When Lunatics Run the Asylum

There are, by any real measure, no moderates in the Republican Party. Not because there aren't any center-right members, but because there are no center-right actions. There are still a few willing to put nation before party, to value facts above ideology, but the fact is that the far right extremists who have taken over their party have made them irrelevant. There are no moderates in the Republican Party because moderation has been banned.

Buzzfeed:

According to Republicans, moderate members of the House GOP conference feel that Boehner, who has struggled with an often raucous and openly defiant right wing, has forced them to go along with conservative demands but has provided them little in return.

One Republican familiar with the dynamics within the GOP argued part of the difficulty for Boehner has been the fact that conservatives -- and not moderates -- have been the "squeaky wheel" within the conference, which has forced him to focus on them for much of the 112th Congress.

Rather than work with his entire conference Boehner has had to "prove to conservatives constantly that he's advocating for them and not screwing them behind their backs," the Republican said.

Boehner remains deeply popular within his conference, and despite the frustration of moderates he faces virtually no chance of an effort oust him as Speaker.

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Romney Wants to Shake that Etch A Sketch Now

I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.
-Romney 2012 Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom, on what happens once the primaries are over.

There you go. With Rick Santorum out, it's time to shake the Etch A Sketch. While it's possible that the search for the Not-Romney will switch back to Newt, most observers believe it's unlikely. And you Ron Paul supporters need to accept facts; it's been over for a very long time. It's gonna be Mittens, whether you like it or not.

It's going to be fun watching the hyper-partisan right shake their own Etch A Sketches. After months of bashing Romney as someone just short of a commie, it'll be interesting to see them line up behind him and declare him History's Finest Candidate. The Inevitable has indeed become The Inevitable; it's time for the heretics to see the error of their ways and rejoin the fold.

But admitting error and embracing reality are not acts that come easily to many conservatives. Some seem incapable of doing them at all. And it may be that the search for the Not-Romney will continue -- among the two candidates who are Mitt Romney.

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Limbaugh's 'Slut' Comments Bring Out the Most Self-Destructive Tendencies of the GOP Base

Right now, the GOP is in a bit of a tailspin. The base seems to be at the stick and they're determined to point the nose straight at the ground. They'll show that stupid planet -- they'll crash this thing right into it and then we'll see who's boss!

A quick spin through the rightwing blogosphere shows a widespread political tone-deafness beyond any I think I've ever seen before. Rush Limbaugh's "slut" comments and subsequent non-apology have thrown them into a complete frenzy of boneheadedness and mindless rage. It's really something to see. They're riding this political loser all the way to the pavement.

I don't want to get too psychoanalytical -- mostly because I'm not qualified -- but you really have to wonder if the recent death of Andrew Breitbart figures into all this. Breitbart was popular on the right, they have no one to blame for his death, and all that emotion has to go somewhere. So it's pointed at innocent bystanders; Sandra Fluke and the people who agree with her. Breitbart's dead, Limbaugh's "under attack"... It's not hard to see the fear and rage that's always there finally boiling over as a result. If you read the comment threads to some of the wingnut blog entries, you'd think it was 9/11 all over again.

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Romney's Tanking Favorables

Who won the Nevada caucuses? Almost certainly, it was Mitt Romney. Officially speaking -- as of this writing at least -- we don't know.

Associated Press:

After months of reassurance that they could play with the big boys despite a trail of mishaps, the Nevada GOP played all of its cards Saturday and lost big time in a messy, disorganized election that saw low turnout and complaints of voter fraud and unexplained ballots.

But the biggest tell that the volunteer-run caucuses didn't go as planned was that more than 24 hours after voters finished casting their ballots, no one officially knew who had won.

By late Sunday, only 89 percent of the votes had been tallied. The holdup was Clark County, the state's most populous county and home to the Las Vegas Strip, where officials stayed up until the wee hours Sunday counting ballots but still couldn't finish the task.

It's not getting a lot of press, since exit polling showed such a convincing win that Romney's victory isn't really in doubt. But the problems in Nevada stem for larger problems for the GOP; Romney's nose-diving approvals and an inability to get GOP voters to give a damn.

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Republicans' Jobless 'Jobs Agenda'

If you want a great example of how the Republican Party's reduced itself to empty talking points, consider their argument that government doesn't create jobs. It's obviously untrue on so many levels, but they keep saying it because the chumps keep buying it. They almost always immediately contradict themselves by talking about all the ways they think government could create jobs. Pet projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, cutting taxes, reducing regulations, etc. will all create a great big jobs avalanche, we're told, if only government would get around to creating all those jobs that they also argue government couldn't possibly create. And lets not forget that all of these people are either drawing a government paycheck or competing for a government job.

But the idea that government can't create jobs becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with Republicans. They get into government and block measures that would increase employment. And that's when they aren't calling the shots. When they are calling the shots, all that stuff they talked about on the campaign trail and Fox News goes out the window. When Republicans are in power, it becomes time to pay off narrow constituencies that helped get them elected. These payoffs have absolutely nothing to do with jobs, mind you, but good governance was never really the point. The point is a corporate anarchy they wrongly refer to as "free market capitalism" -- and a Republican majority to protect that anarchy.

Since you don't achieve anarchy by passing laws, Republicans become obsessed with trivial busy work. You repeal what you can, hamstring this or that agency when the opportunity arises, but mostly you dick around with inconsequential BS that throws a bone to those narrow constituencies.

Steve Benen:

With Congress' approval rating reaching depths unseen since the dawn of modern polling, self-interested lawmakers should probably focus at least some of their attention on addressing actual problems.

House Republicans apparently disagree. In 2010, the GOP majority invested considerable energy in tackling imaginary threats (killing farm-dust regulations, protecting the "In God We Trust" motto); picking unnecessary culture-war fights (restricting abortion rights, going after NPR); and pursing right-wing measures that couldn't become law (replacing Medicare with a voucher scheme).

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The Bain of the GOP's Existence

The next time someone tells you, "I'm a capitalist," go ahead and answer, "No, you're not." You'd just be playing the odds. A capitalist is defined as "A wealthy person who uses money to invest in trade and industry for profit in accordance with the principles of capitalism." In other words, probably not you or the person you're talking to. "Capitalist" is synonymous with "financier."

Also, notice the term "job creation" isn't anywhere in the definition. People don't invest to create jobs, they invest to make money. In fact, whether any jobs are created by the investment is entirely beside the point. In many cases, jobs are lost. The people Republicans hold up as the high-minded "job creators" not only aren't interested in creating jobs, but they'd really rather not. When you're maximizing profits, you want as few employees as possible. After all, you're in the business of writing your own paycheck, not someone else's.

When it comes to what Republicans call "job creation," they'd rather you didn't see how the sausage is made. Because when you get right down to it, it looks pretty heartless. If hiring someone means you'll make money, you'll hire someone -- and if firing someone means you'll make money, they're out. The "job creators" have been doing one helluva lot more firing than hiring lately, which makes the GOP's favored term for capitalists a lie. After all, one would assume that a "job creator" actually would get around to creating some jobs. Lately, they've been acting as "job destroyers."

Which brings us to a guy named Willard "Mitt" Romney, son of wealth, former vulture capitalist and professional job destroyer. Remember the villain in all those movies -- you know, the ones where there's a hostile takeover and rich corporate-type wants to sell off all the company's assets and fire everyone? Yeah, those movies. That's Mitt Romney, CEO of Bain Capital. He's that guy.

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Republicans vs. Reality

A lot is being made of a Wall Street Journal editorial out today that points out the obvious: House Republicans have completely screwed up the payroll tax cut extension. While it's nice to see the WSJ momentarily dip their toes in reality, they can't seem to bring themselves to go for full immersion. The editorial is crawling with half-truths and unfounded assumptions. In other words, it was obviously written by the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Still, when a rightwing propaganda outlet attacks the right wing, it's at least interesting to watch.

But has it set the GOP back on the right course? Not exactly. And by "not exactly," I mean "exactly not."

In a report on the whole fiasco, The Hill shares this tidbit:

House Republicans... think it is Democrats who will be blamed for not working with the GOP on a deal to extend the break for a year. In their talking points Tuesday, they emphasized that a conference committee was the normal process for resolving differences between the two chambers.

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GOP's Economic Sabotage Backfiring

I want you to try -- really try -- to see the following statement as rational or logical; "A payroll tax cut extension is too important for stimulating the economy to be allowed to expire after just two months. Therefore, we need to pass a year-long extension or nothing."

OK, if you got that to make any damned sense, let me know how you did it. Because I can't get it to work at all. If an extension of the payroll tax cut is so important that it absolutely must last for a year, in what insane universe does it make sense that no extension at all is preferable to a mere two months? Further, what's preventing you from coming back in two months and demanding an extension for the remaining ten? I take this argument and I turn it over and bend it and twist it and smack it with a hammer and I just can't get it to fit within any system of logic or rationality that I know of.

As a result, I'm forced to conclude that it's stupid. Those are the rules, I don't make them up. An argument that makes no damned sense at all is just a stupid argument.

And this stupid argument is the basis for the latest roadblock thrown up by House Republicans; It's a super-important, must-pass tax cut that they love so damned much that they're willing to kill it unless it's born perfect.

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Fox Unable to Fathom How GOP Screwed Themselves

Thursday, a Fox News poll showed that the public believes -- by an extremely wide margin -- that Pres. Barack Obama would probably be reelected. The video above is the reaction from the hosts of Fox's morning lobotomy patient show, Fox & Friends. As you can see, they're not taking it well. You expect Gretchen Carlson to look at the camera and ask, "We've been telling you Obama is pure evil! Haven't you people been listening to us?!?"

To be fair, the results aren't anything approaching reality, numbers-wise. The same poll shows the president winning, but that "Obama edges Romney by only 1 point and Gingrich by 5 points." So not by a comfortable margin by any means. In fact, you could call it a statistical dead heat in the Obama/Romney matchup. Still, in a non-numerical sense, the perception of that 44% who say that Obama will win is accurate within the poll, which does in fact show that Obama would win. Fox and Friends were freaking out that the largest percentage agreed with the findings of their poll.

What we see here again is what I've come to call the "clown show effect." While an endless series of GOP debates has amounted to free advertising for Republican candidates, that advertising hasn't been extremely positive. And, of course, Herman Cain's flameout didn't help any.

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GOP Enthusiasm and The Clown Show Effect

When I look at polling, I tend to use myself as a model. I look at the question and think about how I'd answer it. Maybe that's not the best way to go about it. I suppose I'm not always the average voter.

For example, take voter enthusiasm polls. For myself, enthusiasm is pretty much irrelevant. I go out and vote regardless of how stoked I am about it in any particular cycle. Using myself as a model, voter enthusiasm would be a meaningless stat. But other people apparently react differently to their own enthusiasm. The polls really do seem to reflect the final turnout.

Which is why a new Gallup poll must have Republicans feeling a little uneasy. When respondents were asked, "Thinking ahead to the election for president next year, compared to previous elections, are you more enthusiastic than usual, or less enthusiastic?" 49% of "Republicans and independents who lean Republican" reported being more enthusiastic. This compares well with the 44% of Democrats and dem leaners who say the same.

And it's at this point that the good news ends for the GOP. Their enthusiasm has dropped nearly 10% from September, when it was at 58%. Call it the "clown show effect."

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Despite Scandal, Cain Rising Among GOP Voters

Someplace, Democratic strategists are planning a party. Herman Cain's sexual harassment scandal has not hurt him with GOP voters and he continues to rise in the polls. Those are the findings of Washington Post/ABC News poll out today.

Businessman Herman Cain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney are running nearly even atop the field of 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows, with most Republicans dismissing the harassment allegations that over the past week have roiled Cain’s campaign.

Seven in 10 Republicans say reports that Cain made unwanted advances toward two employees when he was head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s — allegations which have been stiffly rebutted by Cain’s campaign — do not matter when it comes to picking a candidate.

Beautiful. Of course, it's not all smooth sailing for Cain. "[T]he potential threat to his burgeoning campaign is evident as well, with Cain slipping to third place among those who see the charges as serious, and Republican women significantly more likely than men to say the scandal makes them less apt to support Cain," the report continues.

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When Republicans Say They Can't Create Jobs, Maybe We Should Believe Them

If you cut government spending, it helps the economy, right?

That's what Republicans keep telling us, but it's hard to see how this can possibly be true. The economy is spending. Government spending is demand. Reduce demand and boost the economy? It makes no sense.

And now we have a real world example of how cutting government spending, as Republicans argue, builds a gangbusters economy. As always, reality has a liberal bias.

Associated Press:

Conservative Republicans have long clamored for government downsizing. They're starting to get it -- by default.

Crippled by plunging tax revenues, state and local governments have shed over a half million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. And, after adding jobs early in the downturn, the federal government is now cutting them as well.

States cut 49,000 jobs over the past year and localities 210,000, according to an analysis of Labor Department statistics. There are 30,000 fewer federal workers now than a year ago -- including 5,300 Postal Service jobs canceled last month.

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The GOP's 'Punish Everything and Everyone' Mentality

I was tempted to write that an LA Times headline -- "Medical help for illegal immigrants could haunt Mitt Romney" -- demonstrates everything that's wrong with today's Republican Party. It hits a lot of the bullet-points; a lack of compassion or mercy, a complete absence of anything approximating common sense, and the belief that every problem can be solved by punishing someone.

The Massachusetts healthcare law that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed in 2006 includes a program known as the Health Safety Net, which allows undocumented immigrants to get needed medical care along with others who lack insurance.

Uninsured, poor immigrants can walk into a health clinic or hospital in the state and get publicly subsidized care at virtually no cost to them, regardless of their immigration status.

The program, widely supported in Massachusetts, drew little attention when Romney signed the trailblazing healthcare law. But now it could prove problematic for the Republican presidential hopeful, who has been attacking Texas Gov. Rick Perry for supporting educational aid for children of undocumented immigrants in Texas.

So undocumented immigrants, including children, should be sick and uneducated. Because a sick and uneducated segment of the populace is just so damned good for a society.

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Obama Jobs Plan Would Be Effective, So Of Course It Must Be Killed

Looks like President Obama's jobs plan is getting the thumbs-up from economists.

Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said.

Economists in the survey are less optimistic than Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has cited estimates for a 1.5 percent boost to gross domestic product. Even so, the program may bolster Obama’s re-election prospects by lowering a jobless rate that has stayed near 9 percent or more since April 2009.

If you want to understand Republican economic policies, that last sentence should tell you all you need to know. President Barack Obama must not be reelected. And if that means that America takes a hit, then so be it.

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GOP Supporters' Lynch Mob Mentality

Last night's Republican presidential debate was almost a rerun, in that the candidates repeated many of the lies they told last time around and in that the media's largely ignoring those lies. As always, the talking heads are all atwitter about who won, who lost, who got the best dig, who had the best applause line, etc. Who told the truth is unimportant, apparently.

And there was even the seemingly requisite offensive crowd reaction. Previous debates have featured applause at the death penalty's failure to prevent crimes in Texas (you don't set records for handing out punishments that actually work) and cheering on the death of the uninsured. And now there's this:



That's right, Stephen Hill, a gay soldier currently serving in Iraq got booed. Even some conservatives are getting a little queasy about the debate crowds, although in strictly typical paranoid terms.

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Thanks to the Media, Voter are the Big Losers in Last Night's GOP Debate

In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It's better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.)
-Jay Rosen, Why Political Coverage is Broken

It was just weeks ago -- August 26th -- that press critic Jay Rosen gave the speech that quote was taken from. Rosen's criticism of the news media, boiled down quite a bit, was that political journalists place more emphasis on political strategizing than they do on the real world ramifications of the policies. That reporters value "savviness" above truth. And that this wrongheaded approach to political coverage hurts us all by causing people to know more about political wrangling than outcomes or consequences.

There is no better example of this than the coverage of last night's GOP debate in Tampa last night. All the coverage is about who won, who got in the best shot, who had the best zinger, what this means to the candidates going forward, and who's gained the most supporters from it. What is barely being covered -- and, in many outlets, not covered at all -- is the fact that the candidates at the debate were lying. Shamelessly, continuously lying.

PolitiFact followed the debate with fact-checks of key statements made by the candidates. Of those statements, only one rated "true" and one "mostly true"-- both were when Mitt Romney pointed out that Rick Perry was lying about his past stance on Social Security. So even those few true statements were lie-related. The rest of the statements ranged from "half true" to "pants on fire."

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Calling the GOP "Anti-Science" is Being Generous

As a noted climatologist and expert on all things geological, Rep. Michele Bachmann can say with some degree of certainty that she knows what caused both Hurricane Irene and the earthquake that shook the east coast last week.

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians," she told a crowd in Florida yesterday. "We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending." Let me just point out that the right is accusing President Obama of politicizing Irene, then move on.

Shelly's not politicizing Irene, though. She's just spelling out cold, hard facts. All this happened because God has an opinion on government spending in the US. Seems to me that a being capable of miracles would be able to be a lot more clear -- maybe writing "STOP SPENDING SO MUCH MONEY!" across the sky in fire. But never mind that; the guy who supposedly runs the entire cosmos has a problem with the ratio of revenues to expenditures in one of the world's two-hundred-fifty-some nations. Call him detail-oriented.

Of course, it pays to point out that Bachmann rejects climate science. "I don't think it has been established as a fact that global warming is the issue of the day," she said in 2010. "One thing we need to do is look at the science." Think about that for a second. The evidence isn't good enough for her to conclude that global warming in a man-made phenomenon, but the science is solid that an angry god causes earthquakes and hurricanes. Worse, it takes someone of great faith to decipher what these earthquakes and hurricanes actually mean. This is the sort of reasoning that gets virgins thrown into volcanoes.

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Wisconsin Summer Recall Wrap-Up: Republicans Call This "Winning"

I have to admit, I was prepared to be disappointed last night. After the last wave of Wisconsin recall elections, I was ready for at least one poll to be wrong and for dems to lose at least one seat. Turns out, all my preparations were for naught -- both Jim Holperin and Bob Wirch sailed to easy and comfortable wins. I'm not going to complain.

It's important to remember the rationale behind the recalls. For Republicans, it was their support of Gov. Walker's union-busting. But for Democrats, the recalls were about leaving the state to prevent a quorum for that union-busting. Wisconsin residents were supposed to be outraged that dems had gone "fleebagger" -- by conservatives' argument, leaving the state rather than doing their jobs. So, of the two rationales, one proved weak. After the smoke had cleared, not a single Democrat had been recalled.

While losing is being cast as winning by Republicans and the punditry (the GOP keeps their senate majority, albeit barely), it's important to note that this represents a shift in reasoning; a fact that's not lost on Wisconsin native John Nichols.

Wisconsin Democrats have won the last two of nine state Senate recall elections held over the course of the summer, meaning that the opponents of Governor Scott Walker's attacks on collective-bargaining rights have prevailed in the majority of recall elections and claimed the majority of votes cast in what many saw as a statewide referendum on Walker's policies.

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The Lousy Deal

We've got a debt deal and it's just the best thing ever! Check out how super-excited the White House is about the whole thing. If we go to the White House website, we learn that it's a "Win for the Economy and Budget Discipline," that the deal "Removes Cloud of Uncertainty," and that the whole thing's a trip through Bipartisan Happy-Land, where gumdrops grow on sugarplum trees and everything is made wonderful by the magical power of Centrism. Yay!

Of course, if we talk to Mean Old Mister Knows-What-the-Hell-He's-Talking-About, then the magic seems to evaporate.

Crooks and Liars:

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman warned Sunday that proposed spending cuts in a deal to raise the nation's debt ceiling would end up hurting the economy.

"From the perspective of a rational person, we shouldn't even be talking about spending cuts at all now," Krugman told ABC's Christiane Amanpour. "We have nine percent unemployment. These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment... If you have a situation in which you are permanently going to raise the unemployment rate -- which is what this is going to do -- that's actually going to reduce future revenues."

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Tea Party Freshmen's Phony Opposition to Spending

You could call it hypocritical, mostly because it is. Tea Party freshmen who claim to be all about cutting spending are practicing an "austerity for you, but not for me" approach to government funding. Elected on a platform of cutting government to the bone, they've since gone on to make sure their constituents know they're bringing home the bacon.

New York Times:

An examination of spending bills, news releases and communications with federal agencies obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows that nearly two dozen freshmen have sought money for projects that could ultimately cost billions of dollars, while calling for less spending and banning pork projects.

Politicians have long advocated for projects on behalf of individuals and businesses back home, even without earmarks. Several lawmakers said they were merely providing a constituent service. But since many of the freshman Republicans campaigned on a pledge to cut spending and to change Washington’s time-honored ways, their support of spending projects suggests that in many cases ideology can go only so far in serving the needs of people back home.

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