GOP Immigration Reform Plan: Kill it, Plant the Knife on the President

It's definitely not the outcome anyone expected -- although maybe we should've. House Republican leadership had put forward two principles for immigration reform, one of which was that "specific enforcement triggers" had to be met in order for House Republicans to advance a bill. "Specific" was exactly the wrong word here, since this was a fill-in-the-blank provision to be decided on later. This was the flag that everyone was watching. The common wisdom was that if they were able to wrangle the base on board, the triggers would be half-way reasonable -- or at least do-able. Undocumented people would have to learn English -- assuming they didn't already know it -- or complete high school or an equivalent. If they didn't, then the trigger would be completely unreasonable, like an impenetrable fence at the southern border or something crazy, like mandatory prison sentences. If the push to pass the bill failed, the signal was expected to be a poison pill -- a requirement that was either so noxious that Democrats would reject it out of hand or so technically impossible that it could never be met.

That's what everyone expected to happen. If the House killed immigration reform, that was the way it was supposed to die. No one foresaw this ignoble end:

Associated Press: Republicans are starting to lay the blame on President Barack Obama if an overhaul of the nation's broken immigration system fails to become law.

The GOP's emerging plan on immigration is to criticize Obama as an untrustworthy leader and his administration as an unreliable enforcer of any laws that might be passed. Perhaps realizing the odds of finding a consensus on immigration are long, the Republicans have started telling voters that if the GOP-led House doesn't take action this election year, it is Obama's fault.

"If the president had been serious about this the last five years, we'd be further along in this discussion," Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, said Sunday.

And in case you don't get the message, Rep. Paul Ryan -- who'd taken the lead on the bill -- said pretty much the same thing; "Here's the issue that all Republicans agree on: We don't trust the president to enforce the law."

No one expected this turn of events -- mostly because it's stupid.

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Economics, the State of the Union, and the Ever-Dimming Appeal of the GOP

As State of the Union speeches go, President Obama's 2014 appearance before the joint chambers of congress went well. Of the people who watched the speech, 53% had a "very positive reaction to his speech." Conservatives will no doubt point out that the sample is skewed left, but the poll can hardly be blamed for not including people who refused to watch the speech. The audience was largely Democrat and indie, so the sample is largely Democrat and indie.

Still, there's some nasty news for Republicans here. The CNN flash poll's respondents were "44% Democratic and 17% Republican." Yet, when asked if "the president's policies will move the country in the right direction," 71% said they would -- a number way too high to be explained by Democratic boosterism. That number has to include a lot of indies and even some Republicans. CNN reports that the number of dems in the sample is "about 12 points more Democratic than the population as a whole," so 71-12=59.

But let's not get all teabagger about things and start "unskewing" polls to advantage Republicans. Let's look at numbers that need no adjustment.

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Motionless, Broken GOP Complains About Being Left Behind

Tonight's the President's State of the Union address and the big news on the right is that the president plans to use the lawful power of the presidency to get some stuff done. Needless to say, conservatives think this is the worst thing ever! For the rest of America, however, this is seen as a good idea. Greg Sargent points to a Washington Post/ABC News poll that includes this relevant response:

Presidents have the power in some cases to bypass Congress and take action by executive order to accomplish their administration’s goals. Is this approach something you…

Support: 52

Oppose: 46

"In other words, despite the inevitable screams about Obama 'tyranny,' this approach will politically be at worst a wash (independents are split on it 49-49) and at best a net positive (in addition to majority support for it, moderates favor it by 56-43," Sargent reports, "only Republicans and conservatives oppose it in large numbers)."

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Yes, Pres. Obama’s poll numbers are bad — but Republicans envy those numbers

NBC News: A year that began with President Barack Obama riding high after his re-election victory is ending with him in the biggest hole of his presidency.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that more Americans disapprove of the president’s job performance than ever before; half say they’re either disappointed or dissatisfied with his presidency and 54 percent believe he’s facing a long-term setback.

In all, only 43% say they’re satisfied with Pres, Obama’s job performance, leaving his numbers underwater. However, the same poll asked, “How would you rate the overall performance and accomplishments of this year’s Congress—one of the best, above average, average, below average, or one of the worst?” only 3% answered the best or above average, 17% said average, and 79% said below average or the worst — with more than half saying that this was one of histories worst congresses.

Obama’s numbers are driven largely by the troubled rollout of Healthcare.gov. With this issue about 90+% resolved and rapidly improving, the president is about to cut the line on that particular public opinion boat anchor, after which we can probably expect his numbers to improve — most likely dramatically.

And if we head over to Gallup, new polling there shows Democrats as a whole soaring over Republicans by ten points — 42% approval to 32% approval. Again we find that, even with underwater approvals, Barack Obama is the most popular man in Washington.

That position can only improve.

[photo by Joe Crimmings]

The GOP's Obamacare Problem

It's being called the relaunch of Healthcare.gov. But the fact that 100,000 people signed up in October -- while the headlines were filled with stories about how the website wasn't working -- suggests that "relaunch" might not be the most accurate description. However, one aspect that's never actually gotten off the ground before was the effort to get Americans to sign up in large numbers. Since the website was hampered by capacity problems, an awareness campaign would've been counterproductive. In fact, until recently, the administration was discouraging organizations from running recruitment campaigns of their own.

That's about to change.

Politico: President Barack Obama will launch a coordinated campaign Tuesday by the White House, congressional Democrats and their outside allies to return attention to why the Affordable Care Act passed in the first place.

After two months of intense coverage of the botched HealthCare.gov rollout, the president will host a White House event kicking off a three-week drive to refocus the public on the law’s benefits, senior administration officials told POLITICO.

The White House will take the lead in emphasizing a different benefit each day until the Dec. 23 enrollment deadline for Jan. 1 coverage. The daily message will be amplified through press events and social media by Democratic members of Congress, the Democratic National Committee, congressional campaign committees and advocacy organizations, officials said.

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A 'Fix' for Obamacare -- Do Nothing

We can probably stop worrying about Republican Rep. Fred Upton's (R-Blue Cross) "Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013" now.

Buzzfeed: President Obama threatened Thursday to veto a House bill that would allow insurance companies to continue offering existing health plans after millions received cancelation notices due to the Affordable Care Act.

The threat came hours after the president asked health insurance companies to allow individuals to keep their existing, canceled plans for a year.

The “Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013,” sponsored by Republican Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, would allow insurance companies to continue to offer plans that were available before the new Obamacare rules took effect. The House is scheduled to vote on the bill Friday and a handful of Democrats were expected to support it.

Obama’s fix allows only individuals whose policies were canceled in 2013 to re-enroll in their plans next year, while the Upton bill would allow insurers to sell the plans to new customers and would not be limited to just one year.

Overriding a presidential veto is an uphill battle in even the best of circumstances, but the idea that enough Democrats would defect to create a two-thirds majority in both houses here doesn't seem at all likely. You can pass a bill in a hurried panic, but the president can sit on it a while and wait for everyone to cool off before he vetoes it. Seriously, this may get a lot of press because of a House vote on the bill today, but it is most probably dead.

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Dancing to Republicans' Tune on Security

Is it legal for a journalist to disclose classified information to the public? That's something of an open question, although legal opinion seems to lean heavily toward "no." After all, if you could prosecute reporters for detailing classified info, all the executive branch would need to do to censor any news story would be to direct the appropriate agency to smack that info with the "TOP SECRET" stamp. So the notion that journalists could be jailed for publishing leaked information is a very dangerous one and one that courts have not treated well.

From a historical standpoint,  publishing classified info as journalism is completely legal and any finding that said otherwise would upset years of legal opinion.

Which brings us to this:

The Guardian: The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

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Republicans Struggle to Explain Their Opposition to Action on Climate

Part of the problem with the Republican Party is that they approach everything as a business matter. They seldom say what they actually believe, preferring instead to put together a sales pitch that rationalizes their positions. As I've pointed out before, this explains the constant insane Republican rape theories. These Republicans believe that all abortion is murder and that using law to force a woman to give birth to her rapist's baby is just the most sensible thing ever. But experience tells them that this position isn't very popular, so they make up BS sales pitches explaining that rape never results in pregnancy. That they don't actually believe what they're saying is obvious -- if sexual violence can't result in pregnancy, why would they care if exceptions rape and incest are written into abortion bans? They wouldn't. It would make no sense, because it would never happen anyway. They keep getting caught up in these idiotic rape theory firestorms for a reason -- explaining what they really believe would actually be worse, from a PR standpoint. So they lie and take their beating for it. It's simply their best option.

Steve Benen spots a similar situation in global warming. Republicans believe -- in shockingly large percentages -- that global warming is a massive conspiracy among scientist to either soak institutions for grant money or to actually somehow bring the world to communism. The science of climate change is part of this conspiracy, meaning the scientific consensus is likewise BS. Whenever reality butts heads with their ideology, conservatives seem to cook up a conspiracy theory to explain why they're still right -- and worse, they tend to believe that theory.

However, the capital newspaper The Hill reported yesterday that Republicans are not attacking the science of global warming in response to the president's new climate push. Instead, Republicans are "battering Obama’s wide-ranging new climate plan with arguments it will cost jobs and hurt the economy." Another case of what they really believe being a political loser? It would seem so.

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Terrorism is Not the Greatest Threat to Liberty

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. -James Madison, fourth US president, known as "Father of the Constitution" for drafting the that document and authoring the Bill of Rights.

When the Bush administration declared a "Global War on Terror," Madison's words should've echoed from every corner of Washington and from every voice in the media. If there was ever a case of Madison's "continual warfare," the GWoT was it. Other Presidents had declared wars on concepts -- a war on crime, war on poverty, war on drugs, etc. -- and those wars did not go (or have not gone) well. When the goal is the complete eradication of a problem, failure becomes extremely easy. The goal should always be to mitigate the problem to as close to nonexistence as reality will allow. This is not the definition of war.

Of course, these other "wars" launched by other presidents were mostly metaphorical. They weren't actually launching a war, but announcing an increased focus on a problem and an increased effort to eliminate it. Bush's War on Terror was quite different. He meant it as a literal war. "Americans are asking, how will we fight and win this war?" Bush explained to a joint session of congress. "We will direct every resource at our command, every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war, to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network."

This wasn't "war" as a rhetorical device, this was actual, people-are-going-to-die war.

And Madison's warning has proven true through every stage of this thing. The forces of liberty don't torture, they don't build concentration camps. The debt and deficits created by this War on Terror have been tremendous and bog us down to this day. To make things worse, Bush decided to cut taxes during a time of increased wartime spending -- an unprecedented and tremendously irresponsible act of fiscal malpractice.

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Republicans Need to Dig Up Some Better 'Scandals'

Want a scandal? Here's a scandal:

Salon: Try, if you can, to ignore all the lurid coke-and-sex bombshells contained in the three Department of Interior Inspector General reports about the shenanigans at the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS). The program director who snorted speed off a subordinate’s toaster oven, and made her give him a blow job while driving around the neighborhood. The two “MMS Chicks” who were notorious for getting plastered at conventions and having one-night stands with oil industry employees.

Try — and yes, I know it’s hard — try even to ignore the allegation that one program director told a subordinate that if she could score him some coke during the MMS performance appraisal period, he would increase her performance award. What’s the big deal? Who wouldn’t be motivated by such an incentive? And what’s a little drunken sex and coke binging on government time among friends? It happens to the best of us.

The significance of the three reports delivered by the inspector general to Congress on Wednesday lies not in the prurience of some of the indiscretions, but in the symbolism. The Royalty-in-Kind Program of the U.S. Minerals Management Service is where offshore drilling meets the U.S. government. And gosh, is it ever one heck of a mess. You want a toxic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Just read the reports.

You'll happy to know that this isn't happening now, but in the misty, far-flung past of bustling 2008. This was the Bush administration's scandal and it was bad. The MMS was responsible for leasing federal land for oil and natural gas drilling. And it was corrupt nearly beyond belief. An Inspector General found not only ethical breaches, but criminal misconduct in an agency who's mission had changed under the Bush administration from serving the interests of the American people to making as much money as possible for the oil and gas industry. The agency was basically run by lobbyists, practically guaranteeing malfeasance. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the agency was finally eliminated under Interior Department restructuring.

I don't bring this up to try to distract from the current controversies plaguing the White House, but to make a simple point; as salacious and shocking as it was at the time, no one talks about the MMS scandal anymore. Of course, the Bush administration had four colossal scandals that leap immediately to mind: the failure to take terrorism seriously, resulting in 9/11; the lies and hype about WMD that led to the invasion of Iraq; the awful response to Hurricane Katrina; and the use of torture. There were also warrantless wiretaps, blowing the cover of Valerie Plame, Dick Cheney getting hammered and shooting some poor guy in the face, and some I'm either forgetting or skipping over for the sake of brevity. In the scandal-production department, the Bushies were overachievers.

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The Gun Show Loophole Remains -- And You Should be Angry About That

Reading through the reactions to yesterday's successful obstruction of an expanded background checks bill, there's one thing you notice right away. Normally, stories like this are peppered with words like "saddened," disappointed," or "discouraged." That's not the case today. Today, people are opening their papers or visiting their favorite online news source and reading words like "angry," "disgusted," and "furious."

The pro-crime lobby may think they've beaten us, but all they really managed to do is make us mad.

For her part, Gabrielle Giffords has spent her time cultivating the image of a happy warrior, a friendly hero overcoming tremendous adversity and senseless tragedy. While the hero part of that persona remains, "happy" doesn't describe her op-ed on the issue in the New York Times:

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.

I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.

Giffords writes that "if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s." The issue of partisanship does not come up. Democrat, Republican, or Independent, if you sided with the pro-criminal gun lobby, we want your head.

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Obama's Chained CPI Offer is Genuine

It's a rare thing these days when right and left agree in Washington, so take a moment to appreciate the bigfoot sighting. Although they both have arrived at this point of agreement for wildly different reasons, the fact remains that they are there, sharing the same space, breathing the same air. This isn't exactly a moment of blissful brother- and sisterhood, but they are joined together in common purpose -- kill the President's proposed budget.

The right doesn't like it simply because it's from Obama. They'd reject renaming Washington "The Ronald Reagan Memorial Gun Refuge" if Obama proposed it. Their opposition is a given. These are not serious or honest people, they're spoiled children holding their breath until they get exactly what they want. And what they want is a nuclear strike on our recovering economy; no new revenues, only deep, deep cuts to spending -- which means hacking off demand at the knees. They'd practically guarantee a second recession. Luckily for us, if they can't do this then they don't want to do anything -- including pass the president's budget.

Which is where right meets left. The President's chained CPI proposal is a smoke-and-mirrors cut to Social Security benefits. And Obama proposes cuts to other entitlements as well. Lefty dems say there are quite enough gaps in the social safety net already, thank you very much. We don't need to take a scissors to it and start cutting more. Centrist and moderate Democrats, seeing that right and left hate Obama's budget, are keeping their opinions to themselves -- probably wisely.

The question is why would Barack Obama, a Democratic president, attack Social Security -- one of his party's greatest and most lasting achievements -- in a budget proposal. What gives?

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Putting Social Security and the Economy in Chains

It's one of those bad news/good news sorts of things. The bad news is that President Obama is definitely looking at some sort of benefit cut in entitlement spending. The good news is that congressional Democrats most definitely do not agree -- and if they say it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. After President Obama met with Republicans to iron out some sort of a deal on deficit reduction, he met with Senate Democrats to pitch ideas to them. It was not a sale.

The Hill:

...Though they are his most powerful congressional allies, there is tension in that relationship too given fears of liberal Democrats that Obama will make too many concessions with House and Senate Republicans on entitlement cuts, all in the hope of reaching a deficit deal.

Obama stood firm Tuesday when pressed to back away from benefit cuts during the meeting with the Senate Democratic Conference, according to lawmakers who attended.

[...]

[B]ehind closed doors, liberals in the Senate caucus raised concerns about Obama’s readiness to consider cuts to Social Security benefits and his support for a deficit-reduction package evenly split between spending cuts and tax increases.

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Once Again, Republicans Face Reality's Liberal Bias

There's an old saying: some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you -- and some days news organizations poll the bears and find out they think you suck. Today is that last type of day for Republicans, ho woke up this morning, shook open their papers, and promptly sprayed coffee all over them in a spit-take of shock. The numbers are not good and the party is definitely not on the path to making them any better.

First off, a Bloomberg poll. In that poll, Barack Obama holds his highest approval ratings since Bloomberg started polling the question in 2009. Conversely, Republicans have their lowest approval ratings for the same period. Further, more think the President's ideas for the economy are better than the GOP's. The party's problem here is that people perceive the GOP's priorities accurately:

“The Republicans are not offering any new solutions,” said poll respondent Cynthia Synos, 62, a political independent who lives in the St. Louis suburb of Greendale, Missouri. “Their answer is always tax cuts and incentives for business. I’ve never heard them say anything innovative to spark the economy that would help the other 85, 90 percent of people that have to deal with the economy as it is.”

The shine is definitely off the trickle-down rose.

When it comes to our current economic situation, respondents seemed to have a pretty good grasp of what the root of the problem; "Public views of congressional Republicans’ record places an added burden on them in the standoff over automatic spending cuts. Americans by 43 percent to 34 percent say they are more to blame than Obama and Democrats for 'what’s gone wrong' in Washington," Bloomberg reports. That means that if the GOP lets the sequester happen -- and all indications are that they will -- their little "blame Obama for the sequester" strategy is probably doomed to failure.

Wait, did I say "probably?" I should've said "definitely," since that's what the second poll shows.

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No, It's Not Just About Golf. It's Much Worse Than That

I firmly believe that one of the big -- if not the biggest -- reasons that our political environment is so completely effed up is because our media is so completely effed up. If the press covered things that actually mattered and bothered to inform people, it would be very hard for charlatans to gain political purchase. But they don't. What we get instead is not substantially different from celebrity "news" shows; the coverage is about personalities, not issues. We get plenty of stories about who's fighting who, but very little information on what they're fighting about.

For example...

Politico:

White House Correspondents Association president Ed Henry is standing by his complaints about the lack of press access to President Obama, pushing back against critics who say he and his fellow White House correspondents are just "whining" and don't respect the president's privacy.

"This is a fight for more access, period," Henry told POLITICO late Monday night. "I've heard all kinds of critics saying the White House press corps is whining about a golf game and violating the president's privacy. Nothing could be further from the truth."

"We're not interested in violating the president's privacy. He's entitled to vacations like everyone else. All we're asking for is a brief exception, quick access, a quick photo-op on the 18th green," Henry continued. "It's not about golf -- it's about transparency and access in a broader sense."

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McCain Holds Nation Hostage to a Grudge

As anyone who tries to remember will remember, "Benghazi-gate" was a trumped up scandal designed to deny President Obama reelection. Obviously, it failed. The story was that the White House covered up certain facts that would hurt Obama on the campaign trail. So a narrative was cooked up to explain why this was all a big scandal that the media should give wall-to-wall coverage.

The way the narrative was supposed to go was that the President saw electoral doom in a terrorist attack on a consulate in Benghazi. Why this was supposed to sink his chances isn't clear nor was it ever explained. It just would, OK?

So anyway, the White House colluded with the State Department to hide the terrorist attack and blame it on anti-American rioters -- as if there's any substantial difference here. The scandal's narrative arc had it that a terrorist attack would mean the president would have trouble being reelected, but a riot would mean he wouldn't. Why? Because stop asking so many sensible questions, that's why.

Of course, the president won reelection fairly easily and decisively, despite the fact that this whole terrorist/riot thing was cleared up long before election day. Despite Republicans' best efforts to churn up a big, scary scandal, young "Benghazi-gate" had died. It now exists solely as a zombie. It has to. The problem with made up scandals is that they have to be played out to the bitter end, lest the scandal-mongers be exposed as con artists, charlatans, and liars. The problem with "Benghazi-gate" is that it's shambled along in undead pointlessness far beyond even that end stage -- which, for all practical purposes, it entered when Barack Obama was reelected back in November. It continues to lurch around only because the GOP refuses to bury it, as John McCain demonstrated so well this weekend. Steve Benen has the skinny:

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Mitt Rubio

It looks like Greg Sargent was right. Marco Rubio didn't offer any real alternatives to ideas laid out by President Obama last night. The Gulp Heard 'Round the World is getting a lot of coverage today and Rubio can be thankful of that. It's not really all that embarrassing and it probably won't affect his political future, while his response might've otherwise.

What Rubio did lay out was a perfect imitation of the Mitt Romney campaign platform -- and a perfect example of what's really wrong with the GOP. It was all tax cuts and small government and abortion and drill baby, drill. Americans didn't like this record the last time it was played, it's not likely they're going to like it any better now. Set the biographical introduction aside and the rest was just complaining.

It's convincing evidence that Republicans think their problems are all cosmetic. Prior to the election, Republicans defended attacks on minorities as proof that they weren't willing to "pander" to them -- as if not ignoring someone's concerns is some sort of a kiss-up and not responsive government. Choosing Rubio to deliver the Republican response shows that Republicans are now ready to pander, but that this whole "responsive government" thing is just going a step too far for them. Pandering is all you're going to get. It represents an apparent belief that Mitt Romney lost because he wasn't a somber-faced Latino in a serious dark suit, not because Americans rejected his proposals. Republicans continue to make the mistake of thinking that Americans rejected the packaging, not the same tired, old, unappetizing slop inside it. Marco Rubio is just the latest "new and improved!" sticker slapped on the party, without any attempt whatsoever to change the party in any substantial way at all. The sticker is the only change -- and it is, of course, a lie.

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Defending Our Most Basic Freedom

It's one of the most sacred rights you have. They should make it as painless as possible.
-Miami-Dade resident Jonathan Piccolo.

It's not the "right" to own a military assault-style weapon that Piccolo is talking about here, but rather the right from which all our other rights spring. It's our most basic freedom and our most powerful form of liberty. It's the ability to bloodlessly change government and to influence the course of our nation's history. The right to vote is the great equalizer -- no one, no matter how rich or powerful -- has a vote any more powerful than yours. Since the Supreme Court determined that money is speech, they may be able to speak louder than you can, but your vote is still equal to theirs. If you're in line behind an ex-president or a Wall Street tycoon, they get one and you get one. Democracy is the freedom we should guard the most fiercely, because democracy is the way we keep all the other ones and even earn new freedoms. There is no free nation that doesn't allow its citizens to vote. There is no free nation that's a sham democracy with a rigged vote. People without democracy are -- by definition -- not free people. Which is why I always say that the enemies of democracy are the enemies of freedom. There aren't many facts I'm as sure of as that.

Which means there's a right side and a wrong side to a battle shaping up in this country -- and one party is staking out the "enemies of democracy" position. Which would make the other the good guys.

New York Times:

With studies suggesting that long lines at the polls cost Democrats hundreds of thousands of votes in November, party leaders are beginning a push to make voting and voter registration easier, setting up a likely new conflict with Republicans over a deeply polarizing issue.

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New NRA Ad Suggests President's Family Shouldn't Get Secret Service Protection

Josh Marshall looks at the NRA's latest attack ad against President Obama and calls the organization "a disease on the body politic." It's a good call. If you want to get more specific, then my diagnosis is leprosy -- movie leprosy that is -- a sort of living rot that destroys the body politic with oozing, festering wounds like the one above.

"There are so many vile things about this ad. But one thing to note is the ad is really only designed to appeal to people who have a deep — really deep — animosity toward the President," he writes. "The sort of people who don’t think he and his daughters should be in the White House and wish him the sort of ill citizens should never wish upon a freely elected head of state."

And that's the key to everything here. Instead of asking, as the NRA's ad does, whether the President's children are more important than yours, ask whether the President's family has received more death threats than yours. Answer: an easy yes. The hypocrisy is not the President's, the hypocrisy is the NRA's. Understanding this fact means understanding that the president's family is under constant threat because of rightwing demagogues like the idiot or committee of idiots who wrote this ad -- people who spend all of their time whipping up a frenzy against Barack Obama in daily sessions of Two Minutes Hate. There's your hypocrisy. The lefty site DailyKos recently reported on the massive amount of threats this president and his family have received, which Gawker helpfully condenses:

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The Platinum Debt Limit Option

First and foremost, let's get this little factoid out of the way: raising the debt ceiling doesn't add to the deficit in any way. It's a way to pay for funds that have already been spent -- and authorized -- by congress. Therefore, not raising the debt ceiling likewise does nothing to reduce spending, deficits, or the national debt. It would, however, mean economic disaster. Think of it as a credit card payment -- except with this card, if you miss one payment, you default and go into bankruptcy. Seriously, this is really, really bad.

So Republicans who threaten to vote against raising the debt ceiling as a way to reduce spending and the deficit are lying or stupid. The move would save nothing, while the actual cost may be incalculable. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments wouldn't be made. Federal employees -- including members of the military -- would not be paid. Federal bondholders worldwide would see their bonds become irredeemable. The ripple effect would spread out from the US and likely create a worldwide economic crisis, earning us few friends in the world. Our credit rating would crash. We may even finding ourselves facing economic sanctions from bond-holding nations as a result. This would be an incredibly boneheaded move and anyone who seriously argues for taking that route loves America not at all.

It's a variation of the he-who-smelt-it rule that those who mostly loudly proclaim to love America most are those who love her least. Tea Party Republicans claim to be the biggest freakin' patriots in the whole world, while arguing that America's best days are behind her, that great things are now impossible, that we must scale back our national ambitions and become a small people with measly dreams of a not-extremely impressive future. They march under a banner of "Status Quo Forever!" -- except they advocate a step back and down from the status quo. They're cowardly anarchists who hate government, but want to keep the police and military. Otherwise, everything can go. We used to all be in this together as a team, 'baggers envision a nation where everyone's on their own. One nation, no longer individual but divided into millions, each trying to get what they can cheat others out of and to screw everyone else as fast as they can. Social Darwinism run amok.

So, of course, we can't count on these guys do actually do what's best for the nation. There's no guarantee that they will. And that's where a crazy scheme to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin comes in.

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