“By Any Other Name, It’s Still A Name”: Why Veto Messiah But Not Moon Unit Or Moses?
It’s not exactly in the Constitution, but it is a parent’s inalienable right to have questionable taste and embarrass their children. And that is why it’s disturbing that a judge in Tennessee would tell a parent what she can and cannot name her son.
OK, so the mother wanted to name the kid “Messiah.” It’s sort of an elegant name, actually, if it didn’t mean anything to a lot of people. And that’s what troubled Tennessee Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew, who did not bear the child or agree to raise the child, but who has nonetheless decided it’s her place to veto the name. To which one can only respond, “oh, for God’s sake.”
The judge told WBIR TV:
The word Messiah is a title and it’s a title that has only been earned by one person. And that one person is Jesus Christ.
So it’s about titles, is it? Then how did singer Michael Jackson get away with naming his kid “Prince Michael?” You could make a stronger argument that the actual name “Jesus Christ” is pushing the envelope. But even then, “Jesus” is a popular name among Spanish-speaking people, many of whom are devoted Catholics.
So what’s the problem, again? Ballew went on, saying, “It could put him at odds with a lot of people. And at this point, he has had no choice in what his name is.”
Well, that’s another question. Silly names that feed the juvenile humor or self-aggrandizement of the parents? Yes, let’s then get rid of Moon Unit Zappa, Gwyneth Paltrow’s kid, Apple, and all those names by parents who think it’s just adorable to name their kids things like “Candy Bar” and “Claire Voyant.”
It’s simply not up to a judge to rename a child, especially when the alleged offense is against a select group of people with a particular view towards religion. The name “Messiah” might mean a lot to some people, but it means basically nothing to a whole group of other people. It’s not as though the name is, on its face, obscene. Though it might be humorous to go on TV and have one’s own name bleeped out when you’re introduced.
The judge pledges to protect and respect religion, but she’s really just imposing her own beliefs on everyone else, and in a way that is intensely personal. And if it’s really religious names that get her into a lather, she ought to have a long chat with Paltrow. The actress’s second child is named “Moses,” after all.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, August 14, 2013
“Unnerving To Watch”: Could Mitch McConnell’s Senate Fight Take Down The Country?
TPM Reader TW thinks back to 2008 and 2011 …
Saw your editor’s blog post on McConnell and it’s something I have been thinking about all week. I work in the investment industry and I am watching the town hall meetings, this thing with McConnell and it’s bringing flashbacks to 2011. I don’t think most people understand just how close we were to a real meltdown that summer. Without Biden and McConnell, there would have been a default and that would have dwarfed 2008.
Now normally, the country would be able to count on the fact that they averted disaster last time, so therefore, they will find a way to avert it again this time. But as I’ve thought about it all week (and for some time before this week), I’ve had a nagging thought that this is all wrong. But, I couldn’t put a finger on it either.
But after seeing the coverage of the town halls this week and listening to the right wing turn on their own, little by little, I guess I get it now. These people really are nihilistic and the only thing that will satisfy them is a total breakdown of government. Only then, they believe, can we have our “freedoms” and our “rights”. I don’t pretend to understand how you mentally get to that point, but that’s where they are.
Now, I know that there have always been crazy people in this country throughout our history, but there has also always been rational people who think first about the country and act accordingly. But that’s not where we are today. Rational people have been voted out or left and in their place are the Lee’s, Cruz’s, Rubio’s, etc. And while they claim to be capitalists and free market proponents, they couldn’t negotiate themselves out of a paper bag in the real world, and they have no understanding of practical economics. You can spout Ludwig von Mises all you want, but it has no practical application to the real world.
Which brings me back to McConnell. For all of the issues I disagree with him on, at least he was rational and would cut the deal to keep us from going over the big cliff. If he’s gone over to Crazyland and Boehner has abdicated any remaining parts of his speakership, then what’s left?
And all this comes as economically, our world is getting better. I realize that there is a ways to go with unemployment/underemployment, housing, etc. but this economy is still getting better. The market is up because of that fact. I know there’s a lot of noise around what’s driving the market, but at the end of the day, professional investors would not be pushing money into the market if they didn’t think the overall economy was headed the right direction.
So, yes, I am worried. A government shutdown can be dealt with, that won’t kill the economy, but the debt ceiling/default will. And without someone who can/will cut a deal, it’s unnerving to watch. At this point, I think we are in a more dangerous position than 2011.
I apologize for the length, but you guys are on the right track here with your reporting. This is the story of the fall, and very few people are talking about it yet.
By: Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, August 10, 2013
“Richard Nixon Runs The Republican Party, Again”: A Contempt For The Regular Norms And Institutions Of Politics
The current Republican Party isn’t the party of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It isn’t a conservative party. It’s the party, instead, of Nixon and Gingrich. And that’s why it’s a dysfunctional mess, and a problem for the nation.
I said something to that effect the other day, and a commenter got all upset about it:
The party of Nixon? The guy who created and implemented the EPA? The guy who normalized the US international relationship with China? The guy who intervened in escalating fuel markets to fix prices, in order to protect consumers?
They are so far away from Nixon’s policies and governance.
I’ve seen this reaction before, and because it’s such an important point it’s worth spelling it out. It’s not about ideology. It’s not about specific policies. A healthy party, one that is able to cut deals and work with others, can be healthy even if their policies are far from the mainstream.
We can get at this a couple of ways. One is that everyone should be very careful about what “Nixon” did, as opposed to what the government did while he was president. Give Nixon the Congress and the policy environment of 1947 — or 1997 — and you get very different results.
But I suppose more to the point is that there’s just no way to read the contemporary Republican Party as some sort of principled ideological party. It just isn’t.
Think, on the one hand, how easily they took to George W. Bush’s support of an intrusive federal government program on education, or to Bush’s support of a major Medicare expansion.
Or think about their convoluted path on healthcare reform over the last 20 years – how an outline originally concocted by Republicans as a reaction to Bill Clinton’s initiative, and eventually implemented in one state by a Republican governor and a Democratic legislature, became (once adopted by Democrats) the essence of tyranny.
And don’t even get started on Republicans and the federal budget deficit.
That’s not a principled conservative party.
As no one knows better than real hardcore ideologues, the ones who know well that George W. Bush and the Republican Congresses he served with were never “real” conservatives. They’re right about that! Even though most of those saying that now are wannabes who never dissented during those years.
Unlike those ideologues, I’m not complaining about pragmatism; I think ideological parties are a terrible idea in a democracy. But while they aren’t the ideal conservative party that some want, they’re certainly not a healthy (conservative) pragmatic party, either.
That’s where Nixon and Newt come in.
Both of these very successful (pre-disgrace, anyway) Republicans became national figures as conservatives. Neither, however, was a principled conservative. Nixon was covered above; Gingrich was a Rockefeller Republican when he first ran for Congress, and both of them shifted back and forth as they saw opportunities to exploit.
But that kind of opportunism isn’t what make Newt and Nixon stand out. No, what they have bequeathed to Republicans is a contempt for the regular norms and institutions of the American political system, along with a Leninist belief that contradictions must always be heightened. Nixon broke laws, to be sure, but other presidents have broken laws. What made Nixon different – what made everyone, including his own party, so eager to be rid of him – was that he refused to accept that others within the system, whether in Congress or the press or the bureaucracy, were as legitimate as the president. What made Gingrich different is his consistent strategy of tearing down institutions (the House, and then the presidency) in order to save them. For both, politics was never about the normal promotion of interests and reconciliation of differences, but instead, very simply, about destroying their opponents.
Because they are the party of Newt and Nixon, the principles that today’s GOP worships aren’t market economics or personal liberty; look instead at a “principle” such as a refusal to compromise.
Or brinkmanship as a principle. The quintessential GOP stance, in a lot of ways, is the current insistence by many in the party that they must shut down the government to prove they are serious about the Affordable Care Act. What makes it such a great example — so much a Newt-inspired example — is that they’ve been flailing around all year trying to figure out what to ask for when they blackmailed the nation over the debt limit and funding the government. And that half or more of the party is insisting on it even as experienced legislators and analysts tell them that it can’t possible work. Because as I said back in the spring, the faction that wants the shutdown isn’t really sure about what it wants to demand; it’s only certain that it wants to take hostages. Extortion for the sake of extortion. As principle.
It’s of a piece with the series of almost-shutdowns we’ve endured (all of them echoing the Gingrich train wreck of 1995-1996). With the debt limit showdown of 2011. With the explosion of the filibuster far beyond previous use in the Senate. With a series of “constitutional hardball” examples over the years. With the choice to attempt to undermine the ACA rather than fix or improve what they could, with the goal – the goal! – of causing as much policy failure as possible.
A party only does those things if its leaders and many of its members have taken as a principle Nixon’s standard operating procedure of treating the rest of the United States government beyond the White House as illegitimate; a party only does those things if it no longer accepts the basic constitutional constraints that most politicians, no matter what their views on public policy, have by and large accepted. And a party only does this if it believes, as Newt Gingrich did, that the best way to gain control of institutions is to first destroy them.
That’s the Republican Party we have. Not every single member of it, of course, but it’s a strong enough influence that it’s what really matters. And while I have no brilliant suggestions for how to do it, I do believe that the most urgent task facing the political system right now is to figure out some way for Republicans to shake off the influence of Newt and Nixon.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Salon, August 10, 2013
“A Lot Of Homework To Do”: Rand Paul’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week
It’s probably safe to say Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has had better weeks. Just over the last few days he started to lose his cool on NPR when asked about a neo-confederate he co-authored a book with; he was caught making ridiculous boasts about his record on minority rights; and he repeated a bizarre conspiracy theory about George Stephanopoulos that’s already been debunked.
And then, after all of this, the Kentucky Republican sat down for a chat with Businessweek‘s Josh Green.
Green: A recent article in the New Republic said your budget would eviscerate the departments of Energy, State, Commerce, EPA, FDA, Education, and many others. Would Americans support that?
Paul: My budget is similar to the Penny Plan, which cuts 1 percent a year for five or six years and balances the budget. Many Americans who have suffered during a recession have had to cut their spending 1 percent, and they didn’t like doing it, but they were able to do it to get their family’s finances back in order. I see no reason why government can’t cut 1 percent of its spending.
Except, whether the senator realizes it or not, his description of his plan is extremely deceptive. As Ezra Klein explained, Paul’s response wasn’t actually an answer: “Paul’s budget eliminates the Department of Commerce. It also eliminates the Department of Education. And the Department for Housing and Urban Development. And the Department of Energy. The State Department gets cut by more than 50 percent. Meanwhile, it increases spending on defense by $126 billion. Perhaps these are good ideas! But Paul doesn’t defend them. He obscures them. He tries to make his cuts sound small even though, in the areas Green asked about, they’re huge.”
In theory, Paul could at least try to explain why he thinks cutting the State Department budget in half would be good for the United States. But he either can’t or won’t do that, so he repeats vague talking points that obscure the facts.
Wait, it gets worse.
Green: Any political consultant who saw that list [of cabinet agencies Paul intends to eliminate] would tear out his hair and say the American people would never accept it. You disagree with that conventional wisdom?
Paul: You know, the thing is, people want to say it’s extreme. But what I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year. I mean, that’s an extremely bad situation.
Except, we’re not running trillion-dollar deficits every year. If the senator takes this issue so seriously, shouldn’t he keep up with the basics of current events?
Green: Who would your ideal Fed chairman be?
Paul: Hayek would be good, but he’s deceased.
Green: Nondead Fed chairman.
Paul: Friedman would probably be pretty good, too, and he’s not an Austrian, but he would be better than what we have.
Again, Paul doesn’t seem to know what he’s saying. As Jon Chait explained, the senator’s answer “makes no sense” because, “Paul is a hard-money fanatic who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve’s role in using money policy to stabilize the economy. That’s the joke. Milton Friedman, though, had the complete opposite view of monetary policy. His central academic insight was support for very active monetary policy.”
My principal concern with Rand Paul is not his ideology. On plenty of subjective questions, he and I would recommend very different courses of action, which is what spirited political debate is all about.
Rather, what troubles me about the senator is that he doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea what he’s talking about. Worse, it’s not like he’s ignorant of obscure policy details on issues he deems irrelevant — Paul is strikingly confused about the issues he claims to care about most.
This Businessweek interview was a mess for the senator on economic matters, but let’s not forget that Paul also doesn’t seem to understand his own views on the use of drones, which is another issue he says he cares deeply about.
If this guy intends to seek national office and ask the American mainstream to consider him credible, he has a lot of homework to do — homework he probably should have done before making the transition from self-accredited ophthalmologist to U.S. senator.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 9, 2013
“A New Toy To Play With”: Where Darrell Issa Sees A Potential Political Scandal, Everyone Else Sees Reality
The discredited IRS controversy clearly didn’t work out the way House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had hoped, to the point that he no longer remembers the serious-but-false allegations he carelessly threw around just a month ago. The far-right Californian now wants to “expand” his investigation, which is a pleasant-sounding euphemism for, “The questions I asked produced answers that didn’t fit my preconceived narrative, so I’ve come up with new ones.”
And this week, after Issa grew tired of his broken old toys, he found something new to play with: officials at the Federal Election Commission apparently asked the IRS’s tax exemption division last year about the status of some conservative political groups. Issa pounced, ordering the FEC to produce “all documents and communications between or among any FEC official or employee and any IRS official or employee for the period January 1, 2008 to the present.”
So what seems to be the trouble? There’s no evidence that the IRS shared private information with the FEC, but Issa and his allies want to know if maybe it happened anyway, and if there’s some convoluted way to connect this to the debunked “scandal” Issa was so invested in.
As Dave Weigel explained, there’s just not much here.
This level of scrutiny, with this much evidence, is a puzzle to some former FEC commissioners. “From what I’ve seen so far this doesn’t look like anything,” said Larry Noble, a Democratic appointee until 2000 who now advocates for public funding of elections. “It looked like what happened was that the staff contacted the IRS and asked for what was public. When I was there, certainly, it was always clear that the IRS would not give out anything that was not public. The IRS has a list of c3 groups, but it’s often out of date, so people check with the source. This looked like a routine inquiry for public information.”
A former Republican FEC commissioner said largely the same thing.
Where Issa sees a potential political scandal, everyone else sees routine and uncontroversial bureaucracy.
Tax Analysts reported this week:
“There are many legitimate or at least innocuous reasons for the FEC and the IRS to be sharing information about politically active nonprofits. The two agencies share regulatory oversight authority,” [James P. Joseph of Arnold & Porter LLP] said.
Ofer Lion of Hunton & Williams LLP said it makes sense for the IRS and FEC to talk to each other when dealing with politically active tax-exempt organizations and applicants. “Most of this probably falls within the FEC’s field of expertise anyway, so it makes sense that they would collaborate,” he said. He added that it would be disastrous if the two agencies went after organizations for political reasons but that he sees no evidence yet that they have done that.
John Pomeranz of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg LLP said it’s possible an FEC staffer contacted Lerner to find out if a particular group had tax-exempt status, which is public information. If Lerner provided an answer, that would be fine, he said.
“It would be great if everybody went through official channels to get information like that, but I think there are a lot of people who rely on contacts inside the IRS to get a quick answer when it takes too long to get an answer the other way,” Pomeranz said.
Gregory L. Colvin of Adler and Colvin said he is not surprised the IRS and FEC contacted each other regarding the AFF and other organizations that spend money on broadcast advertising featuring candidates for federal office. He said that for years the two agencies have been criticized for not coordinating their enforcement of tax and election laws, which “overlap in some respects and leave gaps in others.”
In other words, the “scandal” is that some folks at the FEC were looking for official information on a couple of political groups that were flouting tax-exempt rules, and instead of following bureaucratic, inter-agency procedures, they just sent emails to the IRS.
If you care deeply about bureaucratic, inter-agency procedures related to the FEC and the IRS, this might be fascinating, but if Darrell Issa wants the political world to stay awake, he’s going to have to do better than this.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 9, 2013
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