No More Mister Nice Blog

2012-02-26T21:41:00.000-05:00

SANTORUM'S BEEN ATTACKING JFK FOR YEARS

Something Rick Santorum said in October made news today:

Former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) on Sunday defended a statement he made last October in which he said that he “almost threw up” when he read John F. Kennedy's 1960 Houston address on the role of religion in public life.

...In remarks last year at the College of Saint Mary Magdalen in Warner, N.H., Santorum had told the crowd of J.F.K.'s famous 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, "Earlier in my political career, I had the opportunity to read the speech, and I almost threw up. You should read the speech."

...On Sunday, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Santorum whether he stood by his statement....

Santorum defended his remarks, telling Stephanopoulos that "the first line, first substantive line in the speech, says, 'I believe in America where the separation of church and state is absolute.'"

"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," Santorum said....

Just for the record, he's been attacking that speech for years.

2002:

He (Senator Rick Santorum) told NCR that a distinction between private religious conviction and public responsibility, enshrined in John Kennedy's famous speech in 1960 saying he would not take orders from the Catholic church if elected president, has caused "much harm in America."

"All of us have heard people say, 'I privately am against abortion, homosexual marriage, stem cell research, cloning. But who am I to decide that it's not right for somebody else?' It sounds good," Santourm said. "But it is the corruption of freedom of conscience."

Santorum told NCR that he regards George W. Bush as "the first Catholic president of the United States."

September 9, 2010:

"Ultimately Kennedy’s attempt to reassure Protestants that the Catholic Church would not control the government and suborn its independence advanced a philosophy of strict separation that would create a purely secular public square cleansed of all religious wisdom and the voice of religious people of all faiths. He laid the foundation for attacks on religious freedom and freedom of speech by the secular left and its political arms like the A.C.L.U and the People for the American Way. This has and will continue to create dissension and division in this country as people of faith increasingly feel like second-class citizens."

September 17, 2010:

"We are all engaged in a great battle," he told the conservative activists here. Santorum took issue with a famous speech delivered 50 years ago by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who became the nation's first Catholic president after assuring suspicious voters that "I believe the separation of church and state is absolute."

"That never was and never will be in this country," said Santorum. "Not in this country. Maybe in France."

March 2011:

Rick Santorum told about 50 members of the group Catholic Citizenship that he was "frankly appalled" that America's first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, once said "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute."

"That was a radical statement," Santorum said, and did "great damage." ...

"We're seeing how Catholic politicians, following the first Catholic president, have followed his lead, and have divorced faith not just from the public square, but from their own decision-making process," Santorum said Monday.

"Jefferson is spinning in his grave," he added.

This needed to be brought up, and Stephanopoulos deserves credit for raising it. Mitt Romney demagogued Stephanopoulos when he asked a debate question about birth control, but Stephanopoulos isn't letting up -- and Romney could be the beneficiary now.

2012-02-26T15:00:00.000-05:00

IS SEX LIKE SOCIAL SECURITY?

Maureen Dowd finds that the potential Santorumization of the Republican Party strikes fear even in Republicans:

IT'S finally sinking in.

Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.

"Republicans being against sex is not good," the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. "Sex is popular."

I see Castellanos's point -- I'm no longer worried that Santorum could appeal to enough voters to win if he somehow became the GOP nominee -- but I still wonder why he isn't being blown out by Obama the way Gingrich is, according to the polls. You'll say, well, most of the public isn't paying attention to him yet, but you can't really say that the public is ignoring Santorum while also arguing that Gingrich's woeful numbers, and Romney's slippage, are the result of their current public image. Either people are paying attention to these clowns right now or they aren't, right?

Is sex popular? Well, sure it is -- but I think there are a lot of Americans who like sex but like to think of themselves as not liking sex, at least not to an unseemly degree. I think, and you probably think, that premarital sex and sex using birth control and non-procreative sex in general are just fine, and nothing to feel guilty about, but I think a lot of Americans engage in those behaviors but feel that they should have a problem with them, even though deep down they don't. Their feelings about sex are the feelings you find in classic country music and R&B and blues: I want to do this but it's sinnin', and on Sunday morning I'll be in church saying, "Forgive me, Jesus," even though the following Saturday night I'll be back in the honky-tonk, and the cycle will endlessly repeat. So these people lie to themselves and say they wish America were more moral. They hear Santorum and nod in agreement, even though they don't really agree with him at the gut level.

It's more or less the way Americans feel about government social programs -- they use them and they lie to themselves about using them. Then a Republican demagogue -- but I repeat myself -- says government programs are evil, and they pump their fists in agreement.

I think there are enough Americans who are sufficiently level-headed about sex to keep Santorum from ever reaching the White House. But I still don't think he'd be blown out as badly as Gingrich would. Most people hate Gingrich. Far too many people are too guilt-ridden to hate Santorum.

2012-02-26T12:45:00.000-05:00

SKY IS BLUE, POPE IS CATHOLIC, AND REPUBLICANS HATE THEIR OWN IDEAS AS SOON AS OBAMA ENDORSES THEM

I mentioned yesterday that Rick Santorum is denouncing President Obama's talk about universal higher education, and now it's being revealed that Rick Santorum advocated universal higher education for Pennsylvanians in his 2006 Senate campaign:

TROY, MICHIGAN -- At an Americans For Prosperity-sponsored tea party rally here Saturday, Rick Santorum trumpeted his connections to the working class by attacking President Obama's plan to make college more accessible to Americans.

"President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college," Santorum said. "What a snob!"

The crowd laughed and applauded wildly. But the last time Santorum ran for public office -- his ill-fated 2006 Senate reelection campaign -- he was right there with Obama, running on his promise to make college more accessible to all Pennsylvanians....

"In addition to Rick's support of ensuring that primary and secondary schools in Pennsylvania are equipped for success, he is equally committed to ensuring the every Pennsylvanian has access to higher education," [his 2006 campaign] site reads. "Rick Santorum has supported legislative solutions that provide loans, grants, and tax incentives to make higher education more accessible and affordable."

Well, that just puts college affordability in the same category as cap-and-trade and the individual health-care mandate, right? These were fine idea for right-wingers to advance, but they became Marxist big-government Kenyan elitism as soon as the Obama administration started talking about them. Everything pretty much works that way on the right these days, no?

2012-02-26T11:17:00.000-05:00

WHAT DO WE WANT? APOCALYPSE! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!

This will be interpreted as the work of people who worry that something horrible might take place in America. That's not what it is. This is an expression of hopes, not fears:

Wyoming House advances doomsday bill

CHEYENNE -- State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States.

House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government....

The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier....

The folks who fight for legislation like this, and a lot of people who vote for it, on some level want America to collapse. It would confirm their worldview. It would -- or at least they hope it would -- let them actually become the heroes they are in their own minds.

I'm betting that a lot of these legislators like to hunt and fish and shoot, and generally consider thmselves vastly more self-sufficient than the rest of us. That's fine -- bully for them. They live in a largely rural, sparsely populated state. They feel far removed from the federal government, and from the East in general. They think we in the East have turned America into a nation of, non-hunting, non-survivalist, society-dependent (and especially government-dependent) sissies (even though I bet not a one of them will ever refuse to accept Social Security or Medicare).

These guys are having a Walter Mitty fantasy about societal breakdown. They'd like to be the heroes of stories that play in their heads (and on their favorite movie channels), tales in which real men get the job donew while "Washington bureacrats" are told to suck eggs.

These guys don't think they're preparing for disaster. They think they're preparing for Utopia. For them, this bill is porn. I bet they needed a cigarette after the vote.

2012-02-25T16:32:00.000-05:00

SANTORUM DOES WHAT GINGRICH DIDN'T

Remember when Mitt Romney's people curb-stomped Newt Gingrich in the days leading up to the Iowa caucus, and Gingrich started getting angry, and we all started talking about how Gingrich might wage total war on Romney even at the risk of destroying his chances in the general election, just because he hated him so much, and is such a nasty guy?

Well, that never happened, did it? Oh, wait, it just started to happen -- but not from Gingrich, who sometimes sounds tuff but is really a harmless marshmellow. It's coming from Santorum:

Stepping up his assault on Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum delivered a slashing speech Saturday morning that portrayed the establishment favorite as an elitist and unreliable conservative.

Santorum, appear[ed] before over a thousand conservative activists gathered in suburban Detroit for an Americans for Prospertiy conference....

"I didn't blow in the wind when things were popular with the elite," Santorum said. "Because I don't come from the elite." ...

"I never thought a Republican presidential candidate would adopt the verbiage of Occupy Wall Street," he said, citing Romney's reference to "the one percent."

Santorum's broadside went beyond issues, though, as he trained his fire at Romney's character.

"What you see today might be something different than what you get tomorrow," the Pennsylvanian said

Later, Santorum added: "He wasn't what he said he was yesterday."

Those last two soundbites are tailor-made to show up in Obama attack ads next fall. Isn't that what we thought Gingrich would do?

As for the Occupy Wall Street line, my first thought was that it couldn't possibly resonate, with general election voters or Republicans -- Romney's too buttoned up, too much the antithesis of the right's Occupy unwashed-hippie stereotype. You just can't imagine Romney dirty or unkempt or, for that matter, passionate, and he's so clearly identified with the economic lite that the message fries your brain with its cognitive dissonance. On further reflection, I realize that's true if you think like a normal person -- but on the right, elitists and Occupiers are part of the same urbane, sophisticated threat to real Americans' simple country ways. Just as, to the typical Glenn Beck fan of 2009 and 2010, George Soros and the New Black Panther Party are thick as thieves, so Romney could also seem like a believer in radical chic. I know, I know -- it seems bizarre to me, too. But I think this might connect right now.

****

I'm somewhat impressed by Santorum's hatred for Romney. But we're also reminded that he embodies just about everything that's wrong with modern Republicanism:

And he took a tough shot at President Obama's declaration that he'd like all Americans to attend college

"What a snob," Santorum, an attorney, said to loud applause, warning of teens being indoctrinated "by some liberal college professor."

Rick Santorum: objectively pro-ignorance.

2012-02-25T11:26:00.000-05:00

IF JEB BUSH IS POSTURING FOR 2016 (OR A BROKERED 2012), HE'S GOING ABOUT IT ALL WRONG

I know that the simplest explanation for what Jeb Bush said this week is that the Republican Establishment has him warming up in the bullpen so he can be the cigar-chompers' choice in the event of a brokered convention -- but I don't buy that.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush expressed anguish over the rhetoric he’s heard in the various 2012 GOP debates. "I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I'm wondering, I don't think I've changed, but it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that’s kind of where we are."

There are two problems with the brokered-Jeb scenario. First of all, if you have a brokered convention precisely because your most restive voters chose Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul out of a sense that Mitt Romney is insufficiently loyal to the wingnut cause, how are you going to turn out the base in November with a nominee who says stuff like this, which is equally insulting to wingnuts? You might have turned base voters out with Jeb hewing strictly to the Fox News line, but this isn't going to work. You're going to appeal to Romney skeptics with a guy who seems like more of a turncoat than Romney?

And second, why are you even bothering to roll out a backup plan when -- gaffes notwithstanding -- the Romney Super PAC Death Star is in the process of burying Santorum's Michigan campaign in money on the way to a likely victory in that state?

Now, maybe that second objection is a weak one -- Santorum could still conceivably pull this off -- but really, how do you get Jeb as "RINO" past the purists in November? How do you even get him nominated at the convention? Wouldn't delegates chosen by purity-seeking primary voters be precisely the reason you've got a brokered convention in the first place?

And as for 2016, I don't see how this is a winning strategy, either. I know that the conventional wisdom is that the insanity in the GOP is a temporary fever in the brain that will break relatively soon, but, like DougJ, I don't buy it. If Santorum were the nominee and he picked an even nuttier, wingier running mate, and then went on to be crushed in November, maybe -- maybe -- the party would pull back from the brink and moderate its views in 2016. But Santorum isn't going to be the nominee -- RMoney is going to be the nominee. So if Romney loses, Rush Limbaugh will say what he always says when Republicans lose, precisely what he said in '92 and '08: that they lost by not being conservative enough. And next time we'll get an Allen West/Joe Arpaio ticket.

I could offer the crazy theory that Jeb's posturing is happening with an eye to the Americans Elect nomination, possibly with the GOP Establishment's support, in the event that Santorum defeats Romney. I've speculated about this scenario, as has Rachel Maddow. But it makes sense only if you think the Establishment Republicans have decided to throw the 2012 election. Then again, if Santorum won, maybe they would, bowing to the seemingly inevitable, and they'd back Jeb as an AE candidate knowing they could say he might have triumphed in a two-man race (hint hint for 2016). Too far-fetched?

2012-02-24T18:10:00.000-05:00

THE (NOT PARTICULARLY) HAPPY WARRIOR (FOR HIS CLASS)

You probably already know about Mitt Romney's latest Richie Rich gaffe, which came in a sparsely attended speech he gave in Detroit today:

Romney then listed the various cars he and his wife own.

"I drive a Mustang and Chevy pickup truck," he said. "Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually...."

Now, I've said in the past that Romney ought to switch gears and boast about his wealth. That doesn't seem like a good idea, of course, when he's struggling with sub-$100,000-a-year voters even within his own party, and he digs a deeper hole for himself every time he says something oblivious like this "couple of Cadillacs" remark.

But I think if he can't talk about his wealth in a way that's big-pimpin', he could at least put it into a narrative with a hero and a villain. The hero would be himself and all the brave, beleaguered millionaires and billionaires. The villain would be all us evil commie liberals who don't want people like him to succeed, dammit!

You put your success in those terms and you can talk all day about Cadillacs and $10,000 bets and liking to fire people -- as lomg as the rubes also hear you say, or imply, "And I bet you'd like to be rich and fire people, too. And you know why you can't? Because the damn liberals tax you too much and are systematically destroying the free enterprise system! It's their fault you're not rich!"

Instead, Romney reminds you of his wealth in contexts that are 180 degrees removed from that message. Here, instead of couching a mention of his wealth in talk about how great capitalism can be, he says it as part of a passage everyone knows wound up in his speech because he feels obligated to sing the praises of Michigan, in a transparently phony way.

If he can't do swagger, he should at least do Randian rage. That's implicit when Trump talks, or even Herman Cain. And both of them won a lot more love from the base at their peaks in the polls than Romney ever has.

2012-02-24T11:30:00.000-05:00

MISTAH KURTZ -- HE JUST GETTING REALLY WORKED UP

For years now, right-wingers have been accusing other people of being enemies and traitors, but Matt Taibbi watched the Republican debate on Wednesday night and saw something that seemed new to him: the right turning on its own, in the person of the previously unchallenged culture warrior Rick Santorum.

Taibbi thinks it's the beginning of the end:

This is the last stage in any paranoid illness. You start by suspecting that somebody out there is out to get you; in the end, you're sure that even the people who love you the most under your own roof, your own doctors, your parents, your wife and your children, they're in on the plot....

This is where the Republican Party is now. They've run out of foreign enemies to point fingers at. They've already maxed out the rhetoric against us orgiastic, anarchy-loving pansexual liberal terrorists. The only possible remaining explanation for their troubles is that their own leaders have failed them. There is a stranger in the house!

... These people have run out of others to blame, run out of bystanders to suspect, run out of decent family people to dismiss as Godless, sex-crazed perverts. They're turning the gun on themselves now. It might be justice, or it might just be sad. Whatever it is, it's remarkable to watch.

I'm not sure. It seems to me that the point of maximum paranoia isn't the moment when the paranoiac just turns the gun on himself -- it's more like the moment when he burns his parents' house down before setting off on a random killing spree (one that will, admittedly, end in suicide), or the moment when the personality-cult leader starts returning the FBI agents' fire while making arrangements to torch the compound.

Or maybe that's the wrong analogy -- after all, look who emerged the winner from the Santorum show trial: Mitt Romney. What this really reminds me of is a moment in a totalitarian regime when then the purges and rehabilitations seem to defy all logic, when the longtime loyalist with a few minor blemishes on his record becomes an unperson, while a former unperson becomes the chief inquisitor just because the regime has developed a new appreciation for his viciousness and willingness to apply the screws. But that's not a reassuring moment in the history of such a regime, is it?

2012-02-24T09:10:00.000-05:00

DID PAUL KRUGMAN JUST HELP ELECT MITT ROMNEY?

In today's column about Mitt Romney, Paul Krugman issues a necessary caveat at the very end -- but only after going on at great length in this manner:

According to Michael Kinsley, a gaffe is when a politician accidently tells the truth. That's certainly what happened to Mitt Romney on Tuesday, when in a rare moment of candor -- and, in his case, such moments are really, really rare -- he gave away the game.

Speaking in Michigan, Mr. Romney was asked about deficit reduction, and he absent-mindedly said something completely reasonable: "If you just cut, if all you're thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy." A-ha. So he believes that cutting government spending hurts growth, other things equal.

... Almost surely, he is, in fact, a closet Keynesian.

Krugman goes on to say that Romney must be a closet Keynesian because he "is not a stupid man," and thus he can't help seeing the disaster Europeans are inflicting on themselves. (I don't know -- if the Europeans can't see that, why be so sure Romney can?) Krugman cites the Keynesian pedigrees of Romney's top economic advisers.

Only at the very, very end does Krugman warn us that while Romney may privately be a moderate, he may continue to posture as an extremist once he's in office:

If he doesn't dare disagree with economic nonsense now, why imagine that he would become willing to challenge that nonsense later? And bear in mind that if elected, he would be watched like a hawk for signs of apostasy by the very people he's trying so desperately to appease right now.

The truth is that Mr. Romney is so deeply committed to insincerity that neither side can trust him to do what it considers to be the right thing.

That's not good enough, Paul.

Here's what's going to happen: After the Romney Death Star finishes off Rick Santorum and Romney obtains the nomination, mainstream media chin-scratchers from the center, and even from the nominal left, are going to start telling us, in columns and on Sunday morning talk shows, that Romney is really, really a moderate, particularly on economics (and how dare the Obama campaign say otherwise) -- even Paul Krugman says so.

This talking point may not be heard a lot, but it will be enough to persuade at least a few folks who regard themselves as smarter than the typical GOP yahoo that Romney is all right, that he's ... safe.

*****

Me, I believe that Romney and his advisers have now partaken of the Kool-Aid. One of the advisers Krugman reassures us is nice and Keynesian, Glenn Hubbard, was on a conference call with reporter Wednesday discussing Romney's new tax proposal. Ezra Klein wrote:

"If you take the spending and tax pieces together, it's a narrative of the policy agenda and life under a Romney presidency," Hubbard said. And so it is. But if you really follow the numbers, and the policies they imply, it may not be the narrative the Romney campaign wants.

...Under a Romney presidency, there will be a massive redistribution -- or perhaps it should be called a re-redistribution -- from low-income people who depend on government programs such as Medicaid to higher-income folks who pay taxes.

...[The tax plan] cuts spending as a percentage of GDP to 20 percent by 2016. And it does so while boosting defense spending by billions of dollars. As Romney himself says, that will require spending cuts of about $500 billion in 2016 -- and they will all have to come from domestic spending.

...Romney would need to cut all domestic spending by 20 percent to make his numbers work. But Romney's proposal says his changes to Medicare and Social Security will only affect "younger generations," which suggests that Medicare and Social Security won't see large cuts in the next few years. And once you take those programs out of the mix, Romney needs to cut all domestic spending by 38 percent to make his numbers work.

...If Romney cut Medicaid entirely -- took it from the $407 billion its projected to cost in 2016 and moved it to zero -- his numbers wouldn't work. If he then excised out all spending on food stamps — taking them from a projected $80 billion in 2016 to nothing — he still wouldn’t be there.

Getting a sense of the nastiness in this? There's no closet. Romney and his so-called Keynesians are hiding the extremism in plain sight.

2012-02-23T22:50:00.003-05:00

INTO THE MYSTIC, WITH RIGHT-WINGERS

DougJ writes about David Brooks and Charles Murray:

If you've been following all the Charles Murray/Bobo bullshit recently, this is exactly their fixation: it's not enough to help the great unwashed find good jobs, the unwashed need their social superiors beside them to guide them (cause when they’re bad, they're so so bad). It's not that Murray/Bobo's methods to make this happen are unsound, it's that I don't see any method at all, sir. Writing books and columns about how tote-baggers should live nearer to strip malls simply does not qualify as a method. Also too, believing that tote-baggers should live closer to strip malls is also a very strange reason to oppose health care ad economic initiatives.

Conservatives may even be right (for all I know) that the moral/philosophical beliefs of the middle-class are the most important thing in our country. But they have no realistic plans to "improve" these beliefs.

So it is in general with conservatism. Everything is about some ineffable pseudo-spirituality that may or may not have anything to do with the material world. Why does anyone take conservatives seriously?

I'm not sure why anyone takes right-wingers' spiritual/moral claptrap seriously, but I have a couple of thoughts about why so many of them talk this way.

First of all, ask yourself why fifteen-year-olds say "Fuck you" at the dinner table to their parents. That's easy: they do it because they know they're stuck living with these people; the only way to make that bearable is to needle their parents by saying whatever pisses them off the most. Well, that's how right-wing pseudo-intellectuals feel about us liberals and moderates -- they have to live in the same country with us, and they hate it, so they become God-botherers and moralists because they think nothing could possibly annoy us more. I really believe that's one of the primary reasons they do this -- do you believe Brooks and Murray and Ross Douthat and William Bennett really have a deep, abiding love for God and a profound level of spirituality? I certainly don't. Jimmy Carter really loves God -- not these self-satisfied clowns. It's all just a bird-flip disguised as a moral philosophy.

One other reason right-wingers talk spirituality and morals is: what chance is there that their theories will ever have to undergo a reality test? You advocate, say, deregulating Wall Street, or overthrowing Saddam, and eventually you're confronted with the consequences of what you proposed. But Murray and Brooks and the other advocates of a Great, Selfless Spiritual/Moral Awakening in America know that it will never, ever happen -- nobody actually wants anything like that to happen, and that includes most religious Americans (and right-wingers). So it's always going to be the thing we've never tried, and thus, as a pundit, you can prescribe it forever.

2012-02-23T16:59:00.000-05:00

WEDGE-ISSUE POLITICS IS THE LAST REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL

The Hill reports:

In celebration of Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s elevation to cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI earlier this week, Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) on Thursday suggested lighting the Empire State Building the color red....

Grimm, a Catholic himself who represents Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, tweeted in celebration on Thursday: "I have requested that the Empire State Bldg be lit red to honor NY's Cardinal Dolan. What an honor for an exceptional man of faith!"

That would be this Michael Grimm:

Shortly before leaving the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2006, after a swashbuckling undercover career that would later help catapult him into Congress, a young agent named Michael G. Grimm went into real estate, investing roughly $1 million of borrowed money in a luxury development in Texas.

Seeking a builder to cooperate on the project, Mr. Grimm chose a former F.B.I. agent who had served with him in New York -- even though the former agent was under indictment on state racketeering and fraud charges, according to court and property records.

The former agent, Carlos Luquis, was soon convicted for his role in skimming $2 million from Texans' electric bills, and served 18 months in prison.

Yet Mr. Grimm went on to do business with Mr. Luquis and his wife in two other companies, records show. And during Mr. Grimm's successful insurgent campaign for Congress in 2010, Mr. Luquis was frequently at his side....

Shortly after news of this and other Grimm scandals broke in The New York Times, the Mitt Romney campaign, which had used the tea party-backed Grimm as a surrogate, distanced itself from Grimm. Grimm's backers, however, have rallied around him:

...at an event on Saturday, Grimm turned the serious allegations into a joke about his dog, Sebastian, biting the mailman for carrying the Times. Former Staten Island [borough president] and Congressman Guy Molinari exercised his old-man impunity: "I was going to take a copy of The New York Times and ignite it, but Sebastian beat me to it; he shit all over the paper...Friends, don't ever give up your principles, and don't let these shit-ass newspapers tell you what to do."

Which is more or less what Jesus would have said under similar circumstances, right?

Grimm is playing the Catholic card knowing full well that the Empire State Building has a policy against religious commemorations of the kind he's requested. And, in fact, ESB has turned down Grimm's request. Oh, and just to gild the lily, Grimm pandered even more by evoking September 11 in his request letter:

As a city living in the shadow of 9/11 and in the midst of a terrible recession, it's clear that New Yorkers face a world that increasingly appears to be beyond their control. We truly live in an uncertain time; however, few can do as much as Cardinal Dolan has done to give New Yorkers a sense of constancy and resolve.

Dolan, by the way, didn't become archbishop of New York until 2009. God only knows how we survived from 9/11 until then without him.

2012-02-23T14:19:00.000-05:00

LOU DOBBS THINKS THE LORAX IS MORE ANTI-CAPITALIST THAN ACTUAL CAPITALISTS DO

Apologies if I'm a bit late getting to this story:

On his Tuesday night show, [Fox's Lou] Dobbs trashed the upcoming kids movies The Lorax and The Secret World Of Arrietty, accusing them of being liberal indoctrination that echoes the messages of Occupy Wall Street and President Obama....

Dobbs played clips from the movies and then drew the parallels.
"So, where have we all heard this before? Occupy Wall Street forever trying to pit the makers against the takers and President Obama repeating that everyone should pay their fair share in dozens of speeches since his State of the Union address last month."

Yes, The Lorax is all about "the takers" as opposed to "the makers," the heroic capitalists who actually make things, who seek profit in this capitalist system ... which, um, leaves me confused as to why capitalist co-branding is taking place in connection with The Lorax:

Seventh Generation Joins Dr. Seuss' The Lorax in Speaking for the Trees'

Seventh Generation, the nation's leading brand of environmentally-friendly household products, today announced an educational partnership with Universal Pictures to mark the big screen debut of "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" and bring the tale's crucial message of ecological hope and environmental action to a new generation of children and their parents. The animated adventure opens on March 2....

Lorax messaging on every Seventh Generation label will let consumers know that protecting the Earth and keeping their families healthy can be as simple as making the right shopping choices....

Just because it's green doesn't mean it ain't capitalism, folks:

Why Does the Lorax Love Our 4X Detergent?

Could it be our triple-enzyme, stain-fighting power?
Or our revolutionary, earth-friendly bottle?

Actually, it's both! And the more you know about our friend The Lorax and his message of environmental truth and ecological hope, the more you can see why all sorts of things about our Natural 4X Laundry Detergent might make him smile....

Wait -- there's more:

Universal Pictures, Illumination Entertainment and the Nature Conservancy have banded together on an environmental action campaign to help save one of the planet’s most endangered and diverse tropical forests. It’s just one aspect of the digital activities for Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, the 3D animated movie which opens March 2.

The green initiative leverages Universal Pictures movie to build on the Nature Conservancy's Plant a Billion Trees campaign. Additional support for The Lorax Speaks project comes from the Audrey S. Geisel Dr. Seuss Foundation, Seventh Generation, HP, Mazda and IHOP....

HP, Mazda, and IHOP -- wow, it doesn't get more communist than that, does it?

****

UPDATE: Go here for more on the Lorax/Mazda cross-promotion -- which is a cross-promotion for a Mazda SUV.

Still not capitalist enough for you, Lou?

2012-02-23T11:11:00.003-05:00

OBAMA'S USING THE TIME MACHINE TO DESTROY AMERICA AGAIN

The right is trying to flood the zone with the message EEK! EEK! OBAMA MADE GAS PRICES SKYROCKET! -- here, for instance, is a clip of Eric Bolling singing "The Gasoline Blues" on Fox & Friends, if you can stand it. Some local news reporters are helpfully retransmitting the propaganda:

Florida Drivers Shelling Out Nearly $6 A Gallon At Some Gas Stations

TAMPA (CBS Tampa) -- Talk about pain at the pump! Some Florida drivers are spending nearly $6 a gallon to fill up their gas tanks.

... at a Suncoast Energy station in Orlando, ... drivers are paying $5.79 for a gallon of regular....

Yeah, that hippie eco-freak Obama really jacked up the price at that station:

Orlando Forum: Suncoast Energys- Don't Pay Double for Gas

DON'T PAY DOUBLE FOR YOUR GASOLINE. Steer clear of Suncoast Energy on Semoran Blvd, north of 528. This is the closest gas station to the airport and they are RIPPING OFF customers by charging DOUBLE the national average for gasoline (God knows what they are charging for a bottle of water!)....

Whoops! So, um, this station charges much more than the average. Oh, and the complaint I just quoted is contained in a Trip Advisor message-board post dated November 20, 2008 -- two months before Barack Obama was sworn in as president. So the problem at that station isn't Obama, it's the policies of that station.

Nawww, that can't be right. Obama must be using the time machine to raise prices retroactively, and change all the archived news stories!

Gas gouging is sometimes situational -- as when Hurricane Ike was about to hit, a couple of months before the '08 election (Obama in the time machine again?), and stations in Florida and other states were being accused of opportunistic price increases. Funny thing -- back then, Fox News didn't seem to mind:

In Defense of Price Gougers

Written By John R. Lott, Jr.

Understanding economics has never been a requirement to be a reporter or a politician. With gas prices moving back toward $4 a gallon, "price-gouging" seems again to be everyone's favorite phrase these days. With the price of gasoline already Americans' greatest concern, more so than the economy or taxes, it is a message that many people will be primed to hear. Presumably that is why a majority of Americans want higher taxes on oil companies.

Yet, if political threats of price controls and price-gouging lawsuits prevent prices from rising now, it is the consumers nationwide who will suffer in the long run....

Expect a Fox op-ed from Lott any day now, complaining about the price of gas and demanding government action now.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-23T10:02:00.001-05:00

THE SLEAZY TACTIC OF ASKING US ABOUT WHAT WE REALLY BELIEVE

Respectable political journalist turned right-wing attack hack Michael Barone has a debate wrap-up at the Washington Examiner. Here's how it begins:

This was a debate full of surprises, at least for me. The first: CNN's John King showed some forebearance in not leading off with a question to Rick Santorum on his statements on contraception and other cultural issues. Instead, we had an audience question on how to bring down the national debt. The second surprise was that when King did pose such a question, after the first break, Santorum gave a first-rate reply, declining to speak about his personal feelings about contraception, but instead focusing on the fact that 40% of children are now born out of wedlock, and citing the concern expressed about this fact by Charles Murray in his new book Coming Apart and by a New York Times reporter in a front page story -- both of which matter of factly note the undeniable fact that children born out of wedlock and raised with a single parent tend to have huge disadvantages in life. Interestingly, Mitt Romney, who had responded before Santorum with a strong attack on Barack Obama for what he said was his attack on religious tolerance and conscience, was called on again and made a point of agreeing with Santorum.

Translation: Good thing that reprehensible liberal thug John King held off before trying to inject sex into this debate, as if it's in any way relevant to politics ... even though I actually believe, as do the two leading candidates at the debate, that it is relevant to politics. It's extremely relevant -- in fact, we all think sexual depravity is a key reason this country is going to hell in a handbasket. But if the liberal media asks us to talk about this in public, it's partisan bias.

Have I got that about right?

2012-02-23T07:44:00.001-05:00

IS SANTORUM OVER? WAS SANTORUM OVER BEFORE LAST NIGHT?

Well, even yesterday I was starting to assume that the Santorum moment was over -- the Talking Points Memo poll tracker showed Mitt Romney rapidly gaining on Santorum in Michigan (Romney's in red, Santorim's in black)....

An NBC/Marist poll not only showed the two of them tied in Michigan, but revealed that Romney is crushing Santorum among early voters. Oh, and Romney is headed toward a blowout in Arizona, where he also has a massive lead in early voting, a sign of a far more impressive and machine-like organization.

Yes, some national polls, and polls in states that aren't voting till next month, show Santorum with a big and even increasing lead -- but that's the pattern I recall from the period when the Romney campaign was crushing Newt Gingrich: As Gingrich's numbers fell in states that were just about to vote, he would still seem to be gaining in later-voting states. But that's because the Romney Death Star hadn't gotten to those states yet, with gazillions of dollars' worth of Romney and Romney super PAC attack ads. The polls in the later-voting states were lagging indicators.

So, yeah, when Talking Points Memo lists five ways Rick Santorum blew it in last night's debate, it's worth paying attention, but the die was already cast.

Last night's results matter because they remind us that Romney isn't a hapless stumblebum, or at least Team Romney isn't -- they now know how to prepare the candidate to attack. But meanwhile he's been doing what he has to do to reverse early setbacks. It ain't pretty, and it ain't cheap, but it is brutally efficient.

2012-02-22T18:13:00.003-05:00

USING DEAD PEOPLE TO TROLL FOR E-MAIL ADDRESSES

I wandered over to this National Review page a few hours ago and saw two versions of this ad:

Note the fine print at the bottom: PAID FOR BY THE DAVID HOROWITZ FREEDOM CENTER. When I clicked, I was taken this petition page, copyrighted in the name of FrontPageMagazine.com:

On November 5, 2009, a radical Islamic terrorist, Nidal Malik Hasan, massacred 13 American soldiers and wounded 29 more at Fort Hood. Instead of recognizing it as a terrorist attack, Barack Obama categorized it as "work place violence" effectively denying soldiers who lost their lives that day the military medals they are due for their heroic service -- specifically the Purple Heart.

The military has a long record of properly honoring those who are killed in the line of duty -- a record broken with the Fort Hood Massacre. The military awarded 78 medals after Pearl Harbor was attacked. After September 11, 2001, it created a new medal to recognize all of the heroes that died or were injured in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The men and women of Fort Hood deserve recognition for their sacrifice! Help right this wrong today.

Sign the Petition

I see petition ads all over the place, particularly at right-wing sites. They don't offend me much -- if you can't figure out that the advertisers are asking for your opinion in order to plant a few tracking cookies on your computer and obtain your e-mail address, well, you probably also think three-card monte is legit. Caveat emptor and all that.

But as techniques for obtaining user data go, this one seems particularly loathsome. I don't care about the specifics of the political posturing -- these people were brutally murdered and you look at their deaths as a marketing opportunity?

I didn't think I could find David Horowitz more reprehensible than I already did, but my opinion of him has hit an even lower low.

2012-02-22T13:20:00.000-05:00

IS THAT IT FOR ROMNEY'S SECRET JESUS WEAPON?

I think the chances of the rest of the folks on Mitt Romney's VP short list just got a whole lot better:

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is backing off his unconditional support for a bill requiring women to have an ultrasound before an abortion, focusing new attention on one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in Virginia’s General Assembly this year.

Until this weekend, McDonnell (R) and his aides had said the governor would sign the measure if it made it to his desk. McDonnell, who strongly opposes abortion, will no longer make that commitment.

But delegates and governor's staff were scheduled to meet Tuesday night to strike a compromise after learning that some ultrasounds could be more invasive than first thought....

As a potential VP candidate, McDonnell is screwed either way. If he signs the bill, obviously, this becomes an issue with moderate swing voters in the general election -- but if he backs away from it, the Christian rightists Romney desperately wants to motivate in the fall will see McDonnell as a guy who was bested by evil liberals. They would have been content with him if he'd presided over a state where this wasn't the law, but once the possibility that it might become the law was raised, he had to win. He damn well couldn't face off against -- ick -- feminists and back down. Crushing liberalism is what being a right-winger is all about.

Chris Christie is obviously a better choice for Romney -- I suppose it's a risk for him to go after Rick Santorum's remarks on Satan, but I think he threads the needle deftly here:

"Listen, I think anything you say as a presidential candidate is relevant. It is by definition relevant. You're asking to be president of the United States.... I think it is relevant what he says. I think people want to make an evaluation, a complete evaluation of anyone who asks to sit in the Oval Office," the New Jersey governor said....

"Do I think it's the things we should be as a party talking about and emphasizing at the moment? No," he said.

"I think the idea of the fighting against religion piece of this goes to more to Obamacare issue and the invasion of Obamacare into maybe some religious freedom issues. I think that's an interesting conversation and an important one to have in the context of overall Obamacare and what's that going to mean for the country if it goes forward after the Supreme Court arguments this spring," he said.

Oooh, nice job of palming the Jesus card and then playing it yourself!

Christie walks a fine line on this stuff. He's not a religious-right hero, though he holds his own. (In the new Quinnipiac poll, when Republicans are asked who should emerge as the party presidential nominee in the event of a brokered convention, Christie blows away the field among moderates and non-born-agains, but essentially ties Jeb Bush and Sarah Palin among conservatives and born-agains.)

What saves Christie among the Jesus crowd, I think, is the perception he creates that he isn't losing. They should be appalled that he'd even be willing to put gay marriage to a vote in New Jersey -- but when he puts in in terms of, in effect, Put it to a vote, and screw you homos if you don't like it, he comes off as a winner. Which is all even the Jesus-y right wants. (And mouthing off at Warren Buffett is a plus as well, on the right.)

2012-02-22T12:23:00.001-05:00

EVIL LIBERAL MAD SCIENTIST ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY AMERICA WITH ... MAINSTREAM ECONOMIC THINKING!!!

The Weekly Standard is horrified at this perversion of all that is good and true and right:

Valerie Jarrett: 'People Who Receive that Unemployment Check Go Out and Spend It and Help Stimulate the Economy'

This evening, speaking at North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina, White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said that folks getting and spending unemployment checks is a healthy thing ... because it stimulates the economy:

"Even though we had a terrible economic crisis three years ago, throughout our country many people were suffering before the last three years, particularly in the black community," Jarrett said. "And so we need to make sure that we continue to support that important safety net. It not only is good for the family, but it's good for the economy. People who receive that unemployment check go out and spend it and help stimulate the economy, so that's healthy as well."

(Emphasis in original.)

Good Lord -- next this madwoman will be telling us that the money people get in their unemployment checks goes to the private economy, when check recipients spend the money on goods and services! And that the merchants who receive some of that money will therefore have more money than they'd have if they hadn't received those payments!

Where do liberals get these insane notions?

(This is also at Fox Nation, where it's the lead story, under the headline "WH Senior Advisor: Unemployment Stimulates the Economy." Of course, she's not exactly saying that unemployment stimulates the economy. Ordinarily I'd assume that this is a deliberate twisting of her words, but at this point I'm not sure anymore -- do wingnuts even understand mainstream economic thinking anymore? Do they understand any economic assertion that isn't accompanied by Dagny Taggart's heavy breathing?)

2012-02-22T08:23:00.001-05:00

WE NEVER LOSE OUR TASTE FOR BLOOD, HERE OR OVERSEAS

There's an interesting observation in this news analysis on Iran by Scott Shane of The New York Times:

Despite a decade of war, most Americans seem to endorse the politicians' martial spirit. In a Pew Research Center poll this month, 58 percent of those surveyed said the United States should use military force, if necessary, to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Only 30 percent said no.

"I find it puzzling," said Richard K. Betts of Columbia University, who has studied security threats since the cold war. "You'd think there would be an instinctive reason to hold back after two bloody noses in Iraq and Afghanistan."

In the same survey, 75 percent of respondents said that Mr. Obama was withdrawing troops from Afghanistan at the right pace or not quickly enough, a finding in keeping with many indications of war weariness.

Micah Zenko, who studies conflict prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees an old pattern. "It's true throughout history: there's always the belief that the next war will go much better than the last war," he said.

Faced with an intractable security challenge, both politicians and ordinary people "want to 'do something,'" Mr. Zenko said. "And nothing 'does something' like military force."

I can't help thinking that what Zenko observes also applies domestically.

I've often wondered why Democrats lose favor for long periods of time (1980-1992, for instance), while Republicans roar back almost immediately after they seem to be thoroughly discredited. (Ford came within an eyelash of beating Carter two years after Nixon's resignation; Gore couldn't crush Bush two years after impeachment failed and Gingrich resigned; Republicans dominated the 2010 elections two years after Bush left office in disgrace.)

What Zenko says explains that on a domestic level, I think. Republicans are the party of relentless bellicosity -- they don't just crave fights against foreign enemies, they treat domestic politics as war -- and the public, I guess, always thinks, domestically, that "the next war will go much better than the last war." All that's necessary is that the new Republicans seem different from the old Republicans, so they're assault on the Democrats will seem like a "next war" rather than "the last war." Bush wasn't Gingrich, and the teabaggers weren't Bush, so those victories were new wars.

And I see from the new Quinnipiac national poll that Obama's beating Romney by only 2, and Santorum by only 3. A disturbingly large percentage of the public is clearly ready for another Republican domestic war.

2012-02-21T22:04:00.002-05:00

LIMBAUGH IS LEFT AT A LOSS FOR WORDS BY SANTORUM (AND ROMNEY)

Last Friday, Right Wing Watch posted an excerpt from a 2008 speech in which Rick Santorum argued that Satan had taken control of a number of institutions in America -- among them the mainline Protestant churches. I said then that Mitt Romney should get this quote noticed by mainline Protestants (who make up a dwindling but still significant percentage of the GOP electorate) -- but I predicted that Romney wouldn't do it.

Well, he has done it -- or at least it seems fairly clear that he has. Matt Drudge, who has acted throughout the campaign as Romney's unofficial press agent, has now posted the quote under the headline SANTORUM'S SATAN WARNING. I don't know if this is aimed at making Santorum seem like an anti-mainline-Protestant bigot or at making him seem like an unelectable nutjob to the broad general public -- but, clearly, it's aimed.

And, via Politico, I see that it even has Loudmouth Limbaugh groping for a response:

"That stuff is out there," Limbaugh said, according to a transcript of the show. "It's headlined on Drudge and the left has it, and Santorum will have to deal with it. He'll have to answer it. I don't know. It's just not the kind of stuff you hear a presidential candidate talk about. It's not ordinary in that sense."

Wow, Rush -- that's the best you can do?

You go to the transcript, on Limbaugh's site, and you realize that it really is the best he can do. How often does this happen? How often is Limbaugh left seeming edgy and defensive? Even when he's dead wrong, he almost always thinks he's right, and he rarely seems defeated, but this thing seems to have him licked -- there's one last not-Mitt, and Limbaugh knows that this really hurts him:

Drudge has this plastered up. The Democrats have found it. It's all over the place. Think Progress and whatever leftist think tanks have dug this up, and it's part of the predictable attempt to impugn Santorum as an absolute religious nut and wacko. But he did say these things and he'll to have an answer for these things when queried.

Yes -- how dare the Democrats twist the truth by reproducing Santorum's exact words?

Oh, admittedly, Limbaugh has what he considers a snappy comeback -- but it's awfully weak:

Okay, so he said it. Can we take you back to the United Nations? What was it, 2000... I don't know, three or four or five or six. Hugo Chavez shows up, he speaks either the afternoon Bush spoke earlier or the next day, but he gets to the microphone at the United Nations and the General Assembly and starts sniffing around. (Sniffing) He says, "I can still smell the sulfur. The Devil was here," and he had accused Bush of being the Devil. And the assembled monsters that look like they're out of Star Wars bar scene that made up the UN General Assembly all started laughing. So we're back to the double standard.

Double standard? Um, Rush? May I remind you of something. Hugo Chavez isn't running for president of the United States.

Neither is this guy, Rush:

And let's not forget, ladies and gentlemen, Saul Alinsky, who's the primary mentor of "Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm, mmm, mmm!" Saul Alinsky, the author of the book Rules for Radicals -- a book about which Hillary Clinton wrote her masters or doctoral thesis, whatever it was, when she was at Wellesley. Saul Alinsky, who Obama has studied and implements to this day and whose tactics he taught while ostensibly teaching law at the University of Chicago.

Saul Alinsky dedicated his book that all these leftists love to Lucifer, the Devil! Here's Alinsky's dedication: "Lest we forget, at least an over the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical from all our legends, mythology and history -- and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins or which is which? The first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom: Lucifer." Saul Alinsky made that dedication in his book Rules for Radicals. So Santorum is just joining the crowd here in discussing this.

Alinsky isn't running for president either. And both Alinsky and Chavez were having fun. Santorum was dead serious.

But, see, this is why I don't think we should assume that Mitt Romney is a guaranteed loser. He's by far the weakest link in his own campaign, but his people are pretty good. They're working this quote -- and I have to wonder whether they're the ones who brought it to Right Wing Watch's attention in the first place. I have to wonder why similar quotes are showing up at lefty blogs. Is Team Romney spreading the opposition-research wealth? I wouldn't rule that out.

2012-02-21T15:55:00.000-05:00

OH, THEY'VE BEEN YAMMERING LIKE THIS ABOUT THE GIRL SCOUTS FOR YEARS

This story from Indiana got a lot of attention today:

A Fort Wayne lawmaker has refused to sign on to a resolution celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts, calling the group a "radicalized organization" that supports abortion and promotes the "homosexual lifestyle."

Rep. Bob Morris, R-Fort Wayne, sent a letter to his fellow House Republicans on Saturday explaining why he would be the only member in the House not to endorse the nonbinding resolution.

He said he did some web-based research and found allegations that the Girl Scouts are a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood, allows transgender females to join and encourages sex....

I read that, and the first thing I thought was: Again? I guess I lurk way too much on right-wing sites, but this just seems old hat to me. It reminded me of anti-Girl Scout diatribes like this one from Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review back in 2000:

...The Girl Scouts' leaders hope to make their youthful charges the shock troops of an ongoing feminist revolution.

It's been a long slide for the Girl Scouts. First, as James Davison Hunter points out in his new book The Death of Character, they dropped "loyalty" from their oath in 1972, in favor of "I will do my best to be honest and fair." In 1975, a Catholic archdiocese cut off all support of the Girl Scouts because of their sex-ed program. In 1993, the Girl Scouts made "God" optional in the Girl Scout Promise....

Gasp!

Oh, but it gets worse, according to K-Lo:

Girl Scout policy forbids sex on Girl Scouts time. But the book On My Honor: Lesbians Reflect on Their Scouting Experience, published in 1997, is filled with coming-of-age stories sparked by gay encounters in the Girl Scouts. Along with an essay entitled "All I Really Need to Know About Being a Lesbian I Learned at Girl Scout Camp," and various stories of "butch" counselors who "wore men's clothes and had slicked back short hair," is testimony to the prevalence of lesbians in Girl Scouting. One writer remembers: "By the time I was a junior counselor, Mic was assistant camp director and her gruff, deep-voiced directives no longer scared me. I didn't know that most of the counselors were lesbians." Others remember how sleepovers and camping trips were opportunities for same-sex sexual experimentation. Girl Scout staffers writing in the book claim that roughly one in three of the Girl Scouts' paid professional staff is lesbian.

They claim this is roughly true! Hey, that's all the evidence I need that this is 100% accurate!

And, look, it must be true that all Girl Scout camps are lesbian recruiting lairs for underage girls, because, as K-Lo writes immediately afterward:

The organization itself is not shy about the issue. One resource book for Scouts informs its young readers: "Some girls have sexual attractions or desires for people of the same sex."

No! How dare they say something outrageous like that!

A few months later, K-Lo wrote about the Girl Scouts again, this time for The Washington Times:

"You might know a Girl Scout who earned a badge for selling cookies or learning to cook," says Miss Lopez. "But, did you notice her 'Domestic Violence Awareness' badge?" Shortly after becoming executive director, the Scouts' Marty Evans boasted, "We're not your mother’s Girl Scout troop."

"No kidding," says Miss Lopez. "Remember that when you consider buying this year’s box of thin mints."

Yeah, that's right! You wouldn't want to be unwittingly funding domestic violence awareness, would you?

2012-02-21T12:21:00.000-05:00

IS NEWT GINGRICH ACTUALLY STEALING MATERIAL FROM DWIGHT SCHRUTE?

Mother Jones recently posted a quiz that asks the test-taker to determine whether a certain utterance or deed can be attributed to Newt Gingrich or to the fictional character Dwight Schrute from The Office. It's a really difficult quiz. (I flunked it.)

Now I see (from Fox Nation via Breitbart, and also via Crooks and Liars) that Gingrich talked about hybrids and weapons last week:

At a campaign event in Suwanee, Georgia, the former House Speaker told supporters that he would bring back cheaper gas because "you can't put a gun rack on a Volt."

Hmmm. Is this literally a (somewhat modified) line from Dwight Schrute -- or at least from the actor who plays him, Rainn Wilson? In 2007, when Wilson was chosen to host film's Independent Spirit Awards, the L.A. Times reported the following (emphasis added):

"In a press release, Wilson expressed his joy at being chosen and commented on what he could offer the show. 'It is truly an honor to be asked to host an awards show that salutes the cutting edge in cinema. I like to think that I bring a bit of an 'independent spirit' to the proceedings as I recently installed a gun rack in my Prius,' Wilson said."

Coincidence???

In fact, there are people who actually sell Prius gun racks, and this guy claimed to have a custom-made one a while back. And this guy has a Volt with a gun rack -- here's the video:

Can I get a socially responsible "Yee-haw"?

****

UPDATE: BuzzFeed links the video of the guy with the Volt and the gun rack.

2012-02-21T09:55:00.000-05:00

WE KNOW THIS DIDN'T WORK THE FIRST TEN THOUSAND TIMES WE TRIED IT, BUT THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT!

The Hill reports:

House GOP hopes 'Solyndra economy' becomes Obama's political epitaph

One year after it began, House Republicans are not letting up in their investigation of the $535 million loan guarantee to the failed solar firm Solyndra.

Though the probe has not uncovered evidence of cronyism at the White House, the GOP sees an election-year advantage in pummeling President Obama on Solyndra, and hopes to turn it into a symbol of what they say is a failed administration.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans marked the Solyndra investigation's one-year anniversary on Friday with a new catch-phrase they hope will follow the president on the campaign trail: "the Solyndra economy." ...

For a year you've been trying this, Republicans? And you still haven't managed to hang it around the president's neck?

Can you take a hint?

Here's the problem: You've been trying to sell this as an example of slimy Chicago-style corruption -- but you've also been trying to sell it as naive patchouli hippie-ism. Those two archetypes are completely in conflict in any normal person's mind. You've got to pick one or the other.

I see that you've changed tack slightly:

[Republicans] argue that the Solyndra loan guarantee is emblematic of the president's heavy-handed approach to job creation. Republicans say they are the champions of the "Keystone economy," named for the Alberta-to-Texas oil pipeline that the GOP strongly supports.

"Solyndra and Keystone represent what’s at stake this November," Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-N.Y.) said Friday during a press conference on Solyndra.

See, I think the president is somewhat vulnerable on Keystone, because rejecting an oil pipeline for environmental reasons plays into patchouli-Democrat stereotypes. But even people who are very pro-oil drilling regardless of the consequences aren't necessarily against green energy -- recall the New York Times article a couple of years ago about a nonprofit group in Kansas that was successfully selling notions of conservation and alternative energy even to climate-change skeptics. You tell heartlanders -- even right-wingers -- that green energy reduces imports from foreigners they don't like, and it becomes a fairly easy sell. Solar or geothermal as a home DIY project also pushes American self-sufficiency buttons.

So backing a solar company doesn't necessarily seem evil. And telling people "Obama did something that didn't work" actually contradicts how most people see the stimulus: namely, "What stimulus? I saw no evidence of it." In terms of public relations, too little of the stimulus was highly visible public-works projects; as a result, people think it was just a lot of money poured down a rathole. Now you tell the public, "Well, here's something Obama did" -- and it at least seems like an effort to do something (because the stereotype says that Democrats actually want solar energy to be used in America). The message is muddled. Give it up.

2012-02-20T22:14:00.002-05:00

IN RESPONSE TO BOOMAN

A few days ago, I wrote that I don't believe it's possible for President Obama to win a massive, LBJ-size election victory in November -- a blowout of a size BooMan thinks is conceivable. Today BooMan responded to me in a post called "Why I'm Bullish," and then explained why he thinks the state of Mississippi -- one of the states I said can't possibly go Democratic no matter how much Republicans screw up -- really might not be so far out of reach.

I guess I just don't accept the notion that, as BooMan says, the Obama reelection team is the best there is:

After you watched Michael Jordan win his first championship, did you ever worry that he wouldn't win more? Or, if you prefer football, think about Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers. Some teams are born champions. They are a cut above everyone else. Barack Obama and his campaign team are better at elections than anyone in history. And now they have the advantages of incumbency and four years to prepare. Are you impressed by Mitt Romney's campaign team?

Well, they must be doing something right or he wouldn't have won any contests this year, would he? (Romney is the weak link in his own campaign.) And whoever wins the nomination is going to have Rove and the Kochs and talk radio and Fox -- that's a pretty formidable team. The Obama team didn't exactly blow away the opposition in late primaries in 2008, and it was useless in 2010. These guys are good, but I wouldn't go further than that.

I don't see any reason to believe there's "a good chance that Obama will improve his performance among Latinos by better than 10 points" -- Hispanics may be repulsed by the GOP agenda, but they're not exactly thrilled by heavy-handed immigration enforcement on the part of the Obama administration. Besides, Hispanics want jobs, too, and they're still hard to come by. (The economy, of course, is a key reason to doubt the possibility of a blowout -- sure, it might be possible if we really came out of the recession, but we're only seeing a few green shoots.)

And no, I don't think "Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are two of the least appealing presidential candidates in modern American history" -- is Romney, in particular, any worse than John Kerry or Mike Dukakis or Bob Dole? (Those guys were all beaten, but none by opponents who approached 60% of the vote.) Is Santorum more extreme than Reagan or (as people knew by the second term even if they didn't in 2000) George W. Bush?

I know Santorum, in particular, won't stop saying extreme things -- but I think lefties vastly overestimate how much this puts people off. Last week Greg Sargent wrote a post titled "Is Birth Control Fight a Terri Schiavo Moment?" As evidence he cited the results of a Democracy Corps survey (PDF) that, yes, showed a real depletion of the Republican brand, and a return to the fold of many in the Democratic coalition. But when Democracy Corps clearly laid out the Democratic and Republican positions on contraceptive coverage, the Democratic position won by a mere 49%-43%. With Terri Schiavo, opposition to the GOP position was overwhelming.

And no, I don't think, as BooMan suggests in his Mississippi post, that Romney's going to be hurt in the South because he's not an evangelical -- simply because Obama's not a Caucasian.

Look, I think Obama's chances are good. I think Republicans might keep sabotaging themselves. However, I think there's simply a limit to how well a Democrat can do in a political culture that for decades has accepted right-wing arguments about government wastefulness (always linked to Democrats) and fiscal prudence (always linked to Republicans), and that also regularly retransmits propaganda about GOP "normalness" and Democratic "elitism."

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-20T20:42:00.000-05:00

YOU SAY "HOLIER THAN THOU" LIKE IT'S A BAD THING!

A new University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll shows Rick Santorum at a whopping 45% among Republicans in the Lone Star State, with Newt Gingrich far back at 18% and Mitt Romney even further back at 16%. Andrew Sullivan writes:

Can Santorum Win In The South?

For me, it was always the question. The evangelical South controls the GOP and most of the Christianist leaders backed Santorum against Gingrich at their summit earlier this year. But Newt's Southern roots and mastery of right-wing populist rhetoric always struck me as potentially more sellable in, say, Texas, than the up-tight Bill Donohue-style theocon Catholic from Pennsylvania.

But things have changed, haven't they? ...

I'm not sure what would have happened if Mitt Romney weren't in the race as the guy most observers believed couldn't be beaten, but at this point base voters are so disgusted by Romney's transcendent phoniness that they're seeking out his polar opposite: the guy in the race who's most sincerely far-right, lack of charisma be damned.

Gingrich had them going for a while, and he even got a do-over for his apostasy on the Paul Ryan budget, but he's not getting a do-over on attacking Romney's business career from the left, on his ties to Freddie Mac, and on his marital history. The phonier Romney gets, the purer the base wants the anti-Romney to be.

If Santorum had dropped out early and Michele Bachmann had stayed in the race, I think Bachmann would be the front-runner right now, even if she'd said all kinds of loopy things. It's all about sincerity, as part of a backlash to the most insincere guy who ever lived.

2012-02-20T13:30:00.000-05:00

BUT I THOUGHT HOLLYWEIRD LIBERALS WANTED SHARIA LAW ALONGSIDE THEIR GAY-COWBOY MOVIES AND THEIR HERITAGE-PORK-BELLY AMUSES-BOUCHES

An item from the gossip column of the New York Post:

Sean Stone, son of controversial director Oliver Stone, converted to Islam in Iran last week and says he's already experiencing a Hollywood backlash....

He told Page Six: "I've already experienced the reverse of anti-Semitism, having people within the film industry express a reluctance to work with me now that I have said a simple prayer, 'There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.' I am sure I have [bleeped] off some powerful people." ...

"I am of a Jewish bloodline, a baptized Christian who accepts Christ's teachings, the Jewish Old Testament and the Holy Koran. I believe there is one God, whether called Allah or Jehovah or whatever you wish to name him. He creates all peoples and religions. I consider myself a Jewish Christian Muslim...."

Well, Sean, good luck with that. Obviously you have a point about the interconnectedness of the three major Middle Eastern religions -- but try telling that to the practitioners. (Oh, and you remind me of your father, the big lefty who once tried to bring an Ayn Rand novel to the screen, with a script by a socialite pal of the Bush twins. Eclecticism for eclecticism's sake? Y'know, maybe we really can't all get along.)

I don't think it's appropriate for Hollywood to give Young Sean the cold shoulder -- but I'm waiting for the righties to admit that this disproves everything they've ever said about Hollywood and liberals. They think Hollywood is 100% liberal and -- despite our drinking, our gay weddings, our fondness for non-halal food -- they also think we desperately crave sharia law. If that's the case, why hasn't Sean been lavished with Tinseltown dollars? Why aren't the bigwigs sending him out to recruit more young filmmakers to serve Allah? Why haven't supermarket tabloids already reported alarming tales about George Clooney and Brad Pitt demanding footbaths in their trailers?

2012-02-20T11:02:00.000-05:00

WHEN YOU MAKE A 1% INCOME DOING PART-TIME WORK, IT'S A HELL OF A LOT EASIER TO RAISE A SPECIAL-NEEDS CHILD

When you read this...

Campaigning in Ohio on Saturday, Rick Santorum displayed his culture-warrior side in full force....

Santorum recalled his prominent role in the 1990s debates over the controversial procedure that critics call partial-birth abortion. He lambasted the president's health care law requiring insurance policies to include free prenatal testing, "because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society."

"That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country," Santorum said.

...read it while keeping this in mind:

Rick Santorum grew wealthy over his four years working as a corporate consultant and media commentator after leaving the Senate in 2006, his newly released federal tax returns show. He made more than $3.6 million and drove an Audi luxury sedan....

The former Pennsylvania senator's tax returns, released Wednesday night, show that his annual adjusted gross income surged from nearly $660,000 in 2007 to $1.1 million in 2009 before slipping to $923,000 in 2010....

His 2010 tax returns show he made more than $550,000 in media and consulting fees -- paid to him through a corporation he set up, Excelsior LLC. The previous year, Santorum made more than $820,000 in fees, also paid through the same firm....

Santorum can sneer at the "elites," but I'd say, oh, about 99% of America is less "elite" than he is. He can argue that every women in America should just suck it up and bring every pregnancy to term, regardless of the ability to cover the out-of-pocket costs, and perhaps to do the backbreaking work of caring for a very sick child with extraordinary needs -- but it's easy for him to say that when his household pulls down a million bucks a year even though neither parent has to deal with the time constraints of a real job.

Yes, I know: when he was in the Senate his income was merely in the low six figures. Well, that would be a king's ransom for most Americans, particularly the rural cultural conservatives who've backed Santorum in the past in Pennsylvania, and who back him now in the GOP primaries.

Also keep Santorum's wealth in mind when he's attacking public schools and singing the praises of homeschooling:

At another point on Saturday, Mr. Santorum repeated his skepticism about the government's role in public education. He harked back to a pre-industrial 19th century when many Americans, including presidents, home-schooled their children.

The public school, Mr. Santorum said, arose "when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools."

Hey, Rick: Why don't you try working multiple sub-$10-an-hour, zero-benefits jobs, and then tell me how swell it is to try to homeschool your kids -- especially whenthey need to be prepared for an information economy rather than a 19th-century agrarian economy. Give it a shot and let me know how it works out for you. Sell the Audi first -- and don't keep the profits.

2012-02-19T15:00:00.000-05:00

EPISTEMIC CLOSURE (HORIZONTAL VERSION)

In the wedding listings in The New York Times -- yup, right alongside all those folks getting gay-married -- I see this:

Anne Kristol and Matthew Continetti

Anne Elizabeth Kristol, a daughter of Susan S. Kristol and William Kristol of McLean, Va., is to be married Sunday evening to Matthew Joseph Continetti, a son of Cathy Continetti and Joseph F. Continetti of Springfield, Va. Rabbi David Kalender is to officiate at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.

The bride, 26, who will be taking her husband's name, is studying for a master's in secondary education at George Washington University. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis.

Her father is the editor of The Weekly Standard, the political journal, in Washington. The bride is a granddaughter of Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian and author, and the late Irving Kristol, the political commentator and author.

The bridegroom, 30, is the editor of The Washington Free Beacon, a political Web site, and works in Washington. He is also a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard. He is the author of ... "The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star." ...

Yup -- there's going to be another generation of wingnut purebreds in the Kristol dynasty.

Bill Kristol and the rest of his family and friends have had their eye on young Mr. Continetti for quite a while, as you learn when you go back to read this 2006 New York Observer article, which I've quoted here a few times:

... Doubleday editor-at-large Adam Bellow came up with the idea [for Continetti's first book] shortly after the Presidential election in 2004. ... he needed to find someone to write it. So he did what any media-savvy individual in search of fresh, right-leaning blood would do: He telephoned The Weekly Standard's editor, Bill Kristol.

Mr. Kristol suggested one of his own reporters, Matthew Continetti, 25, for the gig....

Mr. Bellow, who in the past has edited such conservative writers as Dinesh D'Souza and Wendy Shalit, helped his lucky new scribe hammer out a proposal, which Mr. Kristol and others reviewed....

Before Mr. Continetti found himself completing his first book, he was treading a path through a system that connects such ideologically aligned dots as Mr. Bellow, Mr. Kristol and himself....

Mr. Continetti ...was awarded a 2002 summer internship at the National Review through the Collegiate Network, a division of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute that was founded by Irving Kristol and William Simon Sr. in 1979, which directs money into American colleges to fight what it characterizes as liberal bias on campuses....

The network also funds yearlong fellowships, of which Mr. Continetti was a recipient upon graduation. He spent his year at The Weekly Standard as a fellow under Fred Barnes and received a stipend of approximately $28,000 from the network; when it was over, the magazine hired him full time....

And now there's the book deal. Mr. Bellow said that he was taught a "whole generational theory of publishing" by his mentor at the Free Press, Erwin Glikes, who had hired him based on a recommendation from Irving Kristol (who was an acquaintance of his father,, Saul Bellow). The theory consisted of finding the best of the younger generation and giving them book contracts....

You read this and you really start to think Continetti was chosen and groomed for breeding purposes. (And yes, I don't blame you if you read about Continetti and ask yourself, "This guy was best in show?")

2012-02-19T11:46:00.001-05:00

GREEN-EYESHADE GUY WILL SAVE AMERICA!

Tom Friedman increasingly seems like your crazy uncle in the attic -- yes, even more than usual. He's obsessed with the notion that a third-party presidential candidate court take America by storm, inspiring us with soul-stirring exhortations on the subject of ... er, um, fiscal prudence. Friedman has now found his white knight:

I know what I'd pay good money to see: an intelligent independent candidate just taking part in the presidential debates, because it would make both Obama and his Republican opponent better. One independent I'd like to see play that role is David Walker.

Walker was the country's chief auditor, serving from 1998 to 2008 as the U.S. comptroller general. He is currently the chief executive of the Comeback America Initiative (www.tcaii.org), a nonpartisan group dedicated to getting America's fiscal house in order. Walker ... came in second to Hillary Clinton in a reader poll that Politico conducted last October for favorite Third Party candidate....

Oh, yeah, that -- a poll so believable that Politico wouldn't even release the raw vote totals. All we know is that Politico put a few people on the online ballot and readers nominated a few others, among them Walker. Walker then scored 19% of the vote in the ten-candidate field, ahead of folks such as David Petraeus, Condi Rice, Jon Huntsman, and Mike Bloomberg, but far behind Hillary (25%). Walker apparently generates enthusiasm in certain corners:

"A fiscal beast!" tweeted Walker voter @MichaelEylerts.

Yeah, that's what America wants in parlous times: a former comptroller general who's "a fiscal beast." (As for his champion, that would be this Michael Eylerts: the pink-cheeked "inaugural Vice-President of 'No Labels at the Florida State University'" and "a former digital media intern for No Labels," who "has grown tired of hyper-partisanship, ideological extremism and fiscal insecurity." So, um, here's a very young man who's thrown in his lot with the much-mocked No-Party Party, which makes him representative of ... what sector of the American electorate exactly?)

As for Walker himself, you can read here about the "fiscal wake-up tour" he was conducting back in ... 2007. He was hoping to influence the 2008 election. Guess what? You've never heard of him. Neither had I until I read his name in Friedman's column. Nobody read or discussed his 2010 book, Comeback America.

Gosh, you'd think those great believers in fiscal responsibility, the teabaggers, would have flocked to this guy! But gosh, guess what? They didn't -- presumably because he didn't say our problems are all the fault of liberal socialist Kenyan Alinskyites. (Oh, and he does think we need to rase taxes. Next!)

Friedman keeps telling us that America has a deep hunger to hear this message, and today he reminds us that there's a guy who's been actively pushing this message for years, in a fairly high-profile way -- that link above about the "fiscal wake-up tour" was from 60 Minutes -- and still it's had no impact.

Look, we Americans don't want to blame ourselves -- we want to blame others. Sometimes we're right to feel that way. (We liberals weren't the ones who supported fighting the Iraq War while simultaneously cutting taxes. Nor did we request the removal of all effective oversight from Wall Street.) Nobody wants this eat-your-vegetables message -- we want someone else to start eating vegeatables first.

2012-02-19T10:37:00.000-05:00

PLEASE STOP (RE-)MEASURING THE DRAPES

I've been posting at Brooman Tribune for the past few months, but I've been hesitant to post over there this week, in part because BooMan is entertaining the possibility that President Obama will win a victory in November of nearly LBJ-in-'64 proportions: 38 states, or perhaps merely 35, and a popular vote total approaching 60% of the vote.

Um, has any Democrat other than LBJ won as much as 54% of the vote since FDR died? Not as I recollect. Yes, the Democrats are facing a party full of internal strife and unrealistic desires for ideological purity and for a widespread American endorsement of that purity. But please remember: the economy still stinks, Obanma's approval ratings are under 50% in most polls and just 50% in others ... and even with all the ways Republicans have embarrassed themselves in recent months, there are still polls like this:

President Barack Obama trails three of the four Republican candidates in head-to-head match-ups if the election were held today, according to a new Iowa Poll.

The Republican with the biggest lead: Ron Paul, who would defeat Obama by 7 percentage points, 49 percent to 42 percent. Rick Santorum, winner of the 2012 Iowa caucuses, leads Obama 48 percent to 44 percent. Mitt Romney, edged in the caucuses by Santorum, leads Obama 46 percent to 44 percent.

The president defeats only Newt Gingrich, 51 percent to 37 percent....

In the [2008] general election, [Obama] defeated Republican nominee John McCain in Iowa by nearly 10 percentage points....

Paul has never had the slightest chance of being the GOP nominee, and I think he'd be absurdly easy to beat -- much of America doesn't know the first thing about his newsletters, or about how his sunny-sounding libertarianism would in fact lay waste to cherished programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance (even more so than the programs of his GOP opponents). The attack ads would write themselves -- and Paul wouldn't even deny what he intended to do to the safety net.

But Santorum and Romney? If they're both leading in Iowa, then why should we assume either one would lose to Obama in the general election?

Look, I know: there's plenty of attack-ad fodder in Romney's Thurston Howell III affect and Santorum's apocalyptic Christianism. There's going to be more shooting in the GOP circular firing squad. I guess I understand why some people are imagining that this year could be like 1964, 1972, or 1984 -- years in which an incumbent who seemed vulnerable on New Year's Day scored a blowout win eleven months later.

But as I told BooMan in comments, at the very least, there are seventeen states the Republicans will absolutely win even under the worst possible conditions: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Alaska. No Democrat can possibly win 35 states.

The reason is obvious: Our political culture still accepts Republican myths about Democratic fiscal irresponsibility and sound Republican economic stewardship. It still talks about government social programs as
parasitic if not cancerous, and it links those programs exclusively with Democrats even though Republicans have chosen not to curtail them, or have even initiated them (Medicare Part D).

So there are two possible results in November: Obama loses, and Obama wins a close one. A blowout is utterly impossible.

2012-02-18T11:58:00.000-05:00

LOW-INFORMATION CATHOLICS AND THE POTENTIAL REPUBLICANIZATION OF THE CHURCH

Today's New York Times profiles Father Roger J. Landry, a priest in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who unabashedly promotes the Church's anti-contraception message:

This is a priest who believes official Catholic teaching about contraception, and who is not afraid to say so....

He gives his parishioners the stiff, 80-proof doctrine....

Father Landry gets his message across in several ways. First, he talks to engaged couples about their plans for a family. To facilitate that conversation, he gives them a questionnaire.

"The last question," Father Landry said, "is always 'Are you planning to have children? Are you planning to start right away after you're married?' The vast majority of couples answer, 'Yes, we definitely want to have children, but we want to wait two or three years.'"

The priest asks if they are aware of church teaching about contraception. "Shockingly, 50 percent of the couples that I prepare for marriage have never heard that the church teaches about contraception," he said.

We talk about low-information voters, but these people are low-information Catholics -- how do they not know this about their church? Do they also not know how their church feels about stem cells and in vitro fertilization and masturbation and, for that matter, abortion? Do they know their priests molested boys and were protected by a Church cover-up? Have these people been living under rocks?

My first reaction to this is, "Well, when people who don't know this find out, they'll feel really alienated." And maybe that's true -- but Father Landry can apparently claim some success. The Times reporter sees him connecting with his parishioners:

It was last Sunday morning, and the Rev. Roger J. Landry, whose accent is from working-class Lowell, Mass., but whose college degree is from nearby Harvard, had just finished officiating at the 8:30 Mass at St. Anthony of Padua, his church in this old whaling town. After his fiery sermon attacking the Obama administration, several people in the pews applauded -- a sound striking for its echoes in the cavernous, awesome church, and for its rarity. One does not applaud in Mass.

And he says he's getting through on a one-on-one basis, although he's only citing the successes, not the failures:

As a priest, Father Landry has tried, gently, to lead couples away from contraception. "I know from their having told me that many of the couples here have stopped contracepting," Father Landry said. "In terms of the numbers, it's probably between 15 and 20 couples who have explicitly told me that."

The reporter sees a response that's, um, mixed:

After Mass, during the coffee hour in the church basement, parishioners expressed a range of views on the pastor's teachings.

One couple with grown children agreed that if they had benefited from Father Landry's teachings years ago, they would have had more children. "We definitely would not have used contraception," the wife said, "not if we had it to do over again."

An older woman with white hair, sitting near the doughnuts being sold for $1, appeared to disagree. "Don't get me started on him," she said, rolling her eyes when asked about Father Landry’s teachings on contraception.

Oh, I love that woman. I grew up surrounded by Catholics like that -- people who were mostly moderate on values issues, because they were assimilationist.

If priests like Father Landry become the rule rather than the exception, and really do egin to connect, I'm going to miss the moderate old Catholics. The Church seems to want to become like the evangelical Protestant churches, or like the Republican Party: a group that demands a stern, to-the-death commitment to right-wing zealotry, and if you don't like it, the door's that way. That older woman is the Catholic equivalent of a Gerald Ford Republican. And that's all we need, isn't it? Another institution that wants to drive its moderates to extinction? And that works the followers who remain into a group-solidarity lather by puhing extreme views that aren't subject to compromise?

2012-02-17T17:40:00.000-05:00

THIS OUGHT TO BE MUCH MORE DAMAGING TO SANTORUM THAN ANYTHING RICK OR HIS SUGAR DADDY SAID ABOUT CONTRACEPTION
(updated)

I know all the focus in the past couple of days has been on the Foster Friess aspirin joke and on Rick Santorum's past statements about sexual matters, but this strikes me as having the potential to do real harm to Santorum right now as well as in the future:

Kyle Mantyla of People for the American Way's indispensable Right Wing Watch has come up with an audiotape of a Rick Santorum address to the students of the conservative Catholic Ave Maria University in Florida, delivered in 2008. It's an altogether remarkable speech depicting Rick as a leader in a "spiritual war" against Satan for control of America. Much of its involves the usual right-wing stuff about the conquest of academia (outside bastions like Ave Maria) by the forces of moral relativism, but then there is this Santorum assessment of mainline Protestantism:
[O]nce the colleges fell and those who were being educated in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you'd say, 'wait, the Catholic Church'? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.

If I were Mitt Romney, I would give up on trying to be the wingnut de tutti wingnutti and just get that quote in front of every mainline Protestant he possibly can. I'd use it in public appearances. I'd put it in mailers. I'd work it into ads:

we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.

I'd tell voters: "He has literally said that your church is under the influence of Satan. He thinks you're no longer Christian." I'd say this to upmarket suburbanites and to salt-of-the-earth types who bring tuna-and-noodle casseroles to church suppers.

The whole speech is nutty, but it's nutty in a way that barely penetrates anymore: the culture is sexually depraved, academia is under evil influence, etc., etc. This is the kind of thing that would lose Santorum all kinds of votes in the general election, but not now, and the people it alienates probably are probably already lost to him.

But there are still enough mainline Protestants in the GOP that Romney could hurt Santorum now with this. Maybe Santorum isn't getting many votes from people who belong to mainline Protestant churches -- but he can't afford to be seen as bigoted against what is still a Republican voter bloc.

Romney won't raise this -- probably because he's afraid to talk about religion for fear of reminding Republicans of his religion -- but he should.

(Watch Santorum's speech and read the transcript at the link embedded in the quote above.)

2012-02-17T15:46:00.000-05:00

WHAT TOM SAID...

... in response to MSNBC's decision to fire Pat Buchanan:

Indeed.

****

UPDATE: Oh, geez:

Statement by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski regarding Pat Buchanan

Everyone at Morning Joe considers Pat Buchanan to be a friend and a member of the family. Even though we strongly disagree with the contents of Pat's latest book, Mika and I believe those differences should have been debated in public....

Those ideas? They have been debated in public -- primarily between the years 1939 and 1945.

2012-02-17T14:33:00.002-05:00

ADELSON GIVING TO ROMNEY -- INDIRECTLY?

Earlier this month, there were stories -- from The New York Times, from CNN -- making the point that casino zillionaire Sheldon Adelson really, really likes Mitt Romney, even though he gives millions of dollars to Newt Gingrich's super PAC. Adelson, we were told, has promised to help Romney just as soon as Mitt gets the GOP nomination -- a nomination Adelson's millions are preventing MITT from obtaining.

But maybe there's no paradox in this anymore.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's faltering campaign is about to get another shot in the arm, CBS News has learned.

Billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson plans to give another $10 million to the outside group backing the former Georgia lawmaker who is running behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, a source close to Adelson told CBS News....

Does Romney now want this to happen because Gingrich is so far back in the polls he needs to be kept in the race so he can split the anti-Romney vote with Santorum? If I were Mitt, I suppose I'd want this.

Still, Adelson's "I love you, but I'm dating Newt" approach to political check-writing always reminds me of those stories about the young Richard Nixon volunteering to drive Pat on her dates with other men until she finally agreed to marry him -- which always struck me as cringe-inducingly sad.

****

UPDATE: My theory is so brilliant that The Wall Street Journal advanced it two days ago.

2012-02-17T11:30:00.000-05:00

DAVID BROOKS CHECKS THE LINE FOR PARADISE, SEES NO NON-BOBOS

David Brooks is getting a lot of flak, particularly on Twitter (where he's trending), for his column about Jeremy Lin's Christian beliefs. Brooks is being mocked primarily for writing this:

Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He's a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn't neglect the biggest anomaly. He's a religious person in professional sports.

Ta-Nehisi Coates responds:

Did David Brooks just claim Lin is an anomaly because "he's a religious person in professional sports?" Are there no black people in sports?

To which I'd add: or whites from the South?

Or, y'know, Tim Tebow? But Brooks does seem to be aware of the existence of religious athletes:

We’ve become accustomed to the faith-driven athlete and coach, from Billy Sunday to Tim Tebow.

So what is his point? (Felix Gilman has a thought: "I think problem here is that Brooks is misusing 'anomaly' when really all he means is 'thing' or 'column hook.'")

NPR's Steve Inskeep wants to cut Brooks a little slack:

... in re: D.Brooks: religion not "anomaly" in sports, but rest of column provocative: contradiction btwn faith & act

And that's not completely off base. The point Brooks goes on to make is that religion is about selflessness, as Lin himself has put it, while sports is about the opposite. Brooks writes:

The moral universe of modern sport is oriented around victory and supremacy....

The modern sports hero is competitive and ambitious....

He is assertive, proud and intimidating....

But there's no use denying -- though many do deny it -- that this ethos violates the religious ethos on many levels. The religious ethos is about redemption, self-abnegation and surrender to God....

Jeremy Lin has wrestled with this tension quite openly. In a 2010 interview with the Web site Patheos, Lin recalled, "I wanted to do well for myself and my team. How can I possibly give that up and play selflessly for God?" ...

The odds are that Lin will never figure it out because the two moral universes are not reconcilable....

OK, fine -- but, David, why write this column now? Why write it about Lin and not, say, Tebow, or one of the many other athletes who wear their religion on their sleeves?

Well, of course, this is Brooks being precisely what he accuses liberals of being: someone who's unable to give serious consideration to people who aren't part of his sociocultural subgroup. Non-white athletes who regularly thank God in post-game interviews don't count because, well, they're non-white -- who cares? Tebow isn't relevant to Brooks, either because Brooks doesn't want to critique a hero of the Applebee's salad bar or because Brooks barely noticed Tebow's existence all last year, even as he was scolding us liberals for effete contempt directed at heartlanders. (Um, we sure noticed Tebow.) Or maybe Brooks just thinks Tebow is a noble savage whose simple faith is charming to observe but isn't worth analyzing. Lin, on the other hand, is (based on his educational attainments) one of us -- so what he thinks about God actually matters.

And there's Brooks in a nutshell: the guy who mocks us for our dismissal of the heartland embodies what he denounces.

2012-02-17T07:27:00.000-05:00

AS USUAL, IGNORANCE HAS A CONSERVATIVE BIAS

Most of us on the left are assuming that the right's decision to go all in on contraception is a hug political blunder, but CNN makes clear that this can play out the right's way if -- naturally -- people are kept confused and ill-informed:

Half of all Americans say they oppose the Obama administration's new policy concerning employer-provided health insurance plans and their coverage of contraceptive services for female employees including those at religiously affiliated institutions, according to a new national survey....

Surveys on this topic tell a mixed story because many Americans know little about the issue. Recent CBS and Fox polls indicate support for the new policy, using questions that describe the new policy in some detail. But in the CNN poll, when asked their opinion of the Obama policy with no details spelled out, support was much less and a large partisan divide emerged. A recent Pew poll also suggests Americans are closely divided, and that poll may hold the key to the differences. Nearly four in ten Americans say they have heard nothing at all about this controversy.

"The CNN poll illustrates the road ahead for the White House," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "If the administration can't inform more Americans about the details of the policy - details that some other polls show to be popular - the public is likely to split along party lines. Many will dislike the plan simply due to the fact that this is an Obama initiative."

So there it is: if the White House and other supporters of contraception keep the public informed, we win. If the right floods the zone with bamboozlement and misdirection, the right wins.

Still feel 100% confident in the outcome? I don't. Yes, we definitely should be able to win this one, but don't assume that the right has no path to victory -- and the right's path would be one the right is very, very familiar with.

2012-02-16T17:45:00.000-05:00

LIVE BY CITIZENS UNITED, DIE BY CITIZENS UNITED

I don't even know why I'm quoting this, since everyone in America seems to know about it already. But if you missed it, here goes. After the quote, my thoughts.

This whole contraception debate is just so new-fangled, says billionaire investor and mega-funder to the super PAC supporting former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) for President, Foster Friess.

In a simpler time, there were other ways to deal with female sexual desire. "Back in my day, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly," he said Thursday on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, setting the host back for moment....

We know that the only reason Santorum is still in the race is that Citizens United allowed a candidate to survive on massive outlays by one individual to a super PAC allied with, though technically separate from, the candidate's campaign. Once upon a time, of course, every viable campaign had to have donations from a full roster of rich people. Now one is enough.

That means if you're, say, Santorum or Newt Gingrich, your patron all but gets naming rights to you. (And someday, I'm sure, naming rights will literally be up for grabs, and will be offered to corporations as well; four years and a few Roberts Court rulings from now, I look forward to the Tostitos® Mitch Daniels 2016 Presidential Campaign.)

But what this means right now is that Foster Friess isn't just one of a bunch of rich guys who gave Santorum money -- Friess owns Santorum. That's why this hurts Santorum, at least if he gets to the general election. Pre-Citizens United, you had to be a felon to hurt the candidate you financed this much. Now, if he's your boy, practically anything you do can hurt him.

2012-02-16T14:40:00.000-05:00

WORST BUDDY COMEDY EVER

If the "Santorum is more popular but Romney wins the nomination" scenario envisioned by Jonathan Bernstein plays out, it has the potential to make McGovern-Eagleton look like a minor stumble -- and to be utterly hilarious if you're not a Republican:

... Santorum's campaign [is] badly lagging in organization. This could mean he doesn't reap all the delegates that might be his due.... In most GOP caucus states, the voting is not strictly connected to delegate selection. If Santorum's voters don’t understand the procedures, it's very possible he could win the vote and yet pick up only a handful of delegates. Indeed, that may have already happened in caucus states he's won, like Iowa, Colorado, and Minnesota.

... Romney will apparently win Arizona's winner-take-all primary even if Santorum does hang on for a Michigan win, where the delegates are apportioned in a complex mix of rules. It's very possible that Romney and Santorum could split the two states, giving Santorum great headlines, while Romney cleans up in delegates.

... the popularity contest could leave Santorum as the clear, unambiguous winner, while Romney becomes the clear, unambiguous nominee. Imagine Santorum finishing with a five point edge or more in votes -- even as Romney gets crowned the GOP candidate for president.

If that happens, it's hard to see rank-and-file Republicans accepting the outcome as legitimate....

Yikes. And it's easy to imagine Mitt the Machine trying to argue that the math requires everyone to just accept his victory -- even as the inflamed right-wing mobs are howling for his head.

At that point, I think the party elders would put the proverbial horse's head in his bed and force him to accept the only solution that could possibly mollify the base: Rick Santorum as the #2 on the ticket. (In fact, Mitt hasn't ruled A Romney/Santorum ticket out.)

Now, the world of politics seems to be divided into three camps: people who think Santorum is an awful candidate, people who think Romney is a worse candidate than Santorum (hey, it's not just me -- BooMan thinks Romney is worse), and people who can't agree on which one is more awful. But if this scenario pans out, I think -- under extreme duress, and after much intra-party brawling -- we're going to get two for the price of one.

Can you contain your excitement?

2012-02-16T12:00:00.002-05:00

THE MORE WE IGNORE THEM, THE CLOSER THEY GET

Yes, I've been talking about Rick Santorum as someone the general electorate wouldn't immediately laugh off the national stage -- but I've done so in large part because I assumed his obsession with the alleged evils of non-marital and non-procreative sex could be kept in the background as he campaigned. He'd talk mostly about the economy and foreign policy, the rest of America would talk mostly about the economy and foreign policy, and lots of people would go to the polls not really grasping that he's extremely far to the right on social issues. After all, social issues simply haven't been on most people's agendas in the past few years ... right?

Except that the right seems to want to pick a fight on these issues, for reasons I can't begin to understand. Why would you want to do this when you might be about to nominate a presidential candidate whose most profound difference with swing voters is on precisely these issues? Why draw attention to that in this way?

The furor over President Obama's birth control mandate has swiftly entered a new plane, with supporters and opponents alike calling the subject a potent weapon for the November elections and mounting what they say will be prolonged campaigns to shape public perceptions of the issue: Is it about religious liberty or women's health?

Roman Catholic bishops, evangelicals, other conservatives and the Republican presidential candidates have dismissed as meaningless the effort by President Obama last week to soften the rule, which requires that employees of religiously affiliated institutions like schools and hospitals, but not churches, receive free contraception in their health plans.

Sensing an opportunity, Congressional Republicans have leapt into the fray. An amendment to block any health mandate that violates a business owner's beliefs is before the Senate -- and a target of intense lobbying. A House committee is holding a hearing on Thursday to ask, "Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?"

But the political repercussions could be much wider. "This was an unexpected gift," said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a Republican strategist.

And at the hearings this morning, Congressman Darrell Issa insultingly refused to allow a pro-choice woman to testify, defying congressional custom (Democrats on the panel had requested that she be heard):

Ranking committee member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) had asked Issa to include a female witness at the hearing, but the Chairman refused, arguing that "As the hearing is not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration's actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience, he believes that Ms. Fluke is not an appropriate witness."

And so Cummings, along with the Democratic women on the panel, took their request to the hearing room, demanding that Issa consider the testimony of a female college student. But the California congressman insisted that the hearing should focus on the rules' alleged infringement on "religious liberty," not contraception coverage, and denied the request. Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) walked out of the hearing in protest of his decision, citing frustration over the fact that the first panel of witnesses consisted only of male religious leaders against the rule.

And this comes at a time when state legislatures, even in battleground states like Virginia, are pursuing personhood bills and mandatory ultrasounds before abortions. Why?

I think the right is mostly making short-sighted calculations about how to pursue this year's campaigns -- "Well, if the economy is getting better, and Obama got bin Laden killed, all we have left is abortion." But that's absurd when "all you have left" is potentially very unpopular. This is stuff you keep at the state level, assuming most voters won't notice -- you don't trumpet it in a presidential election year when your pro-choice opponent is rising in the polls (and your current front-runner's biggest weakness is that voters who pay attention to him -- which could be all voters soon -- know he's a huge prig).

Is this an attempt to give cover to Mitt Romney if he's the nominee, because it's feared that he won't turn out the base otherwise? Is it Catholic and Protestant organizations just opportunistically trolling for wingnut support and cash? Is it a woeful misreading of the electorate, the result of epistemic closure?

I don't know. But I think making this the focus of GOP efforts in 2012 is a disastrous idea. Even Santorum could make it a race if he were seen as a guy with right-wing economic ideas and a coal-miner grandfather who happened to be sexually square. But put that last bit first and he's really, really doomed -- as is the entire GOP no matter who tops the ticket, if the right keeps this up.

2012-02-16T08:06:00.000-05:00

IT'S STARTING TO LOOK LIKE MORNING IN AMERICA, BUT IF IT WEREN'T...

DougJ and I usually see eye to eye, but he really doesn't understand why anyone would regard Rick Santorum as even a mild threat:

Look, Santorum lost as an incumbent by 18 points, wrote a book saying that women shouldn't work, the guy is a shit general election candidate and no amount of double-reverse contrarianism will convince me otherwise, so laissez le Santorum roulez.

Well, on that second point, Bob McDonnell of Virginia wrote a master's thesis saying women shouldn't work and then won a gubernatorial race by 18 points, a year after Barack Obama won his state. He has sky-high approval ratings in his state (even as Obama's doing well there again in the polls). He's near the top of Mitt Romney's VP short list. (America is full of people who agree with virtually everything feminism stands for but will tell you they don't like feminism.)

Look, obviously, judging from the latest polls, Obama is looking better and better to voters and all the Republicans are looking worse and worse. But if Obama now looks effectively unbeatable running against Santorum, it's because consumer confidence is climbing -- and, yes, because Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot, in Congress, in state houses and legislatures, and in the presidential race. But the latter will cease to be true sooner or later, and as for the rest -- well, yeah, Obama beats Newt Gingrich by 18 points right now, but why isn't he beating all of these clowns by double digits?

The American electorate is still conditioned by decades of propaganda to regard government spending as a monstrous evil (despite the fact that people cling to the programs they use) and to regard Republicans as careful fiscal stewards. People like sex, but I'm not sure they like thinking of themselves as people who like sex, which is why they support abortion rights and (increasingly) gay rights and stick up for single mothers and nevertheless vote for Reagan and both Bushes and, last year, a whole lot of teabaggers.

So, sure, Obama will probably crush Santorum in November 2012 if he's the Republican nominee -- but I'm not sure he would have crushed him if he'd had to run against him in mid-2011, or (especially) in 2010. I think it would have been a tough fight. America still doesn't regard people like Santorum as utterly beyond the pale.

****

And now Kos is trying to get Democrats to vote for Santorum in upcoming primary states? Yeah, sure, do it -- though I think it's hard to get enough people to join in these efforts to make a difference (Rush Limbaugh's pro-Hillary Operation Chaos didn't have much impact in '08). Right now Santorum doesn't seem as if he needs the help, but we all see the Romney Death Star on the horizon, so I guess Rick's the guy you want to help if you want to keep the Republicans bashing one another. (Then again, if the Romney campaign is really running out of money, as is being reported, and if Santorum is rising in every GOP poll, should Democrats vote for Mitt to keep him in the race?)

2012-02-15T18:44:00.002-05:00

HOW DO YOU SAY "FLOP" IN SPANISH?

Seriously? The Republicans are looking at intraparty chaos and bad poll numbers and are so desperate to change the subject that they're going to pretend to be offended by an unambiguously non-racist tweet from Jim Messina, a top Obama campaign official -- and we're going to take their utterly fake outrage seriously?

Here's the story, if you don't know it: Dana Milbank published a column in The Washington Post titled "Does the GOP Care About Latino Voters?" The column is about the decision by Republican senators to delay for months the approval of a Cuban-American judge's appointment to the federal bench, which Milbank sees (correctly) as emblematic of the GOP's self-sabotaging hostility to Latin-Americans. Milbank concludes with an observation about the GOP's dawdling and fumfering while debating the appointment:

Some [senators] spoke about transportation. Others spoke about the budget. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) spoke about the wonders of his state. "The lettuce in your salad this month almost certainly came from Arizona," McCain said. "It's also believed that the chimichanga has its origin in Arizona."

The chimichanga? It may be the only thing Republicans have left to offer Latinos.

And then, after the column appeared:

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina dubbed the last sentence the "line of the day" on Twitter.

That caused Republicans and conservatives to slam Messina on Twitter. Some even called the comment racist.

Do I have to explain this? How the hell is it racist to quote a line pointing out racist contempt?

No Republican actually thinks this was a racist tweet. The Republicans merely believe they can pretend to be offended and we'll take their fauxtrage seriously.

In the past, I've called this "truth creep": You talk about something in a way that seems accurate, and that's close to accurate, but that differs just enough that you've completely and uttered distorted the meaning -- and then you hope that everyone runs with your phony version of the truth.

In basketball, what the Republicans are doing is a common tactic: if an opposing player lightly touches you, or even brushes close by you, you fall to the ground in n Oscar-worthy show of having been brutalized, and hope you manage to get a foul called on your opponent. This is known as a "flop."

That's exactly what the GOP's phony outrage should be called.

2012-02-15T14:40:00.002-05:00

I THINK CALLING IT A "STRATEGY" IS GIVING REPUBLICANS TOO MUCH CREDIT

David Frum looks at President Obama's increasingly impressive poll numbers and concludes that the Republican Party has made an error in planning:

Republican strategy over the past 2 years has been premised on the assumption that President Obama is so hopelessly weakened that the GOP needn't bother addressing centrist voters at all.

That was never a very plausible assumption....

Whether it is the Ryan plan or the debt ceiling showdown or -- now -- contraception, Republicans have spent three years talking to themselves. It has been a narcissistic self-indulgence -- and may soon prove a very costly one as well.

I think it's a stretch to call what Republicans have come up with a "strategy." The people who are taking on these fights in the GOP aren't shrewdly and carefully assessing the percentages of liberals, moderates, and conservatives in America, and planning accordingly -- they're drinking their own Kool-Aid and concluding, at least on a subconscious level, that they don't have to worry about non-conservative voters because non-conservatives aren't really Americans.

Ann Coulter says Democrats would never win if we took away women's right to vote. Rush Limbaugh says Obama is pursuing an electoral strategy of trying win the votes of "the takers," not "the makers." These are rhetorical flights of fancy, but I think a large percentage of Republicans actually believe them, and have started to think that voters who don't pull the (R) lever aren't actually voters at all, because they shouldn't be. The ultimate example of this is the tea party's claim that its members are "taking our country back" -- as if it exclusively belongs to them. And hey, look: there's Rick Santorum, in the upbeat ad he just released this week, being described as "a trusted conservative who gives us the best chance to take back America."

"Republicans have spent three years talking to themselves," Frum writes, which is accurate -- although I'd say that's been true for a lot longer than three years. But what's more important is that Republicans have spent three-plus years assuming that all the people in America who aren't Republican are so depraved that we don't deserve to be called American. They've made political moves based on the notion that we don't really exist -- or at least that we couldn't possibly continue to maintain our beliefs when confronted with the self-evident wonderfulness of what they have to say.

And now they're paying the price.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-15T13:37:00.001-05:00

HOW OBSESSED IS FOX WITH MEDIA MATTERS?

Front page at Fox Nation right now (click to enlarge):

Twenty-one stories on the front page under the lead story and six of them are about Media Matters? Seriously? This is what you think America -- or even your audience -- cares about?

2012-02-15T11:29:00.000-05:00

NOT EVEN TRYING TO CONCEAL THE HYPOCRISY

This is pure Romney:

Romney Surrogate Attacks Santorum for Voting the Same Way He Did

... On a conference call Tuesday afternoon, former Missouri senator and Romney surrogate Jim Talent criticized Santorum's support for expanding government spending, including his vote for the Medicare Part D in 2003 -- a program for which Talent himself voted....

Talent's attack comes a day after we had this from another Romney backer:

Virginia's Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell on Monday warned Rick Santorum against demeaning women in the military, following controversial remarks made by the Republican presidential candidate last week.

"I like Rick Santorum a lot, I just disagree with any inference that he might have made that somehow women aren't capable of serving on the front lines and serving in combat positions," McDonnell told CNN....

McDonnell has a daughter who's served in Iraq, and he's praised her service -- though in the master's thesis McDonnell wrote at Regent University, McDonnell said women should avoid working outside the home (just as Santorum did in his 2005 book, It Takes a Family):

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family....

During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women....

What's next from Team Romney? Chris Christie saying that Santorum is starting to look a little portly in his sweater vests?

2012-02-15T08:04:00.002-05:00

MITT ROMNEY: THE RIGHT'S ANTI-PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Well, here it comes, as expected:

...In an interview with BuzzFeed, a Romney advisor offered details of the campaign's coming two-front attack, which the campaign expects will be echoed by the Super PAC....

The Pennsylvania Republican will "be defined by two things," the advisor said.

The first is a comparison to Barack Obama: "He's never run anything," said the advisor. The Pennyslvanian's experience is limited to roles as a legislator and legislative staffer. "The biggest thing he ever ran is his Senate office," he siad.

The second is a challenge to Santorum's Washington experience.

"They’re going to hit him very hard on earmarks, lobbying, voting to raise the federal debt limit five times," said the advisor. "The story of Santorum is going to be told over the next few weeks in a big way." ...

Is this going to work? To me it seems like thin gruel, but millions of dollars' worth of thin gruel will fill you up, I guess. When Gingrich was the top anti-Romney, I didn't think Newt's fans were going to care much about ancient ethics charges in Congress (there are Democrats in Congress!), but then I started reading stories about formerly pro-Newt or Newt-curious voters having a Pavlovian response of "Ethics!" when Gingrich's name was mentioned. So I guess it's a pretty effective technique.

This really might clear away the last obstacle standing between Romney and the nomination -- but what's it doing to the Republican Party? And I don't mean merely "Can Republicans stand a bruising primary battle?" I mean what is it doing to the myths right-wingers live by?

After decades of propaganda from talk radio, Regnery, Fox, and Koch, right-wingers believe conservatism is perfect and the emergence of a right-wing savior who kills all the bad guys (us) and gets rid of all the bad laws (everything we support) is actually possible. This is a religious faith, one that's carefully cultivated every day, every hour, via right-wing media.

And now Mitt Romney is laying waste to the belief system.

The faithful can see that he's not their perfect hero. Then, whenever he's challenged by someone they think might be their perfect hero, he floods the airwaves with the message that the apparent knight in shining armor is a fraud -- just like all the earlier knights.

That's why it must suck to be a right-winger these days: your likely standard-bearer's message is that everyone is flawed, everything is compromised and corrupted, and this is the best you're going to do -- a message that debunks every bit of right-wing propaganda you've absorbed over the past twenty years, which posits the existence of Pure Evil and (at least in theory, and certainly in the person of the now departed Saint Reagan) Pure Good.

In this way, Mitt Romney's campaign may be having more of a positive impact than all of the left's media outlets combined. It's repudiating the propaganda. It's destroying the wingnut dream.

2012-02-14T17:01:00.002-05:00

SO MANY ANTEDILUVIAN IDEAS, SO LITTLE TIME

Tim Graham of NewsBusters is being mocked for his disgust at the fleeting same-sex image near the end of this charming Valentine's Day "Google doodle" ("Valentine's Day is a big day that gay-left advocates expect their love to be honored as just the same," Graham harrumphs, ungrammatically):

I'm surprised, though, that Graham (or some other right-winger) hasn't criticized the video in another way -- as part of "the war against boys, or "war on masculinity."

Think about it: The young man in the video does everything he can to get the young woman to notice him, and it all fails -- until (SPOILER ALERT) he joins her in the gender-stratified act of jumping rope! Yikes! The only way he can get the girl is to become the girl! It's feminism run amok!!! That's what she wants him to do before he can be her guy! That's what she forces him to do!

Argh -- I've been reading this crap way too long. I seriously believe that, if I decided to devote the time and trouble to it, I could now write a fake right-wing blog, posting boilerplate winger ideas multiple times a day, and never get caught.

2012-02-14T14:16:00.002-05:00

I TOLD YOU NOT TO BE TOO SMUG ABOUT SANTORUM'S RISE

Public Policy Polling goes through the history of the not-Romneys and finds that Santorum is the first one to do better than Romney against Obama:

PPP's newest national poll finds Romney trailing Obama by 7 points at 49-42, while Santorum trails by only 5 points at 49-44.

... Over the previous 6 months when Romney first trailed Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, then Newt Gingrich in our national polling he still did on average 6 points better than them in our general election tests. Santorum's the first insurgent to challenge Romney on that front as well....

Santorum's net favorability is 21 points better than Romney's. Santorum's at -7 (39/46), while Romney is at -28 (29/57). That's mostly because Republicans like Santorum a lot better (+40 at 62/22 to Romney's +2 at 43/41). But Santorum also does a good deal better with independents, coming in at -6 (40/46) to Romney's -23 (32/55). In the head to heads Obama leads Romney by 9 with independents, but has only a 4 point advantage on Santorum with that group.

(Emphasis added.)

How is this possible? Well, I hate the scolding tone of this Jonathan Chait post, but I essentially agree with what he's saying:

Santorum has attracted a terrible reputation among the overclass. He is defined by his crude, bigoted social conservatism, which colors the broader perception of him as an extremist. This in turn leeches out into a sense, often reflected in news coverage, which likewise reflects the social biases of the overclass, that Santorum is a fringe candidate who would repel swing voters.

To put that in a somewhat more charitable way, I think a lot of committed liberals and urban sophisticates (I place myself in both categories) really do care more than the rest of the public about zealously protecting the right to have gay sex, non-marital sex, non-procreative sex, and only wanted children after any sex. Since these issues matter a lot to us, and Rick Santorum is not only on the wrong side on all of them but is so proudly and defiantly, he seems ickier to us than he does, perhaps, than he does to the rest of the public.

Now, I think plenty of swing voters and heartlanders will stand with us on some or all of these things when push comes to shove; even at the Applebee's salad bar they hated Dan Quayle's attempt to slut-shame single mothers a generation ago, and more and more heartlanders are cool with the fact that Ellen DeGeneres is gay. But if these aren't make-or-break issues for moderate Middle Americans, which I think is the case, then they're unlikely to have paid as much attention to Santorum over the years as we have, so right now he doesn't look so bad to them. I don't know if that will continue to be true if he's the nominee and they learn more about him, but for now we shouldn't assume that our view of him is shared by everyone who's not a rightist.

(X-posted at Balloon Juice as part of this post.)

2012-02-14T10:06:00.002-05:00

HARD TO PUT THE POLIGRIP BACK IN THE TUBE

I'm not sure whether to feel schadenfreude or suspicion in response to Politico's lengthy article "Fox News 'Course Correction' Rankles Some." Is this a legitimate story about how Fox is failing to serve its core audience? Or is Fox using Politico to send a message -- to potential non-right-wing viewers, and to advertisers who might be shunning Fox because of the absence of those viewers -- that hey, kids, Fox isn't so bad these days, really? (The latter would certainly be in keeping with the recent effort at Politico that's been described by FishbowlDC as "Operation 'Butter Up FNC,'" which has included such hard-hitting journalism as "How Fox News Has Stayed on Top" and a gushing profile of Fox's Brett Baier.)

From the story we learn that "Fox’s debates have won widespread plaudits" (journalism!); that a Virginia talk-radio host you've never heard of has "gone from all Fox to no Fox" because "they've lost that independent conservative mantra that had drove people like me to them"; that a Red State diarist "hear[s] the language of the Left entering" Fox's programming; that Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media frets about the loss of Glenn Beck on Fox and about the fact that Fox "recently hired 'two far-left radical feminists,' Jehmu Greene and [Sally] Kohn, who were 'graduates of Jane Fonda's Women’s Media Center'” (question: has anyone actually seen either of these two on Fox, except fleetingly?); and that Bill O'Reilly last week "invited onto his show a gay-rights activist to weigh in on Roland Martin's controversial tweets during the Super Bowl." We're told:

O'Reilly and Martin may be old foes, but the spectacle of watching O'Reilly, who once compared gay marriage to interspecies marriage, attacking a CNN anchor for being insufficiently sensitive to the feelings of gay people was quite a switch from the tone of two years ago.

This is a switch for O'Reilly? That would be news to the homophobes who were attacking O'Reilly as far back as ten years ago for his qualified support of gay adoptions. O'Reilly has always been the guy on Fox who deviates a tiny bit from conservatively correct thinking -- on the death penalty, for instance, although he's rather inconsistent on that.

I think this article is selling us on the notion of a new, kindler, gentler Fox -- and, well, you can see why:

... Fox may have some demographic reasons for wanting to broaden its reach. Although it has been completely dominant in the cable sphere for years, last year, its ratings in primetime slipped 9 percent in total viewers and 15 percent in the target 24-54 demographic, while CNN and MSNBC gained viewers in primetime.

Pitching your channel exclusively to old white people who fear cultural change isn't really a good business plan if you want the channel's business to grow.

But once you've done that, where can you go? If you moderate the programming even a tiny bit, your core viewers will rebel, but the rest of us long ago learned never to trust you. It's lose-lose.

And if anything's going on at Fox, it's an attempt to Romneyize the channel in anticipation of a general election in which appealing to swing voters, rather than turning out base voters, will be the key to Republican victory. But now Fox is apparently being attacked just the way Romney is: wingnuts level accusations of lack of faithfulness to conservative principles, and the rest of us just see wingnuttery. Me, I'd be happy to have both Romney and Fox stuck in this position for the foreseeable future.

2012-02-13T18:08:00.000-05:00

THE SMART MOVE IS TO VOTE AS IF NORQUIST IS RIGHT AND SOROS IS WRONG

In an interview with Fareed Zakaria that aired over the weekend, George Soros predicted that if Mitt Romney becomes president, he'll pursue an economic stimulus plan:

George Soros: ... the Republicans don't want to face elections where Obama can claim to have sort of seen the economy recover. So they will continue to push for austerity, no new taxes, and therefore cutting of services, which will depress economic activity and employment.

After the elections, if the Republicans win, actually they'll undergo a miraculous transformation where they discover that actually it wouldn't be so bad if maybe we can afford to have some stimulus.

Fareed Zakaria: So you think Mitt Romney, if elected would pursue a stimulus bill?

George Soros: I'm pretty sure that would happen....

I really, really don't think so. My gut tells me that Soros is wrong and David Frum's gloss on the speech Grover Norquist gave at CPAC last week is correct:

Norquist: Romney Will Do As Told

... In his charmingly blunt way, Norquist articulated out loud a case for Mitt Romney that you hear only whispered by other major conservative leaders.

They have reconciled themselves to a Romney candidacy because they see Romney as essentially a weak and passive president who will concede leadership to congressional conservatives....

The requirement for president?
Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.

The principal piece of "legislation that has already been prepared," and that Romney would rubber-stamp, is, according to Norquist, the Paul Ryan budget.

I find that entirely plausible. It exactly matches the M.O. of all the GOP governors who got elected in 2010: Get in and start enacting the agenda before the voters know what hit them. (And, yes, I know that doing this got most of the Teabag Year Zero governors into trouble with the voters, but I'm not sure their demise is guaranteed, and I'm not sure they care in any case. I'm sure the Kochs and their allies will take care of all of them if they get big chunks of the wingnut agenda enacted and then lose office via electoral defeat or recall.)

Many of us assume, like Soros, that the Republicans know they're destroying the economy through legislative intransigence. I'm not so sure. I think a lot of them by now have actually drunk the Rand/Laffer Kool-Aid and think tax cuts will unleash economic nirvana. I think some sincerely believe that if budget cuts hurt ordinary people, screw 'em -- they should sink or swim in a Randian world. And then there's Romney, who is just, well, pliable.

If he's the nominee, I worry that voters in the middle (and, for that matter, some on the left) will come to the same general conclusion as Soros. But we can't run that risk. Just to be on the safe side, we have to assume that Norquist is right.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

****

UPDATE: See also "Mitt Romney Tells CPAC He'll Cut Social Security Benefits, Begin Privatizing Medicare," at Crooks and Liars.

2012-02-13T13:24:00.002-05:00

SANTORUM: WHY I WORRY THAT THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT

Dave Weigel spots something odd in the new Public Policy Polling survey that shows Rick Santorum with a 15-point lead over Mitt Romney in Michigan:

He's only up by 12 points with actual Republican voters, but he has a 40-21 advantage with the Democrats and independents planning to vote that pushes his overall lead up to 15 points.

Weigel writes:

This is weirder than you think, trust me. In 2006, when Bob Casey, Jr. exiled Santorum from the Senate, the guy won 41 percent of the overall vote. He held 28 percent of independents and 7 percent of Democrats. He was more or less despised by anyone who wasn't a Republican or conservative.

What's got me a little bit worried about Santorum is that we're assuming he's eminently beatable because he got shellacked in 2006. But he seemed like part of the Republican power structure in 2006, and we -- moderates as well as liberals -- were thoroughly sick of that power structure by then, on everything from the Iraq War to the attempt to keep Terri Schiavo alive.

Now I worry that Santorum seems to some voters like the plucky underdog, even within his own party. Back when he was in office, his culture-war meanness seemed to have real clout, because he was part of a right-wing gang that didn't like to take prisoners; at this moment, even to me, he comes off as almost harmless, although I'm fully aware of the fact that he'd be an awful, dangerous president.

Could he possibly do well against Obama if he wins the nomination (which I'm starting to think will happen)? Could he surprise us because voters might see him not as the nasty culture warrior he was when he had power, but as a gee-whiz aw-shucks Boy Scout, and figure he won't really turn the clock back on abortion and contraception and gay rights (except for the old white cultural conservatives, who may think he really can turn the clock back, and who may be Democrats and independents like the ones supporting him in Michigan)?

And before you shout "Man on dog!" and point to poll results showing increasing support for gay marriage and persistent support for legal abortion, let me remind you that right-wing culture warriors are a hell of a lot more likely to vote their social-issue convictions than the rest of us are. Otherwise, how did Republicans win so many recent election cycles?

(Portions of this post appear at Balloon Juice.)

2012-02-13T10:05:00.001-05:00

YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO TO THE CAFETERIA AT ALL

Atrios, Big Tent Democrat, and Jesse Taylor have addressed this E.J. Dionne column in other ways, but I want to talk about the following passage:

Those of us who are liberal Catholics have remained in the church for reasons beyond tribal loyalties or a desire to honor the traditions of our parents and grandparents. At the heart of the love many of us have for the church -- despite our frustrations over its abysmal handling of the pedophilia scandal and its reluctance to grant women the rights they are due -- is a profound respect for the fact on so many questions that count, Catholicism walks its talk and harnesses its faith to the good works the Gospel demands.

When it comes to lifting up the poor, healing the sick, assisting immigrants and refugees, educating the young (especially in inner cities), comforting orphaned and abandoned children, and organizing the needy to act in their own interest, the church has been there with resources and an astoundingly committed band of sisters, priests, brothers and lay people. Organizations such as Catholic Charities, the Catholic Health Association, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and Catholic Relief Services make the words of Jesus come alive every day.

What's bizarre to me about this is that Dionne gives three reasons for staying in the church -- good works, family heritage, tribalism -- and never mentions the Church's belief system. Is that really a secondary or tertiary concern for him?

Does Dionne share the Church's beliefs on the subjects of abortion, birth control, in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research, homosexuality, premarital sex, and masturbation? Does he agree with its habit of being awfully quiet when it expresses its objections to the death penalty, immoral wars, and the excesses of capitalism, while shouting about so-called sexual immorality from the housetops? Is he at all disturbed by the Church's habit of always managing to find an enforcer -- some local bishop or other -- to threaten any prominent pro-choice Catholic Democrat with denial of Communion during election years, or otherwise attempting to sway swing voters against non-conservative politicians? Is the second-class status of women in the Church really OK with him?

Or does none of this matter to him? Is it all about the grandparents and the tribe and the good works, with no real concern about the actual moral code? I realize that practically every Catholic in America is a cafeteria Catholic, but once you've left the old neighborhood, as Dionne has, why do you want to remain a cafeteria Catholic? You live in a big world. If you're liberal and your church is dogmatically conservative, if you're appalled by sexual abuse and you're church isn't, if your church regards condom use by a lower-middle-class couple with too many children as immoral and you don't, why not just leave? Because you like the charities? Write a freaking check!

But it's obvious why Dionne would cleave to the Church: As a Beltway insider pundit, he knows too many people who say that being a secular humanist would deprive him of all moral authority, and he's internalized that argument. And Catholicism is a marketing bullet for him as well: Yeah, I'm a liberal, but Sister Mary Discipline whacked my hand with a steel ruler back in third grade at Saint Ignatius! Also, like too many Catholics, perhaps he dreams of a changed Church, even though the actual Church has shown no interest in his kind of change. Perhaps he's clinging to the Church he imagines, not the Church that really exists.

This isn't like sticking with the Democratic Party if you're a real progressive; in that case, you know one of the two major parties is always going to control the White House and each house of Congress, and you have to name your poison. Religion is different. It's not binary. You can choose from a thousand religious affiliations or choose none at all. And you will if you have core convictions -- unless you see some other advantage in not bothering.

2012-02-12T13:47:00.001-05:00

"GOVERNMENT SUCKS" IS THE CONSTANT; THEIR OWN SENSE OF SELF-WORTH IS THE VARIABLE

Before this big New York Times article came along, it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that tea party supporters and other right-wing heartlanders hate government, yet avail themselves of government programs just the way the rest of us do. What we see from the article is how they feel when the contradiction is pointed out to them.

Hardly any of the good people of Chisago County, Minnesota, will acknowledge that maybe we ought to come up with a tax structure that will pay for the services they and the rest of us readily use. Agreeing to that would contradict the one constant in all right-leaning heartlanders' belief systems: that "less government and lower taxes" is the answer to every political question that doesn't involve killing brown people overseas.

Forced to acknowledge the contradiction, some express a willingness to throw themselves and their families under the bus rather than have another dime go to the hated government:

The government helps Matt Falk and his wife care for their disabled 14-year-old daughter. It pays for extra assistance at school and for trained attendants to stay with her at home while they work. It pays much of the cost of her regular visits to the hospital.

Mr. Falk, 42, would like the government to do less.

"She doesn't need some of the stuff that we're doing for her," said Mr. Falk, who owns a heating and air-conditioning business in North Branch....

Mr. Falk ... said he did not want to pay higher taxes and did not want the government to impose higher taxes on anyone else. He said that his family appreciated the government's help and that living with less would be painful for them and many other families. But he said the government could not continue to operate on borrowed money.

"They're going to have to reduce benefits," he said. "We're going to have to accept it, and we’re going to have to suffer."

Some literally burst into tears:

Barbara Sullivan, 71, moved last year to the apartments above the Chisago County Senior Center in North Branch. Waiting on a recent Friday for the hot lunch, which costs $3.50, she watched roughly 20 people play bingo for prizes including canned soup and Chef Boyardee pasta.

"Most of the seniors around here are struggling to make it," she said.

She counts herself among them. She lives on $1,220 a month in Social Security benefits and relied on Medicare to pay for an operation in November.

She believes that she is taking more from the government than she paid in taxes....

But she cannot imagine asking people to pay higher taxes. And as she considered making do with less, she started to cry.

"Without it, I'm not sure how I would live," she said. "With the check I'm getting from Social Security, it's a constant struggle on making sure that I pay my rent and have enough left for groceries.

"I haven't bought a Christmas present, I haven't bought clothing in the last five years, simply because I can’t afford it."

You have to read more than ninety paragraphs into the article to find someone -- a woman described as "a centrist Democrat" -- who thinks someone, perhaps, ought to pay more in taxes because the services are needed:

Barbara Nelson has little patience for people who say they will not need government help. She considers herself lucky she has not, and obligated to provide for those who do.

"Catastrophes happen in life," she said, sitting in a coffee shop in Taylors Falls....

Ms. Nelson, 61, who describes herself as a centrist Democrat, also dismisses the claim that people cannot afford to pay more taxes.

"Anyone who can come into a coffee shop and buy coffee is capable of paying more," she said. "If someone's life can be granted, in terms of adequate health care, if that means I give up five cups of coffee a month, that is a small price to pay."

Even economic right-centrists (David Frum, for instance) acknowledge that government social programs are ingrained in American life. Government programs actually make it easier for capitalism to function in many ways, by softening the shock of layoffs and reducing the burden workers feel when there's illness or infirmity in their families, to name only two examples. But that notion has disappeared from Main Street conservatism. Heartland rightists would rather see themselves punished than admit that maybe government isn't evil.

2012-02-12T11:39:00.000-05:00

COULD THE GOP POSSIBLY GET BITTEN BY THE SAME DOG TWICE (ITS OWN)?

I see that Sarah Palin gave the best-received speech at CPAC:

If Sarah Palin had been on the ballot for the straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference, there is little doubt she would have won.

The former Alaska governor received far-and-away the most spirited and enthusiastic reception at this convention of about 10,000 conservative activists.

She drew the audience to its feet more than a dozen times during her keynote address on Saturday....

This happened hours after Palin told an interviewer that a brokered Republican convention wouldn't be a bad thing.

Now, I know this isn't going to happen, but let me daydream for a while: Wouldn't it be delightful if, first, the Republican nominating process degenerated into chaos because the party establishment sought the destroy the candidacies of everyone the crazy base liked (Cain, Gingrich, etc.) ... and then we got to a brokered convention and that degenerated into chaos, with the establishment trying to sandbag the crazy base's choice -- Sarah Palin?

C'mon, a feller can dream, can't he?

****

It occurs to me that Palin has now become more or less what she wanted to be: the Hillary Clinton of the right. Hillary's popularity these days is sky-high. Why? To a great extent it's because she's not running for anything, and is thus not a target of criticism. Palin isn't running for anything, either, and recently she's kept a low profile (at least by her standards). Think she'd be this much of a conquering heroine if she were in the race and the opposition research staffs of Mitt Romney and Karl Rove were hard at work generating attack ads and leaks to the press about her, given their awareness of how astonishingly unpopular she is in the eyes of the general population?

So enjoy this for now, Sarah. Just don't try offering yourself as a candidate if the nominating process breaks down, unless you want to be a target of folks who are way nastier than David Letterman

****

And a note to Andrew Metcalf of Crooks and Liars: with all due respect, Andrew, please, just stop:

Sarah Palin and Occupy Could Be Friends

... After three days at CPAC my senses had dulled to the attacks on Obama. But, my ears perked when Palin made a point that wasn't divisive about crony capitalism. She said "crony capitalism" had infected Washington....

Palin made a similar point in Iowa on September 3, 2011, two weeks before protesters occupied Zuccotti Park. She said, "It's not the capitalism of free men and free markets of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and risk. No this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts... and influence peddling and corporate welfare," according to an article about the speech in the Washington Post.

... just the brief mention of crony capitalism was important. Even her restraint to not criticize the [Occupy] protesters [who heckled her] ... meant she might understand her Tea Party and their Occupy share similar populist ideas. The roots of the real Tea Party lie in a backlash against the bailouts.

If there's going to be dramatic change in the political system it's going to take more than one side screaming at the other, clinging to their guns or to their tents. And while it's easy for Democrats to belittle the Tea Party as an astroturfing movement and for the Republicans to belittle Occupy as stinky vandals, it's far more difficult to build coalitions behind common causes....

Oh, please. Let me remind you that Palin's prattle about "crony capitalism" goes at least as far back as this Facebook post ("Institutionalizing Crony Capitalism") in April 2010. How'd that work out for progressives at the polls the following November?

Palin's trick in that Facebook post was to attack Obama seemingly from the left in the service of a right-wing agenda. First she argued that Dodd-Frank would be gamed by lobbyists, including President Obama's Wall Street pals -- true enough -- but then she asserted that "government should not burden the market with unnecessary bureaucracy" Yes, she also argued that the law shouldn't "make a dangerous 'too-big-to-fail' mentality the law of the land." But her audience heard that as noise and the anti-regulation pitch as signal -- or did I somehow miss the election in 2010 of a large cohort of Republican freshmen who favor curbs on Wall Street excess?

Forget it -- these folks may say they resent "too big to fail," but they absolutely don't resent "too big (and too reckless) to crash the economy." They may hate bailouts, but they don't hate the reckless financial endangerment that leads to bailouts. (They don't even believe catastrophic bubbles are the result of capitalism; they blame the current crash exclusively on Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act.) They'll never try to lift a finger to stop Wall Street recklessness -- not as long as they're listening to people like Palin.

2012-02-11T17:17:00.000-05:00

RUPERT MURDOCH: THE WIT AND WISDOM

A tweet from the reportedly gen-yoo-wine Twitter feed of Rupert Murdoch:

Wow -- that's so true! After the second half of a game, one team actually does lose! (Smacks forehead) Gosh, I never thought of that! And it's true that no pols admit that, isn't it? Politicians always say that after every game, both teams win! Right? Don't they?

Rupert's so smart! This is clearly why they pay him the big bucks!

Also:

"Alternate life style" -- you mean like BDSM? Or being an adult baby? Yeah, I guess we don't want welfare to fund anything like that -- although it occurs to me that if it funds your career as a dominatrix, that might improve your economic standing and the GDP. You'd think Murdoch would be in favor of that!

2012-02-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

EYES ON THE WRONG PRIZE?

Last night, BooMan reassessed the Republican race:

For the first time, I am beginning to think that Romney might actually lose the nomination and that Santorum might win it.

And, even worse, I am beginning to think that Santorum is a much stronger candidate against Obama than Romney. I think Gingrich is a stronger candidate than Romney. I just can't exaggerate how bad I think Romney is as a politician and as an alternative to the president.

I'm also beginning to think again that Romney might lose -- Public Policy Polling now tells us that Santorum has a massive lead over Romney, 38% to 23%, among Republicans nationwide. (And possibly, as Tom says, the Obama contraception decision pushes social issues to the top of the GOP agenda, which helps Santorum as a Republican candidate, and hurts Romney.)

And then there's BooMan's other assertion: would the non-Romneys really be stronger candidates against Obama?

I have to disagree on Gingrich -- he's too much of a hypocrite/blowhard/egomaniac/know-it-all; he appealed briefly to GOP voters when they saw him attacking debate moderators and thought he could out-debate Obama, but, really, that's all he had. In the general population, his unfavorable ratings are off the charts. I'm crushed that he's fading in the polls, and that he can't possibly come back unless a new debate moderator tosses him one that he can hit out of the park (which I think all future moderators will avoid doing).

But Ricky?

I think enough liberals and moderates know, or could easily see, how extreme his agenda is. I think his sanctimony and extremism shine through. But there's an aw-shucks, sad-sack quality to him that may make him harder to hate than Gingrich or Romney.

That's also the reason I think Romney might have a hard time crushing Romney the way he crushed Gingrich -- non-Republicans may ultimately be turned off by Santorum, but Republicans seem to have positive feelings toward him. And, well, there's this:

But his digs at the president are not what people talk about as they crowd around him to shake his hand. It is his 3-year-old daughter, Isabella, or Bella, as she is known, who has a fatal chromosomal disorder called Trisomy 18. Bella's struggle is the emotional undercurrent of his campaign and, for his supporters, has become inseparable from Mr. Santorum's appeal as a Christian conservative who opposes abortion.

"When she got pneumonia, he stopped his campaign," said Stephanie Broardt, an Oklahoma City stay-at-home mother who stood on a chair to watch his speech. "He strikes me as a good father. That's another reason why I love him, because he's a family man. Other candidates cannot say that."

It's Sarah and Trig Palin, minus Sarah's diva act. Could general-election voters be swayed by this, if he beat Romney for the nomination? Especially if mainstream pundits started saying Santorum is really kind of a good guy? (Beyond the obvious -- David Brooks, Joe Klein -- my money's on Niall Ferguson as a spreader of that meme; see Ferguson's recent love letter to Charles Murray in Newsweek. I could imagine him writing the Newsweek cover story on how Santorum could lead an American moral regeneration.)

But would Santorum really be a tougher opponent against Obama? A recent Rasmussen poll says he would, but Rasmussen is an unreliable wingnut propagandist; by contrast, the latest Fox News poll has Obama beating Romney by 5 and Santorum by 12 -- and Gingrich by 13, for what it's worth. (Yeah, it's Fox, but the Fox polling operation has always had a surprising tendency to play it straight, even if the results contradict Fox propaganda; this survey, for instance, shows 61% approval for the Obama birth control policy, even before yesterday's policy adjustment.)

My worry would be that the Obama reelection team has concentrated all its efforts on planning for a race against Romney, with, it seems, no Plan B; an Obama aide recently reaffirmed this to The New York Times:

"When you guys were all out there writing your Herman Cain stories, we were not following you into that sideshow," one Obama aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "We are keeping our eyes on the prize."

Four years ago, Team Obama had no plan when Sarah Palin was put on the GOP ticket. The Democratic National Committee had launched a Web site called thenextcheney.com, with negative information about everyone the Dems thought could be on the short list -- and Palin wasn't included. And you'll recall that McCain/Palin briefly surged to the lead after Palin's convention speech.

I think the Obama team was woefully unprepared for Palin, and lucked out when she turned out to be an idiot and an albatross. Would the Obama team be equally unprepared for Santorum? And is he unappealing enough for that not to matter? I think he is, and I hope I'm right, but I'm not sure.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-10T19:55:00.004-05:00

Did the President Just Give the Republican Nomination to Santorum?

Yeah, I know--it sounds like a Slate pitch. Based on all available data, Romney is still the overwhelming favorite. And yet...

Michael Walsh is deranged even by Corner standards, but he makes a solid case:

The contretemps over the HHS mandate can do nothing but help the candidacy of Rick Santorum. For months, Mitt Romney has been lamely defending Romneycare, hiding behind the shriveled fig leaf of the Tenth Amendment to obscure what everyone now acknowledges — that the Massachusetts program is the forebear of and inspiration for Obamacare....

Because now that the coercive evil of Obamacare is visible even to E.J. Dionne Jr., Romney’s “signature achievement” during his one term as governor ought to finish him as the GOP standard-bearer.

Walsh has the politics right: this puts the focus on Romney's big weakness (among Republicans), while making Santorum's signature issue a litmus test for the party. At the very least, it makes Santorum's chances a lot better than the 13% they give him on Intrade.

Santorum, of course, is a much weaker candidate than Romney in the general. I don't think this is 11-dimensional chess or anything like that; putting contraceptives front and center is smart strategy for lots of straightforward reasons. If Santorum gets the nomination, though, it'll be one more happy convergence of luck and strategy for the President.

2012-02-10T17:57:00.000-05:00

BECAUSE I GOT NOTHIN'

Here's a song that seems appropriate right now:

2012-02-10T13:43:00.000-05:00

SEVERELY BAD CHOICE OF WORDS, MITT

Mitt Romney just said this at CPAC:

...I fought against long odds in a deep blue state, but I was a severely conservative Republican governor.

Oliver Willis says on Twitter, "romneybot's internal thesaurus looked up 'very' and spouted out #severely." Sounds about right -- or, more likely, he hires speechwriters who are as tightly wound as he is. (And yup, #severely is now a hashtag.)

Want to know why this is a terrible choice of words, Mitt? Here's what people associate with the word "severe," according to Google autofill:

Ouch.

****

UPDATE: Odd New York Times headline:

Appealing to Activists, Romney Calls Himself 'Severely Conservative'

Shouldn't that be "Trying and Probably Failing to Appeal to Activists, Romney Calls Himself 'Severely Conservative'"?

2012-02-10T11:20:00.000-05:00

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS A GOP SUPER PAC IN ROBES, AND IT SHOT FIRST

There's not much detail in this New York Times story, but it hints at the unspoken story of the contraception battle: the Catholic Church declared war first, months ago, seemingly (who'da thunk?) just in time for an election that's likely to turn on the electoral votes of large swing states with lots of old, culturally conservative Catholic voters. The church fathers were just looking for an excuse to start shooting:

When after much internal debate the Obama administration finally announced its decision to require religiously affiliated hospitals and universities to cover birth control in their insurance plans, the nation's Roman Catholic bishops were fully prepared for battle.

Seven months earlier, they had started laying the groundwork for a major new campaign to combat what they saw as the growing threat to religious liberty, including the legalization of same-sex marriage. But the birth control mandate, issued on Jan. 20, was their Pearl Harbor.

Hours after President Obama phoned to share his decision with Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, who is president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the bishops’ headquarters in Washington posted on its Web site a video of Archbishop Dolan, which had been recorded the day before....

The speed and passion behind the bishops' response reflects their growing sense of siege....

That last line is nonsense. It doesn't reflect a "state of siege" -- it reflects a sense that a perception of siege can be created, and will sway voters to pull the lever for the party the church favors, which is the GOP.

Over at Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner makes the planned nature of all this much more explicit:

Four days before Christmas, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops paid for a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post, co-signed by dozens of leaders of Catholic institutions. But the ad offered no holiday cheer. Instead, it aggressively highlighted the Bishops' pointed confrontation with the Obama administration: either amend a regulation requiring employer health insurance plans to provide contraception without a co-pay, or stand accused of religious discrimination.

The Bishops' opposition to the Department of Health and Human Services rule ... was to date the most public salvo from their Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty. That effort was launched last June.... At the Bishops' annual meeting in Baltimore this past November, Dolan took his charges into conspiratorial territory, telling reporters that "well-financed, well-oiled sectors" were attempting to "push religion back into the sacristy." ...

And the bishops have clearly been working hand-in-glove with the GOP for some time:

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution last October, Bishop William E. Lori, chair of the Ad Hoc Committee, described LGBT equality and access to reproductive care as "serious threats to religious liberty," that "represent only the most recent instances in a broader trend of erosion of religious liberty in the United States."

...investigations have already started on Capitol Hill, where Republicans' ears are cocked for controversies they can gin up to paint the Obama administration as anti-religion....

So, yeah, we should call this what it is: super PAC activity.

****

The Obama administration seems to have dared the bishops to take their best shot on this issue. This morning, it looks as if the bishops are winning -- the administration plans to announce a compromise, although it seems to me that a reasonable swing voter would hear about this compromise and think that the White House is making a quite sensible (and sensitive) accommodation:

... what the White House will likely announce later today is that the relationship between the religious employer and the insurance company will not need to have any component involving contraception. The insurance company will reach out on its own to the women employees. This is better for both sides, the source says, since the religious organizations do not have to deal with medical care to which they object, and women employees will not have to be dependent upon an organization strongly opposed to that care in order to obtain it.

I often see the Obama White House getting entangled in a ginned-up right-wing controversy and seemingly unable to find a way out that will seem reasonable to the center after the right has set the terms of the debate. In this case, though, I suspect that the administration had its next move worked out, and it seems like a good one to me. You're a normal American who supports birth control access? This would preserve that access. You're not terribly religious but you kinda-sorta think that religious groups shouldn't have to involve themselves in stuff they morally object to? This preserves that as well.

What's not to like? The bishops and the wingnuts will angrily answer that question soon, and possibly for months and years to come. But now I think they really may look like the unreasonable ones, even to low-information voters, and even if the right continues to flood the zone with its propaganda.

****

(Posner article via Pam Spaulding.)

2012-02-10T08:20:00.001-05:00

THE PECULIAR WORLDVIEW OF THE PUNDIT CULT

Today, David Brooks tries to tell us what Republican voters (and voters in general) really want, but what he really winds up telling us is what centrist and right-centrist pundits -- at least the ones in his peculiar but disturbingly large cult -- really want.

Brooks is writing about Mitt Romney here:

Republicans ... believe that the next president is going to have to make some brutally difficult decisions in order to reduce the debt. This is not a task for someone who is perpetually adjusting to market signals.

Here's the thing: Republican voters don't "believe that the next president is going to have to make some brutally difficult decisions in order to reduce the debt." Independents and Democrats don't believe this either.

It's not just the fact that most voters care more about jobs than they do about the debt. It's that even when voters focus on the debt, which many of them do, they don't believe these are particularly difficult decisions. I cite this poll all the time, but here I go again: according to Gallup, Americans believe that 51 cents of every dollar sent to Washington in taxes is wasted. Since 1979, that number has never gone lower than 38 cents.

That's because we're constantly hearing, from both parties, that the government is a sinkhole of waste. That leads voters to the conclusion that government is bad, which plays into the right's hands -- but it also means that when voters do talk about cutting spending and reducing debt, they're not calling for the infliction of pain.

You know who actually desires the infliction of pain? David Brooks and his pundit cult.

Brooks goes on to write about Romney:

He needs to show that he is willing to pursue at least a few unpopular policies, even policies that are unfashionable in his own party.

No, he doesn't. This is more pundit-cult thinking. It's the same thinking that underlies the pundit hope for a third-party Messiah who'll win the presidency: cultist pundits want all Americans to be forced to eat something on the dinner plate they don't want to eat -- and think Americans want this, too.

Americans -- Republicans excepted -- want compromise. They want give-and-take. But they don't crave a sacrifice of their own positions. And I just don't understand why the pundit cult thinks they do.

2012-02-09T17:00:00.000-05:00

HEY, CAL, HOW'S THAT CIVILITY THING WORKING OUT FOR YA?

A report from CPAC today:

In the "closed circuit world on the right," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is often the subject of ugly denigrations....

During a political discussion at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) today, Fox News pundit and conservative columnist Cal Thomas continued the ugliness. After the Heritage's Genevieve Wood played a quote of Maddow eloquently debunking the conservative argument on contraception, Thomas said:

I'm glad that you played the Rachel Maddow clip because I think she is the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception. I would be all for that. And all of the rest of the crowd at MSNBC, too, for that matter....

Hmmm, Cal ... what was the name of that book you wrote with Bob Beckel a few years back? Oh yeah, I remember:

Still having a bit of trouble with that practice-what-you-preach stuff?

2012-02-09T16:04:00.000-05:00

A BRIEF HISTORY OF REPUBLICAN CONCERNS ABOUT CARIBOU SEX

Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, February 2012:

Rep. Louie Gohmert, patron saint of amorous wildlife? The Texas Republican, who's not exactly known as a champion of animal rights, said his primary concern in the development of a massive Alaskan oil pipeline is the love life of the caribous surrounding the project. [...]

Here's his theory: The caribou very much enjoy the warmth the pipeline radiates. "So when they want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline," he informed his colleagues. It’s apparently the equivalent of being wined and dined. And that has resulted in a tenfold caribou population boom, he concluded.

“So my real concern now ...if oil stops running through the pipeline...do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?” he asked.

Vice President George H.W. Bush, talking about the original Trans Alaska Pipeline, on the presidential campaign trail in May 1988:

Bush says that petroleum exploration and production in Alaska have improved wildlife habitat. "Caribou like the pipeline," he has said. "They lean up against it, have a lot of babies, scratch on it. There's more damn caribou than you can shake a stick at."

Great minds think alike.

****

(Gohmert via Daily Kos. And yes, I know: a lot of you read the story days ago.)

2012-02-09T14:27:00.000-05:00

REPUBLICANS PLAY ZERO-DIMENSIONAL CHESS

ABC News:

Return of the Culture Wars: Can Mitt Romney Win Conservative Backing?

The resurgence of social and cultural issues in voters' minds poses new challenges for GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney as he reels from surprising losses Tuesday to conservative favorite Rick Santorum.

The economy remains the No. 1 issue of concern for a majority of Americans. But the recent hoopla surrounding the Obama administration's support of contraceptives, the court ruling against California's same-sex marriage ban and heated debate about abortion access has created a perfect storm that has pushed these seemingly dormant issues to the surface....

Romney, meanwhile, has struggled to convince the Republican base of his conservative credentials. Most recently, he came under fire for allowing "abortion pills" as governor of Massachusetts. In 2005, Romney vetoed a law that required all Massachusetts hospitals, including those owned by religious groups, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims, but it was overridden by the state legislature....

First of all, I question the premise that there's been a "resurgence" of these issues "in voters' minds" -- in Republican voters' minds, maybe, but if so, that's only because the Republican attack machine forced these issues onto the agenda by making lots of noise about them (contraception) or stirring up trouble where it didn't exist (Planned Parenthood).

And what a genius thing to do: The Republicans had Romney, who a mere month ago was viewed by a significant majority of Republicans as an acceptable nominee and who at the same time was showing up in polls of the overall population as the most electable running against Obama, and -- instead of continuing to stress arguments that played to his strengths -- decided to gin up culture-war controversies in a way that inspires GOP base voters to reject Romney and vote for much more beatable candidates, like Santorum.

Republican message-mongers did this because they can't walk away from anything that seems like a promising wedge issue -- even if, as in this case, the short-term Democrat-bashing gain comes with a potential serious loss at the ballot box for their party in November.

I actually think, in the short term, the righties are going to win the contraception war -- they've now made so much noise about this that low-information voters probably think Obama did something wrong, even though they can't exactly tell you what it is. He'll have to compromise or accept some GOP restraint. But meanwhile the right has stirred up the culture warriors just when they're ready to rally around an extremely weak presidential candidate. Good one, GOP.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-09T10:10:00.001-05:00

RUPERT MURDOCH'S REALLY, REALLY, REALLY UNEXAMINED LIFE

Spotted on Twitter this morning:

This is jaw-dropping on so many levels. First, and most obviously, we now know who's winning the "Murdoch primary," and it's the same guy who seemed to be winning it a month ago, based on one of Murdoch's first tweets: the guy who lost his last election by 18 points is the guy Murdoch hopes can take down Obama. A shrewd judge of what's best for his side, that Rupert.

Beyond that, though: Murdoch is talking about "moral regeneration," Santorum style? The guy who gave us Page 3 Girls and who likes to salt his TV programming with lesbian cheerleader makeout sessions admires the moral code of the guy who says he's never sat on a couch with a woman who wasn't his wife? Seriously?

Oh, and Murdoch is reading Charles Murray -- the guy who's all over the place right now telling us that the well-to-do should set an example for the lower orders by preaching the virtues of marital stability and living in the same towns as the proles? Where exactly has Murdoch been reading Murray? At his $44 million triplex on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan? Or his $10.5 million estate in Oyster Bay? The 8,700-square-foot, 11-bedroom villa in Beverly Hills? The Confucian-style mansion in Beijing with the underground pool? The private yacht? The Gulfstream? All while snuggling on the sofa with Wendi Deng, his third wife?

Look, I understand: Murdoch's spirits are lifted every time someone comes along who seems to have a fresh approach to smiting the liberal infidel. Right now, that's Santorum and Murray. But the tweet suggests that Murdoch actually believes he shares the values they're preaching. He doesn't just see these guys as hired thugs for the liberal-bashing cause. That's delusional.

2012-02-09T08:09:00.002-05:00

OH, AND I'M SURE ALL THE TEABAGGERS WILL BE JUST FURIOUS THAT THE BANKS GOT OFF EASY!

I'm not loving the Obama administration's settlement with the banks, though it may be the best we can get, and it does include a significant concession to some of the real heroes of this story, the state attorneys general (especially New York's Eric Schneiderman) who don't want to let the banks off the hook:

...the agreement is the broadest effort yet to help borrowers owing more than their houses are worth, with roughly one million expected to have their mortgage debt reduced by lenders or able to refinance their homes at lower rates. Another 750,000 people who lost their homes to foreclosure from September 2008 to the end of 2011 will receive checks for about $2,000....

"I just don't think it's going to be a life-changing event for borrowers," said Gus Altuzarra, whose company, the Vertical Capital Markets Group, buys loans from banks at a discount....

Mr. Schneiderman was able to win significant concessions from the banks in recent days.

... prosecutors and regulators still have the right to investigate other elements that contributed to the housing bubble, like the assembly of risky mortgages into securities that were sold to investors and later soured, as well as insurance and tax fraud.

Officials will also be able to pursue any allegations of criminal wrongdoing. In addition, a lawsuit Mr. Schneiderman filed Friday against MERS, an electronic mortgage registry responsible for much of the robo-signing that has marred the foreclosure process nationwide, and three banks, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, will also go forward.

... California's attorney general, Kamala Harris, also pushed for her state to be able to use the state's False Claims Act. That would enable state officials and huge pension funds like Calpers to collect sizable monetary damages from the banks if officials could prove mortgages were improperly packaged into securities that later dropped in value.

So the Obama administration may have outsourced the war on financial terrorism to the state AGs, but it looks as if they're not going to have to fight with both hands tied behind their backs. That's something, I guess.

****

So, um ... this is going to denounced as a sellout to the evil bankers by all the tea party people, isn't it? And by some in the GOP field, right?

I'm joking, of course -- but a significant percentage of the punditocracy still believes that the teabaggers hate Big Money as much as they hate Big Government; I bet if you were a guest on Morning Joe and said to the panel, "I imagine some members of the tea party will criticize this as a sellout to Wall Street," you'd get nods of agreement.

I guess, theoretically, Newt Gingrich could attack Obama from the left on this -- but who am I kidding? He won't. He attacked Romney from the left because he fell into a fugue state of anti-Romney hate, and because accusing people of corruption is one of his favorite sports (ask Jim Wright). It failed spectacularly for him -- ever since he went in that direction, he's lost his status as the #1 anti-Romney, and he doesn't seem to be getting it back. So, no, he's not going to go after Obama that way. No one on the right is. And yet, if you believed many of the pundits to this day, the settlement would infuriate tea-oriented righties.

2012-02-08T15:30:00.000-05:00

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

Right now I'd have to say it's this guy:

In 2002, at the height of the outcry over the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests, the Archbishop of New York, Edward M. Egan, issued a letter to be read at Mass. In it, he offered an apology about the church's handling of sex-abuse cases in New York and in Bridgeport, Conn., where he was previously posted....

Now, 10 years later and in retirement, Cardinal Egan has taken back his apology.

In a interview with Connecticut magazine published on the magazine's Web site last week, a surprisingly frank Cardinal Egan said of the apology, "I never should have said that," and added, "I don't think we did anything wrong."

He said many more things in the interview, some of them seemingly at odds with the facts. He repeatedly denied that any sex abuse had occurred on his watch in Bridgeport. He said that even now, the church in Connecticut had no obligation to report sexual abuse accusations to the authorities. (A law on the books since the 1970s says otherwise.) And he described the Bridgeport diocese's handling of sex-abuse cases as "incredibly good." ...

That's from Andy Newman at The New York Times, who's clearly trying to find a judicious, objective-sounding way of telling us that Cardinal Egan is a lying, evil SOB. Go to the Connecticut magazine interview and you'll see that same point being made by interviewer Tom Connor with no punches pulled:

Ten years ago this spring, the sexual abuse crisis involving hundreds of Roman Catholic priests and thousands of young victims broke nationally in the media, engulfing dioceses from Boston to Los Angeles but also the Diocese of Bridgeport, where 23 lawsuits against seven local priests were working their way through the courts.

Three years earlier, however, this magazine had reported on long-standing and widespread abuses in the diocese ("Gods and Monsters," May 1999; link opens a .pdf of the original story), then under the leadership of Bishop Edward Egan. In that article, Egan was portrayed as a wily, coldly-calculating defender of the Church and abusive priests, more corporate lawyer than spiritual guardian. The article revealed that he had let accused priests continue to work in local parishes, authorized payments to victims in exchange for silence agreements, and lied about those payments during a deposition....

And that indignation extends to the interview, as it appears on the site. Here's the cardinal claiming he just cleaned up his predecessor's mess, and did it so skillfully there were no further incidents -- which turns out not to be quite accurate:

EGAN: You know, I never had one of these sex abuse cases, either in Bridgeport or here (New York). Not one.... I took care of them one by one. None of them did anything wrong. One of them spent four years in treatment at the Institute of Living in Hartford. I investigated this and at the end I put him in a convent as an assistant chaplain in Danbury. Only once did I not use the Institute of the Living -- I used Johns Hopkins because the man was in Baltimore.

CT Magazine: You mean Laurence Brett (a serial molester who was cycled through eight parishes in the diocese and a family of ten in California before relocating to Maryland, where he was accused of abusing more boys. He was still on the run from the FBI when he died in the Caribbean in 2010).

EGAN: Yep. I sent him to the most expensive place and I did exactly what we were told to do. And as a result, not one of them (the accused priests) did a thing out of line....

The interview is all like that: Egan claiming nothing bad happened on his watch, arrogantly denying any responsibility for suffering, whining about the fact that people still ask him about this, and displaying not an ounce of compassion or empathy for the victims.

Oh, and did I mention this?

Leslie Lothstein ... a psychologist at the Institute of Living, in Hartford, has treated about 300 Roman Catholic priests, not only those with sexual problems, but also those with alcoholism, depression and other mental illnesses....

He unwittingly found himself in the news almost 10 years ago, when it was reported that the Catholic Church had sent priests to the Institute of Living for treatment without always telling the doctors the full details of the priests' transgressions.... What's more, the Catholic hierarchy often ignored the institute's recommendations about the priests' fitness for service.

"I found that they rarely followed our recommendations," Dr. Lothstein told The Hartford Courant in 2002. "They would put them back into work where they still had access to vulnerable populations." ...

And these priests are the people who lecture us about morality because we support abortion rights, or gay marriage, or full access to birth control.

2012-02-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

HOW TO FAKE A FIRESTORM

The New York Times:

WASHINGTON -- Facing vocal opposition from religious leaders and an escalating political fight, the White House sought on Tuesday to ease mounting objections to a new administration rule that would require health insurance plans -- including those offered by Catholic universities and charities -- to offer birth control to women free of charge....

Please note that this is an "escalating political fight" even though polls show that clear majorities of Americans -- and Catholics -- support birth control coverage. The leadership of the Catholic Church is peeved, but rank-and-file Catholics aren't. So why is this a firestorm?

It's a firestorm, I think, because the American political elite teems with high-profile right-wing Catholics -- among them converts such as Newt Gingrich, Robert Bork, Sam Brownback, Laura Ingraham, Lawrence Kudlow, and Ramesh Ponnuru. There's been a concerted effort in recent years to win influential wingers over to the Catholic Church (Father John McCloskey, a prime mover in this effort, was described in a 2002 Slate article as "The Catholic Church's K Street lobbyist"); the effort seems to be the political equivalent of Scientology's focus on converting famous entertainers.

When you combine all these wingnut Catholic converts with birth Catholics who are prominent right-wingers (William Bennett, Scalia/Thomas/Roberts), you get a Catholic-winger noise machine that can convey the sense within the Beltway that Catholics believe a certain thing when, in fact, only prominent right-wing Catholic pols and pundits believe it in great numbers.

This is a great mechanism for fooling easily spooked non-right-wing Catholics such as Cokie Roberts and E.J. Dionne -- both of whom have engaged in fretful hand-wringing about the terrible political misjudgment President Obama has allegedly made. Well, it really does looks like a terrible decision -- if the only Catholics you encounter regularly are your Georgetown cocktail party pals.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-08T07:45:00.000-05:00

THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT AND THE OTHER GOP ESTABLISHMENT

So Rick Santorum swept the contests yesterday, winning the Minnesota primary and the Missouri and Colorado caucuses. I suppose I should have seen that the fix was in a couple of days ago, when right-wing pollster/propagandist Scott Rasmussen made the startling "discovery" that Rick Santorum is the GOP's strongest general-election candidate:

In Rasmussen's latest general election poll, Mr. Santorum is the only GOP candidate who leads President Obama. The former Pennsylvania senator edges out Mr. Obama by a point, while Mr. Romney trails the president by four and Mr. Gingrich trails him by eight. Just a week ago, Mr. Santorum lagged by eight. The key to Mr. Santorum's bounce appears to be his 10 point lead among independents.

Rasmussen's poll result was, to put it mildly, an outlier -- the last six non-Rasmussen polls have found that Obama beats Santorum by anywhere from 8 to 15 points. Are Rasmussen's numbers phony, or is the firm just wildly oversampling right-wingers? And if the numbers are phony, why would the GOP's house pollster want to push Santorum? Alternately, if the numbers come from oversampling of wingnuts, why are wingnuts drifting to Santorum?

Well, the right-wing noise machine has been in "war on Christianity" mode in the past few days, hammering away at the Obama administration's contraceptive-coverage ruling (lead stories at Fox Nation over the past couple of days included "Fear of Civil Disobedience: Army Chaplains Asked Not to Read Disapproval of Contraception Mandate" and "Catholic Church Ups Ante Against Obama...Threatens Fighting in the Streets"). Never mind the fact that a solid majority of Americans, and an even larger majority of Catholics, favor the contraceptive coverage mandate, according to a Public Religion Research Institute poll -- the right wing considers Job #1 to be dividing the country in the hopes of conquering it, and that takes precedence even over rallying around the party's presidential front-runner. (It takes precedence over everything, at all times.) So this issue, which seems on paper to offer a golden opportunity to generate anti-Obama among swing-state Catholics, is being pushed relentlessly (more, it seems, than even the Prop 8 or Susan Komen stories).

So the message going out via the tribal drum to the GOP voter base is a Santorum-friendly message -- it plays to his key issues. Thus, I guess it's no surprise that Rick did so well. Part of the GOP establishment wants to close ranks around Romney, but part of it has other priorities -- or maybe you could say that the same people have conflicting priorities.

*****

I suspect Santorum isn't going to get traction, but if he does, it's going to be interesting watching Mitt Romney's people try to launch a character-assassination campaign against him. Attacking Gingrich that way seems sort of appropriate, and suited to his angry-baby personality. Santorum? He's the whiny wounded warrior who was felled by evil Pennsylvania liberals in 2006 for Taking A Stand. To wingnuts, he's a Boy Scout. If Romney attacks him, are they going to see it as cruel? Or is it that they find him as unlikable as we do (an unlikable Boy Scout), but they're voting for him now because they're sick of Gingrich and don't see any other not-Mitt choice?

*****

AND: Headline of the day, from Gawker:

Shocker: Rick Santorum Goes Three For Three In Tuesday’s Elections Despite Being Rick Santorum

*****

UPDATE: Second link fixed.

2012-02-07T17:24:00.002-05:00

Rove: Still Evil, Still Not Crazy

The liberal consensus on Rove's hissy fit over that Chrysler ad seems to be along the lines of what was he thinking? (see, e.g., Jonathan Chait, Mahablog, or Ta-Nehisi Coates). I'm not so sure. I would agree if I thought the American public was the audience he was trying to reach, but I don't think we are.

I think Chrysler was. Chrysler, and any other corporation not deeply committed to right-wing hegemony.

Rove's rant was a warning shot across the bow. It's a taste of what's in store for corporate heretics. The message is this: either get on our side, or stay out of the fight. And if you don't, we'll unleash the winged monkeys on you. That reference to "Chicago-style politics"? That's not about Obama; that's an implicit threat, a reminder of Rove's rules.

This is about Citizens United. Rove et al. can spend unlimited corporate cash to back right-wing candidates. Democrats can't possibly match what they can raise. But that's not enough. So now he's trying to dissuade any potentially Democratic-minded corporations from putting their money into the race, by making it clear that if they do they'll face the right-wing hate machine.

You know what Karl Rove really finds offensive? The thought of Democrats having the same weapons as Republicans.

2012-02-07T17:20:00.000-05:00

LIMBAUGH: CLINT EASTWOOD IS STUPID AND POWERLESS
(updated)

Just saw this at Politico:

The verdict is in from Rush Limbaugh on the Chrysler ad featuring actor Clint Eastwood that stirred up quite bit of controversy on Super Bowl Sunday: "Eastwood got scammed."

"I think he got scammed. I think he got roped into doing something he thought was patriotic and ended up being played. I do," the conservative radio host said on his show on Tuesday. "I'm just going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest he got suckered into this."

Right -- because after 57 years in the business, and nearly 82 years on earth, Clint Eastwood is a helpless simpleton who can't read a script and decide for himself whether it's suitable for him. And despite four decades of superstardom as an actor and director, he's so desperate for work he can be arm-twisted into doing something that's not in his best interests. And, of course, he's such a weakling, right? Typical of the SOBs that they'd take advantage of such a nebbish.

All those liberal bullies pushing around a weak, helpless, delicate flower -- yeah, that's it.

****

UPDATE, THURSDAY: Now it's Fox's Stuart Varney who says Eastwood is a helpless naif who needs to be coddled and protected because he can't look out for his own best interests:

I think it was sleight-of-hand to convince Clint Eastwood -- an icon -- iconic American and known conservative -- to put his face and voice on that ad which looked very much like it was supporting a second term for President Obama. I think it's one of the great sleight-of-hand political operations of the last generation.

Poor helpless guy!

2012-02-07T15:05:00.000-05:00

NOT JUST OBNOXIOUS, BUT INEFFECTUALLY OBNOXIOUS

A three-judge panel of the Federal 9th Circuit has declared California's Prop 8 unconstitutional -- and wouldn't you think the next sound you'd hear after that bit of good news would be the angry bleat of Rick Santorum? But I can't find any reaction from him -- nothing on his campaign site (yes, that's the real one, not that, um, other site), and nothing in any news feed.

I know he's going to do well in today's contests in Missouri and Minnesota. I expect that this ruling will bring out a few additional voters for him. I think Dave Weigel is probably overthinking things when he says that this will help restart Newt Gingrich's campaign (Weigel says this because Gingrich has called for the abolition of the 9th Circuit, which wingnuts loathe, and he's already out there with a tweet reiterating that position and denouncing this ruling). I still say the day belongs to Santorum -- he's been leading, and people know this is his issue, especially those in the crazy base. But you'd think Santorum would be out there making gay-ade out of this ruling, denouncing it from the housetops and declaring that the Apocalypse is now nigh. That's what the base really, really wants. So it's no mystery why he's mostly struggled at the polls: he won't be loudly, demagogically, rafter-shakingly obnoxious even about his pet issues. He's just a kvetch. (That's an old Pennsylvania Dutch word, right?)

****

Really, did Romney beat Santorum to the punch on this? C'mon, Rick -- you're base wants you to hate with gusto.

2012-02-07T11:26:00.005-05:00

FOR ONCE, MAYBE WE SHOULD PLAY INTO THE RIGHT'S HANDS

Many people have pointed out the racism of Pete Hoekstra's "Debbie Spend-It-Now" Super Bowl ad, but now we're being warned -- by Chris Hayes on Rachel Maddow's show last night, by Mistermix today -- that we could be doing just what Hoekstra wants us to do, by making him (in the eyes of right-wingers, at least) a victim of liberalism and "political correctness." Yes, that's worth noting -- Politico reports that Hoekstra is claiming a serious uptick in fund-raising since the ad went public. (All this is happening even as we get yet another opportunity to point out the Hoekstra team's racism -- we're learning that the HTML code on Hoekstra's site refers to the Asian woman in the ad as "yellow girl.")

I see the point Hayes and Mistermix are making -- but for once I'm optimistic. This seems to be a year when the public is becoming sick of the GOP rage machine and might be turning back to Democrats for a little uplift and comity (and a little common decency).

What Hoekstra's doing is certainly going to work for him with his fellow Republicans -- although why he's bothering with it when he's all but assured of the GOP Senate nomination in Michigan I don't know. Going into the general election, however, I think the racism itself could be a liability. Even people who usually shrug off or overlook racist dog whistles (including barely coded ones) seem as if they might be sick of the all-attacks-all-the-time style of the Republicans; they seem as if they might vote against divide-and-conquer politics this year. So why not point out the attempts to divide? If voters are getting fed up with the vitriolic, maybe it's a good idea to shine the light on the vitriol.

2012-02-07T08:14:00.002-05:00

DON TURDBLOSSOM DRAPER

I guess I'm trying to figure out what sort of Chrysler ad actually would have met with Karl Rove's approval. I suppose it would have said something like this:

Look, that evil Kenyan put a gun to our heads and forced us to take his filthy socialist money. We never should have done it -- in fact, we never should have tried to survive at all. We should have been left to die. Creative destruction, y'know? That's really the American way.

We're sorry we exist. We're sorry we're still making cars, and directly and indirectly keeping hundreds of thousands of people employed. A real American president would have kicked our union thugs to the curb and cut them off without unemployment benefits. But since we're all still here wasting America's money by working and producing actual consumer goods rather than exotic financial instruments, maybe the few bleeding-heart liberals out there who aren't too effeminate to be watching the Super Bowl could throw us a few bucks and buy a car. If you do that, of course, it's because you hate America. But we know all you goddamn liberals really do hate America, so this is a perfect opportunity for you.

We're Chrysler. Regrettably for America, we're not going anywhere.

Is that more or less what you would have preferred, Karl?

2012-02-06T22:35:00.001-05:00

IT'S OBVIOUS WHY REPRESENTATIVE FLEMING BELIEVED THAT ONION ARTICLE WAS REAL

You know about this, of course:

Congressman Falls for The Onion's Planned Parenthood 'Abortionplex' Story

Meet John Fleming, the unfortunate Republican U.S. Representative from Louisiana who made that wonderful and all-too-common mistake of thinking that an Onion article was real and telling his Facebook followers to read it....

The Onion article depicts a preposterously massive complex where abortions are gleefully done in thousands of rooms at once and further abortions are excitedly encouraged. Why would a right-wingers believe we'd build such a thing and goad women on to more and more abortions?

Well, a lot of these folks have started to believe their own talking points, the key one in this case being the one that posits the existence of a "liberal culture of death." It's not clear what the hell wingers mean when they say this -- start Googling it and you find that it manifests itself in, say, Hollywood movies about gay people, or (according to Glenn Beck a while back) a campaign to push a death-oriented sci-fi anthology to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. But primarily the wingers mean a support for abortion rights, sometimes accompanied by belief in a right to euthanasia, or support for stem cell research, or, God help us, opposition to Sarah Palin, which all wingers ascribe to our alleged disgust at the fact that she didn't abort Trig.

The statistic that frequently accompanies discussions of the "liberal culture of death" is that 92% of Down syndrome pregnancies end in abortion -- though how this can be blamed on liberalism I'm not sure, unless America suddenly went 92% liberal and I just missed it.

But the notion is that liberals relish death, savor death, embrace death for its own sake -- we feel about death, according to these folks, the way they feel about God, or Sarah Palin, or Trig, or puppies, or something equally wonderful.

They actually believe this about us. So, sure, they'd think Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood would say, as she does in The Onion's fake story,

"Although we've traditionally dedicated 97 percent of our resources to other important services such as contraception distribution, cancer screening, and STD testing, this new complex allows us to devote our full attention to what has always been our true passion: abortion," said Richards, standing under a banner emblazoned with Planned Parenthood's new slogan, "No Life Is Sacred." "And since Congress voted to retain our federal funding, it's going to be that much easier for us to maximize the number of tiny, beating hearts we stop every day."

It's gone beyond a belief that we're all sluts and slut-lovers with no morals or sense of responsibility (which is Atrios's theory). Now, in their eyes, we're Freddie. We're Jason. We're Hitler. We're nihilists who kill for sport.

2012-02-06T13:37:00.000-05:00

MORE ON CHARLES MURRAY'S ASSERTION THAT JUST LIVING NEXT TO HIM MAKES YOU A BETTER PERSON

As part of his Scold the Poor Tour 2012, which he launched a couple of weeks ago to promote his new book, Charles Murray invited a New York Times reporter to his home in Burkittsville, Maryland, where he explained why just being in proximity with him is good for the poor:

Looking at America Mr. Murray sees a country increasingly polarized into two culturally and geographically isolated demographics. In Belmont, the fictional name Mr. Murray gives to the part of America where the top 20 percent live, divorce is low, the work ethic is strong, religious observance is high, and out-of-wedlock births are all but unheard of. Meanwhile in Fishtown, where the bottom 30 percent live, what Mr. Murray calls America’s four "founding virtues" -- marriage, industriousness, community and faith -- have all but collapsed.

... The first step, he writes, is for the people of Belmont to drop their "nonjudgmentalism" and lecture Fishtown on the importance of marriage and nondependence: to "preach what they practice," as Mr. Murray puts it.

Next they need to leave their upper-middle-class enclaves and move closer to Fishtown.

That's exactly what Mr. Murray said he did two decades ago, when he and his second wife, Catherine Cox, a retired English professor, moved from Washington to Burkittsville, Md., a historic rural town of about 170 people about 50 miles to the northwest....

Life in Burkittsville, as he described it, approximates the small-town virtues he enjoyed growing up in Newton, Iowa....

Yes, Burkittsville -- it's Anytown, USA ... if Anytown had a median household income that's about 40% higher than the national average (or, according to another estimate, 30% higher than that, or nearly $100,000), and if it included the occasional $895,000, 6,472-square foot house:

This spectacular estate sited on 83 (+/-) acres exudes quality and character. Being sold by the estate, the home features embassy sized rooms, extraordinary detail and wonderful views of the two ponds and the farm.. Very formal, very private, but very livable at the same time with large kitchen family area overlooking indoor pool. First floor master suite with 4 additional bedrooms up.

And surely Murray's Iowa boyhood home had something like this right next to Pop's Malt Shoppe:

Martin Paule, 45, gave up a white-collar job in Los Angeles as a paralegal in 1979 and came east seeking a "more rural, more tranquil existence." In 1980, he found it in Burkittsville.

Mr. Paule owns Deva (pronounced Day-vah and meaning "shining one" or "angel" in Sanskrit), a "cottage industry" on East Main Street that makes free-flowing colorful "natural fiberwear for women and men." Mr. Paule says the business has a mailing list with 100,000 names and projected 1992 sales of $2 million.

Ah, but this just means that Burkittsville is the glorious exception to the rule that chi-chi folks and regular Joes don't mingle. So I guess that means the regular Joes are learning from the good example of their betters and are hard-working and industrious -- right? Er, not according to what Murray tells the Times:

In Burkittsville, he said, he and his wife attend Quaker meetings and enjoy friendships with both other professionals and blue-collar tradespeople, whose travails he cited to counter the suggestion that the problems described in "Coming Apart" might have something to do with the disappearance of working-class jobs.

Until the recession hit, Mr. Murray insisted, his blue-collar friends were eager to hire apprentices at good wages but struggled to find anyone willing to do the work. "They are looking at a marked deterioration in industriousness that is real and palpable," he said.

Or maybe the fact that Burkittsville is 50 miles from D.C., 65 miles from Baltimore, and 75 miles from Annapolis leads the local kids to believe that there's are opportunities out in the world that don't involve working blue-collar in a town with 126 residents -- even if leaving town means passing up the golden opportunity to watch Charles Murray and his wife ring church bells on New Year's Eve. (I'm sure Murray thinks that alone ought to have encouraged at least two blue-collar horndogs to stop living in sin and tie the knot.)

I have no problem with Murray's decision to move to Burkittsville -- a lot of financially comfortable people buy houses in small, rural towns in middle age.

But most of them, when they do it, aren't so egomaniacal as to think that they're doing their neighbors a favor.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

SERIOUSLY, GUYS, JUST STOP

Most of the news in the new ABC/Washington Post poll is very good for President Obama:

... Overall, 55 percent of those who are closely following the campaign say they disapprove of what the GOP candidates have been saying. By better than 2 to 1, Americans say the more they learn about Romney, the less they like him....

Obama's overall approval rating stands at 50 percent, the highest in a Post-ABC News poll since a brief run above 50 percent immediately after Osama bin Laden was killed in early May....

In a general-election test, Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans; more narrowly, 51 to 45 percent, among registered voters....

I just want to point out a couple of things that suggest a slow learning curve on the right.

One concerns the way Romney and other Republicans, especially Rick Santorum, try to talk about Obama as if he's a sandal-wearing hippie out of touch with bellicose Real Americans. It ain't working, guys, so just give it up:

Challenged for lack of foreign policy and military knowledge in 2008, both are strong for [Obama] now: He leads Romney by 56-37 percent in trust to handle international affairs and by a similar 56-36 percent in trust to handle terrorism...

You can question some of the things Obama did to get to this point, but really: after the last forty years, did you ever think you'd see a Democrat with a double-digit lead over a Republican on questions like this?

The other number I want to point out concerns the GOP race for the nomination. Here's a poll question:

For each item I name, please tell me if it is a major reason to (support) that candidate, a major reason to (oppose) that candidate, or not a major factor?

The first item listed is "Romney's business experience" -- and, well, 48% of voters overall consider it a "major reason to support" Romney, while only 12% consider it a "major reason to oppose" him -- but among Republicans and Republican leaners, that jumps to 67% support, 5% oppose.

Newt Gingrich, are you listening? Republican voters love Mitt Romney's business experience. Every time you attack him on this, he seems more genuinely Republican in the voters' eyes, and you seem less so. Really, Newt, stick to attacking journalists and non-white people.

The stuff about Romney is a mixed bag. Voters overall think Romney doesn't pay enough taxes -- that's by more than a two-to-one margin -- and they think Obama is much more likely than Romney to protect the middle class. But they're split on whether Romney's wealth is a positive or a negative, they really think his business record is a positive, and they think he'd be better than Obama on the deficit.

In a sane country, nominating a heartless fat cat would be political suicide this year; right now, it appears to be, at worst, a moderately bad idea. That might be good enough for the Democrats, however.

****

(Scan the poll's highlights here.)

2012-02-05T23:03:00.001-05:00

WANT TO RETHINK THAT ANSWER, CLINT?

So I see that Clint Eastwood starred in the Super Bowl ad of the night, on behalf of Chrysler, the subject being Detroit's comeback:

It's halftime. Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.

It's halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they're hurting. And they're all wondering what they're going to do to make a comeback. And we're all scared, because this isn't a game.

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again....

Yeah, Clint -- and how is it exactly that the people of Detroit didn't lose everything, and managed to pull together and resume fighting? Because I'm thinking of a discussion you had with Katie Couric back in 2010:

Clint Eastwood, legendary actor and director, told Katie Couric that while President Obama is a "nice fella," he's "not a fan of what he's doing at the moment."

During an interview about his latest film "Hereafter," Eastwood told Couric that the president is not "governing" and he's laying out lines in the hopes that people will believe him "so he can stay in his position." ...

Clint? If Obama hadn't been "governing" with regard to Detroit back in '09, you'd have had to be in a freaking Toyota commercial tonight. So I hope you've rethought that answer.

2012-02-05T18:14:00.001-05:00

SOMEWHERE IN HELL, JESSE HELMS IS SMILING

Vile ex-congressman and corporate lobbyist Pete Hoekstra has decided that the way to beat Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow in this year's Michigan Senate race is to run a racist ad on Michigan TV during the Super Bowl broadcast:

The advertisement, which will run in Michigan during the Super Bowl and afterward, features an Asian female with a conical straw hat riding a bike through a rice paddy field.

"Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good [sic]," the actress says, in broken English.

"Thank you Michigan Senator Debbie 'Spend-it-now'. Debbie spend so much American money [sic]," the actress says, without a Chinese accent. "You borrow more and more, from us... we take your jobs. Thank you Debbie 'Spend-it-now.'"

See it below or at debbiespenditnow.com (a Hoekstra for Senate page full of scare headlines in faux-Chinese lettering).

Really, what's the difference between that ad and this one?

I'm sorry there isn't a larger Asian-American community in Michigan to raise hell about this -- people of Asian descent make up 2.4% of Michigan's population, which is half the national average, though why any decent person of any ethnic background should fail to be outraged by this, I don't know. Of course, Hoekstra has to win a Republican primary first, so decent people are in short supply in the electorate that will vote on him next.

This ought to be Hoekstra's "macaca moment" -- although George Allen, who had the original macaca moment, nearly won the 2006 Senate election in Virginia and is a strong contender for the seat this year. (Nothing ever permanently disqualifies a Republican.)

One irony: Hoekstra, in the ad, says he wants to be thought of as "Pete Spend-It-Not" -- but he's airing this ad during the TV coverage of the Super Bowl at the exorbitant cost of $150,000, which means he's eating up 10% of his campaign's cash on hand just to run one ad briefly ten months before the election. Way to show your fiscal prudence, Pete.

****

And yes, this is a shameless attempt to defend the ad:

The Hoekstra campaign called the advertisement "satirical" and explained the broken English in the video as a reflection of China’s increasingly competitive education system.

"You have a Chinese girl speaking English -- I want to hit on the education system, essentially. The fact that a Chinese girl is speaking English is a testament to how they can compete with us, when an American boy of the same age speaking Mandarin is absolutely insane, or unthinkable right now," Hoekstra spokesperson Paul Ciaramitaro told POLITICO. "It exhibits another way in which China is competing with us globally."

Well, 60,000 American students were learning Mandarin in 2007-2008, so it's not "unthinkable," even though that's a very low number. But why am I arguing? That's a transparently phony explanation for what this ad is about. (Though it does suggest that Hoekstra and his spokesperson think teaching a foreign language to students is some sort of educational miracle that only a turbocharged superpower could accomplish -- though they're Americans, so I suppose you can't blame them for feeling that way.)

2012-02-05T11:33:00.000-05:00

ZERO UPLIFT MAN

Until last night, I hadn't seen one of Mitt Romney's election-night speeches at full length. What struck me about it -- and I gather it's just his standard speech -- is that it's completely devoid of uplift. The anger at Obama seems sincere, possibly because Obama genuinely annoys him, possibly because annoyance is Romney's natural mode. Then, at the very end, the effort at an extended bit of patriotic inspiration comes off as too short and utterly pro forma. Overall, the speech is pure sourness, which isn't going to work in a country that always wants its presidents, not just the current one, to offer hope.

One reason for Romney's approach, of course, is that he's playing to crowds that don't particularly love America (it's too full of people who dare to disagree with them). Liberals are much more likely to dream of an idealized America than modern right-wingers; instead, right-wingers dream almost exclusively of vengeance against their enemies. So, midway through the speech, when Romney tries to slip an uplift line into a series of Obama attacks -- "We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great" -- he says it as if he means to add at the end, and we want to do that just to piss Barack Obama off! Watch it, starting at about 4:59:

I'm sure the plan is to switch Romney's tone around convention time, with a soft-focus thousand-points-of-light speech a la Poppy Bush in '88. But there was a part of Poppy Bush's soul that genuinely did have a sentimental love for America, and I think that's true of every post-Nixon president we've elected. I'm not sure it's true of Romney. He can recite the lyrics to "America the Beautiful" all he wants, but I'm not sure he can find any sincere cornball feelings about America in his end-of-the-nation-state financier soul.

****

On a somewhat related note, Frank Bruni writes today that Romney should embrace his Mormonism on the campaign trail, because that would humanize him. Bruni cites a recent biography of Romney:

To read "The Real Romney" ... is to realize the utter centrality of religion in his life. One of the book's most arresting passages describes a moment when Ann, his wife-to-be and then a Protestant, asks him what Mormons believe. His detailed explanation moves her to tears, perhaps because it's so heartfelt, perhaps also because he's so nervous about her reaction....

"His church experience is, I think, one of the great humanizing influences in Mitt Romney's life," said Patrick Mason, a professor of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University. Mason noted that if Romney would embrace that side of himself, he could beat the rap that he’s never been exposed to hardship by recounting his missionary experience. "That's usually a very spartan lifestyle, and by definition most of the people you're talking to are going to be poor."

Romney's even longer period as a Mormon lay leader in Boston involved counseling and consoling people dealing with marriage problems, addiction, unemployment: some of life's messiest, scariest stuff. He must have gained a fluency in human frailty. But when The Times's Sheryl Gay Stolberg was researching an article about that time, Romney predictably declined her interview request.

But I'm not sure he wants to humanize himself. Obviously, he'd be less cautious about discussing this kind of thing if he'd grown up as an evangelical Protestant -- but I think in that case he'd use his religion as a stick to beat us secular humanists with, the way most modern Republicans do. I don't think any modern Republican wants to seem vulnerable. The point isn't to show empathy, or a sense of unity with all of one's fellow Americans -- it's to show tribal solidarity and disgust for the "others." It's to define and blame the enemy.

I don't think this is going to work for him in the fall. To win, he's going to have to change his tone -- he's going have to emphasize hope and uplift, and seem at least semi-sincere doing it. I'm not sure he's capable of doing that. And given the party he operates in, I'm not sure he'll ever realize he should try.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-04T11:57:00.000-05:00

KOMEN: SURRENDERING OR JUST GOING LOCAL?

Katha Pollitt is skeptical about the Komen climbdown -- not just the bit about merely keeping Planned Parenthood eligible for future grants (which suggests that the grant applications may not be approved), but also this:

And what about the bit about allowing affiliates "to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities?" Does that mean affiliates will be free to refuse to support PP, setting the stage for state and local anti-choice takeover efforts?

Yeah, that sounds very suspicious. It would suggest that the Komen thinking is: OK, shock and awe didn't work, so now we're going fight a land war. Or, to put it another way, the effort to deprive Planned Parenthood of Komen funds is going to be like the larger fight to ban abortion: if it's politically infeasible to do it nationwide, it'll be done in red states and localities, bit by bit. And we know how successful that effort has been.

Pollitt goes on to write:

Nonetheless, this is a real win for pro-choicers. We hear so much anti-choice propaganda, we may not always remember that, actually, Planned Parenthood is not sketchy and controversial out there in mainstream America. It is beloved. Beloved.

But is it sufficiently beloved to withstand a right-wing war on multiple fronts? Let's hope so.

2012-02-04T10:01:00.001-05:00

AN EXTREMELY WELL-FINANCED CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD

I saw this at Mother Jones last night:

Last week, the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers held their latest get-together with wealthy conservative political donors.... Last September, Mother Jones obtained exclusive audio recordings from a Koch seminar held outside Vail, Colorado, where Charles Koch had declared that the 2012 election would be "the mother of all wars" ...

According to a Huffington Post source, 250 to 300 guests attended the most recent event, which was held in Palm Springs, California. They included Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who along with his wife has given a staggering $10 million to a pro-Newt Gingrich super-PAC....

Former ThinkProgress.org blogger Lee Fang ... wasn't able to get inside [the Palm Springs event], but he did manage to identify several additional guests by scoping out their private jets at the Palm Springs International Airport. They included ... Foster Friess, a Wyoming investor who's helped keep Rick Santorum afloat by pumping $381,000 into two super-PACs supporting the candidate....

So these guys get together for the Koch confabs, pledge to spend millions of dollars in order to defeat Barack Obama ... and then go out and spent millions of dollars trying to beat up one another's candidates. Adelson is bankrolling Gingrich's super PAC; Friess is funding Santorum's. Ken Griffin, as we learn from the chart accompanying this New York Times article on super PACs, is funding Romney's (as, by the way, is William Koch, brother to Charles and David, who organize these gatherings; William has had legal disputes with his better-known brothers).

This right-wing wealth machine is formidable. We won't really have a democracy as long as such a thing can have the undue influence it has on our politics. I'm not sure our side can beat it -- the best we can hope is that it beats itself. And, given the ugly nature of the GOP primaries, which really should be effectively over by now but aren't, maybe that's precisely what's happening.

2012-02-03T23:12:00.001-05:00

WHAT I GOT WRONG

When I speculated that the Susan G. Komen people, under the influence of newly hired wingnut VP Karen Handel, might have concluded that there was money to be made rebranding the group a right-wing cause celebre, I wasn't thinking too much like a crazy right-winger -- I was failing to think enough like a crazy right-winger. I was imagining that these people knew that there was likely to be fallout from ditching Planned Parenthood, and that they thought there might be some advantage -- that ongoing sense of team loyalty and solidarity and grievance -- in aligning themselves with the right.

In fact, what they really seem to have been thinking -- not just Handel but (as we now learn) Ari Fleischer, who was brought in as Komen adviser -- was that ditching Planned Parenthood really wouldn't come with much of a cost. Clearly Handel, Fleischer, and whoever else shared their worldview live in an epistemically closed wingnut world and believe that everyone feels about Planned Parenthood the way they do, with the exception of a tiny liberal sliver of the population. That was a tremendous misjudgment, and it comes because the right increasingly believes its own deceitful talking points about how extreme and out of touch liberals are. Well, don't stop believin', folks. Do us a favor and keep making bad judgments like this.

2012-02-03T16:08:00.000-05:00

MEANWHILE, OVER IN THE PARALLEL UNIVERSE...

I know I care about this a lot more than you do, but I'd like to point out that none of the stories most of us have been paying attention to in recent days -- Komen and Planned Parenthood, Romney's "truly poor" remark, the Trump endorsement, the job numbers -- have been a big deal over at Fox Nation. Over there, the only story that matters is Fast and Furious. This is the lead story at Fox Nation now, as it has been for most of the day; prior to that, this was the lead story for most of yesterday.

I've got to say that I'm not sure why the right-wing noise machine is failing to make Fast and Furious a big deal in the country at large. I know Fast and Furious isn't getting much coverage outside of Fox and talk radio, but neither did the ACORN and "Ground Zero mosque" stories at first. Is the GOP Wurlitzer starting to creak?

Maybe it's that, which would be nice. Or maybe this is specific to Fast and Furious.

I think part of the problem is that the message of the righties on F&F is that the Obama White House didn't do a good enough job controlling guns. Hunh? Aren't you righties always telling us that Obama has both the desire to control all guns and totalitarian superpowers that allow him to disarm the masses whenever he sees fit? Isn't your message here just the opposite?

And aren't you the ones who say that allowing a country to become awash in guns is always a good thing? So if the administration let a bunch of guns into Mexico, shouldn't that have been a positive development -- by your usual standards?

Sorry, guys, it's kind of a muddled message.

2012-02-03T13:35:00.002-05:00

BUT WOULDN'T REDUCING THE NUMBER OF UP-CLOSE ROMNEY MOMENTS ACTUALLY HELP HIM?

Mitt Romney now has Secret Service protection, and The New York Times argues that this could be a problem for him:

The most important side effect will be on Mr. Romney's interaction with supporters, whose access to the candidate at events is likely to be inversely proportional to the number of agents assigned to him.

Reid Cherlin, a GQ contributor who is covering the Republican primaries, worked on both President Obama's campaign and in his White House, and said that having a Secret Service detail "complicates things" for everyone involved.

"Especially in retail-focused states, all of a sudden roads are closed, there are traffic jams, people can't get close to the candidate, the local press feels mishandled," he said. "So there you are cruising down a two-lane blacktop in a tiny town at 80 miles per hour in these black S.U.V.'s. It can be a fun spectacle in a bigger city, but in tiny towns where people want to meet the candidate, it can be a problem."

... For a politician like Mr. Romney, who is remarkably disciplined in public and rarely mixes up his stump speech, those moments on the rope line offer brief glimpses into an impromptu and unscripted version of the candidate. It was on the rope line that we learned about his penchant for guessing voters' ages and heritage -- often incorrectly.... All of those moments will become more difficult to see and hear as the security buffer around him expands.

See, that's why this could be a good thing for Romney. He obviously has a formidable campaign machine ... in which he's the loose cog. The fewer spontaneous moments he has, the fewer chances he's going to have to embarrass himself, and the better it's going to be for him. And the more motorcades he has, the more he's going to look like Presidential GOP Daddy.

On the other hand, he could be the first presidential candidate to seem more robotic than his Secret Service detail. So there's that.

2012-02-03T10:49:00.002-05:00

I GUESS GOP VOTERS DON'T BUY LEFT OR RIGHT ARGUMENTS ABOUT ROMNEY'S GAFFE

Mitt Romney has supposedly been the king of fail since he won Florida on Tuesday, but Republican voters in Nevada seem not to have noticed:

Romney up big in Nevada

Mitt Romney is headed for a dominant victory in Nevada on Saturday. PPP finds him polling at 50% to 25% for Newt Gingrich, 15% for Ron Paul, and 8% for Rick Santorum.

Certainly in Nevada the Mormon vote will get a lot of attention and Romney leads Paul 78-14 with that group, which we project to account for 20% of the vote. But Romney's dominance in Nevada goes well beyond that. He's winning voters describing as 'very conservative,' a group he's had huge amount of trouble with in other states, by a 43-34 margin over Gingrich. He's also winning men, women, Hispanics, whites, and every age group that we track. This will be a pretty thorough victory for him....

The poll was taken on Wednesday and Thursday. Romney's big gaffe -- his national-TV rollout of that talking point about the "very poor" -- happened Wednesday morning. Clearly it's had no negative impact on his standing with his party's voters in Nevada.

The left criticized Romney for seeming to be heartless. Nevada Republicans, being Republicans, don't care if he's heartless. The right attacked Romney for endorsing a government safety net at all. Now, you'd think Nevada Republicans would be quite Randian on that subject -- Republicans do think government is horrifically evil. But, in my experience, Republicans do acknowledge the existence of a subset of the population called "the truly needy" -- they do know there's that kid down the street with cystic fibrosis who can't really be described as a "bum on welfare." But wingers think this population bloc is tiny, and further believe that anyone whose problems aren't glaring is a bum on welfare -- except themselves when they need (or become eligible for) government benefits; then it's "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" time.

So, at least as far as the GOP rank-and-file is concerned, the concept actually was pitched correctly by Romney and his message-crafters -- he just messed up the delivery. He probably alienated swing voters he'll need in the fall, and he screwed up by igniting a media firestorm, but he didn't say anything that offended or alienated his base.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-02T18:27:00.002-05:00

IS THAT THE KOMEN PLAN? TO BECOME THE FOX NEWS OF CHARITIES? (Updated)

The Daily Caller tells us that Susan G. Komen for the Cure is claiming a 100% increase in donations over the past two days, following Komen's decision to stop supporting Planned Parenthood. After reading that, and reading Jeffrey Goldberg's report on the steps that led to Komen's decision, I have to wonder: was this just a cave-in to right-wing pressure, or an expression of new VP Karen Handel's wingnuttery -- or was it an attempt to make right-wing pressure groups' lemons into lemonade by beginning the process of making Komen a pet cause of the right?

I know that Planned Parenthood has also seen an uptick in donations -- but I'm not sure our side can match the right in passion for fighting the culture war. Is it possible that the Komen people feel -- rationally or otherwise -- that tacking to the right will make religious rightists, teabaggers, and Fox News watchers give so much money to them, on an ongoing basis, that they'll come out ahead of where they've been, and never miss the support they're losing now? Remember that the right-wing media could try to turn this into a new front in the mythical "war on religion," particularly targeting corporations that try to sever ties with Komen. Planned Parenthood is getting a bump now from our side, but this could become a long-term project of the right. Maybe Handel got the leaders of Komen thinking that the free publicity would be worth its weight in gold. And given the relentlessness of the right, I'm not sure that's irrational.

****

UPDATE: Well, Komen has now reversed itself. I still wonder if Karen Handel walked into Komen last year with a bad case of epistemic closure and persuaded the rest of Komen's leadership that this was a good idea (or just pushed some people around, acting on her worldview). The fact that this proved to be a terrible strategy doesn't preclude the possibility that Handel thought it was a clever and brilliant strategy, and doesn't preclude the possibility that she brought other people around to that point of view.

Oh, and:

Komen says they will allow @PPact to apply for future grants. NOT that they'll continue grants.

Which appears to be true -- current grants will be funded, and then Planned Parenthood will be allowed to apply for future grants, but we'll see if PP continues to be funded. So the wingnuttery may well have been been postponed, not abandoned.

****

AND: Ezra Klein writes:

[Komen CEO Nancy] Brinker goes on to make clear that they will amend their guidelines so only “criminal and conclusive” investigations affect their funding decisions....

So they are, perhaps, backing down. Or perhaps not. Yesterday, the Komen Foundation said the investigation was not the cause of their reduced support for Planned Parenthood, and that the real issue was that Planned Parenthood did not directly provide mammograms. This statement doesn't address that concern at all. So it would appear to leave open the possibility that the foundation intends to reject Planned Parenthood's future grant applications -- albeit on less overtly political grounds.

Indeed. Or that they need congressional Republicans and the right-wing noise machine to crank up the investigations and find something "criminal and conclusive." Unleash James O'Keeffe? Unleash Fox? Redouble efforts to make Planned Parenthood the new ACORN?

2012-02-02T15:04:00.000-05:00

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING HOW "MODERATE" MITT WOULD DEAL WITH A TEABAG CONGRESS...

Some insider pundits believe it's likely, or at least possible, that Mitt Romney will govern from the right-center if he becomes president, even if teabaggers and other far-rightists control one of both houses of Congress. But if what David Corn writes about Romney and the Trump endorsement is true, we have our answer to that question, and it isn't pretty: Mitt, if you can't stand up to Donald Trump....

A day after Mitt Romney was slammed from all sides for declaring he's not "concerned with the very poor" ... why would he accept an endorsement from celebrity-birther-.001-percenter Donald Trump and appear at the magnate's Las Vegas casino to do so?

... Romney may not have had a choice. This morning, several media outfits -- Politico, the New York Times, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- were reporting that Trump was going to endorse Newt Gingrich. This suggests The Donald was talking to both camps to boost his leverage as he was negotiating a deal. (Quelle surprise!)

The Romney camp had to worry that a Trump endorsement of Gingrich would hurt the front-runner's efforts to keep Gingrich from mounting a full-scale Tea Party rebellion against Romney.... Winning Trump's seal (or bark) of approval would certainly have helped Gingrich in this endeavor and, undoubtedly, caused the commentariat to question whether Romney really could win over the party's conservative base....

To prevent that, Romney needed to be hired (politically) by Trump. And it's not hard to imagine Trump laying down a demand: if I endorse you, you better damn well hold my hand in public. So what's a rich guy gonna do? He will allowed himself to be played by Trump, to be his sidekick, if only for the moment. This shows that Romney cannot escape the gravitational pull of GOP craziness....

You know what else it shows? That Mitt Romney is a freaking coward. He's up by 20 points in the Nevada polls with less than 48 hours to go before the caucusing starts. Coming up soon are states where he has a natural advantage -- Michigan, Maine -- followed by big-money Super Tuesday. He's winning. So why doesn't he have the guts to tell Trump where he can stick his endorsement if it comes at a painful, humiliating cost? I know Trump could theoretically make Romney's life miserable in the fall by mounting a third-party run, but does anyone seriously think he was ever going to do anything other than tease us with that prospect? And with tea party heroes and heroines going every which way in this campaign -- Sharron Angle endorsing Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter continuing to cheerlead for Romney -- why assume that Trump is the Pied Piper of Teabaggia?

If Romney doesn't have the guts to stand up to Trump, he won't have the guts to stand up to the congressional tea party crowd or Al Qaeda. What a gutless wonder.

2012-02-02T11:03:00.001-05:00

NEW MEME: WHEN ROMNEY SAYS SOMETHING EMBARRASSING, IT'S THE MEDIA'S FAULT FOR LISTENING

You expect Jennifer Rubin, who clearly has a desperate desire to be Romney's C.J. Cregg or Ted Sorensen, to say that the fallout from Mitt Romney's "I'm not concerned about the very poor" remark is the media's fault, but the meme has spread to NPR as well.

Rubin:

Romney as the nominee will be flyspecked and criticized over every word. He needs to avoid actual gaffes. But he can't keep the media from editing out all the inconvenient parts of every sentence, paragraph and interview.... Perhaps a less crazed approach to covering Romney would restore their credibility.

The hosts of NPR's Morning Edition:

STEVE INSKEEP: Here's a view of the news media that's cynical but all too often true.

RENEE MONTAGNE: Reporters, it's said, look for stories that confirm stereotypes about people, and if you're a very wealthy presidential candidate with an elite background and a reputation for a tin ear, reporters will listen extremely closely to your offhand remarks about poor people.

First of all, as I said yesterday, it wasn't an "offhand remark," and Romney has said the same thing in the past. (The reporter whose story Inskeep and Montagne were introducing actually made the latter point.)

Second of all (I'm talking to you, Jennifer), Romney's point wasn't taken out of context. He really was saying that the very poor have it just fine, or would with a little tinkering we can do in our spare time.

But what's really toxic about this -- and Inskeep and Montagne are usually better than this (though Rubin obviously isn't) -- is that it suggests that we shouldn't listen to the words politicians actually utter, and we especially shouldn't listen if what they say confirms our impressions of them. How far should we extend that? If Newt Gingrich says something grandiose and bombastic, or Sarah Palin says something in an ill-informed and tongue-tied way, should we ignore it because it's not polite to pay attention when the character flaws we've detected in people who'd like to govern our country actually manifest themselves?

This isn't what these people are saying. Rubin, of course, is saying, "For the love of God, please vote for the guy I've all but openly endorsed, and pay no attention to any evil bastards who point out his flaws." But Inskeep and Montagne are saying that we must limit our attacks on the Republican Establishment's chosen standard-bearer for the party because suggesting that a leader of the GOP is beyond the pale rends the social fabric. As in an abusive household, it's always necessary to maintain the fiction that the leaders of the GOP are upright and respectable, not abusive or pathological or utterly lacking in empathy. We can't say there's something seriously wrong with them. These are the rules.

2012-02-02T07:33:00.002-05:00

IF GINGRICH REALLY WANTS TO PUNISH ROMNEY, WHY NOT RUN THIRD PARTY -- WITH TRUMP? (Update: oops.)

(UPDATE: Is this post already invalid? CNN now says Trump will endorse Romney. Still, the third-party idea still seems valid, if vengeance is Newt's goal....)

Well, you probably know this:

Word started leaking out in Las Vegas earlier that Donald Trump's "major announcement" is to back Newt Gingrich, and sources are confirming it to POLITICO.

The announcement is expected to come at an 12:30 p.m. press conference tomorrow that The Donald is holding.

The move is a bit unexpected since Trump had talked even within the past few days about how he may be compelled to run a third-party campaign of his own if he didn't see a Republican candidate who he thought could beat President Barack Obama....

One thought crosses my mind: Trump is willing to endorse Gingrich but he waited until after Florida? There's got to be a huge bloc of New York-born Floridians who still remember Trump fondly as that nice young man who fixed up the skating rink in Central Park. Poor Newt.

Now? I don't know if this really helps Gingrich -- doesn't Newt already have the pro-grifter vote sewn up? Is this going to add any new supporters?

But it brings to mind something I've been thinking for a while. We know Gingrich isn't going to win the GOP nomination -- upcoming contests include states such as Maine and Michigan where Romney has ties, plus Nevada, where 25% of 2008 caucus-goers were Mormon, and then comes Super Tuesday, which is a pure money contest like Florida, except across multiple states -- so if Newt's goal is vengeance against Romney, how much longer is he going to be effective at that?

Whereas if he ran third-party -- perhaps pursuing the Americans Elect ballot line, and taking his crazy supporters with him -- he could not only punish Romney all year, he could destroy any chance that Romney could win this thing.

And hey, why not make the ticket Gingrich/Trump? As Public Policy Polling noted (in a December survey that showed Romney leading President Obama head-to-head):

One thing that could confound Romney's prospects is if a strong third party candidate entered the race. We find that pretty much all of the big names who have been mentioned for potential independent bids would take a lot more voters from Romney than Obama.

The strongest potential independent candidate we tested is Donald Trump who gets 19% in a three way contest with Obama at 45% and Romney at 31%. The folks who say they would support Trump go for Romney 71-10 in a straight up head to head with Obama.

So there's your ticket! And I think it could be deemed technically in compliance with the Americans Elect requirement that the two people on the ticket be from different parties, because Trump became an independent in December.

As I've said before, I'd happily join Americans Elect just to get Gingrich the ballot line. Hell, if that wasn't possible, I'd circulate petitions for Gingrich/Trump if legally allowed to do so, and I'd urge all of you to do the same. Operation Chaos II! Let's do this!

2012-02-01T16:42:00.002-05:00

WILL NO ONE SHED A TEAR FOR THE POOR, PERSECUTED PLUTOCRATS?

Ted Olson may support gay marriage now, but he's still a right-wing hack. Here he is on the Wall Street Journal editorial page literally describing the Obama administration's response to the Koch brothers' anti-Obama jihad as McCarthyism:

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president's re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?

What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president's surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president's party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly -- and accurately -- stated that you have no involvement?

Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president's re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president's or anyone else's office....

When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace."McCarthyism" defined by Webster's as the "use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition," will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welch's "Have you no sense of decency?" are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him....

The misuse of government power to damage or demean one's political enemies is abhorrent and the very antithesis of a free society and a government of laws, not men. It is time for the public to ask those engaged in these practices, "Have you no sense of decency?"

Your reaction to the first couple of paragraphs may be to compare the supposedly totalitarian tactics of the White House to those of Monty Python's Spanish Inquisitors: Poke them with ... the derogatory speculative innuendo! And your inability to shed a tear for the poor, suffering victims of this persecution may be reinforced by the knowledge that the net worth of Charles and David Koch has risen from $19 billion each in the last year of the Bush administration to $25 billion each last fall -- an increase of more than 31 percent over three years. If that's McCarthyism, then put my name on a blacklist -- please.

Ol' Perfesser Instapundit has a curious response to this:

...I was talking to a CEO last year -- an Obama supporter no less -- who told me he was amazed at how openly Administration officials threatened to use media demonization if he didn't play ball....

But now some of those officials have to be thinking that the people they threaten will be around after Obama's gone, and they'll remember.

So if corporate CEOs take vengeance on administration officials after Obama leaves office, hey, no prob! In other words, the reaction of Glenn Reynolds to the notion of alleged McCarthyism is like his reaction to a lot of other things: it's fine if it's privatized.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-02-01T11:43:00.000-05:00

THAT WAS NO GAFFE. THAT WAS A BRAND-NEW TALKING POINT.
(Update: or maybe not so brand-new.)

This is being called a gaffe, but when you get an accidental gaffe from Mitt Romney, believe me, you know it -- when he slips up and says something even he knows is embarrassing, he doesn't repeat it. In this case he did repeat it, carefully and deliberately. So maybe this is a terrible campaign miscalculation, but, in the usual sense of the term, it's not a gaffe:

After winning the Florida primary, GOP presidential nominee hopeful Mitt Romney explains to CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien that he is focused on a particular portion of the American population in his campaign.

Romney says, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich.... I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling." ...

Via Think Progress, here's the clip. I'll explain what I mean below.

Romney says:

By the way, I'm in this race 'cause I care about Americans. I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich. They're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling. I'll continue to take that message across the nation.

This is lite dog-whistling. Note that the very poor (and, yes, the very rich) are not, according to Romney, Americans. Romney is codedly implying that a certain Kenyan Muslim socialist Negro with ties to Goldman Sachs and George Soros is, in fact, excessively concerned with the needs of the people at the very top and the very bottom. Maybe it's not racial dog-whistling precisely, but it's Beck-like -- at the deepest level, it taps into the notion that rootless-cosmopolitan sophisticates like Obama (and Soros) wallow in government-linked high-finance riches and the decadence of the lower orders simultaneously. It's what you get when you take the overt ethnic stereotyping out of the early-twentieth-century notion of the International Jew foisting rampaging, jazz-inflamed Negroes on poor white Christians down on the farm.

Soledad O'Brien questions Romney's statement and he testily replies (addressing her as "Soledad" in the pointed way that Gingrich addressed "Juan"?):

Well, you had to finish the sentence, Soledad. I said I'm not concerned about the very poor that have a safety net, but if it has holes in it, I will repair them.

I think the challenge right now -- we will hear from the Democrat Party the plight of the poor. And there's no question it's not good being poor, and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor. But my campaign is focused is on middle-income Americans. My campaign -- you can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich -- that's not my focus. You can focus on the very poor -- that's not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans -- retirees living on Social Security, people who can't find work, folks that have kids that are getting ready to go to college. These are the people who've been most badly hurt during the Obama years.

See? He keeps repeating it. It's a rehearsed line. It's a talking point he wants to take into the campaign. He wants to divide and conquer; he wants middle-class people who've had the rug pulled out from under them in this recession to feel that their interests are in opposition to the interests of "the very poor." He wants them to think that President Obama is excessively concerned with "the very poor" at their expense.

Will this work? I don't know. But it's no slip-up. It's no gaffe.

(And yes, he did say "Democrat Party." So when are we going to start calling it the "Republic Party" at every possible opportunity? I'm ready.)

*****

UPDATE: Well, maybe it's not a brand-new talking point -- Bill Scher notes that Romney said the same thing in October:

In October, I reported here that Romney made this exact same argument while stumping in Iowa: "In our country, the people who need the help most are not the poor, who have a safety net, not the rich, who are doing just fine, but the middle class."

Video at the link. (Hat tip: Pam Spaulding.)

2012-02-01T08:16:00.000-05:00

GOSH, I WONDER WHAT PERCENTAGE OF ROMNEY'S ADS AGAINST OBAMA WILL BE NEGATIVE

You've probably seen this stat:

Negative ads were so prevalent in the final week before the Florida primary that they accounted for 92 percent of all campaign commercials that ran....

Mr. Gingrich, outspent and underfinanced, was the primary target.

The bulk of the ads were run by Mr. Romney and his PAC, Restore Our Future, which spent a combined $15.4 million on television and radio advertising in Florida....

The tone and content of the commercials were almost as lopsided. Of all the spots that ran in Florida for the last week, 68 percent were attacks on Mr. Gingrich, Kantar Media found....

Mustang Bobby writes:

Besides a lot of money, the other thing that Mitt Romney has going for him is that he is running against thoroughly unlikeable opponents. Mr. Romney is no Mr. Personality, but the striking thing is how lucky he was to run against people like Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum, all of whom generated a hateful vibe, even for Republicans.... I think one of the big factors in his win last night was that Florida Republicans saw Newt Gingrich bombasting on TV and thought Wow, do I want to watch that asshole for the next four years?

I strongly disagree with this. Republican voters? They fall for Santorum's aw-shucks Boy Scout act and think Bachmann is just a nice lady who hates gay people only because she has such a deep, abiding love for Jesus and freedom. As for Gingrich, GOP voters may have ultimately soured on him, but watching him for four years is precisely what they want, or wanted for quite a while. They wanted to watch him smite Barack Obama with his mighty tongue on continuous loop all through the fall, and then watch him smite reporters and brown people and Harry Reid endlessly after that. It's their version of a first-person shooter game, and they they wanted to spend the rest of their lives playing it. I think they still feel that way -- or at least they still secretly hanker for the Newt they saw in the debates with Juan Williams and John King, the one who seemed as if he couldn't be stopped. Romney stopped him, which made him look weak, and vulnerable to the Obama campaign, so they reluctantly gave up on their view of him as a conquering Visigoth. But they still want a conquering Visigoth.

As Charlie Pierce notes, they got a semi-Visigoth in Romney:

Very early [last] evening, the MSNBC embed with the Romney campaign opined that following Romney around the last couple of days, when it became clear that the election was in the bag, was something like watching an episode of Dexter, the TV show about the charming-as-hell serial killer.... In addition to being a singularly appalling liar, Mitt Romney also has all the basic qualities of a considerable bully. He ruthlessly shoved aside a hapless but nonetheless incumbent Republican governor in order get himself elected in Massachusetts. You've seen him have to rein it in a little on the debate stage. (Believe me, there's more of that to come.) And you saw it on Tuesday night, when Willard accepted victory, and then launched into his usual litany of lies about the president (the president doesn't "want to amass record deficits" -- honestly, no, he doesn't) -- spiced with just the right amount of upper-crust sneering.

I was particularly amused by this little aside: "Like his colleagues in the faculty lounge who think they know better, President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy."

... But it was how Romney delivered the speech that was so revelatory. This is a rich kid who likes flogging The Help. There were just enough shit-eating, country-club grins as he delivered his rancid material to show you what the guy must have been like in those golden moments when he realized that there was more dough in wrecking a company than in investing in it.

Even after twenty-plus years of Limbaugh and fifteen or so of Fox, the ugliest presidential campaign of modern times is still arguably the Poppy Bush campaign of 1988. Well, I think Romney's campaign this year is going to be that Lee Atwater/Floyd Brown campaign on steroids, specifically super-PAC steroids. It's not just Romney's personal and demographic similarity to Bush the Elder. The "faculty lounge" crack quoted by Pierce is an echo of Bush's assertion that Michael Dukakis's policies were "born in Harvard Yard's boutique." The willingness to brazenly fake patriotic sanctimony -- see Romney's incessant invocation of "America the Beautiful" -- precisely echoes the visits to flag factories and other showoffy efforts Bush made to distinguish himself from the ACLU-invoking opponent whose wife was scurrilously rumored to have burned an American flag.

And mock that "America the Beautiful" stuff if you will, but that plus the new habit the Republicans have of beginning debates with the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem tells me that Romney's going to jab President Obama on patriotism until he draws at least a little bit of blood. I can easily imagine him turning to Obama on a debate stage and challenging him to recite second and third verses of some patriotic song or other; we Jon Stewart watchers will chortle, but it might actually connect in Appalachia. I have no doubt that Romney would stoop to that McCarthyite low.

And the ads -- remember that the Willie Horton ad came not from the official Bush campaign but from an ostensibly independent outside group. (Yes, Citizens United.) It's going to happen again. We're not going to get birtherism, but we're going to get distortions and insinuations that approach birther level -- whatever the right thinks will go just to the limit and not quite give the mainstream press the vapors. It's going to be ugly. It's going to be every stereotype from the Protocols of the Elders of Liberalism. It's going to be patriotism and race and gun-grabbing and Soros and Molotov cocktails tossed to a Grateful Dead soundtrack. Romney and his super PAC aren't going to refrain from any line of attack.

Will it work? I don't know. Obama's no slouch. But it will be exceedingly nasty.

2012-01-31T16:24:00.002-05:00

SIX DEGREES OF "LIBERALS SUCK!"

A lot of people are very seriously pondering Charles Murray's new book, and the column David Brooks wrote about it today. I think it's somewhat of a waste of time to expend too much gray matter on Murray; I did my bit on Saturday. Short of reading Murray's book, if you want to assess what the guy is saying now, read the Wall Street Journal article he adapted from the book, as well as the article Adam Serwer wrote last May when Murray previewed the book in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. Or you can go straight to this Roy Edroso post, which is informative and much funnier than anything else I've recommended, and also contains a link to an are-you-oppressing-the-proles-with-your-elitism? quiz from the book.*

The most interesting aspect of Murray's current work is his focus on blue-collar whites; he clearly feels burned by the reception to The Bell Curve. But his change in focus isn't all that interesting -- really, it's just a different approach to one of the main items on the wingnut intellectuals' mission statement, which is: Whenever possible, endeavor to demonstrate that big-government liberalism and liberal cultural elitism are responsible for everything bad in the world, and that the richest plutocrats are blameless. You may have read that Murray blames the well-to-do for failing to wag their fingers sternly at blue-collar workers who quit their jobs and have kids out of wedlock -- but he's not blaming the truly well-to-do, and he's certainly not blaming them for the things they did to become well-to-do. As David Brooks says, citing Murray's book:

... there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country)....

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society's resources. But that's a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

So, see, it's not the people who actually decide where all the job openings are (China rather than the U.S. Rust Belt) who are to blame for the decline of blue-collar America -- it's the people who drink craft beers and avoid strip-mall restaurants who are at fault, just by dint of drinking craft beers and avoiding strip-mall restaurants. (No, really -- check out the quiz. Murray says that.)

But, um, how does this jibe with Murray's old thesis, that non-whites are simply less fit to function at the upper levels of society? Well, it doesn't matter whether it jibes -- it all functions like a parlor game, except one played with control of our dominant political narrative at stake. It's all in that statement I italicized above: if you're a right-wing "intellectual," your work has to proceed from the assumptions that the uber-elitists are blameless and that liberals bear 100% of the blame for everything. Then your task is to keep coming up with new, fresh, seemingly thought-provoking ways to connect these two premises. It's like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon -- it doesn't matter how you get to Kevin Bacon, it just matters whether you do it in a compelling way. Murray's winning the game right now. If he continues to win, the prize is control of our discourse on race and class for years to come.

****

*(Also see: Roy's follow-up on Murray and TBogg's two Murray skewerings.)

2012-01-31T11:00:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER FINDS A STORY HE LIKES -- NEVER MIND THE FACTS

You might not be seeing a lot of evidence of this yet, but there's a very strong likelihood that, as the year progresses, mainstream political journalists will settle on what Bob Somerby famously called "a story they like" -- a story that offers a comforting narrative, facts be damned. The story will be that the Republican Party almost went over the edge with all that tea party craziness, but cooler heads prevailed: the "moderate" Mitt Romney won the presidential nomination and teabag-friendly presidential candidates (Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum) were rejected. The GOP is now safe as houses!

In a front-page New York Times story today, Michael Cooper asserts that the GOP appears to have gotten all that crazy stuff out of its system at the state level:

Second Year In, Republican Governors Moderate Tone

A year after a coterie of new Republican governors swept into the statehouses and put in place aggressive agendas to cut spending and curb union powers, sparking strong backlashes in many places, many of them are adopting decidedly more moderate tones as they begin their sophomore year in office.

... many of the new Republican governors who swept into office last year, taking aim at collective bargaining rights, are striking less confrontational notes as they begin the new year, at least judging by what they have been saying in their State of the State addresses.

But there are a few problems with Cooper's narrative -- as he himself notes:

Of course, governors do not always propose their toughest measures in their annual speeches to lawmakers. Last year, [Governor Scott] Walker of Wisconsin used his State of the State address to call on government workers to contribute more to their pension plans; he did not mention his plan to curb collective bargaining rights until later.

Oh yeah -- that.

Also:

To be sure, some governors -- both first-termers and veterans -- are still proposing measures that are sure to cause controversy this year.

Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a Republican, proposed a major overhaul of the state's tax system that would lower tax rates but eliminate deductions and credits -- including popular ones, like deductions for mortgage interest and charitable contributions and tax credits for poor families....

And more laws that aim to curb the power of unions are being pursued in a number of states this year.

Unions and Democrats were thrown on the defensive this year in Indiana when [Governor Mitch] Daniels, serving in his second -- and last -- term, switched course and decided to support a bill to ban union contracts from requiring nonunion members to pay union dues....

In South Carolina, a right-to-work state whose unemployment rate remained at 9.5 percent in December, above the national average, Gov. Nikki R. Haley, a Republican beginning her second year in office, took a hard line on unions in her address to the Legislature. "I love that we are one of the least unionized states in the country," she said, calling it "an economic development tool unlike any other." She pledged to "make the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted and not welcome in the state of South Carolina."

Teacher tenure continues to be a flashpoint in many states. The governors of New Jersey, South Dakota and Virginia all used their speeches this year to call for abolishing or weakening it....

But hey -- apart from all that, the GOP is really, really mellowing!

Except that's not true. Cooper doesn't even mention what's going on in Republican-dominated states with regard to abortion and reproductive rights. Here's a sample of January headlines from Google News:

Abortion Ban to Be Proposed in Kansas Legislature

Abortion Bills Fill Desks in Virginia Capitol

Florida Lawmakers Push Again to Restrict Abortions

New Hampshire Considers Defunding Planned Parenthood, Weakening Domestic Violence Laws

But that's not how the press wants to cover the GOP in the year of the Romney-Obama race. That's not how the press ever wants to cover the GOP -- the press never wants to acknowledge the party's extremism. The press wants to say that the party is fine, our two-party system is fine, and anything intemperate that Republicans have ever done is anomalous, and unrepresentative of the fine folks all insider journalists meet at cocktail parties. So we get stories like Cooper's.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-31T07:57:00.000-05:00

IN THE LAND OF THE CLOWNS, THE ONE WEARING THE LEAST MAKEUP LOOKS DIGNIFIED

Today's New York Times has a subtly snarky editorial called "Don't Stop the Debates," which urges the Republicans to prattle on:

...Since the debates began, the popularity gap has grown between the leading Republican candidates and President Obama.

But that's not simply because the candidates have increased the intensity of their attacks on each other, nor is it curable by cutting back the mud-fighting.... It's also because voters have been exposed to the broken windows of the Republican idea factory....

The long series of debates are an open window onto the failed policies and dubious values of the Republican Party. No wonder some people want to close it.

The editorial lists some of the candidates' ideas, some of them crazy and presumably considered laughable by the general public (Gingrich's moon colony), others crazy and -- the Times doesn't say this -- potentially quite popular, given how much the public has internalized right-wing government-bashing memes (repealing Dodd-Frank and replacing it with nothing).

Ah, but doesn't the general air of lunacy hurt all the Republicans, including the front-runner? I don't think so. I'm starting to think that it's making Mitt Romney look more and more presidential, God help us -- especially the ranting of Gingrich. Standing next to Newt, Mitt must look to at least some voters like Abraham freaking Lincoln.

At the very least it's a wash, as William Galston argues:

This morning, Gallup released the latest in its series of polls focused on twelve swing states.... Obama and Romney are statistically tied: it's Romney 48, Obama 47 in the swing states and 48-48 nationally.... despite changes in the political environment, a more aggressive stance by the president, and the emergence of less than flattering information about Mitt Romney, the Obama-Romney contest hasn't moved much in many months. Last October, for example, Romney led Obama 47-46 in the swing states. Since last August, Obama's national support has moved in a narrow range between 46 and 48 percent; Romney's, between 46 and 49 percent. This evidence supports the thesis that the 2012 presidential election will be hard-fought and close....

And check this out, from a new Gallup poll (click to enlarge):

Fairly solid majorities think Romney "has the personality and leadership qualities presidents should have" and "can manage the government effectively"? Half the country thinks he "is sincere and authentic"? Authentic? Half the country?

The impression of Republican clownishness is not rubbing off on Romney. If anything, it's setting him off in relief, making him seem like the one guy with at least an adequate level of gravitas in a gravitas-deprived party. The clown car is just making him seem the least clownish.

2012-01-30T14:17:00.000-05:00

THE FUTURE OF NEWT?

Wow, this is just awesome:

Gingrich: I wouldn't accept debate versus Obama moderated by reporters

Newt Gingrich threatened Monday to skip any debate as the Republican nominee versus President Obama that's moderated by a member of the media.

"As your nominee, I will not accept debates in the fall in which the reporters are the moderators," Gingrich said at a rally in Pensacola. "We don’t need to have a second Obama person at the debate."

... Gingrich has made his debating prowess a central selling point of his candidacy, promising fantastical showdowns with Obama in the general election. A frequent applause line for Gingrich, for instance, is his promise to challenge the president to seven, three-hour Lincoln-Douglas style debates....

I am so very, very sorry this guy won't be the Republican nominee. The only thing that would be more advantageous for Obama than getting to stand on a podium and watch Gingrich unleash hours of obnoxious, self-important cockamamie rhetoric in debates would be Gingrich engaging in a divaesque refusal to debate Obama unless the presidential debate commission changed all the rules that have applied to debates for decades, just to accommodate Newt.

And, really, what an idiot: doesn't Gingrich realize that, without debate moderators as foils, he'd be back home right now, as much of an also-ran as Bachmann, Huntsman, and Perry? His insults of debate moderators have been the only real high points (although I don't think that's the right expression) of his campaign.

****

But it occurs to me that we may be getting a glimpse of Newt Gingrich's possible future.

I could see him riding the rails from town to town, with nothing but a portable lectern and a cardboard valise, offering to take on any and all comers in ... a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates! Three hours! No moderator! Come one, come all! Step right up! Do you think you have what it takes to out-pontificate The Mighty Newt?

He could be like an itinerant pool hustler -- except he'd be an itinerant pool hustler of civilization-altering transformational change! It would be awesome! Maybe he could even do one of these debates on the moon!

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-30T12:52:00.000-05:00

OOPS -- THERE GOES THAT RATIONALIZATION

Newt Gingrich yesterday on ABC:

Asked about his "collapse" in the polls on ABC News' "This Week," Gingrich said, "I think that they haven't quite collapsed. And the fact is, when you combine the Santorum vote and the Gingrich vote, we clearly are -- the conservative combined would clearly beat Romney."

Is that "clearly" true? Not according to Suffolk University it isn't:

The new Suffolk University poll of the Florida primary: Romney 47%, Gingrich 27%, Santorum 12%, Paul 9%.

(For the math-challenged, that's Romney 47%, Gingrich + Santorum 39%.)

Oh, and not according to Nate Silver's new forecast:

Our new Florida forecast: Romney 44.7 (97% chance of win), Newt 29.4, Santorum 13.2, Paul 11.1

(That's Romney 44.7%, Gingrich + Santorum 42.6%.)

I really wanted Newt to go all the way, and I'm sure he'll be entertaining if he refuses to quit, but it looks as if he's about to be crushed.

2012-01-30T09:23:00.001-05:00

SCORCHED-EARTH NEWT MAY HURT THE ARTIST MORE THAN MITT ROMNEY

New York magazine's John Heilemann thinks Newt Gingrich really might be crazy enough to keep fighting Mitt Romney all the way to the convention. Heilemann thinks this is a real problem for Romney. I agree with Heilemann about the potential for a prolonged, futile Gingrich fight -- but I'm not so sure about the likelihood of harm to Mitt.

Heilemann writes:

... in Gingrich's case, he might be serious, so much has he come to despise Romney and the Republican Establishment that has brought down on him a twenty-ton shithammer in Florida, and so convinced is he of his own Churchillian greatness and world-historical destiny. The same antic, manic, lunatic bloody-mindedness that has made him such a rotten candidate in the Sunshine State may be enough to keep him the race a good long time.

Waging a protracted battle would likely be an act of futility for Gingrich, but it could turn out to be something much worse for Romney.

But how much more harm can Gingrich do to Romney? In some voters' minds, he's helped create an image of Romney as an evil corporate predator -- but on that subject, what else has Newt got? Does he have anything that isn't in that attack film he released a couple of weeks ago?

Yes, that line of attack does seem to have hurt Romney with general-election swing voters -- though please note that it doesn't seem to have hurt him at all with Republicans, and it's conceivable it even shored up his support with the Randian base. Gingrich's current line of attack -- that Romney is "a Massachusetts moderate who's pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-tax increase, pro-liberal judge" -- may actually help Romney with swing voters. (See? He's not so extreme!)

And really, how many of Newt's best punches are aimed at Romney anyway? Yes, Gingrich hates Romney -- but his most effective attacks have been aimed at debate moderators. And that's not working anymore, is it? A lot has been made of Romney's increasing skill as a debater, but debate moderators have a learning curve, too: Brian Williams and Wolf Blitzer learned not to do what Juan Williams and John King did -- goad Gingrich -- and now he looks toothless and impotent. And there aren't going to be very many more debates.

****

You know where Gingrich may be having an impact? In this year's Oscar race. Consider what happened at the Screen Actors Guild awards last night:

The Help was the big winner at the 18th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards last night, taking three awards many had expected to go to The Artist.

Hmmm ... Gingrich calls Barack Obama the "food stamp president," proposes janitorial work for poor children, attacks Juan Williams, and gets asked about old remarks in which he criticized bilingual education as reinforcing immersion in "the language of the ghetto," all in the space of a couple of weeks. Yes, I know there's always some idiot spouting racist nonsense somewhere, but this is pretty high-profile. Think it might be high-profile enough to be making movie award voters more supportive of a film that focuses on racism? Think it might benefit The Artist if just went away?