The right wing does not have a record of doing things simply to waste time; it is deadly in earnest. Its opponents would be wise to take it seriously. The Republican leadership is putting this bill forward as a genuine proposal, and that ought to spark sharp debate – as well as opposition that spans partisan lines. Those who understand the consequences of this bill, including business leaders, ought to feel obligated to speak out.
Atlas may shrug, but mere mortals should take note. The right wing is serious about disabling the government.
Wisconsin state Sen. Tim Cullen quit the Democratic caucus Tuesday — throwing a cloud of uncertainty over the party’s narrow 17-16 majority, their biggest victory from the waves of state recall elections.
Cullen announced his decision Tuesday after Majority Leader Mark Miller unveiled a list of committee chairmanships in which Cullen was the lone Democrat missing.
Cullen’s statement leaves some ambiguity as to his new intentions:
As of the sending of this email, I am no longer a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus. I will decide over the next few days or weeks whether to become an Independent. I will not become a Republican.
This entire episode makes clear to me that Sen. Miller has no time for my independent ideas and my support of bipartisan solutions to the state’s problems.
Miller disputed Cullen’s version of events, and said Cullen was indeed offered a chairmanship.
“I am disappointed in Senator Cullen and the decision he made today,” Miller said in a statement. “Senator Cullen turned down the chairmanship of the Committee on Small Business Development and Tourism. He told me that if that was the committee offered to him, he would rather chair no committee at all. It was an important committee as small business is the economic engine for Wisconsin.”
By coincidence I was just writing a post about this John Nichols piece in which he discusses the fact that Wisconsin was a victory because it stopped the Walker agenda. I had long been of the belief that the over-emphasis on Walker himself was probably a mistake and that the real emphasis should have been on the agenda.
But now, it’s all just bullshit, isn’t it? When everything hinges on the whims of any one perfidious bureaucrat with an ego the size of Montana, this is the sort of thing that happens. That’s the real problem with polarization — it gives all the power to supercilious crackpots like this.
The worst people in politics are often the so-called “moderates” who are only “moderate” by virtue of the fact that they believe themselves to superior in every way to the people who believe in something.
The L.A. City Council today voted to put an end to the city’s infamous and numerous marijuana dispensaries, citing neighborhood concerns and court rulings that have questioned a city’s right to regulate the retailers.
Most of all, however, the council argued that L.A’s for-profit pot shop scene was never envisioned by state lawmakers whom the City Attorney says wanted to legalize the nonprofit growing and sharing of cannabis among the seriously ill.
What a shame. They’ve been here for 15 years and the only people who object are prissy pleasure scolds who just can’t stand the idea that there is a helpful, harmless drug that doesn’t come from a corporation.
The good news is that maybe we can bring that crime rate up!
Mitt Romney really wants to capitalize on Barack Obama’s statement that business owners didn’t build their businesses on their own. Digby highlighted the egregious example of Gilchrist Metal yesterday. But there’s even more where that came from. Romney is having trouble finding business owners who didn’t receive government help, even in the most superficial sense:
The Romney campaign has spent the last couple of weeks deliberately ripping Obama’s remarks earlier this month out of context, implying that Obama was disparaging business people by suggesting individual initiative has nothing to do with success. As Slate’s Dave Weigel writes, conservatives have seized on this misinterpretation as “proof” Obama is actually a secret Marxist. The implication here is really twofold: Obama can’t fix the economy because he doesn’t understand business, and because “you didn’t build that,” Obama thinks it’s perfectly fine to take from hardworking rugged individualists (like you) and give to a bunch of freeloaders who’d rather not work for a living (like them).
The problem is that the real-world examples Romney keeps seizing on include people who got help from the government. As ABC News’ Jake Tapper reported Monday, the star of a recent Romney ad hitting Obama over “you didn’t build that” had received millions in government loans and contracts. Romney stopped in Costa Mesa, California Monday to meet with a “roundtable” of small business leaders, held in front of a sign that says “We did build it!”
Naturally, it turned out that at least two of the companies represented—Endural LLC and Philatron Wire and Cable—had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts. When Romney visited the Boston’s historic black neighborhood of Roxbury last week, Romney touted an auto repair shop, declaring that “This is not the result of government…This is the result of people who take risks, who have dreams, who build for themselves and for their families.” Except it turned out that the auto repair shop guy started out without any funds and was only able to build his business because of a bond issed by the local government.
If Romney was trying to prove that businesses only succeed on the backs of Galtian ubermensches with no external help, he’s mostly proved the opposite point.
None of which even approaches the point that even if these businesses received no grants, loans or contracts to get started, they still depend on the roads, sewers, dams, education, civil protection, general social stability and other services the government provides. As I mentioned before:
Sure, I’ve worked hard to build a business and to stay afloat when many others in my profession have called it quits. But none of it would be possible without the framework of civilization that my taxes help to support. When I buy lunch, I depend on food safety regulators to make sure a corporation hasn’t tainted the ingredients. I depend on a national transportation infrastructure for business travel and for the shipping of necessities. I depend on the post office to deliver the mail. I depend on the government to assure the stability of the Internet through which I do the majority of my work. I depend on firefighters and police to protect my property, my safety and my community. I depend on educators to ensure that the American public remains educated and affluent enough to purchase products. I depend on the social safety net that ensures relative social stability, general prosperity and an absence of armed revolutionary warlords. My own education on full ride scholarship at a state university depended heavily on government assistance. And so on and so on.
Yes, I’ve worked hard to earn some modest success. But make no mistake: I haven’t built that. I merely stood on the shoulders of a vast network of civilization paid for by tax dollars, without which I would never have had the opportunity to succeed at all. Had I been born in Somalia or Burma, my fate would have been as dismal as the fates of most of my hypothetical compatriots.
To the right wing, the notion of collective responsibility and collective success is a dangerous idea. To the rest of us it’s just common sense.
Sadly, the Romney campaign’s pathetic attempt to find any business owner at all who actually “built it on their own” even in the most simplistic way won’t hurt him in the polls. Few will hear about the failure and fewer still will care. Facts no longer determine elections. Values, team loyalty and gut instincts about the way the world works do. The problem is that about half of Americans have entirely the wrong values and gut instincts about the world.
Frederick Clarkson has a fascinating piece at Religion Dispatches about the new “it” boy in religious celebrity circles. This fellow’s name is Eric Metaxas:
Metaxas is not yet a household name, but this has certainly been his year. He was not only the keynote speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast where president Obama also spoke; he also succeeded the late Charles Colson—both as the voice of the nationally-syndicated radio commentary, Breakpoint, and as one of the three-member board of directors of the premier US conservative Catholic/evangelical alliance, The Manhattan Declaration.
As an up-and-coming evangelical leader, he has also been busy denouncing proposed federal regulations on contraception coverage in employer insurance packages. But he is unique in employing his status as a Bonhoeffer scholar to claim parallels between the regulations and early Nazi-era legislation, as he did, for example, in an appearance on MSNBC.
The Bonhoeffer book itself has drawn praise, but also scathing commentary, especially in the community of Bonhoeffer scholars. Clifford Green wrote in Christian Century that Metaxas is “hijacking Bonhoeffer” into the fundamentalist camp to deploy him against religious and political liberalism.
Less than two weeks after presenting a copy of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy to president Obama, Metaxas found himself discussing the implications of his Nazi analogy at the bookstore of the Catholic Information Center, the DC outpost of Opus Dei (the rightist order that was made a personal prelature of the pope by John Paul II in 1982).
“I am, as an American, offended,” Metaxas told a small audience at the Center, “by the idea that we cannot discuss certain things, and there is a kind of proto-facist—(I am being generous when I say proto)—bullying that happens in the culture” that disallows discussing the “big questions” about life and God.
Bonhoeffer’s voice, Metaxas explained, was prophetic:
“I see him as someone who like Isaiah, or Jeremiah, was saying things to call the people of God to be the people of God… In his day, clearly his voice was not heeded. His voice, if it’s prophetic, is not Bonhoeffer’s voice—it is really the voice of God.”
“This HHS mandate” situation he said “is so oddly similar to where Bonhoeffer found himself” early in the Nazi era. “If we don’t fight now,” Metaxas warned,
“if we don’t really use all our bullets now, we will have no fight five years from now. It’ll be over. This it. We’ve got to die on this hill. Most people say, oh no, this isn’t serious enough. Its just this little issue. But it’s the millimeter… its that line that we cross. I’m sorry to say that I see these parallels. I really wish I didn’t.”
I guess the same rules don’t apply to “religious scholars” that apply to everyone else in public life. Comparing the ACA to Hitler is perfectly ok. If you’re a wingnut preacher.
It’s an interesting introduction to the new pastor on the block, but if you read further you will find that this “revolution” talk isn’t anything new. There have been voices among the religious right going there for quite some time. Which is scary.
As a general rule, I think it’s vitally necessary to have more women in congress. And I certainly hope that most of them are liberals. (Conservative women tend not to vote differently than conservative men.) But I have to take exception to Democratic women who adopt tactics like this to beat fellow Democrats:
EMILY’s List, the nation’s largest resource for women in politics, today announced a new WOMEN VOTE! project in Connecticut’s fifth congressional district. As the nationwide voter mobilization and education project of EMILY’s List, WOMEN VOTE! will communicate with key primary voters about Chris Donovan’s fiscal record in the state legislature.
The Connecticut WOMEN VOTE! program will target more than 26,000 Democratic primary voting women who are age 45 or older. The women will receive five pieces of direct mail highlighting Chris Donovan’s record on taxes and raising his own pay. Three of the mailers will also showcase Elizabeth Esty’s commitment to Connecticut taxpayers: returning 10% of her own salary and working towards responsible budgeting in the state legislature. The first mail will be sent on July 26th.
“Chris Donovan’s 20 year record for Connecticut speaks for itself: exorbitant pay raises and the biggest tax hike in Connecticut history. Middle class families are paying the price,” said Denise Feriozzi, Director of WOMEN VOTE! “Elizabeth Esty returned taxpayer money and is committed to responsible budgeting. We are confident that once voters learn Chris Donovan’s record, they’ll choose Elizabeth Esty to represent them in Congress.”
I don’t think that’s helpful do you? And Emily’s List’s obvious belief that “anything goes” is not a value that I, as a feminist, can endorse. The value of having more women in the government is not to emulate the sleazy practices of the old boys club — it’s to challenge the premise of the club itself.
If this is how Esty is going to conduct herself in office — smearing progressives as “tax hikers” and voting as a fiscal conservative, I can’t see any purpose to supporting her candidacy. We don’t need any more Democrats who endorse Blue Dog and ALEC plans to slash the safety net and enable the most conservative opposition since the Civil War — no matter what sex they are.
I dearly want to see more women in elective office. But when there is a real progressive in the race, I would no more support a ConservaDem like Esty than I would support Michele Bachman. And there is a real progressive in the race — Chris Donovan — the candidate Emily’s List and Elizabeth Esty are trying to smear with the most hackneyed of all Republican inspired attacks — as a self-serving (raised his own pay!) taxnspend liberal. Meanwhile, in her own state
What a country. Not only do we live in a shooting gallery in which half the nation apparently thinks we should all dress in body armor out in public because crazy people owning lethal automatic weapons is a right endowed by our Creator, but if you do happen to forget to “protect yourself” properly from the flying bullets, you’ll have to take up a collection to pay for the medical bills:
Sixteen of the dozens of people hurt in the Colorado theater massacre remained hospitalized Tuesday.
Twelve people were killed in the carnage.
Among the victims still in the hospital is Caleb Medley, who was shot in the eye. He’s in intensive care, under heavy sedation, in the same hospital where his wife is in the maternity ward, due to give birth to their son.
Seth Medley says his brother is in critical but stable condition and making some improvements in small steps, but added that doctors say he’s not anywhere near out of the woods.
One of Caleb and Katie’s best friends is Michael West, who’s known Katie since kindergarten and Caleb since they started high school. West says Caleb can “make you laugh at the most mundane things.”
Complete coverage: Massacre in Aurora
Caleb’s family has been told his medical bills could total $2 million. So, West is trying to raise money.
“Caleb doesn’t have any insurance, so I put together a website,” West says.
So far, the site has raised more than $57,000 for Caleb and his family, but much more is needed
Warner Brothers is kicking in a “substantial sum” for the victims, which is the right thing to do.
But where’s the NRA? They’re a hell of a lot more responsible for this horror than some comic book movie. Wouldn’t it be a gesture of decency of good will for them to contribute some money to the victims of the fruits of their labors? This shooter sure as hell couldn’t have gotten the job done this efficiently without them.
Background checks for people wanting to buy guns in Colorado jumped more than 41 percent after Friday morning’s shooting at an Aurora movie theater, and firearms instructors say they’re also seeing increased interest in the training required for a concealed-carry permit.
“It’s been insane,” Jake Meyers, an employee at Rocky Mountain Guns and Ammo in Parker, said Monday.
When he arrived at work Friday morning — just hours after a gunman killed 12 and injured 58 others at the Century Aurora 16 theater — there already were 15 to 20 people waiting outside the store, Meyers said.
He called Monday “probably the busiest Monday all year” and said the basic firearms classes that he and the store’s owner teach are booked solid for the next three weeks, something that hadn’t happened all year.
“A lot of it is people saying, ‘I didn’t think I needed a gun, but now I do,’ ” Meyers said. “When it happens in your backyard, people start reassessing — ‘Hey, I go to the movies.’ “
I think I’d probably overheat in head to toe kevlar so I’ll just have wait for Netflix if all these lunkheads are going to be carrying firearms into movie theatres.
Normally I can read a news story and provide some reasonable perspective to give further context. But this just leaves me speechless:
Senate Republicans will press this week to extend tax cuts for affluent families scheduled to expire Jan. 1, but the same Republican tax plan would allow a series of tax cuts for the working poor and the middle class to end next year.
Republicans say the tax breaks for lower-income families — passed with little notice in the extensive 2009 economic stimulus law — were always supposed to be temporary. But President Obama had made them a priority in 2009 and demanded their extension in 2010 as a price for extending the Bush-era tax cuts for two years, and both the White House and Senate Democrats are determined to extend them again.
That sets up a potentially tricky issue for Republicans. They have said they do not want taxes to go up on anyone while the economy struggles to gain altitude, but under their plan, written by Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, about 13 million families would see their tax refunds reduced, and some would see their taxes increase.
“Senator Hatch’s amendment would extend tax breaks for the top 2 percent of Americans,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who leads the Senate’s Democratic majority, said this month. “But it fails to extend a number of tax cuts that help middle-class families get by in a tough economy.”
The tax showdown is set for Wednesday, when the Senate will vote on whether to take up Democratic legislation to extend Bush-era middle-class tax cuts through 2013. The motion will need 60 votes to pass, and only if it gets those votes will Republicans be given a chance to vote on their alternative tax plan. The House will vote next week on a similar Republican plan that also allows the 2009 stimulus cuts to lapse.
Let’s be very clear here: we are still in the middle of deep economic recession and high unemployment caused by reckless casino capitalism. Economic inequality is at record levels for the modern era.
And Republicans are flat-out running on a campaign of lowering taxes on the super rich while raising them on lower and middle incomes. Rather than being an insane, devastating and unthinkable political platform, it is simply called “tricky.” The political party advancing this platform has an even chance to win the Presidency, and a better than even chance to win the Senate and hold onto the House. Also, the advertisement on the right-hand side of the page is this:
Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth even trying to save this country from itself. If half of the country wants to experiment with immoral Objectivist fantasies, I’m half inclined to let them as long as they leave the rest of us alone. The problem is, they won’t.
Kids do say the darnedest things. But they don’t say it if they’ve never heard it. And there’s a history in that family of the little kids saying it.
I’d be sympathetic toward a young mom dealing with a three year old if she weren’t exploiting her child on a reality show. Her little sister seems more mature than she does.
