The Self-Inflicted Implosion of the GOP Brand

The post mortem of the aftermath of the Tea Party/Christofascist fueled Republican Party government shutdown continues and none of the disclosures should be deemed good news by sane Republicans, admittedly a dying breed.  And what does the Republican Party and the GOP base have to show for such reckless insanity?    Nothing.  Or at least nothing positive.  So what caused this nihilism?  Andrew Sullivan sums it up well:

The fusion of politics and religion – most prominently the fusion of the evangelical movement and the Republican party – has been one of the most damaging developments in recent American history. It has made Republicanism not the creed of realists, pragmatists and compromise but of fundamentalists – on social and foreign policy, and even fiscal matters. And once maintaining inerrant doctrine becomes more important than, you know, governing a complicated, divided society, you end up with the extremism we saw in the debt ceiling crisis. When doctrine matters more than actually doing anything practical you end up with Cruz cray-cray.  

Thankfully, most Americans seem to have been paying attention and the GOP now enjoys record breaking unfavorable ratings with many diverse demographic segments of American Society.   A Piece in the Washington Post reviews the extent of the damage.  Here are highlights (check out the piece for an amazing graphic):

Polling released this week by the Washington Post and ABC News found the GOP’s unfavorability ratings among Americans at an all-time high of 63 percent.

But a closer look at the numbers reveals that this has been accompanied by a massive collapse in 2013 of the GOP brand among core constituencies important in midterm elections: Independents, women, and seniors. The crack Post polling team has produced a new chart demonstrating that in the last year — since just before the 2012 election – there’s been a truly astonishing spike in the GOP’s unfavorable ratings among these core groups.

[T]he GOP’s unfavorable ratings have jumped 19 points among seniors, to 65 percent; 17 points among independents, to 67 percent; and 10 points among women, to 63 percent. Those are all key constituencies in midterm elections.

Observers believe that over the long term, the GOP will have to do a better job winning over college educated whites, who are an increasingly important constituency, along with young voters and minorities, in the Democratic coalition of the future. (Ron Brownstein has dubbed these groups the “coalition of the ascendant,” arguing they are increasingly important in statewide races, not just national ones.)

Among white collar whites, the GOP’s unfavorability rating has shot up by a startling 21 points, to 70 percent. Among college educated women – who may be more critical to the Dem coalition than college educated men – the spike in GOP unfavorability has been somewhat more dramatic than among women overall, jumping 15 points, to 74 percent. If this trend continues, it could fuel future Dem gains among women.

There is still plenty of time for the current political atmosphere to change, of course. But the possibility of more GOP crises and chaos governing in 2014 – which could reinforce current public impressions of the GOP – remains very real. “The Republican brand is already so damaged,” Duffy says. ”What should be a pretty successful cycle for them is deteriorating by the week.”

The sweet irony of all of this is that all of the GOP's decline in favorability has been self-inflicted thanks to the Tea Party/Christofascist elements of the GOP.

The Tea Party is the Problem with America

It's no secret that I have little regard for the so-called Tea Party which in many ways is a disguise for the Christian Right which needed to hide under a new label given the negative image the Christofascists with many Americans.  The embrace of ignorance, racism, homophobia, reaction against modernity and xenophobia displayed by the Tea Party track nearly identically with the mindset of the Christofascists and some 85% of Tea Party members identify as "conservative Christians."   The American public and the news media need to recognize this reality and not allow this toxic element of the public to get away with the deceptive charade.  As a piece in The Daily Beast notes, partisanship is not the problem in Washington.  It's the Tea Party/Christofascists.  Here are column excerpts:

So now that our government is open and able to pay its bills, what soon-to-be-forgotten lessons have we learned from this sorry fiasco?

Perhaps most important is the reminder that political temper tantrums in Washington exact a toll that goes far beyond unfavorable headlines and worse-than-dog-poo poll numbers. This decision hurt people. Some families couldn’t pay their bills. Others had nowhere safe to send their children while they worked. Poor women lost vouchers that helped buy food and formula for their newborns. Cancer treatments were put on hold for patients who didn’t have much time to waste.

All told, the shutdown and flirtation with default cost America north of $20 billion. The countries that weren’t busy mocking us were frightened by our behavior, wondering if the world’s wealthiest nation would become the world’s deadbeat nation, taking everyone else down with us in a global collapse worse than 2008.

And for what? For what purpose was this pain and humiliation inflicted upon the American people?

Rep. Marlin Stutzman from Indiana. Do you have an answer?   “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

Which brings me to the second shutdown lesson. As a country, we may never get a more revealing, disturbing look at the true source of Washington’s dysfunction than we did over the last few weeks. Together, we endured a 21-hour non-filibuster speech from White Castle enthusiast Ted Cruz that was so devoid of self-awareness I’m not even sure he knew he was giving it. We saw Sarah Palin come all the way back from the small town of Irrelevancy, Alaska, to lead the charge against an open-air memorial that was blocked by a 3-foot barricade, while a few assholes waved Confederate flags outside the White House and reminded each other that Obama’s a Muslim, just for good measure.

In Official Washington, decrying “partisanship” as the “real problem” is the prerequisite for being taken seriously as a smart, unbiased political commentator. But from where we stand right now, partisanship is not the problem. Democrats are not the problem. Republicans are not the problem. The relationship between President Obama and John Boehner is not the problem. The Tea Party is the problem.

The Tea Party is the most destructive force in American politics today. Over the last few weeks, it has demonstrated again that its intent is not to shake up the establishment but to burn down the village. 

What makes the Tea Party dangerous is its members’ willful disregard for the most basic tenets of American democracy. They do not believe in the legitimacy of our president. They do not believe in the legitimacy of decisions handed down by our Supreme Court.  

All this, despite the fact that the Tea Party represents the views of a small, ever-shrinking fraction of Americans. . . . And yet, somehow, this small minority of Tea Party House members, who represent less than one half of one legislative body in one branch of government, has been given enormous influence over the national agenda—a situation without precedent in American political history. It’s insanity.

Boehner was, in his own words, “overrun” by the Tea Party during the shutdown, and so long as he and other Republicans fear challenges from the fringe more than the frustrations of the majority, nothing will get done. And we will find ourselves in the same predicament again and again, regardless of who is elected president or speaker or majority leader.

[W]e cannot allow the Tea Party to continue holding the country hostage over its kamikaze mission to destroy government. The vast majority of Americans reject that mission, and we’re not about to sacrifice ourselves or our democracy as collateral damage. It’s time for all of us to get together and fight the crazy.

I may sound like a broken record, but these people - the Tea Party/Christofascists - need to become political and social pariahs and made so toxic that no decent, responsible legislator will give them the time of day.  Hate, racism, bigotry, religious extremism and selfishness are not cherished American values, yet these are the cherished values of the Tea Party/Christofascists.   They are not nice and decent people and the sooner the rest of us understand this and act accordingly, the better off America will be.

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The South Really Is Different — And It’s Because Of Race and Religion

The last post looked at the winners and losers in the rapidly changing post Great Recession economic front.  Not surprisingly, with few exceptions which mainly have energy industry or entertainment industry ties, most of the cities that fall into the "winner" category" are not in the South.  Why?  Because the South is not welcoming to diversity, knowledge and innovation thanks to the twin pillars of racism and backward thinking, intolerant religiosity.  As I have argued many times before, innovators and entrepreneurs simply do not want to relocate to areas that are socially toxic and unattractive to educated employees who have numerous options on where to live and work.  A piece in Think Progress makes the case that racism in particular (followed by religious extremism) is a poison that hurts the South's prospects for the future.  Here are highlights:

The debt ceiling crisis may be over (at least until February), but the crisis created by the Republican Party’s sharp reactionary turn emphatically is not. I’ve argued that the Tea Party, is the legacy of structural racism in the South dating back to the 1930s, and will remain a powerful force in the Republican Party absent tectonic shocks to the political landscape on the level of the civil rights movement.

The buried story of Wednesday’s government-opening vote in the House was a split between Republican Southerners — and everyone else. Southern Republican whites voted overwhelmingly against the deal — 73 against, 18 in favor. Other Republicans were evenly split (69 in favor, 71 against) and Democrats, of course, unanimously supported the deal. Roughly the same thing happened the last time House Republicans almost took the United States off the default cliff.

The overwhelming Tea Party conservatism in the Southern delegation reflects the region’s exceptionally conservative bent. In a brand-new American Politics Research article, Columbia University’s Steven White ran a series of regressions analyses aimed at separating out the effect of region and religion on Southern political views. White found “very substantial support” for the idea that Southern whites were across-the-board more conservative than whites in the rest of the country. Moreover, whites in the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) were more reactionary than their also super-conservative peers in the Peripheral South (Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia).

Southern political uniqueness appeared to be partly religious — but only partly. Roughly half of America’s evangelicals live in the South, a pattern dating back to the early 1800s. . . . . Since then, Southern Oregon University’s Mark Shibley documents, evangelical faith has dominated spiritual and cultural life among Southern whites in a way that it hasn’t anywhere else in the United States.
Something else, something distinctly regional, explains why the South, both Deep and Peripheral, has more conservative views across-the-board than the rest of the country. Race, and its historical legacy, appears to be the key. 

Three political scientists at the University of Rochester found that, when you control for series of potentially confounding factors, white Southerners in the Mississippi Delta-to-Georgia “Black Belt” were “less likely to identify as Democrat, more likely to oppose affirmative action policies, and more likely to express racial resentment toward blacks” if their county housed high percentages of slaves prior to the Civil War. This effect survives controls for the percentage of African Americans in-county today, inclining the Rochester scholars to believe that racial prejudice (in mutating forms, to be sure) has been passed down continually among Deep South whites from parent-to-child since slavery.

Race and religion, then, have always set the South apart. So the South’s turn away from the Democratic Party over race, beginning in the 1930s and finalizing in the 1990s, is a pattern of evolution consistent with the region’s long history of racial conservatism. That the religious right became a dominant force in both the South and the Republican party in the 80s and 90s is the other side of the coin. 

The South, in short, was a region uniquely well suited for the modern conservative movement’s “fusion” between social and economic conservatism. It’s no surprise that the South is the driver of hard-right conservatism today. That’s what its racial and religious heritage would suggest.

[T]he Religious Right’s growth was tied up in the South’s race problem.  . . . . “It was not the school-prayer issue, and it was not the abortion issue,” Weyrich said. “What caused the movement to surface,” he told Columbia University’s Randall Balmer, “was the federal government’s move against the Christian schools.” After Brown v. Board of Education, many Southern whites moved their kids to private schools (“segregation academies,” in common parlance). Many of these academies were religious in character.

Bob Jones University, which was fully segregated until 1971 and subsequently continued to ban interracial dating, become the flashpoint. In in 1970, the Internal Revenue Service began proceedings against BJU and, in 1975, the IRS revoked its tax-exempt status, citing its racially discriminatory practices. Weyrich and his allies spun IRS’ action into a liberal campaign against the Christian way of life. The Religious Right as an organized movement grew in significant part out of the defense of Bob Jones and other similarly “persecuted” Christian schools.

Evangelical Christianity was politicized by conservative activists who exploited the legacy of Jim Crow to mobilize evangelicals as foot soldiers in the emerging Republican and conservative Southern establishment that itself was born from segregation’s ashes. It isn’t religion that explains the South’s conservatism; it was the rise of conservatism that explains the powerful political role Southern religion plays today.

Studies of Tea Party attitudes suggest a pervasive fear that America is no longer “their” country. Sociologist Theda Skocpol, one of the foremost scholars of the political movement, sees a tinge of racism and xenophobia in that, but more importantly “they also resent young people – including in their own families.”

They believe, according to Skocpol, that younger folks “hold ideas that are not very American.” In reality, these younger folks hold ideas that are not very traditionally Southern.

Things are changing, but nowhere rapidly enough.  As a result, until more of the older generations of Southerners die off, the twin evils of racism and religious extremism will continue to haunt the South and, unfortunately, the rest of America.

Should Obama Invoke the 14th Amendment and Override GOP Obstruction?

A post yesterday looked at the hope by some that rational Republicans (admittedly a dying breed), especially from the South might yet save America from a default on the national debt and the igniting of a possible worldwide economic collapse.  Such moderate Republicans would act like the Dixiecrats of old and provide a majority vote to keep the federal government operating and avoid a debt default.   However, there is another possible way out of the impasse.  One that admittedly would cause shrieks and fountains of foul, flying spittle from the Tea Party saboteurs and their even more vile Christofascist allies: President Obama could invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and order the U.S. Treasury to continue to borrow and take such other actions as might be required to affirm the federal debt. This provision reads as follows:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
—Amendment XIV, Section 4.

The irony would be that it would be the Democrats who would be using a Republican backed provision that sought to protect against possible Democrat sabotage of the federal government.  Here are highlights from a piece in the New Yorker:

The party of Lincoln, grand but not yet old, feared the mischief that Southern senators and representatives might get up to when their states were readmitted to the Union. The Republicans’ foremost worry was that Congress might somehow be induced to cut funds for Union pensioners or pay off lenders who had gambled on a Confederate victory. But the language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers went further. Benjamin Wade, the president pro tem of the Senate, explained that the national debt would be safer once it was “withdrawn from the power of Congress to repudiate it.” He and his colleagues didn’t say just that the debt could not be put off, or left unpaid. They said that it couldn’t even be questioned.

The new insurrection is different from the old one, and not only because this time it’s the Republicans who are the insurrectionaries. The old insurrectionaries wanted to destroy the government; the new ones wish merely to decimate it. The old ones’ weapons of choice were muskets and bayonets; the new ones confine themselves to mendacity, demagoguery, and obstructionism. The old ones were exclusively white and Southern; the new ones, while overwhelmingly white, are more widely distributed. The old ones no longer wished to be citizens of the United States; the new ones, some of them, profess to wonder if the President is a citizen at all.

Still, there are similarities. Prominent among them is a belief that a federal law need not be repealed in order to be nullified. Equally noteworthy is an apparent inability to be reconciled to the results of an election. Last November, after a campaign that turned largely on the issue of health care, Barack Obama was reëlected with a popular majority of five million. In Senate races, Democrats drew ten million more votes than Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Republicans, whom Democrats outpolled by a million and a half, retained their legislative majority only by dint of the vagaries of districting and redistricting. The Confederates had a better case: in 1860, Abraham Lincoln got barely thirty-nine per cent of the vote, a smaller share than any Presidential winner since.

In the current imbroglio, Republicans threatened that, unless their demands were met, they would (a) shut down most of the government and, more alarmingly, (b) deny the Treasury the ability to borrow the money it needs to pay expenses that Congress has already authorized. The first threat was carried out on October 1st. As for the second, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, suddenly offered last Thursday to postpone the deadline for carrying it out—but with conditions, and for a mere five weeks. The new proposed deadline is November 22nd, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

In the end, Obama could have no honorable choice but to invoke the Fourteenth [Amendment]. There is little doubt that he would prevail. The Supreme Court would be unlikely even to consider the matter, since no one would have standing to bring a successful suit: when the government pays its bills, who is damaged? The House Republicans might draw up articles of impeachment, adopt them, and send them to the Senate, where the probability of a conviction would be zero. This would not be a replay of Bill Clinton and the intern. President Clinton was not remotely guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but he was guilty of something, and that something was sordid. Yet impeachment was what put Clinton on a glide path to his present pinnacle as a wildly popular statesman. President Obama would be guilty only of saving the nation’s economy, and the world’s.

Should Obama Invoke the 14th Amendment and Override GOP Obstruction?

A post yesterday looked at the hope by some that rational Republicans (admittedly a dying breed), especially from the South might yet save America from a default on the national debt and the igniting of a possible worldwide economic collapse.  Such moderate Republicans would act like the Dixiecrats of old and provide a majority vote to keep the federal government operating and avoid a debt default.   However, there is another possible way out of the impasse.  One that admittedly would cause shrieks and fountains of foul, flying spittle from the Tea Party saboteurs and their even more vile Christofascist allies: President Obama could invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and order the U.S. Treasury to continue to borrow and take such other actions as might be required to affirm the federal debt. This provision reads as follows:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
—Amendment XIV, Section 4.

The irony would be that it would be the Democrats who would be using a Republican backed provision that sought to protect against possible Democrat sabotage of the federal government.  Here are highlights from a piece in the New Yorker:

The party of Lincoln, grand but not yet old, feared the mischief that Southern senators and representatives might get up to when their states were readmitted to the Union. The Republicans’ foremost worry was that Congress might somehow be induced to cut funds for Union pensioners or pay off lenders who had gambled on a Confederate victory. But the language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers went further. Benjamin Wade, the president pro tem of the Senate, explained that the national debt would be safer once it was “withdrawn from the power of Congress to repudiate it.” He and his colleagues didn’t say just that the debt could not be put off, or left unpaid. They said that it couldn’t even be questioned.

The new insurrection is different from the old one, and not only because this time it’s the Republicans who are the insurrectionaries. The old insurrectionaries wanted to destroy the government; the new ones wish merely to decimate it. The old ones’ weapons of choice were muskets and bayonets; the new ones confine themselves to mendacity, demagoguery, and obstructionism. The old ones were exclusively white and Southern; the new ones, while overwhelmingly white, are more widely distributed. The old ones no longer wished to be citizens of the United States; the new ones, some of them, profess to wonder if the President is a citizen at all.

Still, there are similarities. Prominent among them is a belief that a federal law need not be repealed in order to be nullified. Equally noteworthy is an apparent inability to be reconciled to the results of an election. Last November, after a campaign that turned largely on the issue of health care, Barack Obama was reëlected with a popular majority of five million. In Senate races, Democrats drew ten million more votes than Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Republicans, whom Democrats outpolled by a million and a half, retained their legislative majority only by dint of the vagaries of districting and redistricting. The Confederates had a better case: in 1860, Abraham Lincoln got barely thirty-nine per cent of the vote, a smaller share than any Presidential winner since.

In the current imbroglio, Republicans threatened that, unless their demands were met, they would (a) shut down most of the government and, more alarmingly, (b) deny the Treasury the ability to borrow the money it needs to pay expenses that Congress has already authorized. The first threat was carried out on October 1st. As for the second, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, suddenly offered last Thursday to postpone the deadline for carrying it out—but with conditions, and for a mere five weeks. The new proposed deadline is November 22nd, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

In the end, Obama could have no honorable choice but to invoke the Fourteenth [Amendment]. There is little doubt that he would prevail. The Supreme Court would be unlikely even to consider the matter, since no one would have standing to bring a successful suit: when the government pays its bills, who is damaged? The House Republicans might draw up articles of impeachment, adopt them, and send them to the Senate, where the probability of a conviction would be zero. This would not be a replay of Bill Clinton and the intern. President Clinton was not remotely guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but he was guilty of something, and that something was sordid. Yet impeachment was what put Clinton on a glide path to his present pinnacle as a wildly popular statesman. President Obama would be guilty only of saving the nation’s economy, and the world’s.

Today's GOP is a Train Wreck

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker has apparently strayed off the reservation and missed the de rigueur imbibing of of Kool-Aid mandated by the Tea Party  and Christofascists who now control the Republican Party.  Would that she would finally jump ship and side with sanity and rational though once and for all.  In a column Parker rightly describes today's GOP as a train wreck and endorses throwing some of the lunatic faction - think Ted Cruz, et al - overboard in order to save the GOP ship.  Here are some column highlights:

In trying to understand the Republican Party’s internal battles, it helps to think of Michael and Sonny.  Corleone, that is.

On one side we have Sonny, the hotheaded, impulsive, shoot-now-take-names-later son of Don Corleone. On Capitol Hill, he personifies the tea party followers who would rather die on principle than live to win a later day.

On the other side, we have Michael, the cooler-headed son and intellectual strategist. On the Hill, Michael represents the so-called establishment legislators who understand the way forward but thus far have been reluctant to pull the trigger.

Before action, however, there should be a plan, which has been demonstrably missing in recent weeks.

Remember the “train wreck” that Republicans kept promising? Well, guess what. It’s happening.

[A]lmost two weeks after the government shutdown, polls are showing a shift in Democrats’ favor. Not only do fewer Americans view Republicans in a positive light (28 percent, according to Gallup) but they’re becoming more , not less, approving of Obamacare. While Republicans were nudging the can up the road on the debt ceiling, approval for Obamacare leapt up 7 points, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll .

Great job, Teddy!  That would be Ted Cruz, the Texas senator . . . . Cruz is neither Michael nor Sonny but the star of his own movie. He’s Ted bin Laden — the guy who hands out suicide vests and then goes to lunch. 

What needs to happen is for certain parties to become wiser and to absorb this simple truth: You cannot govern if you cannot win.

Tea party warriors may prefer to perish on principle, but perish they will. And, if something doesn’t change fast and soon, the fear is that they’ll take down GOP control of the House with them. Forget the Senate in 2014. And forget the White House for the foreseeable future. 

Unless, that is, the hard-right suicide flame-throwers can be neutralized or converted. The latter isn’t likely when the echo chamber cheers them on, and while organizations such as Heritage Action are grading legislators on their “conservative” performance. The threat of facing a primary challenge in their districts from someone even loonier keeps many in lockstep with Sonny.

Thus, the only alternative is a systematic, strategic purge of the GOP’s Sonny side. (Sonny Side Down?) Rational conservatives who understand that governing requires compromise, not just “winning,” need to form their own groups to first protect their reasonable legislators and then actively recruit and elect strong, likable candidates who can win general elections. They need to create their own scorecards to grade the obstructionists.

Storming the barricades may be fine at times, but it’s helpful also to have a plan. Remember the day after shock and awe? Now what? This is essentially where the GOP finds itself today. It shut down the government — and now what? It tried to defund the un-defundable (Obamacare was already funded), and now people are gravitating toward the train wreck.  

Now what? Painful though it may be to witness, it may be time for Sonny to take a drive through the toll plaza. Maybe he could give Ted bin Laden a lift. (That’s a metaphor, too.)

What Parker says is largely on point.  Will anyone in the GOP listen?  Probably not.  Meanwhile, I hope  Parker has a flak jacket and isn't easily worried by death threats which will likely come from the "godly Christian" base of the GOP.

GOP Voters and Business Interests Abandoning Congressional Republicans

I am asked at times why, if I write an LGBT blog, I concentrate on trashing the Republican Party so often.   The answer is simple.  The GOP has aligned itself with the most vicious and nasty of the anti-gay far right and heinous Christofascist hate groups - e.g., check out the parade of GOP members of Congress through the Values Voter Summit in D.C. this weekend - with the result that exposing the lies and hypocrisy is part and parcel with exposing the lies and hypocrisy of the enemies of LGBT rights and equality.  And, therefore, the lower the GOP falls, the better the prospects for advances in LGBT rights and equality.  But I digress.  It seems that the cretins rocket scientists not in the Tea Party never factored in the reality that they and their agenda might be radioactive with normal (translate sane) GOP voters and the business interests that have historically helped bankroll the Republican Party.  You know things are bad when even Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is dishing the Congressional GOP. As Think Progress reports, the fever ridden swamp that is today's GOP base is driving away GOP voters and business interests.  Here are excepts:

As the government shutdown enters its eleventh day and the nation races towards a possible default, a growing number of Republican lawmakers, leaders, and voters are publicly blaming Congressional Republicans for the budget impasse. Though they fault President Obama for failing to negotiate with Congress, as the public mood sours, some within the GOP are hurriedly distancing themselves from the mess in Washington.

“It’s time for someone to act like a grown-up in this process,” former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R) told the Associated Press. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) agreed, remarking on Monday that “This is not how we should operate. It shouldn’t be about people fighting and yelling.’ “The bottom line is we need that money in our economy to save rural hospitals and jobs in the rural areas,” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) told the Arizona Daily Star on Thursday, criticizing the GOP’e effort to defund the Affordable Care Act. 

The criticism comes as an Associated Press-GfK poll released Wednesday showed that “three-quarters of Republicans nationally said their party in Congress deserves a moderate degree or most of the blame for the shutdown” and a NBC/Wall Street Journal survey reported that just 24 percent of Americans now have a favorable view of Republicans — the lowest figure in the poll’s history.
In yet another sign of trouble for the GOP, business interests are also showing signs of discontent, signaling a possible rift with Republicans ahead of the 2014 mid-term elections. 

Iowa Republicans “are recruiting a pro-business Republican to challenge six-term conservative Rep. Steve King (R), a leader in the push to defund the health care law,” the Associated Press reports and party establishment leaders in Michigan are threatening to recruit and fund challengers to Rep. Justin Amash (R) and other Tea Party aligned candidates.

A report released earlier this week found that the shutdown is disproportionately affecting Republican-leaning states like Virginia, Alaska, and Alabama, which have higher concentrations of federal employees and federal contracts. 

I continue to urge Virginia voters to send a resounding message to the Congressional Republicans by voting a straight Democrat ticket on November 5, 2013 and send the GOP statewide slate down in a landslide defeat.

Catholic Bishops Wanted Government Shutdown, Asked House Republicans To Hold Nation Hostage

America’s Catholic Bishops wrote a letter urging House Republicans to shut down the government, unless Obamacare denies birth control coverage to women. Photo of Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan from Wikipedia.

It is not just the evangelical Christians organizations mentioned in a post yesterday who have had a hand it forcing the federal government shutdown and pushing the nation towards a catastrophic debt default.   Other religious extremists have also been involved: the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops.  Pope Francis may want the Church to get over its obsession with gays, abortion, and contraception, but the message hasn't been received by the U.S. Catholic bishops, many of whom have sheltered and protected sexual predators while kicking abuse victims to the curb and hiding Church assets.  As reported here, the bishops have urged the GOP to shutdown the government:

When House Republicans shut down the government last Tuesday, they did so with the blessing of Catholic bishops. One week prior to the shutdown, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a letter to the GOP House. The letter asked them to hold America hostage until Democrats kill birth control rules set by the White House. The rules require insurance companies to include birth control coverage for all employees, regardless of the religious beliefs of employers.

This didn’t sit well with Catholic bishops and conservative Christians, who want the right to deny their female employees contraception. So as part of their ongoing temper tantrum over women having access to birth control, the bishops sent a letter  to House Republicans urging them to shut the government down until they get their way on contraception coverage.

“[W]e have already urged you to enact the Health Care Conscience Rights Act (H.R. 940/S. 1204), the letter declared. “As Congress considers a Continuing Resolution and debt ceiling bill in the days to come, we reaffirm the vital importance of incorporating the policy of this bill into such ‘must-pass’ legislation.”

The Conference of Catholic Bishops wants the government shutdown to continue, and for the US to default on its debt … Unless they get special treatment in regards to birth control access. To deny women contraception, they’re willing to deny families critical food assistance, take childcare away from working parents, and threaten the financial well-being of millions of Americans. It totally outrageous.

According to ThinkProgress,

“The “Health Care Conscience Rights Act” permits religious employers to exclude any “item or service to which [they have] a moral or religious objection” from the health insurance package offered to employees.”

If this piece of conservative legislation were to become law, any employer in America could deny female employees the contraception they need. All they have to do is claim that they have a religious objection. It means women will have less access to contraception. It also lets religious conservatives achieve their main goal to control women’s reproductive decisions.

This letter proves Catholic bishops played a role in the government shutdown. They cheered for House Republicans to pull the trigger and shoot America in the foot. They also want Republicans to shoot America in the head, and refuse to raise the debt ceiling … Unless Democrats allow religious employers to discriminate against women. The fact is, the contraception mandate applies to everyone. That’s why it’s constitutional. 

House Republicans are now not the only ones to blame for the government shutdown. Americans can now blame Catholic bishops as well. The bishops are clearly not interested in alleviating the suffering of those affected most by the government shutdown as they are in making sure they can have a say in what reproductive decisions women make.

As I have argued before, the Catholic Church needs to stay out of politics or lose its tax-exempt status.  Period.  These men participated in a world wide criminal conspiracy involving the sexual abuse of children and youths and now they want to destroy America's economy to further their sick, extremist goals.

 

Why Four GOP Virginia Congressman Are Ready to Ignore Boehner

As noted yesterday, four Virginia GOP Congressman, Scott Rigell, Rob Wittman and Randy Forbes, from Hampton Roads, and Frank Wolf, from Northern Virginia, are ready to throw John Boehner, Eric Cantor and the Tea Party lunatics under the bus.  Unlike their Kool-Aid drinking brethren in the GOP, they understand that slashing government spending is not always a good thing, particularly in their districts.  And it also seems that some of them have finally grasp the fact that the nation and Virginia have changed and that to survive politically, they need to change as well (although Randy Forbes sadly continues to prostitute himself to "family values" hate groups).  A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the willingness of these four to commit heresy in the eyes of the fever ridden, ignorance embracing GOP base.  Here are excerpts:

They are the Four Virginia Republicans of the Apocalypse. Their apostasy on reopening the federal government likely guarantees their survival in districts between the Washington suburbs and the Virginia Beach seacoast. Perhaps the same can’t be said for their party.

Scott Rigell, Rob Wittman and Randy Forbes, all from Hampton Roads, and Frank Wolf, a Northern Virginian, account for one-half of the eight Republicans in the state’s U.S. House delegation. Unlike the other half, they favor a no-strings-attached funding measure to end the shutdown that began Oct. 1. It idled thousands of federal workers, many of them in the aforementioned congressmen’s districts.

Rigell, Wittman, Forbes and Wolf — names largely unrecognized beyond their districts — are among 22 House Republicans who would vote with the Democratic minority, apparently assuring passage of an unencumbered bill to resume financing the government.

It’s a scenario the Republican leadership claims is baseless. It’s a scenario that puts these four Virginians crosswise with one of their own: Eric Cantor, the gentleman from Henrico and the House majority leader.

No other state is as heavily represented among the Republican defectors as Virginia. That is because few other states have become the federal suckling Virginia is. Washington largesse, which accelerated here during World War II, transformed Virginia from rural Southern backwater preoccupied with race to a multihued Mid-Atlantic suburban dynamo.


The reinvention of Virginia is evident in the Rigell, Wolf, Wittman and Forbes districts. There, Virginia politics also is being reinvented.

More than a quarter of the state’s economy is attributed to Washington’s beneficence, military and civilian.


In overall federal spending, Virginia — at $17,008 per person — is second only to Alaska. On purchasing, the federal government is the biggest customer in this state. Because of its rich Uncle Sam across the Potomac River, Virginia leads the nation in procurement funding, per capita, and it is third among all states in federal salaries and wages.

Defense spending, per person, is higher in Virginia than any state . . .

Before sequestration became a reality, Virginia got a sense of its possible sting. In 2010, the Obama administration recommended shuttering the Joint Forces Command in Hampton Roads, threatening 5,800 military and civilian jobs. Pushback by the congressional delegation and state and local government forced a partial retreat by the Pentagon. There still were casualties: about 1,900 jobs.

Randy Forbes was particularly high-profile — dare one say, uncharacteristically bipartisan — in the fight to save the Joint Forces Command. He had to be. Ordinarily the only thing to the far left about Forbes is the part of his hair.

Scott Rigell is sui generis among the rebels. He was the only House Republican to oppose the caucus’s initial gamble with Obama: a funding bill that defunded the president’s health care reform. Rigell then became the first Republican in the Virginia delegation to urge a clean spending measure.

As if that didn’t signal Rigell might be angling for something bigger — say, the U.S. Senate or governor — the former car dealer pressed for a bipartisan remedy to the fiscal crisis during an appearance on “The Daily Show,” the political comedy program.  At least Rigell knows where the votes are. No joke.

On November 5, 2013, Virginians will have an opportunity to send the national GOP a strong message that this extortion and effort to destroy Virginia's economy need to stop.  How?  Vote a straight Democrat ticket and  send Ken Cuccinelli, E.W. Jackson and Mark Obenshein all down to a crushing defeat.  And better yet, tell exit polling folks why you voted anti-GOP.

The GOP's Deep Denial Intensifies AnD Threatens the Country and the World

Nearly 20 years ago when I was an active Republican I never anticipated that the day would come when I would hope for the GOP's demise and extinction.  Of course, back then I never thought I be witnessing the effort of an extremist rump of the GOP to literally destroy America's and the world's economy, causing hardship and disaster for literally millions of people both here and abroad.  Andrew Sullivan aptly sums up what America and the world now face with the GOP which has become a economic terror organization akin to Al Qaeda:

The purge has worked, hasn’t it? There is effectively no Republican party any more. There is a radical movement to destroy the modern American state and eviscerate its institutions in favor of restoring a mythical, elysian, majority-white, nineteenth-century past. This crisis is proving that more powerfully than even watching Fox. We need to see what is in front of our nose: a cold civil war has broken out between those properly called conservatives, defending the credit of the government, empirical reality, and adjustments to modern life and those properly called radical reactionaries declaring our current elected president and Senate as illegitimate actors, bent on the destruction of America, and therefore necessitating total political warfare, even to the point of threatening to destroy the global economy.

And why is the GOP effort to overthrow the American government and force a default by the United States so frightening?  A piece in  CapitalGainsandGames lays out why sane and rational Americans need to be very, very concerned.  The piece also lays out why the efforts of the GOP saboteurs may not only be unconstitutional but also force an increase in taxes.  Here are article highlights:

In a few weeks, the debt limit will be breached as all of the Treasury’s “extraordinary” measures are exhausted and there will be insufficient cash to pay all of the government’s expenses as they come due. These include payments of principal and interest on the debt. Therefore, default on the debt is almost inevitable unless the debt limit is raised in a timely manner.

While the debt limit and potential debt default don’t impact on tax policy directly, they are important indirectly. If the U.S. Treasury’s ability to borrow is inhibited by a default, that would cause investors to shun Treasury securities and raise interest rates, this will put increased pressure on the budget to raise revenue. That is why Alexander Hamilton discussed the consequences of default in Federalist 30, which relates to the federal government’s taxing power. Said Hamilton:

In the modern system of war, nations the most wealthy are obliged to have recourse to large loans. A country so little opulent as ours must feel this necessity in a much stronger degree. But who would lend to a government that prefaced its overtures for borrowing by an act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on the steadiness of its measures for paying?

Especially at a time of war, any threat to the Treasury’s financing is a threat to national security. And, lest we forget, the nation is still at war in Afghanistan. Additionally, the recent Syria incident shows that the threat of new hostilities is ever-present. Nor should it be forgotten that 47 percent of the debt held by the public is now owned by foreigners. One can assume that they will not take kindly to any interruption in their interest or principal payments.

The threat of debt default and its impact on national security was very much on the minds of those who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The historian Franklin Noll has explained how representatives of the former Confederate states, now back in Congress, were highly disinclined to tax their constituents to pay the debts of the Civil War’s victors – the Confederate debt was repudiated, only the Union debt was repaid. Consequently, the threat of default was a very real one in the immediate postwar period.

To protect against the danger of default, the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment included the little-known section 4, which reads:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

A number of legal scholars have concluded that this provision makes unconstitutional any law that would call into question or threaten the payment of interest or principal on the debt, including the debt limit.

As an economist, my primary concern is the impact on the economy and interest rates of a debt default, which many Republicans in Congress poo-poo as nothing to be too concerned about. In this respect, I think the views of financial market participants should carry special weight. In the run-up to the 2011 budget deal, which narrowly averted a debt default, a number of top Wall Street economists and executives weighed-in on the potential economic and financial consequences.

In an April 2011 note, J.P. Morgan published an extensive analysis of the “domino effect” of a U.S. default that would spread far beyond those that own Treasury securities. As it explained:

Our analysis suggests that any delay in making a coupon or principal payment by the Treasury – even for a very short period of time – would almost certainly have large systemic effects with long-term adverse consequences for Treasury finances and the U.S. economy. These effects would be transmitted through three primary channels: U.S. money funds, the repo market, and the foreign investor community, which holds nearly half of all Treasury securities. Our main conclusions are as follows:

A technical default raises the risk of a flight to liquidity out of government money funds, potentially triggering an increase in redemptions similar to that seen in 2008.

Even if the technical default is cured immediately, foreign demand for  Treasuries could be permanently impaired.

Finally, on Social Security, it is sometimes said that the payment of benefits is never a problem as long as there are sufficient assets in the Social Security trust fund to pay them. The problem is that the Treasury securities in the trust fund are not marketable. If the Treasury lacks the cash to redeem the securities itself there is no practical way of obtaining the cash to pay benefits in the event that the debt limit becomes severely binding.  

If the consequences of such brinksmanship fell only on elected officials, it wouldn’t matter. But given the potentially large economic costs of a debt default, the U.S. economy and average Americans could suffer a considerable amount of collateral damage.

There is a lot more in the article.  Yet none of the dire predicts mean a whit to the GOP saboteurs.  They literally do not give a damn about the millions of lives they are poised to damage.  It's all about trying to nullify two national elections and nullifying a Supreme Court ruling.  These people are economic terrorists.  What they are doing is likely unconstitutional and I would posit that these people are traitors.  They need to be treated as traitors.  They certainly need to be removed from their offices in Congress.