Author: Eli

I see Mr. Krauthammer has joined the right-wing chorus decrying President Obama for his failure to embrace a properly Serious “nuke ‘em all and let God sort them out” approach to foreign policy:

Under the old doctrine, supported by every president of both parties for decades, any aggressor ran the risk of a cataclysmic U.S. nuclear response that would leave the attacking nation a cinder and a memory.

(…)

Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker is up to date with its latest IAEA inspections, well, it gets immunity from nuclear retaliation. (Our response is then restricted to bullets, bombs and other conventional munitions.)

(…)

Apart from being morally bizarre, the Obama policy is strategically loopy. Does anyone believe that North Korea or Iran will be more persuaded to abjure nuclear weapons because they could then carry out a biological or chemical attack on the United States without fear of nuclear retaliation?

I love the notion that Iraq and Afghanistan got off easy, as if being invaded and ransacked and then enduring years of occupation and terror is some kind of bargain.

But what’s most remarkable is how the neocons can go from weeping crocodile tears for The Poor Oppressed Peoples Of The World and arguing that we need to use force to bring them The Sacred Gospel Of Democracy… to stamping their feet because the President doesn’t want to incinerate those very same people for the crimes of the rulers we were supposed to want to save them from.

On the other hand, if you define “liberate” as “blow the shit out of,” then I guess dropping a few nukes is just about the most liberatingest thing you can possibly do.  I’m sure the five survivors would all be incredibly grateful.

 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Unscrupulous industry engages in amoral business practices, uses its political influence to block meaningful reform and neutralize its regulators, catastrophe ensues.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

The health care industry avoided accountability for exorbitant rate hikes, overmarketed and undertested products, and rescission of insurance coverage for trivial reasons.  They killed the public option, and the reform bill that was supposed to rein them in turned into a bailout instead.

The financial industry looks like it’s going to avoid accountability for crashing the economy with dodgy financial instruments while regulators looked the other way; instead of fines and jail time, they got a $700 billion bailout.  It appears unlikely that they’re going to be subjected to any meaningful reform either.

And now 25 Massey Energy miners are dead because OSHA couldn’t do anything more than levy fines for the thousands of safety violations at Upper Big Branch, and Don Blankenship decided he would rather pay than address worker safety.

These are just the most recent and high-profile examples of a business community implacably and successfully opposed to regulation and oversight in general.  As dday puts it in his post on OSHA’s enfeeblement:

The Reagan revolution ushered out real enforcement of industry and ushered in industry capture or resource starvation. This has continued largely unchecked until today.

In any kind of sane and rational world, no industry would be allowed to write its own regulations or choose its own regulators, or to pressure the government into starving oversight agencies… but that is exactly what has happened, over and over and over again.  And our elected officials allow this not because it’s good for the country, or good for their constituents.  They allow it because corporations can deliver more money to their campaign, or to their spouse, or to their life after government than we can.

To put it another way: The Chamber of Commerce and all the industry lobbyists don’t win because they’re smarter than we are, or better organized than we are, or better messagers than we are.  They win because they have more money to promise to their friends, and to the enemies of their enemies.  Campaign finance is the means by which the system is gamed, and until we find a way to fix this institutionalized corruption, we will continue to see an endless parade of pro-corporate Democrats pushing pro-corporate sham bills that reform nothing.

 

Stephen Colbert once joked that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”  Unfortunately, there’s a loophole: No one experiences anything but the most immediate reality directly.  There’s always some kind of filter in between, whether it be word-of-mouth, newspaper, radio, or television.  And whoever controls those filters, essentially controls the reality of everyone who uses them.

Republicans and conservatives grasped this decades ago, and by the time Democrats and progressives caught on it was too late: A small number of corporate conglomerates and right-wing gazillionaires gobbled up talk radio and most of the news media, and now use them to relentlessly push conservative frames and convince America that it is a center-right nation (at the very least).  They’ve seized control of the filters, and they’re taking full advantage.

But the news media only cover the small sliver of reality that is the present and the recent past.  What about farther back?  Decades?  Centuries?  Well, the conservatives have that covered too:

The right is rewriting history.

The most ballyhooed effort is under way in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state.

(…)

In articles and speeches, on radio and TV, conservatives are working to redefine major turning points and influential figures in American history, often to slam liberals, promote Republicans and reinforce their positions in today’s politics.

The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.

Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.

Joe McCarthy? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.

I used to think of all these stories about the crazy Texas School Board trying to alter history and science as separate from the right’s media takeover, and from the steady drone of climate denialism, but now I’m thinking they’re each just one side of the same four-dimensional coin.  The right views information itself as a threat, and they’re doing everything they can to combat it and co-opt it.

After all, informed voters might decide to vote for sane candidates over crazy dishonest hatemongers.  Informed students might grow up to be favorably disposed to the successes of progressivism over the failures of conservatism.  And informed policymakers might decide that the survival of the planet is a lot more important than Exxon Mobil’s profit margins… or at least their constituents would.

It’s quite audacious when you think about it.  Rather than accepting reality and adapting their ideology to it, the right instead embarked on a massive multi-decade coordinated effort to adapt reality to their ideology. Instead of asking reality what it could teach them, they decided to fight it to the death.  And if they win, everyone loses.

 

In a shocking turn of events, the Republican Party has fired Osama bin Laden from his long-term position as Chief Fearmonger & Boogeyman.  Mr. bin Laden received a letter earlier this afternoon informing him that his services will no longer be required, citing three principal reasons  for his dismissal:

1) The GOP is very sensitive to the American people’s concerns about unemployment, and does not want to outsource essential party functions to overseas contractors in an election year.

2) The GOP and its various Tea Party and conservative movement affiliates have aggressively cultivated their own in-house fearmongering capabilities over the past two years, and are now much more confident in their ability to terrorize American citizens without outside aid.  They also believe that their personal, grassroots approach is better able to microtarget Democrats and progressives than Mr. bin Laden’s more impersonal “big bang” style.

Additionally, the Republican base responded so enthusiastically to the GOP’s efforts to elevate Barack Obama to Boogeyman status that Mr. bin Laden simply became superfluous in  that role.  He will be allowed to retain the honorary title of “Boogeyman Emeritus.”

3) The letter also refers to Mr. bin Laden’s declining productivity.  While his September 11 operation enabled the Republican Party to win a string of electoral and policy victories over Democrats, the Constitution, the environment and the Geneva Convention, Mr. bin Laden’s output has been sporadic since then, limited to offshore operations and the occasional threatening audio- or videotape.

The letter acknowledges that President Bush probably would not have won re-election without bin Laden’s help, but speculates that his “slacking off” was at least partly responsible for their massive losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

It concludes by thanking Mr. bin Laden for his nine years of service advancing Republican interests, and suggests that he might find lucrative employment at a conservative think tank or online publication if he is willing to adopt a more “clean-cut” appearance.

Mr. bin Laden was not available for comment.

Tags: conservatives, fearmongering, GOP, Osama bin Laden, Republicans, tea partiers, teabaggers, Terrorism, threats, vandalism

 

So, Obama and the Democrats have triumphed in their heroic struggle to protect the little guy, right?  The rapacious health care industry is licking its wounds and wondering how it’ll ever survive, right?  Umm… not so much.  As David Ignatius points out:

The winners included many hospital and nursing home chains. Also up were some major drug-makers and drug distributors. And while results for health insurers were mixed, some of the biggest and best-managed companies, such as Aetna and United Health, saw gains.

Attempts to decode the stock market are often delusional, but here’s what I think Wall Street is saying: The health-care sector can anticipate a whole lot more government money headed its way, and the new legislation won’t do much to cut costs – or health-industry revenues and profits.

No kidding.  After all their rhetoric about how terrible the health care industry is, Obama and the Democrats have just delivered them a captive market of 16 million new customers – new customers who will actually serve as a passthrough for $464 billion (p. 22 of CBO PDF) of government money to the health care sector over the next ten years.  And all without any competition or cost controls to keep make them honest.

True, the insurance industry will be required to spend 80-85% of that on health care (or maybe not), but that still leaves them with at least $70 billion… and the hospitals and drug companies with the rest.  And that’s not even counting what their millions of new customers will have to pay out of pocket for premiums and copays and deductibles.

So while the Republicans talk tough right now about how they’re going to repeal this horrible bill which socialistically takes over the health care industry by throwing staggering sums of money at it, it’s just not ever going to happen.  Not because it would be politically unpopular, but because AHIP and PhRMA simply won’t let them.  It’ll be like watching a bizarro mirror image of the death of the public option, as repeal magically shrinks from a must-have moral-imperative campaign promise to a tiny expendable sliver of the GOP’s grand tort reform/HSAs vision.

Tags: david ignatius, Health care, health care industry, hospitals, insurance, pharma, stock market, Washington Post

 

Hey, remember last year when it seemed like everyone was repeating FDR’s “I agree with you. I want to do it. Now make me do it.” mantra to suggest that despite Obama’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for progressive policies, he simply needed us to push him so he’d have a pretext for doing the right thing?

How’d that work out for us?

Consider: Through the tireless work of Jane and many others, the progressive community got 60+ representatives to pledge to oppose any health care reform bill that did not contain a public option; a bloc that would make such a bill impossible to pass.  That sounds pretty “make me do it,” right?  (Sure, now the progressives are folding like they always do, but Obama could have easily pretended to take them seriously.)

And what happened?  First Obama made no attempt to pressure Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman to vote for cloture – and only cloture – on the public option, nor did he ever press Harry Reid to try to pass it through reconciliation.

Then, when Scott Brown took Teddy Kennedy’s seat and forced reconciliation back onto the table, Obama still made no effort to push for the once-again-attainable public option, and even excluded it from his own sidecar proposal, despite the high probability that it would pass, the progressive PO-Or-Bust pledge, and the new “Public Option Please” letter.

Only when the public option was safely removed from the conversation did Obama and all his supporting organizations unleash all the personal arm-twisting and full-court press that we crazy hippies were supposedly so unrealistic to expect from them last year.

Which makes me wonder what Obama really wanted to do and who he wanted to make him do it.  The progressives who formed a voting bloc that, if it held, would have made it impossible to pass health care reform without thepublic option?  The Liebercrats who threatened to vote against cloture unless the public option was eliminated?  Or the Republicans whose unrelenting obstructionism gave Obama the excuse he needed to cave in on the public option even though they were essentially irrelevant to a reconciliation vote?

When the “make me do it” bar is so much higher for progressives than it is for Republicans and Nelsons and Liebermans, it’s awfully hard to believe that we were the kindred spirits Obama was looking to for help.  In fact, it almost looks as though Obama made some kind of secret deal to ensure that the public option would never see the light of day, but surely that’s crazy talk.

(For a superfun extra-credit assignment, try asking the “Who does Obama want to ‘make me do it’?” question about other progressive policy issues, like financial industry reform, climate change, LGBT rights, immigration, EFCA, civilian trials, etc, and see what you come up with.)

Tags: Barack Obama, Ben Nelson, Congress, Democrats, health care reform, House, Joe Lieberman, public option, Republicans, Senate

 

Yet another state circling Bathtub America’s drain:

To close a deficit that he asserted was approaching a staggering $11 billion, [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie called for the layoffs of 1,300 state workers, closings of state psychiatric institutions, an $820 million cut in aid to public schools, and nearly half a billion dollars less in aid to towns and cities. He also suspended until May 2011 a popular property-tax rebate program, breaking one of his own campaign promises.

Democrats were quick to characterize Mr. Christie’s proposal as falling disproportionately on the backs of the middle class, poor, elderly, schoolchildren, college students and inner-city residents, while leaving largely unscathed the wealthy and most businesses.

(…)

“Today, we are fulfilling the promise of a smaller government that lives within its means,” [Christie] said at a joint legislative session here. “The defenders of the status quo have already begun to yell and scream. They will try to demonize me. They will seek to divide us rather than unite us. But even they know in their hearts, if not yet in their minds — it is time for a change.”

I was going to list all the ways this lean, efficient budget will cut services and increase expenses for the poor and middle class, but I keep coming back to this:

The battle to ensue is likely to shape up around the so-called millionaire’s tax, a one-year income-tax surcharge on people making more than $400,000 that Mr. Christie vowed not to renew. (Democrats allowed it to lapse in December.) If that surcharge were renewed, it would bring in close to $1 billion.

In his speech, Mr. Christie reaffirmed his stance on the issue, saying New Jersey’s tax burden was already the nation’s costliest. “Mark my words today: If a tax increase is sent to my desk, I will veto it,” he said.

That’s the essence of Bathtub America right there: Cutting the education budget so you can eliminate a tax on millionaires.  Christie even has the nerve to say that “the watchwords of this budget are shared sacrifice and fairness,” when most of that sacrifice will be borne by ordinary people so that the rich can be spared.

The NYT story points out that this is happening in several states with Republican governors, which makes perfect sense.  The “starve-the-beast” strategy isn’t so effective with a federal government that can borrow almost indefinitely, but it works like gangbusters on state governments that have to balance their budgets each year.  State-level Republicans simply insist that any tax increases on corporations or wealth would start a job-destroying death spiral, thus making draconian cuts the only option, as deeply regrettable as it might be.

Sure, the government kinda stops working, but everyone knows that the private sector does a much better job anyway.  If you can afford it.

Tags: bathtub america, Chris Christie, conservatives, New Jersey, Republicans, wankers

 

By now most of you have probably heard about Constance McMillen, the lesbian student who wanted to take her girlfriend to the prom, and her high school’s Solomon-like solution to this embarrassing dilemma:

With the backing of the ACLU, McMillen fought an Itawamba County school board to be able to take her lesbian partner and wear a tuxedo to the Itawamba County Agricultural High School prom….

The school board responded Wednesday by announcing they were canceling the entire prom, scheduled for April 2.

Yes, that’s right – rather than accommodate one gay couple by allowing them to have the same prom experience as everyone else, the school took prom away from everybody.  But hey, it’s only prom, I’m sure most students don’t care about it at all.  It’s not a big deal like, say, health care…

Employees at Catholic Charities were told Monday that the social services organization is changing its health coverage to avoid offering benefits to same-sex partners of its workers….

Starting Tuesday, Catholic Charities will not offer benefits to spouses of new employees or to spouses of current employees who are not already enrolled in the plan. A letter describing the change in health benefits was e-mailed to employees Monday, two days before same-sex marriage will become legal in the District.

Phew!  That was a close one!  Fortunately, they were able to prevent gay spouses from sharing employee health benefits by simply not offering spousal coverage to anyone who doesn’t have it.  As Teddy pointed out to me, this is not an entirely new trend:

In order to keep the East High Gay-Straight Alliance from meeting, the school board ultimately banned all non-curricular clubs at public high schools. The board then began to re-define selected clubs as “curricular” in order to allow them to meet.

The Salt Lake City school board was clever enough to find a loophole, but their initial reaction was full nuclear bannination of everything, just like Itawamba and Catholic Charities.

It’s amazing and sad.  These social conservatives are so full of spite, they hate gays so much that they would deprive everybody rather than let Teh Ghey have even the tiniest scrap of what everyone else has – or see our military start recruiting at Supermax prisons rather than let gays serve openly.  Hell, it’s probably only a matter of time before the religious right tries to ban sex and marriage just to allay the nagging suspicion that somehow, somewhere, a homosexual might be having a good time.

Sadly, this spiteful streak is not limited to homophobia.  Remember the fight over Obama’s stimulus bill, when Republicans were up in arms because it had all this money for stuff like unemployment insurance and food stamps?  Never mind that those are far and away the most effective ways to pump money back into the economy.  No, God forbid we should ever give money to those people that they haven’t earned with the sweat of their brow – like derivatives traders.

Or how about when Republicans claimed that undocumented immigrants would benefit from the health care reform bill?  Or S-CHIP?  Or the stimulus?  All lies of course, but the same sick mindset: It’s better to let everybody suffer than to do something good for those people.

As I said back at my place a couple of months ago:

It’s sad, really.  If you told America that for every dollar it gave to a homeless guy it would get two dollars in return, it would still walk right by him and tell him to get a job.

It’s not just “I’ve got mine, fuck you” that’s dragging this country down; it’s also “I don’t care if I get mine, as long as I get to say fuck you.”

Tags: Catholic Charities, constance mcmillen, DADT, Gay rights, gay-straight alliance, homophobia, lesbian, prom, religious intolerance, Religious Right

 

So Rush says he’s going to flee heroically emigrate to Costa Rica if health care reform passes:

I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.

As Lisa points out, it’s funny how when progressives talk about leaving the country if, say, Dubya gets re-elected, it’s because they’re Dirty Hippies Who Hate America, but when conservatives do it, it’s obviously because they’re Concerned Patriots Who Can’t Take Anymore.  Because only a dirty hippie would ever suggest that Rush doesn’t love America with all his tiny, plaque-encrusted heart.

But here’s the problem for Rush: If he’s going to leave the U.S. because our health care system has become too socialist… where’s he gonna go?  Not only does Costa Rica have socialized medicine, but the health care system of every single country above them on International Living’s Quality of Life Index is more socialist and universal than ours.

(Note: In an effort to facilitate Rush’s departure, I’ve been working my way down the Quality of Life index, trying to find the nicest possible country that has health care less socialized and universal than the Senate plan.  I’ve researched almost 90 countries now, and so far the best matches I’ve been able to find for Rush are the ones which are too poor to fully fund their public health systems.  But hey, if he wants to move to El Salvador, I’ll fill out the paperwork myself.)

Tags: conservatives, Health care, Hypocrites, Rush Limbaugh, talk radio

 

Good news, everyone!

The Senate Judiciary Committee today endorsed Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel nominee Dawn Johnsen along a party-line vote after a tense debate over her views.

The panel voted to report Johnsen out of committee by a 12-7 vote. “I have to admit that [my] decision was not even a close call,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said today at the panel’s business meeting before he voted against her.

Surely her floor vote must only be a few months away now!

But first Max Baucus must lead a small taskforce of Republicans and conservadems to decide which constitutional principles Ms. Johnsen will agree to sacrifice in exchange for Olympia Snowe’s promise to briefly sort-of look like she might think about voting yes.

Tags: Dawn Johnsen, Department of Justice

 

Peter Daou takes on the climate change deniers – I found this passage particularly compelling:

Another conservative writer goes on about “unsettled science,” as though we were engaging in a hypothetical legal exercise about the merits of reasonable doubt. In fact, this is our only planet. It’s the only place we can survive. We can’t afford to take chances. We can’t afford to do anything less than everything in our power to rectify the problem. We have no choice but to be alarmists — there’s no second chance. We get it wrong and we’ve doomed our children and their children. For what? Because we don’t want to recycle? Because we don’t want to stop polluting? Because we don’t want to bother making sacrifices? Because we don’t want some eager young kid who cares about the earth to dictate to us? Because we don’t like Al Gore? How profoundly selfish can someone be, to deny what they see with their own eyes: car fumes, bus fumes, truck fumes, factory fumes, chemical waste, human waste, toxins coursing through our waterways, in our food, filth we create in immense quantities turning our planet into a garbage dump.

If anything, we should be outdoing one another trying to address the issue, not smugly questioning the need for action under the guise that the science is imperfect. Reversing the damage we’re doing to the earth should be a priority for every citizen. Instead, environmentalism is treated like an annoyance that the media will occasionally poll about and that we bring to the fore once every April.

The right’s willingness to take the hugest of chances that global warming is junk science or some elaborate Al Gore hoax is particularly striking when you consider the Cheney Doctrine that they’re so enamored of:

Cheney defined it: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.” Suskind writes, “So, now spoken, it stood: a standard of action that would frame events and responses from the Administration for years to come.”‘

Why such a heavy bias towards action on an improbable threat, and such a heavy bias against action on a much more probable and truly existential one? Republicans embrace a 1% Doctrine on terrorism, yet it’s more like 99.9% when the fate of the entire planet is at stake.

If I didn’t know any better, I might almost think that their policy prescriptions aren’t really about protecting us from harm.

(Cross-posted at Multi Medium)

Tags: Cheney Doctrine, Climate change, Dick Cheney, global warming, Peter Daou

 

After all, James O’Keefe is facing felony charges for trying to tamper with a Senator’s phones, and his Blockbuster Video Exposé of supposed ACORN wrongdoing is falling apart all around him and his pimp promoter.  And yet, Mike Stark is “struck by O’Keefe strutting around CPAC accepting all sorts of accolades and plaudits while he has a criminal case pending.”

Mike, like most of us, is a decent, law-abiding sort of bloke who would be deeply ashamed to be party to something so fraudulent and mean-spirited as O’Keefe’s tawdry little sting.  Which is probably why he appears so amazed at its author playing the conquering hero at CPAC, felony rap and all.

But no matter how thoroughly O’Keefe’s videos are discredited, or even if he goes to prison for the rest of his life, he will forever be a hero to the right because he took down ACORN.  The right’s #1 boogeyman since 2008, and he took it down armed with nothing more than a video camera, the entire right-wing noise machine, and a very compliant corporate media establishment.  It doesn’t matter to the right that it was all a scam – it only matters that it worked.

This is the way of conservatives today – it doesn’t matter what kind of lies, fraud or dirty tricks they have to pull to win, how much pain they cause, or whether the entire country burns, just so long as they win.  They would rather see tens of millions of Americans out of work and uninsured than vote for economic stimulus or health care reform, because more fear and misery means more votes for Republicans.  They are perfectly happy to hack off America’s arms and legs to spite the Democrats’ faces.

And what of ACORN?  Sure, it’s swell that the Brooklyn prosecutors cleared them of all wrongdoing, but that’s like exonerating a condemned man a week after his execution.  As Mike puts it:

Lost in the outrage… is the fact that Breitbart and his ward O’Keefe, have accomplished a despicable goal: They’ve all-but destroyed an organization committed to helping those Americans most in need. Real people — thousands of children amongst them — will suffer hardship as a direct consequence of Breitbart’s and O’Keefe’s mendacious and malicious hoax, and singularly partisan political agenda.

Or, as the conservatives might put it, mission accomplished.

Tags: ACORN, Andrew Breitbart, conservatives, James O’Keefe, lies, Mike Stark, pimp, scams

 

Trent Franks has really outdone himself this time.  Not only does he manage to offend both African-Americans and women in one compact soundbite, but he does it by combining two of the right’s most disgusting canards:

In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say “How brave blind were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can’t believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible.” And we’re right, we’re right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America’s soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

Ah yes, the good old days of slavery when black women could happily carry their masters’ rape-babies to term without any busybody white liberals pushing them to get abortions.  See how elegantly Franks combines the “Slavery wasn’t really all that bad” (not as devastating as abortion!) meme with the “Abortion is a genocidal liberal conspiracy OMG!” meme.  Breathtaking!

It almost feels churlish to nitpick such artistry by pointing out that “the fertility rate, or births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, among black women remains higher than the national average and has inched up in recent years.”  Why, that would mean the Guttmacher Institute is right about their high abortion rate being due to excessive unwanted pregnancies (the #1 cause of abortions!) and not any kind of nefarious stealth genocide.

It’s funny how the only times Republicans express their heartfelt concern for an oppressed minority, it’s to attack some other group or defend one of their own.  Remember how the invasion of Afghanistan was going to liberate all those poor suffering Afghani women from the nasty sexist Muslims?  Or how progressives were all homophobes after we attacked the Bushies for planting a gay prostitute in the White House press corps?

Yet whenever Republicans have had the opportunity to stand up and support equal pay or gay marriage, all that empathy and support just melts right away.

Almost as if it were never really there.

Tags: abortion, Bigotry, choice, Hypocrites, racism, Sexism, Trent Franks, wanker caucus

 

So let me get this straight: Obama wants the Senate to take the drastic measure of ramming a sidecar through reconciliation, fanning a colossal GOP hissy firestorm about the cheaty system-gaming Democrat Party thwarting the will of the American people who gave the obstructionists their 41-seat supermajority, all so that he can… fiddle around the edges and increase the individual mandate penalty?

Wow.  Way to think big, Mr. President.  And way to use a legislative bazooka to shoot policy mosquitoes.  It’s simply not worth it to push the Republicans into maximum-outrage mode for minimal tweaks that won’t make the bill more popular or make Democratic seats more safe.

And that’s the key.  Most Americans like the public option and hate the Senate bill because it doesn’t have the public option.  The obvious solution to this electoral-disaster-in-the-making was to use the reconciliation sidecar to restore the popular public option and eliminate the unpopular excise tax, but according to the Obama administration Congressional Democrats want to get wiped out in November.

Watching this process unfold is like watching the original Senate bill all over again: Golden opportunity for popular dramatic change to fix what is broken; popular dramatic change gets watered down to unpopular weak incremental tea; Obama and his apologists insist that we have to drink the weak tea because it’s better than nothing; American people become disgusted and vote for Republicans.

I love Glenn Greenwald’s re-enactment, but I have one of my own where Obama is driving his family along the road to Grandma’s:

Daughter: Are we there yet?  Why are you driving so slowly, Dad?

Dad: I don’t want to get a flat tire.  If we get a flat tire, we’ll never make it to Grandma’s, and you all really want to see Grandma, right?

Tire: [Goes flat]

Dad: Dammit!  I guess we’ll just have to press on with three tires and hope the fourth one grows back.

Mom: Honey, why not just use the spare tire in the trunk?

Dad: [Opens trunk] We’re saved!  I can use the tools in here to fashion a replacement tire out of tree bark and garbage!  You’re a genius!

Son: But… what about the spare, Dad?  It’s right there and it’s in perfect shape.  I’d be happy to help you with it; I really want to see Grandma.

Dad: No no, that would never work – I’m only interested in practical solutions, not wild-eyed immature fantasies.  Now give me some help here, unless you want a good paddling.  [Spends eight hours kludging together the world’s most half-assed tire out of tree bark and roadside debris]  Now that is how it’s done.  I rule!

Entire Family: [Is killed when Dad runs head-on into a semi]

Yes, I know Obama has made his disdain for the public option abundantly clear.  I’m just amazed that he thinks he can find enough congressional Democrats with an electoral deathwish to implement his junk-tire strategy, and that he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that it will lead to catastrophe.

 

David Brooks looks around and wonders why we no longer respect our elites like back in the good old days when they were all rich connected white guys:

[H]ere’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.

(…)

The promise of the meritocracy has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, but the reputation is lower.

In his usual obtuse point-missing way, Brooks nibbles around with minor-to-nonsensical explanations like class solidarity, excessive transparency(!), and The Crazy Pace Of Modern Life Today With All Its Twitters And YouTubes And Whatchamacallits, but he completely fails to address the two biggest reasons why no one trusts elites anymore:

1) They’ve earned it. The most powerful people in America have been on a nonstop corruption and fuckup spree that is now impossible to ignore.  The financial elites gamed the system to sack the economy, the political elites bailed them out while stiffing everyone else, and the media elites made excuses or looked the other way.

Throw in serial government incompetence, obstruction and malfeasance that just happens to benefit elected officials’ biggest campaign donors, and it’s not at all surprising that most Americans think their politicians are corporate stooges.

2) Right-wing anti-intellectual demagoguery. Of course, not all elites are intent on destroying the country for their own personal gain.  Many members of the scientific and academic elites have been alarmed by the actions of the political and financial elites – on climate, on the economy, on education, on foreign policy – but in order to neutralize their warnings, conservatives have embarked on a decades-long campaign to discredit intellectuals and experts as effete out-of-touch liberal eggheads, junk-science scam artists, intolerant indoctrinators of the impressionable, and God-hating secular humanists.

The power elites thus gained the latitude to thoroughly discredit themselves, while the intellectual elites who actually know what they’re talking about mostly found themselves shouting into the wind, their vindication forever unnoticed.

Of course, not all professors and scientists are smart, noble Cassandras trying to steer us away from ruin, just as not all CEOs, politicians and pundits are selfish creeps trying to steer us towards it… but it’s a pretty safe way to bet.

 

The Economist’s R.A. points out one of the stimulus bill’s many inadequacies: Lack of aid to the states.

NOT long ago I noted that early in 2009, Christina Romer estimated, based on data overestimating American employment by 1 million workers, that a federal stimulus of $1.2 trillion was called for. Ultimately, Congress passed a stimulus bill worth about $800 billion. But that is not where the impact of government policy on growth ends; one has to think about state and local governments, too.

State budgets have been a persistent drag on output, offsetting much of the discretionary boost from stimulus.

Employment is another casualty of Bathtub America: Not just the public sector workers who lose their jobs when state and local governments contract, but the private sector ones whose employers fold or cut back when government contracts dry up, or move their operations overseas to escape our increasingly decrepit and antiquated infrastructure.

And how does the Senate respond to this crisis?  Guess:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Thursday unveiled a jobs bill that does not contain state aid. A Senate Democratic aide said Reid hopes to back a state aid measure in the future. Republican support, however, remains questionable.

(…)

States are looking at a total budget gap of $180 billion for fiscal 2011, which for most of them begins July 1. These cuts could lead to a loss of 900,000 jobs, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com.

A million more jobs down the drain, and no one in the Senate wants to do anything.  It’s too bad none of them actually have to represent any states, otherwise they might have to pay some kind of political price for it.

 

You’re all familiar with Grover Norquist’s signature quote, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”  Conservative politicians don’t necessarily live by it, but it’s nevertheless part of the central core of their gospel.

As the recession drags on, and as anti-tax Republicans continue to hold sway over the lower levels of government, more and more states and municipalities are discovering that Norquist’s dream is more like a nightmare.

What does bathtub-size government look like?  It looks like Colorado Springs:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.  Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

That is Bathtub America.  It’s not a vibrant hub of unshackled free enterprise.  It’s not an Ayn Randian utopia, where John Galts and Howard Roarks bestride the earth.  It’s dirty, dysfunctional, diseased, and dying.  And it’s spreading.

In Minnesota, where infrastructure underfunding has already caused a bridge collapse, Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty is trying to misuse emergency “unallotment” powers to slash $2.7 billion from “health and human services programs, aid to local governments, and higher education,” and fellow Republican Chris Christie is looking to do the same in New Jersey.  California’s once-great educational system is now a shambles because the legislature’s two-thirds majority requirement makes tax increases impossible… and other states are following it down the drain.

It’s not as bad at the federal level, but years of Republican and centrist governance have crippled our regulatory agencies and neglected our parks and infrastructure, and conservatives won’t be satisfied until they’ve privatized Social Security and replaced Medicare with vouchers.

The mantra of tax cuts and small government is all well and good if you share the conservatives’ cartoon vision of government as a pushy scold that encourages first-graders to have sex, gives your hard-earned money to sacrilegious artists, snail researchers, ineffectual paper-pushing bureaucrats, welfare queens and OMG ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS OMG, and sends black-ops hit squads to disarm patriotic gun-owners and send them to top-secret FEMA camps (oddly, military spending is a-okay), but that view is wildly distorted.

The most important thing the government does is keep everything running.  You may not notice it because it’s operating quietly in the background (much like zinc oxide!), but it’s what prevents society from breaking down into chaos and disrepair, and it’s what provides the educational foundation for the people who will be running this country 20 or 30 years from now.

Starving the government because you don’t like everything it does is like starving your body because you’re pissed off about a hangnail, and then using your inevitable decline as proof that your body sucks and doesn’t deserve to be fed.  And then insisting that you’re better off using the money you saved on food to pay for some nice efficient life-support machines to take care of you instead.

Don’t like taxes or government?  Go to Somalia, or the wilds of Afghanistan, or Colorado Springs, and try living without it for a while.  Just don’t force the rest of us to come along and play Lord Of The Flies with you.

 

Let’s get ready to rumble! Or compromise. Whichever.

It’s on! Eric Cantor, on Fox News just now, made it official: Count Republicans in.

Cantor had written a letter with John Boehner yesterday to the White House, apparently laying down some preconditions for attending the White House’s health care summit. But on Fox, Cantor said Republicans would “absolutely” be showing up.

The obvious question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.  And the answer is… Who knows?

It could be a brilliant maneuver to publicly expose Republican obstructionism and unseriousness.

It could be political cover for replacing the already crappy Senate bill with an even more godawful “bipartisan compromise” bill which makes Republicans, PhRMA and insurance companies happy and everyone else sick.

It could even be a hopelessly naive and deluded attempt to find common ground with the people who have been saying “NO!” to health care reform for the past year.

Any one of those scenarios could be the reason for the health care summit, but there’s no way to tell which one actually is until the event unfolds.  Obama’s history shows us a corporate doormat at best and a facilitator at worst, and he continues to appear disengaged from health care reform.  But it also shows him talking tough about obstruction in the SOTU, and used a televised meeting with Republicans to make them look like fools (a practice run, perhaps?).  All suggestive, but not conclusive.

If I had to bet, I’d put my money on one of the bad scenarios because they’re supported by a much larger body of work.  But I don’t think it’s a slam-dunk, especially if Obama’s finally starting to realize how much political trouble he’s in.  So I’m just going to hold off on cheering, screaming, or shaking my head about this summit until I have a concrete reason to.

 

Tom Tancredo has put his sweaty nativist finger squarely on The Problem With Democracy Today:

And then, something really odd happened, mostly because I think that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. People who could not even spell the word “vote,” or say it in English, put a committed socialist idealogue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama.

Granted, everything after that first sentence is insane racist gibberish, but aside from that, perhaps he has a point.  Would it really be such a terrible idea to administer some sort of test to ensure that only people with at least a passing acquaintance with reality can vote for the government officials who have such a huge impact on our lives?

Here, I’ll throw out some possible sample questions to get the ball rolling:

1) Was Saddam Hussein responsible for 9/11?

2) At the time of the invasion, did Iraq possess weapons of mass destruction?

3) At the time of the invasion, was Saddam Hussein harboring al Qaeda in the regions under his direct control?

4) Were there any successful terrorist attacks on the United States between 9/11/01 and 1/20/09?

5) Was Barack Obama born in the United States?

6) Is Barack Obama a Christian or a Muslim?

7) Is Barack Obama a committed socialist ideologue?

8) Does Barack Obama hate white people?

9) Does Barack Obama want to kill your grandmother?

10) Is liberalism a form of fascism?

11) Do tax cuts increase or decrease government revenue?

12) Is Medicare a government program?

13) Is homosexuality a lifestyle choice?  Is it contagious?

14) Are all gay people pedophiles and/or “recruiters” for the gay lifestyle?

15) Is abstinence-only sex education more effective at preventing teen pregnancies and STDs than comprehensive sex education with a pro-abstinence message?

16) Is the Earth thousands of years old, or billions of years old?

17) Did life on Earth evolve naturally, or was it created as is?

18) Are human carbon emissions causing global climate change?

19) Do scientists and academics contribute anything useful to society?

20) Is individual voter fraud a widespread epidemic that is distorting our electoral process?

It’s true that many of these questions would have the entirely incidental and unintended effect of disproportionately disenfranchising conservative and Republican voters, but doesn’t that seem like a small price to pay for an electorate that makes rational and well-informed decisions about who should run the country?