Raising Arizona: Maybe The Wrong Arizonan Is Facing Impeachment
When Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission came up with a new map, Republicans were apoplectic. GOP officials wanted the post-Census congressional district lines to be drawn in Republicans’ favor, and when the tripartisan panel, created by voters, came up with more balanced lines, the party went into attack mode.
This week, that attack included impeachment proceedings against the commission’s independent chair, Colleen Coyle Mathis, ousted by Gov. Jan Brewer and state Senate Republicans. And on what grounds did GOP officials impeach this official? Republicans cited “gross misconduct” as a justification.
Alan Colmes talked to Brewer yesterday on his radio show, asking the far-right governor to explain the rationale for impeachment. The discussion didn’t go well.
COLMES: What did Colleen do that was inappropriate, Colleen Mathis?
BREWER: Well she acted, uh, inappropriately. Well it was very, pretty much obvious that she in communications, and doing things, uh, not in the public, and the people of Arizona deserve that —
COLMES: You mean she was doing things secretly? Like what?
BREWER: They just simply need to operate in a lawful and open fashion….
COLMES: I’m trying to understand what she did. What are you accusing her of having done?
BREWER: Well she wasn’t operating in the proper manner.
The audio of the exchange really needs to be heard to be fully appreciated; the partial transcript doesn’t capture just how incoherent the Republican governor really was.
And given the circumstances, this matters. Brewer, as part of an unprecedented power grab, just led an impeachment crusade against an independent government official who’s done nothing wrong. The governor agreed to do this interview to explain the rationale for her decision, and then couldn’t explain the rationale for her decision.
The problem, of course, is that Brewer couldn’t admit the truth out loud: the redistricting commission didn’t rig the game to favor Republicans, so Republicans are retaliating against the redistricting commission.
On a related note, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) argued yesterday, “I think Arizonans should consider impeaching Jan Brewer.”
He has a point. If anyone’s guilty of “gross misconduct” in the Grand Canyon State, it would appear to be its governor.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 5, 2011
Mitt Romney And The Challenge Of Making Ridiculous Numbers Add Up
Mitt Romney has an interesting budget challenge. He wants to eliminate a large deficit entirely, but he also wants to increase defense spending and cut taxes on the wealthy by trillions of dollars. It’s the sort of plan that would make balancing the budget sort of tricky, in much the same way putting out a fire with lighter fluid would be difficult.
But don’t worry, the former Massachusetts governor’s platform now includes a spending-cut plan. In the latest in a voluminous series of op-eds, which previewed a speech he delivered this afternoon, Romney explained:
The federal government should stop doing things we don’t need or can’t afford. For example:
* Repeal ObamaCare, which would save $95 billion in 2016.
* Eliminate subsidies for the unprofitable Amtrak, saving $1.6 billion a year.
* Enact deep reductions in the subsidies for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Legal Services Corporation.
* Eliminate Title X family planning programs benefiting abortion groups like Planned Parenthood.
* End foreign aid to countries that oppose America’s interests.
That’s not the totality of the plan — Romney also has some thoughts on entitlements that we’ll get to later — but in terms of discretionary spending, this is the gist of his spending-cut agenda.
There are a few key takeaways to keep in mind. The first is that repealing the entirely of the Affordable Care Act would make the deficit much worse, not better. Romney has this precisely backwards, and the fact that he doesn’t understand this is disconcerting.
Second, if Romney thinks he can take a $1.3 trillion deficit, increase spending on the Pentagon, cut taxes on the wealthy, and pay balance the budget by going after foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he’s an even bigger fool than I’d feared.
And third, Planned Parenthood? Seriously? Mitt Romney thinks he can bring the budget closer to balance by increasing military spending, while blocking working-class and low-income women from accessing contraception, family planning services, pap smears, cancer screenings, and tests for sexually-transmitted diseases?
That’s just sad.
For nearly a half-century, Republican support for Planned Parenthood was the norm. Barry Goldwater and George H.W. Bush championed the health organization, and it wasn’t deemed the least bit controversial.
And yet, now we have Mitt Romney — ostensibly one of the sane GOP presidential candidates — vowing to eliminate funding for this preventive health care for women altogether.
Romney was far less offensive when he was a moderate attending Planned Parenthood fundraisers. This latest incarnation appears to have a real problem with women’s rights and interests.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 4, 2011
Don’t Blame The GOP For Mitt Romney’s Flip-Flops
As former Gov. Mitt Romney gets battered by the likes of George Will, expect to hear a lot more arguments along the following lines.
It’s not Romney who is the flip-flopper. It’s the conservative movement. It was only three years ago that Jim DeMint was praising the Massachusetts healthcare plan. Post-2009, conservatives have flip-flopped on individual mandates, they have flip-flopped on monetary policy, in these cases they have adopted ever more extreme positions.
Yes Romney has had to shape-shift to keep pace, and that’s unfortunate. But don’t blame him—blame them.
God bless David, but this is too cute. It’s impossible to deny, at this point, that the idea of an individual mandate emerged from the right. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was forced to admit this onstage in the primary debate in Las Vegas.
But that hardly means the conservative movement has flip-flopped on the issue.
Sure, it was a feature of the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare, but that was spearheaded by Sens. Lincoln Chafee and Bob Dole. If Frum would like to make the case that those guys were emblematic movement conservatives, he can go right ahead.
I was around Capitol Hill in the late-’90s and, truth be told, I don’t remember hearing much about the mandate at all.
After Hillarycare unraveled, the healthcare debate came to focus on the late Rep. Charlie Norwood‘s “patients’ bill of rights.”
It was a genteel, middle-of-the-road proposal, sure to appeal to women voters (guaranteed access to OB-GYNs was a frequent talking point). It rattled around for a few years, garnered bipartisan support, but most Republicans were happy to see it wither.
On substance, conservatives pointed out, rightly, that the bill wouldn’t do anything to increase access to insurance. And so they proposed market-friendly solutions (“association health plans,” for example) that would have reduced the number of uninsured citizens by a few million.
That the patients bill of rights did nothing for the uninsured was always slightly embarrassing for Democrats to admit—but this was the safe, piecemeal strategy they had embraced until 2009, when they got regulations of that sort on insurance companies and coverage for most of the uninsured, the costs for which would have to be borne by healthy people not paying into insurance pools (hence the need for an individual mandate).
Look: I’m not denying that some Republicans have been more than a little squirrelly on the mandate. I’m just saying it was never an issue that movement conservatives seriously fought for, to the extent that they thought about it all.
Now, onto Michael Gerson, who praises Romney’s pragmatism and downplays the risk that he’ll flip-flop away from the movement after Inauguration Day. Moreover, Gerson argues that Romney’s “multiple choice” reputation will actually strengthen the movement’s grip on his presidency:
Precisely because he has a history of ideological heresy, it would be difficult for him to abandon his current, more conservative iteration. He has committed himself on key conservative issues. Having flipped, he could not flop without risking a conservative revolt. As a result, conservatives would have considerable leverage over a Romney administration.
This is interesting, I’ll admit.
I would agree with Gerson that the chances of Romney switching back to pro-choice on abortion is vanishingly small. Ditto for embryonic stem-cell research. There really is no plausible way for Romney to climb back from these positions.
And when Romney said recently that “the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us,” I was inclined to believe him. I can’t see his administration spending a penny on climate change.
The problem with Romney isn’t that he’s changed his mind on this or that issue. Every politician not named Rep. Ron Paul has done this.
The question Gerson and movement conservatives should be asking themselves about Romney isn’t whether, having checked the right box now, he’ll uncheck it later. It should be: Do you think he’d spend political capital or risk his presidency on any issue that you care about?
Put another way: Do you believe that Mitt Romney is more than nominally pro-life? Will he fight to change the status quo on abortion?
I suppose Gerson’s assurance depends, too, on what constitutes a “key issue.” Does the building of a border fence count? If so, does Gerson really believe that President Romney is going to build a “high-tech fence” to “secure the border”?
How about gays in the military? Romney’s most recent position on the issue is that he didn’t think “Don’t ask, don’t tell” should have been interfered with. Does Gerson think Romney, a la former Sen. Rick Santorum, will fight to reinstate the policy?
Does Gerson think that Romney will try to dismantle Obamacare in its entirety—or just the “worst aspects” of it?
Romney isn’t just a flip-flopper. He’s just downright weaselly.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, November 2, 2011
How The Rich Created The Social Security “Crisis”
Now and then, George W. Bush told the unvarnished truth—most often in jest. Consider the GOP presidential nominee’s Oct. 20, 2000, speech at a high-society $800-a-plate fundraiser at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. Resplendent in a black tailcoat, waistcoat and white bow tie, Bush greeted the swells with evident satisfaction.
“This is an impressive crowd,” he said. “The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.”
Any questions?
Eight months later, President Bush delivered sweeping tax cuts to that patrician base. Given current hysteria over what a recent Washington Post article called “the runaway national debt,” it requires an act of historical memory to recall that the Bush administration rationalized reducing taxes on inherited wealth because paying down the debt too soon might roil financial markets.
Eleven years later, the Post warns in a ballyhooed article, reading like something out of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” that Social Security—the 75-year-old bedrock of millions of Americans’ retirement hopes—has “passed a treacherous milestone,” gone “cash negative,” and “is sucking money out of the Treasury.”
Anybody who discerns a relationship between these events, that is, between a decade of keeping the “have-mores’” yachts and Lear jets running smoothly and a manufactured crisis supposedly threatening grandma’s monthly Social Security check must be some kind of radical leftist.
That, or somebody skeptical of the decades-long propaganda war against America’s most efficient, successful and popular social insurance program. It’s an effort that’s falsely persuaded millions of younger Americans that Social Security is in its last days and made crying wolf a test of “seriousness” among Beltway courtier-pundits like the Post’s Lori Montgomery, who concocted an imaginary front page emergency out of a relatively meaningless actuarial event.
All in service, alas, of a single unstated premise: The “have-mores” have made off with grandma’s money fair and square. They have no intention of paying it back. That’s the only possible interpretation of the Post’s admonition that “the $2.6 trillion Social Security trust fund will provide little relief. The government has borrowed every cent and now must raise taxes, cut spending or borrow more heavily from outside investors to keep benefit checks flowing.”
Little relief? In fact, the law’s working precisely as intended. After 28 years of generating huge payroll tax surpluses to cover the baby boomers’ retirement benefits, the system must now begin to draw upon those funds to help pay current benefits—the vast majority still covered by current payroll tax receipts.
“Rather than posing any sort of crisis,” explains Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “this is exactly what had been planned when Congress last made major changes to the program in 1983 based on the recommendations of the Greenspan commission.”
Again, this is the beneficiaries’ money, invested by the Social Security trustees in U.S. Treasury bonds drawn upon “the full faith and credit of the United States.” Far from being “meaningless IOUs” as right-wing cant has it, they represent the same legally binding promise between the U.S. government and its people that it makes with Wall Street banks and the Chinese government, which also hold Treasury Bonds.
A promise not very different, the Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby points out, from the one implicit in your bank statement or 401K (if you’re lucky enough to have one). Did you think the money was buried in earthen jars filled with gold bullion and precious stones?
Raise taxes, cut spending or borrow? What other options does the U.S. government, or any government, have?
On his New York Times blog, Paul Krugman dissects the Catch-22 logic behind the Post’s bogus crisis. You can’t simultaneously argue “that the trust fund is meaningless, because SS is just part of the budget, then claim that some crisis arises when receipts fall short of payments, because SS is a standalone program.” For practical purposes, it’s got to be one or the other.
So is Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”? No, it’s group insurance, not an investment. You die young, somebody else benefits. Its finances have been open public record since 1936. Do fewer workers support each beneficiary? Sure, but who cares? It’s denominated in dollars, not a head count. The boomers were nearing 40 when the Reagan administration fixed the actuarial tables. No surprises there.
Are longer life expectancies screwing up the numbers? Not really. Most of the rise is explained by lower infant and child mortality, not by old-timers overstaying their welcome. Kevin Drum points out that gradually raising the payroll tax 1 percent and doubling the earnings cap over 20 years would make Social Security solvent forever.
But that’s not good enough for the more hidebound members of the $800-a-plate set. See, over 75 years Social Security has provided a measure of dignity, security and freedom to working Americans that just annoys the hell out of their betters.
By: Gene Lyons, Salon, November 2, 2011
“Descending From The Mountaintop”: House Republicans Keeping The Faith
After preaching for weeks about the urgency of Washington taking action to create jobs, lawmakers decided to put their mammon where their mouths are. And so on Tuesday evening they descended from the mountaintop and came forth to anoint a jobs bill of biblical proportions:
“H.Con.Res 13 — Reaffirming ‘In God We Trust’ as the official motto of the United States.”
The grace of this legislation, taken up on the House floor, was not immediately revealed to all. “In God We Trust” has been the nation’s official motto for 55 years, engraved on the currency and public buildings. There is no emerging movement to change that. But House Republicans chose to look beyond the absence of immediate threats and instead protect the motto against yet-unimagined threats in the future.
The legislation “provides Congress with the opportunity to renew its support of a principle that was venerated by the founders of this country, and by its presidents, on a bipartisan basis,” supporters claimed in their analysis. “This Congress can now show that it still believes and recognizes those same eternal truths by approving a resolution that will allow today’s Congress, as representatives of the American people, to reaffirm to the public and the world our nation’s national motto, ‘In God We Trust.’ ”
The infidel opposition took a rather different view. “We are focused on jobs measures,” said Brian Fallon, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “The House Republicans will hopefully get the message to do the same, God willing.”
In a dissenting analysis of the legislation, a group of House Democrats took a similarly skeptical stance. “Today we face the highest budget deficit in our nation’s history, a national unemployment rate of nearly 9 percent, and an ongoing mortgage foreclosure crisis,” they wrote. “American forces are deployed in combat on several fronts. . . . Yet, instead of addressing any of these critical issues, and instead of working to help American families keep a roof over their heads and food on their tables, we are debating whether or not to affirm and proliferate a motto that was adopted in 1956 and that is not imperiled in any respect.”
Then there’s the matter of whether Republicans violated their own promises by bringing up a ceremonial resolution and taking the God bill to the floor without a hearing. House GOP rules forbid suspending House rules to pass a bill if it “expresses appreciation, commends, congratulates, celebrates, recognizes the accomplishments of, or celebrates the anniversary of, an entity, event, group, individual, institution, team or government program.” (It might be argued that God, though an entity, is exempt from the provision.)
So what, pray tell, are Republicans up to? They can tell their constituents that they are doing the Lord’s work in the devil’s town. Because it is still too early to complain about efforts by the ACLU to snuff out Christmas, the In-God-We-Trust legislation provides a stand-in straw man. There’s certainly some appetite for this: Internet rumors proliferated after President Obama’s inauguration warning that he was seeking to remove “In God We Trust” from U.S. coins.
But it also conveys an impression to independent voters that, at a time of economic crisis, Republicans continue to focus on God, gays and guns.
Of course, there may be innocent explanations for the In God We Trust bill. “God” and “job” are both three-letter words with the same vowel. House Republicans may have been confused by the similarity, much like the dyslexic agnostic who wonders if there is a dog.
Notably, the House majority saw no need to protect the nation’s other motto, the one from the Great Seal of the United States that also appears on currency: e pluribus unum. But give the GOP credit for its tenacity: To continue to pursue social policies even while the nation cries out for economic relief requires the patience of Job — not to be confused with jobs.
In support of the God bill, the legislation’s champions quoted John F. Kennedy: “The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” But they left out a better-known Kennedy passage, from his inaugural address: “let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 1, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 