Month: March 2007

Republicans Aren’t Buying Schwarzenegger’s ‘Post-Partisanship’

Jon Ponder

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger describes his new mode of working cooperatively with the Democrats who control the state legislature as “post-partisanship.” The way the former bodybuilder describes it, post-partisanship is bipartisanship on steroids — yes, he’s working with the Dems but, no, he is not kowtowing to them. Post-partisanship, he suggests, empowers both sides.

GOP Sen. McClintock and I are are in rare agreement. Schwarzenegger’s “post-partisanship” is a pile of hooey.

California Republicans aren’t buying it. As state Sen. Tom McClintock, a hardcore rightwinger and therefore a sad and lonely figure in these parts, said, post-partisanship “is the process by which Arnold sits down with Democratic leaders and gets them to do exactly what they wanted to do all along.”

Sen. McClintock and I are are in rare agreement. Schwarzenegger’s “post-partisanship” is a pile of hooey.

Schwarzenegger was forced to move to the left politically in order to get reelected, and now he has to govern that way to stay popular. This move fools no one on the left or the right in California, which is fine with the governor and his messagemesters. The post-partisanship message was not crafted for Democrats or Republicans, it was designed to appeal to California’s burgeoning independent voters — and they are eating it up.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or even a political scientist, to game this out. In his first term, Schwarzenegger governed to please California’s Republican minority — probably in the misguided belief that his celebrity alone would convert voters to his side. As a result, by the end of his term, the governor’s popularity was around 30 percent.

In his second term, he has done a strategic 180 to appeal to Democrats and independents, and guess what? His poll numbers have flipped, and now hovers above 60 percent.

So what’s with the post-partisanship hooey? In politics. if you don’t define yourself early in the minds of voters, your opponents will define you the way they want voters to see you. The label Schwarzenegger is terrified of is “moderate,” which for the GOP is a code word for “liberal.” To be a moderate — or let’s just say it — a liberal Republican is to be an apostate to the party’s troglodyte-Dittohead base.

In the days before Republicans re-framed the word “liberal” into an epithet, liberal Republicans were commonplace and even powerful.New York City Mayor John Lindsay, Vice Pres. Nelson Rockefeller and even Pres Gerald Ford were liberals. But liberal Republicans were unceremoniously kicked off the bus in the Reagan era because they fuzzied up the GOP’s new dumbed down marketing plan to attract unsmart voters: “Liberal” means “bad.” “Conservative” means “good.”

As elegantly streamlined as this marketing plan was, it would have never worked if the left had not capitulated. By the end of the 1980s, even liberals ran from the “liberal” label — they were “progressives.” (Contrast this with, say, gay people who neutralized the slur “fag” somewhat by wearing it proudly.)

To avoid the “liberal” stank, poltiicians with money to burn, like Gov. Schwarzenegger, pay strategists big bucks to come up with bushwa like the “post-partisanship.”

Schwarzenegger can waste his time and money on re-branding his liberalism anyway he chooses but Californians have a right to ask what he is up to. There is speculation he’s running for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat in 2010 . Fine — but why is he taking his post-partisan campaign to the New Hampshire and Iowa, of all places?

If ‘Immorality’ Is the Military Standard, Why Are Adulterers Allowed to Serve?

Jon Ponder

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Peter Pace equated gay people with adulterers in his now infamous statement in which he described homosexuality as immoral:

Here is another example of the mad mix of cynicism and hypocrisy that is the hallmark of the Bush era. Enlistments are down, so the military is “allowing” its gay members to serve. When enlistments are back up — or the war ends — they’ll start the persecutions again.

“I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,” Pace said in a wide-ranging discussion with Tribune editors and reporters in Chicago. “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.

“As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior,” Pace said.

The difference, of course, is that adulterers are not routinely prevented from serving in the military.

Adding salt in the wound, new figures out today suggest that the military is not persecuting gay service members as agressively as they have in the past:

According to preliminary Pentagon data, 612 homosexuals were discharged in fiscal 2006, fewer than half the 1,227 who were discharged in 2001. On average, more than 1,000 service members were discharged each year from 1997 to 2001, but in the past five years that average has fallen below 730.

Here is another example of the mad mix of cynicism and hypocrisy that is the hallmark of the Bush era. Enlistments are down, so the military is “allowing” its gay members to serve. When enlistments are back up — or the war ends — they’ll start the persecutions again.

Privacy: The Newest Battle Cry of Republicans Seeking to Revoke the Constitution

Trish

There is no right to privacy in the Constitution, abortion foes like to remind us. To them, it’s a constitutional stretch to say that a woman has the right to make up her mind about her body, all by herself, without government assistance.

But there will be more privacy than you can shake a very big stick at in Florida if a state lawmaker gets his way. Personnel records of public workers, such as teachers and elections officials, as well as arrest records, civil suits, and just about everything else formerly “public” will forever more be “private.”

In an extreme case, a newspaper could be prevented from printing the name of a killer unless the killer gave permission for the personal information to be disclosed.

The bill requires that personal identification information should always remain private, even when collected legally.

It would give people the option of choosing whether to have personal identification information released to the public when requested by a state agency to supply such information.

Personal identification information is defined as a person’s name and any information that may be used to identify an individual, including an address, telephone number, social security number, date of birth or mother’s maiden name.

The bill is one of the three labeled most egregious by the First Amendment Foundation, a Florida open-government advocacy group made up of newspaper reporters, broadcasters, and other members of the press. The same state representative, William Proctor (R-St. Augustine), made the list twice.

His second (HB 1211) would make it a misdemeanor to distribute personal identification information about someone without first receiving permission from that person, even if the distributors legally acquired the information from public records.

The framers of the Constitution, as we all know but apparently need to be reminded, wanted us to be able to keep a very close eye on the courts, since they alone have the power to deprive us of our liberty. Without knowing who’s been arrested or tried for what by whom, we can’t possibly exercise the oversight a free society requires.

“It would just close the door to a whole host of records that we use regularly to oversee our government,” said Adria Harper, the director of the Florida’s First Amendment Foundation.

In an extreme case, Harper said, a newspaper could be prevented from printing the name of a killer unless the killer gave permission for the personal information to be disclosed.

These same Republicans want us to know the addresses, license numbers, and blood types of sex offenders. How these two initiatives will coexist is an interesting question. Proctor’s explanation of what he is trying to accomplish is, at best, lame.

“The basic question is to what level of privacy is a person entitled,” Proctor said. “There is the problem of identity theft. That’s not a small problem.”

It is and it isn’t. Identity theft, like online child pornography, is being pumped up and used as a rallying cry to either unconstitutionally hide us or unconstitutionally snoop on us. Either way, it’s bad law.

Unpatriotic: Halliburton Is Moving Its Corporate HQ to Dubai

Jon Ponder

Un-American: Remember when conservatives went ballistic after it was revealed that the Bush Administration planned to hand over management of major U.S. ports to a company based in Dubai? The Republican base was outraged because the government of Dubai, which was a part owner in the ports-management firm, gave money to terrorists groups. You have to wonder why these same people are silent in the wake of news that Halliburton, Cheney’s old company (from which he still gets a monthly check), is moving is headquarters to Dubai:

Reincorporating in Dubai would mean that Halliburton will be paying less taxes to the U.S. Treasury, even as it collects billions from government contracts.

Halliburton, the oil services company once run by Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, on Sunday provided further evidence that the focus of many big US companies is shifting overseas by announcing plans to move its chief executive to Dubai.

Dave Lesar, Halliburton’s chairman and chief executive, said his decision to relocate reflected the faster growth in oil exploration and production in the eastern hemisphere.

Where is the outrage over the fact that as a corporate citizen of Dubai, taxes paid by Halliburton — the majority of which will be derived from the billions it receives from its U.S. government contracts — will also presumably be given to these same terrorist groups?

And there is the question of motive. Of course, moving the headquarters closer to the action makes sense, but maybe Halliburton has other reasons for leaving the United States:

Is this about tax breaks? Getting beyond the reach of congressional subpoenas? And what about all that sensitive information that Halliburton has had access to? At a minimum, reincorporating in Dubai would mean that Halliburton will be paying less taxes to the U.S. Treasury, even as it collects billions from government contracts.

The right likes to question the patriotism of people who question the president’s motives for taking the country to war in Iraq. But I can’t imagine a better example of unpatriotic than this huge company that has made billions for investors from taxpayer dollars moving its headquarters overseas.

Rep. Henry Waxman has an announced an investigation and hearings. Here’s a question: what did Cheney know about the move, and when did he know it?

McCain Supports Military’s Permanent Gay Purge

Jon Ponder

Remind me why this guy is called a maverick — all I see is a George Bush clone, only older:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claims that “military leaders” he’s talked to about the ban on gay servicemembers say, “‘Generally, overall, it’s working.’ … And right now we’ve got the best military we’ve ever had – the most professional, best trained, equipped and the bravest. And so I think it’s logical to leave this issue alone. I really do.” Currently, the U.S. Army’s readiness for war “has eroded to levels not witnessed by our country in decades,” and since Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell went into effect, the Pentagon has dismissed more than 11,000 servicemembers, many in key specialty skills such as training in Arabic.

GOP Base Pins Last Hopes on former Sen. Fred Thompson in ’08

Jon Ponder

It sucks to be a Republican right now. The party that foisted George W. Bush on the country twice has fielded the weakest, most problematic slate of presidential candidates in memory. The Christian nationalist wing is unhappy with the three frontrunners, who have all been labled “moderates” — the GOP code word for “liberal” — in the past. Worse, each one has a ding in his bio that the christianists find unappetizing: two of them are admitted adulterers who have been married more than once, and the other is a Mormon.

Republicans, especially the rank and file, yearn for another Ronald Reagan now the way Democrats used to hope for another JFK.

The talibangelists’ restlessness is what prompted former Speaker Newton Leroy Gingrich to float a trial balloon last week, when he confessed to committing adultery while married to his second wife. (Even though Gingrich was sleeping with a much-younger congressional staffer while leading the charge to impeach Pres. Clinton over a sex lie about his affair with a former intern, Newt refused to cop to the additional sin of hypocrisy.)

As a Democrat, I hope Gingrich runs. While he is supposedly a brilliant strategist, and is what passes on the right for a big thinker, he would be abysmal as the face of the Republican Party. For starters, he is very unpopular. As House Speaker, America came to see him as a petty, tyrannical, pontificating stuffed shirt. By the time his party forced him out of office in 1998, Gingrich’s approval was at 28 percent. (Nixon’s was 25 percent when he resigned.) In a recent Fox News poll, 64 percent said they would never vote for him under any circumstances, as did 40 percent of Republicans.

Judging by calls from Republicans this morning on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Newt’s trial balloon has scared the bejesus out of the party’s base. One name that came up repeatedly was that of “Law & Order” star, and former Sen. Fred Thompson.

Thompson gets bonus points out the gate because he has a quality exalted beyond all others in the GOP: He’s “Reaganesque.” Like Reagan, he is an actor — a better actor than Reagan, actually. And like Reagan, he has been married twice. Unlike Reagan, Thompson is a lawyer and he made a name for himself in the political sphere before going Hollywood — he was the Republicans’ co-counsel during Senate Watergate hearings in the 1970s. He has been in the news lately because of his friendship and support of Scooter Libby, the former senior presidential aide who was convicted on multiple counts of perjury last week.

Thompson appears to have less baggage than the current frontrunners. Still, his Senate resume was not stellar, and while he’s been on a few vice presidential short lists, he has never been battle-tested in a national contest. And who knows if he even has the the belly fire to enter the race, especially knowing that when he does all three frontrunners will turn their guns on him.