Tag: Slate Blogs

It’s probably best just to list the ways in which conservatives were routed on gay marriage yesterday.

Maine: Question 1, which legalizes gay marriage after a 2009 vote struck it down, has been approved by a 53-47 margin.

Maryland: Question 6, which legalizes gay marriage in the state, has been approved by a 52-48 margin.

Minnesota: Amendment 1, which would have defined “traditional marriage” in the state Constitution, has failed by a 49-51 margin.

Washington: Referendum 74, which legalizes gay marriage, is leading by a 52-48 margin, and is expected to pass.

Iowa: This is the victory few people were paying attention to. Republicans worked themselves raw to take the state Senate, targeting Democratic Senate Leader Mike Gronstal in his western Iowa district. Rick Santorum made nearly weekly trips to the state to stump for Republicans. The potential prize: A new vote on gay marriage, which conservatives figured they could win. But Democrats have held the state Senate. And Justice David Wiggins, one of those who affirmed gay marriage, was retained.

New York: And this is the surprise: Democrats will take the state Senate, edging past suburban Republicans who seemed to be locked in. The National Organization for Marriage had published a three-part plan for repealing gay marriage there, starting with wins this year. They didn’t get them.

I’m at a loss to think of any recent rout this decisive for any issue group.

New York:

via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/11/07/the_victory_for_gay_marriage_was_bigger_than_you_realized.html

PRESTON, Mo. — On the drive from Springfield to Independence, before I committed my traditional travel ritual of Losing Expensive Electronics, I saw Robert Schuetz’s home sticking out like a flaming thumb. Inside the limits of tiny Preston, Schuetz had placed eight gigantic, self-made signs.

Intrigued, I parked and walked up to Schuetz’s door. An elderly man in jeans and plaid muted his TV — one could hear the japes of Kevin James and the King of Queens cast — and asked me if I was familiar with Obama’s “martial law order.” I wasn’t so, he invited me inside. The well-kept living room was devoted to TV, DVDs, and books, including a red-bound Bible on a handy endtable. An adjoining room was set up with a computer, radios, and reams of paper that Schuetz had printed out.

“I just put in the search term and I find out what I need,” he said. Schuetz handed me some of his latest findings — a WorldNetDaily article about biased polls, a Daily Mail piece about Monica Lewinsky’s book deal, and the name of the the so-called martial law order: The National Defense Resources Prepardness order.

There was so much material doubting the president’s religion that I had to ask: Was Schuetz comfortable voting for Mitt Romney. “Yeah, the Mormons are okay,” he said. “You seen what they’re doing to Catholics now? They’re saying they’ll shut down Catholic schools unless they teach Islam.”

Schuetz went on to explain his fight with the city over water and free speech rights, but I had to go. “The next sign I’m gonna put out there,” said my host, “is gonna say: Impeach the Sonovabitch!”

via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/10/03/the_swing_voter.html

CHARLOTTE — Ad-libbing: It’s what Irish-American pols do best. There was nearly as much riffing in Joe Biden’s speech as there’d been in Bill Clinton’s.

TEXT: That’s the President’s job.

SPEECH: That’s what presidents do, or at least what they’re supposed to do.

TEXT: I just don’t think he understood what saving the automobile industry meant — to all of America

SPEECH: What I don’t understand — what I don’t think he understood — was what saving the automobile industry meant.

The extra ands and repetitions and literalies — folks, literally not figuratively, they work in a setting like this. And Biden’s speech-crafters have figured out how to say odd things without setting off the fact-check monitors. Who were these mystery opponents complaining that “America is in decline?” Has anyone literally said to Biden, “hey, I’m betting against America?” If Clinton tried to talk through an intellectual argument in jess-folks language, Biden started with jess-folks and ended up parked on the ranch house’s lawn.

via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/09/06/literally_not_figuratively.html

TREASURE ISLAND, Fla. — I spent Saturday at one Ron Paul party and Sunday at another, putting me in airborne contact with at least 10,000 followers of the Modern Thomas Jefferson. One question I kept asking: Are you guys 100 percent sure that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee? Nobody said yes.

This is what outsiders don’t understand: Oodles of Paul supporters believe that the delegate switch-ups
 literally cost them a chance at the nomination. James DiPasquale, a Florida activist who watched some friends try and fail to become delegates, argues that Paul could win if the contest stretched on for a few ballots. (There has been no multi-ballot convention for decades.) “If every delegate was allowed to vote his conscience,” he asks, “how many of them really would want to vote for Romney? It would be a landslide for Ron Paul.” To emphasize the point, he walks around with a life-size stand-up poster of 
Ronald Reagan, to which he’s attached a quote from the Republican demigod, praising Paul.

Read it all here.

(Photo by David Weigel.)

via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/08/27/ron_paul_in_tampa_not_giving_in_to_romney.html

“I made a single error in one sentence,” insisted Todd Akin today. Sean Hannity wouldn’t accept that answer. Over 15 agonizing minutes on his radio show, Hannity beseeched Akin, again and again, to consider quitting the race for U.S. Senate in Missouri. His questions:

“Here’s my big fear, congressman, if I could just be blunt with you. We’re 51 votes needed to repeal Obamacare, hold the Senate. Sometimes an election is bigger than one person. To me, I am very concerned — and I know many other conservatives are as well, because they have all written me today — that if you stay in this race, and this becomes the defining issue of the race, and there is a timeline now in play here, that this could put the entire state of Missouri, this Senate seat, and even the top of the ticket, in jeopardy in Missouri… why I imagine that the issue in Missouri is going to be these words repeated again and again and again?”

“Have you thought that this could be the defining issue of the campaign, which would be a potential loss of a Senate seat?”

“I think for the next week, all you’re going to hear from Democrats are your comments. Look, I’m a Christian, so I believe in forgiveness. I can just tell by the sound of your voice that you’re probably very very sincere in your aplogy. But I also think there’s a political reality. The reality here is that Democrats now have a ton of ammunication, and they’re going to try and use these marks to hurt everybody that they can. And if I was put in that position, I would at least be thinking about what is in the best interest of the party, what is in the best interest of Mitt Romney in this case, what’s in the best interest of Missouri — are they going to hear a campaign about issues, or is this going to be a distraction to the campaign?”

“As this goes on, I think you’re going to face some of the questions I gave you hear. What you meant by legitimate rape, what you meant by the female body to have ways of shutting this whole thing down. I think it’ll be much harder than you think. I’m telling you just on a snap poll, just of conservatives writing me this minute, listening to me now, saying that there’s so much at stake — I’m reading one from a friend right now, ‘this is bigger than one person, this will set us back.'” Will you consider that in the next 24 hours?”

Shortly after this, Dick Morris — the former Clinton strategist turned Republican pundit — put out (of course) a data-seeking “petition” to get conservative activists united for an Akin purge.

Before Akin’s stupid comment, he had a nine point lead over McCaskill, the most of any Republican insurgent against a Democratic incumbent in the country.

But after his comment, he has no chance of winning. That seat could well be the difference between a majority and a minority in the Senate!

And the Tea Party Express put out a statement from its chair, Amy Kremer — not mentioning that the TPX endorsed another candidate in the Missouri primary.

One of the lessons we learned in 2010 is that we need candidates who are not only conservative, but are capable of putting together a strong campaign against liberal opponents.  Akin’s frequent ‘Bidenisms’ are distracting from the important issues at hand.

You begin to wonder what the tone would be if it was legally impossible to take Akin off the ballot.

via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/08/20/republican_media_stars_cynically_beg_todd_akin_to_quit.html

I’m working out of Capitol Hill today, where Rep. Michele Bachmann’s start-fight-then-run-away strategy is a source of much amusement. Yesterday, you’ll recall, Sen. John McCain took the unusual step of criticizing Bachmann, in a floor speech, for peddling questions about the Muslim Brotherhood connections and security status of Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin. Bachmann replied with a letter. And that was… just about it. No bevy of interviews to explain her side of this. No hallway scrums with reporters.

Instead, as is becoming sort of a joke, she hot-footed it to Glenn Beck’s show. The news, I guess, is that she reiterated that Rep. Keith Ellison, R-Minn., “has a long record of being associated with CAIR and with the Muslim Brotherhood” and that “CAIR is an unindicted co‑conspirator, as stated in the large terrorist financing case that we’ve had in the United States of America and so he came out and essentially wanted to shut down the inspectors general from even looking into any of the questions that we were asking.” But I’m just as interested in Beck’s easy questions.

GLENN:  Okay.  So you write this, which is your job.

GLENN:  Your duty to protect and defend the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

GLENN:  There is no question in any sane person’s mind that the Muslim Brotherhood ‑‑ I mean, look at this ‑‑ look at this guy who ran and won the presidency in Egypt.  He says, “Oh, I’m a moderate.  I’m a moderate.”  As soon as he wins, it’s Sharia law, we’re going down, you know, death for Allah is our highest goal.  It’s the all the same crap.  So ‑‑

GLENN:  Okay.  So when you wrote this letter, then Keith Ellison comes out.  And Keith Ellison is ‑‑ he has a record of being the Mafia hitman.

GLENN:  There’s more to this story that I think is even more outrageous.  Not only did they break their own laws, give this guy a special waiver, bring him into the White House.  This is a guy who is a known ‑‑ part of a known terrorist organization.  He then campaigns to have the blind sheikh released, but who pays for his airline ticket?

GLENN:  No, of course not.  Let me ‑‑ let me take you here because one of the more controversial things is you say Anthony Weiner’s wife will is ‑‑ has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Now, this is important because she works for Hillary Clinton.

GLENN:  And it’s not an unreasonable thing to ask seeing that this president and this administration has ‑‑ didn’t know ‑‑ apparently didn’t know that Van Jones was the founding ‑‑ one of the founding members of a radical revolutionary, anti‑American, Communist organization, and he’s in the White House.

GLENN:  So something is ‑‑ somebody’s dropping the ball some place, or somebody knows.

GLENN:  Right.  This has been ‑‑ I mean, your links and your footnotes ‑‑ and they’re down, by the way.  I don’t know if you know that, Michele.  But the Al‑Jazeera links that you put in and you said, here, go link ‑‑ go find the story on Al‑Jazeera.  We can’t get to them this morning.

GLENN:  Yeah, we’re going to have to get them because they’ve either been scrubbed or they’re being hammered, you know, by so much traffic which I highly doubt.

GLENN:  Yeah.  Let me just say this to you and then one more quick question.  I just wrote a letter to the president of my company for The Blaze and he’s in charge of all content.  He’s kind of our news, you know, our uber news director, if you will, he’s the president of content.  And I just said we know the truth on this story.  We’ve had this for a while.  I do not want this company to sit down on this.  So we are going to cover this and continue to cover this to make sure that people hear this story because, Michele, you guys are absolutely right and it is a matter of national survival.

GLENN:  Let me ask you one quick question.  John McCain and all of the elephant media are falling right in line with the Muslim Brotherhood.  Bullcrap.  What did John McCain do yesterday?

GLENN:  But you’re not saying that she is compromised?  You’re saying have we looked into this, right?

GLENN:  I have to tell you, we’re at war.  We’re at war with people in the Middle East, and her ‑‑ she’s compromised ‑‑ forget about the Muslim thing.  She’s compromised or could have been compromised.  Her husband was sending dirty photos of himself.  I mean, you know, in a wartime, you would never put that person in a delicate situation because the family has already been compromised.  But I digress.

I totally get that Bachmann, if she went on CNN, would have to field a bunch of leading questions that weren’t actually very studied. Is there no middle route, though? What’s the point of kicking up dust and then giving a small sample of the dust to a technician who already agrees with you?

Also, what are the odds that the House GOP gives her two more years in which to release sort of half-baked accusations with the heft of a “Member of the House Select Committee on Intellgence”?

via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/07/19/all_of_glenn_beck_s_hard_questions_for_michele_bachmann.html

Republicans talk tougher about anti-leak laws. What do you think journalists who publish leaks should have to endure, former Slate columnist Trey Gowdy?

“Put them in front of the grand jury,” Gowdy said. “You either answer the question or you’re going to be held in contempt and go to jail, which is what I thought all reporters aspire to do anyway. I thought that was the crown jewel of the reporter’s resume to actually go to jail protecting a source.”

The saga of right-wing bloggers against the penny ante “Velvet Revolution” bloggers is too long to explain in one post, but here’s a good look at one of the key villains.

To people who actually know Rauhauser, the premise that he is some kind of evil mastermind has been downright hilarious. To many progressives not in the know, however, it has been alarming and annoying to discover their names linked to him in right wing blogs that also link him to SWAT calls, Brett Kimberlin, and wild accusations of criminality.

Another weekday, another Bain story.

Romney has said he left Bain in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company. But public Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed later by Bain Capital state he remained the firm’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.”

Wasn’t it just six days ago we were talking about employment numbers?

via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/07/12/opening_act_dreaming_of_jail.html

When Paul Gigot’s editorial page speaks, Republicans move. Today, the Wall Street Journal digs right into the Romney campaign and its refusual to issue unconvincing boilerplate about how the health care mandate penalty will be the biggest tax increase of all time. It’s brutal. Romney is “letting down” conservatives who trusted him to be electable. He’s looking a lot like “President John Kerry.” You read it and wonder why they didn’t just work in a Seamus reference. But this is the short version of the paper’s advice.

Mr. Romney should use the Supreme Court opinion as an opening to say that now that the mandate is defined as a tax for the purposes of the law, he will work to repeal it. This would let Mr. Romney show voters that Mr. Obama’s spending ambitions are so vast that they can’t be financed solely by the wealthy but will inevitably hit the middle class.

Democrats would point to the Massachusetts record, but Mr. Romney could reply that was before the Supreme Court had spoken, that he had promised Bay Staters not to raise taxes, and so now the right policy is to repeal the tax along with the rest of ObamaCare.

Accidentally, perhaps, Gigot et al point out that Romney has to struggle in a way that some modern Republican candidates haven’t. He can’t actually promise the middle class that much in the form of tax cuts.

What do I mean? In 1980, Ronald Reagan could run against Jimmy Carter and promise across-the-board cuts to the sixteen marginal tax rates. A married couple making a joint salary of $35,000, for example, had to pay a 37 percent tax on income. Reagan promised, and delivered, cuts that sent that couple into a lower bracket, paying only 21 percent. In 2000, George W. Bush promised lower marginal rates, and delivered them. Both candidates were able to promise baskets of new tax breaks and refunds, too.

Now, look back at Romney. If you’re a middle-class family, what can he promise you, specifically? Well, he has two plans. The first, explained at MittRomney.com, is a 20 percent across-the-board cut to marginal rates. The second is the Ryan plan, which Romney has endorsed. That would collapse the tax code into two lower rates — 10 and 25 percent — and pay for it by getting rid of some tax benefits. Some of those benefits result in lower middle-class tax bills. So which ones does Romney eliminate? Bob Schieffer tried to find out, three weeks ago.

SCHIEFFER: We– we know, Governor, you’ve told us, you haven’t been bashful about telling us where you want to cut taxes. When are you going to tell us where you’re going to get the revenue? Which of the deductions are you going to be willing to eliminate? Which of the tax credits are you going to– when will you going to be able to tell us that?

ROMNEY: Well, we’ll go through that process with Congress as to which of all the different deductions and exemptions are the ones–

SCHIEFFER (voice overlapping): But do you have any ideas now, like, the home mortgage interest deduction, you know, various ones?

ROMNEY: Well, Simpson-Bowles went through a process of saying how they would be able to reach a– a setting where they had actually, under their proposal even more revenue for the government with lower rates. So mathematically, it’s been proved to be possible.

Not very specific, right? Maybe, when we get to the convention, Romney will lay out how much various people would save from his new, low rates and deductions. When he does so, he’ll have to explain the cuts he makes elsewhere to pay for them. It’s just a much trickier, lower-reward game than the one Reagan and Bush could play. Tax rates are so artificially* low that you can’t run on them and still explain how you’ll pay for the welfare state that people like.

Ideally, if you’re a modern Republican presidential candidate, you get to run against a candidate who raised taxes. You can promise relief from those taxes. That’s why, from a WSJ perspective, Romney so badly needs to frame the Obamacare penalty as a Middle Class Tax Hike. There’s no other massive tax hike to run against!

*Unless we assume the payroll tax holiday will last forever

via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/07/05/the_wall_street_journal_and_mitt_romney_s_tax_trap.html