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Hey, did you know our favorite shithead Newt Gingrich is actually Dr. Newt Gingrich? It’s true, incredibly. He even wrote a Ph.D. dissertation back in the ’70s, one described as having “pedantic, adequate prose”:

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I must admit that the idea that Barack Obama is our first gay president (or, more accurately, the “first gay president,” as without the quotes it’s tabloid fodder) is somewhat bizarre to me. Yes, I know it’s a riff on the idea that Bill Clinton was called the “first black president,” but that made sense because it captured something about Clinton, namely that Clinton was comfortably multicultural in terms of his personality that was genuinely unusual in a president at that time. Clinton was technically just as white as, I don’t know, Dwight Eisenhower, but Ike didn’t socialize with black people, didn’t listen to their music, and didn’t make an effort to understand them. Clinton demonstrably did all these things, and his personality reflected it, so the term is somewhat illuminating. Setting aside the little fact that we’ve almost certainly already had a gay president (and probably more than one, if you do the math), I’m not quite sure what to make of applying the label to Obama. For one thing, I’m not wild about connoting Obama with a closeted, secret identity, which is essentially what the right always accuses him of (even if the intent here is hardly negative). But more importantly, while there are some groups of gay men that have group identities I’ve never really thought there was a single gay identity, just gay people, most of whom just live normal lives indistinguishable from straights like me, aside from in their choice of romantic partners. If you think the same way, then a gay president is a completely jejune concept.* And it’s true that Obama has a pretty great record on gay rights, but that doesn’t go to identity. Was Lyndon Johnson our first black president? By this logic he’d have to be, even though that’s a pretty laughable idea.

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People are buzzing about this, but it’s not technically news, since Boehner and especially Mitch McConnell have not really been coy about their intention to wreck the government again. Obviously, if Romney wins, Republicans will roll over on this issue. But I’m hardly convinced we’ll see another showdown if Obama wins. Republicans will be far more interested in extending the Bush Tax Cuts than anything else, and if November shakes out the way I think it’s likely to (another Obama term, a 12-15 seat Democrat gain in the House–possibly a few more, but I don’t think it’ll be much less–and dead even in the Senate with Biden breaking the tie), Boehner will have very little leverage. So making statements like this has to be understood as a bid to improve his negotiating position, nothing more. Boehner would be happy to trade away a debt ceiling increase in exchange for an extension on the upper-bracket tax cuts, and considering that Obama’s campaign has thus far used tax fairness as a running theme, Boehner has naturally trying to find leverage. As we saw in 2010, Republicans can be extraordinarily generous in negotiations if they get tax cuts for the rick out of them. Does it really make sense that Boehner’s top priority would be to procure a bunch more cuts during a lame duck session, or to parley that threat into an objective his party values infinitely more? Now, if Obama said that he absolutely will not extend the upper-bracket tax cuts under any circumstances, I could see Boehner and his House contingent as petty enough to refuse to raise the limit. That would not exactly be politically brilliant, but he’s got a lot of true believers in his caucus.

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I think we’ve hit the end of the (middle of the) road here:

Presumably AE could delay its timetable and hope someone (Buddy Roemer?) eventually crosses the bar to become a nominatable candidate. It could lower its already pathetically low threshold for candidate viability. Or it could just make a mockery of the entire bottom-up process that is supposedly the group’s signature and pick a candidate (or candidates) to put forward, assuming anybody even remotely credible out there would accept the damaged goods of a nomination.

I could have told you this was going to happen. Day-to-day politics going on in America is largely a bottom-down affair, with a relatively small group of people in government and the media setting the agenda that everyone else reacts to. But political movements do not work this way! They start with a group of people who want to make a change, always, and expand out from there. Americans Elect has been pretty smart about giving that first small group of people something to play with, something that is very fascinating to them, but just starting a quasi-political party because a couple of influential people want one that thinks like them is a perfect misapplication of how politics typically works to the realm of genuine political and social movements. You can’t just will into existence a new party that backs everything you support, it doesn’t work that way, and it smacks of an elite misunderstanding of the nature of politics. Sure, with money you can astroturf, you can use paid ads, really, there are any number of tools to manipulate public opinion. But there are limits, thankfully.

Read more on Americans Not Flocking To Vague, Shadowy Political Gimmicks…

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The case for picking Charlotte, NC, as the site of the Democratic National Committee was supposed to be simple:

When Democrats announced the choice in February 2011, they said selecting the Southern city signaled Obama’s intent to fight hard for the conservative-leaning state like he did in 2008. They also highlighted the economic transformation in the state and in Charlotte — from tobacco, textiles and furniture-making to research, energy and banking. Party leaders noted the state’s strong political leadership and expressed hope that a Perdue re-election bid would get a boost from the attention that would be lavished on the convention.

But it’s turned into something of a nightmare:

Read more on Charlotte Wasn’t The Right Choice for the DNC. What Would’ve Been?…

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From the maker of the incredibly long (but great) reviews of the Star Wars prequels:

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FailBlog

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Glenn Greenwald is wise here:

When it comes to assessing a politician, what matters, at least to me, are actions, not motives. If they do the wrong thing, they should be criticized regardless of motive; conversely, if they do the right thing, they should be credited. I’ve had zero tolerance over the last three years for people who pop up to justify all the horrible things Obama has done by claiming that he is forced to do them out of political necessity or in cowardly deference to public opinion; that’s because horrible acts don’t become less horrible because they’re prompted by some rational, self-interested political motive rather than conviction. That’s equally true of positive acts: they don’t become less commendable because they were the by-product of political pressure or self-preservation; when a politician takes the right course of action, as Obama did today, credit is merited, regardless of motive.

The trap that politicians set for us (and I admit I’m not immune to it) is that they want us to identify personally with the image they project. But that image is rarely (I wouldn’t say never because it’s theoretically possibly) a full portrait of the person. You often hear about people having “relationships” with an artist through their work, but the goal of an artist is to reveal him- or herself to the world, which is not really the goal of a politician. We’ll never know the latter group much better than they want us to know them. So, as Greenwald says, the only fair way to evaluate them is by what they actually do as public figures, not by our perception of their motives, which is essentially based on assumptions we make about them based on an image deliberately crafted for our consumption. Thus, Obama deserves enormous credit for his stance on marriage.

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And it turned out a lot better than that one!

President Obama made history Wednesday, becoming the first sitting president to come out in support of legal same-sex marriage.

In an interview with ABC News, Obama said, “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

Read more on The Evolution Is Over…

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I have to admit, I’m hardly bowled over by Dick Lugar’s wannabe kissoff concession statement. The story of Lugar’s primary challenge gathered considerable media interest, and his statement indicates that he was aware of this, and wrote something to get attention. But just like what Olympia Snowe said when she dropped out, Lugar just endorsed the company line and didn’t add any new frame or angle to the ongoing discussion:

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Emily Hauser’s conclusion on the new Israeli government:

Overall, this strikes me as a marriage of convenience between two men who will eventually tear each other apart. [Prime Minister Netanyahu and Opposition Leader Mofaz] both needed a crutch, and when one of them doesn’t need a crutch anymore? It’ll all come crashing down.

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I’ll keep saying it until I’m blue in the face: the filibuster in the Senate has become one of the biggest impediments to our government’s ability to function.

I don’t generally have a very high opinion of the American voter – in large part because they routinely fail to hold the right people to account for things that go wrong in Washington – but I guess you can’t really blame them when so many media outlets fail to even use  the word “filibuster” to describe what Republicans have been doing for the last few years on nearly every piece of substantive legislation.  For example:

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Yeah, I know some might object to calling Geert Wilders a fascist. Certainly, it’s an overused insult. My usual metric for whether or not someone is a fascist is: do they spend an inordinate amount of time defending/excusing/conditionally praising Hitler? That’s not going to get you every fascist, but it nets all of more obvious cases (e.g. Jean-Marie Le Pen and Pat Buchanan). It’s one thing to say that Hitler got Germany out of the Great Depression before any other major country–which is true–but another to spend years of your life arguing that he was misunderstood, wasn’t all that bad, etc. I haven’t heard Geert Wilders talk about how Hitler was some misunderstood genius, which would seem to contradict the heuristic I just mentioned. But he is a man whose hyper-nationalist party scapegoats a small, Middle Eastern minority for nearly all of his country’s problems, and isn’t all that choosy about which freedoms to trample on in order to punish them. In any event, it looks like this clown’s brief spell of time in power is over:

Read more on Not EVERY European Fascist Party Is Doing Well…

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The Times has a profile of Angus King, likely new Senator from Maine. I must admit that I initially skipped over the article before going back to it, just because my first impression of the man was pretty unfavorable. And it still sort of is. I think there are serious questions to be raised about his casual attitude to civil liberties, and even though it’s his shtick I don’t really approve of someone seeking office to play so coy about which party they are going to join. Yeah, yeah, I know, partisanship, but this seems like an awfully important piece of information for a voter to have, no? Could, you know, clarify the decision a bit? We have two parties that increasingly stand for very different visions of a future America. I don’t think it really does anyone a service to elide these differences.

Read more on It’s Good To Be King…

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I typically react viscerally against titles like, “The Republican Party is more pragmatic than you might think,” but there’s actually not that much to object to in the actual piece:

Over the past few years, it has hardened into something approaching conventional wisdom that the conservative/Tea Party wing is in the process of taking over the GOP. But while the right has certainly asserted itself – particularly in the 2010 midterm elections, with mixed results – the reality is that the Republican Party is now in the process of nominating an establishment figure with a moderate reputation for president. Again.

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This song really struck me when I heard it this week:

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The Senate, once the chamber of deliberation and reason, is getting its own extreme makeover. Moderates such as Maine Republican Olympia Snowe and Democrat Ben Nelson are bolting an institution that barely resembles the one they entered as idealistic deal makers.

Read more on Don’t Make Me Laugh…

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Read more on Despicable Quote of the Day — Icky Gay Sexytime Is A Threat To National Security…

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Alec McGillis makes some sense here on the odd battle to secure NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s endorsement:

My guess is that it’s about Romney’s attempts to reclaim the center. If Romney were to land a smooch from Bloomberg, I doubt it would have much direct effect anywhere he has a chance to win. But it would buy him some favorable coverage from the elite media—suffice it to say that the Times would play it high—and the refracted glow could help him among certain upscale voters nationally.

And Obama, of course, would rather not have tons of stories featuring “Romney” and “moderate” in the same sentence, basically. I understand why he’d make the effort, as it doesn’t really cost Obama anything, but it’s not exactly high-stakes.

Read more on Pointless Prize…

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[Embiggen]

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I must say that the discussion over whether or not Mitt Romney would have pushed the button on Osama bin Laden is mostly uninteresting to me as a matter of policy. There’s really no way of knowing for sure–my guess is that Romney would not have done it so as to avoid the risk of it backfiring, but who really knows. Overall, though, I can’t get too worked up about it because it’s so obviously about making the guy Look Weak. See Josh Marshall for the specifics on this angle. Me, I know he’s weak. He has no demonstrable values, only a dense shell of self-satisfaction that you tend to find in the most disastrous figures in political history. There’s no real strength because there’s nothing to lean on when things get tough, which is why Romney does the easiest thing imaginable when that happens. Every. Time. That is what weakness is. So I’m bored by all this.

Read more on On The Road Again…

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In other words, CSM has good information, FOX is nonsense, WaPo has some reliable blogs, and The Atlantic loves mainlining junk. Same as it ever was.

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I’d like to answer this question:

The perception of Bush as inexperienced and unprepared on this front was not wrong. This is arguably more worrisome in Romney’s case because he appears to have no firm principles, which makes him more vulnerable to influence from his advisers, and because he usually has a reputation for being very detail-oriented in his understanding of other subjects. Bush was poorly informed about foreign affairs, but that was a function of his lack of intellectual curiosity. What accounts for Romney’s apparent lack of interest in a subject that he still can’t seem to stop bringing up? I don’t know, but I submit that it’s not a good sign.

I propose that this can be entirely explained by what we already know about Romney. We know already that Romney switched from being pro-choice to being pro-life due to a political need, but that process (as this Slate piece I’ve linked to before suggested) wasn’t one where Romney just decided one day that he wanted to be president and that he was changing his position to win votes. The piece makes it clear that ambition was the driving factor in the change, but not on a conscious level–it’s almost as though Romney supplied the goal and delegated the job of getting there to his brain, while still being able to maintain a consistent throughline.

Read more on Mitt Romney: Still Not A Technocrat…

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I was thrilled to find out that Chris Elliott’s classic one-man show about FDR is available on these here intertubes. It’s a gleefully inaccurate account of the president’s life, and a brilliant skewering of the silly conventions and pretensions of one-man shows. I completely lost it when Roosevelt escaped the Japanese attack on the White House by slipping away to a deserted island:

Read more on Fun Friday: When FDR Defended The White House Armed Only With A Pistol…

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It looks as though the Teahardists really are going to take down Dick Lugar. I have to say that I’m unclear as to what their grievances are with him. With Bob Bennett I had a pretty good sense of whey they were angry with him: he voted for the TARP Bill and supported the principle of health care reform (though not, of course, the ACA). Lugar voted yes on TARP as well, but other than that I have no clue (and not everyone who voted yes on TARP has been purged, by any means).

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The Times has an interesting piece, which argues that elite Republicans strongly want Mitt Romney to stop attacking Obama so much, and spend at least some time outlining a positive vision:

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(Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

I really have no interest in dumping on Jimmy Carter. The man’s post-presidential work has often been extremely admirable, more than enough to excuse the occasional gaffe or poorly-advised action. Man’s earned a pass. Still, to see him reinforcing the notion that the “real Mitt Romney” is no ideologue, but a pragmatic, data-driven technocrat, and assuming that his presidency would largely proceed along those lines, forces me to ask the question: on what basis are we assuming that the “real Romney” is technocratic?

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Yesterday’s Pennsylvania presidential primary drew virtually zero interest from the public, which is about correct. But it wasn’t entirely uneventful. Due to the Republican legislature’s gerrymandering of district lines, quite a few of the state’s Democratic Representatives had to compete for a relatively small number of Democratic seats, and two sitting Congressmen, Jason Altmire and Tim Holden, went down to defeat. They were the final two Blue Dogs in Pennsylvania’s delegation. Both lost to relatively more liberal challengers. And so continues the collapse of the Blue Dogs: a whimper rather than a bang.

Read more on Last Night Was Absolutely Brutal For Pennsylvania Blue Dogs…

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Reading this article led me to a Gallup poll from late last month that I somehow missed, which showed a modest increase in concern over climate change among the public:

The past few years have not exactly been very encouraging to me on this front, but I’ve tried to console myself by saying that, as the economy improves, concern will reassert itself. That appears to be exactly what is occurring–a modest improvement in the economy has been coupled with a modest increase in concern. As the Times notes:

Read more on Climate Change Is Still A Thing People Are Concerned About…

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