A 2010 Supreme Court ruling allowing independent groups to raise unlimited amounts of money to promote candidates has led to the creation of candidate-specific political action committees, which are changing the landscape of the 2012 presidential campaign, the New York Times reported. Nearly all the presidential candidates, including President Obama, are now being backed by one or more of the so-called Super PACs. The PACs are typically run by former staffers of the candidates and financed by the candidates’ top donors. Though not directly controlled by the candidates, the PACs allow the campaigns to circumvent donation limits. Just what we need — more money in politics.
“The minute that the Republican Party becomes . . . the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012,” former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” Huntsman was responding to fellow GOP presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who denied that global warming has been proved. Huntsman added: “When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.”
Gov. Sam Brownback isn’t the only one getting criticized for turning down federal grants. Miami Herald columnist and best-selling author Carl Hiaasen blasted Florida Gov. Rick Scott (in photo) and state GOP lawmakers for rejecting any and all grants even remotely associated with the federal health care reform. This includes nixing more than $50 million in federal child-abuse prevention funds and almost $36 million in grants to help transition ill and elderly Floridians out of nursing facilities and back to their homes (which would save the state millions of dollars). “With a $3.7 billion budget hole and the nation’s second-highest rate of uninsured residents, Florida is rejecting more federal health-care funds than any other state,” Hiaasen wrote, adding that this is “a matter of button-busting pride” to the speaker of the Florida House and to Scott, “who continues to float through his own squirrelly parallel universe.”
For those keeping track, federal appeals court rulings on the health care law are now split, one for and one against. A court in Atlanta struck down today the individual mandate provision, though it overturned a lower court’s decision to invalidate the entire law. An appeals court in Cincinnati has upheld both the law and the individual mandate.
Wisconsin Democrats picked up two seats in Tuesday’s recall election, but that’s seen as a victory for Republicans, because Democrats had to win at least three of the contests to take control of the state senate. Union and anti-tax groups dumped millions of dollars into the campaigns, which were viewed as a referendum on Republican policies.
Newsweek is getting blasted by conservatives for the photo on the cover of this week’s magazine. It’s an unflattering, “crazy eyes” photo of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., with the headline “The Queen of Rage.” Newsweek took heat two years ago for putting a photo of Sarah Palin posing in running shorts on its cover.
If the nation defaults on its financial obligations, the blame belongs to the tea party Republicans. They had victory in their hands and couldn’t bring themselves to support House Speaker John Boehner’s debt-ceiling plan, which, if not perfect, was more than anyone could have imagined just a few months ago. The tea party got too full of itself with help from certain characters whose names you’ll want to remember when things go south. They include, among others, media personalities who need no further recognition; a handful of media-created “leaders,” including Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips and Tea Party Patriots co-founders Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler; a handful of outside groups that love to hurl ad hominems such as “elite” and “inside the Beltway” when talking about people like Boehner when they are, in fact, the elite (FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, Club for Growth, National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Prosperity); and elected leaders such as Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, head of the Republican Study Committee, and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who grandstand and make political assertions and promises that are sheer fantasy. Unfortunately for the country, which is poised to lose its place as the world’s most-trusted treasury and suffer economic repercussions we can ill afford, the stakes in this political game are too high to be in the hands of tea partiers who mistakenly think they have a mandate. Their sweep in the 2010 election was the exclusive result of anti-Obama sentiment and the sense that the president, in creating a health care plan instead of focusing on jobs, had overplayed his hand. Invariably, as political pendulums swing, the victors become the very thing they sought to defeat. — Kathleen Parker, Washington Post Writers Group
Why is the tea party intransigent on the debt ceiling? Why is the tea party pushing congressional Republicans so hard that we have a crisis? As the founder of Tea Party Nation, I feel confident in saying that the tea party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money. Average Americans understand that the federal government is bloated. The government funds too many wasteful programs. There are too many programs and spending bills that exist only to help get senators or representatives re-elected. The tea party movement understands that if we allow Congress to borrow more money or raise taxes, all we are doing is funding the endless expansion of government. The left has accused the tea party of wanting America to default on its debt obligations. Nothing could be further from the truth. The tea party wants America to stop incurring debt obligations and to cut back on the wasteful spending already in place. — Judson Phillips, Tea Party Nation
Though polls show that the vast majority of Americans are politically moderate, favoring a balanced approach to taxes, spending and government, that shouldn’t be confused with centrism, according to columnist E.J. Dionne. Centrism is “not a philosophy,” Dionne wrote. “It’s a position based on calculation. It doesn’t start with fixed principles. It measures where everyone else stands on some political spectrum at a given moment and then frantically adjusts. Because centrism is reactive, you never really know what a centrist believes. Centrists are constantly packing their bags and chasing off to find a new location as the political conversation veers one way or another.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., ripped GOP lawmakers for promoting the “bizarro” idea that Congress could pass a balanced-budget amendment with its current representation. “That is worse than foolish. That is deceiving many of our constituents,” McCain said on the Senate floor Wednesday. But columnist Rick Horowitz blamed McCain for helping unleash such grandstanding by picking Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008: “Who was it who put pizzazz in the spotlight and pushed serious right into the orchestra pit? . . . ‘Dr. Frankenstein, call your office.’”
As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank notes, the members of what one GOP aide calls the “Default Caucus” in Congress are using “the language of gangster films: Do as we say — or the girl gets it.” James Miller, an economist at Smith College, observed: “Your hand is greatly strengthened if you can convince the other side that you’re crazy.” How can Republicans risk default on Aug. 2? By denying that they are: 53 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of tea partiers told the Pew Research Center that the deadline can be safely ignored. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said the president has “manufactured this crisis.” Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, even advocates for default in a Bloomberg commentary: “If the government defaults on its debt now, the consequences undoubtedly will be painful in the short term. The loss of its AAA rating will raise the cost of issuing new debt, but this is not altogether a bad thing. Higher borrowing costs will ensure that the government cannot continue the same old spending policies. Budgets will have to be brought into balance (as the cost of servicing debt will be so expensive as to preclude future debt financing of government operations), so hopefully, in the long term, the government will return to sound financial footing.”
“If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment,” wrote columnist David Brooks. “It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases. A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.” Yet the GOP may balk at this “mother of all no-brainers,” Brooks said. That’s because the GOP may no longer be a normal party and instead is one that cares more about “psychological protest” than practical governing.
Glenn Beck ended his run on Fox News Thursday. The conspiracy-minded radio host had a rapid rise in popularity when he joined Fox News 30 months ago, perhaps culminating with his “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, D.C., last summer. But his viewership has dropped dramatically, and advertisers objected to Beck’s rants. Beck doesn’t plan to go away quietly, though. “For those members of media who are celebrating (my departure) . . . you will pray for the time I was only on the air for one hour a day,” Beck said.
Meanwhile, MSNBC suspended political analyst Mark Halperin for saying that President Obama acted like a male body part during Obama’s press conference Wednesday.
“The two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic,” columnist David Brooks wrote. “Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.” Brooks blasted Republicans’ growth agenda of tax cuts and nothing else as “stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible.” And he criticized Democrats for offering practically nothing. “They acknowledge huge problems like wage stagnation and then offer . . . light rail! Solar panels! It was telling that the Democrats offered no budget this year, even though they are supposedly running the country.” Brooks’ conclusion: “Covering this upcoming election is like covering a competition between two Soviet refrigerator companies, Cold War relics offering products that never change.”
Officials at last weekend’s Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans intervened and escorted a Barack Obama impersonator off the stage after he made “racially tinged jokes about Obama and mocked some of the Republican presidential candidates,” USA Today reported. RLC president and CEO Charlie Davis said of the comedian: “He was funny the first 10 or 15 minutes, but it was inappropriate, it was getting ridiculous.”
Though recklessness is pervasive in Washington, D.C., most of the time it’s not sexual but professional, wrote columnist Dana Milbank. His examples: “President George W. Bush taking the nation to war twice while cutting taxes; President Obama delivering a major transformation of the nation’s health care system without a single vote from the opposition; Rep. Paul Ryan, the House budget chairman, proposing an end to the Medicare guarantee to make more room for tax cuts; Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, gambling that he can go a second straight year without passing a budget at all.” Milbank’s conclusion: “We’d be better off if lawmakers gambled more with their private parts and less with the public good.”
Sarah Palin has been the butt of jokes about her twisted understanding of Paul Revere’s ride, but many other politicians also get their history wrong, particularly when they quote the Founding Fathers. “The problem results, in part, from an unfortunate marriage of two 21st-century trends,” the Washington Post reported. “One is the new obsession with the heroes of the American Revolution as guides in a fearful era defined by political division and deepening debt. The other is America’s continued willingness to believe things it reads on the Internet.”
“There is a tour under way that highlights the great things about America,” wrote Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. But it wasn’t Sarah Palin’s much-publicized bus tour but rather the farewell tour of Robert Gates (in photo), the defense secretary for the past 4½ years. The Wichita native, Milbank wrote, “took on sacred weapons programs at the Pentagon, fired ineffective generals, won the surge in Iraq, revived a crumbling war effort in Afghanistan and got Osama bin Laden.” In contrast, Milbank wrote, “during that same time, Palin quit midway through her term as Alaska governor, then went on to a life of $100,000 speaking fees, reality TV shows and incendiary political speech.”
“A federal grand jury charged two-time presidential candidate John Edwards on Friday with soliciting and covering up the secret spending of more than $925,000 to hide his mistress and their baby during the peak of his 2008 campaign for the White House,” Associated Press reported. The indictment contained six counts, including conspiracy, four counts of receiving illegal campaign contributions and one count of false statements. Sleazeball.
The tell-all book from a former top aide to Sarah Palin is out. And it isn’t flattering. “Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: A Memoir of Our Tumultuous Years” tells of Frank Bailey’s time working for Palin when she ran for Alaska governor and then for vice president. He says he isn’t bitter or disgruntled. “I’m sad at a lot of wasted potential,” Bailey said.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has served seven U.S. presidents. CBS News’ Katie Couric asked the Wichita native to play “word association” with those presidents.
On Lyndon Baines Johnson: “He was larger than life.”
On Richard Nixon: “Probably one of our strangest presidents. . . . I think he had a distorted personality.”
On Gerald Ford: “Very underrated president.”
On Jimmy Carter: “He could not establish priorities.”
On Ronald Reagan: “A great president, I think a historic president. . . . Far smarter, far slyer and more manipulative and more sophisticated in his view of the world than people gave him credit for at the time.”
On George W. Bush: “Firm in his convictions, easy decision maker. . . . He was a good listener. He would get briefings and he would ask a lot of questions.”
On Barack Obama: “He takes his time to get all the facts and to do the analysis and to make sure that he understands everything about situations. But he doesn’t shrink from the really tough decisions.”
“President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s,” columnist Ezra Klein wrote. “And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.” Klein noted how the individual mandate in health care reform and the cap-and-trade policy were originally GOP ideas. And allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire as part of a plan to reduce the deficit is similar to past deficit-reduction deals backed by moderate Republicans. But as Obama and Democrats “moved to the right to pick up Republican votes,” Klein wrote, “Republicans moved to the right to oppose Democratic proposals.”
“The Republican self-deception that draws the most attention is the refusal to believe that Barack Obama is American-born,” wrote Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post. “But there are Republican doctrinal fantasies that may be more dangerous: The conviction that taxes can always go down, but never up, for example, and the gathering consensus among Republican leaders that human-caused climate change does not exist.”
Conservative GOP lawmakers seeking to repeal health care reform, cut taxes or reduce regulations (see Pompeo blog post below) are increasingly appealing to “common sense.” Even President Obama has gotten into the act lately. But as University of Virginia history professor Sophia Rosenfeld noted, “as a slogan, a style of address and an ideal, common sense has long played an outsize role in American politics, typically surging in times of exceptional fractiousness. And for all its homespun appeal, it has often been a vehicle for precisely the opposite of what it suggests: subjectivity, partisanship and demagoguery.”
Good for Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer for vetoing a bill that would require presidential candidates to provide the state with a birth certificate. “I never imagined being presented with a bill that could require candidates for president of the greatest and most powerful nation on Earth to submit their ‘early baptismal circumcision certificates’ among other records to the Arizona secretary of state,” Brewer said. “This is a bridge too far.” But pandering to “birthers” apparently is not too far for Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Even though Jindal says he believes President Obama is a U.S. citizen, he plans to sign a similar bill if it reaches his desk, his spokesman said this week.
The winners and losers of last weekend’s budget deal are still in dispute, Politico reported, “but the broader trajectory of politics, stretching back to the spring of 2009, is not. The Republican — and, yes, the tea party — agenda is not only ascendant, it’s driving the debate over reshaping government at every level.”
A 2010 Supreme Court ruling allowing independent groups to raise unlimited amounts of money to promote candidates has led to the creation of candidate-specific political action committees, which are changing the landscape of the 2012 presidential campaign, the New York Times reported. Nearly all the presidential candidates, including President Obama, are now being backed by one or more of the so-called Super PACs. The PACs are typically run by former staffers of the candidates and financed by the candidates’ top donors. Though not directly controlled by the candidates, the PACs allow the campaigns to circumvent donation limits. Just what we need — more money in politics.
