Month: February 2012

Fukushima wave

by digby

I don’t know if I even want to see this, but we should all probably watch it anyway:

It’s amazing to me that this was only a year ago. It was the most riveting live footage I think I’ve ever seen:

.

Evil geniuses or abject idiots?

David Atkins

The New York Times gave me a good laugh today:

The party’s new delegate system is a major contributor to the prolonged nature of the contest, along with the advent of supportive and well-financed “super PACs” that have helped Mr. Romney’s competitors stay in the delegate hunt when their candidacies might otherwise have withered without enough cash.

For many Republicans, the question is not just whether Mr. Romney will eventually capture the nomination, but at what cost.

There is a growing sense among party leaders that the primary fight has gone on long enough and that continued attacks by the candidates and their allies have steered the conversation away from the economy and could damage the party’s prospects in the fall.

As Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum traded a new round of sharp charges in Michigan on Saturday, some Republican leaders expressed concern about the effects of a prolonged and nasty primary fight.

“The general election prospects for Republicans certainly would be better served if more focus was spent on Obama’s policies and the failures of those policies,” said Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi and a longtime party leader. “There’s still time for that, but it would improve our prospects greatly.”

Gee, you think?

Most of time I think of conservative leaders as evil geniuses more than abject fools. Their voting base are generally oppressed rubes, delusional ideologues, racists or vicious sociopaths, but the leadership is generally very smart and cagey.

But this primary season has made me seriously question that. From the standpoint of Republican interests, the last six months have been a carnival of comical incompetence by the GOP and its candidates. Whether or not one agrees with me and Digby that the birth control fight is better for the social conservative agenda long term, there’s almost no doubt that the sudden obsession with social issues far outside the American mainstream is a terrible thing for Republicans in the short term.

Of course, the other possibility is that the leadership is still composed of evil geniuses, but they’ve almost completely lost control of their voting base, having overprimed its fury beyond the ability to manage. The career trajectory of one Karl Rove would seem to indicate as much.

That in turn is partly a product of the fact that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the like require increasing doses of outrage to stay relevant to their audiences. Add in the fact that the conservative media machine is no longer the messaging machine for the GOP, but the GOP is rather the legislative arm of conservative media magnates, and it’s not exactly a surprise that we’ve reached a point of no return for Republican leadership.

My assumption has always been that the GOP would get its act together and coalesce in united fashion behind a nominee. But now I’m not so sure anymore. It’s going to be a very interesting next nine months or so.

.

Governor Moonbeam goes dark

by digby

Sometimes you just want to give up. This is a seriously great idea. And Governor Jerry Brown seems determined to tank it.

Howie Sez:

So how does our experienced problem-solving governor in his third term and umpteenth elected office overall, and his merry band of establishment Sacramento Democrats, screw it up? Let us count the ways he does:

• Proposes their own idiotic tax ballot measure that sucks in the following ways: (1) It raises sales taxes. Regressive and wildly unpopular. (2) It raises taxes on those making over $250,000 instead of just those making over $1 million. Unpopular (a lot of Californians think they might make that much one day). (3) Sends all the new revenue straight to the General Fund in Sacramento instead of counties so they can spend it on refunding prisons or who knows what. Politically stupid and unpopular (the legislature has a lower approval rating than Congress, if you can believe it). (4) Lasts only 5 years, so we have to do this all over again when, because of Prop 13, we have no property tax revenue coming in and income/sales tax revenue drops off a cliff when we enter another recession, so more cuts on the way. Plain stupid public policy.

• Raises money to pay for signature-gathering and the campaign from the following entities all of whom, by the way, have business before the governor: Occidental Petroleum ($250,000), Blue Shield ($100,000), Kaiser ($250,000), American Beverage Association ($250,000) CA Hospital Association ($500,000), various casinos ($375,000), PG&E ($25,000), California Beer and Beverage Distributors ($75,000). Corrupt, scummy and not exactly good press.

• Gets all his buddies in the Legislature, namely Speaker Perez and Senate President Steinberg, to kow-tow to his line and decree no Legislature Democrat shall endorse the Millionaires Tax of 2012, they shall only endorse raising taxes on their own constituents by way of his stupid measure. Right, because in this Occupy/99% environment, I really want my caucus members explaining to reporters why they oppose raising taxes on greedy millionaires and want to raise them on all the poor people in my district. Politically suicidal and immoral.

• Has his loyal sidekick, political adviser Steve Glazer (the one with the odd homoerotic twitter handle @steveforjerry) to tweet various nasty things about the folks working to pass the Millionaires Tax of 2012, such as that they are in political denial and a circular firing squad. Divisive and obnoxious not to mention the fact that his boss is backing the less-popular measure that’s more likely to fail and screw a lot of people over if it passes. If you are concerned about a firing squad, Steve, maybe you should, uh… stop firing?

• Goes to the CA Dem Party Convention two weekends ago in San Diego to tell a ballroom full of activists and delegates that he hasn’t quite figured out all this tax measure stuff yet, but don’t worry: “you’ll get your marching orders soon enough.” Haughty and just plain stupid. Thanks Jerry, I was waiting for you to tell me what to do.

• And just this week, releases a made-up poll of just 500 people that tell him what he wants to hear: multiple measures on one ballot will lead to all of them failing. Although funny enough, the same poll shows that the Millionaires Tax of 2012 is actually more popular than his, the 4th straight poll to do so. Transparent tactic.

• And the icing on the cake: rumors fly yesterday that he’s proposing a 24% fees hike (over 4 years) for the UC system. So that’s right, if you’re planning on going to college this fall, you can expect to pay a quarter more than the number you’re staring at today. But don’t blame Jerry, he’s only the one proposing a ballot measure that doesn’t fund the UC to help keep fees down while attacking the one frigging ballot measure that does.

Read the whole thing. Oy vey.

Sick man

by digby

So John F Kennedy’s seminal speech on the separation of church and state made Rick Santorum sick:

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

“To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?” Santorum said.

“That makes me throw up and it should make every American who is seen from the president, someone who is now trying to tell people of faith that you will do what the government says, we are going to impose our values on you, not that you can’t come to the public square and argue against it, but now we’re going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square,” he said. Santorum also said he does not believe in an America where the separation of church and state is “absolute.”

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country,” said Santorum. “This is the First Amendment. The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion. That means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square. Kennedy for the first time articulated the vision saying, no, ‘faith is not allowed in the public square. I will keep it separate.’ Go on and read the speech ‘I will have nothing to do with faith. I won’t consult with people of faith.’ It was an absolutist doctrine that was foreign at the time of 1960,” he said.

So is the idea that the first Catholic president was sickening a big seller among Catholics these days? Who knew?

I don’t think Ricky understands his history very well. Evidently, he was unaware that in 1960, conservatives thought of Catholics the same way think of Muslims today. He seems under the impression that America was a wonderful religiously tolerant nation until the horrible secularists came along and ruined everything.

I guess he didn’t know about this, perpetuated, by the way, not by the secularists who didn’t give a damn, but by his favorite allies, the right wing protestants:

.

Tribal solidarity

by digby

This post by Chris Mooney about his new book called The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality is an interesting insight into something that baffles all of us:

I can still remember when I first realized how naïve I was in thinking—hoping—that laying out the “facts” would suffice to change politicized minds, and especially Republican ones. It was a typically wonkish, liberal revelation: One based on statistics and data. Only this time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that people ignore data and evidence—and often, knowledge and education only make the problem worse.

Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming. It’s a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one’s political party affiliation, one’s acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one’s level of education. And here’s the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

For Democrats and Independents, the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science—among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. It’s a reality that generates endless frustration for many scientists—and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable people…

It turns out that educated conservatives are more likely to believe all kinds of unscientific nonsense because they absorb a lot of partisan news and have a tendency to tribal identification. Well, hell:

Thus, they are more likely to know what they’re supposed to think about the issues—what people like them think—and to be familiar with the arguments or reasons for holding these views. If challenged, they can then recall and reiterate these arguments. They’ve made them a part of their identities, a part of their brains, and in doing so, they’ve drawn a strong emotional connection between certain “facts” or claims, and their deeply held political values. And they’re ready to argue.

What this suggests, critically, is that sophisticated conservatives may be very different from unsophisticated or less-informed ones. Paradoxically, we would expect less informed conservatives to be easier to persuade, and more responsive to new and challenging information.

In fact, there is even research suggesting that the most rigid and inflexible breed of conservatives—so-called authoritarians—do not really become their ideological selves until they actually learn something about politics first. A kind of “authoritarian activation” needs to occur, and it happens through the development of political “expertise.” Consuming a lot of political information seems to help authoritarians feel who they are—whereupon they become more accepting of inequality, more dogmatically traditionalist, and more resistant to change.

And, it turns out, educated liberals are different and tend to be open to new information and more flexible of mind. They have other problems, of course, not addressed in this study. (Oy, do they…)

Ultimately, this is about tribalism, feeling part of a group, being validated by it and thinking and behaving in ways that preserve your place in it. We all do it to some extent; we’re social animals and we usually have a strong need to belong to a larger group. But how we process information is important and something that good political strategists understand instinctively.

Rick Santorum Admits What He Shouldn’t

by David Atkins

Rick Santorum on the attack against Mitt Romney:

He criticized the tax plan Romney laid out earlier in the week that would reduce all income tax rates by 20%, noting that Romney said he would make the plan revenue-neutral by limiting mortgage and charitable deductions for the “top 1%.”

“Hmmm, where have I heard that before?” Santorum said. “We have a Republican running for president who’s campaigning as an Occupy Wall Streeter.”

“What is Gov. Romney doing? He’s adopting President Obama’s plan to limit contributions to the very institutions that allow limited government to work. He doesn’t understand how America works any more than Barack Obama understands how America works,” Santorum said.

First, let’s take a moment to gaze in awe at the sight of a serious contender for the Republican nomination for President accusing Mitt Romney, vulture capitalist extraordinaire, of being an “Occupy Wall Streeter.” That deserves a golf clap all its own.

But second, I know it’s a common theme for Republicans to pretend that charitable giving can somehow replace the modern welfare state, but it’s hard to believe they’re allowed to get away with it. It’s one thing to argue that the absence of government will create an economic system of incentives that will create the greatest benefits for all. Factually ridiculous, but rationally consistent. It’s quite another to somehow pretend that individual charitable giving will somehow take the place of Medicare and NASA to provide heart transplants and space shuttle launches. That’s just nuts. Charity is too under-funded, too localized, too mismatched and too ill-suited to replace the modern welfare state alone, much less the major investment projects government must take on to create a forward-looking, prosperous society.

Either limited government works or it doesn’t. If it works, it works. But if it doesn’t work, charity is just a very meager band-aid on a very big problem. When conservatives pretend that charity can substitute for a decent social safety net, I’m always reminded of this scene from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:

“Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe,” said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?”

“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge replied. “He died seven years ago, this very night.”

“We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner,” said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous word “liberality,” Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides — excuse me — I don’t know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge returned his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.

There were plenty of charity seekers in Dickensian England, but very little in the way of social services. Charity was completely inadequate to the task of doing what was necessary to alleviate the utter misery of the poor that Dickens did so much in his life to highlight.

This argument is a glaring glass jaw of the Republican economic argument. What works for Republicans about doctrinaire anti-government, trickle-down theology is the same thing that works for doctrinaire Communists: they can always claim that their ideology was never truly tested or tried. It lives in a utopian hypothetical theoretical construct that can only be failed, but never fail itself. As long as it remains in the realm of the untestable and unprovable, Republicans can always claim that limited government is a perfect system if allowed to exist.

But to admit that it has flaws that charity must pick up the slack for is an admission that should kill their program outright. Far better for the Black Knight to defiantly declare the loss of all his limbs as nothing but a flesh wound, than to acknowledge the seriousness of his predicament while declaring that his injuries can be easily patched with some sutures and a little gauze.

There’s room here for progressives and Democratic politicians to pounce for the kill, if only they dare to do so.

To the tenther power

by digby

The great Charles Pierce (whose Esquire blog is the best new blog of the last few years, as you might expect) points out that the wingnut fringe isn’t fringe anymore:

In 1996, Kenneth Stern wrote a terrific book called A Force Upon The Plain, about the rise of the militia movement in America, particularly in the west. At one point in the book, Stern quotes a militia-connected Colorado state senator named Charlie Duke, who tells a gathering of “patriots” in Indianapolis, that members of Congress “don’t seem to know what the Tenth Amendment is about.” Duke, Stern reports, also was the driving force behind non-binding “Tenth Amendment Resolutions” in 15 states. These resolutions, writes Stern, “exalted states rights over the laws of the federal government.” Recall now that, in 1994, this was the thinking of a guy who also believed that the federal government was implanting microchips into American infants.
Recall it because now, in 2012, every single one of the four remaining Republican candidates for president essentially have signed onto Charlie Duke’s program. Oh, they’ve shined it up. It’s not draped in camo any more, and the four of them are considerably less well-armed than the people who were pushing this 20 years ago, but they’ve all come around to the basic notion. What was once the province of people who were flirting with armed sedition is now a position that any Republican who wants to have a serious chance at national office has to take. Rick Perry based his entire campaign for presidency on this very point, and now he’s heading up a group of Tenther SuperFriends on behalf of N. Leroy Gingrich.

It’s amazing what persistence can do, isn’t it?

And don’t forget, the most famous tenther of them all.

.

Headline o’ the day

by David Atkins

Here’s today’s not-tongue-in-cheek headline from a local Birmingham, Alabama newspaper:

Poll: Santorum comes from behind in Alabama three-way

With Alabama’s March 13 primary looking more and more important, Rick Santorum leads the rest of the Republican field in a poll conducted by Alabama State University. Santorum leads with 28 percent of likely GOP primary voters, while Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney trail with 18.9 percent and 18.3 percent, respectively. Texas Congressman Ron Paul was not included in the poll except for a choice for “other.”

Poor guy just can’t catch a break. Satan is definitely dogging his every step, I just know it.

.

What are cable news shows for?

by digby

This is why I love Up With Chris Hayes. He hosts James Poulos, the author of perhaps the most offensive culture war piece I’ve read since the 1980s entitled “What are women for?” and assembles a group of informed commenters with various viewpoints (one of whom is himself, of course) to discuss it. What ensued was an enlightening and interesting discussion you simply wouldn’t see on any other show:

This piece at Mediaite does a nice job of summarizing the segment. Here’s an excerpt:

The title of the piece took up much of the beginning of the chat, however, as host Chris Hayes explained his problems with the presentation of the work, particularly the title. “It seems, I think, an odd question to ask about human beings, who are presumably for whatever their own ends are for.” He noted that many readers perceived it as a natural slippery slope decline: from asking whether women can control their sexuality to, ultimately, “the essential humanity of women.”

Poulos explained that the questions he was posing beyond the functionality of females was precisely about the culture battles around birth control and abortion. “Why are these issues back; why are we having this conversation now?” He explained that his answer to this question was “because there is a deep argument in this country about sort of what the relationship is between our biological bodies as men and as women and how that biology relates to what it is we do in society, and what our different roles are.” Hayes was comfortable with that answer, save for the fact that “it doesn’t seem that the ‘as men’ part gets as much attention,” to which Poulos replied there simply “isn’t as much disagreement” as to what men are supposed to do.

Michelle Goldberg vehemently disagreed with this premise. “When you say ‘what are women for?’ you’re necessarily implying, ‘in relation to who?’” She added that a similarly posed question about minorities would be met with scorn, to which Hayes joked, “I wrote a column the other day, ‘What Are Jews For?’, it didn’t seem to get much controversy.” Goldberg saw his piece as symptomatic of something bigger on the right, as the perception of feminism (and civil rights) “as a once worthy movement that has attained all of its goals and has become superfluous.”

For someone to believe that while at the same time saying “there is a deep argument in this country about sort of what the relationship is between our biological bodies as men and as women and how that biology relates to what it is we do in society, and what our different roles are” is just a bit contradictory. But she’s right. They simply want to say that this state of flux is normal.(I agree about the argument, actually — but it isn’t just an American phenomenon, it’s global. And it’s far from settled, unfortunately.)

It’s a great segment. Give it a look if you have a few minutes.

.

Mr Principled

by digby

It’s hard to believe this will buy a VP slot for the Aqua-Buddha, but it lookslike they’re giving it the good old college try.

The forced childbirth cult is not amused:

On Monday, on the Sean Hannity program on Fox News, Santorum himself responded to the charge.

“Look, I’m not a big fan of Title X, that is Planned Parenthood. No, I want to defund Planned Parenthood,” he told Hannity.

Santorum also said in December that he strongly supports the most recent efforts in Congress to eliminate taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood.

“[The abortion] is an inhumanity that should not occur in this country,” Santorum said, according to the Daily Iowan. “[Tax dollars] should not be used for things that are morally objectionable.”
[…]
Santorum has repeatedly called for de-funding the Planned Parenthood abortion business and, earlier this year, told the SBA List pro-life group, “If you look at Planned Parenthood; if you look at the abortion industry…they fight every single regulation every single bit of information that should be given to the patient, they all fight it as an affront to the right of abortion.”

In April, Santorum urged Indiana governor Mitch Daniels to sign a bill the state legislature approved de-funding Planned Parenthood.

“I can’t imagine any other organization with its roots as poisonous as the roots of Planned Parenthood getting federal funding of any kind,” Santorum said. “This is an organization that was founded on the eugenics movement, founded on racism — I mean, it’s horrific. It’s origins are horrific. And you can say, ‘well it’s not that anymore.’ It’s not far from where it was in my opinion.”

In fact, the record shows Santorum has a long line of votes to deny taxpayer funding for abortion and Planned Parenthood and frequently compiled 100% pro-life voting records from the National Right to Life Committee.

In fact, he’s so pro-life he’d probably support the death penalty for women who have abortions. That’s how pro-life he is.

You have to admire Paul’s savvy and cunning, though. Not one ad against Romney. If he’s bet on the wrong team, however, Rand might be out of luck.

.