Gay Marriage & The Republican Love Affair With The Past

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her website

The future is always a dystopia and the past is always better than this mess we live in right now. That’s if literature has any ability to tell us about ourselves. Stories about the future: Forewarning. Stories about the good ol’ days: Heartening. Somewhere in our collective unconscious we believe there was a golden era of innocence and irresistible quaintness. The present is far from that—so the future has to be worse. Most likely involving robots … emoting and plotting their revenge.

The future scares us and we wish it could be more like it used to be. Therefore we freak out about change and demand tradition because it connects us to this proverbial Garden of Eden in our minds.
This logical glitch is a pestilence in American politics. Conservative politicians in particular pander to this notion; we must go back to the past. There it’s better because we were better.

Presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s punt on same-sex marriage is: “I agree with 3,000 years of history.” To him this means a love-based consensual marriage between one man and one woman; our current interpretation of marriage. Of course plural marriage, like that of Romney’s grandfathers has also been practiced in the last 3,000 years. As were arranged marriages. As were loveless contractual nuptials. Deuteronomy is pretty clear if a woman isn’t a virgin when she gets married she should be killed. It wasn’t until 1993 that North Carolina became the last state to remove the marriage exemption for rape. Regardless Romney, admits to agreeing with 3,000 years of marriage history. His Etch-a-Sketch must be set to history revision.

I personally don’t agree with any history before sewage systems, women’s suffrage or the Loving decision. I also refuse to romanticize any era before the advent of antibiotics.

The GOP’s objection to state-sanctioned monogamous homosexual relationships is, they offer, based on their belief in the Bible. The current crop of Republicans are less into Jesus (who didn’t like rich people or capital punishment) than they are into 1^st Century values like stoning misfits in the public square. They’ve picked gay marriage to condemn as an evil out to kill us all, because for Republicans there actually IS a magic time in the not-so-distant past to be nostalgic for—specifically 2004. Then gay marriage was the perfect catalyst to get people to vote Republican. Hence Dubya’s second term.

And now? Now in the wake of the unremarkable ending to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (which funny enough is no longer talked about), gay rights doesn’t have the same bite. In 2005 the Supreme Court made sodomy legal in all 50 states and since then there have been absolutely no reports of anyone turning into a pillar of salt. But Republicans who pride themselves on being traditional and firmly planted in the past regardless of folly—are going to try and chum the water with something as anemic as spousal privilege.

Last week President Obama said he supported gays being allowed to marry. This was the right thing to do. But it wasn’t the radical thing to do—it’s popular. Most Americans agree that homosexuals should be able to be married. According to a recent Gallup poll 51 percent of Americans agree with President Obama on this issue.

Will gay marriage corrode the foundation of this country? When gay marriage becomes the norm (which it will eventually) we probably won’t even notice. We’ll get the same amount of wedding invites only all of these will be legal. You’ll know the same amount of gays you know now. Our children will have the same likelihood of being homosexual as they do now. Very few American’s lives will change. It’s just a minority—a persecuted, ostracized, demonized minority—of Americans whose lives will improve with the option for full-legal rights as a married couple.

That’s if the past is actually prolog … instead of paradise.

Robert Reich Explains How We Need A New Era Of Reform Based On Public -- Not Private -- Morality

Romney Has Public Morality And Private Morality Upside Down

by Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website



Mitt Romney’s reaction to J.P. Morgan Chase’s mounting losses from reckless trades is “the market will take care of it.” His spokesman says “no taxpayer money was at risk” so we don’t need more financial regulation. Romney has even promised to repeal Dodd-Frank if he’s elected president.

Yet at the same time, Romney has come out strongly against same-sex marriage. He’s also against abortion. He has no problem with government intruding on the most intimate of decisions a person makes.

He’s got private and public morality upside down. He doesn’t want to regulate where regulation is necessary — at the highest reaches of the economy, where public immorality has cost us dearly, and will cost even more unless boardroom behavior is constrained. Yet he wants to regulate where regulation is least appropriate — at the level of the individual, in bedrooms and other intimate spaces, where private morality should govern.

This is a dangerous confusion. It should be a matter of personal choice whom to marry and when to have children. But it is undoubtedly a matter of public choice whether big banks should be allowed to take the kind of risky bets that plunged the economy into the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and whether people with great wealth and should be able to buy our democracy with huge campaign contributions.

Please see the attached video and pass it on.

 Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

Mitt Romney's Commencement Advice: WWCCD (What Would Charles Colson Do)?

Mitt Romney, in an attempt to assure the Religious Right of his social conservative bona fides, delivered the commencement address at Liberty University, the Evangelical Christian University founded by Jerry Falwell.

The reviews are in and it appears that he was a hit with the white Evangelicals he was trying to win over.  As the Christian Science Monitor reports, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, praised Romney's "well-delivered speech," which "accentuated the core values issues that are essential to a strong nation and of great importance to evangelicals . .  that America's financial greatness is directly tied to moral and cultural wholeness.”  And Richard Land, the Baptist pastor from Tennessee who heads The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, agreed, finding shared "values and a similar worldview" on marriage and abortion.

It was this common worldview which Romney stressed in trying to bridge the gap between his Mormon faith and that of these conservative Christians:  

People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology. Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview. The best case for this is always the example of Christian men and women working and witnessing to carry God’s love into every life - people like the late Chuck Colson.

Yes of course, "always the example" of the late Charles Wendell Colson, former hatchet man for Richard Nixon, whose ruthlessness was captured by his oft-quoted remark that he would "walk over my own grandmother" if it would help Nixon get re-elected.  H.R. Haldeman wrote that Colson “encouraged the dark impulses in Nixon’s mind and acted on those impulses instead of ignoring them and letting them die.”  Among his many dastardly acts was compiling Nixon's infamous "enemies list," orchestrating the effort to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, and hiring E. Howard Hunt, who later led the Watergate break-in.

Hunter S. Thompson described Colson as "the guiding light behind Nixon's whole arsenal of illegal, immoral, unethical 'black advance' or 'dirty tricks' department."  (See Fear and Loathing at the Watergate, where HST writes about his "abortive plot" to "seize Colson out of his house and drag him down Pennsylvania Avenue tied behind a huge gold Oldsmobile Cutlass" and "cutting him loose in front of the White House Guard Gate," an idea hatched out of frustration that Colson -- at that time -- appeared to be "the only one of Nixon's first-rank henchmen who would probably not even be indicted."  But I digress.)

Turns out Colson was indicted on obstruction of justice charges for leaking information to the press about Ellsberg, for which he served seven months in federal prison.  By then he had become an Evangelical Christian, and while serving time founded a prison ministry.

He thus became, as Sarah Posner writes, "the original culture warrior," who "helped forge the Catholic-evangelical alliance against abortion."

He was nothing short of a battle commander in the cosmic culture wars, the manufactured showdown between the “Christian worldview” — the only “true” way to see things — and other “worldviews” he insisted were antithetical to it.

Put another way, as Ed Kilgore does, Colson

was for many years the chief advocate among conservative evangelicals of a “united front” with other conservative Christians (notably Catholic “traditionalists”) to pursue an aggressive cultural agenda wrapped in claims that those enemies of the “Christian worldview” were threatening religious liberty, which happens to have become the battle-cry of Christian Right opposition to Barack Obama. 

So what better role model could young conservative Christians have than Chuck Colson because, as Hunter at Daily Kos writes

when you think about how to be a good, upstanding Christian, you should be thinking about convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson, who did nasty things for partisan political gain, got caught, got sent to prison, and then discovered that mentioning Jesus was a fine way to make a generation of religious conservatives consider your own felon-for-your-party path through life as a decent career choice. Be like Chuck!

Today's GOP: Nothing In Moderation

Long-time Senator Richard Lugar was crushed in the Indiana Republican primary by State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party favorite.  The media has focused on whether Mourdock's extreme views gives the Democrats an opening in a traditionally Republican Senate seat.  Taken for granted in the analysis is the characterization of Dick Lugar as a "moderate."

It seems that all a Republican needs to do these days to be considered a moderate is to not demand Barack Obama's birth certificate and occasionally reach across the aisle in the spirit of bi-partisanship.  

It is true that over the years, Lugar occasionally broke with his Party by voting, e.g., for the Brady Bill, for the Dream Act, and for Obama's Supreme Court nominees.  But overall his record is one of a true conservative.

As David Karol at Monkey Cage puts it, "Lugar’s career is a striking illustration of how the definition of 'moderate has changed as the GOP has marched rightward." 

Throughout his career Lugar has gotten very low ratings from organized labor and environmental groups and high marks from business lobbies.

Lugar has generally voted anti-abortion and, once the issue got on the agenda, anti-gay rights, opposing the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell despite polls showing the public favored that move. Lugar supported the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq War. He opposed the stimulus, the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform. He voted to put Robert Bork and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court. Lugar voted for the Gulf War, the death penalty, oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refugee and removing President Clinton from office.

Lugar obtained his reputation as a "moderate" because the Republicans around him veered farther and farther to the right.  As Karol concludes, "in politics you can move by standing still."

Of Boardrooms And Bedrooms

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

Mario Piperni

The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms.

Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters will be considering a similar amendment in November. Republicans in Maryland and Washington State are seeking to overturn legislative approval of same-sex marriage there.

Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting womens’ reproductive rights – banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.

The Republican bedroom crowd don’t want to talk about the nation’s boardrooms because that’s where most of their campaign money comes from. And their candidate for president has made a fortune playing board rooms like checkers.

Yet America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.y and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.

What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.

It is immoral that top executives are richly rewarded no matter how badly they screw up while most Americans are screwed no matter how hard they work.

Regressive Republicans have no problem intruding on the most personal and most intimate decisions any of us makes while railing against government intrusions on big business.

They don’t hesitate to hurl the epithets “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “contemptible” at private moral decisions they disagree with, while staying stone silent in the face of the most contemptible violations of public trust at the highest reaches of the economy.

We must protect and advance private rights of individuals over intimate bedroom decisions. We must also stop the abuses of economic power and privilege that are characterizing so many decisions in the nation’s boardrooms and executive suites.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

GOP = Cognitive Dissonance

Jon Stewart brilliantly connects the dots:

The Daily Show
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ALEC's Comeuppance

By Jim Hightower, cross-posted from OtherWords

No one likes a smart aleck — or a stupid one, for that matter.

A really stupid one is called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which masquerades as an "educational" group that simply assists state officials with policy research. In fact, it's a corporate-financed, far-right front group that writes and aggressively pushes anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environmental, anti-immigrant, and other extremist "anti-people" legislative proposals.

ALEC's operatives take these cookie-cutter bills from state capitol to state capitol, getting Republican governors and key legislators to introduce them. Then the organization helps organize astroturf campaigns to ram such ugliness into law.

Gov. Scott Walker's repressive agenda in Wisconsin is an ALEC product. So is Arizona's war on Latinos, as is Florida's murderous "stand your ground" shoot-em-up law. However, all this success led ALEC to get stupid. Its leaders got to thinking they were bulletproof, that they could shove this stuff down people's throats all across the country — and the people would just accept it.

That was wrong. In fact, it was stupidly arrogant. Not only have people rebelled, they've also organized and mobilized. Groups like the Center for Media and Democracy, Color of Change, Common Cause, Occupy Wall Street, and People For the American Way have rallied grassroots people to hit ALEC where it really hurts: its pocketbook. Suddenly key corporate sponsors of this extremist organization were hearing from outraged citizens (and customers) — and now company after company is withdrawing its sponsorship.

Among those recently declaring that ALEC just "doesn't fit our business needs" are Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Mars, McDonalds, PepsiCo, and Wendy's.

To connect with these various efforts, go to www.AlecExposed.org

The GOP's Death Wish

Why Republicans Can't Stop Pissing Off  Hispanics, Women, and Young People

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.

It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll.

The movement of Hispanics into the Democratic camp has been going on for decades. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Replicating California Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s disastrous support almost twenty years ago for Proposition 187 – which would have screened out undocumented immigrants from public schools, health care, and other social services, and required law-enforcement officials to report any “suspected” illegals. (Wilson, you may remember, lost that year’s election, and California’s Republican Party has never recovered.)

The Arizona law now before the Supreme Court – sponsored by Republicans in the state and copied by Republican legislators and governors in several others – would authorize police to stop anyone looking Hispanic and demand proof of citizenship. It’s nativism disguised as law enforcement.
Romney is trying to distance himself from that law, but it’s not working. That may be because he dubbed it a “model law” during February’s Republican primary debate in Arizona, and because its author (former state senator Russell Pearce, who was ousted in a special election last November largely by angry Hispanic voters) says he’s working closely with Romney advisers.

Hispanics are also reacting to Romney’s attack just a few months ago on GOP rival Texas Governor Rick Perry for supporting in-state tuition at the University of Texas for children of undocumented immigrants. And to Romney’s advocacy of what he calls “self-deportation” – making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants and their families that they choose to leave.

As if all this weren’t enough, the GOP has been pushing voter ID laws all over America, whose obvious aim is to intimidate Hispanic voters so they won’t come to the polls. But they may have the opposite effect – emboldening the vast majority of ethnic Hispanics, who are American citizens, to vote in even greater numbers and lend even more support to Obama and other Democrats.

Or consider women – whose political and economic impact in America continues to grow (women are fast becoming better educated than men and the major breadwinners in American homes). The political gender gap is huge. According to recent polls, women prefer Obama to Romney by over 20 percent.

So what is the GOP doing to woo women back? Attacking them. Last February, House Republicans voted to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Last May, they unanimously passed the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” banning the District of Columbia from funding abortions for low-income women. (The original version removed all exceptions – rape, incest, and endangerment to a mother’s life – except “forcible” rape.)

Earlier this year Republican legislators in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Alabama pushed bills requiring women seeking abortions to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasound tests (Pennsylvania Republicans even wanted proof such had viewed the images).

Republican legislators in Georgia and Arizona passed bills banning most abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy. The Georgia bill would also require that any abortion after 20 weeks be done in a way to bring the fetus out alive. Republican legislators in Texas have voted to eliminate funding for any women’s healthcare clinic with an affiliation to an abortion provider – even if the affiliation is merely a shared name, employee, or board member.

All told, over 400 Republican bills are pending in state legislatures, attacking womens’ reproductive rights.

But even this doesn’t seem enough for the GOP. Republicans in Wisconsin just repealed a law designed to prevent employers from discriminating against women.

Or, finally, consider students – a significant and growing electoral force, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Attack them, of course.
Republican Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s budget plan – approved by almost every House Republican and enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney – allows rates on student loans to double on July 1 – from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. That will add an average of $1,000 a year to student debt loads, which already exceed credit-card debt.

House Republicans say America can’t afford the $6 billion a year it would require to keep student loan rates down to where they are now. But that same Republican plan gives wealthy Americans trillions of dollars in tax cuts over the next decade. (Under mounting political pressure, House Republicans have come up with just enough money to keep the loan program going for another year – safely past Election Day – by raiding a fund established for preventive care in the new health-care act.)

Here again, Romney is trying to tiptoe away from the GOP position. He now says he supports keeping student loans where they were. Yet only a few months ago he argued that subsidized student loans were bad because they encouraged colleges to raise their tuition.

How can a political party be so dumb as to piss off Hispanics, women, and young people? Because the core of its base is middle-aged white men – and it doesn’t seem to know how to satisfy its base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, and middle-aged.

 Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

Why Does It Seem Everything Republicans Say And Do Is A Trick Or A Lie?

By Dave Johnson, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

DonkeyHotey

In today's Progressive Breakfast: Republicans say student-loan interest rates are high because of "Obamacare." House Republicans are trying to block the Violence Against Women act, using a ruse. They oppose the Dream Act and offer a false compromise to make it look like they support the concept. And that's just from today's news.

Why is there so much deception, propaganda, misdirection, distraction and general subterfuge coming from Republicans? Maybe its because they understand what We, the People would do if we understood their real agenda.

Some Of The Most Repeated Deceptions

Here are a few of the most-repeated deceptions that corporate conservatives and Republicans indoctrinate,m saturate and bombard us with:

Tax cuts increase revenue? This one has been around for a long time, and is completely false. Republican tax cuts have always caused deficits. This is the point, the plan, to force the government into debt and then claim we need to cut the things democracy does for citizens. This is why Bush said that it was "incredibly positive news" when his first budget took the country from a huge surplus to a huge deficit. (Yes, that is in quotation marks because it is a quote)

Obama tripled the deficit? (Bush's last budget had a whopping $1.4 trillion deficit - Republicans -- Fox, etc. -- tell people this was Obama's.) (Please click through.)

Obama made the recession worse? Mitt Romney has been repeating this one. These Three Charts To Email To Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law show clearly how Obama's policies stopped the downward spiral where we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month and and brought us back to (not nearly enough) job-creation.

A Long, Long List

How long would this list be? How many lies and deceptions can you think of, even just off the top of your head? Actually you'd go crazy trying to gather examples of all the deceptive propaganda we are subjected to on a daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute basis.

They are very good at it. They can afford to pay professionals to come up with stuff that really twists people's thinking. They can afford the best pollsters and focus groups to help come up with the best-sounding phrases that resonate with people's core understandings of things. And they can afford the constant repetition that actually forms people's core understanding of things to begin with.

What's a few hundred million spent on creating and disseminating deceptive propaganda, when you get back billions upon billions through tax breaks, wage cuts, offshoring jobs, gutting pension funds, privatizing public assets, killing efforts to get us off of oil and coal, and the rest of the plutocrat 1% agenda?

Why The Lies?

Why are they using deception, distraction, misdirection instead of honest, open, transparent, fact-based ? Why are we constantly bombarded with this nonsense? There is a simple answer: Republican policies are designed to help the 1% at the expense of the 99%. It takes a lot of effort to talk a blue-collar worker into accepting wage cuts and giving up a pension so the 1%'ers can buy a yacht and a private jet.

Why Republicans Need A War On Religion

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her website

Republicans didn’t set out to have a war on women; they wanted a war on religion. Their intention was to march two Republican-created boogiemen into a battle that would make the War on Christmas cringe: ObamaCare and ObamaIsAMuslim. The Affordable Care Act stipulates birth control be included in insurance coverage instead of forcing women to pay out of pocket for such medications. This was the shot across the bow for the GOP to start their war. Republican sage, Congressman Darrell Issa, called a bunch of men of faith (yes, all men) to testify to Congress how the provision in the health care law regarding birth control would adversely affect them.

Then the right-wing echosphere spent the next week bouncing the sound bite: “This isn’t about contraception, this is about religious freedom.”

America’s right-wing: Afraid of Muslims, suspicious of Mormons, terrified of atheists and martyrs of religious freedom.

Republicans botched their war on religion with the word “slut.” Oh and by proposing laws against women getting equal pay, and a right to privacy or recourse if a doctor lies to them. The Chairman of the RNC, Reince Priebus, said the war on women is imaginary at the same moment Republican legislators around the country were introducing bills eroding women’s rights. So the war over what kind of war this was – religion or women – was lost by Republicans. Their best efforts to get a fruitful campaign about religious liberty backfired into a debate about gender equality.

To quote Rick Perry, “Oops.”

This party used to be better at getting traction with these wedge causes-they-call-wars. This has been their modus operandi to pummel artists, single mothers, monogamous gay couples, pot smokers, public employees and other subversives for decades: They create a fake crisis, say it will kill us all and then repeat it until our ears bleed.

How have they fumbled manufacturing a war on religion?! This is a John Carter level of a stink bomb: It’s totally formulaic – how can it fail?

Perhaps it’s just hard to convince Americans we are a Christian nation founded in religion with a tradition of religion in every facet of our lives from our money to our pledge of allegiance AND that faith is somehow being threatened. It’s like saying you’re the size of Goliath but everyone should view you as David.

Republicans really need a war on religion. Badly. A common foe would not only glaze over the fact their nominee is from a new sect distrusted by other sects – it would unite (they hope) all people of faith into their special brand of ultra-conservative gospel. A gospel that mega-church pastor, tax-free status enjoyer, summed up nicely: “I don’t believe in wealth redistribution,” he said on the holiest of Easter Sundays on ABC’s This Week. Yes, when Jesus wasn’t hunting quail with his Glock sub-compact semi-auto – he was all over trickle down economics and scapegoating the poor for political gain.

A war on religion would give Republicans back their big tent. It would be a giant diverse group of people who would put faith in the Grand Old Party looking out for their eternal souls instead of just soulless corporations.  All the hacking away at women’s rights, the social safety net and consumer protections would be given a pass under “religious freedom.”

Try it: “This isn’t about toxic drinking water/corporate welfare/millionaire tax breaks – it’s about religious freedom!” It works for nearly everything.

This will all go perfectly if they find an enemy. One good enough, or bad enough as the case may be, to compel all Americans of faith to give up their petty differences and come together as Republicans. Since the GOP needs this war on religion to push through their ironically social Darwinist agenda – they’re not going to give up trying to create one.

What does a preemptive victim searching for a persecutor look like? It looks a lot like the Republicans’ “war on religion.”

No Frothy Mix To Kick Around Anymore

“It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog.”

DonkeyHotey

Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination.  Hallelujah.

The common wisdom has been that the longer Santorum remained in the race, the better for Obama because Team Romney would have to protect its right flank with money, advertising and messaging that would otherwise be used to go after the President on his left.  But even without Santorum, Romney still needs to talk the right-wing crazy talk so as not to alienate his right-wing crazy party as he pivots to general election mode.  And, in any event, in terms of what is best for the country and what remains of rational political discourse, we are far better off not having to listen to Santorum's nonsense anymore.   

As I've said before, if his bid was successful, Santorum would have been the creepiest GOP candidate since at least 2008.  (A nice compilation of Santorum's greatest hits can be found here.)

It is rather shocking that a potential nominee with Santorum's extreme views about women, about the role of religion in the public sphere, and about  human-jelly fish hybrids made it this far.  What does it say about a major political party in which Rick Santorum is the preferred candidate for more than 25% of their voters.  (Not to mention that Newt Gingrich is the favorite of another 11%.)

Perhaps, more importantly, what does it say about Mitt Romney (with still only 40% support from his party) that it has taken him this long to vanquish such a weak opponent?

Socialism: A GOP Plan Signed By Obama

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her website

Calling ObamaCare “socialized medicine” truly lowers the standards on what could be considered socialized medicine. It’s like calling paved roads “government overreach”; a stop light a “government takeover of your commute”; or a neighborhood with speed bumps “a road to communism.” The law is really some regulations to help consumers buy private insurance coupled with a small fee if consumers decide not to buy said insurance.

Is it perfect? No. Could it be improved? Absolutely. However, ObamaCare is the opposite of socialism, it’s a market solution.

The right-wing got a “free” market solution to health care. That was their cause – personal responsibility their mantra – now it’s law. They got an entire reform bill incentivising citizens to buy into private for-profit insurance plans. This is the Republican vision for America: Less government more profits for giant corporations. This core of the Affordable Care Act was an idea floated by President Nixon in 1974, touted by the Heritage Foundation in 1989, introduced by Newt Gingrich in 1993 and implemented by Mitt Romney in 2005. And now? Now it’s a big festering albatross around Obama’s neck.

As former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said in front of the Supreme Court last week, “We have not waved the white flag of surrender on socialized medicine!”

So the decades-old Republican big idea finally gets Democratic presidential ink and now, if you ask a Republican, it’s an unconstitutional government takeover of health care Stalin would have loved. Mitt Romney wants to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with RomneyCare. Essentially repealing the Affordable Care Act with the Affordable Care Act. Leave it to a Republican frontrunner to vow their first act as president will be to waste time with redundancies while lamenting how ineffective government can be.

Now health care reform has reached the Supreme Court, we will have a ruling on the law in late June. Will it be overturned fully or partially or upheld? It’s anyone’s guess.
Regardless of the outcome, personal responsibility in health care is a Republican pet idea they’ve strapped to the roof of the car.

It makes the case that their ideas should never be law because if partisanship beckons, they’ll rally against them and call any Democrats who signed the bill, Hitler.

Imagine if Obama signed the most recent Paul Ryan Budget plan – a blueprint to cut taxes further for the wealthy and further increase the debt by not taking in enough revenues. If Obama embraced it, Republicans would storm the Capitol calling it a tax hike and a Maoist plot with Wall Street. People in tri-corner hats with signs reading, “Don’t raise my taxes!” and “Stop government takeover of business!” would swarm The Mall. The erosion of Medicare would make Republicans faint on the House floor. “It’s a tenet of Marxism to kill grandma!” They’d gasp.

Just remember, when George W. Bush took office the budget was set to be balanced in a few short years. Social security was actually its namesake – secure. And then he went uber-GOP-with-a-mandate – didn’t pay for any of the wars he started – just showered seniors with unpaid-for Medicare Part D and sent everyone in the country a rebate check. And when this “free market capitalism” failed? He bailed out the banks and the auto industry with taxpayer money, famously saying he “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

Now? Now the Republicans blame the deficit, the debt, the recession, the bailouts and (wait for it) the wars on the Democrat in the Oval Office.

It’s a take on the Pottery Barn rule, “You break it, you buy it.” The Republican version: “We break it, we blame you … and call you a Nazi.”