The Democrats in the House of Representatives produced over 400 bills in the last Congress that the U.S. Senate did not have the time or inclination to act on. We didn’t pay attention to most of those bills, although a few, like Cap & Trade, were big effing deals. When we see the Republican-run House pass bills to repeal health care reform or ban czarism from the executive office, we shouldn’t really get upset. It’s theater. It is only important for setting precedents for future action should the Republicans win back the Senate and the White House in two years. If they do that, then we’re all totally screwed anyway and we’ll be right back to Bushism with no money left to bail us out. Everything I’ve written for two years has had this fact as part of the implicit backdrop. It’s why I have so little patience for Democratic infighting. I don’t care if it’s progressives who are holier-than-thou or Blue Dogs who won’t endorse Pelosi as their leader, we don’t have the luxury of letting down our guard against these know-nothing plutocrats. At the same time, we don’t need to freak out when they are doing something ineffectual just to piss us off and to rally their base. They have so much Stupid to give. It will be like a firehose of Stupid for at least the first nine or ten months here.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I’m waiting for them to impeach the President for the crime of being President while Black.
Yeah, I want to see John Boehner’s birth certificate. I think he’s really German although he tries in inappropriate ways to make folks think he is Dutch. Or a Syracuse fan.
Same for the two Snow Whites and the fourteen dwarfs who are lining up for the GOP Presidential primaries. Show me your birth certificate. No, Michelle, Sarah, Mitt, Huck, Newt, Ricky, …., your real birth certificate.
ACTUALLY, Orange Julius prefers the color orange, because he doesn’t want people asking him about other colors.
understand?
if not, google Boehner and ‘family’, and take a look at his mother.
there is no way, in America, that her ass would have been allowed to drink from WHITES ONLY fountains South of the Mason-Dixon.
take a gander at his sister – has more Negroid features than half my Black family.
Orange Julius is nothing but another Bob Barr.
fascinating. but I couldn’t find any pictures of mother and sister!
check msnbc. they did puff pieces on him.
better yet, go over to Booker Rising, and put Orange Julius into the search engine. shay has done a couple of posts about our incognegro Speaker
thanks, will do.
Banning czars might be a good thing for future policy. It would force a lot of work back to the Cabinet-level. And the peer coordination groups among agencies that already exist. Might end some of the fiefdom-itis that tends to take over when Cabinet members have too much latitude outside the President’s view.
The problem of the waste motion in having to coordinate a large number of information channels sometimes bogs down effective action. And added to that are the frequent changes in personnel and portfolio so folks spend inordinate amounts of time trying to discover who’s doing that job now. Government is slow-moving enough that this latter problem is not as big there as within so-called fleet-of-foot corporations. It is based on a bunch of consultant conceits and untested management theory. Just like the idea of czars was.
You can have stable organizations and flexible information structures or flexible organizations and stable information structures, but trying to have both creates chaos (and not the helpful kind).
The thing is that banning “czars” just means that when the next Republican comes into office and he wants to put something into place like a czar, he’ll just have to come up with a new name for it. Just some suitably patriotic sounding title (I will admit it has always struck me a bit that the American government clung to a Russian term through the Cold War – and part of the reason why the Birchers don’t like the idea of czars has nothing to do with organizational crap and everything to do with the name “czar” which is obviously evidence Rooskie Communism creeping into the Executive Branch).
If they can’t find a patriotic term, then the next Republican who needs one will just call them a “Chief Something-or-other Officer” or “Special Director” or some other business-speak term slapped onto the role. It’s not like the roles will go away – they’re too useful.
The really are useful only for the optics. “We have a czar, special coordinator, special assistant….we are doing something and this is how it is visible.”
Thirty years of drug czars proves the uselessness over the long term even of political use of the function. It’s just one more way of preventing the worker bees from actually getting the job done.
Well said, Booman. It (eternal vigilance) really is a matter of focus these days.
“A firehose of Stupid” – perfect!
Guardian
There is a built-in two year delay already in the rule-writing schedule the EPA put out. The rules have to be written technology-by-technology, and EPA is starting with large point-sources. Power plants and garbage incinerators are in the first wave.
Capito’s gesture can help her even if it fails, when the rules in fact are delayed by two years just by the rule-writing and public comment process.
I thought I put links up to the EPA rule page on this when the rule schedule was first announced and people were freaking out about how this was another Obama betrayal.
The first one is a non-starter.
The response to the second one is “Fine. You essentially are forcing us to depend only on regulation.”
Of course, you know my views that cap-and-trade risks creating a market like Enron exploited for electricity in California. Theoretically, it looks good and it could and has worked elsewhere. But it requires the placement of a tough cap in order to create a real market. Otherwise it is just a pollution subsidy (which was the problem with last year’s bill).
The “infighting” you speak of isn’t about “holier than thou” progressivies purists, its about real disagreements between progressives and blue dogs about the politics and strategies that our party should follow in order to achieve the goal that you rightly highlight as paramount: keeping Republicans out of power. Policy and ideology is maybe 5% of whats really dividing blue dogs and progressives.
So when you say, “why can’t we get all just get along?’ what I really hear you saying is why can’t progressives give up their understanding of politics and strategy and just go along with what those in power in the part (the centrists) think is the best course. That’s a fair takeaway and maybe one that expedience demands, but you could also be asking those in power why they don’t listen to progressive political strategists more and follow their recommendations. We did just suffer a shellacking in the mid-terms so its not unreasonable to expect some new ideas and new approaches from the leadership.
Please. Have you paid the smallest amount of attention to how progressive opinion leaders have behaved over the last two years?
President Obama has been portrayed as a monster. We had disagreements with Clinton and Carter, too, but we didn’t obsess about his freaking chief of staff or attack their integrity on a daily basis.
I actually agree with a lot of that, but it doesn’t change my point really: we disagree about politics and strategy, not policy and ideology. A lot of progressive opinion leaders have gone off the deep end when they make such characterizations, but (and these are honest questions, im not being snarky) how much of this is just implicit in the insider-outsider dynamic of our permeable party structures? The tea party leaders are actually insane and make the jane hamshers of the world look like elder statesman, and yet the GOP party leadership bends over backwards not to offend, and in many cases has adopted the political strategies of the tea party (ie, no cooperation or compromise, the new speaker of the house won’t even say the word “compromise”).
What I’m pushing for is that the two sides (and there are way more than 2 sides, considering there’s not just centrists and progressives, there’s also insiders and outsiders in the Dem party) to at least recognize the dividing line (politics rather than policy) and find a way to get everyone firing on all cylinders for 2012.
I mentioned the tea party earlier to point out that the intraparty divisions implicit in our 2 party systems isn’t an intractable problem. Obama needs to make the necessary tweaks and gestures to get progressives and outsiders on board for 2012- just telling people to fall in line and shut up is a horrible leadership strategy and certainly one that our opponents are not practicing, much to their great success. And those same progressives and outsiders need to take these gestures, see the big picture and get on board.
Did the progressives or the left or the Adam Greens of the world forget the accomplishments of the past two years? They whine because he’s not “doing it” their way, that’s all. And they will make a self-fulfilling prophecy about 2012 if they keep it up.
If 2012 depends on the under-35’s, there is nothing on the agenda from a policy perspective that’s going to get them to the polls. At least I can’t think of anything that’s possible. The excitement of electing Obama is going to be tough to repeat. So his re-election depends on the middle, on people seeing that he’s working for them — all of them. Rich, middle-class, poor. Business owner and workers. Retirees and union folks. Whites and people of color. Young and old. Sick and healthy. etc. He has to be sure to give the broad middle reasons not to vote against him!
Guys like Adam Green (who I watched last night) remind me of petulant children in a grocery store throwing a tantrum: it’s never enough! And what experience does he have, exactly, to be so certain that moving to the left is the way to win? He can’t name a policy that would make a difference either. I sure wish that the TV shows would stop pitting the “left” against the right — Adam Green against the tea-party guy. How about the middle, MSNBC?
Anyhow, enough ranting. It’s time to get on board and support the President who is, as Booman often states, the most thoughtful, progressive, productive president in a long time.
I didn’t see Adam GReen on TV so I’ll defer to you and agree that he is acting like a petulant child. My point though is that what’s driving those tantrums is more about politics than policy. Progressives and outsiders feel that their assumptions and strategies are not being taken seriously by party leaders, and they are basically right. So adam green whining on TV is really just the whine of a powerless outsider, but in this case, much of his political critiques (for example, the politics of the stimulus, HCR, etc), in hindisght make a decent amount of sense (booman has conceded as much on this blog). Progressives and outsiders should keep crashing the gates – in 20 years or so, the Ezra Kleins and Matt Yglesias of the world will probably be op-ed writers twice a week at the Wash Post and NY Times, so in a sense this is all just a matter of time.