Monday, December 7, 2009

Watch out Boy Fogle, they are all around you

At last, The Palmetto State has hit the national average for something: gay couples living here.

UK magazine The Economist (which even Sarah Palin says she reads) has teamed up with the UCLA Williams Institute's demographers to see where American same-sex couples live. The national average is 4.7 couples per thousand. South Carolina falls right there.Here's a colorful map:

This week with Congressman Henry Brown.

The first district congressman had major initiatives on his plate this past week:

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Anglicans, standing on their heads

From Changing Attitudes, the state of play in the Anglican Communion now that LA has elected a lesbian bishop:

The Anglican Communion’s official stance means that it is committed to oppose the consecration of a partnered lesbian or gay bishop at all costs, but not to the execution or life imprisonment of a lesbian or gay person in Uganda nor imprisonment for 3 years of any family member, church member, priest or bishop who fails to denounce a know lesbian or gay person to the police within 24 hours.

Quote of the Day

TPM:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) addressed his former running mate Sarah Palin on Meet the Press this morning -- saying both that she's "irrelevant" and that "she's earned herself a very big place in the Republican political scene."

"I think that Sarah Palin is a -- has earned herself a very big place in the Republican political scene," McCain said. "I'm proud of her. I am entertained every time I see these people attack her and attack her and attack her. She's irrelevant, but they continue to attack her.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

"We don' need no stinkin' constitooshun"

AP:

ALBANY, NY - A Democrat who this week voted against legalizing homosexual "marriage" in New York says that for him there can be no separation of church and state. (See related article)

State Sen. Ruben Diaz, who helped defeat the measure, is a Pentecostal minister who pastors a conservative Hispanic congregation in the Bronx. He says, "I am the church. I am the state. How can I separate myself from myself?"

Yessirree, a serious "journalist"

Boy Fogle, whose paymasters' blog, The Palmetto Scoop, used to advertise itself as "Transforming SC Politics," and who's bitched in the past about bloggers not being included in federal journalist shield protection legislation denying protection to sources who want to be anonymous- while unleashing his flying search monkeys on bloggers-mostly gay- who annoyed him for not being attackable by name- while at the same time confessing he started out anonymous but decided he could get more earned media with his name but continuing giving space to anonymous contributors to his paymasters' blog- is shilling again for SC AttorneyGeneral and goober-natorial candidate Henry McMaster.

While in the past he's fluffed McMaster while not disclosing that his paymasters are the AG's campaign advisors, now he's fluffing his own boss without disclosing who sets the price and determines the services he will render:

“[W]ith the election nearly a year away and with such a large number of undecided voters, it’s too early to suggest that Jim Rex or any other Democratic candidate will run a close race with McMaster,” said McMaster strategist Richard Quinn in a statement. “And with the abysmal job Jim Rex is doing as Superintendent of Education, we welcome a comparison with the record of success Henry McMaster has achieved as Attorney General.”

Quinn said that Rasmussen was a highly respected pollster, but that internal data showed McMaster with an even stronger lead. He also noted that a large percentage of undecided voters would likely break Republican in the general election.

“Using history as a guide, in South Carolina, independent voters typically end up voting 70-75 percent Republican,” Quinn said. “That is very likely to happen again in November 2010. South Carolina is still a very strong Republican state.”

The GOP wants to help you by taking things away from you while claiming the Democrats are taking things away from you.

Today the Republicans in the US Senate failed in advancing one of their efforts to improve health care for Americans: eliminating $40 billion dollars from existing programs for giving the elderly in-home assistance so they don't have to move into nursing home farms.

Let's go ask DeMint about Aetna dropping 650,000 policy holders

h/t Jamie Sanderson:

HEALTH CARE REFORM RALLY

Tuesday December 8th 12 Noon

In Front of the office of Senator Jim DeMint

CUSTOM HOUSE 200 East Bay St. Charleston

Also rallies same day and time in Columbia and Greenville:

Columbia: 1901 Main St.

Greenville: 105 North Spring St.

Patrick C. Labbe RN MSN
SC State Coordinator
(843)814-0244

Even as they oppose a public plan, insurers can dump 600,000 sick people into the ranks of the uninsured with the stroke of a pen.

The Republican health plan is to require you to buy private insurance. Then the insurance companies send you a bill. You give them money. They'll decide, day to day, if you get anything in return.

That's it.

The company figures it will lose between 600,000 and 650,000 members next year because of the price hikes.

In a conference call with investment analysts to discuss the company's third-quarter earnings, Chair and CEO Ron Williams told analysts, "The pricing we put in place for 2009 turned out to not really be what we needed to achieve the results and margins that we had historically been delivering."

Aetna President Mark Bertolini laid out how the company planned to raise prices to improve the company's profit margin. He said the firm had "implemented a combination of underwriting enhancements, pricing actions and plan design changes, intended to ensure that each customer is priced to an appropriate margin."

Aetna's profit margin was 11.1% in 2007, 10.3% in 2008 and 6.9% in the third quarter of 2009.

He predicted that Aetna would lose between 300,000 and 350,000 members from national accounts -- large businesses in multiple states -- because of businesses looking for "near-term cost savings." They would lose another 300,000 in smaller group accounts, which are medium- to small-size businesses.

Laying out specific expected membership losses is "pretty candid," said David Gibbs, a retired health insurance industry consultant from San Luis Obispo, Calif. He worked for and consulted with health insurers, including Aetna, for 25 years, and most recently was with New Jersey-based Health Economics Consulting Group.

He said Aetna's decision comes from a system that encourages insurers to drive away sicker members -- a strategy not unique to one insurer. "They're running a business, and their obligation is a very singular one: to increase shareholder profits."

It Pays To Increase Your Word Power, with "Mande Wilkes"

So, Palin may be as toxic as she is roborant – deadly to Republicanism even as she is vital to its pet issue.

If only the GOP cold nominate eight or nine co-presidential candidates so we would vote on the whole coterie of crazy

Scenes from Mrs. Palin's Northern Virginia grip-and-grin:

As for the folks on line for the book signing, they knew exactly what to do with Palin. "She's got my vote," was a familiar refrain. But Palin was just one of many fantasy presidential tickets on the minds of the crowd, clearly still giddy from Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell's sweeping win a month ago. Rep. Mike Pence (IN), Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Jim DeMint (SC) were all on the shortlist. Exuberance was in abundance. Numerous people spoke of how Virginia was waking up to the "lies" Obama had spun on the campaign trail and said that the McDonnell victory proved things were "getting back to normal" in the state.

Why the Luv Guv won't be impeached, and a third of voters wish somebody else would run for the job

New Rasmussen Poll results released yesterday:

49% of South Carolina voters say Sanford should not be impeached, and they’re evenly divided over whether he should resign. Sixty-six percent (66%) believe his ethical standards are at least as good as most politicians.

In the governor's race, of the ten candidates, everybody is ahead of, or behind, somebody else.

Mrs. Palin's baby was cold, but it didn't seem to mind being in the Turkey Trot at Thanksgiving

Golly! A Palinist who ordinarily wouldn't give to slaps about corralling the media at a Republican convention gets all whingey about being on the receiving end from Mrs. Palin:

Curious to get a response from Hastings about the event in Norman, Oklahoma Watchdog spoke with an assistant manager who gave her name only as “Amanda.” She said no one was really available to give in-depth comments.

“It was a last minute decision,” Amanda said of Palin’s decision not to speak. “She had her son with her and it was so cold.”

So cold? For the former governor of Alaska? Hasn’t she been in dogsled races? I thought Palin loved the cold.

Somewhere, Idi Amin Dada is jabbing Hitler in the ribs and laughing

Box Turtle Bulletin is doing lots of heavy lifting covering the advancement of the Kill the Gays Bill in Uganda advanced by American Christianist evangelicals and Republican politicians. Under the bill, if you live in Uganda, know someone who's gay, and don't turn them in for trial and imprisonment, you yourself could get three years in the can. And if the government thinks a Ugandan national living abroad is gay, they can start extradition proceedings.

It's hard to see much difference between this advancing legal regime and that of the Nazi government in the war years. But the indifference of "civilized" nations seems much of a muchness.

Baucus put his employee/girlfriend up for US Attorney. Then he realized she'd have to leave DC.

Max Baucus, the wholly-owned senator from the insurance industry, turns out to have also been the Democrats' answer to his Nevada colleague, Jon Ensign. Well, except for the preening, Pharisee in the Temple religiosity and Senator Coburn acting as bagman.

When it comes to right-wing military types in Central America, DeMint puts out for free.

William Finnegan on the Honduran democracy whitewash:

But the coup leaders did have friends in Washington. Some were bought, like Lanny Davis, the former Clinton White House special counsel, now a lobbyist, who took them on as clients. Others were ideological. The latter group included conservative regional specialists like Otto Reich (whom I profiled when he was a Bush Administration official) and conservative congressional Republicans. Three congressional delegations travelled to Honduras to show their support for the coup. One was led by Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), who placed holds on two key Latin American diplomatic appointments to try to force a change in Administration policy toward Honduras.

These congressional jaunts to Honduras were extraordinary. Not only were our representatives consorting openly with putschists and a regime not recognized by any of the world’s governments, they were also thumbing their noses at U.S. policy and, specifically, at President Obama, on foreign soil. This is not done. It is, in fact, arguably illegal, under the Logan Act. U.S. Embassy officials in Honduras told me that they had never seen or heard of anything like it. The delegations even declined the help of the Embassy in arranging their local schedules. Embassy staff who had served in El Salvador during the civil war there recalled visits from liberal Democratic politicians who vehemently opposed Reagan-Bush support for the Salvadoran government and military. Even they, however, worked through the Embassy and kept a lid on their views while in-country. When overseas, it’s always, as they say, Team U.S.A. But not, apparently, for the likes of Senator DeMint or Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL).

Where's Trig and all the hanger-on relatives who got off the jet with her?

Billy Graham is now shilling for Mrs. Palin. At 90, he can't see much, or hear much, or walk much, but he can still be propped up for a photo op with the sort of hacks his son likes.

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Bless his heart, he just can't help himself...he's a Republican.

Only Anaconda could announce himself a fan of the gay-friendly TV comedy/musical Glee as having a a Sorkinesque level of intellectual and emotional engagement", before slagging the gay character:

Even the overdone teen pregnancy plot line and token gay cast member somehow manage to transcend their annoying redundancy in Glee, which is something we never thought we’d say about an overdone teen pregnancy plot … let alone a token gay cast member.

Willie, you'll recall, periodically dismisses gay people as birth defects, and lately has been blaming it on Mande, his imaginary friend who lives in his thumb. But compare the overblown prose in his post to the latest Mandegram. They're indistinguishable.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Somewhere, President Harding is saying, "Makes perfect sense to me."

Anaconda's imaginary friend Mande is bloviating again and her latest post is a hilarious frontal offensive against the English language and coherent thought. Take this (please!):

This streak of passivity underscores a blooming libertarian sentiment. To be sure, the leap from interventionism to isolationism is emblematic of Americans’ weariness with hands-on governance.

Or at least that’s one way to look at it.

Ted Baxter lives

Boy Fogle does a few things well at The Palmetto Scoop- as President Eisenhower said of Vice President Nixon, give me a week and I'm sure I can think of what- but empathy just isn't on the list. There's a strained, contrived feel to it whenever he tries to pull it off, especially in what he thinks of women. Witness the last two paragraphs of his account of the Governor's Holiday Open House:

As I said on Twitter earlier, if I were Mark Sanford and my wife looked at me like Jenny did in this photo by the AP’s Brett Flashnick, I would immediately hire a food taster and car starter. Immediately.

I think Rasputin had one and he and Sanford seem to have a lot in common.

Let's parse those two graphs, eh?

"I think Rasputin had one..."

Well, which? A wife? A food taster? A car starter?

He did have a wife, whom he married in 1889 and largely abandoned after 1901 and having fathered an illegitimate child, so she probably shot him a look now and again before he decamped. He doesn't seem to have had a food taster, though, as he was poisoned with cakes and wine in December, 1916 (the cyanide didn't quite do the job, so he was then beaten, shot four times and then drowned).

Rasputin's relationship with cars seems to have been limited. He was driven in one to be dumped in the river by his killers, though.

Now the capper: "he [Rasputin] and Sanford seem to have a lot in common."

Oh? A semiliterate 19th century peasant turned religious mystic who ended up spiritual advistor to the royal family of Russia and a South Carolina businessman turned politician who had an affair with a woman in South America and whose wife looked mean at him?

A commenter to the post- who was at the event, called McLovin' out on not knowing what he was talking about (nothing new about that):

I personally covered this event for WIS-TV last night. This one, single photograph is a misrepresentation of Mrs. Sanfords demeanor during this cheerful event. She was smiling, greeting guests and truly enjoying an evening inside this beautifully decorated home. I hope the readers of your blog are not influenced by a one milli-second snapshot that depicts the opposite. In an interview with me, Mrs Sanford said she planned to follow with special holiday events like baking cookies and making a homemade fudge sauce, and Governor Sanford reflected on when his family used to cut down their own tree from their farm. They were delightful.. Not sneering at each other. Come on Scoop…

Boy's response?

Come on Hannah… Unhappy people are the most likely to bake cookies and make fudge sauce. That’s why they’re called comfort foods. You’ve got to read between the lines!

This week with Congressman Bob Inglis.

Congressman Bob Inglis continues his hard tack right heading into a tough election year. This week he joined with some of the certifiable loons in his party- eg, Paul Broun of Georgia- to call for congressional hearings into the Climate Research Unit at a UK university.

On his campaign site masthead is a slogan Waldo's still puzzling over: "Inspired by people who lead." Anybody care to parse that?

Dick Cheney may be living under a bridge now, but the spy state he set up is increasingly open

A couple of tech notes from the law enforcement-industrial complex:

Cox Communications charges $2,500 to fulfill a pen register/trap-and-trace order for 60 days, and $2,000 for each additional 60-day-interval. It charges $3,500 for the first 30 days of a wiretap, and $2,500 for each additional 30 days. Thirty days worth of a customer’s call detail records costs $40.

Comcast’s pricing list, which was already leaked to the internet in 2007, indicated that it charges at least $1,000 for the first month of a wiretap, and $750 per month thereafter.

Sprint, for its part, as streamlined the process:

Under a new system set up by Sprint, law enforcement agencies have gotten GPS data from the company about its wireless customers 8 million times in about a year, raising a host of questions about consumer privacy, transparency, and oversight of how police obtain location data.

What this means -- and what many wireless customers no doubt do not realize -- is that with a few keystrokes, police can determine in real time the location of a cell phone user through automated systems set up by the phone companies.

And while a Sprint spokesman told us customers can shield themselves from surveillance by simply switching off the GPS function of their phones, one expert told TPM that the company and other carriers almost certainly have the power to remotely switch the function back on.

At a recent professional security conference attended -- and taped -- by Soghoian, Sprint Manager of Electronic Surveillance Paul Taylor revealed the 8 million figure. "[T]he tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement," he said:

We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy.

Tennessee mayor out-bigots Trent Lott's claim America would have been better if Strom Thurmond had been President

In the opinion of Arlington Mayor Russell Wiseman, President Barack Obama's speech on Tuesday night on the war in Afghanistan was deliberately timed to block the Christian message of the "Peanuts" television Christmas special.

Wiseman made the statements on his Facebook page, where he declared Obama to be a Muslim. Only people on Wiseman's "friend's list" had access to the post. He has more than 1,600 friends on Facebook.

"Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'...."

"A Charlie Brown Christmas," which first aired in 1965, has become an endearing program for many because of its emphasis on the "real meaning of Christmas," including Linus' memorable reading from the Gospel of Luke of Jesus' birth.

In Wiseman's extensive thread that attacked the president, his supporters and Muslims, he stated "...you obama people need to move to a muslim country...oh wait, that's America....pitiful."

At another point he said, "you know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has stayed in there, things would be different........"

Tell it to Ted Haggard

A new bio of Christianist Rick Warren underscores the joyfulness of marriage he defends from homosexuals:

Through interviews with Sheler, Rick and Kay Warren disclosed that they were not attracted to each other nor had feelings for each other when they agreed to be married. Instead, they believed that God had spoken to each of them saying this is the person they should marry.

Rick recalled the day when he was invited to speak at the church where Kay’s father was a pastor. As he ascended the steps to the stage to speak he looked over and recognized Kay, who was then dating his best friend, playing the piano. He said he heard God clearly tell him that this is who he will marry. At the time he had a hard time believing that because he didn’t love Kay and she was madly in love with his best friend. But still he kept the revelation in mind.

After his best friend broke up with Kay, Rick asked her on a date. On their second date, Rick asked Kay to marry him. At the time, Kay didn’t love Rick but felt that God was leading her to say yes. She recalled hearing God say, “I’ll bring the feelings.”

“To many people, understandably, it (seeking or listening to God’s voice) sounds very mystical and a little bit strange,” Sheler acknowledges during the Web seminar. “But in the evangelical world, that kind of language is quite common, where someone will say, ‘I’ve been hearing from the Lord lately that I should do such and such.’”

On their wedding day, the two were “virtual strangers,” Sheler writes. They also had a horrible honeymoon and suffered intensely from misunderstandings and other marital problems in the beginning of their marriage. The stress from the marriage problems coupled with Rick’s workload was so bad that he ended up in the hospital. Meanwhile, Kay said that she didn’t believe in divorce so she felt that she was sentenced to a life of suffering.

A report released by the Congressional Research Service in September found that nearly half of congressional tweets simply link to press releases or news articles.

Slate considers why more members of Congress haven't signed up for Twitter yet:

More than two years after Twitter's founding, and a year after microblogging really took off in Washington, only 185 members of Congress—about a third—have signed up. (That said, most Republicans tweet, and the GOP outnumbers Democrats on the site 2-to-1.)

Which underlines a point Waldo's been making for ages: Republicans embrace Twitter because it's perceived a hip and trendy and a way to reach "the kids". But they're tweeting the same vile set of messages they've always stood for, which is why, though the GOP is way ahead among Twittermembers in the Capitol, they are gaining no traction among the groups they think they are reaching.

Why do Christianists hate democracy?

Bishop Harry Jackson, the homo-hating Christianist of Washington, D.C., is upset that democracy has not given him the result he wants- banning marriage equality. His solution?

In future races, religious people are going to start going after people's political careers. In D.C., some very vulnerable black councilmen went along with the city council, and some of these guys will not be sitting in those chairs in 2010 elections. Many in our coalition are wising up, looking for candidates. Political action committees are going to be formed. You're going to see a bloodletting that is going to mark a new style of engagement for people who are against same-sex marriage.

The rest must go beg from Southern Baptists and get the slab-handed proselytism that comes with aid

Once again, why do conservatives who hate government cling so tightly to the control of government?

‘There will never be enough in government programs to help all of those that need to be helped,’ Sanford said.

Shoe's on the other foot, it seems

A main tenet of modern conservatism is that public schools should not be allowed to teach kids anything about sex in order that parents may be left to not teach kids anything about sex.

Thus the Tea Party lot's obliviousness to the connotations of describing themselves as "Teabaggers."

Now someone has pulled them aside and explained the alternate definition, and they don't like it at all. Not one bit. Jay Nordlinger at National Review Online is harrumphing:

Routinely, conservative protesters in the “tea party” movement are called “teabaggers,” and those calling them that do not mean it in a nice way. Many conservatives are mulling what to do about this term: fight it, embrace it, what?

...The liberal media, to use a convenient tag, went after the protesters with glee. Take Anderson Cooper, the acclaimed anchorman for CNN. He was interviewing David Gergen, the political pundit. And Gergen was saying that, after two very bad elections, conservatives and Republicans were “searching for their voice.” Cooper responded, “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.” He said this with a smirk.

Trying hard not to seem square while explaining things to his square readership, Nordlinger gets all Buckleyian:

I have no doubt you are sexually hip, but just in case you’re not, please know that “teabag” has a particular meaning in certain circles. In order to have a discussion of our general topic, we must be aware of that meaning, and I call on the Source of All Knowledge, Wikipedia: “‘Teabagging’ is a slang term for the act of a man placing his scrotum in the mouth or on or around the face (including the top of the head) of another person, often in a repeated in-and-out motion as inirrumatio. The practice resembles dipping a tea bag into a cup of tea.” I could quote you more, but you have had enough.

One assumes Nordlinger went to Wikipedia because Conservapedia ("The Reliable Encyclopedia") hasn't gotten to an entry yet. They are, presumably, busy with the Conservative Bible translation project still.

The interesting bit is seeing the right thinking aloud about how to deal with being on the receiving end end of the sort of epithets they've either doled out- liberally- for decades or sat back and let the more extreme ends spew for them.

DeMint: we make air travel safe by hiring the dumbest people on the planet.

Senator Jim DeMint has dropped an old meme into his "blog": a press release referring to himself in the third person, which tells you how much DeMint pays attention to his "blog", claiming- as he has before- that US labor unions are companions in arms with terrorists and that the only way we can avoid the holocaust is to make the TSA safe for employees who can't make biscuits at Hardee's.

They tell us we're competitors in the world economy. A third of us don't use banks. Welcome to the Middle Ages in SC.

There's days when we wonder what planet the Republican leadership of South Carolina- and their consultant/bloggers- live on.Last year they set up a Knowledge Sector Council to brainstorm drawing idea people to SC. It has no website, publishes no reports, and has no budget. It's just a bunch of the usual insiders getting together for lunch to chinwag and feel like they have done something.

Then you have the triumphalist nativists who see the Boeing plant in North Charleston as affirmation- by a place we scorn as a bunch of arugula-eating recyclers- that Bubbaworld can make it in the big world economy. We don't gotta change nuthin,y'all. It's the sort of fuckwittery than flows from a one-party machine that places a premium on being stupid. And the GOP techie apparachiks say it's just a matter of beaming stupid to young people on their Blackberries so they can realize voting to be stupid is almost as cool as their phone, even if they can barely afford the contract slinging sandwiches at the local Christianist Chik-fil-A.

But reality has a way of butting in. Explain this to a Google thinking about moving some of its idea people to anywhere in SC:

Over a third of SC residents don't use banks

By Katy Stech

The Post and Courier

More than one-third of South Carolina residents don’t keep use a traditional bank or still rely on high-cost services, such as check-cashing, payday loans and money orders, to conduct everyday financial transactions.

A new government study released Wednesday found that the Palmetto State has 614,000 “unbanked” or “underbanked” households, or the fourth highest in the nation on a percentage basis.

The report by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was described as the most comprehensive study to date of households that are underserved by the financial services industry.

About 432,000 South Carolina households or 24.2 percent were underbanked, meaning they have bank accounts but also use more costly financial services, according to the report. The study also determined 182,000 or 10.2 percent of households around the state don’t have any relationship at all with a bank.

The state ranked eighth nationally in the percentage of households without bank accounts, and third for the percentage that are considered underbanked.

The FDIC study has been long-anticipated by the industry, said Penny Cothran, of the S.C. Bankers Association.

“Unfortunately, some of these statistics are not a surprise,” Cothran said.

She said the state’s high rate of unbanked and underbanked households — 34.4 percent — stems from the a lack of financial literacy and the deep-seated belief among some residents that they can get by without the services of a traditional bank.

Cothran explained the thinking this way: “Grandma never had a checking account, and she got by without one. I don’t need one either.”

Experts also traced the state’s higher-than-average rate to the decades-old disparity between minority groups and the financial services business. Though the industry has tried to open its doors to historically underserved populations, some minority groups are still intimidated by or suspicious of conventional banks, said George Bresnihan of Charleston Trident Urban League.

Nationally, minorities fared poorly in the study. For example, roughly 53 percent of African American households were classified as either unbanked or underbanked. Across all U.S. households, 25.6 percent were financially underserved.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

This week with Congressman J. Gresham Barrett.

Congressman J. Gresham Barrett (R-Running for Governor) wants to have it both ways this week. He's in favor of more troops in The 'Stan, but it's overdue, and may not be enough to make the troops we already have there safe, and he thinks we need to commit to being there forever:

"I have had the honor to serve my country in the Army, and while I was fortunate enough to serve during a time of peace, I still understand how important it is that we support our troops and their mission in Afghanistan. Therefore, I am committed to finding ways to help our military succeed in creating a stable Afghanistan that is free of terrorist regimes.”

The biggest news in Barrett-world this week was that former op/ed ed Brad Warthen says Barrett's pretty much a blank slate:

This will probably rankle. After all, the man is a member of Congress. But he hasn’t shown me anything that makes me think he’s really thinking about issues at all. Maybe he’s smarter than this, but he’s not showing it.

-and it's "comeback", Savvy

Savonarola "the Christianist": once a racist, always one. Just the sort of right-thinking representative South Carolina needs advising the US Commission on Civil Rights:

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DeMint: another vote that's not about South Carolina.

I will oppose Bernankeand hold his nomination until we get a vote to audit the Fed.about 2 hours ago from web

JimDeMint

Jim DeMint

The first sentence says it all.

We're grabbing this whole Bruce Bartlett op/ed from Forbes because it's important. You need to read it here. Now. No link.

It raises the kind of questions Americans are asking, but neither party is answering.

The Cost Of War

Bruce Bartlett, 11.26.09, 12:01 AM ET

In recent years, Republicans have been characterized by two principal positions: They like starting wars and don't like paying for them. George W. Bush initiated two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but adamantly refused to pay for either of them by cutting non-military spending or raising taxes. Indeed, at his behest, Congress actually cut taxes and established a massive new entitlement program, Medicare Part D.

Bush's actions were unprecedented. During every previous major war in American history, presidents demanded sacrifices from rich and poor alike. As Robert Hormats explains in his 2007 book, The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars, "During most of America's wars, parochial desires--such as tax breaks for favored groups or generous spending for influential constituencies--have been sacrificed to the greater good. The president and both parties in Congress have come together … to cut nonessential spending and increase taxes."

During World War II, federal revenues roughly tripled as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP) and the number of people paying income taxes expanded tenfold, from 3% of the population in 1939 to 30% by 1943. In 1940, a family of four needed close to $80,000 of income in today's dollars before it paid any federal income taxes at all. By the war's end, it saw its effective tax rate rise from 1.5% to 15.1%. (Today such a family only pays a federal income tax rate of about 6%.) But taxes weren't the only way the war was paid for. Spending on nondefense programs was cut almost in half, from 8.1% of GDP in 1940 to 4.4% in 1945.

Even during wars closer in magnitude to those in which we are presently engaged, significant sacrifices were made. In 1950 and 1951 Congress increased taxes by close to 4% of GDP to pay for the Korean War, even though the high World War II tax rates were still largely in effect. In 1968, a 10% surtax was imposed to pay for the Vietnam War, which raised revenue by about 1% of GDP. And there was conscription during both wars, which can be viewed as a kind of tax that was largely paid by the poor and middle class--young men from wealthy families largely escaped its effects through college deferments.

However, Bush and his party, which controlled Congress from 2001 to 2006, never asked for sacrifices from anyone except those in our nation's military and their families. I think that's because the Republicans understood, implicitly, that the American people's support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has always been paper thin. Asking them to sacrifice through higher taxes, domestic spending cuts or reinstatement of the draft would surely have led to massive protests akin to those during the Vietnam era or to political defeat in 2004. George W. Bush knew well that when his father raised taxes in 1990 in part to pay for the first Gulf War, it played a major role in his 1992 electoral defeat.

Consequently, Republicans resolved to fight our wars on the cheap and with deceptive cost estimates. On the eve of war in December 2002, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Mitch Daniels claimed that the war in Iraq could be fought at a total cost of $50 billion to $60 billion. Indeed, Bush even fired his top economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying publicly that the war might cost between $100 billion and $200 billion.

Of course, both Daniels and Lindsey grossly underestimated the actual cost. According to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost close to $1 trillion thus far. That is exactly what economists not on the White House payroll expected. (See this December 2002 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.)

In his 2008 book, What a President Should Know, Lindsey said that lowballing the cost of the war was a "tactical blunder" because it allowed Bush's enemies to claim that he lied us into war. But at the same time, Lindsey acknowledges that the administration never rose to "Churchillian levels in talking about the sacrifices needed." He also says that asking for sacrifice in the form of spending cuts and tax increases would have served the important purpose of involving the American people in the war effort. As it is, war is largely out of sight and out of mind.

According to the CRS, the marginal cost of continuing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is about $11 billion per month, with no end in sight. Although there has been some decline in spending for the Iraq war, it has been more than offset by the rising cost of the war in Afghanistan. According to OMB director Peter Orszag, it costs about $1 million per year per soldier in the field, so adding 30,000 additional troops in Afghanistan, as President Obama is expected to do next week, will cost another $30 billion per year.

The White House has given no indication of how it plans to pay for expanding the war in Afghanistan. More than likely, it will follow the Bush precedent and just put it all on the national credit card. But at least some members of Congress believe that the time has come to start paying for war. On Nov. 19, Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., introduced H.R. 4130, the "Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010." It would establish a 1% surtax on everyone's federal income tax liability plus an additional percentage on those with a liability over $22,600 (for couples filing jointly), such that revenue from the surtax would pay for the additional cost of fighting the war in Afghanistan.

It's doubtful that this legislation will be enacted. But that's not Obey's purpose. He will probably offer it as an amendment at some point just to have a vote. Republicans in particular will be forced to choose between continuing to fight a war that they started and still strongly support, or raising taxes, which every Republican in Congress would rather drink arsenic than do. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see those who rant daily about Obama's deficits explain why they oppose fiscal responsibility when it comes to supporting our troops.

Obey makes no secret of his motives. He knows that deficits need to be reduced at some point and this will put pressure on spending programs he supports. "If we don't address the cost of this war, we will continue shoving billions of dollars in taxes off on future generations and will devour money that could be used to rebuild our economy," Obey explained in a press statement.

He is not alone in his fear that war presents a threat to the Democratic agenda. As Boston University historian Robert Dallek told Obama at a White House meeting earlier this year, "war kills off great reform movements." He cited the impact of World War I in ending the Progressive Era, World War II in killing the New Deal, the Korean War in terminating Harry Truman's Fair Deal program and the Vietnam War in crushing Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

At this point, Republicans are probably nodding in agreement. If it takes wars to end ill-conceived social programs, then that's another argument in favor of continuing the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. But that's a very short-sighted view because, as essayist Randolph Bourne once put it, "war is essentially the health of the State." Historians Robert Higgs and Bruce Porter, among others, have documented the pernicious effect of war on the size and scope of government. It creates a ratchet effect in which taxes and spending grow and civil liberties are restricted permanently, because when war ends, we never go back to the status quo ante.

If it takes the threat of a tax increase to get people to think seriously about whether it's worth continuing to fight wars far from home--wars that have only the most tenuous connection to the national interest--then it's a good idea. History shows that wars financed heavily by higher taxes, such as the Korean War and the first Gulf War, end quickly, while those financed largely by deficits, such as the Vietnam War and current Middle East conflicts, tend to drag on indefinitely.

If Americans aren't willing to follow John F. Kennedy and "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" to fight a war, then we shouldn't be fighting it.

Bruce Bartlett is a former Treasury Department economist and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Bruce Bartlett's new book is: The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward. He writes aweekly column for Forbes.

Somewhere, Tailgunner Joe is denying Roy Cohn was gay

Right Wing Watch has a nifty, thought-provoking report out on how you can find all the forms of attack on the Obama Administration from the right wing are straight out of the 1950s Joe McCarthy playbook. Only now there are no moderates in the party to challenge it.

When will the right time be?

David Link noticed an interesting thing about the marriage equality debate in the New York State Senate.

There wasn't one.

Only a single senator, Ruben Diaz, Sr., stood up to champion a No vote. Everyone else on his side was silent in the chamber. Diaz’s oratorical contribution did not bother to include any explanation of what might be wrong with equality. The first six minutes of his speech were an appeal to Republicans. He is a Democrat, and wanted to stir up resentment among his colleagues on the other side who don’t get much gay support (e.g., in Diaz’s pretty naked words, money). He then launched into a lengthy recitation of the obvious fact that there are religions that oppose homosexuality, and offered a complete roll call of the 31 states that voted gay marriage down. Finally, Diaz urged his fellow popularly elected senators not to “do away with the people’s will.”

Amidst all of this, there was no argument against same-sex marriage (procreation, preserving the state’s economic resources, supporting heterosexual families), and it is telling that Diaz felt no need to do so. As Senator Tom Libous (another No vote) said afterward, “I just don’t think the majority care too much about [gay marriage] at this time. . . “ If you can rely on the majority not caring much about the rights of a minority, why go out of your way to stir the pot?

None of the Republicans bothered to speak. None offered any policy arguments for the exclusion that has become one of their most cherished campaign planks.

They just sat there and when the vote came, they all voted no.Link concludes, They have nothing but politics and prejudice on their side, and don’t even feel the need to defend them anymore."

One Republican admitted as much:

Sen. James Alesi, a Rochester Republican many thought would vote for the bill, also looked near tears as he rubbed his head and quietly uttered "no" during the vote.

Alesi prior to the vote said he believed politics and the bad economy would keep many Republicans who may be sympathetic to the cause from voting for gay marriage this time around. "In a different atmosphere, there would easily have been five members on the Republican side voting 'yes,'" he said. "But our primary focus has to be on the fiscal crisis we're in."

'tis the season-

The Post & Courier:

Legislators reminded of ethics laws

This week in SC economic development promotion

Anaconda says Cheraw is out of control in the wake of another government funds scandal.

So what would Jim DeMint do for $10 million?

Palmetto Morning has two Jim DeMint vignettes that ought to concern any supporter with a semblance of a conscience:

:

Health Care

DeMint: Wish I'd thought of 'You lie!'

My colleague Kenneth Vogel writes in from tonight's gathering of tea party activists in Washington for the premiere of a documentary about the movement:

After seeing Rep. Joe Wilson raise more than $1 million inthe days following his "You lie!" outburst during President Obama's September address to Congress, Sen. Jim DeMint, a fellow South Carolina Republican, said he wished he'd been the one who lashed out.

Though Wilson apologized for the comment, he was pilloried by the left and lionized by Republican activists in the so-called Tea Party movement.

DeMint – who himself raised hackles on the left and in the White House, for predicting that Democratic efforts to reform healthcare will be Obama’s “Waterloo” and would “break him” – said Wednesday night that his first instinct after hearing Wilson’s outburst a couple months later was self-preservation.

“When I heard this ‘you lie’ comment, the President turned and looked at me and I said ‘Oh no, they think it’s me,’” DeMint told the crowd. When he learned it was Wilson, DeMint said he immediately became concerned that his friend could face a firestorm of criticism that could threaten him politically.

But, DeMint said, “a couple days later, after he raised a few million dollars off of it, I was thinking ‘why didn’t I say that?’”

And this:

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a darling of the Tea Party crowd, credited that movement with blocking Democratic health care reform efforts and predicted the conservative activists behind the movement could ultimately thwart the passage of that bill and others..

"The only reason we don't have national health care right now is you - is the people outside of Washington," DeMint told a gathering of Tea Party activists gathered Wednesday night in Washington for the premiere of a documentary about the movement.

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