A Christian plot for domination?
Michelle Goldberg writing in the The Daily Beast about Dominionism, “a fringe fundamentalist movement … which says Christians should rule the world.” And which apparently has ties to Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry. What.
Not from The Onion, I swear.
In Deficit Plan, Obama Drops Compromise for Confrontation
Binyamin Applebaum, writing for the NY Times:
The key points of the plan read like a mirror image of the priorities espoused by House Republicans. The president proposed raising taxes by $1.5 trillion, mostly on the wealthy, while making only modest cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, and walling off Social Security from any changes. The plan also would reduce military spending by more than $1 trillion. […]
“This is not class warfare,” Mr. Obama countered Monday in his Rose Garden remarks. “It is math. The money is going to have to come from someplace.”
I’m happy about this. Glad to see Obama trying a different strategy for dealing with the harsh realities of governing our divided country.
David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam wrote an interesting op-ed for The New York Times that looks into the Tea Party from an angle not often covered: the people who would go on to form it. The Tea Party’s origin is often glossed over or assumed in media coverage as people new to politics who were mad about taxes or something or other. Campbell and Putnam actually interviewed people before and after the movement got underway, giving them real information about the folks who would join the Tea Party:
Beginning in 2006 we interviewed a representative sample of 3,000 Americans as part of our continuing research into national political attitudes, and we returned to interview many of the same people again this summer. As a result, we can look at what people told us, long before there was a Tea Party, to predict who would become a Tea Party supporter five years later. We can also account for multiple influences simultaneously — isolating the impact of one factor while holding others constant.
Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.
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So what do Tea Partiers have in common? … [T]hey were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.
It’d be nice if they gave crosstabs and such instead of just summarizing without any numbers. Their result here does seem compelling though, both shocking and yet not really shocking at all if you think about what the Republicans who were swept into office by the Tea Party wave have actually been doing as opposed to what they said they’d do.
In Wisconsin, a Big Recall Push Comes Up Short
Monica Davey for The New York Times:
In the end, it fell short of the outcome protesters who had marched in Wisconsin’s state capital for weeks and weeks had hoped for: Democrats managed to seize two Republican State Senate seats in recall elections on Tuesday, but fell short of the three (or more) they needed to take control of that legislative chamber.
By Wednesday, everyone was declaring victory. Democrats and labor leaders said their two recall victories were remarkable if not optimal; only two incumbent Wisconsin lawmakers had ever been thrown out before in such elections since the state began allowing them more than 80 years ago. And Republicans noted that their incumbent senators had on Tuesday won four other recall elections, meaning that Wisconsin voters had allowed them to go on controlling the State Senate, the State Assembly and the governor’s office, just as they had before the state blew up into a battleground over cuts to collective-bargaining rights earlier this year.
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On Tuesday, two Republicans — Senators Dan Kapanke of La Crosse and Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac — were removed by Democratic challengers. Until Tuesday, Republicans had dominated the Senate with a larger 19-to-14 majority, but with six recall elections in a single day, the damage for Republicans could have been far worse.
Four Republicans who held onto their jobs included Senators Robert Cowles of Green Bay, Luther Olsen of Ripon, and Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls. Vote counting dragged into the wee hours of Wednesday in a fourth race near Milwaukee, and Senator Alberta Darling, a Republican, ultimately held onto her seat.
The results of yesterday’s recall elections in Wisconsin are generally being reported narratively as a loss for the Democrats, even though they gained two seats. The truth is that Wisconsin is ideologically a mixed state, and both sides can claim both victory and defeat. Democrats gained ground in a really unprecedented recall effort, but the Republicans still hold the fort. The incessant needs to frame things in terms of winners and losers and reduce complex events to one-sentence stories are two of many silly things about politics.
GOP presidential candidates join Twitter debate
Hilarious piece by The Onion:
Six Republican presidential hopefuls traded tweets in the first presidential debate conducted through Twitter on Wednesday, outlining their agendas across the popular social media service.
In brief responses that buzzed across cyberspace, the GOP field challenged President Barack Obama’s approaches to the ongoing debate over the debt ceiling, job creation and the U.S. involvement in Libya. Republican candidates criticized Obama’s handling of the economy and efforts to reform health care, while using the medium to share links to introductory videos and websites.
“Obama failed. With ur help we can return the people’s voice to the WH, restore fiscal sanity & make Obama a 1 term president,” said Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, reflecting the clipped jargon commonly found on Twitter.
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While televised debates can lead to longwinded answers, the Twitter forum places a premium on being terse. Asked whether a president can create jobs without expanding the role of the federal government, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum tweeted: “The federal govt kills jobs!” Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, responding to a question on whether the U.S. should have gone into Libya, tweeted: “Absolutely not” and then followed up: “Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya – Get out now!”
Addressing the economy, Georgia businessman Herman Cain told followers: “Government doesn’t create jobs. Businesses create jobs. Government needs to get out the way.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., offered a punchy economic plan: “Control spending. Put Americans back to work. Get back to a balanced budget as we did when I was Speaker.” Gingrich was one of several candidates to post a link to his introductory video and later invited followers with more questions to go to his Google+ Hangout on Wednesday evening.
No wait, I’m being told that this is was written by Ken Thomas for the Associated Press, and as such is a real piece by a real news agency covering a real thing that really happened.
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
Playing the Reagan card on the debt ceiling is misleading
The LIEbrul socialismsphere has been getting a lot of play lately of remarks Ronald Reagan made in the 1980s about the debt ceiling. In a letter he sent to members of Congress in 1983 and a radio address he made in 1987, he pushed the necessity of raising the debt ceiling to avoid catastrophe. From the letter:
The full consequences of a default or even the serious prospect of default by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange markets.
So some folks have been pretty giddy about the re-emergence of this stuff: EVEN RONALD REAGAN UNDERSTOOD and all that. I admit that I laughed when I heard it. It’s a nice, self-contained zinger, something which the Democrats haven’t been terribly successful at putting together in our attentionless world.
Of course, since we live in the real world and not the univariate model the politics machine reduces us to, the actual budgeting situation of the 1980s was quite a bit more complex than that. Steve Kornacki of Salon wrote an excellent piece for their War Room blog which goes through the causes of the 1987 budget crisis, the political maneuvering, and how things eventually played out:
On Reagan’s watch, deficits had exploded, thanks mainly to his 1981 tax cuts (which slashed the top marginal rate for 70 to 28 percent) and to a massive increase increase in defense spending. From George Washington through Jimmy Carter, the country’s debt had never grown past $1 trillion, but in just Reagan’s first six years in office, it soared past $2 trillion, with no slowdown in sight. The deficit for fiscal year 1986 reached $220 billion.
It was against this backdrop that Congress decided to confront Reagan in 1987. The Supreme Court had just struck down a key enforcement provision of the 1985 Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law (which mandated annual cuts), so Congress came up with a new plan: They’d attach a provision to the next debt ceiling increase requiring that the deficit be reduced by a fixed amount over the next five years until it was zeroed out. First up would be a $23 billion cut from the deficit, to go into effect with the fiscal year that would start that fall. Under Congress’ plan, automatic budget cuts would be immediately triggered (half of them defense-related) if Reagan and Congress couldn’t agree on a plan of their own by November 20.
The important thing to remember here is that neither congressional party was nearly as ideologically cohesive in 1987 as it is today. The Democratic ranks were still littered with conservatives from the South and moderate (and even liberal) Republicans were not uncommon. The GOP’s Capitol Hill leaders — Bob Michel in the House and Bob Dole in the Senate — were both pragmatic, deficit-wary conservatives. That is, they were as alarmed by Reagan’s deficits as many Democrats were, and they weren’t averse to cutting a deal to address them, even if it meant raising taxes.
Because of the ideologically blurry lines between the parties, Congress’ vote on the debt ceiling plan truly was a bipartisan affair. In the House, Democrats supported it by a 125-111 margin, while Republicans supported it by a 105-65 spread. In the Senate, 31 Democrats voted yes, and so did 33 Republicans.
The Reagan White House reacted angrily, convinced that Congress was using the dual threat of a debt default (if Reagan vetoed the plan) and deep defense cuts (if Reagan signed the plan but then failed to reach an agreement with Congress on how to cut $23 billion from the deficit) to force the president into a tax hike — something he opposed with the adamance of today’s Republicans. Several of his aides urged him to veto it, and for several days he considered doing just that, until he finally relented and signed it. That is the backdrop for the video Democrats are now circulating.
Reagan mythology is leading US off a cliff
Paul Rosenberg of Los Angeles’s Random Lengths News (who, apropos of nothing, looks like “Orson Welles playing a hobo” in Colin’s words) wrote a long opinion piece for Al Jazeera on the deification of Reagonomics in the United States:
Entirely forgetting the real history of how Franklin D Roosevelt used activist government to save American capitalism from itself, the entire US political establishment is instead hypnotised by the false history woven around its most over-hyped president of all time: Ronald Reagan. Idolatry of Reagan’s supposed tax-cutting wonders propels the now widespread economic belief that up is down, that cutting government spending is the way out of – rather than into – a severe recession. At the same time, idolatry of Reagan’s supposed political wonders propels GOP extremists to ignore all other considerations.
He then pretty viciously tears into what he views are myths about Reagan’s economic policies:
The idea that Reagan produced a uniquely booming economy is false
The idea that Reagan brought prosperity is true only for those at the top, not for average American workers
The idea that Reagan was good for the American economy in general is false
The idea that Ronald Reagan consistently opposed tax increases is false
The idea that Reagan’s tax cuts spurred job creation is false
Reagan’s Presidency happened mostly before I was born, and entirely before I understood what a Presidency was, so maybe my outlook would be different if I were twenty-five years older. But I’ve never understood why Reagan is constantly invoked in budget talks these days when he increased the debt, increased federal spending as a percentage of GDP, and increased taxes quite a few times. I’ve always been under the impression as a non-economist that Reaganomics overall did help our economy, if only because it was a change from whatever Ford and Carter did. When you get down to what Reagan actually did and what actually happened to our economy in the ’80s, though, you’ll find it’s a far cry from this mythological interpretation people seem to hold.
Assholes of the Week: Wisconsin Republicans
The big news out of Wisconsin today is that the state Supreme Court reinstated the anti-union bill. Six Republican state Senators are facing recall elections because of their support of the bill, and three Democratic ones are facing recalls because of their opposition.
Last week, the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel obtained letters encouraging Republicans to support “protest candidacies” of additional Democrats in two of the Republican recall elections. The elections mentioned in the letters are those of Senator Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac and Senator Luther Olsen of Ripon. The inclusion of another Democrat would cause a July 12 recall election to be a primary, delaying the final recall election to August 9. The letters admit that this is purely a stalling tactic:
We need to make sure Democrat challengers face primaries to allow our Republicans time to mount a campaign. The GAB is delaying Democrat elections to give them more time to organize. We need the same! A Democratic primary will push the general election back by one month, so that Senator Hopper can have more time to organize a campaign against his liberal challenger.
Daniel Bice of the Journal Sentinel reviewed the political donations of the two “protest” candidates mentioned in the letters, John Buckstaff and Rol Church, and discovered they both have histories of donating to Republicans. In 2008, Buckstaff even donated money to Sen. Hopper, whom he would face if he won the primary. The pejorative name given to these men by the paper is “fake Democrats.”
Since the plan was outed, Republicans have been disavowing involvement and pointing fingers at colleagues while also claiming there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. Emma Roller and Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel wrote a piece yesterday on the current state of affairs.
The campaigns for the Republican senators tried to distance themselves Monday from the plan to run fake Democrats, saying it was orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and the state Republican Party. Fitzgerald has said all the Republicans facing recalls were informed of the plan in advance.
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Republican Party spokeswoman Katie McCallum in a statement defended the plan for primaries as a way to give Republicans time to campaign.
“These protest candidates have a right to have their voices heard; they believe it’s ridiculous for Republican senators to be recalled for doing their jobs…,” her statement said.
The article also contains estimates from clerks of what the additional costs of the primary elections would be:
Election clerks estimate the cost of a Democratic primary in the districts of the recalled GOP lawmakers as follows: Sen. Rob Cowles of Allouez, $86,000; Sen. Alberta Darling of River Hills, $69,700; Sen. Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls, $27,000; Sen. Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac, $84,200; Sen. Dan Kapanke of LaCrosse, $101,000; and Sen. Luther Olsen of Ripon, $60,200.
Those are only partial figures. Two counties in Harsdorf’s district, two counties in Olsen’s district and one county in Kapanke’s district did not provide estimates. The figures also do not include the costs for some of the municipalities within those counties.
The total estimate for the two races mention in the letters is $144,400. If primary elections are forced in all six, the total of all the estimates is $428,100.
This is in a state where today an anti-union bill went into effect. A bill ostensibly passed for budget-balancing purposes.
“Knobgobblers” is all I really have to say.
Legal reasoning called absurd in Nevada special congressional election
As you may have heard, one of the Senators from my state of Nevada, John Ensign, resigned earlier this month amid an affair and possible ethics violations. His seat was quickly filled by our governor through appointment of Dean Heller, one of our House members. Heller’s House seat was then to be filled by a special election, which our Secretary of State is organizing.
I haven’t really been paying attention to it that much but apparently there’s been a bit of a ruckus over how he’s handling said election:
The legal reasoning used by the state’s top election official to determine how candidates will be chosen for a special election to fill Nevada’s vacant U.S. House seat was “unreasonable and absurd,” a state judge said Monday.
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Secretary of State Ross Miller said the Sept. 13 special election would be an open contest, with the 2nd Congressional District seat going to the candidate who gets the most votes.
Okay, well, I’m not entirely sure how that qualifies as capricious.
But he also set different rules for minor political parties and independent candidates, who would have to be designated by their party executive committee or file a petition with signatures of 100 registered voters to get on the ballot.
Oh, huh. There you go.
