“The GOP And Its Urge To Purge”: Don’t Get Caught Reading Marx In The Republican Cloakroom
It seems the Republicans have run out of squishy moderates to purge. Now they’re starting to run conservatives out of town for being insufficiently doctrinaire.
Exhibit A: The defenestration of Tom Cole.
Cole, a deeply conservative congressman from deeply Republican Oklahoma, is not to be confused with a RINO: Republican in name only. But when the lawmaker, who has been part of House GOP leadership, floated a perfectly sensible notion this week — that Republicans should accept President Obama’s offer to extend tax cuts for the 98 percent of Americans who earn less than $250,000 a year — he was treated as if he had been caught reading Marx in the Republican cloakroom.
“I think he’s wrong, and I think most of the conference thinks that he’s wrong,” declared rookie Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho). Cole, he said, is “a man who has voted for a lot of the increased spending in Washington, D.C., and that’s the problem. We have a lot of Republicans who are, you know, catching their hair on fire right now, but they’re the ones who were here for 10 or 20 years causing all the problems that we’re now facing.”
Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) called Cole’s position “absurd.” House Speaker John Boehner went before the cameras to deliver Cole a rare public rebuke.
Cole, who enjoys a lifetime rating of 92 percent from the American Conservative Union as he enters his sixth term, isn’t worried about a putsch. “I think I’m going to be hard to sell as a dangerous liberal,” he told me with a chuckle. The outrage, he said, “surprised me a little bit, because I think the politics of this are blindingly clear.”
Cole is correct, for two reasons. On a practical level, his plan calls Obama’s bluff: Because raising taxes on the top 2 percent of earners won’t bring in nearly enough tax revenue to fix the budget problem, Obama would likely be forced to come up with some serious entitlement-program cuts as part of a larger tax-and-spending deal.
But Cole is right for a larger reason: The Republicans’ negotiating position is morally indefensible. They are holding 98 percent of Americans hostage by refusing to spare them a tax hike unless the wealthiest 2 percent are included.
“Some people seem to think this is leverage. I think that’s wrong,” Cole said. “You don’t consider people’s lives as leverage. I live in a blue-collar neighborhood. I’ve got a retired master sergeant as my next-door neighbor, police officer across the street. These are working folks, they’re great people, and the idea that I would ever use them as leverage is just wrong.”
In defying the party purists, Cole is taking a novel approach: doing what his constituents want him to do. His staff reports that calls and e-mails to his Washington office are running 70 percent favorable, and calls to his south-central Oklahoma offices are 90 percent positive.
No surprise: Median income in his district is under $47,000, below the national average of $52,000. Only 1.8 percent of households there have income of $200,000 or more.
“They’re pro-business, they’re pro-free enterprise,” Cole said of his constituents, who are farm and ranch workers, oil employees and the like. “But they’re going to want to know that we’re not going to raise taxes on them because they make $43,000 a year, and $1,000 to $2,000 is a lot of money when you’re trying to raise a family.”
Cole, who worked as a political consultant and as chief of staff at the Republican National Committee before coming to Congress, understands this reality better than many of his peers. In their obsession with protecting the wealthiest, Republicans often work against their own constituents, because red states tend to be poorer and more reliant on government spending.
Cole’s stand is a refreshing reminder that being conservative doesn’t mean you have to be unreasonable. “Both sides, I think, need to be a lot more clear-eyed,” he told me. “We’re going to be living in this house together for four years in all likelihood. Let’s get some things done that we can agree on.”
Thankfully, Cole, who won reelection with 68 percent of the vote, isn’t intimidated. Of his intraparty critics, Cole asks: “Where’s your political courage? It’s pretty easy to vote ‘no’ around here. But we’ve got a divided government. The American people ratified that in this election. They’ve basically told us to work together. Here’s something we both agree on that would be in their interest. Why don’t we do this?”
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 30, 2012
“Schools In The Crosshairs”: Parent-Trigger Laws Effort Has Become A Stealth Means To Privatize Public Schools
When her dyslexic second-grader landed in a failing public elementary school in Pittsburgh, single mother Jamie Fitzpatrick spotted trouble right away. Her daughter’s teacher spent class time shopping online for clothes while the kids bullied one another. Though other teachers wanted to do right by the kids, their union wouldn’t allow it; teachers were forbidden to offer any extra help to the students outside of class, and because their pay was based on seniority, some of the worst made the most. So despite working two jobs, Fitzpatrick somehow found the time to persuade other parents to sign a petition to turn the school into a nonunion charter. Most teachers joined the effort, perfectly content to give up their union protections. At the new charter school, magic happened. The kids began to get a proper education. Fitzpatrick’s daughter learned to read almost immediately.
It’s an inspiring tale. It’s also fiction—the plot of Won’t Back Down, a film released this fall starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as the supermom and Viola Davis as a frustrated teacher who becomes her ally. Like most people, you probably steered clear of this critically panned box-office flop. If so, you didn’t miss much—except a revealing glimpse into the Hollywood-style fantasies of education reformers who believe they have found a new panacea for saving public education: parent-trigger laws.
These laws sound appealingly straightforward. If enough parents sign a petition, they can get their children’s failing school shut down or converted into a charter. Seven states have passed a parent trigger over the last two years; more will likely follow suit next year. These laws are designed to make public education increasingly look like the free marketplace of parental “choice” that reformers long to see. The idea has powerful backers, including conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—best known for “stand your ground” self-defense laws—and the Heartland Institute, famous for challenging climate science. Walden Media, which produced Won’t Back Down and funded the charter—school documentary Waiting for Superman, is owned by Philip Anschutz, an ALEC supporter and prominent Tea Party funder.
Parent trigger is not solely a right-wing cause. Democratic legislatures in Connecticut and California have passed these laws, the U.S. Conference of Mayors has unanimously endorsed them, and 70 percent of Americans view them favorably. The broad support is no surprise. If parents organize to make radical changes to a failing school, who would want to stop them? But many who back parent-trigger laws don’t realize that the effort has become a stealth means to privatize public schools. Heartland, which owns the website theparenttrigger.com, has crafted model legislation for trigger laws that apply to all schools—not just those that are failing. That might be a logical, if drastic, response if public schools were mired in the deep “crisis” that education reformers constantly cite. But they’re not: Many achievement gaps have narrowed substantially, test scores have risen, and high-school completion rates are at all-time highs.
Won’t Back Down, like the movement it champions, begins from the assumption that public schools are a hopeless mess. The complicated challenges that public educators grapple with—severe budget cuts, for instance, or health problems that make learning a particular challenge for low-income kids—are nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, parents are exempted from responsibility. Jamie Fitzpatrick never volunteers to help out at the school. She doesn’t go to PTA meetings. She never even asks about her daughter’s homework. Gyllenhaal’s character is not so much a parent as an unhappy customer demanding a better school.
Anyone who believes in the school-reform fairy tale of Won’t Back Down should be required to watch another film released this fall to much less fanfare. This one doesn’t feature an Academy Award winner or a soundtrack of No. 1 hits. Instead, Brooklyn Castle chronicles a messy reality—that of Intermediate School 318, a Brooklyn middle school where 70 percent of the kids live below the poverty line, and where funding cuts are threatening the after-school activities that are key to getting many of them engaged. That includes the school’s chess team, which is, improbably, among the best in the country.
In most respects, I.S. 318 is ordinary. It’s not a magnet school or a charter, but it’s also not failing. The kids featured in Brooklyn Castle have real problems: They struggle with ADHD, asthma, and hunger, and many must work after school to help their parents make ends meet. Teachers and administrators encourage the students, helping to set goals for each one. When after-school programs are endangered, the parents rally, launching a letter–writing campaign to state officials and organizing a walkathon to raise money. I.S. 318, like most public schools, succeeds because the community invests in it, without expecting perfection.
“I think this is a good thing for kids to be exposed to—the idea that truth isn’t quite so simple as right and wrong,” I.S. 318 teacher and chess-team coach Elizabeth Vicary says. “The answers aren’t really clear to anybody.” She’s talking about chess. She could just as well be talking about our entire approach to education. The quest for easy fixes is seductive. But the more we look for Hollywood-style magic bullets, the less we focus on what makes public schools work.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, November 30, 2012
“The Pretzel Logic Of The Right”: Another Perceived Attack On The Sovereignty Of America, God And Family!
It’s hardly news any more when conservatives oppose ratification of a treaty reflecting widely shared American values. Concern for U.S. “sovereignty,” often based on conspiracy theories about the United Nations and other multinational organizations the U.S. helped create, has become a reflexive excuse for a kind of rigid unilateralism once associated with the John Birch Society or even older, isolationist conservatives.
But the current conservative fight to kill ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is especially interesting because the most avid opponents are the cultural conservatives who often profess solidarity with the disabled as part of their fight against legalized abortion. Anti-choicers and home-schoolers, however, have declared war on the convention on the theory that it confirms the “reproductive rights” of people with disabilities, and/or might confer other rights upon them that intefere with the absolute power of the family (presumably a servant-leader male-directed family) to raise children as they wish.
Thus it’s not surprising that Rick Santorum is at the head of this particular parade in the Senate, which raises the ire of WaPo’s Dana Milbank:
The former presidential candidate pronounced his “grave concerns” about the treaty, which forbids discrimination against people with AIDS, who are blind, who use wheelchairs and the like. “This is a direct assault on us,” he declared at a news conference….
[Mike] Lee, a tea party favorite, said he, too, has “grave concerns” about the document’s threat to American sovereignty. “I will do everything I can to block its ratification, and I have secured the signatures of 36 Republican senators, all of whom have joined with me saying that we will oppose any ratification of any treaty during this lame-duck session.”
Lame or not, Santorum and Lee recognized that it looks bad to be disadvantaging the disabled in their quest for fair treatment. Santorum praised Lee for having “the courage to stand up on an issue that doesn’t look to be particularly popular to be opposed.”
Courageous? Or just contentious? The treaty requires virtually nothing of the United States. It essentially directs the other signatories to update their laws so that they more closely match the Americans with Disabilities Act. Even Lee thought it necessary to preface his opposition with the qualifier that “our concerns with this convention have nothing to do with any lack of concern for the rights of persons with disabilities.”
Their concerns, rather, came from the dark world of U.N. conspiracy theories. The opponents argue that the treaty, like most everything the United Nations does, undermines American sovereignty — in this case via a plot to keep Americans from home-schooling their children and making other decisions about their well-being.
And so, Santorum brought his famous daughter Bella, who suffers from a severe birth defect, to the hearing where he fought against acknowledgement of the rights of people like her.
This is where the pretzel logic of the Right can lead.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 27, 2012
“Revenge Of The Nuts”: Republicans Threaten To “Shut Down The Senate” Over Filibuster Reform
In response to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan to reform the rules governing filibusters, Senate Republicans are threatening the highly ironic revenge of “[shutting] down the Senate.”
Manu Raju reports in Politico that Reid is considering a ban on the use of filibusters on “motions to proceed,” the process through which debate begins in the Senate. Reid also may reinstitute rules requiring filibustering senators to take the Senate floor and carry out a nonstop talking session (as in the famous movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.)
In order to change these rules, Raju reports that Reid may invoke the so-called “nuclear option,” using an obscure rule to change the Senate rules with just a 51-vote majority instead of the usual two-thirds. The Republican response has been furious:
Republicans are threatening even greater retaliation if Reid uses a move rarely used by Senate majorities: changing the chamber’s precedent by 51 votes, rather than the usual 67 votes it takes to overhaul the rules.
“I think the backlash will be severe,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), the conservative firebrand, said sternly. “If you take away minority rights, which is what you’re doing because you’re an ineffective leader, you’ll destroy the place. And if you destroy the place, we’ll do what we have to do to fight back.”
“It will shut down the Senate,” the incoming Senate GOP whip, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, told POLITICO. “It’s such an abuse of power.”
There are two major problems with the Republican response: first, Reid’s proposal would not threaten “minority rights” as Coburn asserts. Senators would still be allowed to filibuster after the debate begins, and — as long as they’re willing to stay on the floor and keep talking — they would still be allowed to indefinitely delay a vote unless stopped by a 60-vote majority.
Second, threatening to “shut down the Senate” is a perfect example of why filibuster reform is needed in the first place. Since Democrats claimed their Senate majority in 2007, they have had to overcome over 380 filibusters, more than at any other point in history. As Minority Leader Mitch McConnell famously explained, Senate Republicans’ only goal over the past four years has been blocking President Obama’s agenda, and to do so they have brought the Senate to a near-complete standstill by requiring a 60-vote supermajority to pass any legislation.
So John Cornyn’s threat that Senate Republicans will suddenly stop cooperating with Democrats and block any progress in the Senate shouldn’t concern Reid very much. After all, it would be nothing he hasn’t seen before.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, November 26, 2012
“Men Threatened By Women”: John McCain Is Not Very Bright, And Neither Is Lindsey Graham
Neither is Lindsey Graham. The rest of the Republicans who persist with smear campaigns against U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and other women, especially women of color, aren’t too smart either. To the 97 members of the House, who wrote a letter to President Obama attacking Rice, I say, you are even stupider.
The Monday letter was written by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), chairman of a House subcommittee on terrorism. Those that signed the letter are among the most conservative House Republicans, and at least 10 of them lost reelection bids this month.
Buh bye.
They should have figured out by now that women go to the polls more than men, and more black and Latina women voted for Barack Obama than did their male counterparts.
But men like McCain who are ruled by an overweening sense of personal privilege are not very bright. Though they sit on committees with the word “intelligence” in the name of the group, it doesn’t seem to have rubbed off. In fact, all this macho posturing and bluster in front of the cameras may put the nation at risk. Loose lips sink ships.
My assessment has nothing to do with his courage, or past service to the country in war.
Men who feel threatened by women of strength and superior intelligence, who resort to bullying, bluster and lying when challenged by said women, are simply lacking smarts.
Their bigotry tends to crowd out brain cells.
I have a rule of thumb when judging the males of our species. I choose to look at their behavior towards women to understand their character. Men who exhibit bonhomie towards other men, yet choose trophy wives (who they demean while pimpin’ off of them), who can’t or won’t deal on a level of equality with women (especially women of color), or accept that there are women who are smarter than they are, have a part of the brain that has never fully developed. It has been culturally limited, constrained, constricted and shaped by our cultural gender norms and as such many would never even recognize it as a failing.
In fact, there are those who see it as admirable. They see them as “manly men.”
I’m not one of them.
I’m happily married to a man who is pleased as punch to tell his male friends that his wife is smarter than he is. He isn’t the least bit uncomfortable about it. In fact, he thinks he’s pretty smart for marrying me. I agree. I’m pleased that he is more talented than I am. We respect each other. That’s what makes a good partnership.
Politics is about partnerships. Political leadership requires selecting and building a smart team. If your team doesn’t have smart women in it, you won’t get my vote.
Let’s take this latest Benghazi bullcrap being used to taunt and demean U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. It has nothing to do with Benghazi really, which I wrote about in Black Kos last Tuesday. The racism, blended with their sexism is blatant.
By now those who didn’t know her credentials are aware of them. Those of us who have her back, from the president on down to a coalition of congresswomen, to bloggers and commentators like Soledad O’Brian and Rachel Maddow, have made it clear that she is not only a brilliant Rhodes scholar, but is an astute diplomat, with an important background in not only international affairs in general, but Middle East terrorism specifically.
President Obama is not afraid of strong smart women. He’s surrounded by them.
Republicans have attacked his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughters, appointees like Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Melody Barnes and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Republicans have gone after Tammy Duckworth on her military record. Teh stoopid ruled. Scott Brown went after Elizabeth Warren on her pride in having Native American ancestry.
So McCain lost an election partly because of his choice of a female running mate. Her selection—based on her having a uterus rather than brain cells—was stupid.
The War on Women launched by the Teapublicans was stupid.
Escalating that war to target Susan Rice is the height of stupidity.
Targeting women of color is political suicide.
Keep it up.
See how well stupid works out for you in 2014 and 2016.
By: Denise Oliver Velez, Daily Kos, November 25, 2012
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