But it's worth at least a few notes. First, the White House is sticking to what it believes the economy and the country require. President Obama's opening proposal was delivered to Congress by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and quickly leaked to the press by GOPers in the act of rejecting it. The Washington Post:
President Obama offered Republicans a detailed plan Thursday for averting the year-end “fiscal cliff” that calls for $1.6 trillion in new taxes, $50 billion in fresh spending on the economy and an effective end to congressional control over the size of the national debt.
But it also offered some $60 billion in budget cuts and savings, which GOPers lied about before they rejected it. GOPer congressional leadership had hissy fits over it, but don't seem able to come up with their own proposals, only demands on what the President should and shouldn't propose.
A few days later comes word (at least unofficially) that President Obama and the Dems are not going to make another proposal until GOPers agree to higher taxes on the wealthy. And why should they? Several polls show strong public support for it, and Warren Buffett went public again with a minimum tax proposal for the rich.
President Obama is out making speeches about this tax proposal, but also supporting the bill the Senate passed to make sure the tax cuts for the middle class remain past January 1. A couple of GOPers in the House said publicly the GOPer should take this deal right away, but the leadership is balking, or perhaps just floundering.
On Friday, House Dem Leader Nancy Pelosi said if the House leadership doesn't schedule the Senate bill for a vote, she would circulate a discharge petition, which would overrule the leadership and bring it to the floor. The petition requires 218 votes and therefore some GOPer support, and while it is unlikely to get 218 right away, it will be there as an alternative as time goes on and the cliff gets closer. Once it gets to the floor, it will be hard even for GOPers to vote against a tax break for 98% of the population.
Meanwhile, Michael Grunwald at Time called out the media for its mindless reporting on GOPer hypocrisy and nonsense (as Rachel did last week) :
"Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.
I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama. (The deficit is now shrinking.) It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened.
Whatever. I realize that the GOP’s up-is-downism puts news reporters in an awkward position. It would seem tendentious to point out Republican hypocrisy on deficits and Medicare and stimulus every time it comes up, because these days it comes up almost every time a Republican leader opens his mouth. But we’re not supposed to be stenographers. As long as the media let an entire political party invent a new reality every day, it will keep on doing it. Every day."
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