GOP will TOTALLY pass immigration reform if they win the Senate -- cross their hearrts

The Hill: Senate Republicans say they'll try to pass immigration reform legislation in the next two years if they take back the Senate in November.  

The Republicans say winning back the Senate will allow them to pass a series of bills on their own terms that have a better chance of winning approval in the House.  

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a central member of the coalition that passed a comprehensive reform bill in the Senate last year, said he would craft a better legislative approach if Republicans control the upper chamber in 2015. 

That would give his party a chance to pass immigration legislation before the presidential election, when Hispanic voters will be crucial to winning the White House.

There's an obvious aspect of good cop/bad cop in this, with Senate Republicans using House Republicans as bad cops. But there's actually something much more familiar going on here; Republicans are returning to tried and true strategy. The problem is, they're trying to apply it to an entirely different group of voters and it's probably not going to work.

For years, Republicans have used bait and switch politics to trick voters into electing them. They promise they'll amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage and get a Balanced Budget Amendment. They promise they'll chase all those lazy "inner city" people off welfare. They're going to get you prayer in schools and make it a crime to burn the flag. They're going to turn the United States into Reagantopia.

But then they get elected and suddenly they're all about something else entirely. My favorite example is Bush getting reelected on the issue of gay marriage and then immediately getting to work on privatizing Medicare -- something he'd barely mentioned during the campaign. Republicans promise everything talk radio gets the chumps riled up about, then they pass laws that only really help the rich. Sure, they'll throw an abortion bone to the dopes occasionally, but for the most part its promise to fight the Homosexual Menace, then deliver a million dollar tax credit on private jet wax.

It works for the base because they're endlessly gullible and never remember how they got screwed over the last time. But it's also why Republicans can't expand their voter block -- people that credulous and dumb are thankfully a commodity in limited supply. This stuff works on pretty much all of the of people it's ever going to work on. It's not going to gain them immigration reform supporters now.

GOP minority outreach

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Obama offers radical argument that Abe Lincoln was human

CNN: President Barack Obama defended himself Thursday against critics who argued that his recent appearance on a Web-based comedy show [Zach Galifianakis’s scripted interview show “Between Two Ferns”] undermined the dignity of his office and would never have been done by one of his most famous predecessors – Abraham Lincoln.

Obama said in an interview with ESPN radio host Colin Cowherd that Lincoln “loved telling the occasional bawdy joke and, you know, being out among regular folks.”

"One of the hardest things about being President is being in this bubble that is artificial and, unless you make a conscious effort, you start sounding like some Washington stiff," Obama said.

"You have to consciously try to get out of that if you want remind yourself of the wonderful people you’re supposed to be serving who have a sense of humor and aren’t thinking every day about position papers."

The short version here is just because you’ve got a stick up your butt, it doesn’t mean everyone you’ve ever admired had a stick up their butt too. As Mozart’s character is the movie Amadeus” put it: “Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn’t rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus… people so lofty they sound as if they shit marble!” The first step in connecting with voters on a personal level is to be an actual person.

Republicans need to get over themselves. Or do we have to remind them of the solemn dignity of this guy?

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

GOP Lifeguard

Mike Luckovich.

That’s not how you deal with charges of racism

Rep. Paul Ryan has been taking some fire for telling a talk radio host that lazy “inner city” men are responsible for poverty in America and for accepting the writings of racist author Charles Murray as evidence of the claim. All of this skirts the dividing line between dog whistle racism and blatant racism, which means the criticism Ryan has been receiving is well deserved. It’s starting to haunt him at townhalls — as it should.

The way Ryan and the rest of the GOP have been dealing with this controversy has been entirely dismissive; Ryan continuously denies that “inner city” is code for “black” and throws around victim cards whenever confronted with his racism. Someone needs to sit him down and force him to describe these inner city whites he wants us to believe he’s talking about. The energy generated by all the squirming would be enough to power a small village.

Meanwhile, National Review’s Rich Lowry has a piece up at Politico defending Ryan by arguing, as Ryan does, that the clearly racist things he says aren’t racist in the least. But people who’ve grown up hearing the dogwhistles know better and Lowry and Ryan aren’t fooling anyone other than those who want to be fooled. This makes the whole exercise much worse that pointless, since it only makes matters worse. They aren’t winning any new voters with this stuff and they’re continuing to push minority voters away. In the end, the numbers are a loss for Republicans.

If Republicans really want voters to believe they aren’t racist — and I don’t mean just Republican voters, I mean all voters — then they’re going to have to stop being so goddam racist. Offending people, then trying to convince them they aren’t really offended, is ridiculously dumb. They know racism is a loser, so why don’t they just knock it off?

The answer seems to be that they can’t. The racist  tropes of lazy “inner city” types waiting for a handout, the “urban” welfare queens soaking up the welfare, is too deeply ingrained in the GOP psyche. For them, racism is merely bad manners — you don’t say these things aloud in public, you wait until you’re alone with the enlightened elites before you start talking about the lazy and shiftless ways of the lesser races.

Until they somehow manage to exorcize the racism from their souls, Republicans will keep getting this sort of entirely deserved flack. Their answer to “I’m offended” will continue to be “No you’re not!” until they actually learn to give a damn about the racism not only in their ranks, but in the blood vessels of their entire ideology.

[photo by Gage Skidmore]

Pres. Obama orders review of deportation policy

Washington Post: President Obama on Thursday ordered his administration to review its immigration policies to determine ways to make it more humane, a response to mounting pressure from advocates to stem deportations of illegal immigrants.

The move came after Obama met at the White House with three members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which has been drafting a letter to the president expressing concerns about the administration’s deportation policy.

Obama “emphasized his deep concern about the pain too many families feel from the separation that comes from our broken immigration system,” the White House said in a statement after the president’s meeting with Democratic Reps. Ruben Hinojosa (Tex.), Xavier Becerra (Calif.) and Luis Gutierrez (Ill.).

The impetus behind the move was pressure from Latino groups and many on the left to halt — or at least slow — deportations. Pres. Obama, in a typical Democratic over-compensating “See? I can be just as tough as a Republican!” move, had been engaged in deportations at an alarming rate. But now that pressure has caused an apparent reboot of the President’s policy. This overcompensation also explains why Obama’s been going nuts with drones and surveillance.

This is an important story for two reasons, as I see it. First, but not foremost, is that we’re seeing another example of how demographic shifts in the population are driving our politics away from conservative positions. Republicans will hate this, but Democrats have a lot more to worry about from Latino voters than from the GOP. And it’s clear that the administration is less worried about scaring away swing voters than they are of Latino voters.

Second and more importantly, these shifts do not happen without pressure from the left. There was a vacuum here and Latino voters rushed in to fill it. Obama — and other moderate Democrats — can be pushed to the left without a whole lot of consequence, because that’s where the majority of the voters are. The political center is way to the right of middle America and there’s real no penalty for responding to mainstream demands. If we can convince Democrats to worry more about responding to the majority of voters and less about impressing Republicans, both the party and the country would be one helluva lot better off.

[photo by Fibonacci Blue]

It’d be easier to believe the GOP isn’t racist if they’d put down the dog whistle

Raw Story: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Wednesday suggested that men in “inner cities” who refused to work were one of the main causes of poverty in the United States.

In an interview with conservative radio host Bill Bennett that was first noticed by Igor Volsky at Think Progress, Ryan reflected on his controversial poverty discussion at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

“We call it a poverty trap,” he explained. “There are incentives not to work, and to stay where you are.”

Ryan also pointed to the work of Charles Murray, a white nationalist, who has used “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“That’s this tailspin or spiral that we’re looking at in our communities,” he told Bennett. “Your buddy Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those guys have written books on this.”

Here’s Charles Murray. The skinny on Murray is that he spends one helluva lot of time explaining why the incredibly racist arguments he makes aren’t really racist. He’s not the sort of guy you want someone calling “your buddy” in any sort of matter of fact way. He’s probably best known for The Bell Curve, a racist book that argued that minorities were less intelligent than whites. The book was all the rage on the right for a bit back in the ’90s, until everyone realized that the embrace of it proved everything everyone ever said about just how bigoted the Republican Party and the conservative movement had become.

And there goes my last shred of respect for Paul Ryan (although a thin shred was really all I had anyway). “Lazy,” in conjunction with “inner city,” is code for racial stereotypes that would’ve gone out of style in the ’60s, if clowns like Ryan didn’t keep ripping the scab off white segregationist grievances for petty political gain. He proves both that Republican willingness to pander to racists knows no bottom and that Ryan’s own shamelessness is infinite. If you doubt that Ryan speaks for the GOP, just sit back for a bit and count how many of them call him out for this. My money’s on zero.

If Ryan and the rest of the GOP want people to buy into their pretense of “rebranding,” it’d be a big help if they stopped blowing that dogwhistle so damned hard.

John McCain demands Ted Cruz apologize to Sen. McCain… I mean, to Bob Dole

Houston Chronicle: Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) called on Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz to apologize Friday for a joke Cruz made about retired senator Bob Dole of Kansas at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday.

“All of us remember President Dole, and President McCain and President Romney,” Cruz said. “Now, look, those are good men, they’re decent men, but when you don’t stand and draw a clear distinction, when you don’t stand for principle, Democrats celebrate.”

Cruz’s speech encouraged CPAC attendees to “stand with principle.”  Dole, McCain, and Romney, all of whom had unsuccessful presidential bids, were the butt of Cruz’s joke that was intended to exemplify Republicans who did not draw a clear distinction between them and their Democratic opposition.

In an interview Friday morning with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC, McCain, a close friend of the 90-year-old Dole, criticized Cruz, saying that any joke about an injured veteran not having principle was in poor taste and that he needs to issue an apology.

“…When he throws Bob Dole in there, I wonder if he thinks that Bob Dole stood for principle on that hilltop in Italy when he was so gravely wounded and left part of his body there fighting for our country,” McCain said. “Bob Dole is such a man of honor and integrity and principle. I hope that Ted Cruz will apologize to Bob Dole because that’s — that has crossed a line that to me that leaves the realm of the politics and discourse that we should have in America.”

Let’s be honest here; McCain’s not talking about the “Pres. Dole” crack, he’s upset about “Pres. McCain.” McCain — being McCain — is butthurt that Cruz made an example of him as a bad candidate who lost because he was a RiNO. He just thinks it looks better to demand an apology on behalf of someone else, rather than himself. What he’s clearly hoping for are words to the effect of “I apologize for a joke I told at CPAC.”

But how stupid was Cruz’s statement in the first place? The candidates who ran in all those election were chosen by Republican voters. The sort of candidate that Ted Cruz argues is able to win presidential elections can’t even win Republican primaries. If they could, the names he’d be referencing would be names like Santorum, Brownback, and Gramm. It’s a silly argument and McCain would make a much better case against it by pointing out the gaping logical hole in it.

Instead, McCain makes it personal. This leaves the weakest part of the argument standing, in order to play a cheap victim card. It’s an argument that the Republican Party would do well to kill — and the Arizona senator is in a position to help do just that — but everything is all about John McCain and his intense desire that Ted Cruz get off his lawn.

[photo by Gage Skidmore]

Attendence of CPAC panel demonstrates what GOP base really think of minority voters

Crickets chirp as tumbleweeds roll through — and somewhere, the long, lonesome howl of a wolf is heard. That is one ghost town of a panel.

“CPAC organized a panel on minority outreach – an ongoing problem for the Republican Party and its base – and few thought the subject was worth their time,” explains Steve Benen. “…This is no way for a movement or a party to deal with a demographic problem that’s only going to get worse for the right.”

That picture is a Kirlian photo of the racist soul of the GOP. No one showed up, because no one cares. And no one cares because they’re all certain that minorities are mostly welfare queens and food stamp shoppers, Mitt Romney’s 47% makers-not-takers, and the fewer there are at the polls, the better. If there was a panel on voter ID (and there might be, I didn’t check) it’d be busting at the seams.

The base isn’t interested in voter outreach, because they want to keep minorities away from the polls. And if that means the impending demographic doom of the Republican Party, then no one deserves that doom more. If they only want white voters, then they’re only going to get white voters.

That’s not going to work out well for them.

After censure threat, Issa apologizes for silencing dem colleague Cummings

San Diego Union-Tribune: A chastened Rep. Darrell Issa says he has apologized to a fellow senior lawmaker for abruptly cutting off his microphone during a hearing Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Issa, R-Vista, said he made a personal apology on Thursday to the man he silenced, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

“Mr. Cummings is a member of Congress who works very hard for his constituents,” he said.
Issa’s remarks came during a telephonic conversation with U-T San Diego after a House condemnation resolution pressed by Democrats earlier in the day failed to pass.

The resolution called for sanctioning Issa for “the offensive and disrespectful manner” in which he conducted the hearing on Capitol Hill. The resolution failed on a vote of 211-186 as House Republicans refused to back it.

Video of the incident is above.

Seems Issa was worried that his own shameful and disrespectful actions were getting more press than his kangaroo court of a committee and his heroic efforts to flog this dead IRS horse. But it’s hard to see how he’s going to get any traction with this anywhere but on Fox News, since his witchhunt is so lousy at turning up witches that even he’s getting irritated by it. You don’t literally shut down debate when your argument is a slam dunk, after all.

You do it when you know you’ve got nothing.

GOP Civil War will soon be televised

Talking Points Memo: Fox’s monopoly on conservative cable news may soon come to an end.

A Bloomberg Businessweek profile published Thursday revealed Newsmax.com founder and CEO Christopher Ruddy’s plans to expand beyond his highly-trafficked website and influential magazine into television with a 24-hour cable news channel called NewsmaxTV — described as a “kinder, gentler Fox” — launching as early as June.

“Our goal is to be a little more boomer-oriented, more information-based rather than being vituperative and polarizing,” Ruddy told the magazine.

Business-wise, this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Demographic trends show that Republicanism — kinder and gentler or not — isn’t exactly a growth industry. Why you’d want to compete with Fox for an ever-shrinking piece of the pie is a bit of a mystery. Maybe a show on Fox or a syndicated Sunday morning yack show, ala “Meet the Press,” but 24 hours of “Gee, but aren’t Republicans swell”? Yeah, I’m not seeing the genius behind this particular business model.

Still, if conservatives want to start whacking away at Fox News, I can’t say I’m against the idea. But Fox is aimed straight at the brainless ‘bagger base, while it sounds like NewsmaxTV would be aimed more at the people that National Review used to try to attract — i.e., conservatives who take a moment to think about things — before they too decided that the gullible and easily riled dummies were easier to milk. That audience that Ruddy seems to want to appeal to may have passed on with Reagan — that is, the real Reagan, not the cartoonish Reagan ‘bagger’s worship now. That audience would be the Reagan/Dole/Kemp conservatives. Or as Tea Partiers call them these days, “RiNOs.”

The GOP Civil War might take to the upper channels of cable, but you’ve got to wonder how long it’ll last.

Obama: ‘16 presidential race not as important right now as midterms

Reuters: President Barack Obama gently chided Democratic donors on Wednesday for paying too much attention to the next presidential race in 2016 and not enough attention to the upcoming midterm elections in 2014.

Reminding Democrats at a fundraiser in Boston that “we got whalloped” in the 2010 midterms, when Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Obama warned that “it could happen again if we don’t fight on behalf of the things we care about in this election.”

“No one could be more invested than me in having a Democrat succeed me,” Obama told about 70 supporters at a dinner where tickets cost $5,000 to $20,000. But he stressed to Democrats they need to invest time, money and energy on the November midterms.

“In the midterms, Democrats too often don’t vote. Too often, when there’s not a presidential election, we don’t think it’s sexy, we don’t think it’s interesting, people tune out,” Obama said.

Of course, he’s right. Democrats’ biggest problem is turnout. The way things go right now, if there’s a Winter Olympics that year, Republicans do well; if there’s Summer Olympics, Democrats do well. For some reason, Democratic voters are much more likely to show up for the “big game” on leap year than at any other time.

If Democrats could convince voters that every game is the big game, Republicans would be wrecked in election after election. Republicans turn out much more consistently than Democrats; meaning that off-year elections go to Republicans by default, not by effort. Americans haven’t elected (as opposed to reelected) a Republican President since Bush senior (Bush junior lost the 2000 popular vote) — and even then, Bush the Elder was a quasi-incumbent as Reagan’s Vice President. Without the power of incumbency, Republicans are screwed in Presidential election years, because America as a whole is a blue state — that is, when the voters that make it a blue state bother to show up.

Democrats and liberals would be a lot better off letting 2016 take care of itself — they’re all but guaranteed a win, anyway — and take all that energy and put it into 2014. If Democrats could figure out how to replicate presidential year voting turn out, eventually there would be no Republican Party to speak of. They’d be a permanent minority in both houses of congress, in much the same way that they’re currently all but shut out of the White House.

Earth to gay marriage opponents: It’s over. You lose

Washingto Post: Half of all Americans believe that gay men and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll in which a large majority also said businesses should not be able to deny serving gays for religious reasons.

Fifty percent say the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection gives gays the right to marry, while 41 percent say it does not.

Beyond the constitutional questions, a record-high 59 percent say they support same-sex marriage, while 34 percent are opposed, the widest margin tracked in Post-ABC polling.

It’s important to note that the number of people who say they support marriage equality is higher than the percentage who say the Constitution requires it. If you believe that the right to marry is written into the Constitution, you can still be grudgngly homophobic; i.e., “OK, you win. It’s a constitutional right. But I still don’t have to like it.” That a huge majority supports marriage equality — despite the fact that they don’t all believe it’s a constitutional right — says a lot about the acceptance of the LGBT community at large.

But the holdouts are Republicans. Greg Sargent notes, “opposition to gay marriage among Republicans seems to be concentrated among the Tea Party. According to the Post polling team, Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who support the Tea Party oppose gay marriage by 54-38. By contrast, non-Tea Party Republicans and GOP-leaners support gay marriage by 57-36. Tea Party Republicans are often said to be more libertarian-leaning on social issues than other segments of the GOP base (such as evangelicals), but a majority of them still opposes same-sex marriage.”

So the ‘baggers are “Libertarian” — only, without all that pesky liberty.

“All of this sheds more light on the question of whether Republicans need to evolve their party to keep in step with diversifying America,” he goes on. “As Ron Brownstein and Dem pollster Stan Greenberg have suggested, Dems may continue to profit politically in national elections from the GOP inability to broaden its appeal to segments of the electorate that include ‘diverse America’ and the portions of white America ‘who are comfortable with diverse America.’ If this is right, then on gay rights, the GOP continues to be captive to a base that shows no signs of wanting to move into that latter category.”

This is really another example of how gerrymandering is making the GOP a regional party. By drawing lines around the people most likely to vote for them, Republicans are basically choosing which people they’ll represent. And that smallminded, bigoted population is becoming narrower and more isolated on issue after issue after issue.

It says a lot about Republican ideals when they have to actually seek out the most hateful and gullible voters in order to maintain a fingerhold on power. When the only motivations to vote fore you are meanness and ignorance, your ideas can’t possibly be any good.

[photo by Elvert Barnes]

Accusations of sex harassment nothing new for ALEC’s man in Wisconsin

PR Watch: Assembly Majority Leader Bill Kramer, a stalwart of the American Legislative Exchange Council, has been accused of sexually harassing two women while in Washington, D.C. last week for a Wisconsin GOP fundraiser. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the 49-year-old Republican lawmaker physically and verbally harassed a 33-year-old female lobbyist at the fundraising event and another woman on the plane back to Wisconsin…

Kramer’s office staff released a statement indicating that the boss was checking into rehab, but a little counseling may not be enough. This is not the first time that this type of allegation has been made about Kramer. Republican State Representative Chris Kapenga warned his caucus that Kramer was a loose cannon after he engaged in similar conduct at an ALEC meeting in Chicago last August.

According to news reports, Kramer shrugged off the allegations: “I have heard that something happened at ALEC, and everybody I’ve talked to said they heard something inappropriate happened at ALEC,” Kramer said. “I haven’t run into anybody that saw something inappropriate happen at ALEC. Apparently, I had a pretty good time.”

Kramer is an ALEC pointman in the Wisconsin legislature. He supported Voter ID, telecom deregulation, anti-consumer tort legislation, the repeal of collective bargaining rights for state workers and more. He also supported radical restrictions on a woman’s right to choose, including a state mandated ultrasound before terminating a pregnancy.

The cocky Kramer, who likes to use Wisconsin’s new concealed carry law to reportedly carry a Glock semiautomatic onto the floor of the Assembly, will face a vote on Tuesday designed to strip him of his leadership position and ease him out of office.

OK, so here’s the timeline here: the Assembly GOP were warned that Kramer was a pig (and apparently a bit of a nutjob) in September of 2013. In January of 2014, they elected him Assembly Majority Leader (think Eric Cantor’s equivalent in the Wisconsin legislature). They knew that he’d been accused of sexual harassment before, but they went ahead and elected him anyway.

These accusations are so serious that it’s highly likely that he’ll be removed from his leadership post tomorrow. Wait, did I say the accusations were serious? I’m sorry, I meant the bad publicity is serious.

Obviously, Wisconsin Republicans don’t take this sort of thing seriously at all. If they did, Bill Kramer would never have gotten the leadership post in the first place.

WI GOP lawmakers will vote to remove Assembly majority leader in sex harassment scandal

Reuters: Wisconsin Republican lawmakers will attempt to remove Assembly Majority Leader Bill Kramer from his leadership post after two women accused him of sexual harassment last week, according to local media on Sunday.

The Republican caucus in the Assembly will vote on Tuesday on whether to oust Kramer, according to a statement released by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to Wispolitics.com.

“It is clear he has lost our trust and confidence,” Vos said in the statement.

Calling this “sexual harassment” is probably underselling this, since Kramer is accused of groping at least one of the women during a lobbyist’s fundraiser in DC. If that’s not some degree of assault, then it certainly should be.

Since the accusations broke, Kramer has reportedly gone into “treatment" for some sort of disorder. History shows (i.e., Anthony Weiner, Bob Filner) that this sort of attempt to turn popularity-deflating scandal into a sympathy-gaining disability doesn’t actually work so well. That these guys keep reaching for that particular escape hatch suggests a lack of imagination, options, or both. In any case, Kramer’s days as Assembly Majority Leader are pretty certainly numbered.

And the fact that Republicans are moving so quickly on this shows that they really want to get this out of the headlines as quickly as possible. One Wisconsin Republican scandal at a time seems to be about all they’re capable of handling. The party may not be all that comfortable about 2014.

[photo by bloomsberries]

Top WI GOP lawmaker under fire for alleged sexual harassment

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Assembly Majority Leader Bill Kramer may resign from his leadership post as soon as Saturday after being accused of sexually harassing at least two women while in Washington, D.C., for a GOP fundraiser.

Sources said the allegations against the 49-year-old Republican lawmaker involve a 33-year-old female lobbyist and at least one other woman. The Journal Sentinel has decided not to name the women.

Kramer, 49, could not be reached for comment and was not at his Waukesha home Friday night. His chief of staff, Cameron Sholty, said the lawmaker would be meeting with staff Saturday and would be talking with fellow Republican lawmakers over the next 48 hours. He declined to comment further.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos issued a statement calling the alleged conduct “reprehensible.” He said the issue would be resolved quickly.

"Recently I was made aware of serious allegations regarding inappropriate behavior by Rep. Kramer. Since I learned of those allegations I have been consulting with legal counsel and other legislators to understand what options are available.

"The alleged behavior is reprehensible and won’t be tolerated."

According to the report, “Kramer is accused of groping at least one of the women and making lewd and inappropriate remarks to at least two women.” War on Women? Well, Kramer’s engaged in hand-to-hand combat, so…

Along with the recent release of emails from the first John Doe probe, it’s becoming awfully clear that Republicans in Wisconsin are one scuzzy bunch of racists and sexists. Hell, it’s even hard to argue that they’re not just anti-human.

If state Democrats don’t make 2014 at least partially about character and morals, it’ll be political malpractice. So many of these people have none.

O’Reilly distills conservative cluelessness about race down to one perfect moment of stupid

Talking Points Memo: Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Thursday advised Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett to get “gangsta rappers” like Jay Z and Kanye West to say their behavior is wrong if the White House really wants to improve minority communities.

President Barack Obama had invited O’Reilly to the launch of his new initiative called “My Brother’s Keeper” earlier Thursday. The program aims to create opportunities and improve conditions for young minority men, but O’Reilly said he doesn’t believe the White House sees the “urgency” of the situation in the streets.

"You have to attack the fundamental disease if you want to cure it," O’Reilly told Jarrett. "Now I submit to you that you’re gonna have to get people like Jay Z, Kanye West, all these gangsta rappers to knock it off."

"They idolize these guys with the hats on backwards, and the terrible rap lyrics and the drug and all of that," he continued, adding that high-profile figures need to hammer young people with that message to "reverse the peer pressure."

O’Reilly also challenged First Lady Michelle Obama to come on “The Factor” and tell teenage girls “You stop having sex. You stop getting pregnant. This is wrong.”

In O’Reilly’s world the biggest stumbling block for African-Americans is other African-Americans, with whites mere observers to some sort of cultural self-destruction they have absolutely nothing at all to do with. It’s a view that seems to be shared by your average conservative — racism is over and any problems that black people may face are now the fault of black people. “I’m not racist,” a typical rightwinger might say, “but black people are all the same.”

Worse, minority attempts to improve situation are always attacked as “reverse racism” or some sort of plot to steal money and power from white people (see ACORN). Income inequality isn’t a thing. Institutional racism in the criminal justice system isn’t a thing. Ongoing discrimination in hiring and pay isn’t a thing.

But kids listening to “guys with the hats on backward” — now that’s a thing. And O’Reilly is so damned smugly proud of himself for spouting this marshmallow fluff inanity that he practically craps himself with joy.

"[I]t’s yet another demonstration of the rules both prominent and ordinary black people have to live with," writes Paul Waldman. “Unlike white Americans, they are subject to an entirely different and far more wide-ranging kind of responsibility. A black senator has to answer for the remarks of every black activist, black musicians are responsible for the actions of every wayward teenager, and black people everywhere carry with them a thousand sins committed by others. That burden isn’t just psychological; as we’ve seen in cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, it can be deadly.”

It’s no wonder Bill O’Reilly has such a masterful grasp of the conservative mindset when it comes to race. Who better than a simpleminded clown to embody such a simpleminded understanding of America?

Walker’s reassurances less than reassuring

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Gov. Scott Walker said in an interview Monday that there is no private email system in the governor’s office similar to the one that existed in his office when he was Milwaukee County executive.

He also said that as governor he has complied with laws that restrict public servants from mingling their official duties with campaign activity.

Walker once again refused to say whether as county executive he knew of or used a secret email system set up in his office to avoid public scrutiny.

On Monday he called it a “slippery slope” to answer specifics about the more than 27,000 records released last week, because “once you start on one thing, then there’s hundreds of questions on each of those.”

OK, so first off he said he didn’t know about the first router. So how can he say with such certaintly there is no router now? There could be a bunch of blinking LEDs above the ceiling tiles right now and apparently clueless Scooter would have no idea that the modem is there. Which take are we supposed to believe here: that you’re too dumb to know what’s going on in your own office or that you have a complete understanding of everything going on in your office? Because there’s sort of a logical conflict going on there.

Second, you probably don’t want to use the “slippery slope” argument in this situation, because now we’re all wondering what new questions it is that you’re trying to avoid being asked. Walker’s not making this all go away with this dodge, he’s actually making it seem even more likely that he’s covering something up. “If I start talking about the secret email system, then I’ll have to answer questions about the contact list and — hoo-boy — do I ever want to avoid explaining that, let me tell you!”

Walker’s “lie low and hope everything blows over” strategy is failing spectacularly — not in the least because Walker himself keeps wandering out of “no comment” territory and stirring everything up again.

What Scott Walker has in common with a certain recently deposed Ukrainian criminal

If you ever come across a “gee, but Scott Walker is swell!” comment under a news story, blog post, or Reddit comment thread, assume it’s paid propaganda and call the commenter out for it — not because the odds show it’s likely to be true, but because actions like this deserve profoundly negative consequences:

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: In the heat of the 2010 governor’s race, Scott Walker urged both county employees and campaign aides to go to news websites and post comments promoting him and his record, newly unsealed documents show.

It was just such anonymous posts by a county worker on campaign issues that prompted prosecutors to expand a secret “John Doe” investigation — launched to probe into missing money in a veterans fund — to also examine whether taxpayer dollars were being used illegally to finance political operations.

In one instance in May 2010, for example, a close ally posted online a portion of a Walker email almost verbatim on a Journal Sentinel story just minutes after receiving the directive. Walker had sent the note to an inner circle that included county administrators as well as campaign operatives.

Tapping out a message on his campaign Blackberry on the afternoon of May 4, 2010, Walker urged county aides, campaign staffers and other trusted volunteers to go to an online Journal Sentinel business story and respond to critics of his plan to privatize the airport in the comments section below the story.

The legitimacy of pro-Walker statements online need to be challenged, because this sort of activity is the very definition of state-sponsored propaganda. It’s also just a hair short of sock puppetry, making it extremely dishonest. If the people who pull this sort of thing wind up worse off because of it, then they’ll stop doing it. So, when an online comment goes something like, “Yah but Walker is so awesome, too!” then just go ahead and assumed they’re on the guv’s payroll.

And this credibility problem is what Scott Walker has in common with a certain corrupt Ukrainian politician, currently on the run from his own people.

Buzzfeed: Several conservative bloggers repeated talking points given to them by a proxy group for the Ukrainian government — and at least one writer was paid by a representative of the Ukrainian group, according to documents and emails obtained by BuzzFeed.

The Ukrainian campaign began in the run-up to high-stakes Ukrainian parliamentary elections last year, and sought to convince skeptical American conservatives that the pro-Russian Party of Regions, led by President Viktor Yanukovych, deserved American support. During that period, articles echoing Ukrainian government talking points appeared on leading conservative online outlets, including RedState, Breitbart, and Pajamas Media.

The emails and documents, which include prepackaged quotes from election officials and talking points that some writers copied nearly word-for-word, offer a glimpse into how foreign governments dodge tight Justice Department regulations on foreign propaganda to covertly lobby in the United States: The payments were routed through a front group in Belgium to an American consultant, who has urged writers not to cooperate with a reporter investigating the campaign.

The model resembles a recent stealth campaign in which bloggers were paid by the Malaysian government to write favorable stories, though the Ukraine campaign appears to have involved smaller sums of money.

So there’s the common thread: American conservatives on the turd-polishing payroll. At this point, there’s ample evidence that a lot of opinion-making on the right is paid propaganda BS — so really, if you take any of it without a massive grain of salt, you’re literally a grade-A, first-class chump. But take a look at the company Wisconsin’s embattled governor keeps on this one: gangsters and dictators.

I wouldn’t trust this guy. And that advice comes unbought, by the way.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Walker's John Doe Death Spiral

Phil Hands, Wisconsin State Journal.