Aliens Among Us

If you missed the Daily Show yesterday —

E.J. Dionne writes about how wingnuts are making the President out to be alien. Of course, that’s because they can’t come out and say what they are really thinking — “Damn! He’s a n—–!” But they’re also going overboard with the old traditional talking points on Democrats, including the one that they are “soft” on national defense. This is from Richard Adams’s commentary on last night’s GOP debate:

Everyone bar Ron Paul is fixating on Iran and the current president’s fecklessness, which includes such statesmanlike arguments as this from Gingrich: “As long as you are America’s enemy, you’re safe”.

I’m sure Osama bin Laden would agree with Newt that America’s enemies are safe. If he wasn’t so dead, that is.

Anyway — the irony is that the President is, in Dionne’s words, “a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.” If any group of people ought to be voted “most likely to be space aliens” it would be the four clowns still in the presidential race.

THIS Is the Fight They Want???

Politico:

The contraception fight is expanding far beyond Washington, with several states eyeing ways of blocking the new Obama administration rule requiring most insurers cover contraception, or considering rolling back rules that the states themselves already had on the books.

The combination of a hot-button social issue and the calendar for state implementation of the health care reform law’s fine print virtually guarantees the fight will continue for months. Even if the debate subsides in Washington, voters may hear about it in their states for some time to come.

So they’re going into a major election year fighting to cut back on insurance coverage for contraception, because it offends Catholic bishops?

New Hampshire, for instance, is one of 28 states that already have a contraception coverage mandate similar to the new federal rule — but Republican lawmakers there are considering repealing it.

“We didn’t know it was there,” Speaker William O’Brien told the Nashua Telegraph last week. “We don’t want it there.”

You’d think if the mandate was so all-fired oppressive, someone would have complained.

Lawmakers in several of these states — including Missouri, Louisiana and Oklahoma — have already banned coverage for abortion in plans sold under health insurance exchanges.

But the health care law gave states that flexibility on abortion, explicitly. The contraception picture is more complicated. What, for instance, happens if a legislature prohibits insurers from covering the full range of contraceptives in policies sold through an exchange — but federal rules require it?

Such an approach could grow out of the so-called personhood bills, which give embryos legal rights from the moment of conception, pending in several states that could potentially outlaw emergency contraception because it can prevent implantation of fertilized eggs.

That could force a politically difficult problem for the Obama administration.

A difficult problem for the Obama Administration? The damnfool personhood thing couldn’t even pass in Mississippi, once people understood that it might outlaw some forms of birth control. Do Republicans really want to be the anti-birth control party? Is that not political suicide?

Why the GOP (and Romney especially) Should Be Worried

Nice little chart, from Benjy Sarlin at TPM (click to enlarge):

Click to Enlarge

Nearly 90 percent of donations to Romney are from large donors. This is a problem for him in two ways. One, it shows that he doesn’t have a broad base of “regular guy” voters. Two, if Romney donors have already given their maximum donation, he can’t go to that well again during the general election.

Here’s another chart you might have seen on Rachel Maddow’s show (click to enlarge):

Click to Enlarge

This is to demonstrate that Romney’s popularity took a dive after he got Donald Trump’s endorsement. But whether the Donald caused the dive or not, Romney doesn’t seem to be wearing well on voters.

Today in Crazy

Thanks to c u n d gulag for this video:

See also:

Some wingnuts think they found a “gotcha” regarding the Virginia Forcible Rape bill — a Virginia Planned Parenthood does ultrasounds prior to abortions. Of course, the wingnuts make no distinction between abdominal and transvaginal ultrasounds, revealing that they just plain don’t get it. They’re also a bit vague on the “consent” thing.

Hitting Bottom

© Karen Roach | Dreamstime.com

At NRO, Rich Lowry tries very hard to make Rick Santorum sound like a respectable candidate.

As Jeffrey Bell, author of the new book The Case for Polarized Politics, notes in a Wall Street Journal interview, Santorum’s style of social conservatism is deeply American. No other Western country saw the rise of such a social-conservative movement after the social upheaval of the 1960s. Bell traces American social conservatism back ultimately to the God-given natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Sure enough, Santorum is given to quoting the Declaration.

Why are Americans uniquely crazy? Maybe it’s something in the environment. The air, the air, is everywhere …

That won’t stop Santorum-haters from portraying him as threateningly un-American.

Has anybody been calling Frothy “un-American”? I can’t say that I’ve seen that. “Dangerously blinkered religious fanatic” is closer to it.

Patrick Buchanan explains the slippery slope America has been sliding down:

An early triumph of secularism came with the Scopes trial in 1923 in Dayton, Tenn. Clarence Darrow, defending a teacher who had violated state law by introducing Darwin’s theory of evolution into the classroom, mocked the Old Testament teachings of the Evangelical Christians, to the merriment of the establishment.

From that day on, Darwinism was taught in our schools, first as theory, then as fact, then as higher truth. With the Darwinian tenet — we evolved, we were not created — established truth in the public schools, secularism set about driving its enemy, Christianity, out completely.

Under the Warren Court in the 1950s and 1960s, it succeeded.

All Christian commandments, holidays, prayers, pageants and plays were gone. Where Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter had declared that America is a Christian nation, Obama has declared, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation,” but rather a nation of all faiths.

Shudder. Of course, this really goes back to The Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), of which Thomas Jefferson said,

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.

The Santorum campaign is what happens when the old zombie ideas — cut taxes; deregulate — are so worn out even the candidates are bored with them.

Those Sneaky Elitists

Paul Ryan actually said this:

“We’re seeing this new government activism, paternalistic, arrogant, political philosophy that puts new government-granted rights in the way of our constitutional rights.”

See, the Constitution is not a document of government. It was handed down from God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Unfortunately Moses lost it in a craps game, but centuries later an angel appeared to James Madison and told him he could find it buried under Plymouth Rock.

Here’s the broader context:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Sunday blasted the Obama administration’s moves to mandate religious affiliated groups to provide contraception coverage as “paternalistic” and “arrogant.”

“What we’re getting from the White House on this conscience issue, it’s not an issue about contraception, it’s an issue that reveals a political philosophy the president is showing that basically treats our constitutional rights as if they were revocable privileges from our government, not inalienable rights from our creator.” said Ryan on NBC’s Meet the Press.

You want to talk “paternalistic,” Mr. Ryan?

But in the Wacky World of Wingnuts, providing women with full coverage for contraception is paternalism and trampling on our gawd-given rights, whereas religious dogmas that demand women be barefoot and pregnant are not.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum wants to protect us from elitism by denying coverage for prenatal screening tests.

He lambasted the president’s health care law requiring insurance policies to include free prenatal testing, “because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

“That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country,” Santorum said.

In other words, Frothy wants to be sure prenatal testing is not covered, because some women who discover their babies will be born with major disabilities might choose to abort instead, and he knows better than they do that God doesn’t like that, so he wants to step in and protect women from the elites who think women should be allowed to decide some things for themselves.

All Pain, No Gain

Krugman:

Specifically, in early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts would lead to a surge in consumer and business spending, while nations failing to make such cuts would see capital flight and soaring interest rates. If this sounds to you like something Herbert Hoover might have said, you’re right: It does and he did.

Now the results are in — and they’re exactly what three generations’ worth of economic analysis and all the lessons of history should have told you would happen. The confidence fairy has failed to show up: none of the countries slashing spending have seen the predicted private-sector surge. Instead, the depressing effects of fiscal austerity have been reinforced by falling private spending.

The libertarian crew at Reason magazine will be working overtime coming up with a reason why none of this is actually true.

Know When to Hold ‘Em, Know When to Fold ‘Em

The Michigan and Arizona primaries are on Feb. 28. Nate Silver has Mittens heavily favored in Arizona, but Frothy is way ahead in Michigan.

Mittens opposed the auto industry bailout, which turned out to be a great success. Steve Kornacki writes,

So as he campaigns in Michigan now, Romney is playing dumb, pretending that the auto industry’s comeback actually validates what he said in ’08 and that Obama — whose administration nudged GM and Chrysler into structured bankruptcy — was actually following the course that he prescribed. The only difference in their approaches, as Romney tells it, is that he would have forced the auto companies to rely on private financing to get through the bankruptcy process, and not the federal government.

Rich Yeselson adds, “this would almost sound sensible except for the fact that—hello!—there was a monster financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. The entire international credit system was frozen—there was no private capital interested and available for such a massive project.”

Meanwhile, Frothy is running around wailing that the Obama Administration’s agenda is not based on the Bible.

It appears the GOP is sticking to its “religious freedom” frame of the president’s contraception coverage policy. They don’t know when to fold. See also “2012: The year of ‘birth control moms‘?”

Right-Wing Meltdown

A common symptom of the social/psychological pathology called “movement conservatism” is the belief that most Americans agree with rightie ideas. Righties believe this even when most polls say otherwise.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all if Rush Limbaugh thinks doubling down on the culture war is a smart move for conservatives. And with the economy improving, what else do they have?

At least some righties are facing the fact that they won’t have an electable candidate in November. There is talk of changing the rules so that Jeb Bush could be anointed. But Rich Yeselson argues this can’t save them:

But, of course, under such a chaotic scenario, the white knight candidate would be destroyed by Obama in November. The current candidates and their supporters would be enraged, and the newly crowned candidate would obviously benefit from a rigged system designed—like Bush v. Gore—solely for his one time use. It would make the 1968 Democratic Convention in riot torn Chicago look like a chess tournament.

Recall that some Democrats imagined a similar possibility in 2008. Not a new candidate entering the race, but Hillary Clinton winning the nomination via various last minute rules changes, and the support of the majority of super delegates. Of course, however, the first African American major party presumptive nominee could not somehow be screwed out of the top spot at the last minute without tearing the party apart. A Pyrrhic victory, as it used to be during the original Greek crisis.

However, the difference between Dems in 2008 and the GOP in 2012 is that the Dems care passionately about their candidates, whereas Republican voters today seem ambivalent and confused. It’s possible that by summer they’ll be primed to toss the bums out and rally around a savior at the Tampa convention. So I don’t know that I agree with Yeselson.

Sex and God

Is it just me, or does it seem the Right is on the edge of a catastrophic meltdown?

They’re starting to remind me of Hal, the Computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the end, as Dave takes Hal apart, his knowledge base degrades back to his first programming. Similarly, as Republicans lose ownership of what had been their strongest issues — national security and business — all the ugly muck at the depths of their ids is rising to the surface. Finally, there is nothing left but the primordial concern gnawing at their bones all these years — sex.

I started to say “sex and God,” but if you think about it, mostly God exists for them as a bulwark against sexual chaos. So it really is just about sex.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in psychiatry to recognize that James Poulos (“What Are Women For?“), for example, is massively bleeped up about sex and frantic to find something to protect him from women and their frightening, alien bodies. And what is the Virginia ultrasound law but a means to keep women in their place through state-sanctioned rape?

And the answer to the question “What are Republicans thinking?” is, what thinking?