(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
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Per TPMLivewire, Willard Romney, Richard Santorum, and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz all took victory laps tonight.
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Rick Perry, on the other hand, may be reduced to campaigning for the VP slot, after “one of the most swift and complete collapses in primary history“.
Proud to Be A Democrat
Twitching the GOP Horses
… some part of the horse, anyway. Reporting from the salt-of-the-earth diner-demographic in Iowa, Mr. Pierce at Esquire elicits a brilliant analogy:
[My emphasis] This is not quite the “Look! a jackalope!” trope so beloved of internet trolls and Media Village courtiers, which is just intended to distract. Twitching, in the veterinary sense, allows a skillful 200-pound biped to compel obedience from a 1,200-pound quadruped — just as the tiny minority in charge of the Republican party has compelled the GOP rump to vote against its own best interests for the past forty years, and counting.POLK CITY, Iowa — So Dennis Wendle and Don Boone were hanging out together at home down around Liberty, Missouri (no kidding), and they decided that they were tired of living in a state that counted for so very little in the presidential nominating process, especially when compared to The Crucial Iowa Caucuses. So they packed themselves up for the drive north and, yesterday, they found themselves at a table in the Riesling Sun Cafe in downtown Polk City, which was jumping for nine in the morning, and waiting for the imminent arrival of Rick Santorum, whose campaign was said to be jumping as well, perhaps even as high as second place in TCIC. Dennis and Don were pretty much trapped over their breakfast, what with the fact that patrons of the Riesling Sun were outnumbered about 50-1 by journalists, camerapeople, and TV news haircuts from many lands. (Frank Luntz was haunting the ice-cream counter, possibly attempting to lie pistachio into thinking itself to be chocolate.) Don spoke, in succession, to Canadian TV, Japanese TV, German TV, and a local station from Boston.
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“Hey,” Dennis said to me, showing some admirable entrepreneurial drive. “For fifty bucks, you can stand on my chair.”
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Dennis is a retired TWA mechanic, and Don worked for Kansas City Power and Light for over 20 years, and also was an official in an IBEW local. They are shopping around for someone to get behind during this election year. They are not optimistic. “It’s big money and it’s big business, and it doesn’t reflect the views of working-class people like us,” Dennis said. “Corporations are not people. See what I mean? The people’s wishes. I don’t even follow Santorum, but I’ll bet, here’s what we’re gonna talk about. We’re gonna talk about the moral issues. We’re gonna talk about abortion. We’re gonna talk about all those things that are pretty much settled.
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“There’s a trick in the horse industry that we learned before we had sedatives that, if you grab a horse by the lip, and squeeze it, he forgets about anything else. It’s called ‘twitching.’ That’s what they do to us. They twitch us with all that other stuff and pass over the important issues. Not gonna talk about jobs, either, because they’re not here, and they know where they went, but they’re not gonna do anything to bring them back.”…
(And speaking of “twitching demagogues”, Brett Smiley at NYMag‘s Daily Intel reports that Rupert Murdoch has “Sort of Endorsed” Santorum… via Twitter.)
Tuesday Evening Open Thread
Fox News GOP Debate Thread
The livestream is here, but my PC is (very sensibly) refusing to load the Faux News player…
Richard Adams’ Guardian liveblog is here:
8.30pm: Welcome to the GOP presidential debate, brought to you by Fox News and the good people of Sioux City, Iowa – the final slugfest between, well, a pack of slugs.
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The Iowa caucuses is on 3 January and between then and now this is it: the last chance to impress voters nationwide.
Have at it, y’all…
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9.16pm: Asked why he is so rubbish, Rick Perry claims that like star quarterback Tim Tebow – actually not a very good quarterback but he somehow still wins games – he can be better than he looks. “I hope I am the Tim Tebow of the Iowa caucuses,” says Perry. Perry will be lucky to be the Forrest Gump of the Iowa caucuses.
Paging Mr. Tbogg, Mr. Tbogg to the red courtesy phone….
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Roger Simon @politicoroger
I met Saul Alinsky. I interviewed Saul Alinsky. And Saul Alinsky would not have considered Obama a radical. #iowadebate
15 Dec 119.22pm: If you had “Saul Alinsky radical” in tonight’s debate drinking game, then chug, because Newt just dropped that.
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If you don’t know who Saul Alinsky is, join the 99% of the American population who are with you.
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9:35pm: Asked about taking bucketloads of cash from mortgage facilitator Freddie Mac, Gingrich somehow claims that he was “a private citizen” when he did so, and that doesn’t count. Also, he then goes into a weird self-defence, claiming that he loves people buying houses. So he was just trying to help. By banking cheques for $1.6m.
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And yet, not so long ago, Newt Gingrich wanted to shut down Fannie and Freddie. But now it turns out they are just brilliant.
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WIN:
141. David – December 15, 2011 | 9:55 pm · Link
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“I’ve been having affairs since Obama was in high school!” ~Newt
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10.07pm: We’re onto Iran and the nuclear weapons. The question in essence: why, Ron Paul, will you not bomb these dangerous fanatics? “It’s war propaganda going on,” says Ron Paul. “The greatest danger is that we’ll have a president who will over-react.”
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For bonus points he also called Iraq “that useless war”.
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Moderator Bret Baier says Ron Paul would be running to the left of Barack Obama on this matter. “What did we do on Libya? We talked them out of their nuclear weapon and then we killed him,” says Paul. Hmm.
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Paul appears to be running for President of Iran. Which is a novel tactic in a Republican presidential campaign.
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Original Wonkette may have the best summary of the debate (& it ain’t over yet!)
Ana Marie Cox @anamariecox
I want us all to mark this moment when crazy met nuts and crazy won. #iowadebate
15 Dec 11
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Facepalm:
10.26pm: Our correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg is at the debate venue in Sioux City, Iowa, and she sends this analysis of the debate so far:
… Perry has spent a little bit too much time staring slack-jawed into the camera to dispel the impression that he does not have the intellect to be president. But he did get applause for his idea for a part-time Congress, working just 140 days every two years…
Because running THA WORLD’S GREATEST COUNTRY IN HISTORY EVER PRAISE JEEBUS should be a part-time job. Hey, it works for Wal-Mart!
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WINNER of tonight’s debate: President Obama.
LOSERS: Everyone who paid any attention, including those of us here at BJ, each & every one of the candidates, and I strongly suspect Faux News, because while all the participants ladled out a sufficiency of Crazy, there were no “meme-making” moments to enliven two hours of squirming tedium…
“YoYo Economics”
Greg Sargent at his WaPo Plum Line blog reports “Obama unleashes sharp attack on inequality, and Campaign 2012 begins“:
Obama’s speech in Kansas, which just concluded, was the most direct condemnation of wealth and income inequality, and the most expansive moral defense of the need for government activism to combat it, that Obama has delivered in his career. The speech is best seen as a bid to establish a moral and philosophical framework within which literally all of the political and policy battles of the next year will unfold, including the biggest one of all: The presidential campaign itself…
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“We simply cannot return to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country,” Obama said, in what will probably be the most enduring line of the speech. A number of people on Twitter immediately suggested a new shorthand: “YoYo Economics.”
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“Roosevelt was called a radical, a socialist, even a communist,” Obama said, in a tacit reference to similar attacks on himself. “But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight hour work day and a minimum wage for women; insurance for the unemployed, the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax.” Strikingly, the validity of some of these same government functions is still being debated today…
E.J. Dionne, also at the WaPo, provides historical context:
Here is how Roosevelt stated the problem when he spoke in Osawatomie:
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“At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. . . . “
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Roosevelt was uncompromising in insisting that those who wanted to protect private property needed to understand that those who held property had obligations to serve the public interest. “The true friend of property, the true conservative,” he declared, “is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.”
In one of its sidebar readership-capture polls, the Washington Post asks: “Do you agree with President Obama that supply-side economics has ‘never worked?’” Surprise, surprise — the dissenting factor stands at twenty-seven percent!
We’re not at the end of the beginning, but perhaps the beginning of the end
Something huge happened today. The kind of thing that changes the nature of the economy, and Americans’ relationship with their government, and with the corporations that seem to rule so much of our world.
Today is the day that a significant part of the Affordable Care Act took effect. Today is the day that companies that sell and provide health insurance have to start spending 80% to 85% of their income from insurance premiums actually delivering the services for which they charge their customers. Overhead like office space and supplies, marketing expenses, salaries, and yes, profits have to come out of the remaining 15-20%. The rule is called the the medical loss ratio, and in an important decision recently by the Department of Health and Human Services, the insurance companies cannot count the sales commissions that they give out to the people who sell you your insurance plan against the medical loss ratio.
The MLR can ONLY be allowed expenses, which must be actual costs of coverable medical expenses. This is huge. This means no more nonsense like refusing your mother’s cancer treatment because she forgot about that prescription skin cream she had for acne when she was fifteen when she was filling out the application. Hell, the insurance companies are going to be scrambling to pay for coverable things because any part of that 80-85% they don’t spend on allowables will have to be refunded to the policy holders.
Simply put, this is the end of the beginning of the long track to single payer health care.
So, can private health insurance companies manage to make a profit when they actually have to spend premium receipts taking care of their customers’ health needs as promised? Not a chance-and they know it. Indeed, we are already seeing the parent companies who own these insurance operations fleeing into other types of investments. They know what we should all know – we are now on an inescapable path to a single-payer system for most Americans and thank goodness for it.
Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice — Martin Luther King
We’re not at the end of the beginning, but perhaps the beginning of the endPost + Comments (70)
The Unlikely Resurgence of A Grossly Swollen Amphibian
(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)
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To rational observers of his long history of self-destructive bloviation and toxic narcissism, Newton Leroy Gingrich’s newfound “frontrunner” status in the GOP presidential race is a major mystery. The Washington Post, company paper for the political industry, dutifuly untangles how “Newt Gingrich Inc…. went from political flameout to fortune“, detailing the recent career of a professional con artist whose main distinctions from Sarah Palin are a larger vocabulary and a fatter rolodex. None of the repellant details collected in John H. Richardson’s August 2010 Esquire profile have become any less squirm-inducing. And yet, Triumphant Newt is the media’s, and perhaps even the GOP primary voter’s, candidate of the hour.
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It may just be the political version of Wall Street’s “greater fool” theory. Greg Sargent was deliciously sarcastic about Politico‘s breathless claim that “It’s nearly impossible to overstate how much Newt Gingrich’s resurgence can be traced to how strongly Republicans think he’d fare in mano-a-mano debates against President Obama“:
… Newt’s credentials as an intellectual heavyweight are entirely unearned, and… GOPers nominate a megalomaniac like Newt at their peril.
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Newt, however, is undaunted. Indeed, as he told us himself the other day: “I have more substance than any candidate in modern history.” If Jonathan Martin’s reporting is accurate, there are a lot of Republican voters out there who are prepared to believe him.
Frank Rich, on Rachel Maddow via NYMag, blames it on Rupert Murdoch: “… I think most of all it’s a practical decision.. throughout the political world, people really, really don’t like Mitt Romney… there’s something plastic about Romney, something off-putting. And fake. And I think the Murdoch empire wants someone who could win.” (Video clip at the link. Why does Rupert Murdoch, and/or his henchman Roger Ailes, hate America?)
The Unlikely Resurgence of A Grossly Swollen AmphibianPost + Comments (54)