Dead center

As much I hate all the bullshit about “centrism”, I realize that is has political value, so this is a real conundrum:

But to just regular folks out there—particularly the 35-45% of Americans identifying themselves as “moderates”—there’s some value in the brand, implying as it does a certain degree of reasonableness and perhaps even unpredictability. And as it happens, self-identified “moderates” are a much larger segment of the coalition that votes for Ds than the one that votes for Rs. Given that reality, does it make more sense for progressives to deny that people like David Brooks (much less Paul Ryan!) are “centrist” in any meaningful sense of the term, or instead to make the term itself so toxic that it’s ceded to crypto-conservatives because anyone to their left has stopped using it? That’s probably an easy question to answer for those who think an insufficiently loud-and-proud progressive message has kept Democrats from energizing their party base or awakening a “hidden” populist majority that sees no difference between “centrist” Democrats and conservative Republicans.

For those of us not so convinced that maximum polarization is an unambiguously good thing, or who believe that for all the many shortcomings associated with them, ideological “brands” do have some political value, then it’s not that great an idea to call both Barack Obama and David Brooks “centrists” in the same column, while trying to deny that one is at all like the other. In other words, it’s not helpful to be a mushy moderate in one’s definition of “centrism.” By all rights, the brand should belong to the Donkey Party right now—it it wants it—because it has been so decisively abandoned by the party of Paul Ryan. It’s better to police membership in the centrist camp than to burn it down.

I hate it when people call themselves “centrists” and wank about liking ideas from both parties, but, voters like that shit, and Kilgore is probably right that the trick here is not to allow people like Bobo to pretend that they’re “centrist” when they’re really far right.

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Falls mainly on the plains

Austerity is destroying the Spanish middle-class:

Here’s just a brief summary of the ugly statistics: (1) The government in Madrid expects the economy to shrink by 1.7% in 2012 – its third contraction in four years. (2) Unemployment continues to rise. It is now more than 23%, and youth unemployment is above a staggering 50%. (3) Housing prices are down 22% from their peak, and are likely to continue to drop, perhaps by 20% or more. This puts extreme pressure on the balance sheets of an already shaky banking sector.

Obviously, this is an economy in severe distress. And what is the government’s response? More growth-killing austerity. In late March, it announced its most severe package of tax hikes and budget cuts yet, aiming to reduce the deficit by $36 billion. What gives? Madrid is extremely worried about the state of its national finances. It missed its deficit target in 2011, and, without the latest austerity package, would have done so again in 2012.

However, the austerity drive is failing to achieve what it aims to do: improve Spain’s financial position and rebuild investor confidence. Instead, investors have been spooked by the deterioration of the Spanish economy. Demand for Spanish government bonds was weak in a Wednesday auction. Since the government announced its latest austerity budget, yields on its bonds have risen, a sign that investors see them as riskier. Yields on 10-year bonds jumped over 5.6%, the highest since January. And why is that? Well, by tanking the economy, the austerity measures are making Spain’s financial standing weaker, not stronger. Despite its new austerity budget, Madrid estimates that the government-debt-to-GDP ratio will INCREASE in 2012, to nearly 80% from 68.5% in 2011. Simply put, Spain is moving backwards.

Cheer up, though, sooner or later, Spain will have a better-than-expected quarterly GDP number and Bobo will start talking about the “Spanish miracle” and what we can learn from it.

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He’s got this much talent — this much if he’s lucky

Atrios has a pretty solid take-down of Jonah Goldberg, Wanker of the Decade Runner Up #6, but it’s a bit shooting fish in a barrel, innit?

My all-time favorite line about the Doughy one is this:

Sometimes Jonah Goldberg lacks the imaginative resources necessary to come up with new stupid things to say, so he relies on his audience of stupid people and relays their emails.

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Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Is it irresponsible to speculate if President Obama threatened Chelsea Clinton’s life in order to win the 2008 primary, like FOX News anchor Heather Childers does?

 

It’s irresponsible not to, of course.  But the whole “Bush fee-fees were impugned” happened, so all’s fair cause politics ain’t beanbag.

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Totally Called It

And it seems the unofficial and unconfirmed winner of the Ni-CLANG Sweepstakes is Rick Santorum, folks!

Speaking to a group of voters in Janesville, Wisconsin on Wednesday, the candidate seemed to catch himself before using a word that sounds like “n*gger” to describe the president. (The original video of the speech is available here. The remarks in question take place at about 34:50.)

“We know the candidate Barack Obama, what he was like – the anti-war government nig… America was a source for division around the world, that what we were doing was wrong,” Santorum said.

“Oh, come on!” Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley told Raw Story when asked for comment. “Give me a break. That’s unbelievable. What does it say about those that are running with this story that that’s where their mind goes. You know, I’m not going to dignify that with [a response].”

“That is absolutely ridiculous.”

Right.  He meant to say “the anti-war government blah person.”

It’s probably ridiculous.  Santorum, speaking for 30 plus minutes, might have gotten tongue tied.  The video’s inconclusive at best as far as I can tell.  But you know what?  It’s end of March, coming up on April.  We’ve got seven months to go still and we’re reasonably close to having one of the major GOP candidates go there.  Slick Rick here may have reasonable doubt in this instance.  Sometime before November, it’s going to happen.  Santorum wasn’t exactly singing the President’s praises in the speech.

But hey, Santorum’s campaign and at times Santorum himself accused POTUS of promoting infanticide, promoting eugenics, of having radical Islamic policies and of being a bigot towards Santorum’s anti-gay bigot buddies.  These are things Santorum and his people have gone on record of having said, so frankly dropping the n-word really can’t make him much more of an odious, self-righteous jagoff.

Santorum crossed that line long ago.

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Symptoms Of A Syndrome

On a day where President Obama spoke about Trayvon Martin’s murder and said the following:

“All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” President Obama said Friday morning following a White House Rose Garden ceremony when asked about the 17-year-old’s death.

The president called the shooting a “tragedy” and says “every aspect” of the case should be investigated. Obama gave his condolences to the slain teenager’s parents and said if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

We have this going on at a Rick Santorum event...

At a shooting range in Louisiana on Friday, an onlooker encouraged Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum to pretend the target he was firing at was President Barack Obama.

“Santorum is shooting a 1911 Colt,” Politico’s Juana Summers tweeted from the sheriff’s office shooting range in West Monroe. “Range master says ‘Well, it’s not your first rodeo.’ Someone here says ‘pretend its Obama.’”

...and this out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich....

In a radio interview on Thursday, Newt Gingrich returned to one of his favorite recent themes, what he calls the “elite media” and their conspiracy to aid and abet the Obama administration.

In an article at Huffington Post, the former Speaker of the House is quoted as saying to Sandy Rios of the American Family Association that the “elite media” are “in the tank for Obama” and will do everything they can to see him re-elected.

“It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are,” he said, “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church?”

...and I just shake my head.  I’m a black male who has survived to the ripe old age of 36 and is not incarcerated.  I’m an exception in this country, it seems.  I live in one of the 24 states that has a law that solely exists to justify the use of deadly force as the ultimate sanction against someone who is merely perceived to be a threat, without evidence, due process, or the right to face your accuser (because hey, you’re effing dead.)  The legislative need to create laws like this is a symptom of a much more awful syndrome, and in every case these laws were passed by “pro-life” Republicans led by the gun lobbyists.

These laws are designed to allow vigilantism, period.  It’s the worst impulse of the whole Glibertarian/Paulite/Somali Pirate anarcho-justice codified into “I get to decide who lives and who dies, and I reserve the right to exercise that impulse at any point.”  We’re all castles stomping around killing each other, and may the best, most heavily armed castle win.  And as far as Republicans are concerned, well that impulse extends to “We’ve decided that having a black President violates our right not to have one, so we’re going to do something about it from the ground up.”

Trayvon Martin’s awful, pointless murder is just a symptom of a much uglier sickness.

[UPDATE]  Newt doubles down.

“What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful,” Gingrich said on the Hannity Radio show. “It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.

“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him. That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.”

Effing. Perfect.

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Runs deep so deep so deep

I was thinking the other day that it’s a bit surprising there haven’t been more displays of machismo among the four remaining Republican candidates, now that Perry is gone. Machismo was a big part of W’s shtick, I seemed to recall. Then I saw this post at Digby:

By far the most compelling confirmation of the phallic meaning of the president’s aircraft-carrier cakewalk was found on the hot-selling “George W. Bush Top Gun action figure” manufactured by Talking Presidents. I originally ordered one to use as part of the cover design for this book. The studly twelve-inch flyboy not only comes with a helmet and visor, goggles and oxygen mask, but underneath his flight suit is a full “basket”—- a genuine fake penis, apparently constructed with lifelike silicone.

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Perceived Crimes And Collective Punishment

Expanding on the conversation in ABL’s thread from yesterday, I’m honestly wondering if we do understand that the larger, more salient point of crazy, clearly unconstitutional insanity like Arizona’s “right to fire people for using birth control” bill is to assure the Republican base that the coalition of “others” that elected Barack Obama to the White House: all “those” people who “don’t know their proper place” like African-Americans, Latinos, young people, women, the LGBT community, and “traitor” liberals in general, are going to be punished in 2013 and only they will be punished, right?

Look, Republicans are basically saying “Hey, look, we know you’re scared.  When push came to shove, the America you thought you knew sided with the black guy and for a lot of you that was pretty much the last straw.  So here’s the deal:  we promise to make laws that will assure that, demographic shift be damned, they’re never going to have that kind of financial or political power again for a long, long time.  We’re going to force the reckoning that you know has to be coming soon and we’ll make sure the bill goes to them, not you.  And here’s the best part.  We’ll design the laws to be guilt-free code-word stuff.  We’ll give you the power to make the decisions on winners and losers and keep the losers losing for a long time to come.  We’ve got all kinds of experience with that.  Don’t worry about the courts, we’ve got those covered.  If you side with us now they’ll be backing us for decades, that’s where there real long game is and then the control at the local and state level really pays off.  But we need you with us, because anyone against us, well…you don’t want to be them when this train leaves the station, because it’s going to run over everyone else, got it?  What do you say?”

And yes, that means that a healthy chunk of our political process in this country is motivated by the “plot” of GCB.  It’s all about vengeance, both petty and fever-bright.  Never mind the GOP’s real aim is to screw over the people who support them in the end, but they need the political support for now.  They figure once they get back into power, they won’t make the same mistakes of the Dubya era as far as allowing that power to slip through their fingers again.  It’s time to reboot America, they believe.  They’re not too far away from being able to pull it off, either.  Demographic tides and all be damned if they can lock down power at the state level to simply ignore federal laws they don’t like and simply treat the unwashed “others” unlucky enough to live in a red state as untouchable lepers who need to be driven off to the urban hellholes and liberal enclaves.

Something to keep in the back of your mind when you hear the GOP make their pitches this campaign season.

 

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The masquerade is over

I believe there are people who are not conservative ideologues who vote entirely on the basis of their opposition to reproductive rights. Likewise, I believe that there are people who are genuinely libertarians, not just conservatives who smoke pot. I also believe that there are white southern conservatives who are not racists.

Let’s be clear, though: much of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy consists of people who aren’t “pro-life” so much as they are right-wing ideologues. Reproductive rights are just a tool for them to turn force the Catholic Church to act as Republican political PAC. Many, many “libertarians” economics bloggers are just hateful wingers:

Some supposedly libertarian bloggers have let down their guard, coming out in favor of the vile Virginia probe lawand the Rush slut attack, and revealing in the process that all that reasonableness was just a facade.

And a large proportion of southern Republicans are insanely racist:

... PPP asks Republicans in Alabama, “Do you think Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim, or are you not sure?” Guess how many say Christian? 14%! Among the remaining 86%, “Muslim” slightly leads “not sure,” 45%-41%. (“Not sure” may by the demographic Rick Santorum is reaching out to when he accuses Obama of peddling a “phony theology.”)

But the Alabama Republicans are a thoroughly trusting lot in comparison with their Mississippi brethren. Among Mississippi Republicans, just 12% say Christian, 52% say Muslim, and 36% aren’t sure.

I guess the good news is that the internets make it harder and harder for all of these people to pretend to be decent, principled proponents of smaller government, or whatever it is they try to sell themselves as.

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Helpmeets

This really made me laugh:

Not to tempt the gods of non sequitur, but contrary to what the White House insists, Rush Limbaugh is not the leader of the GOP. Even so, he does have a large audience and it is disconcerting that so many seem to share his obvious hostility toward women. Several of his cohorts in discourtesy are snorting and grunting in my inbox even now.

One who wrote in defense of Limbaugh informed me of my place in God’s hierarchy, slightly above goats, and gave me a tutorial about why women have been saddled with the monthly inconvenience and painful childbirth — for tempting men to do evil and failing to recognize their roles as “helpmeets” for men.

“Pagan women like yourself,” he patiently averred, “have no regard for the natural order of God’s plan and shamelessly promulgate the ‘we are goddesses’ bile that has infected the entire country and pretty much stopped it in its tracks from incurring God’s blessing.” I’m leaving out the best parts.

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Gotta run for shelter, gotta run for shade

Kevin Drum (via) on the likely upcoming summer of hate:

July and August of 2010 were a festival of xenophobia and racial rage from the news organs of the right. Among the topics that generated wall-to-wall coverage on a serial basis that summer were (1) the New Black Panthers, (2) Arizona’s new immigration law, (3) the “anchor baby” controversy, (4) the “Ground Zero” mosque, (5) the Shirley Sherrod affair, (6) a new upwelling of birther conspiracy theories, (7) Glenn Beck’s obsession with Barack Obama’s supposed sympathy with “liberation theology,” and (8) Dinesh D’Souza’s contention — eagerly echoed by Newt Gingrich — that Barack Obama can only be understood as an angry, Kenyan, anti-colonialist. Plus I’m probably forgetting a few.

But last summer was pretty quiet. Maybe the right had finally learned its lesson? As it turns out, no. Apparently it’s just that 2011 wasn’t an election year, so there was no point in pushing racial hot buttons all summer long. But 2012 is very much an election year and things are heating up early this time around. I’m speaking, of course, of the latest race-baiting pseudo-exposé on the right: the long-promised video demonstrating just how radical Barack Obama was back in his Harvard Law School days — and probably still is, though of course he’s cannily learned to hide his radicalism from the sheeple now that he’s president of the United States.

[....]

[I]n early 2010, would you ever have guessed that the New Black Panthers would be feted with a multi-week run on Fox News? Or that something called the “Ground Zero mosque” would suddenly burst into prominence based on the hysterical blog posts of Pamela Geller? Or that we’d spend a couple of weeks talking about “anchor babies”?

The GOP base is not excited about Romney, but after a few months of race-baiting and conspiracy mongering, they’ll be pumped up to turn out in droves this November; they’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more xenophobia.

Democrats need to find a way to make Republicans pay for doing this. Establishment media will play the-both-sides-do-it game, Politifact may rate the claim “it is not clear where Obama was born” as partly true, and remember that time in 2004 when the anonymous MoveOn member drew a Hitler mustache on a Bush poster? But every hate-fest needs a scapegoat group, and if the scapegoats are women or immigrants (as seems reasonably likely), we should be able to make the Two Months Hate backfire the way the war on women has.

I’m almost loath to say I wish a motherfucker would, though, since last time this happened a Congresswoman coincidentally got shot in the head. Anyway, it’s coming whether we like it or not. Get ready.

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The residue of design

James Fallows has a long piece about Obama that someone has probably already mentioned here. I mention it because I noticed that over the past few weeks the “Obama is lucky” stuff (e.g. here; here; here) is back with a vengeance, and Fallows argues that there’s more to it.

It’s just a fact that if a black person accomplishes something it will be chalked up to some form of luck, the luck of “natural talent”, the luck of affirmative action, the luck of having a crazy opposition party, whatever. That’s a topic for another time.

My question is this: are there other issues like contraception (which the media insists Obama got “lucky” on) where Republicans can be baited into taking insane positions that alienate most of the population? They have crazy positions on almost all issues, so there should be other opportunities like this. We should all be thinking about this, IMHO.

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They keep bailing…(what the fuck are they yelling?)

It’s all about reality:

Capital One has recently aired advertisements on the Rush Limbaugh radio show. Today, ThinkProgress asked a representative of the company whether it is “taking steps to ensure that your ads will not run on Rush Limbaugh in the future.” Capital One responded: “Yes. We have reiterated our advertising choices to our media partners. If an ad did run, it was not authorized by us, and we do not want it to happen again.”

Separately, Downeast Energy announced they will also stop advertising on Rush Limbaugh. The total number of companies that have pulled their ads on the Rush Limbaugh show now stands at 32.

Censorship! Freedom of speech! Liberal media!

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Devil take the hindmost

You gentlemen, why you all work for me (h/t readers DJ and JG):

 

Just before the last shareholders meeting, the Koch brothers also nominated –but were unable to elect – eight additional individuals for our board.  Those nominees included the executive vice president of Koch Industries, a staff lawyer for Koch Industries, a staff lawyer for the Charles Koch Foundation, a former Director of Federal Affairs for Koch Industries, a former Executive Director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (and who was, incidentally, a McCain bundler), and a lifelong Wichita friend of Charles Koch.  Aside from those functionaries, they also nominated a couple of people with public profiles that make the jaw drop:

• John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog, whose firm counts Koch Industries as a client. Hinderaker has written, “It must be very strange to be President Bush.  A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice.  He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.”  Hinderaker supports the Patriot Act and the Iraq War and calls himself a neocon.

• Tony Woodlief, who has been president of two Koch-created nonprofits and vice president of the Charles Koch Foundation. Woodlief has blogged about “the rotten heart of libertarianism,” calling it “a flawed and failed religion posing as a philosophy of governance” while complaining about libertarians “toking up” at political meetings.

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Every Limbaugh boy and girl

The idiot can’t shut up and it will be fun watching Young Conor’s fine, Horace-quoting, Republican friends continue to defend him:

Against my own instincts, against my own knowledge, against everything that I know to be right and wrong, I descended to their level when I used those two words to describe Sandra Fluke. That was my error.

The more this clown is in the news the more we win.

Keep saying “the war on women”.

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