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Edited on Wed Nov-03-10 03:00 PM by Irritable Liberal
John Boehner made a little mistake recently. He invoked the memory of Johnny Cash in his speeches. Johnny Cash would speak his mind and his and John Boehner's minds would never have been on the same chapter, never mind the same page.
Cash is not around to defend himself, but daughter Roseanne is. She called Boehner an 'asshat' yesterday on Twitter. John Boehner recently stood in Congress and yelled out his mantra "hell no!" He could do that when the Democrats ruled the House. Come January and he will be the guy in the hot seat that Nancy Pelosi will vacate, and yelling 'hell no!' as leader of the GOP in the House does not make for a coherent economic policy.
Boehner is an 'asshat', one that has been left out in the sun far too long. Playing about 100 rounds of golf, Hitting the local bars faster than any congressman at the end of the day and hobnobbing with lobbyists and their patrons will do him no good when he takes office.
He will have to deal with an internecine fight against the Tea Party absolutists in the House who will rather die than reach over the aisle to the Democrats to get anything done. One of the first orders of business for new Congress will be to raise the debt ceiling or government shuts down which is exactly what a good percentage of the GOP want. Let them try that and see what happens. Interest rates will rise, projects will stop being funded and thousands will stop getting paid and a lot of benefits will stop flowing. Not exactly a good way to start getting goodwill from the population.
It should be an easy bill to pass as they have had to raise the debt ceiling virtually every year over the past two decades. There will be a significant amount of resistance to this and Boehner is going to have to deal with that for starters.
The Rea Party caucus will have to cave on this one but they will try to use other excuses to do the same. The last time they shut down the government in 1995 after taking over the House in 1994 it went over like a rancid stink bomb and immediately rescued Clinton's ratings, and that was when the economy was doing well.
That began the modern era of the Republican party that ended in the sordid and absurd impeachment of Bill Clinton. The debacle in Florida bought them the Presidency, Fear and 9/11 won them another term and by the end of eight years th ev had blown a trillion dollars on a useless and incompetently run war, revealed their total incompetence with Katrina and then stood by as the economy drove itself off a cliff.
Every new President's party has lost seats in the midterm elections since the civil war and 2010 was going to be no different. with the worst economy since WWII and one of the worst ever, it was going to be a bloodbath not matter what.
Exit polls from yesterday showed the publics disdain for the GOP was equal to that of the Democrats. They won big because of the vast amounts of money that can now be spent and they could, with some legitimacy, claim that they had nothing to do with the economy's lack of progress over the past two years.
Leaving out their social conservative mantra for the time being, their only two points have been lowering taxes, as in extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the deficit. Neither will have any effect on the economy. Low taxes have done nothing to help and cutting deficits won't help the economy. Every job lost from deficit cuts means less business for the community and more burdens for government in unemployment costs and lower tax revenue.
In all their speeches and rants, GOP candidates have not been able to elucidate one specific policy to get the economy moving other than the recycled myth that lowering taxes for the wealthy will immediately cause them to go out and invest their newly found extra money in investing in new or expanding businesses to create more jobs.
Rising demand creates more jobs and rising demand does not appear in a vacuum. The private sector will not start to create a significant amount of jobs until that happens and cutting government spending at this time is one sure way to ensure that demand does not rise.
Let the games begin.
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