Obama's New Hardline Approach

It's a good thing that President Obama has realized that the GOP (Great Obstructionist Party) won't deal in good faith with him on any measures to boost the economy. The Rethuglicans have calculated that if the economy remains weak, they win in 2012, and they're counting on low-information voters to blame the White House, rather than to look a little deeper at who was obstructing recovery efforts. Hopefully in a sign of things to come, Obama hit the Rethug millionaire tax "class warfare" nonsense head-on yesterday in a Rose Garden speech. As the Kaplan Daily's Dana Milbank noted:

"Let us begin by stipulating that President Obama’s new budget plan is unrealistic, highly partisan and a non-starter on Capitol Hill. That’s what’s so good about it. At last, the president hasn’t conceded the race before the starter’s gun, hasn’t opened the bidding with his bottom line, hasn’t begun a game of strip poker in his boxer shorts. Whichever metaphor you choose, it was refreshing to see the president in the Rose Garden on Monday morning delivering a speech that, for once, appealed to the heart rather than the cerebrum."

Indeed. The Dems will find that the majority of the public wants tax reform and the wealthiest to pay their fair share of taxes, particularly if programs for the middle class are going to suffer more cuts. Regardless of the legislative outcome, this is a losing philosophical fight for the Rethugs, who have been exposed as the party for the economic elites at the expense of the middle class.

Paul Ryan's "Class Warfare" ... on the Middle Class

Even as President Obama is stating his intention of getting the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share in taxes, Randian Rethug and Eddie Munster look-alike Rep. Paul Ryan (Galt-WI) is whining "class warfare!" Class warfare, indeed! It seems Munster... I mean Ryan and his Rethug oligarch patrons* are all too happy to engage in a little class warfare themselves, as long as it's the middle class continuing to get screwed.

* If you're a Rethuglican office holder in Wisconsin, you're by definition a "Koch-sucker."

(Photo: Munster/Ryan or Ryan/Munster?)

Quote of the Day

"For a generation, Republican policymakers have rigged national tax policy to reward the wealthy, and then reward them some more. We’ve seen the class gap reach Gilded Era levels, only to hear GOP officials again demand that working families 'sacrifice' while lavishing more breaks on the very wealthy. Remind me, who’s engaged in 'class warfare' and 'dividing people'”? -- Steve Benen in Washington Monthly, skewering the Rethuglican / New Confederate Party's "coddling of millionaires and billionaires," as Warren Buffett put it recently.

Despite polls showing an overwhelming majority of Americans want taxes raised on the highest incomes, the Rethugs continue to side with their wealthy benefactors against the middle class. As billionaire Buffett has also said, there's an economic class war underway, and the rich are winning it.