A Reminder of the Stakes

Steve Benen considers one of the quieter, yet more important stakes on the table in today’s midterm election:

We’ve probably all seen comparisons between the 2014 elections and “Seinfeld” – it’s the campaign cycle about “nothing.” The analyses are understandable, given just how little focus there’s been on anything resembling substance. Quick quiz: name the defining issue of this year’s elections.

If you said, “Ebola-carrying terrorists hiding in Mexico,” you appreciate just how vapid much of this campaign season has been.

But for many Americans, a great deal is at stake today. These families may not get a lot of attention, and they may not be as fascinating to political reporters as Bruce Braley’s neighbor’s chickens or Alison Lundergan Grimes’ 2012 presidential preference, but they’re probably wondering today whether the election results will allow them to receive affordable medical care.

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Benen, Steve. “Medicaid expansion on the line in many key races”. msnbc. 4 November 2014.

Election Day

You can beat them by a mile in America. You’ll be laughing all the while, in America. They don’t care how you do it in America; just do it with style and a smile.

So cover your eyes, and cover your heart, and pray for the ones you’re tearing apart.

―Floater

We might, of course, encourage people to vote their consciences, but given what passes for conscience these days that might be a bad idea. That is to say, conscience is supposed to be about somethng more than immediate personal satisfaction.

Iowa, for instance. Watch for the returns from Iowa; you’ll likely have reason to laugh, albeit perhaps bitterly, about the proposition of conscience in Iowa.

Certes, we can hope for better than what the polling suggests in the Hawkeye State. And nothing would make us happier at This Is than to be proven wrong.

One of the curses of leftism is that it is more often tragic than anything else when our fretful prognostications are demonstrated true.

Please don't forget to vote! Unless you're going to vote for bad stuff, then go ahead and forget.

—
Robert Wynia (@RobertWynia) November 03, 2014

Rob Wynia of Floater makes the point well enough, as we’ve reached a point at which uninformed voters might actually be a threat to societal stability. But this really is supposed to be some sort of democracy, so, yeah, vote.

But it would also be nice if more voters actually took time to comprehend what they’re voting on. And, hey, you hear that? Yes, you can get extraordinary praise for simply doing your job.

Still, though, today is Election Day, and the vote is not only your right, but also your civic duty. Please do not treat that duty lightly; otherwise you might find yourself in a position like Iowa, where the question is so much about what letter goes in the parenthetical note after a candidate’s name that Iowans are on the verge of humiliating themselves.

See Dick vote. Don’t be like Iowa.

A Note About Iowa

One might wonder, given the polling out of the Hawkeye State, what the hell is wrong with Iowa. The idea that cowardice, ignorance, and tinfoil paranoia are Iowa values might strike many as strange, but that’s the thing: It is a question for Iowans.

No, really. It is perfectly within the rights of Iowa voters to send to the United States Senate a candidate who is incapable of distinguishing fact from opinion.

Ben Terris opens his glimpse into the Ernst campaign with a brief description of something rather quite expected:

Depending on the time of year, Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst (R) either thinks President Obama is an president that who refuses to lead, or is an overzealous “dictator” who is constantly “overstepping his bounds.”

We’re at the part of the Goldilocks story where the president is too small.

“We have an apathetic president,” she told a crowd in Newton, Iowa, as part of her 24-hour get out the vote tour around the country. It’s a different message from the time in January when she suggested that the president should be impeached for enacting parts of his agenda without Congress’s approval.

After the event, Ernst elaborated without elucidating exactly what she meant.

“He is just standing back and letting things happen, he is reactive rather than proactive,” she said. “With Ebola, he’s been very hands off.”

Contradiction is one of Ernst’s talents, which in turn makes her sound as if she has no clue what she is talking about. In Iowa, this sort of cluelessness is apparently a virtue.

What follows, though, might seem a bit excessive, even for Iowa:

The Iowa Question

Retrospect. Hindsight. We should have seen this coming. All of that. But the thing about the clarity of hindsight is that every once in a while, we might feel compelled to pause and ask ourself why certain things are expected.

For instance, Iowa state Sen. Joni Ernst (R-12). What’s that? She’s a plagiarist? Well … right. Should have seen that one coming. Andrew Kaczynski and Ilan Ben-Meir of BuzzFeed posted the seemingly inevitable lede:

Passages of local paper pieces under Ernst’s name appear to have been copied word for word from templates sent as guidelines to Republican members of the Iowa Senate.

The Ernst campaign responded by arguing that the copied materials were produced specifically to be compied as if they were a person’s own work.

If it seems reasonable enough to argue that Gov. Terry Brandstad’s “Condition of the State” address in 2012 was intended to be reproduced by fellow Republicans as if it was their own writing, well, that covers plagiarism.

But it doesn’t cover one’s inability to convey their own thoughts and feelings.

Ken Rozenboom, one of several state senators who published articles with text identical or nearly identical to Ernst’s told BuzzFeed News that the common language was drawn from summaries of the week’s events sent to members of the Senate Republican caucus by their communications team.

“Some … use them in their entirety, some use tidbits,” he said, noting the summaries sent were meant to be used as guidelines.

Another state senator, Sen. Michael Breitbach said, “I write my own. I don’t know what they do.”

Gregory Orear, editor of Red Oak Express, one of the newspapers that ran the suspect columns, explained that he “wouldn’t be shocked”, as he considers them “bottom of the barrel” editorials. “I’m sure some of it was cut and pasted,” he told Buzzfeed. “It’d be nice if she had her own thoughts in it.”

Any number of punch lines suggest themselves, here.

Meanwhile, the nation waits with bated breath as election day approaches. Will Iowa send seditious incompetence to the U.S Senate for the sake of a parenthetic note? That is, if the winning argument is that Joni Ernst’s name is followed by an “(R)”, well, frankly there would be many around the nation who just aren’t surprised.

Iowa, we’re looking in your direction.

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Kaczynski, Andrew and Ilan Ben-Meir. “Iowa Republican Copied And Pasted Passages In Newspaper Dispatches”. BuzzFeed. 29 October 2014.

The Future, Revealed?

We might for a moment pause to recall 2010. Republicans achieved a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, but the real story was in the state houses, where the GOP made astounding gains by hammering away at the economic instability their Congressional partners worked so hard to create.

And then they tacked away from jobs. As Rachel Maddow memorably put it, “Jobs, jobs jobs … j’abortion”. State-level Republicans passed record numbers of anti-abortion bills, knowing that most of them were unconstitutional. And it is certainly an old conservative scheme, to tilt windmills, lose, and then bawl that the sky is falling because the Constitution is Sauron and Democrats and liberals the armies of Mordor.

With many predicting a Republican blowout in the 2014 midterms, some are looking ahead to figure out just what that will means in terms of policy and governance. And some of those are Republicans.

Yet there is a week left; perhaps this isn’t the best time to be telegraphing the Hell they intend to call down upon the Earth.

Or, as Lauren French and Anna Palmer of Politico explain:

Conservatives in Congress are drawing up their wish list for a Republican Senate, including “pure” bills, like a full repeal of Obamacare, border security and approval of the Keystone XL pipeline — unlikely to win over many Democrats and sure to torment GOP leaders looking to prove they can govern.

Interviews with more than a dozen conservative lawmakers and senior aides found a consensus among the right wing of the Republican Party: If Republicans take the Senate, they want to push an agenda they believe was hamstrung by the Democratic-controlled chamber, even if their bills end up getting vetoed by President Barack Obama.

Their vision could create problems for congressional leaders who want to show they aren’t just the party of “hell no.” And while conservatives say they agree with that goal, their early priorities will test how well John Boehner and Mitch McConnell can keep the party united.

Two points: Swing voters can’t say they weren’t warned. And conservative voters complaining about gridlock should admit that’s what they’re after.

More Iowa Insanity

Credibility is one of those things like a coin, that has two sides. To the one, credibility earns extraordinary respect for one’s opinion. To the other, that credibility also accentuates occasions when one exploits, and thereby squanders it.

Steve Benen offers an impressive effort, hoping to explain the magnitude of former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s betrayal of her own prestige in backing the U.S. Senate campaign of Iowa state Sen. Joni Ernst (R-12):

The notion that Joni Ernst has an admirable understanding of America’s role abroad is tough to take seriously.

It’s Ernst, after all, who recently argued that Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction – reality be damned – based on secret evidence that Ernst has “reason to believe,” but can’t explain.

I can see why such nonsense might endear the far-right candidate to a veteran of the Bush/Cheney team, but it doesn’t exactly reflect someone with sound judgment on international affairs.

For that matter, Ernst also argued in a recent debate that “there’s no sense” in having members of Congress meet their obligations under the Constitution when it comes to authorizing the use of military force abroad.

And, then, of course, there are Ernst fears about the Agenda 21 conspiracy.

Then again, maybe Dr. Rice hasn’t actually betrayed any credibility. It could be that she never really had any in the first place, while Beltway journalists pretended she did. It makes for a better story that way.

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Benen, Steve. “Condoleezza Rice praises Ernst’s foreign policy vision”. 29 October 2014.

Just Another Day in Iowa?

A persistent question in our electoral politics: Were you a business owner, would you really hire the candidate who says the job cannot and should not be done?

Really. Please. Just think about it for a moment.

In politics, we call this voting for Republicans. You know, the party that wants to drown government in the bathtub, because drowning someone you’ve beaten to such frailty that they cannot defend themselves is somehow a noble idyll?

And while Iowa state Sen. Joni Ernst (R-12) is the sort of candidate for U.S. Senate that would ordinarily embarrass constituents, we must also remember that this is Iowa we’re talking about.

We already know about the example Speaker Boehner set, arguing that Congress can wait until next year to give any time to President Obama’s ongoing military action against Daa’ish. And Joni Ernst is taking that advice in earnest, making it a campaign argument. Steve Benen, who has spent some effort trying to follow the twists and turns of the Iowa Republican’s remarkably bizarre campaign, tried to unpack the latest truckload of premium-grade fertilizer:

At a Senate debate in Iowa over the weekend, Rep. Bruce Braley (D) argued, “I think Congress should go back into session and have a broader and longer conversation about the nature of our involvement” in the Middle East.

Joni Ernst’s (R) response was amazing, even by Joni Ernst standards:

“Yes, we knew this threat was there months and months and months ago and this decision could have been made earlier this year so there’s no sense in calling Congress back now when this decision could have been made several months ago.”

The quote comes by way of a Democratic group that recorded the debate.

Not Exactly Unexpected

We ought not be surprised:

Several big corporations have reaped millions of dollars from “Obamacare” even as they support GOP candidates who vow to repeal the law. This condemn-while-benefiting strategy angers Democrats, who see some of their top congressional candidates struggling against waves of anti-Obamacare ads partly funded by these companies.

Among the corporations is a familiar Democratic nemesis, Koch Industries, the giant conglomerate headed by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. They and some conservative allies are spending millions of dollars to hammer Democratic senators in North Carolina, Alaska, Colorado, Iowa and elsewhere, chiefly for backing President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., renewed his criticisms of the Kochs this week. In a Senate chamber speech, Reid noted that Koch Industries benefited from a temporary provision of the health care law ….

…. When Congress enacted the health care law in 2010, it appropriated $5 billion for the temporary reinsurance program. The goal was to subsidize employers’ costs for workers who retire before they become eligible for Medicare. Hundreds of employers applied – many were corporations, cities and public universities – and virtually all the money was soon distributed.

“If the Affordable Care Act is so awful,” Reid asked, “why did Koch Industries use it to their advantage?”

Federal records show that Koch Industries received $1.4 million in early retiree subsidies. That’s considerably less than the sums many other employers received. A Koch Industries spokesman said he had no comment on Reid’s latest criticisms.

(Babington)

It’s just one of those things that seems to happen. You know, at the intersection of capitalism, politics, and empty morality.