Democratic Socialist Party

Update from Snooper:

FYI: Macsmind made mention that this story may be a diversion and could very well be a "bait maneuver". I added this information to my article on this same subject. http://tinyurl.com/rdxgss

Submitted by Trevor with H/T to Politico.com

GOP, RNC to rebrand Democrats as 'Socialists'

By ROGER SIMON

A member of the Republican National Committee told me Tuesday that when the RNC meets in an extraordinary special session next week, it will approve a resolution rebranding Democrats as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”

When I asked if such a resolution would force RNC Chairman Michael Steele to use that label when talking about Democrats in all his speeches and press releases, the RNC member replied: “Who cares?”

Which pretty much sums up the attitude some members of the RNC have toward their chairman these days.

Steele wrote a memo last month opposing the resolution. Steele said that while he believes Democrats “are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,” he also said in a (rare) flash of insight that officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party “will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.”

Two other resolutions — to urge Republican lawmakers to reject earmarks and to commend them for opposing “bailouts and reckless spending bills” — are also on the agenda, but language that would have denounced Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican turned Democrat, and Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins for voting for President Obama’s stimulus package has been dropped.

Steele didn’t want the special session to be held at all. The RNC will hold its regular summer meeting in July, and all matters could have waited until then. But the special session is being viewed by some in the party as a “comeuppance” for Steele and an implied criticism of his performance and behavior in his first 100 days in office.

To read the remainder of this article, go to Politico.com.

Friendly fire: NYT hits Obama

H/T Ron G.

Politico:

By JONATHAN MARTIN

The leading liberal voices of the New York Times editorial pages all criticized—and, in some cases, clobbered—President Obama on Sunday for his handling of the economy and national security.

It's not unusual for Barack Obama to take a little friendly fire from the Times. But it's perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd—and in the paper's lead editorial. Their critique punctuated a weekend that started with a widely circulated blog post by Paul Krugman that said the president’s yet to be announced bank rescue plan would almost certainly fail.

The sentiment, coming just two months after the president was sworn in, reflects elite opinion in the Washington-New York corridor that Obama is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage.

Unlike with President Bush, the Obama administration is less apt to dismiss such commentary, at least publicly, as so much carping from an out-of-touch peanut gallery. These are voices that have been sympathetic, and at times gushing toward Obama, during the campaign and in his administration’s early days.
 
The president and his top aides read the Times closely and react quickly to its reporting and commentary. Tom Daschle, for example, withdrew from consideration as Health and Human Services Secretary amid back tax issues on the same day that the paper ran a tough front-page piece and editorial on what keeping Daschle would mean to the Obama brand.

So it likely caused some consternation this morning at the White House and at Camp David, where the president is staying this weekend, to pick up the Times and find:

—Frank Rich, who made a cottage industry of Bush-bashing, writing that until Obama “addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed.”

Recalling the Daschle episode and the public’s response to the image of a wealthy former senator not paying taxes on a limousine, Rich said that judging from their response to the AIG case “the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.”

Larry Summers, perhaps the president’s most high-profile economic adviser, came in for the worst of it.

“Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy," Rich wrote.

—Thomas Friedman, the paper’s highly-read foreign affairs columnist, turning his focus home to find the nation lacking “inspirational leadership.”

Friedman’s indictment was not limited to Obama, but he captured some of the concern about the president’s communications skills by writing that the president “missed a huge teaching opportunity with A.I.G.”

Instead of letting Congress react in its usual knee-jerk fashion to overcompensate for what it believes the public wants—what Friedman called letting them “run riot”—the president should have stepped up.

“He should have gone on national TV and had the fireside chat with the country that is long overdue. That’s a talk where he lays out exactly how deep the crisis we are in is, exactly how much sacrifice we’re all going to have to make to get out of it, and then calls on those A.I.G. brokers — and everyone else who, in our rush to heal our banking system, may have gotten bonuses they did not deserve — and tells them that their president is asking them to return their bonuses ‘for the sake of the country.’”

—The paper’s liberal editorial page and a frequent voice of opposition to Bush’s national security policies complaining about “confused and mixed signals from the [Obama] White House” on some of the same issues.

“Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s benighted ideas,” penned the Times editorialists, carping about Guantanamo specifically, detainee policy more broadly and Obama’s reluctance to investigate Bush-era actions on “terrorism, state secrets, wiretapping, detention and interrogation.”
 
—Maureen Dowd, in her inimitable fashion, citing the take-charge First Lady digging a White House garden to wonder “if the wrong Obama is in the Oval.”

“It’s a time in America’s history where we need less smooth jazz and more martial brass,” wrote Dowd.

—Krugman, who is perhaps the most frequent Obama critic at the paper but also a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose analysis carries considerable sway in liberal circles, not even waiting for the administration’s bank plan announcement this week before panning it.

“It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago,” Krugman wrote on his blog. “The zombie ideas have won. The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank.”

The Princeton economist turned opinion columnist predicted: “This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work. What an awful mess.”

Christina Romer, the Chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, called Krugman’s critique “unfair” in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” and said their plan of partnering with the private sector was to ensure taxpayers didn’t shoulder more of the burden and they didn’t offer “just another hand-out to banks.” 

What an OxyMoron - Obama to Host a Fiscal Responsibility Summit

Are you kidding me????? Just a few days after his nearly 1 trillion (yes that is a "t") Stimulus Bill or as our friend Snooper so affectionately calls it "Crap Sandwich", President Obama is participating in a Fiscal Responsibility Summit today.

From Politco.com writer JOSH GERSTEIN:

With the U.S. government racing toward $10 trillion in spending and loan guarantees to confront the recession, President Barack Obama on Monday will say it’s time to clamp down on federal expenditures.

Huh?

Obama’s decision to convene a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” amid the current bailout bonanza might strike some as an act of sheer chutzpah, or at least some serious cognitive dissonance.

What we don't know about Obama

H/T Pat Dollard.

Politico:
By: John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei

AP

We know a lot more about Barack Obama than we did on Election Day. He wastes little time making big decisions. He was serious about surrounding himself with seasoned people, even if they are outsized personalities likely to jostle one another and unlikely to salute on command. He intends to move quickly to put his personal stamp on government and national life.

Yet much about how the 44th president will govern remains a mystery—perhaps even to Obama himself.

The stirring rhetoric witnessed on the campaign trail and in Tuesday’s inaugural address is laced with spacious language — flexible enough to support conflicting conclusions about what he really believes.

Only decisions, not words, can clarify what Obama stands for. Those are coming soon enough.

Until then, here are the questions still left hanging as the Obama administration begins:

DOES HE REALLY THINK AFGHANISTAN IS WINNABLE?

The new president has strongly signaled that he thinks the answer is yes. But neither his rhetoric nor his policy proposals so far have fully reckoned with the implications.

If he intends to win in Afghanistan, he is not going to be a Peacemaker President. To the contrary, he is committing himself to being just as much of a War President as George W. Bush, certainly for the first term and very possibly for a potential second.

Most military experts think a decisive win in Afghanistan — as opposed to a muddle-through strategy leading to a gradual withdrawal —will involve a major surge in troops and a willingness to tolerate high costs and high casualties.

In any event, the country and its unruly neighbor, Pakistan, will quite likely dominate Obama’s attention much more than Iraq.

Obama advisers say one of the biggest surprises of recent secret briefings on trouble spots around the globe was how unstable, exposed and dangerous Pakistan is. A nuclear neighbor that harbors terrorists injects all the more danger and uncertainty to the war on the other side of its border.

Joe Biden’s first trip abroad as vice President-elect included a stop in Afghanistan. When he returned home, he told Obama: “The truth is that things are going to get tougher in Afghanistan before they’re going to get better.”

If that’s true, Obama may in the end find muddle-through more attractive than victory.

DO DEFICITS MATTER?

In the short-run, Obama and his advisers believe, just like Bush and his advisers, that pumping up the economy is the top priority —budget deficits be damned.

But when does the short-run become the long-run?

Obama has said long-term, trillion-dollar deficits are “unsustainable.” His inaugural address warned about the need to cut programs that don’t work and make “hard choices.”

Does he really mean it? If so, the second half of Obama’s first term likely will be marked by austerity just as much as the first half is going to be marked by massive spending in the name of economic stimulus.

Embracing balanced budgets would also mean embracing steep cuts in weapons systems and entitlement programs, as well as curbing his ambitions for new initiatives in health care and energy. Tax hikes would also be part of the remedy.

With unpleasant medicine like this, Obama may instead find common cause with Democratic liberals and with Dick Cheney, who, according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, once dismissed GOP deficit hawks by saying that Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.

HOW FAST IS TOO FAST IN IRAQ?

The president says he still wants U.S. troops out of Iraq in 16 months. Tellingly, he always adds caveats that conditions and advice from commanders will dictate the pace. Defense Secretary Gates recently made this clear: “He also said he wanted to have a responsible drawdown. And he also said he was prepared to listen to his commanders. So, I think that that’s exactly the position the president-elect should be in.”

What if conditions change for the worse? Violence is way down and many of the most troubled areas are showing signs of stability. But this remains an extremely volatile region that could erupt in new bloodshed. Will Obama still cling to a speedy pull-out if it means the country could implode?

Obama met with his military commanders on Wednesday. But it’s anyone’s guess whose advice he’ll be listening to most closely, and which members of his heavyweight foreign policy team – within which there are significant disagreements over the Iraq war – will really have his ear.

WHAT’S IN THE FILES?

Any time someone criticized their policies on use of force, covert surveillance, or detention or interrogation of terrorism suspects, Bush and Cheney had an answer that was impossible for any outside critic to fully contend with: You don’t know what we know.

What they said they knew was top-secret intelligence showing how many people with murderous designs on the United States are roaming the planet, how imminent the threats are, or how effective controversial anti-terrorist programs had been in averting another attack. Since no one else could see the files, no one else could be on equal footing in deciding whether the administration was right or wrong.

Since Tuesday, Obama has all the same files, and all the same access to the nation’s top secrets, that Bush and Cheney ever did.

How will Obama react when he gets a constant morning diet of dire warnings? The president today moved to shut down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and end torture – and has surrounded himself with critics of both who are unlikely to tolerate backsliding. But it is not unfathomable that Obama has a “Few Good Men” moment and has to tell liberals and civil libertarians they can’t handle the truth – and that drastic steps sometimes need to be taken to avert disastrous consequences. What’s more, it is hardly a given that any president—no matter his philosophy—would wish to give up the expanded executive power that Bush claimed in the name of national security.

DO UNIONS WEAR WHITE HATS?

Obama, for the entire campaign, said all the right things when it comes to keeping peace with Big Labor. He praised the power and fairness of unions. He expressed skepticism about free trade agreements like NAFTA. Most of all, he proudly sponsored legislation to make it much easier for workers to unionize.

Lately, he sounds like a man rethinking his enthusiasm.

In a recent interview with the Washington Post, he suggested he would not aggressively push for legislation to free workers to easily unionize (the bill is known as the Employee Free Choice Act. “If we are losing half a million jobs a month, then there are no jobs to unionize.” Even Nancy Pelosi seems inclined to cut him some slack for a while on this one – but at some point the pressure will intensify and we will learn if this is truly a pro-union White House.

CAN U.S. POWER SAVE DARFUR?

Darfur will be the first test case - but almost certainly not the last one - in which we will learn just how strongly Obama believes his stated view that the United States should act aggressively when it can use its military power to stop genocide or other humanitarian catastrophes.

There is powerful momentum inside the Democratic Party to come to the aid of the suffering people of Darfur. Among the biggest advocates are two of Obama’s top advisers: Biden and U.N Ambassador-designate Susan Rice.

But with the military stretched thin, and with many others in his administration more skeptical about the use of force on problems that don’t directly threaten national security, nothing is likely to happen unless Obama puts his own influence and reputation strongly behind an intervention.

During the campaign, he signaled a willingness to intervene, but also cautioned: “There’s a lot of cruelty around the world. We’re not going to be able to be everywhere all the time.”

HOW MUCH DOES HE HAVE TO PLACATE THE LEFT?

In his inaugural speech, Obama spoke of tired ideologies and a time to think anew about policy and politics. That is easy to do if he simply means rejecting Bush’s idea. But he has suggested this rethinking will hit the left, too – that’s trickier.

Some times, Obama has been wiling to tick off the left. He picked Rick Warren, a Christian conservative, to deliver Tuesday’s opening prayer and filled his cabinet and staff mainly with centrists. Other times, he seems to bend to liberal frustration.

Obama nixed John Brennan’s appointment to be CIA director after anti-torture advocates expressed outrage over Brennan’s involvement in Bush-era interrogations. Brennan’s going to be working in the White House anyway, but not in any position that requires Senate confirmation. Obama also quickly moved to give a prime role to Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, an openly gay religious leader from New Hampshire, when liberals protested the choice of Warren to deliver the inaugural prayer.

Politically savvy liberal activists are an important reason Obama beat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic nominating contest, and a big reason he blew through all fund-raising records. It will be hard for Obama to govern without their enthusiasm, onthe other hand, it will be tough to reinvent politics if Obama is forced to routinely throw bouquets to the various factions of the Democratic Party.