About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006.

Republican proposals don’t call for CEOs and other top executives enjoying that $92 billion taxpayer windfall to demean themselves by compromising their bodily integrity. Instead, they focus their attacks on people.

This isn’t because those who receive government assistance use illegal drugs disproportionately, it’s because this is an election year and GOP politicians know through experience that their angry white base is easily manipulated into boiling anger at the thought of “welfare queens” driving their nineteen illegitimate kids around in brand new Cadillacs. Ronald Reagan certainly knew it when he said in 1976 that he was outraged at seeing a “strapping young buck” buy t-bone steaks with food stamps. It’s racially motivated election year stupidity.

Government assistance is for those who can’t find work. If Republicans were interested in reducing welfare rolls, they’d be more supportive of President Obama’s policies, which have resulted in 23 straight months of job creation and increased economic growth:

They’re not interested in that either. But maybe there’s a compromise — let’s test all welfare recipients, including those who spend millions of dollars lobbying and funding super PACS in order to keep their corporate welfare. Just one quick, unannounced, mandatory bathroom break to urinate into a cup so the government can find out everything you’ve been putting into your body before boarding the company Lear for eighteen rounds, mojitos and a visit to Mitt Romney’s cash in Grand Cayman.

I proposed that compromise to a not-very-receptive Harris County GOP Chairman Jared Woodfill on Scott Braddock’s News 92FM show this morning:

If conservatives insist on creating a new standard — any organization which objects on theological grounds to paying for certain medical services shouldn’t be required to pay for them — then Jehovah’s Witnesses can’t be required to provide insurance that covers blood transfusions. An employee of any Jehovah’s Witness entity who needs kidney dialysis, for example, will just have to do without, even if that employee isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness. Someone who works for a Scientologist organization and needs Prozac will just have to suffer because Scientology forbids the taking of any psychiatric drug.

This, of course, isn’t really about medicine or religion. It’s about conservatives’ constant irrational need to feel under assault, their hatred for Barack Obama, and their revulsion at the thought of female sexuality, a recurring theme in all major religions. The kind of medical treatment people choose is a private, secular decision. What this or that cleric thinks about it is irrelevant; the practice of medicine ought to be left to the doctors.

On Wednesday, I debated the Obama Administration’s contraception mandate with conservative activist Kyleen Wright on Scott Braddock’s News 92FM morning show:

Planned Parenthood health centers that received Komen program funding provided nearly 170,000 clinical breast exams out of the more than 4 million clinical breast exams performed nationwide at Planned Parenthood health centers; clinicians under the grants wrote more than 6,400 mammogram referrals out of 70,000 mammogram referrals issued from Planned Parenthood clinics.

PP is the nation’s number one provider of sexual health services for women. If your organization exists to prevent and battle breast cancer, you’d probably want to go where the breasts are. That’s Planned Parenthood (and Cinemax, for different reasons).

The Komen foundation’s decision to pull its funding from PP can be described as a lot of things, but a principled objection to abortion isn’t one. Here’s its explanation:

Komen says the key reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress – a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups. Komen spokeswoman Leslie Aun said the charity recently adopted criteria barring grants to organizations that are under investigation by local, state or federal authorities.

If Komen wanted to make a statement about abortion rights, it would have said that it pulled PP’s funding because of abortion. Instead, it caved to radical right wing pressure, made up a pretext, and didn’t even have the courage to take a stand one way or the other. Regardless, the effect will be that fewer breast exams are performed and therefore more women will have undetected cancer for longer. Not to understate the case, but that kind of outcome seems contrary to Komen’s previously stated goal of battling breast cancer. It isn’t very “pro-life,” either.

I debated the issue this morning on Scott Braddock’s News 92Fm show with conservative activist Kyleen Wright. Listen here:

If you live in that system — if, for example, you get your news from Fox (and are therefore likely to know less than people who read no news at all) — you live in a world in which “apocalyptic fear” constantly grips the American people. Barack Obama doesn’t just hold views contrary to yours, he’s evil and stupid, bent on destruction of the United States:

Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat.

* * * *

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

At the heart of this mania is the fantasy that conservatives are persecuted. Rush Limbaugh has it:

Conservatism is an oppressed minority today [sic]. The Republican Party is an oppressed minority. . . If ever a civil rights movement was needed in America, it is for the Republican Party. If ever we needed to start marching for freedom and constitutional rights, it’s for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is today’s oppressed minority, and it knows how to behave as one. It shuts up. It doesn’t cross bridges; it doesn’t run into the Bull Connors of the Democrat [sic] Party; it is afraid of the fire hoses and the dogs, it’s compliant.

(Limbaugh’s contempt for black people and casual trivialization of their suffering during the actual civil rights movement by comparing it to the way mostly white, well-off Republicans are treated today really isn’t the point here, but you’ve still got to marvel at his ability to express it in so few words.)

Freshman Tea Party Republican Rep. Allen West of Florida really has it. Here he is last week solemnly declaring to tea partiers that “this is a battlefield that we must stand upon.” If you love your country, you, like he, will refuse to sit back and watch Barack Obama “take the United States of America and destroy it.” Brave of him to oppose something that isn’t happening.

What’s more, West doesn’t mind telling the President of the United States, Senate Majority Leader and House Minority Leader to take their ideology and “get the hell out of the United States of America.” Very patriotic.

He caps his remarks by pulling off a persecution twofer: Not only are Real Americans like him and the assembled fed-up patriots oppressed by traitorous liberals, but he, a United States Congressman, refuses to be silenced in this time of great oppression; if that makes him the “number one target of the Democrat [sic] National Party,” he says, “bring it on.” And cue the swelling Braveheart soundtrack…

This isn’t one of those things about which people can disagree in good faith. The entire premise of West’s speech is factually wrong; it’s a tour de force of unhinged paranoia and unmitigated stupidity. It’s the kind of thing that can only appeal to you if you live in the alternative knowledge system Frum denounces. It’s not good for the Republican Party and it’s not good for the country.

“The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society,” Frum writes, and the point is inarguable. How is progress of any kind going to be made when people in positions of power envision themselves as grand saviors of a nation right on the brink of complete annihilation simply because the candidate they didn’t vote for won an election? That kind of thing leaves principled conservatives like Frum, who quaintly confines himself to reality when dealing with opposition, with few choices.

If anything good comes of this hysterical right-wing pant-wetting, it’ll be the reelection of Barack Obama by people who understand that while he isn’t a perfect president and his record on a number of issues is certainly debatable, he hasbrought the economy back from the brink, delivered health care to 32 million people, saved the American auto industry, and ended the war in Iraq: All things that happened in actual reality, not the one created by hysterical right-wingers.

The first rule of public speaking is “know your audience.” As former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater described it, knowing a white southern audience meant using code words like “food stamps” to ingratiate oneself:

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Another former RNC chairman, Ken Mehlman, said he felt kind of bad that his party had won elections by speaking in code to racists, so he actually apologized to African Americans in 2005:

Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.

In 2010, RNC chair Michael Steele confirmed what everybody already knew:

For the last 40-plus years we had a “Southern Strategy” that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, “Bubba” went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.

Newt Gingrich faded a lot of heat during the South Carolina campaign for repeatedly calling the nation’s first African-American chief executive the country’s best “food stamp president.” (Gingrich defended himself by saying that it might be uncomfortable, but nevertheless a fact that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any other president. Unfortunately for Newt, the claim is false; George W. Bush holds that distinction.)

So it was mighty white of Gingrich in the midst of such charged criticism to offer to attend the next NAACP convention in order to explain to black people why living off the largess of more industrious races was no way to go through life:

Times have changed, of course, and Republicans today object far more aggressively to the accusation of racism than to its actual existence. Recent polls for example — which use anti-conservative technology like “science” — have found that 46% of Mississippi Republicans think interracial marriage should be illegal and large numbers of Tea Partiershave a “low regard for immigrants and blacks.”

Nearly 28% of South Carolinians are African American. Though Gingrich was accused of using racial code words to achieve victory, it doesn’t seem to have hurt him among rank-and-file Republican voters, as he appears to have won the state’s primary across the party’s racial lines:

Know your audience.

But this week’s Newsweek’s cover story, which appears under the headline “Why Are Obama’s Critics so Dumb?” isn’t about Gohmert or his caucus of imbeciles. It is instead about mainstream Republican mythology: The conservative claim that the 2009 stimulus didn’t work, for example, which isn’t dumb as much as it is demonstrably false. (The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that the stimulus created up to 3.3 million jobs. But ask any leading Republican and they’ll tell you, contra reality, that it “failed.”)

Conservative Bryan Preston and I debated Newsweek’s purposefully provocative cover and the non-matching Sullivan essay on Scott Braddock’s News 92FM show this morning:

The First Amendment couldn’t be clearer:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

(Emphasis added, obviously.)

But Congress has made such laws. They deal with what the government describes as “obscenity:”

It is a violation of federal law to air obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to broadcast indecent or profane programming during certain hours. Congress has given the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the responsibility for administratively enforcing the law that governs these types of broadcasts. Among other things, the FCC has authority to issue civil monetary penalties, revoke a license, and deny a renewal application. In addition, a federal district court may impose fines and/or imprisonment for up to two years on those who are convicted of criminal violations of the law.

Since 1978, busybodies, prudes, and government bureaucrats who want to “protect” the rest of us from what they think is obscene have been permitted abridge the right to speak freely. So when morning DJs do a bit the FCC doesn’t like or NYPD gets really Blue (warning: perfectly-formed naked lady’s butt link), the federal government has levied fines for what it deems offensive speech.

But the Constitution prohibits the government from deciding matters of taste. It can’t decide what should offend or determine that its interest in protecting someone else’s delicate sensibilities outweighs others’ right to say what they want, even if that someone else is a child. The framers had children too, after all, but didn’t include in the Constitution any device to protect them from speech that might offend their parents. The “harm” that would befall them is hardly worth trading the right to speak freely.

Others disagree of course, and the Bush Administration took this nannystateism a step further, leading to the case pending before the Court today:

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday testing the constitutionality of a Bush-era regulation that allows the Federal Communications Commission to punish broadcasters with stiff fines for the fleeting use of vulgar language or nude images. The FCC’s rule applies only to radio and over-the-air TV networks — like Fox, ABC, NBC and PBS — but not to cable TV.

Ignoring the First Amendment, the Obama Administration has filed briefs supporting this plainly unconstitutional overreach.

I debated the issue with Karen Kristopher from the Houston Area Association for Decency on Fox 26:

The same people who cheered as George Bush and the Republican Congress turned the $236 billion surplus left to them by Bill Clinton into a nearly trillion-dollar deficit are this week up in arms because the Obamas spent money hosting a 2009 Halloween party for children of members of the military. The country was in the midst of a recession and the White House purposefully kept the opulent celebration quiet, they claim.

Right, except for…let’s see…the very quiet official White House YouTube Channel which posted video of the event at the time, the top-secret White House website which posted pictures and descriptions of the event at the time, the pool reporting, blogs and other media which reported the details of the event at the time, not to mention the contemporaneous accounts from people who were there.

Former Texas Republican Party Chair Cathie Adams and I discussed the right’s latest bout with hysterical Obama hatred on News 92FM this morning with host Scott Braddock: