Of course, ignorance of the beliefs of the founders is nothing new in Texas, at least if former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey is any indication.  When asked why he was basing opposition to the “government takeover” of health care on the Federalist Papers when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government,” Armey replied:  “Widely regarded by whom?  Today’s modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton.”

Armey’s comment that “I just doubt that was the case”  is telling, and makes the Texas effort even more disturbing.  The Republican take on the founders isn’t based on an alternate reading of history.  It’s not based on any reading at all, but rather an unwavering faith that our history conforms with their current political aims.

Right-wing nutcase extraordinaire Rep. Steve King of Iowa (even more here!) combined the efforts to lie about the past and present, both exaggerating the implications of the health care bill and downplaying the oppression under Communist regimes by calling for a “Velvet Revolution” to respond to the Democrats’ health care efforts.  This is not the first time that Republicans, apparently unaware that one of the features of democracy is that sometimes your side loses, have compared themselves to victims of totalitarianism.

But perhaps the most disturbing Republican take on history last week came from Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, who said that if health care reform passes, people’s “free insurance cards” (whatever the hell that means) will be as worthless as Confederate currency after “the Great War of Yankee Aggression.”  Really?!?  Still?

But I suppose that, even in the context of an intense, often race-based hysteria caused by the election of our first black president, I shouldn’t be too concerned about an elected official trying to undermine the legitimacy of the Civil War.  I mean, it’s not like Republican leaders are running ads imploring good God-fearing Americans to take the country back from scary black men.

-AR

What does this have to do with anything of actual importance? I feel like the past months of following the health care debate have been a condensed version of my experience as a Pirates fan. Every time a new package or compromise or new procedural avenue is announced, I convince myself that it’s the one that’s going to get the bill through. And every time, thus far, I’ve been disappointed. So with the White House house announcing that “this is the week!” and the House and Senate having a tentative agreement on how to get the bill through, my reaction is both to celebrate “here we go!” and to lament “here we go again. . .”

In one way, the Democrats inability to pass a health care bill is a lot sadder than the Pirates inability to put together a winning season. (OK, in two ways: whereas passing a health care bill involves giving millions of people access to medical care, the Pirates having a winning season involves winning some baseball games.) While the Pirates’ losing records are consistent with the lack of talent, poor management, and low payrolls they’ve had over the past two decades, the Democrats have failed to pass a health care bill despite large majorities in both houses of Congress. Despite the fact that Republicans have used every procedural tool at their disposal to block legislation since they’ve been in the minority, and despite the fact that Republicans used every tool they could to pass legislation when they were in the majority, Democrats have, to this point, been unwilling to push the limits of the rules so that a simple majority vote could pass the bill. So while there’s a lot to be encouraged by in Harry Reid’s recent “get tough” letter to Mitch McConnell, it also has a “what took you so long?!?” quality.

McConnell, for his part, calls Democratic efforts to pass the bill by majority vote “a raw exercise of legislative power.” I’m not sure exactly what work the word “raw” does in that sentence, but passing a piece of legislation is no doubt an exercise of legislative power. Which is, you know, kind of an appropriate thing for the legislative branch to do.

-AR

DailyKos recently commissioned a poll to gauge just how of touch rank and file Republicans are with reality.  And the answer is:  very.  Only 42% of Republicans say President Obama was born in the United States, compared to 36% who say he was not and 22% who aren’t sure.  Twenty-three percent of Republicans believe their state should secede from the Union, 39% believe Obama should impeached (which isn’t suprising, since 63% believe he’s a Socialist, 31% believe he’s a racist who hates people, and 24% believe he wants the terrorists to win), and 21% believe ACORN stole the 2008 election.

But there’s one number in the poll that’s been getting a lot of attention that strikes me as being surprisingly low.  Fifty-three percent of Republicans believe that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama.  Obviously, I disagree with these people on the relative qualifications of Obama and Palin.  But my disagreement is more with the simple fact that they’re Republicans and not how they judge qualifications for elected office.  On the latter issue, I’m probably more in line with the Republicans who answered Palin than the Republicans who answered Obama.   While there are many seemingly objective factors by which one could say President Obama is more qualified than Sarah Palin–intelligence, temperment, worldliness, etc.–none of these matter as much to me as the fact he’s right and she’s wrong on the major issues a president has to deal with.  If I were a Republican who conceded the objective grounds for Obama’s superior qualification but agreed entirely with Palin on matters of policy, I would no doubt be among the 53% of my party saying she is more qualified than Obama.

To give an extreme example, even after the absurd revelations of the past few weeks, if a pollster were to ask me who I considered more qualified to be president, John Edwards or a generic but respectable Republican like, say, Orrin Hatch, I’d have to go with Edwards.  From my perspective, thinking about issues in the right way, starting with the correct baseline assumptions and principles and reaching the correct results, is the single most important qualification for an elected official.

-AR

With those skeptical expectations in mind, I was pleased with the President’s address.  On policy, there wasn’t much in the way of new announcements, good or bad.  While the spending freeze is a political stunt with disastrous policy consequences (as people far smarter than myself and some guy named Barack Obama have pointed out), we knew it was coming for a few days.  And aside from that, there wasn’t the kind of movement to the right that I had feared.  President Obama seemed to be relaunching, rather than abandoning, the major goals he set for himself when he took office.

The best parts of the speech were those when the President called out the irresponsibility and obtructionism of Republicans.   My favorite passage was:

And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town — a supermajority — then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well.  Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.  We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.   So let’s show the American people that we can do it together.

For the past year, the Administration and the Democratic leadership has been trying pass major initiatives by playing along with the arcane rules of the Senate and the disgraceful manipulation of those by the Republican leadership.  They have dutifully tried to cobble together 60 votes on every bill and waited patiently as important posts remain unfilled due to anonymous holds and demands for cloture.  Last night, the President finally called out this non-sense in the highest profile forum available to him.

I’m not sure anything will change after last night’s speech.  I certainly don’t expect Mitch McConnell to be shamed by the President’s words and actually allow the country to be governed.  But it was a smart and necessary move by the President, and probably the best speech he could have given under the circumstances.  The country and progressives needed to be reassured that the President remains committed to real change on big issues, while Republicans need to be forced to at least publicly defend their scorched earth approach to legislating.

-AR

I am, however, interested in her to the extent that she remains a force in American politics and a potential presidential candidate in 2012.  Palin is, in many ways, the nightmare candidate for a partisan Republican who cares only about winning the next election.  She’s wildly popular with the conservative base, but deeply unpopular among moderates and independents.

She therefore also poses a unique problems for her potential Republican opponents.  Primary contests often feature arguments among the candidates over who is most electable.  But one of the characteristics of the rightward lurch of the Republican Party in the past year has been increasingly valuing ideological purity over electoral pragmatism.  Attacking Palin for being unelectable–that is, for being unpopular with those outside the conservative movement–isn’t likely to sit well with Republican Primary votes.  Indeed, there’s a strong case that the main reason for Palin’s appeal to conservatives is the contempt that non-conservatives have for her.

-AR

Even if Giuliani thinks he can do better this time, it’s hard to see how running for statewide office in New York is a better launching pad than his current “Democrats want the terrorists to win” road show.  New York is a fairly liberal state, and winning statewide office would require Giuliani to emphasize his more moderate views on abortion and gay rights.  That won’t sit well with a Republican electorate that seems even more intent than in 2008 to emphasize ideological purity over electability.

If Giuliani does announce a run for the Senate (or governor), whoever his opponent is should make possible presidential aspirations a major issue and demand that Giuliani pledge, without any equivocation or wiggle room, to serve a full term.  Doing so would be more than political grandstanding.  Again, New York is a pretty liberal state, and I doubt its voters want a senator who, immediately upon taking office, will start casting votes to appeal to Republican primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire (and Florida!)

-AR

This seems like a good time to plug efforts to hold a constitutional convention in California, which would put difficult decisions about taxing and spending (and constitutional rights) back in the hands of elected officials and avoid the kind of catastrophe the state is now facing.

-AR

-AR

An Orange County lawmaker [Mike Duvall] who inadvertently broadcast explicit remarks about his sexual conquests over an open microphone during a lull in a Sacramento hearing abruptly resigned from office this afternoon.

The famously conservative Republican Assemblyman was just having a little pre-hearing banter about his sexual exploits with a couple of much-younger lobbyists , when unbeknownst to him the whole conversation was picked up by a nearby mike. Awkward!

Even more awkward is what it must have been like to be the conversational victim of such a gross overshare (courtesy of the OC Weekly):

“She wears little eye-patch underwear,” said Duvall, who is married with two children. “So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And
 so, we had made love Wednesday–a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going 
up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!”

So many questions, so little time. First of all, what the hell is “eye-patch underwear”? How come the person Duvall is talking to doesn’t stop him at that point to figure that out? Oh right, because he’s THROWING UP IN HIS MOUTH.

You can check out some of the actual footage courtesy of the hilariously dopey KCAL news report that broke the story here.

-AS

So I understand the desire to grasp for any sign of hope. Just as I get thrilled when the Pirates start a season 11-7 and start convincing myself that this is the year, that the team’s for real, so Republicans find themselves overjoyed that Obama’s approval ratings six months into his presidency are slipping and that polls show him tied with Mitt Romney and barely ahead of Sarah Palin. But there’s a lot of baseball left to be played. (The Pirates, by the way, are now 42-52). The 2010 midterms, and likely the 2012 presidential election as well, are going to determined by two things: the success of the stimulus, and health care reform. The former hasn’t really had a chance to operate yet, and the latter hasn’t even been brought to the floor in Congress. Until we have some sense of how Obama has delivered on those two issues, polls are essentially meaningless.

-AR