Are republicans willing to let the economy fail to win an election?

I'm not quite sure what exactly you guys are arguing here. The Obama Admin's record on transparency is very poor and while you separate out national security from other issues that seems more like spin if the issue is how transparent they are as a whole.

Also while we might know that Obama met with healthcare execs that still isn't proof of transparency as we knew that Cheney met with energy execs also during the formation of environmental policy.

 

is that why he wins transparency awards, the only issue people have is prosecuting whistle blowers, those whistle blowers are in national security.

no its not the same, you don't know who cheney met with, you do know who obama met with, names.

 

I consider the above "speculation" for sure, but even assuming this is accurate there is a quite a difference between "reshaping" and "cutting", between the mature tonality you give above and the actual policies being discussed. See previous post here.

Or:

I mean, the meat of Obama's budget proposals should center on DoD cuts, period. EDIT: Note that I am all for correcting Bush's bat**** crazy prescription program too.

Inasmuch as it drives up their taxes, they care. As this almost never happens, there is some disgusting truth to your comment.

 

You and Greenwald are free to call it "alarming" and you guys might be right but I would like to see some more info.

I agree I rephrase Greenwald's terms but I am not changing basic tone of his article which you even state is meant to raise the alarm (implying that this is a very serious change to those programs), even though you concede is based on incomplete information. Don't you think that would qualify as speculative?

 

I don't think he deserved those transparency awards and I think those who gave him the awards were jumping the gun based on what they thought he would do.

That is a difference but I don't think much of one. We don't know what substantially was discussed in either meeting.

 

the retirement age is the key issue in social security reform. when social security was enacted i don't think people lived five years on social security. if my dad doesn't die of a non natural event, he will make twenty years easy. he's working on 12 already, and he's only 74. this isn't anecdotal. not to mention the lower number of current workers per retiree.

 

I apologize if this sounds like being a thread nanny but perhaps it might be better to discuss Social Security reform in the original thread about it.

 

and transparency

 

I believe the proposals of the Fiscal Commission give a good flavor. And one that is, indeed, alarming.

Acknowledged in my previous post. I don't think the term is sufficient, however, as a standalone complaint. The article clearly articulates why this speculation is reasonable.

 

Here he is, in January 2009 talking about it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504114.html?hpid=topnews (Obama Pledges Reform of Social Security, Medicare Programs)

Reshaping means slowing the long-term growth of those programs, and that means cutting something or other. There's no other way around it. The question is do you just simply slash it or do you find ways to minimize the effect on beneficiaries. For example, the Medicare strategy proposed by GOP and Obama are very different - the GOP wants to focus on eliminating the core system while Obama wants to focus on cutting costs through process and payments to suppliers. The merits of each are arguable, but there are different ways to change the program. At the end of the day, the stark reality is that without reshaping Medicare, it WILL bankrupt us eventually - there is no doubt about that.

I don't think any of the SS changes described in the article are draconian - they are exactly the way you want to address the issue. The retirement age will go from 67 to 69 in *50 years*? That gives all current 15 yr olds plenty of time to be prepared.

Indexing to inflation as opposed to wage growth actually makes a lot of sense too. After all, inflation is what determines what people are having to spend money on - food, housing, etc. That's what's relevant when we're trying to figure out how much we need to support people. It should never have been tied to wage growth in the first place.

Agreed - and we don't know details about the budget proposal here. But it supposedly does include additional Pentagon cuts as well. The issue here is that the Pentagon budget isn't tied to a long-term trend. You can cut the Pentagon's budget one year and raise it the next - any cuts you get there don't necessarily lock in long-term trend changes. Entitlements cuts directly address the long-term curve.

The simple reality is that no one ever addresses entitlements because it's never going to be popular. If you could address them without major negatives, it would already have been done. Everyone runs away from it because it's politically unpopular - but the simple reality is that the sooner you make those adjustments, the smaller those adjustments have to be. There is no political benefit to Obama to taking on these programs - it's simply always been something he believed in and seems to believe he has the opportunity to address now (I have my doubts that this will go anywhere).

Something people don't understand about Obama - and I'd argue this is the case with Bush and Clinton as well - is that they just are more to the center than their political parties in Congress. When you have a majority in Congress, you're forced to accept all the things they want to do. Both Bush and Clinton were better leaders when they had an opposition party leading Congress because it let their more natural moderate side out. When they had their own parties in leadership, there is a tendency to overreach - especially in Bush's case when he let all sorts of crazy stuff pass over a longer period. Obama is naturally much more suited as a leader with an opposition party in charge because it neutralizes his leftist base that he simply doesn't agree with. However, the problem he faces is that the opposition party in charge, as David Brooks has pointed out, is not a "normal" party - instead, it has a major subset of crazy in it which skews everything. We haven't had that before, so it's hard to say how this all plays out.

Assuming Obama & Reid are committed to this, Pelosi is left with two options here:

(1) Play the role of the leftist tea partiers - no compromise. It effectively neutralizes both the progressives and the tea partiers. Then the end result either will be the smaller deal or a deal between the non-tea-party GOPers and the blue-dog type Democrats.

(2) Agree to compromise but extract things she wants out of it. Then you need less GOPers on board, and she can shift the deal a bit more to the left.

The entire GOP took strategy #1 with the health care debate - as a result, they had very little influence in the final legislation. Obama took strategy #2 in the December negotiations and got DADT and other things he wanted in it. Both have weaknesses and neither will make everyone happy.

 

^^^Great post.

 

wow, rhad and I agree on something, i was just about to type great post as well

 

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/

 

Speaking of derails, this thread was intended to be about intransigence for cynical political expediency.

I honestly can't believe you are still repeating the "both parties do it" meme, when your best example was the top leaders in the GOP (now) vs. a speaker at a Nader rally 11 years ago. You have yet to cite a single relevant example of Dems ever having done anything remotely like what Republicans have been doing (in line with the OP) for the last three years.

It is simply not true that "both parties do it" but with a couple caveats. It is absolutely false, going back to the thread topic, that "both parties do it." Stop saying that ****, man. You're better than that.

 

You're still going on about this?

We've already been through this before. Read this post. http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showpost.php?p=6217505&postcount=118

 

Major has done a better job covering this than I could but while there are things to be concerned about there are substantive differences between Obama is proposing and what those who truly do want to gut those programs.

"Alarming" is a relative term and I guess where Greenwald might be coming from any change to SSI, Medicare and Medicaid might be alarming. Not surprisingly I don't feel that way but even coming from a position more left of where I am we still don't know how serious these changes are. We don't even know if what the Defict cutting commission has proposed are what Obama is proposing now.

Its not baseless and you and Greenwald are free to your opinion but I would like to see more.

 

That was exactly the post I was referring to, so of course I read it. The following is utter BS:

"and agree that all sides do "it" to a certain extent"

"So while it is true that all sides do it"

Tell me how "both sides do it." Tell me how that "is true." If you want me to stop going on about it, how about giving one single example instead of zero examples.

You can't. You haven't (other than a Nader speaker 11 years ago) and yet you keep posting this fake centrist/equal-time BS.

As I said in my prior post, they do NOT both do it but with some caveats. Damn the caveats. They don't both do it. Period. And you keep repeating that without backing it up.

You're right that I "keep going on" about it because you keep saying the same BS with no evidence whatsoever.

 

The problem as I ssee it isn't really Obama's concession to entitelment reform, which is going to happen at some point anyway - the problem is that he's giving in on entitlement reform in order to get a compromise on things that are MASSIVELY politically unpopular in their own right ( elmination of tax breaks for billionaires, etc)...should have traded entitlement reform for something harder to get through.

 

"Obama is naturally much more suited as a leader with an opposition party in charge because it neutralizes his leftist base that he simply doesn't agree with."

Well, I'm quoting you here, so I guess you actually said this and believe it. You also believe that Clinton and George W. Bush governed better with an opposition party in control of Congress. That's very easy for you to say, since you don't belong to either party, or any party, to my knowledge. So you don't understand, Major. Obama was nominated and elected by the Democratic Party. That party has/had a political agenda. On the campaign trail, Obama made many statements supporting that agenda. Since he's been in office, excepting healthcare, he's moved away from large chunks of that agenda and compromised with the now radical Republican Party again and again. Because of his success with healthcare, one of many issues important to the Democratic Party and granted, one of the most important, excuses have been made for Obama's other actions in office, yes, again and again. Criticize the President about rolling over for the extremists in the GOP and someone yells "what about healthcare?" Complain about the continuation of the policies of G. W. Bush, policies he ran against, and here comes the cry, "what about healthcare?"

There are other issues dear to Democrats, Major. Issues that are, perhaps, not that dear to you. When you and others defend the President for not following the party's campaign platform, for not following what he ran on, for not pushing the issues that enormous numbers of Americans thought they were voting for when they voted for him, you are making excuses for the President's decisions that caved in to the demands of the radicals who have captured the Republican Party. Many millions of Americans aren't buying a lot of those excuses. The approval numbers Obama has are not merely a reflection of the minority that now has undue influence on the GOP, it's not merely the economy still struggling to get out of the doldrums. Those numbers reflect the dissatisfaction of many in the Democratic Party, and many independents, who are bewildered by Obama's continual willingness to cave on many issues and compromise with the extremists. In my opinion, of course.

Obama compromises and they simply ask for more. He compromises again. Same result. We shouldn't be upset, however, because he passed healthcare.

 

examples please

ending DODT, moving out of Iraq,