Currently viewing the tag: "Democrats"
Alyssa Rosenberg takes on every liberal’s favorite fictional president:
Besides trashing Social Security, the Bartlet Administration had few bold ideas. What was the Bartlet plan to ensure universal access to health care? Or the Bartlet plan to combat global warming? What did President Bartlet do to close the education gap between poor and rich children? Or to ensure that every child who does succeed in high school will be able to pay for college? If anything, his education policy was as much a betrayal as his Social Security debacle. Although the first term Bartlet White House had ambitious plans for education reform, the second term Bartlet wound up supporting school vouchers.
After nearly an entire term in the White House, Bartlet’s economic record was so dismal that it is a miracle he was reelected. Consider his attempt to literally defend this record before God (who he also calls a “feckless thug”): “3.8 million new jobs, that wasn’t good? Bailed out Mexico. Increased foreign trade. 30 million new acres of land for conservation. Put Mendoza on the bench. We’re not fighting a war.”
3.8 million jobs sure sounds like a lot, but at the time Bartlet made this speech, it added up to just over 90,000 jobs during each month of his presidency — far less than the country needs just to keep up with population growth. This kind of stagnant growth could be excused if President Bartlet, like President Obama, presided over our emergence from an historic recession, but the Bartlet Administration experienced no similar economic calamity.
Bartlet does deserve credit for appointing Justice Mendoza, but the Mendoza appointment is overshadowed by his egregious decision to appoint Justice Christopher Mulready. Mulready’s appointment came about as part of a compromise to ensure that Senate Republicans would also confirm a chief justice whose very personal experience with Roe v. Wade would otherwise make her unconfirmable. While there is certainly symbolic value to having a chief justice who once had an abortion, such symbolism will come as cold comfort to the millions of American families impacted every time Mulready joins his fellow conservative jurists engaged in a systematic campaign to rewrite the law to leave workers and consumers powerless against the wealthy and the well-connected.
There are some things here that need to be addressed. For one thing, the show did have President Bartlet implement cap-and-trade way back in the second season, which apparently was completely successful, cost hardly anything, and ended the conversation on the subject for all time. This is admittedly ludicrous, I support cap-and-trade but it would obviously involve some costs to implement. But, regardless, the subject was at least addressed. Bartlet’s Administration also worked to make all college expenses tax-deductible in the fourth season. The Mulready appointment was, I think, a poor decision by the fictitious president (or, more accurately, his staff), but it was made clear in the episode that the Court was mostly composed of moderates in the West Wing universe, so that the maneuver was mostly intended to keep the balance on the Court. Universal healthcare was never really broached because Republicans in control of Congress would never have approved, though the early-2000s satisficing equivalent, the Patient’s Bill Of Rights, was pursued and enacted. So far as I can tell, though, her complaint about the jobs arithmetic is entirely valid.
I think there are essentially two things that need to be addressed here. The first is that many of the things that Alyssa finds most objectionable occurred after Aaron Sorkin had been dismissed from running the show, and was replaced by John Wells, who altered the tone of the show to something much closer to his prior show, the paramedic melodrama Third Watch, and had much less of an interest in tackling issues. The drop in quality is evident practically from the first Sorkin-less episode (seriously, watch it and tell me it’s not, from the stupid dialogue to the irrational character dynamics to a resolution that can only be described in Latin terms), and Wells increased the amount of disaster episodes and ramped up more conventional methods of suspense than what Sorkin and Schlamme typically went for. He even changed the soundrack, a television musical sabotage even worse than what occurred on Star Trek: The Next Generation. To be sure, the show hardly abandoned its subject matter, but many of the most perplexing and cynical decisions made by Bartlet’s White House occurred during the first two seasons after Sorkin’s departure (like screwing over unions, going easy on the oil companies, and appointing a reactionary Mississippian as Attorney General, the latter of which is at least redeemed by Dylan Baker’s presence). I have heard that John Wells is a Republican, so it would make some sense that he’d insert his own politics into the show in much the same way that Sorkin did, and this would explain the schizophrenia neatly. In any event, there’s only so much continuity between the two eras of West Wing, and the show only became good again once the show minimized the actual West Wing material and becoming about something else altogether (i.e. the election).
The other main point is that, while the show aired almost entirely in the 2000s, nearly all the subject-matter experts who worked on the show cut their teeth during the Clinton White House in the 1990s. The show clearly envisioned Bartlet as a Ted Kennedy figure with fewer discipline problems and more of a common touch, but the people who worked on the show managed to implant their own point of view onto the fictitious White House. Bartlet never pushes universal healthcare because Clinton vets like Dee Dee Myers were scarred by the experience in real life and figured the issue was dead. The show explored issues like tobacco regulation that were dicey in the 1990s but were passe even by 2000, and in general The West Wing stayed inside a circa 1995 equilibrium well into the 2000s. The most accurate criticism of Bartlet as a character would be that he had a Ted Kennedy-like political philosophy, compassion and boldness, but a Bill Clinton-like reliance on incrementalism. This was a tension the show tried to justify by having him face an opposition Congress in his first term, despite the fact that the past three new presidents all dealt with Congresses of their own party after being elected. In a lot of ways, Sorkin left the show at the right time, as his unfortunate forays into terror-related plots simply didn’t mesh with the universe he had already set up, and the battles of the 1990s had begun to seem quaint rather than vital. I realize this probably wouldn’t have gone over well (or maybe it might have!), but I am convinced that the West Wing universe ought to have gone through 9/11 along with the real one. This would at least have provided a handy way of disposing of the “Bartlet has MS” plot than the anticlimactic fizzle the show eventually resorted to, could have provided an sturdy concept for the show’s often-aimless third season (remember Bartlet going into therapy?), and it would have made the show’s ongoing importance much more direct.
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A sad story from my home state:
Legislative data show that business interests wielded strong influence despite a Capitol dominated by Democrats in the Legislature and governor’s office. Business lobbyists defeated bills that would have cut tax breaks, required employers to give workers unpaid bereavement leave and prolonged the foreclosure process.
In the current economy, “all legislators are more sensitive to the argument that something would be a job killer or harmful for investment or expansion,” said Dorothy Rothrock, a lobbyist for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, which represents major businesses around the state. “That’s made it easier for us to stop or amend bills to make them less hostile or burdensome.”
I find it amazing that Democrats both here and nationally have let themselves get snookered by this. Business groups have keenly leveraged a demand-weak economy into a narrative that, unless they get everything they want, no new jobs will be created. This is not a credible theory, to put it mildly. And yet Democrats seem eager to stand down on all sorts of important measures. “Make them less hostile.” Yeah, because Democrats get up every day and ask, hey, how can I menace businesses today?
Again: new regulations have little to nothing to do with the jobs crisis, and what businesses often mean by a “hostile” regulatory environment is one that doesn’t let them do whatever they want. California is invariably described in this way, but the simple fact is that there aren’t limits on how many businesses can exist, how big they can get, how much they can hire and fire, and so on. California’s government doesn’t routinely break up businesses they don’t like. Where is this famed “hostility” we hear so much about? Having, say, environmental regulations doesn’t imply a hostility to business, merely a concern for the environment, and it’s nuts to imply that is the motivation. There is little actual hostility to capitalism in American political life, there are only some people who think their needs ought to be weighed against those of, you know, the public, and those who don’t. Frankly, I’m tired of the idea that the former group is “hostile” to business, it’s junior high-level relationship manipulation stuff, you know, the whole, “if you love me then you’ll stop spending time with those friends of yours who don’t like me.” Have a little self-respect, I say! My guess is that these pro-business folks know better than what they’re saying. It’s a testament to Republican pundits and their paymasters that they’ve injected this narrative into the conversation, but it’s safely ignored by thinking people.
(h/t Political Animal)
I’m from Oregon and I remember when Ron Wyden was elected to the Senate. At the time I scratched my head and asked, “Who the fuck is this sweaty, lisping drip running for Senate?” I remember discovering that he was a big advocate for the elderly through his entire career. Here’s Wikipedia:
While teaching gerontology [ed. note !!!] at several Oregon universities, Wyden founded the Oregon chapter of the Gray Panthers; he led that organization from 1974 to 1980. Wyden is also the former director of the Oregon Legal Services Center for Elderly, a nonprofit law service.
Fast forward to today and this fact has got to make your head explode when you ponder why he has now so cavalierly decided to sell our country’s future elderly into a system that no longer guarantees coverage for their medical treatments.
[I just mentioned this on Lev's earlier post, but I thought it bore repeating.]
I just don’t understand why Ron Wyden thought working with Paul Ryan would be a good idea. I like Wyden generally, and he is a real liberal and progressive, but there’s just no working with a guy who says stuff like this:
House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) took direct aim at President Barack Obama in a speech Wednesday morning, accusing him of “preying on the emotions of fear, envy and resentment” as he travels the country to sell his jobs plan.
In a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Ryan said Obama’s method of rallying public support for his $447 billion jobs package was “sowing social unrest and class resentment” and could be “just as damaging as his misguided policies.”
“Instead of working together where we agree, the president has opted for divisive rhetoric and the broken politics of the past,” Ryan said…. Ryan accused Obama of using “class-based rhetoric” in his re-election campaign. Obama’s tactics, he said, make “America weaker, not stronger.”
“Instead of appealing to the hope and optimism that were the hallmarks of his first campaign, he has launched his second campaign by preying on the emotions of fear, envy, and resentment,” Ryan said. [...]
Indeed, in almost every sense, Ryan says, Obama has been “fundamentally un-presidential” throughout the summer, “dragging his feet, failing to address the looming debt crisis — which he knows is coming — because he remains committed to his ideology.”
“This is, unfortunately, the way he operates,” Ryan says. “This is his pattern of behavior, this is his personality. For the next 18 months, it will probably be like this. It’ll be in-your-face class warfare, with bitter appeals to envy, fear, and anxiety, plus the demonization of the other side’s motives.”
There are criticisms to be made of Obama, but this is just paranoid raving that goes far beyond the norm. Yes, the Paul Ryan who objected to President Obama’s dastardly plans of…traveling around the country and talking to voters as the practical equivalent of the Bolshevik Revolution is definitely the person to work with here. What a dope. Why, Wyden? Why legitimize a toxic person like this?
I can always depend upon Jon Chait to put it into context:
What Ryan gets is pretty obvious. He has found a way to protect Mitt Romney. Ryan is the author of a radical House budget that, among other things, would transform Medicare into private vouchers, and ratchet down their value over time to the point where they covered a small fraction of the cost of health insurance. It’s wildly unpopular. Unfortunately for Republicans, Mitt Romney found himself in the position last week of embracing Ryan’s deadly unpopular plan, to the glee of Democrats. (Why did Romney do this? Because he needed a line of attack on Newt Gingrich, who had assailed Ryan’s idea as “right-wing social engineering.”) [...]
So, yes, from an intellectual standpoint, Wyden is winning powerful concessions from Ryan. But is that really worth anything? Ryan can simply continue to pursue his campaign for less government everywhere. If he can turn single-payer for the elderly into subsidized private insurance, he will. If he can turn subsidized private insurance for the nonelderly into you’re-on-you’re-own, he’ll do that, too. If at some future point, Ryan needs to argue that regulated, subsidized private insurance exchanges are an unconstitutional monstrosity in order to advance that argument, and somebody points out that he once endorsed a plan just like that for Medicare, is that going to stop him?
Ryan–Wyden, if properly designed, is not a horrible idea, and denunciations by the Obama administration and leading Democrats are way over the top. It’s the sort of compromise you could live with if you got something for it – say, the GOP abandoning its crazed revenge campaign to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Ryan’s plan here is to help Romney get elected and then pass the Ryan plan. And then poor Ron Wyden can issue a press release expressing his disappointment that his friend Ryan couldn’t work together with him in a bipartisan fashion.
Finally, somewhere for my liberal anger to go that isn’t Republicans or Obama! But this is related in kind to Obama’s failures this year. Obama and Wyden are both policy wonks. That affects how they see things and how they act. When Republicans demanded unprecedented concessions in exchange for raising the debt limit, Obama’s response wasn’t indignant fury that Congress was enacting a power grab and denying him what presidents have gotten with no fuss for over a century. Instead he figured, hey, we both want a deal, let’s just do this! The deal is what excited Obama, not the politics. Similarly, Wyden is committed to creating a healthcare system that is basically the individual market in the Affordable Care Act, but for everyone. That was the big idea of Wyden-Bennett, his old plan. How he got involved with Paul Ryan I do not know. But it’s the same basic mistake: Wyden is excited about the possibilities of policy without necessarily thinking through the politics. Wyden-Bennett was pie in the sky because the biggest obstacle to universal healthcare is that people don’t want to lose what they have. W-B ensured they would. Wyden-Ryan might be worth discussion if Wyden were partnering with literally any other Republican in Congress. That the hackish and deceptive Ryan is the partner is a big clue. Might as well work with Glenn Beck. At least he’s honest about his delusions.
John Cole is right. Being a Democrat is just the worst.
Want to take a wild guess on how the “supercommittee” is going? (via Steve B.)
The new deficit-reduction plan from a majority of Democrats on the congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (the “supercommittee”) marks a dramatic departure from traditional Democratic positions — and actually stands well to the right of plans by the co-chairs of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission and the Senate’s “Gang of Six,” and even further to the right of the plan by the bipartisan Rivlin-Domenici commission.
The Democratic plan contains substantially smaller revenue increases than those bipartisan proposals while, for example, containing significantly deeper cuts in Medicare and Medicaid than the Bowles-Simpson plan. The Democratic plan features a substantially higher ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases than any of the bipartisan plans.
And of course it was rejected. Benen speculates that the offer was never serious in the first place, that it was purely to try to gain points for trying. I sure hope so–this is greatly inferior from what we’d get from the default option if the supercommittee fails.
I’ve been thinking recently about the trainwreck that has been the past ten months. It’s been of a definite pattern. Democrats have been desperate to strike a deal, any deal, with Republicans on deficits, presumably in order to help neutralize the “big spender” tag. Republicans have been equally desperate not to strike any deal with Democrats in order to show the Tea Party that they’re opposed to a deal on any terms, regardless of what those terms might be. Follow this with a round of Democrats saying, “The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!” before retreating behind the line. For a party whose morale has been in the toilet for as long as I can remember–possibly since mid-2009–this is such a weird, dispiriting strategy to follow. And yet follow it they do, over and over. At some point, one has to wonder why.
In my opinion, this is partly due to building a political strategy around making a deal with Republicans. This effectively means that you surrender the initiative and put it into the hands of the opposition party to block it, which makes them the protagonist of our little story. This was done evidently with some very starry-eyed notions of what the modern GOP will and will not do. I can sort of understand why Democrats are so desperate to strike some deal (Republican aversion to something like what was just offered continues to be nutty to me), but what’s remarkable is the lack of strategic thinking by the Democrats. Where’s the backup plan? What if nothing is accepted? Democrats get caught flatfooted on this stuff, which shouldn’t happen with questions this basic. So often this year it’s seemed to me as though Democrats from the leadership on down have lost the thread, that there’s little sense of an agenda being advanced or even really proposed. Almost like the party with a hold on the White House and half of Congress is acting the part of an opposition party. Case in point, the idea of making deep cuts to Medicare while simultaneously trying to run against Paul Ryan’s budget plan as defenders of Medicare doesn’t really wash, you have to have political geniuses manning the fort to do something like that, and our party certainly doesn’t have that. Why do this at all? Part of this stems from a pathological inability to make choices. I mean, how important is the deficit issue to Democrats? What do they give up for it, where do they draw the line? What is that line? These are questions that should have been asked and answered last year after the election. And yet, it all still appears to be up in the air. There’s no seeming set of priorities from one month to the next, what is acceptable or not shifts constantly. This isn’t about whether or not this policy orientation is wrong (though I think it is, at least until we have a stable recovery on our hands), it’s about having a policy orientation. Governing parties make choices and pursue objectives. Opposition parties hop around from one issue to the next, hoping to somehow make something happen somewhere, without any sort of leitmotif occurring in there. Admittedly, Republicans managed to make many Democratic priorities politically unpopular (thanks to a big assist from the recession), which complicates that agenda. But sometimes, to quote Martin Sheen from Apocalypse Now, I see no evidence of any method at all.
Thankfully, the White House’s attitude seems to be shifting in a better direction, and now it looks as though they’re trying to advance something resembling an agenda with what levers they have access to (i.e. unilaterally). But that only came after a catastrophic failure called the debt ceiling crisis and seems to cut deeply against the tendencies of much of the party, which continues to very much think that this “opposition strategy while in power” sort of thing is good strategy. They say you have to think like a winner to become a winner. I could think of worse places for Democrats to start.
Gallup has a not-so-encouraging chart:
To be sure, there’s much time left to go till the election, and I would expect Obama’s re-election campaign to remind people of the stakes next year. But it’s pretty stunning nonetheless, and speaks for itself.
One could immediately pivot from this to bemoaning Democrats destroying themselves at any opportunity. But thinking about it, I have to wonder: considering the past eight months, what exactly should Democrats be enthusiastic about? The past year has been a deliberate case of giving Democrats what they don’t want in order to win over “independents”, and getting neither in the process. Obviously, Obama was going to have to make compromises that liberals don’t like to deal with Republicans in Congress, everyone knew that. But he forgot himself and his base for much of the year, and what does your typical Democrat really have to look forward to from Obama II? In all likelihood, Republicans will control one (at least) branch of Congress after the election, and they understand Obama a lot better than he understands them. He actually thought that Boehner would be able to deliver a grand bargain, lest we forget! And wrecked the image of himself as a strong leader trying to get it. I still hope Obama can turn it around, but if he doesn’t, that will be considered the point where it all went bad, of this I’m certain.
Additionally, I don’t think this is another Al Gore 2000 situation. Parts of the left unwisely decided to ensure Gore’s defeat by going third-party, which in retrospect (and even at the time) made little strategic sense. It minimized the danger of the right at that time. But I don’t think that that’s what is happening today. I think Democrats are generally afraid of what Republicans plan to do if they get more power, I strongly suspect they just don’t think Obama is strong enough to stop them after Debtceilingdammerung. To some extent, this sentiment is the fault of Democrats not appreciating the constraints that the system imposes upon Obama. He can’t just declare the American Jobs Act law. But, additionally, there is an extent to which this is Obama neglecting his duties as party leader and not giving his troops a reason to fight, choosing rather to go after Bill Daley’s vision of what independents want, and trusting Tim Geithner’s lock-solid view of politics. Shockingly, trusting a second-tier Clinton Administration apparatchik and the guy behind the bailouts didn’t yield boffo political success. Put simply, maintaining morale is an important part of leadership. It goes both ways is all I’m saying.
Again, I can’t stress this enough, this is just one data point. Who knows where it winds up? But I can’t really blame liberals for not being enthusiastic about next year’s election. When you get down to it, Obama didn’t really try to change Washington during his first term, his plan was like Patrick Swayze’s from Road House (i.e. “Be Nice”), but without the asskicking ability to back that up. And Washington is the same as ever, if not more so. It’s hard to get pumped up over an indefinite* future of shitty compromises, gleefully violated political norms and routinely botched gestures. Why is that enticing? Especially since Obama shows little interest in doing anything about it, not even standing up to unprecedented obstruction of uncontroversial nominees. Admittedly, a totally GOP-run Washington is much worse than that, but those two choices are enough to depress a person altogether.
Happy Friday!
*Not really indefinite, considering the aging GOP demographics, but it sure seems that way now.
(hat tip: Mistermix)
I happened to read that California won’t be getting rid of the death penalty through legislative means anytime soon. This time, the idea was to put it to a public referendum, since simply passing a bill to repeal it was out of the question for some reason. The latter would have only taken a majority vote, the former takes a 2/3 vote. Since over 1/3 of the legislature is Republican, that’s pretty much that. Why not just repeal it outright? Glad you asked! There’s some hint in the HuffPo article about a fear of public backlash, but the idea that a majority-minority state would flip to the GOP over the death penalty is pretty farfetched for me. No doubt some remaining echoes of Tom Bradley and George Deukmeijan still linger somewhere, but still, that was 25 years ago. There’s no reason for this. Illinois did away with executions earlier this year, and it’s much less Democratic than California. And while I suppose it’s entirely possible that an outright repeal would be overturned at the ballot box next year, I just don’t see where the money is supposed to come from to finance such an effort. It would take millions of dollars to get all the signatures, there’s no real grassroots organizing to support capital punishment, and getting rid of it doesn’t really hurt anyone’s pocketbook. I don’t even think the LDS Church would have the heart to subsidize a campaign like that.
I mention that the state is majority-minority because it’s not news that minorities are sentenced to death more than white people. One would think that a state-level party apparatus that is propped up by minority support would be inclined to do right by these folks–seriously, take away Hispanic support and you’ve got a state that would be sending an awful lot of Dana Rohrabachers to Congress. And yet here, as with the marijuana initiative last year, the Democratic Caucus of the California Legislature pushed forward with the most gutless (and, ironically, most difficult) plan to roll back the excesses of “law and order” politics, and failed once again in ways that will make life harder for the people that power the Democratic majority in California. One could also point out the conscious decision not to field another amendment legalizing gay marriage in 2012. But the death penalty thing is a whole other thing. To be honest, I’m frankly shocked. I can sort of get the marijuana thing–there are questions of federal vs. state prerogatives that could have turned into a very dicey legal battle, so putting it to the people makes some amount of sense to have as leverage before doing it. And I can sort of understand letting the legal process play out in the case of gay marriage before plotting the next move. But to have or not to have capital punishment is not that way at all, lots of states don’t have it and if the public really objects to getting rid of it, then politics can take its course and vote opponents out. Which, thanks to very tight gerrymandering, is highly unlikely. The fact is that this is just the tip of the iceberg that is the bad faith behind the California Legislature, and I’m sure I’d be able to rattle off a bunch more if I paid closer attention. But you really don’t need to in order to grasp this essential truth. To be honest, if our state’s government only had a level of dysfunction similar to Washington DC’s, it would be a huge improvement.
This is why I’m actually really happy that the state’s independent redistricting commission has scrambled districts at every level, since it can only ensure more competitive districts and more dynamic politicians. Certainly, it can’t get any worse. I mean, honestly, term limits in the state are six years for Assembly members and eight years for Senators. It’s not like a twenty-term Congressional career is at stake here. So the risk is losing 2-4 years in state government in order to do the right thing? Those aren’t enormous stakes, if you ask me. But I do not work in the worst state government in the United States. That might seem harsh, but considering the problems we have here I feel I’m reining it in quite a bit.
LG favorite DougJ:
The last three elections were wave elections against the party that was in power at the time. I would argue that, in effect, all three were effectively votes against elitist, “centrist” opinion. In 2006, the “suck on this” war drove the Democratic victory, in 2008, the continuation of the “suck on this” war and the Maestro Greenspan-ravaged economy drove another Democratic victory, in 2010, the Kaplan-approved, insufficiently-stimulated economy drove a big Republican victory.Verily. But what happens when people realize that just throwing people out of office is not going to in and of itself change things? I think that’s when it gets interesting.
Snack Food
This is not the most important metric of economic success by any measure, but still a pretty significant accomplishment nonetheless. Welcome to the recovery. (0 comments)Richly deserved: The Fix suggests Newt Gingrich may be the most unpopular person in American politics right now. A CNN/Opinion Research poll finds 63% of all Americans viewed Gingrich unfavorably, compared to just 25% who saw him in a positive light. And a new CBS News/New York Times poll shows a similar split: 54% view Gingrich unfavorably, ... (0 comments)GOP Voters: 'Can We See What It Looks Like With Huntsman And Perry Again?'
WASHINGTON—Claiming something “just seemed off” with the combination of candidates currently seeking the Republican Party’s nomination for president, voters asked Tuesday if they could see once more what the GOP field would look like with Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry back in the race.
... (3 comments)Romney Still Soulless, Insincere, Greedy Humanoid
This really pisses me off: Well my own view is, it’s a great idea. People who are receiving welfare benefits, government benefits, we should make sure they’re not using those benefits to pay for drugs. I think it’s an excellent idea. Why not just pass a law requiring HHS employees to just mock people getting their welfare ... (2 comments)E.D. Kain ponders “Why conservatives can’t do pop culture very well“
It reminds me of a post I did back in 2009, “And Jesus Blessed This Nation At Our Founding… Literally“
(3 comments)Official Gingrich-Cain 2012 response to Rick Santorum’s homophobia: “Rick, Rick, Rick. Don’t you know that the anti-gay bigotry only carries water if you have a few failed straight marriages under your belt?” Follow all their other words of wisdom here. (0 comments)Ron Paul Quote of the Week: Honest Rape
Here’s Grandpa Fustypants on rape and abortion:“If it’s an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room, I would give them a shot of estrogen.”
via (4 comments)Unhinged vagina-shackler on Komen’s volte face:Cancer is Cancer! Aboration is Aboration!
(0 comments)Since it’s Mitt Romney week everywhere, I figured I’d post this op-ed by an ex-Mormon, which is a pretty interesting take at the institutional culture of the LDS church. Not much to say about it, but it’s definitely worth 5 or so minutes of your time. (0 comments)Why Bipartisanship Is Impossible, In One Sentence
When one party climbs back to power by promising action on the economy, does nothing on it, and instead spends literally all its time trying to hurt the other party. (0 comments)New From The Gingrich-Cain Front
Newt rants about cable movies he doesn’t like, and flips out when Herman tries to seize control. Catch all the fun here. And the main site is here, as always. (0 comments)Headline of the Week: Making Rapeanade
Leave it to TBogg:
(0 comments)Rick Santorum Suggests That When Life Gives You Rape, You Should Make Rapeanade Back when I was in junior high and the Clinton Impeachment was going on, I could hardly have imagined that Clinton would be used as an excuse for wrongdoing by Republican leaders. But that’s where we are. Interesting, isn’t it? (0 comments)Catch up with the official Gingrich-Cain “Great Statesmen” series over at @GingrichCain12. (0 comments)Only 65% of White Americans Have a Favorable Opinion of MLK Jr
…with a whimper. Drum is worth reading on this. I think he’s just got to be the most overhyped and overcovered guy who never managed better than third place since…Joe Lieberman? (0 comments)
(THE GRAPEVINE
