Dividing the nation

The Republican Study Committee explains that it "stands with" Wall Street investment firms and hedge funds.



The question arises once again: Are they even trying?

Gender studies

Imagine if Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination last year.

Giving it away

Katha Pollitt is right. Isn't the Times acting in exactly the same fashion as those strumpets that so turn Douthat off in the first place?

So who would I like to see in the Kristol slot? Actually, Kristol. I was livid when they gave him the job, but he was perfect: a dull, complacent apparatchik who set forth the Bush line in all its fact-free glory. His columns were like press releases--you could hardly remember them two minutes after reading them. But his presence on the page reminded readers that David Brooks is not really what Republicanism is all about. Frankly, though, I don't see why there must be two conservatives on the page. Does the Wall Street Journal, the Times's national competition, have two liberals? That the Times, the closest thing we have to a liberal paper, cedes so much turf to the opposition, as progressive bloggers applaud, shows the truth of Robert Frost's quip that a liberal is someone so open-minded he won't take his own side in an argument.

Really, Ross, can't you see the Times is just "masticating your neck?"

Great moments in governing

Gov. Mark Sanford, R-SC, man of principle.

The Obama administration rejected Gov. Mark Sanford’s request to use $700 million in federal stimulus cash to pay down state debt. The White House budget director, Peter R. Orszag, said in a letter to Mr. Sanford, left, a Republican, that the federal stimulus law did not allow President Obama to make an exception for that cash. A Sanford spokesman, Joel Sawyer, had no immediate response, but the governor has said he would reject part of the stimulus money if Mr. Obama would not give him flexibility in spending it. The $787 billion stimulus legislation sets strict rules for the $53.6 billion being sent to help state budgets, Mr. Orszag wrote. It calls for 82 percent of the money to be used for public schools and colleges, and 18 percent on public safety and other government services. “Congress has not authorized the executive branch to waive any of the above statutory requirements,” Mr. Orszag’s letter said.

How else to explain his brave stance putting his ideology and future prospects in the GOP ahead of the people who elected him?

(Aiken Standard Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Mar. 13--With the recession deepening and South Carolina now ranked second only to Michigan in unemployment, State Superintendent of Education Dr. Jim Rex is worried about morale among educators.

"Our school system has seen $370 million in cuts this year," he told Aiken County residents at a community meeting Thursday. "The school districts' budgets have been cut by 15 percent. When you get to that level, you're eventually going to have to get into personnel." Rex was invited by S.C. Rep. Bill Clyburn, R-Aiken, to discuss his education vision and the current budget woes facing the state.

The Aiken School District expects to displace around 90 teachers through an increase in class sizes and has told all retired teachers still on faculties that they may not be rehired for the next term.

Mark Sanford is an intellectual leader of the GOP. After Rush, of course.

An army of Abramoffs will descend like locusts

Remember that little kid sitting next to Michelle Obama the other night? The plucky kid who wrote to Congress to ask for stimulus help to rebuild her collapsing school? The one who wrote, "We're not 'quitters?'"

Well, according to the Moonie Times, she's not plucky at all. In fact, she's an irresponsible, ungrateful guttersnipe.

Facts be damned. To the Times, the plight of J.V. Martin is actually a story of how locals can solve their own problem, but Ty'Sheoma and Obama have hijacked it to make it an example of how only the federal government can help. Obama said Ty'Sheoma's letter reflected "a willingness to take responsibility for our future and for posterity." The Times disagrees: "What is on display is not responsibility but irresponsibility. This is the new reality in America, that those with political pull will benefit, those without will not ... Connections are replacing competence as a measure of a person's worth."

Got it? Ty'Sheoma Bethea, she's no enterprising teen from a broken-down school. She sounds like the new Jack Abramoff, using her "political pull" and "connections" to benefit herself.

The brain bleeds.

The NBC GOP connection

What is going on? First Sarah Palin and Tina Fey. Now Gov. Jindal and Kenneth? Is Lorne Michaels their political strategist?

Magic realism

Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out that minstrel show politics is not a qualification for RNC chairman.

WASHINGTON — Chip Saltsman, the candidate for national Republican Party chairman who came under fire late last year for distributing a holiday CD with the parody song “Barack the Magic Negro,” dropped out of the contest Thursday on the eve of the vote.

Mr. Saltsman, a former Tennessee Republican chairman, sent an e-mail message to members of the Republican National Committee announcing his decision. The message made no mention of why he was leaving the race, but Republicans have said for days that he was struggling to collect enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Mr. Saltsman was always viewed as something of a long shot, but his prospects dimmed after the disclosure that he had distributed the CD with the parody song.

Now, I don't think that last bit is 100% accurate. Yes, many of the party "leadership figures" -- if such a thing currently exists -- were aghast, but many of the rank & file expressed solidarity with the creep.

Co-president

I wish they'd proposed this in 2000.

Rush Limbaugh also makes an appearance in today’s Journal. He has a clever idea to give Obama 54 percent of the $900 billion package — equating that amount to the new president’s electoral majority — while 46 percent, which was John McCain’s electoral tally, would go to a tax-cut plan that would halve the U.S. corporate tax rate and provide a capital-gains tax holiday for one year, after which the investment tax would drop to 10 percent.

Besides the sheer lunacy of this clever idea, it's unclear what he means by "electoral majority." Obama won 365 electoral college votes to McCain's 173. That's a 68% majority. It's math skills like that that make Larry Kudlow to be the go-to guy on ideas to fix the economy.

Ok, let's give the idiot the benefit of the doubt and assume that in his fever brain he meant the popular vote. The gap between the two candidates represented a landslide in modern politics. But beyond that, wasn't it on the very subject of the economic crisis -- and McCain's various reactions to it -- that Americans decidedly declared they had no confidence in McCain's leadership at all?

So Larry the Clown should shut the fuck up. But first, let's run down the various criticisms with the stimulus bill burped by Kudlow and the various other Bush economic stalwarts determined to oppose the legislation no matter how many kittens Obama promises them along the way:

• It's too large.
• It doesn't cut taxes for the wealthy or cooperations sufficiently.
• It gives too much money to the states who have been profligate, apparently, in providing aid to the unemployed and the uninsured. And children. And mothers expecting children. Etcetera.
• It cuts taxes for people who only pay payroll "pay no taxes."
• Repairing crumbling infrastructure is both "pork" and will take too long.
• What would Reagan do?
• FDR caused the Great Depression
  
• Do nothing.
• Laffer Curve!!!!1!!

The fact that the cable media gives these shrieking harpies more air time than they do sensible people doesn't make Republican opposition any less chaotic, confused, contradictory, and oh yeah, cynical.

Aptly named

Dick Armey

Do nothings

One doesn't have to be particularly politically astute, nor am I likely the first to come to the conclusion, but it's obvious that there is absolutely no upside for most GOP members of the House to support the stimulus bill. Congress hasn't been very popular with voters in recent years. Democrats now control Congress. People want Congress to do something about the economy. Congress is doing something. If Congress's popularity improves, Democrats' hold on Congress will grow stronger and Obama's popularity will rise or, at least, stay very high.

So it is no surprise that Republicans were everywhere yesterday, making very silly arguments opposing the stimulus bill.

By extension, there's no upside for Republicans if the various levers of the stimulus bills actually work and the economy improves while they are a minority. In fact, if the economy improves Democrats will be the solid majority party for a very long time to come, just as they were following the Great Depression. To wit:

Altogether, the economic recovery bill would speed $127 billion over the next two and a half years to individuals and states for health care alone, a fact that has Republicans fuming that the stimulus package is a back door to universal health coverage.

“It’s raining money,” said Representative Michael C. Burgess, Republican of Texas.

Universal health care would pretty much seal the deal.

For Republicans, failure is not just an option, it's the only option.

And for all of President Obama's gracious trips to the Hill to meet with Republicans on their turf, he, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid understand this.

A couple of words for GOP leadership

Two, in fact. I'll let you guess what they are.

President Barack Obama is coming to the Capitol this afternoon to curry favor with congressional Republicans. But it appears GOP leaders have already made up their minds to oppose his $825 billion stimulus plan.

House Republican Leader John A. Boehner and his No. 2, Whip Eric Cantor, told their rank-and-file members Tuesday morning during a closed-door meeting to oppose the bill when it comes to the floor Wednesday, according to an aide familiar with the discussion. Boehner told members that he's voting against the stimulus, and Cantor told the assembled Republicans that there wasn't any reason for them to support the measure, according to another person in the room. Cantor and his whip team are going to urge GOP members to oppose it.

But Steve Benen asks a really good question: If all the enticements and compromise Obama and Democrats in Congress have made in an effort at bipartisanship are met with nothing but hostility from GOP leadership, can we forge ahead with a better, less compromised bill? One, for instance, that helps states keep the ranks of the unemployed from misery and one that values the health of poor mothers and their children?

Heckuvan asshole

You probably thought Michael Brown -- he of the Federal Emergency Management Agency fame, under whose watch a great American city was destroyed by a predicted hurricane -- has since been brushed in to the dustbin of history.

Sadly, no!

Change we can believe in --- where it counts

Some odds and ends...

Glenn Greenwald approves of Obama's choice for Office of Legal Counsel. It appears that the president-elect is serious about restoring the rule of law for the Executive Branch.

I first read these posts of Johnsen's a few weeks ago when a reporter asked me about my reaction to the possibility that she might be appointed to head the OLC. Beyond these articles, I don't know all that much about her, but anyone who can write this, in this unapologetic, euphemism-free and even impolitic tone, warning that the problem isn't merely John Yoo but Bush himself, repeatedly demanding "outrage," criticizing the Democratic Congress for legalizing Bush's surveillance program, arguing that we cannot merely "move on" if we are to restore our national honor, stating the OLC's "core job description" is to "say 'no' to the President," all while emphasizing that the danger is unchecked power not just for the Bush administration but "for years and administrations to come" -- and to do so in the middle of an election year when she knows she has a good chance to be appointed to a high-level position if the Democratic candidate won and yet nonetheless eschewed standard, obfuscating Beltway politesse about these matters -- is someone whose appointment to such an important post is almost certainly a positive sign. No praise is due Obama until he actually does things that merit praise, but it's hard not to consider this encouraging.

And, speaking of appointments that make me optimistic that the "24" nightmare we've been living these past eight years may be coming to a close, we may have a new CIA Director who actually opposes treating such things as "simulated drowning" as "enhanced interrogation techniques.

As Joe notes below, multiple news outlets are reporting that Obama has found his next CIA director: Leon Panetta, who once quit the Nixon Administration in protest over his Civil Rights policy, and later became a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

On cue, Marc Ambinder finds the clip, which answers the most immediate question. What are Panetta's views on torture? This is what Panetta wrote in the Washington Monthly earlier this year:

Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground. We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

And in today's edition of "What took them so long," Obama hasn't even been sworn in yet, and still we find John Yoo and John Bolten calling for restraints on the Executive Branch, and Mitch McConnell arguing that the Republican Party is all about fiscal discipline. I mean, we all knew that come the new administration, the GOP would forget about their talk of a "Wartime President," and "The Constitution isn't a suicide pact" and "Deficits don't matter." I just expected them to wait a bit, if only for appearances sake.

As Krugman says, "That's pretty rich."

Shorter Mark Stanford: You're a bunch of whiners

Moments before the deadline, South Carolina's compassionate conservative governor apparently relented and decided that creating a state full of the indigent, may not make the greatest sense, even if relenting contradicted his ideology.

For weeks, Mr. Sanford, newly elected as head of the Republican Governors Association and known for being a fierce free-market foe of government spending, stuck to his stand, questioning the probity of the South Carolina Employment Security Commission and demanding a new audit of the agency.

He has said in the past that he did not trust the commission’s calculation of the state’s unemployment rate, though a spokesman at the Bureau of Labor Statistics said it was calculated the same way as in every other state.

Mr. Sanford is now demanding that South Carolina’s Commerce Department, whose director he appoints, be given access to the state unemployment agency’s numbers, including where applicants are from, their ages, genders and occupations.

The back-and-forth dueling between the conservative governor and the unemployment agency has gone on for weeks, and its executive director, Roosevelt T. Halley, warned that he would have to stop issuing benefit checks to the jobless beginning Jan. 1 if Mr. Sanford did not back down and ask the federal government for the loan.

“It’s absolutely unheard of, it’s insane, for a governor of any state not to request those funds,” State Senator Hugh K. Leatherman, a Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said last week. “I can’t believe anybody would be this heartless, and create such a heartless act on these people.”

On Wednesday morning, at nearly the last minute, Mr. Sanford relented and said at a news conference in his office at the State House that he would request the money. South Carolina is one of three high-unemployment states, along with Michigan and Indiana, to ask for a loan from the federal government to ensure the unemployed continue to receive benefits.

And he's a leading prospect for the GOP nomination in 2012.

A diseased party

I really wish I had something insightful to say about These Great Times in which a vast ponzi scheme is apparently counting as its victims such disparate folks as the owner of the Mets, hair stylists, and European banks, while a sitting U.S. president has shoes thrown at him in Iraq, but I don't.

What I can say is that Senate Republicans are a weird bunch. Their antipathy to unions has led them to act in a way that is against the interests of dealership owners (generally Republicans), automakers in their own states (as parts suppliers go out of business), and, ya know, people living in the United States.

Heckuva job

All those southern Senate Republicans, explaining in their oily drawls that they won't bailout Detroit unless UAW workers earn wages similar to those paid to workers of foreign car companies that happen to make cars in their states, really are doing their German and Japanese overlords a helluva favor it appears:

Shares in European automakers plunged, after similar declines in Asia. In Europe, shares in the French auto giant Renault were down 7.2 percent while Volkswagen, the German carmaker, was down a more modest 0.7 percent.

Shares in Toyota Motor and Nissan fell more than 10 percent and Honda plunged 13.4 percent, while Hyundai in South Korea was 7.7 percent lower. Asian automakers have suffered along with their peers elsewhere from a dramatic decline in demand this year as the United States, Japan and many European countries slipped into recession.

Our descent into a Hobbesian future continues.

Wage cuts only good for the middle class

It's funny, I don't recall Senate GOP members demanding wage cuts for banks and investment banks. I wonder why.

And, as Josh Marshall asks, why is the fate of the nation's manufacturing sector up to a group of lame duck Republicans?

A determined bunch

Make no mistake, the Republican party will do all it can to block legislation intended to halt or delay the collapse of the economy if that legislation does not neatly fit into their ideological world view. That is, if legislation is intended to help homeowners or to keep union workers in their jobs, or if it attempts to reform the deregulated systems that have derailed the financial system, it will simply will not get the 10 enough GOP votes it needs to pass the Senate. Democrats are, in Digby's words, choosing technocratic competence over ideology, but Republicans will have none of it.

Exhibit one:

More than any administration official, Mrs. Bair has called publicly for using billions of taxpayer dollars to finance the modification of loans threatened by default. But her advocacy has contributed to a battle that is pitting White House and Treasury officials against the F.D.I.C. and lawmakers in Congress. The discord has influenced programs that have so far proved insufficient to stem a tide of foreclosures that Moody’s Economy.com expects will affect 10 million homeowners over the next five years. And it is drawing personal conflicts and animosities into the policy-making process.

White House and Treasury officials argue that Mrs. Bair’s high-profile campaigning is meant to promote herself while making them look heartless. As a result, they have begun excluding Mrs. Bair from some discussions, though she remains active in conversations where the F.D.I.C.’s support is needed, like the Citigroup rescue.

A Treasury official involved in the discussions said that while Mrs. Bair was seen as a valuable part of the team, there was a sense of distrust and a concern that she always seemed to be pushing her own agenda.

Mrs. Bair, for her part, says she has always sought to work constructively with other officials and is one of the few voices within the administration pushing for a comprehensive program to help at-risk borrowers.

“I’ve heard the stories of people who are suffering and can stay in their homes if there is just a small adjustment to their loans,” said Mrs. Bair, a Republican who was appointed to her post by President Bush two years ago. “There are some people in the Republican Party who resent the idea of helping others,” she added. “But the market is broken right now, and unless we intervene, these people and the economy won’t be helped.”

And exhibit two:

WASHINGTON — The prospects of a $14 billion government rescue of the American auto industry seemed to vaporize Thursday as the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, spoke out forcefully against the bill, effectively ending its chances despite the urgings of the White House.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Mr. McConnell said he and other Republicans had drawn a clear distinction between the Treasury’s $700 billion economic stabilization, which they helped pass in October, and the proposal to aid the American automakers, which he said raised questions about which industries or individuals deserve help.

“A lot of struggling Americans are wondering where their bailout is,” Mr. McConnell declared. Although Mr. McConnell voiced support of an alternative plan that was developed by Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, it seemed unlikely that there was any possibility of compromise at this late point in the year. But some Congressional aides still expressed hope and said talks would continue.

Expect this to harden even further when Obama takes office, despite the fact that Obama may be even less hated by the GOP than is George W. Bush.

UPDATE: Actually, 10 Republicans did vote for the measure, but that wasn't enough.

Speaking of last night, several readers have written to note that the vote to end the Republican filibuster did not fall strictly along party lines. Four Democrats voted with the GOP to block a vote on the bill: Max Baucus of Montana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, John Tester of Montana, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

It's worth keeping in mind that Reid's vote was purely procedural. Reid supported the legislation, but wanted to reserve the right to bring the bill back to the floor. Under Senate rules, that means he had to vote against it, even though he supported it. This was just a procedural move the Majority Leader frequently uses on failed cloture votes.

As for Baucus, Lincoln, and Tester, they voted with the Republicans because they actually opposed the bill.

Nothing says "American Values" like "Saxby Chambliss"

Lobbyist, RNC chief, sleazebag, Saxby Chambliss wins his run-off.

Base thinking

More please. Look, I think a strong two-party system is important, but if these guys want to model the national party on the California GOP -- a marginal, inbred, permanent minority -- then be my guest.

UPATED for spleling