E.D. Kain

Okay, as is often the case I have done some serious thinking after getting some very good push-back in the comments and from some of the other authors here and elsewhere over my Gary Johnson posts. First of all, I think it’s important to note that I did not say I would support a Johnson candidacy, only that I’m tempted to support the most viable anti-war candidate that comes around. Probably the best argument against supporting Johnson is this: supporting a candidate based on a single-issue alliance is not as effective as supporting a cause.

It’s also more dangerous because if that cause becomes too embodied by that candidate, then the rest of his ideas – like abolishing the Fed, for instance – can then become conflated with the good cause as well. And so you weaken and undermine those ideas by associating them too closely with the bad ideas of the candidate you supported. You see this with Ron Paul, who has very good and decent positions on foreign intervention and the security state, but who is way off in crazy Austrian land when it comes to economics and goldbuggery.

It’s important to build up support for these ideas from the bottom up rather than from the top down. If you want a more anti-war, civil-liberties-based liberalism than you have to argue for it, work with activists to build up grass-roots support for those policies, and vote for local and state candidates who support those ideas. Making a deal with the devil may be a dramatic and appealing way to register one’s dissent, but it’s more than likely counter-productive. A show of support for Johnson’s anti-drug-war policies is just as easily taken as support for slashing public support for healthcare and education, or for busting public sector unions. As someone who really thinks it’s high-time for some form of single-payer health insurance in this country (and the ACA for now) and who supports public education against this constant barrage of corporate reforms, a vote for Johnson would be a vote against things I care deeply about.

The trick, then, is making a vote for Obama go as far as possible. Because I am fundamentally opposed to his foreign policies also, and to his escalation of immigrant deportations and medical marijuana busts and the ratcheting up of the TSA. I think you can support a candidate and still be a vocal and persistent critic. So that is what I will aim to do.

PS – you can email me here or follow me on Twitter here. I have posted a full-excerpt of this post at Forbes.

An anti-war, anti-union, anti-stimulus, anti-safety-net candidatePost + Comments (245)

I think mistermix makes some very good points regarding a Johnson administration and the inherent handicaps of politics over reality. My point here is simply that presidents do have a great deal more influence over foreign policy than over domestic policy. For instance, I think Obama has been a pretty extraordinary president on most domestic issues. His expansion of healthcare access is the most significant liberal achievement in decades, hands down.

Two points: 1) There is no way in hell Johnson gets the nomination. So maybe this is all just mental masturbation to begin with. But 2) I think it’s important for people who care about issues like the War on Drugs, or our interventionist foreign policy to somehow make those in power listen. I like Obama, as far as politicians go. I think he means well, which is more than I can say for most of his potential 2012 opponents. But I’m not happy with a third war and I’m not happy with the drone operations in Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I think a lot of the bad powers that the Bush administration expanded, Obama has either expanded or at least continued. This is a problem for me.

Ditto for the drug wars.

But in many ways I think Johnson is a terrible choice for president in spite of his good policies on drugs and military intervention. I have never heard that he is a creationist and I think that’s little more than a rumor (if someone can link, then by all means…) but he’s downright radical on spending issues, on healthcare, and on a number of other issues I think are tremendously important as well that I disagree with Johnson on. The drug war and the Middle East wars are life and death issues, so they sit right at the top of my priority list – but so is healthcare, and I think people like Johnson or Paul Ryan have bad ideas for healthcare reform, ideas that could badly effect the welfare of millions of American citizens. I would prefer a liberal non-interventionist who would campaign on ending the drug war, expanding healthcare, and so forth.

So there’s no easy answers here. There’s no perfect candidates obviously, and even the ones we like for issues A and B may be horrible or just horribly disappointing on issues C and D. When it comes time to pull the lever, we make as honest a decision as we can – and often that means compromising our values in the least painful way possible. Such is politics.

An Anti-War CandidatePost + Comments (122)

Via Jonathan Chait comes this very sad tale of three Republican lawmakers who just wanted a hug:

The three Republican congressmen saw it as a rare ray of sunshine in Washington’s stormy budget battle: an invitation from the White House to hear President Obama lay out his ideas for taming the national debt.

They expected a peace offering, a gesture of goodwill aimed at smoothing a path toward compromise. But soon after taking their seats at George Washington University on Wednesday, they found themselves under fire for plotting “a fundamentally different America” from the one most Americans know and love.

You see, on the one hand Republicans propose massive tax cuts for the rich and a dismemberment of the major healthcare entitlements and this is considered brave and non-partisan. On the other hand, Obama proposes raising taxes on the rich, and calling a spade a spade and this is wildly –  disgracefully – partisan.

I for one am really worried about the hurt feelings of Paul Ryan and his colleagues. How can we get the economy back on track if Obama is mean to the Republicans?

Oh, also too, Ryan was for the debt before he was against it…

Last but not least, as we all know, Donald Trump has taken the lead by taking birtherism mainstream. My theory: he’s actually a stealth-liberal determined to undo the Republican party from within.

A spade is a spade of course of coursePost + Comments (199)

Speaking of herds of cats:

In a chaotic scene characterized by shouting more typical of the British parliament, the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) alternative to Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) 2012 budget went down in a 119-136 vote.

It was gaveled shut only after Democratic leaders started pushing members to switch their “no” votes to “present,” in order to force a face-off between conservatives and the Republican leadership. A total of 176 lawmakers voted “present.”

That’s from the Hill.

To illustrate just how dishonest the Republican budgets really are, read Jason Kuznicki’s “Return to Normalcy” budget:

It’s got four basic parts:

1. Return to Clinton-era rates of taxation, or at least something like them. As Ezra Klein has noted, this is very likely to happen in any event, because we’d need sixty Senate votes to extend the Bush tax cuts. We’ll just let them expire. As we’ll soon see, our Senators will be busy enough elsewhere.
2. Remove the cap on the Social Security payroll tax. Yes, that means raising taxes. Yes, on the rich. Someone call the Koch brothers!
3. Cap Medicare spending at GDP plus 1%. This is a doozy, I know. Can we do it? We’ll probably have to, like it or not, in any balanced budget plan.
4. Reduce military spending to 1990s levels. In other words, bring the troops home. From everywhere. Let the force shrink by attrition. Cut spending on new weapons systems. Tell the world — much of it industrialized and friendly — that they will have to pay for their own defense, because we can’t afford it anymore. We’ve been doing way more than our fair share for way, way too long, and they can hardly say otherwise.

More or less, the plan would look like this.

This is similar to John’s do-nothing budget, or the do-nothing budgets of Annie Lowrey or David Leonhardt, or my budget. All these budgets have one thing in common: the end of the Bush tax cuts. To help illustrate where that will put us in the Big Scheme of Things, a chart!

Surely letting the cuts expire will lead to America becoming Somalia. A much more Serious idea would be to let the poor and elderly fend for themselves and get rid of all these pesky healthcare entitlements.

No budget for old white menPost + Comments (74)