Month: January 2013

Schmaht as whip

by digby

Lulz:

In her first comments as an ex-employee of Fox News, Sarah Palin said conservatives “can’t just preach to the choir” and must instead “broaden our reach.”

Ms. Palin released her comments through Breitbart.com

When asked “what’s next” for her, she said, “I encourage others to step out in faith, jump out of the comfort zone, and broaden our reach as believers in American exceptionalism. That means broadening our audience.” She said she was “taking my own advice,” an apparent reference to her separation from Fox.

Now that she’s successfully dialogued the raving hippies at Brietbart I’m going to guess she feels confident enough to move completely out of her comfort zone and charge the barricades at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze. Nothing’s going to stand in the way of her outreach to the other side. Let’s all sing kumbaaya, shall we?

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The slickest little Randroid is back

by digby

Chris Bowers caught the Very Serious Man of Integrity Paul Ryan in a slick little sleight of hand this morning:

Earlier today on national television, he attacked President Obama for even supposedly saying that healthcare drives the deficit (emphasis mine):

“I don’t think that the president actually thinks we have a fiscal crisis,” Ryan said on NBC’s “Meet The Press” in his first live interview since the 2012 presidential campaign, when he was Mitt Romney’s running mate. “He’s been reportedly saying to our leaders that we don’t have a spending problem, we have a healthcare problem. That leads me to conclude that he just thinks we ought to have more government-run healthcare and rationing.”

That is a remarkably dishonest statement from Ryan, given that only 13 months ago he actually told Ezra Klein that health care is the main driver of long-term deficits:

Back in December 2011, I asked Rep. Paul Ryan, budget guru to the House Republicans, for his favorite chart of the year (yeah, I get down like that). He sent me one from the Bipartisan Policy Center showing four lines. One, labeled “discretionary spending,” was drifting down. Another, “mandatory spending,” was also falling. A third, denoting Social Security expenses, was rising a bit, but not by enough to worry anyone. The fourth, health-care spending, was shooting skyward. “Government spending drives the debt, and the growth of government health-care programs drives the spending,” Ryan explained.

Here’s the chart:

Now it does sound as though Ryan is outright lying doesn’t it? But he isn’t exactly. In fact, both times he’s actually just being cleverly misleading but in different ways, misdirecting the listener into thinking he’s saying something different than he is.   Today he wants the audience to think the president only says deficits are caused by health care spending because he wants to further expand government programs in order to deny people their health care benefits. (This is bizarre but seems to have some internal logic to the right wing brain.)

Before he just wanted to imply that the reason health care costs were being run up was because the government was inefficient and needed to be taken out of the equation. That too was misleading in a huge way because government health care programs are actually more efficient and cheaper than the private sector.  And his voucher plan would have very effectively rationed health care for the oldest and sickest among us while preserving the most important part of the system:  health insurance and provider profits. (Of the two lies, this one was really the biggest.)

What’s happened is that the terrain has changed and his Party has to be very, very careful about the way they talk about health care costs.  We know they’re talking about Medicare, of course. That’s what “government spending driving health care costs” is all about.  And Paul Ryan is the guy who set forth a plan to voucherize it that proved to be very unpopular just two years ago. So he can’t be as upfront about his agenda as he once was.  But it hasn’t changed, obviously.  He still wants to privatize Medicare.  He just has to circle around it in ever more convoluted ways in order to keep the older base of the GOP on board.  To do that he needs to pretend that he and his nice young men in the GOP are all that’s standing between them and the scary man in the White House who wants death panels to turn them into Soylent Green.

I think what’s most ironic about all this is that if they would just shut up, President Obama, with his offers to raise the Medicare eligibility age and cut Social Security every few months would make their case for them.  Instead they can’t stop making him into a cartoon and it makes them look like fools every time. I guess it’s just reflex.

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Only authorized leakers are allowed

by digby

Jonathan Schwarz notes that a certain Hollywood screenwriter seems to have spilled some very important beans:

This is from the new Time cover story about Zero Dark Thirty (not online):

Virtually everything about Zero Dark Thirty is debatable, according to [Mark] Boal. “Even simple factual questions are being debated and litigated at the highest levels of government…even among those agencies. I’ve spoken to two people in the CIA who worked with the same prisoner, who had two totally different views of what got him to talk and of the value of a particular piece of intelligence in the overall puzzle.“

Ooops. Jonathan points out that this seems to have violated some very, very, very important government prohibitions about revealing secrets and includes some hard-nosed quotes from both Bush and Obama on this topic. Who are these CIA agents? Why isn’t Mark Boal being hauled before tribunals and questioned by the FBI about who is talking to him out of school about such important matters? This would seem to be a dangerous leak of classified information.

Jonathan also notes that this is hardly the first time the government has leaked for its own aggrandizement but it’s more than a little ironic considering that they seem to be pursuing particularly ostentatious investigations and prosecutions of whistleblowers these days. He archly concludes with this:

Hopefully they’ll have this issue of Time at whatever jail where they’re sticking John Kiriakou so he can read all about it.

No kidding.

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Bears!

by digby

Because you need this. For so many reasons:

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QOTD: Krugman

by digby

The bubble:

“Right-wing intellectuals and politicians live in a bubble in which denunciations of those bums on disability and those greedy children getting free health care are greeted with shouts of approval — but now have to deal with a country where the same remarks come across as greedy and heartless (because they are.)”

True that:

“A healthy, 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides: You know what? I’m not going to spend 200 or 300 dollars a month for health insurance, because I’m healthy; I don’t need it,” Blitzer said. “But you know, something terrible happens; all of a sudden, he needs it. Who’s going to pay for it, if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?

“In a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him,” Paul replied. Blitzer asked what Paul would prefer to having government deal with the sick man.

“What he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul said. ”My advice to him would have a major medical policy, but not before —”

“But he doesn’t have that,” Blitzer said. “He doesn’t have it and he’s — and he needs — he needs intensive care for six months. Who pays?”

“That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.,” Paul said, repeating the standard libertarian view as some in the audience cheered.

“But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die,” Blitzer asked.

“Yeah,” came the shout from the audience. That affirmative was repeated at least three times.

This is clearly why Reince Priebus wants to eliminate the primary debates.

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Doc, Did You Say Oops?

Biden on promises

by digby

Gloria Borger interviewed him about his ability to make deals and his relationship with the president. I thought this was interesting:

BIDEN: Well, look, I – I think what you hope – and he – he used this phrase one time, that, um, uh, we, uh, we kind of make up for whatever weaknesses the other guy has. And I’ve got a hell of a lot more weaknesses than he does.

Um, the one place that I – I just have had a lot of experience, um, with all of the people we deal with. And, um, you know, it – everybody talks about well, it’s, you know, it’s back slapping, it’s – it’s old pol – it’s not. It’s trust. It’s simple, simple trust. Find a single person – and you know this town better – who will look you in the eye and say I don’t trust Joe Biden. I’ve built my whole career, my whole career, on never, never, never doing anything with someone I’m dealing with in the opposite position without being completely straightforward with them.

And it’s just that I’ve been around longer and they know me. And – but they also know I speak for him. And he will keep whatever commitment I make on his behalf.

I wonder if that applied to commitments he makes to the people? Commitments like this:

“Hey, by the way, let’s talk about Social Security,” Biden said after a diner at The Coffee Break Cafe in Stuart, VA expressed his relief that the Obama campaign wasn’t talking about changing the popular entitlement program.

“Number one, I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security,” Biden said, per a pool report. “I flat guarantee you.”

I’m going to guess no. But hey, keeping your word to the American people is one thing — Mitch McConnell is a trusted friend.

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Scared of the cyber boogeryman

by digby

I have long felt that the government acts in a peculiarly paranoid way when it comes to “cyber-crime”, almost as if they are dealing with a mystical, supernatural force that is so powerful that our entire world is in imminent danger. Even people who are usually smart sound rather primitively hysterical on the subject, the way the looney war bloggers sounded after 9/11.

In this excellent discussion about Aaron Swartz this morning Chris Hayes and his guests talked a bit about what it is that scares them so:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
This is a complicated topic. The world is structured around the idea of personal property and ownership and the threat of open access seems very radical and threatening to some people. But when you step back and look at it dispassionately, it’s really not so threatening, it’s just that the technology is reordering the “ownership” of information which, frankly, was probably always a stretch. It’s kind of like owning air.

Anyway, it’s a very interesting topic, which guys like Lessig and others have been grappling with a very long time. It’s unusual to see it discussed in such accessible terms as it was on Chris’ show this morning. There’s a lot at stake here, but I feel quite sure that the government hounding activists to their deaths is not going to make things any better.

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Why not just give cows the vote?

by digby

This interview with the slick GOP lawyer who’s proposing to take the gerrymandered electoral college scam nationwide is amazing. He basically evades the questions with lugubrious bromides about “rural voters” while evoking stereotypes about city slickers (of the Detroit persuasion, if you know what I mean) stealing elections from the God Fearing Real Americans who deserve to run the country.

Here’s the thing. The electoral college is an anachronistic throwback already, giving, as it does, power to individual states to override the popular will. It should be abolished. But instead of doing that they are attempting to “improve it” by having GOP states apportion their electors through gerrymandered congressional districts that allowed them to win the House of Representatives with fewer votes than the Democrats.

It’s fairly astonishing that they seek to do this out in the open, but as they lose demographically they are getting more and more shameless in their attempts to game the system in the their favor.

Just look at this fatuous nonsense:

Q: If that’s your goal, why not just get rid of the electoral college and elect presidents by pure popular vote?

A: Abolishing the electoral college is not something I support; it’s what the Founders intended. This is not abolishing or getting around the electoral college at all. Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution gives exclusive plenary power to state legislatures to award electors in the manner in which they see fit. Massachusetts has changed the way they award their electors multiple times throughout history. There’s a letter from Jefferson to the Virginia delegation asking, after he lost to Adams, to change the way they [awarded electors] before the next election.

Already, Maine and Nebraska award their electors in this way, and nobody seems to be outraged about it. The alternative is something like National Popular Vote [an interstate compact currently in place in eight states and D.C. that would award electors to the winner of the overall vote nationally]. It’s just not practical — folks have been trying to do it for years and they need a lot more states to get it done. It’s not going to happen anytime soon. This [electoral votes by congressional district plan] is a practical solution to a real problem. State legislators anywhere can simply get together and say, hey, how do I get more attention for my state? How do I make sure every vote counts?

I’m not really here to argue for or against this or that electoral system. All I think we have to prove is that this is better than the current system. The current system’s a mess.

Uhm no. It’s not better than the current system. Since the Republicans are redrawing congressional districts in their favor every time some Democrat happens to leave town and they can sneak it through in the dark of night, it’s actually a slow, systematic coup d’etat. After all, the plan is to win the presidency and lose the popular vote.

It goes on to argue that this will mean that candidates have to appeal to “everyone” which basically means spending most of their time in places where there are more cows than people. Why not just give cows the vote and call it a day?

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Have the Republicans lost the art of the dogwhistle?

by digby

Cognitive dissonance at #NRIsummit: Lots of pro-life writers, speakers, activists, but none of the R electeds are mentioning social issues
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) January 26, 2013

I trust that Weigel would hear a dogwhistle if they were sending one out. So apparently they aren’t. Not that it would necessarily work with the talk radio, Fox News, internet energized Tea Partying base. I think it’s up in the air as to whether they will accept dogwhistles anymore. But it would appear the GOP isn’t even trying. And that’s surprising.

I don’t know how they thread this needle. Their social conservative base is big and they are going to gravitate to the people who speak their language. And there will inevitably be some who speak it whether it’s Todd Akin, Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum. I suppose they might not have as many opportunities to fly their flag if Reince Priebus is successful in having fewer GOP debates, but this is a large and powerful bloc and I don’t think they’ll be ignored.

This is yet another crack in the GOP coalition. I’ll be fascinated to see how they deal with it.

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