Tag Archives: Democrats

Fiscal Cliff Tragedy/Comedy, Part I

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The tragedy and the comedy of the fiscal cliff negotiations are that they have little to do with the fiscal cliff.

The fiscal cliff is a relatively straight-forward collection of budget issues. But like so many other budget issues that have become the playground of ideologues, the fiscal cliff negotiations have been hijacked by a herculean clash over political dogma, a classic struggle between progressive forces dedicated to the redistribution of wealth and libertarian forces dedicated to dismantling government as we know it. Continue reading →

Holding Middle-Class Tax Cuts Hostage

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from Telemachus.com

Which one is better..or worse? To which guilty party can these words be assigned, Your Honor?

We are always surprised, although we shouldn’t be, when we see the media attack the GOP in Congress for ‘holding the middle-class hostage to getting tax cuts extended for the wealthy (‘fat-cat, dishonest, conniving, Scrooge-like white rich) guys’. (That is the intimation, isn’t it? Tell the truth.)

Why is it taken as the Gospel Truth that the current impasse is solely the fault of the Republican Party in charge of the House of Representatives in Congress? Continue reading →

Offer, Counter-Offer

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Republicans went all crazy yesterday and countered the White House with a fiscal cliff proposal that was first dreamed up by that crazy right-winger Erskine Bowles.

Bowles, who used to toil in the trenches as Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff and who once ran for office in North Carolina as a Democrat, has obviously been seduced by that other right-wing kook, Alan Simpson. How dare Bowles, the closing days of the Super Committee, offer something so radical as to include $800 billion in revenues and about double that in spending cuts. Continue reading →

Soak the Rich

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

My friend, the smart Senate staffer, sent me this missive this morning. I thought I would share it with you:

“There is clearly a Democratic obsession with taxing the rich. Let’s go through a little fiscal arithmetic and take the Democrats’ tax increase obsession out to its logical conclusion.

From a purely political power acquisition perspective, it makes all the sense in the world. It’s been a constant theme of Democrats for many years. Not all, but most, tell the American people that all of our fiscal problems can be Continue reading →

The Bipartisanship Myth

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann recently released It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a book dedicated to the principle that bipartisanship is a worthy goal and that its breakdown is all the Republicans’ fault.

It’s hogwash on two fronts.

First, the nature of our politics is adversarial. We have a two-political-party system, where compromise between the parties is supposed to be a rare accomplishment. Otherwise, why have two parties?

In such an adversarial system, it is complete nonsense to blame one party for being too partisan. The Democrats are looking out for their own constituents just as ardently as the Republicans are looking out for theirs.

In fact, Democratic leaders are far more beholden to their extremes than are Republican leaders. Think about it. Barack Obama is far more liberal than Mitt Romney is conservative. John Boehner, while not exactly a centrist, is not by any means a conservative ideologue, while Nancy Pelosi was easily the most liberal Speaker in the history of the House. Continue reading →

Obama Ship is Sinking

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The holes in the Obama Administration continue to show the greatest inherent problem to the President’s re-election: These people are incompetent.

At almost every level, in almost every issue the Obama Administration is barely keeping afloat. The recent leaks that Obama himself approves using drones to kill specific targets was first brought light in a New York Times piece: “Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war.”

Imagine the apoplexy among the studio hosts on MSNBC if George W. Bush had been found riffling “baseball cards” deciding who should live, who should die and in which order.

They would be “Leaning Forward” so far they’d be staring at their own backsides – as unpleasant an image as that might be. Continue reading →

Contraception Issue Abuse of Executive Power

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The White House announced its new rules on requiring employers that provide health insurance to provide contraceptive services with no additional cost to their employees.

I understand this is broadly interpreting the rule, but I am not going to discuss the policy, religious, moral, or any other aspect of the rule itself.

It apparently only came as a surprise to the White House when conservatives and Catholics (among others) rose up in vocal opposition on the grounds that charities run by religious organizations – like hospitals – would have to provide a specific insurance benefit which is contrary to their religions tenets.

Others have debated the pros and cons of that in other venues and I won’t get into that again here.

The White House hurriedly announced a “compromise” which is an odd construct in that like Republicans in the House and Senate during the writing of the underlying health care legislation, only Democrats were involved. Continue reading →

The Man Behind The Last Balanced Budgets We Will Ever See

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from Telemachus

I had the distinct honor and privilege recently to introduce two talented men with high levels of expertise in the private sector who willingly straddled the line between private and public life early in their political careers and then devoted themselves completely later to serve our state and nation, former North Carolina Governor Jim Martin and Congressman Alex McMillan.

The event was the First Annual Mecklenburg GOP Martin-McMillan Day which is a fitting title given that both men served on the Mecklenburg County Commission before Mr. McMillan followed Mr. Martin as the Representative of the 9th Congressional District when Martin ran for Governor in 1984 and served for 2 successful terms.

The lists of the accumulated achievements of both men would take too long to recount here. Suffice it to say: ‘We were all fortunate they chose to take their private sector expertise into the political arena and serve us in the public trust.’ Continue reading →

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from Mullings.com

The Popular Press is swooning over what they consider to be the new-found potency in President Barack Obama’s demands that the Congress pass his Jobs Bill.

For reasons which I cannot understand, the President decided to make his case for his bill by leading with who was going to pay for it, notwithstanding we have no idea how the first job will be created by the jillions of dollars of new taxes he is proposing.

You want people who make millions of dollars a year to pay more in taxes? Ok. I don’t have an answer to that.

But somehow, in the translation, anyone with a family income north of about $250,000 (husband and wife each making a little over $10 k per month) becomes the equal of Warren Buffett’s income and needs to be penalized for the family’s success. Continue reading →

Obama’s Double-Dip Learning Curve

BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from The Washington Times

In one of the least-needed reassurances in modern political history, President Obama’s top political man, David Plouffe, “told Democrats late last week that the White House would not suffer from overconfidence. ‘What I don’t want to suggest is that we’re sitting around and thinking everything is great,’ he said.”

With the White House’s own economists predicting 9 percent or worse unemployment on Election Day, the president at about 39 percent job approval, college graduates unable to find jobs, a quarter of American homes under water, no credible White House policy or strategy for changing things – and with most non-institutionalized Americans convinced we are in a recession that is going to get much worse – it is surpassingly odd that Mr. Plouffe, as The Washington Post said, was worried that his fellow Democrats might think the president and his men think everything to be hunky-dory. Continue reading →

Trouble Rhymes with Carville

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from Mullings.com

One of the most enduring songs from the 1957 Broadway musical, “The Music Man” is named “Trouble.”
Trouble, oh we got trouble
Right here in River City!
With a capital “T”
That rhymes with “P”
And that stands for Pool.

Yesterday the Democrats had trouble with a capital “T” that rhymes with “C” and that stands for Carville. As in James. As in my former back-door neighbor. As in husband to Mullfave Mary Matalin.

The James wrote an essay for CNN in which he stated it was time for President Obama to panic. I am not paraphrasing. He wrote that after thinking about the drubbing Obama and his fellow Democrats got in two special Congressional elections – one in Nevada and one in New York City, he wrote: “What should the White House do now? One word came to mind: Panic.” Continue reading →

American Republicans, Democrats

BY MICKEY EDWARDS

Reprinted from Atlantic Monthly and Iconoclast

Angry and frustrated, American voters went to the polls in November 2010 to “take back” their country. Just as they had done in 2008. And 2006. And repeatedly for decades, whether it was Republicans or Democrats from whom they were taking the country back. No matter who was put in charge, things didn’t get better. They won’t this time, either; spending levels may go down, taxes may go up, budgets will change, but American government will go on the way it has, not as a collective enterprise but as a battle between warring tribes.

If we are truly a democracy—if voters get to size up candidates for a public office and choose the one they want—why don’t the elections seem to change anything? Because we elect our leaders, and they then govern, in a system that makes cooperation almost impossible and incivility nearly inevitable, a system in which the campaign season never ends and the struggle for party advantage trumps all other considerations.

Continue reading →

“Send In the Clowns…They’re Here”

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

 To succeed in America – to truly succeed in America – you have to be more than excellent at what you do; you have to be a carnival barker making certain that every single person in each of the 50 states knows that you are excellent at what you do.

Continue reading →

Nothing Small About Spending Cuts

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

It is easy to be fairly nonchalant about the current budget battle that has consumed the Congress.

Pundits (myself included) have pointed out that the tens of billions of dollars being discussed is chump change, especially if you consider the trillions of dollars that we owe to the Chinese.

Continue reading →

Leave the Driving to Boehner

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

House Speaker John Boehner has so far driven Congress in the right direction.  He has negotiated successfully to cut spending and keep the government open.  He allowed for an open process that delivered the largest discretionary spending cuts in the history of the lower body.  He has gotten high marks from just about everybody on how he has risen to the occasion in difficult times.  He has his hands firmly on the steering wheel and he seems to know where he is going.

Continue reading →

Religion and Elections

By GARY ANDRES

Reprinted from Realclearpolitics.com

With all the focus on the Tea Party this election cycle, another strong predictor of political behavior – religion – has not received as much attention.

Historically, religious groups have played central roles in electoral contests, but their impact and alliances have shifted over time.

Continue reading →

Summertime Blues

BY TONY BLANKELY

Reprinted from Townhall.com

With apologies to George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and their 1935 classic song, “Summertime” (and the living is easy):  


Summertime,
And the living is queasy
Taxes jumpin’
And foreclosures are high

Continue reading →

Biden No Jack on Message

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from: feeherytheory.com

Sometimes, I just want to strangle Ronald McDonald.

From approximately 2 in the afternoon yesterday until about 8 o’clock yesterday night, my four-year old son had one message and one message only.  He wanted to go to Old McDonald.

Old McDonald – as he likes to call the place where you get the Big Mac – serves Happy Meals, and apparently, the Happy Meal is the only thing that makes my son happy these days.

So, for every fifteen minutes, at various pitches and voice levels, my son requested that we go to Old McDonald’s and get a Happy Meal.

On one level, the discourse between my son and me was extraordinarily frustrating.  I knew that he wasn’t going to get a Happy Meal yesterday, and he knew he wasn’t going to get a Happy Meal yesterday, but that didn’t stop him from requesting it on a fairly regular basis.

But on the other level, the message discipline that came from little Jack was very impressive.  He stuck to his message, no matter how ineffective it turned out to be.

Little Jack reminds me a bit of Joe Biden.

Now, let’s not kid ourselves.  When it comes to message discipline, Joe Biden is no Jack Feehery.  Biden is usually on some crazy tangent somewhere, whether he is talking about Anna Chapman (probably my favorite Biden line ever), the President’s over-reliance on the teleprompter (a close second place), or whatever else comes through his transom.

Continue reading →