“The GOP In Fantasyland”: Unhinged, Uncontrollable And Fully Capable Of Knocking Themselves Out
The make-believe crusade by publicity-hound Republicans to somehow stop Obamacare is one of the most cynical political exercises we’ve seen in many years. And that, my friends, is saying something.
Charlatans are peddling the fantasy that somehow they can prevent the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from becoming what it already is: the law of the land. Congress passed it, President Obama signed it, the Supreme Court upheld it, many of its provisions are already in force, and others will soon take effect.
No matter how contemptuous they may be about Obamacare, opponents have only two viable options: Repeal it or get over it.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) the Canadian American who appears to be running for president, has grabbed headlines and air time by being the loudest advocate of an alleged third option: Congress could refuse to fund Obamacare, thereby starving it and effectively killing it. This is a ridiculous fantasy, as Cruz, who has brains beneath all that bombast, surely knows.
Congress needs to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government beyond Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. The idea, if you can call it one, is that Republicans can refuse to pass any funding bill that contains money for implementing Obamacare.
Theoretically, Republicans could pull this off in the House, where they hold the majority. But the chance that a bill stripped of money for the Affordable Care Act could make it through the Senate, where Democrats hold power, is precisely zero. The chance that a House-Senate conference would starve Obamacare to death while Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) remains the majority leader is also zero.
And if by some miracle such a bill were to make it to Obama’s desk, the chance he would sign it is way less than zero. To swallow the snake oil that Cruz and some other hard-right conservatives are peddling, you have to believe Obama is willing to nullify the biggest legislative accomplishment of his presidency.
So with the bill vetoed and no authorization to spend money, much of the government would have to shut down.
This gambit damaged the Republican Party back when Newt Gingrich tried it. In today’s toxic political climate, with approval ratings for Congress sinking toward single digits, it could be catastrophic. As things stand, Democrats have an uphill struggle next year to win the 17 House seats they need to regain the majority in that chamber. If the GOP forces a shutdown, however, Democrats’ chances might get better.
The basic elements of Obamacare — including the mandate that compels individuals to buy health insurance or pay a fine — originated in conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation. So it is beyond ironic that Heritage — under its new leader, former senator Jim DeMint — is pushing hard for the defund-Obamacare suicide leap.
DeMint has gone so far as to make a campaign swing through the South and the Midwest, whipping up support among the GOP base. Asked by an audience member in Arkansas why Congress should pass a bill starving Obamacare when everyone knows Obama would never sign it, DeMint replied, “Well, we don’t know that, do we?”
Come on. We know.
And we also know that painting Obamacare as the end of America as we know it is an effective way for DeMint to rebrand Heritage , moving it away from mainstream Republican orthodoxy into tea party la-la land. Noisemaking and fundraising go hand in hand; this crazy exercise promises to be very bad for the GOP, but it might end up being very good for the Heritage Foundation’s coffers.
Similarly, Cruz gets to preen before a national audience and demonstrate the fervor of his opposition to Obama and all that he stands for. “If you have an impasse, you know, one side or the other has to blink,” he said recently. “How do we win this fight? Don’t blink.”
The GOP establishment is blinking like crazy. Trying to defund Obamacare has little support among Republicans in the Senate. “I’m for stopping Obamacare, but shutting down the government will not stop Obamacare,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said recently, demonstrating a grasp of reality.
The Republican majority in the House, though, is . . . what’s the word? Unpredictable? Uncontrollable? Unhinged? They pay little attention to wise political advice and less attention to their leader, Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. And while they can’t lay a glove on Obamacare, they’re fully capable of knocking themselves out.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 22, 2013
“A Tough Decision”: Paul Ryan’s Choice, His Constituents Or His Deep Ties To The Koch Brothers
How’s this for irony:
When the City of Kenosha, Wisconsin, was preparing to formally petition Congress to take the necessary actions to get corporate money out of politics and to restore grassroots democracy, the congressman who represents the community was meeting secretly with the Koch brothers to plot election strategies and policy agendas.
Kenosha is the largest city in Wisconsin’s first congressional district, which Congressman Paul Ryan has represented since 1999—thanks to gerrymandered district lines and heavy infusions of cash from out-of-state special interests. With Congress out of session for the August recess and Ryan expected to head home to meet with constituents, members of the Kenosha City Council decided to deliver a message. They voted overwhelmingly to ask Ryan and other Wisconsin representatives “to amend the Constitution to bar corporate wealth from unduly influencing elections.”
That’s not a particularly radical request.
Sixteen states and roughly 500 communities have petitioned Congress to support a constitutional amendment to restore the power of the people—through their federal, state and local representatives—to place limits on the influence of big money, especially corporate money, in American politics. The official calls from states across the country, and from cities such as Kenosha, come in response to the High Court’s decision to remove restrictions on corporate spending to buy elections, which capped a series of rulings that undermined limits on the power of wealthy Americans to dominate the political and governing processes of the nation with unprecedented infusions of campaign money.
Ryan has been among the prime beneficiaries of the money-in-politics moment ushered in by the High Court. As the House Budget Committee chairman, he has collected millions of dollars from individuals and groups that stand to benefit from initiatives such as Social Security privatization and the development of voucher schemes to “reform” Medicaid and Medicare. The congressman has become a favorite of many of the biggest donors in the country, including billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.
The Koch brothers, prime funders of conservative causes and Republican politicians, were enthusiastic backers of placing Ryan on the 2012 Republican ticket. That move entered in a fiasco that saw Ryan fail to deliver Wisconsin for the ticket led by Mitt Romney. Ryan not only lost his hometown of Janesville but many of the other communities in his district, including Kenosha.
Casual observers might guess that Ryan would be listening a little more to his district, especially to the voters in cities such as Kenosha.
But they would guess wrong.
As Kenosha was petitioning for the redress of money-in-politics grievances, the congressman was at a posh resort near Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he had flown as soon as Congress went on recess. The Koch brothers had rented the entire Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort and set up a private security perimeter so that no media—and certainly no citizens—could get near the elite retreat. And they invited Paul Ryan to spend several days with them as their guest of honor. Along with House majority leader Eric Cantor, American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks and a few other worthies, the Kochs and their wealthy friends wined and dined with Ryan.
A source that spoke to Politico reported that Ryan was “well-received by donors.” According to the Politico report, “Ryan has developed deep ties to Koch World”—the vast network of political operations controlled by the billionaire brothers.
The question is whether the congressman retains deep ties to Kenosha.
In case the congressman missed the message, the Kenosha City Council was joined in mid-August by the Kenosha County Board—the governing body of the populous southeastern Wisconsin county that is entirely within Ryan’s district—in calling for an amendment to overturn Citizens United. And constituents like Jennifer Franco, of Kenosha, are saying it’s time for their elected representatives to “stand with the people to proclaim that money is not speech, that artificial entities are not persons, and that every person’s voice carries the same weight.”
The juxtaposition of events in New Mexico and Wisconsin leaves Ryan with a clear choice to make: he can either stick with the Koch brothers or he can respond to the call from Kenosha for a meaningful response to the threat posed to democracy by the buying of elections and the policymaking process.
By: John Nichols, the Nation, August 22, 2013
“A Future Worth Celebrating”: Young Americans Have Challenges, But Race Isn’t One Of Them
After half a century, the March on Washington has moved into the historical record as a courageous but hardly radical event. It is widely remembered for Martin Luther King’s brilliant extemporaneous riffs on “I Have a Dream.” But even a peaceful assembly by “Negroes,” as black Americans were then known, was a dangerous idea in a volatile era.
President John F. Kennedy was dead-set against it, and protest planners were careful about choosing their allies for fear of informants to the Kennedy administration and his Federal Bureau of Investigation. Civil rights leaders formally demoted their best strategist, Bayard Rustin — though he continued to do most of the work — because he was openly gay and a one-time Communist, either of which would have been ammunition for those who wanted to derail the civil rights movement.
The march succeeded, though, perhaps beyond its organizers’ wildest dreams. A solemn demonstration of the power of black Americans’ simple plea for full citizenship, it proved to be one of the pivotal episodes of the civil rights movement. Its success in setting the stage for the Voting Rights Act shaped politics for the next 50 years, helping to propel President Barack Obama into office.
In the current political climate, it’s easy enough to minimize the remarkable progress toward full equality that the nation has made since 1963. It’s true that racism lives on, re-energized by pandering politicians and media demagogues. The criminal justice system is replete with discriminatory practices. Pernicious stereotypes still shadow the lives of black Americans.
Most damning, black workers have come no closer to closing the economic gap than they had in 1963. The Washington Post recently cited figures from the Economic Policy Institute showing that the unemployment rate was 5 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for blacks 50 years ago. The yawning gap remains today, with unemployment at 6.6 percent for whites and 12.6 percent for blacks, according to the Post. Furthermore, over the past 30 years, the average white family has gone from having five times as much wealth as the average black family to 6 1/2 times, the Post said.
Still, it’s disrespectful to those hardy and brave souls who stood on the Mall 50 years ago to suggest that little has changed. The nation has undergone a remarkable transformation in five decades, as the two elections of a black president attest.
Black men and women now hold positions of influence and authority throughout academia, business and the professions. They lead the U.S. armed forces. They are cultural icons, some so popular they are known simply by their first names.
The everyday interactions of Americans from different racial and ethnic groups have changed, as well. Interracial marriage is broadly accepted, and biracial children are a growing part of the population. Schools may not be as well-integrated as King had dreamed, but they are much more diverse than they were 50 years ago. So are churches and civic clubs.
Even the angry backlash by Tea Partiers and other sectors of the far right is a sign of changing times. Much of the hysteria that is lathered up by right-wing talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh is a last surge of protest by an aging demographic: older whites who resent or fear the changes fostered by the civil rights movement. The country is growing browner, and by mid-century, whites will no longer constitute a majority of the population. As a voting bloc and cultural influence, their power is waning. And they know it.
The good news is that younger whites are much more likely to embrace diversity, to accept cultural change, and to support the nation’s civic creed of full equality for all, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation. Polling data show they diverge from the views of their parents and grandparents on many social issues.
Of course, younger Americans will have their struggles, too — their bitter disagreements and their political challenges. And they will have to tackle the economic injustices around which King planned his last crusade.
But they seem less likely to forge a future cleaved by color, and that’s worth celebrating.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, August 24, 2013
“Fifty Years Later”: We Appear To Be Re-Segregating, Moving In The Opposite Direction Of Dr. King’s Dream.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I have a gnawing in my gut, an uneasy sense of society and its racial reality.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech keeps ringing in my head, an aching, idyllic, rhetorical masterpiece that envisions a future free of discrimination and filled with harmony and equality. But I wonder whether the day he imagined will ever come and whether many Americans have quietly abandoned King’s dream as a vision that can’t — or shouldn’t — exist in reality.
I’m absolutely convinced that enormous steps have been made in race relations. That’s not debatable. Most laws that explicitly codified discrimination have been stricken from the books. Overt, articulated racial animus has become more socially unacceptable. And diversity has become a cause to be championed in many quarters, even if efforts to achieve it have taken some hits of late.
But my worry is that we have hit a ceiling of sorts. As we get closer to a society where explicit bias is virtually eradicated, we no longer have the stomach to deal with the more sinister issues of implicit biases and of structural and systematic racial inequality.
I worry that centuries of majority privilege and minority disenfranchisement are being overlooked in puddle-deep discussions about race and inequality, personal responsibility and societal inhibitors.
I wonder if we, as a society of increasing diversity but also drastic inequality, even agree on what constitutes equality. When we hear that word, do we think of equal opportunity, or equal treatment under the law, or equal outcomes, or some combination of those factors?
And I worry that there is a distinct and ever-more-vocal weariness — and in some cases, outright hostility — about the continued focus on racial equality.
In this topsy-turvy world, those who even deign to raise the issue of racial inequality can be quickly dismissed as race-baiters or, worse, as actual racists. It’s the willful-ignorance-is-bliss approach to dismissing undesirable discussion.
In this moment, blacks and whites see the racial progress so differently that it feels as if we are living in two separate Americas.
According to a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday, nearly twice as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly by the police. More than twice as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly by the courts. And about three times as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly than whites at work, in stores or restaurants, in public schools and by the health care system.
In fact, a 2011 study by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School found, “Whites believe that they have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America.”
And in these divergent realities, we appear to be resegregating — moving in the opposite direction of King’s dream.
The Great Migration — in which millions of African-Americans in the 20th century, in two waves, left the rural South for big cities in the North, Midwest and West Coast — seems to have become a failed experiment, with many blacks reversing those migratory patterns and either moving back to the South or out of the cities.
As USA Today reported in 2011:
“2010 census data released so far this year show that 20 of the 25 cities that have at least 250,000 people and a 20 percent black population either lost more blacks or gained fewer in the past decade than during the 1990s. The declines happened in some traditional black strongholds: Chicago, Oakland, Atlanta, Cleveland and St. Louis.”
In addition, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released this month found that “about 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of nonwhite Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race.”
Furthermore, there is some evidence that our schools are becoming more segregated, not less. A study this year by Dana Thompson Dorsey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that “students are more racially segregated in schools today than they were in the late 1960s and prior to the enforcement of court-ordered desegregation in school districts across the country.”
I want to celebrate our progress, but I’m too disturbed by the setbacks.
I had hoped to write a hopeful, uplifting column to mark this anniversary. I wanted to be happily lost in The Dream. Instead, I must face this dawning reality.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 23, 2013
“The Butler And The Truth”: How Things Are Springs From How Things Were, And How Things Someday Will Be
This isn’t your average summer movie crowd.
It’s not just that they are largely African-American, skin in all the shades of buttermilk, caramel and creamless coffee that we call “black.” It’s not just that they are largely old, with raincloud hair and been-there eyes, some leaning on canes for support.
No, the thing you really notice is that they come with grandkids trailing behind them as a kite string does a kite, young people born of the digital age who’ve been told they will spend this afternoon watching a movie with Nana and Pop-Pop. What’s more, it will be a movie in which no one pines for a hunky vampire or spouts quips while shooting bad guys.
No, they have come to see Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the fictionalized story of a White House servant whose tenure stretches from Eisenhower to Reagan. Watching them take their seats, you get the sense that, while these grandparents may have come for Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker, what they have really come for, what they have brought their grandchildren to see, is The Truth. As in The Truth of How Things Were, and how that shades and shapes How Things Are.
That Truth has had a hard time of it in this country. It lives in books, yes, but given that so many of us regard reading as punishment and chore, that’s like saying it lives on Mars. Nor has Hollywood ever had much interest in telling that Truth and on the rare occasions it does, it pretties it up with so many Disneyesque evasions, dulls its hard edges with so much buttery compromise, that it hardly looks like itself.
This absence of The Truth has filled the ether with lies, cowardly, face-saving fabrications that ignore How Things Were and allow some of us to pretend How Things Are sprang fully formed from the indolence of black mothers, the wantonness of black daughters, the fecklessness of black fathers, the thuggery of black sons, the blameless reactions of lawmakers, judges, employers, cops — and neighborhood watchmen.
So what makes “The Butler” remarkable and necessary is simply this: It goes where we are seldom willing to go, shows what we are seldom willing to see, says what we are seldom willing to hear.
Black men hang from a tree like dead leaves. And that is The Truth.
A black man must watch his wife led away by a white man to be raped and there is nothing he can do about this act of psychological castration except endure it. And that is The Truth.
The butler sets out china and silverware for a glamorous state dinner, as, elsewhere, young men and women are being sprayed with ketchup and spittle, punched and kicked and called “n—-r” for trying to buy a meal at a department store lunch counter. And that is The Truth.
America, someone says, turns a blind eye to what we do to our own people, yet has the nerve to look out on the rest of the world and judge. And that, too, is The Truth.
We are guilty of ignorance in this country. Worse, ignorance did not just happen. It was chosen as an alternative to dealing with what we did and do, acknowledging the crimes that made us great. We ought not say those things, a woman once said, because doing so is not “polite.”
But when what happened to you is not allowed to be acknowledged, it invalidates you. It makes you as invisible as a butler standing in an Oval Office waiting to serve while other men debate your fate.
So the most significant thing about this movie is not its performances or its story, but the simple audacity of its Truth. This Truth is what the old ones have brought the young ones to see, what they need them to understand. How Things Are springs from How Things Were. You must know this, children, and respect it.
And use it to shape How Things Will Someday Be.
By: Leonard Pitts Jr., The National Memo, August 21, 2013
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