Old Republicans never die, and unfortunately, neither do they fade away. From the New York Times:
Shortly after his visit to Akron, Mr. Gingrich spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. He waded to the lectern across the ballroom floor to the throbbing beat of “Eye of the Tiger,” with lights flashing and thousands of well-wishers shrieking his name. No one else made such a rock-star entrance.
I’ve decided I like Gail Collins a lot. She’s sarcastic, but she never quite looses her shit, which I’m afraid I would do if I had to write about the mind-blowing stupidity in Washington on a regular basis. (This is a big reason I am not – not – a columnist for the New York Times.) From her column this morning:
Now Shelby has upped the ante with a blanket hold on (all Obama administration nominations). His incredibly grave reasons were the desire to see that a defense contract for a new tanker is awarded to a bidder who will do the assembly work in Alabama. Also, he feels that a new F.B.I. facility for testing explosive devices should be conveniently located in Huntsville.
“If this administration were as worried about hunting down terrorists as it is about the confirmation of low-level political nominations, America would be a safer place,” said a spokesman for the senator.
Those two paragraphs nicely encapsulate the two prongs of Republicans’ incredibly confusing philosophy of governance, which are:
What is going on.
What really attracted me to Obama during the campaign was common sense. He said he wasn’t an ideologue. He said there was stuff to do, and by golly, he was going to do that stuff, and get it done, and he would do so bipartisanly. It didn’t work out so well.
For the first year, I thought he was crazy. Principled, but crazy. It looked like he’d brought the proverbial knife to a gun fight, like he was playing chess on a rugby pitch, like he was quoting Shakespeare when all anyone really wanted was fart jokes.
If I were him, I would have dropped the gloves a long time ago and started nut-punching. The Republicans have been so incredibly destructive over the last few years that it almost seemed like a moral imperative to destroy them back. But now there’s this hour-long video of Obama wading into a meeting of Republican lawmakers, taking their questions, and absolutely devastating them the way only a former law professor can:
After watching this video, I’m starting to think that I underestimated Obama, severely. He wasn’t just mouthing talking points when he boosted bipartisanship in the campaign. The man was stone-cold serious. Bipartisanship really is his philosophy of governance, and (like it or not) he’s demonstrated that repeatedly by including Republican proposals in legislation passed by Democrats.
By fielding their questions clearly and firmly, Obama managed to reveal the Republicans for the nincompoop, hypocrite obstructionists that they really are, while at the same time inviting them to join him in moving the country forward. This was a display of not only incredible political savvy, but profound intellect. After watching this, I really think there’s a chance that Obama will turn out to be one of the great, historically-important presidents of the United States of America.
I also think Republicans will never, ever again let themselves be filmed asking Obama questions.
I’ve been thinking for some time now that the greatest hypocrisy of fiscal conservatives is coupling a fundamentalist opposition to new social spending with ferocious support for the American Military Welfare State. Glenn Greenwald has a great post on the topic. I found this graphic to be enlightening.
Here’s the problem with current standards in American politics: In order to think you’re competent enough to run for state-wide or national office, you kind of have to be an arrogant, overly-self-confident, extroverted prick. Which, if you think about it, almost exactly describes a womanizer.
There are therefore two ways to avoid losing an entire class of political Golden Boys to sex scandals:
There is, of course, a third course of action, which is: Don’t do anything and just enjoy the goddamn shit out of the whole thing. Which is what I chose to do.
From No More Mister Nice Blog:
I don’t know if yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling is really going to lead to the apocalypse predicted by so many, or if the corporate influence on American politics is already at its absolute maximum and this is merely going to alter the number of tools in the fat cats’ political influence toolkit. (The ruling is awful, yet I lean toward the latter view — it seems to me that corporations have found a way to have as much political influence as possible already.)
But I find myself having the same naive reaction to the notion of “corporate personhood” that I’ve always had when it’s come up: If corporations are persons in the eyes of the law, why has no one pursued the argument that we can do to corporations what we routinely do to persons, namely imprison and execute them?
What with health care reform failing, banking regulatory reform a joke, 10% unemployment, climate change unchecked, everyone getting fat on government-subsidized corn products, and two messy wars still ongoing, you’d think things couldn’t get much worse for the ol’ U.S. of A. You would be wrong.
The Supreme Court just overturned a century of precedent and ruled that corporations have the same first amendment rights as people. They can now spend as much as they want on political campaigns.
It’s over, folks.
I posted this video earlier, but I think it’s worth posting again in light of the Masshole vote. It’s an interview with a Harvard health care economist on why we really, really need health care reform.
With now only 59 votes in the Senate, Democrats may not be able to pass health care reform. Tonight’s Senate vote in Massachusetts is a ridiculous coda to an absurdly difficult battle, and frankly, I don’t think we learned anything.
Americans still haven’t fully grasped the fact that their health care system is an international punchline. A majority of them cling to worn-out Reagan-era orthodoxy about tax cuts and Big Government. Meantime, the last decade – arguably the climax of that orthodoxy – saw negative private sector job growth and no increase in middle class wages.
Nobody seems to get it. You can present as many facts as you want. It doesn’t matter. The talking heads and their mouth-breathing minions continue to shout the same talking points, like the more you repeat something – anything – the truer it gets.
This vote was sad for me personally because it means I might not ever be able to afford living in the United States again. Since I do mainly freelance and contract work, I have to pay for my own health care. This is doable when one is young and single, but not so much when one is married with a kid.
America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but I’m not feeling it right now.
From the New York Times:
… as the administration moves to increase oversight within [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] , the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.
As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.