It Isn't Only Republicans Opposing Regulations On Banksters-- Plenty Of Corrupt Blue Dogs & "New Dems" Are Just As Bad

Melissa Bean, a Democrat of convenience-- the stench of corruption

After quite the unseemly kerfuffle from fully-owned bank subsidiary Melissa Bean-- with several of the most anti-working family Blue Dogs in tow (think Walt Minnick, for example)-- late last night the House finally agreed to H Res 956, providing for debate on H.R. 4173 which reform-minded Democrats have designed to "provide for financial regulatory reform, to protect consumers and investors, to enhance Federal understanding of insurance issues, to regulate the over-the-counter derivatives, markets," etc. Bean said she would lead New Dem opposition to the rule (956) if her anti-regulatory, lobbyist-written crap didn't get included. Between a compromise and enough New Dems telling the leadership that she was off her rocker and to ignore her, the vote came and the resolution passed 235-177, only 7 Democrats (a disgruntled progressive and half a dozen GOP-voting Blue Dogs, abandoning the party). [UPDATE: Some reports are circulating that the compromise was a bigger victory for the corrupt New Dems than originally thought.]

So what's driving the bankster-owned ConservaDems into the arms of the Republicans now? Their patrons are hysterical about Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Agency, as well as their usual mania against state laws that are tougher than lax federal regulations. Melissa Bean, one of the only House members in history to have passed the two-million dollar mark in thinly-veiled bribes from Wall Street, is pushing a pre-emption amendment that disallows aggressive state attorneys-general to go after Wall Street banks, regardless of the degree of criminality. It failed in committee but she feels a bankster-greased axis of evil between the GOP, the Blue Dogs and the New Dems can triumph on the House floor. Freshman Walt Minnick (Blue Dog-ID) has, with just half a term under his belt, already scooped up an eye-popping $170,453 in legalistic bribes from Wall Street and is demanding that the CFPA be aborted, something he pushed, unsuccessfully, in committee.





UPDATE: Banksters Get What They Want From A Bipartisan Coalition Of Corrupt Conservatives

The vote on the final bill will be tomorrow but a coalition of Republicans and the worst of the Blue Dogs and New Dems defeated many of the most important regulations in the bill in a series of disastrous floor battles this evening. According to AP "a bipartisan coalition in the House voted late Thursday to make it easier for corporations to engage in complex derivatives trades without government restrictions, eroding the reach of proposed regulations to govern Wall Street. Democratic attempts to toughen the legislation failed."

Tomorrow Minnick and his bankster-owned allies will try again to kill an independent Consumer Finance Protection Agency. Progressives are being encouraged to defeat the overall bill if it is gutted by the conservatives. I might add that defeating Blue Dogs like Walt Minnick should also be a priority. Keep in mind that every dollar you donate to the DCCC goes to prop up unpopular reactionaries like Minnick, Bright, Childers, Shuler, Griffith, etc. Every dollar you give at Bad Dogs goes to defeating them.

Fighting wars without pain might be OK if it were possible, but merely ghetto-izing the pain is unacceptable

"The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again -- for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours -- is obscene. All decent people should object. . . .

"The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. . . .

"What we are doing is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it."

-- Bob Herbert, in his Tuesday NYT column, "A Fearful Price"

by Ken

I've been content to let Howie do the heavy lifting on Afghanistan. I don't disagree with the strong position he's taken against increased American involvement in a war there, but I still feel conflicted about it.

As Hendrik Hertzberg begins his "Comment" piece in this week's New Yorker, "Bad Choices": "There are no good options for the United States in Afghanistan. That has been the conventional wisdom for some years now, and this time the conventional wisdom—the reigning cliché—happens to be true."

Later Hertzberg writes, "The principal virtue of [the president's] choice remains the vices of the others." He writes further:

The botched war in Afghanistan, like the economic crisis and the broken health-care system, is an inheritance from which Obama is trying to extricate the country. In each case, the institutional, historical, and political constraints under which a President must operate mean that the solutions—or, if there are no solutions, the ameliorations—are doomed to be nearly as messy as the problems.

However, one thing about the war in Afghanistan -- and indeed the last war in Iraq, and the ones currently being lined up for Iran et al. by the enthusiasts -- needs to be flagged down. As Bob Herbert wrote Tuesday, it "is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it." It was an innovation of the Bush-Cheney regime, and unfortunately like so many other innovations that expand the power of the executive branch, the chances of its being reversed by succeeding administrations, even those run by less despicable, megalomaniacal leaders, are slim. Giving up power one finds oneself heir to isn't something politicians do a lot of.

Nothing characterizes the hypocrisy and general doodyheadedness of Movement Conservative thuggery more surely than what has come to be known as its "chickenhawkishness" -- the truly astonishing percentage of these Bombs-Away Bozos, screeching to start a new war every day, who have never served in the military and are offended by the mere suggestion that they should.

When our friend Max Blumenthal was honing his videographer's skills, he took his video camera to one of those conclaves of Daring Young Doodyheads (Values Voter Summit, perhaps?) and put the question to all those blood-thirsty doodyheads frothing at the mouth for more invasions, more wars: Would you fight in those wars? Not only wouldn't they, most of them were clearly mystified, or offended, by the fact that someone would ask them such a question.

One especially irritating far-right doodyhead said simply that he could contribute to the war better in other ways. I wonder whether those delicate geniuses (as I hope George Costanza won't mind my calling them) are aware that they get to make that choice because of the elimination of the draft, under which previous American wars, both declared and undeclared, were fought. But can the delicate geniuses really not see how philosophically and ethically repulsive it is to advocate a war in which neither you nor your family, friends, and associates is put at risk of any sort?

Of course this point has been made before, but it never seems to stick, and each time it's brought up, it's as if nobody's ever said it before. I'm not sure anyone's said it as well, though, as Bob Herbert did the Tuesday column from which I've quoted above.

To drive the point home, the column begins with Herbert's encounter with a Columbia University student "who was enthusiastic about the escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan," and "argued that a full-blown counterinsurgency effort, which would likely take many years and cost many lives, was the only way to truly win the war."

He was a very bright young man: thoughtful and eager and polite. I asked him if he had any plans to join the military and help make this grand mission a success. He said no.

Hmm. Is there a cognitive-dissonance monitor in the house?

Herbert relates this to a RAND Corp. study --

showing that the eight years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan were taking an emotional toll on the children of service members and that the difficulties increased the longer parents were deployed.

There is no way that the findings of this study should be a surprise to anyone. It just confirms that the children of those being sent into combat are among that tiny percentage of the population that is unfairly shouldering the entire burden of these wars.

The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again -- for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours -- is obscene. All decent people should object.

We already knew that in addition to the many thousands who have been killed or physically wounded, hundreds of thousands have returned with very serious psychological wounds: deep depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and so on. Other problems are also widespread: alcohol and drug abuse, family strife, homelessness.

The new study, by the RAND Corporation, was published in the journal Pediatrics. The children surveyed were found to have higher levels of emotional difficulties than their peers in the general population.

According to the study:

"Older youth and girls of all ages reported significantly more school, family and peer-related difficulties with parental deployment. Length of parental deployment and poorer non-deployed caregiver mental health were significantly associated with a greater number of challenges for children, both during deployment and deployed parent reintegration."

The air is filled with obsessive self-satisfied rhetoric about supporting the troops, giving them everything they need and not letting them down. But that rhetoric is as hollow as a jazzman’s drum because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire at all to share in the sacrifices that the service members and their families are making. Most Americans do not want to serve in the wars, do not want to give up their precious time to do volunteer work that would aid the nation’s warriors and their families, do not even want to fork over the taxes that are needed to pay for the wars.

To say that this is a national disgrace is to wallow in the shallowest understatement. The nation will always give lip-service to support for the troops, but for the most part Americans do not really care about the men and women we so blithely ship off to war, and the families they leave behind.

The National Military Family Association, which commissioned the RAND study, has poignant comments from the children of military personnel on its Web site.

You can tell immediately how much more real the wars are to those youngsters than to most Americans:

"I hope it’s not him on the news getting hurt."

"Most of my grades dropped because I was thinking about my dad, because my dad’s more important than school."

"Mom will be in her room and we hear her crying."

Which brings Herbert to the point that I made my second extract above, and eventually the third:

The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.

I don’t think our current way of waging war, which is pretty easy-breezy for most citizens, is what the architects of America had in mind. Here’s George Washington’s view, for example: "It must be laid down as a primary position and the basis of our system, that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government owes not only a proportion of his property, but even his personal service to the defense of it."

What we are doing is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it.

A cruel irony in this new way of waging war is that the 1 percent of the country doing the fighting, which tends toi support these military adventures, seems largely ignorant of the way the way they are used by militarily adventurous pols to shield them from the proper scrutiny of the American people at large.

If it turns out that there is an afterlife that involves rewards and punishments for earthly deeds, you have to hope that there is a sufficiently fierce punishment for sending other people's children off to die.

#

If Paul Ryan WANTED To Destroy Jobs In Wisconsin He Couldn't Be Any More Effective Than He Already Is

Paul Ryan has big dreams and Wisconsin's first congressional district is an important stepping stone for him. Unfortunately for the folks who live there, that's the only way they're important to him. He's been a one-man job loss machine for southeast Wisconsin. While other members of Congress have bent over backwards to bring jobs to their districts, Ryan-- in an attempt to prove his far right ideological purity-- has been adding to the destruction of the area's manufacturing base. Yesterday was no different. I doubt any of them will publish it-- or question him about it-- but a DCCC press release went out to all the media outlets in Milwaukee, Racine, Janesville and Kenosha pointing out that Ryan has been as unhelpful about helping small businesses as he's been in denuding the area of the automotive industry.

While millions of Americans struggle in this recession, today Representative Paul Ryan opposed extending tax credits to help small businesses add and keep workers while making America more competitive in the 21st century innovation economy.
 
“At a time when businesses on Main Street need help to continue creating good paying jobs for American workers, Representative Paul Ryan tried to give them the very last thing they need: higher taxes,” said Ryan Rudominer, National Press Secretary for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Businesses hoping to avoid more layoffs and continue fueling America’s economic recovery deserve better than Representative Ryan’s plan to have them pay higher taxes."

You may recall that yesterday we were trying to puzzle out HR 4213, the Tax Extenders Act of 2009, which is meant to help with job creation and foster the kind of growth and innovation that spurs economic recovery. I've spent a lot of time on the phone with Jared Polis and Chris Himes trying to understand it and understand why a small handful of well-intentioned Democrats (basically, them) opposed it. Ryan, on the other hand, took no explanation to understand. He's a quintessential, super-partisan obstructionist. The measure provides $17.8 billion in business tax relief and encourages businesses to increase investments in technology and create more high-tech jobs for the twenty-first century. That's enough of a reason for why the anti-Obama squad is trying to throw a spoke in every wheel, no matter who gets hurt.

It's probably also worth noting that Ryan, who eagerly voted for Bush's gigantic $700 billion TARP giveaway to banksters-- unsurprising since Ryan has gotten more loot from Wall Street ($1,704,095) than any other politician, from either party, in the history of Wisconsin-- is screaming bloody murder because Obama wants to use the $200 billion that was paid back, for job creation projects. That that's exactly what most Americans want to happen is of no concern to Ryan. Ryan, a smooth operator and notorious concern troll, in effect, is giving the finger to southeast Wisconsin voters who favor a plan calling on the government "to create jobs through spending on public works, investments in alternative energy or skills training for the jobless," bring down the deficit and hand the bill to the wealthy (i.e., Ryan's patrons).

A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Dec. 3-7 shows two-thirds of Americans favor taxing the rich to reduce the deficit... The findings are in tune with the job-promotion initiatives President Barack Obama announced Dec. 8, as well as the administration’s assurances it will address the deficit, and proposals from some Democratic lawmakers to raise taxes on the wealthy.

...The poll contains some of the features Obama announced in his jobs plan. Two-thirds of Americans back boosting spending on infrastructure. Six of 10 also support more spending on alternative energy to stimulate job growth, another measure Obama announced.

Tuesday evening Wisconsin's Blogging Blue caught up with Ryan making one of his pedantic ideological speeches while his constituents lose more opportunities. They also came up with a fascinating stat that Ryan's media allies are unlikely to make available to voters.

I was curious to see how much stimulus money has gone into the first District. Under the Recovery Act you are able to trace this by program, by District and by actual disbursements.  If Paul Ryan and his cohorts had been in charge, the 1st District would have seen the loss of $141, 528, 544 in commitments  and the actual expenditure of $78,290,703 according to the Government tracking site (select District 01). This isn’t chump change and I’m sure the constituents in his District that have benefited from these expenditures wouldn’t be happy to see them yanked or to require re-payment.

No, it isn't chump change-- but Paul Ryan is certainly playing Wisconsin voters for chumps. Please, consider what you can do to help elect Paulette Garin.


UPDATE: Ryan Wants To Do For America What He's Done For Southeast Wisconsin

According to today's Washington Post Ryan is eager to increase unemployment!

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), has, as usual, a better idea: Repeal the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978 that, he says, "dangerously diverted the Fed from its most important job: price stability." For 65 years after its creation in 1913, the Fed's principal duty was to preserve the currency as a store of value by preventing inflation from undermining price stability. Humphrey-Hawkins gave it the second duty of superintending economic growth.

Preserving the currency isn't something that ever occurred to Ryan while Bush was debasing it for eight years. He was widelu considered the most knee-jerk rubber stamp in the Wisconsin delegation. His record on jobs is equally clear-- the worst the state has ever seen.

Alan Grayson Still Has High Hopes That Obama Can "Come Home" And Be The President We Thought We Were Voting For Last Year

Yesterday I was reminded why Blue America donors chose Alan Grayson (D-FL) to be our PAC's first endorsee for 2010. Grayson was on Hardball with Chris Matthews; take a look:



Before being elected to Congress last year, attorney Grayson took on-- and beat-- war profiteers and well-connected insiders defrauding the taxpayers. When you see him examining banksters and CEOs at the House Financial Services Committee, you watch them squirm as the deference and obsequiousness they expect from their future employees, turns into brutal cross examination from a skillful, fearless and courageous congressman who doesn't believe "law and order" is only for poor people.

Recently Grayson thwarted the bipartisan Inside the Beltway Establishment by joining with Republican Ron Paul for a real bipartisan effort to force through an audit of the Fed. Thanks to Grayson's persistence there are over 300 co-sponsors of the legislation. Earlier, in June, he was instrumental in rounding up Democrats to vote against the president's war supplemental, and judging by the letter we got from him today, that's what he's working on again:

Next week, Congress will vote on President Obama's plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan. These wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been going on almost a decade. There are first and second graders in this country who have never known an America at peace. To them, America is always at war.

President Obama inspired us in his run for President with his message of peace. He told Iowans about his courageous stance against the war in Iraq, "I opposed this war from the beginning. I opposed the war in 2002. I opposed the war in 2003. I opposed it in 2004 and 2005 and 2006."

This is why Obama was elected: to bring peace and prosperity to our country.

Obama told the people in Illinois who elected him to the Senate, that "the consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not-- we will not-- travel down that hellish path blindly."

He told us that we should "not stay the course or take the conventional path because the other course is unknown." These are the words of a man of peace, and I believe that we can remind the President that he can be that man of peace...
We do not want to join a battle to occupy a foreign country indefinitely, no matter how much the military-industrial establishment may press for it. General Petraeus already said in May that Al Qaeda doesn't even operate in Afghanistan any more, and President Karzai agreed.

But we do want to join the battles that President Obama told us about before he became President, the battles, he said, "against ignorance and intolerance, corruption and greed, poverty and despair." Those are the battles that, "we willingly join."

At the very end of his letter, he addresses President Obama directly: "Mr, President," he writes, "be the President that we voted for, the President that you promised to be. We agree with you that we should not "travel down this hellish path blindly." It is time to come home. I remember when Barbara Lee told me a couple months ago that Grayson came up to her the first day she drafted her resolution, HR 3699, that would prohibit funding any increase in the number of troops in Afghanistan, and asked to be a cosponsor. Now there are two dozen:

Michael Capuano [D-MA]
Yvette Clarke [D-NY]
Emanuel Cleaver [D-MO]
Steve Cohen [D-TN]
John Conyers [D-MI]
Donna Edwards [D-MD]
Keith Ellison [D-MN]
Bob Filner [D-CA]
Alan Grayson [D-FL]
Raul Grijalva [D-AZ]
Maurice Hinchey [D-NY]
Michael Honda [D-CA]
Sheila Jackson-Lee [D-TX]
Dennis Kucinich [D-OH]
John Lewis [D-GA]
James McDermott [D-WA]
James McGovern [D-MA]
Jerrold Nadler [D-NY]
Fortney Stark [D-CA]
Edolphus Towns [D-NY]
Nydia Velázquez [D-NY]
Maxine Waters [D-CA]
Diane Watson [D-CA]
Lynn Woolsey [D-CA]

These are all courageous men and women... but notice that only one-- Alan Grayson-- is in a Republican-leaning district. He's the only co-sponsor who is being targeted by the GOP. (On the other hand, conservative Democrats have singled out Donna Edwards, Diane Watson and Steve Cohen for primary challenges next year, so going up against the White House takes a lot of guts on their parts as well.)

Today, though, I want to ask you to consider going to the Blue America 2010 page and showing Grayson that his efforts and his moxie are appreciated. Yours are too!

Obama Needs Our Prayers

I made this little "Prayer For Obama" clip for the Drunken Sufis "song"-- but with no joy, none at all-- and I planned to post it at the bottom of the 6AM Afghanistan post. But then I found the Eric Massa clip and the Dennis Kucinich document and I figured they were more important. It's just a couple seconds long so it doesn't stand on it's own as a music post... and then I found Matt Taibbi's new Rolling Stone story, Obama's Big Sellout. It's about Wall Street, not Afghanistan, but it's another side of a dreadful card many of us are finally contemplating. Taibbi walks us through it:

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

I suggest you read the rest of Matt's article. It's a lot better than my sad little clip up top.

Conservatives Want To Give Gays A Choice: Get The Cure Or... Get Killed

Do conservatives-- in this country, at this time, Republicans and Blue Dogs-- want to exterminate gay people? You'll have to ask them. I'm sure the Log Cabin Republicans and the GOProud Republicans don't. I doubt Republican closet cases David Dreier and Charlie Crist and Lindsey Graham want to. (I'm not as certain about more tightly closeted Republicans-- and more hysterical closeted Republicans at that-- like Mitch McConnell, Trent Franks, Adrian Smith and Patrick McHenry. And I'm far less certain about what the religio-fascist C-Street cult would like. They're at least partially behind the Kill the Gays legislation in the process of being adopted by Uganda. Last night Rachel Maddow interviewed huckster Richard Cohen, a self-proclaimed psychologist who says he "cures" gays and wrote a book, Coming Out Straight, that has been widely seen as a profitable joke-- until Ugandan right-wingers started using it to justify their anti-gay jihad. Oh-- and speaking of jihads by religious fanatics... Muslims also offer people who think differently than they do an opportunity to "change or die" just before they're killed (or "converted").

Below are both segments of Rachel's interview with Cohen, who may or may not have worked on Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), another "former" gay who now claims to be (mostly) straight.

Tax Extenders In The House Today

Revenue neutral and dull? Yes, but there's still something there

Early this afternoon, the House passed H.R. 955, a simple resolution that provides for a debate and consideration of H.R. 4213, the Tax Extenders Act of 2009 which "amends the Internal Revenue Code to extend through 2010 certain expiring provisions for individual taxpayers, including: (1) the taxpayer election to deduct state and local general sales taxes in lieu of state and local income taxes; (2) the standard tax deduction for state and local real property taxes; (3) the tax deduction from gross income for qualified tuition and related expenses; and (4) the tax deduction from gross income for certain expenses of elementary and secondary school teachers."

Forget about the merits of the underlining bill for a moment. This is a procedural resolution to allow a debate to proceed. Every single Republican-- all 173 who were voting today-- voted against proceeding. They have completely embraced pointless and very ugly partisan obstructionism. OK, that's what they think will win them back control of the government. But the resolution passed 237-182. That means 9 Democrats decided obstructionism was where it's at:

Jason Altmire (Blue Dog-PA)
Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN)
Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
Baron Hill (Blue Dog-IN)
Ron Klein (D-FL)
Frank Kratovil (Blue Dog-MD)
Harry Mitchell (Blue Dog-AZ)
Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)
Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS)

I called every one of these guys to ask why they decided to cross the aisle and vote with the obstructionists on this. I've talked to several of these congressmen before-- some their request when they were candidates and some several times. But none called back and none had a staffer call back. I don't even know if they switched parties or not.

A few hours later the bill itself, H.R. 4213, came up for a vote and it passed 241-181, two Republicans, Ahn Cao (LA) and Walter Jones (NC) joining all but 10 Democrats in favor. The 10 Democrats, though, weren't the same batch who voted against the procedural question. Crossing the aisle this time were:

Melissa Bean (IL)
Jim Himes (CT)
Ron Klein (FL)
Dan Maffei (NY)
Harry Mitchell (Blue Dog-AZ)
Jared Polis (CO)
Kurt Schrader (OR)
Adam Smith (WA)
Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS)
Robert Wexler (FL)

This was even more confusing. But the first name on the list was a hint. Melissa Bean is the House Democrats' biggest tool-- she's worse than a senator-- and she never casts an outlier vote unless there's some kind of special interest/lobbyist behind it. I knew I could reach some of the guys who voted "no" on the final and, sure enough, I just got off the phone with Jared Polis. He explained that in some ways this is like a "Christmas tree bill" and that the presents underneath it sometimes have a lot to do with which lobbyists got paid the most by which special interests. Polis is a major environmental backer and-- like Heinrich, who voted against the enabling legislation-- he felt environmental entrepreneurs/investors were getting short shrift.

Let me mention against that Blue America won't be endorsing any incumbents who haven't signed on as a co-sponsor to the Fair Election Now Act (Dick Durbin's S. 752 and John Larson's H.R. 1826) and we won't be endorsing any non-incumbents who don't advocate the bill and agree to sign on as a co-sponsor as soon as they're sworn in. Polis and Polis are co-sponsors. Bean, obviously, isn't.

Will House Democrats Join With Republicans To Escalate In Afghanistan?

The White House is trying to bum rush tens of billions of dollars through Congress to fund the Afghanistan escalation without a debate on the war. But Bush is gone. And Hope and Change are here. Right?

I recall when President Clinton, a former DLC Chairman, had decided to move the first President Bush's catastrophic NAFTA legislation-- that did so much to accelerate the destruction of the U.S. manufacturing base-- through Congress, he couldn't find enough Democrats to join with the Republicans to pass this obvious disaster-in-the-making. So he turned to a little-known, vicious pitbull in his political department and asked him to do whatever he had to do to round up the Democratic votes needed to turn the GOP minority into a majority. When the vote came, on November 17, 1993, most Democrats voted against NAFTA but that little-known, vicious pitbull Clinton sent up to the Hill oversaw a bloc of 102 Democrats to join almost all the Republicans to pass the bill. That vicious pitbull, by the way, was Barack Obama's first appointment after he was elected, the current Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Last June he was at it again-- this time on behalf of the war supplemental budget-- bribing and beating up Democrats to vote for more money to occupy Afghanistan-- even going so far as organizing primaries against at least one of the 32 courageous Democrats who voted against the supplemental (Donna Edwards).

As David Swanson pointed out at After Downing Street, "The U.S. Constitution leaves the decision to wage war to Congress, and Congress can enforce its decision not to wage war by refusing to fund it." Will more than the same 32 Democrats stand up to Emanuel's bullying and rush through the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to escalate an unwinnable and pointless war? Well, it looks like there will be far more than the first 32. Many Democrats are calling for a war tax to pay for any expenses instead of foisting it-- and the immense interest payments it will generate for the bankster class-- off onto future generations the way Bush did. But paying for the war will lose Republican votes. So Obama is just going to pull off the mask entirely now and expose us to the misery of seeing he really is just Bush-Cheney all over again? Maybe on the jetway as he gets off the plane in Oslo tomorrow?

Funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is included in the Defense appropriations bill this year. The Defense bill likely will be wrapped into a huge omnibus spending measure, a technique Congress uses when it needs to quickly clear a huge backlog of unfinished appropriations work.

And because the Defense spending bill does not limit troop levels, Obama can use the money to send more troops to Afghanistan. By the time the money runs out this spring, many of the new troops will already be in place when Obama asks for another $30 billion or so.

While some Democrats have pointed to the spring vote as the key vote for or against the surge, some liberal Democrats intend to make a stand on the issue now, including Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chairman Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.). Grijalva spokesman Adam Sarvana said the Congressman plans to vote against the omnibus and rally opposition to the war funding in it.

It’s not clear how big of a problem the nascent progressive revolt will be; just 23 House Democrats voted against the Defense spending bill in July.

“There were also a lot of Members who wanted to give Obama a chance to lay out a better course and who are not likely to continue necessarily to give him the benefit of the doubt,” said Darcy Burner, executive director of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, a policy group allied with the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Nevertheless, leadership is considering a legislative maneuver that would split the Defense bill into a separate vote on the House floor as they try to wrap up a catch-all year-end omnibus spending bill. House liberals could then vote for the domestic spending items they support, and Republicans could help carry the Defense spending.

Blue America's No Means No page is raising money to support the Democrats, like Donna Edwards, Alan Grayson, Barbara Lee, Eric Massa, Carol Shea Porter, Lloyd Doggett, etc, who already voted against the June supplemental. And we're willing to add new members to the list. All they have to do is get up on the floor of the House and make a barn-burning anti-war speech pledging to vote against this travesty that is alienating the grassroots Democratic base from the Inside the Beltway establishment Obama leads. Here's a good example from Rep. Mike Quigley, ironically, the congressman who won Emanuel's Chicago seat when he left Congress to work in the White House again:



We'll be working on bring along more and more Democrats to stand up to this gigantic mistake. But speaking of "irony," in two days Obama will be swinging by Oslo to pick up his shiny new Nobel Peace Prize.

When Obama won the prize in October, you had to wonder whether the self-esteem movement, where every kid gets a trophy, had made its way from little league to the Nobel Committee. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr.-- and a guy running two wars, who'd been president for two weeks when nominations closed?

Despite the committee chairman's defensive insistence that Obama "got the prize for what he has done," clearly it was awarded for what the committee hoped he might do (which is rather like giving a physics Nobel to a guy who hopes he'll invent cold fusion).

Well, if the committee hoped a pre-emptive prize would influence Obama's behavior, they must feel pretty silly right now. On Dec. 1, the former surge critic spoke at West Point, defending his decision to throw 30,000 more troops into an unpopular, unwinnable, and unnecessary war.

Sure, the president packaged the decision as part of a plan to "begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011." But that's not the beginning of a genuine withdrawal. It's, er, an "inflection point," according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, at which, maybe, "some handful, or some small number" will be able to come home.

If we're lucky, maybe as many troops as the president just surged, but "it's hard to envision that conditions [will allow] a further withdrawal beyond that," says another senior adviser. "We're going to be in the region for a long time," says National Security Adviser Gen. James L. Jones.

That's not a popular policy. Nearly 70 percent of Americans in a new CBS News poll think the war is going badly, and the latest numbers from Pew show the largest share of respondents favoring a drawdown.

UPDATE: This Morning Dennis Kucinich Is Offering A Resolution To End The War

Kucinich was up on the floor of the House early this morning railing against the escalation in Afghanistan and today he's asking his colleagues to sign his priviledged resolution (below):

click to read

Closer To The Endgame-- Yesterday's Healthcare Action

The nice news about the anti-choice debate yesterday that crazed Republicans and ConservaDems used to try to derail healthcare reform was that it failed and that the Maine Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe crossed the aisle to vote to protect women's right to choice. On the other hand, seven anti-choice Democrats voted with the Republicans, two of whom-- Kaufman (D-DE) and Casey (D-PA)-- are otherwise pretty progressive. The ConservaDems who voted against choice were Evan Bayh (IN), Ken Conrad (ND), Byron Dorgan (ND), Ben Nelson (NE), and Mark Pryor (AR). The final vote was 54-45, tabling the bill and, in effect, killing it.

Then McCain's disingenuous motion to recommit (kill) the entire bill, which failed 42-57 crossover votes from ex-Insurance exec Ben Nelson and Jim Webb, who once again proved that Creigh Deeds isn't the only Virginia Democrat moronic enough to thumb his nose at the base and expect to live. Indeed, in the immortal words of Arkansas anti-choice Senator Mark Pryor, "you don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate. Anyone who's watched C-Span-2 knows that. Now watch this in preparation for how the day wrapped up:



What happened next is anybody's guess at this point, although AP's report says the Democrats are giving up on the widely popular public option concept. No one is talking about what went on in the council of 5 progressives and 5 reactionaries, although Harry Reid released a statement that claimed the public option isn't dead; no other sources are backing that up. Reid:

It is a consensus that includes a public option and will help ensure the American people win in two ways: one, insurance companies will face more competition, and two, the American people will have more choices.

I know not all 10 Senators in the room agree on every single detail of this, nor will all 60 members of my caucus. But I know we all appreciate the hard work that these progressives and moderates have
done to move this historic debate forward.

But last night Russ Feingold, one of the progressive negotiators, didn't sound like he would be partying as hearty as Insurance company executives and lobbyists:

While I appreciate the willingness of all parties to engage in good-faith discussions, I do not support proposals that would replace the public option in the bill with a purely private approach.  We need to have some competition for the insurance industry to keep rates down and save taxpayer dollars. I will base my vote on the bill on the entirety of what is in the bill, and whether I think the bill is good for Wisconsin.

What I've been able to piece together is that there's a trade off-- what was left of the worthless, tattered joke of a "robust" public option for an unsubsidized, expensive expansion of Medicare (the new age, starting in 2011 will be 55 instead of 65) and some kind of bogus faux-public option that will someday be triggered by Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson buttfucking each other on Glenn Beck's show. Actually TPM says the trigger isn't as bad as the one I foresee.

As has been widely reported, one of the trade-offs will be to extend a version of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan to consumers in the exchanges. Insurance companies will have the option of creating nationally-based non-profit insurance plans that would offered on the exchanges in every state. However if insurance companies don't step up to the plate to offer such plans, that will trigger a national public option.

We'll see how many House members have the will to vote no and break with Obama who still is looked at by some people in the DC branch of the Democratic Party as better-- even if just a teensy weensy bit better-- than George W. Bush. (No, really.)



Wanna be talked off the ledge? Chris Bowers makes some good points about why what we think the compromise will look like isn't nearly as bad as some of us think it's turning out.

While it looks like we didn't get a new public option program, we have received at least:

• 4 million more people covered by Medicaid, which is a public option, than the July version of the House bill

• 1-2 million covered by a Medicare buy-in, which is also a public option, and which was entirely absent in the July version of the House bill

• An increase, from 85% in the July House bill to 90% now, in the percentage of money companies receive on health insurance premiums that must be spent on health care.

These are all concessions directly made to progressives in return for dropping a Medicare +5% public option that would have covered 10 million people.  Not bad.

Bankster Shills Making Their Move To Wreck Financial Regulation In Committee

That tweet above from this morning refers to a post by Mike Elk regarding, Melissa Bean's mania to weaken any and all legislation that allows states to regulate banksters, her patrons and the financiers of her disgraceful political career. Unfortunately she has a seat on the House Financial Services Committee, where she is constantly working with Republican obstructionists to undermine progressive reformers.

In layman's terms, Bean's amendment guts the current regulatory framework in which states play the role of the local cops on the beat. It's like moving all of the country's fire departments to Washington. We need regulators out on the front line who can respond quickly to problems before someone's house is burned down by a liar's loan or an entire economy is burned by risky investments... We need states to be cops on the beat watching the banks. So why in the world is Bean trying to disarm the police so necessary for protecting Main Street from Wall Street? It's because the three-term Illinois congresswoman and leader in the New Democrat Coalition has pocketed almost $2.2 million since she's been in Congress from the banking and financial services interests she oversees as a member of the House Financial Services Committee, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, including $338,125 so far this year.

Wall Street Democrats like Bean are currently flooding the House floor with amendments favorable to Wall Street to the House financial reform bill.

Also important to read today is a piece by Damian Paletta at the Wall Street Journal, Financial Bill Hits Big Banks Hardest, which goes a long way towards clarifying an important aspect of the current financial legislation being discussed in the Financial Services Committee.

Lawmakers, responding to popular anger against banks and bailouts, voted repeatedly during hours of committee debate in recent months to add amendments that police large financial companies in ways not envisioned by a White House proposal in June... The shift could have major implications for larger financial companies, particularly if the public mood crystallizes around the notion that too big to fail means too big at all. New fees devised by the House for large financial companies could top $150 billion, industry experts said... The populist bent could alienate moderate lawmakers and make it harder for legislation to pass. But it could also mean more dramatic changes for banks if the package eventually becomes law.

...The House of Representatives could vote as soon as Friday on a plan to overhaul financial-sector regulation. The legislation has several measures aimed at policing big banks:

1) Regulators would be able to block a healthy bank from certain business practices or mergers, even order it to shrink, if its size, interconnectedness or other variables were deemed to pose a risk to the U.S. economy.

2) Financial companies with more than $50 billion of assets would have to pay into a $150 billion fund to deal with future collapses of large financial companies.

3) The government would be able to order certain large banks to split off their commercial bank from their investment bank if regulators identify specific concerns.

4) Large banks would have to submit to consumer compliance exams from a new federal agency, while many small banks would be exempt.

Smaller institutions are supporting the bill, like the members of the Independent Community Bankers of America and the Council of Institutional Investors (a non-profit which represents pension funds for unions, public employees and companies.) As Barney Frank, Chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said the other day, "Sometimes you are best defined by your opponents-- and this is one of those cases." Barney, meet Melissa; she's as bad as Spencer Bachus (R-AL), Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Tom Price (R-GA), Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and the other bankster lackeys on the committee.


UPDATE: GOP Will Not Take This Attempt By Progressives To Protect The Public Laying Down

In fact, according to Roll Call, Boehner, Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Garrett and Hensarling "met with more than a 100 lobbyists at the Capitol Visitors Center on Tuesday afternoon to try to fight back against financial regulatory overhaul legislation."

“The message was [House Financial Services Chairman Barney] Frank and the Democratic majority are ruining America, ruining capitalism, and stand up for yourselves,” said a lobbyist who attended the meeting. “They said, ‘Look, you all oppose this bill, but only a few of you have come out publicly.’”

In addition to asking trade associations to get their members in Congressional districts to write letters opposing the legislation, Republicans asked for companies and trade associations to use their Democratic consultants to gather intelligence on where members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Blue Dog Coalition are in supporting the legislation.