If the Obama compromise goes through, this guy will be getting his giant tax break!
As Lauri Apple puts it, maybe uber-rich hedge douche Dan Loeb was ‘just trying to outdo Khloe Kardashian in this week’s poor word-choice contest.’
Fuck, I wish there was a God.
Bottle-scarred veteran of the Sending-Other-People-Off-To-Die-In-Wars Wars Christopher Hitchens has apparently stumbled off his barstool and wandered outside for a smoke (‘kazzle-frazzle Liberal anti-smoking law fascists mumble-grumble …’) and lo and behold! There’s a bunch of total fucking nutters gaining real political power in this country!
Thanks for noticing, Chris. But no thanks for helping to seed the ground for their emergence in your small way by reliably playing the role of ‘even-the-liberal-Christopher-Hitchens-thinks-killin’s-too-good-for-Muslims-and-anyone-who-says-different-is-a-traitorous-appeaser’ for the last decade.
But don’t worry. Andy Sullivan has held you a seat at the important people’s table. And they still serve Scotch!
H/t: wolf vostell in comments
There’s been a lot of serious-pants stuff going on ’round here lately and for that I apologize. But the times, they are a ‘blowing. I’ve been spending a lot of time over at Balloon Juice, the Washington Monthly and elsewhere to bicker about the current tax-cut imbroglio. It’s depressing. But maybe all of this shouldn’t be quite so discouraging.
Lefties haven’t been at each others’ throats to this extent since at least the health care debate, by my recollection. And before that, the circular firing squad was last seen in such full effect during the 2008 presidential election. It’s useful to remember what we got out of those pissing matches — HCR and the friggin’ presidency.
So there can be an upside to these internecine fights.
And we should also remember that Obama’s Grand Bargain was only made public on Monday. We all needed time to actually figure out what it meant and to vent about the concessions that we found most odious. So yeah, harsh words are going to be exchanged in that sort of climate.
Here’s what I think needs to happen going forward:
– The coulda-woulda-shoulda stuff has to end. By now, we all recognize that the Dems should have dealt with the tax plan before the mid-term elections. Hell, they should have dealt with the Bush tax cuts in early 2009. But it’s not helping today’s efforts to keep hammering on that. We suck, we get it.
– There’s still time to try for a better deal. Yes, the clock is ticking on the lame-duck session. But it’s not midnight yet and we don’t need to ram the compromise through the day before yesterday. We need a stand-alone bill on UI benefit extensions to at least get Senate Republicans on record as blocking help to some of the most vulnerable Americans during the most painful recovery since the 1930s so they could give tax breaks to rich people. We need to figure out what parts of the current compromise might be adjusted more to our liking (a better deal on the estate tax? extensions for the 99ers? etc.) before blinking.
– All the non-tax deal parts of the Dem agenda for the lame-duck session are casualties. It sucks. DADT repeal would have been awesome, but it obviously wasn’t guaranteed even if a tax deal had been struck by now. There is blame a’plenty to go around for this state of affairs. But now the task of getting taxes/stimulus/help for the unemployed as right as we can manage before the bar closes is really the only game in town.
– We have a fundamental difference of opinion on what the ‘long game’ is. For Obama and the compromise proponents, it means swallowing some crap today in the form of worse deficits, sharper wealth disparity and less-than-optimal stimulus while battling for major structural reform on the tax code in the years to come. For opponents, it means swallowing some crap today in the form of less (or even no) short-term relief for Americans and the ensuing political fallout while leveraging the more robust revenue picture that emerges to better protect or even enlarge important social programs down the line, in the face of a more powerful GOP that wants to end them.
This is a serious difference of opinion, but we should realize that both sides believe they are arguing in good faith. Sure, a lot of ‘purity trolls’ want to stick it to the rich after watching them collect record bonuses while the economy they were pillaging went down the shitter. And there is actually a strategic value to finally saying, ‘stop!’ to the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, even if by doing so you are measurably hurting the non-rich in the near-term. But spite isn’t really what’s driving compromise opponents. Nor are they happy about the prospect of losing the good parts of the compromise like UI if the whole thing goes down in flames. They just think the price paid by letting the Bush tax cuts expire is not as terrible as the price paid by the compromise.
For their part, compromise proponents — at least the ones I’ve had exchanges with — really do believe that a battle for reforming taxes to our liking can be had with the GOP in the coming years, and won. They point to Clinton’s success at raising taxes and say it can be done again. They believe the Obama White House has the will to take on the GOP with this issue. And, most interestingly to me, some make the point that a systemic overhaul is where the real fight is always going to have to take place, because the baseline income tax rates are not where the reality of wealth disparity occurs but rather it’s in the loopholes and in the capital gains tax and such.
As a side note, a sort of counter-intuitive third take from an unnamed House Dem was reported by EJ Dionne in his column today. This House Dem is actually FOR the compromise because he thinks Obama LACKS the stones for a fight on tax reform with the Republicans, and he figures that the compromise is as good as it’s ever going to get for Dems anyway.
– Finally, we’re going to have to all come together again, regardless of what happens. Whether the compromise goes through or if the tax cuts simply expire, we’ll again have a choice. We can simply declare whatever happens to be a pile of shit, or we can look on the bright side and call it a shit sandwich. Because at least you get a couple of pieces of bread with your shit sandwich.
Shorter Don Surber
The night Chris Matthews told the truth
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Yesterday, according to President Obama, ‘the middle-class tax cuts were being held hostage [by the GOP] to the high-end tax cuts’.
Today, as he sends Biden out to muscle House Dems into ramming through the compromised tax bill, it’s Obama who’s holding the middle-class tax cuts hostage — and the extension of unemployment benefits to boot.
I mean, is there any other way to interpret this turn of events? Because look — it may well be that this is the best deal we can get this late in the game in a lame duck session. Fine. Shit sandwich at table 3, please. But I’m getting pretty sick of hearing from people, in so many shapes and forms, that those of us who are goddamn pissed off at this turn of events don’t give a shit about all the people whose UI is running out.
That’s hostage-taking, too — and people need to STFU about it.
ABOVE: Evelyn Gordon
Shorter Evelyn Gordon, Neocontentions
What Vietnam Should Teach Us About Iran
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
So the White House and GOP leaders have worked out a deal to make sure they still get historically low taxes on their millions while the working people of this country struggle to make ends meet and all of us keep trundling along towards the cliffs of fiscal doom. Hooray!
But for all the efforts Obama is making to pretty himself up to be John Boehner and Mitch McConnell’s prison bitch, has anyone told the Dems in Congress about this ‘compromise’ on the Bush tax cuts? They’re the ones who’d have to sign off on this giveaway to the wealthy if it’s going to pass before the New Year. So tell your Congress critter not to go for it.
Meanwhile, Ezra discovers that shit sandwiches don’t taste nearly as bad as he thought!
ABOVE: Blogger Bob
Blogger Bob, The TSA Blog
Don’t You Believe It*
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
*Do you know who else said “don’t you believe it”?
ABOVE: Bradlee [sic] Dean
[audio:https://sadlyno.com/wordpress/uploads/2010/12/Bradlee_dean_clip.mp3]
When I last noticed glam-goth-goon-rocker and Land o’Lakes poofter-in-hiding Bradlee [sic] Dean, he was showing a little love to the Muslims, saying that they were more moral than American Christians because they believed in executing gays. This seemed somewhat odd from a guy who appears to take his fashion tips from Rapunzel and Obelix and who would unlikely be mistaken for, say, Clint Eastwood.
Well, he’s back, and with his own radio show to boot, where he seems to have executed a dainty little pirouette with respect to teh Mooslims and their Sharia law. Bradlee [sic] no longer believes Sharia law is the apex of morality but is, instead, a threat to every single volume of the United States Code itself. The threat of the imposition of Sharia law, according to Bradlee [sic], comes not from the usual suspects, you know, the Muslim terrorists, the White House and Nancy Pelosi, but –and here’s the good part — from the gays themselves! Gay marriage is the precursor to Sharia law. The mechanism for this is, not surprisingly, not entirely clear but it has something to do Keith Ellison, the Muslim congressman who also supports gay marriage. Ellison supports gay marriage, says Bradlee [sic], not because he actually supports gay marriage. Ellison does this because gay marriage will cause our entire system of Christian laws to collapse to the ground leaving nothing but Sharia law to swoop in as the law of the land. If you don’t believe Bradlee [sic] said that, click on the audio player under his picture and hear for yourself.
This kind of “creative thinking” lets you see almost anything as a plot to establish Sharia law. Pseudo-gay, pseudo-ex-democrat Kevin Dujan uses this kind of pseudo-reasoning to determine that the pseudo-pr0n-scanners in the airports are a plot to establish Sharia law. It’s only a matter of time before DADT meets the same fate. The argument would be this: once DADT permits gays to go to the PX in Scarlett O’Hara drag, the rest of the Army will quit while the gay soldiers are too busy decorating their barracks to fend off the Muslim hordes, and then we all wake up in beards and burqas.
This could become the next Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon. We could call it Seven Degrees of Keith Ellison. Name a progressive policy goal and in seven steps or less demonstrate how it will inevitably lead to Sharia law in the United States. Here are some starters: Extending unemployment benefits, not extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, the new Food Safety bill, and, my favorite, public funding for the arts.
[Hear the entire radio show here.]
Time for another Amazing Wingnut Fact®, brought to you Ron Ewart:
A mockery was made of the Constitution, the Supreme Law, when President Clinton issued an executive order (EO 12852, June 29, 1993) establishing the “President’s Council on Sustainable Development”, when clearly sustainable development was the brainchild of an international body, the United Nations, and ran contrary to American law, especially property rights law. Essentially, if sustainable development was to be established as American law, and since it was developed internationally, the proper venue was a treaty that should have been debated and ratified, if approved by the U.S. Congress.
Bonus points, from Ron’s website:
