Politics Plus

The time is fast approaching that we will soon see the Republican brain-trust, Beck, Limbaugh and O’Reilly, embark on their annual round of lies accusing the Democrats of waging war on Christmas.  However, the real war on Christmas comes not from the Democrats, but from Republicans.  And, if you are among the two million Americans about to join the ranks of the 99ers, or a member of one of their families, you just got a Christmas present from the Republican party.

Millions of jobless Americans could see unemployment benefits run out in coming weeks after an effort to extend them failed in the House of Representatives on Thursday.

House Democratic leaders said they would take up the measure again but Congress has little time before the benefits expire on November 30. Lawmakers are expected to leave Washington next week for the Thanksgiving holiday and the Senate has not scheduled a vote.

The jobless rate has been stuck around 9.6 percent as the United States struggles to emerge from the financial crisis and its worst recession since the 1930s. Economists expect unemployment to remain high for years to come.

Congress has let jobless benefits lapse twice already this year as Republicans insist the cost — $160 billion in the last fiscal year — be offset by cuts elsewhere to prevent the nation’s $14 trillion debt from growing further.

"We all want to help those in need. But the American people know that someone has to pay when the government spends money and it shouldn’t be our children and grandchildren," said Republican Representative Charles Boustany.

But Democrats say Republicans showed no similar concerns when approving spending for two wars and when pushing to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which would add an estimated $700 billion to the deficit over 10 years.

If the measure is not renewed, some 2 million people by the end of the year will stop getting weekly checks they receive as they look for work, says the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for workers’ rights… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Reuters>

Democrats had to use special rules, requiring a 67%, to prevent Republicans from clogging the calendar with debate on amendments.  The final vote was 258 Yeas to 154 Nays.  Never before has Congress failed to extend these benefits at a time of high unemployment.  Keith Olbermann and Jeanne Reinman, a soon to be 99er, fill in the details.

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I found it touching that Reinman had the compassion to consider those worse off that she is in the midst of her trouble. I consider it despicable that Republicans and a handful of Bush-Dog DINOs want to say yes to the very people whose greed put so many out of work and no to the victims of their greed.

I only hope that the children who will find nothing under the tree and wish there were some coal there so they could stay warm grow up to remember  that when they needed help most, the Republican party, out of pure greed, declared war on their Christmas and said no.

It’s a given that the Republican party lacks anything resembling a a new idea, but some of their old ideas are downright scary.  Did you know we still face a soviet threat?  That’s what one Republican Senator said, while trying to justify a policy that just may be a cover-up to hide a Republican threat against Russia.

Appearing on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell today, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) attempted to justify the threatened Republican obstruction of the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. But in doing so, he wrongly called Russia the Soviet Union — not once, but twice. Watch it:

 

While Barrasso may say this was a slip of the tongue and that he knows that the Soviet Union collapsed nearly twenty years ago in 1991, this is not the first time far-right senators have made this mistake when talking about START. Barrasso also tellingly concluded his remarks by asserting that he disagrees “with the component [of START] that weakens our own missile defense against all enemies, not just the Soviet Union.”

Grouping the Soviet Union (meaning Russia) with other “enemies” of the U.S., is reflective of an outdated Cold War mindset that can only lead to renewed tensions with Russia.

Should Republicans kill the New START treaty, the “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations may collapse. This could endanger U.S. troops in Afghanistan, who depend on supply routes through Russia, and could derail Russian cooperation on Iran sanctions. Perhaps most worrying is that without New START, the U.S. will be unable to monitor Russia’s nuclear arsenal as it has since the end of the Cold War, potentially creating significant nuclear instability… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

Rachel Maddow thinks that the sole reason for this is the Republican policy of opposing anything Obama likes, including their own ideas.  She and Josh Rogin make an excellent case for this.

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Here we have one of those rare instances in which I think Rachel might be mistaken.

I think that Republicans still think of Russia as the enemy.  In addition, this stance could involve corporate criminal greed.  When the Soviet Union broke up four new independent republics, collectively known as the Stans,  around the Caspian Sea, inherited the Soviet Union’s huge gas reserves.  Currently the gas from those fields are piped to Russia and distributed by Gazprom, Russia’s largest company, and the largest supplier of natural gas in the world.  Republicans want control of that gas and have made two earlier attempts to snatch it.

Before GW Bush invaded Afghanistan, he buddied up to the Taliban to negotiate a pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Karachi to bring that gas under US control.

After Bush invaded Afghanistan, he installed a Unocal (own part of Chevron) employee with expertise in gas pipelines, Hamid Karzai, as puppet President there.  He then shifted the focus of US troops securing the route to build that pipeline.  He failed.

As long as Russia has a resource that Republicans want, they will look for ways to take it, making Russia their enemy.  If they accuse Obama of being a communist with impunity, is it that far fetched that they would accuse Russia as well?

Back to Rachel’s piece, Lugar is right.  Reid should call his party’s bluff.  But what will Reid do?  I fear that he will do what he usually does: wag his tail, hump a few Republican legs begging for votes, whine, roll over and play dead.

The US Constitution divides the separation of powers between the three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.  This worked well for over two hundred years until the worst president in US history declared the theory of the unitary executive, asserting that he had the power to do whatever Cheney told him to do.  Republicans backed off that notion in short order, when Obama became President, but they would still reapportion the power to govern as they see fit.

The mixed verdict in the case of the first Guantánamo detainee to be tried in a civilian court on Wednesday quickly re-ignited a fierce debate over the Obama administration’s effort to restore the role of the traditional criminal justice system in handling terrorism prosecutions.

Ahmed Ghailani will face between 20 years and life in prison as a result of his conviction on one charge related to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. But because a jury acquitted him on more than 280 other charges — including every count of murder — critics of the Obama administration’s strategy on detainees said the verdict proved that civilian courts could not be trusted to handle the prosecution of Al Qaeda terrorists.

“This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantánamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantánamo.”

Adding political force of such criticism, Mr. King is set to become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee in January, and he promised to use oversight hearings to pressure the administration over its handling of terrorism trials.

Several other soon-to-be-powerful Republican lawmakers – including Lamar Smith of Texas, in the incoming Judiciary Committee chairman, and Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the incoming chairman of the Intelligence Committee – made similar statements denouncing the use of civilian courts to prosecute terrorism cases.

Still, some proponents of using the regular court system rejected potrayals [sic] of the verdict as a disaster.

Among them, Mason Clutter, the counsel of the Rule of Law Program at the Constitution Project, a bipartisan non-profit group, said that Mr. Ghailani will serve a lengthy sentence and will have far fewer arguments to make in appealing his conviction than if he had faced a military trial.

“The system worked here,” she said. “I don’t think we judge success based on the number of convictions that were received. I think we judge success based on fair prosecutions consistent with the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Ms. Clutter also noted that most of the usual arguments that proponents of military tribunals make about the risk of civilian trials – like extreme security costs, grandstanding by the defendant, and the disclosure of classified information – did not happen in the Ghailani case.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said late Wednesday that his office would seek a life sentence for Mr. Ghailani… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

To deny the judicial branch the power that the Constitution mandates, because they don’t like the verdict, is the pure hypocrisy.  If these people cannot be convicted of crimes under US law, as the Constitution provides, they should be repatriated.

The question here is a simple one.  Shall we govern as the Constitution dictates or according to Republican whim?

This also illustrates the need to remove GOP Joe LIEberman from the Chair of Homeland Security in the Senate.

What is it?  The Republicans’ favorite lie is that they are the party of fiscal responsibility.  That’s the common wisdom.  That’s what we keep hearing on the TV.  It’s those big spending Democrats and responsible Republicans.  The only problem with this is that it is indeed a lie.  One of the ways Republicans say they will slash spending is with a moratorium  on earmarks.  That is another lie.  First of all earmarks account for only $16 billion out of $3.5 trillion.  They are insignificant.   More important, abolishing earmarks will not reduce the federal deficit by one penny.  Once the budget is set, it’s set.  That amount of money will be spent.  Earmarks merely decide how that portion is spent.  Without them a bureaucrat decides how it’s spent.  So all this Republican hoopla is just a distraction from the real issue.  They intend to increase the debt by hundreds of billions of dollars, almost two trillion, in fact.

Senate Republicans voted Tuesday to abandon the use of budget earmarks that direct money to favored projects, setting up an unusual alliance with the White House and exerting pressure on reluctant Democratic lawmakers to follow suit.

The vote by the GOP caucus for a two-year moratorium on earmarks is not binding on its members, but it provided an early example of the influence of the conservative "tea party" movement after the midterm election. House Republicans are expected to take a similar step Thursday.

Just eight months ago, a proposal to do away with earmarks was shot down in an overwhelming vote of the Senate that included substantial Republican opposition.

Republican and Democratic supporters of the earmark moratorium said they would push for a floor vote that would be binding on all senators, and a promise from President Obama to veto any spending bill containing earmarks.

Democratic leaders face a difficult decision on how to proceed. They show no inclination for doing away with earmark expenditures, even as Obama has expressed his desire to limit the practice and newer Democratic senators have sided with him and Republicans on the issue.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), an unabashed earmark supporter whose reelection victory was due in part to his success at steering federal dollars to his home state, said Tuesday, "I am not going, personally, going to back off of bringing stuff back to Nevada."…

Inserted from <LA Times>

Actually I favor the moratorium, because earmarks are a way Senators and Representatives with seniority pay political debts and get a disproportionate share of spending for their states and districts.  They make the spending more wasteful.

Rachel Maddow did a great piece on Republican plans to balloon the debt.

Can there now be any doubt that Democrats, however wasteful, are the far more fiscally responsible party?