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Conservative Myths, Memes, & Lies

July 14th, 2013 3 comments

There comes a point where the sheer volume of fault- and falsehood-ridden conservative “facts” and ideas is rather breathtaking to behold. With sadly lowered expectations of what passes for logic and standards of evidence, and then to be assaulted with such claims on an almost daily basis, we sometimes fail to appreciate the startling number of assumptions and opinions held by conservatives which are not only demonstrably false, but usually obviously so.

Here is a list of ones that come to mind at the moment. I had to stop at fifty, the list was getting so long.

You cannot say the word “God” in the public square. Yes you can. God is everywhere, in every public oath and on every piece of currency. How many children are compelled daily to mention God in the pledge in public schools? How many television and radio shows and even stations are dedicated to preaching 24/7? Clearly, you can say the word all you want. Myths about people practicing religious freedom in public and being arrested for it are inevitably about people failing to secure parade permits and the like. If this claim is instead made to mean that god cannot be mentioned in government buildings, then a person claiming such may be referred to any American legislative session at any level, virtually all of which are initiated, daily, by a clergyman saying a prayer.

You cannot say the word “God” in a public school. Of course you can. The only restriction is that no one representing the school may advocate a specific religion to the exclusion of others.

Children are not allowed to pray in public schools. Wrong. Students can and often do pray in public schools. Any “private, voluntary student prayer that does not interfere with the school’s educational mission” is allowed.

There is a war on Christianity in American society. Quite the contrary. It is other belief systems that are discriminated against; Christianity is safely dominant in American society. The perceived “war” on Christianity is nothing more than (1) appropriate and yet often-less-than-wholly-effective resistance to unconstitutional encroachments by Christianity in violation of the First Amendment, such as resistance against teacher-conducted prayer in public schools; or (2) fictional “attacks” on religion which are nothing of the sort, such as a business using the expression “Happy Holidays!” to greet all customers, including Christians.

Conservatives fight for freedom of belief. Not true; they do so only when the religion in question is Christian; all other belief systems are second-class or worse. Religious discrimination is in fact practiced in the United States—only it’s conservative Christians who are the most often guilty of it. Blocking the building of mosques, demanding atheist billboards be taken down, shouting down a Hindu cleric delivering an invocation—even harassing a Jewish family when they object to their daughter being pressured to convert to Christianity.

Secularism is anti-religious. Secularism is not the banning of religion, it is the policy in which no one religion is allowed to be presented as the official religion of the state, as it is a historical fact that when a belief system is endorsed by the state, all other belief systems suffer as a result. Christians who want state officials and representatives to overtly promote Christianity are in violation of this principle, but do not see things that way. They see their dominance in state affairs as a given, only natural and right; they see secularism as a means of preventing their “religious freedoms,” i.e. to impose their religious beliefs (which they see as moral imperatives) on others. In a way, this is similar to the claim that science is anti-religious when it announces observations such as life evolves from simpler forms or that the universe is billions of years old; these claims do not attack religion, but instead simply contradict religious excursions into realms in which religion has no right to dominate.

Separation of church and state is an offense to religion; the founding Pilgrims would have abhorred it. Very similar to the claim above. The invocation of the Pilgrims is especially ironic, as their plight was one of the reasons that separation of church and state was established, and serves as an excellent example of why the principle is sound. The Pilgrims were driven out of England when the state-endorsed religion enacted a series of laws requiring all subjects to attend state-sponsored churches and to read from state-authorized prayer books, else face fines and imprisonment. The only way to allow all belief to flourish is to do so in a state where no one belief system is allowed to dominate; the only way to assure that is to maintain a strict separation of church and state.

Corporations are job creators. As Nick Hanauer pointed out, businesses, by nature, are opposed to creating jobs. Employing people is an expense, and businesses avoid every expense possible. Businesses hire people only when there is no other choice, and fire people whenever possible. Job creation is most accurately attributed to demand for goods and services, which is mostly driven by middle-class consumption.

Wealthy people are job creators. Untrue, for many of the same reasons listed above. Consumption by rich people is far less responsible for creating jobs than is consumption by other groups, including the poor. Investment by wealthy people does not create jobs, rather said investment is a response to demand that presents an opportunity to a wealthy person to gain more money by purchasing ownership in a business which will attempt to hire the fewest number of people possible to respond that that demand.

Cutting taxes raises tax revenues. The idea that the government can raise more revenues by cutting the amount of taxes people pay is dubious at best. There may be stimulative tax cuts if they are targeted precisely, but it is more likely that there are far better stimulative alternatives—amongst which the strongest include issuing food stamps and spending on infrastructure projects. Worse, conservative tax cuts are aimed primarily at the wealthy, a type of tax cuts which is rather plainly not stimulative.

Cutting taxes for wealthy people and businesses spurs investment in businesses which create jobs. This is usually argued when conservatives wish to cut the capital gains tax, or other taxes which mostly affect wealthy people. It is patently untrue. If a market is depressed and no one is spending, you can give all the money in the world to wealthy people and businesses, and they will not invest it in job-creating industries—precisely because no one is buying anything. Why should a wealthy person build a factory to create things when no one is buying them? In contrast, if you give wealthy people and businesses no tax cuts, or even if you raise their taxes, they will always find revenue to invest (by using their collected wealth or by borrowing from banks) if people are buying something.

Wealthy people will stop working if you raise their taxes. And people will stop eating if you take away most of their food. Or, wait, that’s incredibly stupid.

Reagan cut taxes and doubled revenue. Net taxes actually went up under Reagan, and most revenue increase claimed to his credit was inflationary.

Conservatives want to cut taxes for all Americans. This is contradicted by the most recent election cycle, in which conservatives wanted to repeal both the estate tax and slash the capital gains tax and corporate taxes—and at the same time also advocated raising taxes on the poorest Americans, most specifically by eliminating tax credits and breaks aimed squarely at low- and middle-class earners. This was proposed under the infamous “47%” claim, in which it was usually asserted, either overtly or by inference, that 47% of Americans paid no taxes. The number referred to those who owed no federal income taxes, but who still paid sales, property, payroll, and many other taxes, some even in excess of the percentage paid by the excessively wealthy Republican presidential candidate himself.

Liberals are “takers” who tax hard-working conservatives so they can live off of government entitlements. It is usually not directly stated that liberals are the takers and conservatives are the makers, but that is clearly what is meant. What is ironic is that it is conservative states that take more than they contribute, conservative areas that take more than they give. Generally speaking, the division is much closer to equal than otherwise; there are takers and makers on both sides. However, it is clear that conservatives are just as enamored of entitlements as liberals are; they are just less willing to pay for them when they go to other people.

Democrats are tax-and-spenders; Republicans want to cut the budget. Everyone in government is a “tax and spender.” If there is a differentiation, it works out that Republicans are “spend-and-debtors,” in that they are less willing to pay the bills at the end of the day. The vast majority of spending, the deficit, and the debt has been incurred by Republican administrations and policies over the past several decades.

Business owners built their businesses without any government help. Nobody lives in a vacuum, nobody lives cut off from everyone else. Everyone depends upon resources created by others, many created by or nurtured by the government. Everything from trade deals to education to infrastructure contributes to every business; without the government, business as we know it today would be completely unrecognizable, and certainly far less robust. The assertion to the contrary is part of the recent conservative desire to stop having to pay for what they receive by denying they receive anything at all.

Private industry created the Internet. Yes, people really claim that. I refuted it here. Spoiler alert: the claim is not true.

Freedom on the Internet is threatened by government regulation. To the contrary, the “regulation” claimed to be throttling Internet freedom is that which prevents private industries, primarily telecommunication firms, from asserting ownership over a public resource, which would result in diminished freedom, not to mention higher costs.

Government never creates jobs. This claim is obviously ludicrous, considering the 22 million jobs held in federal, state, and local governments, many of them life-long, in fields ranging from education to the military. One can only assume that the claim being made is that specific stimulative spending does not create jobs in private industry, under the assumption that “creating jobs” means permanent lifetime employment. However, no matter how absurdly you parse the claim, it is utter nonsense; the 2009 stimulus saved millions of jobs, and helped create millions more. Claims of its “failure” are as unfounded as all the other conservative claims on this list.

Conservatives support higher wages and better working conditions, which can only result from a free market system without government regulation. This is one of a class of statements which predicts riches for everyone if only the government stops interfering and businesses can do virtually anything they like. Needless to say, the relentless drive to deregulate business, dismantle unions, and block minimum wage raises has resulted in a workforce remunerated far less than before. It is a rule of business that, unless forced otherwise, wages must be driven down and benefits cut wherever possible, while “efficiency” (fewer people doing more work for less pay) is driven as high as it can be. Witness the rare exception, Costco, paying better wages and benefits—and being castigated by Wall Street for doing so.

Academic excellence can only be achieved through government-regulated standardized testing. Which, when you think of it, is kind of ironic when you consider how conservatives are against anything being government-regulated. Unless, of course, it is something they don’t like, in which case, the government should regulate or ban it. Suffice it to say that standardized testing is a horrible way to run public education.

Conservatives freed the slaves. Conservatives to blacks: “You’re welcome.” This claim is dredged up when conservatives feel like minorities, for some weird, inexplicable reason, seem to be voting less and less Republican. The logic: conservatives today are Republicans, the Republican Party was founded by Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln freed the slaves—therefore, conservatives freed the slaves and are champions of civil rights. They even sometimes try to claim that liberals supported slavery, hinting that liberals oppose religious groups (another common conservative fallacy), and religious groups were abolitionists (most religious groups of the day were not).

Martin Luther King, Jr. opposed corrective or reparative measures against racism. An old idea to combat Affirmative Action by citing King’s statement about judging a person only by the content of their character—whilst conveniently ignoring that King was speaking of a future devoid of racism, not a present in which racism flourishes and corrective measures are the best manner to at least partially counteract such forces.

Racism is no longer an issue in America; the country is color-blind, and corrective measures are reverse racism against whites. This is essentially what the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court recently decided. Within hours of that decision, states which had formerly been restrained by the Voting Rights Act immediately begin passing and enacting strongly discriminatory redistricting and laws, aimed at robbing minorities of the ability to vote and elect representatives for their interests. So, no, we’re not color-blind, and the Voting Rights Act was not reverse racism.

Laws intended to offer equal protection to women and minorities are “special privileges.” “Special privileges” is one of those code words for equal rights and treatment under the law. How a law, for example, requiring equal pay for women and allowing them to sue when they do not receive it, is a “special privilege” is somewhat difficult to reason. Conservatives will likely point to hate-crime legislation as a “representative” example of such special treatment; however, such laws apply to everyone—including violence against whites—and are in effect not to give special treatment to minorities, women, or gays, but to protect society from individuals who pose a special threat as they wish to do violence against entire classes of people.

Businesses and workplaces are often forced to hire unqualified women and minorities in order to satisfy quotas. If such a thing ever happened, it would only as a misapplication of the law, usually due to people believing this very myth. No quota ever required any business or office to hire someone unqualified for the job.

The free market is self-regulating. No it’s not. Oh, it regulates certain economic factors in very crude ways, but it does not self-regulate the behavior currently handled by government regulations. Left to itself, it would abuse employees, pollute the environment, and cheat people to no end. Its chief goal is to make money; all other considerations fall in that wake of that prime directive. It does not react to consumer complaint by cleaning itself up and regulating itself; if it did, government regulation would never have been necessary in the first place. Besides which, non-governmental factors which would help regulate certain aspects of business—such as unions—are consistently opposed by conservatives.

Treatment for drug addicts is coddling criminals / a waste of money. All evidence to the contrary. People have a tendency to reject treatment over incarceration because it means spending money to help people they disrespect or outright despise. No matter that it costs far more to incarcerate, and creates an incredible drag on the economy as well as general damage to society as a whole. Like drug laws overall, it is not about what makes sense or is best for people, it is about appearances and appearances only.

The context of the Second Amendment has not changed at all in 222 years, but the context of the Voting Rights Act has completely changed in 48 years. Do I even need to go into details?

We have never executed a person innocent of the crime for which they were executed. Wrong. Statistical evidence proves it beyond any rational doubt. Most individual proof is extremely difficult as states regularly destroy all evidence after someone is executed, and police and prosecutors refuse to investigate the crime further. Not to mention the fact that we do know of such specific cases. Ironically, conservatives who claim the government never does anything right and do not trust the government at all to regulate business, educate children, or run health care, nevertheless seem to trust the government explicitly to never wrongly execute someone.

States rights must prevail. Except when they want to do something conservatives don’t like. If a state, for example, wants to legalize marijuana, allow gay marriage, or permit people dying of terminal illnesses the right to end their own lives, then states do not have rights over the federal government. But if a state wants to ban abortion, relax gun control, or outlaw gay marriage, medicinal marijuana, and right-to-die, then state’s rights becomes the absolute principle that must be respected. Historically, “state’s rights” has a powerful racial impact due to its use to defend slavery, and later, segregation; like “strict constructionism” and “judicial activism,” “state’s rights” is really just a code word for advocating conservative agendas; these are by no means actual “principles.”.

Conservatives are against “big government.” Funny, then, that every time they get control of things, we get bigger government. Not that Democrats are much better at it—but at least they don’t pretend to be against something they clearly support. For conservatives, “big government” is yet another code word, this one meaning “spending we don’t like.” Medicare, for example, is “big government,” while an exploding military budget which vastly outspends the rest of the world combined is somehow defensible.

Conservatives want to “save” Medicare and Social Security. By dismantling them and replacing them with programs given the same name but not resembling the original programs at all.

Conservatives support the troops; liberals hate the soldiers. Remember how liberal protesters spat on returning Vietnam vets on the tarmac of airports? So do a lot of people—which is strange, as it never happened. In fact, war protesters were usually supportive of vets, which is evidenced by the fact that so many of the protesters were themselves veterans. The specific story as well as the general myth that conservatives are pro-soldier is false. Conservatives have gained the reputation for being pro-military primarily for their support of military spending, in addition to their generally hawkish stances. They mouth support for the troops, but fall short of actually giving it. In fact, when it comes to supporting veterans’ causes, it is liberals who often do the best job, while conservatives do their best to block such support. Conservatives have even claimed that Obama’s efforts to increase benefits and support for troops is evidence that he hates them—I shit you not. Veterans groups typically give very high scores to Democrats for supporting veterans’ issues, and very low scores to Republicans. Republicans, despite their reputation, are much more liable to block the granting of benefits and programs for vets. As General Wesley Clark said in 2004, “Republicans like weapons systems; Democrats like the soldiers.”

If a conservative says something that offends people and results in damage to their reputation or career, their First Amendment rights are being violated. This is a common dodge to controversy. Although conservatives have no problems pushing for boycotts to punish people and causes they disapprove of, when the same happens in reverse, they often claim that the person’s first-amendment rights are being violated. This despite the clear fact that the First Amendment protects your right to say what you want, and not your right to avoid people shunning you for it.

Obama caused high unemployment. Conservatives who claim that Obama was responsible for high unemployment consistently and conveniently ignore that the rate began to skyrocket under Bush, who took it from 5.0% in April 2008 to 7.8 % in January 2009, a rise of 2.8% in just 9 months, and that it hit a high of 10% in October 2009, a 2.2% rise in another 9 months. However, to hold Obama responsible for the latter rise is questionable at best, and most likely completely inaccurate. Imagine Bush piloting an aircraft at 40,000 feet: he pushes the airplane into a steep dive, and at 28,000 feet, as the plane plummets, he hands over the controls to Obama. Obama struggles to level out the plane, but cannot manage to do so until it reaches 20,000 feet—at which points conservatives blame him for the low altitude and do everything they can thereafter to impede his piloting duties. In addition to sheer inertia, the fact is that the unemployment rate is a “lagging indicator,” meaning that the current rate indicates the response to what was happening in the economy 6 to 9 months previously. Meaning that Obama only began “owning” the unemployment rate when it was already at its peak—and has consistently driven it down ever since.

Obama skyrocketed the deficit. Nope. As with the unemployment rate, the deficits skyrocketed under Bush; Obama has done nothing but reduce them. The current deficit is primarily a result of Bush-Cheney tax cuts, the wars in the Middle East, and the 2008 economic collapse. Obama has initiated far less deficit spending than Bush; Bush went from incipient surpluses to a trillion-dollar deficit; Obama has only brought down spending and deficits. Historically, over the past half-century, Democratic presidents have presided over deficit reductions, while Republican presidents have exploded them.

Republicans have always fought hard to balance the budget, but are confounded by Democrats who bust it. See above. When Republicans had control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, they went from a surplus to a nearly $600 billion deficit—and that was before the 2008 collapse. They try to take credit for the deficit reduction in the 90’s, but that was due as much to the Internet boom and to Clinton’s 1993 tax hike. Even under Reagan, who supposedly tried to cut spending while Democrats foiled his efforts, the facts are that the Democratic Congress passed budgets which were lower than Reagan’s proposals 7 of 8 times.

Gay marriage will undermine the institution of marriage, leading to polygamy and bestiality. See my recent post. In short, no.

Gay marriage will undermine population growth. Again, no. Stupid claim.

Global warming is a myth. Funny that Fox News doesn’t put Al Gore’s book on the sidewalk now. Do we really need to discuss how global climate change is real? I hope not.

Scientists disagree on global warming / evolution. There is no consensus. It can be said that scientists disagree on virtually everything. When 97% believe it is happening, that’s pretty conclusive. When only 1% ~ 6% of climate scientists claim that humans have had little or no effect on climate change, claiming that the debate “isn’t settled yet” is disingenuous at best. As for evolution, only 0.15% of scientists in fields relating to evolution disbelieve in it.

Evolution is “only a theory.” So is gravity, but you ain’t floating away, are you? This chestnut is just a distortion of the meaning and use of the term “theory.” The evidence for evolution is overwhelming; we simply do not understand all of the details yet. The creationists use the “theory” dodge to avoid the mountain of evidence supporting evolution, and contradicting their own claims which are supported only by faulty interpretations of ancient scripture. As stated near the top of this list, noting certain realities such as evolution does not attack religion, but instead simply contradicts religious claims about science which religion is not justified to make.

Money equals free speech. It may be true legally, but not in fact. Free speech is free speech; money is a means to elevate one person’s freedom to speak above everyone else’s. You have the right to speak, just not the right to be heard. Money allows a very few the assurance that one will be heard. That is not a right. It is a means of granting extraordinary power and special rights to those who possess wealth, with all of the freedoms a right confers so as to avoid any attempts to level the field. Arguably, the idea that money is free speech actually degrades the freedom of speech for most people.

Corporations are people. This is a legal fiction constructed to allow corporations to create contracts, participate in lawsuits, and shield individual shareholders (e.g., prevent the collection of debt from reaching personal possessions). Although the legal fiction describes the corporation as a legal “person,” this had never been assumed to grant corporations constitutional rights—at least until the right wing of the Supreme Court made the ethically repellent decision of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and declared that corporations have First Amendment rights, as if they were actual people. This is a break from tradition, and has poisoned our political process since then, far in excess of the toxic mess it already was. The conservatives on the court, from thin air, created a right that had not existed before—as audacious a case of “legislating from the bench” as has ever been witnessed before. Suddenly, corporations could be wielded as a super-person by people who already enjoy their own individual rights, giving them extra powers—not by all shareholders, but just those few wealthy and power people who actually control them.

Capital gains tax is double-taxation. No it’s not. Corporate shareholders are shielded by the “body” of the corporation; the price for this is that the corporation is treated separately from the shareholders. It is not double taxation when an employer is taxed and then an employee is taxed. The same principle applies here. Those who make this claim simply want all the protections a corporation supplies without paying any of the costs—an all-too-common conservative theme.

Liberal justices legislate from the bench; conservatives are strict constructionists who want to preserve or “restore” the original constitution. In simple terms, a conservative will define any decision that conservatives disagree with as “judicial activism” and “legislating from the bench,” no matter what the grounds. It is little more than a reflexive response to dismiss judgments that go against them.

Actual judicial activism is when a decision is handed down that goes beyond or contradicts precedent, engages in judicial overreach (the court going well beyond what is necessary to settle the case), and defies standards of judicial restraint.

While it can be argued that both liberal and conservative judges and justices have practiced such activism, there is ample evidence that this is far more a practice among conservative jurists than of liberal ones. Roe v. Wade is the primary and usually sole arguable example of liberal judicial activism. Conservatives, however, have been going on a spree of such activism in recent years. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Bush v. Gore, District of Columbia v. Heller (rewriting the Second Amendment to match current conservative views), or the recent fiasco of Shelby County v. Holder (essentially gutting the Voting Rights Act)—there has been a long string of outrageous decisions by conservative jurists which go beyond any precedent and often any standing law and create completely new legal assumptions based upon little else than a egregiously unrestrained conservative agenda. In 2005’s McCreary v. ACLU, for example, Scalia attempted to rewrite the Establishment Clause.

This flies in the face of “strict constructionism,” which has historically been, according to William Rehnquist himself, a philosophy used when a judge is not “favorably inclined toward claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiffs.” Strict constructionism, nominally at least, is supposed to be about interpreting the law very narrowly. It holds that anything not clearly expressed may not be interpreted, and—in complete contradiction to the Ninth Amendment—that if a right is not positively granted by the constitution, it does not exist.

Not only is this “philosophy” patently unconstitutional, it is not even consistently applied—as the many cases of conservative judicial activism, exemplified by the cases above, evidence more than clearly. In addition, for a group that claims to be “preserving” the constitution, it seems strange that they are constantly trying to amend it.

Voter fraud is a serious issue. No it’s not. Voter fraud is rare, and conservative claims to the contrary are completely unevidenced. Usually cited are cases where people hired to collect registrations create false documents to collect more money—documents which are found, trashed, and never result in actual stolen votes, mostly due to the fact that there was never any intent to do so.

Election fraud, on the other hand, is copious these days—and is quite notably a completely conservative practice. From Katherine Harris’ historical perverting of the Florida Central Voting File throwing the 2000 election illicitly to Bush, to the current right-wing judicial activism allowing conservative states to gerrymander and rewrite voting laws to specifically disenfranchise minorities, conservatives have rigorously and rather openly driven to abuse their legal power in order to win elections dishonestly.

The media has a liberal bias. I’m not even going to dignify that long-standing piece of excrement with an explanation; if you are not fully aware of why it is wrong, then there’s no talking to you; you may return to viewing Fox News, which is totally unbiased.


If conservatives comment on this list, they will most likely do so in their usual fashion: to ignore the bulk of the list, go after the one or two points they believe are weakest, and within those points focus on only one contention or a subset of the entire point—and never, ever concede everything (and possibly anything) else. We’ll see.

The War on Reason Rages On

March 26th, 2013 2 comments

Remember how we believed that the horrific national tragedy of twenty little children being slaughtered with an assault rifle, especially after so many other shootings like the Aurora theater massacre, would lead to an assault weapons ban, or at least a law to limit the number of bullets in a cartridge?

Apparently not.

While the public may have been sufficiently aghast at such tragedies to pull the switch, Congress seems to feel differently. A majority appear to be saying, “No, we think more than two dozen first-graders need to be shot to bloody pieces before we act. Let’s wait and see.”

Not that an assault weapons ban would lead to an immediate halt to such slaughters, but the later you act, the longer they go on. So, good work, senators. You just proved that the NRA is not as weak and ineffective a lobby as some had started to believe.

But hey, at least we can all agree on universal background checks, right? Background checks, even in their currently weak form, have proven effective at stopping two million gun sales, over one million of those to felons, over the past few decades. Obama’s plan for shoring up their weaknesses so that criminals and the mentally ill will have a hurdle in their way before they can acquire a major arsenal is the most milquetoast, sensible, non—

Other gun control efforts like universal background checks on people buying guns are also struggling in Congress, despite public anger at the Connecticut shooting and other massacres.

<facepalm>

It is, after all, what, three months since we saw those children gunned down. So, who cares any more?

On That Note

February 6th, 2013 Comments off

Ann Coulter said yesterday, “Universal background check means universal registration, universal registration means universal confiscation, universal extermination. That is how it goes in history.”

Oh, and my dog crapped this morning.

The Revisionaries

January 30th, 2013 3 comments

Looks like a good PBS documentary coming up about the extremists in Texas taking over the school board and trying to force textbooks to cram in all manner of revisions based upon fundamentalist and right-wing ideological dogma.

Called The Revisionaries, it focuses on a power Texas had to force changes in education nationwide—but the website points out has since significantly decreased after Texas switched from a statewide textbook review to one relegated to individual districts. Thank God.

Check local listings for broadcast times.

Categories: Right-Wing Extremism Tags:

The Coup D’état Is In Progress

January 26th, 2013 2 comments
As I have referenced over the past week or so, Republicans are in the process of what appears to be a political coup d’état. While it may actually follow the letter of the law, it without any doubt completely perverts the spirit of the law. Faced with a party bent on radical extremism in a country with a population growing ever more liberal, they seem to believe it is more fitting to subvert the constitution and steal elections rather than to actually come around to reason on a policy or two.

Here is how it works:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

That’s Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution. They key phrase: “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” In theory, one can suppose that electors can be chosen any way the legislature wants, even if it defies the actual votes of the people in that state. This is where the letter can be exploited to corrupt the spirit of the law as well as the spirit of the nation.

And that perversion is exactly what Republicans are beginning to carry out this day. Not plan for in the future, not consider as a possibility: they are doing this as we speak.

The exploit is as follows: change the way states assign electoral votes so that gerrymandering allows a losing candidate to win more electoral votes, just as it does with House representatives.

Most states currently have a winner-take-all approach to the electoral college; if a candidate wins a majority of a state’s votes, then all votes are counted towards that candidate.

Two states, Maine and Nebraska, buck this trend, distributing electoral votes by district, with the two senatorial votes going to the winner of the state’s popular vote. If districts in a state are fairly drawn, then this plan is not much better or worse than the winner-take-all strategy, just with opposing votes given to the other candidate in smaller chunks.

However, there’s a way this system can be abused: the gerrymander. If you stack the deck, as Republicans have been doing furiously in many states for the past decade or so, then the number of opposing votes given to the other candidate is maximized, and instead of less than half a state’s votes going to the candidate not voted for, a potentially much larger number could be subverted.

And since this plan is to only institute this system in key states where Democrats often win but Republicans control the state government, it would not balance out over the whole country.

Taking it even further, the latest GOP plan is to have the two electoral votes based on Senate seats in these states go to the candidate who wins the most districts, actually magnifying the effect of the gerrymander.

Look at the chart below. The plan at the far right is the one Republicans are trying to enact in battleground states where they control both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office.

Electoral Vote Dist

If this plan had been in effect last year, in the six key states listed above, Obama would have won by 5% of the popular vote in these states, 52% to 47%, but he would have lost the electoral vote, 30% to 70%—a 40% margin!

One could argue that winner-take-all subverted 48% of the votes, an even greater amount. However, this ignores the larger picture. These are only states where Obama won. Add the states where Romney was the winner, and things balance out somewhat. For all its flaws, winner-take-all is a more random system, is more or less impervious to corruption, and has worked fairly well over time in that only twice has a president won the electoral college while losing the popular vote.

And that’s the key point: in our country, we all support the idea wherein the candidate with the most votes wins. That’s the basic assumption.

The new Republican plan topples that system. Look at Michigan; Romney wins less than 45% of the votes, but gets 69% of the electors. In Ohio, he wins 48% of the vote, but gets 78% of the electors.

With the new Republican plan in effect, Republican candidates would start winning presidential elections almost no matter how many votes they won or lost. It would take what is now considered a landslide to overcome this stacked deck. It would be a violation of our principles because it is specifically designed to overcome the popular vote in favor of one party.

Obviously, a system of assigning electoral votes designed to win one party an election no matter what is a clear corruption of Democracy. One problem: gerrymandering is a long-standing tradition of legal corruption which acts as the camel’s nose under the tent. Going back to the 18th century, gerrymandering has been limited (it cannot, for example, be used to intentionally deprive racial groups of due representation), but is generally allowed freely for purely partisan purposes.

While the Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that partisan gerrymandering was unconstitutional and could be challenged in court, it set such a high standard of proof that it made legal challenges of such districts extremely difficult. Since then, the Court has remained divided on whether there is any viable way to set a judicial standard for what makes a given district an illegal gerrymander.

While it is possible that a Supreme Court challenge could upset plans to subvert the electoral college, it is not likely, especially with so many conservatives whose judicial philosophy is centered around ignoring the spirit of the law in favor of interpreting the letter to best suit their political leanings.

Like the filibuster, gerrymandering is a system that has been tolerated because it had never been abused to the point of being a ludicrous mockery of our system of government; but like the filibuster, Republicans have seized on it as a tool to corrupt on the largest of scales.

So, why don’t we just do what is fair, and change the system so that gerrymandering is illegal, states’ districts are drawn by random assignment, and a president is chosen by the popular vote?

Because it would take a constitutional amendment to make such a change, and Republicans would easily block it. Republicans would find some sham reason to object, and since it would require 2/3rds majorities in both houses to even get an amendment started, the idea would die right there.

Another route to amendment has never been used, and would be just as hopeless: legislatures in 2/3rds of the states would have to call a Constitutional Convention, then pass a proposed amendment, and then 3/4ths of all states would have to approve. Again, Republicans would kill such a movement in its cradle, as they control too many state legislatures.

So, there is no constitutional route to stopping this and imposing fairness, and the Supreme Court is most likely going to add its stamp of approval to the virtual coup d’état.

It is happening now. Virginia is the first to move, with the plan already moving through the legislature. While there is a glimmer of hope as one Republican in the legislature is against the idea, this will not matter long; Republicans in Virginia managed to ram through a non-majority, non-census-cycle gerrymander, meaning in two years, Republicans will have a clear path anyway. The Republican governor has hinted he would not go along with it, but Republican governors opposing their party’s moves in other states have caved in and gone ahead with stridently partisan moves before (e.g., the Michigan law designed to gut unions).

Even if it does not pass in Virginia, Republicans in Pennsylvania have already started moving on their own version, and conservatives in Ohio and Wisconsin are showing signs of moving as well. RNC head Reince Priebus is behind the measures.

With Democrats being weak-kneed and ineffectual, the only thing with a hope of stopping this is the occasional Republican with the slightest shred of moral fiber challenging their political interests.

In other words, we’re screwed.

It is entirely possible that in 2016, Hillary Clinton faces someone like Marco Rubio, wins by 10 million votes—and loses the election.

Any conservative who is in favor of this clearly has no respect for Democracy, no respect for the spirit and values our nation is founded upon, and favors winning by any means possible over the voice of the people at large.

Which is pretty exactly where most conservatives these days appear to stand.

There’s a word for a system of governing where the voice of the people is ignored, and one faction grabs power and imposes their will upon the majority.

It is, ironically, the same system that conservatives have been screaming insanely against for the past several years.

And they are getting very close to implementing it.

Oh Really.

January 24th, 2013 3 comments

I’ve mentioned before about conservative projection, whereupon right-wingers will have a certain quality or perform a certain act to an extreme, and then accuse their opponents of exactly that.

John Boehner:

And given what we heard yesterday about the president’s vision for his second term, it’s pretty clear to me that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans. So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party. And let me just tell you, I do believe that is their goal – to just shove us into the dustbin of history. I’ve been in these spots before. I remember November of ’06, January of ’07 — we’ve been through these periods before. And you know, our members get down, our supporters get down.

Republicans have savaged liberals over the years.

They have viciously attacked the Democratic support bases. If you are a social or political group which provides any substantial backing for the Democratic Party, the GOP will demonize your reputation and work night and day to destroy you as a group. Unions have been brutally decimated by conservatives. Teachers have been made into pariahs. Groups like ACORN, which tried to raise voter registration in poorer communities, was literally obliterated. The list goes on. If you are a significant supporter of Democrats, you go on the hit list, and it is not a metaphorical one: the Republicans will destroy you.

Conservatives have vilified Democratic causes. Reproductive rights was transformed into near-demonic support for murdering babies in the form of the “partial-birth abortion.” Equal rights for non-white male groups were depicted as “special privileges.” Secularism and fairness in religious belief was drawn as a “war on Christianity.” Racism was said to not even exist in our “color-blind” society, where the real evil was Affirmative Action, which somehow made life hell for poor white males. Minorities were told that not only should they not complain about racism, but that they should feel devalued and ashamed if there was even the slightest chance that they received favor through some form of Affirmative Action at any point in their lives.

Republicans have pulled every trick in the book to destroy Democratic voting rights and efforts. While they make completely baseless accusations of Democratic fraud after their own thorough investigations revealed nothing, they attempt to bring back Jim Crow laws even more destructive than ever to block Democratic voting. They resort to all manner of fraud, from voter caging to bogus felons lists. They attack Democratic voter registration organizations and shut them down. They gerrymander the crap out of states, even outside of census cycles, and are now set upon ramming through electoral vote distribution based on gerrymandered districts so that a Democratic candidate for president could win a state like Pennsylvania by 10% of the vote but get only 5 of 16 electoral votes for that state, and would still lose the national election even if they won the popular vote by 10 million ballots.

Politically, they leave only scorched earth. They now besmirch any form of compromise. Complete and utter obstruction is their policy when out of power, and ramming everything through wile leaving the other party in the dark is their policy when in power. If even their own policies become adopted by the other side, they suddenly turn and call them vile.

For Christ’s sake, conservatives have even done their best to make Democratic names into slurs. The campaign to smear the word “liberal” worked so well that many liberals now avoid the word and use “progressive” instead. To this day, conservatives refuse to utter the modifier “Democratic” and instead childishly say things like “the Democrat Party,” in an attempt to disassociate the party from its core values, while pushing the “DemocRAT” slur they so smugly adore.

All of this while their extremist PR arm, Fox News, works 24/7 to ludicrously defame and condemn anything Democratic or liberal, aided by bastions of “news” outfits, think tanks, bloggers, and action groups.


After all of that, Boehner says that Obama is out to annihilate the Republican Party… why? Because Obama outlined a strong agenda in his second inaugural speech?

That doesn’t just break irony. It vaporizes it. It reaches back into time and makes sure that irony died as an infant. It is so far beyond irony that it would take the light from irony two billion years to reach it.

And yet: conservatives will take this statement seriously.

The Republican Party is dying not because the president wants to get rid of them—something which, sadly, he has more or less done the opposite of—the GOP is dying because it is becoming so extreme that it is making extremists shake their heads in dismay. It is dying because their supporters are dying while the groups they vilify are growing.

Political Culture of War

January 19th, 2013 2 comments

Republicans are trying a new strategy: Democrats must agree to our budget plans, or else we with withhold everyone’s pay.

There are arguments about the plan’s constitutionality, but that’s not the issue for me. The issue I think is more important is that the tactic is being used in an abusive manner—literally, for extortion. Just as they have used other tactics, like shutdowns and defaulting on the debt.

Democrats agreed to a pay stoppage a few years back, but that was supported by both parties, and was a fairness issue—if no government workers got paid during a shutdown, then members of Congress would be no different.

The current plan is different, in that it is being used to extort. Nothing new for Republicans, this has been so for almost 20 years since the government shutdown under the Clinton administration.

The idea of Congress is very simple: if an idea is good enough for half the members to approve, it gets passed. In order to make such deals happen, both houses must agree. Congress was always intended to be a place where compromises took place in the name of fairness and equity, in the best interests of the people and the nation.

Conservatives have taken a flamethrower to that concept. Screw the people. Screw the nation. Give us what we want, or else we’ll burn it all down.

Republicans, unhappy at losing any battle, have defied the system, defied the very concept of Democracy itself. They have made any law they dislike have to pass a 60-vote hurdle in the Senate. In order to get their way, they have started holding hostage everything they can get their hands on, constitutionally or not. If there’s something important to the nation that they can destroy, they’ll hold a gun to its head unless they get what they want. And unlike a criminal hostage-taker, they don’t get arrested and removed from the equation; instead, they get to keep taking the same hostage time and time again, and then released back out to do it all over again.

It’s the same in the states, with votes. Can’t win an election? Then win state houses enough to gerrymander the hell out of those states. Too many Democrats voting? Then limit voting hours and voting resources at times and places they vote. Still losing? Then bring back Jim Crow, bigger and better than ever—pass laws that target Democratic voters under fraudulent pretexts and throw obstacles in their way. Still not winning? Hey, we can game the electoral system, changing how key states apportion their votes in the most extremely convoluted ways so that even if we lose the popular vote by a wide margin, we can still will more electoral votes. Make it so Democrats have to win by 10 million votes to eke out a victory electorally.

For Republicans, it is not about majority rule. It’s not about what the people want. And Democracy? Fuck Democracy.

It’s about what Republicans want, and how they can get it. Bend the rules, twist the rules, break the rules, whatever works for them. Even the pretexts are falling away as Republicans openly gloat about subverting the vote.

For Republicans, governing is war, and you win by whatever means necessary.

Lopsided

December 27th, 2012 1 comment

I thought that, if Wayne LaPierre were to appear on Meet the Press, that there might be at the very least equal-sided coverage. Instead, I think I saw why he chose that venue: it was hardly a challenge to him. Gregory did a rather lame job of holding LaPierre to the fire, and afterwards, instead of hearing the other side, we got Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer, with Schumer being extremely moderate at best. LaPierre and Graham making the same virulent case, and Schumer kind of saying “can’t we all just get along?” I am sure that LaPierre apologists will claim that Gregory was “tough” on him, but he was not, and was equally aggressive (not very, but acted like it) to all three men.

I wish I lived in an age of actual journalism. Did such an age ever exist? If so, I wonder what it was like.

Let’s go over LaPierre’s statements. Gregory began by asking if guns should be part of the argument; LaPierre countered the same way Graham did later: with crocodile tears for the victims:

We all have five year olds– in our families in some way. I mean we all put ourselves in that situation, and the tears flow down our eyes.

In short, “I don’t want to answer your question and want to appear sympathetic instead.” He does a poor job of it. I use the term “crocodile tears” not just because LaPierre and his patrons profit from tragedies like this and have no intention of turning their attention inward, but because he seriously looked reptilian when he said that. Even the phrasing was insincerely artificial. But the delivery was downright creepy.

He continues:

The N.R.A., made up of all these moms and dads, parents, we have 11,000 police training instructors. We have 80,000 police families. We’re four million members. And we sat down and we said, “What we can we do will actually make a difference today to make these kids safe?

In an example of why he was in fact horribly ineffective, Gregory simply let this pass. The correct response would have been, ”Setting aside for the moment that you do not represent the actual opinions of nor have you actually engaged the vast majority of all of those people you claim to have standing right behind you in lockstep, you did not answer my question, sir.“

Instead, this ass simply gets to walk away leaving the impression that he somehow had a 4-million-person round table and that everyone agreed with what he’s pushing. What I would love to see is how many people have mailed back their torn-up membership cards; a healthy number, I suspect, and one the NRA will never share.

You know, look. I know there’s a media machine in this country that wants to blame guns every time something happens. I know there’s an anti-second amendment industry in this country.

So now he is establishing that (a) only guns are blamed in the media, and (b) there’s an anti-gun ”machine“ (read: conspiracy), all bent on giving guns a bad name. Aside from paranoid, it is a projection; there is no ”machine,“ or else gun control would be stronger by now—the machine is the one LaPierre himself runs. As for the media, not to mention the president, all have been talking about a variety of answers from day one.

If it’s crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our school to protect our children, then call me crazy.

No problem there. I went over this before.

Gregory lamely keeps trying to get LaPierre to answer his first question, about whether guns should even be considered as a possible point to be regarded. He somewhat confusingly replied:

Gun control, you could ban all Dianne Feinstein’s, you could do whatever she wants to do with magazines, it’s not going to make any kid safer. We’ve got to get to the real problems, the real causes. And that’s what the N.R.A. is trying to do.
And I think, I’ll tell you this, I have people all over the country calling me saying, ”Wayne, I went to bed safer last night because I have a firearm. Don’t let the media try to make this a gun issue.“

In short, what he’s really saying is ”no.“

Next, LaPierre tries to dismiss the notion that armed guards at schools cannot stop mass shootings:

And let’s talk about what happened at Columbine, okay? There were armed guards there, and they didn’t go in. They were under orders that if something happened, they would have called the police for backup. … And they waited for the SWAT team to show up, and the SWAT team set outside and tried to figure out what to do. Every procedure has been changed since Columbine as a result of that … They’ve changed every police procedure since Columbine. I mean I don’t understand why you can’t, just for a minute, imagine that when that horrible monster tried to shoot his way into Sandy Hook School, that if a good guy with a gun had been there, he might have been able to stop…

To all of this, Gregory lamely responds that the Columbine officers exchanged fire with ”the shooters.“ Actually, it was just Harris, and focusing on Columbine only strengthens LaPierre’s argument, as he made a vague point about procedures that seems to explain off Columbine. The correct response for Gregory would have been, ”Even if Columbine’s procedures were wrong, Virginia Tech had an entire police department, and Fort Hood was a military base filled with trained armed soldiers. Even the Secret Service ultimately cannot keep presidents from being killed if the assailant is willing to sacrifice his own life, and if a man dresses in body armor and has a semi-automatic rifle with a 100-cartridge drum, a police officer with a pistol stands little chance of preventing a great deal of carnage. Not to mention that studies have shown that armed guards in schools can have a deleterious effect on the children.“

Instead, Gregory said, ”They exchanged fire with the shooters. So your principle of having armed guards was true in Columbine, was it not?“

Oooh, snap!

Jesus.

Next, LaPierre repeats his ”we have armed guards at office buildings“ canard:

Our police do this every day. They protect the president, The Secret Service does. They protect The Capitol. They protect office buildings. Most of the media, I know you don’t have armed guards here, but most of the media, when I go around this country, they’re protected by armed guards. Why can’t we protect our most precious resource?

Again, I dealt with that in this post. In short, the guards LaPierre mentions are not as commonplace as he suggests, and more to the point, they are not there to prevent massacres, nor could they. As for the Secret Service, to get to the level of protection of the president for our schools, the logistics and costs would make such a thing inconceivable.

What does Gregory do? He concedes the point. Way to get tough there, idiot.

Gregory then tries to get LaPierre to concede that at least is some cases, armed guards may not work, to which LaPierre answers, ”Nothing’s perfect, David.“ To which Gregory responds, ”Right.“

Cutting-edge journalism, let me tell you.

Gregory then asks about costs; LaPierre either answers that we should divert money from foreign aid, or else that we find similar funds. Which his Republican buddies would probably then block because it’s not ”paid for.“

Gregory, apparently either following a script or else under the impression that LaPierre is working under some system of logic, points out that LaPierre’s speech included the idea that if something could save lives, we should try it. To which LaPierre replies:

I tell you, my standard is this. You can’t legislate morality. Legislation works on the sane. Legislation works on the law abiding. … There are monsters out there every day, and we need to do something to stop them.

Essentially: gun control doesn’t work. Gregory’s considered reply:

Let’s stipulate that you’re right. Let’s say armed guards might work.

Wow. Real effective way to match that argument. Gregory’s stipulation was a segue to return the question of whether LaPierre would even consider the most obvious of gun control measures, mentioning the 30-round clip. The reply:

I don’t believe that’s going to make one difference. There are so many different ways to evade that, even if you had that. You had that for ten years when Dianne Feinstein passed that ban in ’94. It was on the books. Columbine occurred right in the middle of it. It didn’t make any difference.

Actually, it did. Columbine was a blip in a period where there were far fewer deadly attacks. From Princeton:

The data came from an extensive tabulation by Mark Follman at Mother Jones. Except for 1999, a year of five shootings (including the Columbine massacre), the assault ban period was peaceful by US standards….

Since the expiration of the gun ban in 2004, the number of shootings per year has doubled, and the number of victims per year has nearly tripled. Three of the bloodiest four years shown here occurred since the expiration.

Gregory, of course, was completely uninformed on this key point, and/or did not answer LaPierre’s lie.

LaPierre, when presented with a judge’s decision which pointed out the efficacy of banning large clips, answered:

It’s not going to work. It hasn’t worked. Dianne Feinstein had her ban, and Columbine occurred.

He uses the name ”Feinstein“ here and elsewhere, a total of five times, apparently the same way Republicans use the name ”Pelosi“: as a pejorative to baselessly express corrupt inefficiency. Which is not an argument. Nor is an exception a rule. It’s like saying, ”We outlaw cannibalism, but Jeffrey Dahmer ate people, so obviously the law does not work and we should repeal it.“ An argument Gregory did not even touch.

LaPierre then turned the conversation to mental illness, which is a red herring—everyone is talking about that as being part of the problem, and it does not make gun control irrelevant. Gregory tried to handle that by turning to background checks. LaPierre made it sound like he was for them, but only cited the National Instant Check System (NICS), an NRA-backed attempt to circumvent both waiting periods (which would have prevented Lanza at Newtown had his mother not been a gun nut) and more in-depth checks. NICS is ineffective as states often don’t enter data into it, and private sales and gun shows are easy loopholes to avoid the check at all.

Gregory actually made a few effective points:

But if you want to check and screen more thoroughly for the mentally ill, why not screen more thoroughly for everybody and eliminate the fact that 40% can buy a weapon without any background check? …

But you don’t deny that there are– that even the Instant Check System has huge holes, just like the mental health registry has huge holes.

And here is where we get to the heart of why it is useless to have anyone interview someone as unreasonable and extreme as LaPierre: they simply evade the questions, and, as in LaPierre’s case, are just too skilled at diverting the argument with a storm of BS:

You know what N.R.A. supports, David? N.R.A. supports what works, and we always have. We funded the (UNINTEL) Child Safety Program. We have accidents down to one tenth of what they used to be. We have supported prison building. We have supported programs like Project Exile where, every time you catch a criminal with a gun, a drug dealer with a gun, a violent felon with a gun, you prosecute him 100% of the time.

Which, of course, does not answer the question, and is full of disinformation and evasions, all of which would require far more time to point out the flaws in the new bullshit before getting back to the question LaPierre evaded in the first place.

I would go on, but looking through the interview, it’s mostly just more of the same and, quite frankly, it’s intensely depressing wading through such deep quagmires of festering pus.

My father had it right: just do not give people like LaPierre a national podium to speak from. He calls a press conference? Why report on it? If the nation’s premier handgun control center were to hold a press conference, would it get even a 100th of the attention? No. So ignore LaPierre. He wants to pick and choose which Sunday talk show to use as a bully pulpit on terms he dictates? Tell him to go to hell. Instead invite on the show reasonable and informed people from both sides of the issue to debate in a rational, structured, fact-based way. But we can’t do that. Instead, allow an extremist loon a national pedestal to spew his lies and then bring on two politicians to say nothing of substance.

It’s just the ”Liberal Media™“ hard at work again.

Categories: Right-Wing Extremism Tags:

The Party of the Lottery Winner

December 5th, 2012 1 comment

Jindal and others in the GOP are awakening to a new concept:

Jindal said the Republican Party needs to convince voters it is the party of the middle class and upward mobility.

You know what would be a good way to start? By not refusing to give the middle class an extension on their tax cuts unless the rich get one too.

And while you’re at it, stop trying to dismantle programs the middle class depends upon; Social Security and Medicare are not just for poor people.

Stop attacking institutions like education and unions which helped make the middle class.

Stop endorsing policies that scream, “We’re trying to increase income inequality.”

Stop favoring banks and financial institutions over the middle class.

Stop… aw, hell. You can see where this is going. The GOP would more or less have to dismantle its entire policy structure in order to be the party of the middle class.

Instead, they will likely do what they have always done: push policies that hurt the middle class while insisting that they are “the party of the middle class.”

The problem is, lying like that requires that you not delude yourself, else your lies become transparently ludicrous. That’s hard when you think like this:

“We’ve got to be the party of the middle class. I don’t know why we’ve essentially ceded that ground to the Democrats,” said strategist Matt Mackowiak. “We don’t believe our policies only help rich people. We believe our policies help people become rich.”

“We believe our policies help people become rich”? What happened to “We built that”? I thought their entire point was that government can’t do squat to help people.

At best, what this kind of person is saying is, if you are in the middle class, and you decide to start a business (most don’t), and, without our help, that business succeeds (most don’t), and then it becomes so successful that you become rich (most don’t)… then we’re on your side, and we’ll cut you special tax breaks and help you stay rich.

As for the rest of you middle-class people, the people who try to open businesses but who either fail or just do OK… and most significantly, to the majority of people in the middle class who simply work hard and expect to stay afloat in at least modest comfort… well, you can all go screw yourselves. We’re seeing after the people who can make something of themselves. They deserve our help; you don’t.

I wonder why that’s not working better?

The sad thing is, it’s working a lot better than it should. America has too much of a “lottery winner” mentality.

Categories: Right-Wing Extremism, Taxes Tags:

Republicans’ Love for the Wealthy Has No Bounds

December 4th, 2012 2 comments

Wow. Talk about obstinate:

House GOP leaders endorsed a debt-reduction plan Monday that would raise tax collections by $800 billion over the next decade, but they refused to budge on higher tax rates for the wealthy, the central issue dividing Republicans and Democrats.

The Republicans’ “middle ground” plan? They agree not to slash taxes for the rich yet again, they agree to go forward with their own nebulous and undefined plan to somehow cut deductions as a way of “taxing” wealthy people, and in exchange, Democrats must agree to $600 billion in cuts to health programs and hiking the eligibility age for Medicare from 67 to 69.

That’s a “middle ground”? “Give us most of what we want anyway”? With this plan, the Democrats get nothing they ask for, and the Republicans get mostly stuff they campaigned on.

They lose a major election that they should have won by wide margins primarily because of the issue of income inequality. The general public widely supports the new tax on income over $250,000, and hates the idea of health care cuts. The president is re-elected despite high unemployment rates and a struggling economy mostly on the strength of this issue, which also leads Republicans to lose the popular vote in all areas, maintaining the House only by gerrymandering.

And still, they think it’s a good idea to crash the economy instead of raising taxes on the wealthy by a measly few percent.

Holy crap.

I can only figure that they plan to run down the clock, hoping the Democrats will blink. However, Obama, usually the first to compromise, is actually standing firm on this one.

I am hopeful of the eventual outcome—I believe that Republicans will hold out until just before the end, that Obama will stand firm, and at the last minute the GOP will cave, at least mostly.

The problem is, this game they’re playing will likely damage the nation’s economic standing, just like it did last time.

Categories: Right-Wing Extremism, Taxes Tags:

Benghazi

November 17th, 2012 4 comments

Having heard about an unholy amount of chatter about Benghazi for the umpteenth time, I decided that I’d better inform myself about it. All I knew was that there was some uncertainty after the fact about what the cause had been, that the Obama administration had given mixed signals as to whether it was a planned attack or a spontaneous event triggered by the anti-Muslim video.

I knew that Romney had tried to zing Obama in the debates about whether he had identified it as a terror attack or if he had blamed the video, but that was obviously a trifle. I mean, conservatives are talking about this being worse than Watergate; that rises to a pretty serious level. It suggests that the government did something illegal and, knowing this, Obama tried to have it covered up.

So, what was the illegal action? I had heard people talking about botched security, either a lack of overall preparedness, or a decision at some level to withhold rescue for the diplomats. As far as I can tell, this is pure speculation.

I also heard something about there being two prisoners held at the CIA annex in the consulate, and the attack was a mission to break them out. The CIA denies that such prisoners were held there.

Fox is trying to sell the narrative that the White House dawdled and delayed at the time of the attack, painting a picture of the embassy staff repeatedly pleading for permission to escape or getting military assistance while Obama and his staff coldly told them to sit and wait and did nothing. Reading the article, it appears to be the usual Fox combination of unnamed sources, cherry-picked information, and directed conclusions.

The most central claims, it seems, appear to focus simply on the reporting of the facts by the Obama administration; McCain, for example, called it “a cover-up or the worst kind of incompetence,” and demands investigations—but seems to focus only on how it was reported by Obama and U.N. Ambassador Rice.

The thing is, none of what is being reported rises to the level of an illegal action, so far as I can tell. The mixed messages seem to be the result of scattered intelligence and possibly poor coordination, but that’s not illegal. If prisoners were being held at the CIA complex, was that illegal? I wouldn’t think so, and certainly I don’t hear that being held as the center of the scandal. If the White House failed to react in a timely or effective manner, that might be a black eye for them, but it’s not illegal. And if there is no illegal action, then a “cover-up” is also not illegal.

Who knows. Maybe there is something here, but it sure as heck doesn’t look like it. What it looks like is what we’ve seen several times before: the conservative bubble seeing an event or crisis that could harbor some kind of wrongdoing by the Obama administration, so they immediately claim there is a scandal, while they flail about with any variety of conspiracy theories that, of course, “demand” full investigations with committees and prosecutors and such, while the right-wing media does everything it can to make it appear that there is something actually going on.

Paul Waldman at The American Prospect seems to sum it up best:

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

An Ungracious Exit

November 16th, 2012 5 comments

Usually, when a candidate loses an election, he makes a gracious concession speech and then, in a dignified manner, retires from public attention for a while. We may hear from him later on, but we do not hear him grousing about how the other guy illicitly won the election. Even Al Gore, who lost because the other guy actually did steal the election, in the most galling ways, even Gore did not complain about how the election was lost. He commented on other stuff, like how Bush ignored the warnings before 9/11, but that was years later. After November 2000, he gracefully conceded and faded away for a few years.

Not so Mitt Romney. Barely a week after he loses the election, he’s still grousing to other rich people about how Obama stole the election from him by promising poor people, minorities, and women “free stuff.” He bitterly suggested that Democrats try to give away free dental care in 2016, suggesting that trillion-dollar unpaid-for giveaways are nothing to liberals.

You see, we Democrats are immoral here. You should never win elections by providing things to the electorate. You should win them by providing things to your patrons, in particular wealthy people and corporations. That’s the only moral way to win an election.

So, what was the “free stuff” Obama bribed voters with? According to Romney, it was Obama’s healthcare law and support for comprehensive immigration reform. The problem is, neither of these things really have a significant impact on the budget, but they do help remedy serious problems we face today. In truth, we need better. Single-payer would be more cost-effective still, as would controls on health care prices—but both are fanatically opposed by conservatives like Romney. Immigration needs to be fixed, but “self-deportation” is as ludicrous and insulting as Romney’s pipe dream that he would solve the trade war he’d start with China by looking at them sternly.

So, reasonable and economically feasible plans that address social needs, that’s “free stuff” which costs trillions of dollars a pop.

Unlike Bush’s Medicare plans, which cost vast sums of money and were actually unpaid for, which acted as “free stuff” for seniors, a powerful voting bloc, and was a payoff to Big Pharma to boot. That, apparently, was OK.

Same with Romney’s tax gifts. Apparently, a 20% tax cut across the board, which Romney vigorously tried to frame as being for the middle class, would have cost nearly $5 trillion over ten years, and was unpaid for. That was not “free stuff”? It would provide a huge slice of what government does for free, so I think that qualifies. And, like Bush’s Pharma payoff, Romney’s tax plan would have been a ginormous gift to the rich. Corporate taxes slashed by 30%. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy slashed by 20%, and if, like many wealthy people—including Romney!—you could engineer your income to be capital gains, that would be slashed to zero! And no taxes in death, either.

Yeah, that’s definitely not “free stuff.”

What this shows, more than anything else, is that Romney’s 47% speech that was released on video was not some aberration. It was not something that just “came out wrong.” It appears that this is, in fact, exactly what Romney believes to be true.

Remember how Romney kept saying stuff during the election which was based on far-right-field stuff from extreme web sites? Like the idea that Obama did not use the word “terror” to describe the Benghazi attacks? More and more, it is apparent that this is who Romney is—a guy who reads Newsbusters and Red State, believes them literally, and uses them as sources for his claims.

We thought he was a cipher, a blank slate, a flip-flopper who would say or do anything but in fact represented nothing. We were wrong.

He’s a wingnut. A Freeper.

And he’s a sore loser.

Categories: Election 2012, Right-Wing Extremism Tags:

All or Nothing

November 14th, 2012 4 comments

It’s been said of late that conservatives are so patriotic that they want to secede from the union. They love the Constitution so much, they want to rewrite it. They love Democracy, but hate when people they disagree with vote. They love America, but clearly hate most Americans. They want to do away with government handouts, but will cry havoc if anyone threatens to touch their Social Security or Medicare checks. They denounce government pork, but take the lion’s share. They seem to think that the central theme of a nation which calls itself a “union” is “every man for himself.”

And now that their extremism has truly begun to marginalize them despite every game and trick they can imagine to inflate their influence, more and more of them are having tantrums.

A Republican woman in Arizona was so distraught after Obama won, she ran her husband down with her car because he failed to vote. She claimed that “she believed her family would suffer under a second term of President Barack Obama.”

The Republican county treasurer in Hardin, Texas, made public his opinion that Texas should secede, saying that “in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic.” He claimed to just want to “avoid this gut-wrenching spectacle every four years.” One presumes he did not feel this way in 2004, nor would he have if Romney had won.

However, it is no longer just scattered nutballs at the fringe. It is, instead, a growing conservative movement. Petitions have begin to grow for secession. At the White House web site, there are petitions for 35 states to secede from the union. Seven have grown to over 20,000 signatures; Texas is at 85,000.

Each petition reads the same: “Peacefully grant the State of [state name] to Withdraw from the United States of America and Create its own NEW Government.” West Virginia, apparently, wants to form its own “NEW Govern.”

On the one hand, it’s relatively easy to dismiss: I see no filter which would prevent people from other states or even other countries signing the petitions. I am not sure, but doubt there is a limit to home many petitions one person may sign.

Nevertheless, the disparity in numbers for each suggests at least that it’s not an automated con job.

The greatest caveat is sincerity; perhaps most people doing this individually are doing so as a form of protest.

However, you know that with many—who knows, maybe more than half the numbers—they are sincere. Maybe not very knowledgable, maybe not aware what secession actually means, but sincere nevertheless.

And you can bet that the sincere ones essentially want to leave the table and stick the remaining parties with the check. Take Texas, for example. You think they want to take their share of the national debt with them? By population, it’s nearly $1.3 trillion. I almost signed their petition.

All of this is not about what is claimed. When the debt was skyrocketing under Bush, no one was clamoring for secession. Had Romney been elected and had he been able to institute his policies, the debt would have shot up (instead of having gone down under Obama); in that case, again, you can be assured there would have been no such outcry for secession. Despite their claims, the secessionists are not about the debt; they are fine with it when their party is in power.

Nor do I think it is mostly about race. For some, yes; there is undeniably a racist tinge to much of the discontent. But I believe that were it Hillary or Biden instead of Obama, we’d be seeing the same thing.

No, I think this has more to do with simply being in control. Fully in control. Getting everything that you want. What summed it up best, in my opinion, was a small story from 2005, just a few months after Bush was re-elected.

Republicans owned the White House and controlled both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court was deciding cases more conservatively than not. Fox News was the loudest voice out there, MSNBC not having yet found its voice. Most pundits were conservatives, as were the loudest and the most often heard. Sunday talk shows predominantly featured Republicans. Conservative views and policies ran over liberal ones.

At that time, Starbucks had a little campaign called “The Way I See It,” in which quotes, often political, were printed on the cups. Most were from liberal personalities.

A Republican woman in Florida lamented, “I’m not surprised. I’m used to being under-represented.”

Now, think about that. “I’m used to being under-represented.” For the previous two years, her party had full control over the entire government, and for almost all of it for more than four years, and had just won re-election and control for another two. In her state, her party controlled the governorship and the legislature, and had for some time. How exactly was this woman “under-represented”?

We see this many times in conservative culture. White males dominate in virtually every manner of success and benefit from widespread racial preference, and yet whine about “reverse discrimination.” Christians see their religion and beliefs dominate the nation in almost every single respect, but literally throw themselves on the ground in lamentation over a “war on Christianity.”

It seems that the more conservatives get, the more they feel victimized when the last scraps are still held by someone else.

This is how many conservatives see politics: as an all-or-nothing game. Either we get everything we want, or it’s never enough. We win, we get to do anything we want. We lose, and we wreck the game and scatter the pieces. This is precisely what Republicans in Congress have been doing: overrunning when in power, obstructing when not.

I hate to use the old cliché, but there is no better analogy for what we are seeing than a spoiled-rotten three-year-old throwing a shrieking, foot-stamping tantrum because he can’t have everyone’s cake. It is simply far too apt.

Tell you what. Take a few southern states, give them to the hard-core right-wingers, make sure they take their portion of the debt (they did, after all, incur most of it, but let’s divide it evenly anyway), and let them build their 20-foot wall around their new country. We’ll be far better off without these people.

Just make sure they don’t take any nukes with them.

Categories: Election 2012, Right-Wing Extremism Tags:

GOP Cooperating? Isn’t That Like Sharks Hugging?

November 12th, 2012 3 comments

Bill Kristol himself is noting that Republicans will have to actually act in a bipartisan way and compromise, instead of being totally obstructionist and just pretending to be the bipartisan ones:

“I think Republicans will have to give in much more than they think,” Kristol said. He believes Obama will be able to pass major, consequential legislation in his second term.

“Four presidents in the last century have won more than 51 percent of the vote twice: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan and Obama,” Kristol said. “I think there will be a big budget deal next year. It will be an Obama-type budget deal much more than a Paul Ryan-type budget deal.”

This seems to hold with Boehner’s apparent “maybe we could possibly see our way towards some kind of compromise perhaps” attitude as of late.

So, is this a Charlie-Brown-and-Lucy football-kicking fakeout? Are Republicans just acting in a compromising and bipartisan fashion only so they can later bug out, but claim it was Obama who bullied them into it? Or have conservatives actually figured out that their demographics are sinking, their histrionics are getting old and worn, and that maybe obstructionism isn’t working for them as well as they thought?

I think that, in private, they did not miss the fact that they not only lost the presidency and the Senate rather significantly, but they also lost the House—a trend that will only intensify. And that in order to keep even the House, they are going to have to start rethinking this whole batshit-crazy let-nothing-pass crap that’s been sinking the economy—now that the electorate has given them a not-so-gentle nudge to say, “Stop fracking around and start getting some work done.”

Of course, I am ever the optimist.

Categories: Election 2012, Right-Wing Extremism Tags:

Why Romney Lost

November 11th, 2012 3 comments

Conservatives are suggesting lots of reasons. The media was in the tank for Obama. Hurricane Sandy robbed Romney of his “momentum.” Romney did not vilify Obamacare enough. Obama and/or pollsters “suppressed the vote.” And so forth. Of course, that’s all crap. The media, as always, tried as hard as possible to make the election a horse race, which gets them ratings. Romney’s “momentum” had died well before Hurricane Sandy, and was not his momentum but instead Obama’s self-injury in Denver, from which he recovered. Romney could not vilify Obamacare more than it had been vilified, and people were beginning to tire of the claim, not to mention Romney’s case was weak because of Romneycare. And as for suppressing the vote, that’s a contemptible fabrication from a party that put forth the most powerful drive to suppress the vote in living memory.

So, why did Romney lose?

To me, the reason was simple: Republicans didn’t have anyone competent who could pass through their sickeningly twisted nomination process, and once Romney was through it, it turned out that he was a rich, elitist, out-of-touch, lying, flip-flopping Mormon Gordon Gekko who spat on poor people (the “47%”), proposed raising taxes on everyone but the rich (for whom he would cut taxes deeply, again), gave no details on any of his ludicrous and fraudulent plans, and chose an extremist VP candidate famous for idolizing an radical atheist and wanting to kill Medicare and Social Security.

I mean, seriously, what does it take to lose a presidential campaign nowadays?

It’s not surprising at all that Romney lost. What was amazing is that he came as close as he did to winning. Not too close, but enough to make your hair stand on end when you think about what people could see he was and yet voted for him anyway.

Is it just my imagination, or do politicians in the GOP have to regularly say and do things today which would have destroyed the career of any politician just thirty years ago?

Update: This helps make the case. I am pretty certain you could not make a video like this of Obama, not without using selective editing to fake half the stuff, and even then the video would only be about 20 seconds long and still not half as damning as this.

Categories: Election 2012, Right-Wing Extremism Tags:

Aftermath Analysis

November 10th, 2012 3 comments

Jeesh, have I been busy. Have been putting in 10- to 13-hour days this week, only to get home needing to do another 2-3 hours before getting to bed. The weekend is for catch-up. However, I want to comment on some of the post-game analysis going on regarding the election.

Many on the left are saying now that all that Super PAC spending “didn’t matter,” and that attempts to suppress the Democratic vote failed. I am not so sure. I have serious trouble believing that, had the spending been equal on both sides, and had there been no attempts to suppress the vote, that the results would have been exactly the same, or almost so. It’s hard for me to accept the idea that Obama did not lose a fair amount of the popular vote, maybe as much as a few percent, as a result of the GOP’s more extreme efforts.

It’s possible that the electoral outcome would have been the same, because Romney had no close-call states. The closest margin Romney won by was 2.2%, in North Carolina; in all other states he won, he won by an 8% margin or higher. Obama might possibly have won North Carolina, but he could not have gone so far as to get Georgia.

On the other hand, Obama could have easily lost Florida, and perhaps Ohio and Virginia, had Republicans gone even further. If, say, the courts had not backed Democratic efforts to open polling places, or had they allowed voter ID laws to stay in effect.

What’s interesting—and what one could easily point to to suggest a mandate for Obama—is that in almost all other states, Obama also won by significant margins. While Florida might have been a squeaker, and Ohio & Virginia were around 2%, every other state he won by nearly 5% or better. Almost no amount of additional Republican election fraud (possibly not even including extreme hacking of computerized vote counts) would have pulled those states into Romney’s column.

Even if Obama had lost Florida, Ohio, and Virginia to Romney, he still would have had 272 electoral votes—still more than enough to win. In a fascinating turn of events, Ohio was, it turns out, not the key state—Colorado was. And Obama won it by 4.7%, meaning Romney would have had to push the dial that far back in the other direction in order to win the White House.

So, Obama did not just win by 2.6% of the popular vote, nor did he win by getting Ohio by a margin of 1.9%. Effectively, Obama won by a 4.7% margin. Nationwide, that represents 5.7 million votes, close to double the 3.2 million popular votes Obama received.

This election was not a squeaker, not by a long shot. Nor was Obama’s lead one that he could have easily lost. While not a landslide, it was a solid, insurmountable win for the president.

As a result, we can conclude that the GOP’s efforts failed not because they were ineffective, but because Obama simply had so much support that he won by a wide margin. Which is why Nate Silver’s forecast never had Obama drop below 280 electoral votes; no matter how “close” things seemed in the polls, Obama had a very strong electoral position from day one.


Now, Republicans are already trying to wring the numbers to make it look like Obama’s support is weak, or that their own policies were somehow affirmed. Mitch McConnell even suggested that voters did not “endorse” the president, but instead the mandate was to not raise taxes on the rich.

Let’s take a quick look back to 2004, shall we? Bush won 286 electoral votes, compared to 332 for Obama this year. Bush won by a 2.4% margin, compared to Obama’s 2.6% win. At that time, conservatives across the board proclaimed a Bush mandate, followed by Bush himself. Well, if Bush had a mandate with 2.4% and 286 electoral votes, how does Obama not have one with 2.6% and 332 electoral votes?

Republicans hang on to the thread that is their House majority, claiming it shows that Americans want them there, or at least that Americans don’t want change. However, along with picking up two seats in the Senate, Democrats won the House as well—or, they would have won the House, had Republicans not gerrymandered the hell out of more than half the states. Democrats, in fact, beat Republicans in House races in the popular vote by half a percent; that this led to a 35-or-so-seat margin of victory for Republicans, despite Republicans have deep support in limited places and not broad support overall, can only be explained by gerrymandering.

Think about it: Obama won by 2.6% to 4.7% in terms of actual people voting. Democrats picked up 2 extra seats in the Senate.

Why would people vote for Democrats at the presidential and Senate levels, but switch to Republican in local districts?

The answer: they didn’t. They voted Democratic. That was their choice. The only reason it is not reflected in the election results is because the Republicans engineered districts to allow them—in a more traditional, time-honored way—to steal votes.


Of course, that fact does not stop the Republicans from coming up with various excuses as to how Obama’s win was illicit, and the people really voted for them all the way. Fox’s favorite is now almost a cliché: to suggest that The Liberal Media bought Obama the election. The Liberal Media blamed Bush too much for the current state of things. The Liberal Media failed to report enough of “the numbers” that showed Obama to be a failure.The Liberal Media glossed over Obama’s scandals. The Liberal Media gave unfairly lopsided fact-checking against Romney. And The Liberal Media focused too much on little stuff like Chris Christie’s positive comments. As one conservative summed it up:

The media lauded Obama no matter how horrendous his record, and they savaged Obama’s Republican contenders as ridiculous pretenders.

Yeah, they never said anything bad about Obama, and never stopped bashing Romney unfairly. That was it.

What that really means is, the non-Fox media outlets didn’t go completely Fox on Obama. Which is equivalent to being in the tank for Obama and throwing the election his way.

Another Fox analysis was more in-depth, which is fun to pick apart:

The Media’s Biased Gaffe Patrol Hammered Romney: The media unfairly jumped on inconsequential mistakes — or even invented controversies — from Romney and hyped them in to multi-day media “earthquakes.”

Laughably, they equate Romney’s “47%” remarks with Obama’s “The private sector is doing fine,” as if these were equal gaffes that should have gotten equal criticism. In response, Andy Borowitz said it best: “BREAKING: Man Who Told Half the Nation to Fuck Themselves Somehow Loses Election.”

Number 2:

Pounding Romney With Partisan Fact Checking: There’s nothing wrong with holding politicians accountable for the honesty of their TV ads and stump speeches, but this year the self-appointed media fact-checkers attacked Republicans as liars for statements that were accurate.

Yeah, not really. I posted on that here, the upshot being that the fact-checkers drowned themselves in false equivalencies; Romney demonstrably lied 3 or 4 times more than Obama, but the “fact-checkers” worked hard to make the truth levels seem the same. As bad as that was, it wasn’t nearly enough for Fox & Family.

Number 3:

Those Biased Debate Moderators: Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman slamming him as “practically useless” for not jumping into the debate on behalf of President Obama.

Yeah, how dare those other two moderators actually note Romney’s lies, right there in front of everyone. Moderators are not guardians of truth or fact, they’re supposed to sit still and shut up when a candidate spouts outrageous lies. How dare they.

Number 4:

The Benghazi Blackout: Right after the September 11 attack in Libya, the networks proclaimed that the events would bolster President Obama — “reminding voters of his power as commander-in-chief,” as NBC’s Peter Alexander stated on the September 14 edition of “Today.” But as a cascade of leaked information erased the portrait of Obama as a heroic commander, the broadcast networks shunted the Benghazi story to the sidelines.

Here we see classic conservative projection: as happened with 9/11 and other tragedies, right-wing media rush to politicize events as they claim their competition did for Obama. This is kind of similar to the anguished cry of the late 90’s right wing, Where’s the outrage that the president got a hummer and lied about it? Can’t you see that children are being traumatized by our endless splashing of lurid details in the media? Sometimes, manufactured outrage is so hard to generate and so often unappreciated.

Benghazi was, at most, a wash. That Obama did not transform the diplomatic bureaucracy into a fast-acting juggernaut of security-wielding effectiveness is not a valid criticism, nor is it really credible to suggest that withholding judgment for a few weeks till the facts were straight, and only indirectly noting the incident as terror-related was more than a PR bumble at worst. On the other hand, Romney’s instant and fact-poor attack before the facts were in were hardly a bright spot, and easily matched whatever mistakes Obama made. Citing poor security also paled in light of Ryan’s vote to defund diplomatic security. In the end, all Fox has is an opportunistic smear exploiting a tragedy neither candidate would have been able to avoid. The rest of the media not jumping on the partisan attack wagon is hardly proof that they engineered a whitewashing of the affair in Obama’s favor.

Number 5:

Burying the Bad Economy: Pundits agreed that Obama’s weakness was the failure of the US economy to revive after his expensive stimulus and four years of $1 trillion deficits. But the major networks failed to offer the sustained, aggressive coverage of the economy that incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush faced in 1992, or even that George W. Bush faced in 2004 — both years when the national economy was in better shape than it is now.

“Pundits agreed”? Which ones? And why should we listen to “pundits”? Granted, you could classify it as a possible “weakness,” but only if you looked at facts from certain angles.

This analysis, for example, assumes that the stimulus failed, and it was Obama’s fault. However, one of the more cogent arguments Obama made, most pointedly put forth by Bill Clinton, was that Obama stepped in as the economy was collapsing, headed for a new Great Depression—and Obama quickly turned that around and brought us into job-creating territory, with 32 straight months of private sector job growth.

The stimulus didn’t fail, but it was too weak. Why? Because there were too many tax cuts, and not enough infrastructure spending—Obama tried to pass a better plan, but Republicans blocked him. We know that the stimulus brought an abrupt change for the better, and the amount it failed was minor—if critical—compared to the overall improvement. We also know that tax cuts are ineffective at stimulating job growth—meaning that it had to be the spending that improved the economy. Meaning that had Obama’s original plan passed, we’d have stronger growth. Meaning that the failure was more a Republican one—and although the media, especially Fox, did repeatedly bring up the economy and point out it was owned by Obama, nobody mentioned the dragging effect that Republicans had had, and during the six months leading up to the election, few even pointed out the game-playing the GOP did with the debt default, and very little was mentioned about the Republican obstructionism that prevented further reparative efforts on the part of the president.

As for the relatively “aggressive” economic criticism in the MSM in 2004, I somehow doubt that this Fox analyst actually relied on facts to support his claim. Nor, I think, would the claim hold water if a review of media attention of the 2000 election were to be included.


What Fox’s entire criticism boils down to is that the rest of the media did not follow Fox News’ partisan attacks.

Some are going a bit further, predictably:

Karl Rove told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Thursday that President Obama won re-election “by suppressing the vote” with negative campaign ads that “turned off” potential voters, citing a victory that carried a smaller percentage of the popular vote compared to that of the 2008 presidential race.

…Which is record-breaking irony, as Rove’s own Super PAC was responsible for the lion’s share of negative campaign ads.

As for Rove’s and other conservatives’ use of the specific expression “suppressing the vote,” it is a blatant attempt to smear the other side with the crime rather egregiously committed by themselves. Seriously, when you unilaterally target battleground states with initiatives to obstruct voting by requiring extra effort to obtain IDs, and shut down polling places at specific times, all orchestrated to hinder voting in ways that specifically target voters belonging to the other party… to go around saying the other side is “suppressing the vote” because they ran one negative ad to your four… that’s pretty damned egregious. You could even call it “breathtaking.” It is like a corporate raider who legally stole billions from seniors’ retirement funds whining that he was overcharged when he paid a buck and a half for a 12-ounce Diet Coke.

At least one guy on the right gets credit for not staying on the Kool-Aid IV drip, and that’s Dean Chambers, the guy who started the “Unskewed Polls” web site when Romney was closer to his actual popularity levels before Obama screwed up royally in Denver. Chambers, in face of facts, actually owns up honestly and makes no excuses:

I was wrong on that assumption and those who predicted a turnout model of five or six percent in favor of Democrats were right. Likewise, the polling numbers they produced going on that assumption turned out to be right and my “unskewed” numbers were off the mark.

He even went on to congratulate Nate Silver for getting the numbers right better than anyone else.

Now, in one sense, this is not a big thing, recognizing the facts. But in light of the fact that nearly every other right-winger in the “Liberal Media” is still in denial, it’s rather significant. As unreasonable as Chambers’ assumptions were during the campaign, he can at least face facts when they are incontrovertibly placed in front of him.

If more conservatives were able to do this, we’d be much better off.

Governance by Extortion

November 4th, 2012 1 comment

“The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy.”Mitt Romney, Nov. 2, 2012

This expresses, in crystalline form, how the Republicans have practiced politics over the past many years. It boils down to, “If we are in control, we run over you and give you nothing; if you are in control, we set fire to the house.”

In 2006, Democrats took control of Congress. According to Republicans, they are bipartisan and would reach across the aisle. They didn’t. They began to use the filibuster in record numbers, blocking everything that came down the pike. Trent Lott, then Minority Whip, made the strategy very clear:

“The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail… and so far, it’s working for us. Democrats are the ones taking the blame for not getting anything done.” Trent Lott, July 2007

Immediately upon Obama’s election, Republicans, in what they claim was a bipartisan attempt to reach out, made persistent announcements that they hoped Obama would fail to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and bring the nation back from the brink of depression:

“I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail….”Rush Limbaugh, January 21, 2009

Question: “Do you agree with Rush Limbaugh that we shouldn’t hope for President Obama to succeed?”
Tom DeLay: “Well, exactly right. I don’t want this for our nation. That’s for sure.”
Tom Delay, former House Majority Leader, February 2009

“Absolutely we hope that his policies fail.” … “I believe his policies will fail, I don’t know, but I hope they fail.”Rick Santorum, February 2009

In fact, it was Obama who was bipartisan—literally to a fault. He set the tone at his inauguration, inviting conservative evangelical Rick Warren to give the invocation, and then expanded from there. As I wrote in February 2009, “Obama went way out of his way to include Republicans; he even left pride behind and showed up at the Republicans’ doorstep, gave them large amounts of face time and more than a little respect; he quickly eliminated programs from his stimulus that Republicans complained about, like family planning provisions, and gave Republicans several key elements they demanded, like increased tax cuts, despite their limited effectiveness in situations such as this.” Republicans responded to his overtures by harshly criticizing him, and despite multiple concessions on Obama’s part for a plan already conservative in nature, they rewarded him with zero votes for his proposals in the House, and nearly unanimous votes against in the Senate—the only crossovers being Specter (who soon after became a Democrat), and Snow & Collins (the two Maine centrists); virtually a solid wall of Republicans slapping Obama in the face.

This pattern continued for most of Obama’s term: He begins by issuing proposals which are already compromises (for example, his health care plan was one created by conservatives in the 1990’s, and instituted by none other than the Republican nominee when he was governor), and then makes steady compromises, taking away things liberals want and adding things conservatives want. Throughout the process, conservatives call him vile names, and in the end, they vote in lockstep against Obama. Again and again–even on policies which just years or even months before were policies championed by conservatives themselves.

Their goals were not only clear, they were clearly stated:

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”Mitch McConnell, October 23, 2010

Note that this was their first priority, more important than creating jobs or helping the economy. As evidenced by the fact that, while Democrats in 2008 hastened to pass a stimulus and many other bills to help the economy, Republicans, taking control of the House in 2010, did nothing on jobs or the economy at all. Unless reciting the Constitution—badly—is a “job creator.”

Republicans have made repeated claims of bipartisanship, and similar claims that Obama is harshly partisan. Bipartisanship requires compromise. It requires the agreement or cooperation of both parties on issues they disagree on; that is, in effect, the definition of the word. Obama has begun, continued, and ended with compromise and cooperation, much to his detriment amongst his own party.

Republicans?

“This is not a time for compromise, and I can tell you that we will not compromise on our principles.”John Boehner, October 27, 2010.

Rush Limbaugh laid out the new conservative meaning of bipartisanship without the window dressing:

“To us, bipartisanship is [Democrats] being forced to agree with us after we politically have cleaned their clocks and beaten them.” Rush Limbaugh, at CPAC, February 28, 2009

This is not just a fad with them; when they sense a winning strategy, it becomes their core strategy, more or less permanently. In the 1990’s, they discovered that engineering language helped them; they have stuck with it ever since. In 2006, they discovered that filibusters and obstructionism worked for them; it is now their primary method of governance. Compromise? That too has gone the way of the dinosaur; no matter how hard Democrats try—and they have been trying, even after it was proven more or less hopeless to do so—Republicans refuse to compromise.

And now, they have taken on a new strategy: holding America hostage. They did it last year by threatening to default on the debt, and as a result, severely damaged America’s credit and good standing. Despite that, they are threatening it again.

Nor is it to bring down the deficit or erase the debt; their own policies would add trillions to the deficit. The threat of default, just like the excuse of things having to be “paid for,” only apply to things Democrats try to pass. If it is a Republican measure, it does not need to be paid for—on the claim that all of their policies are so beneficial, that somehow, down the road, they will magically pay for themselves. Which goes contrary to established fact.

They do not even stand by their own promises. They sign pledges against any tax increase—and then propose a spate of tax plans that would indirectly and directly increase taxes on the poor and the middle class. They complain about the “47 percent” as if they paid no taxes, put forth proposals to make the poor pay even more, and then lay out plans to cut taxes for rich people to zero.

And for these “principles,” there is no compromise; “bipartisanship” means that Democrats do whatever Republicans want. The primary task is not helping America or Americans, but achieving political mastery, even if it means bringing the economy crashing down.

This is the modern Republican Party.

That anybody votes for it is a monument to the audacity of propaganda and hate, to the victory of repeating lies and blaming the other guy over the attempt to govern by the traditional system, however faulty the system may be.

The policy is simple: if we win, give the other side nothing. If they win, set fire to the house and let them wallow in the blame.

If you vote Republican—at the local, state, or federal level—this is what you are voting for. Scorched Earth. Lies. Hate.

Because, as Trent Lott pointed out, it’s working for them.

Categories: Election 2012, Right-Wing Extremism Tags:

False Compassion

October 16th, 2012 5 comments

Ryan recently showed up in a photo washing pots at a homeless charity. What a guy, right? Selflessly serving the poor.

But wait—something smells fishy. Ryan is a Rand devotee; serving others like that is an evil to someone like him.

Oh, right. He wasn’t actually helping the homeless, or serving a charity. He was faking it:

The head of a northeast Ohio charity says that the Romney campaign last week “ramrodded their way” into the group’s Youngstown soup kitchen so that GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan could get his picture taken washing dishes in the dining hall.

Brian J. Antal, president of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society, said that he was not contacted by the Romney campaign ahead of the Saturday morning visit by Ryan, who stopped by the soup kitchen after a town hall at Youngstown State University.

“We’re a faith-based organization; we are apolitical because the majority of our funding is from private donations,” Antal said in a phone interview Monday afternoon. “It’s strictly in our bylaws not to do it. They showed up there, and they did not have permission. They got one of the volunteers to open up the doors.”

He added: “The photo-op they did wasn’t even accurate. He did nothing. He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall.”

Well, at least he washed a few dishes, right?

Um, no. The dishes he “washed” were already clean.

But at least his boss is actually compassionate, right? After all, he instituted that Romneycare program which provided insurance for a lot of poor people. And he’s proud of it. I think. Maybe. Or was that last week? Hard to tell, it’s like the wind direction changing. We need a RomneyVane.

But Obamacare, that’s an abomination. How dare Obama do for the nation what Romney did for Massachusetts! Nope. Obamacare has got to go, and Romney has vowed to deprive tens of millions of Americans of health care the moment he steps in to the Oval Office.

Sorry, poor people. That money is needed to pay for a fraction of the ginormous tax cut for wealthy people. You need jobs, after all, right? And we all know that a five-trillion-dollars-over-ten-years tax cut will create zillions of jobs, right? An accurate statement, as “zillions” is not a real number, just as jobs created by tax cuts are not real, either.

So, what will poor people do for health care? Not to worry, Mitt has a safety net to catch them:

Sunday on CBS’a 60 Minutes, Romney gave a hint about what he would replace Obamacae with. Scott Pelley asked him: “Does the government have a responsibility to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who don’t have it today?”

Romney replied “Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance, people– we– if someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

Pelley was taken aback. He told Romney “That is an expensive way to do it…. in the Emergency Room.”

Romney responded: “Different, again, different states have different ways of doing that. Some provide that care through clinics. Some provide the care through emergency rooms. In my state, we found a solution that worked for my state. But I wouldn’t take what we did in Massachusetts and say to Texas, ”You’ve got to take the Massachusetts model.“

This idea is not new; one could call it ”The Republican Option,“ as Republicans have been suggesting the ER as a health care option for some time now. Essentially, it says, ”we’re not going to provide health care, and the states may or may not leave you to die.“

Paul Krugman has a little bit of data for Romney. Not to suggest that Romney is interested in data or anything. But you might be interested:

Even the idea that everyone gets urgent care when needed from emergency rooms is false. Yes, hospitals are required by law to treat people in dire need, whether or not they can pay. But that care isn’t free — on the contrary, if you go to an emergency room you will be billed, and the size of that bill can be shockingly high. Some people can’t or won’t pay, but fear of huge bills can deter the uninsured from visiting the emergency room even when they should. And sometimes they die as a result.

More important, going to the emergency room when you’re very sick is no substitute for regular care, especially if you have chronic health problems. When such problems are left untreated — as they often are among uninsured Americans — a trip to the emergency room can all too easily come too late to save a life.

A doctor followed up on that:

It’s true that EMTALA [the 1986 law requiring that emergency rooms treat you regardless of insurance status] requires a medical screening exam and stabilization of any emergency medical conditions. It does not, however, mandate admission to the hospital for treatment of conditions that are not currently emergent (e.g. cancer, kidney disease, and other more chronic conditions except related to certain complications). For example, if someone were to present to one of our emergency departments with some mild bloating and be found to have an abdominal mass, they may very well be discharged home for outpatient follow-up and treatment. If that person doesn’t have insurance, they will likely have difficulty obtaining that care.

So, got it, poor people? You no-good, parasitic 47-percenters? You’re covered for a heart attack, so long as you’re willing to dodge the debt collectors, but if you have anything that is not currently bleeding or gushing, you’re on your own. Cancer? Too bad. Tumor? Live with it. Or not. Liver problems? What, do you think this country is made of money or something? Go to your corner and wither, you pathetic loser. If you didn’t make it in the free market system, you don’t deserve help from it—because America is nothing more than the free-market system.

You should be thankful that Paul Ryan took the time to pretend to wash a few pots for you, you ungrateful wretch.

Republican Politician Goes There

July 23rd, 2012 3 comments

And then some: Republican Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (recalled) blames gun control and the people being shot at directly. Emphasis in the former senator’s Facebook post mine (spelling is his):

This is certainly a time for prayers for the victims and the families of victims in this horrific crime in Colorado. I just had a call from a very good friend of mine in San Diego, California who’s neice Kim, Kim’s best friend Mikayla and Kevin were in the Theater in the front rows. Kim and Kevin got out and as he was trying to get Mikayla out she said she was shot. As the rush of the crowd exiting through the exit door pushed Kevin and Kim out they lost Mikayla.

As of my phone conversation they were not aware of her status. What a heart breaking story. Had someone been prepared and armed they could have stopped this “bad” man from most of this tragedy. He was two and three feet away from folks, I understand he had to stop and reload. Where were the men of flight 93???? Someone should have stopped this man. Someone could have stopped this man. Lives were lost because of a bad man, not because he had a weapon, but because noone was prepared to stop it. Had they been prepared to save their lives or lives of others, lives would have been saved.

All that was needed is one Courages/Brave man prepared mentally or otherwise to stop this it could have been done. When seconds count, police are ony minutes away. My prayers are with all of those suffering from this sensless act, may God be with them in this moment of pain and heartache.

Yep. He thinks that people should attend movie screenings armed, and if there is ever a mass shooting, people in the audience should return fire. If only!

As to where the “men of Flight 93” were, well, I am sure that if the Republican former state senator had been at the theater, he would have rushed the man shooting continuously into the crowd, no question. Right.

What is amazing is that he seems oblivious to the fact that he is, in fact, criticizing his friend, as his friend was not “prepared” and did not sacrifice himself to save others by trying to tackle the gunman.

Later, in response to the media printing his Facebook post verbatim and in full, Pearce complained that he was being “mischaracterized.”

All I did was lament that so many people should be left disarmed and vulnerable by anti-gun rules that try to create a sense of safety by posting a sign that says “No Guns”, when the only real effect is to disarm everyone who could have saved lives.

I think I should have ended my last post with, “And a crazy-ass conservative from Arizona will start spewing fanatical pro-gun rhetoric in three, two, ….”

Categories: Right-Wing Extremism Tags:

The Shearer Is Hostile to the Sheep, Says the Wolf

April 14th, 2012 1 comment

Republicans most recently alienated women by fighting furiously against allowing contraception to be covered under new insurance plans, and famously denying a woman the chance to speak in Congress on the issue, whilst giving their full attention to a panel comprised entirely of men, all of them religious authorities. This was their statement: women’s health is all about religion, which is ruled by men. When the Democrats got their one female panel member to speak separately, Rush Limbaugh, the Voice of the Right Wing, called her a slut and a whore for suggesting contraception be covered by private health plans. Called to denounce the slurs, the presumed GOP presidential nominee only said that “slut” and “whore” were “not the language I would have used,” clearly implying that he supported the general sentiment.

Even more disturbing are recent right-wing efforts to force women, even rape victims, to undergo a form of rape before they are allowed to undergo an abortion, a legal procedure. This as part of a larger campaign to deny women reproductive rights, a campaign with a history of maligning women.

None of this is new. Conservatives have always fought against women’s civil rights, from suffrage to the ERA to the Lily Ledbetter Act. Feminists, who want nothing more than to allow women to choose whatever they want to do–including stay-at-home motherhood–and to receive equal treatment as men in doing so, have found themselves viciously attacked and dehumanized by right-wingers, reduced to an ugly stereotype and cast as villains against many of the very things they fight to defend.

The conservative, Republican “war on women” has been a longstanding, entrenched battle taken up willfully by the right wing, whose policy and language have been filled with rhetoric which, at best, misunderstands women, and, all too often at worst, is openly hostile to them.

So, according to Romney–famous for not understanding women, or taking up their causes, or speaking to them in a non-condescending manner–according to him, the real war on women is coming from the Obama camp. The two main pieces of evidence? A statistic wholly unrelated to Obama’s policies and actions, and a deliberately misinterpreted quote from a woman wholly unrelated to Obama save that she occupies the same half of the political spectrum–a quote which Obama, his administration, and even his wife all immediately condemned, no less.

The statistics? Technically true in that most net job loss has been among women, but false in that Obama has anything at all to do with that. In fact, ironically, most job losses for women have been in education and government–and Obama actually tried hard to save these precise jobs, but Republicans stripped the bill and were the deciding factor in many of these job losses. Not to mention that Republicans have always been hostile to educators and government workers, even attacking Democrats for trying to hire more people in these areas.

And yet, this is not just supposed to be an equivalency, but proof that Obama is more hostile to women than conservatives are.

You have to admire the balls on conservatives, not just to lie, but to lie as big as that.