While writers here work on the usual in-depth pieces, it was suggested to me that it would be a good idea to have open threads from time to time. So, here's one, on today's news.

Gay Rights: National Boy Scouts are considering ending a ban on gay scouts and leaders.

If adopted by the organization’s board of directors, it would represent a profound change on an issue that has been highly controversial -- one that even went to the US Supreme Court. The new policy, now under discussion, would eliminate the ban from the national organization’s rules, leaving local sponsoring organizations free to decide for themselves whether to admit gay scouts.

A little late and probably a few dollars short, but a welcome move nonetheless.

Immigration: As the Republican opposition to immigration reform all but fell apart earlier this week, President Obama has just concluded a speech on reform. The White House is insisting on a path to citizenship from the outset, as well as treating same sex couples as families under our nation's immigration laws, so that partners of Americans who are foreigners can obtain visas based on that relationship just as any other married couple.

So, the news of the day is that a bipartisan group of senators have a plan for comprehensive immigration reform. That's all to the well and good. This country needs a sensible immigration policy that allows for the legalization of those undocumented immigrants already in the country, and for a rational method for immigrants to come in legally.

Now, don't be mistaken: this Damascene conversion on the part of a few Republican senators is due more to the stranglehold that the Democratic Party has on immigrant voters, rather than to any true change of heart that maybe it would be a good idea to decriminalize 11 million US residents. One can be forgiven if the motivations of a party which has spent the better part of 30 years demonizing immigrants—especially Latino immigrants—are at best questionable now that it has seen the light. The immigration plan is so far merely a blueprint; much work still needs to be done before anything comes to a vote. But it is a sign that at the very least the leadership of the Republican Party realizes that if it is not to descend into the status of a rump regional party, it needs to do something to appeal to constituencies which are now firmly in the Democratic camp, and look to be so for the foreseeable future.

Yesterday, I wrote a piece criticizing Harry Reid and senate institutionalists who went for protecting the silent, call-in filibuster. That criticism, with all my distaste for the instituionalists' pursuit of extraordinary power, stands. But. And there's always a but, isn't there. For all the explanations of the deal I read yesterday, I kept coming back to this: Harry Reid wouldn't do this if he didn't want the Republicans to use the filibuster. Well, does he? I think he might, as a trap. What if Harry Reid here chose to lose a battle in order to win a war? The war would be the 2014 election, and more broadly, breaking the back of the current Republican intransigence. Harry Reid is after all a boxer. He's been known to whoop Republicans with political strategy before. So, I think this is worth another look.

For all the disappointment of the reformers, including myself, let's consider what Harry Reid actually did by preserving the easy filibuster while limiting it on motions to proceed. Basically, 8 senators from each side, including the majority and minority leaders, can bypass a filibuster to move a bill to the floor, or the majority leader can do it by himself, as long as he allows votes on two amendments from the minority.

So? So, by preserving the silent filibuster on actual votes but essentially eliminating it on bringing the bills to the floor in the first place, Harry Reid ensures that Republicans can easily filibuster bills, but only after they are brought to the floor. The silent filibuster is also preserved for actual votes on cabinet-level nominees. In fact, Reid may be daring the Republicans do exactly that on wildly popular parts of the president's agenda, like immigration reform, gun safety legislation, and education reform. Reid is also daring the Republicans to filibuster nominees like Chuck Hagel.

Today, in a brazenly partisan decision and a rare occasion of a court choosing to involve itself in a separation of powers dispute between the two elected branches of goverbment, 3 judges appointed by the last three Republican presidents ruled that President Obama's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board last year was unconstitutional. Why? Republicans at the time forced the Senate to hold "pro-forma" sessions in which the body simply gaveled in and out for a few minutes every few days. So, the judges held that the Senate weren't technically in recess, never mind that it wasn't actually on the job.

While the Obama administration is expected to appeal this decision, if it stands, it will invalidate hundreds of decisions not only by the NLRB, but by the Consumer Protection Bureau - the director to which also had to be appointed in a similar manner. The court is basically saying that a minority in the Senate is allowed to block the people's work with impunity even while they don't actually work. They are allowed to kneecap the government even while vacationing.

All of this was made possible by what Sen. Harry Reid refused to crack down on yesterday: the flagrant use of the call-it-in filibuster to block everything from legislation to presidential appointments. Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell put together a "reform" proposal that does nothing to expose the obstructionism of the Republicans, instead choosing to speed up some motions to proceed and post-filibuster debates. The excuse for this dumb turnabout? Because, said, Senator Reid, we wouldn't want the Senate to turn into - God forbid - the House, something akin to a majoritarian institution. Why, that is just plain anti-democratic.

PM Carpenter has a good piece up on the stranglehold that the GOP has at the state level. Bastions of moderate Republicanism have been taken over by the Teabaggers. Quoting from the New York Times:

In last year’s elections, [Kansas] bucked its long tradition of moderate Republicanism. Conservatives ousted several moderates in Senate primary contests and went on to victory in November. Now, for the first time in generations, the House, the Senate and the governor’s office in Kansas are controlled by conservative Republicans. In much of the rest of the country, the political equation is similar: The Republican Party now controls both legislative chambers and governorships in 24 states. Democrats have single-party control in 13. 

This is, to say the least, disheartening.

I want to riff on President Obama's refrain from his Second Inaugural Address: "Our journey is not complete".

From evidence like this, it's obvious that our journey is far from complete. We're on the right path, an end is in sight, but the path is not even or without impediments.

Today, the House Republicans rolled over and passed a bill ending their threats to default the United States government on its public debt. At least, they did so for a little less than four months - until May 19, 2013. The GOP gets their little pony to withhold pay from members of Congress if they don't pass a budget by April 15 (but would release the pay on the last day of Congress even if no budget is passed). The Senate is expected to pass the measure as well, and the White House has said that the president will not stand in the way of it.

While there is a very legitimate point that we should not be running the US government in 3-month incremental crises modes, nor keep the world economy in constant threat, and while it would absolutely be better to get a debt limit increase covering a period of two or more years, the measure that just passed the House could be a harbinger of things to come. Read carefully the part of the bill about the debt limit:

Suspension- Section 3101(b) of title 31, United States Code, shall not apply for the period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act and ending on May 18, 2013.

Section 3101(b) of title 31 of the US Code is what defines the debt limit. Read the section in the bill notice something: Congress is not increasing the debt limit, it is suspending it. In other words, for the first time since the enactment of the debt limit, we will essentially have no debt ceiling as long as the borrowing is to meet obligations authorized by Congress (which is why we have to borrow money in the first place).

 

President Obama's second inauguration speech, concluded just minutes ago, is being hailed as an undaunted espousing of progressive principles, and rightfully so. With this speech, Barack Obama became the first president in history to mention the civil rights struggles of LGBT Americans in an inaugural address. The speech was laden with a strong defense of the social safety net and a progressive vision of the future, and the president raised issues of economic justice, health care, climate change, voter disenfranchisement and war and peace. There is little doubt that this was a president ready to pursue a bold, progressive second term agenda.

The president today made us all proud. But here's what the pundits are missing: this isn't the start of a progressive presidency. It is the continuation of one. There is history behind today's speech. There are real accomplishments, real hard work, real slogging it out and putting up with destructive forces and winning over cynicism that made today's speech possible. It took a pragmatic president with unwavering commitment to his progressive principles to make today possible.

We told you so. Forgive me for quoting myself, but here's what I wrote in my last piece about the debt ceiling, explaining why the President was not going to give Congress an easy out on this:

The president does not want to make the Republicans in Congress irrelevant in this conversation; he wants them to come to their senses - or more likely, to their knees - and raise the debt limit without being able to keep their hostage.

Well, the Republicans have come to their knees.

Backing down from their hard-line stance, House Republicans said Friday that they would agree to lift the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months, with a requirement that both chambers of Congress pass a budget in that time to clear the way for negotiations on long-term deficit reduction.

What? No government shutdown? No making the United States into a deadbeat nation? No crashing the global economy? Nope. The House GOP, at their aptly named 'retreat', seems to have come up with a strategy to retreat from their threats to shoot the debt ceiling hostage. I seem to have predicted this just as their 'retreat' was starting.

@dccc Well, it is after all, a retreat... I get the feeling they are going to figure out how to retreat on their empty #debtceiling threats.
— The People's View (@thepeoplesview) January 15, 2013

For going on 30 years, our friends on the Right have used the "culture wars" to maintain a death grip on the levers of government, both nationally and in the more regressive states. "God, guns, and gays" was the battle cry of the Right as they methodically seized the reins of power in the Republican Party, turning a center-right party into one that is now purely reactionary.

It has been, up to now, a successful strategy, if one looks only at the exercise of power. Of course, the backers of the modern GOP—the famous denizens of the 1%—for the most part don't care about the passions of the radical Right base. Most of them are in it solely to protect their prerogatives. But there just aren't enough of them to affect electoral politics, regardless of their wealth. They need shock troops, and the main mobilizing tool which the Right has employed has been the cultural backlash against the advances of the 1960s.

A match made in heaven.

Dennis Kucinich, former congressman and icon of the anti-war left, has signed up as an analyst for Fox News. He will debut on “The O’Reilly Factor” Thursday night.

“Through 16 years in Congress and two presidential campaigns, FOX News has always provided me with an opportunity to share my perspective with its enormous viewership,” Kucinich (D-Ohio) said in a statement. “I look forward to a continuation of our relationship this time as a FOX News contributor.”

That's right. The boy mayor of Cleveland who bankrupted his city supposedly to make a stand for his principles has now decided to cash in with Fox News, their opposition to everything Kucinich claims to principled about be damned.

The President and the Vice President spoke today on the issue of gun violence, and they spoke for me, every word:

This is what a leader sounds like. The right to own a gun, the president said, is not the only valued right Americans have.

The right to worship freely and safely, that right was denied to Sikhs in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.  The right to assemble peaceably, that right was denied shoppers in Clackamas, Oregon, and moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado.  That most fundamental set of rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- fundamental rights that were denied to college students at Virginia Tech, and high school students at Columbine, and elementary school students in Newtown, and kids on street corners in Chicago on too frequent a basis to tolerate, and all the families who’ve never imagined that they’d lose a loved one to a bullet -- those rights are at stake. We’re responsible.

Thank you, Mr. President, for standing up for the rights of all of us - for all of the rights enshrined to us in the Constitution, not just one of them. If I had more smart things to add, I would. I don't. I just hope our Congress follows this president's lead.

Addicting Info had a rather interesting piece the other day. When I read it, I felt a little bit of vindication for what many of us have been saying on this and like blogs for a couple of years: The GOP as it exists now cannot continue further down its current path.

That verdict was delivered by no one other than MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, he of the 1994 Gingrich Revolution. Video is below.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

To the chagrin of some, the White House and the Treasury Department has taken off the table "minting the coin" - an idea that would let the Secretary of Treasury simply mint a platinum coin, give it any value (say, a trillion dollars), deposit it in the Federal Reserve Bank, and draw against it to pay our obligations, essentially rendering the debt limit a moot point. Given that the president has already rejected that the 14th amendment could legally be used to override the debt limit, one could jump to the conclusion that he is nudging ever so closely to another showdown on the debt limit with Congressional Republicans.

Only, he isn't. Listen carefully to the president's answer to Chuck Todd in yesterday's news conference:

For every so-called progressive out there running around with their hair on fire about the president's nomination of Jack Lew to succeed Timothy Geithner as Secretary of Treasury, I want you to carefully watch this interview Martin Bashir did with Jon Alter and Jared Bernstein about the nomination:

The rap from the Right on Jack Lew is twofold - that he runs circles around Republicans during negotiations, and that he is too kind to poor people to be able to close the budget deficit effectively. The rub from the Left, lead by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Robert Scheer is that he is a child of Wall Street and an advocate of deregulation, and since Obama is appointing him, he's supposedly slipped into the dark side for deregulation as well. All of this, regardless of the fact that Lew, like his predecessor Geithner is a career public servant, and has never had anything to do with deregulation. He did serve as a chief operating officer - an operational management position, not an investment decision making vehicle. Blaming him for Citigroup's follies during the financial meltdown is like blaming FAA officials for the catastrophic intelligence failure on 9/11.

"There's a saying over at Treasury: 'No peacocks, no jerks, no whiners'."

—President Barack Obama, speaking at the announcement of Jack Lew's nomination as new Treasury Secretary

I hope you will indulge me in sharing one of my occasional personal essays on this blog, but I think it is germane to the current political culture in which we find ourselves.

While I never had anything on the likes of FireDogLake or Huffington Post, throughout my 20s I subsisted on a regular diet of outrage and victimization. I listened to Pacifica, read Chomsky and Parenti, and believed that the world ran on hidden conspiracies designed to subjugate us. I was in a state of perpetual anger.

But the thing is, I never did anything about it. All the talks I went to never did a thing to change how my community operated. I would read Chomsky et al, and feel like I had an insight that the majority of my fellow citizens lacked. But all that reading and listening never spurred me to action. Because the corollary to being in a state of perpetual outrage is that, often, one is in a state of feeling perpetually powerless. The lights of the Left might say that the power is with us; but more often than not they spend the majority of the time expounding on the vast forces arrayed against us, and little on what concrete actions we can take to fight those forces.

A couple of weekends ago, Daniel Marans of Social Security Works, a group ostensibly working to "protect" Social Security, and I had a debate on Take Action Radio's Take Action News with David Shuster (Marans is also Executive Producer of the show) on Social Security, mainly focusing on Chained CPI. You can see the debate clips here (part 1) and here (part 2). He and I will be on again at 1:45 pm ET this Saturday.

Marans has penned an op-ed in Professional Left's favorite corporate-sold link gatherer, the AOL-Huffington Post. In his piece, Daniel Marans goes back and re-litigates the issues we debated, and tries to tell me why I'm wrong. I'll go through the most important points, but let's start at the Professional alarmists' bold, new idea on the 'tactics' we need to follow to fix Social Security's long term funding shortfall: wait till there's a Republican president, perhaps in the mold of Ronald Regan.

But as I said during the debate, Spandan's assumptions were alarmist. Social Security has faced far more imminent shortfalls in the past, notably in 1983, and Congress has never failed to act to close them.

This is a little funny at least, since Daniel fails to note that as I said during the debate, what Congress and President Reagan, back in 1983, did to "act to close" the "imminent shortfalls" was something he and his organization would flatly consider a benefit cut, namely raising the Social Security retirement age. Yes, why don't we wait till there is a Republican president to fix Social Security? The fact that the most ardent self-proclaimed defenders of Social Security have to point to this deal in 1983 as the example of why we should wait now to implement reforms in the program should tell anyone honestly following the debate that they have no real argument.

Yesterday, President Obama nominated former Republican Senator from Nebraska and a Vietnam veteran, Chuck Hagel for the post of Secretary of Defense. The nomination sent the right wing into a frenzy, with the useful idiots at the Log Cabin Republicans catching Romnesia.

Log Cabin Republicans, a gay group, is running expensive full-page ads in the Washington Post and New York Times opposing Obama’s nomination former Nebraska GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense to replace Californian Leon Panetta.

Log Cabin cites a 1998 Hagel statement opposing Clinton-nominated Luxembourg ambassador James Hormel as “openly, aggressively, gay,” Hagel’s vote for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, his support for Nebraska’s constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, his 1999 opposition to repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and his opposition to a judicial ruling in 2005 that the Nebraska marriage ban was unconstitutional.

Oh. I see. So what did the Log Cabins think of a politician making these statements?

In the days since Congressional Republicans suffered a utter, complete, and embarrassing defeat at the hands of the president on the fiscal cliff, they have been trying to regroup. One of the ways they have tried to do so is to issue threats that they would refuse to raise the nation's debt limit if the president does not agree to essentially end the American social compact. Like a wounded animal, they are trying to hit back, and threatening to shut down the government.

But all of that are the empty roars of a paper tiger, and they know it themselves. Of all people, it was Newt Gingrich, the architect of the last government shutdown, this morning on Morning Joe making it clear why this dog won't hunt:

Gingrich explained that “in the end… the whole national financial system is going to come into Washington by television and say ‘Oh, my god, this will be a gigantic heart attack. The entire economy of the world will collapse. You guys can’t be responsible,’ and they’ll cave.”

In December, the Treasury department reported fully divesting from AIG, and making $23 billion in profit for the taxpayers in the process. Yes, that includes investments from both the Treasury and the Fed. The AIG stock sale is only in the latest in the already successful and profitable financial institution "bailouts" managed under the Treasury Secretary who gets too little credit for rescuing our economy from the financial meltdown: Timothy Geithner.

The latest CBO estimate of a total of $24 billion loss to taxpayers from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) included an estimated loss of $14 billion from the government's assistance to AIG (the rest were losses from the auto industry rescue and mortgage programs). Instead, the treasury's portion of the AIG profit comes to $5 billion. Adjust the CBO estimate for the $19 billion reversal ($14 billion estimated loss vs. $5 billion actual profit), and the total cost to the taxpayer of the financial rescue is about $5 billion. Even that is an overestimation, since the Treasury will get some of the money the Fed made in the form of excess payments that the Federal Reserve makes to the treasury.

Well, as predicted, the screeching on the Left has been turned up to 11. A clear victory for Democrats and progressive policies has been turned by sectors of the Left, yet again, into a Satan sandwich.

It was predictable. President Obama and the Democrats achieved something unimaginable a year ago: a deficit deal in which the ratio of revenue to spending cuts was 41:1. Let that sink in. For every $1 cut in spending, $41 was raised in revenue.

Furthermore, none of the cuts were from the safety net. Grandmothers won't have to eat cat food, and inner city children can still see doctors via Medicaid. The triggered cuts, the ones that were supposed to combine with the expiration of tax relief to create the fiscal tsunami, have been delayed for two months; just in time for the debt ceiling rise.

This screeching on the Left is not helpful, insofar as it gives the lazy stenographers of the mainstream media license to opine that Obama is "losing his base".

Of course, DailyKos, Firedoglake, and the assorted gallery of the left media world were never Obama's base. One doesn't support a candidate and then turn on him the minute he doesn't follow your preferred agenda or strategy and call oneself a "strong supporter". There was a little bit of hubris in the Left media; it thought that with Obama in the White House, he would turn to them for counsel, as they felt they had the pulse of the electorate.

However, most Americans aren't of the Left.

So last night, after the fiscal cliff deal passed, I went to a couple of right wing sites to see what they were saying. Okay, fine. I was being a sadist. But man, oh man. Is there a full meltdown on the wing-nut-o-sphere. Here's a little sampling.

Red State:

The McConnell Tax Hike by Eric Erickson

... The Republican Establishment in Washington, DC should be burned to the ground and salt spread on the remains. Republicans who saw Mitch McConnell and John Boehner destroy the last plank of the Republican Party are going to need to look elsewhere for a savior for their party.

Joe Scarborough:

Could the Republican party have mismanaged this situation any worse? msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/ns/…
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) January 2, 2013

I sympathize with Morning Joe, but it's not safe to assume a floor to wingnut stupidity, which lost the GOP this round of negotiations.

So, it's a done deal. The fiscal cliff deal passed by the Senate in the wee hours of the new year morning has just cleared enough votes in the House. 90% of Democrats voted for it. But that's not for lack of trying by the Left's howler monkeys to kill this deal.

This afternoon, I got an email from MoveOn.org, asking me to send an email to my Congresswoman, urging her to oppose the aforementioned deal. And so, of course, I sent her an email urging a vote in favor of the fiscal cliff compromise. What boggles the mind though - although, I suppose I should be used to the intransigence from the Left's howling crowd demanding flying unicorns from the president - is what possibly could be keeping a group like MoveOn and its ideologue brotheren from supporting the deal.

But to understand their grievances - or if you take my frame, hair-on-fire stagecraft - you need to understand, in short, what is in the deal. Summarizing from Wonkblog by Ezra Klein:

• Income tax rates for incomes above $400,000 ($450,000 for joint filers) rise to a marginal rate of 39.6% permanently. All expiring (lower) tax rates for incomes below that amount are made permanent.
• Estate tax increases to 40% for inheritances over $5 million, from the expiring 35%.
• Stimulus tax breaks - the expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit - are extended for another year.
• The Alternative Minimum Tax is permanently fixed to stop it from affecting the middle class.
• Extended unemployment benefits are extended for another year.
• The stimulus business tax breaks - including R&D and wind energy credits - will also be extended for another year.
• Medicare provider payments are prevented from decreasing drastically (both from the sequester deal, 2%, and the automatic yearly reductions that Congress prevents every year).
• The rest of the sequester - i.e. the automatic defense and domestic cuts - is postponed for two months, financed 50% by defense and domestic cuts.
• Personal exemptions are phased out for incomes above $250,000; itemized deductions will be reduced for people with incomes over $350,000.