“Folksy Panderin’ In Bubba-Ville”: Huckabee 2016; Bend Over And Take It Like A Prisoner!
Great American leaders have long contributed profound thoughts of tremendous consequence to the public discourse.
Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Kennedy: “Mankind must put an end to war — or war will put an end to mankind.”
Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”
And now, similarly, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee: “Bend over and take it like a prisoner!”
Earlier this week, Huckabee ended his Fox News talk show so he could spend time mulling another bid for the Republican nomination. If the contents of Huckabee’s latest book – due out January 20th – are any indication, the overarching message of that campaign will be that the government is, um, having its way with the American public in a method that Huckabee, a Christian conservative, finds rather repulsive.
“Bend Over and Take it Like a Prisoner!” is the title of the 10th chapter of Huckabee’s 12th book, God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy – which, as a whole, is an achievement in the genre of poorly written pandering.
The chapter, ostensibly about the TSA and IRS, is a soaring crescendo of latent homosexuality homoeroticism cloaked in almost libertarian – but not libertine! – conservatism.
It opens with Huckabee’s dramatic recollection of going through security at the airport. “Where else would I be ordered to stand still, put up my hands, and have my personal belongings taken and searched without a warrant or probable cause?” He asks. “After years of this indignity, much of the flying public thinks little of it, and they usually don’t complain. They just dutifully stand there, bend over, and take it like a prisoner.”
Clickbait title notwithstanding, Bend Over and Take It Like a Prisoner! is not devoid of substance. Although Huckabee’s condescending tone – like that of an elementary school history teacher – makes it difficult to take seriously.
He takes aim at the Department of Homeland Security and the USA Patriot Act: “…did anyone anticipate that not many terrorists would really get punished as a result of this act, but that American citizens would?”
He then quotes Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
“What would Ben say today?” Huckabee wonders. “Would he cheerfully go through a full-body scanner that electronically strip-searched him and then allow a federal agent to put his blue-gloved hands inside his pants and over his thighs, crotch, and upper body for the sake of domestic travel on a privately owned commercial carrier? I’ll bet you a Benjamin that he most certainly would not. (Come to think of it, though, kite flying Ben would definitely be in awe of this and every other use of…electricity! Also airplane flight, but I digress.)”
Huckabee then basically reprints – in full – a few Politico Magazine articles by former TSA agent Jason Edward Harrington, because he has space to fill (later in the book, he writes out the lyrics to Simple Life by Lynyrd Skynyrd,).
He then provides some insight into his psyche – complete with Animal House reference.
While excoriating the IRS, Huckabee brings his readers along on a flashback to his youth.
“They remind me of a sadistic coach at my high school who used to enjoy ‘giving licks’ to teen boys for any infraction of his rules. Just so you know, ‘giving licks’ was the term used to describe the coach hitting the butt of a student with a short-handled boat paddle, riddled with holes to minimize wind resistance and enhance striking power…The coach had a rule that if you got a ‘lick’ you were required to say, ‘Thanks, coach, may I have another one?’ And most often he would say, ‘Sure,’ and pop you again. One might get three or four before the coach finally said, ‘No, I think you’ve had enough,’ and stop his twisted abuse of a helpless adolescent. Whenever I think of the IRS, I see that coach standing with his paddle, expecting em to say, ‘Thanks, IRS, may I have another one?’”
In closing, Huckabee condemns the current US government for being a “ham-fisted, hypercontrolling ‘Sugar Daddy,’ ” that has conditioned Americans “to just bend over and take it like a prisoner.” But, Huckabee writes, “In Bubba-ville, the days of bending are just about over. People are ready to start standing up for freedom and refusing to take it anymore.”
Now, the book does include a disclaimer on the back cover.
It is “not a recipe book for Southern cuisine, nor a collection of religious devotionals, nor a manual on how to properly load a semiautomatic shotgun.” Instead, “It’s a book about what’s commonly referred to as ‘flyover country.”
Clad in a blue, striped button-down, a silver watch adorning his left wrist, Huckabee beams on the cover. He stands, one assumes on a porch, which overlooks a prairie. “After you finish the book,” he writes, “you might just say, ‘Dang, those good ol’ boys ain’t so dumb after all.
By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, January 8, 2015
“Pitting Retirees Against The Disabled”: GOP Manufacturing A Social Security Crisis To Threaten Benefits For Millions Of Disabled Americans
When conservatives who like to whine about “welfare” are forced to be more specific, some go after the traditional if significantly less generous TANF program of cash assistance, or Medicaid, or those receiving subsidies under Obamacare. But more often these days, they attack either Disability Insurance or SNAP, programs that have experienced large increases in eligibility because of the economy or demographic trends or both.
Congressional Republicans failed last year to force the inclusion of a major reduction in SNAP eligibility in the 2014 Farm Bill. But now they appear to be going after DI, through the half-clever mechanism of pitting beneficiaries against the larger universe of Social Security retirement recipients. Here’s a quick description of the ploy from TPM’s Dylan Scott:
The incoming GOP majority approved late Tuesday a new rule that experts say could provoke an unprecedented crisis that conservatives could use as leverage in upcoming debates over entitlement reform.
The largely overlooked change puts a new restriction on the routine transfer of tax revenues between the traditional Social Security retirement trust fund and the Social Security disability program. The transfers, known as reallocation, had historically been routine; the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities said Tuesday that they had been made 11 times. The CBPP added that the disability insurance program “isn’t broken,” but the program has been strained by demographic trends that the reallocations are intended to address.
The House GOP’s rule change would still allow for a reallocation from the retirement fund to shore up the disability fund — but only if an accompanying proposal “improves the overall financial health of the combined Social Security Trust Funds,” per the rule, expected to be passed on Tuesday. While that language is vague, experts say it would likely mean any reallocation would have to be balanced by new revenues or benefit cuts.
I have zero doubt Republicans will describe this rules change, now that it’s getting attention, as a measure to “protect Social Security,” even though DI is part of the same system, and the ploy may actually be aimed at producing “entitlement reforms” affecting retiree benefits as well as disability eligibility. But Democrats, led by Elizabeth Warren, do seem to be all over this with unusual alacrity:
“It’s ridiculous – but not surprising – that on the very first day of the new Congress, Republicans are manufacturing a Social Security crisis to threaten benefits for millions of disabled Americans – including 233,260 in Massachusetts alone,” Warren said on Facebook. “We can’t turn our backs on the promises we’ve made to our families, friends, and neighbors who need our help the most. House Republicans should stop playing political games to put America’s most vulnerable at risk.”
So we’ll probably see leading Republicans take a low profile on the issue for a while, as their friends in the conservative chattering classes probably ratchet up the talk about the freeloading bums on DI.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 7, 2015
“Playtime Is Over For Obamacare’s Foes”: And Still, Republicans Don’t Have A Serious Plan B
Friends of Obamacare, horrified that the Supreme Court has taken a case that could blow up the federal health insurance exchanges, should recalibrate their dread. While the health reforms were safely humming along, there was little political price for demanding their demise. Thanks to the Supreme Court, now there is.
Years of carpet-bombing assaults on Obamacare have left many Americans thinking that they don’t like the Affordable Care Act. But close down the federal exchanges covering 6 million people (so far) in 36 states and they may think otherwise. With a vengeance.
Here are the stakes in King v. Burwell: Should the justices strike down subsidies for coverage in the federal exchanges, only the very sick would hang in. That would be the end of the federal exchanges.
Donald Taylor, a health policy expert at Duke University, likens the Obamacare attackers to a dog chasing a car. “What’s the dog going to do if it catches the car?” he said to me.
Subsidies would be untouched in the 12 or 14 state-run exchanges (depends on how you define them), the majority of which are in blue states. Red-state politicians — oddly the biggest foes of a law that in effect transfers tax dollars from high-income liberal states to poor conservative ones — would have a mess on their hands.
“Some Southern states will be back up to 20 percent uninsured,” Taylor said, “and that doesn’t sound politically stable.”
The solution for Republicans would be a plan B. But they don’t have a serious plan B.
Republicans do have a proposal of sorts, composed early last year by three senators — Richard Burr of North Carolina, Orrin Hatch of Utah and now-retired Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. But it was written mainly as a political document with which to hit Obamacare over the head during the 2016 campaign — not as a ready-to-plug-in substitute.
Let’s look at the Republican plan that we aren’t supposed to examine too closely.
For starters, it would empower private insurers to play a bigger role in the relationship between you and your doctor — encouraging them to shrink the network of doctors and hospitals you may visit. So much for “choice.”
It also would cut government subsidies for many working stiffs who earn too much to claim poverty but too little to afford decent private coverage. And it would enable insurers to charge older people far more for their insurance. Obamacare lets them charge three times as much. The Republican plan would let them charge five times as much.
Gone would be the minimal coverage standards. That means the insurers could more easily deny payment for services that Obamacare considers basic. For all these gifts to private insurers, the industry actually prefers Obamacare because its subsidies create many more customers for their products.
The Republican replacement plan (as written so far) contains lots of other controversial elements pretty much ignored because few have taken it seriously. For example, it would tax employer-sponsored health benefits. (Obamacare’s “Cadillac tax” on luxurious coverage does some of that, for which it continues to take a beating.)
A group of conservative economists, led by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, has scored the Burr-Hatch-Coburn plan and claims that it would cut deficits by $1 trillion. These are reputable economists, Taylor says, but the text they were working with was “incredibly vague” on where the cap on the taxes would be put.
“The score is a number, and the text on which they did the score was ambiguous,” he said. “It shows just how hard this is.”
So now Obamacare won’t be the only piñata in town.
The Supreme Court will take up King v. Burwell in March. We do live in interesting times.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, January 8, 2015
“The Devil In Mike Huckabee”: Mr. Huckabee Far Overshadows His Kinder Gentler Gov. Huckabee
So Mike Huckabee is ending his weekly Saturday night show on Fox News as he thinks about a run for president in 2016. Tragically, his Fox News audience will be stuck having to find other shows to enjoy, like reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger or the torture scenes from Zero Dark Thirty.
While Huckabee is thinking about his run for president, I thought it was time to think about Huckabee. And I’m talking both of them. What do I mean? Well, there’s “Governor Huckabee,” a genial, compassionate person. And then there’s “Mr. Huckabee,” his callous, rightwing alter ego.
First, however, I want to address those who are simply dismissing Huckabee as having zero chance of securing the GOP nomination in 2016. They are wrong.
Sure, recent polls have Jeb Bush leading the GOP field. But Bush is as exciting to many conservatives as Hillary Clinton is to many progressives, meaning not so much. They are both viewed in essence like eating Brussels sprouts. Sure, you knew it’s good for you, but it’s not exciting.
But Huckabee (akin to Elizabeth Warren on the left) is like an ice cream sundae. They excite people, and primaries tend to be dominated by voters who are the most excited.
And keep in mind that when Huckabee ran for president in 2008, he won the Iowa caucuses. He also did well in other early primaries such as in Missouri, which he lost by 1 percent to the Brussels sprout of that field, John McCain.
Plus the GOP electorate has become more conservative since 2008. In 2012, 50 percent of those who voted in the first batch of GOP presidential contests were Evangelical Christians, up from 44 percent in 2008.This bodes well for Huckabee in early primary states like Missouri, Colorado, and Minnesota, where the like-minded Rick Santorum won in 2012.
Bottom line: Huckabee is for real. At least from an electoral point of view. But who is the real Huckabee is another question.
There’s the kindly Governor Huckabee who championed an increase in the minimum wage, hired more state employees and even expanded government services with programs such as “ARKids First” that provided health coverage for thousands of Arkansas’ children.
Now let’s meet “Mr. Huckabee,” whose views on a range of issues are truly frightening – I’m talking hide the children and grab a pitchfork scary. Here’s a sample:
1. Huckabee wants Christian sharia law: Huckabee stated during his 2007 presidential campaign that we can’t change the Bible to line up with society’s “contemporary view,” instead we “should amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards.” Do you think he really wants to stone to death woman who aren’t a virgin on their wedding night like it mandates in the Bible?
2. Gays are a health hazard: Huckabee stated that “homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.”
3. The Sandy Hook shooting is our fault: Huckabee blamed the horrific killing of 26 people, including 20 children, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012 not on gun violence or even the act of a crazed gunman. Instead he said it was because “we’ve systematically removed God from our schools” and as a result we should not be “surprised that schools have become a place for carnage.”
4. AIDS insanity: When running for the US Senate in 1992, Huckabee called for a quarantine of people who had AIDS. He also decried increased government funding for AIDS research, instead suggesting that money should come from “multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor [and] Madonna,” who should be encouraged to “give out of their own personal treasuries.” In 2007, Huckabee said he stood by these earlier remarks, but would phrase them differently.
5. Michael Brown had it coming: In December, Huckabee told us that Michael Brown would be alive if he acted “like something other than a thug.” He added that he was “disgusted” by politicians and athletes who flashed the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture.
6. Gay marriage makes Jesus cry: In 2013, Huckabee called gay marriage an “unholy pretzel” that has turned “holy matrimony” into a “perversion.” Huckabee also tweeted that “Jesus wept” over the 2013 US Supreme Court decision striking down DOMA. And Huckabee even said in September that he doesn’t care if he is on “the wrong side of history,” as long as he is “on the right side of the Bible” when it comes to gay marriage.
7. Sorry if you are already sick: Not only does Huckabee oppose Obamacare, he opposed the one provision that most people like, namely that health insurers shouldn’t be able to deny coverage to those with preexisting medical conditions.
8. Ignore court decisions/laws that God wouldn’t like: This past September, while speaking of abortion laws and gay marriage court decisions, Huckabee declared that we should not accept “ungodly” judicial rulings that “will cause us to have to stand before God with bloody hands.”
Sure, there are other Huckabee comments I could highlight, like his famous one from last January about women’s libidos, or how Martin Luther King, Jr. would be standing with him in fighting against marriage equality, but I think you get it by now. Mr. Huckabee far overshadows his kinder, gentler Gov. Huckabee.
Now while many of you might be shaking your head in disbelief over Huckabee’s views, keep in mind that it’s likely that nearly 50 percent of the GOP primary voters in 2016 will agree with most, if not all of them. And that’s far scarier than anything Huckabee has said.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, January 7, 2015
“America, We’re In Big Trouble!”: A ‘Governing Majority’ That Doesn’t Know How To Govern
Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the other day that he hopes the Republican-led Congress can prove to the electorate that his party can be a responsible “governing majority.” And on the surface, that’s a perfectly worthwhile goal.
But it’s been quite a few years since GOP policymakers actually tried to govern effectively, and there’s reason to believe the party no longer remembers how. This week, for example, Republican lawmakers will get right to work, pushing the Keystone oil pipeline and a measure to redefine a full-time worker under the Affordable Care Act. Jonathan Weisman had a good piece on the latter.
The House will take up legislation on Wednesday, the first major bill of the 114th Congress, that would change the definition of a full-time worker under the health law from one who works 30 hours a week to one who works 40 hours. A vote is scheduled for Thursday.
Weisman’s report did a nice job noting that even conservatives seem to realize this is a bad idea, with National Review’s Yuval Levin arguing over the weekend that the legislation “seems likely to be worse than doing nothing.”
Republicans, at some level, must understand this. Indeed, they pushed this exact same idea 11 months ago – in a bill they called the “Save American Workers Act” – and it was deemed ridiculous at the time.
An analysis of the bill, released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, found that it would cause 1 million people to lose their employer-based insurance coverage. The report projected that more than 500,000 of them would end up getting coverage through Medicaid, the Children’s Health Care Program or the Obamacare exchanges. The rest, CBO and JCT said, would become uninsured.
The legislation would also lower the amount the federal government collects in penalties from businesses who don’t abide by the employer mandate. As a result, the report found, the deficit would go up by $74 billion over 10 years.
Jonathan Cohn explained a while back, “The Congressional Budget Office just taught the Republican Party a lesson. Governing is hard…. [T]hat’s the reality Obamacare’s critics are never willing to confront. They’re great at attacking Obamacare. But they’re lousy at coming up with alternatives that look better by comparison. There’s a reason for that. The downsides of Obamacare are real, but, in many cases, they make possible the upsides. Take away the former and the latter go away, too.”
Faced with this knowledge, the new, massive House Republican majority has effectively declared, “Well, let’s just pass it anyway.”
And what about Keystone? I’ll dig into this in more detail when the vote draws closer, but for now, I’m reminded of President Obama’s comments at his year-end press conference a few weeks ago:
“At issue in Keystone is not American oil. It is Canadian oil that is drawn out of tar sands in Canada. That oil currently is being shipped out through rail or trucks, and it would save Canadian oil companies and the Canadian oil industry an enormous amount of money if they could simply pipe it all the way through the United States down to the Gulf. Once that oil gets to the Gulf, it is then entering into the world market, and it would be sold all around the world.
“So there’s no – I won’t say ‘no’ – there is very little impact, nominal impact, on U.S. gas prices – what the average American consumer cares about – by having this pipeline come through. And sometimes the way this gets sold is, ‘Let’s get this oil and it’s going to come here.’ And the implication is, is that’s going to lower gas prices here in the United States. It’s not. There’s a global oil market. It’s very good for Canadian oil companies and it’s good for the Canadian oil industry, but it’s not going to be a huge benefit to U.S. consumers. It’s not even going to be a nominal benefit to U.S. consumers.
“Now, the construction of the pipeline itself will create probably a couple thousand jobs. Those are temporary jobs until the construction actually happens. There’s probably some additional jobs that can be created in the refining process down in the Gulf. Those aren’t completely insignificant – it’s just like any other project. But when you consider what we could be doing if we were rebuilding our roads and bridges around the country – something that Congress could authorize – we could probably create hundreds of thousands of jobs, or a million jobs. So if that’s the argument, there are a lot more direct ways to create well-paying Americans construction jobs.”
Again, the Republican Congress knows all of this. They know gas prices have already plummeted and that Keystone won’t push them any lower. They know that the project would create a few dozen permanent U.S. jobs. They know this is all about Canadian oil.
But this new “governing majority,” eager to prove how capable they are, have once again effectively declared, “Let’s pass it anyway” – whether it actually makes sense or not.
Republican lawmakers have had months – and by some measures, years – to come up with a policy agenda they’d implement once they controlled all of Congress. This, alas, is what they’ve come up with.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 6, 2014
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