Republicans – Page 2

Janet Yellen closer to becoming Fed chair

Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen moved closer on Thursday to becoming the first woman to lead the U.S. central bank after a Senate committee approved her nomination and sent it to the full Senate for a final vote.

If confirmed, as is widely expected, Yellen would replace Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke when his term expires on January 31 and become the most powerful woman in world finance.

The vote was 14-8. Three Republicans backed her appointment and one Democrat voted no.

A Democratic leadership aide said the aim was to hold a confirmation vote in the full Senate in December.

Nominated by President Barack Obama, Yellen is viewed as a monetary policy dove more concerned about the costs to society of high unemployment than about the risk aggressive actions to lower it will ignite future inflation or fuel asset bubbles.

She will preside over a central bank that has taken dramatic and unconventional steps to spur economic growth, and which is now wrestling with a decision on when to scale back a bond-buying program that has sought to drive down long-term market interest rates.

The Fed has held benchmark U.S. interest rates near zero since late 2008 and has quadrupled the size of its balance sheet to $3.9 trillion through three massive asset purchase campaigns. It is currently buying $85 billion in bonds a month.

Both Yellen and Bernanke have emphasized in recent days that the Fed will keep interest rates low for some time even after it winds down its asset purchases, remarks that have bolstered expectations of policy continuity at the central bank.

Friends and foes

Minutes of the Fed’s October meeting released on Wednesday showed policymakers were debating how best to enhance their forward guidance on when to expect rates to rise to help temper any economically disruptive moves in financial markets once the central bank starts tapering its bond buying.

The Fed has said it would not raise rates before the U.S. jobless rate falls to 6.5 percent, as long as inflation looked set to stay below 2.5 percent. Unemployment stood at 7.3 percent in October.

When Bernanke first broached the possibility of a near-term reduction in the asset purchases in May and June, he sparked a bout of global financial market turmoil that sent bond yields soaring and hit emerging markets hard.

The Fed’s aggressive actions have drawn fire from Republican lawmakers worried about the risk of inflation and asset bubbles. Many also complain the central bank has abetted big spending by the Obama administration by snapping up the bulk of new Treasury debt issuance.

“The long-term costs of these policies are unclear and frankly worrisome,” Senator Michael Crapo, the top Republican on the banking panel, said before voting ‘no.’

Despite those concerns, Yellen is expected to handily win confirmation when the full Senate considers her nomination.

Democrats control 55 of the 100 votes in the Senate, which means she would need the backing of only a handful of Republicans to secure the 60 votes necessary to clear any procedural hurdles that might be thrown in her path.

She looks well on the way to reaching that threshold.

Yellen received support from three Republicans on the committee: Bob Corker of Tennessee, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Mark Kirk of Illinois.

In addition, Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have also indicated they are inclined to back her.

The Democrat who voted against her in committee was Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

(Reporting by Alister Bull and Margaret Chadbourn; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Andrea Ricci) – Reuters

Debt-ceiling hike denier and proud

by Ilana Mercer

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The government “not paying for all sorts of things” is how Tom Foreman messily defined a default on the debt-ceiling for the Chicken Littles of his news network. In one of many doomandgloom debt-ceiling segments for state broadcaster CNN, Foreman forewarned that a default on the country’s debt “would not be just about D.C., but it could be about YOU.”

In the same phillipic, Foreman carelessly conflated a debt default with a failure to raise the debt ceiling before its Oct. 17th deadline. But then President Pain has been setting the tone for the media, having accused Republicans, in his “Oct. 8 news conference on the shutdown and debt limit,” “of refusing to “meet our country’s commitments, pay our bills,” and of generally precipitating an “economic shutdown.”

The notion, however, that not raising the government’s credit limit must necessarily result in a default on the debt is untrue.

The government takes in approximately $250 billion a month in revenue. Servicing the national debt costs about $30 billion a month. Three trillion dollars is what the federal government expects to loot in the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, 2013 and will end on Sept. 30, 2014.

On reflection, the U.S. Treasury collects enough to pay down the interest on the debt as well as a portion of the principal.

Claiming that the president is powerless to prioritize won’t wash either. “There is no constitutional feature that says the president cannot allocate revenues,” David Stockman told Lou Dobbs. Paraphrased, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan said this: Unless President Obama orders it, there will be no default on the government debt, because Obama has the power to prioritize and allocate the revenue coming in. Oct. 17 is a phony date, designed to intimidate Republicans—and anyone trying to stand against a massive increase in the “public debt.” The Beltway is silent about the ability of the president to honor the country’s debt, because of an opposition to entitlement reform.

Not to be outdone, the president has further asserted that “… raising the debt ceiling … does not add a dime to our debt.” (I confess to being impressed with this bit of logic, coming as it does from a man whose reasoning skills are hardly robust.)

Too true.”Technically, having the credit limit increased on a credit card does not force you to spend beyond your means and end up with a higher balance on the credit card,” averred Professor Jeffrey Dorfman of the University of Georgia. “However, it makes it much more likely.”

Increasing the credit limit on the deadbeat U.S. government’s credit card—it owes 17 trillion gigabucks and counting—guarantees more spending.

The distinction between the country’s “debt obligations” to bondholders and its “expenditures”—what Foreman called “all sorts of things”—seems to befuddle the president. Said Obama: “… we’ve got a lot of other obligations, not just people who pay Treasury bills. We’ve got … senior citizens who are counting on their Social Security check … We have veterans …farmers who are waiting for loans.”

And there are the promises made under the Medicare and Medicaid programs. But these are promises, not debts. Spending programs are not to be equated with debt.

David Henderson of the Library of Economics and Liberty’s EconLog made quick work of this fallacy: The president “is effectively saying that if the government wants to spend x and has only enough money to spend 0.67x, then not spending on the other 0.33x is a failure to keep an obligation. In a political sense, that might be: the government has made a lot of spending promises to a lot of people. But in an economic sense, it’s not.”

What this president has excoriated as a Republican demand for ransom is entirely reasonable. It is not a first for one party to use a government shut-down or the debt limit to get a policy concession, added the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards during a Fox-Business broadcast. President Obama and the Democrats excluded Republicans from the Obamacare negotiations. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act got no Republican votes in both Houses. Unilateral decisions on Obamacare made by Obama have been the order of the day. Using the levers available to them to get changes in a rotten law is hardly unusual or unreasonable on the part of the Republicans.

How nice it would have been had Republicans stood firm; had they refused to raise the debt ceiling—and horrors!—forced the government to balance its budget. Alas, they’ve already been shoehorned into “exploring … a short-term increase in [said] ceiling.” The forces arrayed against the GOP are formidable. There are just too many Americans grubbing for free stuff and a preponderance of Republicans eager to parcel it out in exchange for power.

Considering the U.S. government’s set-in stone spending, the real phony construct is the debt-ceiling itself. In the words of economist and philosopher Anthony de Jasay, placing a ceiling on the federal debt is “a measure whose only effect is to oblige the Congress to raise the debt ceiling every time the rising debt catches up with it.”

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In Syria (and all else), it’s ‘Us’ against ‘Them’

by Ilana Mercer

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The “Us” of this column’s title needs no explaining. The “Them,” however, does. We the American people are up against an entity far more sinister than the traditional, inchoate enemy – terrorism – around which we are instructed to unite in purpose.

The debate over whether to strafe Syria or to stay out of that country pits us against the military-congressional-industrial complex, whose interests run counter to ours.

According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, “Nearly six in 10 [of ‘us’] oppose missile strikes in light of the U.S. government’s determination that Syria used chemical weapons against its own people. Democrats and Republicans alike oppose strikes by double digit margins, and there is deep opposition among every political and demographic group in the survey. Political independents are among the most clearly opposed, with 66 percent saying they are against military action.”

Yet at the behest of Mr. Obama, who had drawn that red line in the sand – ran his mouth off and needed to save presidential face – Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey convened on Capitol Hill to argue against the wishes of Americans and for a “strategic” strike on Syria, a country that poses no imminent danger to “us.”

Offering near-meaningless opposition to the power of the president were our representatives in both Houses – Houses that, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, were “designed as a control for the people,” but have become a control “upon the people.” The latter failed to speak on behalf of the Great Unwashed – which is how they look upon us – delivering self-aggrandizing disquisitions instead.

How seriously do these dangerous war-gamers take “us”?

Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican from Wisconsin, who, so far, has done the right thing in voting against the lobbing of Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria, in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, nevertheless told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that if his constituents came out against the strike, he would vote his conscience and merely consider their wishes.

How considerate of him! You elect a representative believing he’s aligned with certain principles, only to discover that so vast are the powers he’s been granted, that you cannot hope to sway him once he arrives on Mount Olympus. Johnson’s attitude also encapsulates the theatre of the absurd alluded to by Sen. Rand Paul, whereby, after the puppets in the Houses get to say their piece, the presidential veto puts paid to all delusions of a democratic decision-making process.

Prominent among a new breed of military man turned lawmaker to stalk the people’s House is Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger. A “veteran of the military” who still serves as a military pilot in the National Guard is how Kinzinger bills himself. War weary though he purports to be, Kinzinger is not. The verbally flatulent representative from Illinois loved it when his ilk flew sorties over the Old Stable Iraq and seeks a repeat performance over Syria. He appears to see no limits to the role the U.S. should play in rolling back evil around the world, out of “the goodness of our heart.” Yes, the constitutional principle Rep. Kinzinger invokes to justify war against the wishes and interests of the American people is “The Goodness of Our Heart” Clause.

But then, a “Global Force for Good” is how the Navy promises to fulfill “The Goodness of Our Heart” Clause of the U.S. Constitution, on its frightful, promotional website. You see, members of the U.S. military do not regard themselves as defenders of the realm – unless by “realm” one means empire. They’ve been brainwashed to be foot soldiers for the federal government, whenever, wherever.

Imagine what America’s Founding Fathers would think of a military that straddles the planet, having assumed the unauthorized role of a “global force for good.” Those sages opposed the idea of a standing army. They understood that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”

The magnificent Robert E. Lee, on the other hand, had it right. To this American hero, local was beautiful. Gen. Lee saw himself as a Virginian first. Rep. Kinzinger is a Syrian first.

Baseless too is the idea that someone who’s seen war will be especially judicious in sending others to war. John McCain had suffered in war and has not stopped advocating for it ever since. John Kerry voted to go into Iraq. Ditto Chuck Hagel. Both are veterans. Both are itching to “send a message” to Syria, despite Kerry’s earlier admission, in his “remarks on the alleged Syria chemical attack,” that Ban Ki-moon and assorted sources were clueless as to who was doing what in Syria.

“There is no clear indication that there is an imminent threat to the United States from Syria,” stressed Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan, pointing out that no other signatory to the convention against the use of chemical weapons has joined the U.S. in banging the tom-tom for war.

Indeed, a refrain repeated during this week’s hearing was that Assad’s alleged chemical-weapon use posed a threat to our troops. Only if they continue globetrotting!

What Duncan said next is especially poignant. Unlike Sen. Johnson, Duncan had consulted his constituents in South Carolina. Of the hundreds of emails his office had received, not one was in support of Uncle Sam killing more Syrians just because the factions in that country are killing one another. To a letter, Duncan’s South Carolinian bosses, down to the eighth-graders among them, told Duncan, “No! Don’t get involved in the civil war in Syria.”

Three minutes into his address to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s hearing on Syria, Rep. Duncan made another pivotal point: An administration so eager to mire the U.S. in Syria had refused to galvanize the same resources to rescue four brave Americans who fought for their lives in Benghazi.

And here’s the rub. Here’s what American patriots must understand. The “estimable” men arguing for war in both Houses and before them are not on the people’s side. Never will be. For they do not accept that a just government’s duty is to its own citizens first.

Assuming for the sake of argument that lobbing long-range, air-to-surface missiles at Syria will enhance Syrian liberties – the Deciders stateside do not accept that distinguish we must between the right of the people the world over to be free and our obligation to free them.

We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because the ostensible upholding of the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans – our lives, our liberties and our livelihoods.

By this imperative, Kerry, Hagel, Dempsey, Kinzinger, the senior Republican flake from Arizona, the junior Jeff Flake from the same state, will never abide. This is why it is “us” against “them” on Syria and all else.

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Obama ‘absolutely certain’ immigration bill would pass

President Barack Obama says he is “absolutely certain” that the Senate’s comprehensive immigration bill would pass the House if majority Republicans brought it up for a vote. But Republicans say they’ll bring up a series of narrow bills instead.

Speaking Friday at the White House, Obama said he would like to see the House act on the Senate bill in September, as soon as they return from summer recess. He urged the House to put forward a bill that could pass, even if does not match the Senate bill. The versions could be reconciled later. Obama says no bill would solve the nation’s immigration problem 100 percent.

The Senate-passed bill would include billions for border security and a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. – Breitbart

Americans against Congress: Over 80% dissaprove

Record-breaking numbers of Americans have lost support for Congress, according to a survey. Eighty-three per cent of respondents said they disapprove of the job its doing, while 57 per cent said they would replace every member of Congress if they could.

The poll (link to poll), conducted jointly by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, has illustrated new heights of vehement public distaste for the actions of the US government.

“There is a palpable unhappiness with Washington,” Republican pollster Peter D. Hart said upon learning the poll’s results. His Democratic counterpart concurred that “now is the summer of our discontent.”

At the same time, President Barack Obama has seen his approval rating slump to 45 per cent – down from 48 per cent last month. This marks his lowest rating since August 2011, when nearly every US politician suffered a blow on account of the debt-ceiling crisis, when Obama became embroiled in a heated debate with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress.

The reasons cited for the lack of support for Congress included the government ignoring the middle-class, gridlock, the inability for lawmakers to produce any tangible results, and President Obama’s policies and leadership in general.

However, these reasons invariably fall into different camps, with Republicans and Democrats citing different primary reasons. Democrats and independents are irritated with congressional gridlock and governmental inactivity, while Republicans are anti-Obama.

The poll used a cross section of 1,000 adults – including 300 cell phone only respondents – and was conducted between July 17-21.

Similar polls surrounding Obama’s popularity, conducted in recent weeks, seem to corroborate the results. A Gallup report released Monday revealed that Obama averaged a 47.9 per cent approval rating over the course of the past three months. A McClatchy-Marist national survey placed Obama’s overall approval rating closer to 41 per cent.- RT

‘Libertarians are dangerous’

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Thursday offered a clear broadside against Republicans drifting toward a more libertarian view of foreign policy, lumping Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in with them and suggesting they explain their position to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The House earlier this week narrowly voted against a reduction in funding for the National Security Agency, as libertarian-leaning members from both sides joined together to vote for the amendment.

“As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought,” Christie said.

Asked whether he includes Paul — a fellow potential 2016 presidential candidate — in his criticism, Christie didn’t back down.

“You can name any one of them that’s engaged in this,” he said. “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. … I’m very nervous about the direction this is moving in.”

Christie acknowledged that there will always be mistakes when it comes to national security and protecting privacy, but said Americans need to stay focused on what’s at stake.

He dismissed some of the current privacy/national security debates as “esoteric.”

“I think what we as a country have to decide is: Do we have amnesia? Because I don’t,” he said. “And I remember what we felt like on Sept. 12, 2001.”

Christie also praised the national security strategies of both President Obama and George W. Bush.

“I want to say that I think both the way President Bush conducted himself and the way President Obama has conducted himself in the main on those types of decisions hasn’t been different because they were right and because we haven’t had another one of those attacks that cost thousands and thousands of lives,” Christie said.

Christie appeared alongside Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R). The four GOP governors appeared side-by-side at a session hosted by the nonpartisan Aspen Institute.

The four of them are all considered among the GOP’s top potential presidential candidates in 2016, with each of them ranking on The Fix’s most recent list of the top 10 likeliest nominees.

The Republican Governors Association was holding its summer meeting in the mountainous resort town.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R), who was slated to appear, had to stay in his home state with the state legislature moving on legislation — including new abortion restrictions. – Washington Post

Armed revolution 44% of Republicans say

Nearly half of Republican voters beileve that armed revolution may soon be coming to the United States, a new poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University has found.

Think of it as an alternate definition for the term “gun control.”

Nearly half of all Republicans surveyed said they believed that “an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years,” a new poll

While 44% of registered Republican voters indicated that they believed armed rebellion would soon be a reality in the U.S., just 18% of Democrats agreed. As for Independent voters, 27% indicated that guns would soon be used to settle the country’s political problems.

The partisan gap on the question of whether armed revolution will soon play a role in America’s political history mirrors the differences in opinion on gun control. While 50% of those surveyed said that new gun control legislation was necessary to protect the public, just 24% of Republicans said new laws were needed. A whopping 73% of Democrats favored new legislation, the survey found.

“If there was a bipartisan moment after Sandy Hook to pass gun control legislation, it’s past,” Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson, said in a press release. “Partisan views have strongly re-asserted themselves, and there’s no sign that they’ll get any weaker.”

Conspiracy theorists would also seem to have partisan leanings, according to the poll. Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement: “Some people are hiding the truth about the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in order to advance a political agenda,” 45% of Republicans said they either agreed or weren’t sure, compared with 29% of Democrats.

“The differences in views of gun legislation are really a function of differences in what people believe guns are for,” Cassino said. “If you truly believe an armed revolution is possible in the near future, you need weapons and you’re going to be wary about government efforts to take them away.” – Daily News

Did Romney kill his own campaign?

As Republicans try to explain their Election Day losses in terms of policy, tactics, and strategy, one factor is emerging as the essential difference between the Obama and Romney campaigns on November 6: the absolute failure of Romney’s get-out-the-vote effort, which underperformed even John McCain’s lackluster 2008 turnout. One culprit appears to be “Orca,” the Romney’s massive technology effort, which failed completely.

A source within the Romney campaign agreed to share his reflections on Project Orca with Breitbart News:

It’s easy to point fingers after a loss and I wouldn’t normally do it, but consider what happened.

Project Orca was supposed to enable poll watchers to record voter names on their smartphones, by listening for names as voters checked in. This would give the campaign real-time turnout data, so they could redirect GOTV resources throughout the day where it was most needed. They recruited 37,000 swing state volunteers for this.

I worked on the Colorado team, and we were called by hundreds (or more) volunteers who couldn’t use the app or the backup phone system. The usernames and passwords were wrong, but the reset password tool didn’t work, and we couldn’t change phone PINs. We were told the problems were limited and asked to project confidence, have people use pencil and paper, and try to submit again later.

Then at 6PM they admitted they had issued the wrong PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, and reissued new PINs (which also didn’t work). Meanwhile, counties where we had hundreds of volunteers, such as Denver Colorado, showed zero volunteers in the system all day, but we weren’t allowed to add them. In one area, the head of the Republican Party plus 10 volunteers were all locked out. The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. Many of the poll watchers I spoke with were very discouraged. Many members of our phone bank got up and left.

I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN’s. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red.

Regardless of the specific difficulties, this idea would only help if executed extremely well. Otherwise, those 37,000 swing state volunteers should have been working on GOTV…

Somebody messaged me privately after my email and told me that North Carolina had the same problems — every pin was wrong and not fixed until 6PM — and was also told it was localized to North Carolina.

The problems with Orca appear to have been nationwide, and predated Election Day itself. At Ace of Spades, John Ekdahl reported his frustrations as a volunteer in the field:

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of “rah-rahs” and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like “Has this been stress tested?”, “Is there redundancy in place?” and “What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?”, among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

Ekdahl describes how volunteers were expected to print their own materials, and were mistakenly not told to bring their poll watching credentials to polling places. Attempts to communicate with the Romney campaign to ask for assistance were unsuccessful:

By 2PM, I had completely given up. I finally got ahold of someone at around 1PM and I never heard back. From what I understand, the entire system crashed at around 4PM. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I decided to wait for my wife to get home from work to vote, which meant going very late (around 6:15PM). Here’s the kicker, I never got a call to go out and vote. So, who the hell knows if that end of it was working either.

Likewise, Twitchy recorded widespread real-time complaints and criticisms on Twitter by Project Orca volunteers. At one point during Election Day, the system had malfunctioned so badly that desperate volunteers wondered if the program had been hacked.

Romney volunteers in Virginia confirmed that the campaign had relied entirely on Project Orca to turn out the vote in key areas such as Roanoke, where Romney and Ryan had made appearances. Volunteers who had driven to Virginia from safely-Republican Tennessee were shocked at the disorganization they encountered.

While the Romney campaign waited for Orca to function as planned, the Obama campaign had placed signs outside every one of the city’s thirty-three polling places, and was fully staffed with two volunteers outside each polling place, and a strike list volunteer inside, all day long from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. The best that the short-handed Tennessee volunteers could manage was 40% coverage of polling places; the local GOP, they said, had relied entirely on the campaign’s centralized Orca system in Boston to turn out the local vote.

Ekdahl concludes his account by hoping that the failures of Orca did cost Romney the election:

We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity’s sake.

In fact, Orca diverted scarce resources that would have been better used physically moving voters to polling places. By a rough calculation, Romney lost the election by falling 500,000 to 700,000 votes short in key swing states. If each of the 37,000 volunteers that had been devoted to Orca had instead brought 20 voters to the polls in those states over the course of the day, Romney would have won the election.

Before the election, there was much fear-mongering on the Democratic side about the Republicans’ supposed plans to suppress turnout among Obama voters. After the election, GOP strategist Karl Rove accused the Obama campaign of “suppressing the vote” by running a negative campaign against Romney that kept voters at home.

The truth is much worse. There was, in fact, massive suppression of the Republican vote–by the Romney campaign, through the diversion of nearly 40,000 volunteers to a failing computer program.

There was no Plan B; there was only confusion, and silence. Microsoft wrote the software and they tested it for months, however.

Microsoft in Washington State was very much against the Romney campaign. It wouldn’t be difficult to sabotage, said one technical advisor, a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. You could have a problem and blame the end user if you had an agenda, he said. – breitbart.com