I know given my background and peer and social group (largely humanities academics) I tend to spend a lot more time talking about this stuff than most people, but I'm still shocked that presumably non-ignorant people might be troubled that the non-majority (in terms of power, not numbers) perspective might be flawed simply because it differs from the majority one.
Benen: NO REWARD FOR NOMINATING MODERATES....
This isn't a surprising vote, but it tells us quite a bit about what to expect going forward.Obama nominated David Hamilton to serve on the Seventh Circuit court of appeals back in March, and, thanks to a number of Republican delays, he has only today been reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line 12-7 vote.
If you're just joining us, in March, Obama nominated Hamilton for the 7th Circuit. Given Hamilton's record of moderation, the White House said the nomination was intended to send a signal that this process need not be contentious. "We would like to put the history of the confirmation wars behind us," one aide said.
And what happened? The right-wing base flipped out and one far-right senator, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, soon after announced he will filibuster the nomination. (That Inhofe argued filibusters of Republican judicial nominees are "unconstitutional" apparently doesn't matter.)
And today, how many Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were willing to support this moderate, chosen specifically to signal the White House's desire to avoid a bitter process? Zero. Not one.
This is what happens when Obama goes out of his way to avoid a fight.
Given this, I'd just remind the administration that there's no real reward for nominating moderates. If the president selects obvious centrists, Republicans will label them unacceptable ideologues, and oppose their nomination. If the president selects unwavering liberals, Republicans will label them unacceptable ideologues, and oppose their nomination.
Obama might as well pick the best available people for the federal bench, without regard for the GOP reaction, because it's likely to be the same, no matter who he chooses.
Yglesias: House GOP Proposes Hundreds of Billions in Useless Budget Gimmicks
CNN reports on House Republicans’ efforts to get serious about cutting the budget:
The House Republican leadership upped the ante Thursday in the ongoing debate over the size and scope of the federal budget, unveiling a proposal to cut spending by $375 billion over the next five years. [...] President Barack Obama “challenged us to come up with budget savings, and today House Republicans encourage him to not only look over our proposed … common-sense taxpayer savings, but to join our effort,” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, said in a statement.
It turns out, however, that there’s no real proposal here. Instead, “The bulk of the GOP’s proposed savings would come from capping non-defense discretionary spending at the level of inflation.”
A blanket cap in spending is not a good idea. For one thing, it’s incredibly indiscriminate. For another thing, it’s oddly un-inclusive. If we’re just going to reduce outlays in an arbitrary, across-the-board way, why should defense and Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid be left off the table? Well, presumably they don’t want to cut the defense budget because they think it’s important. But isn’t the FBI important? Prisons? If Medicare’s important, isn’t the CDC important? What would be helped by slashing Pell Grants? When the Obama administration proposed $17 billion in federal spending cuts, the announcement was generally met with mild derision at what a small share of the overall pie that is. But the point is that they found $17 billion dollars worth of cuts that there are actual reasons to believe are worth making. It’s easy to generate a high headline number by being arbitrary. But it’s also easy to do devastating damage to the country.
A much better AP story gets that there are only about $5 billion a year in actual cuts here. And just to piss me off personally, one of the the specific items they want to cut is federal support for bicycle routes. I’ll be the first to admit that not that many people use a bicycle as their primary means of conveyance, but there are about fourty times more of us than George Will realizes, and we’re using a commuting method that’s good for the environment and helps reduce traffic congestion for everyone else. Conservatives seem to have decided that bicycles are funny and un-American, like Puerto Rican food and volcano monitoring, but I don’t really see what their reasoning is.
Liz Cheney's media tour June 4: Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is continuing her media blitz, defending Bush administration policies. MSNBC analyst Michael Isikoff joins Rachel Maddow to talk about her latest comments.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
- Kurtz (TPM): Please Make Her Go Away
Liz Cheney is blanketing the airwaves again today, and as is more often the case than not, she's the lone guest, unchallenged by someone with teeth from the reality-based community -- a privilege usually reserved for high officials or newsmakers. Obama hand-holding terrorists? Check. Saddam connected to Al Qaeda? Check.
It's an example of what E.J. Dionne was writing about in today's column:
A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion. ...
The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis [I would add the Cheneys] means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. ...
Democrats are complicit in building up Gingrich and Limbaugh as the main spokesmen for the Republican Party, since Obama polls so much better than either of them. But the media play an independent role by regularly treating far-right views as mainstream positions and by largely ignoring critiques of Obama that come from elected officials on the left.
Amen to that.
Aravosis: The blithering idiot is back
Now the lady who thought Africa was a country is an expert on economics. Her quotes speak for themselves:
"We need to be aware of the creation of a fearful population, and fearful lawmakers, being led to believe that big government is the answer, to bail out the private sector, because then government gets to get in there and control it," she said. "And mark my words, this is going to be next, I fear, bail out next debt-ridden states. Then government gets to get in there and control the people."Apparently she still hasn't learned proper English. The folksy stuff is cute, but makes her sound like an uneducated neanderthal. She's never going to understand that only 20% of the population (i.e., Republicans) find the dumb beauty queen schtick an asset for leading the country (or being a TV commentator).
"Some in Washington would approach our economic woes in ways that absolutely defy Economics 101, and they fly in the face of principles, providing opportunity for industrious Americans to succeed or to fail on their own accord," she said. "Those principles it makes you wonder what the heck some in Washington are trying to accomplish here."
Though the bulk of her remarks focused on government encroachment into the private sector, and praise for former President Reagan's views on limited government, the former vice presidential candidate briefly touched on national security. She told the crowd that "the terrorists are still dead set against us" and that her son Track is still deployed in Iraq.
"It is war over there, so it will not be war over here," she said. "And it had better still be our mission that we win, they lose."
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