Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Obama probably doesn't want to go there, because it could have two outcomes, neither of which are good for him:

1. Boehner's office files a lawsuit, the case goes to the Supreme Court, Roberts & Co. rule against Obama and he is labeled as a gangster thug President who wants to hoard more power for the executive branch that even Bush II and Cheney could have ever dreamed of.

2. Obama wins the lawsuit, but the GOP and its allied outside groups run TV ads from now until Election Day 2012 still calling Obama a gangster thug President who can't stop spending and had to get bailed out by the Supreme Court. And the last 30+ years have shown that when a political battle comes down to sheer messaging, Republicans almost always win.

The political environment is very different than it was in Clinton's time. Yes, the Republicans hated him almost as much as they do Obama, and for many of the same reasons (some of them deserved, BTW). But there was no Fox News to beat the conservative talking point drum 24-7. And the Democrats in Congress back then actually had some message discipline, unlike Democrats today.

 

"The one network that reports both sides" -- Is this a joke? I'm assuming you're a journalist to be on this board, so you must be joking.

 

And the nation is plunged into economic cataclysm possibly WORSE than the Great Depression, which Obama and the Dems can dump 100.00000 percent on the wingnuts.

Nothing can stop that now.

As soon as their designated "angry black man" Cain works himself up into a foam of fine outrage and "lets slip" the N-word on Obama, the door will be kicked open, and they'll all go storming through.

Lee Atwater knew the truth.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E6DF1E30F935A35753C1A9639C8B63

Listen to the late Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the evolution of the G.O.P.'s Southern strategy:

''You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

''And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'''

Atwater, who would manage George H.W. Bush's successful run for the presidency in 1988 (the Willie Horton campaign) and then serve as national party chairman, was talking with Alexander P. Lamis, a political-science professor at Case Western Reserve University. Mr. Lamis quoted Atwater in the book ''Southern Politics in the 1990's.''

The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites.

Once Uncle Cain kicks open the door, they're right back to 1954. Why else do you think they're letting him hang around in the spotlight, before they send him back to the back 40 like all the other field hands? Because he can go where none of them can. And "set them all free."

If the GOP actually does push the whole nation into the abyss, I suspect the Dems will all get on the same page pretty damn quick. It'll be the same page as the armed mobs storming GOP politicians' offices.

Oh and BTW the GOP hates Obama more than Clinton by an exponential margin. Can't possibly imagine why.

 

OK, I'll share a little of my own situation here. In the past three years, we've lost 25 percent of our household income. We did not lose 25 percent of our household bills. The reality is we're barely making ends meet, and that few hundred dollars you so trivially throw around is significant, and it's lowball. My tax bill before my home purchase was about $3,500 more than afterward. And it's still pretty close to that. Being able to itemize because of the MID makes a huge difference. I'm six years into my mortgage and I can still write off virtually all of my mortgage payments because they're 95 percent interest at this point. (yeah, high interest; my credit wasn't the best. It is what it is. I'm very likely one of those people that shouldn't have been sold a loan before the bubble burst. In my defense, I haven't missed a payment and I'm not going into foreclosure. At least not any time soon or against my will.)

We don't do charitable giving because we simply don't have the money. We don't have exorbitant medical bills. I'm doing as much 1099 work as I can find because we need the money, and MID helps make sure that I don't burn all of that in taxes.

It was in the top three reasons we bought our house, and I'm confident hundreds of thousands of people across the country view it the same way. I suspect my tax experience is very common. I also suspect that the housing market that's already in the toilet may be finished off if the MID is taken away. Then, the numbers of people willing to buy houses drops significantly.

Now, if it's deemed that the MID has to be taken away or we'll never balance the budget, I guess I'll take the hit. Part of the deal as a responsible citizen. If that happens, though, there damn well better be cuts to the biggest sections of our government that to this point have been untouchable.

 

I guess you listened to that British foof filling in for Limbaugh today too. He was whining about coverage of the NOTW vs. the Gunwalker scandal and blaming it on liberal media bias.

Of course, a quick search of the Fox News website shows stories about the NOTW hacking scandal have a 4-1 advantage over stories about the ATF scandal. I guess the folks at FNC are throwing their boss under the bus to protect Obama because they're LIBRHUL MEDIA!!!1!

 

Unless you are in a very expensive home, I wouldn't worry. My understanding is if it is taken away, most middle class homeowners will not be affected much at all. I think it said those making $50-75k would actually pay LESS than they do now.

The MID is a break that, from what I understand, benefits high-income people more than middle-income people. So taken away, it would have little impact on the middle class and would hit high-income earners fairly hard.

Here's a CS Monitor story on it: http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Tax-VOX/2011/0302/If-mortgage-interest-deductions-were-cut-who-would-notice

Let me rephrase the first sentence: I guess it's not how much home you own, but how much money you make. So if you make 25 percent less than you used to, I'm guessing chances are you won't be in the brackets most affected by this.

 

I didn't have a chance to listen today, but I'm pretty sure it was Mark Steyn sitting in front of the golden EIB microphone, in the Attila the Hun chair.

He's Canadian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Steyn

 

Either way, he's a furrinur and ain't a Real American.

 

I don't often post because I am the person the politicians are fighting to lure: An Independent, who leans right (center-right I guess you'd call me), but I also tilt left at times. I try very hard to see both sides of the issue. I stay out of the Far-Right and Far-Left precincts, but when I see pure partisanship like Griffin's quote about Fox News, I have to comment. Griffin must not watch Fox News much because you always see both sides of the story on their news programs. Repeat: News programs. The same is not true of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. That could be said of CNN and MSNBC, too, with some of their flamethrowers like Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow, and to a lesser extent CNN's Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer. It's the difference between a newspaper's editorial content on A-1 and their Editorial Page content. As a journalist, I have to believe Griffin knows the difference, but sometimes ideology cloud's people's judgement.

 

I like Shep Smith, but c'mon, EVERYTHING at Fox drips with partisan agenda. I mean, the business model was to tap a right-wing audience that felt it wasn't being catered to (Rush Limbaugh had been spouting the liberal media stuff for years). He hired Roger Ailes to run the network.

Everything is to attract that audience. They were the FIRST to target a political niche audience as its audience (by the time Fox came around, niche markets were the best bet in the ever-expanded world of cable TV). How can you reconcile being call the ONLY network that reports both sides with being the first and only news network to really target a niche based on political leaning?

 

You mean news panels like this, where middle-of-the-road Chuck Lane is faced off against Krauthammer and some guy from The Weekly Standard? Or where Juan Williams is faced off against them? Repeat: News panels like that?

If you don't know what Fox News is and the pernicious work it does, that's on you. Both sides? For more than a year, its afternoon/evening lineup consisted of Glenn Beck's history lessons, Bret Baier's show with Krauthammer, Hayes, and one middle-of-the-road mind, Shepard Smith, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. Three of the four biggest conservative media members in America, plus Krauthammer, plus The Weekly Standard, plus Bret Baier. Both sides!

 

Beck, O'Reilly, and Hannity are three of the four biggest conservative media members in America because of FOX.

All of them had some level of success before joining FOX, but FOX made them the huge stars they are.