America

Birtherism Antidote

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

A nice short piece from NPR yesterday, about a courageous mother who stood up to a hostile neighbourhood and antigonistic police to let her black son swim in the newly-desegregated swimming pool in their town:

http://www.npr.org/2012/06/01/154100293/when-mom-is-right-and-tells-police-theyre-wrong?sc=fb&cc=fp

Even at the age of 13, Holmes felt the animosity. The neighborhood had a private swim club that opened up to anyone who participated in the Memorial Day parade. Holmes was in the band.

“I arrived at the pool on Memorial Day having marched in the parade with my uniform still on, and they called the police,” he says.

The pool managers and the police department told Holmes’ mother that her son was not allowed in the pool. She started to ask why, but then she stopped herself. Instead, she told Holmes to crawl under the turnstile and go into the pool.

“I looked at my mother; I looked at the police,” Holmes says. “And I will tell you that as a 13-year-old, I was more inclined to do what my mother said than to be afraid of the police. So I did it.”

A policeman told Holmes’ mother to get him. Holmes distinctly remembers her response: “If you want him out of the pool, you go take him out of the pool. And by the way, as you take him out, you tell him why he can’t go in the pool today.”

“No one came. No one got me out, and I stayed in the pool,” Holmes says.

I think I needed to post something positive – albeit from 1956 – as an antidote to all of the Donald Trump / Birtherism nonsense that has been dominating the US news recently.

The Hypocrisy of Mitt Romney – Birther Edition

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

donald-trump-barack-obama-birth-certificate-birtherism

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A lot of people have been wondering about the extent to which Mitt Romney would tack back to the centre of the political spectrum in the highly, highly, highly unlikely event that he manages to defeat Barack Obama in November’s contest. And to be fair, Mitt Romney has certainly added fuel to the fire of such speculation by some of his statements, most recently his surprise revelation that everything he has said before about immediately balancing the budget was just a big joke, because he is actually a Keynesian at heart, and knows that to reduce federal spending by $1 trillion in year 1 would not be the most positive thing to do to a fragile economy.

But those people thinking (either worrying or hoping) that a Romney presidency would move to occupy the political centre ground need speculate no more. Because Mitt Romney has now proved beyond question that he is fully and totally beholden to the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, and would no sooner do anything to anger that bastion of support than he would chop off his own hand. How do we know this? Because Mitt Romney refused to distance himself from his most high profile campaign surrogate and supporter, Donald Trump, when he said this:

 

And then doubled down with this:

 

Romney, meanwhile, had only this to say when asked about his wayward campaign surrogate:

Mitt Romney said Monday he wasn’t concerned about Donald Trump’s commitment to the “birther” conspiracy, one day before the GOP presidential candidate hosts a fund-raiser alongside the celebrity business magnate.

Asked on his charter plane whether Trump’s questioning of President Barack Obama’s birthplace gave him pause, Romney simply said he was grateful for all his supporters.

“You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in,” Romney said. “But I need to get 50.1% or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”

Even when his most high-profile supporter and key surrogate goes totally off the rails and revives his old birther conspiracies prompted by nothing at all, Mitt Romney is too afraid of angering his base to unequivocally disassociate himself from the remarks. Surely no one now harbours any remaining belief that Romney would tack back to the centre if he got elected. Tea Partiers, fear not – you may not like the guy and distrust the sincerity of his convictions, but it doesn’t matter – he’s scared of incurring your wrath, so you have him safely in the bag.

If, in some dystopian world, I had to choose between a President Romney and a President Trump, I think I am minded to go for President Trump. He may be batsh*t insane with an ego the size of one of his towers, but at least I would always know what he really thinks about something.

As Long As It Keeps Us Safe

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

CISPA - Congress

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Too often, the Republican Party’s already-tenuous commitment to civil liberties and privacy goes out the window at the first mention of national security

The late Ronald Reagan, now viewed as something close to a saint by many Republican minds, for deeds both real and imagined, once said this:

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help'”.

Engage a committed Republican or conservative voter in conversation for any length of time and you will hear all about their passionate belief in limited government, and the inherent dangers of an overactive, overbearing state. I believe in that ideal myself. And certainly the GOP believes in individual liberty and privacy, and the freedom to pursue happiness, right? Always has.

Well, now congressional Republicans seem to have settled on a new mantra, that goes something like this:

“The twelve most benign words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to protect you from terrorism'”.

Because, of course, the ideological compromises required to perch on the wobbly three-legged conservative stool (social conservatism, hawkish defense stance and very limited regulation of markets) mean that all those Republican platitudes about keeping government out of our lives are tossed out of the window as soon as it comes to “keeping our country safe”, “securing the homeland” or “stopping the terrorists”.

This is made clear once again as the Republican-controlled congress debates the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which is, of course, supported by the GOP. Apparently we were supposed to just smile and nod and ignore the cognitive dissonance caused by hearing Republicans rail against Obama’s supposed expansion of the federal government while simultaneously acting to expand the scope and power of the federal government.

As Juan Williams points out in his article on TheHill.com:

The Republican majority in the House is on the side of giving Internet service providers, private companies and the government a whole new box of tools to fight terrorism. That includes the right for the government and private business to share information on how to build protections against cyberthreats. Under the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, Internet service providers will be free of any legal restraint against disclosing any information to prevent a terror attack.

The big surprise here is that the support for the GOP position includes most of the Tea Party Caucus, including conservative rock stars Michele Bachmann and Allen West. They normally condemn any increase in government power.

Also in that camp is Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. He is co-sponsor of CISPA. In fact, about a quarter of House Democrats voted for the bill. Several big high-tech companies, from Microsoft to Facebook, have voiced their support for the GOP approach.

The bill enjoys a measure of bipartisan support, which makes it all the more dangerous, because if enough Democrats-who-don’t-know-any-better join enough Republicans-who-should-know-better, the thing could actually become law.

Williams concludes:

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security released a video of al Qaeda calling for electronic jihad.

But an essential part of the America being protected is our civil liberties, our constitutional freedoms.

“People Power” stopped the online piracy bill because it was too heavy-handed. Once again, it will be up to “People Power,” to make sure that when the House and Senate go into conference on this bill they do not emerge talking about good intentions while putting the nation on the path to George Orwell’s hell – Big Brother watching your every move.

Agreed. Enough is enough. Warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detentions, targeted killings of US citizens by unmanned drones, everything about the Patriot Act, long lines at the airport to go through intrusive, demeaning and pointless security checks designed to guard against the last clever terrorist ruse rather than anticipate the next one – and don’t even get me started on Britain, where there is no pesky written constitution to stop overzealous politicians from overreacting to every security incident with new draconian legislation – the list grows longer by the day.

Let’s hope that there are enough level heads remaining in congress to prevent CISPA from becoming law.

 

CISPA

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The Hill Channels The Onion

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

I saw this headline on thehill.com and just had to laugh:

Senators think a senator would make the best vice presidential pick for Mitt Romney, several of them told The Hill.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/229757-senators-say-romney-should-pick-one-of-their-own-for-vp

Fancy that. Good to see that they have a sense of humour over there on The Hill.

The Hypocrisy of Mitt Romney – Government Spending Edition

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

mitt-romney-2012-presidential-election

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I missed this when it happened last week, but it appears that during an extended interview with Mark Halperin, Mitt Romney managed to fastidiously lay multiple bundles of high explosive around the foundations of his own economic policy arguments, retreat to a not-very-safe distance, press the plunger and bring the whole thing crashing down around him, revealing his public stance to be the glib, opportunistic sham that it is, with hardly anyone – least of all the interviewer – noticing a thing.

I only found out after being cross-linked through Charles Pierce’s blog at Esquire, where he documents the exchange as follows:

Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office?  Why not do it more quickly?

Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%.  That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.

 

I then picked up the thread when Jonathan Chait jumped on Romney in his piece in the New York Magazine:

Of course! Romney says this as if it’s completely obvious that reducing the deficit in the short term would throw the economy back into recession, even though he and his party have been arguing the opposite case with hysterical fervor. Republicans have committed themselves to Austrian economic notions and other hoary doctrines justifying the position that reducing deficits is a helpful way out of a liquidity trap.

I’ve thought that this represents primarily a case of self-delusion in the cause of political self-interest, as opposed to conscious cynicism: Republicans understood that bigger deficits would spur faster growth and reduce their chances of regaining power, so they found themselves more persuaded by theories suggesting bigger deficits wouldn’t really help. But if they had really converted to this belief, wouldn’t there be even a tiny bit of wailing about Romney’s open endorsement of Keynesianism? It’s not as if conservatives have been shy about holding his feet to the fire when he expresses some tiny deviation from their position. Yet I have noticed zero conservative complaints about Romney’s big fat wet kiss to John Maynard Keynes, which suggests their level of actual devotion to this position borders on nil.

It really does take a special kind of nerve – or else just the realisation that he can be a completely convictionless politician and change his public statements to suit the political mood without ever, ever suffering significant fallout – to execute this kind of 180-degree U-turn in a televised interview, and expect to get away with it.

Aside from revealing an important truth about what a Romney administration would actually do were he to win the election, it also demonstrates a total contempt for his supporters, some of whom he must know actually believe that he will take the immediate and drastic action to balance the federal budget that he still promises in his attacks on President Obama.

What a man.