Category Archives: Republican Party

Same Old Song

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Ready for a “my eyes glaze over” moment? Just see this pro-torture op ed by Alan Dershowitz. In fact, just look at the headline: “Democrats and Waterboarding: The party will lose the presidential race if it defines itself as soft on terror.”

Please. The Right has been screaming that “Democrats will lose the trust of the American people if they define themselves as soft on [CHOOSE ONE: Communism, spies in the State Department, the nuclear threat, defense, crime, Islamofascism] since before I was born, which wasn’t exactly last week. Most of the time the allegation of “softness” is pure hysteria and has little to do with any actual softness. About half the time righties are whistling in the dark about what voters will do.

Over the years I’ve observed that voter opinion on security issues goes in cycles. For a time voters want to be “tough,” followed by another time in which they are tired of being tough and paying for bloated military budgets. I suspect we’re coming to the end of a “tough” cycle.

Cernig of Newshoggers has a fine takedown of Dershowitz, so I don’t have to write one. (See also Sadly, No.) I only want to add that favoring strong and effective antiterrorism measures and favoring waterboarding are not the same thing. They are no more the same thing as “effectively countering the spread of Communism” and “nuking China ” were the same thing 50 years ago.

IMO Dershowitz belongs with some of the other “savant idiots” mentioned in this essay by Daniel Davies.

Being extremely intelligent is rather like fucking sheep – once you’ve got a reputation for either, it’s extremely difficult to get rid of it. If someone was, at some long gone time in the past, a boy genius or an academic superstar, then they’re “incredibly smart” for life, no matter how many stupid things they actually say or do.

The cases on my mind at the moment are Enoch Powell and Larry Summers, but I daresay I could dig up a dozen more if I spent the time. Both of them amazingly intelligent, “scary smart”, capable of quoting reams of Ancient Greek at you while simultaneously calculating the complex conjugate of a plate of spaghetti, backwards. On the other hand, could someone tell me one single example of a clever thing either of them did or said? Not so easy.

In fact, both of these famously intelligent men are not famous for intelligent things they did or said, or even for possessing a modicum of ordinary common sense. They’re famous for actually stupid things that they did and said. In fact, as far as I can tell, the career trajectories of nearly everyone commonly regarded as a “genius” seem to be marked by one boneheaded blunder after another.

Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to get up in front of a “Women in Science” conference and tell them that the reason you don’t employ many women as science professors is that they aren’t good enough? Incredibly intelligent, apparently, that’s how stupid. How stupid do you have to be to not only start talking about “the River Tiber foaming with blood”, but then subsequently to claim that you didn’t realise that it would be controversial? Apparently, only the cleverest man in the House of Commons has what it takes to be as dumb as that.

What this suggests to me is that we greatly overvalue book-larnin’ these days. Lots of otherwise sensible commentators will regularly admit that a “genius” politician was not very good at politics, or a “genius” academic administrator was a terrible manager, but then continue as if they regarded mere incompetence at one’s chosen career to be of secondary importance, compared to the far greater value of being a genius.

In fact, I’d put most of our public “intelligentsia” in the same pot.

Yesterday’s state and local elections showed us that many “hot button” issues dear to the Right had little impact on voters. For example, Amy Gardner writes at the Washington Post “In the Ballot Booths, No Fixation on Immigration.”

Voters across Virginia chose candidates in state and local elections yesterday not out of anger over illegal immigration but based on party affiliation, a preference for moderation and strong views on such key issues as residential growth and traffic congestion.

With a few notable exceptions, the trend benefited Democrats and not those who campaigned the loudest for tough sanctions against illegal immigrants.

At The Hill, Jonathan Kaplan writes “GOP turns impeachment resolution against Dems.”

House Republicans on Tuesday nearly forced Democratic leaders to vote on a resolution to impeach Vice President Cheney.

Anti-war presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) introduced a privileged resolution, used to circumvent the committee process, to get his impeachment measure to the House floor.

The vote to kill Kucinch’s privileged resolution began as a largely party-line affair, but halfway through the vote, Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) persuaded Republican leaders to get rank-and-file GOP lawmakers to change their votes to force the debate.

At one point, the vote to table the motion stood at 246-165. Once Republicans began switching their votes, momentum swung the other way. When the vote stood at 205-206, some Democrats began switching their votes.

The vote to kill Kucinich’s resolution finally failed 162-251, giving Republicans the opportunity to watch Democrats debate whether to impeach Cheney — a debate in which many liberal Democrats were more than willing to engage.

House Republicans clearly enjoyed watching Democratic leaders squirm during the series of votes, which lasted more than one hour.

I would have enjoyed watching Democratic leaders squirm also, and I’m sorry I missed it. But if the Republicans think that impeachment is a loser issue for Dems, they need to get out more. As Kagro X says, “Republicans believe everything is good for Republicans.” Well, wait ’til next year …

Neither

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I just received the November issue of Reason magazine. I don’t know why, since I don’t subscribe to it. But the cover is stunning, and not in a good way. It’s a photograph of Rudy Giuliani with the blurb, “The Liberal Candidate: Is Rudy Giuliani a new Barry Goldwater or a new Bobby Kennedy?”

Um, Reason magazine? Are you people nuts?

The article, which is not yet online, is written by David Weigel. I’ve only skimmed the article, but Weigel seems to take the Giuliani-Bobby Kennedy comparison seriously. Among other things, Giuliani “considers the crusading Kennedy the model for how to use power.”

Please.

Michael Tomasky has a more accurate view.

[Giuliani] will say and do anything he feels he needs to say and do to get power.

Newspapers write that he was “liberal” on social issues in his mayoral days, as if his positions on abortion and immigration were matters of conviction. Nonsense. He took the positions he needed to take to be elected in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. (Although to grant him a speck of humanity, I’d guess that his pro-gay rights views were more or less genuine: anyone living in the city gets to know many gay people.)

And now he is saying and doing whatever he needs to say and do to get millions of rightwing Americans to support him. He recently told a meeting of social conservatives that his reliance on God “is at the core of who I am”. As mayor he was known to attend mass almost never, he obviously cheated serially on the wife (wife No 2) he married in the Catholic church, and the only occasions on which I can remember him invoking God when he was mayor were the two times he was forced to say “so help me God” in taking the oath of office.

But forward he will charge, telling more lies with even more impunity. And immunity, because in a culture where a sense of history is largely limited to remembering certain stirring television images, he will for the most part get away with it, confident in the knowledge that the main thing most Americans will ever recall about him is the film clip of him running from the rubble of the World Trade Centre on September 11. A far smaller percentage will know that the reason he had run was because he had catastrophically decided to place his emergency command centre in the tower complex – the only building in New York that had previously been the target of a major terrorist attack.

Tomasky’s title: “This is one dangerous man: it’s George Bush with brains.”

Weigel admits that Giuliani is not a libertarian, but he seems to want to believe that Rudy would be sorta kinda libertarian in some ways — a “liberal” who will cut taxes and be tough on national security.

A few months ago there was a lot of nonsense scattered about the web about Giuliani’s “libertarianism,” but I had thought the libertarians had started to catch on to the Truth About Rudy. At least Lew Rockwell isn’t fooled —

After Giuliani spoke, the red-state fascists in the audience all started whooping up the bloodlust that the politicians have been encouraging for the last six years – a mindless display of Nazi-like nationalism that would cause the founding fathers to shudder with fear of what we’ve become. These people are frantic about terrorism and extremism abroad, but they need to take a good hard look in the mirror.

Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.

More Suggestions

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A couple of editorials in tomorrow’s New York Times that will get your heart pumping … first, “Playing Games With Toy Safety“:

With the holiday season approaching, there is more bad news about the federal agency charged with protecting children from unsafe toys. Nancy Nord, acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, joined industry lobbyists in opposing a Senate bill intended to strengthen her enfeebled agency. That was followed by the revelation that Ms. Nord and her predecessor took free trips from the toy industry.

Second, “Republican Tricks on Children’s Health“:

For weeks now, the president and his Congressional allies have charged that the Democrats are unwilling to negotiate a compromise on expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip, because they want to use Republican opposition as a campaign issue. But it is the Senate’s Republican leaders who are doing their best to block any compromise.

They clearly would prefer to have no bill enacted — and provide ammunition for the president’s campaign to depict Congress as a failure — than do anything meaningful to help children.

Words fail.

Lies, Damn Lies, and …

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Rudy Giuliani is running a radio ad that is generating much comment and derision. Paul Krugman explains:

“My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and thank God I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent,” says Rudy Giuliani in a new radio ad attacking Democratic plans for universal health care. “My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent, under socialized medicine.”

Really?

You see, the actual survival rate in Britain is 74.4 percent. That still looks a bit lower than the U.S. rate, but the difference turns out to be mainly a statistical illusion. The details are technical, but the bottom line is that a man’s chance of dying from prostate cancer is about the same in Britain as it is in America.

Defending Rudy, rightie blogger Don Surber spoke up:

The head of the National Health Service, Alan Johnson, took offense when Rudy Giuliani pointed out that the 5-year survival rate of prostate cancer is superior in the United States to places like England that offer “free” health care.

Rudy is a prostate cancer survivor. Rudy said in the U.S. the survival rate is 82%, 44% in socialized medicine countries.

Johnson waded into this and piped up that he has a 74% survival rate.

So what? It is 99.3% here.

Rudy was not misleading anyone. He was only using old data. New data shows that the billions Americans spend on cancer research is paying off.

Lancet Oncology magazine ran the numbers last month, according to Medscape.

I looked at the Medscape article Surber linked. The numbers he provides are from an analysis “headed by Arduino Verdecchia, PhD, from the National Center for Epidemiology, Health Surveillance, and Promotion, in Rome, Italy, was based on the most recent data available. It involved about 6.7 million patients from 21 countries, who were diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2002.” So it’s about five years old.

Medscape also says, “The United Kingdom in particular comes out badly in the tables, showing cancer survival rates that are among the worst in Europe.” So comparisons with the UK are not necessarily indicative of “socialized medicine countries.”

But what about the 99.3 percent survival rate? I spent way too much time this morning cruising around for information, and I am way confused. For example, the Center for Disease Control gives a survival rate of 97% and a mortality rate of 26.5, which to number-challenged me makes no sense. I’m sure one of you will attempt to patiently explain it to me, though.

This is from the American Cancer Society:

The 5-year relative survival rate is the percentage of patients who do not die from prostate cancer within 5 years after the cancer is found. (Men with prostate cancer who die of other causes are not counted.) Of course, patients might live more than 5 years after diagnosis. These 5-year survival rates are based on men with prostate cancer first treated more than 5 years ago.

Overall, 99% of men diagnosed with prostate cancer survive at least 5 years. Ninety one percent of all prostate cancers are found while they are still within the prostate or only in nearby areas. The 5-year relative survival rate for these men is nearly 100%. For the men whose cancer has already spread to distant parts of the body when it is found, about 32% will survive at least 5 years.

There are relative survival rates and age-adjusted survival rates and all kinds of other rates, plus mortality rates that make it seem people are surviving and dying at the same time, and the numbers are all over the map. I hypothesize that all these different sources are basing their numbers on diverse criteria, and comparing one set of stats with another is likely comparing apples to oranges. And I have a headache.

Eugene Robinson:

As several truth-squading journalists — notably, The Post’s Michael Dobbs— have pointed out, mortality rates from prostate cancer in Britain and the United States are roughly the same: About 25 men out of 100,000 die of prostate cancer each year in both countries. (That’s the standard way of reporting mortality rates, deaths per 100,000 individuals.)

From there I finally got to Michael Dobbs’s explanation, and it’s very clear and good, and there is a line graph to help those of us who need visuals. The line graph reveals that African American men are way more likely to die from prostate cancer than either white Americans or Brits, which ought to be a concern.

The other point Dobbs explains is that prostate cancer tends to develop very slowly. I gather that nearly everyone survives at least five years from the onset of the disease, with or without treatment. So, because patients in the U.S. are diagnosed much sooner, our diagnosis-to-death stats are much better than Britain’s, even though the actual outcomes aren’t much different from Britain’s.

Back to Krugman:

So Mr. Giuliani’s supposed killer statistic about the defects of “socialized medicine” is entirely false. In fact, there’s very little evidence that Americans get better health care than the British, which is amazing given the fact that Britain spends only 41 percent as much on health care per person as we do.

The 41 percent is a step up; it was a lot less than that in the 1990s.

The figure shows spending for health care per capita in various nations, in 1998. I added “USA” and “UK.” In 1998, the U.S. was spending $4,178 per capita and the UK was spending $1,461 per capita. (From the University of Maine’s “The U.S. Health Care System: The Best in the World, or Just the Most Expensive?” [PDF]). There’s no question that the British NHS has problems, but my understanding is that most of those problem stem from gross underfunding rather than the nature of the system itself.

Krugman, again:

Anyway, comparisons with Britain have absolutely nothing to do with what the Democrats are proposing. In Britain, doctors are government employees; despite what Mr. Giuliani is suggesting, none of the Democratic candidates have proposed to make American doctors work for the government.

To righties, all universal health care proposals are the same. They’re all “socialized medicine” or “Hillarycare.” Since what Senator Clinton proposes now bears little resemblance to what she proposed as First Lady in 1993, it can be argued that even Hillary isn’t pushing “Hillarycare.” But what this shows us is that righties aren’t even looking at the arguments or proposals. Their reactions are pure knee-jerk groupthink, and their opinions are based more on irrational fears and emotions than on facts.

Ezra Klein writes,

Giuliani’s cancer was treated by way of a therapy called Bradychardia, which involves implanting small, rice-sized radioactive capsules into the prostate gland. The technique was developed [PDF] by a researcher from Copenhagen, Denmark. Denmark, you’ll recall, is both in Europe and has a universal healthcare system. It’s a wonder Giuliani didn’t stalk out of his hospital on principle.

Moreover, Giuliani was unlucky enough to get prostate cancer at a fairly young age. But his experience was not typical. The average age at the time of diagnosis is 70 – which means that the domestic care Giuliani is lauding is being provided under the auspices of Medicare – a federally-run, single-payer insurance system.

Ah-HAH! Take THAT, Don Surber.

Since Mr. Surber cited the Lancet Oncology journal as a source, I poked around on the Lancet site looking for more information. Most of their articles are behind a pricey subscription firewall. But I did come across one that’s available for public view, from the October 2007 issue: “Increasing inequalities in US healthcare need taming.”

Although clinics in the USA offer some of the best anticancer services in the world, the proportion of Americans who cannot access these services is shocking. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2005 46·6 million Americans (including 8·3 million children) were without health insurance, with certain subgroups of the population faring especially poorly. For example, a quarter of people whose household income was less than $25 000 were uninsured—this is not surprising, however, given that the average cost of a single adult insurance policy is $2268. Texas had the highest percentage of uninsured people with 30% of adults aged under 65 years without insurance. From an oncology perspective, uninsured people are less likely to have access to screening or early-detection facilities; are more likely to be diagnosed late with more advanced tumours; are less likely to receive appropriate treatment; and are more likely to die from their cancer. Clearly, to make progress in the war on cancer, access to healthcare is a fundamental requirement that precedes any concerns about specific treatments.

Even for those with insurance, coverage is often less than optimum. A 2006 survey by USA Today, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard School of Public Health, of 930 adults who had cancer or who had a family member in their household with cancer, showed that insurance plans for nearly a quarter of patients paid less than actually needed; one in ten patients reached the limit of what their insurance would pay for cancer treatment; one in 12 were unable to get a specific type of treatment because of insurance limitations; and one in 14 were unable to pay for basic necessities such as food, heating, or housing because of financial burdens encountered in paying for their treatments. Furthermore, 6% of patients lost their health insurance as a result of having cancer. More than 17 million US adults are underinsured, yet current legislation to ensure appropriate provision is inadequate. For example, although many US states recently mandated that insurers cover screening for cancers of the breast, cervix, prostate, and colon, several states have since passed exceptions to these mandates, thereby allowing health insurance companies a licence to underinsure. …

… Currently, about 2·5 million people are diagnosed with cancer in the USA each year, of which about one in six have no health insurance and will receive inadequate care. Given the wealth of the USA, these figures are frankly unacceptable. In the run up to the 2008 US presidential elections, the time is right to highlight these issues to make them a high political priority, and to finally eliminate this appalling inequality of care.

See also Joe Conason [Update] and The Carpetbagger.

Wild Things

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I didn’t watch the GOP debate last night, choosing instead to flip between CSI reruns and an Animal Planet show about a charmingly nutty couple and their pet hippopotamus. (Pet owners tip: Feeding your hippo too many sweet potatoes can give her diarrhea.) But judging by the Reason Magazine live blog, the GOP debate made damn fine comedy. A sample:

7:55: Sean Hannity bashes Hillary Clinton (“she’ll promise all of them a new car!”) and then asserts that Republicans “want a positive agenda.” His irony-fu is strong.

8:04: Rudy Giuliani: The real conservative, because George Will said so. As he did at the FRC conference, he mentions his war on porn in his list of conservative achievements. (An auspicious start: My server timed out and gobbled my first two debate comments.)

8:05: I suppose some people will care that Mitt Romney’s cowlick underwent structural damage right before the debate began. He’s conservative because he can bring the Republican *gutteral noise* HILLARY CLINTON HILLARY CLINTON grhgh.

8:07: Fred Thompson: Real leadership means making Ted Kennedy fat jokes. coughing and “I only got a minute here.”

Egalia of Tennessee Guerilla Women:

Wow. I’ve never seen anything like it. Eight raging hormonal white men savaging one Democratic woman.

Some Republicans might want to call this a presidential debate, I call it the eruption of a whole lot of anxious white male fear and loathing of a woman in line to take charge.

This was one rabidly he-man affair. And the seething Republican crowd was right there with them. …

… Fox News moderator Chris Wallace gave the cue for the men to beat their hairy he-man chests when he asked:

“Is she fit to be Commander-in-Chief?”

The Republican audience yelled “NO!”

The post by Paul Mirengoff of Power Tools is unintentionally hilarious; a work of brilliant if unconscious self-parody.

Thompson’s ability to slug it out with Giuliani, coupled with overall improvement in the quality of his answers, makes him one of tonight’s winners. The other major winner was John McCain. McCain brought the house down when he criticized Hillary Clinton for supporting the Woodstock memorial museum. McCain acknowledged that Woodstock must have been “a cultural and pharmaceutical event,” but noted that he couldn’t make it because he “was tied up at the time.” McCain got off another great line when asked if President Bush had been naive when it came to Vladimir Putin. McCain said he didn’t know about that, but when he (McCain) looked into Putin’s eyes (he probably meant to say soul) he saw three letters, K-G-B. In addition to the one-liners, McCain gave sensible and concise answers on a range of issues.

“Sensible and concise answers” in Rightie World means talking in complete sentences for a minute and a half while looking somber. The actual content of the talk is irrelevant. Righties only care about the red meat. More one liners! More Hillary bashing!

Despite failing to shoot down Thompson, Giuliani had another good night. Several times, he successfully tied his answers to quotes from or references to Ronald Reagan. When he’s doing that (instead of rehearsing his New York city crime fighting record), it’s a sure sign that he’s successfully defending himself on the merits as a conservative.

If you can speak reverently of Saint Ronald, you must be a real conservative.

Romney was solid, as he generally is, but didn’t say anything memorable. In response to a softball question about whether Hillary Clinton would make a good commander-in-chief, Romney talked about how he’s better than she is at running things. He thus fluffed an opportunity to attack Hillary on matters of substance.

Matters of substance, like the Woodstock memorial museum. “Better than she is at running things” sounds boring.

Near the end of the debate, he finally launched into an attack on the Clinton administration’s “vacation from history” foreign policy (“we got the dividend but not the peace”). Attacks like that are guaranteed winners in these kinds of debates, and Romney needs to make them at every opportunity.

Less boring policy wonk talk! More jokes! More chest thumping!

When they weren’t bashing Hillary Clinton to show how manly they are, the candidates squabbled over which of them was most conservative. And that takes me to a fascinating opinion piece by Michael Tomasky on the Guardian web site.

Let me offer what I think is the most important undercurrent question of next year’s election: have Americans tired of conservatism, or have they merely tired of corrupt and incompetent conservatism?

Tomasky points out that “movement conservatism” has been around since the 1950s, but not until the Bush Administration did movement conservatives have complete control of the federal government. Reagan had a Democratic Congress, and when the Republicans took over the Congress in the 1990s they had to deal with a Democratic president. Divided government moderated what the Right could achieve and provided righties with someone to blame for whatever went wrong.

Then came Bush. At first things were motoring along nicely, and Bush guru Karl Rove’s prediction that a permanent conservative majority was coalescing seemed probable. Now it has all crashed and burned for the reasons we know about. But we still don’t know what exactly is that “it”.

That is, Americans have now experienced a conservative government failing them. But what lesson will they take? That conservatism itself is exhausted and without answers to the problems that confront American and the world today? Or will they conclude that the problem hasn’t been conservatism per se, just Bush, and that a conservatism that is competent and comparatively honest will suit them just fine?

Conservatives and the Republican presidential candidates hope and argue that it’s the latter. They largely endorse and in some cases vow to expand on the Bush administration’s policies – Mitt Romney’s infamous promise to “double” the size of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, notably. Like Bush, they vow that tax cuts, deregulation and smaller government will solve every domestic problem. Where they try to distinguish themselves from Bush is on competence. Romney talks up his corporate success, Rudy Giuliani his prowess as mayor of New York.

“Movement” conservatives have been talking up the magic powers of tax cuts and smaller government since the 1950s (before that, conservatives weren’t a “movement”). I think by now most Americans have noticed that there is no magic. There’s just talk. Bill Clinton may have been a womanizing, big-spending liberal (not really all that big spending or that liberal, of course), but by damn, the man could run a government. And Tomasky points to a fact righties want to forget: “Reagan left office with a lower approval rating than Bill Clinton did.” The “golden age” wasn’t all that golden.

In some ways liberalism/progressivism is in the same place today that conservatism was in the 1950s and 1960s. IMO the last Democratic president who pushed an unabashedly progressive domestic policy was Lyndon Johnson. Although LBJ was hugely unpopular and became the post-FDR template for big-government, tax-and-spend liberalism, I contend that much of the backlash to Johnson’s programs was less about political and economic ideology than it was about racism. In any event, a growing number of adult Americans are too young to remember what even a mildly progressive federal government was like, which makes progressivism the new new thing.

I don’t think Americans are really that averse to government programs if they can see they are getting some value from them. What they don’t like, is waste. Which brings us back to our current rule by movement conservatives — those people waste money like there’s no tomorrow. How can these whackjobs seriously think they can scare voters with the charge that Democrats will spend their tax dollars? Republicans have been burning tax dollars by the truckload on pork and an unpopular war, and there’s none left over for anything Americans want their tax dollars going to. Waste, waste, waste. I get a sense that voters are damn sick of it, especially after Katrina.

The other point of contention is taxes. A generation of Americans have been born and grown into adulthood listening to rightie propaganda that taxes must always go down. “Starve the beast,” you know. The problem is that “the beast” conservatives are starving is our country. Do read this editorial in today’s New York Times:

This country’s meager tax take puts its economic prospects at risk and leaves the government ill equipped to face the challenges from globalization.

According to a report from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a think tank run by the industrialized countries, the taxes collected last year by federal, state and local governments in the United States amounted to 28.2 percent of gross domestic product. That rate was one of the lowest among wealthy countries — about five percentage points of G.D.P. lower than Canada’s, and more than eight points lower than New Zealand’s. And Danes, Germans and Slovaks paid more in taxes, as a share of their economies.

Politicians on the right have continuously paraded the specter of statism to rally voters’ support for tax cuts, mainly for the rich. But the meager tax take leaves the United States ill prepared to compete. From universal health insurance to decent unemployment insurance, other rich nations provide their citizens benefits that the United States government simply cannot afford.

The consequences include some 47 million Americans without health insurance and companies like General Motors being dragged to the brink by the cost of providing workers and pensioners with medical care.

President Bush and his tax-averse friends extol the fact that the tax haul has risen over the past two years as evidence of the wisdom of his tax cuts. But if anything, the numbers underscore the economy’s weaknesses — mainly its growing inequality.

Indeed, the growth in tax revenue since 2004 is due mostly to the spectacular increase in corporate profits, which have grown at the expense of workers’ wages. Moreover, it’s proving ephemeral. As economic growth has decelerated, corporate profits are losing steam and the growth of tax revenue has begun to slow. This pretty much guarantees that the revenue will prove too low to face the challenges ahead.

I think a majority of the American people are ready to listen to an argument for progressivism. The only question I have is whether Democrats have the guts to make that argument, and if elected, will deliver a genuinely progressive government instead of a grab bag of Clintonian mini-ideas. And because of Republican mismangement we’re likely to be heading into some lean years, no matter how competent the government, and you know the rightie noise machine will blame Democrats for the mess movement conservatism made. They won’t go away anytime soon.

Meanwhile, I look forward to the next GOP debate. I hear the candidates will wear gorilla suits and burn Hillary in effigy. Could be better than Animal Planet.

Update: Hillary bites the heads off puppies?

Update 2: See also Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger.

Bring Back the Smoke Filled Rooms

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This is a textbook example of why We, the People, no longer matter in American politics, from Jonathan Martin at The Politico.

It could be an episode of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story.” Mitt Romney was announced from the podium Saturday afternoon as the winner of the Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Straw Poll,” narrowly edging Mike Huckabee.

But it turns out that the 5,775-vote total included thousands of people who had voted online, and could have become eligible by paying as little as $1 to join FRC Action, the legislative action arm of Family Research Council.

Although the audience at the Washington Hilton was not told, the crowd favorite among the 952 attendees who voted in person turned out to be Huckabee by a mile. He got 51 percent of the in-person votes, compared to just 10 percent for Mitt Romney.

This led one rival to suggest the headline, “Romney Win$ Straw Poll.”

I would just love to ask some of the people who actually attended the FRC shindig how they feel about this. Used, one suspects.

I’ve been wondering why there doesn’t seem to be more movement toward Huckabee in the ranks of white conservative evangelicals. It turns out that whenever white conservative evangelicals get a close look at Huckabee, they flock to him like pigeons to bread crumbs. It’s the leadership of the “values voters” movement who aren’t flocking. I can only guess why that might be, but I suspect that power and money are factors, somehow.

The various Powers That Be like to go through the motions of asking us ordinary people what we think, but ultimately they don’t care. Eventually they’ll settle on whatever candidates promise them the most perks and influence, and then they’ll go about marketing those candidates to the rest of us, like toothpaste. Meanwhile, any candidate who fails to meet with their approval simply will not get the media exposure he or she needs to be competitive.

Note that I’m not saying I want Huckabee to be the nominee. Underneath Huckabee’s nice-guy exterior is a five-alarm whackjob. The point is that what went on at the FRC exemplifies how we’re all being jerked around.

Once upon a time there were no presidential primaries. The nominee was chosen at the party conventions, usually through a process that combined the opinions of delegates with behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing in the famous smoke-filled rooms. States began holding primaries as a way to “popularize” the nominating process. But the people at the top of the power pyramid have learned how to jerk the rest of us around and manipulate what “we” think. Most people go to polls knowing no more about the politicians they vote for than they do about what’s really in their toothpaste. All they know is that it tastes like mint and the people in the television ads have real nice teeth.

What Did They Expect?

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More on why Fred Thompson won’t be the GOP nominee, from Steve Benen.

Yesterday’s “Values Voter Summit,” the year’s largest religious right gathering, offered the actor/lobbyist/senator a chance to reconnect with the activists who’ve been slipping away. How’d he do? I spoke to several people who were on hand for the event, and everyone agreed that they were amazed at how awful he is on the stump.

And here Steve quotes from a New York Times article by Michael Luo:

[Thompson] spoke with his chin often buried in his chest, his voice largely monotone, and he cleared his throat or coughed repeatedly, prompting some to wonder if he might be ill.

“He didn’t look good,” said Ronald Sell, 63, a musician from New York City.

Mr. Sell said he initially had high hopes for Mr. Thompson but left disappointed and wondering why as an actor, Mr. Thompson did not “at least have his lines memorized.”

“If he was the candidate, we’d be in trouble,” Mr. Sell said.

Hopes were raised, then dashed. I sincerely believe a lot of people who got on the Thompson bandwagon confused him with the character he plays (woodenly) on Law & Order. The only question I have is, if Thompson really wanted the presidency enough to bother to run, why isn’t he making a better effort?

The Eroding GOP Base

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Going back to Paul Krugman’s column — the professor writes about the fact that the GOP is hurting at campaign fund raising, in part because Republicans are losing the support of Big Corporations.

… it’s not surprising that lobbyists are casting in their lot with the likely winners. But that’s not the whole story.

There’s also disgust, even in the corporate world, with the corruption and incompetence of the Bush years. People on the left often describe the Bush administration as an agent of corporate America; that’s giving it too much credit.

The truth is that while the administration has lavished favors on some powerful, established corporations, the biggest scandals have involved companies that were small or didn’t exist at all until they started getting huge contracts thanks to their political connections. Thus, Blackwater USA was a tiny business until it somehow became the leading supplier of mercenaries for the War on Terror™.

And the lethal amateurishness of these loyal Bushies on the make horrifies the corporate elite almost as much as it horrifies ordinary Americans.

Last but not least, even corporations are relieved to see the end of what amounted to a protection racket.

In a classic 2003 article in The Washington Monthly, Nicholas Confessore (now at The New York Times) described the efforts of people like former Senator Rick Santorum to turn K Street into an appendage of the Republican Party — not the other way around. “The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer,” wrote Mr. Confessore, “are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the G.O.P.”

But corporations weren’t happy. According to The Politico, “many C.E.O.’s” used the term “extortion” to describe “the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.” And now that Mr. Santorum is out of office, heading the America’s Enemies program at a right-wing think tank, the faint sound you hear from K Street is that of lobbyists singing: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”

I looked up the Nicholas Confessore article Krugman cites. It’s called “Welcome to the Machine,” and it was published in the July/August 2003 issue of Washington Monthly. It’s actually kind of fun to read it now. Even though the Machine is far from being dismantled, it ain’t what it was in 2003. This part exemplifies what Krugman is talking about regarding extortion:

But the flip side of the deal is that trade associations and corporations are expected to back the party’s initiatives even on occasions when doing so is not in their own best interest. When Bush’s recently passed dividends tax cut proposal was first announced, the life insurance industry complained that the bill would sharply reduce the tax advantage of annuities sold by insurance companies, potentially costing them hundreds of millions of dollars. The industry’s lobbyists were told to get behind the president’s proposal anyway–or lose any chance to plead their case. So they did. In mid-March, Frank Keating, the head of the industry’s trade group and a close friend of Bush’s, hand-delivered a letter to the White House co-signed by nearly 50 CEOs, endorsing the president’s proposal while meekly raising the hope that taxes on dividends from annuities would also be included in the final repeal (which they weren’t). Those firms that didn’t play ball on Bush’s pan paid the price. The Electronic Industries Alliance was one of the few big business lobbies that declined to back the tax cut, in large part because the high-tech companies that make up a good portion of its membership don’t even issue dividends. As a result, the trade group was frozen out of all tax discussions at the White House.

And here’s the final paragraph:

A little over a century ago, William McKinley–Karl Rove’s favorite president–positioned the Republican Party as a bulwark of the industrial revolution against the growing backlash from agrarian populists, led by Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The new business titans flocked to McKinley’s side, providing him with an extraordinary financial advantage over Bryan. McKinley’s victory in 1896 ushered in a long period of government largely by and for industry (interrupted briefly, and impermanently, by the Progressive Era). But with vast power came, inevitably, arrogance and insularity. By the 1920s, Republican rule had degenerated into corruption and open larceny–and a government that, in the face of rapidly growing inequality and fantastic concentration of wealth and opportunity among the fortunate few, resisted public pressure for reform. It took a few more years, and the Great Depression, for the other shoe to drop. But in 1932 came the landslide election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the founding of the very structure of governance today’s Republicans hope to dismantle. Who knows? History may yet repeat itself.

Where have you gone, Franklin Roosevelt?

I want to go back to the notion that the Bushies are agents of corporate America, verses the “lethal amateurishness of these loyal Bushies” apparent now even to CEOs. I think the Bushies saw themselves as agents of corporate America, people who would “run the government like a business,” to recall a popular phrase of the 1990s. When the Bush Administration began the Bushies were full of the conceit that they were so much more disciplined and business-like than the Clintons they could work regular “business” hours. James Carney and John F. Dickerson, CNN, March 12, 2001:

Bush’s take-it-slow-and-easy approach is yet another rebuke to his predecessor. Clinton came to office promising to work for the people “until the last dog dies.” In Clinton’s world, working hard meant exhausting yourself, something the President and his staff did regularly, especially in his first term, when leaving the White House before midnight was viewed as proof of a lack of commitment. Clinton’s sheer effort was a key part of his message.

Not so President Bush. “I don’t like to sit around in meetings for hours and hours and hours,” he told TIME during the campaign. “People will tell you, I get to the point.” Meetings should be crisp and should end with decisions. Talking matters less than doing. “People who make up Republican White Houses come from the business world and are used to a business-like routine: getting in early, getting it done and going home,” says Bush spokes-man Ari Fleischer. By contrast, he adds, Democrats tend to come from “the world of government service, which is much more hectic and much less disciplined.”

I wrote a post last year about what bullshit that turned out to be. But one of the funny things about the loyal Bushies is that most of ’em made their bones in government service, academia, rightie think tanks or the Republican Party itself. The few who were genuine businessmen — like the original Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Snow O’Neill — were the first to go. Even Dick the Dick, though he was a CEO of Halliburton, was reportedly not allowed to make operational decisions in that capacity. He was an asset to Halliburton mostly because of his extensive contacts in government and the military-industrial complex.

In other words, these guys were of the “business world” in the same way the 101st Fighting Keyboarders are “warriors” — make believe.

The GOP is also losing the support of conservative evangelicals. Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. write in today’s Washington Post:

For months, Republican presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and John McCain have courted evangelical Christians, meeting with religious leaders throughout the Midwest and the South.

Today, thousands of Christian conservatives will gather in Washington to confront the fact that none of the candidates has won them over. …

… “At the moment, there’s nothing but confusion every place I go,” said Chuck Colson, who runs the Prison Fellowship, a national Christian ministry. “They lament the fact that there’s no one candidate out there around whom evangelicals and conservative Catholics can sort of coalesce around and get excited about.”

He added: “Nobody has rung the bell yet.”

Giuliani’s too socially liberal, Romney’s a Mormon and therefore not Christian enough, Thompson lost points when he refused to endorse a federal ban on same-sex marriage and flubbed a question about Terri Schiavo, McCain has some bad history with evangelical leaders. I suppose Ron Paul is too antiwar. Brownback, who dropped out of the race this week, is Catholic, and in spite of the evangelical-Catholic alliance on abortion there is still much anti-papist sentiment among evangelicals, I suspect.

That leaves Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, and Alan Keyes, all of whom seem tailor made for evangelicals as far as I can tell. Keyes won’t get the racist vote, so he’s out, but it’s not clear to me why evangelicals aren’t rallying around one of the other three. Huckabee in particular seems reasonably marketable, and he’s even an ordained Baptist minister. Yet the big guns on the Religious Right — James Dobson, Bob Jones III, Pat Robertson, etc. — are either withholding endorsement or have endorsed one of the unpalatable frontrunners.

Bulworth writes,

Not that I mind the fact that the Christian Fascists are splintered, unhappy and forming circular firing squads. But this media narrative that fails to critically assess just what it is that the evangelical, fundy right really wants is annoying. They have candidates. But those candidates are not doing well in general, and are mysteriously not getting attention and support from “values voters” in particular. Moreover, some, perhaps many, of the Christianist’s movers and shakers are affiliated with one of the more “establishment” candidates. What does that say about the so-called “values voters” and their leaders?

I’m not sure what’s going on either. Maybe the leadership is holding out for a higher bid — someone who will promise them more power and perks. It’s possible evangelicals are starting to feel jerked around by these clowns, and the “Christian coalition” itself is coming unglued. Not that I’d mind.

Update: See also Pastor Dan.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

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    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. — Some historical artifact hanging in the Rotunda that Republicans might want to read sometime

Yesterday I linked to an NRO post by Mark Hemingway that attacked the parents of Bethany Wilkerson. Among other insinuations, Hemingway wrote,

While the debate around the Frost family at least initially centered around their relative wealth, the issue really at hand is one of bad behavior. While USAction and a labyrinthine maze of leftist activist groups prepare to rally around images of Tampa Bay’s Most Photogenic Baby holding up a crayon sign that says “Don’t Veto Me,” Dara and Brian Wilkerson are real poster children — for irresponsible decisions.

On the conference call, Dara admitted to me that she and Brian had been talking about having children since before they were married. She further admitted that after they were married she voluntarily left a job at a country club that had good health insurance, because the situation was “unmanageable.” From there she took a job at a restaurant with no health insurance, and the couple went on to have a baby anyway, presuming that others would pay for it and certainly long before they knew their daughter would have a heart defect that probably cost the gross national product of Burkina Faso to fix. But not knowing about future health problems is the reason we have insurance in the first place.

Blog reaction to Hemingway was, um, strong. Bill Scher:

In the conservative vision for America, the only people who should choose to have children are people that can afford health insurance. Or in other words: “Pro-Life (If You Can Pay For It).” …

… The honest conservative response to seeing the struggles of working class Americans is to mock them.

And the more honest conservatives are about their cold and callous vision for America, the easier it will be for American voters to make informed decisions about where we should go as a nation.

The Carpetbagger:

Hemingway left out a pertinent detail: Dara left that job seven years before Bethany was born. The implication in the National Review piece is that Dara should have stayed at her job in order to provide for her family. The reality shows otherwise. (And Hemingway’s decision to leave this fact out doesn’t reflect well on his argument.)

Digby:

Implicit in all of this is that every parent in this country has an obligation to either work for someone who provides health insurance for their families —- or be rich. The alternatives — entrepreneurial risk taking, working for retail employers like Walmart or restaurants which fail to provide health insurance, is something that no responsible parent would do. Therefore, that sector of the economy is completely off limits to middle class families. And that is the only sector of the economy that’s actually growing.

(Oh, and by the way, those health insurance providing companies which all responsible middle class should work for are under no obligation to these employees with kids who indenture themselves for the benefit. They are allowed to pull back this coverage any time they want, raise the contributions and fire the employees at will. That’s what Republicans call “liberty.”)

Today Hemingway is whining that he’s been misunderstood:

I suggested that the Wilkersons might have sacrificed by working less-desirable jobs, if that choice (or those choices) meant they could more adequately provide for their daughter. I said that a married couple that has been talking about having kids for years, but has failed to sacrifice financially or make basic economic preparations to pay for their first kid, is acting irresponsibly. That’s hardly “anti-life.” It’s common sense. How many people are in less than optimal jobs because of good benefits for their dependents?

Dude — we heard you the first time.

Life shouldn’t be something you put up with. Certainly, all of us deal with less-than-optimal situations every day; that’s life. But when the big stuff, the stuff that eats most of your time and concern — like your job or your marriage — become something you are just enduring year after year because you don’t have a choice, your life can seem like something you’re just waiting out.

I’ve had jobs that were so miserable I sincerely wondered if I wouldn’t be happier living in a cardboard box on the street. Once I bailed out of an insufferable work situation and found a new job that was even worse. And yes, I do ask myself if it’s me, but I have also had pleasant jobs that I’ve had to leave for reasons unrelated to the job. I think I have bad job karma.

We don’t know what Dara meant by “unmanageable.” Maybe the job required putting in unreasonable hours, which is not compatible with being a parent. Maybe the boss was hitting on her, or was abusive in some other way. I had one boss once who expected me to cheat the vendors and customers to save her money, which I found intolerable. There are some things nobody should have to put up with.

Let’s say Dara enjoys her current job and likes her boss and co-workers. What kind of “free” society would force her to choose between a job she likes and having children?

Freedom is about making your own choices, so let’s talk about choices. President Bush and other right wingers warn us that if we switch to “socialized medicine,” we’ll lose the freedom to choose our own doctors, which is bogus on two levels. First, citizens in most countries with universal health care can choose their own doctors. Second, under our current “system” workers all over America already have been forced to switch doctors by their employer’s managed care plan. And they can’t shop around for a new employer with a better managed care plan, because if they have pre-existing conditions they won’t be insured at all. So what choices do they have?

Even if you have insurance there’s no guarantee you’ll keep it if you develop a major medical problem. Get cancer, lose your home. Some choice.

In America, once upon a time, most people who weren’t slaves or servants were, in effect, self-employed. The whopping majority of free people were farmers. A young person might work for someone else for a while to learn a trade, with the expectation that he would strike out on his own when he was ready. In the 19th century, as the industrial revolution pulled people off farms and into factories, having to work for someone else was derided as “wage slavery.” Now, holding a job is not only respectable, it’s expected. A job isn’t slavery if you can walk away from it, right? But for growing numbers of Americans the system is rigged so that they can’t walk away from it. Call it “insurance slavery.” Road to serfdom, anyone?

John McG of Man Bites Blog writes,

That many people are in jobs they hate for the sake of insurance is a bug, not a feature. … Does the GOP really want to be the party of forcing people into life-sucking 40 hour a week jobs for huge companies for fear that they won’t have insurance? Seems like a loser to me.

I don’t care what the lyrics to the national anthem say; we’re not “the land of the free” if Americans aren’t allowed to make reasonable choices about how to live their own bleeping lives.

No Problemo

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George Will denying global climate change:

This illustrates what I’ve observed about how Democrats and Republicans deal with critical issues. Let’s say there’s a big honking Issue looming in the future — global warming, health care, whatever. Republicans will deny the problem exists until it bites their butts, then they blame Democrats for not having solved the problem sooner. The exception to this involves opportunities to undo some progressive program they hate, like Social Security; then they exaggerate the problem so they can spin their particular “solution.”

Democrats in general are better at recognizing an impending problem, and some of them can demonstrate considerable insight into what is causing the problem. They’ll make stirring speeches about how the problem needs to be addressed. But for the past several years, once they get to Washington their big ideas evaporate. An issue might cry out for a massive overhaul, and the Dems will offer band-aids.

Politicians of both parties are being influenced by Big Money, of course. They can’t do anything that will piss off big campaign contributors. So, nothing gets done.

But what’s Will’s excuse?