Evans Politics, November 25, 2009, by R. J. Shulman, also carried on Citizens for Legitimate Government, here, quoted verbatim, used with permission:
Karl Rove has been the mastermind of a new movement called the Shift of Blamers — or SOBs — who have replaced the birthers, deathers, Tenthers, and teabaggers as the most successful anti-Obama group thus far.
Satire by R. J. Shulman
NEW YORK – (PTSD News) – Karl Rove announced today on Fox News that the Republican strategy to shift the blame for all of America’s woes from anything the Republicans may have caused to Obama and the Democrats is a complete success. “Our goal as Republicans, which was so eloquently spoken by Rush Limbaugh, is not to be the party of ideas or solutions, but the party that makes Obama fail. And the best way to do that is to shift blame for everything we Republicans screwed up to the current president.”
Rove has been the mastermind of a new movement called the Shift of Blamers — or SOBs — who have replaced birthers, deathers, Tenthers, and teabaggers as the most successful anti-Obama group thus far. The SOBs are made up of prominent Republicans, Fox News, FeedomWorks, and the vast majority of talk radio.
“We needed to defeat or water down any health care reform that would cut into the profits of our friends who run the health care industry,” said Rove, “and luckily for us, the Democrats haven’t learned that lies always trump facts and that every congressman has his price.”
“Health care was just the start,” Rove said, “we’ve turned Bush’s blunder in Afghanistan into Obama’s war in which if he sends more troops in, he’s a warmonger, and if he pulls out, he’s a gay French chicken. It took Bush eight years to completely mess up the economy, but we have taken less than eight months to blame the entire mess on Obama, bank bailouts and all.”
“When it comes to women’s rights, traditionally a Democrat issue,” Rove said, “we have been able to pin the sexist label on the liberals for their harsh treatment of Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean. This is surely some of my best work since I was able to convince millions of Americans that George W. Bush should be in the White House rather than the nut house.”
“With the help of all of those SOBs, we will regain Congress and the White House in no time,” Rove concluded. “Remember, it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you shift the blame.”
Sarah Palin Shows More Stupidity with Bill O’Reilly
*Makes Ridiculous Claims and Comparisons About Her Qualifications to be President
*As Usual, when she can’t answer the question, she starts talking about something completely unrelated – her right wing talking points, which she parrots for the base.
“COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Gov. Mark Sanford is accused of breaking 37 ethics laws regarding campaign finances and travel, including using taxpayer money for high-priced airplane tickets that took him around the world and to Argentina for a rendezvous with the woman he once called his ‘soul mate.’”
“COLUMBIA, S.C. — Over the protests of Gov. Mark Sanford’s lawyers, South Carolina lawmakers on Tuesday began the preliminary steps of a process that could lead to the governor’s impeachment and removal from office.”
Rigid conservatives in the RNC want to establish a purity test for the party’s candidates. Guess what? Reagan the conservative hero would have failed most of the criteria.
The most rigidly conservative members of the Republican National Committee are circulating a proposal to establish a purity test for the party’s candidates.
If adopted, the party would withhold money from any contender who disagreed with conservative principles on more than two of 10 essential issues identified by the right-wingers.
“The problem is that conservatives have lost trust in the Republican Party that we will govern as conservatives,” argues James Bopp Jr., an RNC member from Indiana who has spearheaded the purity-test push. “I think that loss of trust is warranted to a certain extent because of the fact that we in the final several years of the Bush administration were supporting increased government, earmarks and, ultimately, bailouts.”
Earlier this year, Bopp and his compatriots pressured RNC chair Michael Steele to declare President Obama to be a “socialist.” The conservative crusaders were rebuffed then, but if they win approval for their purity test at the committee’s winter meeting in January, the party will officially express: “Republican solidarity in opposition to Obama’s socialist agenda is necessary to preserve the security of our country, our economic and political freedoms, and our way of life.”
With Orwellian irony, Bopp and his buddies have labeled their proposal: “Reagan’s Unity Principle for Support of Candidates.
So here’s a question: Applying the standard established in the resolution – review of the candidate’s official record, public statements and answers to questions – would Ronald Reagan pass the purity test?
(2) As governor of California, Reagan oversaw the development of Medi-Cal, the nation’s largest Medicaid program – expanding it to cover long-term care and developed massive new managed care systems. Strike two.
(3) As governor of California, Reagan Reagan established the Air Resources Board to battle California’s smog problems and supported aggressive government intervention where the market had failed to protect the environment. As president, Reagan signed more wilderness protections laws – which restrict private-sector exploitation of natural resources – than any president in history. Strike three.
(5) Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted amnesty to most undocumented workers who could prove they had been in the country continuously for the previous five years. After he finished his presidency, Reagan continues to speak out forcefully for immigration rights. Strike five.
(10) Here’s Reagan, in 1991, on gun control: “I support the Brady Bill, and I urge the Congress to enact it without further delay.” Strike ten.
Of course it is true that Reagan, like John Kerry, was for some ideas before he was against them.
Reasonable people might debate the proper point at which to try and pin Reagan down.
But no reasonable person can suggest that Ronald Reagan would have met the eight out ten test the RNC right-wingers seek to apply – especially on hot-button issues such as gun control, gay rights and immigration.
Indeed, one of the favorites of the RNC’s extreme conservatives, Florida U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio, recently declared that Reagan was wrong to support amnesty for undocumented immigrants.
And it is probably worth noting that, when Reagan was seeking the Republican nomination in 1980, conservatives Phil Crane and John Connolly suggested that “the Gipper” was an amiable fellow but just not pure enough. Crane positioned himself that year as as a pure conservative alternative to Reagan.
Crane, the purist, won 1.8 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Republican primary and exited stage right.
Looking back at Tim Geithner’s less than a year at the helm of Treasury, one can point to rather considerable successes: the economy is growing again (+3.2 percent for the third quarter), and the Dow stands at over 10,400, a remarkable comeback. Even housing is picking up nicely (albeit artificially fueled by the Federal $8,000 exemption for first time buyers), which caused the market to go up some 130 points Monday when the announcement on housing for October came out. However in terms of the employment situation (10.2 percent unemployment, the highest in 26 years) there is growing nervousness about the 2010 elections among Democrats, and monetary policy has not been terribly effective. Even the Republicans, to whom unemployment is not a matter to lose sleep over when profits are up, are grousing about Geithner, as Asim Shah of Bob’s Guide reports:
Mr Geithner has faced a barrage of criticism from the Republican Party in recent weeks over his failure to cut unemployment, improve the strength of the dollar and speed up the pace of economic recovery.
…SNIP…
Dick Bove, a banking industry analyst at Rochdale Securities, said that it was vital the US had a Treasury secretary who had the necessary experience in the sector and the full support of Congress.
“That is not Timothy Geithner,” he said.
“It is Jamie Dimon.”
There is a definite upwell of calls for Geithner to be replaced, and J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon seems to be atop of the list of those considered to replace him. Why the big push to oust Geithner now?
Partly directly because of the employment situation and Democratic nervousness about the elections: if Geithner goes, then the Obama administration is ‘making changes’ to help Americans get jobs (since Geithner’s leadership saw rather poor results in that area). But the reasons go much deeper, including a series of moves which have been rather unpopular and unsuccessful, and also some blowback about the AIG bailout and Geithner and his pals’ deep ties to Goldman Sachs. From Forbes’ Thomas Cooley:
As president of the New York Fed from 2003 until January of this year, Secretary Geithner has been in the midst of the maelstrom from the beginning. But he has been performing triage, making quick, instinctive decisions to stop the bleeding. Now it is time for more thoughtful decisions, for reconstructive surgery if you like, and so far that hasn’t seemed to be his forte.
…SNIP…
Secretary Geithner has seemingly been wrong-footed on financial reform as well. In June the Treasury put forth its list of financial reform proposals. They were far reaching and covered virtually all of the important issues that need to be addressed: systemic risk regulation, regulation of the consumer mortgage market, regulation of derivatives, the structure of the regulatory system. But the devil was in the details, and the details were at best vague. The basic structure drew immediate objections from many.
A centerpiece of the reform plan was to give the Federal Reserve responsibility for monitoring system risk–that is, risk to the stability of the whole financial system caused by the activities of an individual institution. That scheme met with almost immediate objections from many, because it would have changed and broadened the mandate of the Federal Reserve in ways that made it more connected to the Treasury and threatened its independence. And it risked diverting the focus of the Federal Reserve away from its primary task of conducting monetary policy and insuring the integrity of the payments system.
The reform proposals also set off a turf war among regulators. Even the Fed argued that it was the institution to regulate mortgages and consumer credit, a job it had manifestly failed at over the past decade.
More recently, Geithner and the Treasury lost an argument in the House Financial Services Committee over how to structure a resolution fund for large complex financial institutions that fail.
Cooley then explains for us Geithner’s involvement in a growing anger over the AIG bailout, at least among those liberal-minded people in the know:
The most recent bump in the road has been the scathing criticism of Geithner by Neil Barofsky, the TARP special inspector, over the funneling of taxpayer funds intended to bailout AIG (AIG – news – people) to its counterparties including Goldman Sachs (GS – news – people ). As the report put it: “There is no question that the effect of the FRBNY’s decisions–indeed, the very design of the federal assistance to AIG–was that tens of billions of Government money was funneled inexorably and directly to AIG’s counterparties.” And the report was particularly critical of the fact that there was no attempt to extract haircuts from the counterparties–they were all paid 100 cents on the dollar.
The overall giveaway bailout to AIG amounted to a whopping $62 billion. Ouch.
Cooley continues:
As a result, the conspiracy theorists are having a field day. Consider their fuel:
As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Geithner worked very closely with Henry Paulson (THAT b*stard, you know, Bush’s …well, let’s not call names) –his predecessor as Treasury Secretary and before that head of Goldman Sachs –as was warranted by the situation.
Geithner’s primary deputy at the New York Fed was William Dudley, a former Goldman Sachs economist.
The chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York until May 2009 was Stephen Friedman, former Chairman of Goldman Sachs, and a member of the Goldman’s board at the time of his New York Fed service.
Friedman also chaired the search committee that selected Geithner’s replacement (at the N.Y. Fed) –William Dudley.
At the time his former Goldman Sachs colleague Dudley was appointed–December 2008–Friedman purchased an additional $3 million of Goldman stock in violation of the rules.
Now ask yourself, surrounded by this crowd of influences, how likely is it that Geithner would have asked Goldman Sachs to take a serious haircut on their AIG positions?
You don’t have to be a black helicopter fan to recognize that the proximity of the small world that is Wall Street to the very institutions and public servants who are meant to regulate them can seriously compromise their credibility. This proximity and the fact that Wall Street ran amok on Geithner’s watch as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York–the top regulator–has damaged his credibility in his current role.
Apparently, even for the Wall Street crowd, even at the top, Limburger cheese can only smell so bad before you realize that it’s rotten and replace it….
The days ahead will see if Tim Geithner weathers the storm, or if Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan is Obama’s new knight in shining armor. Bob’s Guide gives us J.P. Morgan’s bottom line with Dimon at the helm, which is so appealing as a model of success: “Last month, JPMorgan Chase reported third quarter net income of $3.6 billion, up from $527 million in the same period in 2008.” Forbes reports that Dimon’s “JPMorgan Chase, (is) the largest bank in the country by market capitalization ($168 billion)” and “is the best-capitalized large bank in America ($31.5 billion of loan loss reserves and $162 billion of shareholder equity as of Sept. 30).” That looks pretty good after the debacle of 2008, where insufficient reserves and risky gambles with derivatives based on shaky mortgages brought down the economy.
Plus Dimon “is on nobody’s hate list,” is “a longtime Democrat” and “has connections inside the beltway.” (Forbes) He gained a lot of “stock” (no pun intended) with the government when he helped out by rescuing Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, too.
But does he have the right ideas for America? As the following YoungTurks video points out, he has come out “against every single regulatory measure proposed, not just by the White House, but by Congress as well” and is for pure market capitalism, unvarnished. For example he is the leading proponent of the “no bank is too big to fail” argument. He also seems dead set against consumer protections and regulation of derivatives. Maybe as CEO of J.P.Morgan Chase HE is capable of managing the large risk of derivatives successfully, but what of other institutions, and how will ordinary American consumers be protected?
His perspective is purely that of the predatory professional banker, and ordinary Americans will fall by the wayside. Is this supposed to be some kind of improvement?
There’s a Category 5 storm about to make landfall, and the president and the officials in charge of preparing for the approaching disaster don’t seem to be particularly worried. Sound familiar?
Just as Katrina exposed critical weaknesses in the priorities and competence of the Bush administration, the unfolding unemployment disaster is threatening to do the same for the Obama White House.
The members of the Obama administration may not be attending a birthday party at John McCain’s ranch in Sedona or shopping for expensive Ferragamo shoes in New York as a great American city is destroyed, but their decidedly lackadaisical response to what job losses are doing to multiple great American cities raises the question: will unemployment be Barack Obama’s Katrina?
His economic team’s resistance to a second round of stimulus, “lukewarm” reaction to Congressional jobs legislation, and prioritization of deficit reduction over job creation certainly has the feel of a taking-in-the-damage-from-2,500-feet flyover moment.
“There is no discussion of a package like a second stimulus,” said deputy White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki. “But we are working closely with Congress and consulting with outside experts to determine the right policies and next steps.” No word on whether those outside experts include the 1 in 6 workers currently unemployed or underemployed.
Of course, the real problem isn’t the outside experts; the administration’s wrongheaded approach is a classic inside job. Sen. Sherrod Brown summed it up on CNN, telling John King that when it comes to putting the focus on Main Street, the president’s “advisors are mixed.”
Which makes one wonder: what level of unemployment would it take to unmix them? Even 10.2 percent, the highest level in 26 years, after 22 straight months of job losses, doesn’t seem to have quickened the pulse of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.
And it’s not like the levees haven’t begun to crack, with the real unemployment rate — factoring in discouraged and partially employed workers — at 17.5 percent, the unemployment rate for workers aged 16 to 24 at 19 percent, and the unemployment rate for young African-Americans at 30 percent. What’s more, the average length of unemployment is at a record high, while the ratio of job seekers to open positions is now 6 to 1.
A new ABC/Washington Post poll reported that 30 percent of Americans say someone in their home has lost a job. I’m guessing that Summers and Geithner are comfortably in the other 70 percent. But even if it hasn’t hit home for them, it should be clear that unemployment is going to be the singular issue of 2010.
Congressional Democrats have certainly gotten the message — and have grown tired of waiting for the White House to take the lead. According to The Hill, House Democratic leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, are “worried they’ve appeared unresponsive to rising unemployment because they were absorbed by health care.” The article also says that Harry Reid has told colleagues he wants a jobs bill soon.
As John Larson, the fourth-ranking House Democrat puts it: “It’s jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. Members of this caucus feel… that a jobless recovery is just simply unacceptable to us.”
The problem for the White House and for the Democratic Party — and, most importantly, for the country — is that the administration’s response on jobs is being led by Summers, who actually opposed the extension of unemployment benefits Obama just signed. At this point you have to wonder what Obama’s attachment to Summers and Geithner is. We know if you become a target of Glenn Beck and cause five seconds of embarrassment to the administration you need to start updating your resume (ask Van Jones), but if you slowly bring down the administration, and the party, and the country, that’s apparently fine.
Back in February, when the $787 billion economic stimulus bill was signed, Summers and company promised that it would keep the unemployment rate from going any higher than 8.5 percent. With another 3.4 million jobs lost since then — and the official unemployment rate at 10.2 and rising — what does Summers say now?
The proportion of U.S. homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than the properties are worth has swelled to about 23%, threatening prospects for a sustained housing recovery.
Nearly 10.7 million households had negative equity in their homes in the third quarter, according to First American CoreLogic, a real-estate information company based in Santa Ana, Calif.
These so-called underwater mortgages pose a roadblock to a housing recovery because the properties are more likely to fall into bank foreclosure and get dumped into an already saturated market. Economists from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. said Monday they didn’t expect U.S. home prices to hit bottom until early 2011, citing the prospect of oversupply.
Home prices have fallen so far that 5.3 million U.S. households are tied to mortgages that are at least 20% higher than their home’s value, the First American report said. More than 520,000 of these borrowers have received a notice of default, according to First American.
