Category: Republicans

Militarizing Politics

Via Digby, I see that Sarah Palin and her own private security force have recently engaged in exactly the same sort of bullying, anti-free speech behavior as Joe Miller and his paramilitary guards. Shannyn Moore reports:

Sarah Palin & company spent several days in Homer filming her “Sarah Palin’s Uh-laska” show. (Eyes rolled).

On the public dock, private security patted down private citizens. The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure from their government. Private security searching private citizens in a public place, doesn’t fall under that category. It’s a bit more hinky.

Whether it was TLC or the Palins who contracted security, under what authority did they operate in a public location? Were they looking for weapons? Well, now there’s a Second Amendment issue.

This is Alaska, we carry guns. You can open-carry or acquire a concealed weapons permit from the state. If you are a law abiding citizen, you don’t even need a permit. Sarah Palin recently endorsed Alaska Tea Party Candidate Joe Miller for US Senate. His supporters carried assault rifles in last month’s Golden Days Parade in Fairbanks. If weapons are good enough for a public parade, weapons should be fine at a public dock.

Maybe it wasn’t about guns. Maybe it was about cameras. In that case, it’s a First Amendment issue. Whether Palin had a problem with the First Amendment, the Second Amendment or the Fourth Amendment, she contradicted her entourage’s actions at the Homer dock.

Risking accusations of being all “Wee-Wee’d Up”, one Homer woman made a sign in her shed. She then took the 30-foot-by-3-foot banner out to the boat harbor. It said “WORST GOVERNOR EVER”. Kathleen Gustafson is a teacher married to a local commercial fisherman. She felt like Sarah Palin had let the state down by becoming a dollar-chasing celebrity and ignoring the oath of office she’d sworn on a Bible.
[…]

Saturday morning, Billy Sullivan helped Kathleen tape the banner up on his place of business at the top of the boat ramp. Then here she came. Sarah.

She couldn’t just walk by. Only a few fishermen and tourists would have seen the banner, but Sarah had to stop and protest….

Billy Sullivan caught much of the interchange on his cell phone camera. The back of her security guard’s head and Todd Palin attempted to block Billy’s view…

In what has become typical tragic irony, Sarah initially claimed to support Kathleen’s First Amendment Rights. But as soon as Billy Sullivan walked toward the dock, one of Palin’s entourage tore down the sign to great applause from her group.

Todd Palin approached Billy (who owns a business called Dockside Fish and buys halibut on that dock) and asked him to get out of the Discovery crew’s shot. “You just can’t get enough of her, can you?” he asked. An Alaska State Trooper told Billy he should call the Homer Police Department and report the trespassing and destruction of property.

Digby draws this correct conclusion:

This isn’t an Alaskan thing. It’s a teabagger thing. They are authoritarians. They have no respect for others’ individual rights, only their own.

That’s my take too. I lived in Alaska for less than a year, but am consistently saddened by how the authoritarianism and quasi-fascism displayed by Palin and Miller keep giving Alaska a bad name. Palin isn’t just making people militant Tea Partiers in Alaska; she’s actually militarizing politics. Never before had I heard of political supporters openly carrying assault rifles in parades – and I went to plenty of parades when I was working in Alaska politics. This isn’t normal. It isn’t about Alaska being a conservative state (it isn’t), nor is it about being a state were gun ownership is common and open carry is legal. This is about a splinter group who are responding to elections with Second Amendment remedies.

What’s so dangerous about this style of politics put forward by Palin and Miller is that it doesn’t serve the Constitution nor individual freedom. It actually serves pure, tribal Republican politics. Miller and Palin might provide the patina of selfish anger, but at the end of the day, it’s Wall Street banks, outsourcing manufacturers, polluting mining companies, and Social Security privatizer who will reap any benefits won at the ballot box. This doesn’t mitigate the danger of the Palin/Miller sect, but it’s important to remember that their electoral successes won’t lead to some sort of free market paradise, devoid of government intervention. Rather, it will be what it’s always been: a question of how far the GOP can bend the regulatory power of government to create a favorable set of conditions for Wall Street and big corporate executives to reach billions in profits, while driving down the wages and benefits of working Americans. The real consequences for this, beyond the continued militarization of politics on the right, are going to be felt by Americans who desperately need the economy to improve and jobs to be created.

“Progressive Hunter”

Media Matters has done an incredible investigative piece looking at Byron Williams, a right-wing extremist who got into a firefight with California Highway Patrol while on his way to kill people at the Tides Foundation and ACLU.  In a jailhouse interview done by an independent journalist, Williams credits Glenn Beck’s conspiracy theory chalkboard and extreme rhetoric as the driving force for his belief that violent action needed to be taken.

This is by no means the only example of right-wing extremists, fueled by Glenn Beck, Michale Savage and Rush Limbaugh, who has turned to violence during the Obama administration. But it is the most direct line, where a murderous shooter credits Beck directly for the source of his commitment to action.

Inconsistent or Incoherent?

Joe Miller is inconsistent. And really incoherent.

Alaska U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller (R) “called the idea of a living, changing Constitution ‘bullcrap,’ and said he would support an amendment for term limits as well as an amendment repealing the 17th Amendment, which allows for the direct election of senators by the public rather than by state legislatures.”

Well, which one is it Joe? Do you think the Constitution can never and should never change, despite Article 5:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Or do you think that the Constitution needs serious changing, as you just proposed by repealing the 17th Amendment and adding an amendment to put term limits in place?

The inconsistency, incoherence, and flat-out idiocy of Tea Party candidates like Joe Miller is simply stunning at times.

Two other points worth highlighting from the same Fairbanks News-Miner piece on Miller. First, he is a GOP Bed Wetter, who thinks that our country will fall apart if there is a major terrorist attack in the US.

“One bomb in one city could end our Constitutional republic,” he said.

Personally, I’m with President Obama. I think America is a resilient country, filled with resilient people. If we are hit by another terrorist attack, we’ll survive it and we’ll move on together to defend the country and defeat the people who perpetrated it. I really don’t get how a tough Kansan like Joe Miller, who actually has a law degree and should know better, thinks American society will collapse in the event of a major attack.

Lastly, Miller has a really bizarre defense for take massive farm subsidies year after year, despite being a supposed opponent of federal entitlements:

The candidate said he was basically forced by federal government to accept the money, which also defined what he could grow there, a system he said creates inefficiencies and could be improved if states only gave farm subsidies as they see fit.

Yet a tough, independent guy stood there and took a handout from the federal government without complaint. He only has a problem when it comes to other Americans getting money from the federal government.

The depth and breadth of Joe Miller’s hypocrisy is still being plumbed.

Simple Answers to Simple Questions

Responding to the story of Tennessee firefighters allowing a house to burn down because the owners hadn’t paid a subscription fee to the fire department, Paul Krugman asks:

This is essentially the same as denying someone essential medical care because he doesn’t have insurance. So the question is, do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens?

No.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

Surely this isn’t legal

ThinkProgress has an incredible expose on how the “US” Chamber of Commerce is fundraising from foreign companies in support of their partisan political efforts.

The Chamber has repeatedly sent out issue alerts attacking Democratic efforts to encourage businesses to hire locally rather thanoutsource to foreign counties. The Chamber has also bitterly fought Democrats for opposing unfettered free trade deals. To galvanize foreign businesses, the Chamber has commissioned former Ambassador Frank Lavin — who served as the McCain-Palin Asia campaign director and has appeared on television multiple times recently saying a Democratic Congress is bad for business — to speak before various foreign Chamber affiliates to talk about the stakes for the 2010 midterm elections.

Because campaign finance laws prohibit foreign entities from contributing to political races here in America, we asked the Chamber to defend the legality of its fundraising operation. We have yet to receive a response. But as word of our investigation began to leak out yesterday, the Chamber informed Politico’s Mike Allen that it is now “preparing a response.”

This is explosive stuff. I don’t know how much traction this will get, but it is clearly a major scandal. Foreign companies trying to buy influence in American politics? Anyone associated with this should be ashamed of what they’re doing to our democracy.

It’s just a reminder that the US Chamber of Commerce, unlike many local chambers of commerce, is not a friend of anyone other than major multinational corporations and the people who will protect their interests in the halls of power.

Left Critiques of the Tea Party

Ari Melber has a great piece in The Nation about the Tea Party. He identifies what at first looks like an interesting puzzle about the critiques by the left of the Tea Party, namely that “liberal attacks on the tea party echo attacks on liberals.”

What’s unrealistic to one voter is inspiring to another. Tea Party leaders, just like purist libertarians or radical progressives, like to begin with first principles and aim for fundamental reform. It is curious, really, how progressive critiques of the tea party so often sound like laundered attacks on progressives – you’re not being realistic, that’s not how government really works, the numbers won’t add up, and, of course, your entire movement should be dismissed based on your most fringe members.

First, these types of critiques by the right on the left have been effective attacks at moving center-left positions outside of the Overton Window and marginalizing them, especially with the national media. What’s good for the goose, etc…

Second, and I think this is more relevant, the critiques of the left on the Tea Party are in fact true. Melber notes Congressman Anthony Weiner rebutting some basic Tea Party budgetary assumptions, showing their numbers do not in fact add up:

Beyond experts and participants, the panel also included one member of the loyal opposition to the loyal opposition: Anthony Weiner. The New York congressman has staked out a role several steps to the left – and decibels above – President Obama. True to form, Weiner dispatched tea party tenets with substance and relish. Since the vast majority of the federal budget goes to defense and permanent entitlement programs, he argued, the tea party simply cannot legislate its anti-spending rage unless it slashes the Pentagon or guts Social Security. (Weiner, in full wonk mode, made this point by saying that 91 percent of the federal budget is comprised of defense and non-discretionary spending. You get the idea.) Of course, Social Security reform couldn’t even get a scheduled vote from congressional Republicans in 2005, when (then-popular) President Bush spearheaded the effort. And electing Republicans to cut defense spending? You’d have better luck buying tempeh from a butcher in Weiner’s Brooklyn district.

To pick one example when it comes to the realism critique, the left called for health care reform, elected a president largely around promises of reforming health care in America, and watched as this promise was delivered, albeit imperfectly. Contrast that with Alaska Tea Party candidate, Kansan Joe Miller, who thinks wrongly that unemployment insurance is unconstitutional and Social Security should be left to the states. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that unemployment insurance is constitutional, while leaving Social Security to the states would require “America forbids its citizens from retiring in a different state than the one that they paid taxes in while working.” I’d say the odds of that happening are zero. That is, Miller and other Tea Party candidates are pushing an agenda that is demonstrably unachievable,  because it is based on flawed constitutional arguments and transparently broken ideas.

The last argument Melber identifies as being turned back from the left on the Tea Party – ” your entire movement should be dismissed based on your most fringe members” – is an interesting one. The notion of hypocrisy on this one would have to assume that there are, in fact, an equal proportion of fringe members with comparable extremism on both sides. Of course Melber knows there’s no comparison between the two and he isn’t suggesting that there is parity here. But when core parts of the Tea Party don’t believe that the President is an American or a Christian, when they want to abolish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment insurance, when there are repeated calls for “Second Amendment remedies” to losing elections, the fringe nature of not just some members of the Tea Party but significant portions of this movement’s chosen candidates for federal office, it’s clear that there is pervasive extremism befitting of marginalization.

It’s true that the critiques the left make of the Tea Party sound like the attacks that have been leveled against the online progressive movement. But truth matters. While the left has been able to elected mainstream politicians who pursue policies actively supported by the left and most of the country passively, these ideas have been legislated and made into reality. By contrast, what the Tea Party puts forth is radical, unpalatable and impossible. So while attacks on the left on these lines should be promptly dismissed as inaccurate, the similar attacks on the Tea Party must be recognized for their veracity. Making a distinction like this isn’t hypocrisy, it’s what common sense and political awareness demand.

Pure Deception

Eric Boehlert’s piece on the sad state of the right wing media in the wake of yesterday’s revelations about James O’Keefe’s plans to sexually assault a CNN reporter as a “prank” is a must-read. With O’Keefe, Boehlert sees a recognition that the right doesn’t even care about having the patina of truthiness in their work anymore. Instead, all that matters is being anti-Obama, anti-Democrat and pro-whatever the extremes of the right are saying. Rather than exile O’Keefe – if not for fraudulent and doctored videos of ACORN, then being convicted attempting to bug Senator Landrieu’s office or now for planning to force a reporter into a compromising sexual position – the best that the right musters is silence. This hack should be tossed to the trash bin of politics by Republicans and Tea Party alike, yet he remains a hero and a Member in Good Standing of the Republican Movement.

Beyond lying and deception, what sort of sick mind thinks trying to con and corner a reporter into a sexually compromising situation is a useful political tool? James O’Keefe is a sociopath and you have to wonder what it says about his colleagues on the right.

Taibbi on the Tea Party

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, on the Tea Party:

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about…

[T]he Tea Party doesn’t really care about issues — it’s about something deep down and psychological, something that can’t be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are (“radical leftists” is the term they prefer), and they’re coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do.

This passage is also good:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don’t love my country? I’m a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It’s not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It’s just that they’re shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.

Taibbi is really one of my favorite journalists today, particularly with his work on contemporary politics and investigating the causes of the financial collapse.

Hubris is a virtue, right?

I’m not sure why Digby is trying to warn the Tea Party away from the “puerile arrogance” seen in this video. Personally, I think the Republican base is right. Clearly they are going to win in 2010. It’s just a formality now. Everyone can put down their tea bags and go watch reruns of Surviving Nugent from Netflix for the next seven weeks.

Also, I think the pledge in this video that not only will there be no new taxes and no high spending under a Tea Party-driven Republican Party, but that under a Republican majority there will be “no more taxes” and “no more spending.” So if the federal government exists one day into a Republican majority, the American public was lied to. Or, more importantly, the Tea Party was lied to and their only remaining course of action will be to throw the bums out…AGAIN!

DeMint, Kingmaker

Interesting piece in The Hill about South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, the Senate’s biggest advocate of the Tea Party. Establishment Republicans are not surprisingly angry at DeMint for playing a role in Tea Party challengers knocking off more electable Republicans, notably in Delaware, Colorado, Kentucky and Florida. His actions could end up costing Republicans a chance to win the majority in the Senate.

Can you imagine the outrage if a Democratic elected – say Al Franken or Sherrod Brown – was running around the country, encouraging progressives to challenge incumbents and enact a real progressive vision?

I actually have a lot of respect for DeMint as a movement operative. What he is doing is what the Tea Party wants and what is needed for Tea Party candidates to win. That he’s doing it in the face of the insular, clubhouse rules of the Senate is even more remarkable. I just wish there were comparable progressive elected officials who dedicated their energies to not just electing Democrats, but electing movement progressives.