Not Just “Unconditional”, A Faceplant Surrender

So, it has come to this. A complete, unconditional, unequivocal faceplant surrender by John Boehner. I should feel more Schadenfreude and vindication than I do.

A few thoughts on the truly ridiculous debacle we’ve just lived through (and may have to live through again in January).

1:  Can a major political party get any closer to the life-or-death decision of whether to self-amputate a body part than the Republicans are today? I keep thinking about Utah hiker Aaron Ralston, sawing off his own arm from under an immovable boulder in order to live to hike another day. The Tea Party has made the Republican party an object of ridicule and contempt with truly perilous consequences for even “moderate”-but-enabling characters like John Kline and Eric Paulsen here in Minnesota.

Romney? Really?

This is not — really — a joke. So Mitt Romney walks into a the offices of a GOP phone bank. To rally the troops, you see. The place is crowded with volunteers furiously dialing up voters to prevent what appears to be the certain overturn of the Wisconsin-like anti-collective bargaining legislation rammed into law by Ohio’s new and now deeply unpopular (54% disapproval) governor.

The standard move in these situations is for the candidate to make — at least one — call himself. For the cameras. “Hi, Mrs. Lebowski? This is Mitt Romney. No, really, Mitt Romney. Yes, yes, ‘the guy who looks like he turned your dad down for a loan’, that Mitt Romney’. But no. Not only doesn’t Romney dial-up an Ohio citizen and urge them to support their Republican governor and his aggressive, 21st century union-busting, anti-middle class Republican legislation … Romney doesn’t even endorse what everyone in the room is working so hard to save.

From the CNN story:

Romney expressed generic support for Kasich’s efforts to curtail union rights, but he would not say whether he supports or opposes the specific measures.

“I am not speaking about the particular ballot issues,” Romney said, only after repeated questions from reporters. “Those are up to the people of Ohio. But I certainly support the efforts of the governor to reign in the scale of government. I am not terribly familiar with the two ballot initiatives. But I am certainly supportive of the Republican Party’s efforts here.”

If you’re like me you say, “Well, that’s classic Romney. The guy gives shameless, naked pandering another even worse name. He’s been on five sides of every issue you can think of.” Democrats love the guy for precisely this kind of completely craven and predictable waffling. In addition to the deliciously ripe story of his career as essentially a corporate raider, many times eviscerating American companies and requiring hundreds of middle-class lay-offs in exchange for his own fast profit, Romney is the kind of competition that manufacturers his own oppo-research and attack ads. And, more to my point here, the modern conservative “intelligentsia”, a crowd heavily self-invested in rigid-sounding, ersatz-populist dogmas and total victory-without-compromise is well aware of it. Hence his 25% polling … behind … Herman Cain, a guy who hasn’t even bothered to assemble a full function campaign apparatus.

And ladies and gentlemen, Mitt Romney is where he is today, among the leaders for the Republican nomination, because he is regarded as “the most electable of those running”. Of all of the cartoonish characters on the GOP candidate menu, Romney is the default candidate because he seems the guy with the best chance of beating Barack Obama …. which could still happen. Even the heretofore commonly accepted icons of conservative thought — people like George Will and John Podhoretz — have gone public with very serious doubts about Romney and the rest of the cast.

Said Will Sunday: “Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate. Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the Tea Party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming.”

Earlier last week Podhoretz, in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post wrote of the entire GOP field, “Memo to the Republican field: You’re running for president. Of the United States. Of America. Start acting like it. Stop proposing nonsense tax plans that won’t work. Stop making ridiculous attention-getting ads that might be minimally acceptable if you were running for county supervisor in Oklahoma. Stop saying you’re going to build a US-Mexico border fence you know perfectly well you’re not going to build. Give the GOP electorate and the American people some credit. This country is in terrible shape. They know it. You know it. They want solutions. You’re providing comedy.”

Podhoretz may have been referring less to Romney and more to completely bogus, ego-acts like we’ve seen from Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, “candidates” in name only with, in many cases, not even the pretense of hiring staff and operating a legitimate campaign, but Mitt comes awfully close to comedy.

But, without ascribing any undo legitimacy to the Tea Party’s intellectual foundation, what fascinates me most at this moment is watching to see how that crowd, so pleased with their moral/intellectual purity, and the more mainstream Republican faction that has enabled the obstructionist mayhem the Tea Party has leveled on this economy rationalizes Mitt Romney as their standard-bearer. True, he is not Obama. But for every time Romney has said something supportive of the Tea Party’s take-no-prisoners jihad against common sense and social decency he is also on record saying precisely the opposite.

Were the Tea Party truly rooted in the “principles” they’re constantly professing to fight to their (and our) death for, Mitt Romney would be an absolute anathema, exactly the untrustworthy, self-aggrandizing empty suit they couldn’t possibly trust in good conscience.

More to the point, true Tea Party revolutionaries would have no honorable course of action other than to launch a third party candidacy behind a bona fide flag bearing warrior spirit like … Ron Paul or Bachmann?

As I’ve said before, the Tea Party movement is rooted far more in long-standing cultural and social issue grudges than middle-class economic “populism”. But that makes support for an on-again-off-again whenever-opportune social liberal like Mitt Romney all the more preposterous … and comical.

As for Our Confederacy of Louts …

After roughly a month of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and week or so of OccupyMinnesota, there is one thing we can conclude with certainty. And that is that the Tea Party movement truly has nothing … whatsoever … to do with correcting economic malfeasance. Judging by the reactions of Tea Party Express spokes people and the stable/ward of GOP candidates cravenly pandering to the Republican party’s new core, the Tea Party movement has fully acknowledged that the “populist” Tea Party movement is exactly what we always assumed it was — namely, the conservative fringe’s latest manifestation of the Culture Wars with no focused, much less any sincere interest in attacking or addressing the root causes of American middle class frustration.

Frankly, I’m astonished it took until September of 2011, three entire years after the Great Derivatives Meltdown of September 2008 to see people in the streets demanding legal action against Wall Street, which of course is shorthand for the calculated, heavily-lobbied, institutional system wherein middle class assets are legally looted by those with full and unimpeded access to political power. Given the spectacular nature of the collapse, with very little confusion over the “who”, “why” and “how”, I would have expected riots on Wall Street in the spring of ’09. But no. Instead, the Tea Party, ostensibly outraged over taxpayer bail-outs of too big to fail giant banks (and the possibility of bail outs of other homeowners) bought in — wholly and utterly — to the counter theory sold by establishment Republican politicians and media leaders that the Crash of ’08 was the consequence of liberal meddling with free markets (the Barney Frank/Fannie Mae canard) and pandering to no-goods (most of them minorities) who had no business owning property.

Here’s Bryan Shroyer of theteaparty.net: “The motivation between Occupy Wall Street and the motivation from the tea party are completely different. From their signs, speeches, and websites, they want to continue this push of America down this road of increased government involvement and increased socialism. The tea party is simply a collection of patriots from across the nation who want to get our country back to its capitalist roots.”

And this from the Tea Party Patriots website: ” ‘For two years now, tea partiers have stood firmly on principle and helped shape the political debate in this country. They believe in time-honored American values, principles and systems including the freedom to innovate and employ people to implement and distribute one’s ideas to the public. They believe freedom from government allows entrepreneurs to try new things, see what works and discard what doesn’t. By contrast, those occupying Wall Street and other cities, when they are intelligible, want less of what made America great and more of what is damaging to America: a bigger, more powerful government to come in and take care of them so they don’t have to work like the rest of us who pay our bills.”

And this from Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express via a piece in The Guardian: “Kremer, who lives in Atlanta Georgia but spends much of her time travelling across America with the Tea Party Express battle bus, accepts that there is a shared anger at the core of both phenomenon: disapproval of the way the banks were allowed to get away with it after the 2008 financial melt-down. But she thinks the OWS organisers are going after the wrong target. ‘This isn’t Wall Street’s fault. It’s Washington’s fault – and that’s where they should focus their efforts’.

She is also scathing about the loose political aims of the protesters. ‘You’ve got to be realistic in your demands and efficient in how you set about achieving them. Holding rallies doesn’t do anything other than attract people to the movement. “The question is what do you do then? How do direct all that support and energy towards action, towards influencing legislation’?

Or .. opposing legislation … in the case of Tea Party leaders and politicians, as they continue to obstruct and dilute any form of serious financial regulation and oversight.

It strikes me as a monumental waste of time trying to figure out how anyone, much less someone capable enough to lead a national protest movement looks at the Crash of ’08 and absolves the giant banks, hedge funds and AIG from complicity, and instead focuses the full force of their fury on … a guy who wasn’t even in office at the time. But then the allure of a sinecure and status — underwritten by personalities integral to Wall St. function — always has away of re-directing antipathies.

The real question that continues to fascinate me is this: What is the best tactical response to what I prefer to call our Confederacy of Louts? This latest outbreak, the Tea Party, is more virulent than the John Birchers of the 1960s and the mega-church evangelicals of the late ’90s. Their demographics (largely white, aged, dis-enfranchised) and underlying antipathies are nearly identical. But today’s “movement” is a far more serious threat to middle-class retrenchment than ever before. Left unchallenged they have the clear and present potential to deliver the fate of the American middle class into the hands of our corrupt system of mega-finance and political cronyism for decades to come.

The Merriam Webster definition of “lout” is “an awkward, brutish person”. And for my purposes here, that’s close. But in terms of rhetoric the messaging, while brutish is often slick and compelling. “Awkward” in terms of factual accuracy and intellectual honesty, to be sure. But “compelling” in terms of eliciting the intended response. Which usually involves an appeal to the more loutish aspects of human nature. By example, I give you most any cities’ most popular morning drive radio show: A carnival of loutishness banking a small fortune for a one of a handful of major media conglomerates by routinely pilloring anything too “nuancy”, sensitive to minority interests, and “liberal”. Then you move on to the usual suspects of
political talk radio, FoxNews and on and on.

“Loutish” pretty well describes it, and liberals don’t do “loutish” very well. They/we don’t have much of a stomach for aggressive, middle-class, middle-brow messaging. It all seems so … boorish.

In Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt’s classic essay, “On Bullshit”, he makes the point that out-right liars, because they respect the truth enough not to speak it, are actually less dangerous than bullshitters, who may or may not speak the truth but really don’t care one way or another, since their only intention is to, in effect, close the sale. I don’t doubt for a second that there are some diabolically clever minds pushing and nudging and encouraging the Tea Party movement. They would be the liars. The face of it though, the crowd allegedly inspired to action by the Wall St. meltdown of ’08 and now throwing up a protective cordon around our “entrepreneurs” and “job creators” is, we can now say with complete certainty, a portrait of vaporous, loutish bullshit. It is raw say-anything know nothing-ism in pursuit of personal gain (media personalities, Sarah Palin, etc.) and settling age-old social grudges against … well, uppity minorities and “elites” however they define them.

The point being the liberal counter message — which now has a viable vehicle in the Occupy Wall St. demonstrations — has to convince the middle class, in middle class language and imagery, that the refortification of the middle class is its primary concern, and that the Republican party of 2011 is the Tea Party and the Tea Party is nothing but a collection of credulous chumps, loutish bullshitters, playing foot soldiers for the same forces that corrupted our financial and gridlocked our political systems.

We’ve lived through The Attack of the Louts. It’s way past time to attack back.

Willard in Wonderland

Source: Mike Luckovic, Atlanta Journal Constitution

Willard Mitt Romney’s biggest political vulnerability as a presidential candidate is that he passed Obamacare before President Obama did. After Romney passed the basic equivalent of Obamacare, the Republicans made a seismic shift to the right, making Romney’s golden child look like a shameful bastard child.

As a result, the Father of Romneycare and Grandfather of Obamacare has essentially three choices for managing the angry paternity claims:

MAN UP AND EMBRACE THE KID. Romney could explain why he and other Republicans were right to embrace the private sector health insurance reform model, which, by the way, is dramatically outperforming Rick Parry’s model (Massachusets has 4% uninsured, Texas is six times higher, with 24%).

CONFESS AND REPENT FOR FATHERING A BASTARD. Romney could admit the kid is his, and confess to the Tea Party that he made an unforgiveable error in fathering the reform model that is producing the best health coverage rate in the nation. (The shame!)

GO DEADBEAT AND MAKE SHIT UP. Or Romney could fabricate DNA evidence in an attempt to disprove any common lineage between Obamacare and Romneycare.

Romney has decided to go the fabrication route. In the debates this week and last, he trotted out a series of ridiculous Obamacare-Romneycare differentiators, such as:

Third Parties: 2012 Election’s Critical Missing Piece

In the wake of the Iowa straw poll – a particularly charming incarnation of the poll tax– and the late entry of Texas Governor Rick Perry, the news media is telling us that that the 2012 presidential field is starting to congeal.

Except that it’s not. Not even close. Because we don’t yet know what will happen with third parties. In the end, third parties might very well impact the selection of the next President more than the outcome of the GOP primaries and caucuses that are dominating the news.

At a time when the American electrate is about evenly divided between the two major political parties, and huge numbers are turned off by both parties, this 2012 presidential election could hinge on which third party, or parties, emerges to relative prominence. If it’s a liberal-friendly third party ticket that dominates the third party space in 2012, Obama will almost certainly lose. If it’s a conservative-friendly third party dominating, Obama could still pull it out, despite the environmental mega-trends – lack of peace or prosperity — working against his reelection.

A third party ticket led by Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump or their ilk looms on the right, and a ticket led by Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders or their ilk looms on the left. I’m as interested in those melodramas as I am about the more high profile Perry, Bachmann, Romney scrum.

And beyond the third party machinations on the left and right fringes, keep your eyes on a new third party wild card this year – Americans Elect. Americans Elect looks like it will be a centrist party, and is being promoted by center-left voices like syndicated columnist Thomas Friedman. Here is how they explain themselves.

The Ground Zero of Gridlock

Founding Dads, gasp, "compromising."

Representative democracy is designed to produce compromise. All of those inefficient checks and balances the Founding Fathers built into their Rube Goldberg policymaking machinery means that no single political party or branch of government has autocratic power. That forces branch and party leaders to negotiate and find mutually disagreeable middle ground.

In other words, to the Founding Fathers, compromise wasn’t considered a disease. It was a cure.

Admittedly, compromise isn’t very cathartic for zealots. In sports they say “a tie is like kissing your sister,” and a compromise is a tie of sorts. House Speaker Kurt Zellers would probably rather be kissing his sister right now than compromising with Governor Dayton, and vice versa.

But as frustrating as compromise can be, we have done well with our maddening compromise model. The Constitution – the document the compromise-hating Tea Partiers love to nag us about — was a negotiated compromise that left many of its endorsers disappointed. Almost all major legislative achievements in the nation’s history – the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, the creation of Medicare, the creation of the Interstate Highway system, the “Minnesota Miracle” — were the product of bipartisan, bicameral compromise.

But compromise we did, and it helped us move the country forward and avoid the kind of violent upheaval experienced by others around the world. How remarkably grown up of us.

So what happened? If Minnesotans and Americans have successfully compromised through gritted teeth throughout our history, why does it now seem almost impossible to achieve now?

Whatever the reason, “compromise” has become a bad, bad word, especially among conservatives. According to a Pew Research Survey, 71% of Liberal Democrats agree that “lawmakers should be more willing to compromise, even if that results in a budget they disagree with.” At the same time, only 26% of Republicans who support the Tea Party agree with the need to compromise and be disappointed. The more conservative Americans are, the less willing they are to compromise.

“Completely unreasonable”.

Moments of truth are at hand. And while I don’t foresee the kind of “clarifying moments of truth” we need so badly, the sort of Hollywood-only moments where the unscrupulous villains are revealed for what they truly are, we are heading for some serious course corrections in modern American (and Minnesotan) political misguidance and psychosis.

First, here. The Minnesota legislature is supposed to conclude its business next Monday. But as you may have heard, the new GOP majority, all of whom are bound by interest group lobbyist Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge, steadfastly refuse to compromise … in any way … with Gov. Dayton on applying new revenue to that pesky $5.2 billion deficit. That would be the same GOP that made the unprecedented move of turning to an outside, pro-large business consulting firm for some customized budget formulas, is still noticeably light on specifics of who gets gored. Educators, social service directors and others have run the surreally fuzzy numbers they’ve seen and are shrieking, “Wolf!”. But the GOP leadership — best embodied by party chairman Tony Sutton, of the absurdist gambling conflicts of interest and comically mismanaged Baja Sol fast food chain, House Speaker Kurt Zellers, a careerist walking talking point who I’ve never heard say anything more deeply informed or detailed than “Minnesotans have spoken” and small-town police chief Tony Cornish who sees a critical void in our rights to open fire on anyone — paperboy, neighbor’s dog or cop in pursuit who crosses our yard — sees only value and upside to our state’s “jobs providers”.

Then, in D.C. we have the long-anticipated and now very soon to erupt cataclysm between what’s left of the Republican old guard — in this case Speaker John Boehner — and the party’s new heart and soul, the Tea Party freshmen, over lifting the U.S. debt ceiling. Again, while Boehner is regarded as having “blundered” by telling an Ohio group in late April that “we” will have to increase the country’s debt limit, “and we’ll have to do it again”, the revolutionary masses the party eagerly welcomed to its bed are adamant no such thing will ever be allowed to happen. They are so completely committed to this view that talk of voting Boehner out of his Speakers job (and replacing him with Kurt Zellers-like robo-rhetorician Eric Cantor) is reaching a boiling point.

If you need further proof of the GOP’s soon-to-be-self-destructive, lockstep zealotry at work, consider Newt Gingrich. I’m no fan of Gingrich’s, other than to say one time out of twenty he has a good idea and makes sense. Like he did on “Meet the Press” last week when he said he’s not in favor of “radical change” from either the left or the right. Personally, I’m down with radical change on health insurance reform. But the point here is that Gingrich was at least arguing from some kind of coherent position. Too coherent for the modern GOP’s “group think or die” mentality. As a consequence his presidential ambitions are dead-in-an-instant and he is being forced to both apologize for saying something contrary to the party’s (sole) anointed “big thinker” guru, Paul Ryan, and ask/beg Democrats not to use his line about “social engineering from the right” in attack ads. The spectacle of so utterly rigid a party orthodoxy is so stark and absurd you know for certain that the S.S. GOP has struck a tri-corner shaped iceberg and is heading bow-first into the briny deep (or “shallows” if you prefer analogies to the quality of their economic thinking.)

I’ve had several recent conversations with people about Mark Dayton’s performance as Governor. Most professing surprise that a guy who was an utter failure as U. S. Senator seems to have found his place as a chief executive. While I couldn’t in good conscience vote for the guy, based on his appalling performances in previous elected offices (and because he achieved this latest high office largely through writing himself large checks only one other candidate was capable of writing), I have to agree that Dayton has conducted himself in an all but entirely reasonable way. (The exception being the lack of sharp screws to the Wilfs over who pays how much for a Vikings stadium).

My only equivocation on Dayton is that he has never demonstrated that tenacity, especially end game/crunch time tenacity is his strong suit, and we are only now arriving at that point. Now is when he has to deliver a “win”, and by definition that will require a serious increase in revenues. And by “serious” i mean no less than the 50/50 split he is offering now. He has public support for exactly that. Now he has to use it to force a victory.

Much of Dayton’s stature and standing in the polls can be credited to the contrast with the cartoonish buffoonery of the state’s GOP, which has doubled down on guns, gays, God and gambling, after allegedly being elected to office to create “jobs, jobs, jobs”. The local GOP brain trust — Sutton, Zellers, Cornish and the new uber-zealot Steve Drazkowski — are required to say (as though they believed it) that Minnesotans fully support them. To which I say, the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, TCF bank’s Bill Cooper and The Taxpayer’s League, yes. Everyday citizens, not so much.

On MPR the other day, after offering up his 50/50 plan, which would still require $1.8 billion in new taxes from the state’s upper end/Chamber of Commerce, Bill Cooper/Taxpayer’s League crowd, Dayton sounded exasperated, referring to his GOP negotiating mates as “completely unreasonable”.

In normal times “completely unreasonable” would be garden variety political hyperbole. Today it is not. The modern GOP, after achieving off-year election victories on the vague, plan-free, detail-free cry to “stop the spending” has set a course for a national come to Jesus moment. They’ve presumed that moment will only see the U.S. debt ceiling locked down and the country slashing hundreds of billions in spending (with no realistic plan about God knows where). Likewise, here in Minnesota, with a minority DFL and a “weak”, easily-rolled Governor, they see the enemy fully … fully … capitulating to their demands.

Neither is going to happen. Because it isn’t we are then presented with the alternate scenario. The one all those who have taken the Norquist pledge and suckled at the teat of easy Tea Party votes haven’t fully considered. The one where public reaction — even among the only generally-informed public — to the popular image of the new GOP, a party lacking any semblance of seriousness and constantly self-lampooning itself with intellectual silliness whips back and slaps them to the ground.

The natural response to “completely unreasonable” is nigh, I say unto ye!

Not Intended to be a Factual Statement.

Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and others have been merciless towards Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl’s assertion — on the Senate floor mind you, not over cocktails at The Phoenician — that “90% of Planned Parenthood” funding goes for abortions, when it is really only 3%. The merciless meter buried its needle though with the “explanation” from Kyl’s office that his remarks — on the Senate floor, I repeat — “were not intended to be a factual statement”.

You can’t make it up … other than when you are just, you know, making it up.

If ever there was a gift-wrapped present to merciless satirists it was that one.

But what the Kyl incident says about the Grand Old Party, and what Team Obama has clearly calculated, is what makes it so truly, deeply, lover-ly … delicious. It is well known that Obama was preparing a speech on the “debt crisis” for sometime this spring, but wanted the Republicans, in the form of their guru du jour, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, t0 lay out their “plan” first. Why? Well, because obviously it meant that at long, long last the Tea Party-driven new Republican majority would have to get into … details. And those details would be coming from a guy the Republicans are touting as their best-est, deepest thinker on really serious adult thingies, like money.

Having won a big victory last fall on a campaign strategy of blaming Democrats for the ’08 recession and promising to “cut spending” and get a grip on the “debt crisis” (while ignoring it was largely a crisis of their own making) they never at any point hinted at whose spending they were going to cut. Just “government waste”. Which of course could be anything and nothing. What Obama, a supernaturally patient character, understood/understands is that at some point they’d have to get into the hows and the whats. The Tea Party rabble would demand actual numbers, actual blood in the dirt. He also knew that the “how” of the Republican solution would be anathema to the vast majority of voters, even the huge chunk of them that sat out the off-year election.

It is pretty clear that far from shrinking from a fight over national finances, Obama relishes it. This is it. This is the central issue for 2012. His speech in Tuesday, with its campaign-perfect tone and “bring it on” rhetoric about how no one’s going to gut the social safety net, “while I’m president”, along with its emphatic defense of a liberal-progressive vision of society clearly rattled the GOP’s young Turks. (Ryan himself was in the audience at George Washington University.)  They may genuinely believe that their victory last fall gave them a mandate to eviscerate all sorts of social programs. (All of them created by liberals and all of them opposed at the time of their creation and ever since by conservatives). But outside their caucus bubble they had to know — or had to be warned by guys like John Boehner — that  there lurked a far, far different reality. A reality where the brittle rubber of “not intended to be a factual statement” hits the hot asphalt of every day life and disintegrates.

Given The Sixteen Stooges-cast of characters poised to compete against him, I doubt Obama is losing a lot of sleep worrying about any one-on-one debates. Hell, in the rally-the-base realm where, “not intended to be a factual statement” is a completely viable campaign strategy, where Donald Trump can spike to the top of the “likely Republican voters” poll by covering himself in birther lunacy, where Michele Bachmann has to be regarded as a contender because her cred with “values voters in Iowa” and where a profoundly creepy character like Rick Santorum can make news with his “exploratory committee”, Obama would have more serious competition from Larry, Moe and Curly Joe.

Still, he needed the crucible issue defined … by his opposition. The Tea Party’s late-dawning obsession with the “debt crisis” — long, long after the two unpaid for Bush-era wars, the Bushies’ unpaid for prescription drug benefit and the Bushies’ unpaid-for multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for Warren Buffett, Jay-Z and the Wall Street sharks — is the perfect issue to win reelection on. It is made even better by the haplessness — the let’s not even bother with “intended as a factual statement” — of the Tea Party tail, which is wagging the Republican dog.

A debate on money, social programs and who pays for it is perfect because it invites a serious, highly-relevant choice every voter can understand. If Ryan and the GOP candidates want to actually engage Obama on the specifics of what a voucher system means to Medicare as we know it … bring it on … please. Every pensioner in every Ft. Lauderdale condo will have their hearing aids on high gain. Likewise, those tax cuts — without which there would be no “crisis” in “debt crisis” — if you really want to go out in public again shrieking about Democrats raising “your taxes” and/or “stifling our job providers” — let us prepare a red carpet for your appearances. We’ll even do a sound check on the equipment and touch-up your eye shadow.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about John Kyl’s “Dubious Achievements”-worthy lapse into comical demagoguery is that he, like John McCain, was once regarded as a respectable, rational, albeit old school professional country club Republican.  But now, under the irresistible influence of the Tea Party zealots, for whom “factual statements” are anything that sounds good on Sean Hannity and gets a roar out of the crowd at a Tucson gun show, even he feels obligated to publicly debase himself with instantly demonstrable idiocy. (How much do you think the John Kyl of five years ago ever thought about Planned Parenthood, much less confused it as an all-abortion service?)

The “not intended as a factual statement” crowd is the controlling influence on today’s Republican party, and they have pushed out into the bright light of day a “reality-based” issue that every average voter can easily understand and on which they have clear, well-documented opinions. Barack Obama could not be happier.

And as a liberal who has been waiting for Obama to take on the big fight, I thank them.

God Help Us! The “Adults” are Running the Asylum!

There are a lot of reasons why I wouldn’t want to be John Boehner. But if I was, the presence of Eric Cantor would be up at the top of my list of Weird Ass Critters I Don’t Want to Meet in an Alley”. In the wake of last Friday night’s major budget deal — the one where Boehner, (a guy who once handed out tobacco-industry lobbyist checks on the House floor and plays more golf in a week than a touring pro), kept Cantor and Cantor’s pandering to every grudge the Tea Party could think up at bay long enough to shake hands on a deal with Barack Obama — there’s a lot of talk about, “who won”? While I’m not certain who among those characters can claim victory, I know for absolute certain that none of us out here are any better off.

Since I’ve never read anyone, from my favorite lefties to The National Review describe Boehner as “brilliant” or even “hard-working”, I’m prepared to accept that he is neither. But he is a survivor — from a reliably Republican suburban Cincinnati district — and he is bright enough to understand the ebb and flow of politics. Whether he has a read on the ferocity and petulant,  juvenile expectations of the freshman Tea Partiers who seem to be coagulating around his #2 — Cantor — I am also uncertain. But he has to know that this new crowd, infused with the absolutist thinking you expect from a combination of evangelicals, apocalyptics and “super” Constitutionalists, will stop at nothing to get what they see as a divine right. (When both God and the Founding Fathers are on your side in The End Times, you can never be wrong, can you? And if it turns out you are? Well, The Left Behind are all going to be reduced to cinder so who’s going to count?)

Maybe Boehner and Cantor have worked out a clever tactical strategy, in which Boehner plays to the “middle”, treating Obama like he matters in this recent fight over a pittance, (last week’s $38 billion is not even 1% of the annual federal budget), while Cantor goes on stoking the fires of righteous rage among “them that took them” to the dance the Republicans are at now. Maybe. But this being D.C. politics, it seems far more likely that Boehner is expecting Cantor to go for the dagger (and his job) at the next hint of “compromise”, like say, next month when the batshit starts flying again over  an increase to the debt ceiling or … letting the United States fall into default. (Expect Mike Pence, Michele Bachmann and the usual suspects to start chanting, “Let it fall … ” by May Day.)

Since Cantor has never said a contrary word about any notion the Tea Party notion has ever belched up, I would strongly advise Boehner to operate under the assumption that Cantor is prepared to milk that braying herd for all they’re worth, and if that means grinding Boehner up for low-protein feed, so be it.

Meanwhile Boehner also has to worry about Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Ryan, implausibly, is the face of the Republican party’s “adult” wing, a compliment he earns for not being directly associated with the likes of Bachmann as anything else. With the ever even-handed national media eager-to-desperate for a Republican, any Republican, who sounds like they were educated at an accredited college, and is making decisions based on quaint concepts like study, corroboration and cross-checking, and are not “inspired” by what the burnt profile of Jesus Christ in their toast “spoke to them” that morning, Ryan is a bona fide rising star. A bright intellectual light! A couple more “big ideas” and he’ll be the next Newt Gingrich. (Clear the office desktops, ladies … ).

It says something about the asylum when a “big idea” plan like Ryan’s grand overhaul of the Federal budget — (guaranteed to be fought over pretty much all next year) — is deemed credible and adult even while offering no brave restraints on the Pentagon’s infinitely vast pool of pork, and treadworn schemes like the one for privatizing (“keep your government hands off my …”) Medicare; a plan that drives millions even deeper into the tender mercies of the country’s insurance cabals. Boehner must spit blood at the thought of putting his face on the call for sucking Medicare away from his party’s Revolutionary War re-enactors, with the tea bag dingleberries hanging off their (China-made) tri-corner hats. But if Ryan’s “adult” plan — thoroughly disemboweled as preposterous (here, here, here and here)– gains traction with “the base” (who, as per usual, won’t have a clue what effects it’d really have, even on them), it’ll be Boehner who will have to sell it.

The all-politics-no-governance ideology of the new Republicans has left most of the ward doors to the asylum wide open. The sight of so many droolers and babblers and fiery-eyed messianics roaming free would have Sam Rayburn heading for a bunker, and as the line goes, you sir, Mr. Boehner, are no Sam Rayburn. But yon Mr. Cantor has a lean, hungry and absolutely craven look.

Meanwhile, the opportunity is ripe for Obama on Wednesday, to play adult again and walk the country through the real world of government finance, where you resolve nothing by focusing on a small fraction of the federal budget, and trying to eliminate or gut social programs that no polling has ever shown a majority want cut. Likewise it’d be useful for Obama to explain that the national “defense” (i.e. the profligate waste end of the budget, which is is pushing past 50%), where we continue to buy — at premium chump prices — every gun and widget the defense lobby says we need is the one area of 21st century government that has to be completely emptied out and re-imagined. Then, while he’s at it he should lay in to the childish fiction that we can go on forever lowering taxes/handing out free money to the (“job providing”) elites who are currently sitting on $1.3 trillion in post-’08 crash assets.

Ron Schiller, Tellin’ It Like It Is.

Good stuff that punk’d interview with (former) NPR fund-raising exec, Ron Schiller. As an admitted fan of guerrilla tactics that flood light on otherwise discreet activities — like lobbying, government-to-business palm-greasing and anything else relevant to impoverishing the common culture and the pocketbooks of the unwitting — I can not criticize this latest “attack” on a vaunted liberal institution. Other than to say I wish the institution, NPR, was actually as dangerous an advocate for liberal causes as the punksters believe, or that what Schiller said over that two-hour lunch wasn’t all but completely defensible. (His worst moment is not saying anything when the two fake Muslims go off on a Jewish/Zionist/media control bender. But come on, Schiller’s a professional fund-raiser who I’m sure has trained himself to listen to all sorts of crackpot things from potential donors.)

The heavily-edited 11-minute video making the YouTube rounds emphasizes the familiar, primary arguments of public broadcasting’s detractors. The full two-hour video provides a bit more context, but since NPR and Schiller have already folded on this one, (with NPR CEO Vivian Schiller — no relation — announcing her resignation this morning), there’s no point getting into a heavily finessed argument over what Schiller was really saying. He said what he said, and I agree with practically all of it.

The crown jewel of the punk is Schiller asserting that NPR, and by extension, public broadcasting, would be better off without federal money. He’s absolutely right. The relative pittance in taxpayer money that goes to all public broadcasting, equivalent last time I looked to about $1.21 for every man, woman and child in America, reaps a blowback in constant, raging, irrational, uninformed invective far beyond that modest number. (You have to wonder how much CPB/NPR/PBS staff time is taken up every year schmoozing gutless politicians to retain that staggering windfall of socialized loot.)

On the video Schiller points out, correctly, that big market public stations — like MPR here in Minnesota — would get along pretty much fine, but that smaller stations, like those in northern Wisconsin and other rural areas could possibly go dark. (More likely those smaller stations would get folded in to large regional networks … like MPR … and become less local.) But his underlying point is that NPR’s service has a unique value. Namely, in bringing a much greater diversity and depth of story selection (science, arts, etc.) and reporting to markets where 90 seconds to three minutes of headlines at the top of the hour, before returning to Classic Rock, Hot Country and 30 minutes of commercials is pretty much the norm. (Good God, try picking up any useful information from Sioux Falls to Denver sometime if you can’t find a public radio station. You’d be convinced that Charlie Sheen and the NFL draft really were  the lead stories of the day.)

Schiller, who again was NPR’s exec for fund-raising and had been invited to a lunch by two men offering a $5 million contribution, (NPR declined), agrees that weaning NPR completely from the public teat would give it more independence when reporting on federal government issues, (not something I’d call NPR’s greatest weakness), and would lessen confusion in the minds of some “philanthropists” who mistakenly think the network gets most of its funding from the Feds, not just 10% . I’m skeptical that any savvy philanthropist is all that confused about the percentages involved. Schiller’s better argument is that committed philanthropists, of which public radio at least has many, would probably give more if NPR said adieu to taxpayer cash.

The punksters are of course the same crowd that concocted the notorious, heavily-edited, fundamentally dishonest but in the end politically effective hit on ACORN, every gormless Teabagger’s spoon-fed idea of a radical, transformative force in American politics. But when it comes to punking, ethics are never really the critical question. Again, I only complain that more of this sort of thing isn’t aimed at defense contractors sucking literally hundreds of billions out of taxpayer coffers, or self-righteous, religion-wrapped politicians exchanging hot intern phone numbers over prayer breakfasts. But, whatever.

Where Schiller of course has it exactly right is when he gets into describing the current state of the Republican party and its association with anti-intellectualism. I eagerly wait a convincing argument that the Tea Party, which the Republicans and Republicans only pander to and enable in the most preposterous misconceptions, is anything other than anti-intellectual. Or for that matter that the Tea Party is not primarily white, rife with weirdly obsessed “gun-toters” and seriously racist — which includes a hysterical suspicion of  Muslims and not just tough-looking black dudes in sagging jeans. (What I’ll get instead are the usual trolls outraged over “liberal elitism”, which is another way of saying, “How dare you call stupid people stupid!”)

The implicit connection between Schiller’s view of modern Republicans and NPR is that the latter provides a vital counter-balance to anti-science, anti-teacher, anti-liberal arts, anti-intellectualism. Which it clearly does … without question.

What he doesn’t get in to is that rejecting taxpayer cash might mean more inflow from philanthropists, but it would also have Schiller’s replacement out whoring for more corporate cash, which is a problem for public broadcasting far beyond taking government money.  There are all sorts of inside-government stories I’d like to see NPR do, or do better, but the far more suspicious omissions of coverage invariably involve major business organizations.

Point being that Republican anti-intellectualism is not only threatened by the deeper, broader reporting of NPR, but it wants NPR driven down to the thoroughly bought-off, professionally-compromised and irrelevant levels of your average FoxNews Newsbreak.

Try getting all intellectual-ly and elite-y with a straight diet of that.

 

A Rising Tide of “Extremism”.

Last week, Scott Gillespie, the Star Tribune’s editor … of the editorial page, which is I guess kind of like being chief custodial engineer of the custodians’ locker room … wrote a commentary comparing and contrasting events and Governors in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Maybe you read it … or maybe, you didn’t. Well, trust me,  it was a minor classic of its kind. It was a paean to that largely mythical middle where people of deep convictions and good intentions only register tempered disapproval of the loudness and messiness of  people … who aren’t too pleased with the status quo.

Here’s its essence:

The gubernatorial battle cries in these two neighboring Midwestern states could hardly be more different. And yet, in another sense, they’re similar. Both leaders are steadfastly appeasing one end of the political spectrum while infuriating the other.

More moderate Minnesotans and Wisconsinites might be wondering where it will all end. The Minnesotans have more reason to be hopeful.

The direct suggestion that a call for “taxing the rich” is out there at “one end” of the spectrum where extreme ideas foment is kind of amazing … if you stop and think about it. “Tax the rich” after all is merely a call for readjusting progressive taxation. A readjustment in the midst of an already deep and long-running recession. Moreover it comes with a renewed awareness among a growing chunk of the middle class of the dramatic shift of wealth from the them upwards to the richest of the very rich over the last generation. Gillespie paints this concept as  “appeasing” to “one end” of the political spectrum and just as radical a notion as union-busting and  the unilateral abrogation of lawful contracts is on the other end of the dial.

So okay, you shrug. What else do you expect, really? This is the kind of heavily rationalized thinking we’ve come to expect from the so-called “mainstream media”, certainly since newsrooms  began being treated like just another division of some manufacturing firm.

I was pleased to see my MinnPost colleague, David Brauer, go after Gillespie for that remarkably insulated logic. Ditto a number of acid-tongued commenters to the piece itself.

Gillespie’s grasp of a sea change in public thinking on what is truly extreme and intolerable  really doesn’t matter much. But it’s another powerful example of how badly commercial news organizations like the Strib are trailing the curve of events in Wisconsin and now elsewhere. (It also explains, I believe, why the Strib, which has deep conflicts of interest over a new Vikings stadium, will never recognize or take seriously resistance to taxpayer support for the thing.)

The thing is, if Gillespie really wanted to talk “extremism”, he could have wandered into a discussion comparing and contrasting his two opposing examples. There’s great grist and juice there.

The “extremism” of the Tea Party movement, embodied now by Scott Walker in Wisconsin, is kind of known entity. What exactly they would do with power if they got it was always the mystery. Now we know. but as I said in my last post, based on their campaign of scattershot, inchoate rage and anger, there was no way anyone could explain in detail what Tea Party-logic would mean …  in practice. Therefore, union-busting came as a big surprise. Likewise the vigorous and focused reaction to it. (And, you gotta love Walker trying to backfill the idea that he ever mentioned collective bargaining on the campaign trail.)

An irony here is how often the Tea Party, which I suspect Gillespie would call “extreme” or at “one end”, is portrayed as a grassroots movement swelling up spontaneously all across the country. (Coordination and exploitation of all that rage by powerful, monied benefactors isn’t mentioned nearly so often.) By contrast, the “tax the rich” notion is left mostly unexamined, like someone’s feral stepchild. To the Gillespies and most other news organizations, enterprises committed to their “mainstream-ness”, re-dressing revenue imbalance by restoring the tax brackets of the Eighties is an idea with no “grassroots” foundations, no legitimate constituency and therefore something best quarantined off with the loonies yabbering about birth certificates, “death panels”, “socialized medicine” and keeping your government hands off my Medicare.

What if anything Gillespie thinks of polls that routinely show the public — which includes the mainstream, not just the “ends” — consistently supporting higher tax brackets for the wealthy, I don’t know. But if you need a refresher here’s this and this and this … and oh hell, this, too.

Point being, the belief that the wealthy should pay more is about as mainstream, or to use Gillespie’s preferred nomenclature, as “moderate”, as it gets. Name me three other ideas, besides motherhood, being nice to animals and hating the Yankees that regularly gets a 60%-70% consensus in this country?

The trouble is that mainstream news organization opinion leaders like Gillespie, other big city papers, and any of the broadcast news outlets are very much cogs in the “stewardship” fraternity of large-scale American business. Each plays a vital role in sustaining the other. And the conventional wisdom of that fraternity is that any plan to redress flaws in the rate of taxation that negatively impacts them is radical, extreme and out there on “one end” of the spectrum.

One other facet of Gillespie/the Strib’s blindered view is that you can also bet they will be among the last to recognize that what we’re watching in Wisconsin is a tide of “extremism” more politically potent than the Tea Party we have all followed so avidly. Why? Because with “one end” having showed and played its hand the other “end”, which is actually the middle that tolerated this nonsense in the abstract, has been slapped awake, and rapidly educated to what is actually going on. That “end” of the spectrum is now on high alert for everything else the “grassroots” Tea Party crowd may try to pull.

So yeah, extremism is on the rise in America. Except that this latest swelling tide is made up of bona fide, out there fringe radicals like teachers and nurses and cops and construction workers.

On, Wisconsin! And Indiana … and Ohio.

One of the more reliable truisms is that “the zealots will always overreach”. It’s the question of “when” that gets funky. But pretty obviously the crowd that rode into office on a wave of inchoate, anti-tax, anti-spending, anti-government rage last November is getting slapped upside the head with something they did not expect. It goes without saying that it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

As Wisconsin’s well-coordinated populist uprising spreads around the country the prospects that it’ll stop Tea Party-style revolutionaries in their tracks is not good. They do have the votes, which makes a near-term victory likely, but also Pyrrhic over a longer run of time. Like the 2012 election cycle, for example. I suspect Scott Walker and his crowd probably can figure a way to lure the AWOL Democrats back into Madison — most likely by employing the most tried-and-true gimmick of careerist ideologues … kicking the can down the road. Watch Walker shift the hot-button collective bargaining issue on to Wisconsin’s next budget bill. (Remember, this fight, like the national GOP in DC,  is over gutting the current budget). That “other budget”  has to be fought out by the end of the session this spring. Walker might be able to make the drum-banging protesters go away for a few weeks by playing faux-reasonable and leaving the emotional stuff for … six weeks from now.

But with the maelstrom they’ve created with their ham-fisted maneuvers to date, the national attention that has poured in on them, and the re-vitalized connection of the unions to the Democrats and the Democrats’ organizational machinery, there’s no way for Walker et al to sell one of their classic revisionist histories of what’s going on. Way too many people are paying attention, and just as facts have a liberal bias, a lot of focused attention on the details and the direct, “reality-based” effects of ideological jargon is never a good thing for anti-government zealots. Also, as regards the can-kicking strategy, several observers have noted that (much) better spring weather, in May as Wisconsin’s legislative session is supposed to end, only makes it more likely that more protesters will show up to get in the fun.

So did Walker and his team, with their Koch Brothers support, not see this coming? I mean, their message was “cut spending”. They repeated it ad nauseam, like those raspy audio greeting cards. Everybody knew, right? So what did they miss?

What they “missed” is that since their winning message has no specifics, no details and therefore no honest discussion of the consequences of gutting middle class programs by fiat, there was no way they could have made an informed calculation of the public response. Hell, the public really didn’t know what Walker/every other rote Tea Party-pandering conservative was talking about, other than of course that they were going to wave a sceptre and cut taxes, stop spending, reduce the deficit and provide jobs, jobs, jobs. (Third Rule of Conservative Campaigning: Once you’ve got ’em mad as hell, don’t confuse ’em with details.) Now that the public is getting the cold water wake up to what these guys are really all about, and is getting a 24/7 education in how exactly collective bargaining works, the appeal of the usual conservative bumper sticker logic is, shall we say, somewhat muted. Reality, damn it it’s a pisser.

What is also delicious, in terms of the Tea Party-ites blundering into a situation with a very high-profile scrutiny of their motivations and behind-the-scenes players is the now near universal understanding of the Wisconsin … Indiana … Ohio … Colorado  … Michigan … fight as a thoroughly political brawl, largely unrelated to the righteous claims of fiscal propriety. One analyst quite correctly explained the conflict as the Republicans over-playing their hand in a blitzkrieg attack on the primary sources of Democratic campaign funding … a scenario that could only be counter-balanced if liberals somehow made a similar assault on conservatives’ mega-church constituency, which for them is an equally reliable source of cash and organizing power. The one difference being that there are actual laws on the book — you know, in the Constitution — guaranteeing one while prohibiting the other.

But as we know, the reality of the Constitution is another one of those things the new-conservatives routinely over-talk and wildly under-think.

First Tea Party Revolution Victory: Empowering Bureaucrats!

THIS POST HACKED.

“The Social Network” and The Rest of Us.

THIS POST HACKED.

– The Mgmt.

 

Bill Clinton, My Favorite Republican.

THIS POST HACKED.

– The Mgmt.

 

The Slow Death of Conventional Wisdom

THIS POST HACKED.

– The Mgmt.

 

Teabaggers Not Listening to “The People”

Americans are conservative in the abstract, but liberal in the specific.

That’s the message from a Pew Research survey released today. While 53% say the abstract notion of “deficit reduction” should be a “top priority,” most also want to INCREASE spending on nearly every type of government endeavor, and don’t want to cut anywhere.

Despite the growing deficit, the survey found that a plurality of Americans want to spend MORE, not less, on health care, energy, education, veterans’ benefits, Medicare, military defense, assistance for the unemployed, combating crime, and environmental protection (in order of most support to least).

The survey found almost no support for the more libertarian viewpoints expressed at Tea Party and Ron Paul rallies. For instance, just 6 percent support cutting spending on the massive Medicare entitlement program, or “government-run health care.”

The only two areas in which a plurality of Americans didn’t support more spending were 1) international humanitarian assistance and 2) funding for the State Department and American embassies. But even in these least popular areas, those who wanted to keep funding the same or increase it still overwhelmingly outnumbered those who wanted to decrease funding.

The Pew findings indicate that conservatives who blame government spending on “politicians who don’t listen to ‘we the people’” are themselves not listening to the people. According to this surey, the politicians supporting more government spending are representing the will of most Americans. If the Tea Parties want a smaller government and a democratically responsive government, they should be shouting down their pals at home, not their pols in DC.

– Loveland