Democrats vs Republicans, any real difference?

Okay, so I was challenged to come up with a list of differences between the two major parties so as to prove they’re not just one party with two names. Here’s the opposing list of where there’s not much difference between the parties:

War

Brutal sanctions preceded the Iraq War, but Democrats left the actual military invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan up to Bush. Yes, Obama reinforced the Iraq War and then carried out the Bush plan to pull out by the end of 2011. In contrast to Republican charges that came out after Daesh (ISIS) appeared, the Obama Administration tried very hard to remain in Iraq longer, but neither the Iraqi nor the American public wanted any such thing to take place. 

the Democrats' support for NAFTA, TPP
Formally and officially, Hillary Clinton opposes TPP, but a major criticism of NAFTA was that labor and environmental groups were heard from as an after-thought. If Clinton had truly learned from NAFTA criticism, those groups would have been in on the ground floor for TPP.
 
bank deregulation

True, but Dodd-Frank has had a modest effect on restraining “too big to fail” financial institutions. Not a major effect and not right away, but “what is clear is that Dodd-Frank sent notice to banks and other financial institutions that they couldn’t continue with as little scrutiny and oversight as they had in the past.”

welfare "reform"

Yes, a very bad move on Bill Clinton’s part.

social security "reform"

Bill Clinton was planning on major “reform” but thanks to Monica Lewinsky, he wasn’t able to. The Simpson-Bowles “Cat Food Commission” certainly tried to “reform” SS, but Rep. Paul Ryan thought it wasn’t destructive enough and Rep. Jan Schakowsky thought it went too far, so there was no consensus report, just the recommendations of Simpson and Bowles to gut SS. So not really sure what’s meant by that.

NSA spying

Yep, definitely a bipartisan thing.

corporate welfare for the insurance industry - aka Obamacare (originally a right wing thinktank policy first implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney)
Actually, many people have interpreted that as a clever move by Obama. By going as far to the right as was possible and still having a workable system, that left the Republicans with nothing to recommend in its place. The new Governor of Kentucky ran on dismantling the ACA/Obamacare, but found that he had no way to do so without throwing 300,000 citizens off of their health plans and thereby directly causing 300,000 people to become loyal, committed Democrats, so he backed off on that.
Also, the Democrats did have a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, but they had to keep right-wingers like Senator Joe Lieberman and others aboard, so the set-up had to be kept modest. We can’t blame the right-wing Democrats entirely. there’s evidence Obama wanted to blame Lieberman for his dropping the public option and that Lieberman agreed to be the scapegoat, but that Obama was really the one that wanted to drop it. 

bailing out the banks in 2009 but not Main Street

Yeah, Obama wasn’t in office yet, but he signed off on that.

refusal to fight for serious campaign finance reform
Another bipartisan thing.

refusal to tax the rich
Obama raised taxes on the wealthy a bit, but yeah, we could return to the Kennedy-era 70% rate without damaging the economy at all.
 
or cut the military budget
I’m personally disappointed Star Wars/SDI/Missile Defense is still being researched. Complete boondoggle. The A-10 “Warthog” attack plane simply doesn’t need replacing. Nor does the B-52, for that matter. Both planes are extremely well-designed for their function. The F-35 is another complete boondoggle that’s good for putting money into defense contractor pockets  and not much else. From 2011 to 2014, that is, from the pull-out from Iraq to the appearance of Daesh, US military spending went down a few hundred billion (it went back up again), but yes, way too much being spent.
 
refusal to prosecute makers of illegal wars and torture
Again, yup. Obama made a deliberate decision not to prosecute.

So what can we list as being real differences between the two parties?

Legislation. Enacted laws went from 460 during the last term under G.W. Bush, to 385 under a period of Democratic control of both the House and Senate, but also when Republicans got more and more filibuster-happy. Was at 284 and 296, then crashed to 165 (so far as of June 2016) when the GOP took over the Senate. Speaker Paul Ryan, formerly the Republican Budget Director, can’t seem to pass a Budget Resolution that’s, by the way, required by law. There’s no filibuster in the House and Republicans have a solid majority, so Democrats get zero blame for that. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell regards a Trade Promotion Authority bill (One of those bipartisan things listed above) and a bill concerning the Obama Administration deal with Iran as his two biggest accomplishments of the current Senate. Not really sure what the latter bill did as it would have canceled the deal with enough votes, but they didn’t get those votes and it’s not at all clear that the critics of the deal got anything else out of the bill. 

Republicans just don’t seem to like passing legislation as much as Democrats do.

Zika. After sitting around for two months and essentially twiddling their thumbs, the House finally decided to take money out of the response to Ebola and put it into Zika. Problem is, the fight against Ebola isn’t over. Neither Congress nor the Senate has voted on a bill that gives the Administration the full amount it’s requesting. And Congress left town in late May without doing anything to fix the problem. “Dozens of Democrats staged a media event on the steps of Capitol to decry the Republicans who control the House and Senate for leaving for the week-long break with what Democrats argued was so much unfinished business.”  How serious is Zika? Very!

Republicans just don’t seem to like fixing problems.

Abortion. One of the effects of Zika is that it affects babies in the womb, causing them to be born with microcephaly. That is, their brain is much smaller than normal because it hasn’t developed properly. One would think that, being allegedly very, very deeply concerned about babies in the womb, that anti-choicers would be all over this issue. They aren’t. Problem is, Zika and the called-for response contradicts the anti-choicer crusade against Planned Parenthood that was kicked off by a series of highly edited, misleading videotapes released by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). Studying fetal tissue could help combat the effects of Zika, but the issue of women who have abortions and then donating fetal tissue is what’s at the heart of the CMP videos. A fourth federal committee was established (a dozen states had already investigated Planned Parenthood and exonerated them in every case) to further investigate Planned Parenthood to “find the truth.” As of June 2016, the committee has turned up zip. 

Conducting ideological crusades appears to take priority over solving real-world problems.

Holding up nominations. The Supreme Court nominee blockade, the blocking of any person nominated by the current president to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia is utterly and absolutely unprecedented in American history. Just as an example of the grossly excessive blocking of legitimate nominations, Senator “Tehran” Tom Cotton put a block on “Obama's ambassadorial nominations in order to pressure him to do something about the leaks coming out of the Secret Service. Eventually, that issue was resolved, and Cotton lifted all of the holds except [Cassandra] Butts'. When she met with him to ask why the hold remained on her nomination, Cotton told her "that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s — the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates — and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president."

Shorter Senator Cotton: “I’m holding up a legitimate appointee because, fuck you, that’s why!”

Priorities.  Senate Majority Leader McConnell was asked about Donald Trump’s racist attack on a judge and responded “I think the Party of Lincoln wants to win the White House.” In other words, yeah, yeah, attacking a judge strictly for his ethnicity is, y’know, maybe not so great, but hey, winning is all that matters!

Winning is more important than maintaining basic decency.


No, I’m sorry, the two parties are not as different as I’d like them to be, but they are indeed different. It does make a difference whether you vote or whether you blow off the voting booth. It does make a difference whether you vote for the Democrats or for a third party.

Round-up on the news 19Nov2011

Very pleased to note that Democrats hung tough on the latest vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment.

In 1995, 72 of the 202 Democrats who voted crossed over and voted for the BBA. That’s quite a few, and it means that it wasn’t just conservative and Blue Dog Democrats; quite a few mainstream or even liberal Dems thought it was worth supporting for substantive or political reasons. Today, however, only 25 Democrats crossed lines to support the amendment, while four Republicans voted against it.

Yes, Democrats have previously gotten all wobbly-kneed, caved in and voted for packages that they considered insane, but lately, they're definitely learning and toughening up.

Bwah-hah-hah!!!! Michele Bachmann insists "I haven't had a gaffe." Uh, gee, some random, unknown person in a receiving line tells Bachmann that a vaccine causes mental retardation, so Bachmann insisted that this random person knew what she was talking about. Erm, slight problem, the claim is complete and utter poppycock. Rush Limbaugh even came to the defense of the vaccine, and when Limbaugh tells you you've "jumped the shark," you've really gone overboard! Oh, and her plan to run the government without taxing anybody was a good one! Bachmann's gaffes have been quite frequent.

Speaking of Limbaugh, the fellow got very confused and claimed that the former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was gay. No, gays, straights and lesbians all fall into the category of adults who make love to adults on a consensual basis. Rapists and pedophiles fall into a different category, that of people who abuse victims and who really couldn't care less what the gender of their victims are.

Thankfully, the Super-Committee/Cat Food Commission II seems to be headed for complete failure. The likely result is sequestration in 2013. Given that Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have declared, in response to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's claim that sequestration would result in a "substantial risk of not being able to meet our defense needs" that

"We are staunchly opposed to this draconian action. This is not an outcome that we can live with, and it is certainly not one that we should impose on ourselves. The sequester is a threat to the national security interests of the United States, and it should not be allowed to occur.”

In other words, sequestration is not a serious threat as these Republican Senators will clearly not allow it to gut their preferred programs. Unfortunately this is, by the count of the FireDogLake blogger, President Obama's fourth attempt at a "Grand Bargain." Sure would be nice if it were to be the last.

It's difficult to keep from sympathizing with Occupy protesters when law enforcement authorities get so completely out of control that they use pepper spray directly onto the faces of Occupiers who are just sitting there peacefully. Of course, pepper spray is torture and should never be used unless police officers are in extreme peril, a condition that very obviously did not apply in this case. Great picture from the same blog, by the way. What's the ultimate goal of the neoliberals who are the opposition to #OWS? Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the US have been negotiating, behind closed doors naturally, for a Trans-Pacific Partnership that would lock in many of the worst aspects of NAFTA, but in the Pacific instead of Central America.

And lastly, former Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum, gets all philosophical and declares that, when contemplating the vast number of Americans who are getting food stamps as opposed to being able to work at jobs, that hey, well “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.” Um, yeah, considering that Santorum’s estimated net worth is between $880,000 and $1.9 million, this is a real generous, Christian attitude.

Occupy Philadelphia & Occupy Wall Street march in solidarity

On the evening of Sunday the 13th of November, marchers from Occupy Wall Street (OWS) joined up with members of Occupy Philadelphia (OP) to collaborate in a night-time march. The OWS people were on their way to Washington DC to make it clear that "We are the 99%!"
As I've pointed out, that concept is a bit more complicated than just a matter of dollars one makes in a year. We of the 99% don't consider, say, the filmmaker Michael Moore to be a member of the 1%, even though he obviously makes enough money to qualify. The question is one of collaboration in neoliberalism (Don't think "liberal," think in terms of "capital wants to be liberated from all constraints!") and in trying to act in ways that are contrary to the interests of the rest of us, the regular people.
Of very great concern I think, and something that I find utterly baffling when I try to examine it through the lens of Democratic Party self-interest, is that the Democrats are prepared to help the Super Committee/Cat Food Commission II remain in existence past the statutory November 23rd date for the Commission to issue its report.
What's the point of the Commission? To try and tackle the deficit problem.
How many Americans give a rat's ass about the deficit? 6%.
Well then, what do Americans care about? Jobs. To get jobs, a strong majority supports raising taxes on the rich.
Does the Commission want to raise taxes on the rich? Ha, ha, ha! They'll do no such thing, of course.
Is the Commission in the pockets of the 1%? Yup. The Commission needs to be disbanded immediately. Neither regular citizens nor any members of the Democratic Party stand to gain anything whatsoever from its continued existence.


Update:
Two comments I thought were worth reproducing:
Occu-Posse….March to DC
Submitted by Baja K (not verified) on Mon, 11/14/2011 – 8:21pm
How to find out where and when the NYC to DC Occupy March will be?
Those who’d like to join for all or part of the march can’t do so if the info doesn’t get out there and spread around a bit ahead of time. Various “Occupy” sites may have this info but it’s hard to find.
Check out some old Hopalong Cassidy movies where his posse, galloping along to the rescue of something, was joined by another group of members, and then later by more, and then more and more and more till the whole screen was filled with the cowboy version of what the march on DC might be.
Think “Occu-posse”. Don’t confuse with the James Bond film of similar-sounding name.
————-
I though that was a pretty good question, so:

From a publication called The Root:

CBS is reporting that members of the Occupy Wall Street movement are heading to the nation’s capital. A group from the encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park are embarking on a two-week walk to Washington, D.C. They left at noon today and will arrive by Nov. 23, the day of the deadline for the congressional “super committee” to come up with its deficit-reduction plan.

RT.com says:

Organizers on the OccupyWallStreet.org website have revealed plans for Occupy the Highway: The 99 Percent March to Washington. Protesters will be playing in safe, however, and will ditch the major roadways in exchange for more pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares. They intend on leaving New York City Wednesday at noon and plan to march roughly 20 miles a day, stopping along the way in Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and elsewhere before arriving in Washington two weeks later.

Decisions reached on Occupy Philadelphia

The occupation will begin at City Hall at 9:00am on Thursday, October 6th. Come one, come all! Bring the kids, bring the grandparents, heck, bring the family dog!

Occupy Together has put together some down-loadable posters here.
Here are the Occupy Pennsylvania websites.

Now, I've always had a problem with the Cat Food Commission and don't have much use for Cat Food Commission II, or the Super Committee. But now it's become clear that the second iteration of the Cat Fod Commission is simply unable to produce a useful consensus. The Republican Party is holding firm on a no-cuts-to-the-military and no-tax-increases platform which means all of the automatic cuts will fall on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other socially vital program.
No, let's call for the complete elimination of the Commission.

Jonathan Chait's case for Obama

I guess what really annoys me about the last paragraph in Jonathan Chait's “What the Left Doesn’t Understand About Obama” (Sep 2), is that the piece as a whole reminds me of how my brother-in-law described Colin Powell's 2003 speech at the UN, warning us all of Iraq's mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction. He told me that “Yeah, it was real convincing, provided of course, that you had no prior knowledge of the debate and had no knowledge of the issues. Other than that, yeah, it was really persuasive.”

Chait's final paragraph was:

Liberal critics of Obama, just like conservative critics of Republican presidents, generally want both maximal partisan conflict and maximal legislative achievement. In the real world, those two things are often at odds. Hence the allure of magical thinking.

This might be convincing if President Obama had truly “left everything on the road,” had he truly made a genuinely maximal effort to achieve the goals he said he was committed to. “Liberal critics” were very much aware that the legislative option of “reconciliation” was available for passing the Affordable Care Act in the Senate, meaning that it was completely unnecessary to have a supermajority of 60 Senators to bypass the Senate's filibuster rule (The House operated by plain old majority rule, so there was no need for any bypassing there). The filibuster is, by the way, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Chait's statement:

Yes, Bush passed his tax cuts — by using a method called reconciliation, which can avoid a filibuster but can be used only on budget issues.

But that's a rather bizarre observation, considering that reconciliation was used after the Senate passed the Affordable Care Act, but before it went to the House for final passage of various fixes. It simply wasn't necessary for Obama and his people to permit the Blue Dog Democrats to act as though they had veto power over what went into, and what got thrown out of, the bill. Sure, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) was a terrible fellow for getting the public option deleted from the ACA, but Speaker Pelosi made it clear that, although she was in favor of re-introducing it “...the Obama administration [had] shown no interest in the public option over the past year.“


Yes, President George W. Bush conducted a PR campaign to gut Social Security and feed it to the sharks of Wall Street, but I paid pretty close attention to the 2004 campaign for Bush's re-election, but after that campaign and vote, the introduction of his plans concerning Social Security came as a complete surprise to me. Bush had successfully convinced America that Senator John Kerry (D-MA) couldn't be trusted to be our President, but that's pretty much all that the 2004 campaign was about. It was also clear that Bush wanted to continue the Iraq War and that Kerry was a bit less enthusiastic about that, but Social Security was simply never an issue in the campaign. So yes,

Bush did have one episode where he tried to force through a major domestic reform against a Senate filibuster: his crusade to privatize Social Security. Just as liberals urge Obama to do today, Bush barnstormed the country, pounding his message and pressuring Democrats, whom he cast as obstructionists. The result? Nada, beyond the collapse of Bush’s popularity.

But this episode says absolutely nothing about the filibuster and nothing about the ability of Presidents to force Congress to do as they urge it to do through PR campaigns. If Bush had a mandate, if he was describing reality by saying "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." then yes, one could draw conclusions about how effective it is to barnstorm the country on a PR campaign. But a far better example would be Harry Truman's Whistle-Stop Tour, where he reminded the public what the Democratic Party stood for:

I'm asking you just to read history, to use your own judgment, and to decide whether you want to go forward with the Democratic Party or whether you want to turn the clock back to the horse and buggy days with such people that made up that "do-nothing" 80th Congress.

That Congress tried its level best to take all the rights away from labor. That Congress tried its level best to put the farmer back to 1932. That Congress tried its level best to put small business out of business. For what purpose? To help the big interests which they represented.

Note that Truman was successful precisely because he wasn't trying to ram through a deeply unpopular proposal. He was, instead, reminding people of what they already liked about the Democratic Party. Sorry Chait, but if Obama tours the country, advocating a jobs program, then I think Obama's job would be far more similar to Truman's tour than to Bush's.

Perhaps the oddest feature of the liberal indictment of Obama is its conclusion that Obama should have focused all his political capital on economic recovery. “He could likely have passed many small follow-up stimulative laws in 2009,” Jon Walker of the popular blog Firedoglake wrote last month. “Instead, he pivoted away from the economic crisis because he wrongly ignored those who warned the crisis was going to get worse.”

Nothing the slightest bit “odd” about it. Historically, a high unemployment rate has doomed presidential re-election chances. Getting Americans back to work was and remains a top-of-the-line political priority.

Rather than deploy every ounce of his leverage to force moderate Republicans, whose votes he needed, to swallow a larger stimulus than they wanted, Obama clearly husbanded some of his political capital.

Sorry, but I saw that in early 2009 and continue to see it today as an extremely poor strategic choice. That political capital did Obama no good whatsoever in passing the ACA and winning over “moderate” Republicans (Whose voting records tend to be indistinguishable from their more hard-line colleagues in any event) has been a complete bust. Obama saved his political capital for nothing.


But by far the most serious problem, as the economist Brad DeLong points out, was that Obama pivoted to deficit reduction far, far too early. Appointing the Bowles-Simpson Deficit Commission (Progressives popularly refer to it as the “Catfood Commission” and it's second iteration, the “super committee” created by the debt-limit deal, as “Catfood Commission II”) was a true stinker of an idea that, among many other problems, made it politically impossible to ask Congress for another stimulus without the Obama Administration appearing to be a bunch of incompetents. This was an entirely unforced error that has severely hamstrung the Obama Administration, turned them away from their own best interests and aided and abetted their political opposition by making it appear that their favorite issue since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, deficit reduction, was more important than putting people back to work, addressing Global Warming or addressing Peak Oil. All three of these issues are many, many times more important than deficit reduction is, was or ever will be.


No, I disagree with Chait's title, I think the left understands Obama just fine. Obama's a moderate Republican. He's in the wrong party and his errors have probably made a second term impossible. He needs to disband Catfood Commission II and he needs to adopt a full-blown campaign to get Americans back to work. He needs to put deficit reduction on the far, far back burner until other priorities are addressed and are well on the way to being solved.

Response to letter in DelCo Times

I submitted this comment to the DelCo Times in response to a letter there, but several hours later, it still hasn't been posted. Here it is anyway:

I was out of town when my letter was published on April 18^th, but feel that I am obliged to respond to the latest from Margaret Kane. First off, someone asked me what a “progressive” was as opposed to a “liberal.” Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is a liberal while Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) is a progressive. Ideologically, they're very similar, but Schakowsky and Durbin were both members of the “Cat Food Commission” (Officially, the “Deficit Commission,” or “Bowles-Simpson”) but Schakowsky quit in disgust, denounced the group and produced her own (much better) deficit-reduction plan as the other members clearly just wanted to punish all non-millionaires for not being millionaires. Durbin voted for the Commission's recommendations, pathetically mewling that he had to maintain credibility with the hard-core Republicans in the group. Today, Durbin is further disgracing himself by remaining with the “Gang of Six,” even though the Republicans in the group have said “No way, no how, ain't gonna happen” to any sort of tax increase.

So essentially, liberals are wimpier versions of progressives.

As a progressive, I absolutely and unequivocally denounce JimmyG's comment that he desires the death of Sarah Palin. Back during the Bush-Cheney years, we progressives made it a point that “I oppose the death penalty so much, I wouldn't even apply to Bush or Cheney.” Even with all of the evil those guys performed, we still didn't want to call for their deaths. We wanted people to oppose the Bush-Cheney policies and not Bush and Cheney as people.

As to Kane's essential point, that “both sides do it” and that progressives and right-wingers are equally bad in calling for violence against their opponents, this is what we call a “false equivalence.” The examples have some elements in common, but they're simply not the same. The reporter/blogger David Neiwert has documented a rising tide of right-wing violence that simply has no equivalence on the left.

And yes, Sarah Palin was contributing to increasingly violent language in politics with her “target” map and richly deserved to be denounced for it. Was she the one and only example? Not at all, but she was an especially high-profile target for critics as her map was especially irresponsible in normalizing talk of violence in politics.

People I have very little use for

Sometimes, there are so many awful people in the world, ya just can' write just one piece on them.

David Broder commends Senator John McCain (R-AZ) for winning a fifth term as Senator. This sentence of Broder's was especially disturbing:

Nor was I bothered by the doctrinal compromises the senator made in order to convince Arizona voters that he was, in fact, a conservative.

This brings to mind the declaration of Thomas Paine in 1776:

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Broder had said earlier in the piece:

Now that John McCain has taken care of his political business in Arizona, it is time for him to return to Washington and the responsibilities he bears...

No, it isn't. You see, to my mind, a "leader" who only leads when the grubby business of getting re-elected has been safely taken care of isn't a leader at all, but a mercenary and an opportunist. A true leader doesn't wait until "political business" is all taken care of, a true leader acts anyway and shrugs his shoulders at the possible consequences.

Broder indicts the traditional press corps far more than he realizes here:

McCain is one of the few names that does not draw instant contempt from the voters.

Gee, that wouldn't have anything to do with the mad man-love that the traditional media press corps showed for McCain during the 2008 election, would it? Could it be that McCain doesn't really deserve adulation, but because the media insisted on painting him in such a flattering colors, that he gets it anyway?

Broder finishes up with:

In Arizona, he successfully steered the GOP away from an experiment in extremism.

Erm, no he didn't. McCain unreservedly backed the "Show me your papers" law that promised to secure Arizona's Southern border by authorizing their police to stop all brown people on sight. Fortunately, and no thanks whatsoever to McCain, the law has not been implemented yet. My experience is that with people who actually have principles, true principle is an all-the-time thing. True principle is not something that someone occasionally or every now and then upholds, it's something that someone upholds all the time and under all circumstances. I'm not saying that the "summer soldier and the sunshine patriot" don't have their uses or that they're always worthless, just that they don't deserve to be lionized as heroes. McCain is a survivor, nothing more. He deserves nothing in the way of respect and Broder deserves far less for handing out unwarranted praise.

------------

David Paterson, Governor of New York, has attempted to find a possible compromise on the Burlington Coat factory that some New York City Muslms want to turn into a community center and that will include a prayer room. 60% of the American public opposes building it, at least where it will be located. Folks are calling it the "Ground Zero Mosque" even though it's two blocks and a corner away from Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center that was attacked on 11 September 2001 and where nearly 2,700 lives were lost. Problem: Paterson has suggested moving the site of the community center. Not only would this constitute surrendering to bigotry, but the people there chose that site for a reason, i.e., there's a community in the vicinity that will use it. If we look at the comments from Sister Toldjah, various right-wing commenters on Free Republic and a piece from Front Page Magazine, it's pretty clear there's not much appetite on the right wing for compromise. So why is Paterson willing to surrender the principle at stake? Why is he willing to give in to opponents, especially when it's far from clear how far is far enough and how close is too close? I've seen plenty of vague, general statements on the community center being "too close," but nothing saying "At least three blocks" or anything specific of that nature. Also, as a 9/11 Widow puts it, "politicians are using the issue for political gain." She states several good reasons to fight the bigotry and build the center. Why does Paterson want to start haggling over distance when the issue is very clearly a lot larger than that?

----------------

Alan Simpson, the Co-Chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Known by progressives as the "Cat Food Commission" because it's been pretty obvious to progressives that all of the membes would like to see Social Security recipiets living on nothing better than cat food) made a real howler of a statement:

Yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits!

A very serious problem was that the statement was reported on August 25th. By the 26th "The White House accepted Alan Simpson’s apology regarding the sexist, demeaning comments..." which, along with Simpson's status on the Cat Food Commission, indicates that portraying Social Security recipients as baby calves greedily sucking away at a government program to the point where they endanger the "milk cows" health is perfectly acceptable. As Jane Hamsher of FDL points out, Simpson is hardly some "rogue operator" who just makes crazy statements which then indicate that he, personally, is crazy. No, Simpson's crazy statements are extremely important because in one instance "he had just come from the closed door meeting and was clearly saying what everyone in the room was thinking but wouldn’t say publicly."

The extremely good question here is that the Cat Food Commission is trying to solve the not-very-urgent problem of the deficit, but it's far from clear that attacking Social Security has anything to do with the deficit, so why are they making so much noise about Social Security? James Galbraith's piece (PDF) on Social Security shows that Social Security and Medicare “solvency” is not part of the Commission’s mandate to begin with and that as a transfer program, Social Security is irrelevant to deficit economics in any event.

Yeah, Simpson needs to be fired, but far more importantly, the entire Cat Food Commission needs to be dissolved, immediately!

Catfood Commission meets this Saturday

Here's the URL to the official invitation page for the "Catfood Commission" (They want to reduce our senior citizens to eating nothing better than catfood during their golden years):

Here's a list of talking points that concerned citizens can use while talking to folks about how terrible the commission is:

Alan Simpson goofs up and admits the real purpose for the commission's existence:

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman wonders what the major malfunction of the deficit scolds can be:

Lengthy piece (20 kilobytes), with FDR quote and a heart-breaking sentence: "The bill failed 57-41." Note that 57 Senators voted FOR the bill and only 41 voted against it. Yes, under the much-abused cloture rule, that was enough to kill the bill that would have saved American jobs.

The WaPo continues its downhill slide

Now this I have to say that this is just absolutely amazing. The basic story is pretty simple. The Washington Post produced an article in collaboration with the group called The Fiscal Times. It seems that The Fiscal Times is run by Peter G. Peterson, who is a billionaire investment banker with very decided viewpoints on economics and politics. The organizations he has founded and funded have "long advocated reducing the deficit through entitlement cuts and have called for the creation of [an 18-member task force to see to reducing entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security]. The article produced by the WaPo-Fiscal Times collaboration was a single-source piece that didn't make any use of any source that didn't agree that "entitlement reform and balanced budgets" were good and desirable things. This, despite the fact that 40 progressive organizations take strong issue with the Peterson group.

What's really sad, though, was this paragraph:

“We wouldn’t put anything in the paper that we didn’t believe was independent journalism,” said Marcus W. Brauchli, executive editor of The Post. “We had complete editorial control. Our editors conceived of the story. We asked if The Fiscal Times was interested in producing the story. We edited the story.”

So let's get this straight. The WaPo, in collaboration with a front group that advocates the things "entitlement reform and balanced budgets," that billionaire Pete Peterson has advocated for years, produces a single-source piece (The piece quotes the Concord Coalition, another front group of Peterson's) that copies and pastes rhetoric that Peterson has been putting out for years through his various front groups, and they admit editing it?!?!?!

What exactly did the WaPo editors do?!?!? Did they just run the piece through a spellcheck? Did they fuss over the grammar? Obviously, they completely ignored the fact that the piece was single-sourced and concentrated wholly on Pete Peterson's viewpoints. The editors completely ignored the fact that there were 40 progressive organizations, every single one of which would have been happy to have provided a contrasting, critical viewpoint on the viewpoint presented.

How could any self-respecting editor take credit for such an awful piece o' crud?!?!?!

Round-up piece on the news

Excellent piece on the assassination of abortion provider George Tiller

This person apologizes for her lack of eloquence in describing the kind of doctor that George Tiller was, but I think she did a great job

Kansas TV station 12 has the latest on the hunt for the killer


Speaking of ranting, raving hatemongers, George Miller, the highest-ranking Republican officeholder (Senate Minority Leader), refuses to condemn Rush Limbaugh, et al, who are making wild, hysterical claims about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee

Obviously, Miller is absolutely terrified to get on Rush's bad side.

People are suggesting that Sotomayor, as a member of the National Council of La Raza, is thereby a member of a hate group, akin to the Nazis and the KKK. Here's their side of the story

Rachel Maddow takes that talking point apart

Ed Rendell does not wish to see Joe Sestak run for Arlen Specter's seat

Oh, and I did a piece on different computer operating systems and how they interface with each other. Short answer - you can work with documents that are created on other operating systems, but you can't move programs that are designed for one operating system to another. You can work with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet on Linux Ubuntu (add to it, delete from it, print it and save it), but you can't move the MS Excel program to Ubuntu.