Only fair if we win

The Republican view of elections is that they have to be rubber stamps for Republicans. The purpose of Americans going to the polls is much like the purpose of Russians going to the polls. It's not about the voters choosing their leaders; it's about massaging the egos of autocrats.

The New York Times asked leading Congressional Republicans whether they would accept Trump losing yet another election, and this is what NYT got from them:

Less than six months out from the presidential contest, leading Republicans, including several of Donald J. Trump’s potential running mates, have refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, signaling that the party may again challenge the outcome if its candidate loses.

This is barely news. For forty years, Republicans and their handmaidens in reichwing media have more and more hysterically attacked American elections. 2020 was only the culmination of their persistent sore-loserdom.

Now, they won't commit to accepting the vote of the American people. They don't care about our ctual opinions, only about our obedience and ovine nature.

Here's the thing: Republicans never question their own victories on the same goddamn ballot that Trump loses on.

Yet, the mainstream media, of which the NYT is the ne plus ultra, never follow up their questions about accepting the Presidential results with a question whether they accept the result in their own elections.

Feature, not a bug

Rachel Maddow shows exactly why the Teapublicans were never, ever, ever going to back down from shutting down the government.

There's no reason whatsoever to think they'll change their minds (such as they have).

There's also no reason for confidence that they will shrink back from default when we soon bump up against the debt ceiling.

They did nothing

"Fiddled while Rome burned" would be too referential.

Messaging Matters gives this précis of Teapublican accomplishment:

“They Did Nothing.” It’s that simple. The Republicans on the economy? “They did nothing.” On jobs? “They did nothing.” Rebuilding America’s crumbling roads and bridges to help businesses move their products? “They did nothing.” Immigration? “They did nothing.” Climate change? “They did nothing.” Bringing American jobs back home instead of shipping them overseas? “They did nothing.” Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and the mentally ill? “They did nothing.”* The list goes on and on. And to be clear, the Democrats must articulate their positive agenda. In fact, President Obama has taken to the road to do just that. Saying the Republicans did nothing only makes sense if Democrats clearly explain what solutions they stand for and on which the Republicans should work, with some compromise and cooperation by both sides.

Sorry, I slipped. MM tells me to say "extreme Republicans."

(H/t DailyKos)

Only a socialist would adjust for inflation

U.S. Congressman* Marsha Blackburn (R-gun moll) pines for her early days, growing up in Mississippi, when moral teenagers were damn glad to make $2.15 an hour, unlike today's lazy no-accounts. But:

Blackburn was born in 1952, so she likely took that retail job at some point between 1968 and 1970. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the $2.15 an hour Blackburn made then is worth somewhere between $12.72 and $14.18 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on which year she started.

At that time, the minimum wage was $1.60, equivalent to $10.56 in today’s terms. Today’s minimum wage is equivalent to just $1.10 an hour in 1968 dollars, meaning the teenage Blackburn managed to enter the workforce making almost double the wage she now says is keeping teenagers out of the workforce.

Self-refuting Tea Party wingnuts like Blackburn want to return to a fantasy land that exists only in their feverish, foolish imaginations.

They don't know enough about the world to understand inflation, and they don't care to learn.

---

* Yes, her Congressional web site calls her a Congressman.

Maybe this is to reassure her Tea Party constituents that she's not one a them libbers. It can't be that she's reserving this one area from Southern Baptist submission to her husband.** Maybe she's just running a sloppy operation. There are two very different district maps on her site, one of which shows a district office way outside her district.

Ding, ding, ding. First theory correct:

As Blackburn worked her way around the room, the constituent motioned for her to come back: “Little lady, if you win this thing, what we gonna call you — congresslady? Congressgirl?”

“Sir, congressman will be just fine,” replied Blackburn.

Can I just say this? Barf!

** Nope, she's Presbyterian.

And these hypocrites are the better Republicans

The House Republicans are hopelessly extreme, but we Democrats can work with Senate Republicans. Right?

How is it that even those guys (and one woman who fits right in) qualify for the U.S. Senate when they have yet to master the fundamental moral ability to hold themselves to the same standard they wish to hold others to?

When the Senate passed the long-delayed $50.5 billion Hurricane Sandy relief package Monday, 36 Republicans voted against the bill. But of the 32 no-votes from Senators who are not brand-new members, at least 31 came from Republicans who had previously supported emergency aid efforts following disasters in their own states.

It's really no wonder the Republicans can baldly fight for the winner-take-all society. If the rule that guides them is whatever they can get, they won't bother to recognize need in others, not even the exact same need they have!

Sociopaths.

Minority rules

Karl Rove wanted a permanent Republican majority. How passé!

Republicans have long known how to cripple the Senate with a minority of votes, exploiting the filibuster in complete departure from tradition and custom. They've taken a tool of respect and politesse and rendered it as a pillory on the Capitol lawn for ideas they don't like - that is, most of them.

Republicans have figured out how to win the House of Representatives without winning a majority of votes.

The report credits gerrymandered maps in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with allowing Republicans to overcome a 1.1 million popular-vote deficit. In Ohio, for instance, Republicans won 12 out of 16 House races “despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.” The situation was even more egregious to the north. “Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.”

Republicans are now working to exploit their successful 2010 gerrymandering in the 2016 Presidential election:

Earlier this week, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus endorsed a Republican plan to rig the next presidential election to make it nearly impossible for the Democratic candidate to win the White House, no matter who the American people vote for. The election-rigging plan, which would allocate electoral votes by congressional district rather than by states as a whole in a handful of states that consistently vote for Democratic presidential candidates, would have allowed Mitt Romney to narrowly win the Electoral College last November despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.

If you think the GOP won't try their damnedest to make this happen, despite the obvious likelihood of perennial "victories" by the minority of voters over the majority, you really haven't been paying attention. Were you living in an alternate universe with President Gore?

What do Republicans mean when they tell us we live in a republic, not a democracy? Republicanz rool! Democrats have to be beaten by any means necessary.

Now, about impeachment of President Obama for the completely ordinary act of issuing Executive Orders...

Like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge

The Taliban know that every girl who learns to think and every father who teaches his daughter to think, subverts  the backwardness and evil of fundamentalist Islam. Thinking is a threat to their fervently chosen ignorance. The Taliban are more than willing to kill in defense of their radical refusal to grow into liberal society.

Sirajuddin Ahmad, the spokesman for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, said that Ms. Yousafzai became a target because she had been “brainwashed” into making anti-Taliban statements by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai.

“We warned him several times to stop his daughter from using dirty language against us, but he didn’t listen and forced us to take this extreme step,” he said.

Both father and daughter remain on the Taliban’s list of intended victims, he said.

This reminds me Kurtz's apologia in "Apocalypse Now":

I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do!

Kurtz's eventual response was a descent into the heart of darkness, into monstrous depravity, into insane homicide.

What should our response be? Could we retain our moral character, retain our judgement, which Kurtz called our defeat, and nonetheless issue a secular fatwa that anyone who harms Malala Yousafzai or her father Ziauddin will be subject to a U.S. lethal finding?

Moderation needs space and time and tolerance to grow. Extremists of all stripes know this and murder moderates. Would it benefit moderates to exact a deadly cost from the extremists, or would it simply drive others into their arms?

America is already using drones for targeted assassination as a tool of war, if not statecraft, despite a long-standing inclination not to - in reaction to out-of-control spy agencies during the Cold War. Israel has used assassination. Killing the guilty, the enemy, the vicious murderer of your children has visceral appeal, and there's often no civil authority in these cases. Has that been for the good or the bad? It's hard to tell.

It's hard to imagine our government could responsibly manage vengeance orders, when it can't manage a just civilian death penalty. It can't even manage political asylum very well.

But I know that I wish Sirajuddin Ahmad dead. The shooters who have gravely wounded Malala, I wish dead. Their commanders, dead.

Traditional war-making has proven a very poor tool to accomplish those just deaths without a mortgage of further deaths uncounted. This reasoning is how liberals like me get to law as the best tool to accomplish punishment of the guilty. It lacks the immediacy of gunning down your enemies, but it lasts better.

Public domain photo from the Library of Congress, found here.

More Teapublican ignoramuses

You don't have to look far:

Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who’s been raped.

The GOP has embraced stupidity in order to lower taxes for the very wealthy. That's why Mitt Rmoney and Paul Ryan are perfect nominees.

Republican bullshit or your lyin' science?

Congresspeople appointed to the Science and Technology committee don't actually need to understand or rely on science:

In looking for examples of scientifically unsupportable statements by members of the House science committee, every single anecdote involved statements by Republicans.

The goal of Teapublicans is to repeal the Enlightenment.

Why did you think I call him Darth?

Click image for full Matt Wuerker/DailyKos cartoon.

Decadence of falling empire

The Teapublican public, acting through its minions in Congress, would rather risk killing pilots than to tax us and their wealthy sponsors to put out fires:

Modern airplanes are available, some able to skim up a bellyful of water from a lake without even stopping to land and thus to conduct dozens of drops a day, but these are too expensive for the private contractors who fly the forest missions.

Instead, we're using 60-year-old planes and blaming pilots for their own deaths.

The 27%

I was watching the History Channel the other night and learned that the Nazis only won 37% of the vote in the 1932 election. From that beachhead in the electorate, they used violence, suppression, and mass media to completely co-opt and dominate what had previously been a civilized nation.

American has its 27-percenters. My point is not that they're Nazis - they aren't - but that leverage on power, even in a democracy, frequently does not require a majority. Look at the Teapublican willingness to drive Congressional agendas, without regard for compromise, by abusing the filibuster. It was intended as a rare power; the GOP uses is now as a minimum required supermajority.

On this day 67 years ago, Adolf Hitler killed himself rather than face an accounting at Nuremberg for his brutal crimes against humanity. Coward.

But Hitler's death is still cause for celebration, even if I wish an American dogface had double-tapped him.

Goddamn America

Republicans in Congress didn't say, "Goddamn America." They acted on it.

The Republican Party prefers to damage America if it can damage a Democratic President at the same time. This was so for Bill Clinton and is even moreso for Barack Obama.

Balanced on this knife edge

Like a Phoenix from the ashes of its 1980 debacle at Desert One, JSOC has risen to possess America's licence [sic] to kill:

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command ... even existed.

This kind of elite force is not easy to create. But, once one is created, the hardest task of a democracy is to keep it restrained to uses against our enemies. Once the impossible doesn't take long at all to do, it's easy for politicians to turn elite military units into instruments of personal power instead of their intended use as instruments of national defense.

Under President George W. Bush, JSOC’s operations were rarely briefed to Congress in advance — and usually not afterward, either — because government lawyers considered them to be “traditional military activities” not requiring such notification. President Obama has taken the same legal view, but he has insisted that JSOC’s sensitive missions be briefed to select congressional leaders.

No surprise that a Democrat is better than a Republican. Also no surprise that he's not that much better.

JSOC has made brilliant use of sigint to locate targets.

The Iraqi insurgency’s reliance on modern technology also gave tech-savvy JSOC and its partners, particularly the National Security Agency, an advantage. The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. “We just had a field day,” said a senior JSOC commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe secret operations.

This is more than likely part of what Bob Woodward likened to the Manhattan Project three years ago.

Still, some of that technology has been in use in American cities for a decade or more. Our cell phones track our movements. Acoustic listening posts triangulate gunshots origins in high-crime areas. We seize and do forensics on alleged criminals' electronic devices (rightly so with a warrant).

It's only a matter of time before JSOC innovations get used domestically. How likely is it in the modern American surveillance state that there will be Constitutional controls? And I really don't have enough of a neo-Confederate sense of humor to laugh at one of JSOC's nicknames, "the Secret Army of Northern Virginia."

Bad for business

Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.

Wingnut welfare

Remember teabagger Dale Robertson?  A year ago, he was taking incoming rounds for something he had done in the depths of history - 2009 to be exact.

In his defense, how racist could someone be if he can't even spell his slurs correctly?  And isn't it a desecration to wear the Lone Star flag over such an, ahem, barrel chest?

So what's this piece of work up to now?

He sends out fundraising surveys from waaay out on the fringes.  Yeah, that means smack in the middle of the John Birch teabagger standard fantasy universe.  Here's a sample:

The Barack Hussein Obama Administration and the internationalists in our U.S. Department of State are quietly surrendering our national sovereignty to the future One World Government based at the United Nations.  Should this surrender of our sovereignty be stopped immediately and the internationalists be removed from office?

He also has a web site.  It's about as well-designed as his protest sign - none of them effeminate esthetics for him.  On the site, he refers to himself in the third person - "Dale Robertson is a man of courage and conviction... Sincerely, Dale Robertson".  But he's a founder!

The site sells stuff from T shirts to blast faxes that he says will go to every Senator and Representative.  You can get a volume discount if you send the same fax twice.  One of those faxes tells the Congress to keep its hands off the Internet, though only in paranoid language, not in any terms that could be consistently translated into policy.

He's a regular teabagger entrepreneur, suckling at the teat (or something else) of the credulous tihadists who no doubt freely send him their money.

Republican Jesus, Republican Constitution

Teabaggers and their originalist friends take the same approach to the founder of Christianity that they take to the Founders of the United States.  They make it up to suit their own fantasies:

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed - “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.

And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind.

What's good for the teabaggers, wingnuts, and originalists?  That and only that is what Jesus and Jefferson et al intended.  Never mind what they actually did.

The self-conservatives get the best of all possible worlds while they're alive, and their reward for suffering (from the presence of people like me) is that their streets are paved with well-deserved gold while we writhe somewhere far away out of earshot in a lake of fire.  Win!

(h/t DailyKos and Political Correction)

Also, more at the Plum Line.

Sic semper insanus

Political assassins are very often loners and losers, alienated borderline personalities on a quest to prove they're not as small as they feel.  And often to die in their attacks and finally to quell their sense of worthlessness.

Jared Loughner is cut from this cloth.  His writings look, frankly, crazy.  They give a whole new meaning to warp and woof.

Is it enough to leave it there?  To alibi that the shootings in Tucson are simply an unavoidable tragedy?

No, of course not.  We have made choices - political choices - that make political murder more likely.  We can unmake these choices if enough of us think it's important enough.

First off, we live in an open society.  I've been struck by Representatives saying in response to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords that they need free access to us, the citizens, and of course we need access to them.  They're not aristocrats.

Maintaining an open society is far too important to surrender, even to a succession of lone wolves.  An open society is what we have democratic politics for.  If we were not going to control movement and public access to our elected officials after 1968 or 9/11, we shouldn't start now.  That doesn't mean we can't provide more security for judges and Congresspeople.

Second, we have decided, both for freedom and to save money, to mainstream people with even large and obvious mental health deficits.  It's not surprising that a few of them span the fuzzy borderline between weirdness and malevolence.

I doubt very seriously that there's any new rule about mental health interventions that would have blocked Loughner consistent with personal freedom for people who are not actually coming apart.  What if we made a national choice to have coverage parity for mental illness in our health insurance system!  Private insurance companies won't cover anything out of the goodness of their hearts, so this would take law-making.

Oh, right, Giffords voted for exactly this sort of requirement in the passage of Obamacare, and that's one of the two major reasons the teabaggers hate her (the other being her opposition to the Jan Brewer profile-a-Mexican act).  Repealing mental health parity is what the Republican caucus in the House wants to do.

Third, we have decided that wide access to guns is a vital political right.  Few places have taken this decision further than Arizona. Loughner could easily buy his Glock semi and, apparently, at least three extended clips, each holding 30 bullets.  He could legally carry it concealed without any vetting of his mental health.  Without any review before the fact.

The Arizona legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer enacted the right to concealed carry in 2010.  In 2007, when Loughner previously attended a Giffords event, had he been carrying his Glock, he would have been subject to arrest long before raising his coward's arm to the back of her head and inflicting a wound roughly the magnitude with which John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln.

Arizona is a place where the law is extremely pro-gun.  A bar or restaurant that chooses to be a gun-free zone must post its ban:

Otherwise, bring your Glock on in with as many extended clips as you can carry.

Last, we choose to protect free speech right up to the edge of incitement to violence and maybe even past the edge.  (h/t Digby)

Free speech is not only a First Amendment right, it's a core value of Americans.  We don't want to be told we can't say pretty much whatever springs to mind.  Loughner, even, holds this value, insanely wanting the right to call the number 6 "eighteen."

Legally, incitement to violence has a high bar and is seldom prosecuted.  That's as it should be.  Nearly all the hysterical teabagger statements have been protected speech, even when they coarsely and immorally revel in fantasies of violence.  (I include Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh among the sick purveyors of political violence porn.  They're not the worst, of course.)

But there are other responsibilities than legal ones.  We live in a society that has grown enured to vicious, ugly political rhetoric, almost all of it from the right wing.  As a society, we need to do something about this.

Not outlaw hate speech, of course.  Sanction it socially as outside the polite norms of society.  Express our disapproval in no uncertain terms.  Make the malcontent cranks and liars look like ... the malcontent cranks and liars they are.  Treat them like a turd in the punch bowl.

Social norms matter immensely.  The reason wingnuts hate political correctness so much is that it constrains the slurs they can use.  They'd never admit it, but they have substituted their own much more restrictive PC for the social consensus that they've been attacking for 25 years.  Suddenly there are rules against cheering at memorial services that the wingers hope will excuse them from listening to the content.  And, of course, every manufactured social norm of the right comes with an IOKIYAR get out of jail free card.

I've been spending a lot of time recently mocking, rebutting, and defending against the usual array of know-nothing wingnuts on the MetroWest Daily News.  It is continually amazing how strongly they prefer to be ignoramuses.

Still, it's important that they not go unopposed.  There are too many others reading who are easily led astray if all they hear is bile and illiberal bullshit.  Roll up your sleeves, pick a site, and start tearing down the haters.

Note:  I wrote nearly all of this on Jan. 9 but didn't think it was finished.  Today, I added seven paragraphs to the end (which really wasn't finished), took out some blank spaces where I had intended to go on longer, and hit Publish Post.

Second Amendment remedies?

I don't know whether the shooter of Rep. Giselle Giffords (D) in Tucson, AZ, had political motives.  I hope not, but given the tenor of the times, it's a question that has to be answered - and soon.

Assassin Jared Loughner could have had a grudge against the federal judge that he did kill outright.  He could simply be crazy and in love with the power of a 9mm Glock with an extended magazine - the power to make him less useless and impotent.

A couple of points:  Open carry of firearms, which is the law in Arizona, utterly failed to deter or end this attack.  Eighteen people were injured, and the shooter was not apparently one of them.  Showdown at the O.K. corral did not turn out to be an effective crime-stopper.

The media is making a big deal about the lack of security for Congresspeople.  As if they didn't know before.  Maybe they're just channelling the ignorance of the public, who don't go to events at which Representatives or Senators show up without any security at all.  During this past election season, I saw my Congressman, Jim McGovern, many times - even at a local Tea Party event - and he never had security.

Update (1/10):  Not only is open carry the law of Arizona.  Concealed carry without a permit of any kind is also the law.

Also, the attack was cut short - not short enough - by unarmed citizens.

The 1970s were so socialist

How much has trickled down? Hardly any of it.

What we got by electing Ronald Reagan: We confirmed and made much more extreme previous policy choices by Congress and Jimmy Carter that put investment interests ahead of national interests and certainly ahead of the interests of the middle class.