2015 American Politics Thread: The 114th Congress Is in the House!

PROSECUTOR: "Well that contradicts what your statement earlier when you said that –"

ME: "Yeah, I probably did. Is it lunchtime yet?"

Mr. Gowdy's quite creepy.

Started watching this hearing around five, feel asleep in the chair for a while, have had it in the background as I mark

you have strange enthusiasms

Pierce:

I would like to congratulate the United States House of Representatives for the very fine show they put on today on the stage provided by the Special Committee To Keep Benghazi In The News Until The Polls Drop. There has been no better example of non-governance displayed on TV since the last time Marco Rubio gave a speech. There has been no better view granted of the sheer stupidity and incompetence that has run riot in those halls because of the last two midterm elections since the last time Steve King parted his brain on the left side. There has been no more sterling example of the now-undeniable truth that modern movement conservatism has declined into a tangled mess of myth, shibboleth, and outright fabulism since the last time Ed Klein wrote a book. A whole philosophy of government, and still an influential one, stands exposed as little more than a puppet show for the national Id, and not a particularly sharp one, either. A movement full of grifters and ignorami, acting out a simulacrum of representative government for the benefit of an audience steeped in comfortable, narcotic delusion. Seriously, today's hearings performed roughly the same public service that Patricia Neal did in A Face In The Crowd, when she threw open Lonesome Rhodes's microphone when he wasn't looking.​

i wish i loved america enough to be more outraged by four dead servicemen in wartorn libya than i am by thousands of dead citizens on american soil on 9/11. i guess i'm a communist

an unusually lucid fox news moment

http://i.imgur.com/6QxHcq7.png

Physician, kill thyself.

http://tktk.gawker.com/times-campaign-reporter-familiarizes-self-with-c-span-1738142673

The hearing was so newsless that conservative media outlets turned toward minor details: The Drudge Report leads this morning with a Weekly Standard item about a coughing fit Clinton had in the final hour of her testimony.

physician, dive headfirst into an empty pool

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/23/us/politics/freedom-caucus-demands-translated-to-plain-english.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

well we all know this is an electoral issue but i'll put it here

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/long-twilight-struggle

josh marshall looks like he had kind of a starbursts moment re: hillary and the gowdy committee

tingly leg

Not that Marshall advances this canard, but running a terrible campaign doesn't mean you'll do an abysmal job running a Cabinet department or serving as president. I'm a bad boyfriend but quite handsome and charismatic, for example.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/romney-loves-romneycare-again

Speaking to the Boston Globe for their obituary of Staples founder Thomas G. Stemberg, who died Friday, the former Massachusetts praised Stemberg for his involvement in pushing “Romneycare,” which in turn, Romney said, led to Obamacare, giving “a lot of people” health coverage.

“Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney said. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare. So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance.”

wow, it's almost like in 2012 he was just saying whatever he was supposed to say

such a courageous leader

White House, GOP near two-year budget deal

Senior White House officials and congressional leaders are nearing a deal to raise the debt limit and set the federal budget for the next two years, say sources familiar with the talks.

...Legislation to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government is central to the deal, but the talks are also said to include measures that would fund highway and infrastructure construction and renew the Export-Import Bank for one year.

The agreement is not yet final, as negotiators still need to settle a dispute over controversial policy riders, but congressional leaders hope to announce something Monday evening, according to a Senate source. The deal would cover the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years.

what is Barack Obama giving up

excellent question. if the republicans do not make the answer obvious by proclaiming it as the price of their assent, I'd suspect Obama conceded something pretty huge for them, huge enough to be worth the humiliation of not seeming to have extracted any worthwhile concessions.

officials briefed on the negotiations said the emerging accord would call for cuts in spending on Medicare and Social Security disability benefits

well waht a fine call

Cutting money for poor people and the sick? Never would have guessed!

back to the grand bargain nonsense, while getting even less

it's early to say "naturally, the poor and the disenfranchised are gonna get the shaft." wait until we see the details, which will describe the shaft in greater detail

mein shaft, mein fuhrer

US Military Used Christian NGO as Front for North Korea Espionage - Gen. Boykin's creation

Before it was finally dismantled in 2013, Hiramine’s organization received millions in funding from the Pentagon through a complex web of organizations designed to mask the origin of the cash, according to one of the former military officials familiar with the program, as well as documentation reviewed for this article.

The use of HISG for espionage was “beyond the pale” of what the U.S. government should be allowed to do, said Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, an association of nearly 200 American NGOs. The practice of using humanitarian workers as spies “violates international principles” and puts legitimate aid and development workers at risk, he argued.

“It is unacceptable that the Pentagon or any other U.S. agency use nonprofits for intelligence gathering,” Worthington said. “It is a violation of the basic trust between the U.S. government and its civic sector.”

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/26/pentagon-missionary-spies-christian-ngo-front-for-north-korea-espionage/

Washington Post take on proposed budget/debt deal

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/10/26/congressional-leaders-closing-in-on-a-budget-deal/

Congressional leaders and the White House are nearing a deal on a two-year budget agreement that would increase military and domestic spending in exchange for long-term spending cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare.

...

Aides said the deal would likely include new rules for the Social Security Disability Insurance fund, which is expected to run out of funds by the end of 2016. Discussions have also included maintaining a 2 percent cut to Medicare provider payments that were included in the 2011 Budget Control Act, also known as the sequester. Those cuts could be problematic for Democrats who have insisted that there be no changes to Medicare or Social Security in a budget deal.

The deal under discussion would extend the life of the disability fund for as many as six years and would include programmatic changes, such as allowing some recipients who can still work to take partial payments while earning outside income. The plan would avoid across-the-board disability insurance cuts by implementing smaller changes like expanding a program requiring a second medical expert to weigh in on whether or not an applicant is truly disabled.

A pilot version of that program has been in effect in several states and has been shown to reduce the number of applicants approved, lowering the cost of the program. Other savings would come from so-called “good governance” changes that are intended weed out waste and fraud

A two year deal helps Republicans more in 2016 elections than it does Dems

For real.

Not much discussion of this yet elsewhere.

I agree, mildly, that disability benefits deserve a second look, but fuck this shit about keeping the sequester going for social services.

xpost

i think everyone's waiting for more details to come out

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/us/politics/congress-and-white-house-near-deal-on-budget.html?_r=0

One good Medicare item

The prospective agreement would also prevent expected increases in out-of-pocket costs for millions of Medicare Part B beneficiaries. The increases would have been caused by the rare absence of a cost-of-living increase in Social Security for some beneficiaries, because of unusually low inflation.

and:

Aides said that the Social Security Disability Insurance program would be amended, in part to tighten and standardize eligibility requirements that now vary by state. That change was projected to save the government $5 billion.

In addition, the accord calls for eliminating a provision of the Affordable Care Act, not yet in force, that would require businesses with more than 200 employees to automatically enroll their workers for health insurance.

The emerging deal would also reallocate funds among Social Security program trust funds to ensure solvency of the disability insurance program. Such reallocations have occurred regularly over the decades but Republicans had opposed any new reallocation without changes to reduce costs of the program.

so which 2 dozen republicans will be the ones to vote for it?

seeing that this deal does amount to treason

medicare / social security - birth to the earth

pay for it with eisenhower's tax rates

http://sageamericanhistory.net/coldwar/images/ikeonmacfiring.jpg

That's the thing. The NY Times had that article that if the top rate was raised for the .01 percent, you could do Bernie's plan to pay for college for all. If you lift the payroll tax cap and make more income go into that you can fund Social Security better. If you make the capital gains rate the same as the income tax rate and if you get rid of that exception for hedge fund managers, one can do a lot. But none of it will happen with the current Congress, and its unlikely even a Democratic Congress would have to courage to do all that.

Ryan will of course oppose the budget deal, even though it's the biggest gift he'll ever receive. it's funny watching the MSM push that narrative for him, though. I'm sure that when Boehner repeatedly called him to beg for him to take the Speaker position, and when Ryan spent last week playing Mario Kart with his family, that no one ever mentioned to him that the House and Senate majority/minority leaders were cutting a deal with the White House to save his ass, and that he wasn't totally supportive of that

is that true? doesn't sound right to me. I have to imagine Ryan is completely signed up for this compromise.

is what true, that he will oppose the budget deal? i think he'll publicly oppose it, yeah. he's already stated that "the process stinks" or something like that.

privately, he must love it.

Ryan will be happy secretly if this passes, as long as some of the Freedom Caucus opposes this because it allows increased domestic spending. He can then promise them that in 2 years with a Republican Congress and a possible Republican Prez, they can then slash domestic spending and Medicaid and stuff. Passing this now decreases attention on Ryan's goals and the Tea Party Freedom caucus goals, and allows the mainstream media to ignore how far to the right the Republicans as a party have gone.

xpost
i mean, the only reason this deal can happen is because it can be tied to boehner's departure, which takes away the freedom caucus' leverage. if/when it passes with the support of almost all the democrats and a few dozen republicans, that frees up the rest of the GOP to criticize it and tell constituents that there was nothing they could do because Boehner betrayed them yet again. given that the Freedom Caucus just ran Boehner out of town, i doubt that Ryan is going to ally himself with Benedict Arnold on his way out the door

The deal emerged as the GOP House coalesced around Ryan, so he approves privately.

in other words,

http://i.imgur.com/1Q1AXYC.jpg

Is that Speaker Syndrome?

I feel a little better. Greg Sargent:

What Democrats got:

— $40 billion in additional non-defense spending, over and above the caps imposed by the sequester, over two years

— a debt limit hike through March of 2017, meaning no more conservative-manufactured debt limit extortion through that date

— an end to conservative-manufactured government shutdown drama through the election and beyond

— a solution to a glitch in cost-of-living calculations that threatened to hike premiums for millions on Medicare Part B

— a reallocation of Social Security funds that Dems had sought to keep disability insurance solvent

What Republicans got:

— $40 billion in additional defense spending, over and above the caps imposed by the sequester, over two years, plus an additional chunk of defense spending in a side contingency fund. That is to say, an increase in defense spending overall that is higher than the increase in non-defense spending

— Medicare cuts, but (according to reports and experts) only on the provider side

— A tightening of eligibility requirements to the Social Security Disability Insurance program that experts say does not equal a benefits cut

— a debt limit hike through March of 2017, meaning no more conservative-manufactured debt limit extortion through that date

— an end to conservative-manufactured government shutdown drama through the election and beyond

— a solution to a glitch in cost-of-living calculations that threatened to hike premiums for millions on Medicare Part B

not bad

republicans got to satiate their bloodlust and desire for nihilist chaos by getting someone in government thrown out