Eideard

Obama speaking at fire station in Virginia
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Maybe as early as Thursday night, the Senate will take its first vote on one bite-size piece of President Obama’s jobs bill, a $35 billion measure to fund the hiring of 400,000 teachers and a smaller number of cops and firefighters. It will fail. As usual not a single Republican will vote for it, and since a majority in the Senate is now not 51 but 60 because the Republicans filibuster nearly everything, it will fall well short of passage…

The basic facts are these. The public supports this bill. Senate Democratic sources say that of all the individual pieces of the larger jobs bill, this one polled the best by far. Better than payroll tax cuts. That’s why they decided to go with it first. The funding mechanism is also highly popular. It is a 0.5 percent (don’t miss that decimal point!) surtax on dollars earned above $1 million—so, for example, a person whose salary is $1.2 million would pay the extra 0.5 percent only on those dollars above $1 million, for a whopping tax increase of $1,000. I have not seen polling on this specific amount of tax, but surveys constantly show that the generic “millionaire’s tax” wins broad support. Just yesterday, National Journal put it at 68 percent, including 90 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents…

In an earlier time, in normal times, when legislators used to behave the way legislators are supposed to behave, the minority’s leaders would have brought the price tag down, made the majority and the White House agree to something they wanted—peeling back one of those EPA regulations the Republicans hate—and we’d have had a deal…the minority would have actually paid a bit of attention to those polls showing the American people backed this.

Of course, Republicans can’t say that they’ll oppose Obama on everything, but they don’t have to. People get it. It seeps out of them, like oil from a polluted stream.

It’s difficult to attempt politeness describing what passes for Republican ideology, nowadays. I frequently discuss politics [and economics, technology, education] with one of my kinfolk who is a former Republican. That is, a former member of the Republican Party. After 50 years of commitment to traditional American conservatism – the whole range from environmental conservation to fiscal soundness with a healthy taste of what Bush and Cheney would have characterized as isolationism – he left that party. He doesn’t ask me to be polite – as long as I recognize the difference between conservatism and populist hypocrites. That’s good enough for me.

Watching the effete prancing in the worst political minuet played to patriot tunes since George Wallace tried to lead the White Citizens Councils into Congress and the White House – how could anyone who hasn’t lost his mind defend these deliberate attempts to sabotage the American economy, the American people?

UPDATE: Democrats Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas voted against the administration proposal last night, as did independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. No Republican supported the measure.

Three especially worthless politicians + the predictable in-your-pants vote for the wealthiest 1% of America.

I think he’d also rather be out of the spotlight more often
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner doesn’t like the fact that he’s so often associated with being a creature of Wall Street when nearly his whole career has been in public service.

In an interview on CNN’s “GPS” program on Sunday, Geithner responded sharply when asked how he felt about being portrayed as “somehow in bed with Wall Street firms” while he spearheads the Obama administration’s financial reform efforts.

“It is part of a narrative that hardened, which is that people came to view the judgments we were making through the prism of a myth,” Geithner said, adding it was untrue that he had a background that left him beholden to industry.

“So I think it’s actually very damaging,” he said. “It’s completely false, of course, and it, you know, should have been corrected a long time ago…”

Geithner was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank before being nominated by President Barack Obama to head Treasury and that is about as close as he came to Wall Street.

He joked that he has never had “a real job” in the private sector.

“You know, basically, almost right out of graduate school, I came and worked as a very junior public servant at the Treasury, and spent my entire professional life since in some form of, you know, policy job,” Geithner said.

Most Americans have little or no understanding of the general role of the Federal Reserve. But, then, most Americans have little or no understanding of history and politics, either.

I’ve been as aware – all my life – of how unproductive a task it is to explain to the public at large the realities of history, nature, science, economics, etc..