Trumpcare Headed for Defeat

My guess is that McConnell's reveal today of Trumpcare 2.0 will be as stillborn as the first iteration. There are already two solid Republican nays, Maine's Susan Collins and McConnell's Kentucky colleague Rand Paul, which means Trumpcare is dancing on the edge already.

What's interesting about this new version is that it shows Republicans are more interested in butchering the poor than lining their own pockets. McConnell's new version keeps Obamacare's payroll tax on high earners, as well as its tax on investment income, but pares back Medicaid. According to Thomas Kaplan and Robert Pear in yesterday's "G.O.P. Senators Vow to Unveil Health Bill Thursday, Despite Deep Divisions":

Senate Republicans are also likely to keep a pair of taxes imposed by the Affordable Care Act on people with high incomes. The law increased the payroll tax rate for many high-income taxpayers and imposed a tax on their investment income. Both taxes would be eliminated by the repeal bill passed by the House in May and by the original version of Mr. McConnell’s bill.

Keeping those taxes would undercut a major argument against the bill by Democrats, who have branded it as a tax cut for the rich disguised as a health bill.

But the largest changes to the health care system are likely to remain in the bill. About two-thirds of the increase in the projected number of uninsured Americans would result from deep cuts in expected Medicaid spending, the budget office said. The bill would impose caps on Medicaid spending and would roll back the expansion of the program under the Affordable Care Act.

The GOP plans to reveal its bill today, have 20 hours of debate and then vote next week. During the holiday recess numerous Republican senators publicly proclaimed their opposition to Trumpcare; those from rural states realized that a large portion of their medical system would basically grind to a halt with the proposed Medicaid cuts and restrictions.

What's tantalizing about the coming collapse of Trumpcare is that it creates a logjam for Republican tax overhaul, not to mention other dastardly legislative priorities.

Edsall in Pottstown, PA: For the GOP the 2016 Election is All About the Down-Ticket

I used to read Thomas Edsall's column every week. But then I switched employers, and I no longer had to while away the hours on the train. Consistently excellent, Edsall's reporting usually tells the story of a country wracked by inequality and economic dislocation while its major political parties struggle with how to win votes without doing anything to address the voters' concerns.

This week Edsall describes a visit to postindustrial Pottstown, PA, "Measuring the Trump Effect," where support for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee breaks down along gender lines:

My interviews this week with Pottstown voters in working and middle class white neighborhoods showed almost no support for Trump among women, but steady support among men.

“I like him because he is to the point, and it’s time for a change, I think he’s got the oomph to rattle some cages,” John Keyser, a nonunion employee at Universal Concrete Products Corporation, said. Universal Concrete is one of the few manufacturing facilities left in the area. Keyser told me that he usually votes for Democrats and thinks that Bill Clinton was “one of the greatest and best presidents we ever had.” But this year he supports Trump:

I’d rather have somebody who does get angry and has feelings than what we have had with politicians who don’t care either way. I like the emotional involvement.

In a number of cases, local support for Trump among white men was based as much on their animosity to Hillary Clinton as it was on their faith in Trump.

“I’d vote for the devil before I would ever vote for that woman,” said a man in his 60s who identified himself only as Keith. In a phrase repeated by at least three others, Keith said that Hillary Clinton “belongs in jail.”

Stacey Weinstein, a 53-year-old psychiatric social worker, reflected the opposite side of the coin: she distrusts Clinton, but sees Trump as by far the worse choice.

“I’m not terribly enthusiastic about her because I think she has done some very underhanded things,” Weinstein said, but “Donald Trump is a misogynist, and I don’t like misogynists.”

What stood out in the interviews I conducted on June 13 here and in an upscale development in East Goshen, 24 miles south of Pottstown, was that the Trump supporters were male, with one exception; Clinton backers were decisively (but not exclusively) women.

News consumers would be better informed if more reporters did what Edsall does in this week's column -- go to a town; describe briefly its history, both demographic and economic; and ask people what they think about the candidates. The interviews he quotes breathe fresh air and provide a slice of life we too rarely get to sample. It's too bad that Edsall only appears online and not in NYT's national print edition.

The rest of the story Edsall wrestles with the down-ticket ramifications of Trump's candidacy. This is the $64,000 question for the GOP and explains why party leaders have vacillated so when it comes to embracing or criticizing Trump. Basically the Republican Party is trapped and elders don't know what to do. Look at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. First, he said the party would run attack ads in select states against its own nominee if it ends up being Trump. Then he was one of the first high-profile Republicans in Congress to endorse Trump.

For the GOP it is all about protecting its majorities in the Senate and House, which means inoculating its down-ticket from any Trump backlash at the same time it grabs whatever ride is available on Trump's coattails. Maybe such a calculation is possible at the level of the individual race, but certainly not at the national level. That's why Congressional Republicans seem so adrift when it comes to Trump, and it is not something that is going to be solved between now and November. The GOP hope is to fudge things and not lose too many seats.

Super Tuesday

It was a depressing weekend. The Clinton margin of victory among blacks in South Carolina, even greater than what she racked up in Nevada, is a death knell for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, as Nate Cohn explains in "Hillary Clinton’s Winning Numbers in South Carolina Suggest Sweep in South":

[Hillary] has won South Carolina in a rout, 73.5 percent to 26 percent, exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. Black voters represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.

The result positions Mrs. Clinton for a sweep of the South in a few days on Super Tuesday and puts the burden on Mr. Sanders to post decisive victories elsewhere. If he does not — and the polls, at least so far, are not encouraging — Mrs. Clinton seems likely to amass a significant and possibly irreversible lead.

For Mrs. Clinton, the path to the presidential nomination is straightforward: fight Mr. Sanders to a draw among the nonblack voters who dominate the party’s contests in many Northern and Western states, and win by huge margins among black voters, who represent about a quarter of Democratic voters nationally. They represent the majority of Democrats in the South, which will play a crucial role on Super Tuesday.

The results in South Carolina — as well as in Nevada, where Mrs. Clinton also won black voters by a wide margin — suggest that she can count on big wins in six Super Tuesday states where black voters represent an above-average share of Democratic voters: Alabama, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia. The polls say the same thing.

As a result, the Sanders campaign has effectively conceded the South on Super Tuesday. The campaign is not airing advertisements there, according to NBC News data. It’s instead concentrating resources in five states with far fewer black voters and far fewer delegates: Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts and Vermont. It is a strategy that aims to maximize Mr. Sanders’s chance of winning states, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent Mrs. Clinton from running up huge delegate leads from the South.

The likelihood of a Clinton landslide in the delegate-rich South means that Mr. Sanders can’t compensate with a few narrow, feel-good wins outside the South. The thing to watch on Tuesday night is whether Mr. Sanders can win by big — even double-digit — margins in states like Minnesota or Massachusetts. The margins matter, because delegates are awarded proportionally in the Democratic nomination contest.

Even this might not be enough in a place like Minnesota or Massachusetts, depending on whether one assumes that Mr. Sanders has an advantage in caucus states like Minnesota or a state bordering Vermont like Massachusetts. If Mrs. Clinton has an advantage among Hispanic voters, in addition to black voters, then the burden on Mr. Sanders would grow even more to dominate with white voters in states like Massachusetts or Minnesota.

The polling, at least for now, says Mr. Sanders is not positioned to win by these sorts of margins. He’s in a tight race in Massachusetts. He’s in a tight race in Oklahoma, a state with a below-average black population and a large number of working-class Democrats. There is not much polling in Colorado or Minnesota, but there isn’t much evidence of a blowout there or in neighboring Wisconsin.

I think Cohn's analysis is on the money. Hillary has proven herself Obama's equal in winning a huge percentage of the black vote. And while it is true that Bernie wins a majority of white voters, though apparently not in South Carolina, it is more a split than a landslide. Absent a bombshell like an indictment, Hillary's path to the nomination seems safe.

Hence, the low feeling this weekend. Particularly after reading the massive two-parter by Jo Becker and Scott Shane (The Libya Gamble: "Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall" and "A New Libya, With 'Very Little Time Left' ") about the disastrous Hillary-backed coup of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Hillary's fingerprints are all over the destruction of North Africa, the Middle East and now Europe.

The good news though is she going to have great difficulty winning a general election against Trump. Cohn is too busy lining out the limitations of Bernie's campaign to note the weakness of Hillary's. For starters, Democratic turnout has been less than the GOP so far. Trump broke records for turnout in South Carolina and Nevada. This has to be very troubling for Team Clinton. For the winning formula of the Obama coalition to work, Hillary will need not only the constituency groups -- blacks, Latinos, youth -- but she will need juiced turnout by those constituents. Hillary has the blacks, but so far she does not have young people and there is no evidence that she is winning the Latino vote by a significant margin. Most importantly, Hillary is not inspiring new voters to come to the polls the way Trump is. Read Matt Taibbi's excellent "How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable" and ask yourself, "How does Trump lose any of the big swing states to Hillary?"

One possible answer is found in "Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump" by Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman and Johnathan Martin. The GOP will campaign against Trump in the general:

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

The article also limns Republican plans to steal the nomination from Trump at the convention.

Maybe the GOP will incinerate itself. We can only hope. One thing is for sure: If Hillary does as well tomorrow as is generally predicted, Bloomberg will not run. The elites will all line up with Hillary, and it will be Hillary vs. the world.

Officials Walk Back Talk of U.S.-Iraq Split While Hope for P5+1 Agreement Dims

Two stories today both confirm the importance of Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq's efforts to defeat Islamic State at the same time quoting Iraqi and U.S. officials denying that there is any rift between the two countries.

First, Helene Cooper, reporting from Washington D.C., writes in "U.S. Strategy in Iraq Increasingly Relies on Iran" that

“The only way in which the Obama administration can credibly stick with its strategy is by implicitly assuming that the Iranians will carry most of the weight and win the battles on the ground,” said Vali R. Nasr, a former special adviser to Mr. Obama who is now dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “You can’t have your cake and eat it too — the U.S. strategy in Iraq has been successful so far largely because of Iran.”

***

Landon Shroder, an intelligence analyst for corporations in Iraq who was in Baghdad last summer when Mosul fell, countered that the worry that Iran will gain influence in Iraq ignores the reality that Iran’s Shiite government is already a key Iraqi ally.

“By this stage, everybody who observed what happened in Iraq with the Islamic State should know that the main influencer in Iraq is Iran,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “That’s an unpopular perception in the United States, after spending so much money and lives lost in the conflict, but it’s reality.”

Mr. Shroder said that at the moment, the only force with the ability to bring Kurdish troops, the Iraqi Army and the Shiite militias together to fight the Islamic State is Iran.

Rafid Jaboori, the spokesman for Mr. Abadi, the Iraqi prime minister, said in an interview Wednesday that Iraq had urged the United States and Iran not to play out their bilateral conflict in Iraq’s battle against the Islamic State.

“So far in general there was no clash within the two,” Mr. Jaboori said.

He drew a comparison to World War II. “Countries with different ideologies, different priorities, different systems of government, cooperated to defeat the Nazis,” he said. “It’s foreseeable that we see countries which might not get along very well in terms of their bilateral relations working to help Iraq to defeat this threat.”

Then, Anne Barnard in "Iraqis Want Lead Role in Driving ISIS From Mosul":

But as the battle continued in Tikrit, American officials, as well as some of their Iraqi counterparts, insisted that the countries’ relationship was healthy and that close military collaboration would continue against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or by the Arabic acronym Daesh.

Even though United States warplanes are not participating in the Tikrit battle, as they have in others, the Iraqi government still welcomes continued international assistance, said Ali al-Alaaq, a close aide to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. 

“Today in Salahuddin, we were hoping that the Americans could participate in the battle against ISIS, but we have launched against ISIS alone,” he said. “We are expecting that the support will be continued, especially since we are facing a very important task in Mosul and other cities in Iraq.” 

American officials, too, tried to play down signs of strain between the United States and Iraq. 

“The United States is proud of its partnership with Iraqi forces, which has made huge impacts in weakening Daesh, and we are looking forward to more coordination with the Iraqi forces,” the United States ambassador to Iraq, Stuart E. Jones, said after meeting with Adnan al-Zurufi, the governor of Najaf, in southern Iraq. He appeared to be reassuring Iraqi officials that the United States did not oppose the use of Shiite militias known as popular mobilization forces. They have played a crucial role in the ground fight since many regular army units disintegrated as ISIS seized much of northern and western Iraq in June.

“Our direct coordination is with the Iraqi security forces, and we count on the security forces to coordinate with the popular mobilization forces and other forces that are cooperating in the fight against Daesh,” Mr. Jones said.

The problem for the Obama administration is that it has to deal with Israel's Likudniks and the sheikhs of the Gulf Cooperation Council.  Both groups are dead set against anything that smacks of a victory for Iran, including a deal on its nuclear program emerging from the P5+1 talks in Switzerland.

Michael Gordon's opaque "John Kerry Flies to Saudi Arabia to Discuss Iran Nuclear Talks" is clear enough for the reader to discern that the make or break aspect of the negotiations center on how long uranium processing restrictions should remain in effect. Ten years? Fifteen years?

Obama administration officials have said that a central goal of accord would be to preclude Iran from being able to develop enough nuclear material for a bomb within a year, should it decide to repudiate the agreement. American officials have said the breakout restrictions should last at least 10 years. Mr. Kerry, who took no questions from reporters in his appearance here, said the United States would be interested only in the “right deal.”

“Time is of the essence,” he said, “and important decisions need to be made.”

American officials have not said how long the agreement with Iran might be in effect. One possibility that has been discussed is an accord that lasts 15 years, with restrictions on Iran’s ability to enrich uranium relaxed during the final years.

This will be the petard Obama and Kerry will be hoisted upon. No sunset date will be long enough for the venal pay-to-play Congress and its Saudi and Israeli paymasters. Obama can rescind some of the Iranian sanctions himself, but he needs Congressional approval to relax all of them.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's signaling his willingness to push legislation requiring Congressional approval for any agreement that results from the P5+1 talks prior to their March 24 deadline points to the eventual necessity of an Obama veto.

If the P5+1 talks fail we will have to wait and see if there is a spillover effect on U.S.-Iranian cooperation in the war against ISIS. Failure to reach an agreement will create an even messier mess in a region that is already cracked and reeling.

Back to Where We Started: Boehner Will Have to Go Against His Caucus

The confidence that caused an increase in the Dow on Friday quickly disappeared over the weekend when a Paul Ryan brokered deal to end the government shutdown/debt ceiling standoff fell through.

Republicans are loudly blaming Democrats. Strange stuff since Republicans are the ones that initiated the shutdown and are the ones threatening default.

Apparently the fault lies with the Democrats because they're unwilling to throw the Republicans a bone; in other words, the government shutdown is going to continue and the the world financial system is going to have to get work on building a new foundation because Democrats will not reward Republican blackmail.

As Krugman says in his column this morning, "The Dixiecrat Solution":

[O]ur current state of dysfunction looks like a chronic condition, not a one-time event. Even if the debt ceiling is raised enough to avoid immediate default, even if the government shutdown is somehow brought to an end, it will only be a temporary reprieve. Conservative activists are simply not willing to give up on the idea of ruling through extortion, and the Obama administration has decided, wisely, that it will not give in to extortion.

U.S. Treasury bills can longer be viewed as a completely safe. Republicans want a bone tossed to them so they can maintain extortion as a weapon to enhance their minority status. A potentially catastrophic default on U.S. sovereign debt, one would imagine, renders this weapon inoperable for future use. This is why Democrats are correctly refusing to offer any concessions. Concessions mean we go through this all over again the next time we butt up against the debt ceiling or the government needs to be funded.

The deal being worked on in the Senate is under the care of Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. Jonathan Weisman describes the Collins plan this morning in his story, "Spending Dispute Leaves a Senate Deal Elusive":

The Collins plan would maintain sequestration-level spending through Jan. 15, when formal budget negotiators would be required to complete a House-Senate agreement on spending and taxation over the next decade. That date was already a concession. Ms. Collins, along with Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both Republicans, initially wanted to finance the government for six months at those levels. The initial proposal by Ms. Collins would also have extended the debt ceiling only to Nov. 15, but at the request of Senate Democratic leaders, she and Mr. McConnell pushed it back to Jan. 31.

Having embraced this proposal, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is presumably using it as the basis for talks with Senate majority Harry Reid. As of now Democrats want the reduced spending of the sequester to last only through mid-November, not into the new year as Collins proposes.

It's hard to see how the Tea Party controlled House passes the Collins plan. So we're back to where we were at the beginning. Speaker of the House Boehner is going to have to go against the majority of his caucus and release whatever emerges from the Senate for an up-or-down floor vote. This is Krugman's conclusion, and it basically repeats the dynamic from the fiscal cliff negotiations last New Year's Eve.

Senate Democrats need to stand firm. They are who will determine if the neo-Dixiecrat rump will continue to dominate the federal government.

Banging the Drum for Austerity

Mitch McConnell did the Sunday morning talk shows yesterday banging the drum for austerity.  Krugman in his column this morning mentions that the paper creating the most buzz at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association is one by Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh of the IMF; it is a recantation of austerity.  Krugman provides a thumbnail sketch of the 2008 financial meltdown, a gigantic crisis that required governments not just to prime the pump by keeping interest rates low but to step in and start spending -- run deficits -- until the private sector recovered.

But it all went wrong in 2010. The crisis in Greece was taken, wrongly, as a sign that all governments had better slash spending and deficits right away. Austerity became the order of the day, and supposed experts who should have known better cheered the process on, while the warnings of some (but not enough) economists that austerity would derail recovery were ignored. For example, the president of the European Central Bank confidently asserted that “the idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect.”  

Speaking a Greece, there is an excellent opinion page piece by Kostas Vaxevanis, the embattled publisher of Hot Doc, who made the Lagarde list public and then was arrested and prosecuted by the government and eventually acquited.  Vaxevanis' story is about the rotten oligarchy that rules Greece but it speaks to how government works in all countries.

Fiscal Cliff a Political Creation of GOP

The canard in D.C. plays on.  Members of the Senate are back in session and the House has been called back for Sunday.  Jonathan Weisman reports that there is both hope and pessimism that a deal can be struck: hope from Mitch McConnell that talks are finally percolating; gloom from Harry Reid that procedurally there is not enough time on the clock to finalize any legislation before the end of the year.

Yes, year's end.  Thank goodness.  Today is my last working day of 2012.  And I am relieved.  Jennifer Steinhauer has an entertaining story about the prickly and despondent senators called away from holiday back to the Capitol; it's rich with atmospheric detail, which is unusual for political correspondence.  This is the delightful second-to-last paragraph:

The House and Senate have held numerous pro forma sessions during the week between Christmas and New Year over the years, and in 1995 during a major budget battle. But the last time they held roll call votes that week, before Thursday, was during the second session of the 91st Congress, in 1970, amid a large spending fight and a filibuster over financing for a supersonic transport plane.

For some reason I am fascinated by a SST filibuster in the final days of 1970. Pat and Dick in the White House. The Weather Underground on the run.

The mirage of a deal taking shape, according to Weisman, seeks to "avert most of the tax increases on Jan. 1, to prevent a sudden cut in payments to medical providers treating Medicare patients and to extend expiring unemployment benefits."

Nelson Schwartz has a story about the economic impact of the fiscal cliff negotiations.  Consumer confidence took a big hit in the first part of the month; it's being compared to the debt ceiling debacle from the summer of 2011:

Several economists said the current situation recalls the standoff over raising the federal debt ceiling in the summer of 2011. In that case, too, consumer confidence eroded as both sides in Washington refused to blink until the last moment, but experts added the consequences were likely to be longer-lasting this time because the changes in tax policy affect individuals directly.

We must remember, as housing prices finally start to recover and unemployment continues its incremental decline, that the fiscal cliff is a political creation of the Republican Party. The GOP wants to alter fundamentally popular government programs, social democratic programs, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  Republicans are willing to risk a crisis to achieve this goal.

Strategy of Deception

We used to play a game called "smear the queer" when I was a kid.  One kid would run around carrying a ball chased by a pack of screaming kids until he was tackled or passed it off because he didn't want to be tackled.  The Republicans are engaged in a game of "smear the queer" as a strategy of deception in the fiscal cliff budget negotiations.  First Boehner was the ball carrier.  All eyes were on him.  The pack chased him around for several weeks.  Then he was tackled -- smeared --  when he couldn't get a conservative version of increased tax rates (for those earning over a million dollars a year) through his own caucus.  Now Boehner has tossed the ball to McConnell who is starting to make his moves, his zigs and zags, as the pack renews its chase.

House Republicans leaders say the Senate must act.  In order for this to happen minority leader Mitch McConnell must agree to not use  procedural maneuvers to block a deal.  This from today's story by Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer:

But Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, said no one from the White House or from Mr. Reid’s office has reached out to begin negotiations. Democrats say that Mr. McConnell knows full well what they are proposing: the same Senate bill that passed in July extending all the expiring Bush-era income tax cuts on incomes below $250,000, setting the tax rate on dividends and capital gains at 20 percent, and stopping the alternative minimum tax from rising to hit more middle class taxpayers. Onto that, Democrats would like to add an extension of expiring unemployment benefits and a delay in across-the-board spending cuts while negotiations on a broader deficit reduction plan slips into next year.

Democrats now suggest that Republicans are content to wait until after the January deadline. On Jan. 3, Mr. Boehner is likely to be re-elected speaker for the 113th Congress. After that roll call, he may feel less pressure from his right flank against a deal.

Also in the Weisman and Steinhauer story is Geithner's note to Congress yesterday that the government will hit the debt ceiling on Monday.

So where are we at with five days left of the year?  Republicans are running out the clock, making it appear as if they're working towards a deal when they are not.  The press is starting to report the impact of cliff diving on the working and unemployed (loss of $1,000 for a household making $50,000 a year when 2% payroll tax cut expires; in the first quarter of 2013 three million people will lose federal unemployment benefits averaging $290 a week).  And we haven't even begun to address raising the debt ceiling.

It does not look good.

And clearly that's the impression the GOP desires.  When the Republicans don't control the federal government they want to make sure that it doesn't work.  They pursued this course for the last four years.  And even though they lost a historic election in November -- a clear rebuke from the electorate -- they appear intent on pursuing an obstructionist course for the next four years.  Republican leadership thinks that Obama will buckle confronted with government default.  And once he does the burgeoning youthful, multiracial, progressive electorate will be demoralized and accept defeat and realize that elections don't matter.  That's the GOP wish.

Obama Governs Like a Clinton

The Boehner flameout fills today's paper.  Before leaving for Hawaii Obama made a statement, according to Jackie Calmes and Jonathan Weisman, "for Congress to approve a stripped-down measure by year’s end to prevent a tax increase for all but the richest taxpayers and to extend aid for two million unemployed Americans."

The stripped-down deal is a continuation of the Bush tax cuts for those earning less than $250,000 a year, an increase in the tax on dividends and capital gains from 15% to 20%, a continuation of emergency unemployment benefits and a suspension of the sequester.  In order for this to happen Boehner has to bring the deal to the floor of the House for a vote and McConnell has to agree not to filibuster it in the Senate.  It is doubtful they will do so.  But assuming they comply my worry remains Obama and what he's willing to bargain away to get any deal at all.

At this point I'm willing to concede that I have been wrong and that the cynical interpretation of the Obama presidency by the Counterpunch Left -- that he is a faithful servant of an imperialistic, plutocratic status quo -- is right.  Of course everything isn't hard and fast and black and white.  But it can't be denied that Obama governs like a Clinton. 

Here is the question that needs to be asked -- and asked of the Counterpunch Left -- "Is the disappointment of an Obama presidency worse than a Romney White House?"

Is this even a legitimate question or just the "lesser-of-two-evils" refrain?

****

I'm off to Southern Oregon for the holiday.  I'll be back Christmas Day.