“Feeling A Little Left Out”: The Religious Right Won’t Tolerate Being Ignored
The defining debate within the Republican Party over the last several months has pitted Tea Partiers against the GOP’s Corporate wing. The two contingents have already begun gearing up for some notable primary fights in advance of this year’s midterm elections.
But there’s another wing of the party that’s apparently feeling a little left out.
On a recent snowy day in the Washington suburb of Tyson’s Corner, Va., some of the religious right’s wealthiest backers and top operatives gathered at the Ritz-Carlton to plot their entry into the conservative civil war.
Their plan: take a page out of the playbooks of Karl Rove and the Koch brothers by raising millions of dollars, coordinating their political spending and assiduously courting megadonors…. It’s all geared toward elevating the place of social issues like abortion and gay marriage in conservative politics.
To be sure, all of this makes sense. The religious right, as a political movement, wants to remain relevant with its allies, so it stands to reason that leading social conservatives would begin plotting to defend and expand its influence. It may make intra-party tensions a little more complicated in the coming months, but the religious right probably doesn’t much care.
The trouble, though, is in the assumption that social conservatives have been irrelevant of late.
Indeed, the Politico article stated as fact that social issues have “been largely relegated to the sidelines” in Republican politics, and the GOP’s competing wings have both “steered away from social issues they deem too divisive.”
I can appreciate why this might seem true – after all, it’s not as if John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Cantor run around prioritizing the culture war above other GOP goals. But the closer one looks, the more these assumptions start to crumble.
For example ,the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit reproductive health research organization, found that “abortion was at the forefront of the state legislative debate during the past three years – so much so that states added more restrictions to the books from 2011-2013 than during the entire preceding decade.”
This isn’t the result of a party steering away from divisive social issues; this is the opposite.
What’s more, as we discussed a few months ago, let’s not forget that Republican leaders lined up to kiss the religious right movement’s ring at the 2013 Values Voter Summit, and GOP officials incorporated their opposition to contraception into the government-shutdown strategy. While Republican governors spent much of the year trying to limit women’s reproductive choices, it’s not limited to state government – just about the only bills House GOP lawmakers find it easy to pass deal with abortion.
The Republican Party’s commitment to the culture war remains alive and well. The religious right is worried about lost relevance, but the movement already has considerable influence over the GOP’s direction.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 3, 2014
“The Cruelty Of Unleashed Capitalism”: Rich Catholic Republicans Threaten Pope Francis, Because He Frightens Them
If anyone wonders whether Pope Francis has irritated wealthy conservatives with his courage and idealism, the latest outburst from Kenneth Langone left little doubt. Sounding both aggressive and whiny, the billionaire investor warned that he and his overprivileged friends might withhold their millions from church and charity unless the pontiff stops preaching against the excesses and cruelty of unleashed capitalism.
According to Langone, such criticism from the Holy See could ultimately hurt the sensitive feelings of the rich so badly that they become “incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.” He also said rich donors are already losing their enthusiasm for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan – a very specific threat that he mentioned directly to Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York.
Langone is not only a leading fundraiser for church projects but a generous donor to hospitals, universities, and cancer charities (often for programs and buildings named after him, in the style of today’s self-promoting philanthropists). Among the super-rich, he has many friends and associates who may share his excitable temperament.
While his ultimatum seems senseless – would a person of true faith stiff the church and the poor? – it may well be sincere. And Langone spends freely to promote his political and economic views, in the company of the Koch brothers and other Republican plutocrats.
Still, a Pope brave enough to face down the Mafia over his financial reform of the murky Vatican Bank shouldn’t be much fazed by the likes of Langone.
Yet Langone has reason to worry that the Holy Father is in fact asking hard questions about people like him. Indeed, he could serve as a living symbol of the gross and growing economic inequality that disfigures the American system and threatens democracy.
As a leader of the New York Stock Exchange, he was largely responsible for the scandalous overpayment of his friend Richard Grasso, the exchange president who received nearly $190 million in deferred compensation when he stepped down. Although New York’s highest court eventually upheld Grasso’s pay package, it was a perfect example of the unaccountable, self-serving greed of Wall Street’s elite.
Anything but repentant following the revelation and repudiation of the Grasso deal by NYSE executives, Langone told Forbes magazine in 2004: “They got the wrong f—ing guy. I’m nuts, I’m rich, and boy, do I love a fight. I’m going to make them sh-t in their pants. When I get through with these f—ing captains of industry, they’re going to wish they were in a Cuisinart—at high speed.”
He embarked on a furious vendetta against Eliot Spitzer, who had fought to recapture Grasso’s millions as New York attorney general. And when Spitzer was forced to resign as governor in the wake of a prostitution scandal, Langone’s public gloating seemed to indicate that he had played a personal role in exposing his enemy’s indiscretions. He particularly hated Spitzer for attempting to punish and curtail the worst misconduct in the financial industry.
While Langone passionately defended the outlandish grasping of the super-rich like his friend Grasso, however, he has displayed far less indulgence toward workers, especially those struggling to support their families on poverty wages. Until just last year, he was a director of Yum! Brands, the global fast-food conglomerate that includes Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken among its holdings – and that spends millions annually to hold down the minimum wage and prevent unionization of its ill-paid employees and farmworkers.
What all this adds up to is hundreds of millions of dollars in questionable compensation for financial cronies, but not a dime more for low-income workers. It is exactly the kind of skewed outcome that the Pope means when he speaks about today’s capitalists, “the powerful feeding upon the powerless,” and the need for renewed state regulation to bring their burgeoning tyranny under control. He is talking about Langone, the Kochs, and an entire gang of right-wing financiers.
“How I would love a church that is poor and for the poor,” Francis said not long after his election to the papacy. That could be what he gets – and that might not be so bad, for the poor and for all of us, Catholic or not, who love justice.
By: Joe Conason, Featured Post, The National Memo, January 3, 2014
“They Elected Me, The Overseers”: No Clemency From Snowden’s Self-Importance
Eh, I suppose I could find myself coming around to what the New York Times editorial suggests the United States should do to Edward Snowden. That is, offer the Russia-residing national security leaker, “a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.” Snowden should be held accountable in some way for stealing government secrets. What I don’t think I could stand is a public life of advocacy.
My views on Snowden are pretty clear. They were mostly negative views that were reinforced when I read his interview with The Post’s Barton Gellman published just before Christmas. No need for me to go into detail about what I thought because my colleague Ruth Marcus did it masterfully in the opening paragraphs of her Tuesday column.
Time has not deflated Edward Snowden’s messianic sense of self-importance. Nor has living in an actual police state given the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower any greater appreciation of the actual freedoms that Americans enjoy.
Insufferable is the first adjective evoked by Snowden’s recent interview with Barton Gellman in The Post, but it has numerous cousins: smug, self-righteous, egotistical, disingenuous, megalomaniacal, overwrought.
“Let them say what they want,” Snowden said of his critics during the Moscow interview with Gellman. “It’s not about me.” A side-eye-worthy statement as it came near the end of a story that was one long aria of Snowden self-importance.
It’s not about him, but “I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said.
It’s not about him, but “That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”
And it’s not about him, but he said, “somebody has to be the first” since no one else felt as compelled as he to steal government secrets and violate an oath of secrecy to shed light on the activities of the National Security Agency.
With all the political enemies arrayed on Capitol Hill against President Obama, why didn’t Snowden take his ample concerns to Republican lawmakers? Lord knows, they are always casting about (unsuccessfully) for the latest “-gate” they believe will bring down the Obama administration.
Despite my dim view of the man and his actions, there is no denying that what Snowden revealed demands attention. That’s why one thing he told Gellman had me nodding my head.
“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”
On Dec. 18, the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies issued its report on the government’s surveillance activities and offered recommendations on how to limit its vast scope and capabilities. At his year-end press conference two days later, Obama said, he would make a “pretty definitive statement” on it all upon his return from vacation this month.
No doubt, there is nothing the president could propose that would go far enough for most folks in curbing the excesses of the NSA. But, to borrow a phrase from Snowden, “somebody has to be the first” to try.
By: Jonathan Capehart, PostPartisan, The Washington Post, January 2, 2013
“A Million Here, A Million There”: Millions Of People Have Health Insurance Thanks To Obamacare
The big number in the news this week was 1.1 million – the number of people who signed up for health insurance through Obamacare’s federal insurance marketplace this year. This is an important figure, especially given the fact that it stood at little more than 100,000 at the end of November.
Nevertheless, that 1.1 million figure dramatically understates what the Affordable Care Act has already accomplished. The number we should be talking about is at least 9 million and could be 14 million people who are currently getting coverage under the law.
How many people are currently covered through the law? Start with the 1.1 million who have gotten care through the federal website. If you layer on the number of enrollees who have gotten coverage through state-run exchanges that number tops 2.1 million, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced Tuesday. Then throw in the 3.9 million people who have gotten health coverage under Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Oh and don’t forget about the young adults under 26 who are still covered by their parents’ health insurance plans thanks to the Affordable Care Act. A year-and-a-half ago, the Department of Health and Human Services put the number at 3.1 million but an August study by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that focuses on health policy research, estimated that the figure had reached 7.8 million. Total those numbers and you get a minimum of 9 million Americans covered through Obamacare and a maximum of nearly 14 million.
To borrow Everett Dirksen’s old adage: A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real coverage. This is why Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson told the New York Times last week that the Affordable Care Act is “no longer just a piece of paper that you can repeal and it goes away. … We have to deal with the people that are currently covered under Obamacare.”
To be sure there are provisos and qualifications. Obamacare critics will point out that some number of those insured are only replacing coverage they lost thanks to the law disqualifying their plans (of course that will require those same critics to acknowledge that very few of the people losing their health coverage are now bereft); and in the context of 50 million uninsured it’s only a start – but it is a start. And while I’m writing this in the waning hours of 2013, it doesn’t take a great feat of prognostication to know that the first days of 2014 may well bring another round of Obamacare horror stories as people find out that they don’t have coverage they thought they signed up for. The October website disaster’s effects are still being felt – the administration had been aiming for 3.3 million signups by now, for example, so the 2 million figure is well short.
The law’s well-publicized stumbles have certainly taken their toll in polls. Finally clear of its shutdown self-immolation, the GOP seems to be building its 2014 strategy around Obamacare’s flaws. “Ideally, we’d freeze things the way they are in amber until November,” a senior House Republican aide told Time’s Jay Newton-Small last month.
But putting aside for a moment the fact that 11 months is an age and a day in politics, there’s a fundamental flaw in this GOP calculus: Obamacare’s not the cutting issue they seem to think it is. Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg, James Carville and Erica Seifert surveyed the 86 most competitive House districts and found that the country remains deeply divided on the Affordable Care Act. “Health care is not a wedge issue,” they concluded.
The right’s problem is that it fixates on approval-disapproval numbers without digging into them. So while a CNN/ORC poll conducted in mid-December found that 35 percent favor the law and 62 percent oppose it, only 43 percent oppose the law because it’s too liberal; if you add the 35 percent who favor the law to the 15 percent who dislike it because they wish it did more, the GOP 2014 game plan becomes more puzzling. An early December New York Times/CBS News poll tells the same story: 50 percent oppose the law while only 39 percent approve. But only 42 percent think the law goes too far while a total of 50 percent think it either doesn’t go far enough or is just right.
Those are the figures right now. But in February of last year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 7 million people would be covered this year through the exchanges. Is that figure realistic? The Washington Post’s Obamacare guru, Sarah Kliff, reported this week that the health research firm Avalere Health estimated what the pace of enrollments should look like, modeling it off of the 2006 Medicare drug program rollout. Their guess for Obamacare was 2.4 million people by the end of 2013, making the 7 million target plausible.
One factor which will help? The health insurance industry is going all-in on the law. As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, health insurers are fighting for these millions of new customers. The Journal suggested that insurers will spend $500 million on local TV ads in 2014. Here’s my favorite part of the article: “The ad campaigns are a major shift in strategy for health insurers, most of whom have never really had to market directly to consumers aggressively until now.” It’s the free-market flipside of Obama’s infamous promise: If you don’t like your insurer, you don’t have to keep it. A full fight for customers could help the law reach the 7 million mark – bringing the total number of people insured under it to nearly 20 million.
Is the GOP really going to spend the fall campaigning to take health care away from nearly 20 million people?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 3, 2014
“Where Beliefs Diverge”: The Issue That Turns Republicans Against Israel
America’s right believes that Israel can do no wrong when it’s building settlements in the occupied territories or trying to prevent a nuclear deal with Iran. But when it comes to social policies, fundamentalists ignore that Israel is far more progressive than the United States.
A new governmental panel is suggesting that the Jewish state pay for all abortions for women aged 20-33. Currently, abortions for medical reasons and for girls under the age of 18 are subsidized by the government.
“Unlike in the United States, abortion has never figured in the country’s political campaigns,” The Times of Israel’s Lamar Berman notes. “In fact, Israel does not even have an active anti-abortion movement.”
The Hyde Amendment makes it illegal for Medicaid to fund any abortions, except in the cases of rape, incest or a threat to the life of the mother. Several Republican state legislatures have passed laws that will require women to purchase an additional waiver to cover abortion.
Israel has a single-payer health care system, which helps keep costs low, as Mitt Romney noted during his visit to the country in 2012.
Christians like to play up their connection to the religious traditions of the Holy Land. But abortion is an issue where beliefs diverge.
“That Jewish law does not consider the fetus to be a legal person goes to the heart of why so-called ‘personhood’ amendments—laws that would declare a fertilized egg to be a person with rights—and other attempts by lawmakers and activists to afford fetuses equal protection rights have a constitutional problem,” Sarah Posner notes. “They reflect a particular religious view, one that is not, as Christian-right activists like to say about their beliefs on reproduction, a ‘Judeo-Christian’ one.”
As the far right has moved even further to the right on abortion — passing more restrictions in the last three years than in the decade before — it also has intensified its embrace of the Jewish state. Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev pointed out in 2011 that if President Obama treated Israel the way Ronald Reagan — who placed an embargo on arms sales to the state — did, he would be impeached.
The growing influence of the Christian Coalition following Pat Robertson’s galvanizing 1988 presidential campaign has shifted power to the evangelicals of the Republican Party and given rise to policies based on Christian Dispensationalism, which argues the Jews must return to Israel for the second coming of Jesus Christ to occur. Some Christians go further and argue that the conversion of the “chosen people” is necessary to bring about the rapture. George W. Bush recently raised funds for a group that is actively engaged in converting Jews.
The drastic dissonance between American fundamentalists and Israeli health experts — who would prefer to fund all abortions for all women but didn’t propose this for budgetary reasons — suggests that the right is willing to ignore differences of opinion on reproductive rights… when they’re focused on bringing about the end of the world.
By: Jason Sattler, Featured Post, The National Memo, January 2, 2014
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