Underpaid Genius

How can Mitt Romney characterize half the nation as no-good parasites at a $50,000 a plate fund raiser, and expect that the potential donors would agree with him? It’s simple: all those rich people — and Republicans in general — completely distrust the Federal government since George W left office, which was the the highest point of Republican trust in government since Nixon. They agree with him: they think the government is taking their money and giving it away to people that don’t deserve it.

The thinking is like this: ‘Now we have a muslim socialist in the White House, giving away our hard-earned tax dollars to shiftless layabouts! Bailing out the banks, and the auto industry, when we should be drilling for oil and shooting wolves!’

Charles Pierce likened the GOP to a Confederate party recently, not so much because of racism, whiteness, and southernness — which are all the case, though — but based on the mania for state rights.

In the GOP platform we can see the Tenther principles:

The Republican Party, born in opposition to the denial of liberty, stands for the rights of individuals, families, faith communities, institutions – and of the States which are their instruments of self-government. In establishing a federal system of government, the Framers viewed the States as laboratories of democracy and centers of innovation, as do we. To maintain the integrity of their system, they bequeathed to successive generations an instrument by which we might correct any misalignment of power between our States and the federal government, the Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, is the author of the Arizona immigration bill that the US Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. So of course the GOP had Kobach craft the party’s immigration plank for 2012 in August:

The current Administration’s approach to immigration has undermined the rule of law at every turn. It has lessened work-site enforcement – and even allows the illegal aliens it does uncover to walk down the street to the next employer – and challenged legitimate State efforts to keep communities safe, suing them for trying to enforce the law when the federal government refuses to do so. It has created a backdoor amnesty program unrecognized in law, granting worker authorization to illegal aliens, and shown little regard for the life-and-death situations facing the men and women of the border patrol.

Perhaps worst of all, the current Administration has failed to enforce the legal means for workers or employers who want to operate within the law. In contrast, a Republican Administration and Congress will partner with local governments through cooperative enforcement agreements in Section 287g of the Immigration and Nationality Act to make communities safer for all and will consider, in light of both current needs and historic practice, the utility of a legal and reliable source of foreign labor where needed through a new guest worker program. We will create humane procedures to encourage illegal aliens to return home voluntarily, while enforcing the law against those who overstay their visas.

State efforts to reduce illegal immigration must be encouraged, not attacked. The pending Department of Justice lawsuits against Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah must be dismissed immediately. The double-layered fencing on the border that was enacted by Congress in 2006, but never completed, must finally be built. In order to restore the rule of law, federal funding should be denied to sanctuary cities that violate federal law and endanger their own citizens, and federal funding should be denied to universities that provide in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens, in open defiance of federal law.

I guess it’s not unexpected that the GOP would continue to push for state enforcement of federal laws that they agree with. like deporting illegal immigrants, and push for state obstructionism of laws they don’t agree with, like abortion. But it shows that the real issue isn’t state rights, it is opposition to an open, liberal society and the rule of law.

So I think we should all say, as much as possible, ‘I am voting for the Democrats across the board this election: I am voting against the Confederate Party’.

(chart from Look How Far We’ve Come Apart - NYTimes.com)

We’re not going to be able to make a lot of decisions that need to be made until the American people decide who the decision makers are going to be.

Tom Cole, US Representative (R-OK), on why the House can’t get anything done via NYTimes.com

Nothing is more deceptive or more dangerous than the pretence of a desire to simplify government. The simplest governments are despotisms…

Daniel Webster

The right is declaring defeat in the short term, and the left is declaring defeat in the long term.

Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford

Karlan is alluding to the concerns of liberals that Robert’s reasoning in the health care case may have created a precedent for rolling back many liberal programs.

via NYTimes.com

The World Is Burning

Bill McKibben says very well what a great number of climate observers are saying: the world is burning.

While Colorado burns, Washington fiddles - Bill McKibben via the Guardian

You ever wonder what global warming is going to look like? In its early stages, exactly like this.

Global warming is underway. Are we waiting for someone to hold up a sign that says “Here’s climate change”? Because, this week, we got everything but that:

• In the Gulf, tropical storm Debby dropped what one meteorologist described as “unthinkable amounts” of rain on Florida. Debby marked the first time in history that we’d reached the fourth-named storm of the year in June; normally it takes till August to reach that mark.

• In the west, of course, firestorms raged: the biggest fire in New Mexico history, and the most destructive in Colorado’s annals. (That would be the Colorado Springs blaze: the old record had been set the week before, in Fort Collins.) One resident described escaping across suburban soccer fields in his car, with “hell in the rearview mirror”.

• The record-setting temperatures (it had never been warmer in Colorado) that fueled those blazes drifted east across the continent as the week wore on: across the Plains, there were places where the mercury reached levels it hadn’t touched even in the Dust Bowl years, America’s previous all-time highs.

• That heatwave was coming at just the wrong time, as farmers were watching their corn crops get ready to pollinate, a task that gets much harder at temperatures outside the norms with which those crops evolved. “You only get one chance to pollinate over 1 quadrillion kernels,” said Bill Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a Omaha-based commodity consulting firm:

“There’s always some level of angst at this time of year, but it’s significantly greater now and with good reason. We’ve had extended periods of drought.”

In the markets, all this news was taking its toll: prices for corn and wheat were spiking upwards, rising almost a third on global markets as forecasters suggested grain stockpiles could shrink by as much as 50% as the summer wears on. But in the political world, there wasn’t much reaction at all.

And because of a huge disinformation campaign by the energy cartel, the average American does not think the environmental destruction of the earth is important, not as critical as immigration issues!

Meanwhile, Siberia is burning, but who gives a shit about the Russkis, right?

Can we please get some leaders who have a brain in their heads?

Far from being an independent movement of swing voters, like those of Ross Perot’s Reform Party in 1992, the Tea Party always represented a segment of the Republican Party base, where it finds its present home. Although its influence has waned, we can expect more of the kind of politics that the Tea Party represents. In a slow growth or no-growth economy, the politics of shared prosperity gives way to zero-sum struggles, as countries and groups within countries battle to preserve their wealth and privileges while forcing austerity on others. Rick Santelli voiced the selfish logic of zero-sum politics when he denounced Americans with underwater mortgages as “losers”: “Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?” Thanks to the Great Recession, an optimistic politics of “enlarging the winners’ circle” has given way to a bitter politics in which all too many Americans try to stave off losses to themselves by tossing “losers” overboard.

Michael Lind, The Tea Party Movement Has Fizzled Out - Room for Debate via NYTimes.com

Our biggest political division is the war between the empty places and the crowded places.

Gail Collins

(Source: The New York Times)

As nature abhors a vacuum, so international politics abhors unbalanced power.

Kenneth Waltz

The Partisan Divide in America

Buried in a piece about political advertising, a frightening factoid:

9 Swing States are Main Focus of Ad Blitz - Jeremy Peters via NYTimes.com

A study released this week by the Pew Research Center found that the differences between Republicans and Democrats on a wide range of questions — like whether someone believes in God and what role the government should have in helping the poor — have never been starker in the 25 years since Pew began the survey.

Here’s a chart from that Pew study:

We are living in an increasingly polarized society, with growing divisions between those that identify as conservative and liberal. This is all about values: where we come down on the most critical issues of our time.

In case you are wondering why we can’t get anywhere on climate change and the environment, take a look at the second line in the list. First on the list, the GOP wants to dismantle the New Deal safety net, and, #3, wants to end unions. And so on.

Its as if we have two countries, or cultures. How can we heal this breach? Is there a solution? Are we headed for even more partisan politics, at a time when we need to take collective action to avert collapse of the economic system, government, and the ecosphere?

Worst of all is the growing unconcern of conservatives for the needy:

Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years via Pew

Just 40% of Republicans agree that “It is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves,” down 18 points since 2007. In three surveys during the George W. Bush administration, no fewer than half of Republicans said the government had a responsibility to care for those unable to care for themselves. In 1987, during the Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62% expressed this view.

22% fewer Republicans believe that the government should take care of the sick, poor, and infirm since Reagan was in office. And the obvious question — Who then should take care of them? — goes unasked, but I bet the response would be some mumbo jumbo about charities, families, and ‘let him die’, like the Wolf Blitzer exchange with Ron Paul last fall about the fate of an hypothetical uninsured man in a coma:

Advocacy group challenges GOP candidates on ‘let him die’ question - Shira Schoenberg via Boston.com

The phrase came up in response to an answer by Texas Representative Ron Paul to a hypothetical question from Blitzer about who would pay to treat a 30-year-old healthy man who chooses not to have health insurance, then ends up in a coma. Paul responded that freedom is about “taking your own risk.” “Are you saying that society should just let him die?” Blitzer asked. A few audience members at the Tea Party-sponsored debate cheered and yelled “yes.” Paul said no, and suggested that churches, friends and neighbors would take care of the person, and government should not have to.

Yelling ‘yes’ when Blitzer asked ‘let him die?’ are the Tea Party conservatives. And I despair about finding a way to govern this two-headed monster called America.

Politicians are like a balloon tied to a rock. If we swat at them, they may sway to the left or the right. But, tied down, they can only go so far. Instead of batting at them, we should move the rock: people’s activated social values. When we moved the rock, it automatically pulls all the politicians towards us — without having to pressure each one separately.

Daniel Hunter (via azspot)

(via azspot)