SEE YOU SOON

I'm going to be wrangling relatives for the next few days, so I won't be blogging, but there'll be posts from the usual gang here while I'm gone, so drop by. Have a happy Thanksgiving (or, if you prefer, shake your fist at the Pilgrim imperialists). I'll be back on Sunday.

IF YOU DISRESPECT THE GOP FAMILY, YOU HAVE TO TALK TO THE GODFATHER
(Hint: Not Reince Priebus)

If you're a member of the Republican family and you show the family any disrespect, the Godfather will want to have a word with you:

A few days after Hurricane Sandy shattered the shores of New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie picked up the phone to take on a different kind of recovery work: taming the Republican Party fury over his effusive embrace of President Obama.

On Nov. 3, Mr. Christie called Rupert Murdoch, the influential News Corporation chief and would-be kingmaker, who had warned in a biting post on Twitter that the governor might be responsible for Mr. Obama's re-election.

Mr. Christie told Mr. Murdoch that amid the devastation, New Jersey needed friends, no matter their political party, according to people briefed on the discussion. But Mr. Murdoch was blunt: Mr. Christie risked looking like a spoiler unless he publicly affirmed his support for Mitt Romney, something the governor did the next day....

I am shocked -- shocked! Rupert Murdoch isn't even an official in the Republican Party! And his cable news operation is so utterly fair and balanced! And yet it's to him -- not to any Republican Party official or veteran officeholder -- that a member of the GOP family who strays must turn in order to make amends!

Astonishing, isn't it?

Murdoch warned that Christie was costing Romney the election. Actually, it was probably Murdoch who cost Romney the election -- as I said in my last post, Fox News mainstreams Republican extremism every hour of every day, and compels Republicans with national ambitions to follow along or be reviled as heretics. President Obama and fellow Democrats could then continually point out the extremism of Romney and of Romney's fellow Republicans, including candidates like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock who won primaries with the support of the Murdoch-nurtured tea party.

After Hurricane Sandy, Governor Christie and President Obama were displaying respect across party lines, which is what voters say they want; Mitt Romney was talking the talk, yammering on about how he used to be bipartisan in Massachusetts, but he was doing it after spending years rejecting his past and denouncing Democrats (and Democratic ideas) every chance he could. For all but the last month of his campaign, Romney slavishly imitated Fox News -- talking about evil Obama apology tours and saintly "job producers," shaking his fist at immigrants and people on public assistance and Planned Parenthood, hanging out with Donald Trump.

There's a case to be made, then, that Murdoch cost Romney a hell of a lot more votes than Christie did. But it doesn't matter, because Rupert Murdoch is still the GOP Godfather. If Chris Christie ever wants to run for national office, respect must be shown.

NO, THE ROT GOES MUCH DEEPER

At BuzzFeed, McKay Coppins advances the theory that scruffy upstarts in the wingnuttosphere cost Republicans the election:

The new online right came roaring out of 2008 convinced that the only reason Obama won was because John McCain's weak-stomached campaign -- cowed by the aura of the first black presidential nominee -- had failed to document his ties to the radical left. Their mission would be to "vet" the president as McCain hadn't, and convince the American people to reject him.

Now the loose coalition of scrappy bloggers, advocacy journalists, and unrepentant trolls who spent four years writing about Jeremiah Wright and Saul Alinsky are coming to terms with reality: The polls weren't skewed, and their narrative didn't stick....

"I think the right media may have erred," Dan Riehl, a contributor to Breitbart News and longtime proprietor of Riehl World News, told BuzzFeed a week after the election. "I think we let Obama get into our heads and we wound up campaigning against him, rather than for the things we believe in."

... In hindsight, Riehl questioned the wisdom of devoting so much energy to combing through the president's early life for signs of radicalism — a process that yielded few true exposes, but rather a handful of scraps that bloggers tried to spin into scandals.

In this story, the Breitbartniks get blamed. The Daily Caller gets blamed. RedState gets blamed. Poll unskewer Dean Chambers gets blamed.

Know who doesn't get blamed? Fox. "Scrappy bloggers, advocacy journalists, and unrepentant trolls" of "the new online right" deserve their share of the blame, but something's at the other end of the puke funnel, channeling all their idiocy, and that something is, inevitably, old, gray, mainstream Fox News.

Who gave oxygen to the ridiculous bits of Breitbartnik "vetting" McKay Coppins cites as a distration? Fox. Who doubled down on the "unskewed polls" movement by trotting out supposedly respectable pollsters and pundits predicting a Romney landslide? Fox. Who, many years ago, established the notion that 24/7 demonization of Democrats and liberals was a formula for spectacular media success, never mind how much it polarizes America? Fox. Who's spent four years retransmitting "scrappy blogger" stories about Jeremiah Wright and Saul Alinsky -- and about alleged voter fraud and presidential bowing and the "Ground Zero mosque" and all the rest? Fox. Who relentlessly promoted nutjobs like Herman Cain and Donald Trump as the GOP nomination fight was just getting under way, thus sending a signal to Mitt Romney and all other not-completely-crazy contenders and wannabes that they'd need to be on the crazy train or under it? Fox.

Hey, righties, go ahead and believe the theory that upstarts caused all your problems. It's fine with me if you never get to the root cause.

YOU REALIZE MARCO RUBIO DIDN'T DISQUALIFY HIMSELF FOR THE PRESIDENCY, DON'T YOU?

The entire left side of the blogosphere had a good, hearty chuckle yesterday at the answer given to a GQ interviewer's question by Great Republican Hope Marco Rubio:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

RUBIO: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

Har har har! The Republicans just lost an election by relying exclusively on their old white Bible Belt voter base, and now here's the guy they think will save them four years from now, and he demonstrates that he's an ignorant throwback! Har har har!

Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Belief in young-earth creationism is not the same as rejection of Planned Parenthood or advocacy of self-deportation. According to a Gallup poll from June of this year, belief in creationism is actually going up (click to enlarge):





Yes, GOP voters lead the way -- the belief that God created human beings in their present form within the past 10,000 years is held by a majority (58%) of Republicans -- but the belief is shared by 41% of Democrats and 39% of independents.

You'll say, "Oh, but that's Gallup." Well, a 2007 Newsweek poll found that 48% of Americans were young-earth creationists. It was a majority in CBS polls in 2004, 2005, and 2006. A 2006 Pew poll found that 58% of Americans "generally favor or oppose teaching creationism along with evolution in public schools." (All results from Polling Report.)

And, well, we had a president who talked the way Rubio does: George W. Bush. Here's Bush in November 1999, as the 2000 campaign was getting under way:

I'd make it a goal to make sure that local folks got to make the decision as to whether or not they said creationism has been a part of our history and whether or not people ought to be exposed to different theories as to how the world was formed.

In 2005, he expressed support for teaching intelligent design. There was this, however, in 2008:

Asked about creation and evolution, Bush said: "I think you can have both. I think evolution can -- you're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president. But it's, I think that God created the earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution."

In tone, he sounds almost exactly like Rubio. His message is somewhat different -- but Rubio could probably just switch to "Oh, yeah, I believe in both" at any time, in just this way, and get away with it. America is making progress, but not in this way.

HEY, RIGHT-WING MATTHEW LEE FANS: I HAVE A VIDEO OF LEE I BET YOU WON'T LIKE NEARLY AS MUCH

The lead item at Fox Nation right now appears under the screaming headline "VIDEO: AP REPORTER LIQUIDATES OBAMA OFFICIAL." The video in question shows AP reporter Matthew Lee hectoring State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland because she won't condemn Turkey (a U.S. ally) for referring to attacks on Gaza by Israel as terrorism.

LEE: You're being silent while people are dying left and right.

NULAND: Matt, we are being far from silent. The President has...

LEE: You're not telling us anything about... when the Turks come out, when the leaders of Turkey come out and say that Israel is engaged in acts of terrorism and you refuse to say that you don't agree with that or maybe you do agree with that, that’s being silent.

NULAND: Matt, we have made a decision that we need to engage in our diplomatic work diplomatically; we have been very clear on where we stand on this. Which is that we don't practice diplomacy from the podium.

The exchange goes on for some time. I think Nuland is right to want to handle such things through diplomatic channels, but, of course, Israel-can-do-no-wrong right-wingers disagree. For his efforts, Matthew Lee is getting much right-wing love. ("White House gets BITCH SLAPPED," tweets one right-winger; "I totally want to make out with Matt Lee right now," adds another.)

Um, maybe you folks need to watch another Matthew Lee video, from 2010, in which he badger State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley several times over the fate of Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a Palestinian practitioner of nonviolent protest who'd been sentenced to a year in prison by the Israelis for protesting the separation wall. He ultimately spent 16 months in prison.

MATTHEW LEE, AP: ... Did you ever get an answer to my question from last week about this Palestinian peace activist being jailed?
P.J. CROWLEY, STATE DEPARTMENT: I haven't yet got a satisfactory answer. We're still working that with the post.
LEE: When you say you haven't gotten a satisfactory answer, do you mean -- what does that mean? That means that you have gotten an answer and then rejected it as not being sufficiently informative?
CROWLEY: I'm still seeking --
LEE: Or was too informative, and that's why you're rejecting it?

So, righties: Is Matthew Lee still your boy? Bet you don't like that one nearly as much, do you? It appears he asks tough, needling questions on a regular basis, but without your agenda.

THE BUSINESS PRESS TURNS TO ANOTHER ZELIG

Last summer I wrote a series of posts about Joe Olivo, a business owner from New Jersey who shows up in an unusually large number of news stories, usually denouncing health care reform, proposals to increase the minimum wage, or something else he perceives as a threat to his printing company. Olivo, as it turns out, is affiliated with the National Federation of Independent Business, and that seems to be the reason he shows up in the press as often as he does.

Well, today the business section of The New York Times has a story titled "Investors Rush to Beat Threat of Higher Taxes." The last person quoted in the story is a gentleman named Dyke Messinger, who worries about the potential for tax increases (or even a failure to avoid the "fiscal cliff") in the coming months:

Some business owners say they are holding off on hiring plans because they expect tax rates to rise. Dyke Messinger, chief executive of Power Curbers in Salisbury, N.C., said he would like to fill four slots at his construction equipment company but would only hire three people because he anticipated that his tax bill would rise by $100,000.

"It's not a huge amount of money," Mr. Messinger said. "But it's enough money that you don't want to make a misstep."

It turns out that Mr. Messinger has a lot to say about a lot of newsworthy subjects. Here he is in 2005 explaining how the cheap dollar helps his company get overseas business. Here he is in 2007 testifying before the House about government regulations. Here he is in 2008 heading off to the Bush White House to tell President Bush that America needs new energy policies to reduce the price of gas. (His solution: more offshore drilling and nuclear! Also, conservation.) Here he is in 2010 again explaining how the cheap dollar helps his copmpany get overseas business. Here he is in November 2010 publishing an op-ed in The Washington Times called "Tax Hikes Aimed at the Rich Hit Everyone." Here he is discussing business conditions after a meeting with President Obama in 2011.

Messinger isn't as hard-line as Joe Olivo. In this 2010 NPR story, he actually acknowledges that stimulus spending is helping his business. In this 2012 story, he's not as willing to toe the GOP's "You didn't build that" line as he could be:

By "you didn’t build that," Obama meant infrastructure, not the actual businesses themselves, his campaign said.

"It's almost much ado about nothing," said Dyke Messinger, president of PowerCurbers in Salisbury. "They're both right."

PowerCurbers could not exist without infrastructure provided by the government, Messinger said. Yet, the government had nothing to do with constructing the business itself, he said.

But why this guy? Why are we constantly hearing what he has to say? Well, he's an executive committee member of the National Association of Manufacturers. He's been a NAM board member since 2003.

But that affiliation is rarely mentioned in news stories that quote him. He's generally ID'd as just a humble small businessman.

Do reporters not know about his ties to a powerful lobbying group when they quote him again and again? Or do they just not care?

TWO WAYS YOU KNOW YOUR THINK PIECE HAS GONE OFF THE RAILS

Over at The Washington Post, Chris Cillizza gives us a piece titled "Future for Republicans Is Not So Bad." How reassuring is he about this? Well, he offers four paragraphs' worth of hope to the GOP-- and this is how he ends paragraph #1:

... in 2016, we are likely to see Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) -- all of whom have significantly more star power than Romney -- make the race.

Here's the thing: If you use "star power" and "Bobby Jindal" in the same sentence, you've made a horrible mistake. I don't really have to explain this to people who aren't professional journalists, do I?

(I'd say the same thing about Paul Ryan, except that the GOP base still loves him, as does the Beltway press, apparently. That didn't lead Ryan's ticket to victory in his own state, or even his hometown, but, nationwide, his base still digs him. AAs for Christie, I think his star is rising -- the Saturday Night Live cameo was not bad -- but he's getting himself to the point where the one race he couldn't possibly win is a Republican primary.)

Cillizza's second sign of hope is this:

There are a historic number of GOP governors. Next year, 30 states will be run by Republicans -- the highest number for either party in more than a decade.

To which he adds:

(Keep an eye on Indiana's Mike Pence, who has designs on a national candidacy down the line.)

Mike Pence? Seriously? Cillizza thinks he's going to lead the GOP out of the wilderness?

Here's the fourth result I get when I Google Mike Pence, after his House site, his gubernatorial campaign site, and his Wikipedia page:

Mike Pence's war on Planned Parenthood

Abortion-rights advocates and abortion-rights opponents don't see eye to eye on much, but they do agree on this: Nobody hates Planned Parenthood quite as much as Mike Pence.

The Indiana Republican is on a one-man crusade to deny all federal funding to the group -- not just the money it gets for reproductive health and family planning services, but every penny it gets for anything.

"If Planned Parenthood wants to be involved in providing counseling services and HIV testing, they ought not be in the business of providing abortions," Pence told POLITICO in an interview Tuesday. "As long as they aspire to do that, I'll be after them." ...

Yeah, that kind of talk ought to broaden the base, right?

Look, Cillizza is right that in the past twenty tears Republicans haven't suffered the kinds of Electoral College blowouts that Democrats suffered in 1972, 1984, and 1988 -- they still have an electoral lock on a lot of states. He's right that pendulums swing. He's right that some Republican rising stars might have appeal to both the base and swing voters. (And he doesn't mention the possible weakness of the Democratic field in 2016 if Hillary Clinton doesn't run.)

But the next GOP standard-bearer has to appeal to people outside the White House Correspondents' Association. The next GOP standard-bearer has to remain appealing to swing voters after running the loony gauntlet of the '16 primaries. The GOP has some reason to hope that an electable candidate can emerge -- but the rest of us have ample reason to hope that that will still be impossible.

EXCUSE ME, WINGNUTS, I SPEAK JIVE

The Washington Post doesn't seem confused by Joe Biden's uses of a (decades-old) slang word over the weekend -- clearly he was using it in reference to himself:

Seeking to reassure victims of Hurricane Sandy following a tour of the damaged boardwalk in Seaside Heights, N.J., Vice President Joe Biden told residents Sunday that he spent a lot of time on the New Jersey shore while growing up and that they’ve got a "homeboy" in the White House who "gets it."

The New York Times doesn't seem confused, either:

Recalling his roots as a Northeasterner "literally raised on the shore," Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. pledged unswerving federal support on Sunday for the areas ravaged by Hurricane Sandy....

He promised, referring to himself, that the state had a "homeboy" in the White House.

But the use of this strange Negro lingo by our low-melanin vice president seems to have baffled The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper:

Biden Calls Obama 'Homeboy'

Visiting victims of Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey today, Vice President Joe Biden told them not to worry, saying, "you’ve got a homeboy in the deal who gets it." Biden was referring to President Barack Obama.

Halper later added:

UPDATE: Some suggest Biden here is referring to himself as a "homeboy," not President Obama.

Yes -- "some suggest" that! But this hep jungle talk is so confusing! To Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin's place, too!

Some think the "homeboy" Biden was referring to was Barack Obama, and others believe he was talking about himself. Either way, as usual, it was a cry for psychological help....

Yes, how true! Why, apart from mental illness, would a member of the white race resort to the argot of our sable-hued inferiors? Start down this road, and soon you'll be insisting that intermarriage is acceptable!

Obama wasn't with Biden on the Jersey Shore, so I'm not sure what Drudge's point is with this juxtaposition:





I guess it means: Biden -- still subordinate to a black guy.

DOUTHAT: DEMS AREN'T MOOCHERS WHO WANT FREE STUFF! THEY'RE DESPERATE LOSERS WHO NEED FREE STUFF!

Mitt Romney thinks Obama voters are moochers who just want free gifts, but Ross Douthat isn't that sort of conservative -- he's appalled at this way of thinking:

This is a crisis that the Republican Party often badly misunderstands, casting Democratic-leaning voters as lazy moochers or spoiled children seeking "gifts" (as a certain former Republican presidential nominee would have it) rather than recognizing the reality....

"The reality"? And what is "the reality," according to Douthat? It's that Democratic voters don't want free stuff -- they're miserable, poorly socialized, dependent people who desperately need free stuff!

Consider the Hispanic vote. Are Democrats winning Hispanics because they put forward a more welcoming face than Republicans do...? Yes, up to a point. But they're also winning recent immigrants because those immigrants often aren't assimilating successfully -- or worse, are assimilating downward, thanks to rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and high dropout rates. The Democratic edge among Hispanics depends heavily on these darker trends: the weaker that families and communities are, the more necessary government support inevitably seems.

Likewise with the growing number of unmarried Americans, especially unmarried women. Yes, social issues like abortion help explain why these voters lean Democratic. But the more important explanation is that single life is generally more insecure and chaotic than married life, and single life with children -- which is now commonplace for women under 30 -- is almost impossible to navigate without the support the welfare state provides.

Or sometimes they're just poor and miserable:

Or consider the secular vote, which has been growing swiftly and tilts heavily toward Democrats. The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the "spiritual but not religious" seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general.

Douthat understands these voters. He feels their pain. He acknowledges that they have real needs.

But do you know what they really need? No, not free stuff:

It's not a coincidence that the economic era that many liberals pine for -- the great, egalitarian post-World War II boom -- was an era that social conservatives remember fondly as well: a time of leaping church attendance, rising marriage rates and birthrates, and widespread civic renewal and engagement.

Obama voters need to be freed from "the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity," so we can return to the post-World War II era! Why, after all, was America so prosperous after World War II? It couldn't possibly have been the massive infrastructure spending, or the GI Bill, or the jobs created by the military buildup, or the strong union movement, or the progressive tax rates, or the pent-up consumer demand after near two decades of depression and war, or the fact that our industrial capacity, unlike that of the Europeans, was intact.

No, it must have been the churchgoing and the heterosexual marriage.

(And the bowling leagues. I think that's what Douthat means by "widespread civic renewal and engagement.")

They're what made America rich! So, Obama voters, in addition to joining a bowling league, go to church and stop having out-of-wedlock, non-procreative sex! That's said not out of contempt, but out of love!

Yeah, this is a much more welcoming message for the GOP, isn't it?

YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN PETARD, RIGHT-WINGERS

On the subject of Benghazi, Jennifer Rubin has really gone a bit manic:

This is a full-blown scandal.... The scandal has now enveloped the Oval Office and will define his second term, if not resolved satisfactorily.

She really believes that. Budget battles, the full implementation of Obamacare, other ongoing and unfolding conflicts in the Middle East, the avoidance of a second recession, the struggles of Europe, the rise of China -- none of that is going to define Obama's second term. Rubin actually believes that a couple of weeks' worth of less-than-accurate messaging, in response to four U.S. deaths -- after thousands of Americans have died overseas for the lies of the Bush administration -- is going to define this Obama term. She's nuts.

And here's the irony: she and her ideological soul mates are trying (vainly) to turn this into a scandal by doing the exact opposite of what their side did throughout the Bush years.

Do you remember? Back then, American targets were attacked by Al Qaeda -- and the Bush administration responded, with the unwavering support of wingers like Rubin, by going after Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11 and wasn't working with Al Qaeda.

At that time, right-wing propagandists struggled to make sure that Americans didn't distinguish between one set of Muslim enemies and another. Saddam? Osama? What's the difference? Throughout his presidency, George W. Bush gave one speech after another in which all the Muslims who'd ever looked at America crosswise were described with one singular noun: "the enemy."

As a result, Americans who weren't well versed in the group distinctions in the Muslim world were kept ignorant. They were all alike! They all hate us!

And now we've had an attack in Benghazi that was first characterized as the work of religious zealots angry at a video they thought was blasphemous, but that was actually the work of Al Qaeda-sympathizing terrorists -- and the right wants the American public to be upset at the notion that the administration initially advanced the former story when the latter was true. Righties, you helped make the American people incapable of distinguishing between one group of Muslim opponents and another. Now you want outrage based on the kinds of categorical distinctions you didn't want Americans to be able to make a decade ago?

Well, that's too bad. You relied on ignorance, and you can't expect to reverse it when it suits you.

OBAMA HIT THE GOP (AND IT FELT LIKE A KISS)

The guy Texans just elected to the Senate has a rather peculiar take on recent events, according to Politico's Kevin Robillard:

Sen.-elect Ted Cruz believes Mitt Romney got a little too close to Barack Obama in the third presidential debate.

"I'm pretty certain Mitt Romney actually French-kissed Barack Obama," Cruz said in a speech at the Federalist Society's annual conference Friday.

Cruz said this about the first debate:

"It was the one time we actually contested ideas, presented two viewpoints and directions for the country," he said. "And then inevitably, there are these mandarins of politics, who give the voice: 'Don't show any contrasts. Don't rock the boat.' So by the third debate, I’m pretty certain Mitt Romney actually French-kissed Barack Obama...."

Politico's Robillard notes wryly:

The Texas Republican speech amounted to something of an alternative history of the 2012 election....

Er, yeah -- I don't know what first debate Cruz was watching, but the rest of us saw a fake Moderate Mitt who barely disagreed with Obama on anything, except for disagreeing with Obama's characterization of how much the two of them disagreed.

But I'm not surprised that a right-winger would see things this way -- to Cruz, Romney presented a sharp contrast with Obama in the first debate because Romney won. Romney was the victor, so Cruz thinks he mounted a strong defense of conservative principles. That's because, to conservatives, the really important principle is: we win, you lose.

As I wrote just after the first debate:

Generally speaking, the GOP base simply won't allow [Romney] to deviate from Conservatively Correct Thinking.

But it was OK for him to do so last night because he was beating up Obama. For wingers, absolute fealty to their principles is paramount -- except that being nasty to a liberal or Democrat trumps that. In fact, being nasty to a liberal or Democrat trumps everything for the right....

Last night, [Romney] gave up on [conservative purity]. And the wingers don't care, because he won the fight.

But if he tries it next time and loses, then they'll be upset at what he's saying.

Ergo, "French kiss."

Oh, and what is it with right-wingers and gay sex? Cruz says with disgust that Romney French-kissed Obama. Rush Limbaugh regularly complains that every moment of compromise amounts to an order to "bend over, grab your ankles." They're obsessed with this. It's embarrassing.

TWINKS NOT DEAD!

First of all, as The Atlantic's Jordan Weissman notes, Twinkies aren't dead, even though Hostess is bankrupt:

First: Twinkie, Wonder, and all the other high-calorie marvels of culinary science Hostess sells aren't going to disappear from shelves for good. One of its competitors will likely swoop in, buy them up, and restart production. So you can stop bidding on $100 boxes of Sno Balls on eBay.

Beyond that, I urge you to read his post, or a long Fortune story he cites from this past July -- you'll realize that Hostess went under not just because of the unions (as the entire right-wing blogosphere believes), but also because of bad management:

Suffice to say, Hostess didn't do much growing. It continued to lose hundreds of millions of dollars making and selling starchy snacks that much of the public had lost its taste for, while failing to launch any great new products.

I'd add this:

... Adam Hanft, a brand strategist and CEO of Hanft Projects, says ... "There's a lot that Twinkies has going for it that has never been exploited."

If the company is selling off its brands to the highest bidder, says Hanft, someone savvy could could easily swoop in and take advantage of Twinkies' brand recognition and make it profitable. "I think that there is something cool and retro about the brand that can be tapped into, I think it can be a hipper brand for millennials because it is so iconic, and frankly, it is so unhealthy."

Basically, skinny jeans wearing, bacon and pork belly eating, hipster millennials obsessed with mid-century modern post-war cool - - well, they might be into Twinkies, too.

Plausible? I think so. I think you could easily make these damn things so-unhip-they're-hip, or do "ironic" or "artisanal" or healthier or massively less healthy variants on the classic products to attract the hipoisie's attention. C'mon, marketing geniuses -- think! That never happened.

FREEDOM'S JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE END OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT

In today's column, David Brooks says a few reasonable things about the societal changes that have lowered the percentage of "traditional" households in America (heterosexual marriage, kids, regular church attendance) -- although he says them in his own peculiar way:

The surest way people bind themselves is through the family.... Therefore, our laws and attitudes should be biased toward family formation and fertility, including child tax credits, generous family leave policies and the like.

But the two-parent family is obviously not the only way people bind themselves. We are inevitably entering a world in which more people search for different ways to attach. Before jumping to the conclusion that the world is going to hell, it's probably a good idea to investigate these emerging commitment devices.

"Emerging commitment devices"? Sounds like a Mitt Romney euphemism for battery-operated gizmos he and Ann keep under the bed.

Seriously, though, I'm glad Brooks seems more or less accepting of parenthood in "non-traditional" households. And I'm glad he favors generous family leave policies.

But he's still not comfortable with people who don't settle down, marry, pick a parish, and breed, breed, breed:

At some point over the past generation, people around the world entered what you might call the age of possibility. They became intolerant of any arrangement that might close off their personal options....

Why is this happening? ... People are less religious. People in many parts of the world are more pessimistic and feeling greater economic stress. Global capitalism also seems to be playing a role, especially, it seems, in Asia.

Many people are committed to their professional development and fear that if they don't put in many hours at work they will fall behind or close off lifestyle options....

The problem is not necessarily a changing family structure. It's people who go through adulthood perpetually trying to keep their options open.

I've quoted passages from throughout the column, and you can see what truly horrifies Brooks: the fact that people might not wed or breed because they like having -- gasp! -- options. "Personal options"! "Lifestyle options"! How dare they pursue these! It's not behavior suitable for an adult!

Except that the party Brooks supports, the GOP, keeps telling us that freedom is the most important thing of all, and that wanting to be successful and rich is the highest human calling -- what is that other than the pursuit of "lifestyle options"? When the Alex P. Keatonism of the Reagan/post-Reagan era -- which still hasn't ended -- leads politicians of both parties to say that society is functioning well when it creates more and more millionaires, then people pursuing materialistic "lifestyle options" are just being good, upstanding citizens, right?

Brooks does invoke "global capitalism" as a reason people might sacrifice marriage and family and immerse themselves in work. He implies that this is a Foxcomm thing, seen more in Asia than in America. Well, conditions are much harsher in Asia, but capitalism drives people to work long, lonely hours here, too. I know a lot of people, most of them childless, who burn the midnight oil for less-than-exorbitant pay in Manhattan offices, just because tight, inflexible deadlines and inadequate staffing are part of the corporate culture here in America. That's how you keep your job. There aren't many other options.

Brooks has a pretty soft life -- as far as I know, he's never had that sort of grind-it-out dead-end desk job. So he has no idea that the "options" people cling to as they work hard and breed less can be quite limited.

Thanksgiving Test Post

Steve asked me to drop by over Thanksgiving and I thought I'd give the system a test drive having learned from this incredible article the importance of running a crash test before a big event.  Like a lot of you I spent the run up to this election canvassing (in my case for Elizabeth Warren) and then poll watching on the day.  Now that the election is over I only wish I had done more--gone out for one of those OFA internships, fought my way into joining the sociological data analysis they were doing, worked harder on the social media end of things.  Everyone wants to be part of a winning team but the professionalism and the thoughtful way this campaign was run seems to me to tell a larger and more important story about the importance of joining something larger than ourselves and of voting as the supreme act of civic engagement--not casting a vote, once every four years, but choosing to be a  political actor every day.

Over at dailyKos one of the most inspirational and thought provoking diaries I've ever read describes the linkage between ground game, community health, and voting as a social act. In "Vaccinating Old People For Democracy" the writer describes a multi stage process of bringing non voting, rural, Hispanic and Native American citizens out of their social isolation and into the political arena by using vaccination programs, community fairs, exercise programs, canning lessons and dozens of other innovative strategies.  But it all boils down to this: building community builds voters.  Becoming a voter is a byproduct of becoming engaged as a citizen with the issues of the day and of your own community.

It remains to be seen what happens to OFA and its incredible resources after this election cycle. But the diary I've linked to above indicates another way of organizing, from the ground up, that will, in the long run, be more important than any "day of" poll watching and GOTV.  We've seen a lot of handwringing about the gerrymandering of Republican districts and how difficult that will make retaking the house but I don't believe that has to be a foregone conclusion.  On the contrary I think there is an obvious Trojan horse hiding inside many gerrymandered districts--if the Republican party drew those district lines with the same set of beliefs that they ran the Romney campaign the Trojan horse is the existence of micro communities of potential democratic voters who were thought to be "unlikely" voters by the Republican party: elderly Hispanic, Native American, young women, other minorities, college students, etc..etc...etc...

Locating these voters, reaching people now, in advance of the 2014 election, and engaging them as citizen actors in everything from local debates about garbage collection to local parks issues is going to be what flips solidly red counties to blue and could lead to the 2014 elections being a banner year for the Democratic Party with respect to the house.  If we believe our domestic policies are better for the country and the voter--and I do--then this is the direction we need to go.

GEORGE W. BUSH, VICTIM OF SEXISM?

Fox News Democrat Kirsten Powers is disgusted:

President Obama's silly, sexist defense of Susan Rice

Don't pick on the little lady.

Wednesday, President Obama bizarrely cast the U.N. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, as some delicate flower the boys should stop picking on....

"If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me," Obama intoned....

Obviously caught up in his own silly yarn about meanie Senators and helpless U.N. Ambassadors, the President complained, "When they go after the U.N. ambassador apparently because they think she's an easy target, then they've got a problem with me."

Imagine George Bush saying that people criticized John Bolton because he was an "easy target." He wouldn't.

Well, maybe not. (Emphasis added.) But you know who would say something like that?

Laura Bush: George W. is 'an easy target'

Former first lady Laura Bush said she understands her husband "makes an easy target" for critics and chalked it up to the business of politics.

"We know what politics is like," Bush told ABC News in an interview.... "We know that, you know, people love to blame somebody else. That's just a fact of life in politics. ... I think George makes an easy target."

That was from last summer.

Hey, Kirsten -- is Laura's defense of her husband sexist? Would you say she thinks W. is "some delicate flower"?

AND THIS MAKES MITT DIFFERENT FROM OTHER WOULD-BE GOP PARTY LEADERS HOW EXACTLY?

Josh Marshall writes about Mitt Romney's latest diatribe on the subject of those awful, shiftless, gift-craving Democrats, which is causing a pained reaction among other Republicans:

It's not too much to say that Romney is now uniting the country across party lines that he's someone who should leave as soon as possible and not say anything publicly again. Actually scratch that. Democrats are starting to think that having Romney around and continuing to dump on a broad range of Americans might be pretty awesome.

More seriously, it goes without saying that Romney was never more than a tolerated transplant among professional conservatives. His bonafides were doubted. We know all this. So it's ironic that Republicans are uniting in calls to get off the national stage once and for all precisely because he's continuing to make the kind of makers-and-takers type statements you might hear on a particularly feral and untethered rightwing blog.

But Romney doesn't just sound like an angry right-wing blogger -- he sounds like most of the other people who wanted the nomination he won, or who were talked about as contenders for that nomination. If Republican leaders are embarrassed by Romney now, who do they think would have been more diplomatic?

Among the people who mounted serious challenges to Romney, would Newt Gingrich have been better -- the guy who regularly called Barack Obama a "food stamp president" and who wanted poor kids to work as school janitors because it would give them what, in his view, they otherwise lack, a work ethic? Would Rick Santorum have been better? Even if you don't think he was referring to black people when he said, "I don't want to make blah people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money," there was also this in his Republican convention speech (which, as I recall, no GOP leader complained about):

Under President Obama, the dream of freedom and opportunity has become a nightmare of dependency with almost half of America receiving some government benefit....

President Obama spent four years and borrowed five trillion dollars, trying to convince you that he could make things better for you ---- to put your trust in him and the government to take care of every problem....

The fact is that marriage is disappearing in places where government dependency is highest....

Requiring work as a condition for receiving welfare succeeded....

[But] this summer [President Obama] showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waiving the work requirement for welfare.

So maybe someone who didn't run would have had a more effective message. But who? Haley Barbour, who said about Medicaid, "We have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can't afford their co-payment"? Mitch Daniels, who wrote this in his book, Keeping the Republic?

A growing near-majority of citizens is now dependent on government for a substantial percentage of their livelihood. Increasingly, the burdens of a growing public sector are paid for by a dwindling percentage of the population. It is now reaching the point where society's ability to generate new wealth is being threatened and the non-payers have nothing to lose by demanding still more from their richer neighbors.

Even Bobby Jindal, who's loudly denounced Romney, uses the same sort of language. His anti-Obamacare post at RedState last July 3 began,

As we celebrate our nation's birthday this week, it is important to remember and teach our children the Founding Fathers were declaring our independence, not creating a culture of dependence.

And in his book Leadership and Crisis, Jindal wrote:

... many in Washington still fell the Land of the Free should become the Land of the Free Lunch.

Don't get me wrong. I believe in some safety nets. But safety nets can, and often do, create "moral hazards" when they encourage irresponsible behavior. It took the federal government decades to figure out that if welfare subsidizes out-of-wedlock births, you get more out-of-wedlock births!

Romney was blunter, perhaps, but he said what the rest of them believe -- what pretty much all of them believe. Give any one of them a two-year presidential campaign and they'd all have been talking like him sooner or later.

THE RIGHT'S BENGHAZI OBSESSION: NOT JUST "SCANDAL ENVY"

I think Paul Waldman has a point about why the right is relentlessly focused on the Benghazi killings, but I don't think this is the whole story:

So what's going on here? I can sum it up in two words: scandal envy. Republicans are indescribably frustrated by the fact that Barack Obama, whom they regard as both illegitimate and corrupt, went through an entire term without a major scandal. They tried with "Fast and Furious," but that turned out to be small potatoes. They tried with Solyndra, but that didn't produce the criminality they hoped for either. Obama even managed to dole out three-quarters of a trillion dollars in stimulus money without any graft or double-dealing to be found. Nixon had Watergate, Reagan had Iran-Contra, Clinton had Lewinsky, and Barack Obama has gotten off scott-free. This is making them absolutely livid, and they're going to keep trying to gin up a scandal, even if there's no there there. Benghazi may not be an actual scandal, but it's all they have handy.

I'd say that, in addition, right-wingers are desperate for the facts to fit their theories about Obama. They think Obama hates America and wants America's enemies to win; they think he, as a dirty lefty, wants the agents of our foreign policy, both civilian and military, to come to a bad end.

So, with regard to Benghazi, they think he did something sinister because doing something sinister to harm our military and diplomatic personnel is what the Obama of their caricature would inevitably have done by now. They've been waiting for him to undermine America -- they think it's impossible that he could fail to undermine America, given the opportunity -- so this must be what they've been waiting for.

Sure, they think they have evidence of his evildoing, but his true nature (even though it's all in their heads) is really all the evidence they need: he hates America, so of course something evil is afoot.

STANDING ATHWART HISTORY, YELLING "OOGABOOGA!"

I understand Conor Friedersdorf's point, but I think there's a lot he's overlooking:

What Has Movement Conservatism Accomplished in the Last 15 Years?

... have we seen any evidence of success since 1997 or so? George W. Bush created a new bureaucracy, expanded the federal role in education, approved a massive new entitlement, exploded the deficit, abandoned any pretense of a "humble foreign policy" that eschewed nation building, and left office having approved a massive government bailout of the financial sector.... the country has gotten more socially liberal. Gays can serve openly in the military and marry.

A majority now supports legalizing marijuana.

Circa 1997, if you'd told the average conservative that all those things would happen in the next 15 years, would they have declared the conservative movement finished? I suspect as much.

...what has Fox News accomplished? What has the Tea Party accomplished? What has any movement institution accomplished in the last 15 years? Enough that the movement isn't a failure? ...

What movement conservatism has accomplished is the imposition of severe limits on how far U.S. policy can move to the left on most issues, even when support for a leftward shift is overwhelming, and even when the liberal (or moderate) policies clearly work.

Think back: In Bill Clinton's first two years as president, he and a Democratic Congress raised taxes on the rich and passed an assault weapons ban. Movement conservatism threw a hissyfit, Democrats lost both houses of Congress, and it's been impossible to pass gun-control laws or raise tax rates ever since. President Obama promises now to raise taxes on the rich, but we still don't know if he can pull it off. That's a victory for movement conservatism (as is his openness to a "grand bargain" and to massive spending cuts).

Financial deregulation late in Clinton's term was evidence that he'd internalized the movement-conservative view of financial regulation. The failure of the Obama administration to jail any fat cat in the wake of the financial meltdown is further evidence of movement conservatism's success in defining how we approach corporate malfeasance.

Obama embraces a slightly modified version of the right-wing approach to the "war on terror -- that's a movement-conservative victory. Efforts to deal with climate change are all but abandoned (and are demonized) -- that's a movement-conservative victory. The union movement continues to lose ground, as do abortion rights at the state level -- those are movement-conservative victories. Campaign financing is more corrupt than ever -- that's a movement-conservative victory. It's getting harder and harder for students and poor people to vote because of voter ID laws, which the public supports -- that's a movement-conservative victory.

How do movement conservatives win these victories? By demonizing Democrats and liberals at every opportunity. Clinton is a murdering, raping, coke-snorting drug-trafficker. Obama is a race-war-leading Muslim Marxist. Nancy Pelosi is a witch; Ted Kennedy was a murderer; Al Gore is a serial liar; John Kerry won war medals via fraud. They all hate Jews and Christians and people who listen to country music; they all want to enslave America.

How much progress could we have made if movement conservatives hadn't spent the last generation standing athwart history, yelling "Oogabooga -- liberals must be destroyed"?

WINGNUTS: CHRIS MATTHEWS TOTALLY MADE UP THE IDEA THAT THE WORD "URBAN" CAN MEAN "NON-WHITE"

Via Fox Nation, I see that NewsBusters is claiming that Chris Matthews invented the notion that the word "urban" is a euphemism for "black" or "non-white" in certain contexts:

The list of words MSNBC's Chris Matthews believes are racist if uttered by a conservative got longer on Wednesday.

You can now add "urban" which offended Matthews when Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said it during an interview Monday....

"There's more of this dog whistle crap going on," said Matthews... "Here's Paul Ryan expressing his surprise at the pro-Obama turnout in an interview Monday."

In the video clip, Ryan said, "I think the surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout in urban areas which definitely gave President Obama the big margin to win this race."

... "Why did he have to go step on his own headline 'They won fair and square' by saying, 'Oh it was the black vote?'" Matthews preposterously asked. "Basically, that's what he was saying."

Really? So if a conservative talks about urban, suburban, and ex-urban voters just like anyone else might, he or she is being racist?

Do only blacks live in cities in America? There are no whites in Manhattan, Boston, or Philadelphia?

Other learned winger language experts who think Matthews made this up all by himself include the folks at Weasel Zippers, Michelle Malkin, and a motley crew of right-leaners whose tweets are collected at Malkin's Twitchy.

I can't give you a definitive history of this usage, but I know it goes way back. An organization called the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes changed its name to the National Urban League in 1920; it's known by that name to this day.

In the pop music business, what had been known as soul or R&B began to be called "urban contemporary music" or "urban music" back in the 1980s, at least in the trade. If you don't believe me, ask that notorious liberal propaganda outfit Encyclopaedia Britannica.

(Although maybe I shouldn't be sarcastic -- after all, Britannica is based in Chicago! Obama's hometown!)

You can argue about whether what Ryan said was racist (this guy says it wasn't), but there's no doubt about Ryan's meaning. Or Matt Drudge's meaning when he incessantly uses the word "urban."

THE UN'S NEFARIOUS PLOT TO TURN REAL AMERICANS INTO OBAMA BLOC VOTERS

If President Obama really does nominate UN ambassador Susan Rice to be secretary of state, I wonder if her confirmation hearings will include any questions about the subject of this little confab:

President Obama is using a Cold War-era mind-control technique known as "Delphi" to coerce Americans into accepting his plan for a United Nations-run communist dictatorship in which suburbanites will be forcibly relocated to cities. That's according to a four-hour briefing delivered to Republican state senators at the Georgia state Capitol last month....

In the eyes of conservative activists, Agenda 21 is a nefarious plot that includes forcibly relocating non-urban-dwellers and prescribing mandatory contraception as a means of curbing population growth....

Forcible relocation to cities? Mandatory contraception? OMIGOD! THE UN WANTS TO TURN AMERICAN PATRIOTS INTO HISPANICS AND URBAN HIPSTERS AND SLUTTY SINGLE WOMEN ON FREE CONTRACEPTION! IT'S THE OBAMA COALITION!!!1!!1!

Oh, but I'm just mocking a bunch of state legislators from Georgia, right? It's not as if paranoia about Agenda 21 is a mainstream Republican idea....

The G.O.P. platform approved Tuesday in Florida ... takes a stand on an issue that has historically been out of the party’s mainstream: Agenda 21.

"We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty, and we oppose any form of U.N. Global Tax," the platform reads.

Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations resolution that encourages sustainable development globally. Although it is nonbinding and has no force of law in the United States, it has increasingly become a point of passionate concern to a circle of Republican activists who argue that the resolution is part of a United Nations plot to deny Americans their property rights.

In a New York Times article in February written with my colleague, Kate Zernike, we reported about activists aligned with the Tea Party disrupting local city and state land use planning meetings nationwide to denounce sustainable efforts to reduce energy use -- including bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances. The activists see such community projects as the first steps in a plan to limit individual rights....

(Agenda 21 wants to turn patriots into bicyclists! And supporters of smart meters on appliances! More forced assimilation into the Obama coalition!)

Oh, and speaking of the GOP mainstream, notice who else was heard from in Georgia:

The presentation also featured a special video cameo from conservative talking-head Dick Morris in which the former Clinton aide warns that Obama "wants to force everyone into the cities from whence our ancestors fled."

Morris's latest book, of course, is called Here Come the Black Helicopters!: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom

... Stealthily advancing, the globalists and socialists at the United Nations, and in the United States itself, are trying to dilute our national sovereignty, undermine our democratic values, and mandate massive transfers of our wealth and technology to third world countries. They want to create a "global governance" where binding and critical decisions are made by the UN and international commissions, instead of by our elected officials.

They want to make us citizens of the world, and it means the end of annoying democratic institutions. Economic prosperity will be punished. All countries will be equal, rich and poor, large and tiny, free and enslaved. The Lilliputians will rule the giants....

The detail that's amusing people most about the Georgia confab is this:

About 23 minutes into the briefing, [conservative activist Field] Searcy explained how President Obama, aided by liberal organizations like the Center for American Progress and business groups like local chambers of commerce, are secretly using mind-control techniques to push their plan for forcible relocation on the gullible public:

They do that by a process known as the Delphi technique. The Delphi technique was developed by the Rand Corporation during the Cold War as a mind-control technique. It's also known as "consensive process." But basically the goal of the Delphi technique is to lead a targeted group of people to a pre-determined outcome while keeping the illusion of being open to public input.

The Delphi technique? That must be a paranoid theory from far out on the conservative fringes, right?

Well, no -- when you Google "Delphi mind control," one of the top results is "Using the Delphi Technique to Achieve Consensus: How It Is Leading Us Away from Representative Government to an Illusion of Citizen Participation," a 1998 article on the Web site of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum:

... In group settings, the Delphi Technique is an unethical method of achieving consensus on controversial topics. It requires well-trained professionals, known as "facilitators" or "change agents," who deliberately escalate tension among group members, pitting one faction against another to make a preordained viewpoint appear "sensible," while making opposing views appear ridiculous.

In her book Educating for the New World Order, author and educator Beverly Eakman makes numerous references to the need of those in power to preserve the illusion that there is "community participation in decision-making processes, while in fact lay citizens are being squeezed out." ...

Yes, this came to us via Phyllis Schlafly. Recall Ann Coulter's immortal words:

There is no more pristine example of the left's "in"-crowd snobbery than their treatment of conservative author and activist Phyllis Schlafly....

There is certainly not the remotest possibility that the mainstream media will ever breathe a word of her extraordinary accomplishments....

Schlafly is a serious intellectual....

Publishing articles on "New World Order" mind control? Yeah, sounds pretty intellectual to me.