The day before Thanksgiving: Feeling thankful the Super Committee failed

Super Committee members, photo courtesy of netrightdaily.com.

Van Jones, President of rebuildthedream.com and author of the NY Times bestseller, the Green-Collar Economy, offers several good reasons we might want to be thankful tomorrow on turkey day for the Super Committee’s failure:

The big buzz on cable news this week is that the Super Committee failed when it couldn't come to a compromise on how to cut the federal budget by $1.5 trillion.

But the truth is that the American people won.

And now, we must keep on winning.

We won when Democrats on the Super Committee held their ground on the expiring Bush tax cuts on the wealthy.

Instead of focusing like a laser on job creation, conservative Republicans in Congress held our nation's finances hostage in July. To appease the hostage-takers, Congress created a closed-door committee to force through major cuts this fall.

Thankfully, enough Democrats held together on the Super Committee to stop severe cuts from going through. Many proposed to seek revenue from small tax increases for the wealthy and a tiny "Wall Street Tax" on risky stock trades. But those cries from the 99% fell on the deaf ears of conservatives on the Super Committee.

Progressives don't often battle the concentrated forces of corporations and their armies of lobbyists to a stalemate. For that reason, we can stop, reflect on a job well done, and thank the congressmen and women who stopped the worst from getting through.

Read more:

The troublesome response of the US to the recent violence in Tahrir Square

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, photo courtesy of the Daily Caller.

Any thinking person would have anticipated problems with the ascendancy of the Egyptian military to power in the aftermath of the takedown of Hosni Mubarak. 

Now that violence has erupted again in Tahrir Square, the generals appear to be reluctant to move toward a legitimate Egyptian government.

Correspondent Kristen Chick at the Christian Science Monitor reports from Cairo the troublesome response from the US to the worsening of the power struggle between the military and the protestors:

Security forces have killed at least 29 as Tahrir Square protests enter their fourth day. The US has come under attack for backing the military junta despite vows to support democracy and human rights.

The US attempt to reposition itself as a supporter of democracy and human rights in the Middle East is being undermined by a growing Egyptian perception that Washington will back Egypt's military junta unreservedly despite its increasing repressiveness.

That perception was reinforced yesterday, when a White House statement on the clashes between protesters and security forces appeared to place the blame equally on both sides for violence that has killed at least 29 protesters since Saturday.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the US was "deeply concerned" about the violence and "tragic loss of life" and called for "restraint on all sides, so that Egyptians can move forward together to forge a strong and united Egypt.”

That call for restraint on “all sides,” in the face of days of excessive use of force by police and soldiers, was met with incredulity in Cairo. Security forces have shot not only tear gas and rubber bullets, but bird shot and live ammunition at protesters throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails.

Read more:

It has come to this: the Hillary moment for 2012

Secretary Clinton attends the 2011 APEC Forum. Photo shows Clinton at the CEO Summit in Honolulu, Hawaii on Nov. 11. State Dept Image/Scott Chernis.

 

 

Would anyone at the Mile High Stadium in Denver in ’08, where the Democratic Party nominated Barack Obama against a backdrop of Greek pillars, have dreamed that 2012 might be Hillary’s moment?

The recommendation by Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen in the Wall Street Journal that Democrats replace Barack Obama with Hillary Clinton on the ticket in 2012 is startling in its bluntness:

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion. 

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president's accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president's administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy. 

Note: recall that Democratic leaders dissed Hillary in 08 for being “too polarizing.”

Read more:

Sen. Kerry boasts of the willingness of Supercommittee Democrats to cut “entitlements”

Photo from Kerry's website.

Speaking of entitlements, Sen. Kerry, why doesn’t the supercommittee follow Rep.  Giffords’ advice and cut the salaries of members of Congress?

That would likely be too hard to pass, unlike slashes to Medicare and Social Security that both Democrats and Republicans are so fond of debating these days.

Guess it makes our congressional leaders seem courageous and bipartisan to go after society’s most vulnerable.

In a post by Bryan Tau at Politico, Kerry boasts of the willingness of the Democratic members of the Supercommittee to cut “entitlements”- note how Kerry's use of this derogatory term avoids mentioning specific safety net programs that benefit seniors and other low income folks.

Tau’s post concludes:

Democrats made an unprecedented offer to cut entitlements, and Republicans refused, Kerry said.

"We are not a tax-cutting committee. We're a deficit-reduction committee," Kerry said. "Everybody out there has said to us 'Go big. Do $4 trillion.' We Democrats put a $4 trillion deal on the table and it included huge, hard, tough, horrible reductions on the sacred cows and things that we have been accused of not being willing to do. We put it out there."

Read the entire post:

Gaddafi’s son captured and held - not abused or murdered

Photo courtesy of indiavision.com

It would seem that a sufficient outcry was raised by civilized people in response to the barbaric treatment and murder of Muammar Gaddafi to shame the captors of his son into pursuing justice the other day instead of revenge. 

Reuters has the story:

Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam has been captured, scared and with just a few thousand dollars, in the Libyan desert by fighters who vowed to hold him in the mountain town of Zintan until there was a government to hand him over to.

The fighters claimed his capture as gunfire and car horns expressed jubilation across Libya at the seizure of the British-educated 39-year-old who a year ago was set for a dynastic succession to rule the oil-producing desert state.

Read more:

Gabrielle Giffords’ novel cost-cutting idea for the supercommittee

While the supercommittee continues to debate slashing Social Security and Medicare programs to get the federal deficit under control, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords initiated legislation last January that would cut the salaries of lawmakers for the first time since the Great Depression.

Politico reports:

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ aides, backed by 25 House members, have asked the supercommittee to cut lawmakers’ pay as the 12-member panel works to reach a deficit-reduction deal before its Thanksgiving deadline.

Giffords, who is recovering from an assassination attempt, first introduced legislation to slash congressional salaries in January. The Arizona Democrat has been in the news lately because her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, wrote a book about her ordeal.

In a letter to the supercommittee, the bipartisan group of lawmakers write that the cut should be made “both as a commonsense way to cut government spending and to send a powerful message to the American people that Congress should not be exept from the sacrifices it will take to balance the budget.”

Read more:

"In the pantheon of billionaires without shame..."

Bloomberg's photo courtesy of http://1stamendmentdomainrevenuerecoveryservices.us

Update: Minutes ago, Reuters reported the Occupiers are swarming through the financial district.

________________________

Robert Scheer, editor of Truthdig.com and author of “The Great American Stickup,” speaks out on NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's decision to repress the free speech rights of OWS:

In the pantheon of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street banker-turned-business-press-lord-turned-mayor, is now secure at the top. What is so offensive is that someone who abetted Wall Street greed, and benefited as much as anyone from it, has no compunction about ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" that he helped to create.

You would think that a former partner at the investment bank Solomon Brothers, which originated mortgage-backed securities, a man who then partnered with Merrill Lynch in the high-speed computerized trading that has led to so much financial manipulation, would have some sense of his own culpability. Or at least that someone whose Wall Street career left him with a net worth of $19.5 billion would grasp the deep irony of his being the instrument for smashing Occupy Wall Street, the internationally acknowledged symbol of opposition to corporate avarice.

Read more: