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- One assumes Senate candidate Scott Brown is willing to lie about his knowledge of and participation in the tea party movement because he correctly concludes that such an association would not go over well in the Bay State. Yet what's more interesting is that the tea partiers are willing to finance elements of Brown's campaign despite Brown being a moderate Republican candidate. Daniel Larison suggests this is because Brown has promised to obstruct Obama and the Democrats' agenda, contrasting him with another moderate, Charlie Crist, who "crossed the red line of actively endorsing the stimulus legislation."
- Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in explaining his decision to deny the children of his state a $700 million Race to the Top education grant, claims that "[it] would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special-interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington." You know, whenever I hear some right-winger defending his state's right to give their kids the learnin' without tracking with any sort of higher standard, I'm reminded of what this actually entails. In Texas, for instance, there's a serious push to codify an alternative version of history that deifies the American conservative movement, prepping children for a lifetime of ignorance and, hopefully, voting Republican. But as every good conservative knows, indoctrination is something that only occurs on the left-wing.
- The Washington Times, of all places, reports on the greater success Barack Obama has had cutting spending compared to his predecessor, prompting Ezra Klein to observe that "it does put Republican fury about the deficit in context." Indeed. I don't know how much more mileage Democrats can get out of reminding voters how terribly irresponsible the Bush administration was with the public trust, but there might be something to be gained in reminding them that the same congressional Republicans who are howling about deficits and spending under a Democratic president were perfectly happy to debt-finance such productive measures as tax breaks concentrated amongst the country's elites, war in the Middle East, and giveaways to pharmaceutical companies under a Republican president.
- I wish that instead of somberly conceding that we'll need new euphemisms for taxation if we ever hope to raise revenue again we could perhaps take the opportunity to change the nature of the conversation from "taxes are government theft!" to "are you willing to be taxed for this or that government service." Such a transition would, I hope, relegate bashing modest and useful spending by government to the right-wing fringe. Until then, we're stuck with "This anti-capitalist and anti-wealth mentality is scary and very anti-American" being used to describe a small tax on large banks that most Americans, I imagine, absolutely loathe.
- Remainders: John Shadegg's retirement is definitely great news for Republicans; one reason it's easy to ignore climate change is that it most directly and immediately threatens poor people in the southern hemisphere; I'm sure resuming START talks will witness a renaissance of "bear in the woods" thinking on the right-wing; Carl Hulse explains the politics behind Obama's first veto; and reason 5,091 why I don't watch cable news.
--Mori Dinauer
