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Teabaggers Try To ‘Flush’ Graham Out Of GOP; Graham Responds: ‘If You Don’t Like’ Moderates, ‘You Can Leave’

By Lee Fang on Oct 13, 2009 at 7:45 pm

In April, former Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (PA) switched his party affiliation to caucus with the Democrats after being targeted by right-wing activists and others within the GOP. Shortly before his departure, an anti-Obama tea party rally focused its attention at Specter, hate radio host Rush Limbaugh demanded that Specter be “flushed” out of the party. A campaign with the theme “Benedict Arnold” subsequently harassed Specter for voting for the stimulus.

Now, after voting to confirm Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and expressing a willingness to build a compromise approach to clean energy legislation, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) appears to be the new target of tea party activists. At a Graham town hall in Greenville yesterday, activist Harry Kimball of “RINO HUNT” protested by constructing a display that depicted Graham, as well as moderates like Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), being flushed down a toilet:

KIMBALL: This is for every RINO who has failed to represent us. [...] [the toilet represents] flushing them, flushing them.

One attendee of the event asked the senator, “when are you going to announce that you are switching parties?” The question drew loud applause from the crowd. Graham defended himself, and denounced the influence of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) on the Republican party:

GRAHAM: I’m going to grow this party, I’m not going to let it get [inaudible], I’m not going to let it be hijacked by Ron Paul. [...] I’m going to find people in Maine, Delaware, Illinois, other places–

AUDIENCE: Move there!

GRAHAM: That can win as Republicans, and I’m going to go up, and we’re going to move this party, and this country forward, and if you don’t like it, you can leave.

Watch it:

Angry attendees in the crowd interrupted Graham with cries of, “You’re a country club Republican,” “Sotomayor!,” and “You lie.” Outside the event, right-wing activist Julliet Kozak picketed the town hall with a sign decrying all “Unconstitutional Anti-Christ Socialist Federal Deficit Spending Programs.” She explained that she opposes what Graham is “doing in our Congress, what he’s doing to our country.”

Graham’s fellow South Carolina senator Jim DeMint (R) was an outspoken proponent of ejecting Specter from the Republican Party. DeMint told a conservative blogger Specter “cut our knees from under us.” He added that conservatives in the Senate need to aggressively “go after” Specter and other GOP moderates.

Update

According to the newspaper The State, Graham repeatedly responded to those who accused him of being a “traitor” to “chill out.” One man told Graham he had “betrayed” conservatism and made a “pact with the devil” by working with Democrats.

“We’re not going to be the party of angry white guys,” Graham said to even more shouts. Some people walked out during Graham’s speech after he told them, “if you don’t like it, you can leave.”


Update

,Brad Johnson rounds up the conservative blogosphere’s reaction to Graham.


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Economy

Bartlett Schools Kudlow: Tax Cuts Would Have Done No Good Whatsoever For Our Economic Problems

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 13, 2009 at 7:45 pm

When reports emerged that the Obama administration was looking at additional spending measures to spur job creation in the wake of September’s employment report, Republicans immediately claimed that the administration was simply “preparing to push for more of the same flawed tax-and-spend policies,” while advocating yet another variation of its standard collection of tax cuts.

But Bruce Bartlett — former economic adviser to President Reagan and a Treasury Official under President Bush Sr. — hasn’t gone down that road and thinks that the Republican party “no longer has a credible economic policy.” He’s particularly put off that the party “continues to advocate tax cuts even though the recent Bush tax cuts led to only mediocre economic growth and huge deficits.”

“So much of what passes for conservatism today is just pure partisan opposition,” Bartlett has said. “What remains is a caricature — that there is no problem that more and bigger tax cuts won’t solve.” And when CNBC’s supply-side ideologue Larry Kudlow (a former Reagan official himself) asked Bartlett whether tax cuts would have been preferable to stimulus spending, Bartlett replied with this:

I don’t think tax cuts would have done any good whatsoever for the current economic problems that we have today. The problem is workers don’t have incomes to tax, because they’re unemployed, corporations don’t have profits to tax, because they’re losing money, and investors are sitting on huge capital losses, not capital gains…I think that today we have the same set of problems that we had in the 1930′s with a lack of demand, and we need to get monetary policy mobilized and that requires spending in the economy to increase and that’s what will get us out of the crisis.

Watch it:

Bartlett certainly befuddled Kudlow, who could only say “I don’t understand your analysis…What is it you’re saying here?”

But Bartlett is absolutely right — private spending has collapsed, consumers are saving more than ever, and government is the only entity available to fill the output gap, or the difference between what the U.S. is able to produce and what it’s able to sell. And with unemployment still creeping upward (and the underemployment rate at 17 percent), its becoming clearer that current spending still may not be filling that gap.

According to a new Economic Policy Institute-Hart Research poll, 71 percent of Americans support putting unemployed people back to work at government-funded public service jobs that help meet community needs (the number actually rises to 74 percent when the example of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps is invoked). With so many idle resources, it simply makes sense for them to be employed in a useful manner, a notion which Bartlett accepts, much to Kudlow’s chagrin.

Of course, even Kudlow doesn’t actually have any problem with government spending — as long as that spending is concentrated on Wall Street.

Related Posts

Politics

Federal authorities investigating anti-Obama Nazi message on Massachusetts golf course.

By Faiz Shakir on Oct 13, 2009 at 6:40 pm

The U.S. Secret Service and the FBI are investigating an incident at a Lakeville, Massachusetts golf course, in which vandals etched “I” above a swastika and “Obama” on the green. The Boston Herald reports that vandals used the heels of their shoes or cleats to scrape the message into the grass:

9db27f613e_ltpSwastika101309

“We investigate these cases thoroughly,” said Steven Ricciardi, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Boston office. Authorities say the incident “likely constitutes a hate crime, whether the culprits meant it as a prank or not.”

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 13, 2009 at 6:14 pm

Jet propelled back home, from over the seas to the U.S.A.:

— Excellent bit of food science writing explains boiling eggs.

— Cost-shifting onto private insurers is largely a myth.

— Obama administration admitting defeat on corporate tax reform.

— New GOP website claims Jackie Robinson as “Republican hero” ignoring his denunciation of Barry Goldwater, the entire post-64 party, and the conservative movement.

— PWC distances itself from PWC study.

Back in the USA with Chuck Berry’s “Back in the USA”.

Climate Progress

The BBC asks “What happened to global warming?” during the hottest decade in recorded history!

By Joe Romm on Oct 13, 2009 at 5:42 pm

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif

Existential question of the day:  How can Paul Hudson’s byline be “Climate correspondent, BBC News” when his ‘reporting‘ doesn’t correspond to the climate, which continues to warm?

It is tiresome debunking yet another poor researched article by a media outlet that has historically had a great deal of credibility [see "NYT's Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation"].  The BBC headline inanely asks “What happened to global warming?”  Answer — it keeps on keepin’ on:

And those posts were just projections from December 2008, before factoring in the record warming we’re seeing this year (see “NASA reports hottest June to September on record“).  The figure above is from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  The solid red line is the five-year mean, which is obviously a better view of the climate picture, as opposed to the highly variable annual data.  NASA used the “January-September (9 months) mean” for the 2009 data point.  The hottest year on record is 2005, and 2009 is likely to be close to the second hottest years of 2007 and 1998.

But Hudson is a Brit, so he (sort of) uses the data from the Met Office aka Hadley Center in his lede:

Read more

Yglesias

A Terrible Argument Against Congestion Pricing

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 13, 2009 at 5:31 pm

Traffic Jam

Via Ryan Avent, David Owen says that congestion pricing would be bad for the environment because traffic jams inspire people to take transit instead of driving.

This is, in my view, a very silly line of argument. It’s probably true that you could construct a model of a situation in which congestion pricing increases the net quantity of driving. But if that situation exists, and you want to change it, then there are lots of good policy options available. You could use the revenue from congestion pricing to finance more attractive transit options. Or you could take advantage of the reduce congestion to start taking lanes away from private automobiles and building bike and bus lanes. You could do all kinds of things.

The main point I would make is that the issue of whether or not you should congestion-price roadways is more-or-less at right angles with the question of how much your public infrastructure should promote driving versus cycling or transit or walking or anything else. The point of congestion-pricing is that the most efficient way to manage the scarce resource of space on crowded streets during peak hours is via a congestion price. That’s true no matter how much or how little driving you’re hoping to see. If you want people to drive less, the thing to do is to build narrower roads and invest in transit and bike infrastructure. If you want people to drive more, the thing to do is to build narrower roads and be stingy on transportation alternatives. But either way if you want to avoid productivity-killing traffic jams you ought to charge people for driving at peak hours.

Security

Hate Group Spokesperson Joins Bandwagon To Hinder Noncitizen Census Count

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Oct 13, 2009 at 5:30 pm

KentWhile Sens. David Vitter (R-LA) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) fight to include an amendment in the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill that would require the US Census Bureau to add a question about immigration status to its 2010 survey, hate group spokesperson Phil Kent has added his voice to the mix. Kent, a spokesperson for Americans for Immigration Control (AIC) and board member of its 501(c)(4) arm, was featured in an op-ed debate on the census in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today.

Kent’s general argument echoes that of Vitter, Bennett, and others. In their view, counting undocumented immigrants in the US Census will hurt predominantly Republican states because blue states with large populations of “illegal aliens” will steal their states’ representatives:

That principle [Wesberry v. Sanders] is being shamelessly violated in next year’s census. The Democrat-controlled Congress has abdicated its constitutional responsibility by giving a wink and a nod to the influx of illegal immigrants “concentrating the power” of voters in California, Texas and a few other states where Democrats seek demographic political advantage over Republicans.

The Constitution requires that representation be determined by an indiscriminate population count. That means that those who suggest that we shouldn’t count undocumented immigrants are essentially saying that there’s something wrong with the Constitution and that it should be changed. In the case that Kent cites, Wesberry v. Sanders, the Supreme Court decided that congressional districts have to be approximately equal in population. The majority decision does not draw a distinction between citizens and noncitizens, rather it reemphasizes the Constitution’s original intent of determining the allocation of Congressmen “solely by the number of the State’s inhabitants [emphasis added].”

In her counter op-ed, Afton Branche of the Drum Major Institute (DMI) explains that accurate census data is necessary in order to efficiently distribute federal funding and Community Development Block Grants that benefit all residents. DMI warns that the non-participation of undocumented immigrants could lead to inaccurate demographic information and result in costly mistakes in infrastructure, education, and healthcare planning.

Not only is Kent misguided, he misleads. Kent argues that if “liberal Democrat-dominated California” includes its “6 million illegal aliens,” it will gain a “whopping 57 House members in a newly reapportioned Congress.” However, earlier this year, the Pew Hispanic Research Center pointed out that California is home to about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, a 22% drop since 1990. The Public Policy Institute of California reports that many immigrants are leaving California, which could cost the state a House seat after the 2010 census is completed. Meanwhile, Kent’s homestate of Georgia has experienced an immigration influx and been identified as a “new immigrant destination.” According to some reports, Georgia is expected to gain a House seat.

Kent’s boss, AIC director John Vinson, claims that America is plagued by “europhobia” — racism that “targets Americans of European descent” and has called for the “secession of the former Confederate states in order to protect the racial purity and economic viability of the white middle class.” His organization cites safeguarding the “the racial and cultural composition of the United States” as one of its primary goals. Phil Kent served in as a press secretary and public affairs advisor to Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC).

Media

O’Reilly And Hume Claim Fox News Covered ‘All The Bad News That Came Out Of Iraq’

By Matt Corley on Oct 13, 2009 at 5:20 pm

Yesterday, former Special Report anchor Brit Hume helped lead the Fox News pushback against the White House’s charge that the network is “opinion journalism masquerading as news” and “often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” “If Fox News really were a GOP mouth piece, the White House would not be attacking it,” said Hume in a Special Report commentary. “It would feel no need to.”

Later that night, Hume joined Bill O’Reilly to continue defending the network’s news coverage. O’Reilly and Hume agreed that Fox “routinely hammered President Bush on Iraq” and was “very faithful about covering all the bad news that came out of Iraq”:

O’REILLY: Now you and I came up in the old school, where we were taught as a reporter you should be skeptical of everybody. I mean, that’s your job as a reporter.

HUME: Right.

O’REILLY: To be skeptical, skeptical of the Democrats, skeptical of the Republicans. It doesn’t really matter. And I have to say that when President Bush was in trouble in Iraq, this network and this program and your program, as well, routinely, routinely hammered President Bush on Iraq.

HUME: Well, we certainly — we were very faithful about covering all the bad news that came out of Iraq.

O’REILLY: Absolutely.

“There was no cheerleading of President Bush on this network when his administration ran into trouble,” claimed O’Reilly. Watch it:

O’Reilly and Hume appear to have a selective memory when it comes to their cheerleading of the Bush administration. When Hume stepped down from the Special Report anchor chair, he marveled that Bush had put America on “an amazing” foreign policy “path.” During his time at Fox, Hume repeatedly spun bad news for Bush and pushed misleading information that bolstered the Bush administration’s faulty case for invading Iraq. Perhaps this is one reason why a 2003 study found that 80 percent of those who primarily relied on Fox News believed falsehoods about why we went into Iraq.

When it came to Iraq war coverage, O’Reilly explained his philosophy on his radio show in June 2007 after the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Fox covered the war less than CNN and MSNBC. Claiming that Fox’s competitors were reporting on violence “because they want to embarrass the Bush administration,” O’Reilly said, “Do you care if another bomb went off in Tikrit? Does it mean anything? No!” “There’s little news value in broadcasting daily bombings,” O’Reilly added on his Fox show.

Transcript: Read more

Health

A Robust Cap On Out-Of-Pocket Costs Would Ensure Meaningful Access To Care For All Americans

By Guest Blogger on Oct 13, 2009 at 5:00 pm

Our guest blogger is Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and sponsor of HR 676 (“Medicare for All”).

conyersIn his speech last month, President Obama explained that his ideal health care reform plan would include a cap on out of pocket costs because “in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.” A recent study has found that health care costs contributed to 62 percent of bankruptcies in 2007 – despite the fact that three quarters of bankruptcy filers owned health insurance. The President’s call to action could not be more timely.

To its credit, Congress has taken strong steps to address this issue. In addition to providing subsidies to low-income Americans and mandating that insurance companies cover a certain percentage of a consumer’s total health care costs, both the House and Senate’s reform bills include provisions that would cap family out-of-pocket costs. Once this cap is exceeded, the health insurer would be required to pick up the tab for any remaining health care expenses.

The three versions of the House’s bill, H.R. 3200, would cap yearly in-network out-of -pocket costs at $5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a family. Similarly, both bills currently being considered in the Senate would cap these costs at $5,950 for an individual and $11,900 for a family. While these caps are considerably better than the status quo –many employer-provided plans lack any sort of cap on out-of-pocket costs – they will likely leave many Americans vulnerable. In particular, working class families with incomes just high enough to disqualify them for subsidies would be at heightened risk to accumulate huge medical expenses.

For example, a high school teacher making approximately 500 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), or $54,150, would not qualify for subsidies and could pay up to 10 percent of his or her income on out-of-pocket costs if the House’s cap is adopted. The situation is similarly problematic for a family of three making 400 percent of FPL, or $73,240. Such a family could pay up to 14 percent of its income on out-of-pocket costs.

So what would an effective out-of-pocket cap look like? Earlier this summer, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Elizabeth Edwards noted in testimony before my own House Judiciary Committee that “even moderate levels of out-of-pocket spending relative to family income…created medical bill problems.” A study from the Center for Studying Health Systems Change found that financial pressures on families from medical bills increased sharply when out-of-pocket spending for health care services exceeded just 2.5 percent of family income. These statements and studies seem to reaffirm what most of us have known all along: that in these difficult economic times, asking cash-strapped Americans to pay thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs is simply not an option.

Read more

Yglesias

Physics and Metaphysics: Together at Last

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 13, 2009 at 4:45 pm

Construction_of_LHC_at_CERN

Richard Alleyne reports on the intriguing theory that Hibbs Bosons from the future are preventing the Large Hadron Collidor from working:

The pair’s hypothesis centres around the Higgs Boson, a mysterious tiny particle and building block of life that it is hoped the LHC will discover.

They have come up with a theory that it will “ripple backward through time” and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said.

Aha, I hear you saying, isn’t the idea of events in the future causing events in the past incoherent? Fortunately, I’m here to tell you that the answer is no. Way back in the July 1964 issue of Philosophical Review, Michael Dummett published “Bringing About the Past” which persuasively argued that backwards causation is just as conceptually sound as the idea of forwards causation. That said, it remains an open question of empirical science whether any actual examples of backwards causation exist.

Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya think that we may have such a situation on our hands, and they argue in “Test of Effect from Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Effect of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider” that the circumstances now exist to perform empirical tests to locate backward causation in action.

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