Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!

Before we begin, I want to make it clear that the proposed draft from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is just the opinion of two men, one Republican Plutocon, who had been out to kill Social Security for decades, and one notorious DINO.  It is unlikely that anything anywhere near this will get the fourteen votes needed to recommend it.  I have read the entire report, and I am flabbergasted.  Not everything in the report is bad.  Some of the defense cuts and waste cuts made pretty good sense.  Bowles said they had “harpooned both whales and minnows”.  That is true.  What he did not say is that, if you happen to be a whale, your harpoon is a tooth pick, and if you happen to be a minnow, your harpoon is a telephone pole.  The lower your income, the more draconian the cuts will be.  Simpson and Bowles would balance the budget on the backs of the poor, the elderly, the sick, and working men and women.  The bottom 10% get a 50% tax increase, even before losing the automatic deduction.  When Obama appointed this commission, he did so early on in the false hope that Republicans would work together with Democrats for the good of the nation.  He screwed up!

The release Wednesday of a draft proposal for reducing the federal deficit made clear how hard it will be to devise a sustainable plan that can win the necessary political support.

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairmen of President Obama’s federal deficit commission, offered up a wide-ranging set of ideas that would bring $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade.

Their package touched every aspect of government, combining deep spending cuts with tax increases to eventually bring both expenditures and revenue to 21 percent of gross domestic product.

Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, called the scope of the initial plan "the first time in my memory of Washington … that it’s all there."

"We have harpooned every whale in the ocean," he told a news conference with Bowles, the former chief of staff for Democratic President Bill Clinton.

The draft plan will be debated and revised by the commission before a December 1 deadline, but immediate reaction ranged from cautious consideration to outright rejection on both the political right and left.

Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a liberal Democrat, called the proposal "simply unacceptable," and two Democratic commission members voiced initial opposition while a third mixed praise with serious reservations.

Retiring GOP Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a deficit hawk on the commission, called the draft plan "aggressive and comprehensive" but added he hoped it could be improved, while conservative tax reform advocate Grover Norquist flatly rejected any tax increases to reduce the deficit.

Obama, who is in Asia, was noncommittal, according to White House spokesman Bill Burton.

"The president will wait until the bipartisan fiscal commission finishes its work before commenting," said Burton, who called the draft "a step in the process towards coming up with a set of recommendations."

If 14 of the 18 commission members agree on a final plan, it will go up for a vote by the lame-duck Congress that serves until the end of the year. If not, the panel’s work will serve as the basis for continuing efforts to come up with legislation in the new Congress that will convene in January, this time with Republicans in control of the House.

Either way, a bitter political debate is certain… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <CNN>

Perhaps part of the reason it is so outrageous is that Corporocons and Plutocons donated staff.

…But the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has also come under attack for its unusual approach to staffing: Many of its employees aren’t employed by the panel at all.

Instead, about one in four commission staffers is paid by outside entities, many of which have strong ideological points of view about how to tackle the deficit.

For example, the salaries of two senior staffers, Marc Goldwein and Ed Lorenzen, are paid by private groups that have previously advocated cuts to entitlement programs. Lorenzen is paid by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, while Goldwein is paid by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is also partly funded by the Peterson group.

The outsourcing has come under sharp criticism from seniors’ organizations and liberal activists, who say the strategy is part of a broader conservative bias favoring painful entitlement cuts over other solutions. The fears of some liberal groups appeared to come true on Wednesday, when the commission’s two leaders recommended significant reductions for Social Security and other social-welfare programs… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Washington Post>

How’s that for bias?

Obama should have staked out a Democratic policy in advance, instead of using something as a starting point that is skewed so far to the right that it would make Himmler blush!  The best video coverage of this I have found is from Keith Olbermann, who devoted two segments of his show to it.  In the first, he and Representative Anthony Weiner discuss the Commission’s preference for targeting those who are least responsible for the mess and most hurt by the recommendations.

In the second, he and Howard Fineman discuss reactions and the unlikelihood that anything like this will get the needed fourteen votes.

Obama needs to realize, once and for all, that bipartisanship will cost him his job and cost us out future.

As the resident , please know that this is NOT my cat food!