Obama's inaugural speech: the liberal majority

We have no idea what Obama will say at his second inauguration. But it should sound something like this.

 

My fellow Americans, last November we as a nation came to realize what many of us had suspected for a long time, that America is a center-left nation, with a liberal majority.

We know that in November, America voted for liberalism. We voted to put a hard-core bank regulator in the Senate, and expanded Democratic control of the Senate in spite of all those vulnerable seats, and elected Democrats in red states, and sent Alan Grayson back to Washington, and voted for gay politicians and gay rights and gay-supporting judges, and voted for marijuana and unions and tax increases and the minimum wage, and for funding for schools rather than churches, and college for immigrants, and lots and lots of female candidates. Right-wing candidates didn’t do so well – all that rape talk. More Americans voted for Democrats than Republicans, even in the House races; we overcame Republican vote suppression, but we just couldn’t overcome Republican gerrymandering.

We, the liberal majority, know that seventy percent of the national debt was incurred during Republican administrations and most of the rest was incurred by Democratic presidents cleaning up Republican messes. We know that the current economic crisis was created by Republicans, that tax cuts don’t create jobs, and that even Reagan raised taxes twelve times. We wonder why the Republicans change their minds about deficits every eight years – deficits are okay for Republican presidents, but when Democrats do it, it’s treason.

We, the liberal majority, know that it isn’t frivolous to spend money on schools, roads and bridges, policemen and firefighters, paramedics and nurses, and protecting air and water and food and our children. And FEMA. We don’t think the teachers who care for our kids and turn them into adults are overpaid or greedy; we think the solution for underfunded schools is to increase funding, not decrease it. We thank unions for giving us sick leave, workmen’s compensation, maternity leave, fair pay, child labor protection, health care, and protection for whistleblowers. We know that if anti-government zealots want to experience life without any government protection, flights to Somalia leave daily.

We, the liberal majority, wonder why Republican seniors are consuming government entitlements while condemning them, and pretending that your entitlements don’t come from government, and voting in large numbers for the party that wants to take your entitlements away, and quaking in your shoes about death panels that don’t exist and never will. We believe that if conservatives demanded the right to use our tax money to pay for Iraq, we can use their tax money to save Medicare.

We, the liberal majority, try not to roll our eyes when John Boehner puts the phrase “job-killing” in front of everything I do – Obama’s “job-killing” foreign policy speech, Obama’s “job-killing” trip to the bathroom – but then blocks every job proposal I submit, and proposes no jobs bills of his own. But plenty of bills to fight abortion.

We, the liberal majority, know that the real job creators are consumers, not corporations. Demand drives supply, as it has for five thousand years of human commerce. We know the nation would be better off if corporations worked to create jobs here in America instead of overseas, and if they would invest in jobs, rather than spending a billion dollars to try to buy the elections. We know that there are a lot of things that government does better than corporations, and that perhaps we’ve gone far enough to try to privatize schools and warfare and prisons and Social Security. We know that if folks really think that corporations are people, the big firms should play by the same rules as everyone else, that Wall Street should have cops on the beat just like Main Street, that corporations who want the same freedoms as the rest of us have the same responsibilities.

We, the liberal majority, know that all those businessmen who think they are self-made men, got a ton of help from banks and investors and the federal government and the state government and, you know, their employees. We think that corporate leaders who take home million-dollar salaries while destroying their firms through incompetence and criminality should be a little less petulant about paying 17 percent in taxes when their janitors pay 25 percent.  Or paying no taxes at all. We know that elitists really have declared class warfare, in the form of the conservative effort to undermine the middle class and the American dream; we know that their contempt for the rest of us doesn’t just apply to the 47 percent – it applies to the 99 percent.

We, the liberal majority, look forward to the day when conservatives set aside fallacy and delusion and Orwellian lies and bad spelling, and embrace science and fact and reality and established economic theory. We look forward to the day when any conservative who lies in public can be fact-checked by Candy Crowley. We view with alarm the effort by conservatives to hide reality from their children via homeschooling. We find it fascinating that conservatives jam up the shelves of bookstores with mountains of books by people like Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter – for an audience that doesn’t read. We look back fondly to the era of our founding fathers; all of them, even the conservatives, loved reason and science, embracing the humanism of European thinkers and the works of the pagan Romans and Greeks. Both of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence loathed most of the Bible and publicly embraced reason.

We, the rational majority, know that global warming is an established scientific fact, and even if it was a hoax, fighting to stop it would save money, free us of dependence on our cars and Middle East oil, create jobs, and save our forests and our air and our health. We know that there is no such thing as clean coal. We know that my first administration increased oil drilling here at home, to help free us from  the Arabs. We know that politicizing the weather is silly. We know that evolution is an established fact, that the world is older than six thousand years, and that Jesus never did ride that dinosaur.

We, the liberal majority, know that if the conservatives who are sitting in their megachurches waiting for the Rapture were to actually read the Bible, they would know that Jesus cared for the poor and the sick, and hated war and organized religion. We want to pray in church, not in school, like the Constitution says. We wonder why the people who cheer the “God Hates Fags” signs of the Westboro Church are same people who burned Dixie Chicks CDs for exercising their First-Amendment rights. We wonder why people take celibate priests seriously when they give us their expertise on marriage, and take pedophile priests seriously when they lecture us on morality.

We, the liberal majority, try to keep a straight face when conservatives spend thirty years hijacking the national political agenda and forcing us to endlessly debate abortion, school vouchers, school prayer, intelligent design, putting the Commandments in courtrooms, stem cell research, euthanasia, cloning, civil unions, HPV shots, contraception, sex education, faith-based initiatives, banning books, assisted suicide…and then complain that there is a war against Christianity and that they are afraid to talk about God.

We, the liberal majority, don’t believe that the millions of women who want access to reproductive care and contraception are all sluts. We know that abstinence education has failed to stop teen sex, pregnancy or STDs. We think that supporters of small government should embrace keeping government out of our bedrooms. We know that the people who demand that a baby be born, shouldn’t be trying to cut off support services for mother and child after the birth. We are not sure what we’re going to do if one more “pro-marriage” conservative is caught cheating on his wife. We wonder what would happen to all those conservatives who want to interfere in the lives of women, gays and lesbians, if the tables were turned, and Big Bad Government came to interfere with their private lives and reproductive choices.

We, the liberal majority, know that the gays don’t have a secret agenda, they have an open demand for fairness and equality. We know that God doesn’t hate gays because he created millions of them; we know the Founding Fathers didn’t hate gays because they signed the Declaration of Independence wearing wigs and satin tights. We know that you can’t pray away the Gay, although it would be great if you could pray away the Stupid.

We, the liberal majority, know that if you’re worried that homosexuality will lead to polygamy, you should go bother the Mormons; if you’re worried about homosexuality causing pedophilia, go bother the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts; if you’re worried about incest, go ask our Republican friends in West Virginia; if you’re worried about sex with animals, go ask our friends up in sheep country in Montana; if you’re worried about weakening heterosexual marriage, go ask Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Mark Sanford, Larry Craig, John Ensign, Bill O’Reilly, Rudy Giuliani, David Vitter, Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Strom Thurmond, and our friend Arnold Schwarzenegger.

We, the liberal majority, know that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch and that Obama killed bin Laden after Bush gave up. We believe that the conservatives who scream at liberals for not supporting the troops, should support armor for our troops and services for our veterans.

We, the liberal majority, that know that my administration really isn’t coming to take anyone’s guns. And we think that the people who are obsessed with the Second Amendment might want to take a look at the First. And all the other Amendments too, for good measure.

We, the liberal majority, no longer want to be led by a national brain trust consisting of Drudge, Fox, Rush and the dittoheads, Beck, Coulter, Bachmann, Palin, Rick Perry, Christine O’Donnell, Pat Robertson, Angle, Brewer, Romney, Trump, Murdoch, Cain, Gingrich, the Koch brothers, Shel Adelson the casino boss, Scott Walker, Rick Scott the felon, Santorum, and of course Bush and Cheney. And Karl Rove.

We, the liberal majority, try to restrain our laughter when we are called un-American by people who wave Confederate flags, call for secession, call it “tyranny” when they lose an election, deliberately trash the inner workings of Congress so that it can’t function, and deliberately crash the economy for political purposes. We know the movement of independent grass-roots tea party patriots isn’t grass-roots, isn’t independent, and isn’t patriotic. It is a paid, organized arm of the Republican party. We grow weary of conservatives who think the White House belongs to them by birthright and work to demonize every Democrat to occupy the Oval Office for the last 40 years; we know we have a President who was born in America and that nobody can be a fascist and a communist all at the same time, no matter how many times the conservatives insist it’s true. We know the birthright of American citizenship doesn’t belong solely to terrified white people.

And we, the people, have one question for our Republican friends, at long last. Are there any patriots left in your party? Is there one leader in your party who is willing to attack America’s problems, instead of America’s Democrats?

Ask not what you can do for your party. Ask what you can do for your country. It’s about time.

The ghost of Harry Truman haunting Romney

I was just reading about Truman’s victory over Dewey in 1948. Truman was the underdog, and his internal monologue went something like this.

“While I’m campaigning, all I have to do in my spare time is deal with an obstructive Congress, overcome a split in the Democratic party, set up the Defense Department and the CIA, rebuild the White House, labor strikes, inflation, civil rights, NATO, desegregate the Army, the Marshall Plan, the UN, contain communism, the Berlin airlift, Israel, the atomic bomb. No sweat!”

Imagine Romney’s internal monologue in the last week of the election.

“I can be honest and lose this race by an inch, or lie like crazy and win by an inch. So my plan is to exploit the misery of others by staging fake Sandy rallies, evade hard questions on rape and FEMA, get my governor buddies to suppress the vote, lie to voters about voting rules, and bury the country in ads lying about Medicare, Benghazi, Jeep and welfare. You didn’t build that!! The Democrats loved me in Boston! I lied all year, why stop? I lied twenty seven times in the first debate and gained ground in the polls! If I lie over and over now, it will be too late for anyone to catch me at it, before election day. And Obama’s wasting time with silly stuff like making sure the little peepul in New Jersey get food and water and don’t drown – what a sucker!”

Yep, that’s what leadership looks like!

Republican delusions that cost them the election

Mitt Romney lost the election for a number of reasons. Some are specific to him – the flipflopping, the obvious contempt for the common people, and so on. But other issues still matter for the GOP’s prospects in the next election. Here are two.

The first thing is that the GOP’s thuglike political tactics didn’t work.

They lied over and over, and Obama and the media let them get away with it for months. Romney’s Medicare lie almost cost Obama Florida. But they went for the lie a couple of times too many, on Benghazi and on Jeep, and they were publicly busted for it.

They tried 400 million dollars worth of attack ads, and the quest to retake the White House and the Senate fell flat. In fact one of the biggest targets of these ads, Sherrod Brown, still won.

And the vote suppression efforts backfired too. Minorities in Ohio and Florida realized the Republicans were trying to push them away from the polls, and they showed up in staggering numbers to ensure their votes were counted. And now the Obama-run Department of Justice is going to investigate, although the Supreme Court may make that harder by invalidating the Voting Rights Act.

But the second thing, the big one? The Republicans have been trapped in what Rachel Maddow would call a “bubble” of extremist lunacy.

Extremist delusion is what impelled them to anger women with their attacks on Sandra Fluke and Planned Parenthood, and their idiotic comments on rape; likewise their obvious self-destructive contempt for blacks, Latinos, and gays. They truly do share Romney’s belief that half the country is a bunch of lazy traitorous socialist moochers who have just voted themselves bread and circuses; they really hate half of the entire country, and they don’t mind saying so out loud.

It was extremist delusion that forced Romney to campaign as a fascist in the primaries, giving Obama plenty of Romney quotes to bring up later, and impelled Romney to choose the would-be destroyer of Medicare as his running mate. And actually Romney is the latest in a line of Republicans who were actually moderates and nice enough personally, but were forced by the party to run as nasty sneering extremists and then lose. George H. W. Bush, Dole, McCain. Pro-choice? Who, me?

It was extremist delusion that led Republicans into the quicksand of “all government is bad including FEMA”, from which they could not extricate themselves when Chris Christie was embracing Obama on the Jersey shore.

It was extremist delusion that led to the proliferation of conspiracy theories, about the evil media, about lying pollsters, faked unemployment figures, voter fraud, free phone giveaways, the unions, Nate Silver, and even Democratic vote suppression.

It is because of these foolish-sounding extremist delusions that the GOP has failed to develop a stable of credible upcoming leaders. Because the party forces its leaders to spew extremist nonsense or be expelled, they have driven away big-name moderates like Colin Powell and Mike Bloomberg, and indeed anyone who believes in facts, math, science and economics. They are forced to consider people like Trump and Cain and Bachmann and Palin to be “leaders”, and call Newt Gingrich and John McCain “statesmen”, and consider George Will an intellectual heavyweight, and Dick Morris and Karl Rove political heavyweights, and Ayn Rand a philosopher. Meanwhile the Democrats have an impressive list of potential Presidents and Senators in the wings, and can reach out to a deep bench of leaders like Bill Clinton to speak creditably at their conventions, and a dazzling array of policy experts like Elizabeth Warren who are everything Paul Ryan wants to be and never can be.

And it is this range of delusions that impels Republicans to argue that Romney would have squeaked through as president if it hadn’t been for Sandy: America really wants to ban abortion and gay marriage, and keep the tax breaks for the rich and corporations, gut the unions, mess with Medicare and Social Security, repeal Obamacare. When confronted with the fact that most of America doesn’t want those things, they insist that the “real” America does, as though they get to decide who the real Americans are. Hint: they’re white.

George Will is out there saying conservatives in America outnumber liberals two to one: America still likes us! Mark McKinnon still insists that America is a center-right nation, even though GOP presidential candidates have won the popular vote just once in twenty four years: Bush, as a wartime incumbent with a listless opponent, got a whopping 50.7 percent when he ran for reelection. Republican Senator Ron Johnson said Romney lost because the voters were just uninformed – we just need to do a better job selling our “pure” ideas to those stupid rubes! To envision the typical Republican, picture a dumb white guy who is standing in front of a restaurant, having just been hugged by the girl he thought was his girlfriend, not quite grasping that he has just been friend-zoned.

After they failed in 2008 to persuade America that an Obama presidency would mean Obama taking all your guns, raising your taxes, putting an abortion clinic on every corner and killing your grandma….They are already at it, crying wolf again. Now that Obama has been reelected, America is dead, let’s start a revolution, stock up on guns!

So they’re not going to learn the right lesson from this race. They will need to be hit in the head at least one more time, probably two. They still insist on spending all their time in that bubble, talking only to each other because everyone outside the bubble is contaminated, and tuning out everyone except Fox and Rush. And already party officials are coalescing around the notion that the problem in the Romney race was not their philosophy, but their tactical performance and their candidates.

The GOP will lose in 2016 because of their split from the rest of the country...and reality

 

The shattering Democratic victory in the 2012 election revealed a nation split into two very different parts. The nation is divided into four neat portions: the Northeast, the Midwest, the West….and then there’s the South, not counting Florida which is its own strange self. The Northeast, Midwest and West constitute the three-quarters of the country that is sane….and then there’s the South.

 

In the sane three-quarters of the country, Obama won the popular vote by a staggering 7.3 million votes. In the South he lost by 4.7 million. The South is the one area in which Obama was outperformed by John Kerry’s race eight years earlier, because of the race issue. This really is a picture of two different countries.

 

In the sane three-quarters of the country, everything the Republicans tried, failed. Lies, evasions, attacks failed. Romney’s blatant lie about Jeep actually backfired. Rick Scott, John Husted and their fellow Republican criminals tried no less than seventy different ways to try to rig the voting, and failed to deliver either Ohio or Florida, a danger which Obama publicly demanded a fix for. The Israel-Iran scare tactics with Jewish voters fooled nobody. The Republicans had twenty one Democratic Senate seats to attack, and still failed to take the upper house.

 

The stunning amounts of conservative money, hundreds of millions worth of ads attacking Obama, couldn’t turn around those battleground states. With the exception of North Carolina, every state Obama chose to contest, he won. When the Republican donors carpet-bombed Sherrod Brown in Ohio, they failed there too: right now I am imagining the tiny, exhausted manager of a tiny, local radio station  in Cincinnati building a gigantic swimming pool with all that Republican ad money. Sheldon Adelson backed six candidates with his pots of money, and lost all six races; in all, a lot of crazed rightwing billionaires are a lot poorer right now, with nothing to show for it. You think maybe Adelson and the Koch brothers will hire some rightwing goons to beat up Rove and Dick Armey and try to get their money back?

 

Mourdock and Akin, the candidates for rapists everywhere, with a chance to pick up two sure Republican gains, went down in flames; so did rightwing bomb-throwers Allen West, Joe Walsh and George Allen, and loudmouths like Tommy Thompson, Connie Mack and Josh Mandel flopped too. Michele Bachmann almost went down with them. America went for liberalism, and went big: they voted for Elizabeth Warren the feared banking regulator, a number of vulnerable Democrats, Democrats in red states, Democratic counter-puncher Alan Grayson, a gay Senator, gay marriage, a vulnerable judge who supported gay marriage, gays in red states, legal pot, voting rights, college for illegal immigrants, support for unions and minimum wage increases, lifting the California GOP’s endless ban on any taxation, and tax increases for schools; state funding for churches was blocked, and again the two loudmouth anti-abortion Senate candidates were crushed. New Hampshire, once a conservative bastion, is now ruled by five women. In the sensible three-quarters of the country, joy and sanity reigns.

 

But in that one quarter of the country that still has Confederate flags hanging off of their trailers and in their garages, where you can open your window and hear every car and every kitchen tuned into Rush Limbaugh all day, where reality only rarely penetrates, they are still in denial. Romney wouldn’t even write a concession speech, and if you read the text of his speech from election night, you can see that it was just his victory speech with a few words changed: there was no way he could lose, right? We all know the polls were wrong, right? The Romney campaign, Karl Rove and Donald Trump tried to persuade Republicans that the race wasn’t really over, perhaps hoping to drag out a recount and portray Obama as an “illegitimate” president, but even Fox News and John Husted threw in the towel. Sorry, Karl, you’re not conning Fox into crowning the President like you did in the Bush-Gore race.

 

When the Republicans are not arguing that “Obama didn’t really win, he doesn’t have a mandate, we can ignore all the Democratic victories because the national popular vote was close, Republicans won the House which means the people are for us”, and so forth, etc ….when they do accept that they really lost, the excuses begin. It was Sandy, it was Christie, it was the media, it was Romney who wasn’t a real conservative. They just can’t accept that America has taken a good look at Republican “values” and rejected them.

 

And by the way, speaking of popular votes and mandates, Bush’s mandate in 2000 was 47.9 percent to 48.4. Bush was on the 47.9 end, half a million votes behind Gore. Thanks to Sandra Day O’Connor, who admitted she wanted Bush to win so she could retire, Bush proceeded to exploit his negative-half-a-percent-mandate to rule like a despotic, autocratic Bourbon king in France. “Don’t count the votes! Illegal wars! Illegal wiretaps! Illegal detention of people I don’t like! Torture is good, empathy is bad! Fire U.S. attorneys who refuse to persecute my enemies! Screw Congress! Screw the press! To hell with balanced budgets! To hell with our European allies! To hell with the facts! I’ve got political capital and I’m going to spend it! L’etat c’est moi!” I’m surprised he didn’t govern on a velvet throne with a giant turkey leg in his hand like Henry VIII. After losing the popular vote.

 

Just in case anyone forgot.

 

So the Republican holy war will continue. America is sick to death of the campaign of obstruction waged by the Republicans, and even mild-mannered Harry Reid has promised to change the filibuster rules, but still the GOP has no plans to abandon their blood feud with Obama. Mitch McConnell is already demanding that Obama move even further to the right, before the GOP really really promises to meet him in the “center” this time. And maybe even let him kick a football! Boehner is saying the same: his notion of bipartisan compromise is…the existing GOP position. Then the old mantra of destroying Obama’s first term and making Obama a one-term president, a colossal gamble that backfired, will shift to new calls for Issa to draft articles of impeachment, particularly if the Republicans do well in the midterms.

 

And while tactically the Republicans will continue to hound Obama, strategically they will be ever more firm in their resolve that America will love Republicans as long as they can just be conservative enough. Cal Thomas, the morning after the election, was ranting that America, in choosing the Democrats, had given up on morality: Republicans, conditioned for years to argue that anyone who challenged President Bush hated the troops and America itself, really do believe that anyone who disagrees with them is morally and ethically suspect, and that compromising with Democrats is akin to negotiating with terrorists. Appeasement. They will never let go of their far-right views, and will continue to expel apostates like Dick Lugar from their ranks. To wave an unlamented farewell to turncoats like Olympia Snowe. Day after day, they will further affirm their twisted view of reality in the Fox/Rush echo chamber.

 

They will continue to drive more and more sane people out of their party, so that even their base supporters will begin to crack. Obama, with the help of Latinos, won a majority of Catholics even though the church was screaming about Obama’s alleged attack on religious liberty, and Obama the scary Muslim even got thirty percent of the evangelical vote. Obama also made inroads with Cuban-Americans, so all you Republicans who think that nominating Marco Rubio is the short route to winning Florida and the White House might want to take a second look down there.

 

All of this sets up the Republicans for a serious butt-kicking in 2016.

 

In 2016 the Democrats will field a white candidate who is more immune to the personal attacks of the Republicans, someone readier than Obama for a street fight, defending a stronger economy, leading waves of Democratic voters who are hell-bent on overcoming the efforts of guys like Rick Scott to make it harder for them to vote, and an electorate enjoying the benefits of Obamacare, the safeguarding of Social Security and Medicare, and an improving job market. Unions will be energized by Scott Walker and John Kasich; women will be energized; the tea party will be discredited and the old white guys will begin to age off the system.

 

So the Democrats will be even stronger next time, and even begin to contest southern states by going after the minority vote. If a black presidential candidate can come within about ten points in Georgia, the Carolinas, Missouri, there is territory to exploit down there, once the Democrats begin rebuilding their party down south. Obama, a black candidate, only lost 55 to 44 in Mississippi! Better outreach to Latinos can put Texas into play, and once Texas is on the table, there is no big state that is still safe for the GOP. The more the old-white-guy demo shrinks, the purpler the South gets.

 

In the 2016 election, the Republicans will fall further behind with women, minorities, gays, and the young, in their obsessive focus on your typical Republican stalwart: an aging white male with a high-school education, with more tattoos than teeth. They will be leading their shrinking platoons of old white guys, and an increasingly reluctant phalanx of fatcat donors who are still wondering what they got for their money in 2012. Unless the zealots can figure out some way for their wimmin-folk to magically begin giving birth to more seventy-year-old angry white guys who like to wear hats and drive Buicks really really slow, they will have a serious demographic headache.

 

The GOP zealots will shout down the pragmatists. “Sure, I know, we need women, but we can’t back down on abortion or contraception! Sure we need Latinos, but we can’t budge on immigration! And hell no to gay marriage!”

 

And at the top of the ticket they will no longer have a man like Romney, a gifted liar who fooled a lot of people into thinking he was a moderate and a bridge-builder. Romney really was the best opponent they could have sent up against Obama. Next time Team Red will be led by a total whackadoodle like Bachmann, Santorum, Newt, a member of the dreaded Paul family, or Donald Trump. Or Sarah Palin, if the Gods of Politics are smiling on the Democrats. Or some thug-like coward like Chris Christie who will burst into flames of rage the first time a reporter asks him a hostile question. Or some reality-denier like Paul Ryan who will even lose a big part of the old white guy vote because of Medicare and Social Security. So the eight-year Democratic reign in the White House will be….sixteen years.

 

All you Republicans who are laughing at my prediction were the same ones ridiculing my predictions for Obama in 2008 and 2012. You just never learn, so you?

 

Chris Christie, our savior!

For anyone who thinks Chris Christie is the savior of the GOP, Chris Christie has only been in the governor’s chair since 2010, and has already added an amazing amount of baggage to his track record.

He won a local election by lying so egregiously about his opponents that they sued for defamation; a key county employee also sued for defamation. He was so controversial that he was primaried out of office by another Republican; Christie sued for defamation.

He then worked as a lobbyist, blocking regulations against fraud and other corporate skullduggery.

Despite having very little legal experience he got a job as U.S. Attorney by fundraising for Bush and getting a boost from Karl Rove; as U.S. Attorney he came under fire for giving no-bid contracts and legal breaks to relatives and allies, to campaign donors, and to one prosecutor who had declined to prosecute Christie’s crooked brother. One of his violations ruined the career of Michele Brown, an assistant U.S. Attorney. The House Judiciary Committee had to drag him in for questioning; Christie showed up, but then ignored the direction of the committee and ran out on the hearings. As fast as a man like that can “run”, anyway. The same Committee investigated his use of the court monitor system, and shortly thereafter the Justice Department changed the court-monitor rules to prevent corruption. His tenure as U.S. Attorney was also marred by the illegal use of entrapment and cellphone tracking; the ACLU had to go after him.

He tried to rig a senatorial election by issuing a frivolous subpoena to a Democratic Senator just before the election.

He campaigned on protecting the pensions of police and firemen, and then violated an agreement and cut their pensions as governor, which led to a lawsuit.

He cost New Jersey $400 million in education grants by fouling up the grant application, and then tried to blame Obama for his own mistakes, and fired the official who blew the whistle on him. The New Jersey Education Association publicly slapped down Christie for rejecting a compromise with the unions, which contributed to the mess. Finally he was slapped down by the state supreme court for trying to steal money from poor schools and give property-tax breaks which would disproportionately help the rich. And for deceiving the court in the process.

He essentially proposed to end Medicaid in his state, by lowering the eligibility threshold to around $5000 in income.

All this is why he had a net disapproval number in the polling in his own home state.

Latinos? We love Latinos!

One interesting thing has happened already in the post-mortems for the 2012 race: everyone, even the Republican wingnuts, agrees that the GOP must go after the Latino vote. Going after blacks is historically unlikely, and the party just has too many fences to mend with women, so Latinos it is. The final 2012 state, Florida, hadn’t even finished counting its ballots, before senior Republicans were sharing with the country their sudden epiphany on the immigration issue.

The problem for the Republicans is two-fold. First, Latinos aren’t stupid, and they haven’t forgotten the toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed by the GOP in recent years. Second, the obvious GOP options for Latino candidacies are not so obvious when you look more closely. Marco Rubio and Susana Martinez are both new on the scene, taking office in 2011; they are both very conservative, they both have very thin resumes, and they both have ethical troubles. “I am the son of exiles!...Umm, no I’m not, sorry!” Rubio has the added advantage of being from Florida, but he also has the stench of Dick Cheney all over him. Ted Cruz is ineligible for the national ticket because he was born in Canada.

The Democrats have Julian Castro in their back pocket. Castro has only been mayor since 2009, and running for a state-wide election in Texas is a longshot, so a good cabinet job might be the thing to make him a viable VP contender. Meanwhile the Democrats should finally begin building their party in Texas and making Texas a purple state. Villaraigosa has ethical baggage and should be avoided.

The GOP could indeed go after women, possibly by nominating Kelly Ayotte; Nikki Haley on the other hand has some baggage. The Democrats obviously can counter with Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren or one of the other Senate newcomers like Tammy Baldwin.  And the GOP is unlikely to back away from its anti-abortion stance any time soon, which means the GOP ship will always be taking on water, in terms of women voters.

If the election is fought in one of these areas, the Republicans will be on offense because the Democrats have huge advantages within these groups now, and are more likely to lose support among these groups than gain it. But in both cases, the policies of the GOP will help the Democrats retain these supporters.

 

How the GOP will try to steal the 2016 election

Just in the last week of the election, the Republicans were caught using seventy different kinds of vote-rigging, to steal the election.

Not 70 instances of cheating. 70 different kinds of cheating. Count with me!

First, rig the entire process before the voters even start getting into the process:

• Stacking elections boards with supporters of vote-suppression efforts
• In Ohio, a Republican vote-suppression group, a group under criminal investigation, has managed to gets its employees hired as the actual poll workers
• Firing election officials who try to make it easier for voters to vote
• Failing to notify the public of rules changes

Next, get Democratic voters out of the process:

• Illegal vote purges in Ohio
• Invalidating voter registrations submitted on the last day of registration
• Purging black voters off the rolls
• Suing blacks in court to prove their registrations are valid
• Launching challenges at the courthouse for legal voters who happen to be black
• Voter data “lost” at the motor vehicle bureau
• Imposing illegal residence requirements on students
• Telling registered voters that they’re not registered
• Setting up registration verification rules which are certain to miss thousands of voters

Deceiving voters:

• Deceptive voting guides
• Robocalls telling people they can vote Wednesday – calls from the supervisor of elections
• Robo-call scare tactics; my favorite was Romney the Mormon telling voters that the Obama the Christian is the threat to Christianity
• GOP efforts to steal ballots by circulating “Victory Vans” and telling people they can drop off their ballots there
• Giving voters the wrong place and time to vote
• Running illegal half-hour anti-Obama “TV specials” packaged as straight news stories during the news hour
• Fake call centers taking “votes” over the phone

“Working the referees”

• Disproved charges that computers are stealing Republican votes
• Scary “voter fraud can send you to prison” signs

Making voting unpleasant, difficult, painful, impossible:

• Cuts in early voting
• Blocking parking lots at polling sites
• Towing the cars of voters
• Trying to block volunteers from handing out water to voters
• Posting political signs illegally, including gay-bashing signs
• Moving polling sites to churches with graphic anti-abortion posters
• Defying court orders to allow voters to vote
• Locking the doors on polling places when too many people want to vote
• A bomb scare shutting down a voting site
• Foot-dragging to get the electricity back on in the Democratic parts of Ohio
• Ridiculously long lines and inefficiency in Democratic areas in Florida

Bullying tactics at the polls:

• Tea Party groups drafting lists of black precincts to send their intimidation teams to; the lists were supposed to be secret
• Forging signatures to get unauthorized “poll watchers” into the polls
• Dressing up teaparty watchers to look like union members, to fake voters out
• Sending “poll watchers” to intimidate minority voters and minority areas
• Harassing voters right in the polling places
• Telling voters, on no authority, that they can’t vote
• Following and filming black voters as they fill out their election paperwork
• Poll workers refusing to tell voters where their correct precinct is
• Poll-workers caught switching Obama votes to Romney
• Poll workers filling out spaces where voters left slots blank on their paper ballots
• Stopping poll watchers from helping voters figure out the rules
• Judge visiting polling place and ordering poll watchers not to help voters
• Lodging false accusations of intimidation at black poll watchers , the sentiment being that any black person coming anywhere near a voting booth is a threat to Uhmurka
• Attempting to drive away neutral election monitors entirely

Trying to play the “Voter ID” game:

• Ads insisting you need ID when legally you don’t
• Posting signs illegally demanding ID
• Scary looking “poll watchers” demanding that voters show ID while still outside the polling places, in violation of court orders
• Poll workers demanding ID even when the law says otherwise
• Poll workers imposing harsher ID rules than the law allows
• Illegally turning away voters without ID
• Asking only blacks for IDs
• Asking only women for IDs

Making it harder for voters to vote some other way:

• Shutting down early voting
• Illegally changing the Ohio rules on provisional voting, in violation of the law and court decrees
• Giving poll workers broad leeway to demand that voters use only provisional ballots
• Forcing people to use provisional ballots even when they’re registered
• Forcing people with provisional ballots to return with IDs
• Illegally forcing voters to fill out the poll workers’ portion of provisional ballots, allowing for errors which permit the poll worker to throw out the ballot
• Absentee ballot requests not answered
• Throwing absentee vote applications in the trash

Cheating outright:

• Republicans trying to double-vote in Nevada
• Sending GOP crooks to the polls to prove that Democratic voter fraud happens by…committing voter fraud. And getting caught and arrested.

Throwing sand in the electoral machine:

• Mysteriously losing or running out of ballots in Democratic precincts
• Sending the wrong ballots to the wrong precincts
• “Printing errors” that make some Florida ballots unreadable
• Broken voting machines in Democratic precincts
• Machine rigged to turn Obama votes into Romney votes
• Mysterious disappearance of black votes in Fla due to a “computer glitch” which turned out to be, of course, “human error”
• Using unauthorized software in voting machines

Flunking out of the Electoral College:

• Once again, Republicans are trying to game the Electoral College, by seeking to change the rules in a large, blue state. The proposed change would split up the state’s electoral votes instead of giving them all to the winner of that state, and compounding the problem by allocating the electoral votes by congressional district, right after the Republicans gerrymandered the districts. They tried without success to impose these new rules in California and Pennsylvania, and now they are trying it in Ohio. Which is kind of funny, really: they wouldn’t be trying to split the Ohio electoral votes if they thought they had a shot at re-taking the state in 2016, would they?

The extraordinary element in Florida is the emergence of Rick Scott. The man is a felon – he got busted in court for defrauding Medicare so egregiously that he was fired from his own company, a firm which was forced to pay $2 billion in fines, the biggest fraud case in history. This crook is the guy the Republicans elected governor, the man they chose to control their elections. Now why would you want a crook running your elections, I wonder?

Since the GOP is discovering that they can’t win elections with their toxic policies, their lies, or their terrible candidates….expect them to game the system even more next time.  

 

The next fight isn't in D.C.

The Republicans know they have an existential crisis – they face extinction. They know they have nothing more to offer the American people. They know that with the American economy under their control for thirty years, we’ve followed the path of tax cuts for the rich, all the way into a morass of titanic debt and staggering deficits. They know that their chest-beating neo-con foreign policy has gravely damaged not only our military but our national reputation abroad. They know their social policies are widely viewed by people who are not white evangelicals, and by most of the world, as barbaric, trying to throw women back into the nineteenth century, throw gays and lesbians into the closet of discrimination, throw blacks in jail, and throw Latinos out of the country entirely. They know they have driven sane moderates out of their party, leaving only the crooked rich guys and the delusional redneck wingnuts. Not enough money to buy elections, not enough votes to win. They know they’re going the way of the Whigs, because their policies are incredibly destructive.

They had one great chance left, the fact that they were competing against a black President who doesn’t even have the wherewithal to defend himself against their lies; they almost exploited that opening into a presidential win by Romney. And they are going to pray for one more chance to avoid sliding into permanent oblivion, either a Democratic opponent who is another Carter-Dukakis-Obama milquetoast who won’t fight back. For 2016 the Democrats have a lot of strong candidates, white boys from the south and west like Schweitzer and O’Malley who can credibly go to places like Texas and Georgia and start working to make them Democratic again. They also have Hillary, who can spin up turnout among the wingnuts like nobody else. The wingnuts have been repeating for years, as an article of faith, that because the Clintons had the nerve to take from George H. Bush the White House that they thought they had bought and paid for, it must have all been, you guessed it, a conspiracy. And that they must be destroyed. Whitewater! All those murders! Vince Foster! Black helicopters! Paula Jones! Huma Abedin! But that may not be enough. But Hillary is perfectly capable of defending herself. Democrats are learning, very slowly, that they need to nominate fighters who can defend themselves.

So, since Republicans can no longer win by peddling discredited policies or by bullying on weak Democratic candidates, their new strategy is to stop Democrats from exercising any power at all, by using obstruction in Congress to prevent Democrats from accomplishing anything, by exploiting Citizens United to buy the election process outright, and by blocking up the judicial nomination process so that only Republicans get on the federal bench. They know they can no longer compete in the democratic process unless they cheat. And above all, they intend to steal elections.

So that is the next battle. The coming fights won’t be about Santorum versus Christie, or Hillary versus Cuomo, or tax policy or Syria or gay marriage or health care. They will be about the unglamorous grunt work in the statehouses, to keep people like John Husted from stealing elections in Ohio, or Rick Scott in Florida, to stop Scot Walker from busting unions just because they vote against him, to make sure that we have early voting and absentee, to make sure polling places in the ghetto and the barrio have enough ballots and machines, to stop voter purges and intimidation, to shoot down vote-fraud conspiracy theories, to stop voter ID. They will be about electing Democratic governors to stop Republican election fraud. They will be about knowing who your state-level legislators actually are: the battle to save democracy will happen in the states, not Washington. They will be about getting your family and your friends out there to register to vote. They will be about rebuilding the Democratic party in southern states. Only when we have strong Democratic majorities across Washington and across the country, can we begin the work of repopulating the judiciary with sane judges, ending the wave of filibusters in the Senate, overturning Citizens United, and saving American democracy.

Traditional America is dead!

Currently people like Rush Limbaugh are lamenting the death of “traditional America”. Well, why should we mourn? A century ago, women couldn’t vote, blacks could be murdered with impunity, Latinos were invisible, and gays were criminals; there was no Social Security or Medicare; the utilities refused to give rural America electricity; a woman’s life expectancy was 51 years. They have country songs about these “good old days”: in these “good old days” we endured a Depression, several recessions, two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, McCarthy, Watergate, the terror of the Cold War, but that was okay, because white men were still running the show, right? Whenever these circus clowns say the word “traditional”, translate it to “white”. The soul of Rush Limbaugh is the soul of every mob of “traditional” illiterate Know-Nothing bullies who ever waited at the New York docks to beat up the new Irish immigrants, then the Italians, then the Poles, then the Puerto Ricans….

“Take America back!”….from the scary black guy. Because America, and all it represents, belongs to white people. All those other people are just here on sufferance. To be seen and not heard.

“Let’s secede!” Some Texas Republicans are sounding the tocsin already. In other words, we only like democracy when we win. When we lose, we want to run away from home.

 

How Obama saved Christianity

For four years now, Republicans have been screeching that the scary Muslim from Kenya was going to destroy American capitalism and Christianity. And the irony is that Obama has actually saved both.

More than anyone else, Obama saved capitalism. He stopped the slide in the markets and employment, he saved the financial industry and the auto industry, he saved five million jobs despite Republican opposition, and he began undoing the damage and the fractured policies of the Republicans who preceded him.

But he also may have saved Christianity.

For forty years now, Christianity in America has been hijacked by right-wing zealots who read the Old Testament but got bored and stopped reading before Jesus entered the picture. And they were so enthralled with this judgmental, Leviticus-driven view of the world that they tried to export these religious views out into the world of policy, politics, economics, science, education and medicine. They forced the whole country to put their most cherished political issues at the top of the agenda.

They went gunning after women on abortion and contraception. They went after our kids, and their own kids too, on school vouchers, school prayer, evolution, sex education, banning books, HPV shots. They hammered away at the separation of church and state by putting the Commandments in courtrooms and by pursuing faith-based initiatives. They invaded science by declaring war on stem cell research and cloning, infected the medical world with their views on assisted suicide, resuscitation and euthanasia, and showed their social brutality with their views on gays and lesbians.

Two thousand years after Saint Paul did all he could to expand Christianity by removing the need for the Jews and pagans of the Roman world to follow outmoded Mosaic laws, American Christians tried to take their faith backward, not just to the days of Jesus, but to the days of Moses, invoking the Torah to condemn anyone who didn’t meet their standards of behavior. As the Republican big tent shrunk, so did the Christian big tent.

So a lot of people turned away from Christianity. The rightwing loons made Jesus uncool. People who sang along with Jesus Christ Superstar 40 years ago, sang “Jesus is just alright with me” in the 1970s, joined the kumbaya guitar-strumming churches, boasted of being born again in the 1980s, began to feel embarrassed. Many left their churches, or suffered in silence while the faithful around them spewed hate and intolerance. The ranks of atheists, agnostics, Pastafarians, Wiccans, Buddhists and other “Others” grew by leaps and bounds. Polls showed that the number of people attending church went down, but the number of people claiming to be churchgoers went up: people were turning away from the churches but were afraid to admit it publicly and were looking for some other path to faith.

Now, sane people want to reclaim Christianity, to restore the Sermon on the Mount to their faith, to shift away from hate and toward compassion in hard times. Likewise a tsunami-like backlash is beginning to react against the unholy, destructive alliance of Republican politicians and Taliban-like evangelicals which dominated American society for thirty years.

Obama, when you look closely, is at the center of all this. He is breaking up that unholy alliance, forcing conservatives to reexamine what they really believe and to wonder where their intolerance has taken them. He is reaching out to his own allies without pandering to them: he is forcing his friends in the black churches to reexamine gay rights, and impelling his Latino friends to reconsider the bêtes noires of the Catholic Church, contraception and abortion. He has put us on a path toward a future in which religion and politics stay in their own respective lanes, in which religious belief can grow, keep up with the times, and rediscover tolerance. It took the Catholic Church three hundred years to admit that man was an animal and the earth was a satellite, but perhaps modern religion, freed from the grip of the arch-conservative zealots, can move more quickly and remain relevant for a modern America.

But that can only happen with someone like Obama at the helm. Whenever a Republican takes over, evangelicals succumb to the delusion that they are God’s chosen leaders for our nation, that only their religious views matter, that you can’t be a liberal and a good Christian.

Ban heterosexual marriage!

Having heard many, many people in my state argue that we cannot allow gay marriage, people like Matt Birk of the Baltimore Ravens, let me make a contrarian argument.

For five thousand years, straight people, and only straight people, have been entrusted with the institution of marriage. And for five thousand years they have made total hash of it, a record of disastrous failure. Marriages destroyed by infidelity, drinking, drug abuse, immaturity, domestic violence, abandonment, child abuse, incest, and mental cruelty. Heterosexuals have proved that they cannot be trusted with this institution anymore.

I propose that for the next five thousand years, only gays and lesbians can marry. Straight people will just have to get along with the same deal that gays have had to put up with. Fighting with lawyers and doctors over legal rights, health care, child custody, hospital visitation. Because opponents of gay marriage insist, vehemently, that forcing people who love each other to live like that is okay, right? Force straight people to live in the shadows, if they think it's okay to treat gays that way.

So Matt, your team has had its four downs. For the next five thousand years it's the other team's turn. Gays get to marry and people like Matt don't. They can still have kids, buy houses, make their lives, but no marriage. Who's with me?