“David Vitter, God Bless The Koch Brothers”: The Most Patriotic Americans In The History Of The Earth
It stands to reason that Republican politicians are going to celebrate Charles and David Koch. After all, the billionaires’ generosity is critically important in conservative politics right now and may ultimately be the deciding factor in which party has power in Congress.
But Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) is willing to take his appreciation for the Koch brothers to a pretty extraordinary level, as evidenced by a town-hall event in Shreveport this week. American Bridge posted the above video (http://youtu.be/-7mStFMk6og), and for those who can’t watch clips online, the conservative senator told constituents:
“I think the Koch brothers are two of the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth. […]
“God bless the Koch brothers. They’re fighting for our freedoms.”
Sure, Republicans are bound to be grateful to the billionaires for saturating the airwaves with anti-Democratic attack ads, but Vitter’s effusive praise seemed a little over the top.
Burgess Everett saw an even longer version of the clip and reported that Vitter, as part of the same discussion, said he’s “not defending big money in politics.”
No, of course not. He’s just grateful that the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth are fighting for our freedoms.
It’s worth noting that Louisiana will host two major elections in the next two years: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) is running for re-election this year, and she’s already facing attack ads from the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, and Vitter is running for governor next year, and likely hopes the Kochs’ operation will support his candidacy.
But there’s an even larger context to this: what is it, exactly, the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth hope to receive in exchange for their political investments?
The New York Times reports today on the bigger picture.
As [Americans for Prosperity] emerges as a dominant force in the 2014 midterm elections, spending up to 10 times as much as any major outside Democratic group so far, officials of the organization say their effort is not confined to hammering away at President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. They are also trying to present the law as a case study in government ineptitude to change the way voters think about the role of government for years to come.
“We have a broader cautionary tale,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. “The president’s out there touting billions of dollars on climate change. We want Americans to think about what they promised with the last social welfare boondoggle and look at what the actual result is.”
Leaders of the effort say it has great appeal to the businessmen and businesswomen who finance the operation and who believe that excess regulation and taxation are harming their enterprises and threatening the future of the country. The Kochs, with billions in holdings in energy, transportation and manufacturing, have a significant interest in seeing that future government regulation is limited.
Indeed, Wonkblog reported just yesterday that a Koch Industries subsidiary is the biggest lease owner in Canada’s tar sands, covering an area of 1.1 million acres. The piece added, “Separately, industry sources familiar with oil sands leases said Koch’s lease holdings could be closer to 2 million acres.”
This helps bring into sharper focus why the Democratic fight with the Koch brothers has become so important. The dispute isn’t about some misleading AFP attack ads about health care reform; this is about a broader agenda.
As Greg Sargent explained this morning, “The real purpose of the Dem strategy is to create a framework for a broader argument about the true goals and priorities of the actual GOP policy agenda. It’s about tapping into a sense that the economy is rigged against ordinary Americans, and in favor of the one percent, and dramatizing that the GOP’s economic agenda would preserve that status quo, blocking any government policies designed to address stagnant mobility and soaring inequality. Or that, as Jonathan Chait puts it, the GOP has ‘built a policy agenda around plutocracy,’ and its primary ‘organizing purpose is to safeguard the economic interests of the very rich.’”
And it’s against this backdrop that David Vitter proclaims, “God bless the Koch brothers. They’re fighting for our freedoms.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 20, 2014
“Authored By Reagan”: It’s Worse Than Paul Ryan, The Right Has A New Ugly, Racial Dog Whistle
While attention focuses on Paul Ryan’s remarks about inner city culture, another dog-whistle theme continues its slow roil: food stamp abuse. More even than Ryan’s twisting narrative, the brouhaha around food stamps helps make clear that conservatives seek to conjure a much bigger bogeyman than “lazy” minorities.
Ostensibly worried that too many people prefer welfare to work, House Republicans this January stripped $8.6 billion from the food stamp program. This threatened to reduce monthly food assistance by an average of $90 per family — from households that are barely hanging on, with average gross monthly incomes of just $744. Yet far from conceding defeat, states are joining battle by adjusting their programs in ways that evade the cuts, bringing the food stamp debate back.
Just last week, House Speaker John Boehner warned that “states have found ways to cheat, once again, on signing up people for food stamps,” and he implored his colleagues “to stop this cheating and this fraud from continuing.” Cheating and fraud constitute stock themes in the conservative assault on food stamps — tropes applied indiscriminately to both recipients and government. And therein lies a clue to the real target.
To see the actual agenda clearly, though, it helps to reach back to Ronald Reagan, for he perfected today’s conservative assault on food stamps.
Reagan frequently stumped by sympathizing with the anger of voters waiting in line to buy hamburger, while some young fellow ahead of them used food stamps to buy a T-bone steak. With this tale, Reagan invoked the stereotype of the welfare recipient who abuses government benefits to live in luxury (Reagan’s other version: welfare queens).
The comedian Jon Stewart recently compiled a montage of contemporary conservative talking heads spinning just these sorts of yarns about food stamps. It would have been funnier if people weren’t actually being pushed into hunger.
Going to the racial dimensions of these hackneyed fictions, when Reagan initially told the T-bone steak story, he identified the food stamp abuser as a young “buck,” a term then commonly used among Southern whites to refer to a strong black man. This veered dangerously toward open racism, and in any event proved unnecessary. Even after Reagan dropped that term from future renditions, the racial element continued just below the surface, with welfare recipients implicitly colored black.
But this was not a simple plot to demonize minorities. Rather, Reagan had another scapegoat in mind, and here we come to the heart of dog-whistle politics. Ostensibly, even more than grasping minorities, the greatest enemy of the middle class was liberal government. After all, it was government that was reaching into taxpayer’s pockets and wasting their hard-earned dollars.
By “darkening” government itself, Reagan provided the kindling for a taxpayer revolt that ostensibly would cut off funds to the lazy and irresponsible — but that in fact generated enormous windfalls for the very rich. In the 1980s, by one estimate, the top 1 percent of Americans reaped tax cuts worth a trillion dollars, and they’ve received a further trillion dollars from the Reagan tax cuts in each ensuing decade.
Tax cuts for the very rich were just the beginning. By trashing safety-net programs as massive giveaways to undeserving minorities and thereby engendering a general hostility toward government, the right has systematically attacked New Deal programs across multiple domains — from education and housing to marketplace and workplace regulation — undoing in area after area the policies that once promoted an equitable distribution of wealth.
Perhaps to understand the full devastation wrought by modern racial politics, we should bring forward another figure from the shadowed background of the T-bone steak story: the cashier. In the 1970s, she was more likely to be unionized and relatively well-paid, with good benefits. Today, whether white or black or some other race, she is likely working without union protection for a minimum wage whose value has sharply fallen and that cannot sustain a small family above poverty. Indeed, like many Wal-Mart employees, it’s the cashier who today is on food stamps.
When House Republicans war against food assistance, just as when Ryan tilts at government poverty programs that don’t work because of a tailspin of culture in our inner cities, their real target is progressive government. Yes, race-baiting superficially aims at minorities and hits nonwhite communities hard, including the 24 percent of food stamp recipients who are black. But just as cuts to food aid also afflict the 38 percent of program participants who are white, dog-whistle politics savages Americans of every race.
And it devastates every class, too, for this sort of racial politics doesn’t just slam the poor, it imperils all who are better off when government protects the broad middle rather than serves society’s sultans. When conservatives blow that dog whistle, government is the target, and you’re a likely victim.
By: Ian Haney-Lopez, Salon, March 22, 2014
“Strangling, Even Without A Tie”: NBC Is Sticking With David Gregory As “Meet The Press” Slowly Dies
NBC’s “Meet the Press” is in trouble. After dominating the Sunday morning ratings war for decades, it has lately faltered, coming in third in the fourth quarter of 2013. Critics and media writers think host David Gregory ought to be replaced. But NBC executives, according to Michael Calderone, are sticking with Gregory. “We’re doubling down on David Gregory right now,” says NBC News senior vice president Alex Wallace. (Wallace may not understand that the phrase “double down” refers to knowingly making a high-risk bet. If that’s the case, she is not alone.)
While they are sticking with Gregory, NBC executives are not too proud to make some desperate grabs for a younger audience. Millions of people still watch the Sunday shows, but few of those viewers are under the age of 55. Network news executives and producers are keen to reach a younger demographic, but unwilling to make some of the more radical changes — like having a non-idiot host and not inviting John McCain on every goddamn week — that may attract a more youthful audience. Instead, NBC’s gambit is having David Gregory do additional interviews and panel discussions to be aired on “the Internet,” a global computer network known to be popular with the non-retired set. To emphasize that he is, as the kids say, “with it,” Gregory will sometimes not wear a tie.
Gregory has long done web-only interviews (“Press Pass”) for the “Meet the Press 24/7″ page, and has been conducting interviews over Twitter (“Tweet the Press”) in the past few months. On Thursday, NBC News launched “Meet the Press Express,” a mid-week digital video series, hosted by Gregory, which features a rotating group of journalists from the network’s Washington bureau.
In a play on the NCAA tournament, Gregory, sans tie, spoke with Roll Call’s Christina Bellantoni, The Atlantic’s Molly Ball, and the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery about their political brackets, and the group sized up the futures of key political players. The “Meet the Press Express” discussions are expected to be more casual than the Sunday roundtable and to feature a younger generation of political journalists who may someday appear on the television show alongside, say, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman or historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Brackets … but for politics? That’s just the sort of outside-the-box approach to political analysis that appeals to a guy like me, an 18-54-year-old male consumer.
All the network Sunday shows, “Meet the Press” included, are notorious for their conservative (in every sense of the word) booking choices. Old, white center-right men dominate the interviews and panels, with the same few faces appearing again and again. So it’s nice to hear that “Meet the Press” will finally feature some younger, fresher voices. But … only on the Web, apparently. Because they are, in some sense, auditioning to be allowed to sit at the Sunday morning grown-ups table with respected elders like Bill Kristol.
But “Meet the Press” is not losing viewers to “Face the Nation” and “This Week” because those shows skew younger — Bob Scheiffer is no one’s idea of a teen idol and those shows have nearly identical booking practices. “Meet the Press” is declining because it’s not the definitive version of its thing — the Sunday morning political chat show — anymore, and its competitors offer essentially the exact same product, giving no one a reason to remain loyal to one over the others.
So I will give NBC some credit. The solution is not to replace Gregory with someone like Chuck Todd, the human incarnation of the odious phrase “politics junkie.” That show would be largely the same. Instead, the network will apparently allow Gregory to continue to guide “Meet the Press” toward its inevitable, long-overdue demise. Which is fine! If there has to be a “Meet the Press” I’d prefer a good one to the current bad one, but there doesn’t actually have to be a “Meet the Press.”
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 21, 2014
“Ted Cruz’s Exploitative New Sham”: What “Drafting” Him To Run For President Really Means
“It is time to Draft Ted Cruz for president,” says RedState diarist “razshafer,” and to that end, Raz has established RunTedRun.com, and an affiliated Draft Ted Cruz for President PAC. Raz is, Dave Weigel explains, Ted Cruz’s (now former) regional director Raz Shafer, and not just some person using Cruz’s name to convince conservatives to send along their lucrative email addresses.
Here is part of Shafer’s pitch:
I know there are other candidates who may run as conservatives, but I believe Ted Cruz has demonstrated that he’s the only consistent conservative who will do what it takes to roll back Barack Obama’s agenda. He’s the only one who has the passion, principles, and courage needed to deliver real results for Americans.
I’ve never spoken to Ted about him running for president and I honestly don’t know if he will do it, but I do know he won’t succeed unless freedom-loving Americans like you and me begin organizing this effort now.
Ted Cruz is the people’s candidate and we need to be the ones driving the effort to elect him.
So if you’re ready to be proud of your vote again and you agree that Ted Cruz should run for president, please do three things:
Go to RunTedRun.com and sign the official Draft Ted Cruz for President petition.
Urge your friends and family to join you.
Donate whatever you can to help us spread the word and build support.
My advice, even if you do support Ted Cruz and think he should run for president, is don’t do any of this. It is a waste of your time and you will be exploited. Your name and contact information will be sold. You will have no effect whatsoever on Cruz’s decision to run for president or not. Your monetary donation will have no effect whatsoever on Ted Cruz’s potential 2016 electoral chances.
Unless you have a lot of money, and giving that money to politicians is how you gain access to those politicians in order to convince them to advance your agenda, most of the time you shouldn’t give money to politicians. Especially credible presidential candidates and sitting members of Congress. Mainly because most presidential candidates and sitting members of Congress are awful, but also because generally they already have a lot of money, have access to more money, and don’t need yours. (Again, this all assumes you’re not very rich. The very rich waste plenty of money on losers and dumb causes, but they can afford it. Plus, many of their political investments show some pretty impressive returns.)
You really shouldn’t donate money — or give away your contact information — to shady (or even reputable!) organizations devoted to “drafting” someone or other to run for president. Especially if the person they are drafting is probably already going to run and doesn’t need some sort of pseudo-grass-roots demonstration of mass appeal and fundraising ability. Ted Cruz knows he is popular and can raise money and he probably will at least pretend to run for president, unless he decides it would be more lucrative to just be a right-wing media star, in which case you have still wasted your money.
This isn’t just about Ted Cruz! Hillary Clinton is almost definitely running for president too, and she really doesn’t need your support. She has a vast fundraising network and national campaign experience; you don’t need to sign a petition (or, god forbid, write a check) to nudge her toward deciding to run again. She has already done extensive polling on the subject of whether Americans are “ready for Hillary,” and (I can’t stress this enough) she has very rich friends who will write her much bigger checks than you will.
Sometimes, these PACs or other groups dedicated to drafting someone to run for office are truly aimed at convincing reluctant candidates that they have enough already existing support to make a presidential campaign feasible. In that case, your name and donation could make a real difference! And then you end up with Wesley Clark 2004. But for the most part, national politicians don’t need or deserve your money, and people running officially unaffiliated outside groups shouldn’t be gifted your valuable data. Don’t draft anyone.
By: Alex Parene, Salon, March 20, 2014
“Paul Ryan Is Victim-Blaming Men Now”: No, Men Don’t Lack A “Culture Of Work”, They Lack Decent Jobs
Last week Paul Ryan provoked an outcry when he claimed that poverty in America was in large part a product of a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working, just generations of men not even thinking of working, or learning the value and the culture of work.” Ever since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, the phrase “inner city” has been criticized as a GOP dog whistle for “black people,” so Ryan has rightly faced a backlash for his comments. (While claiming they were “inarticulate,” he insists his comments had “nothing to do with race whatsoever.”)
But another aspect of this much-remarked-on incident has drawn no notice: his focus on inner city men. Ryan’s comments seem to be based on an unstated assumption that what he calls the “culture of work” is especially relevant to men.
That assumption in turn is a product of an increasingly anachronistic and indeed reactionary world view, in which working for money is the epitome of what it means to be a man. More precisely, to be a man, on this view, is to work a “real job” — that is, a job that at least pays enough to allow him to be the provider, the breadwinner, for his family.
Ryan’s inner city men, who have never “learned the value and the culture of work,” are therefore not merely failing, but failing specifically as men, by failing to provide for their families.
The problem with this neat little morality tale is captured by what ought to be some startling statistics. Note that another unstated assumption behind comments such as Ryan’s is that the American economy actually produces enough decent-paying jobs to allow a reasonable number of Americans to have such jobs, as long as they embrace “the culture of work.”
To say this isn’t the case is an understatement. What is a “good” job, financially speaking? One which pays $50,000 per year? $40,000? $30,000? The latter figure, which represents take-home pay of less than $2000 per month, and which is only twice the minimum wage (which itself has declined sharply in real terms since the 1960s), is an extremely generous definition of what constitutes a decent-paying job.
But let’s use it anyway, to determine how many Americans of working age have such jobs. If we make a couple more unrealistically optimistic assumptions — that nobody under 18 or over 69 is working, and that no one has more than one job — the answer is: three out of 10.
Nearly 70 percent of American working-age adults do not have jobs that pay at least $30,000 per year, because there are only three such jobs for every 10 American adults between the ages of 18 and 69. In other words, the vast majority of working age Americans cannot possibly acquire decent-paying jobs, even if one defines a decent-paying job extremely broadly, because there aren’t nearly enough such jobs, not because people fail to embrace “the culture of work.”
Here’s another statistic that those who embrace the culture of math will find relevant to Ryan’s claims that inner city men in particular are poor because they have a bad attitude toward gainful employment: the labor force participation rate. This is the percentage of non-institutionalized adults who are either employed or actively seeking work.
The year Paul Ryan’s father reached working age (1948), 86 percent of American men, but only 32 percent of American women, were participating in the labor force. (A large portion of women who worked outside the home were poor, usually non-white, domestic workers. It was fairly unusual for a white middle class woman over 30 to work for income).
Since then, the labor force participation rate among men has declined by 18 percent, while the rate among women has nearly doubled. Another consequence of this social shift is that most men make less money than they did 40 years ago, even though the country as a whole is vastly wealthier: for 60 percent of men, real wages are actually lower now than they were in 1973.
Republicans love to talk about the wisdom of the free market in general and the irresistible laws of supply and demand in particular, but Ryan (who is currently touted as his party’s economic whiz kid) seems to be failing Econ 101. Poverty in America has nothing to do with the shiftless “inner city” men haunting Paul Ryan’s all-too vivid imagination, and everything to do with the fact that seven out of 10 American adults of working age can’t get a decent-paying job, because those jobs don’t exist.
In a culture in which it’s now assumed that every non-elderly adult who isn’t a full-time student or the primary caretaker of small children should be working for wages, this fact has especially devastating consequences for precisely those men whose plight Ryan addressed in such an “inarticulate” way.
By: Paul Campos, The Week, March 19, 2014
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