Good afternoon, Daily Kos readers. This is your afternoon open thread to discuss all things Hill-related. Use this thread to praise or bash Congresscritters, share a juicy tip, ask questions, offer critiques and suggestions, or post manifestos.
Today's Most Important News of the Day™ is all about the Republican Dave Obey's seat.
Update: This is rotten timing. Sadly, I need to step away for a few hours. I'll be back to answer questions and drop mojo later. Sorry, everyone.
My thoughts are across the fold:
Thoughts and prayers today to the people of Haiti. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit the island nation yesterday and tore apart much of the infrastructure of already destitute country. It is the disaster of the century.
"It's the disaster of the century" for Haiti, Karel Zelenka, director of Catholic Relief Services in Port-au-Prince, told U.S. colleagues in a brief telephone call Wednesday morning before the line went dead. "We should be prepared for thousands and thousands of dead and injured."
If you have a cell phone, you can help out. The White House has posted, among other information, instructions for donating $10 to the Red Cross for relief efforts.
You can also help immediately by donating to the Red Cross to assist the relief effort. Contribute online to the Red Cross, or donate $10 to be charged to your cell phone bill by texting "HAITI" to "90999."
I did the text message thing last night and it is the easiest way I have found to donate money.
Meanwhile, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is asking the administration to grant temporary protected status to Haitian immigrants.
Temporary Protected Status is typically granted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to foreign nationals if conditions in their home country prevent them from returning safely.
It's the very least we can do. It would be inhumane to repatriate people to a disaster zone.
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In other news, Barney Frank is getting serious about limiting the take home pay of Wall Street executives.
Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he is looking at levying new taxes or fees on financial firms as well as ways to further empower shareholders to restrict pay.
"The question of compensation for people in the financial industry is a legitimate cause of concern," Frank said on Wednesday.
Frank called a hearing for Jan. 22 and said he is not convinced by arguments that restrictions would hurt the industry by forcing well-paid employees to go elsewhere.
Congressman Frank's position is laudable, but likely indefensible. He is, in essence, wanting to dictate the pay rate of a certain profession. Loathsome as these executives are, I can't see the federal government doing this. We don't limit the pay of lawyers, journalists, or used car salesmen. A better approach would be to continue shaming them for taking home such outrageous salaries while doing such a shitty job managing the financial system.
And that is precisely what the commission investigating the financial meltdown did yesterday:
The heads of Wall Street’s largest banks faced skeptical questions on Wednesday about executive pay and the failures of regulation from the bipartisan commission established to examine the causes of the biggest downturn since the Depression.
Tensions flared as commission members retraced the events leading to the near-collapse of the financial system in 2008 and pressed bankers on whether they or their employees had acted unethically.
But at least they are sorry about the whole thing.
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Is Byron Dorgan being offered a Cabinet position?
President Barack Obama has invited Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to the White House for a meeting in the coming weeks, stoking speculation that a Cabinet post may be next for the retiring senator.
Dorgan, an outspoken populist who announced this month that he plans to leave the Senate at the end of the year, has vowed not to go quietly.
Dorgan said in an interview he has no plans to drop his fight to allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and other countries, even though that would put Obama and Democratic leaders in an awkward spot.
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Maybe Dorgan can take Timmy G's job. He's facing some tough questions.
THE $182.3 billion (€126.5 billion) bailout of AIG is getting more costly by the day for the Obama administration. New revelations last week cast the spotlight back on Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary who played such a vital role in the credit crunch bailouts.
For all the attacks on the bailouts from Obama’s opponents, it’s worth remembering that this is a situation he inherited and the money started flowing under George Bush junior. But Geithner was Hank Paulson’s batman under Bush — so if anyone deserves flak, it’s him.
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In military news, President Obama is planning to ask for another $33 billion to fund the surge build up in Afghanistan.
The money, mainly for the deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and other war costs in the current 2010 fiscal year, would come on top of Obama's expected request to increase the Pentagon's overall budget in fiscal 2011 to a record $708 billion, the officials said on condition of anonymity.
Remember that the Bush Administration used supplementals and emergency spending to fund the wars without making the budget numbers look too awful. I hope this is a one-time thing and not an indication of how this administration plans to pay for combat operations.
Meanwhile, the Army is apparently so pressed for cooks that they are prosecuting a single mom who refused to deploy because she had no one to look after her 10-month-old son.
Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, a 21-year-old Army cook, refused to deploy to Afghanistan in November because she had no one to take care of her 10-month-old son. Hutchinson said when she brought her situation to her superiors’ attention, they told her that she would have to deploy anyway and place the child in foster care. "For her it was like, ‘I couldn’t abandon my child,’" her civilian attorney Rai Sue Sussman told the AP.
Spc. Hutchinson could get two years in prison and a dishonorable discharge.
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Ezra Klein ruminates on eliminating the filibuster entirely:
More broadly, one of the hopes of eliminating the filibuster is that it changes some of the forces encouraging lockstep party discipline. As the political scientist Barbara Sinclair has documented, the sharp rise in the filibuster came in the early-'90s, when Republicans decided to try and regain Congress by relentlessly obstructing the president's agenda. They succeeded, and neither party ever really looked back.
In the absence of the filibuster, that strategy loses much of its luster. The majority party looks like a failure if it can't get its agenda through Congress, or if its agenda is held up and broken up and slowed down and left to sit and amass opponents as the majority frantically compromises away its best features to reach 60 votes. But it's the minority party that looks like a failure if the majority party is able to pass its agenda smoothly and quickly, and then go to the American people atop a raft of accomplishments. And that's a lot easier to do if you need 51 votes rather than 60.
Personally, I would like to see the cloture threshold lowered to 55 votes or some sort of rule limiting the use of the filibuster.
Charlie Rangel puts it a lot more bluntly and sums up what we have been saying here for about year now.
"The Senate is just a pain in the ass to everybody in the world as far as I can tell. I’m so angry that I just wish from now on that we’d just find out what it is that Lieberman and Nelson will let us have," the senior lawmaker said. "But we’re not giving up on anything in the House."
Preach on!
Okay, maybe abolishing the filibuster is a non-starter since it would be the Senate voting on the rules change (and need 67 votes to do it). What about this idea?
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will begin talks this week with leading lawmakers about creating a bipartisan budget commission, an idea that has long languished in Congress but could become central to the Obama administration’s promise to reduce annual deficits.
The aim is to reach an agreement that could be a fallback if, as many expect, the Senate next Wednesday rejects a commission proposal from Senators Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the Democratic chairman and the senior Republican, respectively, on the Budget Committee. They want a panel to recommend budget cuts in time for Congress to vote after the November elections.
All I can say is good luck with that.
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Or there's Senate candidate Marco Rubio's plan to fix the economy.
Last night on CNBC, Marco Rubio, a right-wing Republican running for US Senate in Florida, told host Larry Kudlow about his "solutions to the high unemployment" and economic recession. Rubio chafed at responding with any actual ideas, policies, or solutions. In fact, Rubio proposed that if he were elected, he would call for "a two year recess or something" so no laws or reforms could be enacted:
What a great idea! Let's do absolutely nothing. Bonus: Rubio gets his new job as a Senator and doesn't go into the office for about two years, but still draws a paycheck. Brilliant!
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Finally, in The Most Important News of the Day™ David Obey has some rather interesting competition for his House seat. The chair of the House Appropriations Committee will either run against a tea party goon or a former star on "The Real World" and lumberjack champion.
National Republicans are excited about Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin district attorney and one-time "Real World" star who is attempting to unseat Rep. David Obey (D-WI). Duffy is raising money, nabbing mentions on conservative blogs and has earned attention on the National Republican Congressional Committee "young guns" list of potential stars.
But he's got a tea party candidate, produce and dairy farmer Dan Mielke, labeling him as the establishment's favorite at every turn.
No I'm not kidding. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that my campaign management class tells the students the first day that the most important thing to remember in a campaign is the date of election day. Therefore, this GOP primary could be good for some laughs. To wit:
The primary is Sept. 14 - a date Mielke had to look up during our interview.
Here's Rep. Obey's Act Blue page.
Have a good night, everyone.