A holiday guide to arguing with your right-wing relatives
Explaining voter fraud, Benghazi and the fiscal cliff to Fox-watching family members
By Alex Pareene Thursday, Nov 22, 2012 07:00 AM CST
“The Holidays” are now officially here, and all Americans will soon have to face their extended families and listen to them talk. For many young Americans — specifically young Americans related to old white Americans — Thanksgiving and our various Winter Holidays are extra stressful, because young Americans are largely a liberal, Obama-voting bunch, and old white Americans are mostly not. Unfortunately, old white Americans spend a lot of their time being lied to by conservatives on TV, the radio and the Internet, and while that is not their fault, it can be hard to talk about politics with people who believe an elaborate series of fictions and distortions.
If you actually want to engage your right-wing relatives — and let me be clear, you really should not do this, you are going to ruin Thanksgiving — it’s best to come prepared. Below, you’ll find a series of talking points designed to address some of the most popular current trending topics in the alternate conservative media world. (You’ll find last year’s guide here [ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/25/how_to_argue_with_right_wing_relatives/ ].)
Barack Obama stole the election. The proof is the 59 precincts in Philadelphia where Romney received no votes, which is impossible.
Do you know what these precincts in Philadelphia have in common? They are almost entirely black. They are also in … Philadelphia, where Mitt Romney did not bother to even pretend to campaign. You can count the number of registered Republicans in these areas on one hand. In 13 of these precincts no one voted for the Republican in 2012 or 2008. The thing is, Mitt Romney did not appeal to the urban black working class that much, and he did not try to. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, expended a lot of effort getting as many people in these neighborhoods registered and to the polls as possible. What’s shocking is that there weren’t more urban precincts where Romney received zero votes. The fact that Mitt Romney got 26,000 votes in the Bronx seems to me more likely to be a horrible mistake than Romney getting zero votes in much of Philly.
No, the proof is that black people voted in Maine.
Yeah, Maine has 15,000 black people, and they have to vote somewhere. But also, calm down for a second and think about this: How would that help Barack Obama win an election, exactly? Shipping illegal fraud voters into Maine is not actually a good way to steal a presidential election. It would’ve made much more sense to send them to Virginia.
ACORN.
No longer exists.
OK, but Obama only won because of the hurricane.
I guess it didn’t hurt him, politically, but Obama was winning before Sandy hit the Northeast and he continued winning afterward. Remember, every site that averaged battleground state polls [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map.html ] showed the president with an electoral advantage that sometimes narrowed but never went away. Romney was never actually leading. It was only according to the polls that eventually turned out to be the most inaccurate — Rasmussen and Gallup — that Romney was beating Obama. According to national polls [ http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2012-general-election-romney-vs-obama ] in general, Romney’s “momentum” had stalled before the superstorm.
Obama only won because of Chris Christie.
See above. Again, it didn’t hurt, but the president was already winning.
Obama only won because he gave gifts to poors/blacks/gays/Latinos.
Sure. This is also what politics is! When you are elected, you “give” your constituents the “gift” of supporting policies they support. With Republicans the “gifts” are massive tax cuts for rich people and new restrictions on women controlling their own bodies. More federal money for religious institutions and exciting new war airplanes and fewer regulations on companies that make a lot of money poisoning us, things like that. Nice “gifts” that certain Republican constituencies really like. (And let’s not forget that both parties promise old people that they will protect the greatest gift of all, love Medicare.)
The Obama “gifts” were all things that are also pretty good policy, like “healthcare for people” and “a brief promise not to deport you for no reason.”
The Obama administration did nothing to prevent Americans from being killed in Benghazi and then lied about the attack on our consulate as part of a massive cover-up.
None of the “Benghazi scandal” accusations actually have a coherent motive from the perspective of the Obama administration. Take the most out-there conspiracy: that the White House (or the Department of State) purposely didn’t scramble Marines who could’ve gotten there in time to rescue everyone. Even ignoring the fact that these Marines were hundreds of miles away and totally unfamiliar with the place currently under attack, the idea that armed support was specifically denied by the administration is completely nonsensical. Why would a president seeking reelection actively allow a deadly attack on an American diplomatic outpost to happen? What possible political purpose does that serve?
In the less insane but still incomprehensible McCain/Graham version of the Benghazi conspiracy, the administration supposedly specifically lied to the American people when Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice blamed the attack on a “flash mob,” when in fact it was al-Qaida.
We have, now, the actual briefing materials the CIA prepared for Rice [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57550337/cia-talking-points-for-susan-rice-called-benghazi-attack-spontaneously-inspired-by-protests/ ] before she went on the Sunday shows that fateful day. The transcripts of her remarks make it very clear that she was carefully repeating what our intelligence agencies had told her was their current best understanding of what had happened at the consulate. There was no intent to deceive. The CIA still thought there had been a demonstration outside the consulate. It later determined that there hadn’t been. Rice did not deny that al-Qaida or an affiliated group could’ve been behind the attack. The CIA suspected as much but didn’t want to reveal too much about its classified investigation [ http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/petraeus-benghazi-testimony-reveals-conspiracy.html ] by saying which groups it was looking at. (This is the CIA we’re talking about; it doesn’t want to tell anyone anything.)
But regardless of whether what Rice said was technically accurate according to her understanding at the time, she had no reason to purposely lie. It had already been widely reported that the attack seemed to have been pre-planned, and had been carried out by very well-armed people. It wouldn’t have been a “better” incident for the administration if there had been a protest before the horrible attack that killed a bunch of people that everyone already knew about. As Matt Steinglass puts it in the Economist [ http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/11/susan-rice ]:
Such a cover-up would have made no sense because the attack would not have been less politically damaging had it grown out of a spontaneous demonstration. The attack on the Benghazi compound would not have been any less politically difficult for the administration if it had grown out of a riot, nor would any normal voter have expected it to be less politically damaging, nor would any normal campaign strategist have expected any normal voter to have expected it to be less politically damaging. Had Susan Rice gone on the talk shows on September 15th and inaccurately stated that the attackers had been wearing green pants, when in fact their pants had been red, there would be no reason to suspect this to be part of a political “cover-up”, because no American voters could conceivably have cared either way.
A proper cover-up would’ve involved trying to cover up the attack, not weirdly lying about a tangential detail.
David Petraeus only resigned because of something something Benghazi cover-up.
If he resigned to avoid implicating the administration in Benghazigate, he screwed up, because he testified on Benghazi last Friday.
Oh no, the Fiscal Cliff will kill us all, because of socialism and Obama’s debt!
OK, deep breath. The teevee news has been lying to you about what the “fiscal cliff” is and what it means and why it is happening. It is a series of measures designed to cut the deficit very quickly. People are worried about it because cutting the deficit a lot too quickly is … bad for a weak economy, like ours. That’s right, fixing the deficit now is bad for the economy. Even Republicans agree with this, or else they … would not be worried about “the fiscal cliff.” So p.s. you’re a Keynesian.
They will most likely avert it by basically doing the exact same thing again and putting forth some sort of huge austerity plan set to kick in like a year from now, and then a year from now we will all have this argument again. What rich CEOs want is a “grand bargain” that “fixes” everything by cutting taxes and slashing Social Security and Medicare, which is something they have always wanted, but that plan has nothing at all to do with averting the fiscal cliff. The cliff is merely being used as a convenient (invented) crisis.
I heard Papa John’s and Applebee’s are going to fire people because of Obamacare.
The new law says companies with more than 50 employees have to offer healthcare. The vast majority of companies with over 50 employees already do. The ones that don’t, and that are now crying that they will fire people instead of providing healthcare, are run by stingy assholes. Papa John is a stingy asshole. You are siding with a stingy asshole over nice pizza-making regular people. Also, if you don’t like our employer-based healthcare system GO BACK TO CANADA or alternatively just lobby for a Canadian-style healthcare system here.
To add a little historical context to this, over the last four decades, only two presidents have reduced the deficit this much, this quickly: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Believe it or not, the federal deficit has fallen faster [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals/ ] over the past three years than it has in any such stretch since demobilization from World War II.
In fact, outside of that post-WWII era, the only time the deficit has fallen faster was when the economy relapsed in 1937, turning the Great Depression into a decade-long affair.
If U.S. history offers any guide, we are already testing the speed limits of a fiscal consolidation that doesn't risk backfiring. That's why the best way to address the fiscal cliff likely is to postpone it.
While long-term deficit reduction is important and deficits remain very large by historical standards, the reality is that the government already has its foot on the brakes.
In this sense, the "fiscal cliff" metaphor is especially poor. The government doesn't need to apply the brakes with more force to avoid disaster. Rather the "cliff" is an artificial one that has sprung up because the two parties are able to agree on so little.
Hopefully, they will agree, as they did at the end of 2010, to embrace their disagreement for a bit longer. That seems a reasonably likely outcome of negotiations because the most likely alternative to a punt is a compromise (expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the top and the payroll tax cut, along with modest spending cuts) that could still push the economy into recession [ http://news.investors.com/blogs-capital-hill/111612-633762-obama-fiscal-cliff-agreement-wont-save-economy.htm ].
Rather than applying additional fiscal restraint now, the government needs to make sure it sets the course for steady restraint once the economy emerges further from the deep employment hole that remains. In fact, a number of so-called deficit hawks are calling for short-term tax cuts to spur growth [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/an-economic-prescription-growth-before-austerity.html?_r=0 ], rather than immediate austerity.
That's just a bit faster than the 3.0 percentage point deficit improvement from 1995 to '98, but at that point, the economy had everything going for it.
Other occasions when the federal deficit contracted by much more than 1 percentage point a year have coincided with recession. Some examples include 1937, 1960 and 1969.
President Obama hasn't gotten much credit for reining in the deficit, probably because a big part of the deficit progress has come from the unwinding of extraordinary government supports that he helped put in place. Stimulus programs have come and mostly gone; the end of stimulus to states led them to enact Medicaid curbs; jobless benefits in recent months have fallen by 50% since early 2010 (due to both job gains and extended benefits being exhausted).
TARP and the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also make the deficit improvement look better, boosting the fiscal '09 deficit by about $200 billion more than in fiscal '12 (though the initial cost of TARP was overstated).
Still, military spending is now on the decline due to fewer troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; Medicare costs rose 3% last year vs. the average 7% growth in recent years; and after the last year's Budget Control Act, excluding the automatic cuts set to take effect in January, nondefense discretionary spending is already on a path to shrink to 2.7% of GDP, well below the 3.9% average, notes the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3840 ].
Girl Who Was Chained To Dresser With Dog Choke Collar Found Dead
November 22, 2012 11:06 AM
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Authorities on Wednesday were investigating the death of a 6-year-old girl whose father is in prison for chaining her to a dresser last year in northwest Arkansas.
Jersey Bridgeman’s body was found in a nearby vacant house about 10 minutes after she was reported missing Tuesday morning, Bentonville Police Chief Jon Simpson said.
Police in the city about 215 miles northwest of Little Rock are treating her death as a homicide, but they have not said how the girl died or released the names of any suspects. Simpson said autopsy results are pending.
It’s not clear who the girl was living with or who reported her missing.
More than 100 people gathered to mourn the child at a candlelight vigil Tuesday at the Children’s Advocacy Center of Benton County near Bentonville, the center’s executive director, Beverly Engle, said.
“There was a unique quality about Jersey,” she said. “A little old soul, but such a delight.”
Engle said Jersey was interviewed last year at the center when the abuse allegations were reported to police in nearby Rogers. According to a court document, the girl told officers she slept on the floor in the same room as her father, David Bridgeman, and her stepmother, Jana Bridgeman.
“She said that Jana and David chain her to the dresser because she had gotten up and eaten some pies, cereal, and bread,” Rogers Police Detective Larry Taylor wrote in the court affidavit.
He added that the girl “stated that they put a belt around her waist so that she could not get up and get any food.”
Both the father and stepmother pleaded guilty in June to false imprisonment, permitting abuse of a minor and endangering the welfare of a minor.
Jana Bridgeman, also identified as Jana Slinkard in court records, is serving a 12-year prison sentence, plus three years for a probation revocation, according to online Department of Correction records.
David Bridgeman is serving an 18-year prison sentence. Prison records show he has a tattoo that says “Jersey.”
He admitted to chaining his daughter to a dresser with a belt last year after a woman who was staying with the couple contacted police about possible child abuse, according to court records. That woman said she found the girl chained to a dresser with a silver chain and what appeared to be a dog collar.
David Bridgeman told an investigator that his daughter got into medication and other things around the house, so he and his wife decided to chain her to the dresser at night so she couldn’t wander off, according to court records.
“He said that he thinks she may be sleepwalking and that they discussed buying a child gate, but since he does not have a job, they could not afford to buy one at that time,” Taylor, the detective, wrote in the court affidavit.
The father said he cut a belt to make it fit around his daughter’s ankle and added a lock on the chain after she pulled it off, according to court records.
At some point, his daughter complained that the collar hurt her leg, so he chained her by the waist instead, court records indicate.
“It should be noted that the chain that David used was approximately one to two feet in length and appeared to be a dog choke collar,” Taylor wrote in the affidavit.
Jana Bridgeman’s attorney, Billy Bob Webb, declined to comment Wednesday. David Bridgeman’s attorney, Sarah Ashley, didn’t return a phone message seeking comment.
The FBI has dispatched agents to assist in the homicide investigation, spokeswoman Kimberly Brunell said.
Fundraising After Girl’s Death Leads To Family Infighting
Posted on: 6:22 pm, November 22, 2012, by Shain Bergan, updated on: 06:25pm, November 22, 2012
Several funds claiming to be raising money for Jersey Bridgeman have sprung up, leading to infighting within Jersey’s family.
The six-year-old Bentonville girl was found dead Tuesday morning in an abandoned house two doors down from her home. The Bentonville Police Department opened a murder investigation, but has not released the names of any suspects or persons of interest.
One fundraising effort on the Give Forward website [ http://www.giveforward.com/jerseybridgemanmurdured (now 'oops, that page doesn't exist')] states it was created by Jason Bridgeman, an uncle on Jersey’s father’s side of the family.
“I’m starting this to help my brother pay for the funeral, and a headstone,” the site states.
The site does not specify what “brother” is being referenced. Jersey’s father, David Bridgeman, is serving prison time for chaining the girl to a dresser last year.
The site has raised $120 of its stated $5,000 goal.
The Give Forward page for Jersey “is fraudulent,” said Jennifer Rollins, Jersey’s aunt. Family members said they do not believe the money would go toward Jersey’s burial. Rollins said David Bridgeman has lost his parental rights, distancing his side of the family from Jersey.
Rollins said the family set up a legitimate fundraising page [ http://www.gofundme.com/Jerseydianne ] Thursday morning on GoFundMe, titled “Jersey Dianne”. The stated goal is $8,000.
Tiffany Bridgeman, another one of Jersey’s aunts, fired back that Jason Bridgeman’s Give Forward page is legitimate.
“He has every intention of giving every single penny of whatever we raise to Jersey’s family,” Tiffany Bridgeman told 5NEWS in an email. “This is not the time for our families to argue and fight. We need to come together and mourn the loss of this beautiful baby girl who was taken away from everyone.”
A commenter on a 5NEWSonline story claimed yet another fundraising effort has popped up for Jersey’s family. The commenter said the Jersey Dianne Bridgeman Memorial Fund has been set up with Arvest Bank. Calls and messages to the bank franchise went unreturned Thursday because of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Father of man suspected of breaking into Zoo Boise: 'He's not a malicious monkey murderer' Michael J. Watkins' booking photo at the Ada County Jail. November 20, 2012 The father of a man accused of killing a monkey during a break in at Zoo Boise said Tuesday he believes the tragedy was a drunken prank that got out of hand. "He's a good kid," Jerry Watkins, 52, said of 22-year-old Michael Jacob Watkins. "He's not a malicious monkey murderer." [...] http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/11/20/2354319/father-of-man-suspected-of-breaking.html [with comments]
Earlier this week, GQ magazine published an interview with Senator Marco Rubio, [ http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201212/marco-rubio-interview-gq-december-2012 ] whom many consider a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, in which Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”
It’s funny stuff, and conservatives would like us to forget about it as soon as possible. Hey, they say, he was just pandering to likely voters in the 2016 Republican primaries — a claim that for some reason is supposed to comfort us.
But we shouldn’t let go that easily. Reading Mr. Rubio’s interview is like driving through a deeply eroded canyon; all at once, you can clearly see what lies below the superficial landscape. Like striated rock beds that speak of deep time, his inability to acknowledge scientific evidence speaks of the anti-rational mind-set that has taken over his political party.
By the way, that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics [ http://gofbw.com/News.asp?ID=8473 ] — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.” Gee, thanks.
What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence.
The most obvious example other than evolution is man-made climate change. As the evidence for a warming planet becomes ever stronger — and ever scarier — the G.O.P. has buried deeper into denial, into assertions that the whole thing is a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists. And this denial has been accompanied by frantic efforts to silence and punish anyone reporting the inconvenient facts.
But the same phenomenon is visible in many other fields. The most recent demonstration came in the matter of election polls. Coming into the recent election, state-level polling clearly pointed to an Obama victory — yet more or less the whole Republican Party refused to acknowledge this reality. Instead, pundits and politicians alike fiercely denied the numbers and personally attacked anyone pointing out the obvious; the demonizing of The Times’s Nate Silver, in particular, was remarkable to behold.
What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research [ http://grist.org/politics/a-chat-with-chris-mooney-about-the-republican-brain/ ] linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs. Today’s Republicans cocoon themselves in an alternate reality defined by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and only on rare occasions — like on election night — encounter any hint that what they believe might not be true.
And, no, it’s not symmetric. Liberals, being human, often give in to wishful thinking — but not in the same systematic, all-encompassing way.
Coming back to the age of the earth: Does it matter? No, says Mr. Rubio, pronouncing it “a dispute amongst theologians” — what about the geologists? — that has “has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States.” But he couldn’t be more wrong.
We are, after all, living in an era when science plays a crucial economic role. How are we going to search effectively for natural resources if schools trying to teach modern geology must give equal time to claims that the world is only 6.000 years old? How are we going to stay competitive in biotechnology if biology classes avoid any material that might offend creationists?
So don’t shrug off Mr. Rubio’s awkward moment. His inability to deal with geological evidence was symptomatic of a much broader problem — one that may, in the end, set America on a path of inexorable decline.
which had this guy wondering if the final count was in yet .. the easy answer you ALL know is NO ..
Pennsylvania Could Be a Path Forward for G.O.P.
By NATE SILVER - November 23, 2012, 4:57 pm
The last ballots in the presidential election were cast more than two weeks ago. But votes in 37 states, and the District of Columbia, are still being counted, with the results yet to be officially certified.
President Obama’s national margin over Mitt Romney has increased as additional ballots have been added to the tally. According to the terrific spreadsheet .. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AjYj9mXElO_QdHpla01oWE1jOFZRbnhJZkZpVFNKeVE&toomany=true#gid=19 .. maintained by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, Mr. Obama now leads Mr. Romney by 3.3 percentage points nationally, up from 2.5 percentage points in the count just after the election.
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