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Want to know where a "bipartisan" bill comes from? Follow the money.

Scene of the Crime

The so-called "JOBS" Act is a good example: The acronym stands for "Jump Starting Business Startups," but a better name would be "Jivers' Opportunity to Bilk Suckers." The bill is a sham that declares open season on hapless investors while offering a money-making bonanza to a variety of wealthy political patrons. And it passed the House this month with an overwhelming majority.

Bills like this one don't just write themselves. Washington insiders know that many of them are drafted by industry lobbyists, then delivered to compliant legislators to be submitted and passed as "bipartisan" solutions.

But figuring out who's behind the "JOBS" Bill is a challenge. It's like one of those Agatha Christie mysteries that takes place on a wealthy estate — which is appropriate, given the average personal wealth of a Washington politician — where everybody in the story is a suspect.

Motive

There has been a lot of reporting on the bill's contents, which are currently being debated on the Senate floor, so we'll stick to the highlights: It allows startups to advertise for private-citizen investors (sometimes called "crowdfunding"), so a lot of people could be suckered into unwise investments with their own savings; it makes it easier for banks and bank holding companies to play in the investment world again, effectively undoing anything resembling the Volcker rule for these investments; it gives a tax break to millions of "small businesses," which in its definition would include multimillionaire financial advisors, attorneys, plastic surgeons and the like, none of whom would create additional jobs; it allows companies to conceal key facts, such as the amount they pay their own executives; and it eases accounting and other regulatory requirements for so-called "emerging growth companies," giving them far greater license to bilk and deceive those "crowdfunders." (Crowdfunding is a good idea if done properly, but that's not the real goal of this bill.)

Oh, and those "emerging growth companies" could generate as much as a billion dollars per year and still be considered "startups." The economic data's clear on that point: Companies of this size don't generate jobs; smaller ones do.

Opportunity

It's a good thing your humble correspondent has worked on Wall Street. Otherwise it would be possible to believe that the one-billion-dollar limit, although it's ridiculously high, actually means something.

In real life, that sort of thing's easy to get around. When your massive corporation approaches the one-billion-dollar mark — even after your high-priced lawyers and accountants have used all their tricks to lower its reportable income — then all you have to do is split the company into two new ones. That way you get to continue evading all the accounting rules — and you can raise even more money from the suckers!

(An amendment's being offered that would moderate some of the bill's more egregious provisions, and is currently being debated, along with the House version of the bill, on the Senate floor.)

Continue reading »

Harry Reid better get his ass in gear and change the Senate filibuster rules, pronto. Because as long as we have a president who brings Bipartisanship, his rubber duckie, to a gunfight, this isn't going to change:

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans intend to block action on virtually all Democratic-backed legislation unrelated to tax cuts and government spending in the current postelection session of Congress, officials said Tuesday, adding that the leadership has quietly collected signatures on a letter pledging to carry out the strategy.

If carried out, it would doom Democratic-backed attempts to end the Pentagon's practice of discharging openly gay members of the military service and give legal status to young illegal immigrants who join the military or attend college.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has made both measures a priority as Democrats attempt to enact legislation long sought by groups that supported them in the recent midterm elections.

A nuclear arms treaty with Russia that President Barack Obama wants ratified would not be affected, since any debate would take place under different rules than those that apply to legislation. Even so, its passage is not assured as Republicans are seeking concessions from the White House.

Officials who disclosed the new Republican maneuver did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss it.

It was not known how many of the Senate's 42 Republicans had signed the draft letter, which the leadership intends to make public quickly.

{{Facepalm}}

In a move as predictable as Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, Democrats are using Social Security scare tactics to gain ground before the November election. President Barack Obama is not only tolerating this classic old politics maneuver by his party — he is leading the charge.

Amid a flurry of Democratic Party news releases and press conferences warning voters that Republicans are targeting Social Security for destruction, the President devoted his radio and Internet address last week to commemorating the 75th anniversary of the signing of the law that created the program. He cautioned that "some Republican leaders in Congress don't seem to have learned any lessons" from the past and are "pushing to make privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda if they win a majority in Congress." This familiar refrain might indeed help the Democrats limit their midterm losses, but Obama's involvement shows that on this issue he is putting party before bipartisanship and that he sometimes can be tone-deaf to the human element required to change Washington's acid culture.

From Suburban Guerrilla:

PUSHING BACK

Mark Kleiman's got it right:

What should we do about it? Why, we should make them pay.

The contemporary Republican Party has demonstrated a complete lack of scruples and no sense of limits in either taking power or using power. (The current "purge" -- their word, not mine -- of the Directorate of Operations at the CIA to rid it of those not personally loyal to GWB is just the latest example.)

If they keep playing football and we keep playing croquet, guess who's going to keep winning?

Pelosi and Reid, and the rest of us, need to take a page from the Republican playbook of 1993-2000. No surrender, no compromise, no bipartisanship, no civility, no reaching out to Republican officeholders (as opposed to detachable Republican voters): nothing but scorched earth from here to victory.

No, it won't be pretty. But continuing to be ruled by these thugs is worse.

There is a prison in Texas where 15.7% of the inmates were raped in the preceding year alone. Think about that for a second. One in six inmates were raped either by other inmates or those charged with guarding them -- which in that prison alone means there were 470 victims of sexual violence in a 12-month period. In any country that likes to think of itself as a beacon of freedom, this is outrageous and must be stopped.

While the percentage is not quite as significant at other prisons around the country, it is still disgracefully high, especially for those who are violated in the most dehumanizing way possible. This includes over 100,000 men, women and yes -- CHILDREN -- a fact that should be every bit as shocking, embarrassing and downright sickening as those photos from Abu Ghraib.

Well, now seems like the perfect time to do something about this. It is currently Sexual Assault Awareness month, and we are approaching the end of a deadline (June 2010) for the Attorney General to act on recommendations mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), passed in 2003. You want bipartisanship in Washington? I give you a bill that was unanimously passed, co-sponsored by Sens. Teddy Kennedy and Jeff Sessions, and signed into law by George W. Bush. Its standards were created by a bipartisan federal commission upon consultation with corrections officials, criminal justice experts, advocates and prison-rape survivors.

So what can you do to make sure the Obama Administration enacts these common-sense solutions, such as weeding out known predators, ensuring the especially vulnerable receive additional monitoring and increasing the overall transparency of our corrections system by providing independent audits of our prisons? You can quite literally make your voice heard.

How? By adding your public comment to the rising tide of those who realize that whether your issue is improving public health, creating a more just and moral society or saving taxpayer money (think litigation), ensuring Attorney General Holder codifies the federal regulations mandated by the PREA, forthwith, should be a top priority.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that "In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." In the era of interactive media, you needn't be part of the elite to make your voice heard. Every one of us has a weapon in our very own progressive arsenal, our ability to raise our voices quite publicly. So speak up, and become a part of a campaign to further ensure we live in the America we want and deserve.

**I am proud to be a media consultant for Just Detention International

Charlie Brown, will you never learn? You really thought Democrats were actually standing up to the Republicans on financial reform, huh? From Huffington Post:

Threatened with the prospect of having to spend the entire night sleeping on a cot inside the white sepulchre known as the United States Capitol, Senate Republicans have apparently assented to allowing a debate on the financial regulatory reform bill. Victory for Main Street! Unless, of course, Senate Democrats decided to back down on a strong(ish) bill so that the seeds of bipartisanship could be sown. In which case: Victory for David Broder!

No one exactly knows what is happening [C&L note: The Washington Post now confirms the deal], buthere's what the New York Times is reporting:

Republicans insisted that they had won some crucial concessions from Democrats, including the elimination of a proposed $50 billion fund that would be paid for by big financial companies and would be used to help pay for putting failed banks out of business.

The Obama administration also had expressed opposition to the fund, out of concern that it would complicate efforts to deal with more costly failures of financial companies. And the Democrats already had expressed a willingness to remove the fund from the bill.

Oh, well, that's just great! You know, it seems like only a week ago, Republicans were calling that provision the "permanent bailout fund" because that was the precise lie that Frank Luntz coached them to tell, over and over again. Incensed Democrats complained about this falsehood, over and over again, and actually did pretty well in getting the media on their side. But now, it's just one more thing that nobody really liked anyway, whatever -- hope you enjoyed the Kabuki theater.

Of course, we now have the benefit of viewing Senator Christopher Dodd's FinReg bill alongside the one put forth by the GOP, and can appreciate the ways in which they parted company. (TheWashington Independent's Annie Lowrey has a great comparative analysis of which you can avail yourself.)

Significantly, the two proposals aren't exactly worlds apart. But one way in which they part company dramatically is in the area of consumer protection. Per Matt Yglesias:

The ugly part of the bill is what it does to consumer protection. On the one hand, it seemingly weakens the independence of the consumer regulator. On the other hand, it has the consumer regulator preempt any and all state regulations. This is a helpful reminder that nobody on the right actually gives a damn about federalism except as a tool to advance conservative substantive policy--federal preemption of strong state regulation is always welcome.

Oh please, please, Sen. Graham. If we're really, really good, and do everything exactly the way you want, will you finally let us win one?

What planet do they live on? They're so good at the cognitive dissonance, they can't even tell when they sound like clowns. Gee, I wonder what a Congress where they were less cooperative would look like - Dresden?

At the same time, passing it has its risks too. While a bill-signing ceremony in the Rose Garden would provide at least a short-term boost to a beleaguered president, Republicans have made clear that the legislative procedure Democrats are using to avoid another filibuster would so anger them that they would not cooperate on other major initiatives this year.

“If they jam through health care,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, then Democrats will have “poisoned the well” on other issues. He was interviewed Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

An immigration proposal he has been working on with Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, would likely fall victim to the worsened environment, he said.

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While speaking today at the House Republicans' retreat in Baltimore, President Obama explained something to his questioners I wasn't sure he actually understood until now: That he wasn't going to accept Republican bills or amendments that simply didn't work, just so he could claim bipartisanship.

Whew! It's about time.

He also said that he had, in fact, integrated many Republican ideas in the healthcare bill, and proceeded to list them. In fact, he did a great job. He was calm, engaging and evenhanded. And I don't even care if no Republican votes will change as a result - the rest of America saw it, live on TV and then on the news all night.

He was truly excellent.

And in perhaps his best moment, he called Republicans out on blaming him for the deficit:

THE PRESIDENT: Jeb, with all due respect, I've just got to take this last question as an example of how it's very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we're going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign.

Now, look, let's talk about the budget once again, because I'll go through it with you line by line. The fact of the matter is, is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. -- $1.3 [trillion.] So when you say that suddenly I've got a monthly budget that is higher than the -- a monthly deficit that's higher than the annual deficit left by the Republicans, that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true.

And what is true is that we came in already with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. What is true is we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade -- had nothing to do with anything that we had done. It had to do with the fact that in 2000 when there was a budget surplus of $200 billion, you had a Republican administration and a Republican Congress, and we had two tax cuts that weren't paid for.

You had a prescription drug plan -- the biggest entitlement plan, by the way, in several decades -- that was passed without it being paid for. You had two wars that were done through supplementals. And then you had $3 trillion projected because of the lost revenue of this recession. That's $8 trillion.

Now, we increased it by a trillion dollars because of the spending that we had to make on the stimulus. I am happy to have any independent fact-checker out there take a look at your presentation versus mine in terms of the accuracy of what I just said.

We wouldn't want anyone to overdo it (and we totally support recovery and sobriety for those who are practicing such). That said, Will Durst has the best of the drinking games:

The first time Barack H. Obama mentions bipartisanship, the last person to pretend to faint has to drink three shots of beer.

This open thread is for the speech (live-stream here) and the Republican "response," which is the main reason we do the drinking game first.

And if you're a totally sober sucker for punishment, there's an opportunity to publicly fact check FOX tonight. You guys deserve a round on the house.

Speech and follow-ups open thread below....

Live Streaming video of the SOTU

Flashback via NPR:

ROBERTS: Well, it's always politically difficult for Democrats when they are dealing with an issue like terrorism. It remained the Republican's only winning issue through most of President Bush's second term, and it's a particular problem for a Democrat who hasn't served in the military.

It's her world and she lives in it. And you don't you.

Plus you better not dare take a ride into her Village.

DONALDSON: One third of that majority is on a government health program. I'm on Medicare. People who've been in the military are on a government health program. And yet the Republicans were able the make the idea that being on a government health program is terrible.

ROBERTS: Well, that's what I can't get over, is how the Democrats...

DONALDSON: Absurd.

ROBERTS: ... and the White House lost control of the message. I mean, that to me is phenomenal. After doing as well as they did in that campaign, they -- they let this public option -- nobody had ever heard of a public option. Suddenly it became the Holy Grail. You know, it's absurd. They should have just been out there day after day saying, "Thirty more million people insured, and you don't have pre-existing conditions on coverage."

Now I agree with her about screaming for the thirty million people who have no coverage and all, but poll after poll after poll shows that Americans love the idea of a public option. Even Scott Brown voters in Massachusetts love the public option, but not in Cokie's world.

Cokie also thinks that Obama should call John McCain and his crew into action and join the good fight because then he could embarrass them.

DOWD: ... he's going to have to say, "I embrace this. We went off a bit over the course of the last year, but I want to bring a bipartisan solution to the problems of America."

ROBERTS: He needs to call on them, you know, call them to action and ask them to be in it together for the country, you know, so that they look unpatriotic if they're not.

In Cokie's world, President Obama never reached out to republicans after he was sworn in.

In the third week of his transition to power, President-elect Barack Obama is working to build a cordial relationship with Republicans by seeking guidance on policy proposals, asking for advice on appointments and hoping to avoid perceptions of political arrogance given the wide margins of his victory. Obama has made calls to Republican leaders, and he dispatched Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, to meet with them on Capitol Hill.

Maybe she forgot. It happens:

For now, the Republican strategy is to praise President Obama and aim their fire at the House Democratic leadership. "It was very impressive that he came to the Congress and met with us. He was certainly very forthright," said Michigan Republican Dave Camp.

It could be that she was napping he entire month of January, 2009.

Not long after Senator John McCain returned last month from an official trip to Iraq and Pakistan, he received a phone call from President-elect Barack Obama.

{}

It was just one step in a post-election courtship that historians say has few modern parallels, beginning with a private meeting in Mr. Obama’s transition office in Chicago just two weeks after the vote. On Monday night, Mr. McCain will be the guest of honor at a black-tie dinner celebrating Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

Maybe she went to Hawaii for a vacation back then and didn't see Obama court the Queen of America, Olympia Snowe.

Or maybe, just maybe she's a blithering idiot?

Rep. Mike Pence, chair of the House Republican Conference, said Tuesday that President Obama had accepted an invitation to address GOP members of Congress at the group's retreat later this month.

"House Republicans are grateful that the President of the United States has accepted our invitation to meet with the Republican Conference later this month," Pence said in a statement released by his office. "House Republicans look forward to presenting the president with our proposals to protect our nation, create jobs, control federal spending, lower the cost of health care, achieve energy independence and strengthen families."

The House Republican Conference is slated to meet in Baltimore Jan. 28-30.

Being bipartisan and reaching out has really helped the president so far. Thanks Cokie.