John Boehner

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John Boehner makes his move for diversity

After people noticed that all the House committee chairs were chairmen, John Boehner announced the appointment of Candice Miller to head the House Committee on Administration.  Miller is a white woman which does nothing for racial or ethnic diversity, but does give them a token woman in a leadership position.

Politico reports

It’s a consolation prize of sorts for Miller, who lost to Rep. Mike McCaul  (R-Texas) in a three-way race for the Homeland Security chairmanship. In that race, Miller told  POLITICO she was making the pitch that she was “tough enough” to chair the panel  charged with overseeing the nation’s vast homeland security infrastructure.

According to the Committee website, the committee is responsible for a mix of duties ranging from housekeeping (overseeing the dining room) and important (overseeing elections).

Now in its 60th year of existence, CHA’s two principal functions include oversight of federal elections and day-to-day operations in the House.

…

CHA also exerts great influence on the internal procedures and priorities of the daily operations of the institution. In its first three decades, the committee’s influence grew as it attained the power to fix the level of allowances available to Members, to oversee House officers, to implement new services for Member offices, and to set human resources and management policies for staff and service personnel on the House side of Capitol Hill. CHA has a hand in a number of house-keeping duties outlined in House Rule X. These responsibilities range from disbursing appropriations for committee staff and member staff salaries to handling parking assignments, restaurant services, and the issuance of identification badges. The committee also administers travel allowances for Members, assigns office space, and compiles and publishes information related to campaign financial disclosures. CHA must approve the acceptance or purchase of works of art for the Capitol. Additionally, the committee has oversight of the Library of Congress, the House Library, the Botanic Gardens, and the Smithsonian Institution.

In more recent years the committee has focused on technology updates. Since 1971, with the introduction of House Information Systems, later named House Information Resources (HIR), the committee has introduced technological innovation to the institution. HIR became the primary computer support service for Members and committees. In the 1990s, CHA facilitated development of the House e-mail system and the availability of Internet access, and authorized software and networking upgrades to provide better electronic links between Members’ Washington, D.C., offices and their district offices. In the late 1990s, CHA took a lead role in developing THOMAS, a Library of Congress Web site that provides public access to the Congressional Record, committee reports, roll call votes, and information of the status of bills pending before Congress. The committee also was a moving force in developing a House Intranet system, as well as a reliable cellular phone and text-messaging network for Members and staff.

So while the work of the CHA is not necessarily trivial, it is strange that the only woman to chair a House Committee is in a job that bears more than a passing resemblance to what men would call “women’s work.”  Of course, every woman knows that without someone to take on the management of a household, things do not always run smoothly.

Good managing, Representative Miller.

Rep. Candice Miller is pictured. | AP Photo

AP Photograph.

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Creating Jobs: which party does better

The Republicans will campaign on the idea that lowing taxes on the wealthy (I think Romney wants to keep the Bush tax cuts and even cut more) creates jobs because the money the wealthy do not pay in taxes goes to create jobs.  Fay Paxton has looked at the history of job creation and posted an analysis on Winning Progressive.   Her conclusion:  Democrats create more jobs.  These charts describe private sector job creation.

Yes, the first months of the Obama Administration were rough, but as the chart shows, we started bleeding jobs under George W. Bush.

Ronald Reagan wins among Republicans, but he wasn’t afraid of raising taxes.

So what about federal public sector jobs?  The Republicans always claim that the Democrats are the party of big government.  Is this true?  Paxton says

Republicans talk about being conservatives who believe in small government and reducing the federal workforce. The numbers don’t bear out their claims.  In a press conference, House Speaker John Boehner said, “In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs.”  The Republicans even advanced legislation calling for a reduction of 200,000 federal employees.

Here’s the truth:

According to the Office of Personnel Management, it is true that the federal workforce increased by 237,000 employees. What Boehner does not tell…150,000 of the employees added to the roles were uniformed military personnel, no doubt to accommodate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 237,000 figure also includes temporary Census workers.

Despite claims of huge government expansion, historically, Democratic presidents reduced the size of the federal government workforce. The federal employment numbers, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the department charged with tracking the number of employees, the data shows the following:

Paxton summarizes

If we combine the totals for all federal employees, including the military:
Reagan began office with a total of 4,982,000 employees and ended his term with 5,292,000 employees. While President Obama took office with a federal employee roster of 4,430,000 employees (fewer than Reagan). At the end of 2010 President Obama’s federal workforce numbered 4,443,000; that’s 849,000 fewer employees than Reagan, the advocate of small government! Add to this the fact that President Reagan governed during peacetime, while President Obama inherited two wars.

So the figures don’t lie:  Democrats do a much better at creating new private sector jobs and reducing the size of the federal government.

 

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The War on Women: Part 2012

I have a book from 1996 on my shelf  “The Republican War on Women” by Tanya Melich.  Melich outlines the Republican strategy to outlaw abortion, curb contraception, cut funding for child care programs and otherwise control women’s choices by limiting them.  This was the start of the culture wars, code for a war on women and the poor.  Now it is 2012 and the war is heating up again.  There is the Komen Foundation v. Planned Parenthood.  And you have Affordable Health Care and the President v. the Catholic Bishops and all the Republican Presidential Candidates.  Rick Santorum who just won three primary contests is the culture war candidate who thinks the contraception is evil and would do away with it all together.  All of this is being framed as an assault on regligious freedom. by the President.

Zack Beauchamp writing in the Daily Dish put it this way

2012’s great birth control debate is far from over. The Catholic Church is threatening all-out war against the Obama Administration until it caves on the decision to require contraceptives without co-pays. One popular framing of the debate is religious liberty versus women’s health, but that’s not quite right. The Administration’s requirement isn’t a threat to liberty, religious or otherwise. It’s a sally in an ongoing debate about the character of liberal rights – and one on the right side, to boot.

We usually think of religious liberty as an individual believer’s right to worship and practice freely. That’s of course not at issue here – the feds aren’t marching into Catholic bedrooms and making everyone take Plan B on Sunday morning or requiring Catholic hospital administrators to pass out free birth control in the lobby. The regulations instead require they indirectly subsidize birth control use, which several faiths believe means being forced to participate in evil. But opponents worry about a much broader problem than religious freedom. Check this from Ross Douthat last week:

Critics of the administration’s policy are framing this as a religious liberty issue, and rightly so. But what’s at stake here is bigger even than religious freedom. The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.

Ross is arguing that government regulations “crowd out” private associations that perform valuable societal functions. Forcing members of those associations to adhere to legal rules they find repugnant puts them in a devil’s choice: do something they believe fundamentally wrong or, more likely, get out of providing public services entirely. Government thus guts the ability of private, voluntary organizations to do good. See David Brooks and Kirsten Powers for similar arguments.

The problem with this argument is, as Beauchamp goes on to point out, we are not talking about voluntary organizations but employers – often large employers who employ many persons who are not Catholic.  The Guttmacher Institute posted a summary the other day.  It turns out that 28 states already require insurers to cover FDA approved contraceptives.  20 of those states have some form of opt-out provision ranging from just churches to broader provisions for church affiliated institutions like universities.  Interestingly among the twenty states that have exceptions those exemptions are extremely limited for hospitals. 

The latest polling supports the Obama Administration regulation.  The only group that does not are white evangelical.s

Finally, Think Progress has posted this story about DePaul University which offers contraception coverage.

“The employee health insurance plans include a prescription contraceptive benefit, in compliance with state and federal law,” DePaul University spokesperson Robin Florzak confirmed to ThinkProgress. “An optional insurance plan that covers such benefits is available to students, also due to previously established state and federal requirements.” The University notes, however, that it is disappointed with the Obama regulation and hopes to engage in an “effective national conversation on the appropriate conscience protections in our pluralistic country.” Other Catholic colleges and hospitals, including Georgetown and the six former Caritas Christi Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts, have also admitted to offering birth control benefits.

Notice that DePaul talks about conscience protections not doing away with the requirement all together. 

So who does this really hurt?  It hurts a woman’s ability to control her own body.   Here is Zack Beauchamp to sum up.

Birth control is for 98% of womenthe principal means of protecting a right central to their own liberty – the right to choose when to create a family. Chances are most women employed by Catholic universities and hospitals are part of the 98%. For these women, not having access to birth control renders a crucially important right meaningless.

Full insurance coverage is a critical part of the picture. Birth control is an expensive product – $81 a month is considered a steal with no contribution from your insurance, but that number still prices out many women. Even insurance plans that have copays can be prohibitively pricey. Cheaper alternatives like condoms have significant failure rates. Insurance, overwhelmingly provided by employers in the American system, that covers birth control with no copays is a woman’s best bet.

The Administration’s critics are saying that, in the currently existing health care system, protecting that right would create a grave threat  to equally important rights of free association. Seems like a classic rights conflict. However, churches and institutions that serve only co-religionists are exempt from the requirement. The only institutions covered by the birth control mandate have chosen to participate in the broader market, a zone of private life governed by political rules.

I think that the Catholic Bishops, the Republican Presidential Candidates and John Boehner are really the ones who want government to interfere in the lives of women.  Just because an insurer offers a benefit does not mean you have to take advantage of it.

Gail Collins puts it this way in today’s New York Times

The church is not a democracy and majority opinion really doesn’t matter. Catholic dogma holds that artificial contraception is against the law of God. The bishops have the right — a right guaranteed under the First Amendment — to preach that doctrine to the faithful. They have a right to preach it to everybody. Take out ads. Pass out leaflets. Put up billboards in the front yard.

The problem here is that they’re trying to get the government to do their work for them. They’ve lost the war at home, and they’re now demanding help from the outside.

And they don’t seem in the mood to compromise. Church leaders told The National Catholic Register that they regarded any deal that would allow them to avoid paying for contraceptives while directing their employees to other places where they could find the coverage as a nonstarter.

This new rule on contraceptive coverage is part of the health care reform law, which was designed to finally turn the United States into a country where everyone has basic health coverage. In a sane world, the government would be running the whole health care plan, the employers would be off the hook entirely and we would not be having this fight at all. But members of Congress — including many of the very same people who are howling and rending their garments over the bishops’ plight — deemed the current patchwork system untouchable.

The churches themselves don’t have to provide contraceptive coverage. Neither do organizations that are closely tied to a religion’s doctrinal mission. We are talking about places like hospitals and universities that rely heavily on government money and hire people from outside the faith.

And if you want to see what this is all about in a nutshell click on this link to the Ann Telnaes animated cartoon.

I hope the President sticks to his decision.

 

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Accept the tax increase and defeat the Republicans

I was eating my lunch at my desk today as I often do (I know a bad habit) and the Republicans were voting down the Senate bill in several complicated procedural moves I don’t pretend to understand.  I do know the bottom line:  Increase in payroll taxes, no unemployment extension, and funny things happen to reimbursements to doctors for Medicare.  Anyway, I posted on the New York Times comment section on the story of the Republican vote, that maybe we should accept the tax increase as a way of contributing to the Republican’s defeat in 2012.  Last time I check it had over 300 recommendations!  Maybe I’m on to something here.  But I have to give credit to my husband at FortRight who said at breakfast, “it might be worth $1000 to see the Republicans go down.”

Stand firm, Harry Reid.  Stand firm, Mitch McConnell.  You made your compromise as the House asked and just because John Boehner can’t herd his cats or maybe squirrels (Ana Marie Cox on her Guardian blog quoted a friend who called them squirrels because “[they] are panicky and prone to irrational running into traffic.”) doesn’t mean you have to save him.  Here is John with his squirrels.

Now they want the President to order the Senate back.  Stand firm, Mr. President.  Yes, not passing the bill will hurt briefly, but the Republicans will get the blame and will be forced to come back in January and be serious about a real bill, with real funding to pay for it.  As Ana Marie Cox said, “Congressional Republicans are roadkill.”

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The complicated deficit deal

I know I’ll be writing more about the imact of the “compromise” in the days to come, but for now here a summary.  The Atlantic Wire has the best written summary I’ve been able to find.

The basic plan, as explained by The New York Times‘ Carl Hulse and Helene Cooper, Politico’s David Rogers, and The Hill‘s Alexander Bolton, goes something like this:

1. Raise the debt limit by $900 billion and cut spending by the same amount over 10 years. Members of Congress can vote to show they don’t like the increase but Obama can veto their disapproval. 
2. Create a bipartisan committee with three members of each party from each chamber of Congress to find spending cuts the size of a second debt limit increase of $1.5 trillion. As a special holiday treat, the plan must be presented to colleagues by Thanksgiving and voted on by Christmas.
3. If the plan passes, Obama can raise the limit by $1.5 trillion.
4. If the cuts committee can’t come up with a plan, Obama can get only a $1.2 trillion debt limit increase, and Congress must either:
a. Pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, or
b. Allow spending cuts the size of the debt limit increase over the next 10 years, with at least half coming from cuts to defense spending. These cuts would be automatic by the end of 2012.
 
 
There is still a chance to get revenue increases through the committee’s recommendations.  That is what the Democrats have to run around the country selling:  increased revenues and more chanced to create jobs.  I heard Nancy Pelosi say at one point that the country did not want this debt crisis business, but were interested in “jobs, jobs, jobs.”  This has to be the new Democratic message:  OK, we have pretty much caved on the debt business, now create some jobs.
 
 
We Have a Debt Limit Deal: Now What?
 
So smile now, because if there aren’t more jobs soon – and the deficit deal has the potential to make a lot more of them go away – you might not be smiling in November 2012.
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If you don’t laugh, you have to cry

After John Boehner decided to walk out on the debt talks on Friday (and John, we know that it was not because of the President, but because Eric Cantor said no taxes even if you call them tax reform), we moved even closer to default.  So a little humor (from the left) on the situation for Sunday morning.

First up, Ruben Bolling and my favorite, Tom the Dancing Bug

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Then ( I have to say I love it that Daily Kos collects the Comics), we have Matt Weurker’s Tea Party Tango

Matt Wuerker

To tango or to compromise, it takes two, Mr. Cantor. 

Speaking of Mr. Cantor, you can hear him yourself at this animation by Scott Bateman.

And to end, two editoral cartoons.

Tony Auth on Congress

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And Dan Wasserman

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The President has taken himself out of the talks, telling Congress to come up with a solution.  We shall see.

Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid are pictured. | AP Photo

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Tax breaks and the debt/budget crisis

Feeling hot and kinda pessimistic this evening.  I feel as if the progressive forces are fighting windmills and I worry that President Obama will cave in with dire consequences. 

Here is a very interesting chart posted by Chris Bowers on the Daily Kos this afternoon.

Class Warfare

If these numbers are accurate, and I believe they are,  it is interesting how they match up.  We don’t really have to do much to keep programs running. 

In the meanwhile Politico reports

Turning right with a vengeance, Republicans will bring to the House floor Tuesday a newly revised debt-ceiling bill that is remarkable for its total absence of compromise at this late date, two weeks before the threat of default.

Final revisions made Friday submerge conservative demands to reduce all federal spending to 18 percent of gross domestic product — a target that threatened to split the GOP by requiring far deeper cuts than even the party’s April budget. But Republican congressional leaders still want a 10-year, $1.8 trillion cut from nondefense appropriations and have added a balanced-budget constitutional amendment that so restricts future tax legislation that even President Ronald Reagan might have opposed it in the 1980s.

Indeed, much of the deficit-reduction legislation signed by Reagan would not qualify under the new tea-party-driven standards. And even the famed Reagan-Tip O’Neill Social Security compromise — which raised payroll taxes — passed the House in 1983 well short of the 290 votes that would be required under the constitutional amendments being promoted by the GOP.

One of the more interesting aspects of this fight centers around the battle between Eric Cantor and John Boehner for control of the Republican House.  If Cantor wins, it may drive the more moderate Republicans toward the Democrats.  But it doesn’t appear at this point that the Tea Party Republicans really care about reelection – and perhaps they don’t even care if Obama wins reelection.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, right, stands with House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio on Capitol Hill in Washington. | AP Photo

Paul Krugman has an interesting take of the Republicans.

Let’s talk for a minute about what Republican leaders are rejecting.

President Obama has made it clear that he’s willing to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal that consists overwhelmingly of spending cuts, and includes draconian cuts in key social programs, up to and including a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. These are extraordinary concessions. As The Times’s Nate Silver points out, the president has offered deals that are far to the right of what the average American voter prefers — in fact, if anything, they’re a bit to the right of what the average Republican voter prefers!

Yet Republicans are saying no. Indeed, they’re threatening to force a U.S. default, and create an economic crisis, unless they get a completely one-sided deal. And this was entirely predictable.

First of all, the modern G.O.P. fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of a Democratic presidency — any Democratic presidency. We saw that under Bill Clinton, and we saw it again as soon as Mr. Obama took office.

As a result, Republicans are automatically against anything the president wants, even if they have supported similar proposals in the past. Mitt Romney’s health care plan became a tyrannical assault on American freedom when put in place by that man in the White House. And the same logic applies to the proposed debt deals.

Put it this way: If a Republican president had managed to extract the kind of concessions on Medicare and Social Security that Mr. Obama is offering, it would have been considered a conservative triumph. But when those concessions come attached to minor increases in revenue, and more important, when they come from a Democratic president, the proposals become unacceptable plans to tax the life out of the U.S. economy.

…

Which brings me to the culpability of those who are only now facing up to the G.O.P.’s craziness.

Here’s the point: those within the G.O.P. who had misgivings about the embrace of tax-cut fanaticism might have made a stronger stand if there had been any indication that such fanaticism came with a price, if outsiders had been willing to condemn those who took irresponsible positions.

But there has been no such price. Mr. Bush squandered the surplus of the late Clinton years, yet prominent pundits pretend that the two parties share equal blame for our debt problems. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed a supposed deficit-reduction plan that included huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, then received an award for fiscal responsibility.

So there has been no pressure on the G.O.P. to show any kind of responsibility, or even rationality — and sure enough, it has gone off the deep end. If you’re surprised, that means that you were part of the problem.

It was fun for a while to watch Boehner herding the Republican cats and watching the infighting, but now it is time for moderate Republicans to join the Democrats and show some common sense.

 

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After Health Care Reform Passage – Threats of Violence

Before the House even completed its work on passage of the Senate Bill and then the Reconciliation Bill, the ugliness had begun to escalate.

OK, so VP Biden kinda embarrassed the President with an F-bomb, but that was small potatoes compared with the racial remarks aimed at black Congressmen, the anti-gay shouts at Barney Frank, and a Congressman shouting “baby killer” at Bart Stupak (one of the most anti-abortion members of Congress) over the weekend. And it is certainly insignificant compared to what has happened since.

Bob Herbert titled his New York Times column “An Absence of Class.”  I think he was being too kind.  But what he says rings very true.

A group of lowlifes at a Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, last week taunted and humiliated a man who was sitting on the ground with a sign that said he had Parkinson’s disease. The disgusting behavior was captured on a widely circulated videotape. One of the Tea Party protesters leaned over the man and sneered: “If you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong end of town.”

Another threw money at the man, first one bill and then another, and said contemptuously, “I’ll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot.”

In Washington on Saturday, opponents of the health care legislation spit on a black congressman and shouted racial slurs at two others, including John Lewis, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was taunted because he is gay.

…

At some point, we have to decide as a country that we just can’t have this: We can’t allow ourselves to remain silent as foaming-at-the-mouth protesters scream the vilest of epithets at members of Congress — epithets that The Times will not allow me to repeat here.

It is 2010, which means it is way past time for decent Americans to rise up against this kind of garbage, to fight it aggressively wherever it appears. And it is time for every American of good will to hold the Republican Party accountable for its role in tolerating, shielding and encouraging foul, mean-spirited and bigoted behavior in its ranks and among its strongest supporters.

…

The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship.

The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country. If people are arguing over immigrants or abortion or whether gays should be allowed to marry, they’re not calling the G.O.P. to account for (to take just one example) the horribly destructive policy of cutting taxes while the nation was fighting two wars.

If you’re all fired up about Republican-inspired tales of Democrats planning to send grandma to some death chamber, you’ll never get to the G.O.P.’s war against the right of ordinary workers to organize and negotiate in their own best interests — a war that has diminished living standards for working people for decades.

Herbert wrote that on Tuesday.  Tonight I went to Politico.com.  The first headline was:  “Hoyer: Members are at Risk”.  Then there are these:  “Slaughter, Stupak receive death threats” and “Cut gas lines at Perriello’s brother’s home probed.” 

Will the Republican leadership speak out or will they be content with John Boehner’s statement as reported in the Washington Post.

House Republican Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said the violence is unacceptable.

“I know many Americans are angry over this health-care bill, and that Washington Democrats just aren’t listening,” Boehner said Wednesday on FoxNews Channel. “But, as I’ve said, violence and threats are unacceptable. That’s not the American way. We need to take that anger and channel it into positive change. Call your congressman, go out and register people to vote, go volunteer on a political campaign, make your voice heard — but let’s do it the right way.”

I hope that law enforcement can successfully do their jobs.  Republican leaders need to go further by condemning other Republican leaders like Michael Steele and Sarah Palin.  Again from the Post

“When people start talking in the rhetoric of putting people on ‘firing lines,’ . . . or they put a target on their faces, with cross hairs,” Hoyer said at a news conference, “that activity ought to be unacceptable in our democracy. . . . That’s wrong. ”

Hoyer appeared to be referring to Republican Party Chairman Michael S. Steele‘s comment in a recent interview that Pelosi is on a “firing line” and to a map posted Tuesday on Sarah Palin‘s Facebook page, which marked with a gunsight districts of House Democrats she plans to campaign against.

I’m not overly concerned about the law suits against the bill, but I am very worried that someone will succeed at doing real violence to a member of Congress or to the President himself.  I am also afraid the the violent speech and the actual violence will escalate as the polls show increasing approval of the bill and the Senate finally passes the reconciliation bill and it is signed by the President.

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Passing health care

It seems pretty obvious that neither the Blair House summit nor the inclusion of some of the Republican suggestions have gained health care reform any Republican votes.  So how exactly can the bill pass?

Here is a diagram from today’s Washington Post

The President never used the term reconciliation in his remarks presenting his plan, but I think it was pretty clear what he meant.  According to the New York Times story

Wednesday’s remarks, made to a group of sympathetic medical professionals, many of them clad in traditional white lab coats, marked Mr. Obama’s entry into the end game of Washington’s long and divisive health care debate. With Republicans unified in opposition to the measure, Mr. Obama used his appearance to make the case to the public that while he is willing to accept Republican ideas, starting over, as Republicans are demanding, does not make sense.

He called on Democrats to stick with him.

“This has been a long and wrenching debate,” Mr. Obama said, adding that while health care “easily lends itself to demagoguery and political gamesmanship,” that is no reason “for those of us who were sent here to lead to just walk away.”

The President’s proposals would be shaped into legislation and then included in the bill by the House Rules Committee, but I guess that Representative Boehner doesn’t understand how the process works because he is now complaining that the President’s bill is “too short.”   I know that Representative Cantor thinks the bills passed by the House and Senate are too long.  Guess the Republicans will complain no matter what the length of any Democratic bill or Democratic proposal.

The health care bill is not going to make everyone 100% happy,  (Where’s the public option?) but the important thing is to make a start.  We are still tinkering with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and we can do the same with health care reform.  And one final thought:  I think the Democrats will do much better in the fall elections if they have an actual bill they can explain and sell – especially if they pass it with no Republican support.

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The State Dinner

Last night there was a State Dinner at the White House, the first given by the Obamas. 

First Lady Gursharan Kaur of India, First Lady Michelle Obama, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, and President Obama arrived for the state dinner.

The dinner for the Prime Minister of India was attended by over 300 guests including two women with the first name Maya (one being the President’s sister), General and Mrs. Powell, and Governor  Bobby Jindal and his wife.  Governor Deval Patrick attended with his wife, Diane.  But where were the Republican Congressional Leadership?  Not there.

While the Washington Times reported that neither John Boehner not Mitch McConnell were invited, it turns out that is not true. Keith Olbermann reported last night on Countdown that both had been invited and had declined.  

I have several questions for the Republicans.  Are you so fixated on bringing down this President that you can’t spend an evening being civil at a State Dinner?  Are you afraid that because this was a dinner given by an African-American President for an Indian Prime Minister that somehow your whiteness would be threatened?  Notice that two of the Republicans (I don’t know if any of the Indian American attendees are Republican.) were black and Indian.  Are you letting your racism out do your civility?  The lame excuse of having to go home for Thanksgiving doesn’t cut it. Most Americans travelling for Thanksgiving will do so today. 

Too bad you didn’t see your way to attend.  It looks like it was a wonderful occasion.  And you missed Jennifer Hudson singing.  Oh, I forgot.  She’s African-American.