Lunchtime Reading: legs for short skirts Edition

Bill Maher: The GOP: divorced from reality (h/t sgw)

If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments.

It's been a week now, and I still don't know what those "tea bag" protests were about. I saw signs protesting abortion, illegal immigrants, the bank bailout and that gay guy who's going to win "American Idol." But it wasn't tax day that made them crazy; it was election day. Because that's when Republicans became what they fear most: a minority.

The conservative base is absolutely apoplectic because, because ... well, nobody knows. They're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore. Even though they're not quite sure what "it" is. But they know they're fed up with "it," and that "it" has got to stop.

Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law.

And here's the list of Republican obsessions since President Obama took office: that his birth certificate is supposedly fake, he uses a teleprompter too much, he bowed to a Saudi guy, Europeans like him, he gives inappropriate gifts, his wife shamelessly flaunts her upper arms, and he shook hands with Hugo Chavez and slipped him the nuclear launch codes.

Do these sound like the concerns of a healthy, vibrant political party?

It's sad what's happened to the Republicans. They used to be the party of the big tent; now they're the party of the sideshow attraction, a socially awkward group of mostly white people who speak a language only they understand. Like Trekkies, but paranoid.

The GOP base is convinced that Obama is going to raise their taxes, which he just lowered. But, you say, "Bill, that's just the fringe of the Republican Party." No, it's not. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is not afraid to say publicly that thinking out loud about Texas seceding from the Union is appropriate considering that ... Obama wants to raise taxes 3% on 5% of the people? I'm not sure exactly what Perry's independent nation would look like, but I'm pretty sure it would be free of taxes and Planned Parenthood. And I would have to totally rethink my position on a border fence.
...

Look, I get it, "real America." After an eight-year run of controlling the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, this latest election has you feeling like a rejected husband. You've come home to find your things out on the front lawn -- or at least more things than you usually keep out on the front lawn. You're not ready to let go, but the country you love is moving on. And now you want to call it a whore and key its car.

...

And if today's conservatives are insulted by this, because they feel they're better than the people who have the microphone in their party, then I say to them what I would say to moderate Muslims: Denounce your radicals. To paraphrase George W. Bush, either you're with them or you're embarrassed by them.

The thing that you people out of power have to remember is that the people in power are not secretly plotting against you. They don't need to. They already beat you in public.

Atrios Versailles

During the 90s and the whole Lewinsky saga I just thought the Villagers were a bunch of shallow childish gossips. Now I understand that they're much more malicious than that, a corrupt class of moral monsters dedicated to the preservation of their status and privilege.

At least it's easier to point that out, now.

Attaturk: Today Joe Barton will outwit the Surgeon General by asking "Where do babies come from?"

Atrios has a Deep Thought The United States doesn't torture, but anyone who opposes torture is un-American.

DemfromCT (Daily Kos):USA Today/Gallup: Obama Earns "Political Capital"

Crisis management 101 from USA Today/Gallup:

President Obama's opening months in the Oval Office have fortified his standing with the American public, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, giving him political capital for battles ahead.

As his 100th day as president approaches next Wednesday, the survey shows Obama has not only maintained robust approval ratings but also bolstered the sense that he is a strong and decisive leader who can manage the government effectively during a time of economic crisis.

This is where the political capital gets underlined:

By more than 2-1, those surveyed credit Obama with keeping the promises he made during the campaign and making a sincere effort to work with congressional Republicans. In contrast, by 56%-38% they say congressional Republicans haven't made a sincere effort to work with him.

Oh, and everyone loves Michelle (79% approval.)

This, coupled with the in-depth data from Pew and AP in anticipation of the artificial 100 Days story, puts Obama in good position to get what he wants from Congress, Republican obstruction notwithstanding.

GOP's legal blockage April 23: The Republicans continue to try to block Obama's pick for Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Dawn Johnsen. Rachel Maddow is joined by Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate.com.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Sargent: Key Dem Senator Likely To Vote Against Top Obama Legal Nominee

Uh oh. This could signal real trouble for a key Obama nominee under assault by the right: Office of Legal Counsel chief Dawn Johnsen, a fierce Bush critic who would be at the center of the war over whether Obama will meaningfully reverse a host of Bush-era legal policies.

Conservative Democratic Senator Ben Nelson is all but certain to vote against Johnsen, Nelson spokesperson Clay Westrope tells me. Westrope confirms that while Nelson will take into account any further information that emerges, the Senator cannot now envision a scenario under which he’d support her — potentially making it an uphill climb to get her confirmed.

Johnsen is an important nomination: The OLC is the office where the torture memos were produced, and Obama’s pick of Johnsen cheered many liberals because it signaled a desire for his lawyers to aggressively articulate what the law allows. Johnsen has written that OLC lawyers should be “prepared to resign” if the White House ignores their opinions.

Johnsen has been under relentless attack by Republicans who claim her harsh legal criticism of Bush’s war on terror proves she’s weak on national security and cite her previous pro-choice statements as proof she’s an ideological hard-liner. But now a Democrat is echoing the latter criticism. Westrope emails:

“Senator Nelson is very concerned about the nomination of Dawn Johnson, based on her previous position as Counsel for NARAL. He believes that the Office of Legal Counsel is a position in which personal views can have an impact and is concerned about her outspoken pro-choice views on abortion.”

GOP Senators may filibuster the Johnsen nomination, meaning it will require 60 Senate votes to get through. So the loss of a Dem like Nelson could be a big deal.

Yglesias: Epidemic of Hippie-ism Spreading Through the Ranks of Former Generals

Warren Strobel reports on the radical left’s continued march through the ranks of distinguished military officers:

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” he wrote.

With respect, I actually disagree that the “only” question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account. The more important question is whether we can get prominent political figures who play an important role in the anti-tax or anti-abortion movements to accept a commonsense definition of torture and to say that torture is wrong and we shouldn’t do it. We could be living in a world in which Republican-friendly executives were calling up the politicians to whom they make campaign contributions and saying “I hate unions and environmentalists as much as the next greedy bastard, but you guys should really stop defending torture—I’m not comfortable with the idea of bloodthirsty madmen running the country.” Instead, such people seem mostly inclined to keep writing checks and hope that the politicians they support can use the torture issue to win elections and start delivering on the anti-union, anti-environmentalist agenda.

An angry O'Donnell speaks with perfect clarity in this clip. It also includes an implicit criticism of the media for allowing people to lie without correction.
Lawrence O'Donnell, Jonathan Capehart take on Liz Cheney's torture myths



Taliban troubles April 23: Rachel Maddow is joined by NBC Chief Foreign Correspondent, Richard Engel to talk about the latest on the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Yglesias: If You Want Health Reform, Reconciliation Must Be On the Table

The debate over the use of the “budget reconciliation” process has taken on a weirdly circular quality. On the one hand, folks say that going through reconciliation will wreck the chances of Republican cooperation. On the other hand, reconciliation proponents maintain that if Republicans would do more cooperating there’d be no need for talk of reconciliation. Meanwhile, the key moderate Democrats who hold the balance of power in the Senate have shown a tendency to twist in the wind on this.

But with the Senate GOP acting yesterday to block a vote on Kathleen Sebelius’ confirmation on the grounds that she’s pro-choice, it’s time for a little Real Talk. There’s no indication that Republicans have any serious desire to cooperate on a serious health care reform bill. Instead, they seem to be interested in using the carrot of cooperation as a way to get Democrats to unilaterally abjure procedural methods and revenue sources that would make reform possible.

Igor Volsky surveys the record:

Of course, if you don’t give, you’re not gonna get and Republicans have shown only limited willingness to cooperate with Democrats on health care reform. Key Republicans voted against the popular SCHIP legislation, eight Republican senators (including health care heavy weights Grassely and Hatch) voted against Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Service, Republicans misrepresented the intent of health information technology and comparative effectiveness research in the stimulus, encouraged smear groups to lie about CER and health IT, invited Easter special Sally Pipes to testify about health care reform, and have already taken the public option off the table.

Bipartisan outreach is, at times, a necessity. When the same party controls concurrent majorities in both houses of congress and the White House and is discussing an issue that’s eligible for reconciliation treatment, it is not a necessity. It’s a tactical option. But it’s just that—a tactical option, not a first-order concern of substantive policy.

What I worry is that there are a certain number of Democrats who, deep down, just join their Republican colleagues in not wanting to see health care reformed. But they don’t want to say that. So they may first block efforts to prevent the GOP from blocking reform, and then let the GOP block reform, all the while posing as reformers. Keep your eyes open.

Rothenberg: April Madness: Can GOP Win Back the House in 2010?

Cheerleading has its place, including on a high school or college basketball court. But not when it comes to political analysis.

Over the past couple of weeks, at least three Republicans - House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.), former Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) and campaign consultant Tony Marsh - have raised the possibility of the GOP winning back the House of Representatives next year.

That idea is lunacy and ought to be put to rest immediately.

None of the three actually predicted that Republicans would gain the 40 seats that they need for a majority, but all three held out hope that that's possible. It isn't.

"I don't remove the prospect that we could take the majority back in 2010," Cantor said at a breakfast with reporters early this month.

Gingrich recently told Roll Call contributing writer Nathan Gonzales that Democratic support for the budget and the stimulus bill could help the GOP "beat enough Democrats to get Republicans back into the majority."

Tony Marsh, a consultant to Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, went further in a Townhall.com piece. He argued that Republicans can win back the House next year by expanding the playing field, running smarter campaigns and offering a "contrasting and visionary message to America."

Yes, Republicans have plenty of opportunities in good districts following their loss of 53 House seats over the past two cycles. And yes, there are signs that the Republican hemorrhage has stopped and even possibly that the party's fortunes have begun to reverse course.

But there are no signs of a dramatic rebound for the party, and the chance of Republicans winning control of either chamber in the 2010 midterm elections is zero. Not "close to zero." Not "slight" or "small." Zero.

Big changes in the House require a political wave. You can cherry-pick your way to a five- or eight-seat gain, but to win dozens of seats, a party needs a wave.

Recruiting better candidates and running better campaigns won't produce anything like what took place in 1980, 1994, 2006 and 2008, when waves resulted in huge gains for one party. The current political environment actually minimizes the chance of a near-term wave developing.

The problem for Republicans is that they aren't yet in the position - and won't be in one by November of next year - to run on a pure message of change, or on pent-up demand for change.

...

The uptick in mood, combined with the public's still-vivid memory of the disappointing Bush years, makes it almost impossible for Republicans to deliver a change argument successfully. GOP candidates and strategists will have to wait for at least another election cycle before they can hope that a change message will resonate with voters.

Of course, there are millions of Americans who are unhappy with Obama's agenda and with the direction of the country. But those people have never liked Obama, and more importantly, they don't come close to constituting a majority of Americans.

Most Americans - even many of those who are still worried and pessimistic - are willing to give Obama more time and to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The benefit of the doubt is exactly what voters gave President Franklin Roosevelt and his party in the 1934 midterms, when Democrats gained seats after two disastrous elections for the GOP during which the party lost a total of 150 seats in the House. Democrats gained seats for a third successive election in 1934 (nine seats) and for a fourth cycle in a row in 1936 (11 seats).

It's not yet clear which party will gain seats in next year's midterms or how large the swing will be. The GOP could well gain back some ground, given how far its House numbers have fallen.

But a small gain is not the standard of success that Marsh and company have set. They've talked about the country making a 180-degree turn after two years and following a Democratic wave for change with a Republican wave for change.

Since there is no sign of that happening, we are left with the obvious conclusion: Cantor, Gingrich and Marsh are merely cheerleading, trying to make their supporters more energetic about next year's elections.

But cheerleading to keep enthusiasm high has a downside. It creates unreasonable expectations. Managing expectations, not creating impossible ones, is also part of the game.

Given their unbridled early cheerleading, Marsh, Cantor and Gingrich better have the legs for short skirts.

Benen: BANANA REPUBLICS....

To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, Republicans keep using this phrase, but I don't think it means what they think it means.

On Tuesday, Karl Rove argued on Fox News that accountability for Bush administration officials who broke the law would make United States "the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses."

Almost immediately, the right embraced the argument as their new favorite. In just the past few days, in addition to Rove, the notion of the United States becoming a "Banana Republic" has been touted by radio host Bill Cunningham, Sean Hannity, Mark Steyn, and Glenn Beck, among others.

Yesterday, this blisteringly stupid argument reached the level of the United States Senate. Sens. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) actually repeated the Rove-inspired nonsense in public:

McCain: "In Banana Republics they prosecute people for actions they didn't agree with under previous administrations."

Bond: "This whole thing about punishing people in past administrations reminds me more of a Banana Republic than the United States of America. We don't criminally prosecute people we disagree with when we change office. There are lots of questions that could have been asked of the Clinton administration failing to recognize the war on terror. They did not. The Bush administration went forward, and that's the way our country should. The President said he was going to be forward looking and now he has opened up the stab in the back."

It would take too long to go through this foolishness word by word, so let's just address the broader point: these Republican lawmakers and officials are also using the same coordinated phrase, but they don't seem to know what a "Banana Republic" is.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a "Banana Republic" is an accountable chief executive who ignores the rule of law when it suits his/her purposes. The ruling junta in a "Banana Republic" eschews accountability, commits heinous acts in secret, tolerates widespread corruption, and generally embraces a totalitarian attitude in which the leader can break laws whenever he/she feels it's justified to protect the state.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Rove, McCain, Bond, Hannity, Beck, et al are so caught up in their partisan rage, they've failed to realize they have the story backwards. They're so far gone, they're so blinded by their rigid ideology, they have no idea that they're projecting. It's genuinely pathetic.

If our goal is to avoid looking like a "Banana Republic," then we would investigate those responsible for torture, which is, not incidentally, illegal. The accused would enjoy the presumption of innocence and due process rights. The process would be transparent, and those who act (and have acted) in our name would be held accountable.

It's the hallmark of a great and stable democracy: we honor the rule of law, even when it's inconvenient, and even when it meets the cries of small men with sad ideas.

To do otherwise, to retreat because a right-wing minority whines incessantly, would do more to make us look like a "Banana Republic" than anything else.

Benen: GORE AND GINGRICH....

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce has been hard at work this week, exploring global warming and ways to combat climate change in considerable detail. The efforts culminate today with committee testimony from Al Gore.

House Republicans were able to invite their own witnesses to give testimony, and last night, they announced that they're calling on one of their own big guns.

Newt Gingrich has just been added to the witness list for tomorrow's House hearing on energy and global warming legislation.

Gingrich will appear before a subcommittee hearing immediately follow the testimony of Al Gore and former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), who are expected to make a bipartisan push for the comprehensive energy legislation introduced by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.). That legislation includes cap-and-trade provisions.

"Some on the majority side believed for the longest time that the former speaker knows a lot about health policy but not so much about energy or the environment," said Lisa Miller, a spokeswoman for Republicans on the committee. "When reminded that he was a former professor of environmental studies and wrote two books, 'Contract with the Earth' and 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less', they decided to permit him to testify before a subcommittee. It wasn't a bad outcome, even if it took awhile."

A few quick points. First, for GOP officials to keep relying on Newt Gingrich to be a party leader is a dream come true for Democrats. Second, on a related note, that Republicans can't think of anyone better than Gingrich to be a high-profile voice on energy issues points to just how serious the party's mess really is.

And third, there's the inconvenient fact that when it comes to energy and environmental policy, Newt Gingrich doesn't have the foggiest idea what he's talking about.

Should be an interesting day on the Hill.

Atrios on Servicers

The banksters don't want to be responsible for anything it seems.

With tens of thousands of homes across Florida left abandoned and overgrown by the foreclosure crisis, governments from Miami to Winter Garden have responded by sending crews out to mow lawns, clean pools and do other basic work -- leaving behind bills for the banks to pay once they take possession of the property.

The state's banking industry wants to put a stop to the practice.

Banking lobbyists have quietly crafted a measure in the Florida Legislature that would prevent cities and counties from forcing the banks that hold mortgages on properties in foreclosure to maintain those properties until they have actually acquired the title to the land -- a process that can take six months or more to complete. The language, written by the Florida Bankers Association, would also prevent cities from establishing registries to keep track of all the foreclosed homes in their area.

I'm sure some beancounters think this is a good idea, but I'm pretty sure this is really really stupid. Failure to maintain these properties is going to leave the banks with title to squatter-filled gutted shells with a mosquito farm in the pool.