“A Big Gulp Isn’t Cheap”: Why Half-Term Gov Sarah Palin Wants You To Think She’s Running For The Senate
For the past several weeks, former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin has been hinting at a run for Senate in her former home state of Alaska. Now, thanks to a recent Federal Election Commission filing, we know why.
Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC, raised just $460,536 in the first half of 2013. That number falls far short of SarahPAC’s totals for the first halves of 2011 and 2012, when the PAC raised roughly $1.2 million and $1.7 million, respectively.
In the first six months of 2013, SarahPAC spent $496,505.68, almost $36,000 more than it brought in. Although the PAC is not in debt (it reports having over $1 million in cash on hand), that represents a troubling trend for the one-time governor’s committee.
Furthermore, as Matt Berman points out at National Journal, the PAC’s spending pattern raises some serious questions. According to the FEC filing, the PAC donated just $5,000 to political candidates in 2013 — all of it going to Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO). The rest of the money went to expenses and consulting fees, including at least $11,500 a month to PAC spokesman/treasurer Timothy Crawford.
So the next time you hear Sarah Palin feigning interest in running for Alaska’s Senate seat in 2014, you won’t have to ask yourself why she would enter a race she’s almost certain to lose. Or why a self-declared “maverick” would want to join a body governed largely by seniority and a complicated system of unwritten rules. Or why a woman who knows very little about laws would want to write them. Or why an Arizona resident would run for Senate more than 3,500 miles from her home. Or why, after failing to complete four years as governor, Palin would seek a six-year term in Washington.
Simply remember that paying the consultants that she claims to hate so much, and flying around the country waving around a Big Gulp, isn’t cheap. And as Palin proved back in 2011, nothing jumpstarts fundraising efforts quite like a fake run for federal office.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, August 1, 2013
“The Long-Predicted Comeuppance”: House Falls Apart When The GOP Actually Tries To Implement The Ryan Budget Plan
House Republicans failed to pass an appropriations bill on Wednesday that would have cut federal transportation spending by $4.4 billion, halting their first attempt to implement the deep cuts to federal spending they have campaigned on and supported in the past.
In March, for the third time, House Republicans passed a budget outline written by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). This Ryan Budget included a radical re-do of Medicare for anyone 55 and under along with even more cuts than the previous two because it kept the sequestration in place, while shifting the defense cuts to other areas of the budget, and set a course for the budget to be balanced within 10 years.
“With this action, the House has declined to proceed on the implementation of the very budget it adopted three months ago,” said appropriations chair Hal Rogers (R-KY). “Thus I believe that the House has made its choice: sequestration — and its unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts — must be brought to an end.”
It’s much harder to vote for $4.4 billion in cuts when you — and your opponents — see how those cuts would actually hit your district and you know they have no chance of passing the Senate or being signed into law by the president.
Talking Points Memo‘s Brian Beulter called the collapse of the bill as the House breaks for its August recess “the GOP’s long-predicted comeuppance.”
“It might look like a minor hiccup, or a symbolic error,” he wrote. “But it spells doom for the party’s near-term budget strategy and underscores just how bogus the party’s broader agenda really is and has been for the last four years.”
Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) in a press conference on Thursday asserted that the votes were there to pass the bill, even though the bill’s manager, Tom Latham (R-IA), said, “I’m not sure that the votes were all there,” on Wednesday.
Boehner assured reporters that his caucus’ strategy was not falling apart, but he did call for a short-term continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown.
“It’s clear that we’re not going to have the appropriations bills finished by September 30,” Boehner said Thursday morning. “I believe a continuing resolution for some short period of time would probably be in the nation’s interest. But having said that, the idea of operating for an entire year under a CR is not a good way to do business. And I’ve been working with [appropriations chairman Hal Rogers] to try to find a way to actually do all of these appropriations bills. I think it’s important for Congress to do its work.”
It’s so important that Boehner has the House scheduled to be in session for nine whole days in September.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, August 1, 2013
“A One Trick Pony”: The Tea Party’s Unhealthy Obsession
Bipartisanship is a four letter word to the tea party zealots in Congress.
This week, Congressional Republicans dismissed President Obama’s proposal for corporate tax cuts out of hand. Last year, the president proposed the American Jobs Act, which House Republicans didn’t even consider despite the inclusion of tax cuts for businesses that hired new employees.
The president generously proposes and the House GOP caucus automatically disposes. Corporate tax cuts are the holy grail of the Republican Party, so the GOP’s resistance to the president’s proposals makes me think that House Republicans would automatically reject any proposal from the White House. I’m sure that Republicans would even find a reason to reject a plan initiated by Obama to build a memorial on the capital mall dedicated to conservative hero Ronald Reagan.
The president has given up on congressional Republicans, but he hasn’t given up on the American people.
In a series of speeches and proposals, Obama has discussed the urgent need to invest in projects that will put Americans back to work and rebuild our sagging infrastructure of bridges, water systems and transportation. The president has also explicitly denounced the politics of austerity as a road to prosperity. The sequester budget cuts have already slowed the economic recovery and the additional cuts that the tea party wants will reverse the fragile economic recovery.
The president has said that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s package of budget cuts, his so called Path to Prosperity, is really the path to austerity, which runs directly into the road of recession. Besides austerity, the only thing that congressional Republicans have to offer is the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which would, in turn, repeal the new restrictions against predatory health insurance company rip offs.
The public worries about jobs and the economy. Congressional Republicans have not only rejected the president’s constructive economic proposals, but they have an unhealthy obsession with destroying the progress created with the passage of the Affordable Care Act. House Republicans have voted 38 times to repeal the new health care reform law. Now, Tea Party zealots like Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, want to force repeal of the law with the threat of a government shutdown.
The GOP would be a lot better off if it would bet the farm on a key economic issue. Playing chicken with a government shutdown to repeal Obamacare is a risky wager. Voting 38 times against the health care law makes it seem like the GOP is a one trick pony racing in the wrong direction.
The president is also trying to move his own party away from the politics of austerity. Democrats can’t beat Republicans in a battle of green eyeshades. Eyeshades have their uses, but mostly they limit vision.
The Grand Old Party’s obsession with the Affordable Care Act not only ignores the public concern about the economy, but it has created an internal Republic party crisis. This week, Cruz laid into Republicans who don’t want to play a game of chicken with ACA repeal and a government shutdown. The battle between the Tea Party radicals and establishment Republicans will be prime time TV for the next few months.
Gridlock has the economy in a headlock. Hopefully President Obama can use his bully pulpit to move Republicans off the dime.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, August 1, 2013
“The Courage Of Invisible Women”: The Consequences Of Forgetting Sybrina Fulton And Mamie Till
Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, has been a textbook example of courage in the seventeen months since her youngest son was killed by George Zimmerman. Thrust into the public sphere during a time of great personal tragedy, Fulton has carried her pain with incredible poise. It was no different when she spoke before the National Urban League in Philadelphia this past Friday. She told the audience: “My message to you is please use my story, please use my tragedy, please use my broken heart to say to yourself, ’We cannot let this happen to anybody else’s child.’ ”
In that moment, she made the connection between herself and Mamie Till, mother of Emmett Till, the teen slain in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a woman, even stronger. Speaking on her decision to have an open casket at his funeral after her son’s face had been so badly beaten and disfigured he was unrecognizable, Mamie said: “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.” These mothers of black sons publicly asked us to use their pain to seek justice. However, the way we use that pain cannot diminish the reality of the people who live with it. By which I mean, we have a bad habit of acting as if black women exist only as props in the story about black men and it’s time to stop.
Black women’s pain fuels but then becomes obscured in the popular narrative about the consequences of racism and the fight for racial justice, as it becomes framed through the experiences of black men. All of us who do work around these issues are guilty of this oversight, myself included. In our attempts to address the problem of anti-black racism in the US, we neglect to consider the experiences of black women as part of that story.
While the Congressional Black Caucus convened a meeting to discuss the plight of black men and boys, black women and girls who suffer under the same systems of oppression being discussed as problematic for our boys have been left out of the public discourse. We talk often of the criminalization of black boys, and point to the school-to-prison pipeline as an example, but fail to mention the ways it affects black girls, as Monique W. Morris laid out in her report for African American Policy Forum in March of this year. According to Morris: “Black women and girls continue to be over-represented among those who are in contact with the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Black girls continue to experience some of the highest rates of residential detention. Black girls represent the fastest-growing segment of the juvenile justice population, and they have experienced the most dramatic rise in middle school suspension rates in recent years.” Yet, the problem continues to be framed as a nearly exclusive to black men and boys.
The same is true of New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy. While it’s true that the policy disproportionately targets black men, black women are also subjected to these supposedly random searches whose constitutionality has been challenged. Additonally, according to The New York Times, “stops of women by male officers can often involve an additional element of embarrassment and perhaps sexual intimidation.”
At times like this, it’s important to remind ourselves of our history. As Danielle L. McGuire expertly documented in her 2010 book At the Dark End of the Street, one of the major catalysts of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s was the dehumanization experienced by black women. The bus boycotts began because of the physical threat and sexual terror heaped upon black women’s bodies, in addition to having to ride in the back. And while a young Martin Luther King Jr. grabbed the headlines, it was a great number of black women paying the day-to-day price of movement building, organizing and doing field work, only to have their contributions minimized in favor of a “great man” reading of history.
Writing for The Guardian, Jamila Aisha Brown put it this way: “The victimization of young women is subsumed into a general well of black pain that is largely defined by the struggles of African-American men. As a result, any insight about this important intersection of race and gender is lost under the umbrella of a collective sense of persecution.”
The stories of black men are important, but they are not a stand-in for the stories of all black people. We can’t continue using the pain of black women’s lives to explain our existence if we are then going to pretend that pain isn’t worth examining on its own. We dishonor the courage of the Mamies and Sybrinas of the world when we do.
By: Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation, August 1, 2013
“The Nature Of His Public Service”: John Boehner’s Plan To Hurt The Country On Purpose
Sequestration cuts, we learned yesterday, continue to undermine the U.S. economy severely, and are quickly losing support of the congressional Republicans who pushed for the policy in the first place. As the GOP budget strategy unravels, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said yesterday the sequester is “unrealistic,” “ill-conceived,” and a policy that “must be brought to an end.”
For now, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) doesn’t give a darn.
Speaker John A. Boehner came before the mics on Thursday, and he made one thing clear: The sequester is here to stay until the White House gets serious about spending cuts.
“Sequestration is going to remain in effect until the president agrees to cuts and reforms that will allow us to remove it,” the Ohio Republican said to reporters in his weekly news conference. “The president insisted on the sequester none of us wanted, none of us like it, there are smarter ways to cut spending.”
It’s frightening how little Boehner understands about this policy. He’s the Speaker of the House, for goodness sake.
First, the president didn’t “insist on the sequester.” That’s just crazy.
Second, if “none of us” want this stupid policy, it’s within Boehner’s power to stop the cuts that are hurting the country on purpose. For reasons that only make sense to him, the Speaker refuses.
Third, Boehner’s argument is that he’ll stop deliberately undermining the country when Obama “agrees to cuts and reforms.” But Obama has already approved $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, and offered Republicans even more. So far, GOP officials have offered no comparable concessions.
And finally, there’s the problem Boehner doesn’t like to talk about: he has no alternative.
In effect, he’s saying, “When Obama agrees to make me happy, I’ll agree to end the pain.” And what would make Boehner happy? He won’t say — Obama is supposed to just offer Republican goodies, in the hopes that the House Speaker will eventually say he’s satisfied and turn off the policy that’s hurting the country on purpose.
Maybe Boehner should take a moment to consider how he defines the nature of “public service.” Does he seriously believe he’s acting in the nation’s best interests by pushing a policy both parties hate and is clearly undermining economic growth and job creation?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 1, 2013
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