When It Comes To Corruption, Is There Really A Lesser Of Two Evils?

Schumer has accepted more in Wall St. bribes ($26.7 million) than McConnell and Ryan combined ($24.7 million)

Michael Tomasky predicted at the Daily Beast Monday that if the Democrats focus exclusively on policy rather than Trump's scandals, failing to hold Trump accountable, it will cost them the midterms. He reminded his readers that on Sunday Trump "tweeted that he is ordering an investigation of the investigation into him. His campaign, okay; but him"... and implored his reader to "Think about that... [T]his president-- who, it is documented, has spent 40 years lying to and defrauding people in business, and who lies nearly every time he speaks-- and his apologists have so corrupted our system that some people are discussing Trump’s move as if it’s legitimate. Just another interesting twist and turn in Donald Trump’s Washington, ha ha.

No. It’s not. It’s a scandal. It’s the biggest sign yet that Trump knows and respects no law and will use every tool he can to thwart an investigation that is obviously legitimate. We learned over the weekend from the Times that Russia may not be the half of it, a Gulf emissary reportedly offered to help Trump win the election. Again, the August 2016 meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., Erik Prince, and people from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel (what a troika!) is not denied by Trump spokespeople; nor, so far, is the fact that Don Jr. “responded approvingly” to their offers of help. Boom. That alone is collusion and is illegal. As even Steve Bannon knows, if you’re part of a presidential campaign, you call the FBI the moment you even receive such an offer.

With each revelation, Trump becomes more unhinged and more accusatory and thinks up new ways to try to discredit the FBI and entire principle of independent investigations of the executive branch. He and his campaign almost certainly cheated, and all he does-- this is the president of the United States-- is lie and turn the tables, trying to delegitimize the entire Department of Justice.

...Lately there’s been some chatter about whether Democrats want to talk about Trump heading into the midterms. My colleagues Sam Stein and Gideon Resnick reported that congressional Democrats were refusing to go on cable shows because they want to talk about prescription drug prices but cable wants to talk about Trump. Then I reported that four leading Democratic presidential hopefuls seemed to go out of their way at a major liberal conference to avoid mentioning the president.

This is a guaranteed losing strategy. Candidates campaigning in districts can talk about prescription drugs and other matters all they want. This will happen well below the radar of cable news shows, but voters will hear them. Meanwhile, the national party has to talk about Trump. If a narrative develops between now and November that the Democrats want to be “careful” about how they speak of Trump, core Democratic voters will be demoralized and disgusted.

I can hear the answer back: We’re letting Mueller take care of that. If and when he issues a report before Election Day, we’ll pounce. That’s too cautious. It depends on the actions of someone else. It’s not enough. I’m sure they’d also say we don’t want to get sucked into the impeachment trap, seem like we’re too eager to impeach Trump. But that’s easily enough avoided. All they need to say is we’ll follow the evidence and see where it leads.

But the point they need to emphasize is that unlike the Republicans, they’ll look for the evidence. They’ll look into the Trump Hotel. They’ll haul Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke and Ben Carson up before Congress to explain things. They’ll focus on what’s been happening at the Veterans’ Administration. They’ll investigate policies and outcomes, from the environment to the tax bill (oversight can be “substantive” too, and thus seen as not just “political”). They’ll investigate this Jakarta thing, which has barely been discussed in the media but which alone would have floored this city in normal times. And yes, you bet they’ll investigate the campaign.

The president is lawless. His lawyer is lawless. Both of his lawyers. All they know is to lie, deny, distort, extort, and bully. The country is being governed by Mafiosi values. If the Democrats are unwilling to say that, they’ll let down millions of Americans who are counting on them to defend the law, and they’ll lose, and deserve to. History sometimes presents moments when caution is called for. This isn’t one of them.

It will be hard for the House Democrats to find anyone in Congress more overtly corrupt that their next party leader, Queens Democratic Machine boss and Wall Street whore, Joe Crowley. And what about Debbie Wasserman Schultz? Last time I looked she was still a Democrat in Congress. But they may need to look for someone more corrupt that those two after releasing another plank in their 2018 platform yesterday: "A Better Deal for Our Democracy."

Writing for the Washington Post Mike DeBonis reported at 5AM that the Democrats’ newest midterm pitch is a crackdown on corruption. Oh God! The Republicans may be are certainly grotesquely corrupt, with Trump in our outside the equation, but is anyone supposed to think the Democrats are a scintilla better? Did they for example move against Tony Cárdenas yet? At least Ryan forced Blake Farenthold to resign-- and his victims weren't even underage!

Democrats are preparing to highlight allegations of corruption surrounding the Trump administration-- and a legislative agenda to prevent future abuses-- as they continue rolling out their party platform ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The first planks of the “A Better Deal” platform, released last year, focused on the party’s economic agenda. Now, with questions about pay-to-play politics swirling around President Trump and his current and former aides, Democrats are set to introduce anti-corruption proposals Monday billed as “A Better Deal for Our Democracy.”

According to a senior Democratic official familiar with the announcement, the new agenda will include proposals that would eliminate loopholes that allow lobbyists and lawmakers to buy and sell influence without the public’s knowledge. The message: Elect Democrats in November to “clean up the chaos and corruption in Washington.”

One proposal-- which would tighten the federal laws governing lobbying disclosures and foreign-agent registration-- responds to the apparent sale of influence by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer. According to recently disclosed financial records, Cohen earned millions of dollars from companies that wanted to secure access to Trump’s inner circle in the early days after his 2016 win.

But Cohen never registered as a lobbyist or otherwise disclosed the payments-- possibly because, under federal law, only those who spend more than 20 percent of their time on lobbying on behalf of a client must register as a lobbyist. Democrats will propose to change the law so any lobbying contact would have to be publicly reported.

Another proposal could rewrite federal statutes that might have allowed lawmakers of both parties to skirt convictions on bribery and pay-to-play allegations-- including former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell (R), former senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and  Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ.). All were charged with fraud violations but were then acquitted or had their convictions overturned after courts found that their actions were not criminal under the current letter of federal law.

“This administration is failing to police itself, to set moral standards, to clean up its messes, to shun corrupt behavior, and to drain the swamp,” the Democratic official said. “It’s the American people who are getting stuck with a raw deal. That has to change.”

The proposals are set to be rolled out Monday afternoon on Capitol Hill with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) and several other congressional Democrats who have been engaged in anti-corruption issues, including Rep. John Sarbanes (MD) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI).

The new Democratic focus on corruption as a campaign message marks a return to a formula that helped put Democrats into the House majority in the 2006 midterm elections-- after numerous scandals including the Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham revelations put pay-to-play politics on the public’s political radar in a big way. Polling done after the election showed that the tide of corruption helped swing votes to Democrats, and the party’s official now sees signs of similar concerns among voters.

Democrats, the official said, will make the case that they are best equipped to rein in what they are calling “the most corrupt administration in modern times” and are prepared to connect the corruption allegations to a Republican governing agenda that has delivered outsize tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and dismantled financial and environmental regulations that aimed to protect average taxpayers.

Democrats are also preparing to highlight an apparent atmosphere of rule-bending, if not rule-breaking, in the Trump administration. Several Trump Cabinet members-- including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, as well as former Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price and former Veterans Affairs secretary David Shulkin-- have been subject to official investigations of questionable spending on travel and other expenses.

I Can't Sleep Nights, Worrying I'm Not Doing Enough For Bernie

Progressive pundit Michael Tomasky has given his permission for Bernie to stay in the race but warned him that "if he wants to remain a major progressive leader in a Clinton presidency, it’s time to ratchet back his attacks on the presumptive nominee." Has Bernie been attacking her? I must've fallen asleep and missed it. "From here on in," write Tomasky, "Sanders ought to lay off the attacks on Hillary Clinton, the Goldman Sachs speeches and all the rest. Eventually, he’s going to lose. She’s going to win. He can do it in a way that burnishes his standing in the party he’s decided to be a member of and that makes him a pivotally powerful senator during a potential Clinton presidency. Or he can do it in a way that damages her reputation and ultimately his own." I'm sure the rest of his story is wonderful but I deleted it. I was too eager to get to get to something less silly. The Intercept ran a piece by David Dayen yesterday that Tomasky should read. Perhaps it would help him focus on why it's so, so important that Bernie turn up the heat and do everything he can to save the country from a Trumpf presidency by beating the unelectable Democratic establishment candidate. In fact, anyone who doubts, Hillary plans to turn the country over to Wall Street-- so if you've been living under a rock (though not a BlackRock) for a year-- needs to read it.

Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches, but an even bigger Wall Street player stands ready to mold and enact her economic and financial policy if she becomes president.

BlackRock is far from a household name but it is the largest asset management firm in the world, controlling $4.6 trillion in investor funds — about a trillion dollars more than the annual federal budget, and five times the assets of Goldman Sachs. And Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, has assembled a veritable shadow government full of former Treasury Department officials at his company.

Fink has made clear his desire to become Treasury Secretary someday. The Obama Administration had him on the short list to replace Timothy Geithner. When that didn’t materialize, he pulled several members of prior Treasury Departments into high-level positions at the firm, which may improve the prospects of realizing his dream in a future Clinton Administration.

And his priorities appear to be so in sync with Clinton’s that it’s not entirely clear who shares whose agenda.

Clinton, for her part, has refused to rule out a Treasury Secretary drawn from Wall Street.

Fink’s ready-made team available for a move from Wall Street to Washington includes... Cheryl Mills, arguably Clinton’s most trusted confidant. Mills was Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, was deputy White House counsel in the Bill Clinton administration and is on the board of directors of the Clinton Foundation. Fink hired Mills for the BlackRock board of directors in October 2013, in what observers mused was a ploy to insinuate himself into the Clinton inner circle.

It’s worth considering how Fink’s recent experiences might inform his approach at Treasury. Asset management firms invest pools of money into securities on behalf of their clients, which in BlackRock’s case include 94 of the Fortune 100. They don’t issue securities themselves; they just buy stuff.

Asset managers don’t package and sell dodgy financial products like investment banks, and don’t trade with borrowed money like hedge funds, so they are typically viewed as more restrained and less averse to regulation than their colleagues in those related industries.

But they are embedded in the broader financial system as voracious buyers of securities. For example, BlackRock holds major share amounts in nearly every mega-bank, takes funds from scores of Wall Street investors, and manages a majority of the federal government’s bailout programs. They may not create the risk, but they own a lot of it. Fink, who co-created the mortgage-backed security while a trader at First Boston in the 1980s, is a longtime respected figure on Wall Street; Geithner reportedly used him as a conduit between Treasury and the financial industry.

He also knows how to work the levers of power to achieve his ends.

Whether buy-side firms like BlackRock represent a systemic risk to the financial system is the subject of some debate. Some believe asset managers could trigger problems by failing to pay off counter-parties, or being forced into a fire sale of their assets.

But Fink and BlackRock pushed hard to successfully resist the designation of asset managers as systemically important financial institutions (or SIFIs), which would be subject to additional regulation like larger capital requirements.

Fink also opposes efforts to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall firewall between investment and commercial banks, as does Clinton.

In fact, Fink’s views on Wall Street are so similar to Clinton’s that it’s hard to see that as a coincidence. Most notably, Clinton’s financial reform plan is mute when it comes to regulating asset management firms as SIFIs.

Fink has in recent months stressed an end to “short-termism” in the financial markets. For example, he wants to limit share buybacks that pump up stock prices, and encourage investors to hold stock longer, to focus on long-term corporate performance. Clinton has mirrored this language to such a degree that the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin suggested that Clinton “could have been channeling Laurence D. Fink.”

While the call to end short-termism is in some ways laudable, in Fink’s case it certainly reflects his self-interest. Clinton’s tax plan, for example, would keep capital gains rates higher for short-term holdings and decrease the rate for investors who hold assets over five years. Because BlackRock buys and holds most of its investments, any policy favoring long-term strategies in the markets would improve the firm’s bottom line.

Victor Fleischer, a leading tax lawyer and professor at the University of San Diego, questioned Clinton’s embrace of the short-termism argument in the New York Times earlier this month, saying it would “do little to address top-end income inequality,” since plenty of wealthy people buy and hold. And Fleischer explicitly worries that the short-termism idea originated from Fink. “I find it hard to shake the feeling that at the end of the day, in a Clinton administration, it would be Larry Fink, not the technocrats, calling the shots,” Fleischer wrote.

Fink has also promoted the privatization of Social Security, while mocking the idea of retiring at 65, which is easy for a business executive who sits at a desk all day to say, rather than working on an assembly line or as a waiter. Fink owes his initial backing at BlackRock to Pete Peterson, the former commerce secretary who has been at the forefront of the campaign to cut or privatize Social Security. He sat on the steering committee of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a stalking horse for Peterson’s ideas.

While Clinton has adamantly pledged not to cut or privatize Social Security benefits, Fink’s track record would cause concern among advocates, were he to obtain a cabinet post. And having a ready-made team of trusted advisors who know their way around the Treasury building and the players in a potential Clinton West Wing can only help Fink in that campaign.

I can imagine her giving the nomination speech now... "who better to deal with those horrible Wall Street cheats than a Wall Street cheat expert?" Maybe that's what she was doing with Giovanni Gambino in Charleston, South Carolina. Attorney General? Remember, a vote for Hillary is a vote for Wall Street and, probably, a vote for the cruel reality of a Herr President Trumpf. The alternative to another Wall Street Administration:

Rubio's 19th Century Vision For America Isn't Going Anywhere

New York's Gabriel Sherman, writhing about what Team Clinton has in store for Biden: "The research effort started about a month ago and is being conducted by operatives at Correct the Record, the pro-Hillary superpac founded by David Brock, which is coordinating with the Clinton campaign. According to the source, the research has turned up material on Biden’s ties to Wall Street; his reluctance to support the raid that killed Osma bin Laden; and his role in the Anita Hill saga as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee." But with the Clinton opposition research team putting all its energy into readying the attack against Biden, who's preparing to go after whichever maniac the GOP finally nominates?

Yesterday's silly insider buzz was all about how that Republican would be... Rubio. The Real Clear Politics average GOP primary polling has him in 4th place, almost at double-digits and just behind Fiorina, just ahead of Jeb:

• Trump- 23.2%
• Carson- 17.2%
• Fiorina- 10.4%
• Rubio- 9.9%
• Bush- 8.4%
• Cruz- 6.2%
• Kasich- 3.2%
• Huckabee- 2.9%
• Christie- 2.6%
• Paul- 2.3%

Nate Cohn admits Rubio "hasn’t quite had his moment in the media spotlight, he hasn’t made big gains in the polls, and he hasn’t earned many endorsements. But," he wrote in yesterday's NYTimes, "the political landscape surrounding his candidacy could not have changed much more in his favor over the last six months." That means that after Walker was driven out of the race Rubio's all the mainstream conservative voters have left other than the pretty loathed and floundering Jeb Bush. In yesterday's PPP survey Rubio's favorables/unfavorables were a relatively robust 57/24% while poor Jeb's were a sorry, low-energy 34/49%. Rubio has picked up some Walker operatives, theoretically a good thing, and some Walker donors and bundlers.

The sense that Mr. Rubio’s position has improved is reflected in the betting markets, which show him rising steadily to a 29 percent chance of winning the nomination, more than twice the 13 percent he held before the last Republican debate. Mr. Bush is at 31 percent.

Mr. Rubio, however, will still need to capitalize on the voids created by Mr. Walker’s exit and Mr. Bush’s weakness. With well-received debate performances, he has been praised as the best communicator in his party and has strong favorability ratings. But he has not yet become the top choice of many party elites or voters; in fact, he holds about as much support in the polls as Mr. Bush, and far fewer endorsements.

Mr. Rubio’s biggest shortcoming is that he is not the natural favorite of any wing of the party, which is the easiest way for a candidate to become the first choice of a meaningful block of voters. He’s the opposite of candidates like Mr. Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul and John Kasich, who have messages and political identities that resonate with one of the party’s core constituencies, like the Tea Party, evangelicals, libertarians or moderates.

Mr. Rubio’s challenge could simply be a reflection of his greatest strength-- his wide appeal. The son-of-a-bartender message is so broadly attractive in part because it’s aimed at no one, except, perhaps, bartender households.

...But it’s also possible that Mr. Rubio’s problems run deeper than the factional politics of a severely divided party. Perhaps his vaunted communication skills haven’t turned into big polling gains because his personal traits-- he’s a young, Catholic, Latino lawyer from Miami-- don’t help him resonate among old, evangelical, white, less-educated and rural voters. His youthful appearance may not help assuage concerns about his preparedness for the presidency.

Beyond his limited experience in national politics, he has big vulnerabilities on his failed immigration reform effort and his ties to a billionaire benefactor.

Paul Waldman and Jonathan Chait were both laughing. Waldman: "By any objective measure, Rubio isn’t doing much better than he was a month or a year ago... But that will probably change. Here’s how the prophecy of Rubio’s future success becomes self-fulfilling. Members of the media decide that Rubio has a good chance of winning the nomination. Then they begin writing more stories about him. Those stories tend to be very positive, not because of some personal pro-Rubio bias any reporter has, but because the stories’ basic frame-- Rubio is climbing, Rubio could be the nominee-- leads them to focus on his more appealing characteristics and the things he’s doing right, as a way of explaining what they say is happening (just as a story about Jeb Bush’s drop in the polls will naturally focus on mistakes that he’s made and things he’s doing wrong). Voters see all this positive coverage, and begin thinking, “Gee, that Rubio fellow is pretty appealing.” Donors see it and give him more money. Other Republican politicians see it and start thinking about whether it’s time to make their endorsement. Each tiny movement upward in the polls, no matter how small, reinforces the cycle and keeps propelling him upward."

Chait seems even more skeptical: "Rubio has carved out a valuable niche in the Republican field as the candidate who will carry out the agenda of the party’s donor base, but who has the identity and communication skills to sell that agenda more effectively... [A]sked if he disagrees with Bush or Romney on anything at all, Rubio does not directly offer any examples. Instead, he says he will “spend a tremendous amount of time talking about higher-education reform.” This is an interesting and perhaps accidentally blunt description of his political strategy. (Obviously Rubio wants to spend a lot of time talking about higher-education reform, and less time talking about less popular things he plans to do in office.) But it’s not true that other Republicans never talked about reforming higher education. Romney talked about it a lot... What’s stranger is Rubio’s claim that his issues-- actually, issue, singular, is completely novel to anything considered by Bush or Romney because “they were not part of the 20th century debate.” The gambit here is to wall off any association between Rubio and previous Republican failures by drawing a line at the century mark, after which all intellectual continuities stop." OK, but that's both silly and untrue.

Michael Tomasky seems about as worried as Rubio as I am-- i.e., not at all. Writing for the Daily Beast yesterday, he was also laughing at the expense of the insiders-- "not regular real people, but total political junkies, and, being on the side of the fence I’m on, mostly liberal total political junkies"-- who are calling it for Rubio already. He agrees with everyone else that Rubio-- for all his weaknesses-- may wind up as the "insider" or "mainstreamish" candidate: :"The logic is straightforward enough. It looks like the race will eventually whittle down to one outsider vs. one insider. The outsider could be Donald Trump or who knows maybe Ben Carson, with an outside shot at Carly Fiorina. As for the insider, not so long ago that was either Rubio or Jeb Bush or John Kasich, throw a dart. But Bush just keeps getting worse and worse, and Kasich looks increasingly goofy."

I think my little focus group is over-sweating this. So herewith, four reasons why Rubio might be formidable, and four corresponding reasons why he’s being overrated.

Reason One: This whole youth business. Let’s face it, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is the spring chicken. At least she’d be shy of 70 when inaugurated. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden probably couldn’t last two terms. So Rubio can lay it on thick with all that cloying rhetoric about the future and passing torches to a new generation. The media really fall for that. Oh, and speaking of…

Reason Two: It seems the media like him. They sure like him more than they like Hillary. If she’s the nominee, the default narrative in the media will be something like “fresh-faced new figure takes on tired old hag.”

Reason Three: The Latino vote. You’ll be reading a lot if he’s the nominee about how he won 55 percent of the Latino vote in his first Senate run in Florida in 2010. The press will be full of breathless stories about how if he can replicate that, the Democrats are doomed.

Reason Four: He seems reasonable and totally unthreatening, which may make it hard for Democrats to sell people on the idea that he’s a right-wing extremist. There’s an art for these wingers in knowing how to emphasize all the non-extreme stuff and really play down the extreme parts. Rubio is better at that than the others. A case in point is that woman-on-the-$10-bill business from the second debate. Three of them said Rosa Parks, but Rubio said it first. This was after Rand Paul said Susan B. Anthony, which isn’t bad, but Anthony doesn’t cover nearly as many reassure-mainstream-America bases as Parks does. Also keep in mind that he had that crackerjack answer about Black Lives Matter recently, which was likely the best response to the movement by a GOP candidate. If Rubio can keep doing things like that, the “No, you fools, he’s a true right winger!” counter-narrative might be very tough to advance.

All right. Now, here are the reasons why Rubio is eminently beatable in a general election.

Reason One: His youth story line can be very easily countered. Picture a Clinton-Rubio debate. Rubio prattles on about youth, the future, optimism, what have you. Mrs. Clinton? “Well, look, the Senator is undoubtedly younger than I am, that’s an objective fact. But if we’re talking about which one of us has the policies of the past, I’d say voters should look beyond mere age. Which one of us wants to keep fighting the Cold War in Cuba, and which one of us wants to move toward a new future there? Which one of us opposes gay people getting married, a policy of the past that large majorities of Americans no longer support? Which one of us would allow no abortions even in the case of rape and incest, which is literally kind of a 19th-century position? Which one of us not only opposes raising the minimum wage but opposes the existence of a federal minimum wage law, which would us all the way back to 1937, the last time this country had no federal minimum wage? That’s the candidate of the future?” Boom. If she said something like that and made two good commercials and Democrats in general hammered away at it, Rubio would shut up about the future pretty fast.

Reason Two: The women’s vote. Let’s go back to that abortion sentence above. It was at the first debate that Rubio said no rape or incest exceptions on abortion. Now, if he becomes the nominee, he’ll try to walk that back in some way, at least rhetorically, and he’s usually been clever and slippery in the way he’s worded it. No Republican nominee since abortion became a public issue has ever opposed exceptions for rape and incest. It’s an extreme position that should, if the Democrats hit it the right way, cost him a few points among suburban women in all the key swing states.

Reason Three: The Latino vote. He’s not getting close to 55 percent among Latinos. OK, some say, but what if he gets a mere 40, isn’t that enough? Well, maybe, maybe not, depending on other factors. But after being for immigration reform, he’s now basically against it and against a path to citizenship, although here too he is slippery. He says now that we should postpone the citizenship debate for 10 or 12 years, which means that if he serves eight, he won’t be the guy to be doing anything about it.

So that’s a way of being against it without saying the words “I’m against it,” but people aren’t stupid. In one recent poll that looked especially closely at Latino preferences (PDF), Clinton led Rubio among Latinos 61 to 31 percent (statistically, no different from how she fared against Bush or Ted Cruz). I would bet you today that that’s about how it will end up if those two face each other. And that ain’t enough.

Reason Four: The Electoral College. My long-suffering readers know that I bang on about this a lot, but the Democrats have a big advantage here, and I see nothing about Rubio that will shake this up. Rand Paul could have beaten Clinton in Colorado and Nevada, maybe even Ohio. Not Rubio. And fine, let him win Florida. A Democrat can still get 300-plus electoral votes without Florida.

The Republican Civil War-- As Seen Through Two Very Different Sets Of Eyes

And then there will be this to contend with...

Many Republicans are distraught that Trump has dragged their party back into the mud and slime of racism, bigotry and ugly communal hatred. This is what Reince Priebus' autopsy after the Romney debacle was supposed to prevent. Primitive hatemongers like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee could never have done it by themselves, but the celebrity and marketing power of Trump isn't something the Republican Establishment was banking on. He's redefining the Republican brand-- or sharpening the definition that the party elites have tried to gloss over and play down-- as a party steeped in negativity, xenophobia, Know-Nothingness and a natural and smooth kinship with the KKK and Nazi Party. Today's CNN/ORC poll shows Trump still in first place-- only more so. With Establishment candidates like Jeb (down 4 to 9%), Kasich (down 3 to 2%), Rubio (down 5 to 3%) and Walker (down 3 to 5%) disappearing as serious contenders, Trump surged from 24% August 16 to 32% today.

Some Democratic observers-- like Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast-- can hardly believe their good fortune and are sitting back ordering more buttered popcorn. And a Republican or two-- well, Canadian conservative David Frum-- see the opportunity for dragging the GOP into modernity. 

Let's start with Tomasky, who is enjoying the blood feud that's erupted between the distraught GOP elites and the sweaty Trumpians and other assorted white supremacists who attacked Jonah Goldberg for his doubts of the efficacy of the Trumpoid Apocalypse.

Commenters on the article were venomous: Go ahead, you RINO-quisling-sellout (or, occasionally, you dastardly Jew), who needs you anyway? This comment was representative, and even a little quasi-poetic: “So Blow and Rage, Jonah, Blow into the winter night, strut and fret your rabid slobber onto the stage, idiot-like until you are flattened by the Trump steamroller-- of course we will be forced to hear more of your shout and flabberting, but it won’t mean a thing. I hope the Republican Party collapses so we can get on with partnering with something that is not so diseased that its internal organs are melting into a pus-fulled [sic] syrup that is oozing out of every…whatever.”

...[F]or people like me, this is definitely pass-the-popcorn time. What better entertainment could there possibly be than watching American conservatism being wrecked by a bunch of white nationalists?

American conservatism has spent decades winking at these kinds of groups and voters-- denouncing them very occasionally when caught red-handed playing in the same sandbox, as when a white Southern Republican is forced to explain that gosh, he didn’t know the local citizens’ council was a white supremacist group; but for the most part courting these voters and stoking their anxieties through means sometimes subtle, sometimes not. So let them tear each other apart.

The amusing thing is, Goldberg actually makes some good points in his newsletter piece, mainly that Trump isn’t much of a conservative on a number of issues. About that, he is correct.

But if he can’t instantly grasp how modern conservatism made Trump-- and not only Trump, but even more importantly, the people who are now his rabid supporters-- then I doubt it can be explained at a level of remediation that will sink in. But it’s pretty simple. When Steve King jokes about people crossing the border with their cantaloupe-sized calves full of bags of weed, he’s creating Trump and Trump’s backers. And multiply that times 300 for every crazy-borderline racist comment in recent years by Michele Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh and all the rest of them, and you get a party and a movement whose nudges at that kind of thing have done far more to create Trump and his supporters than the occasional faux-solemn and perfunctory denunciations have done to thwart them. So this problem of white nationalism bubbling uncomfortably close to the surface is one the Republican Party and the conservative movement have deserved to have for a long time now.

Mind you I don’t think liberals should be gloating too much about this yet. It’s way too hard to predict what all this will mean for the election. In all likelihood, Trump won’t have the votes to win the nomination, John Kasich or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush will, and the Trump voters will mostly start getting themselves worked up about the looming menace of President Hillary and come out and vote for the sellout RINOs they’re now repudiating at #NRORevolt.

But let’s say that at some point, we do see a real civil war in the Republican Party over all this, and the time comes when GOP leaders need to own up to a Joe McCarthy kind of moment—that is, a moment when they are finally forced to step forward and say Donald, we don’t want you or your more extreme supporters. The National Review itself did a version of this, of course, back in the old days under Bill Buckley, when it said much the same to John Birch Society types.

But the Review was just a magazine. It lost some subscribers, I’m sure, but not the White House. For a political party the stakes are a little higher, and I don’t think today’s GOP would have the stones to do it. The party is stuck with Trump and his backers. It created them.

Don't pass any popcorn Frum's way; he's fretting, not gloating, although he does see a silver lining in the nightmare scenario Trump has unleashed on his party. He claims to feel the disappointment and frustration with the GOP Establishment that the great unwashed mass of racists, bigots and low-info paranoids are expressing with their support of Trumpy. "Donald Trump," he asserts (with dogged hope and a trace of trepidation), "was propelled into first place among Republicans in July 2015 much more by anger against the party’s existing leadership than by any attraction he exerted on his own." 

Proof? Hate Talk Radio icon Mark Levin:

Senator Mitch McConnell and Representatives John Boehner and Karl Rove and their ilk …. You’re sick of them. You’re sick of them not doing what you elected them to do. You’re sick of them lying to you. You’re sick of them attacking everybody who doesn’t agree with them through their surrogates. You’re sick of how they treat people who dare to challenge them in Republican primaries … You’re tired of so-called conservative commentators on TV and elsewhere who serve as their surrogates ... You don’t feel you have a home and you don’t feel that there’s a party that stands up for you. 

You go, girl! The hateful, hate-filled GOP rank and file eats this kind of stuff up.

Whatever happens to the Trump candidacy-- almost certainly nothing good-- the insurrectionary mood inside the Republican Party will not easily be quieted. More than 40 percent of Republicans want illegal immigrants deported. The party’s best-funded candidates are committed to some kind of pathway to citizenship. More than a fifth of Republicans believe the wealthy wield too much political power.

The forces that have worked to render the GOP a minority party remain at work:

The Radicalization of the Baby-Boom Generation as It Enters Its Sixties

Through most of their life cycle, the people born between 1945 and 1960 expressed more liberal views than people born between 1930 and 1945. That abruptly changed in 2007-2008, as the economy boomers aged, the economy crashed, and Barack Obama was elected president. The boomers, a cohort more than 70 percent white, face retirement at a time when there don’t seem sufficient public resources for everyone-- and under an administration that seems to regard non-poor retirees as a group to be redistributed from, not to.

The Assertiveness of the GOP’s Wealthy Donor Class

Limits on political giving have vanished as potential givers have amassed unprecedented wealth. Those givers differ on almost every issue from non-givers in their party on almost every imaginable issue. Unsurprisingly, the givers tend to get their way most of the time. Unsurprisingly, the non-givers resent it.

The Emergence of a Conservative Entertainment Complex

The entertainment complex appeals to a very small slice of the country--but it can make or break political careers within a larger Republican party. The only counterweight against it is the power of huge money from a narrow class of mega-donors.

After the Fox debate, I received an email from an old friend who advises one of the Republican Party’s very largest donors. I quote an extract with his permission:

This is the first time I've ever done anything but throw cold water on this idea, but I think the Republican Party is about to split.

The establishment's utter failure to even consider what Trump's rise means, much less how the Republican Party must accommodate Trump supporters rather than the other way around, means a split. And a good thing, too.

I have never voted anything other than straight-ticket Republican ticket in my life, nor ever considered doing so. But I think I'd be happy to cast one for Trump as a protest vote.

But, but, but … I wanted to say to my friend, you and your boss are the Republican establishment, or at least two of its very most important members! If we’ve reached the point where even the establishment hates the establishment, the mood is dangerous indeed.

More popcorn; more buttah! 

And if you missed Jonathan Chait's New York column yesterday, it's all about Jeb doubling down on much of what the base hates about the GOP. "George W. Bush," he wrote, "passed a sweeping across-the-board tax cut in 2001, promising his plan would promote faster economic growth while still allowing budget surpluses."

Instead, Bush’s plan brought back the structural deficits that had disappeared during the 1990s, along with a mediocre recovery that was itself inflated by a housing bubble, the popping of which culminated in the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. You might think that the brother of that guy would go out of his way to prove that he has different ideas for fiscal policy. Instead, Jeb Bush has unveiled his tax-cut plan, and it’s the same thing his brother did, only more extreme. 

As in extremely bad for working families... and, ultimately, of course, the economy and the nation. I doubt any of the esteemed writers quoted above will agree, but there really is only one logical response to this, one that will change the paradigm.

The Republican Wing Of The Democratic Party Claims It Still Doesn't Have A Silver Stake Through It's Heart

Even House progressives tell me it's Hoyer's turn to be leader next-- doom!

Adam Green of the PCCC pointed out when Landrieu was handily defeated by some hack GOP nonentity Saturday that the last of the Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party who prevented the public option in the Affordable Care Act-- the others being Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln-- had all been driven from office within 4 years; I think he left out Mark Pryor-- but he also lost his Senate seat last month. Good riddance to all of them. Take a look at the ProgressivePunch lifetime crucial vote scores of the half dozen Democratic Senators who have voted the most frequently against progressive values in the current session:

• Tom Carper (DE)- 72.30
• Claire McCaskill (MO)- 72.13
• Kay Hagan (NC)- 70.67 defeated
• Mark Pryor (AR)- 66.50 defeated
• Mary Landrieu (LA)- 65.42 defeated
• Joe Manchin (WV)- 61.75

They wreck the Democratic Party brand and discourage voters with progressive values from bothering to go to the polls. And there are even more of them in the House-- Wall Street-owned New Dems and Blue Dogs, dwindling but still with enough clout within the party-- thanks to well placed corrupt conservative leaders like Steny Hoyer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Crowley, Steve Israel-- to confuse voters about what it even means to be a Democrat. These are the dozen Democrats in the House who voted most frequently against progressive initiatives and principles in the 2013-14 session, along with their ProgressivePunch crucial vote scores for the current session:

• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)- 26.20 forced to retire
• John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)- 26.64 defeated
• Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)- 27.68 forced to retire
• Ron Barber (Blue Dog-AZ)- 32.58 defeated
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)- 33.62
• Pete Gallego (Blue Dog-TX)- 34.07 defeated
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)- 36.20
• Bill Owens (New Dem-NY)- 39.47 forced to retire
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)- 40.17
• Nick Rahall (Blue Dog-WV)- 40.61 defeated
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)- 41.67
• Joe Garcia (New Dem-FL)- 44.59 defeated

What does the Democratic Party learn from these defeats? Nothing absolutely, nothing. The corporate whores and Wall Street shills just want to double down on their failed Blue Dog/New Dem approach which is so hated by Democratic grassroots voters-- and so beloved Inside-the-Beltway. I found this clueless piece from one of the Beltway trade publications republished yesterday by the Arizona Daily Star. [Warning, they refer to reactionaries and conservatives as "moderates," a well-worn Beltway trick to mislead readers.]

The Blue Dog Coalition of moderate House Democrats is reaching a turning point in its 20-year history, after losing more than a third of its members by the end of 2014 through retirements and election defeats.

It’s now down to a dozen returning members, less than a quarter of its peak.

Veteran members including Collin C. Peterson of Minnesota, the last original Blue Dog, and Jim Cooper of Tennessee hope to promote a rebound by the group.

“It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” Cooper said.

Blue Dogs have a long history of surviving adversity since they became a caucus with about 20 members in 1995, he said, and he predicted they will regain strength in a tough political environment.

Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University, said the Blue Dogs will be hard-pressed to reclaim the clout they had in 2010, when the group had more than 50 members and won enactment of a top priority: the pay-as-you-go law, which required that spending and tax bills not increase the deficit.

Southern voters have turned against Blue Dogs in part because much of the region’s electorate opposes President Obama and party leaders such as Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Black said. “They are selling a product no one wants to buy.”

But despite recent losses, Cooper said Blue Dogs will have influence in the 114th Congress because of Republican divisions and the ability of Senate Democrats to block partisan bills.

“House Blue Dogs will play a quieter role. It will take a Republican split before we can be clearly decisive in a vote. But there are going to be many Republican splits... There are going to be plenty of opportunities for Blue Dogs to make a key difference on legislation,” Cooper said.

Cooper is just one of four returning Blue Dogs from the South, with Reps. Sanford D. Bishop Jr. and David Scott, both of Georgia, and Henry Cuellar of Texas.

Cuellar and other Blue Dogs predict loose coalitions with Republicans on shared priorities where Republicans hope to deter-- or override-- vetoes by Obama. For example, they envision common ground with the Republicans on tax cuts, giving trade promotion authority to the president, regulatory curbs and energy sweeteners, including approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Peterson predicted that the group will expand its ranks quickly from the freshman class. Among the new recruits are Reps.-elect Gwen Graham of Florida and Brad Ashford of Nebraska, who have already attended meetings, Peterson said.

Membership “ebbs and flows,” Peterson said. He narrowly won re-election and must decide whether to run again in 2016.

Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, a longtime ally of the Blue Dogs, said he and other party leaders will give wide leeway to the coalition’s members to vote their consciences, and will try to help them promote priorities and win re-election.

“They need to bounce back, and they will bounce back,” Hoyer said. “We are going to work at it.”

UPDATE: Let The South Go

Mike Tomasky explains why the South is a lost cause for the Democrats-- and why they should embrace that.

At the congressional level, and from there on down, the Democrats should just forget about the place. They should make no effort, except under extraordinary circumstances, to field competitive candidates. The national committees shouldn’t spend a red cent down there. This means every Senate seat will be Republican, and 80 percent of the House seats will be, too. The Democrats will retain their hold on the majority-black districts, and they’ll occasionally be competitive in a small number of other districts in cities and college towns. But they’re not going win Southern seats (I include here with some sadness my native West Virginia, which was not a Southern state when I was growing up but culturally is one now). And they shouldn’t try.

...Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”

Cohen thinks maybe some economic populism could work, and that could be true in limited circumstances. But I think even that is out the window now. In the old days, drenched in racism as the South was, it was economically populist. Glass and Steagall, those eponymous bank regulators, were both Southern members of Congress. But today, as we learned in Sunday’s Times, state attorneys general, many in the South, are colluding with energy companies to fight federal regulation of energy plants.

It’s lost. It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be. I’ll save that for another column. Until that day comes, the Democratic Party shouldn’t bother trying. If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.

What Works Better-- America's War On Poverty Or The GOP's War On Poor People?

Conservatives always ignore history and always want to reargue their issues. Today we're hearing the same tired, discredited arguments for why the rich should be the focus of government largesse and why helping the poor is a waste of money. When you hear today's crop of ignorant teabaggers and erudite think tank loons arguing against the minimum wage, they are trying the same nonsense they tried-- and failed with-- for decades. Today the far right Club for Growth, predictably, demanded that all the senators they own vote against extending unemployment benefits. Overturning FDR's New Deal will always be at the tip-top of the Republican policy agenda. It's why working people who haven't been brainwashed by Fox and Hate Talk Radio never trust them-- despite their best efforts to divide working families through a policy of racism, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia.

Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of the War of Poverty and in the Daily Beast this morning, Michael Tomasky lashed out against the arguments that intellectual feather-weights Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) have been making about how the whole project was a dismal failure. It wasn't.

Our problem is when conservatives like Rubio talk gibberish: “Isn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure?” No, it isn’t. It’s high time to say the war on poverty was a success. A wild success, indeed, by nearly every meaningful measure. But no one thinks so, and a big part of the reason is that most Democrats are afraid to say so. They’d damn well better start. If we’re really going to be raising the minimum wage and tackling inequality, someone needs to be willing to say to the American people that these kinds of approaches get results.

You may have seen the big Times piece Sunday that looked back over the half-century war on poverty, kicked off by Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 State of the Union address. The article noted that in terms of health and nutrition and numerous other factors, the poor in the United States are immeasurably less immiserated today than they were then. But it did lead by saying the overall poverty rate in all that time has dropped only from 19 to 15 percent, suggesting to the casual reader that all these billions for five decades haven’t accomplished much.

What’s wrong with thinking is that we have not, of course, been fighting any kind of serious war on poverty for five decades. We fought it with truly adequate funding for about one decade. Less, even. Then the backlash started, and by 1981, Ronald Reagan’s government was fighting a war on the war on poverty. The fate of many anti-poverty programs has ebbed and flowed ever since.

But at the beginning, in the ’60s, those programs were fully funded, or close. And what happened? According to Joseph Califano, who worked in the Johnson White House, “the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century.” That’s a staggering 43 percent reduction. In six years.

The war on poverty then lost steam in the 1970s. Some of that was Johnson’s fault-- money that might have been spent fighting poverty was diverted to bombing and shooting the Vietnamese. Some of it was the fault of liberal rhetoric. Johnson and others would speak of eradicating poverty, and of course eradicating poverty is impossible, and when it didn’t happen, conservatives were able to say, “See?” (Democrats ought to have learned their lesson along these lines; Barack Obama made a similar mistake in 2009, vowing that the stimulus would keep the jobless rate under 8.5 percent.) And so the public started electing politicians who told them poverty couldn’t be cured by government but only by pulling up one’s bootstraps and friending Jesus more aggressively.

But even for its shortcomings, the Great Society and the war on poverty did absolutely amazing things. I’d like my fellow West Virginia natives to imagine our capital-poor state without the billions the Appalachian Regional Commission has spent since 1965 on roads, local economic development, community health clinics, and numerous other projects. The Great Society brought federal billions to schools, made college possible for millions of kids from modest means, educated innumerable doctors, and so much more. And it’s always worth remembering that the official poverty rate, now 15 percent, overstates the true number because it doesn’t take into account certain policies that don’t offer direct subsidies to poor people, notably the Earned Income Tax Credit, a once bipartisan policy that went to 27.5 million families in 2010 and encourages work and lifts many millions of families above the poverty line.

The political problem is that Americans don’t know about or focus on these successes. They just know that we tried, and poverty still exists. Thus has the “war” frame ended up being extremely handy for conservatives, who will always be able to point to the existence of poor people and therefore to make the claim that the whole thing has been a failure. That is why Rubio can say what he says in his new video and have people who don’t know any better nodding their heads in agreement. And it’s why Ryan can prattle on as he does about government and dependency. I can assure you that when both unveil their specific policy platforms later this year, they’ll consist of a mix of things that a) already exist in some form; b) have been tried and proved tricky to implement; c) sound good in theory but will be woefully underfunded; or d) have been studied to death, with findings suggesting their impact will be minimal.

It will be Democrats’ job to make sure Rubio and Ryan can’t get away with their ideological sleight of hand. They will undoubtedly speak solemnly, for example, of teenage pregnancy and child-bearing, confident that most Americans don’t know that the incidence of these behaviors, even in the African-American community, has decreased dramatically since 1990. If we are entering a new phase of fighting a war on inequality, Americans need to know some facts about the last war that firmly support the view that the effort and resources have done far more good than harm. The Democrats just have to be willing-- and proud-- to say it and say it and say it.

Eloise Reyes, the grassroots progressive running for the Democratic nomination in the Inland Empire (CA-31), is one of those candidates willing to explain why she's proud to say it and say it and say it-- which is, in great part, why Blue America has endorsed her. (The DCCC is backing an empty suit and loser named Pete Aguilar, who already lost to Gary Miller is this deep blue district in 2012, even though Aguilar has gone on record in favor of reducing earned Social Security benefits to retired seniors.) This morning, we asked Eloise, about the role of War on Poverty programs in San Bernardino.

The War on Poverty is about so much more than reducing the number of Americans who live below a particular economic threshold. It is about breaking cycles of injustice and empowering Americans to lift themselves up out of social and economic disparity. When we invest in programs and initiatives that combat poverty, we show our commitment to creating opportunity for all Americans, tackling racial discrimination and providing a safety net for the most vulnerable members of our society, like the elderly and the disabled.

And history has shown that when the war on poverty has been waged with sufficient funding and political muscle, it has been remarkably effective and has had real and meaningful effects on the lives of millions of Americans. Even so, we continue to see House Republicans march in lockstep with their predecessors in Congress, who have fought tooth and nail for decades against efforts to alleviate poverty and address its root causes. California’s 31st Congressional District is just one community where this battle rages.

Here in the Inland Empire, one in five children lives below the poverty line. Yet our current Member of Congress, far-right conservative Gary Miller, is more committed to fighting a war on the War on Poverty than actually improving the lives of the people he represents. Even amongst the field of Democratic candidates running for this House seat, we see Pete Aguilar supporting proposals like the Chained CPI, which would dramatically chip away at the benefits of Social Security recipients. Clearly, the first step in continuing to combat poverty-- both in CA-31 and nationally-- is electing the right Democrats to office.

Let's get rid of right-wing garbage like Miller and make sure Steve Israel doesn't sneak in "Democratic" versions of the same anti-working family corrupt elitists like Pete Aguilar. While Israel is hiring tutors to teach Aguilar Spanish, so he can try to relate to the community, you can contribute to Eloise's grassroots campaign here.


UPDATE: At Least One House Candidate In Hawai'i Remembers How Much Good The War On Poverty Did For His State

Stanley Chang is the progressive in a crowded field of Democrats hoping to replace New Dem Colleen Hanabusa in the first CD. The majority-Asian-American district is deep blue (D+18) and encompasses Honolulu and the southern area of Oahu. Several of his opponents-- particularly Donna Mercado Kim and Mufi Hannemann are so far to the right that they are as bad as any Republican. This afternoon, Chang told us that the war on poverty isn't something from the past but an ongoing commitment Americans make to society.

"Simply put, we are losing the war on poverty because we've all but given up on fighting it.  In many cases, the Republicans in Congress are not just rooting for our failure, but are actually cutting ever larger holes in the social safety net that the poorest American families fall right through. Late last month, we saw Republicans cut unemployment benefits-- a nice holiday gift-- after a year that also saw cuts to food stamps and other important programs for millions of Americans. The failure of Republican governors to accept Medicaid expansion is a perfect example of this. The Medicaid Expansion program under Obamacare will allow poor Americans (mostly working single mothers and veterans, yes veterans) to go to the doctor instead of the Emergency Room, where costs skyrocket before being passed on to the rest of us.

"We know the math works: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I'm proud to join the fight in the war on poverty because I know that it is one we can start winning again, if we're willing to try."

A Cold Thanksgiving And Christmas Season-- But Just For Poor Families, So Our Congress Of Multimillionaires Doesn't Give A Rat's Ass

The Ted Cruz/Koch brothers-inspired government shutdown cost the American taxpayers an unfocused and gratuitous $24 billion. Conservatives in Congress can at least tell them selves they're recouping part of that loss by cutting back on food stamps. The end of next week-- Friday, November 1-- will come as a shock for millions of American families as food stamp benefits-- including benefits for children, seniors and the unemployed thrown out of work because of bad conservative economic policies that crashed the economy are slashed. Conservatives feel confident that many of the 47 million families impacted won't vote-- so why should they care? They sure aren't part of the campaign donor class.

For a family of four, the cut will be $36 per month, or about 20 meals under the Department of Agriculture’s estimate for the cost of a “thrifty meal.”  Single adults will see their monthly benefits reduced to $189 per month, for a cut of $11.

“We have never seen a cut like this affecting all beneficiaries,” said Lisa Davis of the food bank network Feeding America. “With the government shutdown and other national and international issues going on, many people have no idea this is coming.”

Davis said that food banks are bracing for an influx of the needy as the holiday season approaches, and are concerned about keeping up with demand after donations wane in January.

“We’re hugely concerned … this will affect 23 million kids,” said Tom Nelson of Share Our Strength, a group focused on child hunger. “At a minimum we can’t accept more cuts.”

…Hunger groups are fighting a House proposal to cut an addition $40 billion from food stamps in the farm bill. Those cuts come primarily from provisions that would make it harder to qualify for food stamps when receiving other aid, such as home heating assistance, and by stopping states from waiving work requirements.

With conservatives blocking an increase in the minimum wage, low wage employers, like McDonald's, tell their workers to make ends meet by getting food stamps. Watch:



We've talked about the gospel-singin' congressman from Tennessee, Farmer Fincher, who helped lead the Republican jihad against poor families on food stamps. For many, it was hard to watch Tennessee Republican Stephen Fincher, a Methodist gospel singer aside and the congressman for the 8th district (Jackson, Germantown, Dyersburg and the whole western part of the state minus Memphis), voting to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program for the neediest American families. Why was Fincher harder to watch then any of the 217 House Republicans who backed this travesty (all but 15 of them)? Well, there's a special little place in hell for the gospel-singin' Fincher from Frog Jump? Fincher, it turns out, has gobbled up nearly $9 million in farm subsidies from Uncle Sam over the last decade, mostly for his cotton crop. Congressman Fincher also received a $13,650 grant to help buy grain hauling and storage equipment from the state Department of Agriculture in 2009 as part of the Tennessee Agricultural Enhancement Program. Yes, teabagger Stephen Fincher is a welfare queen. And a hypocrite. A pious hypocrite eager to starve poor families who can't get jobs because of economic policies his party used to crash the economy.

And it gets worse, according to Forbes magazine. Remember when we were talking about how so many wealthy congressmembers on the House Agriculture Committee were all gung-ho to shave billions of dollars off the food stamps program? That's Fincher's committee. (No conflict of interest there, right?)

Armed with an array of proverbs and quotes from the Holy Bible, Congressman Fincher is pressing his fight to dramatically curtail the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)-- better known to most Americans as food stamps-- relied upon by 47 million Americans for some or all of their daily sustenance.

Why?

Because the Bible tells him so.

Appearing this past weekend at a gathering at a Memphis Holiday Inn, Fincher explained his position on food stamps by stating, “The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity is to take care of each other, but not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.”

The Congressman’s remarks come on the heels of his taking the biblical route when responding to Representative Juan Vargas’ (D-Calif.) somewhat different take on the teachings of Jesus. During a recent House Agriculture Committee debate over the Farm Bill (which contains the food stamp budget), Vargas, citing the Book of Matthew, noted, “[Jesus] says how you treat the least among us, the least of our brothers, that’s how you treat him.”

Vargas also noted that Jesus directly mentions the importance of feeding the hungry.

Not to be outdone by a Godless Democrat, Congressman Fincher responded with his own Bible quote taken from the Book of Thessalonians-- “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

Nicely played, Congressman.

While the biblical back-and-forth is interesting, I wonder if Congressman Fincher would be good enough to refer me to the part of the Bible revealing to us how providing adequate food stamp assistance to those in need violates the teachings of Christianity but venerates accepting government hand-outs in the guise of farm subsidies?

Michael Tomasky, writing over the weekend at the Daily Beast, asserts that "the GOP isn’t trying to cut $40 billion from SNAP just to save money. It wants to punish the poorest among us." He calls it "unspeakably cruel and that it's at least as much about inflicting pain and anguish on poor families as it is about saving any more-- which, of course, the $14 billion cost of the shut down shows definitively the Republicans don't even care about at all.

The basic facts on the program. Its size fluctuates with the economy-- when more people are working, the number of those on food stamps goes down. This, of course, isn’t one of those times. So right now the SNAP program, as it’s called, is serving nearly 48 million people in 23 million households. The average monthly individual benefit is $133, or about $4.50 a day. In 2011, 45 percent of recipients were children. Forty-one percent live in households where at least one person works. More than 900,000 are veterans. Large numbers are elderly or disabled or both.

…The proposed GOP cut is such a piddling amount of money, in terms of the whole federal budget and especially when spread out over 10 years. But nearly half of it is quite literally taking food out of the mouths of children. What’s the point? The point really is that Tea Party Republicans think these people don’t deserve the help. That’s some fascinating logic. The economy melts down because of something a bunch of crooked bankers do. The people at the bottom quarter of the economy, who’ve been getting jobbed for 30 years anyway and who always suffer the most in a downturn, start getting laid off in huge numbers. They have children to feed. Probably with no small amount of shame, they go in and sign up for food stamps.

And what do they get? Lectures about being lazy. You may have seen the now-infamous video of Tennessee Congressman Steve Fincher, who told a crowd over the summer that “the Bible says ‘If you don’t work, you don’t eat.’” This while Fincher, a cotton farmer, has enjoyed $3.5 million in federal farm subsidies. This year’s House bill ends “direct payments” to farmers whether they grow any crops or not-- except for one kind: cotton farmers.

Religious bloggers have noted that Fincher got his theology wrong and that the relevant passage, from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, wasn’t remotely about punishing people too lazy to work. It was about punishing people who’d stopped working because they thought Jesus was returning any day now. So: mean bastard, hypocrite, and Scripture-mangling idiot to boot. Nice trifecta.

The other argument one sometimes hears concerns the dreadful curse of food-stamp fraud. The actual rate of food-stamp fraud-- people selling their coupons for cash-- is 1.3 percent, but this of course doesn’t prevent the right from finding a couple of garish anecdotes and making it seem as if they’re the norm. Voter fraud, Medicaid fraud, food-stamp fraud…Somehow, in Republican America, only poor people and blacks commit fraud.

This cut is the fraud, because it’s not really about fraud or austerity. It’s entirely about punishing the alleged 47 percent. The bottom half or third of the alleged 47 percent. It’s absolutely appalling. These folks have done a lot of miserable things in the past four years. But this-- the morality of this is so repulsively backward, the indecency so operatically and ostentatiously broadcast, I think it takes the gold going away.

The conference process starts next Wednesday and is going to take maybe a few months. Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow has taken the lead on this issue and has been terrific. Ditto Pat Leahy. Max Baucus, I’m told, is a good get to go a little wobbly (surprise). But this is one where the Democrats have to say this won’t stand. It’s one thing to shut down the government for two weeks and take quixotic stabs at Obamacare. Telling poor children that that fourth box of macaroni and cheese is excessive is something very different.

Fincher and Baucus-- too many corrupt millionaires in Congress for a democracy