A Conservative Is A Conservative, Whether He Calls Himself A Republican Or A Democrat And It Doesn't Matter If He Passes Himself Off As A "Moderate"-- They Own All Society's Problems

The two parties aren't "the same." Democrats aren't the same as Republicans. There are some good Democrats. There are no good Republicans. The identity politics Democratic politicians play-- pro-woman, pro-gay, anti-racism, for example-- is better, way better, than the identity politics Republicans play. As for corruption... well corruption is part of, and even lionized by, conservatism. Liberals at least feel guilty about their own corruption, for whatever that's worth.

When he was younger than I am now, my grandfather told me that the only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican. I'd say he hit that one out of the park. A few days ago, The Independent published an OpEd by North Carolina academics Kevin Singer and Alyssa Rockenbach, People worry that 'moderate' Democrats like Joe Biden are the same as Republicans. Our study suggests they may be right. They offered a new set of criteria to look at politicians. It helps explain why there is so much energy around the Republicans for Biden movement right now and so much more enthusiasm from that direction than from progressives, who generally dislike him less than they dislike Trump and will hold their noses and vote for him, deceiving themselves into thinking they will be able to have an impact on his neoliberal agenda after he's in the White House.

Friday, we put together a ritual denunciation of consevative Democrats-- misnamed "moderates" by the media and misguided academics like Singer and Rockenbach-- who had just accepted, and celebrated, endorsements by the very right-wing U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Singer and Rockenbach, though, address the idealization of "moderatism" as the ultimate political virtue. "When it comes to addressing climate change," they wrote, "Eric Levitz of New York Magazine argued that 'a major [obstacle] is the tendency of moderate Democrats to mistake their own myopic complacency for heroic prudence.' Political researcher David Adler found that across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions, and the most supportive of authoritarianism. Furthermore, Adler found that centrists are the least supportive of free and fair elections as well as civil rights-- in the United States, only 25 percent of centrists agree that civil rights are an essential feature of democracy. This finding dovetails with observations made by Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from Birmingham Jail: 'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the… great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Klu Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.' Even Arthur Books, a self-avowed moderate, admits to 'the failure of the mainstream, moderate, progressive formula for how to create a more equal pluralist America,' adding, 'I’m a moderate guy, but the evidence doesn’t support moderation when it comes to racial equity.' That’s all well and good. But what does the data show?"

They reported on a study of beliefs and attitudes of college students across the country (IDEALS) and found that "as America battles a global pandemic and an economic collapse and reckons with systemic racism, IDEALS suggests that moderate men may be the least likely to make a positive difference. When broken down by political leaning, IDEALS found that moderate male students in their senior year were time and again the least likely, or among the least likely, to somewhat or strongly agree with the following statements":

Strikingly, in almost every case, the responses of moderate men are very similar to conservative men and women. Their level of agreement with the statements above is as much as 14 percent lower than moderate women, who are more likely than men to lean Democratic, or liberal men and women.

This IDEALS finding is on par with a recent Gallup study encompassing over 29,000 interviews with American adults, which revealed that moderates and conservatives remain closely aligned in their ideological preferences.

This raises important questions heading into the election: Is a moderate male candidate a bait-and-switch for Democratic voters? Are they actually casting their votes for a conservative?

That moderate men most resemble Republicans has been confirmed, of all places, on dating apps. Brittany Wong of HuffPost writes, “It’s almost become a coastal cliche at this point: If someone lists their political views as ‘moderate’ on a dating app, the thinking goes, go ahead and assume the person is a conservative.” One interviewee noted, “It’s just in my experience, even ‘moderate’ guys tend to have extremely different views on topics that matter to me, like gun control, women’s reproductive rights and immigration.” Sometimes, moderate men who appear to bend liberal turn out to be “faux woke,” according to one interviewee who was initially attracted to someone whose profile featured photos at a women’s march. Eventually “he slowly started to drop his facade,” revealing behaviors inconsistent with his professed political beliefs.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has grown increasingly frustrated with moderate Democrats during her tenure, saying at a recent event, “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center or a center-conservative party.” Her [ex] chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, recently deleted a tweet comparing two moderate Democrat coalitions-- consisting mostly of men-- to Southern Democrats who favored segregation and opposed civil rights. During this election cycle, a recurring criticism of Vice President Biden has been his record on school desegregation.

To be sure, Vice President Biden also aligns with more progressive Democrats on key policy issues, prompting Paul Waldman of the Washington Post to assert, “Biden is getting more progressive in substance, yet it has done nothing to change his image as a moderate.”

Nevertheless, Biden’s popularity among Republicans has grown consistently in recent months. A number of prominent former GOP officials, and even some of Trump’s ex-staffers, have voiced their support for Biden, including former Governor John Kasich and former Senator Jeff Flake. Their support, however, seems less driven by the good things they believe Biden will do, and more by the bad things they believe Biden won’t do. In his speech at the Democratic National Convention, for example, Kasich remarked that Republicans and Independents may fear that Biden will “turn sharp left and leave them behind,” but assured viewers, “I don't believe that.”

Let's take San Diego City Council president Georgette Gómez, a congressional candidate-- running for an open seat being contested by an hereditary multimillionaire conservative Democrat-- as an example. Gómez has been endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, while the Wall Street-owned and operated New Dem Caucus has embraced and endorsed her opponent, Sara Jacobs, granddaughter of mega-GOP donor Irwin Jacobs, whose money is largely financing her campaign against Gómez. Jacobs stands for nothing at all except getting elected. In the primary, she pretended to be a progressive-- a laugh-- and now she is showing her true colors as another corporate suck-up, opposing everything and anything that will help working families.

What Drove The Republican Party Base Insane? (Spoiler: It Was More Than Just Fox And Hate Talk Radio)

This morning's first post-- based primarily on the work of Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson conflating today's off-the-rails Republican extremists with the post Civil War secessionist Democratic extremists of 1879-- is one of the most chilling ever at this blog. If you missed it, I heartily recommend you go back and read it right now. It will certainly put into context the GOP's hallucinatory dogma of paranoia and disorientation, something that goes beyond the silly Trump (and Carson) phenomena just to the heart of the neo-fascist train the Republican Party is about to unleash in the person of Ted Cruz, likely the real reason Reince Priebus was moaning last week that the party he presides over is "cooked" as a national party.

In a revelatory post at Salon Sunday Chauncey DeVega-- drawing brilliantly on the work of German-born political philosopher Leo Strauss (1877-1973), who was the dude, by the way, who laid the ground for Godwin's Law in 1951 with his Reductio ad Hitlerum-- does a deep dive about what's become of the GOP's "conservative" grounding and ability to handle actual analytic thinking. Today "the power and appeal of the Republican Party," he writes, "lies in how its consultants and media accomplices have created a highly entertaining and confusing type of absurdist political theater. While wealth and income inequality are central to America’s political polarization and dysfunction, the alternate reality cultivated by political leaders and right-wing media has a heavy impact on a political culture where broken politics is not just an aberration or outlier, but rather the norm." This is about to get very scary.

Movement conservatism is compelling for so many people because of its visceral emotional appeal, and how the mindsets of conservative authoritarians are oriented toward accepting a Manichaean, binary, fear-centered, and dominance-oriented perspective of the world.

Moreover, movement conservatism is obsessed with protecting “real America.” This functions both as salvation and as something at risk by “liberals,” “progressives,” people of color, immigrants, gays, or whatever other group is viewed as a threat to the status quo of the “good old days.” Alas, this “real America” never truly existed.

Nevertheless, this illusory world must be protected at all costs because it is central to the “politics of disorientation,” a vaudevillian and spectacular political belief system that today’s conservatism uses to make sense of the world.

The politics of disorientation has several elements:

Apocalypticism: Historian Richard Hofstadter, most famously in his seminal work The Paranoid Style in American Politics, noted how conservatives, even in the 1950s and 1960s, were creating a cult-like political system that prized orthodoxy over critical thought, alternative evidence, or empirical reality. This is the shadow under which the politics of disorientation operates for movement conservatives. On this point, historian Robert Toplin explains at the History News Network how:

Individuals who seek a broader understanding of the present political standoff in Washington may find Hofstadter’s judgments thought-provoking.

Richard Hofstadter recognized that evangelical leaders were playing a significant role in right-wing movements of his time, but he noticed that a “fundamentalist” style of mind was not confined to matters of religious doctrine. It affected opinions about secular affairs, especially political battles. Hofstadter associated that mentality with a “Manichean and apocalyptic” mode of thought. He noticed that right-wing spokesmen applied the methods and messages of evangelical revivalists to U.S. politics. Agitated partisans on the right talked about epic clashes between good and evil, and they recommended extraordinary measures to resist liberalism. The American way of life was at stake, they argued. Compromise was unsatisfactory; the situation required militancy. Nothing but complete victory would do.

Spectacle: The culture of illusion and distraction, wherein entertainment is a stand-in for full and authentic human experiences, enables the Reality TV-esque popularity of demagogues like Donald Trump, and the litany of ridiculous policy positions-- again divorced from empirical fact or reality-- offered by the leading Republican candidates. Here, Fox News, a “news” operation that has made right-wing talking points interchangeable with “facts,” represents the culture of illusion in full operation. That Fox News is America’s highest rated “news station” and actually has the most ignorant and uninformed viewership of any major news media outlet, signals to how entertainment is confused with substance in the culture of illusion and distraction. The masses are asses in such a system, not because such behavior is “natural,” but because such behavior is normalized and encouraged.

The right-wing media is one of the most effective propaganda operations in modern history.

Lies and Deception: The Right-wing media, the elites in the Republican Party, and its various interest groups, are engaged in a systematic campaign of deception toward the American people. This is philosopher Leo Strauss’s theories on truth and leadership in action.

As explained by political writer Jim Lobe:

…Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical-- divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that “those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right-- the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”

This dichotomy requires “perpetual deception” between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,”The people are told what they need to know and no more.” While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of Leo Strauss and the American Right (St. Martin’s 1999).

Movement conservatives, and Republican voters, en masse, are utterly confused about the nature of reality, and respond with rage and anger when confronted by facts-- a version of the Dunning-Krueger effect, in which where people are ignorant but do not have the expertise or awareness even to know just how ignorant they are-- because they have been systematically misled.

A hallucinatory ideology. This is a dangerous system of belief wherein people are unmoored from reality and embrace distorted views of the world and the people around them, often driven by stereotypes or other types of hatred, which then works to legitimate destructive behavior.

Authoritarian political attitudes are on the increase in the United States. This trend is especially prominent among conservatives. Authoritarianism, with its intolerance, appeals to violence, and eliminationist rhetoric about “liberals,” “progressives,” and any type of “Other,” are fixtures and habits of the right-wing media and conservative political elites.

Hallucinatory ideology helps to create the intractability and hostility to political compromise and good governance that form the brand name of conservatism and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama.

Thus we find ourselves. And the question-- one that has lingered over American politics since the election of a Black and Democratic president drove movement conservatives to mouth-frothing derangement in 2008 and 2012-- still remains: Will normal politics on display in last week’s Democratic debate be able to defeat the madness and insanity of the Republican Party in November of 2016?

Or will a Republican win the White House, not because they are serious people with serious thoughts about how best to serve the Common Good, but rather because they are demagogues, more captivating than their Democratic rivals? The latter is a distinct possibility, as the politics of disorientation are a difficult foe for the rational and the reasonable to battle and overcome.

Late today, news broke from Denver that the former Republican president, George W. Bush detests the junior senator from his state, Ted Cruz, a neo-fascist who is also a Republican. Cruz worked for Bush when he was president but that didn't stop him from telling a roomful of rich Jeb donors yesterday that "I just don't like the guy."

Bush took a harsh view of Cruz’s apparent alliance with Trump, who stood with the senator at a Capitol Hill rally last month in opposition to the Iran deal. While Trump, the current GOP poll leaders, has attacked most of his competitors in the 2016 field, he has avoided criticizing Cruz.

One donor, paraphrasing the former president’s comment in response to a broad question about how he viewed the primary race and the other Republican candidates, said: "He said he found it ‘opportunistic’ that Cruz was sucking up to Trump and just expecting all of his support to come to him in the end," that donor added.

George W. Bush is well acquainted with his home-state senator, who served as a domestic policy adviser on his 2000 campaign before rising to national prominence by distancing himself from-- and often going out of his way to antagonize-- the GOP establishment. In his book published earlier this year, Cruz ripped Bush’s record, criticizing elements of his foreign policy and faulting the administration for enabling "bigger government and excessive spending and new entitlements."

While Jeb Bush’s campaign is spending far more time of late pushing out information that contrasts favorably with Rubio, his oldest brother seemed to see Cruz as the biggest threat in the end. According to several donors, the former president said not to doubt Cruz’s strength.

"He said he thought Cruz was going to be a pretty formidable candidate against Jeb, especially in Texas and across the South," a donor said.

...Bush also cast Cruz’s candidacy as an exercise in personal gain, not service. "He sort of looks at this like Cruz is doing it all for his own personal gain, and that’s juxtaposed against a family that’s been all about public service and doing it for the right reasons," a donor said. "He's frustrated to have watched Cruz basically hijack the Republican Party of Texas and the Republican Party in Washington."

It well may come down to a battle between GOP over-confidence and wretched, self-defeating Democratic Party leadership, but, unless Bernie Sanders figures out a way to overcome the Clinton/Wall Street money machine, it will certainly come down to another nauseating lesser-of-two-evils election that will change nothing for the country.

A Star Is Born: Christopher Hucko -- Republican Candidate #18?

Photo by the Orland Park (IL) Police Dept.

"Man arrested for vibrator theft offers to show police his penis, before slamming Obama"

-- a New York Daily News headline yesterday

by Noah

I bet the above headline from the New York Daily News caught your eye. What the hell? you probably said. What's next? And I bet you want to read more, right? Here is Laurie Hanna's lead, possibly the dream lead of a newspaperperson's career:

A Chicago man caught with a stolen vibrator in his underwear told cops he had no idea how the device got there, before stripping naked in his cell and shouting derogatory comments about President Obama.

Now you're probably thinking, where do they get these people? In fact, to get a real feel for what a character this guy is, you need to read either the Daily News piece or The Smoking Gun's.

My reaction, though, went a little further. Given the lunacy of the current republican primary season, this man just may be what republican voters are looking for! Forget Trumpy. Trumpy is so yesterday. There's a new loon in town!

It's not just the mere existence or even thought of President Obama that drives republicans over the edge. I've commented before about the fact that there is also something weird about the way the republican mind deals with human sexuality. Both topics drive them batty. And for the 2016 election cycle we have no shortage of republican presidential candidates that epitomize this dual absurdity.

So here I am, proposing one more potential republican candidate for the 2016 presidential nomination. We already have 17 crazies; why not add one more to the mix? Meet candidate #18: Christopher Hucko. Might he end up being the bottom on a Trump-Hucko ticket? Surely this man, like Trumpy, knows how to get our attention.

Far be it from me to be judgmental. Understand that when I talk about republican attitudes toward all things to do with sex and sexuality, I don't mean "weird" in any kinky sense or anything like that -- although there is the whole "Masturbation is murder" crew, and then there's presidential candidate Rick Santorum who's on record as saying that contraception leads to things that are "not okay." (Hint: like pleasure, when we know that sex is only for procreation.)

And you better not be enjoying it!

We've also been hearing a lot lately about republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, about their general war on women, including 2012 VP candidate Paul Ryan's hateful attempts to redefine rape, and about their demented homophobia. Current republican presidential candidates Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee have even agreed to appear in an anti-gay "documentary."

Ben Carson? Well, try not to engage him in a conversation about sex in prison. "A lot of people who go into prison," he has said, "go into prison straight and when they come out, they’re gay." This in fact is one of Right Wing Watch's "Five Wildest Ben Carson Quotes: Prison Sex, Nazi America, Health Care Slavery And More." Possibly after you look at the other four quotes, you may want to just avoid any conversation with Ben Carson altogether.

Then there's current leading republican candidate Donald Trump's recent post-debate attacks on Megyn Kelly of FOX "News," saying she had "blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever." Let's let John Oliver deconstruct this one.



Sure, there's no doubt that Megyn was out to get Trumpy for his previous misogynistic comments, but for republicans such sexism is standard fare, and judging from Trumpy's growing poll numbers, it's obviously a plus to republican voters. Besides, Megyn Kelly is not one who should pretend to be classy in such matters, when she herself went on the notoriously misogynistic Howard Stern show and talked about her breasts and her husband's penis.

It's also hard to forget the not-so-long-ago spectacle of a republican-led House of Representatives getting so worked up in a lather over President Clinton getting a BJ from an intern that they released every graphic detail in book form to the media and the public, thinking that that would convince the American public to go along with their impeachment efforts.


LET'S FACE IT, REPUGS VIEW MATTERS OF SEX AND
SEXUALITY DIFFERENTLY FROM NORMAL PEOPLE

With all of this in mind, I give you Christopher Hucko. What, you may ask, are his presidential credentials? Hey, c'mon, what are any of their credentials? I mean, Rick Perry? Scott Walker? Another Bush?

Euphoria G-Spot Delight (in pink)

Well, in addition to the possibility that his surname is a shortened version of Huckabee, Mr. Hucko has been known to sign his name as "Obama is a criminal," as he did when he was asked to sign a Miranda consent form by the officers who collared him with the $48 pink Euphoria G-Spot Delight vibrator that had mysteriously found its way into his underwear. That signature alone will get him tons of republican votes, but Hucko features the perfect storm of being able to rant mindlessly about President Obama and do it while offering to show police his penis (that had been his answer to the question of what he had stuffed in his pants), which he claims has a tattoo of a cherry on it. In short, he's perfect!  Reince Priebus can rest easy now. He's found his man!

Let's ignore the fact that Hucko was arrested after shoplifting the vibrator from a Chicago sex emporium and said he didn't know how it got into his pants. There are plenty of cases of criminal activity not being an impediment to a political career. If bribery is legal, why should being caught stealing a vibrator and stuffing it in your pants end your dream? Which does more harm to society? (And if you think of the delegates who will choose the GOP presidential candidate in Cleveland, how many of them would love to have a pink Euphoria G-Spot Delight stuffed in their underwear? Probably a lot of the women too.)


WILL HUCKO BE ONSTAGE FOR THE NEXT REPUBLICAN DEBATE?

That's not for me to say. But I do know that he would fit right in. In addition, can't you just see him on Hannity, sitting between Pat Robertson and the Duck Dynasty wacko? Hucko is a natural! Can't you see him talking loofahs with Bill-O? (He has a police record, but I can't say for sure that it includes stealing a loofah.)

The quest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is already the expected freakshow. But Christopher Hucko could be the cherry to go with the nuts on the sundae. (Don't forget that tattoo of a cherry he says he has on his penis.) We're already seeing some candidates trying to out-Trump Trumpy, but this guy Hucko -- well, the possibilities are endless. What would Trumpy or any of the other 17-and-counting loonies be able to do to top him? Create a line of self-named sex toys to hand out at rallies in Iowa? Will they all appear at the next debate with vibrators standing on their podiums, as if to say, "Hey, Megyn, say hello to my little friend," while the republican audience cheers? I think we've blown right past "binders full of women."

Not to worry about the losers in this primary. They can always become pitchers for Viagra like failed republican presidential candidate Bob Dole did all the way back in 1998.

The only real question is, what do any of these wackjobs do if he ends up getting his party's nomination and has to face Hillary Clinton, assuming she wins hers? What with all of them obviously suffering feelings of inadequacy, all she would have to do is go to the first debate, pull out a vibrator and wave it at her opponent, laughing as she screams, "Mine's bigger!" Game over.

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"Advice conservatives never give themselves," courtesy of Jen Sorensen (who levels a shocking accusation at Davy Brooks)

Jen Sorensen, Daily Kos Comics (click to enlarge)

by Ken

This strip is so wonderful that it hardly needs amplification or commentary, though I think you're going to enjoy it even more after you've read Jen's own background note (see below). And I'm going to go a step farther, extracting the pearls of conservative wisdom Jen has incorporated here, just so you can hear them in isolation, and let them rattle around your head a little. I'm also going to preempt a bit of Jen's note by revealing that, beyond the obvious starting point of the death of Sandra Bland, the formulation here and indeed the content of panels 2 through 4 are filtered through the, er, sensibility of America's Whiner, Davy Brooks.

You can, of course, go straight to the strip -- as you likely already have done. And if you want to accuse me of overexplaining the joke, I can accept that. Still, I think there's value in first hearing these dicta on their own. Feel free to adapt them mentally to the right-wing voices you cherish most.

1. You need to cut out the victim mentality.
2. You should be more respectful of authority.
3. You people are too angry. Lighten up!
4. When are you going to stop living in the past? Get over it!

Now do you see what I mean by adapting them to other right-wing voices? It really doesn't come as a great surprise to learn that the voice Jen was kind of hearing in her head was the seemingly moderate whine of our Davy B. Consider, though, how harsh, even scathing these pieces of "advice" would sound coming out of the mouth of Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, to pick just a few examples. (I probably should have brought Noah in on this. He's a connoisseur of the kinds of diatribes I'm trying to imagine.)

Now look at the strip -- or if you already have, look at it again.

Finally, let's add Jen's own thoughts:

Some people blame Sandra Bland for escalating the situation during her traffic stop, suggesting she should have been more respectful to the barking, button-pushing officer. Funny how all this finger-wagging about manners when dealing with law enforcement didn't seem to apply when the person in question was Cliven Bundy, the freeloading rancher who put up armed resistance over paying grazing fees. Apparently rebellion is virtuous if you're a highly-armed white cowboy/militia leader/Tea Party activist/Jade Helm conspiracy theorist, but if you're a black woman who forgot to signal while changing lanes, do not even think about behaving ungraciously towards the authorities, no matter how abusive they are.

Other panels in this cartoon were somewhat inspired by a recent David Brooks column, which was written as an open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates in response his new book. After professing what felt to me like patronizing faux humility, Brooks more or less lapsed into ye olde "why don't you stop wallowing in victimhood and pursue the American Dream?" spiel.

"Patronizing faux humility"? From our Davy? That's shocking! (Just kidding. Actually, if you look up "patronizing faux humility" in the dictionary, I think we all have a good idea whose picture you'll find there.)

"Patronizing faux humility"? From Davy Brooks? Can it be?

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GOP candidates flip-flop in the breeze -- all except Scott Walker, who just lies

With a Doonesbury bonus: The deep roots
of modern conservative policy-making

"None of the leading Republicans," says E. J. Dionne Jr., is willing to offer a more fundamental challenge to the party’s rightward lurch over the past decade."


"Unfortunately for the Republican Party and the country, [Wisconsin Gov. Scott] Walker’s careful parsing of shape-shifting counts as one of the cerebral high points of the debate among the party’s 2016 presidential candidates."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column
"The right's political correctness"

by Ken

In case you're coming late to Governor Walker's "shape-shifting," it's the lying scumbag's way of explaining that he's not a "flip-flopper," not he!, no way, no matter how often or how conveniently he may change his positions on any subject to suit alterations in the political temper of the moment. As E. J. Dionne Jr. explains the governor's position -- and I'm going to trust him, in part because I consider him a highly trustworthy observer and for the rest because I'm damned if I'm going to watch the vile sack of filth:

“A flip would be someone who voted on something and did something different,” the Wisconsin governor explained last week on Fox News. His altered views on immigration don’t count because he is not a legislator. “These are not votes,” he helpfully pointed out.

Oh.

E.J., declaring this "sheer brilliance!," goes on to note a lucky -- for Governor Walker, that is -- coincidence:

Other than former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Walker’s major rivals at the moment are Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). They have all cast lots of votes. So Walker can accuse them of flip-flopping while claiming blanket immunity for himself.

If the governor had an honest cell anywhere in his lying carcass, he could have offered the simpler and truer explanation that when he takes a position, only his all-consuming self-servingness comes into play, and never the truth, except possibly for his apparently inborn aversion to it. And as a right-winger, he has official sanction to lie, which he exercises at all opportunities except when he's cornered and can't come up with a suitable lie.

I assume E.J. doesn't feel it necessary to point out the obvious: that Governor Walker's new position on flip-flopping is utter bullshit, just like everything else he says. You either take a position or you don't, and while everyone is certainly entitled to change a position, and indeed should be encouraged to do so when they find their previous position unsatisfactory, you can't pretend that you haven't changed your position. Well, you can, but then you would be lying. Which is certainly nothing that would faze Governor Walker. It's where he lives.


At last week's Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Oklahoma City (which Howie wrote about earlier today), Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker makes sure that none of his rivals can tell more lies per microphone minute -- and the Right kinds of lies -- than he does.

The immediate issue for the governor is his flip-flop on immigration. And this leads E.J. to his mournful observation that his creative obfuscation "counts as one of the cerebral high points of the debate" among his party's 2016 presidential aspirants. "The shortage of philosophical adventure and the eagerness of GOP hopefuls to alter their positions to make them more conservative," says E.J., "a Republican primary electorate that has moved so far right that it brooks no deviation."

And so, E.J. notes, even Rand Paul, currently best known for his one-man stand against the Republicans' official position on the national-security state (they're all for it, in case you've forgotten), "even Paul has recast his foreign policy positions to make them sound more hawkish and thus more in keeping with prevailing Republican views."

The same is true, E.J., says of the band of self-styled "reform conservatives," who seem incapable of taking any even slightly unorthodox position without simultaneously declaring their unbroken fealty to the most rightward of right-wing "beliefs," or at least the beliefs of the moment.

With occasional exceptions, they have been far more interested in proving their faithfulness to today’s hard-line right than in declaring, as conservatives in so many other democracies have been willing to do, that sprawling market economies need a rather large dose of government. Conservatives, Levin says, are “eager to build on the longstanding institutions of our society to improve things.” Good idea. But somehow, the successes of decades-old governmental institutions in areas such as retirement security, health-care provision and environmental protection are rarely acknowledged.

"Where, for example," E.J. wonders,

is the candidate willing to acknowledge that, like it or not, there’s no way that anywhere close to all Americans will be able to get health insurance unless government plays a very large role? Where is the Republican who will admit that if the party had its way on further tax cuts, many programs Americans like would fall by the wayside?

And this is awkward, E.J. points out, because "many Republicans, especially reform conservatives, know that most Americans who criticize government in the abstract still welcome many of its activities."

Yet stating this obvious fact is now politically incorrect on the right. Conservatives who condemn political correctness in others need to start calling it out on their own side. Otherwise, Scott Walker’s artful redefinition of flip-flopping could become the 2016 Republican debate’s most creative intellectual contribution.

What E.J. is again too polite to point out is that these same right-wing pols have done much to create this situation by encouraging and exploiting the hardening of the Republican base's position -- precisely because it then makes that base so poliically exploitable.

Which doesn't create much of a problem as long as your only consideration is the personal gain you can derive from swearing loyalty to what the base wants to hear at any given moment. But if in a moment of weakness you want to consider what might be good for the country or for Americans generally, well, if you know what's good for you, you'll keep your trap shut.

The comfort lies in knowing that if at any moment there's a change in the voodoo bromides the organized American crazies want to hear, you can always change your position -- as long as you don't have a voting record to answer to, according to one newly enunciated lying-scumbag theory.


IS THE SKY BLUE? OR, THE DEEP ROOTS
OF MODERN CONSERVATIVE "THINKING"

DOONESBURY     by G. B. Trudeau

[Click to enlarge.]

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"We can't reason with cats," says expert John Bradshaw -- which makes them sound a lot like right-wingers

Domesticated cats may have developed in the Americas! So says cat authority John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol's Anthrozoology Institute, and author of Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet, in this really wonderful interview with WNYC's Leonard Lopate.

"We can't reason with cats. We have to accept them as they are.”

-- John Bradshaw

by Ken

My original plan was to write about the truly astonishing round of braying lies screeched by the Usual Right-Wing Suspects twisted beyond recognition from projections about Obamacare and the labor force contained in the newly released CBO report. Obamacare will kill 2.5M jobs, they declare! But of course, either because they truly don't know how to read or they truly don't have any regard whatsoever for the truth, the right-wingers immediately exploded in an orgy of lies so putrid and America-hating that you'd think for once they would feel compelled to do the honorable thing and being blowing their tiny diseased brains out.

But the magnitude of the shamefulness is so cosmic and enraging that I can only splutter, so for now let me just refer you to Greg Sargeant's "Plum Line" report yesterday, "What the CBO report on Obamacare really found," and to Ryan Cooper's follow-up today, "On jobs, conservatives are full of it."

Instead I thought we'd talk about something more difficult to understand than right-wingers but vastly more worth the effort: cats.

After all, what's so hard to understand about right-wingers? They're either scum-sucking morons or brain-diseased pathological liars manipulated by greed-besotted predators, or greed-besotted predators themselves. Whereas cats . . . well, as John Bradshaw says, "“We can’t reason with cats. We have to accept them as they are.” Much the same could be said of right-wingers, but at least when we accept cats as they are, we're left with, you know, cats.

In the interview, according to the WNYC website, Bradshaw "tells us all about cats -- from how they were first domesticated to how they hunt to how they show affection. He offers new insights about the domestic cat that challenge many of our most basic assumptions about our feline companions." (It seems only fair to point out that before Cat Sense, Bradshaw wrote a book called Dog Sense.)

Here are some highlights from the Leonard Lopate Show page of the WNYC website.

A Few Cat Facts


"We can't reason with cats," said John Bradshaw. "We have to accept them as they are.”

Signs of affection: Rubbing against you, coming toward you with an upright tail, grooming you. Purring is associated with contentment, but science suggests it's just a signal that it needs attention. Some cats purr when they want to be fed,  some cats have been known to purr when they're in pain.

Playing with your cat, especially if it's an indoor cat, is important. It mimics hunting, a cat's natural instinct, and keeps it engaged and active. John Bradshaw recommends a puzzle feeder to keep a cat busy. You can make on yourself: Poke a few holes (slightly larger than a piece of dry food) in a plastic bottle. Put a small amount of dry cat food in it the bottle. Put on the lid. Give it to your cat to play with.

Cats have the basics in their minds of how to kill prey. If a kitten doesn't encounter live prey until its grown up, it might not be the most effective hunter. When cats seem to play with a mouse or other prey instead of killing it, it's a sign they're not especially skilled hunters. It's not purposely torturing the animal.

Whether or not a kitten is handled by people when it's very young--as early as three weeks old--determines whether it'll be social and comfortable around people. If feral kittens don't come in contact with humans until they're eight or ten weeks old, it can be too late for them to be comfortable and social with humans.

A cat's instinct is to run away from people and things it doesn't like. If you ply the cat with food to get it to come out of its hiding place, it'll come to realize that people aren't a threat and it will eventually be more social.

Cats don't need a great deal of physical space, so they're fine inside. They're very adaptable, which is why they make good pets.

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Why It Makes No Sense To Travel With A Conservative, Even A Nice One

When I was 13-- and all my friends were studying for their bar mitzvahs-- I was making my first big hitch-hiking excursion. My grandparents were in South Beach, which was very grandparent-friendly back then, for Easter and I decided to see what hitching would be like. Brooklyn to Florida with $20 and a toothbrush in my pocket. I got as far as the New Jersey Turnpike and got arrested. They made my father come pick me up. He gave me the dough for a Greyhound. But it wasn't about the destination. I wanted to try out hitchhiking. I had plans.

A couple years later-- having sent farming implements and seeds ahead, care of poste restante-- I set out for Tonga. This time I think I had nearly $90… and it was for life. I said goodbye to everyone and hitched to California and stowed away on a boat bound for New Zealand, where I planned to stow away on another boat bound for Tonga. There were two a year back then. I was discovered on the boat in San Pedro Harbor and beaten up by some drunk watchman. So I went back to Brooklyn. But I've been traveling ever since.

And not to Disneyland or Aruba. After college I flew to Germany, bought a VW van and drove to Morocco. But Morocco was just a practice trip, like South Beach had been. After Morocco, I drove my girlfriend up to England so we could be at the Isle of Wight Festival and see Dylan and Hendrix and so she could catch a plane back to the U.S. to complete her last year at college. I drove to India. Not just India-- Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, all the way down the west coast of India to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then all the way up the east coast of India to Nepal. And then back to Europe. I was away almost 7 years. What a glorious adventure! Sometimes I write about it on my travel blog and sometimes there's even call to bring up my travels here at DWT. This is from a post from 2009 about looking for peace in Afghanistan.

There aren't many members of Congress who have traveled extensively out of the country. In his delightful book, Fire-Breathing Liberal, Rep. Robert Wexler marvels at how many of his Republican colleagues [on the House Foreign Relations Committee] seem to think not possessing a passport is a badge of honor! Last weekend I spent some time with Rep. Barbara Lee who is no longer surprised when she talks with Republicans who haven't been-- and don't want to be-- outside of the U.S. The opposite extreme would be one member who certainly qualifies for the Century Club, Rep. Alan Grayson. When I told him I was going to Mali, he was able to give me some travel tips for remote, seldom visited villages like Bandiagara and Sanga, and a few weeks ago he told me about some odd customs I can expect to experience in Albania.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg had much the same thing to say about Republican Know Nothings trying to grapple with foreign policy: “If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate-- they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here,” he warned, “only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.”

A couple years ago, Krugman recommended a post by Richard Florida, America's Great Passport Divide. That's where that map just above comes from. I couldn't help but notice that the states with the smallest percentage of passport holders-- i.e., states with people who don't travel outside the country-- are also the states that elect Republicans the most regularly. Mississippi is the worst, closely followed by West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas.

"It’s a fun map," writes Florida. "With the exception of Sarah Palin’s home state, it reinforces the 'differences' we expect to find between the states where more worldly, well-travelled people live versus those where the folks Palin likes to call 'real Americans' preponderate. Mostly to entertain myself, I decided to look at how this passport metric correlates with a variety of other political, cultural, economic, and demographic measures. What surprised me is how closely it lines up with the other great cleavages in America today." And, as he says, the statistical correlations are striking across a range of indices.

People in richer states tend to hold passports and people in poorer states tend to not. Same for educated people versus ignorant people. The kinds of folks who elect John Boozman, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, Lindsay Graham, Jeff Sessions and David Vitter, don't hold college degrees-- or passports. They watch Glenn Beck instead and listen to Hate Talk Radio.

States with higher percentages of passport holders are also more diverse. There is a considerable correlation between passports and the share of immigrants or foreign-born population (.63) and also gays and lesbians (.54). The more passport holders a state has, the more diverse its population tends to be.  And yes, these correlations hold when we control for income.

What about politics? How does passport holding line up against America’s Red state-Blue state divide? Pretty darn well, actually. There is a considerable positive correlation between passports and Obama voters (.59) and a significant negative one (-.61) for McCain voters.  It appears that more liberally-oriented states are more globally oriented as well, or at least their citizens like to travel abroad. Again, the correlations hold when we control for income, though they are a bit weaker than the others.

...And finally, states with more passport holders are also happier. There is a significant correlation (.55) between happiness (measured via Gallup surveys) and a state’s percentage of passport holders. Yet again, that correlation holds when we control for income.

There are stark cultural differences between places where international travel is common and those where it’s not, and we can see them playing out in the cultural and political strife that has been riving the country over the past decades. Think of John Kerry, who was accused of looking and sounding “French” and George W. Bush, who’d hardly been overseas before he became president, or for that matter Barack Obama, with his multi-cultural global upbringing, and Sarah Palin, who had to obtain a passport when she traveled to Kuwait in 2007. The trends in passport use reflect America’s starkly bifurcated system of infrastructure. One set of places has great universities and easy access to international airports; another an infrastructure that is much further off the beaten track of the global circulation of capital, talent, and ideas.

I've been reading a very research-oriented academic book by John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford lately, Predisposed. One of the themes is that "liberals and conservatives report distinct personality and psychological tendencies and have different tastes in all sorts of things from art and sports to personality traits and vocational preferences… Conservatives' cognitive patterns reveal a comfort level with clarity and hard categorization while liberals are more likely to value complexity and multiple categories."

Roland and I are planning a trip to Thailand. We would never think of taking a conservative with us. We take chances-- all the time. Conservatives don't. Our trips are always off the beaten path. Even if a conservative does go abroad, most don't venture away from the most predictable and "safe" (and shallow) experiences. We're happy because a progressive friend who's never traveled abroad is rarin' to go. Predisposed reinforces that "people who seek out new information [liberals] are simply much more likely to arrive at different political conclusions than those who are comfortable avoiding the risk and uncertainty accompanying new information [conservatives]… Conservatives' relative discomfort with the new and unfamiliar shows up not only in self-reports about themselves but in behavioral patterns like a reluctance to acquire new but potentially risky information. Such reluctance has pros and cons; it protects conservatives from negative situations but also means that invalid negative attitudes cannot be disproven… [V]ariations in people's willingness to explore new objects and situations may be at the core of the differing world views of liberals and conservatives."

The differing orientations to new information are likely to manifest themselves in differing attitudes towards science and religion, with liberals eager for more data even if those data are alarming (think global warming) and conservatives more likely to be content with knowledge that they believe has already been revealed to them. Seen from this vantage point, it is not surprising that attacks on science are more likely to come from the political right. The one-study-shows-this-but-another-shows-that nature of the scientific process is probably more bothersome to the conservative than to the liberal mindset. From the conservative perspective, referring to a set of findings and claims as "just a theory" could hardly be more damning; it bespeaks an absence of certainty that is troubling, especially if someone is proposing big and expensive changes on what is taken to be little more than debatable conjecture. To liberals, theories, even if dissent is present and i's are left undotted and t's uncrossed, are much more valuable-- the weight of current scientific evidence is likely good enough for them and future modifications to knowledge are more likely to be taken in stride.

In the last couple of years, two our our most memorable experiences were fraught with the kind of uncertainty and danger that would cause a conservative to break down. We went wandering in the Himalayas and had no idea where we were or which way went where. And it was raining. A couple years before that we wound up in a trackless bush in Mali and ran into villagers who seem to have never seen anyone like us before. It was worth the whole trip. But we're not conservatives.

What Turns A Normal Baby Into A Right Wing Sociopath?

Born in 1911, Ronald Reagan came from a normal working class Illinois home. He was a labor union activist in the 1940s and the president of his union from 1947 until 1952 and again in 1959 but at some point in there he sold out to management and started secretly ratting out other actors to the FBI as "communist sympathizers." He remained a Democrat and even helped California Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas defend herself against the deranged attacks from a sleazy, fascist-oriented political newcomer, Richard Nixon. By then, though, he was dating Republican Nancy Drew and he started shifting his flimsy political beliefs rightward. Once General Electric, an overtly conservative firm, hired him as a TV host in 1954 he worked to please them by adopting their right-wing agenda, including a new anti-union stance. By 1962, he switched parties and became not just a Republican, but a far right Republican, even embracing racism. Opposing civil rights legislation, he said "if an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so" and he actively campaigned against Medicare.

Many people point out that Reagan wasn't as extreme as Republicans are today. They're incorrect. His actual beliefs may have been shallow but his intent was always to go hard right. He would be as much a crackpot today as Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, or Jim Inhofe. He'd fit right in. You may find a liberal saying something respectful about him but you'll never find a liberal claiming Reagan was ever anything else than what he was, a right-winger.

Last week, as normal people commemorated the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy, lots of delusional Republicans and right-wing trolls tried claiming JFK was a conservative. In fact, in 1960, when JFK accepted the nomination of New York's Liberal Party, he was widely quoted as saying "if by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties-- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal,'" then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal'."

In their scholarly new book, Predisposed, John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford investigate what makes one person a conservative and someone else a progressive. Their premise is that people experience and process different world. "We taste and smell the same things differently," they wrote. "We cognitively and subjectively interpret the same paintings or stories or jokes differently. We have different personalities, moral foundations, and personal values-- and we have different politics… Openness means openness to experience and information and refers to people who are curious, creative and arty, those who enjoy and seek out novel experiences and are more likely to adopt unconventional beliefs… People who score high on openness, for example, tend to like envelope-pushing music and abstract art… Those open to new experiences are not just hanging Jackson Pollock prints in unorganized bedrooms while listening to techo-pop reinterpretations of Bach by experimental jazz bands. They are also more likely to identify themselves as liberals."

Social scientists have suspected for the better part of a century that political orientations are tied to personality. In fact, in some instances the controversy has been less about whether personality traits influence ideology than whether ideology is a personality trait. Personality can be thought of as the particular patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that make an individual unique.

…Liberals and conservatives might differ on such eclectic non-political tastes as literature and salads for the same reason people with particular personality traits have different tastes and preferences. Maybe “liberal” and “conservative” are just handy terms for describing people who happen to have distinct bundles of traits driving their thoughts, feelings and actions. The big trick, of course, is figuring out the specific traits that consistently distinguish liberals from conservatives… This research, to put it mildly, has been controversial. It began with reflections on the traits that make for a good Nazi.

Erich Jaensch was a psychologist in pre-World War II Germany who was best known for his work on eidetic imagery (an eidetic image is an image that is perceived as real but is not). He began classifying people on their eidetic capabilities and then, ominously, began attaching cultural significance to these capabilities. Somewhere in the process this agenda morphed into providing scholarly cover for some of the more odious racial elements underpinning Nazi ideology. Jaensch’s argument that eidetic individuals are more likely than non-eidetic individuals to possess certain traits does not seem particularly freighted with political importance. Yet from this basis he started to develop a classification scheme for two personality types that accrued major political ramifications.

The “J” type personality was athletic, practical, and decisive. The “S” type was individualistic, egocentric, and liberal. J-types were likely to be upstanding Nazis; S-types, according to Jaensch, were more likely to be Jews and perhaps Frenchmen. He saw these personality types as biologically (read racially) rooted and connected to, not just different views of the world but maybe even different forms of humanity that would take predictably different sides in any cultural conflict. There is no prize for guessing who Jaensch viewed as the good guys in such conflict.

After the J-types jackbooted themselves and everyone else into a bloody, global conflict and lost, they were viewed less as practical and decisive than as existential threats to humanity.

During and immediately following World War II a number of social scientists investigated the inner workings of J-types. No one really believed in Jaensch’s chain of inference-- the conclusions were not only morally repugnant but empirically unsupported-- but the concept of an authoritarian personality type had been floating around in academic circles for quite a while. Maybe humanity was not divided into J- and S-types biologically fated to clash in a global struggle for cultural dominance but maybe there was something to the notion of certain personality traits being more acceptant of authoritarian social structures. This possibility was a very big deal in the middle of the 20th Century, when authoritarian ideological systems aggressively sought to replicate themselves through persuasion or force.

The big ideological “isms” that threatened democracy-- fascism on the right and communism on the left-- were clearly aided not just by the acceptance but in many cases the enthusiastic support of large numbers of seemingly ordinary people. This support came despite the indisputable fact that these regimes often fostered scientific ideas that were specious: Jaensch’s extrapolation from eidetic capabilities to justifications of Nazi racial purity or Trofim Lysenko’s rejection of Mendelian genetics for a new form of “anti-bourgeois” agronomy.

Moreover, the moral consequences of the policies being justified were difficult to miss: Gas chambers and gulags, wars and genocide, man-made famines and a generally cavalier approach to human rights and dignity. What was truly puzzling to social scientists was that these policies were not only accepted and implemented by the ideological true believers but by the average tovarisch and burgher. To be sure, many people just acquiesced in order to protect family and others actively resisted at extreme costs to themselves. Yet, authoritarian regimes needed many average citizens to get with the program. And lots of them did. Why?

In the 1940s and 1950s, psychologists began to hypothesize that people with certain preferences-- a desire for social order and clear, universally followed rules and regulations-- were more likely to provide that support to authoritarian regimes. They began to wonder whether these preferences were deeply psychologically embedded; in other words, whether they constituted a distinct and identifiable set of traits that could be isolated as a personality type. Thus was born the notion of the authoritarian personality. Investigators accept at least parts of Jaensch’s conception of a J-type but often view such personality types as threats to rather than foundations of society. A number of names are associated with the academic work foundational to developing and testing the concept of the authoritarian personality. The most prominent, though, is Theodor Adorno, a German academic whose experience with authoritarianism was all too practical. He was a man of broad interests-- he is still remembered as a music and cultural critic-- who studied philosophy, psychology and sociology, receiving his PhD in 1924. A rising star in more than one academic field, Adorno fled Hitler’s regime after losing his right to teach. Adorno’s father was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, a dangerous genealogy to have in Nazi Germany.

Adorno ended up at the University of California Berkeley studying, among other things, the sociology and psychology of prejudice. There he began a series of collaborative research projects with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, an Austrian-born psychologist and fellow refugee of the anti-Semitic pogroms of the Hitler regime, and Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford, two psychologists who studied ethnocentrism. These projects resulted in The Authoritarian Personality. Theories about authoritarianism had been making the rounds in respectable academic circles for a decade or more before this book was published in 1950, but this was likely the first-- and certainly best known-- systematic empirical investigation into whether there was such a thing as a personality rooted in politics. As the authors put it, their major hypothesis was “that the political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit’ and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality.” Specifically, what they were interested in were “potential” fascists-- not overt and committed ideologues, but those predisposed to accept or support fascism should it become a mainstream social movement. [Basically, teabaggers of the day]

They ended up developing the F-scale-- the “F” stood for fascist. The F-scale focused on nine traits, which for the most part ignored specific policy issues like preferences on hiring quotas and focused on “central trends in the person.” These traits included conventionalism (a rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values), superstition and stereotypy (a belief in mystical determinants of individual fate coupled with a predisposition to think in rigid categories), and anti-intraception (an opposition to the subjective or the imaginative). A number of the questions they used to try and get at these traits were prescient in that they reflected the sorts of non-political items now known to discriminate between liberals and conservatives. For example, one of the anti-intraception questions was: “Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more interesting than those which contain mainly action, romance and adventure.” One of the conventionalism questions asked whether it was more important for a person to be artistic and sensuous or neat and well-mannered.

…In The Psychology of Politics, published just a few years after The Authoritarian Personality (1954), Hans Eysenck argued that personality was projected onto social attitudes. In this book, Eyesenck suggested that ideology was a product of two core underlying dimensions. One of these dimensions amounted to a basic left-right take on political and social issues. The other was “tendermindedness” or “toughmindedness.” The idea was that ideology depended not just on issue preferences but also on underlying personality. Authoritarians, be they on the left or right, were more likely to be toughminded. Eyesenck put both communists and fascists in this category since both groups were willing to pursue their political beliefs with little regard for the preferences and interests of others.

…[I]n the 1960s Glenn Wilson and colleagues in England, New Zealand, and Australia, took the basic concept of conservatism as reflecting a dimension of personality characterized by resistance to change and adherence to tradition. The result was the C-scale (“C” for conservatism) also broadly known as the Wilson- Patterson index-- versions of which we use in our own research. They measured conservatism with questions probing attitudes on everything from school uniforms to the death penalty and found it to correlate not just with the political orientations you would expect but also with tastes and preferences more broadly.

A more recent extension of the authoritarian personality research program is right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). It was developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer, who wondered whether there was a set of people “so generally submissive to established authority that it is scientifically useful to speak of ‘authoritarian people’.” Altemeyer’s answer was a decisive yes. He spent decades refining what amounted to an RWA personality test. Through various iterations this test included questions that had clear political implications, but he also experimented with questions that dealt with child rearing, music and films, and personal hygiene. RWA had much stronger psychometric properties than its F-scale predecessor and Altemeyer consistently reported that people scoring high on RWA tests were more likely to support controls on personal freedom, support harsh forms of punishment, be hostile to perceived out groups (e.g. homosexuals, feminists), and be more likely to support government persecution of these groups.

Reagan was pretty clueless about where he belonged on the spectrum. Kennedy certainly has a much keener understanding.

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