The Math Demands It!
(via ThinkProgress)
... because “I think we can beat Santorum even if the Devil stays out of it.” Representative Frank always gives good interview, bless him.
If your dead soul stern personal philosophy forbids you to take pleasure in other peoples’ wedding plans, the relevant question is at the 3:50 mark.
Blue Dog Heath Shuler of North Carolina is hanging up his congressional cleats as Democrats just don’t seem to be eager to support the guy anymore and he got stuck holding the bag on redistricting.
One of the last remaining members of the Blue Dog Coalition, Shuler was hit by congressional redistricting that made his western North Carolina district much more difficult for a Democrat to win.The three-term congressman had been floated as a possible candidate for governor in North Carolina, but announced on Wednesday that he would not be running for that office.
Shuler did not address the new challenges that redistricting created for his electoral prospects, but in a statement on Thursday said he wanted to spend more time with his wife and two children.
“This was not an easy decision,” Shuler said. “However, I am confident that it is the right decision. It is a decision I have weighed heavily over the past few months. I have always said family comes first, and I never intended to be a career politician.”
Shuler stressed to reporters that family considerations were his sole reason for leaving Congress.
Bye, Heath. Your Congressional career was about as useful as your NFL one. Here’s the Act Blue page for donations to the Dem running to replace Shuler, Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell, who will most likely be running against…surprise!...yet another GOP business tycoon who’s started out his campaign in December by loaning himself a hundred grand. I keep saying we need more and better Dems in Congress to back President Obama. Here’s yet another opportunity for that.
Dave Wiegel, at Slate, has been following Newt Gingrich around Florida this weekend:
LUTZ, Fla.—Newt Gingrich began his day in one the front pews of the Exciting Idlewild Baptist Church, one of the largest non-airport faciilites I’ve ever seen a Starbucks inside of. The speaker, Callista, and his top Florida surrogate Bill McCollum sat, stood, and sang along for a service tied to Sanctity of Life Day…
Gingrich wrapped up and found a good place for a receiving line, right in front of the crowded Starbucks. The chatter from the crowd: Respectful of Gingrich, very forgiving of his “moral values.”
“I heard Dick Morris say that Republican women don’t like Callista,” scowled Mary Gaulden, who’d hand-made Newt buttons and affixed them to her shirt. “That’s nonsense. I’ve met Callista, and I can tell you she would bring to the White House a kindred spirit to Jacqueline Kennedy.” The speaker and his wife were saved, and penitent, and that was that…
Jacqueline Kennedy? Ah-HAH!
But the real Red(State) meat was distributed later in the afternoon:
... Newt Gingrich was in The Villages. If you needed to design a last redoubt of the Tea Party voter, a place to collect the older, whiter conservatives who make up the movement, you could do no better than a planned community of at least 75,000 people, with a central census-designated zone of around 8,000, where people under 19 can only stay with permission for 30 days. Gingrich pulled more than 1500 people over to the Sumter Park section of the complex. Parking began outside of a Barnes and Noble. It spilled across the street, with souped-up golf carts sharing space with SUVs, fighting for small patches of grass. Representatives of the Tri-County Tea Party passed out brochures, advertising meetings of 2000 people, showing the markings that previous conservative ambassadors had put on them.
Gingrich, taking a stage with his wife beside him, spoke for 27 minutes. The text was a splice-up of Tea Party talk and attacks on Mitt Romney—different flavors of the same soup…
Gingrich needed the audience’s help, because the Republican establishment was afraid of him, and (implictly) doing damage… “The truth is we have been served badly, the American people, by the establishment of this country in both parties. Let’s be clear about it. In both parties! It’s time someone stood up for hard-working, tax-paying Americans and said, enough! And if that makes the old order uncomfortable, my answer is: Good.”
Name-brand third-party candidate available, for the right price. Although I sure don’t see the ‘sensible centrists’ at American Select accepting The Newt as their spokesmodel.
“I’m delighted that tomorrow Michael Reagan will be campaigning with me,” said Gingrich, “which should tell you how false the ads were earlier this week by Romney, to suggest that I wasn’t a Reagan Republican. Nancy Reagan said in 1995, ‘Just as Barry passed the torch to Ronnie, Ronnie passed the torch to Newt.’ And Michael will be here to prove tomorrow, to every doubting person, I am in fact the legitimate heir of the Reagan movement. Not some liberal from Massachusetts!”
Up to now, Gingrich had been calling Romney a “Massachusetts moderate.” The “liberal” tag was new; it was exactly what the Tea Party was longing for.
Rejected-by-his-own-party Ex-Speaker Gingrich: Zombie Reagan’s Heir! In Revenge of the Golfcart Snowbirds, coming to the Hell’s Octoplex this August…
I would be remiss not to highlight today’s fundraising appeal for Warren’s campaign. From the website:
Scott Brown is celebrating the two-year anniversary of his election today—and we’re fighting back by launching a money bomb to stand up and show the power of Elizabeth’s grassroots support.
Elizabeth’s campaign has lots of grassroots momentum—but Scott Brown still has a two-to-one cash-on-hand advantage, with millions of dollars more from Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the Chamber of Commerce, and other Wall Street interests waiting in the wings…
Balloon Juice also has an ActBlue page for Warren, though I don’t know whether contributions there will be credited towards today’s money bomb.
Who’s up for the opposite of a drinking game for tonight’s GOP debate? Maybe hit the tip button every time Newton blows his dogwhistle, or Willard describes himself as ‘trustworthy’, ‘faithful’, or ‘happily married for 25 years’? (Even at a buck a hit, that should get us past the million-dollar mark by around 8:45pm…. )
... “I would not put the cart before the horse and define [Romney] as an unambiguous frontrunner,” DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told TPM in an interview at St. Anselm College in Manchester. “He’s coming off what at some point probably won’t even be defined as a win in Iowa where fewer voters came out for him than came out in 2008.” She added that anything less than 50% in New Hampshire should be interpreted as a sign of weakness given his close ties to the state.
Nonetheless, as polls show Romney threatening to secure the nomination early, Democrats are unveiling new campaigns to try to define his business experience as more Gorden Gekko than Steve Jobs. Party officials have been holding press events in Iowa and New Hampshire with Randy Johnson, a worker who was laid off from his job at American Pad and Paper under Bain Capital’s management in the 1990s, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that Bain’s layoffs under Mitt Romney will be a critical part of their general election strategy should he win the nomination. Romney says that his opponents are cherry-picking his failures and ignoring success stories like Staples, but his campaign has been unable to substantiate its claims that he created net jobs and critics note that even some of Bain’s failures ended up creating a profit for Romney and his fellow investors through consulting fees and dividends.
“Mitt Romney, I think, is more of a job cremator than a job creator,” Schultz said. She added: “He was a corporate buyout specialist at Bain Capital. He dismantled companies. He cut jobs. He forced companies into bankruptcy and he outsourced jobs and sent jobs overseas. That’s not a record to write home about, that’s not a record to be proud of, and it’s something voters need to know.”
It was a cold grey pre-spring morning early in 2002, and I was one among the hordes migrating through the Back Bay (subway, commuter rail, and intercity bus) terminal. Suddenly a tall humanoid in an expensively-tailored dark tweed business-capitalist overcoat lunged into my meagre personal space and thrust a dark-gloved hand towards my throat. When I automatically pulled back, he bared his top-quality-dental-hygiene teeth in a primate threat gesture possibly intended to mimic a smile. Two or three much younger, smaller drones in cheap knock-off overcoats immediately rushed over and carefully guided the tall humanoid away from me and towards another potential target. One of the little drones tarried to look back at me, arrange his shiny happy features into a frowny-face, and hiss, “That was Mitt Romney! He’s going to be your next Governor!”
Half-awake and running late, I was still sufficiently curious to tarry a few minutes to watch the worst approximation of the standard political grip’n’grin I have ever seen. Even when his entourage of young Mormon missionaries formed an advance guard, every third or fourth innocent passer-by (both genders and a wide range of ages, skin tones, and apparent income levels) shied away from Romney like they’d just read Gavin de Becker. He exuded the polar opposite of charisma.
That was my first, and please goddess my only, personal meeting with Willard Mitt Romney. I’ve witnessed equivalent events for both John Kerry and Michael Dukakis, and neither of those famously un-gemultlische individuals inspired the same visceral negativity from random citizens—general or specific anti-political animus, yes, but people weren’t pulling away from Kerry (who was also very tall & expensively dressed) like he’d tried to grope them.
It’s not going to be hard for President Obama’s re-election committee to make Romney seem unlikable. He is unlikable. The best his political supporters have been able to manage are variations on Wilde’s quip about GBShaw: “An excellent man; he has not an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.” The more time professional politicians and political operatives—not among the world’s most sensitive individuals—spend with him, the less they like him. The Media Village courtiers, however dutiful their attentions to their own paychecks and perquisites, have not been and will never be enthusiastic about their chances to share a non-alcoholic beer or customized-Range-Rover tire swing with “Mitt”. Of course, conventional wisdom is that he gets a minimum forty percent of the votes just by having that ( R ) after his name (although if anyone can break through that floor, it’ll be Romney). And there’s the overlapping twenty-seven percent that won’t vote for an African-American/a Democrat/their own best interests. But making Romney “appealing” to the notorious Low Information Voter is going to cost the Rethug political machine many, many precious millions of dollars… thrown down a sinkhole.
Greg Sargent at the Washington Post highlights the Obama administration’s response to Romney’s craven defense of his fellow One Percenters:
[Wednesday] Romney denounced the Cordray appointment as “Chicago style politics at its worst.” The Obama campaign responds:“Mitt Romney today stood with predatory lenders and Republicans in Congress over the middle class. He doubled down on his promise to eliminate the Wall Street watchdog and allow Wall Street to write its own rules again, leaving consumers vulnerable to hidden fees, financial traps and excessive risk taking that will hit their pocketbooks. Governor Romney has made clear he has not learned the lessons of the economic crisis, instead, he’s giving the most irresponsible financial actors a bright green light to pursue profit at any cost to communities across America.”Note the mention of “Republicans in Congress.” Dems know it’s imperative that they prevent the eventual nominee from achieving separation from the unpopular Congressional GOP and its policies.
There is a sidebar poll asking “Has Mitt Romney locked up the Republican nomination?“. Responses, as of pre-dawn Thursday, are running 71% against.
Dave Weigel at Slate discusses “three lessons from Iowa“:
Lesson One: The Tea Party isn’t a small-government-first movement…. Sixty-four percent of caucus-goers called themselves “Tea Party supporters,” and 30 percent of them backed Rick Santorum—a social conservative who proudly defended his earmarks. Rick Perry, who campaigned desparately on the issues Tea Partiers say they care about—no earmarks! Term limits! Part time Congress!—got 14 percent of this vote. Michele Bachmann got 9 percent of it.
Lesson Two: Money is speech, which means people can ignore it. Michael Li was the first to calculate how much the candidates spent for every vote. Santorum spent $1.65 per vote. Rick Perry spent $817…
Lesson Three: Republicans aren’t so excited about 2012…
Ya think? More at the link; also, those precious votes cost Romney $113.07 each, which is pretty spendy for a race in which Willard’s handlers claimed he wasn’t really competing. I gotta say, seems to me, it’s all good news for President Obama!
So, what other encouraging news is on the agenda today?
(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
Per TPMLivewire, Willard Romney, Richard Santorum, and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz all took victory laps tonight.
Rick Perry, on the other hand, may be reduced to campaigning for the VP slot, after “one of the most swift and complete collapses in primary history“.
... some part of the horse, anyway. Reporting from the salt-of-the-earth diner-demographic in Iowa, Mr. Pierce at Esquire elicits a brilliant analogy:
POLK CITY, Iowa — So Dennis Wendle and Don Boone were hanging out together at home down around Liberty, Missouri (no kidding), and they decided that they were tired of living in a state that counted for so very little in the presidential nominating process, especially when compared to The Crucial Iowa Caucuses. So they packed themselves up for the drive north and, yesterday, they found themselves at a table in the Riesling Sun Cafe in downtown Polk City, which was jumping for nine in the morning, and waiting for the imminent arrival of Rick Santorum, whose campaign was said to be jumping as well, perhaps even as high as second place in TCIC. Dennis and Don were pretty much trapped over their breakfast, what with the fact that patrons of the Riesling Sun were outnumbered about 50-1 by journalists, camerapeople, and TV news haircuts from many lands. (Frank Luntz was haunting the ice-cream counter, possibly attempting to lie pistachio into thinking itself to be chocolate.) Don spoke, in succession, to Canadian TV, Japanese TV, German TV, and a local station from Boston.
“Hey,” Dennis said to me, showing some admirable entrepreneurial drive. “For fifty bucks, you can stand on my chair.”
Dennis is a retired TWA mechanic, and Don worked for Kansas City Power and Light for over 20 years, and also was an official in an IBEW local. They are shopping around for someone to get behind during this election year. They are not optimistic. “It’s big money and it’s big business, and it doesn’t reflect the views of working-class people like us,” Dennis said. “Corporations are not people. See what I mean? The people’s wishes. I don’t even follow Santorum, but I’ll bet, here’s what we’re gonna talk about. We’re gonna talk about the moral issues. We’re gonna talk about abortion. We’re gonna talk about all those things that are pretty much settled.
“There’s a trick in the horse industry that we learned before we had sedatives that, if you grab a horse by the lip, and squeeze it, he forgets about anything else. It’s called ‘twitching.’ That’s what they do to us. They twitch us with all that other stuff and pass over the important issues. Not gonna talk about jobs, either, because they’re not here, and they know where they went, but they’re not gonna do anything to bring them back.”...
[My emphasis] This is not quite the “Look! a jackalope!” trope so beloved of internet trolls and Media Village courtiers, which is just intended to distract. Twitching, in the veterinary sense, allows a skillful 200-pound biped to compel obedience from a 1,200-pound quadruped—just as the tiny minority in charge of the Republican party has compelled the GOP rump to vote against its own best interests for the past forty years, and counting.
(And speaking of “twitching demagogues”, Brett Smiley at NYMag’s Daily Intel reports that Rupert Murdoch has “Sort of Endorsed” Santorum... via Twitter.)
(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
During this hectic holiday season, let’s keep reminding our “low information” family members and acquaintances:
When you vote for a modern Republican, you are voting for a Bad Person.
The livestream is here, but my PC is (very sensibly) refusing to load the Faux News player…
Richard Adams’ Guardian liveblog is here:
8.30pm: Welcome to the GOP presidential debate, brought to you by Fox News and the good people of Sioux City, Iowa – the final slugfest between, well, a pack of slugs.
The Iowa caucuses is on 3 January and between then and now this is it: the last chance to impress voters nationwide.
Have at it, y’all…
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9.16pm: Asked why he is so rubbish, Rick Perry claims that like star quarterback Tim Tebow – actually not a very good quarterback but he somehow still wins games – he can be better than he looks. “I hope I am the Tim Tebow of the Iowa caucuses,” says Perry. Perry will be lucky to be the Forrest Gump of the Iowa caucuses.
Paging Mr. Tbogg, Mr. Tbogg to the red courtesy phone….
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Roger Simon @politicoroger
I met Saul Alinsky. I interviewed Saul Alinsky. And Saul Alinsky would not have considered Obama a radical. #iowadebate 15 Dec 119.22pm: If you had “Saul Alinsky radical” in tonight’s debate drinking game, then chug, because Newt just dropped that.
If you don’t know who Saul Alinsky is, join the 99% of the American population who are with you.
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9:35pm: Asked about taking bucketloads of cash from mortgage facilitator Freddie Mac, Gingrich somehow claims that he was “a private citizen” when he did so, and that doesn’t count. Also, he then goes into a weird self-defence, claiming that he loves people buying houses. So he was just trying to help. By banking cheques for $1.6m.
And yet, not so long ago, Newt Gingrich wanted to shut down Fannie and Freddie. But now it turns out they are just brilliant.
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WIN:
141. David – December 15, 2011 | 9:55 pm · Link
“I’ve been having affairs since Obama was in high school!” ~Newt
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10.07pm: We’re onto Iran and the nuclear weapons. The question in essence: why, Ron Paul, will you not bomb these dangerous fanatics? “It’s war propaganda going on,” says Ron Paul. “The greatest danger is that we’ll have a president who will over-react.”
For bonus points he also called Iraq “that useless war”.
Moderator Bret Baier says Ron Paul would be running to the left of Barack Obama on this matter. “What did we do on Libya? We talked them out of their nuclear weapon and then we killed him,” says Paul. Hmm.
Paul appears to be running for President of Iran. Which is a novel tactic in a Republican presidential campaign.
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Original Wonkette may have the best summary of the debate (& it ain’t over yet!)
Ana Marie Cox @anamariecox I want us all to mark this moment when crazy met nuts and crazy won. #iowadebate 15 Dec 11
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Facepalm:
10.26pm: Our correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg is at the debate venue in Sioux City, Iowa, and she sends this analysis of the debate so far:... Perry has spent a little bit too much time staring slack-jawed into the camera to dispel the impression that he does not have the intellect to be president. But he did get applause for his idea for a part-time Congress, working just 140 days every two years…
Because running THA WORLD’S GREATEST COUNTRY IN HISTORY EVER PRAISE JEEBUS should be a part-time job. Hey, it works for Wal-Mart!
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WINNER of tonight’s debate: President Obama.
LOSERS: Everyone who paid any attention, including those of us here at BJ, each & every one of the candidates, and I strongly suspect Faux News, because while all the participants ladled out a sufficiency of Crazy, there were no “meme-making” moments to enliven two hours of squirming tedium…
Greg Sargent at his WaPo Plum Line blog reports “Obama unleashes sharp attack on inequality, and Campaign 2012 begins“:
Obama’s speech in Kansas, which just concluded, was the most direct condemnation of wealth and income inequality, and the most expansive moral defense of the need for government activism to combat it, that Obama has delivered in his career. The speech is best seen as a bid to establish a moral and philosophical framework within which literally all of the political and policy battles of the next year will unfold, including the biggest one of all: The presidential campaign itself…
“We simply cannot return to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country,” Obama said, in what will probably be the most enduring line of the speech. A number of people on Twitter immediately suggested a new shorthand: “YoYo Economics.”
“Roosevelt was called a radical, a socialist, even a communist,” Obama said, in a tacit reference to similar attacks on himself. “But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight hour work day and a minimum wage for women; insurance for the unemployed, the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax.” Strikingly, the validity of some of these same government functions is still being debated today…
E.J. Dionne, also at the WaPo, provides historical context:
Here is how Roosevelt stated the problem when he spoke in Osawatomie:
“At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. . . . “
Roosevelt was uncompromising in insisting that those who wanted to protect private property needed to understand that those who held property had obligations to serve the public interest. “The true friend of property, the true conservative,” he declared, “is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.”
In one of its sidebar readership-capture polls, the Washington Post asks: “Do you agree with President Obama that supply-side economics has ‘never worked?’” Surprise, surprise—the dissenting factor stands at twenty-seven percent!
Something huge happened today. The kind of thing that changes the nature of the economy, and Americans’ relationship with their government, and with the corporations that seem to rule so much of our world.
Today is the day that a significant part of the Affordable Care Act took effect. Today is the day that companies that sell and provide health insurance have to start spending 80% to 85% of their income from insurance premiums actually delivering the services for which they charge their customers. Overhead like office space and supplies, marketing expenses, salaries, and yes, profits have to come out of the remaining 15-20%. The rule is called the the medical loss ratio, and in an important decision recently by the Department of Health and Human Services, the insurance companies cannot count the sales commissions that they give out to the people who sell you your insurance plan against the medical loss ratio.
The MLR can ONLY be allowed expenses, which must be actual costs of coverable medical expenses. This is huge. This means no more nonsense like refusing your mother’s cancer treatment because she forgot about that prescription skin cream she had for acne when she was fifteen when she was filling out the application. Hell, the insurance companies are going to be scrambling to pay for coverable things because any part of that 80-85% they don’t spend on allowables will have to be refunded to the policy holders.
Simply put, this is the end of the beginning of the long track to single payer health care.
So, can private health insurance companies manage to make a profit when they actually have to spend premium receipts taking care of their customers’ health needs as promised? Not a chance-and they know it. Indeed, we are already seeing the parent companies who own these insurance operations fleeing into other types of investments. They know what we should all know – we are now on an inescapable path to a single-payer system for most Americans and thank goodness for it.
