Do you support Obama, in anyway at all? Then by your own logic, you are supporting drone strikes, Guantanamo, and in fact, his tactics and maneuvering during his entire time in office, including the ones you have been criticizing in this thread. Regardless of your intentions or personal feelings on the subject.
I’m not a Democrat, and I’ve constantly expressed my contempt of Obama.
It is nevertheless a fact that those who believe they benefit from allying themselves with racists place the value of those perceived benefits above whatever distaste they may have for associating with racists.
The Republicans considered closing tax loopholes for the wealthy a concession and Boehner wanted to know what he’d get in return.
This is the reality. Obama and the Democracts win if they compromise halfway and we still go over the cliff, because starting Jan 1st they can propose tax breaks (equivalent to the Bush Era ones) to those households earning less than $250,000 a year and increase Social Security benefits pre-fiscal cliff.
Defense spending fans lose, and conservatives lose either way as they’re forced to vote for the tax breaks the Democrats put forward.
The only way they could have achieved a draw was extending the tax breaks to the $400,000 level, which Obama’s own party considered him a sell out for accepting. That it was still unacceptable dissolves the last shred of cloak over who they really work for.
The GOP has put themselves in a trap they created and Obama is making certain when all is said and done, it’s going to be his way. Bet. That isn’t the mark of someone inexperienced in politics.
I don’t think Obama is going to get his way. He is like a priest negotiating with a band of pirates. The pirates are all too willing to slit the throats of the hostages and in the end the priest will do what they say. Looks like the limit of no tax increase will be $450K and the estate taxes will remain low. Then the Republicans will hold the knife to the hostages’ throats in order to pay for the deficits that they created.
Boy, QFT.
Right now Barack Obama is quite literally the most experienced person on the planet for the office of President of the United States who is eligible to hold the office, with the arguable exception of the very old George H.W. Bush. (I’m also curious as to what Hilary Clinton’s extensive experience was in 2008.)
It’s not Obama’s fault that the House of Representatives is run by ideological fanatics. He is attempting to achieve the best interests of the United States of America and they aren’t. There’s nothing Reagan, Johnson, Nixon, Clinton or anyone else could have done.
But surely if he’d invited them to the White House for drinks a couple of times, that would’ve changed everything.
And Carter, of course.
Word. Step on the gas and go over the cliff. I’m not seeing a lot of downside here since there will be no grand bargain.
Just got more gas and my generator back on. Day 6 of the Christmas day blizzard, power failure. Thanks so much for your non-help Entergy. 180,000 homes restored so far and they still haven’t shown up in our neighborhood.
I see no progress is being reported on the fiscal cliff talks. <sigh> The House Elections next Fall are going to be a bloodbath. D’s and R’s will be out on their asses. Any Senators facing reelection will be in trouble too. Everyone I’ve talked too is so fed up and disgusted with these clowns.
There’s still a few more hours to go. I know they can come back Jan 2 and stop the worst of the damage from going over the cliff. But, really the pressure to fix it now is the best incentive for a good deal. After Jan 1 the foot dragging will be even worse.
Some breaking news of progress.
But, geez is this some convoluted logic or what? Do they really think we’re that stupid and not know their taxes went up Jan 1 because of Congress’ failure to act?
Vote now. They already have the excuse that they voted to prevent the automatic tax rise Jan 1.
Except that everyone will demand that everybody else votes out their rep. Folks around here hate congress and the way they do nothing as much as everyone, but they keep putting the same rep back in the House because “He does good things for them.” (Not really, this is a lower-middle class and below area, and he is GOP, so he basically spends most of his time screwing them over. But the GOP was good enough for daddy and grand-daddy, so they’ll keep voting that way.) The same thing happens everywhere, “Those folks over there should get that bum out of Congress!”
If they pass it quickly, they can keep it from actually hurting. But they are politicians, so they have to play games with semantics so they can go home and say they never voted for a tax increase.
The election is, technically, not next year. It’s November of 2014, still almost a full two years off. That’s why they’re doing this now. Nobody will remember the details in two years and rightly so. There will be 50 new partisan battles by then.
Besides, nobody votes on “these clowns”. You vote on your own representative, who you probably elected by a 40-point margin in November. And you will re-elect that person, with a 98% level of certainty.
There’s been progress reported through the day, in fact. But they still aren’t there.
They don’t care what you think. They’re trying to avoid being primaried or punished for violating the no-tax increase pledge they moronically signed. That is pretty much all they are thinking about.
The only thing that bothers me is this: if they can’t get this done today, what makes anyone think they can really get it done tomorrow or in the next few days? At every stage this process has been founded on the logic that eventually Congress will just have to solve the problem because not solving it would be intolerable - but that hasn’t happened at all.
Yes, that’s the Republican strategy: hope the public blames everybody equally.
It doesn’t matter how many of them are or aren’t, they are still the party that panders to racists and homophobics and the rest of them still support that party. I don’t think every Catholic molest children either but they still belong to a child molesting organization.
Or Republicans can vote no on any plan by the Democrats and propose a counter offer lowering tax rates for everyone who makes under, say, $1M.
That’s a major sidetrack for this thread, but the simple truth is the policies and strategy that attracted Southern voters were not racist strategies. They were just strategies that the GOP had always followed (minimized welfare state is a big one.) Aside from Jim Crow most white voters in the South were really Republican kind of voters anyway, at least based on their desire for small government, low taxes in exchange for lower services etc.
Why are we in any way morally responsible that a bunch of whites from Mississippi are racist if the reason they’re voting for us is because they agree with our economic and tax policies? There’s no realistic argument you can make that the modern GOP advocates or passes racist laws or policies.
Inner city blacks, once Jim Crow died, were never going to be a group of voters we’d have an easy time attracting. It’s very different getting urban votes from people who are members of a “community” than it is getting suburban or rural votes. Urban communal voters you need to talk to them on two levels, both communally and individually. Rural and suburban voters it’s more retail style politics, you just need to sell your message across the board to the individual voters, but you don’t have to treat with power brokers and the like. The GOP doesn’t have the ability to work with a lot of the power brokers in the black community who could give them inroads, that’s important because it controls things like publicity and public speaking events, if several local community leaders are there supporting a candidate’s visit that has a real impact, and the GOP by and large hasn’t found a good way to work with that group of people.
Hispanic voters are very different, in that many of them are long time Americans (many Tejanos for example trace lineage back to pre-Anglo settlement of Texas), many are recent immigrants from different countries and many are second or third generation immigrants. They all have very different back stories and are not nearly so concentrated or monolithic as the black community. George W. Bush did very, very well with Tejanos as Governor and nationwide with Hispanics because he recognized Hispanics can respond to the same sort of retail style politics that gets suburban and rural voters, as long as you avoid doing something that pisses off all Hispanics, like threatening to make them show their papers and deport them. If George Bush can do well among Hispanics there is no reason other Republicans can’t, there just needs to be a deliberate choice made in the Republican party to shred the anti-immigration Know Nothing style politics that has taken hold in amongst many whites in the Southwest.
Does the new Congress take over Jan 1? I’m a bit confused how this would work. All of the negotiations have been with the old Congress. When do the new folks take over?
The new Congress (the 113th) starts on January 3rd. The reason 1/1 is a big date is that’s the day all the tax increases and spending cuts legally go into effect. Any bill passed after that date has to be “retroactive”, in all reality because the cliff is really more of a “hill” a compromise passed on 1/1, 1/2 or even a few days later by the 113th Congress that was retroactive would really not be that big of a deal.
Where it can be a bit of a problem, is most employers use a payroll system of some sort that needs to know what the Federal tax rates are to do withholding. Many employers are just leaving the old rates in for the first month, from what I’ve heard, under the assumption a deal will be passed. But some are instead already ready to go with the Fiscal Cliff rates, which would just mean too much would have been withheld from employees check for January (something that would be rectified when you file your taxes, but not ideal for many.)