New Year’s Resolutions: New Rules For The New Year
NEW YEAR’S resolutions are the original New Rules. Except that resolutions are usually self-oriented: I am going to lose weight this year. My New Year’s resolution, by the way, is to do the ones from ’75; I made a lot of good ones that year. I was 19, and thought I could polish them off by age 20. Alas, I’m a little behind.
Also, New Rules are bigger, broader and grander. I don’t tell you what I’m going to eat; I tell you how the world should work. Here’s what 2011 prompts me to decree for 2012:
New Rule Now that we have no money, and all our soldiers have come home from Iraq and they’ve all got experience building infrastructure, and no jobs … we must immediately solve all of our problems by declaring war on the United States.
New Rule If you were a Republican in 2011, and you liked Donald Trump, and then you liked Michele Bachmann, and then you liked Rick Perry, and then you liked Herman Cain, and then you liked Newt Gingrich … you can still hate Mitt Romney, but you can’t say it’s because he’s always changing his mind.
New Rule Starting next year, any politician caught in a scandal can’t go before the press, offer a lame excuse and then say, “Period. End of Story.” Here’s how you indicate a “period” and the end of a story: shut up.
New Rule The press must stop saying that each debate is “make or break” for Rick Perry and call them what they really are: “break.”
New Rule You can’t be against same-sex marriage and for Newt Gingrich. No man has ever loved another man as much as Newt Gingrich loves Newt Gingrich.
New Rule Internet headlines have to be more like newspaper headlines. That means they have to tell me something instead of just tricking me into clicking on them. If you write the headline, “She Wore That?” you have to go to your journalism school and give your degree back.
New Rule Let’s stop scheduling the presidential election in the same year as the Summer Olympics. I get so exhausted watching those robotic, emotionally stunted, artificial-looking creatures with no real lives striving to do the one thing they’re trained to do that I barely have energy left to watch the Olympics.
New Rule No more holiday-themed movies with a cast of thousands unless at least half of them get killed by a natural disaster. Fair’s fair — if I have to watch Katherine Heigl and Zac Efron as singles who can’t find love, I also get to see them swallowed up by the earth.
New Rule Jon Huntsman must get a sex change. The only way he’s going to get any press coverage is by turning into a white woman and disappearing.
New Rule Starting this year, every appliance doesn’t need a clock on it. My stove, my dishwasher, my microwave, my VCR — all have clocks on them. If I really cared that much about what time it was (or what year it was), would I still have a VCR?
By: Bi Maher, Author of “The New Rules”, New York Times Opinion, December 30, 2011
Gingrich Raked In Oil Money After Flip-Flopping On Cap And Trade
2012 GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich executed a high-profile flip-flop on cap and trade, saying in 2007 that “mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system” were something he “would strongly support,” before disavowing that position this year. “I never favored cap and trade,” he claimed during a Fox News interview earlier this month.
It turns out that this move was more than politically convenient for Gingrich. As the Washington Post noted today, Gingrich’s climate flip-flop was also quite lucrative, with millions of oil dollars pouring into his now defunct energy non-profit after he announced it:
Within weeks, the money began pouring in from major U.S. energy firms, which eventually contributed more than $2 million to American Solutions’ pro-drilling and anti-cap-and-trade campaign for the next two years, according to a review of disclosure reports and other records by The Washington Post.
The top contributors included Peabody Energy of St. Louis, which gave $825,000, and Devon Energy of Oklahoma City, which contributed $500,000.
Gingrich also has a complicated relationship with oil subsidies, deriding Congress for not cutting them, but also mocking progressives for wanting to cut them.
Gingrich, of course, has been quote cozy with corporate interests in the last few years, making and taking millions from various corporations for work in a variety of areas. And those corporations have seen their investment pay off, as Gingrich has peddled his influence to secure earmarks and push for deregulation. His cap and trade flip-flop is simply part of a larger pattern of Gingrich saying what he needs to say to keep corporate dollars flowing.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, December 29, 2011
Why Romney Decided to Go Glenn Beck
A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney abruptly changed his main campaign message. Before that point, he had been lambasting President Obama as a likable failure, well intentioned but sadly unable to revive the economy. When asked if Obama was a socialist, Romney would deny it outright, insisting he was merely in “over his head.” But starting December 7, Romney began to paint Obama as a sinister radical who had not failed, but had succeeded all too well, in transforming the basic nature of America.
At the time, I thought Romney’s sudden switch was a response to Newt Gingrich’s sudden (and apparently short-lived) challenge from the right, positioning himself to speak more directly to the fears of a freaked-out Republican electorate. But I now think Romney’s campaign has concluded that his old campaign message wasn’t strong enough for the general election. Conservative columnist Kimberly Strassel has a column passing on research findings from American Crossroads, a Republican independent expenditure group. Crossroads surveyed a large number of swing voters and concluded that they couldn’t beat Obama merely by portraying him as having failed:
“To lock down voters in the middle, Republicans are going to have to convince them that Obama isn’t just a flawed and ineffective leader, but that he has an agenda and motivations that they don’t share,” says Steven Law, president and CEO of Crossroads
Strassel presents these findings as advice that Romney needs to take. But I think it’s pretty obvious that Romney has already taken it. His tone toward Obama has grown harsher, and he is now openly (and falsely) calling Obama a socialist who is promoting total economic equality. I’m actually pretty skeptical of this research – the political middle clearly seems to be voters who like Obama but blame him for the poor economy without having a strong ideological understanding of why the economy has failed. But, whatever its merits, this seems to be the strategy Romney has embraced.
The tension between the previous version of Romney and the newest model sprang to the fore when he visited the Wall Street Journal editorial board for a weekend interview. In it, Romney carefully presented himself as an ideologue rather than a technocrat:
[Romney] concludes with even more force, “America doesn’t need a manager. America needs a leader. The president is failing not just because he’s a poor manager. It’s because he doesn’t know where to lead.”
Voters will have to judge the quality of that vision, and how it compares with President Obama’s. But there’s no doubt it’s a contrast with Mr. Romney’s visit to our offices in 2007, which became legendary for its appeal to technocratic virtue.
In that meeting the candidate began by declaring “I love data” and kept on extolling data, even “wallowing in data,” as a way to reform both business and government. He said he’d bring in management consultants to turn around the government, mentioning McKinsey, Bain and the Boston Consulting Group. Mr. Romney seemed to elevate the power of positive technocratic thinking to a governing philosophy.
So it is also notable that now Mr. Romney describes the core failure of Mr. Obama’s economic agenda as faith in “a wise group of governmental bureaucrats” rather than political and economic freedom.
Romney’s problem is that he is, as Jodi Kantor’s New York Times profile shows, a technocrat at heart. He approaches public policy from a data-driven standpoint, searching for solutions that do the most to increase human welfare. This inevitably estranges him from the conservative tradition, which in its essence is a philosophical belief in limited government that holds firm regardless of empirical effects.
It was Romney’s technocratic inclinations that caused him to look at a problem like health care and wind up embracing essentially the same solution that the Obama administration did, which is why conservatives distrust him. The irony is that Romney approaches campaigning the way he approaches governing, obeying the data above all else. If the data tell him to start wildly accusing Obama of abolishing all economic inequality, then that is what he will do.
By: Published in New York Magazine, Daily Intel, December 27, 2011
The Problem Isn’t Mitt Romney’s $10,000 Bet Offer. It’s His Serial Dishonesty
One of the biggest pieces of news out of Saturday’s debate is that Mitt Romney offered to bet Rick Perry $10,000 over the latter’s claim that Romney wrote in his book that he viewed the individual mandate as a “model” for the country. Dems and Republicans alike are pouncing on the casual offer of a large wager as proof that Romney is out of touch, and reporters are predicting that this moment could crystallize a national media narrative about Romney.
But while the $10,000 moment is politically problematic and revealing in some ways, it doesn’t really deserve to rise to the level of national narrative. What’s more deserving of a national storyline about Romney is his serial dishonesty, his willingness to say and do anything to win.
This morning, Romney is pushing back on the idea that there was anything amiss about the $10,000 bet offer, arguing that he picked an “outrageous” sum to highlight just how “outrageous” Perry’s claim was. But Perry’s claim — while not completely accurate — wasn’t all that outrageous.
Perry argued that Romney wrote that the individual mandate he passed as governor of Massachusetts “should be the model for the country.” It’s true, as PolitiFact points out, that Romney’s book did also say that such reforms should be implemented at the state level. But Romney has in fact talked about the mandate as a national model: In 2007, he said he hoped that “most” states would adopt it, and added that he hopes to see “a nation that’s taken a mandate approach.” Romney is now trying to obscure the fact that he plainly saw his chief accomplishment as something that should ultimately be adopted on a national, or quasi-national, scale.
More broadly, political reporters and commentators are always tempted to seize on such moments as the $10,000 bet as defining of a candidate’s character. But this moment is ultimately almost as trivial as was John Edwards’ $400 haircut. More important is the broader pattern of dissembling and dishonesty that only begins with his equivocations over the mandate. To wit: Romney attacked Newt Gingrich for opposing mass deportation of longtime illegal residents without saying whether he supports such deportation. Romney continues to insist Obama apologized for America, even though this has been repeatedly proven flatly false. Romney released an ad ripping Obama’s quotes out of context in a highly dishonest way — and the campaign later boasted about the media attention the dishonesty secured. Romney falsely asserted that Obama is “bowing to foreign dictators” — then his campaign later insisted the claim was “metaphorical.” And so on.
This broader pattern is what deserves the status of national narrative about Romney’s character, not some throwaway line about a bet.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, The Line Plum, December 12, 2011
Women, Watch Your Back: Anti-Choicers Are Gambling With Your Life
In a medical emergency, the last thing we should be worried about is whether a hospital is going to put ideology ahead of the care we need to protect our lives and health. But if anti-choice lawmakers get their way, women and their loved ones will have to watch their backs.
Yesterday the House passed an unprecedented bill that would allow hospitals to let women die at their doorsteps. It sounds almost unbelievable — but utter disregard for the well-being of women who need abortion care has tragically reached new levels in the House.
The bill, the so-called “Protect Life Act” does anything but. Indeed, it gambles with women’s lives. It could allow hospitals to ignore the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) which requires that patients in medical emergencies receive appropriate medical treatment, including abortion care if that’s what’s medically indicated.
The bill’s proponents will first tell you that this is necessary to protect religiously affiliated hospitals, and then claim that there’s no such thing as emergency abortion care (which begs the question of why they’re so intent on overriding it). They’re wrong on both fronts.
First, the denial of appropriate medical care to a woman suffering from emergency pregnancy complications can be devastating. The following story recorded in the American Journal of Public Health is just one example:
A woman with a condition that prevented her blood from clotting was in the process of miscarrying at a Catholic-owned hospital. According to her doctor, she was dying before his eyes, her eyes filling with blood. But even though her life was in danger, and the fetus had no chance of survival, the hospital wouldn’t let the doctor treat her by terminating the pregnancy until the fetal heartbeat ceased of its own accord. She ended up in the I.C.U.
Second, even the Catholic Health Association, the leadership organization for Catholic hospitals — hardly an anti-religious or pro-choice lobby — has told Congress that they don’t “believe that there is a need for the [refusal] section to apply to EMTALA.” The very institutions on whose behalf this heinous provision has been proposed are saying “don’t do this.” But so far, the bill’s sponsors remain unmoved.
Every representative who voted for this bill should hear from you and be made to think about the woman, mid-miscarriage, bleeding and scared out of her wits, who rushes to the nearest hospital only to be told by her doctor that he’s not allowed to treat her. Think about that woman, and then tell us — what are you going to do?
By: Sarah Lipton-Lubet, Policy Counsel, ACLU Legislative Office, Published in RH Reality Check, October 14, 2011
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