Newshoggers.com

Santorum's Cherry Picking

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Because of his Catholic faith Rick Santorum opposes birth control.  But just how strong is Santorum's faith - how often does he actually listen to the Bishops?  Juan Cole reminds not very often.

Top Ten Catholic Teachings Santorum Rejects while Obsessing about Birth Control

1. So for instance, Pope John Paul II was against anyone going to war against Iraq I think you’ll find that Rick Santorum managed to ignore that Catholic teaching.
2. The Conference of Catholic Bishops requires that health care be provided to all Americans. I.e., Rick Santorum’s opposition to universal health care is a betrayal of the Catholic faith he is always trumpeting.
3. The Catholic Church opposes the death penalty for criminals in almost all situations. (Santorum largely supports executions.)
4. The US Conference of Bishops has urged that the federal minimum wage be increased, for the working poor. Santorum in the Senate repeatedly voted against the minimum wage.
5. The bishops want welfare for all needy families, saying “We reiterate our call for a minimum national welfare benefit that will permit children and their parents to live in dignity. A decent society will not balance its budget on the backs of poor children.” Santorum is a critic of welfare.
6. The US bishops say that “the basic rights of workers must be respected–the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions…”. Santorum, who used to be supportive of unions in the 1990s, has now, predictably, turned against them.
7. Catholic bishops demand the withdrawal of Israel from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Rick Santorum denies that there are any Palestinians, so I guess he doesn’t agree with the bishops on that one.
8. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops ripped into Arizona’s law on treatment of immigrants, Cardinal Roger Mahony characterized Arizona’s S.B. 1070 as “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law,” saying it is based on “totally flawed reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources.” He even suggested that the law is a harbinger of an American Nazism! Santorum attacks ‘anchor babies’ or the provision of any services to children of illegal immigrants born and brought up in the US.
9. The Bishops have urged that illegal immigrants not be treated as criminals and that their contribution to this country be recognized.
10. The US Conference of Bishops has denounced, as has the Pope, the Bush idea of ‘preventive war’, and has come out against an attack on Iran in the absence of a real and present threat of an Iranian assault on the US. In contrast, Santorum wants to play Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove and ride the rocket down on Isfahan himself.

So as it turns out Rick Santorum is not a particularly good Catholic but just another political hack and homophobe.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

Running Out Of Fat Cats

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Mitt Romney is running out of rich people.

The former Massachusetts governor’s gold-plated fundraising machine has depended almost exclusively on big checks from the wealthy individuals — business leaders, Mormon allies, longtime Republican Establishment donors — whom Romney and his team have been cultivating for years, pressing the cases that resonate for those crowds: That he’ll cut taxes; that he’ll beat Barack Obama; that he’s inevitable and they’d better get on board.

But Romney has proved unable to tap into the emotion-driven small-dollar contributions that helped power Barack Obama in 2008, and which fueled even his more Establishment rival, Hillary Clinton, this time four years ago when she too began to run out of big donors. The result: Republican fundraisers say that despite his success so far, they think Romney is fast approaching a wall, and that he will likely be forced to pay for the campaign out of his own deep pockets.

Dependence on rich people is a problem, you can only give $2,500 once but you can give $25 a 100 times. In addition there is a limited number of rich people.  Santorum like Obama is able to tap the small donor and that's a well that won't go dry.  This may be a test of just how effective the Super-Pacs can be.

Mitt Romney - Face Dancer

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Face Dancer:

A Face Dancer is a type of human in Frank Herbert's science fiction Dune universe. A servant caste of the Bene Tleilax, Face Dancers are shapeshifters, and their name is derived from their ability to change their physical appearance at will.

Of course in Romney's case it's an ability to change his ideological appearance at will.  As David Frum reports this is how Grover Norquist sees Romney. 

Norquist: Romney Will Do As Told

The most quoted speech at CPAC this year was Mitt Romney's, but my vote for the most significant goes to Grover Norquist's. In his charmingly blunt way, Norquist articulated out loud a case for Mitt Romney that you hear only whispered by other major conservative leaders.

They have reconciled themselves to a Romney candidacy because they see Romney as essentially a weak and passive president who will concede leadership to congressional conservatives:

 

All we have to do is replace Obama. ... We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.

 

The requirement for president?

 

Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.

 

From mistermix at Balloon Juice:

Mitt Romney’s new anti-Detroit-bailout Op Ed in the Detroit News includes bonus union bashing to prove the severity of his conservatism. Since 62% of Republicans in Michigan oppose the bailout, versus 36% of the overall population, Romney has to double down on bailout bashing in a desperate effort to erase Santorum’s 15 point lead in that state.

We all know that Santorum is toxic as a national candidate, but the problem for Romney is the only way to beat Santorum is to adopt the same anti-gay, anti-woman and anti-progress positions in the primaries and bet that he can somehow reverse course this Fall. The longer the contest draws out, the more Romney has to pander, and the more he turns himself into the Goldwater-like candidate that the Republican establishment is desperate to avoid.

Romney is an ideological Face Dancer who will assume whatever face his masters require.  The problem is Romney is going to have dance to the extreme right to beat Santorum.  The longer the primary fight continues the more difficult it will be for Romney to dance to the center. 

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Obama's Election Budget

By Steve Hynd

There's a nice run-down on the main talking points of Obama's planned election budget over at the Beeb.

The proposal includes $1.5 trillion (£950bn) in new taxes, much from allowing Bush-era tax cuts to expire.

...His plan to allow George W Bush-era tax cuts to expire would affect families making $250,000 or more per year.

The president would also put in place a rule named after billionaire Warren Buffett to tax households making more than $1m annually at a rate of at least 30%.

In a populist touch, over the next decade, the plan would levy a new $61bn tax on financial institutions, in an effort to recover the costs of the financial bailout.

And it would raise a further $41bn by cutting tax breaks for oil, gas and coal companies.

...It means the president would not fulfil his 2009 promise to half the federal deficit by the end of his first term.

I say "talking points" because this is clearly a budget plan that will never be realized and isn't intended to be. As the BBC's Adam Brookes notes in a sidebar:

President Obama is seeking to ignite passion and commitment in his supporters as his re-election effort gets underway. And that is what his budget speech was all about.

Mr Obama sought to lay down the economic vision that will define his re-election campaign. His plan does hack away at government spending. But Mr Obama's senior advisers have said bluntly that this is not an austerity budget.

Austerity, they say, will only slow down recovery. Little wonder his Republican opponents in Congress, for whom tax increases are a diabolical heresy, are raging at the plan. They are swearing to dismember it, which they can and will.

But Mr Obama's aim now is not really to persuade a furious gridlocked Congress of anything. It's to persuade frightened American voters that he can lead them back to prosperity.

It's a savvy move, I'll admit. Obama intends painting the GOP as the party "of the rich, for the rich" and his own party as being all for the little guy, just for long enough to get re-elected. Then he and the Dems can quietly go back to being the other party of the rich, for the rich, with impunity.

Update AP has an agency-by-agency guide to the winners and losers under Obama's proposed budget. the biggest losers in percentage terms compared to the 2012 budget are Education (-52%), Labor (-35.7%), Transportation (-39.4%), Housing and Urban Development (-21.3%). The biggest winners are Energy (+41%), Commerce (+15.6%), State (+13.8%). No comment from me required, there.

Obama = 77% Dubya

By Steve Hynd

Back in June 2008, Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush on the floor of the House, in a move that progressives at the time loved.

Now, ant-war activist writer David Swanson notes that 27 of those articles apply equally well to President Obama.

I think all progressives can agree that being 33 23% not-Republican isn't at all good. The big question, I suppose, is whether it's enough of a difference to justify voting for the guy and his party. Maybe instead the thing to do is put up with the 23% extra margin for a decade or two while we build a movement and a new party that can get an actual non-Republican elected. After all, despite Democrat fearmongering of the "most important election EVAH!" kind, ignoring that Republicans have ruled the roost for at least half of the last century and haven't managed to destroy the United States yet. (Contrary-wise, despite rightwing howls over the post-war decades, neither have the Dems succeeded in destroying America.) On both sides of the partisan not-fence there is a deep and persistent contempt for the rights of the common people and a belief that power confers privilege in its original sense - private law - in all matters both foreign and domestic. That 23% difference seems to be shrinking all the time.

Only a true Labor movement, a "big tent" party, can alter the current status quo. I've been banging this drum since 2005, making arguments for a coalition of the Left (by which I mean the true constituency of the Left - all of those who are poor and working class). Over the years, I've become more and more cynical - I now do not see the Democratic Party as any possible part of the solution, because the party's leadership are inextricably part of the problem.

I'm not arguing that the Republicans are in any way a better alternative than the Democrats. I'm are simply arguing that Democrats' actions leave me feeling that they are not worth the Left's time, money and loyalty. They are well aware that the current system makes them one of only two big fish and that their core agenda is moderate, middle-class and corporate. In 2008, the average net worth of a Senator was almost $14 million. The average net worth of a Congressman was $4.6 million. President Obama is worth somewhere north of $5.5 million and will leave office significantly richer than when he was sworn in. Do you all think that might just be a wee, tiny tad of a conflict of interest when it comes to considering whether to enact legislation to help the poorest or instead do stuff like perpetuating the Bush tax cuts - something that would leave lawmakers on average $3 million each richer over a decade?

Bear with me here while I digress on British political history. In April 1888, Kier Hardie stood for election to the British parliament as an independent labour candidate, after realising that the Liberal Party was happy to call for the votes of working people as its natural due but would never enact more than a tiny proportion of a labour agenda that was at odds with its own essentially rich-elite nature. he lost that election, but it began a process that saw Hardie returned to parliament as the first MP from an independent labour party in 1892 - a process that saw the rise of a Labour Party that by 1924 became the party of government for the first time. That Labour Party - despite it's latter-day co-opting by the Whigs again, in the Americanised form of the Blairites - is singularly responsible for the UK's policies of women's suffrage, of worker's rights, of universal healthcare, universal education and a social safety net for those who struggle. It's policies have been copied, in some form or other, the world over.

Despite any regretable tendency to proclaim "not invented here", the story of the rise of the Labour Party in Britain has important lessons for modern America. While not exact, the analogy is none the less clear: a nation where rule is divided between competing elements of the rich elite - one that pretends to care about the interests of the common people and one that makes no such pretense - with each taking their turn to steer the country, always toward greater power and enrichment for the already rich and powerful, the only difference being the degree of audacity with which that policy is pursued. Those lessons are simple: it takes a long time to build an effective labor movement, and it does that movement no good to keep voting for liberal Whigs in the hope that those members of the rich elite will enact legislation to satisfy any meaningful proportion of the working class's needs. But as Saul Alinsky once said, "Power goes to two poles -- to those who've got the money and those who've got the people."

There is no demographic reason why a party of the common people, for the common people, should not be the majority party in the United States. Indeed, there are reasons to believe such a party, responsive to a popular and democratic socialist agenda, could be the natural majority party. The party could not be named the Labor Party - thank McCarthy and his kneejerk legacy - but a Populist Party could, with a couple of decades of organising, see majorities on the Hill and a President in the Oval Office.

It's important to realise that the current electorate is not the same as the potential electorate. By American standards the turnout for the 2004 Presidential election was high, for example - yet by the standards of other Western democracies it was woefully low. Chris Bowers at MyDD researched who didn't turn out to vote and came up with some interesting findings. In 2004, for example, the national median income was $35,100 p.a. yet the median income of the electorate was $55,300 - a difference of 57.5%.

In other words, it is mostly the poorest segment of society who don't vote. Consider that although a presidential election winner might gain 52% of the electorate, he'd still only win 34% of all the possible votes. There is a huge potential constituency out there, between 25% and 30% of the potential electorate, who simply don't vote - and they don't vote simply because neither major party have policies that address their concerns! A party that can mobilise that unheard constituency and take even 10% from the current Big Two wins the first national election in which it has built up sufficient organisation to do that mobilization on a nationwide basis.

The standard Democrat response to anyone who suggests such a thing is circular - since a true broadbased party of the poor and working class doesn't exist it cannot get elected and since it cannot get elected it should not exist. But they show no burning desire to break the cycle of abuse between the left and the party's leadership illustrated so well by this graphic that first did the rounds in about 2005:

We are without doubt in a class war, one the rich started and the rich are winning, and it is right to call it for what it is. Senators and Congressman - and President - no matter which party political lable is affixed to them, have no idea what it is to be truly poor in America. While you were suffering, they have increased their wealth. They have engineered our current economic dire straits as the direct consequence of their unfettered seeking for more riches and their sociopathic inability to empathize for the effects of that seeking on the rest of us. They have engineered a political system where our only real choices are between all-out asset strippers - the Republicans - and those who pretend to have our interests at heart while doing the bidding of the rich who run corporations which have bought and paid for lawmakers. If you're committed to a progressive or populist approach to government and public service, if you are poor, if you're an ethnic minority (especially Black or Hispanic), or are a woman concerned with her reproductive rights (which are increasingly under attack), the Democrats have been more than happy to take you for granted and even openly entertain selling you up the river. Everyone is stuck in this cycle until the vast majority who must scrape to make ends meet each month stop voting for them.

Solidarinosc

Santorum and the Bishops

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I have thought all along that the recent birth control flap had little to do with birth control.  The Republicans and tea party crows are opposed to it because it comes from Obama.  The Catholic hierarchy is opposed to it because it is a threat to their power - the power to control women and sex.  Over at Balloon Juice recovering Catholic Dennis G. has some great insight.

The Bishops are demanding an end to any rule that requires any insurance company to cover any contraception or family planning as basic health issues for women. This is just the latest iteration of a centuries old objection to women having control of their bodies, their lives, their happiness and their liberty by the conservative power-focused elites running the Roman Catholic Church. This objection manifests itself in screeds against anything that treats sex as an activity separate from breeding and/or free from the dictates of Church Law.

And yet, I don’t think this latest play is about sex or even the Church trying to control the lives of women—I think it is about power and that sex, women, gay marriage and a host of other culture warrior issues are the pathway that they see as the golden road.

Yes the golden path back to "the good old days" before the reformation and the American and French revolutions.

For anybody who has looked at the history of the Catholic Church (and any organized religion for that matter) a key part of their activities over time becomes how to maintain power, privilege and influence—and all the goodies that come with it. Eventually that is all that matters for the institution. The greatest success in this effort always comes when political leaders bow to the dictates of the Holy Roman Church and agree to make State Law subservient to Church Law. Back in the days of Kings and Queens you only had a handful of elites you had to work with and the mutual pursuit of power inspired many of them to treat Church Law as State Law. It worked for a long while and then came the Reformation, Protestantism, King Henry, the Enlightenment, Democracy and eventually a desire by more and more people to make their laws free of religion and the dictates of any Church.

The United States of America was founded on the belief that Church and State are separate and that the Laws of this Nation trump the laws of any religion—including the Roman Catholic Church. As you can imagine, this has made the conservative wing of the Catholic Church quite sad. For over a century they have been on the losing end of many political fights—especially when it comes to women in America. The Church opposed suffrage for women and any effort over the years that might free women from the Church sanctioned role of breeder. The Church has fought every form of contraception and lost most battles. They also have lost the battle of finding any American politician who was willing to embrace the idea that US Law should be subservient to Church Law—until now.

While there are two Catholics in the race, Santorum and Gingrich, only Santorum is the true cultural warrior who could be counted on to place the will of the Bishops above the Constitution.  Once again the Bishops would have the power they desire.

Supporting a Santorum surge is an opportunity for power and that is why the Bishops are doubling down on opposing any insurance company offering any contraception or family planning services to anybody, anywhere. Ultimately the entire issue is about power and not about sex.

Of course the Catholic hierarchy is so out of touch even with American Catholics they can't see that there is no possibility that Santorum could win a national election.  I suspect they may also fear the growing power of the Church of Latter Day Saints and would not like to see the Mormon Romney in the White House.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

Catholic Church Priorities

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Catholic bishops are not satisfied:

Unacceptable — former Vatican Ambassador, Prof. Robert George, others respond

Today the Obama administration has offered what it has styled as an “accommodation” for religious institutions in the dispute over the HHS mandate for coverage (without cost sharing) of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception. The administration will now require that all insurance plans cover (“cost free”) these same products and services.  Once a religiously-affiliated (or believing individual) employer purchases insurance (as it must, by law), the insurance company will then contact the insured employees to advise them that the terms of the policy include coverage for these objectionable things.

This so-called “accommodation” changes nothing of moral substance and fails to remove the assault on religious liberty and the rights of conscience which gave rise to the controversy.  It is certainly no compromise.  The reason for the original bipartisan uproar was the administration’s insistence that religious employers, be they institutions or individuals, provide insurance that covered services they regard as gravely immoral and unjust.  Under the new rule, the government still coerces religious institutions and individuals to purchase insurance policies that include the very same services.

Of course it doesn't satisfy them - nothing short of making birth control illegal again would because it interferes with their ability to control sex and women.  But in the midst of this outrage we are reminded once again that the Catholic hierarchy has zero moral authority.

8,000 instances of abuse alleged in Archdiocese bankruptcy hearing

Sealed documents filed in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee bankruptcy identify at least 8,000 instances of child sexual abuse and 100 alleged offenders - 75 of them priests - who have not previously been named by the archdiocese, a victims' attorney said Thursday.

Was this another example of Obama playing three dimesional chess?  Greg Sargent thinks it might be:

Birth control may now be wedge issue against GOP

At his press conference this morning announcing the new shift in contraception policy, Obama said: “I understand that some folks in Washington may want to treat this as another political wedge issue. But it shouldn’t be.”

The irony is that after this announcement, this very well may become a wedge issue — against Republicans.

That’s because anyone who comes out against the proposal Obama outlined today will be asked a simple question: Are you saying that employers should dictate to female employees whether they should or shouldn’t have access to birth control coverage?

Now I think this was a political winner for Obama from the begining but Sargent is right - it's now an even bigger winner. 

Just When You Thought!

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Just when you thought the Republican primary race and clown show couldn't get any stranger it did.  Little Ricky (man on dog) Santorum looks to be the nights big winner.  He's won in Missouri and Minnesota and with 30% reporting he's up by 12 in Colorado.  The Republican base really doesn't like Romney and would rather lose the White House than see Romney there.  Santorum was probably helped by the recent contraception brouhaha which isn't about contraception at all but about Obama Care for most of the base.

Good News Everybody (NFP edition)

By Dave Anderson:

An actual piece of very good news on the job front via the BLS:

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January, and the
unemployment rate decreased to 8.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported today. Job growth was widespread in the private
sector, with large employment gains in professional and business
services, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing. Government
employment changed little over the month....

The unemployment rate declined by 0.2 percentage point in January to
8.3 percent; the rate has fallen by 0.8 point since August.

All backward looking data has also been revised upwards.  243,000 new jobs in a month is a pace that is sufficient to actually tighten up the labor market and thus improve wages/income.

Climate Denialism: A Future Crime

By Steve Hynd

TP Green notes that Mitt Romney is climbing aboard the denialist crazy train in his search for GOP primary votes, attacking Gingrich in a public email for appearing in a 2008 ad for Al Gore's climate campaign.

Romney’s campaign spokesman Ryan Williams bashed Gingrich as being part of the “Soros agenda” for the advertisement:

"It is interesting to see the latest attack from Speaker Gingrich and his disintegrating campaign. Unlike Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney never sat next to Nancy Pelosi in an ad funded by George Soros on behalf of Al Gore’s global warming initiative. As recently as 2008, the Soros agenda had no better friend than Newt Gingrich. Nice try, Mr. Speaker."

For most of the world, anthropogenic climate change is settled science. We get that putting more energy into the system (a.k.a global warming) means not just an overall temperature rise but also vastly more energetic and unpredicatble weather systems leading to things like unusual cold spells and snowfalls in Winter, or to stronger tonadoes and heavier flooding in areas where such already occur. The evidence is overwhelming and the notion that climate change is some Soros-created conspiracy is just crazy. Anyone who believes otherwise has a reality-map which is so divergent from what is actually happening as to fulfil the primary requirement for a psychosis: a thought disorder in which reality testing is grossly impaired.

But the Republican Party has been bought and paid for by the Energy lobby; the Kochs and Halliburton, Exxon and the rest. Scientific shills for hire take to the pages of rightwing newspapers to push the Energy lobby's agenda and that filters down to the Republican rank-and-file as a gospel teaching to which purity tests apply. Both Romney and Gingrich, along with others in their party like McCain in 2008, have had to shift their public stances on climate change to a full-on denialism under the sway of this psychosis.

I'd understand if the GOP's position was that anthropogenic climate change was real, was happening, but that it was economically unviable to try to halt its progression. I'd disagree but at least it'd be a logically consistent position and the GOP could join the rest of us in talking about how we handle the effects of that change. Instead, their denialist intransigence is shaping up to become the greatest crime against humanity the Republicans have ever backed - and I include Iraq, their many bigotries and their "I'm alright, Jack" economic support for the 1% against the 99% in that statement. If they won't admit there's a cause, they cannot begin to formulate policies to deal with the problems.

Analyst Jack Whipple puts it succinctly:

"Taken together, the decline and eventual near cessation of fossil fuel production and that of many other minerals, disruption in global weather patterns, and the growing food and water scarcity will constitute the third great transition. Unlike the previous transitions in which life arguably got better for some, if not most, of the world's peoples, any upside to this transition seems to pale in the face of what is to come."

While a 2007 report by the centrist think-tank CNAS was rather more explicit:

In the case of severe climate change, corresponding to an average increase in global temperature of 2.6°C by 2040, massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario...nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.

The tipping point for that 2.6°C radical change has already been reached.

As TP Green's Brad Johnson noted last year:

The Republican Party is doing its utmost to cripple our nation’s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. At Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s behest, House GOP slashed clean energy investments to pay for emergency disaster relief following the Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes. They cut the DHS disaster preparedness budget, including firefighter funding, in half (after Democrats raised an outcry, some firefighter grants were restored). They have blocked funding for the NOAA Climate Service, and slashed money for critical weather satellites. In states throughout the nation, conservatives are gutting clean-energy programs and attacking climate science, while local emergency services budgets are stripped to the bone.

With the security of our homeland under the clear and present threat of global warming, conservatives are choosing to cripple our defenses, simply to serve the obscene profits of climate polluters.

Climate change is the big anvil-to-be around the GOP's neck. In decades to come, their denialism for so many years will wreck their claims to be the strong party on national security, as it becomes clearer that their intransigence (and being in hock to the energy lobby) for nearly a decade in power under Bush left the US lagging behind others in facing up to the security challenges climate change entails. Mitt and the other GOP frontrunners want to repeat that crime of ommission for another term or two. Meanwhile, many people will die and others will live miserable lives. Their denialism constitutes a crime against humanity "in waiting".