That's the jaw-dropping conclusion of a recent study by the study by the Center for American Progress. Thanks to the Republicans' historic use of Filibusters, anonymous holds, and other obstructionist tactics, President Obama's confirmation rate is "falling off a cliff." The CAP assessment of data from the Congressional Research Service, the Justice Department and the Senate Judiciary Committee found that:

Such tactics are completely unprecedented, and so are their results. Fewer than 43 percent of President Obama's judicial nominees have so far been confirmed, while past presidents have enjoyed confirmation rates as high as 93 percent. And President Obama's nominees have been confirmed at a much slower rate than those of his predecessor--nearly 87 percent of President George W. Bush's judicial nominees were confirmed.

To be sure, the Republicans' successful rearguard action is helping to preserve conservative dominance of the federal judiciary. But with its sluggish pace of nominations, the Obama administration isn't helping itself.

Last November Charlie Savage of the New York Times warned that the "opportunities to reshape judiciary are slipping away." And Republican obstructionism was only part of the story:

By this point in 2001, the Senate had confirmed five of Mr. Bush's appellate judges -- although one was a Clinton pick whom Mr. Bush had renominated -- and 13 of his district judges. By contrast, Mr. Obama has received Senate approval of just two appellate and four district judges...

Mr. Bush, who made it an early goal to push conservatives into the judicial pipeline and left a strong stamp on the courts, had already nominated 28 appellate and 36 district candidates at a comparable point in his tenure. By contrast, Mr. Obama has offered 12 nominations to appeals courts and 14 to district courts.

In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that the same dynamic of a distracted Obama White House and scorched-earth Republican opposition was continuing to leave vacancies across the federal courts:

During President Obama's first year, judicial nominations trickled out of the White House at a far slower pace than in President George W. Bush's first year. Bush announced 11 nominees for federal appeals courts in the fourth month of his tenure. Obama didn't nominate his 11th appeals court judge until November, his 10th month in office...

Key slots stand without nominees, including two on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the body that reviews decisions by federal agencies and a court that is considered second in importance only to the Supreme Court. Federal judicial vacancies nationwide have mushroomed to well over 100, with two dozen more expected before the end of the year. To date, the Obama administration has nominees for just 52 of those slots, and only 17 have been confirmed.

In President Obama's defense, the administration has been stretched thin, grappling with the Bush recession, health care reform and two wars. But the window of opportunity to undo the dramatic rightward swing of the Third Branch is closing fast. As for Republicans, in 2007 then Mississippi Senator Trent Lott explained how the GOP would approach judicial nominations - and virtually anything else Democrats would want to do:

"The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it's working for us."

For more background, data, and charts, see "For GOP and Media, Obstructionism is the New Normal", "GOP Wins Gold Medal for Obstructionism", and "Bipartisanship's Willing Executioners."

—Perrspective 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

A month ago, Lahaye worried that the addition of Elena Kagan to the United States Supreme Court could be one of the "signs of the times." Now in a Fox News appearance with former Arkansas Governor and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, the man who brought rapture to millions of readers suggested the end could be nigh under President Obama:

LAHAYE: [Obama's Socialism] is going to work against our country, and bring us closer to the apocalypse.

HUCKABEE: Are we now living in the End Times, from your perspective?

LAHAYE: Very definitely governor. I believe that what we see around us, for example the three major issues of our day are the global government, global economy and global religion and those are the three legs of the stool of globalism. And it happens at the same time that Israel just happens to be back in their land for the first time in almost 1900 years. At the same time that Russia and the Islamic nations are getting together - they've never done that in the history of the world - and yet now they're the enemies of this country that God said they'd bring back into the land.

If so, that should be just fine for Mike Huckabee and his friends in the religious right and the Republican Party. As it turns out, many of the leading voices of a major American political party not only look forward to the Rapture and the Second Coming of Christ but believe it will come in the form of an End of Days conflict with Iran over the fate of Israel. For them, Armageddon isn't a concern, it's their foreign policy.

Predictions of the fulfillment of biblical prophesy have long been a staple in evangelical circles and the far-right fringe. But what may have been a laughing matter for some became deadly serious during the 2008 presidential election when John McCain sought (and later renounced) the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee.

While Hagee's anti-Catholicism and praise for the divinely mandated role of Adolf Hitler led McCain to throw him under the bus, it is the influential pastor's belief that final the biblical battle against the Anti-Christ will be fought by the United States against Iran that should have frightened Americans most. As Hagee put it in 2006 at the annual gathering of his group, Christians United for Israel (CUFI):

"The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West...a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ."

As it turns out, Huckabee doesn't merely oppose the consensus around a two-state solution in the Middle East. (Last year, Huckabee proclaimed, "The two-state solution is no solution, but will cause only problems." Previously, he insisted there's "no such thing as a Palestinian.") In Israel to support extremist Meir Kahane acolyte Dov Hikind to raise funds to expand Israeli settlements, Huckabee in August in essence backed de facto ethic cleansing as the answer to Palestinian aspirations for a national homeland - somewhere else:

"The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."

Pushing her book in November, Sarah Palin not only went rogue on 40 years of American foreign policy, but raised suspicions that she believes the Apocalypse is nigh.

"I disagree with the Obama administration on that. I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don't think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand."

(As Jeffrey Goldberg reported in The Atlantic, while Palin "holds fairly typical Protestant Zionist beliefs, and one of those beliefs is the regathering of the Jews in Israel," the minister of the Assembly of God church she frequented believed that "based on some personal revelation he claims to have gotten from God, that the Jews would move to Alaska during the Tribulation.")

Given the stand-off over the Iranian nuclear program even as the regime faces growing unrest, the need to scrutinize the End Times views of the GOP's leading lights is becoming even more urgent. With the likes of John Bolton, Rush Limbaugh, and Alan Kuperman agitating for military strikes against Tehran, the growing influence of Rapture Republicans is a potentially combustible catalyst.

But these developments are not new. As I wrote back in May 2006 ("Bush, Iran and the Second Coming"), key figures in the radical religious right and their allies in the Bush White House see Israel and end-of-times conflict with Iran as the realization of biblical prophesy contained in the Book of Revelation.

The influence and impact of evangelical thinking and language about the End of Times and divine intervention upon the now departed Bush administration is made clear in books like Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy" and Michael Lind's "Made in Texas." Phillips concludes that George W. Bush is convinced that "God wanted him to be president", a view backed by Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, who reported, "Among the things he said to us was: I believe that God wants me to be president." As White House official Tim Goeglein once put it, "I think President Bush is God's man at this hour, and I say this with a great sense of humility."

President Bush himself has not publicly claimed to have a divine mandate. (As Time reported after September 11, however, "privately, Bush even talked of being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment.") But Bush is clear in his belief that God's hand was at work in his presidency. Just last week, Bush defended his decision to invade Iraq, declaring:

"I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free."

During a February 2003 National Prayer Breakfast, the President intoned:

"We can be confident in the ways of Providence...Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God."

During a March 2006 appearance in Cleveland, President Bush brushed aside the question, "Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the Apocalypse? And if not, why not?" While Bush may or may not literally believe that Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ are imminent, his radical right Republican base is another matter altogether. Appearing on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight in March 2006, Kevin Phillips noted that while Bush couldn't publicly state that he literally believes in the biblical prophecy of Armageddon in the Book of Revelations, his conservative Christian allies clearly do:

"A survey by "Newsweek" several years back found that 45 percent of American Christians believed in Armageddon, that it was coming. And about the same percentage thought the anti- Christ was already on Earth. Now, if you were to take the religious Christians, and the Republican coalition includes most of the religious Christians, you probably have about 55 percent of the Republican coalition that believes in this."

By "this," Phillips is referring to the end of times struggle in Israel, the conversion or mass death of Jews with the Second Coming of Christ. As the late Jerry Falwell put it, "scripture is clear on that." (Falwell also told Newsweek's Howard Fineman that he introduced George W. Bush to Tim LaHaye, author of the "Left Behind" series on the Second Coming and the Rapture.) That future, as Rod Dreher described it in the National Review several years ago:

"To Jews who adhere to ancient tradition, whose number include religious Israeli nationalists, the long-awaited Messiah will return to become the king of Israel and high priest of a rebuilt Temple, which can only be on Temple Mount. For Christian fundamentalists, Jesus Christ's return at the height of the battle of Armageddon, in which forces of the Antichrist clash in Israel with a 200 million-man army from the East, will require a Third Temple from which the Lord will begin a millennial reign."

The result for Bush's amen corner was what Fineman described as "Apocalypse Politics." That entails above all unswerving support for Israel. Israel is seen as ordained by God, a view held by 44% of Americans, according to a 2003 Pew Research survey. But the evangelical Christian Zionist movement goes further, seeing in Israel "a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy about the second coming of Jesus," a belief shared by 36% of Americans in the Pew research. For the Republican religious right, Israel must not only be staunchly supported in its conflict with the Palestinians, but that the conflict itself should be welcomed, even accelerated.

Bush's conservative Christian allies back Israel in both word and deed. Billy Graham and Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network offer daily prayers for Israel. For one-time presidential candidate Gary Bauer claimed, "America has an obligation to stand by Israel" because "God has promised that land to the Jewish people." Evangelicals organize pilgrimages and tours of Israel and even provide Jewish settlements in the West Bank with financial support. When the President Bush pressured Ariel Sharon in 2002 to pull back its tanks from towns in the West Bank, the White House received a hundred thousand emails from Falwell's followers and faced the Christian Coalition on Mall in Washington. Bush backed off. As the Village Voice reported in 2004, the Bush White House consulted with rapture Christians before finalizing its policy on Sharon's proposed Gaza withdrawal.

But the friends of Bush are not content to wait for the Second Coming of Christ and with it, the slaughter of the mass of Jews with the conversion of the remaining 144,000. As Falwell suggested, the arrival of the End of Times should be prodded, advanced and cajoled:

"The danger, if there is a danger in believing in the imminence of the Lord's return - and I do, is to become a fatalist, that certain things are going to happen regardless and there's nothing we can do about them. That isn't true."

Nowhere is this desire to accelerate biblical prophecy more on display than in the ongoing effort to breed the symbolic "red heifer." Since the early 1990's, fundamentalist Christians in the United States have been trying to help breed the perfect calf that will signal the Second Coming. As the NRO's Dreher described the biblical role of the red heifer:

"The ashes of a flawless red heifer - an extremely rare creature - were required by the ancient Hebrews to purify worshipers who went into the Temple to pray. In modern times, rabbinical law forbids Jews from setting foot on the Temple Mount, thus violating the site where the Holy of Holies dwelled, until and unless they are ritually purified. Without a perfect red heifer to sacrifice, the Third Temple cannot be built, and Moshiach - the Messiah - will not come."

It's no wonder Haaretz columnist David Landau deemed the red heifer "a four-legged bomb" with the potential to "set the entire region on fire."

Hagee calls pastors "the spiritual generals of America" an appropriate phrase given his reliance on them to rally their troops behind his message. The CUFI board of directors includes the Reverend Jerry Falwell, former Republican presidential candidate and religious right activist Gary Bauer, and George Morrison, pastor to the 8,000-member Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, Colorado, and chairman of the board of Promise Keepers. Rod Parsley, the Ohio televangelist who is rapidly becoming a major political figure in the Christian right, signed on as a regional director.

Just how much influence the likes of Hagee had - and have - over Bush, his foreign policy team and the Republican leadership is open to debate. But as Max Blumenthal and Bill Moyers each reported in 2007, Pastor Hagee counts Washington's hardest of hard liners among his friends and CUFI allies. In October, Moyers described CUFI's annual summit in DC featuring Hagee's friends in high places:

At the recent annual CUFI summit in Washington, D.C., prominent politicians were present to pledge support for this growing movement, including Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, as well as former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Lieberman particularly sang Hagee's praise:

"He is a Ish Elokim, a man of God and those words really fit him...like Moses he's become a leader of a mighty multitude, even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the promised land."

Meanwhile, despite Lahaye's worries about Barack Obama, the leaders of the 50 million evangelicals who now constitute the backbone of the conservative movement aren't merely "waiting for Armageddon." When it comes to fomenting conflict involving the United States, Israel, Iran and much of the Middle East, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, John Hagee, Pat Robertson and a host of other rapturous Republican stalwarts are taking a hands-on approach. For them, apparently, the End can't come soon enough.

—Perrspective 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Everything, they say, is bigger in the Texas. So it is with the failure of the health care system. Leading the nation with a horrifying 25% of its residents uninsured, Texas ranked 46th in the Commonwealth Fund's 2009 scorecard of state health care performance. Nevertheless, that dismal performance was no barrier to Governor Rick Perry proclaiming that the Lone Star state has the best health care in the country.

Perry the full-time fabulist and part-time secessionist made his jaw-dropping claim on Bill Bennett's radio show Wednesday:

BENNETT: Thirty seconds on the doctors. You've got the best health care in the country, now I think, don't you? Because of your tort law?

PERRY: We do, yes. I spoke with the doctors yesterday in San Antonio. We've got, you know, three of the great health care -- well not -- three of the great health care regions. When you think about the medical center in Houston, there are more doctors, nurses, researchers go to work there than any other place in the world, every day. You got UT Southwestern up in University of Texas Health Sciences Center, San Antonio, Scott & White. I mean these fabulous health care facilities.

As it turns out, this isn't the first time Perry has made such grandiose claims about the Texas health care mess. In a Washington Post op-ed titled, "Let States Lead the Way," Perry and Newt Gingrich blasted Democratic health care reform proposals. The duo insisted it is the Lone Star State which should be at the front of that vanguard. In response, an incredulous Ezra Klein asked, "How's that working out?"

The answer, of course, is quite poorly. While from 2007 to 2009 Texas nudged its way from a horrific 48th to a merely miserable 46th in the Commonwealth Fund rankings, the health care system there remains an ongoing calamity for its residents. Among the poster children for the failure of red state health care, Perry's state brought up the rear across the five indicators measured. When it comes to health care access and equity, Texas is dead last.

While it is predictable that Republicans Bennett, Perry and Gingrich cite Texas' draconian tort reform law as an example for the nation, the data is far from clear as to its benefits in actually reducing malpractice premiums, lowering costs and attracting physicians to the underserved state.

As detailed in "Republican Malpractice Myths," it comes as no surprise that a cavalcade of GOP leaders, including Perry, Sarah Palin, John Cornyn and John Kyl cited the same study showing malpractice awards caps enacted in 2003 in Texas fueled an increase in the number of physicians in the Lone Star State:

According to the Pacific Research Institute, medical licenses in Texas have increased 18 percent in the last four years, with 7,000 new doctors moving to the state.

The actual impact of the Texas law, however, remains in dispute. The state's rising population, its 48th place ranking in physicians per capita, its staggering percentage of uninsured, its lack of an income tax and the 147% jump in malpractice premiums in 2003 alone make gauging the unique contribution of malpractice caps difficult to assess. Regardless, health care costs in Texas have continued their upward spiral. . (It's worth noting that Governor Haley Barbour's claim that tort reform meant that physicians in Mississippi "have quit leaving the state and limiting their practices to avoid lawsuit abuse" has similarly been debunked.)

Ultimately, Rick Perry's latest myth-making only serves to highlight the two inescapable truths of the debate over health care reform in the United States. First, health care is worst in precisely those reddest of states where Republicans poll best. Second, Republicans like Rick Perry lie about that fact.

—Perrspective 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Nowhere is the Republican myth-making on behalf of the richest Americans more on display than in California. There, former CEOs Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are pushing policies to transfer tax dollars into the vaults of the wealthy, including their own.

As you'll recall, in 2008, former HP chief executive Fiorina had a troubled tenure as a campaign surrogate for John McCain. But while she misrepresented McCain's views on abortion, on taxes she's hasn't deviated from the script.

And that script says, as McCain claimed in 2007:

"Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues."

As it turns out, not so much. The national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under George W. Bush. Analyses from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that the Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half of the deficits during his presidency and, if made permanent, would contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession - combined.

Nevertheless, two weeks ago Carly Fiorina joined John Boehner, Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio, Tom Coburn, Judd Gregg, Mitch McConnell and the rest of the new Republican alchemists in her battle against Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer:

"Let me propose something that may seem crazy to you: you don't need to pay for tax cuts. They pay for themselves, if they are targeted, because they create jobs."

And in almost perfect segue for her Golden State Republican colleague Meg Whitman, Fiorina added, "Why are we making it harder for people to invest capital? We should be making it easier!"

The former eBay CEO Whitman couldn't agree more. At a time when California is billions of dollars in the red, the billionaire has proposed killing the state's capital gains tax altogether. As her campaign brochure declares:

Eliminate the state tax on capital gains.

California is one of the few states in the country that taxes capital gains at a higher rate than traditional income. This is double taxation at its worst.

Not only is Whitman's claim false, as the Los Angeles Times duly reported. But as the Times' Michael Hiltzik also noted, ending the capital gains tax would cost California up to $10 billion in revenue annually even as it would put tens of millions of dollars directly into Meg Whitman's pocketbook.

Meg Whitman, the billionaire former chief executive of EBay, proposes to eliminate the state tax on capital gains. That tax, like the state tax on all other income, tops out at 10.3% for income exceeding $1 million.

The Whitman campaign refused to tell me this week what percentage of Whitman's income derives from capital gains (which can be defined as profits on stock, bond, real estate and other such investments). Whitman has thus far refused to make public her tax returns, which might hold a clue...Capital gains might even represent the majority of her income in some years.

As Chris Kelly of the Huffington Post aptly put it, "Meg Whitman's Tax Plan: She Stops Paying Hers."

Of course, John McCain's one-time stand-ins learned well at the feet of the master. As the Center for American Progress noted, McCain's 2008 tax plan wouldn't merely have added $2 trillion more to the national debt while delivering 58% of its benefits to the richest 1% of American taxpayers. That scheme to cut taxes for the wealthy, including halving the capital gains rate, would have delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars annually directly to John and Cindy McCain.

As for Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, their tax policies are a fiscal suicide pact for California and the nation, all based on an economic delusion. But for them, it would be a California dream come true.

—Perrspective 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Until this week, Republican Congressman Zach Wamp's claim to fame had been breaking his term limits pledge. But now, the Tennessee gubernatorial candidate is making voters a new promise: secession. And as it turns out, Wamp has plenty of company in transforming the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Jefferson Davis. From their inflammatory rhetoric and antebellum nostalgia to their resurrection of discredited Confederate notions of secession, nullification and states rights, the GOP's fans of Dixie constantly remind Americans that the old times there are not forgotten

Wamp made his secession threat during a discussion of the insurance mandate required by the new health reform law:

"I hope that the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government," said Wamp during an interview with Hotline OnCall...

"Patriots like Rick Perry have talked about these issues because the federal government is putting us in an untenable position at the state level."

As the health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those longing for the days of the antebellum South. Missing the irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Southern states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to the House floor to show that he was still fighting the Civil War:

"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States -- the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama's support for the Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which codify the reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:

"What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression."

The next logical step for the neo-Confederate s of the GOP is to threaten secession. And as ThinkProgress reported a year ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested to a furious Tea Party rally that the secession option should be on the table:

Perry told reporters following his speech that Texans might get so frustrated with the government they would want to secede from the union.

"There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that."

To be sure, violating the oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States is an odd definition of patriotism. Sadly for Perry, Wamp and the GOP secessionists, Supreme Court Justice and would-be Elena Kagan colleague Antonin Scalia crushed their hopes:

"If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede."

Hoping to stand the Civil War on its head, President Obama's Republican opponents are once again turning to nullification. Suggesting that South Carolina's effort to nullify federal tariffs starting in 1828 was a blessing, foes of the new health care reform law claiming state sovereignty trumps federal supremacy. The new "Tentherism" is embodied by Minnesota State Senator Tom Emmer, the Republicans' choice to succeed Governor Tim Pawlenty. As TPM recounted last week:

He has even proposed a state constitutional amendment that would allow federal laws to operate in Minnesota only if they were consented to by super-majorities of the state legislature.

Even more appalling, the Republican Confederacy of Dunces literally whitewashes the national stain of slavery. Before Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul longed for a return to the separate-but-equal days of Plessy v. Ferguson, Arizona Rep. Trent Franks declared:

"Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery."

Of course, for the likes Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and Mississippi's Haley Barbour, slavery itself is merely a historical footnote. Barbour explained why his state's proclamation of Confederate History Month, like that of Virginia, made no mention of it at all:

"To me it's a sort of feeling that it's just a nit. That it is not significant. It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly."

In the battle over the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, the Republican National Committee, too, concluded slavery was just a nit. Unable to prevent three-fifths of the Senate from voting on Kagan's nomination, Republicans instead are suggesting the Founders' three-fifths of a person standard for counting slaves was no defect. As an RNC memo from May charges:

"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?"

And so it goes. As Hotline reported, Zach Wamp hopes the American people "will send people to Washington that will, in 2010 and 2012, strictly adhere" to the Constitution. Just not, as TPM pointed out, the one you think. Under the Constitution of the Confederate States of America:

Language promoting "the general welfare" was omitted, while the right to own slaves was explicitly guaranteed although foreign slave trade was forbidden).

The president, serving a single six-year term, was given line-item veto power over the budget, and his cabinet awarded nonvoting seats in Congress. To guarantee Southerners their much-desired states' rights, the federal government had no authority to levy protective tariffs, make internal improvements, or overrule state court decisions, while states had the right to sustain their own armies and enter into separate agreements with one another, and were given greater power in amending the constitution.

So much for the Party of Lincoln.

—Perrspective 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, the former House Speaker and future White House hopeful tried to blame the Obama administration for his own inflammatory comments from earlier in the week. And to be sure, his remarks to Sean Hannity last Monday were incendiary:

"Well, let me say, first of all, Secretary Vilsack did exactly the right thing. I mean I often disagree with this administration. But firing her after that kind of viciously racist attitude was exactly the right thing to do...

And I just think it'd be good for those of us who are often critical of the administration to recognize that here's a case where Secretary Vilsack did exactly the right thing, moved very promptly, and fired somebody who frankly shouldn't be serving the American people because they clearly had a set of attitudes inappropriate for a federal official."

As the nation soon learned, of course, Sherrod's attitude and life story were instead laudable and inspiring. And as he showed in the fall of '94, it was Speaker Gingrich who had a set of attitudes inappropriate for a federal official.

It was Smith who drew Americans' initial sympathy - and subsequent scorn - for her invention of a black bogeyman to conceal her heinous crime.

On October 24th, 1994, as the New York Times recalled, Smith killed her young sons, killings for which she was eventually sentenced to life in prison:

That night, investigators say, Mrs. Smith pulled her car to the edge of a deep lake, stepped out, put the gearshift in drive and let it roll down the boat ramp into the black water. Her two little boys, buckled snugly in their safety seats, died under the lake...

..."I believed her, right up to the end," said Juliaette Kerhulas, of Mrs. Smith's story that a young black man had ordered her out of her burgundy 1990 Mazda on the night of Oct. 25, then driven away with 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alexander in the back seat.

Ms. Kerhulas wasn't the only one who believed in her. None other than future House Speaker Newt Gingrich rushed to the defense of Smith, whose step-father ironically happened to be a prominent Republican fundraiser and member of the Christian Coalition. Even after her confession, Gingrich insisted the Smith murders showed the decay of American society under Democratic Party rule:

Enter Newt Gingrich, who rushed into action on election eve with another reliable generic culprit: society. He said the double murder "vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things," expediently adding that "the only way you get change is to vote Republican."

As Frank Rich recounted in August 1995:

Asked later by Tom Brokaw to elaborate, the Speaker-to-be cited "a direct nexus between the general acceptance of violence" and "the pattern that the counterculture and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society began in the late 60's."

Of course, Newt Gingrich's disgusting political opportunism hardly ends there. He laid blame for the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre at the feet of "the liberal political elite." As frothing-at-the-mouth Tea Partiers turned to violence and intimidation in 2009. Gingrich insisted "it'd be nice for President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid to take some responsibility over what their actions have done to this country."

Now as in 1994, it's Newt Gingrich who needs to take some responsibility.

—Perrspective 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Gonzales' latest playing of the victim card came in the wake of the news that Bush holdover prosecutor Nora Dannehy would not bring charges in the U.S. attorneys scandal. After the release this week of the six-page letter Harper's Scott Horton deemed, "another audacious whitewash at DOJ," Gonzales' lawyer George Terwilliger said his critics "owe him an apology."

On Friday, Alberto Gonzales like James Brown, announced, "I feel good." But as he also told John King of CNN, that's not the only emotion he felt at not having to following in Scooter Libby's footsteps:

"I feel angry that I had to go through this; that my family had to suffer through this and what for? It was for nothing. I'm glad the investigation is over, and I'm glad the American people were reassured that nothing wrong happened during my tenure as the attorney general in connection with the removals of these U.S. attorneys."

When King noted that "the inspector general found you gave inaccurate and misleading statements but they said there was insufficient evidence there was any criminal activity," Gonzales brushed off the imbroglio as a "personnel decision" while countering:

"What is really important that you cited to in the letter is that there is no evidence that the removal of Iglesias or the removal of the other U.S. attorneys that any case was improperly influenced."

Not enough evidence, that is, to put the man George W. Bush called "Fredo" in prison.

Nevertheless, from almost the moment he left office, Alberto Gonzales has cried that he - and not the fired prosecutors, the detainees tortured under his watch or American citizens he enabled to be illegally - is the real victim.

Last December, the former Bush White House counsel and AG portrayed himself an Esquire interview as an innocent bystander caught in the political crossfire:

"I think 90 percent of what happened to me is politics, pure and simple. It's tough to knock out a president. But if you can get someone who is viewed as close to the president, then that may be a good thing."

As it turns out, that Gonzales declaration of victimization pales in comparison to his self-described martyrdom the year before. In December 2008, the former AG complained to the Wall Street Journal that the scorn and derision heaped upon him was undeserved:

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?"

"For some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

For most people, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is a national embarrassment, a pimple on the ass of American history. But to hear him tell it, Fredo is a victim of partisan warfare. And the lesson he apparently learned in Washington is not that he politicized the Bush Justice Department, but that he didn't politicize it enough.

As he acknowledged to Esquire, Gonzales' real lament about the U.S. attorneys firings is that the Bush White House wasn't political enough. After the Republican losses in the 2006 midterm elections, Gonzales suggested, the Bush administration's error was that it simply couldn't get away it:

"We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn't see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn't see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it."

Now ensconced in the law school at Texas Tech, Alberto Gonzales claims "I'm proud of that record," while sighing that "I don't believe my life's work should be solely defined by four years in the White House and two years as attorney general." But in all likelihood, the poster child for Bush administration incompetence and corruption will be recalled for statements like this:

"Senator, that I don't recall remembering."

Back in 2007, the American Bar Association stripped Alberto Gonzales of his title, "ABA Lawyer of the Year." But there's one title he still proudly claims.

Victim.

—Perrspective 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

But now that their party stands on the brink of recapturing the House, GOP leaders including Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) have made a campaign pledge to lead exactly the kind of witch hunt they once pretended to decry. And to be sure, with their talk of subpoenas, investigations and even impeachment, that Republicans are making American voters a promise, not a threat.

Despite his own checkered past, Rep. Issa has emerged, in the words of the New York Times, as President Obama's "Annoyer-in-Chief." And fresh off his inquisition in the Sestak no-pay-for-no-play non-scandal he deemed "Obama's Watergate", Issa last month made clear he plans to ramp up the GOP's efforts to protect its friends and target its enemies. As to a Republican takeover of the House in November, Issa warned:

"That will make all the difference in the world. I won't use it to have corporate America live in fear that we're going to subpoena everything. I will use it to get the very information that today the White House is either shredding or not producing."

As for Michele Bachmann, a Republican inquisition isn't merely a plank in the GOP platform for the fall, it's the entire agenda. In an interview this week, the head of the new Congressional Tea Party caucus vowed perpetual investigations of the Obama administration:

"Oh, I think that's all we should do. I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another, and expose all the nonsense that has gone on."

If this sounds like it flies in the face of decades of Republican talking points, it should.

Mr. Bush said today that the Walsh prosecution reflected "a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences."

The "criminalizing politics" canard has been part of the Republican scandal survival kit ever since.

Take, for example, the imbroglio surrounding the politically motivated firings of U.S attorneys in 2006. On PBS Newhour in May 2007, Republican California Congressman Dan Lundgren was only too happy to offer the criminalization of politics ruse for Monica Goodling and Alberto Gonzales alike. Just moments after acknowledging Goodling's admission of violating civil rules and Hatch Act prohibitions ("she did admit that she made mistakes in that regard"), Lundgren returned the script:

"Let me just say this -- and I think it's an important point -- there is too much of a tendency in this environment to try and criminalize political disputes. That's been the effort here. They have found no basis for criminality, so the suggestion is now a vote of no confidence. Who knows what is next?"

But it was Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) who beat Lundgren to the punch, defending Goodling in the opening moments of her testimony. Pence, who famously compared his March 2007 visit to a Baghdad market to shopping in his home state of Indiana, trotted out the tired GOP talking point for her:

"I'm listening very intently. I'm studying this case. And I want to explore this issue of illegal behavior with you. Because it seems to me so much of this -- and even something of what we've heard today in this otherwise cordial hearing -- is about the criminalization of politics. In a very real sense, it seems to be aabout the attempted criminalization of things that are vital to our constitutional system of government, namely the taking into consideration of politics in the appointment of political officials within the government."

Later that morning, of course, Monica Goodling admitted her own lawbreaking and suggested that Attorney General Gonzales may have obstructed justice in trying to coach her. Acknowledging that "I believe I crossed the line, but I didn't mean to", Goodling clarified for all why she sought immunity in the first place:

"I do acknowledge that I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions, and I may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions, and I regret those mistakes."

(As it turned out, the DOJ's own inspector general later rejected Goodling's criminalization of politics maneuver.)

GonzoGate, however, is far from the first 21st century use of the "criminalizing politics" defense by Team GOP and its echo chamber. Consider the case of Tom Delay. As early as April 2005, a furious Delay declared of the ethic charges swirling around him, "Democrats have made clear that their only agenda is the politics of personal destruction and the criminalization of politics." Amazingly, that comment came before Delay's own October 2005 indictment in Texas for money laundering in association with his Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC).

Unsurprisingly, the conservative echo chamber rushed to Delay's defense and magnified his talking point. Days after Delay's indictment by District Attorney Ronnie Earle, Robert Novak penned a column titled "Criminalizing Politics", concluding:

'Democrats are ecstatic. The criminalization of politics may work, even if the case against DeLay is as threadbare as it looks."

No discussion of Robert Novak and the Republican redefinition of GOP crime as everyday political disagreements could be complete without a look the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. While neither Karl Rove nor others were ever charged with the technical and narrowly defined offense of revealing the identity of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak and others, Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby was convicted by jury on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice. But for the familiar goose-steppers of the conservative ascendancy, Libby the felon too was a victim of the criminalization of politics.

The usual cavalcade of apologists for Republican law-breaking swarmed to Libby's defense. With his looming indictment in the fall of 2005, Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison compared Libby to Martha Stewart, and offered a new variant of the Delay sound bite, the "perjury technicality." Hutchison said she hoped that:

"That if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."

Hutchison, of course, had plenty of company in offering the criminalization of politics canard in the CIA leak case. On October 14, 2005, Bill Kristol complained, "I am worried about what happens to the administration if Rove is indicted," adding, "I think it's the criminalization of politics that's really gotten totally out of hand." In succeeding days, Kristol's Fox News colleagues Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Stuart Varney and Chris Wallace joined the chorus singing from the RNC's criminalization of politics hymnal. On October 24th, Kristol took to the pages of the Weekly Standard to denounce a supposed Democratic strategy of "criminalizing conservatives." When Libby was later convicted, the Wall Street Journal editorial page called for a pardon. The WSJ cited grave dangers if the Libby verdict were to stand: "perhaps the worst precedent would be normalizing the criminalization of policy differences."

Sadly, two years later, President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder were complicit in aiding and abetting the Republican criminalization of politics defense. This time, the misdeeds concerned the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture.

During his confirmation hearings in January 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder reassured Republican torture enthusiasts in the Senate when he declared "we don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist" with the outgoing Bush White House. But with prosecution of the Bush torture team back on the table after the release of the OLC memos and reports from the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, the Republican echo chamber is quickly circling the wagons in defense of the indefensible.

In a scathing April 2009 editorial titled, "Presidential Poison," the Wall Street Journal went on the attack using the GOP's tried and untrue criminalizing politics canard:

Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret...

Above all, the exercise will only embitter Republicans, including the moderates and national-security hawks Mr. Obama may need in the next four years. As patriotic officials who acted in good faith are indicted, smeared, impeached from judgeships or stripped of their academic tenure, the partisan anger and backlash will grow...

Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, due in part to his personal charm and his seeming goodwill. By indulging his party's desire to criminalize policy advice, he has unleashed furies that will haunt his Presidency.

Of course, those furies were unleashed long before Barack Obama took the oath of office. But just in case Americans needed a reminder, former "blog of the year" Power Line lashed out in a piece called "Criminalizing Conservatism." Rather than advising conservatives to try the novel approach to governing which excludes committing crimes, John Hinderaker warned that his persecuted right-wing partisans are rapidly becoming an endangered species:

"Many liberals don't just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail. Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences...

President Obama and his party may achieve another objective by publicly making this kind of threat: deterring Republicans from serving in public life. For many Republicans considering whether to accept an appointment to government office, the prospect that they may be subjected to criminal prosecution if the next administration is Democratic could well tip the balance in favor of remaining in private life."

Columnist and Fox News regular Fred Barnes has been making that same bogus case for years. Whether the scandal involved Plamegate, federal prosecutors or even public broadcasting, Barnes played the same "criminalizing politics" card. And with the prospect of torture prosecutions, he's sounding like a broken record:

"Pat Leahy, the senator from Vermont, is one of the most partisan people in the history of politics, and certainly in Congress today. And what he wants is to criminalize policy differences...I think that's exactly the wrong thing to do."

Regrettably, Barnes was seconded by David Broder, the supposed dean of the Washington press corps, who declared of the potential prosecution of the Bush torture team in April 2009:

"It would set the precedent for turning all future policy disagreements into political or criminal vendettas"

Predictably, Senators Kit Bond and John McCain among others faithfully reproduced the GOP talking point about potential torture prosecution constituting a "banana republic," Following the script, Bond insisted, "We don't criminally prosecute people we disagree with when we change office."

As for Michele Bachmann and Darrell Issa, himself deeply involved in the Bush administration's purge of U.S. prosecutors, they couldn't agree more. Unless, that is, they are in the majority and the office in question is held by a Democrat.

—Perrspective 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) |

That history hasn't prevented Carlson from leading the right-wing jihad against the members of Journolist:

Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.

Apparently, that demand for journalistic ethics doesn't apply to Tucker Carlson and his Daily Caller.

That was clear from the moment Carlson announced his new adventure to create what David Weigel in January deemed the "right's answer to HuffPost." Last summer, he declared his goal was a news site "along the lines of The Huffington Post" with an ideology "not in sync with the current program." And as Howard Kurtz noted:

When he announced the Daily Caller last spring, Carlson was more explicit about its ideology, telling Human Events the site would be "opposed to what's going on" under President Obama -- "a radical increase in federal power... a version of socialism."

But facing pushback over his plan to carry water for the GOP and the conservative movement, Carlson feigned a retreat:

"Our goal is not to get Republicans elected. Our goal is to explain what your government is doing. We're not going to suck up to people in power, the way so many have. There's been an enormous amount of throne-sniffing," he says, a sly grin beneath the mop of brown hair. "It's disgusting."

As it turns out, what was really disgusting was Tucker Carlson's sniffing of his father's throne. When George W. Bush was in power and in trouble over the outing of Valerie Plame, Tucker was quite the suck up, indeed. He just never explained why.

The scandal surrounding the outing of the covert CIA operative and the subsequent conviction of Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby provides case in point. Few voices on television were more strident in Libby's defense than Tucker Carlson. But throughout, he remained silent on his father's leadership of the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Fund.

From the beginning, Tucker Carlson aimed both barrels at Libby prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In November 2005, he insisted Fitzgerald was "accusing Libby - falsely and in public - of undermining this country's security," adding, "Fitzgerald should apologize, though of course he never will." Reversing his past position in support of independent counsels, Carlson in February 2007 blasted "this lunatic Fitzgerald, running around destroying people's lives for no good reason."

With Libby's conviction and sentencing in 2007, Carlson the son echoed Carlson the father. Richard Carlson, a former U.S. ambassador and past president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, couriered a check to Libby on the day of his indictment. On May 29, 2007, he reacted to a Fitzgerald filing which confirmed that Valerie Plame was indeed a covert agent at the time of her outing:

"I think it's certainly unseemly that he is kicking him while he's down. For Fitzgerald, to get on his high horse, it's disgusting and he should be ashamed of himself."

Just one week later on June 6, 2007, son Tucker joined in, essentially calling Fitzgerald a liar and Plame a perjurer over her clandestine status:

"CIA clearly didn't really give a shit about keeping her identity secret if she's going to work at f**king Langley...I call bullshit on that, I don't care what they say."

When President Bush ultimately refused to pardon Scooter, Tucker and Richard Carlson joined Vice President Cheney in expressing their outrage. On January 19th, 2009, Carlson the Elder whined:

"I'm flabbergasted. George Bush has always prided himself on doing the right thing regardless of the polls or the pundits. Now he is leaving office with a shameful cloud over his head."

Ironically, that cloud metaphor is the same one Patrick Fitzgerald used to describe the lingering stench from Vice President Cheney's office in the wake of the Plamegate affair. And on the same day Cheney also appeared on CNN to proclaim "I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon," Tucker Carlson called Jon Stewart a "partisan hack." (No doubt, that had less to do with the Daily Show host's criticism of CNBC's Jim Cramer and more to do with Stewart having called Carlson a "dick.")

As Arianna Huffington pointed out in 2006, the Libby affair was not the first time in his own reporting that Carlson the Son kept hidden the interests of Carlson the Father:

This seems to be a bit of sore spot for Tucker. In a 1997 column, Howard Kurtz wrote about a dust-up over an article Tucker Carlson had written in The New Republic, in which he slammed Grover Norquist as a "cash-addled, morally malleable lobbyist" for his dealings in the Seychelles islands -- but failed to mention that his father, as U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, had butted heads with Norquist over those dealings.

At the time, Tucker Carlson told Kurtz that there had been no need for him to run a "disclaimer" because "I didn't talk to my dad about the piece."

I wonder if, nine years later, he'll use the same line to explain away his lack of a Libby disclaimer: "I never talked to my dad about the case."

But he is talking about what a few hundred reporters and columnists discussed in their private emails. Adding insult to injury, Carlson quipped, "In addition to being partisan hacks, a lot of these guys turn out to be pedestrian thinkers. Disappointing." Of course, the principled Tucker Carlson also once proclaimed, "News outlets] should not allow reporters to cover things where their interests are at stake."

Interests, say, like his father.

UPDATE: Dave Neiwert provides more background on Carlson's filial piety - and dubious ethics - in this 2006 blog post. Carlson himself responded to Huffington by claiming "her points were absurd, her tone was nasty." Tucker deemed it "irrelevent" that "Libby was my father's personal lawyer long before he joined the Bush administration" and "they're friends." He concluded:

"It's attempted character assassination by a nasty little propagandist. Arianna Huffington ought to be ashamed of herself. I wish I could tell her that to her face."

—Perrspective 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

On Wednesday, prosecutor Nora Dannehy announced she would bring no charges against Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, Monica Goodling or any of the key players behind the purge of 9 U.S. attorneys. That scandal, part of a larger effort to target Democratic politicians and suppress Democratic voter turnout, will go unpunished despite the key roles of Rove and Miers, and the apparent perjury of former Attorney General Gonzales. As Dannehy, selected by Gonzales' successor, Michael Mukasey summed it up:

"Evidence did not demonstrate that any prosecutable criminal offense was committed with regard to the removal of David Iglesias," the Justice Department said in a letter to lawmakers Wednesday. "The investigative team also determined that the evidence did not warrant expanding the scope of the investigation beyond the removal of Iglesias."

Prosecutors also said there was insufficient evidence to charge someone with lying to Congress or investigators...

Dannehy faulted the Justice Department for firing Iglesias without even bothering to figure out whether such complaints were true. That indicated "an undue sensitivity to politics on the part of DOJ officials who should answer not to partisan politics but to principles of fairness and justice," the Justice Department wrote in its letter.

But that was not a crime, and was not an effort to influence prosecutions, the letter said.

That slap on the wrist for the Bush legal team followed another this week. Scott Bloch, the disgraced Bush DOJ lawyer convicted for withholding information from Congress about files that he ordered be erased from office computers, will likely be given probation. While ethics advocates like Debra Katz of the Government Accountability Project argued probation for Bloch "understates the true scope and impact" of his crimes and "would represent a miscarriage of justice," Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Leon apparently had no issue with it:

While the charge carries a sentence of up to six months in prison, prosecutors did not object to Bloch's request for probation, noting that he has no criminal history and faces a likely sanction on his ability to practice law. Bloch works at the Tarone & McLaughlin firm in Washington.

While Scott Bloch for now is still practicing law, Bush torture team architect Jay Bybee sits as a judge on a federal court. Among other things, Bybee as you'll recall affixed his name to the August 2002 memo largely authored by Office Legal Counsel rubber stamp John Yoo, a document which proclaimed that torture "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Now in closed-door testimony to a House Committee, Bybee revealed that CIA interrogators may have exceeded even his almost-anything-goes guidelines:

Jay S. Bybee, who headed the department's Office of Legal Counsel, told investigators in May that he never approved some interrogation techniques that detainees say were used against them, including punching, kicking and dousings with cold water. Techniques his office did approve, such as waterboarding, or simulated drowning of terrorism suspects, were used excessively, Bybee said.

As you'll also recall, in February Judge Bybee along with John Yoo narrowly avoided disbarment and other recommended sanctions for creating the Bush administration's framework for detainee torture. As we learned this week, Bybee's only regret was his own victimization:

"I have regrets because of the notoriety that this has brought me," he said. "It has imposed enormous pressures on me both professionally and personally. It has had an impact on my family. And I regret that, as a result of my government service, that that kind of attention has been visited on me and on my family."

As for Alberto Gonzales, his lawyer George Terwilliger said his critics "owe him an apology." Gonzales, whose comical selective amnesia under Congressional questioning included the classic, "Senator, that I don't recall remembering," like Bybee has only one regret. As he acknowledged to Esquire in December, Gonzales' real lament about the U.S. attorney firings is that the Bush White House wasn't political enough. After the Republican losses in the 2006 midterm elections, Gonzales suggested, the Bush administration's error was that it simply couldn't get away it:

"We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn't see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn't see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it."

Now, of course, it appears Alberto Gonzales did get away with it. Nevertheless, as he declared in December 2008, "I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

—Perrspective 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) |

Ignoring the claims of his GOP colleagues including Jon Kyl and Judd Gregg (not to mention Rand Paul and Sharron Angle) that jobless benefits are a "disincentive for them to seek new work" which leads those without work "to stay on unemployment" or just "sit there," McConnell insisted:

"Everyone agrees we should help people struggling to get back on their feet and keep food on the table....Republicans support extending benefits to the unemployed...There's no debate in the Senate about whether to pass a bill. Everyone agrees that we should."

Then, in a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black, Senator McConnell blamed President Obama for the mushrooming national debt George W. Bush and his Republican enablers in Congress helped produce:

"If Republicans have done anything wrong in this debate, it was to underestimate how committed Democrats are to spending money we don't have...The President likes to point out that Congress has added to the debt in years past. What he doesn't mention is that we weren't in the middle of debt crisis then. We weren't be lectured by the French about the need to cut back on our spending. People weren't rioting in Greece. And we didn't have a President who came into office with a list of legislative priorities that would double the national debt in five years and triple it in ten."

That the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under George W. Bush long ago gave lie to the myth of Republican fiscal discipline. As it turns out, of course, the Bush tax cuts didn't come anywhere close to paying for themselves. And making them permanent is the very worst thing the so-called deficit hawks could do to reduce the U.S. debt.

As Ezra Klein pointed out, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the 2001 Bush tax cuts "increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005." The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities similarly found that the Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half the deficits during his tenure.

If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent beginning next year, as Mitch McConnell and his Republican Party demand, the fiscal devastation will be multiplied. A budget calculator from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget put the price tag at $3.28 trillion between 2011 and 2018. And as another recent CBPP analysis revealed, over the next 10 years, the Bush tax cuts if made permanent will contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession - combined.

Mitch McConnell's grandstanding notwithstanding, the GOP was never serious about extending the unemployment benefits for suffering Americans. After all, they could have paid for it by simply reinstating the estate tax for multi-millionaires the GOP let expire for this year. Regardless, given the current economic crisis, John McCain's 2008 economic adviser Mark Zandi repeatedly insisted not only that unemployment benefits provide "the biggest bang for the buck," but that "it would be counterproductive to try and offset it this year or the next."

As for Mitch McConnell and the new Republican alchemists who believe tax cuts magically turn the government's revenue losses into gains, the chairman of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers Gregory Mankiw was incredulous. "I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don't." Those making it, he insisted, are "charlatans and cranks."

Now, McConnell's Republican tax cut fallacy is being accompanied by a new GOP talking point. The looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts which the GOP voted for and Dubya signed is a "Democratic tax hike."

(This piece also appears at "Crooks and Liars.)

—Perrspective 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

Appearing on ABC This Week with Jake Tapper, the Vice President acknowledged that when it comes to a stimulus package, both size and performance matter. But for the legislative reality of Republican opposition, "I think it would have been bigger":

"There's a lot of people at the time argued it was too small," he said. "A lot of people in our administration...even some Republican economists and some Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman, who continues to argue it was too small."

"But, you know," Biden told Tapper, "there was a reality. In order to get what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes. And we found three. And we finally got it passed," Biden said.

But on this point, conservative blogger Ed Morrissey is half-right in defending his party. As Morrissey notes, President Obama in February 2009 said of the roughly $800 billion recovery program winding its way through Congress "I think we're in range" and "It is the right size, it is the right scope."

But as the record shows, the Obama administration's decision to not to fight for a much larger stimulus program came months before. Sadly, that fateful step, made before Barack Obama even took the oath of office, would come back to haunt both the economic recovery and Democratic political prospects.

Writing in The New Yorker last fall, Ryan Lizza recounted how President Obama and his advisers, especially Larry Summers, concluded that discretion was the better part of valor when it came to the $1.2 trillion package many felt was needed:

The most important question facing Obama that day [in December 2008] was how large the stimulus should be. Since the election, as the economy continued to worsen, the consensus among economists kept rising. A hundred-billion-dollar stimulus had seemed prudent earlier in the year. Congress now appeared receptive to something on the order of five hundred billion. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, was calling for a trillion. Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn't require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer's analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion. The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer's $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was "an insurance package against catastrophic failure." At the meeting, according to one participant, "there was no serious discussion to going above a trillion dollars."

Of course, it's true, as David Axelrod argued, that Congress was a "big constraint." (As he put it, "If we asked for $1.2 trillion, it probably would have created such a case of sticker shock that the system would have locked up there.") And to be sure, the entire Republican caucus would have been joined by some squeamish Democrats weak at the knees over the staggering price tag. As Matthew Yglesias summed up the administration's rejection of Christina Romer's prescription, "they felt it wasn't possible, legislatively speaking, to do what was objectively necessary."

Instead, President Obama set the pattern that would define much of his first year in office. Hostage to his own fetish of bipartisanship, Obama would make major concessions to Republicans before the negotiations even started. In return, he was greeted with virtually total Republican opposition. On the stimulus as on health care and so much else, President Obama extended his hand to the GOP, only to be slapped in the face.

The result has been a triple whammy for the President and his party. First, the recovery has been slower than it otherwise could have been. Second, the economy's slow ramp up has created a perception problem: Americans wrongly believe the stimulus has failed despite incontrovertible evidence of its success at producing jobs and economic growth. And last, the political blowback from that perception is not only making a second stimulus bill almost impossible, but threatens to wipe out the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

And from the beginning, Paul Krugman has been prescient about the political path the recovery from the Bush recession would take. On January 5th, 2009, Krugman warned then President-elect Obama about the stimulus plan, "Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they'll demand 100%." The next day on January 6th, Krugman warned that the $787 billion recovery package was not only too small, but would pose dire political consequences for President Obama:

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we're talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says "See, government spending doesn't work."

In October, Krugman updated his grim assessment. "I went back to my first blog post -- January 6, 2009 -- worrying that the Obama economic plan was too cautious...Alas, I didn't have it wrong -- except that unemployment will, if we're lucky, peak around 10 percent, not 9." A second stimulus would almost surely be required, an economic necessity that politically would be almost impossible to produce.

As Vice President Bidenand the CBO among others have pointed out, the undersized American Recovery and Reinvestment Act worked as designed. ("Imagine," the Times' David Leonhardt asked in February, "if one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked...what would the economy look like today? Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now.") But since then, the continued struggles of the U.S. housing market, the teetering of the Eurozone and political intransigence in the face of President Obama's own caution has made the nascent recovery a tenuous one.

Alas, in office Barack Obama replaced the audacity with timidity. In dealing with Republicans on the stimulus, Obama should have listened not to the better angels of his nature, but to Biden's predecessor, Dick Cheney. Arriving in office without a popular vote mandate or large majorities on Capitol Hill, the Bush administration nevertheless rammed its $1.4 trillion tax cut package through Congress. As Cheney put it in December 2000, "we don't negotiate with ourselves":

"It's his program, it's his agenda, and we have no intention at all of backing off of it. It's why we got elected."

On the size of the stimulus, President Obama backed off before the first shot was fired. And for that, he can't blame the Republicans.

—Perrspective 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

During the heated debate over health care reform, President Obama repeatedly insisted that under his proposal, "you can keep your doctor." But the President was also careful to add the important caveat, "what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform." Which is exactly right. But by shifting costs to employees or dropping coverage altogether, American employers for years have been limiting workers' ability to choose which doctor - if any - they can see. And now, as the New York Times reports, private insurers are increasingly making that choice for them.

In his September 2009 address to Congress, President Obama made this commitment:

"First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have."

Not the government. But as the Times reported Sunday, insurance companies and the employers who purchase coverage from them are another matter altogether. Initially targeting cost-conscious smaller businesses which already provide insurance to their employees, "the country's biggest insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals."

But large employers, as well, are starting to show some interest, and insurers and consultants expect that, over time, businesses of all sizes will gravitate toward these plans in an effort to cut costs.

The tradeoff, they say, is that more Americans will be asked to pay higher prices for the privilege of choosing or keeping their own doctors if they are outside the new networks. That could come as a surprise to many who remember the repeated assurances from President Obama and other officials that consumers would retain a variety of health-care choices.

Of course, if this erroneous criticism sounds familiar, it should. Last summer, health insurance groups and their Republican front men trotted out industry-funded reports to warn of the chaos passage would bring, bogus claims dutifully reported by ABC News and others. As Karl Rove parroted the thoroughly debunked talking point, "The Lewin Group estimates 70% of people with private insurance -- 120 million Americans -- will quickly lose what they now get from private companies and be forced onto the government-run rolls as businesses decide it is more cost-effective for them to drop coverage."

Of course, dropping coverage and limiting choice of doctors has been underway for years, just not by the government.

A 2007 report from the Economic Policy Institute revealed the rapid - and dramatic - decline in employer-provided health care. The drop-off from 64.2% of Americans covered through workplace insurance in 2000 to just 59.7% in 2006 alone added 2.3 million more people to those without coverage. Census data since showed workplace coverage dipped further in 2007, down to an alarming 59.3%. A recent Thomson Reuters survey put the figure for 2009 at a stunning 54.6%. Other data from the U.S. Census revealed that it was only the expansion of government programs including SCHIP and Medicaid which offset the erosion of employer coverage in 2008.

A report last year from the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast employers will face a 9% increase in health insurance costs in 2010. 42% of those business surveyed will pass at least some the new burden on to their workers. As PWC's Michael Thompson concluded last June:

"If the underlying costs go up by 9%, employees' costs actually go up by double digits," he said, noting that will have a "major, major impact" when many employers also are freezing or cutting pay.

And recent surveys by the National Business Group on Health and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the situation is quickly worsening. While the NBGH sampling of 507 firms each with over 1,000 employees revealed that 56% will hold workers responsible for a greater share of health care costs next year, the September Kaiser study was grimmer still:

Forty percent of employers surveyed said they are likely to increase the amount their workers pay out of pocket for doctor visits. Almost as many said they are likely to raise annual deductibles and the amount workers pay for prescription drugs.

Nine percent said they plan to tighten eligibility for health benefits; 8 percent said they plan to drop coverage entirely. Forty-one percent of employers said they were "somewhat" or "very" likely to increase the amount employees pay in premiums -- though that would not necessarily mean employees are paying a higher percentage of the premiums.

Which is exactly the case at one of the firms choosing one of the lower cost, more restrictive insurance plans cited by the New York Times today:

"What this does is eliminate the Gucci doctors," said Peter Skoda, the controller of the Haro Bicycle Corporation, a Vista, Calif., business that employs 30 people. Facing a possible 35 percent increase in its rates, Haro switched to an Aetna plan that prevents employees from seeing doctors at two medical groups affiliated with the Scripps Health system in San Diego. If employees go to one of the excluded doctors, they are responsible for paying the whole bill...

The company's premiums average $433 a month, Mr. Skoda said, with employees paying one-fourth of the expense. A few employees opted for more traditional coverage, enabling them to go where they please. But they are paying significantly higher deductibles and out-of-pocket costs that could add thousands of dollars to their medical bills.

Seizing on the New York Times article and another Boston Globe piece today, conservative bloggers were quick to pronounce "Obamacare, one big HMO" and wrongly conclude "no, you cannot keep your doctor." Of course, we've been here before. Long before she introduced the easily debunked "death panels" fraud, Betsy McCaughey almost single-handedly undid the Clinton health care reform effort with the false claim that "The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better." Fifteen years later, GOP spinmeister Frank Luntz urged Republicans opposing Democrats on health care reform to "call for the 'protection of the personalized doctor-patient relationship.'"

Of course, Americans' choice of doctors and the "doctor-patient relationship" was never jeopardized by President Obama and his health care reform, the first provisions of which are just now starting to kick in. That threat comes - as it has for years - from the private insurance market.

—Perrspective 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

As Politico reported Friday, the imbroglio started after a Mark Halperin piece in Time in which an unnamed Romney aide said of the half-term Alaska governor, "She's not a serious human being." Another Romney intimate warned:

"If she's standing up there in a debate and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she's in trouble."

The response from the Mama Grizzly's den was immediate. A Palin aide declared, "It shocks me that anyone would try to do that," adding:

"For Washington consultants to sit around and personally disparage the governor anonymously to reporters is unfortunate and counterproductive and frankly immature."

Of course, it's much more fun when they do it on the record.

Which is what Republican strategist and McCain pal Michael Murphy did last year. In the wake of her resignation as governor, Murphy deemed Palin an "awful choice" as McCain's running mate and a "political train wreck." Then in a rare moment of conservative candor, Murphy presented the flip-side to all the right-wing's heavy breathing over Palin from the likes of Rich Lowry, Matthew Continetti, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter:

"If Sarah Palin looked like Golda Meir, would we even be talking about her today?"

Of course, Mike Murphy's vitriol can brushed off as the bias of a former Romney advisor. But as it turns out, Murphy caused his own man some serious trouble back in 2005.

As he prepared his 2008 presidential run, Mitt Romney faced the difficult task of reversing the pro-choice line he took in becoming governor of Massachusetts in order to appeal to the virulently anti-abortion voters of the GOP primaries. Romney jettisoned his past pronouncements such as "I believe women should have the right to make their own choice" and "I fully respect and will fully protect a woman's right to choose," instead declaring by the fall of 2005, "My political philosophy is pro-life"

And it was then that Michael Murphy said what everyone else what thinking about Mitt Romney and the abortion issue:

"He's been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly."

As his assessment spread like wildfire, Murphy was quick to backpedal, claiming he "was discussing a characterization the governor's critics use."

As it turns out, Michael Murphy is again in hot water, this time in California. An "entertainment/production" company started by Murphy pocketed $1 million in fees from GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, despite Murphy's own flirtation with her primary opponent Steve Poizner.

In any event, when it comes to his 2012 rival Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney can speak for himself. In fact, he already has. While he reacted this week to the "anonymous numbskulls" by declaring "she's proven her smarts," in May 2009, Romney laughed off Time magazine's selection of Sarah Palin as one of America's most influential people:

"But was that the issue on the most beautiful people or the most influential people?"

The Republican primaries may not have started yet, but it's not too early to get the popcorn and watch the show.

—Perrspective 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

For his part, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) wants to go the something route by mimicking the 1994 Contract with America with a new "Commitment to America" for the fall campaign. But to date, his efforts have hardly been a resounding success.

His first attempt at rebranding the Republican Party in 2008 produced "The Change You Deserve," which sadly was already the slogan for the anti-depressant, Effexor. His lieutenant Eric Cantor then rolled out - and quickly abandoned - the National Council for a New America. Its successor, a request for online input called "America Speaking Out" has produced more guffaws than ideas. Worse still, Boehner to much laughter this week followed up his wildly unpopular call for a repeal of the new health care reform law with the same line on Wall Street reform and a proposed moratorium on new regulations of any kind.

But by riding a wave of voter anger over the sluggish economy, Republicans nevertheless stand to make major gains in the House and Senate. Which is why, the Post asks:

But will Republicans actually want to run on those ideas -- or any ideas? Behind the scenes, many are being urged to ignore the leaders and do just the opposite: avoid issues at all costs. Some of the party's most influential political consultants are quietly counseling their clients to stay on the offensive for the November midterm elections and steer clear of taking stands on substance that might give Democratic opponents material for a counterattack.

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse agrees, insisting "The smart political approach would be to make the election about the Democrats."

"In terms of our individual campaigns, I don't think it does a great deal of good" to engage in a debate over the Republicans' own agenda.

For his part, New York GOP Congressman Peter King echoed that sentiment:

"I don't think we have to lay out a complete agenda, from top to bottom, because then we would have the national mainstream media jumping on every point trying to make that a campaign issue."

Like Jerry Seinfeld's response to George, "I think you may have something there," Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also seems taken with the idea of his being the Party of Nothing:

"We're not going to tell you that if you vote Republican you're going to wake up in your dream home with a brand-new Corvette outside, ready to take you to the best job in the world," McConnell said. "You know why? Because government can't deliver that promise."

Opposing that conservative nihilism is the Contract with America's prime mover, Newt Gingrich. "Consultants, in my opinion, are stupid," Gingrich said, adding, "The least idea-oriented, most mindless campaign of simplistic slogans is a mindless idea." Under Gingrich's tutelage, the Tea Party in April unveiled its "Contract from America." Unsurprisingly, that fiscal suicide pact was merely a rehash of Gingrich's 1994 document and the 2008 Republican platform.

With Boehner's "Commitment to America" scheduled for a post-Labor Day launch, Republicans have about six weeks left to figure out what, if anything, to stand for. But voters seemingly rewarding the GOP for its record-setting obstructionism and success in killing trust in government, those advocating that the Republicans be the Party of Nothing have a good chance of winning out. As Trent Lott put it before leaving the Senate:

"The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it's working for us."

Or as George Costanza described it in 1992, "I think I can sum up the show for you with one word: NOTHING."

—Perrspective 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

Long before he became what Politico deemed "Barack Obama's biggest critic," Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was a Democrat. Dr. Krauthammer left his psychiatric practice to work for Jimmy Carter and write speeches for Walter Mondale. But that was before he fell - hard - for Ronald Reagan. And now in his latest assault on President Obama, Krauthammer is deploying a Reagan who never was to defend the mythical small government he never created.

In his Friday column, Krauthammer warns Republicans, "Don't underestimate Barack Obama." He frets that "the net effect of 18 months of Obamaism will be to undo much of Reaganism." Because of "the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see" which "are not easily reversed," Krauthammer worries that taxes (now at their lowest level since 1950) may have to be increased:

There just isn't enough to cut elsewhere to prevent national insolvency. That will require massive tax increases -- most likely a European-style value-added tax. Just as President Ronald Reagan cut taxes to starve the federal government and prevent massive growth in spending, Obama's wild spending -- and quarantining health-care costs from providing possible relief -- will necessitate huge tax increases.

Sadly, Charles Krauthammer must be confusing Ronald Reagan with someone else. Not only did the size of the federal government continue to grow under the Gipper, but the national debt tripled during the fiscal nightmare that was the Reagan presidency. Reagan was, as Timothy Noah wrote in Slate in 2004, "the man who taught Republicans to be irresponsible."

In 2001, Michael Kinsley marked Reagan's 90th birthday by noting, among other things, that when it came to small government, "this legendary Reagan revolution barely happened."

Federal government spending was a quarter higher in real terms when Reagan left office than when he entered. As a share of GDP, the federal government shrank from 22.2 percent to 21.2 percent--a whopping one percentage point. The federal civilian work force increased from 2.8 million to 3 million. (Yes, it increased even if you exclude Defense Department civilians. And, no, assuming a year or two of lag time for a president's policies to take effect doesn't materially change any of these results.)

Under eight years of Big Government Bill Clinton, to choose another president at random, the federal civilian work force went down from 2.9 million to 2.68 million. Federal spending grew by 11 percent in real terms--less than half as much as under Reagan. As a share of GDP, federal spending shrank from 21.5 percent to 18.3 percent--more than double Reagan's reduction, ending up with a federal government share of the economy about a tenth smaller than Reagan left behind.

What Reagan did leave behind was red ink as far as the eye could see. And it was the legendary Gipper whose financial recklessness and tax-cutting fetish came to define the modern GOP.

The numbers tell the story. As predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-settings deficits. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios."

Forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe (a fact conveniently forgotten in Krauthammer's and other conservative hagiographies of Reagan), the Gipper nonetheless presided over mushrooming of the American national debt. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history.

To help perpetuate the myth of Republican fiscal discipline, GOP leaders including Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, John Boehner, Judd Gregg, Tom Coburn, John McCain and Kay Bailey Hutchison (just to name) are continuing another. As they have ever since Reagan first drank the Laffer Curve Kool-Ade, Republicans still wrongly insist that cutting taxes increases government revenue and thereby reduces the deficit. On the same day that Charles Krauthammer again laid rose pedals at Reagan's feet, Paul Krugman explained what happens when Republicans "redo that voodoo":

It's not true, of course. Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash.

But we're talking about voodoo economics here, so perhaps it's not surprising that belief in the magical powers of tax cuts is a zombie doctrine: no matter how many times you kill it with facts, it just keeps coming back. And despite repeated failure in practice, it is, more than ever, the official view of the G.O.P.

For his part, Charles Krauthammer isn't merely parroting that "'zombie doctrine" which never worked; he's worshipping a Ronald Reagan who never was.

—Perrspective 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |