Certainly nothing wrong with this:
The leaders of President Obama’s deficit commission sparked criticism from both sides of the political aisle Wednesday for proposing broad cuts to federal programs.
But the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has also come under attack for its unusual approach to staffing: Many of its employees aren’t employed by the panel at all.
Instead, about one in four commission staffers is paid by outside entities, many of which have strong ideological points of view about how to tackle the deficit.
For example, the salaries of two senior staffers, Marc Goldwein and Ed Lorenzen, are paid by private groups that have previously advocated cuts to entitlement programs. Lorenzen is paid by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, while Goldwein is paid by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is also partly funded by the Peterson group.
The outsourcing has come under sharp criticism from seniors’ organizations and liberal activists, who say the strategy is part of a broader conservative bias favoring painful entitlement cuts over other solutions. The fears of some liberal groups appeared to come true on Wednesday, when the commission’s two leaders recommended significant reductions for Social Security and other social-welfare programs.
Bruce Reed, the panel’s executive director, defended the staffing arrangement as fiscally responsible and said the staff includes a broad range of views. Other staffers paid by outside entities include an analyst from the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute and a Clinton administration official who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, he said.
As long as a dirty fucking hippy who worked for Bill Clinton was included, I guess this is okay.




20 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About TBogg
RSS/XML Feed
1. Anyone on the left still think O’Blowme is worth any more than tits on a bull?
2. Guess the EmAssEm will still call him a “liberal.”
3. Third Party time?
Look! Up in the sky! It’s the Nader signal!
Guess ur staying with him, then. LOL.
I love how Reed says it was “fiscally responsible” to have them work for free. Just like letting corporations regulate themselves and write legislation: hey, they do it for nothing! Wottadeal!
I’m realistic enough to know that I don’t have a choice and that the alternative is a great deal worse.
Apparently, Axlerod and the President are not in the Petey Peterson loop. And I thought they were all BFF’s. The White House got their PDF file off the internet same as the rest of us. It is good to be King Peter.
The alternative is a lot worse and also, too, America is in decline. Thanks to the Democrats, the speed of decline won’t be as rapid as it would be if the Republicans had full control.
I thought that the Purina Cat Chow and Fancy Feast people would have contributed a few staffers.
I see that the creeping spread of New Speak continues. Calling any commission staffed by the Peterson Foundation “impartial” is like calling a cat a vegetarian.
I HOPE that Obama publicly responds to these clowns with a “Thanks, but no thanks.”
I FEAR that the response will be, “Okay, then, I guess we’d better get started on these recommendations, since the shellacking we just took proves that middle-class taxpayers demand to get screwed some more.”
I still don’t understand why Erskine Bowles, former Administrator of the SBA, would target the SBA for absorption by Commerce. The only thing I can think of is that since SBA loans are now almost entirely loan guarantees of monies lent by Banksters, this represents some infringement of some agreement of which we remain unaware. Well, that, and the demand that federal employees be furloughed and that all federal copying machines be set to automatically copy on both sides of the paper. Too.
Because the SBA no longer signs Erskine Bowles’s paychecks.
Thanks for joining us for another episode of SATSQ.
The Republicans do too, which is why they’re Nader’s and the Greens’ most reliable funders. Of course, if this country ever got true IRV with ranked-choice voting, the GOP would immediately cut off funding to all their lefty spoiler parties, as they would no longer be useful for spoiling things.
The bloody Democrats have started calling the house whining for money. I’ve instructed Mr. Marion in Savannah to inform them that they’ll not see a plugged nickel from me until they grow spines. Which I doubt I’ll see in my lifetime. I’m now off to scour the interwebz for yummy recipes for cat food.
I found the committee’s findings regarding Pudgy McBristol’s ability to reduce her long term surplus by pooping out another cub at odds with their projections of her near future intake of surplus-inducing fluids.
And they weren’t meaning creamy vanilla shakes from Ronald McD…..
Catfood?
Four Loko is 4 squares per day…
Inquiring minds want to know if HuffPo’s sensationalistic-click-generating banner headline this morning was:
1) Jumping the Shark
2) Fucking the Cow
3) Stuffing the MamaGrizz
Exactly. The Dems are not going to change the direction of this country (nor are the Rethugs, but then why should they, since it’s going the direction they want), but they might be able to change the speed.
If we are to have even a snowball’s chance in hell of changing direction, it will have to come from someone whose name isn’t followed by either “D” or “R”. Based on past performance, that person is not going to be Ralph Nader, who at this point is just a useful idiot for the “R” folks.
What we need is someone and something on the order of Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party. Given the current state of this country — politically, socially, and economically — I would say the chances of that happening are several orders of magnitude less than that of that snowball in hell.
I don’t have any idea what the headline actually was but, it’s a pretty safe bet answer the answer is yes. Prolly 8 out of 10 times. HuffPo is like the cable news of the internet.
Really? A Democratic primary challenger to Obama from the left would be much worse? How do you figure?