Eight Republican presidential candidates will debate for the second time in less than a week tonight at 7 pm central time. I expect former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Representative Ron Paul to have a go at Texas Governor Rick Perry, like they did during last week’s debate. Representative Michele Bachmann has been trying to distinguish herself from Perry too lately. I see the other four candidates mainly fighting not to be ignored by the moderators.

I’ll update this post later, but meanwhile here’s a thread to talk about the debate or the presidential race in general.

UPDATE: First thoughts on the debate and excerpts from the transcript are after the jump.

I’ve seen a lot of hippie-punching by professional Democrats, but the Iowa Democratic Party’s attack on Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement yesterday was a particularly cynical example.  

The House of Representatives passed the bill on raising the debt ceiling today by a surprisingly large margin of 269 to 161 (roll call). About three quarters of the Republicans recognized what a great deal they wrangled out of a weak president. However, Tom Latham (IA-04) and Steve King (IA-05) were among the 66 House Republicans who voted no.

Vice President Joe Biden spent part of Monday selling this raw deal to Democrats on the hill, and half the Democratic caucus ended up voting yes, including Gabrielle Giffords, making her first return to the capitol since she was shot in January. Bruce Braley (IA-01), Dave Loebsack (IA-02) and Leonard Boswell (IA-03) were all among the 95 Democrats who voted no.

Memo to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and all other stupid Democrats who voted for today’s deal: This is why no one powerful ever cares what House Democrats say. Republicans got President Barack Obama to meet almost 100 percent of their demands. They should have been forced to provide 100 percent of the votes to approve this bill. Pelosi claimed the deal protected Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from cuts, but the “super-Congress” deficit-cutting commission will have other ideas. Some other Democrats pointed to large potential cuts in defense spending over the next decade. I have a bridge in Windsor Heights to sell anyone who believes those cuts will materialize.

After the jump I’ve posted statements on today’s vote from Braley, Loebsack, Boswell and Latham. I will add King’s when it appears. I have requested a comment from King’s Democratic challenger, Christie Vilsack, and if I receive a reply I will post it below. Click here for details about how Iowans voted on the debt ceiling bills that reached the House floor Friday and Saturday.

UPDATE: Added King’s statement slamming the debt limit deal below. Like Latham, he said the agreement didn’t do enough to limit future government spending. In their comments, Braley, Loebsack and Boswell all emphasized that the deal puts too much of the deficit-cutting burden on the middle class while protecting wealthy individuals and special interests.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is paying for robocalls attacking 60 House Republicans, including Iowa’s Tom Latham, for their intransigence in debt ceiling negotiations. Latham currently represents the fourth district but will run against Democrat Leonard Boswell in the new third district in 2012. Boswell can use the help, because Latham is building up a much bigger campaign war chest. I’ve posted the DCCC call script after the jump. Excerpt:

“Congressman Tom Latham and Speaker Boehner would rather our economy default just to protect tax breaks for Big Oil companies and billionaire jet-owners. Republicans quit negotiating with President Obama on raising the debt ceiling.

“This is serious. Latham’s billionaire buddies will be ok. But we will pay the price if government can’t pay its bills. Our Social Security and Medicare benefits are at risk. Interest rates would spike for our credit cards, car loans, and mortgages. Our 401(k) retirement accounts would drop. And, gas and food prices would skyrocket.”

That message might be persuasive if Obama weren’t begging Republicans to join him in cutting Americans’ Social Security and Medicare benefits. On a related note, Senate Democratic leaders just spent the weekend working on a deal to massively cut government spending without increasing tax revenues at all–not even from (gasp) “Big Oil companies and billionaire jet-owners.” No matter how the debt ceiling drama ends, the Democrats’ incompetence this summer will cause problems for the party’s Congressional candidates in 2012.

Meanwhile, Latham is pushing a plan B in case no deal comes through by August 2:

Under [Latham’s] bill, H.R. 2605, the federal government would prioritize payments to seniors, veterans, military personnel and “core public-safety functions” if the debt ceiling is reached and federal spending must be curtailed.

Latham said his bill is partly a response to what he called “scare tactics” that these critical payments would not be made.

“The White House and irresponsible special-interest groups have begun employing scare tactics as a means of achieving their political ends in the debt-limit debate,” he said Friday. “My legislation removes the use of these priority groups as political pawns and shields them from these contentious debates.”

No one knows exactly what would happen if Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling in the next week, but even if Latham’s bill became law, financial markets would see the federal government unable to pay all its bills. That would likely result in a downgrade of all U.S. debt.

After the jump I’ve posted Latham’s press release on what he called “safety net legislation.” It’s notable that he acknowledges the need to raise the debt ceiling, provided a “long-term plan” is in place to reduce government spending. Some House Republicans, like Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann, oppose increasing the debt limit under any circumstances.

Latham’s bill is much broader than a fallback plan introduced by Bachmann and Representative Steve King (IA-05) earlier this month. That dead-on-arrival proposal would have “set payment of military salaries and payment of principal and interest on publicly-held debt as the top priorities if the debt limit is reached.” The DCCC immediately accused King of “putting China before Iowa’s seniors,” saying his bill “would require the U.S. government to pay debts to China before ensuring seniors receive the Social Security they count on every month.” Latham may not be the brightest bulb in Congress, but he wasn’t about to walk into that trap.

Yesterday’s heartbreaking attacks in Norway are the big global news story this weekend. This man, Anders Behring Breivik, is suspected of setting off a bomb in downtown Oslo on July 22. The explosion killed seven people and destroyed the prime minister’s office building. The suspect then reportedly dressed in a policeman’s uniform and shot to death at least 85 people at a youth camp run by Norway’s governing Labor Party. Breivik has “confessed to the factual circumstances,” according to his attorney, who said his client planned the crimes long in advance. Police are trying to determine the motive for the attacks. The suspect reportedly had right-wing and anti-Muslim views, but why would anyone attack teenagers at a summer camp?

The big U.S. news story is that House Speaker John Boehner was too stupid to take the deficit reduction deal President Barack Obama offered:

Obama said he had demanded $1.2 trillion in additional revenues over 10 years, in exchange for spending cuts, including cuts to Medicare and Social Security. He said the revenues had been structured in a way that marginal tax rates would not be increased, and no Republicans would be forced to cast a vote that would violate the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which most Republicans in Congress have signed.

You read that right. While agreeing to cuts in programs that tens of millions of Americans rely on, Obama was ready to guarantee no increases in any tax rates, even at the highest income levels, for the next decade. Not only that, he bent over backwards to give Republicans political cover, so they could accept his offer without facing blowback from Grover Norquist. The same Grover Norquist who now wants Congress to stop playing chicken with the debt ceiling. And Obama was angry Boehner walked out on negotiations, saying he felt “left at the altar”! I don’t see how this so-called Democrat could be handling the budget negotiations any worse. For the first time, I am seriously thinking about writing in a candidate for president in November 2012.

The Iowa Policy Project analyzed the latest state jobs numbers here. Iowa has more than a billion dollars in various state reserves, but Governor Terry Branstad and Iowa House Republicans insisted on an extremely tight budget for fiscal year 2012. The predictable result was a “sharp drop in government jobs” in June, which “fully accounted for the first net drop in Iowa nonfarm jobs in the last six months.” Shrinking government does not help the private economy create more jobs. On the contrary, government job losses contribute to our unemployment problem. Iowa’s unemployment rate is 6 percent, still well below the national average, but that’s no excuse for unwarranted austerity policies.

Here’s one good thing that happened this week: Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Admiral Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all certified “that the U.S. military is prepared to accept openly gay and lesbian service members, and that doing so will not harm military readiness.” As a result, the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy will officially end 60 days from July 22.

This is an open thread. What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers?

UPDATE: Iowa native Chuck Manatt passed away this week at age 75. He chaired the Democratic National Committee from 1981 to 1985 and co-chair Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. The Los Angeles Times published a good obituary of Manatt. He will be buried this week in Audubon, near the farm where he grew up.

If Barack Obama doesn’t want to be a one-term president, he has a funny way of showing it. I can’t imagine how the president could come out of the debt ceiling negotiations in a worse political position.  

I really don't care that Alan Simpson used the word “tits” in his description of Social Security as a “milk cow with 310 million tits.” Yeah, I realize that he was being jerkily provocative. He knew that his rough language would result in a satisfying amount of pearl-clutching, while meanwhile he could hide behind an ersatz farm-boy “well out in the barnyard that's how we pronounce 'teats'” line.

The plain truth is that Sen. Simpson has made a tidy post-Senate career out of being a sort of affable country dumbass. In the mid-1990s, while he was cooling his post-DC jets at a Kennedy School sinecure here in the People's Republic of Cambridge, he even had a local TV show on WGBH with Robert Reich called “The Long and Short of It.” Ha ha, see, because Simpson is very tall while Reich is very short.

Anyway, the long-term (i.e. 75-year) shortfall in SS amounts to 0.7% of GDP. Not exactly a huge item, compared to other recent liabilities taken on by the US Govt, including a couple of wars and two rounds of tax cuts for the wealthy in 2001 and 2003. In fact, it turns out that the long-term cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the plus-$250K crowd is roughly equal to the long term shortfall in SS. So, allow tax rates to return to those ruinous Clinton-era levels for the top 3% or so, devote the resulting dough to SS, and bada-bing, SS “crisis” solved for another 75 YEARS.

Speaking of which… did you know that the US Defense budget is scheduled to “go bankrupt” in about one month? ONE MONTH! Geez, according to current polling I guess it's more likely that E.T. will be dispensing my Ham Squishy at the Quik-E-Mart than the Defense Dept. will be fully funded for FY2011.

House Republican leader John Boehner gave a revealing interview to the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review this week. He dismissed the need for more financial regulations, saying the draft Wall Street reform bill is like “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” Boehner also dabbled in Steve King-style rhetoric, accusing Democrats of “snuffing out out the America that I grew up in.” Then he spoke frankly about Republican priorities:

Boehner had praise, however, for Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan and stepped-up drone attacks in Pakistan. He declined to list any benchmarks he has for measuring progress in the nine-year war, at a time of increasing violence and Obama’s replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus.

Ensuring there’s enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country’s entitlement system, Boehner said. He’d favor increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people who have at least 20 years until retirement, tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than wage inflation and limiting payments to those who need them.

“We need to look at the American people and explain to them that we’re broke,” Boehner said. “If you have substantial non-Social Security income while you’re retired, why are we paying you at a time when we’re broke? We just need to be honest with people.”

Boehner handed our president the opportunity to highlight the differences between Republicans and Democrats. Last year Boehner advocated a federal spending freeze, which would have made a severe recession much worse. Now this guy still doesn’t understand how serious the 2008 financial crash was. President Barack Obama plans to slam Boehner’s comments about financial reform at a town-hall event today.

Ideally, Obama would also bash Boehner’s plans for entitlement reform. The top House Republican wants to reduce Social Security benefits for future recipients in order to keep us on a war footing indefinitely. In other words, make working Americans pay the bills for endless war.

Unfortunately, our president seems less and less committed to a timeline for ending the war in Afghanistan. David Dayen predicts, probably correctly, that the July 2011 deadline for drawing down troops in Afghanistan will disappear now that General David Petraeus has replaced General Stanley McChrystal as commander in the theater.

Obama’s unlikely to go to the mat to preserve Social Security either, having just appointed Republican Alan Simpson to co-chair a deficit commission. Simpson wasn’t serious about addressing the budget deficit as a U.S. senator, and his “zombie lies” about Social Security are notorious.

I never expected Obama to be a partisan warrior, but if he can’t be bothered to help build the Democratic brand, could he at least protect Social Security, one of the greatest programs the Democratic Party ever created?

UPDATE: The president shouldn’t count on Americans supporting endless war in Afghanistan.

Iowa Senators Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley voted no on Tuesday as the Senate rejected an amendment to “establish a Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action, to assure the long-term fiscal stability and economic security of the Federal Government of the United States, and to expand future prosperity and growth for all Americans.”

President Barack Obama supported creating that commission, which is the brainchild of Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad. The goal is to find some way to get big Social Security and Medicare cuts through Congress. Don’t get me started on why a Democratic president and a bunch of Democratic senators are so keen on cutting the most successful programs Democrats have ever enacted.

Anyway, Conrad’s idea was for the commission to work out a comprehensive deficit reduction strategy, which Congress would be not be empowered to amend before voting on it. Two decades ago, a similar procedure was developed for recommending military base closings to Congress.

Conrad’s amendment, offered to a bill that raises the U.S. debt ceiling, failed on a bipartisan 53-46 vote. 36 Democrats, 16 Republicans and Joe Lieberman voted for creating the deficit reduction commission, while 22 Democrats, 23 Republicans and Bernie Sanders voted no (roll call here). Bloomberg News reported,

Conrad’s idea was attacked from the left and right, with groups such as the Washington-based anti-tax Americans for Tax Reform saying it would mean higher taxes while the AFL-CIO and NAACP said it would lead to cuts in federal benefits.

It was also opposed by lawmakers who lead congressional committees with authority over tax and spending programs. Among them are Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Tom Harkin of Iowa, head of the health-care panel.

Senate Republican Conference Chair Lamar Alexander told Politico that Obama needs to “produce a Democratic majority in favor of” this idea if he wants more Republicans to vote for it.

During tonight’s State of the Union address, Obama is expected to announce plans to create his own deficit reduction commission. Bloomberg noted yesterday that “Such a panel’s recommendations ordinarily could be ignored by lawmakers, although Conrad, North Dakota Democrat, is trying to negotiate an agreement to guarantee a vote.”

Too bad the wrong North Dakota Democrat is retiring from the Senate.

Any relevant comments are welcome in this thread.

Bleeding Heartland user American007 noted not long ago that Time Magazine often gives its “Person of the Year” award to people attempting to deal with a weak economy. So it was this year, when Time’s editors laughably chose Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke:

The story of the year was a weak economy that could have been much, much weaker. Thank the man who runs the Federal Reserve, our mild-mannered economic overlord

I wish I were joking, but here’s more from Time:

The overriding story of 2009 was the economy – the lousiness of it, and the fact that it wasn’t far lousier. It was a year of escalating layoffs, bankruptcies and foreclosures, the “new frugality” and the “new normal.” It was also a year of green shoots, a rebounding Dow and a fragile sense that the worst is over. Even the big political stories of 2009 – the struggles of the Democrats; the tea-party takeover of the Republicans; the stimulus; the deficit; GM and Chrysler; the backlash over bailouts and bonuses; the furious debates over health care, energy and financial regulation; the constant drumbeat of jobs, jobs, jobs – were, at heart, stories about the economy. And it’s Bernanke’s economy.

In 2009, Bernanke hurled unprecedented amounts of money into the banking system in unprecedented ways, while starting to lay the groundwork for the Fed’s eventual return to normality. He helped oversee the financial stress tests that finally calmed the markets, while launching a groundbreaking public relations campaign to demystify the Fed. Now that Obama has decided to keep him in his job, he has become a lightning rod in an intense national debate over the Fed as it approaches its second century.

But the main reason Ben Shalom Bernanke is TIME’s Person of the Year for 2009 is that he is the most important player guiding the world’s most important economy. His creative leadership helped ensure that 2009 was a period of weak recovery rather than catastrophic depression, and he still wields unrivaled power over our money, our jobs, our savings and our national future. The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world.

Reality check: Bernanke has no plan to deal with unemployment, even though the “Federal Reserve Act dictates that one of the founding directives of the Federal Reserve is to ‘promote effectively the goals of maximum employment.’”

But Bernanke is wild about cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Hooray for our “mild-mannered economic overlord”!

The Senate Banking Committee votes on Bernanke’s renomination tomorrow, and he is expected to pass. However, three senators have said they will put a hold on his renomination when it reaches the floor.

I agree that the current recession could have deepened without the federal stimulus bill, especially if we had imposed the federal spending freeze Republicans wanted. But the stimulus should have been larger and better targeted toward job creation. Bernanke doesn’t favor any additional federal stimulus to create jobs. He shouldn’t even get another term at the Fed, let alone “Person of the Year.”

Our Country needs, Hope … yes very much so.

Our Country also needs Competence in SO many Government Positions of power … NO more 'Heck of Job — Brownies' PLEASE!

But the one thing America needs even more than Hope and Competence — it's Real Leadership!

What is Real Leadership made up of?

More Compromise and Committee meetings?  (I hope not)

Media Fanfare and soaring rhetoric?  (nice, but …)

How about Honesty, How about taking a real Stand?

How about talking straight with the American People, and detailing all the 'Hard Work' and 'Sacrifice' that Real Change will ultimately require?

That's what Real Leaders do.

They tell you the Truth, and speaking the Truth eventually leads to widespread Action, and the Changes we need.

Once again John Edwards, has NOT failed to Lead on the Issues, so important to everyday Americans …

For the past several Tuesdays, I have been posting diaries in support of John Edwards on the front page of MyDD.

This week I wrote a diary about Edwards' performance at the AARP forum in Davenport last Thursday. I thought it was a strong debate for all who participated, but I wanted to call attention to some particularly strong moments for Edwards.

The diary is long, so I put it after the jump. I welcome your feedback.

Tomorrow night there's another MSNBC debate. I don't have high hopes for the quality of the discussion, given the format and moderation of the previous debates hosted by that network.