It happens like clockwork: Another election cycle, another bill aimed at creating a ballot measure using fear of gayness to herd “values voters” into the voting booth and the Republican fold, another scene of panicked Democrats fearing to take a stand for gays because it might drive some socially conservative voters into the arms of the GOP.

But something funny happened to the clockwork this time out, at least in Minnesota — the Democrats are refusing to panic. Instead, led by our new governor, Mark Dayton — who is turning out to possess more calmly-controlled fire in the belly than anyone dreamed possible — they’re standing with the GLBT community, and for marriage equality.

And when I say “fight”, I mean fight. The local Democrats are going after this not just as yet another GOP-designed distraction from the Republican-controlled legislature’s failure to come up with meaningful jobs bills (one of the Republican Party of Minnesota’s key issues last fall), but also taking on the “morality” question itself: Instead of allowing the social conservatives to have the morality playing field all to themselves, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor folks are questioning a “morality” that, under the pretext of respecting religious-based versions of morality, sends the government snooping into our bedrooms and legislating against the actions of consenting, loving adults. Or, as state representative Steve Simon puts it in the video segment above, “How many more gay people does God have to create before we ask ourselves whether or not God actually wants them around?”

Big Business loves to whine about how mean that nasty old Socialist Muslim Obama is to them, and has donated untold millions to GOP-allied front groups dedicated to defeating Democrats at the ballot box — yet the latest numbers from the Commerce Department show that the quarter just past was the most profitable ever for American corporations. (Now, guys, how about sharing some of the wealth here by maybe hiring a few folks to work alongside the people you’re working to death?)

The business bonanza should not be surprising; about the only surprising thing is that it’s confined to business and not to the rest of us. As Kevin Drum pointed out back in 2005, the economy has generally done better for everyone when Democrats are in charge:

The results are simple: Democratic presidents have consistently higher economic growth and consistently lower unemployment than Republican presidents. If you add in a time lag, you get the same result. If you eliminate the best and worst presidents, you get the same result. If you take a look at other economic indicators, you get the same result. There’s just no way around it: Democratic administrations are better for the economy than Republican administrations.

So why would anyone want Republicans in charge? Here’s a hint: The already-filthy rich want to pull up the ladder after themselves so you and I can’t climb it. Drum explains this all through a series of charts, then sums it up as follows:

Bottom line: if you’re well off, vote for Republicans. But if you make less than $150,000 a year, Republicans are your friends only one year in four [election years, when GOP candidates kick down the goodies to us peons to get our votes]. Caveat emptor.

I only wish that the Commerce Department statistics were broken down by company. That way, I could look up and see which ones donated the most money to pro-Republican groups.

Jeff Rosenberg reports that the teabagger wing of the Minnesota Republican Party is attacking efforts by state and local officials to keep them from practicing typical Republican voter-intimidation tricks:

Minnesota Majority, the group that is organizing gangs of thugs to intimidate voters on election day, is trying to turn our very polling places into partisan battlefields.

The law in Minnesota is simple: It says that no campaigning is allowed in the polling place. Voters must be allowed to exercise their right to vote peacefully, without being beset by partisans. The right to peace and privacy while voting is a fundamental part of our right to vote.

Now MN Majority and the North Star Tea Party “Patriots” are suing Hennepin and Ramsey counties for the “right” to outfit their voter-intimidation thugs with Tea Party logos and campaign slogans.

These groups are part of the umbrella far-right group “Election Integrity Watch”, and they’re trying to push to wear Tea Party slogans that despite their claims aren’t even close to being disguised as non-partisan. The lawsuit won’t get very far in court, but that’s not its point. Its point is to be part of the climate of fear and intimidation that the Republicans are trying to create in order to keep younger and poorer voters from voting.

A good chunk of the fear-and-intimidation gambit is to imply, heavily, that those who are poor, non-white, or between the ages of eighteen and thirty have no business trying to vote, and that any efforts made by them to vote are “illegal”. This is done in part by suggesting that “vote fraud” is a far more common problem than it really is: Read the rest of this entry →

Remember how John Boehner and the Republicans said they’d pledged to help small businesses through tax cuts?

That was September 23. On September 24, all but one Republican voted against a Democratic bill that does just that.

So much for their lemon of a pledge. But will anyone in the GOP/Media Complex notice?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4zekfQGp34

Considering the tens of millions of dollars in advertising, ballot aid, and other assistance given by Republicans and conservatives to various lefty fringe parties like the Greens — aid designed not to make them able to compete on an equal footing, but to make them just strong enough to weaken the Democrats enough to ensure Republican victories — it occurs to me that the one thing that would truly be devastating to the cause of professional spoilerdom (though not at all to democracy) would be for instant runoff voting to be accepted nationwide.

Think about it:

Q: Why are the Republicans giving the Greens and the Naderites all those millions? A: So they can game the current winner-take-all system to ensure the Republicans win.

Q: What happens when instant runoff voting becomes the law of the land? A: The GOP strategy of propping up the Greens and Naderites in order to siphon votes from the Dems is no longer operative.

Q: What will the Republicans and conservatives currently funding the Greens and Naderites do when the aforementioned strategy is no longer operative? A: Well, they sure as hell won’t be funding those groups any more, will they?

So, for you folks out there who find some of the smaller lefty parties too cutesy, irritating, hypocritical or dangerous for words, know that there is a solution: Instant runoff voting! Furthermore, it works to eventually improve the majority lefty party (the Dems) so that the concerns that led the sincere ones (i.e., the non-Republicans) among the third-party backers to go that route are reduced, if not outright eliminated.

You’re welcome.

It has often been said that politics is the art of the possible. The heart of this concept is the whip count.

You don’t allow votes to proceed if you know from the start that your whip count shows you will not prevail in some way, shape or fashion. Why? Because the worst thing in the business of legislative politics is to always be the symbolic loser. (Think of politicians like FDR, LBJ, and Teddy Kennedy — people who Got Things Done. They all knew this instinctively, without having to be told it.)

The whole thing about whip counts is why Jane Hamsher (you may have heard of her) decided to go with the public option rather than single payer when Obama and Congress started on the health care reform legislation, as there was no way in hell single payer would have come close to passing. We almost got the public option through, despite Obama and Rahm’s cutting the $150 million ad deal with industry stakeholders in May of last year; we couldn’t have come close with single payer and we knew that from the start, thanks to having ears on the ground. And even though we didn’t get the PO, the fight was close enough so that the organization Jane put together was able to pivot on a dime and successfully press for student loan reform, which turned out to be a nice consolation prize once the stake was buried in the public option’s heart. Now, that same organization has joined up with coalitions like LEAP (Law Enforcement Officers Against Prohibition) and Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, to push for marijuana legalization.

Here’s the thing about legalization: It’s not just a way to undo the hideous damage wrought on this country and its Constitution by the War on Some Drugs. It’s to us what gay-marriage referenda were to the Republicans in the last few election cycles — namely, a way to energize the base AND to attract independent voters. Once the voters are in the booths to vote on the referendum, they see the candidates from the party that back the referendum and vote for those candidates. Even if the referendum doesn’t pass, it’s already served its secondary purpose. Poll after poll shows that legalization of marijuana is perhaps the single most important issue for young people of voting age; this is also a group that tends to vote for progressives and Democrats, but also tends to get easily discouraged from voting — a factor that looks to cost the Democrats seats if nothing’s done to address this.

Will the Democrats realize what an opportunity they have to win back the 2008 voters they alienated in 2009 and 2010? The next few weeks will tell the tale.

Even though more Republican officeholders are retiring or running for other offices than are Democratic ones, the GOP/Media Complex only focuses on the Democrats. Gotta defend the "Democrats in Disarray" narrative at all costs, y’know.

The latest case in point: Indiana’s Steve Buyer, retiring days after his Frontier Foundation was embroiled in financial scandal. The only way I knew about this was because somebody forwarded the story to me. Meanwhile, Democrats who retire or decide to try for other offices are seen as proof of — of — well, of something that somehow indicates they’re not very well off, and this is trumpeted throughout a very GOP-friendly media.

Oh, well.

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth lately at the Republican attacks, led by the racist nutjob Glenn Beck of FOX News, against Van Jones, who until he resigned this weekend was Obama’s green jobs czar.

Jones, you see, was under attack by Republicans for referring to them (and to himself) as "assholes" in remarks meant to demonstrate their and his toughness, as well as for signing a 9/11-related petition that questioned what Bush knew and when he knew it — pretty tame stuff, considering that wrist-slitting advocate Michele Bachmann has accused Obama, ACORN, and lefties in general of all sorts of bizarre and impossible things, and George W. Bush once called NYT reporter Adam Clymer a "major league asshole" and was not being complimentary in the least when he said it. And yes, conservatives and Republicans applauded both of them for it. (Here’s Jonah Goldberg on Bush’s dig at Clymer: "It never hurts to call a reporter from the New York Times an a**hole.")

Once again, we see the different ways in which Democrats and Republicans deal with scandals and setbacks, real or ginned-up, and the different ways our media elites treat Republican and Democratic setbacks — real or ginned-up.

When the Republicans got their butts unexpectedly kicked in 1998 by a pissed-off public warning them to stop it with the impeachment crap against Bill Clinton (a warning which featured kicking the Senate’s two most vocal impeachment advocates — D’Amato and Faircloth — out of office), what did they do? They chose Newt Gingrich — who of all the GOP leadership was the least involved with the impeachment mess — to be the scapegoat for the party’s midterm losses, and kicked him out so he could go make ten times as much dough as a lobbyist. Then, they went ahead with a lame-duck Congressional impeachment anyway — and they did so with the media’s full cooperation and approval.

When Democrats are attacked with real or fake scandals, they either ignore the attacks and hope the media doesn’t join in with the media’s Republican pals to amplify them, or they immediately try to cut their losses and cut loose whoever or whatever is the object of the hissy kabuki. (John Kerry’s tardy response to the Swift Boat smears is a classic example: He thought he could depend on the press to debunk and then stop publicizing the smears. He was wrong.)

Republicans, instead — and usually with the press’ assistance — pretend nothing ever happened. Even when it’s really blatant, they usually figure they’ll skate if only they can keep the press quiet. Look at how many months it took for Republican Senator Larry Craig’s airport-solicitation arrest to hit the news; it was nearly three months from his June 11, 2007 arrest until Roll Call finally broke the story on August 27, 2007. If he’d been a Democrat there would have been TV cameras filming him on his way out of the bathroom.

Don’t believe me about the press’ disparate treatment? Just look at Doris Kearns Goodwin’s telling PBS viewers that Bill Clinton’s pardoning Marc Rich was far, far worse than the first George Bush’s essentially pardoning himself over the Iran-Contra scandal. Seriously. Meanwhile, she had an attack of the vapors January at the prospect that Bush and Cheney might be called to account for genuine war crimes such as torture.

Or you can look at the press’ treatment of the winner of the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore. In 2000, the Atlantic Monthly adorned the cover of an issue with a picture of Al Gore as a vampire. The James Fallows cover story to which this fanged illustration referred included these words:

Al Gore is the most lethal debater in politics, a ruthless combatant who will say whatever it takes to win, and who leaves opponents not just beaten but brutalized. But Gore is no natural-born killer. He studied hard to become the man he is today.

And:

Debate has also been the medium in which Al Gore has displayed the least attractive aspects of his campaigning style: aggressiveness turning into brutality, a willingness to bend the rules and stretch the truth if necessary. A generation ago Gore was a divinity student who said he was repelled by the harsh realities of politics. Now he is the political combatant most likely to leave his opponents feeling not just defeated but battered.

Gee, project much, Mr. Fallows? That’s not the Al Gore we all know. But of course, truth was the first casualty in the War on Gore.

Finally, how about David Broder, the Dean of the White House Press Corps and the amplifier of many a Republican-crafted piece of hissy kabuki? David Broder never met an RNC talking point he didn’t like, including the one that states that anything Republicans do should never ever ever be prosecuted.

The reflexively cynical among us think that Arlen Specter’s jumping ship is Bad News: "He’s still a Republican." "He’ll switch back once he wins." "This keeps a real Democrat from winning the seat next year."

As a Republican, Specter had to tack right to have even a prayer of not facing a primary challenger in the GOP — and he soon found out that this wasn’t enough to keep Toomey out of the race against him. Now that he’s switched, he doesn’t have that worry. In fact, his main worry now is facing a primary from the left. (That’s us. Yeah, Harry Reid promised him an opponent-free primary, but we’re not Harry Reid.)

Of course, he could switch back, the cynics say. But Specter has 200,000 reasons not to do so — that’s the number of Pennsylvania Republicans who switched to being Democrats in 2008. Specter himself cited that number today. His first public announcement of his switch was not to some hand-picked Amen Corner, but a group of thirty-odd constituents standing outside his office waiting to discuss various matters with him; they gave him a big round of applause. Read the rest of this entry →