Month: May 2014

Tea Party brand losing market share. Back to Wingnut Classic. (Formula’s the same though)

by digby

So the Tea Party is supposedly a dead letter. But the fact is that the Tea Party never existed. It was the “re-branding” of the right wing in the wake of Bush’s ignominious failure. Now that brand is tarnished, but the mission will go on:

Tea party-aligned candidates may lack traction in GOP primaries, as Tuesday’s results from North Carolina and Ohio suggest, but the movement is showing its power by shaping the 2014 campaign agenda and pushing Republicans to the right.

Many GOP incumbents and candidates backed by party leaders have embraced tea-party priorities, especially the call to repeal the 2010 health law and slash government spending. That has put those candidates in a stronger position to deflect challenges from the right than in the past two election cycles.

Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton, who drew no challengers in the Senate GOP primary, opposed a farm bill loathed by tea-party conservatives but is popular in his rural state. Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston, a GOP Senate candidate, voted against a spending bill he helped to write.

In Ohio, a House Republican, one of dozens of state and federal legislators who turned back tea-party challenges in Tuesday’s primary, had burnished his conservative credentials by voting against a deal to raise the federal debt limit.

The Senate GOP primary results in North Carolina Tuesday were widely seen as an important victory for party leaders and business allies in their effort to prevail over tea-party activists. In some 2010 and 2012 Senate races, tea party-aligned conservatives won GOP primaries, then lost general elections.

The whole point of this exercise is always to push the party to the right by hook or by crook. What they call themselves from one election to the other is irrelevant. Indeed “Tea Party” now sounds just a little outdated doesn’t it? Isn’t it something we associate with Obamacare?

The far right always finds new ways to market their product. They’re now in the process of remaking themselves as the “mainstream”. But the strong bitter taste of conservatism will never change.

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Lessons in dissent for the 21st century


by digby

Bag News Notes did what it does best and isolated the images in the Cecily McMillan Occupy case.

Look at the whole series.  You’ll find that it’s almost impossible to conclude that she wasn’t being grabbed from behind and reflexively reacting. Certainly there is more than a little bit of reasonable doubt. Now 9 of the 12 jurors are asking the judge for leniency. The law doesn’t allow for them to be apprised in advance of the possible sentence and apparently they didn’t realize that convicting someone of a felony is very serious and tends to carry jail time.

I guess what I can’t get over is that this is the same woman we all saw having seizures on the ground while the NYPD stood around like a bunch of potted plants.  I still find that shocking. That she is now convicted of a felony for hurting a cop is simply mind boggling.

Something terrible is happening in any culture when the only protesters who get any respect from authorities are those who are carrying deadly weapons.   Cliven Bundy and his armed militia drew the local Sheriff on to a stage and publicly humiliated him and the sheriff nodded and took it. The authorities backed off.  These unarmed and peaceful protesters were dreadfully manhandled by police and one of the most famous of them, a woman who suffered a seizure while in custody, is now facing 7 years in prison.

What lessons do you suppose are being drawn from these events? I don’t know about you but I suspect they aren’t exactly healthy ones.

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When in doubt Benghazi

by digby

This is pretty good:

I think what gets me about Benghazi!™ is the chutzpah of people who cheered on the invasion of Iraq rending their garments over the deaths of 4 Americans in Libya. It’s so morally obtuse that you have to assume they are trying in some fashion to gain absolution for their bloodthirsty insistence on taking revenge against a nation that didn’t attack America.

(Also too, Clinton scandal and simple hypocritical idiocy. Those motives cannot ever be discounted with these people.)

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He’s not a bigot himself, of course, but he’ll defend to the death your right to discriminate.

by digby

Ted Cruz says:

“I’m very much a believer that the scripture teaches that you hate the sin and love the sinner, and so, you know, from my perspective I am perfectly willing to interact with anybody,” he said. “Look, I work in the U.S. Congress. But at the same time, I don’t think the law should be forcing Americans to violate their religious faith.”

He was talking about the alleged infringement of religious liberty in being unable to discriminate against gays. But since that argument comes right out of Jim Crow, I think it’s fair to guess he would have found a way to support white supremacy on the same basis. It’s not as if they didn’t use the Bible to defend racial discrimination.

Then he lied about the Little Sisters of the Poor being required to provide birth control when all they’re required to do is fill out a form to be exempted. Which is, apparently, such an infringement of their religious liberty that this might as well be the English Civil War. it’s so bad.

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This isn’t politics, folks.

by digby

This is disturbing

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is warning its workers in Utah to be on alert after two men threatened an agency wrangler on Interstate 15 about 90 miles south of Salt Lake City. The BLM says the incident occurred on I-15 near Nephi about 11 a.m. Tuesday when two men wearing hoods pulled up alongside a marked BLM truck and held up a sign that read, “You need to die.”

KUTV-TV reports one of the suspects held what appeared to be a handgun. The BLM worker slowed down and let the dark blue Dodge truck with an extended cab pass before exiting the interstate at Mills. He says he couldn’t get a license plate number because it was covered in duct tape. Authorities are looking for the truck.

Holding random federal workers personally responsible for the issues surrounding the Bundy Ranch protest is beyond radical. It’s right in line with Timothy McVeigh’s vision of revolution.

This is not normal politics. In fact, threatening random federal workers with death is not politics at all.

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The renewable energy map and the slave state map

by David Atkins

Here’s a map of states with the most solar and wind renewable energy:

Here’s the Slave state map from 1854:

It’s also worth noting here that apparently Arizona–yes, Arizona–derives only 3% of its energy from solar, and 50% from coal.

Dividing and Conquering

by David Atkins

I was going to do my own substantial piece on Tillis and his “divide and conquer” remarks, but Greg Sargent‘s is superb and needs little addition:

Control of the Senate, the prognosticators tell us, could come down to North Carolina. If GOP establishment favorite Thom Tillis clears 40 percent today and avoids a runoff – as seems likely — we’ll be hearing a great deal about how Republicans vanquished destructive elements within the party and emerged with the strongest and most “moderate” opponent against vulnerable Dem Senator Kay Hagan.

So it’s worth pointing out that Tillis comes with vulnerabilities of his own. For one thing, whatever his relative moderation when compared with his primary opponents, he appears to be a diehard 47 percenter.
On Hardball last night, Chris Matthews featured video of Tillis — previously captured by a local North Carolina group — in which Tillis’ 47 percenter-ism was on full display.

In it, Tillis said we have to “divide and conquer” those on public assistance, by getting those who really need it — the sick — to turn on and look down at those who “choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government.” Speaking of that latter category, Tillis added: “At some point, you’re on your own. We may end up taking care of those babies, but we’re not going to take care of you.”

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Indeed, the 47 percenter-ism on display in this video didn’t occur in a vacuum. Tillis not only opposed the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which would have expanded coverage to 500,000 people he would represent; he also boasted in an ad that he was personally responsible for stopping that outcome “cold.” Tillis and North Carolina Republicans also dramatically slashed unemployment benefits, which, in the words of one national observer, turned help for the jobless into a ”thinner safety net than it has been in decades.”

Tillis has heaped contempt on those protesting such policies, arguing: “What I see from the folks who are opposing our agenda is whining coming from losers.”

As Ed Kilgore has noted, the real hallmark of 47 percenter-ism is a gut-based appeal that separates the deserving from the undeserving poor, a dichotomy that reveals “the politics of selfishness and self-righteousness that is at the emotional heart of conservative politics at present.”

This sort of thing represents the worst that conservatism has to offer, which is honesty about what the real beliefs of its base and machinations of its politicians. Fortunately for us, conservatives have such epistemic closure today that they’re increasingly comfortable projecting their moral ugliness right out into the open.

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She’s baaaaack.  And I am not surprised at all


by digby

I’ve been busy the last couple of days and haven’t been able to keep up with the news as closely as usual so I didn’t know that Monica mania was back. I’m telling you, all this back to the 90s stuff has got me feeling young again.

RT @Crossfire: Does Monica Lewinsky speaking out help or hurt Hillary’s 2016 ambitions? Reply with Help or Hurt using #Crossfire
— Van Jones (@VanJones68) May 7, 2014

Oy.

Counter to the widespread dismissive reaction among lefties who’ve been around a while, I’ve always assumed there would inevitably be renewed interest in all this stuff, especially some of the uglier aspects of the Starr investigation, because … well, its what they do. I suspect it’s going to be made relevant again by the fact that a woman is (likely) running and, more generally, the contemporary politics of the War on Women will make a philandering First Man an irresistible line of inquiry among the Village media once again.

And as much as people assume that millenials have no interest and no stake in a story that was big when they were still in diapers, I think they need to think again. Here’s a piece in today’s Daily Beast by a young woman who puts it all in current context:

[O]ur real problem with Lewinsky’s essay is that she’s had the temerity to return to the public eye when we’d rather sweep her under the rug and slut-shame her into silence. While we’ve long forgiven the 42nd president, she is still the late-night joke that’s been told too many times. Bill Clinton is one of the world’s most respected statesmen, and Lewinsky is the woman who was dumb enough to blow him.

Does anyone think that the right is unaware of the potential to turn Bill Clinton’s history into a current storyline? And just think, they can make feminist heroine Hillary Clinton an enabler and force all of us who attacked the Todd Akin neanderthals to twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain why bad old Bill should be allowed back into the White House.

In fact, here’s a breathless Joe Scarborough already on the case:

The guy who not only to Monica Lewinsky but a lot of other people. He got a free pass. And his approval ratings went up in the ’90s. And I learned when that train was coming just step back and let it pass because there was nothing that was going to be said. He always got free passes. He is still getting free passes…

I still can’t believe the way he was treated in the 1990s. And it was always the women. The victims. And these people come out, and have the nerve to come out after defending him, after defending him, claim to come out wanting to support women and protect women. Women’s rights unless we’re protecting a really, really powerful man who’s on our side politically. Swear to God, I’m going to pass out.

The Lewinsky scandal was seen at the time through the lens of the unprecedented partisan attacks of the previous five years and the total abdication of all sanity by the press. And frankly, the country just wasn’t as evolved on these issues at the time. Now this is a major battleground in our ongoing culture war, with liberals leading the charge for a change — and that makes them vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. That wouldn’t matter to the Republicans as they simply do not acknowledge that such a thing exists for them. But they are smart enough to deploy some very good actors to declare with over-the-top lugubrious sanctimony that the Clintons will be bringing rape culture to the White House even as it’s clearly nothing they would ever care about outside this context.

Perhaps I’m wrong and the right won’t press this angle. But I see the scandal machinery is up and running and it appears to me that they think it’s going to once again be a useful wedge for them with Clinton. I don’t know that the American people will be any more impressed by it than they were the last time, but I do think it’s obvious that the culture has made a shift on these issues and it’s not a shift that favors traditional conservatism. If they see a way to rip a hole in the liberal matrix by calling them “Bill Clinton hypocrites” I think they’re going to try.

And all you have to do is take a look at the Village media yesterday and today to see that they still can’t resist it. It’s an addiction . Those of you youngsters who haven’t seen the press corps high on Clinton junk, get ready for a very surreal trip.

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QOTD: Amy Davidson

by digby

From this fascinating short piece about the different ways the conservative and liberal Supreme Court judges view the notion of politeness:

There is an etiquette in political exchanges, which Kagan seems aware of: we make a gesture, we wait expectantly, and demand a certain grace—even when it might be more useful to disrupt it. What that politeness often ignores is need or inequality, which can mark the difference between connoisseurship, condescension, and vulnerability to coercion. As Kagan notes, when describing the pressures on the hypothetical person who comes before the government: “After all, she wants, very badly, what the judge or poll worker or immigration official has to offer.”

This is about the ruling on government prayer from this week. I think this perfectly describes one of the fundamental differences between the two competing ideologies. What conservatives call politeness is really deference to authority. What liberals call politeness is sensitivity to the least powerful among us. I wonder which way Jesus would fall on that question?

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Speaking of guns

by digby

When I wrote my piece below about the freedom loving citizens whose loaded guns force the rest of us to kow tow or risk being shot, I hadn’t read this:

Speaking at a rally in Iowa for Republican Senate candidate Sam Clovis on Friday, Gohmert recalled that he had initially been blamed after Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) had shouted “You lie!” during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address in 2009.

“Somebody yells ‘You lie!’ and the camera goes on me!” he told the crowd, adding that he “knew” the president wasn’t telling the truth about an immigration bill.

“And so Joe was right,” Gohmert continued. “That’s not how a country goes forward effectively, with a leader that will play those kinds of games. You know, truth is too important.”

The Texas Republican then pointed to an 1798 John Adams quote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

“It only is fit for people who cling to their God and their guns, you know?” Gohmert offered as an interpretation to the delight of the crowd. “So, it is deeply troubling if you get in these tough situations and you can’t trust your leadership.”

There you have it.

I don’t think the people who carry loaded weapons around in public necessarily believe that. They just don’t care about those who feel it makes their already tenuous lives more dangerous and certainly less free. When someone is armed it makes it impossible to engage them in the kind of heated and contentious debate that’s required for a free society — and guaranteed by the constitution Louis Gohmert believes was only written for people like him.

Gohmert is a fool, we all know that. But he blurted out a truth nonetheless: the people who insist on being armed as a “demonstration” or a “protest” are using the second amendment to quell dissent. And they are forcing unarmed law abiding citizens to behave in different ways toward them than they behave with others — less freedom for them, more for the gun owners. Once you put convenient, lethal force in the mix, liberty becomes a zero sum game.

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