Has the G.O.P. gone socialist?!

No, but it looks like that boner Boehner has finally seen that the vast majority of Americans are on the lower fringes of what we still call the "middle" class and seriously need money more than the folks who take bonuses (paid for with bailout money) while everyone else eats white rice and beans six nights a week. Maybe someone finally explained to him that the median income in this country is only 29% of his own $174,000 per annum Congressional salary.

Or, more likely, his new willingness to allow the tax cuts for the rich to expire is more about the self-interest of Republican Congressional reps to hang onto their power. I can just see Boehner slapping his forehead. "Oh, right. We're elected by majority vote, and the huge majority will never make $200,000. D'oh." Thanks to Obama for bringing this up now that we're fast approaching midterm elections. On the other hand, now it becomes harder to paint the GOP as the obstructionists and elitists that they are. But, then again, Obama finally gets some cred as someone who can achieve results across the chasm we call "the aisle."

Dog Training

In his new NYT column "Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back" Frank Rich recommends that Obama forcefully illustrate the class warfare that has been waged for decades in the U.S. You know, the redistribution of wealth that has resulted in the decimation of the middle class and the concentration of 25% of the nation's wealth into the hands of 1% of its people.

Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.

 Word.

Quote and Blogger of the Day: Matt Taibbi rips a new one for David Brooks

In his blog piece Let Them Eat Work, Matt Taibbi shreds David Brooks (NYT) for asserting in the latest Opinionator Blog (with Gail Collins) that, "for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?"

Matt's piece is so good I had trouble picking what to pull out as my Quote of the Day". After several reads I decided to honor this sentence:

If [Brooks] keeps this up, he’s going to make his way into the Guinness Book for having extended his tongue at least a foot and a halfp farther up the ass of the Times’s Upper East Side readership than any previous pundit in journalistic history.