Left breast? Right?

Perhaps it was inevitable that when Michelle Obama proposed something, Michele Bachmann would be the one to criticize her. The surprise is how many of the reactions crossed the usual political boundaries. On blogs and in interviews, some liberal Democrats found themselves agreeing with Representative Bachmann, a Tea Party celebrity from Minnesota, when she criticized the first lady for a campaign to promote breast-feeding. Some conservatives, meanwhile, stood up for Mrs. Obama for promoting what they said was a healthier choice.

What self-respecting liberal would deign to agree with this wingnut?


Mrs. Obama told reporters this month that she would promote breast-feeding, particularly among black women, as part of her campaign to reduce childhood obesity. The Internal Revenue Service then announced that breast pumps, which can cost several hundred dollars, would be eligible for tax breaks.

Ms. Bachmann lashed out at the campaign on Tuesday on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, saying that it reflected a “hard left” position that “government is the answer to everything.” While noting that she had breast-fed the five children she gave birth to, Ms. Bachmann said, “To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump — You want to talk about nanny state, I think we just got a new definition.”

What about mortgage tax deduction, farm subsidies and  other tax loopholes?

Ms. Bachmann was wrong that Mrs. Obama wants the government to pay for breast pumps; the I.R.S. would simply allow people to deduct breast-feeding expenses if they itemize, or use the pre-tax dollars in their medical savings accounts to pay for pumps. And the federal government is now one of the biggest buyers of baby formula, through its nutritional programs for women and infant children. So giving a tax break for breast-feeding might actually help reduce government spending, as Ms. Bachmann advocates.

But why let facts get in the way?

By Thursday — perhaps, again, inevitably — Sarah Palin had weighed in. “No wonder Michelle Obama is telling everybody, ‘You better breast-feed your baby,’ ” she said at a speech on Long Island. “Yeah, you’d better, because the price of milk is so high right now.”

 Another right wing jerk weighs in: what does the President, or the First Lady, have to do with the price of milk? Price supports are legislated by Congress.

Union busting

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, convening a two-day labor-management conference here on Tuesday, argued that teachers’ unions can help solve many of the challenges facing public schools. But as the conference opened, that view was under challenge in a number of state capitals.

Republicans in several states have proposed legislation in recent weeks that would bar teachers’ unions from all policy discussions, except when the time comes to negotiate compensation. In Tennessee and Wisconsin, Republicans have proposed stripping teachers’ unions of collective bargaining rights altogether.

The Fox right wing is intent on busting all unions. Their determination and anger at unions is surprising; unions are so limited in their power, but they must represent something that gets under their skin.

Education historians said the unions were facing the harshest political climate since states began extending legal bargaining rights to schoolteachers decades ago.

AOLington Post

for anyone to feel betrayed by Arianna Huffington at this point is silly: The onetime Gingrich disciple has made a career out of serial reinvention; her latest transformation, from progressive doyenne to corporate contessa, is as predictable as it is lucrative. But what makes liberals’ reaction to Huffington’s supposed sellout even more ridiculous is the fact that the success of the Huffington Post had nothing to do with its politics. While the website may have started as “a liberal Drudge,” it has since become, in Shafer’s felicitous phrasing, an “SEO Speedwagon” — devoted to getting eyeballs any way it can, and specifically through search-engine baiting, aggressive aggregation that borders on theft, and slideshows of starlets that rival soft porn. This strategy has worked so well that, as Huffington herself notes, 85 percent of her site’s traffic now comes from nonpolitical content. (For once, she’s being sincere: No ideological cause drives a photomontage of “celebrity boob jobs.”) 

She used to, I well remember, be married to Michael Huffington.

Medals of Freedom

Conservatives, and a queen

Now, this is what I like to see: conservative infighting. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld can't even go out in their own backyard: Ron Paul supporters heckled them at CPAC Thursday. Rumsfeld was greeted by boos and then a walkout of many young attendees. Cheney was peppered with taunts of "Where's Bin Laden?" and "draft dodger." Cheney's supporters replied by yelling "shut up" and chanting "USA!" Rumsfeld was presented with the "Defenders of the Constitution Award."

Jordan tribes break taboo by targeting queen - Popular discontent in Jordan has taken a new turn with unprecedented public criticism of King Abdullah II's wife, Queen Rania, who stands accused of "corruption" by large tribes. "We call on the king to return to the treasury land and farms given to the Yassin family (of the queen). The land belongs to the Jordanian people," 36 tribal leaders said this week in a joint statement. By so doing, they have broken a taboo in the desert kingdom, where criticism of the royal family is punishable by a three-year imprisonment.

In an age when popular uprisings have toppled two Arab governments, to have such a law as criminalizing criticism of the king is absurd.

Tables are turned

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, faced harsh questions Wednesday about the central bank’s efforts to stimulate the economy, in his first hearing before the new Republican majority in the House.

Bashing the Fed has become de rigueur for right wingers.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, defended Mr. Bernanke and the Fed.

And, in a turnabout, Democrats are now the Fed's defenders.

Change we need

House Fails to Extend Patriot Act Spy Powers

The House failed to extend three key expiring provisions of the Patriot Act on Tuesday, elements granting the government broad and nearly unchecked surveillance power on its own public. The act was hastily adopted six weeks after the 2001 terror attacks. Three measures of the act are set to expire at month’s end, and the House’s lack of a two-thirds vote on Tuesday failed to move the sunsetting deadline to Dec. 8, as proposed. The vote was 277-148, or 23 votes short. The failure of the bill, sponsored by Rep. James F. Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wisconsin), for the time being is likely to give airtime to competing measures in the Senate that would place limited checks on the act’s broad surveillance powers. The White House, meanwhile, said it wanted the expiring measures extended through 2013.

Republicans on Egypt and debt

G.O.P. Hopefuls Leave Egypt Crisis to the President - A parade of prospective Republican presidential candidates has been visiting the Middle East in recent months, making pilgrimages that are the first steps in a methodical process of building credibility in foreign policy.

I have never understood how visiting Israel builds foreign policy credentials. It is a must for domestic constituencies, but how is taking an airplane useful experience for conducting international relations?

But as the crisis in Egypt has intensified this week, elevating foreign affairs above domestic political skirmishes, the potential Republican candidates and the party’s leaders in Congress have, with only a few exceptions, had little to say.


What could they possibly say?

To some degree, the silence from Republicans reflects a lack of substantive differences, especially on Egypt. House Speaker John A. Boehner set the tone on Sunday, saying, “Our administration so far has handled this tense situation pretty well.” And in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said Tuesday, “America ought to speak with one voice, and we have one president."

Suntan John has some difficulty tossing compliments the President's way.And it is good to see Mitch Mc has finally accepted the fact.


Party elders have largely agreed. On Wednesday, James A. Baker, the former secretary of state, said of the Obama administration, “They’ve been handling this Egyptian crisis quite well, frankly.”

Nice of him to say so.

While it is hardly rare for opposition candidates to have limited foreign policy experience — take, for example, Senator Barack Obama as he started his candidacy four years ago — the president’s Republican rivals so far do not even have a high-profile issue, as Mr. Obama did with Iraq, on which they can offer national security policies and values that contrast with those of the White House.

The escalating crisis in Egypt has attracted fresh attention to foreign policy at the very time that prospective Republican contenders are trying to establish their credentials as prospective commanders in chief. Gone are the days when the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire were the only obligatory stops on the campaign trail. Particularly for candidates who want to appeal to evangelical voters, Israel, Jordan and other points across the Middle East are now important stops as well.

A, an explanation.

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, completed his 15th visit to Israel this week. Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi is set to leave on Saturday for a trip to Israel that is scheduled to include a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, made a similar visit last month, and Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, has led a trade delegation to Israel.

Well, at least the Israeli tourism business is healthy.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, who seldom goes more than a few days without criticizing the administration, has been silent about the turmoil in Egypt. 

Maybe she just can't see the pyramids from her front porch.


Bernanke Takes Sides on Debt Limit Vote This one calls for some adult supervision, and Big Ben is just the one to provide it. The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, warned Congressional Republicans on Thursday not to “play around with” a coming vote to raise the government’s legal borrowing limit or use it as a bargaining chip for spending cuts. Though he called on Congress and Mr. Obama to confront “daunting fiscal challenges,” Mr. Bernanke said the debt ceiling should not be used as a negotiating tactic, warning that even the possibility of the United States not being able to pay its creditors could create panic in the debt markets.

Crowded Republican field bodes well for Obama

The burgeoning free-for-all for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination bodes well for President Obama’s reelection.It’s almost as if his chances improve in direct proportion to how many GOP politicians decide it may be their year to run for president.

The more of them, the better. Late 2011 and early 2012 will prove to be a butchering time, as candidates such as the first four names below, try to move further and further right, slashing at the others as not being pure enough (and I root for Michelle Bachman to join the fray), as some others try to dig in and find some sort of center (but who will have to at least tilt right).

There are the battle-tested candidates from the 2008 campaign – Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and maybe Rudy Giuliani – who are the “frontrunners” because they have experience and money. But in addition there are a baker’s dozen and counting of other potential candidates – from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to true nobodies like the former Louisiana congressman and governor, Buddy Roemer, who last held public office in 1992.

Newt? Rudy? They just can't believe people don't give a hoot about them any longer.

The fragmented Republican field reflects a party riven by a tug of war between ideological purists and political pragmatists. It is testimony to the growing conviction that a Republican nominee will not prevail against the incumbent.

I root for internecine warfareamong the Republicans; let the survivor and her or his 25% go up against the President riding the wave of economic recovery.

Palin could mobilize the Republican “base” to win the primaries and then go down in flames in a defeat that would make Barry Goldwater’s 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson look like a contest. But if Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, the self-appointed congressional spokeswoman for the Tea Party, enters the contest, she would make Palin look like a moderate.

I've love to see those two loons competing to be the purer ideologue.



Romney, who will be 65 in November 2012, spent his Mormon missionary years in France, has lived on the East Coast and is Atlantic-oriented. Huntsman, who will be 52 at the time of the election, spent his missionary years in Taiwan, is from a Western state and is Pacific-oriented. Where does the future lie?

Insurance, taxes, and snow

Tea Party Shadows Health Care Ruling: “It is difficult to imagine,” Judge Vinson, of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., wrote in a central passage of his 78-page opinion, “that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.” Supporters of the health care act — which Judge Vinson invalidated after ruling it was unconstitutional to require citizens to buy health insurance — saw in the language a deliberate nod to the Tea Party movement. Government can mandate that all drivers must have insurance in order to drive; how is that so very different?

The Return of the Cranky Mayor: After a short, uncharacteristic stretch of empathy and contrition from New York City’s chief executive following the Blizzard Brouhaha, the moody mayor re-emerged on Wednesday morning, ready to sass. The setting was the Blue Room at City Hall, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was asked why municipal employees were being penalized for not showing up to work during a snowstorm last week — even though the city instructed most of them to stay home. Sympathetic he was not. I hadn't noticed that the Mayor had stopped being cranky.

The Paradox of Corporate Taxes: Of the 500 big companies in the well-known Standard & Poor’s stock index, 115 paid a total corporate tax rate — both federal and otherwise — of less than 20 percent over the last five years, according to an analysis of company reports done for The New York Times by Capital IQ, a research firm. Thirty-nine of those companies paid a rate less than 10 percent.