Well, it turns out that if you open the PDF version of the Republican’s “A Pledge to America,” their follow-up to the 1994 “Contract With America,” you learn that the author of the document was not, actually, some staffer in House Minority Leader John Boehner’s office,* but none other than Brian Wild. The Hill: Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reports that Wild, as a lobbyist at the Nickels Group, “was paid $740,000 in lobbying contracts from AIG, the former insurance company at the heart of the financial collapse; $800,000 from energy giant Andarko Petroleum; more than $1.1 million...
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Delaware Republican nominee for Senate Christine O'Donnell not so much a fan of birth control (surprisingly)
So, we’ve learned that Christine believes in abstinence, and definitely thinks that masturbation is immoral, so, it’s of no surprise, then, I guess, that she’s also no big fan of birth control. In fact, she calls condoms “anti-human.” What? In a 2006 interview on Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” the devout Catholic contended that condom use is “anti-human.” “And what … if the population is increasing, so what?” O’Donnell said. “People aren’t bad. When did humans become a bad thing? Why is it that we have to, you know, stop people from getting pregnant?” Priceless. Wait, there’s...
Continue reading...Kentucky Republican nominee for Senate Rand Paul sees Hitler around the corner
Jason Zengerle from GQ recently had a sit-down with Senate candidate Rand Paul, who has said some crazy stuff so far in this campaign cycle, and, well, Paul didn’t disappoint: Just fifteen minutes earlier the candidate whom Paul came out to support was likening the current Speaker of the House to a former Soviet dictator, so I ask if he thinks that’s what the press might be referring to when they say the Tea Party is extreme. He leans forward and smiles. “Well, I think whether or not your analogies are over the top, whether you might...
Continue reading...Unconventional campaigns
Jonathan Bernstein wonders if Sarah Palin, with a national profile and an enthusiastic base, could run for the presidential nomination successfully without playing by the normal rules: Of course, Sarah Palin sits at this point of the campaign with total name recognition and terrific enthusiasm from a not insignificant number of GOP primary and caucus votes. Those assets may mean that she can wait until longer than usual to start following the normal rules of how one runs for president. Or, perhaps, she’ll try to capture the nomination without doing those things. Is it possible? Well, we...
Continue reading...Fed keeps on keepin' on
The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee met today, and it seems they’re keepin’ on keepin’ on. At least according to their release: The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate for an extended period. The Committee also will maintain its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its securities holdings. Now, this is despite recognizing that...
Continue reading...Social conservatives and irrelevant solutions
Well, David Boaz at Cato and I may share very few opinions, but I always appreciate a good smack-down: Social conservatives talk about real problems but offer irrelevant solutions. They act like the man who searched for his keys under the streetlight because the light was better there. Social conservatives tend to talk about issues like abortion and gay rights, stem-cell research and the role of religion “in the public square”: “Those who would have us ignore the battle being fought over life, marriage and religious liberty have forgotten the lessons of history,”said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.)...
Continue reading..."I believe the Lord would have you be real."
So, we’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle, the Neo-Palinists (a cursory Google search leads me to hope that I coined that term), but Michael Gross at Vanity Fair brings us something pretty spectacular from the Original Gangster herself that is pretty incredible. It comes in the form of an e-mail sent by pastor and right-wing political activist (pre-tea party) Lou Engle (no relation to Friedrich Engels) to Sarah Palin right before her vice presidential debate with then-Sen. Joe Biden:* The e-mail was written by Lou Engle, a right-wing pastor...
Continue reading...She turned me into a newt
Good grief. So, Republican nominee for Senate Christine O’Donnell claimed back in (maybe) 1999 on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect to have dabbled in witchcraft (but never joined a coven), and had one her first dates on a Satanic altar (after seeing a movie, of course). May be a cliché, but this is seriously some shit that you really just can’t make up.
Continue reading...Won't somebody think of the children?
The National Review cover story, “The Case for Marriage,” draws an argument against same-sex marriage solely founded on the idea that marriage is for sexual relations, and that sexual intercourse between men and women makes babies. It is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for marriage. The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If...
Continue reading...This is how bad it got: Poverty and unemployment insurance
This chart is pretty staggering, and gives a little more credence to the call to keep expanding unemployment insurance, even if Sharron Angle thinks it “spoils” the unemployed. This chart comes from Arloc Sherman from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who writes: The headline story in today’s Census Bureau report is the large jump in the poverty rate in 2009. But an exclusive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of the new survey data shows that unemployment insurance benefits — which expanded substantially last year in response to the increased need — kept 3.3 million people...
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