“Dire Consequences And Denial”: With Their Jobs Secure, Republicans Could Less About The Rest Of America
The sequester’s automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are set to go into effect on Friday, and there is no plan as yet to stop it.
America, this is your feeble government at its most ineffective and self-destructive.
The White House favors a balanced plan that would include spending cuts and some tax increases for the wealthy. Republicans reject any solution that includes tax increases.
These are two fundamentally different perspectives, only one of which is supported by a majority of Americans.
A Pew Research Center/USA Today survey released Thursday found that only 19 percent of Americans believe that the focus of deficit reduction should be only on spending cuts. Seventy-six percent want a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, with more emphasis on the former than the latter.
But the impasse could have dire consequences. A study last year by Stephen S. Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, estimates that the sequester could cost 2.14 million jobs and add 1.5 percentage points to the unemployment rate. Fuller’s analysis was cited in a Congressional Research Service report prepared for members of Congress.
What’s more, the sequester would reduce military spending by $42.7 billion; nonmilitary discretionary spending would drop $28.7 billion, in addition to a mandatory $9.9 billion reduction in Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In anticipation of the very real possibility that the sequester could come to pass, some Republicans are leaning on the shoulder of an old friend: denial.
This week on CNN, Senator Rand Paul pronounced the $85 billion in mandated cuts a “pittance” and a “yawn” that is “just really nibbling at the edges.” He also called President Obama’s warnings about the sequester’s impact “histrionics,” “ridiculousness” and “emotionalism.”
What a perfect segue to Rush Limbaugh, who took to the air this week to denounce predictions about the sequester’s effects as a “manufactured” crisis, saying that “for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country.”
Limbaugh continued:
“In truth, we’re gonna spend more this year than we spent last year. We’re just not gonna spend as much as was projected. It’s all baseline budgeting. There is no real cut below a baseline of zero. There just isn’t. Yet here they come, sucking us in, roping us in. Panic here, fear there: Crisis, destruction, no meat inspection, no cops, no teachers, no firefighters, no air traffic control. I’m sorry, my days of getting roped into all this are over.”
Those not denying the crisis are hoping to exploit it.
Karl Rove, writing in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, called the president “a once-in-a-generation demagogue with a compliant press corps” who will subject the American people in the short term to a “slew of presidential photo-ops with those whom he claims will lose jobs.” Mr. Rove advised House Republicans to “pass a continuing resolution next week to fund the government for the balance of the fiscal year at the lower level dictated by the sequester — with language granting the executive branch the flexibility to move funds from less vital activities to more important ones.”
Rove supports the steep cuts but wants to allow the president “flexibility” in applying them. That Rove is as slick as an eel. In other words, he wants to force the president to rob Peter to pay Paul and take the flak for making all the tough choices.
Another Pew Research Poll released this week found that although many Americans favor cutting government spending in the abstract, most don’t agree with cuts to specific programs. “For 18 of 19 programs tested, majorities want either to increase spending or maintain it at current levels,” Pew found. “The only exception is assistance for needy people around the world.”
Ah, foreign aid, the tired old whipping horse that would do virtually nothing to reduce the deficit, as it accounts for a paltry 1 percent of the federal budget.
Rove’s plan to shift to the president the burden of choosing where to bring down the ax is Rove’s way of getting Republicans “to win public opinion to their side.” That is a roundabout way of acknowledging that right now they’re losing. A Bloomberg poll released this week found the president’s job-approval rating at its highest level and the Republican Party’s favorable rating at its lowest since September 2009.
Furthermore, the Pew/USA Today survey found that if a deal isn’t reached in time, about half the public will blame Congressional Republicans while fewer than a third will blame the president.
And if the sequester happens, we’ll all lose. It will be a disaster for the job market and the economy. But no one can accuse these politicians and pundits of caring about such things as long as their own jobs are secure.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 22, 2013
“The Unsubstantiated Smear”: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, And The Smear-Tacular Tea Party GOP
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has gotten a lot of grief lately, and for good reason. His speculation about whether Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel received secret payments from North Korea was the kind of unsubstantiated smear that takes your breath away. But in all the ballyhoo over Cruz something else seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle: the extent to which the unsubstantiated smear has become stock in trade for Tea Party senators.
Take, for example, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. Earlier this month he gave a speech in which he set out to “describe” what “patriots,” “people who like freedom,” and “people who like this country” are “up against” these days. The answer: “liberals, progressives, Democrats, whatever they call themselves nowadays, Socialists, Marxists.”
That’s right, Senator Johnson. Having determined that the term “liberal” is too freighted with negative connotations, there are a lot of us Democrats calling ourselves Marxists these days. It’s a bit of rebranding and we have high hopes.
But regardless of what we call ourselves, the implication of Johnson’s observation is pretty clear: on the one side you have patriots (people like Johnson), and on the other you have people who neither love freedom nor America—those are the Democrats.
In the same speech, Johnson said “Liberals have had control of our culture now for about 20 years.” It’s part of their “diabolically simple” strategy to undo America. Wow, liberals must be a pretty nefarious bunch. Need proof? Johnson doesn’t offer much, but maybe he doesn’t need to. Twenty years ago was 1993. That year cross-dressing home wrecker Mrs. Doubtfire took the country by storm. It was pretty much everything liberals stand for in 125 minutes of heart-tugging hilarity.
And if Cruz and Johnson aren’t enough for you, take a listen to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. In a recent interview with NPR Paul was asked to explain how Mitt Romney could have lost in 2012. Paul’s explanation: “it is much easier to offer people something for nothing, than it is to tell people that in reality hard work and sweat equity is how a country gets rich.” That evidently appealed to Obama voters because the president said “he was going to take from the rich and give to the poor. And there’s always more poor than there are rich. So, you can see in a democracy it’s easier to sell that message.”
Oh, OK. The way to success in America is hard work. But “poor” people would rather have the spoils of success handed to them than have to work hard. So a president who promises to do that has found himself a winning message. What a terrific view of people who labor at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder, the aspirations they have for themselves and their families, and the kinds of things they think about when they go to the voting booth (to say nothing of how it characterizes Obama supporters: we’re lazy, and just looking for a handout.)
To be sure, this isn’t the first time we’ve ever heard people say things like that. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Dinesh D’Souza have been peddling this pabulum for years. And anyone who’s been in the middle of a congressional election with a Tea Party candidate has heard all of this and more.
But the frequency with which this kind of rhetoric emanates from conservative quarters ought not to inure us to its impact. It encourages the transformation of ideological differences into bright lines that allegedly divide good people from bad, and it gives sanction to the notion that difference is itself sufficient evidence that the other person could be engaged in any manner of nefarious conduct.
It’s the kind of thing that you’d like to think wouldn’t work in the American political system. But for the last couple of election cycles its worked like gangbusters, tapping a deep vein of grievance that animates the Tea Party, a myopic sense of victimhood and entitlement.
So holding Senator Cruz to account for his slander was a good thing. But if the recent past is any indication, the smear isn’t going anywhere. It wins votes. And that should be troubling to all of us, Democrats and Republicans, who share the pluralistic notions of democracy to which our country has long aspired.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World report, February 21, 2013
“Staying Stupid”: Why The ‘Hip’ Young Republicans Can’t Change Their Party Or Themselves
Savvy Republicans know that something is deeply wrong with the GOP – frequently mocked these days by Republicans themselves as “the stupid party” — which has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Some have noticed as well that their congressional majority is so widely despised – its main achievement being historically low public approval ratings — as to be sustainable only by gerrymandering. During the last election cycle, those fearsome Republican SuperPACs, funded by the overlords of Wall Street and Las Vegas, spent hundreds of millions of dollars – with no discernible impact on an alienated electorate.
The result is a burgeoning self-improvement movement on the right, generating introspective articles and interviews in which Republicans ask: “What is wrong with us? How can we change? What must we do to avoid partisan extinction?”
But like many troubled people grappling with serious life issues, they aren’t truly ready for change. They want to maintain the status quo while giving lip service to reform – and changing as little as possible beyond the superficial. They would do anything to project a fresher image, more attractive and effective, without confronting their deeper problems.
The deceptions involved in this process are perfectly exposed in Robert Draper’s fascinating excursion among the urbane young Republicans whose frustration he skillfully reported in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. His account is well worth reading, if only to observe these self-consciously “hip” conservatives confronting the reality of last November – and failing utterly to comprehend its meaning. Early in Draper’s article, a GOP technology consultant notes that the youth vote for President Obama grew by 1.25 million in 2012 over 2008 (precisely the opposite of what most pundits and pollsters predicted). But he doesn’t seem to realize that the youth gap cannot be remedied by stronger social media or updated voter files.
The young Republicans bitterly mock the Romney campaign’s technological ineptitude, and complain more broadly about the party’s repellent reputation among young voters, minorities, gays, immigrants, women, and everyone sympathetic to them. They largely seem to believe that if the Republican National Committee would hire people like them – and if Rush Limbaugh and Todd Akin would simply shut the eff up – then the party could expand beyond its narrow, aging, white, and religiously conservative base.
As they hasten to assure Draper, these dissidents would adopt a friendlier attitude toward those who are different, and are even eager to engineer a few minor platform alterations to accommodate immigrants or gays.
But why would they make such concessions to decency? Not out of any sense of justice or shame. They are not interested in social justice and they only feel ashamed of losing. Rather than honestly confronting the harm done by pandering to bigotry and division, they’d prefer to paper it over with a smiley face and move on.
By proclaiming that their defeats are due mainly to technological inferiority or bad messaging, the young Republicans ignore the underlying source of popular disdain for their party. It is true that their technology was feeble, their candidate and consultants were incompetent, and their messaging was often repellent. But the self-styled hipsters of the right are in fact not much different from the Tea Party octogenarians in their hostility to government investment, social insurance, health care, education, and industry – and both are in conflict with the evolving attitudes of young Americans across all demographic lines.
The disgruntled figures who spoke with Draper represent almost nobody in the GOP, compared with the legions commanded by Limbaugh and the religious right. But if their fantasy could be made real, what shape would it take: A tech-savvy, gay-friendly, 21st-century Calvin Coolidge? A composite of Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Rand Paul?
Good luck with that.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, February 19, 2013
“The Tea Party Is Beating Mitch McConnell”: Tea Party Wins, Regardless Of The Primary Outcome
If Mitch McConnell isn’t conservative enough for you, Matt Bevin may be your guy. The Kentucky businessman is reportedly considering mounting a primary challenge against the Senate minority leader from the right, and has been reaching out to local Tea Party groups to secure support, according to the Hill’s Alexandra Jaffe:
Sarah Duran, president of the Louisville Tea Party, told The Hill that Bevin had been in touch with her over the phone to discuss his run multiple times over the past few weeks, and that he met with the group two weeks ago to discuss his interest in the race. […]
She added that other Tea Party groups had reached out to Bevin to encourage him to run, and that even “some people that have supported McConnell in the past” had been in touch with him about a potential bid.
Does Bevin have any chance of beating McConnell? Well, he’s wealthy and could presumably fund his own campaign, which would be crucial in taking on McConnell, who is sitting on a prodigious $7 million war chest. And McConnell is fairly weak — the least popular senator in the country, according to a recent PPP poll.
But Bevin’s campaign is a long shot, at best. McConnell is a savvy operator who will have the state’s entire GOP establishment behind him, endless supplies of money, and universal name ID, while Bevin is almost entirely unknown. And McConnell is hardly a RINO despised by the far right like Rich Lugar or other GOP senators who have fallen to Tea Party challenges.
Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a more moderate, less powerful senator in a more conservative state, held on to his seat last year in the face of a Tea Party challenge. A primary challenge against House Speaker John Boehner fizzled harmlessly as well. Over 90 percent of senators who seek reelection win, after all.
Still, that doesn’t mean that a Tea Party challenge is unimportant. For the movement, a primary challenge can be successful even if it fails, as long as it succeeds in pushing the target further to the right and making him more responsive to the far right’s demands.
And by that measure, Bevin may have already won.
Rumors that the Tea Party might target McConnell started even before Election Day last year, and the Republican leader stepped up his outreach accordingly. In August, he held a large rally with fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who is positioning himself as a national leader of the libertarian and Tea Party wings of the GOP, even though McConnell campaigned against Paul and the two have clashed in the Senate.
McConnell even hired Paul’s former campaign manager, Jesse Benton, to lead his own 2014 reelection bid. Benton also ran Ron Paul’s presidential campaign and has deep ties in the conservative activist community. “The year-long search that ended with Benton’s hiring was a major signal to Republicans that McConnell views support from the younger libertarian and tea party movements as crucial not only to his political future, but also to his party’s prospects nationally,” Politico noted at the time.
The bar is especially high for a leader like McConnell, who would like to not only win, but win by a large margin to discourage future challengers and show strength within his caucus back in Washington. Which is why he seems to be taking the threat seriously.
As he leads his party’s negotiations on sequestration, gun control, immigration and everything else in the next two years, he will know that it’s not just his colleagues’ reelections at stake, but his own as well. And that makes him less likely to cooperate with the White House and more interested in adhering to the hard-line positions set by the growing number of conservatives in his own caucus, whose support he will need next year. In other words, the Tea Party wins, regardless of the primary outcome.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, February 19, 2013
“The Tone Ain’t The Problem”: The GOP’s Woman Problem Is The GOP
Tuesday night was supposed to be another big step in the Republican rebranding, but it didn’t really turn out that way. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio proved more Aqua- than Superman. And Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the dark horse darling, turned into something of a snooze inducing sleep sheep.
But maybe GOP-ers can take solace from this: it doesn’t really matter. Because what Rubio and Paul did mere hours before their respective turns on the national stage likely did more long-term damage to the GOP brand than any speech could fix.
Our story starts all the way back in 1993. That’s when the Senate Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of then-senator Joe Biden, issued a report showing that women were disproportionately falling victim to some heinous crimes, crimes that were also less likely to be successfully prosecuted. In other words, if you robbed someone you were more likely to face punishment than if you raped them.
This, understandably, caused some pause. How could our criminal justice system be serving women so poorly? And what could be done to fix it?
One option was to continue to work at the state level to make things better, and that’s what some people did. But others looked at the years leading up to the Biden report and recognized that states had been doing the best they could to stop violent crimes against women for decades and their best wasn’t enough. That helped pave the way for federal engagement: the Violence Against Women Act, also known as VAWA. It’s been on the books for 20 years now.
Two days ago, 22 Republican senators decided that was a mistake. And it wasn’t just any group of 22—it featured many of the party’s leading lights: the presidential frontrunner, Rubio; his Tea Party rival Paul; two other Republicans who’ve occupied an increasing share of the national stage: Ted Cruz of Texas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin; the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky; and the immediate past head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, John Cornyn. They all voted against reauthorizing the law.
Why? Well, they offered all sorts of reasons, but most seemed aimed at the same place: the bill was an overreach. It made the definition of domestic violence too broad. It trampled the rights of defendants. It was doing something best left to the states.
If you think it unusual to hear some of these arguments coming out of the mouths of conservatives, you’re right. Under ordinary circumstances, it’s conservatives who prefer the sledgehammer approach to criminal justice, but here they say that’s the problem. And its conservatives who for decades have done more than anyone else to gut the due process rights of defendants. But now they rally to the cause of those accused of domestic violence? That’s quite a thing.
And sure, we hear the 10th Amendment argument raised just about every time a conservative wants the federal government to stop doing something. But here’s a news bulletin: the reason the Violence Against Women Act came into being in the first place was because the states weren’t getting it done. The 10th Amendment isn’t like putting on ruby slippers. Invoking it over and over again doesn’t make the federal government go away.
In any case, it’s hard not to see something a little less grandiose than constitutional scholarship underlying the Republican efforts. In the Heritage Foundation’s one pager urging a no vote, its authors warn that provisions of the bill will “increase fraud and false allegations [of abuse], for which there is no legal recourse”, and that “Under VAWA, men effectively lose their constitutional rights to due process, presumption of innocence, equal treatment under the law, the right to a fair trial and to confront one’s accusers, the right to bear arms, and all custody/visitation rights.” The bill is intended to protect women from deadly harm, but its pretty evident who the Heritage Foundation is preoccupied with protecting.
Think that’s an unfair characterization? Maybe. But this is a party whose right wing has found reason to oppose equal pay for women; which questioned whether Hilary Clinton was faking an emotional response at the Benghazi hearing; which raised objections to women serving equally in the military; and which seems to have developed a fetish for transvaginal ultrasound. Etc.
Now, to be sure, there were 23 Republicans in the Senate who found it within themselves to set aside whatever convoluted ideological calculations swept up their brethren, and voted yes on Tuesday. And that’s a good thing. But for the party that lost women in the last election by double digits, it’s hardly enough.
If Republicans really want to become more appealing to more of the electorate, here’s some advice: The tone ain’t great, but the tone ain’t the problem. When so many of your party leaders believe what these guys do, to mangle a phrase from James Carville, it’s the you, stupid. You’re the problem.
And you might want to try and fix that first.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, February 14, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 