obama

The Republicans are going on the warpath today with the “give to us and help us win this year so we can repeal health care”. How? How can they come up with enough votes to repeal health care. This wouldn’t be a simple “oh we got a majority and we repeal it”. It would take legislation to overcome it and for that legislation to be enacted the President must sign it. Do you think President Obama is going to sign a bill overturning his legacy?

Will the Republicans can 67 votes in the Senate to override a Presidential veto?

Will they get 290 votes in the House to override it?

No.

So all the Republicans are doing is feeding their followers another pipe dream. This time though the math is simple – they are promising something they absolutely can not deliver on. I wonder if anyone from the media will call them out on it?

I’ve been saying it all along and now Mitch McConnell is validating it:

Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.

Republicans embraced it. Democrats denounced it as rank obstructionism. Either way, it has led the two parties, as much as any other factor, to where they are right now. Republicans are monolithically against the health care legislation, leaving the president and his party executing parliamentary back flips to get it passed, conservatives revived, liberals wondering what happened.

In the process, Mr. McConnell, 68, a Kentuckian more at home plotting tactics in the cloakroom than writing legislation in a committee room or exhorting crowds on the campaign trail, has come to embody a kind of oppositional politics that critics say has left voters cynical about Washington, the Senate all but dysfunctional and the Republican Party without a positive agenda or message.

Nate Silver did a post yesterday taking down the meme that FDR would have been able to push through healthcare. Of course FDR had a much bigger majority as Nate points out:

It’s amazing to see the size of FDR’s majority, but I believe there is another reason why Obama isn’t FDR.

Tomorrow Obama will lay out his compressive healthcare plan. That’s only a year into the debate and when healthcare is on life support. Obama decided a long time ago to play it safe in the world of politics, rather than taking a firm stand. That is something FDR would never have done.

No – we really need a new FDR and not someone who puts politics ahead of national interests. Sadly though Presidents like FDR are an extinct species. Both parties champion candidates who prefer politics over principal, and that is what’s helping destroy America today. We need to get back to a time when national interests took a precedent over the game of politics, and that won’t happen until there is a real populace movement based upon these feelings and not upon racism or hatred like the tea party.

The healthcare Gestapo is up to their old tricks:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today will release a new report showing more dramatic health insurance premium increases are proposed in Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington.

Keying off the Obama administration's recent probe into a planned 39 percent rate hike from Anthem Blue Cross in California, Sebelius will detail large increases in six other states and say that given record insurer profits, health care reform has never been more urgent.

At 11:30 a.m. today, Sebelius will release the report, obtained by TPMDC and titled "Insurance Companies Prosper, Families Suffer: Our Broken Health Insurance System."

It finds that Anthem's rate increase (now delayed until May) is "not unique" and that experts say premiums will keep rising.

The report quotes National Association of Insurance Commissioners officials predicting the nation will "see rate increases of 20, 25, 30 percent."

(emphasis added)

And yet the Republicans want to block healthcare reform, placing politics above national interest.

Yesterday it was Kit Bond, today we have Richard Shelby:

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary "blanket hold" on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

So this is the Republican games being exposed? They will do what they can to really run up government spending, then blame it all on the Democrats. It’s time to stop trying to play nice with these assholes and go nuclear. President Obama should hold a prime time press conference and call these Republicans out by name for their games. The American people need to be made aware of what is going on and if the RNC and tea party want to support these assholes, then they also need called out. It’s time to fight back.

Drudge is pushing this headline today:

Largest-ever federal payroll to hit 2.15 million employees...

It goes to a Washington Times story talking about the increasing workforce of the U.S. government – not a bad thing with unemployment where it’s at. But let’s take a look at where these numbers are coming from:

Mr. Obama says the civilian work force will drop by 80,000 next year, mostly because of a reduction in U.S. census workers added in 2010 but then dropped in 2011 after the national population count is finished. That still leaves 1.35 million civilian federal employees on the payroll in 2011.

From 1981 through 2008, the civilian work force remained at about 1.1 million to 1.2 million, with a low of 1.07 million in 1986 and a high of more than 1.2 million in 1993 and in 2008. In 2009, the number jumped to 1.28 million.

Including both the civilian and defense sectors, the federal government will employ 2.15 million people in 2010 and 2.11 million in 2011, excluding Postal Service workers.

So there really hasn’t been that big of a jump in the size of government, well except for defense, which is about 79% of the increase. Will the right start demanding that we make cuts there? Haha yeah right. Let’s take a closer look at these defense numbers:

After years of decline at the end of the Cold War, the Defense Department is restaffing. Mr. Obama estimated that the Pentagon will have 720,000 employees this year and 757,000 employees next year - up from a low of 649,000 in 2003.

John McCain blasted off a campaign email last night that stated the following:

During his first year in office, President Obama and Congressional Democrats have amassed a $12.4 trillion deficit that is growing each day.

A trillion dollars a month? Wow that’s amazing for a party that hasn’t accomplished that much due to Republican obstructionism. So we need to mark that as a flat out lie.

But it gets even better. This is from Media Matter’s fact check:

In fact, the FY 2009 deficit, which totaled $1.4 trillion, was already estimated to be $1.2 trillion when Obama came into office and "virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years" are due either to policies implemented under President Bush or to the recession, which began during Bush's tenure, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Now what big policy implemented under Bush would have raised it so much? Maybe TARP – the bank bailout. And yes this would be the very same bank bailout that McCain suspended his campaign to go to Washington and help make sure it passed.

I would much rather see some tea bagger win McCain’s seat than him get sent back for another term. This guy isn’t just a hypocrite – he’s a flat out liar.

(h/t Cesca)

In 2008 three employees of the city of Cincinnati wanted to volunteer for the presidential campaigns, two for Obama and one for McCain. None of them could though. It turns out that Cincinnati had a law on the books for the past 80+ years that prohibited any political involvement by city employees.

The law was enacted because of local councilman and Republican chairman George "Boss" Cox. During his reign Cox would shower his supporters with city jobs, but that came at a price – a demand to donate 2.5% of their paycheck to the Republican Party. Cincinnati decided it was time to prevent such political corruption from running rampant again, so they enacted the law.

Attorneys for the complainants argued successfully that the law was to broad. It was an essential gag order against city employees, even banning them from discussing politics at a barbecue in their own backyards.

A settlement was reached in the U.S. District Court today to revamp the rules and allow city employees more freedom in campaigning and donating money. One of the complainants had this to say after the settlement was reached: "If the city attempts to hinder my First Amendment rights like communist North Korea I won't hesitate to sue again." I can’t say I don’t blame him at all.