Tea Party

AV Club reviews the pilot from "Turn"

Academia, the corporate media and the corruption of the Republican party, for the most part, are the problem.

Shutdown takeaway: the US wants a fair society, not 'defund Obamacare' crazy by MarkWeisbrot

Ten Takeaways From The Great G.O.P. Cave-In by John Cassidy

GOP wins with Ryan discretionary budget austerity, but no changes to entitlements, and the deficit is no longer an issue

But they'll probably pay electorally.

For the GOP, when Democrats are in power, the deficit is an issue. When they are it isn't but they push for tax cuts and deregulation to spur "economic growth."

Boehner Urges G.O.P. Unity in ‘Epic Battle’ by Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker

Democrats say they simply cannot trust the speaker to deliver. Mr. Reid said in an interview in his office on Friday that Mr. Boehner came to him at the end of July with a proposition: If Senate Democratic leaders could accept a stopgap spending measure in the fall at levels that reflected across-the-board spending cuts, the speaker would refrain from adding extraneous measures that could precipitate a clash.

Mr. Reid was leery, since that level — $988 billion in discretionary spending for the 2014 fiscal year — would be $70 billion less than the Senate-passed budget. “I didn’t like it. I’ve got a couple of tough women to deal with,” he said, referring to Senators Patty Murray of Washington, the chairwoman of the Budget Committee, and Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee.

On Sept. 12, in a meeting of the top four Congressional leaders, Mr. Boehner said he was running into problems with a conservative groundswell demanding that a gutting of the health law accompany any spending measure. Mr. Reid and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, suggested a procedural step that would allow the House to vote on a stopgap spending bill with a side provision removing funds from the health care law that the Senate could strip out before sending the spending measure to the president.

Again, the speaker agreed. And again, he could not carry through, Mr. Reid said. “If I told him I would do something, I would do that,” the Senate leader said.

At a White House meeting with the president this week, Mr. Boehner twice brought up quiet talks between Ms. Murray and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman, as a way to end the impasse with a broad budget deal. The third time, Mr. Reid laughed out loud.

Wall Street paymasters won't allow default

Frank Rich on the National Circus: GOP Can’t Impeach Obama, Closes Government Instead

The federal government shut down yesterday after House Republicans refused to pass any budget that didn't defund Obamacare. The president's signature domestic initiative passed by the skin of its teeth in 2010 and survived both a Supreme Court challenge and a national election in 2012. Are you surprised the GOP is staking so much on a fight it has already lost three times?
Not at all. Let’s be clear what this is about: the refusal of a defeated political party to accept the legitimacy of the democratic process when it didn’t get its way. The focus on Obamacare as a means to delegitimize a twice-elected president is just the latest pretext after previous pretexts failed, from the president’s supposedly fake birth certificate to the “Fast and Furious” scandal to Benghazi and all the other would-be impeachable offenses investigated by the House’s Inspector Clouseau, Representative Darrell Issa of California. Think of the Obamacare-driven shutdown as parallel to the Monica Lewinsky–driven impeachment of Bill Clinton: a handy — though ultimately backfiring — vehicle for an attempted right-wing coup against a Democratic president. If the GOP’s real aim was to get government out of Americans’ medical care, it would be resuming its campaign to “reform” (e.g., gradually defund) Medicare, for starters. But you don’t hear anything about that anymore now that the party realizes that its base loves Medicare — so much so that tea-partiers carried signs saying “Keep Government Out of My Medicare!” in ignorance of the fact that it is a program of the government they loathe. So Obamacare is the chosen weapon instead. Unfortunately for the Republicans, it is going to detonate in their own caucus. 

...

So, what will change the equation? Paul Ryan got it half-right when he said yesterday that the battle on tap two weeks from now, over the debt limit, will be “the forcing mechanism to bring the two parties together.” But the parties won’t come together then — the Republicans will have to retreat. The moment the radicals seriously threaten to push America into default and toss our economy and the world’s into an uncharted cataclysm, Wall Street, which still writes far more checks for the GOP than the outside right-wing groups supporting the shutdown, will pull the plug on the revolution.

positive outlook

No bubble yet in the economy. Private sector sort of chugging along with banks still tight on credit to home buyers. Germany doing well with 5 percent unemployment. They did worksharing. (If the U.S. had rational fiscal policy, we'd be at more like 6 percent. Toss in worksharing and we're at 5 percent.) The Fed hopefully will be headed by Yellen and they will either maintain or improve their management. Hopefully Japan's growth overcomes the sales tax and Abenomics proves so successful that even the skeptics will have to admit it worked - that or they'll twist the explanation of the mechanisms of success to fit their views.

The deficit is no longer a problem in the U.S. Any deficit cutting is merely political (actually it has been with the sequester.) Affordable Care Act takes effect. It's working according to Krugman:

Yes, there may be some negative news stories about the glitches. But Obamacare is not up for a revote. As Jonathan Bernstein says, the only thing that matters is whether it works. And today’s heavy volume is yet another sign — along with abating health costs and below-expected premiums — that it will.

From David Warsh via Thoma:

The responsibility to take care of oneself will have been joined, however loosely, to the long-established right to emergency medical care.

Something like 25 million citizens, more than half of those who are currently uninsured, will enter into a relationship with a medical practice within the next few years. They’ll join more than 250 million Americans who are currently insured in the biggest undertaking to improve public health since the days of city sanitation and the war on communicable disease more than a century ago.

In many states, collective well-being will begin to improve almost immediately (the initial enrollment period extends through the end of March). In other states, especially those in the Southeast, where Republican governors have dug in against implementation of the law, a more complicated political game will play on. Everywhere, changes within the enormous health care sector, already underway, will gather momentum.

No wonder the fuss is so great.

At first glance, the statute bears a striking resemblance to mandatory vehicle insurance in the United States. Massachusetts led the way in broadening that market, too, followed closely by Connecticut. In 1925, the Commonwealth required automobile owners to get liability insurance in order to register their automobiles. New York followed suit, in 1956, and North Carolina, in 1957; other states quickly fell in line. Today only Virginia requires no insurance; residents of the state must at least post a $500 bond instead, and an overwhelming majority purchase insurance.

It will become the norm like Medicare and Social Security and it will be improved. The American healthcare system will move toward the international norm for advanced countries with lower costs and a healthier population with more security. Health care costs are driving government debt to the extent that the debt is a problem. With the cost curve bent, health care spending won't crowd out other priorities.

Obama signed Obamacare into law in 2010 and was re-elected in 2012. Scott Brown replaced Kennedy in 2010 as a Massachusettes Senator. Then Elizabeth Warren replaced Brown. Liberal De Blasio looks likely to be the next Mayor of NYC after Giulanni and Bloomberg. Warsh:

On Tuesday the Affordable Care Act goes into effect. It was passed by the Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. The White House holds all the cards. The Defunders, the operating arm of the Tea Party in Congress, are certain to lose if the president remains firm. He should simply state: you don’t negotiate with terrorists.

As if to underscore the point, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), a veteran of the government shutdowns of 1995-96, told Politico last week that if If the Republicans succeed in shutting down the government Tuesday, “they’ll fold like hotcakes” after a week or two, when constituents begin to complain about the lack of service. “You do not take a hostage you are not going to for sure shoot. And we will not for sure shoot this hostage.”

And in the longer term? My guess is that Tea Party dissidents will lose ground in the midterm elections next year; that the GOP will split in the 2016 campaign and that a Democrat will be elected president; that in 2018 the Tea Party will further fade. And by 2020, the Republican governors who are successful in implementing the Affordable Health Care Act will be running for president, strongly, on the strength of their records.

After a week or two Boehner will fold. The consituents will complain. Led by Peter King, moderates revolted and Boehner assured them he'd work it out. With the deficits, debt and Obamacare no longer on the radar and with the economy improving, the Tea Party will fade.

a bad negotiator you say?

White House Believes G.O.P. Will Bend as Cuts Take Hold

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s team concedes that the almost certain arrival of across-the-board budget cuts on Friday will not immediately produce the politically dramatic layoffs and airport delays that the administration has been warning about for days. 

But White House strategists say they believe that a constant drip-drip-drip of bad news will slowly emerge in Congressional districts across the country in the weeks ahead, generating negative headlines and — they hope — putting Republicans on the defensive for their refusal to raise taxes. 

Yet by accepting the inevitability of an extended Washington stalemate, the president is risking the possibility that Americans will eventually blame him — not members of Congress — for job losses, smaller paychecks, longer lines at airports, a reduction in government services and a less well-equipped military. 

He could also ultimately emerge as a kind of president-who-cried-wolf if Americans just shrug at the slow-rolling budget cuts and think the crisis atmosphere that Mr. Obama created was more hype than reality. On Tuesday, the president began admitting that the impact of the cuts “won’t be felt overnight.” 

Even so, he has aggressively used the White House political machinery to ratchet up public anxiety about the budget cuts, called sequestration. The goal, officials said, is to prepare Americans for layoffs, shrinking benefits and reduced services — and to ensure that Republicans get blamed. 

“It will be like a rolling ball,” Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said this week, describing the impact of the budget cuts on her sprawling agency. “It will keep growing.” 

White House officials said on Wednesday that Mr. Obama had invited the Congressional leadership to a meeting on Friday, after the cuts have gone into effect — a stark indication that the administration does not expect any progress before then. 

The wait-it-out political strategy in the White House is different from the one Mr. Obama pursued in previous tax and spending standoffs with Republican lawmakers. In those clashes, the president urgently sought to reach last-minute deals with Republicans to avoid the dire fiscal and economic consequences of an impasse. 

Republicans are trying to make the case to the American public that the president and his staff are trying to frighten people by overstating how difficult it will be for government agencies to trim their spending. 

In an interview Tuesday evening, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, said the White House was trying to “play games with the American people, scare the American people,” adding, “This is not leadership.” 

Officially, White House officials say the president remains hopeful that something might happen in the next 48 hours to delay the automatic cuts, which he and the Republicans agreed to in the summer of 2011 as a way to prod agreement on how to cut the nation’s soaring deficit. 

In reality, there appear to be no attempts at last-minute negotiations. The president’s top aides said they expected Mr. Obama to have discussions with lawmakers this week, but they have repeatedly said that they do not have any planned meetings or phone calls to announce before Friday. 

“The president has been engaged and will continue to be engaged with Congressional leaders of both parties on the issue of the sequester,” Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday. 

White House officials do not expect Mr. Boehner or Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, to suddenly agree to tax increases in the next two days. And the president has no intention of backing away from his demands for what he calls “balanced” deficit cutting that includes tax increases and spending cuts. 

As a result, the next several weeks could look very much like the present, with Mr. Obama flying to communities around the country to highlight the impact of the budget cuts. 

House Republicans, meanwhile, remain confident that their members will not give in to the president’s demands for tax increases no matter what happens after the cuts take effect. 

Strategists for Mr. Boehner believe that Republicans have been successful in branding the automatic cuts as Mr. Obama’s idea. For weeks, the speaker and others have pointed to news reports from 2011 suggesting that sequestration was initially proposed by the president’s top aides. 

Top Republicans say that their members previously made concessions to Mr. Obama only when inaction would have automatically led to a payroll tax increase or an income tax increase on all Americans. This time, they say, their inaction will lead to spending cuts, something they say Americans support. 

Mr. McConnell said in a statement on Wednesday that the meeting with the president on Friday was a chance to affirm the Republican commitment to spending cuts. 

“With a $16.6 trillion national debt, and a promise to the American people to address it, one thing is perfectly clear: we will cut Washington spending,” Mr. McConnell said. “We can either secure those reductions more intelligently, or we can do it the president’s way with across-the board cuts. But one thing Americans simply will not accept is another tax increase to replace spending reductions we already agreed to.”

Republicans didn't care about the payroll tax increase, which happened anyway. Americans don't support spending cuts as the Republicans will find out. The Teabaggers miscalculated again just as they assumed the debt ceiling clown show was feasible until their leadership explained it to them.

The Politics of Austerity by Thomas Edsall

The economic collapse of 2008 transformed American politics. In place of shared abundance, battles at every level of government now focus on picking the losers who will bear the costs of deficit reduction and austerity. ...

The new embattled partisan environment allows conservatives to pit taxpayers against tax consumers, those dependent on safety-net programs against those who see such programs as eating away at their personal income and assets.

In a nuanced study, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” the sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol and her colleagues at Harvard found that opposition to government spending was concentrated on resentment of federal government “handouts.” Tea Party activists, they wrote, “define themselves as workers, in opposition to categories of nonworkers they perceive as undeserving of government assistance.”

In a March 15 declaration calling for defunding of most social programs, the New Boston Tea Party was blunt: “The locusts are eating, or should we say devouring, the productive output of the hard working taxpayer.”

The conservative agenda, in a climate of scarcity, racializes policy making, calling for deep cuts in programs for the poor. The beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately black and Hispanic. ...

Less obviously, but just as racially charged, is the assault on public employees. “We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” declared Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin.

For black Americans, government employment is a crucial means of upward mobility. The federal work force is 18.6 percent African-American, compared with 10.9 percent in the private sector. The percentages of African-Americans are highest in just those agencies that are most actively targeted for cuts by Republicans...

(via Mark Thoma)

Back in 1999, Jamie Kennedy confronts Christine O'Donnell, the Republican's current "Tea Party" candidate for the Delaware Senate seat. O'Donnell reminds me of this post I did on Michelle Bachmann which I reproduce below. O'Donnell does seem nicer than Palin or Bachmann.

Her eyes tell me that in a former life she organized doomed children’s crusades and burned heretics by the gross.

And yet this zealous flame is imprisoned in the body of a suburban, would-be-folksy Minnesotan. It’s that contrast, I think, that makes her so hypnotic.

Glenzilla is just wrong in this post. 

As Atrios responded -- and I couldn't agree more -- Tea Party extremism isn't an aberration from what the GOP has been; it's perfectly representative of it, just perhaps expressed in a less obfuscated and more honest form.

No, if the Tea Party had been in charge they wouldn't have passed TARP and we'd currently have 30 percent unemployment and all that entails. How can Greenwald and Atrios be so flip and unserious? In my opinion it's because they have become thoroughly embittered for various reasons and they enjoy being hyperbolic.

George H.W. Bush raised taxes and paid for it. The Tea Party will never raise taxes. In her book the Dark Side, Jane Mayer discussed the various conservatives who fought Cheney and Addington over checks and balances on the executive branch.

What makes things confusing is that the Tea Party is essentially astroturf, a corporate and rich person-sponsored entity and not a grass roots phenomenon. (To the extent it has been grass roots, I would bet it's because the unemployment rate is at 9.5 percent. And the crazies always come out when there's a liberalish President.) Granted, the Republican party has been extreme in its opposition to Obama, that is refusing to compromise on anything. For example, they refuse to compromise at all about confirming Obama's nominees to the Federal Reserve or Elizabeth Warren or Dawn Johnson to the OLC, etc. Since Obama won the election, he should be allowed to govern. That's how democracy is supposed to work.

Glenzilla and Atrios don't know how to make distinctions. Either that or they just dishonestly refuse to. For example like other anti-war types they can't distinguish between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Partly it's an overreaction to the conservative right and partly it's because is some way they're spoiled and refuse to acknowledge the stakes.

Glenzilla says

A Washington political/media culture that rolls out the red carpet for every extremist Bush official is now suddenly offended by these Tea Partiers' extremist views?  Please. 

This is his target. Plus moderate liberals who see some value in Senators like Collins and Snowe even though the Maine Senators along with mainstream Democrats went along with the most egregious Bush administration post-911 policies.

The Tea Party candidate for the Delaware Senate seat is a religious nut named Christine O'Donnell who believes "homosexuality is an identity disorder." Glenzilla dishonestly fails to mention this which is surprising given that he is gay.

He does mention Jesse Helms:

During the Clinton years, Jesse Helms was the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and threatened the President not to go on Southern military bases lest he be killed.

Yeah but he was from North Carolina. John Ashcroft and Tom Coburn are nuts too, but this is Delaware, not Missouri or Oklahoma. Plus Helms wasn't part of a "movement," he was a lone nutcase.

Update: After some consideration I think the issue is that in back in the "bad old days" Helms atavistic views weren't as rare among the population. Whereas today, you have movies like "The Kids Are All Right," you have Hillary Clinton as a viable Presidential candidate and Barack Hussein Obama as the leader of the Free World. So it's more that the country has moved which makes the Tea Party seem more crazy relatively speaking. Glenzilla may have a point on the class issue. Establishment Republicans should know better, but then Christine O'Donnell isn't poor compared to, say, a starving Afghan, Pakistani or African.

Glenzilla and Atrios are being patronizing in other words.

Polarization

Clive Crook says that Obama's big mistake was refusing to "disown the left." Krugman is right to disagree.

Obama has been moderately leftish. With interest rates at zero and the economy needing a jump-start, Obama did a stimulus but failed to take the left's advice to make it sufficiently large. Maybe he didn't have the votes.

Obama passed health care reform with its liberal goal of fixing the malfunctioning private sector and fiscally conservative goal of fixing the long term deficit problem. However he did not follow the left's advice and include a public option. Maybe he didn't have the votes.

Obama passed reform of the banking and financial system in response to the Great Clusterfuck of 2008. He didn't follow the left's advice and nationalize and/or break up the biggest "zombie" banks. This could have caused panic and further damage at a time when the global economy was fragile. Or it could helped the banks deleverage in an orderly manner and saved the taxpayers money. For me it's an open question. (They did end up performing "stress tests" to boost confidence, something the Europeans are copying in response to their sovereign debt crisis.) If we enter a "lost decade" it could be seen as a missed opportunity. Although a lot of banks have been liquified and/or absorbed into other banks, something the Firebaggers refuse to acknowlege.

Obama did follow the left's advice in creating a financial consumer protection agency, but housed it in the Federal Reserve Bank and might not back Elizabeth Warren's appointment to head it.

Jonathan Chait points out that Republicans have been unapologeticaly embracing the far Right and will lose elections in November because of this.

...The Nevada Senate race is a prime example. Harry Reid, once a dead man walking, is now sitting on a nice lead because Republicans nominated a lunatic to oppose him. "A total f*** up by the state and national Republicans to allow Angle to get nominated," a source notes to Ben Smith.

But of course there are numerous such fuckups. In Kentucky, Republicans turned a rock-solid safe seat into a toss up by nominating ultra-radical Rand Paul over party hack Trey Grayson. In Pennsylvania, they turned a relatively safe seat in Arlen Specter, who had been almost completely housebroken by the right since 2004, into another toss-up. (More importantly, they drove Specter from the party and made him the 60th Senate seat, allowing the passage of health care reform.) And in Florida, they turned another safe hold into a toss-up by challenging, and driving from the party, Charlie Crist.

Florida is actually the closest thing to a rational move for the right. First, I think Crist's current lead is far from safe, because the Democratic vote is likely to consolidate above its current abysmal level and that will come out of Crist's hide. Second, Crist is a genuine moderate, so there really was a more reasonable risk-reward calculation for conservatives looking to gain a more ideologically reliable Senator at the risk of losing the seat altogether. There's at least a strong chance that the Rubio challenge will burn them.

This is four Senate seats put at serious risk by running right-wing primary challenges, plus one enormous liberal domestic policy accomplishment. In all these instances, conservatives either celebrated the right-wing primary challenge or, at the very least, quietly accepted it. There was very little pushback at the time from the party establishment, other than a feeble effort in Kentucky. I have seen no recriminations whatsoever in hindsight. And yet it seems perfectly clear that the effect of these challenges has been a disaster from the conservative perspective. You don't have to love Sue Lowden to understand that a 90% chance of Lowden winning is better than a 20% chance of Sharron Angle winning.

Happy Tax Day!

(And a belated Happy Zombie Jesus Day!)

Patriots Glenn Beck and Nick Cavuto and Dick Armey among others have been organizing "Tea Parties" to protest Obama's alleged drift towards socialism, Think Progress reports. The turnouts were rather low.