Skinemax from Smash TV on Vimeo.

So, I guess the economy not on stimulus is just a fish lying in the dirt with no water at all? Can we make a video where we get a fishbowl and drop the fish in it and say “This is the economy on a bigger stimulus suited to the actual size and magnitude of the crisis?”

The thing is, we haven’t really seen any stimulus in quite a long time now. So if you’re still sick of stimulus, you might want to find something more, uhm, stimulating to fixate on. Like Rick Santorum’s odd obsession with gay people.

It reminds me of LBJ’s ‘Daisy’ ad a bit:

Maybe Cain’s next ad can have a nuclear bomb eviscerate the goldfish. This is your economy on Herman Cain, bitches! 

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Is Ron Paul going soft on Romney because of the money?

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and the likeliest explanation is usually the most straightforward and least complex. So when rumors started surfacing last month that Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson was supporting Newt Gingrich in order to hurt Rick Santorum and help Mitt Romney it all sounded like too much 3-dimensional chess to me. Wouldn’t it just make more sense to back Romney? Why risk hurting Romney with negative ads – something that really did happen thanks to Gingrich’s rough-and-tumble South Carolina campaign – when you could use your money to prop up Romney’s campaign?

It doesn’t make sense.

But it’s just one billionaire with an agenda. That doesn’t make him a brilliant political strategist. It’s a fairly basic strategy all told – just point and shoot your money camera and hope something sticks.

The latest conspiracy theory is far more complex. Writing in The Exile, Mark Ames suggests that too many people in one of Ron Paul’s Super PACs have ties to the Huntsman and Romney campaigns for it to be a coincidence. I wrote recently about what I described as Ron Paul’s divide and conquer strategy. The Texas congressman has never attacked Mitt Romney in any of the GOP debates this election season, but he’s gone after just about every other candidate. Ames thinks something more sinister is at play:

Ron Paul’s SuperPAC, “Endorse Liberty,” is headquartered in Mitt Romney’s backyard: Salt Lake City, Utah.

Moreover, the SuperPAC’s staff and founders include several former Romney supporters and Huntsman supporters. And one of the founding principals of Endorse Liberty, Ladd Christensen, is something of an oligarch in Utah: Christensen is the longtime business partner of John Huntsman’s billionaire dad. They founded Huntsman Chemicals together, as well as Hunstman-Christensen.

Huntsman endorsed Mitt Romney when he bowed out of the race—in fact, Huntsman has a history of stepping aside for Mitt Romney and playing his second banana, going back at least to the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, which John’s billionaire dad helped to fund on behalf of Mitt Romney.

So to repeat: Ron Paul’s SuperPAC is based in Salt Lake City, and one of the founders is Ladd Christensen, John Huntsman’s business partner in Huntsman-Christensen and Huntsman Chemicals.

A couple of quick points. First it’s Jon Huntsman. No “H” in there. Not to nit-pick, but c’mon.

Second, Utah is not Mitt Romney’s backyard. He’s an East Coast Mormon. But I understand where Mark is going here. The Mormon connection may indeed be enough to bind Huntsman and Romney together. I’m less certain it’s enough to get Paul on board. Some independent, libertarian-leaning people with deep pockets backed Huntsman, but now that he’s gone is Paul the next best choice? Or are we really dealing with a Mormon conspiracy theory that has somehow netted the Paul campaign to play softball with Romney?

Ames pulls this quote from Morning Joe:

“The thing that went unspoken but everybody knows, and that is that Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have formed an alliance,” Scarborough said. “It is such an obvious alliance that Mitt Romney would do well to just come out and admit it. I don’t know what he’s promised Ron Paul. I don’t know if Ron Paul is hoping that his son gets in the administration. But let’s just be really honest here — for all the people for Ron Paul to form an alliance with in the Republican Party, to pick out Mitt Romney is really bizarre.”

Maybe so, but again we need to look at the likeliest explanation, and Ames’s theory hardly seems like it. Ames has a lengthy critique of Peter Thiel and uses that as some sort of evidence. Now we have a cynical ploy by Thiel, a conglomerate of Very Rich Mormons, and the Paul campaign to try to support Romney and hurt his rivals.

But again, wouldn’t it make more sense for these rich and powerful men to just put their money into Romney’s Super PAC? That war chest is much larger than Paul’s, but plenty of people are starting to say that Romney’s campaign is hurting for cash.

I guess it’s possible that Paul wants a spot on Romney’s ticket, or wants a more prominent role in the Republican Party in order to position his son Rand for a run, but it’s also possible that Paul is just waiting for his turn to take on Romney after the front-runner is wounded badly enough. Honestly, Mark’s theory makes for great political speculation but it’s not compelling precisely because you have to jump through too many hoops to make it work. Or rather, too many people involved have to jump through too many hoops to make it work.

Besides, how people behave in debates or on their ads says very little about their past or future support for a rival. Huntsman had some very harsh anti-Romney ads (and words) during his brief run and later endorsed the former Massachusetts governor.

And it’s not as though he’s always used kids gloves with Romney, either, despite what people are saying:

Another forceful response on foreign policy here.

Is it possible that Paul can sufficiently undermine Romney simply by disagreeing so fundamentally with Romney’s ideas and painting that contrast so effectively?

It seems more likely than long-shot conspiracy theories. But that’s just me. I never was a fan of conspiracy theories.

Update – here’s a Ron Paul ad that ran first in South Carolina and is recirculating now:

(hat-tip Mistermix)

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I was never a fan of Andrew Breitbart’s style or his politics, but it’s still tragic when someone dies so young, at what may have been the height of his career. If there’s a place after this one, I hope he finds peace there. The founder of Big Government and a host of other conservative blogs was 43.

Somebody needs to make Santorum look good.

Art Jones wants to go to Washington D.C. but even as crazy as the Republican party has gotten, there’s no way it’s going to happen:

“As far as I’m concerned, the Holocaust is nothing more than an international extortion racket by the Jews,” Jones said. “It’s the blackest lie in history. Millions of dollars are being made by Jews telling this tale of woe and misfortune in books, movies, plays and TV.

“The more survivors, the more lies that are told.”

A member of the Nationalist Socialist Party in his younger days, Jones took part in the Nazis’ march on Chicago’s Marquette Park in 1978. While he doesn’t deny nor repudiate his “past affiliations,” he says he votes Republican “90 percent of the time.”

“Philosophically, I’m a National Socialist,” Jones said. “Officially, I don’t belong to any party except my own, the America First Committee.”

There’s really no lessons to draw from this, other than that free speech is an undeniable good. In other countries, hate speech and Holocaust denial are kept secret. They’re illegal, and so the perpetrators of these hateful ideas go underground. That’s dangerous for all sorts of reasons. In America, this stuff is kept in the light of day where it can be properly ridiculed. Rather than hide in the shadows, hatemongers are kept front and center in our public dialogue.

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Better late than never (applies to me and Mitt in this case)

So in light of Romney winning in Arizona and Michigan, I just remembered that I’d never published this piece. I wish I had, since I was right. Oh well. If wishes were bagels. I’m a terrible blogger, I guess. Who just doesn’t post something???

Anyways, here it is:

According to the latest CBS News poll, Rick Santorum has a slight lead over Mitt Romney nationally. Poll results place Santorum atop the pile with 30 percent of GOP primary voters backing the former Pennsylvania senator. Clocking in at 27 percent, Romney runs a close second.

Jamelle Bouie is flabbergasted:

As recently as last month, I couldn’t have predicted that Rick Santorum would be leading national polls for the Republican presidential nomination. That’s not to say that I didn’t think about it, but it seemed unfathomable. Not only does Santorum have the dubious distinction of having lost a re-election race by 17 points, but he’s been synonymous with extreme social conservatism for at least a decade.

[...]

In a different primary, with a stronger frontrunner, an off-brand candidate like Rick Santorum would have remained on the outskirts of the race—a gadfly, of sorts. But because of Romney’s profound weakness as a politician, the former Pennsylvania senator has a slim shot at the nomination. Indeed, he currently leads in the crucial Michigan primary on February 28, which is a make or break state for Romney, whose father governed the state. What’s more, Super Tuesday is less than a month away, and it is something of a national primary, with ten states voting on the same day. If Santorum continues to gain steam, he could do very well.

Romney is certainly a weak candidate. The Republican base is angry and Romney has a hard time speaking the language of anger and resentment. I’m not sure he’s a bad politician so much as he’s just not the man for the times – a shoe-in but for the conservative mood.

Whatever the case, he is a weak player this primary season. He may be the presumed front-runner, but his position at the top remains tenuous at best.

The lack of conservative faith in Romney is why we’ve seen the rise of  Not-Romney in its various incarnations. Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry – these are all just different names for the same candidate, different manifestations of Not-Romney giving essentially the same pitch.

This is also why we’ve seen such wild ups and downs in the polls, as each candidate tries desperately to claim the mantle of “true conservative.”

But the GOP base has had trouble lopping off the Not-Romney’s heads in time to instigate the necessary coup against Romney and the Republican establishment. Without a single candidate to rally behind, the anti-Romney camp remains in disarray.

Santorum and Gingrich have very little national organization, and without it they have a desperately hard time at transforming a surge in the polls into real momentum. Among all the candidates, only Ron Paul and Mitt Romney have any sort of national network and the funding to take advantage of it. Worse still, Santorum and Gingrich have both failed to list their names listed on every state primary ballot, a glaring shortcoming by any standard.

What’s keeping guys like Santorum in fighting condition more than anything is Super PAC money.

Dave Wiegel explains:

The healthcare law is a mixed bag. It doesn’t go as far as many wanted it to go – something like single payer, preferably. It changes rather than expands the role of government in providing access to healthcare. It’s inefficient in some ways; in other ways it improves upon the status quo. One thing that sort of irks me about it is how politics forces us to make do with something as ad hoc as all of this. We have Medicaid – administered by the states – and Medicare – administered by the federal government – and now the ACA – administered by the states – and rather than just save tons of money and increase efficiencies enormously by combining all these programs into one federal healthcare program, we have to leave this expensive patchwork in place and then just build upon it (and the patchwork is much worse once you think about how the private insurance system is designed, and the entrenched inefficiencies baked into healthcare writ large including hideously opaque prices…)

In any case, take away the parts that people dislike about the bill and of course people suddenly love it. Talk about it being struck down, and most Americans still imagine that their favorite parts will remain.

If you took away all the fearmongering surrounding the bill, they’d probably be fine with it also. But a steady diet of death panels and threats about tax-hikes has everyone much more frightened than they would otherwise be about a bill that basically just opens up non-employer-based insurance exchanges so that people have just a tiny bit more access to reliable healthcare than they did before. It’s neither a panacea or a government take over. It’s just sort of a step in the right direction and a step in the wrong direction all at the same time, and better – certainly – than doing nothing.

The ACA hurts Obama in swing states, even if people like the bill in pieces; but as James Joyner notes, if Romney gets the GOP nod it may be a moot point anyways.

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I don’t have a definite answer on this, of course, but it seems to me that Paul is attempting to subvert the playing field – divide and conquer by contrasting himself with the Not-Romney candidates rather than with Romney. Perhaps he assumes that people just know he’s 180 degrees the opposite of Romney and he wants voters to understand that in fact the others, like Santorum and Gingrich, are closer to Romney than they are to Paul when it comes to policy positions. At the same time he can force them to defend themselves against Romney and Paul, and not draw the ire of the Romney campaign. This leaves him on the offensive more and on the defensive less which costs less money and frees Paul up to keep getting his message out without having to deflect the big money that comes with any Romney attack.

In other words, Paul is killing at least two birds with one stone by pitting himself against nobody of consequence and distinguishing himself as the Not-Not-Not-Romney (or something) without risking any big Romney campaign backlash – yet.

It’s another example of Paul’s political acumen, and the cleverness of the people he’s surrounded himself with. A Paul victory may still be a long shot, but you have to admire the political maneuvering here. Of course, it may not be enough. If Paul helps knock out Santorum or Gingrich, it might make the remaining Not-Romney stronger, hurting Paul. We’ll see. I doubt very  much that we’re looking at Paul position himself for a VP slot on the Romney ticket – as hilarious as that would be.

Also, does anybody else wish we’d gotten a chance to see Ron Paul debate Sarah Palin?

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Charles Koch was fascinated by Murray Rothbard's libertarianism

The billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are often painted by the left as anti-worker elites working in the shadows to undermine labor unions, the middle class, and the New Deal. This is only partly true. They are also major philanthropists whose political ideology hardly reflects on their good works, whether or not it’s your cup of tea.

Besides, that political philosophy contains many good things outside of workers’ rights issues. The brothers have bankrolled anti-war and anti-war-on-drugs writing and research. Publications like reason are a mixed bag for sure, but reason-style libertarians tend to be socially liberal and represent, at least in the mainstream, a more liberal-ish version of libertarianism than is found elsewhere. And some of the work at that magazine – namely the investigative work of Radley Balko – has been extremely important. It’s even saved lives.

In 2008, as the Ron Paul revolution was gaining serious momentum, reason writers Julian Sanchez and Dave Wiegel dug into the Ron Paul newsletters in an attempt to discover who had penned the various racist and bigoted screeds back in the early nineties.

This was interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the willingness of the libertarian magazine to go after the one candidate in the entire race with any libertarian credentials to speak of was, in some ways, remarkable.

At the same time, the article and the ensuing debate over Ron Paul’s credibility underscored a divide between libertarians that extends back to the days when the Ron Paul newsletter first started publishing paranoid race-baiting and conspiracy theories.

Back then, the libertarian movement was nowhere near as vibrant as it is today. Some of the leading thinkers in the movement were the same men that reason later hypothesized were behind the newsletters: Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. At the time, Rockwell and Rothbard were championing what they termed “paleo-libertarianism” – an attempt to spread libertarian ideas by promoting a socially conservative, and at times downright nativist, narrative about government and society.

This contrasted sharply with the liberal wing of the libertarian movement, perhaps best embodied at the time by none other than Charles Koch, who found Rothbard’s redneck-libertarianism repellant, or at least unhelpful – a cynical ploy to promote libertarianism through fear rather than through the more pragmatic approach adopted by Cato.

The relationship between the Koch brothers and Murray Rothbard goes all the way back to the dawn of the Cato Institute, when Charles Koch founded the libertarian think tank in order to promote Rothbard’s views. The relationship ended badly, however, with Rothbard disgusted by what he saw as a compromise of pure libertarianism. The Kochs, it turned out, were just too liberal for Rothbard.

Writing at LewRockwell.com in 2008, David Gordon goes into some detail on those early days of Koch-Rothbard unity, noting that, “owing to Paul’s long association with Rothbard and Rockwell, his campaign had little appeal to Cato. High officials of Cato cooperated with James Kirchick’s malicious smears against him in The New Republic.”

Paul, like Rothbard, was once employed by the Kochs, but according to Gordon had been too principled to remain in their employ.

“It should come as no surprise that Matt Welch,” Gordon continues, “the new editor of Reason, has published a viciously negative piece against Rockwell and Paul. Koch is a large funder of the magazine, and, as Murray Rothbard learned to his cost, he expects those he funds to obey his dictates.”

In many ways, this contrast with the paleo-libertarian scene ought to make liberals more fond of the Koch brothers. After all, they would have none of the bad craziness that found its way into the Ron Paul newsletters; they refused to sign on to the paleo-libertarian sinking ship; they pushed Cato in a much better direction than Rothbard and Rockwell pushed Paul and other conservative libertarians.

And yet the Koch brothers are among the biggest financial of Republican causes today. They rub shoulders with guys like Santorum’s Super PAC sugar-daddy Foster Friess, whose take on liberty includes bad jokes about contraception. The Koch’s may care about individual liberty and other libertarian values, but they still help bankroll deeply socially conservative causes and would trade many liberties so long as economic liberty was preserved. Although Cato itself has remained staunchly anti-war, Koch money has found its way into plenty of pro-war pockets.

The problem with the Koch brothers isn’t that they’re too libertarian, or that they didn’t go for libertarian purity like Rothbard wanted them to, it’s that they exemplify the sort of destructive Republican fusionism that’s made libertarianism a movement of the right – even when it’s the more liberal wing of libertarianism so derided by Paul supporters.

I suppose I still hold out hope that a liberal-tarian movement will emerge somehow, but all the big money is behind a distinctly Republican libertarianism, at least when it comes to the Koch brothers. And the paleo-libertarianism of Ron Paul and others represents a social conservatism that makes me uncomfortable and that, I think, misunderstands liberty in serious ways (on states issues, immigration, etc.)

Ron Paul has said many refreshing things in the GOP debates. His take on the Iranian bomb threat, the war on drugs, and so forth has been music to my ears. Alas, his involvement with the newsletters is too big of an issue for me to ignore. The Koch’s may not have the same skeletons in their closet, but their perpetuation of rightwing fusionism has all but ensured that libertarianism, even in its more liberal manifestations, remain a creature of the right.

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