Conservatives
mikethemadbiologist | August 30, 2011They're getting pretty good at hostage taking, and it worked before. Alex Seitz-Wald reports:
Despite the devastation caused by Hurricane Irene this weekend, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) today stood by his call that no more money be allocated for disaster relief unless it is offset by spending cuts elsewhere. The Washington Post reported this morning that FEMA will need more money than it currently has to deal with the storm's aftermath and is already diverting funds from other recent disasters to deal with the hurricane, but Cantor's comments suggest Republicans won't authorize…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2011Sheril has the details:
That's what Florida Governor Rick Scott and the Republican-controlled Legislature just did. Embarrassing for Florida and a travesty for the Everglades.
They've dismantled the South Florida Water Management District-the state agency charged with protecting the Everglades. As The Sierra Club explains, this wasn't belt tightening, but an attack on science and more specifically an attack on Everglades restoration. Among the 280 employees laid off was Dr. Christopher McVoy, lead author of the recently published 576-page book Landscapes and Hydrology of the Predrainage…
mikethemadbiologist | August 24, 2011By way of Matthew Yglesias, we read that,over at National Review Online, Kevin Williamson claims progressives only care about science as a way to wage culture war (yes, coming from movement conservatives, that's rich):
There are lots of good reasons not to wonder what Rick Perry thinks about scientific questions, foremost amongst them that there are probably fewer than 10,000 people in the United States whose views on disputed questions regarding evolution are worth consulting, and they are not politicians; they are scientists. In reality, of course, the progressive types who want to know…
mikethemadbiologist | August 21, 2011In this case, South Carolina. From Steve M.:
I was reminded of this when I glanced at Jacob Weisberg's Jon Huntsman profile in Vogue and my eye fell on this this har-har-har good-ol'-boy anecdote about a Huntsman campaign appearance in Greer, South Carolina:
Henry McMaster, the state's silver-haired former attorney general, then makes the political tenor of the room explicit when he rises to introduce Jon Huntsman in his thick-as-gravy drawl. "Some of you folks may remembah that I made a pledge that I looked forward to the day Democrats in South Carolina were so rare we'd have to start…
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2011Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, in an attempt to win the craziness sweepstakes, has been proclaiming hither and yon that half of all Americans pay no income tax. Call me confused, but I thought Republicans wanted to lower income taxes? Maybe it has something to do with who those non-payers are?
Well, who are they? Let's see:
The number one reason should come as no surprise. It's because they have low incomes. As my colleague Bob Williams notes:
A couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax this year because their $11,600 standard…
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2011So the Tea Party Fort Sumter conservatives have sunk to new lows--they're celebrating the downgrade of U.S. debt (italics mine; video at the link):
Is the tea party happy that Standard and Poor's, the credit rating agency, downgraded the United States' credit rating for the first time ever?
You'd think that was the case if you were in the crowd at a tea party rally in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, on Sunday morning. The Tea Party Express rolled into that northeastern city as part of its tour to bolster the six GOP state senators facing recall elections on Tuesday. But the most shocking moment of…
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2011Recently, I described how the out of control Tea Party Fort Sumter conservatives were created and encouraged. Athenae dispatches conservatives like David Frum who are SHOCKED that this could possibly happen:
I feel about this the way I feel about people who keep grizzly bears and gorillas and tigers as pets. They keep animals that outweigh them as pampered houseguests, feeding them raw salmon and steak and putting cute little collars on them and shit, and then are ABSOLUTELY SHOCKED when their "best friends" get bored one day and eat their faces.
I mean, COME ON. Did you really not think you…
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2011Guess who Mitt Romney picked as co-chair of his "Justice Advisory Committee"? Robert Bork. Yes, this Robert Bork:
Banning Porn, Art and Science : Bork also called for shrinking the size of the First Amendment until it is small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. "Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political. There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic."
Here are some other blasts from the past:
Opposition To Civil…
mikethemadbiologist | July 31, 2011One of the things to remember about the Tea Party Uruk-hai who run the Republican Party make up the shock troops of the GOP is that they were manufactured--just like the orcs in the Lord of the Rings. Comrade Driftglass explains:
Conservatives built this monster.
It didn't just wander out of the woods one day, or land here from another planet. The Wingnut Base -- whatever teabagger, Colonial Williamsburg camouflage they're sporting this week, and however hard the media tries to pretend they aren't who we know they are -- was manufactured by the Conservative Movement to win elections. Made…
mikethemadbiologist | July 29, 2011A vote to resolve the debt ceiling political crisis failed last night because House Republicans--who hold a majority in the House of Representatives--opposed the bill. Here's a major reason why--Pell Grants, which are federal scholarships for low- and lower-middle income students:
House conservatives who have stalled legislation to raise the national debt limit are angry that it includes $17 billion in supplemental spending for Pell Grants, which some compare to welfare.
Legislation crafted by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to raise the debt limit by $900 billion would directly…
mikethemadbiologist | July 25, 2011From The NY Times:
Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer and a consultant on terrorism, said it would be unfair to attribute Mr. Breivik's violence to the writers who helped shape his world view. But at the same time, he said the counterjihad writers do argue that the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam "is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged. Well, they and their writings are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged."
"This rhetoric," he added, "is not cost-free."
Just another lone wolf, I guess.
Of course, Glenn Beck has compared the murdered children to "Hitler Youth."…
mikethemadbiologist | July 23, 2011Mike Konczal is disappointed in the behavior of one of the members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission ('FCIC'), Peter Wallison, movement conservative and member of the rightwing faith tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Like many conservatives, Wallison blames the housing crisis on efforts to provide African-Americans with loans, even though, as Konczal explains, that's simply not true. Here's what the FCIC was charged to do:
First off, let's remember what this document is. The FCIC report was designed to be our age's Pecora Commission, a collection and investigation of…
mikethemadbiologist | July 21, 2011Or more accurately, it's the revolt of the liberals. Personally, it's none of my business whom Republicans nominate for president, but, to me, Romney seems to be a strong electoral candidate (albeit one disliked by the Tea Party/theopolitical base). Why?
Liberals.
Hunh? Let me explain.
I've been talking to liberals who have non-overlapping circles of friends in Virginia, one of the closely contested swing states (thanks to Google+, the ability to use the phrase "circle of friends" is rapidly drawing to a close. But I digress). As I far as I can tell, there are enough liberals who would…
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2011As a fellow card-carrying member of the Ancient, Holy and High Hermeneutic Order of the Shrill, I mean that as a compliment:
There aren't many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief -- of the black-humor variety -- in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy.
A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. "Has the G.O.P. gone insane?" they ask.
Why, yes, it has. But this isn't something that just happened, it's…
mikethemadbiologist | July 14, 2011It's as if Republican House Whip Eric Cantor wants to be a cartoon villain:
...as the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz reports, one group that Cantor is apparently fine with making pay more is American college students. Cantor, at the White House for budget negotiations, apparently proposed that students who take out student loans should immediately start paying interest, rather than getting to make payments after graduation:
As Monday's White House budget talks got down to the nitty-gritty, Eric Cantor proposed a series of spending cuts, one of them aimed squarely at college students. The House…
mikethemadbiologist | July 10, 2011Or something. A while ago, in "Michele Bachmann, Light Bulb Vigilantes, and the Dim Bulbs of the Tea Party", I described the fear that the psychiatric wing of the Republican Party (and its dominant wing) has towards more energy efficient light bulbs. This is what appears to drive that fear:
On her way out, Dee Hogan of Nashua told me she would gladly vote for Bachmann. "I don't appreciate that your next-door neighbor is going to start yelling at me, telling me to shut my lights off when they have that shut-your-lights-off thingee. I don't want people in my face, telling me what to do."
I…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2011So GOP Senator Orrin Hatch has decided to embrace his inner douchebag:
"I hear how they're so caring for the poor and so forth," Hatch said in remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, in reference to Democrats. "The poor need jobs! And they also need to share some of the responsibility."
...But it was Hatch whose remarks Wednesday raised the idea that the wealthy are already doing too much, even as the nation's effective tax rates are at modern lows since the Bush administration slashed rates in 2001 and 2003. In his view, it seems, the middle class and poor should be picking up the slack.
"…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2011A while ago, I discussed the record low rate of male employment in the U.S. Well, Mike Konczal also has that figure (why read anyone but the Mad Biologist. We are always firstest...). But he notes some other jarring data:
You have to go back to pre-1988 to find an era when there were a fewer percentage of women working than there are right now.
You've come a long way, baby. If you have a job, things suck too:
Meanwhile, how's the economy working out for those with jobs? Average weekly earnings of all private employees dropped from $791.20 to $788.56. We can't really have an inflationary…
mikethemadbiologist | June 29, 2011It's OK If You're a Republican, I suppose:
Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, had between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury EFT. The fund aggressively "shorts" long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, meaning that it performs well when U.S. debt is undesirable. (A short is when the trader hopes to profit from the decline in the value of an asset.)
According to his latest financial disclosure statement, which covers the year 2010 and has been publicly available since this spring, Cantor still has up to $15,…
mikethemadbiologist | June 23, 2011I've long held that tenured professors who espouse 'free trade' or 'free markets' should have their tenure revoked--let's see how their tune changes (and I do include Krugman in this*). Ditto pundits with cushy sinecures. Let's put them in a world where they could show up at 9am and be told to pack their things and leave the building by 11am and see whether they extol its virtues (FREEDOM!!!)**.
Anyway, by way of Digby, we stumble across this brilliant essay about Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher who made libertarianism respectable. While the whole thing is worth a read, this section…