Posts Tagged ‘Grover Norquist’
Gerry-Built Monday Links
* Although their etymologies are obscure and their meanings overlap, these are two distinct expressions. Something poorly built is “jerry-built.” Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution. Many people cross-pollinate these two expressions and mistakenly say “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built.” It’s hard not to take this personally.
* In Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others, Gilligan documents a striking statistical connection between changing rates of violent death in the United States over the past century and the party of the president. He concludes that Republican administrations are “risk factors for lethal violence,” and that the only reason they have not produced “disastrously high epidemic levels” of suicides and homicides is that Democrats have repeatedly undone their damage.
* Gingrich, true to form, takes right-wing attacks on the very idea of journalism itself all the way to the next level.
* Grover Norquist promises impeachment if Obama doesn’t extend the Bush tax cuts.
* Political religion: May you find the Ronald Reagan living inside each and everyone of you.
* I think I’ve linked this one before, but it’s a classic: Jourdan Anderson’s 1865 letter “To My Old Master.”
* A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever.
* Say goodbye to Captain Marvel.
* And today in fandom: #BelieveInSherlock. Big spoilers for the end of the second season, if you’re not current yet.
‘I Can Say to You with Deepest Sincerity: If This Country and This Legislature Are In Thrall to Grover Norquist, We Haven’t Got a Prayer’
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Norquist expresses pride that the GOP has been so thoroughly transformed since the days of Reagan. “It’s a different Republican Party now,” he says. Norquist even goes so far as to liken the kind of Republicans common in Reagan’s day – those willing to raise taxes to strengthen the economy – to segregationists. The “modern Republican Party,” he says, would no sooner recognize a revenue-raiser than the “modern Democratic Party would recognize George Wallace.”
In Rolling Stone: How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich.
Blink
In that sense, yesterday’s development undermined the basic vision of the conservative movement: that decoupling taxes and spending would cause revenue and outlay arrows to diverge; and that when faced with the resulting unsustainable debt load, the country’s representatives, pushed by powerful interest groups, would keep the tax rates and scotch social programs. Choose the corporate state over the entitlement state.
That didn’t happen.
Brian Beutler argues that the McConnell plan signals the Republicans’ blinking not only on the debt ceiling fight but on thirty years of anti-tax fanaticism.
