K Marx The Spot

Scariest Sarah Palin Moment Ever?

This might be the most damning thing Sarah Palin ever said. From The New Yorker's review of her memoir:

When Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard editor and writer, asked Palin who her favorite thinker was, she replied, "You."

She might be the only person in America, including Fred Barnes to think that way.

Labels: Fred Barnes, Sarah Palin, Stupid Republican tricks

Gubernatorial Privilege

The good folks at Talking Points Memo are chagrined to find that Sarah Palin would not reveal whether she voted for Ted Stevens for re-election as senator from Alaska. (Stevens has been convicted, but not sentenced, for taking bribes.)

Of course Palin voted for Stevens. If he wins re-election then resigns, or wins re-election and is then expelled from the Senate, then Governor Palin gets to pick his successor. And that successor could be Sarah Palin.

EDIT: the good folks at Talking Points Memo note that a vacancy would eventually be filled by special election, thanks in no small part to Senator Frank Murkowski willing the gubernatorial election in 2004 and appointing his daughter to his old seat. However, there are conflicting state laws, one of which would allow Palin to appoint an interim senator. Stay tuned.

Labels: Sarah Palin, Stupid Republican tricks, Ted Stevens

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

How incompetent is the Massachusetts Republican Party? If it were a minor-league team it would be the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, only with a worse record. If it were a television network, it would be the CW, only without "America's Top Model" on its schedule.

In October 2007, Republican Jim Ogonowski narrowly lost a special election to replace outgoing Democrat Marty Meehan—he won 45% of the vote, but Niki Tsongas, widow of former representative and Senator Paul Tsongas, captured 51% of the vote.

How ineffectual is the Republican Party in Massachusetts? Let me show you two ways.

First, the party will not have a challenger to Tsongas, even though its choice in the special election won 45% only 7 months ago.

Second, Ogonowski decided that his 2007 campaign was the foundation for a challenge to Senator John Kerry. But it seems that the organization of his campaign leaves more than a little to be desired:

Republican Jim Ogonowski, who has the backing of key party members in his bid to challenge US Senator John F. Kerry, could be in danger of stumbling on his first crucial test: collecting 10,000 voter signatures to secure a spot on the GOP primary ballot.

With all the signatures submitted by the campaigns and the exhaustive certification process winding down, Ogonowski still needs at least 259 certified signatures to qualify for the September primary. But even that estimate is low, because he is expected to need a cushion of up to 1,000 more to withstand challenges to the validity of individual signatures that are sure to be mounted by his rival in the GOP primary, Jeff Beatty.

"There appears to be some question as to whether he will make it," said Secretary of State William F. Galvin, a Democrat whose Election Division compiles signature tallies submitted by individual city and town clerks.

How a candidate who recently ran a campaign, and his staff who recently filled key roles in that campaign, could fail to meet the fairly modest signature requirements to get on the primary ballot is nothing short of amazing.

But there is something that Republicans are good at—and that is fundraising dinners:

Galvin's questions about the viability of Ogonowski's signature drive coincided this week with a boost to Ogonowski from former governor Mitt Romney, who is hosting a $1,000-per-person fund-raiser tonight at the Taj Boston hotel on Arlington Street.

Now, that's rich.

(In a sane state, the utter incompetence of the Republicans and the ethical dodginess of the legislative leadership would get the Green Party to contest a bunch of legislative seats in an effort to get the Democrats to pay heed to the Green platform. As far as I can tell, the Green Party is running for one state Senate seat. One out of 200 possible legislative slots means that the Greens are running a vanity operation, not a party.)

Labels: Jim Ogonowski, Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party, Massachusetts Republican Party, Stupid Republican tricks

Republicans and Big Government

Pity the poor Massachusetts Republican. A good year is a year in which they contest perhaps three-quarters of the seats in the legislature, and win one-quarter of those. The traditional bogeymen of politics do not work—voters seem unconcerned about gay marriage, welcoming of immigrants, and unworried about the black underclass.

Indeed, in a special election to be held on Tuesday, the Republican party is trumpeting its candidate's support of affordable housing and devotion to environmental causes, even to the point of driving an electric car to work.

Alas, the Massachusetts Republican party, that bastion of small government, is located at 85 Merrimac Street, which is at the southern end of the Bulfinch Triangle in Boston. That Merrimac Street is not underwater is entirely due to public works projects to remove one of the three original peaks of Beacon Hill to fill in the old mill pond beyond it.

Indeed, the state Republican Party owes the very existence of its headquarters to one of the first massive public works projects in Massachusetts history.

Labels: big government and its critics, James Worden, Stupid Republican tricks

The Inherent Contradictions of a Capitalist

if reports like this one are correct, then Willard Mitt Romney's quest to be president is over, and he will have to fall back on becoming God of His Own Planet someday.

What puzzles me is not how much money this supposedly savvy businessman wasted, but how often he would use the same jab at his opponents—that they had not held real jobs in the private sector—without someone noting something that The Old Man would surely have noted. If having a real job in the private sector is such a good thing, then why was Romney angling for the most visible of public sector jobs? And if being president of the United State s is important, would not a voter want someone who had learned something from being part of the government?

For the wing of the Republican Party that hates government—the sort that relishes runaway spending because it ruins the fiscal standing of future governments, and that encourages bad acts because it makes government look bad—his inherent contradictions were easy to ignore, because running the government like a leveraged buyout firm runs a typical business is exactly the model that they envision. For even most Republicans, government is at worst a necessary evil, so the incessant parading of his private-sector experience was annyoing at best and frightening at worst.

Labels: Stupid Republican tricks, Willard Mitt Romney

What a Country

I thought that deporting citizens was supposed to be something that only failed states were supposed to do. But when the ruling party operates under the premise that government is a bad thing, then it has no incentive to run the government efficiently.

After he was arrested in Colorado on a minor drug charge, [Thomas] Warziniack told probation officials there wild stories about being shot seven times, stabbed twice and bombed four times as a Russian army colonel in Afghanistan, according to court records. He also insisted that he swam ashore to America from a Soviet submarine.

Court officials were skeptical. Not only did his story seem preposterous, but the longtime heroin addict also had a Southern accent and didn't speak Russian.

Colorado court officials quickly determined his true identity in a national crime database: He was a Minnesota-born man who grew up in Georgia. Before Warziniack was sentenced to prison on the drug charge, his probation officer surmised in a report that he could be mentally ill.

Although it took only minutes for McClatchy to confirm with Minnesota officials that a birth certificate under Warziniack's name and birth date was on file, Colorado prison officials notified federal authorities that Warziniack was a foreign-born prisoner.

Labels: Stupid Republican tricks

Do As I Say, Not As "I Do"

I think that Romney and McCain and Huckabee have all of the ammunition that they need to sink the Battleship Giuliani.

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York's Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing "security."

Hoe is a leader supposed to act? Let us take a look at the Giuliani Partners web site.

Giuliani Partners' professional guidance to leaders is based on six fundamental principles:

• Integrity
• Preparedness
• Optimism
• Communication
• Courage
• Accountability

I think that we have to give Giuliani credit for Preparedness and Optimism, but no marks for Integrity, Communication, Courage, or Accountability.

Labels: Rudy Giuliani, Stupid Republican tricks

"Alert" of the Week

How can you tell when your federal government is run by knaves? One way is to be on the lookout for alerts like this one.

Federal agents are warning leaders at some of the [Boston] region's top universities—including MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts—to be on the lookout for foreign spies or potential terrorists trying to steal their research, the head of the FBI's Boston office said yesterday....

"What we're most concerned about are those things that are not classified being developed by MIT, Worcester Polytech, and other universities," said Warren T. Bamford, special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office. He said colleges are vulnerable to those looking to exploit that information and use it against the United States.

The FBI's website says universities should consider the possibility of foreign spies posing as international students or visitors and terrorists studying advanced technologies and scientific breakthroughs on campus, as well as violent extremists and computer hackers.

Now, get this straight: the FBI is discussing unclassified research—topics that are not considered vital to national security, and the sorts of things that academics discuss at conferences and publish in research journals all the time.

How is it possible that things that researchers are trying to get published in open forums are somehow targets of espionage? Somehow it does not seem all that plausible that al-Qaeda is looking for a few months' advance notice of the latest in distributed computing, literary criticism, or materials science. But it does seem plausible that the Bush administration will do almost anything to foment fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Labels: putported espionage, Stupid Republican tricks, universities

Do As I Write, Not As I Do

Remember when Robert Bork was preaching the gospel of Tort Reform? Thou Shalt Not Sue for Frivolous Punitive Damages and all that?

Those days have passed, it seems.

Judge Robert Bork, one of the fathers of the modern judicial conservative movement whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate, is seeking $1,000,000 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages, after he slipped and fell at the Yale Club of New York City. Judge Bork was scheduled to give a speech at the club, but he fell when mounting the dais, and injured his head and left leg. He alleges that the Yale Club is liable for the $1m plus punitive damages because they "wantonly, willfully, and recklessly" failed to provide staging which he could climb safely.

Judge Bork has been a leading advocate of restricting plaintiffs' ability to recover through tort law. In a 2002 article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy—the official journal of the Federalist Society—Bork argued that frivolous claims and excessive punitive damage awards have caused the Constitution to evolve into a document which would allow Congress to enact tort reforms that would have been unconstitutional at the framing:

State tort law today is different in kind from the state tort law known to the generation of the Framers. The present tort system poses dangers to interstate commerce not unlike those faced under the Articles of Confederation. Even if Congress would not, in 1789, have had the power to displace state tort law, the nature of the problem has changed so dramatically as to bring the problem within the scope of the power granted to Congress. Accordingly, proposals, such as placing limits or caps on punitive damages, or eliminating joint or strict liability, which may once have been clearly understood as beyond Congress's power, may now be constitutionally appropriate.

So, it's somehow a crime against sanity for a woman to be given $2.7 million (reduced by the trial judge to $480,000) in compensation for third-degree burns that required skin grafts and a week in the hospital, but it is well and proper to sue for over $1,000,000 because of a hematoma to one's leg. What a brave new world that has such thinkers in it!

Labels: Robert Bork, Stupid Republican tricks, tort "reform"

Deferral of Judgment

So much for sanity at American blood banks. All sorts of risky behaviors entail limited deferrals from donating, but male-to-male sexual contact, no matter what kind, still means a lifetime ban.

Before giving blood, all men are asked if they have had sex, even once, with another man since 1977, when the AIDS epidemic began in the United States, according to the drug agency. Those who say they have are barred from donating. The drug agency says those men are at increased risk of infection by H.I.V., which can be transmitted by blood transfusion. Anyone who has used intravenous drugs or been paid for sex is also permanently barred from donating blood.

In March 2006, the Red Cross, the international blood association AABB and America's Blood Centers proposed replacing the lifetime ban with a one-year deferral after male-to-male sexual contact. New and improved tests, which can detect H.I.V.-positive donors within 10 to 21 days of infection, make the lifetime ban unnecessary, the blood groups told the F.D.A.

In a document posted Wednesday, the drug agency said it would change its policy if it received data proving that doing so would not pose a "significant and preventable" risk to blood recipients.

The deferral guidelines make clear that some potentially serious conditions are not lifetime bans from donating. One can donate blood after recovering from many types of cancer. One can donate, after 12 months, after many types of exposure to hepatitis. One can donate, after 1 month, despite taking Propecia, which can cause birth defects in pregnant women. After 12 months, one can donate after successful treatment for syphilis or gonorrhea. After 3 years, one can donate after successful treatment for malaria.

What is particularly interesting is that blood donations are not tested for malaria, the passage of time is considered to be sufficient evidence that a previously ill donor is now no longer presenting a danger to a potential blood recipient. Yet a gay man who has always engaged in safer sex practices and has always tested negative for HIV and AIDS is permanently deferred.

The key difference is that lifting the proscription against sexually active gay men involves treating gay men as potentially healthy donors; admitting that homosexuality might be a healthy lifestyle would be a first for this administration.

Labels: blood donations, heterosexual privilege, Stupid Republican tricks

How Stupid? This Stupid.

Just how stupid are the brainiacs in the Bush administration? Now we know.

The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington's foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations—creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that "neocons" in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China—an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.

What makes this attempt at a change in relations with China the paragon of stupidity is why having an avowedly independent Taiwan was so important. While getting rid of Saddam Hussein was at least superficially a good thing—although what Iraq would be like without Saddam Hussein was potentially unsettling—Taiwan truly acts independently of mainland China. The current state of affairs between Beijing, Taipei, and Washington is a stalemate that all three sides seemed willing to maintain. But now no idea seems too stupid for the Bush administration to have seriously considered.

Labels: China, Stupid Republican tricks, warmongering

Honesty in Washington

We may not know what outgoing Republican Senator Wayne Allard thinks of first responders, but we certainly know what his staff thinks of them.

"First responders in Colorado have recently provided critical services in the face of blizzards and tornados," added Allard. "Since I don’t think first responders have really done anything significant in comparison to their counterparts who have dealt with real natural disasters, I have no idea what else to say here..."

Yes, that is exactly what the press release said.

Labels: first responders, Stupid Republican tricks, Wayne Allard

Independent in Name Only

It should have been obvious by now that Joe Lieberman's self-description of an "independent Democrat" means only that he will stop caucusing with the Democrats in the Senate when it suits him. So it should come as no surprise that he is already intimating that a switch to the Republicans might suit him sooner rather than later.

Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, says his disagreement with the Democrats over the Iraq war won't prevent him from working with his former party. For now.

"I hope the moment doesn't come that I feel so separated from the caucus" that he decides to shift allegiance to the Republicans, he said in an interview. Asked what Democratic actions might cause such a break, he invoked Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 definition of pornography: "I'll know it when I see it."

The 65-year-old lawmaker is the margin of difference in the Democrats' 51-49 control of the Senate. A switch to the Republicans, which he won't rule out, would create a 50-50 tie that would allow Vice President Dick Cheney to cast a deciding vote for Republican control.

Anyone who would prefer Dick Cheney exerting control over the organization of the chamber to the status quo might be a small-d democrat, but is surely not a large-D Democrat.

Why should Lieberman's dalliance with the Republicans come as no surprise? Read accounts of his 1988 campaign against (truly liberal) Republican Lowell Weicker, note his positions and campaign strategy, and see how the right wing knew they had an ideological ally in Lieberman.

Labels: Joe Lieberman, Lowell Weicker, Stupid Republican tricks

House Organists

In case you wondered whether Fox News was the official cable network of the Republican party, Eric Kleefeld of TPM Cafe has some awfully good empirical evidence.

[T]ake a look at this screen capture of the National Republican Senatorial Committee's multimedia page. You might think the term "multimedia" would imply that it's a collection of stuff from various news organizations, plus in-house content from the NRSC. It turns out, though, that it's nothing but ... a collection of Fox News video clips. Every clip in the NRSC's "multimedia" section is from Fox.

Better yet, it has been four days since that report. And the same four clips are the only clips there. Perhaps the web team at the NRSC is being a tad subversize with a dusty corner of the web site, or perhaps the powersa that be are not even ashamed. (Or both.)

Labels: Fox News, NRDC, Stupid Republican tricks

Self-fulfilling Promises

Avedon Carol reminds us that the Republican Party, so fond of reminding Americans of the fallibility of government is, perhaps not so coincidentally, particularly good at fouling up governance.

Labels: Sideshow, Stupid Republican tricks

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Privatization of government services has proven so effective in other aspects of efficient, accountable government that it was inevitable that the Bush administration would do the right thing by letting tax lawyers write some tax rules.

The Internal Revenue Service is asking tax lawyers and accountants who create tax shelters and exploit loopholes to take the lead in writing some of its new tax rules.

The pilot project represents a further expansion of the increasingly common federal government practice of asking outsiders to do more of its work, prompting academics and other critics to complain that the government is going too far.

They worry that having private lawyers and accountants draft tax rules could allow them to subtly skew them in favor of their clients.

Of course lawyers with clients would would like to take advantage of tax loopholes would never leave such loopholes open. Doing so would be putting their clients interests first, and in order to do that they would need to be following years of industry practice. It would never happen that way in real life.

Labels: IRS, Stupid Republican tricks, tax lawyers