Month: January 2012

Contra Drum, Andrew Sprung believes Obama will paint Romney as both a flip-flopper and an extremist:

It seems to me … that the flip-flopper charge and the extremist charge are complementary.  Romney, in pursuit of a nomination prize awarded by the Republican base, has flip-flopped into extremism: no new taxes, no universal healthcare, no abortion, no attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, no aid to homeowners, no job-creating measures that involve federal spending, no accommodation for Gingrich-styled "deserving" undocumented aliens.  Each of these positions represents a reversal of a past position (except perhaps aid to hurting homeowners). 

Jack Shepherd dug up a hilariously awkward interview with Beck at the beginning of his career:

I guess they're just incompetent:

The 183,064 government job cuts in 2011 represented a record high for that sector since Challenger began tracking it in 2002.

The gap between what Republicans say about Obama and, well, reality is growing. I thought that was close to impossible.

Daniel McCarthy makes the case that the libertarian has begun an "architectonic shift" within the GOP: 

More significant than the overall percentage Paul claimed [in Iowa] is the 48 percent he won of the under-30 vote. This augurs more than just a change in the factional balance within the GOP. It’s suggestive of a generational realignment in American politics. The fact that many of these young people do not consider themselves Republican is very much the point: Paul’s detractors cite that as a reason to discount them, but what it really means is that the existing ideological configuration of U.S. politics doesn’t fit the rising generation. They’re not Republicans, but they’re voting in a Republican primary: at one time, that same description applied to Southerners, social conservatives, and Reagan Democrats, groups that were not part of the traditional GOP coalition and whose participation completely remade the party.

And Paul has the money to stick around for a while.

"An article on Monday about Jack Robinson and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children's TV show "My Little Pony" that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover," – the NYT.

Ponnuru, contra Ornstein, thinks Santorum has legs:

Going after Santorum’s “highly charged statements” would present dangers for Romney that I doubt he will want to take. Again the contrast to Gingrich is instructive. There is no significant Republican constituency that is invested in the claim that the welfare state made Susan Smith drown her kids, or that people like him are what stands between us and Auschwitz, or that the failure to qualify for the Virginia ballot was comparable to Pearl Harbor. There is one for the view that homosexual behavior is immoral. 

Ramesh worries that Santorum might also "lecture" the country about the evils of contraception, not something with a huge constituency even among evangelicals. But what makes Santorum Santorum is not that he just believes that homosexual sex and contraception are immoral – but that the government has a vital and legitimate role to penalize private sexual consensual acts if they are not within a heterosexual marriage. Santorum is quite explicit about this, and based his opposition to the Lawrence vs Texas decision on exactly those grounds:

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

He does not believe that you have the right to adult, consensual sex in your own bedroom, if the government decides it's bad for society as a whole. That includes masturbation and contraception on exactly the same grounds as homosexual acts. All of them are sodomy and subject to government regulation. Santorum can say he is just referring to the role of the courts, not backing substantive legislation to criminalize private adult consensual sex. But it's clear he believes that such sex is a serious threat to civilization, and only prudential grounds should restrain the government's decision to enforce that morality.

Recall that Santorum is contemptuous of the whole idea of the pursuit of happiness, if it isn't regulated by Catholic natural law. He is opposed, in his own words, to "this whole idea of personal autonomy," not to mention "the idea that people should be left alone."

Santorum's slogan is "Faith, Family, Freedom." But it is more accurately described as Faith Family and Freedom That Doesn't Violate The Tenets of Faith and Family as defined by Santorum. This is what the Tea Party comes down to in the end: opposition to the whole idea of freedom or being left alone by the government. I'd be laughing if I weren't crying.

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)

How Obama frames the Richard Cordray appointment, which is legally questionable:

Ezra Klein provides background and explains why Obama is trying to push through Cordray's appointment and the appointments of three other nominees:

The answer is that, without them, the institutions they're intended to lead will fail. Obama's maneuver was about the agencies, not the appointees. In the absence of a director, the CFPB can't exercise its powers. The expiration of Craig Becker's term on the NLRB, meanwhile, means the board is about to fall from three members to two members — a number that the Supreme Court has ruled is less than a legal quorum, and so a number that means the NLRB cannot make binding rulings. This is not an accident: Republicans have straightforwardly argued that they would obstruct the confirmation of any and all nominees to the CFPB until the Obama administration agreed to radically reform the agency. They were, in other words, using their power to block nominations to hold kill or change agencies that they didn't have the votes to reform through the normal legislative order.

Frum believes both parties are guilty of power grabs:

[Y]es, Obama has here pushed presidential power beyond past limits. But it’s not only presidents who can bend the rules. The Senate has also pushed its powers here beyond the usual limits. The Senate is pretending to be in session when it’s obviously not in session. It is engaging in this pretense in order to use its power over confirmations to negate an agency lawfully created by the prior Congress. Most fundamentally, the Senate here is further extending a weird quirk in its own rules–the quirk that allows individual senators to delay votes on appointments–in ways that allow the Senate minority to impose its will on the whole US government.

First Read thinks Obama is setting himself up to run against Congress:

[I]t is absolutely clear that he and his team want a fight with Congress — and any legal challenge that comes with it. And they've made it clear if they don't currently HAVE a dispute with Congress, they are happy to pick a fight. And this fight, over the Consumer Protection board, has the added benefit of creating an "us vs. them" middle class narrative. After Obama made his recess appointment of Richard Cordray official, the Romney campaign fired off this press release: “This action represents Chicago-style politics at its worst and is precisely what then-Senator Obama claimed would be ‘the wrong thing to do.’ Sadly, instead of focusing on economic growth, he is once again focusing on creating more regulation, more government, and more Washington gridlock.” But the Obama campaign fired back with this: “By opposing the appointment of Richard Cordray to run the first-ever consumer watchdog bureau, Mitt Romney today stood with predatory lenders and Republicans in Congress over the middle class.”

Chait argues that Romney is being baited:

Romney comes from the world of finance, has drawn extremely strong support from finance, and he simply looks like a stereotypical Wall Street shark. If I were Obama, I would want to set up financial reform as the number one contrast issue of the presidential election. Appointing Cordray to the post is a good step to establishing the contrast. And Romney, perhaps still concerned about a conservative primary threat, seems to be walking right into the trap.

Again: the strategic direction and discipline is coming from Obama not the GOP right now. They are in danger of boxing themselves in with a plutocratic candidate in a populist moment.

First there was Shit Girls Say. Then there was Shit Black Girls Say. The inevitable next step:

Not all of these parodies are created equal; "Shit Yogis Say" is just ok.