Wednesday, July 11, 2012
The Extreme Primary
Republicans lament the lack of public enthusiasm for their party's primary election in a month to select a U.S. Senate candidate as if that were a bad thing.
Actually, the public running the other way from their choices on Aug. 14 is a very positive sign. As the Republican Party moves further to the extreme right edge of a very flat Earth, its primaries have become awfully embarrassing.
In Wisconsin, the best known candidate, Tommy Thompson, governor for 14 years until 2001, has the same absurd problem as Mitt Romney, only more so.
Now that Republicans officially oppose government doing anything—"That's socialism!"—any Republican candidate who previously held office has to apologize to anti-government crazies for ever accomplishing anything.
That's why Romney can't run on his only major public achievement—the popular health care reform he passed as governor of Massachusetts mandating everyone to buy health insurance, providing subsidies for the poor and preventing insurance companies from refusing to cover people who get sick or have pre-existing conditions.
That pretty much removes everything Romney ever did to benefit anyone other than himself in a life devoted to amassing a quarter of a billion dollars and who knows how much more hidden in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
Thompson's Record Repels Conservatives
Thompson has an even bigger problem under the new Republican rules. Even his enemies acknowledge he was an extremely effective governor.
That means Thompson accomplished far more than Romney ever did. And almost all of it is now anathema to Republican extremists.
In 1993, Thompson committed the state to providing two-thirds of the funding for Wisconsin's public schools, a guarantee demolished by the largest cut to education in state history by Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
As chairman of the Amtrak board, Thompson was such an enthusiastic supporter of high-speed rail that one of the first trains was actually named after him. He made Wisconsin a central piece of the high-speed rail system for the upper Midwest to create jobs and expand businesses here.
Walker ran against high-speed rail and foolishly turned down nearly a billion dollars in federal funds, sending those jobs and business expansions to other states.
As President George Bush's Health and Human Services secretary, Thompson protected the University of Wisconsin-Madison's pioneering stem cell research from policies halting new research elsewhere because of nonsensical objections from anti-abortion extremists.
Anti-Government Candidates
It's sad to watch Thompson deny so many of his own positive achievements and even his early support for health care reform to pander to the mean-spirited extremists who now control his party.
Worse than Thompson having to lie about ever doing anything worthwhile in government are all of his opponents who are probably telling the truth when they promise never to support any government program that benefits the public.
Thompson's most dangerous opponent may be the one voters know least about. Most Wisconsinites had never heard of Eric Hovde before he announced his candidacy to be their senator.
Only because of a legally required, but ridiculously unclear financial disclosure statement do we now know Hovde has somewhere between $58 million and $240 million. How's that for a murky response?
Qualifications schmalifications. Hovde's only qualification is the same one that elected another right-wing Republican millionaire no one really knew anything about, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson.
(Buyer beware: Johnson recently said publicly he opposed the government requiring insurance companies to cover cancer patients.)
Like Johnson, Hovde has enough money to run TV commercials morning, noon and night misleading voters into thinking he's somebody important because he's on television.
Mark Neumann is another Republican millionaire with so much money he believes he deserves to be elected to something, anything. That's why he keeps running again and again and again.
Neumann is such a nasty campaigner he should be warmly embraced by today's Republican Party. But Neumann made the fatal mistake of aiming his nastiness against Walker in the 2010 gubernatorial primary. Game over.
The fourth candidate, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, has the excess baggage of all the unethical and illegal tactics of the Republican Legislature under Walker without any of the governor's fake boyish charm to cover up how foul it all was.
Golly, why wouldn't the public be enthralled about voting for such a line-up of candidates? Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic Senate candidate, sure likes the field.
Republicans are already grasping at straws. Neumann's spokesman recently said: "It's good for us because conservatives are the ones who are mostly likely to come out and vote in August."
Why would that be exactly? Light-headed from the heat?
Republicans usually don't take my advice, but here it is in all sincerity: The Republican Party isn't going to get any better candidates until it starts honestly trying to attract some better voters.
Actually, the public running the other way from their choices on Aug. 14 is a very positive sign. As the Republican Party moves further to the extreme right edge of a very flat Earth, its primaries have become awfully embarrassing.
In Wisconsin, the best known candidate, Tommy Thompson, governor for 14 years until 2001, has the same absurd problem as Mitt Romney, only more so.
Now that Republicans officially oppose government doing anything—"That's socialism!"—any Republican candidate who previously held office has to apologize to anti-government crazies for ever accomplishing anything.
That's why Romney can't run on his only major public achievement—the popular health care reform he passed as governor of Massachusetts mandating everyone to buy health insurance, providing subsidies for the poor and preventing insurance companies from refusing to cover people who get sick or have pre-existing conditions.
That pretty much removes everything Romney ever did to benefit anyone other than himself in a life devoted to amassing a quarter of a billion dollars and who knows how much more hidden in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
Thompson's Record Repels Conservatives
Thompson has an even bigger problem under the new Republican rules. Even his enemies acknowledge he was an extremely effective governor.
That means Thompson accomplished far more than Romney ever did. And almost all of it is now anathema to Republican extremists.
In 1993, Thompson committed the state to providing two-thirds of the funding for Wisconsin's public schools, a guarantee demolished by the largest cut to education in state history by Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
As chairman of the Amtrak board, Thompson was such an enthusiastic supporter of high-speed rail that one of the first trains was actually named after him. He made Wisconsin a central piece of the high-speed rail system for the upper Midwest to create jobs and expand businesses here.
Walker ran against high-speed rail and foolishly turned down nearly a billion dollars in federal funds, sending those jobs and business expansions to other states.
As President George Bush's Health and Human Services secretary, Thompson protected the University of Wisconsin-Madison's pioneering stem cell research from policies halting new research elsewhere because of nonsensical objections from anti-abortion extremists.
Anti-Government Candidates
It's sad to watch Thompson deny so many of his own positive achievements and even his early support for health care reform to pander to the mean-spirited extremists who now control his party.
Worse than Thompson having to lie about ever doing anything worthwhile in government are all of his opponents who are probably telling the truth when they promise never to support any government program that benefits the public.
Thompson's most dangerous opponent may be the one voters know least about. Most Wisconsinites had never heard of Eric Hovde before he announced his candidacy to be their senator.
Only because of a legally required, but ridiculously unclear financial disclosure statement do we now know Hovde has somewhere between $58 million and $240 million. How's that for a murky response?
Qualifications schmalifications. Hovde's only qualification is the same one that elected another right-wing Republican millionaire no one really knew anything about, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson.
(Buyer beware: Johnson recently said publicly he opposed the government requiring insurance companies to cover cancer patients.)
Like Johnson, Hovde has enough money to run TV commercials morning, noon and night misleading voters into thinking he's somebody important because he's on television.
Mark Neumann is another Republican millionaire with so much money he believes he deserves to be elected to something, anything. That's why he keeps running again and again and again.
Neumann is such a nasty campaigner he should be warmly embraced by today's Republican Party. But Neumann made the fatal mistake of aiming his nastiness against Walker in the 2010 gubernatorial primary. Game over.
The fourth candidate, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, has the excess baggage of all the unethical and illegal tactics of the Republican Legislature under Walker without any of the governor's fake boyish charm to cover up how foul it all was.
Golly, why wouldn't the public be enthralled about voting for such a line-up of candidates? Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic Senate candidate, sure likes the field.
Republicans are already grasping at straws. Neumann's spokesman recently said: "It's good for us because conservatives are the ones who are mostly likely to come out and vote in August."
Why would that be exactly? Light-headed from the heat?
Republicans usually don't take my advice, but here it is in all sincerity: The Republican Party isn't going to get any better candidates until it starts honestly trying to attract some better voters.
And stop all taxpayer funbded road repairs, let the roads dereriorate so only the military and Baja capable off-road trucks can get anywhere.
But you also forget Boehner's main point regarding the income tax. It is not enough to drop corporate taxes to zero, corporations still must abide by general accounting rules on how they spend or invest their profits. The real point is to drop the PERSONAL income tax rate on the wealthy, so that the owners can dump all the corporations assets into the paychecks of the owners... tax free, and leave the liabilities with the corporation, bankrupt and kaput. Once in the hands of the owners, the government cannot place rules on how that money is then spent or moved out of the country... to a foreign region where the residents are eager for even a $4/day, no benefits job.
All politicians are rich. Poor people don't get elected. And we don't want them to. Being poor is an indication of laziness and lack of intelgence. Also a poor money manager.
Incumbent politicians are often rich because it's hard for the SEC to accuse them of insider trading when they are directly involved with making the laws that businesses are affected by. Besides, those incumbents MADE the laws that bar the SEC from tagging them for using their knowledge of the law, even before the bill is publicized, much less signed into law.
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The real problem, the very reason that workers in private jobs are so pissed at government and it's workers... is that the private sector has failed to keep it's working class and Middle class workers from moving up in compensation as fast as the true cost of living has.
Public workers have moved up faster than private. And you know the vengeful spirits of true Americans... "If I can't win, then I sure as hell am not going to let you win!". Someone once said "Look at a pail of crawdads, when one is trying to crawl out of the pail, the others drag it back down again". That's the ugly American, like a bucket of cold-blooded crawdads.
And we want to place the keys to the kingdom in the hands of the top 1%, "Shut-down government, privatize everything"?
There once was a time when all the menfolk and womenfolk of a community would get together and hold barn-raisings and house-raisings. Everyone contributed what they were able, and eventually everyone was being housed. It was not just the wealthy that got housed. -- What's wrong today? Back then the entire community was the same race and the same religious denomination. Differences of wealth did not hold them back, why should differences of skin color or what god you pray to hold a community back today?
Funny, I have just the opposite opinion. I think the J/S is a rag I refuse to pay for, and wouldn't even wrap my fish in for fear it might contaminate it. Guess I must be a putz. But, given your intelligent, substantive comment, I think I'm okay with that.