VOTING GETS RIGGED, JUST LIKE THE ECONOMY

Republicans in Virginia are moving forward with an effort to reapportion the state's Electoral College votes on a congressional-district-by-congressional-district basis, which, thanks to pro-GOP gerrymandering and the clustering of Democratic voter groups, would have given Mitt Romney a 9-4 Electoral College win in 2012, even though President Obama won the state's popular vote handily. Several other states with GOP governors and legislatures are considering similar moves to deal with the pesky Democrats-always-win-the-popular-vote problem in presidential elections.

Jamelle Bouie and Ta-Nehisi Coates see this as a disenfranchisement of black voters in the affected states -- which is an appropriate way of looking at it. Democrats win states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia because of the votes of non-whites; these schemes neutralize those non-white votes.

But I see something else at play. Right-wing billionaires are undoubtedly the people behind these schemes -- and remember what kind of economy our plutocrat overlords are running these days.

In America today, how do you get rich and stay rich? On Wall Street, you do it by creating exotic financial products that are incomprehensible except to the financial elites and the rocket scientists they employ. Across the business world, you do it by hiring armies of lobbyists, in Washington and fifty state capitols, so that the law, especially the tax code, rewards your kind lavishly, whether your business succeeds or fails on its own terms, and guarantees bailouts in response to the worst failures. And if, somehow, lobbyists have neglected to get a particular statute criminalizing your standard business practices removed from the books, you employ a large army of lawyers with enough firepower to ensure than overworked government lawyers and regulators can never bring you to justice.

In other words, unless you're Steve Jobs -- and he's not with us anymore -- you don't get rich in America by building a better mousetrap. You get rich by rigging the system.

The GOP and its financiers are just doing to electoral democracy what they've already done to the economy. Winning by gaming. Winning by bamboozlement. It's all they know.

IT'S KIND OF LIKE A SUPERGROUP OF STUPID

Tweeter, retweeter, and subject:





(Tweet here. Inspiration for the tweet here. UPDATE: And I gather Rand has walked his criticism back since then.)

THE BREITBART/O'KEEFE-IZATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS, PART MCMLXXVII

I haven't been able to watch the Benghazi hearings, but I've checked my Twitter feed, and the lefties who've been watching are 100% convinced that Hillary Clinton has been wiping the floor with the Republicans who are trying to take her down.

The righties in my feed have a very different perspective. They have what they want: a soundbite they can rip from context and use as a cudgel to beat the administration and Secretary Clinton with. I'm not sure if they really expect their efforts to color mainstream coverage of this story, but it's clear that that's what they're hoping. They have a new "you didn't build that," a new "spread the wealth around," and they're going to wring everything they can out of it.

Clinton erupted as Senator Ron Johnson tried to press her on why details about the nature of the attack weren't released sooner.

"With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans," she said. "Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, senator. Now, honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this. The fact is that people were trying, in real time, to get to the best information."

The point of this is: Look, bad guys killed our people. You're arguing about whether the nature of the attack was initially mischaracterized. I just want the bad guys found and brought to justice, no matter how the attack unfolded.

But, of course, the ripped-from-context quote is "What difference, at this point, does it make?" It's already being seized on by National Review and Fox News and The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard and Glenn Beck's Blaze and Michelle Malkin's Twitchy and the Free Beacon and, of course, Breitbart. There's already a popular hashtag, #whatdifferencedoesitmake.

Now, sometimes these things never attain any more than shibboleth status -- they're secret codewords right-wingers use whenever they talk about a particular Antichrist of theirs. This will definitely attain that status -- years from now, when Hillary publishes her memoirs or announces a run for president, folks on winger message boards will write "What difference does it make?" and not even bother to put the phrase in context, because all the like-minded readers will just know.

But sometimes these things do more damage. Sometimes they really do color how a story is covered outside the right-wing bubble. Will that happen this time? Will the wingers be able to turn this decontextualized soundbite into a deceptive sign of Secretary Clinton's indifference?

This is an Andrew Breitbart/James O'Keefe tactic, but its use is not limited to O'Keefe and the carriers of the Breitbart torch -- this is a mainstream GOP tactic. The entire party and all its coat-holders are on board.

Here's the soundbite in context. The attempt to distort what Clinton said may not be more than a minor irritant. But righties are going to work this for quite a while.

PEW HEADLINE GIVES NRA-FRIENDLY SPIN TO GUN POLL

A new Pew poll says that a majority of Americans either support President Obama's gun control proposals or think they don't go far enough. Fewer than a third of Americans think the package of proposals is excessive.

I read this as a clear mandate for the proposals.

So what's Pew's headline?

"Mixed Reactions to Obama's Gun Proposals"

Pew's lede:

With the public paying close attention to the national debate over gun control, Barack Obama's gun proposals receive a mixed rating from the public. A 39% plurality say Obama's proposals are about right while another 13% say they do not go far enough. About three-in-ten (31%) say the president's proposals go too far; 17% do not offer an opinion.

No, that's not a mixed reaction. A majority of respondents want to go at least as far as Obama does. More than two thirds of respondents raise no objection.

Only the usual right-wing remnant -- the usual suspects who object to everything that doesn't come with the Fox/Limbaugh stamp of approval -- have a problem with the president's gun agenda. They're the 27 percenters, give or take 4. Why do we have to defer to them?

****

ALSO, TOO: It's not clear whether the 31% actually know what Obama is proposing. Guess we'll have to wait for another polling outfit (hello, PPP?) to tell us what percentage of these folks think Obama is proposing total confiscation of all firearms.

IS AMERICA SPECIFICALLY HOSTILE TO THE IDEA OF A BLACK MIDDLE CLASS?

Ta-Nehisi Coates just finished reading The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson's book about the 20th-century Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North and West. Coates tells us that Southern blacks who migrated had difficulties wherever they went, even though

the migrants were generally better educated than their Northern brethren, more likely to stay married, and more likely to stay employed. In fact, in some cases, black migrants were better educated than their Northern white neighbors.

The book leads him to several conclusions, among them this:

What becomes clear by the end of Wilkerson's book is that America's response to the Great Migration was to enact a one-sided social contract. America says to its citizens, "Play by the rules, and you will enjoy the right to compete." The black migrants did play by the rules, but they did not enjoy the right to compete. Black people have been repeatedly been victimized by the half-assed social contract. It goes back, at least, to Reconstruction.

And he doesn't let America's current leaders, including the president, off the hook:

The half-assed social contract continues to this very day with policies under the present administration, like the bail-out of banks that left the homeowners whom the banks conned underwater. The results of the housing crisis for black people have been devastating. The response is to hector these people about playing video games and watching too much television. Or to tell them they've have "an achievement gap." It is sickening, dishonest, and morally repugnant.

Ultimately, Coates believes,

America does not really want a black middle class.

Coates talks about the animosity faced by blacks striving for the middle class, all over the country. I grew up in Boston and lived through the busing era -- I know racism was far from geographically isolated and hardly a distant memory.

But is it correct to say that "America does not really want a black middle class" today? I think the problem now is that the powers that be don't really want any middle class whatsoever. And the hostility of the rich to the middle class has been a problem throughout the period when blacks might have moved into the middle class.

Conservatives say that white ethnic groups faced prejudice, yet managed to make it in America without affirmative action and similar programs. Bur white ethnics (including my Italian forebears) were able to get their piece of the pie during a period when the pie was getting bigger.

When was the civil rights era? The 1960s. What has happened to the (overwhelmingly white) middle class since then? Middle-class incomes have been flat since the 1970s. Blacks had to maintain a separate economy until the point when we whites finally conceded, at least in law, that they had a right to some of our pie -- and then they were expected to fight with us for the same amount of pie.

Yes, a lot of whites still don't want blacks to get ahead. But the system hasn't wanted anyone to get ahead for the past forty years, except the 1%. And the aftermath of the 2008 crash makes clear that the 1% want to break the rest of us, eviscerating our social safety net and keeping the unemployment rate high enough that we'll continue to settle for crumbs when we're lucky to land or keep jobs. Yes, whites on average start at a far better position than blacks. But the 1% don't really want any middle class whatsoever.

DON'T EVEN BOTHER

There's been another school shooting -- at the Lone Star College campus outside Houston -- but don't even bother wondering whether this will inspire a twinge of self-doubt among the gunners.

You see, guns are banned at Lone Star College's campuses. So every gun absolutist in America will now tell us that the shooting has nothing whatsoever to do with the gun culture Texas's attorney general recently crowed about in ads:








No, it's all the fault of gun-free zones. They breed shooters, you see. People who don't even own guns suddenly find themselves packing heat and feeling murderous rage when they enter a gun-free zone. It happens by spontaneous generation.

Oh, and Texas doesn't allow concealed carry on campuses anyway -- so Texas is, on this subject, dangerously liberal, as the gunners will endlessly remind us. (A bill to allowed concealed carry on campuses failed in 2011.)

As it turns out, a member of the Texas legislature filed a "campus carry" bill just last Thursday.* If we liberals were as conspiracy-minded as the right, we might start wondering whether shootings were being staged, with the understanding that they'd inevitably result in increased gun sales and, in the red states, looser gun laws. I'm not that paranoid -- though if we start seeing curiously timed shootings with minimal harm to human beings in GOP-dominated states with intolerably moderate gun laws, I'm going to have my suspicions.

****

This is the fourth school shooting in the past 12 days and the sixth this month.


*Link fixed.

DOES THIS MEAN WE HAVE TO RETURN SADDAM HUSSEIN'S CORPSE TO POWER?

This is rapidly becoming the most important story in America, apparently:

Beyonce did not sing the national anthem live at President Obama’s inauguration.

Millions of viewers around the world were stunned by the singer's spectacular rendition of the anthem but The Times has learnt that she was lip-syncing to a pre-recorded backing track....

The very mature American right is now going to inform us that this means the Obama second term is a travesty and a sham.

Of course, this is hardly the first patriotic moment of song to be lip-synced:

It was what turned a star into a superstar: Whitney Houston's mesmerizing rendition of the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl. Houston’s powerful "Star Spangled Banner" performance came at a poignant, patriotic time -- the U.S. had just entered the 1991 Gulf War.

But ... [w]hat the Super Bowl audience and hundreds of millions of TV viewers heard was lip-synched.

"The music was pre-recorded, and so was the vocal,” confirmed Rickey Minor, who was Houston's musical director at the time....

The Reagan presidency heralded America's right-wing backlash, but the backlash didn't take on a fully martial aspect until the Persian Gulf War -- a yellow-ribbon-bedecked war one opposed at one's peril. The Whitney Houston rendition of the national anthem was heard less than two weeks after the war began; it literally ended with F-16 fighter jets flying overhead. The performance didn't take place at a government function, but it was as much a part of the process of manufacturing consent for the war as Hitler comparisons and false stories of babies in incubators being removed and left to die.

So if Beyonce's lip-syncing is going to be held against President Obama, can we also hold Whitney lip-syncing against the Bush family, the GOP, and the entire institutional right? Can we have all the blood and treasure back? Can we ban Jeb and George P. from ever running for president?

NO, BARACK OBAMA DID NOT INVENT THE IDEOLOGICAL SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS

People seem to be astonished -- and, on the right, horrified -- at the fact that Barack Obama's second inaugural address was built on the assertion that his ideas are better for America than his opponents' ideas. Aren't reelected presidents supposed to make nice in their inaugural speeches? Aren't the speeches supposed to be like election-night victory speeches -- gracious, and full of praise for the opposition?

Um, no. Let's go to Saint Reagan's second inaugural address:

... for a time, we ... asked things of government that government was not equipped to give. We yielded authority to the National Government that properly belonged to States or to local governments or to the people themselves. We allowed taxes and inflation to rob us of our earnings and savings and watched the great industrial machine that had made us the most productive people on Earth slow down and the number of unemployed increase.

By 1980, we knew it was time to renew our faith, to strive with all our strength toward the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society.

We believed then and now there are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.

And we were right to believe that....

Freedom and incentives unleash the drive and entrepreneurial genius that are the core of human progress....

We have already started returning to the people and to State and local governments responsibilities better handled by them. Now, there is a place for the Federal Government in matters of social compassion. But our fundamental goals must be to reduce dependency....

There's lip service to bipartisanship in the speech, but it's a thoroughly partisan speech. The main thrust of the speech is "our way is superior; their way is ruinous."

And George W. Bush's inaugural was all about the glories of the Bush Doctrine and the interventionist Bush foreign policy:

... We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one....

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world....

The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause....

Even the domestic part of the speech was about Bush's notions of an "ownership society" in which private saving substituted for entitlements:

To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will bring the highest standards to our schools, and build an ownership society. We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance -- preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society.

Neither of these speeches conceded that opponents had some really good ideas. Neither of these speeches admitted the possibility that the best results might be achieved through difference-splitting.

The partisanship of Barack Obama's speech was not unprecedented. So if it upset you, get over it.

INAUGURAL AS DIS TRACK

I missed the inaugural speech, but I just finished reading it (at the site of The Weekly Standard, of all places), and I agree with James Fallows:

This was the most sustainedly "progressive" statement Barack Obama has made in his decade on the national stage.

It struck me as defiantly progressive. While it reached out to the vast majority of Americans, it was also a detailed rebuke of all the unproductive, divisive, infantile noise that's emerged from the right in recent years. Obama took on his haters -- and the haters of liberal and moderate ideas in general -- point by point, at every moment declaring those ideas to be fully in the American grain. It's hard to imagine him living up to this rhetoric in his second term, but I'm grateful in any case for the statement of principles.

I'm grateful that he insisted on the notion that change is true to our national principles, because right-wingers, when it suits them, argue otherwise:

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.

Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.

Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.

.. we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.

"Collective action"! That must have elicited howls in Wingnuttia.

The following passage has already elicited howls at Power Line:

It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law -- for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.

Every point here is a slap in the face to right-wingers who deserve far worse; every point here is one that a clear majority of non-wingnut America can rally around.

Oh, and there's this:

But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.

The notion that we're betraying the young unless we eviscerate Social Security and Medicare is a particular hobbyhorse of David Brooks. Congratulations, David: I think the president of the United States chose to dis you personally in an inaugural address.

I'm sure Maureen Dowd and Peggy Noonan are already hard at work writing denunciations of Obama's arrogance and hauteur. But if that's what the speech represents, he's entitled to it. He faces opponents who deny the way America has changed to survive, who defy the will of the people, and who continue to gum up the works and render this country all but ungovernable. They deserve every ounce of his contempt, and then some.

ON VIDEO GAMES, RALPH NADER AGREES WITH WAYNE LaPIERRE
(updated)

Politico decided to ask Ralph Nader how he's feeling as the second Obama inaugural approaches. Nader says he's anticipating "another rendition of political bulls--," and goes on to grumble about the lack of bankster prosecutions, the drone war, and the fact that the minimum wage hasn't been increased.

Fair enough (although isn't there, um, another political party that bears some of the blame of this?). But then is Nader is asked about Obama's gun control proposals -- and whether out of sincere disgust or just an absolute refusal to give credit to anything Obama does, he denounces the president for not doing anything about video games -- y'know, just like Wayne LaPierre.

Obama’s plan doesn't go far enough on the violent video game creators [Nader] called "electronic child molesters."

"We are in the peak of [violence in entertainment]. Television program violence? Unbelievable. Video game violence? Unprecedented," Nader said.

He added: "I'm not saying he wants to censor this, I think he should sensitize people that they should protect their children family by family from these kinds of electronic child molesters."

Well, that ought to get Nader another of his many appearances on Fox News.

Of course, violent video games are played all over the developed world -- but only in America do massacres like Sandy Hook happen on a regular basis.

So, OK, Ralph and Wayne, let's assume you're both right. Let's assume that violent video games really do inspire the desire to imitate the violence in some players. That doesn't seem to be a problem in other countries, because in those countries you simply can't imitate the shooters, because you can't get access to the weaponry. So you can no more imitate the games than you can go out and deal with your own zombie apocalypse. The games are pure fantasy for players all over the world -- except in America where (maybe) they're imitated because they can be.

So even if video games are being imitated -- and there's still no convincing evidence of that -- the problem is still the availability of guns. So you're wrong again, Ralph.

*****

UPDATE: For what it's worth, note this about Nehemiah Griego, the 15-year-old who's charged in the shooting deaths of his father (a minister named Greg Griego), his father's wife, and three of their kids in New Mexico on Saturday:

[Greg] Griego reportedly served in Desert Storm, and Nehemiah told neighbors he wanted to be a soldier. He always wore army clothing and camouflage, but he wasn't allowed to play violent video games, according to one neighbor, since the boy's parents didn't allow anything "dirty or violent" and limited TV watching.

Reports say the five were "fatally shot multiple times with a 'military-style' assault rifle and other weapons."

JACKBOOTED THUGS

Do not cross the gun absolutists. Vengeance is swift:

Cabela's Inc., the North American hunting and fishing retailer, announced Saturday that it will not participate in the Eastern Sports and Outdoors Show to be held Feb. 2-10 at the Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg [Pennsylvania].

This comes on the heels of smaller retailers boycotting because of the decision by event organizer Reed Exhibitions to ban the display and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines....

The international retailer -- which has 40 outdoor gear and sporting goods stores across the U.S. and Canada -- is "definitely a superpower in the industry" ....

Cabela's was to have been one of four anchor vendors at the show. The company organizing the show wanted to show some sensitivity in the wake of the Newtown massacre. But that's simply not allowed. The gun absolutists won't tolerate it.

Potential attendees will not tolerate any collaboration with the enemy:

... In the 24 hours since Reed posted the announcement on the show website and began answering media questions, more than 350 Facebook users had posted their responses to the show's page.

The vast majority were strongly opposed to Reed's decision to exclude tactical rifles like the popular AR-15 replica of the military's M-16.

Many vowed that they would not attend the show and encouraged others to do the same....

General calls of "boycott" were common, as they were on the popular HuntingPA message boards, where several discussion threads had attracted almost universally negative reaction from a few hundred hunters and shooters....

This is why Obamaites were naive to imagine that Wal-Mart might agree to endorse the administration's gun control agenda -- the retaliation from the gun community would have come immediately and mercilessly, and would have forced Wal-Mart to recant.

Let's call the gun lobby and its supporters what they really are: a protection racket. Do what they want and they're with you: if you're a corporation, they'll give you their business; if you're a pol, they'll back you. Cross them? They'll seek to crush you. Who are the jackbooted thugs again?

STUFF HAPPENS ON GUN APPRECIATION DAY THAT GUNNERS SAY IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE

Gun fetishists declared yesterday Gun Appreciation Day, and, well, this was embarrassing:

Officials said the Dixie Gun and Knife Show will continue Sunday without private gun sales after three people, including a retired sheriff's deputy, were injured Saturday when a gun brought in by a patron who planned to sell it accidentally discharged.

As were these incidents:

Two similar incidents occurred at entirely separate gun shows in the Midwest, one in the Cleveland suburb of Medina, Ohio and the other at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. In Ohio, the local ABC affiliate reports that one individual was brought to a hospital by EMS, and in Indiana Channel 8 WISH says that an individual shot himself in the hand while trying to reload his gun in the show parking lot.

William "Flavorful Mustard Is Elitist" Jacobson poo-poohs all this by noting three rock shows at which harm has come to attendees. (For decades, literally thousands of rock concerts and club gigs have taken place every night of the week all over the world, nearly all of them without incident. But never mind.) And a winger blogger who calls himself Soopermexican declares that Gun Appreciation Day was safer than a typical day in Chicago, so there! (Soopermexican comes to this conclusion by dividing the nember of injuries at Gun Appreciation Day by the total of number of people in America, conveniently overlooking the fact that every resident of the United States did not attend a Gun Appreciation Day event. But again, never mind.)

Here's the real problem with this analysis: The injuries at Gun Appreciation Day events literally should not have happened. We know this because the gun community tells us so. Surely the events at which the injuries took place were full of "good people with guns." Surely guns were as plentiful at those events as the gun absolutists would like them to be everywhere in America. Under those circumstances, according to gun propaganda, nothing bad involving a gun can possibly happen. As long as guns are in the hands of enough good people, guns are 100% beneficial to society. They're like God -- purely good, incapable of evil.

So what happened? In the hands of good, patriotic, God-fearing people, how could the holy Gun -- the greatest invention in the history of humanity -- ever do anyone any harm?

FOX NEWS: AMERICANS UNALTERABLY OPPOSED TO GUN-CONTROL POLICY NO ONE'S ACTUALLY PROPOSING

Headline of a Fox polling story:

Fox News poll: Twice as many favor more guns over banning guns to reduce crime

Yes, that's what Fox's pollsters asked:

Would there be less violent crime in the United States if: [ROTATE 1-2]

Guns were banned 28%

More law-abiding people had guns 58%

Fascinating -- or it would be fascinating if any politician or other influential figure were actually proposing to ban all guns. A significant percentage of Americans may think that's what's being proposed by the president, but it's not even close. So why even ask the question, except to give a news organization that thrives on straw-man arguments a little more straw?

And the other choice is equally absurd. If more law-abiding people get guns, that will mean that the gun market is thriving even more than it is now, and purchasing a gun is even easier than it is now -- which means that more guns will also be obtained by people who aren't law-abiding. (Or people who are law-abiding now but may eventually lose their battle with mental illness or rage or depression and decide to shoot up a school, or kill a spouse, or shoot themselves.) The belief that there's some way to increase the number of good people with guns without also increasing the number of bad people with guns, in a nation where the NRA has emasculated all national agencies that enforce gun laws, as well as most local agencies, is delusional.

To their credit, the same poll respondents who engage in this NRA-propaganda-fed magical thinking about guns actually want laws to make getting a gun harder:

The most popular suggestions are requiring criminal background checks on all gun buyers (with 91 percent favoring this proposal), providing services for mentally ill people who "show violent tendencies" (89 percent) and improving enforcement of existing laws (86 percent)

Large majorities also favor mandating mental-health checks on gun buyers (83 percent) and requiring criminal background checks on anyone buying ammunition (80 percent).

Smaller majorities favor putting armed guards in schools (60 percent), banning high-capacity clips (56 percent), [and] banning assault weapons (54 percent)....

And yet, according to the poll, 56% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the NRA, which exists to make sure that nothing on the above list ever happens (except for the armed guards in schools).

But that, I suppose is because Americans see the NRA as fighting the good fight against politicians and other policymakers who want to ban all guns.

You know, people who don't actually exist.

REPUBLICANS RELEASE CEOs AND GLOBAL FINANCIERS, KEEP ALL OTHER HOSTAGES

I'm not sure why so many people are doing the happy dance in response to Eric Cantor's offer of a three-month extension of the debt ceiling in return for a full budget agreement on the part of the Senate. Hell, even the usually dour Paul Krugman is pleased.

We're told that this will really take the debt ceiling off he table for much longer than three months, because a couple of other deadlines are coming up in the next three months, and surely the resolution of those problems will deal with this one as well. Jonathan Cohn:

And while their proposal would extend the government's borrowing authority for only another three months, two other fiscal policy deadlines would come first -- March 1, when the automatic spending cuts of the budget sequester are set to take effect, and March 27, when the Continuing Resolution that funds the government expires. Not everybody agrees on the implications, and the agreement would come with a few conditions attached, but the emerging consensus is that Republicans would probably add another, longer extension to whatever deal those debates produce.

Oh, so we just have to come up with a way around the sequester that's satisfactory to both Democrats and Republicans by March 1, and mollify Republicans so they don't shut the government down after March 27. A mere formality!

As Cohn says,

To be sure, Republicans are still determined to fight for their priorities -- namely, massive spending cuts and, where possible, new tax breaks for the rich. They might even shut down the government if they don't get their way. The expiration of the Continuing Resolution offers an opportunity for that.

But refusing to give the government new borrowing authority, so that it defaults? Wreaking all sorts of havoc on the economy? Republicans seem to have lost enthusiasm for that tactic.

So the terrorist tactic that would rattle the markets -- a default threat -- seems to be off the table. The terrorist tactic that specifically targets ordinary people -- holding massive spending cuts and entitlement reforms in one hand, and a government shutdown in the other, and saying, "Choose one" -- is very much on the table.

So we're still hostages. The fat cats have been released. Forgive me if I'm not dancing.

OBAMA FOLLOWS THE ADVICE OF DAVID BROOKS, GETS CRITICIZED FOR IT BY ... DAVID BROOKS

Just before the 2012 election, David Brooks gave us a column expressing his disappointment in President Obama. Brooks wrote:

Sure, House Republicans have been intransigent, but Obama could have isolated them, building a governing center-left majority....

Today Brooks imagines the thoughts of Democratic strategists as they confront the future. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't like what he believes they're thinking. He quotes their supposed thoughts at length:

"... The president should propose no new measures that might unite Republicans, the way health care did in the first term. Instead, he should raise a series of wedge issues meant to divide Southerners from Midwesterners, the Tea Party/Talk Radio base from the less ideological corporate and managerial class.

"He's already started with a perfectly designed gun control package, inviting a long battle with the N.R.A. over background checks and magazine clips. That will divide the gun lobby from suburbanites. Then he can re-introduce Bush's comprehensive immigration reform. That will divide the anti-immigration groups from the business groups (conventional wisdom underestimates how hard it is going to be for Republicans to back comprehensive reforms).

"Then he could invite a series of confrontations with Republicans over things like the debt ceiling -- make them look like wackos willing to endanger the entire global economy. Along the way, he could highlight women's issues, social mobility issues (student loans, community college funding) and pick fights on compassion issues, (hurricane relief) -- promoting any small, popular spending programs that Republicans will oppose...."

And this differs from trying to isolate intransigent House Republicans -- the very thing Brooks thinks Obama should have done -- how exactly? Why, if I didn't know any better, I'd say this was a plan for, um, building a governing center-left majority, or at least trying to, or at the absolute minimum demonstrating that a governing center-left majority could exist, if the craziest Republicans on the far right weren't so, um, crazy.

****

Brooks thinks it's awful that Obama wants to make the most extreme House Republicans "look like wackos." Elsewhere in the column he writes, in the imagined voice of Republican strategists:

"...The president ran in 2008 against Washington dysfunction, casting blame on both parties. Over the years, he has migrated to a different narrative: The Republicans are crazy. Washington could be working fine, but the Republicans are crazy...."

What a terrible message for Obama to send! And do you know who else has said that Washington could be working fine, but the Republicans are crazy? This hothead:

And my problem with the Republican Party right now ... is that if you offered them 80-20, they say no. If you offered them 90-10, they'd say no. If you offered them 99-1 they'd say no.

And this hothead:

... the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms....

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities....

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency....

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name....

Both of those hotheads were Mr. David Brooks, in 2010 and 2011, respectively. But God forbid that the president of the United States treat people who "do not accept the logic of compromise" and "have no sense of moral decency" as if they're unreasonable.

THE "LIBERAL MEDIA" AND ITS LATEST REPUBLICAN MANCRUSH (NYC edition)

Mike Bloomberg is finally going to leave the mayor's office at the end of this year. New York, supposedly the bluest of cities, hasn't elected a Democratic mayor since 1989 -- but a lot of people have been expecting that to change this year, with Democratic City Council Speaker Christine Quinn seen as the mayoral favorite.

But a large number of white men in expensive suits don't want a Democrat to win. (Omigod, a Democrat will give away the city to the unions!) And, in addition, one particular ego has landed in the mayor's race.

So, on New Year's Eve, The New York Times gave us a story titled "Giuliani Ready to Use Muscle to Put His Man in Mayor’s Seat." Giuliani's "man" is the recently departed head of the much-relied-upon, much-reviled Metropolitan Transporation Authority, Joe Lhota, previously a Giuliani advisor and Wall Streeter.

It's possible that you'll read the following and think "man" should be replaced with "puppet":

Over the last few weeks, Mr. Giuliani and a coterie of former aides have coalesced around the deputy, Joseph J. Lhota, a Bronx-born Republican, with a single-mindedness that borders on fervor, encouraging him to leap into the campaign and talking up his prospects to business and political leaders, at times well beyond the borders of New York. In Ohio, a few days before the presidential election, Mr. Giuliani was overheard extolling Mr. Lhota's mayoral qualifications backstage at a rally for Mitt Romney.

For Mr. Giuliani, 68, a Lhota candidacy represents a coveted chance to reassert his stamp on a city that he transformed in the 1990s, and a way to fend off what he sees at the ultimate threat to his legacy: the election this year of a liberal Democrat who rejects his conservative approach to policing and budgeting.

But Lhota isn't just Giuliani's "man." More and more, he seems to be The New York Times's "man." A week prior to the Giuliani article, there was "A Republican Mayoral Possibility Unsettles Democrats." When Lhota resigned from the MTA, there was "It May Not Be the End of the World, but It's Bad News for Transit Riders." And today there's a revolting bit of hagiography that attempts to portray Lhota as a potentially larger-than-life mega-mayor in the Giuliani/Ed Koch mold; the story is titled, variously, "Outsize Personality Joins, and Jostles, Mayor's Race," "Lhota Joins Mayoral Race, and Stands Out," and in the app version, most fawningly, "Candid and Uninhibited, Lhota Stands Out in Mayor's Race."

Hey, Lhota and the Times, get a room.

Here's the way the story starts:

To pump himself up for tense negotiations with the City Council, Joseph J. Lhota listened to the soaring theme song to the film "Top Gun," and, afterward, relaxed to the soothing tones of Gregorian chants.

Dispensing with diplomacy, he loudly challenged a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor to "be a man" at a public meeting of the region's transit authority, and he once gave the middle finger to a reporter in the rotunda of City Hall.

And, acting on instinct, he raced into the streets of Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, to direct traffic and then, at day's end, delivered a copy of a Winston Churchill biography to his boss, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, for inspiration.

In a city whose once raucous and colorful politics have become remarkably button-down and tranquil over the past decade, Mr. Lhota, who filed documents on Thursday to become a Republican candidate for mayor, is something of a throwback: an unapologetically outsize personality, known throughout his career for big emotions and an uninhibited style.

Translation: Hey, New York, forget about whether Lhota as mayor would be good for you -- the real question is whether you're tough enough to handle him. Well? Think you got what it takes?

(And yes, I suppose that Holocaust-survivor thing is a bit problematic -- though it's easy to imagine Rudy or Ed doing the same thing and getting away with only a few minor scratches, because they were so colorful.)

Here's the thing: voters don't want Lhota. (According to Quinnipiac, he trails each of the three leading Democratic mayoral contenders by at least 40 points. Maybe it's the MTA fare hikes, Joe?) But certain right-leaning power brokers want him. So expect more gush like this from the Times, which is clearly happy to be sweet talked this way, between now and November.

(Oh, and it won't just be the Times. By astonishing coincidence, The New York Observer just hired a new editor named Ken Kurson who just so happens to have coauthored Giuliani's book Leadership. The Observer, incidentally, is owned by Donald Trump's son-in-law.)

IF YOU DISMISS IT AS "TROLLING," I THINK YOU'RE MISSING PART OF THE POINT

A lot of folks -- Raw Story, Libby Spencer, Anne Laurie, Mediaite -- are linking to a segment from last night's Rachel Maddow Show in which Maddow dismisses a lot of provocative right-wing rhetoric as trolling. (Video of the segment is below.)

From Raw Story:

"Trolling is a key part of the conservative-entertainment/media business model," [Maddow] said. "These guys say stuff all the time that they do not intend to be persuasive. They're not trying to explain something, or bring people along to their way of thinking, they're just doing something to attract attention, and hopefully condemnation and outrage from the mainstream, and particularly from liberals. They want to offend you. They seek to offend you. That is the point."

I agree that that's one point of making provocative statements -- to induce liberal outrage, and thus attain hero status among right-wingers by boasting of liberal attacks on yourself.

But it's not the whole point. Provocative statements are also meant to rally mobs. The implicit message of these provocations is: if what I just said offended you, chew on the fact that, outside your comfy little elitist enclave, there are millions of people who agree with what I just said 100% -- now what are you going to do about that?

Consider a part of Maddow's segment, in which she presents clips from four prominent wingnut provocateurs:

ANN COULTER: "Okay, explain to me why 'retard' is inappropriate."
MICHAEL SAVAGE: "You want my health care? I'll give you the Savage health care -- take the chocolate out of that fat woman's mouth!"
RUSH LIMBAUGH: "There is a movement on to normalize pedophilia."
MARK LEVIN: "Since when the hell do we Americans believe in separation of church and state?"

I think the wingnut audience literally agrees with every one of these statements. I think that audience sees Coulter as a brave fighter against "political correctness" in language, sees Savage as a guy telling the truth about how our so-called health crisis is sick people's own damn fault, and agrees with Levin that America is a Judeo-Christian nation, dammit. As for Limbaugh, he had sources when he made this pronouncement, though not a particularly exhaustive list -- one Guardian article, the story of Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash -- but he probably didn't need those, because the wingnuts in his audience firmly believe academia and the entertainment business are cesspits of deviant fornication and pro-immorality brainwashing.

If you're offended by all this, Coulter will never stop pointing out the large, adoring crowds that greet her wherever she speaks; Savage and Levin and (especially) Limbaugh won't let you forget that their radio audiences are in the millions; and they'll all tell you they've written #1 New York Times bestsellers. Maybe the book sales are partly bulk buys, maybe the radio ratings are slipping -- but these people actually have had big audiences. At the peak of their popularity, that's what made Coulter and Limbaugh, in particular, so dangerous: they said all that awful stuff and yet they were untouchable. The more appalling their pronouncements, the bigger their audiences seemed to get.

Which brings us to the NRA. Maddow sees the group as a troll organization. She looks at recent inflammatory NRA videos and says,

"If you have to troll for it, if you're going for purposeful outrage and nothing more serious than that, it is also pretty good evidence that you are really not all that relevant to the discussion the adults are having."

But that's not true if the NRA is still powerful. It's not true if outrageous NRA statements attract more members, sell more guns, and empower the NRA to threaten more elected officials. The NRA isn't being tone-deaf -- it's deliberately trying to offend us to show that it has the power not to give a crap about what we think, because every time it offends our sensibilities, more people pay NRA dues, and more pols cower in fear.

The key question is whether that's still true. Maddow makes the point the NRA spent a lot of money this year backing candidates who lost. I agree with her that pointing out the NRA's diminished political power is important (but I sure hope that power is still diminished in 2014, when the electorate is likely to be whiter and more right-wing).

The point is, the NRA doesn't troll because it's weak -- the NRA trolls because trolling has always kept it strong. When the NRA sent out a fund-raising letter referring to "jack-booted government thugs" less than a month after the Oklahoma City bombings, that was "trolling" to rally supporters and demonstrate power. When Charlton Heston said "From my cold, dead hands" while brandishing a rifle at the NRA convention in Colorado less than two weeks after the Columbine massacre, that was "trolling" to rally supporters and demonstrate power. The NRA did this when the NRA clearly was powerful.

Maybe it's not going to work anymore. But it's worked in the past. In any case, it's not a sign of weakness.

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DOES WAYNE LaPIERRE HAVE TO STRANGLE A PUPPY ON LIVE TV TO TRULY DISCREDIT THE NRA?

Many lefties and centrists have watched the NRA's behavior since Sandy Hook and concluded that the gun lobby is embarrassing itself. The NRA has disqualified itself from serious consideration in the gun debate. It's sidelining itself while serious people discuss the problems of gun violence. And the NRA is denying reality by ignoring the fact that even gun owners support many gun-control ideas.

So that means the NRA is really, really unpopular at this moment -- right?

Well, no, it isn't:

... a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that the National Rifle Association is more popular than the entertainment industry.

Forty-one percent of adults see the NRA -- the nation's top gun lobby -- in a positive light, while 34 percent view it in a negative light.

By comparison, just 24 percent have positive feelings about the entertainment industry, and 39 percent have negative ones.

The NRA's fav/unfav score is virtually unchanged from its 41 percent-to-29 percent rating in the Jan. 2011 NBC/WSJ poll, nearly two years before the Newtown shootings....

Among those who own a gun, 62 percent view the NRA favorably. But that percentage drops to just 25 percent among those who don't.

How does this happen? How does the NRA raise its public profile in an unhinged and offensive way, attacking even the president's school-age children, while taking positions at odds with even its own members' beliefs, and still maintain plurality support from the public -- including one in four people who don't even own a gun? And how can it be more popular than the entertainment industry, which produces at least some products that just about everyone enjoys?

Somehow the public has been persuaded that the entertainment industry is a remote, out-of-touch bunch of wealthy elitists who get rich selling us trash (lots of people say that, across the political spectrum, when they want to appear high-minded). The NRA, by contrast, is seen as your next-door neighbor -- or you. The NRA is thus one of many institutions -- the Republican Party, the Catholic Church -- that somehow can't be fully discredited, no matter how many awful things it does.

So we don't really have the NRA on the ropes. We won't have the NRA on the ropes until we figure out what inclines so many Americans to feel favorably disposed toward the group -- and undermine that. You'd think, given the NRA's behavior, that that wouldn't be hard. But it's clearly more difficult than we think, because we assume we don't have to do anything except wait for the NRA to discredit itself. That isn't happening. And I don't think it will happen.

MURDOCH PLAYS 11-DIMENSIONAL GUN VIOLENCE SCAPEGOAT CHESS

Fox Nation, the Fox News discussion board, is full of fevered denunciations of President Obama on guns ("Freedom, Tyranny and Granny's .38"; "King of the Gun Grabbers"), while Fox prime time last night gave Rand Paul a forum to announce his nullification plan for Obama's executive orders (shown at the bottom of the screen on Fox as Paul spoke: a headshot of Obama and the phrase "STANDING UP TO THE KING").

But the main Fox News site is a bit less fevered -- when I woke up this morning, this was the lead story:





But note the unmitigated gall of this: it's an attempt to deflect criticism of guns by focusing it on Hollywood -- from the news division of a media empire that includes a huge film studio.

But Murdoch knows Hollywood is safe, so the harrumphing is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. And the huge picture of Quentin Tarantino (there's also a still from Django Unchained on the home page) is a way of telling the easily led Fox audience not to go see Tarantino's violent movie -- which is not a Fox release -- at a time when Fox's big movie is the rather more high-minded Lincoln.

(The Murdochians are pretty much the last folks in America still engaging in the old tabloid-news practice of trashing the competition at every opportunity. The New York Post regularly bashes the Daily News. Fox Nation regularly mocks NBC and what it regularly calls "left-wing Politico.")

Don't worry -- Fox News won't keep this up. Fox certainly won't be lamenting movie violence a month from now, when its big release will be this:

PEGGY NOONAN: SIZE MATTERS

Peggy Noonan has some thoughts about the size of Barack Obama's ... um, signature:

... I have on the wall of my office something that means a lot to me, a framed presidential commission from 1984 that named me a special assistant to President Reagan....

Underneath my Reagan commission is another, same size, almost identical, signed in 2011 by President Obama....

The two commissioning documents ... are different in one big way. On the Reagan document, the president's signature is small, clear, modest -- rising about half an inch at its highest point....

The Obama commission is startling in that the president's signature is so big, more than an inch and a half high at the B, which is an inch and a half wide. Reagan's first and last names could fit in the B alone. Obama's signature is dramatic, even theatrical: The O is cut almost exactly in two by the elongated b of Obama. Even in his signature he starkly divides....

To me it's a metaphor for the growth in the power and size of the federal government the past quarter century and, frankly, the more flamboyant egos -- or, a nicer way to say it would be the bigger personalities -- that populate it today.

Yes, that's right: a big signature equals big government! And both of these things are awful! Having a small, modest signature is way more American!

So take that, John Hancock, you commie! Elbridge Gerry was a much better American than you!





****

Noonan continues:

This always makes me think of what's happened with American flag lapel pins. I have one from Reagan days on my desk. It's a little bitty thing, half an inch wide. Now American flag lapel pins are more than twice that size, as big as a man’s thumb.

I wonder why. The men aren't bigger, or the suits.

You wonder why, Peggy? I'll tell you why: it's because your ideological soul mates incessantly play games of "Who's more patriotic?" with their enemies. The flag pins wouldn't be quite so flamboyant if your wingnut pals would back the hell off once in a while.