I was struck by this paragraph in an article by Michael Tomasky on the GOP poison-pill amendment put forward by Eric Cantor that scuttled the Farm Bill in the House last week:

It’s just amazing to me the way they [i.e., the GOP] keep finding new ways to kick poor people. One, deregulate everything so that banks can start placing bets against their own securities. Two, destroy the economy, so that millions more people lose their jobs and have to go on food stamps in the first place. Three, decide that poor people have to pay the penalty for all this financial hanky-panky, and cut the federal programs they depend on to the bone. Four, cut food stamps even more, and make the recipients work more.

It made me think of the recent special election for Jo Ann Emerson’s House seat in the 8th congressional district, which was handily won by Tea Party fellow-travelor Jason Smith, who promises to be just the type who will promote policy directions of the sort Tomasky decries. Pertinent fact here: according to Wikipedia, the 8th district “is the poorest district in Missouri and the 11th poorest congressional district in the country.”

It’s hard to believe that racism, trumped up rage, paranoia and conspiracy fears can be so potent when it comes to getting folks to vote against their own interests, but the evidence is hard to deny.  Obama was just telling the truth in 2008 when he talked about the power of guns, God, and, by implication, gays, to rile up folks who are scared silly by a changing world. You can call such language elitist all you want, but since we all have to live with the consequences of this silliness, we get to call it the way it is.

As we all know, Missouri’s God’s Own Party is deeply, deeply concerned that the Department of Revenue was making copies of Conceal and Carry Permits when permit holders were getting their driver’s license.

The KC Star has an editorial about how concerned sane people should be about this.  (It is behind a pay wall, so I won’t link to it.)

We also know how concerned the GOP is with privacy.  That is why they have approved a bill on first reading that welfare recipients in Missouri will have to submit to drug tests, to allow their tax returns to be reviewed, and to allow inquiries into the school attendance of their children.  And, let’s not forget the need to show approved government documents to vote.

The reason why this terrible breach of privacy was taking place was to see if people who had claimed a mental disability were also permit holders.

One would think that the GOP would approve of such an initiative.  After all, it is a well-known fact that we must crack down on the mentally ill getting guns.  And, the GOP is particularly concerned about welfare fraud.

So, one would think that this is an initiative the GOP would endorse.  

It is so hard to fathom how they think sometimes, isn’t it?  

Via Digby who comments that “… this logic has been pervasive for at least a decade and it just keeps rolling.”

The sad about this type of smoke and mirrors is that neither the media nor lots of good Democratic pols seem to have caught on to the hustle. I distinctly remember being at a local meeting where I heard Claire McCaskill talk about why she might consider Social Security funding “fixes” that would seriously weaken the program in order to “save” it. And she was all wide eyed, filled with conviction, and good intentions. Why are these folks, upon whom we so desperately depend, so easily diverted from the real issues?

Because, of course, the really sad thing here is the fact that a formula for government that posits as its leading axiom that we do the distasteful deed today so we won’t have to do it tomorrow not only often proceeds from unexamined and often false premises, but keeps us from doing what we need to do to identify and fix the real problems.  

You read the title right. Jesus. The PBS Newshour did a segment on the Missouri Senate race this evening. The piece quoted one Rev. Stoney Shaw of the Ferguson Baptist Church on his support for Todd Akin:

Some of my family was — my children: Dad, you’re not going to support him, are you? Everybody is turning against him. I said, well, there was another guy that everybody turned against, Jesus Christ. But he prevailed.

Is Rev. Shaw implying that exciting the outrage of civilized Missourians is the equivalent of the crucifixion of Christ? Or does the crucifixion here amount to no more than just getting the cold shoulder from most of the GOP? John Danforth as Pontius Pilate perhaps? Off hand, I can’t see the comparison. To take a few examples:

Jesus said: “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). Todd Akin said: “We’re overtaxing people who work [i.e. have money] and overpaying the people who don’t [i.e. the poor].”

Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the temple (Mark 11: 15-19). Todd Akin put himself up for sale.

Jesus fed the multitudes (Matthew 14: 13-21). Todd Akin wants to kill nutritional support, food stamps and subsidized school lunches, for the poor.

Jesus said: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly” (Matthew 6:6). Todd Akin supports a national day of prayer.

You get the drift? We could go on with this for a long, long time. The point is, if Akin has been metaphorically crucified, it’s highly unlikely that it had anything to do with a resemblance to Jesus. And that’s the important point to remember when you’re thinking about who’s apt to prevail in the end.  

I just got this email that is “Paid for by the Missouri Republican State Committee.”

IMPORTANT DATE TO REMEMBER: The GOP primary is August 6

It sure is good to know the Republican primary is on a different day from the non-partisan and Democratic primary.

Wait……wait……I have just got a new email.

IMPORTANT DATE TO REMEMBER: The GOP primary is August 7

In the meantime, we all to like this passage in this email.

McCaskill votes for massive tax increase: Everyone knows that you shouldn’t raise taxes during an economic downturn.  But while the US economy continues to sputter, Claire McCaskill sided with Barack Obama and against Missourians by voting to force a massive new tax increase on many American job creators and business owners.   Her vote allows the 2001 & 2003 tax cuts to expire on individuals making more than $200K ($250K for couples), and it also allows the death tax to increase on many Americans.

Actually, McCaskill and the Democrats voted to make sure that taxes do not increase on any income under $250,000, even for the income of Romney, Obama, Hartzler, McCaskill, or you and me.  So, McCaskill and the Democrats voted to cut taxes on EVERYONE, but because income over $250,000 is so sacred the Republican position is that no one has their taxes remain at the Bush tax cut level.

It sure would be good to know who those “job creators” are that will have to pay more on their income over $250,000/year.  

By the way, who are these Americans who will see their “death taxes” go up?

It’s always fun to take a look at particularly amusing past mistakes. In that spirit I offer this video of former State Rep. Cynthia Davis regaling a gathering with the reasons they should vote for her, the Constitution Party Candidate, for Lieutenant Governor this fall (h/t The Turner Report):

It’s the standard, sweetly oblivious Tea Party Cynthia we all remember so fondly, patting herself on the back for being the “most constitutional” legislator in Missouri, issuing the routine condemnations of government as incompetent and out to “ruin our lives.”

Oddly, though, Davis doesn’t seem to realize what it means that that she got a chance to fix what she perceived as wrong by serving in government. That fact might suggest to some that government actually serves a legitimate purpose and that we need it. Additionally, if, in democracies at least, individuals can enter government to correct perceived problems – and here I’m not making any judgments about the corrections a Cynthia Davis would pursue – it means that in general government has the power to self-correct through the agency of engaged citizenry, something that is not always true of other social institutions – particularly when it comes to private enterprise of which folks like Davis seem to be so enamoured.

Davis does, though, to give her credit, put her finger on a big problem facing our democracy right now. Seems that Cynthia has learned the hard way that politics involves money – and was shocked to learn that her fellow GOPers did favors in return for hefty campaign dollars. Pervasive corruption she implies, is why she, a seeming bastion of “constitutional” purity, decamped from the GOP.

Of course, a meaner-minded person than I might ask if Davis hadn’t actually been rejected by the party first – and perhaps might still be going great GOP guns if she had prevailed against Scott Rupp in the 2010 state Senatorial primary, or if her short tenure as Chair of the St. Charles Republican Party had been happier. Nevertheless, she deserves credit for speaking up now about a real and very obvious problem in Missouri (and in the wake of Citizens United, elsewhere) where untrammeled campaign donations flow far too freely with no accountability.  Ask yourself, though, if someone as lame as Davis can, in her halting way, identify the biggest problem facing our democracy today, the role of big money, hadn’t we  better get busy and do something about it before it’s too late?

Addendum:  More on money and political favors: Paul Blumenthal and Howard Fineman write that what Super PAC donors really want is a return on their investment. Also, more on the “dark money” that, via, for example, Crossroads GPS, is influencing elections right here in Missouri – just ask Claire McCaskill who’s been blitzed with Crossroads ads and billboards – and who’s now, as a result, according to the most recent poll running behind every one of the sad doofuses vying for the GOP nomination.  

Remember when GOPer Roy Blunt ran for the Senate by harping on the “failed” stimulus?

Remember when Rep. Todd Akin (R-2) took to the floor of the U.S. House to denounce the Recovery Act (i.e., the stimulus) as a failure, and Obama and the Democrats for turning the Bush recession into a depression?

Remember when Rep. Billy Long (R-6) demanded that Congress “admit they made a mistake and vote to repeal the Stimulus Act in order to reduce our deficit”?

These examples offer a very small subset of the disrespect that our GOP delegation lobbed at the Recovery Act. Almost every Missouri GOPer has a small archive of similar statements. They are usually accompanied by recipes for budget cuts, deficit reduction and similar austerity measures.

Which is what makes this chart (h/t Maddow blog) so sweet (for those of us in the U.S. at least).  Look at what happened to Great Britain and the Eurozone countries that took the austerity message so deeply to heart:

Britain, whose austerity policies many GOPers urged the administration to emulate, has officially entered a “double-dip” recession, while the U.S., where our President and his Democratic allies managed to push a small stimulus past GOP obstructionists, shows slow but consistent growth ever since the stimulus package began to take effect in the second half of 2009.

Don’t forget, either, that many economists have faulted the Recovery act only for being too small. Most realize,  though, that a larger stimulus would have been impossible given the Republican’s hide-bound, seemingly ideological opposition to the Keynesian approach that proved so effective in the 1930s and 40s.

Ed Kilgore, reporting on Robert Draper’s new book on the 111th Congress, quotes several passages that indicate that the GOP war on the stimulus may have been motivated by political considerations as much or even more than ideological concerns. Draper recounts the almost immediate mobilization of key Republican policy makers, at a dinner on the night of the Obama inauguration no less,  to devise ways to “submarine” the Obama presidency. Kilgore summarizes the strategy they devised:

In Draper’s account, these schemers decided on three very immediate steps: a campaign of villification [sic] aimed at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, an effort to obtain a unanimous vote in the House against economic stimulus legislation, and an early initiation of attack ads.

So political has the attack on the stimulus been and so divorced from fact, that I doubt whether the dire effects of the austerity crash across the Atlantic will penetrate GOP rhetoric in the slightest degree. I predict we’ll continue to hear the same tired canards about the “failed” stimulus” from the same cast of characters from now until November. Maybe then, if we’re lucky, the players will change for the better – in a few cases at least.

The title of yesterday St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s editorial says it all:  “It’s pitch perfect that Voter ID measure tossed as a fraud.” The voter ID measure, of course, refers to the efforts of Missouri’s GOP legislators to place an amendment intended to suppress voting rights by requiring would-be voters to produce very specific types of photo ID (e.g.,  photo student ID from local universities would not suffice). To no one’s surprise, the folks who tend to lack such documents are overwhelmingly from groups that tend to vote Democratic.

Cole County Circuit Court Judge Patricia Joyce rejected the ballot language because it was, if you will forgive my understatement, misleading:

Judge Joyce, in no uncertain terms, accused the Republicans who wrote the summary language for the inaccurately titled “Voter Protection Act” of trying to pull a fast one on voters.

A ballot amendment that purports to combat unsubstantiated voter fraud uses fraudulent language? Who could’ve guessed.

But don’t be too hard on our Missouri GOP. Dishonesty on this topic is the norm. Consider: The Department of Justice, which is investigating a similar type of Voter ID law in Texas that has the potential to negatively affect, at the very least, half the state’s Hispanic-American population, has found that the GOP legislators involved in passing the law are very, very averse to having their strategic deliberations made public:

Texas, which sued the federal government in an attempt to have their voter ID law approved, said in a court filing last month that “communications between members of the state legislature, communications between state legislators and their staff, and communications between state legislators and their constituents” should be protected by legislative privilege. The state also tried to prevent officials with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from deposing legislators who supported the voter ID legislation known as SB 14.

So what’re they trying to hide?

Just to recap once again: We’ve got laws imposed by predominantly GOP legislatures that have the potential to seriously restrict voting rights among groups most of whom tend to vote Democratic. The rationale is to prevent voter fraud, almost no instances of which can be substantiated. Most of the very few fraud claims that have been verified tend to be of the sort that would not be affected by presenting voter ID. Finally, the folks behind these laws not only try to hide their reasoning, as in Texas, but as in Missouri, they try to misrepresent the very intent of the law to those voters who, as the Post-Dispatch notes, aren’t able to hear the right-wing dog whistle:

Republican primary voters know what you’re trying to accomplish, and they’re on board. You want to limit the number of African-Americans in St. Louis and Kansas City and college students in Columbia and elsewhere who might vote for President Barack Obama and other Democrats. And if in the process a few folks in wheelchairs, elderly nuns and legal immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens are denied the right to vote, even better.

Tell the straight truth, and Judge Joyce will approve your ballot language.

Or don’t tell the truth. But the risk that you run is that the stench that emanates from the Republican Party will become so overwhelming that it will destroy our democracy. Remember that, Tea Partiers, the next time you feel inclined to agitate about “big government,” “freedom” and your Alice-through-the-looking-glass vision of the Constitution.

I wonder if the people cheering Ron Paul in Columbia understand that, when he says he wants to get rid of “entitlements,” he means all the social safety net programs that many in his audience need to survive. Rep. Paul is a strong believer in “free market” economics which means every man for himself and don’t ask your fellow citizens for help.  Maybe his supporters agree with him and would give up Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Pell Grants, farm subsidies, and disaster aid (as Gov. Kasich of Ohio did recently.)

Here is what President Dwight Eisenhower said about such things in a letter to his brother, Edgar, in 1954:   “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.  There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things.  Among them are H.L. Hunt (you probably know his background,) a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.  Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Today’s Republican leaders and presidential hopefuls have perverted  the kind of  common sense conservatism that I championed as a loyal Republican until 1980.  I knew President Reagan’s  free market folks would begin dismantling all parts of the social safety net.  I could see the ship of state was headed for dangerous waters and the life boats were being jettisoned to cut costs and raise profits.    

Now corporations control our government at all levels, and we need to look no further than our own Missouri state legislature for proof.  For someone who wore an “I like Ike” button as a teenager, this is all very sad.  The “G” in GOP no longer stands for “Grand.”  It stands for “Greedy.”