Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to effect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.
MORNING MESSAGE: Newt's "Ideas"
OurFuture.org's Bill Scher: "It has come to this. The Republican primary race has become so sad that even Newt Gingrich gets a turn at playing frontrunner. He has long conned much of conservative movement and the Washington media into treating him as some sort of intellectual giant, when his vaunted 'ideas' are no more impressive than those of a barstool blowhard. And for a few months this spring, it seemed as if his pathetic campaign road show had made the intellectual emperor's clothes spontaneously combust... But what exactly is he offering today that is so ingenuous? Nothing but the same conservative gruel that has either been proven disastrous or vehemently opposed by the public."
Supercommittee No "Speeding Bullet"
Ten days to supercommittee deadline and no deal imminent [CNN Politics]: "They have been meeting for two months, poring over concepts and ideas already hashed out by three other groups over the past year. But 10 days before their deadline, members of the so-called congressional 'super committee' created to forge a deficit reduction deal indicated Sunday that they remain hung up on basic issues of tax and entitlement reform that have previously stymied agreement."
Obama tells the Super Committee to "Bite the Bullet" [ABC News]: "With the deadline for the deficit-cutting Congressional supercommittee rapidly approaching, President Obama urged lawmakers today to abandon their "rigid positions" and reach a consensus, warning there are no 'magic beans" to solve the deficit problem. 'My hope is that over the next several days, the congressional leadership on the supercommittee go ahead and bite the bullet and do what needs to be done because the math won't change,' Obama told reporters at a press conference."
Supercommittee talks "at a difficult point" [BBC News]: "'We still have time, but we have no time to waste,' Republican Senator Patrick Toomey said on Fox News on Sunday. 'It's at a difficult point. I think we've got a ways to go, but I hope we can close that gap very quickly,' he said. House of Representatives Democrat James Clyburn told Fox News: 'I am not as certain as I was 10 days ago, but I think that we can.' The US owes more than $14tn in debt and runs an annual budget deficit of more than $1.4tn. The bipastisan super-committee was set up in August. Its plan is to be submitted to both houses of Congress for an up-or-down vote by the end of the year."
"Class War" Update
New report reveals "welfare for millionaires" [Newsweek]: "From unemployment payments to subsidies and tax breaks on luxury items like vacation homes and yachts, Americans earning more than $1 million collect more than $30 billion in government largesse each year, according to the report assembled by Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who is so often at odds with members of both parties that colleagues call him 'Dr. No.' The Internal Revenue Service provided the data showing how much money was going to the much-referenced top 1 percent. In all, millionaires receive hefty help from Uncle Sam... Still, eliminating them would help make a small dent in the $1.5 trillion congressional leaders are trying to find by Thanksgiving."
Mike Meyers writes that GOP policies would "soak the poor": "Since the federal income tax became law almost a century ago, progressive taxation -- taxing people according to their ability to pay -- has been a bedrock principle of how Americans paid for their government. It makes sense. After all, the most prosperous obtain more than most people from a federal government that enforces copyrights and patents, maintains courts that officiate over property-rights disputes and (when the government does its job right) regulates markets to ensure their fairness... Great fortunes grow with government cooperation. In recent years, Republican leaders have been chipping away at the principle of progressive taxation. Lately, they have adopted a tax policy that some call 'soak the poor.'"
The RNC chairman says his party "doesn't favor the rich": "'Of course the party doesn't favor the rich, but what the party does favor is reducing taxes on every single American out there,' [Republican National Committee Chairman Reince] Priebus said on CNN's 'State of the Union.' ...As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to sweep the nation and Republicans and Democrats struggle to compromise on a deficit reduction plan, A recent CBS/New York Times poll showed that 69 percent of Americans believe Republican policies favor the rich. Only 9 percent believe they help the middle class."
GOP Flails At Foreign Policy
AP's Matt Appuzo says the GOP is searching for its voice on foreign policy: "After years of Republicans dominating the politics of national security, this year's GOP presidential candidates are struggling to find a coherent national security argument against President Barack Obama... All of the candidates offered only incremental criticism of the Democrat who has racked up a string of security successes, a stark contrast to the with-us-or-against-us politics Republicans have used since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. If the debate made anything clear, it's that Republicans have lost-their go-to national security talking points, with Osama bin Laden's body somewhere in the Indian Ocean, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drawing to a close and Obama expanding the use of unmanned spy planes to hunt terrorists."
David Shorr after the GOP "Commander in Chief" debate on foreign policy, asks "Is this the best you can do, really?": "If nothing else, devoting an entire GOP campaign forum to national security and foreign policy -- the CBS News / National Journal organizers called it the "Commander in Chief Debate -- helps accentuate the preparation and seriousness the candidates have devoted to international affairs. Or the lack thereof, since some candidates appeared utterly unserious and unprepared... Most of the candidates are using the same foreign policy strategy: think of something that sounds tougher than President Obama's policy -- or tougher than what you can get people to believe about current policy -- and never mind whether your recommendation would fly in the real world."
Michael Tomasky reveals the GOP's foreign aid fallacy on debate night: "Nativist politicians have always bashed foreign aid, of course: Why in a-hell should we be a-spendin' good money over there? ... et cetera. Politicians who have more sense than that typically don't have the courage to stand up and say things like: Foreign aid serves a grand and important purpose, and if anything we should triple it! And we should. It's well known to people who actually bother to know things—just as it's poorly known among the broader public—that foreign aid comes to 1 or 1.5 percent of the budget."
Occupy Movement Update
Occupy arrest, evacuations, and a serenade [CNN Politics]: "Police in Denver arrested three protesters Sunday, a day after 17 demonstrators were hauled off to jail... As President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and the heads of 18 other nations dined together Saturday night, they were unwittingly serenaded for almost 45 minutes by a musician playing a song about the Occupy movement... Dozens of doctors and nurses descended on New York's Zucotti Park on Sunday to administer free flu shots to ward off the risk of a sweeping infection in the close quarters... Oakland police issued a third notice for demonstrators to vacate city parks on Saturday, police spokeswoman Officer Johnna Watson told CNN. The protesters had not complied with that order, Watson said... In Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter said Sunday he was increasing police presence near the Occupy Philly camp... Police in Portland, Oregon, made more than 50 arrests Sunday as they cleared two parks -- Chapman and Lownsdale Square -- of protesters... Salt Lake City said 19 people were arrested Saturday night as authorities moved in to clear an Occupy Salt Lake encampment at a downtown park."
Matt Taibbi explains how he learned to love the OWS protests: "There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape... This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of. That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values." :
Ex-Marine injured in Oakland protest makes public statement [Reuters]: "Ex-Marine Scott Olsen, whose injury during clashes between Oakland police and demonstrators gave impetus to anti-Wall Street protests, said on Sunday he is "feeling a lot better" in his first public statement since his injury. In a message posted to social networking site Google Plus, 24-year-old Olsen thanked those who had been tracking his progress for their outpouring of support. 'I'm feeling a lot better, with a long road in front of me,' Olsen wrote. 'After my freedom of speech was quite literally taken from me, my speech is coming back but I've got a lot of work to do with rehab.' The post is accompanied by a photo of Olsen, smiling with a neck brace on and a visible scar on his forehead."
Time's Up for the GOP?
Daily Kos' Laurence Lewis says the GOP's time has come and gone: "The Republican Party needs to be put out of its misery. A functioning Republic needs at least one opposition party, but the current and likely final iteration of the Republican Party is not it. The current iteration of the Democratic Party could be it, should it continue to fail to live up to its greatest history and increasingly mythological ideals, but that would depend on the creation of a legitimately viable progressive party, and for now at least that is not going to happen. But for the Democratic Party to recapture the magic of its greatest history, or failing that for a legitimately viable liberal party to emerge from the wreckage that is our current political system, the Republican Party must be put out of its misery."
What happened Tuesday night, writes DailyKos' Dante Atkins, wasn't a rejection of GOP overreach, but a rejection of the GOP: "What happened in Mississippi, Ohio and Maine this past Tuesday was not a rejection of local Republican overreach. What happened, rather, was a wholesale rejection of the agenda that the Republican Party is attempting to impose across the country. This is simply who the Republican Party is and what is stands for. Their entire nationwide agenda is an overreach: After being elected out of frustration with a lack of economic recovery, they are attempting to ram through as much of their actual agenda as possible before voters realize what is happening and constrain them. The biggest mistake Democrats can make at this point is to allow the Republican Party to act chastened by its supposed excesses and to pretend that they have learned their lesson and will be less extremist from now on. Rather, they must push the message relentlessly that Republicans will continue to wage their wars on unions, voting and women without a single thought for jobs or the economy."
