GOP: The party of taking no responsibility

I'm not enough of a glutton for punishment to sit through Sarah Palin fielding softballs lobbed by Sean Hannity, but if you're interested in Madame It's All About Me's latest chapter in, well, It's All About Her, you can read about it here. For those who have forgotten, we had a president for eight years who never, ever, acknowledged a mistake, and look where that got us. If being as much of a dunderhead as Snowflake Nasnooki of the North (or the Texas Tool, for that matter) makes you infallible, then the Great White Alpha Male in the Sky either has a really sick sense of humor or doesn't warrant worship. Take responsibility for your words? Admit inappropriateness? Even if that would let you put it behind you? Nope. Being a Republican means never taking responsibility for your actions.

Now it applies to Congress as well. As Keith Olbermann pointed out, barely two months after crowing about how they now run Washington, the Republicans are now trying to back out of the kind of draconian spending cuts they claim to want -- by claiming they don't know nothin' about birthin' babies, Miz Scarlett -- that they have no power at all and have to wait for the president:

Meanwhile, here in the reality-based community, it's the Republicans who have largely been responsible for running up the debts we face today.

James Kwak:

I know this is a bit early, but I wanted to get some facts out there in advance of the debate. I picked five major bills in the past decade that have significantly increased the national debt: the 2001 tax cut, the 2003 tax cut, the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit, the 2009 stimulus, and the 2010 tax cut. (I left out the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars because it’s hard to pin down Congressional votes specifically authorizing their costs, in part because the famous Senate vote wasn’t actually a vote to go to war, in part because of the peculiar way the costs of the wars were budgeted.)

Then, for each of those bills, I looked up the CBO budget impact estimate made at the time. (Sources are at the bottom of this post.) Their costs, as projected at the time (and hence as knowable by members of Congress), were as follows. The first number is the ten-year cost; the number in parentheses is the portion of that cost through fiscal year 2011. Numbers are in billions.

* 2001 tax cut: $1,346 ($1,346)
* 2003 tax cut: $350 ($354 — the cut has a tiny deficit-reducing impact in its final years)
* Medicare Part D: $395 ($271). Note that I am not including the fact that the cost of this bill was almost immediately reestimated after it passed to be significantly higher, since that was not knowable to members of Congress when they voted.
* 2009 stimulus: $838 ($793)
* 2010 tax cut: $858 ($374)

That’s a total of $3.8 trillion — $3.1 trillion of it hitting the national debt by this year, and hence contributing directly to the need to raise the debt ceiling.

Then I looked up how current senators voted on these bills, whether they were in the Senate or the House at the time. For each senator, I added up how much of the current (2011) debt he could have voted for, and how many he did vote for. So, for example, Daniel Akaka (D-HI) was in the Senate for all five votes, so he was on the floor for $3.1 trillion in budget-busting bills; he voted for the last two, so he voted for $1.2 trillion, or 37 percent of what he could have voted for.

The results are predictable, but I still think worthy of noting, especially with all of the grandstanding that is going to happen.

Overall, current Democratic senators (including Sanders and Lieberman) had the opportunity to vote on $127 trillion of additional debt, and voted for $64 trillion, or 50 percent; current Republican senators had the opportunity to vote on $104 trillion of debt and voted for $70 trillion, or 67 percent.

The difference would have been greater except for trends in the composition of the Senate. Of current senators, the proportion in each party voting for each bill is as follows:

* 2001 tax cut: Democrats 18%, Republicans 93%
* 2003 tax cut: D 3%, R 94%
* Medicare Part D: D 17%, R 88%
* 2009 stimulus: D 100%, R 5%
* 2010 tax cut: D 77%, R 87%

So the typical Democratic vote pattern is N-N-N-Y-Y (I counted “present” and not voting as no votes — there were very few of these, anyway), which would mean voting for 37 percent of the total debt produced by these bills (just like Daniel Akaka). In fact, thirty-four Democrats were able to vote on all five bills, and twenty of them voted that way.

The typical Republican vote pattern is Y-Y-Y-N-Y, which means voting for 75 percent of the total debt. And, of the twenty-seven Republicans around for all five bills, eighteen of them voted that way.

The reason that the Republican-Democratic “debt responsibility” percentages are 67-50 instead of 75-37 is that not all senators have been in Congress for the past decade, and most of the ones who have only been there for a few years are Democrats. So there are many Democrats who were only in Congress for the last two votes, on which they typically voted Y-Y (100%), and a few Republicans who were only there for the last two votes, on which they typically voted N-Y (32%). So the facts that the Democrats’ budget-busting bills came later, and that I’m only looking at current senators, make the Democrats seem more profligate than their party has been as a whole, and vice-versa for Republicans.

The bottom line: As a party, the Republicans who will be railing against fiscal irresponsibility and threatening to block a raise in the debt limit are the irresponsible ones themselves who created the need to raise that debt limit. The Democrats can claim to be somewhat less irresponsible; more to the point, perhaps, insofar as they did vote to raise the debt, at least their current behavior (assuming that most support the administration and vote to raise the debt limit) is at least consistent with their past votes.

To the extent that Republicans are associated with "fiscal responsiblity", it's because the Democrats, in their inimitable way, have been too lazy, or too afraid, or too SOMETHING, to point this out. The Republicans are not, and have never been, the party of fiscal responsibility. They just scream that they are, and no one screams back. But then, Republicans never take responsibility for what they say, or what they do. Like the Pope, they regard themselves as infallible. Sarah Palin puts human beings in her crosshair metaphor and someone shoots them? Nothing wrong with what she did. John Ensign pays off the parents of his paramour while running as a family values Republican? Nothing wrong. Tom Delay is convicted of money-laundering? It's a political conviction. Republicans never, ever, ever admit to doing anything wrong. Instead they deflect blame to others: Liberals. Illegal immigrants. "The Lamestream Media." Markos Moulitsas (who very conveniently has a "foreign-sounding" name). Liquor. "Soulmates." Nothing they do is ever wrong, nothing they do is ever inappropriate. In the eyes of the GOP, well, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, if a Republican does it, then it is not wrong.

And yet this country continues to hand the car keys to the very same petulant drunk teenager who wraps the car around a tree and blames it on the kid who brought the beer.

Oh, they're going to love us for this.

Just go read this. Then take a stiff drink. You'll need it.

Somehow I think the only thing Joe Miller DOESN'T find unconstitutional is the right to have a gun and pretend to be a cop

This one comes to us from Skippy: We know that Alaska Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller thinks that Social Security is unconstitutional. We know he thinks unemployment insurance is unconstitutional, unless it's someone in his own family collecting it. We know that he thinks farm subsidies are unconstitutional unless it's his own pseudo-farm collecting them. Apparently he also has this idea that freedom of the press means that if you're a Senate candidate, your goons get to essentially perform a citizens arrest of a journalist for doing his job:

Alaska Dispatch editor Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed by security guards at a Joe Miller town hall event Sunday afternoon. Hopfinger says he approached Miller to ask questions, but was arrested for half an hour until police arrived.

According to Hopfinger, Miller’s security team pushed him and he pushed back because he felt his personal space was being invaded. He says guards detained him and accused him of trespassing, although the town hall was a public event held at Central Middle School, a public building.

“At some point I was suddenly surrounded by more guys, more security guards I guess,” Hopfinger said. “They were kind of putting their chest into me, and at one point I put my chest in too -- it got to be too much.”

Hopfinger says the incident escalated so fast he barely remembers what happened, and that next thing he knew he was in handcuffs.

The Alaska Dispatch is one of several news organizations suing for access to Miller's employment records at the Fairbanks North Star Borough. Miller worked at the FNSB as a part-time attorney from 2002 to 2009.

The Anchorage Daily News filed papers in Fairbanks Superior Court Friday to join a lawsuit filed by the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner last week. The Alaska Dispatch has filed a separate suit asking for Miller's employment records.

The news organizations are interested in documents that contain the details of Miller’s departure or allegations of misuse of borough property.

Miller called the request a violation of his privacy. But the Alaska Dispatch’s attorney says that the requests relate to Miller's performance as a government employee, not his private life.

“I mean, I asked him some hard questions; we need to get some answers,” Hopfinger said. “He's being sued by two newspapers and an online newspaper now over his employment at the North Star Borough. He hasn’t denied the accusations, so I started out -- that's where this all came from.”

Joe Miller is a crook and a thug -- and Alaska voters have a right, indeed, an OBLIGATION, to know this before deciding to vote for him next month. If they decide once they have all the facts that they still want him to represent them in Washington, that's their right. But they ought to come to that decision through a position of knowledge, not just the spin the Miller campaign wants them to believe.

Newsflash from the Department of "Duh..."

I know this news will shock you -- if you've been living on Neptune for the last decade:

Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.

Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter's questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California's ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.

"It's taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life," said Mehlman, now an executive vice-president with the New York City-based private equity firm, KKR. "Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I've told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they've been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that's made me a happier and better person. It's something I wish I had done years ago."

Privately, in off-the-record conversations with this reporter over the years, Mehlman voiced support for civil unions and told of how, in private discussions with senior Republican officials, he beat back efforts to attack same-sex marriage. He insisted, too, that President Bush "was no homophobe." He often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called "the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now."

Even after working for George W. Bush, Ken Mehlman has still never heard of John Hagee, Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin's pastor, and the rest of the closet cases in this country who seem to think that they should decide whom others get to love.

Ken Mehlman, go fuck yourself.

I like Elena Kagan more already

How else should a Jew answer an obviously inflammatory and dumbass question like this?

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked the solicitor general where she was Christmas Eve during a discussion about the bombing attempt of an airliner in Detroit.

"Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant," Kagan quipped.

Coming up tomorrow: Kagan answers the other Question They Don't Have The Guts To Ask by talking about Lilith Fair.

How can Republicans say they love America when they think it is a weakass wuss of a country?

For the last decade we've had to listen to Republicans call themselves patriots and us traitors because we believe in the Constitution and in the system of laws and justice that was built to found this country. Conservatives seem to have so little faith in the ability of the system that the Founding Fathers they so revere put together that they believe we have to resort to the worst human rights abuses of the worst tyrannical nations and groups in the world in order to survive.

It may very well be that it is not possible to survive without turning into a nation that tortures, that invades nations without provocation, that has to throw its values in the trash in order to live to see another day. I don't buy it for one minute, but people like Dick Cheney and Peter King and others who have been shitting their pants for the last nine years while the rest of us have gone about the business of living our lives do live it. I suppose they think that the millions of people who continue to live in New York within sight of Ground Zero, and the many more who commute to work there every day in skyscrapers are a bunch of wusses if they don't believe in torture and show trials and indefinite imprisonment without charges.

We're seeing just what kind of frightened, little men these people are by the vapors they're having about trying terrorism suspects in New York. First it was Dick Cheney calling the current President a traitor, now it's a group of Republican lawmakers demonstrating their utter lack of faith in the very nation they claim to love, respect, and revere:

Standing in front of the Supreme Court this morning, a group of Republican lawmakers railed against the court system run out of the building behind them. A sign affixed to the plexiglas podium each spoke at in turn spelled out the reason for their concern. "Protect our homeland," it read. "Keep terrorists out of America."

The justice system laid out in the Constitution, they said, is just too weak to protect American citizens from wiley terror suspects. From "activist judges" to courtroom sketch artists, the group reeled off a list of reasons the Obama administration decision to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to the U.S. for trial could quite possibly end in, as Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) suggested, a nuclear attack on the United States.

[snip]

King suggested that "activist" judges could be inclined to release terror suspects over some liberal legal principle or another. "A judge can rationalize most anything," he said. "If you're a living, breathing -- how should I say it? -- 'evolving' constitutionalist than you can write anything you want to justify your own rationale."

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) was troubled by what might happen when waterboarding and the American right to a fair trial met in a U.S. courtroom. She worried what might happen if terror suspects argued they'd been given "cruel and unusual" punishment at Gitmo.

"This is what scares me because they're in a U.S. court now and the rights are different," she said. "What will they say [about their detention] and what could happen and could they be out among the people again? It's very frightening."

How frightening? Mushroom cloud frightening, according to Franks. He said that a federal trial would give the suspects "a megaphone to speak to the planet," which he said "only hastens the danger" of, literally, a nuclear terrorist attack.

When a reporter pointed out that federal trials aren't televised, perhaps making the "megaphone" a little less likely, Republicans said there were other ways for terror suspects to peddle their propoganda from a U.S. courtroom -- for example, sketch artists.

What I would ask these lawmakers is this: If the justice system which is such an integral part of what we know as a free nation is "too weak" to handle these trials, then what exactly is it about America that they are trying to defend? Is it the right of the military to plunder other nations for the benefit of giant multinational corporations? Is it the right of banks to profit off of government cash while gouging borrowers? Is it the right of Republican lawmakers to enrich themselves with corporate cash while ignoring the needs of the people they represent? If we are not a nation of laws, then what are we? A nation of chickenshit faux-tough guys like Dick Cheney, with his five military deferments because he had "more important things to do" than fight a war he believed in? A nation of greedy scumbags? If we are not about justice, then what ARE we?