WAS THE HOUSE GOP'S ABORTION MELTDOWN NECESSARY?

I keep trying to wrap my mind around this story. The GOP has gotten away with so much extremism in recent years, so why the sudden concern about this?

House Republican leaders abruptly dropped plans late Wednesday to vote on an anti-abortion bill amid a revolt by female GOP lawmakers concerned that the legislation's restrictive language would once again spoil the party's chances of broadening its appeal to women and younger voters.

In recent days, as many as two dozen Republicans had raised concerns with the "Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" that would ban abortions after the 20th week of a pregnancy. Sponsors said that exceptions would be allowed for a woman who is raped, but she could only get the abortion after reporting the rape to law enforcement.

A vote had been scheduled for Thursday to coincide with the annual March for Life....

But Republican leaders dropped those plans after failing to win over a bloc of lawmakers, led by Reps. Rene Ellmers (R-N.C.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who had raised concerns.

Elmers and Walorski voted for the same bill in 2013, and spoke in its favor. But suddenly they're concerned. Why?

What's supposed to be the problem is that this bill attempts to define (to use a now-famous phrase) "legitimate rape":

... many female lawmakers were also furious over its clause stating that women can be exempt from the ban in cases of rape only if they reported the rape to authorities....

Here's why that's a problem, according to the objecting legislators:

The Justice Department estimates that nearly 70 percent of rapes go unreported, oftentimes due to victims' fear of retribution. Reps. Renee Ellmers (N.C.) and Jackie Walorski (Ind.), among other GOP lawmakers, argued the bill could hurt the GOP with women and young voters.

These Republican women threatened to vote on a Democratic amendment altering the bill:

One conservative lawmaker told The Hill that a key factor in deciding to pull the original 20-week bill was that Republicans might not have had the votes to defeat a Democratic motion to recommit that would have returned the legislation to committee for additional changes.

Democrats threatened to use the routine procedural vote before final passage to strip out the rape reporting language, and all but one female Republican told leadership they would support it, one lawmaker said.

But if the language wasn't a problem for Republicans in 2013, including the Republican women who are objecting now, then this brouhaha had nothing to do with principle and was just an effort to position the GOP as the non-Todd Akin party, in advance of the 2016 elections.

But -- and I'm being purely cynical here -- why do any Republicans think that's necessary early in 2015? Republicans have done really well in congressional races since 2010. Yes, candidates such as Todd Akin have lost races, but Republicans who haven't said outrageously extremist things have been unaffected by talk of "legitimate rape" and the like by Republicans such as Akin. Also, the experience of candidates like Joni Ernst suggests that Republicans can pretty much do and say anything they want before a campaign gets under way and there'll be no consequence to them or the party. That may not be true for presidential candidates, but there aren't any potential GOP presidential nominees in the House.

The GOP could have passed this bill and most Americans wouldn't even notice; the president would have vetoed it and it would have slipped down the memory hole. I'd suspect that the entire kerfuffle was for show if not for the fact that every story I've read describes it as an unexpected meltdown on the part of the GOP, driven by a sincere and unexpected rebellion on the part of Ellmers et al.

Meanwhile, the House instead passed a bill to block federal funding of abortion, a bill that extends the ban to private health insurance. Is that bill noticeably less extreme than the one that was tabled? Also, the House leadership says that the tabled bill will be brought back. So what was this all about?

Chris Cillizza thinks scuttling the bill was a shrewd move by the GOP:

An anecdote relayed to me by a very conservative Republican consultant a few years back still sticks with me.... In 2012, Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin lost their races for Senate at least in part due to their unwillingness or inability to affirm their pro-life credentials and then move on to issues people were more concerned about in that election. (Both men rambled into a discussion of rape and whether women can get pregnant from it.) Two years earlier, Pat Toomey, running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, would make clear to anyone who asked that he was pro-life but would then quickly pivot to talking about jobs, the economy or President Obama. Toomey won.

The point of the story, according to the consultant, was that Toomey understood that steering conversations -- and voters' perceptions -- away from troublesome areas and onto stronger ground isn't an abandonment of principles. It's smart politics. It didn't make Toomey any less pro-life to affirm his beliefs and then carefully avoid being caught in the thicket of other social issues questions. And, it, inarguably, helped him win in a Democratic leaning state.

But the original plan was to vote for this 20-week ban and then (presumably) pivot to other subjects. It would be nice to think that voters would have punished the party for the vote, but they probably wouldn't have -- there'd have been a vote, then a pivot, and the vote would have been forgotten. Now we just see the GOP obsessing over abortion, the exact opposite of a quick pivot. Why didn't Republicans just go with the bill, given how likely they'd have been to get away with it?

ROMNEY JUST EFFECTIVELY DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE

Mitt Romney's 2016 presidential campaign is now pretty much over:

Mitt Romney says one of the biggest challenges facing the country is climate change and that global solutions are needed to combat it.

He said this in a speech last night to an investment management conference in Salt Lake City. He made the same point in a speech in California on Monday.

He's a Republican with presidential ambitions, so I don't know what the hell's gotten into him.

Romney's done a flip-flop-flip on this issue:

For Romney, this is his second about-face on climate change. In his 2010 book, No Apology, he called human activity a "contributing factor" to melting ice caps. And in the run-up to the 2012 Republican primaries, Romney backed a reduction in emissions to curb anthropogenic global warming. "I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer," he told the Manchester Union-Leader in 2011. "And...I believe that humans contribute to that. I don't know how much our contribution is to that, because I know there have been periods of greater heat and warmth in the past, but I believe that we contribute to that. So I think it's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you're seeing."

But as the 2012 campaign evolved, Romney reversed course. He said that he opposed curbing carbon dioxide emissions. He declared, "We don't know what's causing climate change on this planet." Instead, he pledged to increase coal production and ramp up oil exploration. At the Republican convention in Tampa, he turned climate change into a punch line. "I'm not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or to heal the planet," he remarked during his nomination speech....

No, it doesn't matter that Senate Republicans just voted to acknowledge the reality of climate change, because, as I said last night, they aren't acknowledging that climate change is any more than a natural variation, and they're not acknowledging that it's a problem (and some are portraying an acknowledgment of climate change as a recognition of the fact that the weather changes).

Sorry, but Romney simply can't get the 2016 Republican nomination if he's saying that climate change is a problem that needs to be dealt with. Add this to his dreadful numbers in a new Washington Post/ABC poll -- the supposedly electable moderate trails Hillary Clinton by 15 points (though Clinton also has double-digit leads over Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and Mike Huckabee) -- and Romney is toast for 2016.

Okay, maybe not -- maybe the poll numbers will change, and (much more important) maybe he'll flip-flop again on the climate. (Would you put that past him?) He'll have to, because this is going to be a litmus test in the 2016 primaries. And he's failing it.

LETTING THE CHOKEHOLD COP SLIDE: GOOD CAREER MOVE

In case you had any doubts, the DA who failed to obtain an indictment against the cop whose chokehold killed Eric Garner is almost certainly going to Congress:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee commissioned a poll this month testing potential Democratic candidates to replace Rep. Michael Grimm, along with voters' opinions on the Eric Garner case....

Republicans have all but nominated Staten Island district attorney Dan Donovan, despite some concerns that Donovan's candidacy could focus attention on his role in the grand jury process that declined to indict a police officer in the death of Garner.

In a potential head-to-head matchup, the poll found 28 percent of voters would support [Democratic state assemblyman Michael] Cusick, compared to 48 percent for Donovan.

After hearing information about both candidates, support for Cusick jumped to 33 percent while Donovan stayed nearly the same, at 49 percent.

So Donovan still wins in a rout. And that's no surprise: Of the poll respondents, 50% agreed with the decision not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the Garner case; 34% disapproved (16% said "don't know" or refused to answer the question). Oh, and:

The poll also found Mayor Bill de Blasio with a 26-68 percent favorable-unfavorable rating in the district. One Democratic operative characterized those as “toxic” for any potential Democratic candidate, if Republicans can successfully make the special election a referendum on the mayor.

Well, what do you expect? According to Ballotpedia, this district is 73% white, and culturally it's never been urban or liberal.

Politico told us a couple of weeks ago that national GOP leaders were fretting over this election:

National Republicans fear they’ve got a problem on their hands in an upcoming New York City special congressional election....

Daniel Donovan, a Staten Island prosecutor and veteran political figure, is locking up the support of local GOP power brokers who will decide who runs in the election. But on Capitol Hill, party strategists are nervously taking stock of Donovan....

Washington Republicans, who are more focused than their local counterparts on how the party is perceived nationally, worry that Donovan’s candidacy would create a national spectacle and turn the election into a referendum on his handling of the racially fraught case....

Yes, but in a district that agrees with the decision not to indict Pantaleo, will the Democrats even bother to raise the subject? The DCCC poll tests several lines of attack against Donovan that have nothing to do with this case. (Example: "Dan Donovan was caught accepting $1,500 from a mob-connected waste management company that received millions of dollars in government contracts under his watch." I'm trying to resist the temptation to say: Yeah, but on Staten Island, who hasn't?) What this tells me is that Democrats are going to say little or nothing about the Garner case. And so Donovan will slide.

Whenever it comes (Governor Cuomo still has to schedule the special election), Donovan's victory will be one more small bit of evidence that the GOP is the party of white people exclusively. The election is unlikely to attract national headlines, so I'm not sure how much harm this does to the party. But it does some.

ON CLIMATE CHANGE, REPUBLICANS ARE PRETTY MUCH UNTROLLABLE

Over at The New Republic, Rebecca Leber is gleeful:

Democrats Are Trolling Republicans So Hard on Climate Change

Democrats see weakness in the GOP's stance climate change, and they’re doing everything to exploit it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has promised an open amendment process on the bill to approve the Keystone pipeline, and on Wednesday the Senate will take up six of those amendments -- two of which are Democratic efforts that will put Republicans on the spot: Are you a climate change denier or not?

Senator Brian Schatz's amendment declares that climate change is real and caused by human activity, while Sheldon Whitehouse's asserts climate change is not a hoax. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders's has a third amendment, stating the U.S. has a responsibility to act on pollution, which could be taken up at a later point.

But Republicans have wriggled out of this trap. They've taken advantage of the noncommittal wording of the Sheldon Whitehouse amendment and voted for it en masse:

The U.S. Senate has voted overwhelmingly, 98 to 1, to approve an amendment affirming that climate change is real, and "not a hoax."

... One lawmaker, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has even called climate change "a hoax."

The amendment, from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D–RI), takes a veiled jab at Inhofe, asking simply whether it is “the sense of the Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax."

In a surprise this afternoon, Inhofe rose before the vote to ask to become a cosponsor of the Whitehouse amendment. Scattered applause greeted his remarks. "The climate is always changing," he said, and always has. The hoax that he has talked about, he suggested, is that there are people who think they are so "arrogant" and "powerful" that "they can change climate."

... Inhofe was one of the last Sentors to vote, in favor. The lone no vote came from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS).

Yes, Inhofe has used the word "hoax" in reference to climate change -- but what he said was this:

"With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."

All he had to do today in order to support the Whitehouse amendment was agree that, um, the climate changes. He still doesn't believe those changes are caused by humans, or that they amount to global warming. So he agreed to an amendment that reads, in its entirety, "It is the sense of the Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax," and all but one of the other Republicans followed suit.

Inhofe argued the hoax was idea that climate change was man made, and since the amendment didn't state that, he argued he could support it

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorpNBC) January 21, 2015

Trolling averted. And now there's no reason for Republicans to vote for any of the other amendments that specifically ascribe climate change to humans, because they're on record as not being deniers, even though they still are deniers.

Senator Dan Coats expressed the sense of the GOP caucus with this tweet:

Just voted to express that climate change is not a hoax. As @varvel pointed out, in Indiana we call it “March” pic.twitter.com/TW9x0Gr6vy

— Senator Dan Coats (@SenDanCoats) January 21, 2015

Yeah, that's confusing climate and weather. But Heartland America won't mind that.

I predicted last week that if a stronger amendment from Senator Bernie Sanders is put up for a vote, nearly all Republicans will vote no, with no hesitation. I stand by that prediction.

****

UPDATE: The Brian Schatz amendment stating that "human activity significantly contributes to climate change" just got only 50 votes in the Senate, 10 fewer than it needed to overcome a filibuster. If it's voted on, the Sanders amendment won't even get that many.

****

UPDATE, THURSDAY: Regarding the Schatz amendment:

The 5 Senate Rs who voted to say “human activity significantly contributes to climate change”: Alexander, Ayotte, Collins, Graham, Kirk.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 22, 2015

IN BIZARRO WORLD U.S.A., IT'S EASIER FOR A REPUBLICAN TO SAY "POVERTY" THAN A DEMOCRAT

Charlie Pierce has a gripe about last night's State of the Union address:

As for the speech, one of the most popular current reactions has been that the president didn't mention al Qaeda, and that this was the first State Of The Union speech in 12 years that didn't refer to that particular bogeyman. I was more interested in another word that didn't appear prominently in the speech. That word was "poverty." I know, I know. All those references to helping the middle-class are sure winners, and they poll extraordinarily well, and they are fine public policy.... But the whole Democratic party emphasis on the middle-class has made me a little itchy ever since Bill Clinton discovered that it was the magic key to getting old white folks to vote for him. Poverty disappeared from the Democratic policy debates and, therefore, from the national political debate entirely....

You can't call something an anti-poverty program an anti-poverty program any more. The term no longer is politically viable, being an embarrassment to Democrats and anathema to Republicans. Poverty must appear in our national debates only as a dark threat to our embattled middle class. That's the only acceptable way to discuss it -- not as a daily crisis for millions of people, but as a potential crisis for millions more.... Poverty in this country continues to be a deep and serious problem in and of itself, and not merely a condition into which unfortunate one-time members of the middle-class might one day find themselves. It still demands specific solutions to the specific problems it presents.

It's true that the word "poverty" showed up only once in the president's speech last night, while "middle class" was uttered seven times. I think Pierce is right that Democrats shy away from the word "poverty," and embrace "middle class," because expressing concern about "poverty" suggests too much interest in helping those people.

But Republicans aren't shying away from the word "poverty" quite as much as Pierce thinks -- not that we should praise them for that. In fact, these days it seems as if Republicans absolutely relish the opportunity to say "poverty."

Here's Rand Paul using the word "poverty" eleven times in an op-ed about Ferguson that was much shorter than last night's Obama speech. Of course, Senator Paul's ideas about poverty aren't particularly enlightened:

... we’ve become two separate worlds in which the successful are educated and wait to have children until they are married, and those in poverty are primarily those without higher education and with children outside of marriage.

This message is not a racial one. The link between poverty, lack of education, and children outside of marriage is staggering and cuts across all racial groups. Statistics uniformly show that waiting to have children in marriage and obtaining an education are an invaluable part of escaping poverty.

I have no intention to scold, but escaping the poverty and crime trap will require more than just criminal justice reform. Escaping the poverty trap will require all of us to relearn that not only are we our brother’s keeper, we are our own keeper. While a hand-up can be part of the plan, if the plan doesn’t include the self-discovery of education, work, and the self-esteem that comes with work, the cycle of poverty will continue.

Yes, poverty is a real problem, says the senator -- and it's the fault of the poor.

Mitt Romney is also focused on poverty these days -- but he doesn't think it's the fault of the poor. He thinks it's the fault of liberalism:

Mitt Romney stressed the need to sharply reduce poverty in America Friday night during a speech to members of the Republican National Committee.

“Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty in American than ever before,” the former Massachusetts governor told a large crowd aboard the USS Midway Museum on San Diego Bay.

He said only Republican and conservative principles, such as focusing on education, fostering strong families and creating jobs, could solve a problem that President Lyndon Johnson first tackled 50 years ago.

“His heart was in the right place, but his policies didn’t work,” said Romney, contending Obama has failed in similar fashion to Johnson. “Their liberal policies are good for a campaign every four years, but they don’t get the job done.”

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Paul Ryan claimed to have identified "A Better Way Up From Poverty." (The key step, of course: "unwind the cycle of dependency on government.")

On the right, it's hip to talk about poverty -- in pretty much the same way it's popular in some corners of the right to talk about racism. Right-wingers are eager to decry racism -- which they define as any attempt by liberals to bring up the subject of race. Similarly, for the Republicans I've just quoted, poverty is exclusively caused by liberal culture -- either government programs meant to eradicate it or tolerance of sex and procreation outside of marriage.

Maybe a future Democrat will reclaim the word "poverty." But for now, discussing poverty is more or less a one-way taboo -- off limits for the people who actually care about eradicating it, acceptable coming from people who don't really give a damn about it.

TODAY IN HIGH-TONED BUTTHURT

Jay Cost at the Weekly Standard:

Put simply, in the face of the most Republican Congress since the 1920s, President Obama has offered a defiantly liberal agenda. It has precisely zero chance of passage.

I happen to think there is a fair bit of common ground to be found between the two parties. Corporate tax reform and corporate welfare reduction come immediately to mind. On both these issues, congressional Republicans and the president could cut back government subsidies for the wealthy and well-connected.

All together now, kids: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

In my new book I call this, pursuing Jeffersonian ends (greater equality) with Jeffersonian means (less government).

I’d add to this list, trade and immigration. In theory, common ground can be found.

Well, yes, probably trade. But immigration? Was Cost in a coma the last two years, when a few Republicans took baby steps toward immigration reform, only to run screaming from the pitchfork-wielding mob that is thier party's base? (Marco Rubio's current 2016 rank, according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages: ninth place.)

But little of that is going to happen because President Obama insists on trolling Republicans.

Yes, that's right: according to Cost, Republicans have been champing at the bit, desperate for the opportunity to work with Democrats, because nothing is more important to them than doing what's right for America, which is making democracy work via compromie -- but then Obama insulted them, so the hell with doing what's right for America, because Republicans' feelings trump America's needs. Yeah, what could be more Jeffersonian?

*****

And on a related subject, let's recall the words of Ron Fournier yesterday:

The pronouns: Count how many times Obama uses the words "I," "me," and "my." Compare that number to how often he says, "You," "we," "our." If the first number is greater than the second, Obama has failed.

Let's see: Of the president's State of the Union address and the official GOP response by Senator Joni Ernst, in which had more talk about "I" and "me"? Here, I'll give you a hint:

[Ernst's] populist conservatism was evident in nearly every passage and at times explicitly mentioned, including when she talked about the fast-food chain where she worked in her youth. “As a young girl, I plowed the fields of our family farm. I worked construction with my dad. To save for college, I worked the morning biscuit line at Hardee’s,” she said. “We were raised to live simply, not to waste. It was a lesson my mother taught me every rainy morning.

“You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry. But I was never embarrassed, because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet.”

Oh, but it was okay if her speech was all about her because that's non-elitist narcissism, which is the good kind.

CALLS FOR "SHARED SACRIFICE" ARE THE LAST REFUGE OF A BLOWHARD

Ron Fournier has just published an unsurprisingly gaseous column about President Obama's upcoming State of the Union address. Zandar and Jamelle Bouie have already addressed some of the column's worst aspects (UPDATE: Jim Newell, too), but I just want to comment on this bit of lazy, boilerplate-ish nonsense:

Among George W. Bush's greatest mistakes was not asking Americans to sacrifice in the aftermath of 9/11. He put the nation on perpetual war footing without demanding new taxes or national service. Obama inherited the so-called war on terrorism and doubled down on the mistake of thinking Americans are too cynical for sacrifice. He gives lip service to national-service programs. In his hands, proposals for higher taxes smack of class warfare rather than shared sacrifice. Can he appeal to our better angels?

Let me see if I can explain all the ways this is ridiculous.

First of all, we're just now coming out of a period that felt to most people like a deep, sustained recession. The tax plan the president has proposed -- increases for the very rich, cuts for the middle class -- reflect the (to put it mildly) uneven nature of the recovery. Fournier calls this "class warfare," but, in fact, it would represent "shared sacrifice": the non-rich have sacrificed since 2008, and now the rich might sacrifice a little to make up for the windfall they've received from the boom in their economy. What's insulting about Fournier's words is that, after most people have spent years being kicked in the gut by the economy, he wants them to stand in line for more kicks, as a patriotic duty. Why?

And when we talk about national service as "shared sacrifice," who in particular is going to do the sacrificing? Presumably not every citizen of this country, or even every adult citizen. Presumably it's going to be the young who'll do the enlisting in the military, or do the community service. But the young have had an especially hard time in this downturn; economically, they may never be able to make up for what they've lost by not getting their careers off the ground. Why do they need to sacrifice more?

And who's going to pay for all this? Fournier, being a good right-centrist, surely doesn't believe we have piles of money lying around to pay for all those national service positions. What do we sacrifice economically -- and who sacrifices -- so Fournier can experience the warm glow of knowing we have a shared sense of communing with our better angels?

And is anyone in America naive enough to believe that we could construct a truly fair national service program? Isn't it obvious that such a program would work like everything else in this country -- the children of the 1% would find ways to avoid their obligations or at least get the cushiest slots, while lower-status kids would get the dregs? How shared would this sacrifice be?

It's not clear exactly what Fournier wants, but it's obvious that he thinks we're not supposed to look at inequities in wealth and taxation over the last several decades as we raise taxes to the level that will satisfy Fournier -- now the new burden is supposed to fall on everyone equally, even though the old burden didn't and still doesn't. And as for national service, that's just automatically going to be fair across class lines, even though nothing else is in our society. Sorry, Ron, I'm not buying it.

****

UPDATE: Charlie Pierce finishes Fourier off.

AND SPEAKING OF UNSERIOUSNESS...

In The Washington Post today, former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen declares that President Obama is being unserious:

Let’s imagine you were a Democratic president who just lost control of Congress to the Republicans, and you wanted to make it really, really clear that you are not serious about governing. What would you do? Simple: Use your State of the Union address to propose hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes that will never be enacted, in order to fund a slew of new government programs that have no chance of being approved.

Welcome to President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address.

Oh, dear -- proposals that can't get through Congress! Shouldn't a president devote his State of the Union address to more serious items?

Well, let's look at the person the Republicans have chosen to give their response to the State of the Union address: newly elected Iowa senator Joni Ernst. What did she advocate in her successful campaign?

Let's ignore the pre-2014 policy positions Ernst tried to run away from, such as support for a "personhood" amendment that would ban all abortions, or opposition to the UN's harmless but, to right-wingers, terrifying Agenda 21. Let's just look at positions she espoused during her campaign for Senate.

She advocated repealing Obamacare. She said she favored abolishing the Education Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. She spoke in support of partial privatization of Social Security. She advocated an amendment to the Constitution requiring a balanced budget. When asked whether she supports a minimum-wage increase, she told an interviewer, "I do not support a federal minimum wage."

Will the federal minimum wage be repealed in the remaining two years of President Obama's term? No. Will the EPA and Education Department be abolished? No. Would Obamacare repeal or privatization of Social Security survive an Obama veto? No. Could a balanced budget amendment get a two-thirds vote in both houses of the current Congress? No.

So Joni Ernst -- the person the GOP chose to speak for the entire party after the State of the Union address -- campaigned on a lot of ideas that have absolutely no chance of passage, at least in the next two years. Many would be extraordinarily difficult to enact even if the presidency and both houses of Congress were in Republican hands.

But it's President Obama who's "not serious about governing." Right. Got it.

MARINE LE PEN HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE AN EXCELLENT FOX PUNDIT

Marine Le Pen, head of the National Front party in France, has an op-ed in The New York Times today. If you're familiar with American right-wing bloviation on foreign policy and terorism, her main recommendation will have a familiar ring:

“To misname things is to add to the world’s unhappiness.” Whether or not Albert Camus really did utter these words, they are an astonishingly apt description of the situation in which the French government now finds itself. Indeed, the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius no longer even dares pronounce the real name of things.

Mr. Fabius will not describe as “Islamists” the terrorists who on Wednesday, Jan. 7, walked into the offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, right in the heart of Paris. Nor will he use “Islamic State” to describe the radical Sunni group that now controls territory in Syria and Iraq. No reference can be made to “Islamic fundamentalism,” for fear that Islam and Islamism might get conflated. The terms “Daesh” and “Daesh cutthroats” are to be favored instead, even though in Arabic “Daesh” means the very thing to be hidden: “Islamic State.”

Let us call things by their rightful names, since the French government seems reluctant to do so. France, land of human rights and freedoms, was attacked on its own soil by a totalitarian ideology: Islamic fundamentalism. It is only by refusing to be in denial, by looking the enemy in the eye, that one can avoid conflating issues. Muslims themselves need to hear this message. They need the distinction between Islamist terrorism and their faith to be made clearly....

Once things are called what they are, the real work begins.

Really? The work of fighting these people can't even get under way until all government officials are shouting MUSLIM MUSLIM MUSLIM, carefully adding in a whisper, like Le Pen, that they distinguish "Islamic fundamentalism" from "Islam," a distinction that is likely to be ignored by enraged ordinary non-Muslim citizens?

In the past I've called this the "Rumplestiltskin" approach -- you can't act until you utter the magic word. But President Obama generally refrains from uttering the magic word, and he had Osama bin Laden killed. Does Le Pen not consider that part of "the real work"? Does she disapprove of the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was said to be a key inspiration for the Charlie Hebdo massacre, even though that killing was also set in motion by the non-"Rumplestiltskin"-uttering President Obama?

There's a case to be made that some of what Le Pen describes as "the real work" is actually counterproductive -- drone strikes that kill civilians, torture prisons, the Iraq War, surveillance exceses. But that's not what she's saying. Like so many American right-wingers, she's saying that efforts to prevent terrorist attacks can't even begin until all politicians utter the particular phrases that give right-wingers a self-righteous thrill.

This is nuts -- but it's widely believed on the right. If Le Pen ever decides to cede control of her party to someone else, she has a promising future as an American right-wing pundit.

SO THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE WHO'S REJECTED BY THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT IS ... MITT ROMNEY?

You know the narrative of many Republican primary contests in the tea party era: establishment candidate who's the favorite of the party bosses but is hated by rank-and-file voters faces off against the True Conservative choice of the people. Something like that seems to be happening in the contest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, according to a new CBS poll -- but the candidate who's being rejected by party insiders and embraced by ordinary voters isn't exactly an insurgent:

Just last week, the 2012 GOP nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, told a room of donors in New York City that he's seriously entertaining a 2016 bid.

Fifty-nine percent of Republicans would like to see Romney jump into the 2016 race, while only 26 percent believe he should stay out, according to the CBS News poll.

Wait -- I thought Republicans were begging Romney not to get in. What happened? How did he manage the highest positive score, and the top positive-to-negative ratio? Jazz Shaw at Hot Air has the numbers in table form:



Some of it is name recognition, obviously -- but that's not helping Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, or Rand Paul, all of whom have more haters than fans (and more haters than Romney has).

You have to remember that even though rank-and-file voters don't regard Mitt Romney as a true conservative, they actually liked the things Romney did that the party bosses now believe made him a terrible candidate in 2012. They agree with Romney that much of the American population -- maybe 47%, maybe more -- consists of "takers." They agree that "corporations are people." (Remember that the tea party cheered the Citizens United decision, and remember also that the Hobby Lobby decision is premised on the notion that corporations are people.) They're Randians, so they believe a "wealth creator" is entitled to keep his tax returns secret, and to have as many car elevators as he wants.

Unlike the party bosses, a lot of them don't think Romney ineptly blew a winnable race -- they think Obama stole it, through outright voter fraud, IRS trickery, giveaways to "takers," and (probably) the intervention of ACORN (which didn't exist in 2012, but never mind).

In 2014, the party bosses became very good at freezing out candidates they deemed unelectable. They may need that skill in 2016, in order to freeze out the guy they considered their most electable candidate in 2012.

FOX TURNS A TAX CUT INTO A TAX HIKE

President Obama has proposed a change in the tax code that would lower taxes for the vast majority of Americans:

President Obama will use his State of the Union address to call on Congress to raise taxes and fees on the wealthiest taxpayers and the largest financial firms to finance an array of tax cuts for the middle class....

So how does Fox Nation describe the proposal? This way:



That's right: according to this headline, Obama wants to raise your taxes, Fox Nation reader, because he thinks you aren't paying your "fair share." You. Not the rich.

I don't know what the demographics of the typical Fox Nation reader is, but according to Pew, the regular Fox News audience has far fewer high earners than most other major media outlets:



That may be because so many Fox viewers are retirees and therefore don't have much annual income anymore. Or maybe Fox viewers don't trust the pinkos at the Pew Center with anonymous income information.

Tea party members, as we know, are somewhat wealthier than the general public, though the stats suggest that they're middle-class, not really rich. Presumably, that's the Fox demographic as well. They're not the 1%. But the Fox headline is intended to make them think that President Obama wants to tax them like the 1%. And even though the text under the headline explains otherwise, I'm betting they believe the headline.

QUAYLE. PALIN. ERNST?

I said last month that I could imagine the 2016 Republican ticket being Mitt Romney and Joni Ernst, and this bit of unabashed, breathless flackery from The Hill really persuades me that she could be the 2016 running mate:

Ernst: New GOP power player

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is enjoying a meteoric rise.

Just weeks removed from being a first-term state senator, she’s now preparing to give the GOP’s response to President Obama’s State of the Union address.

It’s the first time a newly sworn-in senator will deliver the Republican remarks, but GOP leaders have good reasons for tapping the fast-rising star.

The motorcycle-riding, gun-toting, self-described “farm girl” is also the first female combat veteran to ever serve in the Senate — and the first woman to ever win a race for federal office in Iowa. She’s guaranteed to be a power player heading into the 2016 presidential race as an influential voice in the swing state, and a potential kingmaker in the state’s influential caucuses....

Charlie Pierce refers to Politico as "Tiger Beat on the Potomac"; generally speaking, no publication deserves that designation more than Politico, but this Hill piece is extreme in its uncritical gush even by the standards of Politico at its worst.

Please notice two things: this piece appears in The Hill, not at Breitbart, and Ernst was chosen to deliver the State of the Union response by party bosses, not by tea party crazies. That means that although you know and I know that Ernst is an Agenda 21-fearing, nullification-invoking, impeachment-endorsing extremist who's agreed in the past that bureaucrats implementing Obamacare should be arrested and jailed, she's being promoted by the GOP establishment. These people may fear the likes of Ted Cruz, but even though she's been his ideological soul mate, they like her. They like her a lot. She ticks off so many demographic boxes -- she's young, she's female (and the sort of woman they think will appeal to the socially conservative married women who do vote GOP but might like Hillary Clinton in 2016), she's a war veteran (at a time when not one of the men contending for the presidency in their party has ever seen combat, and the vast majority have never even served)....

So they think they can disappear her past -- and in her electoral victory in Iowa, which still votes Democrat at the presidential level, that was certainly the case.

She stopped talking the extremist talk as she was running in 2014, and if she keeps that up, they probably can browbeat the mainstream press into refraining from bringing up her past positions. However, if she remains very conservative, she's just the sort of person who winds up in the #2 slot on the GOP ticket as a counterweight to a presidential candidate whose right-wing bona fides the base doesn't trust (and with the exception of Reagan and George W. Bush, the base never thinks the nominee is conservative enough). Think Poppy Bush and Dan Quayle, or John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Of course, the tickets I've mentioned lost two out of three elections. But in Palin's case, at least, we haven't been able to get rid of her ever since, and she retains some power to poison debate on serious issues.

And this time, if it's Ernst on the ticket, it looks as if it won't be the nominee making a bad decision all by himself -- it'll be the party elders poring over poll and focus-group results and foisting her on the public.

She's dangerous. She has some charisma. And if the nominee is Romney, Bush, Christie, or Rubio in particular -- anyone who seems insufficiently conservative and rural for the Republican rank-and-file -- she really could be the #2.

TO CONSERVATIVES, ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE SAME PLACE: GALT'S GULCH

Mitt Romney is rebranding himself again, this time as a poverty fighter:

In his first public appearance since his surprise announcement that he will seriously consider a third campaign for the White House, Romney offered an economic message that represented a dramatic departure from the themes he sounded in losing the 2012 campaign to President Obama.

“Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before,” Romney said. “Under this president, his policies have not worked. Their liberal policies are good every four years for a campaign, but they don’t get the job done.”

... He added, “People want to see rising wages and they deserve them.”

Washington Monthly's Mark Kleiman regards this rebranding as a positive sign, but Kleiman misinterprets what Romney's saying:

I notice that progressive bloggers and Tweeters are pointing and laughing at poor little Mitt Romney for his sudden outburst of populism. But it seems to me that, as pleasant as laughter is, what’s really called for is a smile of grim satisfaction....

The Red team - up until today - has believed, or at least said, that market-driven inequality reflects natural differences in economic contribution and is therefore just, while taking from “producers” and “job creators” and giving to the “47%” is unjust, and that the great inequality of outcome maintains incentives and thus contributes to efficiency. They love to criticize redistributive policies as “class warfare” and emphasize the importance of making the pie bigger rather than carving it up more equally, along with (formal) equality of opportunity rather than equality of result.

So when Mitt Romney describes rising levels of disparity - the rich getting richer while the number of poor people increases - as “income inequality getting worse,” he is making a major rhetorical concession to the good-guy side.

But Romney's not conceding anything -- he's not conceding that liberals have it right and he's not conceding that it's necessary to redistribute some wealth from the haves to the have-nots.

Just the opposite, in fact:

He cited former president Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty half a century ago. Johnson’s intentions were good, he said, but his policies had not worked. He argued that Republicans must persuade voters that conservative policies can “end the scourge of poverty” in America.

So he's saying that the same policies the right has always advocated are still the best policies -- and those, of course, would be huge cuts in social programs, tax cuts (primarily benefiting the rich), and significantly curtailed government regulation. For the good of the poor!

That's what conservatives believe, or at least what they're arguing lately: not that inequality under Obama is the result of conservative aspects of his economic approach (such as favoritism toward the big banks), and not that the rejection of greater amounts of stimulus or other anti-poverty programs (such as infrastructure development) by conservatives in Congress is harming the poor, and not that increasing inequality is a long-term trend, greatly exacerbated by changes that began in the Reagan era and have never truly been reversed (such as huge shifts in the tax burden away from the rich and corporations).

No, what conservatives are telling us these days is: liberalism = inequality. Social spending causes inequality. They're never quite clear on how this is supposed to happen, but they're certain that, given the fact that Obama is (as they're always telling us) the most left-wing president ever (Franklin Delano who?), and given the fact that (as they're also always telling us) he's had unchallenged, absolute, dictatorial control of the American government for six years (Senator Mitch who?), then if we have increasing inequality, it follows logically that it's 100% the failure of pure, undiluted, hard-core liberalism.

So, no, Mark, the right isn't conceding anything. It's just finding a new route to the same old endpoint: Cut taxes, cut spending, cut regulation, repeat ad infinitum.

HERO OF THE RIGHT SAYS WORST POSSIBLE THING, ACCORDING TO THE RIGHT

What's the worst thing you can possibly say about the Charlie Hebdo massacre and other such attacks, according to the American right? What do right-wingers think is the most naive, self-deluded response you can possibly have to this sort of terrorism?

Rich Lowry, writing in the New York Post, is happy to answer that:

The ‘nothing to do with Islam’ lunacy

It’s settled: The Paris terror attacks had almost nothing to do with Islam.

Consider that on the one hand, you have the chilling new tape of the Charlie Hebdo attackers declaring, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad,” and on the other, you have the tortured assurances of White House spokesman Josh Earnest. Which are you going to believe?

The Obama administration’s mind-bogglingly determined refusal to say that we are at war with “radical Islam,” together with the left’s evasions about Islamic terrorism, means that there has been a haze of euphemism around what should be a galvanizing event in the West’s fight against terror.

Yeah -- why can't President Obama be more like French prime minister Manuel Valls, who became a hero to the right when he said, after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, “We are at war.... It’s a war against terrorism and radical Islamism, against everything that would break our solidarity, our liberty, our fraternity.” Not only is Valls unafraid to use the phrase "radical Islamism," he's even spoken of "Islamic fascism rising everywhere" ("un fascisme islamiste qui monte un peu partout"). He's also the French official who said, "If 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France." He would never be so naive as to say that extremist groups in the West and the Middle East aren't Islamic!

Oh, wait -- The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg tells us he said precisely that:

“It is very important to make clear to people that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS,” Valls told me.

Oops.

Valls said this while engaging in a different semantic debate: He rejects the term "Islamophobia" precisely because he distinguishes "Islamism" from Islam. Here's that quote in context:

“It is very important to make clear to people that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS,” Valls told me. “There is a prejudice in society about this, but on the other hand, I refuse to use this term 'Islamophobia,' because those who use this word are trying to invalidate any criticism at all of Islamist ideology. The charge of 'Islamophobia' is used to silence people. ”

And, in fact, even when he used the term "radical Islamism" and sent a thrill up so many American right-wingers' legs, he distinguished "radical Islamism" from Islam. Here's a fuller version of that quote (emphasis added):

“We are at war -- not a war against a religion, not a war against a civilization, but to defend our values, which are universal,” Valls said.

“It’s a war against terrorism and radical Islamism, against everything that would break our solidarity, our liberty, our fraternity.”

The problem is that Valls may carefully make this distinction, but many of the people who are demanding a harder line from President Obama simply don't. Here's Franklin Graham, the preacher who was instrumental in getting Duke University to reverse its decision to permit a weekly Muslim call to prayer from its chapel tower:

“That violence is there and it's coming and it's going to come to this country. It has nothing to do with what I say. I'm just trying to warn this country about what's coming. Islam is a violent religion.”

If Valls is denounced as "Islamophobic" because he has harsh words for "radical Islamism," it's because many others who denounce "radical Islam," unlike Valls, blame the religion as a whole. If Valls doesn't like being called Islamophobic, he should blame the Franklin Grahams in his own country and the rest of the world. Valls says he's not at war with a religion -- but they are.

JINDAL: IT'S NOT JUST "NO-GO ZONES"

I'm glad USA Today is writing about Bobby Jindal's upcoming speech in London, which I told you about on Wednesday:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a potential candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, will give a speech Monday in London and reiterate the disputed claim that Muslim immigrants have created "no-go zones" in Europe where non-Muslims are not welcome....

"In the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home," Jindal's text reads. "It is startling to think that any country would allow, even unofficially, for a so called 'no-go zone.' The idea that a free country would allow for specific areas of its country to operate in an autonomous way that is not free and is in direct opposition to its laws is hard to fathom."

The "no-go zones" theory became a bit of an international incident over the weekend when Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism said on FoxNews that in parts of France, Britain, Sweden and Germany, Muslim immigrants have set up enclaves where the host nations "don't exercise any sovereignty." He added that in the United Kingdom there are even entire cities -- specifically the city of Birmingham -- "where non-Muslims simply don't go in."

British Prime Minister David Cameron responded: "When I heard this frankly, I choked on my porridge and I thought it must be April Fools Day. This guy is clearly a complete idiot."

On Wednesday, quoting a Weekly Standard story, I told you about this aspect of Jindal's speech, but I neglected to mention another excerpt the Standard quoted:

"In my country, Christianity is the largest religion. And we require exactly no one to conform to it. And we do not discriminate against anyone who does not conform to it. It’s called freedom.

"A so-called religion that allows for and endorses killing those who oppose it is not a religion at all, it is a terrorist movement...."

By saying this, Jindal is throwing in his lot with those who argue that Islam should be denied First Amendment freedom-of-religion protection in America -- a disturbingly common idea on the right. For instance, here's freshman Georgia congressman Jody Hice, speaking during last year's campaign:

"Most people think Islam is a religion, it’s not. It’s a totalitarian way of life with a religious component," he said. "But it’s much larger. It’s a geo-political system that has governmental, financial, military, legal and religious components. And it’s a totalitarian system that encompasses every aspect of life and it should not be protected [under U.S. law]."

Hice didn't stop there.

"This is not a tolerant, peaceful religion even though some Muslims are peaceful. Radical Muslims believe that Sharia is required by God and must be imposed worldwide," he said. "It’s a movement to take over the world by force. A global caliphate is the objective. That’s why Islam would not qualify for First Amendment protection since it’s a geopolitical system ... This is a huge thing to realize and I hope you do. This will impact our lives if we don’t get a handle on it."

Hic is seen as one of the most extreme members of Congress -- but Jindal is right out there with him.

Assuming Jindal gets into the presidential race, it's clear that Ted Cruz is not going to be the candidate who's furthest to the right.

****

Incidentally, Fox is report is reportedly planning to respond to Emerson's statement about "no-go zones" by broadcasting a correction. Given Fox's track record, that's extraordinary -- though we'll see how far the correction goes.

JAMES TAYLOR? OH, ALL RIGHT, WHY NOT?

My first reaction to this was a sense of Boomer embarrassment:

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry paid respect in both English and French on Friday to the victims of last week's terrorist attacks in Paris in a show of American solidarity with the French people....

"I represent a nation grateful each day that France is our oldest ally," he said before introducing his friend, musician James Taylor, who performed his hit "You've Got a Friend," starting with several bars of the French national anthem.....

It seemed like something Malia and Sasha should have prevented with an eyeroll. Dad music? Seriously? Eeeeuuuwww!

Saying that on Twitter got me into a Raw Story roundup of right-wingers casting aspersions on the administration. But my objections were really aesthetic -- I'm a 55-year-old white guy, old enough to remember when this song was a hit; I was a seventh-grade softy at the time who liked mellow music more than was good for me. Now I have a love-hate relationship with it.

My instinct was to mock, but clearly the song was met with a considerable amount of applause. (Taylor, as Raw Story notes, was made a Chevalier del'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010.) And if this seemed to some (and, initially, to me) like an inappropriate, tone-deaf American response for a country that's just suffered through days of unsettling violence, well, recall that a key moment during the solidarity rally in Paris happened when a resident played John Lennon's "Imagine" out an apartment window, inspiring a spontaneous singalong.



I remember when songs like thia were on the charts. It was the time of Cambodia, Kent State, Altamont ... I was just a kid, but there was clearly a sense that the 1960s had unleashed some furies. (Everyone's immediate assumption on first hearing Taylor's "Fire and Rain" was that Suzanne had died of a drug overdose.) Some people wanted to listen to soft rock and secular hymns as an antidote to the craziness. And maybe a lot of French people feel the same way now.

The right is susceptible to this impulse as well. After 9/11, when we had a Republican president, there was a lot of chest-thumping country music, but there was also "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning" by Alan Jackson, a country tearjerker about the attacks.



Right-wingers think a Republican president would never go soft with a war on, but a few years later, while the Iraq conflict was still raging, Alan Jackson wound up in a White House-produced Christmas video starring the Bushes' dogs. Tony Blair also had a cameo.



Oh, and on a related matter, remember Jake Tapper's harrumphy assertion that President Obama should have gone to the Paris march because of how the French responded to 9/11?

You also have to look at the fact of, who was the first world leader to come to the United States after the trauma in 2001 who was it? The President of France, Jacques Chirac came to Washington D.C. and New York right after 9/11, within a week and a half or so. I don’t think that’s a mistake.

Well, as Tapper's current employer reported at the time:

Chirac's visit was scheduled well in advance of the terrorist attacks....

Just wanted to note that for the record.

NOONAN'S "ANONYMOUS" SOURCE

Peggy Noonan uses today's column to try to talk Mitt Ronney out of running for president again -- but first she recounts a conservation she had at a Republican retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with an elected official whose identity she carefully conceals:

A conversation with a Republican governor who is a possible presidential aspirant:

... to the governor I said, in a world in which foreign affairs continue to be more important than ever, in a dangerous world with which we have ever more dealings, shouldn’t we be thinking about senators for the presidency, and not governors?

He listened closely, nodded, then shook his head. No, he said, governors still have the advantage. Why? Because foreign policy still comes down, always, to your gut, your instincts. And your instincts are sharpened by the kind of experience you get as a chief executive in a statehouse, which is constant negotiation with antagonists who have built-in power bases. You learn what works from success and failure with entrenched powers that can undo you, from unions to local pressure groups to unreliable allies. Being a governor is about handling real and discernible power. A governor can learn what a senator knows more easily than a senator can learn what a governor knows.

Gosh, I can't imagine who that extremely anonymous governor with presidential aspirations could be.

You don't suppose it's this guy, do you?

Gov. Chris Christie has little doubt about it: The next president of the United States will be a governor.

The governor ... said “the American people are done with that experiment” of having people who served in Congress moving into the White House....

“We’re better at it,” responded Christie when asked if he thought the next president would be a governor. “I do.”

Christie, speaking at an annual Republican Governors Association conference alongside fellow GOP executives, argued governors have experience “running large enterprises.”

Noonan says the anonymous governor told her that "foreign policy still comes down, always, to your gut, your instincts." Why, that reminds me of an anecdote that appeared in Collision 2012, Dan Balz's book about the 2012 campaign:

Christie ... hardly needs prodding to talk about how many “unsolicited phone calls” came in asking him to run [for president in 2012].... He told [Henry] Kissinger that he honestly didn’t think he could run yet.

“I haven’t given any deep thought to foreign policy,” Christie admitted.

“Don’t worry about that,” said Kissinger, according to Christie. “We can work with you on that. Foreign policy is instinct, it’s character, that’s what foreign policy is.”

And the bit about dealing with "entrenched powers that can undo you" sure sounds like Christie, although the lace-curtain-Irish prose of Noonan's paraphrase is probably a pale version of what Christie actually said, which I'm sure had a lot more Mario Puzo in it.

So, Peggy, don't bother. We know who your source is.

BUT WHY SHOULDN'T 63-YEAR-OLD WHITE MALE OSCAR VOTERS VOTE FOR BLACK NOMINEES?

This is pathetic:

For only the second time in nearly two decades, the 20 Academy Awards acting nominations went to a group made up entirely of white actors and actresses.

Among the notable snubs was David Oyelowo, who received praise for his turn as the late Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma.

In 2011, the 20 nominees also were entirely white. Before that, one has to go back to 1998 for an all-white acting group.

Selma was also snubbed for best director, best screenplay, and all technical awards. Why did this happen? Vox's Todd VanDerWerff thinks the answer is simple: "because the average Oscar voter is a 63-year-old white man."

But if that's the reason -- and I think it is -- what that says about the Academy is even worse than it seems.

Think about a 63-year-old white man. Assuming his 64th birthday will come later this year, he was born in 1951. That means he's old enough to remember the events depicted in Selma, which takes place in 1965, when he was 14. Granted, at that age he might have been more interested in sex or sports or movies or finding ways to buy beer. But how do you live through the civil rights era as a young person and not feel some connection to those events? You were 17 when Martin Luther King died -- how does that have no impact on you? And look at you now -- you're in an industry that prides itself on political progressivism. And even if you're a suit, you're in a business that calls itself creative -- do you do this while completely lacking empathy for anyone who's not like you?

Given the sorry state of most of Hollywood's output -- the CGI roman-numeral blockbusters and comedies about farting boy-men, greenlighted mostly by white males -- and given the near-total freeze-out of women in directorial roles (or in most acting roles beyond male stars' arm candy), I guess I know the answer. And it's pathetic.

Yes, sixty-something white men gave us a white Oscars. But given what they've lived through -- not just the civil rights movement, but all the other movements for human dignity of people other than Caucasian males -- sixty-something white men ought to have even a passing interest in people who aren't like themselves.

Narcissism: I guess that's associated with movies, too. That's the real problem here.

****

ALSO:

And that distinguishes it from every biopic that won an Oscar how exactly? @pbump

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) January 16, 2015

MICHIGAN GOVERNOR ENDS HIS POLITICAL CAREER

Republican Rick Snyder, who just won reelection as governor of Michigan, did the right thing today:

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) bucked the National Rifle Association on Thursday and vetoed a concealed carry gun bill that would have allowed some people with restraining orders issued against them for domestic violence to carry a concealed pistol....

The bill would have revised current Michigan law to state that if an individual with a temporary personal protective order issued against him for domestic violence is not explicitly prohibited by a judge from having a gun, that person can legally obtain a concealed pistol license. Current law states that anyone with a PPO issued against him is prohibited from carrying a gun concealed....

The National Rifle Association had tried to neutralize the opposition to the bill that was related to domestic violence and pressure Snyder to sign it....

Ian Millhiser of Think Progress responded to to this by tweeting:

BREAKING: MI gov disqualifies himself from winning another GOP primary by siding w/ domestic abuse victims over NRA. http://t.co/UfrXuZ6wGE

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) January 15, 2015

Millhiser is right, but Snyder hasn't just guaranteed himself a loss in any future primaries -- as the twice-elected Republican governor of an electoral-vote-rich blue state, Snyder had been mentioned as a possible dark-horse presidential candidate, which means he stands a good chance of being on pundit short lists for the #2 spot on the GOP ticket. But don't listen to any pundit in 2016 who beings up his name for VP -- this veto closes the door on any possibility that he'll be on the ticket, especially given the fact that Republican base voters will almost certainly believe that their presidential nominee is a weak-willed RINO (as they always do, no matter who it is), and will want a fire-breather to balance him out (again, as they always do).

So thanks for the veto, governor. Best of your luck in your final term of elected office.

PEOPLE USED TO GETTING WHAT THEY WANT VS. ROMNEY

I'm struck by the discrepancy in reactions to Mitt Romney's presidential moves.

From the GOP elites:

Leading the anti-Romney charge was the voice of the GOP establishment wing, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. “The question the former Massachusetts Governor will have to answer,” the newspaper wrote, “is why he would be a better candidate than he was in 2012... The answer is not obvious.”

The Journal’s owner, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, piled on: “He had his chance, he mishandled it, you know? I thought Romney was a terrible candidate.”

From the Republican rank-and-file:

Mitt Romney is leading yet another GOP presidential poll....

The new poll from Townhall and Gravis Marketing shows Romney tops among Iowa Republicans with 21 percent of registered voters. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is the second-highest-polling candidate with 14 percent....

Well, the folks in the Republican rank-and-file may be narrow-minded, paranoid rage junkies, but they're still ordinary people -- they're not used to having things go their way 100% percent of the time. Rupert Murdoch and the fat cats who are The Wall Street Journal's target market expect more out of life -- maybe they knew the presidency was out of reach in 2008, the way Murdoch knew he'd have to pay some small price when the phone-hacking scandal hit, but except in those moments when circumstances are really against them, they expect to win all the time. They think it's their due.

The 2012 election was supposed to be winnable. Fat cats aren't used to losing winnable fights. Losing that election wasn't a disappointment to the fat cats -- it was flat-out unacceptable. Fat cats expect to win every winnable battle. And given the way society is constructed, that's not an unreasonable expectation.

So no wonder they hate Romney -- to them, losing wasn't an option.