt to nix this deal.    

With this victory in hand, President Obama can now try to negotiate for a longer middle-class tax break and perhaps be in a stronger position going forward in an attempt to get congressional Republicans to give up something for a change.  It won't be easy.  Senate Republicans still have the power of the filibuster, House Republicans remain under the influence of all that tea, and Republicans of all stripes insist on taxing wealth less so workers can pay more of the tax burden as a way of reviving the economy.  But Obama has succeeded in reminding people that the Republican party is not the party to trust to fight for the little guy.

Neither is the Democratic party, but that's another story.  Don't sell out on the Keystone XL pipeline in the negotiations that come after the holidays, Mr. President! :-O 

Closer To the Edge

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner finally got a debt ceiling bill over the finish line in the House of Representatives Friday evening with two more votes than he needed. The bill passed included $917 billion in spending cuts over ten years and increase the debt limit enough to cover about six months. But it didn't go nearly as far as most Tea Partiers want, even without tax increases included, and Boehner had to include a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution - which has no chance of making it out of Congress without a two-thirds majority in either house, which it cannot receive - to get it to pass.

Boehner comes out of all this severely diminished as a leader, because he had to keep delaying the vote on this bill on account of not getting enough votes to pass it. This victory was a Pyrrhic one; as soon as the bill reached the Senate, the upper house killed it, as Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said it would. However, the Democratic Senate plan offered by Reid has fared no better. It would cut $2 trillion in spending over ten years (again, no tax increases) and extend the nation's borrowing authority through 2012, sparing incumbent politicians the task of having to deal with it in an election campaign that's already guaranteed to be contentious. That plan has been shelved, and the Republican House has already rejected it. So Reid doesn't exactly look like a hero either.

Reid and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell have been trying to formulate a compromise that the House might have to swallow, but they haven't apparently made and meaningful progress on that front either.

The best thing that could happen if the United States defaults is if the Tea Party is discredited (like the nation's finances) once and for all. As for progressives who thought we were on the cusp of a new golden age in January 2009, they'd better find themselves another candidate. They know what I'm talking about.

Drunk On Tea

House Speaker John Boehner can't get enough votes from Tea Party Republicans that will slash spending in return for a debt ceiling increase. That's the good news. The bad news is that the Senate proposal from Harry Reid remains the only alternative, and that's almost as bad as the Boehner bill. President Obama had better -no, had best - be prepared to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to keep the country from going into default. The Tea Party is so intoxicated with their power to hold up everything, it may be the only thing anyone can do.

Obama might be a hero in the end if he can stave off cuts to the social safety net. But right now everyone in Washington is a goat.

Lying There and Staring at the Ceiling

President Obama's speech tonight about raising the debt ceiling was meant to get Americans to rise to the occasion and call members of Congress for a balanced approach. He left the podium in the East Room with Americans - at least this American - even more pessimistic. Though Obama tried to be reasonable and offered the House Republican leadership all sorts of cuts along with tax increases as a peace offering, he offered no real re-assurance that the middle class would get a fairer shake from Washington. Obama's latest remarks were no more eye-opening and inspiring than his earlier remarks.

House Speaker John Boehner treated Obama's milquetoasty remarks as impudent sarcasm, and he offered a good heap of his own. Boehner refused to acknowledge any of Obama's overtures and even blamed the President for the economic mess we're in, declaring that he would never submit to any reckless taxation and spending offered by the White House. Boehner wants only to cut, cap, and balance expenditures - really, cut, cut, and cut - and allow a debt ceiling increase only for six months to set the stage for cutting, cutting, and more cutting. We're left with Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid's plan, which would allow a greater amount of cuts with no tax increases on the rich and with savings projections based on the winding down of war expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to extend the debt ceiling beyond the 2012 presidential and congressional elections.

This is progress?

Obama said that letting the debt ceiling expire isn't proper for the greatest nation on earth. It isn't proper for America either.

Whose Default Is It?

President Obama couldn't take it anymore. He tried to negotiate in good faith with the Republicans and get a deal over lowering the deficit and raising the debt ceiling with House Speaker John Boehner, and now the Speaker has walked out. Apparently Eric Cantor told him to. Obama - who has never had any respect from Republicans since he took office - has every right to be angry. He spoke yesterday evening in his press conference with forcefulness, conviction and candor as he admitted to giving House Republicans almost anything they wanted but he still couldn't get them to make any concessions regarding tax increases on wealthier Americans. He said he has no idea what the Republicans could possibly say yes to. but then, the Republicans aren't called the Party of No for nothing.

That's a triple negative, but so are the Republicans.

Anyway, Republicans will blame the president for the not avoiding a debt default by not giving in enough on cuts and taxes. Boehner is already insisting that they had an $800 billion revenue deal that the President has walked away from. Obama has already blamed the Republicans for their inflexibility on taxation. There's plenty of blame to go around. But no one is going to get an A for effort to avoid default if there is a default, and no one will get any credit (no pun intended) if and when the debt ceiling is finally raised. Americans are just sick of everybody in Washington now. :-(

Afghanistan Speech Update

In my earlier post about President Obama's speech on Afghanistan, I mentioned House Speaker John Boehner lamenting "that the plan is based more on the calendar than on strategy," but these sentiments in fact were expressed before the speech. Boehner later said that he could endorse the plan in general. His exact words were:

"As I understand it, the top brass at the Pentagon are comfortable with the president’s strategy. And I have said since the president took office that if the president listened to his commanders and his diplomats in the region, that I would support his plan. I am generally supportive of the plan, because there is enough flexibility in the withdrawal to take into consideration conditions on the ground."

Nancy Pelosi, despite her own reservations, also endorsed Obama's timetable. "The good news is the President is bringing the war in Afghanistan to an end," she said. "The President, for his reasons, has the timetable he has. I respect that."

Back later.

Train Wreck

President Obama and congressional Democrats have acquiesced to all sorts of demands from House Republicans to cut spending, but Speaker John Boehner has kept moving the line in an attempt to placate the Tea Party. And the Tea Party's demands have gone beyond just cutting short-term spending on a few programs. Some zealots, like the horrible Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) has vowed to allow the government if there is no rider on the budget bill zeroing out Planned Parenthood funding to stop government funding of abortion - even though Planned Parenthood funding does not go to abortion procedures because Planned Parenthood deliberately keeps those services separate from birth control and gynecological exams.

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan continues to promote his Medicare "reform" plan and his budget proposals in general, insisting that the debt will be paid off by 2050, with government spending as 14 percent of the gross domestic spending by then and corporate tax rates reduced to 25 percent - all with 2.8 percent unemployment as early as 2017! No one believes any of this, least of all Ryan's employment projections, and what Ryan wants to accomplish is based on cuts affecting programs that benefit the middle and lower classes.

Oh yeah, that $4.4 trillion figure refers not to cuts over ten years - that number is $5.8 trillion - but to the tax cuts Ryan would preserve for the wealthy.

You know, I'm dizzy from following all of these numbers . . ..

Also: Senate Republicans successfully blocked efforts by the previous, Democratic-controlled Congress to pass a budget by refusing to go along with a budget that didn't have the spending cuts they wanted. When Harry Reid tried to compromise with them, they moved the line and forced the budget to be brought up by a new Republican House and a Senate with a larger Republican minority. That doesn't sound fair, but Republicans were never about fairness. :-0

Lazy Media

As a writer, I've written a few articles I wasn't too thrilled with, largely because they were written under deadlines and I thought I could have done better with more time. Other times I wrote the odd piece (usually on my blog) based on a misunderstanding of the facts, and I've issued corrections as a result. But while I try to do my best, many in the Big Media seem to be happy to coast on their achievements and their generous salaries . . . and one media figure finally admitted so.

When MSNBC's Savannah Guthrie spoke this morning of a "gang of six" in the U.S. Senate trying to work out a bipartisan blueprint for the 2012 federal budget, Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), told Ms. Guthrie that he and the other five senators in this group are not a gang. (Of course they're not; can you imagine Conrad, the nerdiest man in the Senate, as a gang member?) Ms. Guthrie apologized, saying that it's common practice to label any aggregation of public figures a "gang," just as it's common to name a scandal by attaching the word "gate" as a suffix to the cause of the scandal (Billygate, Debategate, et. al.) after Watergate. She said that the media happen to be lazy.

Oh, my God! A Big Media personality admitted it! The Big Media are lazy! They don't challenge what the government tells them! They don't investigate serious conflicts of interest, like Clarence Thomas's possible involvement with Citizens United (honorable exception: Rachel Maddow)! They don't fact-check! And they're too lazy to come up with new names for scandals! That would explain why the senior George Bush - awarded the Medal of Freedom this week by President Obama - was able to say in 1980 that nuclear war was "winnable" (it was recorded on video) and to be able to get away with denying he'd ever said that four years later. Or why his son was able to get us into an unwinnable war in Iraq over non-existent nuclear weapons without being challenged by the press.

For a more recent example, how about John Boehner's claim about the growth of the federal payroll? Boehner said yesterday that if federal budget cuts result in federal employee layoffs, "so be it. We're broke." Boehner - who became Speaker of the House by promising to help create jobs - complained that over 200,000 federal jobs had been created in the first two years under President Obama's watch. But a 2010 Washington Post report found that only a tenth as many government jobs - 20,000 - had been created since 2002. The journalist who reported this did his/her homework. But I have yet to see any of the overpaid media personalities on MSNBC or even on public television point this out, and I doubt anyone on broadcast media or on CNN has done so. (Fox News? Yeah, right.)

How did I learn this factoid? I read about it on the Huffington Post, which has not sold out entirely despite its merger with AOL.

Look, I like Savannah Guthrie. She and Chuck Todd actually make a cute couple on MSNBC's "The Daily Rundown." But if she agrees that the Big Media are lazy, maybe she and Todd should set an example and do some more serious reporting on their show.

They can start by getting rid of their daily reporting of the soup du jour in the White House cafeteria.

Republican Acts

I wonder how many independents who voted for Tea Party Republicans in the midterm elections thought they were merely voting for more jobs and less spending. I'm certain many of them weren't voting to limit access to abortion. They probably didn't mean to give control of the House of Representatives to social reactionaries. They did. And now that social reactionaries are in power in the House, they're pursuing a misogynistic agenda to limit a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. (Note that I didn't say "a woman's right to choose" - that's mealy-mouthed Washington jargon. A right to choose? Choose what? A dentist?)

The bill, sponsored by New Jersey House Republican Christopher Smith, would, among other things, ensure that every federal government agency and program is barred from from spending tax money to fund abortions. It also would shut down the private - yes, private - market for health insurance coverage that includes abortion, and bar some rape survivors, as well as women whose pregnancies endanger their lives, from getting such insurance coverage. Oh yeah, it also would prevent the District of Columbia from using public money to fund abortions. This amounts to rich white men telling a poor city dominated by racial minorities what to do on religious and health-related matters. D.C. congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has protested, but without a vote on the Committee on the Whole, there isn't much she can do about it. In fact, there's nothing she can do about it.

And Speaker Boehner? He calls this bill one of the his highest legislative priorities. This is the third bill out of the 112th House, and not one of them deals with jobs. (And not one of them will get through the Senate.)

The bill is called the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which is an obscene name for a few reasons. First, President Obama has already issued an executive order saying that no federal funds will go to abortion, a move abortion rights activists denounced back in March. So title is misleading. Secondly, it's an unwieldy, witless name for legislation that is as childish and dumbed-down as it is fraudulent - just like the title of H.R. 112-1, the Job-Destroying Health Care Law Repeal Act. Personally, I yearn for the days when legislation had boring names, like the Sherman Antitrust Act, which respected the intelligence of voters and expected them to know about the contents and the perpetrators of the bill. This abortion bill should be called the Smith Act, or the Smith Reproductive Rights Act, which would assign responsibility for it and encourage the intellectually curious citizen to find out what it says. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 wasn't called the "Denying Freedom For Unions to Assert the Workplace Rights Of Its Members and to Prevent Right-To-Work Shops That Undermine Employees and Aid Big Business Act," but that's what it did, and that's what people knew it did. And when it was passed by a Republican Congress over President Truman's veto, union members knew they could blame Ohio senator Robert Taft and New Jersey congressman Fred Hartley for it.

One last thing about the current Smith Act (as I'll call it). The Republicans claim that they're all about small government and less government control. Enough people were taken in by this rhetoric to give House Republicans a majority. But people are quickly learning what they're doing with the smaller government and lesser government control they maintain. "I think people who claim to be 'small government' conservatives are disingenuous," said one reader of the Washington Post. "I think they want a government small enough to fit into an individual's bedroom, but too large to fit into a corporate boardroom." Enough said.

The Elephant In the Room

John Boehner took the oath of office as Speaker of the House yesterday, and the cheering from his fellow Republicans was probably the most joyful noise made by white people since Muhammad Ali got beaten up by Leon Spinks. Some folks saw political significance in the size of the gavel Speaker Boehner elected to use; it was a pretty big gavel, seemingly almost as big as outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who handed it to him. What did it represent? Boehner's desire to crush Democrats? His manhood? His idea that bigger is better? More likely, he was sending a signal to the country that, for all of his displays of humility, he plans a no less heavy-handed and radical way of doing things since Newt Gingrich occupied that same office.

Pelosi may have felt she got the last laugh with an introductory speech for the new Speaker that caused him to tear up in public again, but trust me, Boehner won't be crying much longer. Old people are going to cry when they see their Social Security and Medicare benefits cut. Children are going to cry when they find their school lunch programs have been zeroed out, and their parents are going to cry when they find that their kids aren't learning anything in this defunded schools. And more and more of us are going to cry after the 2012 elections when redistricting in favor of the Sun Belt solidifies the Republican majority in the House.

Health care reform is the first target of the Republicans, as the House will vote to repeal it next Wednesday with no ability for Democrats to offer amendments, although Harry Reid - who still leads a majority caucus in the Senate - vows not to bring that bill to a vote there. Next will be regulatory "reform" that will in effect get rid of various regulations designed to protect people from the abuses of big business. Michele Bachmann has already vowed to vigorously support repeal of the new financial regulation law.

As wrongheaded as Republicans are, liberals have their own reality to contend with, which is that nothing much can be done to adjust or redirect America's rightward trajectory. The 111th Congress marked the second time since 1989 that a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President declared the end of the era of Ronald Reagan only to have a Republican resurgence begin Reaganism anew. This country is simply not a liberal country. European-style social democracy has never been a saleable product in the United States. Americans who worship self-reliance reject the idea of a nanny state, and they view shared wealth as the antithesis of the old dream that they, too, can join the moneyed classes - in a word, get rich. I know that polls suggest support for more taxes on the rich and expansion of health care reform, but if you counted the number of Americans who would push those ideas to creating the conditions embodied by, say, the Canadian system, you'd be very disappointed. The same people who don't want their Social Security benefits cut still don't the government to regulate and tax every last bit of human activity to the same extent as they imagine it to be in other Western nations.

And yet I've argued for a strong liberal party to either replace or at best supplement the Democrats. A more liberal America is possible in the future - several countries have remade themselves and started over with new assumptions in the past - but not as long as two corporate mainstream parties control everything. Only one out of five Americans identify themselves as liberal, but a new liberal party, formed from the grass roots, could grow that number over time.

In the meantime, we'll have to work with what we have - a party too beholden to corporate interests to work for the people. And the Republicans, too.

Budget Concerns

One of the biggest complaints about the extension of the Bush tax cuts is that they make it so much harder to cut government spending. Too many people have too much interest in the government programs that the commission report laid out by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson has suggested should be on the table. Already people are complaining about the proposed retirement age increase to qualify for Social Security - to 69 from the current 67. The Americans who need to wait to reach the age of 69 to begin collecting a Social Security pension, by the way, aren't concerned with it so much now. They haven't even started kindergarten yet. See, the retirement age would, under this plan, rise to 69 in 2075. But people who won't be around then are against it because they believe it opens the door for more rule changes that are detrimental to the American people.

If you want my humble opinion - well, maybe it isn't so humble - I can propose several sensible ideas. For example, we should the actually increase spending on mass transit and intercity rail projects while dramatically cutting highway spending for a net decrease in the federal transportation budget. We can move much more people by mass transit with a modest public transportation spending increase than we do with the massive amounts of money we already spend on highways. Also - and I'm actually with Rand Paul on this one - we should zero out farm subsidies that primarily help agribusiness, and we should encourage farmers to grow more diverse crops and create value-added products rather than limit themselves to the modest government-supported corn and soybean cash crops. And last but not least, stop spending so much money on the military, for Pete's sake - our multi-billion-dollar weapons systems aren't helping us win the war in Afghanistan. But no, all of that is too sensible, and even though I plan to write my Republican congressman to suggest these ideas, I doubt it's going to happen.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell plan to start the new year with painful spending cuts that will hurt too many people even as the extended tax cuts help the rich, and many think President Obama, by allowing the tax cuts to be extended, has given them the rope to hang themselves with when they try to make those cuts. I hope this is correct, though personally, I think the President has given Boehner, McConnell, and their fat-cat friends the silk from which to produce expensive neckties - made in China - to wear to the inauguration of President Romney. Because when the deficit explodes, they'll just blame Obama for that.

After all, he agreed to middle-class tax cuts and a payroll tax holiday.

Which would make raising the retirement age irrelevant.

What a Fool Believes

MSNBC's Chris Matthews has opined that President Obama has turned lemons into lemonade in this congressional lame-duck session by brokering a deal on extensions of the Bush tax cuts and improving his standing among moderates for his less ideological approach to getting thing done. Well, may I say a few words on the subject? While I respect my fellow member of the Philadelphia Irish brethren, Matthews is off the mark on this one.

True, Obama's poll numbers have improved since the "shellacking" the Democrats got in the midterm elections. Obama did get key policy initiatives through in this lame-duck session. This all misses the point. Though he's denied John Boehner and Mitch McConnell a good deal of political credit for the tax bill, the truth is that the Republicans still got most of what they wanted and gave up very little. They got tax cuts through extortion, refusing to extend unemployment benefits and middle-class tax breaks unless they got got tax breaks for the top two percent of Americans. They pretty much said to the President, Do what we say and nobody gets hurt. With tax cuts having been extended and a payroll tax holiday having been enacted, they have added to the deficit and given themselves an excuse to propose massive spending cuts to social programs that benefit a huge amount of people - like Social Security.

As for Obama getting his mojo back . . . well, the Republican House convening in January will be hostile to many of his proposals, and Speaker-designate John Boehner refuses to compromise. Mitch McConnell will block any such proposals in the Democratic Senate with even more votes at his disposal. While I am happy to see the Don't Ask, Don't Tell (or DADT, which sounds like a recording studio acronym) policy repealed and the act of allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military, bear in mind that the bill that would have allowed foreign-born minors to get an education and serve in the military to earn citizenship (the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, yet another one of those long-winded names for legislation, with dumbed-down acronyms) did not pass. Further action in the 112th Congress on that issue is unlikely. And, as I have preciously noted on this blog, the Republicans will have the clout and the numbers (not to mention the money) in their favor going into the 2012 congressional elections; Obama may still win a second term, but his party will most likely be reduced to oppositional status - at best - in 2013.

Not only is it foolish to think Obama has added strength going into 2011, it's equally foolish for his liberal base to think that momentum is on their side just because Republicans have looked churlish and a few progressive "wish list" proposals became policy. They're still flailing for relevance in a center-right political atmosphere at a time when their role in the debate has been diminished by their own apathy and media indifference. Liberals have used poll numbers on individual issues to prove that the public actually agrees with them more, and majority support for letting taxes go up on the rich and growing support for the health care law back up that claim. But they still have to make their case in an environment where they have difficulty being heard.

Two cases in point: New Jersey governor Chris Christie insisted that there's no money to meet pension obligations in his state on CBS's "60 Minutes," but when Steve Kroft interviewed him, he failed to ask Christie about his tax break for upper-income New Jersey residents, as Ed Schultz pointed out. Meanwhile, the media have been looking back on a year that saw a Glenn Beck conservative rally on the Washington Mall in August, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's "Restore Sanity and/or Fear" rally parody on the Mall at the end of October, as well as a serious liberal rally - One Nation Working Together - held on the Mall early in October. When mainstream media outlets mention any of these rallies in retrospect, one rally doesn't get mentioned. Guess which rally.

(The PBS NewsHour didn't even report on the One Nation Working Together rally when it happened.)

No Respect At All

President Obama and the congressional Republican leadership were supposed to talk over dinner at the White House tonight, but incoming Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority - Minority - Leader Mitch McConnell asked that the meeting be postponed, citing scheduling conflicts in configuring the Republican congressional caucuses. This is like an aspiring actor turning down a starmaking part in a big-budget movie because he's already committed to a soap commercial. The Bush tax cuts are about to expire with no definite idea of whether or even how to extend them, people are still having trouble finding employment in this jobless recovery, and the congressional Republican leaders would rather dole out their legislative assignments that have dinner with the President.

It has become blatantly obvious the the Republicans disrespect this President and that they want to humiliate him in every conceivable way. They can't bear the thought of giving someone young -and let's face it, blacker - than they are their time. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are ready to cede on Republicans to economic issues without much of a fight.

Although Boehner and McConnell have rescheduled their meeting with the President for November 30 - twelve days later - it seems unlikely that the three men can come up with any workable working relationship, and that the Republicans would rather wait until the new Congress convenes to tell Obama how it's going to be. They've done everything but call him "boy" so far to demean him. Even Bob Dole never took Bill Clinton to task like this after the 1994 midterm elections. McConnell has made it clear that he wants Obama destroyed and defeated - in that order - and the Democrats are willing to go along to get along.

The Republicans already have some leverage. Even before the new Congress has taken office, the Republicans can use the latest poll numbers to jerk Obama around in this congressional lame duck session. Only a quarter of Americans think Obama can be re-elected in 2012, and his approval ratings remain mired at about 45 percent. No matter how much Obama tries to get his message across, no one seems to want to pay attention to him.

Is anybody listening? Oh, there's no respect at all.

(I, for one, would have loved to have dinner with the President and discussed issues with him, because I have plenty to say about that. Ironically, I ate out with my mother tonight for my birthday after we postponed it . . . for twelve days.)

Pledging My Time

The Republican "Pledge To America" sounds more like a threat than a promise. At a lumber company in Virginia, House Republican leader John Boehner and several of his factota unveiled a program Republican House candidates and incumbents are running on in the fall campaign. It;s essentially this: Cut taxes, cut federal spending, repeal the health care law, and oh yes, stop federally funded abortions while they're at it (in deference to the religious right). No mention of job creation, no explanation as to what they'd replace the health care bill with, none of that stuff. Boehner, deputy leader Eric Cantor, Mike Pence, and a couple of other GOP congressmen picked an amazingly low-key setting for their announcement; rather than trumpet a plan on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, as Newt Gingrich did with his Contract With America in 1994, they unveiled it at a lumber yard (manly) in northern Virginia (the real America), specifically in the unincorporated suburb of Sterling (unincorporated = no government = no taxes = no need to participate in local affairs).

Their presentation was so muted, in fact, it makes one think they believe they're going to win the House anyway. And, most likely, they will. Well, that's what Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog has been consistently forecasting for weeks. But this "lemon Pledge," as liberals have derided it, is so short on specifics and details, you wonder if maybe the Republicans take their would-be victory so much for granted that they don't need to deal with programs and solutions. Boehner himself just said yesterday that they don;t need to talk about solutions to problems in an election campaign. Uh, isn't that the best time to do it - I mean, to help persuade undecided voters and give the base something to vote for? Oh, right, the base voters already have something to vote against - President Obama - and they don't care about specifics. Just as long as there's a pledge to America.

Public radio is asking America for pledges of late. Because commercial radio is so awfully predictable and predictably awful, I listen to two public stations where I live, a folk rock station (WFUV-FM in New York) and a jazz station (WBGO-FM in Newark, N.J.). Both stations have been asking for money ad infinitum in their current pledge drives, both of which end September 30; they've been going on interminably, and I don't even remember when they started. But they fact that these drives have been going on for so long only underscores how bad the economy is and how badly these stations need money in light of money no longer coming from different sources. Public broadcasting always loses corporate donations and government assistance in bad times, and it's lucky to get any of it back when times get better. I'm even being made to feel guilty by WFUV announcers if I don't give anything, even though I can't. As a taxpayer, I'd be happy to see some of my tax money to keep public broadcasters on the air and free of corporate sponsorship, which is how countries in the rest of the Western world pay for public radio and television. But this is America, where the free market has the upper hand. I'm just quietly waiting for the current pledge drives to end so I can hear more music.

All of this pledging made me decide to take the pledge and commit myself to a fundraising party a woman in my social network is hosting on Saturday, when the march for jobs takes place in Washington. What made me decide to do so was the recent news from Connecticut, showing that the distinguished Democratic Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal has seen his lead over his drug-pushing, violence-peddling Republican opponent shrink to three points.

That scared the hell out of me.

More Politics As Usual

Some quick observations of what passes for political discourse in America these days. . . .

President Obama has started targeting House Republican leader John Boehner in his campaign speeches for the Democrats, now that it's finally become apparent that he can't just ignore Republicans in Washington the way they're ignored in Chicago. Some have criticized Obama for personalizing the midterm elections by trying to make Boehner that bad guy when you have folks in the House like Mike Pence of Indiana and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota who are beyond bad. But Boehner would be Speaker of the House if the Republicans were to take control, and he'd have more power than Pence or Bachmann, so what's Obama supposed to do - bash the underlings in the House Republican caucus and ignore the naysayer at the top? Obama's new strategy may not reverse Democratic losses, but it could stem them.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, Joe Sestak is learning how many voters are turned off by the liberal views he espouses, as polls show him consistently behind Republican Senate nominee Pat Toomey. Although Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, likes and respects Toomey, he know s that the "fruit loops" (to borrow one of his own phrases) in the Republican party will control the agenda if they take back the Senate, and as reasonable as Toomey is, a Senator Toomey wouldn't be effective in a Republican caucus guided by loonies. Rendell hopes to make this clear in his efforts to help Sestak, and he believes Sestak can win if a) enough voters realize the threat to their economic interests a Republican Senate would bear and b) turnout in the Philadelphia area is up tremendously. Voters in the central and northern parts of the state just aren't interested in Sestak's agenda.

Meanwhile, Ed Schultz is helping Republican David Vitter in his bid to win a second term as a U.S. Senator from Louisiana. How is the progressive Schultz doing this? Well, you see, every time Schultz announces on his show his intention to bring up the subject of Vitter's disgusting sex scandals, his idea is to address it in the Rapid Fire Response segment of his show, where he asks a liberal pundit and a conservative pundit for their opinions on the subjects. Twice he's meant to ask his panel about Vitter; twice he ran out of time before he had the chance because discussion on his other chosen topics for that segment ran too long. As much as I would like to hear right-wing pundits like Heidi Harris or John Feehery defend David Vitter in that segment, it's obvious that Schultz has to devote a longer, more detailed account of Vitter's crimes elsewhere in the show, even if this means no conservative commentary in Vitter's defense. Because sometimes, as Edward R. Murrow once said, there is no other side of the story. And no one can excuse Vitter for his sins. Note to Ed Schultz: Get Charlie Melancon back on your show immediately.

Transport Is a No-Go?

President Obama just came out with a wonderful idea on how to create more jobs and get the economy moving, the very sort of idea Chris Matthews has been calling for on MSNBC - spend more money on transportation infrastructure, creating what Matthews calls "the smell of construction." Obama wants to spend $50 billion on upgrading America's passenger rail network, highways, and airport runways and pay for it by closing tax loopholes. Now who could possibly be against spending money to create more job and improve America's transportation network?

Oh, right. . . .

John Boehner, of course, has slammed the proposal as more government spending that does nothing to stimulate the private sector - except provide contracting opportunities for the privately owned companies that would actually build all this stuff, though you won't hear Boehner admit that. The right-wing New York Post, on its front page today, lampooned Obama as a pothole President as dismissed his latest proposal as another government spending spree.

You know, back when Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991, Republicans were against a lot of items in that law. Many congressional Republicans were opposed to more mass transit spending, and President George Bush did not want to commit a lot of money to Amtrak. They were for more spending on highways. They argued in favor of more highway spending to allow Americans the ability to travel where they wanted and when they wanted by car. Of course, people mostly use they cars to get to places they have to go to - like work. But at least in 1991, Republicans were at least for something, not simply saying no to the Democratic congressional majority of the time. Now they don't even want to spend more money on highways, and they don't want to spend more money on aviation either.

What's going to happen when Interstate 75, which runs through Boehner's district, starts falling apart? What would be wrong with the proposed high-speed rail line that would serve the Cincinnati area, where Boehner is from, adding more jobs to his district? Boehner apparently wants to become Speaker of the House first before he answers those questions.

No Is The Answer

There's a lot of negativity going on in Washington these days. . . .

House Republican leader John Boehner was home in Ohio addressing the City Club of Cleveland (well, he represents a district in the Cincinnati area, but never mind), calling on President Obama to fire his economic advisers, keep the Bush tax cuts in place, and repeal the health care law passed in March. Just as Mitch McConnell intimated that he will tell Obama what to do by demanding that he adopt a center-right agenda if the Republicans win control of the Senate in November, Boehner pretty much said he'll tell Obama what not to do if the Republicans win the House in November. He's already telling Obama that now, in fact. So, no to Obama's economic plans, no to tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, and no to health care reform, even if it doesn't go as far as the Canadian system. Vice President Joe Biden says that he still doesn't know what the Republicans are for. Does Boehner have a positive agenda for a Republican House - or even a set of policy proposals like Newt Gingrich's Contract With America from 1994?

Boehner can't give an honest answer, because the answer would be no.

Meanwhile, Shirley Sherrod said no to a new job at the Agriculture Department involving civil rights-related "outreach" work after Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack forced her to resign from the agency for statements about race taken out of context. She may do some consulting work for the department. I admire her stand on principle - telling the government agency who forced her out to give the precious outreach job offered to her out of guilt to someone else - but I hope she has something to fall back in the middle of a severe recession.

A lot of people are looking for work. But prospective employers keep telling them no.

Democratic Senate and Republican House?

I think America had best get used to the notion of "Speaker Boehner." Despite Justin Coussole's spirited campaign for the noted tanned golf semi-pro's House seat, it's not only likely that the Republicans will take the House of Representatives in November but that John Boehner will be there to assume the Speaker's gavel. The White House is trying to make him the face of the Republican party to stir up the Democratic base, but the idea of "Speaker Boehner" won't set off alarm bells until Boehner actually is Speaker because as of now, too few people have heard of him. Bear in mind that few people had actually heard of Newt Gingrich before he became Speaker of the House in 1995.

A victory by Justin Coussole isn't entirely out of the question, though, as this article by Howie Klein of the Huffington Post suggests.

Meanwhile, the chances of the Democrats maintaining a majority in the Senate have improved as Republicans have continuously nominated a series of wackos and misfits to oppose sitting Democrats or to run for seats left open by retiring Democrats. I believe that the Democrats will have a bare majority of 51 or 52 Senate seats come January, mainly because the voters will realize that GOP crackpots like Sharron Angle in Nevada and Rand Paul in Kentucky aren't ready for prime time.

I did a little research, and it appears that, except when a change of party affiliation in June 2001 gave the Senate to the Democrats during the 107th Congress while the Republicans held a majority in the House, there hasn't been a Democratic Senate and a Republican House since the 47th Congress met between 1881 and 1883, during the Republican presidential administrations of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur. So, if a Democratic Senate and a Republican House is the result of the 112th Congress to convene in January, we'll be seeing such a setup for only the second time in 130 years, and for the first time in that period in a Democratic presidential administration. The dynamics might prove fascinating.

One other historical fact demands notice. In 1854, when the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act led to violence in the Great Plains territories over slavery and the country began to fall apart, President Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, saw his party hold the Senate (not elected by the people until 1914) but lose the House. The new Republican party won the most seats but not a majority, as new parties were springing up to fill the void left by the collapse of the Whigs. So a party coalition opposing the Democrats controlled the House in the subsequent 34th Congress.

Are we headed to similar discord? I hope not.

Woman Of the House

It happened. Nancy Pelosi demonstrated today why she's the most powerful woman in Washington. (Sorry, Hillary.) She hauled the House of Representatives back into session in the middle of their inexplicably month-long summer vacation to pass a $26 billion spending bill that saves teachers' jobs and funds Medicaid payments. House Republican leader John Boehner decried the bill, declaring that it raises taxes and helps only special interests.

Boehner - whose tanning salon bills must really shock George Hamilton - is right on both counts. What he doesn't mention in promoting the former point is that the tax increase is a closed loophole that allowed American businesses not to pay taxes on their foreign operations. As for the latter point, well, teachers and poor people are of special interest . . . to the Democrats who represent them. The bill, which allows money allocated earlier to be spent on law enforcement, is of no special interest to Boehner, who represents people who can afford to send their kids to private school, have good health insurance, and probably live in gated communities with private security officers. There's nothing in it for them.

Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, was on Ed Schultz's show to talk about the bill, and he declared that his union for one, will definitely work hard to elect more Democrats to Congress. This bill isn't going to turn the tide for Democrats and change the dynamic of the midterms, but it will give them a much-needed boost. :-)