“Unregenerated Paulism Strikes Again!”: What Changed In The Last Six Years For “Paul The Younger”?
Last week MoJo’s David Corn drew attention to the rather large flip-flop being executed by the junior senator from Kentucky with respect to America’s relationship with Russia:
Earlier this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) slammed President Barack Obama for not doing enough in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Crimea….
Paul went on to outline a number of steps he would take, were he president, including imposing economic sanctions and visa bans (which Obama has already implemented), kicking Russia out of the G-8, and building the Keystone XL pipeline. (He did not explain how helping a Canadian firm export tar sands oil would intimidate Putin.) He added, “I would reinstitute the missile-defense shields President Obama abandoned in 2009 in Poland and the Czech Republic.” He griped, “The real problem is that Russia’s President is not currently fearful or threatened in any way by America’s President, despite his country’s blatant aggression.”
This was, Corn noted, a million miles away from Rand Paul’s reaction to Russian aggression towards Georgia.
[W]hen Russia sent troops into Georgia (on George W. Bush’s watch), Paul didn’t want to provoke Russia by placing missiles in Poland. Yet today, when Russia moves into Ukraine (on Obama’s watch), he’s all for dispatching missiles to Poland to send a message to Putin. Does Paul care more about Crimea than Georgia? Or does he care more about keeping a foot on the GOP’s anti-Obama bandwagon? Paul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
It appears that Paul, an isolationist who doesn’t want to be isolated within the GOP, spotted the opportunity to develop some Obama-bashing hawk cred as the presidential campaign nears. “I stand with the people of Ukraine,” Paul declares now, though that was not what he said about Georgians. What’s changed in the past six years: geopolitics or Paul’s own political calculations?
Paul the Younger can safely survive exposure of his flip-flop by David Corn. But it’s a little more difficult for him to ignore Paul the Elder, who sees no need to change his own take on U.S. foreign policy, as indicated by his pungent op-ed at USAT today:
Residents of Crimea voted over the weekend on whether they would remain an autonomous region of Ukraine or join the Russian Federation. In so doing, they joined a number of countries and regions — including recently Scotland, Catalonia and Venice — that are seeking to secede from what they view as unresponsive or oppressive governments.
These latter three are proceeding without much notice, while the overwhelming Crimea vote to secede from Ukraine has incensed U.S. and European Union officials, and has led NATO closer to conflict with Russia than since the height of the Cold War.
What’s the big deal? Opponents of the Crimea vote like to point to the illegality of the referendum. But self-determination is a centerpiece of international law. Article I of the United Nations Charter points out clearly that the purpose of the U.N. is to “develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.”
Why does the U.S. care which flag will be hoisted on a small piece of land thousands of miles away?
Critics point to the Russian “occupation” of Crimea as evidence that no fair vote could have taken place. Where were these people when an election held in an Iraq occupied by U.S. troops was called a “triumph of democracy”?
Perhaps the U.S. officials who supported the unconstitutional overthrow of Ukraine’s government should refocus their energies on learning our own Constitution, which does not allow the U.S. government to overthrow governments overseas or send a billion dollars to bail out Ukraine and its international creditors.
Suffice it to say that “What’s the big deal?” is not a terribly popular position to take in contemporary Republican politics towards the infamous “weakness” of Barack Obama towards the rapacious Russian Empire. I suppose it’s possible Rand Paul is going to triangulate on his old man as a definitive illustration of his acceptability to the conventional conservative movement and its militaristic tendencies. Otherwise, there may be some tense moments at the next Paul family dinner.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 18, 2014
“And You Thought Christie Was Bad”: Report, Scott Walker’s Jobs Agency Pouring Money Into Red Districts, Neglecting Others
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has long been criticized for his state’s poor jobs numbers — but now the potential 2016 presidential candidate is under fire for the locations of the jobs that have been created.
In 2011, under Walker, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation was established as the state’s largest private-sector jobs agency. The WEDC’s purpose is to develop and facilitate economic programs that create new jobs or subsidize already existing ones. Using taxpayer money, the WEDC awards, grants, and loans money to businesses across the state.
According to a Citizen Action of Wisconsin report released in February, however, data reported by the WEDC shows “[jobs] impact concentrated in a handful of legislative districts” – specifically, districts represented by Republicans.
Furthermore, because red districts in the state are benefiting more from the WEDC than other districts are, members of the Republican Assembly who are in leadership positions benefit from a disproportionately increased number of jobs in their districts.
Using numbers reported by the WEDC, the report finds that Republican assembly districts have approximately 86 percent more jobs projected in the first quarter of the 2014 fiscal year than Democratic districts. While there are 453 jobs projected per Democratic district, an overwhelming 842 jobs are projected per Republican district.
Additionally, while over 6,000 jobs are projected to be created in just one GOP assembly district alone, 14 districts have zero jobs projected, which calls the WEDC’s methods of distributing funds and impacting job creation into question.
“There’s a real question about what’s actually being done with public money, and whether or not the resources are being distributed fairly across the state,” says Robert Kraig, the executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin.
WEDC spokesman Mark Maley denies the agency has committed any wrongdoing, explaining, “What we’re really focused on is economic development all over the state. We absolutely do not make any political favorites or geographical favors, when it comes to granting awards.”
WEDC’s own data, however, proves inconsistent jobs impact across districts not only represented by different parties, but also home to varying socioeconomic classes. As Citizen Action points out, there is one job impacted for every 36 residents in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County, but one job impacted for a whopping 166 residents in Milwaukee County. The difference between the two counties extends beyond partisanship: Waukesha’s average income is 73 percent higher than Milwaukee’s, and its poverty rate is 75 percent lower.
Maley denies that the impoverished county — which also happens to be Democratic — is not being helped by the WEDC. In fact, he says, a million-dollar grant has been awarded to the city of Milwaukee to renovate an automotive facility, but the grant will not show up in the report because it was not part of the WEDC data used by Citizen Action.
Governor Walker also denies that any particular districts are favored under the WEDC and blames the “completely biased and partisan” Citizen Action report for painting a different reality.
Walker adds that “…you have a significant number of business leaders more often than not [who] happen to be Republicans vs. Democrats. We measure success not by party affiliation. We measure success by whether those employers are creating jobs.”
But as Kraig counters, the conservative governor’s logic suggests that Wisconsin families should “move to Republican districts where they can live in closer proximity to the supposed ‘job creators,’” which not only is an unrealistic and unfair expectation, but the answer to an already shaky defense.
By: Elissa Gomez, The National Memo, March 17, 2014
“The Missing White Poor”: Guess Who Makes Up A Plurality Of America’s Poor?
You may have heard about how last week, Paul Ryan made some unfortunate remarks about poverty, blaming it at least partly on, well, lazy black people: “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular,” Ryan said, “of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” The reason many people got angry about this is that when we talk about poor white people, nobody suggests that it’s a product of a pathology that lies within those particular people. Republicans may think persistent poverty in rural areas is a regrettable thing, but they aren’t delivering lectures to those people about their “culture.” It’s kind of a generalized version of the fundamental attribution error—people like me are poor because of conditions outside themselves, while people unlike me are poor because of their inherent nature.
Ryan’s words set off a predictable round of “Is Paul Ryan racist?” contemplation (see here, for example), and in response to that we have to remind ourselves that that is always the wrong question. It’s impossible to know with certainty whether anyone is racist, because that requires looking into their heart. But much more importantly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what people say and do, not what lurks within their souls. You can say to Paul Ryan, “Here’s what’s wrong with what you said” without shouting “You’re racist!” which not only doesn’t convince anyone of anything, it only leads everyone who doesn’t already agree with you to shut down and refuse to listen to anything else you have to say. Before we get to today’s chart about race and poverty (oh yes, I do have a chart), you should play this classic from Jay Smooth every time you’re tempted to call a politician a racist.
Now, on to our chart. Everyone knows that minority populations in America, particularly blacks and Hispanics, suffer from disproportionate levels of poverty. For the moment, we don’t have to go into why that is and what can be done about it. I just want to note something that seldom gets mentioned: the actual racial makeup of America’s poor. In fact, when I tried to find a chart laying it out to paste into this post, I couldn’t find one. So I took poverty data and population data and made one myself (this is as of 2012):
The point of this chart is that even though blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately poor, the largest group of poor people in America is … white people.
Despite that fact, when you say “the poor,” what pops into most people’s heads is an image of a black person, probably due in no small part to the fact that poverty in America is represented in the media as a largely black phenomenon (I’m not just saying that; there’s research backing that up).
I’m not saying there aren’t different kinds of poverty that might demand different solutions, given the particular economic challenges that characterize particular areas where certain people are concentrated. Though it’s worth noting that many of the states with the highest poverty rates among whites also have the highest poverty rates among blacks. These are largely in the South, where Republican economic policies of low taxes and light regulation have, weirdly enough, not resulted in economic nirvana for all. But the point is that when we talk about “the poor,” the image of a white person should be just as likely to come to your mind as the image of a black or Hispanic person. But I’ll bet it isn’t.
Finally, a programming note. All this week I’ll be guest-blogging for Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, so my posting here will be somewhat lighter. Be sure to check both places!
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Writer, The American Prospect, March 17, 2014
“Christianity Vs Ideology”: Christian Conservatives Should Be Christians First And Conservatives Second
Many liberals have long suggested that it’s impossible to be a Christian and a conservative, because the love of the poor preached by Jesus Christ is incompatible with the economic and social policies promoted by conservatives. Christian conservatives, obviously, disagree. They would say that, at least on economic and social policy, Christian liberals and Christian conservatives agree about the ends — policy that promotes the common good with a preferential option for the poor — but disagree about the means. Jesus told us to love the poor. That is not at all the same thing as voting for programs that take money from one group of people to give it to another, whatever the merits.
As a Christian and a conservative, obviously I think that’s true.
But that’s not where the story ends. It’s where it starts.
To most non-Christians — and to many Christians — Christianity is primarily a set of doctrines. But for 2,000 years, Christianity has understood itself to be fundamentally an encounter with a specific person:Jesus Christ. And Christians accept as authoritative the Gospel account of Jesus Christ’s self-description as “the Truth.” Jesus didn’t say that his doctrine was the Truth. He said that he was the Truth.
Why is this important?
Because if you believe that the person of Jesus Christ is “the Truth,” then the corollary that logically follows is that everything that is not Jesus Christ is not “the Truth.”
To put it more practically: To be a Christian is to believe that all political ideologies are suspect. And wrong. It doesn’t mean that Christians should retreat from all political ideologies — as that would also be a political ideology, and also wrong. By all means, be a Christian liberal. Be a Christian conservative. But if you are a Christian liberal, if you are a Christian conservative, then by definition there will be tensions between your Christianity and your political ideology. It’s axiomatic. And if you are a Christian first and an ideologue second, you should confront those tensions instead of papering over them.
Let’s take my own tent of Christian conservatism, since this is about us.
Yes, it is absolutely possible to be a Christian and believe that limited government and free markets are the best ways to advance the prospects of the poor. But when conservatives portray the poor as moochers and divide the world into “Makers” and “Takers,” and hold up those “Takers” quite clearly as objects of contempt, the Christian has to recoil. And not just recoil, but cry injustice.
It’s fine to believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, but a Christian should look at how policies affect the poor first, rather than a byproduct of everything else. (And some Christian conservative politicians like Mike Lee, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio have started to look at that.)
Even if the solution isn’t a new government program, a Christian who is also a conservative should at the very least be concerned about an economy that too often seems to have a playing field tilted in favor of the winners.
A Christian who is also a conservative should also wince at cultural narratives, advanced by some conservatives, that constantly belittle, mock, or dismiss the perspectives of groups that have been historically or are marginalized.
A Christian who is a conservative should at the very least be concerned about how a country with the mightiest armed forces in the world uses its strengt abroad and at home.
In the Gospel, Jesus calls on his followers to be “signs of contradiction.” Christians should stand out of the pack and, frankly, be a little weird. By all means, Christians should enthusiastically join political parties and ideological schools. But they should also stand out inside them as Christians.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, March 17, 2014
“Socialized Education”: Another Republican Who Thinks It’s Time To Close The Doors At Public Schools
Once in a great while, a conservative policymaker will condemn the existence of public schools in the United States. They’re usually not quite as direct, though, as Ohio state Rep. Andrew Brenner (R), who recently published an online item insisting, “Public education in America is socialism.”
In the post, titled “Public education in America is socialism, what is the solution?,” Brenner laid out his argument. He noted that the Tea Party, which “will attack Obama-care relentlessly as a socialist system,” rarely brings up “the fact that our public education system is already a socialist system […] and has been a socialist system since the founding of our country.” […]
Brenner’s solution: more privatization. “In a free market system parents and students are free to go where the product and results are better,” he wrote.
Did I mention that Brenner is the vice-chair of the Ohio House Education Committee? He is.
For what it’s worth, the Ohio Republican apparently looked up “socialism” on Wikipedia and found that the word means “a social and economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy.” And since he sees public education fitting this bill, and because he believes all socialism must always be bad in all instances, Brenner seems to think it’s time to close the doors at public schools.
Of course, the same could be said for public police departments and fire departments, which would also have to be privatized, but one assumes Brenner and his allies will get to this on another day.
To be sure, even most far-right policymakers rarely talk this way publicly – most Americans celebrate the nation’s public-school system as an important institution and would generally oppose candidates eager to close them all down – but it’s worth noting that Brenner isn’t entirely alone.
Indeed, former senator and presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, just a few years ago, made very similar noises about public education. “Just call them what they are,” Santorum said in 2011. “Public schools? That’s a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools.”
In early 2012, CBS’s Bob Schieffer asked Santorum, “Are you saying that we shouldn’t have public schools, now? I mean, I thought public schools were the foundation of American democracy.” The Republican didn’t back down, reemphasizing his belief that federal and state governments should not be involved in public education.
Republican pollsters have frequently suggested that it’s a mistake for party officials to call for shutting down the federal Department of Education because it gives the appearance of hostility towards public education.
But this apparently doesn’t stop some GOP candidates and policymakers from going even further.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 14, 2014
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