Childish Tax Things

Maddow had a terrific segment on this issue last night.
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Jan. 23: President Obama invited Republicans to a meeting of congressional leaders to talk about his stimulus plan. It seems the Republicans are infusing their own proposals into the bill, including adding more tax cuts. Are tax cuts what America needs? Rachel Maddow is joined by Rep. Peter Defazio, D-OR
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/28820486#28820486

I’m sure Boehner would be too, if a new condom factory were planned for his Ohio district (which might not be a bad idea).
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No sh!t. Anything to keep Republicans from breeding.
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On the stimulus negotiations and the lamentations of Boehner, note the reaction of John Cole, who was a lifelong Republican until 2006:

“Remember that CBO report I linked to earlier this week? The one that supposedly said the stimulus package as proposed would not spend fast enough to be stimulus. Guess what. It doesn’t exist… I promised to myself that never again would I be as gullible as I was during the Bush years, but I really don’t know what the appropriate level of skeptical is for Republicans right now. Even after losing their asses in the last two elections, facing numerous crises, here they are just flat-out making sh*t up on arguably the most important topic of the day.”

childish things.
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They really are idiots. The national highway system of the Eisenhower era would have been built faster and cheaper by tax cuts alone of course.
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We would have gotten to the moon, with tax cuts.
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They have no ideas at all.

The internet, created with tax cuts.

Their real problem is that every principle they’ve espoused has been exposed as a lie.

theory of economic expansion–tax cuts uber alles–that not only has been proven defective in recent years
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Scientists are fond of pointing out that theories rise and fall on the process of testing and experimentation. Creationists are fond of pointing out that theories are never ‘really’ proven. This might help explain why the ‘theories’ that guide Republican economic thinking are actually ‘faith based’.
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Having been tried and failed their failure is written off as insufficient effort and so we try again. Einstein had a name for such activity.

Having just spent three weeks traveling by train, I was aghast at Maddow’s reference to Amtrak improvements being “on the cutting room floor”. Both the Lakeshore Limited (NY-Chicago) and the Cardinal (Chicago-NY) were using sad, beaten up rolling stock, and the stations at Rochester, Buffalo-Depew and Indianapolis were shabby 70s shoeboxes. Since when is our rail system not infrastructure?

That’s not even the silliest of it. I heard Republicans complain yesterday, almost in the same paragraph, that the trouble with the package was that not enough of the money was going to be spent soon enough to stimulate us out of recession and also that the food stamp and unemployment expansions were bad because…wait for it…because they wouldn’t have any long-term benefit.
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And you know the silliest part? People still pay attention to these cretinous, partisan liars.

And, as Dirks generally notes, they aren’t really tax cuts unless they are accompanied by spending cuts.
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Which they never are.

“Their real problem is that every principle they’ve espoused has been exposed as a lie.”
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Too bad the media, for the most part, refuses to acknowledge this and continues to pretend that the GOP has anything to offer. It’s the same ole he-said-she-said, and the game goes on and on.

joyo: I travel on Europe’s fantastic speedy rail system – it beats air travel anytime. I wonder why we can’t build a rail system like that. It will take off pressure on our airlines and do other helpful things. And this required the co-operation of all of Europe. Somehow politics never was a problem.And won’t that create jobs?

sevenoaks: One would think so, but according to Maddow’s report, the current stimulus package is lite on rail. I do rail nearly all the time, not from fear of flying but from love of scenery.

“It’s the same ole he-said-she-said, and the game goes on and on.”
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It’s even worse than that. Digby on the current GOP lie that the Congressional Budget Office says that the vast majority of the money in the currently proposed stimulus package won’t be spent until after 2010:

Insider baseball question:
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Given the Dems have a Congressional majority, is Obama courting the GOP because he lacks the support of some blue dog Dems, or because he’s worried about a GOP fillibuster in the Senate (and Harry Reid’s fecklessnes)? Or is it simply his own commitment to bipartisan governance?
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In other words – what does Obama get in return for compromise? (I do think the GOP has forgotten that “compromise” does not mean “give us everything we want”…)

Boehner would be too, if a new condom factory were planned for his Ohio district
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Can you see the headline?
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Boehner Demands Personal Condom Factory.
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This is astonishing, people. It’s like John Stewart implanted a chip in Boehner’s head and now he produces comedy automatically!

“In other words – what does Obama get in return for compromise?”
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He gets to check the charge of being “too liberal” or “too partisan” by the corporate press. That’s a very big deal, but, since media politics are basically insane, I’m in no position to judge the merits of the trade off.

fashionable as it is to justify condom buying as a downpayment on the future, i don’t think it makes much sense to the average joe. Dems have to be really careful about what we put in those things. Otherwise the trust the public has for us will erode very quickly. As for the taxes, i think obama was more than justified in his point. On one hand, republicans are complaining that the plan is too expensive; on the other hand, they’re clamoring for more taxes. A demand that runs counter to the purpose of the plan to invest in the future and not just the immediate present. They also need to understand that they’re not on level playing field with Obama. That being said, i still haven’t seen any consequential analysis anywhere about the potential downsides of such a sharp rebuke of republicans. I think we need the spirit of bipartisanship in order to pass healthcare, energy legislations.

“I do think the GOP has forgotten that “compromise” does not mean “give us everything we want”
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They haven’t forgotten anything:
http://crooksandliars.com/2007/04/05/rep-blackburn-doesnt-understand-compromise/
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shepherdwong, I saw that…amazing. Funny thing, Tweety went off on somebody yesterday saying he didn’t want any blog stuff, he wanted real journalism.
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“First kill all the lawyers journalists.”
-Shakespeare, ‘Henry VI’
Now THATS change I can believe in!

What if your parents had used a condom, Joe?

Boehner et al. are ready to cry foul! every time Obama doesn’t do what they want, because he promised to be “bipartisan,” which apparently means ceding his authority to the Republicans.
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But this is no worse than the media crying foul! because Obama didn’t let the video cameras into the second swearing. wasn’t transparent! That baffles me, as nothing was hidden about it. Apparently “transparent” means letting the camera into all events and deliberations.
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I sure would like to see the Republicans admit they’re getting more of a hearing from Obama than they did from BUsh, and the media acknowledge that OBama would be hard pressed to meet the cloaking exhibited by the previous admin. Credit where it’s due, please.

It would be extremely redundant to add a condom factory to Boehner’s district SINCE HE IS ALREADY THE WORLD’S BIGGEST SCUMBAG. All right, that joke had to be told, I am merely fate’s agent…

GAME OVER for the Comments.
gpanfile nailed it. Nicely done, my friend.

We can all go home now, and don’t forget to tip your waitress on the way out.

Too bad the media, for the most part, refuses to acknowledge this and continues to pretend that the GOP has anything to offer. It’s the same ole he-said-she-said, and the game goes on and on.
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This is, increasingly, a problem for the traditional media. They want to play this role, but they are losing their ability to do so, because other, more accurate sources of information are trumping them.
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They, especially the teevee “they,” are shortly gonna have to choose between propaganda and audience. So far, they’ve sacrificed audience to propaganda…

shepherdwong: So he’s playing to the self-identified Centrists in the DC media establishment? That could be. Yet during the campaign Obama hasn’t shied from laying out a fairly progressive agenda. I think Americans are ready for it even if Brooks and Broder aren’t.
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Also I’m still waiting for the GOP to come up with an idea that hasn’t already been tested and failed over the past 8 years.

Boehner’s holding out for a colonostomy bag factory. A condom factory would imply his constituency is having sex for something other than procreation. Another big no-no in the republican party.

Has anybody asked the question “How do payroll and income tax rebates help people that have no jobs”? Anybody? Please, for the love of all that is holy, someone bring some frigging sense to these politicians.

Has anybody asked the question “How do payroll and income tax rebates help people that have no jobs”?
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Don’t you remember during the campaign when helping people who had no jobs was the #1 sin of Obama’s plans. Where do you think “redistributionist” and “socialist” came from?
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How about green condoms, with the refreshing scent of new mown grass? In any case, Boehner et al can fall back on the old Trojan slogan, “For the prevention of disease only”

dum: “green condoms, with the refreshing scent of new mown grass” just sounds astonishingly odd. Was your first sexual experience with a landscaper?
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As for prevention of disease, that is only needed if people have sex with more than one person in their life, which we all know is a GOP no-no.

I think that Team Obama needs to abandon and repudiate the whole idea of this being a “stimulus” package, because Boehner is right — as a stimulus package, its incrediby inefficient, and as long as people keep talking in terms of a stimulus, the GOP wins the debate.
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The proper terms to use are “stabilization” and “recovery”, not merely because these are more accurate, but because they will put the GOP on the defensive — the american people don’t seek “stimulus”, rather they want “stability”; and they don’t see the economy as “too slow”, rather they see it as broken or sick, and in need of “recovery”.

And while the Village loves Obama for his non-threatening “post-partisan” stance, the simple fact is that Obama needs to get a backbone (and transplant one into Congressional democrats) and stop trying to placate congressional republicans (tax cuts are an especially bad idea, because we’re already running massive deficits.) Things are going to get worse before they get better, and Democrats will lose in 2010 and 2012 unless people are constantly reminded that the problems we face were caused by Bush and the Congressional Republicans.

the GOP isn’t going to be ‘post-partisan’ in elections in the near future, and with the memory of the American people being way too short, allowing people to forget how we got here in the spirit of post-partisanship is a recipe for disaster.

“So he’s playing to the self-identified Centrists in the DC media establishment? That could be. Yet during the campaign Obama hasn’t shied from laying out a fairly progressive agenda. I think Americans are ready for it even if Brooks and Broder aren’t.”
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The game we’ve been watching (see: Iraq, healthcare, energy, Wall Street, the failure of the press, etc.) is the corporatist elites (though better to call yourself a “Centrist”) against all of the rest of us. So Obama has to check them long enough to enact the progressive agenda the country needs and sacrifice better policy (and rhetoric) where he deems he must along the way. He seems to be doing a pretty good job of figuring out how to deal with their inanity and change policy for the better so far so I’m loath to second-guess him.

shepherdwong: I like your theory, and wnvg’s notion that this is to make Obama look bipartisan so that the GOP can either get on board or reveal themselves to be nothing but obstructionists.
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In fact the two theories dovetail, because “revealing” the GOP can only mean “to the beltway media” – the rest of the country is already on board.