Ray Flynn's second worst endorsement

Ray Flynn thinks Scott Brown (R-whatever Wall St. wants) is a "regular guy." He also thought that pederast-enabling Cardinal Bernard Law should stay in charge of the Boston Archdiocese.

So... Consider the source.

Liberal economic devastation

Even the Boston Herald has noticed that, compared to the rest of the U.S., the Massachusetts economy is growing well:

The University of Massachusetts’ quarterly MassBenchmarks report yesterday estimated that the state’s economy expanded at a 4.3 percent annualized clip between April and June. That’s way above the 1.3 percent second-quarter growth rate that the Commerce Department reported yesterday for the U.S. economy overall.

The wingnuts are all flushing this down the memory hole ("does not compute"), but they'll be raving when the double-dip recession starts. They will of course blame so-called liberal economic policies, instead of the Republican gutting of those policies.

Hard to understand

How is it that Scott Brown can forget the subsistence the government provided in his childhood so that he can now deny other children the same help?  What kind of person has more sympathy for wealth than for himself?

Is he utterly morally blind?  Other people are not deserving.  He was - despite acknowledging that he was a punk.

Is he a raving narcissist?  The world is entirely for his benefit.

Is he bought?  Keeping the good things he has obtained (creditably, I might add) is so important that he can suppress his conscience.

Is conservatism a disorder of sympathy?

I can't see how fear of deficits can prompt Brown to inflict permanent deficits on children when he knows what their lives are like.  I just don't understand this.

Rump party

The Massachusetts Republican Party has fielded such a dismally sparse slate of legislative candidates that its partisans can't dream, even mathematically, of gaining a majority in the state House of Representatives. Despite Martha Coakley's obvious vulnerability, the Republicans have no one to run against her.

How could the Republicans miss such an opportunity to make this election truly competitive? The ground is better for Republicans in Massachusetts than it has been in decades:

• The national anger from the right has energized conservatives. (True, the most energized are extreme conservatives, who don't play well in Massachusetts anywhere besides newspaper comment threads and bilious talk radio.)
• Scott Brown won in January, and it wasn't a fluke result of a special election, as turnout was very high.
• The top of the Republican ticket is credible - Charlie Baker is conservative but not insane, though he appears to have less of the common touch than Mitt Romney.
  
• The GOP should expect to win at least two statewide offices. (Anything less would be a disastrous fumble.)
• Several high profile Democrats have been drummed out of the legislature on the way to indictment and possibly prison, including three straight House Speakers.
• The current House Speaker, Robert DeLeo, though not to my knowledge under investigation, displayed the extent of his power in pushing racinos into the casino bill. Everyone outside the race track owners and employees in his district knows slot parlors are bad public policy, yet his parochial interest trumped the consensus on casinos in a way very embarrassing to Democrats (even though I was glad the whole bill was not enacted).
  

Yet twelve of forty Democratic Senators are unopposed, as well as a whopping 84 of 160 Democratic State Reps. This is, of course, good news. Most of my friends in the legislature are likely to win re-election, and their politics is good for us.

First, it's not campaign contributions the Republicans lack. They can often outspend Democrats three-to-one, as least for open seats.

They lack candidates because the career path of a legislator is middle class. How is a conservative businessman going to give up $250,000 a year for a $60,000 legislator's salary? Thus, brand new Republican candidates who've never even run for local office cluster at the top of the ballot, where at least they can hope for a U.S. Congressman's low six-figure salary. But it's not an accident that two of the most credible Republican candidates are Karyn Polito and Mary Connaughton. They've both been in campaigns before, locally and regionally. They know how it's done, where it's not clear that Baker does.

It's also not surprising that they're women. Republicans have done a terrible job of recruiting women to run, but women - especially married women out here in the suburbs - may have less economic pressure. Yet when a woman is primed to run statewide, the party fathers intervene (Jane Swift and Mitt Romney), or the party fractures (Kerry Healey and Christy Mihos, though he ran as an independent).

Massachusetts is not nearly as liberal as its national reputation, but it's very Democratic. It's just that the Democrats have liberal and centrist factions, and the Republicans fight over the remnants on the right. Hard to win elections that way, much less enough elections to contribute much to governing.

The Republican "leaders" have chosen instead to stay in control of their rump party and hope to win the governorship. Their alternative would require a move to the center and the recruitment of fewer CEOs and more suburban women. I'm not holding my breath.

Leaving the stupid their outrage

The House is going to vote on the Senate health care bill. Up or down, as always.

Never mind the Republican propaganda to the contrary on Fox (as usual):

An emerging Democratic plan to vote on health care reform without really voting on health care reform has critics riled up.

Sure, the Boston Herald has the AP's similar take:

...plans to push massive health care legislation through the House without a direct vote.

And CNN has a typically bullshit headline in support of GOP talking points:

Could House approve Senate health care bill without vote?

The Washington Post ladles on the stink:

House may try to pass Senate health-care bill without voting on it

But the New York Times is surely a paragon of truth, right? Uh, no. Your big media - conduit for whatever Republicans would want in a press release (such as this one). Here's the Times:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is eyeing a strategy by which the Democrats include the Senate bill in the rule that will set the terms of the House floor debate on the health care legislation. Once the rule is adopted, the Senate bill would be “deemed” to have passed without House members actually voting on it.

Look, this is pretty simple: The House is going to vote on this. The entire membership must approve the floor rule. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants can't simply stamp a bill law and be done with it. They need 217 votes.

Pelosi wants to package the vote in its floor rule because she wants her members to be able to vote at the same time on Senate bill and the reconciliation bill that fixes the Senate bill (well, starts the first toddler steps toward fixing it). This has a real benefit for Pelosi, no doubt about it. It stretches the ideological range of her shaky coalition.

Prominent Republicans want you to believe that this is about Democrats escaping responsibility for voting for the Senate bill, when actually they know it's not. Their own future ads will tie Democrats to this vote without worrying about parliamentary procedure in the least.

This parliamentary maneuver is about making a vote in favor of insurance reform of health care easier to explain. Liberals will be able to say that they held their nose and voted for the bill because of the reconciliation fixes. Conservatives will be able to say that they agreed with the Senate bill and agreeing with the reconciliation fixes was the only way to get that.

No one - no one - will try to convince voters that this new law is perfect, just that it is a little better than what went before.

Meanwhile, every media outlet I've read that has a story is pushing Republican talking points. The press could have dug - but didn't - into a quote featured prominently in the GOP release:

“I think we're going to have a vote, and the American people are entitled to an up or down vote. We don't want to see procedural gimmicks used to try and prevent an up or down vote on this issue.” Senior White House Advisor David Axelrod, 3/14/10, ABC’s This Week)

Republicans want to show Axelrod and Democrats as hypocrites when the GOP themselves baldly show their own hypocrisy. The House will have an up-or-down vote; it always does on any bill that passes. But Axelrod decried the filibuster in the Senate, where Republicans rely on it to prevent the corresponding up-or-down vote, when the very phrase entered our political lexicon because Republicans demanded that Democrats not use the same filibuster.

Most amazing is the sheer eagerness of Republicans to lay bare their depraved indifference to the truth or to holding themselves to anything close to the standard they want to hold Democrats to. If we had a political media worth having, the GOP would be drawn and quartered for this straightforward, undeniable, blatant bit of duplicity. (It's so visibly out front I can't even call it deceit.)

The upshot, instead, is that the media would rather help Republicans foment even more unjustified outrage in their know-nothing base.

And of course, the Democrats, still naive about the bare knuckle game they're in, adduce cases where this sort of rule has been used before. So what!

What they need to be doing is saying, "The Republicans are lying about this. There is going to be a vote. It'll be on C-SPAN if you want to tune in. Their claims are as always a thin tissue of lies intended to fool the fools. I'm sure there aren't many fools out there who are taken in by this."

The Democrats need to say this over and over and over again. Sweetly, with a sad smile. The Republicans don't deserve any credibility. The future of America depends on exacting a price from them every single time they lie.

The media once cared for the task of winnowing grains of truth out of bullshit. Reporters no longer do this without help. When are the Democrats going to cotton onto this 30-year-old truth?

Counter-intuitive

Something I heard last night from a friend who happens to be my state rep: The Boston Herald drives what happens on Beacon Hill, especially in the House. I have to admit that I was shocked by this. I almost never read the Herald. Hardly anyone except hardcore wingnuts out here in the 'burbs reads the Herald. It's the paper for people who find the Globe too hard to read.

Conservative media outlets like the Herald relish propaganda. They don't see their role as objective. They see it as a counterbalance - against outlets like the Globe that do actually provide op-ed balance to their political ideology. By contrast, today the Herald has two conservative editorials (no surprise), three conservative op-eds, and Howie Carr for a clean sweep.

Maybe that's not representative. It looks as though I'll have to add the Herald to my news stack for a while to gather more data.

One of the op-eds comes from my bête noire Eric Fehrnstrom (professional Romney shill). He analyzes the 2010 Massachusetts gubernatorial race with the goal of electing Republican Charlie Baker. Former Democrat Tim Cahill, says Fehrnstrom, stands in the way, and the GOP needs to co-opt him.

Get this, Fehrnstrom's analysis is right (heh) on target. Another three-way race greatly benefits Deval Patrick.

Pressing on

There was at least one guy at the Massachusetts Democratic Party with a press credential, and there were TV cameras on the floor, though I didn't pick up who was filming. Today, though, hardly any coverage at all - a feature on the youth convention in the Globe, an unrelated story on Democratic scandals on Beacon Hill that would have tied in naturally to Deval Patrick's speech, a filler story on a moving violation and fender bender by the mayor of Fall River, and an AP file in the Herald limited to slot machines, not even anything sandbagging Robert Haynes's fiery and rambling speech. Maybe there are sound bites on local TV, maybe not.

Moral of the story: If you want coverage in this era of shrinking journalism, you have to cover yourself. Even change agents have to adjust to change.

So far, though, there's nothing on Youtube, nothing on massdems.org, and nothing on devalpatrick.com.

Papers, please

When the police can stop you for no specific cause and, under threat of suspension of your driver's license, force you into a Breathalyzer test, the difference between America and a police state is - politeness. Yeah, there's a difference of degree, too, but that's easy to change when everyone in politics periodically goes through a paroxysm of "toughness", which the voters lap up eagerly. (Witness Iraq.)

I've been through two internal domestic checkpoints, one in Maine looking for drunk drivers, the other in New Hampshire looking for illegal aliens. I didn't match either target, but I still felt the hot breath of the law on the back of my neck.