Seriously, though, I have to give the conservatives credit on this. The indications are uniform that the public (and Catholics in general, too) are not on their side. But they’ve managed to make this into a real headache for Democrats and have even managed to make it seem like it’s not entirely a partisan thing. That’s smart politics, it really is, and I’m always for credit where it’s due. But just count on this man to ruin it for them by going and pushing a bill to block it:

House Speaker John Boehner delivered a scathing attack from the House floor today on the Obama administration’s mandate that health insurers offer birth control coverage.

Escalating the already intense debate over the new requirement, Congress’ most powerful Republican called it an “attack on religious freedom.”

Conservatives have complained in recent days that the rule will force employers who object to contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs to cover those services. Catholic charities, universities and hospitals often object to such procedures.

It is unusual for a House speaker to address the House from the floor, as Boehner did today.

“This attack by the federal government on religious freedom in our country must not stand and will not stand,” he vowed.

Here’s why this is dumb. Right now, conservatives have some leverage here. The Obama Administration has famously walked the talk of trying to avoid social issue “discussions” like this one. They think they are divisive and don’t want to get into this stuff if they don’t have to, and are often literally frightened of tough criticism in this area (see the Plan B decision last year, which just reeked of panic). They don’t want to go down this road if they don’t have to, and if Congressional Republicans were to let this thing build organically, they’ll likely get most of what they want. The White House has already dropped peace feelers, and whatever your feelings about Obama’s team, this is just how they roll. They will make concessions for no reason in hopes of placating the opposition, just as they always have.

And, suddenly, here comes John Boehner, full of swagger, ready to throw down some legislation that will almost certainly turn this into Just Another Culture War Skirmish, resetting everything to normal partisan loyalties as usual. Democrats uneasy with the policy will now be able to say that it’s being turned into a political weapon, allowing them to have their cake and eat it too by saying they have their issues with the policy but aren’t going to be tools of the anti-choice right. Their pro-choice constituents and traditionalist Catholic constituents will be satisfied, I suppose. Meanwhile, this puts pro-choice Republicans on the spot, having to decide whether to support their party or…ha ha ha. Of course they’ll support their leadership even if they disagree because that’s just how they roll. And they’ll pay the price in November for having voted against making birth control more easily available. Anyone want odds that this isn’t how the situation turns out? And that, in a month, it’s nothing more than one more thing for Rick Santorum to grouse about on the stump?

I don’t know if you all have seen the old Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries from the early ’80s (if not, go watch it!), but the line where Smiley says that Karla is weak because he’s a fanatic has always stuck with me. If you’re fanatical, you’re going to go to extremes that aren’t advisable because you’re so convinced you’re right, and that is correctly classified as a weakness (at the very least, it’s something that can be manipulated). And Smiley’s line perfectly encapsulates why Republicans are losing this battle, among other things. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cleaner example of one person screwing up something politically useful more efficiently than this. I’m so glad this incompetent boob is the top Republican in the House.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

After all of this (and the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-poor people, anti-union, anti-anyone-not-white-male-straight-and-wealthy palaver as well) clearly, the Asians were next up.

I was going to call the post forming itself in my head:

“Dear Asian-Americans – Look out, I think they’re coming for you.”

I will admit, however, that I was stymied by an inability to figure out just what the slurs might be. It’s the burden, I suppose, of being the “model minority” — you face discrimination and othering and bigotry, but it comes wrapped in words that are meant to sound like compliments. “Good at math” being one example. “Tiger mom” being another.

AND THEN THEY FREAKING CAME. And good lord, how could I have been so stupid? [...]

They are Chinese, but in a really oddly Vietnam-y way, one which will remind you that not only are they Not American, they are Inscrutable, and Peasant-y, and Very Very Dangerous.

They are also oddly interchangeable, because the scuttlebutt is that the woman featured in Hoekstra’s ad (in which she says she’s Chinese in pidgin English while bicycling along a rice paddy in a conical hat) isn’t even Chinese-American. It’s just scuttlebutt at this point, but I would be willing to bet that Hoekstra’s campaign didn’t necessarily make a point of looking for an authentically Chinese-American person to use for race-baiting purposes.

Soooo, it’s been a super long walk to get here, but:

Dear Asian-Americans: I am so sorry that I didn’t warn you about the GOP. I could see it coming — I just had no idea how fast the Racism Train was running.

What’s exceedingly strange about this is that the Asian-American community has historically been friendly to Republicans. Many of the older Japanese people I’ve known never forgot that it was a Democratic president who sent them to internment camps during WWII (and a Democratic governor who carried out the legwork, at least initially). To be sure, Asian-Americans comprise a lot of legitimately different groups who don’t all think alike, of which the Japanese are only one, but during the ’70s and ’80s, these communities were drawn to the GOP over anti-Communism, social conservatism, and a culture of frugality, which (among other things) powered Sam Hayakawa’s successful Republican Senate campaign. This book goes over all of this in much more detail for those interested.

Really, though, Asian-Americans are some of the most natural Republican voters outside of their base that you could possibly imagine. It’s amazing that they’ve lost them. California has one of the highest concentrations of Asian-American voters in the country, and Meg Whitman only managed to win 39% of them in a really, really good Republican year (in context, she won about 1/5 of Black voters too, so that 39% is undoubtedly inflated by a fair amount from normal circumstances). That their political support for the GOP has eroded is probably why Republicans are feeling free to lash out as they have, but what’s worth remembering is that Republicans have typically not really tried much Asian racebaiting. It’s much harder to run a Lee Atwater sort of strategy against a generally prosperous minority group, after all, and one whose stereotypes resist being wrongly labeled as lazy, stupid bums. Honestly, the more natural bigoted approach for that would probably be some kind of ersatz anti-Semitism, which is basically I think what Hoekstra’s ad is, with the sneaky foreigner who’s also portrayed as ignorant and foolish (but mostly moneygrubbing). I think that’s the hidden resonance here. Nothing is ever new in this game, my friends.

Not that it matters much in the long term. Hoekstra is a marginal political talent who was a punchline in Congress and lost a gubernatorial primary in 2010 to a complete unknown, and I fully expect him to lose again this year. He’s one of those candidates that Republicans repeatedly try to foist on blue-state electorates that want no part of them, like three-time loser Dino Rossi (remember him?) in Washington.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

One of my absolute favorites so far is a message from a press attaché to Syrian President Assad on how to put one over on the gullible rubes in flyover country:

She advised: “It is hugely important and worth mentioning that ‘mistakes’ have been done in the beginning of the crises because we did not have a well-organized ‘police force.’ American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear that there are ‘mistakes’ done and now we are ‘fixing it.’

She’s got us dead-to-rights there.  It almost reads like a PR memo from Karl Rove to GW.

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

The patented Microsoft technology solves the problem with “A system and method for capturing annotations for a non-modifiable document. … Once it is determined that an annotation is to be created, the system determines the file position of the selected object. The file position of the selected object is stored along with the created annotation in another file or a non-read only portion of a file storing the document. Using the file position, the annotation may be properly identified with the selected object without modifying the non-modifiable document.”

Yeah, you read that correctly.

Microsoft got a patent for what is basically the electronic equivalent of writing something on a post-it note and sticking it someplace inside a book.

…

Sure, we can all laugh at how ridiculous it is, but pretty much every technology company of any size or consequence is somehow enmeshed right now in a clusterfuck of reciprocal nonsense suits and countersuits worth trillions of dollars — and most of their claims are based on bullshit like the Microsoft patent above.

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently.

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

Some U.S.-born children with parents who are illegal immigrants have been denied food stamps under Alabama’s new immigration law, Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen told Yahoo News on Monday.

Five people have called into the group’s Alabama hotline to say they were denied food stamps because they couldn’t prove they were legal residents, even though the food stamps are for their children, who are citizens.

Cohen says the civil rights group, which has already filed two lawsuits against Alabama over the law, will most likely bring another suit over the denied food stamps.

The point was to kick people off of food stamps, right?

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

On the other hand, Star Wars fans have perfected the art of grumbling about Lucas’s self-indulgent, moneygrubbling rereleases and just going to purchase them anyway. It’s been happening for as long as I remember. Say what you like about Star Trek fans, but we generally just didn’t buy when they were presenting us with junk like Voyager and Nemesis, and managed to force the powers that be to actually give us something decent. I don’t know that Star Wars fans ever did that. So I wouldn’t bet on the movie being a flop, especially since it’s going to be really cheap as the filming is all done already.

Still, I tend to think that Lucas missed a trick here. It would have been a smarter business move to release the original three movies first in 3D, go with a straight nostalgia pitch, then do the prequels for those who have interest in them. The way Lucas is doing it seems sure to make the project as a whole much less commercially successful by reminding people how lame the payoff was to all that anticipation over the prequels, dampening interest in seeing the “classics” ruined. Lucas no doubt sees things differently, and if I had to guess, this venture is probably partly to keep up his insane rivalry with James Cameron (who is releasing Titanic in 3D, of course), but more as a way of getting people to appreciate the prequels more by making them even more visually flashy. Way to learn the right lesson there, George.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

Well, history loves to repeat itself.

The latest social welfare program that conservatives are using to drop easily understood racist dog whistles to their mentally ambulatory brownshirts is food stamps – the federally funded program to enable black people to gorge themselves on fried chicken and orange drink provide the barest minimum of nutrition to poor people in their time of need.

How much does this lavish government largesse cost us?

A program that provides only, on average, $133 per month [!!] to families barely getting by?

A program where half of the recipients are children?

Answer:  Less than 2% of our entire federal budget:

So let’s all try to keep a little perspective.

Just imagine what we could achieve if people like Newt Gingrich directed their energies toward improving the nutritional health of our children instead of demonizing their lazy, shiftless, handout-taking parents…

…

I know, I laughed just then too.

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

“If it’s an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room, I would give them a shot of estrogen.”

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

I pray to jeebus they sell sweet, delicious rickrolls!

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

[ Gherald @ Library Grape ]

Cancer is Cancer! Aboration is Aboration!

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

Take the latest kerfuffle over the Komen Foundation’s yanking of support for Planned Parenthood.

First you bring in a new VP dead-set on defunding Planned Parenthood and craft a new policy with the specific intent of having it only apply to Planned Parenthood:

[T]hree sources with direct knowledge of the Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut off Planned Parenthood. (Komen gives out grants to roughly 2,000 organizations, and the new “no-investigations” rule applies to only one so far.) The decision to create a rule that would cut funding to Planned Parenthood, according to these sources, was driven by the organization’s new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, a former gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who is staunchly anti-abortion and who has said that since she is “pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.” (The Komen grants to Planned Parenthood did not pay for abortion or contraception services, only cancer detection, according to all parties involved.)

Then, once you’ve executed your plan to drop Planned Parenthood funding for political reasons and cause a holy shitstorm by doing it, you run to your Facebook page, clutch your pearls and accuse your critics of politicizing the issue:

Grant making decisions are not about politics–our priority is and always will be the women we serve. Making this issue political or leveraging it for fundraising purposes would be a disservice to women.

It’s the same old tapdance they do when it comes to Republicans saying racist shit:

1. Republican says some racist shit.
2. People who don’t like racist shit call the Republican out on saying racist shit.
3. Said Republican clutches pearls and decries the mean people who are playing the race card against him.

So it is and so it shall ever be.

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

Romney won tonight, and I suspect that Palin picked the losing team on purpose. She plays the underdog well. This way she can be in that seat regardless of whether its Romney or Obama in the White House next year. The perpetual underdog, forever whining at the margins. She’s shrewd enough to see what Newt’s campaign represents – the resurgent grassroots conservatism that is propping it up; the remnants of the anti-establishment Tea Party, or at least that sentiment. It’s a sentiment of loss – of preservation against all odds.

See, Palin doesn’t want to win. She doesn’t even want her guy to win or her cause to win. There’s more to gain from losing. That’s her entire shtick, and she knows it.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote anything about Palin, which isn’t a bad thing. But I have to say, it’s been pretty fascinating to vaguely follow what she’s been up to, to follow this downward slope to the end. It’s pretty clear that Palin wants to be famous for being famous, to be a Britney Spears/Kim Kardashian type who was always being buzzed about, whose life has every detail just relentlessly picked apart and obsessed about. That’s why she gave up her post for a reality show that failed. But it turned out that Palin as a person really wasn’t all that interesting, even to people more kindly disposed to her than I ever was. Her talent wasn’t an overpowering personality, it was that she could work people into a constant lather. That was her one skill, and why I figured that a likely unsuccessful Palin presidential run was inevitable. In fact, Palin would have been the biggest “business plan” candidate of them all! She’d be able to work people into a frenzy without having to actually be president, playing to all her strengths and none of her weaknesses. It would have been the smartest possible move for her to make, but Palin turned out to be seriously deluded: she thought her most marketable trait was her personality, and has been abundantly proven wrong. This belated attempt to insert herself into the election feels half-hearted and pitiful by comparison to the old stuff. Almost defeated. Which fits I guess.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

Which smile is most pained? I'm going with the unknown guy in the middle. Trying way too hard there, guy.

The thought occurred to me today that Mitt Romney is reminding me an awful lot of Meg Whitman, 2010′s megabuck Republican candidate for Governor of California.

The parallels are there: both candidates came from business backgrounds and had astonishing personal wealth. Both boasted continuously about how their business experience would make them job-creating geniuses if they were elected, though Whitman’s tenure running eBay gave her better credibility to make this argument than Romney’s atop job-shredding Bain Capital. Both ran against Democrats that were viewed in a lukewarm fashion at best by the electorate–Jerry Brown’s favorability was underwater for most of the campaign, lest we forget. Whitman had an enormous amount of money to spend to defeat Jerry Brown, and wound up dropping over $100 million of her own cash to do so.

But she lost by a huge margin. This might be expected considering that California is more Democratic than the country, but the state doesn’t seem to have much of a problem electing Republican Governors that tend to be more moderate. In fact, there have only been three Democratic Governors since WWII in this state, and one of those got recalled. This race, in any event, was close most of way. But Whitman, who saw her campaign slide away for employing an illegal immigrant, was already dropping in the polls well before that story broke. The Times sums up the reasons for this:

Ms. Whitman has spent much of the campaign explaining why she had rarely voted before entering politics. Her record at eBay, including layoffs under her watch, has been the subject of scrutiny. And she has been assailed by independent fact-checkers for running what were described as misleading or false advertisements attacking Mr. Brown by portraying him as a big spender when he served as governor of California in the 1970s.

Sounding familiar? Romney has had a different issue with voting that probably won’t matter in November, but the rest of this echoes Romney completely. Romney even has a comparable story of employing an illegal immigrant to Whitman’s. And Whitman’s other major problem in the campaign? Failed flip-flops:

After assuming a relatively tough line on illegal immigration in the primary — though explicitly avoiding the tough anti-illegal immigrant law passed in Arizona — she moved, the moment the general election began, to appeal to Latino voters with an extensive and expensive Spanish-language campaign that extended from television airwaves to bus stops to billboards that read, “Más Trabajos,” or more jobs.

She flip-flopped a few times on cap-and-trade too, for what it’s worth. Not a great idea to be ambiguous on environmental policy in this state is all I’m saying. But that’s another story. The point is that taking a hard line on immigration, as Whitman and Romney have done in their primaries, is essentially a killer if you want to get any Hispanic support as a Republican. It doesn’t matter if you soften it later, Hispanics at this point are suspicious of Republicans over this and other issues and Democrats will absolutely trot it out endlessly and hammer it home with no end. Republicans have a very thin margin of error to trod with these voters, and both Whitman and (likely) Romney have already crossed it. Obama will probably get over 70% of the Hispanic vote, I’m predicting.

Whitman’s campaign, ultimately, failed to connect for many reasons. But the overall gestalt pointed to one reason: the people didn’t connect with someone who just luxuriated in wealth, felt entitled to get a position because of her wealth and status, and couldn’t relate to normal folk. As Ruben Navarette Jr. put it at the time:

So then why did Whitman lose? For one thing, she never connected with voters and that hurt her when the Brown campaign started pushing the message that she was this rich empress who lived in a bubble and couldn’t relate to average Californians. [...]

There are plenty of differences between the two cases, but I think there are enough similarities between Romney and Whitman to make it an interesting question, and possibly some hope for Democrats in November. It’s amazing how these two politicians seem to have almost identical backgrounds, strengths and weaknesses (though in fairness, Romney did actually win an election once). Personally, I long for the days when rich people thought politics was a dirty profession.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

Sully points us to a post by Francis Fukuyama that I think is pretty right-on-the-money:

Americans with their democratic roots generally do not trust elite bureaucrats to the extent that the French, Germans, British, or Japanese have in years past. This distrust leads to micromanagement by Congress through proliferating rules and complex, self-contradictory legislative mandates which make poor quality governance a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US is thus caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, in which a hobbled bureaucracy validates everyone’s view that the government can’t do anything competently. The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes.

I often come back to a line of thought very similar to this when pondering why our modern political system is so dysfunctional. I suspect that one of the big concepts from our always infallible and sainted founding fathers that conservatives want to resurrect is their deep antipathy toward direct democracy:

The Economist loves freedom, as America’s founding fathers did. So democracy has always been, for us and the founding fathers, a “mere” afterthought to liberty, a means not an end. James Madison (pictured), in particular, was wary of even using the word “democracy” lest Americans confuse its representative form with its direct form; he preferred “republic”. So did Benjamin Franklin. Asked by a Philadelphian what form of government the constitution of 1787 had created, he replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

While all that sounds lovely in theory, a high-functioning republic is predicated on the good faith of the people holding elected office. When you lose that good faith, either through corruption or wanton acts of nihilism like the current GOP’s filibuster brigade in the Senate, the only way to rectify the situation is through aggressive oversight (yeah, good luck on THAT) or the intervention of more direct democracy. As The Economist notes:

Voter initiatives, referendums and recalls were introduced a century ago during the Progressive era, for good reasons—frontier politics were corrupt and direct democracy was a way to circumvent venal legislatures.

But woe betides the republic that ever abdicates its power into the hands of direct majoritarian dominion:

Since the 1970s, direct democracy has become something very sinister. Starting with California’s infamous “Prop 13″, which capped property taxes and also required two-thirds majorities in both houses of the state legislature to raise any future taxes, voter-initiative industries sprang up in various states that now churn out ballot measures as though by conveyor belt. Getting enough signatures to qualify an initiative for the ballot is easy for sponsors with lots of money, who can afford to pay college students a dollar or more for each signature they collect in a mall. [...]

The result is dysfunction. States with excessive direct democracy, such as California, Oregon and Arizona, now face daunting budget deficits because the recession has exposed the cumulative legacy of past voter initiatives. Voters love schools, hospitals, prisons, and trains. They also hate the taxes that pay for them. Recessions are often triggers of fiscal chaos, whereas ballot-box budgeting is the cause.

The question of how to fix all this is one of the most complicated sociopolitical problems I can imagine.

We live now in an age awash in corporatist corruption, which presumably necessitates ever-greater populism in order to purge our government of hacks beholden only to the donors that keep their bloated, diseased careers afloat.

But, with rampant populism unleashed in 51 distinct and separate incubators, I fear that the competing forces of majoritarianism will never be able to climb down off their ledges and find a way back to whatever level of homeostasis we’ll need to maintain in order to dial back the clock from our mutually assured destruction.

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

So maybe I’m just a masochist for being repeatedly flummoxed by the bleedingly obvious contradiction between the holy warriors’ parallel jihads against both contraception and abortion. I.e.: So maybe better use of contraception would help avoid all those terribad fetus killings… Hrm???

Every time a /facepalm story comes up along the lines of the wingnut VP at the Susan G Komen Foundation aborting the organization’s funding for breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood, I keep slamming my head into the well-worn groove in my desk over how stupid and counterproductive these fucking idiots can be.

But maybe I’m just not cynical enough. Maybe the mucky-mucks behind the holy crusade against unshackled vaginas really don’t give a shit about aborted fetuses and are just using the issue as yet another whip to drive their host of frothing lumpenproles to gallop ever-faster toward the illusory promised land they’ve been told to believe in. Or something…

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

All this of course comes back to the issue that Mitt Romney’s about as approachable as a hedgehog with a migraine, and he can’t override his own instincts when it comes to dealing with “the people”.  He’s never dealt with them outside of spreadsheets and statistics and it shows.  It’s all numbers to the guy.  And nobody, nobody believes him when he says he rich aren’t his focus.

This has merit, but I actually have a slightly different take. Romney has been compared to Al Gore more times than I can count (the comparison was made most directly here), and Romney’s campaign reeks every bit as much of consultant overload as Gore’s did. I don’t think Romney’s spontaneity is killing him, I think it’s that his obsessive attempts to follow his consultants’ ideas that are doing it, which makes more sense anyway considering how he tends to be overrehearsed and overprepared. Gore was severely abused by the media, no doubt about it, but it’s hard to deny that his campaign was as effective as it should have been considering the strong economy and President Clinton’s popularity. Romney’s behavior has an odd deja-vu effect for me, as Romney continues to come off as stiff in exactly the same way, as though he’s trying to suppress his real personality and avoid coming off as too smart, too elite, that he stumbles over himself trying to convey an image that is fundamentally just not true. Of course, Gore was further disadvantaged by his consultants’ supremely idiotic decision to distance himself from a president with a 67% approval rating because Washingtonians always thought Clinton was a much more controversial figure than the rest of the country did. But that’s another story.

Of course, like Romney, Gore was the son of a prominent politician and grew up in the bubble to some extent. They had similar barriers to overcome in connecting with voters. But what was exasperating about Gore’s campaign was that a few years later, Gore became a prominent public figure again, and after freeing himself of consultants he was actually a smart, likable, and passionate person, traits that were suppressed by what was, in retrospect, a completely incompetent campaign operation. What is possible is that Romney’s consultants might actually be putting lipstick on a pig, as it were. I don’t know enough about Romney to know whether or not this is true of him as well, but my guess is that his inability to connect with the electorate is related to his complete lack of respect for it, his lack of ability as an actor, and perhaps a dash of insecurity that his own personality is good enough to make voters love him. The former is hardly a Gore-like trait, but the latter two certainly are.

My personal belief is that Romney is an exaggerated, even parodic, version of the things that politicians are that voters hate. He doesn’t just tell a little white lie now and then, he tells voluminous lies about nearly everything under the sun. He doesn’t just shift positions occasionally when the political winds change, he overhauls his entire political philosophy whenever it’s convenient, and he hectors people who have held his new beliefs for much longer than he has on their lack of sincerity on those issues. I’m not entirely convinced that “Mitt Romney” isn’t some character dreamed up by Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro from Wag The Dog to somehow rig the election for the president, while also making a point about the vacuity of modern politics. He feels almost like a bad fictitious “politician” type. Obama’s authenticity should make for a nice contrast in November.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

Headline: Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.

President Obama ran — and won — in 2008 on the idea of uniting the country. But each of his first three years in office has marked historic highs in political polarization, with Democrats largely approving of him and Republicans deeply disapproving.

For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever. (The previous high was George W. Bush in 2007, when he had a 59 percent difference in job approval ratings.) [...]

What do those numbers tell us? Put simply: that the country is hardening along more and more strict partisan lines.

While it’s easy to look at the numbers cited above and conclude that Obama has failed at his mission of bringing the country together, a deeper dig into the numbers in the Gallup poll suggests that the idea of erasing the partisan gap is simply impossible, as political polarization is rising rapidly. [...]

For believers in bipartisanship, the next nine months are going to be tough sledding, as the already-gaping partisan divide between the two parties will only grow as the 2012 election draws nearer. And, if the last decade of Gallup numbers are any indication, there’s little turnaround in sight.

[Also, too: a lovely poll called: "Vote:  Is Obama the Nation's Most Polarizing President of All Time?"]

Yes, the body of the article does a fine tapdance but we’re left with the link-whoring evoked by the headline and poll question.

Do we get much in the way of an analysis of what is behind the disparity in poll numbers?  Not really.

Are we treated to all kinds of insinuation that Obama is out there being all partisan and making people hate him.  Yep, quite a bit.

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

Mary Baker Eddy, Mass Murderer

I was watching a Family Guy episode yesterday where a Christian Scientist family was letting their kid die of cancer because they rejected modern medicine in favor of the power of prayer.

The show made a good point that I often wonder about:

Isn’t it the height of human pride and arrogance to reject knowledge in the modern world (e.g., evolution, medicine, etc.) because you think you know God’s mind best?

If you believe so fervently in the power of prayer to cure your sick child (based on the teachings of some loon from the days of bloodletting and miracle tonics), what if God is trying to answer your freaking prayers by bringing forth unto the world medicine and science!?

[ Metavirus @ Library Grape ]

Perhaps the theory that the Republican primary race is destroying Romney’s chances has been a bit overstated? I do think that there are reasons to think Romney will underperform this year. His endorsement of the Ryan Plan will give Obama an easy club to beat him with, one that will really hurt among indy voter types. He’s been incredibly hamfisted and inept when it comes to talking about his tax arrangements and how he made his money, plus chestnuts like “I won’t apologize for being successful!” and “Don’t put free enterprise on trial!” are just not going to be that powerful outside of Republican audiences. And his hardline immigration stance reduced Newt Gingrich to a pile of goo last week will insure he’ll only get a token amount of Hispanic support in November. This is all true. But it’s important to remember that Romney is (correctly) perceived as a credible possible president by the media and the public. This is not the case with, say, Newt Gingrich, who has similar favorability but does far worse in head-to-head polls. It really does seem clear that the “Not Obama” candidate is going to do pretty well, so long as he meets a certain plausibility threshold. As all the models say, I suppose.

Not that anything is set in stone–I’m sure that if the economy improves a bit, some of those “Not Obama” voters will drop off, and Romney’s electoral support will be closer to the public’s views of the candidate himself. But it’s important to note that Romney’s strength at this point isn’t being Mr. Popularity. In fact, if the economy doesn’t improve, he doesn’t really have much of an incentive not to be a complete prick this year.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

Two readers have sent us confirmation that Edward Davies, Mitt Romney’s militantly atheist father-in-law, was indeed posthumously converted to Mormonism by his family, despite the fact that when he was alive he regarded all religions as ‘hogwash.’

When it’s hard to ignore this:

Ezekiel 18:20 – The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.

As far as Christians go, I’m generally on the inclusive side of things. I try to find similarities instead of differences, generally putting a strong emphasis on the whole judge not concept. But one of the key ideas of Christianity is that it’s belief that saves a person, not some ex post facto mysticism. I’m not judging here (though I admit I find the whole thing creepy), but let’s just drop the pretense is all I’m saying. Just because there’s a Jesus in your religion doesn’t make you a Christian.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

Hope they enjoyed it, ’cause it’s ending soon:

State Senate district lines drawn by a citizens’ commission must be used in this year’s elections, the California Supreme Court ruled today, rejecting a Republican group’s request to put the new boundaries on hold until voters can decide whether to repeal them in November. [...]

The referendum’s sponsors argued that the referendum is virtually certain to qualify for the ballot and asked the court to ban use of the new map in the June primary, even if it means using districts that are of unequal population. The court with a 6-1 majority of Republican appointees voted unanimously to deny the request.

It’s such a desperation play. Using an unequal map wouldn’t last five seconds in Federal Court. It seems as though Republicans have basically given up on keeping 2/3 in the lower house (Assembly), and a Republican Senate map just isn’t going to be approved by referendum in this state. This whole thing is just a delaying tactic to buy maybe another two more years of no tax hikes, but the legal case was so weak they gave a Republican Court literally nothing to work with on the Senate lines. As of now, Democrats are certain to get 2/3 in both houses and pick up a couple Congressional seats (conventional wisdom says three, my guess is five or more), and the collapse of the GOP in California will finally be complete. The irony is that their power (such as it is) is already over anyway, as these assholes have managed to make tax hikes insanely popular through their rigidity, and Moonbeam’s going to get them through the back door if the front is closed.

So, Republicans here will be forced to reboot come this time next year. That’s going to be interesting to watch.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

Happy Friday!

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frCx3MQJLO4

I’ve come to the conclusion that Republicans who are sincerely calling for Mitch Daniels to enter the race–not the ones who wish he had, the ones who want him to do so now–actually want to kill off their party’s chances in 2012. The deep and not entirely known flaws of a Daniels run, in my opinion, dwarf those of Romney’s bid. Any thinking person would come to the conclusion that the whole thing is a bad idea for Republicans, and while that description doesn’t include Bill Kristol, I would think Jay Cost (via Daniel Larison) is more rational than this:

While [Daniels] could not win an outright majority of delegates because of the passing of too many filing deadlines, he could do what Bobby Kennedy attempted in 1968: get in late, do well in the latter contests, win some big states, and make the case that, early primaries aside, he is the true choice of the party, the one who could unify everybody around a common cause. If nobody has won a majority of delegates by June, that could very well be enough for a dark horse victory for Daniels.

I actually disagree with Larison that Daniels is well-positioned to make the case for deficit cutting/entitlement reform. Yeah, Daniels doesn’t have Swiss accounts and Cayman Island shelters to drag him down, but on the other hand Obama would be able to dismiss his rhetoric out of hand by pointing to the inconvenient fact that Daniels was the budget chief who okayed both rounds of the Bush Tax Cuts and the Iraq War, not to mention Medicare Part D. These are four big holes punched through the deficit on Daniels’s watch, making him one of the key architects of our deficit. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has not raised the federal deficit by a single cent. Shifting from making Romney into the bad guy of the past ten years to making Daniels the bad guy of the past ten years would be easy, because it’s right there in the public record. And that alone should be enough.

It’s also entirely nuts to nominate a top Bush Administration economic official for president in an environment where the majority still blames the bad economy on George W. Bush, where the president intends to run for another term on not returning to old, unpopular Bush policies (that Daniels helped implement). Blaming Daniels solely for these policies is demagogic, but it’s not as though he resigned in protest over them, or even disowned them afterward.

What’s more, it’s even nuttier when you think about the inevitable results of doing this:

1. A successful Daniels candidacy would ensure a deadlocked convention. That’s the definition of success in this case, which should be a first clue. It’s unlikely that anything in the universe would be able to make Paul, Gingrich or Romney drop out ahead of time, the latter two especially if they even have a chance of winning. Such a convention hasn’t happened since primaries became de rigeur, and having one would bring about, as Larison puts it, “…disaffection of the voting base that feels that its choice has been hijacked.” Which, great timing for that, two months before the election.
2. A Daniels nomination, were it accepted, would mean elevating a candidate who hasn’t been vetted and might have embarrassing surprises in his closet.
3. Daniels has no experience on the national stage, and could well have a Rick Perry-style cultureshock in such a different arena.
4. Daniels is a far less effective communicator than Romney, and a far less dynamic presence in general. My guess is that Obama would run circles around him in debates. And I don’t subscribe to the “hip to be square” concept either.

Really, anyone who knows all this and signs up for it anyway is either suicidal or a fool. Just ask Democrats: in 2004 we didn’t fall in love with John Kerry, but we voted for him anyway. We didn’t spend months on end panicking and wondering if we could somehow induce Gary Locke to hop in and derail the whole thing.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

But there’s still another explanation, which has to do with racial stereotypes and double-standards. Simply put, a little-known African-American politician who dabbles in edgy populism risks alienating certain white voters, who will view his populism through the lens of race. However the candidate actually intends it, these voters will treat his rhetoric as evidence that he plans to take from white people and give to black people, and, needless to say, they’ll be nudged along in this assumption by the right-wing media. (Fox et al was pretty good at fanning these fears even when Obama’s rhetoric was about as far from populist as you can get).

Three years into his term, by contrast, most Americans have a fairly detailed portrait of the president. He’s no longer a black man they don’t know, but a person they have a relatively intimate relationship with, at least as public figures go. Many, if not most, probably don’t even think of the president in racial terms anymore.

Which is to say, Obama may have finally embraced populism because he finally can embrace populism, whereas it simply wasn’t politically possible before.

I think this is certainly a possibility, but…it’s not the simplest one, which is that the Democratic Party has a deep disdain for populism. To know why that is, I like to think about what would happen if the Democrats fully embraced an authentically populist approach as a party. This is impossible to predict, but I think the following four things would happen in short order:

1. Democrats would quickly increase their share of the fabled white, working-class vote by a decent margin.
2. Democrats would probably lose some percentage of the totebagger, Charlie Rose-viewer vote off the bat, though probably less on net.
3. The political establishment (and its political wing, the Blue Dog caucus) would go absolutely apeshit, attacking Democrats as reverting to the far-left McGovern days and such. Joe Lieberman would have a field day.
4. Corporate donations would fizzle, putting the party at (more of) a disadvantage when it comes to financing electioneering activities. And it’s hard to see how they make it up.

Now, I’m not necessarily certain that it’s not worth taking the plunge. In fact, post-Citizens United, I think it’s really the only choice. There’s a theory of politics (Jamie Court is pretty eloquent explaining  it) which basically states that the forces of reaction and propping up the status quo are always going to be better-funded than the ones arguing for progress, so instead of playing that game, you play a different one–use anger to mobilize people for change, to basically detonate existing points of pressure and then get out of the way. And this theory has a lot going for it: it’s essentially the dynamic that gets corporations to create safer products and designs a lot of the time, driving progress in that sphere. What’s more, it would effectively force Democrats to rely much more on strengthening unions to compete, which was really where I think the Democrats went wrong in the first place, in paying them lip service to get big corporate money.

But it’s unsurprising that a simple observer and activist would say, “Let’s do it!” while the people responsible for making the party a success do not. And it occurs to me that the Democrats can’t afford to become a populist-reformist party that only occasionally holds power for short periods of time to enact rapid bursts of change, when one considers the shambles that the would-be Republican Party of governance is in right now. There is, I think, little question that populism is a vastly more effective approach for Democrats operating outside of the Coasts. The establishment favored Blue Dog-ish Iraq Veteran Paul Hackett over liberal-populist Sherrod Brown for the Ohio Senate nomination in 2006, and Brown won a surprisingly wide victory that I strongly doubt Hackett would have enjoyed. Democrats strongly stood by doomed Sen. Blanche Lincoln in 2010 when polls showed that the populist alternative trailed by far less. Admittely, Lincoln was in incumbent, but there was no need to spend a single penny in favor of an unpopular, damaged incumbent who was obviously going to lose by Santorum margins in November. None of this is particularly new, and I’ve written about it before, but it still stands. It is my opinion that the Blue Dogs represent mostly the worst aspects of our establishment consensus–deficit peacockery, military hawkishness, wishy-washiness on social issues–but the reason they have stuck around is because the establishment provides them with enormous cover. The Democratic Party has come to rely on this dynamic. But it’s not a very strong foundation for a reformist party, in my opinion.

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

“The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been,” said the retired Cuban leader, who has dueled with 11 U.S. administrations since his 1959 revolution.

Also, these guys really need to stop with this stuff:

Another Republican candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said he would authorize increased covert operations to bring down the Cuban government.

Look, the whole point of plausible deniability is that you can fucking deny it! If you tell people you’re going to do it, it’s not covert. It’s just openly breaking the law at that point. Also, it means that other countries that want to hurt America could stage some sort of false flag mission to increase tensions with Cuba. I don’t expect much from Newt Gingrich–respect for other countries’ sovereignty, certainly not–but at the very least he could stop fucking up American security, now, couldn’t he?

This really ought to be the Gingrich campaign song, if he can’t get the rights to “Crackdown” by The Clash:

(h/t: Pwire)

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]

As for the style, Daniels’s overall tone was fairly gloomy, set by this early line: “On these evenings, Presidents naturally seek to find the sunny side of our national condition.  But when President Obama claims that the state of our union is anything but grave, he must know in his heart that this is not true.” And, later, this: “So 2012 is a year of true opportunity, maybe our last, to restore an America of hope and upward mobility, and greater equality.” Daniels started here and pretty much ended here. The speech as written tried to shift toward a more hopeful vision of the future if we just got the danged fiscal house in order, but Daniels’s limits as a speaker insured he’d fail to get that across verbally. The whole thing was low energy and one-note, and felt defeated above all else, which I think is not really the message Republicans want to send in 2012. The difference between President Barack Obama, a man who has taken more abuse than any president probably since Lincoln, going up there and still being able to swing for the fences, get people fired up, and show some genuine passion and idealism up there, and the man Republicans seem to think would be best-suited to replace him was just incredibly stark. And Daniels’s speech smacked very much of a Romneyesque tendency to reach for the right-wing rhetorical jugular insincerely, in fact he’s much less natural at delivering the red meat than Romney is (though I will admit that the “lightbulb” line was delivered pretty well, I reacted to it in spite of knowing it was horseshit). All in all, a speech with significant content and major presentational deficits, the latter of which suggest a limited political skill set that would probably have led to a Rick Perry-like result Daniels moved onto the national stage. If there was any doubt that Mitch Daniels should have run for president, this speech really ought to extinguish it.

Oh, yeah, and Obama did quite well too. But there hasn’t been an occasion that needed outstanding rhetoric and delivery where Obama didn’t rise to the challenge. It was amazing how Romney-centric it was, actually. He’s got his eyes on the ball. And the gestalt is encouraging. Onto November!

(P.S. I can’t resist taking a victory lap for my first-ever Andrew Sullivan link, which I’ve always likened to a stand-up comedian getting a shot on Carson’s Tonight Show. I’m very pleased with it!)

[ Lev @ Library Grape ]