Less of this, please (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The looming fight over the ‘fiscal cliff’ promises to be another gigantic sellout of the middle classes and poor. President Obama has talked about a ‘Grand Bargain’ he intends to make with the Republicans in order to stop a set of $1.2 trillion spending cuts and tax hikes that are scheduled to take place on Jan. 1st should Congress not agree on a plan to reduce the deficit. According to most economists, the automatic cuts and tax hikes are very likely to cause a recession, reversing progress made over the past year and a half that has seen economic growth and steady job creation.

As Cenk Uygur writes, Obama has essentially sold out the Democratic base before negotiations have begun:

President Obama has proposed that the Grand Bargain include $4 trillion in savings. He has said over and over again that the ratio would be $3 in spending cuts to $1 in tax increases. This is before his legendarily disastrous negotiating begins. So, let’s do some quick math. According to the president’s own plan that would be $3 trillion in spending cuts, which is significantly higher than the current plan of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts.

Let me add one other fact, if all you do is let the Bush tax cuts expire for people making over $250,000, you would already have $1 trillion in tax increases. And we were told because of this election that was already non-negotiable. That’s what we fought to make sure would happen and the president has guaranteed it. So, what exactly do progressives gain out of this Grand Bargain?

The reality is that this is cost shifting. They are going to move the spending cuts away from defense and on to the middle class and poor by hacking away at Medicare and Medicaid. This is defined as courageous in Washington. What a load of crap. What would be courageous is taking on the rich and the powerful and the large political donors, which is the exact opposite of what’s going to happen.

Uygur hits the nail on the head here – the reality of the ‘Grand Bargain’ is that Republicans get to hold the country to ransom, much like they did with the debt ceiling, and force through savage cuts that will hit the poor and elderly. Obama has yet again started negotiating from the right by outlining cuts to the welfare state and a minor tax hikes for the rich  that would be considered conservative in any other era or country.

Glenn Greenwald (painfully accurately) outlines what the negotiations will most likely look like:

STEP ONE: Liberals will declare that cutting social security and Medicare benefits – including raising the eligibility age or introducing “means-testing” – are absolutely unacceptable, that they will never support any bill that does so no matter what other provisions it contains, that they will wage war on Democrats if they try.

STEP TWO: As the deal gets negotiated and takes shape, progressive pundits in Washington, with Obama officials persuasively whispering in their ear, will begin to argue that the proposed cuts are really not that bad, that they are modest and acceptable, that they are even necessary to save the programs from greater cuts or even dismantlement.

STEP THREE: Many progressives – ones who are not persuaded that these cuts are less than draconian or defensible on the merits – will nonetheless begin to view them with resignation and acquiescence on pragmatic grounds. Obama has no real choice, they will insist, because he must reach a deal with the crazy, evil GOP to save the economy from crippling harm, and the only way he can do so is by agreeing to entitlement cuts. It is a pragmatic necessity, they will insist, and anyone who refuses to support it is being a purist, unreasonably blind to political realities, recklessly willing to blow up Obama’s second term before it even begins.

STEP FOUR: The few liberal holdouts, who continue to vehemently oppose any bill that cuts social security and Medicare, will be isolated and marginalized, excluded from the key meetings where these matters are being negotiated, confined to a few MSNBC appearances where they explain their inconsequential opposition.

STEP FIVE: Once a deal is announced, and everyone from Obama to Harry Reid and the DNC are behind it, any progressives still vocally angry about it and insisting on its defeat will be castigated as ideologues and purists, compared to the Tea Party for their refusal to compromise, and scorned (by compliant progressives) as fringe Far Left malcontents.

STEP SIX: Once the deal is enacted with bipartisan support and Obama signs it in a ceremony, standing in front of his new Treasury Secretary, the supreme corporatist Erskine Bowles, where he touts the virtues of bipartisanship and making “tough choices”, any progressives still complaining will be told that it is time to move on. Any who do not will be constantly reminded that there is an Extremely Important Election coming – the 2014 midterm – where it will be Absolutely Vital that Democrats hold onto the Senate and that they take over the House. Any progressive, still infuriated by cuts to social security and Medicare, who still refuses to get meekly in line behind the Party will be told that they are jeopardizing the Party’s chances for winning that Vital Election and – as a result of their opposition – are helping Mitch McConnell take over control of the Senate and John Boehner retain control of the House.

There’s always hope that Obama will stand his ground, and given his recent hammering of Mitt Romney, he has some political capital to play with. Paul Krugman has written a plea to the President to take a firm stance with the Republicans, and go over the so called fiscal cliff if necessary in order to preserve the President’s standing with his base and save the economy from more unnecessary damage:

President Obama has to make a decision, almost immediately, about how to deal with continuing Republican obstruction. How far should he go in accommodating the G.O.P.’s demands?

My answer is, not far at all. Mr. Obama should hang tough, declaring himself willing, if necessary, to hold his ground even at the cost of letting his opponents inflict damage on a still-shaky economy. And this is definitely no time to negotiate a “grand bargain” on the budget that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory……

This time, nothing very bad will happen to the economy if agreement isn’t reached until a few weeks or even a few months into 2013. So there’s time to bargain.

More important, however, is the point that a stalemate would hurt Republican backers, corporate donors in particular, every bit as much as it hurt the rest of the country. As the risk of severe economic damage grew, Republicans would face intense pressure to cut a deal after all.

Meanwhile, the president is in a far stronger position than in previous confrontations. I don’t place much stock in talk of “mandates,” but Mr. Obama did win re-election with a populist campaign, so he can plausibly claim that Republicans are defying the will of the American people.

I’m not holding out a huge amount of hope for this – while I think Obama has been incredibly crafty at handling the Republicans in certain regards, when it comes to negotiating on the economy, he has consistently fallen short and allowed big business and the Republicans to define the terms of the debate. The tax system in America is already dangerously skewed to reward the rich and punish the poor, making debt reduction and economic growth almost impossible. An exacerbation of the status quo could be horrific. Tax cuts for the rich do not create economic growth or new jobs, and slashing spending on medicare/medicaid and social security does nothing other than make the lives of millions of Americans unbearably difficult. Austerity is a recipe for disaster during a recession (see much of Europe as an example of this), and Obama may well be on the verge of undoing the progress he made during his first term.

The Left has to intelligently hold the President to account here and tell him that he must not yield to Republican demands. There’s no need to self sabotage (as Glenn Greenwald/Jane Hamsher etc are likely to do), but Obama should be forcefully reminded about who put him back into office, and what he needs to do to retain their loyalty.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From ABC News:

Raising tax rates is “unacceptable” to House Speaker John Boehner as he prepares to open negotiations on the looming “fiscal cliff” with the president and congressional Democrats, he told “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer today in an exclusive interview.

“Raising tax rates is unacceptable,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said in his first broadcast interview since the election Tuesday.

“Frankly, it couldn’t even pass the House. I’m not sure it could pass the Senate.”

That stance could set up a real showdown with the White House given that the president has said he would veto any deal that does not allow tax cuts for the rich to expire. But the speaker said that Republicans would put new tax revenue on the table as leaders work toward a deal.

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Associated Press/Carolyn Kaster

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM:

President Obama ran on raising taxes and won. House Republicans ran on not raising taxes, and got to keep their majority. So now the GOP is offering a familiar sounding compromise: let’s not raise taxes.

More specifically, Obama’s re-election, and the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts, have made House Republicans’ prime imperative to preserve the current tax rates on high earners, which Obama campaigned and won on returning to Clinton era levels.

It’s a big ask, given the results of the election, and Obama’s long-standing pledge to veto legislation that extends all of the Bush tax cuts, even temporarily. Thus, their hopes rest on a vague suggestion that they’ll concede higher revenues in a future tax reform agreement with Obama, so long as he drops his demands for higher tax rates and agrees to cut entitlement spending.

This sounds familiar because it’s broadly speaking the same deficit cutting deal Republicans spent most of this past Congress pursuing — one that raises little, if any revenue, let alone revenue from high earners. And early signs indicate that Democrats won’t bite.

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Say what you want about the President, the mans temperament is nothing short of astonishing. The current crisis in Libya has again demonstrated the difference between Obama and Romney.  One is a world class leader with a seriously cool head and the other a third rate buffoon playing at leader while wrecking everything around him. Romney’s behavior has been nothing short of disgusting, while the President has refused to jump the gun and has been reasonable and measured in his response to the mayhem.

Notes Andrew Sullivan:

I remain of the view – it has strengthened over these past four years – that while Barack Obama is obviously fallible, has made mistakes (blowing off Bowles-Simpson too soon), gaffes (“you didn’t build that”), and one critical miscalculation in the debt ceiling end-game (asking for more revenue just as Boehner was being cut off at the knees by Ryan and Cantor), he is also one of the coolest temperaments to have sat in that chair. What people don’t note enough is both the self-discipline (that we know doesn’t come easily) and the zen-like calm he exudes. Occasionally I ask some sources close to him how he reacted to some piece of news or the other. They almost all say that his range of emotion is about a tenth of the average human being – and that he is as intent on being a good father and husband as being a good president. He is cool not in the pop culture sense, but in the “old soul” sense. This is why so many wavering Americans still like him. In an ocean of drama, he is an oasis of public calm.

Without getting into the policy aspect of the Presidential race, you have to give it to Obama. He knows how to keep his head in a crisis.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From the Yahoo! News:

Returning to Washington for a brief session between their summer recess and fall campaign season, the House of Representatives on Thursday passed a spending bill funding the government into the next year.

The funding extension, known as a Continuing Resolution (CR), keeps to the $1.047 trillion spending agreement reached between the parties and avoids a government shutdown until March 27, 2013, nearly five months after the November election. The federal government has continually relied on short-term funding extensions since 2009, the last time the Democrat-controlled Senate passed a traditional budget plan that set spending levels.

“This bill is very restricted in its scope, does not contain extensive or controversial policy riders or funding levels that dramatically differ from current levels, and protects critical funding for our national defense,” said House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, Republican of Kentucky. “The legislation reflects the bipartisan agreement made by the House and Senate leadership and the White House to prevent a government shutdown, maintain the programs and services critical to the American people, and provide certainty and stability to ensure our continued economic recovery.” [...]

On hand Thursday was Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who took a brief hiatus from the campaign trail to vote in favor of the spending continuation.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab (via The AP):

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that he’s not confident Congress can reach a budget deal and avoid a downgrading of the U.S. debt rating.

Moody’s Investors Service said Tuesday that it would likely cut its “Aaa” rating on U.S. government debt, probably by one notch, if budget negotiations fail.

Boehner was asked at a Capitol Hill news conference how confident he was that negotiations would prevent the government from hitting the so-called fiscal cliff — an economy rattling set of across-the-board spending cuts and higher taxes caused by the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts that are set to hit in January.

“I’m not confident at all,” Boehner said.

The Ohio Republican reminded reporters that the House has passed legislation to both avoid the automatic, across-the-board cuts next year and to renew the Bush era tax cuts for one year as well. Republicans warned of the impact of the impending cuts on the military and implored Senate Democrats to act to avoid them.

The Senate, however, has deadlocked over taxes and failed to address the across-the-board cuts, known as a sequester in Washington parlance.

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By Bob Cesca: During the Clinton administration, and immediately following the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the impeachment process began.

Not officially, and it wasn’t until midway through Clinton’s second term when the Republicans finally voted to impeach. In that four year span of time, the zealots who refused to allow Clinton to get away with a full four-to-eight years of his administration went from hints of fringy conspiracy theories to a full blown impeachment process including an infamous special prosecutor investigation to the vote to impeach in the House and, ultimately, to the nail-biting (but failed) vote to remove the president from office in the Senate.

All of that was in the shadows of a massive economic boom and rapidly shrinking deficit. When the ink was still warm on the House roll call to impeach, the deficit turned into a surplus and the the economy reached a high water mark unlikely to be matched again anytime soon. Still, they pursued Clinton with the unwavering tenacity of the T-1000 from Terminator 2.

Fast forward in time. In the last 24 hours, there have been hints and rumblings from the congressional Republicans that they’re setting the table for a potential second term stab at impeachment again.

On Fox News the other day, Senate Minority Leader and Albino Sleestak Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in the Senate, accused the president of a high crime — literally a scandalous crime similar to Watergate, without the bungled break-in.

“What they’re trying to do is intimidate donors to outside groups that are critical of the administration, McConnell said. “The campaign has rifled through donors’ divorce records. They’ve got the IRS, the SEC and other agencies going after contributors trying to frighten people and intimidate them out of exercising their rights to participate in the American political discourse.”

That’s a serious accusation from someone who’s been doing some nosing around (sleestak don’t have noses, but you know what I mean). The details are very specific and the consequences of such an allegation would, with Watergate as a precursor, naturally reach into the Oval Office. It goes without saying that McConnell floated a trial balloon to the radical FNC audience of anti-Obama nutbags. It’s not surprising, really, coming from the leader who famously said his primary goal was making President Obama a one-term president and, we can assume, if a second term happens, he might have a back-up plan for removal.

That’s not the worst part. McConnell first revealed these accusations five days ago… to Breitbart.com, which published in an exclusive chat with McConnell:

“This is a dangerous, radical administration,” said McConnell.

“I’m going to lay out a long litany of abuses pursued by the Obama Administration and its allies against its political opponents,” McConnell said. “It’s reminiscent of the Nixon administration. It’s much more pervasive than Clinton. They have their enemies list. They’re checking it twice. They’re going to go after those that have been naughty and not nice.”

The stupid Santa Claus reference notwithstanding, that’s a really big deal. McConnell went on to detail his accusations during a speech to the American Enterprise Institute.

Meanwhile, John Boehner, the most powerful Republican in all of Congress, accused the president of a massive cover-up in the “Fast and Furious” ATF operation. Here’s an official statement from Boehner’s office:

Until now, everyone believed that the decisions regarding ‘Fast and Furious’ were confined to the Department of Justice. The White House decision to invoke executive privilege implies that White House officials were either involved in the ‘Fast and Furious’ operation or the cover-up that followed. The Administration has always insisted that wasn’t the case. Were they lying, or are they now bending the law to hide the truth?

Yet another very serious warning that the president is in the figurative line of fire.

Elsewhere, Mitt Romney appears to be making the nothingburger Solyndra “scandal” a central issue in the campaign.

All of this, I believe, will lead to another impeachment proceeding.

And why not? Even though it turned into an embarrassment for them the last time they tried it (most Americans were disgusted with the process and punished the GOP in the 1998 midterms), precedent is oddly irrelevant for the “elephant” party. After all, they’ve been leaning on the Red Scare button for the last four years in spite of Joe McCarthy’s legendary flame-out and subsequent legacy as one of the most evil and hated politicians in American history. The Republicans love a good encore, even if the audience hurls tomatoes at their heads. They will do anything to punish a perceived enemy.

It won’t matter that the president has tried to compromise with them and include members of their party in his administration. They don’t care. All they need is to hold their House majority and win a few more Senate seats and, if the president is re-elected, these will be the scandals they will use to fuel their effort to embarrassment, punish and remove Barack Obama from office.

Bill Clinton was, with all of his faults, a very centrist southern white man. Now imagine what they’re going to try to do to an African American president in sketchy economic times.

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Romney: No We Mustn't

By Ben Cohen: I’d bet a significant amount of my own money that Mitt Romney will not be victorious in the 2012 Presidential election. But with a fragile economy and a breaking middle class, the possibility that Romney could pull an upset is not out of the question. And it is worth worrying about because the consequences of a Romney Presidency are severe.

There are many factors working against Romney this year, the primary one being himself. Romney is a deeply unattractive nominee because he has no distinct personality, cannot connect with voters and is painfully out of touch with reality. On top of that, his party has shown the maturity of a group of 6 year olds deprived of cake at a birthday party – hardly inspiring when gearing up for a national election. The GOP hasn’t exactly warmed to him in the past, and the combination of apathy and disorganization could be fatal. Romney cannot even inspire his own party to support him let alone the swing voters and moderates he will need to attract in the general.

This all looks good for Obama.

However, this election may not come down to who the country likes best or which party is better organized. American voters are a fickle lot, and they’ll jump ship if the economy isn’t providing them with jobs or opportunity. The fact that Republicans are almost entirely responsible for the snail paced economic recovery doesn’t mean much – Americans want jobs and security, and they want them now. Although the US economy has been adding jobs at a better rate in recent months, it is still part of a fragile world economy that could break at any point. A recent report by the IMF highlighted the extreme danger of a disorderly default and exit by Eurozone member, warning it could spark a gigantic market panic and create a  bigger crisis than in 2008. Events like this are out of Obama’s hands, and it could ruin his Presidency if he doesn’t make sure he pummels Romney from every angle over the coming months.

A Romney President is dangerous for two key reasons. The first is his economic policy, and the second, his foreign policy.

On the economy, Romney has pledged to cut taxes and slash welfare at every given opportunity (despite his more mixed record as governor of Massachusetts). We haven’t seen detailed proposals about what he would do in office, but given his statements thus far, its a good bet it wouldn’t involve a great deal of wealth distribution or government funded job creation programs. Romney represents the interest of big business, and he would do their bidding at the expense of the country once in power. Any further cuts to education, welfare or medicare/medicaid would cause untold damage to the already suffering population. An astonishing amount of Americans live with food insecurity, chronic poverty and lack of health care, and they rely on government programs for what little they do have. Much of the US already looks like a third world country, and more austerity measures from Washington would exacerbate the alarming trend.

On foreign policy, Romney is possibly more dangerous in terms of the long term damage he could do. Andrew Sullivan writes on the possibility of a Romney victory in November:

My fear is that this is a man who backed torture, who wanted to “double Gitmo”, whose belief in America’s divine destiny has Mormonism to back it up, who was best buds with Netanyahu, who believes that Russia is our “number one foe”, who wants a big increase in defense spending, and who promises a war on Iran. That’s what we have on the table versus Mataconis’ feeling that Romney would turn to pragmatism in office, as the weight of the office and the permanent interests of the US sink in.

Talking about what you would do as President and actually being President are of course two different things – Romney probably doesn’t actually believe half the things he says, but the people he would  surround himself with do, and they would make sure he followed a far more brazen foreign policy than the current one. Presidents have far more latitude when it comes to foreign policy, and Romney would have a good shot on following through with his campaign promises. Another war with a Middle Eastern country,  more support for Israel, and more inflammatory rhetoric against other super powers would regress Americas standing in the world back to the Bush years and do untold damage to trade and economic cooperation.

A Romney Presidency would be a disaster on all fronts, and the mere threat of it should make every intelligent citizen do their best to ensure he get nowhere near the White House in November.

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Ronald Reagan: By Current GOP Standard, a Socialist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

President Barack Obama said Tuesday Republicans want to force a “radical vision” on the nation, accusing the opposition party of moving so far to the right that even one of its beloved figures, Ronald Reagan, could not win a GOP presidential primary.

In a blistering election-year critique, Obama sought to present himself to voters as the protector of the middle class and the leader of a Democratic Party that is willing to compromise in Washington. He singled out the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, for criticism and more broadly said Republicans had shifted from any reasonable debate on health care, debt reduction and the environment.

Republicans “will brook no compromise,” Obama told news executives at the annual meeting of The Associated Press.

He cited a Republican presidential debate late last year when the entire field rejected the prospect of $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases as a means to lower the debt.

“Think about that. Ronald Reagan, who as I recall was not accused of being a tax-and-spend socialist, understood repeatedly that when the deficit started to get out of control that for him to make a deal he would have to propose both spending cuts and tax increases,” Obama said. “He did it multiple times. He could not get through a Republican primary today.”

Republicans called Obama’s remarks a partisan attempt to cover up broken pledges to cut the federal deficit in half, curb spending and make tough choices to reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

“The president has resorted to distortions and partisan potshots and recommitted himself to policies that have made our country’s debt crisis worse,” said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, said that after the past three years, “the last thing President Obama is qualified to lecture on is responsible federal spending.”

Making his case for re-election, Obama said the nation must restore a sense of security for hard-working Americans and stand for a government willing to help those in hard times. The Democratic president blasted Republicans by name and said the choice between the parties is “unambiguously clear.”

Read more at the AP…

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After his humiliating failure last night, Speaker Boehner has re-written the GOP’s doomed to fail bill on the debt ceiling. Just hours after its introduction, the bill will be voted on tonight (supposedly, they said the same thing yesterday). So whatever happened to Boehner’s promise that all major bills would be posted online for 72 hours?

This isn’t the first time this has happened with the Keystone Kongress.

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