Senate reaches compromise, on the backs of education / Media giving heavy exposure to Republican critics

THE U.S. SENATE HAS APPARENTLY SETTLED ON A COMPROMISE ON PRES. OBAMA'S STIMULUS PACKAGE
Reports early Friday (2/06/09) evening indicated that a Senate compromise was made. The compromise was reached via the support of three Republicans.

NEEDY SCHOOLS TO PAY FOR COMPROMISE
The Republicans, who gave us eight years of the president (G.W. Bush) who claimed to be the education president, insisted on a thick host of cuts.
Prominent among the cuts was education spending. This will hurt financially needy districts profoundly. They can look forward to increases of student class sizes, such as 30 students in a kindergarten class.

The cuts will pit district against district and school against school (given the combination of cuts and the protection of pay for No Child Left Behind "NCLB"); this from Huffington Post:

In a key reduction from the bill that reached the Senate floor earlier in the week, $40 billion would be cut from a "fiscal stabilization fund" for state governments' education costs, though $14 billion to boost the maximum for college Pell Grants by $400 to $5,250 would be preserved, as would aid to local school districts for the No Child Left Behind law and special education.

2010 RACES START NOW
The Democrats need to call attention to the destructive role that Republicans have played in this mess. When cities and states have to slash budgets, due to Republican-triggered cuts, the Democrats need to publicly highlight this. When the recovery is weak, because of modest federal infusions of cash, Democrats need to call attention to the Republican pressures for austere financial contributions to the recovery.

Democrats need to call attention to the guns/butter dichotomy. Every dollar for the military is money withheld from useful social spending or useful injection into the civilian economy.

The Democrats need to start a drumbeat of these talking points NOW. There are many vulnerable Republican senate incumbents, in seats in economically depressed areas, e.g., George Voinovich of Ohio. The Republicans need to go. Spector too. The Republican pair in Maine are lucky that their seats aren't up for reelection in 2010. They (Collins and Snowe of Maine) and the other so-called moderates have shown their true colors on this urgent stimulus package. Moderate Republicans are generally liberal on social issues and conservative on economic issues. That kind of posture is not helpful in this true national emergency.

President Obama has offered an olive branch to the Republicans. They have not responded in kind --not even the moderates. Instead, they have, as he has recently pointed out, pursued the same old thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

*THANKFULLY, HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI IS COMMITTED TO PROPELLING A STRONG BILL THROUGH CONGRESS, AGAINST THE CALLS FOR BIPARTISANSHIP*
From Glenn Thrush and Patrick O'Connor at Politico, Friday afternoon (2/7/09):

In a statement sure to rile Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Friday dismissed calls for bipartisanship as “process” arguments extraneous to passing a stimulus bill — and warned Senate Democrats against slashing proposed increases to education spending.
. . . .
“Washington seems consumed in the process argument of bipartisanship, when the rest of the country says they need this bill,” the California Democrat said, seeming to sweep aside the Obama administration initial desire to have broad GOP support for the plan.

“We must have a bill [quickly],” she said, in a clear message to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who has spent the past two days wrangling with moderates who want to cut proposed education funding for the states by as much as $50 billion.

“These cuts are very damaging — [the House bill] was put together very carefully. ... The funding goes directly to school districts, they are stimulative because they maintain jobs instead of cutting jobs.”

NETWORKS DEMONSTRATE BIAS IN BOOKING MORE REPUBLICAN APPEARANCES THAN DEMOCRATIC APPEARANCES
The Democrats need to hold press conferences, to call attention to the media bias for Republicans, a bias that has led to a (recent) public appetite for austerity.
See this study at ThinkProgress.org, for factual demonstration of this partisan bias in booking of guests.

REPORT: GOP Lawmakers Outnumber Dem Lawmakers By Almost 2 To 1 In Cable News Stimulus Debate Again»

Last week, ThinkProgress released a report showing that, in the debate over the House economic recovery bill on the five cable news networks, Republican members of Congress outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by a ratio of 2 to 1. The analysis tallied interview segments about the stimulus on CNBC, Fox Business, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC during a three-day period, finding that the networks had hosted Republican lawmakers 51 times and Democratic lawmakers only 26 times.

The economic recovery package passed the House last week with zero Republican votes, shifting the focus to the Senate. Though the venue has changed, the debate on cable has not improved much.

In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that Republican lawmakers outnumbered Democratic lawmakers 75 to 41 on cable news interviews by members of Congress (from 6am on Monday 2/2 through 11pm on Thursday 2/5):



Some observations from our analysis:

* Last week, Fox News came the closest to balance with 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. But the so-called “fair and balanced” network was not able to maintain such a ratio this week, hosting 24 Republicans and only 11 Democrats.

* The business news networks were particularly egregious this week. CNBC had more than twice as many conservatives, with 14 Republicans and 6 Democrats. Fox Business was even worse, hosting 20 Republicans for just 4 Democrats.

* In the previous study, the supposedly liberal MSNBC favored Republicans 15 to 9. This week, however, MSNBC became the only network to host more Democratic members of Congress than Republicans, with 17 Democrats and 12 Republicans.

Though the imbalance is already stark, the tilt of the coverage would have been even more lopsided if the analysis had been broken down into whether a lawmaker who appeared on TV was a supporter or a critic of the economic recovery plan. Some of the most frequent Democratic guests this week were outspoken critics of the proposed stimulus plans, such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Kent Conrad (D-ND).

Fortunately, the imbalance on the networks is not going unnoticed. A House Democratic leadership aide told Politico’s Michael Calderone yesterday that “what happened with cable last week is that Republican House members were the only show in town.” A “very senior” Democratic aide told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that the leadership is “aware of the problem and are taking steps to fix it.” The aide noted that “there is also an onus on producers to remedy this issue.”

Clinton III: Obama's economics and energy choices likely to make left unhappy

The Democratic Party's left flank is already getting uncomfortable.

When President-elect introduced his economic advisors, the effect would dispel two fantasies,
(1) the right's fantasy that he is a socialist,
(2) progressives' fantasy that he will change everything, that he will implement their dream policies.

The profile of his advisors suggests an establishment, centrist, neo-liberal administration. Yes, his team is fronted by Chief of Staff -to be Rahm Emanuel, reputed to be a pitbull. Yet, there are the figures from the second half of Carter's term and Clinton's two terms that alienated (and infuriated some) progressives:
Robert Rubin, Laura Tyson, Paul Volker.
And most of all, the anticipated Treasury Secretary possibility, Lawrence Summers.(--Or Paul Volker, as Melbourne, Australia's Herald Sun suggests.) In short, Oblama's administration is shaping up to be, as Rachel Maddow said, Thursday night, Clinton-Term III.

This important article in today's NY Times, by Jackie Calmes and Ben White, "Obama’s Possible Treasury Choices Draw Criticism," covers the essential points.

CHICAGO — Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, a member of the new economic advisory board that met with President-elect Barack Obama here on Friday, is also a leading candidate to be the next Treasury chief.

That prospect has critics of Mr. Summers, particularly on the Democratic Party’s left, reviving old controversies in hopes of dooming his chances. In the days since Mr. Obama was elected, liberal bloggers have sought to ignite an online opposition by recalling the rocky five years Mr. Summers spent as president of Harvard, where he angered many women and blacks before resigning in 2006.

Reaching back farther, other Web sites have resurrected a 1991 memorandum that Mr. Summers signed as an economist at the World Bank that suggested parts of Africa could be repositories for toxic waste.

Mr. Summers, 53, left the meeting on Friday with Mr. Obama without answering a question about the controversies, and Obama advisers declined to discuss them.

The main rival to Mr. Summers for the Treasury job, according to Obama advisers, is Timothy F. Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and a Treasury staff member under Mr. Summers when he led the agency in the final two years of the Clinton administration.

But Mr. Geithner presents a different problem for Mr. Obama, who staked his campaign on a call for change in Washington, especially in areas of economic policy.

Though a nonpartisan Federal Reserve official, Mr. Geithner is tightly linked with the policies of the current Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and the Bush White House. Among the public, there remains deep skepticism over the wisdom and fairness of the bank bailouts.

Many on Wall Street still question Mr. Geithner’s role in allowing the investment bank Lehman Brothers to collapse into bankruptcy, an event some believe exacerbated the financial crisis. Some also say Mr. Geithner relies too much on financial executives for guidance and, except in the Lehman case, is too quick to come to their rescue.

“He is too tied to Wall Street and too tied to this administration,” said Joseph Mason, banking professor at Louisiana State University and a critic of the bailout plans.

The simmering opposition to Mr. Summers and Mr. Geithner is typical of post-election transitions, when various groups weigh in for or against potential recruits.

Mr. Summers is widely known to want another stint in the job he held in 1999 and 2000 at the end of President Bill Clinton’s administration.

But in angering feminists, blacks and environmentalists over time, Mr. Summers has hurt himself with three groups that make up much of the base of the Democratic Party — making him a prime example of the constituent politics that Mr. Obama must maneuver around in coming weeks.

While at Harvard, Mr. Summers sparked a furor by suggesting that innate factors might help explain why more men than women go into scientific fields and excel there.

“There is no need for Obama to open that can of worms and court controversy when there are other good people” who could lead the Treasury, said one Democratic source who asked to remain unnamed. While Mr. Summers could weather the attacks, he also faces skepticism among colleagues, even those who admire him as an outstanding economist with a successful record at the Treasury, as being arrogant and sometimes condescending.

But Mr. Summers has influential promoters, not least his predecessor as Treasury secretary, Robert E. Rubin, for whom he served as deputy. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, through a spokesman, on Friday also praised Mr. Summers as “one of America’s leading economic minds” and “a valuable resource to House Democrats” as they have sought ways to address the economic crisis.

Typical of the material on the Internet about Mr. Summers, on the morning after the election, the Huffington Post reported that Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, had contacted the Web site to register her “mixed feelings” about his rumored prospects.

A day later, the site posted the private memorandum from 1991, when Mr. Summers was chief economist at the World Bank, that suggested dumping waste in underpopulated and “underpolluted” African countries.

The issue was raised in 1993 at Mr. Summers’s Senate confirmation hearings to be under secretary of the Treasury at the start of the Clinton administration. He was confirmed then and two more times, as deputy and then as secretary.

One Obama adviser counseled against interpreting Mr. Summers’s inclusion on the 17-member economic advisory board that Mr. Obama announced on Thursday, and Mr. Geithner’s absence, as indicating anything about their relative chances.

Mr. Geithner is a sitting Federal Reserve official, while the Obama board includes former government officials like Mr. Summers and Mr. Rubin and corporate leaders.

Like Mr. Summers, Mr. Geithner served at the Treasury under Mr. Rubin, helping manage the Russian credit crisis in the late 1990s.

Mr. Geithner, 47, also played a role in the bailouts of Brazil, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico and Thailand. And he spent two years in Tokyo in the early 1990s, where he studied Japan’s economy, later urging Mr. Rubin to assist in lifting that country out of its long financial malaise.

He is widely liked and admired across the financial industry as a tough but fair regulator with a keen understanding of the ways of Washington and Wall Street.

“He is very smart and very thoughtful and listens very, very carefully and is able to earn the trust of everyone he deals with,” said Peter G. Peterson, senior chairman of the private equity firm Blackstone Group. Mr. Peterson led the search committee that selected Mr. Geithner for his job at the Federal Reserve.

In addition to his ties to the current administration, some critics say Mr. Geithner’s quiet persona — he is rarely one to dominate a room — could be problematic for a position that demands a statesman capable of advocating the position of the United States before world leaders.

Mr. Peterson, however, dismissed the idea that Mr. Geithner shrinks from confrontation, noting that he discussed the issue with Mr. Rubin and Mr. Summers in 2003 when considering Mr. Geithner for the Federal Reserve job.

“They rather smiled when I asked the question,” Mr. Peterson said, “and said that Tim can be very, very direct when he needs to be.”

And the above cited Herald Sun article raises rumors by Politico.com that Obama will nominate California Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger as Secretary of Energy.

"And there's more": "There is also speculation he will retain Republican Robert Gates in the job of defence secretary, to ensure a smooth transition in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," according to the Melbourne Herald Sun, date-lined for tomorrow, November 9.

* * *
Obama's landslide vote suggested a shift to "the blue," to liberalism. Will Obama govern with this in mind? The potential economic team choices instead suggest that he will govern from the center, representing purple politics (Democrats and Republicans blended).

Progressives have been pining for the evisceration of moderate, Democratic Leadership Council types. Let's hope that Obama fulfills the dream of a progressive departure form the centrism of the Clinton years. The first indications of Obama's economic team are not encouraging that dream.

OBAMA: palling around with Republicans & foreign policy establishment

Gen. Colin Powell (ret.) is African-American, but race and partisan affiliation are not the only thing that influences his candidate choices. No, it is not incongruous that Powell is a Republican and is supporting Obama. The fact that other Republicans have also endorsed Obama should give pause to the arguments that only attribute Powell's endorsement to shared racial identity.

Oh, right-wing wingnuts,
you've got it wrong with the place of Sen. Barack Obama in his web of connections.
Obama: palling around with Republicans.

Let's look at the Republican support Obama enjoys, aside from Colin Powell:
John B. Anderson, the Illinois Republican congressman that ran for president as an independent in 1980. Former senators that entered the senate as Republicans: Lowell Weicker Jr. (Conn.), Lincoln Chafee (R.I.)
Former Congressmen that entered the House as Republicans: Jim Leach (Iowa), Pete McCloskey (Cal.)
----and Colin Powell, career-long Republican, who referred to the Republican Party yesterday as "my party"

Obama: palling around the the military and foreign policy establishment.

Powell is an African-American, but we don't only see him as an African-American. He is part of the military and foreign policy establishment. As the following people have endorsed Obama, we can say that these military and foreign policy establishment folks pall around with Obama ... they meet with and consult him ... :
Madeline Albright (former Ambassador to the United Nations, former Secretary of State), Zbignew Brezinkski (former National Security Advisor), Wesley Clark, Anthony Lake (former National Security Advisor), Donald McHenry (former Ambassador to the United Nations), Sam Nunn (former Chair of Senate Armed Services Committee), Bill Richardson (former Ambassador to the United Nations); and
Deputy Undersecretaries of Defense, Secretaries of the Navy and Air Force, a Vice Chief of Staff of Air Force, and high-ranking Army generals.

----and Colin Powell, former National Security Advisor, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former Secretary of State

NO, PUNDITS, IT IS NOT RACE THAT DROVE POWELL'S ENDORSEMENT. No one charged the above-cited individuals with racial solidarity in their endorsements; we sense an ugly double standard here, in the opposition to Powell's endorsement, by way of asserting racial solidarity as the basis for the endorsement.

McCain, Palin and the GOP's class war

As I wrote yesterday, This election, should John McCain lose, will result in a big shake-up and a long moment of self-reflection for the Republicans. They will need to loosen their strong ties to the cultural conservative right. As David Brooks noted, the Republicans have lost the affinities of many voters in affluent areas along the two ocean coasts. (See his column, "The Class War Before Palin.")
Columnists hypothesized earlier this year that McCain stood to lose the support of the anti-immigrant crowd. The Republican ticket this year stands to lose the support of many moderate thinking Republicans this year. The Sarah Palin selection sealed indecision that these moderates would have about the ticket. The Colin Powell endorsement of Barack Obama will finalize the flight of moderate Republicans from the party's ticket this year.
The Republicans/ conservatives will need to reconcile the six-pack crowd with the multiple homes crowd within their ranks.
At the close of last week, John Heilemann wrote in New York Magazine of how the McCain/Palin campaign is opening up tensions within the GOP and the conservatives:

The Right’s Class War: The prospect of a McCain loss has the Republican Party angrily turning on itself. Can the eggheads and the Joe Six-Packs get along?
For a man who has just been, in his eyes, excommunicated from both a magazine and a movement founded by his father half a century ago, Chris Buckley, son of the sainted William F., is doing a creditable job of keeping his upper lip stiff. “I’m still sort of getting my apostate act down,” Buckley says with a chuckle when I phone him a few days after the unpleasantness unfolded. “I’m reading Apostasy for Dummies.” The apostasy in question is, of course, his endorsement of Barack Obama, which provoked such a torrent of outrage and abuse from the right that Buckley felt it only proper to offer to quit his column at National Review—an offer that was taken up, to his great surprise, “rather briskly,” as he puts it. “I guess it shows, be careful to whom you tender your resignation, because they just might accept it!”
Buckley’s good humor does nothing to conceal his melancholy and bewilderment at this turn of events. “I was really quite amazed by the reaction, and I think it shows just how bloody calcified the political discourse has become, and tribalist, and snarling,” he tells me. “I want to say that it’s a tempest in a teapot, but there seems to be something going on here, and maybe this has accidentally tapped into it.”
If the Buckley affair were an isolated incident, such talk would be easy to dismiss as self-flattery—but it isn’t. With the prospect of defeat for John McCain growing more likely every day, the GOP destined to see its numbers reduced in both the House and Senate, and the Republican brand debased to the point of bankruptcy, the conservative intelligentsia is factionalized and feuding, criminating and recriminating, in a way that few of its members can recall in their political lifetimes. Populists attack Establishmentarians. Neocons assail theocons. And virtually everyone has something harsh to say about the party’s standard-bearer. Election Day may still be two weeks away, but already the idea-merchants of the right have formed a circular firing squad.
When the weapons of choice shift from pistols to Uzis after November 4, the ensuing massacre will be for Democrats a source of political opportunity, not to mention endless entertainment. But for Republicans it will be a necessary passage toward either the revival or reinvention of conservatism. Nobody serious on the right doubts that the overhaul is at once required and bound to be arduous—but it may take longer and prove even bloodier than anyone now imagines.
To get a sense of the struggle ahead, a good place to start is with Sarah Palin, who has been the flashpoint for the most severe intra-conservative contretemps so far. In the weeks since her selection as McCain’s running mate, a startling assortment of name-brand pundits on the right—Kathleen Parker, George Will, David Frum, David Brooks—have pronounced themselves displeased with the pick. Brooks went so far as to declaim that Palin “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” Buckley, for his part, tells me that McCain’s vice-presidential choice was roughly 60 percent of the reason that he decided to endorse Obama. “I will readily confess that I was one of many who swooned the day after the announcement,” he says. “But it’s kind of like dating a supermodel. There comes a moment, unfortunately, where they start talking.”
Yet Palin retains the fierce loyalty of a cadre of more populist, grassrootsy voices in the right-wing punditocracy who have denounced the main-line-conservative criticisms of Palin as the snooty, disloyal, and craven attempts of faux Republicans to curry favor with the ascendant liberal elite. “They … believe as intellectuals,” writes one pro-Palin opinionator, Victor Davis Hanson, “that the similarly astute Obamians may on occasion inspire, or admire them as the like-minded who cultivate the life of the mind—in contrast to the ‘cancer’ Sarah Palin, who, with her husband Todd, could hardly discuss Proust with them or could offer little if any sophisticated table talk other than the proper chokes on shotguns or optimum RPMs on snow-machines.”
Not surprisingly, Sarracuda’s foes on the right dismiss the counter-backlash more or less out of hand. When I ask Frum about the apparent class overtones of the anti-anti-Palin argument, he deems it a mere “rhetorical trope.” What he hears instead is the sound of defeatism. “The people who defend her have already given up any serious thought of Republicans’ wielding governmental power anytime soon,” Frum says. “They have already moved to a position of pure cultural symbolic opposition to a new majority. The people who criticize her do so because we have some hope that we could be in contention in 2012, and there’s some risk that she could be the party’s nominee, and she’d probably lose—and even if by some miracle she won, she’d be a terrible president.”

Read the remainder of Heileman's column, in Power Grid in New York Magazine.

IMMEDIATE ANALYSIS: On Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama

Gov. Colin Powell's endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama was mainly a rejection of the Palinization of the Republican Party.

For too many years, and with increasing intensity, we have been seeing the cultural conservatives becoming a more powerful, more incluential figure in the Republican Party. With the choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as Vice President, Sen. John McCain made it clear that he was tilting his hand toward the cultural conservative side of the party.

This saga has been a tragedy for Sen. John McCain. Here is the fellow that Independents, and even many Democrats, cited as a Republican that they felt very comfortable with. This was the Republican that people in the middle raised in contradistinction against the cultural conservatives.

This trip down the cultural conservative road marks McCain's following Buchanan in the path from the Republican Party of Richard Nixon.
Gen. Colin Powell (ret.), in his endorsement of Obama, did not reject John McCain as much as he rejected Sarah Palin, McCain's choice of Palin, and the low-road travelers of the Republican political machine. While Powell did upbraid McCain's reaction to the economic crisis as unwise, the majority of his indictment of McCain's candidacy dealt with the unclean direction of the McCain campaign and many Republicans.

Why did McCain choose Palin? He was grasping for the cultural conservative voters. But Palin embodies the cultural conservatives in a way that brings up too many embarrassing or unsettling hallmarks of cultural conservatives: her insistence of no quarter for abortions, even in the case of rape or incest (see her interview with Katie Couric), her belief that people shared the planet with dinosaurs (suggesting a literal reading of the Bible), her super-patriotism about God granting us fossil fuels.
Moreover, the selection must have tremendously offended the many Republican women that could have added strength to the ticket. Imagine the strength and wisdom that Condoleeza Rice or Kay Bailey Hutchinson could have added to the ticket.
The selection of Palin raises additional concerns about McCain. What is his conception of the role of the Vice President? However anyone wants to dress up the position, it is an understudy position. The understudy is someone hired to be ready to perform, should an actor be indisposed. The Vice President immediately steps in, in the event of the death or the temporary incapacity of the President. Now, we know that McCain's first choice actually was Sen. Joe Lieberman. Lieberman, despite plenty of mythology to the contrary, has a solid voting record on most issues, other than military policy. What was his reason for choosing Lieberman? Was it leadership qualities, personality? Was it related to whatever assumed demographic coattails a Lieberman role was presumed to bring along?
The VP pick is usually read as giving hints about the management or policy course that a candidate would take as president. Yet, the contrasts between Lieberman and Palin couldn't be more stark. Lieberman is a liberal; he would be useful for hoisting along moderates and some liberals to vote for McCain. Palin, as a conservative, is useful for shoring up McCain's conservative credentials and making conservatives a little bit more likely to forget about McCain's positions on immigration and campaign financing. The Vice President is supposed to, most of us would believe, carry on the ideological and leadership tendencies of the president. Just how would McCain govern, should he get elected? Along liberal lines, as the initial Lieberman choice suggests? -or as a hard-core, true-blue conservative Republican, as the Palin choice would suggest to us? The ideological direction of this latter choice is the direction that is turning off moderate Republicans, as Gen. Powell pointed out in his own view of the party's direction. This is not the Party of Teddy Roosevelt; this is the Party of Goldwater (recall his contempt for the United States' east coast, and his openly wondering if "just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea"). (With Palin we get that eastphobia redux, with her paranoid, blaming snipe against "East Coast politicians.")

This election, should McCain lose, will result in a big shake-up and a long moment of self-reflection for the Republicans. They will need to loosen their strong ties to the cultural conservative right. As David Brooks noted, the Republicans have lost the affinities of many voters in affluent areas along the two ocean coasts. (See his column, "The Class War Before Palin.")
Columnists hypothesized earlier this year that McCain stood to lose the support of the anti-immigrant crowd. The Republican ticket this year stands to lose the support of many moderate thinking Republicans this year. The Palin selection sealed indecision that these moderates would have about the ticket. This Powell endorsement of Obama will finalize the flight of moderate Republicans from the party's ticket this year.
(Of course, EVEN MORE DAMAGING, we should note that this endorsement, with all of the weight of Powell's gravitas, will give further encouragement to Independents to also join the rush to Obama.)

Former GOP Senator: Palin \'Dangerous for the Future\'

Former GOP Senator: Palin 'Dangerous for the Future'

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(At least some Republicans can see through the hype and mania for Palin; Lincoln Chafee, formerly a Senator of RI, gives his take on Palin.)