Month: May 2015

GOP Spends Full Week Eating Crow Served Up by President Obama (January 25, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Obama-Dinner

This is an era of diminished expectations and cynicism where Congressional approval rates have fallen under 10 percent, narrowly beating out the public’s surprising fondness for cockroaches and Genghis Khan. And no one expects grand bargains of any type to be negotiated that will put the country and its’ middle class back on the road to solvency. We must take solace where we can find it.

This was a  week which commenced with a subdued  inaugural vision of hope and change, shared by a battle-scarred and wary second-term President. Still, it can’t escape our collective liberal notice that by any standards this was also a  very bad week for the Republican Party and its stubbornly quaint platform. If, as our very own Sarah Jones writes this week, “John Boehner Thinks Obama Wants to Shove the GOP to the ‘Dustbin of History’,” the Speaker of the House may thank his party mates for acting as the President’s accomplices.

Case in point: as NPR and other news outlets reported just a few days ago, Republicans were forced to blink during their latest turn at fiscal war games. In a report entitled House GOP Backs Off Debt Ceiling Demands, NPR host Scott Simon states “After insisting for weeks on a dollar in spending cuts for every dollar that they would agree to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans dropped that demand, at least for the next three months.”

As we know now, the right did not surrender out of a genuine concern for the credibility and financial state of the nation. No, ultimately the party bowed because even their closest cohorts found the position untenable. When the Koch Brothers are unable to stand by their man Boehner (because at the end of the day, unmitigated, selfish, wealth creation is behind all their demands), even the stubbornest radical is forced to face the likelihood of defeat. Queue the retreat and inevitable patriotic messaging.

And that’s not all. Coming off an election cycle stunning in its attempted reversal of 50 years of social, economic and professional progress for women, the GOP proponents of “traditional family values” were handed an unexpected setback. Outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced plans this past Wednesday to open more than 230,000 front line combat positions in the U.S. Armed Forces to female soldiers.New York Times columnist Gail Collins reported that only recently, “[Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee] and her allies declared victory when they merely got language in the defense authorization bill requiring the Defense Department to study the question of women in combat.”

From a meandering study to a done deal in record time. How must it have hurt Fox News to have to run this headline: Leon Panetta Praised by Latinas After Combat Ban Lifted? Could it happen to a better party? A group that made a concerted effort to degrade Latin American immigrants and female reproductive rights in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential election is now forced to watch idly as a second-term Obama receives the gratitude of a constituency comprised of both of the GOP’s most reviled elements..

Most of the nation appears to be following the lead of the POTUS. Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back for embracing changes that probably should have been instituted long ago. Announce it and move on to putting out the next fire kindled in some fashion by Republican opposition. The clock is already ticking on the President’s remaining ability to foment the reversal of eight years of comprehensively schlocky, dangerous policy. But these small victories are a painful reminder of where we’ve been and how far the President’s leadership has taken us.

That deserves at least a moment of celebration.

Arrest of Rand Paul’s Son Continues Family Legacy of Woman Hating (January 15, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

william-paul

The Associated Press is reporting today that 19-year-old William Paul, the son of Republican senator Rand Paul from Kentucky and grandson of ever-present presidential candidate Ron Paul, was charged with misdemeanor assault. William Paul was taking a flight that deplaned in Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. While details of the arrest remain vague as the story develops, what is known is that young Mr. Paul is suspected of assaulting a female flight attendant “by aggressive physical force.”

We are aware of the historically poor choices made by young adults from time to time and it is critical not to rush to a determined judgment until all facts are brought to light. As I read the AP’s brief piece, I found myself weary and resigned. While William Paul has never run for public office, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, does it?

Remember in October 2010 when MoveOn.org volunteer Lauren Valle had her head stomped at a Rand Paul Rally? Who can forget the repugnant images of the small woman falling under the burly feet of Paul’s testosterone-enraged security detail.  A close Paul aide labeled the incident “incredibly unfortunate” at the time., Can we feign surprise at the disrespectful and dangerous treatment of female protesters from a team that believes it has a right to comprehensively control the female body? Rand Paul is opposed to abortion without exception, even in cases of rape or incest. He supports a Human Life Amendment and a Life at Conception Act, which confer more privileges and protection on a cluster of cells than a living, independently breathing female adult. Need it be said that he also favors the overturn of Roe v. Wade, allowing states to decide the issue of abortion unburdened from federal involvement?

And here is Rand Paul’s enlightened stance on the tolerance ofsexual harassment in the office: “There are people now who hesitate to tell a joke to a woman in the workplace, any kind of joke, because it could be interpreted incorrectly.”

In 2012, Rand Paul had this to say about the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill designed to equate the pay of workers irrespective of gender: “Three hundred million people get to vote everyday on what you should be paid or what the price of goods are…In the Soviet Union, the Politburo decided the price of bread, and they either had no bread or too much bread. So setting prices or wages by the government is always a bad idea.”

Given his father’s illustrious track record as a patriarchal patronizer of female equality, William Paul’s brush with the law is hardly shocking. The entitled son of the political elite is further accused of “underage drinking, disorderly conduct and being intoxicated and disruptive.”

Rand Paul must be very proud. His son has done a magnificent job of ingesting and reflecting his father’s ideology. If Paul is concerned about the effect of William’s imbroglio on his popularity and re-election chances, clearly, he has no one to blame but himself.

The Media Gives the Republican Party a Free Pass to Obstruct (January 8, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

GOP-fillibuster

For all the complaints on the right side of the political spectrum, decrying a “liberal media bias” in favor of President Obama, I sometimes wonder if I am alone in drawing the opposite conclusion. That is to say when it comes to reporting on the increasingly partisan deadlock that has virtually consumed Washington, as well as the nation’s inability to accomplish anything beyond an endless train of disappointing stopgap measures, I wonder if the bulk of the country’s media outlets, concerned with mass appeal and the appearance of a balanced approach, have grown too afraid of identifying the Emperor without his clothes.

Case in point, this headline today on Yahoo! News via Reuters:Analysis: Obama shows combativeness entering second term but risks await. The writer, Matt Spetalnick is correct in his observation that before the official commencement of his second elected term, we have seen a President more self-assured and emboldened by poll numbers that consistently reflect an electorate exhausted by Congress’ failure to come together on long-term solutions to real problems, including but not limited to: our national debt, the effect of current entitlement spending on future generations, the systematic annihilation of the middle and working classes, the growing income disparities and education costs that are denying millions of Americans a fair shot at pursuing the American Dream.

However comments like this leave this reader curious as to whether the meaning of “analysis” has been lost on some of those who write about the political machine for a living: “Some critics say Obama now runs the risk of overreaching when he should instead be building Republican bridges to resolve the next looming budget confrontation.”

I do not have to ask Mr. Spetalnick for a list of his sources to hazard a guess as to who some of those “critics” might be: John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, an assortment of Tea Party crackpots or anyone working for these folks, immediately come to mind. As a long-time journalist, I completely understand the need to represent both sides of the story, but I was also under the impression that one of the driving tenets of journalism is to educate the public, to bring issues to light that might otherwise go unresearched by a general population preoccupied with the business of daily life.

I do not mean to single Spetalnick out for special scorn. There are far more egregious examples of bland, wall-sitting journalistic hatchet jobs disguised as legitimate reporting, and we could have a whole separate discussion about the ways in which the consolidation of corporate media and the lower profit margins of traditional journalism have affected the way we receive our “news.” But with that said, analysts and reporters are under no obligation to surrender their insights for a pair of rose colored glasses, and at some point we have to stop letting them get away with it.

Exactly what kind of “bridges” should Obama be building with the GOP? What happened to the one he tried to build in the summer of 2011, the efforts to strike a Grand Bargain with House leaders over the raising of the debt ceiling limit, which included what many liberals considered an unwarranted gift of borderline austere spending cuts? The same one that Republicans ultimately rejected in favor of last month’s manufactured fiscal cliff crisis? The real truth is my friends, nothing short of absolute capitulation on tax policy, spending and limited government would satisfy the current Republican party, and to take that one step further, the party’s platform is BAD for America by almost any standard of growth or savings.

In a true, functioning democracy, when a special interest group has lost perspective and reasoning and turns to policy development that serves a small minority, the end result is marginalization and ultimately, disintegration. With every Presidential election, the GOP moves itself farther away from laying claim to representing the will of the people. Voter turnout and statistics back this conclusion. But now, at the inception of President Obama’s second term, with looming fights in front of us over a host of issues that demand attention and reform, it is time for members of the media to surrender their own manufactured centrism in the interest of moving the country forward.

The Republican Party Resolves to Destroy Middle Class Once and For All in 2013 (December 27, 2012)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

middle-class

Paul Krugman, the famed economist and Op-Ed columnist forThe New York Times, has, in recent years, coined quite a few clever nicknames for hypocritical fiscal conservatives. And in referring to fiscal conservatives, he does not write of the dying breed of Republicans like Bob Dole, the former Senator, Presidential candidate and disabled war veteran who was humiliated in public by his own party earlier this month.

Dole made a rare appearance in the Senate chamber several weeks ago in an attempt to promote passage of a seemingly benign U.N. Treaty, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Designed to improve access and mobility for the disabled across the globe, the treaty met with defeat from the crazed likes of political also-ran Rick Santorum, who decried the treaty on the catch-all Tea Party grounds that it posed a “direct assault on us and our family!”

It’s enough to make you wonder if Dole asked Santa for a time machine this Christmas so he could venture back to 1996 and fall off the stage at that rally directly onto Santorum’s delusional, useless noggin. It’s frightening to consider that in 2013, nearly 20 years after his failed bid for the Oval Office, Dole would be considered an unelectable liberal radical within his party’s ranks.

But I digress. When Paul Krugman writes of “deficit scolds,” “bond vigilantes,” and my personal favorite, “prophets of fiscal doom,” he refers to true charlatans like Congressman Paul Ryan, who wrote former President George W. Bush a budget-busting blank check for eight years, rubber stamping every unaffordable idea of which Dubya could dream, before suddenly putting on his serious monetary face the minute a Democratic President took the oath of office.

For months, nay years, we have been hearing from Ryan and his ilk that failure to address our long term budget deficits presents dire consequences, an imminent collapse of American security and respectability at a minimum if not an outright nullification of our entire way of life. As we moved ever closer to the edge of the fiscal cliff, the caterwauling grew louder…until it became clear that there’s just no way that President Obama is going to go against public opinion and leave the Bush-era tax cuts intact wholesale.

And just like that, the old fiscal cliff doesn’t seem so scary to GOP leadership. After all, when you come down to it, it’s not Ryan, Santorum or the one percent who will end up hurting if Congress blows past its 2012 deadline, right?

Those who booted up their computers this week to catch up on post-holiday news were greeted with headlines like this: “Senators Returning With Little Urgency as Fiscal Clock Ticks.” Writers Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer report “With just five days left to make a deal, President Obama and members of the Senate were set to return to Washington on Thursday with no clear path out of their fiscal morass even as the Treasury Department warned that the government will soon be unable to pay its bills unless Congress acts.”

Why the sudden move away from Republican baying about the dangers of falling over the fiscal cliff? Another writer for The Times, Nelson D. Schwartz, offers a possible answer: “Some hits — like a two percentage point increase in payroll taxes and the end of unemployment benefits for more than two million jobless Americans — would be felt right away. But other effects, like tens of billions in automatic spending cuts, to include both military and other programs, would be spread out between now and the end of the 2013 fiscal year in September.”

Why worry about what happens at the end of the year, in other words, when it is merely the unemployed and the working middle class who will take an immediate hit to their financial solvency? And lest anyone think the GOP is really troubled by the “automatic spending cuts,” it is best to keep in mind that the word “military” is the only one that gets their attention.

By now I really ought to be used to this sort of disingenuous skullduggery, the seamlessness with which members of the GOP establishment will hold the ENTIRE NATION and its future hostage in order to save some millionaires/billionaires a few bucks, but I must confess, I am not. I urge the mass media to give these tricks their proper title – treason.

Boehner Attempts to Leverage Newtown Tragedy Distraction in Fiscal Cliff Negotiations (December 18, 2012)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Nancy Pelosi

The terrible events surrounding last week’s semi-automatic killing spree at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newton, Connecticut stopped the nation in its tracks. Quite understandably, we took a collective pause to consider the implications of a disturbed man, armed to the teeth, who could just walk into a primary school and kill small children and staff with abandon. The circumstances are saturated with a heightened sense of pathos given the time of year. The holiday season is a multi-cultural, multi-faith time of family and celebration and last week’s news did not ask much of us in the way of empathy. Who can imagine walking in the shoes of those who lost a child or family member in this tragedy? How isolating and painful must it feel for those burying a loved one against a backdrop of communal food preparation, ritualistic gift procurement and the repetition of well-loved Christmas Carols? There are few of any political stripe who can’t locate common ground in grieving for these devastated souls.

At a time when we are reminded anew of the frailty of human life and  the technical advances in modern weaponry that render it ever easier to claim, perspective should be relatively easy to locate. Petty partisan squabbles ought to take a backseat to the the recognition that something is deeply broken within the American system. Children of any socioeconomic class should be able to go to school without encountering a madman carrying guns. We need to take a new look at what the Second Amendment actually protects. Does a right to bear arms revoke the right to set limits on how that liberty is exercised?

And somehow Sandy Hook has cast Republican recalcitrance in the face of the looming fiscal cliff in the base light in which it deserves to be viewed. While perusing the New York Times this morning, I encountered a post on the paper’s “Debt Reckoning” blog by writer Jonathan Weisman. In the piece, entitled “Boehner Intends to Pursue a ‘Plan B’ on Taxes,” Weisman writes:

“House Speaker John A. Boehner, playing hard ball only days before the nation heads into a fiscal crisis, will tell fellow House Republicans that he will move forward with his own tax plan in the coming days to increase tax rates only on income over $1 million, then shift the fight on spending cuts to early next year when the nation runs into its borrowing limit.”

The timing for this sort of pathetic gerrymandering could hardly look worse. Does this group care about its current and future reputation whatsoever? The GOP has become almost synonymous with tone-deaf, small picture thinking. Our President displayed the calming, sober leadership we have come to expect from him. He emotionally addressed the tragedy while traveling to Newton to offer direct comfort to the community. Boehner and Company continue to look for a lifeline for a drowning, unpopular platform; one  that protects the wealth of the very few, even as they scream about the immorality of deficits.

It seems as if the deficit is being used as a bargaining ploy by the Republicans. This ploy is being used against a president who is being distracted by the growing crisis of mass public executions. Something that is largely stoked by the continuous rollback of firearm regulations from an NRA-loving Republican party. While Obama’s attention is focused elsewhere, let’s paint a fake portrait of compromise  then should the President hold his ground, tar him with accusations of misplaced priorities.

The White House should not let this happen. For over 12 years now, Republican positions have been responsible for; one fiscal, foreign policy, domestic agenda, middle class welfare catastrophe one after another. Then while Obama is busy cleaning up assorted messes, they try to make a new one unchallenged. It’s pathological.