Category Archives: Republican Party

The Ryan Albatross

Posted on by

Steven Taylor, one of the few self-identified “conservative” bloggers I actually respect — well, OK, the only one I respect — asks of the Ryan budget plan — WTF does the GOP intend to do with it? Are they actually thinking of trying to pass it? Are they crazy?

Remember: we know that some attendees of Tea Party rallies have brandished signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.* Further, many Republicans ran for office in 2010 by campaigning on the notion that the PPACA was damaging to Medicare (for example: Coates Ad: Obama Forcing Seniors into “Government Run Healthcare” and Blunt Ad Complains of Cutting Medicare…to Support “Government-Run Health Care”).

Remember also (and more importantly): the public overwhelmingly opposes Medicare cuts: “76% of respondents oppose cutting Medicare (30% find it “unacceptable” and 46% find it “totally unacceptable”)” (see link for details on the given poll—which replicates a consistent result in poll after poll on this topic).

So again: will the GOP actually go to the mattresses for this plan?

Let me give you my utterly unsupported guess as to what’s going on with Ryan and his budget — Ryan’s plan actually has been rattling around for several months, under the title “Roadmap for America’s Future.” And it got mentioned a lot in GOP talking points, although until recently you had to wade into the fine print on your own initiative to understand what the plan actually provides.

My impression all along has been that the GOP kept bringing it up not because they were all in love with Ryan’s ideas — although destroying Medicare is always a plus for them — but because it was the closest thing the GOP had to a concrete deficit-reduction proposal. So, for most of them, it was a prop. It was a stack of paper they could wave around and claim to be a plan that would solve everyone’s problems while they carped ceaselessly on whatever it was President Obama was doing.

Ryan himself — possibly not the sharpest pencil in the box — may not have understood it was the appearance of a plan, not the plan itself, that had value to the GOP. So a couple of weeks ago, from his position as chair of the House Budget Committee, he submitted the thing as a serious proposal.

Given Ryan’s timing, he might have thought that popular support in Washington for his ideas would cause Congress to drop other budget bills in progress and adopt his budget instead. And given the pundit-world swoon that followed, one suspects that the Puppet Masters were behind the release of the budget and had put out a general order to the puppets to start swooning.

One thing to keep in mind about the Puppet Masters is that most of them became rich and powerful because they inherited more money than God. And while they may possess a large degree of shrewdness, it’s a myopic kind of shrewdness. I suspect their “smarts” have serious limits. They may have imagined they could use their influence to get some version of the Ryan budget passed into law. And it may have just dawned on them over the past couple of days that they made a huge miscalculation. This would account for the over-the-top hysteria in right-wing media — if Daddy ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

President Obama’s decision to stay behind the scenes until Ryan threw his pitch may turn out to be one of the smartest moves he ever made. If the Dems play this right — please — the Ryan budget could become the Mother of All Wedge Issues and an albatross to hang around the neck of every Republican running in 2012.

See also: Paul Krugman, “Who’s Serious Now?”

Update: What makes anyone think the President didn’t know full well the microphone was on? This is exactly the kind of thing the President needs to be saying to everyone, loudly and often.

Update: Ryan and his fellow travelers think the President was being mean to them in his speech last week.

They expected a peace offering, a gesture of goodwill aimed at smoothing a path toward compromise. But soon after taking their seats at George Washington University on Wednesday, they found themselves under fire for plotting “a fundamentally different America” from the one most Americans know and love.

“What came to my mind was: Why did he invite us?” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “It’s just a wasted opportunity.”

The situation was all the more perplexing because Obama has to work with these guys: Camp is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, responsible for trade, taxes and urgent legislation to raise the legal limit on government borrowing. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) chairs the House Republican Conference. And Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is House Budget Committee chairman and the author of the spending blueprint Obama lacerated as “deeply pessimistic” during his 44-minute address.

Unbelievable. I’m starting to think Ryan really is a clueless wonder. See also Matt Yglesias.

Wisconsin GOP: Above the Law?

Posted on by

You might remember that a judge in the People’s Republic of Wisconsin [update: to be known henceforth as Fitzwalkerstan] last week issued a temporary restraining order that stopped the publication of the state’s new union-busting law. This was to keep the law from going into effect, per Wisconsin state law, until a suit challenging the law is decided.

Yesterday the text of the law was published on a website of the Legislative Reference Bureau, which provides research and drafting services for the state legislature. The head of this bureau, Stephen Miller, said that this publication did not constitute action that would put the law into effect. But Wisconsin Republican are saying, aha! The law was published! It can go into effect now.

It appears Miller was maneuvered into publishing the bill by state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel —

Fitzgerald and Miller met Friday. Miller said Fitzgerald asked him to publish the law and, after reading the statutes, Miller agreed that he could do so. He said he had never published a law without being given a date by the secretary of state during his 12 years of running the reference bureau.

After the restraining order was issued March 18, La Follette sent a letter that same day to the reference bureau rescinding earlier instructions to publish the bill Friday. “I further instruct you to remove all reference to March 25, 2011, as the publication date and not to proceed with publication until I contact you with a new publication date,” his letter said.

The Republicans’ argument, as I understand it, is that the court order barred the Wisconsin Secretary of State from publishing the law, which is usually done in a newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal. However, the court order didn’t say the non-partisan Legislative Reference Bureau couldn’t publish it. And the website publication meets the state’s public notice requirements for putting a law into effect, they say.

Miller himself says the publication was only an “administrative step,” according to the Wisconsin State Journal.

Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette, a Democrat, says he doesn’t think the website publication satisfies the legal requirements for publishing, and the law is not in effect. But Scott Fitzgerald says it is too in effect, nyah nyah nyah.

I’m neither a lawyer nor an expert on Wisconsin state law. However, since the restraining order was broadly worded and clearly intended to stop the law from going into effect while it was being challenged in court, it is not unreasonable to assume that Fitzgerald’s maneuver does not satisfy the publishing requirement. But the lawyers and judges will have to duke this one out.

It’s fascinating to me that the Wisconsin Republicans aren’t even trying to not look like the old Soviet Politburo now. They’re so all-fired eager to bust unions and punish their opponents they can’t wait a few weeks for the courts to decide the pending suit.

Wisconsin’s Cultural Revolution

Posted on by

James Fallows writes from Beijing that the activities of Republicans in Wisconsin remind him of … Beijing.

A University of Wisconsin history professor, William Cronon wrote an op-ed for the New York Times critical of Gov. Scott Walker, and now Wisconsin Republicans are in all-out McCarthyite witch hunt mode, trying to find some way to shut him up or discredit him. More details from Josh Marshall and from Professor Cronon.

The state Republican Party wants access to the professor’s university email account so that they can see who he’s been talking to about Gov. Walker and his union-busting activities. Writes James Fallows,

The reason this strikes me particularly hard at the moment: I am staying in a country where a lot of recent news concerns how far the government is going in electronic monitoring of email and other messages to prevent any group, notably including academics or students, from organizing in order to protest. I don’t like that any better in Madison than I do in Beijing.

Since Cronon is a state employee his university emails legally are public property, but if there’s any reason for the Wisconsin Republicans to go after the professor’s emails other than intimidation, I can’t think of it. See also John Nichols.

No rightie blogger that I’ve seen has commented on this yet, but when they do, I predict they will defend the Wisconsin Republicans and then go back to screaming about how they’re the defenders of liberty from Big Government.

Speaking of emails — an Indiana deputy prosecutor has resigned because of an email he sent to Gov. Walker suggesting some staged union “thuggism.”

“If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions,” the email said.

“Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC and umbrella union organizations in the protest. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam.”

The prosecutor, Carlos Lam, also said the pro-union protests presented “a good opportunity for what’s called a ‘false flag’ operation.” The email was obtained by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, which obtained Gov. Walker’s emails concerning the union-busting bill.

What strikes me about the email is the implied assumption that Republican thuggishness is justified, even sanctioned by God, because the DNC and unions are inherently bad, somehow. It was no secret that the DSCC and the AFL-CIO supported the pro-union protests, but I guess the union thugs weren’t being thuggish enough.

And yeah, another blogger already made the comparison with Donald Segretti and CREEP.

In other developments from the Cheese State — yesterday a state appeals court punted the legal challenge to the Wisconsin’s union-busting bill to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Stress Fractures on the Right

Posted on by

John Terbush writes at TPM that three Republican governors — Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Ohio’s John Kasich, and Michigan’s Rick Snyder — have seen their approval ratings drop significantly after pursuing aggressively anti-union policies.

However, Evan McMorris-Santoro writes at TPM that the union busters of the Right are not taking a hint. They’re attacking Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana for not being anti-union enough. Daniels is as anti-union as they come, but his presidential ambitions may not be willing to fall on a sword for the cause, so to speak.

Unrelated great snark: This Just In: FOX News Discovers War Cost Money

Tonight in Wisconsin

Posted on by

Are Wisconsin GOP senators getting the “wobblies”? Stephen Moore writes in the Wall Street Journal that conservatives are worried that three Republican senators may defect to the Democrats’ side to kill the governor’s union-busting bill.

If there’s any solid evidence Republican resolve is about to crumble, Walker doesn’t say. But Greg Sargent writes that an NBC Wisconsin affiliate is reporting that “four moderate Republicans are wavering and could break with the GOP and vote against Walker’s budget repair bill.”

When even Rasmussen polls show Republicans are losing ground, and with recall efforts underway, some senators must be thinking hard about their political futures and whether they want to be chained to Scott Walker if he goes down like the Titanic.

Last week, conservative apparatchiks like Jennifer Rubin were gushing about Scott Walker’s future as a presidential candidate. This week, Americans for Prosperity (e.g., David Koch) is trying to whip up support for Walker by sending a bus around the state. A Wisconsin ABC affiliate reported,

Americans for Prosperity brought a bus tour to Ashwaubenon Friday morning, looking for people to sign petitions in support of Governor Walker’s budget proposals.

High turnout at the “Stand Against Spending — Stand With Walker” campaign forced organizers to move from Perkins restaurant to the Holiday Inn next door.

Organizers say more than 100 people showed up to give their support.

Wow, that sounds so … rinkydink. And news stories say the bus tour is being met by protesters all around the state, also.

Rick Ungar writes at Forbes that Gov. Walker’s overreach already has cost him and Republicans dearly.

The Wisconsin governor’s desire to be at the forefront of his perceived GOP revolution may not only have doomed the anti-union effort, but it may forever label him has the man who gave the democrats the gift that keeps on giving – the return of the union rank and file into the arms of the Democratic Party.

The governor may be facing the downside of drawing media attention. Isthmus newspaper and the Wisconsin Associated Press today filed a lawsuit over Walker’s failure to respond to a request for access to emails. Scott had bragged that he had received 8,000 emails telling him to stand firm on his budget bill. So, let’s have a look, said news media. Um, we’ll get back to you, someday, said the governor’s office.

But those are The People’s emails, and under the state’s Open Records law, Walker is obligated to cough them up. Stay tuned.

Walker sent out layoff warnings today, although I thought he had promised layoff notices. Is he starting to blink? Or is he about to hit the iceberg?

The Republican Job Creation / Victory in 2012 Plan!

Posted on by

The Republican Job Creation/Victory in 2012 Plan is a variation on the plan that has worked very well for them these past 30 years or so, namely —

1. Screw Everything Up
2. Blame Democrats/Liberals/Leftists
3. Win!

In fact, the only time this plan seems to fail for them is after a long run of dominating both the White House and Congress, and at least part of the electorate catches on that, just maybe, it wasn’t Democrats who screwed everything up. But this enlightened effect doesn’t seem to last very long, however, possibly because Dems fail to capitalize on it by taking over news media and ceaselessly repeating a few catchy talking points to drive home the point that Republicans screw everything up.

The precise plan right now is to jam through their insane “fiscal sanity” measures, which will cost the nation 700,000 jobs and cut economic growth by as much as 2 percentage points. Then, throughout 2012 yammer endlessly about “Obama’s economy.” Win!

Greg Sargent, who insanely is trying to be sane, writes,

Even if you disagree with these analyses, you’d think the fact that there are now two of them reaching similar conclusions would be newsworthy enough to break through the din of Beltway deficit-reduction fetishizing. The argument about budet cuts is too often framed solely as an argument between so-called deficit “hawks” and “doves,” as a dispute between those who say steep cuts are necessary and those who say they’re cruel and extreme. The fact that outside analysts think that budget cuts could actively hamper the recovery deserves to be part of the discussion.

Mais non, dear readers. That makes sense. Therefore, it won’t happen.

See also: Paul Krugman, “Not Enough Bureaucrats” and “Leaving Children Behind.”

Update: Now, here’s a man with clarity. Indiana Republican Governor Mitch Daniels said that cutting budgets is essential even if it costs a lot of jobs. He’s not even bothering with “underpants gnomes” thinking that cutting budgets magically will create jobs. He knows that the times demand budget cuts, because this will result in a leaner, meaner electorate that will not only vote for Republicans but will gratefully accept whatever the Corporate Overlords dish out.

Mississippi: The Land That Time Forgot

Posted on by

I had heard something about Gov. Haley Barbour releasing a woman from prison on condition that she donate her kidney. Wow, what will small-government conservatism come up with next, I thought.

But today I read the details in Bob Herbert’s column. Two sisters named Jamie and Gladys Scott have been serving double consecutive life sentences for taking part in a robbery in which $11 was stolen. That’s right, $11. No one was harmed during the robbery, Herbert says, and the sisters had no prior criminal record. The Scott sisters have been in prison for 16 years.

This is from Human Rights:

The Scotts, who were 19 and 21 when the robbery occurred, have been incarcerated for 16 years. Meanwhile, three male acquaintances also convicted in the robbery are free after serving just a couple of years in prison. The men reportedly received lighter sentences in exchange for providing the prosecution with incriminating information against the Scotts.

“The authorities did not even argue that the Scott sisters had committed the robbery,” writes Bob Herbert of the New York Times. “They were accused of luring two men into a trap, in which the men had their wallets taken by acquaintances of the sisters, one of whom had a shotgun.”

Jamie Scott now has a life-threatening kidney disease. In his announcement of the suspension of the sentence, Gov. Barbour expressed no concern for Jamie Scott’s health. Instead, he said, “Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the state of Mississippi.”

So, the only reason the outrageous sentence was suspended — not commuted — is that Jamie Scott’s health care was costing the state too much money.

(But I assume the sisters have no insurance, and Mississippi is notoriously chintzy with Medicaid. So I suspect they may have to rely on charity to pay for a transplant. We’ll see.)

Bob Herbert wrote today that the sisters were not informed of the suspension, but learned about it on television. Nor was Gladys Scott consulted about donating her kidney, although she said it was something she wanted to do, anyway.

Herbert continues,

I was happy for the Scott sisters and deeply moved as Gladys spoke of how desperately she wanted to “just hold” her two children and her mother, who live in Florida. But I couldn’t help thinking that right up until the present moment she and Jamie have been treated coldly and disrespectfully by the governor and other state officials. It’s as if the authorities have found it impossible to hide their disdain, their contempt, for the two women.

The prison terms were suspended — not commuted — on the condition that Gladys donate a kidney to Jamie, who is seriously ill with diabetes and high blood pressure and receives dialysis at least three times a week. Gladys had long expressed a desire to donate a kidney to her sister, but to make that a condition of her release was unnecessary, mean-spirited, inhumane and potentially coercive. It was a low thing to do.

I posted a photo of the sisters just so we’re all clear about where this contempt is coming from. You might recall Gov. Barbour’s recent bout of amnesia regarding the civil rights movement? And this guy is considered by some to be one of the GOP’s more respectable potential presidential candidates in 2012.

And then there’s the gender issue. In 2009, Randy Radley Balko reported in Slate that Gov. Balko Barbour had “pardoned, granted clemency to, or suspended the sentences of at least five convicted murderers, four of whom killed their wives or girlfriends.” (emphasis added).

Well, you know, killing a wife or girlfriend is not like real murder. They probably had it coming. (/sarcasm) Note that all five of these men had been in a prison program that assigned them to do odd jobs around the governor’s mansion.

See also: Scott Sisters Kidney Donation Threatens Organ Transplant Laws

Update: See E.R. Shipp in The Root:

The judge who essentially sentenced the Scott sisters, Jamie and Gladys, to life in prison was downright lenient in 2005 when it came to sentencing one of the ringleaders of the lynching of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 — Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. That despicable human being was given 60 years — 20 years for each murder? — but left free while appealing his conviction.

Jeebus, people, you might as well go back to wearing sheets and burning crosses and stop pretending. You aren’t fooling most folks.

Oopsie; New Jersey Owes $271m

Posted on by

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is doing his bit to further the Republican agenda of letting America rot, and as you recall he recently halted a project to build a new tunnel to Manhattan under the Hudson, for which the state had received a big chunk of federal money. He wanted to spare New Jersey taxpayers, he said.

But here’s the oopsie — the feds want the tunnel money back.

The Federal Transit Administration has sent a debt notice to New Jersey demanding a payment of $271,101,291 by Dec. 24. After that, the feds will charge interest on whatever the state still owes.

An editorial in the New York Times sums up Gov. Christie’s other accomplishments so far:

While Mr. Christie was busy hacking away at public education in his state so he could preserve lower tax rates for multimillionaires, his administration also bungled its application for education money through the Race to the Top program and lost $400 million. He also lost federal matching funds for family planning by vetoing the state’s share.

Apparently, Gov. Christie’s only executive abilities are losing federal money and getting himself on YouTube. No wonder the GOP sees him as future presidential material.

News That Isn’t News, Teabag Edition

Posted on by

Kate Zernike writes for the New York Times that the “tea party” movement is largely being organized and funded by FreedomWorks, which isn’t really news.

FreedomWorks staffers are going around the country training the teabaggers how to be useful political tools and get out the vote for FreedomWorks candidates. It is this organizing that is behind the several upsets in recent Republican primaries, in which “tea party” candidates upset long-entrenched Republican incumbents. FreedomWorks is also helping Glenn Beck stage his vanity rally in Washington, DC this weekend.

Also,

Through its political action committee, FreedomWorks plans to spend $10 million on the midterm elections, on campaign paraphernalia — signs for candidates like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida are stacked around the offices here — voter lists, and a phone system that allows volunteers to make calls for candidates around the country from their home computers. With “microfinancing” grants, it will steer money from FreedomWorks donors — the tax code protects their anonymity — to local Tea Parties.

There are other groups, including labor unions, spending more than that. But the interesting thing to me is the degree to which the sheep teabaggers tea partiers see themselves as a grassroots anti-establishment movement when it’s really an astroturf organization being fueled by establishment figures of long standing.

FreedomWorks itself evolved from another organization, Citizens for a Sound Economy, created in 1984 by the Koch Foundation with help from Big Tobacco. Joshua Holland of AlterNet has called FreedomWorks a “Wall Street front group,”, although I think it’s probably more accurate to call it “astroturf for hire.” FreedomWorks works with a number of PR firms to manipulate public opinion for a number of right-wing special interests.

According to SourceWatch, its funders in 2007 included —

  • Armstrong Foundation, $20,000
  • Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, $80,000
  • Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, $100,000
  • Sarah Scaife Foundation, $200,000
  • Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, $20,000

In other words — grassroots, my ass. What’s behind the “tea parties” are the same mega-wealthy familiy trusts that bankroll everything else that’s right wing in America. Other establishment figures associated with FreedomWorks include Dick Armey, Steve Forbes, and C. Boyden Gray.

Teabaggers also like to pretend they aren’t working for either party. But Zernike writes, “in the 2010 midterm elections, FreedomWorks is urging Tea Party groups to work for any Republican, on the theory that a compromised Republican is better than Democratic control of Congress.” In other words, now that most of the primaries are behind us the baggers are being used as Republican party operatives, and I doubt many of them will notice.

Update: See also Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast.

Newt Wants to Be Your President

Posted on by

Un-bee-lee-va-bull:

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich twice called on the United States to attack North Korea and Iran Thursday because the United States has only attacked “one out of three” of so-called “Axis of Evil” members by invading Iraq. He also claimed that Muslims are trying to install Sharia law on America and said that the “War on Terror” should have been a war on “radical Islamists” instead.

Speaking at an American Enterprise Institute event yesterday, Gingrich compared not following through on President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” agenda with not fully engaging the Axis power in World War II.

“If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ’41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won,” Gingrich said, adding that Americans should “over-match the problem.”

Newt, who allegedly has a degree in history, doesn’t notice that FDR did not “fully engage the Axis power” in World War II until after Pearl Harbor and after Germany had declared war on the U.S. Before that, Germany had already bombed Britain and invaded Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The destroyer U.S.S. Ruben James had been sunk by a U-boat attack weeks before Pearl Harbor. But the U.S. officially was neutral until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The United States under Franklin Roosevelt did not enter the war until the war was brought to us.

So no, Newt, history does not tell us that Roosevelt would have attacked Iran and North Korea just because it was on his to-do list.

Also, Newt continues to spout inane and hateful drool about the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” the Islamic center that would not actually be a mosque and would not even be visible from “Ground Zero.”

According to Nate Silver, Newt’s biggest obstacle to the Republican nomination in 2012 is Sarah Palin. This is because the two of them appeal to the same demographic slice of the conservative base, but that slice likes Palin better than Gingrich. So maybe he thinks that to have a shot at the White House he has to out-Palin Palin. Otherwise, if that’s what he really thinks, someone should adjust his meds.