Tag Archives: mitch

Negotiating With Republicans != Negotiating With Tea Partiers

by KlaraGuzm Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Megan McArdle was pretty unimpressed with President Obama’s press conference following the Democrats’ midterm defeat. “No one reasonable expected the president to grovel,” she says, but surely he could have adopted a more conciliatory tone?

Most notably, of course, he said he would take executive action on immigration by year’s end unless Republicans passed a bill. It’s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I’ll go ahead and do what I want anyway. This is how you “negotiate” with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader.

I’m not sure that isn’t what Obama thinks he’s doing….But Mitch McConnell is not a seven year old….McConnell is not the proverbial Tea Party extremist who won’t negotiate; he’s an establishment guy, known as a strategist and a tactician, not an ideologue (which is why the Tea Party isn’t that fond of him). In short, he’s someone who can make deals. Responding to McConnell’s rather gracious remarks about finding common goals by announcing that you know what the American public wants, and you’re going to give it to them no matter what their elected representatives say, seems curiously brash. It might chill the atmosphere today when he sits down with congressional leaders.

I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans….

I’m not here to defend Obama’s negotiating record. I’d rate it higher than McArdle, probably, but it’s obviously not one of Obama’s strong suits. Still, she’s rather pointedly ignoring the elephant in the room here.

As near as I can tell, Obama has regularly demonstrated the ability to negotiate with Mitch McConnell. Not perfectly, and not without plenty of hiccups, but they can do business when the incentives are strong enough. In fact, they did do business on immigration reform. A year ago the Senate passed a comprehensive bill 68-32. Here’s what Obama said about McConnell on Wednesday:

My interactions with Mitch McConnell, he has always been very straightforward with me. To his credit, he has never made a promise that he couldn’t deliver. And he knows the legislative process well. He obviously knows his caucus well — he has always given me, I think, realistic assessments of what he can get through his caucus and what he can’t. And so I think we can have a productive relationship.

The unnamed elephant in the room, obviously, is John Boehner and the tea party caucus in the House. Boehner has repeatedly shown that he can’t control his own caucus and can’t deliver a deal of any sort. That’s not because either Obama or Boehner are incompetent negotiators, it’s because the tea partiers are flatly unwilling to compromise in any remotely constructive way. So when Obama adopts a combative tone on immigration, it’s aimed at Boehner, who really does have the miserable job of trying to ride herd on a bunch of erratic and willful seven-year-olds—as he himself has admitted from time to time.

Does Obama know how to negotiate with Republicans? Sure. Does he know how to negotiate with tea party extremists? Hard to say. But then again, even John Boehner hasn’t figured out how to do that. Perhaps Obama’s playground style hit-them-over-the-head approach is about as good as it gets.

Read this article:  

Negotiating With Republicans != Negotiating With Tea Partiers

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Negotiating With Republicans != Negotiating With Tea Partiers

The Filibuster Isn’t Going Away, It’s Just Changing Parties

by ROWDarcisvg Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Danny Vinik says that with Democrats soon to be the minority party in the Senate, Harry Reid will employ the filibuster just as much as Mitch McConnell ever did:

Reid has a history of supporting the filibuster when in the minority and criticizing it when in the majority. There’s no reason to expect that to change with McConnell as majority leader.

And that’s a good thing. If Republicans are going to reap the political benefits of indiscriminate filibustering, then Democrats should do so as well. The advantage of filibustering is that it allows a party to block progress without taking all of the blame for it, for the simple reason that most of the public—and, surprisingly, most of the media—don’t realize that filibusters are basically thwarting majority rule. Presidential vetoes, on the other hand, are easy for the public and media to understand and easy to appropriate blame. If Democrats relinquished the tool now, they’d give up a chance to make the same sort of gains. It’d be the equivalent of unilateral disarmament.

Agreed. In fact, it never even occurred to me that Democrats might use the filibuster any less than Republicans have over the past six years. The GOP has taught a master class in the virtues of obstruction, and there’s no reason to think that Democrats haven’t learned the lesson well. The only question is whether Reid will be able to hold his caucus together as well as McConnell held together his.

Actually, I take that back. That’s not the only question. Here’s the one I’m really curious about: will the media treat Democratic filibusters the same way they treated Republican filibusters? To put this more bluntly, will they treat Dem filibusters as routine yawners barely worth mentioning? Or, alternatively, will they treat them not as expressions of sincere dissent against an agenda they loathe, but as nakedly cynical ploys employed by vengeful and bitter Democrats for no purpose other than exacting retribution against Mitch McConnell? Just asking.

Link:

The Filibuster Isn’t Going Away, It’s Just Changing Parties

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Filibuster Isn’t Going Away, It’s Just Changing Parties

"More Money Than I Could Count": Mitch McConnell’s Very Special Relationship With Lobbyists

by KatheriTonga Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

There may be no Washington lawmaker cozier with K Street than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). DC law firms and lobbying shops are stuffed with ex-McConnell staffers and pals. And he uses them well to preserve his power and position. As the conservative National Review reported, “McConnell has often exercised power in DC by pressuring major donors to withhold donations from a given lawmaker or organization. His allies on K Street are often the people who deliver this message and ‘enforce’ it.” The stats below show just how close McConnell is with the well-heeled lobbyists of Washington, DC—a relationship that no doubt will serve both sides well, should the GOP win the Senate and McConnell become its majority leader.

See original:

"More Money Than I Could Count": Mitch McConnell’s Very Special Relationship With Lobbyists

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on "More Money Than I Could Count": Mitch McConnell’s Very Special Relationship With Lobbyists

GOP Obstruction Is Making It Harder To Catch Rapists—Mitch McConnell Would Rather Not Talk About It

by AllanThurston Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will not say if he will stop blocking a major spending bill in the Senate that contains funding to help identify and prosecute rapists—or whether he would support a separate bill to break the log jam.

As I reported last week, since June, Senate Republicans have held up a $180 billion appropriations bill that would fund several federal agencies, including the Department of Commerce, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Justice. Part of the funding allotted for the DoJ is supposed to go toward a $41 million grant to help states and localities go after rapists by funding jurisdictions to process backlogs of rape kits, the samples of DNA evidence that are taken after a sexual assault and used to identify assailants. There are over 100,000 untested kits waiting to be processed at crime labs and police departments around the country, partly because states and localities don’t have enough money to test them. The kits can go untested for decades, allowing countless rapists off the hook.

The sweeping spending bill has hit a wall in the Senate because McConnell and other Senate Republicans want Dems to let them add several unrelated amendments to the legislation. The amendment McConnell introduced would make it harder for the EPA to enact new rules on coal-fired power plants. Democrats have complained that GOPers are abusing the amendments process to hold up a bill they don’t like. “Regardless of the outcome of the amendment votes…Republicans have indicated that they are not willing to support the underlying bill,” a Senate staffer told me last week.

On Tuesday, the Louisville, Ky. Courier-Journal asked McConnell if he would withdraw his amendment, which would indicate that he and fellow Republicans would be willing to vote for the underlying bill, including the $41 million in funding to process rape kit backlogs. McConnell dodged the question. His office did not respond when Mother Jones asked the same question this week.

Lawmakers may be able to add the rape kit funding into an temporary spending measure in October. However, neither McConnell’s office nor Republicans on the House and Senate appropriations committees will say whether they would support doing so.

Continue at source – 

GOP Obstruction Is Making It Harder To Catch Rapists—Mitch McConnell Would Rather Not Talk About It

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on GOP Obstruction Is Making It Harder To Catch Rapists—Mitch McConnell Would Rather Not Talk About It

John Oliver Explains Why He Attacked Mitch McConnell With an Old, Wrinkly Penis

by ConnieMobley Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

On Sunday’s episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver and his crew got… graphic.

During one of the segments, Oliver discussed the state of the American political attack ad, and argued that as more money floods into the system, the quality of the ads declines. He said that the only way attack ads could get any worse would be if they were shown on cable TV, which doesn’t have to abide by network content standards. To demonstrate the point, the LWT crew made a pair of fake attack ads for the Kentucky Senate race between Alison Lundergan Grimes and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“For too long, politics in Washington have been dominated by old, white, wrinkled dicks,” the narrator says in the fake anti-McConnell ad. “And no dick is older, whiter, or wrinklier than Mitch McConnell’s.”

And then viewers are treated to a shot of an old, wrinkled penis that is supposed to represent Mitch McConnell.

Watch:

Try unseeing that. You can’t.

Anyway, I talked to Oliver on Tuesday to get the inside scoop on the humor and the horror that is his show’s old, wrinkly attack ad. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation:

MJ: Whose idea was it, if you recall, and whose penis did you use?

JO: Okay, those are two excellent questions. The first one, I’m not sure, and it might help to just go with collective responsibility. I don’t want to go with a sort of “I am Spartacus” moment but I think plausible deniability might be useful at that point. The second is the much more interesting question. And that is that, of course, you do need to cast a penis. And to do that you have to be presented with a selection of penii—I don’t know if that’s the collective term. And so then what you’re looking for—it’s amazing—when you look at then you start judging them for the purpose, because you want something that is funny but not sad. Because, you know, a sad penis does not help the comedy. No, it makes you think about the person the penis is attached to. So really, you just want a representative old man penis. And I’m not sure that sentence…has ever been said out loud before…We got to one that we liked, and the owner of that penis was generous enough to model it for us.

MJ: How did you get to one you liked? Like, what is the process of “getting” penii?

JO: We went through photos. It was basically the penis version of a headshot.

MJ: So this was like models?

JO: Models, basically. And you go through and say, “This one’s good, this one’s good, let’s get down to a short-list. Okay, it’s between these three. Um. I like this one.” And then what you do is you make a decision, you walk out of a room, and you stare out a window and question what the fuck you’re doing with your life…That’s basically how it goes.

MJ: I’m assuming you weren’t in the room when they shot it?

JO: I actually wasn’t because we were having to write…But apparently the man was very happy…I just came back and our editor, she had to live with that footage for a few days, but she did a fantastic job.

MJ: Has she recovered, psychologically?

JO: Yeah, she was very good. She’s called Cori McKenna, and she actually edited both the commercials…The other commercial was basically a chainsaw massacre in a mine involving a kitten, and I think she found that slightly less alarming to cut together than a sequence of beautiful tracking shots of an old man’s junk.

So there you have it.

My full interview with Oliver with be featured on Friday’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, so stay tuned.

Excerpt from:  

John Oliver Explains Why He Attacked Mitch McConnell With an Old, Wrinkly Penis

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on John Oliver Explains Why He Attacked Mitch McConnell With an Old, Wrinkly Penis

Green tech incubator Greenstart ups its game

by s1cx54s Posted on March 18, 2013

Green tech incubator Greenstart ups its game

By Susie Cagle

We’d all like to accelerate cool green tech, but maybe the initial acceleration is less important than the distance traveled.

At least that’s what Greenstart, which Grist profiled back in October, seems to be thinking as it retools its business plan: No longer an accelerator, Greenstart will essentially become a venture capital endeavor, with a focus on helping companies through multiple stages of their development instead of just shoving them off a cliff with bags of money.

“This change was 100 percent motivated by listening to our startups,” writes founder and managing partner Mitch Lowe in a post today very effectively titled “We Killed Our Accelerator.”

Greenstart’s Mitch Lowe.

Fast Co.Exist reports:

This week, Greenstart announced that it’s shutting down its three-month accelerator program — and morphing into a combination early-stage venture capital firm and design studio. What happened?

“It was simply because entrepreneurs were saying loud and clear that 90 days is nice but we want a partner for the life of our company,” says Mitch Lowe, managing partner at Greenstart. “You just get to the good stuff at 90 days. You’re starting to add real value.”

Greenstart will now be writing even fatter checks to its portfolio companies, funneling $250,000 to $500,000 into about a dozen startups each year. And those companies won’t just be incubated — Greenstart is in it for the long haul.

To that end, the company is beefing up its own in-house design team in order to help the start-ups with more than just a little spending cash to start with. From Forbes:

The focus on design comes from a recognition that products that are beautiful and easy to use can make their users swoon and pay good money for them. …

“Really high-quality designs are so hard to come by. Bringing them to companies at this formative stage of their experience is a great magnet for companies that want to work with us and for us to lower product, technical and market risks,” Lowe said.

“We are either onto something or totally crazy,” he added.

Rich, pretty, and possibly crazy? Sounds like a venture capital firm to me! Greenstart may soon be investing in more cleantech start-ups than any other VC firm. We’ll be watching to see how it does.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Read More: 

Green tech incubator Greenstart ups its game

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Green tech incubator Greenstart ups its game