It seems that Democrats are so shell shocked from the legislative and policy battles of the last two years, they're even afraid to pull the trigger on an issue that works for them. Democrats decided to take a pass on a vote to extend the Bush Tax Cuts for everyone except the rich.
All the recent polling points to massive support for letting the Bush Tax Cuts expire at the end of the year for the rich and extending them for the rest. But even this isn't enough to assuage the Democrats bunker mentality as they head home to campaign. With a stagnant economy and stubbornly high unemployment weighing them down in the polls, the last thing Democrats want to be accused of is raising taxes in a bad economy.
Click here for the full story from Politico.
Republicans are calling Democrats arrogant. With their new "Pledge to America" Democrats could make a strong argument that Republicans are deaf. In 1994 the GOP used the steps of the Capitol as the backdrop for their "Contract with America." Yesterday, they used a Northern Virginia Hardware Store to release their latest reincarnation of a governing agenda that saw incomes stay flat or retreated, deregulation that created the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, promise to repeal and replace Health Care Affordability Act, and extend all the Bush Tax Cuts which will increase the national debt by $4 Trillion. OK (wink, wink).
Now, if a large number of the Tea Party candidates do win their races they promise to privatize Social Security, privatize or end Medicaid and Medicare, and end Unemployment Insurance. They too have a contract. Theirs is called the "Contract from America." Just like the establishment GOP's "Pledge to America", the "Contract from America" offers a lot of what they want to do, but very few specifics about how to do it and what their plan will replace or improve.
There's one other problem for the GOP. An AP-GfK poll released this month found that the only thing that voters dislike as much, or more than, Democrats,... Republicans. The difference is that anger on the GOP side is much, much more intense than Democrats. Oh, Americans still blame Bush and the Republicans for the economy than Obama and the Democrats.
In what is being described as a theory, Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is claiming that methane gas was the cause of the explosion. Citing pictures that show equipment inside the mine was shut off, manually, Blankenship is claiming that the miners knew methane gas was present and turned off the equipment.
Regardless, this still doesn't excuse all the other mine safety violations and blatant and brazen disregard for MSHA regulations. Federal investigators are still working to find the cause, but it would seem this could be one possibility among many others.
Tax pic image found at: http://www.intheiropinion.com/uploads/image/tax.jpg
Boehner pic image found at: http://www.usnews.com/dbimages/master/11483/FS_DA_090617boehner300.jpg
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