Peggy Noonan to the GOP - time to act grown-up

But back to Sonia Sotomayor, which is my subject.

 

She is of course a brilliant political pick—Hispanic when Republicans have trouble with Hispanics, a woman when they’ve had trouble with women. Her background (public housing, Nuyorican, Catholic school, Princeton, prominence) is as moving as Clarence Thomas’s, and that is moving indeed. Politically she’s like a beautiful doll containing a canister of poison gas: Break her and you die.

 

The New York Post’s front page the day after her announcement said it all: “Suprema!” with a picture of the radiant nominee. New York is proud of her; I’m proud of our country and grateful at its insistence, in a time when some say the American dream is dead, that it most certainly is not. The dream is: You can come from any place or condition, any walk of life, and rise to the top, taking your people with you, in your heart and theirs. Maybe that’s what they mean by empathy: Where you come from enters you, and you bring it with you as you rise. But if that’s what they mean, then we’re all empathetic. We’re the most fluid society in human history, but no one ever leaves their zip code in America, we all take it with us. It’s part of our pride. And it’s not bad, it’s good.

 

Some, and they are idiots, look at Judge Sotomayor and say: attack, attack, kill. A conservative activist told the New York Times, “We need to brand her.” Another told me a fight is needed to excite the base.

 

Excite the base? How about excite a moderate, or interest an independent? How about gain the attention of people who aren’t already on your side?

From Little Green Footballs

 

What, and set themselves up to have a chance of winning elections? I really don't think becoming a right wing version of the nutroots is a clever strategy for the Republicans.

 

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

To be fair - now a Right Wing Wingnut

Little Green Footballs reports:

 

Former Rudy Giuliani speechwriter John Avlon, author of Independent Nation: How the Vital Center Is Changing American Politics, has a new feature for CNN’s “American Morning:” Wingnuts of the week.

 

Here’s how Avlon introduces the segment:

We’re trying out a new segment on “American Morning” called “Wingnuts of the Week.” It builds on a simple premise – the far-right and the far-left are equally insane.

 

What’s a Wingnut? It’s someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of American politics – the professional partisans and the unhinged activists – the folks who always try to divide rather than unite. In our polarized two party system, they have disproportionate influence and too often define the terms of debate. With this segment, we’re going to try and take that power back.

Michele Bachmann come on down!

 

Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann first became nationally known in the late innings of campaign ’08, when she told Chris Matthews, “I am very concerned he [Barack Obama] may have anti-American views.” Undeterred by common sense or common decency, she followed that with a call to investigate all members of Congress for anti-American views. The media fallout made her, if anything, more beloved by conservatives. She was subsequently selected to be the master of ceremonies at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s Presidential Banquet. But the howlers have kept coming – recently put in a handy compendium by my colleagues at the Daily Beast.

 

This past week, in an interview with PJTV.com she took another leap too far, saying, “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter.”

 

Two things: First, the bemused reach for causality between pandemics and Democratic presidents is a great illustration of the Wingnut’s impulse to blame everything bad in the world on the opposite party. Second, she got her facts wrong. It was under the administration of Republican President Gerald Ford that swine flu last reared its porcine head.

 

But Bachmann’s had chronic trouble with facts, including a recent congressional floor speech in which she again confused a Republican for a Democrat, claiming that it was FDR who signed the “Hoot Smawley” tariffs that helped propel the USA from a recession into the Great Depression. The “Smoot Hawley” Act was signed by Republican President Hoover. To round out her week’s trifecta, Bachmann reached for an awkward metaphor when describing the generational theft of today’s unprecedented deficits and debt, saying “it’s the mother of all ironies ... that the kids who voted en masse for Barack Obama are the ones being fitted with shackles and chains.” The “irony” of slavery metaphors to describe the Obama generation? Really? Really.

 

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

Diseases Coming Back, Thanks to Anti-Vaxers

From Little Green Footballs (The headlong flight from reason and the modern world continues!)

 

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a report from the Centers for Disease Control warning about new outbreaks of diseases thought to be eradicated—due to parents who are buying into the anti-vaccination craziness promoted by people like Jenny McCarthy: Fear of Vaccines Spurs Outbreaks, Study Says.

Parental doubts about the safety of childhood vaccinations are leading to outbreaks of largely eradicated diseases like measles and whooping cough, doctors warned in a new report.

 

A U.S. measles outbreak last year — almost exclusively among unvaccinated people — has sparked concern about places where many parents opt out of having their children vaccinated.

 

In Ashland, Ore., more than a quarter of kindergartners aren’t vaccinated, leading the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hold a town-hall meeting on vaccination there earlier this year. ...

 

Too many abstainers can put a town at risk, wrote Dr. Saad Omer, of Emory University in Atlanta, the lead author in the report in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

 

“People need to recognize that in the case of infectious diseases, what other people do impacts my child,” Dr. Omer said in an interview. “If they live in a community that has a cluster of refusers, their risk of getting a vaccine-preventable disease goes up, just by virtue of who they play with.”

 

Vaccines for diseases like whooping cough aren’t 100% effective for each individual, and some children can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons. That means that eradicating a disease requires vaccinating a large percentage of the nearby population to stop infections from spreading — what’s called “herd immunity.”

 

Schools with many abstainers have been linked to outbreaks.

There are actually schools that accept children who haven’t been vaccinated?

 

And by the way, in addition to being a shill for “intelligent design” creationism, Republican Tom Tancredo is also an anti-vaccination kook:

A woman asked Tancredo, “What do you think of autism in this country?” She has a 4-year-old with autism. Tancredo said, “I think much of it is due to the number of shots we give to kids . . .” They talked about mercury in vaccines’ preservatives.

UPDATE at 5/7/09 10:32:34 am:

 

And if you haven’t heard already, Oprah Winfrey is now promoting the anti-vaccination kooks too, by giving a talk show to Jenny McCarthy: Why is Oprah Winfrey promoting vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy?

 

UPDATE at 5/7/09 10:41:35 am:

 

And to make things even worse, support for anti-vaccination insanity is now beginning to show up in GOP state platforms; from the Oklahoma platform:

5. We support the right of parents to apply for exemptions for their children from school vaccinations requirements for medical reasons, religious reasons, or other reasons of conscience.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

An Open Letter to the Republican Party

The conservative side of politics here in Australia at least suffers from substantially different problems. Same net result though The Sensuous Curmudgeon writes an Open Letter to the Republican Party: My fellow Republicans: As our party is going though a much-needed period of introspection, please consider that there was a time when this party stood for the Constitution, the rule of law, national defense, free enterprise, limited government, low taxes, balanced budgets, and individual rights. We still honor those principles; but those who now govern have no concern for or even understanding of such matters. While the other party has been winning elections and undermining everything we have traditionally valued, what issues dominate our political discourse? Our party has been talking about sex and religion. When we say “sex,” we mean topics like abstinence, promiscuity, homosexuality, pre-marital relations, contraception, sodomy, nudity, pornography, masturbation, same-sex marriage, sex education, abortion, and morning-after pills. Does that list sound familiar? It should, because those are the issues that too often dominate your campaigns. Except for late-term abortion, where the other party has an extreme position that could be exploited (except that it’s lost in a sea of other sex-related issues), there is absolutely no reason to discuss such matters as part of our party’s policies. The Constitution doesn’t give the federal government any authority over those issues. If they need to be addressed, it should be done only at the state level. When we speak of religion, we mostly mean the current movement to insert religious doctrines into public school science classes, especially creationism and its love-child, intelligent design. It seems to us that this is a latter-day substitute for prayer in public schools, which is essentially a dead issue these days, but still a hot-button item. There are other religious issues, like objections to certain areas of biological research. Our obsession with creationism and blocking biological research has earned us the reputation of being an anti-science party, which is a burden our adversaries are delighted to exploit — notwithstanding their Luddite opposition to nuclear energy, oil exploration, aerospace technology, etc. Aside from that, religious issues should not concern the national government — especially when we have so many vital matters — our traditional principles — that must be addressed before the republic is lost forever. [...] An inordinate emphasis on sex and religion makes hypocrites of half of us, and fools of all. More importantly, it will permanently marginalize the party, while the opponents of our traditional principles triumph. [Cue applause from the Secular Torquemada...] Read the whole thing... Source

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

Republican ducks and dodges evolution question

Oh dear. Dear oh dear.

Mike Pence Ducks and Dodges the Evolution Question for 5:25

Sci/Tech Tue, May 5, 2009 at 7:22:20 pm PDT

You’ll never witness a better example of political pandering than this video, in which Indiana Republican Representative Mike Pence ducks, dodges, and refuses to answer simple questions from Chris Matthews about whether he accepts the theory of evolution — even including the obligatory “global warming” diversion that we’ve seen in so many LGF threads on the subject. Pence is very obviously trying not to get on the bad side of the Luddite wing of the GOP; it’s just pathetic.

(And no, this doesn’t mean I’m suddenly a fan of Chris Matthews, by the way.)

And people wonder why the Republican Party has the reputation for being anti-science. The answer is right here in this excruciating five minutes and twenty five seconds of video.


Source

Posted via email from Garth's posterous