“A Responsibility To The Truth”: Why Is There A Resurgence Of Congressional Birtherism?
There is no serious debate over whether Barack Obama is an American citizen. He is.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from saying otherwise. For example, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a Republican representing Missouri’s 4th district. Following the standard template for these things, she was asked by a constituent at a town hall about the president’s birth certificate. And following the template, she failed to denounce or even disagree with this disproven idea:
I don’t know, I haven’t seen it. I’m just at the same place you are on that. You read this, you read that. But I don’t understand why he didn’t show that right away. I mean, if someone asked for my birth certificate, I’d get my baby book and hand it out and say ‘Here it is,’ so I don’t know …. I have doubts that it is really his real birth certificate, and I think a lot of Americans do, but they claim it is, so we are just going to go with that.
A spokesman clarified her comments to Politicotoday, but the explanation neither addressed her statement nor her actual views; after all, she repeated the statements to a reporter immediately following the original meeting.
Crazy, right? But not isolated. In March, Rep. Cliff Stearns — the man whose questions about Planned Parenthood led to the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to cut off funding for the organization — made similar comments. “All I can tell you is that the general consensus is that he has produced a birth certificate,” he said. “The question is, is it legitimate? That’s where we stand now.” When I contacted Stearns spokesman Paul Flusche to ask about it, his response was, “This office won’t comment on every video posted by liberal groups” — as though the video had somehow been conjured without Stearns’ involvement.
I’m on the record as objecting to polls about Obama’s (or really anyone’s) religion or place of birth because they reinforce a false impression. There are facts here; and opinion is really irrelevant. But it’s a different situation with elected officials, who have a certain responsibility to the truth. There’s no acceptable excuse for Stearns or Hartzler. Stearns is locked in a tight primary (his opponent even accused him of trying to bribe him out of the race, which Stearns denies), so perhaps it’s a panicked pander. Hartzler, on the other hand, appears to be in a safe GOP district: Although she unseated Democrat Ike Skelton two years ago, the district is quite red and he was something of a vestigial presence.
If members of Congress truly believe that the president isn’t an American citizen, then they surely have the obligation to single-mindedly focus on proving that and ejecting him from office. But since they almost certainly don’t believe it and just as certainly can’t prove it (since it’s false), they instead have an obligation to speak out against birtherism. Unfortunately, as members of Congress spend more time mixing with constituents as they campaign, we’re only likely to hear more incidents along these lines.
By: David A. Graham, Associate Editor, The Atlantic Magazine, April 9, 2012
“Intensive Fear-Mongering”: Who’s Distracting Attention From His Record Now?
In an earlier post today, I discussed at some length the anger of Republicans over Barack Obama’s efforts to “distract” voters from his record and suggest they take a long look at what life under a Romney administration might look like.
This afternoon, though, it was Mitt Romney playing the distraction game in a speech to the National Rifle Association.
Mitt, you see, has rather a poor relationship with the gun lobby, having signed a couple of bills as governor of Massachusetts they really, really didn’t like, while refusing until he started running for president to give them toadying fealty to which they feel entitled from GOP pols. He also can’t boast of much of a repertoire of hunting and fishing stories, since he’s only recently taken up the hobby of slaying game. I’d be willing to bet he doesn’t even own one of those big Second Amendment belt buckles with a fierce, gun-wielding eagle on it.
I’m sure Romney would have been happy to regale the NRA crowd with lurid reminders of the Obama administration’s relentless efforts to restrict gun rights–except they don’t actually exist, unless you buy the right-wing conspiracy theory that the botched “Fast and Furious” operation was some devious effort to set the stage for more regulation of gun dealers.
So instead Mitt did some intensive fear-mongering about what Barack Obama, released from the political constraints of re-election, might do to express his hatred of freedom:
Romney further pressed his vision of the fall election as a defining choice between two different destinies, and accused the Obama administration of curtailing Americans’ personal, religious and economic freedoms. He referred to the NRA as a single-issue group — that issue being freedom.
Eighteen minutes into his speech, Romney pivoted to Second Amendment issues, pledging to stand up for the rights of hunters, sportsman and other gun owners, and accusing the president of failing to do so.
It’s unclear to me why it’s okay for Romney to posit the election as “a defining choice between two different destinies,” with special attention to the potential impact on the shape of the Supreme Court, but if Obama does the same thing, it’s an outrage.
Let’s have some of the same sauce for geese and ganders, please.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 13, 2012
“Magic Asterisks”: Buffett Rule Is Not Raising A Tax; It’s Closing Republican Tax Loopholes
The debate over the Buffett Rule is missing something important. As it stands, the fight is between Democrats who believe millionaires shouldn’t pay a lower tax rate than the middle class vs. Republicans who says no one’s taxes should go up by any amount at any time for any reason.
That’s a legitimate fight, to be sure, but there’s more to it: approving the Buffett Rule would mean closing a loophole, and in the larger context of the debate over tax policy, this makes all the difference in the world.
Let’s step back for a second. Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget plan appears to add an additional $5.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Ryan insists that’s not the case — once he “clears out all the special-interest loopholes,” his numbers will start to add up.
Which loopholes? Well, it turns out that Ryan refuses to say. Maybe they’re secret loopholes; maybe they’re imaginary loopholes; but either way, he hasn’t identified any — literally, not one — loophole he’s willing to close to help pay for his own agenda. It is, as Paul Krugman put it, the “mystery meat” of the Republican plan.
“Oh, yeah?” my Republicans friends ask, “well why don’t Democrats come up with some loopholes to close?”
And therein lies the point: the Buffett Rule closes a loophole. It’s a quirk of the tax code that certain millionaires who enjoy private-equity riches pay a lower tax rate than middle-class families, and approving the Buffett Rule would not only mean establishing a degree of fairness, it would also mean scrapping this loophole.
The point is not lost on President Obama, who made this observation on Wednesday:
“I’d just point out that the Buffett Rule is something that will get us moving in the right direction towards fairness, towards economic growth. It will help us close our deficit and it’s a lot more specific than anything that the other side has proposed so far.” [emphasis added]
In other words, where Paul Ryan is vague and evasive, Obama is being direct and specific. The president is identifying actual loopholes he wants to see closed (Buffett Rule, corporate-jet loophole, tax subsidies for oil companies), which would total tens of billions of dollars in the coming decade. Meanwhile Republican leaders talk about loopholes, but choose not to back this talk up with anything substantive.
One approach represents an honest budget policy. The other, relying on magic asterisks, is a fraud.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 13, 2012
“An Unrepresentative Woman”: Typical Stay-At-Home Mom Bears No Resemblance To Ann Romney
You’d have to be a monster to deny that Ann Romney has had a rough time of it these last few years. Breast cancer and multiple sclerosis? We should obviously sympathize and send her well wishes. But nothing about that should prevent us from also looking honestly at her background and asking how representative a symbol of twenty-first century American womanhood she is. Liberals shouldn’t sneer at the fact that she never held a job outside the home (if only Hilary Rosen had phrased it in the clinical, social science-y way I just did, this “controversy” probably never would have erupted!). But conservatives have no business pretending that she represents anything beyond what she in fact is, which is a woman who was born to fantastic privilege and who married into even more fantastic privilege, and who simply hasn’t had to make the hard choices that many women have to make. She turns out not even to represent stay-at-home moms very well at all, and if Republicans think this little fracas is rallying stay-at-home moms to their reactionary cause, they’re deluding themselves.
First, a bit about Ann nee Davies. She grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of American’s wealthiest suburbs. She attended the posh private sister school of the posh private school her future husband attended. Her father was the president of a company that made maritime machinery. While still in college, she married the son of an ex-automobile company CEO. The couple would have to make its own way in the early years, as young couples do, but surely they knew that if a serious crisis hit them, they’d have someone to turn to. They’d never end up on the street or on a relative’s Castro convertible.
I’m plenty aware that I am going to be accused in the comment thread of class envy, but I’m just laying out facts. They shouldn’t be held against her: For all I know Ann Romney is the most generous, empathetic, and self-abnegating woman in the United States. But it’s simply a fact that she’s never had to worry about how she was going to feed her kids, or what she might do if tragedy befell. And lo and behold, tragedy, or something very close to it, did befall. She received two devastating diagnoses. She undoubtedly had excellent insurance coverage and undoubtedly received the best possible care. And since conservatives are so obsessed with pillorying the people they think of as the undeserving in society, I say it’s not unreasonable of me to point that out she “earned” her excellent insurance and care by marrying well.
But what of the millions of women who share her bad luck health-wise but don’t share her good luck wealth-wise? We don’t know what she thinks, and maybe since she’s not the candidate she is under no obligation to tell us, interesting as it might be to find out. But we do know what her husband, her own presumed insurance provider, thinks. He thinks the hell with them. He used to care about them, when he passed a law giving them a fair shot at buying affordable coverage, but now he wants to repeal the law that does the same thing nationally, and the only reason is political calculation and cowardice. That’s his, not hers. But I do wonder whether she agrees with him that these women should be left on their own because to help them would be to hand a political victory to the enemy.
The interesting thing about all this is that your “typical,” if there is such a thing, stay-at-home mom bears not the remotest resemblance to Ann Romney. The Census Bureau studied this question for the first time (?!) in 2007, and the results were, to me, totally surprising and fascinating. Stay-at-home mothers, you probably think, are more likely to be white, well-off, proper, all-around June Cleaver-ish. Uh, June Cleaver was around 50 years ago and lived on TV. In today’s actual America, stay-at-home moms are more likely to be: younger; Hispanic (Latina, if you prefer); foreign-born; less well educated. About one-quarter of married mothers of children under 15 didn’t work outside the home, the bureau found; and fully 19 percent of that one-quarter had less than a high-school degree, while that was true of just 8 percent of working mothers. This suggests pretty clearly that a significant number of women who stay at home don’t do so by choice, but because they don’t have marketable skills—or because they can’t get jobs that pay enough to cover the cost of childcare.
The study found 5.6 million stay-at-home moms in all. The above numbers suggest that maybe half of them or thereabouts are there by total choice—have decided to stay home and raise multiple children. The rest are probably there because of crappy educations—their fault in some cases, no doubt, the system’s in others. Whichever the case, these women are not staying home by “choice,” and they tend to be the women society really forgets about and pays no attention to. I doubt pretty strongly that they identify much with Ann Romney or are rallying to her husband’s cause.
This whole fracas happened simply because conservatives saw an opportunity to accuse liberals of being elitist. There was a whiff of that in Rosen’s wording, but at least Rosen is affiliated with the side in American politics that wants women who didn’t grow up in Bloomfield Hills and marry well to have a chance to receive excellent health care if they ever find themselves in Ann Romney’s position.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 14, 2012
“A Matter Of Economic Necessity”: Thanks To Republicans, Moms Must Work
You want to talk about a war on stay-at-home moms? How about Republican economic policies that prevent women from ever becoming one.
I’m talking about policies, for instance, like the equal-pay-for-equal-work law that embattled Governor Scott Walker just shot down in Wisconsin, thus guaranteeing that when Badger State mothers do go to work to put food on their family’s table they’ll now have to spend more time away from their kids in order to do it. Three cheers for Republican Family Values!!!
Republicans have always understood better than Democrats that a good offense is the best defense. And so, with the gender gap between Democrats and Republicans approaching Grand Canyon proportions, it’s no mystery why Republicans are eager for a replay of the Mommy Wars of the late 1960s and early 70s when bra-burning feminists squared off against Mrs. Beaver Cleaver and her tastefully arranged string of white pearls.
And so, there was Mr. Etch-a-Sketch himself, chief Romney PR flack Eric Fehrnstrom, tweeting after a left-leaning CNN talking head put her foot in her mouth: “Obama adviser Hilary Rosen goes on CNN to debut their new ‘kill Ann’ strategy, and in the process insults hard-working moms.”
Some things never change. Eric Fehrnstrom is still a thug and Democrats are still incurable weenies.
Hysterical that someone might think calling Mrs. Romney a pampered plutocrat who never worked a day in her life was an implied slur on apple pie and motherhood, the rush by Democrats — up to and including the First Couple – to degrade themselves running away from Hilary Rosen and her ill-chosen words shows just how much Democrats are counting on that 19-point hole Republicans have dug themselves into with woman.
Republicans, as we’ve learned the hard way, are terrific when it comes to starting wars on false pretenses. So, if Democrats applied even a fraction of the strategic thinking Republicans use all the time to the Republican’s made-up War on Homemakers, they’d see Republicans have given them a golden opportunity to go on the attack and pivot back to their signature issue in this campaign: economic justice.
Social conservatives like nothing more than to assert it’s liberals and feminists who are pushing women into the workplace against their will by making those who’d rather be homemakers feel inadequate and unfulfilled for their politically incorrect choice of careers. But the truth is most of these moms couldn’t stay home even if they wanted to since working isn’t a career choice but a matter of economic necessity.
That’s why the idea of casting millionairesses like Mrs. Romney as self-sacrificing stay-at-home-moms is, when you think of it, laughable if not ludicrous.
By now we know the statistics by heart. Over the past 40 years, only incomes in the top 20% have seen any growth at all. During this time, average incomes for most Americans have either stayed level or declined. Whatever wage increases average households have earned in the past generation were made by women entering the workforce. And this at a time when incomes for those in the top 1% grew from an average of $500,000 a year to more than $2 million.
These trends haven’t changed even since the Wall Street-engineered collapse of the global credit markets in 2008.
As Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post, “three years after economic growth resumed the real value of Americans’ paychecks is stubbornly still shrinking.”
Profits by the S&P 500 are up 23% since 2007 while cash reserves have increased 49% during that time, in large part because firms are neither hiring in the US nor raising worker wages — even though on average workers are generating nearly $50,000 more each year in revenue than just three years ago, says Meyerson.
So where is all the extra income going? According to University of California economist Emmanuel Saez, all income growth in the US in 2010 went to the wealthiest 10% of households, and 93% to the wealthiest 1%.
“Profits and dividends are up largely because wages are down,” says Meyerson. Indeed, as JPMorgan Chase chief investment officer Michael Cembalest wrote in an investor newsletter last year: “US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”
Even in today’s fragile recovery, Meyerson says most of the jobs being created are in low-wage sectors, where 70% of all job gains in the past six months were concentrated in restaurants and hotels, health care, retail trade, and temporary employment agencies.
Construction still has an unemployment rate of 17% in part due to Republican reluctance to commit public funds for basic infrastructure construction.
The disconnect between conservative praise for full-time motherhood and conservative economic policies that prevent more women from actually being full-time moms is the same contradiction we see in the abortion debate, where pro-life conservatives talk about the sanctity of life while saying it would be just terrible for the government to lend a hand to single women forced by restrictive pro-life laws into becoming mothers against their will.
Republican charges ring hallow when they accuse Democrats of disrespecting the hard work women do to raise a family, because at the end of the day choice and self-determination for women (as well as men) are liberal values, not conservative ones.
When conservatives are not demanding strict conformity to ancient and rigid gender roles based on 5,000 years of Judeo-Christian doctrines, or whatever, they are hiding behind a false “individualism” that allows a few privileged multimillionaires to take away the real individual freedoms of the millions these plutocrats are thus able to defraud, exploit and abuse.
Republicans talk a good game about the virtues of motherhood. But when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are and fighting a real war on behalf of moms who want to be moms, the Republican Party, like always, has gone AWOL.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, Salon, April 13, 2012
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