Die Laughing, Republican Style

So you thought the Grover Norquist robots of the Republican Party were only in it for themselves, their families, and their wealthy benefactors? Well, scratch the middle category:  a select group of extreme right wing House members are perfectly willing to throw their own flesh and blood under the bus -- or should I say hearse - just to make an ideological point.

Rep. Bill Posey of Florida and his gang of six conservatives want to do away with the payoff they'll get if they die in office.  Yes, you heard right: they are framing their bill as being all about money they personally would get as a dead body in good standing in Congress. Nothing about the spouses, the kids, or the grandkids in relinquishing the payout of a year's salary of $174,000.  

But then again, are they not the Living Dead zombies of supply side economics anyway? In their world, a pulse and respiration are just liberal concepts. They are the reanimated Norquistians, roaming the countryside, arms outstretched, sucking the lifeblood from the lower classes to keep themselves going.

Among the Gang of Seven is everybody's favorite old batty aunt from hell, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. You may remember Virginia as a frequent winner of Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" awards for her various heartless votes and remarks against everything from health care to education.  She said if Congress wants to provide for their families, look somewhere else besides her beloved taxpayers.  But please do continue paying for her franking privileges, travel, vacations, Cadillac health plan and generous pension.

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Way to be More Heartless

And then there is loveable curmudgeon Ron Paul (R-TX), who defiantly did not provide health coverage for employees of his last campaign, with the upshot being that his campaign manager died uninsured and destitute after the 2008 race.

Said Posey (who has never yet had one of his bills passed): "I believe Members of Congress should do what other Americans do, purchase their own life insurance."

Yeah!  Get down with the common people!  He went on, "And with so many Americans struggling to make ends meet - mostly because of bad policy coming out of Washington - this taxpayer funded 'gratuity' just adds more insult to injury. It's no wonder Americans have such a low opinion of Congress."

I am so relieved, aren't you?  They get it, they finally get why we have such a low (about 12% approval rating) opinion of them.  And now they are redeemed for altruistically agreeing not to take it with them when they get raptured up, or whatever their future plans are.

They Won't Be Smiling When Gramps Cuts Them Off:  The Posey Heirs

Do you think it's a mere coincidence that Posey's second largest campaign contributor is the insurance industry? And now that Congress will be forced to buy its own life insurance, the industry is champing at the bit, salivating over the ultra-high premiums the 60, 70 and 80-somethings will now have to fork over to pay for their own "final expenses." Posey certainly made sure to send a press release hyping his industry-friendly legislation straight to the insurance industry for their delectation.

The Republicans may get to have it both ways. Not only are they laughing all the way to the bank with lobbyist largesse, they'll be laughing all the way to the mausoleum too. And their heirs can just forget any ideas about Gram or Gramps conveniently kicking the bucket before their terms are up. You hear that, Rand Paul?

Fathers and Sons, the Ayn Rand Edition

"Up in the Air": The Sequel



The actors are all dutifully playing their parts in PASS THIS JOBS BILL RIGHT NOW Theater.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn't even have the votes to pass it in his own party, so he's stalling.  Minority Leader Mitch McConnell knows it can't pass, so he tried to force a vote on it RIGHT NOW. President Obama was out of town, busily raising millions from wealthy donors, so he can keep his own job. It's a race to the top of the pile of gold, and his goal is an unheard of $1 billion war chest.  More than 90 percent of the time, elections are determined by who raises the most money -- economy or no economy.


Obama must be concerned about jobs, because when he presented the George W. Bush-contrived Free Trade Trifecta to Congress this week, he made sure it contained a renewal of Trade Adjustment Assistance to compensate the thousands of workers who will might lose their jobs to South Korea, Panama and Columbia.  Of course, there is nothing in the bill which actually funds such compensation to the American victims of free trade rape. But it's fun to imagine a remake of the George Clooney movie "Up in the Air", with Obama taking over the role of the charming hatchet man who fires people by video conference. 


The presidential bullshit will take its inspiration directly from the cinematic script.  Obama might stage an internet town hall for the newly redundant whose jobs have now been shipped to slave wage factories in South Korea, whose pensions were stolen and now sit in nouveau-legal tax havens in Panama, whose livelihoods were sent to the jungles of Columbia where hired thugs can murder with impunity the trade unionists standing in the way of corporate profits. 


 He will flash his famous grin and intone: "Anyone who ever built an empire sat where you're sitting right now! Save for college, tighten your belts, win the future." And a group of shell-shocked unemployed people will be sitting in back of him as living prop temps, dutiful grins frozen on their faces, their termination packets containing no federally funded severance pay, in their laps. (I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the packets contained info on how to volunteer for OFA and learn some new skills.)


Obama will then tell them if they want the compensatory benefits he promised them to just CALL CONGRESS RIGHT NOW!  And like George Clooney, he will obsessively continue racking up his millions of frequent flyer miles in his obsessive quest to rack up millions of dollars at fundraisers.


Oh, and about that Air Force One.  It is manufactured by Boeing, whose CEO just so happens to be the chairman of the Business Roundtable (BRT), Obama's most favorite corporate group, and who just so happened to be the first to congratulate Obama on toeing the corporate line on the new free trade deal.  And why not, since Obama named him to the White House Exports Council last year!  Who said the deal will cost us jobs, anyway?  Not James McNerney of Boeing!  According to a statement he put out yesterday, the deal will ADD 250,000 new American jobs.  Of course, he may have simply meant the jobs will be provided by corporations who have some of their land holdings within the continental U.S.  He did not actually specify the geographical location of the new hives of worker bees.  He did not actually mention anything about why the compensation rider for dispossessed American workers was necessary to give Barry some cover with the hoi polloi, either.



Fingered!!! Free Trade Lovers Caught in the Act


 Remember, it was the BRT that urged Obama to scrap smog emission standards last month by pointing to a study they themselves funded showing it is perfectly safe to breathe polluted air.  So I would take McNerney's 250,000 American jobs claim with a huge grain of salt.) 
But the NAFTA-like bill enjoys bipartisan support!  Isn't that what the pundits tell us we all count as our top priority?


Well, there are skeptics, inconveniently comprised of most labor unions and liberals, who are raining on Obama's feel-good program of fake job creationism in anticipation of the state visit later this month by the South Korean president. "As with any such agreement, there will be winners and losers," according to John Feffer, a Korea specialist at the Institute of Policy Studies. "The problem is that most of the winners are the wealthier players, namely major U.S. and South Korean manufacturers and financial institutions. The losers will be U.S. workers, Korean farmers, probably the environment in both countries."


And then there's chronic spoil-sport Dennis Kucinich, who writes:  "Hundreds of thousands of American jobs have been displaced and outsourced as a result of our pursuit of trade policies which are adverse to the economic interests of the American people. My home State of Ohio is one of the top-ten states posting the biggest job losses since the passage of NAFTA."


Hmmm... isn't Ohio one of those battleground states Obama needs for his reelection?  Isn't that the state where he posed in front of a crumbling bridge just last week, shouting himself hoarse in his populist rant of PASS JOBS ACT NOW??  Is Dennis Kucinich due for another mystery ride on Air Force One where it will again be explained to him that his seat is in danger of being redistricted out of existence?  I don't know.  It's all up in the air.





Outsourcing, Inc.

 

The New Obama Campaign Talking Points: EGAD!!!

Since Congressional Democrats are not exactly champing at the bit to fight for the president's PASS AMERICAN JOBS ACT NOW!!  (Senate votes are lacking), his campaign strategizers figure they had better distract those amorphous swing voters from the crappy economy and unemployment crisis post-haste.

According to a N.Y.Times blog post by John Harwood, Obama will use social issues and his security state cred as wedges between what he calls his "like-minded thinkers" and the unwashed, uneducated right-wing rabble who jeer at gay soldiers at Republican debates.  He will appeal to the sensibilities of the so-called "monied burbs" and run a campaign celebrating EGAD: the Environment, Gay Rights, Abortion Rights and the Drone killings of Al Qaeda suspects as well as the big get on Osama bin Laden. It's the Snob Appeal, stupid!

(Yes, it's OK to cheer for presidentially-ordered assassinations as long as a Democrat does them. Look at it this way: Obama outlawed torture at his ostentatious signing statement when he first took office. He is being merciful by using computerized Drone attacks to put enemies of The Homeland out of their misery quickly, without resorting to water-boarding first. Plus, he is being open and transparent about his murders. If Bush were still president, we would never have known that the CIA and the military are now one great big family and are killing American citizens. So eat your peas, civil libertarians. Don't let perfect due process be the enemy of some damned good pragmatism).

But back to the Harwood article: if it is even close to accurate, Obama will abandon the old-school Democratic plank (labor, the social safety net, poverty, the economy) and focus on what matters most to "lifestyle liberals" who are not particularly worried about their own money supplies.  He has already voiced his disgust at the redneck crowd booing a gay soldier at a recent Republican debate. Therefore, he is one of "Us." (if you make over $250,000, that is). Shared outrage at the right-wing fringe is now reason enough to vote for Obama and feel all warm and self-satisfied.  Pay no attention to 20 percent unemployment and 50 million uninsured and the highest childhood poverty rate in history.

And for God's sake, get over that white liberal guilt further instilled in you by Melissa Harris-Lacewell-Talkwell-Perry, accusing you of insidious racism if you no longer feel the Barry love. Agonize with Salon's Joan Walsh as she takes paragraphs and paragraphs to explain that she really, really likes and respects Melissa as a person but golly gee, it's not fair to call Obama critics insidious racists, yo.  And that of course, the disappointment in Obama is no reason at all not to actually vote for him again. Because, think of the alternative.

And if you have some free time, do check out the Patchwork Nation website where the Obama operatives apparently gleaned the demographic info on their targeted "Monied Burbs."  You can go to the map and find out where your particular locale fits in.  I looked up my county (Ulster, NY) and was not surprised to find out I live not in a Monied Burb, but in a Service Center.  I apparently used to live in a Monied Burb (Orange County).  And that is so weird, because one of the towns (Kiryas Joel) in "monied" Orange County was recently rated as the poorest of the dirt poor municipalities in the entire nation!

Another category is the Evangelical Epicenter (Obama will likely avoid those towns like the plague). Then there are Tractor Central and Military Bastion (battlegrounds for sure) and Immigration Nation ( another issue to be kicked down the road into the next millenium) and one called Mormon Outpost (Romney shoo-in) and an agonizing one for Joan Walsh dubbed Minority Central (no Black Caucus slipper-wearers allowed).