Both also should serve as wake-up calls to those know-nothings and kleptocrats who reject the value of government and would like it rendered down to nothingness -- the helpless infant that Eric Cantor, Grover Norquist and their pals wish to see drowned in the bathtub.

I've never been through a major earthquake, although I've experienced some minor tremors, the first early on a New Year's Day in upstate New York while I was still a teenager. Just as you read about in animal behavior books, the dog, lying at the foot of my bed, apparently sensed something was up, jumped off and scurried out of the room mere seconds before the shaking began. Not a word of warning from her. So much for man's best friend.

Continue Reading...

From the Washington Post:

Continue Reading...

Meanwhile, John Boehner, the speaker of the House, gave his five-step "two-step" plan to famous shouty radio guy Rush Limbaugh, before he showed it to his own conference. (Of course, his conference is full of morons and extremists, many of whom wouldn't have known what to think about Boehner's plan until Uncle Rush explained it, so this was more shrewd than disrespectful.)

Continue Reading...

Am I the only Jew in America who finds the House majority leader deeply embarrassing to our people? Am I the only tribe member who considers this smarmy yutz today’s numero-uno shonda fur die goyim?

Shonda what?

* * *

My father used to tell us a morality tale. Not long after the events of November 22 and 24, 1963, our rabbi attended an interfaith meeting of clergymen from our midsize New Jersey town. He later reported to his congregation a conversation he’d had at the gathering. “The Protestant minister,” Dad would say, “said to the rabbi, ‘I see one of your people got Lee Harvey Oswald.’ Jack Ruby was Jewish, you know. [Right, Dad, I know from the other 18 times you’ve told me the story.] And the rabbi said, ‘Yes, and I see one of yours got the president.’”

Continue Reading...

The report, "Polluting Democracy: Coal Plays Dirty on the Hill," reveals that these Congress members are also among the biggest recipients of funding from the fossil fuel industry on the Hill.

Greenpeace notes, "this report provides a sampling of the actions of a bipartisan cadre of 15 politicians, who are among those in the House of Representatives working for America’s dirty and decrepit coal-fired power industry. These 15 members have tried to stop EPA from modernizing standards for pollutants that come predominantly from coal-fired power plants, including mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, greenhouse gases, and coal ash."

Among the 15 politicians pointed out by Greenpeace, these five caught our eye:

Continue Reading...

The failed vote was a huge surprise, and naturally attention focused on the role of  the House GOP leadership. Nancy Pelosi had managed to deliver most of her caucus, even though the prospect of bailing out Wall Street's biggest financial institutions made most Democrats sick to their stomachs. But 133 House Republicans had voted no. At the time, Eric Cantor was deputy minority whip -- his job was to wrangle votes. Although now he would like to pretend it never happened, he supported TARP and voted for it. So where did the train run off the tracks?

Continue Reading...

The presidential warning, directed at House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., marked an acrimonious end to a two-hour negotiating session at the White House that produced no evident progress toward a compromise.

Another round of talks is set for Thursday.

With a threatened default less than three weeks away, Moody's Investors Service announced it was reviewing the U.S. bond rating for a possible downgrade, and the Treasury said the annual deficit was on a pace to exceed $1 trillion for the third year in a row.

With the negotiations at a seeming standstill, Republicans drew a warning of a different sort, from an unlikely source -- the party's Senate leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

In an interview with radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham, McConnell warned fellow conservatives that failure to raise the debt limit would probably ensure Obama's re-election in 2012.

Continue Reading...

Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, had between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury EFT. The fund aggressively "shorts" long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, meaning that it performs well when U.S. debt is undesirable. (A short is when the trader hopes to profit from the decline in the value of an asset.)

According to his latest financial disclosure statement, which covers the year 2010 and has been publicly available since this spring, Cantor still has up to $15,000 in the same fund. Contacted by Salon this week, Cantor's office gave no indication that the Virginia Republican, who has played a leading role in the debt ceiling negotiations, has divested himself of these holdings since his last filing. Unless an agreement can be reached, the U.S. could begin defaulting on its debt payments on Aug. 2. If that happens and Cantor is still invested in the fund, the value of his holdings would skyrocket.

Continue Reading...

One popular analysis: There's a split in the Republican camp! Speaker of the House John Boehner knows that revenue increases have to be included in any deal, and Cantor wants to avoid any taint of any such heresy. And then, once the deal is done, Cantor will lead a coup to depose the apostate.

Continue Reading...

The Virginia Republican said in a statement that the Republican-dominated House simply won't support tax increases, and that he wouldn't participate in the budget meeting scheduled for Thursday. Cantor said that it's time for President Barack Obama to weigh in directly on the budget because Democrats insist on negotiating some tax increases.

A spokesman for Jon Kyl of Arizona, who's representing Senate Republicans in the talks, said Kyl would not attend Thursday's scheduled meeting either.

The moves seem aimed at drawing Obama more directly into the talks. Cantor expressed frustration earlier this week that the president had not been more involved. Whether the tactic generates hard feelings that could jeopardize an agreement remains to be seen.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Why isn't Washington responding?

The world's third largest economy suffers a giant earthquake, tsunami, and radiation dangers. A civil war in Libya and tumult in the Middle East cause crude-oil prices to climb. Poor harvests around the world make food prices soar.

All this means higher prices. American consumers, still reeling from job losses and wage cuts, will be hit hard. (Wholesale food prices surged almost 4 percent in February, the largest upward spike in more than a quarter century.)

Even before these global shocks the U.S. recovery was fragile. Consumer confidence is at a five-month low. Housing prices continue to drop. More than 14 million Americans remain jobless, and the ratio of employed to our total population is at an almost unprecedented low.

So you might think our elected representatives would want to avoid a repeat of what happened the second half of 2010 when the fragile recovery began tanking. They'd certainly want to prevent a double-dip recession.

Continue Reading...

The Daily Caller reports:

When the House Republican leaders arrive at the White House to meet with President Obama for lunch Wednesday, Majority Leader Eric Cantor plans to tell the president that he may still not understand how business works in America.

Cantor told reporters Tuesday that if given the opportunity, he will explain to the president that businesses do not have a "responsibility" to the nation or to the government in the way Obama explained in his speech to the Chamber of Commerce earlier this week.

"If we're going to correct the ailing economy, and put us back on the path to growth, we're going to have to create an environment that businesses will want to come here. Will want to deploy capital here. Will want to invest in research and innovation here. That's how we lead in America," Cantor said. "It's not because Washington says, 'Go do that,' and businesses then go and do that. That's not who we are. So again, I'll have hopefully this discussion with the president tomorrow."

Continue Reading...

Two years into the Obama administration, so-called birthers continue to argue that Obama isn't a natural-born citizen and that he hasn't proved he's constitutionally qualified to be president. Birth records in Hawaii haven't dissuaded them.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says he believes Obama is a citizen and that most Americans are beyond that question.

Appearing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Cantor refused to call people who question Obama's citizenship "crazy," saying it's not nice to call anyone crazy.

Cantor says he believes that Obama wants what's best for the country and that there are honest disagreements over how to achieve that.

Continue Reading...

No longer can Republicans snipe from the sidelines, free of any responsibility to govern. For the past two years they've had little compunction about declaring responsibility for every perceived bad economic indicator -- every upward blip in the unemployment rate, every slip in value of the American dollar -- to be the fault of the Democrats ostensibly running the show. Never mind that the roots of the crisis that crushed the U.S. economy go back decades and were nourished by policy decisions enacted by both parties. The reality of American politics is that we are always living in the instantly sound-bitten present. If Obama almost immediately "owned" the horrible economy he inherited from George W. Bush, then Boehner et al. should be equally culpable for anything that happens tomorrow.

Continue Reading...

Soon-to-be GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor met on Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- the same day when the actual U.S. Secretary of State met with Netanyahu -- and vowed that he and his GOP colleagues would protect and defend Israeli interests against his own Government.  According to a statement proudly issued by Cantor's own office:

Regarding the midterms, Cantor may have given Netanyahu some reason to stand firm against the American administration.

"Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington," the readout continued. "He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other."

Continue Reading...

The Atlantic magazine reported last week that Ohio Republican Rich Iott has participated in the reenactments wearing a Waffen-SS uniform since 2003. Iott says he has been a historical reenactor in other venues for many years.

House Republicans' No. 2 leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, says he repudiates Iott's actions and would not support someone who would do that.

Cantor's remarks came after Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida cited Iott as an example of GOP candidates she said are extreme.

Cantor and Wasserman Schultz appeared on "Fox News Sunday."

Continue Reading...

Granted, we've been hearing some variation of this message all year. But it's acquired new urgency with the release of a Gallup poll that shows Republicans leading Democrats in a generic congressional ballot test by 10 points -- the biggest GOP advantage ever measured in the poll -- and a new projection from Larry Sabato, the election forecaster from the University of Virginia, that Republicans will gain 47 House seats this fall, more than enough to take back the chamber. And Nate Silver has upgraded the likelihood of a Republican Senate takeover to 20 percent -- a startlingly high number when you consider how many seats the GOP needs to pick up to pull it off.

Continue Reading...

But the best part of this is not that Eric Cantor obviously wants America to fail, it's that he's a bad investor -- inflation is nonexistent and the Fed will likely keep interest rates near zero for the rest of the year, and possibly beyond. Cantor bought the shares in December. According to the Washington Independent's Annie Lowrey, "the fund is down 31 percent this year."

(Cantor might assume that bonds will collapse, the government will default, and America will collapse into chaos because sometimes bullets randomly rain from the sky into buildings he rents.)

Continue Reading...

Not because it's actually reined in federal spending; that's not really the point, since House Republicans don't have the power to do that, and since even if every one of the programs Cantor put up for a vote was zeroed out, the federal budget would only shrink by .16 percent. And Cantor only wants to try to take out one of the five programs people can vote on this week, anyway. (UPDATE: Cantor's office points out, correctly, that the GOP could cut the spending if enough Democrats joined with them; I didn't mean to imply they couldn't force a vote, which they can. But it's unlikely they'll actually win it. And even if they did, the Democratic-run Senate -- which can rarely be roused to pass any legislation these days -- would have to go along with it.)

Continue Reading...