Moving quickly on contraception, in the laboratory of the states

When I read the Blunt Amendment that Republicans and church leaders are pushing I wrote that the proposed federal legislation would override the state laws now in place that guarantee coverage of contraception. People who have contraception coverage now under state law could lose it under the proposed federal law. True.

Well, this anti-contraception campaign is moving a little faster than I predicted, because the Blunt amendment hasn’t even been debated yet and conservatives and church leaders are moving to overturn existing state law on contraception, without waiting for Congress:

New Hampshire, one of the least religious states in the nation, has become the latest front in the political battle over contraception. State GOP leaders oppose the new federal rule compelling insurers to provide birth control to employees of religious organizations. They want to change a 12-year-old state law that requires contraceptive coverage under insurers’ prescription drug policies.
It’s hard to miss the politics fueling state House Speaker William O’Brien’s push to carve out a religious exemption from the contraception mandate.
“The Obama administration is trying to divide this country and to divide women against Catholics,” O’Brien said. “The amendment before you, however, is a way of guaranteeing religious freedom by ensuring that we are not forcing employers to purchase health care coverage that violates their belief.”
New Hampshire has required contraceptive coverage in all prescription drug plans since 2000. The law was passed by a Republican Legislature and signed by a Democratic governor. Nobody at the time, it seems, saw the policy as a blow against religious liberty.
Democratic state Rep. Terie Norelli, who co-sponsored the law, said that objection never came up.
“There was no discussion whatsoever — I even went back and looked at the history from the bill,” she said. “There was not one comment about religious freedoms.”

It wasn’t just lawmakers who were silent; religious leaders were, too.
“I wasn’t here back in 1999,” said Diane Murphy Quinlan, chancellor of the Catholic Diocese of Manchester, “and we didn’t have a full-time lobbyist in the Legislature. It’s possible that it was missed.”
The diocese isn’t itself directly affected by the contraception mandate because it, like the state’s largest Catholic hospital, has chosen to self-insure. But if the church gets its way, contraceptive-free insurance may soon be widely available on the open market.
“I ask that all of our people of good will support that which is in the best interest of that which gives life, that which sustains life,” Bishop Peter Libasci said during a recent news conference. The diocese helped draft the bill, which would free any employer, be it an auto repair shop or a metaphysical bookstore, with a religious objection to birth control.

Wow. Not abortion, mind you. Contraception. In one of the “least religious” states in the nation.

It’s unknown how many New Hampshire employers now carry insurance that runs counter to their religious tenets, but some are out there. “We are part of a group plan that forces us to do things that are against our Catholic principles,” said George Harne, president of The College of Saint Mary Magdalen. He admits that he wasn’t aware of the state law until the controversy erupted over the federal rule. But, he said, “If we had not found it now, we would have eventually discovered the problem and sought to correct it.”

If someone had told me six months ago that Republicans in New Hampshire would be openly joining with a church to draft legislation to limit to access to contraception I would not have believed it, but here it is. Talk about doubling down.

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I’ll be damned if he’ll marry his boss’s daughter

Via Washington Monthly, an interesting profile of Sarah biographer and Kristol-in-law Matthew Continetti:

After graduating in 2003, Continetti moved to Washington to work at The Weekly Standard. He was eager to report, not to opine, and this goal set him apart from most of his peers. “If your ambition is to write for some prestigious magazine, that is very different from the aspiration, ‘I want my team to succeed,’” explains Reihan Salam, a writer for National Review.

Traditionally, conservative magazines have placed little emphasis on reporting. “The great missing element in conservative opinion journalism has been reporters,” says Andrew Ferguson. “I’ve seen interns rotating through the office. You say, ‘So what do you want to be?’ And they say, ‘I want to be George Will.’ ... When you come across someone like Matt who will make phone calls and go through boring government documents to find information, it’s a rare thing.”

[....]

Continetti’s march toward outright partisanship is not unusual in Washington. In the conservative media world in particular, there are significant rewards for helping out the movement—that is, for putting political objectives above journalistic ones. “If you are working for a conservative publication, you are kind of rewarded for not deviating,” says Sanchez. “The thing that is rewarded is, in some sense, the easiest, laziest thing. It is sort of hard [to] think, ‘I’m going to do the more difficult thing and win the prize of being less successful.’”

Say what you will about the tenets of Tucker Carlson, at least he didn’t marry Bill Buckley’s daughter.

(Title for true musical theater buff’s only.)

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European Austerity Is Working? O R’yleh?

The Elder Keynesian Krugthulu arises from the depths of Lost Decade, shrill but dreaming, not to bring madness, but to end it!  Ia! Ia ftaghn stimulus!

Last week the European Commission confirmed what everyone suspected: the economies it surveys are shrinking, not growing. It’s not an official recession yet, but the only real question is how deep the downturn will be.

And this downturn is hitting nations that have never recovered from the last recession. For all America’s troubles, its gross domestic product has finally surpassed its pre-crisis peak; Europe’s has not. And some nations are suffering Great Depression-level pain: Greece and Ireland have had double-digit declines in output, Spain has 23 percent unemployment, Britain’s slump has now gone on longer than its slump in the 1930s.

Worse yet, European leaders — and quite a few influential players here — are still wedded to the economic doctrine responsible for this disaster.

For things didn’t have to be this bad. Greece would have been in deep trouble no matter what policy decisions were taken, and the same is true, to a lesser extent, of other nations around Europe’s periphery. But matters were made far worse than necessary by the way Europe’s leaders, and more broadly its policy elite, substituted moralizing for analysis, fantasies for the lessons of history.

Specifically, in early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts would lead to a surge in consumer and business spending, while nations failing to make such cuts would see capital flight and soaring interest rates. If this sounds to you like something Herbert Hoover might have said, you’re right: It does and he did.

Now the results are in — and they’re exactly what three generations’ worth of economic analysis and all the lessons of history should have told you would happen. The confidence fairy has failed to show up: none of the countries slashing spending have seen the predicted private-sector surge. Instead, the depressing effects of fiscal austerity have been reinforced by falling private spending.

Just as the financial crisis, the housing depression, and the Great Recession should have doomed Laffernomics and the notion that tax cuts cause growth through, you know, bloody reams of empirical evidence, so should the notion of austerity as a solution to the problem be laughed out of this universe and every other.  Of course, austerity was never the “solution” to the problem of the 2008 crash, it’s the “solution” to the New Deal and the decades of classic liberalism that followed.  Republicans want to “solve” it.  The stimulus was too small to fix the problem fully, but it certainly saved our asses.  The GOP says “we’re on the path to Greece!”  We would be on the path to Greece now under them, and that’s what they want.  Makes it so much easier to cut, cut, cut.

And so to the Mountains of Economic Madness the Austerians head, hoping to take all of us with them for “shared sacrifice”.  But Mighty Krugthulu knows the way through…

The point is that we could actually do a lot to help our economies simply by reversing the destructive austerity of the last two years. That’s true even in America, which has avoided full-fledged austerity at the federal level but has seen big spending and employment cuts at the state and local level. Remember all the fuss about whether there were enough “shovel ready” projects to make large-scale stimulus feasible? Well, never mind: all the federal government needs to do to give the economy a big boost is provide aid to lower-level governments, allowing these governments to rehire the hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers they have laid off and restart the building and maintenance projects they have canceled.

Look, I understand why influential people are reluctant to admit that policy ideas they thought reflected deep wisdom actually amounted to utter, destructive folly. But it’s time to put delusional beliefs about the virtues of austerity in a depressed economy behind us.

The evidence against austerity keeps piling up, but of course austerity for the 99% to benefit the 1% is the point in and of itself, and it always has been.  That’s the abyss they want to throw us into.

Madness, indeed.

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Pat Buchanan out at MSNBC

MSNBC dropped conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on Thursday, four months after suspending him following the publication of his latest book.  The book “Suicide of a Superpower” contained chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.” Critics called the book racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic, charges Buchanan denied.

Pat Buchanan gave the keynote speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention.  He had failed to secure the nomination, but had done well enough to demand the spotlight during prime time.  Molly Ivins said later of his speech that “it probably sounded better in the original German.”

Speaking of which, Buchanan was quite the amature apologist for Hitler himself, having once said the Fuhrer was “misunderstood” and that the US and Germany should’ve fought on the same side in WWII.

Buchanan took to the ‘pages’ of the Creators’ Syndicate, of which he’s been a long time member.

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.  The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”  A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it “exists to strengthen Black America’s political voice,” claimed that my book espouses a “white supremacist ideology.”   Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, “The End of White America.”

Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!

Well, with the disaster of optics that was today’s hearings on contraception sponsored by the Congressional Republicans and only featuring male witnesses, and that fool Freisse, or Freak, or Fuckwit or whatever the hell his name was, and then this?  I’d say the forces of light have had a pretty good day.

Oh, yeah—Open Thread

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They pay people for advice like this…

The life of a DC gasbag is a sweet one. Take the latest advice from GOP maven Mike Murphy to Mittens (emphasis added):

“He should drop the biography-based message. Nobody wants a well-intentioned accountant in charge when the house is on fire. For the first time [????] in his professional life, Romney needs to stop thinking and calculating and get stupid. The race now is about his heart… And while the cerebral Romney [????] may recoil at the psychological striptease this requires, it is how people pick their President in modern America. Romney must fill that vacuum or else others will maliciously fill it for him.”

From where I sit, Mittens has no problem being stupid. Nor does he have any problem selling his soul and saying and/or doing anything he feels might help him win. I mean, Mitt is a guy who is willing to completely denounce everything his father believed and is exactly the kind of vacuous politician his father hated. And he sold his father out just to appeal to the Conservative mob running Republican politics these days. After that sell-out, I don’t see how he is holding back from any over-the-top pandering to the wingnuts. Mitt is all in with the crazy-town talk. His problem is that the CONservative base doesn’t believe him and never will until he starts demanding Barack Obama’s birth certificate and promises to deport him back to Kenya as the first official act of a President Romney. And even then, Mittens will never out crazy Newt, Rick and the rest.

Still, Murphy has a sweet gig. It must be nice to get paid to offer dribble like the notion that Mittens might still have any integrity left to ruin in his race for the GOP nomination.

Fun times.

Cheers

ps. I’m on my way to Detroit this weekend to see family and look forward to a closer look at the clown parade in action. I’ll try to get up a few reports from the field.

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The Bishops make their move

So it looks like the Bishops have decided to double-down on their latest effort to have the Federal Government enforce Church Law.

The President offered up a rhetorical solution in response to their rhetorical freak-out over language in a new health insurance rule and the fiction that their objection was about religious freedom was exposed as bullshit. They could walk away, but instead they are pumping up the volume to keep the issue alive. It is a political play that has more to do with Republican politics than almost anything else.

The Bishops are demanding an end to any rule that requires any insurance company to cover any contraception or family planning as basic health issues for women. This is just the latest iteration of a centuries old objection to women having control of their bodies, their lives, their happiness and their liberty by the conservative power-focused elites running the Roman Catholic Church. This objection manifests itself in screeds against anything that treats sex as an activity separate from breeding and/or free from the dictates of Church Law.

And yet, I don’t think this latest play is about sex or even the Church trying to control the lives of women—I think it is about power and that sex, women, gay marriage and a host of other culture warrior issues are the pathway that they see as the golden road. More »

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Why Republicans are Crawling Into Women’s Vaginas

More good news: jobless claims are down again. Here’s a graph of jobless claims from Steve B (click to embiggen) that explains why the Republican Party is ginning up the culture war—it’s easier than acknowledging that the economy is getting better.

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Getting to Know All About You

Following up on Zandar’s post on polling, I just want to add that my favorite graph just keeps getting worse. And there’s this:

Overall, 55 percent of those who are closely following the campaign say they disapprove of what the GOP candidates have been saying. By better than 2 to 1, Americans say the more they learn about Romney, the less they like him. Even among Republicans, as many offer negative as positive assessments of him on this question.

Not to go all Tom Friedman in a cab, but I was at a Super Bowl party last night with some friends who aren’t much interested in politics. The only political remark of the night happened when they sang America the Beautiful, and it was a pretty negative review of Romney’s performance in Florida.

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Something’s Wrong, Something’s Amiss

Gosh, I can’t quite put my finger on what’s bothering me about this analysis of Romney’s performance in Florida from CNN’s Juan Carlos Lopez here, but it’s just not right.

How Romney won Florida’s Latino vote

Huhwha?  Did I miss something?

As Mitt Romney dominated the Florida Republican primary Tuesday night, he also captured the bulk of the votes from Latinos in the state, with 54% of their ballots. But how did he pull that off?

His victory could be seen as somewhat surprising for a candidate with a tough stance on immigration, who promised that if he were president, he’d veto the Dream Act that would legalize young undocumented adults who came to the United States as children if they attend college, join the armed forces or meet other requirements.

But Romney’s methodology for winning their votes reveals a more focused, calculated approach to securing the fastest-growing voter demographic in the state and the country, and could prove to be a hurdle for President Obama in the general election.

Oh, that’s it.  Florida’s Republican primary is closed, so the only Latino votes the Marquis de Mittens captured were in fact 54% of registered Republicans.  Please, somebody tell me how Mitt getting, say, 54% of the African-American vote in a closed GOP primary means he could prove to be a hurdle for President Obama in the general election.  I’m eagerly awaiting that explanation.

But it’s the independents there who voted for him in 2008—and the 400,000 in Florida who list no party affiliation—who are at real risk of being lured to the Republican side in 2012. They will be the prize in the November election, and where Obama—who starts with a 60% lead among all Latinos in state polls—may end up battling Romney over the growing Latino vote.

So a 60% lead among the total Latino voting population in the polls makes President Obama vulnerable to a battle with Mitt Romney among Latino voters in Florida.  Got it.  If we’re expanding the definition of “battle” to include Wellington and the Prussians smooshing Napoleon all over the Belgian countryside at Waterloo, then Lopez is spot on.  Good call, CNN.

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Morning in America

Do you remember when one of the big MSM critiques of Democrats was the lack of optimism they showed, how they were always scolding and negative about our future, and how Americans, who are fundamentally optimistic, couldn’t identify with the party and its candidates because of it? I do, but apparently this guy doesn’t, because I’ll be damned if he cracked more than a reluctant smile last night.

It’s not just Cantor and Boehner at the SOTU, it’s also Gingrich, Romney, Santorum and Paul in the debates. Those twice-weekly pissing matches are glum, overly serious affairs contrasting the grim meathook future of another four years of Barack Obama with an even darker apocalypse of program cuts and never-ending austerity under the Republicans.

I’m not saying that politicians need to tell us happy lies, but I think it is fair to expect them to have a bit of optimism and some proposals that try to make the lives of Americans better. We haven’t seen either from the Party of Reagan for at least a solid decade. Hating the gays,the browns, and the poors, and cutting programs to keep taxes down are all unpleasant work, and it shows.

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All right in a sort of a limited way

Laura Ingraham today on her radio show:

Rick Perry should drop out of this race. . . . And I like Rick Perry, I thought he was pretty cool in the last debate, except for that little problem with calling Turkey an Islamic terrorist regime. I mean, God bless him but he’s not put in the time to kind of know anything about foreign policy and you can’t be president if you don’t know anything about foreign policy.

The “Romney Book”, page 9:

Romney has no foreign policy experience.

Page 66:

Romney’s foreigh affairs resume is extremely thin, leading to credibility problems.

Romney “Lacks Any Background In The Military or Foreign Policy.” Though Romney has devoted considerable time during the campaign to national security – including a major speech on Thursday in New York City on the threat of nuclear terrorism – the one term governor lacks any background in the military or foreign policy. (Jonathan Martin, “McCain hits Romney on Bin Laden comment.” Politico.com 4/28/07)

The Romney Book is going to be the gift that keeps on giving for months and months….

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Open Thread: McCain for Obama 2012!

As NYMag’s Daily Intel reminds us:

Using out-of-context quotes in attack ads is quintessential campaigning. Mitt Romney recently said that practice was “fair game.”

The Conventional Wisdomeers may harrumph about “taking advantage of an old man’s senile dementia”, but I believe John McCain just hates Willard Romney so much that he can’t even shape his mouth around That Name.

Watch for the Very Serious Pundits to seize upon this joke as exactly equivalent to the weird “Don’t vote for Huntsman, adopter of non-white children and probable Manchurian Candidate” YouTube. Both sides!

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The shape of things to come

There are those who say that Bob Somerby’s obsessive focus on the War On Gore is overdone, but I think Elias Isquith might have a point here:

An underrated aspect of what will be the 2012 election is the fact that, just as they hated Al Gore in 2000, the national political press hates Mitt Romney. For a taste of what, in some bizarro alternative universe, a right-wing Bob Somerby will for years be obsessively blogging about as soon as the polls close this November, check this brutal Dana Milbank column, “Mitt Romney out of control”:

[....]

The press’s romance with President Obama may have soured with the years; but I don’t think any opposing candidate — not even the Goracle — would come out on the losing end of a media war with Mitt Romney. The contempt these supposedly savvy insiders hold for the Troy McClure of American politics is just too, too overwhelming.

I guess I’m skeptical overall, though—the glowing coverage of the Romney kids isa case in point.

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Department of Predictions

From this morning’s Toledo Blade:

Investment from resurgent American automakers made big news in 2011, with General Motors and Chrysler announcing multiple large projects in Toledo and northwest Ohio that together total nearly $1 billion and should create or help preserve almost 3,400 jobs.
Promise for the future of manufacturing in northwest Ohio was one of the brights spots in a year that saw many changes to the business landscape in the region.
The big bucks in manufacturing are coming from Chrysler Group LLC. The automaker last year committed $500 million to its Toledo Assembly complex. That investment, which will go toward updating the line that ultimately will build Jeep’s new sport utility vehicle in 2013, will add a second shift to the plant, and lead to more than 1,100 jobs. Chrysler also said it planned to invest $72 million in its Toledo Machining Plant.
General Motors Co. announced plans for two investments totaling $343 million in its Toledo Transmission plant for upgrades and a new line for an upcoming eight-speed transmission. It also plans to pump $47 million into its Defiance Powertrain plant.
“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of capital investment in our traditional manufacturing sector around the automotive industry,” said Ford Weber, president and chief executive officer of the Lucas County Improvement Corporation.
In addition to the automakers and other large-scale manufacturers, Mr. Weber noted suppliers are investing in facilities here, and that’s likely to continue, especially with emphasis on just-in-time delivery.

Because it can’t be repeated often enough, here are a conservative and a libertarian boldly planning political strategy, in 2009:

“The pattern here is pretty clear,” House Minority leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday. “Every time the president makes a so-called tough decision, it’s the American middle class that gets hit the hardest.”
Obama defends his administration as a reluctant and stern savior of an industry that’s vital to the American economy.
Republicans see in GM a chance for their party to come out with a unified message — a confidence grounded in the conservative belief that government involvement in private industry always spells disaster. And GM’s long history of financial problems — even in more prosperous times — also makes Republicans see the company as a big albatross around Obama’s neck.
“This is somewhere in between Baghdad and fixing the flood in Louisiana,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said, comparing the GM decision to major stumbles by former President George W. Bush. Obama “has decided to take this over. He now owns it.”

I’ll just repeat this part, because it’s absolutely key to understanding the (alleged) Conservative Soul:

a confidence grounded in the conservative belief that government involvement in private industry always spells disaster

Not facts or numbers, not a basic working knowledge of the NW Ohio manufacturing scene or the US auto industry or a discussion of the relative merits of several possible extraordinary measures we might have taken after a massive implosion of the economy, but belief.

They may as well have told us they were praying for us, that we were “in their thoughts” during this “difficult time”.

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I wanna be your dog

Rickroll:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leads in a new CNN poll of Iowa six days before the January 3rd caucuses, outpacing Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) 25 to 22. But the real surprise in the poll is that former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum moved to third with 16 percent of the vote, after months of campaigning in the state seeing little traction.

If anyone has Hakyekian modesty, it’s this guy, right?

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