A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Nov 06, 2007. Original here. Note: This diary was written at a time when many were still touting Ron Paul as the great libertarian voice of reason on the Iraq War--and ignoring a whole lot of his crazy, and just how deep it went. There's a slightly different reason for re-running it now. The practice of deploying false equivalencies is not necessarily a centrist foible per se. Indeed, it's often evidence of the center following the right. The events of last week, following the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords, in which false equivalence was raised to a high art, combined with the occassion of Martin Luther King's birthday, reminded me of this diary, which I think speaks volumes about the right's laughable attempts to make itself out to be the moral equivalent of the left.
To further this point, I have added a p.s. to this diary, highlighting a copycat act of foolish misrepresentation of King that was posted just last Friday at the Daily Paul.
(H/T to L.W.M. in Comments at Unclaimmed Territory, from whom this is shamelessly ripped off.]
The IRS is a monster Ron Paul wants to get rid of. He says the income tax is unconstitutional. What's more, "Federal Reserve notes aren't leagal tender," he informs us. He doesn't actually know the details of the case, but that doesn't bother him facilely comparing wingnut tax-evaders to Martin Luther King. This has been up on YouTube for four months.
Read about Ron Paul's would-be heroes on the flip.
None of this invalidates him when he's right. Even if Hitler told you the sky was blue, it would still be blue. But it does provide some useful context--and raise some pretty basic questions. Like, "How bad is it when a freakin nutball is the voice of reason?"
The late Mary Travers once sang a song called "Where Have All the Flowers Gone? It was a lamentation about the human cost of war and it was a popular protest song during the Vietnam era. Well it seems to me that someone could write a song, or at least ask the same question, about Libertarians. Specifically, where have all the Libertarians gone?
In the din and roar surrounding politics in America today much is made of the importance of Libertarian thinking. Some have pointed out its importance to the Tea Party Movement: "More recently, the Libertarian theme of the "tea party" began with Republican Congressman Ron Paul supporters as a fund raising event during the 2008 presidential primaries to emphasize Paul's fiscal conservatism, which laid the groundwork for the modern-day Tea Party movement." That said it's interesting to consider the following two questions: First, if Libertarian ideas are so compelling, how come Libertarians garner such a small portion of actual votes during major electoral campaigns? Secondly, if Libertarians command such low voting totals, how is it that there is such a disproportionate number of Libertarian organizations and who is putting up the money to support them?
During the 2008 election cycle, America's Libertarian's had a clear choice among those vying for the Republican nomination for president. Ron Paul was an outspoken Libertarian and had been so for many years. Paul's Libertarian bona fides were well established, widely known and beyond question. But Paul wasn't even remotely competitive within the G.O.P.'s contest for candidate in the 2008 presidential election cycle. Yet even though Paul was eliminated from the race, Libertarians still had a choice in the person of Bob Barr, the former Republican Congressman of Georgia, and the Libertarian Party's presidential pick for 2008. The irony of it all is that even though they still had a horse in the race, in an election that offered four different choices for president, the Libertarian candidate finished dead last with a paltry 523,686 votes or 0.4% of the total votes cast in 2008. With the aforementioned facts in hand, we can only conclude that Libertarians either do not vote, fail to vote for their own candidates or that there aren't very many of them in existence after all.
Well, if it's hard to discern the actual existence of Libertarians in any precise number, then how is it we have over sixty five Libertarian organizations afloat in the body politic according to Wikipedia? The Stason Organization lists 11 "Major Libertarian Organizations" and 33 "Think Tanks". But this begs the question: Why so many organizations for just over a half of a million voters, or less than one half of one percent of the voting public? It seems a bit fishy to me that we have all of these "Libertarian" organizations in a country that seems to have so few Libertarians. If we have so few Libertarians, then where does the cash that fuels all of these "Libertarian" organizations come from? After all it would be pretty hard to fund this large number of organizations out of the pockets of just 0.4% of the voting public. Could it be that these "Libertarian" organizations are propped up by those with a specific agenda and deep pockets or do these 523,686 voters just all happen to be billionaires? So can someone tell me where have all the Libertarians gone, long time passing?
During Netroots Nation, we are running Golden Oldies plus a few surprises. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on July 26.
A Matt Stoller Golden Oldie
Tue Dec 25, 2007. Original HERE.
Here's Ezra Klein expressing a fairly common sentiment among both Democratic base voters and Democratic elites.
As a result of my post defending Obama this morning, I'm getting a bunch of links along the lines of "Ezra Klein, no fan of Obama..."
This is, to be sure, my failure as a writer, so just to be clear: I'm impressed with all three of the major Democrats, and, for that matters, most of the other Democrats not named "Bill Richardson."
Ezra is happy with the Democratic candidates; most Democratic voters share Ezra's views. I don't (and neither do a few others). The issues we are dealing with today - health care, jobs, even a war in Iraq - are literally the same issues we dealt with in 1992. How can that possibly be considered progress? A real progressive candidate would take an apolitical problem and turn it into a mainstream political subject. None of our candidates have done that. Here are five easily mainstreamable problems ripe for the picking. There are more of these, I'm just picking at five that touch on the national security state, secrecy, economic injustice, and attacks on our civil liberties.
Subject: End the War on Drugs
Factoid: There are 1 million people put in jail for doing what Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George Bush have done.
Marijuana is America's largest cash crop, and it is responsible for around 225,000 arrests a year. Overall, the war on drugs incarcerates around 1 million people a year. Direct spending on the war on drugs this year is $50 billion dollars, about $600 a second. Around half of high school seniors have consumed marijuana (pdf). Simply put, why do some people go to jail for marijuana and cocaine, and others run for President?
Subject: End corporate media ownership:
Factoid: General Electric, a major defense contractor and conglomerate, owns NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.
Our media is owned and controlled by a few major companies. One of them, GE, has major defense contracts, and strong incentives for war. It also has huge interests in the financial industry. Why is this company controlling our news content again, while we are in two wars? And why did the FCC just relax ownership requirements in local areas, again?
Subject: End American empire
Factoid: As of 1998, America had troops stationed in 144 countries around the world.
There are any number of ways to talk about this issue, from disparities of foreign aid to complaints about the IMF to the war in Iraq to the CIA and blowback. The bottom line is that America has troops everywhere in the world, it's expensive, the way it is done now is a bad idea, and we need to bring them home and return to being a republic. That or we need to figure out how to be a responsible international power again and get rid of the Blackwater-style military we are building and the gunrunning vigilante CIA-style Cold War and post-Cold War nonsense.
Subject: End the war economy:
Factoid: Money for Iraq keeps passing in 'emergency' legislation to avoid being subject to budget rules.
For some reason, Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans argue that they are fiscally responsible while ignoring their votes to spend 700-800B a year on war. Libertarian charlatans like energy expert Amory Lovins think that the corporate sector and the military sector are legitimate parts of the state, but that other spending is wasteful. The whole notion of the military not being a part of the overall government is crazy, and reflective of a huge, corrupt, and Soviet-style misallocation of capital through secret budgets and fear.
Subject: End the cradle-to-prison superhighway
Factoid: 2 million people are in prison in America, by far the highest total of any other country in the world.
Think slavery has ended? Think torture is 'new'? Think again. With two million people in prison, and tens of thousands of sexual assaults every year, prison is a huge industry and a horrendous abridgment of the idea that is America.
Touching on any of these massive injustices in our economic infrastructure is something no candidate has systematically done. Only John Edwards has remotely addressed the concept of the war on terror, in a somewhat half-hearted way, and he has made 'poverty' a somewhat commonly repeated theme, though not in any meaningful sense. Clinton and Obama are disgracefully absent on these topics. Ironically, Bill Richardson, aside from his great work on residual forces, has also said that the 'war on drugs is not working', which reflects perhaps a more executive oriented and confident worldview. Chris Dodd has also advocated for marijuana decriminalization, which is a less aggressive but still laudable sentiment, especially in light of his work on core constitutional issues.
So anyway, while the insider wonk community is happy that their issues seem to be taken care of, and Democratic base voters like the different candidates we have, I find that actual progressive reframing of our political system is appearing only at the margins of our secondary candidates like Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd, and among crazy white supremacist types like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. Each of the five hinges I've discussed starts with the verb 'end', and that was not planned when I started this post. I think it means that we must end a chapter in American history, and begin a new one.
Restoring healthy communities, healthy citizens, a healthy global order, healthy local media, and a healthy sustainable economy are the key drivers of where need to go as a country. The cancerous symptoms are all around us, and leading Democratic Presidential candidates are too corrupt and morally crippled to even begin talking about them. But we'll get there.
At the Daily Beast, Benjamin Sarlin reports on "The New Jack Bauer Republicans", namely a couple of would-be GOP congresscriters looking to turn war crimes charges into a political goldmine:
Two Iraq veterans who left the military after surviving charges of crimes against detainees are running credible campaigns for Congress. And far from minimizing the incidents, both candidates have put the accusations front and center in their campaigns, attracting rock-star adulation from conservatives nationwide in the process. But critics, including human-rights activists, veterans, and now even defeated primary opponents, warn that their records should disqualify them from office.
Yes, the good news here is that a GOP war vet who lost the primary is willing to sacrifice any potential political future to make sure one of these war criminals doesn't get to Congress:
Last week, Ilario Pantano won the Republican nomination in North Carolina's 7th District, setting up a challenge to incumbent Democrat Rep. Mike McIntyre in November. In 2001, immediately following the 9/11 terror attacks, Pantano, a veteran who had previously fought in the Gulf War, left his career as a successful producer and media consultant in his native Manhattan to rejoin the Marines and was eventually deployed to Iraq. In April 2004, Pantano killed two unarmed Iraqi detainees, twice unloading his gun into their bodies and firing between 50 and 60 shots in total. Afterward, he placed a sign over the corpses featuring the Marines' slogan "No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy" as a message to the local population....
Far from minimizing the incident, Pantano has made his biography central to his appeal. His book, Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy, which recounts the ordeal, features blurbs not only from the Michelle Malkins of the world but from Democratic politico James Carville. Pantano received sympathetic treatment from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show as well for his moving account of the complexity of war.
But Pantano's defeated primary opponent, Will Breazeale, doesn't buy it. Breazeale, himself a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves who served in both Iraq wars, is not only refusing to endorse the Republican candidate, he's planning to do everything in his power to ensure his defeat, whether it takes a write-in campaign or a publicity tour.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, he said that Pantano's actions in Iraq were so severe that his election to Congress would be "dangerous."
"I've taken prisoners in Iraq and there's no excuse for what he did," Breazeale told The Daily Beast. "To shoot two unarmed prisoners 60 times and put a sign over their dead bodies is inexcusable. And once people know the real story, he has no chance of winning in November."
Breazeale, who was the GOP nominee in 2008, said he knows his actions will likely destroy his political career with the GOP. But he views continuing his opposition to Pantano past Primary Day to be a matter of principle. On Tuesday he is scheduled to hold a press conference with a third candidate in the primary, Randy Crow, to announce a joint effort to push Pantano out of the race.
"I know people think it's sour grapes, but I have nothing to gain by opposing him except clearing my conscience and fighting for good government," he said. "I've already announced I'm never running for anything again in my life. I'm putting everything on the line."
For all the talk, there are damn few actual "principled conservatives" in the world--at least in the electoral realm. Breazeale appears to be one of the rare exceptions. I don't imagine that I agree with him on very much, but he's certainly got some sort of moral core, and that's not only important in its own right--it's increasingly rare in these all-too-desperate times.
A Matt Stoller Golden Oldie
Tue Dec 25, 2007. Original HERE.
Here's Ezra Klein expressing a fairly common sentiment among both Democratic base voters and Democratic elites.
As a result of my post defending Obama this morning, I'm getting a bunch of links along the lines of "Ezra Klein, no fan of Obama..."
This is, to be sure, my failure as a writer, so just to be clear: I'm impressed with all three of the major Democrats, and, for that matters, most of the other Democrats not named "Bill Richardson."
Ezra is happy with the Democratic candidates; most Democratic voters share Ezra's views. I don't (and neither do a few others). The issues we are dealing with today - health care, jobs, even a war in Iraq - are literally the same issues we dealt with in 1992. How can that possibly be considered progress? A real progressive candidate would take an apolitical problem and turn it into a mainstream political subject. None of our candidates have done that. Here are five easily mainstreamable problems ripe for the picking. There are more of these, I'm just picking at five that touch on the national security state, secrecy, economic injustice, and attacks on our civil liberties.
Subject: End the War on Drugs
Factoid: There are 1 million people put in jail for doing what Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George Bush have done.
Marijuana is America's largest cash crop, and it is responsible for around 225,000 arrests a year. Overall, the war on drugs incarcerates around 1 million people a year. Direct spending on the war on drugs this year is $50 billion dollars, about $600 a second. Around half of high school seniors have consumed marijuana (pdf). Simply put, why do some people go to jail for marijuana and cocaine, and others run for President?
Subject: End corporate media ownership:
Factoid: General Electric, a major defense contractor and conglomerate, owns NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.
Our media is owned and controlled by a few major companies. One of them, GE, has major defense contracts, and strong incentives for war. It also has huge interests in the financial industry. Why is this company controlling our news content again, while we are in two wars? And why did the FCC just relax ownership requirements in local areas, again?
Subject: End American empire
Factoid: As of 1998, America had troops stationed in 144 countries around the world.
There are any number of ways to talk about this issue, from disparities of foreign aid to complaints about the IMF to the war in Iraq to the CIA and blowback. The bottom line is that America has troops everywhere in the world, it's expensive, the way it is done now is a bad idea, and we need to bring them home and return to being a republic. That or we need to figure out how to be a responsible international power again and get rid of the Blackwater-style military we are building and the gunrunning vigilante CIA-style Cold War and post-Cold War nonsense.
Subject: End the war economy:
Factoid: Money for Iraq keeps passing in 'emergency' legislation to avoid being subject to budget rules.
For some reason, Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans argue that they are fiscally responsible while ignoring their votes to spend 700-800B a year on war. Libertarian charlatans like energy expert Amory Lovins think that the corporate sector and the military sector are legitimate parts of the state, but that other spending is wasteful. The whole notion of the military not being a part of the overall government is crazy, and reflective of a huge, corrupt, and Soviet-style misallocation of capital through secret budgets and fear.
Subject: End the cradle-to-prison superhighway
Factoid: 2 million people are in prison in America, by far the highest total of any other country in the world.
Think slavery has ended? Think torture is 'new'? Think again. With two million people in prison, and tens of thousands of sexual assaults every year, prison is a huge industry and a horrendous abridgment of the idea that is America.
Touching on any of these massive injustices in our economic infrastructure is something no candidate has systematically done. Only John Edwards has remotely addressed the concept of the war on terror, in a somewhat half-hearted way, and he has made 'poverty' a somewhat commonly repeated theme, though not in any meaningful sense. Clinton and Obama are disgracefully absent on these topics. Ironically, Bill Richardson, aside from his great work on residual forces, has also said that the 'war on drugs is not working', which reflects perhaps a more executive oriented and confident worldview. Chris Dodd has also advocated for marijuana decriminalization, which is a less aggressive but still laudable sentiment, especially in light of his work on core constitutional issues.
So anyway, while the insider wonk community is happy that their issues seem to be taken care of, and Democratic base voters like the different candidates we have, I find that actual progressive reframing of our political system is appearing only at the margins of our secondary candidates like Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd, and among crazy white supremacist types like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. Each of the five hinges I've discussed starts with the verb 'end', and that was not planned when I started this post. I think it means that we must end a chapter in American history, and begin a new one.
Restoring healthy communities, healthy citizens, a healthy global order, healthy local media, and a healthy sustainable economy are the key drivers of where need to go as a country. The cancerous symptoms are all around us, and leading Democratic Presidential candidates are too corrupt and morally crippled to even begin talking about them. But we'll get there.
Two key lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee, Reps. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Ron Paul (R-TX), are pushing to authorize a full, comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. The plan has sparked fury from both the Fed and the corporate banking industry, but the proposal is so appealing that the controversy is almost laughable.
The Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful economic institutions in the world, but most of its operations are conducted in total secrecy. The Fed's rescue activities have dwarfed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, but without any public accounting. Some of these efforts may have been entirely appropriate, but we don't even know who the Fed is helping. That fact is a major barrier to establishing effective and fair economic policy.
"The Fed is a typical Washington institution that operates un-democratically and in virtually total secrecy, and a Congressionally-mandated audit that they (and much of the DC establishment) desperately oppose would be a serious step towards changing the dynamic of how things function. At the very least, it would provide an important template for defeating the interests which, in Washington, almost never lose."
Under the Grayson-Paul plan, which is offered as an amendment to the Financial Stability Improvement Act of 2009, the Government Accountability Office would be given the authority to audit all of the Federal Reserve's activities, just as it can audit other public programs and institutions.
Last week, the House Financial Services Committee approved the audit-the-fed bill, despite opposition from panel Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA), who tried to gut the plan. Even on the Financial Services Committee, where the banks concentrate their campaign contributions, Grayson was able to convince 14 other Democrats to stand up to the financial establishment.
The vote of approval scarcely registered on mainstream media's radar, and even then, the Grayson-Paul legislation was portrayed as an assault on the Fed's "political independence." As Dean Baker notes for Talking Points Memo, it's hard to see how a simple, public accounting can be construed as a political hit on the Fed's policy-making.
By setting interest rates, the Fed has enormous power to do almost anything under the economic sun, from fueling quick growth to destroying jobs. All of these powers have useful functions under the right circumstances, and we really don't want Congress to make decisions about the economy based on the interests of powerful lobby groups. The Grayson-Paul bill wouldn't do anything of the sort. As John Nichols explains for The Nation, audits of sensitive economic policy decisions would be subject to a six-month lag before they could be publicly released. If the Fed needs to act fast, Congress won't be able to get in its way. The public will eventually know how its own money is being spent, however, and learn how a public institution is conducting itself.
"In other words, this is about simple transparency, which everyone should favor," Nichols writes.
The White House and the Congressional Democratic leadership need to support a full and comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. It's an issue of basic democratic accountability. There is no good reason why economic policy should be conducted in secret.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Unemployment figures in the U.S. are staggering: The official rate stands at 10.2%, the highest in 26 years. A broader measure that includes people who are involuntarily working part-time or who have given up looking for work is at 17.5%. That's a full-blown economic emergency.
But, as Joshua Holland explains for AlterNet, President Barack Obama's response to the unemployment crisis has not matched the urgency of his response to the crisis on Wall Street. This isn't just unfair, it's bad economics.
"It's important to understand that the economic crisis in which we find ourselves is not just a function of a shaky financial system but of a crash in consumption that's come along with the evaporation of $14 trillion worth of the wealth of American families," Holland writes.
Widespread joblessness can be every bit as damaging to the economic structure as a financial crisis. When people are out of work, they buckle down on household expenses. When several million people cut back at the same time, the economic machine grinds to a halt. If people are not buying and selling stuff, the economy isn't working.
As Mary Kane explains for The Washington Independent, about 40% of families don't have enough money to cover expenses through a three-month stretch of unemployment-even if one member of the household is receiving unemployment benefits. Kane highlights a Brandeis University study that reveals the haggard state of the American household and the unfair distribution of wealth along racial lines. A full 66% of African-American and Latino families can't afford three months without work. At a time when 5.6 million workers have been jobless for at least six months, the study highlights just how dire finances have become for many households.
GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses potential labor market remedies with economist Dean Baker and The Nation's John Nichols. Baker suggests a work-share arrangement, in which employers cut back on their workers' hours to allow more people to work. To prevent losses for households, the government would step in and pay for the shortfall in hours. Employers would have more part-time jobs available, but the government would make sure everyone was paid as if they were working full-time. Baker also endorses a public jobs program, which he says could be especially useful in cities like Detroit and Cleveland that have been hit particularly hard by the economic downturn.
Nichols highlights the political consequences of failing to fix the unemployment mess. Unemployment directly affects the lives of voters. If widespread joblessness persists through November 2010, Democrats will net huge Congressional losses. If Obama thinks it's hard to garner bipartisan support for his legislative priorities now, imagine a few dozen more Republican obstructionists.
It's not that Obama failed to respond to the unemployment crisis. He did. That's what the stimulus package was all about. Today's 10.2% unemployment is a catastrophe, but it would be more like 12% without the stimulus package. But, given the seriousness of the issue, Obama is not giving unemployment enough attention.
In fact, Obama's economic priorities are a mirror-image of his campaign promises, as Robert Scheer argues in both a column for TruthDig and an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! After talking tough about reining in recklessness on Wall Street and making the financial system more accountable, Obama has hired many of the very policy makers who pushed through the deregulatory agenda back in the 1990s. Top Obama administration officials like Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Gary Gensler and Neal Wolin helped make this mess in the first place.
"This is not a minor criticism," Scheer says. "I think the guy is betraying his own presidency."
Obama's timid efforts to rein in Wall Street and heal the ailing job market are setting the stage for a political disaster. If Obama and Congressional Democrats can't take strong action to fix the economy, they will find themselves with much narrower majorities next November. The economy, and the public institutions that support it, are supposed to work for everyone, not just the financial elite.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
- UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE
- the racially ambiguous V leader demanding only positive media coverage
- a (one) world government
- "reptilian spies"
- I heard the word hope at least once
Or am I just to eager to jump on the Stossel network here?
Maybe it's time the Punditalkcrazy realized that Sarah Palin is the most polarizing politician in the Republican Party, not just America. Rasmussen reports:
Although, Newt is more evenly balanced. (Now there's five words in the English language I bet you never thought you'd see in the same sentence with a negation!)
Maybe Obama meant "fierce advocate against gay rights", though, in all fairness, maybe he didn't mean anything at all.
Maybe Charles Franklin (cofounder of Pollster.com) is smarter than the entire Punditalkcrazy put together. Okay, not saying much. But his take on Palin is all the proof you need....
Noxious though it may be, there's nothing aberrational about Palin's refusal to condemn anti-abortion violence as terrorism. The right has a long, long history of inciting violence, and excusing it, rather than condemning it. When Clinton was President, there were frequent examples of this. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the GOP Congress held hearings during which the "Militia" leaders were treated with deference and respect.
Then, just last fall, while Ron Paul was ramping up his "insurgent" presidential campaign--and in full denial about his past racist publications--he praised a couple who then engaged in an armed stand-off with federal officials. I wrote about it in a diary, "Ron Paul Equates Former Militia Wingnut Tax Evaders With Martin Luther King", which included this video, so there can be no mistaking Paul's position. The principle tax-evader in question, Edward Lewis Brown, was convicted of armed robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon in 1960, and was imprisoned until 1965. But Paul compared him not only to Martin Luther King, but to Ghandi as well:
Hey, they's not terra-ists! They's just Ghandi with a gun!
I'm waiting to see Grover Norquist speak at the Target Center in Minneapolis surrounded by a few thousand Ron Paul supporters. Yesterday a Ron Paul supporter proselytized to me for fifteen minutes about freedom and property before going on a rant against President Lincoln for provoking the civil war by raising taxes on South Carolina. This is, shall we say, 'out of the box' thinking.
Here's Tom Woods laying into McCain and Obama. His quips are remarkable, this one is a vicious criticism of Madeleine Albright.
And here's a line about McCain versus Obama on the tax code. It's fresh rhetoric, really compelling, and horrific at the same time.
... Norquist just spoke, and he talked about how Democrats are people who don't want the unemployed 'to get jobs and switch parties'. He also compared Republicans that vote for higher taxes to 'ratheads' in coke bottles.
Texas Congressman and Republican Primary candidate Ron Paul is holding a "counter convention" which he calls the Rally For the Republic in Minneapolis while the RNC goes on in St. Paul. While he says that this rally is not an event to get votes as a write-in candidate, it is certainly a thumb in McCain's eye.
The event covers "the great American principles of individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy." It is strongly focused on getting out of Iraq.
This is an interesting mix of speakers who are independent, or libertarian, or radical-right-Republicans. Take a look at their schedule today:
Tuesday's Rally for the Republic schedule:
11:30 - Doors open
12:30 - Intro: Tucker Carlson
12:40 - National Anthem: Matt Colvin
12:50 - Invocation: Barb Davis White
12:55 - Howard Phillips
1:10 - Doug Wead
1:30 - Tom Woods
1:50 - Grover Norquist
2:10 - Lew Rockwell
2:30 - Bill Kauffman
2:50 - Special Guest
3:10 - Bruce Fein
3:35 - Gov. Jesse Ventura
4:05 - John Tate‚ Campaign for Liberty Presentation
4:25 - Gov. Gary Johnson
5:00 - Aimee Allen
6:00 - Break
7:00 - Intro: Barry Goldwater (Jr.)
7:05 - Ron Paul
8:05 - Sara Evans
9:30 - End of Program
9:30 - Jimmie Vaughan After Party
Paul has said that this "a philosophic campaign... my campaign for the Presidency has ended." But it will compete with the first really big day of the RNC (and be covered live on C-Span2) and can't be good for the Republican Party's hopes to get back on track after Gustave muted their first day.
So it looks like the Republicans have their own Nader... and it remains to be seen if this, combined with the Bob Barr Libertarian Party campaign, has an effect on the election.
Former Rep. Bob Barr won the Libertarian Party's Presidential nomination at the party's convention in Denver Sunday afternoon. He defeated long-time party activist Mary Ruwart, 54 to 46 percent, on the sixth ballot.
Fourteen candidates ran for the nomination. Former Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel was defeated in the fourth round.
Third place finisher Wayne Allyn Root, an internet gambling entrepreneur, is the vice-presidential nominee. (...)
"I'm sure will we emerge here with the strongest ticket in the history of the Libertarian Party," Barr said in his victory speech.
For a great play by play of the convention, click here.
Now, if Barr-Root actually will be "with the strongest ticket in the history of the Libertarian Party," it would require at least 1.07% of the popular vote, surpassing the 1.06% Edwards Clark scored for a fourth-place finish in 1980. Since that election, the best libertarian performance was 0.50% by Harry Browne in 1996, also for fourth place. In fact, 1984 and 1988 are the only elections where the Libertarian nominee even managed to finish in third-place.
As a former congressman, Bob Barr appears to be a more formidable candidate than the typical third-party crusader. Also, Ron Paul's campaign demonstrated that there was both activist excitement, and a 2-3% national voting base, for an effective libertarian candidate. So, there does seem to be an opening, at least in theory.
However, I just don't think that Barr is going to be able to make a real impact on this election. In fact, he probably won't even break the 1.06%, 1980 high-water for Libertarians. For one thing, after decline sets in, third-parties in American never recover. The No Names, the Populists, the Socialists, The Progressives, the Reforms, the Greens-all of them went into permanent decline after an initial splash. Further, you can't change leaders in mid-stream, and Bob Barr is not going to attract the same support that Ron Paul had. The activist excitement around Ron Paul over the last year was closely connected to Ron Paul himself, and will not be easily transferable in such a short period of time. Yet further, even if the activist excitement around Ron Paul was transferable, it isn't going to a Libertarian-come-lately like Bob Barr. Even the Libertarian Party was lukewarm about Barr, as it took him six ballots to receive a narrow delegate majority of 54%.
So, while I would like to believe that Bob Barr will receive more than 1.06% of the vote, I just don't think it will happen. In fact, with Ralph Nader in the field, he won't even get all of the non-ideological, "f**k you" vote, which is the roughly 1% of the electorate that always chooses third-parties no matter what. It is nice to dream of Barr pulling down 3% of the vote, with his supporters drawing roughly 2-1 from the McCain camp, but in truth he will probably get about 1% of the vote, with about two-thirds of his supporters being people who would never vote for either McCain or Obama. So, Barr might swing the election 0.1% in favor of Obama, and thus probably cancel out Nader. There is an outside chance even this small amount will swing a state or two, but not much.
Third parties will not be a significant factor in this presidential election. If Ron Paul himself had run for the Libertarian nomination, it would be a different story. Alas, 'twas not to be.
Update: Another reason Barr is unlikely to be a factor is that third-party performance is actually on the decline (or, at best, stagnant). Click here and here for my post-2006 election analysis on this subject.
Author Pat Buchanan says President Bush should be impeached for failing to stop the invasion of illegal aliens across the U.S. border with Mexico.
"I think he's committed an impeachable offense in refusing to enforce the immigration laws and in failing to uphold the Constitution by defending the states against this invasion," Buchanan told radio talk-show host Curt Smith this weekend on National Public Radio stations in upstate New York.
"When you have 6 million people apprehended on the border and several million got in on your watch ? and you have the ability to stop it ? I think you're derelict in your duty," he said. "And if the president says 'I can't do it,' you need a new president who will do it."
"This is not Ellis Island," said Buchanan. "This is an invasion."
Theodore Roosevelt is one of my greatest political heroes. The "strenuous life" was T.R.'s definition of Americanism, a celebration of America's pioneer ethos, the virtues that had won the West and inspired our belief in ourselves as the New Jerusalem, bound by sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity. "We cannot sit huddled within our borders," he warned, "and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond."(...)
And for Roosevelt that common destiny surpassed material gain and self-interest. Our freedom and our industry must aspire to more than acquisition and luxury. We must live out the true meaning of freedom, and accept "that we have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither."
Some critics, in his day and ours, saw in Roosevelt's patriotism only flag-waving chauvinism, not all that dissimilar to Old World ancestral allegiances that incited one people to subjugate another and plunged whole continents into war. But they did not see the universality of the ideals that formed his creed.
The last major conservative split took place in the early 1990's, when Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were able to exploit conservative dissatisfaction with Bush Sr. over trade, immigration, the first Iraq war, and multilateral cooperation abroad. A McCain nomination has the potential re-open this exact same rift. It is ultimately a split between neoconservative imperialism and paleoconservative American exceptionalism. While McCain is a strong believer in the inherent superiority of American civilization, he draws many of the same internationalist conclusions from that belief that we have seen from the Bushes: spread American influence through foreign wars, free trade, religious evangelizing, and immigration policies that are relatively open when compared to those favored by other conservatives. This draws the ire of paleocons like Buchanan who are mainly interested in preserving what they see as the exceptionalism of American cultural identity through closed borders, closed trade, and a general disdain for involvement overseas.
With McCain as the nominee, a conservative split of this nature is almost inevitable. Like Bush, Iraq and immigration are two of the few areas where he simply refuses to pander to certain sections of his base. What is less inevitable is that this split will blow up into a full-scale primary and third party challenge ala 1992. In fact, that appears extremely unlikely, given what appears to be a remarkable decline in the political influence of paleoconservatives.
The first stage of the convoluted delegate selection process to the Republican national convention will take place tonight. While I don't expect it will receive much coverage--there are only about 30 stories discussing the caucuses on Google News right now, and 13 of them focus on Ron Paul's trip to the state--the results will provide significant insight into the state of the Republican nomination campaign none the less. With only eleven precincts across the entire state, turnout will be extremely low and limited to die-hard activists. With John McCain and Mitt Romney making the strongest pushes here, it will help to determine if John McCain's recent victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina has allowed him to turn a corner with the party faithful or not:
By most indications, the most organized pushes for delegates came from U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
For his part, McCain held a meet-and-greet function at the Camelot Club in Baton Rouge in late December, where handlers were able to get a bit of in-person delegate work done. With members of the national press hunkered down in a waiting area, McCain met privately for a brief period with several donors and members of the transition team of Gov. Bobby Jindal, a fellow Republican.
Romney has taken a more modern approach to herding delegates. His campaign oversaw a mass e-mail drive earlier this month that reached out to conservative voters and asked them to run as delegates for the Louisiana Republican Convention. In a response sent from the originating e-mail address, Alan Philip, Romney's regional political director, wrote that the names targeted for the drive were gleaned from lists compiled by old GOP campaigns in Louisiana. In particular, he cited the recent and failed attempt by term-limited state Sen. Craig Romero, R-New Iberia, to capture the 3rd Congressional District.
Tonight, 105 delegates to the February 16th state convention will be chosen. On February 16th, those 105 delegates will be trimmed down to 44 of the state's 47 national delegates (three delegates, representing the senior GOP leadership in the state, have already been chosen). Unless a candidate receives over 50% of the vote in the February 9th Louisiana primary, all of these delegates will be officially unpledged, and not obligated to support any candidate on the first ballot of the national convention. However, since the delegates signed up to support a candidate in today's caucuses, we will know the candidates which each of the delegates favor.
Now, with little media, and with the delegates almost certain to be officially "uncommitted," it may not seem like anything is at stake here. However, as I discussed yesterday, McCain has struggled in low-turnout party caucuses and conventions like these, while Romney has thrived. If McCain is able to win the most delegates to the state convention, it will be a strong sign that he can indeed perform well in caucus and convention states, thus greatly improving his chances to become the nominee. However, if Romney wins, especially if he wins by the wide margins of his Wyoming and Nevada victories, it will be a confirming sign that McCain will struggle mightily in caucuses and conventions around the country, and that Romney is indeed the choice of the party faithful (remember that Bush Sr. introduced Romney when he made his big speech on Mormonism). With numerous caucus and convention states between now and February 9th--Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Washington, West Virginia--Romney can potentially use them as a rich delegate farm, combined with a Florida to California strategy, to emerge as the delegate leader after February 9th. From that point, he would be positioned to take the nomination on March 4th with a double win in Ohio and Texas.
So, even without media, and even without official delegate selection, tonight's result will reveal quite a bit about the state of the Republican nomination campaign. Don't expect Huckabee to play well here, since he is not nearly as well liked by the party faithful as Romney, and since Louisiana is mainly a Catholic state rather than an evangelical one. However, Paul's dedicated activists should once again do better than expected, just as they did in Iowa and Nevada. If the results from Nevada are replicated here, a crushing Romney victory combined with Paul edging out McCain for second, that will be the best possible sign that the Republican nomination fight will go on for a long, long time.
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