Right-Wing Agenda

Salt Lake Tribune:

Buttars escaped a primary contest with the strongest of his rivals, Gary Armstrong, by a single vote at the Salt Lake County Republican Convention. One ballot was discarded because the delegate had apparently marked both names. The two-term incumbent now goes on to face Democrat John Rendell in the November general election.

Armstrong did not challenge the discarding of a spoiled ballot even though, had it been added to his total, it would have put him over the 40 percent mark to force a primary in June.

But he expressed bitter disappointment at the race's outcome.

"Our district can't survive four more years of Chris Buttars. I will support the Democrat," said Armstrong.

Republican delegates and party activists tend to be farther right on the political spectrum than Republican voters as a whole, so we can expect Buttars' support in the general to be even less than what he got at the convention.

Paul Waldman:

For months, I've been predicting that conservatives would delicately prompt voters to see Barack Obama through the lens of race. They'd drop hints, they'd make roundabout arguments, they'd find a hundred subtle ways to encourage people to vote their prejudices, while denying vociferously that they were doing anything of the sort.

It turns out I was wrong. Not about whether they'd try to exploit racial prejudice (that was about as easy to predict as the rising of the sun), but about how they would do it. After some hesitation and baby steps, the conservative campaign against Barack Obama has finally begun. And there's nothing subtle about it. [...]

The Republicans are certainly setting down their marker: they intend, as they have so many times before, to wage a campaign appealing to the ugliest prejudices, the most craven fears, the most vile hatreds. It's not that people should vote against Obama just because he's black, they're saying, but you know, he's that kind of black. As Rush Limbaugh said on Friday, "It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half, that he's decided he's got to go all in on the black side." Ladies and gentlemen, your "moral values" party. [...]

And therein lies the story as some conservatives are now telling it: The comments of Obama's former pastor prove that deep down, Obama is just a black candidate. He may say he wants to transcend racial divisions, he may say he understands the concerns of white people, but when his mask comes off he'll be revealed as just another [Al] Sharpton or Malcom X, those blacks you've come to hate and fear.

Holy dark ugly baby, Batman! (Deseret News):

[Dan Jones & Associates] found that among Buttars' Senate District 10 voters, 67 percent said they prefer that Buttars not be re-elected, and that someone new should be elected in that state Senate district. In fact, 53 percent said that Buttars "definitely" should not be sent back to the Legislature. [...]

Among Republican registered voters in Senate District 10, Jones found that only 32 percent of members of Buttars' own party want him to be re-elected, while 54 percent said another person should serve. Thirteen percent of GOP voters didn't have an opinion on Buttars' re-election, Jones found. Jones polled 208 registered voters in Senate District 10, with the results having a margin of error of plus or minus 6.9 percent.

That's a big margin of error (due to the small sample size), but even given the MOE, the maximum support Buttars would have among Republicans is 39%.

Statewide, the poll found that about 40% of voters wanted to keep their state legislators and about 40% wanted someone new. All 75 House seats and 15 of the 29 Senate seats are up for election this year.

Voice of Utah takes Mitt Romney to task for complaining about the need for "tort reform":

At the end of tonight's GOP debate, candidates were asked about energy independence. Mitt Romney got the last word. He started off reasonably, noting that we need to invest a lot more money in the cause. Then, apparently realizing that he had not yet emitted all the GOP buzz words, he swerved into tort reform. American corporations spend more in "defending tort suits than in research and development," he said disgustedly.

How many things are misleading about Mitt's statement? Let us count the ways:

• Far, far more commercial lawsuits – businesses suing each other or suing individuals – are filed than personal injury lawsuits. Consider Utah, for example. Last month, more than 300 lawsuits were filed in Salt Lake courts (state and federal). Of those, about 16 percent were personal injury. The rest were all contract/commercial. Does Mitt support a restriction on lawsuits by corporations? That would sure unclog our court system.

If you haven't been following the story of Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old who spoke in favor of expanding the SCHIP program (or even if you have), Paul Krugman in the New York Times provides a concise summary of the wingnuts' attacks on him:

Soon after [Graeme's] radio address, right-wing bloggers began insisting that the Frosts must be affluent because Graeme and his sister attend private schools (they're on scholarship), because they have a house in a neighborhood where some houses are now expensive (the Frosts bought their house for $55,000 in 1990 when the neighborhood was rundown and considered dangerous) and because Mr. Frost owns a business (it was dissolved in 1999). [...]

All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate. If service members oppose a Republican war, they're "phony soldiers"; if Michael J. Fox opposes Bush policy on stem cells, he's faking his Parkinson's symptoms; if an injured 12-year-old child makes the case for a government health insurance program, he's a fraud.

Conservative John Cole says:

The political reporting at the Deseret News is actually pretty good. I wonder how the D-News reporters feel about working for an "objective" "news" "editor" like Joe Cannon (Salt Lake Tribune):

Vice president Dick Cheney won't be the only headliner speaking to a secretive conservative policy conclave this weekend.

The editor of the Deseret Morning News, former Republican state chairman Joe Cannon, is also on the marquee at the influential Council for National Policy. [...]

Cannon says he will be explaining to the group how newspapers operate and describing the local media scene. "These people don't know a lot about how newspapers work." [...]

Though he will honor the council's demand of no news coverage, Cannon strenuously maintains he is going as a journalist. "I'm not in the politics business anymore." [...]

But the policy council's director Steve Baldwin sees Cannon's invitation differently. "He is a speaker and is part of the program," Baldwin said in an e-mail. "We are closed to the media."

Sure, Joe. Guys like James Dobson "don't know a lot about how newspapers work." Mmm-hmm.

Does anyone actually think Cannon wasn't there to tell the assembled powerful conservatives how the Deseret News could help them?

The case of the Jena 6 in Louisiana is putting a spotlight on Republicans and the issue of race. A roundup:

• No Way, Baby (digby at Campaign for America's Future)

• "Republicans don't talk to minority groups" (MissLaura at Daily Kos)
  
• The Ugly Side of the G.O.P. (Bob Herbert in the NYTimes)
  
• Making Carefully Nuanced Distinctions Regarding the Totally Unacceptable (The Phil Nugent Experience - a post from April but very relevant) [Note: Phil Nugent is not to be confused with raving wingnut moron Ted Nugent, who, like many Republicans his age, got out of serving in Vietnam]

When it was time for Reagan to move on into his twilight years, his vice-president, George Bush the Elder, overcame his essential emptiness and lack of any serious widespread support in part by means of a TV commercial that tied his opponent to a scary-looking black man. Of course, everyone understood that Bush had no racist impulses in him but had to do what he had to do to ensure the votes of Joe Caveman. [...]

Read the rest of this entry...

TIME:

When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls."

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the "consent of the governed" was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.

Bush at the press conference today:

I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials.

ThinkProgress points out that 31 of President Clinton's top aides testified before Congress on 47 different occasions.

In contrast, between 2000 and 2004, Bush allowed only one of his closest advisers, then–Assistant to the President for Homeland Security Tom Ridge, to appear in front of Congress. He has also refused three invitations from Congress for his aides to testify, a first since President Richard Nixon in 1972.