Punting the Pundits

In a recent piece for the American Prospect, Sarah Posner outlined how the fringe of the religious right increasingly dictates the larger conservative agenda, as evidenced by the bold Republican push towards open war on contraception.  Sarah writes about the reason for the attacks on Planned Parenthood:

   It is not solely about shutting down Planned Parenthood’s federal funding because the organization provides abortion services (indeed federal funding of abortion is already banned by the Hyde Amendment). It’s about shutting down Planned Parenthood because it provides contraceptives. That is a target because, as Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has put it, “an arrogant corrupt Washington elite” has “declared war on marriage, on families, on fertility, and on faith.”

Mike Huckabee has started to join the chorus of anti-contraception voices as well, calling Planned Parenthood “Planned Barrenhood”—basically signing off on the idea that any attempt to control fertility is wrong, no matter how you do it.  While the official argument is that this is still just about abortion, the mask slips more and more all the time, and the public is beginning to be clear about how radical the anti-choice agenda really is. And the thing is that when you drop the bloviating about fetal life and attack contraception head on, it’s much harder to distract people from how viciously misogynistic this agenda really is.

Joan Walsh: Haley Barbour’s neo-Southern strategy fails

Maybe America isn’t ready for a president who claims Mississippi racism wasn’t “that bad”

Only a few hours after the Washington Post reported that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour was less than a week from his declared deadline to make a decision, “and most expect him to run,” Barbour announced the opposite. “I will not be a candidate for president next year,” the Republican said in a statement Monday. “A candidate for president today is embracing a ten-year commitment to an all-consuming effort, to the virtual exclusion of all else. His (or her) supporters expect and deserve no less than absolute fire in the belly from their candidate. I cannot offer that with certainty, and total certainty is required.”

In a primary field still crowded with people who will never be president, Barbour’s departure is nonetheless good and bracing news. Late last year, the man from Yazoo City floated a new Southern strategy in what was probably intended as a positive Weekly Standard profile, and it went nowhere. Barbour told the Standard that racism in his hometown wasn’t “that bad,” and praised the local chapter of the notorious White Citizens Council for policing the Ku Klux Klan; later he refused the state NAACP’s request that he denounce efforts to issue a state license plate to honor KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. I said at the time that Barbour’s Weekly Standard comments weren’t a gaffe, but a trial balloon for politics in post-Obama America: C’mon, isn’t everybody sick of all the whining about racism? It wasn’t that bad!

Dean Baker: What We’re Not Being Told About Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan

The mainstream media has failed to report that the Ryan plan is a privatisation programme that will hand $30tn to insurers

The film Casablanca features one of greatest moments in movie history. With Humphrey Bogart standing with a smoking pistol over the body of the dead Gestapo major, Claude Rains, in the role of the French colonel, tells his troops: “the major has been shot, round up the usual suspects.”

Unfortunately, the Washington policy gang is busy following Claude Rains’ instructions. The nation is drowning in endless accounts of how the huge deficit will sink the economy and the country. These accounts invariably feature stories of a Congress addicted to spending and a nation that wants government benefits that it doesn’t want to pay for.

This story has nothing to do with reality, as all budget analysts know. The explosion of the budget deficit in the last three years is a response to the plunge in private sector demand following the collapse of the housing bubble. If the budget deficit were smaller, we would simply have less demand and fewer jobs.

The New York Times Editorial: The Republican Threat to Voting

Less than a year before the 2012 presidential voting begins, Republican legislatures and governors across the country are rewriting voting laws to make it much harder for the young, the poor and African-Americans – groups that typically vote Democratic – to cast a ballot.

Spreading fear of a nonexistent flood of voter fraud, they are demanding that citizens be required to show a government-issued identification before they are allowed to vote. Republicans have been pushing these changes for years, but now more than two-thirds of the states have adopted or are considering such laws. The Advancement Project, an advocacy group of civil rights lawyers, correctly describes the push as “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Why ‘False Choices’ Still Matter

WASHINGTON-The idea that “false choices” are distorting our politics is under attack. I want to defend the concept for both substantive and personal reasons.

The canary in the coal mine was my colleague Ruth Marcus’ column on March 31 in which she argued directly: “It’s time to retire the false choice.”

“As a rhetorical device, particularly as a political rhetorical device, the false choice has outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any,” she wrote. “The phrase has become a trite substitute for serious thinking. It serves too often to obscure rather than to explain.”

While I empathize with Marcus’ frustration that false choices are sometimes invoked to evade choices altogether, I respectfully but passionately disagree with her. And she has company in her skepticism.