Month: February 2012

I woke up, got my coffee, and opened Think Progress. There I saw a headline telling me that the Washington state Senate has approved marriage equality. The article says that this means certain passage of the bill. Then I saw another headline: Alabama State Senator Thinks Increasing Teacher Pay Goes Against A ‘Biblical Principle.’ It’s a somewhat jarring way to start my day. This country can’t agree on anything.

As you may know, it is the “Year of the Bible” in Pennsylvania, thanks to unanimous support, from republicans and demmocrats alike, for a resolution introduced by Rep. Rick Saccone.

I had a lively phone conversation with Saccone’s office before we produced this one, in which I kept listing all the Bible laws that might be inconvenient in our times.  The woman on the other end of the phone got VERY flustered and upset. At one point she said that “the Old Testament doesn’t count, Christians only follow the New Testament.” She also said I must be confusing my Bible with my Koran.

She was certainly letting her freak flag fly.

Here is some free advice, don’t waste your time on concentrating on the various surrogates currently being feted by the Main Stream Media (MSM) in the Republican Party’s civil war. It is much clearer to shine the light of astute political analysis on the actual political power factions within the Party that are represented by the surrogates so closely monitored by the MSM. As a disclaimer, I will note here that Ron Paul as a candidate has little or no common with the respective parties engaged in the struggle for control of the Republican Party. However candidate Paul does have a radically different ideologically driven agenda. Therefore in this respect he is not seriously chasing the Republican nomination and thus will not be included in the discussion that follows below.
There are TWO and ONLY TWO groups fighting for control of the Republican Party. The first group is the Southern Block of the Republicanized descendants of the old DIXIECRATS (AKA Southern Democrats before the Democratic Party fully integrated African American Democrats). This Southern Block originally consisted of the Dixiecrats in all of the southern states who had previously left the Democratic Party in anger and subsequently joined the Republican Party during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign’s “Southern Strategy”. This group has been purposely mislabeled many times by the mass media mainly to confuse the public. Of late the MSM has referred to this group as Evangelical Christians, but the Evangelical Christians are essentially members of the 21st century version of the old Southern Bible belt, which in truth is just a subdivision of the original main Dixiecrat majority. This Southern Block was responsible for making their indigenous virulent uncompromising hatred of Negroes an official part of the Republican Party’s ideology just slightly least in importance to the anti-tax pledge. The incorporation of this uncompromising racialist ideology was accepted by the official Republican Party in conjunction with the mass migration of the Dixiecrat apostate population into the Republican Party as a critical part of Ronald Reagan’s “Southern Strategy”.

The second group fighting for control of the Republican Party is a powerful cabal composed of Wall Street, Domestic Corporate America, and International Foreign Interests. The action arm of this group is the majority of the large scale lobbies located in the nation’s capital. In total this group has over a trillion dollars available for any all-out “tooth and nail” national political fight. The selected presidential Republican candidate for this domestic/international cabal is Mitt Romney.

The Southern Block initially fielded three candidates seeking the Republican nomination for president. Newt Gringrich entered the lineup initially as a self-funded privateer seeking the Republican nomination. (Since there were many prime time televised debates scheduled, and Newt considering himself to be an excellent debater decided to give it a shot.) Subsequently poor debating skills and scandals eventually willowed down the initial large field of candidates seeking to secure the support of the Southern Block to the point where currently only Gingrich remains a viable candidate representing the Southern Block.

So it is the two forces symbolized and represented by Romney on one side and Gingrich on the other prepare for the final upcoming battle on Super Tuesday or perhaps the struggle will continue to the actual Republican convention.

What will victory secure for either group? Well, I’m glad you asked. The Southern Block is fighting to preserve their home base, i.e., a respected place in the future of American politics. Therefore in this sense they are fighting for the survival of their political lives, i.e., to keep alive the old adage “that one day the South will rise again”. The Southern Block was energized by the election of the nation’s first African American President. The Dixiecrat mentality views this as an immediate attack on the sovereignty of their respective state governments including their values, and “southern traditions and way of life”. Many members of the Tea Party are also rabid constituents within the Southern Block. The MSM has recently taken to calling the Southern Block the “Social Issue” oriented part of the Republican Party as the internal fighting between the presidential candidates turned toxic and “name-calling” nasty.

On the other hand the Republican establishment (including the International/Domestic Corporate Cabal) see this as an opportunity to rid the Party of the residue of Reagan’s “southern Strategy” experiment which has remained a drag on the Republican Party ever since Reagan left office. The fanatical dedication of the constituents of the Southern Block to prioritize a host of trivial “social Issues” under the Party banner has made the Republican Party a national laughing stock over the decades. Hence the Corporate Cabal group see this as a prime opportunity to jettison the Southern Block along with all of its home grown con-men from playing any significant role in a future Republican Party.

IMO under normal conditions the Corporate Cabal has more than enough power to accomplish a win in this instance, but with the added advantage of The Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States, they should have no difficulty in securing control over the Republican Party thus changing the political landscape in America for decades to come.

The success of the Corporate Cabal’s lobby driven ALEC program in (a) electing Republican controlled legislatures in more than 30 states in 2010, and (b) getting these states to pass ALEC created voter suppression legislation demonstrates the planned reach of the Corporate Cabal into the political heart of America. In this regard they have chosen to move their headquarters from the confines of “K’ Street in Washington to the National Republican Party. This is why Gingrich and the Southern Block don’t stand a chance in the remaining rounds of this historic fight for the “soul” of the Republican Party.

Holy crap. This is taking hooliganism to another level:

The death toll rose to at least 73 people late Wednesday after hooligans from the winning team stormed onto the field after an Egyptian soccer match between two longtime rivals and attacked opposing players and fans.

Violence broke out in the coastal town of Port Said after that city’s team won a rare victory over the visiting Ahly, a powerhouse club from Cairo. Port Said supporters rushed the field immediately after the game as chaos spread and players and fans from Ahly ran for cover beneath the stadium and into locker rooms.

Egyptian TV quoted medical authorities as saying at least 73 people had been killed. Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the nation’s military ruler, dispatched military planes to Port Said to pick up Ahly players and fans and return them to Cairo.

Security officials feared the riot would lead to retaliation by Ahly hooligans, known as Ultras. The group was involved in the attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo in September, and its members have been on the front lines in the recent deadly clashes between antigovernment protesters and riot police and soldiers.

Philadelphia Union fans are considerably better behaved. They don’t go around attacking embassies and killing the opposing fans. And Philly is not known for the good behavior of its fans. That’s part of why I chose to root for New York teams even though both were on my teevee.

Interestingly, the former head coach of the U.S. Men National Soccer Team, Bob Bradley, is now the national coach for Egypt and will try to get them into the World Cup. Hooliganism is widespread, but this might be the worst case of it ever seen. The death toll is already much higher than in the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster.

It’s senseless. I love soccer, but it’s just a game.

Ted Olson may support gay marriage now, but he’s still a right-wing hack. Here he is on the Wall Street Journal editorial page literally describing the Obama administration’s response to the Koch brothers’ anti-Obama jihad as McCarthyism:

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president’s re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?

What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president’s surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president’s party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly — and accurately — stated that you have no involvement?

Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president’s re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president’s or anyone else’s office….

When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace.”McCarthyism” defined by Webster’s as the “use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition,” will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welch’s “Have you no sense of decency?” are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him….

The misuse of government power to damage or demean one’s political enemies is abhorrent and the very antithesis of a free society and a government of laws, not men. It is time for the public to ask those engaged in these practices, “Have you no sense of decency?”

Your reaction to the first couple of paragraphs may be to compare the supposedly totalitarian tactics of the White House to those of Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisitors: Poke them with … the derogatory speculative innuendo! And your inability to shed a tear for the poor, suffering victims of this persecution may be reinforced by the knowledge that the net worth of Charles and David Koch has risen from $19 billion each in the last year of the Bush administration to $25 billion each last fall — an increase of more than 31 percent over three years. If that’s McCarthyism, then put my name on a blacklist — please.

Ol’ Perfesser Instapundit has a curious response to this:

…I was talking to a CEO last year — an Obama supporter no less — who told me he was amazed at how openly Administration officials threatened to use media demonization if he didn’t play ball….

But now some of those officials have to be thinking that the people they threaten will be around after Obama’s gone, and they’ll remember.

So if corporate CEOs take vengeance on administration officials after Obama leaves office, hey, no prob! In other words, the reaction of Glenn Reynolds to the notion of alleged McCarthyism is like his reaction to a lot of other things: it’s fine if it’s privatized.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog)

I hate to see Don Cornelius go out like this. Apparently, he has killed himself.

So much awesome. I don’t know why people complained so much in the 1970’s. Who cares about high interest rates when you’ve got Soul Train?

RIP, Don Cornelius. You were a genius.

Mitt Romney is to be commended for his honesty. This ranks right up there with “I like being able to fire people,” and “corporations are people, my friend.” Romney has shown that while he may have the golden touch for all of his personal investment choices, he has a tin ear for politics. Romney doesn’t even bother trying to mask his contempt for non-rich Americans. Once again, Mitt Romney shows he has the same compassion level for the non-rich that the Mel Brooks’ character King Louis did when he was using live peasants for skeet shooting practice.

Here is a new ad that we are in the process of buying national cable TV news for now.

Mitt Romney committed another gaffe this morning while he was talking to Soledad O’Brien of CNN. Now, some people are going to say that he’s being taken out of context, but I want to focus on the first one and a half sentences. Here’s how he started:

“By the way, I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor…” –Mitt Romney, February 1st, 2012

What’s the logical implication of that juxtaposition? What does that tell you about how Mitt Romney’s mind works? He cares about Americans, not the very poor. To me, that was the most damning part of the whole thing. I think he realized that what he had said didn’t sound right, so he continued on to say he was not concerned about the very rich, either.

But the logic of his argument didn’t improve.

Romney says, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

O’Brien asked him to clarify his remarks saying, “There are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, ‘That sounds odd.'”

Romney continues, “We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor…. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus…. The middle income Americans, they’re the folks that are really struggling right now and they need someone that can help get this economy going for them.”

You can watch the whole thing here. He talks about wanting to look out for retirees on a fixed income and people who can’t find a job and parents who are trying to save for college expenses. He says these are “middle income Americans” and that they are the ones who have been “really struggling” as a result of Obama’s policies. His campaign is going to be all about helping these middle income folks, and not the poor.

I could attack Romney’s comments in any number of ways. CabinGirl’s reaction was priceless. She said he wasn’t focused on the poor because they couldn’t afford the photo ID they now need to register to vote. But it’s the logical error that is most confounding. How do you remain “middle income” if you don’t have a job? How does living off your Social Security check provide a “middle income”? How are “middle income” people struggling more than “low income” people?

His entire argument is confusing.

What he seems to be saying is that there are a lot of people out there who want to work and are accustomed to a middle class way of life, and then there is a giant underclass of permanently unemployed poor people that he doesn’t give a shit about.

I guess that’s not an uncommon way of looking at the world if you travel in conservative circles, but it’s not very attractive and it isn’t usually expressed so clearly by presidential candidates.

I’m trying to think of the right analogy to describe David Frum’s dilemma. He’s like a man who has disembarked from a train and is standing on the station platform watching as the train slowly disappears over the horizon. Except the train is not continuing on, but has reversed itself to go back to from where it came. Or, he is like King Oedipus, who realized that he had slept with his mother and murdered his father. He brought the plague upon the country, however unwittingly, and now must decide whether or not to gouge out his eyes. Or he is the passenger who confidently assured everyone else that it was safe to ignore the “Bridge Is Out” sign, but now realizes his error and can’t get the driver to listen to him. These are the kinds of impressions I had while reading Frum’s reaction to Yuval Levin’s piece in National Affairs.

It’s good that the scales have fallen from Frum’s eyes. Maybe, these days, he is less Oedipus Rex and more the blind prophet Tiresias, who tells the king of his fate but is not believed. In his long thoughtful piece, the most important part is where he quotes G.K. Chesterton’s saying that we should not tear down any fences until we first know why they were built. It’s an explicit acknowledgment that the structures of the modern welfare state were built in reaction to the Great Depression and that they remain important even in boom times when we are tempted to feel they are extravagances we cannot afford. Here we can actually watch the scales falling from his eyes:

Speaking only personally, I cannot take seriously the idea that the worst thing that has happened in the past three years is that government got bigger. Or that money was borrowed. Or that the number of people on food stamps and unemployment insurance and Medicaid increased. The worst thing was that tens of millions of Americans – and not only Americans – were plunged into unemployment, foreclosure, poverty. If food stamps and unemployment insurance, and Medicaid mitigated those disasters, then two cheers for food stamps, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid.

Why not three cheers? Perhaps he’s still holding back. Yet, he recognizes that the Republican train has left the station.

In the interval since I started writing this response to Yuval Levin’s important piece in National Affairs, the Ryan budget plan has been approved by the House of Representatives on a near-total party line vote. Ideas like those endorsed by Yuval Levin are now the formal position of the Republican party. My guess is that the party’s presidential nominee will attempt to tip-toe away from that position in 2012, but who knows? Anyway, it will not matter. President Obama’s billion-dollar campaign will ensure that Republicans are thoroughly identified with it.

So Yuval Levin’s proposition is the proposition that Republicans will take to the country. Perhaps that is as it should be. Since the economic and electoral disasters of 2006-2009, Republicans have veered in a sharply libertarian direction. Why not put that new direction to the test of democracy?

Yuval Levin proposes ending the social insurance system in this country. No more universal benefits like Medicare and Social Security. Everything is means-tested, no benefit is guaranteed. That is Paul Ryan’s vision, too. And that means it is the Republican Party’s vision in this election cycle. Frum correctly warns that danger lies ahead.

I strongly suspect that today’s Ayn Rand moment will end in frustration or worse for Republicans. The future beyond the welfare state imagined by Yuval Levin will not arrive. At that point, Republicans will face a choice. (I’d argue we face that choice now, whether we recognize it or not.) We can fulminate against unchangeable realities, alienate ourselves from a country that will not accede to the changes we demand. That way lies bitterness and irrelevance. Or we can go back to work on the core questions facing all center right parties in the advanced economies since World War II: how do we champion entrepreneurship and individualism within the context of a social insurance state?

I hope Frum is correct. But to get the American Republican Party to behave like the Tories they would have to take the “movement” out of “movement conservatism.” They’d have to become the loyal opposition again, rather than an apocalyptic party of total obstruction. Based on Mitt Romney’s victory speech last night, none of that is happening in this election cycle:

President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great…

…I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become.

The GOP is headed over a cliff, the only question is whether they’ll succeed in taking the rest of us with them.

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Romney Forces Crush Gingrich in Florida Ad Wars

(Mother Jones) – Quoting a “source monitoring the Sunshine State ad war,” Politico reports that the Romney campaign and pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future spent $15.3 million on television ads in Florida. That’s 450 percent more than Gingrich’s campaign and super-PAC Winning Our Future spent on TV ads. And that doesn’t include money spent on direct mail sent to voters, get-out-the-vote efforts, and other non-TV campaigning.

“Until the Adelsons’ checks arrived in January, Winning Our Future had collected just $2 million, according to the filings. Its large donors included Sivan Ochshorn, Mrs. Adelson’s youngest daughter, who contributed $500,000 to the PAC in late December. The pro-Gingrich PAC also collected a $500,000 contribution from Harold Simmons, a Texas billionaire and major conservative donor, as well as another $500,000 donation from W. S. Propst, an Alabama businessman.”

In other words, just as Gingrich clinched a double-digit victory in South Carolina after blitzing the airwaves there with ads attacking Romney, Romney and his allies are doing the same in Florida. And boy is did it paying off!

Booman’s fp story on Florida results – Romney Does Great, GOP Not So Much. CNN exit poll analysis.

G.O.P. Donors Showing Thirst to Top Obama

• Analysis: Financial titans rally to Romney’s cause
• Romney and outside groups paid for almost 13,000 television ads

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."