Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Sometimes (like Krugman) you have to re-arrange the order.

Over before it began

by digby

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

So here’s what’s happened so far. The President put forth a jobs bill, which didn’t make it through the congress, as expected. This jobs bill was highly touted as containing “ideas” that Republicans had proposed in the past and therefore, it should have “something for everyone.” Needless to say, the GOP wasn’t interested in any one from column A and one from column B negotiating. After the defeat of the big jobs package, the Democrats announced they were going to propose popular pieces of the bill and force the Republicans to prove once and for all that they don’t care about the plight of the average American as they join together in Scrooglike conformity.

Unfortunately, the Republicans decided not to play (surprise!) and are instead proposing their own combinations of the most toxic conservative elements of the President’s bill and the President is apparently signing on, thus signing into law a terrible GOP policy while simultaneously giving them a “bipartisan” win.

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What, at this point, is the rationale of the Democratic Party? We’ll kill terrorists twice as hard and only slash the safety net half as much? We’ll pass the Republican agenda so they don’t have to?

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I’m not sure what the President hopes to gain by proposing and then signing deeply unpopular GOP legislation, but that appears to be the plan.

Do you get it now digby?

(References supplied)

Update:

House Passes the "Even Obama Supported" Non-Jobs Jobs Act

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Thursday October 27, 2011 2:18 pm

The House bill eliminating the 3% withholding rule, making it easier for government contractors to cheat on their taxes, a small part of the American Jobs Act and supported by the President, passed today, on a near-unanimous vote of 405-16. The bill was paid for through a separate measure, which changes the calculation of modified adjusted gross income by including Social Security benefits in the calculation, for the purposes of determining eligibility for programs like Medicaid and SCHIP. This fix of a “glitch” that would allow some middle-income early retirees to get nearly free Medicaid coverage (we can’t have that!), passed by a smaller amount, on a vote of 262 to 157. 27 Democrats joined 235 Republicans in supporting the bill.

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How facilitating tax cheating counts as a jobs measure is beyond me, but whatever the case, the bill and its offset go to the Senate. A 3% withholding bill got 57 votes in the Senate last week, with a different offset that just reduces expenditures across the board. That was before the Administration came out in favor of the bills, however. So surely, something incorporating 3% withholding is likely to pass Congress.

The CBO estimates that federal revenues would be reduced $11 billion over 10 years by this measure. That’s a little more than 2% of the cost of the American Jobs Act. And it has almost nothing to do with jobs. But it’s destined to become law.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

WikiLeaks cables and the Iraq War

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Sunday, Oct 23, 2011 7:44 AM

That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, “provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.” The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike. Although this incident had been previously documented (.pdf) by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the high-profile release of the cable by WikiLeaks generated substantial attention (and disgust) in Iraq, which made it politically unpalatable for the Iraqi government to grant the legal immunity the Obama adminstration was seeking. Indeed, it was widely reported at the time the cable was released that it made it much more difficult for Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain beyond the deadline under any conditions.

In other words, whoever leaked that cable cast light on a heinous American war crime and, by doing so, likely played some significant role in thwarting an agreement between the Obama and Maliki governments to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and thus helped end this stage of the Iraq war (h/t Trevor Timm). Moreover, whoever leaked these cables – as even virulent WikiLeaks critic Bill Keller repeatedly acknowledged – likely played some significant in helping spark the Arab Spring protests by documenting just how deeply corrupt those U.S.-supported kleptocrats were. And in general, whoever leaked those cables has done more to publicize the corrupt, illegal and deceitful acts of the world’s most powerful factions – and to educate the world about how they behave – than all “watchdog” media outlets combined (indeed, the amount of news reports on a wide array of topics featuring WikiLeaks cables as the primary source is staggering). In sum, whoever leaked those cables is responsible for one of the most consequential, beneficial and noble acts of this generation.

WikiLeaks suspends publishing to fight financial blockade

Julian Assange says banking bans have destroyed 95% of whistleblowing site’s revenues

Esther Addley and Jason Deans, The Guardian

Monday 24 October 2011 08.42 EDT

Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, has announced that the whistleblowing website is suspending publishing operations in order to focus on fighting a financial blockade and raise new funds.

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The website, behind the publication of hundreds of thousands of controversial US embassy cables in late 2010 in partnership with newspapers including the Guardian and New York Times, revealed that it was running on cash reserves after “an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade” by the Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Western Union.

WikiLeaks said in a statement: “The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency.

“The US government itself found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a US financial blockade. But the blockade of WikiLeaks by politicised US finance companies continues regardless.”

Assange said donations to WikiLeaks were running at €100,000 a month in 2010, but had dropped to a monthly figure of €6,000 to €7,000 this year.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This should explain a lot for you if you’re confused.

They’re Back: Obamabots Fan Out in Defense of their Hero

By Taylor Marsh

18 October 2011

What Glenn is describing in the top quote (link) is a virulent strain of what I call fan politics, which is most visibly seen today by Obamabots, as they’ve been called around here since 2007. Greenwald has been attacked on this site (Taylor Marsh) by them, as has Mr. Krugman. Fan politics is about people, like the Obamabots, who support a politician regardless of the policies he or she delivers upon, thinking anyone finding fault in their candidate of choice is committing some larger sin for not following in line. Fan politics is particularly destructive because it demands party loyalty take the place of political dialogue, party trumping principle.

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Die hard party loyalists don’t seem to get there is a undulating political upheaval slowly taking place, which has been happening on the right for several years, with the left joining in, the foundation of their discontent the continued drag right of the Democratic Party, which began under William Jefferson Clinton. What saved Clinton from the wrath being felt today, besides the fact that new media hadn’t matured, was the courage he had to launch the largest tax increase in decades, though Lawrence O’Donnell claims it was the biggest ever, which, along with the tech boom, led to peacetime prosperity for everyone.

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(T)he background of the left’s discontent is the belief that if Obama is reelected he will tinker with the New Deal, because he won’t have anything to lose, with his legacy of accomplishments his only priority. But as we’re seeing with health care, as the Administration scuttles Teddy Kennedy’s CLASS, not even Obama’s accomplishments are safe, because of the ramshackle way ACA was designed. Obama also seems to believe, joining conservative Democrats and Republics, that entitlement “reform” should be a priority, leaving most to rightly think that whether it’s a Democrat or Republican in the White House in 2012, the people’s safety net will be weakened.

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What is at the root of Obamabot invective, however, is the palpable fear and realization that Pres. Obama could actually lose in 2012. This is a stunner for them, especially considering where Barack Obama started his presidency.

But now the President’s fans have their own egos attached to him and the thought of Obama losing is scaring the crap out of them. Their goal to get Obama reelected now tied to not being proved wrong about him, but also to protect gloating rights, never mind that the current choices from either party leave a lot to be desired. The sad truth is there isn’t very much difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney that will be felt by people. For Obamabots, it’s not just about Pres. Obama winning reelection in 2012. It’s not about their belief that Barack Obama will champion greater policies in a second term. There is no evidence he will. Obama’s reelection is now also about them. It’s personal, not political or policy driven.

Fan politics for the sake of the politician being supported is always toxic. It also usually disappoints. Just ask the bookend to the Obamabots, die hard fans of Sarah Palin.

Emphasis and some references provided.

This week’s episodes originally aired November 8, 2003.