Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: abortion, Al Gore, army, Barack Obama, Bibi Netanyahu, Bruce Springsteen, choice, Congress, DADT, Democrats, discrimination, elitism, equal marriage rights, global warming, GOP, Israel, LGBT, media, non-discrimination, polling, science, Supreme Court
Points for answers. Extra credit if you can identify the podcasts I’ve been driving with recently.
Do GOPers make their global warming messaging about attacking Al Gore because they think he’s unpopular and they want to discredit science? Because they think he’s popular and they want to discredit him? Or just because they want to change the topic?
If Barack Obama combined a blue ribbon panel with a moratorium on firings of service members for being gay, how many Democrats in Congress would back him up?
Does having Democrats running the federal government make people who don’t like abortion but want it to stay legal feel more (not 8%, but maybe 1%) comfy identifying themselves “pro-life” without worrying about an abortion ban?
How do thousands of already-and-now-permanently married same-sex couples affect the fight for equal marriage rights for everyone else in California?
When will America have its first Supreme Court nominee who’s open about having had an abortion?
Is Obama serious about using our leverage to push Bibi?
Is Bruce Springsteen the only liberal immune from being tarred with the “elitist celebrity” brush? If so why?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: conservatism, equal marriage rights, equality, GOP, Jeff Sessions, language, LGBT, Maggie Gallagher, media, Mike Huckabee, Miss California
Jeff Sessions – who couldn’t get his own judicial nomination through a GOP Judiciary Committee even after flip-flopping to the correct position on whether the NAACP or the KKK poses a greater threat to the Republic – is now tying himself in knots over whether he would have a problem with a gay Supreme Court nominee per se, or just with one who believed gay people should have the same rights as everyone else. I’m sure when Strom Thurmond voted against Thurgood Marshall’s nomination to the Court, it had nothing to do with him being Black – just with him being a Black man who believed Black people should have their equal protection rights protected.
But while it’s funny/ sad/ ridiculous to watch Sessions and Co. squirm in saying first that “identity politics” are bad and then that we should be concerned that a gay nominee would make people “uneasy,” or hear the Family Research Council signal openness to a gay nominee without “pro-gay ideology,” there’s a reason these guys are struggling to say something coherent: Open gay-bashing is becoming less popular in America, but it’s hard to explain why LGBT people shouldn’t have equal rights if we’re not inferior Americans.
It’s not by accident that the right-wing opposition to gay equality is a moving target. Anti-gay bigotry is still prevalent in America, and will be no doubt for a long time. But as Americans, including many who are uncomfortable with gay people, become less sympathetic to politicians saying that there are no gay people, that gay people need psychiatric help, that gay people are sinners, etc., Jeff Sessions has to come up with different ways to explain why he opposes the “gay agenda” – just like he had to come up with new ways to explain his animus towards the NAACP a generation ago.
So the issue is: elitist judges trying to tell regular people what to do (this one gets more tenuous now that more people support same-sex marriage than the Republican party); schoolteachers depriving parents of control over how (and whether) their kids learn about sexual orientation; priests getting locked up for not officiating at marriages they don’t believe in; now Miss California’s Miss America candidacy was judged not just on her body but on (gasp) how she answered a question! Perusing The Corner suggests that National Organization for Marriage President Maggie Gallagher’s latest argument for why LGBT people shouldn’t be allowed to get married is that opponents of gay rights will face social stigma as soon as gay people escape enshrined legal stigma. In the 90’s Mike Huckabee was decrying our culture’s decline “from Barney Fife to Barney Frank” – now he’s decrying a gay blogger’s intolerance towards Miss California.
So as more states and more Americans come out for legal equality, expect conservatives to get that much more creative in explaining their opposition as a defense of the little guy (the teacher, the priest, the voter, the beauty pageant contestant, the law professor), that much more eager to declare themselves tolerant of people with “gay tendencies,” and that much more fulsome in their outrage when intolerant liberals suggest they have a problem with gay people.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Arlen Specter, Brian Beutler, Democrats, GOP, Joe Sestak
Brian Beutler is asking why the National Republican Senate Committee would simultaneously run ads attacking and praising newly-minted Democrat Arlen Specter (to get re-elected, Specter would likely first have to overcome a challenge from the left in the Democratic primary, then beat Pat Toomey in the general election).
I think it’s a mistake to take the purpose of the NRSC’s “pro-Specter” robocall at face value. It makes more strategic sense as another anti-Specter, pro-Sestak call aimed at Democratic primary voters. Here’s what the ostensibly “pro-Specter” call actually says:
Yesterday, our Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak voted for President Obama’s budget, which contains spending increases for Democratic priorities like housing and environmental protection. But don’t Pennsylvanians deserve an independent voice in Congress? Our new democratic Senator Arlen Specter has been that voice. Last night, Senator Specter stood with conservative Senate Republicans in opposing the Obama budget. So call Joe Sestak at 610-892-8623. Tell Joe Sestak that Pennsylvanians want an independent voice, not another vote for the Obama agenda.
Look at it this way. Picture yourself as a liberal Democratic PA primary voter. Here are the words that stand out in this call associated with each candidate:
Joe Sestak: for President Obama’s budget, Democratic priorities, housing and environmental protection, Obama agenda
Arlen Specter: new Democratic senator, stood with conservative Senate Republicans, opposing the Obama budget
If I’m a Democratic primary voter (and I am), all of this will just make me more inclined towards Sestak, and less towards Specter. And the fact that the GOP is ostensibly vouching for Specter will just make me distrust him that much more. Which is exactly the point: Hurt Specter’s standing with Democratic base voters so that Joe Sestak emerges as the nominee (and more power to them).
If the NRSC were really trying to make Sestak less popular, wouldn’t they slap him with terms like “big government” or “energy tax” or “taxes for tuition benefits for illegal immigrants who come here to study abortion”? Do they really think “environmental protection” is a turn-off for Democratic primary voters and opposing Obama is a turn-on? They may be tone deaf, but not that tone deaf.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: conservatism, Democrats, GOP, Rush Limbaugh
Of course l’affaire Limbaugh is fun to watch, both for the drama of Republicans inching onto the limb of wanting the economic recovery plan to work and then scurrying off of it when Rush roars, and for the ongoing beating the Republican brand is taking. That said, I think one of the angles getting missed in the discussion of this is that Republicans fear getting on Limbaugh’s bad side because he has a singular ability to shape the opinion of a noteworthy minority of the country.
For better or worse, right-wingers have a leader who can keep right-wing elected officials in line. Does anyone disagree that there’s no equivalent leader or organization on the left with the same level of clout to hold elected progressives – including the President – accountable?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Barack Obama, Ben Nelson, court, Democrats, GOP, media, Olympa Snowe, Sam Alito, Susan Collins
Now that the Senate has voted for cloture on the stimulus, I gotta say it’s striking how the goalposts have moved in terms of what the media consider a majority out of 100 senators. The dominant sense you’d get from following mainstream media coverage of the debate is that 61 Senators is the cut-off for a Senate majority, and if Obama’s initiatives don’t make it past that post he hasn’t garnered that much support (and he isn’t really that bipartisan). That’s not how I remember things being covered during the Bush administration, when the same talking heads did their talking about the filibuster as though it was an extreme measure.
Put differently, with a Republican in the White House the onus was on Democrats to justify why anything would be worth a filibuster; with a Democrat in the White House, the onus is on Democrats to scare up 61 votes.
When John Kerry talked about filibustering Sam Alito’s Supreme Court nomination (which, compared to the stimulus package, is also far-reaching in impact but most would agree was less time-sensitive to get done), that was covered as an antic from the fringe. But amidst the veneration of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, the starting assumption seems to be that the very most moderate members of the Senate GOP Caucus by default will filibuster the President’s bill unless they get to rewrite it.
Is this an unfair comparison? And if not, then do we blame the media, or blame the Democrats for having lacked the parliamentary-style party discipline to better control the media narrative?
That said, I don’t think there’s much evidence that the public cares terribly much about what Nancy Pelosi rightly called “process arguments” – who’s obstructing who, who’s more bipartisan, etc. And the latest polling suggests that as with the Presidential election, the GOP may be capturing media cycles without capturing voters. Another reason to hope the Conference Committee leaves the Nelson-Snowe crew with a token accomplishment or two but otherwise churns out the bill best designed to actually stimulate the economy – whose success or failure is what voters will actually remember a year from now.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Congress, Democrats, GOP, Joe Wurzelbacher, John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, Rahm Emanuel
(First in a series? You tell me, dear readers)
The Speaker of the House is not constitutionally required to be a member of the House. So a future Democratic majority could draft Rahm Emanuel directly into service as Speaker without Emanuel needing to primary (please please) LWB Idol Tom Geoghegan for his old House seat. Unlikely to happen, right? Because even (maybe especially) after the pathetic performance of both houses through much of the Bush years, we can expect the House to show enough jealousy in defending its own institutional power not to put an outsider in the driver’s seat. And if not that, we can definitely expect individual members to show enough jealousy in defending their personal ambitions not to let somebody leapfrog to the top of the party leadership, even (maybe especially) if it’s a former congressman who bolted to run the White House.
But are there scenarios where this could happen? Republicans wide a wave of discontent over the still-terrible economy and frustration that Obama’s (GOP-engineered) legislative failures to take back the House in a few years, but John Boehner and enough of the guys around him flame out that a party turns its lonesome eyes to Newt Gingrich? Or Joe the Plumber?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Barack Obama, Democrats, GOP, Hillary Clinton, John McCain
Seems pretty clear to me the answer is yes. Overall, I doubt Clinton’s apparent margin would be as big as Obama’s is at this moment; I’d guess she’d be doing better in Florida and worse in Colorado and Virginia. I doubt with Clinton at the top of the ticket we’d be considering the possibility of a new Democratic Senator from Georgia or (less likely) Mississippi or Kentucky. It’s hard to imagine her bringing in as many first-time voters or turning as many independents. But by all indications, Hillary Clinton would be beating John McCain right now for the most important reasons Barack Obama is beating John McCain, and the main reasons (which got a huge exclamation mark from this fall’s economic news) it looked a year ago like Clinton/ Obama/ Edwards would beat Romney/ McCain/ Thompson: eight years of right-wing Republican rule has devastated the Republican brand (so much so that conservatives are left to plead that it wasn’t right-wing at all).
If Clinton had been the candidate, I bet McCain could have convinced some more folks that he was the one in the race who would “turn the page” on politics as usual in Washington, and he could have kept his money out of Georgia, but it’s hard to imagine he would be poised to win the election right now. Conversely, while Clinton’s claims about McCain as a nominee – that he would throw the kitchen sink at the Democrat – proved true, her claim that Obama as nominee would wilt under the attacks proved laughably false (though unsurprisingly, her own gutter attacks on Obama proved to have long life on John McCain’s shelf).
Point being, what a wasted opportunity it would have been if the months of competition between Obama and Clinton had been settled just based on who looked to more Democrats like a safer choice to go up against John McCain.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Barack Obama, GOP, Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, John McCain, Senate, Tim Johnson
Remember when Howard Dean was going to suspend his campaign for president? You know, no more campaigning, no more staff, no more press releases, no more interviews, no more trying to get people (aside from the good people of Vermont, who couldn’t help themselves) to vote for him? That was a big deal.
On the other hand, you could be forgiven for wondering, given that John McCain is still sending his Vice President and his surrogates out to rally the faithful, still has TV ads airing (and they’ll all be back on Saturday), is still out spewing his own campaign talking points while his campaign still blasts Barack Obama, and still took the time to address (the painstakingly gracious and bi-partisan) Bill Clinton’s group while other US Senators were trying to make a deal, just what the big deal was when he announced he was suspending his campaign.
But we shouldn’t understate the significance of John McCain’s sacrifice: if he actually votes on bailout legislation, it’ll be his first Senate vote in six months! (That makes McCain the Number One Absentee Senator, ahead of Tim Johnson, who was recovering from brain hemorrhage). So if McCain’s campaign sees it is a world-historical event when he considers his first (potential) Senate vote since he was traipsing around on a largely ignored biographical tour and trying to take advantage of Hillary Clinton’s news hooks, who can blame them?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: choice, class, conservatism, GOP, John McCain, language, law, Sarah Palin
In the comments, Ben – who we can all agree should start his own blog ASAP – offers a thoughtful response to the last post:
Don’t you think a person can consistently hold that (1) under current law, abortion is a matter of individual choice; (2) as long as abortion is a matter of choice, there is a single right answer that women ought to choose; and (3) since many women nevertheless make the wrong choice (in this person’s view), and the harm of making the wrong choice is sufficiently great, the law should not leave abortion to individual choice? This constellation of beliefs would explain, without contradiction, feeling pride in another person’s choice not to have an abortion while supporting legislative measures to take the choice away from them. Similarly, “Choose Life at Yale” can consistently pursue a two-pronged agenda: (a) as a stopgap measure, advocating for women to exercise their choice under current law in a particular way, and (b) on the assumption that (a) will not be 100% successful, advocating for denying women the choice in the first place. In this way, Palin’s rhetoric about her daughter doesn’t seem different to me than a moral vegetarian’s both feeling pride in a child’s decision to be a vegetarian and favoring the criminalization of meat-eating.
Absolutely, I agree that it’s philosophically consistent (a) to want abortion/ animal cruelty/ awful haircuts banned and (b), for as long as the practice remains legal, to support/ admire people who choose against it. I think very few people, whatever the practice in question is, would maintain (a) and not (b). Lots of people, however, maintain (b) and not (a) (and not just on bad hair-cuts). That is, lots of Americans believe abortion is a choice that should be available but that should not be chosen. Others wouldn’t go so far as to say abortion is always the wrong choice, but will admire and be more comfortable with people who choose against it. These pro-choice voters who (whether always, or just usually) want people to choose life represent a huge chunk of our electorate. That’s the reality politicians on both sides of this issue face.
Fortunately for these “(b) but not (a)” voters, there are a lot of “(b) but not (a)” politicians out there. Depending on where you set the bar, you could count most pro-choice members of Congress in this group. So voters who are uncomfortable with abortion but don’t want it banned tend to have ample opportunity to vote for representatives who reflect their desire for abortion to be both legal and rare.
Anti-choice politicians need these voters to choose instead to vote for someone who shares their discomfort with abortion but not their opposition to banning it. There are different ways to do this: emphasizing abortion restrictions that these pro-choice voters may support and the pro-choice candidate does not, chipping away at the sincerity of the pro-choice candidate’s desire to reduce abortion, and more. Another is to shift the focus away not just from Roe v. Wade, but away from policy questions entirely, so that (b) is the only issue.
I say the way Palin talks about these issues is misleading not because I doubt that she and others maintain both (a) and (b) with conviction and consistency, but because (setting law-breaking aside) (b) is only an issue given her failure to achieve (a). And emphasizing (b) in the way Palin does regarding her daughter, and the way some of her admirers do in talking about Sarah’s choice to birth Trigg, obscures the most significant policy question here – abortion’s legality – while appealing not just to voters’ negative feelings about abortion but to their positive feelings about choice.
And when anti-choice politicians talk about their respecting their daughters’ choices – particularly when they are fathers like John McCain – it helps take the edge off their anti-choice politics by making them seem tolerant of the whole range of choices women make, even or perhaps especially when they cite their admiration for pro-life choices. I don’t have reason to doubt that John McCain or Sarah Palin would continue loving a daughter who chose abortion without throwing her out of the house. But if they had their way with the supreme court, those daughters could be thrown in jail. So I think non-coerciveness as parents is a distraction from coerciveness as politicians.
There’s also a class issue here, in that as long as abortion is legal but subject to the cocktail of restrictions anti-choice folks are pushing at the state and federal level, women from families like the Palins and the McCains can go on making their choices while those “small town voters” they vouch for have less and less choice to make.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: choice, Dahlia Lithwick, Democrats, gender, GOP, John Kerry, John McCain, language, media, NYT, Sarah Palin
Dahlia Lithwick notes the mendacity of choice language on abortion from anti-choice politicians like McCain and Palin:
In announcing that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant last week, GOP vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin used this puzzling locution: “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby.” Pundits were quick to point out that Bristol’s “decision” must have been at least somewhat constrained by her mom’s position–as articulated in November 2006–that she would oppose an abortion for her daughters, even if they had been raped…So what exactly, one wonders, was young Bristol permitted to decide?
These rhetorical somersaults are, as Lithwick notes, the same ones John McCain employed in talking about a hypothetical Meghan McCain pregnancy eight years ago. There’s no mystery here: Americans like choice more than they like abortion. Republicans know this, so they dress up their hard-line anti-choice positions as though they were just about choosing against abortion, while never conceding that there should be a choice at all (in my college days the student anti-choice group was called Choose Life At Yale; they published an ad comparing voting for John Kerry – who also advocates choosing life but is pro-choice – to voting for Jefferson Davis). And the media too often plays along, as when the New York Times profiled women in an abortion clinic making painful choices that weighed medical, religious, economic, and social factors; the Times held up these women, who were doing exactly what the pro-choice movement defends women’s right to do, as representing a middle ground in the abortion debate.
I’d add that watching Palin’s gymnastics on choice is probably the most interesting part of the 2006 gubernatorial debate re-aired on C-SPAN over the weekend. For someone who wants the government to criminalize a woman’s choices about her future, Sarah Palin’s rhetoric is awfully “personal.” She answers the first question on choice – about whether as a public official she would attend a public event to publicly support legislation banning abortion – by saying that she’s pro-life and “I don’t try to hide it and I’m not ashamed of it.” When asked whether a rape victim should be able to choose abortion, she objects that it wouldn’t “be up to me as an individual” whether that woman was forced to carry the fetus for nine months – leaving unsaid that if she had her way, it wouldn’t be up to the woman as an individual either. But Palin makes clear that she’d force the rape victim to carry the fetus by specifying only the life of the mother as acceptable grounds for abortion. Then she answers the follow-up question by saying rape is “a very private matter also, but personally, I would choose life.” The hypocrisy here is glaring: if Sarah Palin indeed wants that woman’s choice to be private, she should oppose government outlawing it. But she doesn’t.
So it should come as no surprise a minute later when she addresses euthanasia with the same rhetorical sleight of hand: “This is a very personal and private and sensitive issue and I do respect others’ opinions on it, but personally I do believe that no, government should not be sanctioning or assisting taking life.”
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Barack Obama, Chris Shays, Connecticut, GOP, Jim Himes, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin
Chris Shays is the only Republican congressman left in New England, after the good people of Connecticut ousted the other two remaining faux-moderate GOPers tasked with representing their blue state. Shays is so committed to having it both ways that he recently aired an ad promising “the optimism of Barack Obama” and “the straight talk of John McCain” (maybe he can update it to tout Joe Biden’s statesmanship and Sarah Palin’s love of tax cuts and mooseburgers). But as the campaign of Chris Shays’ opponent – non-profit leader Jim Himes – reminds us, while Chris Shays has cast some votes with the Democrats, he doesn’t like to do it when it actually counts: Out of the closest third of the votes in the House, he votes with the GOP 89% of the time. Folks who think believe Connecticut can do better than a “catch-and-release” Congressman can contribute to Jim Himes’ campaign in this perpetually-close district here.
(Full disclosure: the research here is my brother’s baby – which I guess makes me its uncle)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: crime, GOP, language, Mike Huckabee, wealth
Media-appointed populist Mike Huckabee reassures CEOs everywhere that raking in the cash while laying off the workers who made it possible isn’t the kind of “criminal” activity that the government should do something about:
In one memorable riff at the Reagan Library early this year, Mr. Huckabee called it “criminal” for corporate CEOs to take fat bonuses while shipping the jobs of ordinary workers overseas, adding “If Republicans don’t stop it, we don’t deserve to win in 2008.” In a Christmas eve interview on CNBC, I asked Mr. Huckabee what he intended to do about it. His answer: nothing soon in the way of new laws or regulations. He said he would use the bully pulpit to shine a spotlight on the practices and seek increased responsibility from corporate boards of directors.
So breathe easy, rich guys: under a Huckabee administration, the only CEOs who get locked up will be the ones with HIV.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Antonin Scalia, choice, court, Democrats, Frank Rich, GOP, gun control, Hillary Clinton, James Dobson, judges, law, LGBT, media, NYT, Roe, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Alito
I have to believe Frank Rich knows better than this:
Even leaving aside the Giuliani record in New York (where his judicial appointees were mostly Democrats), the more Democratic Senate likely to emerge after 2008 is a poor bet to confirm a Scalia or Alito even should a Republican president nominate one. No matter how you slice it, the Giuliani positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control remain indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s.
Look, I like to gloat as much as the next guy, but let’s not do it at the expense of reality. And Rudy Giuliani has indeed gotten more traction than many (myself included) thought he ever could, despite James Dobson et al’s significant discomfort with him. But he’s not a pro-choice candidate (he’s not a pro-gay rights or pro-gun control candidate either). He believes abortion is immoral, and he’s made it clear to anyone who’s paying attention that he’ll appoint judges who will make abortion illegal. The intermediate question of whether he has nice things to say about laws banning abortion is a detail (he’s also reversing himself on laws that make it more difficult for women to access the right to choose). While the Senate on a good day can hold back particularly crazy nominees, the only people who come their way for confirmation are the ones the president sends over. And in case you haven’t noticed, drafting strategies on how to overturn Roe isn’t enough to deny you confirmation votes from Democrats.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Carpenters, debates, GOP, labor, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, UNITE HERE
In today’s GOP debate, Giuliani touts his mom’s membership in ILGWU (UNITE), and Mike Huckabee declares his sympathy for hotel workers (HERE).
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, praises the Carpenters.
