“Keeping The Family Name In Our Faces Forever”: The Palin’s Are Our Punishment Forever
There was good news and bad news for Sarah Palin in the self-consciously ridiculous Public Policy Polling survey of Iowans for their preferences in the 2016 presidential contest (I mean, Caucus campaigning starts pretty damn early, but not this early!). On the one hand, she has an impressive 70/17 favorable/unfavorable rating among Iowa Republicans. On the other hand, only 10% of them chose her as their 2016 presidential favorite, tied for fourth with Jeb Bush.
But there’s fresh evidence that Palin’s real motive in life, other than continuing to pose as the ultimate pain-free martyr, is to keep the family name in our faces for, well, as long as any of us live. And it’s on that depressing note that I observe in terror that Bristol Palin is back in the news as a political blogger.
Yes, on the day after the president’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage, Alaska’s best known sexual abstinence advocate/unwed mother is lighting up conservative browsers everywhere with an attack on Obama for paying attention to his daughters’ opinions.
If you have your blood pressure under control, you can read the whole mess, but her train of logic seems to be that everybody gets all alarmed by the possibility that Christian women might submit to their husbands if they run for public office, and here’s The One submitting to his daughters, and everybody thinks that’s just fine!
I got angry enough about Bristol’s planted axiom that only conservative Republican women like Michele Bachmann (and presumably Bristol’s own mother) are “Christians” that I barely made it to the second howler. Not that she is listening, but someone really ought to inform her that people wondered about Bachmann submitting to her husband because she was repeatedly on record saying that’s exactly what she did, as a matter of Divine Law. Lots of Dominionist-influenced Christian Nationalists say and think that, you betcha! The questions did not come out of the blue.
While they are at it, Ms. Palin’s interlocuters might want to explain to her that when discussing same-sex marriage as something of a generational issue, it was rather natural for Obama to mention the views of immediate family members from a younger generation! I mean, they are right there at the White House; he didn’t have to hire a pollster or anything!
To be clear, I am not mocking Bristol Palin when I offer these responses. She has the last laugh on me, and on all of us. Like her mother, she has a knack of luring people who know better into paying attention to her rants. In my defense, I’ll say that some of Sarah Palin’s most casual, fact-free rants have wound up in national GOP talking points, leading millions of anxious seniors to believe that the President of the United States wants to have them euthanized. It’s sometimes best to get a head start on Palin-generated nonsense, or in this case, on the next generation of Palins.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 10, 2012
“The Branstad Rule”: GOP Governor Uses Tax Loophole To Cut His State Income Tax Bill To $52
President Obama and Senate Democrats have been trying to implement the Buffett rule, a minimum tax on millionaires, which would remedy the problem of millionaires being able to pay lower tax rates than middle class families. One state lawmaker in Iowa thinks his state needs its own version — the Branstad rule — after Gov. Terry Branstad (R-IA) was able to pay just $52in state income taxes on his nearly $200,000 in income:
Gov. Terry Branstad’s $52 state income tax bill in 2011 is proof that fixes are needed in the tax system, Sen. Robert Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids said today.
“Some people talk about nationally we need a Buffet rule, maybe in Iowa we need a Branstad rule,” said Hogg, who additionally noted that a person making between $30,000 to $40,000 a year can expect to pay somewhere around $1,000 or more in state income tax.
Branstad was able to pay such a low amount because Iowa is one of just six states in the country that allows residents to write off their federal income tax payments from the previous year on their current year’s tax return. So Branstad was able to apply his 2010 federal income tax payments — which were paid on the salary he received from his prior job as the president of Des Moines University — to this year’s state income tax bill.
Iowa loses $642 million annually due to this provision, nearly one quarter of its total income tax revenue. More than half of the benefit of the deduction goes to the richest 5 percent of Iowans, while 76 percent of the benefits go to the richest 20 percent. “States should take a hard look at eliminating, or at least capping, their deduction because of the impact this lopsided tax policy has on state budgets and tax fairness,” the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy wrote. Branstad’s administration called his low tax bill an anomaly.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, April 25, 2012
Wisconsin Recall More Popular Than Republican Primaries
America is almost four weeks into the voting stage of the Republican presidential race. The candidates are debating. The media is covering the competition 24/7, and in such minute detail that Rick Perry’s quitting of the contest was treated as news. And Republicans in three states have caucused and voted in numbers that party leaders, pundits and the talk-radio amen corner tell us are significant.
Yet at the same time, those same party leaders, pundits and radio talkers continue to dismiss the movement to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as a false construct with little real hope of prevailing.
Fair enough, let’s compare.
Since January 3, Republican caucuses have been held in Iowa (with an electorate of 2,231,589), and Republican primaries have been held in New Hampshire (electorate of 998,799) and South Carolina (electorate of 3,385,224).
That adds up to a total electorate of 6,615,612 in the trio of first- (and second- and third-) in-the-nation states.
Turnout for the Iowa caucuses is now pegged at 121,479. Turnout in the New Hampshire primary was 248,448. Turnout in the South Carolina primary was 601,166.
That adds up to a total turnout of 971,093, or about 14.5 percent of the possible voters in the three states.
And what of Wisconsin?
The state has an electorate of 4,170,501.
The United Wisconsin petition drive to recall anti-labor Governor Scott Walker collected significantly more than 1 million signatures.
Rounding to a million, that’s about 23.9 percent of the possible voters in the state.
So here’s what we know:
1. If you add up all the caucus and primary votes that have been cast so far for Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, the former Rick Perry, the former Jon Huntsman, the former Michele Bachmann and the eternal Buddy Roemer, they still have not attracted as much support as has the drive to recall Scott Walker.
2. If you compare the percentage of the electorate in the three caucus and primary states that has expressed support for all the Republicans who would be president, it is dramatically lower than the percentage of the Wisconsin electorate that wants to recall Scott Walker.
3. If you add the total number of names on petitions filed January 17 to recall other Republicans in Wisconsin—Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald and three of Fitzgerald’s colleagues—the total number of signatures filed in support of the recall of Walker and his cronies is close to 1,940,000. That figure is just about double the number of votes cast in all the Republican presidential contests for all the Republican presidential candidates so far this year.
Conclusion: if the Republican presidential race is a serious endeavor, the Wisconsin drive to recall Scott Walker, Rebecca Kleefisch, Scott Fitzgerald and their compatriots is doubly serious. And far, far more popular with the available electorate.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 28, 2012
Mitt Romney’s “Not-A-Mandate” Iowa Victory
Mitt Romney and his backers decided that to win in Iowa they had to destroy Newt Gingrich’s campaign. Now Gingrich looks eager — and able — to return the favor.
Romney got his victory, but it doesn’t feel much like one. It’s embarrassing that the supposed Republican front-runner managed to beat Rick Santorum by only eight votes out of about 120,000 cast in Tuesday’s caucuses. It’s troubling that Romney has spent the past five years campaigning in Iowa and still could draw just one-quarter of the vote.
And it’s downright ominous that Gingrich is threatening to do whatever he can to block Romney’s path to the nomination. If the sneering description of Romney in Gingrich’s post-caucus speech Tuesday is a preview — he called him a “Massachusetts moderate” who is “pretty good at managing the decay” — this could get ugly.
I mean uglier. Sometimes it seems as if niceness is Iowa’s state religion, but the way Romney and his crew took Gingrich apart was vicious. A pro-Romney political action committee, Restore Our Future, spent more than $4 million ensuring that Iowans couldn’t watch 10 minutes of television without being assaulted by an ad explaining why Gingrich was a scoundrel, a knave, a hack, a goon or — shudder — a closet liberal.
Romney could claim distance from this sordid barrage since Restore Our Future is “independent,” wink wink, of the campaign. There was a certain poetic justice, since Gingrich has done as much as any individual to make U.S. political rhetoric a blood sport. Could it be that the man who calls Barack Obama a “food-stamp president” can’t take a little heat?
But Gingrich is furious — perhaps not just because he believes that the negative advertising was unfair but because he knows that it was brutally effective. He had surged ahead of Romney and seemed to have a viable path to the nomination. Tuesday night, after being worked over, Gingrich won just 13 percent of the vote and finished fourth.
It’s doubtful Gingrich can become the nominee. But he can inflict as much damage as possible on Romney, especially in this weekend’s two New Hampshire debates.
Gingrich is smart enough to know that the effect will be to give Santorum the time and space he needs to begin building a campaign organization that can compete with Romney’s. This de facto anti-Romney alliance, if it materializes, will be one of convenience, not conviction. But it could be effective.
The Iowa campaign proved what pollsters have been telling us all along: Republicans just don’t like Mitt Romney very much.
Oh, they like him much better than they like Obama. But this past week in Iowa, while it was easy to find support for Romney, it was hard to find passion. Crowds didn’t swoon over Romney the way they did over Ron Paul or Michele Bachmann. Many of the staunch conservatives who dominate Republican politics here simply do not believe that Romney is one of their own.
“I would never vote for Mitt Romney, even if he were the nominee,” said Phil Grove, whom I met Monday afternoon at a Bachmann rally in West Des Moines.
Grove, a chemist, and his wife Sue, a nurse, were still undecided — the caucuses were just a day away — and had reasons for rejecting each candidate. Santorum and Gingrich were creatures of Washington, they said; Bachmann and Paul had good ideas but probably couldn’t beat Obama. Romney, though, was seen by the couple as simply beyond the pale.
Romney’s good fortune is that true-believer conservatives have had multiple candidates from which to choose — until now. With Bachmann dropping out and Rick Perry staggering, the race becomes — from Romney’s point of view — disturbingly simple.
He comes out of Iowa with a win, in the technical sense, but also with a new chief rival who has the potential to do fairly well in New Hampshire and very well in South Carolina. Given the shrinking field, there will be room for Santorum’s support to grow if he campaigns effectively.
Romney, meanwhile, still hasn’t proved that he can break through that 25 percent ceiling he keeps bumping against. And he has to deal with a Newt Gingrich who is wounded, angry and able to make himself the center of attention — the political equivalent of a snarling wolverine.
Yes, a funny thing happened on the way to the coronation.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 4, 2012
Rick Santorum Has the “Heart and Faith” Necessary For Imperialism
Despite sponsoring foreign-policy legislation while in the United States Senate and preparing to run for the presidency, Rick Santorum has embarrassed himself time and again during the GOP primary when making statements about the rest of the world. The most recent example is his cartoonishly simplistic understanding of the British Empire’s decline from its 20th-century peak.
Here’s what he told a crowd Monday in Iowa, as reported by The Huffington Post’sElise Foley:
“If you look at every European country that has had world domination, a world presence, from the French to the British — 100 years ago, the sun didn’t set on the British Empire,” Santorum said at an appearance in Sioux City, Iowa. “If you look at that empire today — why? Because they lost heart and faith in their heart in themselves and in their mission, who they were and what values they wanted to spread around the world. Not just for the betterment of the world, but safety and security and the benefit of their country.” “We have taken up that cause,” Santorum added. But now, he said, “We have a president who doesn’t believe in America.”
This proved too much for Daniel Larison:
Yes, it couldn’t have had anything to do with two exhausting global conflicts that cost the lives of millions of British subjects, or the financial ruin of Britain that followed these conflicts. The British just “lost heart and faith in their heart in themselves and in their mission.” Obviously, the only thing needed to maintain “world domination” is self-confidence and resolve.
The mockery is deserved, and piling on is necessary, for it’s getting wearisome to take seriously someone who claims to venerate America’s founding values, bristles at the notion that foreign occupations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan suggest an imperial mindset, and yet asserts that Great Britain failed the world when it stopped trying to rule a fifth of its inhabitants. One wonders how long he thinks the British should’ve asserted their will in India, Ireland, and its North African colonies, among other places, and why he thinks maintenance of these colonies always enhanced rather than detracted from the safety and prosperity of the home islands.
“Believing in America” should entail an embrace of the values on which it was founded: the idea that all humans are endowed with self-evident, inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But in Santorum’s twisted formulation, belief in America requires an embrace of its military footprint in multiple foreign nations, something he apparently regards as our “cause.” In other words, the problem isn’t just that Santorum has a naive, simplistic and woefully inadequate understanding of how empires rise and fall, it’s that he regards global domination as this nation’s proper object — as if we’re called to be a hegemon on a hill rather than a city.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, January 3, 2012
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