“Gibberish Makes For Poor Rhetoric”: Republicans Struggle To Understand Their Own Shutdown Plan
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) isn’t the most prominent member of the House Republican caucus, but in recent weeks, he’s played a pretty important role in shutting down the government. It was Meadows who initiated a formal letter, endorsed by around 80 of his House GOP colleagues, vowing to oppose any spending measure that failed to gut the Affordable Care Act.
To this extent, Meadows helped identify that most radical contingent of his caucus, and positioned himself as one of its ringleaders.
With this in mind, as Brian Beutler reported yesterday, “it was a big surprise” when Meadows told reporters this week that the government shutdown has nothing to do with Obamacare. “This fight now has become about veterans and about national guard folks that perhaps — reservists that are not getting paid,” the North Carolina Republican said. “That’s where the fight is today.”
In theory, this is excellent news. Republicans have spent the last several weeks making one demand: take away health care benefits from millions of Americans or the government’s lights go out. If one of the far-right congressional ringleaders of this fiasco is arguing, on the record and out loud, that the fight is no longer about health care then the shutdown can end immediately.
This point was not lost on NPR’s Tamara Keith, who asked Meadows why the House doesn’t just vote on “a full CR if you don’t care about Obamacare anymore.” If you listen to the audio, there’s an awkward silence that lasts about five seconds. Eventually, the congressman says, “Why not vote on, on a full CR?”
Keith replies, “Yeah, sure. Because if you’re, if Obamacare isn’t the issue to you anymore…” At this point, Meadows tried this explanation:
“Because it, twofold.One is, is, that when you when you start to look, they say ‘clean CR?’ That it, it translates into into to truly a blank check, and, and so Obamacare is an issue for me and my constituents, but what happens is today is, we gotta figure a way to open it back up and, and with that, in opening it back up, when we start to look at these issues, it, it is critical that we make it, the decisions we, we make to be as least harmful as they possibly can be.”
So to review, the reason the House can’t vote on the Senate spending bill is an incoherent word salad, filled with lots of words that seem unrelated to one another.
Remember, Mark Meadows isn’t some random guy off the street; he’s an elected member of Congress who helped write the strategy that House Republicans followed to shut down the government.
To be sure, it was absolutely amazing to hear Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) argue that House Republicans are “not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
But Meadows’ quote is nearly as ridiculous. You won’t hear Democrats repeating it in speeches because gibberish makes for poor rhetoric, but Meadows’ response reinforces what many have feared: House Republicans haven’t the foggiest idea what they’re doing right now.
Indeed, on the government shutdown’s fourth day, a few truths have come into sharp focus. Republican members of Congress (1) don’t know why they shut down the government; (2) don’t know what they hope to get out of the shutdown; and (3) don’t know how to end the shutdown.
But if you wouldn’t mind blaming Democrats anyway, they’d certainly appreciate it.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 4, 2013
“The Temptation Of Renown”: Juror B37 Considers Writing Book About The Zimmerman Trial, Then Comes To Her Senses
It’s sort of quaint that when the winds of national attention float past someone who never would have otherwise gotten the chance to receive something resembling fame, their first thought so often is, “I should write a book!” The publishing industry may be dying and 99 percent of authors may never get sales out of the four figures, but everyone, even people who haven’t written anything longer than an email since they were in their teens, thinks the world would be eager to read 300 pages of their thoughts and feelings.
So it was that Juror B37—since she hasn’t revealed her name, I’m going to call her Gladys—emerged into the bright light of a Florida morning and said to herself, “There’s gotta be a way for me to cash in on this.” And she decided to write a book, because like most Americans, Gladys isn’t non-famous, she just isn’t famous yet. She quickly retained a literary agent, who no doubt told her that this thing was going to be huge. After all, it’s all over the news. Folks just can’t get enough of this Zimmerman trial. How many millions of people would gladly plunk down 25 bucks to read the real inside story of what went on in those two days of deliberations? Maybe Hollywood would option the book, and then Gladys could be played by Anne Hathaway, who would want to learn all about the trial from her personally, and then they’d totally become best friends, and then…
Let’s say this for Gladys: After running through all that in her head for a day or two, at some point she said to herself, “Who the hell am I kidding?” After all, it would take her ghostwriter at least a month or two to spit out a manuscript, then it would take weeks more to get it into stores, by which time nobody could possibly give a crap what Gladys, or anybody else on the jury, thought about the trial. After all, the whole thing was televised—it isn’t like what went on in the courtroom is a mystery. And the trial itself wasn’t particularly dramatic. There were no stunning moments, no “Oh my, I can’t seem to get this glove on my hand,” no gripping testimony from the one person who was actually there when the crime took place. All Gladys would be able to tell anyone is what she and her fellow jurors discussed, which probably isn’t that interesting. So Gladys quite sensibly decided not to write a book after all.
Gladys’ return to reason notwithstanding, it never ceases to amaze me how many people think that their lives will be improved if they achieve some measure of fame, not as validation for their efforts, and not even the kind of fame that comes with enjoyable privileges, but just being known to strangers as an end in itself. There are dozens of reality shows which exist to let us gawk at people so despicable that we can feel much better about our own lives and relationships, and they not only have no trouble finding people willing to let them turn the cameras on every pathetic detail of their lives, they have to beat off the potential stars/subjects/contestants with a stick.
OK, you got frustrated and yelled at your kids the other day, but have you seen those monsters on Dance Moms? If you’re in the mood to have your faith in humanity’s fundamental goodness obliterated, I highly recommend the program, although it turns out, not too surprisingly, that the producers work hard to make the show’s participants seem as horrid as possible. What I’ve always wondered is whether the moms themselves think that they come off as sympathetic. What are they getting out of their participation, other than the contempt of millions? Perhaps they and others like them think that, like the Duck Dynasty fellas, once the cameras are on them they’ll be able to turn their brand of homespun charm into an entire multimedia empire. (Right now a book by the Duck Dynasty patriarch stands at number 3 on the combined print and e-book New York Times bestseller list, trailing only Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and the publishing phenomenon of the last couple of years, Proof of Heaven, in which a doctor describes how he went to heaven for a while when he was in a coma, and there’s just no possible way it could have been a dream, because, you know, Jesus is awesome. There are a couple dozen Duck Dynasty books of wisdom, cookbooks, kids books, wall calendars, and who knows what else available for purchase.)
The best move Juror 37B made this week was doing her interview with Anderson Cooper in darkness, so we can’t see her face. She probably did that because she was afraid that if everyone knew who she was, she might get harassed by people who disagreed with the verdict she rendered, which is possible. But being a regular person is its own kind of privilege, one she may have learned to appreciate.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 16, 2013
“A Common Thread”: The Conservative Paranoid Mind On Gun Control, Immigration And Terror Suspects
Liberals and civil libertarians shouldn’t yet be saying that there’s utterly no way that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be declared an “enemy combatant.” The post-9/11 law, whatever one’s opinion of it, does say that an American citizen affiliated with al Qaeda, the Taliban, “or associated forces” engaged in hostility with the United States can be declared an enemy combatant. It doesn’t seem like he’s that, but who knows, he may shock everyone when he comes to by saying that he and his brother were precisely that.
But it isn’t liberals who are jumping the gun here. As usual, conservatives are rushing to judgment, shredding the Constitution, using the bombing as an pretext for derailing immigration reform, and generally seeking any excuse to reimpose their paranoid and authoritarian worldview, which needs fear like a vampire needs blood, on the rest of us.
The cry, which I’m sure will pick up steam this week, was led over the weekend by the usual suspects—John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Kelly Ayotte, and Peter King. On the basis of what evidence? On the basis of no evidence at all. They know nothing! We’re starting to piece together a portrait of these guys, although it’s more of Tamerlan than of his younger brother. It’s a grim portrait. He evidently did become a radicalized Islamist. But if he and his brother were acting alone, even if the bombing was 100 percent politically motivated, they can’t be called enemy combatants. Period.
At most, they should say: “If the facts connect him to al Qaeda or any other designated groups, then he should be declared an enemy combatant.” Some would disagree with that, but no one could really criticize that as a legitimate posture within the parameters of U.S. law. But to call Dzhokhar a “good candidate” for enemy-combatant status now, as they did, is appalling. Moreover, the Supreme Court said in the Hamdi decision that U.S. citizens who are named enemy combatants still have their due-process rights, so it’s not clear exactly what these four want to happen unless they want the Justice Department to contravene the court.
Similarly, other conservatives—especially in talk radio; notably Laura Ingraham in an endless trail of tweets—are arguing that the bombings prove that now isn’t the time to be liberalizing our immigration laws. What? These guys were 9 and 16 years old when they came here. What exact change in immigration law would “prevent” two future Tsarnaev brothers from carrying out another bombing? It’s absurd.
Funny thing, this urge to prevent. It’s awfully selective, have you noticed? Tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of minors—many of them Muslim—have immigrated legally to the United States since 1986, the last time immigration law was substantially changed. Some of them are no doubt reprobates or drunks or criminals, but surely some are cardiologists, inventors, successful capitalists, and innovative artists. But suddenly, these two guys and these two guys alone offer some kind of proof of the need to crack down, to prevent this from happening again. Meanwhile, we have a pile of dead bodies higher than the Himalayas, the vast majority of them slain by native-born Americans who can go online or to a gun show and acquire all the weaponry and ammo they please, but we can’t ever try to do anything to prevent that. The Second Amendment is inviolate. Can’t be touched or impinged upon in any way. To do that is fascism.
The common thread through all of this is the conservative need to instill and maintain a level of fear in the populace. They need to make gun owners fear that Dianne Feinstein and her SWAT team are going to come knocking on their doors, or, less amusingly, that they have to be armed to the teeth for that inevitable day when the government declares a police state. They need to whip up fear of immigrants, because unless we do, it’s going to be nothing but terrorists coming through those portals, and for good measure, because, as Ann Coulter and others have recently said, the proposed law would create millions of voting Democrats (gee, I wonder why!).
And with regard to terrorism, they need people to live in fear of the next attack, because fear makes people think about death, and thinking about death makes people more likely to endorse tough-guy, law-and-order, Constitution-shredding actions undertaken on their behalf. This is how we lived under Bush and Cheney for years. This fear is basically what enabled the Iraq War to take place. Public opinion didn’t support that war at first. But once they got the public afraid with all that false talk of mushroom clouds, the needle zoomed past 50 percent, and it was bombs away.
Conservatism, I fear (so to speak), can never be cleansed of this need to instill fear. Whether it’s of black people or of street thugs or of immigrants or of terrorists or of jackbooted government agents, it’s how the conservative mind works. I don’t even think it’s always cynical and manipulative; conservatives often do see enemies under every bed. But that doesn’t mean they’re there, and it most definitely doesn’t mean the rest of us ought to make law and policy based on their nightmares.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 22, 2013
“The Last Four Years, And The Next Four”: President Obama’s Problem, He Hasn’t Spent Enough Time “Socializing”?
Tonight, PBS’s Frontline will be broadcasting a documentary called “Inside Obama’s Presidency,” about the President’s first term. The story told in this preview is about a now-somewhat-famous dinner that a bunch of Republican muckety-mucks held on the night of Obama’s inauguration, during which they made the decision that the best way to proceed was implacable, unified opposition to anything and everything the new president wanted to do. As we all know, this plan was then carried out almost to the letter. Watch: http://video.pbs.org/video/2325654248
The story of this inauguration-night dinner was told in Robert Draper’s book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the House of Representatives, which came out eight months ago. Seeing the story retold, what’s striking is that beforehand, one would have considered the participants—Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, Jim DeMint, John Kyl, Tom Coburn—to be extremely, sometimes infuriatingly, conservative. But with the exception of DeMint, one wouldn’t have thought that group to be utterly opposed to the very idea of legislating and having a government that, at a minimum, operates.
Yet here we are, not only with that crew, but with dozens of Republicans elected in the two elections since who practically make them look like a bunch of accommodationists. And yet, sage Washington insiders actually believe that things would run a lot smoother if Barack Obama spent more time going to parties and hanging out with sage Washington insiders. Something tells me that even after four more years of GOP hostility and intransigence, that idiotic idea is never going to die.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 15, 2013,
“The Choice Is Clear”: President Barack Obama For Re-election
The economy is slowly recovering from the 2008 meltdown, and the country could suffer another recession if the wrong policies take hold. The United States is embroiled in unstable regions that could easily explode into full-blown disaster. An ideological assault from the right has started to undermine the vital health reform law passed in 2010. Those forces are eroding women’s access to health care, and their right to control their lives. Nearly 50 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, all Americans’ rights are cheapened by the right wing’s determination to deny marriage benefits to a selected group of us. Astonishingly, even the very right to vote is being challenged.
That is the context for the Nov. 6 election, and as stark as it is, the choice is just as clear.
President Obama has shown a firm commitment to using government to help foster growth. He has formed sensible budget policies that are not dedicated to protecting the powerful, and has worked to save the social safety net to protect the powerless. Mr. Obama has impressive achievements despite the implacable wall of refusal erected by Congressional Republicans so intent on stopping him that they risked pushing the nation into depression, held its credit rating hostage, and hobbled economic recovery.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has gotten this far with a guile that allows him to say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. But he has tied himself to the ultraconservative forces that control the Republican Party and embraced their policies, including reckless budget cuts and 30-year-old, discredited trickle-down ideas. Voters may still be confused about Mr. Romney’s true identity, but they know the Republican Party, and a Romney administration would reflect its agenda. Mr. Romney’s choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate says volumes about that.
We have criticized individual policy choices that Mr. Obama has made over the last four years, and have been impatient with his unwillingness to throw himself into the political fight. But he has shaken off the hesitancy that cost him the first debate, and he approaches the election clearly ready for the partisan battles that would follow his victory.
We are confident he would challenge the Republicans in the “fiscal cliff” battle even if it meant calling their bluff, letting the Bush tax cuts expire and forcing them to confront the budget sequester they created. Electing Mr. Romney would eliminate any hope of deficit reduction that included increased revenues.
In the poisonous atmosphere of this campaign, it may be easy to overlook Mr. Obama’s many important achievements, including carrying out the economic stimulus, saving the auto industry, improving fuel efficiency standards, and making two very fine Supreme Court appointments.
Health Care
Mr. Obama has achieved the most sweeping health care reforms since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. The reform law takes a big step toward universal health coverage, a final piece in the social contract.
It was astonishing that Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress were able to get a bill past the Republican opposition. But the Republicans’ propagandistic distortions of the new law helped them wrest back control of the House, and they are determined now to repeal the law.
That would eliminate the many benefits the reform has already brought: allowing children under 26 to stay on their parents’ policies; lower drug costs for people on Medicare who are heavy users of prescription drugs; free immunizations, mammograms and contraceptives; a ban on lifetime limits on insurance payments. Insurance companies cannot deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Starting in 2014, insurers must accept all applicants. Once fully in effect, the new law would start to control health care costs.
Mr. Romney has no plan for covering the uninsured beyond his callous assumption that they will use emergency rooms. He wants to use voucher programs to shift more Medicare costs to beneficiaries and block grants to shift more Medicaid costs to the states.
The Economy
Mr. Obama prevented another Great Depression. The economy was cratering when he took office in January 2009. By that June it was growing, and it has been ever since (although at a rate that disappoints everyone), thanks in large part to interventions Mr. Obama championed, like the $840 billion stimulus bill. Republicans say it failed, but it created and preserved 2.5 million jobs and prevented unemployment from reaching 12 percent. Poverty would have been much worse without the billions spent on Medicaid, food stamps and jobless benefits.
Last year, Mr. Obama introduced a jobs plan that included spending on school renovations, repair projects for roads and bridges, aid to states, and more. It was stymied by Republicans. Contrary to Mr. Romney’s claims, Mr. Obama has done good things for small businesses — like pushing through more tax write-offs for new equipment and temporary tax cuts for hiring the unemployed.
The Dodd-Frank financial regulation was an important milestone. It is still a work in progress, but it established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, initiated reform of the derivatives market, and imposed higher capital requirements for banks. Mr. Romney wants to repeal it.
If re-elected, Mr. Obama would be in position to shape the “grand bargain” that could finally combine stimulus like the jobs bill with long-term deficit reduction that includes letting the high-end Bush-era tax cuts expire. Stimulus should come first, and deficit reduction as the economy strengthens. Mr. Obama has not been as aggressive as we would have liked in addressing the housing crisis, but he has increased efforts in refinancing and loan modifications.
Mr. Romney’s economic plan, as much as we know about it, is regressive, relying on big tax cuts and deregulation. That kind of plan was not the answer after the financial crisis, and it will not create broad prosperity.
Foreign Affairs
Mr. Obama and his administration have been resolute in attacking Al Qaeda’s leadership, including the killing of Osama bin Laden. He has ended the war in Iraq. Mr. Romney, however, has said he would have insisted on leaving thousands of American soldiers there. He has surrounded himself with Bush administration neocons who helped to engineer the Iraq war, and adopted their militaristic talk in a way that makes a Romney administration’s foreign policies a frightening prospect.
Mr. Obama negotiated a much tougher regime of multilateral economic sanctions on Iran. Mr. Romney likes to say the president was ineffective on Iran, but at the final debate he agreed with Mr. Obama’s policies. Mr. Obama deserves credit for his handling of the Arab Spring. The killing goes on in Syria, but the administration is working to identify and support moderate insurgent forces there. At the last debate, Mr. Romney talked about funneling arms through Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are funneling arms to jihadist groups.
Mr. Obama gathered international backing for airstrikes during the Libyan uprising, and kept American military forces in a background role. It was smart policy.
In the broadest terms, he introduced a measure of military restraint after the Bush years and helped repair America’s badly damaged reputation in many countries from the low levels to which it had sunk by 2008.
The Supreme Court
The future of the nation’s highest court hangs in the balance in this election — and along with it, reproductive freedom for American women and voting rights for all, to name just two issues. Whoever is president after the election will make at least one appointment to the court, and many more to federal appeals courts and district courts.
Mr. Obama, who appointed the impressive Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, understands how severely damaging conservative activism has been in areas like campaign spending. He would appoint justices and judges who understand that landmarks of equality like the Voting Rights Act must be defended against the steady attack from the right.
Mr. Romney’s campaign Web site says he will “nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito,” among the most conservative justices in the past 75 years. There is no doubt that he would appoint justices who would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Civil Rights
The extraordinary fact of Mr. Obama’s 2008 election did not usher in a new post-racial era. In fact, the steady undercurrent of racism in national politics is truly disturbing. Mr. Obama, however, has reversed Bush administration policies that chipped away at minorities’ voting rights and has fought laws, like the ones in Arizona, that seek to turn undocumented immigrants into a class of criminals.
The military’s odious “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule was finally legislated out of existence, under the Obama administration’s leadership. There are still big hurdles to equality to be brought down, including the Defense of Marriage Act, the outrageous federal law that undermines the rights of gay men and lesbians, even in states that recognize those rights.
Though it took Mr. Obama some time to do it, he overcame his hesitation about same-sex marriage and declared his support. That support has helped spur marriage-equality movements around the country. His Justice Department has also stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act against constitutional challenges.
Mr. Romney opposes same-sex marriage and supports the federal act, which not only denies federal benefits and recognition to same-sex couples but allows states to ignore marriages made in other states. His campaign declared that Mr. Romney would not object if states also banned adoption by same-sex couples and restricted their rights to hospital visitation and other privileges.
Mr. Romney has been careful to avoid the efforts of some Republicans to criminalize abortion even in the case of women who had been raped, including by family members. He says he is not opposed to contraception, but he has promised to deny federal money to Planned Parenthood, on which millions of women depend for family planning.
For these and many other reasons, we enthusiastically endorse President Barack Obama for a second term, and express the hope that his victory will be accompanied by a new Congress willing to work for policies that Americans need.
By: The New York Times, Editorial, October 27, 2012
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