“Why Is The GOP So Angry At Everything These Days?”: Fevered Lunatics Whose Principal Policy Option Is To Fight Rather Than Talk
At the end of a week when many paused to reflect during Passover and Easter ceremonies, a question with no real answer seemed to crash into our culture with all the subtlety of a marching band in a funeral parlor: Why do so many Republicans seem so angry all the time at so much around us?
The fury of some like Ted Cruz is understandable. It’s fueled by his massive ego and outsized ambition along with his personal belief that he is so smart and the rest of us are so pedestrian that he can manipulate opinion to win the Republican nomination for president with the support of the mentally ill wing of his party.
“A real president,” Cruz the bombardier said last week, “would stand up and say on the world stage: Under no circumstances will Iran be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran will either stop or we will stop them.”
Then there is the minor league Cruz, the tough talking, totally in-over-his-head governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who is running to crack down on the salaries of teachers, cops and firefighters everywhere. Oh, he’ll also teach Iran a good lesson by throwing any deal out the window no matter what other countries might think. Imagine Scotty informing Angela Merkel of his decision while he wears his Cheese-Head Hat.
There are so many others too. There’s the kid who started the pen pal club with the ayatollah, Tom Cotton. There’s the mental midget from Illinois, Mark Kirk, who went right to the basement for his best thought on Iran, claiming that England got a better deal from Hitler than the U.S. got from Teheran. Kirk, not a history major.
But my personal favorite? In this corner, from Baltimore, wearing the costume of a true warrior, locked and loaded and ready to roll, the former Ambassador to the United Nations, John “Bombs Away” Bolton. He took to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times to declare war on Iran. After all, why waste time!
“The inconvenient truth is that only military action…” Field Marshall Bolton wrote, “can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.”
Bolton, of course, is one of the Mensa members who told George W. Bush that it would be swell to go to war in Iraq. Twelve years later things are really going well there.
At least Bolton knows war on a firsthand basis. At age 18 he was in South Vietnam where…OH, I’M SORRY…MY MISTAKE…that was another Bolton. That was Dennis Bolton from Bedford, Indiana, born two weeks before John Bolton was born in Baltimore in November 1948. Two different young men with two different tales to tell.
Dennis Bolton went to Vietnam. John Bolton who went to Yale. Dennis Bolton was killed near DaNang on April 19, 1967 where he served with the Marines while John Bolton finished his freshman year at New Haven.
In 1967, Bedford had a population of about 13,000. It’s a nice small town where Gene Hackman could have filmed Hoosiers, one of the great sports films ever. Ten young men from Bedford were killed in Vietnam.
Indiana, of course, is the state where Mike Pence and Republicans in the state legislature spent the week clowning it up over their lost fight to make it harder for some Americans simply to be happy. Make no mistake about it, their war was against same-sex marriage and they suffered a TKO when the country turned against them in the snap of a finger, an overnight knockout delivered with stunning speed. But I digress.
In 1967, Baltimore had a population of about 930,000. It’s a tough town with a lot of different neighborhoods, some dangerous, many working class, where Barry Levinson hadn’t made Diner yet and HBO hadn’t given us the gift that is The Wire. Four hundred and seventeen residents of Baltimore were killed in Vietnam.
Dennis Bolton’s name is on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. John Bolton’s name was on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times as well as on the lips of some angry, fevered lunatics whose principal policy option is to fight rather than talk.
Obviously, Bolton never made it to Vietnam. He joined the Maryland National Guard to avoid going to Vietnam and, hey, good for him. At least he served.
Of course, he blamed his absence from combat on the politics of the time. On liberals like Ted Kennedy and others, claiming they had already lost the war by the time he was ready to take on the North Vietnamese Army. I guess that explains the itch, the unfulfilled need, the frustration that guys like Bolton have lived with across the decades.
And today, “Bombs Away” Bolton still has a strong desire to light it up. And according to some pundits he’s even considering a run for president. Obviously his platform will remain as unchanged as his thinking: Different time, different dangers, different countries but same selfish solution: Send someone else’s kids to fight and die while Bolton and others play with a lit fuse in a world more dangerous than dynamite.
By: Mike Barnicle, The Daily Beast, April 5, 2015
“We Should Just Go Ahead And Start Bombing”: The Insane Logic Underlying Republican Opposition To The Iran Deal
Republicans are, naturally, united in their opposition to the preliminary deal the Obama administration struck with Iran to restrain its nuclear program. And now, the presidential candidates in particular are going to compete with each other to see who can make their opposition more categorical. They’re all criticizing it, of course, and Scott Walker has already said that on the day of his inauguration, he’ll pull out of the deal. I’m guessing the rest of them will follow suit and pledge something similar. The question is: OK, so on January 20, 2017, you announce that we’re out of the deal (since we’re in the Republican fantasy world for the moment, let’s put aside the involvement of Europe and the UN). What happens next?
Well for starters, the Iranians would no longer be constrained by the things they agreed to. They could kick out all the inspectors and institute a crash program to create a nuclear weapon if they wanted. Are Republicans saying that Iran would never do that? I don’t think so. Yet in practice, the Republican position seems to be: 1) We can never trust the Iranians to adhere to the terms of any nuclear deal we sign with them because of their insatiable thirst for nuclear weapons, so 2) If there’s no agreement at all—no limits on nuclear research, no limits on the quantity and purity of uranium they can enrich, no inspections—then everything will be OK.
To be clear, I’m not saying this deal is perfect, though a lot of people who know a lot about this issue are arguing that it’s far stronger than what they expected (see here, for instance). But Republicans aren’t saying we need to reopen negotiations and push for something better. They’re just saying we should scrap the agreement, and then … well, they actually don’t say what happens then.
In effect, the Republican argument is, We’ve put this dangerous criminal in prison, but I don’t think this prison is secure enough. He might escape! So the answer is to tear down the prison and let him go. Then we’ll be safe from him.
So they ought to be asked: Are you proposing a re-negotiation of this deal? Or are you just saying that if we scrap it and reimpose sanctions on Iran, then they’ll capitulate to all our demands? And if that’s what you’re saying, is there any reason at all to think that might happen? After all, Iran has been under sanctions from the U.S., the EU, and many other countries for years, yet their nuclear program has continued. What will be different without an agreement?
We should hear conservatives out on all their specific complaints about this deal. They might have a case to make about particular weaknesses. But in every case, we have to ask: What’s your alternative? I haven’t yet heard an answer from any of them, other than the few honest enough to say what so many of them are thinking, that no deal will ever work and we should just go ahead and start bombing.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 3, 2015
“A Juicy Target For Budget Cutters”: To Balance Budgets, Governors Seek Higher Education Cuts
Governors in nearly a half-dozen states want to cut state spending on colleges and universities to help close budget shortfalls, often sparking vehement opposition among state lawmakers of both parties.
Republican governors in Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, and Wisconsin, and Connecticut’s Democratic governor have proposed higher education cuts for the coming fiscal year. Higher education spending traditionally is a juicy target for budget cutters because schools can make up the lost revenue by raising tuition.
But students and their families already are being squeezed by steadily rising college costs. In fiscal year 2013, schools got about 47 percent of their revenue from tuition, up from about 24 percent in fiscal year 1988, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy of Connecticut has suggested a tuition hike to compensate for the cuts, but the Republican governors are urging the schools in their states to find the necessary savings by trimming bureaucracy and consolidating campuses.
University officials argue that past budget cuts have pushed them to the breaking point, forcing them, for example, to rely heavily on adjunct professors and teaching assistants instead of full professors. During the recession, 48 states cut higher education spending. Alaska and North Dakota didn’t. They are the only two states spending as much or more on higher education than they did before the recession, when the numbers are adjusted for inflation, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a Washington, D.C.-based research group.
Some critics have urged the Republican governors to roll back recent tax cuts to spare the colleges and universities. But so far the governors have balked, arguing that lower taxes have helped working families and attracted businesses.
Nowhere is the controversy greater than in Louisiana, which has a complicated higher education system and a Republican governor who is considering running for president.
Governor Bobby Jindal proposed a budget that would reduce higher education spending by $141 million in fiscal 2016. In recent weeks, he has proposed offsetting some of the cuts by getting rid of some refundable business tax credits, which have a total value of $526 million. But the business community is strongly opposing that idea. That leaves the Republican-dominated legislature in a bind, forcing members to choose between education and low taxes, two priorities they generally support.
State Senator Conrad Appel, a Republican, said in an interview that if the higher education cuts Jindal proposed all go into effect “it would be really serious” and a big blow to colleges and universities. He said he wants to scale back the proposed cuts, but wasn’t prepared to say exactly how.
“If we vote to replenish, some of the cuts will be mitigated to some extent,” he said. But, he noted that the Louisiana public university system has “structural inefficiencies” that will mean more budget cuts in the future. He said he told college administrators last week that they should take steps to cut their budgets, whether that means consolidation of campuses or other methods.
“What I don’t recommend is for higher education to ignore the opportunity to fix the problem,” he said. “Either they are going to fix it or we are going to fix it for them and they won’t like it.”
Robert Scott, president of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, said that since Jindal became governor in 2008, the number of full-time employees at state colleges and universities has decreased 23 percent due to budget cuts, and that schools have been raising tuition along the way. But now, he said, “they are about to price themselves out of the market.” He said the flagship school, Louisiana State University, “still has some headroom” to continue tuition increases, but most of the small schools in the state system don’t have that luxury.
John Griswold, a fine arts professor at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, said his state is a test case for cuts to higher education.
“The conditions in Louisiana were perfect for testing an assault on state-funded higher education,” Griswold said. He noted the state has a conservative governor, legislative rules that preclude cuts in most spending except for higher education and health care, and an economic downturn prompted by the drop in oil prices.
“Similar conditions exist in other states, so conservative politicians elsewhere can also demand deep cuts to higher ed, based on populist appeals to ‘good business’ and an end to ‘welfare mentality,’” he said.
Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a potential presidential candidate who has cut state income and property taxes by $541 million during his tenure, has proposed cutting $300 million from the University of Wisconsin system.
According to Walker, that amounts to a 2.5 percent cut, but other analysts have put the figure as high as 13 percent. The fact-checking service PolitiFact split the difference, assessing the reduction at about 6 percent. The cut would be exacerbated by the fact that there is a tuition freeze in place.
“Through flexibility and empowering current leaders from across the system, (University of Wisconsin) System and campus leadership will have the tools necessary to deliver a high quality education in a strategic manner while saving taxpayers $150 million a year,” Walker’s spokeswoman, Laurel Patrick, said.
Meanwhile, two Republican state lawmakers have called for changes in the governor’s budget that would lessen the cut, including raising out-of-state tuition and requiring the university to spend down reserve funds.
“We will work toward a smaller, more manageable cut instead of the $300 million cut proposed in the governor’s budget,” the two, Reps. Dean Knudson and John Nygren, said in a press release last week.
In Illinois, Republican Governor Bruce Rauner recommended a reduction of nearly 6 percent in direct spending on state colleges and universities. Despite the cut, Rauner argues that “this budget proposal continues to offer state support to our public universities” through contributions to the universities’ retirement system and insurance benefits for university employees.
But Rauner faces strong opposition from the Democratic-controlled legislature and from the state’s universities.
Senate President John Cullerton said on his Facebook page that the governor’s budget cuts will “undermine access to health services, child care, affordable college and retirement security for working- and middle-class families” and vowed that the legislature will amend it. While Rauner has proposed cuts in a range of areas, the education chunk is drawing the most attention.
In Arizona, the Republican-led legislature went further than Republican Governor Doug Ducey in cutting higher education, agreeing to a $99 million cut, down from an earlier legislative proposal of $104 million. Ducey had proposed a $75 million reduction as a way to pay for business tax cuts. Universities and proponents of higher education fought the governor’s cuts so doggedly that they prompted a backlash in the legislature, which upped them.
Arizona State University President Michael Crow called the action a “drastic remedy to the state’s budget troubles” and one that will come back to haunt the state when it has fewer college graduates contributing to the state’s economy.
In Connecticut, Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy proposed cutting $10.6 million from the University of Connecticut system and an additional $20.6 million from the state’s regional universities. Malloy has expressed support for tuition hikes, after several years of urging that tuition merely keep pace with inflation.
In Kansas, Republican Governor Sam Brownback since 2011 has pushed through a 25 percent reduction in the state’s top income tax rate, lowered sales taxes and eliminated a tax on small-business income. As a result, state revenue has declined by $685 million. Brownback now is looking to make cuts in education and elsewhere in an effort to balance the books.
Walter McMahon, professor emeritus of economics and education at the University of Illinois said cutting higher education to close budget gaps is “very, very shortsighted.”
“Spending on education is really an investment,” McMahon said. “As money is invested in human capital formation, each graduate is in the labor force for over 45 years and contributes increased earnings and tax revenue to state coffers.”
He added that statistics show that more educated people live longer, healthier lives and commit fewer crimes, allowing states to spend less on health care and prison costs.
By: Elaine S. Povich, The National Memo, March 30, 2015
“Governors As Mini-Presidents”: Being A Governor Is Not The Same As Being The Commander In Chief
In a Sunday Show appearance mainly given notice as indicating his apparent eagerness to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, Martin O’Malley did something that is sadly common but ought to be mocked out of existence: pretending that being a governor is not only an adequate but a complete preparation for the presidency. Get this (from JP Updates‘ Jacob Kornbluh):
O’Malley, who came as close as he can to announcing a 2016 presidential run, cited Maryland’s state sanctions on Iran’s economy under his tenure as one example of how he had already slowed Iran’s rush towards acquiring a nuclear bomb. Maryland had “passed some of the earliest and strongest sanctions against Iranian nuclear development of any state in the nation,” he asserted.
C’mon, give me a break. This is the foreign policy equivalent of the exceedingly annoying tendency of governors to take personal credit for national economic booms, like a child in a car seat pretending to drive his parent’s automobile. I say this as someone that worked for three governors and have had opportunities to closely watch many others–including O’Malley. I like and admire these people, as a group, far more than Members of Congress. But in trying to counter Washingtonian prejudice against politicians who aren’t performing in the Big Top, they sometimes go too far.
O’Malley isn’t remotely as egregious on this score as Scott Walker, who is rhetorically trying to reshape the world in the image of the view from his window in Madison. But he still ought to cut it out. He’s been a two-term big city mayor and a two-term governor. He’s qualified to run for president by any reasonable standard. But the idea that if elected he can smoothly move into the Oval Office and assume the responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief without some culture shock is simply not credible. That’s true of Very Senior U.S. Senators, for that matter. Truth is, there is only one putative candidate for president who is entirely acclimated to the foreign policy challenges of the presidency, and in my opinion, that should offset a lot of the carping we hear about her lack of specific “accomplishments.”
In any event, governors should stop trying to project themselves as mini-presidents. Being a governor is a big job, and an important job, and a job that tells you a lot about its occupant’s qualities. But it’s really not the same thing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 30, 2015
“Winning Against The Oligarchs”: Getting Just A Fraction Of The 94 Million Adults Who Didn’t Vote In 2012 To Start Casting Ballots
Last week our Supreme Court let stand Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s voter suppression law, one of a host of such laws enacted in the North from Idaho to Michigan to New Hampshire, and everywhere below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Do not be lulled into inaction by that decision. Do not accept that a rich minority will rule America and remake it to their liking. Even with faithful allies on the Supreme Court, the oligarchs win only if you let them.
The factual basis for this and other decisions upholding voter suppression laws is specious, especially for the kind of photo identification requirements at the polling booth that Walker signed into law. Rigorous research into voter impersonation, the only illegal voting technique which photo identification can stop, found just 10 cases in America from 2000 to summer 2012.
Walker is, of course, a loyal vassal of the Koch brothers and their confreres, who works diligently to impose their minority views through laws under which all of us must live.
Those rules include low taxes for oligarchs and enabling dynastic wealth; diminishing worker rights, job safety laws and reliable pensions; repealing environmental protections while tightly restricting your right to challenge polluters in court; and gutting public education at every level while converting universities from centers of inquiry into job-training programs.
All of this can be stopped. All that is required is getting just a fraction of the 94 million adults who did not vote in 2012 to start casting ballots.
Poll after survey after focus group shows little public support for Kochian ideas, especially when they are described in neutral and accurate language.
A plethora of polls shows broad support for progressive policies including higher tax rates on million-dollar-plus incomes and stopping corporate welfare. Three of four Republicans favor increasing Social Security benefits, yet congressional Republicans — and scared Democrats — are moving to cut them at the behest of the ultra-wealthy and their minions.
Making majority wishes into law will be more difficult in the near term thanks to a series of Supreme Court and lower court rulings since 2008. The courts have shown expansive tolerance for a wide variety of voter suppression laws. And the judiciary has done nothing to stop voter-roll purging so ham-handed that former congressman Lincoln Davis was among 70,000 Tennesseans barred from voting in 2012.
Two years ago, on a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court nullified a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Glover Roberts Jr. declared, “Our country has changed.” We saw change immediately. Southern state legislatures changed their laws to make sure fewer black Americans voted or did so in heavily black jurisdictions.
The important lesson here is that just sitting back and accepting these rulings, behaving as if you are powerless, would be a disaster for five and possibly all six noble purposes of our nation.
Yes, the voting standards the court majority has set, often by a one-vote margin, make it easier for a shrinking minority to impose its will. But it does not mean that minority will impose its will.
The unlimited money that the Supreme Court ruled can legally be poured into election campaigns under Citizens United is a threat to democracy.
That 2010 decision expanded campaign finance loopholes so much that the ban on government contractors donating to politicians has evaporated. Oil giant Chevron was among those contractors making huge contributions to politicians loyal to them by funneling the money through affiliates called LLCs, limited liability corporations.
Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey said last October that if Republicans won 2014 gubernatorial elections, they could control “voting mechanisms.”
“Would you rather have Rick Scott in Florida overseeing the voting mechanism, or Charlie Crist? Would you rather have Scott Walker in Wisconsin overseeing the voting mechanism, or would you rather have Mary Burke? Who would you rather have in Ohio, John Kasich or Ed FitzGerald?” Christie, the president of the Republican Governors Association, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last October.
About the only thing the courts will not abide is honesty by those who sponsor laws to rig elections by suppressing voters.
Anyone who doubts that should click on this brief 2012 video of Mike Turzai, the Pennsylvania House Republican leader. Turzai told the party faithful that his state’s voter ID law “is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
A state judge struck down that law and savvy GOP politicians decided not to appeal. Romney then lost Pennsylvania by more than 5 percentage points, evidently because the majority was not suppressed.
The awful truth is this: So long as politicians don’t boast about their real intentions, they can enact voting laws that rig elections in favor of an influence-buying minority that cannot win any other way.
So that’s the lesson. What are you going to do about it? Yes, you. Not somebody else. You.
You have more than enough power to make sure that we do not head back toward the rules of the late 19th century, when hunger and disease ravaged the poor, as Jacob Riis documented in How the Other Half Lives. We need not indulge the vanity and greed of men like Henry Clay Frick, which grew so unrestrained that on a single day his pleasures cost more than 2,200 lives.
People just like you got women the right to vote, child labor laws, collective bargaining laws, and environmental laws. It took time. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton devoted their whole lives to suffrage. But in the end they and others persuaded male office holders to extend voting rights to women.
Will you do what is required to reverse our slide into the awful grip of a 21st-century oligarchy?
It’s not that hard. Really. And it does not require much money, either.
What it does require is these virtues — focus, diligence, and persistence.
There is one more crucial element: persuasion. That means winning people over by showing them a better alternative than the slickly marketed Kochian vision that sounds appealing unless you understand that it means a future in which a few gain at the expense of the many.
Making fun of the often laughable and crazy statements of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, and their like is counterproductive. It makes people think they are being looked down upon, including many people who do not share those laughable and crazy ideas, but are put off by the way progressives talk.
A better vision is a society where we all gain if we work, save, and act prudently, and where we all share the burden of caring for those who cannot care for themselves.
A better vision is one in which the bottom 120 million Americans own more than a third of one percentage point of all assets. A better vision is one where corporations are vehicles to encourage risk taking and wealth creation, not tools to mine the public treasury, pick consumer pockets, and stealthily prosper on the dole.
What is required to achieve a vibrant, free and broadly prosperous America is this:
- Register millions of people to vote, paying scrupulous attention to both the registration rules and following up to make sure the names actually show up on the voting rolls.
- Maintain contact with these new voters, which can be done at low cost with emails, neighborhood meetings and knocking on doors.
- Get people to the polls on Election Day and, where it is still allowed, help them vote in advance.
- Tell politicians you support to stop wasting money on television and radio ads, which are sold at the highest rates, and to invest most of their campaign dollars into getting out the vote.
Going along with the television and radio ad game is playing by the Koch brothers’ rules. That is a contest they will win because they have the money. Instead, do what the Kochs and other smart businesspeople do: Change the game. Play your own game. And don’t worry about right-wing voter registration drives, because numerous polls show that among those not voting, their appeal is narrow, while yours is broad.
It would also help to organize supporters to follow watchdog news outlets, an issue for a future column.
As a guest on call-in radio and answering audience questions after my many lectures across the country, I hear a constant refrain that nothing can be done, that the anti-democratic interests are so rich and powerful that they must win.
Wrong. That’s utter nonsense. Don’t think like a victim. Take charge.
America is still the democratic republic where the majority of people who cast ballots choose our elected leaders. Get more people to the polls on the only day that counts – Election Day – and we can change everything for the better.
All that is necessary is for you to do the work.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, March 28, 2015
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