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(Newt Gingrich 1994 - "Who's yer daddy?")

When the party is in power the talk overflows with the milk of human kindness - Bi-partisanship is on the lips of every triumphant candidate. The sentiments "Come, let us reason together" are slathered over every press conference with a spatula - we are all one big happy family and the thought of revenge never enters our minds . . . .much.

And so was the case when the Republicans gained control during the mid-season elections in 1994.

November 11, 1994 - newly designated Majority Speaker Newt Gingrich held a press conference outlining his "Contract With America" - pouring forth big plans, big ideas and big love - all the trappings only one handed a family sized bottle of Power could enjoy.

Gingrich: “It’s very important to understand, this country has sent the congress a very powerful signal for change . . this is a city which is like a sponge; it absorbs waves of change and it slows them down and softens them and one morning they cease to exist. We want to, every way we can, bias the opportunity in favor of the American people, actually getting the changes they’re asking for – and now obviously every member is going to play a major role, every member is going to participate.”

Joining him for this episode of the Love Fest were Dick Armey, Jim Nussle, Frank Wolf, and Pat Roberts. Armey went out of his way to let people know he wasn't "in it for revenge". Although the underpinnings of it were plainly visible - smiling, happy faces notwithstanding.

My, how times have changed.

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From the Ed Show May 1, 2009. Ed Schultz's "Op-Ed" on President Obama's choice for David Souter's replacement on the Supreme Court. Ed's got this one right. Elections have consequences. The GOP did nothing but carping over their desire for an "up and down" vote when they were wanting Bush's right wingers nominated to the point where I was ready to throw something through my television screen if I heard it one more time. Bill "the cat killer" Frist said it so many times I was wondering if he was repeating it in his sleep.

Now that the shoe is on the other foot we'll see what sort of three ring circus they put on to obstruct Obama's nomination. I await the WATB side show that is sure to come. Fortunately since we have so many of them recorded crying about getting Bush's nominees through the inevitable hissy fits will be much easier to be called out for that they are..feigned indignation and wanting things both ways. Whether our sorry ass excuse for a "mainstream media" will follow suit is another story.

JFK on the campaign trail, pushing back on bipartisanship. Open thread below...

Hayward: No, I'll tell you what was bad. The sneak attack on our economy, the dress rehearsal of Indy bank, when Chick Schumer helped get that started and the guy in the background George Soros manipulating all the currency.

Matthews: What?

Hayward: You want to keep that going?

Matthews: You mean the economic situation we faced right now...JD you can talk fast but I don't know what you're talking about.

Chris Matthews brings on J.D. Hayworth and Harold Ford Jr. to talk about the stimulus bill. When Matthews pins down Hayworth on whether we want another eight years like what we had under Bush. Hayworth goes after him for potentially wanting to run for the Senate. Apparently even Matthews who routinely talks over his guests wasn't quite prepared for the thuggishness of J.D. Hayworth.

Apparently Mr. Hayworth's idea of bipartisanship is corporate Democrats voting with Republicans.

John Amato:
C&Ler JC emailed me after he saw this yesterday and said that Hayward must be on a straight diet of FOX News as he went off the rails trying to debate the stimulus plan.

I just watch former Republican Congressman JD Hayworth of Arizona blame the current economic mess on Sen. Chuck Schumer and George Soros. Chris Matthews tried to get him to admit that the Republican policies of the last eight years were responsible. It was like the crazy Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann moment on Hardball. There is a reason that JD is a former congressman losing in a red state.

Hayworth, the EX-Congressman from AZ. is the perfect example of what the Republican party is. They're a party of insane people parading around with the American flag draped around their shoulders while James Dobson whispers in their ears that gays are trying to destroy the world. Let them obstruct and perform like the sideshow---circus acts that they've become. Bring it on JD, you are the perfect messenger for a message-less and dangerous ideology.

The Senate's passage Tuesday of the economic recovery package followed a now-familiar 30 year pattern. The Democratic President Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him in 1993, faced a monolithic wall of GOP opposition to his economic program. But Republicans Ronald Reagan in 1981 and George W. Bush 20 years later enjoyed substantial Democratic support for their dangerously irresponsible and regressive tax cuts that as predicted drained the federal treasury. Now as then, for Republicans the road to economic stimulus is a one-way street.

After being blanked in the House, President Obama picked up a whopping three Republican votes in the Senate one day after his first presidential press conference. (At this point, prospects for any gains on the final bill emerging from the House and Senate conference seem dubious.) But while his quixotic quest to reach across the aisle may have come up empty for now, Obama can take some comfort from Bill Clinton's experience in 1993. After all, Clinton's package of stimulus programs and upper-income bracket tax increases not only preceded a record economic expansion, it happened to get no Republican votes in either house of Congress.

As the New York Times noted at the time:

"Historians believe that no other important legislation, at least since World War II, has been enacted without at least one vote in either house from each major party."

Inheriting massive budget deficits and unemployment topping 7% from Bush the Elder, Clinton's $496 billion program was nonetheless opposed by every single member of the GOP, as well as defectors from his own party. As the Times recounted, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Al Gore to earn victory:

An identical version of the $496 billion deficit-cutting measure was approved Thursday night by the House, 218 to 216. The Senate was divided 50 to 50 before Mr. Gore voted. Since tie votes in the House mean defeat, the bill would have failed if even one representative or one senator who voted with the President had switched sides.

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At tonight's press conference, President Obama was asked a few times about "bipartisanship," probably most clearly by Chip Reid:

Question: Thank you, Mr. President. You have often said that bipartisanship is extraordinarily important, overall and in this stimulus package, but now, when we ask your advisers about the lack of bipartisanship so far -- zero votes in the House, three in the Senate -- they say, "Well, it's not the number of votes that matters; it's the number of jobs that will be created."

Is that a sign that you are moving away -- your White House is moving away from this emphasis on bipartisanship?

And what went wrong? Did you underestimate how hard it would be to change the way Washington works?

Obama: Well, I don't think -- I don't think I underestimated it. I don't think the -- the American people underestimated it. They understand that there have been a lot of bad habits built up here in Washington, and it's going to take time to break down some of those bad habits.

You know, when I made a series of overtures to the Republicans, going over to meet with both Republican caucuses, you know, putting three Republicans in my cabinet -- something that is unprecedented -- making sure that they were invited here to the White House to talk about the economic recovery plan, all those were not designed simply to get some short-term votes. They were designed to try to build up some trust over time.

And I think that, as I continue to make these overtures, over time, hopefully that will be reciprocated.

But understand the bottom line that I've got right now, which is what's happening to the people of Elkhart and what's happening across the country. I can't afford to see Congress play the usual political games. What we have to do right now is deliver for the American people.

So my bottom line when it comes to the recovery package is: Send me a bill that creates or saves 4 million jobs. Because everybody has to be possessed with a sense of urgency about putting people back to work, making sure that folks are staying in their homes, that they can send their kids to college.

That doesn't negate the continuing efforts that I'm going to make to listen and engage with my Republican colleagues. And hopefully the tone that I've taken, which has been consistently civil and respectful, will pay some dividends over the long term. There are going to be areas where we disagree, and there are going to be areas where we agree.

As I said, the one concern I've got on the stimulus package, in terms of the debate and listening to some of what's been said in Congress, is that there seems to be a set of folks who -- I don't doubt their sincerity -- who just believe that we should do nothing.

Now, if that's their opening position or their closing position in negotiations, then we're probably not going to make much progress, because I don't think that's economically sound and I don't think what -- that's what the American people expect, is for us to stand by and do nothing.

...
So, you know, we -- we can differ on some of the particulars, but, again, the question I think the American people are asking is, do you just want government to do nothing, or do you want it to do something? If you want it to do something, then we can have a conversation. But doing nothing, that's not an option from my perspective.

Obama's strategy is a long-term one. If Republicans continue to obstruct, they're going to increase their own popularity, because he will have no trouble painting them as the source of their problems. After all, thanks to George W. Bush, they're already predisposed to think so anyway.

Later, Mara Liasson asks a similar question:

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April 2008: BBC's Newsnight interviews US Judge Advocate Diane Beaver about the Bush administration's legallese cover-story for war crimes.

I truly loathe the notion of torturers and those who ordered torture getting away with it.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called for the commission as way to heal what he called sharp political divides and to prevent future abuses.

He compared it to other truth commissions, such as one in South Africa that investigated the apartheid era.

"We need to come to a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past," Leahy said in a speech to the Georgetown University law school.

"Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened," he said. "And we do that to make sure it never happens again," Leahy said.

I'm unclear on how just saying "now we know" will stop any of it happening again. Trials and prison sentences would surely accomplish far more as a deterrent to possible future copycats - that's partly why we don't just slap the wrists of abusers or rapists and say "we know what you did!"

Leahy said he had not yet begun to promote the idea with the administration of President Barack Obama or with the Democratically controlled Congress. But he suggested it could be formed by both Congress and the White House, and said the panel must have credibility across the political spectrum.

Issues to investigate would include the Justice Department's firings of several U.S. attorneys, which Leahy said may have been motivated by a White House aim to influence elections, policies on the treatment of terrorism suspects and other areas "where (congressional) committees were lied to."

This included the war in Iraq, he said. "There were lies told to the American people all the way through."

Screw bipartisanship and "credibility across the political spectrum". When one party's senior leadership for eight years has deliberately broken international and US laws while their supporters make excuses for them, they should be treated as having given up any right to respect or to having a voice in how their crimes are handled. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party's leadership seems divided into two camps. One cannot shake off its fear of the GOP's noise machine and its fear of losing elections to do what is right. The other apparently has no intention of looking too hard into crimes they might want to commit themselves.

I firmly believe America can handle the truth - my experience as an ex-pat living here is that Americans are mainly good and just and I believe that if all the secrets are revealed in courts of law then Americans will be outraged and demand justice - but its political leadership either cannot or will not.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

- Paul Krugman, "The Destructive Center," today.

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.

In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.

Krugman amplifies the point that's so frustrating to me: Obama made some really, really bad choices, and the Republicans picked up the ball and ran with it. This isn't just a matter of railing against the Republican Senators - these were serious strategic errors on the part of Obama and his administration, at a time when we can't afford much delay.

And rather than push back hard on the wrong strategy, far too many Democrats seem to think this is a time we should shut up and sit down, lest we hurt the new president's feelings.

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On Meet the Press Barney Frank calls out the Republican's hyprocrisy on never having any problems with spending for the military but complaining about social spending and on their sudden love of bipartisanship. And of course true to form David Gregory manages to change the subject just as Frank really starts to lay into them.

MR. GREGORY: Senator, will, will Republicans in the Senate try to delay passage?

SEN. ENSIGN: Sure. First of all, we only got the bill at 11:00 last night, OK? The--it was so complex. This is--this is almost $1 trillion. You don't get do-overs with $1 trillion. If you get this thing wrong, $1 trillion isn't like, "Well, we did it wrong, we'll try it again." A trillion dollars...

MR. GREGORY: Will it pass--do you think it'll pass this week?

SEN. ENSIGN: It'll pass this week. But we want some time to go through it. We want some time for the American people to be able to look at it. Getting it at 11:00 on a Saturday night and, and just having, you know, a day and a half to look at $1 trillion in spending I don't think is adequate.

MR. GREGORY: Congressman:

REP. BARNEY FRANK (D-MA): Well, two things. First, watch this face, David, because some of the arguments you've been hearing now about how government spending never helps the economy, you're going to hear the absolute reverse when military spending comes up. We have an airplane, the F-22, that is designed to defeat the Soviet Union in a war, and I think we can save billions. The defense budget has gone way up under George Bush. But somehow to my Republican friends enormous amounts for the war in Iraq--which I thought was a mistake--hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars for weapons to fight the Cold War, they don't count those. But you're going to hear an argument about how important military spending is for the economy. So...(unintelligible).

Secondly, they talk about this wasteful spending. Let me talk about it. I'll be flying out of here this afternoon to go over to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they're about to lay off cops and firefighters. That's the wasteful spending that my colleagues are talking about, money to go to the states to stop from laying off cops and firefighters. Money to help keep teachers going. Those are jobs. There seems to be this notion that if you hire someone to do something useful, that somehow becomes social spending and it doesn't count. In fact, these have dual purposes. If you keep cops and firefighters and teachers from being laid off, you're improving the quality of life, I think, or preventing a deterioration.

Secondly, as to the bipartisanship--again, I want to congratulate my Republican colleagues that they're not too old to learn. Because I was in Congress in 2001, two, three, four, five, six, when the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, the White House and they pushed things through. There was none of this concern that one-party rule was a bad thing. Now that they're not the party, they've decided that that's a bad idea, and it's always nice when people know new things. But we had an election last year which had pretty decisive results in the White House, the Senate and the House, and it did say that public spending for improved infrastructure to keep bridges from crumbling, to keep cops and firefighters working, that that's a good thing.

MR. GREGORY: Congressman:

REP. PENCE: Well, less than 5 percent of this bill is for roads and bridges and infrastructure. And let me, let me be clear with Barney. I, I don't, I don't have any problem with some spending on infrastructure and making sure that people's unemployment benefits aren't lapsed. The point is, is what, what should most of this bill be about?

MR. GREGORY: Right.

REP. PENCE: No one is saying that spending by the federal government isn't going to have some benign positive effect on the economy.

REP. FRANK: David, we--excuse me, but...

MR. GREGORY: Well, let, let's just...

REP. PENCE: It's what, what will be the most effective to turn this recession around?

REP. FRANK: Mike, you just ignored what I said. You just ignored what I said. As I understand, one of the big cuts that had to be done--and I think Senator McCaskill and others were trying. But to get any Republicans at all, you had to adopt a cut that's going to mean policemen and firemen are going to be laid off.

SEN. ENSIGN: That's not true, Barney.

REP. PENCE: That's not true.

REP. FRANK: It's not just infrastructure.

SEN. ENSIGN: That's not true.

REP. FRANK: You're cutting off aid to the states. Aid to the states is to prevent...

SEN. ENSIGN: Hold on. All right, David...

REP. FRANK: ...this budget crunch from laying off public employees.

SEN. ENSIGN: Yeah.

MR. GREGORY: Let, let's get--I want to get to the--we're going to get to some of the cuts and whether they're wise in just a moment.

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Paul Krugman debunks Joe Scarborough's talking points on how the Republican party has actually governed as compared to their rhetoric. It would be nice if we had more progressives than just Paul Krugman who actually know something about economics allowed on our airwaves to shoot these guys down when they tell such obvious lies.

Scarborough: Let me just say though, George Bush over the past eight years had the most disastrous spending policy. They decided to cut taxes. They decided to increase the deficit. They decided to increase entitlement spending while they were fighting two wars. They made no tough decisions what so ever. You can't say that that's the traditional conservative approach to economics. It was a disaster and I think we can all agree with that can we not?

Krugman: You've got some mythical image of what a modern conservative is. Reagan increased spending while cutting taxes. Bush increased spending while cutting taxes... Who is your ideal here?

Krugman follows with giving us a dose of reality from Scarborough's talking points about how we were just so full of bipartisan love and that worked so well while Clinton was in office.... and calls what happened while he was President and Republicans controlled the Congress what it was...gridlock. He manages to get Scarborough to admit that we need some bold steps now if we're going to fix the mess we're in. I don't think bold is what we're going to get as long as the Republicans feel obstructing is better for them for political purposes than actually fixing our economy.

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David Broder, appearing on Andrea Mitchell's MSNBC program this morning, wants the public to know that "bipartisanship" is all the rage inside the Beltway these days -- as indeed it has been for as long as we can remember. What does "bipartisanship" mean? It means believing right-wing nonsense and treating it as credible:

Mitchell: I've read a lot, and talked to a lot of people, and heard a lot of debate about the stimulus package, and reasonable people on both sides -- conservatives, liberals, Democrats, Republicans, economists -- aren't really sure what's gonna work and how it's gonna work. What are the risks here in taking it all on? I mean, Alice Rivlin, who created the Congressional Budget Office, has written, importantly, that she would separate out what is job-creating, what is stimulus, and look at the bigger-ticket items down the road. Um, how do they know? How does the president know what he's getting into here?

Broder: Ah, nobody knows, because this is uncharted territory. There are plenty of smart people who purport to understand the dynamics of the economy, but as we know, the first effort at stimulus did not achieve the expected results. So this is a gamble. It's a big gamble for the country, it's much better off if it includes the best thinking that's available in both parties, not just one party.

As dday astutely retorts:

Um, sir, WHAT DO YOU THINK THE FIRST STIMULUS WAS? It was a 100% tax rebate along the lines of the sum total of the thinking of one party. In fact, the "best thinking" of those people now is to weight the stimulus down with - wait for it - tax cuts, which would cost three times as much as the current plan because they want the tax cuts to be permanent, which is an even worse stimulus (There's also the point that the Republicans would push more people onto the Alternative Minimum Tax and actually RAISE taxes for the middle class while dropping them for the rich, but that's normal and besides the point I'm trying to make).

So, according to Broder, because a 100% tax rebate didn't work, we have to come up with a "bipartisan" approach that includes the ideas of those who prefer what amounts to a... 100% tax rebate.

This is idiocy, and suggests one of two things: either most of the Beltway is trying to protect the assets of the rich, or they actually don't know the meaning of the word "stimulus." And we are seeing this kind of confusion all over the media. If it's the latter, that's at least partially the fault of the Administration, who isn't doing the best job of explaining why exactly we need fiscal spending to make up the shortfall caused by plummeting consumer spending and private investment.

I can't wait for Broder to start pontificating, as he always does, about how he listens regularly to "ordinary taxpayers." Uh-huh. Sure.

Broder's just repeating the right-wing talking-point du jour, a skill he's perfected over the years. It's vintage Villagespeak: "bipartisanship" means "pretending we're neutral while advancing right-wing tropes."

After all, why shouldn't we incorporate the wisdom inherent in the right-wing geniuses who made this mess? When it comes to the Republican Party, the "best thinking available" -- that is, the thinking enforced by party poobahs and pundits -- can be found from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist.

Maybe David Broder can remind us again exactly why we should listen to them.

January 23, 2009 C-SPAN

January 23, 2009 C-SPAN

January 23, 2009 C-SPAN

January 23, 2009 MSNBC Keith Olbermann