Justin Green

Political Theory and Punditry from a native of Flyover Country

FAA to employees: if Romney wins, you will probably lose your jobs

This is despicable. According to new reports, two senior FAA officials recently told a group of FAA employees in Seattle that if Republicans are elected, they will cut the FAA budget so severely that many will lose their jobs.

From the AP:

A government transparency group is urging an investigation into Federal Aviation Administration managers who allegedly urged workers in Seattle to vote Democrat in the upcoming elections.

The Washington, D.C.-based group Cause of Action sent a letter Wednesday to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s inspector general saying that in May at a mandatory staff meeting in Seattle, two senior FAA managers told employees that if Republicans win the presidential and congressional elections, the agency would face budget cuts. They allegedly said that if Democrats win, their budget would remain largely unchanged.

One of the managers is alleged to have said that “Republican politicians wished to cut the budget of the FAA, while Democratic politicians intended to keep the FAA budget at the same or similar levels as in recent years. Any cuts in the FAA budget would lead to furloughs, job losses, and pay reductions among FAA employees,” the Cause of Action complaint said.

Read the Rest

This type of partisanship is in clear violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits employees in the executive branch (with a few exceptions) from engaging in partisan political activity.

Read it on Fox News

H/T Joe Miller

We could only wish, am I right?

End the TSA.

Why Mitt Romney? Why Republican?

Tumblr decantedjade responded to my post, “Thoughts On Last Night,” which sought to illuminate some key differences between today’s GOP and Democratic Party.

Here’s decantedjade’s response.

I do not agree that Mitt Romney is the correct choice, because all of the values he used to espouse (he used to be much more moderate, and pro-choice, and anti-gun, and all sorts of things), he’s cast aside for an election. If he were running as an independent I might vote for him, but he’s running with the Republican party, and to win the GOP he has to pander to scary, insane extremists.

The Obama administration has in no way been perfect. But they aren’t avoiding questions about policy details, and they aren’t pandering to extreme leftists, and they aren’t lying through their teeth. Plus they aren’t running with Paul Ryan, who is handsome and intellectual but also kind of a frighteningly scary person. With all of this in mind, why do you believe Mitt Romney is the correct choice?

It’s 1 am, I have an 8 am train to New York, and have been up since 5:30 this morning, but here’s a rough answer.

I see three critiques, so I’ll answer each of them individually:

(And I’m going to throw the rest below a page break. Because, you know, Tumblr attention spans.)

Let’s call this post “The Tyrannical Irony Of Great Expectations”

I don’t begrudge President Obama for the situation he inherited in January of 2009. When people throw out the “are you better than four years ago?” question, the answer (at least for most people) should undoubtedly be yes.

With that said, above is what voters have come to expect a “recovery” to look like (source: Nate Silver’s 538 Blog).

Below is what we’ve got. (source: Think Progress)

Reagan’s economic recovery created millions of jobs beyond what were originally lost, while Obama’s recovery has yet to break even, when accounting for new job seekers.

Perhaps that provides context for President Obama’s comment about the private sector “doing just fine.” In a touch of irony for reactionaries in the GOP, Obama, unlike Reagan, has overseen an era of government shedding public jobs. That may be for the long-term good, but in the short term, it amplifies the recession.

So the private sector may be doing “just fine,” but the recession kicked us so hard that “doing just fine” won’t really cut it these days.

Zeke Miller has done a nice job describing the VP selection process (and with a GIF!). Here’s how Paul Ryan escaped a media stakeout at his house:

“It was more of a walk. I grew up in those woods. The house I grew up in backs up to the house I live in now. So I know those woods like the back of my hand, so it wasn’t too hard to walk through them. So I just went out my back door and went through the gully in the woods I grew up in playing in. I walked by the tree that has the old tree fort that I built, went out next to the driveway that I grew up in, met Andy, my chief of staff, who grabbed me in his van and we went out.”

Incidentally (but totally not related to Ryan’s famous 6% body fat), Google’s 2nd most searched term associated with Ryan is “Shirtless.”

I bet I can name a few people on Tumblr who entered that search.

Heroically hurling herself into the breach between Romney’s plan and math comes Jennifer Rubin, the conservative blogger and unofficial Romney spokesperson.

Pretty neat sentence from Jonathan Chait in New York Mag.

Oh my God! An ad about the issues.

Mickey Kaus has a detailed post on the subject. I recommend giving it a read.

In the coming months, Romney is going to be hammered by the Obama campaign. The Bain commercials will continue, not because Obama disagrees with Romney’s decisions, but because Romney refuses to explain those decisions. The calls for his tax returns will mount, because Obama knows Americans are fine with wealthy people but hate people who treat them with disregard and contempt. Obama will attack Romney on health care, because Obama has the backbone to stand up for what he thinks is right.

From a column of mine on July 25.

Call me utterly shocked that Romney is getting hammered for Bain, taxes, etc. Just shocked.

By the way, this column got me called a “fool,” a “Paulite,” a “RINO,” and a few other things via email that I won’t upset your eyes by publishing. People don’t like seeing the truth about their crap candidate, but I don’t feel bad sharing it.

[I]t is sad to report how lacklustre the debate about government is in America.

The obvious decline is on the right. This newspaper is hardly delighted that government spending has grown from 34% of GDP in 1980, when Friedman published “Free to Choose”, to over 40% today; but American conservatism has grown so angry that it has become a parody of its former self. Tax cuts are always right (even if they inflate the deficit); government activism is always wrong (even if stimulus helped avert a depression). And the right’s hypocrisy when it comes to spending on conservative projects (prisons, the armed forces, subsidies to big business) is breathtaking. George W. Bush presided over a huge growth in government.

If the Republican Party has moved to the unthinking right, the Democratic Party has moved to the unreforming left. Mr Obama has shown little of Mr Clinton’s enthusiasm for modernising government: indeed, he is unpicking welfare reform, by loosening work requirements. He has presided over a huge expansion of legislation, much of it badly drafted, such as the 850-page Dodd-Frank bill (see article). Worryingly in hock to the public-sector unions, Mr Obama seems to think the public sector is inherently more moral than the private one. Companies are at best cows to be milked, at worst prey to be hunted.

The fine (nameless) folk at the Economist drop the mic as they strut off the stage.

The Road to Perdition: Huntsman to Paul to Romney

[This is obviously quite rough, as it was written in a hasty manner. I will expound this weekend]

My regular readers will be unsurprised to hear that I’m less than fond of Willard Romney. Yesterday, I intimated that, at varying times, I supported Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul in the GOP primary process. I’m sure that leaves many of you scratching your heads. Those were very different candidates, right?

Absolutely.

Huntsman’s background was quite impressive. He was a successful, and enormously popular, governor in the state of Utah. He followed that up with a stint as the Ambassador to China. By any objective measure, he was perhaps the most classically conservative candidate in the primary field.

But the man simply couldn’t campaign. His first ads were outright weird, his social media strategy off-putting (if not outright condescending), and he failed to show the edge needed to win primaries. You don’t win a GOP primary with stints on MSNBC and by doing impressions of the GOP that would impress Aaron Sorkin and the Newsroom people.

When Huntsman predictacly exited the race, Ron Paul was basically a leftover, and somewhat of a protest, choice. The GOP has certainly been hawkish for some time, but the shameless jingoism and senteminatity on stage at certain debates was nearly enough to induce vomiting.

I’m no isolationist. I don’t favor being weak on the world stage. I’m not a peacenik.

But the relatively fresh position in the GOP that we can remake the world in our own image is not a conservative position. It is one I will never, nay can never, support. It is profoundly utopian, foolish, and sentimental — in the worst way.

So here we are. Mitt Romney complains that Obama pursues foreign policy much like an old school Republican. Obama has been viewing things through a national security lens, as Conor Friedersdorf intimates, rather than one of sentimentality and emotion.

That’s fairly smart, and it is far preferable to Willard.

So there you have it.

More Commenters

These guys keep hitting the nail on the head. Here is the top comment on my op-ed:

Why should we stand up for Romney? I dunno, he’s our nominee, maybe?

Take your ball and go home, Paulite. We don’t need you. You’re part of the problem, your rhetoric and apparent motive is indistinguishable from that of the typical DailyKOS member.

The last thing Conservatives need is just another moronic “thinker” with no tactical prowess or imagination, cannibalizing our candidates.

Here’s how these things work, dimbulb. The Presidential candidate stays above the fray in certain regards, his surrogates do the dirty work. We are his surrogates, a few doors removed. Do the dirty work … but not *against* our candidate, fool.

A few things:

1) I did end up supporting Ron Paul in the primaries, and he was a much better candidate than Mitt Romney. But if I’d had a choice, it would have been to vote for Jon Huntsman, who was not only more conservative (in the temperamental way) than Romney, but seemed happy to say what he felt, rather than jingoism and/or whatever was currently popular in focus groups.

2) Voters and journalists are not Romney’s “surrogates.” In fact, they should explicitly NOT be carrying water for their preferred candidate. I support Romney over Obama, but I’m not going to be a partisan hack. If I wanted to do that, I’d work for the campaign. What journalists try to do is tell it like they see it, report the facts as they are (rather than what they want), and to let people make choices from those facts.

3) And I hate the Daily Kos.