Newshoggers.com

Base locks (local and national)

By Fester

Steve Benen at Political Animal is looking at the GOP's problem at a national level. It is the same problem that Senator Specter faces. Right now the GOP is a base only party and that base is locked into its positions without a willingness to take an 80% ally or solution:

These rank-and-file Republicans that make up the party's base have a straightforward agenda -- make the party as right-wing as they can on issues such as immigration, taxes, and marriage equality. "I've never seen the grass-roots quite as motivated, concerned and angry," said Steve Scheffler, the head of the Iowa Christian Alliance and the state's RNC committeeman.

It's not that there are no voices trying to pull the party in the other direction -- the Main Street Republican Partnership, the Republican Majority for Choice, and the Log Cabin Republicans exist -- it's just that those voices are hopeless, powerless, and ignored.

The result is obvious: a Republican Party that stays exactly as it is now. Same coalitions, same priorities, same ideology, same agenda.

The GOP's elected leadership is dependent on their base to re-elect them without primary challengers. That base ise nationally growing smaller. The Washington Post reports that its most recent poll shows Republican partisan identification at 21%. This is the lowest number in twenty six years for the Republican Party. It may be a bit of statistical nosie but it lines up with other generic ballot test and partisan identification questions. The GOP is losing its non-movement conservative base; they are losing people who will vote Republican 80% of the time, and then third party or Optimus Prime more often then they vote Democratic.

And right now that base is locked into its ideological comfort zone despite the fact that those positions are repugnant and repellent to quite a few potentially persuadable voters. Until there is either a massive screw-up that the public attributes to Democrats or systemic change in the base's priorities (purity versus relevance), the GOP is screwed. For a while, I'll enjoy the schradenfreude, but it is not healthy over the long run of a political system to have the opposition party be run by the ridiculous.

McCain "Defends" Napolitano

By BJ Bjornson

With friends like this . . .

Arizona Senator John McCain is the latest high-profile politician to repeat the diehard American falsehood that the Sept. 11, 2001, attackers entered the United States through Canada.

Just days after Janet Napolitano, the U.S. homeland security secretary, sparked a diplomatic kerfuffle by suggesting the perpetrators took a Canadian route to the U.S. eight years ago, McCain defended her by saying that, in fact, the former Arizona governor was correct.

"Well, some of the 9/11 hijackers did come through Canada, as you know," McCain, last year's Republican presidential candidate, said on Fox News on Friday.

The Arizona senator's remarks prompted the Canadian embassy to immediately reissue remarks made Tuesday by Ambassador Michael Wilson, who reminded Americans once again that none of the attackers came to the U.S. via Canada.

. . .

"As the 9/11 Commission reported in July 2004, all of the 9/11 terrorists arrived in the U.S. from outside North America. They flew to major U.S. airports. They entered the U.S. with documents issued to them by the U.S. government. No 9/11 terrorists came from Canada."

Criticisms of the Obama administration aside, I'm still really glad this guy didn't win.

St. John To The Rescue

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Republican Party is without ideas or a leader.  So who's going to ride to the rescue on the economic front?  This guy:

Take, for example, John McCain’s admission that economics isn’t his thing. “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” he says. “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.”

His self-deprecating humor is attractive, as always. But shouldn't’ we worry about a candidate who’s so out of touch that he regards Mr. Bubble, the man who refused to regulate subprime lending and assured us that there was at most some “froth” in the housing market, as a source of sage advice?

And John, if you haven't read that book yet keep in mind even Greenspan has admitted he was wrong:

But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

And yes this is the Same John McCain who told us that the "fundamentals of our economy are strong" on the very same same day the financial system collapsed.

But none of that will not stop St. John - he's going to come up with a new 10 point economic contract with America.  Now this is a work in process but let's take a look at what he has so far.

1. Tax Cuts

2. Deregulation

3. No earmarks

4. ?

5. ?

6. ?

7. ?

8. ?

9. ?

10. And did you know John McCain was a POW?

Phill Graham wanted number two but even St. John is smart enough to see that that won't fly. 

 

Masturbation masquerading as moderation

By Fester:

Andrew Sullivan is fetishizing center-right idiocy in the name of bipartisanship instead of effectiveness:

 the Senate does its job in good faith! And so we have what the Constitution hoped for: the emergence of lawmakers able and willing to hone and finesse legislation after a healthy debate. The sane center is at work here; and David Brooks shrewdly celebrates it here. My point would simply be: Obama's understanding of his constitutional role - not as party leader or omniscient messiah, but president - will allow a space for Congress to do its job. This is a messy process. But that's what American democracy is at its best: a horrible, dissonant, slow but ultimately effective mess.

This is not the Age of Krugman, Cantor and Rove. It is the Age of Collins, Nelson....

  Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody's and a flaming lefty who was one of Senator McCain's chief economic advisers during the 2008 campaign has an argument for the different multiplier impacts of different proposals.  The worse performing spending metrics (general aid to state governments) has higher impact and efficiency than the best tax policy changes (fully refundable tax credits and FICA holidays).  The reasoning is fairly simple, the government spending has much higher velocity of use. 

Right now the Collins-Nelson axis is seeking to chop out the more effective portions of the stimulus bill and replace those chunks with ineffecient tax cuts and pork distribution:

Total Reductions: $80 billion

Eliminations:

Head Start, Education for the Disadvantaged, School improvement, Child Nutrition, Firefighters, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Prisons, COPS Hiring, Violence Against Women, NASA, NSF, Western Area Power Administration, CDC, Food Stamps

*****************************

Reductions:

Public Transit $3.4 billion, School Construction $60 billion

To hone is to sharpen,to improve.  That is not what is happening.  Let's take it through reconciliation in a couple of weeks because right now John Cole has summarized the negoations perfectly with his analogy:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

Who Cares?

Commentary By Ron Beasley

McCain won't vote for stimulus as it stands now.

Sen. John McCain, Obama's opponent in the November presidential contest, said he did not believe the stimulus package did enough to create jobs.

"There have to be major rewrites if we want to stimulate the economy... . As it stands now I can't vote for it," McCain said on Fox television.

Who Cares?  John McCain ran on more Republican tax cuts - he lost.  He is irrelevant and it's OK to ignore him.

Republicans Are Resistant to Obama’s Stimulus Plan.

Republicans plan to test President Barack Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship as his $825 billion stimulus package heads to the floor of the House of Representatives this week, with the House Republican leader saying Sunday morning that many in his party will vote no unless there are significant changes to the plan.

Who Cares?  The Republicans ran on more of the same insane Reagan/Bush economic policy and they lost and it's OK to ignore them.  They are irrelevant.

This is why:

Economy in free fall in fourth quarter

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The U.S. economy contracted violently in the fourth quarter, with gross domestic product falling at its fastest pace in more than 25 years, economists said ahead of what promises to be a grim week of economic news.

 "Real economic activity fell off a cliff during the fourth quarter, producing a sharp drop in employment, output and spending," wrote economists at Wachovia.

 And the worst part is that it's not over. Economists expect another huge decline in the first quarter, with a smaller contraction in the second quarter.

McCain and the Republicans lost because the American people realize that Republican supply side economics is a failure of epic proportion.  My fear is that Obama and the Democrats fail to realize it. 

And Obama and the Democrats don't need the Republicans - see here 

Santorum on drugs

By Fester:

I am confused. I am puzzled.

Former Republican Senator and Man on Dog advocate Rick Santorum argues that Obama is attempting to co-opt Senator McCain's support for his agenda. McCain is cooperating so he can get into the good graces of the dreaded liberal media (the same one that gives the former Senator a column...) by delivering bi-partisan cover to several major policy initiatives. I get this argument. It is a modified version of McCain as the Grand Apologist argument that Joe Klein and others have raised where McCain attempts to corner the market on bipartisanship by defining that word as whatever he supports and taking the occassional stand against the GOP on secondary ideological issues when it is cheap to do so. I understand that portion of the argument. I don't understand one of the examples:

In McCain's mind, however, losing the presidency will not be the final chapter of his life story. He knows the path to "Big Media" redemption. Working with the man who vanquished him in November will show them all the real McCain again.

Remember, it was this onetime prisoner of war who led the charge to open diplomatic relations with Vietnam. If that past is prologue, and McCain's legislative record is any guide, he will not just join with Obama but lead the charge in Congress on global warming, immigration "reform," the closing of Guantanamo, federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, and importation of prescription drugs. [emphasis mine]

Importation of prescription drugs as a betrayal of core 'conservative' principals? Huh?

Actually running the policy back to principals, it is both a fiscally conservative policy (if one accepts federal involvement in healthcare at all) and a free market policy --- allow buyers to locate desired products and negoatiate the best price that they can. Hell, as a liberal of the technocratic sub-species, I support this policy on those two grounds, save money by using price discovery to provide better services to people. I can understand quibbling on program design. For instance I support active negoatiations with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) using their quasi-monosopy powers to leverage against patent protected monopoly powers of drug makers. A less interventionist approach could be to use a 'best price' guarantee. That approach would still give the private markets significant power leverage against the government, but it would produce significant efficiency gains none the less. But at this point, it is 'mere' quibbling over program design and wonking out. 

I understand a conservative, as we currently define that word and political/policy preference bundling, being opposed to any action on global warming, immigration reform, pro-torture and anti-Constitutional policies and science for 'ideological' reasons. I get that, but how the hell does the re-importation of prescription drugs fit into that ideological bundle? It is just regulatory capture of consumer and public surplus for well-heeled donors...

D'oh, I think I get it now.....

Caving is not consensus

By Fester:

Senator Droopy and friends came out with a Washington Post-Op-Ed calling for a consensus policy on Iraq.  Their prescribed policy is, as Steve Benen notes, the same policy that McCain ran on and got crushed on.  The prescribed policy is to fetishize the Surge, never question the logic, seek tactical results at the blindness of operational or strategic impacts, ignorance of reality (prevent Iranian hegemony and influence --- the guys in charge that they praise in the previous and proceeding paragraphs are heads of parties whose membership receive numerous Iranian government pensions!) and disregards both domestic political realities, fiscal realities, and pre-existing agreements.  But beyond that, it is not a bad plan....

There is already a consensus plan across American and Iraqi public opinion, Iraqi and American elite opinion, joint agreements and both governments' intents --- get almost all American troops out of the country in sixteen to thirty six months. 

So in this definitional black-hole, consensus means a near supermajority caving in to an isolated trio of cranks.

This is not surprising, as I noted in November that this will be Senator Lieberman's M.O. for the remainder of his term in office:

So what should we expect to see from Senator Lieberman?

He will attempt to bear hug Senator McCain's primary political asset --- the ability to create in his own persona the only 'reasonable' and 'bi-partisan' contract zone that he can dominate.  He will seek to become the leader of any Gang of "X" where X is a small number of Republicans who are not crazy and conservative Red state Democrats.  He will seek to become the political-media complexes' reasonableness threshold.  'If he agrees, it is okay; if he disagrees, it is too radical...'

I think this will work initially well for Lieberman as he will be enabled by the GOP as he is their best wedge into the Democratic caucus (I wonder how much information he'll leak to McConnell on legislative strategy) and he has national press covering fire.  And besides, he pisses the right people off, including the dirty fucking hippies who have gotten oh so worked up about Iraq,

No suprise at how predictable this was to us plebes....

No Audit for Obama?

By BJ

This story tugs at the old sense of fairness.

The Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

Now, for obvious reasons, the government should exercise its oversight capability on anything the taxpayers are funding, and since McCain’s campaign was taxpayer-funded, he has to bite the bullet on this one.  I don’t know if such an audit will finally get to the bottom of complaints about his potential misuse of public financing to secure a loan during the primaries, but at least all those folks getting worked up about Sarah Palin’s wardrobe should get an answer or two.

But for the Obama campaign to sidestep this strikes me as unfair, and to some extent unwise.  The right has already been twisting itself into knots over how Obama was able to raise such large sums of money, and will use this lack of an audit to confirm in their own minds that the stories they’ve spun for themselves are therefore true.

While I have little faith that an audit with its pesky “facts” will do anything to change their minds, since such things will always produce findings that are unflattering to the audited, it would at the very least put to rest any questions about bias for those of us not in the non-persuadable category.

And quite frankly, we’ve just spent the last eight years bitching about a White House occupant whose fetish for secrecy was more than “We the People” should allow from any public servant.  If Obama really wants to show us all a new era of open and accountable government, he can start by opening his campaign books to an independent review.  Fair is fair, and if I were one of the 3.1 million people who donated money to the campaign, I would very much like to know that there was some kind of independent oversight in place to provide assurance that the money was accounted for properly.

In the meantime, as Alan Stewart Carl suggests, maybe John McCain can rewrite his election finance laws so that the billion-dollar industry of electing the US President will be assured of seeing the auditor’s flashlight.

Southwest Pennsylvania Congressional District PVI changes

By Fester:

I am rethinking my initial analysis that Pennsylvania will be the most active Congressional battleground in 2010.  I had not anticipated the size of the Appalachia versus the rest of the state effect that actually occurred in the 2008 general election.  This will significantly change the Partisan Voter Indexes for a couple of Congressional districts which will move them out of the probably competitive zones to the barely competitive absent a mistress choking incident. 

The New York Times published this very interesting chart that depicts the counties where John McCain in 2008 outperformed George W. Bush in 2004.  The obvious conclusion is that the line follows the Appalachian Mountain ranges.  The northern edge of this zone is southwestern Pennsylvania.  This zone includes PA-4, 12, 14 and 18.  PA-4, 12 and 14 are Democratically held districts.  However PA-4 has been a slight Republican lean district, while PA-12 has been a lean Dem district and PA-14 is a heavy base Dem district.  PA-18 is a Republican District with a slight Republican lean and a very conservative Democratic registration advantage. 

Without pulling any precinct level data, I am making a couple of estimates on the Obama-McCain splits by Congressional District in SW PA and this area has become significantly more Republican leaning.  PA-4 which is represented by Dem. Rep Altmire probably went to McCain by five points, which means it is roughly a R+9 or R+10 district for a one year PVI.  This is a significant change from the previous R+3 rating.  It will probably be rated an R+7 district for 2010.  This SHOULD be a natural GOP target seat.  However I am not sure who is on the GOP bench for this district. 

PA-18 saw Obama underperform by 8 points in Washington County, 14 points in Westmoreland County, and overpeformed by 5 points in Allegheny County.  However the portions Allegheny County that are in the district underperformed the Obama margins that are seen in the Mon Valley, the East Hills suburbs and most importantly Pittsburgh.  I am guessing that McCain won the district outright and probably won it by a few points.  So for this cycle, PA-18 is probably an R+9 or so district.  This should be an easy GOP hold despite the large Democratic registration advantage in the district. 

Now moving over to the other side of the state, PA-13 which is a projected open seat as its current representative, Rep. Allyson Schwartz is rumored to be considering a run for the Senate.  PA-13 is in the Philly Burbs which went heavily Democratic.  PA-11, Kanjorski's district, is still a reliable Democratic tilt district and the scare he received should be sufficient to make sure he works his ass off for the next two years. 

I had initially anticipated eight heavily contested races in 2010.  Now I think we'll see three Republican challenges (PA-3, PA-4, PA-11), two Democratic challenges in PA-15 (Rep. Dent) and PA-6 (Rep. Gerlach) and then token challengers in PA-18, and PA-12.

Late-Night Election Thoughts

By BJ

Well, it is all over but the lawsuits, though they’re unlikely to change anything.  As I write this, Obama holds slim leads in both Indiana and North Carolina with 99% of the precincts reporting.  That will push him to 364 Electoral Votes, assuming he loses Missouri and Montana.  If he does carry Missouri, it takes him to 375.  As the vote in the three west-coast states is being counted, Obama’s margin in the popular vote is also increasing, and should end up over 5%.  All in all, a pretty damned good night.

McCain’s concession speech was good, (though I have to disagree with Fester in that I don’t think it out-shined Obama’s acceptance speech, but then few can match Obama on public speaking).  McCain was the gracious and honorable “maverick” that only showed up once or twice during the campaign such as his convention speech.  There have been a lot of pre-mortems and there will be a stream of post-mortems for his campaign, but in the end it is not wrong to point out that no other Republican would have made the race even this close.

On that note, I do fear what will become of the Republican Party now.  While McCain was gracious in defeat, his supporters were far less so, and reading around the right-wing blogs, graciousness seems in very short supply.

I know that some are congratulating Obama on his win, such as our own John McCain. Yes, that’s fair, but if you listened to the concession speech the reasons this is such a “great moment” is because Obama is black, not because he was qualified, or even able to handle the Presidency. As I said before that makes this election even more pathetic. It was all about electing the first “Affirmative Action” candidate to office.

I can't wait to see the quality of discourse from the right over the next four years.

As for Obama, what can be said about his acceptance speech?  In the words of one of the commentators at CBC, seems to be going for the title of poet-laureate as well as President of the United States.  As with many of speeches, it was powerful, moving, inspiring, and included a call to action and for sacrifice that we haven’t heard for a long time from a politician.  Whether or not people understand just what he means by that is still debatable, but I like what I hear.  That said, I don’t envy him the task ahead.

And just for the hell of it, I’ll leave the final word tonight to my buddy salvage:

I can't believe y'all elected a secret Muslim Manchurian Marxist Fascists Liberal Black Panther Bastard spawn of Malcolm X ant-Semite terrorist radical man-dater who wasn't even born in America making him completely unconstitutional as your President.

Right now I wish I was the guy who owned the biggest paper and data shredding concern in the DC area. I would tell my guys that they'd be working straight through 'till the New Year.

Oh the wignuts, this is going to be a complete phase-shift, they will suddenly fall in hate with government "jackboots" all over again. It will be like the Clinton years only louder and oh so crazier.

Everything good that happens from now on will be because GW Bush was President, everything bad because Obama, yes we are going through the looking glass.

But that just means more things to laugh at.