Month: May 2015

Are Moderate Republicans Ready to Revolt Against G.O.P. Leadership? (October 8, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Peter King

Despite a strong aversion to anyone who brands themselves a conservative in 2013, I am really starting to like New York House Republican Peter King (not to be confused with “cantaloupe calf” idiot Steve King). King apparently has no qualms at all about refuting the claims of his party’s leadership in the interest of common sense. Despite endless G.O.P attempts to brand the current government shutdown as a development of Democratic choice, King will have none of it.

See King go toe to toe with Fox News host Chris Wallace this weekend, reminding the disingenuous network that Republicans “are the ones who shut down the government.” Listen to him blame treasonous Senator Ted Cruz for foisting a “strategy doomed to failure” on House lemmings. My enthusiasm is tempered of course by the fact that King has yet to agree to join Democrats in bringing up a clean continuing resolution for a House floor vote, but I wonder how long he can hold out. New York State is definitely not Tea Party territory, and for every safe and cozy gerrymandered Representative, there is a swing state House member that has to worry about his or her position in 2014.

There are other signs that the once quiet Republican moderate voice is converting to a dull roar. One of the lead stories featured in the New York Times this week, A G.O.P. Moderate in the Middle … of a Jam, evaluates the plight of Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania. Dent, who occupies the seat once held by unyielding conservative Senator Patrick J. Toomey, has demonstrated real leadership throughout this crisis. Last week he did the Tea Party unthinkable. Partnering with Democratic Representative Ron Kind of Wisconsin, Dent rolled out a bill that would reopen the government with six months of spending. The proposal included a repeal of the ACA medical device tax but stopped far, far short of demanding the defund or repeal of the Obamacare horse that has already left the barn.

Then we have sometimes maverick Arizona Senator John McCain, who was ahead of the curve in March of this year when he labeled Cruz and fellow GOP obstructionist Rand Paul (among others) a crew of “wacko birds.”

Granted, these are just three voices and I join the chorus of many pundits at both ends of the political spectrum who assert that G.O.P. leadership owns much of the blame for this sorry state of affairs. By allowing themselves to be shoved so far to the right that the party is now hanging onto relevancy by the thinnest of threads, they exposed the entire country to the empowered bullying of extremists. But if there is any good to come from the shutdown and impending debt ceiling battle (and granted, it is precious little), I suspect that a coalition of humiliated Republican lawmakers are about to go all Farrah Fawcett from The Burning Bed on their cohorts.

Politico writer Manu Raju published a story last week about the party’s growing disenchantment, with Ted Cruz and his kamikaze tactics. “At a closed-door lunch meeting in the Senate’s Mansfield Room, Republican after Republican pressed Cruz to explain how he would propose to end the bitter budget impasse with Democrats, according to senators who attended the meeting. A defensive Cruz had no clear plan to force an end to the shutdown — or explain how he would defund Obamacare, as he has demanded all along, sources said.”

I know most of us are thinking, “Yeah, let me know when they start piling on Cruz in OPEN door meetings.” But as disapproval of Republican shutdown tactics surges to 70 percent and the stalemate continues with no end in sight, the dwindling caucus of sane G.O.P. leadership is bound to revolt. After all, 21stCentury politics is all about the election cycle and dominating the news of the day. And with millions of workers displaced by the shutdown across party lines, with government tasks piling upand with mounting evidence that red states are faring worst of all in the stalemate, it won’t be long before high profile Republicans decided they’d like to try to keep their jobs, even as party mates cost taxpayers theirs.

Democrats Have to Hang Tough for the Future of Government and Our Children (October 3, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

government-closed

The three most important children in my life are my 13 and six year-old nieces, and a four year-old step-granddaughter. Since President Obama’s election to the nation’s highest office in November of 2008, I have given a lot of thought to how I might try to explain the rapid disintegration of the nation’s political discourse. A good portion of the gridlock is certainly old-fashioned ideological difference, but it has been clear for years that other forces are at play. As these girls I love are of mixed race heritage, and all growing up in ethnically diverse households, tolerance is fortunately, their experiential norm.

So trying to account for the rancorous, divisive dogmatism and xenophobia (let us never forget that the Tea Party Nation was a key influence on the Birther movement) that has presently brought the daily functions of government to a screeching halt is somewhat challenging. It is incredibly disheartening and frustrating on a personal level, but I grew up in an era (the 1980s) where my conservative, immigrant grandparents comfortably trafficked in ethnic stereotypes and epithets, even as my kid sister and I cringed in embarrassment.

The next generation of our family is rather blissfully unaware that it was once considered socially acceptable to draw attention to, and pass judgment upon “otherness.” There will always be unfortunate exceptions, but by and large, day-to-day interactions in their world are characterized by public courtesy, regardless of privately held beliefs. The common American has taken a great public leap forward in this respect.

So how to clarify the feral, mean-spirited and utterly defeatist Republican goal of rendering the POTUS a one-term President? Just two days after the 2010 midterm elections, NBC News characterized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as offering “an aggressive assessment of the results, calling for votes to erode the reach of the health care law that was a signature of the Obama administration.”

The Birthers, Obamacare opponents and the Republican establishment which sought to unseat the President in 2012 with the boring, one percent loving candidacy of Mitt Romney, have all lost their causes. These issues have been dealt with at the ballot box, the Supreme Court and the court of public opinion, yet so great is the distaste for our African-American President with the Muslim name on the part of certain members of privileged white society, that here we are. The first large scale shutdown of government functionality since 1995. At that time the Republican-led House, under the stewardship of Speaker Newt Gingrich, paid dearly for its gamble in the 1996 elections, which saw Democrats pickup key seats.

There is little reason to expect a different long-term outcome this time, except several other variables stand to make the “temporary” pain of shutdown more keenly felt. Many families are still reeling from the Great Recession and its sustained impact on the job market. Government employment, devastated by cash strapped local budgets and the ill effects of 2013 sequestration “bargain,” already in record decline, is in full-on furlough mode. Hardworking families across the country have just lost their paychecks, however temporarily.

And for what? Because the racist, classist, elitist guardians of white privilege can’t stand to “give in” and fund the government for six more weeks with a continuing budget resolution? NEWS FLASH: the issue of Obamacare has been settled several times over. It’s done. And despite the sustained campaign of fear and misinformation waged by the G.O.P against the American people, my fellow citizens will quickly wonder what all the fuss was about. Those who can obtain low-cost coverage from which they were excluded before because of financial or pre-existing health conditions, the many who begin to understand that they’ll no longer be one accident/illness away from insolvency, and the majority who respect the integrity of the democratic process will recoil from this disingenuous, destructive, arbitrary gamesmanship. Give it time.

But for now, I don’t know how to account for what’s happening to the very people whose future and health (mental as well as physical) I worry about most. What can I tell my girls about people willing to sacrifice the nation for the regressive, immature attitudes of the few? As awful as the situation is, I am grateful that President Obama and most of his fellow Democrats have taken a stand against blackmail. They must. Republicans have to lose this one, and badly, or what type of government paradigm are we bequeathing to our youngest?  Hatred and sour grapes resulting in scorched earth tactics cannot be tolerated a day longer. For better or worse, this is a defining moment in our nation’s history, when we decide what kind of country we want to be for the rest of the 21st Century and beyond. For the sake of our children, let this pain and shame result in a better, more constructive, more tolerant future.

Everybody Hates Ted: The Republican Party Has Turned on Cruz (September 26, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

ted-cruz-obamaphobe

Years ago, I adopted a personal paradigm that has yet to fail: if I’m injured in any way by an arrogant, self-serving narcissist (as though there were any other kind), I do not have to lift a finger by way of retaliation. Though I may have been inconvenienced, or worse, in the short term, in the long run, these folks have a way of undoing themselves. What’s that famous quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln? “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time….” Wise man.

Freshman Texas Senator Ted Cruz has never been able to fool all of the people. Quite the contrary. In just nine months of the job, the “legislator” (I use the term very loosely as pertains to the quarrelsome elected official) has done his best to become public enemy #1 of the liberal agenda. It’s important to keep in mind that the term “liberal agenda,” no longer has the same connotation of years past. Unfortunately in 2013, those deemed to be in possession of a liberal agenda need only exhibit a desire for functional government, without resorting to extortion to extract concessions from across the aisle. Compromise is for sissies.

When asked by Fox News host Chris Wallace in May of this year if he could “make it” in today’s Republican party, 1996 Presidential candidate, and nobody’s idea of a radical, Bob Dole  famously replied,  ”Reagan wouldn’t have made it. Certainly, Nixon couldn’t have made it, because he had ideas and we might have made it, but I doubt it.”

The lunatics have been running the asylum for awhile now as pertains to the G.O.P. and until very recently, it appeared that the troika of newly elected Senate “it” boys – Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz – could do no wrong as far as the party was concerned.

Before the last couple of weeks, the privately anti-Ted faction of the Republican Party had to keep quiet, steeping in progressively annoyed shame as the aggressive young Canadian seemed to locate unmitigated gall at every turn. Satisfaction came briefly and cheaply, as when Cruz presumed to lecture California’s Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein vis a vis the Constitution this past March. The senior lawmaker shot back, “I’m not a sixth grader…Senator, I’ve been on this Committee for 20 years…After 20 years, I’ve been up close and personal with the Constitution. I have great respect for it. … So I, you know, it’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time.”

But my friends, after Cruz’s brazenly egocentric, disingenuous summertime “Defund Obamacare” campaign, punctuated by this week’s senseless and shameful non-filibuster on the Senate floor, longtime Tedemies have been treated to glorious new sounds. The jumping of the shark, the thud of the wall of protection that once surrounded Cruz, and kept more mainstream Republicans from daring to criticize the Tea Party Golden Boy. The following is a roundup of my favorite quotes in recent days from disgusted and newly empowered G.O.P. moderates:

New York Republican Congressman Peter King:  ”My sound bite is to say he’s a fraud…I start with that, and then I go on. It takes me two or three minutes to explain it.”

Arizona Senator, and failed 2008 Republican Presidential Candidate, John McCain: “I spoke to Senator Cruz about my dissatisfaction.” I’m going to go out a limb here and characterize the famously fiery McCain’s paraphrase as the understatement of the month. McCain once publicly described his fellow lawmaker as a “wacko bird.”

Anonymous GOP Aide: “Some people came here to govern and make things better for their constituents. Ted Cruz came here to throw bombs and fundraise off of attacks on fellow Republicans. He’s a joke, plain and simple.”

It’s been a regular schadenfreude feast for Cruz’s enemies, and the fact that he brought this reversal of fortune upon himself only makes the meal more delicious. Just how huge is the sudden shift of public opinion within the party? The Atlantic ran a piece this week that observed, “Watching the pushback against Senator Ted Cruz right now is like watching a group of kids who have been in thrall to a bully suddenly wake up to who he is and start working to cut him down to size. Republican members of Congress who were once his allies have begun to turn on a man who has become an outsize figure in their party since winning office less than one year ago.”

It’s all just marvelous and it couldn’t have happened to a better guy.  Unfortunately for the long-suffering citizen, Cruz has over five years left of his term, but if I can pay just one compliment to Tea Party zealots, they have a long memory. Couple that with the certainty that Cruz is not done sticking his foot in it, and for the first time, well ever, I look forward to seeing someone get “primaried.”

Another Week, Another Public Massacre, Another Missed Opportunity to Ban Assault Weapons (September 16, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

navy-yard-shooting

“So, why did Congress decide to let that assault weapons ban expire?

Well, it was 2004. Democrats had lost control of the House, so they were starting to feel shy about pushing for the assault.”

–          Business Insider report, December 16,2012

I am going to take a break from the usual, and usually just, weekly partisanship in which I engage on this site to write about a problem that all of us own, and all of us need to fix. Now. It is the proliferation of assault weapons that are making the workplace, public spaces and even grade schools threatening venues for regular folks just trying to make it through the day.

In December of last year, NRA Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre famously said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” LaPierre recorded this bit of wisdom for posterity as an argument in favor of posting armed guards in schools across the country. The implicit subtext was that those against weapons stockpiles in the classroom are simply not in favor of protecting our children.

At the time of LaPierre’s outrageous utterance, I feared it wouldn’t be long before a case would present itself that would blow all sorts of holes in the trigger happy lobbyist’s theory. And sadly, this morning, the country turned on their television sets, car stereos and booted up their computers to learn of another instance of horrific violence brought about by the country’s absurdly lax gun policies.

The New York Times is reporting that “A gunman was dead and the police were looking for two other potential gunmen after a shooting Monday morning that left multiple people dead and injured at a naval office building not far from Capitol Hill and the White House, according to law enforcement officials.”

Our thoughts and prayers are with the injured, deceased and their families during this terrible time and collectively, I am certain that a wish for the quick apprehension of the masterminds crosses party lines. But here’s where the problem lies for me, as pertains to the NRA’s consistently rehashed argument that more guns are the answer to preventing tragedies such as this. According to reporting from Michael D. Shear, Emmarie Huetteman and Abby Goodnough, “The Navy Yard is a secure military facility, with guards posted at gates and a large wall surrounding the buildings.”

So it would seem in this instance that a number of “good guys” with guns, inside a facility that likely had emergency protocols and procedures in place and well-rehearsed, were not sufficient to undermine the will of a few crazies armed to the teeth. Janis Orlowski, the chief medical officer at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, where a number of victims are receiving treatment, was characterized by journalists as being of the opinion that “the gun used in the attack was most likely a semiautomatic rifle.”

As I stated at the opening of this piece, we all own this issue. Democratic political cowardice under the Bush II administration is partially responsible for the serious public safety crisis we have today. This rising, terrifying threat has been compounded by the successful and dirty lobbying on behalf of gun manufacturers with which the NRA engages at local, state and national levels.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Declaration of Independence was written before the Constitution and no one’s right to bear arms trumps my right to life. Though I never wish to own or fire a weapon myself, I don’t begrudge anyone’s desire to maintain a small stockpile for hunting and security purposes.

But I can’t be convinced that an AR-15, which can fire up to 700 rounds per minute, is anything more advanced than a human killing machine, or that the forefathers could have envisioned such a tool when they enshrined that “right to bear arms.”

It’s time for all of us, across party lines to stand together and tell our local representatives, our Governors, the U.S. Congress and the President, “enough.” Enough of the mass public executions and the labeling of citizens who want common sense gun reform to reduce the incidence of these atrocities as “un-American.” What is unpatriotic is continuing to condone the death of innocent civilians because our elected officials are scared of disappointing the NRA.

Paul Krugman’s Stubborn Mastery of Facts Continues to Undermine G.O.P Policy (September 9, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

krugman-cnn

Every now and then a pundit publishes a piece of writing so simple, so right on, that it’s necessary to force a momentary pivot away from the gaping maw of the 24/7 news cycle to celebrate it. It’s one thing to share a link on Facebook or retweet a story, but I have to wonder if those sorts of essentially mindless activities have supplanted the demand of critical thought. And as a busy person who is as often as guilty of the “read, digest and move onto the next thing” as anyone else, I’m going to practice what I preach this week.

Because friends, Paul Krugman’s Monday morning column, “The Wonk Gap,” subtitled, “What the G.O.P. doesn’t know can hurt us,” is really what it’s all about.  I have long admired The New York Times’ Nobel Prize-winning economist for his approachable, accessible good sense. That approval went to another level in the fallout from the late 2008 financial collapse and the Great Recession that we seem unable to fully shake. While a large assortment of Krugman’s colleagues began to issue battle cries railing against the Federal deficit and debt, when it was clear that our biggest problem was the dual devastations of joblessness and demolished home value and equity, Krugman refused to throw in with popular opinion.

The result is that while the often-heartless austerity team has been proven wrong time and again (there’s zero examples of cutting a nation’s way to prosperity – see Greece, Spain, etc.), Krugman’s Keynesian philosophy has been vindicated over and over. He labeled the 2009 stimulus package too small and argued that a larger plan would pose no great threat to our nation’s long-term debt structure. With a U6 unemployment ratestill hovering near 14 percent, a measure that includes people seeking full-time employment, as well as those forced into part-time positions out of basic necessity, the jobs situation hasn’t improved much in the last four years.  Meanwhile factcheck.orghighlights the obfuscations of the GOP’s favorite debt policy fraud, Paul Ryan, by concluding “Ryan’s chart ignores $2 trillion in deficit reduction and compounds that exaggeration by projecting the inflated deficit figures out for many decades in the future.”

If the data fails to support the G.O.P. platform and the liberalism of economists like Paul Krugman has been proven to encompass solid policy as well as human empathy (imagine!), why then have the failed ideas of the modern Republican Party been so difficult to banish from our discourse? Let’s go to the man himself for a possible answer:

“[A sizeable portion of today’s Republican leaders] are inadvertently illustrating the widening ‘wonk gap’ — the G.O.P.’s near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive. Health care is the most prominent example, but the dumbing down extends across the spectrum, from budget issues to national security to poll analysis. Remember, Mitt Romney and much of his party went into Election Day expecting victory.”

Moreover by tuning out any creditable sources that conflict with the party’s wish fulfillment, Krugman writes, “conservative ‘experts’ are creating false impressions about public opinion…Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.”

I experience a genuine surge of adrenaline, accompanied by an increased pulse rate, flushed cheeks and giddiness when I read truth manifestos like this one.  Whereas the majority of conservative pundits have to contort themselves to make anything resembling a logical point, Krugman’s very success is located in the simplicity of his arguments. He is unafraid to continuously point out, very respectfully, that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

I respect Krugman’s apparently genuine belief that there will be a time when facts win, when the people of this Great Union will pause to wonder why they keep getting poorer, availing themselves of less and less opportunity anytime the modern Republican party controls an arm of the government. More war, less jobs and the removal of the social safety net even as the top one percent and the corporate interests they represent gobble up remaining resources. There are certain weeks I feel almost too demoralized, too exhausted to continue raising my voice in an attempt to counter the efforts at middle and lower class suppression I see everywhere I look. It is in part the stubbornness of experts like Krugman, with too many credentials to ignore, that inspires me to continue. We can’t let today’s G.O.P. destroy this great democracy. If Krugman can find new and interesting ways to spread a staunchly consistent message, then so can I.