The New RINO: A Conservative Without the Drama

Some folks, particularly many of my readers, are quick to throw the label RINO (Republican in Name Only) at any Republican not sufficiently conservative in their view. I don’t object to the practice one bit if the shoe fits. George W. Bush was a RINO. He spent the country into bankruptcy.  Lately, however, folks are confusing sensible with RINO.

Early on in the GOP primary season I expressed interest in Jon Huntsman. Just on paper, he looked like the strongest contender having both executive (Governor of Utah) experience and foreign policy (Ambassador to China) experience. I also liked the fact that he didn’t run away from climate change and evolution as scientific lines of inquiry worth exploring. Since I’m not a Republican, my analysis stopped there. I was quickly informed by several of my readers that Huntsman is a RINO and has no business anywhere near the Oval Office. Hence I was pleased to stumble upon a quiz posted by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough in Politico magazine. The quiz, copied below in its entirety compares Huntsman to the current leading contenders Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. (YIKES I feel like I’m living in an alternate universe putting Newt Gingrich and “leading contender” in the same sentence!)

1. Who said, “I will preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose. I am not going to change pro-choice laws in any way”?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

2. Who bragged about being a moderate with this comment, “There is a new synthesis evolving with the classic moderate wing of the party, where as a former Rockefeller state chairman, I’ve spent most of my life”?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

3. Who starred in a 2007 global warming commercial with Nancy Pelosi that was sponsored by Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

4. Who once famously said, “I don’t line up with the NRA”?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

5. Who was paid $312,000 by ethanol interests and then said ethanol is good for national security and for the economy?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

6. Which candidate bragged about not being a Republican during the Reagan presidency and promised that if elected he would not “return to Reagan-Bush policies”?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

7. Which candidate told Planned Parenthood that he supported state funding of abortion?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

8. Which candidate has consistently supported the type of individual mandates for health insurance that conservatives are trying to overturn through court challenges to Obamacare? (Trick question: Two of three are correct answers.)

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

9. Which candidate went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and called Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan “radical” and “right-wing social engineering”?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

10. Which candidate is the only GOP presidential contender to come out in full support of the Ryan plan?

A. Mitt Romney
B. Newt Gingrich
C. Jon Huntsman

11. Which candidate bragged to CNN that he’s “the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson”?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

12. Which candidate told Planned Parenthood that he supported the “substance” of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

13. Which candidate said of the Medicare prescription drug plan that was the largest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society, “Every conservative member of Congress should vote for this Medicare bill. Obstructionist conservatives can always find reasons to vote no”?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

14. Which candidate attacked Steve Largent, Tom Coburn and other conservatives as “the Perfectionist Caucus,” while giving his last speech as speaker in support of Dick Gephardt and Dave Obey’s colossal Omnibus Bill of 1998?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

15. Which candidate was ranked by Cato Institute in 2008 one of the most fiscally conservative governors in America?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

16. Which candidate was cited by the Pew Center for running the “best-managed” state, hailed by Forbes magazine as the “most fiscally fit” and ranked first in the country for job creation?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

17. Whose economic plan does The Wall Street Journal consider the most impressive and conservative of the Republican presidential field?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

18. The American Conservative wrote this about which GOP candidate, “For the past two decades a ‘moderate’ Republican was one who didn’t generally side with his party on three issues: taxes, guns and abortion. [This candidate’s] record on those isn’t just to the right of the moderates. It is to the right of most conservatives”?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

19. Which candidate was praised in a Club for Growth report for reforming health care with “no individual mandate, no employer mandate and no provision for a massive expansion of subsidized care unlike Obamacare or Romney’s plan”?

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

20. Who are the real RINOs here? (Feel free to circle two.)

A. Mitt Romney

B. Newt Gingrich

C. Jon Huntsman

Answers: 1) A; 2) B; 3) B; 4) A; 5) B; 6) A; 7) A; 8.) A and B; 9) B; 10) C; 11) B; 12) A; 13) B; 14) B; 15) C; 16) C; 17) C; 18) C; 19) C; 20) you decide.

via Opinion: Who is the real RINO? – Joe Scarborough – POLITICO.com.

Clearly, at least from this quiz, the only candidate of the three who is NOT a RINO is Jon Huntsman. So, you have to ask yourself why is Huntsman labeled so by so many? Could it be that unlike Gingrich, Huntsman doesn’t talk about the President’s Kenyan anti-colonialist background? Perhaps it is because Huntsman, unlike Gingrich,  doesn’t identify liberalism as the most dangerous phenomenon in America since World War II Nazism? Could it be that unlike Romney, Huntsman has not been anointed by the establishment and certainly no one anointed by the establishment could possibly be a RINO.

The fact that Jon Huntsman has been virtually ignored by his party and the potential primary voters  tells me that his party is not really serious about leading us out of this crisis. The GOP electorate have so far only shown interest in opportunists and drama queens. If that trend does not change, the GOP does not deserve your vote in November of 2012.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Did Obama Attend Kindergarten?

No, this is not an article about madrasas. No, I am not requesting that Obama release his academic records. Remember the 1988 book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? Well, I never read it but I do know the premise. The lessons learned early in life are the most important ones, lessons about honesty, fairness, and kindness. One thing that I learned at a very young age was not to call names. How does this lesson apply to President Barack Obama? Let’s take a trip in the wayback machine and see.

April, 2008: Obama as a candidate for President said,

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them and they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

July, 2009: President Obama said,

I don’t know – not having been there and not seeing all the facts – what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

Both of these statements by Obama triggered outrage from his critics. How dare he call Pennsylvanians “bitter”? The nerve of him to call the Cambridge police stupid! At the time, I defended him because I felt in both cases he spoke truth. Yet now comes another incident that has me rethinking my position.

November, 2011: President remarks at APEC Forum,

I think it’s important to remember that the United States is still the largest recipient of foreign investment in the world. And there are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity — our stability, our openness, our innovative free market culture. But we’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — well, people will want to come here and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America.

GOP Presidential wanna-be Rick Perry took this quote and ran with it claiming that Obama was calling Americans lazy. He drummed up a campaign ad totally distorting Obama’s message.

Democrats are right to criticize Perry for taking Obama’s message out of context. Clearly, Obama was not talking about Americans in general. He was talking about American business and their efforts to pursue foreign investment. But what Obama’s defenders are missing is that the entire brouhaha could have been avoided if Obama did not engage in name calling.

Whether it’s “bitter” in 2008 or “acted stupidly” in 2009 or “lazy” in 2011, Barack has a hard time staying away from negative, damning adjectives. When he does this he comes off judgmental and condescending. He is basically begging his opponents to kick him in the ass either in context or out of context.

A man of Obama’s considerable rhetorical skills should know that it is always better to phrase a criticism or judgment in the form of a positive suggestion for improvement rather than a negative description of the current behavior. Every corporate manager has been taught this when training to give performance reviews.

My advice to the President: stop name-calling and start building alliances. You’ll need every alliance you can find in 2012.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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OWS Becomes the Sneetches

One of my more popular posts over the past few years concerned a Dr. Seuss fable called The Sneetches. You can read the post to get the details of the fable but what’s important here is that Dr. Seuss’ story informed my perception of human nature. As I wrote back then:

This simple tale has always encapsulated for me a philosophy about the human condition. Take any set of humans, no matter how seemingly similar, and they will find a means to discriminate among each other and sow the seeds of discord. It happens between whites and blacks … it happens between dark-skinned blacks and light-skinned blacks, and so on. Each time you think you’ve got a group of people who are more similar than different, they discover a way to find a meaningless difference about which to segregate.

And so it goes with the Occupy Wall Street crowd in Zuccotti Park in New York City prior to their recent eviction. Jon Stewart, sadly one of the best sources of dead-on political commentary and news considering his show is a comedy, documented the mind-blowing schism that had occurred among the OWS protesters.

Yes, the one world, fairness for all movement had split along … wait for it … economic lines. In the words of one protester there was the aristocratic bunch and the ghetto bunch. So once again my Sneetches philosophy of human nature was confirmed. The rank hypocrisy implicit in this schism was on further display when one protester explained to Daily Show “correspondent” Samantha Bee that everyone should have an iPad, just not HIS iPad. Sharing was paramount so long as it wasn’t that particular protester who had to do the sharing.

It was easy at first for folks like me who voted for hope and change in 2008 to become enamored with the OWS movement. The movement in its first few weeks highlighted the inequity of our current system and put a magnifying glass over the criminal bankers who have yet to pay for their crimes. But you can shine a light on a problem for just so long before it becomes as boring as a test pattern. Without moving to the next stage of suggesting viable solutions, the stagnant atmosphere that develops invites all of our worst human tendencies to come to the fore. Hence, the crime rate within the occupation had increased, the friction with police had increased and as this Daily Show video shows, unity within the organization itself had decreased. In fact, one could argue there never was organization despite all the “general assemblies”.

OWS is becoming the exception that proves the rule there is strength in numbers. As OWS protests have spread across the country, so has increasing discord. When you add local law enforcement the potential for explosive situations multiplies. The movement is devolving into one huge temper tantrum.

Still, like Linus in his pumpkin patch, I always thought I could at least count on sincerity winning the day within OWS. Alas, Jon Stewart has taught me otherwise. The OWS protesters cannot see past the nose on their own face any better than the  rest of us. What I thought was a sincere rebirth of 1960′s idealism in the 21st century has turned out to be just another bunch of Sneetches.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Sports, College and Cash

Much has been made recently of getting the money out of Washington. Whether it’s the influence of lobbying firms, or the lust that seemingly all politicians have for campaign contributions to ensure their reelection, many folks are saying that cash is fueling a dysfunctional government. However, the negative influence of money is hardly limited to Washington as we were shockingly reminded this week. The football program at Pennsylvania State University received a jolt when former coach Jerry Sandusky was indicted on multiple counts of child molestation. Had this been run of the mill pedophile behavior taking place at Sandusky’s home (where some of the attacks did occur) the worst we could say about Penn State was some remote guilt by association. However Sandusky committed some of these crimes on university property. In fact he molested minor boys at facilities open to university staff where the risk of getting caught was quite high.

This is where the plot thickens and sickens. An assistant grad student, Mike McQueary, in 2002 witnessed a young boy around the age of ten being sodomized by Sandusky in the Penn State locker room shower. Rather than stop the assault, McQueary, then 28 years old,  reported the incident to his father, who advised him to report the incident to head coach Joe Paterno, a legend in college football. Paterno, in turn, reported the incident up the chain. The bottom line, police were never notified. The 23 page indictment of Sandusky makes clear that several child molestations preceded this one and at least one occurred subsequently, as late as 2008.

What has many puzzled and disgusted is how an institution could know that Sandusky was engaging in this behavior and not report the matter to the authorities. The bottom line is no one wanted to rock the boat in the lucrative world known as college football. The Penn State football culture was insular, a world that played by its own rules. Let’s make no mistake, millions of dollars are at stake in college football. Coaches at top sports colleges make considerably more than professors at those same schools.

After a full week of outrage, I’ve heard very little by way of solutions. I think the time has come to put college sports back in the space where it belongs. My measures might seem draconian but it would take the money out of college sports and set priorities straight.

1. All college sports at every school must be demoted to the same status as any other extracurricular activity. Being on the football team should be no different from being in the drama club.
2. All sponsorship activities from various businesses cease immediately. College sports programs get funded through the college, period, end of story.
3. College sports are no longer televised. Since when are the Whiffenpoofs’ concerts televised on a regular basis? No need to televise college sports either.
4. All athletic scholarships cease. Scholarships should be based on need and/or academic achievement. We don’t send our kids to school to play football. We send them there to learn.
5. The NCAA should be re-missioned to establish programs unaffiliated with colleges, which train aspiring athletes. Professional sports teams can then draft their picks from these training programs. This allows us to maintain a wall of separation between academics and sports. This change of mission would of course involve renaming the NCAA.

The corruption within college sports is nothing new. The shame is that it took such a disgusting instance of complicity within this organization to remind us. It’s equally a shame that some Penn State student’s priorities were so askew that they rioted when Paterno was deservedly fired. Sports has morphed from a game to high-priced entertainment to religion. And we all know from the Catholic Church what happens when grave transgressions occur within a religion. It’s time we got our perspective back folks.

Football is just a game. The love of no game is worth the sacrifice of any child’s innocence.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Personhood Comes to Mississippi

There was a time when the only “hood” conjured up by mention of the State of Mississippi was the white hood of the Klansman as he burned crosses and lynched blacks. My, what a difference some sixty years make! Now Mississippi’s concern for civil rights reaches all the way back into the uterus. Tomorrow, the citizens of Mississippi will vote on whether the state constitution should be amended to define “personhood” as the point at which the human female egg is fertilized by the male sperm. With a person thus defined, a whole new class of homicides could conceivably be on the books in no time flat.

This legal definition of “person” is clearly designed to challenge Roe v. Wade and that in itself is not so bad. It might even be considered a clever way of attacking the 1973 Supreme Court decision. The problem is that the definition shows no understanding of human biology and is therefore patently absurd. You see, the definition does not specify that the fertilized egg must be implanted in the wall of the uterus. Without that specification all sorts of ridiculous results occur.

• Very often, fertilized eggs leave the woman via menstruation, having never successfully attached to the uterine wall. This “crime” of a discarded person would not even get noticed.
• At least two forms of birth control, the IUD and the “morning after pill” prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. This interference in the development of a “person” would be homicide.
• Since in vitro fertilization involves the fertilization of multiple eggs outside the womb and reintroduction of a subset of those zygotes back into the womb, those “persons” outside of that subset would not be allowed to live, hence murder by definition of the constitutional amendment. This means in vitro procedures would have to be changed such that only one egg is fertilized and reintroduced into the womb, thereby greatly decreasing the likelihood of pregnancy.

As Chris Hayes of The Nation magazine and MSNBC pondered last weekend on his show “Up”, what kind of enforcement mechanism would be in place to support this amendment? Would the uterus suddenly, in the words of The Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg, become a “crime scene”? Would every miscarriage trigger a criminal investigation?

Clearly a major component in the abortion debate is an understanding of when life begins. Reasonable people can differ on this. However, pregnancy itself is defined as starting with implantation of the zygote into the uterine wall, at which point it becomes an embryo. So if we agree that abortion is termination of a pregnancy, then we cannot count a zygote as being “aborted”. Until implantation, the woman is not pregnant. So loss of a zygote cannot be abortion.

The bottom line is that the proposed amendment ignores biology and goes too far in its attempt to stop abortions. If the amendment passes, it will be a triumph of moral fervor over scientific knowledge and common sense.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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You Cannot Fill a Leaky Bucket

It’s one thing to argue about politics but things have gone completely awry when we cannot agree on basic mathematics. Such was the case late last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when the two co-hosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski got into a heated discussion about raising taxes on the very rich.

This was not your typical argument with the liberal (Mika) saying the current tax system was unfair and the conservative (Joe) saying that the rich pay more than their fair share. No, this argument was about a much more fundamental concept that for reasons that evade me, Mika just couldn’t grok. Joe Scarborough said that before you raise the taxes of the rich one dime you first have to close loopholes. Mika saw this as some distraction from getting that extra ounce of blood out of the “1%”.

Look folks, this ain’t rocket science. If for every tax hike you have a corresponding effort by creative attorneys and accountants to evade the tax hike, then you’ve wasted your effort. The simple truth is  that by closing loopholes, you automatically bring in more revenue without ever raising taxes one cent. The problem, as evidenced in the Mika/Joe debate is that closing loopholes doesn’t provide that catharsis that “punishing the rich” with a tax hike provides. But what good is catharsis for the sake of catharsis? It might make you feel good but it doesn’t solve the problem. On this one, Joe is absolutely right. You simplify the tax code first by closing loopholes. Then and only then do you consider which rates need to be raised.

If the bucket has a hole in it, it doesn’t matter how much water you pour in.

Distribution of Wealth

There has been much talk lately about the unfair distribution of wealth in the United States of America. It is the fundamental lament of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The other day I was looking at some graphs illustrating this “unfair distribution” and it occurred to me that one area of dispute may revolve around definitions. Distribution as it applies to our current problem is a statistical concept. It’s a phenomenon mapped out on an x and y-axis. Yet when we get into a political discussion about it I think another strange perspective kicks in. It is almost as though we view that there is some huge pot of money and some grand poobah decides who gets what share of the pot. This evil overlord “distributes” the money in such a way that 1% get most of it and 99% see very little of it. Our current national dialogue centers around everybody getting “their fair share”, again as though there is some central fund from which to divvy out the riches.

That definition of distribution not only leads to class warfare, it makes it impossible to diagnose the problem. The distribution problem comes down to two factors, lack of employment and skewed valuation of the jobs that do exist. Since those who hire typically make more than those who are hired, high unemployment immediately funnels wealth to a small minority. Yet even if we had 4% unemployment (probably a best case scenario) we would see skewed distribution due to the way jobs are valued. Is Madonna really more important in your life than your child’s teacher or your gardener? Yet neither of those folks could ever hope to attain Madonna’s wealth. Is a hedge fund manager really more valuable to society than a fireman?

So the first step to leveling wealth distribution is getting as many folks employed as possible. Quite frankly, if you don’t work you don’t deserve remuneration. There isn’t some central pot from which you get to have your fair share. Income is a trade of money for services. As a liberal I do believe it is society’s obligation to provide training opportunities so all those willing to work can do so.

The second step to leveling wealth distribution is to reconsider how we compensate for various jobs. This does not mean taking money away from the very rich. It simply means paying teachers, firemen, policemen, and yes even the gardener, a little bit more. This second step is actually the harder nut to crack because it cuts to the value system each of us applies to various forms of work. One of the reasons we have such a problem with illegal immigration is that illegal immigrants are willing to do work the average American considers “beneath” him. The current distribution of wealth is more  a reflection of our collective value system than it is any segment “stealing” more than their fair share.

There is no doubt that the behavior of the financial sector in recent years has been reprehensible. But we are kidding ourselves when we lay all the blame at their doorstep. By perpetuating our value system, the 99% play a large role in keeping the 1% where they are.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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