Tag Archives: veto threat

Morning Bunker Report: Wednesday 5.16.2012

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WHAT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY STANDS FOR TODAY—————————–—

George W. Bush finally endorses Romney at ornate elevator door-shutting ceremony — “I’m for Mitt Romney,” Bush told ABC News this morning as the doors of an elevator closed on him, after he gave a speech on human rights a block from his old home — the White House. [...] Romney already had the support of Bush’s brother and parents; he’s already hired Bush’s former team to lead his campaign; and he’s already adopted most of the same policy priorities of the failed former president. The Republican National Committee conceded recently that a Romney presidency would be the same as Bush’s presidency, “just updated.” – Steve Benen & Wonkette | Note: Read that first sentence again — George W. Bush gave a speech on ‘human rights‘!!?! 

THAT’S SO BAIN! The Tampa Bay Times reports on yet another example of Mitt Romney’s “heads I win, tails you lose” business model: Millions of dollars in tax subsidies given to Bain-owned Dade Behring for creating jobs in Puerto Rico … after which the company shut down its Puerto Rico operations. [...] Romney says he supports tax incentives at the state level, but note that this involved federal dollars—dollars that went to a Bain-owned company for creating jobs even though the company destroyed the jobs. Adding insult to injury: Romney’s firm “earned” $342 million on it’s $30 million Dade Behring investment, a profit of more than one thousand percent, even though it ended up firing 850 Floridians. — Jed Lewison

John Boehner and fellow Republicans want to play another game of “government shutdown” over the debt limit – Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wants Congress to raise the debt limit again later this year “without drama, pain and damage.” House Speaker John Boehner has other ideas. [...] “When the time comes, I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase. This is the only avenue I see right now to force the elected leadership of this country to solve our structural fiscal imbalance. If that means we have to do a series of stop-gap measures, so be it – but that’s not the ideal. Let’s start solving the problem. We can make the bold cuts and reforms necessary to meet this principle, and we must.” — Brian Beutler | TPM

  • There will be no compromise: any tax increases to the wealthy or cuts to the DoD are completely off the table.
  • Why are Republicans flirting with Debt Limit Debacle 2.0? — Protecting The Bush Tax Cuts: This is a generational imperative for the GOP. The 2001 and 2003 Bush cuts are key to the decades-long conservative goal of redistributing wealth further up the income ladder and rolling back the federal government’s role in providing social services. All of the cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of the year, and if President Obama wins in November, he’ll have a lot of leverage to demand that the Republicans own up to the results and allow the cuts for high-income earners to expire.  – Brian Beutler | TPM
  • Under the current baseline agreed to in the Budget Control Act, the debt-ceiling deal wherein Boehner claims he received “98 percent of what he wanted,” every bracket of the Bush Tax Cuts will expire at the end of fiscal 2012. The only way any bracket, whether at the low-end or high-end, will be extended beyond fiscal 2012 is through an act of congress. If congress and the president simply do nothing, they will automatically expire. — Bob Cesca
  • Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY – ”It is pretty galling for Speaker Boehner to be laying down demands for another debt-ceiling agreement when he won’t even abide by the last one. The last thing the country needs is a rerun of last summer’s debacle that nearly brought down our economy.”
  • Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-MD  – ”The dollar for dollar limit, of course, led to the sequester, which none of us like. While it sounds good, the execution of that principle does not seem to be very disciplined. The Speaker, in my view, believes [in a broad, balanced approach] as well, [but] the Speaker’s party does not believe in balance. Mr. Boehner is responding to the same people who didn’t want the Export-Import Bank to pass. The Republicans are good at buying and lousy at paying. They borrowed a lot of money, as a result we owe a lot of money. They don’t believe that tax cuts need to be paid for so they give away revenues, they continue to spend money and inevitably deficits occur.”
  • The last GOP-led hostage crisis over the debt — It was, to my mind, the worst thing an American major party has done, at least in domestic politics, since the Civil War. It was a move without parallel. The entirety of a party threatened to deliberately hurt the country unless their rivals paid a hefty ransom — in this case, debt reduction. It didn’t matter that Republicans were largely responsible for the debt in the first place, and it didn’t matter that Republicans routinely raised the debt ceiling dozens of times over the last several decades. This wasn’t just another partisan dispute; it was a scandal for the ages. This one radical scheme helped lead to the first-ever downgrade of U.S. debt; it riled financial markets and generated widespread uncertainty about the stability of the American system; and it severely undermined American credibility on the global stage. Indeed, in many parts of the world, observers didn’t just lose respect for us, they were actually laughing at us. It’s the kind of thing that should have scarred the Republican Party for a generation. Not only did that never happen, the Republican hostage takers are already vowing to create this identical crisis all over again, on purpose.– Steve Benen

The Andrew Breitbart Fail-Train chugs along – Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe released a new video today supposedly exposing voter fraud in North Carolina by highlighting non-citizens like Zbigniew Gorzkowski who have voted in recent elections. The problem: Gorzkowski is an American citizen. — Think Progress

Rove Group Drops $25 Million In A Single Month To Attack Obama – Crossroads GPS, a group backing Mitt Romney that is affiliated with Republican strategist Karl Rove, will spend $25 million this month on ads attacking President Obama on his spending record. The campaign will begin on Thursday with an $8 million ad buy that will run in 10 states. — Think Progress

PRESIDENT OBAMA / DEMOCRATS————————————————————

The Obama Administration on Tuesday threatened to veto the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 over provisions related to Guantanamo Bay and same sex marriage. The House Armed Services Committee approved the $642 billion defense budget last week by a 56-5 vote. The budget is $8 billion over the military spending caps imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. The legislation would continue to prevent the Obama Administration from closing down Guantanamo Bay by prohibiting the transfer of detainees to the United States or a foreign country. “The Administration continues to strongly oppose these provisions, which intrude upon the Executive branch’s ability to carry out its military, national security, and foreign relations activities and to determine when and where to prosecute Guantanamo detainees,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement. — Raw Story 

Sen. John McCain wants campaign finance reform again, so guess where he goes for support:  McCain said Tuesday he could join Democrats once again to form a bipartisan coalition, even though it would annoy the Republican leadership. [...] The Disclose Act introduced by the Whitehouse in March would require any group that spends $10,000 or more on election ads or other political activity to file a disclosure report with the Federal Election Commission within 24 hours. Reports would detail the nature of expenditures over $1,000 and reveal the names of donors who give $10,000 or more. The legislation would also require that outside group advertisements include “stand-by-your-ad” disclaimers listing the biggest donors. Forty-three Democrats have co-sponsored the legislation, but no Republican has endorsed it. – TheHill.com

The DNC responds to complaints about Scott Walker Recall Election June 5 — Following a report that the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is “furious” with the Democratic National Committee for not pouring more money into the Scott Walker recall effort, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will visit Wisconsin this month to campaign with Walker’s challenger — but there’s still no indication that the Wisconsinites can expect more help than that. [...] “We are confident that they will be here for us,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party spokesman Graeme Zielinski when asked if the visit meant more monetary support from the DNC. — Buzzfeed

BREAKING NEWS: Despite the Republican Party, Congress passed a bill – The Senate approved legislation today that would reauthorize the Export-Import Bank after rejecting five Republicans amendments, including a proposal to shut down the bank. The bill was approved 78-20 — with all 20 “no” votes cast by Republicans — and now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature. The House passed the measure last week 330-93.  [...] “This bank is one of the most powerful tools that we have for manufacturing jobs in America,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said on the Senate floor. “In fiscal 2011 alone, the bank supported nearly 290,000 export-created jobs in America.” – Roll Call News

Only one party’s to blame? Don’t tell the Sunday shows – Last month, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published an Op ed and a book making the extremely controversial argument that both parties aren’t equally to blame for what ails Washington. They argued that the GOP — by allowing extremists to roam free and by wielding the filibuster to achieve government dysfunction as a political end in itself — were demonstrably more culpable for creating what is approaching a crisis of governance. It turns out neither man has been invited on to the Sunday shows even once to discuss this thesis. As Bob Somerby and Kevin Drum note, these are among the most quoted people in Washington — yet suddenly this latest topic is too hot for the talkers, or not deemed relevant at all. I ran this thesis by Ornstein himself, and he confirmed that the book’s publicity people had tried to get the authors booked on the Sunday shows, with no success. — Greg Sargent | See also:  Op-ed of the day — Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem

Morning Bunker Report: Thursday 4.26.2012

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——————————WHAT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY STANDS FOR TODAY

DONALD TRUMP DECIDED TO MAKE AN ASS OF HIMSELF in Scotland’s parliament yesterday, demanding the country end plans for an offshore wind farm he fears will spoil the view at his exclusive new $750-million-pound ($1.2-billion) golf resort. In a typically blunt display, the New York property tycoon told an inquiry into renewable energy to stop the wind power efforts in the country’s north. “Scotland, if you pursue this policy of these monstrous turbines, Scotland will go broke,” he said. “They are ugly, they are noisy and they are dangerous. If Scotland does this, Scotland will be in serious trouble and will lose tourism to places like Ireland, and they are laughing at us.” [...] When challenged to produce hard evidence about his claims on the negative impact of turbines, Trump said: “I am the evidence, I am a world class expert in tourism.” The public gallery burst into laughter. – Yahoo!

MITT ROMNEY’S SPEECH INCLUDED THE WORD “America” a numbing 33 times. But there’s something else I want to note from Romney’s speech, something that both Republicans and Democrats do, and it drives me crazy: ”I’ll tell you about how much I love this country, where someone like my dad, who grew up poor and never graduated from college, could pursue his dreams and work his way up to running a great car company. Only in America could a man like my dad become governor of the state in which he once sold paint from the trunk of his car.”  You see, Mitt Romney may not have pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, but he has a pair of bootstraps that he inherited from his father, which he keeps in a small mahogany box and takes out and gazes upon every now and again to remind himself of how great it is for someone to have bootstraps, and pull himself up by them, if that’s what he needs to do. All he’s saying is, he knows from bootstraps. – Enough With “Only In America”

MARCO RUBIO AUDITIONS FOR ROMNEY AND THE BASE: U.S. may have to strike Iran (and Russia, and China…) — Rubio, a member of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently campaigned with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and has been touted as a possible running mate. [...] “We should also be preparing our allies, and the world, for the reality that unfortunately, if all else fails, preventing a nuclear Iran may, tragically, require a military solution.” Rubio, also lambasted Russian president-elect Vladimir Putin’s preaching of “paranoia and anti-Western sentiments” and the “curtain of secrecy that veils the Chinese state.” “On the most difficult transnational challenges of our time, who will lead if we do not? The answer, at least today, is that no other nation or organization is willing or able to do so,” he said. – Raw Story

TEA PARTY FRESHMAN REP. SCOTT TIPTON (R-CO) relies on campaign contributions from oil and gas companies that he has a financial stake in. Public Campaign reports that one-third of Tipton’s first quarter fundraising comes from corporate PACs and party committees, while only 14 percent comes from small donors of less than $200. – ThinkProgress

BAD TOUCH: REP. FRANCISCO CANSECO (R-TX) CLAIMS TSA ASSAULTED HIM (they made him feel funny in his tummy) during a pat-down at the San Antonio International Airport. “The agent was very aggressive in his pat-down, and he was patting me down where no one is supposed to go,” Canseco told local network KENS 5. – Raw Story

REP. TODD AKIN (R-MO) says the federal government shouldn’t be involved in student loans at all: “America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in.” — TPM

PRESIDENT OBAMA / DEMOCRATS————————————————————

RON PAUL’S CAMPAIGN PULLED IN LESS MONEY FROM THE MILITARY last month than President Obama’s did, according to campaign finance numbers. Paul’s anti-war stances still draw more military donations than Mitt Romney, but the decline is another indicator of his campaign’s increasing status as more of a traveling libertarian speaking series than a traditional effort to win the presidency. On the Open Secrets blog: Overall, Paul retains the lead. Analysis of OpenSecrets.org data shows that so far in this election cycle, members of the military who donated more than $200 have given Paul’s campaign about $333,134, versus $184,505 to Obama and just $45,738 to Romney. But in March, Obama and Paul switched places. Members of the military sent $36,448 to Obama and just $17,733 to Paul. Even though Romney solidified his position as the presumptive Republican nominee, military donations to his campaign remained anemic — only $8,630. – Obama Overtakes Paul Among Military Donors

PRESIDENT OBAMA SAYS the amount of money poured into fighting the scientific consensus on climate change will push the issue into the presidential campaign. [...] “Part of the challenge over these past three years has been that people’s number-one priority is finding a job and paying the mortgage and dealing with high gas prices,” Obama said. “In that environment, it’s been easy for the other side to pour millions of dollars into a campaign to debunk climate-change science. “I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way,” he added. – POLITICO

THE WHITE HOUSE ON WEDNESDAY shocked lawmakers and advocacy groups by announcing that President Obama would veto a proposed national cybersecurity bill known as CISPA if it reaches his desk in its current form. [...] The ACLU is one of several advocacy groups staunchly opposed to CISPA over concerns that the bill’s language is so broad that it would allow companies and U.S. intelligence agencies to share unprecedented amounts of personally identifiable information about Web users without proper oversight and accountability. – White House Veto Threat Scrambles CISPA’s Prospects

FOX NEWS SUGGESTS President Obama’s appearance on NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is somehow denigrating the office of the presidency. For instance, today on Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson said that it’s “nutso” for Obama to go on “these comedy shows” because it “lowers the status of the office.” – Obama Lowered “The Status Of The Office”? Bush Appeared On Deal Or No Deal

  • 9 presidential pols on late-night TV – 6. George W. Bush drew both laughs and groans on “Late Show with David Letterman” on March 1, 2000, when he told his host, who had recently undergone heart bypass surgery, “It’s about time you had the heart to invite me.” 8. Al Gore read a “Top 10” list of rejected Gore-Lieberman campaign slogans on the Sept. 14, 2000, episode of “Late Show with David Letterman.” No. 9: “Remember, America, I gave you the Internet, and I can take it away!” 9. Mitt Romney also used Letterman’s “Top 10” segment to jab himself on Dec. 20, 2011. The No. 1 thing Romney would like to say to the American people? “It’s a hairpiece.”