As mentioned in an earlier post, Eric Cantor was poised to deliver a speech on economic inequality at the University of Pennsylvania when he realized the audience might be less than receptive. He canceled.

The UPenn student paper has published Cantor’s prepared remarks, and they’re exactly what you might have imagined they would be. His plan for reducing income inequality is to cut taxes on the wealthy.

At one point, Cantor would have said,

In a recent poll, 82 percent of Americans think that their children will be worse off than they are. What happened to the hope of surpassing the success of your parents?

You happened, you idiot. See also Steve Benen

Comment to a Guardian article:

The reason why the left falls down in times of crises is that it fails to define how it wants to use authority, it almost you would think has problem with authority itself – whereas the right seems to make itself out as more potent, vibrant, energetic and charged up – and it will and has used the state for its means, however repugnant it has been in doing this.

On the left – the left struggles to define how it will use power and authority – the right has no bother in doing this.

I think there’s some truth in this. When the Right knows what it wants, it is perfectly happy to use the power of government, head-stopping mobs, and even undermine democracy (i.e., voter suppression) to get what it wants. Too many on the Left seem psychologically unwilling to accept even legitimate power. They want somebody to fix things, but they don’t always seem to know exactly how that’s going to happen.

Greg Sargent and Steve Benen explain how the GOP hopes to gain from obstruction of legislation that the public supports.

Sargent:

Voters either don’t understand, or they don’t care, that the GOP has employed an unprecedented level of filibustering in order to block all of Obama’s policies, even ones that have majority public support from Dems, independents and Republicans alike.

Their reaction, in a nutshell, seems to be: The Obama-led government isn’t acting on the economy? Obama can’t get his policies passed? Well, he must be weak.

Indeed, if the GOP’s strategy is to deliberately create government dysfunction out of a belief that the public will blame Obama for it and lose faith on government in general, turning to GOP ideology instead, it very well may be working. The new AP poll finds that only 41 percent say government can do much to create jobs, a finding that’s borne out in other polls.

Benen:

The public likes to think of the President of the United States, no matter who’s in office, as having vast powers. He or she is “leader of the free world.” He or she holds the most powerful office on the planet. If the president — any president — wants a jobs bill, it must be within his or her power to simply get one to the Oval Office to be signed into law.

And when the political system breaks down, and congressional Republicans kill ideas that are worthwhile and popular, there’s an assumption that the president is somehow to blame, even if that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Polls show the public favors the Democratic Party’s policy ideas over those of Republicans. But since Democrats can’t get their policies passed over Republican obstruction, voters seem inclined to punish the Dems by voting for Republicans.

And, unfortunately, most Americans aren’t hearing the whole story of the obstruction. Those who only read headlines or listen to 30 minutes or less of broadcast news every day have no idea what’s really going on.

Judging by a lot of leftie commentary in the blogosphere, even people who seem to care about politics and seem to pay some attention to issues come to irrational conclusions about why the President isn’t accomplishing what they want. So how would someone who doesn’t pay much attention to politics — or worse, who listens to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh — have a clue?

The Dems plan to continue to push for jobs. Senate Dems are going to try to get a vote on the infrastructure portion of the nixed Jobs bill, to force Republicans to vote no on it again. But Steve Benen says,

As it turns out, reporters seem annoyed that Senate Democrats continue to fight for jobs, pressing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on why he’d bother with an infrastructure bill that Republicans disapprove of.

Maybe because it shouldn’t be up to the Senate minority to veto an idea before a debate? Maybe because this is a bill Republicans should gladly endorse? Maybe because there’s value in getting GOP lawmakers on record on an important and popular bill?

All told, the U.S. Department of Transportation projects that this $50 billion proposal would create roughly 800,000 jobs. They’re jobs, apparently, Republicans don’t think the nation needs.

Greg Sargent:

In a particularly interesting moment, reporters repeatedly pressed Reid to explain why he was going to force Republicans to vote this way, given that they have already said they’ll never support raising taxes. (It would be nice to see these reporters question Republicans as aggressively on why they won’t back policies that even GOP voters like, but that’s probably expecting too much.) But Reid refused to give ground, again and again pointing out that the public is on the side of Dems, and against Republicans, on this issue.

“The Republicans in the Senate are the only group of people in America that feel this way,” Reid said, in a reference to their opposition to the millionaire surtax. “Around the country, Democrats, independents, and Republicans support what we’re trying to do.” As it happens, large majorities also support increased infrastructure spending — including of GOP voters.

I feel like occupying the Washington press corps right now.

The first whimper is the one that comes after “not with a bang but…” — President Obama has announced all U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of this year.

It really is good news, but it seems a bit … anticlimactic, yes? See also Digby, who points out that we’ve got the Mother of All Embassies in Baghdad, and it’s going to take a small standing (and probably mercenary) army to protect it.

Sell the bleepin’ embassy to a mall developer, I say. Who needs it?

The next whimper is from Eric Cantor, who canceled a speech at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business zchool today because he was afraid … of increased attendance? That’s what Ben Smith says … “Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring said the decision to cancel was made as a result of the increased attendance.”

“Increased attendance” may have referred to the this —

Occupy Philly, the Center for American Progress and Keystone Progress, in addition to Penn students, planned a protest outside the event with an expected crowd of 500 to 1,000.

The third whimper is more of a bleat — Lindsey Graham thinks we need to get people on the ground in Libya, fast, because there is money to be made there. And oil! Seriously. Just listen:

Via Annie Laurie, here is a partial transcript:

If we could have kept American air power in the fight it would have been over quicker. Sixty-thousand Libyans have been wounded, 3,000 maimed, 25,000 killed. Let’s get in on the ground. There is a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya. Lot of oil to be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles.

Yes, let’s invade another Muslim country because it has oil. Charles Pierce:

Jesus H. Christ on a catamaran, he could’ve waited a couple of days.

But Senator Huckleberry Grabitall is an impatient fellow. There’s oil under them that corpses, and it’s by god our oil, so we should just go in and drink that damn milkshake before our plucky allies decide that, just because it’s under their sand, they have some sort of legal right to the stuff. Sorry so many of them got killed — Psst! A lot more of them would have been alive if Mighty Man Me had been running things — but we’re past all that now. Sweep ’em aside and let’s go to work.

Sometimes I wonder if people like Huckleberry actually know how ludicrous they sound, not merely to us, but to the rest of the world. Right now, whatever government exists in Libya is rolling bandages, collapsing from exhaustion, and just trying to keep seven or eight light bulbs burning at once. That’s okay, though, because Senator Huckleberry wants to air-drop the Economics Department from the University of Chicago in there to set up a “government based on free-market principles” — which, in this case, means don’t even think about nationalizing your own oil, Achmed.

Elsewhere — Rupert Murdoch could be whimpering after some of his investors get hold of him.

A lot of the negative news about OWS is coming from Fox News and the New York Post, and I tend to disregard both sources. But what Alex Klein reports for New York magazine seems credible to me. Apparently there is friction in Zuccotti Park between people who are serious about building a movement and the usual spoiled attention whores who so often show up at lefty events.

Apparently some among the OWSers are trying to keep some kind of discipline and order, partly so as not to give the city an excuse to evict them, and it’s being resented. One 19-year-old male complained that “They are becoming the government we’re trying to protest.” (Like the government, or his parents?)

The serious ones are hoping cold weather will drive out the un-serious, but in my experience the really freezing weather sometimes doesn’t show up until late December in Manhattan. A lot can happen in two months. I hope for their sakes they can figure out a way to keep it together, but they ought to consider encouraging people to leave if they aren’t willing to respect some community rules.

This is just plain delicious.