Who should we root for?

So we want a Republican candidate who will lose to Obama. However, just in case, we want a Republican candidate who, if he wins, won't be too disastrous. Who should we root for (and don't tell me "whom")?

I guess I'd have to go for Huntsman who is possibly not actually beneath contempt, though his conservative economics don't appeal to me. He might be tolerable as President, but he is unlikely to win, given the screwball nature of a lot of Republican voters these days. Huntsman may very well come in second in NH since he isn't Mitt and he seems to have landed a big zinger Sunday morning when he called Romney out over the issue of serving as Obama's ambassador to China.

The silver lining to the never-ending air time given to Republicans this primary season is that they are generating a lot of free negative ads attacking each other. In particular, Gingrich and Santorum have been digging up a lot of facts (already reported by the liberal media) concerning the anti-worker activities of Romney's company Bain Capital.These attacks have been, of course, largely financed by Pacs and SuperPacs for the other Republican candidates. They will come in handy for the Dems in the general election. (The Dems have been victims of this phenomenon in previous elections when they have had long primary battles.)

Another debate

Somehow I watched a large chunk of the Republican debate this evening. As usual, there was little actual content and almost no facts. The Republicans are getting  a lot of free airtime to vent their nonsense -- that Obama is a radical European Socialist, for example, or that there are no "classes" in America.

This last, by the way, was from that frothy candidate Rick Santorum, who then went on to say that he is the candidate of blue collar workers. (They're not a "class" -- maybe just a subset or category, huh?) Of course, Rick Santorum stands for everything that screwed his coal-mining ancestors. The only thing, let me repeat, the only thing that made the lives of mine workers better was unionization. Not the work ethic, not courage, and certainly not religion. It was unionization, something Santorum and every single other Republican of any sort is against.

(And, for the record, about the only political party that fought long and hard in support of the mining unions was CPUSA: the American Communist Party. Whatever its motivation, and whatever the communists did that was horrible in the USSR, they gave unqualified and courageous support to the one thing that helped the working class in this country: unionization.)

The Republicans don't know this, or don't want to know this. And the idiot "moderators" of this debate -- the pretty boy and Diane Sawyer (is she on drugs?) -- swallowed everything without the slightest visible urge to bring any sort of reality to the "debate."

Pitiful. As I've said before: this was the B-team, and there is no A-team. The same statement holds true for the both candidates and moderators.

Why didn't I watch some football or do another crossword? What part of beneath contempt don't I still understand?

Interim appointment

It's good to see that the reality of American politics has finally broken through to our President. He has received negligible support from the Republicans on anything, and they have declared openly that they would not approve any head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless the Bureau, set up through a super-majority (filibuster proof) vote of Congress, is stripped of many of its powers.

Consider, then, the following quote from Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader: “Although the Senate is not in recess, President Obama, in an unprecedented move, has arrogantly circumvented the American people.” On the face of it, this is about as absurd a statement as can be made. When a President is not allowed to appoint a qualified head of a federal agency that was created by majorities of both houses of Congress, who exactly is trying to circumvent the American people?

This is the latest in a long list of Republican gas attacks on the truth, and is further proof that both parties are not equally to blame for the impasses in Congress. Let's hope that, for a change, the media will point this out.

Thanks Mr. President for shoving the eminently reasonable Cordray interim appointment down the throats of the Republicans -- couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of phonies.

Unclear on the concept: part LVXII

Apparently the Illinois Catholic Charities organization is closing down rather than having to help gay couples adopt children. They are protesting an Illinois requirement that they can't accept state money unless they stop discriminating against same sex couples.

First of all, it is not clear to me why they would stop performing charitable work simply because they don't want to help certain people: Whatever happened to the the injunction of "hating the sin but not the sinner"? They certainly could follow the standard conservative principle of refusing to take "government money," yet continue their good works using their own funds.

Instead, keeping with an equally long tradition of militant right-wingers, they would rather try to pull an end-run around policies put into place through democratic means by a majority of their fellow citizens.

OK -- so far nothing unusual: just standard religious exceptionalism. However, Anthony R. Picarello, general council for the militant Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCB), offers this analysis:

"It's true that the church doesn't have a First Amendment right to have a government contract, but it does have a First Amendment right not to be excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs."

No, Mr. Picarello. The church was not excluded from this contract because of its beliefs, it was excluded from the contract because it wouldn't comply with the terms of the contract, which clearly state that contractors may not discriminate. They can believe anything they want, and announce their beliefs in pulpits and street corners as much as they like. To make a simple analogy, if a building contract requires foundations to be poured with concrete, and you believe that Elmer's glue will suffice, you can state that belief as much as you want, but you can't expect to get that contract.

Lots of fundamentalist churches used to believe -- and a few still believe -- that "mixing of the races" is wrong. They used the same argument that Mr. Picarello is now dredging up to try to show that anti-discrimination laws were somehow oppressing them. But it didn't work then and it shouldn't work now. This is a democracy, and we try to treat all law-abiding citizens fairly. If that violates the opinions of some religious group that wants to treat some law-abiding citizens unfairly, well then they can't expect taxpayers' money -- some of which was contributed by the very people they want to shortchange -- to support their efforts to do so. Would the Catholic Bishops use the same logic to support groups that refuse to place children with Catholic or Mormon or Jewish or left-handed families, say?

What part of democracy does Mr. Picarello and his clients not understand?

(Which brings me to our "cave"-man President. Will he now let religious groups refuse to cover contraception in their healthcare plans, in violation of current statutes? Why isn't this a no-brainer for him?)

You can't make this up.

 John Boehner said yesterday (about the House going along with the Senate on temporary tax cut):


"...why not do the right thing for the American people, even though it’s not exactly what we want.”

(This is a quote from UPI)

We'll take it...

Well, it's not like the Dems and Obama did anything great or bold or clever. In fact, the Republicans in the House overreached, the way arrogant and not very smart people often do. They were mislead into doing so because they are fundamentally wrong about things: they buy into a philosophy of a powerful elite over the majority and of the wealthy over the poor. Most are self-righteous in their narrow and intolerant religious views and ignorant of not only science but of economics and social philosophy.

The victory itself was minor: the PTR (Party for the Rich, formerly the GOP) in the House, in thrall to the Tea Screamers, having to back down and eat the Senate's two-month extensions of (1) a dubious "temporary" lowering of the FICA tax and (2) a temporary extension of unemployment benefits. Many battles over these issues remain -- and we'll see how tough the Dems are when push really comes to shove.

However, let's hope that this is the first cry of "The emperor has no clothes on." Maybe folks will wake up from the seemingly endless nightmare of buffoonery we've had to put up with from the Republican presidential B-Team (there is no A-Team) candidates.

Could this be a turning point? I will go to bed hoping so.

The there that isn't

There simply is nothing to discuss or even listen to from the "field" of Republican presidential candidates. I actually watched most of the last debate and couldn't find anything substantive. The whole was based on how much each candidate didn't like Obama and thought his policies were failures. Not one scintilla of defense for any pro or anti positions was given. No one explained why the "personal mandate", for example, was bad -- they just competed with each other in their distaste for it. They couldn't explain why this policy came out of Republican/conservative think tanks and had been supported by Republicans for decades ("Individual mandate is individual responsibility"). Or why Nixon's healthcare plan was to the left of Obama's. Or why the "public option", so popular in public opinion polls here and successful in practice most everywhere else, is not under discussion anywhere in the ranks of our reps.

Of course, none of the candidates explained how they would eliminate the vastly unpopular denial of coverage for "previous conditions" that the insurance industry has saddled us with, and which Obama's healthcare plan would get rid of. Would they allow people to opt out of healthcare premiums until they were sick? Or, would they simply let those without healthcare die (as many in the audience at an early debate seemed to favor)?

Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts supported and signed the bill which is the model for Obama's healthcare bill, said that, basically, he did so because "what's good for Massachusetts is not necessarily good for the country." No one knows what he means by this except as a way of making excuses to the Tea Screamers and other yahoos who don't like the plan. Thus, there was no debate on the issue, just on whether Romney hated the plan at least as much as his rivals say they do.

None of the candidates or the simpering incompetent moderators seemed to understand that the temporary lowering of the FICA tax does not necessarily imperil Social Security -- since when do Republicans care about saving Social Security as we know it? -- because the change specifically says that the lost revenue would be made up from general funds. Do facts have any meaning in this circus? One can make the argument -- and I have a great deal of sympathy for it -- that lowering the FICA tax temporarily will make it impossible ever to raise it back again, making Social Security dependent on general funds from the federal budget. The could allow a breach in the wall of the whole SS structure which, in future years as the hump of "boomers" pass through the system, would require more and more general revenue funds. A far better plan -- and one I've always supported -- is to raise the cap on income subject to FICA. This would enable the wealthy to shoulder their fair tax burden, perhaps lower the rate for everyone (especially when the boomers die off) and would ensure the solvency of the SS system indefinitely.

In any case, the world of true debate about real ideas is not the cloud-cuckoo-land of the Republican "debates". The latter is all about $10,000 bets, conspicuous religiosity, and who has hewn most faithfully to unexamined conservative mythology. It seems to me that grownups should be allowed equal time to reply -- especially those from the fact and reality-based community.