NY Republicans and Stone Casting

Funny... those family value Republicans - even New York ones - always have SUCH a short tolerance for anything even vaguely hinky anyone else does when we've got folks like GOP "morality czar" (and no bigger hypocrit has ever graced the title) and addicted gambler and dominatrix-driven "boy toy" Bill Bennett and House Rep David "When Clinton did it, it's bad. If I do it with prostitutes, it's good family values!" Vitters are racing to grab the biggest stones to hurl at NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's house of glass by demanding the latest pol-with-a-prostitute-proclivity resign or be impeached within 48 hours.

I dunno. Of the main claims, I don't see where Spitzer differs from Republicans - hey, remember was it once GOP-big-deal Dan Burton's OTHER wife? And Burton's stayed on for years in the House - who have tippled in the paid trade. What I find most egregious (the adultery thing really IS between Spitzer and his wife) is being the attorney general and prosecuting others while knowingly breaking the law. BUT the prostitute thing sure is less on my anger-meter than when Tom DeLay has still yet to spend an instant in jail with all the evil he pulled for years. At least Spitzer figured he could only screw women he was married to or whom he could pay rather than screwing ALL of us up the tender chute with billions in corruption and ever-more-screwed democracy through his dirty tricks.

DeLay wasn't forced out by the people - although many did get damned mad and have stayed mad at him - and not by his colleagues (though staying every day he did was damned outrageous). And turned right around and reinserted himself back in politics while daring anyone to remind him he was indicted. His wife, too, no?

Considering the good Spitzer has done (took on prosecution of cases that HURT us over "the powers that be"), and the fact that prostitution, tawdry as it is, just doesn't rise to the occasion of lying us into war as Bush did, for example. And we didn't kick the boy king Bush out.

Paul Krugman: "Distract and Disenfranchise"

Rozius brings us Monday's missive from Professor Krugman; read it all here or accept my big snip-snip-snip:

I have a theory about the Bush administration abuses of power that are now, finally, coming to light. Ultimately, I believe, they were driven by rising income inequality.

Let me explain.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the White House, conservative ideas appealed to many, even most, Americans. At the time, we were truly a middle-class nation. To white voters, at least, the vast inequalities and social injustices of the past, which were what originally gave liberalism its appeal, seemed like ancient history. It was easy, in that nation, to convince many voters that Big Government was their enemy, that they were being taxed to provide social programs for other people.

Since then, however, we have once again become a deeply unequal society. Median income has risen only 17 percent since 1980, while the income of the richest 0.1 percent of the population has quadrupled. The gap between the rich and the middle class is as wide now as it was in the 1920s, when the political coalition that would eventually become the New Deal was taking shape.

And voters realize that society has changed. They may not pore over income distribution tables, but they do know that today’s rich are building themselves mansions bigger than those of the robber barons. They may not read labor statistics, but they know that wages aren’t going anywhere: according to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of workers believe that it’s harder to earn a decent living today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

You know that perceptions of rising inequality have become a political issue when even President Bush admits, as he did in January, that “some of our citizens worry about the fact that our dynamic economy is leaving working people behind.”

But today’s Republicans can’t respond in any meaningful way to rising inequality, because their activists won’t let them. You could see the dilemma just this past Friday and Saturday, when almost all the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls traveled to Palm Beach to make obeisance to the Club for Growth, a supply-side pressure group dedicated to tax cuts and privatization.

The Republican Party’s adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big problems. It can’t offer domestic policies that respond to the public’s real needs. So how can it win elections?

The answer, for a while, was a combination of distraction and disenfranchisement.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were themselves a massive, providential distraction; until then the public, realizing that Mr. Bush wasn’t the moderate he played in the 2000 election, was growing increasingly unhappy with his administration. And they offered many opportunities for further distractions. Rather than debating Democrats on the issues, the G.O.P. could denounce them as soft on terror. And do you remember the terror alert, based on old and questionable information, that was declared right after the 2004 Democratic National Convention?

But distraction can only go so far. So the other tool was disenfranchisement: finding ways to keep poor people, who tend to vote for the party that might actually do something about inequality, out of the voting booth.

Remember that disenfranchisement in the form of the 2000 Florida “felon purge,” which struck many legitimate voters from the rolls, put Mr. Bush in the White House in the first place. And disenfranchisement seems to be what much of the politicization of the Justice Department was about.

Several of the fired U.S. attorneys were under pressure to pursue allegations of voter fraud — a phrase that has become almost synonymous with “voting while black.” Former staff members of the Justice Department’s civil rights division say that they were repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia’s voter ID law to Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters.

The rest is here.