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Last week, as Congress opened its new session, two regular Joes – Sen. Manchin of West Virginia and Vice President Biden of Delaware – gave a hand to Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, who’d suffered a stroke a year earlier.

Joe and Joe assisted Sen. Kirk in climbing the 45 Capitol steps to take his seat once again in the Senate chamber. It’s what every regular Joe in America does. They help their co-workers, family, friends and neighbors.

Similarly, Americans believe their government should help when necessary. When the task is too big for a couple of Joes to achieve, Americans want their government to step up. Disaster relief is such a task. Republicans just don’t get this. The GOP uses government to hurt Americans, not to lend a helping hand.

That’s what the GOP did last week. The majority of Republicans in the U.S. House – 64 percent – voted against extending tax breaks for working Americans.

Those Republicans voted to raise taxes on – to hurt – 99 percent of Americans, most of whom badly need the tax break as a result of the Great Recession, the decline in housing values and the decade-long stagnation in wages. Those Republicans also voted to wound the American financial system, which needs workers to have money so they can spend it and revive the economy.

But that’s just the beginning. Those Republicans in the House, who constantly claim to be so very worried about deficits, also voted to spend more money – that is, more than the $1.5 million already wasted – defending discrimination against gay people. (more…)

Four years ago Barack Obama prepared to take the oath of office as a Democratic president, at a moment when free market ideology and Republican incumbency were disgraced by events. But a year that should have marked the end of the laissez-faire fantasy and the resurgence of effective government instead began an era of muddle through.

I have often quoted the British historian A. J. P. Taylor. Speaking of the revolutionary year in Europe, 1848, when democratic revolutions broke out only to be crushed, Taylor observed, “It was a turning point of history, but history didn’t turn.” In many respects, that also describes 2008.

The Republicans were voted out, but the big banks that caused the collapse were propped up rather than broken up. Their basic business model was allowed to continue, with taxpayers guaranteeing billion dollar paydays for corporate moguls. The economic rules of the game continued to tilt against regular working families, who are more precarious than ever. Obama took most of his economic advice from the very people whose belief in complete license for finance caused the collapse.

The administration played softball with a Republican opposition determined to wreck the recovery rather than allow Obama any victories. Democrats were almost as thoroughly in bed with Wall Street as Republicans. The mantle of populist frustration, absurdly, passed to the tea parties. Democrats, in the 2010 mid-term, suffered the worst defeat since 1938, a year when President Roosevelt listened to the Wall Street deficit hawks of that era.

But two years later, even muddle-through managed to beat muddled thinking. Mitt Romney divided his own party, committed one mistake after another; and despite one decent debate performance, he couldn’t beat the incumbent even in a weak economy. (more…)

Lost in the kerfuffle over whether or not new Republican frontrunner Herman Cain’s tax plan actually proves that he is the anti-Christ (as hinted by Michele Bachmann) was some much more serious business.

Members of the House of Representatives have been casting a string of votes of staggering recklessness and cupidity. The House voted to delay EPA’s authority to regulate toxic air pollutants from cement kilns, but it also voted, in a virtual partisan lockstep, to defeat a series of amendments designed to retain at least minimal protection for the public health. The House voted 246-166 to prevent the EPA from limiting emissions from cement kilns even if the emissions caused learning disabilities or harmed brain development. It voted 253-166 to prevent the EPA from acting even if it was essential to improve children’s health. It rejected several amendments that merely required Congress to admit that mercury and other cement-kiln emissions cause premature deaths, heart attacks, asthma, and brain damage. The House even voted, 254-169, to reject an amendment by Representative Henry Waxman that conceded that the rules, if allowed to go into effect, would reduce the amount of mercury deposited on land and water.

Then the House turned its machete to EPA standards designed to protect the public from toxic emissions from industrial boilers. Once again, when the Democrats proposed that regulations go into effect if they were essential to protecting health, Republicans voted them down. Even if these regulations were needed to prevent brain damage, House Republicans said, they should be blocked. Even if the nation’s ten most polluted cities — no way. (more…)

By Bob Cesca
Author, “One Nation Under Fear”

There are a variety of explanations for the frustratingly backwards outcome of Tuesday’s election.

Clearly Americans were dissatisfied with the objective reality that the Obama administration and the congressional Democrats actually made things better by cutting the deficit by an historic $122 billion; creating upwards of three million new jobs; ending the war in Iraq; passing the largest middle class tax cut in history; and rescuing the economy from the brink of collapse. Not good enough, obviously.

Or did voters simply not know about these accomplishments? That’s entirely possible given the Democratic Party’s uncanny penchant for running away from its successes, while also fumbling very basic add-water-and-serve marketing chores. (And, by the way, adding to the party’s failures to ballyhoo its accomplishments, the progressive movement was systematically out-hustled, out-gunned and outmaneuvered for much of the last two years.)

Of course there’s also the Flailing Rage Factor, which I tend to favor as a reason for Tuesday’s outcome more than ignorance or lack of Democratic marketing chops. For two years now, Americans have been incited by fakery and horror stories to the point of being pumped up into a ‘roid raging mob chanting shallow platitudes and bumper sticker zingers — incoherently attacking Speaker Pelosi’s face, and bent out of shape by the fact that there’s not a doddering old white guy stumbling through the West Wing spinning grandfatherly yarns about American mornings and saintly cowboys.

Ultimately, what Americans voted for Tuesday was divided government, which admittedly isn’t new in American politics. We typically like the idea of two sides, Congress and the White House, locking horns and ultimately compromising on the important matters of the day.

Unfortunately, this is a “pre-01/20/09″ mindset. It’s a mass delusion based on antiquated political attitudes. (more…)