GOP: Slightly More Popular than Pakistan

If you follow me on Twitter (and you should, I'm fascinating), you'd know that I woke up this morning with no idea what to write about. Sometimes, you just cruise your RSS feeds and see what grabs you.

What grabbed my attention was a New York Times/CBS News poll that shows that GOP grandstanding and publicity stunts aren't really doing any good. Turns out that two-thirds of Americans approve of President Obama's overall job performance, while giving the Republican party low numbers.

How low? Bargain basement low. According to NYT, "[J]ust 31 percent of respondents said they had a favorable view of the Republican Party, the lowest in the 25 years the question has been asked in New York Times/CBS News polls." This means that, according to Pew, if the GOP were a country, it'd tie Cuba in popularity with Americans, between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Polling house statisticians have a technical term for approval ratings this low -- "screwed."





And why should the ratings be higher? It's not like the Republican party has had especially constructive ideas lately. Their April Fools Day budget alternative was put together in order to counter accusations of being the "party of no." It wasn't a serious proposal, because they knew it would go nowhere. It was just a public relations stunt. No one took it seriously -- including, as the poll shows, voters.

And, at a time when it would be really helpful for them to get their act together, they're fighting amongst themselves.

The Plumline:

You know there’s serious disarray afoot among a party’s Congressional leaders when the principals and their staffs start leaking damaging info about each other, and that now seems to be happening among House GOP leaders.

Check out this nugget from Ben Pershing’s piece on increasing tensions among House Republicans. It appears that someone is trying to pin the blame for the House GOP’s politically-disastrous, numbers-free budget on John Boehner:

Privately, [House Republican whip Eric] Cantor and the lawmaker tasked with writing the GOP budget, Rep. Paul D. Ryan, had urged the party to hold off going public until it could produce a finished product. Both men wanted a more detailed proposal with dollar figures that would make it a more defensible document. Boehner and House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence disagreed, hoping to counter as quickly as possible Democrats’ charge that Republicans are “the Party of No.” The result was a botched rollout and bad press.

And someone wants to shift the blame for the botched budget rollout away from Eric Cantor.

Hence the leak. Nothing the GOP has been trying has been working and they're stuck in sort of the opposite of a circle jerk -- they aren't trying to please each other, they're trying to stab each other in the back. Frankly, it's hard to blame Cantor. Boehner's a boob. Losing him would improve things for House Republicans immeasurably.

If Republicans are busy trying to shift blame to each other, is it any wonder that their approval ratings are so low?

As a result of Republican disarray, traditional GOP ideas have become extremely unpopular. CBS News notes that the poll shows that "almost three-quarters of Americans think it is a good idea to raise taxes on people making more than $250,000 per year..." While the GOP is trying to launch tired old defenses of their wealthy interests, the national mood is more along the lines of "soak the rich." The idea that the wealthy are the "wealth creators" isn't flying anymore -- mostly because it was never true anyway. They don't create wealth or jobs -- consumer demand does that -- all they really are are "wealth collectors." Not surprisingly, most people no longer see any economic value in pooling wealth in a few pockets.

I sometimes wonder if Republicans have stopped trying to regain voters. They sure don't seem to be. There is no new Republican message, it's all the same stuff they've always stood for. From economics to science to foreign policy to religious lunacy, they haven't changed a damned thing. None of this stuff flies anymore and it seems as if all they're doing is trying to hold their ground.

I suppose the idea there would be to stem the bleeding first and then recover. But if the current state of the party tells us anything, it's that they have no idea how to recover. During the Bush years, the party moved so far to the right that there's nowhere else to go in that direction. At least, nowhere other than complete Tim McVeigh, white supremacist, survivalist crazy land. If they move left, they risk losing those few who still support them, as they'll stop being sufficiently crazy.

In the end, it's their own damned fault. You can only stretch those centrist bonds so far before they snap. In trying to drag the country as far to the right as they possibly could, all they managed to do was move themselves away from the center and outside the mainstream.

If you don't believe me, ask the mainstream. They'll tell you.

-Wisco


Get updates via Twitter

Terrified into Terrorism

Last week, the Iowa Supreme Court overturned that state's ban on same sex marriage. The unanimous decision was based on fact and reason, as the court spelled out in their ruling. "The statute at issue in this case does not prescribe a definition of marriage for religious institutions. Instead, the statute declares, 'Marriage is a civil contract' and then regulates that civil contract," the ruling reads. "Thus, in pursuing our task in this case, we proceed as civil judges, far removed from the theological debate of religious clerics, and focus only on the concept of civil marriage and the state licensing system that identifies a limited class of persons entitled to secular rights and benefits associated with civil marriage."

In other words, marriage as a contract is the state's business, while marriage as a religious ceremony is religion's business -- and the state of Iowa isn't in the religion business. When two people can go to a Justice of the Peace and have themselves declared married, marriage stops being solely a religious institution. And, following that reasoning, marriage stopped being solely a religious institution a long time ago. The state has no more reason to care if you're upholding your religious traditions in the ceremony than they do whether you're upholding your family's traditions. Your religion is your business, not the state's. Iowa has no reason to care if you're being a good Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, etc. It's not the state's job.

If marriage were nothing but a religious ceremony, then it would be impossible for atheists to marry. In fact, it would be just as much of an offense for two atheists to marry as two people of the same gender. After all, a purely religious ceremony without any of the religious trappings and hoodoo would practically be the definition of a "mockery" -- like an atheist baptism. Oddly, few (I won't say none, because there's always someone) get all freaked out when two non-believers tie the knot, even though it obviously happens all the time, in every state.

In Iowa, the state Supreme Court used the laws of the land, not the laws of some randomly chosen religion, to reach their decision. As a result, the ruling is entirely rational. The problem is that many people reacting to the ruling are not.





For example, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins. "Same-sex 'marriage' continues to be a movement driven by a liberal judicial elite determined to destroy not only the institution of marriage, but democracy as well," he said. "The casual dismissal of the facts of human biology and thousands of years of human history, simply to pander to a small band of social radicals, is bizarre and indefensible."

That's right, the Iowa Supreme Court is trying to "destroy democracy." It's not extremely clear how they'll destroy it or why they want to, but it is clear that the nation is doomed to fall under the heel of the Homosexual Menace. Which is exactly what a press release from the Traditional Values Coalition warns of.

If this ruling is permitted to stand without challenge, it will result in the persecution of Christians and anyone else who criticizes homosexual conduct.

This ruling will mean that schools will be forced to teach that homosexual marriage is normal – and parents who object will face ridicule and possible criminal penalties against them.

This ruling will be used to force pastors to conduct same-sex ceremonies or face penalties.

Religious groups could lose government funding, tax exempt status or other benefits if they openly oppose same-sex marriage.

Religious employers could face penalties for refusing to provide spousal benefits to same-sex couples.

Religious colleges could be forced to extend housing benefits to same-sex couples.

Needless to say, almost none of that is true. These nuts read a decision that says religion is none of the state's business and come to the conclusion that the state is getting into the religion business. It's insane.

This isn't an extremist position, beliefnet's Rod Dreher shares these concerns and worries he won't be allowed to be a "public Christian." By "public Christian," he seems to mean "a jerk," since he thinks that he'll suffer "all the legal sanctions that now apply to people who openly express racist views." When the closest parallel to your situation that you yourself can come up with is the plight of the American racist, it might be a good time to stop and re-evaluate your beliefs.

It might also be a good time to check your hyperbole. When you're running around warning of the end of democracy, the oppression of Christians, and the end of freedom of speech, people are going to do something crazy like take you seriously. There are three groups who make up a large percentage of the far right -- the stupid, the gullible, and the gullible who are stupid. These people are going to buy this crap. That hasn't turned out so well in the past.

Associated Press, March 2009:

An unemployed truck driver seething over liberalism told police he opened fire in a church last year because it harbored gays and multiracial families and he hoped others would follow his example.

Prosecutors opened their case file Thursday on Jim David Adkisson, 58, who pleaded guilty a month ago to killing two people and wounding six others at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. The file includes interviews with investigators and a suicide note Adkisson left in his car...

"They just glory (in) these weirdos and sickos and homos," he said in an interview recorded by investigators...

Adkisson concluded, "I'd like to encourage other like-minded people to do what I've done. If life ain't worth living anymore don't just kill yourself. Do something for your country before you go. Go kill liberals."...

And, of course, we've recently been reminded just how dangerous a panic-stricken gullible ass can be. Richard Poplawski shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers and wounded two others over the weekend. Poplawski was "convinced the nation was secretly controlled by a cabal that would eradicate freedom of speech, take away his guns and use the military to enslave the citizenry... He appeared to share a belief that the government was controlled from unseen forces, that troops were being shipped home from the Mideast to police the citizenry here, and that Jews secretly ran the country." Apparently, he was a chump who believed everything he read. Of course, stupid people do stupid things -- often with terrible consequences. Many times, "gullible" and "dangerous" are synonymous.

Am I saying that people should be stopped from saying this hyperbolic BS? No, not by law anyway. But they should be held responsible in the court of public opinion whenever they open their mouths and this crap spills out. When you tell people the nazis are right around the corner, a'comin' to get them, you really shouldn't be surprised when some idiot believes it, panics, and strikes a blow for "the good guys."

As I said, the Iowa decision was rational. That's not the problem. The reaction to it on the right is irrational and irresponsible. The country has a lot more to fear from a bunch of wingnuts, terrified by right wing propaganda, who think they're only thing that stands between freedom and totalitarianism.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, James Blow tells us that "the unrelenting meme being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year."

And I'm supposed to be afraid of marriage equality in Iowa? I'm afraid of the idiots who think they're "defending my freedoms." Now might be a good time to dial back the fearmongering a bit, don't you think?

-Wisco


Get updates via Twitter

Goldberg: The Moron

I never feel comfortable taking on a Jonah Goldberg column. He can't seem to make an argument without getting all of his facts wrong. As a result, all you really have to do is set the record straight and Goldberg's work is left a smoking ruin. It doesn't really seem like a fair fight, but I guess I'm not the one who picked it. By choosing to do battle with reality, Goldberg sets himself up to get his rhetorical ass handed to him.

With "Liberals' Dirty Shame," he gets in a twofer -- liberals are big fans of the porn and are enemies of free speech. Enemies, that is, unless the speech involves women of questionable morals displayed in all their bare-skinned glory.

In 1996, Miloš Forman directed The People vs. Larry Flynt, the propagandistic film that made a "First Amendment hero" out of the publisher of Hustler, a racist and filthy porn magazine. Frank Rich of the New York Times dubbed it "the most timely and patriotic movie of the year."

Even if you've never seen the movie (or read Hanna Rosin's contemporaneous debunking of it in The New Republic), it's easy to guess why the film was a favorite of people like Rich. It whitewashed Flynt while demonizing conservatives as religious prudes.

Considering that Jerry Falwell played a big part in Larry Flynt's life, it'd be hard not to portray Flynt's conservative rivals as religious prudes -- mostly because that's exactly what they were. And the typical right wing cognitive dissonance is on display here; liberals are perverted fans of filthy smut, until you need them to be radical feminists who believe "that womanhood is an existential and metaphysical state of enlightenment." It's hard to believe that both groups would be the same people. But being a conservative columnist means never having to deal with accusations of consistency.





What makes this all especially fun is that "Liberals' Dirty Shame" isn't just about lefties and their porn. No, it's about liberals, porn, censorship, and what a terrible, terrible person Hillary Clinton really is.

[A] case before the [Supreme Court], Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, involves a documentary-style film, Hillary: The Movie, that ran afoul of campaign-finance laws designed to censor so-called stealth ads as well as electioneering paid for by corporations or unions.

To be fair, the film does amount to partisan advocacy. It’s a scorching indictment of the former Democratic presidential front-runner, produced by an unapologetically conservative outfit. It's as one-sided as a MoveOn.org-produced documentary about George W. Bush would be. But, some might wonder, should partisan advocacy ever be illegal in a democracy?

Yeah, here's where Goldberg really goes off the rails and into a reality of his own creation. The problem with Hillary: The Movie wasn't so much the movie itself, but ads for the movie. The movie was just something thrown together by a bunch of anti-Clinton conspiracy theorist nutjobs in order to create an ad campaign. H:TM wasn't censored. According to NPR, it "was available on DVD and came and went quickly in theaters." In fact, despite a national ad campaign, the movie played in a grand total of six theaters. It had a national advertising campaign, meaning you might see an ad about a movie that claims Hillary Clinton might've killed people, but you'd have to catch a plane to another state to go see it. It was bass-ackward marketing -- the ad wasn't made to support the movie, the movie was made as an excuse to run the ad. It wasn't a movie, it was a loophole in McCain-Feingold.

And this actually worked. The movie was in and out of those few theaters it ran in, the DVDs were burned, the ad campaign was launched. Hillary: The Movie didn't run into trouble until they tried to get the movie on pay-per-view. You'd imagine it would've run for a night or two, preceded by ads upon ads about what an unpunished and unrepetant criminal Hillary Clinton is. Once again, the movie was to support the ad campaign.

At this point, the film got the attention of the Federal Elections Commission. The purpose of the movie and its ads, a three judge federal court found, was "to inform the electorate that Sen. Clinton is unfit for office." As a result, the film was encased in concrete, all the DVDs were thrown into a volcano, the script and storyboards were shot into the sun, and everyone was instructed to never speak of it again.

At least, that's what Goldberg would have you believe. In reality, Citizens United could run the ads all they wanted, run the film all they wanted, even show the movie on the sides of barns right off the interstate if they thought that sounded like fun. But it was a campaign ad and, as such, they had to reveal who provided the funding for it. Turns out that the funders of this little project weren't especially proud of their connection with it and the PPV run never happened.

Eek! Censorship!

All of which makes this paragraph more than a little absurd:

Several justices asked the deputy solicitor general, Malcolm Stewart, if there would be any constitutional reason why the ban on documentaries and ads couldn't be extended to books carrying similar messages. Stewart, speaking for a president who once taught constitutional law, said Congress can ban books "if the book contained the functional equivalent of express advocacy" for a candidate and was supported, even slightly, with corporate money. Such advocacy, Stewart conceded, could amount to negatively mentioning a politician just once in a 500-page book put out by a mainstream publisher.

Ban? What ban? At best, this is an abuse of the English language, at worst it's a damned lie. Citizens United could've mailed a DVD to every address in the United States. They could've started their own cable network and run H:TM 24/7. They could've converted it to a stage play and done theater in the park in every city in America, every day until the end of time. But the backers chose not to be associated with this pack of lies. A book "banned" in a similar manner could be a bestseller, read by every person on Earth. If anyone "banned" the film, it was the film's funders, out of embarrassment over being connected to it.

As I said, I never feel comfortable taking on a Jonah Goldberg column. Because it's so damned easy it feels like cheating, somehow.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to all my porn.

-Wisco


Get updates via Twitter

The Republican Party Keeps Up the Good Work

Last week, Republicans released a budget without numbers. This turned out to be a bad idea, since the very first thing anyone reporting on it did was point out that the GOP's "alternative budget" wasn't actually a budget at all. It was a stunt to grab headlines and in that sense it succeeded. The only problem is that they weren't good headlines and the whole thing turned out to be the political embarrassment of the week.

Details -- important stuff like, say, figures and projections -- would come out the next week, we were told. And yesterday, on April Fools Day, they did.

Kind of.

It turns out that many of those figures and projections are best described as "made up." The author of this document, Wisconsin's own Rep. Paul Ryan, took a shot at explaining why the economy's going down the tubes. The problem was that his explanation, laid out in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, didn't make any sense at all.

Instead of doubling the debt in five years, and tripling it in 10, the Republican budget curbs the explosion in spending called for by the president and his party. Our plan halts the borrow-and-spend philosophy that brought about today's economic problems, and puts a stop to heaping ever-growing debt on future generations -- and it does so by controlling spending, not by raising taxes. The greatest difference lies in the size of government our budgets achieve over time.

A housing bubble? Credit default swaps? Toxic assets and a lack of common sense regulation of the financial sector? Pfffft! Liberal claptrap. What caused the economic downturn was the fact that the federal government is spending too much money.

This is not the best way to impress people with your grasp of basic economic principles.





Of course, the thing to do here is to spend less money. That this is the exact opposite of what Obama proposes is just a big coincidence. Barack Obama just happens to be 100% wrong. It's unfortunate, but there ya go. That few economists -- or anyone who's been paying attention for the past six months -- think that government spending is causing this recession is beside the point. They too are 100% wrong.

And Ryan provides a nifty chart to prove it.



The spending proposed by the president goes right up off the charts -- you kind of have to assume it goes on forever. Give the Republicans some credit for not projecting their numbers as the mirror opposite of Obama's -- when you're making stuff up, that'd be your impulse.

The GOP includes a similar graph in their budget report [PDF]. You'll notice that it extends to 2080 and cites the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) as the source for these figures. Turns out there are quite a few problems with this. According to journalist Marc Ambinder, the CBO "has never done a projection of the Obama budget through 2080, so that sourcing can't be right."

Not surprisingly, the farther you project into the future, the more likely you are to be wrong. This is kind of like offering a weather forecast for April 1, 2080 -- it's probably not going to be extremely accurate. Which explains why the CBO doesn't project out that far.

At least, not in concrete terms. Ambinder found that Ryan got these figures from a CBO letter sent to him called The Long-Term Economic Effects of Some Alternative Budget Policies, "which contained budget estimates based on the CBO's December 2007 Long-Term Budget Outlook."

But there are three problems with using this as a source. The first is that the CBO's 70 year projections are, as one CBO official told me a moment ago, "advisory is nature": "We have a lot of uncertainty in our ten-year projections, so there's obviously much more in our 70-year projections."

Second, both the 2007 Budget outlook and the 2008 letter to Ryan are based on the Bush budget, not the Obama budget. (For the ineluctable, historical reason that they were written in 2007 and 2008.)

Third, both budget documents were written by Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, when he was head of the CBO. (I'm going to guess he knows about the long-term budget risks that he identified last year.)

Ryan is using Bush budgets to project Obama's spending. There's a fourth problem here that Ambinder doesn't mention; this budget is Bushian in nature (although the Republican's report doesn't mention him once). According to that report, the alternative GOP budget "permanently extends the 2001/2003 tax relief provisions and the alternative minimum tax 'patch.'"

The problem here is that during Bush's first term, job growth was flat. Bush did gain jobs during that term, but it wasn't any better than the population growth. Bush's economic policies decreased the rate of unemployment by 0.3% from 2001-2005 -- according to the Wall Street Journal Bush's "job creation record compares poorly to that of almost every previous presidential term for which comparable data is available."

So let's reinstitute a cornerstone of Bush's first term economic policies, because that worked out so well. Unemployment is high now, but -- if the GOP have their way -- it'll be 0.3% better by 2012. Yay! It's not like there's any rush or anything.

Other fun ideas include privatizing Medicare and a reduction in capital gains taxes. According to Ben Furnas with the Center for American Progress, "This temporary reduction in the capital gains tax rate is particularly pernicious as it would likely have exactly the opposite effect Ryan claims it would have. Ryan says it would 'create an incentive for risk-taking and investment.' Actually, it would do just the opposite: encourage wealthy people to cash out of their holdings, discouraging new long-term investing (right at a time when we need it most) but providing a sweet windfall for the wealthy investor class." Furnas describes the proposed budget as "$1.5 million tax windfall For CEOs."

All in all, the House Republican's budget alternative is just a collection of old bad ideas, dressed up in fictional numbers and flavored with BS. In fact, "alternative" isn't even a decent word for it, unless you define it as "Hey, let's go back to doing what we've been doing for the past eight years." It's mostly a "stay the course" budget -- offered at a time when the course has sailed us straight off the edge of the world.

-Wisco


Get updates via Twitter

Obama, Hitler Youth, and April Fools

Here it is, the end of America, democracy's doom. Barack Obama, currently conspiring overseas with European socialists to destroy capitalism, will come home to find a bill on his desk that creates a fascist youth corps. Woe be unto the republic.

Associated Press:

Tens of thousands of Americans, from teenagers to baby boomers, soon will get a fresh chance to lend a helping hand in a time of need.

The House voted 275-149 Tuesday for a $5.7 billion bill that triples positions in the Clinton-era AmeriCorps program, its largest expansion since the agency's creation in 1993, and establishes a fund to help nonprofit organizations recruit and manage more volunteers. AmeriCorps offers a range of volunteer opportunities including housing construction, youth outreach, disaster response and caring for the elderly.

Congress was sending the bill to President Barack Obama, who often cites his years as a Chicago community organizer for giving him his political start. Obama has made national service programs a high priority. His budget proposal calls for more than $1.1 billion for the programs, an increase of more than $210 million.

"I call on all Americans to stand up and do what they can to serve their communities, shape our history and enrich both their own lives and the lives of others across this country," Obama said in a statement.

Doom!





Don't see the problem? That's because you're not crazy enough. If you were, you'd clearly see the connection between people building houses for Habitat for Humanity, delivering Meals on Wheels, and helping fill sandbags in flood zones with the fascism. It's so obvious.

"Old-timers naturally recall Communist, Fascist and Nazi youth brigades as severing children from their parent's religious traditions and beliefs," writes an appropriately freaked out Judith Reisman at WorldNetDaily. Yeah, you just naturally look at an expanded volunteer program and immediately think of the Hitler Youth.

At the heart of all this is a speech Barack Obama gave in July of 2008. In that speech, he slipped up and let the cat out of the bag. "[W]e are going to grow our foreign service, open consulates that have been shuttered and double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 to renew our diplomacy. We cannot to continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we have set," the new Hitler said. "We have got to have a civilian national security force that is just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded."

One sentence. But, if you're crazy enough, one sentence is all it takes to uncover a massive Democratic conspiracy to crush our freedoms using brown-shirted child overlords. And it is a vast conspiracy. The following November, the supposedly "nonpartisan" Annenberg Foundation used its FactCheck.org site to silence any critics by burying them with the obviously liberally biased reality.

[This story has] been circulating in right-leaning blogs and conservative Web sites ever since July, when Obama made a single reference to a "civilian national security force" in a campaign speech in Colorado. Obama's detractors make much of his expansive (and exaggerated) description of such a force as being "just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the U.S. military. They also ignore the context.

Obama was not talking about a "security force" with guns or police powers. He was talking specifically about expanding AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps and the USA Freedom Corps, which is the volunteer initiative launched by the Bush administration after the attacks of 9/11, and about increasing the number of trained Foreign Service officers who populate U.S. embassies overseas.

Likely story. That would've been the end of it, but these are wingnuts we're talking about here. When the going gets tough, conservative crazies get crazier. And, for people who already believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim illegal alien sent by terrorists to destroy America with socialism, it's entirely plausible. Of course, for people who believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim illegal alien sent by terrorists to destroy America with socialism, anything is plausible. "Gullible" really isn't a strong enough word to describe them.

"If we're going to create some kind of national police force as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces, isn't this rather a big deal?" wrote WND founder Joseph Farah soon after Obama spilled the beans with his single sentence. "I thought Democrats generally believed the U.S. spent too much on the military. How is it possible their candidate is seeking to create some kind of massive but secret national police force that will be even bigger than the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force put together?

"Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that? If not, why did he say it? What did he mean?"

The mainstream media, unwilling to embrace the lunacy, hasn't reported on any of this. That's too bad, because on the first day of April, it's so much fun to watch the fools freak out over it.

-Wisco


Get updates via Twitter