When Obama set up the Fiscal Commission, he made a big mistake.  In an attempt at bipartisanship, he gave Republicans equal say, guaranteeing that the commission can make no recommendations that the Republicans don’t support, because they will goose-step together.  To make matters worse, the Democrats include a notorious DINO.  While I have reserved judgment until I see the actual report, I have come to think that calling it the cat food commission is not far off.  Fortunately, Obama is taking a saner approach to the problem.

President Barack Obama said on Thursday he favored raising more revenue for Social Security to prolong the solvency of the U.S. retirement fund, rather than just cutting benefits or making people work longer.

Obama told a televised youth town hall event that he thought the best approach was to increase the amount of income subject to Social Security taxes above the current cap set around $106,000, but he did not rule anything out.

"I have said that all options are on the table. I think we’ve got to look at how we preserve it for the next generation," he said.

"I do think that the best way to do it would be to look at the fact that right now, you only pay Social Security taxes to about $106,000, and after that you don’t pay any Social Security tax," he said. "That could be modified or changed in a way that would help extend the solvency of Social Security."

His remarks lay down a marker for the president’s fiscal commission as it weighs options for Social Security that also include extending the U.S. retirement age, currently set at 67 for those born after 1960, or limiting some benefits… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Reuters>

My solution is to completely eliminate the salary cap.  The Republicans have three proposals:

• Privatize Social Security:  What will seniors do the next time Republicans trash the economy and their retirement accounts vaporize into bankster bonuses?
• Cut Benefits:  Benefits are already so low that many seniors are living in poverty now.
• Increase the retirement age:  This one is class warfare.  Working longer is more difficult for laborers.  Furthermore life expectancy is directly proportional to income.  Raising the retirement age diverts most of the benefits to the rich.

The only solution that  makes sense if for everyone to pay their fair share.

You know that the US Chamber of Commerce is funding attack ads, lots of them, against Democrats.  Almost all blame Democrats for the job losses caused by Republican policies.  The irony here is the the Chamber is a front line proponent of outsourcing US jobs, and they’re getting the ad money from the corporations that outsource jobs and the foreign companies and countries that are benefiting from the outsourcing.  I have an idea to combat this and an action plan.

A top Democrat on Tuesday said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s “agenda” is to send U.S. jobs overseas.

“The Chamber has an agenda, and it’s aimed at promoting outsourcing of American jobs, and spending money against those who stood against them,” said Jon Vogel, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).

Vogel made the comment at a forum hosted by National Journal, which included his Republican counterpart, Guy Harrison, executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Upon hearing Vogel’s comment, Harrison pounced.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait. The Chamber’s agenda is outsourcing U.S. jobs. The U.S Chamber of Commerce? I just want to make sure,” Harrison said.

Vogel and Harrison talked back and forth for a moment as the audience tittered. Vogel made reference to comments by the Chamber’s chief executive, Tom Donohue. A DCCC spokesman later sent out a list of comments by Donohue on the topic.

“There are legitimate values in outsourcing,” Donohue said in 2004, “to gain technical experience and benefit we don’t have here, to lower the price of products, which means more and more of them are brought into the United States.”

“But the bottom line is that we outsource very few jobs in relation to the size of our economy,” Donohue said. “American companies employ 140 million Americans … The outsourcing deal over three or four or five years and the two or three sets of numbers are only going to be, you know, maybe two, maybe three million jobs, maybe four.”

The Chamber also recently opposed legislation called the “Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act.”

According to OpenCongress.org, the bill “would give companies a two-year payroll tax holiday, reducing the amount of Social Security taxes they would have to pay, for new employees who replace workers doing similar jobs overseas.”

“It also revokes provisions of the tax code that Democrats say encourage companies to outsource their work force.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Daily Caller>

As expected, Rachel Maddow was all over the story.

The problem here is that too many voters are not yet informed of the vicious cycle in play here.  We have to change that.  Please watch for Chamber attack ads where you live.  When you see one, contact everyone you know.  Ask them if they have seen the ad, and tell them about it, if they have not.  Explain to them that, while the Chamber is attacking the Democrat for the job losses there, they are funding the ads with secret money from both the corporations who are sending the jobs overseas and from the foreign countries and corporations that are getting the jobs.  Ask them to tell everyone they know.  To start the ball rolling, I have told and am asking you.

If you haven’t guessed by the five previous articles I have posted, I oppose Chris Dudley for Oregon Governor.  If he were running against a mentally challenged chimpanzee with halitosis and mange, who masturbated in public and threw feces at passing crowds, I’d vote for the monkey.  Kitz is a big improvement over that, so he’s an even bigger improvement over Dudley, a tax evader, global warming denier, and corporate shill.  What’s more, he couldn’t make a free throw in a close game if his life depended on it.  But this one tops them all.

It’s awfully tough to present your party as the champion of populist fury when the centerpiece of your 2010 campaign is another $700 billion tax cut windfall for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. Which is why, as the AP reported Wednesday, GOP consultants are working overtime to recast Linda McMahon, Rick Scott, Meg Whitman and other very rich Republican candidates as regular folk. But with the wolves’ in sheep’s clothing showing their true colors over the minimum wage, unemployment benefits and retirement security, those carefully manufactured images may yet go down in flames.

Or in the case of Oregon Republican Chris Dudley, up in flames.

The son of a well-to-do family who converted his professional basketball career into providing financial advice to the gilded class, Dudley has called for slashing the state’s capital gains tax rate in a move that would drain $800 million from Salem’s already broken budget. Like billionaire Meg Whitman in California, Dudley would be reap a big payday from the tax cuts he proposes. Then again, Dudley was even better at gaming the tax system than playing basketball.

As the Willamette Week and later the Oregonian detailed, in 2004 Chris Dudley claimed a $350,00[0] tax deduction for letting the Lake Owego fire department burn down house his house in a training exercise. In a nutshell, Dudley got U.S. taxpayers to help pay for the new home he built there.

The Willamette Week described the Dudley’s 2004 “Burn to Learn” gambit, the same one which got ESPN announcer Kirk Herbstreit in hot water with the Internal Revenue Service in Ohio:

In December 2002, during the last of his 16 NBA seasons, then-Portland Trail Blazer Dudley bought a 1.81-acre property in Lake Oswego for $1.15 million. The property included a 4,900-square-foot home with four bedrooms, four bathrooms and a four-car garage…

Dudley claimed a $350,000 deduction for the house on his 2004 federal tax return. He based the value on an appraisal he supplied to WW, which says its purpose was to “establish both the overall market value of the property, and the market value of the site.”

Given Dudley’s career NBA earnings of more than $30 million, he probably faced a combined federal and state income tax bill of 40 percent in 2004. That means the $350,000 deduction saved him about $140,000.

And while Americans debate the morality of Tennessee firefighters watching a man’s home consumed by flames over an unpaid $75 fee, Dudley’s burning-down-the-house scheme has gone unnoticed.

Chris Dudley, it turns out, is the poster child for President George W. Bush’s claim that “the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.”…

…And Chris Dudley isn’t content to cut business and upper-crust tax rates (including his own), as BlueOregon was among the first to document, . Another Dudley gift to business would be slashing Oregon’s $8.50 minimum wage. As he explained at an Intel forum in September:

“It doesn’t make sense that our waitresses are getting tips plus the highest minimum wage in the country.”

When a questioner lamented that “it attracts the wrong end of the labor pool to our state,” Dudley concurred by responding, “”I agree with you on that issue.” But for the cell phone camera which caught the exchange, Chris Dudley confessed that his opposition to the minimum wage is the hate that dare not speak its name:

“I’m not going to make a forefront campaign issue on it because I think it’s something – it’s a hot button that people don’t really understand.”

Of course, voters do understand the Republicans’ water carrying for the wealthy; they just may not know about it… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>

Whenever Republicans are backed into a corner over their corporate corruption, that are quick to claim that we common folk just aren’t bright enough to understand the issue.   Art Robinson told the same lie.  Dudley Do Wrong is wrong for Oregon!

Vote!

When Barack Obama assumed office in January, 2009, he already had two strikes against him.  He inherited a mess comparable to what FDR faced the last time the Republicans had wrecked the economy under Hoover.  But in FDR’s day, Republicans were a saner breed and many were willing to work with him to make things better for Americans.  Today’s Republicans are so despicably desperate for power that they are intentionally sabotaging our nation to keep Obama from making accomplishments, even going so far as to filibuster their own proposals.  In spite of that, he has accomplished some amazing things.  I have been free with my own criticism of the man, and will continue to be so.  Whenever I think he is wrong, I say so, and will continue to do so.  However, he far better than anyone the Republicans have to offer and he will have zero chance to accomplish anything else, if Republicans take the House and the Senate.  Lets give him the chance.

…From the outset, it was inevitable that Obama’s transcendent campaign would give way to an earthbound presidency — one constrained by two wars, an economy in free fall and an opposition party bent on obstruction at any price. "Expectations were so sky-high for him that they were impossible to fulfill," says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. "Obama’s partly to blame for this: People were expecting a progressive revolution. What the president has delivered instead is gritty, nuts-and-bolts, political legislative work — and it’s been rough."

During his campaign, skeptics warned that Barack Obama was nothing but a "beautiful loser," a progressive purist whose uncompromising idealism would derail his program for change. But as president, Obama has proved to be just the opposite — an ugly winner. Over and over, he has shown himself willing to strike unpalatable political bargains to secure progress, even at the cost of alienating his core supporters. Single-payer health care? For Obama, it was a nonstarter. The public option? A praiseworthy bargaining chip in the push for reform.

This bloodless, if effective, approach to governance has created a perilous disconnect: By any rational measure, Obama is the most accomplished and progressive president in decades, yet the only Americans fired up by the changes he has delivered are Republicans and Tea Partiers hellbent on reversing them. Heading into the November elections, Obama’s approval ratings are mired in the mid-40s, and polls reflect a stark enthusiasm gap: Half of all Republicans are "very" excited about voting this fall, compared to just a quarter of Democrats. "Republicans have succeeded in making even the president’s victories look distasteful, messy — and seem like bad policy steps or defeats," says Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Many on the left have expressed nothing but anger, frustration and disappointment."

But if the passions of Obama’s base have been deflated by the compromises he made to secure historic gains like the Recovery Act, health care reform and Wall Street regulation, that gloom cannot obscure the essential point: This president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 20 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. "When you look at what will last in history," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, "Obama has more notches on the presidential belt."

In fact, when the history of this administration is written, Obama’s opening act is likely to be judged as more impressive than any president’s — Democrat or Republican — since the mid-1960s. "If you’re looking at the first-two-year legislative record," says Ornstein, "you really don’t have any rivals since Lyndon Johnson — and that includes Ronald Reagan." [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Rolling Stone>

This is the lash half page of an extensive seven page article that thoroughly lays out the issues involved to reach this conclusion.  I urge you to click through and read it.

During Obama’s campaign I warned over and over again that he is a centrist and would govern from the middle.  I sat on the fence for a long time, before I decided to support him shortly before the primary.  Sadly, many of my fellow progressive friends were to ecstatic with Obamaphilia to see that and painted him with the image of who they wanted him to be instead of seeing him as he is.  Many now feel betrayed and are taking the attitude that they want what the want, they want it all now, and if they can’t have it they will jump off the bandwagon.

In my ideal world we would have single payer health care (Medicare for all), ENDA in, DOMA and DADT gone, 100% public financing for campaigns, TBTF banks broken up, massive stimulus and more.  If only we lived in my ideal world, but we don’t.  At least under Obama we have had some PROGRESS.

Therefore progressives should support that progress by hanging in there.  The sweetness of that rebel thrill of voting for the third party candidate (except in rare cases like SC-1, where the Democrat is a Republican plant) will sour in your mouth, if Republicans return to power.