But unfortunately, I don’t think it is over. The Citizens United decision has opened the floodgates for corporate political spending. How big is the flood? In the month of December alone, just in Iowa, more than $10 million was spent just on television and radio political ads. And that’s just for the presidential primary. How many billions of dollars will be spent before the elections in November?
The Iowa caucuses happen Tuesday (yes, tomorrow), and it seems like nobody knows who the winner will be. Some polls show Ron Paul in front. Some show Mitt Romney winning. Some show Rick Santorum surging from behind (sorry).
The bottom line (sorry again) is … who cares? If you look at the six contested GOP primaries since 1976, the winner of the Iowa caucuses has gone on to be elected president just once. And that lone accurate prediction was George W. Bush in 2000. Big whoop.
As far as I can tell, the only real winner of the Iowa caucuses is the media, which loves a horse race like this.
I just wanted to take a minute at the start of a new year to remind everyone about Jury Nullification. If you are ever on a jury, no court, judge, or even defense lawyer will ever tell you about your constitutional right to Just Say No.
That’s right. If you are a juror for someone who is accused of smoking marijuana, even if you are sure they are guilty you have the right to vote not guilty. Maybe because you think drug laws are stupid and that nobody should be thrown in jail and have their life ruined for smoking pot. That’s called jury nullification, because you are in effect nullifying the law.
The judge may even tell you that you have to vote purely on whether the defendant is guilty as charged. If so, the judge is lying, and he almost certainly knows he is lying.
What makes this an even more important issue is that there seems to be a campaign against jury nullification. Earlier this year a retired professor was charged with a crime for providing information about jury nullification outside a courthouse. If that is a crime, then I am probably breaking the same law by writing this post.
Glenn Greenwald has a fantastic rant in Salon. Go read it now.
It doesn’t matter if you want Ron Paul to be president or not. You should definitely support him as It would be great for him to be the Republican candidate for president. Why? Because he is the only even remotely viable candidate for president (including Obama) who challenges the conventional political wisdom on some very important issues: ending preemptive wars, decriminalizing drug use, and many other issues that are extremely important but almost never part of our dismal political discourse. As Greenwald puts it: “[Paul’s] nomination would mean that it is the Republican candidate — not the Democrat — who would be the anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate.”
But the real irony fueling Greenwald’s rant is the reaction that most progressives have to Ron Paul, because it challenges their denial about some of Obama’s most repulsive policies (his support for CIA assassination, his unprecedented war on government whistleblowers, his shielding of Bush-era war criminals from prosecution, and others listed by Greenwald).
Let me be clear. I would definitely vote for Obama over Paul. But that does not mean that I support all of Obama’s policies (in fact, I strongly dislike some of them). The real problem is that progressives are complicit in not talking about these bad policies, because they are afraid that the American electorate will vote in someone far worse.
We should not be afraid of open discussion. The us-vs-them attitude that pervades American politics is poison.
UPDATE: Maybe a comic will help make this point:
Thanks to all my readers who made running this blog worth it! I hope 2012 is a great year.
Why is it that political setbacks get the Republican base even more fired up, while similar setbacks make Democrats get disillusioned and lose interest?
A reader has asked an interesting question — what would be the result if libertarian Ron Paul were elected President. This is not a hypothetical question — some poll show him leading in Iowa. Whether you’re a fan of Paul or not, if you can imagine a scenario that is likely to happen if we had a libertarian president, please share it with the rest of us in the comments. You know, scenarios based on us going back on the Gold Standard, legalizing drugs, making abortion illegal, etc. Humor is encouraged, but to be truly funny they must have an element of truth.
If you aren’t sure of Ron Paul’s positions on various issues, here’s a few sources: Official Campaign website, Wikipedia page, RonPaul.com, Daily Paul, and Who is Ron Paul.
“The independent Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney announced it would suspend anti- Newt Gingrich ads during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. They said they’re doing it out of respect to Gingrich, his family, and his mistresses.” – Jay Leno
“The pro-adultery website ashleymadison.com – have you heard of this? It’s a website for married people that want to cheat. Anyway, they have come out and endorsed Newt Gingrich for president. I guess it’s their way of thanking him for all the years of business.” – Jay Leno
“John Edwards – remember that sleazeball who ran for president? He’s asking that his upcoming criminal trial be delayed because he’s been diagnosed with a medical condition. Lets hope it’s erectile dysfunction.” – Jay Leno
“Anthony Weiner and is his wife, Huma, have given birth to a baby boy. He posted a photo of the new baby on Twitter, but people are afraid to open it.” – Jay Leno
“Yesterday in New York City, Donald Trump officially changed his political affiliation from Republican to Independent. And Donald’s hair has switched from pelt to carpet sample.” – Jay Leno
“Rick Perry told reporters this week that he has a permit to carry a concealed handgun. He also has a concealed vocabulary, concealed knowledge of the issues, concealed tolerance…” – Jay Leno
“There have been a lot of changes in the polls lately. It’s unbelievable. President Obama’s ratings are up, Ron Paul is leading in the polls in Iowa, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are in a tie, and Rick Santorum is still two points behind Kim Jong-Il. He’s got a way to go.” – Jay Leno
“We’re learning more and more about the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. It seems he died of a heart attack while riding on a train in North Korea. I don’t want to say Kim Jong-Il was little, but the train he died on was going around his Christmas tree.” – Jay Leno
“In a new interview, President Obama was asked to describe Michelle, and he used the words ‘beautiful, smart, and funny.’ When asked how he picked those, he used the words, ‘she’s, sitting, and right-next-to-me.'” – Jimmy Fallon
“Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called President Obama a clown and an embarrassment. You don’t talk about our president that way. Our vice president, sure, that would be fine.” – Jay Leno
“President Barack Obama went out and did some shopping. He took the entire White House Press Corps with him, but still he’s out there boosting the economy — the Chinese economy but still, he’s doing what he can, ladies and gentlemen.” – David Letterman
“President Obama went Christmas shopping at Best Buy in Virginia this week. He had to go to Best Buy because he’s not allowed to go to Walmart, because China said, “You can’t buy any more stuff from us until you pay off what you already owe us.” – Jay Leno
“President Obama bought about $200 worth of Christmas presents at Best Buy. Then it got awkward when he asked the Geek Squad if they fix economies.” – Jimmy Fallon
“While shopping at Best Buy, out of force of habit, President Obama put everything on layaway. He told the store, “Don’t worry about it; the grandkids will pay for it.” – Jay Leno
“The New York Daily News reported that Obama bought the Wii game “Just Dance” for his daughters, Sasha and Malia. Or in other words, the New York Daily News just ruined the fun of opening presents for Sasha and Malia.” – Jimmy Fallon
“The payroll tax extension passed the House and Senate by unanimous consent. This was a procedural move allowing it to pass, even though most members of congress were already home for the holidays. They weren’t even there! Only 12 people out of 535 were there and they got it done. Imagine how much they could do if we got rid of all of them?” – Jay Leno
I’ve long suspected that Jon Huntsman knows both that he cannot win the nomination in the current Republican party, or even if he did, that he probably could not win against Obama. Instead, he is positioning himself for a presidential run in 2016, when Obama won’t be an issue and by then (hopefully) the Republican party will have imploded (from the effects of the Tea Party, Fox News, and their war on science) and will be starting to rebuild itself.
As Obama used to say, Iraq was a “stupid” war. After spending three trillion dollars, with thousands of American soldiers dead (more than the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks), and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, just what did we accomplish? Well, we removed strongman Saddam Hussain from power. Of course, we helped keep him in power in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, especially during the Iraq/Iran war.
Arlen Specter, former Republican-turned-Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania, performs a respectable stand-up comedy routine:
Mitt Romney keeps trying to paint Obama as a Soviet-style socialist, which is clearly false. Earlier this month, he declared:
[Obama] seeks to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people to enjoy truly disproportionate rewards are the people who do the redistributing — the government.
Entitlement societies are praised in academic circles, far removed from the reality of a competitive world. Opportunity is replaced by the certainty that everyone in an entitlement society will enjoy nearly the same rewards. But there is another certainty: they will be poor.
In an entitlement society, the invigorating pursuit of happiness is replaced by the deadening reality that there is no prospect of a better tomorrow.
What makes this statement so hypocritical is that Romney claims that what he is trying to preserve opportunity and meritocracy, where education, effort, and willingness to take risk is rewarded. The reality is that Republicans have spent the last 30 years destroying opportunity and meritocracy and replacing it with an American aristocracy where the rich get their risks socialized. Where wages for the middle class have fallen even as corporate profits increased, and where the opportunity for someone poor to work hard and move themselves into the middle class has plummeted. The only entitlement society we actually have is corporate executives insisting they are entitled to their extravagant bonuses even as their companies fail and suck off the government teat.
Indeed, would Mitt be rich and running for president today if his father had not been George Romney, the CEO of American Motors and Governor of Michigan? It is interesting to note that neither American Motors nor the state of Michigan did very well at all in the end, but that didn’t stop either Romney from benefiting greatly.
It always seems like the people who complain the most about other people sucking money from taxpayers are the people who actually do it the most (this may be a corollary to the premise that those people who bash gays the most are themselves afraid to come out of the closet).
The latest example is Rick Perry, who has made a career of criticizing government workers and the poor for what he calls living off taxpayer largess. So it should come as no surprise that Perry is the only Republican candidate for president who is charging his travel and security expenses to the government. Not only that, but he has the largest security contingent of any Republican candidate — the only candidate who has a larger security force is President Obama.
Perry even justified having the government pay for his campaign travel and security by claiming “I’m going to be promoting Texas. I’m going to be traveling to places where the Texas story needs to be told, and we will tell it.” I guess it is only coincidental that Perry’s travel expenses skyrocketed after he announced he was running for president. In fact, in just the month of September (immediately after he announced he was running) he spent $397,000 of the taxpayer’s money on travel and security, including $4,400 on a single meal.
I’m appreciative of Obama finally getting us the hell out of Iraq, a place — as Obama repeatedly said — we should never have invaded in the first place.
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