Coyote Blog

Like many libertarians, I am tempted not to vote each election, though I usually do.  However, choosing between whatever lesser evil exists in the Coke or Pepsi party gets tiresome.  Given that, I have never voted in a party primary, until yesterday when I voted in the Republican primary simply to vote against Andrew Thomas for state Attorney General.  Thomas has for years been Joe Arpaio's chief enabler and of late as County Attorney has spent his time launching frivolous lawsuits against his political enemies, from County supervisors to judges.  When attorneys from adjacent counties would not support his suits, he sought criminal charges against them.

Most recently, it was revealed that a series of grand juries, which typically will indict an inanimate object, not only refused to indict in several of his cases but ordered him to shut down the investigation entirely.  This useless prosecution of a County Supervisor turned out to be part of a plan.  When Thomas decided to vacate the County Attorney position to run for state DA, he disagreed with many of the County Supervisors as to who his replacement should be, and as narrated in this letter, began filing charges against Supervisors to deny them a quorum  (apparently some quid pro quo discussions, of the sort "we will drop the charges if you vote how we want" were actually recorded and turned over to the US Attorney, so if Thomas should win his election we be following the NY/Spitzer path of having our top state legal officer facing felony charges and disbarment.

Unfortunately, Thomas (and Arpaio) have somehow become folk-heroes among lame-brained Arizona voters, who tend to accept any sort of civil rights violations by officials as necessary measures to maintain the peace in the face of the dreaded Mexican immigration wave, so their re-election chances are not necessarily hurt by near Louisiana or Chicago levels of abuses of power.

I was tempted not to vote -- you know, one vote won't matter -- because I felt downright icky actually voting in the Coke primary.  But in AZ, the Coke primary is pretty much the election since the state is so full of Coke voters, so I did it.  As it turns out, my vote may matter.

99.7% of Precincts Reporting
(2232 of 2239 Precincts)

Don't know a thing about Tom Horne, but I eagerly voted for him as not-Thomas.  Here is the lock of the week:  with a vote this close, Thomas will keep this in the court for months, perhaps years.  If he gets the wrong decision, he will go after the judge, and if that doesn't work.....

Update: Apparently, Arpaio got his guy elected in the race to fill Thomas's county attorney seat, so I suppose once we get rid of one Arpaio-enabler we just end up with another.  I took Arpaio's list of people he endorsed yesterday and the only votes I cast were for whoever the challenger was to team Arpaio.

Update #2: This is a depressing quote (emphasis added)

Oddly, the truth-telling was attributed to our own local Pinocchio, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in regards the decisive victory of Bill Montgomery over interim Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley.

"That's going to make my job very easy," Arpaio said of Montgomery's win.

I must say that I am not much of a fan of trying to find spurious relationships between long-term economic trends and the political parties who hold office at various times.  But I must say I kind of liked this one from Mark Perry:

PS-  I was around a dinner table this weekend with a group of Republicans, including some activists.  I asked them what exactly they thought Republicans would do next term if they won real gains in Congress.  None of them, many hard-core activists, could name anything except divide government and slow the pace of growth.  Which I suppose is better than we have now.

I have no particular problem with this post from Kevin Drum where he would like to see some different polling questions about the Ground Zero mosque (though I do think they reflect some naivite about the founders' intentions in building the mosque, as telegraphed pretty strongly by its proposed name).  I think the underlying desire to raise awareness about how small changes to poll question wording can make big changes to poll outcomes is a good one.

Here is my problem with all polls like this.  Consider the question

Do you oppose construction of the Ground Zero mosque?

How I answer this is influenced by the unstated intent of the poller or whomever is paying for the poll.  That is, the answer is likely be used as justification for some government action, in this case confiscation of the property rights of the owners of the land by not allowing them to do with the land as they wish.

In this nanny state of micro-fascism, we have a very hard time separating opposition to something from be desirous of government intervention.  For example, I oppose teenagers spending all day watching crappy TV and playing PS3 games rather than reading.  I oppose overcooked steaks.  I oppose people who take forever in buffet lines, selecting one leaf of lettuce at a time.  I oppose airplane bathrooms that smell bad.  I oppose using "incent" as a verb.  I oppose writers who have really long passages without paragraph breaks.  I oppose commenters who constantly harass me about my horrible proof-reading rather than just getting over it and accepting that I suck.

However, in none of these instances would I advocate government action.  Now, of course, I go further than most, in that I also oppose government action in any number of more controversial activities that I also personally oppose but would never ask to be banned, including prostitution, meth use polygamy, driving without a seat belt, and pulling tags off mattresses.   So a better question would be:

Do you oppose government action to block construction of the Ground Zero mosque?

To:  David DeWitt (Press Secretary)

I am always happy to see more libertarian candidates in our Congressional races, but in the year 2010 I just don't think there is an excuse for sending out a mass email for anything other than Viagra without an "unsubscribe" link. This is particularly true given that your campaign must be harvesting email addresses from a variety of sources rather than using an opt-in system, since up until today I had never even heard of Travis Irvine nor do I live in Ohio.  There are many services that provide automated mailings that take care of all the list management and unsubscribe mechanics.  Constant Contact has a very nice service.

Since your candidate is a libertarian and, I assume, familiar with the concept of rational self-interest, I will put my suggestion in those terms.  Without an "unsubscribe" link, I am forced to hit the "report spam" button in Gmail.  If enough people do the same, there is a good chance your candidate's email will not be getting through to anyone's email box, even those who are interested.

Greg Patterson has an interesting post (at least to political neophytes like me) on how not to write a political hit piece.  For example:

The theme of the piece is that Jim Ward is an outsider and that Schweikert is a career politician.  Then lead quote is from...an incumbent Congressman.  Dude, that's awesome.  I like John Shadegg, but he's been in Congress for 16 years.  So Ward is telling me that he's an outsider by showing me that he's been endorsed Arizona's longest-serving Republican Congressman?

Folks on the Left seem amazed that Obama could not muster a single Republican vote for his climate bill.  I am amazed they are amazed.  When you set traps lined with feces-smeared pungi sticks for opposition legislators, it may be momentarily fun for the Progressive base, but it does not make the opposition very happy to work with you.

Which is fine with me -- I don't think I can get too worked up about the Coke and the Pepsi party beating the crap out of each other.  But this administration does not seem to be able to make up its mind how it wants to govern.  With the Presidency, control of both Houses, and (originally) 60 votes in the Senate, a scorched Earth approach was probably viable.   I have no doubt Gingrich would have taken that approach had he had such numbers.

What confuses me, and I think a lot of the Progrossives rooting for a new October Revolution, is Obama has communicated publicly in scorched Earth mode but has not really legislated that way.  Time after time the Democrats keep seeking out Republican votes to give them cover for legislation that might be unpopular, but Obama's Chicago-style demonizing does not seem to help that much.  I am not much of a political observer, so their may be a sensible strategy in all this but I don't see it.

Jacob Sullum writes about the gnashing of teeth among Arizona politicians that suddenly must rely on voluntary contributions rather than campaign funds taken by force from taxpayers who may not even support them.  I liked this quote from Goldwater:

"If they behaved reasonably," they would have a contingency plan," Dranias said. "After 19 months of rulings from the district court saying this is unconstitutional, no serious candidate would not be prepared for this contingency."

Added Bolick, "People who gambled that public subsidies would be available to them now are reaping the folly of such a gamble."

But if they were reasonable people who considered long-term consequences and took responsibility for their own actions, would they even be politicians.  Is it any surprise that a class of human beings who, in response to looming bankruptcy in Medicare, pass a trillion dollars of new health care spending commitments closed their eyes to what would likely happen when this campaign finance law reached the Supreme Court?

By the way, I met Clint's Bolick's wife Shawna who is running for the Republican nomination in District 11 for the state House.  I am not registered and refuse to register with a party so I can't vote, but if you are looking for someone to support she seemed pretty sharp.

Remember all that BS about the Obama administration only being ruled by facts and science?  This is a mythology at the core of the progressive movement, that it is possible to have a wise dictator who uses the heavy hand of government coercion only for the best interests of the country, driven only by science and not by political influence.

This is of course a crock.  It was a popular point of view in the early 20th century, and at the heart of efforts like Mussolini's fascism, which in turn was much admired by FDR and emulated in US efforts like the NRA (the blue eagle, not the gun organization).  Over time, history has demonstrated folks like Hayek right on the knowlege problem (no one can possibly be smart enough to make optimum decisions for everyone, particularly when everyone has different preferences) while we have plenty of evidence to demonstrate the incentives for politicians are skewed so badly as to make good decisions almost impossible.

But the myth persists, even in the face of obvious counter-examples, like this (emphasis added):

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken."The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think."

The analysis, performed by Medicare's Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a "nonpolitical" office, set off alarm bells when submitted. "We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff," says the HHS staffer, "and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary's office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report."

In the end, the report was released several weeks after the vote -- the review by the secretary's office reportedly took less than three days -- and bore a note that the analysis was not the official position of the Obama administration.

Wouldn't want to influence a vote with actual facts.

One of the perils of being a populist, as John McCain is finding out, is that the public is allowed to change its mind, but politicians who attempt to follow them end up looking bad.

the four-term senator says he was misled by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. McCain said the pair assured him that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program would focus on what was seen as the cause of the financial crisis, the housing meltdown.

"Obviously, that didn't happen," McCain said in a meeting Thursday with The [Arizona] Republic's Editorial Board, recounting his decision-making during the critical initial days of the fiscal crisis. "They decided to stabilize the Wall Street institutions, bail out (insurance giant) AIG, bail out Chrysler, bail out General Motors.... What they figured was that if they stabilized Wall Street - I guess it was trickle-down economics - that therefore Main Street would be fine."

I am not sure this is much of a defense.  Even without McCain's access to such financial luminaries, I and many others predicted at the time the $700 billion slush fund would be used as, well, as slush fund to bail out the politically well-connected.  I must admit I didn't see the GM/UAW bailout coming, but its not wildly surprising in retrospect.

Unfortunately for all of us, McCain's competition in the next election, JD Hayworth, is even less appealing.

When I  compare Obama's rehtoric on health care, where he attempts to avoid any detail and runs quickly away from being responsible for making any hard tradeoffs (in fact works to fool the public into believing there are no hard tradeoffs) with Chris Christie's budget speech, the difference is startling.

I find it pretty hilarious that folks on the left suddenly feel the US is ungovernable, largely because they have not been able to pass a couple of complicated and risky legislative initiatives.  Was the US ungovernable when Bush couldn't pass Social Security reform?   It seems that showing leadership on a national scale with diverse interests is a tad harder than running a grad school policy round-table.  Oddly, the left seems befuddled by actual diversity of opinion, rather than the faux diversity with lock-stepped beliefs they built in academia and among themselves.

I don't read Real Clear Politics much but I thought Jay Cost makes a good point:

Let's acknowledge that governing the United States of America is an extremely difficult task. Intentionally so. When designing our system, the Founders were faced with a dilemma. How to empower a vigorous government without endangering liberty or true republicanism? On the one hand, George III's government was effective at satisfying the will of the sovereign, but that will had become tyrannical. On the other hand, the Articles of Confederation acknowledged the rights of the states, but so much so that the federal government was incapable of solving basic problems.

The solution the country ultimately settled on had five important features: checks and balances so that the branches would police one another; a large republic so that majority sentiment was fleeting and not intensely felt; a Senate where the states would be equal; enumerated congressional powers to limit the scope of governmental authority; and the Bill of Rights to offer extra protection against the government.

The end result was a government that is powerful, but not infinitely so. Additionally, it is schizophrenic. It can do great things when it is of a single mind - but quite often it is not of one mind. So, to govern, our leaders need to build a broad consensus. When there is no such consensus, the most likely outcome is that the government will do nothing.

The President's two major initiatives - cap-and-trade and health care - have failed because there was not a broad consensus to enact them. Our system is heavily biased against such proposals. That's a good thing.

One of the roles of the President is to bring some adult supervision to his party in Congress.  Bush failed on this, allowing Republicans to run rampant in earmarking excess, and Obama has if anything been even worse on this dimension.  He routinely remains aloof from the legislative details (some would say he just got rolled by Nancy Pelosi) and then proceeds to speak as if the actual bill matches his grand words and promises when it is obvious to all that it does not.

Paul Krugman in the NY Times, Via Todd Zwycki

The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

Don't hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don't even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents' obstructionism.

It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis.

OK, sign me up.

From the NY Times, June 23, 2005

Mr. Bush has reacted by railing against Democrats for obstruction -- as if Democrats are duty-bound to breathe life into his agenda and, even sillier, as if opposing a plan that the people do not want is an illegitimate tactic for an opposition party.

Via the NY Daily News:

The race for governor just got a whole lot sexier.

"Manhattan Madam" Kristin Davis is tossing her lacy brassiere into the political ring - with the help of one of the GOP's most fearsome strategists.

Though he's often labeled a "trickster," former Nixon, Reagan and Bushes operative Roger Stone tells us he's dead serious about getting Davis on the ballot.

"This is not a hoax, a prank or a publicity stunt," said Stone, who has been quietly huddling with Davis for months. "I want to get her a half-million votes."

I love this:

Davis laid out her credentials last weekend at a Libertarian Party convention on the lower East Side.

"I was valedictorian of my high-school class," said the golden-tressed Davis, sporting a modest black suit but wicked Christian Louboutins with 5-inch heels. "I worked 10 years in finance. I was vice president of a hedge fund. I went on to build a multimillion-dollar business from scratch."

While branding "taxation as confiscation," the former escort empress said the legalization of prostitution and marijuana could provide $2.5 billion in revenue to help close the budget gap.

"I'm a natural Libertarian," said Davis, who also embraces gay marriage and the views of the National Rifle Association.

And here is some great political strategy:

Even though she needs only 15,000 signatures to get on the ballot, she's shooting for 45,000 - and Stone doesn't see any problem getting them.

"Kristin knows lots of Penthouse Pets," he said. "We'll get four, make them notary publics and have them, suitably attired, collecting signatures at Grand Central Station during rush hour."

I think my post from Inauguration Day one year ago holds up pretty well, though I caught a lot of grief for it at the time  [a few spelling errors fixed]

OK, I was really going to remain silent today, because no one seems to want to hear a rant about today's imperial coronation.  But as I sit here watching the press coverage and waiting for John the Baptist to show up, and as I observe the general cultish hysteria and the swooning of normally serious adult people, I just can't help myself.  For a libertarian like myself, its like watching people line up at 3am to be the first to be in the store when McDonald's switches its fountain drinks from Coke to Pepsi.   Heck, I was creeped out by the cult following of Ron Paul this year, a politician I agree with a lot, so I certainly am going to get the willies from the love-fest for an admitted statist like Obama.

I am not enough of a historian to speak for much more than the last thirty years, but the popularity of non-incumbent political candidates has typically been proportional to 1) their personal charisma and 2) our lack of knowledge of their exact proposals.  Seriously, can you name any other difference (on the plus side) between Obama and Hillary other than these two?  We forget, but GWB was the unknown newcomer in 1992.  As was Clinton and Carter.  Reagan was an exception, but was running against an incumbent who really had a terrible four years, and Bush I was an exception as well, though he was running against one of the weakest candidates and campaigns the Democrats have fielded in 50 years.  Folks are excited about Obama because, in essence, they don't know what he stands for, and thus can read into him anything they want.  Not since the breathless coverage of Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's vault has there been so much attention to something where we had no idea of what was inside.  My bet is that the result with Obama will be the same as with the vault.

There is some sort of weird mass self-hypnosis going on, made even odder by the fact that a lot of people seem to know they are hypnotized, at least at some level.  I keep getting shushed as I make fun of friends' cult behavior watching the proceedings today, as if by jiggling someone's elbow too hard I might break the spell.  Never have I seen, in my lifetime, so much emotion invested in a politician we know nothing about.   I guess I am just missing some gene that makes the rest of humanity receptive to this kind of stuff, but just for a minute snap your fingers in front of your face and say "do I really expect a fundamentally different approach from a politician who won his spurs in "¦. Chicago?  Do I really think the ultimate political outsider is going to be the guy who bested everyone at their own game in the Chicago political machine?"

Well, the spell will probably take a while to break in the press, if it ever does "” Time Magazine is currently considering whether it would be possible to put Obama on the cover of all 52 issues this year "” but thoughtful people already on day 1 should have evidence that things are the same as they ever were, just with better PR.   For God sakes, as his first expenditure of political capital, Obama is pushing for a trillion dollar government spending bill that is basically one big pork-fest that might make even Ted Stevens blush, a hodge-podge of every wish-list of leftish lobbyists that has been building up for eight years.  I will be suitably thrilled if the Obama administration renounces some of the creeping executive power grabs of the last 16 years, but he has been oddly silent about this.  It seems that creeping executive power is a lot more worrisome when someone else is in power.

It has been suggested by some that today is less a cultish coronation but a big victory party in the battle against racism.  Well, I am certainly willing to accept it on those terms.  I have been arguing for years that it is time to declare victory on the worst aspects of race and gender discrimination, and move on to problems of interest to all races (like individual freedom or giving kids options to escape crappy public schools).   Unfortunately, I fear that too many folks in power are dependent on the race/gender/class wars continuing, so you and I may think we are declaring victory, but those with power over our lives have not.

If it wasn't for his reactions (Patriot Act, Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan) to 9/11, shouldn't GWB be a leftish icon?  (source)

Ironically, the current Congress renewed most of the Patriot Act, Obama will most likely not close Gitmo any time soon, I see no movement out of Iraq, and Obama has doubled down on Afghanistan.    GWB may have been the worst president in recent memory (since at least Nixon) for libertarians, though Obama seems to be on a trajectory to surpass him.

The bad news:  The Democrats are going to pass a half-baked mess of health care insurance changes.   Several opponents of the bill are saying there is a silver lining -- that this will allow Republicans, who did such a bang-up job when they last controlled Congress and the Presidency, to get back in power.  Color me less than excited.

I think this kind of argument might work for a libertarian, but I am not sure it is a very strong argument for a liberal Democrat that wants to do more rather than less of what Congress and the GWB administration did over the last 8 years to worsen the recession.

Personally, though, I'd say Obama has been remarkably restrained about the whole thing, especially when it comes to our disastrous fiscal situation.  In a mere eight years, George Bush and the Republican Party managed to take a thriving economy and a federal surplus and turn it into a hair's breadth escape from Great Depression II and an endless fiscal sinkhole.  Rome may not have been built in a day, but it didn't take much longer than that for the modern Republican Party to bankrupt America.

Particularly hilarious is that Drum blames the cost of the useless but expensive stimulus bill on GWB.  Huh?  And blaming Republicans for Fannie and Freddie is a real joke.

As you might imagine, the deficit in his world is all from tax cuts and not above-inflation increases in spending.  The basic picture he shows is absurd - money is fungible, so any trillion dollars of the government spending could be blamed for the deficit - it just depends on what spending you consider incremental.  Stupid analysis.  Though it is interesting that at least two of the major drivers even by their slanted analysis - Bush tax cuts and Afghanistan - are policy issues Obama was presented with opportunities to reverse and chose not to.

It appears that the unprecedented embargo on mocking the President is finally coming to an end after 10 long months.  Comedians may finally have decided it is OK to make fun of this President like they have all the others.  To this end, this is pretty funny from SNL.

Coyote Blog, July 16, 2009

It is totally clear to me that Obama and Pelosi will spend any amount of money to pass their key legislative initiatives.  In the case of Waxman-Markey, the marginal price per vote turned out to be about $3.5 billion.  But they didn't even blink at paying this.  That is why I fear that some horrible form of health care "reform" may actually pass.  If it does, the marginal cost per vote may be higher, but I don't think our leaders care.

WSJ, Nov 19, 2009

What does it take to get a wavering senator to vote for health care reform?

Here's a case study.

On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for "certain states recovering from a major disaster."

The section spends two pages defining which "states" would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that "during the preceding 7 fiscal years" have been declared a "major disaster area."

I am told the section applies to exactly one state:  Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.

In other words, the bill spends two pages describing would could be written with a single world:  Louisiana.  (This may also help explain why the bill is long.)

Senator Harry Reid, who drafted the bill, cannot pass it without the support of Louisiana's Mary Landrieu.

How much does it cost?  According to the Congressional Budget Office: $100 million.

Steven Landsburg via Mark Perry

It's always impressive to see one person excel in two widely disparate activities: a first-rate mathematician who's also a world class mountaineer, or a titan of industry who conducts symphony orchestras on the side. But sometimes I think Paul Krugman is out to top them all, by excelling in two activities that are not just disparate but diametrically opposed: economics (for which he was awarded a well-deserved Nobel Prize) and obliviousness to the lessons of economics (for which he's been awarded a column at the New York Times).

It's a dazzling performance. Time after time, Krugman leaves me wide-eyed with wonder at how much economics he has to forget to write those columns.

On January 20th of this year, Barack Obama probably had perhaps the strongest personal position to work from of any President in recent memory.  Everybody wanted to hear what he had to say and many were prepared to do what he asked.

Today, he seems to have frittered away much of this authority and devalued his own brand.  How else to explain that he is relying on a former president (Bill Clinton) to sell his health care agenda in Congress and it took another former president (George W Bush) to visit the Ft. Hood tragedy.

Yours Truly, on July 16, 2009:

It is totally clear to me that Obama and Pelosi will spend any amount of money to pass their key legislative initiatives.  In the case of Waxman-Markey, the marginal price per vote turned out to be about $3.5 billion.  But they didn't even blink at paying this.  That is why I fear that some horrible form of health care "reform" may actually pass.  If it does, the marginal cost per vote may be higher, but I don't think our leaders care.

Barbara Hollingsworth, 11/4:

The Heritage Foundation's Dennis Smith says that a "manager's amendment" to Pelosi's controversial 1,900 "“page health care bill includes new provisions that will allow back-door payoffs to specific members of Congress, such as more favorable Medicare reimbursements to particular doctors or hospitals and lower taxes on medical device manufacturers in certain congressional districts.

One such earmark - which Smith says "suddenly appeared" after the Energy and Commerce Committee had already completed its work - creates a new $6 billion Medicaid slush fund for nursing homes to be doled out by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, with no input from the states, ordinary rulemaking or administrative review.

This is nothing but a blatant attempt to buy off wavering Blue Dog Democrats. Just when you thought this bloated behemoth couldn't get any worse, it does.

I almost never comment on horserace politics, so I had just three thoughts this morning:

1. Who are these 20% or so of the voters who slew back and forth in as little as a few months between the two parties?  What goes on in their head -- "The Republicans are threatening my freedoms, I better vote Democrat.  Oh no, the Democrats are now threatening my freedoms, I better vote Republican."  At what point do folks wake up and say "both these parties threaten my freedoms whenever they are in power - I wonder if there is an alternative?"
2. The spin put on the election by everyone is both predictable and hilarious.  We will soon see what lessons the Democrats really took from the election by what legislation they bring to a vote this year and what they delay.
3. One thing I am surprised Republicans did not mention today --  A Republican was more succesful in getting a Democrat elected with her endorsement (NY23) than was Democrat Obama with his support and endorsement of the Democratic candidate in New Jersey.  Though of course Corzine was a sleazebag, so its unclear if there are any real national messages in that election.

A while back I wrote:

People often use terrible, specious logic when arguing things political.  I have particularly seen this over the last 6 months.  The argument typically goes like this:

1. I make a critique of a policy in the Obama administration, say on health care
2. Sometimes as an opening response, or sometimes when [the] other person is unable to specifically counter what I have said, they respond instead, "well, your guys  fill in the blank ." The latter part might be "got us into Iraq" or possibly "are pushing this birther nonsense."
3. I respond that  fill in the blank was not something I support(ed) and that if  by "my guys" they mean Republicans, that I was not a Republican, that I do not think the Republicans have an internally consistent position, and that I disagree with many programs and policies typically advocated by Republicans.  And besides, how did this have anything to do with the original conversation?
4. They respond to me now as if I am somehow cheating.  Confusion reigns.

Michael at Q&O has a good example today, from the White House blog reacting to criticisms that there are too many unaccountable czars running around:

But of course, it's really the hypocrisy here that is noteworthy. Just earlier today, Darrell Issa, a Republican from California and one of the leaders in calling for an investigation into the Obama Administration's use of "czars", had to admit to Fox News that he had never raised any objections to the Bush Administration's use of "czars". Many of these members who now decry the practice have called on Presidents in the past to appoint "czars" to coordinate activities within the government to address immediate challenges.

That addresses the charge, how?  Unbelievably, the White House is resorting to the kindergarten playground argument "well, you started it."

By the way, I had asked before if such an argument had a name.  Its clearly a subset of ad hominem arguments, but I suspected that something so common must have be labeled.  It has:

Tu quoque (pronounced /tuːˈkwoʊkwiː/, from Latin for "You, too" or "You, also") is a Latin term that describes a kind of logical fallacy. A tu quoque argument attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting his failure to act consistently in accordance with that position; it attempts to show that a criticism or objection applies equally to the person making it. It is considered an ad hominem argument, since it focuses on the party itself, rather than its positions.