Over ‘fiscal cliff,’ fiscal pain to accelerate

December 17, 2012
This is what the other side of the “fiscal cliff” looks like.
If President Obama and Congress fail to reach a deal to avoid hundreds of billions of dollars of tax hikes and federal spending cuts, many Americans will feel the pain with less money in their paychecks in the first week of the New Year.On Friday, Jan. 4, middle-class Americans who get paid

Obama and Romney: No ‘lie’ - The Washington Post

By Al Kamen,

Once upon a time, politicians knew how to call out a baldfaced lie.
Teddy Roosevelt once accused an opponent of “atrociously” and wickedly” lying, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin pointed out on Tuesday’s “Morning Joe.” And Abraham Lincoln famously slapped Stephen Douglas with this insult: “I don’t know what to call you except you are a liar.”

Once upon a time, politicians knew how to call out a baldfaced lie.

Teddy Roosevelt once accused an opponent of “atrociously” and wickedly” lying, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin pointed out on Tuesday’s “Morning Joe.” And Abraham Lincoln famously slapped Stephen Douglas with this insult: “I don’t know what to call you except you are a liar.”

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Romney by two touchdowns

By Charles Krauthammer

It was the biggest rout since Agincourt. If you insist, since the Carter-Reagan debate. With a remarkable display of confidence, knowledge and nerve, Mitt Romney won the first 2012 debate going away.


Romney didn’t just demonstrate authoritative command of a myriad of domestic issues. He was nervy about it, taking the president on frontally, not just relentlessly attacking, but answering every charge leveled against him — with a three-point rebuttal.

 And he pulled off a tactical coup by coming right out of the box to undo millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads that painted him, personally, as Gordon Gekko — rapacious vulture capitalist who doesn’t just lay off steelworkers but kills their wives — and, politically, as intent on raising taxes on the middle class while lowering them for the rich.

The Romney campaign had let these ads go largely unanswered. But a “kill Romney” strategy can only work until people get to see Romney themselves. On Wednesday night, they did. Regarding the character assassination, all Romney really had to do was walk out with no horns on his head. Confident, smiling and nonthreatening, he didn’t look like a man who enjoys killing the wives of laid-off steelworkers.

Not a very high bar, I admit. But remember: It’s President Obama who set the bar. And succeeded. Romney suffers from unprecedentedly high negatives (50 percent), the highest unfavorability rating at this late date for any challenger in the past three decades.

As to the policy, Romney finally got to explain to the 60 million Americans watching that he intends to lower taxes across the board, particularly for the middle class. As for the rich, he got to explain the difference between lowering tax rates and reducing tax payments. He repeated at least twice that the rich would continue to pay the same percentage of the tax burden, while lower rates would spur economic growth.

His success in doing this against a flummoxed Obama does more than rally the conservative base. It may affect waverers — disappointed 2008 Obama supporters waiting for a reason to jump. They watch Romney in this debate and ask: Is this the clueless, selfish, out-of-touch guy we’ve been hearing about from the ads and from the mainstream media?

And then they see Obama — detached, meandering, unsure. Can this be the hip, cool, in-control guy his acolytes and the media have been telling us about?

Obama was undone on Wednesday in part by his dismissive arrogance. You could see him thinking annoyedly: “Why do I have to be onstage with this clod, when I’ve gone toe-to-toe with Putin?” (And lost every round, I’d say. But that’s not how Obama sees it.)

Obama never even pulled out his best weapon, the 47 percent. Not once. That’s called sitting on a lead, lazily and smugly. I wager he mentions it in the next debate, more than once — and likely in his kickoff.

On the other hand, Obama just isn’t that good. Not without a teleprompter. He’s not even that good at news conferences — a venue in which he’s still in charge, choosing among questioners and controlling the timing of his own answers.

By the end of the debate, Obama looked small, uncertain. It was Romney who had the presidential look.

Reelection campaigns after a failed presidential term — so failed that Obama barely even bothers to make the case, preferring to blame everything on his predecessor — hinge almost entirely on whether the challenger can meet the threshold of acceptability. Romney crossed the threshold Wednesday night.

Reagan won his election (Carter was actually ahead at the time) when he defused his caricature as some wild, extreme, warmongering cowboy. In his debate with Carter, he was affable, avuncular and reasonable. That’s why with a single aw-shucks line, “There you go again,” the election was over.

Romney had to show something a little different: That he is not the clumsy, out-of-touch plutocrat that the paid Obama ads and the unpaid media have portrayed him to be. He did, decisively.

That’s why MSNBC is on suicide watch. Why the polls show that, by a margin of at least 2 to 1, voters overwhelmingly gave the debate to Romney.

And he won big in an unusual way. This could be the only presidential debate ever won so definitively in the absence of some obvious and ruinous gaffe, like Gerald Ford’s “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”

Romney by two touchdowns.

Read more on the debate:

George F. Will: Romney accomplished a trifecta

Eugene Robinson: Obama’s off night

Michael Gerson: Romney was exceptional when it counted

The Post’s View: Romney’s ruinous tax plan

Ruth Marcus: Romney artfully dodged the facts

How the Supreme Court ruled

Individual Mandate

Is the penalty in the law equivalent to a tax that therefore—
under the Anti-Injunction Act—cannot be challenged until it's
actually levied? YES and NO

In voting to uphold the mandate, the justices ruled that a penalty for refusing to obtain health insurance amounts to a tax. But the court did not accept that the Anti-Injunction Act precludes a decision on the health-care law.

Is the law's individual mandate constitutional? YES

The court rejected the administration's commerce-clause argument, but ruled that Congress has "the power to impose" the individual mandate under its taxing authority. The provision "need not be read to do more than impose a tax," the opinion said. "That is sufficient to sustain it."

Medicaid Expansion

Is the law's provision expanding Medicaid to cover a greater share of the poor constitutional? YES, but . . .

The justices found that the law's expansion of Medicaid can move forward, but not its provision that threatens states with the loss of their existing Medicaid funding if the states declined to comply with the expansion. The finding raises questions as to how effectively the federal government will be able to implement the expansion of the joint federal-state insurance program for the poor.

Comments

1. There is concern that the Court chose to use the federal government's taxing authority as the basis for upholding the law, and the reason is that the commerce clause has been the basis for most legislation that has provided a countervailing check on the greed and bigotry. And the decision certainly does not preclude the eventual necessity for there to be one health care plan for all Americans. 

Women leaders receive Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards at Kennedy Center

For the first time in the 11-year history of the Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards, Hillary Clinton couldn’t make it.

A trip to Turkey kept the Secretary of State from attending the awards ceremony, held at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House on Wednesday evening, but it didn’t keep her from appearing on screen to deliver a taped greeting to the 2,000-plus guests and eight female honorees in the theater that night.
Clinton, after all, is an integral part of the history of the Vital Voices Global Partnership, which she and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright started as a U.S. government initiative in 1997, and which has since grown into its own as a nonprofit organization — though with the same mission of advancing women’s roles as economic, social and political forces of change.
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Republicans clash with Attorney General Holder over voter ID laws, gun sting

Republican lawmakers clashed with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Thursday over Justice Department efforts to block voter-ID laws in several Southern states during this election year.
Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee also grilled Holder over the botched “Fast and Furious” operation, in which federal agents in Arizona allowed suspected arms traffickers to buy more than 2,000 guns in order to track them to a Mexican drug cartel.

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[ For More on the Suject ]

Conservatives used to care about community. What happened?

To secure his standing as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney has disowned every sliver of moderation in his record. He’s moved to the right on tax cuts and twisted himself into a pretzel over the health-care plan he championed in Massachusetts — because conservatives are no longer allowed to acknowledge that government can improve citizens’ lives.

Romney is simply following the lead of Republicans in Congress who have abandoned American conservatism’s most attractive features: prudence, caution and a sense that change should be gradual. But most important of all, conservatism used to care passionately about fostering community, and it no longer does. This commitment now lies buried beneath slogans that lift up the heroic and disconnected individual — or the “job creator” — with little concern for the rest.

A cooling love affair with driving our cars

Good news for Memorial Day weekend: Since peaking at a national average of $3.93 on April 5, the price of regular gasoline has fallen almost 25 cents per gallon. That’s like a $25 billion tax cut for consumers. In fact, gasoline is cheaper now than it was a year ago at this time. Futures markets are signaling further possible declines.

Obama The Cry Baby !!!

 

         Obama can give up the whining, yes he can!

By Jennifer Rubin

I am sure you noticed that President Obama complains a lot. The 24/7 news cycle, the House Republicans, President George W. Bush, Wall Street and a long list of invented villains take up a good deal of his speaking time.

Let’s be frank: He’s a whiner. The good news is that there is a new brand of tough love therapy that seems perfect for him. Doesn’t the following ring a bell?

Whining, as defined by expert — the therapists, spouses, co-workers and others who have to listen to it — is chronic complaining, a pattern of negative communication. It brings down the mood of everyone within earshot. It can hold whiners back at work and keep them stuck in a problem, rather than working to identify a solution. It can be toxic to relationships.

Now I’m not, definitely not, suggesting the president is mentally unbalanced or ill. He’s just a run-of-the-mill whiner. But the advice (in bold below) dispensed by therapists seems like it could do the trick for many of us, including the president. I’ve adapted the advice to his situation.

Go gently. Um, Mr. President, do you think voters are looking for a positive, can-do president?

Use a tone of genuine curiosity. I was just wondering if you feel better after a GOP-bashing speech. Or do you get frustrated all over again a few hours later? Do you sometimes feel like Bo’s the only one who still listens to you?

Point out there’s a pattern. Mr. President, I’d like you to look at a couple of Google searches: “Obama says GOP party over country” and “GOP wants dirty water.”

Open up the conversation. Is it your poll numbers that are your real worry?

Ask the person what he plans to do about the problem. Do you think there’s an alternative to blaming everyone else for your failures?

Suggest an alternative. Mr. President, you could do what Mitt Romney has done — stop demagoguing and offer reasonable entitlement reform. Heck, you could even dust off the Simpson-Bowles report. I think there’s a copy around somewhere. Maybe you could take a trip to Israel, finally. Or maybe you could put out a real immigration reform plan, with bullet points and everything. I mean, what if — this is a stretch, I know — you tried to sell the voters on your successes? Okay, okay, forget that last one.

Set a time limit. Only five minutes a day for whining, Mr. President, and when no one is in earshot.

Give positive reinforcement. I was just re-reading your 2008 campaign speeches. Wow, they were inspiring! No red states, no blue states. Stop politics as usual. Voters love that stuff, you know. And when you put your mind to it, you can inspire them.

Now Americans will devour a good self-help guide. So for the voters, this nugget of wisdom could really catch on: “How do you get someone to stop the constant griping? The answer is simple, but not always easy: Don’t listen to it.” I think more and more voters are adopting that tactic every day.