Is there anyone out there who believes that even one Republican would support Davis if the shoe were on the other foot? Jayzuz, will we ever learn?
Empowering Schwarzenneger like this is a recipe for disaster for California Democrats. As I wrote on American Street, he is hugely popular and is going to put every bit of his popularity on the line for George W. Bush. I’m not saying it will work, but he can guarantee that Kerry is going to have to spend money and time in super expensive California, which he should not have to do.
Boxer, Feinstein and even John Burton are giving Arnold big slurpy BJ’s and lending support to these two propositions as if they were sacred texts from Mt Sinai. It’s ridiculous. These propositions are band aids at best and simple GOP propaganda at worst. They are not going to solve the budget crisis but they are certainly going to cement the dominance of the Cult of Arnold in the electorate.
The Republicans always fight, even when they don’t have to. We, on the other hand, say “thank you sir, may I have another.” We have given up the moral high ground on the undemocratic recall travesty and are actively empowering the cyborg they used to seize power. It’s pathetic.
Am I the only one who thought that Elizabeth Bumiller made an ass of herself this morning in the NY debate? I know they probably told her to try to keep it moving, but she certainly seemed to relish interrupting with what were usually non-sequitors. She was inappropriately hostile, as if she were upset that the candidates were not giving her proper respect. It was odd, I thought. She should keep her day job as a Heather because she certainly isn’t ready for day time.
Not that the others were great. Dan Rather looked as if he needed a double shot of espresso. I don’t know what’s happened to that guy. At one time he was right up there with Woodward and Bernstein in exposing a corrupt president. He personally turned poor Ron Zeigler into a walking rolaids commercial.
Oh wait. He ‘s still just like Woodward and Bernstein. Just like them he’s part of a fat and flaccid establishment press that is paid to write historical fiction about Junior’s bravery and go on television and profess to be willing to sign on to whatever the president wants him to do. I forgot.
During the 2000 campaign, candidate George W. Bush seemed particularly confident about his ability to pay for Social Security reform. Despite independent estimates that creating the kind of “voluntarily” private accounts he envisioned could cost more than $1 trillion, Bush consistently took the position that he could reform Social Security for free, without undermining promises to baby boomers anticipating retirement over the next several decades.
Why was Bush so sure of himself? According to documents unearthed yesterday from the trove of 19,000 files given to me by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, and a bit of additional probing, candidate Bush and later President Bush believed in the “Lindsey Plan.” These documents show us what the president thought about Social Security reform at the only moment over the past three years—the fall of 2001—when he was fully engaged with this issue.
Larry Lindsey, Bush’s tutor on economics during the campaign and later chairman of the White House’s National Economic Council, devised a scheme based on creative accounting principles. Essentially, it proposed that the government would issue substantial new debt to sustain old-style benefits. This debt would be serviced and paid down by confiscating revenues from the higher returns from those opting for new-style personal accounts
For the first nine months of the administration, this was called the “free-lunch” plan—a painless way to convert to a blended, private-accounts model. Inside of the Treasury Department and the Council of Economic Advisers, however, officials were befuddled by it. Lindsey seemed to have never called upon analysts inside the Social Security Administration to run the traps on his idea. Treasury and CEA did—and the numbers didn’t even come close to working out. But that didn’t stop Lindsey, or the president, from believing in and promoting the “free-lunch” plan. These two memos on RonSuskind.com, which have never before been released, show what Bush and others in the White House were actually thinking about Social Security reform.
[…]
In the post-9/11 environment, the report vanished with little notice. But should the president take Greenspan’s recent suggestion and instigate a debate about Social Security again, we will now have some idea what he means by “reform.”
Junior’s courtiers are magical thinkers. Bush himself is not nearly intelligent enough to understand this stuff and he trusts all the wrong people. His vaunted instinct is nothing more than emotional responses to appeals to his vanity. How is it possible for one administration to find an important position for every single nutjob in the party?
(This discusses foreign policy, but the total cock-up in economic policy is the result of the same forces.)
…Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney’s right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
The neo-cons took advantage of Bush’s ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA and vice-president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state’s lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a north-eastern, moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the southern culture.
Let’s face it. He’s a childlike man who is manipulated by people who make him feel powerful.
John Kerry just gave me another good reason to vote for him.
It’s been awhile since I heard a presidential candidate make a good argument against the death penalty. The last time, I think, was 1988 and that didn’t work out too well.
Times have changed, though. The DNA revolution has proved that we are executing innocent people, which has always been my main objection to it. It’s good to hear a national candidate make this argument at the right time.
Our death penalty system is a national disgrace. If they want to re-run the 1988 election, fine. Except for all the the peace and prosperity there’s not a lot of difference between then and now.
When you compare the fortunes of the Hummer to those of its opposite—Toyota’s hybrid Prius, which can get upwards of 50 miles per gallon—it looks like the market may be shifting. First sold in the United States in 2000, the diminutive Prius remained a curiosity as the Hummer rose to celebrity. But sales rose to about 20,000 in 2002 and to 24,000 in 2003. Since the new 2004 model was introduced in the fall, the Prius has been stomping the Hummer. In November 2003, the Prius outsold the H2 by a 2-to-1 margin, according to Autodata. In January 2004, Prius sales were up 82 percent from January 2003.
For the 2004 model year, Toyota initially boosted production 50 percent to 36,000. But demand has been strong enough that production has already been increased to 47,000. And that’s still not enough. My Toyota dealer doesn’t have a Prius on the lot and says that interested purchasers must put down a deposit today and wait six months. By contrast, my local Hummer dealer has several on the lot.
Comparing the Prius and the Hummer is like comparing apples and oranges, or apples and watermelons. The Hummer costs more than twice as much as the Prius—although the absurd, huge federal tax break available to purchasers of giant vehicles for business use reduces the price a lot. (Those who purchase a Prius receive a smaller and shrinking tax break.)
[…]
Those who buy Hummers and Priuses are symbolic, marginal buyers. But economists will tell you that behavior at the margins can influence entire markets. In the summer of 2002, the marginal buyers were pushing hard for the gas guzzlers. Today, more people are clamoring for fuel-efficient cars.
It’s amazing how rising gas prices and a shitty economy can force big macho Americans to wake up. Or listen to their wives…
The great Charles Pierce writes in on Altercation today to acknowledge the fact that Andrew Sullivan does seem to be genuinely anguished over Karl Rove’s craven capitulation to the wing-nuts. He also points out something that I think is important and has not been discussed in any depth (except by me — to me) which is that this is just the latest in a whole line of assaults on the constitution.
Pierce points out that that this isn’t the first time that the constitution has been used to discriminate. Indeed it our sacred document was founded on the heinous 3/5th compromise, so one could say that it took a civil war to purge the document of its inherent discrimination. But, even more recent history shows that a blatant disregard for the constitution, the traditions undergirding it, the fundamental firmament of it have been declared fair game by the right wing.
The impeachment is the best example. That provision clearly was designed not to be used as a political football, what with its super majority requirement for conviction and the obvious definition that it apply to high crimes and misdemeanors. It was used only once prior and that was while the country was just emerging from a civil war in which the president was perceived to be sympathizing with the losing side. Never before had anyone thought it should be used in a case of minor sexual indiscretion that caused no threat to the nation (as a “pillow-talk” spy scandal would, for instance.)
Clinton’s impeachment was used as a blatantly political weapon to force him to resign, which thankfully, with the backing of the American people, he did not do. Nevertheless, it loosened the informal but serious restrictions against a powerful congress usurping the will of the people by attempting to remove a duly elected president on dubious legal grounds. Politicians had always before tried to steer clear of this type of unreviewable constitutional messiness because it is just the kind of thing that could truly destabilize what has become the most remarkably stable democracy on earth. No more.
Then, just 2 years later, unelected Supreme Court judges who had been appointed by the candidate’s father and/or party decided a national election despite the fact that the constitution laid out a complicated scheme to require that elected representatives resolve just such issues in the congress and be answerable to the people for the outcome.
And as Pierce says:
Why shouldn’t C-Plus Augustus look upon the Constitution as little more than a Post-It note for his campaign? It’s not like We, The People respect it that much any more. We — and our representatives — handed the Bill of Rights over to John Ashcroft for use as a bathmat, after allowing its provisions to be recast as “loopholes” in our jurisprudence and our popular culture for nearly 30 years. The fact that Congress has willingly deeded over its war powers to the executive — apparently in perpetuity — is treated as the natural order of things, and not as the towering constitutional heresy that it is. Let’s not even get into the fact that any country that truly respected the Constitution would have taken Tony Scalia out for a walk years ago.
There is an undemocratic strain in the modern Republican party that gets stronger and stronger as the far right exerts its muscle. As I wrote here, on American Street, this is becoming a rather serious problem not only for Democrats who have long had to deal with this stubborn GOP unwillingness to compromise on anything, but for Karl Rove who is finding out just what a problem it is trying to govern when a large portion of the electorate insists upon moving further and further to the right every time you compromise or appease them. At some point, the country, moderate at heart, stops supporting such rightward actions and rebels.
This is what forces the GOP to nuclear options like constitutional amendments, violent demagoguery and impeachment. If you can’t persuade a majority, and they can’t, you end up trying to rule by force.
The far right wing is a very dangerous movement, as Dave Neiwert and others have laid out in such detail. I’m sorry that it took something this obviously bigoted to get someone like Sullivan’s attention, but I’m glad it finally has.
However, the fact is that they have been willing to tinker with the constitution for purely political reasons for some time now. It’s probably not a good idea to support that no matter who is on the receiving end. It’s bad news for everyone.
If they think it’s a good idea to turn America’s attention to the fact that Bush lied and exaggerrated and misled the American people on Iraq dozens of times on national television, in great detail, so be it. It’s hard to make this president look even worse than he already does, but watching a bunch of blowhard GOP Senators try to explain his actions might just do it.