Jon Stewart

Chicago Ted says he often doesn't get a chance to see The Daily Show, so this one's for him, especially considering Ripley's digestive issues.

Here it is.

How the GOP Lost the 2016 Election, According to Bruce Bartlett

Bruce Bartlett is a man without a party.

His Republican credentials are impeccable. An aide to Ron Paul in 1976, he went to work for Jack Kemp the next year. Later he was an aide to Iowa Senator Roger Jepsen. When Jepsen became chairman of the Joint Economic Committee in 1983, Bartlett became it's Executive Director.

He was big in the 1980's supply-sider circles, publishing two books on the subject. In 1987 he became a senior policy advisor in the Reagan White House, and the next year was a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at George H.W. Bush's Treasury Department.

But since then he's been something of a gadfly for the Republicans. In 2005, the National Center for Policy Analysis – a right-wing "think tank" [tee-hee, snicker, snicker] fired him for being critical of George W. Bush's economic policies. The next year he published a book called, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, which compared Bush to Richard Nixon, claiming they both abandoned conservative principles.

By the end of the George W. Bush Administration, it was clear that his mind had opened to "new" ideas. In The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward, Bartlett defended his dalliance in supply-side economics, but – in the depths of GWB's Great Recession – he found reasons to praise Keynsians. This year he wrote in The American Conservative that "no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy's problems than Paul Krugman."

So Bruce Bartlett is a liberal's favorite conservative: one whose opinions can be influenced by empirical evidence (a/k/a: the facts).

Why all this run-up? Because Bartlett has recently written a very interesting series of articles on the history of the Republican Party since World War II. In order, they are:

The 1963 March on Washington Changed Politics Forever

How the March on Washington Flipped the Southern Vote

How the South Won the GOP and Lost the 2016 Election 

I would quibble with much of it, but having a coherent Republican perspective is refreshing.

If you can get interested in this sort of thing, I recommend them highly. If you can't, I don't.

BULLETIN! BULLETIN! BULLETIN!

Washington, D.C. – A Grey-Haired Sane Republican (Sanus Republicanus), a species not seen in years, and which most Americans had assumed to be extinct, has been sighted in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Experts across the country were skeptical of early reports of the sighting, intimating that uneducated amateurs were behind them. Sanus Republicanus shares some characteristics with Tertio Modo Democratus (popularly known as Third-Way Democrats), they argued, and an untrained eye could easily confuse them.

The arguments ended, however, when this video of a Sanus Republicanus in its natural habitat was presented at this year's annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA).



Although the specimen is undeniably a Grey-Haired Sane Republican, experts are no less concerned about the viability of the species. This is, after all, only one. A special committee of the APSA is formulating plans for a breeding program, should a female of the species ever appear.

And In Other News ...

President Barack Obama is apparently a direct descendant of John Punch, "the first documented African enslaved for life in American history."

"How can this be," you ask? "His father was Kenyan, not an African-American with 400 years of family history in this country."

And you're right. He's related through his mother!

This really is quite a country.

What Hath Reagan Wrought?

Kevin Drum on default:

How do you get across how insurrectionary this is? Raising the debt ceiling isn't a concession from Republicans that deserves a corresponding concession from Democrats. It's the financial equivalent of a nuclear bomb: both sides will go up in smoke if it's triggered. Ditto for the government shutdown. And ditto again for the piecemeal spending bills, which are basically a way for Republicans to fund only the parts of government they like but not anything else.
 
You can't govern a country this way. You can't allow a minority party to make relentless demands not through the political system, but by threatening Armageddon if they don't get what they want. It's not what the Constitution intended; it's not something any president could countenance; and it's reckless almost beyond imagining.

And most important of all, it's not something that should get written about as if it's just a modest escalation of normal political disagreements. It's not normal. At all. But how do you get this across? How do you get across just how non-normal it is that we're even talking about it?

Here goes your IRA:

Source: NY Times

If U.S. Government debt isn't secure, nothing is secure. Hold on to your hats, folks. Happy landing.

Articles Worth Reading

There have been some worthwhile articles about why we shouldn't be playing footsie with default:

• Roger Parloff in Fortune writes about Why the 14th Amendment Matters in the Debt-Ceiling Crisis. The 14th Amendment states that "the validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned." A snippet:

Yale's Balkin explained on his Balkinization blog in June 2011: "Section 4 targets the worry that, once fully readmitted to the Union, senators and representatives from Southern states ... would deliberately refuse to repay debts incurred in suppressing the confederate rebellion." Still, he continued, the provision "was stated in broad terms in order to prevent future majorities in Congress from repudiating the federal debt to gain political advantage, to seek political revenge, or to try to disavow previous financial obligations because of changed policy priorities."

If you're particularly interested in the legislative history of this part of the 14th Amendment, the Balkin blog post Parloff links to will satisfy you.

•  Joe Nocera's column on Why the Debt Ceiling Matters tries to touch all the bases, one of which is:

[A] point worth making is that U.S. government debt is the only risk-free asset in the world. That debt undergirds the entire world financial system — precisely because the whole world has such faith in it. There is always demand for U.S. government debt. Almost every other asset you can think of is in some way measured against it. A default would destabilize the market for Treasuries. And that, in turn, would likely destabilize every other asset. 

The stock market would fall. Interest rates would rise — meaning, for instance, mortgages would become more expensive just as the housing market is starting to revive. Treasuries themselves would likely have to pay higher interest to investors, which would create a rather sad irony: a default would exacerbate the country’s long-term debt (the very problem the Republicans claim to care about).

 There are more points worth making, and Nocera's column touches on them.

•  The New York Times offers an editorial, The International Fallout, that outlines the damage the GOP has already caused to American interests overseas. A snippet:

The biggest foreign policy casualty, so far, may be the cancellation last week of President Obama’s trip to Asia, which the president’s press secretary said was necessary so he could deal with the shutdown and the political stalemate in Congress. Even though he sent Secretary of State John Kerry in his place, this was the third time that Mr. Obama had canceled or postponed a trip to Asia, further hampering his efforts to make the region a centerpiece of his foreign policy.

In Mr. Obama’s absence, China was able to grab the spotlight. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who became the first foreigner to address the Indonesian Parliament, offered billions of dollars in trade to that country. Mr. Xi then visited Malaysia (another stop President Obama had planned) and announced a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” including an upgrade in military ties. Mr. Obama should reschedule his trip as soon as he comfortably can.

The fiscal chaos has also given China, America’s largest creditor, an opportunity to scold the United States.

Think about that for a while: a President of the United States is unable to leave the country because the opposition party has the country in turmoil.

 

I Can Hardly Wait!

[Sorry, I decided to delete this post. It was supposed to be funny, but the longer it was there, the less funny it got.]

On the Importance of Commas

Thanks to Dave for sending on this gem:

Adding only one comma still doesn't work.

OMG! I Agree with Scalia!

Much is being made across the liberal blogs today of Justice Antonin Scalia's interview in New York Magazine. I didn't find a thing surprising about it.

The Raw Story summarizes:

When asked about his morning media consumption, he claimed to “skim” The Wall Street Journal and Washington Times, but that he had given up on the Washington Post because it “became so shrilly, shrilly liberal.”

He told Senior that the Internet has “coarsened” people. “You can’t go to a movie—or watch a television show for that matter—without hearing the constant use of the F-word—including, you know, ladies using it,” he said. “People that I know don’t talk like that! But if you portray it a lot, the society’s going to become that way.”

On the topic of homosexuality and his judicial opinions on it, he said that “I have friends that I know, or very much suspect, are homosexual,” but that none have ever come out to him, possibly because of his strident belief in Catholic doctrine. He then taunted Senior, leaning in and telling her “I even believe in the Devil.”

When she expressed shock at his literal belief in Biblical text, Scalia responded, “he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.” He then volunteered that while the Devil no longer “mak[es] pigs run off cliff,” he’s still quite active: “What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.” [Shades of The Screwtape Letters – Semp.]

“You’re looking at me as though I’m weird,” he continued. “My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.”

Nothing surprising about any of that. For years, Scalia has been rumored to be a member of Opus Dei, for the love of Francisco Franco!

In liberal blogosphere articles about the interview, the fact that Scalia objects to vulgar language in Hollywood movies (see paragraph two in the above quote) is repeatedly held up as evidence of how wacko he is.

Well, I'm on that wacko bus, too. I'm not a Puritan; I know that in some movies it's important to have the characters talk like the guys in Cook County Jail. But it's so prevalent now, even in movies that are presumably aimed at children, that I'd say Mr. and Mrs. Cornfed in Nebraska are perfectly justified to be resentful of those weird, liberal Hollywood people ("Do they talk like that around their own children?"), and be considering home schooling.

Being liberal doesn't mean you have to have the vocabulary of a sailor. [Sorry, Mike.]

Here and There

• A group called House Majority PAC is running ads in the districts of "at risk" Republicans, making sure their constituents know where their Congressman stands in regards to the shutdown. You can find samples of them here.

• You might remember Wendy Davis, the photogenic state senator from Fort Worth, who filibustered the Texas legislature right up to its constitutional closing time to prevent an anti-abortion bill from passing. Davis got such a name recognition boost out of it that she's decided to run for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. She'd be a long-shot even if she got it, though. Her Republican opponent has money out the wazoo.



• From Politico [yech], a hint that Texas Senator Ted Cruz will not be named Most Popular by his Senate class:

... [A]s the government shutdown heads into day three, a number of Republican senators privately blame the Texas freshman for contributing to the mess their party finds itself in. And now that they’re in it, they say it’s up to Cruz to help find a solution.

“It was very evident to everyone in the room that Cruz doesn’t have a strategy – he never had a strategy, and could never answer a question about what the end-game was,” said one senator who attended the meeting. “I just wish the 35 House members that have bought the snake oil that was sold could witness what was witnessed today at lunch.” [My emphasis]

• I've written before that I am convinced the core principle of the post-1964 Republican Party is racism. Everything else – "smaller government," opposition to Obamacare, taxation issues – has its roots in that.

Kevin Drum has an interesting post that does not support my thesis, though it doesn't refute it either. It turns out that a unifying fear of the loons that listen to right-wing radio is: being called a racist.

• Not far of that mark, a new book called Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America reports:

We also ask if people think Obama is destroying the country. We asked this question of all self-identified conservatives. If you look at all conservatives, 35 percent believe that. If you look at tea party conservatives and non-tea party conservatives, only six percent of non-tea party conservatives believe that vs. 71 percent of tea party conservatives.

To which Ed Kilgore responds:

71% think Obama is “destroying the country.” Wow. So is it any great surprise that these same people, and the House members who identify with them, are willing to go to dangerous lengths to mess up Obama’s signature policy achievement and force a significant change in the federal government’s direction? Who cares about the risk of destroying the economy if the destruction of the country itself is the current trajectory?

The Report from Bull**** Mountain

Jon Stewart keeps an eye on Fox News so we don't have to. Also because, like Anthony Weiner, it's a never-ending source of comic chutzpah.

Sorry, can't get the video to post correctly, so why don't you mosey on over to Talking Points Memo and have a laugh.

Where Do These Bozos Come From?

Cruz, Gohmert, and now this "profile in courage,"  Randy Neugebauer, who confronts a Park Service Ranger and tells her she should be ashamed of herself for enforcing the shutdown he has helped cause.  The purpose of this is what? A photo op? Film to show back home of him single-handedly taking on the Gummint?



This, my friends, is about the level of the Republican Party right now. It's really sad. There used to be a time when respectable people could be Republicans, too.

Addendum: Vice President Biden called the Park Ranger and told her he was proud of her. So am I. She handled it perfectly.

Food for Fox Fantasies

It appears that the unfortunate woman whose erratic behavior (to put it mildly) in Washington D.C., resulted in her death yesterday was suffering from post-partum depression.

Talking Points Memo reports that she "had begun to suspect she was under government surveillance and that President Obama was stalking her."

How long do you think it will be before Fox reports this as though it might have been true? When will Darrell Issa hold hearings?

The Connection Between Boehner and Fargo

Jonathan Chait is more and more convinced that 80 wacko Tea Partiers in Congress will force the U.S. Government, for the first time in history, to default on the national debt.

[House Speaker John] Boehner does not seem to share his party’s sociopathic embrace of hostage tactics. Boehner resembles William H. Macy’s character in Fargo, who concocts a simple plan to have his wife kidnapped and skim the proceeds, failing to think a step forward about what happens once she’s actually seized by violent criminals. He doesn’t intend for her to be harmed, but also has no ability to control the plan once he’s set it in motion. In the end, Boehner's Speakership is likely to end up in the wood chipper, anyway.

If there really are any Republicans left who are not stark, raving mad, they don't have much time to get control of their party back. It will be ugly, but it's gotta be done. There are, after all, some things more important than being reelected.

Jon Stewart Does the Shutdown

Most galling is the claim that "no Republican" ever supported a shutdown. If you think that might be true, 1) you need to pay more attention to current events, and 2) take a look at the Maddow video three posts down.

Smoke It if You've Got It

Oh, to hell with the Banana Republicans. There's always this:

Madness

The Tea Party buffoons are going "Tra-la-la, Tee-hee-hee, Hooray! We've shut down the Gummint! "

Meanwhile, Digby at Hullabaloo offers this:

The WSJ reports, via The Atlantic which calls it the saddest paragraph you will read all day:

At the National Institutes of Health, nearly three-quarters of the staff was furloughed. One result: director Francis Collins said about 200 patients who otherwise would be admitted to the NIH Clinical Center into clinical trials each week will be turned away. This includes about 30 children, most of them cancer patients, he said.

 To which I offer:

This.

And this: The blood dripping from John Boehner's hands on today's NY Daily News cover is not hyperbole.

The Purpose of the Shutdown

Rachel Maddow gets what most television news folks don't:  For the Banana Republicans, the government shutdown was an end in itself.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mitch McConnell: “The President’s more than willing to negotiate with Iranians, I don’t know why he wouldn’t be willing to negotiate with us.”

Jon Stewart: “If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hard-lined, unreasonable totalitarian mullahs in the world, but not the Republicans, maybe he’s not the problem.”

God Has Answered My Prayer about the GOP

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one:

'O Lord, Make my enemies ridiculous.'

And God granted it."

– Voltaire

Does History Repeat Itself?

The year was 1975, and New York City was in dire financial straits. Mayor Abe Beame had a plan, but what the city needed was a $1 billion line of credit. Congress passed a bill authorizing such, but President Gerald Ford, under pressure from Republican Party conservatives, promised to veto the bill. The New York Daily News' headline is still talked about:

 

At the time it was considered a hard-hitting headline.  Today, not so much . . . especially when you consider this morning's Daily News front page:

 

Oh, my!