This bit of snotty stupidity was re-tweeted by progressive bloggers a couple of days ago, and it encapsulates the cluelessness of many of Harry Reid’s detractors:
This is typical of sniping we see from progressives who don’t understand cloture and can’t read a map. 82% of Republicans voted for cloture on the Civil Rights act. And here’s the list of majority leaders from Mansfield to today, with current PVIs noted:
- Mike Mansfield, Montana, ’61-77 – R+7
- Robert Byrd, West Virginia, ’77-89 – R+8
- George Mitchell, Maine, ’89-95 – D+5, but 2 Republican Senators
- Tom Daschle, South Dakota, ’95-03 – R+9
- Harry Reid, Nevada, ’03-Now – D+1
Do you see a pattern? Unlike the Republicans, who pick Senate leaders from safe seats (Kentucky is R+10), the Democrats tend to pick leaders from swing states, because it’s Democrats who have to hold swing states to hold the majority. This list of PVIs by state shows that Democrats holding the Senate is an unnatural act. By voting patterns alone, Republicans should have 55 seats in the Senate. Running better candidates, and tolerating pragmatic compromise, is what keeps Democrats in control of the Senate, and that’s why Democrats there elect leaders who know how to win in swing states instead of ideologically pure, safe seat progressives.
Here are a few more ugly facts that nobody wants to acknowledge:
By the numbers, filibuster reform hurts Democrats, since they are the natural minority in the Senate. McConnell’s short-sighted abuse of the filibuster may tempt Democrats into a strategically stupid move, since it may lead Democrats to abolish the tool that they could put to good use when they’re back in the minority.
The politically smart move for Democrats was to spend political capital on DREAM, not DADT. The Hispanic vote is the key to turning the red strongholds blue. Democrats already own the gay urban centers without the gay vote.
But, hey, it’s more fun to bitch about Reid, so let’s keep that up.
Update: I misremembered where I had first heard this Mansfield quote – I thought it was re-tweeted by a progressive I follow, but the origin is actually on Talking Points Memo.
dr. bloor
I propose that our glorious leaders rename the blog “You’re Stupid, That’s Why.”
Skepticat
Could but probably wouldn’t. It’s become only an obstructionist gimmick, and in general this doesn’t seem to be the kind of game the Ds play. Being principled only screws them, of course.
Just Some Fuckhead
Just FYI, anyone can tweet anything. It doesn’t make them representative of anyone except themselves. Thanks.
Baud
I find “nostalgia” arguments incredulous: “[Insert historical figure here] would never have put up with that.” They are meaningless and unprovable – and typically false; our forbears compromised on a ton of shit to get stuff done.
Villago Delenda Est
Sorry, Reid is still the planet’s most advanced invertebrate.
mclaren
And that’s only part of the huge difference twixt today and 1964. Back then, the parties ruled with an iron fist. There were no independent sources of funding for candidates, such as today’s 527s or progressive/reactionary Political Action Committees. Parties controlled the funds and dispensed or withheld them to force party members to vote the way the ward bosses demanded.
Too, congress had a ruthless seniority system, and the majority leader wielded incredible power back then. The committee chairmen could make or break a house member’s political career. Today that’s all gone.
I’m sympathetic to a liberal who slams Obama as insufficiently progressive, but let’s be honest…1964 was a different universe, politically speaking. In 1964 TV barely registered as a campaign cost, and as a result, campaigns for congress cost orders of magnitude less than today even accounting for inflation. Today, the corporations own congress because of the tremendous cost of running for office and most of that cost comes from the need to buy TV time. TV wasn’t even a campaign expense on most house and senate campaigns in the early 1960s — indeed, the first televised presidential debate occurred only 4 years earlier, in 1960, and was incredibly crude and limited by today’s standards.
Everything is completely different today. Seniority, the power of party bosses, the strength of the party hierarchies (back in 1964, candidates were actually picked by guys in a smoke-filled room at the presidential conventions: today, individual candidates have completely bypassed that process and the presidential conventions are mere celebrations of what’s already been decided in the primaries), the amounts of cash required to run for congress, party discipline — all 100% totally completely different.
There is no comparison between the political situation in 1964 and the political situation today, irrespective of the extreme lunacy and fanaticism of the Republicans, simply because of the facts on the ground about campaigning and the way the parties and congress operate in 2010.
Lolis
Reid had the hardest job of herding that group of ragtag “Democrats,” all who think they would be a better Majority Leader and President than Reid and Obama. The massive egos and colloquial interests that dominate the U.S. Senate is pretty extraordinary. I give Reid credit for getting as much done as he did.
Capt
“But, hey, it’s more fun to bitch about Reid, so let’s keep that up.”
Zzzzzactly!
Great piece!
J
This post would benefit from some minimal explanation of what a PVI is and means.
mr. whipple
@Lolis:
Agreed. All things considered, he’s been pretty damn good, imo.
moe99
I would say, rather, that if the filibuster is generally to the Democrats’ advantage, then McConnell’s abuse of it, has as a long term goal, getting rid of it, so it could not possibly assist Democrats in the future. I hate McConnell but he didn’t get wher he is today by being dumb as Jim Bunning.
andrewsomething
While I mostly agree with you, are we supposed to know or care who “Tigerz23” is?
burnspbesq
Umm, Damian, Mansfield had 66 Democratic senators to work with. He also had a Democratic President who had once been Senate Majority Leader himself. He also had some moderate-to-slightly liberal Republicans that he could reach across the aisle to work with. I’d call those slightly better conditions under which to move an ambitious legislative agenda.
jwb
How could it be strategically stupid if it leads the Dems to abolish the tool and so makes the Dems less effective when they take their place as a “natural” minority in the Senate? Don’t you actually mean that McConnell’s abuse of the filibuster, however short-sighted it might seem, is inadvertently a strategically smart move, since it may lead Democrats to abolish the very tool they could wield most effectively when they are in the minority? In fact, I think this has been at least part of the strategy of the GOP in abusing the filibuster: they want the filibuster gone but they also want to be able to pin filibuster reform on the Democrats.
ETA: Moe99 beat me to it.
Cat Lady
Can you imagine if Twitter existed in 1964, the tweets that would have come out of that Senate about Johnson? The n* word would have been the very least of it. The Senate majority leader could count on work being done with Senators preening only for each other.
sparky
@mclaren: be careful! if you start looking reasonable (as distinct from saying reasonable stuff as you have been), you’ll clog up an important outlet of “us versus them”.
otherwise, yes, you are correct. but on the other hand, the USA was good then about ginning up a war, and it is now too. who says the USA doesn’t make anything any longer?*
it’s getting pretty damn tiring to see this endless wrangling about stupid thoughtless comparisons and bad analogies. must everyone bite at every stupid remark uttered on the intertronz?
*is this snark or just nauseating? discuss, showing your work.
MarkusR
What exactly would we filibuster? We are the party of legislating, they are not. Look at everything they didn’t accomplish during the Bush years when they had the opportunity. It’s not like Dems were the Party of No during those years. If the filibuster had been absent for the past ten years today the laws would be much more liberal.
burnspbesq
@mclaren:
Almost everything you say in your comment is accurate. The one major inaccuracy is the reference to smoke-filled rooms. Goldwater’s successful campaign was an insurgency; he was anathema to the Republican establishment. See, e.g., Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm.
Joey Maloney
@moe99:
Cf. Starr, Kenneth, and the Special Prosecutor law.
JPL
OT..An organization called Humanewatch.org has a full page ad in the NYTimes against the Humane Society. I know it’s a front organization for food organizations but I can’t figure out why they are attacking the Humane Society? Crew has an article on the lobbyists fronting them but it shocked me to see them take a full page ad in the NYTimes. It’s the same group of people that went after MADD.
It’s on page 11 in my Times.
mistermix
@moe99: Yes, you’re right and I re-worded that part of the post. Thanks.
EZSmirkzz
Yawn
You guys are ending up in the same bag aren’t you?
Semantics aside, you’re doing the same thing with “Democrats” as the more pointed “Reid”, but it is still criticism, which has no useful effect if it doesn’t move the opinions of those being criticized.
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar remains a viable political analogy, the persuasive argument attracts more people than snark. As you know I am a purveyor of persuasion, and persuasive arguments.
DADT is a long running effort that many of us old folks really had to persuaded to accept, and then advocate for.
The Dream Act is a relatively new issue, since immigration reform was thought by one and all to have been a done deed under Reagan, (as well as Social Security.) The idea that people are qualified to bleed and die for liberty that they are not allowed to exercise says more about the morality of the American people than those who, ostensibly, are breaking the law to do so.
The idea that students that excel at scholastic endeavors are not welcomed with open arms into our society belies the idea that this society can fork a civilization, and punishes the children of undocumented workers for the sins of their fathers, something that goes against both our religious tenets, and the ideals espoused on the Statue of Liberty.
Politics be damned. Doing the right thing, just like education, is its’ own reward.
mistermix
@andrewsomething: Sorry, I updated the post to explain why we should care. TPM was going through some DADT angst on Thursday. I though it was twitter and went back and searched for it there.
cleek
@MarkusR:
SS privatization,
jwb
@mistermix: I still think you are wrong to call McConnell’s use of the filibuster “short sighted” from the standpoint of strategy. It’s only short-sighted if you think it will come back to bite him and the GOP. Otherwise, if you think it is short sighted from the standpoint of the country’s well being, I would agree, but that doesn’t seem to be what your post is about.
jurassicpork
So, Senator McCain, you were for DADT before you were against it?
eemom
this is gonna be a whole day of posts about idiots Monday-morning-quarterbacking* yesterday’s legislative events, is it not?
*this phrase represents the sum total of my knowledge about football. My daddy taught me it.
JD Rhoades
But they almost never do.
mclaren
@sparky:
You make an excellent with the “us vs them” mania that has increasingly gripped both the blogosphere and politics. A number of sociologists have done studies of this and documented the dwindling numbers of moderate voters over the past 20 years.
It’s thought that the increasing political polarization in America is due to self-selection. That is to say, that there are now so many ways for either liberals or conservatives to cocoon themselves in only those news sources and opinions which fit their viewpoints, that both liberal and conservative views have become amplified by this echo-chamber effect to the point where each group has become increasingly extreme in its views.
On the one hand we get Republicans who only listen to Fox News and only visit sites like Red State and consequently have a completely different view of the current state of America than liiberals who only listen to Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and only visit DailyKos and Firedoglake.
While it’s true that the Fox News crowd is significantly more misinformed and wildly more fanatical than the Olbermann group, both groups are constantly getting a manic drug high of outrage and self-righteous indignation to the point where they can no longer even talk to one another.
That wasn’t the case back in 1964 because the media hadn’t fragmented or personalized as they have today. Nowadays you really can use RSS feeds to craft your own personal version of the news every day, even if that means the Black Helicopter Global Warming Is A Con Job Abolish the Federal Reserve Return to the Gold Standard Shut Down the IRS There Is No Such Thing as Peak Oil news reports off the web.
I mean…back in 1964, if you went to library and asked “How many books can I find that tell me about the reptoids who live in the center of the earth and control my government?” the answer would be `none.’ Today, if you ask google that question, google will want to know: green reptoids? Or gray reptoids? And do you want a list of only the books, or all the YouTube documentaries and the websites and the RSS feeds about reptoids who live in the center of the earth and secretly control our government too?
mistermix
@jwb: I think it is politically short-sighted, also, because if the Democrats don’t reform the filibuster (and they probably won’t), the Republicans have set a precedent for abuse of cloture that will gum up the appointments of President Palin or Huckabee.
Javier
First of all, there are gay people in every county in the country. Openly gay people tend to be motivated politically. We’re the kind of people who are made for GOTV efforts.
Second of all, you can try and dismiss urban gays votes all you want but can’t dismiss their money.
Joey Maloney
@JPL: Rachel Maddow has done some work on this. Humanewatch is one of a slew of empty-shell orgs, all created pretty much by one guy, a Dr. Rick Berman, all more or less on the same template, all for mostly no other reason than to shake down the rubes.
Here’s 3 minutes of Rachel on the subject. And here’s another, longer (and better-quality) clip.
Bob Loblaw
Well, if Tigerz23 wrote it, it must be important. He’s a luminary for our times, after all…
It’s like the last few years never even happened. What goofy Panglossian bullshit. If you really think it’s more strategically important to preserve hypothetical minority rights in an outdated system, rather than just adapt and embrace the new parliamentarian paradigm that the Senate was evolved into over the years, I can’t help you.
Wait, I thought pragmatists never turned down the deal that was on the table in the short run? One would think that the passage of repeal would rather definitively settle which bill was the easier get, and therefore the only practical outcome.
somethingblue
@Baud:
Also annoying: “[Historical figure X] must be rolling over in his/her grave.”
Mnemosyne
@JPL:
They did some really good investigating a couple of years ago and proved that slaughterhouses were putting cows that were potentially infected with mad cow disease into the food supply, so the food industry is trying to ACORN them.
cleek
@JD Rhoades:
recently, the Dems have used the filibuster to block a repeal of the Estate Tax. they blocked the (anti-)gay marriage amendment, they blocked numerous odious judicial nominees, etc..
G Newman
Mistermix, your argument is flawed. The US before Gingrich (and even more before Reagan) had very different Cook PVIs; you can’t apply current scores. West Virginia and Montana were reliably Democratic states, as was Nevada for Republicans. Elections functioned differently under the legacy New Deal Coalition that even Carter benefited from in ’76, before white Southerners, who were initially pissed by the the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act were peeled off permanently by Reagan and the Moral Majority. And Mormon-influenced Idaho would never elect a Frank Church today, any more than a conservative and fundamentalist-dominated Texas would reelect a liberal like Ralph Yarborough or a New Dealer like LBJ. (Nor would the very-Republican Vermont have ever elected a Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders before the late 1970s.) Your argument is valid for the 1990s and after, with House Speakers Daschle, Jim Wright and Tom Foley, who all lost their very-public reelection bids. At least Nancy Pelosi can be a forceful progressive, because she comes from a safe district, and is cannot be victimized by social conservative wedge issues (like race, gays, guns, and God) that would rip away her blue-collar supporters.
somethingblue
… yet, oddly, never seem to.
(I see I’m at least the third person to make this point, but it’s worth making thrice.)
And regardless of which party it benefits, why shouldn’t the Senate operate by majority rule, as it’s supposed to? If you want to require a supermajority, amend the Constitution.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Unless we’re playing by Instapundit rules, I’d say that’s a sign some percentage agrees…
And, interestingly, the point of the ’64 law was, in fact, to improve an earlier law. And it got passed not just through willpower. LBJ was a good wrangler of votes — but, I submit, not good enough on his own. He also had, bluntly, the shade of a dead, generally-loved President who was known to be sympathetic to the ideal. MLK was still alive, and actively pushing for this. The March on Washington happened the year before, and was the largest demonstration in the history of the city. All this combined to create a media focus sympathetic to the process.
Add all that to the equation of a majority in the Senate, and all the powers the leadership had then, as aptly documented in this thread.
These things don’t get passed in a vacuum. A lot of people gave blood, sweat, tears, and yes, lives to get that damn bill passed — to get me some of the freedoms I enjoy today. Wanking on their sacrifices by misremembering and misapplying the lessons thereof is a disgraceful act.
mclaren
@EZSmirkzz:
This offers a perfect illustration of the classic modern liberal thought process. Modern liberalism comes out of the Enlightenment and presupposes that human beings are fundamentally reasonable and therefore amenable to reason. Consequently, liberals use facts and reason to try to persuade their political opponents (and undecided voters) to change their minds.
Unfortunately, as the last 30 years of American history have shown, this doesn’t work.
It’s worth quoting psychologist George Lakoff in the latest issue of The Edge website:
Source: “What beliefs did scientists hold for a long time that are now known to be wrong?” The Edge website, December 2010.
As Bill Clinton put it so memorably: “People will vote for a leader who is strong and wrong instead of someone who is weak and right.” People are persuaded not by reason, but by irrational emotions and marketing tricks. The human decision process is not based on logic, so fact-based persuasive arguments fall flat, or, as recent scientific studies have shown, actually strengthen a person’s incorrect belief when it is contradicted by the facts presented.
sherifffruitfly
My personal fav (so far) is the fucktard on Kos who thinks DADT repeal is a corporatist conspiracy aimed at getting more gay people killed.
http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2010/12/18/183749/51/296#c296
“Really, it doesn’t cost any money and opens up a whole segment of the population for exploitation by the eternal-profitable-war military arms supplier cabal.
More bodies eligible for the meat grinder. DADT repeal is a win for corporatists. Of course it would pass eventually, just as soon as the Repubs had extracted every drop of side-benefit they could from delaying it.”
hahaahaha – I laugh a little every time I see that.
Cheryl from Maryland
OT, but I missed the thread on the lunar eclipse and baby names for Suzanne.
Using the moon as a starting point for names gives you endless possibilities.
Phoebe — another minor Greek moon goddess associated with Semele.
In Italian, Coral can be the symbol of the moon because coral branches were though to evoke the points of a crescent moon. Or Astrea/Astrid — personification of light and justice.
Then there’s Clare — meaning clear and bright (and the name of St. Francis’ sister). For Irish, there’s Brigit (pre-Xtian spelling of Bridget), considered the Celtic counterpart to Minerva. And Anya from the noun aine, meaning brilliant, shining and splendid.
Best wishes for a safe delivery and a healthy daughter.
somethingblue
@cleek:
… until Obama negotiated it away and Senate Dems did nothing to stop him.
… but not by using the filibuster. Amendments require a 2/3 majority (67 votes, not 60), and the amendment didn’t even get a majority.
… who were then confirmed when the Gang of 14 agreed that the filibuster would be preserved as long as Democrats agreed not to use it.
Michael G
On the point “But Democrats *never* use the filibuster”. Let me add this from TvTropes:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TooAwesomeToUse
Back when they were the minority, the Democrats knew when they used the filibuster to block something the republicans consider important, the next day Rush/Beck/FoxNews would have started their hardcore whining, “The filibuster must be banned!!!”. Democrats don’t use the filibuster because they know they’re only going to get one or two chances with it before the media turns on them.
Texas Dem
Republicans will eventually get rid of the filibuster if the Dems don’t do it first. No way in hell the GOP would ever tolerate anything close to the level of obstruction that the GOP has inflicted on Dems. Either do it now on our own terms or watch a future GOP Senate do it for us. There’s no other way.
Downpuppy
@G Newman: You beat me to the loss of West Virginia.
Getting back to unionism & a working class that understands its own interests is only going to happen after megatons more shit comes down.
cleek
Dems used the filibuster to stop Bolton from being appointed UN ambassador (Bush eventually got him in on a recess appointment). they used it to block drilling in ANWR. they filibustered to force changes in the PATRIOT act, when it came up for renewal. etc.
Just Some Fuckhead
Crazy wild-eyed leftist David Kurtz of the fringe site TPM is certainly emblematic of snotty progressives that just don’t get it. Amazing how progressives always get the whip around here no matter who says what.
Texas Dem
Another point: The dream act was appropriately titled because it was just that, a dream. There’s no way we’re going to get ANY immigration reform as long as the economy is in the crapper and we have 10 percent unemployment. When the economy turns around, we’ll be able to push immigration reform again. Until then, it’s a fool’s errand. Better to take the wins you can get, when you can get them. Besides, the Dems now have a great issue they can use in 2012, when the economy will hopefully be in better shape.
cleek
@somethingblue:
repeal = 0%. Obama got 35%.
yes, by using the filibuster.
tell that to Miguel Estrada.
Davis X. Machina
@Downpuppy:
The US is the Saudi Arabia of false consciousness — world’s largest producer, world’s largest proven reserves, and its production is one of, if not the nation’s major employer.
U6 at 35-40%, might — might — do the trick. (Low end of the range for a Republican, white president. High end of the range for a black, Democratic president)
burnspbesq
@somethingblue:
Wait a sec: the estate tax has been repealed? Must have missed that.
mclaren
@mistermix:
This argument seems flawed to me. You overlook the huge differences in structure and temperament between the two political parties.
The Republicans have a huge corporate-funded slush fund controlled by essentially a handful of people like Karl Rove, plus a remarkably unified TV/radio propaganda network. As a result any Republican who gets out of line can be quickly crushed: Limbaugh and Fox News and Dr. Lura and Hannity O’Reilly launch non-stop smears while the funding from the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Foundation dries up and suddenly Rove and the Kochs start funding primary opponents for any Republican who deviates from the pure party line.
If a Democrat deviates from the pure party line, what happens? Nothing. There’s no liberal version of Fox News to swift-boat him, there’s no equivalent of Karl Rove’s corporate slush funds on the Democratic side to fund primary opponents or withhold funding from deviationist Democrats.
The basic temperament of Republicans differs drastically from Democrats. Republicans are natural authoritarians, so by inclination they look to a single leader and march to the beat of a single drum. Democrats are by nature individualists, so they tend to wander all over the place. Republicans place most value in tradition and emotional values like patriotism and loyalty, so all a republican leader needs to do is broadcast images of the American flag and mom and apple pie and the Republicans will fall into line to torture arabs or invade Iran or impale babies or whatever. Democrats place most value in skeptical critical thinking and fact-based pragmatism, so when a Democratic leader wants something done, the first reaction of most Democrats is to evaluate the proposal critically and propose alternatives.
As a result of these basic differences in structure and temperament twixt Democratic and Republican parties, it is essentially impossible for Democrats to exhibit the party unity required to make effective use of the filibuster. A filibuster is an ideal tool for an authoritarian group, but a group of pragmatic skeptics like Democrats can’t unify enough to make it work.
jcricket
The Senate is already non-majoritarian in its very nature (2 seats per state). Given that the Dems never seem to wield the same level of control over their members, as the Republicans, we just don’t use the filibuster as “effectively” (I put that in quotes on purpose).
I think if you 100% abolished the filibuster you’d see Republicans pass a lot more legislation, but Democrats would too – so things would change back and forth more than they do now. I can’t decide if that’s a great thing, but at least America would get to more immediately see the consequence of who they’re voting for, and I think that’s good.
Right now Americans get to vote for Republicans who make promises about spending cuts, but then never enact them, and can blame Senate procedure for that. I half want America to see what life is like under real Republican rule. Go ahead and try to privatize Social Security and voucherize Medicare. If they passed it, they’d get voted out in a heartbeat. Or if they passed something making abortion illegal, etc.
All that said, I’d 100% support some of the senate rule change/filibuster compromises I’ve seen where you eliminate anonymous holds, get rid of filibustering cloture, get rid of delaying tactics, phony amendments, etc. And force the filibustering party to sustain a real filibuster. I can’t see why all that would be bad, unless we think we’ll be permanently in the minority.
Shadow's Mom
So, first I offer up this essay on filibuster and cloture in the Senate.
Here are some things I would like to see that might improve the function of our broken Senate:
1) 55/45 to pass a cloture motion. This could still prevent some legislation from coming to a vote, but would allow legislation that has majority support in the senate from getting an up or down vote (DREAM Act might have passed under these rules).
2) Similar rules for intent to filibuster as exist to invoke cloture. That is, if you intend to filibuster in order to block legislation, then file a statement of intent with the clerk and produce 16 supporters of that intent. No vote needed, but put your name out there in opposition.
3) Remove the requirement for cloture on nominations and, in particular, remove the secret hold on nominees. If a senator wants to put a hold on a nominees then that senator must place the hold explicitly and articulate why.
Not perfect, not comprehensive, but something has to change.
Bill Bennett of Colorado, Tom Udall, and others will be putting forward a motion to modify senate rules for the 112th Congress as allowed by the Constitutional rule at its start
http://www.facebook.com/FixingSenateRules
Perhaps the time has come to lobby the Senate Majority Leader’s office and your senators to support this move to force greater accountability in the the way the senate operates during the 112th Congress.
joe from Lowell
What a freaking idiot!
Do you know why the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964? Because it had been WAITING for several years!
Davis X. Machina
@jcricket:
There aren’t enough non-mean, non-stupid people to provide and support a governing coalition all by themselves, so I’m afraid you may be right.
jwb
@mistermix: ok, that makes sense. Personally, I think the GOP strategy all along has been to provoke the Dems into abolishing the filibuster and into joining the game of polarizing rhetoric, because the GOP knows that, with the media landscape as it is currently constituted, the ground is tilted far in their favor in that situation.
angler
Came here to check and make sure BJ would use repeal to go up is down again against liberals. You did. Predictable. Yes, liberals pushed Reid to act. He acted. Would he have done so with Dan Choi shutting up and not holding Reid accountable?
Of corse you’re ostensible justification is a stupid damn tweet–a tweet! really representative–from TPM. Kudos for showing what thin evidence you’ve got recycle this crap, but c’mon.
What? They should have sat on their hands and not pressed the leadership? I remember a president saying “make me do it.”
askew
I think this video sums up the moronic professional left and their followers perfectly.
joe from Lowell
@mclaren: That was a really intelligent, thoughtful comment.
There really is no comparison.
jwb
@sherifffruitfly: Man, who is paying these people to come up with this shit?
justawriter
An interesting analysis, but I think it misses a few points. The main problem is that it looks at historical figures through a modern lens. In Mansfield’s day, many states were as dependably Republican as the South was Democratic, but it was for much the same reason. The states that came into the Union within a few decades of the Civil War were created by the Republican dominated Congress to have a Republican dominated bureaucracy. So if you were an ambitious politician, you joined the Republican party no matter what you believed in. The modern ideology based parties are a recent phenomenon. Mansfield likely had more Republican allies than Democratic ones.
In my own state of North Dakota, even the socialists ran in the Republican primary. The surprising thing was that often they won (see the Non Partisan League). When the League broke with the Republican party in 1960, we had a competitive two party state for nearly 40 years. Montana’s left wing was even stronger because of the influence of the United Mine Workers and railroad unions in that state.
What changed in the West was the Sagebrush Rebellion, which I am coming to see as an extension of the Republican Southern Strategy which set poor whites against poor blacks. Farmers were always a big part of the New Deal Coalition along with labor. They were also one of the first big blocks peeled off in the late 70s and early 80s when the right was able to drive a wedge between them and the environmental community. They have been chipping away at vulnerable pieces of the coalition ever since, most notably moving the hunting bloc away from the Teddy Roosevelt conservation ethic into the Teddy Nugent gun nut lobby. The progressive-liberal wing of the party to its shame didn’t fight to keep those voters in the tent.
Contributing to the problem was the withdrawal of organizing resources from the state Democratic parties as power and money were centralized in DC. Unions carried a lot of the burden of party organizing and in states where unions were weak, well, it wasn’t pretty. Meanwhile ALEC and other rightwing front groups have been pouring resources into the local Republicans and moving the party to the right at a rapid clip.
As late as 1990, Democrats had a dominant position in statewide elected offices in North Dakota, and elected multiple Democrats to state offices for 10 years after that. But without organizing resources, the Democratic caucus has turned into a fairly powerless rump with no statewide elected officials. Dems started to make gains under Dean’s 50 state strategy, but that disappeared after the 2008 election. OFA apparently has a state director here, but all his press releases have a DC contact number.
2010 was ugly here for Democrats. We lost Pomeroy and Dorgan’s seats and likely won’t get them back for at least a generation. Conrad may be a lost cause for 2012.
So I guess what I am saying is that there is nothing “natural” about a Republican Senate majority. We stopped fighting for every state and as a result the “natural” Democratic majority withered and died from neglect.
TR
@sherifffruitfly:
Jesus Christ, that is twelve kinds of stupid.
Someone needs to convince that loon that the best way he can stick it to the man is by building a giant paper mache puppet for the next ANSWER rally. At least it’ll keep him out of harm’s way for a while.
TR
@mclaren:
Well said.
Essentially, there are two different political worlds — life before Buckley v. Valeo, and life after. You just can’t compare the two.
LongHairedWeirdo
The goal should be to *reform* the filibuster, not remove it. Make it visible, and make it require work. Right now, it’s possible to do little-to-nothing and keep a filibuster alive, and it’s not visible. You want to be able to say “turn on C-SPAN and see how the Republicans are spending their time holding up (e.g.) unemployment benefits.”
And, since the Republicans are *only* holding up unemployment because they are Very Serious People with Strong and Sound Principles, they’ll be quite proud to let their obstruction be visible, won’t they? Because it’s a principled stand, not mere obstruction. Right?
Anya
@jurassicpork: Didn’t he make the same rant when Cole’s Senator was chairing?
McCain is a disgrace. If we were a serious country, this rant will be met with derision and he would be shunned, alas, he will continue to appear on teevee.
TR
@angler:
Who here is or has ever said that?
I recall plenty of progressives proclaiming “Obama is no better than Bush!” and stupidly vowing to sit out the 2010 midterms because DADT hadn’t been repealed yet, even though Obama had laid all the groundwork for its repeal six weeks later.
But hey, nice job attacking that straw man there. You really beat the shit out of that, champ.
EZSmirkzz
@mclaren: A persuasive argument has nothing to do with facts or reason, those are only attributes that some would wish to see in them. The Republican’s arguments are testament to persuasion although mostly lies and appeals to the emotions, neatly folded into Rayguns 11th commandment.
Snark on the other hand would be pointing out that appeals to higher authority are basically appeals to memory, and therefore illogical, mitigated by the fact that all logic is circular, and therefore, also illogical.
Davis X. Machina
@TR: Nuh-uh. Exacto knives. Adhesives. Solvent-based paints. And in high winds those heads can collapse on their puppeteers without warning, and with disastrous results.
I think you’re being very unfair minimizing the risks those heroes run every day in their struggle to provide us with a convenient shorthand for ‘myopic delusions of efficacy’.
See what a mouthful that is? ‘Giant puppets’ is a piece of cake by comparison.
Martin
Where’s the ‘Obama Took My Penis’ tag?
I’m still waiting for Obama, who everyone told me was bigoted against gays, to veto this thing.
TR
@Davis X. Machina:
Good point. Maybe he should form a protest sign with finger paints. “OBUMMER IS BUSHITLER!”
JD Rhoades
@TR:
I recall plenty of progressives saying the exact same thing because Obama had picked Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration.
It’s one of the reasons I quit reading some “progressive” blogs, like the GOS and Americablog, altogether.
I went into this from the beginning knowing that Barack Obama wasn’t as liberal as I am, so I have, perhaps, less tolerance for the OMFG WE ARE BETRAYED! howling that went up, literally, a couple of weeks after the election. I expect that kind of bullshit from the wingnuts, but I couldn’t believe it from liberals.
Dollared
@sherifffruitfly: I’ll double down on the Kossacks and agree with them.
What was less important to the Koch Bros, Halliburton, Boeing, Booz-Allen and Goldman Sachs than DADT?
DADT is like gay marriage and abortion to them – a great way to keep white christians fired up and voting for Republicans. But the core of Republicanism is all about disabling the credibility and power of the federal government, funding corporate welfare (defense) and getting the most money for themselves via predatory tax policy.
Obama has given them all that on a stick with chocolate sauce – lower tax rates, no rule of law, TARP, HAMP, THE ESTATE TAX GUTTED _ WHOOPEEE!!!!, no carbon tax or cap n trade, no union card check, higher defense budgets, wars continued, mandated purchase of private health insurance by every American, undermining Social Security, no Volcker rule, etc., etc. Did you see that he just agreed to not regulate dangerous chemicals, citing the weak economy. Oh – did I mention the failure to nominate liberal judges who might enforce the law against corporations?
I’m so excited – now 100,000 gay Americans have an equal chance to spend the defense budget, kill brown people, spy on Americans, and then retire to fleece the Government as contractors.
Ain’t exactly the Civil Rights Act, is it? I’ll save my party hat and whistles for New Years’ Eve.
JPL
OT Thanks you for responding to my comment about HumaneWatch…
The Washington Post article on the Humane Society explained a lot.
kindness
Sorry but I disagree. If they do nothing about the filibuster you are guaranteeing Obama loses in 2012 and Republicans will take the majority in the Senate in 2012.
The Republithugs were able to win this year because they painted the Democrats as unable to do anything (other than wreck the immaculate constitution). And Senate rules prohibited Democrats from carrying on a functional government. Yea, it’s self fulfilling from an ass backwards citizenry to reward Republicans for monkey wrenching government, but that’s what happened.
Kill the secret hold. Change the rules so that a majority can actually run the Senate.
Republicans will beat up on Democrats when they get the majority but it’s less bound to happen if Democrats show they can actually lead the country. So, yea, I disagree with your fear of changing the filibuster rules.
lamh32
Well if Manchin don’t “family obligations” as an excuse for not being there for the votes yesterday, was gonna get him some cover from Repub scron, then he was sadly mistaken. From TPM:
Joe Manchin Skipped DREAM And DADT Votes For A Christmas Party
angler
on CREAM, a ways back mistermix posted that hispanics should stop their national lobbying and instead follow the model of 19th cntuyr immigrants by building up local machines, electing lower ranking officeholders and generally pursuing long-term institutional strategies rather than trying to get congress to do something now. https://balloon-juice.com/2010/10/06/memo-to-my-people/
No matter what they liberals will offend. If DREAM had gotten more than DADT did likely we’d have the same post about needing to trust Reid and STFU.
As for TR, bringing a strawman ” no better than Bush” to attack an alleged strawman. Mistermix says stop bashing Reid and be smarter about politic. My points are twfold liberal pressure helped get this done and MM’s evidence is for some leftist emo meltdown is Reid after passage is bullshit.
Enjoy the win.
Anonymous At Work
Mastermix,
Actually, Chait’s commentary on the difference between liberals and conservatives in terms of compromise-vs.-hardline negotiations makes the filibuster the enemy of the liberals and the friend of conservatives. Shorter version is that liberals care about advancing policy goals and conservatives don’t. Therefore, anything that stops the Senate from acting is the friend of conservatives and the enemy of liberals.
That said, it is a mixed-bag for Democrats and Republicans under political consideration since the filibuster allows for good political cover for Senators wishing to be “for something” and yet not have to have that “something” actually pass. I.e. some bills will have 51 co-sponsors but will never ever pass due to the filibuster; should the filibuster be eliminated, some of those 51 would stop being co-sponsors.
Davis X. Machina
@JD Rhoades:For a certain kind of progressive, there’s a problem — you’re smack up against the paradox of the heap.
It’s a given that politics corrupts, so too all politicians are corrupt.
The only truly principled thing a politician elected to high office can do is take the oath, and then resign. But by the time things reach that point, they’d already had been nominated, run a campaign, and been elected. So they’d never be free of the taint of having run in the first place. One could, more or less deliberately, lose, of course, or having won the nomination step down then , far in advance of the actual election, but that’s still running — voluntarily embracing the System, corrupting yourself thereby….
The answer is, I suppose, that Obama should have resigned on Inauguration Day, because Biden has no soul to lose anyways, he’s so far gone in corruption at this point.
jwb
@JD Rhoades: “I expect that kind of bullshit from the wingnuts, but I couldn’t believe it from liberals.” How long have you been around liberals? It’s been this way ever since I can remember. So, yes, I’d hoped, but I can’t say that I’ve been at all surprised at how the left has proved that once again they like nothing better than a good game of circular firing squad.
xian
@Just Some Fuckhead: no, idiot, it was what the person wrote, not who he is. It’s not about *you*. It’s about stupid ill-founded comments.
TooManyJens
I’m not sure why we’re talking about getting rid of the filibuster, since nobody in the actual Senate is talking about doing that. The proposal that seems to have the most traction is Merkley’s plan to make the minority have to actually hold the floor while filibustering. Call it the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington option. The idea is to make it too painful to use all the time, not to abolish it entirely.
Dollared
@TooManyJens: And that is as far as I would go. The Republicans will take the Senate in 2012. The math is overwhelming.
The only thing that could change that is a major political event, like the president boldly declaring a vision for a revival of the United States and driving a nonstop
2421 month campaign to make that vision a new future for the US.Never mind. Just keep the filibuster as is.
Just Some Fuckhead
@xian: Yeah, it was an ill-founded comment by the mistermix of TPM if for no other reason than people of color were already able to serve openly in the military before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But mistermix decided to use it as an opportunity to attack and educate progressives about alleged political realities. It’s a recurring theme round here.
mclaren
@Dollared:
Regrettably, I’d have to agree. If you look at what Obama allegedly “accomplished,” very little of it has anything to do with a liberal Democratic agenda — HCR is really the only item that fits in that category, and, as you point out, removing all cost controls while mandating that everyone buy crappy private insurance from greedy collusive corrupt medical-industrial cartels and then deliberately weakening the insurance exchanges to the point where they’ll be so small that the premiums for insurance through a state exchange will actually be higher than regular individual premiums… Well, that has nothing to do with actual health care reform, and the proof is clear.
Take a look at health care stocks. They skyrocketed after the HCR bill got passed. If Obama’s HCR bill really was going to make health care more affordable, you’d expect the profits of every sector of the medical-industrial complex to drop, right? So medical stocks should’ve plummeted across the board? But they didn’t? Because investors realized that the mandate + no cost controls = the single biggest giveaway to private corporations in American history since the federal government ceded all the land around the transcontinental railroad tracks to the railroad trusts.
Republicans were able to block all meaningful change in the Bush policies except for cosmetic window dressing like DADT. Yes, yes, if you’re gay and you serve in the army it makes your life better…out here in the real world, however, the big issue isn’t whether your life in the army as a gay is slightly nicer or somewhat less comfortable… The big issue out here in the world is the U.S. government continuing to expand two unwinnable pointless wars in third world hellholes while relentlessly tearing up the constitution and using it for asswipe what with the president ordering the assassination of U.S. citizens without trial and without even alleging that a crime was committed, warrantless wiretapping, endless expansion of the war on drugs, endless expansion of the military budget et al. Not to mention endless increase in oil imports, endless increases in college tuition 7x the rate of inflation, refusal to reinstate usury caps on interest rates so people still get charges 35% interest on credit cards in the middle of zero inflation… The list goes on. Obama is giving us Bush’s third term with some nice cosmetic touches like DADT.
I didn’t man the phone banks for Obama and go door to door talking to voters and handing out fliers so Obama could give us Bush’s third term.
sherifffruitfly
@Dollared:
hahahaha!
“true progressives” yesterday: Obama hasn’t repealed DADT! He hates gay people!
“true progressives” today: Obama repealed DADT! He hates gay people!
Laughter really helps the Sunday morning hangover. Gawd bless “true progressives” for providing that in spades.
Woodrowfan
FYI, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 each received a large majority of BOTH parties. If you look at the breakdown it was more of a regional than a party vote.
NR
@Dollared: The problem is, Democrats don’t actually use the filibuster against Republicans. They like their powder dry.
mclaren
@Dollared:
What math is that?
If the economy is still down the tubes in 2012, which it will be with unemployment well above 8% at least and possibly above 9%, then historical studies show that the incumbent president typically gets turned out. Only one president in the modern era has gotten re-elected with unemployment above 7% (Reagan), and we’re talking about Obama running in 2012 with unemployment above 8%.
So there’s good reason to believe that the numbers show Obama losing the White House in 2012.
But the senate going Republican is a different story. That’s a bunch of different races, many of them not predicated solely on the economy, but rather on local issues.
Do you have any hard numbers to show us about the senate that would suggest a Republican shift in 2012?
Dollared
@NR: So true. I prefer my powder as a huge cloud of smoke, piles of debris, and the lingering smell of burnt sulfur. But on this blog that makes me a complete fool, as opposed to a true realist that would understand that it was God’s will that we have 10% unemployment and an ineffective president.
sparky
@mclaren: i was under the impression that political segregation is, as you say, partly due to the lower costs of segregation and partly due to the rise of single issue/identity politicking, not to mention the self-segregation of Americans by class.
also, i think (and no i have no evidence for it) that demographics also play a role. the number of people in the US in 2010 is about double the number in 1960. given this and the reduced barriers to entry into the discussion, i would expect disunion, thus, ironically, it may be that this growth has facilitated factionalism.
the upshot is that each of us are alone with our “selves”.
Dollared
@mclaren: pretty simple: Seats at risk in 2012: Demos 23, Republicans 10. Sensible optimists plan for a Republican Senate.
Davis X. Machina
@Dollared: MA and NV are the only remotely plausible flips, at least this far out, so it does look grim…a climate that sees Diaper Dave Vitter win re-election doesn’t favor scandals, however much they’re a sure thing, winnowing the GOP ranks much.
You Don't Say
@askew: Hilarious!
Dollared
@sherifffruitfly: That would be idiots, Sheriff.
I’m merely pointing out that only three things have changed in the past 30 days: the Koch Brothers have gotten everything – everything! they wanted, some short-sighted liberals feel better, and military recruiters have been able to relax their targets about 2% because gays won’t get kicked out (as much).
That’s it – our government’s funding situation is now worse, Obama has retreated on toxic chemicals, we still have fewer judges appointed at this point in Obama’s presidency than have been appointed since Carter, and the estate tax has been reduced.
Oh – and Andrew Sullivan is happy.
Super. I’m very excited about DADT.
mclaren
@Dollared:
While I’m not convinced that 2/3 of those 23 Democratic senate seats will go Republican in 2012, the prospect of a Republican-controlled house + White House + senate proves truly chilling.
At that point, it would be time to sell the house and move overseas. Do a Leo Szilard and catch the last train out before the borders get locked down permanently.
sparky
@mclaren:
oops!
well, let’s look on the bright side: at least everyone who is paying attention has discovered that they live in an oligarchy and not a republic.
Dollared
I’ll tell you what really galls me about this blog. I think most of the gang here are more labor democrats than most progressive blogs. Led by John, many of us really care about inequality and the prospects for our children to have productive lives and avoid poverty.
If anything, every person who feels that way should be outraged – outraged – by Obama’s sellout. The very fact that he sells out funding the government, setting us all up for Social Security cuts (that he has clearly signaled he wants to do), in exchange for 13 months of unemployment and DADT, is a perfect expression of how he truly does not care about the working poor, and the middle class.
Yes, we all hate Republicans. But don’t the people on this blog recognize how hard life is for the white, non-college-edcuated middle class? What has Obama done for them? And don’t tell me that he’s guaranteed that they can buy health insurance for no more than $15,000/year.
No wonder they gave up after 18 months. At least Republicans pay lip sevice to their concerns.
Just Some Fuckhead
@sparky:
It’s hard to escape that after the recent tax cut deal that will loan hundreds of billions of dollars to the wealthiest Americans right after the year long hysteria about how the poorest, oldest and most vulnerable Americans will have to suck it up and take a haircut.
jwb
@Dollared: “At least Republicans pay lip service to their concerns.”
More like dog whistles.
lol
@cleek:
The SS Privatization pushed by a Republican President that couldn’t get majority support in a Republican Senate and House?
joe from Lowell
@Dollared:
Is Daniel Akaka really “at risk?” Sheldon Whitehouse? Orrin Hatch?
I count it as 6 Democrats and 3 Republicans actually “at risk.”
jwb
@Just Some Fuckhead: The oldest at least voted for this particular haircut.
joe from Lowell
@lol:
Agreed. Social Security privatization is poison. It’s easy to win that one outright. That’s the last thing the Democrats would need to filibuster.
cleek
@NR:
actually, they do.
the difference is that the GOP has dramatically stepped up their (ab-)use of the procedure in the last couple of years. prior to the Dems’ recent takeover of the Senate, both parties used it at more or less the same rate.
the Dems haven’t been in the minority since the GOP made cloture a requirement for nearly everything. so we don’t know how they’ll respond to the new normal.
joe from Lowell
I can remember when the central complaint in the indictment by the disgruntled ODS sufferers was that Obama broke his promise to end the Iraq War. Until, at a certain point, the withdrawal had advanced to the point that even the diehards had to drop that line of argument (seen it lately?) and yet, doinig so didn’t alter their opinion of him at all. They just swapped something else into their bill of particulars, and carried on as before.
Often, that something was DADT.
So, I suspect we’re looking at the same old pose, but with a new answer to the question, “How has Obama failed you today?”
cleek
@lol:
whenever the GOP gets the Senate back, it’s probably not going to look a lot like the GOP of 2005.
Console
The only thing i’ve learned about “progressives” during the obama admin is that they care more about taxing the rich than helping the unemployed, more about having to buy healthcare insurance than SCHIP and medicaid expansions. I can understand being underwhelmed by DADT because DOMA is left and I see no leadership from congress or the white house on that front. But, that isn’t the reasoning I’m seeing. As far as I can tell, people are bitching just to bitch.
lol
@joe from Lowell:
The current line is that the withdrawal actually started under Bush so by getting us out of Iraq, Obama is just like Bush.
lol
@Console:
DOMA repeal isn’t anywhere in the cards. I don’t think there’s even 35 votes in the Senate to do it, much less 50 or 60. And the numbers are much worse in the House of course.
It’ll get struck down by the courts eventually.
eemom
@Dollared:
now that is just a stupid fucking statement.
What the republicans do is LIE to them to get them to vote for people who are going to fuck them in the ass, again.
And I have zero — ZERO — patience or sympathy for the tools who let them do that. Fuck “low information.” Fuck “most people don’t pay attention.” Fuck all those sorry ass excuses.
Every. fucking. citizen. has a responsibility, not only to vote, but also to find out the truth about what’s going on before they cast their vote.
And it ain’t fucking rocket science to see through the republican lies.
It doesn’t take political junkiehood or a life spent on blogs to figure it out. The truth is really pretty fucking obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together — especially, you know, when the SAME people who fucked them over in the first place are the ones telling the lies.
Once again: fuck that “at least the republicans” shit. It makes me furious.
jwb
@cleek: I think a lot will depend on how the national budget battle goes this year and how bad the budgets are at the state-level, where we have some really wingnutty legislatures and governors in place who are liable to do some really, really stupid things. There will be lots of attempts to pin everything bad on Obama and the Dems, of course, but that’s going to be a lot harder with the goopers controlling the House. If the states’ budgets end up being as draconian as I think they will be, next summer has great potential to be explosive in a way that will completely scramble the political deck.
kay
@lol:
I think Biden is more influential now, and will be for the next two years, so that probably bodes well for sticking to the timetable for Afghanistan, as Biden was the (very public) dissenter after the initial review policy. He lost that round but he’s better-positioned now.
The Biden Faction will have more pull. Probably a positive development re: Afghanistan, for liberals.
eemom
……and besides, WHAT fucking “lip service”??
Repeated the exact same tired old tropes they’ve parroted for the last 30 years:
Taxes bad!
Government bad!
Free market good!
Free market good!
Free market FIX EVERYTHING!!
how fucking stupid does ANYONE have to be to fall for the exact same lies by the exact same liars??
“No wonder they gave up,” my ass. “Lip service”, my ass. You’re as big an idiot as they are.
cleek
@jwb:
i hope so.
but i’m expecting the GOP to crank all the nutty teabagger stuff up to 11. it worked for them last time, they’d be fools not to try it again.
Kenneth
@joe from Lowell:
Do you actually believe he is going to withdraw totally from Iraq, any more than he wasn’t going to make the tax cuts for billionaires permanent?
How about the McSurge in Afghanistan, too? How many Afghans do you supposed have been murdered for the McSurge?
He’s just as much of a Rogue State leader and War Criminal as Bush.
El Cid
@Dollared:
On the downside, they end up screwing themselves over even more seriously because either through trickery of right wing and enabling mainstream media or sheer cultural rigidity & prejudice (i.e., white Southerners).
But people do that all the time in all walks of life, so it’s not in any ways surprising that they would do so in the political arena as well. It’s the bedrock underlying the success of retail advertising.
NR
@Console:
Yeah, it’s not like $700 billion is a lot of money that could be used to make our country better in any number of ways or anything.
Console
@NR:
Right because the GOP house is going to do such great things with all that new revenue in whatever budget they put out.
sparky
@lol: close, but not quite: the Bush timetable was faster than the Obama timetable–
guess who?
and of course it wasn’t a withdrawal in the way most people understand the term, as the US still has who knows how many bases there, as well as 50,000 troops:
NYT July 3, 2010
jwb
@cleek: I expect so as well, since the GOP clearly scuttled the budget deal in order to be able to have a showdown in the spring. I don’t get the sense that they’ve thought through all the moving pieces, however, in that the states will be going through their budgets at the same time, and if the GOP in the House is going into shutdown mode in order to cut whatever and the state then is looking at having to deal with that further cutback… I just think it has the potential to get quite complicated as they work to pin everything at every level on the Democrats.
On the other hand, it looks like basic services in a very large number of states are going to be hit hard, and state and local government employment is likely to take a big cut, which will likely undo any positive affects from the tax cut. Then, too, as the state and Fed cut, they will undoubtedly have to start cutting at things the corporations want or are paid to do. The corporations won’t be any happier to get cut by the GOP than by the Dems. This is sort of what happened back after the 1994 election, and the politics did not play out at all like anyone thought they would. The GOP has obviously studied 1995-96, but I’ll be very surprised if they have any better success this time around, even now that they have their media propaganda machine fully in place.
One further thing: I don’t know that a disruptive summer that scrambles the deck ends up being a winner for the Dems. For instance, I can imagine someone emerging as the leader of the teabaggers, pushing Palin and Beck asider, ripping it out of the hands of its corporate underwriters, and turning into an openly fascist movement.
Karmakin
@jwb: Yup, and the sad thing that it’ll work too, I think.
The problem with the tax agreement isn’t so much that it cuts taxes on the rich. It’s the framing of the agreement. If Obama put forward that this agreement proves that deficits need to be put on the backburner in favor of job creation until full employment has been reached again, then I’d by and large be ok with the agreement (although I still think that lower taxes on the rich is a huge moral hazard issue. One that could be fixed by raising capital gains taxes however).
But Obama’s stance that this is a short-term measure that will HAVE to be paid for via spending cuts in the near future, well that bothers me. Basically we’re giving the middle class and the upper middle class a tax cut, and it’s going to be the poor that basically “pay” for it.
The policy is a bleh compromise but I understand why it had to be done. The politics of it are a huge sell-out.
NR
@Console: Hello, non-sequitir.
NR
@Karmakin: Early reports are that Obama’s next State of the Union address is going to be all about the deficit and not about jobs.
If that’s true, enjoy this while it lasts, because even Sarah Palin will be able to beat him in 2012.
catclub
@cleek:
“SS privatization”
This makes no sense. Filibusters are done to stop popular bills.
No filibuster helps (as others have posted) the party that wants to legislate some sort of progress. The status quo is protected by the filibuster.
BTW: I predict that even though the Dems SHOULD get rid of the filibuster – they will not.
Lieberman will not support it. McCaskill seems to be that way too.
That leaves 51.
You only need to keep: Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Mary Landrieu,
Jim Webb, Kay Hagan and Joe Manchin, together as a force for progressive changes to the senate rules – easy peasy.
Who have I missed?
jwb
@Karmakin: I don’t think I’m as pessimistic as you on the short-term politics, because I don’t think the GOP has a good handle on how to force the issue to its advantage. Largely, this is because I don’t think there is a way for the GOP really to force the issue to its advantage: when it comes down to it there is little in the federal budget that can be cut without fairly severe political cost. Then, too, I don’t think the corporate overlords want a massive government shutdown. You can’t forget that the government is one of corporate America’s biggest spigots. On the other hand, a good portion of the populace is angry and getting angrier, and it’s that volatility that I think makes good odds for an explosion next summer.
catclub
@sparky:
I still give thanks every day that McWars ‘Walnuts’ McCain is not president. That is enough.
Just remember, Bush was the sane one (of the two wackaloons) in the White House at the end of his term.
He stopped Cheney from bombing Iran.
So if Obama is just like Bush, McCain would have been three times worse than Cheney.
kay
@sparky:
I’m going to call you on this, sparky, because I had a local organizing event at my house the evening after the draw-down was announced, and a disproportionate number of the attendees were 1. veterans, and 2. long-term Democrats. I listened to their discussion. They knew exactly what it meant. They follow the war, and they were expecting back-pedaling. They were pleased by the announcement, most considered it a campaign promise fulfilled, and they wondered why it got so little media coverage. They thought it was better than it was portrayed, not worse.
I don’t think you should assume anything about how “people” understand “the term”. They knew exactly what it meant. They’d been waiting to hear. They were pleased. I was surprised by how high up on their list of priorities it was. They were watching Obama on that.
I think you’re off-base with this assumption.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Baud:
.
.
You know who else found nostalgia arguments incredulous…
.
.
AxelFoley
@NR:
LOL, hilarious.
Davis X. Machina
@Console:
Non-sequi•
tirtur. Third person singular, present deponent. Cf. res ipsa loquitur, et al.It’s not pedantry. It’s my job.
Mike M
The original purpose of the parliamentary rule requiring 2/3rds vote to end debate was to ensure that the majority did not squelch the right of the minority to be heard. In a normal assembly, the chair puts the question to a vote once debate has been exhausted (or the time for debate has run out). But the filibuster in the Senate has turned the basic principle on its head, so that it can be used to block both debate and any other action on a bill. It is an anti-majoritarian rule in an already anti-majoritarian body.
The creation of the Senate in the Great Compromise was essential in order to get the original states to adopt the constitution, but then there were only 13 states and population differences were relative small. Now there are 50 states and the gap between very large states like California and rural states like Wyoming is huge. The population of the US is now so densely concentrated in a few states that the Senate gives inordinate power to rural, sparsely populated areas. There is nothing fair or reasonable about the original compromise any longer. It makes the US legislature high dysfunctional and largely unrepresentative of its people.
rikyrah
I think gay soldiers are more sympathetic than a bunch of folks who a lot of Americans, including Democrats, believe have broken the law to be here.
I wanted DADT done.
I was ok with the DREAM Act, and I think those Dem Senators who flaked out did their party a disservice.
Dollared
@eemom: I know they are idiots.
However, to win enough control of the country to help them despite themselves, we need their VOTES.
So somebody has to, you know, actually campaign. And fight like hell for them AND TELL them that we are fighting for them.
Saying they are idiots, and stopping there, is how we got to 30 years of national decline.
Dollared
@El Cid: I know. I am asking the Democrats to get good at retail advertising.
chaseyourtail
“This is typical of sniping we see from progressives who don’t understand”_________(Fill in blank with just about anything).
Progressive don’t know what the hell they’re talking about most of the time. Their ignorance and arrogance is astounding.
I still can’t get enough of this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNonphW3yJ8&feature=player_embedded
joe from Lowell
@Kenneth:
The withdrawal plan has met every benchmark in the schedule, and there is not even the slightest evidence that the administration has any intent other than complete withdrawal. And the tax cuts for billionaires hasn’t been made permanent.
How instructive that the example you picked as proof – making those tax cuts permanent – only exists in your imagination, too.
Now you’re just babbling off topic, because you have VERY STRONG FEELINGS. Seek help.
If I take one your hand-crafted, double-sided mimeographed manifestoes with the handwriting that goes all the way across the page with no margins, will you let me walk out of the subway station? Or do I need to give you some change, too?
El Cid
@Dollared:
A lot of people apparently don’t agree with me, but I’m still dumbfounded at the absolutely dry, alienating name of “stimulus” used to discuss the recovery act. I know it wasn’t its formal name, but, still. Anything — USA #1 WHOOT WHOOT WHOOT JOBS FOR AMERICA AND AMERICANS ACT. Just something which doesn’t sound like an algebra or geometry term for regular discussion.
joe from Lowell
@sparky:
The withdrawal date is December 31, 2011. You’re pretending that the date for the end of combat operations – which was met – is actually the date for the end of the American presence, and then pretending that having met the first benchmark is evidence that the withdrawal is not proceeding as stated.
That’s just grossly dishonest. You have to lie to pretend your position hasn’t been discredited.
brantl
Oh, sure, go back on the campaign promise on Don’t ask, don’t tell and “spend political capital” on Dream, that you don’t have the votes for, anyway. Just pander, don’t make good on your promises.
What bullshit.
mclaren
@Console:
Really, I don’t think that’s accurate. Let me sum up succinctly why so many people are outraged by Obama’s performance. A far-right conservative friend of mine sent me this email:
Dollared
@El Cid: Yes, I think the Original Sin of Democrats is that they’d rather be proud of their policy genius and their superior ethics than actually go out there, build a great marketing plan, stick to it, and out-demagogue and out-work the Republicans.
But they can’t help anybody unless they get off their asses.