Friends of Putin infiltrate the GOP mainstream as the left has lost its mind

Thirty House Democratic Congress members have signed a letter urging Biden to negotiate with Putin over Ukraine as they unwittingly join forces with the extreme right. That is a de facto unholy alliance for the books.

Has the left lost their blithering minds.? .What a gift to Putin, just when he needs it and is losing the war. ...and yes, do not include the Ukrainians in the process...and we will have peace in our time.

The right already lost their minds as they talk about defunding the Ukranians if they get into power.

That must have been music to Putin's ears. He will now just have to sit back and wait for the GOP to take over the House and for Ukraine and Europe to give into the cold weather of Putin's drone attacks and fuel deprivation to belly up in their support for Ukraine's brave resistance to the Russian invasion. Fortunately, for the sake of US national security interests, the left will have to buck Biden to get their way. He has resolved to support Ukraine until they win or are ready to negotiate in their own interest. Pacifying Putin only means we will have to take on his expansionist lust elsewhere, destabilizing all of Europe, including the Balkans. Other bad actors in the world looking to grab territory will learn a valuable lesson: Just wait for the US to cave in even while it is winning. What's next? Formosa and Southeast Asia?

History repeats itself: Before Pearl Harbor, American Firsters were a powerful voice in US politics, keeping the US out of the raging aggression of Hitler and firestorms killing thousands in the London Blitz. Hitler made the calculation that the US would stay out of the war because of the strong tisolationist voice raised in the US. The American Firsters were acting like friends of Hitler. We know how that ended. Here we go again: McCarthy defends the ‘blank check’ remark on Ukraine | The Hill McCarthy must have felt the heat from his extreme right flank as he looks forward to being the House speaker. Per the Hill article, "While a majority of Republicans have supported giving aid to Ukraine, a solid anti-interventionist contingent of the House Republican Conference has expressed opposition to sending more dollars to support its defense. Influential outside groups like Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, have lobbied against some Ukraine funding measures. In May, 57 House Republicans voted against a $40 billion security supplemental for Ukraine".These forces are acting like Friends of Putin.

Complicating it all is the 2022 growth of the equivalent of the 1940 American firsters simply because they like the idea of an autocracy run by Trump. Trump's bromance with Putin permeated his presidency and those who take their political cues from whatever comes from Trump's mouth are the Friends of Putin who are feeling their oats in shaping the Grand Old Party's policies.

For the GOP, it is the same old song..stop government spending on foreign stuff and social programs and "government waste," and we will reduce the deficit, a great part of which they engineered themselves with their unfunded tax cuts to the rich when they were in the driver's seat. It is also bad timing since the deficit has decreased dramatically even with the aid the US is giving to Ukraine and even with the Biden administration's spending programs. The 2022 deficit of $1.375 trillion was half of the FY 2021 deficit, $40 billion less than forecasted in the President's 2023 Budget and $1.8 trillion lower than the deficit the President inherited. As a percentage of GDP, the FY 2022 deficit was 6.8 percentage points lower than in the previous year. Unlike the unfunded tax breaks to the rich of the GOP's enacted policies, Biden's spending had real pay fors, reducing the costs of Medicare to the government by requiring pharma to compete for bids and tax increases on the rich.

Thirty Dems, including AOC, call for Biden to negotiate with Putin (nypost.com)

McCarthy defends ‘blank check’ remark on Ukraine | The Hill

GOP: SAME TUNE, JUST WORSE

My column appearing in the Sky Hi Daily News on line edition May 17 2011 (note: in my submission to the newspaper, I did not call Boehner a bonehead.  I do consider the policies he supports to be boneheaded...but the editor repositioned the word in published version.  I have a great deal of respect for the
difficult tasks with which John Boehner is confronted and the adroitness he has demonstrated in meeting the challenges)

Now that the Bin Laden takedown is already fading to Page 2 and birthers have lost credibility, the economy is a cause cèlébre once again as the GOP sits down with Vice President Joe Biden to make the effort to hammer out a compromise.

Did John Boehner, speaker of the house, commit a bonehead move when he kicked off GOP strategy at an economics forum May 10? He raised the ante for conditions to agree to increase the debt limit while ignoring other serious plans. Hopefully this is only a position strengthening exercise prior to negotiations. Surely Republicans are not so irresponsible they would risk crashing the economy if they failed to get their way 100 percent. 

The Boehner address reminded me of that old camp sing song: “same song, second verse; could get better but it's gonna get worse.” 

He renewed the idea of holding the debt ceiling hostage on terms that were more of the same as yore, adding zeros to some figures and including some twists that others had long ago dissed . 

The prior GOP hostage deal was that they would lift the debt ceiling only if the president would present a “serious debt reduction plan.” 

The president proposed one, but the Republicans said it was only a speech that had not been put into an introduced budget bill and, in any case, included tax increases . They further upped the ante by adding cuts to current budget discussions to the hostage list.

Republicans probably hoped you would not remember that the Obama proposal would reduce the deficit by nearly the same as the plan House Republicans just approved without destroying Medicare as we know it. 

The key provision of the Obama plan, a trigger to force Congress to approve a plan to reduce the deficit if no progress was made by 2014, was simply blown off by Boehner because it did not rule out tax hikes, it kicked the can down the road, and he wanted to be specific about cuts now.

Boehner raised the hostage terms from cutting billions to cutting trillions in the long term, demanding more cuts than the amount the debt ceiling is raised.

Read Boehner's lips: “No new taxes.” Only cuts are acceptable. This is in spite of Obama's plan proposing $3 in cuts for every one dollar in tax hikes. The Simpson-Bowles debt commission and the gang of six in the Senate, including some heavy weight Republicans, came to the conclusion we could not reduce the deficit significantly without some tax increases

Boehner kept the Ryan plan on the table — the unpopular proposal House GOP members are all on the record as approving — which would substitute guaranteed Medicare benefits with vouchers that contain no guarantees they would keep up with escalating costs. The GOP still plots to kill “Obamacare,” thus eliminating health care cost containment provisions of the law, removing the $400 billion it saves to the Medicare system, and restoring the donut hole in drug benefits charged to seniors.

However, Boehner toned down support for the Ryan proposal by saying that everything is on the table except tax increases. What he put on the table was a warmed-over dinner: revival of the old GOP proposal to cut Medicare benefits to the wealthy. This is no more than a riff on the old GOP tune. 

Bonehead Boehner may have committed his insistence on Republicans being specific about what additional cuts they intend to make to meet their upped ante. Could it be they do not want more poster children of GOP heartlessness for Democrats to exploit?

Another bonehead move is that the hostage Boehner insists on holding to the debt ceiling issue is feeble. Republicans dare not execute it because it would wreck the economy, at least according to most economists. Most Republicans understand the risk and do not care to have it haunt them in 2012.