From Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, congressional leaders have found a way to work with presidents on policy, even if they were ideological opposites. If Republicans win back the House, will they reach out in good faith to President Obama? NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE recently posed that question to Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee.All together now – WAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!
“Absolutely,” Ryan says. “But these days, it seems like every time you reach your hand out, you get burned . . . from what I can tell, President Obama has little interest in trying to triangulate like Bill Clinton or Dick Morris.” The president’s ideology, he laments, often gets in the way of negotiations. “Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan,” Ryan says. “At the expense of the American idea, he has doubled down on Chicago-style politics and class warfare, pitting one group against the other.”
Here are the only six words you need to know when considering what the congressional Repugs plan to do if (God help us) they take control of one or both chambers after the election:
1) MakeAnd the proof is pretty much here in this Politico post by the ever-Repug-accommodating Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, particularly the following…
2) Obama
3) A
4) One
5) Term
6) President
“The goal, obviously, would be to make it a one-term presidency,” said a GOP lobbyist briefed on the talks.See?
And it’s always hilarious to me to read the corporate media mythology about how President Clinton and Baby Newton Leroy Gingrich supposedly put aside their differences in true Broder-esque fashion, sang “Kumbaya” and passed welfare “reform,” which The Big Dog subsequently signed into law; Ezra Klein brings us the reality point of view here…
…Clinton vetoed the first two welfare reform bills the Republican Congress sent him for their unimaginable cruelty -- they were punitive programs, focused on punishing, not uplifting, poor blacks. The third bill sparked the most acrimonious and intense negotiations of the Clinton White House, with the president proving unable to decide his course till the eleventh hour and 59th minute.So much for “bipartisanship.”
…
Eventually, Gingrich and Co. crafted a bill they thought would split the Democratic Party and sent it to the president. Against expectations, he signed it, gambling that he could repair its most offensive elements during his second-term. On some level or another, he was right. He did improve the legislation. But a bill by Bill -- the welfare reform Clinton wanted -- would have been infinitely better, kinder, more generous, and more successful than the Republican incarnation. Clinton and the Republicans didn't work together -- they worked to undermine him and he sought to foil them. He won.
Asked whether an extension of the tax cuts would contribute to the national budget deficit, Fitzpatrick said that similar reductions in the Kennedy and Reagan administrations actually provided increased revenue.Gee, I’m not sure if that gets a “pants on fire” rating or not, but this tells us that The Sainted Ronnie R actually tripled the deficit (the adopted son of The Gipper tried to spread a related fabrication here).
"If you believe in pro growth economic policies you believe that when you cut taxes people will invest in the economy, you create jobs, more people will be working and paying payroll taxes ultimately revenue to the federal government will go up and will not go down," Fitzpatrick said.
And if you actually care about reducing the deficit (and Mikey apparently does not), this chart from Ezra Klein (good stuff from him, coincidentally) should tell you all you need to know, particularly the area in red (and Princeton economist Alan Blinder disagrees with Mikey here on the job-creation impact of tax cuts – yes, I know this has been pointed out a million times, but as long as sleazy pols like Mikey keep regurgitating this stuff…).
Also, the following should be noted about the debate…
On outsourcing jobs, Murphy called Fitzpatrick out for being the tie-breaking vote to expand disastrous, NAFTA-style trade deals that outsourced American jobs to Central America and the Middle East. Before the vote Fitzpatrick met with constituents like Mary Dunne and promised her he’d vote against outsourcing. Then he walked down to vote, got a call from Dick Cheney telling him to be a “yes,” and he immediately Fitz-flopped.To reward our congressman’s good work, click here.
On the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, Murphy slammed Fitzpatrick for passing tax cuts for the Paris Hiltons and Lindsay Lohans of the world without paying for a dime of it. Murphy called for extending the middle-class tax cuts – which accounts for 98% of American families - and allowing those for the wealthiest 2% to expire.
On choice, Murphy stated he supports a woman’s right to choose and highlighted Fitzpatrick’s extremist position of opposing that right, even in cases of rape and incest. Fitzpatrick is far outside the mainstream, Murphy said, and seems like much more of an Alabama Republican than a moderate Bucks County Republican.
On stem cells, Murphy reiterated his support for stem cell research while Fitzpatrick tried to dodge his previous record of voting against it, denying the promise of that technology to millions of Americans who suffer from Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or other diseases.
Because Hastert is the kind of guy who never lets go of an issue once he got ahold of it, he took on Colombia as his own personal jihad. He lobbied then-Speaker Gingrich to push the White House to come up with a plan to aid the Colombian government. When he became Speaker, he designed his own plan, later known as Plan Colombia, to provide aid to the government. He worked with President Clinton’s anti-drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, and eventually, through sheer force of his persistence, made Plan Colombia the law of the land.Just remember that, boys and girls: Democrats = narco terrorists.
It wasn’t easy. Neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration later on thought that Plan Colombia could work. Democrats in Congress (who also seem to take the side of the narco-terrorists, for some reason) opposed Plan Colombia, because they didn’t like the politics of fighting drugs at their source, and they didn’t like President Pastrana, his successor President Uribe or either of their tactics.
With that in mind, I give you the following from The Nation (here)…
Since 2002 Plan Colombia has authorized about $75 million a year for "alternative development" programs like palm oil production. These programs provide funds for agribusiness partnerships with campesinos in order to wean them from cultivating illicit crops like coca, which can be used to make cocaine. These projects are concentrated in parts of northern Colombia that were ground zero for the mass displacement of campesinos.And what sweethearts Urapalma are - continuing…
USAID officials say the projects provide an alternative to drug-related violence for a battle-scarred country. They insist that the agency screens vigilantly for illegal activity and has not rewarded cultivators of stolen lands. But a study of USAID internal documents, corporate filings and press reports raises questions about the agency's vetting of applicants, in particular its ability to detect their links to narco-paramilitaries, violent crimes and illegal land seizures.
In addition to the $161,000 granted to Coproagrosur, USAID also awarded $650,000 to Gradesa, a palm company with two accused paramilitary-linked narco-traffickers on its board of directors. A third palm company, Urapalma, also accused of links with paramilitaries, nearly won approval for a grant before its application stalled because of missing paperwork. Critics say such grants defeat the antidrug mission of Plan Colombia.
"Plan Colombia is fighting against drugs militarily at the same time it gives money to support palm, which is used by paramilitary mafias to launder money," says Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro, an outspoken critic of the palm industry. "The United States is implicitly subsidizing drug traffickers."
According to reports by the Colombian government and nongovernmental organizations, Urapalma has illegally claimed more than 14,000 acres of dense tropical land in Chocó--land seized with the help of people like (Brig. Gen. Pauxelino) Latorre and his paramilitary collaborators. Latorre, a graduate of the US Army training academy known as the School of the Americas, was charged (in 2008) with laundering millions of dollars for a paramilitary drug ring, and prosecutors say they are looking into his activities as head of the Seventeenth Brigade. Another general, Rito Alejo Del Río…is in jail on charges of collaborating with paramilitaries; he, too, received training at the School of the Americas.As noted here, not passing a Colombian Free Trade agreement is one of the few means of leverage trade unionists have to demand justice for the murders of members and organizers; also, as noted here, Feehery’s former boss has a history of “freelancing” when it comes to that country, telling them in 1997 “not to deal with” President Clinton (nice), to say nothing of hostility to human rights abuses.
Government reports, legal documents and testimony from human rights groups show that drug-fueled paramilitaries--often in cooperation with the US-funded military--forcibly displaced thousands of Chocó's farmers in the late 1990s, killing more than a hundred. Since 2001 Urapalma and a dozen other palm companies have seized at least 52,000 acres of the depopulated land in Chocó, most of it held collectively by Afro-Colombian farmers…
The damage may be just beginning. In 2005 Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, citing surging markets in food and biofuels, urged the country to increase palm production from 750,000 acres to 15 million acres--an area the size of West Virginia. Critics point out that many of the new palm growing regions exhibit patterns of narco-trafficking and paramilitary violence similar to that in Chocó, including massacres and forced displacement. A report by the international organization Human Rights Everywhere found violent crimes related to palm cultivation in five separate regions--all of which fall within Uribe's initiative. Almost all of these regions have also been targeted for palm cultivation support by USAID.
And in closing, just remember that, amidst tales of rampant murder, seizure of property and trafficking in lethal drugs abetted in no small way by the most recent Republican Speaker of the U.S. House, Feehery still finds the unmitigated gall somehow to blame Democrats for being “unable to do anything constructive in any aspect of American life.”
If that isn’t a “pot, meet kettle” statement, I don’t know what is.
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