Rationalizing extremism

The Heritage Foundation doesn't exist to research credible conservative alternatives. It exists to provide pseudo-intellectual claptrap to paste a fig leaf over the nasty bits of wingnut prejudice. Heritage proposed Obamacare in the 1990s, only to go full metal jacket on it when a Democrat proposed it.

Same on immigration:

[T]he study, which comes out under the leadership of conservative former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), is a sharp departure from a “Backgrounder” the Foundation published in 2006. Then, Heritage noted that “worker migration is a net plus economically.”

The wingnut bullshit artists are in charge, and they need to keep the rubes inflamed so that they don't notice it's the plutocracy who are screwing them.

Update: My man Paul Krugman agrees with me. Usually it's the other way around.

The truth is that Heritage has never been in the business of doing economic analysis; it’s just a propaganda agency posing as a think tank.

Freedom of my religion

Jim DeMint, like fundamentalists of a certain stripe, doesn't believe in the freedom of each person to make religious choices unhindered by government. This is what we mean when we call these people the American Taliban:

Speaking at a church rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina, DeMint told attendees people quietly told him he should not back down from a position he took in 2004 that openly gay individuals and single mothers who are involved in a sexual relationship should not be allowed to teach. He did not weigh in on whether unwed men should be allowed to teach.

"(When I said those things,) no one came to my defense," he said, according to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. "But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn't back down. They don't want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion." [emphasis added]

DeMint argues here that the government abrogates his rights by permitting someone else the free exercise of religion. It's an astonishingly stupid point of view, yet one that's very common among religious conservatives. (Conservatism, bad for you!)

And what the hell is a "church rally"? Sounds as though the IRS should be revoking more tax exemptions...

Cream DeMint

CNN abuses anonymous sourcing to cream a Republican for a change.

One unnamed senior GOP aide told CNN's Dana Bash: "I wonder who Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer are calling first tonight - Chris Coons for becoming the next Senator from Delaware or Jim DeMint for helping to make it happen.

This anonymous Republican aide is making a valid point, but it's still bad journalism for CNN to permit this aide to remain nameless, even if Dana Bash did launder her failure to name names through Peter Hamby.

Impotent op-ed

"Republicans must end partisanship"

Past nuclear arms control treaties have won broad bipartisan support, and it should be no different for this treaty.

Where has John Rhinelander been for the past twenty years? Republicans don't do bipartisan. They fight using every means they can lay their hands on until Democrats concede or fail.

In the past, as bad as it often was, the Republican Party wasn't led around by the nose by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, with Jim DeMint trying desperately ("pick me, pick me!") to get out in front of the frothing wingnuts.

Now it's Republicans, making the world worse one obstruction at a time!

Might as well ask a two-year-old to please stop throwing tantrums. The difference of course is that a two-year-old will eventually become three, while Republicans will only get more extreme, as they have through all of the last fifty years.

AK-47 won the American Revolution

Someone's holding a gun lobby to Lindsey Graham's head. Graham (R-you thought he could be both from South Carolina and sane? Ha) sacrifices this burnt offering on the altar of the NRA:

“I think you’re going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. He was speaking in opposition to a bill that would keep people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives.

This is a guy who thinks he can't get any more heterodox on any topic, and his model for orthodox is Jim DeMint (R-teabaggers' first Presidential candidate). Graham keeps going:

[He] pointed out, “when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.”

Though of course the founders did all keep their budget Chinese AKs over the fireplace, and their superiority over ancient British musket meant they didn't need to venture up to Saratoga except to bet on the ponies. Yorktown was just some movie-maker's wet dream. The whole revolution was done in a couple of months - to account for the awful transportation infrastructure of the time, though I'd bet they in fact were wishing they could fly even then.

Valley Forge? George Washington was just an SOB, holding back the AKs so he could get to know Lafayette better.

You mean the founders didn't consider automatic weapons either when they wrote the Second Amendment? Unbelievable! Where was the NRA?

If Democrats had any sense of reciprocity, they'd be on all the talk shows saying, "Republicans want to arm terrorists." They wouldn't even be lying.

Slightly more fair-minded: Republicans would rather kiss the NRA's ass than keep automatic weapons and high explosives away from car bombers and other terrorists.

Give Graham the last word in poseur tough-guy security against terrorists:

“I am all into national security. ... I want to stop reading these guys their Miranda rights,” he said.

Stop playing nice

It's more important to Jim DeMint (R-Ft. Sumter) to be a dick about unions than to secure Americans against terror threats:

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, has been holding up the confirmation of Erroll Southers to be TSA chief, in an effort to prevent TSA employees from joining a labor union. Southers is a former FBI special agent and counterterrorism expert.

But is he chastened in the least about his role? Nope, he doubles down on the labor hatred:

"I hope this incident will lead the President to re-think this policy and put the interests of American travelers ahead of organized labor."

Not ahead of organized management, mind you, just ahead of labor in any form.

In the best of leaders, it takes serious self-esteem to be a national politician, but this degree of immunity from conscientious self-assessment is world-class demagogue.

Meanwhile, any deliberative body that permits a single member to block an appointment is seriously broken. It once worked, but in the end it has encouraged continuous temper tantrums from Republicans who cherish the rights of their privileges without any of the concomitant responsibilities to their fellow members, much less to the country.

One party is determined to make this country ungovernable. If that means thwarting the will of the majority, they have no problem with that. If it means failing utterly to grapple with any problem other than the politics of power, that's what they learned from their Republican forebears.

The time is long past to stop treating the Republicans as colleagues. At best, they are cage-fighting adversaries, at worst enemies of the republic.

Update (12/30): Yesterday, DeMint was proud of his obstruction. Today, he's out with a "new" story: It's the Democrats' fault. Hint: It's their fault they didn't give him his way.

Win elections instead

Republicans always want term limits when they're out of power.

Not a coup if they like the guy

As long as the conservative business elites retain power, Republicans don't care about something so trifling as democracy or due process:

A delegation of Republican members of the United States Congress visited Tegucigalpa on Friday to offer support to Mr. Micheletti. The Obama administration has called for the restoration of Mr. Zelaya and it has suspended all military and some economic aid to the de facto government. Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, said that calling Mr. Zelaya’s ouster a coup was “ill informed and baseless.”

Let's see. A democratically elected President was removed from office by the military and exiled, whereupon the army installed its own man as caretaker. Yep, sounds like a coup to me.

Diagnosis

The problem: Nearly all Republicans and many blue dog Democrats are opposed to health care reform. They are unwilling to do anything that might provide universal health care. The Republicans' opposition stems from the fear that people might actually like the public option. The conservative Democrats' from the fear that their constituents might vote them out of office before they find out they like it.

This loose coalition of conservatives can't come right out and say they oppose reform, but their every behavior shows it. Without a real public option, anything labelled health care reform is fakery. Mitch McConnell knows what he's doing. So does Jim DeMint.

As Nancy Pelosi says, insurance companies have had long enough. They have provided no progress toward universal coverage at all. Paul Krugman argues that the market fundamentally cannot provide universal coverage (although you'll notice he does not say that market mechanisms are completely useless).

Unfortunately, the prognosis is starting to look grim. There doesn't seem to be a working majority for any significant reform, so we may get a few portability fixes and big giveaways for the insurance industry.

Reaction stories tilt right

McCNN has been running stories all week that were entirely cobbled together out of Republican reactions to events at the DNC. Many of them had URLs that included 'gop' and 'reax'.

Today, McCNN runs a Sarah Palin reaction story. It is emphatically not a Democratic reaction story - it leads with Republican reactions from the McCain campaign (how's that a reaction?), from Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), from Jim DeMint (R-SC), from John Boehner (R-OH), and even from Duhbya (R-disaster).

Then and only then does the story get to reaction from Democrats. This is another reason I call the network McCNN.