Showing posts with label John Boehner. Show all posts

Last Deal Gone Down


Looks like a debt ceiling deal is in place, and John Boehner is declaring victory. All I can say is: we'll see. It is reassuring to see House progressives denouncing the deal as a "sugar-coated Satan sandwich." There must be something good in there if it can make someone that mad.

The cuts are of the fictional "slowing the rate of growth" variety, not actual cuts. But, for the first time that I am aware of, the public seems generally aware of the bogusness of the debt "crisis" and of the magic of baseline budgeting, which renders trillion dollar cuts to be evanescent. This is still a "DC" budget agreement, meaning it only really makes sense to budget wonks. (see Verum Serum's explanation for why the "baseline" will and will not prevent the Supercomittee from raising taxes).

I know there will be howls on the Right over the deal, not because they wanted to cause a default, but because there's a sense out there that cuts should be real cuts, not cuts in the rate of growth. And I can understand that. It's what's preventing this from feeling like a victory. But, you know who didn't win this fight? Barack Obama and the American Left. Ol' Golden Throat thought he could intimidate House conservatives by taking his "tax the rich" message to the American public. Well, he made his case ad nauseum, and failed spectacularly. Indeed, it was his arrogant demand for an additional $400 billion in revenue that sent John Boehner back to the Tea Party freshmen, and their allies. Maybe "we" didn't win, but the other guy sure as hell lost, and badly.

One thing that Rush Limbaugh said during the last week that I thought was effective: Republicans should stop acting like losers, and start acting like winners. By that he meant that the post-1994 Republican Congress had continued the Bob Michel mindset that came with 40 years in the House minority. They expected to lose, even though they had won a landslide election in November. At times, Rush seemed more like Mike Singletary, than the titular head of the Republican Party. But, you know, it was effective. When you saw the Democrats revving up their "Republicans are stealing X-mas" talking points for one last go, and the MSM eagerly re-typing DNC memos into front page stories, you had to think many in the GOP flinched. But, in the end, they obtained something of a back bone.

Is the deal perfect? Hell no! We've got this dumb Super-committee that is apparently going to agree on budget cuts. (Hah!) As usual, the only cuts that are imminent are cuts in defense spending, not entitlements. (not to say the Pentagon is sacrosanct. there's plenty of waste, fraud and abuse there. But at least national defense is in the Constitution). And tax increases are still very much in the mix. But, the deal gets us to 2012 with Democrats having failed to do the one thing they hoped to get out of this mess: pin the bad economy on the GOP.

All in all, it was a pretty good day at the office.


Declaring Victory? Not Quite Yet


Looks like even the wise counsel of Thomas Sowell or Ann Coulter has failed to persuade some of the more conservative members of the Republican House Caucus to vote to pass the Boehner plan.

The House postponed a Thursday night vote on Speaker John Boehner's plan to raise the federal borrowing limit after he failed to stem a revolt by conservative GOP members. The delay leaves the credit status of the U.S. government in jeopardy with five days remaining before it begins running out of money to pay all its bills

The development came after a two-hour debate on the bill was abruptly ended earlier in the evening. Mr. Boehner, knowing that a rejection could undermine his speakership, then joined other House GOP leaders in trying to pressure party members to reconsider their opposition.

Those efforts fell short and it wasn't clear if the vote would be rescheduled. But the development appeared to hand the initiative for the moment to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), who is pushing an alternative version of the debt bill.

House Republicans and Senate Democrats planned to meet Friday morning at 10 a.m. to plan strategy. Republicans will figure out whether, and how, they can move forward.

I have to admit I would not have minded if the Boehner plan was passed, so long as we had some metaphysical certitude in knowing that the GOP would keep the budget cutting heat turned on. But, that's been the problem with past budget deals: lots of promises of cuts in the "out years" that simply never materialize.

Not only that, no budget cutting plan, no matter how "draconian" the media might portray it, has ever dealt with the spending increases built into the budget process by baseline budgeting, a concept that has only been the law since the 1970's, but which apparently is the Alpha and Omega modern legislating.

Either you want to cut spending or you don't. Spending cuts are actual cuts, not reductions in the growth of future spending, or goofy credits for not continuing the Afghan War Surge for another 10 years. (amazing how the "adults in the room" behave, isn't it).

At the moment, the GOP appears to be in disarray, but at least they're trying to put something together. Democrats are literally on the sidelines, screaming insults and announcing imperiously that the latest House offering is DOA. And it's no joke about the insults. Verum Serum has collected some choice bits, all from people in the Dem leadership btw
Tell me again how it works that the left is "winning," even as they are becoming more shill and incoherent by the hour.

Like a lot of people, I was unhappily resigned to yet another short-term fix, but for people like Connie Mack and Rand Paul, going along with this Kabuki was too much for them to stomach. Their constituents sent them to DC to make actual cuts, and so far they are determined to make them. Good for them. America might not have a third party, but the conservative wing of the Republican Party has almost become a third factor in getting anything done in Congress. It's not optimal. It will lead to a million "GOP civil war!" headlines, but the fight is a good one.

UPDATE: looks like they got it done. They added some bit about Congress passing a Balanced Budget Amendment and sending it out to the states. The final bill raises the debt ceiling by $900B and "cuts" (spare me. we know these aren't real cuts) $917B. Now the bill has gone to the Senate where the adults in the room have declared the bill a draconian terrorist act that is dead on arrival.


Sealing Our Fate: Suddenly the Debt Deadline Is 1 PM PST


Word is that Congressional leaders are working around the clock to have some sort of debt ceiling deal, whether short-, medium-or long-term, in place before the Asian markets open. If you are getting a queasy Lehman feeling, you are probably right.

House Speaker John Boehner hopes to have a framework for a debt-limit plan in place by Sunday afternoon to avoid roiling the Asian markets, he told colleagues on a Saturday conference call.

An immediate deal would raise the debt ceiling and cut spending, Boehner said, and there are still options on the table for more comprehensive deficit reduction of $3 trillion to $5 trillion, according to GOP sources on the call. He is also aiming for a framework in the form of Cut, Cap and Balance — the plan that has failed in the Senate, Obama has threatened to veto but House Republicans passed overwhelmingly

Boehner apparently also said this to the president before walking out on talks with the White House.

“As I read the Constitution, the Congress writes the laws and you get to decide what you want to sign,” Boehner said, recounting what he told the president, according to two sources.

You have to feel for Boehner. While he has taken flak from the right for even negotiating a deal, he is also dealing with a disingenuous leftist who simply doesn't want to abide by the Constitution, but only wants to lock in the trillion dollar deficits of the last two years, the voters be damned.

Republicans are under enormous media and political pressure to agree to raise taxes. But, why should they? Their constituents explicitly sent them to DC to hold the line on taxes and reduce the size of government. Who out there can Obama can point to that wants to raise taxes and increase gov't spending, and is demanding it as explicitly as conservatives are demanding the opposite?


The Untold Stories


Try to guess the identity of this Republican office holder:

Yet Mr *******'s life story is the type of classic up-by-the-bootstraps tale of the American Dream that can put a tear in a voter's eye. As his story becomes better known, the Democrats could even be drawing favourable attention upon him. Right now, most Americans have never heard of Mr *******, and fewer still can pronounce his name, which rhymes with ******. The alleged elitist country club Republican is an **** Congressman who grew up in near poverty.


His sister Lynda Meineke, who is 51, is a waitress and bar tender at Andy's Cafe in Carthage, Ohio, a family business that was founded by their grandfather Andy Boehner in 1938. As a child, one of Mr *******'s jobs was to mop the floor.


Sitting outside the bar this week, sipping a bottle of Bud Light and smoking a cigarette, Mrs Meineke described her childhood as "cramped" but happy. "We learned how to share. If there was a toy, it wasn't just for you but for all the younger ones."


Mr *******, 61, is the second of 12 who grew up in a German-Irish family in Reading, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati. All but two of them still live within a few miles of each other. Two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.


The future Congressman started work as a janitor and took seven years to get his degree – the first in the family to do so – because he had several jobs to pay his way. He joined a plastics and packaging company, rising to president before entering local politics by being elected to the town board.

That is the biography of House Minority Leader, John Boehner; he of the "party of Big Business and lobbyist ties" whose tan, golfing and smoking habit - not to mention his likely ascent to the Speaker's dais - have marked him as the new conservative Darth Vadar. The profile is from the Telegraph, which is appropriate. An American media outlet would never allow the public to learn the biography of any conservative politician. Better to dehumanize them, and pretend that they are little more than corrupt pod people grown on a farm owned by the Koch brothers.

The article also notes that Boehner's prominent tan is the result, not of plutocratic sessions under a tanning bed, but genetics: Boehner's mother came from a family with a dark, olive complexion. Kinda puts President Obama's comments on the subject -"He is a person of colour, although not a colour that appears in the natural world" - into a whole new perspective, that perspective being that Obama is an a**hole.

Now, I am sure there are plenty of liberals who, in the unlikely event they were to read the Telegraph, would be incredulous that a man with Boehner's background could be a Republican. They should take a look at their own leaders sometime. Between the daughter of the mayor of Baltimore who married a wealthy financier (a limousine liberal from birth!) to the "blow jobs in the Oval Office" rock star former president to a smug lawyer who attended a racist "church" for 20 years and rewrites the Declaration of Independence to suit his own ideology, you could ask what other choice a regular guy like Boehner would have.




Best Retirement Invesments Auto Search