And Now For Somethng Completely Different

The big loser today in the new House was Eleanor Holmes Norton, the representative from D.C. In the last Congress, she balked at the bill granting D.C. a vote in the House because the GOP had attached a number of restrictions on it having to do with gun rights. She should have taken it as I wrote then. Today, she as well as all representatives from D.C. and the American territories like the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Samoa,and Guam were stripped of their voting rights in committees by the Republican leadership.

The Heritage Foundation claims the new House is committed to cutting $100 billion from the budget this fiscal year. But the GOP is backing off that saying that half the fiscal year is already gone and that they will "aim" to bring down government spending to 2008 levels by 2012.

The House Republicans are planning on governing as if they have a mandate. The GOP did the same thing when they won in 2000 by one Supreme Court justice's vote. This is something Democrats have to learn--when you win, pretend it's a massive mandate. The House Republicans as well as the Senate Republicans are acting as if the 2010 mid-terms were a total repudiation of Barack Obama. This fits with their overall narrative that Obama was a mistake or ,as the base insists, the creature of ACORN.

But E.J. Dionne pointed out something in his column the other day that should make the GOP hesitate. He indicated that over 50 of the new GOP House members won in districts that Obama won in 2008. Not that Obama would win them again but the turnout of 41.5% in 2010 didn't match the 62% turnout in the presidential election. Even with redistricting, the GOP is very vulnerable if the Democrats come out in force.

Another columnist pointed out that the teabaggers didn't win any mandate--many of them didn't even receive a majority of votes. Instead, the tide was turned against the Democrats by massive amounts of money--particularly some $20 million from Hedge Fund managers--and a lack of turnout from key Democratic constituencies like the millenial voters.

The Chamber of Commerce should be delighted with the Congress they bought but they are uneasy because Republicans in the House are saying they are going to cut the funding for the highway fund and mass transportation. This was one area where the Chamber and President Obama agreed on and the Chamber thought they had Boehner on board. Infrastructure spending is key to some Chamber members and was seen as the next quiet economic stimulus.

The Republicans will be using the next 20 days to register symbolic votes to repeal everything President Obama has done. The object of this is to create the framework for the debate for the next two years. The White House would be stupid to fall for this. Republicans are emphasizing the need for austerity when the American people are not registering this in polls. If you take the GOP's two hobbyhorses--the deficit and terrorism, those are the last two concerns of the American people.

I would bet on President Obama coming up with a more realistic approach to budget cuts and reform of the entitlement programs. Unlike progressives, I feel that he will preserve Social Security and not undermine it as some have suggested. Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham and his sidekick John McCain are salivating to cut government spending and in particular social security--since both men are wealthy and have life-long pensions from the government while you don't.

The debate for the new RNC chair was disturbing to me because why would any grown person allow Grover Norquist and Tucker Carlson to moderate any debate for a major political position. What was particularly disturbing was that the RNC allowed Grover's outfit plus Maggie Gallagher's anti-gay marriage organization NOM to host the debate. With the RNC $20 million in debt, it doesn't look good for Michael Steele. Today, the money people weighed in with their objections to him. The debate demonstrated that all candidates loved Ronald Reagan, want a litmus test for the party,are against gay rights and same-sex marriage,some own many guns, and are for tax cuts. The debate was embarrassing. They should go back to smoke-filled rooms.

Meanwhile Jeb Bush says he is thinking about running for President in 2016, which should be enough time for the American people to forget his brother. PPP polling has shown that the most viable GOP candidate against Barack Obama is Mike Huckabee because he has the religious base and has high favorabilities. Mitt Romney does well and has a better organization but he faces problems with the base, which are evaneglicals, and the fact he is the father of Obamacare. GOP pundits are now weighing in with criticism of Sarah Palin, trying to head disaster off at the pass.

Frank Gaffney of the Center for Strategic Policies alerts us to the problem posed by the infiltration of CPAC by the Muslim Brotherhood. He blames Grover Norquist, the foremost apologist for Wahabhism in the United States as being the culprit. He claims that CPAC now supports Sharia Law--as opposed to Elena Kagan and Harold Koh. Frank has finally located the enemy on the Right.

It looks like Carl Hiaasen of "Strip Tease" fame has a new political target in Florida. But it looks like his bosses at the Miami Herald may want a monopoly of their own covering Governor Rick Scott, who unlike other newly elected Governors, hired former Bush event managers to throw a gala affair at his inaugural, which was considered by the Floridians as grotesque. People shouted "criminal" at him during what was seen as a failure of a speech. As Hiassen wrote previously, the highlight of Scott's resume was that he didn't go to jail. Scott vowed to cut 19% off property taxes, which will devastate local communities, but he says "It will be fun."

The Guardian (U.K.) covered the festivities today on the Hill and noted that the new Republicans were far-right, dullards, and corporate tools. The writer felt nostalgic for Newt Gingrich ,who at his swearing in spoke longingly of FDR. I personally recall talking to Newt about his love of dinosaurs. In those days, he didn't believe children played with them. The writer said that at least Newt enterained thinking out of the box. That was before the sex scandals and his mismanagement of the House.

We have to give Gentleman John Boehner credit for some savvy internal politics. Michelle Bachman wanted a leadership position but was denied, then she wanted a post on Ways and Means and was denied. Instead, Boehner put her on the Intelligence Committee, which is ironic and humorous. But his point was that she takes up the space in the room and makes all Republicans look crazier than they really are. At intelligence, she just can not talk about the subject. Boehner was hoping Bachmann's media exposure would be diminished. Good move.

The constitutional stunt wasn't a great success as the new members were on television ineptly trying to explain how Obama's policies were unconstitutional. They simply couldn't.

James Fallows at the Atlantic commented on the Jon Huntsman for president trial balloon. He preceptively said that Huntsman could not become a viable nominee because of being part of the Obama Administration. He thinks this was all a clever move to enhance Huntsman's cache as the United States enters a period of intense negotiations with China about a host of issues. The Chinese Premier will be meeting President Obama in about a month. Fallows quite cleverly says that rumors about a Huntsman's presidential drive makes him more serious in the eyes of the Chinese. He thinks Obama and Huntsman dreamt this up together.

Look for President Obama to sideswipe the Republicans with a number of dramatic budget cuts. Already Bob Gates is preparing for proposals to cut the Pentagon budget this year by $200 million.

Republicans are in a budget box of their own. Yes, the ideologues would love to completely dismantle the federal government. But they have vowed not to cut defense spending and all the entitlement programs--Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid--this year. So without additional government revenues, they are down to a budget of less than $400 billion for everything else the federal government does. A 25% cut of all this would be crippling and more so because it would have an immediate negative impact on the public. That's why you are only hearing vague noises about specific cuts. The two I have heard--cutting spending for Public Broadcasting in retaliation for their firing of Juan Williams and cutting Planned Parenthood. Now they are trying to sell their repeal of the healthcare bill as a cut in spending--when it means a rise in the deficit.

One Democratic congressman summed up the new Republican approach as "Enron-style economics." This puts the Hoodoo in the Voodoo Economics. You can't get more bizarre in economic thinking than the current House Republicans. They make George W's policies seem plausible.

Reader's Choice

If you're tired of the flood of rightwing books that portray President Obama as a third-worlder, closet Muslim,a post-American President who wants us weak because of some ideology borrowed from Saul Alinsky,the hero of the teabaggers, I have just the book for you. If you are a leftist, you might even agree with the author. Fidel Castro enters into the Obama book fad with his small book of essays, "Obama and the Empire" (Ocean Books, 2011 (first book of the New Year)). Fidel says that after the white males of the United States screwed up so badly and capitalism went into a global crisis,the powerbrokers needed to find someone who did not match the usual profile of the white male patriarch in order to salvage the political-economic system. In a racist society, such a man was found in Barack Obama, who could then be used to deceive the world and restore America's fading prestige. Castro claims it was a cruel joke to play on those who struggled in the African-American liberation struggle--which normal people call the civil rights movement. Castro gets in his usual jibes and pet themes in the book. He says that Barack Obama received the Nobel prize for having won the presidential election in a racist society--which is true-- but then nominates Evo Morales for the Prize. He criticizes Obama's relationship with the new generation of anti-Castro Cubans and blasts the virtual annexation of Colombia by the United States. And Castro comes through on the issue of climate change and uses this theme to taunt the industrialized countries. Probably Bill Ayers would agree.

If you endured the revisionist history of the Pilgrims put out by Fox News over Thanksgiving--that the Pilgrims abandoned socialism for capitalism in order to survive, you might treat yourself to a superb new history of the Pilgrims by British author Nick Bunker (Knopf). "Making Haste from Babylon:the Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World" explores extensive new materials discovered in England and New England to draw a new portrait of the Pilgrims' religious and political experiment and the creation of a little new empire in New England based on the extensive trading of beaver pelts to England. Beaver pelts were considered the equivalent of the gold in El Dorado and assisted the Pilgrims' rise in political fortunes. As for John Winthrop's "City on the Hill", he warned that the greatest threat to it was Greed, something true today and then.

If you have read the extensive critiques of coal mining and listened to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s environmentalism,the counter-intuitive response is James Fallows' "Why the Future of Clean Energy is Dirty Coal: It's the only way to stop Global Warming."(Atlantic, December 2010). Fallows examines the joint U.S.-China Clean Coal Project led by our Energy Secretary Stephen Chu. The project is due to open its first plant in China next year and then come to the States in 2014. Stephen Chu said this past week that the advances by China in the area of alternative energy should be this generation's "Sputnik" moment. Fat chance that our political system will seize the moment. That's why the stimulus package had billions in seed money for these clean energy sources. Fallows' article is fascinating how international cooperation works away from the media limelight. The China-U.S.team has been working constantly for several years and have developed a productive working method and a sense of camaraderie among the participants.

Steven Weber and Bruce Jentleson believe the United States must develop new approaches to engage the world and can not rely on hegemony. Free-market capitaism, hegemony, Western culture, peace and democracy--the ideas that shaped world politics in the twentieth century have lost a great deal of their strength and political and cultural authority is now more contested and power more diffuse than ever. The United States must now see itself as competing in the world of ideas instead of waging a war of ideas. Now ideas and influence are the critical currency, even more than military might. Weber and Jentleson have written a small but dense book "The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas" (Harvard, 2010).

Continuing his excellent writing on torture, Scott Horton in Harper's analyzes the Wikileaks Cable dated February 6, 2007, which covers the American efforts to stop Germany from indicting CIA officers who renditioned and tortured a German citizen and green grocer Khaled El-Masri, who was mistaken as an Al Qaeda agent from the Hamburg cell. El-Masri was travelling by bus to Skopje, Macedona to visit his family. He was seized by the CIA and protested he was innocent of anything. He was beaten, stripped naked, shot full of drugs, given an enema and put into a diaper and sent to the CIA "snake pit" in Afghanistan where they conducted harsh interrogation. Despite the insistence of Washington on El-Masri's guilt, CIA on the ground were convinced he was the wrong man and that he had been right all along. Deciding that he knew too much he was held incommunicado. Later he was bundled up and left off alone miles from his Macedonian home. After walking to the village where his wife and family were supposed to be , he found out from neighbors that they thought he had abandoned them so they moved to Lebanon. Horton deals with Condi Rice and Jeff Ballinger's attempt to get the Germans off the case of persecuting the CIA agents. What's clear from the exchange was that the decision to seize El-Masri was made in Washington and probably by Condi Rice herself.

Following that up is Horton's interpretation of the Wikileaks Cable that showed that the Obama Administration and former Bush officials interferred with the Spanish courts so that they didn't bring war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney, Richard Addington,Yoo and others for condoning torture. Revelations of this interference have fueled outrage among the American Left. It was bad enough, they reasoned, that Obama just wanted to move forward and not look back but here he's interferring with another country's judicial system, perverting both their justice system and our own.