CORRECTION!

Dear reader(s),

Though it was unintentional, I must apologize for misleading you.  I recently claimed in a blog post that Mitch McConnell is the worst negotiator ever.  However, this implies that one day a worse negotiator may join the senate.  Instead, in the interest of accuracy, I should have said, "Mitch McConnell is the worst negotiator possible."  This week the senate minority leader actually lost a negotiation with himself.  As I've already noted, POTUS has been calling on congress to relinquish control over the debt ceiling.  McConnell (among others) has been dragging his feet over this, despite the fact that he proposed a bill in 2011 which would have had precisely this effect.  On Thursday, believing that senate democrats would oppose such a bill, McConnell called for a vote on the McConnell plan.  Harry Reid agreed to an immediate up or down (simple majority) vote.  McConnell was assuming that Reid would baulk, showing disunity among democrats and especially between congressional democrats and the White House.  When Reid agreed, McConnell had not choice but to filibuster his own bill--a bill for which he himself had called the vote.  The full story here, and here, and here, and here.  Video here.

Mitch McConnell, worst negotiator ever!

As I've noted many times in recent weeks, the debt ceiling is a chimera.  Actually, it's not just a chimera, it's a chimera that was created by the US and that legislators are using to scare the public.  POTUS and Tim Geithner have now inserted the debt ceiling into the fiscal cliff talks.  The response of Greta Van Susteren and Sarah Palin was to compare such an eventuality as giving debt ceiling responsibility to POTUS to giving him a limitless credit card.  This was an incredibly uninformed response, but neither here nor there since neither of these women is a policy maker or legislator.  However, this week Mitch McConnell chimed in with the same (false) analogy:

The analogy is, of course, demonstrably false, and we should assume that McConnell knows it's false.  So why would he make such a claim?  It's part of the pissing contest over the fiscal cliff.  It simply looks bad to give your opponent anything, no matter how insignificant.  This is a terrible tactic for negotiating.  If you have something entirely meaningless (both to yourself and in itself) that someone else wants, and for which someone else will give you something in exchange, you take that deal--that is a successful negotiation.  What McConnell is doing is more akin to throwing a tantrum.

Debt ceiling, again.

I've posted recently about the debt ceiling--this week Greta Van Susteren interviewed Sarah Palin regarding the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling.  Both reacted to Timothy Geithner's request that the task of reviewing and raising the debt ceiling be given to the president.  Palin and Van Susteren agreed that that would be tantamount to giving president Obama a credit card with no limit.  Now Boehner and Fox News are showing their indignation over Giethner's suggestion.  "Congress is never going to give up this power," the House Speaker told Fox News Sunday.  Boehner doesn't understand the debt ceiling any more than Van Susteren or Palin.  First, it is not a power, it's a responsibility--the US gains nothing by raising the debt ceiling (except that we guard our credit rating); we do not get more money out of the situation.  Second, congress already shirked this responsibility (which resulted in a downgrade of the credit rating of the US).