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Americans are smarter than the GOP thinks.

wateringgoodseeds:

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that Republicans aren’t getting much traction with their focus on Benghazi over the last week. Voters trust Hillary Clinton over House Republicans on the issue of Benghazi by a 49% to 39% margin and Clinton’s 52% to 44% favorability rating is identical to what it was in late March.

Teagan Goodard’s Political Wire

This is something else that always pissed me off about conservatives: They think the American public is as stupid as they are.

A lot of the bullshit they throw out genuinely insults my intelligence.

(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)

In 2010, Republicans threatened to put the nation into default unless Democrats agreed to fulfill every wild conservative wish, more or less, about the size of government. This time? Apparently, Republicans are planning to threaten default unless they get … tax reform!

GOP’s debt limit threat goes off the rails

(The Washington Post) - That’s the takeaway from a nice Post story about GOP strategy heading into the need to raise the debt limit this summer. The problem, basically, is that Republicans have already cut discretionary spending deeply thanks to sequestration, so it’s relatively hard for them to ask for that. What about entitlement cuts? Yes, Republicans had previously claimed they wanted entitlement cuts, and in his budget, Obama offered them Chained CPI on Social Security. But while cutting “entitlements” in the abstract is a big attraction for many conservatives, cutting Social Security and Medicare – which is what cutting entitlements actually means — is unpopular. So — while this is not entirely clear cut or decided — House Republicans apparently have suddenly decided they don’t want to ask for those in exchange for the debt limit hike, either.

Instead, they are considering forcing the Democrats to go along with them on tax reform. Jonathan Chait had some fun with this by noting that the main difference between the parties on tax reform is that Republicans insist on revenue-neutral tax reform while Democrats want net revenue increases, which means that Republicans would be threatening to default the nation unless Democrats … agree to larger deficits.

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The author of this story sums it up nicely in the last line of the story: This is what a “post-policy party” really looks like.

Climate science-denying Republican to head climate subcommittee: Another day, another anti-science move by the House Science Committee

(Salon) - A House subcommittee on climate change announced that its new Chair will be Rep. Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah who does not believe in man-made climate change, and who has written several end-times novels that were endorsed by none other than Glenn Beck.

“I’m not as convinced as a lot of people are that man-made climate change is the threat they think it is,” Stewart told the Salt Lake Tribune. “I think it is probably not as immediate as some people do.”

As Tim Murphy from Mother Jones reports, Stewart is no big fan of the EPA or Endangered Species Act either:

House Republicans snub Sandy victims to try to repeal Obamacare for the 34th time

(Politicus USA) - With House Republicans taking heat over not passing the Hurricane Sandy disaster relief bill, Michele Bachmann introduced the first bill of the new Congress to repeal Obamacare.

Bachmann proudly tweeted:

At noon today, I introduced the first bill of the 113th Congress to repeal Obamacare in its entirety.

House Republicans have voted on zero actual job creation bills (disguising a tax cut as job creation doesn’t count), but they have voted on repealing Obamacare 33 times in the past two years. It is a certainty that Bachmann’s bill will come to the House floor, and the House will vote to repeal Obamacare for the 34th meaningless time.

It would be easy to pick on Bachmann’s priorities, but she is just a symptom of the larger disease. House Republicans don’t care about the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Gov. Chris Christie specifically blamed John Boehner for the bill not being brought to the floor, when the person he really should have blamed was Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Cantor is the loudest and the most powerful GOP voice in the House behind the idea that disaster relief should be offset by spending cuts. InSeptember 2011, Cantor wanted a 40% cut in funding for first responders in exchange for disaster relief. Cantor has a long history of disaster relief hypocrisy. The fact that he chose to call out Boehner instead of the right wing billionaires’ best boy reveals a lot about both Chris Christie and who really controls the Republican Party.

If House Republicans actually cared about the victims of Sandy, disaster relief would have been the first bill introduced today. Instead the nation was given another cheap stunt that is designed to do nothing but waste more time on another meaningless debate and vote that will score ideological points with the right wing zealots who still believe that Obamacare is the root of all evil.

As far as the House is concerned, it is business as usual for the least popular Congress of all time.

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Want disaster relief? Sorry about your luck, the GOP is too busy trying to keep you from getting affordable healthcare.

Tea Party Republicans favor spending taxpayer money on anti-gay discrimination. “They found the time to appropriate extra money to defend discrimination, but they didn’t find the time or money to push the hurricane relief bill through,”

It’s emerged that House Republicans have decided to continue to spend taxpayer funds defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court. GOP lawmakers gave the green light to this idea in a private meeting last night, and it is expected to pass the House as part of a rules package when it is voted on today.

The optics of this move are intriguing. DOMA has already been found unconstitutional by lower courts. The House GOP has already spent over $1.5 million paying outside counsel to defend this law, and while the amount it will ultimately spend on this means little in the larger fiscal scheme of things, it comes just after House Republicans took a beating for failing to vote on aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

“They found the time to appropriate extra money to defend discrimination, but they didn’t find the time or money to push the hurricane relief bill through,” prominent gay advocate Richard Socarides told me today.

How many supposedly fiscally conscious. Constitution-loving Tea Party House members favor spending taxpayer money defending DOMA? Perhaps a reporter should ask them, and if they favor it, how they reconcile that with their zeal to cut spending on wasteful government.

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It always gets to me how the same folks that yell and scream about the government wasting money are perfectly fine as long as the government is wasting money trying to deny rights to groups of people they deem unworthy of said rights.

Republicans Now 100 Percent AWOL From Fiscal Cliff Talks

(Mother Jones) - John Boehner gave up on fiscal cliff negotiations after he was unable to get House Republicans to agree to any proposal at all, even one that he himself had crafted. The fate of the Republic, he said, was now in the Senate’s hands. So how is Mitch McConnell handling things?

An aide said Wednesday that McConnell had not been in contact with any top Democrats, including Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader, during the holiday break….Always cautious, McConnell has kept a decidedly low profile during the last few weeks of political theater in the Capitol….Behind the scenes, he [] helped devise Boehner’s Plan B maneuver, which failed to gain enough Republican votes to be brought up in the House. In the aftermath of that defeat, however, McConnell may be unwilling to take on the job of deal-maker. The reasons reflect the pressures that have buffeted his fellow Republicans.

“I cannot emphasize how little a constructive role he will play in this,” Democratic strategist Jim Manley, a former top Reid aide, said of McConnell. “He’s going to be very reluctant to get involved, and to the extent he does get involved, he’s going to move very slowly.”

No Republican dares to be associated with a tax increase, including McConnell. Grover Norquist and his blood pledge still control them all. Will this change after January 1, when the conversation is no longer about raising taxes, but about lowering them? That would make sense, but sense is in short supply these days in the GOP caucus. Here’s the best quote in the entire story:

“The president made a strategic miscalculation and overreached,” said one GOP aide granted anonymity to discuss party strategy. “He could have worked to reach a fair agreement, but instead he picked a fight, poisoned the well, and now we are likely to have a rather unproductive next four years. The decision he made only hurts himself.”

The president overreached! He spent an entire year campaigning on letting tax rates go up modestly on the rich, and then, after winning a convincing victory in November he insisted on … letting tax rates go up modestly on the rich. In GOP-land, that constitutes “poisoning the well,” and it will now become the official excuse for another four years of bitter obstruction and spittle-flecked conspiracy theories. The whole process took less than two months from start to finish. Happy New Year, everyone.

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The problem is, the Republican Party has been extremely dishonest to their own base.

There’s a good chunk of the country that actually believes we can substantially cut the budget by cutting foreign aid, Planned Parenthood, PBS, and vague “government waste.” A lot of people actually believe we spend hundreds of billions a year on this stuff. Their base has been so bedazzled and bullshitted about government waste and “Cadillac driving welfare queens” that they have simply lost all touch with reality.

Of course, it’s not true. Really the budget comes down to four things and only four things:

1. Tax rates.

2. Medicare and Medicaid

3. Social Security

4. The Military and Veterans Benefits

This is it. These four things represent pretty much the entire Federal budget. Everything else is small potatoes, totally irrelevant. The problem is the Republican Party base is primarily white people age 40+. They support a large military, don’t want their tax rates to rise, don’t want their insurance or mortgage interest deduction to go away, and don’t want to cut the Social Security and Medicare they’re either currently on or will be on soon.

THIS is why Romney never mentioned what tax deductions he would use to pay for his proposed rate cut. THIS is why House Republicans refused to say what deductions they would cut to raise the $800 billion in revenue they proposed.

The Republican base has been brainwashed into thinking the deficit is all because of poor people, black people, illegal immigrants, foreign aid, and evil overly-paid government bureaucrats. The truth is we have such a deficit because of all the programs they like and benefit from.

The above is a comment I found on reddit as a reply to this article I posted earlier about republican voters not actually supporting the cuts republican politicians want to make.

This person is spot on.

I even went to google to verify that they were correct as to the “4 things” because I thought for sure that spending on social programs like TANF just had to be as big part of this as medicare and medicaid.

Turns out, that “jobs and family security” accounts for about 21% of federal spending, but of that 21% 3.7% is for supplemental nutritional programs, that 3.7% includes SNAP (Food Stamps), the school lunch program and WIC. That is, that figure includes all three of these programs.

Also included in that 21% is 0.7% for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). (source)

Compared to the rest of federal spending, it really is small potatoes and has been turned into a bogyman by conservatives.

There’s Not A Single Spending Cut That Republican Voters Actually Support

(Business Insider) - The “compromise” in the fiscal cliff deal from Democrats is supposed to come in the form of spending cuts. But a new Marist-McClatchy poll shows that voters — including Republicans — oppose any and every specific spending cut proposed to them.

It goes hand in hand with the disparity between voters’ wish for blanket “spending cuts” and their opposition to any cuts to an entitlement that benefits them.

A look at what Republicans oppose:

• By 47-37, letting the Obama payroll tax cut expire.
• By 68-26, cutting spending for Medicare.
• By 61-33, cutting spending for Medicaid.
• By 66-28, eliminating the tax deduction for home mortgage interest.
• By 72-25, eliminating the charitable tax deduction. 
• By 56-44, raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.

Republicans don’t favor much in any potential deal — they also, of course, are opposed to allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on any income bracket. Pollster Lee M. Miringoff warns that they might be unhappy with whatever happens.

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This leads me to believe that there are a lot of republicans (at least in this poll) who identify as republican without knowing fully what their party is supporting.

There seems to be a lot of hemming and hawing about “too much spending” from conservatives but when it comes down to it, it’s not actually what the voters (even republicans) want. In other words, it’s all a lot of talk.

Also, I went searching for the actual poll these numbers came from as none of the links in the article gave a direct link to the polling numbers mentioned in the article, here it is, and the numbers check out.

The War on Objectivity: How the right’s smearing of Nate Silver is just a piece of a larger movement towards removing facts from objective reality if they don’t fit a narrative.

By Paul Krugman

Brad DeLong points me to this National Review attack on Nate Silver, which I think of as illustrating an important aspect of what’s really happening in America.

For those new to this, Nate is a sports statistician turned political statistician, who has been maintaining a model that takes lots and lots of polling data — most of it at the state level, which is where the presidency gets decided — and converts it into election odds. Like others doing similar exercises — Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, and Pollster — Nate’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver, and has shown that edge widening over the past couple of weeks.

This could be wrong, obviously. And we’ll find out on Election Day. But the methodology has been very clear, and all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may.

Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all.

This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.

This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.

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I would argue that the last paragraph has already happened.