Intrasquad anger among Democrats, who stand to lose ground in 2012 Senate elections, can be worse.And as you read this post, you will find no evidence whatsoever to support Harwood’s claim that I highlighted (only his statement at the beginning that “every poll shows it”). And I don't see why I should have to do his research for him.
I don’t really have anything brilliant or interesting to say in response, but I thought I should point that out.
WASHINGTON — Of the multitudinous insults that have zinged across the Capitol this year, a taunt most brutal was leveraged by the Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky on the Senate floor on Thursday night. He accused the Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, of “fundamentally turning the Senate into the House.”Which is particularly hilarious since the party of Sen. Mr. Elaine Chao happens to be in charge there – continuing…
Mr. McConnell’s rage — and its expression roughly akin in this town to comparing the Hope diamond to a Joan Rivers baguette sold on cable TV — stemmed from a last-minute tweaking to the Senate’s intricate rules that prevented Republicans from forcing Democrats to vote on a stream of unrelated amendments to a China currency bill.Ummm – am I the only one who is utterly confused by this cutesy remark (of course, being a guy, I would think sandwich when I hear about a “Joan Rivers baguette”).
How about if I introduce a little bit of actual reporting to this nonsense?
As noted here (from September a year ago)…
WASHINGTON — A determined Republican stall campaign in the Senate has sidetracked so many of the men and women nominated by President Barack Obama for judgeships that he has put fewer people on the bench than any president since Richard Nixon at a similar point in his first term 40 years ago.Also, this tells us that as many as 100 Obama Administration nominees had “secret holds” placed on their nominations as of April 2010 (if I can track down an update, I’ll add it here).
The delaying tactics have proved so successful, despite the Democrats' substantial Senate majority, that fewer than half of Obama's nominees have been confirmed and 102 out of 854 judgeships are vacant.
Forty-seven of those vacancies have been labeled emergencies by the judiciary because of heavy caseloads.
…
White House counsel Bob Bauer and progressive groups squarely blame Republicans.
The Senate GOP is obstructing "confirmations across the board, even forcing noncontroversial nominees who passed committee with overwhelming bipartisan support to wait months for a floor vote," Bauer said.
Marge Baker, executive vice president of the liberal People for the American Way, said that stalling votes on judges is "part and parcel of the general obstruction we're seeing right now."
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has acknowledged that his strategy is partly payback for Democrats' blocking some Bush appointees.
But McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said the responsibility for the lack of confirmations lies with Obama, who nominated just 33 people to judgeships in 2009, and Reid, who controls the Senate calendar.
"We can't confirm what's not there," Stewart said.
But Republican senators have forced postponements of hearings and votes in the Judiciary Committee and used their power under the chamber's rules to block any easy route to full Senate votes.
And in keeping with the judicial appointments, this post from last February tells us the following…
Obama must shoulder part of the blame for his administration's relatively slow pace in judicial appointments. But mostly this is a story of Senate dysfunction and the politicization of judicial appointments. It only takes one senator to put a hold on a prospective judge -- and more than a few Republicans are all too eager to get their hands on Obama's appointments.Almost as absurd as New York Times reporter baselessly comparing one of our two bodies of the U.S. Congress to a Broadway musical (sounds like Steinhauer is auditioning for the part of Maureen Dowd’s “mini me” – here is a list of other related posts on this topic).
It's time for them to let go. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky announced in January an agreement to quash some of the procedural tactics that have stalled nominations.
(Oregon Federal Judge Marco) Hernandez made it through, but that's hardly a credit to the Senate. Three appointments over three years to get a judge with impeccable credentials confirmed to the federal bench? That's not advise and consent. That's absurd.
(Attorney General Eric) Holder’s bad advice began almost immediately after Obama took office, when he and White House counsel Greg Craig convinced the president to announce the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010 — without even examining the feasibility of doing so. Not only did the president suffer the indignity of missing this deadline, public opinion turned against the decision so sharply that Democrats abandoned the president and joined Republicans in voting 90-to-6 in the Senate to block funds for the facility’s closure. Almost three years later, Guantanamo remains open and the administration has given up hope of closing it.Gee, I gave up trying to count the deadlines that Obama’s predecessor (and Thiessen’s former boss) kept missing on when we would be all done with Number 43’s Not So Excellent Iraq Adventure (more on him later...talk about "indignity").
The next unneeded firestorm came with Holder’s decision to release classified Justice Department memos on the CIA terrorist interrogation program and reopen criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators. Holder overrode the objections of five CIA directors, including Leon Panetta. According to The Post, “Before his decision to reopen the cases, Holder did not read detailed memos that [career] prosecutors drafted and placed in files to explain their decision to decline prosecutions.” If he had bothered to do so, he could have predicted the eventual outcome: The special prosecutor he appointed came to the same conclusion as the career prosecutors under the Bush administration and found no criminal wrongdoing by the CIA officials involved in the agency’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. After two years of wasted resources and needless controversy, Holder came up empty.As noted here from September 2009…
In response to a public campaign by the CIA, the Obama administration has decided to further scale back an already narrow investigation of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture during the Bush years that was announced last month by Attorney General Eric Holder.Oh, and by the way, as noted here (under the heading of “actions have consequences”), the two Americans released by Iran last month after their illegal captivity, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, said that their captors used the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and the secret CIA prisons as an excuse for their maltreatment (yes, we know what Iran is, but had we not engaged in these odious practices – which also did not, and do not, yield actionable intelligence – we would have denied the Iranians of a propaganda tool).
In announcing the probe, Holder had made clear that it would be limited to CIA agents whose torture of alleged terrorists went beyond the bounds laid down by Bush administration directives. It would target neither the Justice Department lawyers who drew up findings providing a pseudo-legal justification for waterboarding, hanging prisoners from walls, placing them in boxes for hours on end, and similar crimes, nor the top Bush administration officials who ordered and oversaw such practices.
The CIA—including the current director and Obama appointee, Leon Panetta—and former Bush administration officials, led by former Vice President Dick Cheney, have denounced Holder’s token probe, claiming that it will hamstring US intelligence operations and give aid and comfort to the terrorists.
The Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill was supposed to protect consumers. Not surprisingly, this “protection” means consumers are going to be nickel-and-dimed to death with brand-new banking fees.As Think Progress tells us here, "it’s unclear how (conservatives) thinks a law that hasn’t even been fully implemented could already be killing one of the most powerful industries in the country" (and get a load of how our supposed financial geniuses will be forced to "recover" after reaping double-digit-percentage profit increases in the second quarter).
Blame Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, for inserting an amendment into that crony-capitalist law to limit debit interchange fees that large banks (those with more than $10 billion in assets) can charge. Banks typically have provided debit cards free to consumers, and often included reward programs. Interchange fees paid by merchants made this possible. Now that the law has taken hold, the average fee has gone from about 44 cents per transaction to 21 cents. That might not sound like much, but in the first full week the cap was in effect, one of the largest processors in the country, Heartland Payment Systems, returned almost $1.8 million to the merchants in its network.
This adds up to big money. Interchange fees amount to about $16 billion a year for banks, and the Durbin Amendment is expected to cost banks $6.6 billion in revenue, which comes on top of a $5.6 billion loss from earlier restrictions on overdraft fees. Having lost a large chunk of their revenue, the big banks are going to look for other ways to recover.
Besides, as noted here (from Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research)…
Debit cards have a cost; it makes sense to have the people who benefit from using them pay the cost. Under the former system, cash customers effectively were being taxed so that banks could allow people to use debit cards for free. Under the new system, the cost is transparent and people could decide for themselves whether they want to pay it. Market supporters should prefer the current system. [E-mail to Media Matters, 9/30/11]As noted here, though, the Washington Times should “clean its own glass house” on the issue of financial credibility before it starts throwing stones elsewhere.
DALLAS — George W. Bush says that after eight years in the White House, he's happy to be back home in Texas and out of the spotlight.I really shouldn’t give Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History credit for anything here, but I suppose what he’s doing is literally better than nothing.
But the former commander-in-chief tells The Associated Press there's one aspect of his presidency he still misses: interaction with U.S. troops. And Bush, who sent them to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, says that despite his desire to remain largely out of the public eye, he wants to make sure veterans and military members know they still have his support.
"I was a little concerned that our veterans don't think that I still respect them and care for them a lot," Bush told the AP. He added later, "There's nothing as courageous in my judgment as someone who had a leg blown off in combat overcoming the difficulties."
Bush is hosting next week's Warrior Open golf tournament in suburban Dallas, an event featuring members of the U.S. Armed Forces wounded while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, including those who lost limbs and suffered brain injuries. Bush joined more than a dozen wounded military members in the Warrior 100 - a 62-mile mountain bike ride he hosted in West Texas last spring.
But as far as supposedly “supporting the troops” is concerned, let’s recall the following from here (about Jim Nicholson, Number 43’s former head of the VA, as reported by Joe Conason)…
In contrast to the four most recent VA heads--who had previously held leadership positions with Disabled American Veterans, the Department of Defense, a state-level VA department, and VA itself--Jim Nicholson brings a refreshing lack of experience to veterans' advocacy (note: this is a decidedly tongue-in-cheek remark...)Oh, and did I point out that about 26 million Social Security numbers of our veterans somehow went missing, more or less, around Memorial Day Weekend in 2006, creating a rather significant data breach?
In Bush's first term, Nicholson was rewarded with the ambassadorship to the Holy See. But he traded vespers for vets last February, joining his brother John, who was already head of the National Cemetery Administration. In June (2005), he admitted that VA had underestimated the number of veterans who would be seeking medical treatment this year by nearly 80,000 because it had failed to take into account the surge in enrollment by veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts--13,700 of whom have suffered blown-off limbs, bullet wounds, and the like. The miscalculation was a surprise to Congress, since Nicholson had written on April 5: "I can assure you that VA does not need [additional money] to continue to provide timely, quality service." Republican House Appropriations Committee Chair Jerry Lewis said VA's failure to identify the problem and notify Congress earlier "borders on stupidity."
And do you want more evidence as to how much Former President Nutball “supported the troops?” As Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated here in 2009, the “stop-loss” policy under Bushco, which basically amounted to a back-door draft, constituted “breaking faith” with our men and women in uniform.
I guess this is what you would expect from a guy who said here he was envious of our service people because he thought war was “romantic” (and based on this, I would say that those who were sent off to war are telling Former Commander Codpiece what they think of his “support”).
Update: Uh, yep.
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