The definition of insanity, as Albert Einstein once famously put it, is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last week in a preemptive strike against President Obama’s proposed jobs bill. He was unsheathing a now-voguish truism among right-wingers: Freshmen tea-party senator Ron Johnson also trotted out Einstein’s maxim to attack Obama’s plan, as did Georgia Republican congressman Lynn Westmoreland. And Kentucky senator Rand Paul cottoned to the phrase so much, he’s used it twice this month, to both decry Obama’s choice for a new chairman of economic advisers and to call for a no-confidence vote on Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner. House GOPers Eric Cantor and Jeb Hensarling have turned to the insanity apothegm to describe Obama’s health-care reforms and efforts to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, respectively, while Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain used it to bash Obama’s policy toward Israel.
Jared Bernstein, former Chief Economic Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, recently posted three easy to understand charts demonstrating that while the Republican Party loves to talk about how Obama’s economic policies were failures… it simply is not the case.
Here are the three charts:
Keep this in mind the next time Mitch McConnell says — as he did in reaction to Obama’s jobs plan and the prospect of fixing the crumbling bridges into Kentucky — something like this:
“I’m less enthused by the president lumping a crucial artery for goods and services in America together with a call for another stimulus and massive tax increases,” McConnell added.
And keep it in mind when the entire Republican Delegation from the State of Kentucky spews out their echo-chambered lies — as they did after the President’s jobs speech, all repeating each other — like these:
“Unfortunately, I am concerned that the president’s proposals follow the previous pattern of borrowing and spending. We have learned we cannot create a growing economy by spending more money in Washington.” – REP. BRETT GUTHRIE (KY-02)
“I remain concerned that what we’ve heard from President Obama this evening is an echo of his Administration’s unsuccessful strategy of the last few years.” – REP. HAL ROGERS (KY-05)
“At a time when we need bold leadership, the proposals outlined this evening by President Obama are disappointingly more of the same ideas he has previously offered.” – REP. ED WHITFIELD (KY-01)
“The tax, borrow and spend stimulus policies of the last several years are not working. More of the same will not work any better or more quickly than it did the last time.” – REP. GEOFFERSON DAVIS (KY-04)
“The President is proposing a nearly half-trillion-dollar stimulus – once again, following the same failed policies we saw with his last exorbitant spending spree.” – SEN. RAND PAUL
“Yet here we are, tonight, being asked by this same president to support even more government spending.” – SEN. MITCH McCONNELL
The message of these three simple graphs is itself disarmingly simple: the stimulus worked. It prevented recession from becoming depression. It just ended too soon.
And that’s why the President’s new jobs agenda is so damn important.
In his speech last Thursday, Barack Obama said this:
Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us a economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads? At a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in America?
There are private construction companies all across America just waiting to get to work. There’s a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America.
This bridge — the Brent Spence, connecting Covington and Cincinnati – is “functionally obsolete” according to the Department of Transportation and this summer large chunks of concrete began falling from the upper deck onto the lower one.
Most people would identify this as a problem.
The I-71/I-75 bridge is a key connector between Michigan, northern Ohio, Upstate New York and the Great Lakes and the industries, consumers and shippers of the American South, in particular, Florida. According to the DOT (pdf):
“The Brent Spence Bridge, which opened to traffic in 1963, was designed to carry 80,000 vehicles per day. Currently, approximately 160,000 vehicles per day use the Brent Spence Bridge and traffic volumes are projected to increase to approximately 233,000 vehicles per day in 2035.”
Sounds serious.
Except for the fact it’s Barack Obama talking about fixing it. And it might require closing tax loopholes for billion dollar corporations. And it might mean a very, very small group of very, very rich people might pay the same taxes they paid before the war and before the Bush Tax Cuts bankrupted the country.
But with those few words, Obama made the bridge a top priority for replacement and, perhaps, a subtle jab at House Speaker John Boehner of West Chester and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
“I appreciate the president highlighting this project and I trust this means that when the planning for this project is solidified this administration will prioritize it,” McConnell said Friday.
Whether it will help win their support for his jobs plan remains to be seen.
“I’m less enthused by the president lumping a crucial artery for goods and services in America together with a call for another stimulus and massive tax increases,” McConnell added.
Translation: Mitch McConnell’s going to fight Barack Obama, he’s going to fight the jobs bill, he’s going to pretend it’s a stimulus package and he’s going to pretend the last one failed. He’s going to lie, cheat and steal because, as he has made clear, Mitch McConnell’s one-and-only mission is:
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
In Mitch McConnell’s world, America can go itself. Let the bridge crumble. Let it fail. Let us fall.
As for Kentucky… who cares about Kentucky?
Certainly not Mitch McConnell. Or Rand Paul. Or Hal Rogers… or Geoff Davis, the Congressman who supposedly serves the people of Northern Kentucky most affected by this bridge. And it’s not just Davis, of course. The entire state is affected by the flow of traffic along these interstates, with I-75 in particular driving commerce and investments right through our center, with thousands and thousands of jobs depending on that continued flow of traffic.
But the state’s Republican delegation have all stated their opposition to the plan the President laid out last Thursday.
The Republicans of the Commonwealth of Kentucky would rather see the Brent Spence Bridge fail than see Barack Obama succeed.They would rather see Kentucky fail than see an America with a modern transportation infrastructure.
The Sherman Minton Bridge was closed late Friday afternoon and will remain shut down indefinitely after officials discovered cracks in the span.
Will Wingfield, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Transportation, said officials “do not have an estimate” on how long it will take to repair and reopen the bridge, which carries Interstate 64 traffic across the Ohio River.
Wingfield said the cracks were found in two steel support beams below the lower deck closer to the Kentucky side.
The bridge to Mitch McConnell’s hometown is falling apart — how long can his opposition to an investment in America stand?
Unlike the Sherman Minton Bridge, the will of Mitch McConnell and the Kentucky Republican Party doesn’t seem to be crumbling.
The closure came just a day after President Obama renewed his call for Congress to invest in infrastructure improvements to stimulate the economy and address the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads, as studies have shown the nation needs $2 trillion in investment just to bring its infrastructure up to date. McConnell criticized Obama’s plan, saying it was “a re-election plan.”
But while McConnell insists that Republicans “agree that we must bring America’s infrastructure up to 21st century standards,” his recent record doesn’t show it. When progressives and Democrats argued that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act should be geared toward infrastructure, the GOP under McConnell’s leadership fought to focus it on tax cuts. The Senate GOP derailed a 2010 jobs plan focused largely on infrastructure investment, and if McConnell’s post-speech rhetoric is to be believed, he will be at the forefront of the Republican Party’s opposition to this plan too.
Mitch McConnell and Kentucky’s Republican Party are so dedicated to the cause of Obama’s failure that they will allow America’s failure and this state’s failure.
With the failure of these bridges, Kentucky can return to the 19th Century, cut off from manufacturing, produce, consumer goods and jobs.
The old story of Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” is just that… an old story. It’s time for a new one and Mitch McConnell (and Rand, Geoff, Ed, Hal and Brett) are writing it.
You don’t need a bridge to get to their Kentucky because, as everyone will soon know, Kentucky is nowhere.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday carried his battle to reform the military from the field to the bureaucracy, saying he has ordered commanders to reduce headquarters staff by 15 percent next year.
If, on the other hand, you took the Washington Post in those olden days before the war, you would have been met by this front page headline:
Majority Hold Bush Responsible For Dwindling Budget Surplus
By Dan Balz and Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 11, 2001; Page A01
And that article would have begun:
A majority of Americans say they are prepared to roll back President Bush’s $1.35 trillion tax cut to help deal with the shrinking federal budget surplus and say Bush more than congressional Democrats bears responsibility for a problem that has suddenly put him on the defensive, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News national survey.
The poll also offered a clear warning to Bush and Congress as they move toward dipping into the Social Security surplus to fund other programs this year and next, despite earlier promises not to do so. An overwhelming 92 percent of those surveyed said they opposed using Social Security funds for other purposes — with 81 percent saying they are strongly opposed.
Shortly after the tax legislation became law in June, a majority of Americans (52%) predicted that the tax cuts were likely to stimulate the economy, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. Yet comparable percentages said the tax cut also was likely to return the country to deficit spending (55%) and make less money available for domestic programs such as education and Social Security (53%).
The public’s belief that deficits would return was understandable, given recent history. The country had been running substantial annual deficits since the early 1980s and Americans were having trouble truly believing that their country’s balance sheet was in the black.
In March, Newsweek asked if it was “pretty safe” to rely on surplus projections – then estimated at a staggering $6 trillion over 10 years – or whether there was a “good chance” that the surplus would be a lot lower. Fewer than a quarter (22%) said it was safe to rely on budget surplus projections, while three times as many (67%) expected the surplus to be lot lower.
Reflecting the doubts about future surpluses, there was broad support across the ideological spectrum for limiting the size of the tax cuts if, as expected, the surplus projections proved too optimistic. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey in March found that 73% favored automatically scaling back the tax cuts if the surplus turned out to be much smaller than projected. Comparable percentages of liberals (76%), moderates (76%) and conservatives (71%) supported automatically scaling back the tax cuts in this circumstance.
By limiting the tax cuts to a decade, Congress ensured that the tax cut would be reviewed, though there was no provision to automatically limit the tax cuts if the nation’s fiscal situation worsened.
The public’s skepticism about future surpluses – like its prediction about the coming recession– was well founded. By fiscal year 2003, the country was already facing a $300 billion annual deficit, amid surging military expenses in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In March of this year, the CBO estimated the budget deficit at $1.5 trillion.
Despite the obvious recklessness of the Bush Tax Cuts and how they have undermined and helped to bankrupt this country, elected officials like Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell and Ben Chandler continue to support them.
So all of Kentucky’s big politicos had stuff to say about the President’s straight-up reasonable speech last night, with Rand Paul taking to his webcam and Mitch, Ed, Brett and Hal all putting out more of the same statements that just echo each other. Yarmuth said the speech was good and pushed for more.
And Ben Chandler, well, his was our favorite. Here’s an excerpt:
“…I’m pleased…”
Oh fine. Here’s what our Quiet Congressman had to say in his entirety after listening to the President of the United States of America lay out one proposal after another for 45 straight minutes:
“The best way to jumpstart our economy and solve our fiscal crisis is by putting Kentuckians back to work. That will go a long way to reducing the deficit, and I’m pleased the President’s focus is on creating jobs, strengthening our middle class and small businesses, and growing our economy.”
Something less than stirring.
A lot of pundits and experts and other people who get paid to be on teevee have said over the last couple days — when they’re not pretending to buy into the idea Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor and those other asses are actually considering doing what’s right for America — is that House Democrats are frustrated with Obama because he’s not “leading.”
This statement from Chandler is a good example of why this piece of “knowledge” is incorrect. The President is leading and on issue after issue he has led… whether it was the Bush Tax Cuts or the Dream Act or so forth.
And time and again, it is members of his own party who aren’t backing him up, who are fighting the good fight. Chandler’s statement is promising, perhaps, but will Ben Chandler fight for this bill? Will he fight with the President? Or will he shirk away and hide his head as Mitch and Hal and Boehner and everyone else chips away at what little this country still stands on?
In his speech, Barack Obama said:
I ask every American who agrees, to lift your voice: Tell the people who are gathered here tonight that you want action now. Tell Washington that doing nothing is not an option. Remind us that if we act as one nation and one people, we have it within our power to meet this challenge.
Now’s your chance. Call Ben Chandler, tell him that mild and meek support is not enough. Tell Ben you want him to fight. Tell him America needs him to fight.
I’m one of the few liberals who was happy that Obama moved his jobs speech to Thursday. It gives us more time to focus on the GOP rebuttal tonight.
I know rebuttals are supposed to come after a speech, but that implies Republicans are operating on some kind of prevailing logic, and as Michelle Bachman and the biology books in Kansas would say, “logic is just a theory, not a fact.” Whatever your political allegiances are, you have to admit that Republicans have become a little predictable. At tonight’s GOP debate, how many candidates are going to say, “Let’s at least hear what the president has to say before we attack him”? If you said “One or more” then go look in the mirror and tell your reflection that you hate it, because you are wrong. If, however, you think they’ll call Obama’s plan some version of “socialism”, “anti-Americanism”, “Kenyacare”, or “homo-nomics” then you show the sort of intuitive thinking and clear reasoning to implies you are not the desired demographic of the GOP Debate.
Does that mean that they won’t put forth a plan of their own? Of course they will. It’s not like they’re reckless hucksters trying to aggrandize their own short term political futures and divide the country at the expense of the nation’s economy. They’re ideologues.
So taxes are evil and they support the cutting of evil. Closing tax loopholes? That’s also evil. Making multi-billionaires pay a slightly higher rate? Get outta here, comrade. We’ve heard this song before. It was bullshit before, and it’s more mendacious bullshit this time. This isn’t worth complaining about. Do you get upset when Don McClean closes his concert with “American Pie”? One hit wonders play their one hit. Except there’s a twist. We’re running out of rich-person taxes to cut, and there are still no jobs.
So if it’s not the evil taxman preventing us from infinite jobs, what is it? The GOP says it’s regulations, and if we get rid of the regulators then we’ll create jobs. (For those of you keeping score at home, yes, they think laying people off will create jobs, giving the rich tax breaks will create money for the middle class, condoms lead to unwanted pregnancy, war leads to peace, and the best way to cure homosexuals is to suck the gay off them. They are adorable.) But their argument is seductive enough. After all, no one likes regulations. It’s the reason we hate going to the DMV. If we cut away the red tape then isn’t it conceivable that people will want to create businesses, and we can finally get back to work?
Friends, don’t drink that Kool-Aid. Also, don’t say, “Don’t drink that Kool Aid” because it’s a fucking annoying cliché. What’s Kool Aid ever done to people aside from give their children diabetes? (As we’re a Kentucky blog, can’t we at least change the phrase to “Don’t drink the Ale-8-One”?) I know, I know, people who use that phrase are talking about Jonestown. But that was a bunch of ultra-religious weirdos who claimed they were unique visionaries and convinced their followers that they too can see the truth if they just take a sip of a seemingly benign drink. I don’t see why the Tea Party would be obsessed with them.
But I was talking about regulations. They’ve saved your life, of course. (Well, that’s technically only true if you’ve taken medicine, been on a public road, consumed water, food, or nutrients, or been inside of a building). But the GOP makes them seem like the busywork the teacher used to give you in first grade.
It’s easy to make this feel abstract, but it recently became very real to me. I spend the bulk of the year in Baltimore, Maryland where I work. As you may have heard, the East Coast has recently undergone quite a bit of God’s wrath, including both an earthquake and a hurricane. While the disasters were happening, I was living the highlife in our beloved Kentucky Commonwealth. It didn’t sound like a missed much. My friends told stories about getting panicked, holding onto doorways, and then evacuating work. It’s not exactly the stuff of Bruce Willis movies. Within an hour, the earthquake became a joke. And why not? No one died, and the most pain we had to endure was hearing smug Californians tell us how they were better prepared than we were.
Then last week, I returned to Baltimore and found that the ceiling in my apartment had collapsed. Had I been home at the time, I very well might have been the first and only casualty of the earthquake. Technically, I don’t know if the ceiling collapsed from the quake, the hurricane, or just from being a shoddily made apartment that is rented by those of us without a ton of money. It doesn’t really make a difference; the building was substandard. And I know that because buildings in America have standards, and that’s why they didn’t collapse
This earthquake was 5.8 on the Richter scale. The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a 7.0. Granted, there’s a substantial difference between a 5.8 and a 7.0, but that doesn’t explain everything. Why is the American earthquake a joke and the Haitian earthquake a worldwide tragedy? Regulations.
Haiti is a tea party paradise (except for all the rum and French speaking). There are no regulations there to get in the way of the free market. Businesses can do what they please. Naturally, companies save themselves money by cutting costs and making unsafe buildings. Sure, they’ll call the death toll from the earthquake tragic, but it’s the hand of God. What they don’t admit is that most of these deaths were completely preventable. If your reaction to that is “If safety from disasters is a priority for people, then surely the housing market will reflect that,” then I have nothing to say to you except, “Thank you for reading my post, Senator Paul. I respect the office you hold.”
The only reason the east coast is not in rubble right now is because of strong, patriotic American regulations. So when you watch the GOP Debate tonight, and you’re doing a shot every time they say 9/11, and they’re squabbling about who loved this country more, Reagan or Jesus, stop to ask yourself: If they honestly love America, why are they trying to turn it into Haiti?
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It only costs $109 (and just $35 if you have a valid student ID).
The top item on their agenda… attacking the unconstitutional Southern Poverty Law Center because they are a “Danger to American Liberty.”
The subject of Rand’s speech is not yet disclosed and Pappy Paul will give the Sunday evening keynote.
If you aren’t familiar with the Birchers, it’s hard to know exactly where to start, except to say that the Tea Party is nothing new and neither are really simplistic views of the US Constitution. They are rippling with racism and terrified of the non-existent threat of communism and “collectivism.”
One of the founder members is Fred Koch, energy magnate and Tea Party underwriter.
And… you know what. I’m doing a bad job of explaining it. Let me hand this over to a real John Bircher now…
A week ago, Hal Rogers and his fellow Republicans were falling all over themselves trying to deny funds to the hurricane ravaged east coast or at least manufacture another fiscal crisis to force further federal cuts to the government infrastructure.
Rand Paul’s father, who is apparently is running for president though we never hear anything about that, went on the radio and said that FEMA should be disbanded and people who live in areas prone to flooding should be left to fend for themselves because, of course, they’re the one’s living there so screw them.
Yet strangely…
No such complains have been made about FEMA’s decision to bail out three Kentucky counties.
Rand Paul and his pappy are silent. Hal Rogers, on the other hand, is inserting himself into the effort, as if he hadn’t just threatened federal assistance to every other state.
The federal government has approved individual assistance funding for people whose property was damaged in flooding that hit Bell, Knox and Perry counties in June, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers announced Friday.
The decision means people can apply for money to help with home repair and other costs incurred from the flooding.
….A presidential disaster declaration covered Bell, Knox, Perry, Breathitt, Knott, Lee and Magoffin counties.
And further more, neither Hal nor Rand (nor the Governor for that matter) are complaining about President Obama’s flagrant federal insertion into the special place of our daily lives.
The University of Louisville’s share of federal funds for research and development in science and engineering grew at the fourth-fastest rate among 100 universities nationwide between 1999 and 2009, according to National Science Foundation figures to be published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Friday.
This is socialism. It is very nearly communism.
And no one is saying anything! Everyone is looking the other way.
Or, even worse, they are sanctioning this unConstitutional behavior.
Obama’s National Institutes of Health Czar was in Louisville to make the announcement. Standing silently beside him were not just UofL’s socialist fuhrer James Ramsey but also… Mitch McConnell?
Asked how his support for federal research funding squares with his calls to cut government spending, McConnell said, “The emphasis on debt reduction is going to have an impact on the federal budget across the board. And I think, particularly in the area of Congressional-directed funding, it’s going to be a minimum. That, of course, makes the role of NIH even more important.”
Where is Rand Paul? Where is the Tea Party? How can Mitch’s behavior stand unchallenged?
The Founding Father’s said nothing of funding state hospitals.
The United States Constitution does not mention a “national institutes of health.”
And further — if you’re paying attention, and the media hopes you are not — you’ll notice that’s not just one institute… it’s multiple ones!
InstituteS.
It’s like a metastasized government agency of government thugs taking our money and reallocating it… to what end?
That’s right. You’re a felon! Just by breathing not-completely clean air and drinking not-exactly safe water. Those EPA bastards have it in for you and any day now their SWAT teams are going to swoop into your house and throw you in federal prison. Any day now.
Since its creation in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency has done more harm than good. EPA regulations cost more than 5 percent of our annual gross domestic product – the equivalent of the costs of defense and homeland security combined. Since EPA regulations have expanded, unemployment in America has increased by 33 percent. This abuse of power by the implementation of regulations infringes upon our basic constitutional rights.
Starting at the beginning, Rand Paul has already argued that in fact the EPA has done more good than harm when he went on and on to Jon Stewart about how the air and water are cleaner now than they were 30 years ago (albeit, stupidly making the argument the EPA didn’t do anything).
Next, let us contemplate the notion that somehow it is the EPA that has increased unemployment.
Using Rand Paul’s exact same logic, one could also say that since All My Children went on the air in 1970 — the same year the EPA was founded — unemployment has increased 33%. Let us cancel All My Children!
Oh… oh, that’s already happening. ABC is dumping that show. Perhaps our jobs will come back now?
No. No, that doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?
SHE WON'T GO!
KentuckyElection.org
BONNIE PRINCE BILLY
