Archive for Republicans
Boehner: The clearing of the market
Posted by: | CommentsAll the government’s efforts to help distressed homeowners stay in their homes have done, says Rep. John Boehner, is “delay the clearing of the market.”
I love that euphemism, “the clearing of the market.” As in throwing families out into the street. It’s like how the Pentagon described the secret carpet bombing of Cambodian villages as “counterinsurgency strikes.” Or how the FBI (same time period) testified about an investigation and used “a male individual residing in the adjoining domicile” to mean the next door neighbor. It’s so cold and clinical, so devoid of human emotion.
Euphemisms reveal what is most important to you by hiding what is not. “Clearing the market” reveals that boosting real estate values clearly takes priority over helping families stay in their homes. That’s the bottom line.
Having It Both Ways
Posted by: | CommentsRepublicans want to fall in line, the saying goes, and Ann Coulter is falling in line now that Gov. Mitt Romney is back as Republican front runner. She even likes his healthcare plan: Three cheers for Romneycare — “a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles.” After paragraphs gushing about the individual mandate’s conservative roots in the Heritage Foundation, Coulter goes “tenther” calling the 2,000-page Affordable Care Act, not bad policy, exactly, just an illegal one: “If Obamacare were a one-page bill that did nothing but mandate that every American buy health insurance, it would still be unconstitutional…”
Of course, Heritage didn’t think so when in response to the Clinton health proposal, prominent Republicans in the congress included many of its ideas in a couple of health care bills, including the “Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993” (18 Republican cosponsors and a breezy 579-page read) and the “Consumer Choice Health Security Act of 1993” with multiple sponsors in the House. Or when Mitt Romney used the Heritage model in Massachusetts. Only when the Obama White House adopted Romney’s template did Heritage and Republicans balk, as Think Progress reminded them:
– Heritage On Romney’s Individual Mandate: “Not an unreasonable position, and one that is clearly consistent with conservative values.” [Heritage, 1/28/06]
– Heritage On President Obama’s Individual Mandate: “Both unprecedented and unconstitutional.” [Heritage, 12/9/09]
– Heritage On Romney’s Insurance Exchange: An “innovative mechanism to promote real consumer choice.” [Heritage, 4/20/06]
– Heritage On President Obama’s Insurance Exchange: Creates a “de facto public option” by “grow[ing]” government control over healthcare.” [Heritage, 3/30/10]
– Heritage On Romney’s Medicaid Expansion: Reduced “the total cost to taxpayers” by taking people out of the “uncompensated care pool.” [Heritage, 1/28/06]
– Heritage On President Obama’s Medicaid Expansion: Expands a “broken entitlement program,” providing a “low-quality, poorly functioning program.” [Heritage, 3/30/10]
With Coulter singing his praises, once again it’s springtime for Mitt.
Is Our Democratic Centrists Learning?
Posted by: | CommentsRemember when Minnesota’s Gov. Mark Dayton was branded “too liberal to win? That was then. This is now, from PPP:
January 27, 2012
Dayton sees strong approval in MinnesotaRaleigh, N.C. – Minnesota DFL Governor Mark Dayton holds a +19 job approval rating, with 53% of voters approving of his job performance as Governor and 34% disapproving. His support is fueled by near-unanimous approval among Democrats (85-5) and strong approval among Independents (51-33).
Also today from the Star Tribune, Dayton blasts GOP senators as ‘unfit to govern’ after they voted his appointee to the public utilities commission — a clean energy advocate:
Open political warfare erupted between Republicans in the Legislature and DFL Gov. Mark Dayton on Monday with the Senate’s decision to oust a top Dayton appointee from office.The Senate’s 37-29 party-line vote rejecting former state Sen. Ellen Anderson as chair of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) prompted a stern rebuke from Dayton, in which he reminded Senate Republicans of their “leadership scandals” and pronounced them “unfit to govern.”
[...]
A quietly furious Dayton said at a news conference after the vote that “a very good person, a very dedicated public servant and an excellent chair of the Public Utilities Commission was wrongly maligned and cruelly rejected today by Republican senators, who showed once again they are unfit to govern this state. You would think that after their leadership scandals, which caused them to replace all their leaders last month, they would behave themselves for at least a little while.”
Not bad for a liberal.
Rabbit Punch
Posted by: | CommentsWow! That’s terrific bunny …
New York Times : A Mortgage Investigation
The moment Obama mentioned a panel to investigate banks, I thought: “I hear you. Now show me.” The panel is to include New York AG Eric Schneiderman, a thorn in the side to an administration that seems keen on sweeping the whole thing under the rug. A attempt at co-opting him? The Times thinks so.
There is good reason to be skeptical. To date, federal civil suits over mortgage wrongdoing have been narrowly focused and, at best, ended with settlements and fines that are a fraction of the profits made during the bubble. There have been no criminal prosecutions against major players. Justice Department officials say that it reflects the difficulty of proving fraud — and not a lack of prosecutorial zeal. That is hard to swallow, given the scale of the crisis and the evidence of wrongdoing from private litigation, academic research and other sources.
Fiscal Times :
After the Layoff: Congrats on Your New, Worse Job
The good news is the unemployment rate is slowly ticking down – from 9 percent in October 2011 to 8.5 percent in December. Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 200,000 in December, and hiring was up in retail, hospitality, professional services and health care.Yet, for the majority of U.S. workers, average wages have remained stagnant for decades, and median household income dipped during the recession, declining 6.4 percent between 2007 and 2010. According to a study released in December by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, just 7 percent of those who were let go during the recession have matched previous income. A little over half reported taking a pay cut – and of those, 29 percent took a reduction in salary by 30 percent or higher. To top off the bad news, 30 percent of the reemployed percent took a reduction in benefits.
Digby: Zombies are eating election officials brains
Not that this will stop the wingnuts from their crusade but it should. Turns out that the South Carolina zombies weren’t zombies after all.
What Digby said.
The SC Republican Primary: Eyes Wide Shut
Posted by: | CommentsPrimary voters just gave former Speaker Newt Gingrich the win in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, “America’s most conservative state.” Reddest of the red. Buckle of the Bible Belt. CNN welcomed viewers to the Charleston debate this week with “Welcome to the South,” a place “where values matter.”
More there than anywhere else? What values mattered most to South Carolinians who gave Gingrich his win?
Not trust. Why should they trust Newt Gingrich? His three wives can’t.
Not “family values.” Gingrich is on his third marriage and committed adultery with his last two wives. In the soft-focused 1950s of conservative nostalgia, South Carolina Republicans would have dismissed Gingrich as a serial philanderer, and his third wife as a loose woman running for First Homewrecker. But not today. For the modern conservative, values compress to suit the flawed candidate most likely to win (with apologies to Cyril Northcote Parkinson).
“Nothing short of twisted”
Posted by: | CommentsAll things old are new again. Like red-baiting from the Red Scare period a half century ago. On the campaign trail in South Carolina, Gov. Mitt Romney got snappish with a questioner who asked what he — a member of the 1% — would do as president for the 99%. The Romney campaign thinks he did a good job responding this way:
Steve Benen at Washington Monthly disagrees. Romney’s vision, Benen believes, is a “Dickensian nightmare” for American workers:
The country deserves to have a meaningful, substantive debate about a generation of policies that have rewarded wealth while making conditions harder for working people. There are real issues that reflect real-world challenges facing Americans: rising income inequality, poverty, an unjust tax system, and wealth that’s increasingly concentrated at the top.
For Mitt Romney, those who even consider this a legitimate area of debate prefer, in his mind, communism.
This is nothing short of twisted.
No argument there. You’re either with the GOP or you’re with the commies.
So, Who Are The Welfare Junkies?
Posted by: | Comments
So much misdirected anger.
Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.
This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) revisited. It is the Lee Atwater/Roger Ailes revolving door, “Willie Horton” campaign ads from 1988. It is the right blaming hurricane victims in New Orleans’ poor, Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 for not leaving town in their SUVs and checking into Shreveport or Dallas hotels until Hurricane Katrina blew herself out. It is conservatives blaming the 2008 financial meltdown on the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. The government, you see, forced private mortgage lenders and Wall Street to fatten themselves on CDOs built from the “liar loans” they invented and sold to shiftless poor people. In the United Kingdom, it is BBC’s 2010 “The Scheme,” a series critics described as “poverty porn,” depicting welfare recipients that London’s tabloid Daily Mail calls “welfare junkies” (Well, what do you know?) and “foul-mouthed, lazy scroungers, cheats, layabouts, drunks, drug addicts” leeching off “the goodwill of taxpayers.”
Skullduggery
Posted by: | CommentsYour Republican representatives in Raleigh, ostensibly in town to try to override Governor Perdue’s veto and overturn the Racial Justice Act, convened in the middle of the night to attack teachers. Just when I get my jaw back up against my face, the NCGOP does something that drops it again.
N&O:
“Just after 1 a.m. today, in a secreted session critics called unconstitutional, Republican legislative leaders passed a bill aimed at weakening the state’s largest teachers union.
Two Democrats — state Reps. William Brisson and Jim Crawford — broke party ranks to join Republicans in a 69 to 45 vote to override Perdue’s veto of the measure, Senate Bill 727. The 1:12 a.m. vote means teachers who belong to the N.C. Association of Educators can no longer have union dues deducted automatically from their paychecks.”
[...]
In a statement issued at 1:16 a.m., Perdue called the lawmakers actions unconstitutional. “The Republicans in the General Assembly didn’t have the votes to get what they wanted legally,” she said. “So, in the dark of night, they engaged in an unprecedented, unconstitutional power grab. I am saddened for the people of North Carolina that the Republicans abused their power and chose this destructive path.”At a press conference that ended just before 2 a.m., Democrats and the teachers group called it retribution for attacks against the GOP budget that cut education funding. Those who spoke called the session vindictive and insane.
[...]
As rumors brewed, Republicans refused to answer questions. Aides to Tillis held back and tried to block this reporter from asking questions at one point.
It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Magazine World
Posted by: | CommentsPaul Krugman this morning in the NYT:
Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”
Sure, Romney once said that corporations are people, but Krugman doesn’t take it literally. And sure, Romney favors policies that would help corporations at the expense of the middle class, writes Krugman, “but that’s a long way from saying that he wants to introduce feudalism.” Krugman hopes any such statements by Obama would be condemned across the political spectrum.
But now consider what Mr. Romney actually said on Tuesday: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others.”
That used to be called putting words in people’s mouths or attacking a straw man. Krugman brands it “post-truth politics.” But this is more like Bizarro World Transactional Analysis, where actual statements are twisted and restated to paint a fun house mirror caricature of adversaries.
It is a political version of Mad Magazine’s old “What They Say…and What They Really Mean” strips. I saw this up close recently on Facebook threads where someone took statements by other commenters and — changing the subject and out of nowhere — immediately twisted them and spit them back in a bitter, “what they really mean” attack while playing victim and suggesting commenters had attacked him, the Tea Party, etc. (I wonder who modeled that behavior?) We’ll see much more of this in 2012.
For more making much ado about nothing, see Joshua Holland’s The 10 Most Ridiculous Right-Wing Outrages of 2011 over at AlterNet. Zombie ACORN, jihadist turkeys, Muffin-Gate and more…
