Rock. Boehner. Hard place.

Two items from The Hill show just how bad things are getting for the GOP leadership.

Two high profile conservative groups lashed out Monday at the counteroffer made by House Republican leaders to President Obama in the "fiscal cliff" negotiations.
 
“Republicans were reelected in the House to stop Pres. Obama's agenda, not figure out creative ways to fund it,” Dan Holler, communications director for Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told The Hill in an email.
 
And Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group partially funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, said the GOP offer “left conservatives wanting.”...The Hill

And this:

A majority of Americans would blame congressional Republicans if Washington fails to reach a deal in deficit talks to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” according to a new poll.

A Washington Post-Pew Research survey released Tuesday finds that 53 percent said they would blame Republicans, while 27 percent said President Obama would be at fault. ... ...The Hill

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The Tax Policy Center says there's no there there in the latest Republican proposal

Republicans have said that the $800 billion in new revenues would come from eliminating loopholes and deductions in a way that only targets those over $250,000. That way, Republicans can argue that their plan doesn’t hit the middle class, only the rich.

The problem, though, is that you’d have to eliminate virtually every significant loophole and deduction that benefits the wealthy to make this possible, according to Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Worse, if you also want to lower tax rates, as Republicans say they do, it would become even harder.

“If the tax rates are going to be lowered significantly, it’s harder and harder to hit that revenue target,” Williams told me, adding that until Republicans specified what sort of rate cuts they have in mind, it’s impossible to say whether this is even doable.

Williams added that to come within the ballpark of raising $800 billion in new revenues in this fashion, you’d probably have to pare back substantially or eliminate an enormous range of deductions, from the write-offs for employee provided health insurance, interest from municipal bonds, and money invested in retirement plans, to itemized deductions for charitable contributions, state and local taxes, and mortgage interest payments.

Good luck waiting for Congress to eliminate all of those. ...Greg Sargent, WaPo

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But in the long run, this news may have the greater impact on our future (and Republicans won't like it at all):

Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of the banking sector's harshest critics, is being tapped to serve on the Senate Banking Committee.

The Harvard law professor who built her public image primarily as a fierce critic of Wall Street will now play a lead role in monitoring it, after a source confirmed to The Hill that Warren has won a spot on the panel. ...The Hill

Comments

[Not Completely Useless]

The part I don't get is how the Republicans seem to think there's a qualitative difference between money raised by increasing tax rates and money raised by decreasing tax deductions. Talk about raising rates and they warn you the economy is going to collapse because "job creators" won't invest anymore. Talk about raising the same amount of money from the same people by decreasing deductions and they're fine with it. What's the difference, guys? None as far as I can tell.

[PW]

Lots of reasons for behaving like this, not excluding their proven party-wide mental illness -- the same brand of illness that too often turns into angry, destructive behaviors like taking a gun into a movie theatre and using it. Didn't used to be, but by now (thanks to Republican affiliates) this kind of embittered, messianic fury is more commonplace than we would have dreamed even as recently as the Reagan administration.

At the very least, they are confirmed obstructionists.

Their targets? The people who didn't vote for them. That includes the "librul" world of moochers like museums and education and eldercare and music and libraries and the disabled and the homeless and so on. All of these and plenty more will have to take the hit in their guts if donors cut back their contributions to non-profits on account of losing the tax advantage of donating. Besides, the political disadvantages to right -- the symbolism, and risks coming from upping a tax rate on the Adelsons and Kochs -- is more than they can handle.

Being rich, don't forget, means you're one of god's favorites.

Next question? Like, how about their being baby-eaters?

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html