Dan Quayle, of all people, has a piece in Kaplan about how woefully the tea baggers are being treated by the media:
Since the very first tea party gatherings, the national news media has covered this movement in the only way it knows how — as something grubby, impertinent and possibly dangerous. Of course, in any movement, violence and unlawful behavior are always to be condemned without reservation. But attempts to portray the tea partiers as a surly mob have the contrived feel of a political strategy.
That seems to be the theme du jour for conservatives, whether it’s Ann Althouse saying that Teabonics is a product of photoshopping or Lew Rockwell blaming Tea Party excesses on federal agents or Charles Lane favorably comparing baggery with pre-Civil War “extremism”.
It’s all a clear sign that Republicans will double down on the tea in 2010 in 2012 (you probably knew this already, but I’ve only become convinced in the last few days). None of this makes any sense as a long-term political strategy for Republicans, but it’s what they’re doing.
TenguPhule
Is this supposed to be some kind of bad April’s Fool’s joke?
William
The Republican 2010 election strategy: Extremism in defense of extremism is no vice.
TenguPhule
Okay, I’ve read the article.
Goddamnit DougJ! I just ate and now I feel nauseous after seeing that sad sack of shit skullfuck the wordkittens!!
Yutsano
It does if you look at the massive amount of media attention the teabaggers are getting from both the right and the left. If the idea is to keep up the noise regardless of the consequences, their strategy is succeeding even without a long-term exit plan. It is short-sighted, but that’s what they’re hoping for. Just win the news cycle, next talking point, next election, and it’s all profit baby.
PeakVT
As long as conservative Democrats are effective at watering down legislation, the Republican moneybaggers will let the teabaggers run wild.
SiubhanDuinne
I’m really going to have to stretch to keep this on topic, but I can do it! Ahem: *Speaking of teabaggers*, I was just reading the NYTimes’ review of Caribou Barbie’s show on Fox, and this kind of struck me as slightly odd:
Now I guess there’s nothing really *wrong* with comparing Huckabee to singer Jerry Lee Lewis, but the whole context of the paragraph makes me think that the reviewer was actually thinking of comedian Jerry Lewis.
And here’s why I think this was a hasty, sloppy bit of writing: the reviewer was Alessandra Stanley.
randiego
There’s a Kaplan nursing college down the street from my office park. It has a decent deli and of course lots of nursing students.
Same Kaplan?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Why wouldn’t they? The GOP has closed the gap on dems in polls and managed to confuse and piss the entire country off on politics to where we are in pox on all their houses mode.
Then it’s simple math for the lizard cortex to calculate that when voters go all wholly on incumbents, of which their are many more dems right now, it will get the GOP closer to CC;er numbers with the dems. Or so the plan, if you can call it that. It is scorched earth, and flying by the seat of pants and cynical almost beyond belief. Though it was about the only strategy to get back power in a short period of time.
The problem is they are very fractured as a party and basically leaderless on a national scale, if you don’t count Limbaugh and Beck, and this will come to the surface when the campaign season fully gets under way. And so will the fact that Bush/Cheney is not that far in the past when dems remind voters of that fact.
We talk a lot about dems being purists and eating our own. But it is childs play compared to what is happening between the nativist animals of the tea party and rank and file republicans and all the other subfactions like business repubs and moderates who are currently hiding under their beds. They are all offended by dems implementing policies that give government a bigger role in solving our problems, but I don’t think they have been out of power long enough where the hunger for power exceeds their willingness to coalesce the waring factions.
And when the ads start on teevee, the likely hood of some of those factions alienating anyone with any shred of decency on the right is high, especially with money restrictions being no more for outside groups.
randiego
I’ll be damned. Same Kaplan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan,_Inc.
Kryptik
It makes perfect sense, Doug. You just have to realize the overarching mindset here: If you’re losing, the answer isn’t to get better ideas, but to appeal to the refs and get them to ignore fouls on your part and/or over-call fouls on your opponents part.
The strategy has been working too, at least to actually legitimize the movement just enough to allow the media to apply the usual “balance” it regards everything with.
Mike Kay
How could Charles Lane praise the teabaggers, after all, he was once the editor of the liberal “New Republic”?
kth
@SiubhanDuinne: Like Huck, Jerry Lee Lewis is from Arkansas, and was quite the wildman back in the day; indeed, Huckabee even has had legendary Killer sideman James Burton (more importantly, also guitarist for Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, and both Elvises (Presley and Costello)) play with Huck’s band on the show (Huckabee himself playing bass). Pretty sure the allusion is the intended one, though one never knows for sure with Staley.
Splitting Image
The Republicans in 2010 are the Democrats of 1982, heading for 1984. They even have the VP candidate from 1980 lined up and ready for the nomination.
Incidentally, I think Quayle is right that the tea partiers have been marginalized by the mainstream news organizations since the beginning, but it’s mainly because they’ve been taking their marching orders from the Republican party. When Ron Paul started the movement in 2008, he organized a counter-convention opposite the G.O.P. convention. It got exactly zero attention because the narrative of the year was “Democrats divided, Republicans united”. Fox News paid the movement no attention whatever until January 20, 2009, but once they dived in whole-hog, everyone else started dismissing the whole thing as astroturfing, which within a few months was exactly what it was.
Quayle is correct that the tea partiers were ignored because they were dangerous, but to the Republicans moreso than the Democrats. But he parrots the Fox line in the second sentence by claiming the original teabaggers were responding to the Obama agenda. Even TARP was still a twinkle in Goldman Sachs’ eye when the movement was being formed.
Cliff
Someone tell Quayle to shut the fuck up and eat his potatoe.
SiubhanDuinne
@kth: Thanks, didn’t know that. It makes marginally more sense now.
Mike Kay
Blast from the past
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRCWbFFRpnY
Mike Kay
wait a fucking minute. it just hit me.
Dougie, I refuse to click on the link, but are you saying Lane compared the teabaggers to John Brown?
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike Kay #16:
I was so sure that was going to be a clip of Quayle ranting about Murphy Brown, Unwed Mother.
Mike Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
That’s a good one.
Of course he couldn’t do that today, with Bristol Palin as the face of the party.
Loneoak
A friend posted this article from Dissent that discusses the perpetual overcounting of Teabaggers.
jl
Brad DeLong has a very appropriate comment on the Charles Lane piece, with a very appropriate title:
Is This an April Fool’s Joke?
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/03/is-this-an-april-fools-joke—-the-tea-party-and-a-history-of-going-to-extremes.html
DeLong’s bottom line:
‘I am sorry: those who kill tens of thousands have a different “attitude” than those who set people free without killing anybody.’
Edit: Link don’t work:
April 01, 2010
Is This an April Fool’s Joke?
Charles Lane of the Washington Post:
PostPartisan: Some in the antislavery movement were as extreme, in their way, as the Southern “fire-eaters.” We tend to think of the secessionists as resisting federal authority during the run-up to Fort Sumter. But the antislavery side had its moments of nullification as well. In 1851, a Boston crowd broke into a federal courthouse to free “Shadrach,” a black man being held there by U.S. marshals enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law…. I am not suggesting a moral equivalency between the anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces. But I am suggesting an attitudinal equivalency…
First of all, Shadrach Minkins has a name–which does not deserve to be put into scare quotes. He was a human being.
Charles–excuse me, “Charles”–sees an “attitudinal equivalency” between the “>black abolitionists who “arrested Minkins from his court officers, carried him off and temporarily hid him in a Beacon Hill attic… Boston black leaders Lewis Hayden, John J. Smith and others helped Minkins escape from Massachusetts, and he eventually found his way to Canada on the Underground Railroad…” and Jefferson Davis and his ilk who raised armies that killed 100,000 Americans.
I am sorry: those who kill tens of thousands have a different “attitude” than those who set people free without killing anybody.
Worst Washington Post writer alive. Shut it down now.
Redshift
Yeah, Danny-boy, it’s so completely unfair when everyone knows they treated anti-war or pro-immigration rallies a couple of orders of magnitude larger as such an important and legitimate part of the political landscape!
The only thing wrong with the coverage of the teabaggers is that the news media bought into the idea that they had any significance at all. But since one of the biggest challenges for the political media is figuring out a name for the all-important “angry white people” demographic is going to be this time around, I guess it’s not surprising that the Fox/Armey prepackaging of them successfully took advantage of the media’s natural laziness.
Linkmeister
Try this one to the DeLong post: http://tinyurl.com/yjagsp4
morzer
I don’t know that anything comes close to Hannity praising the McVeigh wannabes. Don’t these idiots understand what a real domestic terrorist looks like? I’d like to believe that the GOP will fall off the cliff, but sometimes I really wonder how deep and nasty the right-wing currents run in this country. These days, the news looks like a rerun of the 1850s, with the same hateful rhetoric, the same racism, the same attempt to subvert the institutions of the USA, the same demagogues peddling falsehoods. Are we going to see people dying and being maimed because the right-wing can’t handle democracy and the modern world?
jl
The GOP advert written by Quale has some problems, IMHO. As for the Washington Post, isn’t there a ethical rule about clearly labelling adverstisements? I don’t see a disclosure at the top of the article.
Anyway…
“Like many influential causes before it, the “tea party” movement appeared on the scene uninvited by the political establishment.”
I guess Dick Armey is a fringe figure who never gets on TV, as far as DQ is concerned.
“Sometimes in politics it’s easier to recognize foes than friends, and this may be why Democrats have been quicker to figure out the movement’s potential.”
Quayle should have added that the teabaggers themselves are catching up with the Democrats at identifying very many dire foes, many of them other teabaggers.
“The tea partiers are concerned, above all, with fiscal matters and national security; they are not focused on the social issues that bring together other parts of the Republican coalition.”
A substantial fraction of them are focused on the most crude and frightened racism imaginable, which is a social issue that has brought together some ‘other parts of the Republican coalition’.
“If the tea party remains an independent political force in 2012, with no partisan ties,”
Remains? An independent political force? With no partisan ties? Really?
“This might not have happened if the Republican Party hadn’t shown the good sense to embrace the tax revolt, which resembled today’s tea party movement.”
A tax revolt that was also a corporate astroturfed fraud back then, or at least co-opted by corporations by the time the ballot initiatives were written.
“Since the very first tea party gatherings, the national news media has covered this movement in the only way it knows how — as something grubby, impertinent and possibly dangerous.”
This is wrong, the national news media immediately admired it greatly as a potential problem for Democrats, and gave it lots of free air time. I think, as a commenter noted above, DQ is confusing the coverage of the teabaggers with that for lefty groups.
jl
@Linkmeister: thanks for fixing the link.
mclaren
@Dougj:
You’re a little late to the party, but welcome anyway. It’s been clear since circa late summer of 2008 that the Palin-Beck faction has taken over the Republican party, and the only meaningful challengers to Sarah Palin for the 2012 presidential nomination will come from the contingent to the right of Palin.
This makes 2012 the ideal election cycle in which to primary Obama hard from the left. It’s a win-win strategy. Think about it: worst case? Obama gets nominated, the left challenge fails, but Obama gets squeezed slightly more to the left anyway. Best case? You get a genuine liberal Democratic presidential candidate, who will win regardless because the Republican party has gone batshit insane and whomever they nominate in 2012 will be somewhere to the right of Glenn Beck, so s/he’s toast regardless.
Group psychology clarifies the Republican mindset. Psychological studies of groups have shown that they rapidly form in-group/out-of-group cliques, with the in-group faction growing increasingly more extreme over time. See The defiance and defence of group norms: why extremism becomes the bread and butter of social life.
This explains the peculiar fact that juries often render verdicts with which each individual juror vehemently disagrees. What’s happening there is that each individual member of the group feels compelled to take a more extreme position than the group consensus, leading to much more extreme behavior when people gather into groups than when they act individually.
This pathological trait of groups leads to the phenomenon of evaporative cooling of group beliefs, first discussed in Festinger’s classic book When Prophecy Fails about the behavior of doomsday cults. Evaporative cooling in a group occurs when collective behavior gets so extreme that people start leaving the group. But who leaves? Typically, the most moderate group members, who’ve gotten fed up with the group’s extremism. Over time this leaves only the most extreme group members in charge, leading to ever more radical collective behavior by the group.
When this trend goes unchecked, it leads to eventual collective lunacy so extreme that the group disintegrates and/or gets broken up for perpetrating some kind of outrage — c.f., the Aum Shin Rikyo’s subway sarin attack in Japan. The Republicans are now well along the path of evaporative cooling toward a total crack-up.
I highly recommend the book When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (1956) by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, as well as Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements (1966) and the all-time bible of group psychology, Gustav LeBon’s 1897 classic The Crowd: A Study of the popular mind.
Also of interest: Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (2002) by Michael Shermer and Stephen Jay Gould, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles McKay (1847).
The behavior of the Republicans makes perfect sense in the context of group psychology, and is in fact completely predictable. Prediction #1: Republicans will continue to become more extreme, they will nominate either Sarah Palin or someone more extreme in 2012, and they will lose the 2012 election resoundingly. This will not lead to a return to the moderate center in the Republican party — instead, it will lead them to more extremism, and at some point in the foreseeable future, major leaders within the Republican party will be implicated in and/or arrested for violent plots against the U.S. government.
Prediction #2: increasing violence by right-wing groups associated with the Republican party (but that’s a no-brainer, we all saw that coming a mile away years ago — in fact, it first became visible during the Clinton presidency).
Prediction #3: the eventual disintegration of the Republican party as its brand grows so toxic no one wants to associate with it. We’re already seeing this with the tea partiers, who clearly don’t want to identify themselves as Republicans even though they espouse most of the extreme beliefs (birthers, climate denialism, black helicopter conspiracy theories, international banking conspiracy theories, identifying liberals as an existential threat to American democracy, “one world government” fears, FEMA concentration camp fantasies, etc.) which now typify the contemporary Republican party.
Yutsano
Keep the dream alive man. No seriously. Your magical unicorn will come to you if you just keep believing! I swear for a faction that has little use for organized religion, the amount of blind faith out of PUMAs for their ideal universe never ceases to astound me. Obama is not getting primaried period. He’s done what no President since Teddy fucking Roosevelt has done. If you think any serious challenger will knock him out of the 2012 race I seriously want what you’re smoking.
@L. Ron Obama: Fortunately for us this is happening very late at night. Less exposure to the idiocy that way.
L. Ron Obama
So was the article ghostwritten by Bill Kristol?
Mark S.
Man, there is some 11D chess going on tonight. Too bad the opponent is Althouse and not, say, Kasparov.
L. Ron Obama
@mclaren:
Early candidate for dumbest post of the year. Everyone on this blog is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Why do you even bother? Seriously.
As for Quayle, where the fuck did they dig him up, and can they please put him back again?
Brachiator
You have to go with the strategy that you have, not the strategy you wish you had.
It remains to be seen whether this frenzy of anger, fear and resentment will gain the Republicans anything in 2010. And you certainly can’t entirely dismiss them since wingnut craziness has risen to a steady level since Obama’s election and is entirely immune to rational discourse (which is excellent for the Republicans).
Also, what is getting lost in the noise is the degree to which moderates and independents may be unhappy with the Democrats. Between outright biased reporting from Fox and friends, and sloppy reporting from the ever-shrinking mainstream media, it is difficult (except for folks like Nate Silver) to get an accurate read of the public mood.
L. Ron Obama
@mclaren: also tl;dr
Linkmeister
@jl: Sure, no problem.
asiangrrlMN
And, I’m feeling this song right now. Just a fair warning to all the late-nighters.
morzer
There’s a non-trivial chance that you split off enough “progressive” votes to actually give the crazies a shot at winning in the general, especially if the “left” decides to create some symbolic third party candidate in its image. Remember that nice Mr Nader and that grumpy Mr Gore? I am a bit too old to move to Canada, so I’d appreciate it if we concentrate on keeping the ship afloat before we decide to discuss what color we paint the deckchairs.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Meh. Mostly boredom than any other real motivation. I knew there was gonna be an Obama bash in there somewhere and I figured getting its quills up sounded more fun than anything else. You knew I was gonna do it.
I say we stick Danny Boy in a box and send him back to Indiana. No return address.
Oh, and if I can figure out a method of shipment I’ll send BHF’s cake to you. It will have the hazelnut variation however.
Calliope Jane
Oh, Dan Quayle. So many, many memories of mocking him, laughing at him, praying that GHWB would stay healthy because a President Quayle scared the fuck out of everyone . . . . Sigh.
And now have to read his thoughts on the tea bagger extremists. Thanks a lot. But! I love his argument. Don’t let 2010 be like 1992! Remember 1992, guys? Bush-Quayle was never, ever going to win because of Perot! (is that how everyone else remembers it?) Certainly not anything to do with what GHWB was up to (or not – ignoring domestic policy, “read my lips,” Dana Carvey impressions) or Quayle, well, existing. Of course not! It was all Perot’s fault! And we’re certainly not going to examine why a majority of the populous wanted something other than GHWB, nope, not at all. And just look what happened! We were stuck with Clinton-Gore, and wasn’t that just awful?! Right?! Guys? Guys?!
Yeah, the Republicans are going crazier because they have nowhere else to go and no other cards to play. I’m irritated at the institutional support they’re getting — and from weird venues, too (really, David Letterman?). And what are they angry about, exactly? They hate the government, but want them to do something about jobs, and immigration, but want them to stay far, far away from Medicare and Social Security (whether to keep the government from touching it or, I guess, abolish it altogether). They don’t seem to like democracy and the free exchange of ideas or, well, Democrats involved in anything. That’s dangerous and worrisome and I hope that my faith in the American people is not misplaced.
And, wait, isn’t Quayle’s son running for congress or something in AZ? Perhaps he’s just worried about his son’s prospects if he does / does not go full teabagger.
On a happier note — some family friends live in a southern Arizona border town. Now they are very sweet and very religious people that have been very proud of voting for Obama after voting for Bush twice. And they’re just gushing about Obama accomplishing all that he has with all those “horrible republicans” in his way, especially on health care. Some 300,000 people in their county will be getting health care because of the Affordable Care Act, and that’s in part because of all the whipping, calling, and faxing that came out of this blog. And that is an amazing thing.
jl
Today’s Brooks’ column is pretty funny too.
The Ecstasy of Fiscal Policy
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/02/opinion/02brooks.html?ref=opinion
“The heart of the problem, you figure, is that unlike yourself, Americans have grown complacent and careless. For 200 years, they lived precarious lives. There were boom and bust economic cycles, devastating epidemics and natural disasters that came without warning.”
This takes us either to 1976. 1987, or 1989, depending on the three sensible starting points. So, Brooks must have written this in a hurry, right? Or is there some idiotic attempt at social opinion engineering here?
“These days, voters want low taxes — about 19 percent of G.D.P.”
What GOP leaders would be satisfied with this level?
“By that time [2020], interest payments on the debt alone would be $900 billion a year.”
Note sure if Brooks is talking real 2010 or current 2020 dollars, here. Let’s assume real 2010 dollars. Assuming 20 year average annual constant price 3.8% growth rate, that will be 4% of GDP. Will that make us Rome in 476AD as Brooks suggests at the bottom of the column? If Brooks is projecting nominal annual payments, the proportion would be smaller.
“it is simply impossible in a democracy to rewrite the social contract WITHOUT POPULAR CONSENT. Commissions are fine, but they have to be embedded in a broader democratic process.
The way to do that is to break free from the polarized committee structure. INVITE A DOZEN HANDPICKED SENATORS AND HOUSE MEMBERS and stick them in a room three times a week for six months.
After they’ve come up with a debt-reduction plan, have them send it up in SECRET to the presidential deficit commission, which President Obama was smart enough to create.
So once the SECRET Congressional plan is passed to the White House, the deficit commission can unveil THE THING AS IF IT WERE THE PRODUCT OF NONPOLITICAL EXPERTISE.”
That passage is an effing hilarious passage (caps for emphasis added). And who will handpick these Congresspeople, the mice? Broder?
Edit: forgot to say that I think some of the above nonsense is due to a late dinner parties this week to excess lubrication, or something like that.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Oh and just for youse. A pic of part of my flock:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44164793@N05/4483731180/
The little white cochin has the funniest personality out of all of them. Plus she has to run to keep up with the others. It’s hilarious to watch.
AngusJackBootedThugOfMeat
I for one welcome the GOP Tea Party overlords.
These people, a ragtag collection of nutcases, anger management class dropouts, racists, xenophobes, government haters, tax resisters, and malcontents, have one thing in common as near as I can tell: They are losers. They’re all a bunch of losers. And there really are not that many of them.
They have no particular message or unifying worldview, and the only thing they seem to believe in as a group is the idea that government is somehow out to get them and by Dog they are going to get it back.
They aren’t going to coalesce, or raise a lot of money for candidates, or do anything really useful in a political context. It’s seven months to an election. By this time in 2008, Barack Obama’s team had almost locked up a nomination that the world had already conceded to Hillary Clinton just a few months earlier. They had money and momentum. What does the Tea Party have? A sad medicine show out there on the road somewhere? They are ‘partnering’ with outfits like this, for crissakes? Crazy people.
I am not afraid of them, but if were a Republican, I sure would be. The Tea Party is a dead end. Go Tea, GOP. Go go go!
Yutsano
@Calliope Jane:
THIS!
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Nom nom nom nom nom! Yeah, I figured you were doing it for your own amusement. I love our little flock, and I love the big, black cock (cleaned it up on my comment on Flickr). Such a cute and happy little family!
@Calliope Jane: Your last paragraph is great to read. It heartens me to know that some people (including my brother) have seen the light.
morzer
@AngusJackBootedThugOfMeat:
I’d like to believe this, but the economy is still very sour, Democratic enthusiasm is low, and teabaggers are fired-up enough to do a lot of damage. I put more hope in people starting to see some benefits from the new legislation, especially seniors getting their $250 for do-nut hole closure. That said, I fear we shall be lucky to escape without at least one episode of domestic terrorism.
Yutsano
@morzer:
I was actually fucking encouraged by our normally massive fail MSM today when I saw CNN put up an article explaining in clear unambiguous terms how HCR benefited people right away. It was very well and clearly written, accurate, and with little to no agenda. Just straight facts news reporting. They can honestly do it if they try, I was almost proud of them. Almost.
AngusJackBootedThugOfMeat
@morzer:
Don’t agree. The economy is showing signs of life, Dems are closing the enthusiasm gap according to a new poll this week, and the GOP has painted itself into a corner of anger, bitterness, pettiness, obstruction, and alliance with just plain crazy people. HCR passage has awakened Dems, as predicted.
Screw pessimism. Let the Republicans have that.
asiangrrlMN
@morzer: I lean towards AJBToM’s side, which is astounding since I’m by nature a pessimist. Healthcare reform was a big fucking deal. The Republicans shot their wad, so to speak, and now they are scrambling. As Yutsano pointed out, the media is now actually reporting on what is in the bill rather than on the process. I’m cautiously hopeful that the Dems will slowly inch upwards as the Republicans continue to spiral down.
morzer
@AngusJackBootedThugOfMeat:
I’d be happier if the employment figures were showing signs of life. Without jobs, a recovery doesn’t mean a thing to Joe Sixpack. I prefer realism to unjustified optimism.
morzer
@asiangrrlMN:
I’d like to agree, but without jobs the recovery is empty – and if unemployed people see business as usual in Wall Street and for fat-cat CEOS, they aren’t going to be happy. In fact, a jobless recovery might even make things worse.
morzer
@Yutsano:
An accurate and honest article by CNN? About healthcare reform? April Fool’s Day was yesterday, mate!
asiangrrlMN
@morzer: I agree about the jobs, to a certain extent. Unemployment is flattening out, which is a huge improvement in and of itself.
Congress is tackling finance reform next, and Barney Franks was practically egging on the Republicans to fight FOR the bankers and Wall Street peeps and against everyone else. I think the Dems have a bit of steel in their spine, and I think it will mean something.
Let’s be honest. Most Joe Six-packs (whatever that means) aren’t gonna vote Dem, anyway.
Yutsano
@morzer: Jobless claims fell to 433,000 this week. In normal employment, that runs anywhere from 350,000 to 400,00. The economy added 130,000 jobs in March, at least that’s what they’re forecasting. February only sucked job-wise because of the massive sock of snow that hit the Northeast for two weeks. Oh and a huge number of stimulus projects come online in the next couple of months as the summer construction season ramps up. I also read that the vast majority of joblessness is in those who have a high school education or less. If you have some college it’s right around 7%, and those with advanced degrees are running near full employment. We don’t really have an unemployment gap, we have an education gap. That hole needs to get filled and fast if we’re going to be a job creating engine again.
Joey Maloney
@William:
Also, vice in the defense of vice is extremely funny.
Mike Kay
@Yutsano: Thanks!
This is fascinating.
Ya know typical news stories always break unemployment down by region, race, gender, age, even by sector, which are all important factors, but I’ve never seen broken down by education.
morzer
Yutsano, the problem with those job figures is that the Census is starting up, which means many of them are short-term. Yes, short-term jobs are better than none, but the figures aren’t really very encouraging. Sorry to sound like Eeyore, but we really can’t put too much stock in these figures. If we get some consecutive months of real job creation, it will help, but we aren’t there yet. I agree about the education gap, but it’s going to take a long time to close, or even narrow appreciably. Speaking of the NE, we’ve had truly evil amounts of rain, and Rhode Island got pretty badly hammered, with substantial damage and economic losses. I live in MA, and I really wondered if the monsoon had decided to relocate to the US.
morzer
@asiangrrlMN:
I sincerely hope we are going to see strong, publicly trumpeted financial reform from the Dems. It’s the perfect issue to pin the GOP into a corner and whale on them until the nasty little bastards scream uncle and promise to be good boys from now on. On a related theme, I have discovered that when dealing with the GOP fanboys online, an effective tactic is to ask them what the deficit was when Reagan took office, and what it was when he left. Repeat the exercise for Bush I and Bush II, and one gets a very satisfactory silence, punctuated by little feet scuttling into the distance. Facts can be so wonderfully cruel.
Yutsano
@morzer: You are being an Eeyore, but I refuse to give you too much crap for that. The simple fact is something could go very wrong between now and November and votes could break away from the Democrats in droves. Obama can’t hold a gun to industry’s head and tell them to hire jobs, not while the stock market wants its gains yesterday. I personally think we’d be much better off with some sort of ethical corporate governance rather than the laissez-faire crap that persists today. The notion of standing together or hanging separately seems to escape the fucktards on Wall Street, and I think Obama will make quite a bit of political hay out of all that yet. Just don’t think the game is over, it’s not even close. Hell two months ago we all thought health care was DOA and look where we are now. Chin up me bucko, we got good fights ahead of us yet, but we have to make them good fights.
@morzer: I use that trick too. They usually either attack, change the subject, or continue their rant like you never said anything. Then if you bring it up again they act like you’re badgering them. It’s the strongest signal that they got nothing. But you can REALLY turn the shiv in and mention that both Bush and Reagan raised taxes.
Grace Nearing
@AngusJackBootedThugOfMeat: I for one welcome the GOP Tea Party overlords.
These people, a ragtag collection of nutcases, anger management class dropouts, racists, xenophobes, government haters, tax resisters, and malcontents, have one thing in common as near as I can tell: They are losers.
They have two other things in common as well: Medicare and Social Security.
morzer
@Yutsano:
I had one tell me that Medicare D was enacted to avoid another Democratic fiscal disaster. I asked him how exactly Medicare D was paid for, and how specifically it was designed to avoid a fiscal disaster. An unbroken silence ensued.
asiangrrlMN
@morzer: Watch this clip from Olbermann. A Republican senator (Corker) said that Dodd’s proposal gives too much power to the consumers. Barney Frank responds.
@Yutsano: And ask about the budget when Clinton left office. That’s always fun, too.
AngusJackBootedThugOfMeat
@Grace Nearing:
Yes, and thanks. I forgot all about their breathtaking inconsistency and hypocrisy.
They have an ability to attract a crowd, but the crowd is just a lot of people like them. These are not people who can lead a “movement” to anything worthwhile.
Another thing that strikes me about them is that they talk one moment about how important the Constitution is to them, and in the next breath, they are talking like secessionists. I have a hard time figuring out what benefits they want to derive from being a part of the U.S. in the first place.
Mike Kay
@mclaren: face it, you’re an idiot and a moron.
The last time you did this, you, yourself, ruled out your two favorite candidates (feingold and grayson), because according to you, a Jew couldn’t win the presidency.
You still have no candidate. you can’t name one person from the “hard left” who could run. not one.
Bernie Sanders isn’t even a Democrat. Kuinich betrayed the Firebaggers and voted for HCR. Dean has the scream.
So you’re stuck with running Hamsher. I would suggest Grifter Glen Greenwald, but he’s Jewish, and therefore, he flunks your criteria.
morzer
@asiangrrlMN:
Corker seems to be entering the Bunning phase about 5 years early. That idiocy about “too much consumer protection” is a gift for the Dems, and it ought to be in every ad they make:
“You lost your home when the banks foreclosed. They threw you out, while they continued to play fast and loose with our economy. Now Democrats want to protect you from predatory banks – but the Party of No doesn’t want you to have “too much consumer protection”. Did you have too much protection before? Do you want real security from predatory banks? Vote for the Democrats, not the GOP. You already know what the Republicans will say:
“Hell, no you can’t””
Or something similar.
AngusJackBootedThugOfMeat
@morzer:
Hear, hear. I am for strong financial reforms. Laissez faire experimental banking and finance regulation is a recipe for disaster as far as I am concerned.
morzer
@Mike Kay:
Greenwald has his faults, but he isn’t a grifter.
Yutsano
@Mike Kay: You forget him being teh ghey also. Not to mention his other half is a durn ferriner. So uhh yeah Glenn is out on a few levels.
Mark S.
I’m curious if the teabaggers are going to raise hell about financial reform. If they do, I can’t see any intelligent person seeing them as anything other than Fox drones. Weren’t they madder than hell about the bailouts? Wouldn’t they want to make sure we don’t have to bailout the financial institutions again?
What will probably happen is they will blame this all on poor bankers being forced by the government to give out loans to shiftless minorities. Good luck with that, but kiss any minority votes goodbye after that (and this is before they start screaming about immigrants).
Yeah, I agree with everyone who thinks the teabaggers are a dead end.
mclaren
@Yutsano: Thanks for the hysterical name-calling. Since you denounce the scenario of someone running to the left of Obama in the 2012 primaries, this clinches it as a solidly sensible move.
Here’s a question for ya — if 2012, when the Republicans are going stark starking bonkers, isn’t the time for the Democrats to move toward the left…when is? According to pessimists like you, it’s never the right time to move to the left. No, accord to the self-deluded contingent from the DLC, Democrats always have to move to the right to get votes. Really? Then why didn’t the Democrats nominate someone to the right of McCain in 2008? And why did Obama win so big?
@Mike Kay:
That seems redundant. Isn’t “idiot” sufficient? Or, for that matter “moron”?
Let’s just settle on a single smear, shall we? Either idiot or moron. That should save you time and energy in typing.
As usual, the group at Balloon Juice maintains their usual high standard of discourse. Congratulations!
True dat. Consider all the trouble JFK had getting nominated, and he was only a Catholic. America remains a very racist and religion-intolerant country. Oddly, the racism seems to be abating before the lack of tolerance for non-Protestants in the highest office.
Actually, I can name quite a few.
Howzabout Barney Frank? He’s gay, but that doesn’t seem to have the deadly aura it used to, and Frank is clearly the smartest and most competent congressman on the Hill. Or how about Howard Dean? Ole howie could give it a second shot — that would be a blast. Or Jane Hamsher could indeed give it a shot, since Obama seems to have broken the color barrier for presidential nominations. Or Colin Powell could switch parties and run as a Democrat. Or how about markos Moulitsas? Or Bill Gates? Here’s a real left-field choice for you — Craig Venter. Don’t know his politics, but how about Guion Bluford, the first black astronaut? Or how about Steven Chu, the current Secretary of energy?
Face it — there are tons of brilliant highly successful super-talented Democrats out there to choose from.
Dean also has the cachet of being right about nearly everything. Great track record to run on. Sort of reminiscent of Obama voting against the Iraq war, which everyone back in 2007 assured us was the “kiss of death” for his presidential chances.
When you descend into character assassination, it’s a good idea to spell correctly the name of the person you want to smear. It’s “Glenn Greenwald.” And, yes, I would suggest Glenn…except that he’s Jewish.
Can you explain why one of the most respected journalists in America is a “grifter”?
…No, probably not. We now return you to our regularly scheduled wallow in the sewer of the Balloon Juice comments sections, replete with the usual smears and name-calling and utter lack of substantative discussion of the issues.
Brandon
The way elections are won is a simple word: turnout. Now you can either try to increase your sides turnout (voter registration, education, outreach and GOTV) or you can try to drive down your opponents turnout (negative ads, voter intimidation). Needless to say, you need not have seen Boogie Man to know which tactic R’s prefer. Legitimizing teabaggers is just another way for R’s to drive down turn out on the other side. I mean seriously, how many people do you think will be turned off by politics if teabaggers are driving the political discussion/the embodiment of our political discourse? And then, after once again poisoning the well, R’s will turn around come election time and say, “see, I told you Obama couldn’t unite the nation, the country was turned off by his socialism” or sone other nonsense, which will get their base all riled up. Meanwhile most folks will stay home because they are sick of it all and keep being told by the media that it’s both party’s fault and they don’t want to have to wait in line and navigate a mob of teabaggers intimidating people at the polling place just so they can vote.
I don’t know, the strategy seems pretty obvious to me. And really, why should R’s care about the long game? They’ll keep winning elections for a good decade using this same tired formula of driving down turnout and exciting their base. And when the time comes and they have to change, they’ll pivot just a little, get mass plaudits from the media and not held accountable for their past, as usual, and move on.
Moses2317
The ridiculousness of Mr. Quayle’s essay is well documented by the commentors here. It would be fun to pose some questions to Mr. Qualye:
Former vice president Dan Quayle will be online Monday, April 5, at Noon ET to discuss his Outlook article titled Don’t let the tea party go Perot.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2010/04/01/DI2010040102937.html
daryljfontaine
@asiangrrlMN: Interesting advertising psychology thing going on over there on MSNBC web site. To view the clip I had to choose one of two ads to watch; the choices were Bank of America or Walgreen’s.
I seriously wonder how many people voluntarily chose to give Bank of America eyeballs given a choice like that.
@mclaren: Without name-calling, I remember 1980, Carter, and Ted Kennedy. I also remember President Ronald Reagan. Forgive me if I regard your “modest proposal” with a metric ton of skepticism.
D
SRW1
Not sure that’s really the case. The Republicans have nothing much to offer in terms of ideas, so it makes sense to dumb everything down. They become competitive in that way, you know. The challenge in this strategy is to make sure things don’t get out of hand.
The other aspect is that this ‘teabagging’ will very likely abate when the economy gets better, but by that time it may well have done its job for the Republicans because it will have pulled the country further to the right.
Mike Kay
@mclaren: How dumb are you? First, you didn’t know Grayson was Jewish. Now, you don’t know that Barney is Jewish. Gawd Almighty. I have to assume you’re new to politics. Barney has been around for decades, everyone knows Barney is Jewish, the same why everyone knows Kennedy was Catholic.
Colin Powell is from the “hard left”? Don’t think so. Besides, he’ll never recover from his disastrous 2003 UN presentation on WMDs.
You are a puppy, aren’t you? You were probably in high school 7 years ago.
Here, this is what you said: “This makes 2012 the ideal election cycle in which to primary Obama hard from the left.” See, from your own words, the person has to be “hard left” and not Jewish.
You’re stuck. There’s no one out there, except Hamsher. And she’s never even run for the PTA, let alone county supervisor.
Ya gotta give it up. You are simply unable to cast a protagonist for your scenario.
jurassicpork
Shorter Short Bus Dan: “Blame the lib’ral media.”
Rhoda
@mclaren; Yeah, I don’t think so. Think about a democratic party without black voters and then imagine President Palin’s inauguration. Because that’s the best bet IMO.
Tomlinson
@mclaren:
I’ll bite. The correct answer is “never”.
I do agree that the republican party is pulling hard right. What happens next will be interesting to watch, but I expect one of two things: either the republican party fractures and the sane group goes center while the teabaggers stay hard right and continue ducking their black helicopters. This centrist group peels off the right leaning dems and you have a new, centrist republican coalition.
Or the dems move centrist and slowly marginalize the few remaining sane republicans.
In any case, there is an increasingly large vacuum in the center, and we all know what nature abhors. Actually, that’s not the case. Scenario (2) is already happening, the dems are moving centrist, even as the “most liberal president in history” (what crap) rules. IMO, this is exactly what Obama wants. Long term power is not going to come from either the left or the right fringe, and he’s not playing small ball.
Go ahead and primary Obama from the left. Good, I say. I really do want to watch that, in the sort of way it can be ghoulishly satisfying to watch the spring training game between the Red Sox and Boston College.
Uloborus
I have to say, I have no desire to primary Obama from the left. He gets things accomplished under very difficult circumstances, and he hasn’t got many positions I’m to the left of. I think Afghanistan was worth giving a try intelligently and Iraq’s drawdown had to be gradual. HCR? We *got* it. Most of the Bush executive abuses are being cleaned up in the courts where they belong. Stimulus? He wanted and asked for bigger and didn’t get it. Nobody else was going to get one twice as big.
And I think the idea of pressuring him to change is ridiculous. I would think the Rahm stories have made it clear by now that the only things he decides his positions based on are A) what he thinks is right and B) what he thinks he can get at the time.
So I don’t see a point to challenging him.
gbear
TBogg has a pretty good prediction of what will happen at the DC teabagger rallies on April 15. I feel so sorry for the cops and security people who have to work at this event.
arguingwithsignposts
@mclaren:
Wow. Put down the ‘shrooms and step away from the hash pipe.
BTW, Dean urged congress to PTDB.
There is absolutely *no* political upside to primarying Obama from the left. Which is why it will probably be the next meme from the Hamshers of the Left.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Yet another fucknugget explains that the big, savage dog is just an old softy once you get to know him.
I can hardly wait for the post-election “Why don’t minorities vote Republican?” head scratching. It’s always hilarious but this cycle promises to be chock full of comedy goodness.
Sly
@mclaren:
You’re faulty assumption is that the public would see a challenger from Obama’s left as preferable (read: seen as comparatively sane) to any Republican candidate who isn’t Tim Pawlenty or Mitt Romney.
I doubt that very much.
None of those people are both to the left of Obama and would pose a credible threat, that being defined as the ability to win at least one of the early nominating contests in 2012. The only person who is able to do anything remotely like that is Pelosi, and even she couldn’t pull it off. Plus she’s too smart and comfortable to do it, and recognizes that the hold-up on the Glorious Progressive Revolution has not been the President, but the Senate. She has done nothing but shower Obama with constant praise for almost two years.
The only people on that list who could theoretically come as close as her are Powell and Dean. Neither of which are to the left of Obama.
brantl
The republicans didn’t believe that the teabaggers were marginally smart enough to decide what they wanted for themselves. They thought that they would get to whisper in their ears and they’d follow like zombies. They were half right on both of those. The teabaggers are just barely smart enough that they’ve decided to pick their own way, and they are zombies, just enough different and just barely smart enough that they don’t go where the republicans tell them to go.
The Republicans have overestimated how good of con-men they are, and they have (just barely) underestimated the intelligence of the teabaggers (if only by a gnat’s ass thickness).
Ash Can
Dan Fucking Quayle? Really?
OK, I’m starting to think that the Tea Party is being seen by GOP has-beens and never-weres as a way for them to get into, or back into, the national spotlight. They’re grabbing onto the coattails of the movement in an attempt to save/resuscitate their political careers.
Either that, or they’re just batguano fucked in the head.
Bob
Just more of the same Christian victim mentality.
boo hoo, you are only the majority.
AxelFoley
@mclaren:
LOLWUT?
Yeah, you primary Obama, and if, by some miracle, he loses the Democratic primary, watch the Democratic candidate get stomped by the Republican candidate, as blacks leave the Democratic party in droves.
Keep sniffin’ that glue, kid.
David in NY
You need a new tag for this one. How about: “Republican=lemming”.
David in NY
@arguingwithsignposts:
Hey, I thought we frowned on punching hippies around here!?
tomvox1
What I love–absolutely LOVE–is this notion that “The Media” has been uniformly condescending to the Teabaggers, when in reality a lot of the coverage has been far too respectful of this corporately bankrolled, infinitesimally small band of yahoos. It was only until recently, after one too many racist eruptions, that the meme of “populist uprising” has been peeled away from the Tea Party. In another six months, they’ll realize they are actually the dying gasp of the revanchist ethos that has undergirded the Republican Party since at least desegregation.
The Eisenhower Repugs (if there are any left) should be planning a better strategy than embracing the crazies or they’ll need to form a new party if they ever want to be heard from again.
gwangung
Gawd, mclaren, this is just teabagger stuff with global cut and paste.
It’s typical authoritarian drivel, trying to change things from the top down, without bothering to build grassroots support or building the local mechanism to challenge the established parties. The time to build that mechanism is BEFORE you run a national candidate.
It’s empty wankering that shows you’re devoid of both ideas and the know how to put any ideas into action.
LuciaMia
Oh, Dan. Proving once again, “Beauty fades, stupid is for ever.’
Grumpy Code Monkey
@morzer:
Nader didn’t cost Gore the 2000 election. Gore and his staff ran a horrible campaign. It should never have been that close to begin with, but they let themselves get outplayed by Rove.
It’s the wrong comparison anyway. We’re talking about the equivalent of challenging Bill Clinton in ’96. Ain’t gonna happen.
Brent
The big issue getting lost here in all the accurate analysis of tea-party vapidity is that they are a highly visible movement which exist almost exclusively to voice anti-Obama and anti-Democratic talking points. It does not matter that it makes no sense. They are doing the Repblican’s dirty work for them and are therefore extremely useful fools. The media helpfully grants them legitimacy and populist status which lends their anti-government screeds (i.e. anti-democract, anti-Obama) another newscycle win. Since the Republicans have only unpopular policy ideas which have not changed since Reagan, they benefit to an extraordinary degree from any negative attention heaped upon Democratic incumbents.
Without the teabaggers, Republicans would only have the Limbaugh/Beck barkers and so for “regular ordinary hard working patriotic Americans” to come out and repeat their takling points on TV every few days is a huge boon. It poisons the well and no national Republican leader has to get dirty himself but point to this “grassroots” movement and claim they represent how “angry” America is at Obama totalitarianism, ect. I think they are a powerful tool for keeping anti-Obama resentment high and in the public eye.
Little Dreamer
@mclaren:
__
You never cease to amaze me. Have you ever considered that what the country is actually seeking is someone who is close to a centrist and THAT is why Obama won?
Are you seriously trying to propose that a Democrat to the right of McCain (?? who might that be?) would have won more votes because the voting public is not ready for a full leftist agenda?
While I would really like for our policies to be more left-leaning, the fact is that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Dream on! Furthermore, just because I want more left leaning policies doesn’t mean I want to see this country jump off the ship on Port side either.
Chuck Butcher
@mclaren:
I’m not going to call you names and I do understand a wish to bring national politics left, but a wish in one hand and shit in the other and what do you have? What you’re talking about is the most personally popular Democrat as President and you’re talking about 2012 and looking at today as though that is then.
To Primary a President you need political credibility and you propose to ask a person with that to Primary this President and put something hard gained at risk in a quixotic endeavor. To make any impact at all you’d need that President to be unpopular and the opposition Party to have imploded into craziness. The GOP will haul itself centerward in General Elections in 2010 other than the handful of nutcases they run. They won’t lose the teabaggers with that move – where the hell do they have to go?
Primary season is play to the base season and the base that comes out and does work tends to be more of whatever Party you’re discussing – especially in off-year elections. This one could be different, but who knows what is going to happen, not something to count on. When this Election is over you have a different dynamic than you had previous to it – however it works out.
I don’t know of anybody with enough standing to push the President or try to replace him that is pissed off enough to try it in a Primary. You also seem to assume that the President will continue on exactly the same course over the next couple years and that there will be sufficient discontent. A buttload of assumption based on not much.
There is a politicians’ calculation that you aren’t making, anyone from outside the “moderate” mindset that gives a damn also pays enough attention to know that they have nowhere else to go. Your hypothetical candidate would get a handful of protest votes and those would be ignored in the politics of the General because they’re going to vote “Obama.”