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“No GOP Moderates Need Apply”: Republican “Robo-Teams” Mindlessly Towing The Line

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) has had a fair amount of success in his first two years implementing a very conservative agenda. Most notably, Brownback’s tax “reform” plan, which sharply cut income taxes on Kansas’ wealthy while punishing the poor, was signed into law in May.

But it apparently wasn’t quite enough to satisfy the right. We talked earlier this week about a group of congressional Republican moderates — an endangered and ineffectual contingent — feeling increasingly frustrated, but reader R.P. flagged an item out of Kansas, where the GOP is actively purging centrists from their midst.

Frustrated by their inability to achieve some policy goals, conservatives in Republican states are turning against moderate members of their own party, trying to drive them out of state legislatures to clear the way for reshaping government across a wide swath of mid-America controlled by the GOP. […]

The push is most intense in Kansas, where conservatives are attempting to replace a dozen moderate Republican senators who bucked new Gov. Sam Brownback’s move to slash state income taxes.

Greg Smith, a Kansas state representative who’s running for the state Senate, told the AP, “If you don’t believe in that playbook, then why are you on the team?”

What an illustrative quote. The far right is drawing up the plays, and those who disagree, even a little, ought to be replaced with loyal, almost robotic, teammates who will do what they’re told.

In Kansas, this translates into a series of contentious GOP primaries, which will be held early next week, in which right-wing activists try to replace the moderates (or at least those who seem moderate by 2012 standards) in their midst. This includes, the Republican Senate President, Senate Majority Leader, and several key committee chairs whose fealty to the far-right cause has disappointed the party’s base. The Koch brothers and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce are providing the financial resources to fuel the purge.

For his part, Brownback has already turned on many Republican incumbents, throwing his support to primary challengers because the moderates, in his words, help “promote a Democrat [sic] agenda.”

A traditional poli-sci model might suggest this is risky. Most voters consider themselves mainstream and “somewhere in the middle,” and traditionally punish parties that become too extreme.

But in states like Kansas, Republicans figure they have nothing to worry about — the GOP dominates, and winning the primary means winning the seat.

For the activist right, this means there’s very little risk in fighting to replace more reasonable Republicans with ones who’ll mindlessly toe the party line.

In the post-Bush, post-financial-crisis, post-war era, the Republican Party has slowly been confronted with questions about what kind of party it wants to be in the 21st century. It appears the decision has been made: the GOP wants a small, rigid, right-wing party that tolerates very little dissent and even fewer moderates.

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 3, 2012

August 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“On Speaking Ill Of The Dead”: Protecting The Reputations Of Abusive Powerful People

If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”
— Alice Roosevelt Longworth

This year has seen the deaths of four prominent men — Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Breitbart, Andrew Cockburn, and, most recently, Gore Vidal — who all had wildly diverging political views, but one salient characteristic in common: their scathing, take-no-prisoners political commentary. None of those guys exactly treated politics like a tea party. They didn’t wring their hands about whether they were hurting anybody’s feelings. or lose any sleep about whether they were being fair. On the contrary, all four were combative and sharp-tongued; each one of them clearly took pleasure in being, at least on occasion, extraordinarily vicious.

Which is why I found the wanly polite reactions to their deaths, at least in some quarters, to be puzzling. Some examples: on a listserv I’m on, some writers made it clear that they had sharply negative opinions about Alexander Cockburn, but were oddly reluctant to commit them to paper (and these were extremely voluble folks who are rarely shy about weighing in on anything else). When Gore Vidal passed away, sunny obituaries like this one seriously downplayed the man’s bigotry (and I say that as someone who holds mixed, but more positive than not, opinions of Vidal’s work. David Greenberg provides a useful corrective here). Heck, when Andrew Breitbart ascended to that choir invisible even I, who possess unmitigated loathing for the man, held back. I was afraid if I unloaded on Facebook or a listserv with my uncensored opinions of him, I’d be castigated as a prime example of the Indecent Left.

Suffice it to say, I’ve come to rethink all of that. Why go soft on a public figure all of a sudden, just because that person happens to be dead?

Now, I perfectly understand that when a private citizen dies, you don’t want to be the kind of prize idiot who’s badmouthing him at the funeral in front of the grieving widow. But when a public figure dies, it is entirely appropriate to examine that person’s entire legacy, and not hold back. Holding yourself up to that kind of public scrutiny is basically part of the job description, if you are a public figure. If you don’t like it, you need to seek some other line of work.

One of my email correspondents explained that he didn’t want to write anything negative about a recently deceased public figure because he wanted to spare the grieving family’s feelings. In reply, one wit chimed in, “The time to feel sorry for the family was when the person was alive,” but that doesn’t quite get at it, either.

The fact is, a public person’s public life and legacy do not belong to her family, it belongs to the world at large. To censor oneself and deprive the general public of a full and frank discussion out of consideration of the private feelings of a few individuals reflects distorted priorities. It would be selfish and narrow in the extreme if the loved ones of a public figure believed that that person belonged to them and only to them, and should be immune from criticism. If we took that attitude to its logical conclusion, all intellectual life in this country would stop dead in its tracks.

Okay, so I think we can agree that the “sparing the feelings of the family” justification for avoiding honest discussions about the merits, or lack thereof, of dead people, is a load of bunkum. Are there any better arguments out there?

One might be, “I don’t speak ill of the dead because I hope when I’m gone, I’m repaid in kind.” My response to that is, good luck with that one, buddy, especially if you’re on the left and you don’t want conservatives to attack you when you shuffle off this mortal coil. It’s human nature for people to say mean things, and it’s probably more likely that they will say them when you’re gone than when you’re still here to defend yourself. And for whatever reason, many conservatives seem less constrained than many liberals are by these middle class niceties

Yuppie careerism, in the form of wanting to advance oneself by protecting the reputations of powerful people, even when they’re dead, and even when those reputations are totally undeserved — well, that definitely is sometimes a reason why people abide by this convention, but it’s hardly a creditable one.

Finally, there’s one more reason I can think of for whitewashing the dead: sheer wimpiness. And that, to be honest, is what got a hold of me when Breitbart took his dirt nap.

The prissy delicacy with which so many commentators treated the passings of Messrs. Hitchens, Breitbart, Cockburn, and Vidal was all the more annoying because, though each one of them had, in their time, written some fairly venomous obituaries themselves, they were also tough-minded enough to understand that turnabout is fair play. Take, for example, Cockburn on Irving Howe; Breitbart on Ted Kennedy; Vidal, who described Truman Capote’s death as “a good career move,” and Christopher Hitchens, who when Mother Teresa died, gleefully seized upon it as an opportunity to start energetically making the rounds to promote his vicious book about her (which I actually think is kind of awesome).

My feelings about this issue explain why, all too frequently, I find the obituaries in American newspapers — genteel, respectful, and often bleached of any hint of color, with all pertinent conflicts and controversies either sentimentalized or all but erased — to be maddening. I much prefer the warts-and-all style obituaries that British newspapers such as The Independent have longed specialized in.

That said, America has not been without its lively obituaries. In the 90s and early 00s, there was an excellent obituary zine called Goodbye!; it is still online, and you can find the back issues here. Its motto was “Because the dead can’t sue for libel,” and it contained many fine essays on the recently departed, famous, infamous, and obscure. On this slow news and blogging day, I strongly encourage you to browse its archives. I think my favorite Miller piece has got to be this one, on the death of Harvey Ball, surely one of history’s greatest monsters, because he created the Smiley Face. The obit contains this classic line: “Hey Smiley – your old man just died! Still smiling?”

You may wonder why Goodbye! stopped publishing, and whether Mr. Miller succumbed to the unfortunate, if inevitable, fate of all the subjects he so faithfully chronicled. Fear not! In a rare instance of virtue being rewarded (didn’t Oscar Wilde say something to the effect of that’s why they call it fiction?), Mr. Miller now does this sort of thing for a living, at the Wall Street Journal. I miss the punk rock edge of Goodbye! but I can hardly fault Mr. Miller for forsaking his zine for a steady paycheck.

Steve was actually a friend of mine back in my NYC days, though unfortunately we’ve lost touch over the years. A fascinating fact about him is that he is a survivor of the WTC attacks — he was on one of the upper floors of the towers on September 11th. Interestingly, he doesn’t think — or at least, did not think at the time — that the experience changed his approach to writing obituaries very much. He still appears to enthusiastically favor speaking ill of the dead. As do I!

 

By: Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 4, 2012

August 6, 2012 Posted by | Media | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Romney’s Olympic Tax Myth”: Like A Designer Drug For The Fox News Set

More than catnip, this latest conservative tax myth is like a designer drug for the Fox News set, tailored perfectly for maximum impact at a time when Americans are hungry for anything Olympics-related. The offense: According to Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist’s anti-tax outfit, President Obama’s IRS will tax Olympic winners up to $9,000 after they return home victorious from London. Conservative blogs are having a field day and Republican politicians are clamoring to capitalize on news. Darling Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida introduced a bill to exempt Olympians’ winnings from taxes and an adviser to Mitt Romney told reporters today, “He believes that there should be no taxation of the type you are describing.” They’re calling on Obama to support the plan.

The only problem: It’s not really true. In addition to their medals, American winners are given prize money from the U.S. Olympic Committee: $25,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver, and $10,000 for bronze. Their medals are also worth about $675, $385 and under $5, respectively. ATR says this all gets taxed at 35 percent, meaning a gold medalist owes $8,986, silver winners owe $5,385, and bronzers owe $3,502.

First off, the medals aren’t subject to taxes. Mark Jones, the communications director for the U.S. Olympic Committee told Salon in an email, “There is no ‘value’ to medals and there is no tax associated with it.”

As for the prize money, according to Politifact, ATR’s claim is “mostly false.” Consulting accountants who have worked with athletes, the fact-checking website noted that while the money is certainly taxable, athletes could deduct all the expenses that went into getting them to the podium, including travel costs, equipment, training and coaching fees from the previous year. Those are all considered business expenses, and could lower or even eliminate an athlete’s tax liability, depending how much they spent. Moreover, the 35 percent rate assumes athletes are in the highest income bracket, earning over $380,000 a year. While some Olympians certainly make millions, the majority of athletes probably do not. Many are barely scraping by, lacking sponsorship deals and unable to work full-time due to training demands. (We wrote yesterday about marathoner Guor Marial, who works from 11 p.m. to 9 a.m. at a home for mentally disabled adults every night so he can spend his days training.) This would put them in a lower tax bracket where they would pay far less, or even nothing, on their winnings, even before deductions.

A quick Nexis search revealed zero stories from 2004 and 2008 about Olympians being taxed for their winnings. One would think, judging by how much attention the story is getting today, that there would have been articles written then about disappointed athletes who returned home to find a hefty tax bill. We did find several stories like that, but they were all from Canada.

Moreover, while it may be politically popular to exempt Olympic winnings, there’s no real reason why they should be treated any differently from, say, the prize money that comes with winning a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize, or even the lottery, all of which are taxed like any other income. Past Nobel laureates have complained about being taxed for their prize, which at about $1.4 million, would produce a much larger bill than the gold medalist’s winnings.

“There is no principled basis to tax Olympic prizes any less than Nobel prizes, earnings or lottery winnings. If Congress wants to give Olympic winners more money, it should transparently give them more money rather than create an obscure tax expenditure to do exactly the same thing,” David Miller, a tax attorney with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP in New York, told Salon.

So Rubio and Romney, are Nobel laureates any less deserving than Olympians of special treatment?

 

By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, August 2, 2012

August 4, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Demented Dominion”: Jim DeMint Claims Romney Personally Pledged Support For Pushing Tea Party Agenda In First 100 Days

Senator Jim DeMint is all smiles. Ted Cruz’s upset victory in Texas’s Republican Senate primary means the conservative wing of the GOP conference, a bloc the second-term lawmaker from South Carolina shepherds, will almost certainly increase its ranks.

“This confirms that there is a new political reality,” DeMint tells National Review Online in an interview in his office. “The people who are winning, for the Senate particularly, are those who are telling Americans the truth.”

Political observers expect Cruz, should he win in November, to join DeMint’s coalition of tea-party favorites, which includes Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, among others.

DeMint agrees that Cruz would be an ally, but he emphasizes that he is looking for an ideological partner, not a political loyalist. Cruz’s rise has not whetted DeMint’s ambitions. “I have no intention of running for leader,” he says, when asked whether he will challenge Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader. “I’ve been a leader ever since I walked in the Senate door. You don’t have to be elected to lead.”

Besides, DeMint says, McConnell sees the signals coming out of Texas, Indiana, and other states where tea-party candidateshave won. And as a savvy operator, McConnell is probably not looking to buck the newcomers.

“Elected leaders carry an important administrative function, but they are going to reflect the conference,” DeMint tells me. “If the conference is moving in the right direction, our leaders will move in the right direction.”

A week ago, DeMint traveled to Texas, where he stumped for Cruz alongside former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Standing with the youthful contender and Palin in Houston in front of thousands of voters was “pretty emotional,” DeMint recalls. “For so long, the party bosses controlled all the money and picked the candidates, pretty much deciding who they would run as a Republican.” These days, thanks to conservative activists and the rise of the Tea Party, “that has totally changed.”

Last summer, DeMint was one of the first conservative leaders to endorse Cruz, who was then an unknown. DeMint weighed in early to send a message to his fellow Republicans. “There is not enough urgency around here,” he says, commenting on Capitol Hill’s ongoing fiscal debate. “But when I got to know Ted, it became clear that he is ready to make the hard choices — and they’ll need to be made.”

DeMint already has a legislative plan ready for Cruz’s arrival. “If we get the [Senate] majority and the White House, we have got to pass a budget that sets up the structure, through reconciliation, to repeal Obamacare by killing the mandate,” he says. He also wants to “totally redo our tax code,” put “Medicare on a sustainable course,” and “deal with Social Security.” But should Republicans win then stumble, “it’d be betrayal to our country.”

“We need to do it in the first 100 days,” DeMint says. “[Mitt] Romney has told me, face to face, that he knows that he needs to get these things done right away. He is looking at this as a one-term proposition.”

DeMint acknowledges that reform faces many hurdles, but come January, the 60-year-old senator is optimistic that he’ll have a slew of tea-party senators ready to help. “Ted Cruz, Richard Mourdock, Deb Fischer, hopefully Mark Neumann, these folks will hopefully come in and bring a lot of closet conservatives in the Republican party out in the open,” DeMint chuckles. “Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Mike Lee — they have the sense of urgency. But they are outnumbered.”

“If we get four or five more like them, it will embolden a lot of [Senate] Republicans who are conservative at heart, but got into a business-as-usual rut and don’t want to rock the boat,” DeMint says. “Now, if they see the boat rocking, I think it might help us.”

 

By: Robert Costa, National Review, August 2, 2012

August 3, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The New Wedge Issue”: It’s A Scary Time To Be A Woman

Last Friday, the Obama campaign released an ad in several swing states attacking Mitt Romney for his stance on abortion. “It’s a scary time to be a woman—Mitt Romney is just so out of touch,” says a woman named Jenni. A narrator explains that Mitt Romney opposes requiring insurance coverage for contraceptives, supports overturning Roe v. Wade, and once backed a bill that would outlaw all abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. The ad concludes: “We need to attack our problems, not a woman’s choice.”

In recent elections, presidential candidates have been wary of diving into explosive abortion politics; in 2008, only $4 million was spent on abortion-related advertising, compared with $39 million on budget-related ads or $88 million on environmental ones. It’s an issue the public remains divided on. According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” hit a record low of 41 percent this year, while those describing themselves as “pro-life” hovered around 50 percent. “The minute you take positions on the abortion issue, there are a lot of people you’re alienating,” explains Susan Carroll, a Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “Usually, candidates try to run away from the issue.” So why is the Obama campaign running toward it?

One reason might be to remind voters of the “War on Women.” Republican lawmakers’ and presidential candidates’ ugly policy proposals this spring—forcing vaginal ultrasounds, defunding Planned Parenthood, weakening the Violence Against Women Act, fighting access to contraception—created an opportunity for Democrats to shave off women voters from the GOP. President Obama had the support of fewer than half of women under 50 in February; by April he was polling above 60 percent, outgunning Romney 2-to-1. But the gap has narrowed in recent months. The Obama ad serves both to remind women of the GOP’s recent history and to tie Romney to the attack on reproductive rights.

Still, the question remains why the Obama campaign didn’t stick to safer ground, focusing on the GOP’s attacks on contraception or maternity care—both broadly unpopular. The answer lies in the Republican Party’s shift to the right. A decade ago, between 30 and 40 percent of Republicans identified as pro-choice. This May, that number was a scant 22 percent. It’s hard to know whether that’s the result of Republicans changing their minds about abortion, or pro-choice respondents ceasing to identify as Republicans. But the result is the same: The party is increasingly uniform in its opposition to abortion.

This, in turn, has opened up an opportunity for Democrats. For most Americans, the abortion question is not all-or-nothing—it’s about where one draws the line. Opinion polling on abortion is highly sensitive to phrasing; despite a majority of the country identifying as “pro-life,” polls also consistently show that a majority of respondents supports access to abortion in at least some circumstances. Politicians have been walking this tightrope for years—“I’m personally pro-life but believe in a woman’s right to choose”; “I believe the issue should be left up to the states to decide”; “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” With the GOP moving further to the right, a wider space has opened for Democrats to pick up abortion moderates. As Ed Kilgore wrote in Washington Monthly earlier this year, if a woman’s right to choose continues to be eroded around the country, it could become more likely that the quiet pro-choice sentiments of the American majority will emerge as a political force.

Romney, meanwhile, is feeling the squeeze. His campaign has disputed the charge that the former Massachusetts governor wants to ban abortion in all circumstances, pointing to remarks he’s made that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and maternal health. But Romney is limited in how forcefully he can counter the Obama team’s claims lest he upset the conservative base. It’s the basic problem Romney faces across the board: He must appease absolutists while still appearing reasonable enough for the general election. It’s a balancing act the Republican Party’s standardbearers are going to have to struggle with as long as the party champions ideological purity.

 

By: Daniel Townsend, The American Prospect, August 2, 2012

August 3, 2012 Posted by | Abortion, Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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