ALLEGED GOP REBRANDING IS YOUR NEW PIZZA SUMMIT

When we think back to what Republicans were doing in early 2009, just after Barack Obama was inaugurated, it's easy to forget that important members of the party seemed inclined to go somewhat moderate, at least in terms of style, in an attempt to win back voters. This happened in May 2009:

Pizza Party

Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Eric Cantor experiment with bottom-up Republicanism.

It's Saturday morning at a pizzeria in Arlington, Va., and the Republican Party may have just discovered the key to its comeback. "Free pizza for everybody all day!" jokes Mitt Romney, perched on a stool next to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and former Gov. Jeb Bush....

Drumming up new solutions is the mission of the National Council for a New America, a coalition of Republican leaders announced last week and led by Cantor. In the coming months, top leaders will travel around the country soliciting ideas from average Americans....

For the kickoff event, a few dozen local Republicans -- including names like Grover Norquist -- packed into Pie-tanza, a small restaurant in a suburban strip mall, to see Romney, Cantor, and Bush discuss the GOP's future.

The conversation steered clear of hot-button issues like gay marriage and immigration, focusing instead on the economy, health care, and education....

Sounds like early 2013, doesn't it? In place of Romney, you've got this year's presidential aspirants, Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio, making outreach noises. In place of Eric Cantor, you've got, um, Eric Cantor.

But that's not what we remember about Republicans in 2009. What we remember is a big group of angry, intransigent folks in Medicare scooters and tricorn hats waving Obama-as-Hitler pictures and creating the sense that what elected Republicans were actually in the process of doing -- impeding Obama as much as possible -- was a stance with broad popular support.

I think 2013 and 2014 are going to be a semi-rerun of 2009 and 2010. Reporters are being distracted by the shiny object of moderate-sounding pronouncements from presidential wannabes, and by Fox News dumping Sarah Palin and Dick Morris (never mind the fact that Fox is still welcoming the likes of Ann Coulter and Donald Trump, and offering a platform for the tirades of Ted Nugent).

The biggest differences between 2013 and 2009 seem to be that the right isn't sending an angry army out into the streets, and that the GOP feels it can't be quite so blatant about its efforts to render Obama incapable of governing.

So Republicans are picking their battles -- and they clearly seem to feel that since ordinary Americans don't have a personal stake in the fate of presidential appointees, the GOP can bottle up or slow-walk nearly every confirmation process. (OK, not the one Republicans thought was going to open up a winnable Senate seat.) To Susan Rice, Chuck Hagel, and Richard Cordray, add the name Jack Lew:

An investment Jack Lew made in the Cayman Islands has been flagged as an issue in the Treasury secretary nominee's vetting by the Senate Finance Committee, according to multiple sources close to the confirmation process.

The White House says the investment was previously disclosed and is already a public matter...

"He's got to still answer some questions or we may have to postpone the hearing," Hatch told POLITICO on Thursday....

Yes, I would like to live in a country where the president of the more left-wing party wouldn't pick someone for Treasury who had Caymans investments. And, yes, after the way Mitt Romney got beaten up last year for his finances, I guess payback was inevitable.

But this is an issue that hasn't mattered to Republicans before:

Lew has been confirmed by the Senate three times in the past -- twice by unanimous consent. He was confirmed as director of the Office of Management and Budget under both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and as deputy secretary of State under Obama.

And, of course, it's OK if you're a Republican:

... when Henry Paulson, then the CEO of Goldman Sachs, was nominated to be Treasury Secretary by President Bush in 2006, Republicans didn't find issues with Paulson's large investments in the Cayman Islands and Hatch gave a statement in support of Paulson's nomination.

Paulson's financial disclosure showed 21 Cayman investments.

Republicans are going to keep this up. Republicans are going to block staggering numbers of nominees -- and I absolutely believe that will include Supreme Court nominees. I won't be surprised if Obama leaves office with a couple of High Court vacancies unfilled, possibly for years.

Oh, but Marco Rubio is hip enough to like Tupac, so it's OK, right?

WINGERS: IT'S OK TO POLITICIZE A NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST -- UNLESS YOU'RE THE (DEMOCRATIC) PRESIDENT

Last year at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama said this:

And when I talk about shared responsibility, it's because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it's hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone. And I think to myself, if I'm willing to give something up as somebody who's been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that's going to make economic sense.

But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus's teaching that "for unto whom much is given, much shall be required."

As Right Wing Watch noted:

... right-wing leaders and Republicans [were] outraged, with Sen. Orrin Hatch lashing out about it on the Senate floor and Rep. Phil Gingrey walking out in protest while Ralph Reed, of all people, [said] that Obama went "over the line" ...

So one should never politicize a National Prayer Breakfast, according to the right? Oh, no -- right-wingers can politicize a National Prayer Breakfast all they want. A National Review columnist praised another speaker at the same breakfast, biographer Eric Metaxas, for lashing into the president. Metaxas effectively compared Obama to the devil:

... [Metaxas's] clever wit and punchy humor barely disguised a series of heat-seeking missiles that were sent, intentionally or not, in the commander-in-chief's direction....

Standing no more than five feet from Obama whose binder had a speech chock full of quotes from the Good Book, Metaxas said of Jesus:

"When he was tempted in the desert, who was the one throwing Bible verses at him? Satan. That is a perfect picture of dead religion. Using the words of God to do the opposite of what God does. It's grotesque when you think about it. It's demonic."

It happened again at yesterday's breakfast, when another speaker attacked the president with a series of right-wing talking points:

Joining President Barack Obama at Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast was Dr. Benjamin Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon with Johns Hopkins Hospital. For 25 minutes at the breakfast, Carson fearlessly articulated a series of conservative principles and reform proposals.

After attacking politically correct speech as "dangerous" and a "horrible thing," Carson turned to education. He discussed the scholarship program he manages which is directed at troubled youth. Carson said that education was the key to avoiding the fate suffered by ancient Rome. "Moral decay, fiscal irresponsibly -- they destroyed themselves," Carson said.

"Our deficit is a big problem," Carson [said]. "Think about it -- our national debt -- $16 and a half trillion dollars."

"What about our taxation system? So complex. There is no one who can possibly comply with every tax issue," he said....

He said God expects a flat tithe which is perfectly proportional at 10 percent -- applied to government, that would be a flat tax.

"Well some people say, 'well that’s not fair,' because it doesn't hurt the guy who made 10 billion dollars," Carson said, anticipating the counterargument. "Where does it say you have to hurt the guy? He just put $1 billion in the pot. We don't hurt him....."

Can you imagine if a liberal had dared to do this to George W. Bush, especially back when the right thought he was both a potential fifth face on Rushmore and God's emissary on earth?

No -- it's fine to disrespect a Democratic president at the breakfast. The Washington Times says so. So do Fox Nation and Glenn Beck's Blaze and Michelle Malkin's Twitchy and all the other folks who would have been jackbooted respect-for-the-presidency cops if a Republican had been the principal guest at that breakfast.

I know, I know -- IOKIYAR. But this is an especially shameless example of that.

NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED THAT SUBSISTENCE-LEVEL WORKERS WOULD FEEL HURT BY A TAX INCREASE

Taegan Goddard notes the following:

Two new polls show President Obama's approval rate under 50%: Fox News has it at 49%, while Quinnipiac finds it at 46%.

Quinnipiac says Obama was at 53% approval in December, and 40% approval; the numbers are now 46%-45%. Gosh, what happened? You think maybe it might be this change that happened as a result of December's budget deal?

... at street level, the pain from the expiration of a two-percentage-point break in Social Security taxes in 2011 and 2012 is plain to see.

"You got to stretch what you got," said [Eddie] Phillips, 51, a front-desk clerk and maintenance man for a nonprofit housing group who earned $22,000 last year. "That little $20 or $30 affects you, especially if you're just making enough money to stay above water." So he has taken to juggling bills, skipping a payment on one this month and another next month.

"I'm playing catch-up each month," he said. "You go to the supermarket and you can't spend what you used to."

Jack Andrews has it slightly better than Mr. Phillips. He earns a bit more than $40,000 a year manufacturing ceramics in a local factory, but because his wife, Cindy, is disabled, he is the sole breadwinner. Something had to give now that he is earning about $800 less a year, or $66 a month, and it was the couple's monthly night out.

"It's just gotten out of reach," Mr. Andrews said....

In Medford, Ore., Darchelle Skipwith had to scrap her monthly budget and start over when the law changed.

She is buying less meat; driving less often to see her sister, who lives 12 miles away in Eagle Point; and putting less away in savings. In August, Ms. Skipwith, 42, hopes to get a raise of 50 cents an hour at her job stacking shelves at Walmart, which should help make up the difference.

For now, she has no choice but to change her daily routine.

"I added it up -- it's about $75 a month," Ms. Skipwith said. "That’s not a lot for some people, but mine is the only paycheck. I don't have extra money coming in."

I know the payroll tax cut was supposed to be temporary. I know Republicans demand insane concessions, and we were fortunate that a deal could be struck that avoided a major financial catastrophe.

And yet this regressive tax increase went through practically without comment, and all the Very Serious People thought it was good:

"I don't see any reason to consider supporting its extension,” said Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, in testimony last year. Even Nancy Pelosi, a reliable liberal who leads the Democratic minority in the House of Representatives, was for letting it expire.

But now they're shocked that it's having an impact:

Complete monthly data for retail sales in January will not be released until later this week, but the weekly data already available for last month showed a steady deterioration in shopping activity.

"There is something going on," said Chris G. Christopher Jr., senior principal economist at IHS Global Insight. "The payroll tax seems to be cutting into things."

Gosh, who'da thunk?

If you make up to $113,700, you pay it on every dime you earn. If you make, say, $1,000,000, this increase doesn't apply at all to the last $886,300 you make. (And if you're self-employed, you pay both your share and the employer's share, because you're considered your own employer.)

And so:

... in a Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment released on Friday ... [w]hen asked how their financial situation had changed in January, 32 percent of people with incomes below $75,000 said their pay had dropped, compared with 13 percent who said it had increased. By contrast, 38 percent of people earning more than $75,000 said their wages had gone up last month, and 23 percent said they had gone down.

"We rarely see such divergent trends," Dr. Curtin said. "Mostly it was the payroll tax hurting the lower incomes...."

Ya think?

We have one party that despises the non-rich and another party that cares about the non-rich some of the time, while giving the have-nots the back of its hand the rest of the time. I wish this fact got one-thousandth of the attention on the left that drones get.

Hm...Really?

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) next month will host a private fundraiser in Boston, theBoston Globe reported Thursday.The event, which will include 25 to 30 guests who will be asked to donate $3,800 to to the Christie's re-election bid, will be held March 1. 

Lets round up, shall we? 30 guests times 4,000.00 is 120,000?  For a guy running in another State's Gubernatorial election? I see why its worth it to Christie to fly up and gorge on steak on his campaign's dime, but why is it worth it to the movers and shakers of Boston? Is it the financial guys jonesing for a taste of the sweet, sweet, Rodney Dangerfield good looks and Don Rickles comedy stylings of New Jersey's own fat fuck? I can't imagine its the Tech guys. But maybe 3,800 is chump change and this is the equivalent of a Tupperware party for the big money boys. They are going to be spending the money anyway, somewhere, so they might as well eat out with Christie as with anyone else. Myself I can't think of anything more horrifying. I'd be afraid he'd mistake me for an appetizer.  But presumably they want to be an early donor to someone they think can take the Republican party back from the lunatics. At that rate expect them to fly a lot of wannabe Republican Presidential Candidates up here to kiss their rings. At 3,800 its cheap at the price although it would be hard on the stomach.

FINDING IT HARD TO REGARD THE DRONES AS ANY MORE AWFUL THAN WAR IN GENERAL

Salon's Joan Walsh got into a dispute over a tweet from a defender of President Obama arguing, in Walsh's words, "that 'selective outrage' over the targeted killing issue, not merely concern about it, could reflect 'white privilege.'"

I'm white, but I've seen arguments of this kind being made on Twitter and elsewhere, and I have to admit I find myself nodding in some agreement. I understand the outrage at the Obama administration's drone program -- but I think if targeted killings of U.S. citizens seem vastly more horrifying to you than the pursuit of war in general, then you have expectations that would be laughable in the exclusively non-European countries where we've fought all our wars (and "police actions" and whatnot) since World War II ended. A lot of people have died in those wars, and more have been injured or displaced, and no individual non-combatant victim in those countries was ever indicted by a grand jury or convicted in a court of law. But now it's happening to U.S. citizens overseas and the reaction seems to be: Hey, that could be me!

Walsh writes about what she calls American privilege:

On the question of targeting U.S. citizens: I'm proud of the extraordinary rights we enjoy as Americans, and I don't know why so many people shrug at the notion that the president can abrogate those rights if he decides, based on evidence (which he doesn't have to share) that you're a terrorist....

I think almost all of us born here enjoy American privilege, and we should examine it when we look at the way our government protects our privilege globally. Obama's most ardent defenders continue to insist that being concerned about targeted killing abroad somehow reflects insufficient concern for the rights of Americans neglected right here at home; I say it's the job of people of conscience to care about all of it.

But if you're especially outraged at targeted killings of American citizens, if you think they're more horrifying than everything else that's been done in the wars we've fought, that strikes me as a sense of non-combatant privilege. Many of us -- maybe only many white Americans? -- not only assume we're entitled to due process, we expect never to be on a battlefield. In other words, we expect never to be in a situation in which due process doesn't apply.

To me that's a sense of privilege. So I see what's wrong with the drone program, but it's a subset of what's wrong with war. Some Americans expect to be shielded from this sort of suffering at all times, and are shocked that a few Americans aren't.

FASCISM OVERTURNED IN GEORGIA!

A great wrong has been righted in Carroll County, Georgia:

An amendment to remove a reference to firearms from Carroll County's disaster and emergency ordinance was passed by the Board of Commissioners Tuesday without discussion.

The decision to change the ordinance was made to avoid conflicting with Second Amendment issues raised by a Georgia gun rights organization.

The action eliminates the word "firearms" from a list of items whose sales could be suspended in case of a local disaster declared by the county commission chairman. The wording was questioned in a Jan. 18 letter, hand-delivered to commission Chairman Marty Smith, by James Camp of Temple, representing GeorgiaCarry.org....

As originally worded, the ordinance says that in times of local disasters or emergencies the commission chairman could "suspend the sale, distribution, dispensing or transportation of firearms, alcoholic beverages, explosives and combustible products and can close businesses which sell them."

"My recommendation is that we remove it (the word 'firearms')," Daley said. "I can't think of any incidence where it would be used."

... The vote was 6-0 in favor of the amendment....

Because, really, you never know when you might absolutely need to stop and purchase a handgun in the middle of an emergency in order to shoot a tornado or disarm some vicious floodwaters, right?

However:

[GeorgiaCarry.org] has also asked the city of Carrollton to remove firearms as one of the prohibited items from the GreenBelt trail, but the city hasn't yet acted on the request.

That would be this trail:





Firearms? There? Hey, what could go wrong?

DOES GOP WEAKNESS MATTER WHEN THE MAINSTREAM PRESS IS ROOTING FOR REPUBLICANS TO WIN?

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Politico report:

Republicans and Fox News are moving to purge the controversial political creatures they created.

Both were damaged badly in 2012 by loud, partisan voices that stoked the base -- but that scared the hell out of many voters. Now, the GOP, with its dismal image, and Fox News, with its depressed ratings in January, are scrambling to dim those voices.

We then read about supposed signs of a GOP return to sanity -- the banishment of Sarah Palin and Dick Morris from Fox News, Karl Rove's plans to go after candidates in GOP primaries who can't win, and so on.

Over at Digby's place, David Atkins thinks it won't work, in part because, as one GOP operative notes in the Politico piece, the party is still full of "suicide conservatives, who would rather lose elections than win seats with moderates," as well as "groups on the hard right that depend on direct mail fundraising that requires a high degree of audacity, and borderline shrillness."

David writes:

The Republicans are stuck. The establishment GOP ship knows it's headed for a demographic iceberg and needs to change or die. But they're tethered to Fox News and its audience, which won't let them change course. And Fox News itself also realizes it's headed for the same iceberg to a certain degree, but Roger Ailes is tied to the Breitbarts and Newsmaxes that won't let them budge, either.

They've been creating this monster of ugly profiteering and rabid resentment for decades. They can't just make it go away now. The base has too much invested, and the con artists aren't done bilking their marks.

But meanwhile, the mainstream media, having just lived through four years of Obama and with four years yet to go, is bored. Mainstream journalists want a new story. And that story is a GOP comeback -- starting now and (they hope) reaching its climax in 2016, when a Republican Obama (young, Kennedyesque in his vigor, quite possibly brown-skinned) takes the White House.

For years, mainstream journalists have steadfastly resisted to acknowledge that the Republican Party is insane. (Remember how two deeply establishmentarian political observers, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, couldn't get booked on TV news shows when they wrote a book blaming Republican craziness for the sorry state of American governance?) Now, however -- see the Politico story -- it's apparently OK to say that the GOP has been crazy, but only in the context of saying that it's ceasing to be crazy. (Whether or not that's true.)

So Politico and other news sources become fanzines for Bobby Jindal. Time gives Marco Rubio a profile that's pure hagiography ("the charismatic conservative often hailed as the Tea Party’s answer to Barack Obama has emerged as the most influential voice in the national debate over immigration reform"), accompanied by a cover image describing him as "The Republican Savior." And on and on.

Republicans don't have to reform their party too much. Check the MSM -- the fix is in.

DEAR SARAH PALIN: YOUR FELLOW CONSERVATIVES NOW AGREE THAT YOUR "CROSSHAIRS" MAP SHOULD HAVE BEEN BANNED

OK, perhaps the headline is a slight exaggeration. But look at the lead items at Memeorandum right now. They all concern this story:

The Family Research Council shooter, who pleaded guilty today to a terrorism charge, picked his target off a "hate map" on the website of the ultra-liberal Southern Poverty Law Center which is upset with the conservative group's opposition to gay rights.

Floyd Lee Corkins II pleaded guilty to three charges including a charge of committing an act of terrorism related to the August 15, 2012 injuring of FRC's guard. He told the FBI that he wanted to kill anti-gay targets and went to the law center's website for ideas....

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said that the Southern Poverty Law Center should take responsibility for the shooting and take down their hate map....

Nearly all the blog respondents to this (and other versions are the same story) are right-wingers who are fully in agreement with the notion that the Southern Poverty Law Center has blood on its hands for posting its maps.

Many of these bloggers, however, were horrified when the 2011 Tucson mass shooting that critically wounded Gabby Giffords was initially blamed on a "crosshairs" map posted by Sarah Palin's SarahPAC.

Back then, the right-wingers' position tracked that of Slate's Jack Shafer. He wrote:

... Only the tiniest handful of people -- most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds -- can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.

The call ... to take our political conversation down a few notches might make sense if anybody had been calling for the assassination in the first place, which they hadn't. And if they had, there are effective laws to prosecute those who move language outside of the metaphorical....

Any call to cool "inflammatory" speech is a call to police all speech, and I can't think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power. As Jonathan Rauch wrote brilliantly in Harper's in 1995, "The vocabulary of hate is potentially as rich as your dictionary, and all you do by banning language used by cretins is to let them decide what the rest of us may say." Rauch added, "Trap the racists and anti-Semites, and you lay a trap for me too. Hunt for them with eradication in your mind, and you have brought dissent itself within your sights."

Our spirited political discourse, complete with name-calling, vilification -- and, yes, violent imagery -- is a good thing. Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private....

****

What's an incitement to violence? When a right-wing blogger writes, "Break their windows. Break them NOW," with specific references to offices of Democratic officials and candidates, I'd say that's an incitement. Sarah Palin's "Don't repeat, reload" rhetoric is pushing it -- though at least after being criticized, she's tended to throw in rhetorical qualifications ("And we reload with reality by giving facts and numbers to the American public..."). Her "crosshairs map" seemed too stylized to be an incitement (though I never blamed it for the Tucson shootings because it was clear from the earliest news reports that Jared Loughner was profoundly mentally ill, more obsessed with paranoid theories about letters and numbers than with politics).

The SPLC hate map? Well, go look. There's no incitement to violence. There are symbols on the individual state maps, but they're symbols representing the groups' ideologies. Is it painting a target on a neo-Nazi group to map it with a swastika, a symbol the group itself is likely to brandish proudly? (There are a lot of clenched fists on the maps, by the way, representing black separatism. The symbol for "anti-gay" is, um, a triangle. Inciting!) Names and cities appear on the maps, but no addresses, phone numbers, or e-mail addresses.

What Shafer wrote two years ago is correct regarding these maps -- if you use them to plot crimes, you have the problem. And hey, aren't right-wingers the folks who are always yammering about personal responsibility, and not blaming society for the actions of individuals?

DEATH ISN'T GOING TO STOP GEORGE P. BUSH FROM USING CHRIS KYLE TO HELP GET ELECTED

Saw this story today:

George P. Bush had planned to spend today at a gun range with ace sniper Chris Kyle, talking about veterans issues and getting in some target practice.

But Kyle, the U.S. military's most lethal sniper, and his friend Chad Littlefield were killed Saturday at a gun range about 77 miles southwest of Fort Worth.

Bush, who lives in Fort Worth and is the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said in a letter released to the Star-Telegram Tuesday that he was saddened to learn about Kyle's death and described him as "a true American patriot." ...

George P. hasn't officially thrown his hat in any rings yet, though he does have a political action committee and he recently filed papers in Texas indicating that he's preparing to run for something. It's generally believed that he's going to run for Texas land commissioner in 2014. (After that, presumably, he intends to become governor and then president of the United States in short order.)

He clearly understands the business. He was going to go shooting with Chris Kyle to try to get some reflected glory from the hero sniper; now Kyle has been killed, but George P. isn't going to let that stop him from using Kyle's name and fame to further his own career -- you may never get to see him shoot with Kyle, but he's sure as hell going to release a letter to the press telling you he was going to shoot with Kyle. I think George P. has a bright future in Texas politics.

In the letter, George P. praised Kyle, but also had words of sympathy for his killer:

"While certainly no excuse, the struggles for soldiers like the young man who took the lives of Chris and Chad are immeasurable," he wrote. "This was an unspeakable tragedy, but we must now look to the future and ask what we can do to prevent this from happening again."

Um, maybe one thing we can do is not encourage returning vets with severe PTSD to shoot guns? Oh, sorry, I forgot -- George P. and the killer and the dead men are all from Texas. So forget I said that.

(Via Tim Murphy of Mother Jones.)

GETTING HIPPIE-PUNCHED, AS A VARIATION ON HIPPIE-PUNCHING?

I don't know if there's a prevailing theory on how the drone memo became public, but it seems to me that the leak has actually worked in the White House's favor. Think about where the White House stands on foreign policy right now: Benghazi became a big deal in the past few months. Syria and Egypt and Mali are trouble spots, and a lot of people are finding it hard to believe that Al Qaeda is "on the run." Iran is still rattling sabers, as is North Korea. Obama's incredibly popular first secretary of state is gone. Obama's nominee for defense secretary is in trouble, accused of a multitude of sins against American foreign policy muscularity. Oh, and the sequester cuts may very well go through, with Republicans gearing up to blame the defense portion of the cuts on Obama.

But now the drone memo has leaked, and lots of people on the left are furious at the president, while, on the other side, you've got the likes of this:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) will offer a resolution next week commending President Barack Obama's use of drones and the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.

"Every member of Congress needs to get on board," Graham said....

"Hippie-punching" is what lefties have called Obama administration rejections of progressive ideas and insults to progressives. This seems like reverse hippie-punching: taking a foreign-policy hit from the left at just the moment when right-wingers might be starting to land a few blows that will allow them to portray the White House as weak. And to be cynical about it, why not get yourself hippie-punched on drones when (as I said in the last post) the American public approves of the drone program by a 62%-28% margin?

So no, I don't know who leaked the memo. But I know who's helped politically by the leak.

ANTI-DRONE BEDFELLOWS: STRANGER AND STRANGER

Fox Nation, The Weekly Standard, Matt Drudge, and various right-wing blogs seem to be celebrating an anti-drone resolution that just passed in the city council of Charlottesville, Virginia. NBC News tells us about the resolution:

The Charlottesville City Council on Monday night rebuffed an attempt to totally ban unmanned aircraft in the city's airspace, according to U.S. News & World Report, and instead passed a resolution that pledges that the city will not use information obtained by drones in court.

Local activist David Swanson and The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group, brought the resolution to council members....

So Fox Nation is excited about a resolution backed by David Swanson -- a former communications coordinator for ACORN whose book War Is a Lie was praised by Mumia Abu Jamal? ("It's self-published, brilliantly and passionately written, and while being truthful is full of hope of destroying the military-industrial-media-congressional-imperialpresidential-complex.") David Swanson, whose group WarIsACrime.org used to be the anti-Iraq War group After Downing Street, and is a coalition that includes Code Pink?

And the Rutherford Institute? Well, I guess it's no surprise that Rutherford and Fox might be on the same side -- Rutherford was the principal backer of Paula Jones's lawsuit against Bill Clinton -- although Rutherford's interests seem to be a mix of religious issues and secular civil-liberties issues. (Rutherford doesn't like abortion or RFID-enabled school ID badges.)

I'm sure there are Ron Paul and Firedoglake fans who'll see this as a sign of an emerging lefty/libertarian anti-authoritarian coalition. Me, I think folks at Fox and the Standard will use any stick that comes to hand to beat Barack Obama and other Democrats with -- the mainstream right will delight in drones and surveillance and targeted killing as soon as the responsible party has an (R) next to his name.

But for now, having struggled for four years to bring Obama down by attacking him from the right, the wingnut media seems to be making efforts to attack him from the left. Given the fact that Americans approve of the overseas drone campaign by a 62%-28% margin, I don't think it'll work. But media rightists will try anything.

WIFE OF GLENN REYNOLDS FINDS CHANGING LIGHTBULBS AN EMPOWERING FEMINIST EXPERIENCE

Yes, "Dr. Helen" Smith, the proudly anti-feminist "Instawife," actually wrote this:

I hate all the empowering stuff that feminists always go on about: "empowering" women in education, the workplace and the military etc. Usually when I hear the word "empowerered," I think of a group that sees themselves as weak but wants the government or others to place them in a privileged position to obtain goodies or special rights that men are not entitled to. If one truly has power, they do not use the word empowered in every sentence. That said, I do like feeling "empowered" around the house when I can take care of simple household repairs without asking my busy husband to help me with general stuff, for example, changing light bulbs in high places. And if my "empowerment" helps my husband, so much the better.

My husband, Glenn, was nice enough to order me two different kinds of light bulb changers in order to see which one worked better....

Mrs. Instapundit goes on to tell us that she prefers the handy-dandy Unger 3pc Light Bulb Changerkit to the sucky Bayco Light Bulb Changer Kit (Amazon product links for both are conveniently provided), which she just tried, with terribly disappointing results:

The changer comes with a suction cup you attach a string to to allow you to pull it away from the bulb easily. I ended up pulling it and breaking the bulb and then the string fell out.

So she went back to the Unger and grrl power was achieved:

... I found the Unger kit easier to use and the two mechanisms for changing the bulbs were simple, popped in and out and no string was necessary. I have to say I felt like a real handyman (woman) going around the house fixing all the lights and making sure they were all in working order.

(I guess using a stepstool or a stepladder was out of the question.)

And the empowerment lesson in all this?

So, whether you are male or female, I recommend the Unger Changerkit. It can really make your life easier and give you a sense of "empowerment" if that is what you're looking for. Me, I'm just trying to give my husband time to do more important things.

More important things like, I guess, posting even more Amazon product links on his blog, because, y'know, capitalism.

REPUBLICANS: STILL INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY INSANE

This actually happened:

A proposal to study whether Virginia should adopt its own currency passed the state House of Delegates on Monday....

Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William) has been fighting for the bill for three years as a safeguard against what he believes is a central banking system that has swung out of control. But until Monday, the plan seemed little more than a quixotic quest. The House voted 65 to 32 to approve the measure....

The plan calls for spending $17,440 to create a 10-member commission, which would determine the "need, means and schedule for establishing a metallic-based monetary unit" -- in other words, a return to a gold standard.

It is unclear how Marshall's measure will fare in the Senate. And Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) has said in the past that he does not support the commonwealth printing its own money. But that the bill has made it even this far underscores the depth of distrust among some surrounding the nation's central bank....

I'm used to thinking of Bob Marshall as crazy -- as I told you in December, when he was proposing that Virginia schools be required by law to arm some teachers or other school personnel, this is a guy who once said that women who have abortions subsequently have disabled kids because God is punishing them, and once blocked the appointment of a gay judge because he believed being gay meant the judge couldn't uphold the Virginia constitution. I failed to mention a few choice quotes:

Bob Marshall's take on the Obama Agenda: "Suicidal deficits, enemies lists, abortion, euthanize seniors, health care that kills capitalism ... 'Live and let die,' Obama theme song!"

Bob Marshall compares the economic stimulus package to slavery: "It is as much a chain as ankle bracelets were as to African-Americans in the 1860s in this state. It's just invisible. But it is a chain of death that we're not going to escape."

On Abortion in the case of incest and rape Marshall said: "Sometimes incest is voluntary." Marshall added, with regard to rape, that "the woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman."

Marshall on the Morning After Pill: "We have no business passing this garbage out and making these co-eds chemical Love Canals for these frat house playboys in Virginia."

Yes, they call him "Sideshow Bob" in Virginia -- but the sideshow has moved to the main stage if his crazy bill passed one house of the GOP-controlled legislature by more than a 2-to-1 margin. You're the clowns, Republicans -- all of you -- if this is mainstream in Virginia.

WELL, SO MUCH FOR GUN CONTROL AND THE SMART GRID

I'm reading about the Justice Department memo justifying targeted killings of U.S. citizens believed to be Al Qaeda operatives, and I can't help noticing that the right is quite upset -- or at least is regarding this as a useful stick to beat President Obama with and is faking distress, despite the fact that the policy in question would have been met with right-wing hosannas under Bush/Cheney (or, for that matter, McCain/Palin or Romney/Ryan).

The wingers see a slippery slope that leads to the targeting of them, or at least of good, God-fearing heartlanders.

Here's Patterico, for instance:

... Obama is a liar and I do not trust him. So while I might be OK with what the memo proposes, there is no way for me to be sure he won't take it further, if he thinks it would benefit him politically. He doesn't consider himself constrained by little things like budget deadlines. Why would he pass an opportunity to kill a U.S. citizen outside the above guidelines if he thought he could justify it?

RELATED? Iowa farmers complain about drones monitoring their farms....

I bet U.S. citizens never thought drones would be conducting surveillance on farmers.

It's not like this guy thinks of himself as above the law or anything, does it?

And from the comments at Weasel Zippers:

Considering all the "official" documents floating around pointing at conservatives, and conservative Christians in particular, as dangerous groups, it frankly scares the hell out of me....

****

Big Sis's DHS 9 page memo comes to mind on 'potenial' terrorists ..

"If you are a member of an active conservative group that opposes abortion, favors strict immigration enforcement, lobbies to protect Second Amendment rights, protests big government, advocates federalism, or represents veterans who believe in any of the above, the answer is: You."

****

Any rural white person who is crazy enough to own a firearm must be an al Qaeda plant and therefore must be eliminated. Also, queue up the voter rolls--anyone ignorant enough to vote against Obama must be a terrorist.

This is being filed away by rank-and-file righties as even more evidence that Obama can't be trusted with power -- I actually think it's going to make even the seemingly less controversial gun-control measures he and other Democrats are proposing harder to pass. I think it's going to be a little more encouragement to people resisting electricity "smart meters," in part because of privacy concerns and fears that the Evil Government will try to control individuals' energy use (smart meter protests have been going on for a while in Naperville, Illinois). I'm sure this will be linked to Agenda 21 conspiracy theories, though I'm not in the mood right now to figure out how.

I don't think any of this is going to stop the drone strikes -- I can't really see righties and lefties banding together to do something upliftingly democratic and bipartisan like forcing a reconsideration of the policy via combined public pressure (when was the last time something like that happened in America?) -- there are too many people in office, from both parties, who like what's being done by the administration. Maybe it will threaten the appointment of John Brennan as CIA director, but I'm not sure about that. I think the most enduring effect, in addition to reinforcing the anger of lefty Obama skeptics, will be an increase in right-wing paranoia -- for no good reason.

A 2016 GOP PLAN TO RUN ON SCREWING THE POOR, ENRICHING THE RICH, AND LETTING THE ROADS CRUMBLE

I've told you, and others have told you, that cutting or eliminating state income taxes (which tend to be somewhat progressive) is all the rage among GOP governors, as is raising sales taxes (which fall disproportionately on the poor, the lower middle class, and the middle class, because the more of your paycheck you have to spend to live, the more they get to tax you). Bobby Jindal is a big fan of this approach (he wants to eliminate all income and corporate taxes in Louisiana) -- and you know he wants to be president.

So it's not a surprise to read what I'm reading in The Wall Street Journal this morning: that Republicans -- bizarrely -- think this approach could win them the White House four years from now.

TOPEKA, Kan. -- Even if he doesn't enter the race himself, this state's Republican governor, Sam Brownback, is determined to play a starring role in the next presidential election.

How? By turning Kansas into what he calls Exhibit A for how sharp cuts in taxes and government spending can generate jobs, wean residents off public aid and spur economic growth.

"My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, 'See, we've got a different way, and it works,' " Mr. Brownback said in a recent interview.

Coming off the largest tax cut in state history on Jan. 1, Kansas is now on the leading edge of a growing but still largely untested quest among conservative governors to create growth by dramatically revamping state tax codes.

Is this an idea limited to a few Republicans, or is it a party idea? Ask Brownback:

Mr. Brownback recounts how Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reacted when the two talked recently about the work under way in Kansas.

"Mitch said, 'This is exactly the sort of thing we want to do here, in Washington, but can't, at least for now,' " Mr. Brownback said. An aide to Mr. McConnell confirmed the conversation.

Now, what exactly is Brownback doing? As The New York Times recently reported:

... the poorest 20 percent of Kansans will spend an additional 1.3 percent of their incomes, an average of $148 per year, on taxes, according to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

And as Jamelle Bouie notes:

As for the top 1 percent of Kansans? Their tax burden will decrease by $21,087 a year, or a little less than the state poverty line for a two-person household.

Is this actually meant to appeal to voters? Or is it meant to appeal primarily to Republican donors? I suspect it's the latter -- as I said yesterday, Wall Street donors want the GOP running on fiscal policy rather than social issues, and many Republicans really, really want to do what these donors would like them to do.

And they apparently want to do what rich donors would like even if it alienates ordinary citizens and puts their states' fiscal health in peril. Consider what the Journal story says about Brownback's plan:

... the governor faces an array of challenges. His income-tax cuts, which took the top rate from 6.45% to 4.9% at the start of the year and are targeted to hit 3.5% by 2017, are projected to leave a significant hole in next year's state budget, which starts in July.

The official state economic-forecasting agency predicted last fall a drop of $700 million in revenue in the next fiscal year, equivalent to about 12% of this year's budget, with the decline growing steeper after that. Mr. Brownback's budget proposal for the coming year, released in January, put the figure even higher, at $800 million....

To make up for the revenue drop, the governor is pushing to preserve what was meant to be a temporary increase in the state sales tax, and to eliminate two popular deductions, including the state write-off for home-mortgage interest payments.... He also wants to transfer more than $100 million from a state highway fund to cover other expenses.

Seriously? This guy wants the party (and, probably, himself) to pursue the White House in 2016 on a plan that eliminates state home mortgage deductions? As well as keeping sales taxes high and allowing roads and bridges to crumble?

Even some GOP legislators are balking -- though we're told,

In Kansas, about a dozen centrist Republican lawmakers were targeted by conservatives and voted out of office last year, so Gov. Brownback now enjoys the backing of an overwhelmingly conservative legislature.

Corporatist teabagging!

Brownback seems to be engaging in classic Laffer-curve magical thinking:

Mr. Brownback and others believe the tax cuts will eventually pay for themselves by drawing in new businesses and stirring job growth.

In any case, Brownback is not alone -- he's doing this, Jindal is doing similar things, and so are Governors Mike Pence in Indiana, Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, and John Kasich of Ohio. I think this is what Romney/Ryan probably would have done with a willing Congress. I'm certain it's what a Republican president elected in 2016 will do if there's also a GOP House and Senate.

But can the GOP win with this? I think it's possible. I worry that the fat cats just didn't know how to use Citizens United effectively last year -- and that they may be learning from their mistakes. Then maybe, with this as inspiration, they really will buy an election for the GOP.

THE GUNNERS GET CRAZIER
(updated)

As I told you a couple of weeks ago, when John Noveske, a much-admired gunmaker, and Keith Ratliff, a popular gun reviewer, died within a day of each other last month, a lot of folks on the Internet were speculating that the two of them had been killed by the Vast Kenyan Fascist Gun-Grabbing Conspiracy. Now some people think Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered on a Texas gun range over the weekend, was the third victim.

Click this to enlarge -- it's all over the Net (here, here, here, here, here, here):





Remind me again: What's the value to Evil Obama in killing these guys? Are their deaths going to increase support for gun control? Not among gunners (the gun community is just becoming more and more paranoid, paranoia being one of the many unpleasant emotional states than can be eased, if you're a gunner, by purchasing more guns) and not among the rest of us (most of us had never heard of Noveske and Ratliff; maybe some of us knew about Kyle). Are these major players in the gun world? No, they aren't -- and nobody from a major manufacturer or lobbying organization has suffered a scratch.

But long before Sandy Hook, right-wing haters compiled lists of "suspicious" deaths allegedly traceable to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; the dead are almost all small fry or tangential figures. (Murdering Ron Brown: why exactly would one bother?)

In any case, there'll be more of this. And, at least in the case of Ratliff and Kyle -- Noveske died in a car accident -- the gunners are doing what they do with every gun death: denying that gun culture could have possibly had anything to do with the fact the fact that someone was, y'know, shot to death.

****

UPDATE, TUESDAY: Wow, this just gets better. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones reports:

Various tea party activists, libertarian websites and other conspiracy-minded Obama haters are claiming that Russian security forces have discovered that Obama is about to unleash "death squads" across America to assassinate defenders of the Second Amendment. According to Liberty.com, one of the sites perpetuating this latest story, Russian intelligence has outlined the whole nefarious plot in a memo for President Vladimir Putin, detailing the Obama's administration's dispatch of "VIPER teams...which is the acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Team, a programme run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and whose agents terrify millions of Americans with Nazi-like Gestapo tactics on a daily basis at airports and who report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)."

Liberty.com (run by a Florida tea party leader), which echoes the theory promoted by similar sites, maintains that these teams -- 800 of them, to be precise -- are set to "disperse throughout his country in preparation for what Russian intelligence analysts are predicting to be a series of high-profile killings of dissident Americans set to begin as soon as February 22nd." Obama has apparently been emboldened to launch such an operation by the recent federal court ruling upholding his right to kill American citizens with drone strikes without explaining why.

Dead gun activists and the Russkies and drones! It's all connected, maaaan! And things get serious on February 22! (Even though they actually started to get serious last month! Or in December, when Obama faked the Sandy Hook massacre!)

And, yes, drones belong in there becauise, as I said in another post, many right-wingers think the Obama drone program is specifically aimed at them.

Yes, We Are The World's Laughingstock.


Posted below an article about the recent discovery of Richard III's bones under a parking lot in the UK.

patriot17
1:43 PM EST
I heard on Fox News that Richard III was actually born in Kenya, and so was not legally qualified to be the King of England.

WALL STREETERS WERE APPARENTLY UNAWARE UNTIL NOW THAT REPUBLICANS ARE CRAZY HOMOPHOBES WHO HATE THE URBAN NORTHEAST

I love the lede of this Politico story:

Wall Street donors and bundlers plunged hundreds of millions of dollars into the GOP's effort to take back the White House and Senate this year -- and now some are threatening to cut off the spigot ahead of 2014 in the face of disappointing results.

New York donors have a list of complaints: Republicans focused too much on social issues, backed too many weak candidates, stalled Hurricane Sandy aid and even let taxes go up for the very rich -- in other words, the very people giving the money and their friends....

You can understand their disappointment regarding the tax hikes on the rich (hey, isn't this the kind of legislation we pay you guys to block?), but, um, the rest of it? That's a surprise?

Apparently so:

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) ... said donors ... want to hear directly from top senators about the lessons learned from the disappointing 2012 cycle -- when Wall Street donors cringed alongside other Republicans as not one, but two GOP Senate candidates made controversial comments about rape....

One fundraiser said multiple companies and executives said not to come up to New York until after Sandy relief was passed....

Donors, too, have been perplexed at the focus of some Senate GOP candidates on social issues.

"There is a vein throughout the Republican Party of people who are very socially liberal. You don't live in New York City, which exalts in its diversity, in all these things that happen here if you have a problem," said one veteran Republican New York fundraiser of the frustration with the party's stance on social issues. "Everybody who lives here -- everyone has lots of gay friends, friends of color, Muslims, that’s the world you live in. It's not exotic. It's part of the fabric of life."

The GOP donor base includes guys like hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who made a seven-figure contribution to a pro-Romney super PAC -- and has made donations in the millions to support marriage equality. (Singer's son is married to a man.) And they somehow never imagined that what they've been doing has been at cross-purposes, until just now.

I guess they believed that all the abortion-bashing and gay-bashing and bashing of the values and mores of coastal urban America was just boob-bait for the Bubbas -- the party didn't mean any of that. Well, surprise -- the party did mean all of that. The Bubbas vote in primaries. You can't win a GOP nomination without mollifying the Bubbas. Right-wing media moguls, who may personally share the Wall Streeters' ideas on social issues, keep fanning these flames. And that's turned the GOP into what it is today.

I THINK IT'S APPROPRIATE TO GO GODWIN HERE

A post from Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit is the lead item at Fox Nation right now:

Defense Secretary Panetta Admits Information from Waterboarding Led US to Bin Laden

...Yes, waterboarding worked.
Today on Meet the Press Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta admitted that information gleaned from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him.

"The real story was that in order to put the puzzle of intelligence together that led us to Bin Laden, there were a lot of pieces out there that were a part of that puzzle. Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used. But the fact is we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that."

(Emphasis in the Hoft post.)

As noted over at Little Green Footballs, Hoft doesn't quote Panetta's next sentence -- "I think we could have gotten bin Laden without that."

You know what? I don't care if torture obtains useful information. It's wrong, period.

Nazi scientists actually derived useful data about the human body through brutal techniques. An example:

Unburdened by even the slightest sense of humanity, the Nazi hypothermia experimenters ... let their victims' interior body temperatures drop to 79.7°F before attempting to revive them. Most died an excruciatingly painful death as a result. However, some did revive, and the Nazis found that rapid rewarming in hot water proved the most effective way to revive them.

Researchers who've sought to use Nazi hypothermia data know it was obtained in an unimaginably immoral way. But those who've wanted to use the data have argued that the abhorrent way the information was obtained shouldn't preclude its use:

Doctor John Hayward is a Biology Professor at the Victoria University in Vancouver, Canada. Much of his hypothermia research involves the testing of cold water survival suits that are worn while on fishing boats in Canada's frigid ocean waters. Hayward used Rascher's recorded cooling curve of the human body to infer how long the suits would protect people at near fatal temperatures. This information can be used by search-and-rescue teams to determine the likelihood that a capsized boater is still alive.

According to Kristine Moe's survey in the Hasting Center Report, Hayward justified using the Nazi hypothermia data in the following way:

"I don't want to have to use the Nazi data, but there is no other and will be no other in an ethical world. I've rationalized it a bit. But not to use it would be equally bad. I'm trying to make something constructive out of it. I use it with my guard up, but it's useful."

Torture is wrong because it's wrong. The right is going to wave soundbites like this in our faces forever, but we're looking at the wrong question. Asking "Did waterboarding work?" is like asking "Did plunging emaciated Dachau prisoners in ice water work?" Morally, it doesn't matter.

ONE MAN'S AFFLICTION IS ANOTHER MAN'S DRUG OF CHOICE

A couple of gun stories today. This one, from Texas, is tragic and infuriating:

Chris Kyle, a former Navy SEAL who became known as the deadliest U.S. sniper, was one of two men murdered on Saturday afternoon at a gun range in Erath County....

Eddie Routh, 25, is in custody in connection with the shootings.

Investigators said Routh, a former Marine and expert marksman who is said to suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, is believed to have turned his weapon on Kyle and the second victim, killing them both at point-blank range about 3:30 p.m....

Since retiring as a Navy SEAL, Kyle had been actively helping other military veterans recover from PTSD....

This was in Texas. This was on a gun range. Chris Kyle died even though he had 160 confirmed kills as a sniper in Iraq. To state the obvious, why wasn't a bad man with a gun -- or, more precisely, a profoundly troubled man with a gun -- stopped by a good man with a gun?

And is it really a good idea for a veteran with war-related PTSD to be shooting, even as recreation, and possibly as therapy?

In Texas, and all over the country in Gun World, I'm sure everyone would answer that question with a resounding yes. Guns are like therapy dogs. Guns carry God's grace. Guns are good for whatever ails you.

Past efforts to tighten access to guns by people with mental and emotional problems have been unalterably opposed by the Gun Owners of America, precisely because they targeted PTSD (GOA called the last such law the "Veterans Disarmament Act"), while the NRA supported the most recently law but worked to weaken it. And for all the NRA's post-Newtown talk about mental illness, you can bet your bottom dollar that the NRA will weaken any new bill as well.

****

Meanwhile, The Washington Post profiles two Rhode Island gun absolutists: Rob Farago, a prominent gun blogger, and David Kenik, who makes self-defense videos. Part of the Post's reporting takes place over a couple of meals in Providence:

... the two men dig into dinner at a swank Italian restaurant, both of them choosing chairs that let them face the entrance.

"Look at the way Robert and I are facing," Kenik says. "Crime happens everywhere. There's no place to feel safe."

"That's your opinion," Farago says, distancing himself a bit.

"It's in the back of my mind," Kenik says.

Don't imagine that Farago is much less paranoid than Kenik. Here's Farago on another day, after a sushi lunch:

Exiting the restaurant, he poses a question: What business in this little commercial area would criminals most likely target? The jewelry store, obviously. That's situational awareness.

Standing on the patio at Starbucks, he tells a story. A while back, he was right in this spot when the alarm went off across the street at the Bank of America branch office. Amazingly, people ignored it. They kept walking up to the bank to use the ATM. They didn't seem to register the alarm at all.

Farago reckoned that, if a gunman emerged from the bank, he'd take cover inside the Starbucks, putting a brick wall between himself and the shooter.

"If I have incoming fire, I've got a plan ready to go," he says.

There was no gunman. Just a false alarm.

But that's not the point. The point is that Farago was alert to the potential danger in the world. He was prepared to defend himself, if absolutely necessary, with his Glock. Even though, so far in his incarnation as a gun guy, he's never had any reason.

The Post gives us Farago's background -- ex-CNN producer and cameraman, ex-car blogger, ex-freelance writer. No military service is mentioned. Kenik? We learn less about him, but in this interview he says he "had no formal training" in the use of guns, and this LinkedIn page suggests that he never served, either.

The alleged killer of Chris Kyle in Texas went to war and came back with PTSD. Rob Farago and David Kenick seem to have given themselves PTSD, even though they never served. They constantly anticipate danger -- apparently because it makes them feel good to see themselves as able to deal with danger. How sick is it to induce PTSD in yourself?

SO MUCH FOR THAT NEWFOUND REPUBLICAN POPULISM

Here's Peggy Noonan on Friday, detecting signs of change in the GOP in a speech at the recent Republican National Committee meeting:

Rep. Dave Camp zeroed in on the worst of Wall Street, the use of derivatives that helped crash the economy in 2008. He proposes to "crack down on the ability of investment firms and wealthy individuals to limit their taxes through complex financial instruments," Roll Call reports. That's a pirate move, and of the best kind because it doesn't come from a pirate but from the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, a conservative veteran respected on both sides of the aisle.

These sharp cracks in the air just may be the sound of a frozen party moving on into swift and warmer waters. And if it's just a beginning, good, it's a beginning.

So -- the "frozen party" of fat cats is "moving on into swift and warmer waters" of populism? Really?

No, not really:

Senate Republicans are renewing their vow to block any nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) unless major changes are made to its structure.

In a letter sent to President Obama on Friday, 43 Republican senators committed to refusing approval of any nominee to head the consumer watchdog....

The party doesn't care about ordinary citizens. Some of its members may claim to be wary of big business, but only in favor of small business. The party's solution to the big guys screwing you is to encourage a whole new crop of little guys to become the new big guys screwing you.

As Noonan puts it, quoting a Ted Cruz speech at the RNC meeting:

Republicans spent 2012 answering President Obama with the slogan "You built that!" But that was a slogan aimed at those who'd already arrived, who were established. The GOP message, [Cruz] said, should have been, "You can build that." The party should not allow itself to look like the party of big business, it has to be the party of the young person in the garage inventing something that will challenge big business.

And then that young person in the garage can shaft the consumer, or despoil the environment, or exploit overseas workers, or all of the above. That's what America is all about! Not finding the right balance between the vaulting ambition of capitalists and the human needs of the vast majority of citizens who'll never be fabulously successful entrepreneurs, but unleashing those ambitious capitalists and letting them do whatever they please.

The only little guy Republicans will ever be champions of in the foreseeable future is the little guy who's got his eyes on being the big guy. If you're not that guy, any concern Republicans express about ordinary citizens is not about you.

ON OBAMA'S GUN AND MANDATORY SPORTS IN POLITICS

The Most Important Story in America right now is, apparently, the fact that the White House has released a photo of President Obama shooting skeet. BuzzFeed notes that Team Obama is having fun with this:

Attn skeet birthers. Make our day - let the photoshop conspiracies begin! m.flickr.com/photos/whiteho…

— David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) February 2, 2013

Me, I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of American politicians having to prove they're fit to hold office by shooting guns -- or demonstrating interest in any sporting activity they have a damn good reason not to care about.

I don't hunt. Why? Because I grew up in a large city (Boston) and live in another large city (New York). Barack Obama grew up mostly in Honolulu. He's lived since then in places such as New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Of course he doesn't spend a lot of time shooting.

Gun lovers want us to understand and respect their culture. Hey, why don't you guys try understanding and respecting ours? If you say we shouldn't have contempt for your enjoyment of hunting and target shooting, well, fine, I accept that -- but you need to drop the contempt for those of us who didn't grow up with those recreations, and never developed a fondness for them. It just wasn't part of our culture, and that's OK.

I hate that U.S. pols, in order to seem "down to earth" (which most of them aren't), have to feign an interest in hunting or NASCAR (yeah, I even felt sorry for Mitt Romney to some extent, although his NASCAR comments were an unforced error).

I said some harsh things about Ed Koch yesterday, but I give him credit for never pretending to care about baseball the way his New York mayoral predecessors had generally been expected to do. He didn't care about the Yankees or the Mets, and yet even those of us who didn't like him much saw him as a genuine New Yorker. (He didn't love sports, but he loved street life and argumentation and good deli, so he obviously belonged here.) We seem to have stopped requiring baseball love of our mayors here, and I think that's good -- Rudy Giuliani's baseball fandom was sincere, but David Dinkins clearly preferred tennis, and Mike Bloomberg seems lukewarm (and he seems to still harbor some loyalty to the Red Sox). It's fine. We're grown-ups. Like what you like.

On the other hand, if we are going to require sports-love from our pols, I wish John Kerry had made more of his own hockey playing. These things are regional. We don't fully grasp NASCAR up in the Northeast because NASCAR developed out of the way bootleggers drove on back country roads. Much of the Northeast doesn't have back country roads. (Ever try driving the extremely narrow streets of Beacon Hill? You're not going to set any speed records there.) What we do have up here is ice. So an ice-based sport took root here, and Kerry played hockey. Show some cultural respect.

I AGREE WITH THIS

Let's regulate guns instead of abortion. 24 hr waiting periods before purchase, parental consent, mandatory viewing of gunshot wound videos

— Steph Herold (@StephHerold) February 2, 2013

And while we're at it, since right-wingers like "heartbeat bills" so much, how about one for guns? If you want to buy a gun, we check your pulse. Then you look at the gun. While you're looking and holding it and checking it out, we take your pulse again. If it races so much we can tell you're head over heels in love -- sorry, you're too emotionally unstable regarding that weapon. You can't have it.

GOP STRATEGY IN MASSACHUSETTS: LOSE DELIBERATELY, BUT WITH A BROWN GUY?

You probably already know that Scott Brown isn't going to run for John Kerry's Senate seat in Massachusetts. This all but assures a Democratic victory (though, of course, a Democratic victory seemed all but assured the first time Brown ran).

The Washington Post lists possible Republican candidates:

With Brown out of the picture, potential GOP candidates include former state senator Richard Tisei, former governor Bill Weld and businessman and former Navy SEAL Gabriel Gomez, whom national Republicans have been recruiting.

Gabriel Gomez? Seriously? The national GOP has been recruiting him?

Last year, Gomez acted as a spokesman for the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund, a supposedly nonpartisan group (actually run by GOP operatives) that produced a 22-minute swiftboat-style video accusing President Obama of deliberately endangering national security -- and putting Americans' lives at risk -- with leaks. Here's a trailer for the video:





On Hardball last summer, Gomez was brought on to defend the video, and he said that Obama besmirched the killing of Osama bin Laden by talking too much about himself:

"I think if you watch his whole presentation the night that Osama bin Laden was killed and he came out, I think that you'd come to the conclusion just like we did, I think a lot of Americans came to that same conclusion -- that he focused a majority of the comments on himself as opposed to the troops. We're not saying he didn't thank the troops and he didn't give credit to the troops. What we're saying is a big majority of the presentation was focused on him and his administration. That's the point we're trying to make."

Really? You're going to run this guy, who can't even give unqualified credit to the president for the bin Laden mission, in a state Obama won by 23 points?

I think the Republicans who want Gomez to run don't care if he loses. I think they don't care if he alienates Massachusetts voters. I think they care about the fact that his name is Gomez -- they want another Hispanic-surnamed candidate to go with Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and Governors Brian Sandoval and Susana Martinez. The want the rest of the country to see this guy as a candidate with an (R) next to his name. Look! We're not racist! Either that or it's never occurred to them, in their conservative bubble, that this guy's past swiftboating might offend people in a very pro-Obama state.

Good luck with that strategy, Republicans.

ED KOCH CHOSE TO LEAVE THIS WORLD WITH A RIGHT-WING TALKING POINT

Before he died, Ed Koch had this inscribed on his tombstone:

"My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish"
(Daniel Pearl, 2002, just before he was beheaded by a Muslim terrorist)

Click to enlarge:





Just a week ago, at the Huffington Post, while discussing the inscription, Koch wrote:

On January 21, the New York Times, the newspaper of record, recalled the killing of Daniel Pearl... The Times reported, "More than a dozen of the militants [why not call them Islamist terrorists?] involved in his murder remain at large, a testament to the lack of will by Pakistani authorities to prosecute the cases, according to a report released Thursday."

Yeah! As Koch said, why not call them Islamist terrorists?

Well, if you got to the Times, you can read the sentence Koch quoted in its entirety:

Nine years after the American reporter Daniel Pearl was captured and killed by operatives of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, more than a dozen of the militants involved in his murder remain at large, a testament to the lack of will by Pakistani authorities to prosecute the cases, according to a report released Thursday.

Oh -- so the Times didn't call the militants "Islamist terrorists" because it had already identified them as members of Al Qaeda. Not good enough, apparently, for Ed Koch.

The next sentence in the Times story begins, "Some of the 14 men who are known to have played a role in the death of Mr. Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, committed other terrorist acts in Pakistan...." And Pearl is said to have been kidnapped "as he was pursuing a story about Islamic extremism." Still, apparently, not good enough for Koch.

Koch really should have spent his final years as a right-wing pundit.


(Tombstone link via Memeorandum.)

IF ED KOCH WERE ALIVE AND HEALTHY, HE'D BE A VIGOROUS PART OF THE ANTI-HAGEL HIT SQUAD

I guess I'm supposed to be mourning Ed Koch, but my eyes are dry. He was a Trump-like egomaniac, and as mayor he divided the city racially like Rudy Giuliani a decade later. He won praise at the peak of his popularity and power from folks like George Will:

[Koch] has withering things to say about affirmative action, public employees' unions, "poverty pimps" (our mayor is a phrase-maker) and especially what he calls in conversation "arch-white-liberals" -- a splendid contribution to social categories. If Reagan were an East Coast urban ethnic Democrat, and in an uncharacteristically rotten mood, this is what he might sound like.

Koch endorsed George W. Bush in 2004 ("The Democratic Party just doesn’t have the stomach to go after terrorists") and he endorsed Republican Bob Turner in the race to succeed Anthony Weiner ("'I disagree with [Obama] on the way he views the state of Israel,' Koch said Monday at Turner's Howard Beach campaign office"). He backed Obama last year, but -- in one of his last interviews, with the New York-based Algemeiner newspaper -- he attacked Obama for nominating Chuck Hagel as defense secretary, describing it as an Obama betrayal of Israel:

... "Frankly, I thought that there would come a time when [Obama] would renege on what he conveyed on his support of Israel," said Koch, adding, "it comes a little earlier than I thought it would."

"It's very disappointing, I believe he will ultimately regret it," Koch said, "and it undoubtedly will reduce support for him in the Jewish community, but I don't think he (the President) worries about that now that the election is over." ...

"I'm sure that the Arabs are drinking orange juice and toasting Hagel's good health," Koch said.

"I believe it will encourage the Iranian program. I believe it will encourage the jihadists. They will say 'ah, we are winning the battle. America is beginning to desert Israel,'" he added.

So he thought Obama would betray Israel, but still endorsed him?

... "I did what I thought was warranted and intelligent," he said, "He was going to win! There was no question about it. I thought it would be helpful to have a Jewish voice there, being able to communicate."

The Mayor says he has no regrets, "it wouldn't make any difference. The Jews were going to vote for him no matter what. And that's the nature of the Jews. They are always very solicitous of everybody else except their own needs and community."

As Koch subsequently told Michael Goodwin of Fox News:

"I don't regret supporting him. I believe it bought time... I'm just sorry it was so short-lived."

That was Koch: he endorsed Obama, but then said he always expected Obama to prove himself an Israel-hater, and added that he, Ed Koch, postponed Obama's betrayal of Israel with his endorsement. (That was the Trump-style egomania.)

Feh. He's gone. I won't miss him.