“Obama Will Make Some News Thursday, Too”: Will Call For The Restoration Of The Voting Rights Act On Its 50th Anniversary
As I write this post, political junkies are awaiting the official word on the list of candidates who will appear in Thursday’s first official Republican presidential debate. But in an example of questionable timing by Fox News, Thursday is the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And since said act was largely vitiated by a conservative majority of SCOTUS in 2013, and congressional Republicans have barely lifted any fingers to restore it, the president’s going to do everything possible to force voting rights into the national consciousness that day, and perhaps even into the GOP debate, as reported by The Hill‘s Jordan Fabian:
President Obama will call for the restoration of the Voting Rights Act on its 50th anniversary Thursday, the White House said.
Obama will hold a teleconference to commemorate the landmark legislation and call for its renewal, following a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that voided one of its central provisions.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who rose to prominence in the 1960s as a civil rights leader, will participate.
The event will allow Obama to draw a sharp contrast with Republicans, many of whom argue some provisions of the 1965 law went too far. It will take place on the same day as the first GOP presidential primary debate.
You have to love this quote:
Asked about the timing of the event, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that “one person’s irony is another person’s serendipity.”
“Maybe there will be an opportunity for Republican candidates to discuss the right for every American to cast a vote,” he added.
It will tell you a lot about the GOP and about Fox News if the subject is not mentioned on Thursday night.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 4, 2015
“Only Losers Out-Trump Trump”: Trump’s Supporters Have An Intuition That Something Is Deeply Wrong In Their Party
The Fox News debate this week ought to be an occasion for the Republican Party’s presidential candidates to put new and innovative ideas on display. At the center of the discussion should be Friday’s report about the historically anemic wage growth during this year’s second quarter.
Here’s guessing that the previous paragraph called forth dismissive chuckles among many shrewd readers for its naivete. We all “know” that the only important thing about Thursday’s encounter — other than which 10 candidates get to participate — is how the rest of the Republican field will deal with Donald Trump, and how The Donald will deal with them.
Many would blame this on Trump and also on the nature of journalism these days.
Well, sure. Trump has a lot to answer for. His defense Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week” of his statement that the United States “would not elect another black president for generations” because President Obama had set “a very poor standard” was astonishing in its outrageousness — even by Trump’s standard.
And the media tend to analyze debates by focusing on gaffes and on whether a given candidate “did what he (or she) had to do” in political terms. This conditions how the candidates behave.
I would further concede that the mere inclusion of Trump’s name here likely increased my online page views. The media incentives these days militate against searching discussions of the Earned Income Tax Credit or methods of prompting investors to take a long-term perspective.
But before they take the stage, the Republican candidates who get to confront Trump should ask themselves why a showman who gleefully ignores all the political rules is outshining the rest of the field.
There are many reasons to criticize the far right and what it has done to the GOP, with the complicity of its so-called establishment. But it’s both remarkably elitist and an analytical mistake to write off Trump’s backers as “crazies” while ignoring the source of their frustrations. They tend to be less well-to-do Republicans who are fed up with the political system, dislike the codes and conventions that dictate the way most politicians talk and have lost confidence that politics and government can really do very much for them.
That Trump is quite brilliant at faking authenticity (except for his thoroughly genuine belief that he’s far better than his opponents whom he loves to brand as “losers”) should not be held against his supporters. It’s not hard to see why they get a kick out of the extent to which he is getting under the skin of his many critics.
If Trump’s rivals see their task as proving themselves to be as theatrically gifted as he is, he’ll clobber them. But there’s an unconventional alternative: lifting up politics by embracing the idea that voters, especially those being hammered by the economy, aren’t dunces and would like for their government and their politicians to take concrete steps to improve their situations. This is especially important in a new economy that simply doesn’t deliver to large parts of the middle class, let alone the poor.
As it is, there is a terribly stale quality to the pronouncements even of candidates such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio who are bidding to be the “new ideas” guys. While both at least talk about the need to restore paths to upward mobility, their underlying proposals remain rooted in the thinking of the Reagan era. Unwrap their well-packaged agendas and what you have are the same old nostrums: that government can do little about what ails us and that the path to nirvana is still paved with tax cuts and business deregulation.
But as progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz noted to me in a conversation last week, it’s precisely the rules and policies of the past 35 to 40 years that have helped lead the middle class into its current economic impasse. I don’t expect many conservatives to embrace Stiglitz’s views. But it would surely be an improvement if these candidates recognized that they are running in 2015, not 1980.
Is there no Republican engaging in a real — as opposed to superficial — questioning of the party’s old assumptions? Is there not even a glimmer of acknowledgment that if stagnating wages are the problem, further tilting the system toward employers and financiers is unlikely to solve it?
Trump’s supporters have an intuition that something is deeply wrong in their party. Their explanations for its shortcomings may differ from my own, but they are correct that the party is not delivering what they have a right to expect. Most candidates will play along with the disaffection. Those who try instead to reverse the loss of faith by responding to it constructively will deserve to win the debate.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 3, 2013
“Another Shutdown Psychodrama”: Why The GOP’s Threat To Shut Down The Government Over Planned Parenthood Will Fail
So here we are again: Republicans want to make a policy change, but since doing so will be difficult through the ordinary legislative process, they are threatening to shut down the government to get what they want.
This time it’s about Planned Parenthood, long a target of conservative loathing. Galvanized by selectively edited videos made by conservative activists trying to make it seem as though the organization is profiting from the sale of fetal tissue, Republicans in Congress are now trying (as they have before) to “defund” Planned Parenthood. The White House says it will veto any budget bill that does that.
In response, at least some conservatives have reverted to a time-worn tactic: Shutdown! Ted Cruz says if that is what it takes to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, so be it. Some of his allies in the House seem to agree. Conservative pundit Erick Erickson demands, “If Republicans are not willing to make this their hill to die on…the Republican Party needs to be shut down.”
For the record, most of the money Planned Parenthood receives from the federal government comes from reimbursement for health care services through Medicaid. Precisely zero goes to abortion services; by law, no federal funds can go to abortions. So when Republicans say they want to “defund” Planned Parenthood, what they’re talking about is taking away medical services — breast cancer screenings and the like — from poor women.
I’m not going to go too deeply into the videos, other than to say that nothing in them shows that the organization did anything illegal. The worst anyone has been able to say is that the “tone” used by Planned Parenthood officials was callous. You can object to fetal tissue research if you like, even though it’s done with the consent of patients and can yield valuable medical insights, but there’s no evidence that Planned Parenthood isn’t complying with the laws that cover how that tissue can be used.
Until Barack Obama became president, most government shutdowns happened for one reason: because Congress and the president couldn’t agree on a budget. Sometimes the issues were broad, like cuts to domestic spending, and sometimes they were more specific. But they were usually connected in some rational way to the perceived necessity for a shutdown, in that there was disagreement on how to spend the money that will keep the government operating.
But Republicans in the Obama era have been nothing if not creative thinkers when it comes to policy procedures and norms. And in this area, their innovation was to say, “We have a policy disagreement with the other side, but we can’t get our way through the normal channels. So how about if we shut down the government until we get what we want?”
There’s one important fact about this threat that you’d think Republicans would have learned by now: It always fails. The public doesn’t rally around the shutdowners’ cause, because it violates a basic sense of how policy-making ought to operate. Congress can bicker and fight, but the way it makes decisions is that legislators vote on things, and the side with more votes wins (except for proposals that are filibustered, but that’s a different story), subject to the presidential veto. If you lose through that process, you’ve lost, period. Even if you were right on the merits, the system’s rules are longstanding and familiar enough that they seem fair, since everyone understands the rules and agrees to live under them.
But relying on a shutdown is like a baseball team that’s trailing at the start of the ninth inning, so they hide all the balls and say they won’t return them until they’re declared the victor. It just doesn’t seem right.
And it isn’t just that Republicans can’t get enough public support for the shutdowns — more importantly, they don’t actually get what they want. In 2013, they shut down the government in an attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act, you may have noticed, is still around. In 2014, they nearly shut down the government in an attempt to stop Obama’s executive actions on immigration. That failed there, too (though some of those actions have been held up in the courts).
It should be noted that the congressional GOP leadership is smart enough to say they’re not interested in another shutdown psychodrama. But if they’re in a tough spot, besieged by their more conservative members — not to mention outside groups and pundits — there’s no denying the part they’ve played in making this a regular demand of conservatives. It was the congressional leaders who devised the strategy of opposing Barack Obama on everything and filibustering every bill of any consequence. They’ve happily gone along with the hysteria on the right that says that Obama isn’t just a president they disagree with, but an enemy of America who seeks to destroy everything we hold dear. They’ve encouraged the belief that compromise is always, and by definition, an act of betrayal.
Given all that, is it any surprise that whenever a new issue comes up, at least some on the right think it’s a hill worth dying on? Shutting down the government might be doomed to fail, but I suppose it feels like fighting.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 3, 2015
“I’ll See Your Chainsaw And Raise You A Semi Automatic”: GOP Candidates Are Finding It Difficult To Capture The Spotlight
Two weeks ago, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) presidential campaign, eager to generate some interest in its message, released an unfortunate video. The 51-second clip showed Paul, looking and sounding a bit like a used-car salesman, setting fire to large stacks of paper, putting the paper through a wood-chipper, and literally using the chainsaw.
It was supposed to have something to do with federal tax policy.
That, of course, set a fairly high bar for presidential candidates doing silly things to generate attention for themselves. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), do you have a rebuttal?
“There are few things I enjoy more than on weekends cooking breakfast with the family,” Cruz opens the video. Raw bacon and aluminum foil are then wrapped around the barrel of a machine gun at a firing range.
“Of course in Texas, we cook bacon a little differently than most folks,” Cruz says.
The far-right senator appears to have partnered with IJReivew, a conservative site, for the video called, “Making Machine-Gun Bacon with Ted Cruz.” The minute-long clip is online here.
The video proceeds roughly as one might expect: the raw bacon “cooks” as Cruz fires the gun. When he’s done with target practice, the senator removes the foil, takes a bite with a fork, and laughs. “Mmm, machine-gun bacon,” he says.
For the record, I’m not entirely sure if this actually is a “machine gun.” More knowledgeable sources can (and should) check me on this, but I was under the impression that machine guns are fully automatic, firing bullets quickly. The far-right senator appears to be firing one bullet with each pull of the trigger. It seems like a relevant detail – if Cruz doesn’t know what a machine gun is, this video may prove to be more embarrassing than intended.
Regardless, whether or not this video is better than Cruz’s tryout for “The Simpsons” is a matter of taste.
As for the larger context, this is apparently what it means to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015.
In a massive field of 17 candidates, which is currently led by a former reality-show host who has never sought or held public office, GOP candidates are finding it increasingly difficult to capture the spotlight. Looking “presidential” is nice, but it’s also evidently dull.
And so we’ve reached the curious combination of candidates, chainsaws, and raw meat on gun barrels.
What’s more, it’s only early August. What the YouTube clips will look like in, say, November, is anybody’s guess.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 3, 2015
“Ignorance Never Takes A Break”: Conservatives Launch Pre-Emptive Attacks On Sec. Julian Castro
One year ago, Julian Castro (former Mayor of San Antonio, TX) was sworn in as the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Many people (including this writer) assume that he is the most likely prospect to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016. Apparently a lot of conservatives share that assumption because lately they have launched some interesting attacks on Castro.
First of all, there was Samuel Rosado writing in the National Review that Julian Castro was never a “real” mayor.
Julian Castro is often introduced as the former mayor of San Antonio, Texas. Presumably, journalists and the general public think of this as a major accomplishment and a useful dose of executive experience — it is, after all, a city of 1.4 million people. But San Antonio doesn’t work like most high-profile American cities, such as New York and Chicago, which are largely run by their mayors. It runs under the council-manager form of government, meaning the city council appoints a city manager who actually handles the day-to-day operations of government.
It is true that cities around the country vary in terms of the organizational structure of their government. But working with a city manager (who usually handles administrative tasks) in no way strips a mayor of his/her title – much less most of the associated responsibilities.
I would also point out that Sec. Castro served on the San Antonio City Council for four years and is rightly credited with some significant accomplishments as Mayor.
In 2010 Castro created SA2020, a community-wide visioning effort. It generated a list of goals created by the people of San Antonio based on their collective vision for San Antonio in the year 2020. SA2020 then became a nonprofit organization tasked with turning that vision into a reality.
In 2010 he established Cafe College, which offers college guidance to San Antonio area students. In 2012 he led a voter referendum to expand pre-kindergarten education.
But when it comes to ridiculous critiques, it will likely come as no surprise to anyone that Rep. Steve King tops the charts.
What does Julian Castro know? Does he know that I’m as Hispanic and Latino as he? pic.twitter.com/CYmNIdyqLW
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) July 17, 2015
As I have often said, there are times when the only appropriate response to nonsense like that is to point and laugh. Apparently someone at Wikipedia had the same reaction. Mediaite caught the screen grab with King’s name changed to Esteban Arnaldo “Steba” Rey.
So far the criticism of Castro has been pretty laughable. If he gets the nod as the VP nominee, I’m sure it will only escalate.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 19, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 