With Plastic Gun Ban, Congress Votes to Kill a Cherished Gun Lobby Argument

Bad news for the people who think the Second Amendment term "well-regulated" means "not to be regulated." A long-standing gun regulation will be formally renewed at the White House today, proving that even the Tea Party-dominated House of Representatives sees allowing certain weapons to be legally owned would be ridiculously and needlessly pro-criminal.

CNN: The Senate voted unanimously on Monday to renew a 10-year ban on guns that cannot be picked up by metal detectors commonly found in airports, court houses and government buildings.

The law, which prohibits firearms made mostly of plastic, was set to expire at day's end.

It had drawn renewed attention recently due to its pending expiration and the advent of mainly non-metalic handguns produced by 3-D printers.

The House acted last week, and now the measure goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.

In a world where bottles of shampoo are perceived as a serious danger of terrorism, an undetectable firearm ban was really a no-brainer. And the current guns are undetectable, despite a steel fig leaf designed to create a loophole in law. "Currently, plastic guns made using 3-D printers comply with the law by inserting a removable metal block," CNN reports. "That has led to worries plastic guns could pass through metal detectors without being flagged by simply removing the block."

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Putting Bigotry Before Healthy Families

Same-sex relationships make for good families. It's science.

Huffington Post:

With the Supreme Court poised to hear arguments on same-sex marriage next week, a top pediatricians' group has issued a statement supporting marriage equality for all consenting couples, as well as full adoption and foster-care rights for parents regardless of sexual orientation.

"There is a lot of research to back up this policy," said Dr. Ellen C. Perrin, a professor of pediatrics at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and one of the lead authors. "If a child has two parents that are dedicated and willing to provide a permanent, secure family, why would we not support that family? It's clearly in the best interest of children."

This is not the first time the American Academy of Pediatrics, or AAP, has publicly addressed same-sex parenting. In 2002, the organization, which represents more than 60,000 pediatricians, issued a policy statement supporting second-parent adoption by partners of the same sex -- a stance it reaffirmed in 2010. In 2006, the group also published an article exploring the legal, financial and "psychosocial" ramifications of civil marriage. It concluded that more than 25 years of research have found no link between parents' sexual orientation, and their children's emotional well being.

Marriage confers many benefits that a more informal relationship does not. There are insurance issues, legal issues, issues at school, issues about emergency medical decisions, etc. Legally speaking, an unmarried parent is an only parent, with any support from a same-sex partner being limited by law. While single parents are more than capable of raising healthy families, laws barring marriage equality ban parents who want them from these extra benefits and privileges from access to them. as a result, children suffer.

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There's No Defending Our Insane Gun Culture

The other day, I pointed out that the things gun apologists are saying in the wake of a Connecticut school shooting make no damned sense at all. My jumping off point was a statement from Mike Huckabee that suggested the shooting was the result of a lack of religion in schools. It's hard to get past how offensive that is, but I managed. There are countries in the world that are more religious and more violent, while barely religious countries exist that are much safer than the US. When you compare the US to the rest of the world, gun apologists' arguments fall apart.

So it comes as no surprise that the hackish George Will offers his own completely illogical take on things.

Raw Story:

[...]

“We ought to bring in Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago,” [Will] insisted. “Chicago is an epidemic of violence with young, largely unparented — that is, no father in the home — adolescent males. That’s a problem quite separate from this.”

The conservative columnist also worried that the massacre of 20 children at an elementary school in Connecticut would be used to “ratchet up the security of schools and elsewhere in public spaces.”

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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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For the GOP, We are All Just 'Minor Things'

Here's a short list of things that are the height of tyranny -- at least, in terms of healthcare reform -- according to Republicans (and courtesy of Crooks and Liars):

-Excluding children under age 19 with pre-existing conditions
-Lifting lifetime and annual limits on benefits paid. No longer can a price be put on someone's life.
-Allowing young adults to remain on their parents' policies.
-Closing the Medicare Part D donut hole for seniors.

These things must be repealed or the Republic shall surely fall! So the party's majority in the House of Representatives voted to save America from communism last night, passing a bill to repeal the healthcare reform law. Unfortunately, the effort is doomed to fail and is seen as symbolic (read, "political theater"). The hyperbolically and inaccurately titled "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" has no chance of ever becoming law itself. It would have to pass in the Senate -- where it stands no chance -- then to the president's desk -- where it'll be surely vetoed. Then it's back to Congress, where there's no chance of a veto override. The only thing more doomed than this bill are Sarah Palin's presidential ambitions.

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An Effort to Motivate the Democratic Base

One of the things I think it's really important to understand about American politics is a handy rule; people don't vote for things, they vote against things. Like most handy rules, it's not 100% true. The candidate who's all criticism and no alternative proposals isn't going to get very far. But it's true enough. It might be more accurate to say that people are more motivated to vote against things than for things. It's why negative campaigning and attack ads work.

But there are more ways to motivate people to vote against something than smears and mudslinging. Obviously, if your opponent is just plain awful, you only need to point out what their positions actually are. It's this approach that Harry Reid is using against Sharron Angle in Nevada. "Negative" doesn't necessarily mean dishonest. Sometimes, all you have to do is point out that the person who's falling down drunk isn't the best person to choose as designated driver.

And sometimes, the negative campaigning goes under the radar. I believe this is the case with one of the stories of the week. On Sunday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs pointed out that bad things could happen to the House of Representatives in November. "I think there's no doubt there are enough seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control," Gibbs said on Meet The Press. "There's no doubt about that." When a Republican says they'll take the House, it gets press, but not a lot of attention out here in the real world. They're supposed to say that, for the same reason that a football player assures everyone that they're going to win the big game. But when a player on the other teams says it, then that makes some ripples.

John Dickerson, Slate:

Did Gibbs let slip one of those truths that everyone in Washington knows but that as the president's spokesman is not supposed to admit? No. He merely articulated the White House political strategy.

[...]

In May, the president warned that if Republicans took over Congress, they would repeal the just-passed health care law. He added that they'd drive the country's economy into the ditch again, as they did last time they were in control. "The American people will have a choice about whether or not we're going to keep rebuilding [an] America that is stronger and more prosperous," Obama said at a Democratic fundraiser in New York, "or going back to the policies that got us into this mess in the first place." He has repeated those remarks since then, including at two events last week in Missouri and Nevada.

In a campaign where neither party benefits much from positive messages and where the Democratic base is dispirited and less enthusiastic than its counterparts, fear is the best motivator. Since Sarah Palin isn't running for anything this time around, the best specter the president has to conjure is Republicans in control of Congress...

John Boehner becomes speaker of the House and, for example, Joe Barton becomes the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Not the most appetizing prospect. You don't even have to say anything bad about these people. The base knows House Republicans pretty well; well enough to get spooked by the idea of having them running things. And there's some crossover to this appeal; nationally, Republicans are still less trusted on the economy than Democrats. Having people pause and think about what it would really mean to have the GOP running the House can only benefit Democrats. So "Republicans could win" becomes a winning message for Democrats.

This strategy also involves the White House throwing themselves under the bus. There isn't much danger for Obama there, because he's not up for reelection until two years from now. And there isn't any doubt that his polling sucks, so allowing House dems to distance themselves from -- or even attack -- the White House isn't the worst idea anyone's ever had. For her part, Speaker Pelosi took up the message to rally the troops (emphasis mine):

Friend --

Here is what will happen in November. Democrats will keep control of the House. Period.

While some Washington pundits are claiming that Republicans have the momentum, I remain more confident in our chances for victory as long as we have our secret weapon -- you.

Democrats can either enroll their entire base in a motivational seminar and hope they all show up or they can motivate them to vote against Republicans. And there's also a post-election messaging war to be won here. It's not unreasonable to believe that Pelosi's good cop argument will turn out to be the winning argument. There are good reasons to believe it's unlikely that the GOP takes the House of Representatives in November. Premature Republican triumphalism may hurt that party in the end, dispiriting the teabagging base who've been promised over and over that their efforts will not be in vain. Among the GOP base, the mood isn't one of optimism, but of certainty. A continuing Democratic majority would demoralize them. Of course, there's the predictable danger that this base will become even more insane because of it, but that's a prospect I think everyone's willing to live with. Personally, I don't think these people are in it for the long haul. Once they fail to "take their country back," I think there's going to be some attrition through desertion. Hysterical, eye-gouging, hair-tearing outrage is exhausting. Unless you have a talent for it, you can only keep it up for so long.

There's a lot of that kind of talent out there in the Republican base, but it's by no means universal.

-Wisco


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Has the White House Learned Anything From the Healthcare Reform Push?

Here we go. President Obama's speech on the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

You can get the transcript here. Reviews have been mixed -- and by that, I don't mean that some have been good and some have been bad. I mean that the most thoughtful reviews have been internally mixed; it was good and it wasn't so good. The only full-on good review I could find (although I didn't spend all night looking) comes from NBC's Mark Murray.

"Yes, the president's speech lacked specifics about how to achieve energy reform (But who thought that legislative specifics would be the focus of a 15-minute address on the spill and how to respond to it?)," he wrote. "It also was short, as the AP writes, on specifics about how he would be able to keep his promises on Gulf reconstruction and the BP fund to compensate Gulf residents...

"But if the goal was to assure the public that Obama is on top of the crisis, that BP will be punished, that Gulf residents will be compensated, and that energy reform is too important to kick down the road, it certainly met expectations."





I'll accept that view. A lot of people are pointing to a post-speech reaction on MSNBC by Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Howard Fineman, but their input is spoiled -- at least for me -- by Matthews' obsessive attention to trivia. I don't care that the president referred to a Nobel Prize-winning physicist as a Nobel Prize winning-physicist. No one's picking up your new meme, Chris. Give it up. We're not interested. It's things like this that make it impossible for me to watch Hardball. Privately, I think of it as The Giant Yellow Head Freaks Out Over Crap that Doesn't Matter Show.

But if Matthews' punditry wasn't especially helpful, neither is Murray's glowing review. There's plenty of room for criticism of the speech, as well as praise. In the end, most of the panning comes from a disagreement over the focus. The president used his time to reassure people that the crisis was being dealt with. His harshest critics say he didn't get into enough detail on his call for energy reform. Greg Sargent pointed out the flaw in this reasoning.

"The intended audience of this speech was a general public wondering what the heck is going on with the spill and what the broader game plan is," he wrote. "This audience didn't need to hear the level of commitment to specific policy prescriptions that we all might have wanted."

My own worry isn't that there wasn't enough detail last night. We knew going in that it would be a fifteen minute address, so why on earth would we expect anything other than broad strokes? My worry is that there won't be more details coming. That neither the president nor anyone in his cabinet have learned the lessons from the fight for healthcare reform.

In that legislative push, the White House left the heavy-lifting to congress. And let's be clear about one thing; congress is a mess. Republicans have shown no appetite for even debate, let alone compromise, and Harry Reid's weak leadership was no leadership at all. What was called for was presidential leadership, which was lacking throughout much of the debate. If Obama doesn't spell out exactly what he wants, we're going to get a pile of crap.

And, in that spelling out, he needs to set the bar high. We didn't get a public option in healthcare reform because we went straight for the compromise position -- the public option. If we had shot for singlepayer, the public option would've been the logical compromise. But by starting out with nothing to bargain away, the option was doomed from the start. Obama needs to propose absolutely draconian regulation of greenhouse gases, then negotiate down to cap and trade. He needs to position the debate in his favor.

It should also be made clear that we're leaving fossil fuels behind. That part of our technological history is over. Yes, we'll still look at fuel efficiency, but we need to be told the truth -- using less oil isn't the solution. Using no oil is. It's a finite resource and we'll be forced to abandon it eventually, so why wait?

I'm going to keep saying it until it sinks in, but we have technology that literally pulls energy out of thin air and we're poking holes in the ocean floor and removing the tops of mountains for fuel. This is beyond stupid. With enough effort, we could be off oil within a few decades -- maybe even two.

But that will take leadership. And not from congress, where we already know there's a shortage. In fact, it's almost a sure bet that congress is going to get even dumber and more useless. President Obama will have to come up with the specifics that his critics are already asking for. This is much too important to allow to become a rerun of the healthcare fight.

-Wisco


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The Grand Old Panderers

Last night, Republican warnings of voting as a block turned out to be bluster. They'd promised a "vigorous defense" of the policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, but five Republicans wound up voting for repeal. Rising GOP star Paul Ryan actually sat out the vote, perhaps a signal that Republican house leadership had given up on the idea. And shame on the twenty-six Democrats who voted against it. Still, the repeal -- conditional though it is -- passed the house 229-168. Sanity prevailed.

That's not to say that insanity didn't give it one helluva good shot. Republicans still being Republicans, there was plenty of stupidity, hatred, and outright lies on the floor of the house.

You wonder what Gohmert thinks "overt" means. Of course, that's just Louie Gohmert being Louie Gohmert, who Steve Benen once called "one of Congress' most embarrassing buffoons." If it's stupid and crazy and Sarah Palin's not around, Gohmert probably said it.





But what about the plain lie Mike Pence, who serves as Chairman of the House Republican Conference, told about what "Americans want?" He has to know that's not true. I know that Republicans operate in a completely fact-free zone when they need to, but you don't walk into a debate like that without at least taking a glance at some data. He absolutely has to know he's lying. Americans want DADT gone. If Pence doubts that, he can literally choose any poll he likes. They all have the same findings: the public, by an extremely wide margin, doesn't like the policy very much. Pence, in pretending to rise to the defense of the American people, actually rises to oppose us.

I've come to think of that video as a sort of walk of shame. It won't be long before those arguments will be almost universally seen as stupid and embarrassing. And that's because they'll be proven wrong. There's no credible data anywhere backing these arguments up, they're pure supposition -- and that supposition is based in bias. Think about the "slippery slope" arguments against gay marriage; five states and DC now recognize same sex marriage, but there's still no one demanding to marry their dog. Turns out all the Chicken Little freaking out was as baseless and idiotic and hyperbolic as it seemed.

Are US military personnel the finest fighting force in the world or are they emotionally fragile homophobes who'll turn into a quivering, non-functioning mass in the mere presence of someone they know is gay? That depends on what Republicans need them to be at the moment. And since when do we measure good policy by how bigots would react to it? We know for a fact that there are white supremacists in the military. Should we ban anyone who isn't white, just to keep those morons happy? I think the saner thing would be to reverse Don't Ask, Don't Tell and apply it to homophobes. If you've got a problem serving with gays, you get to shut up about it or you're out. It's not gays who would harm "unit cohesion," it's bigots.

But these are Republicans we're talking about here. Their party is home to bigots and bigots never recognize that they're the problem. So the GOP welcomes them with open arms and encourages them to be bigoted. If it's a wedge-issue, they'll dive right in. Want to hate Muslims or Atheists or gays or the poor or Hispanics? These are your guys.

Welcome home.

-Wisco


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Primaries Don't Tell Us Much

Normally, primary midterm elections would be about as newsworthy as the weather; everyone would report on it one day and then it stops being news. But this year is different. The media has set up a narrative about this election cycle -- gonna be a big year for Republicans -- and anything that happens from here until November will serve that narrative. Part of this line lies in some simple math; it's a bad year for incumbents, Democrats are in the majority, therefore Democrats will bear the brunt of a big anti-incumbent sweep.

And last night we saw incumbents do very poorly, for the most part. In Arkansas, Sen. Blanche Lincoln is forced into a runoff for her party's nomination and, in Pennsylvania, long-time Sen. Arlen Specter lost to Rep. Joe Sestak. For their part, the New York Times is sticking with their story:

The results were sobering for both parties, amounting to a rejection of candidates selected and backed by leaders in Washington who found themselves out of step with their electorates.

Republicans and Democrats alike are now left to learn the lessons from the frustration being expressed by voters, and to unify behind nominees who face daunting general election campaigns.

But using Blanche Lincoln as representative of all incumbent Democrats is crazy and doing the same with Specter is even more so. Specter switched parties just last year -- admitting that he stood no chance of winning as a Republican. Democrats were cheered by the math -- Specter helped seal the 60-seat majority at the time -- but weren't so happy with or trusting of the man. Sestak, on the other hand, is a real Democrat and, as a former two-star admiral, the highest-ranking former military officer in congress. Sestak is by no means a lightweight. Yes, the White House backed Specter, but what else could they really do? He'd jumped the Republican ship and, if Obama had left him twisting in the wind, that'd be a real disincentive for other Republicans to do the same. In any case, as Specter's chances became weaker, White House support for his candidacy did the same. That election is a unique case and treating it as representative of anything other than itself is a mistake.

As for Lincoln, her determination to be a speedbump on the road to healthcare reform cost her big. She is not the favorite of national Democrats and certainly not of Democratic voters. Like Specter, Lincoln has establishment support, but only because of the advantage an incumbent holds. And using this election as evidence of an anti-incumbent mood is even farther off-base -- under almost any other state's rules, Lincoln probably would've won. The last count I could find was 45%-43%. In Arkansas, a majority -- 50%+ -- is needed to avoid a runoff. It's a good law and one I wouldn't mind seeing nationalized (imagine a world without Bush v. Gore), but the "Voters Reject Lincoln" headlines are just plain wrong, no matter how you look at it.

Yes, the teabaggers have rejected Utah Sen. Bob Bennett and Rand Paul won over the GOP establishment choice in Kentucky, but the Tea Party isn't everyone -- no matter how hard the media pushes that meme. In all of the cases, looking at party primaries for clues about the general election seems silly. In the Republican primaries, the craziest candidates seem to be winning -- which probably isn't excellent news for the GOP. And the Democratic primaries are a mixed bag -- just like they usually are.

If you want some sort of a glimpse at how the general is going to go, you need to look at the one actual election that was held last night. In Pennsylvania, voters chose Democrat Mark Critz over Republican Tim Burns for the late John Murtha's seat. RNC chairman Micheal Steele had predicted a win in that district and laughed off the idea that a Democrat had any chance at all. "What are you talking about?" Steele told the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza when asked about the possibility of a loss. "Oh, come on. We're going to win."

Now granted, there was no incumbent in that race, so we can't use it to measure any anti-incumbent mood. But that doesn't mean it's meaningless. Pennsylvania's 12th is exactly the sort of swing district that Republicans will need to take in order to win big in November (it went to McCain in 2008). And they didn't. Whizbang statistician Nate Silver explains:

[I]f the Republican Tim Burns were to win by about 5 points, that would give us one indication that the cycle was shaping up to be more like 2004, from which the Republicans emerged with 232 House seats. And if Democrat Mark Critz were to win by, say, 8 points, that would give us one indication that the cycle was shaping up to be more like 2006 or 2008.

Critz won by eight points. While it's clear that Silver was throwing out a rough estimate on the fly, the weather's looking slightly better for Democrats than Republicans here. Silver says we can read something from this race, but "not necessarily very much." Personally, I agree, although I'd argue that even that "not very much" is more than any party primaries will tell us. Kentucky and Pennsylvania both have closed primaries, meaning only people registered with the respective parties vote -- i.e., only Democrats vote in the Democratic primary and only Republicans vote in the Republican primary. Using these to read the minds of the voters in the general election is more than a little crazy. And, if you had to declare a winner in Arkansas -- the open primary of the night -- you'd have to give it to Lincoln, the incumbent.

I guess in the end what I'm saying is that a lot of people are going to be saying a lot about what all the primaries last night meant and that you should probably not put too much faith in that analysis. We can see that Democrats seem to like real Democrats, Republicans like real crazy people, and voters in one swing district went blue. Add it all up and I have to give the night to Democrats. Just not by much.

Wisco



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Just a Reminder: Republicans Lie

Yesterday, I included this video in my daily roundup. Think Progress had caught Republicans attending a morning fundraiser with the oil and gas industry on the very same day that the House would take testimony from executives about the Deepwater Horizon gusher polluting the Gulf of Mexico. It's Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, the first interview, that I want to examine here:

INTERVIEWER: Nice to meet you Congressman Sessions... Do you think on the morning that the House is going to talk to a lot of these BP and oil executives, it's good that your caucus is meeting with the oil and gas industry for a fundraiser?

SESSIONS: You know, what I think is really good is that Barack Obama wants oil prices to skyrocket, consumers to pay five dollar gasoline, and to continue his drive to make sure we lose ten million American jobs.

The problem here is that Pete's not even within shooting distance of reality.





In the roundup, I focused on what seemed most obvious to me. Sessions is pulling a mindreading act, telling the interviewer that Barack Obama wants a whole list of things that Obama has never said he wanted and that no sane person (other than the oil execs Sessions just finished meeting with) would ever want. This is a favorite version of the straw man for the right; create a position no one holds (see John McCain's "Obama wants to teach sex ed to kindergartners" ad for a fine example), then pretend to defend the voter from the insane positions you've just made up out of thin air.

I can do the same thing. Pete Sessions wants the Gulf of Mexico filled with oil. He wants you to drink oil and eat oil and, if someone doesn't stop him, he'll come over to your house and dump oil all over your lawn. He's never actually said he wants that or that he'd do it, but his actions make that clear. Pete Sessions wants to poison your baby's mashed peas with light sweet crude.

But this sort of straw man argument is only dishonest. You can't really say it's a lie, you can only say Sessions is incorrect. Even though he states this list of crazy things President Obama supposedly wants, he's clearly taking the position of someone taking a guess. There's a level of plausible deniability here. Pete could simply be wrong. That'd make him a fool, sure -- but Republicans don't have any problem with looking foolish. "Lying or stupid?" is a call you often have to make when considering the things Republicans say.

And, as much as I like to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt, assume they wouldn't like to be called liars, and instead call them stupid, I can't in this situation. Pete Sessions is just lying and there's no way around it. He talks about "five dollar gasoline," but the facts point in the other direction.

Associated Press:

Gas prices are poised to fall as Memorial Day approaches, a welcome change for motorists who have gotten used to seeing increases cut into their summer vacation money.

Experts who had been predicting a national average of more than $3 per gallon by Memorial Day now say prices have likely peaked just beneath that threshold. Rising supplies and concerns about the global economy have helped send wholesale gasoline prices plummeting by 22 cents a gallon since last week.

"Gasoline supplies are about as good as they've ever been going into the summer driving season," says oil analyst Phil Flynn of PFGBest in Chicago.

If offshore drilling is our only hope in keeping gas prices down, then millions of gallons of oil spilling out into the ocean really ought to drive prices up, wouldn't you think? Yet AP reports, "The massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has had no impact on fuel prices because it's had only minimal impact on petroleum production." Turns out that events and situations in other parts of the world are having an even bigger (and more positive) effect on oil prices. There's a reason for that.

American offshore drilling only accounts for about 2% of the global oil supply -- a drop in the bucket. And that oil doesn't necessarily stay here, it's sold on a global market as a commodity. Think of it as all being poured into one big, giant vat, then whoever wants it buys so many buckets of it. The oil we drill here may very well go to China, which obviously does nothing to keep the price down at the Gas'n'Go down the street. And the "offshore drilling keeps oil prices low" argument is further eroded by other facts.

In 2007, the US was by far the top consumer of oil, chugging it down at a rate of 20,680,000 barrels a day. This accounts for 24% of total global oil consumption. Now, even if we kept all the oil produced by offshore drilling here in the states, we'd still be relying on other sources for 92% of the oil we consume (the remainder after we take our 2% of global production from our 24% of global consumption). Not only is offshore drilling a drop in the bucket globally, it's a drop in the bucket here at home. The reduced production in the Gulf has had no effect on gas prices. And there isn't enough oil out there for increased production to make any difference either. Numbers don't lie.

And, for better or worse (and I say worse), Obama still hasn't ruled out increasing offshore drilling. Not only is Sessions accusing the president of wanting things he's never expressed, he's accusing him of wanting things that are the opposite of what he's expressed. It's around this point that the benefit of the doubt -- the excuse that Sessions is just being typically stupid -- falls apart. Sessions may or may not be dumb, be we can also say without hesitation that he's lying.

This isn't to single Pete Sessions out. The fact of the matter is that he sounds like any Republican on the subject -- or any subject. They don't seem to care about real solutions, but are only concerned with making Democrats and Obama look bad. If that's not exactly helpful to the nation, that's tough. If it takes lying to get the job done, then 24/7, wall-to-wall lies it will be.

-Wisco


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Cantor Unveils Plan to Eliminate Deficit Within 100,000 Years

Washington is spending way too much of your money on crazy things like keeping you healthy and keeping our economy afloat. After years of spending money hand over fist, without any thought to where that money was going to come from, Republicans have suddenly woken up to the idea that deficits are bad. That'd be news to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who famously told former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due." For his weird fetishism over the deficit, O'Neill was fired a month later -- by Cheney.

But there is no more zealous believer than the convert. Dick, George, and their free-spending White House crew are gone, so it's time to tighten the belt to pay for all the money that Dick, George, and their free-spending White House crew threw down the rathole. Luckily for America, House Republicans have an awesome idea on how to whittle that deficit down to nothing in no time:

The new GOP page explains:

YouCut – a first-of-its-kind project - is designed to defeat the permissive culture of runaway spending in Congress. It allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact. Vote on this page today for your priorities and together we can begin to change Washington's culture of spending into a culture of savings.

Yay for Republicans!

There's just one little problem, none of the ideas you're allowed to vote on (you can't submit your own ideas) add up to jack. Savings range from $600 million to a mere $1 million. The federal budget deficit last year was $1.4 trillion. Not only aren't Republicans willing to make the tough choices, they aren't even willing to make the easy ones. Not on their own, anyway. They need you to decide what chicken feed gets cut. But you get to vote every week, so I guess it adds up. Or not.

"What's especially interesting, though, is that all of the proposals don't amount to much given the larger budget picture," writes Steve Benen. "Merit aside, if officials were to scrap every penny of the spending on Cantor's list, it would save taxpayers about $1.1 billion a year."

At that rate, this new Republican idea should eliminate the deficit in... quick back of the envelope calculation... Oh, about 20,000 years. Of course, that's not the rate at which Cantor's willing to cut. Remember, you get to choose one, not all. There are five possibilities this go-round, so if that's any indication of how this thing's going to work going forward, we should be out of the deficit hole in about 100,000 years. It's that sort of lightning-quick action we really need these days.

It strikes me that it's probably not a coincidence that Cantor's new big idea follows an Economist/YouGov poll last month showing that, when it comes to the budget, the average person is largely ignorant. And who can blame us? We've got our own budgets to keep an eye on. That's why we elect people to keep an eye on the federal budget for us and pay them to do it. It's worth pointing out that Cantor's all but admitting that he's unwilling to do that job.

According to the poll, 71% believe we should reduce foreign aid to cut the deficit. But foreign aid accounts for less than %1 of all government spending. We could eliminate it entirely and not even put a dent in the deficit. Starting to see a similarity here between the popular notion of what reduces the deficit and Cantor's little gimmick? Yeah, me too.

"In contrast, Democratic plans on health care, student loans, and energy policy would produce significant budget savings," Benen writes, "but generated apoplectic opposition from Cantor and other Republicans." See, those are Democratic ideas to reduce the deficit, which are socialism! Apparently, real capitalist deficit reduction takes about as long as the process of fossilization.

Of course, Cantor's little project is nothing but a gimmick. He wants you to believe that the ideas presented represent government waste, but number one on the list is eliminating the Presidential Election Fund, which provides matching funds for presidential candidates. Cantor says this will save $260 million in savings, but you probably know this better as the $1 check-off on your tax form. It's a voluntary program. It wouldn't save anything because, if the program ended, so would that check-off and so would the revenue generated by it. We'd be able to raid that fund once as we eliminated it -- if we were smart about it -- but after that we'd get nothing. There's a good chance we could reduce the deficit more with a yearly telethon, bake sale or fun run.

But, of course, this isn't a serious attempt to reduce the deficit at all. It's just the Republican Party trying -- and, one would hope, failing -- to rehab their image as hopeless spendthrifts. It's what they've been doing since Obama took office. If they want to get back into power, gimmicks might do the trick. However, if they want to stay in power, this isn't going to cut it. They're going to have to come up with real ideas and real solutions. I'm not holding my breath. What they've come up with so far is a joke. Instead of solving problems, they pretend to solve problems. And reality TV-style "vote them off the island" games are no way to govern.

-Wisco


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Please, Call it "Obamacare"

Write those letters now. Call your friends, and tell them to write them. If you don't, this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day... we will awake to find that we have so­cialism. And if you don't do this, and if I don't do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
-Ronald Reagan, urging voters to act against the passage of Medicare

As Republicans rail against creeping socialism, it's apparently already too late -- about 45 years too late. According to conservative icon Ronald Reagan, the United States went fullblown Marxist when Medicare passed in 1965.

What can we learn from Reagan's warning? For one thing, that hyperbole looks especially stupid as history moves on. For another, that the "slippery slope" argument is always horsecrap, because it involves crystal ball gazing. For yet another, it proves that Republicans either don't have the courage of their convictions or don't believe the things they say; Reagan never pushed for the repeal of Medicare, he left America to the socialist nightmare of singlepayer health insurance for seniors. Mr. "Morning in America" had previously argued that Medicare would be sunset in America. Remember that as other conservatives lament the passage of healthcare reform in the House of Representatives last night; they were wrong the last time, too.





The effects of this bill will be felt immediately. Many provisions won't kick in until 2014, but Reuters has a great breakdown of what's in the bill -- including what happens this year:

Insurance companies will be barred from dropping people from coverage when they get sick. Lifetime coverage limits will be eliminated and annual limits are to be restricted.

Insurers will be barred from excluding children for coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

Young adults will be able to stay on their parents' health plans until the age of 26. Many health plans currently drop dependents from coverage when they turn 19 or finish college.

Uninsured adults with a pre-existing conditions will be able to obtain health coverage through a new program that will expire once new insurance exchanges begin operating in 2014.

A temporary reinsurance program is created to help companies maintain health coverage for early retirees between the ages of 55 and 64. This also expires in 2014.

Medicare drug beneficiaries who fall into the "doughnut hole" coverage gap will get a $250 rebate. The bill eventually closes that gap which currently begins after $2,700 is spent on drugs. Coverage starts again after $6,154 is spent.

A tax credit becomes available for some small businesses to help provide coverage for workers.

And, explaining house minority leader John Boehner's fierce opposition to the bill, "A 10 percent tax on indoor tanning services that use ultraviolet lamps goes into effect on July 1."

Clearly, this bill might as well have been written by Kim Jong-Il.

On the right, the meltdown has already begun. As part of a last minute deal to get passage, Rep. Bart Stupak dropped his opposition to the bill over abortion coverage. In exchange for his vote -- and the vote of other anti-choice Democrats -- Stupak accepted an executive order that goes nowhere near as far as his amendment would have gone. Basically, the order states that government has to abide by existing law. In other words, Stupak and company caved. As Bart Stupak spoke in defense of the healthcare bill the chamber just passed, an unknown Republican shouted out "Baby killer!" Classless.

So, now it's a baby-killing, Marxist government takeover of healthcare. What are Republicans going to say when all this crazy stuff doesn't come to pass -- when the US doesn't turn Soviet, when there aren't any "death panels," when abortion rates don't skyrocket? Nothing, of course. They won't say a thing. They never do. Reagan pushed his crazy anti-Medicare fearmongering, then denied he ever did so. When Carter brought it up in a debate, Reagan's response was that famous "There you go again" line. He said he wasn't so much against the goals of Medicare, as he was in favor of alternate legislation.

So they'll freak out for a little bit. Maybe launch a doomed and half-hearted campaign to repeal healthcare reform. But I can practically guarantee that, as time goes on, one bit of rhetoric will die off -- conservatives will stop referring to it as "Obamacare." None of the things the GOP is warning of will happen and people will come to rely on these reforms in their everyday lives. Imagine if Medicare were most widely known as "LBJcare" and you can see why I say Republicans will stop using "Obamacare." Hell, Democrats should embrace that language and try to keep it going for as long as they can.

History shows that Republicans can say crazy things without consequence. I think we can change that.

-Wisco


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Undecided Voters and Pro-Life Democrats are Equally Dumb

There's a truism in American politics that the remaining undecided voters get dumber the closer you get to election day. This is especially true lately, since the differences between candidates is likely to be stark. If it's late October 2008 and you're still torn between Barack Obama and John McCain, it's pretty clear that you have no idea what you want in a candidate. Like all generalizations, it's not universally true that the late undecided voter isn't very smart, but it's true enough. Some of these voters realize the importance of their decision and agonize over it, some don't like either candidate and are trying to determine who sucks less, but most are just slow. By the time you reach the finish line, the differences between the candidates should be pretty obvious.

Don't ask me why, but this truism popped into my head when I read this post from Greg Sargent:

Late last week, a source says, President Obama summoned a key undecided House Democrat, New York Rep Scott Murphy, for a one-on-one meeting at the White House — a sign that he’s beginning to lavish direct personal attention on individual members of Congress to persuade them to vote for the Senate bill.

According to a source familiar with the meeting, the President asked Murphy what he needed in the bill in order to support it. Murphy is being closely watched right now because he voted No last time, and flipping him to Yes would be a key get for Dem vote-counters.

“It was, `What are you looking for in the bill?’” the source says, describing the President’s request. “Scott was pressing him on the need for cost control. Medicare fraud came up. Scott said we need to step up — what we did in the House last time was not enough.”

According to Sargent, the White House "is amping up the efforts at persuasion, so expect more one-on-one meetings like this one, with the President making a direct effort to give individual House Dems what they need to climb aboard."

Let's look at some dem holdouts and apply the "undecided voters are dumb" cliché, just to see if it fits.

The biggest cadre of holdouts are among Rep. Bart Stupak's abortion funding holdouts. These people are dumb. Federal funding of abortion -- for good or ill -- is already illegal. What Stupak's amendment would do would make it illegal to offer coverage for abortion in private plans in health exchanges. This would be a de facto illegalization of abortion coverage. They say they're concerned about federal money paying for abortion, but the facts say there's no reason for those concerns. So, giving the Stupakian contingent the benefit of the doubt and assuming they're not just lying, we have to assume they're stupid.

Further evidence of pro-life dem stupidity comes in the form of statistics. The United States ranks 30th in the world for infant mortality. This is among the worst in the industrialized world. Even Cuba does better. And Stupak and company stand against expanding coverage for pre- and neonatal care -- under the flag of "saving babies."

Stupid again.

For his part, Bart Stupak is predicting failure for healthcare reform.

The Hill:

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said Monday he thinks House Democratic leaders are not close to having the votes to pass health reform.

In an interview with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, the anti-abortion rights lawmaker said, "I'd be surprised if they have 200 votes."

House Democratic leaders need 216 to pass the bill.

At this point, no one really seems to know if the votes will be there, but the consensus is that it'll be close. The only people echoing Stupak's numbers are people named "Bart Stupak." According to The Hill's whip count, it's the anti-reform side that's short of votes, not the reform-minded. There are a lot of undecideds, but including even leaners who could switch, the antis only have 37 votes now -- they need 38. By my count, if you throw out the leaners, they have only about 24 or 25 firm or likely no votes. These may not be undecided voters, but I think we've established that they're dumb nonetheless.

So Barack Obama is back on the campaign trail this week, kissing hands and shaking babies, trying to sway undecided voters in the final minutes of a year-long campaign. If you're hoping to see reform pass this year, remember that he's pretty good at convincing these last-minute dummies.

-Wisco


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The United States of God

My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.
-Abraham Lincoln, to Judge JS Wakefield, after Willie Lincoln's death in 1862.

It's unfortunate for the religious right that history exists. They'd have you believe that every President of the United State spent all of their time thinking about God -- what God wanted from them, what God wanted from the country, what they could do that would please God, etc. George Washington, for example, shuffled around his office on his knees, hand clenched in constant prayer, fulfilling his duty as elected lead shaman of a new democratic republic. Every president thereafter followed Washington's lead.

But the hole in this rewritten history is that there have been four presidents -- at least -- who weren't Christian. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and William Howard Taft were all Unitarian. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Johnson didn't belong to any church at all. Turns out a lot of heathens have been elected lead shaman.

That someone bothered to write these sort of facts down represents a problem for right wing revisionists who claim the US is -- and always was -- a "Christian nation." But what has been written can be erased, truths are only problematic so long as they're known. The ongoing effort to transform a secular government based on law and reason into a big church based on reverence for Jesus is a big project. Every unfortunate fact must be hidden -- preferably by painting over them with new "facts."

And here we come to Virginia Rep. Randy Forbes. Not surprisingly, Forbes is a Republican and a loyal and reliable foot soldier for the religious right. History offends Forbes' Christian sensibilities, so history must be changed. Forbes has a plan to do just that.





The history so offensive to Forbes and other Christian right crusaders comes in the form of a new visitors' center for the US Capitol. Tourists waiting for Capitol tours no longer have to wait outside, but can now wait in the Capitol Visitor Center (CVC), which is a 580,000-square-foot, three story structure filled with exhibits and the inevitable gift shop. For the most Jesus-addled Republicans, the exhibits are insufficiently Christian.

Sane people see it for what it is, insane people see it as literally evil and an insult to a Christian heritage they've pretty much made up.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU):

...During the dedication, congressional leaders hailed the CVC as something that should make Americans proud.

“As both members and visitors enjoy the educational benefits of the Capitol Visitor Center,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), “we will be inspired to explore new paths and to write new chapters in our nation’s great history. With that reverence for our history and dedication to progress, may this Temple of Democracy continue to be a place where people of diverse background and opinion can find common ground for the common good.”

But there is one segment of the population that is anything but proud of the Capitol Visitor Center: The Religious Right has spent the last few months complaining about the new structure, issuing salvo after salvo against it. The CVC, according to these groups, is a “godless pit” and a shrine to secular liberalism. They’d like to rework it -- and add a heaping helping of “Christian nation” propaganda.

Especially ridiculous in his complaints was S. Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint. He complained that the CVC exhibits "are left-leaning and in some cases distort our true history. Exhibits portray the federal government as the fulfillment of human ambition and the answer to all of society’s problems."

Yeah, that's terrible. What's basically a museum about government focuses on -- *gasp* -- government. What a bunch of liberal BS. A museum about government should teach that Jesus runs everything. Because, if there's one perfect place to rewrite history, it's in a museum dedicated to historical education.

"The ruckus over the Capitol Visitor Center is yet another manufactured controversy courtesy of the religious right," said Americans United's Barry Lynn. "These groups want to enlist Congress and use the Center to promote their fallacious and discredited ‘Christian nation’ view."

So Forbes introduced H. Con. Res. 34, a bill subtitled, "Calling upon the Capitol Preservation Commission and the Office of the Architect of the Capitol to place the Lincoln-Obama Bible on permanent display upon the Lincoln table at the Capitol Visitor Center for the benefit of all its visitors to fully understand and appreciate America's history and Godly heritage." You see the problem already.

Law professor Howard Freidman boils the bill down to it's most unconstitutional and inaccurate basics:

Whereas the Holy Bible is God's Word;

Whereas each President, after taking the oath of office, has repeated President Washington’s petition prayer seeking divine help by saying, "So help me God";...

Whereas in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, he referred to God 14 times, to verses in the Holy Bible 4 times, and invoked prayer 3 times in 701 words; ...

Resolved ... That Congress calls upon the Capitol Preservation Commission ... to place the Lincoln-Obama Bible on permanent display ... at the Capitol Visitor Center for the benefit of all its visitors to fully understand and appreciate America's history and Godly heritage.

That's right, we're to use unchurched doubter Abraham Lincoln's Bible to declare, in US law, that "the Holy Bible is God's Word." At the same time, visitors can "fully understand and appreciate America's history and Godly heritage."

"It’s offensive to see Forbes attempting to use Lincoln as a vehicle to promote 'Christian nation' claptrap," writes AU's Rob Boston. "He’s merely trying to exploit one of our greatest leaders by laboring to portray him as some type of antebellum Jerry Falwell. In fact, the religious views of our 16th president have been hotly debated by scholars for years."

Of course, the bill is doomed on so many levels. It has no chance of passing in the Democrat-controlled House. If passed, it would almost certainly be vetoed. If it miraculously survived the veto pen, it would be struck down by even our currently right-leaning Supreme Court.

Maybe Republicans like Forbes and DeMint are setting themselves up to lose, so they can go running to the nutjobs with "proof" that our "Christian nation" is under attack by godless heathens, Muslim terrorists, and -- I don't know -- the Masons, maybe. Lot's of money to be raised that way.

Or maybe they're just as crazy as they seem to be. Maybe, despite all evidence to the contrary, they believe their own BS. Maybe they believe that history, as it's always been written, has always been wrong. That the US really was meant to be a big church, but got sidetracked on day one.

Whichever it is, the people they're representing are being rendered stupid by their actions. Propaganda by people like Forbes and DeMint is encouraging people to be ignorant.

I suppose that's the point. Only the most ignorant voters would elect people like these.

-Wisco


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Planet America

Things are looking good for former Bush administration officials. You wouldn't think this would be the case, looking at some of the news stories that have come out after they'd packed up their stuff and left the White House. But that'd be because you think rationally; that doesn't fly in DC anymore. Post-Bush, the nation's capital is still dominated by denial.

Sure, Bush was an abuser of the law and -- under the paranoiac Dick Cheney's guidance -- played a little fast and loose with legalities. But that doesn't mean he actually broke the law and, since we don't know for sure, we should probably forget the whole thing. When it comes to anti-Constitutional behavior, human rights abuses, and war crimes, it's probably best to ignore things -- no one wants to open up that whole can of worms. We used to say that no one was above the law, now we worry that upholding the law might be inconvenient or embarrassing. As it is now, some people are above the law -- but only if those people are members of the Bush administration.

Outside the US, people don't get this. They insist on bringing this stuff up over and over. Out in the big, wide world, they just don't get that the Bush administration gets a pass for anything and everything, because to do otherwise would be bad politics. Forgive and forget. Look forward, not backward. Let's move on. Some people don't get the simplicity of solving a problem by pretending it never happened.

Take David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University. As a former UN prosecutor, Crane is a citizen of that big, wide world and doesn't see things through the lens of political expediency and an insular American media. For Crane, the United States is not a separate planet in its own orbit and things that happen in one nation inform and set precedent for things that could -- and sometimes should -- happen in other nations.

In Crane's world -- which, admittedly, is that part of the world that isn't the US -- a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir means that other leaders could be held accountable for their crimes.

Crane says that the Bashir warrant "may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture." Turns out that when something's a war crime for one leader, it's a war crime for all leaders.

Crazy, huh?





But has the US actually tortured? We've called what we did "enhanced interrogation techniques." So it can't be torture, because we didn't call it that. Of course, the fact that we've "enhanced interrogation techniqued" people to death kind of puts a ding in that argument.

Griper News:

"[Prisoners] were handcuffed to fixed objects above their heads in order to keep them awake," reads the [Church report]. "Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of 'compliance blows' which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case, a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of the blunt force trauma, and in the other case pre-existing coronary artery disease was complicated by the blunt force trauma."

When you've got people dying because of your interrogation techniques, "enhanced" is an understatement. I'd also point out that interrogations are approached from a position of ignorance -- there are things you want to know, which is the entire purpose of the interrogation, and this means there are things you don't know. Among those things, you might reasonably include whether or not the subject knows anything more than you do and whether or not they're actually a terrorist. While many would argue that a terrorist deserves anything they get, not many would argue that we should punish a crime with torture or that we should punish a prisoner for a crime we don't know they committed. The assumption of guilt isn't justice.

But that's all logic and logic is a tool of that big, wide world. It's been banished from the separate planet that is the United States. Our government can do anything to anyone, because that's how they've kept us safe. Logic would dictate that if your government can do anything to anyone, then it can do anything to you, and this doesn't exactly make you safe from your government. Luckily for Bush and Cheney, logic doesn't fly here.

If it did, they might worry about a report on a UN probe of "secret" CIA prisons. I put "secret" in quotes because they're the worst-kept secret the US has -- everyone knows about them.

Of the prisons, Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, said, "We call on all governments to cooperate, not just in clarifying the facts, but in ensuring that such secret detention centres will no longer be used in the future." His colleague Martin Scheinin, Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism, went further, calling them "one of the most horrendous practices" that the Bush administration instituted after 9/11.

I'm guessing that Scheinin didn't know about this:

Raw Story:

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of "America's Constitutional Crisis" whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," Hersh said. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."

"It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," he continued. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

I think the word you're looking for is "murder." When we weren't enhanced interrogating people to death, we were doing it the easy way -- with an assassin's bullet in their head. Hersh says he's collecting enough evidence to convince "even the most skeptical."

But, as I said, we don't live in the big, wide world where any of this is a problem. We live on Planet America, where the severity of a crime depends on the political convenience of that crime's prosecution. And prosecuting Bush, Cheney, and other former White House officials would be extremely inconvenient -- especially for a Democratic congress that refused to lift a finger while all of this was going on. There were no investigations into these international crimes and talk of impeachment was positively taboo. As a result, many of the Democratic congressional leadership are complicit. They may not have liked this stuff, but they allowed it and blocked every attempt to stop it.

And that's why we aren't going to see Bush or Cheney tried. Guilty of war crimes, guilty of murder, they'll make bundles of money speaking to right wing audiences about just how freakin' great they were. There's a truth commission building, but to be absolutely honest, that won't do a damned thing to keep a future group of White House lunatics and paranoiacs from doing exactly the same thing. Nothing short of arrest and trial would do that.

But that's not going to happen here on Planet America, because we want to pretend that the neocons acted alone. A complicit congress of enablers can't be shown for what they were.

-Wisco


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What if Bush was the Peanut Guy?

The Peanut Corporation of America is responsible for hundreds of cases of salmonella in the United States. Investigators found "dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers" in its Plainview, Texas processing plant, prompting the Texas Department of State Health Services to recall every product ever made from peanuts shipped from the facility. In Blakely, Georgia, the story is the same -- Peanut Corporation of America ran an astonishingly unclean operation. All told, 600 people have suffered food poisoning. Nine have died. Calls to the company's telephone number "elicited a recording that said it was no longer in service." For all intents and purposes, Peanut Corporation of America no longer exists.

But the man ultimately responsible for his company's operations still exists. PCA owner Stewart Parnell was subpoenaed to testify to congress. He pleaded the fifth and refused to testify.

Clearly, congress has hit a dead end. Parnell can't possibly be prosecuted, his company is in no danger of ever returning to poison people, and it's time to let bygones be bygones. What we need to do is find out what happened, so we can avoid it ever happening again. And the best way to do that is to put together a blue ribbon panel and hold a third world style truth and reconciliation commission. No one will be charged, no one will go to jail, no one will pay any price, Parnell can get on with his life and we can get on with ours. But we'll get the truth and that's what really counts.

You might've noticed that my little synopsis veered off into crazy town around the third paragraph. Of course Stewart Parnell should be prosecuted -- along with those managers and executives who helped him sell garbage to unsuspecting families. So what if his company is shut down and will never sell poison again? So what if he won't testify? So what if all this has happened in the past?

Parnell lacks one quality that would apparently put him above or beyond the law -- he's not a former President of the United States. Stewart Parnell is just a former Poison Peanut King. When anyone else has committed a crime, they have to face the legal system. When a former President has committed a crime, we have to have a truth commission -- without prosecutions -- to get to the bottom of the crime and let the criminals walk away. There will be no jail time, there would only be embarrassment for the accused -- that is, if he weren't shameless. But the accused is shameless, so there wouldn't even be that. He would face the wagging finger of justice and retire to Dallas a rich, rich man. Maybe hire a ghost-writer and put out a memoir. And his example would do absolutely nothing to prevent future executives from committing similar crimes. After all, the crime without any real consequence might as well be legal -- without punishment, there is no crime.





But this is Sen. Patrick Leahy's solution -- not to the garbage vendor's crimes, of course, just to Bush's. What we need is a truth and reconciliation commission that, in any practical sense, would be a panel put together to write history. They'd have subpoena power and the ability to prosecute perjury, but no power to prosecute the underlying crimes. We'd get the truth, while criminals in the Bush administration get off scott free.

"People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts," Leahy said. "If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth."

Some find Leahy's suggestion a frustratingly wrongheaded. "There's no question that torture occurred here," constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann tuesday. "There's no question that it was a war crime. And so the only reason to have a commission of this kind is to avoid doing what we're obligated to do under a treaty."

"It is shameful that we would be calling for this type of commission..." Turley continued. "We're obligated to investigate. This whole discussion in front of the whole world is basically saying that we are not going to comply with the promise we made, not to ourselves, but to the world." Not surprisingly, law professor Turley is absolutely correct about our obligations under international law. Prosecuting torture is not optional. In other words, Leahy's solution is most likely illegal.

"At the end of the day, no one believes that people will be prosecuted for a known war crime -- and when we do that then we will become accessories," Turley said. "Those crimes of President Bush will become our crimes. His shame will become our collective shame."

Even worries that prosecutions would be politically unfeasible are misplaced. A USA Today/Gallup poll finds that about two thirds support investigations and, of those who want probes into Bush crimes, about 61% want to see prosecutions. In fact, more people (34%) would rather do nothing than those who'd like to see Leahy's proposal (24%). And it's hard to imagine that many who preferred Leahy's idea would be heartbroken if there were prosecutions. I think if you polled people and asked them which solutions they opposed most, you'd probably wind up with very different numbers.

If Leahy's truth and reconciliation commission is the best we get, I'll take it. But it's not the best we can do. We can hold criminals accountable for their crimes, no matter who they are or what position they used to hold. It doesn't matter if they were the president of a peanut company or President of the United States, the law is for everyone and applies to everyone. We shouldn't let crimes go unpunished unless we've got a damned good reason to do so.

In the case of George W. Bush and his administration, that "damned good reason" just isn't there. As I said, if you don't punish a crime, then it might as well be legal. With Leahy's proposal, some future president considering crime could look back in history and say, "Let's go ahead and do it, the worst that could happen is that we wind up like Bush."

No one fears the wagging finger of justice.

-Wisco

After Stimulus Vote, Republicans Demand More Rope

When the stimulus passed in the House of Representatives, it did so without a single Republican vote. When it passed in the Senate yesterday, it earned a whopping three Republican votes. Sens. Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins broke ranks with their party, voting for a watered down version of the bill. Not content to fiddle while the nation burns, these three senators recognized that we're in an honest-to-goodness emergency. Something needed to be done and, despite pressure from their own party, these three senators did something. Not enough, but something.

How real is this emergency? So real that the world economy came close to literal collapse in late 2008. It was then that there was an electronic run on banks "to the tune of $550 billion dollars" within "an hour or two."

According to [Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA)], on September 18, 2008 the Fed tried to "stem the tide" by pumping money into the financial system but it didn't work and decided instead to announce an immediate increase in deposit insurance to $250,000 per account to stop the panic.

Said Kanjorski: "If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2 p.m. that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it."

But, of course, when the market and the economy are this bad, the Republican party decided that it would be a perfect time to do a little grandstanding, score some cheap political points with their base, and put on a show of wingnut solidarity. Three senators didn't play along.





With the Republican party the minority in both houses of congress, you'd think that most conservatives would be concentrating on increasing their numbers their. But, if you did think that, it would mean that you haven't been paying attention lately. The only people who still consider themselves Republican voters are fringe nuts and that means that cooler heads must never, ever be allowed to prevail. The lunatics are running this particular asylum and that's the way they like it. Wisdom is for the weak-willed, true conservatives listen only to their jerking knees. When you have an abundance of rope, the only Republican thing to do is to hang yourself.

Newsmax.com:

“Arlen Specter is DONE,” wrote a blogger named steelfish on the FreeRepublic Web site. “He won his last primary by less than 1 percent against a real conservative of Pat Toomey. And only because the President Bush came to PA and campaigned for him. He is DONE.”

Specter is up for re-election in 2010. Washington Republican strategists tell Newsmax this weekend that Specter's defection has sealed the deal: he will face a primary for the GOP nomination.

"We don't care if we lose the Pennsylvania Senate seat to the Democrats," one Washington strategist told Newsmax. "Better to remove Fifth columnists from the party."

The sentiment was echoed in chat rooms and blogs across the web.

“They are frauds. RINOS" Republicans in Name Only, wrote a blogger named Croupier101 on the Fox News blog site.

Let's be clear here, unless things change drastically, the power of incumbency will probably be the only thing that keeps Republicans in Washington for a while. Replacing moderate Republicans with candidates who are sufficiently and acceptably crazy probably isn't the wisest way to go about things. But, as I said, wisdom is for the weak-willed -- most remaining Republicans listen to the weak-minded. For the pretend tough guys of the GOP base, it's better to have a Pyrrhic victory against a fellow Republican than a constructive one against a Democrat.

"Maybe Collins, Snowe, and Specter should just change Parties now and make it official," writes Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters. "It'll be much less painful watching them vote like liberals without the 'R' after their names, don't you agree?" Yeah, because being three down in the senate is much better than not having complete, lockstep party groupthink. If your party can't be a party of clone zombies, you might as well just fold up the tent and quit the government business.

This isn't just a blogger revolt, this is an institutional attitude. "The American people don't want this trillion-dollar political payoff that will just line the pockets of non-governmental organizations who supported Obama in the election," said Scott Wheeler, the executive director of The National Republican Trust PAC. "Republican senators are on notice," he said. "If they support the stimulus package, we will make sure every voter in their state knows how they tried to further bankrupt voters in an already bad economy."

"[Sen. Specter] crossed the line one too many times," Wheeler told CNN. "We're now going to get involved in finding a conservative alternative."

You do that Scott. That'd be great. Find someone just a freakin' nuts as you are. Because, if the last two elections have taught us anything, it's that voters think that Republicans haven't been crazy enough lately.

Want some more rope? There's plenty.

-Wisco