Paying the Price of the Bush Years

Federal employees return to work this morning. The deal that Obama signed into law after midnight was put together in the Senate. It is the same as outlined on this blog a few days ago, minus the one-year delay in the reinsurance tax on health plans. (CNN provides the text of the actual bill.)

What does it accomplish? Basically nothing. The splinter of a bone tossed to the GOP in the form of an income verification requirement for individuals who receive a subsidy to purchase health insurance has been dismissed as meaningless by the White House. The House-Senate budget conference to be concluded by December 13 that the new law mandates will likely be a failure due to the Republican's ban on raising new revenue.

The last two-and-a-half weeks accomplished nothing and resolved very little. The New York Times editorial board said "The only things Republicans achieved were billions of dollars in damage to the economy, harm to the nation’s reputation and a rock-bottom public approval rating." This standoff was about the internal politics of the Grand Old Party. Speaker Boehner played a game where he gave the Tea Party enough rope to hang itself hoping that it would sate the fire eaters in his caucus for the next go-round. As Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker describe it in this morning's story, "Republicans Back Down, Ending Crisis Over Shutdown and Debt Limit":

Two weeks of relative cohesion broke down into near chaos on Tuesday when Republican leaders failed twice to unite their troops behind a last-gasp effort to prevent a default on their own terms. By Wednesday, House conservatives were accusing more moderate Republicans of undercutting their position. Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a leading Republican voice for ending the fight, said Congress should have passed a bill to fund the government without policy strings attached weeks ago. 

“That’s essentially what we’re doing now,” Mr. Dent said. “People can blame me all they want, but I was correct in my analysis and I’d say a lot of those folks were not correct in theirs.”

Good analysis in today's paper is provided by Jeremy Peters' "Losing a Lot to Get Little." Peters is skeptical that the Tea Party has learned anything:

“We managed to divide ourselves on something we were unified on, over a goal that wasn’t achievable,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri. “The president probably had the worst August and early September any president could have had. And we managed to change the topic.” 

The question so crucial to the Republican Party’s viability now, heading into the 2014 Congressional elections and beyond, is whether it has been so stung by the fallout that the conservatives who insisted on leading this fight will shy away in the months ahead when the government runs out of money and exhausts its borrowing authority yet again. 

It is not an abstract question. The deal reached Wednesday would finance the government only through Jan. 15 and lift the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. Some top Republicans suggest that this confrontation, one some of the most conservative Tea Party-aligned Republicans have been itching for since they arrived, ended so badly for them that it would curb the appetite for another in just a few short months. 

*** 

Speaker John A. Boehner’s strategy always involved a gamble that his members would come away from this clash chastened. He intentionally allowed his most conservative members to sit in the driver’s seat as they tried in vain to get the Senate to accept one failed measure after another — first to defund the health care law, then to delay it, then to chip away at it. His hope was that they would realize the fight was not worth having again.

The worry among many Republicans is that the Tea Party flank will not get the message, mainly because their gerrymandered districts are so conservative they do not have to listen. 

Some fear that history is repeating itself. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in which the Republicans lost the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections, the party tried to regroup. Its establishment warned that it had to stop being so shrill, so exclusionary and so narrowly focused on issues that alienate large chunks of voters who might otherwise think about being Republicans. 

Certainly, the budget fight showed that Congressional Republicans have divergent ideas about how to heed that advice.

Like a cradle-bound baby fondling his excrement, we're doomed early next year to some form of a repeat of this October's nauseating, self-indulgent Republican identity crisis. We're paying the price of the Bush years. So frightened by the rise of Obama and the discrediting of the GOP brand after the brazen lies that led to the Iraq War and the collapse of Wall Street, Republican sachems felt the need to lie down with the kooks and the Birchers. At this point there is no indication that there will be any change of direction in 2014.

Tea Party Destroying "Capitalism in One Country"

It's hard to see how the United States avoids default. Boehner's gambit to deflate Senate negotiations by offering up a House deal was successful for a day before the effort collapsed; once again, he couldn't line up the ultras in his caucus. The deal Boehner was trying to piece together would have taken the main components of the deal being hatched in the Senate -- paying for the operation of government through January 15; lifting the debt ceiling through February 7 -- and added Tea Party sweeteners in the form of forcing Congressional staff members to purchase Obamacare without subsidy and putting limits on what the Treasury Department can to to manage payments once the debt ceiling has been reached.

That Boehner could not garner Tea Party support for his debt-ceiling/government-shutdown deal makes it close to certain that anything that emerges from Senate negotiations today will not have Tea Party support in the House. So -- not to belabor a point made on this blog repeatedly the last two weeks -- it will be up to Boehner -- as he has done in the past with the fiscal cliff and storm relief -- to allow an up-or-down vote and to pass a bill with majority support from the Democrats.

Even if a way out of a financial meltdown is found at the eleventh hour, lasting damage has been done. Damien Cave has an interesting story today, "Viewing U.S. in Fear and Dismay," which is a collection of quotes, some by people on their way to work, from around the world:

“The U.S.’s exorbitant privilege” — of issuing the world’s most widely accepted currency — “allows it not to have a budget, to bump against debt limit with scant market reaction,” said Luis de la Calle, a Mexican economist. 

If Mexico and many other countries shut down their governments, stopped paying salaries and threatened to default, he added, the titans of global finance, as they have in the past, would make sure the consequences were swift and severe. “We have little choice but to be responsible,” Mr. de la Calle said.

What we're going through is the concentration of capitalism in one country -- this is a point that the Monthly Review has made in the past, sort of an upside down postmodern version of Stalin's "Socialism in One Country" -- combined with the reactionary, revanchist capture of one of the parties making up the duopoly.

The Tea Party was organized and financed by plutocrats fearing the progressive majority that elected Obama, twice; at the time that it was whipped into being by the captains of capital, back in the summer of 2009, I thought it revealed how desperate and out of touch conservative power brokers were. Now, as "Capitalism in One Country" starts to dissolve, the strategy of empowering the Tea Party has backfired. Clearly.

Senate Debt/Shutdown Deal Basically a Punt

When I got home last night from work after a stop off at the grocery store (whose United Food and Commercial Workers employees are looking at potentially going on strike, having been locked for some time in contentious negotiations with the employer group) I checked the messages on my answering machine. It's campaign season. So there was an invitation to participate in a conference call sponsored by opponents of the GMO-labeling initiative that will be on the ballot in November; there was a message from a city council candidate, I believe; an offer to have my carpets and drapes professionally cleaned. But the lengthiest message of the four was one from Glenn Beck urging me to sign "even if I have already signed before" a petition telling Obama to de-fund Obamacare. Several years ago -- it has to be going on six or seven -- I ended up on a conservative robodial list. I actually I appreciate it because it lets me know what issues are percolating among the Tea Party driven Right Wing.

Here's the skinny on the deal being hatched in the Senate to re-open the federal government and to avoid default on the sovereign debt of the United States. Based on what's being reported there are five components to the deal, one of which is not a repeal of the medical device tax. The best synopsis I have read is one that Paul Krugman links to in a blog post from yesterday, "Almost Over"; it is an update provided by Roll Call's Niels Lesniewski. The five components are:

1. Reopen the government through January 15.
2. Lift the debt ceiling through February 7.
3. Begin a House-Senate conference with a deadline of December 15 to pass a budget that ends the sequester.
4. Department of Health and Human Services certify incomes of individuals qualifying for a health care subsidy.
5. Delay for one year a reinsurance tax that mandates, according to the IRS, "[A]ll health insurance issuers and third-party administrators on behalf of self-insured group health plans to make contributions under this program to support payments to individual market issuers that cover high-cost individuals."

Numbers four and five are meant to balance out. Four is a conservative demand; five is a union one (according to Lesniewski unions pushed for the delay; they're worried about absorbing the hit to their health & welfare funds). By having four and five offset you can make the argument that you're not caving in to Tea Party blackmail. But the New York Times editorial board isn't buying it. This is from today's unsigned editorial, "The Senate Tries to End the Crisis":

Senate negotiators insist that the income verification process would not impose any delays on the health law’s coverage of the uninsured, beginning in January, or the individual mandate to buy insurance. They said Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, would quickly make the certification, which would later be audited by the department’s inspector general. But the White House needs to provide assurance that this would not affect the implementation of the law in the slightest.

Delaying the insurance company tax, according to negotiators, doesn’t count as ransom, because Republicans never asked for it. In fact, it was requested by unions who object to paying more through their own health policies. But that strained logic doesn’t make it a good idea. If the delay is not paid for in some way — details remain unclear — it could force some insurers to raise premiums and make coverage less affordable. Without another source of money, the proposal should not be included in the final package.

Excepting income verification and reinsurance tax delay, the Senate deal shaping up is a punt, plain and simple. It is hard to see how the Tea Party caucus in the House votes for a punt. Maybe they do, figuring they can shut down the government again on January 15. But that seems unlikely. You can't keep pressing the shutdown button. Sooner or later there will be some serious blowback; organized push-back, I would imagine, is not far off.

So once again, we're back to where we started. Does Boehner allow a vote?

Republicans Beat the Retreat back to Paul Ryan + Free Syrian Army Implicated in Massacre

There is some confusion this morning about the possibility of a deal being reached between Republicans and Democrats on raising the debt ceiling. Conflicting reports from yesterday had Obama willing to sign off on a clean bill lifting the debt ceiling until November 22 without ending the government shutdown. As it turns out this was not the case. The Democratic position, reaffirmed by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, is that the government shutdown must end as well. Whether the GOP can get any deal through its caucus in the House is another question entirely.

All the to and fro yesterday of Democrats and Republicans meeting separately with Obama tended to obscure the real news of the last 48 hours -- the Tea Party demand that Obamacare be de-funded as the price to re-open government and lift the debt ceiling is now off the table. It is done, broadly acknowledged as a failure. A good story that captures the prevailing wisdom that the shuttering of government to coincide with the October 1 opening of the online health insurance exchanges has backfired is the Eric Lipton and Nick Confessore "Kochs and Other Conservatives Split Over Strategy on Health Law":

Opponents of the approach are arguing that conservatives would have been better served by trying to force an overall reduction in federal spending and tying that effort to the debt ceiling fight, a step the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity urged this week. Specifically, the group argues that stopping the health care plan should be a years-long effort to marshal what it says will be growing public animosity toward the law. That will help elect Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, which will repeal it.

Conservatives are tossing recriminations back and forth as they beat a retreat back to fallen angel Paul Ryan and an elusive grand bargain on the budget.

I slightly misspoke yesterday when I assumed that the basis for Ryan's budget proposal offered in exchange for raising the debt ceiling was his 2012 The Path to Prosperity block granting of Medicaid and privatizing of Medicare. Chastened from his shellacking in last year's presidential election Ryan's budget prescriptions are apparently more modest and focused. This is from Jonathan Weisman's "Ryan Is Again in the Forefront for the G.O.P.":

An opinion piece [Ryan] wrote in The Wall Street Journal this week laid out what has now become the House Republican plan: a debt ceiling increase tied to changes to Medicare and Medigap plans that would save more than enough money to ease some of the across-the-board cuts to domestic and defense programs; a fast track for the comprehensive simplification of the tax code; and a demand for immediate, serious and structured negotiations with the White House and Democratic Senate. 

The fact that Mr. Ryan’s plan quite obviously made no mention of the health care law as a bargaining chip quickly drew him scorn from some on the right, but to Democrats and more moderate Republicans, the sidelining of the health care fight immediately gave the plan credibility. 

He marketed his idea on Wednesday to the House’s hard-line conservatives in the Republican Study Committee, getting enough favorable reaction to pull in the Republican leadership. On Thursday, after Mr. Boehner presented it to the full Republican conference, it became the official Republican position. As Mr. Boehner laid it out to the public, Mr. Ryan stood silently behind him. 

On Friday, he will take his message to the Values Voters Summit, a meeting of social conservatives. But according to an advance text of his remarks, he will add words of caution: “This president, he won’t agree to everything we need to do. A budget agreement — with this president and this Senate — it won’t solve all of our problems. But I hope it’s a start. I hope we can get a down payment on our debt.” 

Republicans and Democrats said Thursday that the success or failure of this new path forward will rest on Mr. Ryan’s shoulders. Republicans hope that with Mr. Ryan leading the charge, Washington will finally grapple with the true drivers of the federal budget deficit: entitlement programs like Medicare that are swelling as the population ages. Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said conversations between Mr. Ryan and the senators he will need on his side had already begun. 

Democrats, closely examining the outlines of the Ryan plan, say he is showing a new modesty and a narrower vision than the one rejected by American voters in the 2012 presidential campaign. Back then, and even earlier this year, Mr. Ryan championed converting Medicare into a voucherlike program in which beneficiaries would be given fixed premium subsidies they would use to buy private health insurance. 

Now he is talking about means-testing Medicare to make richer beneficiaries pick up more of the tab and ensuring that taxpayers do not subsidize the private Medigap plans purchased by upper-income recipients to augment Medicare coverage. Versions of both of those proposals are in Mr. Obama’s budget for the current fiscal year.

It is hard to imagine that means-testing Medicare is going to mollify the fire eaters in the Tea Party caucus; there are not many realists in its ranks. The question is whether the Tea Party still has enough juice, now that conventional wisdom has coalesced around the idea that the shutdown and debt ceiling standoff has been an unmitigated disaster, to torpedo a deal based on Ryan's plan.

An important story worth mentioning is Human Rights Watch's report concluding that Syrian rebels committed "crimes against humanity" in an August 4 massacre of 190 civilians in Latakia province. Anne Barnard reports in today's New York Times that the Western-backed Free Syrian Army is implicated in the massacre and could be guilty of war crimes:

[A]t least 20 groups took part in the fighting, the report says, including some affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit collection of mainly Syrian rebel forces the council is trying to organize. 

And in a video filmed nearby during the operation, Gen. Salim Idris, who leads the military council, is seen insisting that his forces played a leading role, in statements responding to criticism from Islamist groups that his fighters were hanging back. The report said it was unclear whether forces linked to General Idris took part in the initial Aug. 4 attack, when forensic evidence suggests most of the civilians were killed. But it also said that anyone continuing to coordinate with such groups could be complicit in war crimes. 

The Human Rights Watch report accuses the five leading fighting groups of crimes against humanity; names several private donors in Kuwait and other Persian Gulf countries as financiers of the operation; blames Turkey for allowing the fighters to use its territory; and calls for an arms embargo against the five groups, adding to its previous calls for such an embargo against the Syrian government. 

“Unified action by the international community is really long overdue when it comes to trying to deter these abuses and violations,” Ms. Fakih said, recommending that war crimes in Syria be referred to the International Criminal Court, which could investigate all parties.

Government Shutdown Bait and Switch Underway

The date for when the government will default if Congress does not authorize an increase in the debt ceiling is apparently now November 1 not October 17. This according to a story by Annie Lowrey, "Tracing the Calendar Down to the Last Cent":

That is when more than $55 billion in federal payments come due, almost certainly more than enough to use up whatever cash the Treasury might still have on hand. The three weeks between now and then — should Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling — would most likely be ones of market turbulence, plummeting confidence and a slowing economy.

But so far the markets have not reacted in a significant way. Jesse Eisinger writes in a DealBook column "Complacency on Wall Street Could Be Worse Than a Panic" that having gone through this once before people are jaded and feel that this is all a pantomime on the Potomac that can be ignored. Eisinger cautions that this is dangerous and could lead to disaster; he thinks that there are real not fictive barriers to reaching a deal. As someone who has been predicting an adverse market reaction by now if a deal had not been reached, I tend to agree with him.

There appears to be a deal of sorts in the offing. That deal, according to the reliable Jonathan Weisman, involves a short-term funding of the government and raising of the debt ceiling while negotiations begin once again in pursuit of the El Dorado of the "grand bargain." The problem with the grand bargain is there is no deal at the end of that rainbow. It is a Paul Ryan initiative. It is my perception that anything Ryan touches -- not unlike George W. Bush, another youthful-seeming, modestly telegenic GOP standard bearer -- turns to shit in his hands. Ryan wants to take a meat ax to Medicare and Medicaid. There are not the Democratic votes there. Any grand budget deficit bargain would have to be extremely modest to get through the Senate. Then you're right back at the problem that started all this -- the Tea Party fire eaters in the House. They will torpedo any modest grand bargain.

As for the problem that started all this, the fire-eating Tea Party, there is a frontpage story by Eric Lipton, Nick Confessore and Nelson Schwartz, "Business Groups See Loss of Sway Over House G.O.P.," that is worth checking out. I think it oversells the extent to which groups like the National Retail Federation and National Federation of Independent Businesses will go out of their way to recruit and fund primary candidates to take down some of the Tea Party yahoos in the House. Nonetheless the article features some choice quotes:

“We ask them to carry our water all the time,” said one corporate sector lobbyist, who demanded anonymity in order to speak frankly about the relationship with Republicans. “But we don’t necessarily support them 100 percent of the time. And what has happened is the rise of an ideological wing that is now willing to stand up to business interests.”

Lipton, Confessore and Schwartz rightly point out that the Tea Party phenomenon is a Frankenstein monster of the Chamber of Commerce's making:

To some extent, the Chamber itself, along with other lobbying groups, helped create the conditions for Washington’s impasse. 

After the 2010 elections, the Chamber and other business interests funneled millions of dollars into Republican redistricting efforts around the country, helping draw overwhelmingly safe Republican districts whose occupants — many among the most conservative House members — are now far less vulnerable to challenges from more moderate Republicans. 

The Chamber spent more than $32 million on the 2012 election, nearly all of it backing Republicans. Similarly, the American Banking Association sent 80 percent of its $2.6 million in political action committee donations to Republicans in the last election cycle, compared with 58 percent in 2008, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, out of dissatisfaction with Democratic efforts to impose more financial regulations.

Two-thousand-and-eight might seem like a lifetime ago but the political vibe that it created at the time remains vivid to this day. Bush and Cheney had thoroughly discredited the Republican Party with a disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq and a ham-handed response to the Lehman Brothers collapse. A black man won the presidential election in a rout. He had large Democratic majorities to work with in the House and Senate. Business leaders were shitting their britches. They feared a raft of progressive legislation -- card check, carbon regulation, universal health care -- churning out of Washington.

Starting in the summer of 2009 they fired up the assault engines. In order to man those engines, the only people around willing to be used for the cause were the kooks and conspiracy-theorist types.

The kooks have always been around. In our recent political dispensation, say since the 1960s, they have been known as Birchers, the far Right Wing ideologues that filled the ranks of the John Birch Society in Southern California suburbs and who believed communists were everywhere hiding in plain sight. The difference is that in our present-day period these kooks have been provided a megaphone. The media dutifully fell in line and reported the orchestrated response of kooks being lined up to speak out against health care reform at the Congressional townhalls conducted that summer of 2009 as somehow signifying a grassroots popular democratic mass uprising against Obama and progressive policy. It was nothing of the sort. It was nothing more than an assiduous stove-piping of select events and images which created the impression of an uprising. "If you build it, they will come." And they did. Citizens United helped. The 2010 elections were a watershed for the Tea Party.

And here we are today.

As Debt Ceiling Approaches GOP Doubles Down on Bunkum

Republicans acknowledge that their decision to link the reopening of the government to the health care law is unpopular. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Monday found that disapproval of Congressional Republicans had jumped to 70 percent, from 63 percent late last month.

But David Winston, a Republican pollster close to Mr. Boehner, said Mr. Obama’s stance was likely to prove unpopular as well. “Anyone who says he knows how this is going to turn out doesn’t know,” Mr. Winston said. “We are in a very unsettled time.”

That's from today's story, "Senate Leaders Mull Raising Debt Ceiling in Challenge to House," by Jonathan Weisman and Jackie Calmes, and it pretty much says it all. Republicans have a losing strategy on their hands, one that promises to do lasting damage to the party's already tarnished brand, and the longer they stick with it the worse it is going to get for them. But rather than change course, judging by the quote from Boehner's pollster, the GOP plans to double down, hoping that some of the ensuing gore will splatter on Obama and besmirch him as well.

People are not trusting of the Republican mantra of "Just come to the table and talk" because everyone intuitively understands extortion and exploitation when he or she sees it. If this were all merely about talking and horse trading why the closure of government? Why the threats to default on U.S. debt and thereby undercut the global gold standard? No, people understand that this is blackmail carried out by an ignorant, bitter minority.

The Dow was down close to one percent yesterday. As Republicans maintain their charade -- the odious Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in a DealBook column today about some on Wall Street who think that failure to lift the debt ceiling is no big deal -- this will worsen. It should provide some impetus to efforts in the Senate to pass a debt ceiling bill. And, assuming that Obama doesn't toss the GOP a lifeline and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, all that will be left will be the inevitable -- for Boehner to capitulate and allow a straight up-or-down vote in the House.

Boehner might lose his speakership as a result.

And while the other option -- that Boehner stands by the Tea Party and hurls the nation into default -- remains a possibility, I think it is unlikely. The Republican Party would suffer enormous damage, probably more than its gerrymandering could withstand.

Tea Party Revanchism

After meeting last night with Speaker of the House John Boehner, along with Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Obama's stated position is that "grand bargain" talks on the federal budget can begin once the government reopens with a clean funding resolution and the debt ceiling is raised.

Republicans promptly rejected this. They have no intention of giving up their leverage, which is what agreeing to Obama's conditions would entail. The GOP has no wish to enter into negotiations. Republicans have been sidestepping budget talks for the entire year. They have no intention of giving something up to get something in return. They think that Obama can be made to cave in.

Already sights are set on October 17, the deadline when the federal government reaches the debt ceiling. The Tea Party now sees that once you go over the brink, as it has with the government shutdown, it no longer provides any strategic advantage; in fact, it becomes a liability.

And that's where we are at now. Can the Tea Party caucus wagging the dog in the House remain intact for the next two weeks until the next brink, the debt ceiling deadline?

There was a sharp drop off from late morning on yesterday in interest in the government shutdown. I measure this by the number of stories that appear on the Google News page and the chatter among my office coworkers. So there is the possibility that the country could muddle along for the next two weeks with a government shutdown as the new normal. But bit by bit the GOP will suffer, and overall there is no question that they are losing the propaganda war. I am doubtful that House Republicans can hold out until October 17. Obama is putting Wall Street to work on lobbying the GOP leadership. This might not bear fruit this week -- I originally thought the Tea Party would be deflated by Friday -- but I bet by next week Boehner will be ready to release a "clean CR" for a vote.

The Tea Party, which is the populist base of the current Republican Party, is based on nostalgia for a time that we haven't seen in this country since the full employment and social and racial homogeneity of the 1960s. The Tea Party's revanchism is founded on a desire to return to the past -- before Vietnam was recognized as the quagmire it was, before the Black Panthers, before Haight-Ashbury spread to every large city in the nation -- when factory jobs were still plentiful and rents inexpensive and the suburbs were new and futuristic.

I've been reading an excellent history of The Chocolate Watchband, a 1960s Garage Punk Psychedelic band from the San Jose suburbs, written by lead singer David Aguilar. Aguilar captures the essence of the middle-60s -- the raw power -- that I believe to be at the heart of Tea Party revanchism:

It was the spring of 1966. It was a very different world than what it is today. 

Using the words of Tom Shachtman, "America was a monster. Our booming economy was one leg of the colossus and the other was our Military might. In the world, only the Soviets and we counted. We believed our environment and natural resources were virtually limitless. We were certain American ingenuity, technological virtuosity, and money could solve the world's problems. We believed Americans could fix anything and that nuclear missiles, the ultimate weapons of destruction, could actually keep us from having a global war. On the ladder of life, youth was expected to start at the bottom and creep upward as described by the system. In other words, the ladder of success was a long and arduous climb everybody had to make to succeed in this world. We lived in a dream of constant upward mobility. It was powered by never-ending consumption. We knew how much people above us were earning because it was reflected in the things they owned." 

The Watchband lived in nuclear families in identical little patio homes in the suburbs of San Jose. The nuclear family consisted of a man and woman, married for the first and only time to each other, living together with their natural 2.4 children with a cat and dog thrown in for good measure. Single-parent families were rare and the thought of one was difficult to comprehend to our society. Mark's dad had passed away when he was 2 and his mother had never remarried. He was the exception in the group. We all went to the same schools, studied the same things, and had the same teachers our brothers and sisters had. At school we dressed up in costumes for Halloween, planted trees on Arbor Day, sent tiny little punch-out paper hearts around for Valentine's Day and had both Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays off. We obeyed most of the rules, feared discipline from our parents if we screwed up, and any young woman getting pregnant paid the penalty of either being banished to a relatives' house until delivery and adoption took place or was she ushered immediately into the wedding chapel. If it was before the sixth month, she got to wear white. There were no ifs, ands or buts about this one. Single mothers and inter-racial marriages were unheard of. FM radio was called "Underground Radio" because they played songs longer than 3 minutes in length and didn't have a lot of commercials. TV went off the air at 1 AM and came back on at 6 AM. Milky Ways and Snickers cost a nickel and Cokes in green bottles were a dime with 2 cents returned on the empty bottle .... no lie!

The irony of Tea Party revanchism is that the prosperity of the 1960s created the conditions for undoing the rigid social boundaries and simplicity that the lily-white, predominantly rural, present-day Know Nothings hanker after.

Tea Party Propaganda War + ISIS

The Tea Party is unbowed one day in to their shutdown of the federal government. The coverage in today's New York Times points to a propaganda war that will unfold in the next few days as the House Republicans attempt to pass piecemeal spending bills, which they failed to accomplish last night, hoping to force Senate majority leader Harry Reid to take them up. If he refuses, then the GOP can blame the Democrats for keeping the national parks and veterans' centers closed. 

But there is peril on this path for Republican hardliners. To get piecemeal spending bills passed over Democratic opposition they must do so under ordinary rules requiring a simple majority vote. This opens up the possibility that "a clean CR" -- a bill to reopen the government without language to limit, delay or repeal Obamacare -- could make it to the House floor for an up or down vote.

Here is how the august Jonathan Weisman explains it in his "House G.O.P. Pushes Piecemeal Approach as Democrats Stand Firm":

Aides to the Republican leadership said the bills would be introduced on Wednesday under ordinary rules that require only simple majorities, and they should easily pass. But Democrats are likely to be granted procedural votes of their own, which would be an opportunity to test how many Republicans would defy their leadership and vote to reopen the entire government without crippling President Obama’s health care law — the standoff that shut down the government at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday. 

As public anger grows, more Republicans are coming forward to call for such a rebellion. 

“The frustration and anger over Obamacare is being interpreted to be an all-or-nothing calculation,” said Representative Patrick Meehan, Republican of Pennsylvania, who now favors a simple stopgap spending measure to reopen the government. “People are very worried about Obamacare. Some of its pieces are problematic. 

“But they want us to come here and work on problems across America, and we can’t get to doing that if both sides are dug in,” he said. 

Democrats face pressure of their own to drop their stance of approving a spending bill only if it is free of policy prescriptions. Senate Democratic leaders say they plan to immediately kill all three of the piecemeal House bills, arguing that they will not be forced to choose between financing veterans’ programs or cancer research at the National Institutes of Health.

Tea Party stalwarts are convinced that they can still win the battle for American hearts and minds, even though the first-day response to the opening of the online Obamacare insurance market was so robust it led to meltdowns in the system.

The House GOP is suffering from the same kind of magical thinking that predicted a Romney win absent any polling data last election eve. Nonetheless, they will launch this piecemeal spending bill strategy and try to create some traction in the Senate. I read yesterday that Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, broached the idea of a deal based on a repeal of the medical device tax part of Obamacare. Thankfully, this was quickly shot down by Harry Reid.

Give the propaganda war a few days to play out.

There is a good story by Ben Hubbard this morning, "Qaeda Branch in Syria Pursues Its Own Agenda," about the method of operation of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS):

The rise of extremist groups has exacerbated Syria’s instability. ISIS has attacked rebel bases to capture supplies, and routed rebel groups last month to seize control of Azaz, a strategic city near the Turkish border, leading to a tense cease-fire. Last week, Qaeda fighters tried to storm a village in Idlib Province to kidnap some rebels, leaving 20 dead from both sides, including the jihadis’ Libyan commander. 

“We want to keep Syria together as a country of freedom and equality,” a leader in an Islamist rebel group opposed to ISIS, called Suqour al-Sham, who gave his name as Abu Bashir, said via Skype. “They want to form an Islamic state that comes together with Iraq.” 

In an audio statement released online late Monday, a Qaeda spokesman defended the group, saying its contributions to the anti-Assad fight had been underappreciated and denying that it had started fights with rebel groups. 

“Those who aspire to sideline the state are many because of incorrect beliefs and doctrines,” said the spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani al-Shami. “They are greedy for power and for the worthless things of this world.” 

Analysts say the group is a revival and extension of Al Qaeda in Iraq, whose sectarian-fueled insurgency pushed that country to the brink of civil war in 2006 and 2007, before the group suffered major defeats at the hands of tribal fighters and American troops. 

In Syria, however, the group has found the vast territories that have fallen into rebel hands near Syria’s northern and eastern borders as an ideal environment to regroup and advance its agenda. 

The area is stateless, covered by a weak patchwork of local councils and rebel groups struggling to administer their towns and often competing with one another for resources. This gives the group a wide area to work in with no immediate enemies. The porousness of the Iraqi and Turkish borders also makes it easy for the group to bring in supplies and fighters. 

Brian Fishman, a former director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and now a fellow at the New America Foundation, said those factors gave Al Qaeda a more favorable environment in Syria than it ever had in Iraq. 

“The conditions in Syria will be ripe for ISIS for quite some time,” he said.

There is a good Moon of Alabama blog post from a few days back that discusses negotiations between the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian government. The reality that is sinking in with the non-jihadi opposition is that the true enemy is the Saudi- and Qatari-funded mujahideen.

Tea Party Doomed

An important thing to remember as we begin the first day of a House GOP shutdown of the federal government is that the Tea Party ideology that is driving all this is a distinctly minority point of view. Mitt Romney, Republican standard bearer who campaigned on a repeal of Obamacare in last year's presidential election, lost by 5 million votes. Republicans maintained control of the House of Representatives but lost eight seats in the process and Democrats candidates ended up winning 1.4 million votes nationwide. Gerrymandering has helped the GOP maintain its majority in the House. In the Senate, Republicans were widely predicted to regain control. But thanks to some extremely incendiary comments by Tea Party candidates, Democrats, in an amazing turnabout that was the highlight of the election season, actually picked up two seats.

The Tea Party is a revanchist movement that wants to return to a past which is a fantasy. It is a splinter movement that has been blown up into flame by plutocrats who were frightened to discover following Obama's 2008 election that a strong, multicultural Progressive majority exists in the United States.

We first saw the Tea Party on display during the orchestrated demonstrations against national health care legislation at Congressional town halls the summer of 2009. The paranoid types have always been with us. Go to any public forum -- any meeting of your city council or school board -- and they'll be there. But what was different this time around is that the kooks had some deep-pocketed backers who were willing to provide an organizational infrastructure.

It is this moneyed assistance that is important to keep in mind when noting that Speaker of the House John Boehner, a man who if nothing else is a dedicated servant of concentrated wealth, could end the government shutdown promptly by allowing the clean Senate continuing resolution a vote on the House floor. This is from Joe Nocera's column this morning, "Those Banana Republicans":

The House speaker, John Boehner, won’t bring “a clean C.R.” — that is, a continuing resolution without any of the anti-Obamacare language — not because it won’t pass, but because it probably would, which would infuriate the Tea Party wing of his party and jeopardize his leadership post. Indeed, as Boehner well knows, many House Republicans do not want the government to shut down and would probably vote for the Senate’s clean bill if given half a chance. Their unwillingness to speak out against the extreme faction in their party is shameful. And it’s tragic that, at a time when the House desperately needs a strong speaker, it has John Boehner instead. 

What was clear on Monday was that if the government does shut down, the Republicans are going to be blamed. All day long, we watched the Democrats, starting with President Obama, make the case that Republican demands were unreasonable, and, indeed, dangerous, given what was at stake. Republicans spent the day on the defensive. Senator Elizabeth Warren, the liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, described Republican tactics to me as “hostage taking.” Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, told reporters that if “we can’t pass this” — meaning a clean C.R. — “we’re only truly entering a banana republican mind-set.”

Wall Street is on board the government shutdown because it couldn't take place without assistance from Boehner. Boehner is not a man who is going to buck the boss.

So what's going on?

I think what's going on is that the plutocrats who whipped a political movement into being have lost the degree of control that they come to expect. Active Tea Party opposition to bombing Syria no doubt upset the Wall Street types who don't like to see any loss of imperial prerogatives even if a black man is the commander-in-chief. And what really must dismay the plutocrats is the possibility of a government default in a couple of weeks if the House Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling, a default that would send shock waves through the global capitalist system.

The longer the government stays shut down the more the Tea Party caucus will splinter. In another week or two, assuming the government remains shuttered, the Tea Party will be thoroughly discredited, the public ire coming its way immense. It will be broken and in no position to engineer a default on sovereign debt.

There is a war on within the GOP. This very well could be the battle where the Karl Rove-led Wall Streeters route the Tea Party Birchers.

Absent Tea Party Surrender Government Headed for Shutdown

Judging from the coverage this morning, it looks like Senate majority leader Harry Reid is not going to buckle in the showdown with the Tea-Party-led House Republicans. Good. This needed to have happened at the end of last year following Obama's landslide election win and the GOP's pathetic showing in November.

There are still scenes left to play out in this drama as it unfolds today in D.C. Absent a bargain of some sort the government will shut down tomorrow. Here -- this is from Jeremy Peters and Jonathan Weisman's story this morning, "Senate Action on Health Law Moves to Brink of Shutdown" -- is what we can expect today:

Republican lawmakers said on Sunday that the House leadership had one more card to play, but that it was extremely delicate. They can tell Mr. Reid he must accept a face-saving measure, like the repeal of the tax on medical devices, which many Democrats support, or they will send back a new amendment that would force members of Congress and their staffs, and the White House staff, to buy their medical insurance on the new health law’s insurance exchanges, without any subsidies from the government to offset the cost. 

Republicans expressed certainty that for all the discomfort a shutdown would inflict on Capitol Hill, Democrats would not risk it to protect their own benefits.

If the Tea Party caucus is willing to settle for this -- a repeal of the tax on medical devices -- then there is a chance a deal could be reached. It would be unfortunate because it would maintain the GOP penchant for budgetary brinkmanship as a negotiating tactic, and it would guarantee further drama on down the line as the House Republicans continue their attempts to nibble away at Obamacare. But it's not clear that the Tea Party is willing to set its sights so low. Tea Party Republicans feel as if they have already given up a lot over the weekend by agreeing to a one-year delay in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act rather than its de-funding.

And on the other side of the aisle I think it has finally dawned on the Democratic leadership, and quite possibly even the conciliator-in-chief, that negotiating with the House Republicans in the face of threats to shut down the government or default on the sovereign debt is a losing proposition.

Even if a deal is struck today that avoids a government shutdown tomorrow, rest assured that an even larger conflict is coming our way in a couple of weeks with the vote to raise the debt ceiling. That's why my thinking from last week -- that a shutdown would be avoided -- has changed.

I now think that it has dawned on the Democrats that it's better to have the House GOP shutter the government in the near term, thoroughly discrediting Republicans to a broad majority of the public and thereby undercutting them going into a debt-ceiling standoff.

Barring a complete capitulation by the Tea Party -- or turnabout by Speaker Boehner to allow a clean bill without any anti-Obamacare chicanery -- the federal government is headed for a shutdown.

"Puttin' People on the Moon" + Bite of Broadview 5K + Thomas Edsall's NYT Blog

Just back from a jog this morning, broken tree branches and rain puddles everywhere from yesterday's storm, I was treated to "Puttin' People on the Moon" from the Drive-By Truckers' fifth album, The Dirty South (2004).

I went out this morning in order to process some of the lactic acid in my legs from the Bite of Broadview 5K I ran Saturday morning. The Bite of Broadview is a little neighborhood festival in North Seattle. Christ the King Catholic Church serves as the hub for the event. I ran the race last year and enjoyed it. It's a fast course with a couple of hills tossed in. The vibe of the run is distinctly neighborhoody, non-big city. It's refreshing. Despite the rain and wind, I improved on my best 5K time by almost one minute.

One item of housekeeping. As it approaches certainty that there is going to be a government shutdown this week, an excellent blog to keep an eye on is the online column Thomas Edsall writes for the New York Times Opinionator. I think he captures what's going on with the two national political parties better than anyone right now. Economic inequality as the driving force of our current political system is a constant in Edsall's Opinionator pieces.