Political Ruminations

Morning Quote: Mitt Romney

“When Republicans act like Democrats, they lose. And in Newt Gingrich's case he had to resign. In Rick Santorum's case, he lost by the biggest margin of any Senate incumbent since 1980.”

- Mitt Romney joins Santorum and Gingrich together as Washington insiders in an interview with NBC News yesterday.

Morning Quote: David Frum

“It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program.”

- Conservative commentator David Frum on the insanity that has come to define the modern Republican Party. In reality, Frum need not look any further for answers than the color of the Obama presidency because therein lies the reason for the current state of modern American conservatism.

Updated: Rick Santorum’s Abortion Hypocrisy

Rick Santorum, presidential hopeful and hypocrite, advocates criminalizing abortion, and yet……his wife had an abortion.

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UPDATE: More info.

Karen and Rick Santorum have said that they did not induce labor. However, Karen Santorum said she would have induced labor if it were necessary. From Santorum's account of her second trimester pregnancy, by Steve Goldstein, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 4, 1997:

Karen, a soft-spoken red-haired 37-year-old, said that “ultimately” she would have agreed to intervention for the sake of her other children.

“If the physician came to me and said if we don’t deliver your baby in one hour you will be dead, yeah, I would have to do it,” she said. “But for me, it was at the very end. I would never make a decision like that until all other means had been thoroughly exhausted.”

The fetus was delivered at 20 weeks, at least a month shy of what most doctors consider viability.

So, according to Rick and Karen Santorum, it was purportedly not induced. However, Karen Santorum admits that she would have allowed it to be induced if necessary, thus making a choice that Rick Santorum seeks to deny to other women.

Indeed, if Rick Santorum has his way, abortion will be criminalized, and the same procedure that Karen had will not be available.

 

Morning Quote: Rick Santorum

In March, GOP presidential hopeful and lunatic, Rick Santorum said we should go to war over “moral” values:

“America is about an idea, and it has to be about shared value, or what is it? What is it? And that's why these moral issues, that everyone says oh, maybe we should step to the side and have a truce on, you can't. It is who we are. It is the purpose of our country. And I have been out fighting the wars on these moral issues.”

Watch:

Rick Santorum is the anti-gay, anti-abortion guy who is running on these social issues. Never mind health reform or jobs. Or anything important or non-discriminatory, for that matter.

Morning Quote: Tea Party Nation Wants to Disenfranchise Young People and the Poor

Tea Party Nation president, Judson Phillips, hosting a conservative radio show, discussing the changes he feels should be made to voting rights.

The Founding Fathers originally said, they put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote. It wasn’t you were just a citizen and you got to vote. Some of the restrictions, you know, you obviously would not think about today. But one of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community. If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners.

Listen to the audio.

 

Think Progress has more background:

Phillips is advocating a policy of voter disenfranchisement that has its roots in the 18th century. When the United States was first founded, ownership of property was one of the requirements to vote in most elections. Many of these restrictions were phased out by the 1820s and replaced with requirements that the voter pays taxes. By 1850, these requirements, too, were phased out. Nashville Scene blogger Betsy Phillips calls the Tea Party Nation president’s idea a “frivolous proposal designed to stoke intergenerational antagonism — as if the people who are older and can afford a home are somehow better citizens than the 18-year-olds who are going off to war to die for our country.”

Unfortunately, numerous major conservatives have advocated for rolling back the voting rights of Americans. Supreme Court justice Anthony Scalia, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), and Sen.-elect Mike Lee (R-UT) have all advocated for repealing the 17th Amendment, which would end direct election of U.S. Senators and return Senate elections to the purview of state legislatures. (H/T: Tea Party Nationalism)

Morning Quote

A really excellent comment from Bill Maher on Jon Stewart’s Sanity Rally, and the use of the ‘both sides’ meme. Video after the jump.

If you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something.

Now, with all due respect to my friends Jon and Stephen, it seems to me that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and reasonable, and not try to pretend that the sanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts, the other one is very close to playing with his poop.

And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balances’ sake. That the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There's a difference between a mad man, and a madman.

Now, getting over 200,000 people to come to a Liberal rally, is a great achievement that gave me hope. And, what I really loved about it is that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the mall in August. Although it weighed the same.

Cartoon of the Week

Truth be told, the right wing has moved so far to the right that it is almost impossible to find any area of agreement.

Adding.....Aw hell, really. The right wing nutjobs and their whacked out view of the world are the last people in the world I would want to agree with on almost anything. And, let's not forget what their stated goal is going forward.

Kentucky's Greedy Senator Elect, Rand Paul on Bush Tax Cuts For the Wealthy - "There are no poor people"

Last night in Kentucky, Rand Paul talked to Wolf Blitzer [video below]about the Bush tax cuts and why he wants to shield the ultra-wealthy and the mega corporations. Think Progress:

Speaking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Paul announced his intention to do anything it takes to shield the privileged rich and corporate America. Asked if he would end the $830 billion, unpaid-for Bush tax cuts to the rich and return tax rates for the wealthiest bracket to Clinton-era levels, Paul snapped and said such a move would cause a “second great depression” and declared that “anybody who proposes such a policy really is, I think, unfit to be making decisions.”

Paul then clarified his delusional worldview by telling Blitzer that “there are no rich” and “there are no poor.” In Paul’s mind, even taxing yachts would somehow punish the working poor in Kentucky. “We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people,” concluded Rand:

PAUL: I would say that they must be in favor of a second American depression, because if you raise taxes to that consequence, that’s what will happen in this country. Raising taxes in the midst of a recession would be a disaster for our economy. And anybody who proposes such a policy really is, I think, unfit to be making decisions.

BLITZER: What if they just raised taxes on the richest, those making more than 250,000 dollars a year?

PAUL: Well, the thing is, we’re all interconnected. There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor. We all are interconnected in the economy. You remember a few years ago, when they tried to tax the yachts, that didn’t work. You know who lost their jobs? The people making the boats, the guys making 50,000 and 60,000 dollars a year lost their jobs. We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people. So just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let’s not punish anyone. Let’s keep taxes low and let’s cut spending.

Read the full article at Think Progress.

Hey, Kentucky, swell job in electing this Rand-style sociopath.

8 False Tea Party-Republican Memes to Talk About Before You Go to the Polls

1. The Tea Party is a grass roots movement.

REALITY: The Tea Party is a rebranding effort by the Republican Party, led by the billionaire Koch Brothers and their organization, Americans for Prosperity. Read this report, and don't forget to look at this fabulous graphic, which is worth at least 10,000 words all by itself. The corporate takeover of our government is in process.

2. The stimulus was a failure.

REALITY: Not only was it not a failure, but a huge number of Republicans not only had their hands out to grab the money while the "failure" word came flying out of their mouths at regular intervals, 114 of them took credit for the same stimulus that they voted against. Additionally, the stimulus cost $787 billion, not $1.2 trillion, and created 3.3 million new jobs, and prevented an even deeper recession.

3. The President is a Muslim Kenyan Socialist who has never produced his birth certificate.

REALITY: The President is an American Christian centrist who produced his birth certificate for public display when this ridiculous meme first began during the 2008 election. Socialism requires a more left wing point of view, and this president is not even center left, much less far left.

4. Nowhere in the constitution does it state that there must be a separation between church and state.

REALITY: It is important to understand that this meme was not born out of ignorance, but out of a desire to intertwine religion and government, and thus the Far Right has re-interpreted the first two clauses in the First Amendment to be more to their liking. Constitutional scholars agree that these clauses denote the doctrine of the separation of church and state. Because our SCOTUS is Far Right, it is a dangerous meme.

5. The health care reform bill enacted by Democrats hurt Medicare and recipients of Medicare.

REALITY: Not only did it not harm the Medicare program, it actually strengthened it.

6. There is no difference between union funding of election ads and funding by secretive Super PACs.

REALITY: The difference between them is enormous. Union funding comes from the workers, the people who belong to the unions, and thus we know who is funding these ads. Secretive Super PACs, on the other hand, are funded by anyone, including in some cases foreign interests or multi-national companies, and no disclosure is required. There is also NO limit on donor contributions. Individuals funding union pacs are limited to specific, and low, dollar amounts, and there is disclosure.

These last two are from Dave Johnson, in his words.

7. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and is "going broke".

REALITY: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.

8. President Obama tripled the deficit.
REALITY: Bush's last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama's first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion.

Please re-blog this post, email it, and link to it. This stuff matters.

Links to Obama Administration / Democratic Party Accomplishments:

~ Rachel Maddow recounts what the Democrats accomplished in the past two years, and in the face of unrelenting opposition from the Republican Party. Maddow says that the Democrats, who controlled both Housees and the Presidency, were about policy, not politics.

~ Crowd-sourced on Twitter, a well sourced listing of the achievements of the Obama administration.

~ WTF has Obama done so far?.com

And finally, go VOTE!

Morning Quote

Sharron Angle denies the existence of the doctrine of the separation of church and state in an interview with John Ralston:

RALSTON: The separation of church and state arises out of the Constitution.

ANGLE: No, it doesn't, John.

RALSTON: Oh it doesn't? Oh, the Founding Fathers didn't believe in the separation of church and state, the Establishment Clause, the First Amendment?

ANGLE: Actually, Thomas Jefferson has been misquoted, like I've been misquoted out of context. Thomas Jefferson was actually addressing a church and telling them through his address that there had been a wall of separation put up between the church and the state precisely to protect the church

RALSTON: So there should be no separation.

ANGLE: To protect the church from being taken over by a state religion. And that's what they meant by that.

Morning Quote

Perfectly stated by Zaid Jilani of Think Progress, the description of the U.S.’ two major political parties [emphasis mine]:

Although there are a diverse set of political beliefs in the United States, there are currently two major political philosophies clashing for control of the American body politic. One, the progressive view, believes in a society where a democratically elected government plays an active role in helping all people achieve the American Dream, no matter who they are. The other, the conservative vision, believes in the on-your-own-society that favors the wealthy, big corporations, and other privileged sectors of society.

An accurate description of both parties that voters should keep in mind when they are unsure of whom to vote for.

The National GOP Trust PAC Releases the Most Despicable Money-Grubbing Political Ad Ever

Via Bob Cesca, this piece of trash ad contains barely a grain of truth in it, and that grain is confined to the fact that there actually is a "Ground Zero" Everything else is a lie or a distortion, put out by the National GOP Trust PAC . Those who created and released this ad are the most despicable kind of human beings on the planet, and that is not hyberbole. Using images of someone's loved one falling to his death on 9/11 for political purposes is nothing less than craven.

Please re-post this video, let's send it viral.

And then, vote the damn Republicans down in November. This country can not take any more of these fascist pigs.

Adding... for the truth about how Americans really like their hallowed ground, check out Cesca's article on HuffPost.

This bears repeating: unlike Park 51, which is blocks away, there's going to be a 55,000 square foot mall under the same ground where people fell to their deaths on that terrible day. Ground that's mixed with the remains of the dead. A mall.

Quote of the Day

The difference between Liberals and Conservatives.

“Democrats, for all their faults, generally do approximately what they say they're going to do and then either pay the price or reap the benefits. Republicans don't. They parachute into Tea Party gatherings and spout stemwinders about taking an axe to government spending, but when they get back to Washington they do just the opposite — all while figuring out ever newer and more inventive ways of providing tax breaks to favored industries.”

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones columnist