AT LEAST WE'VE BEEN WERE SPARED THIS (I THINK)
Progressivism got rolled in the budget battle, but -- though this isn't much compensation -- at least we've (probably) been spared a wave of think pieces arguing that events of this week suggest a move toward good sense, and an aversion to extremism, on the part of right-wingers.
You know how these articles work, right? Three makes a trend.
Number 1: Glenn Beck was let go by Fox. Number 2: The GOP didn't shut down the government.
The problem is Number 3. Let's see: There was a poll of GOP voters released this week. How'd that turn out? Oh, yeah -- Donald Trump was the fastest-rising presidential candidate; he was tied for second place, and gaining fast on the leader. And not only isn't he letting up on the birtherism that got him to #2, he's now engaged in a Palinesque insult war with Gail Collins of The New York Times about birtherism. (His letter to the Times is here; her column in response is here.) So, um, so much for that.
...Oh, who am I kidding? Idiot pundits will still write "Republicans go sensible" pieces -- they'll just toss in Paul Ryan's "brave," "adult" budget as Number 3, and insist that it's different from tea party extremism ... somehow. They'll say the right is focusing on the One Important Thing, the Debt Monster That Will Eat Us All, and rejecting "extraneous" issues -- Beck's conspiracy theories (despite the fact that Beck still gets nearly two million viewers a day), social issues (despite the fact that they were nearly the reason the government got shut down), and birtherism (I don't know how they're going to explain those poll numbers away -- I guess they're just going to say that the same sensible souls who cut the budget deal will force the birther toothpaste back in the tube, and a year from now all good Republicans will hold hands and sing and dance and celebrate the good, sensible nomination of good, sensible Jon Huntsman or Haley Barbour, despite their current poll standing in the low single digits).
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Friday, April 08, 2011
SHUTDOWN AVERTED -- ZANDAR FOR THE WIN!
Well, they cut a deal at the eleventh hour. There isn't going to be a shutdown.
And as far back as last November, when Eric Cantor went on Fox News Sunday, days after the midterms, and threatened to shut down the government, Zandar called it:
The people that stand to lose the most here, especially from the threat of a sovereign debt default, are the investor class. They are the ones who spent billions to get the GOP into power, and the threat of default will annihilate the bond market. The big players, especially the hedge fund giants, stand to lose hundreds of billions from a treasury meltdown as interest rates on long bonds skyrocket and yields drop like lead elephants on gravity steroids.
They will not allow the Republicans to toss satchel charges into their cathedral of cash.
... This is not a card Cantor and the Tea Party crazies will ever, ever be allowed to use.
Zandar urged a lot more courage on the Democrats than they actually had -- though, of course, in recent weeks it sure looked as if the Republicans were going to go through with this regardless. More recently, Zandar said there wouldn't be a shutdown because of the fat cats and because Democrats were so willing to make concessions. In any case, he called it, and I have to say I think he's right that this deal was struck not just because Republicans didn't want to look bad to the voters, but because the political system's puppetmasters really, really didn't want it to happen, and let that be known.
Well, they cut a deal at the eleventh hour. There isn't going to be a shutdown.
And as far back as last November, when Eric Cantor went on Fox News Sunday, days after the midterms, and threatened to shut down the government, Zandar called it:
The people that stand to lose the most here, especially from the threat of a sovereign debt default, are the investor class. They are the ones who spent billions to get the GOP into power, and the threat of default will annihilate the bond market. The big players, especially the hedge fund giants, stand to lose hundreds of billions from a treasury meltdown as interest rates on long bonds skyrocket and yields drop like lead elephants on gravity steroids.
They will not allow the Republicans to toss satchel charges into their cathedral of cash.
... This is not a card Cantor and the Tea Party crazies will ever, ever be allowed to use.
Zandar urged a lot more courage on the Democrats than they actually had -- though, of course, in recent weeks it sure looked as if the Republicans were going to go through with this regardless. More recently, Zandar said there wouldn't be a shutdown because of the fat cats and because Democrats were so willing to make concessions. In any case, he called it, and I have to say I think he's right that this deal was struck not just because Republicans didn't want to look bad to the voters, but because the political system's puppetmasters really, really didn't want it to happen, and let that be known.
JUST TO BE CLEAR ABOUT IT
Even though I've offered (extremely) indirect evidence suggesting (to me, at least) that incompetence rather than deceit is the explanation for what happened to the votes in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, I absolutely believe that we need to ferret out the truth. I absolutely agree with this:
The circumstance lends legitimacy to the call by the advocacy group Citizens Action of Wisconsin for "an immediate federal investigation and immediate impoundment of all computer equipment, ballots, and other relevant evidence needed to verify a fair vote count in Waukesha County." Citizen Action says this investigation should include an accounting of all communications by "Kathy Nickolaus and anyone in the Waukesha clerk's office with all outside actors, and all interested parties to the election dispute."
Will this happen? You know if the parties were reversed, half a dozen very prominent Republicans would have already demanded a Justice Department probe and impoundment, and would be threatening hearings in Congress if those steps weren't taken immediately. It would be New Black Panther Party II. Has anyone in the national Democratic Party said a word about this yet? And no, I don't give a damn that D.C. is preoccupied with the shutdown battle -- that wouldn't stop Republicans if there were hay to be made.
Even though I've offered (extremely) indirect evidence suggesting (to me, at least) that incompetence rather than deceit is the explanation for what happened to the votes in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, I absolutely believe that we need to ferret out the truth. I absolutely agree with this:
The circumstance lends legitimacy to the call by the advocacy group Citizens Action of Wisconsin for "an immediate federal investigation and immediate impoundment of all computer equipment, ballots, and other relevant evidence needed to verify a fair vote count in Waukesha County." Citizen Action says this investigation should include an accounting of all communications by "Kathy Nickolaus and anyone in the Waukesha clerk's office with all outside actors, and all interested parties to the election dispute."
Will this happen? You know if the parties were reversed, half a dozen very prominent Republicans would have already demanded a Justice Department probe and impoundment, and would be threatening hearings in Congress if those steps weren't taken immediately. It would be New Black Panther Party II. Has anyone in the national Democratic Party said a word about this yet? And no, I don't give a damn that D.C. is preoccupied with the shutdown battle -- that wouldn't stop Republicans if there were hay to be made.
KATHY NICKOLAUS: REASONS YOU MIGHT WANT TO VOTE "STUPID" RATHER THAN "EVIL"
In comments to my last Wisconsin post, c u n d gulag directs my attention to a story by The Nation's John Nichols about what's going on in deeply Republican Waukesha County. Nichols finds it very suspicious that county clerk Kathy Nickolaus has suddenly discovered a large number of votes -- but I want to note that a Daily Kos diarist has gone into the memory bank and rescued a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story from 2006 about Nickolas:
Computer glitches, inoperable equipment and other problems troubled Tuesday's primary balloting in Waukesha County, resulting in one candidate mistakenly being posted as winner of a race only later to be declared the loser....
Christine Lufter, who lost a Republican primary in the 97th Assembly District, said Wednesday that she would not likely challenge the outcome, although she was still trying to sort out what happened....
Computer monitors at the county clerk's office late Tuesday briefly showed Lufter winning her race, as county officials scrambled to correct flawed returns from the City of Waukesha.
Final results later showed Lufter losing to fellow Republican Bill Kramer by a significant margin.
County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said some returns from the City of Waukesha inexplicably had data recorded in the wrong column, which momentarily skewed results....
The events of this week favor a Republican against a judicial candidate who appears progressive -- but the 2006 glitch affected two Republicans. Did the final outcome favor a wingnut over a moderate?
Well, no. Bill Kramer is currently a reliable Scott Walker ally -- but here's Lufter's announcement of her candidacy, from '06:
Noted taxpayer and pro-life advocate, and Town of Waukesha resident Christine Lufter today announced her candidacy for the 97th Assembly District seat being vacated by Ann Nischke.
"I've spent virtually my entire life in Waukesha, and like most conservatives, I want to make sure the 97th District is represented by someone who shares a deep commitment to our strong fiscal and social conservative values, someone who will not say one thing on the campaign trail but vote differently once in office. Over the past several days I have received many phone calls encouraging me to run, and after praying about it and spending time talking with family and friends, I have decided to continue my passionate fight against needless government spending as a candidate for the state assembly, where if elected, I will fight to lower the tax burden on our citizens and be a tireless advocate for pro-life causes." commented Lufter.
For the past two years Lufter has served as President of the Waukesha Taxpayers League, leading the fight against the 2005 Waukesha School referendum, as well as reducing the size of the Waukesha County Board....
Down-the-line boilerplate right-winger. If this is the person who was harmed by Nickolaus's rejiggering of the results in '06, I have a hard time seeing how it was done out of sinister right-wing intent.
(Oh, and in the general election in '06, Waukesha was the last county to report results. So to me this seems to be an ongoing competence problem.)
In comments to my last Wisconsin post, c u n d gulag directs my attention to a story by The Nation's John Nichols about what's going on in deeply Republican Waukesha County. Nichols finds it very suspicious that county clerk Kathy Nickolaus has suddenly discovered a large number of votes -- but I want to note that a Daily Kos diarist has gone into the memory bank and rescued a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story from 2006 about Nickolas:
Computer glitches, inoperable equipment and other problems troubled Tuesday's primary balloting in Waukesha County, resulting in one candidate mistakenly being posted as winner of a race only later to be declared the loser....
Christine Lufter, who lost a Republican primary in the 97th Assembly District, said Wednesday that she would not likely challenge the outcome, although she was still trying to sort out what happened....
Computer monitors at the county clerk's office late Tuesday briefly showed Lufter winning her race, as county officials scrambled to correct flawed returns from the City of Waukesha.
Final results later showed Lufter losing to fellow Republican Bill Kramer by a significant margin.
County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said some returns from the City of Waukesha inexplicably had data recorded in the wrong column, which momentarily skewed results....
The events of this week favor a Republican against a judicial candidate who appears progressive -- but the 2006 glitch affected two Republicans. Did the final outcome favor a wingnut over a moderate?
Well, no. Bill Kramer is currently a reliable Scott Walker ally -- but here's Lufter's announcement of her candidacy, from '06:
Noted taxpayer and pro-life advocate, and Town of Waukesha resident Christine Lufter today announced her candidacy for the 97th Assembly District seat being vacated by Ann Nischke.
"I've spent virtually my entire life in Waukesha, and like most conservatives, I want to make sure the 97th District is represented by someone who shares a deep commitment to our strong fiscal and social conservative values, someone who will not say one thing on the campaign trail but vote differently once in office. Over the past several days I have received many phone calls encouraging me to run, and after praying about it and spending time talking with family and friends, I have decided to continue my passionate fight against needless government spending as a candidate for the state assembly, where if elected, I will fight to lower the tax burden on our citizens and be a tireless advocate for pro-life causes." commented Lufter.
For the past two years Lufter has served as President of the Waukesha Taxpayers League, leading the fight against the 2005 Waukesha School referendum, as well as reducing the size of the Waukesha County Board....
Down-the-line boilerplate right-winger. If this is the person who was harmed by Nickolaus's rejiggering of the results in '06, I have a hard time seeing how it was done out of sinister right-wing intent.
(Oh, and in the general election in '06, Waukesha was the last county to report results. So to me this seems to be an ongoing competence problem.)
SULLY'S NEXT HEARTBREAK
Andrew Sullivan, responding to critics of his fanboy defense of Paul Ryan's budget, writes:
The Bowles-Simpson type tax reform in Ryan's budget really does boost revenue, largely fom the rich who benefit disproportionately from the byzantine tax code.... As I understand it the lower tax rates for the successul are paid for by eliminating tax expenditures that largely benefit the wealthy.
I think David Dayen is right: we won't get the Ryan plan, but it shifts the debate rightward so that Ryan becomes the bad cop, which makes Simpson/Bowles the good cop. We probably will get something like Simpson/Bowles as a result.
Except not entirely. The whole point of the tax overhaul in both Ryan's plan and Simpson/Bowles is supposedly that the broad-based cutting of tax rates will be offset by the closing of loopholes that benefit the wealthy and corporations. But how much of a rube do you have to be to think this will actually happen?
Well, of course you don't have to be a rube -- you just have to be a Beltway insider or an East Coast elitist pundit like Sully. Those in this caste all think we're going to get both sides of the bargain. Really? Here in Kochistan? In Immelt-vania?
Grow up. We're going to cut rates, or cut rates on the rich ... and close hardly any loopholes at all. It's just more shock-doctrine economics. Budget deficits and debt will persist, requiring more cuts to programs that benefit you and me, and more givebacks from government workers. As I've said before, I think it's a bubble -- the fat cats using our impoverishment to get us to support Republican economics, which impoverishes us even more and lines their pockets -- until, I suppose, we turn to revolution or fascism, or just have nothing more to give, which is the point when the bubble bursts.
In any case, the plutocrats aren't going to accept loophole-closing, and Sully's going to be shocked -- as shocked as he was when the Iraq War turned out to be a debacle. Ah, but I'm sure he'll be doing well enough financially to endure the pain of disillusionment.
****
Oh, and there's this from Sully:
My generation will have to suck it up. That's the price to be paid by both Democrats and Republicans failing to tackle this issue seriously in the past decade.
Well, the way I'd put it is that that's the price all of us under 55 will have to pay for five geezers in robes throwing the 2000 election to the guy who lost. I make a lot of lousy predictions, but the day Bush was declared the winner, I said to wife, "Well, there goes our Social Security." I had the wrong government program -- at least so far -- but it was painfully obvious: he was going to cut taxes, the economic reality of the boomer pig-in-a-python be damned. And don't get me started on the glorious war Sully once cheered.
Democrats "fail[ed] to tackle this issue seriously in the past decade" because Democrats in the past decade had no power. They had no power as long as Bush had a veto pen and they had no power under Obama as long as Republicans had 41 senators.
Andrew Sullivan, responding to critics of his fanboy defense of Paul Ryan's budget, writes:
The Bowles-Simpson type tax reform in Ryan's budget really does boost revenue, largely fom the rich who benefit disproportionately from the byzantine tax code.... As I understand it the lower tax rates for the successul are paid for by eliminating tax expenditures that largely benefit the wealthy.
I think David Dayen is right: we won't get the Ryan plan, but it shifts the debate rightward so that Ryan becomes the bad cop, which makes Simpson/Bowles the good cop. We probably will get something like Simpson/Bowles as a result.
Except not entirely. The whole point of the tax overhaul in both Ryan's plan and Simpson/Bowles is supposedly that the broad-based cutting of tax rates will be offset by the closing of loopholes that benefit the wealthy and corporations. But how much of a rube do you have to be to think this will actually happen?
Well, of course you don't have to be a rube -- you just have to be a Beltway insider or an East Coast elitist pundit like Sully. Those in this caste all think we're going to get both sides of the bargain. Really? Here in Kochistan? In Immelt-vania?
Grow up. We're going to cut rates, or cut rates on the rich ... and close hardly any loopholes at all. It's just more shock-doctrine economics. Budget deficits and debt will persist, requiring more cuts to programs that benefit you and me, and more givebacks from government workers. As I've said before, I think it's a bubble -- the fat cats using our impoverishment to get us to support Republican economics, which impoverishes us even more and lines their pockets -- until, I suppose, we turn to revolution or fascism, or just have nothing more to give, which is the point when the bubble bursts.
In any case, the plutocrats aren't going to accept loophole-closing, and Sully's going to be shocked -- as shocked as he was when the Iraq War turned out to be a debacle. Ah, but I'm sure he'll be doing well enough financially to endure the pain of disillusionment.
****
Oh, and there's this from Sully:
My generation will have to suck it up. That's the price to be paid by both Democrats and Republicans failing to tackle this issue seriously in the past decade.
Well, the way I'd put it is that that's the price all of us under 55 will have to pay for five geezers in robes throwing the 2000 election to the guy who lost. I make a lot of lousy predictions, but the day Bush was declared the winner, I said to wife, "Well, there goes our Social Security." I had the wrong government program -- at least so far -- but it was painfully obvious: he was going to cut taxes, the economic reality of the boomer pig-in-a-python be damned. And don't get me started on the glorious war Sully once cheered.
Democrats "fail[ed] to tackle this issue seriously in the past decade" because Democrats in the past decade had no power. They had no power as long as Bush had a veto pen and they had no power under Obama as long as Republicans had 41 senators.
OUTNUMBERED, OUTGUNNED
A huge cache of votes was found yesterday in Brookfield, Wisconsin -- enough to put David Prosser, the Walkerite right-wing judge who appeared to have been defeated, back in the lead, and probably an insurmountable lead.
If your first thought is that this is skulduggery, well, the whole thing looks deemed legit, alas:
...at the news conference with [Waukesha County Clerk Kathy] Nickolaus, Ramona Kitzinger, the Democrat on the Waukesha County Board of Canvassers, said: "We went over everything and made sure all the numbers jibed up and they did. Those numbers jibed up, and we're satisfied they're correct."
As a Democrat, she said, "I'm not going to stand here and tell you something that's not true."
Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas, who sat in on Nickolaus' news conference, said voters can be confident in the results because "all the votes are in that office. If anyone wants to look at them and verify, they can."
And you know what? Even before this, where were we? As CH said in my comments on Wednesday, when Prosser was trailing in the vote count but the race was too close to call:
And while we're eyeing Wisconsin, I note that in the state Supreme Court election (in which the incumbent is a sure-fire Repub vote), the results appear 50/50... after a pathetic 33% voter turnout. A lousy 33%, after all the hoopla, demos, yadayada, and at that, it's higher than the usual 20% in a spring election there. Hell, no wonder we can't make a dime.
The fact that this race was even close is obviously a sign of increasing strength on the part of progressives -- but there's a long way to go, and I'm not sure how many progressives grasped that. Really, didn't a lot of people think that the good guys now had both the numbers and the motivation to start rolling right over the Walkerites in Wisconsin? Didn't some people think that the sleeping giant had been awakened and it was only a matter of time before recalls tipped the Wisconsin Senate back to the Democrats, with Governor Walker next in line?
A few weeks ago, I wrote a couple of posts arguing that the recall poll numbers didn't look good enough to justify a great deal of confidence -- Scott Walker wasn't nearly unpopular enough in districts where recall elections were likely to be held, while the recallable Republicans were mostly ahead of generic Democrats. And that was in the immediate aftermath of the union-stripping battle, when feelings were still raw.
The good guys have done a hell of a job -- but it's not enough yet. We have no experience at the sort of total war the right has been fighting nationwide, particularly in the last two years of well-financed teabaggery and Citizens United. At best, our side is nearly as angry and fired up as Wingnut Nation is every day, thanks to Fox and talk radio.
The fallacy is this: In '08, Obama won Wisconsin in a landslide. That's a lot of Democratic votes. I'm a Democrat. I'm furious about what's happening in Wisconsin. Therefore, all those people who voted for Obama in Wisconsin must be just as angry.
It's not true (at least not yet). The noise machine keeps large numbers of rank-and-file rightists angry and engaged. We're not caught up.
****
UPDATE: I'm sure a lot of you think the found votes indicate something fishy, but (as Steve Benen notes), Nate Silver thinks what happened is probably legit (See this series of tweets).
And, well, if it's a dirty trick, we'll see if Democrats have the firepower to fight that, too.
****
UPDATE: Nate Silver elaborates, in great detail. He still thinks this is a matter of incompetence, not conspiracy.
A huge cache of votes was found yesterday in Brookfield, Wisconsin -- enough to put David Prosser, the Walkerite right-wing judge who appeared to have been defeated, back in the lead, and probably an insurmountable lead.
If your first thought is that this is skulduggery, well, the whole thing looks deemed legit, alas:
...at the news conference with [Waukesha County Clerk Kathy] Nickolaus, Ramona Kitzinger, the Democrat on the Waukesha County Board of Canvassers, said: "We went over everything and made sure all the numbers jibed up and they did. Those numbers jibed up, and we're satisfied they're correct."
As a Democrat, she said, "I'm not going to stand here and tell you something that's not true."
Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas, who sat in on Nickolaus' news conference, said voters can be confident in the results because "all the votes are in that office. If anyone wants to look at them and verify, they can."
And you know what? Even before this, where were we? As CH said in my comments on Wednesday, when Prosser was trailing in the vote count but the race was too close to call:
And while we're eyeing Wisconsin, I note that in the state Supreme Court election (in which the incumbent is a sure-fire Repub vote), the results appear 50/50... after a pathetic 33% voter turnout. A lousy 33%, after all the hoopla, demos, yadayada, and at that, it's higher than the usual 20% in a spring election there. Hell, no wonder we can't make a dime.
The fact that this race was even close is obviously a sign of increasing strength on the part of progressives -- but there's a long way to go, and I'm not sure how many progressives grasped that. Really, didn't a lot of people think that the good guys now had both the numbers and the motivation to start rolling right over the Walkerites in Wisconsin? Didn't some people think that the sleeping giant had been awakened and it was only a matter of time before recalls tipped the Wisconsin Senate back to the Democrats, with Governor Walker next in line?
A few weeks ago, I wrote a couple of posts arguing that the recall poll numbers didn't look good enough to justify a great deal of confidence -- Scott Walker wasn't nearly unpopular enough in districts where recall elections were likely to be held, while the recallable Republicans were mostly ahead of generic Democrats. And that was in the immediate aftermath of the union-stripping battle, when feelings were still raw.
The good guys have done a hell of a job -- but it's not enough yet. We have no experience at the sort of total war the right has been fighting nationwide, particularly in the last two years of well-financed teabaggery and Citizens United. At best, our side is nearly as angry and fired up as Wingnut Nation is every day, thanks to Fox and talk radio.
The fallacy is this: In '08, Obama won Wisconsin in a landslide. That's a lot of Democratic votes. I'm a Democrat. I'm furious about what's happening in Wisconsin. Therefore, all those people who voted for Obama in Wisconsin must be just as angry.
It's not true (at least not yet). The noise machine keeps large numbers of rank-and-file rightists angry and engaged. We're not caught up.
****
UPDATE: I'm sure a lot of you think the found votes indicate something fishy, but (as Steve Benen notes), Nate Silver thinks what happened is probably legit (See this series of tweets).
And, well, if it's a dirty trick, we'll see if Democrats have the firepower to fight that, too.
****
UPDATE: Nate Silver elaborates, in great detail. He still thinks this is a matter of incompetence, not conspiracy.
Thursday, April 07, 2011
IF ONLY HE WOULD USE THOSE POWERS FOR GOOD...
Well, it looks as if Republicans just won the messaging war on the shutdown: it's now being reported that the House has approved a Republican resolution that funds the government for another week (with predictable odious cuts) but also appropriates money for the Pentagon through September 30. So an Obama veto threat can now be portrayed as Obama not funding the military and not fully paying the troops.
At this point, I'd like to see the president stick to his veto threat ... while also declaring that, pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority, and under the doctrine of the unitary executive, he's ordering that the troops be paid in full indefinitely, regardless of how long the shutdown lasts. While he's at it, he should declare that, under the same John Yoo-approved doctrines, he deems the Pentagon funding in the House continuing resolution to be the law of the land.
Screw 'em. Why not? He's already using dubious Bush-era powers, so it'd be nice if he used them to lay down a little partisan smack. "You want to patriot-bait me? Bait this, schmucks."
What are the Republicans going to do? Say "How dare he use imperial powers to ... um, pay the troops and fund the military"? I'd like to see them try.
Well, it looks as if Republicans just won the messaging war on the shutdown: it's now being reported that the House has approved a Republican resolution that funds the government for another week (with predictable odious cuts) but also appropriates money for the Pentagon through September 30. So an Obama veto threat can now be portrayed as Obama not funding the military and not fully paying the troops.
At this point, I'd like to see the president stick to his veto threat ... while also declaring that, pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority, and under the doctrine of the unitary executive, he's ordering that the troops be paid in full indefinitely, regardless of how long the shutdown lasts. While he's at it, he should declare that, under the same John Yoo-approved doctrines, he deems the Pentagon funding in the House continuing resolution to be the law of the land.
Screw 'em. Why not? He's already using dubious Bush-era powers, so it'd be nice if he used them to lay down a little partisan smack. "You want to patriot-bait me? Bait this, schmucks."
What are the Republicans going to do? Say "How dare he use imperial powers to ... um, pay the troops and fund the military"? I'd like to see them try.
WONDERING ABOUT THE BOUNDARIES OF THE TRIBE
Public Policy Polling has found that Haley Barbour is the favorite presidential candidate among Republicans in his home state of Mississippi, but what's really striking in PPP's survey is this, which shouldn't surprise me but does:
We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.
Do the marriage segregationists favor Barbour? No -- they favor another candidate, and guess who it is:
For the most part there aren't any huge divides in how voters view the candidates or who they support for the nomination based on their attitudes about interracial marriage but there are a few exceptions.
Palin's net favorability with folks who think interracial marriage should be illegal (+55 at 74/19) is 17 points higher than it is with folks who think interracial marriage should be legal (+38 at 64/26.) Meanwhile Romney's favorability numbers see the opposite trend. He's at +23 (53/30) with voters who think interracial marriage should be legal but 19 points worse at +4 (44/40) with those who think it should be illegal.
****
Full results of the poll are in this PDF -- and I'm really disappointed that the survey didn't include Donald Trump. I'd love to know if his supporters would favor an interracial marriage ban more than other candidates' supporters. I'd also like to know if he'd do as well as I think he would.
A couple of months ago, what I just wrote would have seemed insane. Trump? In the Deep South? Now it doesn't seem crazy. The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll says Trump is the top candidate among teabaggers. And we know tea party membership is disproportionately Southerm. Why wouldn't Trump score well in Mississippi?
I'd like to see the correlation between Trump's popularity in Mississippi and the marriage question because I think these resentment-driven voters see their tribe as being defined by resentments these days more than by geography or accent or good-ol'-ness. I think they'd see Trump as an honorary Southern white hater, in the way that they don't see, say, Jimmy Carter as one of their own at all, thanks to talk radio and Fox.
Public Policy Polling has found that Haley Barbour is the favorite presidential candidate among Republicans in his home state of Mississippi, but what's really striking in PPP's survey is this, which shouldn't surprise me but does:
We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.
Do the marriage segregationists favor Barbour? No -- they favor another candidate, and guess who it is:
For the most part there aren't any huge divides in how voters view the candidates or who they support for the nomination based on their attitudes about interracial marriage but there are a few exceptions.
Palin's net favorability with folks who think interracial marriage should be illegal (+55 at 74/19) is 17 points higher than it is with folks who think interracial marriage should be legal (+38 at 64/26.) Meanwhile Romney's favorability numbers see the opposite trend. He's at +23 (53/30) with voters who think interracial marriage should be legal but 19 points worse at +4 (44/40) with those who think it should be illegal.
****
Full results of the poll are in this PDF -- and I'm really disappointed that the survey didn't include Donald Trump. I'd love to know if his supporters would favor an interracial marriage ban more than other candidates' supporters. I'd also like to know if he'd do as well as I think he would.
A couple of months ago, what I just wrote would have seemed insane. Trump? In the Deep South? Now it doesn't seem crazy. The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll says Trump is the top candidate among teabaggers. And we know tea party membership is disproportionately Southerm. Why wouldn't Trump score well in Mississippi?
I'd like to see the correlation between Trump's popularity in Mississippi and the marriage question because I think these resentment-driven voters see their tribe as being defined by resentments these days more than by geography or accent or good-ol'-ness. I think they'd see Trump as an honorary Southern white hater, in the way that they don't see, say, Jimmy Carter as one of their own at all, thanks to talk radio and Fox.
TRUST ME! I'M AN EXPERT!
After the ballots in that Wisconsin judicial election were counted, Fox Nation and The Wall Street Journal went into instant "Eeek! Voter fraud"! mode. Today it's the Daily Caller, which tells us, "Election fraud allegations fly in close Wisconsin Supreme Court race." I haven't made my way through the article, but I just want to note that the Caller isn't telling you a few things about its lead witness:
Wisconsin citizens and election experts are questioning the veracity of the state's Supreme Court race, which the Associated Press reports left-wing legal activist JoAnne Kloppenburg won by 204 votes over Justice David Prosser, out of the more than 1.4 million votes.
On an estimated more than 10,000 ballots in Dane County, Wisconsin, where the state capital Madison is, voters selected only a pick in the Supreme Court race, while leaving even the hotly contested mayoral and county executive choices blank. That raises red flags for election experts like Scott St. Clair of the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank....
First of all, St. Clair brings no special knowledge of Wisconsin to the table -- the think tank with which he's affiliated (actually called the Evergreen Freedom Foundation) is based in Olympia, Washington, focusing mostly on local issues (like cutting the state's minimum wage). "Investigative journalist" St. Clair writes libertarian-leaning articles, many of them about ferries (no, really), for a little-read local site called Crosscut.com. (He's also a Sarah Palin fan.) So when he declares that he doesn't know why voters would vote in a judicial election and not vote for mayor, he's overlooking the fact that the judicial election is a proxy war in the major political battle of this moment, both statewide and nationally, while the mayor's race was between two candidates who are both liberal Democrats and both opponents of Scott Walker. And that "hotly contested" county executive race? It was expected to be a Democratic blowout, and the expected happened.
Did I mention what Scott St. Clair does in his spare time? He posts comments at Seattle-area blogs, many of them under the name Piper Scott. The name has meaning to him:
Do these comments suggest that St. Clair is a guy you can trust to assess data accurately? Well, how much confidence does this one give you?
Here's something that baffles me...When alarmists say this, that or the other is the warmest "on record" what does that mean??? Only that it's the warmest since somebody started writing this stuff down. Could things have been warmer prior to that...like over thousands and thousands of years??? And could not other factors contribute??
Or this one?
I've never contended that history offers neet parallels. What it offers are themes and lessons mostly lost to those under 40 who have no sense of perspective and who continue to see themselves as unique and apart from both the inexorable force of history and its compelling drive. Typical of youth, they think the rules of the road don't apply to them, so they refuse to heed the wisdom of their elders about speed limits and left turns, thus ending up having to call home with "bad news about the car..."
Boys don't learn to drive until they've totalled two cars each. Girls, being smarter than boys, only total one.
Yes, folks -- drivers in America, on average, wreck 1.5 cars before becoming licensed. It's a fact! You could look it up!
St. Clair also portrays a hero of his, Winston Churchill, as an opponent of socialized medicine -- which is entirely at odds with the facts.
There's the Caller's first "expert." I'll leave it to others to tell us about the rest.
After the ballots in that Wisconsin judicial election were counted, Fox Nation and The Wall Street Journal went into instant "Eeek! Voter fraud"! mode. Today it's the Daily Caller, which tells us, "Election fraud allegations fly in close Wisconsin Supreme Court race." I haven't made my way through the article, but I just want to note that the Caller isn't telling you a few things about its lead witness:
Wisconsin citizens and election experts are questioning the veracity of the state's Supreme Court race, which the Associated Press reports left-wing legal activist JoAnne Kloppenburg won by 204 votes over Justice David Prosser, out of the more than 1.4 million votes.
On an estimated more than 10,000 ballots in Dane County, Wisconsin, where the state capital Madison is, voters selected only a pick in the Supreme Court race, while leaving even the hotly contested mayoral and county executive choices blank. That raises red flags for election experts like Scott St. Clair of the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank....
First of all, St. Clair brings no special knowledge of Wisconsin to the table -- the think tank with which he's affiliated (actually called the Evergreen Freedom Foundation) is based in Olympia, Washington, focusing mostly on local issues (like cutting the state's minimum wage). "Investigative journalist" St. Clair writes libertarian-leaning articles, many of them about ferries (no, really), for a little-read local site called Crosscut.com. (He's also a Sarah Palin fan.) So when he declares that he doesn't know why voters would vote in a judicial election and not vote for mayor, he's overlooking the fact that the judicial election is a proxy war in the major political battle of this moment, both statewide and nationally, while the mayor's race was between two candidates who are both liberal Democrats and both opponents of Scott Walker. And that "hotly contested" county executive race? It was expected to be a Democratic blowout, and the expected happened.
Did I mention what Scott St. Clair does in his spare time? He posts comments at Seattle-area blogs, many of them under the name Piper Scott. The name has meaning to him:
Do these comments suggest that St. Clair is a guy you can trust to assess data accurately? Well, how much confidence does this one give you?
Here's something that baffles me...When alarmists say this, that or the other is the warmest "on record" what does that mean??? Only that it's the warmest since somebody started writing this stuff down. Could things have been warmer prior to that...like over thousands and thousands of years??? And could not other factors contribute??
Or this one?
I've never contended that history offers neet parallels. What it offers are themes and lessons mostly lost to those under 40 who have no sense of perspective and who continue to see themselves as unique and apart from both the inexorable force of history and its compelling drive. Typical of youth, they think the rules of the road don't apply to them, so they refuse to heed the wisdom of their elders about speed limits and left turns, thus ending up having to call home with "bad news about the car..."
Boys don't learn to drive until they've totalled two cars each. Girls, being smarter than boys, only total one.
Yes, folks -- drivers in America, on average, wreck 1.5 cars before becoming licensed. It's a fact! You could look it up!
St. Clair also portrays a hero of his, Winston Churchill, as an opponent of socialized medicine -- which is entirely at odds with the facts.
There's the Caller's first "expert." I'll leave it to others to tell us about the rest.
LUCIANNE GOLDBERG KEEPS IT UNCODED
From Lucianne.com this morning:
Hey, why even bother coding the racism, right?
Keep it classy, Lucy.
****
UPDATE: Uncle Mike in comments notes that the Lucianne folks have acknowledged the embarrassing nature of this by ... changing "Ribs" to "Chicken." Gosh, thanks, folks!
From Lucianne.com this morning:
Hey, why even bother coding the racism, right?
Keep it classy, Lucy.
****
UPDATE: Uncle Mike in comments notes that the Lucianne folks have acknowledged the embarrassing nature of this by ... changing "Ribs" to "Chicken." Gosh, thanks, folks!
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
THE POST-BECK WORLD: A LOT LIKE BECK'S WORLD
This doesn't really have anything to do with Glenn Beck's upcoming departure from the daily Fox schedule, but it is a caution to those who might be ready to celebrate because they think we've finally passed Peak Wingnut: Daily Kos and the SEIU got Public Policy Polling to survey Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, and PPP obtained the following results:
Q: If the candidates for President next year were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Donald Trump, who would you vote for?
Barack Obama: 47
Donald Trump: 38
Undecided: 14
That's right: the new King of Birthers trails Obama by single digits. A majority of Americans say they'd at least consider voting for him.
And no, it's not because Obama is having trouble beating everyone -- go here and you'll see that PPP has Obama beating Palin by 15, beating Gingrich by 11, and beating Pawlenty by 14. Rasmussen polled the "grownup" Republicans against Obama in January and found the president beating Barbour and Daniels by 17, and Huntsman by 10. That's Rasmussen! But PPP has Trump within 9.
I know, I know -- it may be that a lot of voters aren't paying attention to Trump's birtherism lounge act, and just think of him as that smart business tycoon with a reality show. Still: 9 points? Really, America?
Beck doesn't even speak well of Trump, but they're part of the same brave new world that's disconnected itself from objective reality because deeply cynical right-wing media figures with deep pockets know that the ignorant and superstitious vote for politicians who line their pockets. Trump's success means that that world still exists, even if Beck is going away.
****
UPDATE: More Trumpmania:
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appears to be the early front-runner in the largely unformed race for the Republican nomination for president, but real estate magnate Donald Trump may be a surprise contender, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
Among Republican primary voters, Mr. Romney captured the support of 21% in a broad, nine-candidate field. Mr. Trump was tied for second with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, with 17%....
The linked story includes this:
Mr. Trump "may be a punch line but when he talks about the way to solve our problems, he makes a lot of sense to the average guy out there," said Todd Mauney, a conservative Republican in Weatherford, Texas. "I don't know if people can get over him being the butt of every joke but for me, he can be serious when it’s time to make real decisions."
How could I have missed it? No wonder Trump's surging among wingnut voters -- he's being mocked. To the right-wing base, nothing proves virtues more than being the object of mockery in the media. It's been true since Nixon.
This doesn't really have anything to do with Glenn Beck's upcoming departure from the daily Fox schedule, but it is a caution to those who might be ready to celebrate because they think we've finally passed Peak Wingnut: Daily Kos and the SEIU got Public Policy Polling to survey Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, and PPP obtained the following results:
Q: If the candidates for President next year were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Donald Trump, who would you vote for?
Barack Obama: 47
Donald Trump: 38
Undecided: 14
That's right: the new King of Birthers trails Obama by single digits. A majority of Americans say they'd at least consider voting for him.
And no, it's not because Obama is having trouble beating everyone -- go here and you'll see that PPP has Obama beating Palin by 15, beating Gingrich by 11, and beating Pawlenty by 14. Rasmussen polled the "grownup" Republicans against Obama in January and found the president beating Barbour and Daniels by 17, and Huntsman by 10. That's Rasmussen! But PPP has Trump within 9.
I know, I know -- it may be that a lot of voters aren't paying attention to Trump's birtherism lounge act, and just think of him as that smart business tycoon with a reality show. Still: 9 points? Really, America?
Beck doesn't even speak well of Trump, but they're part of the same brave new world that's disconnected itself from objective reality because deeply cynical right-wing media figures with deep pockets know that the ignorant and superstitious vote for politicians who line their pockets. Trump's success means that that world still exists, even if Beck is going away.
****
UPDATE: More Trumpmania:
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appears to be the early front-runner in the largely unformed race for the Republican nomination for president, but real estate magnate Donald Trump may be a surprise contender, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
Among Republican primary voters, Mr. Romney captured the support of 21% in a broad, nine-candidate field. Mr. Trump was tied for second with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, with 17%....
The linked story includes this:
Mr. Trump "may be a punch line but when he talks about the way to solve our problems, he makes a lot of sense to the average guy out there," said Todd Mauney, a conservative Republican in Weatherford, Texas. "I don't know if people can get over him being the butt of every joke but for me, he can be serious when it’s time to make real decisions."
How could I have missed it? No wonder Trump's surging among wingnut voters -- he's being mocked. To the right-wing base, nothing proves virtues more than being the object of mockery in the media. It's been true since Nixon.
THE CROW'S IN THE OVEN
OK, OK, I was wrong about Beck -- he "intends to transition off of his daily program" at Fox "later this year," according to a joint announcement by Fox and Beck's company Mercury Radio Arts. The announcement says Beck and Fox "will work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channel as well as content for other platforms including Fox News' digital properties"; we'll see if that really happens.
I still say Beck was doing better at a non-prime-time hour than anyone else is likely to do, and Fox had to be somewhat pleased with that, despite Beck's ratings drop. But Beck is the kind of guy who always thinks he's moving onward and upward, building a bigger and badder media empire -- here's his new message board/news site, here he is co-authoring a self-help book. I bet he wanted Fox to pay him what he seemed to be worth when his ratings were 2.8 million a day rather than 2 million, and Fox just didn't see any justification for that. He doesn't work out of the Fox building, he has far more control over his own content than other Fox headliners, and so I imagine he's seen as a pain in the ass more than he is as a failure. And I'm sure Roger Ailes sees it as a penis-measuring contest, and he's the only one who gets to win those.
Beck, I think, is about to move into his Apple Records phase -- you know, when the Beatles thought they could get clear of all the short-haired men in suits and control their own destiny. Beck's a better businessman, but I suspect he thinks he can do far more on his own than he'll actually manage. He's not going to matter as much doing Special Video Reports or whatever the hell he's planning -- what's made him compelling, and terrifying, is that he does that crazy stuf every day in your living room, and you get to watch.
As for Fox, I always expect worse. What'll replace Beck? Megyn Kelly with a bullwhip? Donald Trump's conspirarama? Erick Erickson? (Somehow #3 scares me the most.)
****
Favorite reader reaction at Beck's Blaze, from Hauschild at 1:30 P.M. today:
Man, the only two programs I look forward to are no longer viable – Two and a Half Men and Glenn Beck.
OK, OK, I was wrong about Beck -- he "intends to transition off of his daily program" at Fox "later this year," according to a joint announcement by Fox and Beck's company Mercury Radio Arts. The announcement says Beck and Fox "will work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channel as well as content for other platforms including Fox News' digital properties"; we'll see if that really happens.
I still say Beck was doing better at a non-prime-time hour than anyone else is likely to do, and Fox had to be somewhat pleased with that, despite Beck's ratings drop. But Beck is the kind of guy who always thinks he's moving onward and upward, building a bigger and badder media empire -- here's his new message board/news site, here he is co-authoring a self-help book. I bet he wanted Fox to pay him what he seemed to be worth when his ratings were 2.8 million a day rather than 2 million, and Fox just didn't see any justification for that. He doesn't work out of the Fox building, he has far more control over his own content than other Fox headliners, and so I imagine he's seen as a pain in the ass more than he is as a failure. And I'm sure Roger Ailes sees it as a penis-measuring contest, and he's the only one who gets to win those.
Beck, I think, is about to move into his Apple Records phase -- you know, when the Beatles thought they could get clear of all the short-haired men in suits and control their own destiny. Beck's a better businessman, but I suspect he thinks he can do far more on his own than he'll actually manage. He's not going to matter as much doing Special Video Reports or whatever the hell he's planning -- what's made him compelling, and terrifying, is that he does that crazy stuf every day in your living room, and you get to watch.
As for Fox, I always expect worse. What'll replace Beck? Megyn Kelly with a bullwhip? Donald Trump's conspirarama? Erick Erickson? (Somehow #3 scares me the most.)
****
Favorite reader reaction at Beck's Blaze, from Hauschild at 1:30 P.M. today:
Man, the only two programs I look forward to are no longer viable – Two and a Half Men and Glenn Beck.
PAUL RYAN: ALL THAT'S MISSING IS THE SHEPARD FAIREY POSTER
(updated)
Democrats and liberals need to discredit the Paul Ryan budget, and some are trying, but, as usual, they're not doing it the way it needs to be done. Most of the responses are wonkish -- the Ryan budget will prevent millions who'd get coverage via the (still little-loved) health care law from getting coverage! The Ryan budget will increase the deficit and then make Medicare recipients pay more eleven years from now! The Ryan Medicare plan will be subject to political pressure eleven years from now that will raise its cost (or reduce benefits)!
All of this is true. All of this is important. None of it, however, is easy for the average American to grasp. None of it is visceral and immediate. I said it before and I'll say it again: The Republican plan abolishes Medicare. There's your message, Democrats and liberals. Somebody needs to say that. Oh, and: Paul Ryan says Medicare and Social Security are "a cancer."
Meanwhile, Republicans know what they're doing. They're selling this by making Paul Ryan a hero -- after all their fumbling around and with an utterly pathetic presidential field, they've nevertheless found their Barack Obama.
I know, I know -- Obama was multiculti and oratorically gifted and sounded kind of progressive. Well, yeah -- but the reason he found favor with the folks in the mainstream media is that he was just their type: youthful, optimistic, an apparent big thinker, a perfect cocktail of wonkish/jockish (but not too much of either), and seemingly not conservative but also not (ick) dogmatically liberal.
The press fell for this combination in '92, in the person of Bill Clinton. He had big ideas and the common touch. Just like many yuppie reporters, he jogged (which, for a politician, was kind of new and hip). He was DLC. He was the new JFK (and then Obama was the newer JFK).
When there's no one like this, the press turns to less satisfactory substitutes -- wishing George W. Bush were smarter, wishing Newt Gingrich didn't seem like a middle-school bullying victim turned Nietszchean. But in Ryan they've got what they want. He's young and vigorous and has big wonky ideas and makes himself sound reasonable selling them. He works out a lot. He sells his budget as a "path to prosperity" and a way of saving entitlement programs -- optimism! Lack of mean-spiritedness! (I guarantee you you're going to read mainstream press articles about how we need to do something like what Ryan's proposing so we can avoid the extremism of the tea party.)
The Republicans know they can sell Ryan as a heroic dreamboat. They know the press will buy it. And what's our side countering with? Wonkery -- nothing more.
Republicans know you have to tarnish a press dreamboat. They sure did it to Clinton and Obama (Both also did it to themselves. But Republicans positioned themselves to exploit every weakness, while highlighting every flaw and making up ones that didn't actually exist.)
Want to blunt the power of Ryan's message? Discredit the messenger. Sorry -- this is America. That's how these things work. The alternative is Ryan as rock star, and Ryanism as our future.
****
UPDATE: What was I saying? From AP:
Meet Paul Ryan: Packer fan, deer hunter, budgeteer
He's a Green Bay Packers fanatic and a fitness buff, a father of three and a bow hunter not averse to sending emails while stalking deer in the brush.
Seven-term Rep. Paul Ryan is the Republican out front with a message politicians of any stripe don't like to say out loud: Medicare, Medicaid and someday soon Social Security must be reformed or cut outright if the nation's deficit is to be brought under control.
He's delivering that inconvenient truth in a role he's coveted for years....
Shoot me. Shoot me now.
And just in case you thought I was crazy to argue that Ryan would be distinguished from, y'know, real extremists, there's this:
Ryan told The Washington Post that he's not a "root canal" Republican focused on making America suffer for a broader goal.
See? He's sort of a centrist!
Oh, and there's this, too, from the Daily Beast's John Avolon:
Rep. Paul Ryan has put forward a gutsy budget proposal that deals with entitlement reform and promises to cut the deficit and debt by more than $6 trillion in the next decade. Fiscal conservatives should be cheering.
But instead, some on the far right seem determined to bring about a government shutdown by the end of the week over a comparatively small sum....
See? People "on the far right" are Paul Ryan's enemies.
Argh.
****
ALSO, TOO: This.
(updated)
Democrats and liberals need to discredit the Paul Ryan budget, and some are trying, but, as usual, they're not doing it the way it needs to be done. Most of the responses are wonkish -- the Ryan budget will prevent millions who'd get coverage via the (still little-loved) health care law from getting coverage! The Ryan budget will increase the deficit and then make Medicare recipients pay more eleven years from now! The Ryan Medicare plan will be subject to political pressure eleven years from now that will raise its cost (or reduce benefits)!
All of this is true. All of this is important. None of it, however, is easy for the average American to grasp. None of it is visceral and immediate. I said it before and I'll say it again: The Republican plan abolishes Medicare. There's your message, Democrats and liberals. Somebody needs to say that. Oh, and: Paul Ryan says Medicare and Social Security are "a cancer."
Meanwhile, Republicans know what they're doing. They're selling this by making Paul Ryan a hero -- after all their fumbling around and with an utterly pathetic presidential field, they've nevertheless found their Barack Obama.
I know, I know -- Obama was multiculti and oratorically gifted and sounded kind of progressive. Well, yeah -- but the reason he found favor with the folks in the mainstream media is that he was just their type: youthful, optimistic, an apparent big thinker, a perfect cocktail of wonkish/jockish (but not too much of either), and seemingly not conservative but also not (ick) dogmatically liberal.
The press fell for this combination in '92, in the person of Bill Clinton. He had big ideas and the common touch. Just like many yuppie reporters, he jogged (which, for a politician, was kind of new and hip). He was DLC. He was the new JFK (and then Obama was the newer JFK).
When there's no one like this, the press turns to less satisfactory substitutes -- wishing George W. Bush were smarter, wishing Newt Gingrich didn't seem like a middle-school bullying victim turned Nietszchean. But in Ryan they've got what they want. He's young and vigorous and has big wonky ideas and makes himself sound reasonable selling them. He works out a lot. He sells his budget as a "path to prosperity" and a way of saving entitlement programs -- optimism! Lack of mean-spiritedness! (I guarantee you you're going to read mainstream press articles about how we need to do something like what Ryan's proposing so we can avoid the extremism of the tea party.)
The Republicans know they can sell Ryan as a heroic dreamboat. They know the press will buy it. And what's our side countering with? Wonkery -- nothing more.
Republicans know you have to tarnish a press dreamboat. They sure did it to Clinton and Obama (Both also did it to themselves. But Republicans positioned themselves to exploit every weakness, while highlighting every flaw and making up ones that didn't actually exist.)
Want to blunt the power of Ryan's message? Discredit the messenger. Sorry -- this is America. That's how these things work. The alternative is Ryan as rock star, and Ryanism as our future.
****
UPDATE: What was I saying? From AP:
Meet Paul Ryan: Packer fan, deer hunter, budgeteer
He's a Green Bay Packers fanatic and a fitness buff, a father of three and a bow hunter not averse to sending emails while stalking deer in the brush.
Seven-term Rep. Paul Ryan is the Republican out front with a message politicians of any stripe don't like to say out loud: Medicare, Medicaid and someday soon Social Security must be reformed or cut outright if the nation's deficit is to be brought under control.
He's delivering that inconvenient truth in a role he's coveted for years....
Shoot me. Shoot me now.
And just in case you thought I was crazy to argue that Ryan would be distinguished from, y'know, real extremists, there's this:
Ryan told The Washington Post that he's not a "root canal" Republican focused on making America suffer for a broader goal.
See? He's sort of a centrist!
Oh, and there's this, too, from the Daily Beast's John Avolon:
Rep. Paul Ryan has put forward a gutsy budget proposal that deals with entitlement reform and promises to cut the deficit and debt by more than $6 trillion in the next decade. Fiscal conservatives should be cheering.
But instead, some on the far right seem determined to bring about a government shutdown by the end of the week over a comparatively small sum....
See? People "on the far right" are Paul Ryan's enemies.
Argh.
****
ALSO, TOO: This.
BOEHNER, FRAMING THE POST-SHUTDOWN DEBATE
Politico last night:
John Boehner: Democrats 'win' in government shutdown
Speaker John Boehner is warning his Republican colleagues that Democrats would "win" a government shutdown and the GOP would suffer a political catastrophe if the federal government runs out of money at the end of this week.
"The Democrats think they benefit from a government shutdown. I agree," Boehner said during a closed-door, 90-minute meeting on House Republicans on Monday night, according to several lawmakers who attended the session....
Hot Air's Allahpundit, from the right, offers this interpretation:
Three possibilities. One: It's all lies, concocted to weaken Boehner's hand at a critical moment in negotiations. Two: It's true, and is being leaked by Boehner's allies in the caucus to warn the base that they might be steering us off a cliff before Paul Ryan's epic budget has had a fair shake publicly. Three: It's true, and is being leaked by Boehner's opponents in the caucus to warn the base that he's going wobbly and that they should keep up the pressure for deeper cuts.
Let me offer a fourth possibility: Boehner knows a shutdown is likely, so he's leaking (or some Republican is leaking) a soundbite that frames Democrats as the people trying to make this happen, for political gain. The public, after all, is prepared to split the blame so far. The public (teabaggers excepted) wants compromise, but most Americans have no idea how much Democrats have compromised already. So this line (which Republicans will all parrot once the government is shut down) can absolutely frame the debate, portraying Democrats as the bad guys.
*****
I've been intrigued by Zandar's notion that Republicans really won't shut down the government, primarily because their corporate masters don't want it to happen. Zandar's most recent post on this is here. He thinks Republicans won't need to do it because Democrats keep giving them everything they want, even when the goalposts get moved -- though the incessant goalpost-moving suggests that Republicans don't want to declare victory, right?
I wonder if Zandar is partly right. John Boehner and the graybeards quoted in the Politico article I linked above say they don't want a shutdown; they say they fear Republicans will be blamed. I think if they're sincere about wanting to dodge a shutdown, it's because the fat cats don't want it, as Zandar says. On the other side, of course, are teabag types who are itching to shut it all down.
But what about a brief shutdown? Could Boehner give the crazies what they crave, sating their thirst for anarchy, while wrapping it all up, say, over the weekend, or in a few business days, before our financial overlords get cranky?
That's my prediction. (Well, that and a lot more Democratic capitulation along the way.)
Politico last night:
John Boehner: Democrats 'win' in government shutdown
Speaker John Boehner is warning his Republican colleagues that Democrats would "win" a government shutdown and the GOP would suffer a political catastrophe if the federal government runs out of money at the end of this week.
"The Democrats think they benefit from a government shutdown. I agree," Boehner said during a closed-door, 90-minute meeting on House Republicans on Monday night, according to several lawmakers who attended the session....
Hot Air's Allahpundit, from the right, offers this interpretation:
Three possibilities. One: It's all lies, concocted to weaken Boehner's hand at a critical moment in negotiations. Two: It's true, and is being leaked by Boehner's allies in the caucus to warn the base that they might be steering us off a cliff before Paul Ryan's epic budget has had a fair shake publicly. Three: It's true, and is being leaked by Boehner's opponents in the caucus to warn the base that he's going wobbly and that they should keep up the pressure for deeper cuts.
Let me offer a fourth possibility: Boehner knows a shutdown is likely, so he's leaking (or some Republican is leaking) a soundbite that frames Democrats as the people trying to make this happen, for political gain. The public, after all, is prepared to split the blame so far. The public (teabaggers excepted) wants compromise, but most Americans have no idea how much Democrats have compromised already. So this line (which Republicans will all parrot once the government is shut down) can absolutely frame the debate, portraying Democrats as the bad guys.
*****
I've been intrigued by Zandar's notion that Republicans really won't shut down the government, primarily because their corporate masters don't want it to happen. Zandar's most recent post on this is here. He thinks Republicans won't need to do it because Democrats keep giving them everything they want, even when the goalposts get moved -- though the incessant goalpost-moving suggests that Republicans don't want to declare victory, right?
I wonder if Zandar is partly right. John Boehner and the graybeards quoted in the Politico article I linked above say they don't want a shutdown; they say they fear Republicans will be blamed. I think if they're sincere about wanting to dodge a shutdown, it's because the fat cats don't want it, as Zandar says. On the other side, of course, are teabag types who are itching to shut it all down.
But what about a brief shutdown? Could Boehner give the crazies what they crave, sating their thirst for anarchy, while wrapping it all up, say, over the weekend, or in a few business days, before our financial overlords get cranky?
That's my prediction. (Well, that and a lot more Democratic capitulation along the way.)
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
RYAN: MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY ARE "A CANCER"
I know even this isn't enough to guarantee a full-throated Democratic response, but here, via Digby, is Paul Ryan on Glenn Beck's radio show last year:
PAUL RYAN: ... what I've been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today and so to me it's really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate.
... GLENN: And I think we're saying the same thing. I call it ‑‑
PAUL RYAN: We are saying the same thing.
GLENN: It's a cancer.
... PAUL RYAN: ... this is really a cancer because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature and turns it on its head and says, no, no, no, no, no, they come from government....
Even I could make this freaking ad. Grandma. A Social Security check. And Ryan saying, "It's a cancer." That's all you need.
Anyone?
****
(For a more extensive transcript, follow the links.)
I know even this isn't enough to guarantee a full-throated Democratic response, but here, via Digby, is Paul Ryan on Glenn Beck's radio show last year:
PAUL RYAN: ... what I've been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today and so to me it's really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate.
... GLENN: And I think we're saying the same thing. I call it ‑‑
PAUL RYAN: We are saying the same thing.
GLENN: It's a cancer.
... PAUL RYAN: ... this is really a cancer because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature and turns it on its head and says, no, no, no, no, no, they come from government....
Even I could make this freaking ad. Grandma. A Social Security check. And Ryan saying, "It's a cancer." That's all you need.
Anyone?
****
(For a more extensive transcript, follow the links.)
I RARELY SAY "PASS THE POPCORN," BUT ... PASS THE POPCORN
Lately I've been thinking that the GOP presidential primaries are, alas, going to end with the least crazy, most electable, most obvious candidate getting the nomination -- Romney. I say this because Huckabee seems reluctant to run, Palin is doing so poorly in recent polls that she's likely to experience a Thompson/Giuliani-style flameout even if she does run, Pawlenty is far less inspiring to the base than his own videos are, and Bachmann and Gingrich don't seem able to connect with voters outside the Bible Belt, e.g., in New Hampshire, which means that Romney will probably trounce the motley field of God-botherers and tea types in the big cities of Florida and the bigger urban states that are part of the Super Tuesday pack, thus establishing unstoppable momentum.
I thought that, and then I saw this, from Public Policy Polling:
Mitt Romney's still the clear early front runner to take the Republican primary in New Hampshire next year but for the first time in our polling of the race PPP finds someone within single digits of him...Donald Trump.
If Trump actually run 21% of New Hampshire GOP voters say they'd vote for him, compared to 27% for Romney. The key to Trump's relatively strong showing? He does well with birthers and Tea Partiers, two groups he has seemed to actively court with his public comments of late. 42% of primary voters firmly say they do not believe Barack Obama was born in the United States to 35% who believe that he was and 23% who aren't sure. Trump leads Romney 22-21 with the birther crowd....
No, I don't think Trump is actually going to run. But now he's demonstrated the way to deal a mortal wound to Romney in what's practically his home state -- just go birther. Months from now, long after Trump has announced that after careful thought he's decided not to run, don't you think some other candidate will have absorbed the lesson and made birtherism (if only of the "I'm just asking the question" variety) a major part of his or her campaign?
And if that limits Romney to a victory in New Hampshire that's a single-digit squeaker, while a birther/teabagger/Bible-thumper package of messages by his opposition sends him to defeat in Iowa and South Carolina, can Mitt possibly pull through?
I don't know who's going to pick up the Trump birther mantle -- Gingrich? Bachmann? Cain? Rand Paul? But if this poll is right, birtherism could be the deciding issue in the race, knocking Romney out.
Unless, of course, he goes birther or semi-birther himself. Hard to imagine, but it's not as if he has a moral compass, right?
Lately I've been thinking that the GOP presidential primaries are, alas, going to end with the least crazy, most electable, most obvious candidate getting the nomination -- Romney. I say this because Huckabee seems reluctant to run, Palin is doing so poorly in recent polls that she's likely to experience a Thompson/Giuliani-style flameout even if she does run, Pawlenty is far less inspiring to the base than his own videos are, and Bachmann and Gingrich don't seem able to connect with voters outside the Bible Belt, e.g., in New Hampshire, which means that Romney will probably trounce the motley field of God-botherers and tea types in the big cities of Florida and the bigger urban states that are part of the Super Tuesday pack, thus establishing unstoppable momentum.
I thought that, and then I saw this, from Public Policy Polling:
Mitt Romney's still the clear early front runner to take the Republican primary in New Hampshire next year but for the first time in our polling of the race PPP finds someone within single digits of him...Donald Trump.
If Trump actually run 21% of New Hampshire GOP voters say they'd vote for him, compared to 27% for Romney. The key to Trump's relatively strong showing? He does well with birthers and Tea Partiers, two groups he has seemed to actively court with his public comments of late. 42% of primary voters firmly say they do not believe Barack Obama was born in the United States to 35% who believe that he was and 23% who aren't sure. Trump leads Romney 22-21 with the birther crowd....
No, I don't think Trump is actually going to run. But now he's demonstrated the way to deal a mortal wound to Romney in what's practically his home state -- just go birther. Months from now, long after Trump has announced that after careful thought he's decided not to run, don't you think some other candidate will have absorbed the lesson and made birtherism (if only of the "I'm just asking the question" variety) a major part of his or her campaign?
And if that limits Romney to a victory in New Hampshire that's a single-digit squeaker, while a birther/teabagger/Bible-thumper package of messages by his opposition sends him to defeat in Iowa and South Carolina, can Mitt possibly pull through?
I don't know who's going to pick up the Trump birther mantle -- Gingrich? Bachmann? Cain? Rand Paul? But if this poll is right, birtherism could be the deciding issue in the race, knocking Romney out.
Unless, of course, he goes birther or semi-birther himself. Hard to imagine, but it's not as if he has a moral compass, right?
WWGOPD?
Just to make an obvious point: If the parties were reversed and the GOP were the non-right-wing party confronted with Paul Ryan's budget, Republicans wouldn't respond by saying, "Democrats want to change Medicare for people under 55." They wouldn't respond by saying, "Democrats want to eliminate Medicare as we know it for people under 55." They'd just say, flat out: This plan abolishes Medicare. They wouldn't asterisk it, footnote it, or qualify it in any way. They wouldn't take great pains to avoid suggesting that current seniors need to be worried -- they'd work like hell to make sure current seniors were worried.
We make lists of the various Republicans who embrace (or refrain from embracing) birtherism and climate-change denial and other conspiracies, but one step down from those flagrantly loony notions is the idea that the Obama health care law was a "government takeover" of medicine. Can you name a prominent Republican who hasn't uttered that particular lie? And how many prominent Republicans can you name who have said, no, there were never any death panels in the health care bill?
The Republican plan abolishes Medicare. Period. Full stop. That's what every Democrat should say -- because this is war, and if the parties were reversed, that's what every Republican would say.
Just to make an obvious point: If the parties were reversed and the GOP were the non-right-wing party confronted with Paul Ryan's budget, Republicans wouldn't respond by saying, "Democrats want to change Medicare for people under 55." They wouldn't respond by saying, "Democrats want to eliminate Medicare as we know it for people under 55." They'd just say, flat out: This plan abolishes Medicare. They wouldn't asterisk it, footnote it, or qualify it in any way. They wouldn't take great pains to avoid suggesting that current seniors need to be worried -- they'd work like hell to make sure current seniors were worried.
We make lists of the various Republicans who embrace (or refrain from embracing) birtherism and climate-change denial and other conspiracies, but one step down from those flagrantly loony notions is the idea that the Obama health care law was a "government takeover" of medicine. Can you name a prominent Republican who hasn't uttered that particular lie? And how many prominent Republicans can you name who have said, no, there were never any death panels in the health care bill?
The Republican plan abolishes Medicare. Period. Full stop. That's what every Democrat should say -- because this is war, and if the parties were reversed, that's what every Republican would say.
SUPERSTITIOUS NONSENSE SPREAD AS DISINFORMATION IS GOOD FOR AMERICA!
I realize Joe Scarborough wrote this Politico op-ed sucking up to Donald Trump primarily because he wants Trump to throw some of his current ratings mojo Scarborough's way, but even beyond that motive the piece is a disgrace. You don't have to admire Ronald Reagan or even Sarah Palin -- I loathe both -- to see a difference between their C-student grasp of important facts and Trump's embrace of utter conspiratorial nonsense, either cynically or because he's as dumb an SOB as any mouth-breathing World Net Daily reader. Yet Scarborough writes about Trump as if he's just the tonic our political culture needs:
Throughout his remarkable political career, elites regularly treated former President Ronald Reagan as though he were a badly told political joke.
Reagan rankled the sensibilities of the polite political crowd when he fought the transfer of the Panama Canal during his 1976 campaign for president: "We bought it, we paid for it, it is sovereign U.S. territory, and we should keep it."
That position simultaneously horrified the foreign policy community and revived the former governor’s political fortunes.
A decade later, Reagan's support for a missile defense shield was ridiculed as science fiction, even as it brought Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's negotiators to their knees.
Presidential biographer Richard Reeves wrote that throughout Reagan’s political career, he "was dismissed as a lightweight with no strategy." It was a misperception that the former actor exploited time and again.
...anyone who believes political commentators' scorn for Trump will keep him from winning the Republican nomination need only read the nasty things Washington's wise men said about Reagan in 1979.
That is not to say that Trump is Reagan. He is not. But he isn't Palin either. That means a run by the New York billionaire would shake up politics in a way not seen since Ross Perot sought the nation's highest office in 1992.
Yes, that's just wonderful -- Trump thinks Obama was born in Kenya and believes (as Roy Edroso reminds us) that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams from My Father -- and all Scarborough can say is that what Trump's saying is a welcome gob in the eye of hoity-toity status quo defenders who deserve it.
I look forward to future Scarborough articles arguing that it would be a welcome challenge to snooty elite opinion if a Holocaust denier were a finalist for chancellor of the New York public schools, or if the next president's shortlist for head of the Centers for Disease Control included someone who thinks sex with virgin cures AIDS.
I realize Joe Scarborough wrote this Politico op-ed sucking up to Donald Trump primarily because he wants Trump to throw some of his current ratings mojo Scarborough's way, but even beyond that motive the piece is a disgrace. You don't have to admire Ronald Reagan or even Sarah Palin -- I loathe both -- to see a difference between their C-student grasp of important facts and Trump's embrace of utter conspiratorial nonsense, either cynically or because he's as dumb an SOB as any mouth-breathing World Net Daily reader. Yet Scarborough writes about Trump as if he's just the tonic our political culture needs:
Throughout his remarkable political career, elites regularly treated former President Ronald Reagan as though he were a badly told political joke.
Reagan rankled the sensibilities of the polite political crowd when he fought the transfer of the Panama Canal during his 1976 campaign for president: "We bought it, we paid for it, it is sovereign U.S. territory, and we should keep it."
That position simultaneously horrified the foreign policy community and revived the former governor’s political fortunes.
A decade later, Reagan's support for a missile defense shield was ridiculed as science fiction, even as it brought Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's negotiators to their knees.
Presidential biographer Richard Reeves wrote that throughout Reagan’s political career, he "was dismissed as a lightweight with no strategy." It was a misperception that the former actor exploited time and again.
...anyone who believes political commentators' scorn for Trump will keep him from winning the Republican nomination need only read the nasty things Washington's wise men said about Reagan in 1979.
That is not to say that Trump is Reagan. He is not. But he isn't Palin either. That means a run by the New York billionaire would shake up politics in a way not seen since Ross Perot sought the nation's highest office in 1992.
Yes, that's just wonderful -- Trump thinks Obama was born in Kenya and believes (as Roy Edroso reminds us) that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams from My Father -- and all Scarborough can say is that what Trump's saying is a welcome gob in the eye of hoity-toity status quo defenders who deserve it.
I look forward to future Scarborough articles arguing that it would be a welcome challenge to snooty elite opinion if a Holocaust denier were a finalist for chancellor of the New York public schools, or if the next president's shortlist for head of the Centers for Disease Control included someone who thinks sex with virgin cures AIDS.
ARROGANT, OUT-OF-TOUCH ELITIST
I'm looking at Paul Ryan's Wall Street Journal op-ed defending his Medicare-killing budget plan, and I think this is the line that most offends me:
But because government should not force people to reorganize their lives, its reforms will not affect those in or near retirement in any way.
The nerve of this little elitist. My wife and I are in our early fifties -- fairly close to retirement, yet still young enough, under Ryan's plan, to be thrown on the tender mercies of the free market for our health care when we're old -- and I just want to know what he thinks people in our situation do. Does he think we just sit around blissfully ignoring the passing of time until about about, oh, 64 or so, and then make our plans for how we're going to survive retirement in a couple of hours one evening? Does he think we don't worry about this, and strategize for it, years and even decades before retirement is imminent?
Paul Ryan is 41 years old. He's a career politician with 12 years' service in the House and decades more to look forward to -- that is, if he's not named VP, treasury secretary, or Fed chairman by a future Republican president, in which case he'll make even more than he makes now, which is three times the national household median.
His retirement income will almost certainly start with both a generous federal pension and income from a defined-contribution plan -- members of Congress, unlike most workers, get both.
And all that is a drop in the bucket, because, of course, at some point in his life he'll almost certainly become an obscenely paid lobbyist, Fox News commentator, or (most likely) both. He'll get think tank sinecures and he'll be named to corporate boards. He'll pull down single-speech speaking fees that march a teacher's annual salary. In other words -- unlike the vast majority of us -- he knows he'll never be involuntarily unemployed, and he'll always be employed at a very pleasant level of income.
What the hell does he know about having to "reorganize" one's life? His life is already organized very nicely, thank you.
****
UPDATE: Booman Tribune's Steven D and his wife are also just under 55, though a lot less fortunate in matters of health than my wife and I have been. Read Steven's heartbreaking post to learn what's really going to happen to a lot of people if Ryanomics prevails.
I'm looking at Paul Ryan's Wall Street Journal op-ed defending his Medicare-killing budget plan, and I think this is the line that most offends me:
But because government should not force people to reorganize their lives, its reforms will not affect those in or near retirement in any way.
The nerve of this little elitist. My wife and I are in our early fifties -- fairly close to retirement, yet still young enough, under Ryan's plan, to be thrown on the tender mercies of the free market for our health care when we're old -- and I just want to know what he thinks people in our situation do. Does he think we just sit around blissfully ignoring the passing of time until about about, oh, 64 or so, and then make our plans for how we're going to survive retirement in a couple of hours one evening? Does he think we don't worry about this, and strategize for it, years and even decades before retirement is imminent?
Paul Ryan is 41 years old. He's a career politician with 12 years' service in the House and decades more to look forward to -- that is, if he's not named VP, treasury secretary, or Fed chairman by a future Republican president, in which case he'll make even more than he makes now, which is three times the national household median.
His retirement income will almost certainly start with both a generous federal pension and income from a defined-contribution plan -- members of Congress, unlike most workers, get both.
And all that is a drop in the bucket, because, of course, at some point in his life he'll almost certainly become an obscenely paid lobbyist, Fox News commentator, or (most likely) both. He'll get think tank sinecures and he'll be named to corporate boards. He'll pull down single-speech speaking fees that march a teacher's annual salary. In other words -- unlike the vast majority of us -- he knows he'll never be involuntarily unemployed, and he'll always be employed at a very pleasant level of income.
What the hell does he know about having to "reorganize" one's life? His life is already organized very nicely, thank you.
****
UPDATE: Booman Tribune's Steven D and his wife are also just under 55, though a lot less fortunate in matters of health than my wife and I have been. Read Steven's heartbreaking post to learn what's really going to happen to a lot of people if Ryanomics prevails.
Monday, April 04, 2011
COWARDS? NO, THEY'RE WORSE THAN THAT
In response to this ...
The Obama administration, ending a year of indecision with a major reversal, will prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, before a military commission and not a civilian court, as it had once planned.
...John Cole writes:
Nothing else to say but cowards....
And no, I'm not talking about Obama and Holder. I’m talking about the clowns in Congress who apparently don't have enough faith in this nation and who are so afraid of one man that they have to try him in secret in another country.
Most of them know perfectly well that Gitmo could be closed and this and other trials could be conducted the way the Obama administration originally envisioned -- they just know they can proclaim that it's too risky and the public will accept the nonsense.
And one big reason? Not cowardice exactly -- more like false bravado. A big percentage of the country wants to flatter itself by imagining that these guys have superpowers, and the military or the Bush administration or Cheeto-chomping right-wing bloggers are somehow holding these supervillains at bay using superhuman powers of their own. These folks aren't pants-wetters, they're worse: they're people who want to persuade you they're tough by exaggerating the risks they, and they alone, are fending off. (They certainly give no credit to the actual current commander in chief, or anyone in his administration.)
****
And I'd just like to remind you of what Peggy Noonan wrote less than a month ago:
If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys—to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations....
America wanted -- needed -- to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom.
Noonan's a right-wing apparatchik, but she's old-school, so she doesn't always remember what ideas have been disappeared by the right's culture commissars. She still thinks it's the early Bush era, when it was unthinkable that we wouldn't force bin Laden to do a perp walk into a courtroom in Manhattan, assuming we caught him alive. And, as Noonan's slip-up reminds us, that would have been perfectly fine.
In response to this ...
The Obama administration, ending a year of indecision with a major reversal, will prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, before a military commission and not a civilian court, as it had once planned.
...John Cole writes:
Nothing else to say but cowards....
And no, I'm not talking about Obama and Holder. I’m talking about the clowns in Congress who apparently don't have enough faith in this nation and who are so afraid of one man that they have to try him in secret in another country.
Most of them know perfectly well that Gitmo could be closed and this and other trials could be conducted the way the Obama administration originally envisioned -- they just know they can proclaim that it's too risky and the public will accept the nonsense.
And one big reason? Not cowardice exactly -- more like false bravado. A big percentage of the country wants to flatter itself by imagining that these guys have superpowers, and the military or the Bush administration or Cheeto-chomping right-wing bloggers are somehow holding these supervillains at bay using superhuman powers of their own. These folks aren't pants-wetters, they're worse: they're people who want to persuade you they're tough by exaggerating the risks they, and they alone, are fending off. (They certainly give no credit to the actual current commander in chief, or anyone in his administration.)
****
And I'd just like to remind you of what Peggy Noonan wrote less than a month ago:
If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys—to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations....
America wanted -- needed -- to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom.
Noonan's a right-wing apparatchik, but she's old-school, so she doesn't always remember what ideas have been disappeared by the right's culture commissars. She still thinks it's the early Bush era, when it was unthinkable that we wouldn't force bin Laden to do a perp walk into a courtroom in Manhattan, assuming we caught him alive. And, as Noonan's slip-up reminds us, that would have been perfectly fine.
SOMEONE WILL PROBABLY SAY SOMETHING, POSSIBLY INCLUDING THE DEMOCRATS
Paul Ryan and the rest of the Republicans, as you know, want to gut Medicare and Medicaid:
Republicans will present this week a 2012 budget proposal that would cut more than $4 trillion from federal spending projected over the next decade and transform the Medicare health program for the elderly...
The plan would essentially end Medicare....
Mr. Ryan's proposal would apply to those currently under the age of 55, and for those Americans would convert Medicare into a "premium support" system. Participants from that group would choose from an array of private insurance plans when they reach 65 and become eligible, and the government would pay about the first $15,000 in premiums. Those who are poorer or less healthy would receive bigger payments than others....
Democrats say the GOP plan will leave millions exposed to financial risks. The Medicare premium subsidies would grow more slowly than health costs, they say, so seniors would end up with less coverage....
Steve Benen suspects Republicans have overreached; Atrios isn't so sure:
Cuts won't hurt the Republicans unless someone else points out that the cuts are, you know, bad.
On issue after issue in recent years, Democrats have been too timid and/or sold out to stand up for traditional Democratic principles -- but they did fight off Social Security privatization at the beginning of George W. Bush's second term. And if they wimp out, I think the most likely group to get the word out is going to the AARP.
Those of us who are of a certain age started getting solicitations from AARP as we were about to turn fifty; a hell of a lot of Americans sign up just for the coupons and discounts, and then get all the mailings. Back in the fall, AARP made its position clear on the proposal with the Orwellian name, when it was being proposed by a panel led by Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici:
AARP Executive Vice President John Rother said his group would oppose premium support. Of the overall task force report, he said it "raises lots of questions because of how it shifts more costs to individuals."
This isn't new -- as far back as 2003, AARP's Republican CEO, Bill Novelli, was opposing "premium support," even though the group also supported the Bush prescription drug plan.
AARP support for that Bush plan ticked off Democrats. AARP support for the Obama health care plan ticked off Republicans. It's not surprising that Republicans are going after AARP just as this budget plan is being introduced, but AARP is kind of a Bigfoot -- it looks out for its own self-interest and its members' interests as it sees them, and (unlike Democrats) the group seems capable of taking heat and persisting. I'm not trying to nominate these folks for sainthood, but I do think they'll speak up.
Also, I've got to add that putting the diving line at age 55 may have been a political mistake -- we gainfully employed fiftysomethings tend to be terrified as it is that we're going to be downsized and never, ever find work again, simply because of our age; we're not like really young workers, who may think they're going to kick the world's ass and retire rich by 45. We're an anxious lot already, we don't need any more uncertainty, and we're not going to just shrug this off.
Paul Ryan and the rest of the Republicans, as you know, want to gut Medicare and Medicaid:
Republicans will present this week a 2012 budget proposal that would cut more than $4 trillion from federal spending projected over the next decade and transform the Medicare health program for the elderly...
The plan would essentially end Medicare....
Mr. Ryan's proposal would apply to those currently under the age of 55, and for those Americans would convert Medicare into a "premium support" system. Participants from that group would choose from an array of private insurance plans when they reach 65 and become eligible, and the government would pay about the first $15,000 in premiums. Those who are poorer or less healthy would receive bigger payments than others....
Democrats say the GOP plan will leave millions exposed to financial risks. The Medicare premium subsidies would grow more slowly than health costs, they say, so seniors would end up with less coverage....
Steve Benen suspects Republicans have overreached; Atrios isn't so sure:
Cuts won't hurt the Republicans unless someone else points out that the cuts are, you know, bad.
On issue after issue in recent years, Democrats have been too timid and/or sold out to stand up for traditional Democratic principles -- but they did fight off Social Security privatization at the beginning of George W. Bush's second term. And if they wimp out, I think the most likely group to get the word out is going to the AARP.
Those of us who are of a certain age started getting solicitations from AARP as we were about to turn fifty; a hell of a lot of Americans sign up just for the coupons and discounts, and then get all the mailings. Back in the fall, AARP made its position clear on the proposal with the Orwellian name, when it was being proposed by a panel led by Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici:
AARP Executive Vice President John Rother said his group would oppose premium support. Of the overall task force report, he said it "raises lots of questions because of how it shifts more costs to individuals."
This isn't new -- as far back as 2003, AARP's Republican CEO, Bill Novelli, was opposing "premium support," even though the group also supported the Bush prescription drug plan.
AARP support for that Bush plan ticked off Democrats. AARP support for the Obama health care plan ticked off Republicans. It's not surprising that Republicans are going after AARP just as this budget plan is being introduced, but AARP is kind of a Bigfoot -- it looks out for its own self-interest and its members' interests as it sees them, and (unlike Democrats) the group seems capable of taking heat and persisting. I'm not trying to nominate these folks for sainthood, but I do think they'll speak up.
Also, I've got to add that putting the diving line at age 55 may have been a political mistake -- we gainfully employed fiftysomethings tend to be terrified as it is that we're going to be downsized and never, ever find work again, simply because of our age; we're not like really young workers, who may think they're going to kick the world's ass and retire rich by 45. We're an anxious lot already, we don't need any more uncertainty, and we're not going to just shrug this off.
THE RIGHT-WING ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT: IS IT A TREND YET?
I guess the wingnut strain of anti-war sentiment isn't just for the Ron Paul crowd anymore. We know that Michele Bachmann -- who, assuming Huckabee doesn't run, is probably the front-runner in Iowa -- has expressed her opposition to U.S. involvement in Libya. Glenn Beck has now said that U.S. troops should be removed from the Middle East (non-embeddable video at the link, via the Right Scoop). And John Hinderaker at Power Line says this:
Is It Time to Get Out of Afghanistan?
I think it is. In the aftermath of September 11, we had no choice but to overthrow the Taliban, destroy al Qaeda's training centers and kill and scatter as many al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists as possible. We did that, brilliantly. Bin Laden escaped by the skin of his teeth, but al Qaeda has never recovered from that initial devastation.
Since then, for going on nine years, we have pursued a somewhat half-hearted peacekeeping/democracy policy in Afghanistan. The Bush administration was right, I think, not to devote excessive resources to Afghanistan, which is virtually without strategic significance compared with countries like Iran, Iraq and Egypt. Moreover, the country's human natural and human raw material could hardly be less promising.
Afghans are not just living in an earlier century; they are living in an earlier millenium. Their poverty, cultural backwardness and geographic isolation--roads verge on the nonexistent--are hard for us to fathom. They are a tribal society run by pederasts whose main industry is growing poppies. If our security hinges on turning this place into a reasonably modern, functioning country, we are in deep trouble. But I don't think it does; and, in any event, I don't think we can do it....
(By the way, I hope the Time folks who gave Power Line that Blog of the Year award back in '04 are reading the "tribal society run by pederasts" line and feeling a sense of pride in their choice.)
I have an extremely hard time imagining Paul-style categorical anti-interventionism catching on with the majority of the wingnut rank-and-file -- not while right-wingers continue to see Democrats and liberals as pantywaist peaceniks who want to sing "Kumbaya" with America's enemies. And if you're going to do this, you have to write the Iraq War out of the equation, as Hinderaker does, because liberals hate the Iraq War, which has always made it sacred to the right:
The war in Iraq is over, and has been for some time. Our mission there has been a success; how important a success depends not on us but on the Iraqis. For a predominantly Arab country, Iraq is doing well. At this point, we have done about all we can do. Our troops are no longer in a combat role, and we should bring them home, and honor their victory, on schedule.
And I think it would be hard to sell wingers on the notion of pulling out of Afghanistan, which was also a Bush war, though Hinderaker sure does give it the old college try.
Ultimately, I don't think this is going to work. Beck's line is that we should withdraw so the U.S. military can "replenish" itself, in preparation for the moment when the world will be "on fire" after Iran has waved a magic wand, ended all Sunni-Shia conflict, and united all the evildoers into a massive force that will destroy Israel and then America; the apocalyptiic stuff plays on the right, but the tactical retreat idea is probably way too wussy.
Bachmann's argument, that we may be helping al Qaeda in Libya, and that this intervention is (ick) humanitaritan plays better, I'm sure -- it's OK to oppose war when the war is (a) treasonous and (b) not a real war, dedicated solely to kicking evildoer ass.
It's possible that there could be some useful anti-war talk on the right. It might really do some good in the short run. But it isn't anti-war so much as anti-wars-not-conducted-by-us. We'll still nuke Iran when Bachmann is president.
****
By the way, please notice the futility of advocating "humanitarian war" in a teabag age. It's sort of the foreign policy equivalent of advocating Budget Cuts Lite -- it's something you do as president because you accept right-wing frames (that the deficit is the top domestic priority, that muscularity is a must overseas), but you still never placate the wingers this way.
I guess the wingnut strain of anti-war sentiment isn't just for the Ron Paul crowd anymore. We know that Michele Bachmann -- who, assuming Huckabee doesn't run, is probably the front-runner in Iowa -- has expressed her opposition to U.S. involvement in Libya. Glenn Beck has now said that U.S. troops should be removed from the Middle East (non-embeddable video at the link, via the Right Scoop). And John Hinderaker at Power Line says this:
Is It Time to Get Out of Afghanistan?
I think it is. In the aftermath of September 11, we had no choice but to overthrow the Taliban, destroy al Qaeda's training centers and kill and scatter as many al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists as possible. We did that, brilliantly. Bin Laden escaped by the skin of his teeth, but al Qaeda has never recovered from that initial devastation.
Since then, for going on nine years, we have pursued a somewhat half-hearted peacekeeping/democracy policy in Afghanistan. The Bush administration was right, I think, not to devote excessive resources to Afghanistan, which is virtually without strategic significance compared with countries like Iran, Iraq and Egypt. Moreover, the country's human natural and human raw material could hardly be less promising.
Afghans are not just living in an earlier century; they are living in an earlier millenium. Their poverty, cultural backwardness and geographic isolation--roads verge on the nonexistent--are hard for us to fathom. They are a tribal society run by pederasts whose main industry is growing poppies. If our security hinges on turning this place into a reasonably modern, functioning country, we are in deep trouble. But I don't think it does; and, in any event, I don't think we can do it....
(By the way, I hope the Time folks who gave Power Line that Blog of the Year award back in '04 are reading the "tribal society run by pederasts" line and feeling a sense of pride in their choice.)
I have an extremely hard time imagining Paul-style categorical anti-interventionism catching on with the majority of the wingnut rank-and-file -- not while right-wingers continue to see Democrats and liberals as pantywaist peaceniks who want to sing "Kumbaya" with America's enemies. And if you're going to do this, you have to write the Iraq War out of the equation, as Hinderaker does, because liberals hate the Iraq War, which has always made it sacred to the right:
The war in Iraq is over, and has been for some time. Our mission there has been a success; how important a success depends not on us but on the Iraqis. For a predominantly Arab country, Iraq is doing well. At this point, we have done about all we can do. Our troops are no longer in a combat role, and we should bring them home, and honor their victory, on schedule.
And I think it would be hard to sell wingers on the notion of pulling out of Afghanistan, which was also a Bush war, though Hinderaker sure does give it the old college try.
Ultimately, I don't think this is going to work. Beck's line is that we should withdraw so the U.S. military can "replenish" itself, in preparation for the moment when the world will be "on fire" after Iran has waved a magic wand, ended all Sunni-Shia conflict, and united all the evildoers into a massive force that will destroy Israel and then America; the apocalyptiic stuff plays on the right, but the tactical retreat idea is probably way too wussy.
Bachmann's argument, that we may be helping al Qaeda in Libya, and that this intervention is (ick) humanitaritan plays better, I'm sure -- it's OK to oppose war when the war is (a) treasonous and (b) not a real war, dedicated solely to kicking evildoer ass.
It's possible that there could be some useful anti-war talk on the right. It might really do some good in the short run. But it isn't anti-war so much as anti-wars-not-conducted-by-us. We'll still nuke Iran when Bachmann is president.
****
By the way, please notice the futility of advocating "humanitarian war" in a teabag age. It's sort of the foreign policy equivalent of advocating Budget Cuts Lite -- it's something you do as president because you accept right-wing frames (that the deficit is the top domestic priority, that muscularity is a must overseas), but you still never placate the wingers this way.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
DID ANYONE EVER GO BROKE UNDERESTIMATING THE AMERICAN VOTER?
A professor, quoted in today's New York Times article about the Trump presidential campaign/pseudo-campaign/whatever-it-is:
"...Out of this campaign coverage, all you get are a lot of empty media moments about someone who is unlikely to run, more unlikely to be nominated, and utterly unlikely to win."
I agree with "unlikely to run" (and the Times article does a good job of summarizing the evidence that this is an oft-repeated Trump publicity stunt meant to sell him and his media products). I agree with "more unlikely to be nominated" (he's learned how to massage one wingnut pleasure center, but others in the race have been studying the hive mind of the GOP base and know how to massage several).
But "utterly unlikely to win"? I wish I were certain of that. It's a remote possibility that he'd get the GOP nomination, but I continue to believe that whoever does get the nomination will automatically be deemed sane and within the pale by the establishment press, just by dint of being a GOP Daddy (even if it's Palin or Bachmann) and a winner. And remember, this is a country where we've elected the likes of Rick Scott, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Ronald Reagan. And there is that Newsweek/Daily Beast poll from February showing Trump trailing Obama by only 2.
Trump's not really serious about running. But if he were, I think we as a nation are capable of just saying "Oh, what the hell" en masse and voting him in, because, heck, America should be run more like a business! And Trump's on TV! We love TV!
****
And I don't know what to make of this:
David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) suggested Thursday he [Trump] could be a great choice for President:
Yeah, this is probably no more meaningful than Pat Robertson's endorsement of Giuliani in '08. But it's bizarre.
And meanwhile, in a GOP straw poll in York County, South Carolina -- won, not surprisingly, by Mike Huckabee, with Gingrich and Bachmann the only two other finishers in double digits -- I see Romney at 8% and Trump at 7%, tied with Pawlenty. That's not a top-tier performance, but still: 7%? A Noo Yawkuh? In South Carolina? And only a percentage point behind Romney?
****
As an aside, in the straw poll story, please note the unsurprising identities of several also-rans (Barbour, Thune, Daniels, Huntsman), and one surprising also-ran: Palin. I think she really has been simply replaced by Bachmann.
A professor, quoted in today's New York Times article about the Trump presidential campaign/pseudo-campaign/whatever-it-is:
"...Out of this campaign coverage, all you get are a lot of empty media moments about someone who is unlikely to run, more unlikely to be nominated, and utterly unlikely to win."
I agree with "unlikely to run" (and the Times article does a good job of summarizing the evidence that this is an oft-repeated Trump publicity stunt meant to sell him and his media products). I agree with "more unlikely to be nominated" (he's learned how to massage one wingnut pleasure center, but others in the race have been studying the hive mind of the GOP base and know how to massage several).
But "utterly unlikely to win"? I wish I were certain of that. It's a remote possibility that he'd get the GOP nomination, but I continue to believe that whoever does get the nomination will automatically be deemed sane and within the pale by the establishment press, just by dint of being a GOP Daddy (even if it's Palin or Bachmann) and a winner. And remember, this is a country where we've elected the likes of Rick Scott, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Ronald Reagan. And there is that Newsweek/Daily Beast poll from February showing Trump trailing Obama by only 2.
Trump's not really serious about running. But if he were, I think we as a nation are capable of just saying "Oh, what the hell" en masse and voting him in, because, heck, America should be run more like a business! And Trump's on TV! We love TV!
****
And I don't know what to make of this:
David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) suggested Thursday he [Trump] could be a great choice for President:
Before you watch the Donald Trump's interview with Bill O'Reilly last night let me sum up the main points that Evangelicals might be interested in:As it turns out, Brody is not alone. As he reported yesterday, Donald Trump is getting some serious attention from some of the biggest names in evangelical politics:
- He's opposed to gay marriage.
- He's pro-life.
- He says "There is a Muslim problem" in the World.
- He says, "There is a doubt as to whether or not (Barack Obama) was born here."
Ralph Reed, one of the top GOP strategists in the country and Chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition tells The Brody File, "There is a nascent and growing curiosity in the faith community about Trump. Evangelicals will like his pro-life and pro-marriage stances, combined with his business record and high-wattage celebrity all but guarantee he will get a close look from social conservatives as well as other Republican primary voters." Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council is curious to hear more as well. "Given Donald Trump's background in the gambling industry and his flamboyancy one would not think he would be a fit with Evangelical voters. However, given the wide open field of candidates, strong statements that Trump has recently made on core social issues combined with an overarching desire to see a new occupant in the White House, he may find support among social conservatives."
Yeah, this is probably no more meaningful than Pat Robertson's endorsement of Giuliani in '08. But it's bizarre.
And meanwhile, in a GOP straw poll in York County, South Carolina -- won, not surprisingly, by Mike Huckabee, with Gingrich and Bachmann the only two other finishers in double digits -- I see Romney at 8% and Trump at 7%, tied with Pawlenty. That's not a top-tier performance, but still: 7%? A Noo Yawkuh? In South Carolina? And only a percentage point behind Romney?
****
As an aside, in the straw poll story, please note the unsurprising identities of several also-rans (Barbour, Thune, Daniels, Huntsman), and one surprising also-ran: Palin. I think she really has been simply replaced by Bachmann.
TERRY JONES: THIS IS GOING TO GET MUCH UGLIER
Do you know what the sonofabitch is planning next? This:
"It is definitely a consideration to stage a trial on the life of Mohammed in the future," he said in interview on Saturday....
Do you know what that would probably be like? Do you know the details of his recent Koran stunt?
Before a Koran was burned at his modest church here on March 20, the pastor Terry Jones held a self-styled mock trial of the holy book in which he presided from the pulpit as judge.
... After listening to arguments from both sides, the jury pronounced the Koran guilty of five "crimes against humanity," including the promotion of terrorist acts and "the death, rape and torture of people worldwide whose only crime is not being of the Islamic faith."
Punishment was determined by the results of an online poll. Besides burning, the options included shredding, drowning and facing a firing squad....
Good grief. He's thinking of doing this next to -- I mean, what else could it be -- an image of Muhammad?
This would lead to the cartoons riots on seroids.
The inevitable violence is, from my point of view, utterly absurd and irrational. But my disgust at the rioters is also extended to the American right-wingers who are rubbing their hands gleefully, delighted that the angry reaction by some Muslims will tarnish all Muslims, and who are actually going to take smug satisfaction at the deaths that will result, just because those deaths will help them score political points.
Jones's plan for this new "trial" are vague. He is going to do this, however:
The pastor and his supporters will later this month join a protest against jihad and sharia law in front of the biggest mosque in the US in Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a large Islamic population which Mr Jones described as the "Mecca of America".
I throw up my hands.
****
I'll note that the U.S. Supreme Court's standard for laws restricting political speech is that such speech can be proscribed when the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." I'm not a lawyer, but that strikes me as a pretty good description of what Jones is doing, even if the "imminent lawless action" the justices had in mind was action in violation of domestic law, and was action advocated by the speaker. (On the other hand, can we really say that Jones is condemning the violence that followed his deed? He's deeply invested in the idea that Muslims are a lower order of being. He wants them, or at least some of them, to affirm his theory. He wants this to happen. So in a way he's an advocate of this violence.)
Do you know what the sonofabitch is planning next? This:
"It is definitely a consideration to stage a trial on the life of Mohammed in the future," he said in interview on Saturday....
Do you know what that would probably be like? Do you know the details of his recent Koran stunt?
Before a Koran was burned at his modest church here on March 20, the pastor Terry Jones held a self-styled mock trial of the holy book in which he presided from the pulpit as judge.
... After listening to arguments from both sides, the jury pronounced the Koran guilty of five "crimes against humanity," including the promotion of terrorist acts and "the death, rape and torture of people worldwide whose only crime is not being of the Islamic faith."
Punishment was determined by the results of an online poll. Besides burning, the options included shredding, drowning and facing a firing squad....
Good grief. He's thinking of doing this next to -- I mean, what else could it be -- an image of Muhammad?
This would lead to the cartoons riots on seroids.
The inevitable violence is, from my point of view, utterly absurd and irrational. But my disgust at the rioters is also extended to the American right-wingers who are rubbing their hands gleefully, delighted that the angry reaction by some Muslims will tarnish all Muslims, and who are actually going to take smug satisfaction at the deaths that will result, just because those deaths will help them score political points.
Jones's plan for this new "trial" are vague. He is going to do this, however:
The pastor and his supporters will later this month join a protest against jihad and sharia law in front of the biggest mosque in the US in Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a large Islamic population which Mr Jones described as the "Mecca of America".
I throw up my hands.
****
I'll note that the U.S. Supreme Court's standard for laws restricting political speech is that such speech can be proscribed when the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." I'm not a lawyer, but that strikes me as a pretty good description of what Jones is doing, even if the "imminent lawless action" the justices had in mind was action in violation of domestic law, and was action advocated by the speaker. (On the other hand, can we really say that Jones is condemning the violence that followed his deed? He's deeply invested in the idea that Muslims are a lower order of being. He wants them, or at least some of them, to affirm his theory. He wants this to happen. So in a way he's an advocate of this violence.)
Saturday, April 02, 2011
WOULD WE RIOT? PROBABLY NOT. WOULD WE BASH? QUITE POSSIBLY.
The violence in Afghanistan in response to the burning of a Koran by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida has been horrific. Reacting to this, Rusty Shackleford at My Pet Jawa addresses the following to the Afghan Taliban:
...I dare you: burn a Bible.
Do it publicly. Put in on the internet....
Not only will there be utter silence by President Obama, Sec. of State Clinton, or any other White House spokesperson .... but the media won't even cover the story.
Why? Because no one will care.
... None of us will give a damn.
It's the words in the book that are important, not the book....
At this point, I do think the media would cover it, as a sidebar to what's happening now. Would American Christians riot? Hard to imagine.
Would some Americans engage in bashing -- of vulnerable individuals, of small mosques? Yeah, probably.
It's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Americans haven't been in a shooting war with Muslims on U.S. soil for nearly a decade (much as some right-wingers might feel otherwise). Americans aren't living in extreme poverty comparable to Afghanistan's; we have economic woes, but nobody is ascribing our economic troubles to Islam (yet).
Angry Christians and self-styled patriots in America don't riot much. Some of them do bash, however. They attack individuals and unprotected institutions. Recall the wave of attacks on individual Asian-Americans in the early 1990s, when a lot of white Americans thought "Japan, Inc." was responsible for taking all of our jobs.
Would leaders ever endorse violence? About a dozen years ago there was a Missouri state legislator named Sam Gaskill, a Vietnam veteran, who proposed making it legal to violently assault a flag-burner. That proposal didn't get very far -- but it was pre-9/11, and it was a long time before the Obama years, which have seen the Republican Party and the mainstream right embrace every form of conservative extremism without qualms.
We just don't have a proper test of whether Americans would respond to Bible-burnings or flag-burnings with violence. Here are some hypotheticals:
What if a '60s-style left became a real force in America, and that left were virulently anti-Christian? What if, while having a genuine impact on American politics, this new New Left were regularly burning Bibles? Do you really think the right would just shrug and say, "It's the words in the book that are important, not the book"?
What if we had a Republican president again, a new war against an Islamic state, and -- because the president was Republican -- a successful campaign to paint the domestic opponents of that war as the worst traitors? We lived through that under both Bushes -- but that was pre-Beck, pre-Pam Geller, pre-tea party. What if this president didn't say, as the Bushes said, that this wasn't a war against Islam? What if the president were named Palin or Bachmann or Cain? What would happen to American Muslims? What would happen to war critics?
I don't know that we can count in the future on our leaders urging calm and restraint. I don't know that we can count on them to distinguish the combatants overseas from people who look like them here, or seem to look like them, or seem to sympathize with them. We don't seem to do what's being done if Afghanistan, but I don't think that means we never will.
The violence in Afghanistan in response to the burning of a Koran by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida has been horrific. Reacting to this, Rusty Shackleford at My Pet Jawa addresses the following to the Afghan Taliban:
...I dare you: burn a Bible.
Do it publicly. Put in on the internet....
Not only will there be utter silence by President Obama, Sec. of State Clinton, or any other White House spokesperson .... but the media won't even cover the story.
Why? Because no one will care.
... None of us will give a damn.
It's the words in the book that are important, not the book....
At this point, I do think the media would cover it, as a sidebar to what's happening now. Would American Christians riot? Hard to imagine.
Would some Americans engage in bashing -- of vulnerable individuals, of small mosques? Yeah, probably.
It's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Americans haven't been in a shooting war with Muslims on U.S. soil for nearly a decade (much as some right-wingers might feel otherwise). Americans aren't living in extreme poverty comparable to Afghanistan's; we have economic woes, but nobody is ascribing our economic troubles to Islam (yet).
Angry Christians and self-styled patriots in America don't riot much. Some of them do bash, however. They attack individuals and unprotected institutions. Recall the wave of attacks on individual Asian-Americans in the early 1990s, when a lot of white Americans thought "Japan, Inc." was responsible for taking all of our jobs.
Would leaders ever endorse violence? About a dozen years ago there was a Missouri state legislator named Sam Gaskill, a Vietnam veteran, who proposed making it legal to violently assault a flag-burner. That proposal didn't get very far -- but it was pre-9/11, and it was a long time before the Obama years, which have seen the Republican Party and the mainstream right embrace every form of conservative extremism without qualms.
We just don't have a proper test of whether Americans would respond to Bible-burnings or flag-burnings with violence. Here are some hypotheticals:
What if a '60s-style left became a real force in America, and that left were virulently anti-Christian? What if, while having a genuine impact on American politics, this new New Left were regularly burning Bibles? Do you really think the right would just shrug and say, "It's the words in the book that are important, not the book"?
What if we had a Republican president again, a new war against an Islamic state, and -- because the president was Republican -- a successful campaign to paint the domestic opponents of that war as the worst traitors? We lived through that under both Bushes -- but that was pre-Beck, pre-Pam Geller, pre-tea party. What if this president didn't say, as the Bushes said, that this wasn't a war against Islam? What if the president were named Palin or Bachmann or Cain? What would happen to American Muslims? What would happen to war critics?
I don't know that we can count in the future on our leaders urging calm and restraint. I don't know that we can count on them to distinguish the combatants overseas from people who look like them here, or seem to look like them, or seem to sympathize with them. We don't seem to do what's being done if Afghanistan, but I don't think that means we never will.
Friday, April 01, 2011
SORRY, TEABAGGERS -- I THINK ROGER AILES JUST PAINTED YOU OUT OF THE PICTURE
You recall what happened yesterday:
Just how sparse was the Tea Party crowd? A Bloomberg dispatch tactfully noted the rally attracted "dozens" of supporters.
Dozens!
And today, there's this:
You Saw This Coming: Fox News Announces 'Mondays With Trump' On Fox & Friends
... Fox & Friends has announced ... "Mondays with Trump," a brand new segment where "The Donald now makes his voice loud and clear on Fox" on the news of the day....
What's the connection? Think about it: Why do you think the tea party rally in D.C. was sparsely attended? Maybe because it wasn't hyped endlessly on Fox for weeks?
Notice who was hyped endlessly on Fox in that same period?
Sorry, guys -- teabagging is so 2010. Trump is very 2011. At least that's the way it looks right now.
Anyone remember the Esquire profile of Roger Ailes? Here's a short excerpt:
...show Roger Ailes a television screen, he'll tell you what works, what doesn't, and how to make it better. "I tell my people that if they want to be artists of television, the screen is their canvas, but they have to repaint it every three seconds."
He may not do serious remodeling every three seconds, but he is an impatient guy. It looks as if he's repainted the screen. Out go the tricorn hats. In comes that hair.
Why? Well, besides the obvious (celebrities sell, and it's nice if they're ideologically compatible celebrities), it looks as if the plan at Fox may be to attack Obama between now and November 2012 not primarily as a socialist wealth-redistributor or taker-over of health care, but as a sinister Manchurian-candidate alien. All this Constitution jabber is nice, but Obama's alleged alienness is visceral.
It's visceral the way anger at illegal immigrants is visceral -- and that, by the way, is why I think birtherism is so potent on the right. It touches the same tribal nerve as immigration -- remember, immigration is the only major issue on which wingnuts disagreed with George W. Bush, ever. (They'll say they thought he spent too much, but they're lying -- when he was in office, they didn't give a crap.)
****
By the way, Glenn Beck may not have his Fox contract renewed, but I think this is a pretty good sign that even if he's dumped, Fox won't get any less crazy or toxic. (Hell -- Trump probably won't run for president, and maybe Ailes will put Trump on in Beck's place.)
You recall what happened yesterday:
Just how sparse was the Tea Party crowd? A Bloomberg dispatch tactfully noted the rally attracted "dozens" of supporters.
Dozens!
And today, there's this:
You Saw This Coming: Fox News Announces 'Mondays With Trump' On Fox & Friends
... Fox & Friends has announced ... "Mondays with Trump," a brand new segment where "The Donald now makes his voice loud and clear on Fox" on the news of the day....
What's the connection? Think about it: Why do you think the tea party rally in D.C. was sparsely attended? Maybe because it wasn't hyped endlessly on Fox for weeks?
Notice who was hyped endlessly on Fox in that same period?
Sorry, guys -- teabagging is so 2010. Trump is very 2011. At least that's the way it looks right now.
Anyone remember the Esquire profile of Roger Ailes? Here's a short excerpt:
...show Roger Ailes a television screen, he'll tell you what works, what doesn't, and how to make it better. "I tell my people that if they want to be artists of television, the screen is their canvas, but they have to repaint it every three seconds."
He may not do serious remodeling every three seconds, but he is an impatient guy. It looks as if he's repainted the screen. Out go the tricorn hats. In comes that hair.
Why? Well, besides the obvious (celebrities sell, and it's nice if they're ideologically compatible celebrities), it looks as if the plan at Fox may be to attack Obama between now and November 2012 not primarily as a socialist wealth-redistributor or taker-over of health care, but as a sinister Manchurian-candidate alien. All this Constitution jabber is nice, but Obama's alleged alienness is visceral.
It's visceral the way anger at illegal immigrants is visceral -- and that, by the way, is why I think birtherism is so potent on the right. It touches the same tribal nerve as immigration -- remember, immigration is the only major issue on which wingnuts disagreed with George W. Bush, ever. (They'll say they thought he spent too much, but they're lying -- when he was in office, they didn't give a crap.)
****
By the way, Glenn Beck may not have his Fox contract renewed, but I think this is a pretty good sign that even if he's dumped, Fox won't get any less crazy or toxic. (Hell -- Trump probably won't run for president, and maybe Ailes will put Trump on in Beck's place.)
AN IMPOVERISHMENT BUBBLE?
I look at the rich and the politicians they've managed to put in office, and my first thought is that they know exactly what they're doing -- business profits are up, taxes for corporations and the wealthy are being cut at the state level, a high level of unemployment seems to be the new normal -- but then I think: What do the economic elite do when something's working for them? Recent history tells us that they keep doing it until everything blows up, and then they get bailed out while we clean up the mess from the burst bubble.
So is that what this is? A class-warfare bubble? An economic-inequality bubble? But if so, what happens when this one blows up? And how will it blow up? And if the whole point of the bubble is to impoverish the middle class, how is the middle class going to clean it up after it bursts?
****
We know that this is what right-wing politicians and the rich want, obviously. Today, Paul Krugman writes about Republican economic thinking:
... Two weeks ago, Republican staff at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee released a report, "Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy," that argued that slashing government spending and employment in the face of a deeply depressed economy would actually create jobs.
Here's the report's explanation of how layoffs would create jobs: "A smaller government work force increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs." Dropping the euphemisms, what this says is that by increasing unemployment, particularly of "educated, skilled workers" -- in case you’re wondering, that mainly means schoolteachers -- we can drive down wages, which would encourage hiring....
So firing a bunch of people, while forcing down wages for those who remain employed, is good for the economy. Now, I don't understand how putting a lot less money in ordinary people's pockets is supposed to be good for an economy that's two-thirds consumer spending -- it's hard to sustain consumer spending when, as consumers, you have far less to spend -- but, hey, I'm not a Republican.
Elsewhere in Krugman's newspaper, I see that the new jobs we're adding to the economy are simply unable to keep people in the middle class:
... many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.
A ... report being released Friday tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living.
... According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year -- or just above $14 an hour -- to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies.
... for those who do get jobs, it may be hard to live without public services, say nonprofit groups that assist low-income workers....
But, of course, as our businesspeople create jobs that don't create a decent standard of living in the absence of government assistance, those same businesspeople are (successfully) backing politicians who want to make big cuts in that government assistance. So ordinary Americans are getting shafted by employers and the government.
And then there's this from USA Today:
The heads of the nation’s top companies got the biggest raises in recent memory last year after taking a hiatus during the recession.
At a time most employees can barely remember their last substantial raise, median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives’ compensation started working its way back to prerecession levels, a USA TODAY analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics International found. Workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1% in the 12 months ended December 2010, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics....
****
My belief is that, following the classic bubble pattern, rich people and right-wing politicians are going to impoverish the middle class until we snap. But what will that snapping be like? I'd like to think we'll develop class consciousness and turn on the fat cats, but I think it's just as likely we'll turn to American fascism. I think it's likely that Europeans will turn to racism, with Muslims as the new evil Others. (We'll do that too in America, with Muslims, Mexicans, and blacks. Our fascists will probably also target unarmed coastal liberals.)
I just don't think the plutocrats are ever capable of saying they've had enough of doing anything that's making them money -- and destroying the middle class is what's making them money right now. But if they leave us all poor, who's going to bail them out when this inducing-inequality bubble bursts? And are we going to burn down the country -- or kill one another -- when we don't see any other alternative?
I look at the rich and the politicians they've managed to put in office, and my first thought is that they know exactly what they're doing -- business profits are up, taxes for corporations and the wealthy are being cut at the state level, a high level of unemployment seems to be the new normal -- but then I think: What do the economic elite do when something's working for them? Recent history tells us that they keep doing it until everything blows up, and then they get bailed out while we clean up the mess from the burst bubble.
So is that what this is? A class-warfare bubble? An economic-inequality bubble? But if so, what happens when this one blows up? And how will it blow up? And if the whole point of the bubble is to impoverish the middle class, how is the middle class going to clean it up after it bursts?
****
We know that this is what right-wing politicians and the rich want, obviously. Today, Paul Krugman writes about Republican economic thinking:
... Two weeks ago, Republican staff at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee released a report, "Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy," that argued that slashing government spending and employment in the face of a deeply depressed economy would actually create jobs.
Here's the report's explanation of how layoffs would create jobs: "A smaller government work force increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs." Dropping the euphemisms, what this says is that by increasing unemployment, particularly of "educated, skilled workers" -- in case you’re wondering, that mainly means schoolteachers -- we can drive down wages, which would encourage hiring....
So firing a bunch of people, while forcing down wages for those who remain employed, is good for the economy. Now, I don't understand how putting a lot less money in ordinary people's pockets is supposed to be good for an economy that's two-thirds consumer spending -- it's hard to sustain consumer spending when, as consumers, you have far less to spend -- but, hey, I'm not a Republican.
Elsewhere in Krugman's newspaper, I see that the new jobs we're adding to the economy are simply unable to keep people in the middle class:
... many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.
A ... report being released Friday tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living.
... According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year -- or just above $14 an hour -- to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies.
... for those who do get jobs, it may be hard to live without public services, say nonprofit groups that assist low-income workers....
But, of course, as our businesspeople create jobs that don't create a decent standard of living in the absence of government assistance, those same businesspeople are (successfully) backing politicians who want to make big cuts in that government assistance. So ordinary Americans are getting shafted by employers and the government.
And then there's this from USA Today:
The heads of the nation’s top companies got the biggest raises in recent memory last year after taking a hiatus during the recession.
At a time most employees can barely remember their last substantial raise, median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives’ compensation started working its way back to prerecession levels, a USA TODAY analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics International found. Workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1% in the 12 months ended December 2010, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics....
****
My belief is that, following the classic bubble pattern, rich people and right-wing politicians are going to impoverish the middle class until we snap. But what will that snapping be like? I'd like to think we'll develop class consciousness and turn on the fat cats, but I think it's just as likely we'll turn to American fascism. I think it's likely that Europeans will turn to racism, with Muslims as the new evil Others. (We'll do that too in America, with Muslims, Mexicans, and blacks. Our fascists will probably also target unarmed coastal liberals.)
I just don't think the plutocrats are ever capable of saying they've had enough of doing anything that's making them money -- and destroying the middle class is what's making them money right now. But if they leave us all poor, who's going to bail them out when this inducing-inequality bubble bursts? And are we going to burn down the country -- or kill one another -- when we don't see any other alternative?
WILL IDLE THREAT MAKER BECOME MORE FAMOUS THAN TERRORIST WITH ACTUAL BOMB PLACED IN A CROWD?
A 26-year-old Wisconsin woman named Katherine Windels has been charged with making death threats via e-mail to Governor Scott Walker and fifteen Republican legislators. She's facing felony counts. I absolutely believe that law enforcement should take this kind of thing seriously -- but please note the following, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Asked if she intended to follow through on any of her threats, Windels told the investigators "No," according to the complaint...
WKOW-TV reported Windels was not in custody. She was expected to be served Friday with her first court appearance in late April, according to the station's website.
I see no evidence that the woman had any means of carrying out this threat, and it looks as if authorities don't think she's particularly dangerous.
With that I mind, I direct you to the current list of blog responses to this story on Memeorandum (click to enlarge):
I had to break the screen shot in two to give you all of it.
Now I direct you to the reaction when Kevin William Harpham was arrested three weeks ago on charges of attempting to detonate a bomb at the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington -- a bomb that actually existed, and that an FBI agent said "was very lethal and had the potential to inflict multiple casualties" (again, click to enlarge):
There's already more response on the right to the arrest of Windels than there was on the left to Harpham's arrest. The right blogosphere has decided to use the story of Windels to "win the morning" -- and it's working.
How big a story will this be? How well known will Katherine Windels become? If there really are recall elections for Republican senators in Wisconsin, will the right-wing noise machine make her a household name -- not just in Wisconsin but among Wingnut Nation from coast to coast? Will her story open wallets when they're looking for donors in that campaign?
Meanwhile, after three weeks, did you remember the name of the man charged in the Spokane bombings? (I didn't.)
Their messaging is just better than ours.
A 26-year-old Wisconsin woman named Katherine Windels has been charged with making death threats via e-mail to Governor Scott Walker and fifteen Republican legislators. She's facing felony counts. I absolutely believe that law enforcement should take this kind of thing seriously -- but please note the following, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Asked if she intended to follow through on any of her threats, Windels told the investigators "No," according to the complaint...
WKOW-TV reported Windels was not in custody. She was expected to be served Friday with her first court appearance in late April, according to the station's website.
I see no evidence that the woman had any means of carrying out this threat, and it looks as if authorities don't think she's particularly dangerous.
With that I mind, I direct you to the current list of blog responses to this story on Memeorandum (click to enlarge):
I had to break the screen shot in two to give you all of it.
Now I direct you to the reaction when Kevin William Harpham was arrested three weeks ago on charges of attempting to detonate a bomb at the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington -- a bomb that actually existed, and that an FBI agent said "was very lethal and had the potential to inflict multiple casualties" (again, click to enlarge):
There's already more response on the right to the arrest of Windels than there was on the left to Harpham's arrest. The right blogosphere has decided to use the story of Windels to "win the morning" -- and it's working.
How big a story will this be? How well known will Katherine Windels become? If there really are recall elections for Republican senators in Wisconsin, will the right-wing noise machine make her a household name -- not just in Wisconsin but among Wingnut Nation from coast to coast? Will her story open wallets when they're looking for donors in that campaign?
Meanwhile, after three weeks, did you remember the name of the man charged in the Spokane bombings? (I didn't.)
Their messaging is just better than ours.
KENYAN SOCIALIST FASCISM -- IN THE BENJAMIN HARRISON ADMINISTRATION
Via Zandar, I see that paranoid Texas congressman Louie Gohmert has found a new existential threat to the very existence of a free America:
Rep. Gohmert: Libya Goal Is To "Deplete The Military" So Obama Can Call Up Private Army
[Wednesday] night on the House floor, ... Gohmert nonsensically suggested that Obama might be trying to "deplete the military" in Libya, so he can call up the Commission Corps established in the Affordable Care Act:
Gohmert is repeating a claim that's being made in widely circulated e-mails: that the U.S. Public Health Service's "Ready Reserve Corps," which is expanded by the new health care law, is some sort of private army. As FactCheck.org notes, this (of course) isn't true:
The truth about the new Ready Reserve Corps is a lot less interesting than the conspiracy theories. Before the law was passed, the Public Health Service, unlike other elements of the government's seven uniformed services, didn't have a "ready reserve" -- a cadre of individuals who could be called up involuntarily in times of need. What it had was a regular, full-time corps of 2,800 doctors, nurses, scientists and other medical professionals, which was the limit under law. It also had a reserve corps. But most of the individuals in the reserve corps, which was larger than the regular corps, were on extended active duty for the duration of their careers; in other words, they worked full-time, just like the regular corps, because they were needed, but the statutory cap prevented the service from bringing them into the regular corps.
The new law eliminates the personnel cap and brings the members of what used to be the reserve corps into the regular corps, which as a result now numbers about 6,600, according to an official at the Public Health Service who spoke to us on background.
Even Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is willing to acknowledge that the Ready Reserve Corps was established more than sixty years ago, in 1944 (although it should be noted the president at the time was that non-Kenyan socialist FDR).
The Ready Reserve Corps is part of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps -- and, as USA Today noted a few years ago:
The U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps dates its beginning to a 1798 act providing for the care of merchant seamen.
Remember that? No, I'm serious -- you might remember it. Rick Ungar of Forbes noted on his blog a couple of months ago that that act was an early sign that the Founding Fathers actually did think a health care mandate was compatible with Constitution:
In July of 1798, Congress passed -- and President John Adams signed -- "An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen." The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.
Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.
So, if the Commissioned Corps's origins can be traced to that law, maybe the establishment of the Corps really was an unconstitutional big-government power grab -- by some of the Framers of the Constitution!
But I believe that was a precursor to the Commissioned Corps we have today. The president-day Commissioned Corps was established during Benjamin Harrison's administration:
In 1889, following another deadly outbreak of yellow fever in the South, Congress officially created the Commissioned Corps of the Marine Hospital Service, a mobile force of physicians organized along military lines. The surgeon general was to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The following year, Congress gave the Marine Hospital Service interstate quarantine authority.
Obama ... FDR ... the Founders ... Benjamin Harrison ... a Kenyan-Muslim-socialist-fascist conspiracy so vast....
****
UPDATE: Embarrassing error in header corrected.
Via Zandar, I see that paranoid Texas congressman Louie Gohmert has found a new existential threat to the very existence of a free America:
Rep. Gohmert: Libya Goal Is To "Deplete The Military" So Obama Can Call Up Private Army
[Wednesday] night on the House floor, ... Gohmert nonsensically suggested that Obama might be trying to "deplete the military" in Libya, so he can call up the Commission Corps established in the Affordable Care Act:
GOHMERT: ... But then when you find out we're being sent to Libya to use our treasure and American lives there, maybe there's intention to so deplete the military that we're going to need that presidential reserve officer commissioned corps and non-commissioned corps that the president can call up on a moment's notice involuntarily, according to the Obamacare bill.
Gohmert is repeating a claim that's being made in widely circulated e-mails: that the U.S. Public Health Service's "Ready Reserve Corps," which is expanded by the new health care law, is some sort of private army. As FactCheck.org notes, this (of course) isn't true:
The truth about the new Ready Reserve Corps is a lot less interesting than the conspiracy theories. Before the law was passed, the Public Health Service, unlike other elements of the government's seven uniformed services, didn't have a "ready reserve" -- a cadre of individuals who could be called up involuntarily in times of need. What it had was a regular, full-time corps of 2,800 doctors, nurses, scientists and other medical professionals, which was the limit under law. It also had a reserve corps. But most of the individuals in the reserve corps, which was larger than the regular corps, were on extended active duty for the duration of their careers; in other words, they worked full-time, just like the regular corps, because they were needed, but the statutory cap prevented the service from bringing them into the regular corps.
The new law eliminates the personnel cap and brings the members of what used to be the reserve corps into the regular corps, which as a result now numbers about 6,600, according to an official at the Public Health Service who spoke to us on background.
Even Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is willing to acknowledge that the Ready Reserve Corps was established more than sixty years ago, in 1944 (although it should be noted the president at the time was that non-Kenyan socialist FDR).
The Ready Reserve Corps is part of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps -- and, as USA Today noted a few years ago:
The U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps dates its beginning to a 1798 act providing for the care of merchant seamen.
Remember that? No, I'm serious -- you might remember it. Rick Ungar of Forbes noted on his blog a couple of months ago that that act was an early sign that the Founding Fathers actually did think a health care mandate was compatible with Constitution:
In July of 1798, Congress passed -- and President John Adams signed -- "An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen." The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.
Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.
So, if the Commissioned Corps's origins can be traced to that law, maybe the establishment of the Corps really was an unconstitutional big-government power grab -- by some of the Framers of the Constitution!
But I believe that was a precursor to the Commissioned Corps we have today. The president-day Commissioned Corps was established during Benjamin Harrison's administration:
In 1889, following another deadly outbreak of yellow fever in the South, Congress officially created the Commissioned Corps of the Marine Hospital Service, a mobile force of physicians organized along military lines. The surgeon general was to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The following year, Congress gave the Marine Hospital Service interstate quarantine authority.
Obama ... FDR ... the Founders ... Benjamin Harrison ... a Kenyan-Muslim-socialist-fascist conspiracy so vast....
****
UPDATE: Embarrassing error in header corrected.
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