I’ve been surprised at the reaction to Rand Paul’s talking filibuster. By and large, Republicans have been cheering for it, even though the vast majority of them disagree with Paul on the policy. Anything that makes the president look bad, I guess. More concerning, liberals are cheering it on as the way filibusters were meant to be. I will admit that it has a certain charm. But there are real issues here.

Talking Filibuster

The talking filibuster wouldn’t really fix the Senate. In fact, I think we can conclude that as long as we have a minority party that thinks that the Senate itself lacks legitimacy, there will always be problems. What we need above all else is a reformed Republican Party that plays by the long established but unwritten rules. Given that we aren’t going to get that any time soon, we really need to abolish the filibuster.

Jonathan Bernstein noted earlier this week a few of the reasons that even the supposed real filibuster reform wouldn’t have worked:

So unlike what almost all liberals seem to think, filibuster reform is not enough; we need the filibuster removed. After all, isn’t the Senate already undemocratic enough? And lest all my liberal friends go on tilt, remember: if these revolutionary Republicans ever become the majority, they will destroy the filibuster anyway. We might as well get a little use out of it. It would be great to get all those justice seats filled.

Drones

On the issue that Rand Paul was filibustering, I’m in much agreement. But what is the big deal with the drones? The truth of the matter is that the executive has long ago taken to using totally unconstitutional powers to kill people without due process of law. This is not about drones and it is not about citizens. The Constitution really doesn’t make much note of “citizens.” The Due Process Clause does not apply to citizens; it says, “No free man…” Last time I checked, those Pakistani farmers were free men.

Now Rand Paul has teamed up with fellow pretend libertarian Ted Cruz to create a new bill that says that the president oughtn’t to kill Americans except when they represent an “imminent threat.” Kade Ellis notes that this phrase is wide enough to fly a drone through it. And Adam Serwer thought the whole thing was a joke:

I’m all for oversight. But this is just pathetic. These systems have to be well designed. And even when they are, like with FISA, they are mostly just rubber stamps for the executive.

The real question we face is when are the people of the United States going to vote in enough solid liberal legislators to get the work of the people done? As long as we liberals continue to sit out midterm elections and allow the local school boards to be filled with creationist idiots, we will continue to see Democrats who are more conservative than Republicans a few generations back, and Republicans who only need a swastika and a charismatic leader to fulfill their destiny. The road is long but the cow is patient. Or something.

I spend so much of my life angry at various people that it is hard to know how to react when I am angry even by that standard. Actually, I have good news. But buried inside it is an appalling revelation. This all has to do with someone who I think is at the very top of the list when it comes to the most evil and vile people in America: Jame O’Keefe—a man who shockingly still commands respect in the mainstream media.

I’m sure you remember O’Keefe’s amazingly successful sliming of ACORN. In the end, it turned out that everything O’Keefe claimed about the group was wrong and based upon deceptive editing. Leave it the Democratically controlled Congress to destroy the group based upon this right wing hit job. If I were O’Keefe, I would have been pleased as hell. After all, he did nothing to prove that the group was bad. All the work was done by insipid Democratic legislators who don’t believe in a damned thing.

The worst part of O’Keefe’s hit job was what he did to Juan Carlos Vera. He was the guy, who when O’Keefe came into his office obviously talking about the slave sex trade, took down as much information as he could. After O’Keefe left, Vera called the police and set them in action regarding this illegal activity. Of course, O’Keefe didn’t care about that. He had Vera on video apparently helping the idiot young man continue on with his nefarious activities.

So not only did Vera lose his job—like all ACORN employees; he also got so much bad publicity that he was effectively unemployable. As a result of this, he sued O’Keefe for $75,000. Yesterday, he was awarded $100,000 settlement. Think about it: this is a deal from the perspective of O’Keefe’s conservative backers; only $100,000 to get rid of the generally highly ethical and effective ACORN. Again: all they needed were a bunch of spineless Democratic politicians—many of whom owed their positions to ACORN organizing.

According to the settlement which Wonkette managed to get its hands on:

This is either untrue or irrelevant. If O’Keefe was unaware of Vera turning the information he gathered over the the police, it is only because he was willfully so. His work was treated as journalism. Journalism requires meeting up with people you accuse. Had he done so, Vera would have told him this. O’Keefe would have been compelled to check with the police. The police would have told him that this was true. O’Keefe would have had to remove Vera from his video. But he didn’t do that, because O’Keefe is not a journalist; he is a Republican political operative. And as such, the media should have treated his allegations the same way they would treat any politician’s claim.

I am very happy for Mr. Vera. But justice has most certainly not been served. O’Keefe has certainly done far more damage than this to Vera. What’s more, O’Keefe should be in jail. He should be a national pariah; he should be worse than Saddam Hussein. Instead, he is at large, being well paid to work his nefarious magic to try to bring down other liberal institutions. In general, his attempts have been pathetic. But for some reason, the major media still treat him as though he were a journalist. But I can see their difficulty: it is so rare that they have any contact with actual journalists, they don’t really know what they look like.

As many people (Frank) will tell you, within the realms of poetry, film, and music, I am a philistine. Even so, I think I can tell the difference between true talent and aggressive marketing. Speaking of Taylor Swift, I find her to be a common, typically insipid, overindulged, and overly praised young woman who is being used as a celebrity drone attack on innocent children.

My husband defends Swift, saying, “At least she writes her own songs.” My response to that is: BFD. I wrote poetry when I was a kid – didn’t make me a poet. I was just another narcissistic, teenaged ball of angst, attempting to put into words all the deep and painful longing of my young, shallow soul. My writings were as introspective and naively romantic as hers, which is why I burned all of them.

In “Love Story” she writes:

So we know what she was reading in English class at the time and that she is under the impression that The Scarlet Letter was a romance. As I said, BFD. She will never be in the same league as Janis Ian, Tori Amos, Carol King, or Alanis Morissette.

Then there are her singing and guitar playing talents. She is admittedly more talented than I in these categories. However, had I learned I would have been a great proficient. Here is a poor quality video that highlights her singing and guitar playing talents.

The reason I’m even mentioning Taylor is because I read this appalling CNN headline: Taylor Swift slams Fey, Poehler.

WTF?! That little slip of a freakishly tall girl is going after to of the most actually talented women in our country? That’s quite a sac she’s hiding under her dress.

Apparently, during the Golden Globe Awards, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler poked fun at her:

Well! If Taylor wears panties they were in a twist. She chose to respond via a Vanity Fair magazine interview that “for a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her… is frankly a little sexist.”

Wow Taylor. Project much? Maybe, before speaking or writing, you would be better served by reading, not reading into.

In the video “news” report, I was pleased to see Erin Burnett kindly bitch slap the kid:

Ramesh Ponnuru is a smart observer of conservative politics. He is also kind of a conservative freak when it comes to his own policy ideas. But he is worth reading because of his insights into what the conservatives are doing. Earlier this week, he asked an interesting question, Do Conservatives Actually Want to Win Elections? In answer, I ask, “Does it matter?”

He brings up three points. First he notes that it is madness that CPAC is claiming that Chris Christie isn’t a “real” conservative. As I’ve argued: when it comes to core conservative ideology, Christie is as extreme as any of them. Second he notes that it is just bad politics to require not just that Republicans vote no on Obama nominees, but to also filibuster. And third he notes that the Club for Growth is in the process of funding primary challenges against incumbent Republicans who have strayed a little bit from the party line.

These three points are all the same; purging heretics:

Ponnuru ends the article by quoting Michael Kinsley from decades ago, “Liberals were always looking for heretics while conservatives were always looking for converts. But that was a long time ago.” What we have with the modern Republican Party is a revolutionary movement. Those who are in control know that under most circumstances, they will never gain power; their ideas are toxic. But under the right circumstances, they can gain power.

What’s more, these revolutionaries are are supported by establishment types like Ponnuru. They understand only too well that by skewing the political debate so far to the right, the Democratic Party has yielded half the playing field. Now even when Republicans lose, they win. And soon enough, a charming radical like Chris Christie will come along who will be elected as president and he can finish the job of destroying the last bits of the New Deal and the Great Society. And when the country is laid to waste, we will elect a Democrat who will come in to see if the carnage can be managed a little better: the poor fenced in, the dead buried more promptly. But there won’t be anyone screaming for equality and democracy—at least not one who is given any attention. Because that’s crazy talk. That’s a non-starter. Everyone knows that reasonable people don’t believe in that kind old fashioned thinking.

You see, the Republican Party doesn’t really need to win elections—at least not often. You see, they have a secret weapon: the Democratic Party.

This morning, Greg Sargent wrote, Obama Urges Republicans to Take Yes for an Answer. In it, he points back to Ezra Klein’s meeting with an unnamed legislator who apparently didn’t know what Obama had offered in terms of a Sequester deal. He notes that Obama is reaching out to Senate Republicans: “Obama will tell all these Senators that he’s offering them what they want, i.e., serious cuts in retirement programs, in exchange for less in new revenues, and that this is actually a very good deal for them.” Can Obama be this naive?

As the whole Ezra Klein meeting and then follow up shows: Republicans may not know what Obama is offering, but once they know they will just have different reasons for not dealing. What’s more, the worst thing that could happen now is a deal. Obama has already offered more than a 2-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases. If negotiations start in earnest, we all know what that means: a final deal that is almost entirely spending cuts; Obama will get some small revenue increase and claim victory because he got the Republicans to go back on their no new revenue pledge. Wow!

The Sequester is very bad. First, it will greatly slow down the economy. Second, almost no one will notice. So at this point, since any deal is going to be mostly spending cuts anyway, I’m for just leaving it alone. At least this way we get some cuts to the military. Obama is now in his traditional “panic negotiation” mode where he will agree to anything. And he is eager (as Clinton was before him) to screw our elderly citizens with Chained-CPI. Watch out for any deal coming down the pike.

Obama would like to see himself as Lincoln. The problem is that Lincoln really did believe in something. Sure, he was more or less a moderate in his day. But he was not a thread-the-needle kind of guy. If Obama had been president during the Civil War, he would have sued for peace after the first defeat, the Confederacy would be its own country today, and only now would they be abolishing slavery. I stand by what I said yesterday, but even more broadly: history will not look back all the fondly on Obama’s presidency. Deal-making is not an end in itself. The deal has to be worth making. In Obama’s case, it very often isn’t worth making. But not to worry: Obama’s post-partisan! And he has hope that when things change we won’t all be totally fucked.

Matt Yglesias reported this morning on Undersecretary of Treasury Lael Brainard speaking to the National Association of Business Economists. She was talking about how to get southern Europe (Greece, Italy, and so on) out of their depressions. She said, “Not only do deficit countries have important responsibilities in this regard, so do large surplus economies.” Let me explain what she means by this.

The southern countries are now suffering because when the Euro became one, lots of money flowed into these countries in the form of investment from richer countries up north. This had the effect of raising wages in the south. But when the 2008 crisis hit, all this money stopped flowing in. And because their wages were now too high, their exports were uncompetitive. As a result, these poor countries are net importers of goods. In order to get their economies rolling again, they need to become net exporters.

That’s all fine, and these countries have suffered badly and have given it the old college try. But a country can’t become a net exporter if all other countries are also net exporters. The problem is that the countries in the north have not enacted policies to help. Germany, for example, is still a net exporter. They are a rich country. They should enact policies that will increase imports. But they have resisted this.

And this is all so very German of them. They seem to think that the economic problems in southern Europe are all those countries’ problems. I don’t know, I guess they think that Italy forced those German bankers to lend them money. Regardless, there were two parts of the problem and as Brainard points out: there are two parts of the solution. Germany standing around telling Italy it’s all wrong doesn’t solve anything. Except to make Germans feel superior. And we’ve had more than enough of that export.

I just watched the 15 February episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. There were two notable parts of the show. The first was George Zimmerman’s brother Robert. (Not Bob Dylan!) The amazing thing about the interview is just how good he is a public spokesman and apologist. Maher even notes this during the interview. Of course, it isn’t all good. He makes some comments that are at least questionable.

Jonathan Capehart takes Zimmerman to task on one issue in particular: his statement that, “‘Stand your ground’ is not a factor in this defense.” As Capehart explains in some detail, before George Zimmerman even goes to trial for second degree murder, he will have a “Stand Your Ground” hearing. And if it is found that he did “stand his ground,” he will never even be tried for murder.

So it’s all good for Robert to go around and tell stories of the mixed race Zimmerman household and that his brother really was beaten up by the time the police got there. And I can even understand why he’s lying about “stand your ground”: he doesn’t want his brother to be sacrificed as a result of the unpopularity of the law. But it will all turn out very bad if George Zimmerman does allude not just conviction but even trial. And as Capehart has long argued: that is a very real possibility.

Also on the show was Jamie Weinstein, senior editor at Tucker Carlson’s insipid The Daily Caller. And he played the good little libertarian well on the show. But he bugged the hell out of me. How is it that all of the public libertarians spend all their time on Republican talking points? At one moment he argued that Obama had vilified the rich by claiming that they ought to pay a bit more of their pocket change in taxes. Jon Meacham countered him on this—truly surprised that anyone would seriously make that argument. Then Weinstein tried to claim that he wasn’t making that argument. (It was only one of many!) He looks like a teenager and he has the intellectual sophistication of one. I don’t know why Maher brings people like him on his show; he must just be that desperate for conservatives. It’s pathetic.

During Overtime, Weinstein showed that he was a fake libertarian by claiming that he was for cannabis legalization. This to me is the ultimate test as to whether someone really has a principled libertarian ideology: are they in favor of legalizing heroin. If they aren’t, then they really aren’t for freedom. If they don’t think people should be able to legally buy and sell heroin, then their ideology descends into good old fashioned conservatism: the rich should have rights and the poor should stand in line.

Watching Real Time is always a mixed blessing. On the one side, Maher is very funny and some of the guests are great. On the other, he always has idiot conservatives on and he doesn’t know enough to counter them on their bullshit. This is even more true with libertarians because Maher has strong tendencies in that way. In fact, I would argue that he is more a libertarian than someone like Jamie Weinstein, because a real libertarian would admit that the Democrats are much closer to libertarian ideology than the Republicans, who are proto-fascist.

Afterword

One more thing. During New Rules, Maher said, “After Michael Jackson turned white and now this: other races must give some their their pop stars to the black community. Starting with Justin Biebbro.” That’s the photo above.

Steven Brill has gotten a lot of attention for his big cover story for Time, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us. In general, I don’t pay that much attention to healthcare policy. The truth is that the issues are clear. The only things that get in the way of good policy are the installed interests and the Republican Party. So I didn’t even hear about the article until Brill showed up on The Daily Show. I was none too impressed.

Brill’s main claim is that hospitals are charging too much for things. Three dollars for a capsule of Tylenol?! I understand that these things are outrages, but they aren’t the main issue. Even the centrality of insurance companies in healthcare delivery isn’t the main issue. The main issue is that doctors make far too much money in the United States. Primary care doctors make 50% more in the US than they do in Germany and Canada; they make almost double what they make in France and Australia. I don’t think anyone is arguing that doctors in the US are better than they are in Germany, Canada, France, and Australia.

And yet, in Brill’s big bad indictment of the healthcare system, the doctors are the heroes. He dismisses the idea of a single payer system because—This is rich!—the doctors wouldn’t make as much money. So we have a system where general practitioners make roughly $200,000 per year, but we can’t have a decent healthcare system because these doctors would suffer if they were only making $150,000 per year. It really is that pathetic.

Note: this has nothing to do with single payer systems. The government keeps doctor salaries artificially high by lowering the supply of doctors through immigration policy and certification standards. I understand that we probably want to keep certification standards high. But why are American doctors shielded from the effects of globalization but manufacturing workers aren’t? I suspect that Brill has never even thought about that question. I’d bet he has friends who are doctors. This is same old thing: one member of the upper (or perhaps upper-middle) class taking care of another.

The United States has two big problems with its healthcare system. Doctors are paid too much and insurance companies increase costs while denying care. It may be unfortunate that a hospital charges $3 for a capsule of Tylenol, but that problem isn’t anywhere near central. You would think in 24,000 words that Brill would have figured that out.

Conservatives have a special fondness for government waste. As I pointed out leading up to the Fiscal Cliff, John Boehner seemed to think there were wasteful government programs, he just needed Obama to tell him what they were. This goes along with polls that shows that the American people want to cut government spending. But when asked about specific programs, they always want to continue funding those—in many cases they want to increase that funding.

There is one exception. Americans want to cut foreign aid. Of course, that wouldn’t do much because foreign aid is generally a bit less than 1% of the federal budget. But Americans think it is much higher. An American Public Opinion poll from two years ago found that the median American thought that foreign aid was 25% of the budget. So there you have it! In the minds of most Americans, we could balance the budget and then some (Quite some!) if we just stopped handing money out to people who hate us.

This kind of thinking is pushed by the conservative movement without actively lying. It is the reason we have Republican politicians constantly talking about “waste” without mentioning what the waste is. It is just a given that the government wastes money. When they do, they present spending on projects that sound wasteful but almost never are.

This process unfortunately dates back to a democrat, William Proxmire, who gave out the Golden Fleece Awards from 1975 to 1988. Much of the supposed waste that Proxmire noted was good and even critical government spending. He, like his modern day conservative heirs, liked to go after research contracts. It is often easy to dismiss as crazy a piece of research based only on its title.

Last year, “Michael” at End of the American Dream wrote, 30 Stupid Things The Government Is Spending Money On. But there are many other lists to be found throughout the conservative media ecosystem. What’s really interesting is that it contains “wasteful government spending” claims that I’ve heard make the rounds this week:

As it turns out, this program is using video games that have their own social and economic systems to study some social science problems. This is fairly standard stuff. A lot of economists use these programs to study markets. They are in effect large computer models with lots of free research subjects. Now, I can’t say that the research is a particularly great use of money. I don’t know, because I haven’t be able to find more than the briefest of summaries of it. And this makes me think that the conservatives who are complaining about it know no more than I do.

But I do know about other things. The article complained, “The U.S. government spent $200,000 on ‘a tattoo removal program’ in Mission Hills, California.” Here’s the problem: this is part of a gang prevention project. Gang members get out of jail and want to go straight. But they have all these gang tattoos. (In one case, a young man had “Fuck You” tattooed on his forehead!) Does this sound like government waste? It sounds like violence prevention to me.

Some of the items do seem ridiculous. Take for example, “The U.S. government once spent 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.” Of course, as usual, it sounds worse than it is. This is a program to “establish and evaluate whether an alcohol and HIV intervention center can assist in reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS among sex workers in China.” Now maybe that money isn’t worth spending. We could discuss that. But we can’t do anything if the conversation stops at: government teaching prostitutes to drink responsibly, te he!

And some of the “waste” is just pathetic. A great example of this: “The U.S. Postal Service spent $13,500 on a single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.” There are several problems here. First, $13,500? Really?! That’s the best they can come up with for the “30 stupid things”? But it’s worse, because the government didn’t pay for that dinner. The USPS is independent; the government doesn’t fund it at all. And finally, that dinner was for potential corporate customers—a completely legitimate expense.

What all this shows is that the conservative movement wants to imply that the government is this hugely wasteful institution. The data just don’t indicate this. So they mislead and even lie. It is shameful.

Ross Douthat had some interesting things to say the other day, Rand Paul, Realism, and Republican Reform. It is mostly about how Rand Paul, in terms of foreign policy, is a non-interventionist (His best quality!) but is trying to re-brand himself as a realist like Colin Powell.

The problem that Rand is having is that in the Republican Party, no one listens to him because he doesn’t think the best thing in the world is spending all our money on the military and going to war as often as possible. By becoming a realist, he can make more acceptable arguments like, “Sure we could go to war with Iran but it would cost a lot of American lives and money.”

Republicans Don’t Like Reality-Based Foreign Policy

I’m sure you’ve already caught the problem with this approach: Republicans are just as much against reality-based foreign policy as they are against non-intervention. Douthat rightly notes that Republicans don’t have a general foreign policy platform.

Instead, they just have gut feelings: military spending is good; Iran is bad; Israel is always right; and, of course, “We’re number one!” Douthat claims that the party could be sold on a realist platform, but that it requires that people like Rand Paul actively sell it.

Why Douthat Is Delusional

What Douthat is missing about Republican foreign policy thinking is the same thing Ezra Klein missed about Republican economic thinking: all the things they care about are not created equal. Above all else, Republicans want a foreign policy platform that tells them that America is the best and baddest.

They don’t particularly want to go to war with Iran over vague Israeli ideas that a country in the region might someday have a nuclear bomb like they themselves have. They just want to make a big deal of the fact that if America goes to war with some country, that country is fucked (regardless of all the recent lessons from history).

It is good that Douthat is talking about ways that the Republican Party could actually change as opposed to just talk nicer. But his hopes are bound to be dashed, for the same reason that everyone else in the party only wants to deal with cosmetic changes. The main thing that drives Republican voters is the thought that America has gone hopelessly wrong. This requires dramatic changes. And the voters are no closer to accepting a realist approach to foreign affairs than they are measures to make the economy more egalitarian.