posted November 11, 2012 03:34 PM            

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Originally posted by Randall:
Some Obama supporters are so blind that they will deny till the end and make excuses for just about anything that he does. While others can see right through him. Luckily, Republicans kept the House, and we have enough in the Senate to filibuster. So, we can keep him from causing too much more damage than he already has caused.

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Dems, GOP fight brewing over curbing filibusters

WASHINGTON (AP) — A brewing and potentially bitter fight over Democratic efforts to curb filibusters is threatening to inflame partisan tensions in the Senate, even as President Barack Obama and Republicans explore whether they can compromise on top tier issues such as debt reduction and taxes.

A potential showdown vote to limit Senate filibusters would not come until January. Democrats are threatening to resort to a seldom-used procedure that could let them change the rules without GOP support, all but inviting Republican retaliation.

That fight is looming as the newly re-elected Obama and GOP leaders prepare to use the lame-duck session of Congress that starts Tuesday to hunt for compromise on the "fiscal cliff" — the nearly $700 billion worth of tax increases and spending cuts next year that automatically begin in January unless lawmakers head them off.

posted November 11, 2012 04:22 PM            

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Originally posted by Randall:
...they will, of course, drop employees to only 30 hours a week to avoid the added financial burden of compliance, so Obamacare effectively doesn't accomplish its goals; in fact, it hurts the economy and wage earners more by decreasing their take-home pay and eliminating overtime--especially since wage earners who don't have insurance will be fined by the IRS, taking more of the only thing they look forward to--their tax refunds.

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posted November 11, 2012 04:28 PM            

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Originally posted by juniperb:
That fight is looming as the newly re-elected Obama and GOP leaders prepare to use the lame-duck session of Congress that starts Tuesday to hunt for compromise on the "fiscal cliff" — the nearly $700 billion worth of tax increases and spending cuts next year that automatically begin in January unless lawmakers head them off.

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posted November 11, 2012 06:25 PM            

"Demographics defined Tuesday’s presidential election, and demographics have something to do with the impasse that will continue between the president and the Congress as they confront deep budgetary challenges.

Some divisions are clear on the surface. Mitt Romney was almost entirely dependent on white votes while President Obama won with a majority of minority votes and the support of white voters, particularly women and young people in urban areas. But something even deeper is at play and understanding that may offer a path to less divisiveness. Jack Turner, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington, believes that some of our ideals got tainted early in our country’s history and rescuing them would make us a better country.

During fights over the budget and throughout the campaign, the idea of individualism kept coming up. The claim that “I did it myself” versus the idea that we all help each other. We heard that some people are hardworking and deserving while others — the 47 percent—aren’t. What should be a legitimate argument over government spending becomes a fight over the worthiness of different Americans.

Turner recalled that in the aftermath of Obama’s first election four years ago a chorus of media and political voices chanted “no more excuses.” They said it was time for blacks and Latinos to stop complaining and take care of business for themselves. That attitude ignores the challenges that many Americans still face, and it ignores the ways in which people who see themselves as independent benefit from government and from social advantages. That way of thinking is deeply rooted in the country’s history.

Turner argues in his new book, “Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America,” (The University of Chicago Press) that individualism in a democracy doesn’t mean every man for himself. It means taking responsibility for yourself, but it also should mean every person taking inventory of himself and his role in hindering or helping to fulfill democracy’s promise.

Turner writes that the ideals of individualism and self-sufficiency are used as excuses for inaction, especially in the face of inequality. When our democracy was young, white men defined themselves as self-sufficient individualists. Dependency was for slaves. Those definitions became part of people’s sense of identity, a group identity, not really individual at all...

Moving forward requires citizens across the political spectrum to make a decision not to be complicit in continuing inequality, he said.“It’s not a matter of fault,” Turner said. “It’s a matter of responsibility.” Rapidly changing demographics mean nursing a sense of white superiority is not sustainable as a political strategy. Welfare-queen speeches, Willie Horton ads, food-stamp-president comments have increasingly limited appeal.

“We have an America undergoing vast changes,” Turner said, “and we have to learn to deal with it in mature ways.” http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/opinions/guest_columnists /article_0a2e8d92-2afd-11e2-ac5a-001a4bcf887a.html

posted November 11, 2012 06:50 PM            

"Five days isn’t a long time to digest a presidential election, all that came before it, and all that’s likely to come after. But it’s long enough to get a bit of perspective.

Max Weber wrote that “politics is the strong and slow boring of hard boards.” It is not a vocation that rewards impatience. Progress is slow. It’s tough. It requires compromises and is marked by disappointments. It’s incremental even when it needs to be transformational. At least, that’s how it usually is. But step back and take an accounting of these last few years: The United States of America, a land where slaves were kept 150 years ago and bathrooms were segregated as recently as 50 years ago, elected and reelected our first black president. We passed and ratified a universal health-care system. We saw the first female Speaker of the House, the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice, and the first openly gay member of the Senate. We stopped a Great Depression, rewrote the nation’s financial regulations, and nearly defaulted on our debt for the first time in our history. Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, Maine, Maryland, Washington and the District of Columbia legalized gay marriage, and the president and the vice president both proclaimed their support. Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana. We killed the most dangerous terrorist in the world and managed two wars. We’ve seen inequality and debt skyrocket to some of the highest levels in American history. We passed a stimulus and investment bill that will transform everything from medical records to education and began a drone campaign that will likely be seen as an epochal shift in the way the United States conducts war.

Americans of good faith disagree over the worth of these initiatives and the nature of these milestones. None of us know the verdict that history will render. But we can say with certainty that the pace of change has been breathlessly fast. We have toppled so many barriers, passed so many reforms, completed so many long quests, begun so many experiments, that even those of us who’ve been paying attention have become inured to how much has happened.

It is common, for instance, to hear pundits wonder why the president didn’t invest in long-term infrastructure after the financial crisis or move Medicare beyond fee-for-service as a way to cut the debt, either forgetting or never knowing the stimulus was one of the largest one-time infrastructure investments in the nation’s history and that the Affordable Care Act is the most ambitious effort to move American health care towards a pay-for-quality paradigm ever mounted.

The even more frequent complaint is that the pace and scale of change has been, if anything, insufficient. The stimulus should’ve been bigger, the health reforms more ambitious, the largest banks broken apart, the wars either finished more swiftly or expanded more decisively. All that may be true, but it doesn’t obviate the remarkable pace and scale of the changes that have come.

More troublesome is that even once change has happened, it takes time for it to be felt. The health-care law, for instance, won’t go into effect until 2014. And in some cases, the extraordinary efforts were meant to keep something from happening. Our success in stopping another Great Depression will be studied by economists for years to come, but in real people’s lives, that work meant less change, not more, though we should be thankful for that.

Political journalism, meanwhile, is built to obscure change once it’s happened. The demands of reporting the news require us to focus on what’s being done, rather than what’s been done (notice how, less than a week after the presidential election, we have already moved on to the Petraeus affair). The focus on conflict elevates voices that argue that we haven’t done nearly enough, or that what we’ve done wasn’t worth doing. The internal culture of the media encourages a kind of jaded cynicism — you’re always safer pretending to have seen it all before than admitting to never have seen anything like it.

There is a theory in evolutionary biology called “punctuated equilibrium.” It holds that most species don’t change much for long periods of time, but then they change dramatically, in rapid bursts, over geologically short periods of time.

Political scientists Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones have argued that “punctuated equilibrium” describes the path of political systems, too. Typically, politics is held in stasis, with little progress being made in the slow boring of those hard boards. But when change does come, it’s not a steady process of incremental advances but a breathless flurry in which the boards give all at once.

Whether we intended to or not, whether it was sufficient or not, whether we liked it or not, we have been living through a remarkable period of political change in these last few years. We have bored through so many hard boards that we’re no longer surprised when we reach the other side, and we mainly wonder why we haven’t gotten through more of them, or why we didn’t choose different ones. But viewed against most other eras in American life, the pace of policy change in these last few years has been incredibly fast. Historians, looking back from more quiescent periods, will marvel at all that we have lived through. Activists, frustrated at their inability to shake their countrymen out of their tranquility, will wish they’d been born in a moment when things were actually getting done, a moment like this one." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/11/11/the-remarkable-pace-of-change-weve-seen/

posted November 12, 2012 06:12 AM            

And that reminds me, Republicans lost the Independent Vote (generally speaking) because of what the Republicans did in 2010. They promised Independents jobs and working on the economy but once they won they instead focused the majority of the time fighting abortion and gays as well as doing idiotic stuff like "affirming God" and even some major baseball thing while ignoring jobs (other than blame Obama while doing everything they could to monkeywrench things he tried to do to help the economy and some politicians said outright they did it just because they don't like him, not because of a valid reason)...and not only did they stymie Obama on general principle when it looked as if it might help the economy but they also cut jobs (like teachers) which had the effect of putting a lot more out of work and thus not stimulating the economy (so more people were out of work instead of less). I still recall how many Independents (I think it was after the baseball thing) swearing they were going to remember this in 2012.

Of course the Democrats have their problems as well, yet from drones to the NDAA most Republicans not only want to continue it but do it even harder, so as much as I dislike how Obama has handled these issues I'm actually more worried than relieved at what Republicans are trying to do (instead of putting out the fires they seem to want to pour gasoline on them and make them worse).

And then Republicans tend to add insult where the Democrats only offer injury. For example, BOTH major parties ignore the rampant rape culture in the military, and I despise both parties for it at the national level as it's their responsibility (especially the POTUS)...but Republicans not only ignore it like Democrats, they then make a big deal about Don't Ask Don't Tell which adds insult to injury...and even worse some have said the reason to keep gays out include that they fear what gays will do to the other men, that is they fear men being treated (including raped) like women, so they admit rape is a very bad thing but then are more concerned with (at least as far as I know) very rare homosexual rape than with the all too common heterosexual rape, which is just one more way that Republicans show contempt toward women (right along with gays) and that costs them votes...and I know I'm not the only woman to consider that when I decide how to vote (especially if I feel they think I "rape easy" or a rape baby is more important than my life as Ryan does). You can gnash your teeth that we women take that personally all you want but given that we have the right to vote (and too many men support that right for you to take it away from us) the Republicans need to learn to treat us and our concerns with respect, or learn to do without our votes (generally speaking of course).

posted November 12, 2012 01:34 PM            

Where's NDAA in its legal battle?
This is from Sept of this year: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/09/obamas_ndaa_law.php You can also read the ruling here: http://www.nylj.com/nylawyer/adgifs/decisions/091312forrest.pdf

The judge didn't buy any administration argument.

As to why Obama signed it...I can only think of two reasons: 1) It was the drafters of the bill that decided that what the court deemed as a "fix" was necessary, and Obama deferred to their legislative authority, and 2) the bill also contained the military budget.

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Employer responsibility under the ACA:
http://healthreform.kff.org/the-basics/employer-penalty-flowchart.aspx

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These companies who pay minimum wage or slightly above but who hire a lot of people (like Papa John's) who don't provide insurance and then are expected to provide full coverage to everyone at their expense alone, they will, of course, drop employees to only 30 hours a week to avoid the added financial burden of compliance, so Obamacare effectively doesn't accomplish its goals;

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To establish whether or not this is true, we have to find out whether offering Papa John's employees health insurance is going to cost the business more than $2000/person. A significant hurdle to this calculation is that Papa Johns is a franchise, so it doesn't directly employ most of its 16,000 people. Franchisers do. In fact, John Schattner was supposing that his franchisers would cut hours to get out of ACA (not stating that he, himself, was going to be doing that).

According to this article, there is one size of business that will have trouble with ACA/Obamacare:

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The Urban Institute report found that the ACA will increase the number of people covered by employer-sponsored insurance by 2.7 percent, from 151.5 million to 155.6 million (this is a reversal of the trend of the past decade, when employer-sponsored coverage consistently declined). The increase, which will result largely due to employers wanting to avoid tax penalties, is expected among businesses of all sizes, with the largest bump among small businesses.

Employer spending per person insured declines by 7.3 percent for small businesses and stays “virtually unchanged” for large employers, found the report, authored by Linda Blumberg, Matthew Buettgens, Judy Feder and John Holahan. However, mid-size businesses, those with between 101 and 1,000 employees, may experience an increase in per capita spending. The report states in regard to mid-size employers:

The 4.6 percent increase largely reflects penalty costs that hit this group of firms more heavily than larger firms because firms in this group are less likely to offer coverage…than their large firm counterparts. Per capita spending for the vast majority of employers in this group, who already offer coverage, will be unaffected by the penalties.

In this regard, Schattner may be right, and if that's the case, then those employees will have to find insurance on their own.

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in fact, it hurts the economy and wage earners more by decreasing their take-home pay and eliminating overtime--especially since wage earners who don't have insurance will be fined by the IRS, taking more of the only thing they look forward to--their tax refunds.

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There's a problem in the logic of this theory: the working poor will receive tax breaks for their health insurance.

Starting in 2014, people with family incomes up to 138% of the poverty level ($31,809 for a family of four and $15,415 for a single person in 2012) will generally be eligible for the Medicaid program. And, people buying coverage on their own in new state-based health insurance exchanges will be eligible for federal tax credits to subsidize the cost of insurance. Tax credits will be calculated on a sliding scale basis for people with family income up to four times the poverty level ($92,200 for a family of four and $44,680 for a single person in 2012). (A calculator from the Kaiser Family Foundation illustrates the assistance people would be eligible for at different income levels and ages.) http://healthreform.kff.org/coverage-expansion-map.aspx

posted November 12, 2012 02:47 PM            

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Originally posted by PixieJane:
The problems I have with Obama (at least most of them) can't be solved by Republicans...and really, just trying to stymie him out of pettiness just makes them look bad. More than one Republicans has swore to monkeywrench Obama at every opportunity and it comes off as childish...now if they gave REASONS for it, REAL reasons that don't sound fake and/or petty, then that would be different, but seeking compromises is also good (at least most of the time), refusing to compromise ever (when Obama has done so, even when it did him no real good in the end) just makes those digging in their heels look like a certain body part.

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Not only have their attempts stifled every attempt in the past 4 years for President Obama to make changes to benefit this country, Republicans have deliberately gone out of their way to stagnate this nations growth and in doing so have deeply hurt the middle class. Now we know where their loyalties lie. This is a political grouping that are willing to blatantly sacrifice the well being of the majority of this country because of their insurmountable hate of this President. Not his policies but who he is and evidently what he represents (a New America). What stand up gentleman those Repubs are, Boehner what a prince!

We've even got someone on this thread hoping that the filibusters continue, in order to stifle the attempts of the President to bring about reform in the next four years. Plans that will impact this whole nation. The propaganda attempts by the Republicans have indubitably succeeded! They created a divide when they stopped taking into consideration the desires of the people and failed to connect with a changing cultural landscape. Their loss, and thank goodness. On to bigger and better things.

The Senate belongs to the Democrats, and if the Republican party continues it's annihilation agenda, we'll hopefully be looking at a change in House power come 2014. In which case the President can really implement his agenda, on top of the policies he plans to implement between now and that period. Below is a nice article from Jonathan Chait of New York magazine. It's a very long article, I'm only going to post parts I find most relevant. Enjoy!

"We Just Had a Class War. (And one side won.)" November 11, 2012 (Jonathan Chait, New York)

"When President Obama took the stage at McCormick Place in Chicago well after midnight, we were all too wiped out with joy or depression or Nate Silver auto-refresh fatigue to pay careful attention to the speech the newly reelected president delivered. The phrase that lingered in most of our sleepy ears was the reprise of his career-launching invocation of the United States as being more than red and blue states. So soaring, so unifying. But those words were merely the trappings of magnanimity draped over an argument that was, at its core, harsher than the one he had regularly delivered during the campaign.

The telling phrase came when Obama turned away from the thank-yous and patriotic hymnals into the guts of his remarks. “Despite all our differences,” he transitioned, “most of us share certain hopes for America’s future.” The key term here is “most,” as opposed to “all”—“most” meaning less than 100 percent and possibly as little as 51 percent. He attributed to most Americans a desire for great schools, a desire to limit debt and inequality: “a generous America, a compassionate America.”

Obama then proceeded to define the American idea in a way that excludes the makers-versus-takers conception of individual responsibility propounded by Paul Ryan and the tea party. Since Obama took office, angry men in Colonial garb or on Fox News have harped on “American exceptionalism,” which boils our national virtue down to the freedom from having to subsidize some other sap’s health insurance. Obama turned this on its head. “What makes America exceptional,” he announced, “are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.” Obama invoked average Americans living out this ethos of mutual responsibility (such as a “family business whose owners would rather cut their own pay than lay off their neighbors,” the example of which stands at odds with the corporate ethos of a certain ­Boston-based private-equity executive). And even the line about red states and blue states began with the following statement: “We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions.”

Presumably more was at work here than mere uplift. The president was establishing the meaning of his victory. Even in the days leading up to Tuesday, clouds of dismissal had already begun to hover overhead. The election was “small,” in the words of one story in the conventional-wisdom-generating machine Politico, and “too narrow and too rooted in the Democratic base to grant him anything close to a mandate,” in the words of another. “I don’t think the Obama victory is a policy victory,” sniffed Romney adviser Kevin Hassett. “In the end what mattered was that it was about Bain and frightening people that Romney is an evil capitalist.”

Like every president, Obama won for myriad reasons, important and petty. But his reelection was hardly small and hardly devoid of ideas. Indeed, it was entirely about a single idea. The campaign, from beginning to end, was an extended argument about economic class.

It began last December, when Obama delivered a trademark Big Speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Teddy Roose­velt once spoke, on government’s place in mitigating income inequality. It was, in a sense, an extension of his failed budget negotiations with House Republicans. Obama had decided that his reelection effort would be an attempt to go over Speaker of the House John Boehner’s head and bring to the voters the proposition he couldn’t get the opposing party to accept: that both moral decency and plausible budgeting required an end to George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich...Conservatives, of course, were dying to join the great debate over class—dying to listen to their standard-bearer assail Obama as a redistributionist and lay out a ringing defense of economic freedom. Romney constructed much of his summer campaign around Obama’s wrenched-out-of-context line “You didn’t build that,” conveying the party’s belief in the centrality of business owners, a notion for which Romney himself served as the main avatar. And when he selected Paul Ryan, the chief party ideologist, as his running mate, it seemed as though the battle of ideas was about to be joined in full...

If there is a single plank in the Democratic platform on which Obama can claim to have won, it is taxing the rich. Obama ignored vast swaths of his agenda, barely mentioning climate change or education reform, but by God did he hammer home the fact that his winning would bring higher taxes on the rich. He raised it so relentlessly that at times it seemed out of proportion even to me, and I wrote a book on the topic. But polls consistently showed the public was on his side.

Obama’s goal was to prove to the GOP that their rigid defense of the richest one percent was political poison and to force them to bend. For now, at least, their same monomaniacal refusal to increase any taxes on the rich is leading Republicans to deny any connection between the tax issue and Obama’s victory. Numerous Republicans pointed last week to the party’s restrictionist immigration agenda as the source of its dismal performance with the growing (and increasingly Democratic) Latino bloc. But the party’s Latino problem does not rest with immigration law. Polls show that Hispanics are just plain liberal on the main role-of-­government questions dividing the parties. More than three fifths want to leave Obamacare in place rather than repeal it; a mere 12 percent agree with the Republican position of closing the deficit entirely through spending cuts. The harsh truth that fend-for-yourself economic libertarianism is a worldview mainly confined to the shrinking, aging white electorate is a reality Republicans prefer not to acknowledge.

Republicans in Congress have been similarly intransigent. Americans “reelected our majority in the House,” Boehner asserted last week, and thus they “made clear that there is no mandate for raising tax rates.” Never mind that voters clearly indicated the opposite when asked directly by pollsters, or that the GOP’s continued House majority reflects its advantage in drawing up districts comfortably gerrymandered to its benefit.

Of course, what the people want is all fairly beside the point now. What matters in Washington is power and leverage—two things that accrued dramatically in Obama’s favor last week. But it’s not irrelevant that American voters had a chance to lay down their marker on the major social divide of our time: whether government can mitigate the skyrocketing inequality generated by the marketplace. For so many years, conservatives have endeavored to fend off such a debate by screaming “class war” at the faintest wisp of populist rhetoric. Somehow the endless repetition of the scare line inured us to the real thing. Here it was, right before our eyes: a class war, or the closest thing one might find to one in modern American history, as a presidential election. The outcome was plain. The 47 percent turned out to be the 51 percent." http://nymag.com/news/features/obama-class-war-2012-11/

posted November 12, 2012 07:23 PM            

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Originally posted by AcousticGod:
Basically, the Administration's stance is that NDAA didn't give any change in authority.

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The executive branch had already arrogated to itself the power to indefinitely detain Americans, that's true, but Obama came under fire for further codifying and making more explicit the fact that Americans could find themselves in the crosshairs of preventive detention measures.

If the language were innocuous, the President wouldn't have felt the need to make a "signing statement" after the fact, to calm the general panic he created.

Interestingly, there have been bills proposed like the Enemy Expatriation Act which will enable the widespread stripping of citizenship from Americans...and would give Obama a "loophole," so to speak, if he wants to indefinitely detain Americans without breaching his signing statement promise. He can just make them non-citizens as a first step. But that is rarely discussed.

Internal exile is right from the totalitarian playbook and is frightening; I'm worried about that bill (or a similar one) getting passed.

Anyway, it shouldn't have to be reiterated, but when I'm reading links that treat the issue of preventive detention matter-of-factly, when I think it warrants a hair-trigger response, I have to marvel at the calm/oblivion.

You can't get much worse than preventive detention. If someone is so dangerous that they are not merely guilty of conspiring to plot murder but are actually TERRORISTS, then there is something wrong with a government that lets them out on the loose. So who, besides the real criminals who've committed an actual crime and can be imprisoned right now, is on their minds when they make plans for increasing the scope of preventive detention?

They won't even pay us the courtesy of letting us know what we can do to AVOID getting put on the terror watch list. The terms are totally ambiguous and the punishment is hell on earth.

So it may be argued that it's only a matter of semantics, that the language of the NDAA in question isn't so radically different than previous NDAAs. But some of us feel strongly that it pays to be hyper-vigilant against tyranny, and alarm bells go off like crazy in our heads when a new NDAA is putting the threat in more vivid terms than before.

Incrementalism. Boiling the frog...

Regardless of where the bill stands now, and what parts are struck out, it still highlights the character of Obama, that he ever signed the thing, and is on record for pushing for the very draconian measures he later pretended to oppose.

posted November 12, 2012 09:28 PM            

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Originally posted by Randall:
Get a clue, Kat. When we explain something to you, it goes in one ear and straight through to the other like there is no brain matter in the middle to stop it. For the umpteenth time

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posted November 12, 2012 10:26 PM            

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Originally posted by PixieJane:
Obama has been promising to roll back the police state since before he was elected as POTUS, and he actually started breaking those promises even before he was elected president. So I'm not inclined to think that Obama only signed the NDAA with the greatest regret or refused to stand for some principles out of a sense of futility. If he's as principled as some here think then he's spineless because he's backed down time and time again (though I personally don't see Obama as spineless, he wouldn't be the POTUS if he was).

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posted November 13, 2012 04:05 AM            

1. What He Did Willingly: this file would include any positive changes in government that some would like to give him full credit for, and

2. What He Did Reluctantly: questionable decisions the President made get filed here. It is automatically assumed that Congress or someone else made him do it.