John Boehner is Humiliated Publicly, Still Orange

Last night was a show vote just to prove Boehner had control of his caucus, and the beginning of a dance that will see this bill moved to the Senate, where it would be defeated. He didn't even make it past step one:

What was originally described as a brief snafu has turned into a stunning rebuke of House Republican leaders, who were unable Thursday to round up the minimum number of votes to pass Speaker John Boehner's debt limit bill.

The vote, originally scheduled for 6 p.m., was delayed at the last minute, when Boehner and his leadership team finally faced the harsh reality: despite a swing of momentum in their direction over the previous 24 hours, they didn't have the votes. And with no Democrats there to help them, they needed 217 Republicans to be on board. They were not.

Boehner and his leadership team met for hours, in various leadership offices, with reluctant members, and persuasive supporters, hoping to cobble together a majority. Meanwhile, leadership aides insisted for as long as possible that a vote was still planned late Thursday.

At about 10:30 p.m., House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) emerged from Boehner's second floor Capitol office and announced to assembled reporters, "No vote tonight."

Today he'll probably find some way to get it passed by putting plenty of teabagger language in there, and so this game gets delayed for yet another day.

My guess is that it the process remains the same, the senate passes the Reid bill, and sends it back to the house (which I think can happen at the earliest Monday).

And then (I think) the house would have a chance to pass that bill or the country defauts.

I would still bet heavily on us not defaulting (because if we did it would break the most basic law of politics that rich people/corporations always get what they want), but this whole thing has been handled so incompetently by everyone not named Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell that there's at least a chance this actually does happen.

At this point, you'd have to think there's some serious reflection going on in the White House. Maybe using our nation's impending default as an excuse for to try and force through a bipartisan 4 trillion dollar grand austerity wet dream bargain wasn't such a great idea after all?

Teabagging for a Default

I know the tea party has had some rallies where turnout was undersold, but whoever got mulitiple senators to come out and speak to this "crowd" should probably be fired.

Photo from Dave Weigel:

From TPM:

TPM:

Despite featuring Tea Party icons Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Rand Paul (R-KY), among others, a gathering outside the Senate organized by the Tea Party Express to urge Republicans to stand firm against a compromise bill drew only a handful of attendees. Reporters, many of whom came to interview presidential candidate Herman Cain, appeared to easily outnumber protesters. And despite being the most prominent attendee, Cain ended up not addressing the crowd and instead watching from the sidelines.

In his post, Wiegel offered this:

"Thought experiment: If liberals pulled a few hundred people to Congress for a rally against cuts/for tax hikes, would they get this much coverage?"

I'll answer that one for him. Moveon and others are having a rally today, and I bet there are more people (not like that will be difficult), and I doubt there's as much coverage.

The tea party message ties perfectly to what the beltway media already believes (people angry about deficit, poor people have it too good, cuts to social security and medicare are necessary). The message from a group like moveon (people need jobs, austerity doesn't work and will hurt the economy, don't cut medicare and social security, rich people and corprations should have to pay their fair share of taxes too) just doesn't fit any of their narratives.

They're ok with people being angry at the government, but only if it's for their pre-approved reasons. And as we've seen before, if something doesn't fit a cookie cutter beltway narrative, they just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist.

Best Escalating Fight Between a Former Senator and a Sex Columnist EVER

Dan Savage's New Threat to Rick Santorum from Dan Savage

Basically, this is what it looks like when a human utterly crushes another human.

It's 2011, People.

Arkansas, what the fuck?

A high school student in Arkansas was blocked from receiving sole valedictorian honors this summer, despite earning the highest G.P.A. in her class and receiving only a single B in her four years at McGehee Secondary School. Kymberly Wimberly’s offense? She’s black. School administrators worried that Wimberly’s accomplishment would result in a “big mess” at the majority-white school, so Principal Darrell Thompson told the student’s mother “that he decided to name a white student as co-valedictorian,” even though the white student had a lower G.P.A. The matter is currently pending in federal court.

Follow The Money

When you see the lobbying for these new free trade agreements, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out who is going to benefit from these deals:

WASHINGTON -- The three major free trade agreements Congress will soon consider are being promoted as a big win for American workers. But take a good look at who's lobbying for them most enthusiastically, and it becomes evident that the biggest winners will be giant multinational corporations -- and the countries on the other end of the deals.

The agreements would knock down any number of barriers and regulations currently limiting the unfettered flow of capital and goods between the U.S. and three countries: Korea, Colombia and Panama.

The agreements would ideally bring greater trade and wealth to all four economies; they would offer U.S. financial services huge new opportunities, while lowering costs for the nation's mega-retailers.

And they could potentially send hundreds of thousands more American jobs overseas.
With so much attention being paid to the debt-ceiling hijinks, the major lobbying effort for the three trade bills has been taking place almost entirely outside public view. But many of the biggest American companies have been engaged in a massive, months-long effort to get the bills passed.

The Panama deal is considered relatively minor, attracting attention mostly because of the country's checkered history as an off-shore tax haven. The deal with Colombia is somewhat bigger and more controversial, particularly because of Colombia's well-documented tolerance of the murder of trade unionists.
But it's the Korea agreement that is literally the big deal. Korea has the 14th-largest economy in the world, and is already the United States' seventh-largest trading partner.

Ground zero for the free-trade lobby is the U.S.-Korea FTA Business Coalition, a group convened by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and led by the top lobbyists for Boeing, Chevron, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. The group's central lobbying argument is that the deal will "create new American jobs and opportunities for economic growth by immediately removing barriers to U.S. goods and services in Korea."

The biggest of the big-business coalitions -- the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, the Financial Services Roundtable, the American Farm Bureau, Big Pharma and the Retail Industry Leadership Association -- are all lobbying hard as well, along with a slew of individual mega-corporations.

It's not surprising, but this is a story that rarely gets any traction in the beltway media, where free trade rivals only tax cuts on rich people as a policy that can be advocated endlessly as both religion and economic panacea without examining the outcomes in the slightest. As Thomas Friedman once said:

We got this free market, and I admit, I was speaking out in Minnesota -- my hometown, in fact -- and guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.

There is nothing that better exemplifies the beltway media's reporting on free trade than that sentence, so major kudos to the Huffington post for their coverage of this issue.

1936 FDR: "U Mad?"

I'd never seen this clip since it started bouncing around the internets last week. So great.

What Game is He Even Playing?

This from Obama just baffles me. His statement on Friday

Essentially what we had offered Speaker Boehner was over a trillion dollars in cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and defense.  We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.  We believed that it was possible to shape those in a way that preserved the integrity of the system, made them available for the next generation, and did not affect current beneficiaries in an adverse way.

And response to a general follow up question:

If I’m saying to future recipients of Social Security or Medicare that you’re going to have to make some adjustments, it’s important that we’re also willing to make some adjustments when it comes to corporate jet owners, or oil and gas producers, or people who are making millions or billions of dollars.

And there it is, from the man himself. Bragging about offering cuts to the two most popular programs in US history.

In addition to the disgusting talk of asking future recipients of Social Security and Medicare that you're going to "make some adjustments", (and buying 100% into the right's core belief that the poor in this country have it too good), I just don't understand who this type of talk is designed to appeal to.

Is Obama really so clueless that he thinks the entire electorate is made up of the Washington Post Editorial board, and is desperately hoping for a "serious" politician to cut to Social Security and Medicare?

Or does he genuinely want to cut Social Security and Medicare so badly that he doesn't care how bad this looks?

I'm actually not sure which option is worse, to be perfectly honest.