Monthly Archives: October 2014

Remember the ‘nanny party’?

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Remember ‘the Nanny Party’ ?

Has anyone noticed that since the most recent Ebola outbreak began, we’ve been hearing less about Democrats as ‘the Nanny Party’?

Maybe paying attention to public health and public safety is starting to look good.

What with one thing and another, there has been less from the GOP, lately, about

  • defunding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  • slash-and-burn budget-cutting across the board in the U.S. government, including cuts to funding for the FAA and for U.S. airports where international passengers will be screened for Ebola, funding for the four specialized hospitals in the U.S. where Ebola patients are treated, and funding for vaccine research
  • abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
  • repealing the Affordable Care Act 

There has been less blatant use even of the broad-brush “tax and spend” mantra, and when it is used, the slogan is a sign of a fading campaign.

Not that the bad days are gone forever.

Mike Lee, Ted Cruz

For one thing, whack jobs are still out there, running for office in 2014. Regardless of the outcome in the race for U.S. senator from Iowa in 2014, it will remain incredible that a candidate like GOPer Joni Ernst could run. For the record, Ernst is another candidate who has called for eliminating the EPA–along with the IRS (i.e. funding our government) and the Department of Education.

 

Joni Ernst claims

For another, the Republican Party generally tones down most of the most rapacious proposals right before an election. The (perennial) game plan is to sound halfway decent, for the few weeks leading up to elections, and then to implement the Let’s-bring-back-the-Great-Depression policies in office afterward.

 

More later

The fundamentals are always in place, beyond the silly ‘nanny’ ridicule, beyond the opposition to all public health programs, beyond even the attacks on federal agencies that many people have noticed.

Of our two major parties, by and large it is always the Republican Party that supports the three strategems most dangerous to public health and public safety, along with jobs:

1. Privatizing. See Rick Allen in Georgia (“no position”? on Social Security?). Rick Scott in Florida; also here. Dan Benishek in Michigan, also here. Rick Snyder in Michigan. Fred Upton in Michigan. Tom Cotton in Arkansas.

2. Outsourcing. See House Republicans (CISPA). Terri Lynn Land in Michigan. David Perdue in Georgia; also here. Rick Scott in Florida. Scott Brown in Massachusetts New Hampshire. Tim Walberg in Michigan.

3. Offshoring. See Senate Republicans. David Perdue in Georgia. Carlos Curbelo in Florida.

What privatizing, outsourcing, and off-shoring have in common–aside from damage to employment at a decent wage–is that they are all inherently potential security breaches.

Contracting out to private companies shifts you from cave canem to the dog that didn’t bark in the night. No more public watchdog means lower standards, less accountability to the public.

Outsourcing to a raft of ‘contractors’ leads to a raft of ‘subcontractors’, and each additional level of contracting is another pore (figuratively speaking) to breed suppurating pustules of incompetence, theft, and neglect.

Off-shoring is not only a way to undermine the U.S. middle class. Off-shoring jobs opens more doors to fraud; off-shoring assets enables tax evasion on wealth, including the wealth of multi-national corporations.

All of this is fairly clear. The national political press should report it more clearly.

Elections 2014, and New York District 21 Is Looking Weird

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Elections 2014, and New York District 21 Is Looking Weird

Candidates Stefanik, Woolf, and former candidate Funiciello

Okay, this is just strange. A former GWBush official is running for Congress in an upstate New York district, and polls show the race as close. Admittedly, the official in question–Elise Stefanik–was only a minor official under Bush, and New York’s 21st District does not number among those suffering worst from the invasion of Iraq. Stefanik was still in prep school at the Albany Academy for Girls when George W. Bush got the White House after the non-vote count of 2001. She was barely out of college–a Harvard grad–when she went to the Bush White House, where she worked for the Domestic Policy Council under Karl Zinsmeister and for Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten.

But the struggle continues. More recent items on the plummy resume include this kudo from her alma mater, “Elise Stefanik (SAC 2006) has joined the Foreign Policy Initiative as director of communications and external affairs.”

FPI: The new PNAC

The Foreign Policy Initiative, for those of you keeping tabs at home, is the newest avatar of the former Project for the New American Century (PNAC), long since designated as a cyberspace ghost town but in its heyday the think tank that brought us the Iraq invasion with its consequent ills. Founders and directors include Bill Kristol and the other head cases who worked feverishly, for years, to make terrorism the new communism; committed to revisiting their palmy days in the Cold War, they went the old military-industrial complex one better, by working ceaselessly to make a cold war hot. This is the leading edge young, up-and-coming GOPers want to associate themselves with?

To coin a phrase, have these people no shame?

Other items on the resume include work for 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, where Stefanik was titled Director of New Media and Deputy Policy Director. Stefanik also founded an entity called “American Maggie,” now defunct.

But be it noted that the valid criticism here is not of small-time efforts or even of failed efforts. The criticism is of awful efforts.

The late great poet Adrienne Rich was right: amnesia in the public discourse is a continuing problem.

 

One in a series of short posts on especially soul-destroying 2014 races.