How Not to Deny You're Waging a War on Women

You may need a refresher on Virginia state Sen. Dick Black, a far-right Republican who just doesn't get how marital rape can be a thing. If so, here's Mother Jones' Molly Redden's reporting on the subject from January 15.

After taking a drubbing in last year's state elections, Virginia Republicans are debating whether their party has come to be defined by its extremists. But in a congressional district in Northern Virginia, one of the state's main instigators of culture warfare, state Sen. Richard H. "Dick" Black, is running in the Republican primary to replace longtime GOP moderate Rep. Frank Wolf, who is retiring. And he's guaranteed to ignite wedge-issue passion. Exhibit A: As a state legislator, Black opposed making spousal rape a crime, citing the impossibility of convicting a husband accused of raping his wife "when they're living together, sleeping in the same bed, she's in a nightie, and so forth."

Black has referred to emergency contraception, which does not cause abortions, as "baby pesticide." Black also fought to block a statue of Abraham Lincoln at a former Confederate site in Richmond. He wasn't sure, he explained at the time, that statues of Lincoln belonged in Virginia. He has argued that abortion is a worse evil than slavery. And once, to demonstrate why libraries should block pornography on their computers, Black invited a TV reporter to film him using a library terminal to watch violent rape porn.

Last week, we got the not-unwelcome news that Black was dropping out of that race. Black said he was staying in the state Senate to "maintain our 20/20 split," but there's good reason to believe that he was pushed out. Black is exactly the kind of candidate establishment Republicans don't want running in November -- the kind who uses hard-ass conservativism to be a jerk and troll everyone who isn't a true believer. Maybe he could've won the district or maybe he couldn't have. But he would've been guaranteed to engage in jackass antics that would make national waves and make the party look bad as a whole. And, as I pointed out last week, Black's not the only candidate that Republicans have who's making trouble for the GOP as a whole.

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What Happens When GOP Economic Fairy Tales are Applied to the Real World

A piece in the New York Times this weekend compared the economic fates of Wisconsin and Minnesota, two states that were in roughly similar economic condition in 2012. Minnesota elected a Democratic government, while Wisconsin chose Republicans. And it was with this choice that the two neighboring states' fortunes began to diverge.

Three years into Mr. Walker’s term, Wisconsin lags behind Minnesota in job creation and economic growth. As a candidate, Mr. Walker promised to produce 250,000 private-sector jobs in his first term, but a year before the next election that number is less than 90,000. Wisconsin ranks 34th for job growth. Mr. Walker’s defenders blame the higher spending and taxes of his Democratic predecessor for these disappointments, but according to Forbes’s annual list of best states for business, Wisconsin continues to rank in the bottom half.

Along with California, Minnesota is the fifth fastest growing state economy, with private-sector job growth exceeding pre-recession levels. Forbes rates Minnesota as the eighth best state for business. Republicans deserve some of the credit, particularly for their commitment to education reform. They also argue that Minnesota’s new growth stems from the low taxes and reduced spending under Mr. Dayton’s Republican predecessor, Tim Pawlenty. But Minnesota’s job growth was subpar during Mr. Pawlenty’s eight-year tenure and recovered only under Mr. Dayton.

Trust me, it sucks when your state is used as an example of economic failure. While Walker complains that previous higher taxes and spending are dragging the state down (a tough argument to make -- the mechanics are so bad he doesn't even bother to explain them), Minnesota has raised taxes and spending to great success. And that spending has been distinctly Keynesian. NYT reports that the "lion’s share of Minnesota’s new tax revenue was sunk into human capital." Wisconsin, of course, has been anti-Keynesian, reaching into workers' pockets to take pay and benefits away.

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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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No Money for Firefighters, Thanks to Austerity

Welcome to the wonders of austerity!

Grist: Tea Partiers who watched gleefully as the sequester slashed government spending are welcome to douse forest fires near their homes with teapots full of Earl Grey this summer. Across-the-board budget cuts mean federal wildfire fighting efforts could be overwhelmed.

The U.S. Forest Service will hire 500 fewer firefighters this year and 50 fewer fire engines will be available than previously expected, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced this week. The Interior Department also plans to pare back its firefighting crews.

The seasonal firefighting jobs are going up in smoke because of Congress’s inability to come up with a national spending plan. President Obama called for spending cuts and tax increases to help balance the budget, but Republicans would have none of the latter.

As they always are when it comes to anything other than military spending, prison-building, or corporate welfare, Republicans are being penny wise and pound foolish. In insisting on deep cuts to spending and in cheering on the sequester, they've managed to save $50 million in Forest Service spending -- or what the pentagon spent about every half hour on a randomly chosen day in 2013. So we'll throw $1.6 billion in a day at defense against foreign armies, but we're not willing to spend that much in a year defending against natural disaster. You might have noticed, we don't get invaded by foreign militaries every year. Spending on natural disasters is somewhat predictable, meaning you can set up an approximate budget for it. We've decided to stop doing this, because we're smart like that.

The result is predictable.

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