Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 29
January 9, 2011
In the US, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time | Michael Tomasky
The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords may lead to the temporary hibernation of rightwing rage, but it is encoded in conservative DNA
It was instructive to read elected Republicans' official statements in response to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting for what they did not say. The House Speaker, John Boehner, said: "An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society. Our prayers are with congresswoman Giffords, her staff, all who were injured and their families. This is a sad day for our country." Arizona Senator John McCain issued the following: "I am horrified by the violent attack on representative Gabrielle Giffords and many other innocent people by a wicked person who has no sense of justice or compassion. I pray for Gabby and the other victims, and for the repose of the souls of the dead and comfort for their families. Whoever did this, whatever their reason, they are a disgrace to Arizona, this country and the human race."
All well and good, and I have no doubt every word is sincere. But you'll note that they are silent on the question of the violent rhetoric that emanates from the rightwing of American society. You don't have to believe that alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is a card-carrying Tea Party member (he evidently is not) to see some kind of connection between that violent rhetoric and what happened in Arizona on Saturday.
Is he a nut? Of course he's a nut. By definition, anyone who shoots innocent people like that has a screw loose. But nuts come in many varieties. There are some who think Dick Cheney planned 9/11, others who believe the CIA has installed eavesdropping devices in their fillings, and still others who insist they're the reincarnation of Mary Queen of Scots. So what particular type of nut is Loughner? We don't have a full picture yet. But we have enough of one. His coherent ravings included the conviction that the constitution assured him that "you don't have to accept the federalist laws". He called a female classmate who had an abortion a "terrorist".
In sum, he had political ideas, which not everyone does. Many of them (not all, but most) were right wing. He went to considerable expense and trouble to shoot a high-profile Democrat, at point-blank range right through the brain. What else does one need to know? For anyone to attempt to insist that the violent rhetoric so regularly heard in this country had no likely effect on this young man is to enshroud oneself in dishonesty and denial.
I would like to report to you that my nation is in shock, and that we will work together to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. Alas, neither of these things is close to true. Of course an event like this is hard to believe in the moment; but in the context of our times, it's really not surprising at all. Last summer, a California man armed himself and set off for San Francisco with the express intent of killing liberals at a nonprofit foundation that had been pilloried by Glenn Beck and others. Only the lucky accident of his arrest en route for drunk driving prevented the mayhem then.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has documented more than two dozen killings by or arrests of rightwing extremists who intended to do serious political violence since 2008. One Tennessee man killed two worshippers at a liberal church, regretting only that he had not been able to ice the 100 liberals named by author Bernard Goldberg as those most responsible for destroying America. Giffords herself received threats after voting for the healthcare reform bill, and shots were fired through the window of her district office. An event like this has been coming for a long time.
As to the future, some things will change, at least for a while. Sarah Palin will be deeply diminished by this. Speaking about the now well-known cross-hairs imagery over the map of Giffords' congressional district on Palin's website, Giffords herself last year expressed concern about "consequences". Palin pooh-poohed this at the time. Her unctuous and hypocritical "prayer" for Giffords and the other victims will mollify only those who think she can do no wrong. But in general, this hastens that blessed day when we no longer have to pay attention to her self-serving lies and idiocies.
Republicans and even Tea Partiers will have the sense – again, for a while – to steer clear of directly gun-related rhetoric. We won't be hearing much in the near term about "second amendment remedies" and insurrection and so forth. But this will be temporary. Guns are simply too central to the mythology of the American right, as is the idea of liberty being wrested from tyrants only at gunpoint. For the American right to stop talking about armed insurrection would be like American liberals dropping the subjects of race and gender. It's too encoded in conservative DNA.
In addition, contemporary American conservatism has been utterly arrested by this ridiculous paranoid fantasy that our government is a tyranny. Here was Republican Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia, speaking in Washington last April on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing: "Fellow patriots, we have a lot of domestic enemies of the constitution, and they're right down the Mall, in the Congress of the United States – and right down Independence Avenue in the White House that belongs to us. It's not about my ability to hunt, which I love to do. It's not about the ability for me to protect my family and property against criminals, which we have the right to do. But it's all about us protecting ourselves from a tyrannical government." The year before, this same Broun singled out then-Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, as one such "domestic enemy of the constitution". He was re-elected last November with 67% of the vote.
This kind of rhetoric will go into hibernation now, but only for a bit. Because not only is it too central to rightwing mythology; it is central to Republican electoral strategy. This is one of those things that no one says, because it can't really and truly be proved forensically, but everyone knows. Get people to hate liberals. Get them to think not only that liberals have ideas for the country that are wrong – get them to believe that liberals despise the country and are actively attempting to hasten its demise. Say progressivism isn't just invalid or even dangerous, but "evil" and a "cancer," as Glenn Beck says. Fear gets people to the ballot box.
Direct responsibility for what happened Saturday? No. Mentally ill people are mentally ill. The Beatles weren't responsible for the messages that Charles Manson heard in their music. But there's a difference. Paul McCartney had no earthly reason to think that an innocent song about a fairground ride (Helter Skelter) would lead a man to commit barbarous acts of murder. Today's Republicans and conservative commentators, however, surely understand the fire they're playing with. But they do it, and a tragedy like Saturday's won't stop them, as long as they can maintain a phoney plausible deniability and as long as hate continues to pay dividends at the ballot box.
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While I'm here, quick Sunday sports blogging | Michael Tomasky
Since I'm sitting at the computer and logged in to the system, I might as well fire off a quick sports post while I'm here.
I'm sure some of you noticed the mighty Mountaineers' miraculous victory over Georgetown yesterday, right here in little old Washington. Your correspondent was in attendance. We looked great. I mean, I think G'town tied it up once down the stretch, but the Mounties really stood firm, forcing four straight turnovers down the stretch. I now see clearly why Casey Mitchell's indefinite suspension was brought to an end (28 points, that's why!).
How about those Jets? That was sweet. And I never in a million years thought the Seahawks had a chance in hell.
It is, arguably, the best American sports weekend of the whole year, wild-card weekend. The games are usually terrific and outcomes are often surprising. And it's all the more fun if snow is involved, which may be the case in Kansas City today, though probably not Philly.
Predictions:
Kansas City 20, Baltimore 14.
Green Bay 35, Philadelphia 31.
Mind you I'd rather see the Iggles win. My gut just tells me otherwise. What think youse folks?
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Some interesting shooting-related links | Michael Tomasky
I just wrote my big take on the shooting for tomorrow's newspaper. I assume it will be posted here this afternoon some time US time.
In the meantime, a few interesting links:
Rebecca Traister wrote a fine piece at Salon on Giffords.
Michele Goldberg had an interesting-as-usual take at the Tablet.
Ditto Adele Stan at Alternet (she closely chronicles the right, and frankly I don't know how she can stand doing it).
Max Blumenthal has a wonderful piece, also in Salon, about the slain judge, who seems a man of great distinction. Max once testified in his courtroom. The whole saga paints a fascinating portrait of Cochese County.
Isolated incident? Check out this chilling list assembled by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which they call their Insurrection Timeline. There've been many incidents, carried out and attempted but stopped, along these lines in the last three years.
And finally, wouldn't you know it, there's already a Facebook page called "Jared Lee Loughner American Hero" (you can Google it; you need to have a Facebook account to view the page). Justin Brooks writes on the wall: "The man who fired the first shot in the 2011 US Civil War. Mark today in history and let the revolution begin!" That's America.
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January 8, 2011
Gabrielle Giffords bs alert | Michael Tomasky
First of all, of course, all great wishes for Gabrielle Giffords. I have followed her career reasonably closely since she was elected in 2006, because she has been a pretty courageous Democrat from a district that's historically Republican.
But let's forget all that now. Let's now just do two things. One, pray/hope for her survival and recovery. Two, I would encourage all of you to keep an eye out for any signs of coverage that deplores the shooting but says something like, "Of course, there IS a lot of anger out there, so..." You won't hear that today. But keep an ear out for it Sunday, and Monday. As if there's a rationale for something like this. Just keep an ear out.
It might turn out that the shooter is just a nut. If so, so be it. But I implore you, just keep your ear to the ground. You can just hear it, can't you? "Of course, no one defends something like this, but..." Listen for that part after the but.
Finally, I see that Republicans are expressing the requisite horrified reaction. Good for them, today. But Giffords' office windows were broken during the 2009 healthcare summer of madness. And she cancelled an event just last week. Just keep an eye out.
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January 7, 2011
Bachmann in overdrive | Michael Tomasky
What do you think of the news that Michele Bachmann is sizing up a run for the presidency? Intriguing:
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) appeared today on ABC News's Top Line, where she did not say "no" about the possibility of running for president. But at the same time, based on her other statements in the interview, it seemed like this could be more about seeking a platform to speak on the issues she cares about.
Jonathan Karl asked Bachmann point blank whether she was thinking about running for president.
"I am going to Iowa," Bachmann responded with a smile. "There's your answer. I'm going to Iowa."
Bachmann then said the reason she is going to Iowa was, "What I'm seeing is the focus has been on the personality: Who will be the nominee in 2012?" Instead, she said, the discussion should be about the issues facing the country, and the honing of the overall conservative message -- and of course, about making sure that the party will nominate "a courageous constitutional conservative."
Inevitably, there will be comparison to you-know-who, simply because both are women. But that's only natural. If there were two Latinos or two Floridians or two ex-Marines or two anythings running for something, they'd be compared. So let's compare.
I think it's clear that Bachmann is smarter than Palin. I mean, hey, at least she was reading Gore Vidal novels when she was young. At a similar age Palin probably thought Gore Vidal was a brand of liver tonic or something (say it fast). Plus, being in Congress for six years, well, she has presumably learned a few things about policy in spite of herself.
And yet, she's obviously a far less serious candidate. I could see Palin getting the nomination under a, b and c circumstances. I can't picture Bachmann getting there under any circumstance short of truly bizarre. She'd be kind of a right-wing equivalent of Dennis Kucinich.
I suppose it's just because Bachmann is less of a star than Palin. By the way on the subject of Palin, read this review of her reality show from USA Today, by the Alaska writer Nick Jans, who evidently actually knows how to hunt and fish and so forth:
Faced with that hapless animal, this darling of Second Amendment supporters nervously asks her dad whether the small-caliber rifle kicks. Then, even more astoundingly, her father repeatedly works the bolt and loads for her as she misses shot after shot before scoring a kill on the seventh round — enough bullets for a decent hunter to take down at least five animals. (Given Palin's infamous tweet "Don't retreat, reload," we can infer she plans to keep her dad close by.) Later, Palin blames the scope, but any marksman would recognize the flinching, the unsteady aim and poor shot selection — and the glaring ethical fault of both shooter and gun owner if the rifle wasn't properly sighted. Instead of some frontier passion play, we're rendered a dark comedy of errors.
Does it kick? Even I know that's a question that somebody who really knew guns wouldn't ask.
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The new Huck Finn | Michael Tomasky
A perusal of the morning headlines elicits nothing extraordinary on the politics front, and I didn't have time for a quiz this morning (we'll get back to that next week), so we begin our day with news that next month will bring the publication of a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which the n-word, used some 200 times in the novel, is to be replaced with "slave." From Delia Lloyd at Politics Daily:
The decision to create a new version of the text was made by Alan Gribben of Auburn University, who is editing the book for Alabama-based publisher New South. Gribben, a Twain scholar who has taught the book for decades, says that he himself struggled with uttering the N-word aloud in the classroom. And he's not alone. Despite being considered one of the greatest American novels, "Huckleberry Finn" is the fourth most banned book in U.S. schools. Gribben is thus trying to combat what he calls the "pre-emptive censorship" that many educators have employed toward Twain's works because of their racially charged content.
But news of the new edition has not been greeted warmly either inside or outside of the academy. It's been excoriated as nothing less than censorship in many literary quarters. One Twain scholar, UCLA's Thomas Wortham, compared Gribben to Thomas Bowdler, the British editor of the 19th century who created a notorious "family" version of Shakespeare, which removed all sexual themes so as not to offend Victorian wives and children. "How can we expect children to learn real history if we sanitize it for them?" queries Wired's Matt Blum...
...As a devotee of Mark Twain, I'm sympathetic to these objections. Take the N-word out of "Huckleberry Finn" and is it still "Huckleberry Finn"? Probably not. It is, after all, a story narrated in Huck's voice.
As a parent, however, I'm less sympathetic to Gribben's critics. Over the holidays, when we were back in the U.S., my husband and I bought the latest Eminem CD, "Recovery," for our son. But we deliberately selected the edited version, which takes out all of the swear words. We weren't so much concerned with our son hearing the curses (trust me, he's heard them) as we were with some of the derogatory words the rap artist uses to talk about women. Why expose a 10-year-old to misogyny?
I suppose I'm with Blum, of course; what reading person wouldn't be? At the same time, I have noticed in recent years just how jarring it is to hear that word. Even as a joke.
Watched Blazing Saddles lately? I went to see it when it came out, when I was probably 15 I guess. I had certainly been taught that that word was hideous. But its usage seemed funny in the context, at least most of the time, because it was clear that Brooks had an ironic distance from it and was making fun of the ignorance of the characters in the film who used it. And besides, I was 15.
But lately when I've seen it...my memory is they've taken some of them out but left some in. It's not really funny anymore. It's just not a word you want to hear. I guess black people are entitled to use it. But we've passed the point in history where irony can give the word adequate cover.
I would still say that in college courses, people ought to be able to handle it. But I read it in eighth grade. I understood that Twain was using the word as it would have been used then by a white boy, and I understood that Huck's obvious love for Jim meant that it was just a neutral descriptor as far as Huck was concerned, little different from farmer or journalist. But how many of my eighth grade class mates got that?
Cultures change. We watch today movies from earlier eras when men casually smack women, and those men are hero protagonists. I noticed this recently in Octopussy. I don't know that it hit me, as it were, at the time of the film's release, because things were different then; but seen today, Roger Moore smacking a woman? Appalling. And anyway what were they thinking calling a movie Octopussy?
If I'd been on some committee that voted on whether to publish this new edition, I guess I'd have voted no. The preservation of great literature as its author intended is pretty important (and I should note that I think Huck Finn is still the greatest American novel). But so are a culture's changing values. That's not the same thing as censorship, or even political correctness, in which a minority browbeats the majority into submission on some often picayune semantic point. This may be semantic, but it's not picayune. Interesting dilemma.
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January 6, 2011
Bill Daley, healthcare and the left | Michael Tomasky
How big a deal is it that Obama's new chief of staff opposed healthcare reform?
The conventional wisdom on Obama's hiring of Bill Daley as chief of staff seems quite positive, as summed up in this Politico piece, which is replete with slavering quotes like this one:
"The heads of the Fortune 50 and the Fortune 10 will be able to call Bill with a great deal of comfort, but similarly [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin will be able to call Bill with a great deal of comfort," said Chicago lawyer and Democratic operative Wayne Whalen, a longtime Daley friend. "This effort to pigeonhole him, if that's going on, as a sop to business is lacking in understanding of what he would bring to the role."
Whalen also expressed confidence that Daley could help Obama deal with Republicans in Congress, including the new House leadership. "I think they would be comfortable dealing with Bill," Whalen said. "Unlike a lot of people, he doesn't bring a lot of ideological baggage to the position."
At the same time there are those who think he isn't carrying enough ideological baggage. The HuffPo banner reads:
JP Morgan Exec … Opposed Health Care Bill … Didn't Back Consumer Protection … AND OBAMA'S NEW CHIEF OF STAFF
It's troubling, certainly. But let's remember, Obama's last chief of staff didn't support healthcare either! OK, that's an overstatement, but I'm referring to the fact that we know very well that Rahm Emanuel kept trying to get Obama to scale HCR back dramatically.
Here's what Daley said about healthcare:
"[Democrats] miscalculated on health care," Daley once told The New York Times in an interview. "The election of '08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left -- not left."
Liberals are supposed to be appalled by this statement, and I guess many are. My regular readers will know that I'm one liberal who largely agrees with it. I warned starting in December 2008, if not November, that if people thought the election results meant the country had embraced liberalism, they were deluding themselves.
The part of Daley's statement that's wrong is the idea that the healthcare bill represented some hard left assault. Remember, it was modeled on Mitt Romney's plan, and the Republican alternative to Hillarycare back in the day. It is a hard left plan only if you concede that the Republicans get to define all terms of debate. Daley obviously concedes that on some level in his brain.
This is a longstanding liberal conundrum. Take these Wall Street types Daley was obviously hired to assuage. They, or many of them, actually seem to have persuaded themselves that Obama hates them and hates capitalism. It's like that idiot head of the Blackstone Group who last summer said that Obama's alleged war on Wall Street was like what Hitler did to Poland. It's preposterous.
So, what they think is absurd. And yet, they think it. And they're there, and, alas, they matter. So, what are you gonna do? If someone thinks you're a bad person because you have sex with dogs, you're probably going to try to persuade them that you do not, in fact, have sex with dogs, rather than letting them go on thinking that you do.
Liberals and Democrats face these questions every day. People on the right say so much crazy nonsense, you have to pick and choose: what is worth my time to fight, and what isn't? The problem with Democrats – like Daley – is that they don't fight hard or smart enough on these things, and so ideas get into the civic bloodstream, like HCR was leftwing or Obama has raised people's taxes or bailing out America's largest capitalist corporation is socialism.
This is frustrating and dispiriting to liberals, who, in turn, get more vociferous to make up for how namby-pamby most Democrats are. I don't really care what Daley's positions are. Obama's the president. He told Rahm to go take a hike on healthcare, and he'll do it to Daley if he disagrees, I'd reckon. What people ought to care about is that Daley not be overly invested in this idea that he's there to prove to everyone to Obama's right that he's Mr Reasonable.
He can be invested in it. Those relationships clearly need repair. But he can do that without dropping Rahm bombs on the people to Obama's left, which are usually done just to pander to the people on the right.
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Well, it turns out looks can deceive | Michael Tomasky
Looks like our Tomasky blog candidate for RNC chair hit some choppy waters yesterday, seduced into same by that siren of right-wing radio Laura Ingraham.
Ingraham was asking Ann Wagner about illegal immigration. Exchange one:
LI: Are you for birthright citizenship?
AW: Uh...for birthright citizenship...when they're born here? That's the 14th amendment, is it not?
Exchange two:
LI: Do you think that the 12-million-plus people who are here illegally should ever have the right to vote?
AW: No, I do not. Unless they become citizens...
Ann, Ann, Ann. Where do I start? The first exchange, right at the beginning of this audio clip, demonstrates that Wagner is soft on the anchor baby question. Indeed the subsequent exchange from which I do not quote suggests that she may not even be familiar with the present-day crusade to send those cursed anchor babies back to wherever it is they belong.
The second exchange, at 1:37, is even worse, because that "unless" business implies, as Ingraham correctly noted, that Wagner believes there should be a path to citizenship for illegals. This woman is clearly one of those squishy McCain Republicans.
A defender of hers over at Breitbart's site thinks everything she said was kosher, and/or that it isn't fair because party chairs don't set policy anyway.
He's right on point two, but I'm not so sure this doesn't hurt her. Come of to think of it, she did look a little suspiciously country-clubby, and that kind of Republican is a little out of fashion, unless they're multi-millionaires, who never go out of fashion.
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Main promise broken literally on day one | Michael Tomasky
The central plank of the GOP Pledge to America during last year's election was to cut discretionary spending by $100 million now, in this fiscal year. I'm sure some of you noticed that the New York Times reported two days that this rock-solid promise is now a sad little pile of dust:
As they prepare to take power on Wednesday, Republican leaders are scaling back that number by as much as half, aides say, because the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, will be nearly half over before spending cuts could become law.While House Republicans were never expected to succeed in enacting cuts of that scale, given opposition in the Senate from the Democratic majority and some Republicans, and from President Obama, a House vote would put potentially vulnerable Republican lawmakers on record supporting deep reductions of up to 30 percent in education, research, law enforcement, transportation and more.
Now aides say that the $100 billion figure was hypothetical, and that the objective is to get annual spending for programs other than those for the military, veterans and domestic security back to the levels of 2008, before Democrats approved stimulus spending to end the recession.
Budget expert and blogger Stan Collender explains the technical reasons why this figure was always ridiculous:
The technical side of this has always been quite simple: It's exceptionally difficult to cut spending when we're already four months into the fiscal year; the reductions have to be much larger to achieve the desired level of savings in the shorter period of time. In this case, House Republicans were looking at making the decision as the current continuing resolution expires in March, that is, with only six months left in the year. Reducing spending by $100 billion in six months meant coming up with cuts closer to $200 billion on an annual basis. Given the areas of spending the GOP said would be exempt from reductions, the cuts from what's left would have had to have been even larger and included massive layoffs. When they finally realized what they would be asking their members to vote for, the political reality of the situation apparently finally hit home for House Republicans.
I think Collender is being generous with that "finally realized" bit. They had to know this all along. They know when a fiscal year starts. They were just cynically assuming that tea-party voters didn't.
As Collender goes on to note, this was an unusually weak play by the party we associate with ball-busting strength:
The GOP got nothing in return. Even if it always knew the $100 billion spending cut pledge was going to be impossible to keep, it makes little sense for Republicans to unilaterally decide not to comply with it without getting something in return from congressional Democrats or the White House. The hardball strategy would have been to put a new spending level in place that assumed the full $100 billion in cuts and then agree to less in a few months in return for something when negotiating with Democrats over the extension of the continuing resolution. The fact that they didn't do this is more than a little curious.
Curious indeed. My answer? Governing is harder than throwing spitballs. This is Exhibit 1. I wonder what exhibit number we'll be up to by November 2012...
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January 5, 2011
Meet the House of Representatives of 2011: bland, far-right and corporate | Michael Tomasky
The new Republican era is under way with John Boehner as the next speaker
Well, here we go. After an interminable reading of the roll – yes, the names were called of all 435 members of the 112th House of Representatives – that was dull even by C-SPAN's standards, the clerk announced at exactly 1.38pm this afternoon that John Boehner had received enough votes to be the next speaker. The new Republican era was underway.
I remember very well the last time the Republicans took over the House of Representatives, under Newt Gingrich 15 years ago. Gingrich was as outrageous and demagogic then as he is now—in 1991 he participated in the ghastly gay-baiting of the then-speaker, a Democrat, based on absolutely no evidence of any sort. But there was, all the same, something … I can't quite type "likeable", but original about him. He thought, as they say, outside the box. I'll never forget that in his maiden speech as speaker, after he accept the gavel from the very man he'd so cruelly slimed, he invoked Franklin Roosevelt. You could hear liberal Democrats in the chamber gasp. That took chutzpah. Yes, Gingrich kept it interesting.
About this bunch, there is nothing interesting. Most of them are as bland and odourless as they are mercilessly and unashamedly in the employ of corporate America. The ones who aren't that are so far to the right that even corporations, at least some of them, are suspect, insofar as they can be woven into the fabric of dark conspiracies about how the government and the banks and Hollywood are out to capture "your" freedom and make "you" submit to coastal, elitist norms.
Who are these people? Here's a small sampling.
Speaker John Boehner, one hears repeatedly, grew up the poor son of a publican and one of 12 children in the very conservative suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. One hears less often that his net worth now is between $2m and $7m.
Majority Leader Eric Cantor has the distinction of being the only Jewish Republican in Congress. He's Boehner's bad cop, basically. Not long ago he mused that the Republicans might move aid to Israel out of the foreign aid category, because they want to rip into all foreign aid that isn't destined for Israel.
Darrell Issa is a name to remember. The Californian will chair the main government oversight committee, meaning that he will have the power to decide what investigations into alleged Obama administration misfeasance to launch. The job comes with an investigative staff and subpoena power. We'll be hearing a lot from him.
Floridian Ileana Ros-Lehtinen will chair the foreign relations committee. Reliably conservative like most Cuban-Americans of her generation, she used to seem really rightwing, but time and change have rendered her almost reasonable by comparison with her comrades, though she has little use for socialists or Palestinians.
Dave Camp will chair ways and means, the House's most important committee. He says that, like Barack Obama, he wants to reform the tax system. One doubts the two have the same kind of reforms in mind. The tax code, Camp likes to say, is "10 times the size of the Bible with none of the good news".
Wisconsin's Paul Ryan will chair the budget committee. He's the one Republican in the House of Representatives who has evinced genuine and far-reaching curiosity about policy. Needless to say, his future is up in the air.
Keep an eye on new senator Mike Lee of Utah. In endorsing his opponent in the state's GOP primary, the Salt Lake City newspaper wrote that both Lee and the opponent were "radical" but saw in the opponent "at least a modicum of openness to the spectrum of ideas, a glimmer of a pragmatism. We can't say that of Lee." He should fit right in.
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