David Atkins

Trump's troll presidency takes another pointlessly cruel action

There is so much news happening in the last 24 hours that it feels like drinking from a fire hose. Others like our own Martin Longman can analyze the situation around Lev Parnas better than I can—and it’s a very busy weekend for me, so apologies in advance. But I would be remiss not to highlight one of the more minor stories of the day that might otherwise escape attention, if only because it puts in sharp focus the pointless, petty cruelty of this administration.

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‘How will you pay for it’ is the new ‘but her emails’

Even as all eyes in the political world focus on the rapidly-moving impeachment process, there is a perverse phenomenon occurring around fiscal policy.

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The media won’t cover Democratic House bills ⁠— so why not subpoena and impeach?

House Democrats are frustrated, and understandably so. Despite passing a wide array of bills that would genuinely benefit people, those realities never seem to break through to the public at large. The full collection of House bills, if signed into law, would be transformative, improving lives on issues from healthcare to guns, the environment, civil rights, and even democracy itself.

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The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Why Democrats Should Block Gorsuch

In 1950, two mathematicians at the RAND Corporation created a now-famous game called "Prisoner's Dilemma." A study in the incentives of cooperation and resistance, it is now very relevant to Democrats trying to determine how to respond to President Trump's nomination of conservative jurist Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

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How Hillary Can Boost Her Standing Among Millennials

Hillary Clinton has long struggled with younger voters, but the problem now threatens to cost her the election. Clinton’s address to millennials this week underscored her awareness of how crucial they are to her chances in November. But her support from voters ages 18 to 35 has declined by double digits since August, raising an urgent question for Democrats: Why are millennial voters so reluctant to embrace Clinton?

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What a Rand Paul World Would Look Like: 6 Things You Should Know About the War-Mongering, Faux Libertarian

Many young people and progressives who are wary of a Clinton presidency are seeking potential alternatives, even outside the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, much of the attention of voters seeking an alternative to mainstream candidates of both parties has focused on Rand Paul. This is no accident: Rand Paul has carefully positioned himself as "the most interesting man in Washington" for supposedly being a different kind of Republican, hip and able to connect with younger voters. Paul has made it his mission to bring more of the increasingly progressive youth vote back to the GOP fold, and polling shows that Paul does have greater support among younger voters than older ones. Paul has also mounted the most aggressive social media campaign of the GOP hopefuls for president, again partly in an effort to reach younger voters.

But Paul's delicately crafted maverick image is far from the reality. Here are six things younger and more progressive voters need to know about Rand Paul.

1. Rand Paul wants more military spending and more war in the Middle East. Rand Paul has grown a reputation for anti-interventionism over the years partly by association with his stridently anti-interventionist father Ron Paul, and partly on account of statements he made during his early years as a senator. To be fair, he has staked out a slightly less rabid position on Iran than some other GOP presidential hopefuls, though that's not saying much. As with all politicians, the key is not to watch what they say but what they actually propose and vote for.

On March 25, Rand Paul introduced a budget amendment calling for a whopping $190 billion increase to military spending. The United States already spends more on war and military expenses than almost the entire rest of the world combined. Paul hasn't yet clarified what he thinks that $190 billion would be spent on, if not to facilitate more wars abroad. To pay for it, he calls for drastic cuts to climate change research, education, housing assistance, and foreign aid. 

Rand Paul was even more hawkish than his Republican colleagues on dealing with ISIS, proposing a full-scale military assault that would almost certainly have demanded a resurgence of American troops on the ground in Iraq. No matter what one thinks of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy, it's difficult to argue that Rand Paul would be any kind of improvement from an anti-interventionist perspective.

2. Rand Paul would be even worse for students and the middle class than other Republicans. Rand Paul's proposed budget is cruel and shortsighted even by Republican standards, constituting a massive giveaway to the extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Paul's budget would entirely eliminate funding for the Department of Education The worst case scenario there would be the elimination of funding for public schools entirely, while the best case would be allowing block grants to states to spend education money as they see fit. So if Alabama wanted to make education funding dependent on teaching students that dinosaurs lived alongside humans before missing Noah's ark, they would be allowed to do that in Rand Paul's perfect world without pesky oversight from the federal government.

But that's not all. Elementary students would lose school lunches, as well as children's health insurance programs and other food assistance. Paul made a splash with his proposal to allow students to deduct their tuition over the course of their working career, but that itself is a wolf in sheep's clothing: the plan would do little to help students burdened by student loans who cannot find a job after college, and it would further starve the government of the revenues it needs for programs like education, which Paul plans to cut. But Rand Paul didn't have any difficulty in placing the interests of big banks over those of students by voting against Elizabeth Warren's proposal to allow students to borrow money from the government at the same low rate that banks do. Meanwhile, Rand Paul also supports repealing the Affordable Care Act, including its provision that allows Americans under 26 to remain on their parents' health plans.

And it's not just students and young adults who would suffer under Rand Paul. He would eliminate the Housing and Urban Development and Energy departments, crucial instruments for improving blighted neighborhoods, helping working Americans achieve middle-class stability, and moving the country toward a renewable energy future.

Last but not least, his budget also calls for privatizing Medicare and Social Security, slashing Medicaid, and dramatically cutting taxes on the obscenely wealthy during a period of record income and wealth inequality. He also wants to repeal even the modest constraints placed on Wall Street in the wake of the Great Recession. His flat tax plan would dramatically decrease taxes on the super-rich, and raise them on the poor and middle class. In short, Rand Paul's economic policies are a betrayal of the poor and middle class, further enriching the 1% and Wall Street at the expense of everyone else. On these issues alone the glaring difference between Rand Paul and even the most conservative Democrat could not be more stark. Paul would be an utter disaster on core, bread-and-butter economic issues not only for students but Americans of all ages and backgrounds.

3. Rand Paul voted against reforming the NSA. One of Paul's supposed differences with the Washington establishment is his stated opposition to the surveillance state and his support for privacy rights. Rand Paul is indeed vocal in his opposition to the renewal of the Patriot Act, but the devil is in the details. When Paul had a real opportunity to curtail the NSA's power in November of last year, he infuriated civil liberties advocates by voting against a bill that would have dramatically scaled back NSA operations on the grounds that the reforms would be part of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act might be modified when it comes up for renewable, but it's very unlikely to be scrapped entirely.

Civil liberties advocates know that the best chance at reforming the NSA will come by making alterations to the law. Which means that when Rand Paul opposes NSA reform on a hardline stance against renewing the Patriot Act, he gets to have his cake and eat it too. He wins support from privacy-minded voters while ensuring that the establishment knows he's not a real threat to make even minor changes to how the security state does business.

Meanwhile, despite her reputation as an establishment friend of the security state, Hillary Clinton herself joined with NSA critic Mark Udall in voicing support for the need to makes changes to surveillance law to defend privacy. If Clinton were to accept restrictions to the NSA as part of a Patriot Act renewal or other related vote, she would do far more to defend privacy than Rand Paul has ever done.

4. Rand Paul opposes marriage equality and reproductive choice. Despite styling himself as a libertarian who favors privacy rights, Rand Paul stridently opposes both abortion rights and gay marriage, sticking the government in your womb and in your bedroom. On abortion Rand Paul goes further than even many of his Republican colleagues, opposing abortion even in cases of rape and incestUsing the federal government's power to force a 13-year-old to carry her father's baby to term is hardly the portrait of freedom. When challenged, he tried to dodge the question by saying the issue wasn't worth talking about. As if that weren't bad enough, Rand Paul also took the extraordinary step of voting against the Violence Against Women Act

On marriage equality, Rand Paul continue to take an archaic stance against the rights of LGBT Americans to marry and strengthen household stability, despite blaming the weakening of marriage for increased poverty among straight Americans.

5. Rand Paul advocates for discriminatory laws. Paul famously opposed the Civil Rights Act, including its provisions demanding that all Americans be treated equally regardless of race. He then attempted to backtrack on that statement by claiming that civil rights provisions should be left up to the states to decide, but that's an obvious dodge, given that the Civil Rights Act was passed at the federal level precisely because intransigent, mostly former Confederate states adamantly refused to integrate schools or force businesses to serve blacks as well as whites at the lunch counter.

If civil rights were left entirely up to states to decide, many states would still be stuck in the Jim Crow era. Which is precisely how conservative politicians like Rand Paul who advocate for "state's rights" in the realm of civil liberties want it. Paul's antiquated views on civil liberties match up with his support for discriminatory voter ID laws on their merits (if not on their politics), and his steadfast opposition to gay rights.

6. Rand Paul does not support decriminalizing drugs. As we've seen, Rand Paul often pretends to be something he is not on many issues, not least of which is drug policy. While his father, Ron Paul, is a strong advocate of drug decriminalization, the son has not followed in his father's footsteps. In fact, he has gone out of his way to distance himself from his father on the issue to reassure the GOP base. He has publicly assured conservative evangelicals that he disagrees with drug decriminalization, and that his father's views on the subject should not be attributed to him. Paul's stance even on marijuana, much less harder drugs, isn't "live and let live," but rather just more of the same "just say no."

It's true that Rand Paul advocates sentencing reforms for nonviolent drug offenses, but so do many Democrats, including President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Not that drug policy really matters much at the presidential level, since Congress is unlikely to put any sort of decriminalization bill on the president's desk. On that front, the real work is happening in the states, where Democrats are leading the push for relaxation of drug laws over strident Republican opposition.

In short, younger voters and other progressives should take a good, hard look at Rand Paul before considering him an alternative to Hillary Clinton, or any other Democratic presidential candidate. On economic issues Paul is a dangerous and heartless right-wing radical. On social issues he's as reactionary as the worst Republican theocrat. Even on drugs and foreign policy, it's not at all clear that Paul would be an improvement. When it comes to the interests of all but the obscenely wealthy, Rand Paul is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

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Can Cool Pope Francis Change the Catholic Church?

The Catholic Church is arguably the world's oldest non-governmental organization. It is also one of its most conservative—at least until now.

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What Happens When Conservative Ideologues Get to Run Their Own States

It would be hard to blame liberal-minded Americans for feeling a sense of despair as we begin a new year. The Republican Party is ascendant and reinvigorated after its smashing victories in 2014 at nearly every level of government. The NYPD is in near open revolt against one of America's most progressive mayors while police departments around the country seem immune to basic reforms. 

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Man Who Killed NYPD Officers Was Just Another Resentful, Mentally Ill Person With Access to Firearms

No sooner had the fatal shooting of two NYPD officers reached the newswires than the predictable partisan backlash began: conservatives  who had been on their heels as a movement grew against police brutality suddenly found their foooting from which to unleash a torrent of invective blaming liberals for the killings. Sensible people have pointed out that it is possible to mourn the brutal killings of police officers alongside the pointless deaths of unarmed civilians. 

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How Conservative Brains Are Wired Differently and What This Means for Our Politics

President Obama has famously declared that Americans are not as divided as our politics suggest. But recent discoveries about the political brain seem to indicate that liberals and conservatives may be divided from one another by intrinsic brain chemistry.

P. Read Montague and his coauthors wrote in the study that their results "invite the provocative claim that neural responses to nonpolitical stimuli (like contaminated food or physical threats) should be highly predictive of abstract political opinions (like attitudes toward gun control and abortion)." Indeed, watching the brain's reaction to a single disgusting image was sufficient to guess each subject's political orientation. Montague said in the press release, "I haven't seen such clean predictive results in any other functional imaging experiments in our lab or others."

This information has a variety of distressing implications. We already know that conservatives tend to have culturally different moral reasoning than progressives, and that even supposedly simple words like "freedom" have deeply different meanings to people depending on their political perspective.

But if our politics is also hardwired in our genes, then our familiar red-blue/urban-exurban geographic divisions may not just be a cultural gulf, but a separation between two different types of people whose minds function in fundamentally different ways. For whatever reason, a high number of Americans seem to be intrinsically responsive to messages that rely on judgmentalism, fear and disgust as primary motivators. Not much is likely to change that, because those responses aren't simply a cultural overlay but hard-coded into the brain.

It is a truism of liberal politics that progressives appeal to people's hopes and dreams, while conservatives appeal to their fears. But if the brain science is right, it may simply be that, no matter what people's policy preferences might be, the voters to whom fear appeals most outnumber those who base their vote on more aspirational emotions.

Some historians might be inclined to contest this premise. After all, political fault lines in America were more muddled prior to the Reagan era. Today's highly conservative Deep South was an integral part of FDR's progressive coalition that famously rejected "fear itself" and expanded the social safety net.

But the New Deal and the decades that followed only masked America's internal divisions by glossing over racial and gender injustice with a Leave It to Beaver smile. Conservative whites were, in essence, happy to strengthen the country's infrastructure and social protections as long as the benefits didn't accrue to people that activated their amygdalan fight-or-flight responses. Fear and loathing were mostly reserved for Nazis, Communists and decadent wealthy elites. The Civil Rights era changed all that: with the empowerment of minorities and women who didn't fit the traditional mold, conservative fear and anger turned toward domestically oppressed groups--and the do-gooder coastal liberals who were, in essence, forcing a Second Reconstruction on them against their will. America has been stuck in a politically divided rut ever since.

The path forward for liberals isn't to try to deactivate conservative fear-based responses by using more powerful frames based on hope and change. That seems nearly impossible. Would it be possible instead to reorient the target of their anger and fear toward the very wealthy elites on Wall Street who are actually damaging their economic well-being by hollowing out the American economy in favor of the asset class?

An economic populist approach has the advantage of being right on policy and on politics. The aspirational liberalism championed by President Obama is destined to disappoint in an era of rampant political obstruction designed to deflate hope and blockade real change. The rhetoric of the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party, by contrast, is unafraid to make sharp contrasts and define villains. The instinct of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party is to pretend that there are no villains in the economy, only temporary obstacles to inclusive growth; the instinct of the more economic populist elements is to clearly define the perpetrators of the decline of the middle class. Their very "divisiveness" is what allows voters motivated more by anger and fight-or-flight instincts to identify with political warriors who will solve problems by taking down the real bad guys.

This is not to say that decades of cultural coding will go away overnight or radically reshape the electorate. For most of the public, entrenched sociological assumptions about who is scary and who isn't will endure. But it would not take more than a minor shift in the attitudes of some swing voters—particularly combined with an upsurge in progressive turnout inspired by a more muscular brand of economic messaging—to seriously change the electoral calculus. 

Polling shows that the vast majority of voters, including many conservative ones, distrust large corporations and Wall Street financiers. Republicans themselves have adapted to this anti-corporate populism within their own party by railing about "crony capitalism," essentially deflecting the blame for corporate misbehavior onto government collusion. Part of the challenge for Democrats is that many of these voters might be inclined to vote against Big Money, but they don't trust the Democratic Party to actually stand up against it instead of (supposedly) take their tax dollars to support people they culturally fear and resent. These voters must hold their nose to vote for either party at the moment. Winning a significant share of them back can be accomplished not by reducing the Democratic Party's commitment to social welfare, but rather by increasing its credibility as the champion of the middle class.

FDR provides a working historical precedent for this approach. While his administration did admonish directly against fear itself, it also pulled no punches in channeling the anger of dispossessed Americans toward the plutocrats who opposed him in ways that are strikingly sharp in tone to a modern ear, but find echoes in the language of combative moral authority we typically only see from conservatives today. Consider FDR's 1936 Madison Square Garden speech, and how little in common it has with the neoliberal rhetoric of modern Democrats: 

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. they had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master."

That was a speech designed not for the more rational parts of the brain, but straight for the amygdala, the so-called "lizard brain." FDR used rhetoric like this in combination with aspirational speeches to build a large and broad coalition that appealed to Americans across the aisle.

Obviously, practical challenges lie ahead with any move toward economic populism. Money has never talked as loudly in American elections as it has today, and the prospect of facing off against the combined power of both conservative groups and Wall Street is daunting. No one seems more aware of this than probable Democratic frontrunner for the 2016 presidential nomination Hillary Clinton, whose neoliberal economic messaging and coziness with Wall Street are no secret.

Even so, America has seen its share of corrupt Gilded Ages and irrationally exuberant greed before. We have responded each and every time by strengthening middle-class economic protections without sacrificing progress on social equality. That sort of approach can yield dividends for progressives again.

In short, it will be easier to convince conservative-leaning brains that Wall Street plutocrats are more to be feared than minorities or empowered women, than to convince them that there are no enemies to be feared at all.

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5 Reasons the Rich Are Ruining the Economy by Hoarding Their Money

It has been nearly four decades since the Reagan revolution in supply-side economics came to power in the United States. Tax rates on the wealthiest Americans are at near record lows, asset values have been pumped up to record highs, and corporate America is sitting prettier than ever before. There can be no question but that the ideologues who promoted supply-side economics have succeeded in enforcing their vision policy on our lives. But their decades-long experiment has also proven to be structural failure at every possible level (except for padding the pockets of the top 1%.) Here are five things we know without doubt about supply-side economics today:

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How the Rich Stole Our Money--And Made Us Think They were Doing Us a Favor

If you’ve paid attention to the economy over the last few years, you’ve doubtless seen the charts and figures showing the decline of the American middle class in concert with the explosion of wealth for the super-rich. Wages have stagnated over the last 40 years even as productivity has increased, which is another way of saying that Americans are working harder but getting paid less. Unemployment remains stubbornly high even though corporate profits and the stock market are at or near record highs. Passive assets in the form of stocks and real estate, in other words, are doing very well. Wages for working people are not. Unfortunately for the middle class, however, the top 1 percent of incomes own almost 50 percent of asset wealth, and the top 10 percent own over 85 percent of it. When assets do well but wages don’t, the middle class suffers.

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Why "Fines" Don't Stop Bad Corporate Behavior

As anyone who is paying attention knows by now, the slap-on-wrist "fines" being levied against criminal corporations aren't doing much to curtail illegal behavior:
 

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The Awful Service Jobs Replacing Skilled Labor

We already knew it anecdotally, of course, but a new MIT studyadds further weight to the notion that outsourcing and mechanization are turning previously well-paying skilled jobs into low-paying service jobs:
 

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The Terrifying Future Envisioned By Libertarians

I've written often before about how much of the war between the American left and right is essentially the building of sand castles in the face of the oncoming tide of globalization, deskilling and mechanization of the workforce accompanied by catastrophic climate change. Much of what constitutes public policy battles in this country are fought between the one-percenters simply trying to loot what's left before it all crashes and burns, and neoliberals desperately trying to pump up asset prices and force everyone into engineering programs to disguise the destruction the of the regular wage economy. The far right and progressive left, meanwhile, are each trying to bring back the social and economic norms of the 1950s and late 1960s, respectively, in efforts of utter futility.

It's rare to find columnists who are asking themselves the right questions. It's rarer still to find ones who have the right answers. But it's when conservatives and libertarians ask the right questions and come up with their honest responses that we see the crippling danger of allowing them anywhere near the levers of power. Consider the example of Tyler Cowen, conservative/libertarian economist and pundit, writing in POLITICO Magazine, celebrating a future in which a few technically skilled "economic winners" in cities will lord it over a mass of rubes left behind in an era of mass mechanization:

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The Deep South -- Where the American Dream Goes to Die

David Leonhardt has a fantastic piece about social mobility in the United States. It turns out that the American Dream, while getting more and more distant across the board, is still much more possible in some places than in others. What places? Well, surprise surprise:

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How an Ayn Rand-Loving Libertarian Destroyed The Company He Runs With His Cultish Objectivist Theories

In case you thought the cult of hedge fund Objectivist free market libertarianism was just destroying government and the social fabric, never fear that it can destroy companies as well. Just look at what has happened to Sears after it hired insane free market hedge fund libertarian Eddie Lampert to run their company:

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Mitt Romney Shunned at CPAC -- Why Do Right-Wingers End Up Despising Their Standard-bearers?

Much has been made of Mitt Romney's cold reception among conservatives just a few months after being their standardbearer for the presidency. The usual reasons given are that Romney was too liberal on social issues, didn't run a good campaign, wasn't adequately charismatic, etc.

But Mitt Romney is only the latest in a long string of GOP presidents and presidential candidates to be shunned by their own party since Ronald Reagan. Let's look at them in sequence:

1992: George W. Bush loses to Bill Clinton. Between breaking the "no new taxes" pledge, losing fringe support to Ross Perot, and coming off as an out-of-touch Kennebunkport Yankee, Bush Senior was quickly shunned and forgotten by the conservative base.

1996: After a whopping defeat, Bob Dole was barely heard from again beyond making ads for erectile dysfunction. The GOPcouldn't even be bothered recently to pass a bill on behalf of the disabled in spite of his emotional presence and support.

2000-2008: Despite his lionization by the conservative establishment for years, it's important to remember that George W. Bush was dealt two major legislative defeats, largely by his own caucus. The first was his attempt to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, and the second was immigration reform. After a narrow victory in 2004, Democrats rolled into control of Congress in 2006. After the financial crisis and bailout in 2008, Bush Junior was so unpopular that he had to stay well out of the public limelight to give John McCain a chance.

2008: Speaking of John McCain, he was so ill-liked by the Republican establishment even prior to his defeat that he felt the need to rally his base by nominating the famously ignorant Wasilla Wonder as his vice-presidential nominee.

2012: Mitt Romney. No comment necessary.

Nor have the vice-presidential picks fared much better: of Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, and Paul Ryan, only the last three have much respect among the GOP base. But Palin and Cheney are absolutely toxic to those who aren't hardcore conservatives, and Paul Ryan is well on his way there.

Democrats, by contrast, have no such problem. Progressives have been upset with Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama for various reasons. But they have remained popular not only with the majority of the Democratic base, but also among the general public. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton are rockstars in the party with high public approval ratings. Al Gore has become a respected leader on climate change and sympathetic figure given the way the 2000 election was snatched from him. And Barack Obama is still Barack Obama. Of the Vice Presidents and VP candidates, only Joe Lieberman has become toxic for his politics (Edwards would still be popular but for his personal indiscretions)--and that because he has moved so far to the right.

What does all of this mean? It suggests something rather powerful.It suggests that Republican policies are deeply unpopular and ineffective, but that the Republican base refuses to believe or acknowledge that to be true. 

Republican Presidential candidates have lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections. Their base has no choice but to blithely interpret those results as the product of inadequate conservatism. Yet those presidential candidates have usually chosen more conservative vice-presidential candidates to help rally the base--and those vice-presidential picks are even moreallergenic to the public than the presidential nominees.

Meanwhile, the only Republican to win the popular vote in the last six election cycles was George W. Bush, a presidential failure so monumental that Republicans have cleansed their memories of his very existence.

Democratic presidents and candidates have no such problems. Bill Clinton was a successful president. Al Gore's warnings about Social Security lockboxes and climate change have been proven right. John Kerry's warnings about Republican financial and foreign policy have been proven right. And despite our numerous misgivings as progressives, Barack Obama remains a largely popular president navigating the worst economy since the Great Depression.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Mitt Romney is the latest victim of the Right's capricious relationship to its standardbearers. The problem isn't their candidates. It's their ideas. But the Right is all too happy to blame the candidates when their ideas fail the test of reality and public opinion.

The GOP Has Taken America Hostage -- Is There a Downside for Them?

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the fiscal cliff "negotiations" is that there is essentially no downside for Congressional Republicans in holding the country and its economy hostage. Democrats are less than two months removed from having resoundingly won the Presidency, gained seats in the Senate, and earned over a million more votes for House candidates than did Republicans. Due to gerrymandering, however, the Republicans still have a narrow majority in the House. Due to the Senate's ungovernable filibuster rules, Republicans can also control the balance of legislation in the Upper Chamber as well.

It's true that Republicans have been taking a beating in the polling on the fiscal cliff negotiations. That's not surprising, since Republicans want very unpopular things. Further cuts to earned benefit programs and lower taxes on the rich were resoundingly rejected by voters in November, and they continue to poll poorly. In theory, fear of voter backlash should cause Republicans to think twice about holding the line on these policies. But voters already rejected Republicans by wide margins this year and it did little to weaken their negotiating position.

There is little problem for Republicans, then, in attempting to get their way through holding the economy hostage despite the clear will of the American people. The biggest danger to most individual Republicans remains a primary challenge from someone even farther to the right. The vast majority of them are so protected by gerrymandering as to face little to no danger from a Democratic challenger in the near future.

Also, since the conservative agenda depends on the notion that government itself is a failure and doesn't work, there's no issue for them in making that supposed incompetence a reality. Since the President and his party end up being blamed by voters when economic conditions are poor, scuttling the economy in the wake the President's re-election is actually a smart political move for them.

It's up to Democrats to show that government can be a force for good and to protect the economy, which means that only Democrats have the incentive to reach a deal to avert crises like the "fiscal cliff" or the debt ceiling. Republicans have no such incentive.

But there is yet another twisted irony here. Since conservatives both lack incentive to make a deal work and want deeply unpopular policies, it makes perfect sense for them to withhold any cooperation on a deal that makes sense and the American people actually want, opting instead to force most Democrats to vote for an amalgam of terrible policies while they themselves remain mostly intransigent. And why not? Since seniors tend to like their earned benefits but support Republicans because of fear that tax revenues are being spent on the "wrong" people, why not force Democrats to cut those benefits while raising taxes to avert a fiscal crisis? There's no significant backlash Republicans can expect from voting no.

From the conservative calculus, there's no reason to stop the taking of economic hostages and no reason not to push the damage of horrible votes to avert crises back onto Democrats.

So what should Democrats do? The same thing governments do when confronted by more pedestrian hostage takers: refuse to negotiate. Insist on the correct and popular policies, and if Republicans refuse to abide by them, then allow the chips to fall where they will on various fiscal crises.

There should be, then, no deal on the fiscal cliff today. Democrats should make it clear who was responsible for the failure to come to a deal and why, allow the tax increases and cuts to take place, and then do little over the next two years but force Republicans to vote against simple and popular policies like middle-class tax cuts, repeal of the most onerous sequestration cuts, immigration reform and the entire rest of the broadly popular Democratic agenda all the way until November 2014.

It may or may not be that voters will punish Republicans appropriately at that time. But at the very least Democrats will avoid the indignity of being manipulated by hostage takers into voting against the American people just to reach a terrible deal.

Some Red-State Residents Say They Want to Secede -- But Their States Wouldn't Be Able to Sustain Themselves

The drearily predictable calls for secession in the wake of the re-election of the first African-American president have already begun:
 

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Watch: Secret Mormon Ceremonies Revealed -- How Mormons Baptize Dead Non-Mormons

As a child of ex-Mormon parents whose blood relatives are mostly still practicing Mormons, I heard a good deal about the secret Temple ceremonies that no one was ever allowed to speak of, much less put on film. They have been described before by participants, but actual footage of the ceremonies has leaked onto the web in the last week. Well worth a peek:

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The Blue Dogs Got It Wrong: Change Never Comes From The Center

Oh how cute! The Blue Dogs are starting to realize that their brand might be getting a little tarnished, so they're remaking themselves. Behold: The "Blue Dog Research Forum" is now...Center Forward.

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