Visual source: Newseum
Dana Milbank on congressional fiddling:
Where are the jobs?
God knows.
After preaching for weeks about the urgency of Washington taking action to create jobs, lawmakers decided to put their mammon where their mouths are. And so on Tuesday evening they descended from the mountaintop and came forth to anoint a jobs bill of biblical proportions:
“H.Con.Res 13 — Reaffirming ‘In God We Trust’ as the official motto of the United States.”
Speaking of fiddling while Rome burns, Katrina vanden Heuvel takes a close look at the super committee's lack of progress:
Congress has now achieved the remarkable feat of making itself less popular than Wall Street bankers.
And the way it is heading, it hasn’t hit bottom yet — there’s still 9 percent of the public that approves of the job the legislators are doing. [...]
A vast majority want Congress focused on jobs. They want Medicare and Social Security protected, not cut. They want taxes raised on the wealthy and on Wall Street. They want the wars ended, the troops brought home and the money saved to be devoted to rebuilding America. The most sensible decision of the supercommittee would be to disband so Congress can reconsider the disastrous debt ceiling deal.
Turning to horserace politics, Maureen Dowd sums up the state of the GOP race:
We have the starchy guy — tall, handsome, intelligent and rich, with a baronial estate — who’s hard to warm up to. And we have the spontaneous guy, who’s charming and easy to warm up to — until it turns out that he has an unsavory pattern with young women and a suspect relationship with facts.
It’s the Republican primary. Or “Pride and Prejudice.” Take your pick.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s not the scandal that kills you; it’s the cover-up. Herman Cain has added a corollary: It’s not the cover-up that kills you; it’s the cascade of malarkey that spills out when you try to cover up the cover-up.
Meanwhile, Josh Kraushaar argues that the Democrats' new-found love for populist rhetoric may help them reconnect with 2006 and 2008 voters:
Democrats have been rediscovering their inner populist lately. President Obama is calling on the wealthiest Americans to pay their “fair share” in taxes. Elizabeth Warren, campaigning for the Senate in Massachusetts, has become a rising star by bluntly criticizing the business class. And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a petition last month aimed at leveraging the Occupy Wall Street movement against the Republican Party.
But the clearest test for whether Democrats can sell a message centered on income inequality won’t be in the presidential race, where Obama’s chances of victory depend heavily on the mood of upscale, white-collar professionals. Rather, the battle for the hearts and minds of the working-class will take place in the House race battlefields, where Democrats can’t afford to write off blue-collar voters if they hope to win the 25 seats they need to recapture the majority.[...] While Democrats aren’t going to win back many of those seats given the districts’ conservative orientation, they’re betting that a message decrying income inequality can put some of them in play.
Here's a topic that gets far too little attention: poverty. Bill Gates writes in The Washington Post about the need for foreign aid (he's looking at you, Republicans):
Fifty years ago, almost 20 million children under the age of 5 died every year. In 2010, the figure was down to 7.6 million . This 60 percent decline in childhood deaths — reflecting advances in agriculture, education, health and sanitation — is compelling evidence of the increasing justice in our world.
But the global economic crisis is putting the long-term trend of progress at risk, as Congress’s debates about the foreign aid budget underscore.
Tina Rosenberg chimes in at The New York Times:
Many countries that donate emergency food aid are moving away from shipping bags of food and toward using vouchers or other methods for local purchase. (The World Concern program is financed by Canada Foodgrains Bank and the Canadian government.) The United Nations World Food Program is also using cash, vouchers and electronic transfers ― often by cell phone ― when circumstances allow. Vouchers solve many of the serious problems that have always plagued in-kind food aid: food can get to the hungry quickly; there are no transport or storage costs; it works in dangerous situations; it allows recipients to buy the food they want and increases the welcome for refugees and contributes to the local economy. Aid is multiplied as it helps not only recipients, but merchants. For example, Catholic Relief Services responded to floods in Benin with a program that gives villagers vouchers they can use to buy grains, legumes and oil from local small vendors ― usually women who sell tiny quantities of goods in outdoor markets. Without the voucher business, these women would be almost as poor as their new customers.