Month: January 2011

So the movement right is having a huge fight over who gets to attend CPAC. Some background here and here as the bigfeet of Christianism – from NOM to FRC – refuse to attend if a splinter gay-right group, GOProud, is included. But who could have predicted this development: it’s all being orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood:

Frank Gaffney, a leader of the conservative movement for the last 30 years, charges that CPAC has come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is working to bring America under Saudi-style Shariah law.

… Gaffney, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, is founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and co-author of the new book “Shariah: The Threat to America.” He told WND that Islamism has infiltrated the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, in the person of Washington attorney and political activist Suhail Khan and a group called Muslims for America. Gaffney also accuses another ACU board member, leading conservative political organizer Grover Norquist, of helping the Muslim Brotherhood spread its influence in the nation’s capital.

There must be a word for this process of self-purification: self-McCarthyism? The attack on Norquist’s Muslim faith is particularly vile.

A slideshow worth your time.

Paging Ira Glass:

Karl Smith explains why unusually strong economic growth is possible – if unlikely:

10% growth is crazy high for the United States because we usually don’t have a massive reservoir of untapped labor which could be easily mobilized.

10% growth is not crazy high for the Chinese economy because effectively they do have a massive untapped reservoir of labor. Workers migrating from extremely unproductive rural farm work to highly productive industrialized work along the coast is the source of China’s growth.

However, unlike normal circumstances the US does have a reservoir now. The massive unemployment we have is the potential feedstock for super-normal growth. In a basic sense economic growth either comes from more workers or higher worker productivity. 

 

Howard Gleckman makes a 2011 prediction:

The House GOP leadership promises to slash spending (excluding–take a deep breath–Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense, homeland security, veterans’ benefits, and interest on the debt) by $100 billion this year alone. Even if such a plan made it through the House, it would die in the Senate, where many Republicans much prefer to trim business regulation rather than shrink federal benefits for individuals. The GOP may succeed in slashing some regulatory budgets, limiting federal hiring and pay, and curbing what they consider waste, fraud and abuse. And Obama will probably go along with some small spending cuts. All of this may have great symbolic meaning for both the anti-government right and the pro-government left. But the impact on the overall deficit will be much less than the heated rhetoric will imply.

 

An tumblr that lives up to its name.

Larison rebuffs Beinart:

[T]he constant search for a “Tea Party foreign policy” seems to be a waste of time. If there is a movement of activists and voters focused almost exclusively on one set of domestic issues, most pundits wouldn’t ask what the foreign policy views of movement members are. The question would never come up, because the movement consciously defined its priorities as having nothing to do with foreign policy. For that matter, there isn’t much interest in the domestic political preferences of explicitly antiwar movements, except by way of trying to discredit or defame them as part of the “fringe.” Yes, if Tea Partiers wanted to be thoroughgoing Jeffersonians and strict constructionists, they would favor dramatic reductions in the warfare state as Beinart says, but what gives Beinart the impression that there are suddenly legions of Jeffersonians among the Republican rank-and-file?

An eye-opening series of charts.

Jonathan Rauch argues that the anti-GOProud CPAC scuffle exposes a Republican weak spot: 

[C]onservatives’ hostility to homosexuality isolates them politically from the rest of the public, and the anti-gay consensus is fracturing even on the right (44 percent of Republicans say homosexuality should be accepted by society).

Translation: an issue which once divided and dispirited the Democratic coalition while uniting and energizing conservatives now cuts the other way. It’s a wedge issue against the right. Not just temporarily, either.