Herald article today: my answer to Uncle Luke
It’s District 5 day for me today. My Herald column focuses on the very little the district has seen go right over the last few decades, and answers this column by Luther Campbell in the Miami New Times: Read more
What do tea parties and evangelicals have in common?
Tea parties and evangelicals parting ways?
A Politico story points to the growing divide between right wing evangelicals and the tea party movement, which lately has been up-staging the faithful as the darling of the GOP. Clearly, the two are strange bedfellows: evangelicals reluctantly got into politics in a big way in 2000, wooed by Karl Rove’s tactical promise that a born-again president would implement the two simple things the Christian right craves: outlawing abortion and preventing the spread of gay marriage. Over the course of eight years, they got exactly nothing: a temporary speed bump on stem cell research, a ban on distributing condoms in Africa … some incremental stuff on the rarest of abortion procedures. But on the whole, what evangelicals got from eight years of Bush, and six years of total Republican control of the federal government, plus a majority of governorships in the previous decade, was a red hot bowl of nothing.
Fast forward to 2010, and evangelicals have been pushed aside by a new GOP favorite: the tea party movement. Read more
Earth to wingers: the GOP thinks you’re nuts (and they’re living large off your money)
So this past Friday, I had the craziest conversation, with a right wing tea party/9-12 movement guy from Miami. He called me after I emailed a few tea party people in South and Central Florida to get their reactions to the now-infamous RNC memo screeching about “socialism” and separating Republican donors into two categories: fear-based, “reactionary” small donors, and ego-driven, tchotchke-mad big givers. (If you still haven’t read the presentation, here it is.) The tea party guy, who I won’t name to keep from embarrassing him, really didn’t answer my question (the question being: “what’s your reaction to the RNC presentation…?”) but instead launched into about a 30 minute debate with me, during which he asserted that: Read more
Today’s Herald column: Rubio can’t have it both ways
Marco Rubio: talking right wing, hiding from the consequences?
The upshot of my column today: Senate candidate Marco Rubio has up to now, gotten away with pandering to the hard right in his rhetoric, without having to confront the real-life consequences of the conservative ideology…
And then, along came Jim Bunning. Read more
Jeb slaps Crist on stimulus, but does he have a case?
Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist in happier days.
This morning on MSNBC, Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie eagerly highlighted Jeb Bush’s NewsMax interview in which he rapped Gov. Crist on the knuckles for supporting the Obama stimulus plan (although he did call Crist a “nice guy.”) Bush, whom just about everybody knows prefers Marco Rubio, went so far as to call Crist’s early stim support: “unforgivable“:
Bush says Crist should have stood alongside other Republicans who were fighting for an alternative.
The alternative would have been a focus on infrastructure and a focus on broad-based tax cuts to the American private sector, which will ultimately create the jobs, Bush told Newsmax.
Crist counters that what would have been unforgivable would have been to forego the 87,000 jobs he says the stim has saved or created statewide (actually, more like 112,000, and there’s a website where you can check up on it for yourself,) by not taking the money.
That’s “20,000 educators, and I can’t in good conscience not support those people.” [Crist said]
“I work for them…”
While we’re considering whether Jeb’s criticism means anything more than that he really, really wants to endorse Rubio, it’s helpful to remember what was going on back in February of 2009, when Crist infamously failed to please the wingnuts by punching the president of the United States in the face instead of hugging him in Fort Myers. Read more
The insanity of John Yoo
John Yoo: sadistic or insane?
Revelations in the Justice Department’s whitewash of the torture memos offer a frightening glimpse into the mind of John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who, with now judge Jay Bybee and others, gave the Bush administration a license to entertain the darkest fantasies of Dick Cheney. What Yoo believes is not just weird, or scary, or Byzantine. It’s downright un-American. Apparently, Yoo believes that as long as he says the United States is “at war” with some entity — state or non-state, and even without a Constitutional declaration of war by Congress, the president of the United States has it perfectly within his power to:
- Torture a child by having his testacles crushed in front of his parents to get them to talk;
- Order the massacre of a civilian village (meaning the My Lai massacre would have been, in Yoo’s construction, perfectly legal, had it been ordered directly by the president);
- Launch a nuclear attack without the consent of Congress;
And only God knows what else. How is this man being allowed to instruct young would-be lawyers?
Meanwhile, Newsweek’s Michael Issikoff posts about Dick Cheney’s time machine theory of torture and Jose Padilla, and the gruesome new details of Bush-Cheney-era torture contained in that DOJ whitewash report. And what’s scariest about this whole sorry spectacle, is that a majority of so-called “conservatives,” probably agree with John Yoo (so long as the president in question is a Republican.)
Related: Torture and impunity.
Latest Herald column: ‘yawn of a new era’
Florida candidates Alex Sink and Kendrick Meek
You’ve got to hand it to the Herald editors. They come up with some killer headlines…
So over the last few weeks I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to politically active Democrats, to get a sense of how people are feeling about the campaigns. The results weren’t great for either of the major candidates (I didn’t get into the A.G. and other races,) but they weren’t catastrophic either (except if Camp Kendrick ever wants any help from the Daily Kos.) Read more
A strong case for change
The pundit class has a way of overreacting. Last year, they declared the Republican party to be dead, dead, dead, only to turn around by the end of the year, and begin declaring the Democratic party to be dead, dead, dead (we’re still in that memespace now.) But when it comes to the very real problems plaguing the Obama administration, I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say we have a serious problem. Obama’s team is great at election strategy, but green in the ways of Washington. As for the president himself, Leslie Gelb gets to the heart of the matter in a long, well-written piece in the Beast:: Read more
The 2009 Big Lie
Departing Senator Evan Bayh and a host of hand-wringing pundits are pushing the moany meme that what’s wrong with Washington, as evidenced by the Senate stalemate of 2009, is a lack of “bipartisanship” and the silencing of poor, beleaguered moderates. Really? The way I remember it, Democrats, especially in the Senate, weren’t the victims of a lack of bi-partisanship, or bullying by liberals (who got exactly nothing they wanted in 2009), or even of Republicans. Democrats were victims of other Democrats, who had they not joined Republican filibusters of Democratic bills and collaborated with Republicans to enforce “minority rule” and choke off Democratic ideas that didn’t meet with the approval of Republicans (or that couldn’t get 65, 75, even 85 votes!…) a lot would have gotten done last year. Read more
Tea parties turn on Ron Paul: is this the beginning of the end?
Allahpundit asks: if Ron Paul isn’t safe from the tea party movement, who is? And it’s a good question. The tea party movement began as a sort of Libertarian/conservative uprising, focused on shrinking government, ending bailouts and cutting taxes. It definitely had an element of Obama Derangement Syndrome grafted onto it, but in theory at least, it also was anti George W. Bush. Clearly it has morphed into something else — a confederation of people who reject the results of the 2008 election, mainly Palinites (the angry mobs who shouted “kill him!” and “off with his head!” at Palin’s ‘08 rallies look an awful lot like those making up the tea rallies these days…) George W. Bush defenders, neoconservatives (who really don’t seem to fit in, but whose beef with Paul is that he opposes foreign adventurism, a la Iraq) plus the well-documented fringe of racists, nativists, birthers and just plain angry white people. Throw in Tom Tancredo leading the lobster-gobbling, pinky in the air Nashville conventioneers and you get a strange gobbledygook of race baiting and snobs who can afford to pay $800 to hear Sarah Palin say what you can hear her say for free on Fox News, and what you’re left with is a very strange brew. Read more
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