The Brief Life of Bipartisanship and the Return of the Wingnuts

Hey, remember how the modest two year budget deal hammered out by Paul Ryan and Patty Murray was a sign that insane partisanship was on its way out? Yeah, you can stop shoveling dirt in gridlock's grave, because Republican hostage-taking isn't all that very dead yet.

Wall Street Journal: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) signaled that Republicans would not raise the debt ceiling next year without some sort of concessions from Democrats, saying lawmakers were still crafting their strategy.

“We, as a caucus, along with our Senate counterparts, are going to meet and discuss what it is we want to get out of the debt limit,” Mr. Ryan said on Fox News Sunday. “We don’t want ‘nothing’ out of the debt limit. We’re going to decide what it is we can accomplish out of this debt limit fight.”

The U.S. government spends more money than it brings in through taxes, which means the Treasury Department has to borrow money by issuing debt. The government can only borrow money up to a certain level - called the debt ceiling – which is set by Congress. In October, lawmakers agreed to “suspend” the debt limit until Feb. 7, 2014. The White House has said it will no longer negotiate with Republicans on conditions for raising the debt limit, but many Republicans have said they will only vote to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for budget changes like spending cuts.

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Is Paul Ryan's Deal Something Paul Ryan Can Support?

There are three things I can pretty much guarantee happened this morning; the sun came up, newspapers were delivered to doorsteps, and Paul Ryan wetted his finger and stuck it out the window, to see which way the Tea Party winds were blowing. After working out a budget deal that takes a little bit of the bite out of the sequester, Rep. Ryan is likely measuring the pulse of his colleagues in his chamber -- and finding that pulse is a little more agitated by his deal than he might've hoped.

Over at Business Insider, Brett LoGiurato has an article up, the headline of which says it all: "Conservatives Are Starting To Freak Out About The Budget Deal." The Heritage Foundation doesn't like it, the Tea Party doesn't like it... In short, the base hates it. A man who still reportedly harbors presidential ambitions, Paul Ryan has always tried to walk a fine line between seeming to be the moderate Republicans who can win a general election and the Tea Party extremist who can win Republican primaries. And in attempting this balancing act, he has largely failed. If there's on person you can count on to oppose a deal swung by Paul Ryan, it's Paul Ryan. If the 'baggers hate it, he's going to hate it. Because, let's face it, winning the GOP primary is the first step in winning the White House. So it's first things first; make sure the rightwing extremists are happy, then try to figure out how to explain it to everyone else later.

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Reality Drives the GOP Off the Rails

The House Republican caucus went fullblown clown show yesterday, as they tried -- and failed -- to fit their ideological square peg into reality's round hole. At issue was the THUD bill -- a bill to fund both the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. This resulted in utter failure and the bill was pulled. It this was a tremendous embarrassment for the House GOP.

What happened was simple: House GOP applied their fiscal flateartherism to a bill that would genuinely affect their own constituencies. It's fine when the cuts are to abstract groups in other people's districts -- welfare queens and lazy jobless folks and those leeches living the sweet life on food stamps -- but when the big sequester-level cuts have to be applied in terms of anything other than empty rhetoric, they look all too real and all too suicidal. Brian Beutler explains:

...In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it.

But these aren’t normal times. Republicans have refused to negotiate away their budget differences with Democrats, and have instead instructed their appropriators to use the House GOP budget as a blueprint for funding the government beyond September.

Like all recent GOP budgets, this year’s proposes lots of spending on defense and security, at the expense of all other programs. Specifically, it sets the total pool of discretionary dollars at sequestration levels, then funnels money from thinly stretched domestic departments (like Transportation and HUD) to the Pentagon and a few other agencies. But that’s all the budget says. It doesn’t say how to allocate the dollars, nor does it grapple in any way with the possibility that cutting domestic spending so profoundly might be unworkable. It’s an abstraction.

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The War on Facts, Televised

A week long illness is now receding and I can wear my glasses again without wanting to hurl. Sinus pressure must realign your eyeballs or something, I don't know. But it sucked.

Another thing that sucks and makes me want to hurl is a video up at Politico, which I'll spare you. You don't have to actually watch it to get my point. And since the attached article is titled, "Paul Krugman riles fellow pundits," Politico owes the man an apology. Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a professor at Princeton University, in addition to his column and blog in the New York Times, while "pundit" has become mostly synonymous with "hack." The days of a punditry populated largely with people who actually know what the hell they're talking about have long since passed -- if they ever existed at all. Today, the vast majority of pundits are partisan propagandists. And their hackery is insufferable.

After all, in what world would Mary Matalin -- a professional Republican operative -- be considered a "pundit?" Unfortunately, the answer to that is "the one we live in." She was one of the "fellow pundits" Krugman riled on ABC's This Week. The other was this tool:

After Krugman called House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget a "fake document" and the columnist said he was "amazed that people haven't gotten that," [George] Will unsheathed his verbal sword and went at Krugman.

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See How Much Romney-Ryan Love the 47%? See? See?

On the off-chance that you're not familiar with the what I'm going to call the Youngstown Clean Pot Massacre, here's the skinny. If you are familiar with the story and don't need a refresher, go ahead and skip the following blockquote. Frankly though, I found the real-world absurdism of the story almost as hilarious the second time around.

Mediaite:

Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is in hotter water than it takes to wash dishes that are already clean over his ill-advised Saturday photo-op at a Youngstown, Ohio, soup kitchen. After pool reporters revealed that Ryan’s visit to the St. Vincent De Paul Society Dining Hall consisted of washing dishes that were already clean, and after the hall had emptied, the president of the charity blasted the Ryan campaign for “ramrodd(ing) their way” into the soup kitchen, and added that ““The photo-op they did wasn’t even accurate. He did nothing. He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall.”

On Monday night’s The Ed Show, host Ed Schultz tore into Ryan over the artifice involved in his visit to the soup kitchen, which included washing dishes that were already clean, and later speaking only for still cameras, not reporters, with some people who “appeared to be homeless,” wondering just what Ryan could have been saying to them.

“I wonder what Ryan told those men he talked to,” Ed fumed. “He probably didn’t tell them he plans to turn Medicaid into a block grant program, to voucherize Medicare, to slash billions from food assistance programs.”

Brian J. Antal, president of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society, took the Romney-Ryan campaign to the woodshed last night over the incident. Soup kitchens are not for photo ops, he said. "We're a faith-based organization; we are apolitical because the majority of our funding is from private donations," Antal told the Washington Post. "It's strictly in our bylaws not to do it. They showed up there, and they did not have permission. They got one of the volunteers to open up the doors."

So Ryan walks into a clean kitchen, pulls clean pots and pans out of the cupboards, and pretends to scrub-a-dub-dub. He puts the kitchen's fundraising at risk, by making the organization running it seem partisan and seem to endorse Romney-Ryan. And it's all so hamhanded and transparent that reporters can't help but figure out what's going on right away. The Youngstown Clean Pot Massacre was not a carefully planned out operation.

So the question is, why? Why stage this photo-op at all?

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Ryan Offers Lies to Those Who Demand Lies

I was going to start off by saying that Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican Convention last night proves that Team Romney's got nothing. But that wouldn't exactly be on the money. Ryan managed to spend a half hour attacking Obama, so it would be more accurate to say that Paul Ryan's speech proved that Team Romney has nothing true. You can blow a half hour on lies, an hour on lies, or -- as Mitt Romney himself has proven -- a few months on lies. The amount of time you can spend lying is limited only by your imagination. So, gun to my head demanding I say something nice about Romney-Ryan: they've got a lot of imagination.

The biggest, most obvious, most ridiculous lie was that Barack Obama promised to keep open a Wisconsin auto plant that's shuttered to this day. Of course, the problem is that Obama never made that promise and that the plant closed during the Bush administration.

Not even Fox News can get fully behind this steaming pile of BS. In a piece titled "Paul Ryan's speech in 3 words," Fox's Sally Kohn describes the Ryan speech as "dazzling," "deceiving," and "distracting." You might've noticed that only 33% of those descriptors are positive.

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Why Romney's Afraid of Abortion Questions

And that would be Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, affirming a point I made yesterday -- specifically, this one:

[Trying to spin it] is stupid. Either the [RNC's strict anti-abortion] plank means what it says or it doesn’t. If an “unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed,” then what the hell do rape or incest have to do with anything? If a woman is impregnated through rape, how is that not an “unborn child?” If a young teen is molested and made pregnant by Uncle Perv, how is the fetus not a person to whom “Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply?”

How can they create exceptions and remain consistent in their reasoning? They can’t. They can’t possibly. And they never meant to.

And now here's Ryan, applying exactly that lunatic logic. "I'm very proud of my pro-life record," Ryan explained in an interview, "and I've always adopted the idea that, the position that the method of conception doesn't change the definition of life." That is, if abortion is "killing a baby," then it doesn't make any difference how the patient got pregnant. Like Todd Akin, Ryan sees abortion as evil -- regardless of how pregnancy occurred. No exceptions for rape or incest.

Then Rep. Ryan goes on to dig in deeper; Mitt Romney's position on the issue goes pretty far -- but not far enough for him. "And the president, in this case the future President Mitt Romney, has exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother," Ryan said, "which is a vast improvement of where we are right now." In an earlier interview, Ryan called Romney's position a "good step in the right direction."

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Being 'Pro-Life' Means Lying Very, Very Easily

When Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri said that it was almost impossible for a woman to get pregnant from "legitimate rape," he was repeating a lie that's been around for a while now. The "pro-life" camp has always been the "pro-lie" camp. Whether it be linking abortion to breast cancer and depression or claiming that nine months of pregnancy -- with all the medical expense that goes with it -- is merely "inconvenient," they've always lied without hesitation.

And there's a reason why they lie so easily -- they believe they're 100%, absolutely correct. Further, they believe their position is endorsed by their god and, through a simplistic process of elimination, assume it's opposed by their devil. The enemies of the anti-abortion movement are the allies and minions of Satan, so any tactic -- no matter how dishonest and shameful -- is smiled upon by Jesus. This is not a political debate, this is war. Nothing is off the table. Deceit is an acceptable and legitimate tactic in war. Especially when that war is as fundamental as a battle of good vs. evil. If ever the ends justified the means, it's in a cosmic struggle for the fate of the universe.

All of which makes statements made by "pro-life" politicians worthy of a grain of salt, as Akin's comment so clearly demonstrates. If you believed a lie could save America from it's worst and most dangerous enemy, you'd do it. So will they.

But in terms of utility, it turns out that the "legitimate rape" line wasn't the wisest lie. Legal abortion in cases of rape and incest -- which the hardcore anti-abortion folks oppose -- is actually a very popular idea. Even among those who otherwise oppose abortion. And dismissing rape is never a smart thing to do in any context. This may very well cost Akin an election that he was winning just days ago.

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Ryan and Medicare: A Recipe for Increased Costs

Against the background of Mitt Romney's continuing attacks on Barack Obama and Medicare, PolitiFact checked a statement by Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter. "You know, I heard Mitt Romney deride the $700 billion cuts in Medicare that the president achieved through health care reform," Cutter told Face the Nation. "You know what those cuts are? It’s taking subsidies away from insurance companies, taking rebates away from prescription drug company. Is that what Mitt Romney wants to protect? And interestingly enough Paul Ryan protected those cuts in his budget."

Not surprisingly -- since they also rated Romney's statements on this subject "mostly false" - PolitiFact rated this as "true."

But none of this is extremely surprising. It's a well-established fact that the Romney campaign is built on a mountain of lies. And this is yet another -- PolitiFact goes further than Cutter and argues that it's dishonest to even call the amount a cut. "Well, there are cuts and then there are CUTS. Neither Obama nor his health care law literally 'cut' a dollar from the Medicare program’s budget," the editors write. "Rather, the health care law instituted a number of changes to reduce the growth of Medicare costs. At the time the law was passed, those reductions amounted to $500 billion over the next 10 years."

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So When's Ryan Going to Bring All This Supposed 'Substance?'

Well thank God Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan to be his running mate. Now we can finally have a debate of substance. This has been the media's line -- as they've gone straight to covering Ryan's workout schedule. But don't blame the media entirely. They're only half-wrong on this one. They're being forced to cover a physical fitness infomercial because Paul Ryan is a man largely without substance. He pretends to be a serious, wonkish deepthinker -- and the media has inexplicably fallen for it -- but when you start examining the facts and cracking the numbers, the most substantial thing about Paul Ryan is his status as a P90X success story.

For example, consider this headline from Talking Points Memo -- "Paul Ryan Slams His Own Medicare Cuts In Ohio":

Speaking at his alma mater Miami University in Ohio, Paul Ryan slammed President Obama for adopting Medicare cuts that, until last week, were openly supported by Ryan himself.

“The president, I’m told, is talking about Medicare today,” Ryan said. “We want this debate.”

Ryan went on to say that “what I don’t think he’ll be telling people is that the president took $716 billion from the Medicare program — he raided it to pay for Obamacare.”

Like Romney, Ryan has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which included $716 billion in savings taken from health care providers, not seniors’ benefits. But unlike Romney, Ryan wrote and passed two Republican budgets that kept the cuts in place.

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Selection of Ryan Has Many on the Right Almost as Worried as They Should Be

Part of the media consensus on Mitt Romney's choice of running mate seems to be that conservatives just love Paul Ryan to pieces. And that's true, up to a point. The Tea Party types think he's great, but they're reactionaries who measure a politician by the responses of liberals -- lefties hate him, so he must be OK. And, of course, the rightwing punditry likes him for similar reasons; liberals will fight this guy tooth and nail and conflict equals ratings.

But there's one group on the right who don't like Mitt Romney's choice at all. We'll call them "people who know what the hell they're talking about" or PWKWTHTTAs.

Politico:

Away from the cameras, and with all the usual assurances that people aren’t being quoted by name, there is an unmistakable consensus among Republican operatives in Washington: Romney has taken a risk with Ryan that has only a modest chance of going right — and a huge chance of going horribly wrong.

In more than three dozen interviews with Republican strategists and campaign operatives — old hands and rising next-generation conservatives alike — the most common reactions to Ryan ranged from gnawing apprehension to hair-on-fire anger that Romney has practically ceded the election.

While many of these PWKWTHTTAs are genuinely excited to see someone as hard-right as on the ticket, Politico reports that "the more pessimistic strategists... think the Ryan pick is a disaster for the GOP. Many of these people don’t care that much about Romney -- they always felt he faced an improbable path to victory -- but are worried that Ryan’s vocal views about overhauling Medicare will be a millstone for other GOP candidates in critical House and Senate races."

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Why Romney Picked Ryan -- A Dumb Guy Told Him To

I suppose I have to write the obligatory Paul Ryan post. The good news about that is that there's a lot to talk about with Ryan. The bad news is that everyone's saying it. The worse news is that a lot of pundits are trying to come up with new, clever things to say about Ryan and down that road lies idiocy. I was resigned to repeating (and hopefully clarifying) some of the unstupid things pundits were saying -- a not very fun post to start the week.

And then I saw this:

Politico:

Once again, Bill Kristol gets his way — and once again, watch out.

For two consecutive presidential cycles now, the founding editor of the Weekly Standard has successfully led the conservative media drumbeat for a bold vice presidential pick: In 2008, he fervently supported and promoted Sarah Palin for months before the country even knew her name. In 2012, he urged Mitt Romney to “go for the gold” with Paul Ryan.

For a generation, stretching back to the 1980s, Kristol has used his influence to goad Republicans to be bolder and more ambitious — and riskier, for themselves, the Republican Party, and the nation—in their decisions. This extends beyond political calculation to policy. In 2003, Kristol was at the forefront of the lobbying effort for the Iraq war, which — however history judges it — cost far more in blood and treasure than he and his fellow neoconservatives had anticipated.

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GOP Harming America for Political Gain

It's something that's completely obvious to any close observer of politics and now it's clear that it's pretty apparent to even casual observers -- Republicans are sabotaging America.

Talking Points Memo:

Nearly half of voters believe that Republicans are deliberately hamstringing efforts to resuscitate the economy in order to bolster their chances of defeating President Barack Obama, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling (PPP), conducted in conjunction with Daily Kos and SEIU, shows that 49 percent of registered voters nationwide think Republicans are “intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy” to ensure Obama’s defeat in November. Half of all independents surveyed feel the same way.

And it's not just the DC subspecies of the Republican animal who's guilty of this; the state level variety is also playing along, attacking the problem of rising employment and consumer demand by laying off public workers by the truckload. At the federal level, Republicans block any attempt further stimulate the economy (because, contrary to their talking points, the stimulus worked). At the local level, they lay off workers, cut wages and benefits, and do whatever else they can to make sure demand remains weak and unemployment remains high. Then they all join together and complain about poor economic performance and high unemployment. They're making your life suck, so that they can enjoy political gain by complaining that life sucks. And for that, the most charitable assessment I can make of an average elected GOP official is that they're one sick individual. The least charitable is that, by actively working against the best interests of their nation and its people, they're damned close to committing treason. As always, one doesn't necessarily rule out the other.

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Misreading the Catholic Vote

It's always fun to feign perplexity over polling. Basically, it works this way; a bunch of pundits agree on a narrative -- often based on stereotypes. They take their assumptions and run with them, until everyone starts thinking that they have some sort of basis in fact, rather than speculation. Then, when polling comes out showing the speculation to be exactly wrong, the head-scratching ensues.

So it is with a new Gallup poll. In that poll, Romney leads among the "very religious," while Obama leads among everyone else (the "very religious" are a minority, by the way). None of this is very surprising -- the religious nuts always go for the Republican. But what has the pundits all confused is that President Obama leads among Catholic voters.

This is a serious variation from the accepted pundit groupthink. That whole contraception coverage thing was supposed to be a big problem for Obama. Yet here they are backing him anyway. The word "despite" is used in just about every story and post dealing with this I've seen so far; Catholics back Obama "despite" the whole BC thing.

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Paul Ryan, True-Believerism, and the Coming GOP Medicare Fiasco

It's a warning I haven't written about in a while, but beware of true believers. I used it more during the Bush administration, when the neocons were ignoring the fact that the invasion of Iraq just wasn't working. The neocons had a domino theory for Iraq; Saddam Hussein falls and -- for some unexplained reason -- the middle east stabilizes, Israel becomes everyone's buddy, and Democracy breaks out all over the place. Everything was falling down around their ears, but the line from the Cheneyite wing of the White House seemed to be "It will work! It will! The theory is so beautiful and perfect, it can't possibly be flawed."

This is why you should always beware true believers. They're the fanatics, the zealots, the guys who are absolutely certain the flawless idea can't fail. They're the ones who believe that when something's not working, you need to do more of it. And they seem to be incapable of recognizing failure. They're the doctor in the bad medical drama, pounding a patient's chest and shouting, "Damn you! Don't you die on me!" Except the true believer would keep pumping away until the body was stiff. The TV doctor listens when someone tells them it's over, the true believer thinks it's impossible for it to be over.

The neocon true-believerism was bloody and disastrous. Other kinds are simply disastrous. And, luckily, the example of true-believerism offered today only harms the true believers.

Politico:

To Democrats, the release of the House GOP budget is like Christmas in March. And they’re planning a celebration of sorts.

Democrats are organizing media blitzes, House floor speeches and town halls back home to seize on the changes to Medicare that Republicans are expected to propose Tuesday. To blunt GOP talking points that only Republicans are willing to confront the debt, Democrats intend to unveil their own budget next week calling for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes on the rich.

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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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Generals in the Class War Decry Class Warfare

It's not class warfare. It's math.
-President Barack Obama

That quote was from the president's speech announcing a plan to reduce the deficit. Included in the plan is a choice -- either close tax loopholes that allow the rich and corporations to dodge their fair share of the tax burden or end the high end Bush tax cuts which, as the president rightly pointed out, were intended to be temporary anyway. In fact, when Bush asked congress to make them permanent after the fact, congress refused.

There's no reason that Obama couldn't have demanded both the closure of the loopholes and the end to the bottom heavy tax structure -- none other than Barack Obama being Barack Obama and leading with a concession. But that's another post. This post is about the claims by Republicans that asking the wealthy to pay their fair share is "class warfare."

Los Angeles Times:

Top congressional Republicans on Sunday accused President Obama of trying to incite class warfare with his proposal for a new tax on millionaires and said they would not support the measure because it would hurt economic growth.

"Class warfare … may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics," House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said on "Fox News Sunday." "We don't need a system that seeks to prey on people's fear, envy and anxiety. We need a system that creates jobs and innovation and removes these barriers for entrepreneurs to go out and rehire people."

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Conservative Thinkers' Self-Inflicted Dilemma

Reading a Politico piece on Republican elites worrying about 2012, you can almost stop reading after the fourth paragraph:

It's a tough time to be a conservative intellectual.

From the Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal, on the pages of policy periodicals and opinion sections, the egghead right's longing for a presidential candidate of ideas -- first Mitch Daniels, then Paul Ryan -- has been endless, intense, and unrequited.

Profoundly dissatisfied with the current field, that dull ache may only grow more acute after Ryan's decision Monday to take himself out of the running.

The problem, in shorthand: To many conservative elites, Rick Perry is a dope, Michele Bachmann is a joke, and Mitt Romney is a fraud.

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Rep. Paul Ryan Hides Behind a Paywall

What is that I smell; is it fear or blood in the water?

Politico:

It will cost $15 to ask Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) a question in person during the August congressional recess.

The House Budget Committee chairman isn’t holding any face-to-face open-to-the-public town hall meetings during the recess, but like several of his colleagues he will speak only for residents willing to open their wallets.

Ryan, who took substantial criticism from his southeast Wisconsin constituents in April after he introduced the Republicans’ budget proposal, isn’t the only member of congress whose August recess town hall-style meetings are strictly pay-per-view.

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Well, At Least it's Not a Buck and a Half's Worth of Arugula!

In 2008, Barack Obama was an elitist. This was the worst thing ever. He supposedly ate in fancy restaurants and ordered unearthly foreign delights like arugula. This meant he was out of touch with the average person, unlike his opponent John McCain who -- as you might remember -- couldn't remember exactly how many houses he owned.

Human Events, 2008:

John McCain may be gaining what Obama is losing among women because of Obama's "Arugula Gap."

"Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?" Obama asked an Iowa crowd in 2007. I had to Google "arugula" to discover it's a leafy substitute for lettuce in trendy restaurant salads. Most people don't shop at Whole Foods (which specializes in "organic" foods and other environmentally-fashionable products). And most women, I suspect, aren't looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of their high school French teacher than of John F. Kennedy.

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