Tag Archives: Rick Santorum

Censorship Con

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A profound reversal in attitudes has taken place in the last twenty years. While in the 1960′s the cries of “freedom” and “liberty” came from Progressives, today it is the right that sees liberty under attack. The campaign rhetoric of the four Republican candidates for President all put the defense of liberty at the top of their agenda. They see in Progressives attempts to regulate bad actors in the world’s of finance, health insurance, or environmental pollution a basic attack on the free market. As Rick Santorum said on Super Tuesday about Obamacare, ”Ladies and gentlemen, this is the beginning of the end of freedom in America. Once the government has control of your life, then they got you.”

I think we need to really consider whether liberty is the value that trumps all others in our society. Let’s take the case of the publisher of backpage.com. 

The biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com. This emporium for girls and women — some under age or forced into prostitution — is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equityfinanciers, including Goldman Sachs with a 16 percent stake…

There’s no doubt that many escort ads on Backpage are placed by consenting adults. But it’s equally clear that Backpage plays a major role in the trafficking of minors or women who are coerced. In one recent case in New York City, prosecutors say that a 15-year-old girl was drugged, tied up, raped and sold to johns through Backpage and other sites.Backpage has 70 percent of the market for prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a trade organization.

Now the State of Washington has passed a law creating criminal penalties for sites like backpage.com for advertising girls under the age of 18. And what is the response from backpage.com–”Censorship”.

“There’s going to have to be a challenge to it,” said Liz McDougall, general counsel for Village Voice Media Holdings. “Otherwise it would effectively shut down an enormous portion of the Internet that currently permits third-party content.”

Now where have I heard that before? The defenders of Kim Dotcom and the other pirates who have lived luxuriously off the stolen work of musicians and filmmakers around the world, say that any attempt to block these sites is censorship. This is utter nonsense. As I have pointed out before, the issue is not Google or Baidu’s precious freedom, but their precious revenues.

How did we get to this point that the Libertarian rhetoric dominates our political debate? The Village Voice’s liberty to service pimps of underage girls, trumps society’s right to protect those girls from exploitation? The selfish individual’s liberty to not buy health insurance and make the rest of us pay for his emergency room care trumps society’s right to create a working health insurance system? Megaupload’s liberty to host stolen movies trumps the artist’s right to get paid for his work?

As I have said before, we must come off the barricades and stop using this foolish rhetoric of censorship and liberty where it really does not apply. You have no right to free food. Why do you think you have a right to free music? It is time for all the parties involved to sit at the table and figure out some solutions that afford the creators of imaginative work to get paid for their considerable labors.

Long Goodbye

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Politics on a Presidential level fills me with joy. It’s like watching the NBA Finals. Even when the players have a bad night, the stakes involved in the series is so high, that a true fan of the game can take comfort in even the lamest  post game posturing. No matter how Mitt Romney tries to spin it, last night was a bad night. The evening began with the Romney mouthpiece Matt Drudge all but declaring Romney the winner for the night, based on the early exit polls. What of course Drudge forgot was that working people don’t vote at 10:30 AM. The only people voting early are what my mother used to call “the coupon clippers” and by that she didn’t mean supermarket coupons. In the Fifties corporate Bonds literally had a quarterly coupon that you would “clip” and cash in at your bank. So if you were rich enough to live off your investments all you had to do was to go down to your “Bank and Trust Company” once a quarter and clip your coupons. That’s the way Mitt Romney and his 1 percenters still live. And they vote in the morning, on their way to the country club.

Of course Mitt wound up in third place in both Alabama and Misssissippi, once the working class voted.  Mitt and his Super Pac outspent Santorum ten to one. The Romney campaign is sputtering.  Santorum on the other hand seems to have hit his stride. He’s kind of like Dan Ackroyd in the Blues Brothers–he’s on a mission–and neither money nor good sense is going to keep him from Tampa. Romney seems to have everything to lose and Santorum seems to have nothing to lose. Romney is so patently inauthentic and he just  hopes the establishment can push him through, before the grass roots has time to realize they’ve been played. But people see right through the “cheezy grits” phony and reject him. Of course Gingrich’s ego-manaical refusal to get out of the race make Santorum’s job a lot harder. For Gingrich this campaign has turned into a Reality Show, much like the Salafi’s, the couple that crashed the White House Dinner last year. Newt and Calista are determined to crash the party in Tampa this summer. How could they possibly stay in the media spotlight if he “quit the show”.

Which leads us inevitably to the fall election. Despite the handwringing over the Washington Post Poll this week, the President is in pretty good shape.For one thing, all the pundits saying that gas prices will pull down the Presidents ratings should be aware that gas makes up only 3.5% of the consumer budget.  As the Pew Poll pointed out, Obama beats Romney handily in the fall.

So if Romney wins, it could be a tight race, but Obama will win. But if somehow the Tea Party manages to capture the convention, denying Romney the win because he didn’t have it tied up before the convention, then we could have an historic November election. Assuming Rick Santorum is the candidate,  we might have a “choice election” (not an echo) that might look like 1964.  Santorum may be sincere, but I really doubt you want to re-litigate the culture wars in 2012 over birth control, homosexuality and school prayer. It could be the Republican wipeout that would change contemporary politics, for it would show that the wingers, the ditto heads only make up a small minority in America and we are sick and tired of them telling us how to live our lives.

Andrew Breitbart, RIP

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As readers of this blog know, I have somewhat of a following among the libertarian right.  I don’t really understand it except that there is a deep part of me that distrusts centralization, whether in academic bureaucracies, corporate headquarters or in government institutions. So I guess I was not surprised when a couple of people wrote me this week and asked me to say something about the death of Andrew Breitbart. I know my liberal friends are going to be angry with this post, but so be it.

I had met Andrew for the first time two months ago over dinner in a Santa Monica steakhouse. I had come at the invitation of a conservative friend who wanted me to see that Breitbart was not the demon that I had depicted him as, during the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. When I left the restaurant after a large meal and multiple bottles of red wine I had a couple of impressions that stayed with me. First was that Andrew was a somewhat charming provocateur, much in the spirit of Abby Hoffman. Like Hoffman, I was never sure Breitbart really believed half the shit that came out of his mouth, but his main purpose seemed to be a social irritant.

The second impression from the dinner was that Andrew was sick at heart about the prospects of beating Obama in 2012. He called the current Republican field “pygmies” and I actually believe he felt that Sarah Palin would have been a far better candidate. I laughed at that. He truly despised Obama, and in some weird way I think he felt that the election of 2008 had been the culmination of an era of political correctness, which he considered to be the main source of evil in the modern world. Just why Barack became the focus of his anger, I couldn’t fathom, but I came to see this loathing as something that was not connected to a rational process, but rather something more from his “reptilian brain”. This kind of anger is not kind to your heart.

So how ironic that the day of Andrew’s passing that Rush Limbaugh, a far less charming angry man of the right, chose once again to dive into the deep pool of misogyny that has defined his career since he first used the term “Feminazi”.  Limbaugh’s assertion about Susan Fluke being a “prostitute and a slut” are so unhinged that one can only believe he is back on the “hillbilly heroin” (OxyContin) again. So Limbaugh may be just a drug-addled “entertainer”, but what is Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich’s excuse for that same attitude— believing we have been on the road to damnation as a country since the pill was introduced and Rock and Roll eclipsed Frank Sinatra? In my book, Outlaw Blues, I quote Sinatra in 1956 saying that Rock was filled with “sly, lewd and dirty lyrics”, performed by “cretinous goons”. Of course Frank was pissed off at Elvis, but why is Rick Santorum still angry about the sexual revolution fifty years later?

In some weird way I hope that Rick Santorum does become the standard bearer for the Republican Party. I have said from the beginning of this campaign that I would really like a showdown between President Obama and a Tea Party Conservative. If Romney wins the nomination, he will weasel back to the center so fast it will make your head spin. The fact that Romney is unwilling to denounce Limbaugh proves what a spineless toad he is.

But not Rick. With him as the candidate it will be “a choice not an echo” and in my view will be a total repeat of Goldwater’s 1964 drubbing. The country will come to the realization that we are not a hard right society and that the Tea Party is a minority cult. And then maybe, with some real breathing room after an epic victory, the Democrats might reexamine some of the ideas of subsidiarity and decentralization that might realign some of the anti-war libertarians and the true liberals in a new progressivism.

Which brings me back to Breitbart. He wanted a choice election too, but not the choice of “pygmies” like Romney, Santorum or Gingrich. Although he liked Limbaugh, he despised Glenn Beck. Over the course of the dinner I kept saying that I was a classic Liberal. I believed in liberty and equality of opportunity. And he kept saying that he believed in those things too, but that “liberalism” had been demeaned by the Left. If we had had time, we might have come to some meeting ground. But it was not to be.

Deja Vu all over again

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I must admit that I am increasingly confident that Barak Obama will have a second term. The new poll from CBS/New York Times indicates as I have suggested before that Obama is in good shape.

Showing steady improvement since early December, Mr. Obama’s approval rating has reached the 50 percent mark in The Times/CBS News poll — an important baseline in presidential politics and his highest approval rating since May 2010 (excepting the brief bump he received after Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011).

It is clear that Axelrod and Co. have suckered the Republicans into a battle over birth control! How 1950′s. This may actually lead to Rick Santorum grabbing the nomination on platform that even Barry Goldwater would have thought too right wing.

So then my mind turns to the battles of a second term. I think they will revolve around defense, disruption and devolution.

On defense the battle lines are already being drawn, with progressives who want to make a once in a generation complete reordering of the Pentagon’s stranglehold on our discretionary spending, having already won giant cuts if Congress does nothing. On the other side are Panetta, and the Republicans railing against the coming cuts.

The overall spending was dictated by the budget agreement that Obama and congressional Republicans reached last August that calls for defense cuts of $487 billion over a decade. More troubling to Panetta and lawmakers is the likelihood that automatic, across-the-board cuts will kick in in January unless Congress can come up with at least $1.2 trillion in savings.

The additional $500 billion of cuts would still leave the U.S. Military far larger than any potential rival. Of course the new focus on the Pacific is designed to start another mindless arms race with the Chinese, just like the criminal waste of money from 1950-1989 on the Soviet Arms Race. This needs to be stopped. Continue reading →

Republican Reality TV

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As you know, I believe we are experiencing a national mental breakdown–a Crack-up. Last night’s night’s Iowa Caucus only reinforced the idea that our politics is getting separated from reality. Tom Friedman pointed out this morning the dialectic of the Republican race.

Two things have struck me about the Republican presidential candidate debates leading up to the Iowa caucuses. One is how entertaining they were. The other is how disconnected they were from the biggest trends shaping the job market of the 21st century.

But when truth and fiction become indistinguishable, certain insights can still be drawn. And these insights are not without their power to elucidate the greater facts of our current economic and spiritual crisis.

Take the coming battle of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Is it not the climax of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street? Is Mitt Romney not Gordon Gekko, lion of the leveraged buy-out, destroyer of jobs? And isn’t Rick Santorum the working class Martin Sheen character who will fight Gekko with every fiber of his soul. Continue reading →