A couple quotes from the comments, one that I agree with and one that perfectly encapsulates what I disagree with most.
President Perry will assure us that tax cuts are the best way to generate revenues for our nuclear war against Iran. And the GOP majorities in both houses will agree.
And you know what? I hope Obama loses in 2012. I hope we get a Romney presidency with Republican supermajorities. I hope you then learn the difference between sane and crazy.
Romney scares me a lot less than Perry, but a Romney presidency with Republican supermajorities would mark the end of American civilization. We’d get some form of “the Ryan plan”, some new crazy war somewhere to justify defense increases, the end of the social safety net, the end of federal support for science and education, the end of the EPA, the list goes on and on.
How could anyone wish for that?
And a president Perry with Republican supermajorities would be worse.
Linnaeus
There’s plenty of problems with the Democrats, but those can’t be solved by electing Republicans.
celticdragonchick
My spouse and I will be getting our passports this fall. This sort of thing was what we had in mind.
Paul in KY
My, you’re a perceptive fellow.
Edit: cetlicdragonchic, I’m getting my British citizenship (to be a dual citizen), so when President-for-life Perry has wrecked the country, off to mother Albion I go.
I urge anyone with a mother/father who was born a British citizen to look into it.
gex
I do not hope for, in any way, the new Dark Ages. But, were they to come to pass, I *do* hope people might put 2+2 together and finally come up with 4. Enough of this left says 2+2=4 (deserving a DFH punch), right says 2+2=6, so 2+2 must be 5.
Alas, I doubt that is what will happen. Tribalism and barbarism will rule the day.
Nied
@Linnaeus: Sure they can! Disgruntled Liberals and Conservatives agree: Electing more and worse Republicans will solve everything! How’s that for bipartisanship?
cleek
a Heretix ref?
no way.
Corner Stone
The president will “urge” Congress to take up a jobs bill.
When they return from 5 week recess.
jwest
This place is going to be a hotbed of depression when President Palin is sworn in.
boss bitch
Romney is just as bad as Perry.
dollared
So? My problem is that nobody has shown me how Obama and the Democrats have a strategy to win.
The war continues to be fought on their battlefield. No Drama Obama is No Plan Obama.
And no, it is not self evident to the American people that the Republicans are fucking batshit. 2010 was absolute proof of that. And no, the media continues to hide it from them.
And the continuing economic crisis will be blamed on Obama, with no strategy to reduce the criss, and very little by way of effective strategy on how to change it.
So thanks for sharing the nightmare. How do we wake up?
Davis X. Machina
I could reference earlier comments about cardboard boxes, bridges and sparrows, but it would be superfluous.
Never bet against stupid. Stupid doesn’t always win, but it always covers the spread.
And a mean-stupid parlay is as good as a cashier’s check.
someone
> There’s plenty of problems with the Democrats, but those can’t be solved by electing Republicans.
Unfortunately they also can’t be solved by electing Democrats. Say what you will, but I think the Tea Party has it figured out. People laughed when they sacrificed control of the Senate for their ideology. Look where they are now. Turns out primarying your own party is a pretty effective strategy, as many on the left have been saying for at least the last 15 years.
Yevgraf
I hate the GOP with a white hot passion, but lets be serious – a Romney presidency would not have hard core dominionism as its driving feature.
Davis X. Machina
jwest refers to a ‘President Palin’.
The name rings a distant bell, but I just can’t place it. I know it’s the answer to a trivia question.
Palin, Palin, Palin….. The woman who ‘won’ the Boston Marathon by taking the MBTA? First woman to qualify at Indy? The inventor of the process that makes Velveeta™?
Someone help me here…
Hunter Gathers
We are witnessing the birth a new faction on the left – the Emo-Progressive Cutter Caucus, otherwise known as the EPCC. No matter what any Democratic POTUS or Congress can enact, the EPCC can always be counted on to complain that what was enacted wasn’t progressive enough, the POTUS didn’t shame conservatives enough, and that they welcome, with open arms, the Wingnut Utopia. Because President Perry’s war with Iran and destruction of the social safety net will therefore be the spark that ignites the coming of the Magical Progressive Unicorn that shits single payer healthcare, causes the Pentagon to shut its doors and taxes the upper class at 99.999%. These people are beyond fucking parody.
Sad Iron
“a Romney presidency with Republican supermajorities would mark the end of American civilization. We’d get some form of “the Ryan plan”, some new crazy war somewhere to justify defense increases, the end of the social safety net, the end of federal support for science and education, the end of the EPA, the list goes on and on.”
And that would be different from the direction we are moving now… how?
RalfW
There’s reptile brain anger flashing with people like Emma. The challenge is that as they each feed on their collective, shared Internets anger, the condition moves up to the advanced brain, getting rationalized and turned into voter intent.
Indeed, even a Romny + GOP Congress (w/o super-majorities) would do terrible harm to us. Perry + GOP super-majorities could virtually end the human species on the earth. Really. It’s that crazy right now.
I’m sorely tempted to Godwin. I guess I am just by invoking the name…
fasteddie9318
Most importantly, I hate my ancestors for not leaving me a fortune on which to live, but secondarily, I hate them for coming to the US too many generations ago for me to qualify for dual citizenship. Assholes.
By the way, DougJ?
How certain are you that we haven’t already marked it?
Suffern ACE
@someone: Its effective if you can win the primaries and then the general. So far, all my side has managed to do in the past 15 years is drive Lieberman from the party so that he could keep his chairmanship in the Senate.
RalfW
@Hunter Gathers: Latte-hadists?
NR
If this “scare you to the polls” tactic is all you guys have for next year, you’re fucked. Because I’ll tell you right now, it is not going to work. People out there are hurting right now, and “the other guys are worse” is not going to get them to vote for you when Obama and the Democrats haven’t done jack shit to even try to help them.
You guys better come up with something else, and fast.
Nied
@gex:
Except it doesn’t work that way at all. We had 8 years of unrestricted Republican rule and while it was an unmitigated disaster, the public handed the same assholes power not 2 years later even though they doubled down on the policies that got us there.
I think there’s a real delusion out there that we’re supposed to win some “final victory” and everything that we want will be enacted, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s all crappy compromises, set backs and half victories. What a lot of people don’t seem to realize is once you get a couple of half victories you have a whole.
CaseyL
This is exactly the sort of idiotic bullshit that makes me want to punch DFHs, and I am a DFH.
“Heightening the contradictions,” which is a fancy way of saying “I’ll withhold my vote and I care alot less about what the consequences will be to other people than I care about how good I will feel about myself” accomplished great things in 1968, 1972, 1980, and 2000. How could it possibly go wrong this time?
Mike in NC
A nuclear war with Iran is pretty much a given if any Republican gets into the White House. These governors and ex-governors have as little foreign policy knowledge as Sarah frickin’ Palin — excepting Huntsman, who doesn’t stand a chance — and any one them wouldn’t think twice about hitting the Doomsday button if their neocon advisors (all of whom worked for Bush/Cheney) told them to. Rapture time!
RalfW
@Yevgraf:
I’m not sure I get this, but the important feature of the actual post is Romney + supermajority GOP. Romney may or may not be evil to his core – it’s hard to tell based on his abject panderism. But he wouldn’t veto any of the Repub/Teahadist awful that Congress would dish out.
RP
The emo is getting ridiculous. Obama, Reid, and Pelosi have accomplished far more for the left in the first 2.5 years of Obama’s presidency than Clinton et al accomplished during his first term. Even if you think Obama completely screwed the pooch with the debt ceiling, it’s simply absurd to claim that his entire presidency has been a failure and that we’re headed for the end of America. The chicken little routine is pathetic.
ppcli
@Davis X. Machina: Palin was the guy who played Dennis and Sir Galahad and the head of the Knights who say Ni, etc. in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Sarah Palin must be, like, his mother or sister or something.
AliceBlue
The MSM is trumpeting the debt deal as a “tea party triumph” but the rank and file teapartiers are not celebrating. In fact, they’re doing just the opposite.
C.J.
@someone:
What about Markos and the “more Dems, then better Dems” strategy? Did that disappear?
shortstop
@someone:
Yeah, works like a charm if you’ve got the votes to win in the general. If you don’t, just triple or quadruple the number of actual liberals — as well as non-liberals willing to vote for same — and huffily keep pretending your number actually exists.
WyldPirate
Sometimes, societies have to learn–even relearn–lessons the hard way. That looks like where we are headed.
Politically, the center of the democratic party is to the right of Nixon era GOP. Our Democracy, to paraphrase Mencken, is going to give us the goverernment we deserve, so invest in high quality water-based lubricants.
Sad Iron
@NR: Exactly.
beergoggles
The only way people will recognize crazy is if u give it to them. Reason and logic are easily overlooked.
Some vindictive part of me hopes the republicans win congress and the presidency just so their non-rich base can truely appreciate their policies first hand. Face it, cutting medicare just kills off the republican base that much faster. The faster they die off the quicker we can start rebuilding.
Zifnab
Hey, we’ve got a Governor Perry and Republican supermajorities in Texas, and our state is doing fantastic! No really, stop laughing. Everything down here is great.
slag
That’s very exciting. I wonder what it will look like.
dollared
@NR: They do have something else. They are going to blame hippies when Obama loses.
Hunter Gathers
@Yevgraf:
Bullshit. Mittens would spend the vast majority of his time trying to prove his ‘conservative convictions’ by enacting every single Wingnut foreign and domestic policy pipe dream just to prove he’s as much of a true believer as his VP, ‘Crazy Eyes’ Bachmann. Can’t wait for VP Bachmann to be at the head of National Pray Away The Gay Day.
kindness
Perry has been shown to be a Christian Dominionist. For those who aren’t familiar with this just think Christian Taliban of the worst degree. Same fanaticism & intolerance of others beliefs, just the Christian variety. A Perry/Bachmann team is truly one of the seals that need to be broken open for the apocalypse to begin.
j
And Alberto Gonzales & John Yoo on the Supreme Court.
Emma
Confession time: I was furious at the time I wrote that. (Nah, Emma, you, with such an even temperament?). But I am tired of watching liberals shoot at each other, rather than the enemy. Whenever something goes wrong, we find whoever ON OUR SIDE disappointed us and proceed to shred them. And then, we act all surprised when the enemy turns our own words against us.
I knew that the election of the African guy with the funny name was going to send the conservatives into a tailspin. I didn’t expect how much it would send LIBERALS into a tailspin. From the “Hillary wuz robbed” crowd, to the contingent that somehow heard a constitutional law professor sound like Malcolm X, to the ones that thought they had gotten a liberal version of George Bush, to the “magic ponies” crowd who seemed to think that he could make our whole screwed up system disappear by sheer force of character. And they are all shooting at him.
Not only does he have to fight the Republicans (which, for the magical ponies crowd, still control the House), to the Blue Dog democrats (which are the balance in the Senate) to a media absolutely in the tank for corporate interests, he also has to fight US.
Do we stop pushing? No. Booman has a good idea. If all of us in this blog formed ourselves into our own informal PAC and proceeded to apply steady force to the “Mr. President, the Bush tax cuts cannot stand” “Congress, the Bush tax cuts cannot stand” we would be doing something for ourselves and our nation. Instead, people are talking about moving to Canada, primarying the President, and voting Republican. (edit to reflect the stupidity of some of the commenters: or insisting that Obama and Romney are absolutely leading to the same place)
It’s damn frustrating.
fasteddie9318
@RP:
Isn’t DougJ claiming that if he loses, we’re headed for the end of America? That’s quite a bit different from the way you’re characterizing it.
Loviatar
@ 19 – Suffern ACE:
Don’t blame Liberals for this screwup.
Lieberman kept his chairmanship because of Obama. Many of us who supported his ouster were quite willing to lose the Senate for a couple of years as long as he was excised from the party.
But the go along to get along crowd decided to give him a choke hold on the party.
Ol' Dirty DougJ
I couldn’t disagree more. Fear is a great motivator.
Clever moniker
@Mike in NC:
I’m pretty sure that the R’s have swung back to isolationism by now. If they do anything big and wingnutty, it would be withdrawing fro the UN or closing embassies to pay for tax cuts.
In any event, if Romney or Perry has a Republican congress, don’t expect it to last past 2014–remember they actually believe their own economic BS, so if we’re continuing to slide (as looks likely) they won’t do anything to stop it.
freelancer
I have a song stuck in my head today. This sounds about right:
Zifnab
@AliceBlue:
That’s because the Tea Party will never be happy until they’ve crushed their opposition completely beneath their boot heels. And even then… they’ll only be happy until something goes wrong and they need a new witch to burn.
I’m curious to see how many Republicans hang on to their House seats come next November. How many primary-ers will become primary-ies? How many Republican legislators will even seriously support Romney for President (assuming he wins the nomination)?
The fault lines are pretty clear at this point. Boehner’s coalition is falling apart. I am not ready to bank on Republican hegemony in 2012 for a little while yet.
TenguPhule
Where is the benevolent 1st world country that will invade us and put the Teabaggers to the sword for our own good?
It worked so well in Panama, Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
What could possibly go wrong?
Davis X. Machina
@ppcli: Shit, you’re right. I knew it couldn’t be Michael Palin, because he’s not a native-born American…
After fifty, its as if someone swapped the hair spray with a can of Pam.
Nied
Also the whole “Romney wouldn’t be that bad, he’s a squishy moderate” meme that’s coming up lately really pisses me off since it’s word for word INDENTICAL to the reasoning the Nader morons used to excuse George W Bush. That worked out fucking brilliantly didn’t it guys?
Jewish Steel
@NR:
Sure you don’t want to wait til the Tea Party picks your kamikaze kandidate to make a pronouncement like that?
fasteddie9318
Is it out of bounds to suggest that any moderate Republican who runs at the top of a ticket with a hard-core Christian Dominionist in the VP slot, and wins the election, has effectively painted a bullseye on his or her chest? There are a lot of unhinged nuts who could see that situation as a real opportunity to bring about some divine rule or some such craziness.
andy
Yes it would. If that kind of filth retain the House and took over the Senate you can damn fucking bet he would sign whatever they put in front of him.
See, my only remaining parent depends on Social Security and Medicare, and when the GOP decided to put a gun to the head of the country it was like they were putting a gun to her head too.
I can’t believe I’m the only one who feels this way, and I can’t believe we’ll all forget by November either.
Sure, the President has been a disappointment- but look what he has to work with. You can all wish all you want that the entire GOP caucus drops dead of something lingering, painful, and demeaning (and believe me, I fantasize about that), but that’s not going to happen.
This really is a hostage drama- but the problem is that the SWAT team is due to show up in 2012 to deal with. It’s up to all of us to try and make sure that they know who to fucking shoot, okay?
TenguPhule
We need to run on the “chop a Republican’s head off” platform. I’ve been saying that for years now.
Davis X. Machina
When you have a political party predicated on the worst in human nature, you begin each election cycle half-a-lap ahead.
We’ve got the ghost of FDR. They’ve got very real FUD.
Emerald
@NR:
Wow.
So you won’t be helping out on the Good Side, clearly. We will thank you then for President Romney/Perry/Bachmann/Palin, who will be appointing probably two and possibly three SCOTUS justices.
That court will “interpret” the Constitution to remove voting rights from all our new brown citizens and plenty of the young ones, thus achieving at last the permanent Republican majority promised by Karl Rove.
And yeah, that would be the end of America.
Thanks NR. And yes, it will be your fault. Good thing you’re not scared.
ShadeTail
Who would wish for that? I have to admit, I’m pretty close to wishing for it myself. The only thing stopping me is that my parents and one surviving grandparent are all on Medicare and Social Security. But the fact remains that in a democratic republic, people deserve the government they vote for. Some people are just so fucking dumb that they can only learn the hard way. And if they’re going to continue to vote for lunatics and criminals who then turn around and stab them in the back, well, so be it. Let them get stabbed, then, and either they’ll learn better or natural selection will take its course.
Bender
Too late — Obama has already destroyed it.
shortstop
@TenguPhule: Tumbrels and torch-bearing mobs? I’m seeing the ad possibilities.
El Tiburon
Sorry to burst your bubble, pal – but we are headed this way regardless. The so-called Democrats are just slowing down the process enough so as not to get us all rattled up.
Check it out: see, we already have a new paradigm: when it’s time to raise the debt ceiling, then the Republicans will simply tell the democrats what they want. Say, reduced funding for the EPA or more ID in school. And the Democrats will say sure, just tell us what to do, but let us at least be able to fool the rubes over at BJ that we did all we can do. And there you go.
Unless, of course, it’s a Republican President.
I still don’t understand, after the past 3 years or so, what it is exactly you all are fighting for? Oh yeah ,that Heritage Foundation healthcare that saved a friend of a friend and Lily Ledbetter (with no enforcement) and some gay Judges.
Seriously, is it just me?
ONE MORE TIME: Your President and most Democrats in Congress are selling your liberal/progressive asses down the fucking river. HELLO?!? Is this thing even on?
Davis X. Machina
@fasteddie9318: The solution to that is to run the Dominionist at the top of the ticket — especially if he has good hair.
aimai
I’ll pick the guy who is at least trying to do the right thing, although failing, over the Republicans who are actively trying to destroy us. I think that’s pretty straightforward.
aimai
aimai
I’ll pick the guy who is at least trying to do the right thing, although failing, over the Republicans who are actively trying to destroy us. I think that’s pretty straightforward.
aimai
Luthe
@NR:
What the F*** has Obama done so far?
Now that that’s out of the way, a simple way to explain to your friends and neighbors who to vote for. There is the Party of the Weak and the Party of the Crazy. The Party of the Weak is, admittedly, sucky, but they manage to flail their way toward things that benefit the common good eventually. The Party of the Crazy, on the other hand, could give a fuck about the common good and is in fact trying to work against it at every turn. They want forced pregnancies, seniors starving in the streets, and working conditions that are only slightly better than those in a Chinese coal mine. The only thing that stops them is the flailing of the Party of the Weak.
So, while the choices are not great, the Party of the Weak is still the better option. With it, the future improves, while without it, we all go down in flames.
Linnaeus
@someone:
Depends on the context, i.e., the particular office, the issues driving the election, the record of the incumbent, etc. Let’s not forget that the Tea Party had an infrastructure behind it (both directly and indirectly) that was largely obscured by most media coverage. This infrastructure has been built up over the past 40 years, so it’s going to take some serious effort to counter that.
So, I’d say, a significant part of strengthening the left-liberal/progressive project is to build progressive institutions that are independent of a particular party or candidate (as well as improve the ones that already exist). The work they do won’t show immediate results, but it will pay off.
trollhattan
After four years driving around with my dog caged atop my car, I’d tire of a Romney presidency.
On the plus side, a year’s food supply stashed away by everyone will be excellent news for the farm belt.
lldoyle
The power to appoint judges and justices, standing alone, makes it clear that electing a Republican would be a much worse disaster. Pretending that isn’t an issue is to sound a lot like Ralph Nader in 2000.
The fact that Obama hasn’t gotten nearly enough of his appointees seated, is not the point. A GOP president will in fact seat a bunch of judges, and we won’t like any of them.
I’m not much of a fan of the “lose now to win later” attitude/strategy.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Your words have spoken to me. There is nothing more important than President Obama’s re-election. His prestige and career are in our hands – let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work!
.
.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
Funny, it always works for the Republicans. They get their voters to the polls by telling them that Democrats are going to kill Medicare/force everyone to have an abortion/make sharia law the law of the land.
Aren’t you the one always telling us we need to emulate Republican tactics? So why are you now trying to claim that fear doesn’t motivate people to vote when we see how well it’s worked for the other side for the past 40 years?
shortstop
@Davis X. Machina:
Cannot be said often enough*.
*Decidedly not snark.
Davis X. Machina
@Zifnab: 59 of 87 House GOP freshmen voted for the debt deal.
El Tiburon
You know, we may lose a generation, but it seems to me the only cure for this disease is to let it run its course and hopefully the majority of Americans will realize (once again) how fucked the Republicans are and be done with them.
Also, too – maybe we won’t settle on some centrist, moderate Republican and his Audacity of Hope.
RP
@fasteddie9318: I wasn’t trying to lump doug in with the emo, chicken little crowd.
patrick
some of us are demoralized to the point that a bullet in the head is preferable to death by 1000 papercuts….
and our liberal triumphs of this administration? like an inadequate stimulus that was 50% tax cuts? extension of budget busting tax cuts? health insurance reform that doesn’t address the root of the problem, and is a huge windfall for the for-profit insurance and drug industries? we’re all destined to economic surfdom, but hey, gays can serve openly in the military…..
Clever moniker
According to 538’s twitter feed, something like 63% of Democrats support the deal, so there isn’t really that much circular firing squad going on (though the fact that 63% support such a patently awful deal is depressing in its own right).
Nied
@Loviatar:
Now this is a bit of tactical brilliance right here! Sure we would have had to water down the Stimulus even more to get another Republican vote in the senate if we got one at all, sure we would have traded a compromised HCR bill in for no HCR bill at all, and sure gay and lesbians would continue to be drummed out of the military for being who they are, but we sure would have stuck it to that asshole Lieberman! Totally worth it!
Jim Pharo
Here’s what I’m not clear on. How is this:
“some form of “the Ryan plan”, some new crazy war somewhere to justify defense increases, the end of the social safety net, the end of federal support for science and education, the end of the EPA, ”
different than where we will be in November, 2012? Or January 2013? We already have our shiny new war, our social safety net is already in tatters and getting worse, the EPA is square on the chopping block…
It seems to me that the Dems have already lost because they are not able to persuade adequate numbers of Americans of the right-ness of their positions. Despite all our efforts for many years, we seem to be losing ground rapidly in the battle for public opinion.
Lincoln was right that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Unfortunately, in our current environment, that means that the GOP is going to win.
I’m also looking to pack bags and get out. My wife’s family may have enough UK roots to get us there. Otherwise, I’m having a hard time finding a place we can live legally…
Gang, this play is over. Our side didn’t win.
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
Name a country where that has ever happened without a massive loss of life. Just one. Or is this one of those “American exceptionalism” things where you’re convinced we’re the one country who won’t have to have a Reign of Terror or Cultural Revolution first because we’re just that awesome?
dan
I think at this point, the decision is between “slowly” degenerating to the “end of american civilization” or going at a faster rate. Im generally shocked at the attitudes expressed here. The democratic party is not a life line. They are complicit. just because they want to choke you out slowly rather than cutting off your head does not make them the better option. and for those so worried about a potential romney or perry administration and their potential “aggression” have you paid any attention at all to what Barry and the O’s have done? Its literally the third term of Dubya and people on this site are girding their loins for what MAY come? sheeeit
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@patrick: please, with the suicide bullshit
NR
@Emerald: Right. When (and yes, I do mean when) Obama loses next year, it’ll all be my fault. It’ll have nothing to do with 9+% unemployment, an economy in the shitter, or Obama letting the teabaggers fuck things up even more. No, I, in my omnipotence, will single-handedly cause Obama’s defeat and bring on the Rapture. Or something.
God, you’re a fucking simpleton.
Blue Neponset
President Romney won’t be as bad as you think. He isn’t a teabagger, and once he has the job he won’t be beholden to the crazies. The bad news is he will be very beholden to the big money wing of the Republican party.
Either way, after the events of this past week I am pretty sure we will find out what kind of President Romney will be in Jan 2013.
I hope Obama enjoys the lecture circuit. He is still a relatively young man so he will have a long time to think about why he lost.
Davis X. Machina
Year Zero.
Danny
If someone want one more silver lining, remind yourself that no substantial cuts will happen before 2013 and most of it is after 2015. Depending on the future political situation (and the fiscal one) there’s not much in the deal that can’t be changed by future legislation.
someone
@RP: I have to disagree. Not that I think highly of Clinton but the FMLA was a bigger victory for the left than anything Obama has passed as was the OBRA-93.
Nutella
@NR:
I sure as hell don’t want to see a Republican win but I’ll be damned if I’ll cheer for getting dumped on by Democrats. I just got a call from OFA asking me to contribute and told them that when Obama said he was willing to cut Social Security he lost my support.
I do want to support people who are doing the right thing and I haven’t given up in despair. Finding people doing the right thing is tough these days but we all need to try rather than give up.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Clever moniker:
Did they say why the supported it? Did they support it because they like it, or because it was better than going into default, or because it prevented us from going into default and it actually screws with the Republicans (choose tax increases or military spending cuts).
kth
We had all three branches controlled by teabaggers from 2003-2007, and while it was one fuck-up after another it was not the end of civilization. The current teabaggers are no different, voted for Bush, Frist, DeLay and the rest in droves, and to believe otherwise is to give credence to their rebranding campaign.
Divided government is essential to the teabaggers aims, as they need bipartisan cover to make anything stick that is really radical. But the Dems won’t go along with anything radical, so that really reduces the teabaggers to monkey-wrenching. The post-Civil Rights Act electoral cycle in a nutshell.
General Stuck
Here is my prediction. Obama’s approvals will go up after this agreement, and his stock with white swing votes will go up as well. And he will be inoculated from the “tax and spend” liberal card the wingnuts always use on dems with great success.
The House GOP, will continue to do crazy shit, and pass crazy bills that will die in the senate, or get vetoed, and they will look exceedingly more extreme, but they won’t stick out their necks again with a debt ceiling raise, and if they defund and shut down the US government, they will be creamed in the general election. They have played that card and got little of what they were after. If they play it again, and I don’t think they will, Obama will paint them as the seditious psychopaths they are.
Obama wins reelection, largely from dems uniting, except for the whiny progressive brats, who are few in number. Albeit it loud
Dems unite under the protect medicare and SS flag, as the wingers continue to hump that third rail to destroy entitlements, mainstream, moderate and conservative dems. And the leftist whackadoodle sliver of the dem base will play an important role from Obama ignoring them, as he moves to the center, like all presidents do for a second term campaign
The mythical hordes of progs will go on the blogs and write stupid shit, like they do now, but upped to eleventy. And make themselves out to be even more of a screaching platoon of left wing nutters. I fully expect Greenwald to claw his own eyes out, and Jane to stage fake burnings at her stake.
Write in on a rock. or save this comment, then watch, and learn. Stuck out, for now.
Davis X. Machina
A selection of Senate nays —
…Menendez (D-NJ)
Merkley (D-OR)
Moran (R-KS)
Nelson (D-NE)
Paul (R-KY)
Rubio (R-FL)
Sanders (I-VT)
Sessions (R-AL)…
Ben Nelson, hanging tough for social democracy.
fasteddie9318
@Blue Neponset:
Once he has the job he won’t care about winning reelection?
NR
@Mnemosyne: Fear is a great motivator–for a certain segment of the population.
But guess what? That segment is never going to vote for a Democrat anyway.
When you’re talking about someone who’s been unemployed for two years and is in danger of losing his home and seeing his family put out on the street, “The other guys are worse” isn’t going to carry much weight.
But hey, it looks like that’s all you guys have. So I guess we’ll see next year which of us is right.
tomvox1
The phrase “nose to spite your face” springs to mind.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Nutella: And what cuts did he propose for Social Security?
gex
@Nied: I wasn’t saying it works that way or worked that way. I’m just saying what I would hope for when the right completely breaks the country. I can hope. I even acknowledged the more likely scenario.
steve
For a sizable chunk of the Bush II presidency, the Republicans controlled every branch of government. Throughout this entire period they behaved like a persecuted minority; everything that was wrong with the country was the fault of those evil liberals who were sabotaging and undermining everything.
If we get a GOP president and GOP congressional majorities in both houses in 2012, I don’t expect things to be any different from the last time they were in the driver’s seat. Everything will be a godawful mess and it will all be blamed on the Democrats. Nobody on the right will have buyer’s remorse; their reaction will be, hey, we have to elect even MORE Republicans.
dan
Jim Pharo is 100% right.
Poopyman
Romney needs somebody beside him telling him what to think. All the worst Republican operatives can see this and are already jockying for position. My money is on David Addington pulling a Cheney and getting the VP slot.
Danny
@Loviatar:
I answered you on ARRA and PPACA in that old thread btw. CliffNotes is that I don’t see how guys like you manage to pass yourself off as “progressives”. It’s obvious you don’t know what a progressive is.
Not trying to pick a fight, just my earnest opinion.
Lolis
So now Yahoo Finance has articles about how austerity is bad and will hurt the economy. Maybe Obama’s secret plan is by endorsing austerity it will cause the media and some opponents to shun austerity. If only … But, seriously, wtf with our media? They push RW talking points and now have gone all lefty when it is too late to influence public opinion.
Mike Goetz
“economic surfdom”
Hang ten, dude!
Elizabelle
This looks like a good thread to skip.
shortstop
@El Tiburon:
Kee-rist. Keep pretending that the results of the whole thing going up in flames–which brings us to the next stage of horrific; there is no “running its course” except in fantasyland–will be the citizenry sitting up, shaking itself off and crying, “Now I see the liberal light!” It’s going to be so awesome when America says it’s really, really sorry it wouldn’t listen to you! Hell, no, there won’t be any reaching for authoritarian institutions in the middle of chaos. There won’t be any doubling down on the worst of human instincts: blaming the poor, brown, immigrant, gay, female, etc. populations and ratcheting up the economic scapegoating. I mean, it can’t go much lower than it is now, right?
Go for it! History bears you out, except for the “bearing you out” part.
And you call us naive and self-deluding.
Jewish Steel
@General Stuck:
It’s campaign time. If you aren’t seeing through this prism, you aren’t seeing.
Elizabelle
@ Lolis:
Yup. Sometimes the dog does not really want to catch that car.
jayackroyd
when we had Republicans running the government, we got Medicare Part D.
And Bush got reelected.
When I was talking with Brad DeLong, a while ago now–that is BEFORE this particular clusterfuck, we speculated on whether a McCain presidency would have tolerated this level of unemployment. Unemployment was a political crisis for Reagan.
McCain might well have taken it more seriously than Obama has, not having the reassuring notion that he could count on the left having nowhere else to go.
I’ve been wondering whether it would be a good idea for Dems to cross over to the GOP primaries to support Romney. Dems for Romney is an interesting idea, actually. Might make him more comfortable owning his record.
Because what *I’m* predicting is another wave election, throwing the bums out another time. Hasn’t worked yet, but there’s really nothing else a voter can do except vote out the bums who have fucked them so royally.
Dem House, GOP Senate, GOP POTUS.
Good news is we’ll get rid of the filibuster.
NR
@Nutella: Remember that YOU, single-handedly, will be responsible for Obama’s loss. It has nothing to do with the economy, unemployment, or any other factors. When Obama loses, it’s ALL YOUR FAULT. I hope you’re happy.
Tom65
Let’s be clear about this.
I don’t give a rat’s ass whether the emo progressives got their magic fucking pony. I don’t give a rat’s ass whether they feel that Obama was sending them coded messages during the ’08 campaign indicating that – despite his record and his actual campaign platform – he was Jimmy Carter on steroids. Fuck you for not paying attention, fuck you for pouting like a bunch of Justin Bieber fans who didn’t get front-row tickets, fuck you for sitting out the elections last year and handing Congress to a bunch of idiots who can barely get through the day without putting a fork in their eye.
“Sending a message”? Yeah, how did that work out for you? Get off your whinging asses and do something besides complain on the internet and threaten to withold your vote. Get out and vote your interests. That’s how the system works, morons.
dollared
@General Stuck: Emailed to my permanent inbox.
Of course, you didn’t mention the part where unemployment reaches 12% in Obama’s second term because there is no magical return to prosperity when China and India get all our economic growth and employment.
But I agree that even in that scenario having Obama appoint John Ashcroft to the Supreme Court in a munificent act of unprovoked bipartisanship would be better than having President Perry appoint Justice Yoo.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Emma #40:
Obviously not. But it is kind of hard to get the car out of the ditch when we can’t agree about which side of the car to push on. There are two fundamentally different ideas about what motivates voters (who ultimately are the lever we use to get stuff done) at work here.
The Left generally thinks that voters respond to policy, so to win in the long run we need to push on the party leadership to get behind the right policies (rather than GOP-lite bullshit). If they do so, the party and its leadership will benefit from association with popular policies and we will get more/better Dems to enact those popular policies. Popular policies empower leaders in this view of the world.
The Moderates generally think that voters respond to personalities rather than policies, so to win in the long run we need to build up the popularity of the party leadership and then the policies which are (at least in the mind of the average voter, if not necessarily in reality) associated with our side will gain in popularity as well. Popular leaders empower policies in this view of the world.
The problem is that while both groups (the Left and the Moderates) may be pushing for very similar policy goals, these two different views of how voters work lead to drastically different conclusions in terms of how we should approch the issue of criticism/praise of the leadership on our side.
The first policy-centric view sounds more adult and constructive, and the second one sounds childish and an open invitation to a personality cult. The problem is, from looking back at how the GOP has succeeded over the last 40 years (and the Dems have not), I think the second personality-centric view may be a more realistic appraisal of how our actual voters make decisions. For example if you look at the Reagan administration, early in his WH tenure Ronnie himself was far more popular personally with voters than the right-wing policies which he and his supporters pushed for, but over time those policies became less toxic to the public.
jwest
Just as Reagan followed the debacle that was Carter, Palin will follow Obama. Then, primarily through the natural cycle of world economics or through some advancement in technology, the economy will take off like a rocket.
Formerly democrat-voting women will institute a fund drive and petition to immediately have Palin’s image carved on Mt. Rushmore with our other great leaders. It’s inevitable.
NonyNony
@Jim Pharo:
Except that public opinion is consistently on the side of the Democrats. Hell a majority of Republican voters think that taxes are too low and the government isn’t spending enough to create jobs. You can’t blame that on losing a battle for public opinion.
The Democrats are losing on a number of fronts. They’re losing on the local elections issue – city, state and county-wide elections are the trenches of politics. It’s dirty work, but it’s the farm club where new politicians grow. Republicans run for every seat – Democrats not so much. And that means that Republicans control redistricting – which only tightens their hold over the Federal government.
They’re losing in the messaging war to the extent that they can’t convince voters that the Republican brand is crazy and that if you want a moderate, balanced government you should vote exclusively for Democrats (Democrats are their own opposition party) and this is mostly because Democrats are perceived as losers and nobody wants to be a loser.
Also too – Democrats are losing out short-term on votes from racist white people who are afraid that they’re going to lose their privileged status in the next couple of decades. This is something where the Democrats don’t have the support of a good-sized chunk of the electorate – the remnants of the “Southern Strategy” (that works outside the South as well). You’ve got people who don’t want to support Republican economic policies but won’t vote for Democrats because Democrats are a part of “those people”. Can’t fix that kind of stupid, you can only hope to outlive it.
And then finally there’s the perception that Democrats aren’t going to fix problems anyway. The lost a lot of Labor votes over the years because they say one thing and then do another. A lot of working class people still remember the Democrats as the party that turned their back on them – culminating with Clinton pushing for NAFTA. If both parties are going to screw over Labor, you might as well vote your cultural conservatism and your racism because at least then you get SOMETHING out of your vote. Obama and the Republicans have helped with the Labor voters – Obama by helping to stabilize GM and Chrysler (which working class people actually do recognize as a Good Thing) and the Republicans by being so shitty towards working class people that it’s a reminder that with both parties will screw you, Republicans will always make it more painful. (that’s not enough – Labor voters need a legitimate outlet for their economic distress and the Democrats have become the party of sane capitalists – THERE’S the opening for a 3rd party – a Labor party – if someone is ambitious enough to grab at it).
Mostly the Democrats have shot themselves in the foot over and over again for the last 30 years. It isn’t that the public has been won over by Republican propaganda – it’s that the Democrats appear too inept and/or shady to trust.
Paul in KY
@fasteddie9318: Such as said hard core dominionist VP
patrick
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
ok, for a less effective analogy….at some point it’s just better to rip the band-aid off your hairy scrotum than to pull it off slowly and gently….
Redshift
@Danny:
And we have lots of examples of legislation that attempts to dictate to future Congresses getting repealed or worked around (Gramm-Rudman, AMT, the Medicare “doc fix”.) People who get elected to Congress want to do stuff, and their reaction to such restrictions tends not to be “well, this is the law, we have to follow it” but “we make the laws, we don’t have to just accept it.”
Nied
@Blue Neponset:
FTFY from 1999
Clever moniker
@Belafon:
I suspect it wasb some combination of in-group solidarity + macroeconomic ignorance.
dollared
@Tom65: You’re just fucking wrong. 2010 voting by liberals and progressives was almost exactly the same as 2008. Exceptional turnout by the white over 65 crowd won the election. Fox beat Obama’s team. Period. Obama message fail and lack of tactical response to the Tea Party enabled this.
Blue Neponset
@fasteddie9318: If President Romney listens to the tea baggers he won’t win reelection anyway. They guy is a lot of things but he isn’t stupid. There is no way he will be beholden to the crazies.
ppcli
@Mike Goetz: I thought Tsar Alexander II freed the surfers.
Paul in KY
@Luthe: True, but we need something a bit more catchy for a bumper sticker.
shortstop
@Davis X. Machina:
They can treat reflexive contrariness with the same drug they use for “restless leg syndrome,” I heard.
WereBear
I see now. It’s all my fault.
I should have voted for the firebreathing progressive who won the Primary!
I should have made sure the Senate, the most hidebound organization since The House of Lords, got filled with sensible liberals.
I should have checked the box that said, “Give me a House full of True Populists!”
I am so sorry.
People are going to vote for Republicans as long as women continue to date abusive assholes and men continue to marry high maintenance shrews. We shake our heads and wonder what the heck is going on, but a slice of the population is always going to fall for pretty lies. They don’t pay attention to reality because reality has never worked for them.
My plan is to discuss the situation with as much drama and pathos as I can. The Tepublicans damn near brought down civilization as we know it. CBS NBC NPR are all useless. But we are not; WE have more credibility than they do, now.
Let’s try to use it for good.
fasteddie9318
@Blue Neponset:
FTFY
RP
Perfect example of chicken little nonsense.
Poopyman
@jayackroyd: Jesus, Mary and Joseph. That is about the stupidest idea floated on a forum abounding in stupid ideas.
Suffern ACE
@dollared: Of course, whenever they try to round ya’ll up and get yah on message, ya’ll call them thugs. Ya got half the party wants to be known for being “contrarian” and the other ten percent wants to have a clear conscience, like that matters and the rest just don’t like boys wearing suits.
Thoughtcrime
And now for a word from Balloon Juice’s next Front Pager:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY
Loviatar
@ 78 – Nied:
While there they may have been quite a bit of sticking it to that asshole Lieberman involved in the primarying of Lieberman, the main purpose was to remove an impediment to the implementation of Democratic policies.
.
Since you didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word “tactics” I decided to provide you with a definition.
Tactics – the manoeuvres used or plans followed to achieve a particular short-term aim. Usually subordinated to an overall strategic goal.
.
Strategic goal: excise Lieberman from the Democratic party. Also, as much as possible remove his ability to damage Democratic policies.
Tactical plans: Primary Lieberman, so he can no longer run as Democrat. If he is reelected as an Independent, deny him prerequisites of Democratic party membership (chairmanship, seniority, etc.)
You see how the tactics fit the overall strategic goal of removing Lieberman’s ability to damage Democratic policies.
.
So according to your post, you agree that Lieberman is an impediment to Democratic policies. I think we all can agree that the Senate would be better without Lieberman, so why reward him for being an “asshole”.
.
Again Obots, liberals are willing to suffer in the short term to have better long term results. I don’t see the same mentality from the go along to get along crowd.
Nutella
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Obama put SS cuts on the table in these negotiations.
Blue Neponset
@fasteddie9318: You got me there. Well played Sir.
fasteddie9318
@shortstop:
Chronic cyanide exposure? Not for the restless leg people, of course, but for Nelson, maybe.
Heliopause
We’re already getting some form of the Ryan plan. Ryan voted for the bill.
We’ve already got crazy new wars in Libya, Yemen, and Somalia.
We’ve already got that ball rolling, thanks to our brave Democratic leadership.
Honest to Christ, I’m not entirely convinced at this moment that Romney wouldn’t govern to the left of Obama.
shortstop
@NR: I’ll go on record as saying that I don’t blame emoprogs for any future losses Obama or the Democratic party may sustain. I do, however, blame you for a) being congenitally boring and annoying and b) losing me a lot of my beloved sleep in the fashion of the people one building over. They too keep having very sparsely attended parties (see point a) that nevertheless involve more incoherent shrieking than every other shindig in Uptown put together.
Bender
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
FIFY
Paul in KY
@Poopyman: Please God no! I don’t think Addington could do that (hopefully) as he doesn’t have the political background that Darth Cheney had (in House, Sec Def, Sith Overlord, etc.).
Addington is more like the Mouth of Sauron.
Danny
@jayackroyd:
Hey Jay, are you still holding on to your “Obama’s secret plan is to privatize medicare” conspiracy theory? You predicted that he would have come out of the closet by now.
Since you said you’d hold me to my claim that I would oppose a Premium Support plan for Medicare can I now ask you to do some book-keeping and account for how well you think reality has conformed so far to the conspiracies you’ve been floating in various fora?
jl
Since there is no real debt crisis now, and the effects of the real long term debt crisis (in terms or borrowing costs) will not even be horizon for years (or at the peak of the next business cycle, which at this rate will be years), one possibility is that the debt commission will do everything it can to rig the cuts. Either they will be further postponed, or will be made to go away via smoke and mirrors.
The short run economic costs of evading the cuts will be zero, and the cost of the cuts to specific economic sectors and political interest groups will be high, except for the financial rentier class who I believe want and need low inflation and low interest rates to maintain the pretense of solvency. So I would guess it will be a fight between the rentiers and political interest groups more closely dependent on the real economy.
So most important thing is to look at details of the Nov/Dec spending cut process, and what approach will best maximize the spending cuts that can be postponed or flim flammed away.
Who will be on cutting committee will be key.
Unless of course, the banks can get permission soon enough to bulldoze enough houses fast enough (for a little black economic humor).
Anya
@Nutella: No matter how many times you repeat it, a lie does not become true.
Paul in KY
@dollared: Justice Yoo would make Justice Scalia seem like Justice William O. Douglas (when he was higher than a kite).
Clever moniker
Not to spoil everyone’s Lieberman-bashing, but he’s a big part of the reason why DADT was repealed.
And if you’re looking at long-term politics, he was one of the authors and sponsors of cap-and-trade, which is basically the ultimate in long-term policymaking.
So I’d say the Dems were better off with him than without him, and that the occasional headache is worth it.
wesindc
I like Steve M quote but he forgot to add “Because Jebus told me so”
Felanius Kootea
@dollared: You know I generally don’t agree with your take on things but this one worries me as well. And deep in my gut, something is bothering me – since most of the moderate or liberal republicans have left the GOP and many are now Democrats, will the Deocratic party ever regain the character many seem to think it has lost. On the local level, as with Wisconsin I can see the party putting up a strong fight in the wake of Repub atrocities. On the national level, I’m just not seeing it. It would be ironic if the tea-party won by simply making everyone who is not a tea-party member a Democrat (i.e., the label means nothing anymore).
Bender
Guess you didn’t listen to his “we need to spend, spend, spend and tax the “rich” who only pay twice their “fair share” speech an hour ago.
fhtagn
Most LIBERALS don’t care about Obama’s name, much less his skin color. They do care about a lousy economy and a Democratic party that appears to pre-emptively surrender every time. As for the country as a whole, if the best defense of Obama’s record that can be made to the voters is that he has a funny name and he’s black – well, sorry, but Podunk won’t buy it.
Mnemosyne
@Blue Neponset:
And George W Bush worked with Democrats in Texas, so clearly he’s going to govern in a bipartisan manner.
Jesus, how many fucking times are you going to fall for the Republicans’ bullshit? “Oh, sure, Bush/Cheney turned out badly, but we totally pinky-swear that Romney/Rubio will be different!”
It’s so weird how you don’t trust a word Obama says but have this simple faith that Romney is a different kind of Republican who won’t be beholden to the Tea Party.
RalfW
To help dispel the darkness, I just gave to the BJ Act Blue page, and right about the same time, someone else did, and it pushed over $16K. Still has $4K to go…
C’mon, it’ll cheer you up.
Davis X. Machina
Reminded me immediately of Barf, in Spaceballs, the human-dog hybrid who can chase his own tail.
Danny
@jayackroyd:
And actually reading what you in fact wrote in this post, I’m even more prone to wonder if the lot of you arent just plain old ratfuckers. Spreading conspiracy framings of the actions of the dem president that the base is supposed to use to interpret day to day losses in the political game. Floating the notion that maybe republican candidates are a better choice for the progressive base.
Maybe it’s time for us to seriously entertain the notion that you’re on the take, Jay?
Blue Neponset
@Mnemosyne:
It’s also weird that you talk to me like you actually know anything about me.
Skip over my posts if they bother you so much. I am getting sick of your bullshit.
Loneoak
In the midst of this debate about what kind of politicians we need or want, you all should really watch this. The mayor of Villnius uses an armored personnel carrier to run over a Mercedes parked in the bike lane, shakes the hand of the Euro-douche to whom the car belonged, and then sweeps the glass out of the bike lane. Fucking made my day.
Emma
@fhtagn: You’re either a troll or an outright idiot or a republican liar. I didn’t say a thing about his skin color. Right after that sentence, I gave a long list of types — and not one of them was about racism.
Kane
That’s like saying in 2000 that Bush scares you a lot less than John McCain, Pat Buchanan, and Alan Keyes.
They were all offering virtually the same policies, but the comparison to the “scarier” candidates allowed for the portrayal of Bush as the “compassionate conservative” and the candidate you would like to have a beer with.
Rick Taylor
I have to admit, the thought has crossed my mind at times whether we’d be better off in the short run with a Republican President. The Republicans would forget about their objections to raising the debt ceiling, probably no one of importance would care much about the deficit, and they might even let some sort of stimulus pass as they’d be the one to benefit politically from it (albeit one directed largely to the wealthy). They’re practicing extortion; elect a Republican President, or we will ruin this country.
Of course on the minus side, we wouldn’t have passed a health care bill, the Bush tax cuts would have been extended indefinitely, and depending on who it was we might be at war with Iran.
The Populist
Oh.FUCKING.PLEASE.
God damn it people. We LOST 2010 for one simple reason: NOBODY FROM OUR SIDE WENT AND VOTED. PERIOD. END OF DISCUSSION.
NO.BODY.
God, I love you all and I love this country but what the fuck is Obama supposed to do when the fucking TEA PARTY has control over everything with their block of votes?
Sorry, when I see Republicans winning in areas that are usually good for dems, I KNOW it’s for lack of turnout. I hate this. I hate seeing my friend’s kids dropping out of college because tuitions are through the roof. But you know what? I ask them…did you vote in the last election: NO.
If we don’t vote, we get what we are seeing now. I don’t want to defend Obama but what the hell is he supposed to do? If he invokes the 14th, we see months of impeachment hearings. Had Boehner agreed to some revenues, the tea party would have shut the vote down.
I am not, in no way at all, defending Obama. I do see the difficulties he has to navigate. Maybe we can give him some majorities in 2012 and if he fails to do what we want, THEN we make sure the dems understand the meaning of dried up support.
Until we get what they had with the first few years of Bush (majorities across the board), there ain’t nothing this president can do to make us happy. Sorry, call me a guy making excuses for him but the facts are the facts.
Loviatar
@ 140 – Clever moniker:
THIS, THIS, THIS
perfect go along to get along mentality of the Obots.
.
We got DADT, so screw that there was no Senate investigation of the run up to the Iraq war.
We got the possibility of sometime in the future there may be a plan for Cap and Trade, so screw any investigation of Bush era torture.
I could go on about his threats to investigate the Obama administration. I could go on about his speech at the Republican convention and his support for McCain. But why would I do that, we got DADT and the possibility of sometime in the future there may be a plan for Cap and Trade.
good enough for me, what about you guys.
wrb
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
great post
p.a.
El Tiburon @ 71
I have tended to think this way also, but if 8 years of W didn’t open enough eyes (or penetrate enough cement craniums), what will?
Did O sign it yet? Maybe a signing statement to the effect of “Yeah, I’m not doing this shit.” But that would be sooo un-bi-partisan. Can’t have that.
Also, I still do not get the “Reply” button.
fhtagn
Doesn’t anyone bother to read polling analysis these days? Doesn’t anyone know that “swing” voters are almost always not genuine independents? As for white swing voters – what on earth are they going to find to make them like Obama any better in a wretched economy? And no, you can’t inoculate yourself from the tax and spend claim by caving in on the debt ceiling. The GOP will just turn round and say that they forced you to behave better, but given a chance you’ll go back to your evil socialist ways quick as Newt Gingrich on a blonde intern.
Mnemosyne
@Loviatar:
Now that’s the funniest claim I’ve seen all day. Bravo.
Funny, I don’t remember you saying that you’re currently living on your Social Security check but you were willing to give up your income for a few months. But perhaps I’m maligning you and you actually were planning to give up your only source of income to win the battle.
The Populist
And when we do they own the supreme court for the next few decades. Why can’t we all understand that there is a hell of a lot more at stake here than whether Obama is this or that.
Supreme Court = all our lives affected in ways that could get worse if McCain was in there right now.
Sotomayor and Kagan have been good picks by the POTUS.
Mnemosyne
@Blue Neponset:
Hey, I’m not the one making starry-eyed declarations about how Romney’s not going to be beholden to the Tea Party like all of those other nasty Republicans. If you really think that, you may want to chat with the citizens of Wisconsin and Michigan, who got a bit of a shock when they voted in their “moderate” Republican governors.
Danny
@Loviatar:
We got PPACA, ARRA, Finance Reg.
All solid, progressive legislation. We got Lily Leadbetter, SCHIP, Sotomayor, Kagan, Byrd act, Pell Grants, and so on.
fhtagn
@Emma:
Which of us decided to bring up Obama’s race and name as a means of bashing LIBERALS? If you insist on making idiotic claims, expect people to call you out on them.
jl
Does anyone know of any evidence that the debt, deficit, tax and spend issue is something for the Democrats to be afraid of, compared to the jobs issue?
I’d like to know.
If the reports are true that the Obama WH is going through all these gyrations to ‘innoculate’ the Democrats against the tax and spend issue, at the sacrifice of concentrating on jobs, I think that is crazy.
I think the idea of doing any symbolic policy effort for the purposes of protecting oneself is crazy. Crazy GOP don’t care, it don’t give a shit. It makes stuff up anyway, regardless of what you do.
And more important to focus on real issues.
So, I need some evidence that the GOP spend and tax issue is anything more than one of their standard off the shelf talking points, and not one of the most important ones.
I think more important economic issues for voters are threats to social insurance policies, and jobs.
Now, look how the GOP lied and gimmicked and nonsensed its way through pulling the ‘threat to social insurance’ gimmick off the shelf.
Edit: and will add that was during a minute little pause in the GOP’s efforts to destroy social insurance in the US.
Best to concentrate on really important issues, not BS symbolic issues in a vain attempt to take it off the shelf. that will never work with the GOP, they will take anything off the shelf, and use it anyway they can, as long as it works to fix the next election. ‘Cause crazy GOP don’t care and crazy GOP don’t give a shit.
Paul in KY
@Loneoak: Just watched it. Mayor is pretty ballsy as probably all those high priced cars in the video were owned by Russian/Lithuanian mafiosi. The ‘euro douche’ looked like a Russian version of the ‘you talkin to me’ character in Goodfellas (although a bit more reserved, I’d have to concede).
Nied
@Loviatar:
I’m not talking about primarying him, I’m talking about kicking him out of the party once the primary failed. Because doing so wouldn’t remove an impediment to liberal policy (winning the election would have) it would have added one.
Winning a primary and an election accomplishes those goals. Kicking him out of the caucus doesn’t, in fact kicking him out of the caucus turns him from a vote to water down democratic policies to a vote against democratic policies.
Yes I do. Primarying him and winning would be a great way to get rid of him. Kicking him out of the caucus doesn’t remove him from the Senate it just gives you less votes, and likely ensures all of the policies I just listed don’t pass.
FTFY
celticdragonchick
@The Populist: @celticdragonchick:
Repeated for truth.
Paul in KY
@The Populist: Impeachment for Pres. Clinton was like being thrown in a briar patch (as brer rabbit). Who’s to say it wouldn’t turn out that way for Pres. Obama?
Suffern ACE
@Loviatar: Yep. And what has your corner of the tent accomplished?
Nutella
@Loneoak:
There’s somebody who knows how to film an effective political ad. The Democrats need to hire him and his marketing team STAT.
ETA: It was extremely effective even to people who don’t understand a word of Lithuanian.
fhtagn
@General Stuck:
Doesn’t anyone bother to read polling analysis these days? Doesn’t anyone know that “swing” voters are almost always not genuine independents? As for white swing voters – what on earth are they going to find to make them like Obama any better in a wretched economy? And no, you can’t inoculate yourself from the tax and spend claim by caving in on the debt ceiling. The GOP will just turn round and say that they forced you to behave better, but given a chance you’ll go back to your evil soc.ial.ist ways quick as Newt Gingrich on a blonde intern.
The Populist
@Loviatar:
We also got Elizabeth Warren and in a way that will help her win should she run for Senate. She’s a dem we all could rally around.
LTMidnight
Yeah let’s continue to wait for that Moonbat Messiah to deliver America unto the promised land.
And you wonder why liberals aren’t taken seriously.
kindness
You people are nutz.
Romney can’t win because the evangelicals believe his religion is the same as Satan worship. Oh he may win the primary but he won’t win the race because no amount of Karl Rove begging the religious right to vote for an false god believer will make that happen.
Ricky Perry on the other hand has great hair…Who cares if he doesn’t mind executing innocent people?
WyldPirate
@El Tiburon:
This. This is what the Obot morons don’t get while the are appeased with the goddamned half-assed, soon to be repealed, ACA and the toothless Lily Ledbetter chickenshit.
Obots are just like the Religious Right that was placated for years with meaningless claptrap from Reagan to GWB.
There is an old army acronym for this behavior–bohica–“bend over, here it comes again”.
Rihilism
Feck all this emo navel-gazin’. What everyone needs is a nice cup of tea…
Suffern ACE
@Paul in KY: Nothing good came out of that impeachment process. Nothing. Zero.
All that happened was that the rabbit was thrown in the briar patch and he walked out.
I don’t know where this idea that that impeachment is a good thing. I guess we got MoveOn.org. That’s about it.
Danny
@jl:
You’ll find ample polling that americans think that the deficit is a BIG problem. Michael Dukakis got hammered in 88 by GHWB painting him as a “tax and spend liberal”. It wasnt an issue in 92 and 08 because a republican with big deficits was the incumbent.
The use in killing off the “tax-and-spend” meme is that we in fact want to tax-and-spend. Only we dont really want to do that, we want to use government to help people and solve problems, and often that entails taxing and spending.
That’s why Obama’s right to focus his messaging on wanting to use government to help people and solve problems.
Repubs forced the deficit issue now, and we lost this particular fight but I dont think the fight over revenues is over, not by a long shot. And Obama’s done a great job of getting the public to support new revenue, only he got precious little legislation to show for it, so far.
Mike in NC
@Poopyman:
Scumbag Addington is too obscure to be VP. But he’d easily be on the short list to be VP Michelle Bachmann’s Chief of Staff.
The Populist
@Paul in KY: If he had invoked the 14th, it would have been worse. Why? Tea partiers would be all over his alleged circumvention of the constitution.
See, I look at it simply as this: Impeachment = always on tv, the right would get the 24 hour news cycle, get the clueless onboard with the idea Obama is bad and awful and then while Congress fiddles, the country burns and more jobs get lost.
See, these folks WANT the endgame to be Obama on trial. How is he supposed to do what WE want when many of our own never turned out to keep a dem in office in both chambers?
The Supreme Court is the reason people can call me an O-bot. My life is affected by things like Citizens United. I own a small business. A corporation like Wal Mart is NOT a fucking person.
In the end, just think what other damage a super majority Supreme Court will do to this country. THIS is why the right want full control. They want to stack the courts for decades.
Loviatar
@ 161 – Danny:
El Cid
This shit always happens — people love pretending that electoral futures depend on whether or not there are “progressives” or whatever who say nasty things about a President or Democratic party politicians or groups.
What sort of real world is this based on? What sort of magical thinking?
Do you think this is what political scientists or historical or sociological researchers reveal when looking at our prior history?
Is this a common conclusion, that among the most significant variables predicting or associated with a major historical election result was the degree of harshness of the complaints by tiny groups of disaffected ‘activists’ or low level bitchers or a tiny few media figures not visibly changing American discourse?
Electoral and policy futures comes down to how faithfully people who are already Democrats or overwhelmingly vote Democratic talk supportively?
I.e., if all the “firebaggers” and whiny and complaining “progressives” or whatever would instead speak nicely and supportive of Obama then this would be enough to have some more positive effect on his re-election chances?
Even more so for the entire Congress?
Why do people think this? What sort of reality and empirical evidence backs this up?
The Populist
@Mike in NC:
The VP will be Meg Whitman. Mark my words.
Nutella
@kindness:
Hmmm, so what you’re saying is that the best thing for Democrats is for Romney to win the primary? Since that means Obama is sure to beat him?
I’m not seeing that. It seems to me he’s less likely to win the primary because he’s Mormon and more likely to win the election because he can fake centrism.
Loviatar
@ 168 – Suffern ACE:
.
we got a president elected in ’08
Mnemosyne
@jl:
Other than the past 40 years of politics?
Like it or not, it’s still a phrase that people respond to. There is still very much a public perception that Republicans are “fiscal conservatives” but Democrats “tax and spend.”
There’s probably a clever way to reverse it, but I don’t think it’s going to be able to be changed top-down starting with the president.
aimai
@The Populist:
That’s incorrect. Lots of people got out and voted for the Democrats. It wasnt the most politically active and angriest of liberal/left Dems who didn’t get out and vote it was the new voters, the people who had to be personally inspired by Obama to get out and vote the first time. Exactly the kind of people who don’t bother to vote in midterms. There’s nothing new here: if you want to win off year elections you have to motivate your voters. Not your base-they get out and vote out of habit–but your new voters. The dems relied on new voters and excited voters in 2008 and they gave them plenty to vote for. But in 2010 Obama wasn’t on the ballot and the Dems couldn’t work up a master narrative like “Keep the House!”, or didn’t bother to, or failed to excite their voters.
You always need a master narrative for some voters, a battle which they feel they need to join. If the Politicians don’t offer that their side will lose. Even though regular/old/white voters will continue to vote out of habit. The sporadic voter won’t.
I hope to g-d that Obama and the Dems can flog the narrative that the Republicans are dangerous to children and other living things because if they don’t we’ll lose the house again and now we know that without controlling all three branches of government the Democrats simply can’t govern. Not won’t govern. Can’t.
aimai
Tom65
For anyone talking about burning the village to save it, have you already forgotten the six years of Bush II/GOP dominance? This village burned once already this decade; I don’t think this strategy is a winner.
Corner Stone
@Tom65:
Shut up, you fucking liar.
The Populist
@Danny:
Obama better focus on pushing Jobs bills. If he wants to recover from this, HE NEEDS TO GO ON THE OFFENSIVE when it comes to work and jobs.
The right have their fucking tax cuts, so if I am Obama, I ask nonstop: So where are these jobs bills and jobs the right keep saying will come along?
jl
If Romney can promise me a cool spirit body and get me a cool planet to rule benevolently, or take a ministry too, or however it works, then I will vote for him.
But he has to promise to do it quick, before my bank account is tapped out. So, it has to be a real plan that can be done in a couple of years.
Edit: I don’t know if that tale about Mormon beliefs is real, or some urban legend BS, but it sounds kind of neat, like Back the Future stuff. So if Romney can get that going, he has my vote.
Final cut edit: Seriously I think any theory that ends up with the idea that it would be in any way good for any GOP faction to win any election or control any branch of fed gov is crazy. If you get near that conclusion, better back up and off, and review your thinking. Probably a flaw in there someplace.
sglover
Ah, good to see that in a turbulent world, some old verities are still intact. Like the readiness of your baseline Balloon Juice commenter to explain away every betrayal and sellout that the Donk hands them.
Hope’n’Change thanks you for your loyalty. In the exact same way that P.T. Barnum used to. Never forget, no matter how corrupt and self-dealing and vicious he is, AT LEAST HE’S NOT A REPUBLICAN! That makes it all better…..
Paul in KY
@Suffern ACE: Pres. Clinton’s approval ratings went up. If he’d been eligible to run again, he would have whupped Shrub.
Since he wasn’t eligible, some bad things did happen (Lieberman in VP slot, etc.). If the Pres. was being impeached for some crazy Repub reason, then that could help him (IMO). Obviously, if he was being impeached for anything that one could ginn up a plausible case for, then that would be the final torpedo in the S.S. Obama.
Emma
@fhtagn: OK, I’ll go with stupid. Focus here. I DID NOT BRING UP HIS RACE. AT ALL.
I mentioned all the ways I saw liberals going nuts, and not one, NOT ONE, involved race.
Loviatar
@165 – Nied:
A simple question:
.
Do you think any policies or bills would have come out differently if Lieberman was denied the prerequisites of caucusing with the Democratic party?
If yes, please list.
.
If no, why not get rid of the fucker. He had proven his disloyalty why keep him around.
.
Corner Stone
@El Cid:
Idiots who choose to not look at the actual events. Or liars who have a reason to not look at the actual events.
Fools or liars, which are they?
dollared
@The Populist: nothing could have been better than impeachment. the Media would have jumped on the repeat narrative of Republican Overreach. Guaranteed Obama re-election.
The Populist
@Corner Stone:
And how, exactly, is he lying. I’d sure like to know because he’s 100% right on why this mess exists to begin with.
Awaiting your factual response with baited breath.
Mnemosyne
@Loviatar:
So which Republican of 2008-2010 do you picture switching sides to vote with the Democrats? Because we’re not talking about your perfect world scenario where Lieberman was replaced by Lamont in 2006. We’re talking about the actual makeup of the Senate during 2008-2010, which you say would ideally have seen Lieberman voting with the Republicans instead of the Democrats.
So who do you picture as the Republican who broke ranks and joined up with the Democrats to vote in favor of the stimulus and PPACA to counter Lieberman’s votes against them?
Danny
@WyldPirate:
This is the New Lefts way of dealing with tactical defeat ever since 1968.
“The Man sold us out”. Lets fuck him. And that way to go about things has given us a grand total of three democratic presidents since 1968 – and by incident the New Left have claimed them all sell-out; favored primarying all three, third-party challenge against all three.
Your credibility to effect change has run out, bro.
The Populist
@dollared:
I see your point but look at the bigger hole it will create for the people suffering in our country. I’d rather stay away from impeachment and look for ways to get these tea idiots to expose themselves for the frauds they are.
fhtagn
@Emma:
I see, you called him the “African” guy without intending any racial reference. How… imaginative of you. ALternatively, you said something idiotic and are now trying to pretend otherwise. If you can’t make an honest argument, why bother?
Martin
@El Tiburon:
And what did liberals get passed?
And when HCR was in its closing stages, what did liberals cry from the rooftops? “Kill the bill!”
Honestly, what we’re fighting for is actual progress. I don’t fucking care if actual legislation dims the bright line between your ideal principles and reality. And that seems to be the biggest concern from the left.
“How will we differentiate our proposed product when the one now on the market looks similar? I know! Let’s destroy the one on the market!”
That’s always the answer. That’s always the presented evil of incrementalism. How will we convince the public to take that next incremental step if the last one actually helps them? How will the kids ever learn to look both ways before crossing the street if we don’t first run them over with the car?
The Populist
@Danny:
Not happening. Sorry, I will take the flawed dem in the white house over your astroturf, pie in the sky nonsense at this time.
Why? I live in a real world, not some happy happy joy place where magic happens and people never suffer.
Sorry.
Corner Stone
Yeah. Probably.
Keith G
@Emma:
No. Silly. Wrong.
There are actually some sound ideas in your post. Too bad it also contains passages that mindlessly use a broad brush to indict so many good folks. Why is that necessary?
You seem to know some facts. Stick to them.
Blue Neponset
@Tom65: If nothing changes, nothing changes. Romney could turn out to be Bush 41. The Democrat who beats Romney in 2016 might be the second coming of FDR, TR, LBJ, IKE and JFK.
This isn’t a zero sum game. There is a potential upside to Obama losing in 2012.
The Populist
@Corner Stone:
You were asked for evidence of your claims. Still waiting.
Corner Stone
@The Populist: Are you making the argument that Democratic turnout was lower than avg norms for midterms in 2010?
Because if you are, then you’re an idiot.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Tom65:
I’m not sure about anyone else, but I’m starting to come to the conclusion that we’ve already lost the chance to keep it from burning. It’s happening no matter what, even if our best-case scenarios for our side come to pass, because again the Country loves its hippie punching too much to bother supporting any policy it likes if it gets liberal support.
I’m honestly at the same place as @aimai and @El Cid are at. I’m gonna vote, and because I have no real choice, I’m gonna vote Democratic because they at least aren’t being actively malicious the same way the GOP is. But I just can’t…muster up anymore enthusiasm past that at this point. It just feels it’s become completely impenetrable, and all that ends up happening is the ‘hippies’ end up convenient scapegoats for both parties, and the policies we want become even further marginalized simply because they’ve become ‘hippie’ policy or ‘firebagger’ policy or something easily tarred by the loudest, shrillest, and most annoying of its supporters.
And if folks like Ozone are to be believed, this is the way it will always be ever and anon because the country is and will ever be anti-liberal. So we should just suck it up and accept that America will and forever will hate us except for those few years when the GOP REALLY fucks up to give them time to lurch even FURTHER rightward and have AMerica fall in love with them again.
Corner Stone
@The Populist: You can go wait in traffic you fucking punk. If you think Democratic voters turned out in low numbers in 2010 then you’re a fool and an idiot.
srv
@Tom65:
Not enough. Objectively, we’d be better off with “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” Dick. We don’t go anywhere w/o stimulus. A republican could have gotten away with it. Reagan did.
LTMidnight
It never ceases to fascinate me that with all the religious zealots on the far right side of the aisle, it’s the far left that are waiting for some “Liberal Savior” to deliver America unto some Liberal Promised Land.
Those who actually argue that we should let the country fall into Republican hand out of some belief they will tear the country down and out of the rubble will rise some Liberal Nirvana need to stop watching so much goddamn television and join the rest of us in the real world.
Otherwise, you’re better off in a pumpkin patch with Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin. He’ll show up sooner than the Moonbat Messiah.
Poopyman
They wuz guilty of sumpthin’, otherwise they wouldn’t a’got in trouble.
jibeaux
What’s got me depressed is that I went from being 75% sure that Obama would win re-election to 75% sure it will be the R nominee. The economy a year from now is going to be worse or at best about the same, and the base — leaving aside whether they’re justified or not — will be demoralized, with few recent accomplishments to hang their hats on and with most of the ACA not bearing any fruit yet. It’s just how I see it playing out. I wholeheartedly endorse the first comment, and I vote in every election including primary runoffs for Commissioner of Labor, but you can’t ignore that much of the country doesn’t act that way, and you can’t generate higher turnout without something to be genuinely enthusiastic about. Blog commentary about how Republicans are worse just doesn’t cut it.
jl
Still waiting for any evidence from a commenter indicating that the GOP ‘tax and spend’ issue, compared to jobs, is anything more than a BS GOP talking point. Which will immediately be replaced with something else, or a BS line the GOP will try again anyway during campaign season, to see whether they can get away with it.
sgrAstar
@dollared: Can’t agree that the 2010 elections show much beyond the indisputable fact that a lot of people stayed home. Turnout in 2010: ~41%. Turnout in 2008: 56.8% [VEP]. In 2010 the people who put Obama over the top stayed home, with disastrous consequences. Must. Not. Repeat…..
Keith G
@Corner Stone: Ya notice that a certain portion of our commetariat is a bit jumpy and defensive?
Why is that?
It’s 100 outside. Do you know where your air conditioner is?
Clever moniker
@The Populist (200):
Well, impeachment is actually a good way for the TP to indecently expose themselves. When a congress with a 14% approval rating goes up against a president with 44%, it won’t be pretty for congress (anyone remember when he visit the House Republicans to talk about HCR and Fox changed the subject?).
Davis X. Machina
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
When was it ever run by liberals?
Coalition government, or permanent minority. That’s the menu. The relative composition of the coalition is the only thing up for grabs in any time-span not measured in lifespans.
Danny
@Loviatar:
Well, in honesty I missed the Lieberman context when I first replied. But fwiw – yes we wouldnt have gotten most of those bills without 60 votes, given that the repubs all unified to filibuster. That’s just plain fact isnt it?
But I personally dont agree with the decision to give him that chairmanship. I think he should have gotten “demoted” so to speak in a way that kept him inside the tent. Would that have been possible? Well that goes to the individual Joe Lieberman and how he’d react to different scenarios, and I simply dont have a clue.
I think it’s a problem for the progressive movement in general and the democratic caucus in particular that we lack good enforcement mechanisms and incentives to keep politicians, institutions and surrogates working in the same direction towards more progressive policy outcomes.
That both means more punishment for DINOish behavior as well as for Ratfuckery/cluelessness of the Jane Hamsher/Jay Ackroyd variety.
Corner Stone
@Keith G: I’m meeehhhllltttiiingg.
SectarianSofa
@sglover:
Hello Troll Person! Glad to see someone still working on empirical study of verities in the turbs, you know. God’s work, son. Wearin’ the flag and shouting the truth in the basement.
(I may be mixin’ metaphors, but if I’m addressing you, which ostensibly I am, sglover, it doesn’t matter much, does it? You’re going to keep samplin’ the ‘verities’ in the turbulence, keep telling the truth, keep callin’ it like it is.)
MY EYES, THEY HAVE NOW BEEN OPENENENED!!!!
We’re so lucky to have you.
Larkspur
Yup. Really nice hair. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.*
*Oh shut up, I’m not going to hurt him, and anyway, hair grows back.
Tuttle
Let me get this strait.
The left pressured Obama for a better deal. Obama didn’t get a better deal. In fact, he got a pretty raw deal. And the conclusion of the center is that the left should just shut up already?
Why? Is it making you feel like a bunch of moronic tools for thinking you could just clap louder and magic ponies would sprout from the ground?
If so, our work here is done.
Loviatar
@198 – Mnemosyne:
Lets start with the Maine twins on Lily Ledbetter and go from there on a bill by bill basis.
Overall though, I would pretty much trade what was accomplished from 2008 – 2010 to get rid of Lieberman.
Yes that includes the expanded Insurance scheme giveaway to big business that is PPACA.
.
As you Obots like to say long game baby, long game.
.
.
P.S.
Lieberman actively campaigned against his parties nominee for president in 2008 and he suffered no repercussions. What do you think the next Democratic Senator who is considering something similar is going to think. I’ll you, why the hell not, there won’t be any repercussions.
FlipYrWhig
@NonyNony:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Republican voters tell pollsters that the government isn’t _spending_ enough to create jobs. They may say that the government isn’t _doing_ enough to create jobs. But they also don’t believe that spending money creates jobs. Presumably what they think the government should do to create jobs is the opposite of spending: to wit, cutting taxes and creating new tax incentives for businesses.
Davis X. Machina
@Corner Stone:
2010 +19R among voters 65 and up.
2008 +10R among voters 65 and up.
2008 was the first time in at least 40 years +65 voters didn’t vote for the ultimate winner in a presidential campaign.
It doesn’t matter whether Democrats stay home. It matters how many people who don’t know what a 78 is, or have never seen a push-button transmission, turn out.
jayackroyd
@danny
Are you saying you’re actually good with this outcome? That instead of advocating Medicare Exchanges, Obama’s worked to boost the eligibility date to 67 proves that I’m wrong, that Obama really is a liberal, not a centrist?
Really?
You’re good with this outcome?
Really?
eemom
instead of calling people names, why don’t you do a little work to see if the numbers back up your claims?
Oh, that’s right. You’re not so big on the actual FACTS, are you.
Nied
If Lieberman were caucusing with the Republicans I have serious doubts that he would have voted for the stimulus (vote for the first signature policy of the guy who he campaigned against yeah I don’t see that happening) meaning Obama would have had to water it down even further to get another Republican vote or it doesn’t pass at all, he definitely would not have voted for the ACA since it passed on party lines and he wouldn’t be in the party, so there goes health care, and he was key to getting DADT repealed last year, I find it hard to believe he would have worked that hard for a policy his new party hated that much.
The Raven
Don’t we already have a Republican supermajority, at least in practice?
FlipYrWhig
@jl:
Agreed. Just view it as “If we’re going to have to have cuts, let’s make damn sure it’s _these_ cuts, not ones that affect the material lives of vulnerable beneficiaries.” IMHO the whole thing we’ve just been through makes a lot more sense as a compromise between Republican and Democratic approaches to _spending cuts_, as opposed to a compromise between Republican and Democratic approaches to deficits, debts, or the economy in general.
kindness
@Nutella: No I wasn’t saying that. I said Romney may win the primary. I followed that up with false platitudes to Ricky Perry. Read between the lines.
Honestly, Obama’s saving grace is the stack of half wits the republicans are serving up to him. If only his presidency was so charmed.
Corner Stone
@eemom:
This zombie lie has been debunked over and over and over again.
It doesn’t matter. It soothes the troubled soul of the steely eyed centrist, ex-Republican here.
Paul in KY
@Loviatar: I would have treated the Senator from Tel Aviv more harshly than he was.
He’d have probably started caucusing with the Repubs (while still being an ‘Independent’). I’m not sure that would have been worse. For me, DADT was down my list of priorities (glad it has been done, but there are/were bigger fish to fry than that).
Martin
@Blue Neponset:
Romney doesn’t have Bush 41s Congress. Remember, the president can only sign legislation that Congress sends him. Romney would have largely the same Congress that Obama has, and at best will sign the same legislation, and realistically will sign worse legislation.
Bush 41 started with a Congress with a 10 seat Dem majority in the Senate (and those were actual Dems, not Libermans, and better filibuster rules) and a 68 seat majority in the House. Not unlike what Obama started with.
Bush 41 ended with a Congress with a 12 seat Dem majority in the Senate (and still better filibuster rules) and a 106 seat majority in the House.
Bush did okay because he was totally outgunned. He could veto, but legislation was driven entirely by the Dems. A split Congress is simply a mess, and occasionally worse than a unified Congress in opposition, particularly when gridlock results in real consequences.
So, Romney will only have a chance of doing no worse than Obama if we deliver the House back to the Dems, at which point Obama would have a much easier time of it himself. You’re oversimplifying things tremendously.
Mnemosyne
@Tuttle:
Depends on what the left is saying. If the left is saying, “Hey, this deal is pretty sucky,” I have a hard time arguing with that. What I have a problem with is when the left is saying, “This was Obama’s plan all along so he could kill all of our social programs! Sure, I was wrong the previous half-dozen times that I told you he was going to kill Social Security, but now I’ve been proven right!”
(Except that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security all remain untouchable under this bill, but who cares about little details like that when there are accusations to make?)
I’m not getting the deep desire to assign malicious intent to a political loss and insist that the only reason for the loss was that it was all part of Obama’s secret plan the whole time.
Mike in NC
Dubya was exactly the same and many people believed that was a feature, not a bug.
When you think about it, Perry is probably more electable than Willard.
Corner Stone
@eemom: Oh, and I’m not taking any shit from you, you fucking FIREBAGGER!!
jibeaux
@jl:
I don’t know that I have any, but I have long thought that the very idea that you would be tarring someone with an evil nickname by calling them “tax and spend” is completely asinine. Taxing and spending are core functions of any functional government. Every president, including the Republican ones, taxes and spends, the major difference being that Republicans spend more. It’s like criticizing private industry for buying and selling goods and services. Obviously, since it hasn’t gone out of vogue yet as an insult, I would be in the minority on this.
Loviatar
@219 – Danny:
Democrats only had 60 votes in the Senate for a period of time before Senator Kennedy died. Even then he was absent for a significant portion of the 60 vote period, most of those bills got passed without a filibuster proof majority.
Danny
@The Populist:
I think you’re not really responding to me, it was me getting screwed by the Quote fuctionality. My post should have looked like this:
@Wyld Pirate:
This is the New Lefts way of dealing with tactical defeat ever since 1968.
“The Man sold us out”. Lets fuck him. And that way to go about things has given us a grand total of three democratic presidents since 1968 – and by incident the New Left have claimed them all sell-out; favored primarying all three, third-party challenge against all three.
Your credibility to effect change has run out, bro.
AlphaLiberal
I posted this over at TPM after reading through dozens of posts slagging on progressive activists.
Progressives were, and are, out there working on winning elections. We were last fall. But when the actions of the Dem Party fail to inspire and rally the non-politically engaged voters, there is only so much we can do. If they perceive the Dems taking care of banksters and big business and not them, they think “why bother?” (When Obama courts cuts to Social Security and Medicare before an election, for example – not helpful).
Another example: not backing off of fights as they did on the Bush tax cuts last year, before the election: Dems Officially Decide To Delay Bush Tax Cut Vote Until After Election.
Never forget: it’s not the duty of voters to re-elect Dems regardless of their performance. It’s the Dems who have the duty and obligation to give voters a reason to turn out and vote to begin with. That begins with fighting for working people, not the rich and privileged.
Keep blaming the activists for the failures of party leadership and you will have fewer activists. We are out on the ground now in Wisconsin and we will be working – for someone – in 2012. We are not the enemy.
wrb
@Corner Stone:
The enthusiasm gap matters.
It was 2.6% in 2010, 0.5%, in 2008 0.9% in 2006 and 0.6% in 2004.
Mysteriously, some who claim to want Democrats to win work hard at things bound to increase it.
Look at the projected effect of different sized gaps on these 2012 electoral maps.
stochasticdemocracy
Corner Stone
@jibeaux:
Not if you’re taking from the righteous and giving to the unclean it’s not.
Danny
@Loviatar:
Because Scott Brown voted a lot like Kennedy would have on those bills. If you feel certain that the fucker Lieberman would have if we kicked him out sure, but i dont expect much from Lieberman. He campaigned for McCain after all, the little traitor.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Davis X. Machina:
I understand about coalition gov’t, but it seems like our current coalition prides itself on thumbing the eyes of anyone left of Pelosi, and even she’s fucking shat on by half the party in Washington. I’m not even asking for liberals to “run” the country. I’m asking to not have the left side of things told to go fuck itself before the debate even begins and then blamed for everything when it goes wrong.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
She’s not giving you shit. She’s on our side now, whipping us into shape, turning us into a well-oiled machine for the final showdown against the Obots.
Man up, soldier!
Danny
@jayackroyd:
Are you saying that you get to run around and promote conspiracy theories and when reality comes crashing down you get to move the goalposts? Dont think so, ratfucker.
Own up and openly account for your fuck-ups or lose what little credibility you had.
jibeaux
@Corner Stone:
Oh, I understand the subtext is what gives it that insult quality. I just don’t have the kind of brain that lets me assign subtexts to functions as morally neutral as “tax” or “spend”. But then, I don’t assign morality to the concept of government either. It might be the right tool for the job or it might be the wrong tool, but it isn’t inherently good or bad so I can’t relate to “small government” arguments either. I’d make a bad Republican even if I shared their beliefs.
Phil P.
@Clever moniker:
I believe they have swung back to isolationism only because there is a Democratic commander-in-chief. This will change quickly enough with Pres. Perry or Romney. Don’t forget all the cheering just before 2008 election for McCain’s plan to intervene in Georgia, or wherever the hell it was…
Davis X. Machina
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: It’s like a bad marriage — let’s keep it together for the sake of the children.
Corner Stone
@jibeaux: Oooo, you’ve got a long way to go, little soldier.
Let the Indoctrinations begin!!
Martin
We’re boosting eligibility to 67 in this deal? Looks to me that entitlement programs didn’t get touched, as Obama, Reid, and Pelosi wanted. Looks to me that the trigger isn’t on entitlement programs but on defense/health care providers, which is what Obama, Reid, and Pelosi wanted. Sure, entitlements can get pulled in during the trigger negotiations, but this was a ‘live to fight another day’ move, and the burden is on the GOP now to create an outcome other than defense/healthcare spending cuts.
If Obama “worked to boost the eligibility date to 67”, then why isn’t it or some other entitlement cut in the bill?
Loviatar
@229 – Nied:
I’ll give you the no on the Stimulus. I could make a case for a yes as CT is the bedroom community for the NY banker/hedgefund community and they would have made there displeasure known on a no vote, but I’ll give you your no.
Disagree on PPACA, as you said it was a party line vote and with or without Lieberman there were more Democrats in the Senate at the time of its passage.
He led on DADT, but according to the Obots this was one of Obama’s signature bills, you don’t think he could have asked another Democratic Senator to take the lead (cough, cough Sen. Boxer/Fienstein). Also again, pretty much a party line vote with more Democratic Senators in office at time of passage with or without Lieberman.
.
On the bills you listed; 1 soft no and 2 definite yeses on passage.
Corner Stone
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You’re going to need to give your new girlfriend a few lemon juice baths then because she still stinks of the President Stuck she cavorted with so willingly across the toobz.
Danny
@The Populist:
Yeah, agreed pretty much. Of course our big problem is this: nothing gets through the house so we’re not likely to be passing any actual jobs bills. Jobs bills cost money so they’re gonna be scored by the CBO as adding to the deficit which means that Blue Dogs will only get behind them if they are tax cuts. Putting jobs on the village front-burner also means that the public thinks more about the bad jobs situation and plausibly blames Obama for it.
Those are the reasons why I think Obama hasnt been pushing jobs more than he has (and he has, only not a big push).
But one of the few benefits of this shitty debt ceiling deal being dems scoring some fiscal cred, and more voices starting to sound the alarms on the economy, I expect a push to be coming pretty soon.
I’m not holding out hope for anything more than maybe some more payroll tax cuts to actually get through this House so we just have to hold on tight and hope for providence to carry us through this one.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Davis X. Machina:
Funny how it’s working out how all those kinds of situations work too: feeding the self-fulfilling vicious cycle again.
And unfortunately we don’t have the supportive older sister with a place to crash at when the abuse becomes too much. Just expected to take it and realize it’s all your fault anyway, you filthy filthy whore.
Just….guh.
FlipYrWhig
@jl:
Um, they’re linked.
Liberal Democrats and Republicans have completely contrary views on “jobs,” that is, what the government should do to help people get back to work.
Liberal Democrats believe that the government should send government money to worthwhile projects that employ people, especially to do things of lasting value and public benefit. Republicans (and some Democrats, alas) believe that the government should get out of the way, cut taxes and let people keep more of their money.
When Democrats propose the former course, they get socked with a “tax and spend” line: “we’re broke, we can’t afford it,” etc. In theory, signing onto a deficit reduction package allows Democrats to make a new case for spending: we just put our house in order, we’re owing less, we’ve rebuilt our credit, and _that’s_ where the money is coming from.
El Cid
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: To be clear, I’m not suggesting people not do what they can to organize electorally — as ever, though, as they think best.
I’m pointing out that there’s some bizarre fantasy in which large factors which we know very well play in determining electoral victories are really dependent upon how some group hated by average pro-Democrats (i.e., “ultra-liberals”, or “the left”, or “firebaggers” to put it as weirdo obsessives here do) talk badly about the President or Democrats in general.
For example, 2010’s Congressional results were exactly those which electoral turnout demographics always find and predicted this time too.
But no, no, it was those who complained too much for the first two years. It was those who didn’t have Obama’s back.
Just like now, things like the actual impact of the economy of people’s lives, the lack of both a real and politically apparent devotion to job improvement are viewed as mattering less than peoples’ ideological devotion and enthusiastic commitments to organizing.
It’s an empirical question to ask which is more significant to likely Democratic voters’ probability of turning out and voting for Democrats: what they are actually experiencing in terms of jobs and what they believe they have heard the Administration and Congress focused on?
Or supporters explaining with zeal how much was tried and just couldn’t be done?
Organizing burnout and unwillingness to restart again by former volunteers aren’t fictional phenomena, either. They too have been studied, and though there are influential changes by the efforts of organizers to get those two groups back involved, real world conditions, and their experiences of them, matter.
The same people who seem to me to demonstrate this attitude of blaming a lack of will to back a Democratic politician or set of politicians with sufficient zeal as a cause of loss, well, of course, that’s always the truth.
If people would just suddenly do this or that, yes, the entire world could be radically different tomorrow. But, somehow, we don’t. How much history would have changed if people had suddenly had some magical wave of simultaneous realization wash through their minds and hearts together?
Even when it happens somewhere, it’s not out of the blue. You can see the evidence of such a likelihood originating somewhere.
The Egyptian revolution did indeed erupt spontaneously by mass numbers of both middle and working class Egyptians, but only after years of fracturing blocks to the lava’s path by clever and innovating organizing efforts in poor and working class neighborhoods by labor activists supported by an organizational infrastructure. It wasn’t just an object in itself created by zeal, though that indeed all mattered and as in all revolutions, follow paths unpredicted by its arguable origins.
Further, people seem to think that the results of governing decisions should be looked upon in this or that way, and maybe they should, but people don’t react, or speak, or volunteer, or vote, as you reasonably think they should.
So maybe taking real world factors into account, and actually prioritizing them, might tell a good deal more about current and likely efforts and voting.
And maybe occasionally realizing that this isn’t the policy coordinating center of the Administration or the National Committee or foreign policy leaders, and just a fucking blog named “Balloon Juice” in which people comment.
Or even more radically, holding that people get to think independently and reason out what they conclude and why, and that this is partly why many go to comment anonymously on “blogs”, rather than be viewed as troublesome insurgents failing to maintain a unified policy disciplined and asking questions which wouldn’t realistically be asked or answered of some government officials.
I.e., maybe someone could make an argument which was logical and based on empirical evidence but they couldn’t do it if they held a particular office, or is not likely given some current political environment, so, shut up with your desire to think and talk about stuff prompted by a desire to think and conclude for yourself what’s true and what isn’t.
Nied
@Loviatar:
So kicking Lieberman out of the party would automatically get them to vote for Lilly Ledbetter? Are you trying to say Dems didn’t bother to lobby them?
So symbolism>accomplishments in your world, as a wise man once said “That is why you fail.”
Yeah I’m sure insurance companies just love having their overhead capped by law, being forced to take customers that will lose them money, and having to pay extra in taxes if they charge too much. Such a deal it is!
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
I’m still convinced that a huge reason why so many Republicans won in 2010 was that a lot of Democrats insisted on running against their fellow Democrats. I really don’t understand why so many Blue Dogs thought it would be a winning strategy to run on “I hate Obama and I will fight his policies if re-elected!” And given that 2/3rds of the House Blue Dogs lost their seats to Republicans, I think I was proven right.
If Democrats had been willing to stand by their policies and be proud of them instead of trying to run away, I don’t think there would have been a massacre in November. But hindsight, 20/20, etc.
Tom65
@Blue Neponset:
This is either really good snark or a sad cry for an intervention.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The true moment of American Glory will come when Perry dies of a heart attack and Vice President Bachmann takes over and launches the war to liberate the white Tibetan homeland from the Chines. This debt debate will be so old news then, like not having radiation induced lung cancer at age 40
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Mnemosyne:
Which is why it’s still galling the prevailing wisdom on our side RE:2010 has apparently become ‘Stupid fucking libs sabotaged us!’
WyldPirate
@Danny:
Fuck off, dickhead. I worked my ass off for Obama to get him elected.
I won’t make the same mistake twice. I’m not going to lift a finger for assholes that as Chuck Butcher said the other day are “taking a sledge hammer to the economy”. That is what Obama and the Dems did.
It won’t matter in NC in ’12 anyway. Obama isn’t going to carry North Carolina again. It was his tightest margin and the mouth-breathers were complacent.
FlipYrWhig
@El Cid:
The way I remember it, the disaffected left quickly claimed responsibility for those bad results — like, “See, we told you, you should have taken care of us, but you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price.” So part of the reason why the idea persists is that both the disaffected left _and_ many Obama supporters believed the hype.
Mnemosyne
@Loviatar:
And the truth comes out: punishing one (1) guy would be worth trashing all of the legislation passed during the 111th Congress, not to mention trashing the Supreme Court nominees, the cabinet heads, the department heads, etc. etc. Having a completely non-functional government would have been worth it so you could see Lieberman properly punished. And having 10 months of non-functional government since November 2010 only convinces you even more that we would have been better off having complete deadlock for the previous two years, too.
Danny
@El Cid:
If a faction within a movement starts using up their energy to advocate and mobilize not against the movements adversaries but against other parts of the movement, then yes the movement becomes weaker. People stay home. Not only nutroots and emobaggers stay home, but confused people on the fence stay home.
I’m not allowing Jane Hamsher et al more than a supporting role in our big 2010 defeat. On the progressive side we also had the Netroots in general and the movement in general who are piss poor at getting people motivated and to the polls when we’re in power.
The problem is that even surrogates who where pretty happy about 08-10 spent their time snarking and making jokes about the “silly” teabaggers instead of sounding the big fucking alarm about a threat to the country. Instead of overselling the loot from the all-dem congress they undersold it.
That’s one of our structural problems that makes us suck at midterms and at both ruling and winning at the same time.
But insofar that the emo-proggs were, and are actively running around claiming they got the silver bullet, while de facto working to shoot us in the foot, they – you – merit getting smacked down.
no video at work
somebody else said it here many many threads ago. I think this is like taking off a bandage. You can do it slowly, & it hurts just a little bit but for a long time, or you can do it fast & it hurts badly but for just a short time. Having Republicans in complete control would rip the bandage off fast. do a lot of damage & then kill the brand for a generation or two. Electing Dems means it will take a few years to do the same amount of damage with the added ‘benefit’ that Dems will get some of the blame.
In my darkest moments I think maybe we should just step aside and let them destroy the country quickly so we can get on to the job of rebuilding. But if 8 years of that moron from Texas and is evil flying monkeys didn’t teach voters the lesson I am afraid of what it would take.
jl
@258 FlipYrWhig
I think you go astray in the last paragraph in your comment.
There is a difference between the Democrats and the current mutated GOP cult. Democratic policy ideas have a good chance of working, and GOP cult policies do not.
Problem I see is that Democratic compromise on an issue where there is a factual basis in terms of what is true versus not true, what works versus what does not work, produces a situtation where the Democrats disarm themselves.
The GOP cult position on the effect of government stimulus is factually wrong. If Democrats do anything that gives into that wrong position, the Democrats disarm themselves in helping people get jobs, and people care a lot more about that than the debt.
So, in fact, government stimulus needs to be at least maintained or preferably increased. How do you do that after a bogus debt deal, and still innoculate yourself against the tax and spend attack? You can’t, unless you are willing to be at least as irrational and ruthless in terms of aggressive false attacks and lie mongering as the current GOP cult.
So, I still don’t see it. When the Democrats start to push for the correct policy, the GOP will accuse them of being weasels, and going back on the deal. Nothing has changed.
I hesitate to say this or that Obama tactic or policy is stupid. But I think that if Obama is trying to innoculate himself from some boilerplate GOP charge (that they will use anyway), that is stupid.
El Cid
@FlipYrWhig:
Okay, fine, say that’s also the case.
Which, however, is the reasonable analysis?
Noting that well-known demographically-indicated voter tendencies predicted the election results?
Or that political tendency A (say, the more mainstream people who identify with the Democratic party per se) or B (“leftists” or other liberals or populists identified more by their behavior and speech than ideology) claim that blog rhetoric mattered?
Beth
That’s all very well and good, but it was Obama and not Bush who made the cuts. Owning DC for 6 years, Republicans were too afraid to complete their agenda. Sharing power, they can do whatever they want and blame the Democrats.
artem1s
@someone:
interesting thought. don’t think its a solution (letting the firebaggers take charge of the asylum created by the wingnuts), but interesting.
Loviatar
@260 – Nied:
you don’t think the two women Senators from Maine seeing a bill mandating equal pay for women with a real chance to pass would put aside there party affiliation to vote for it. what happened to your Obot realist hat.
no getting rid of a cancer in the Democratic party and showing other Democratic Senators that they can’t be disloyal to the point of campaigning for the opposing parties nominee vs. a bunch of watered down programs, which are mostly retread Republican policies (PPACA = Heritage plan, Stimulus = 2/3 conservative, etc.). long game baby.
mandated customers, of which a good potion will be younger customers with limited healthcare needs. Also, much better than being out of business all together, which is what Universal Healthcare or a public option would have done. They staved off UHC for at least another generation, I call that a win for the Insurance industry.
Danny
@WyldPirate:
I don’t give a shit. You’re like some perversely evolved animal with instincts telling you to offer your body to the wolf in order to spite the bear. How can I feel sorry for that? You do what you have to do.
(You’re wrong on substance as well. This deal now will hit 2012 GDP with – 0.1%. That’s not taking a sledgehammer to the economy in any way, shape or form. Ignorance breeds idiocy so no great surprise there)
Nied
Yeah hedgefund owners were so persuasive that not a single member of the CT Republican House delegation voted for it.
At the time of it’s passage there were exactly 60 Democrats in the Senate, and the ACA got exactly 60 votes. So unless kicking Lieberman out is supposed to magically conjure another Democratic Senator from somewhere you’re flat out wrong.
He could have asked someone else but would they have gotten it passed?
NR
You know, people here just don’t have a fucking clue. For all the shrieking hysteria about disloyal lefties, those are not the people you need to worry about next year. The people you need to worry about are the people who are hurting because of the shitty economy and are looking at Washington and seeing that Obama HAS NOT DONE A GODDAMN THING ABOUT IT.
THOSE are the people that are going to put a Republican in the White House next year. Not any fucking “firebaggers.” Please get a fucking clue.
Emma
@NR: Funny that. I’ve been speaking with a number of people who are exactly that, and they are all relieved. Social Security and disability checks will come in, unemployment benefits still coming, no need to touch the crappy little savings accounts for medical stuff.
*shrug* we must know different people.
Loviatar
@267 – Mnemosyne:
see this is where we differ, you believe what was passed in 111th Congress was all that could be accomplished.
.
I happen to disagree, I believe we could have gotten more.
you believe what you believe, I believe what I believe. I willing to bet though my belief is closer to the truth.
El Cid
@Danny: The Communist Party USA each and every election proclaimed it urgent to stop Republicans and vote Democratic as it would signal the onset of Fascism.
(For Communists and many orthodox Marxists, any dangerous right wing government must be of the form Fascist, whatever the historical definitions of Fascism were. I’m a bit more anal about the term.)
That they did so while each time exhorting supporters to continue organizing ‘for the workers’ revolution’ did not make their appeals any more persuasive.
It mattered in the 1930’s in the Popular Front of liberals and leftists for FDR, against Hooverism, and the New Deal, but that wasn’t the result of spontaneous attitude changes by individuals either. It was the result of organizational strength and further organizing which had lots of different tendencies agree to
But that was a period in which there really were grassroots movements on the liberal and left side. Nationwide.
One of the only significant ones which organized black and other “minority” communities and poor communities in general to both register and turn out to vote was ACORN, which unfortunately the Democratic Party in Congress gleefully rushed to destroy. ACORN actually had a significant, measurable impact on turnout in areas they had a strong presence in.
However, yes, there were some problems with ACORN, they weren’t perfect, so, you know, ‘meh,’ so I heard from the same mainstream Democrats now angry that there isn’t sufficient liberal support for grassroots organizing. Or it was just that mean old Breitbart and his fellow race-baiting stooges and the mainstream media dupes.
Okay, sure: if 100% of political factions loosely categorized as on ‘one side’ of a political spectrum were to unify in support of each and every Democratic politician in every election, yes, things would indeed by different.
How will someone, some organization, make that happen? Who or what will do the nasty, wrenching grunt work to forge a newer Popular Front not occasioned by the convenience of two Bush Jr. regimes and 4 years of absolute Republican dominance of all 3 branches and the Supes? Surely no one would suggest that it was organizing which made Republicans I know vote for Obama, for all the important effects organizing did indeed have.
Is it now “emo” to point out real, objective conditions which now, and historically, affect electoral outcomes, or even the play of forces behind them?
(I’m ignoring your absolute stupidity in trying to place me too in the category of emobagger or whatever. If you disagree, back it up with evidence. Quote me. Plenty of liars on here say this bullshit. I just tire of stupid arguments. I suppose this makes me an irritating harmful dissenter, too.)
Danny
@NR:
You firebaggers love to say that: over and over and over and over. And yet, once we get into specifics you’re always wrong on substance. How does magnets work?
And yet here you people are, talking about Obama instead of about the hurting people: over and over and over…
He passed multiple bills adressing it, ARRA and much more, spending 900B$… Until we lost the midterms. Your crowd thought it would be a good thing losing the midterms because it would “send a message”. Your crowd knows jack-shit.
You’re helping send them there, while telling yourself and us you’re doing the opposite; you’re here being obnoxious; you’re an online nuisance. Hence, I dont like you.
Mnemosyne
@Loviatar:
Sorry, I didn’t realize that we were dealing with your faith-based conviction that you’re right and not with the actual facts on the ground from 2008 to 2010.
I’ll keep that in mind the next time you try to claim that your beliefs are, like, totally fact-based because they’re what you think may possibly have happened if the 111th Congress had been totally different in makeup than it was.
Tom65
@Danny:
Yup, can’t have it both ways. Either you’re the base and the PRESIDENT MUST LISTEN TO YOU OR ELSE, or you’re just another member of the 101st Keyboardists (Progressive Battalion). Pick one.
Beauzeaux
When the situation was manageable, it was neglected.
And now that it is thoroughly out of hand, we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure.
There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind.
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong; these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
Winston S Churchill
Speech to the House of Commons May 2, 1935
WyldPirate
@Danny:
This is perhaps one of the top ten dumbest comments ever written here.
“fiscal cred”? Are you fucking nuts? They are doing exactly THE WRONG THING at the wrong time given the state of the economy.
evidence? Consumer spending WENT DOWN last month. We have a “double-dip” recession in the works. It may not be one in which the economy as a whole contracts. There is simply a lack of demand sufficient to stimulate growth that results in more people working and higher wages.
“Fiscal cred” my ass….
NR
@Danny:
God, you’re a fucking idiot. ARRA was not good enough, as evidenced by the fact that the economy is still in the shitter. But more to the point, voters are not going to look at what Obama did two and a half years ago. They are going to look at what he is doing NOW. And what he is doing now is embracing austerity and ignoring the dismal jobs situation.
Whine and cry about firebaggers all you want, but THAT is what is going to lead to Obama’s defeat next year.
dollared
@Corner Stone: So NR knows the unemployed people willing to work and you know retired people.
And the retired people will vote for Republicans, as they always do.
WyldPirate
@Danny:
I’ll take Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman’s word over your’s, dipshit.
Danny
@El Cid:
You will? I will? We will?
By supporting anyone who’s taken just one step over to our side of the fence. By making sure that everyone on our side brings the hurt to those on the other side of the fence. Like the Commies did during FDR.
An example of that is making Breitbart hurt for ACORN rather than making those of us who didnt stand up enough for ACORN hurt. If Breitbart gets the double whammy of taking out ACORN and making us fight amongst ourselves as reward for his despicable shenanigans then what incentive does he have to back the fuck off? You think about that. The reason why he can smear a good but flawed organization and win is because the conservative movement has everything we dont have: working powerful institutions, strong and coordinated grassroot support etc. Thats why people didnt stick up for ACORN – because we’re outgunned. Pointing your gun at your brothers in arms makes us more outgunned – not less.
The Commies lost because the workers revolution failed and made people hurt more instead of less. But they did a good thing here insofar as they helped give us Social Security and the New Deal.
You got every right to opine what factors played a part in the 2010 midterms. I didnt fully agree so I gave you my 2 cents. I had a vague impression that you were on the firebagger side of the fence, but if you dont feel you belong there I’ll retract the part about “you” and leave the rest as it stands.
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
This is the tricky part, though — when FDR got the New Deal passed, he was successful in part because he had a credible threat to hold over the heads of the plutocrats that it was either calm things down with a New Deal or risk having the country go either fascist or communist like countries were doing all over Europe. You had quasi-fascist populists like Huey Long in Louisiana and genuine soshulists like Upton Sinclair running for governor in California. Communism and fascism were here in the good old US of A, and FDR was the only one who had a plan to fend them off and save American capitalism from itself.
Unfortunately, we just don’t have an equivalent threat to make the plutocrats toe the line anymore. Communism is dead and they don’t think fascism would be too bad (classical Italian-style fascism, that is). So at this point, I’m not really sure what the solution is to reduce their power.
(Also, too, a historical note: one of the reasons why so many early civil rights leaders were accused of having Communist ties was that they actually did, given that the US’s Communist Party was the only political party at the time that even gave lip service to racial equality.)
les
@Nutella:
And how many cuts to our tattered net were enacted? Or even voted on? Or even written up as legislation? Do you have the faintest grasp of reality?
OzoneR
@dollared:
Has it ever occurred to any of you that maybe Americans are batshit?
Lydgate
@WyldPirate:
Yes, I’ve started thinking the same thing too. I always wondered how long it would take them to come to their senses and realize nobody was going to make a truly serious effort to overturn Roe. In the same way, I just don’t get these Obama loyalists. What does it take?
Nied
Because here in the real fucking world they didn’t! I don’t know how much more realist you can get than that.
Ah here we get the bullshit “the stimulus was only 1/3 stimulus” meme from firedoglake (because in Hamsherland cash transfer to states to fill in budget holes, increased unemployment benefits, and tax cuts aimed at the poor aren’t stimulative). I’m sure the country would be much better off with no stimulus at all, and no healthcare plan is better than one that has some similarities to one Republicans came up with. Especially when we can show everyone what big swinging dicks we have by sticking it to Joe Lieberman.
Yes yes, never mind that the very practices that made insurance companies so awful are banned, never mind that their profit margin is going to be squeezed from both ends by the mandated MLR and excise tax, never mind that 30 million people are going to get health care coverage. No Carthago Delenda Est!
Those 30 million poor people can go screw until the insurance companies are properly punished for their sins! (Maybe after we’re done punishing Lieberman for his.)Lydgate
@Mnemosyne: Huey Long was not a quasi fascist. Corrupt, yes, but not a quasi fascist.
NR
@OzoneR:
If that’s the case, we’re fucked no matter what we do, so I’d rather go down fighting.
les
@Bender:
An intentional bid for idiocy of the day?
dollared
@dollared: ignore that. meant for emma.
Danny
@WyldPirate:
Well it’s true that if the economy isn’t out of the recession by 2013 then the cuts start to become a factor. And I would suspect that Krugman keeps his language vague enough to say that the deal will “hurt the economy” without saying when.
Brad DeLong though, is flat out dishonest. He claimed – 0.4% GDP in 2012, but thats only reasonable if you expect a multiplier of 2.7 for every dollar cut out of the fed budget and the highest multiplier used in forecasting the stimulus was 2.5. Obama gets to choose what to cut so a multiplier over 1 is pretty unreasonable unless you count on him trying to cause as much damage as possible. I asked DeLong in his comments section how he arrived at that number – he never responded. He’s a hack.
I posted in AL:s open thread some quotes from a Reuters piece that Nate Silver linked to where two economists said impact in 2012 is pretty much zero, and that size of cuts meaning – 0.1 % respectively.
wrb
@El Cid: @El Cid:
No, but nor is it a bizarre fantasy to acknowledge that propaganda, disinformation and group or herd behavior now and historically have influenced political outcomes We aren’t natural man, responding just to our local environments or abiding by the dictates of historical statistical norms established via a very small sample size.
The low information but once-enthusiastic voter has been subject to an onslaught of deceptive negative propaganda from the left since Obama was elected, such as claims that not achieving that for which there were simply not the was somehow “failure” or demonstration of “spinelessnes- or the absurd claims of immediate economic damage being made today.” Of course such propaganda has an effect. It always has.
I’m a bit surprised to find you making such an weak argument. It was actually the intelligence of some posts you made about South America that caused me to make this the first blog in which I read the comments.
Julie Raffety
Who are you going to vote for–Michelle Bachman? Sarah Palin? That’ll show…who?
OzoneR
@Loviatar:
Of course you are, I’m willing to belief you’re completely wrong.
Danny
He’s since walked that back, now claiming it’s .3%; using a multiplier of 2 on unclear grounds.
Corner Stone
@dollared: Honestly, I’ve been puzzling on it.
Loviatar
@276 – Nied:
you Obots and you selective realist goggles.
why would any Republican vote for the Stimulus plan when they knew it has enough Democratic votes for passage. why open yourself up to a primary from the right if there is no need.
If this is the reason Obots are using for keeping Lieberman in the bosom of the Democratic party, it was not worth it. As stated in other places I wouldn’t lose any heartache if PPACA went down. It is nothing more than an expanded Insurance scheme and a giveaway to big business, along with setting UHC back at least one generation.
why not, same parameters were there with or without Lieberman
dollared
B@OzoneR: I’m sure they are misinformed. They also want to have their cake and eat it too. I also think they have the ability to make informed judgments and they could make choices if we make it easy, but it is hard and it takes really effective politicians who make better decisions than Obama.
So that is why you see many frustrated liberals. We will never get better decisions from the electorate if we don’t give them the choice, and Obama is denying them the choice, rhetorically, administratively and legislatively.
NR
@Julie Raffety:
Once again, if this is all you have for next year, you’re fucked.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Julie Raffety:
Ah yes, we’re held hostage to Obama. Isn’t that particularly ironic in light of the last three years?
Emma
@Keith G: The existence of this thread, and some of the others on this blog, argue that liberals are going off the deep end in every direction. Liberals, if we include the PUMAs, have been going out of their minds since the inauguration.
I should have realized the moment I used a descriptor for Obama that invoked the republicans’ view of him,there would be people that IN SPITE OF THE CONTEXT, would jump on that.
Sometimes I give my fellow democrats more credit than they deserve.
Corner Stone
“Where the fuck else you gonna go?”
dollared
@Danny: Delong may be off on the timing but the multiplier makes sense. Remember the stimulus had a huge tax cut component that is very, very ineffective, especially in a demand squeeze (more Obama self-sabotage).
Nied
I love the goal post moving here. From “it would have passed anyway” to “well I didn’t like it so it doesn’t matter”. Also apparently in Hamsherland covering 98% of the population isn’t universal, and forcing companies to take money losing customers they don’t want while slashing their profits is a giveaway. I think you hit on it in your last post, your not mad that Insurance companies can still do harm (the overwhelming majority of the harmful things they’ve done in the past are outlawed) it’s that the ACA allowed them to exist instead of punishing them for their sins.
Danny
@WyldPirate:
Well there you go, illustrating the tragicomedy of the nutroot crowd. You take your own inability to read for comprehension and use it to run off on some irrelevant rant.
“Fiscal cred” translates to “fiscal credibility” translates to “fiscal credibility with the public”. It is immaterial to my point if the actual deal – that no one on the left much likes – actually is the right policy for cutting the deficit.
What is relevant to my argument is if the deal and the fight leading up to the deal gives Obama fiscal credibility with the public at this moment, right now. And I submit that it does. There. Now you can run off and rant about whatever you feel like or go do grassroots work for Romney or enjoy your couch. Whatever you feel like, my dear, disenfranchised nutroot.
OzoneR
Worth the read
http://www.slate.com/id/2300662/pagenum/all/#p2
The Populist
@Tom65:
AND a supreme court we will be stuck with for decades. Sorry, I’ll take Obama and his weak kneed compromise over any domination of the courts by extremists who will make Roberts, Alito and Scalia look like nice guys in comparison.
Tom65
@Just Some Fuckhead:
It’s a legitimate question. I know you don’t want to hear it, but the fact of the matter is you get a choice between Obama or one of the Insane Klown Posse. Primarying Obama insures you get the Insane Klown Posse.
Bitch about the system all you want, but it’s too fucking late if all you pay attention to is national races. You want a progressive paradise? Go sell it at the local level, in the state and county races. Otherwise, you’re no better than the libertarians, throwing Hail Mary’s every four years and whining that no one takes you seriously.
Mack Lyons
@Loneoak: Ok.
Too bad that was staged, with the late-model Mercedes and the cheap Roman Bellic-looking bastard.
I want to see that APC roll over a Ferrari or a Rolls Royce. Then, and only then will I believe he meant business.
Danny
@dollared:
No what I meant was that the measures in the Stimulus that were scored the highest got a multiplier of 2.5, e.g. infrastructure. Tax cuts get a multiplier of 1 and below.
That’s why using a multiplier of 2.7 means that DeLong assumes Obama is going to cut stuff thats most likely to hit the economy, and then DeLong is highballing that.
Loviatar
@Nied:
holy shit you Obots are assholes with your selective realist goggles.
I’ll type slowly so you can understand.
why would any Republican vote for
the Stimulus planany Democratic bill when they know it has enough Democratic votes for passage. why open yourself up to a primary from the right if there is no need.Stimulus: 1/3 tax cuts (conservative), 1/3 block grants to the states (conservative), 1/3 infrastructure spending (progressive). you do the math, no I better do it for you. 2/3 conservative 1/3 progressive
wow you have a lot of faith in the implementation of this plan. my faith is in the fact that the Insurance industry just got mandated 30 million new paying customers, with regulations to follow instead of UHC or having to compete against a public option. I see a giveaway to another big business group by the corporatist arm of the Democratic party
El Cid
@Danny:
I pointed out what happened. I noted who did what in Congress. He didn’t do it. I mentioned who actually did what. And its effects.
What, now it’s a failure of dedication to even mention what Congressional representatives did in Congress? That’s “pointing guns” at my “brothers in arms”?
It was a fucking Congressional vote which destroyed an organization which was helping Democrats be elected.
OK. Great. Go after Breitbart. Of course, it makes sense, has to be done.
But ACORN, and the work that they did, is gone. I didn’t do it. It was an action which actually took place, in this world, in reality, not in a rant, not in the eructations by unhappies.
I can’t even be angry about that stupid, immoral, and self-damaging act by the very Democrats who need such organizational support to be elected on a fucking satire blog’s comments?
Would it be okay to mention what happened and its effects about 20, 40 years from now? 100? 1,000? Only after a century of continuous rule by Democrats? Never? Must I make sure to un-aware myself of it? Undergo sessions of self-criticism to make sure I do not think much less utter such divisive undermining thoughts?
Breitbart can think what he wants. We can think what we want, about him or anything else. It’d be great to wipe him out, and so forth.
But the fact that elected Democratic politicians rushed to damage their own and their party’s political futures is now a reality. It’s real. A significant organizational base which contributed positively and substantially to Democratic electoral victories is gone — and therefore is not only worth understanding as a reality in and of itself (because in many areas ACORN was there pushing and organizing for improvements in the communities which leagues of Democrats hadn’t done but who were often needed to enact them) but how elected politicians and their party interact with supporting organizations.
Reality doesn’t simply vanish because I declare my profound dedication to enthusiastically support allies and pursue enemies. It’s there. It happened.
This broad-based, geographically spread organization which had effects in reality (and saying so isn’t hagiography but, again, noting evidence) did what they did while there was a right wing media. What they did wasn’t impossible for the entire time of their actions given a right wing media environment.
Partly because, as has been studied time and time and time again, not just by scholars but by generations of organizers, local actions are not nearly as much determined by national opinions and media.
And no one as far as I’ve seen — certainly no one here that I can recall in these blog comments — proposes any way whatsoever to replace that sort of work.
Sure, attacking firebaggers. Bitching about the lack of party enthusiasm by the left.
But building an organization to both fight for the immediate interests of poor and minority communities no matter who is in power or who owns which media for years and years, and to simultaneously aid voting registration and turnout — and given where they were and with whom they worked, for Democratic benefit?
It’s flat-out immoral to fail to protect organizations on the frontline for such communities, and to only focus upon issues like the media or a party’s electoral victories which might improve the lives of that community.
But it’s stupid to think that you can replace such ground-level organizing and assistance to very struggling and hurt populations with a focus on electoral organizing and, of course, a simultaneous conviction to not talk about stuff which isn’t immediately helpful to that.
Look, people talk about the importance of labor unions to the Democratic Party and many elections — but they’re mostly significant because they’re labor unions. They don’t just exist for the next campaign. They have to do stuff now for their members, even though they do understand that this is in the context of a nexus of factors including — but not always most directly — which party is in power, and on which level and where.
I hate to break this to anyone, but it is no one’s human responsibility (much less to their or the world’s advantage) to spend 100% of every minute of every day thinking in agreement with party line needs.
Just Some Fuckhead
El Cid, when did you turn into such a goddamn firebagger?
Jennifer
I’ll just note here that I am psychic and that also, too, I am much better at playing this game than the elected leadership of the Democratic Party.
Loviatar
@312 – Nied:
no moving of the goal posts. it would have passed anyway if you guys (Obots) really wanted it. Obama proved that with the Debt Ceiling bill. He bent over and the bill got passed. It really only hurts the first time, after that you get used to it.
A bit of advice don’t clench.
Danny
@NR:
Sure. It wasnt good enough. It was good enough to stop the 800k/a month jobs loss and get us into a weak recovery but it wasnt big enough to get us into a strong one.
But it was as good a bill we could get 60 senators to vote for. So arguably it was as good a bill as it could have been in the real world.
If we got lets say 8.3% unemployment next november and 250K job growth / month and Romney or Perry as the republican candidate I fully expect firebagger ratfuckery to have the potential to put the republican in the White House and switch the Senate to R.
It did happen in 2000 after all.
Or maybe we’ll see something like the Teddy primary of ’80. The Teddy crowd still maintain that Reagan would have won no matter what but back then it looked to be down to the wire up until the debate.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
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Firebaggers just can’t accept another historic legislative victory courtesy of President Obama, that’s all.
.
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Loviatar
another one for you Obots
Anders Breivik’s crazy list of demands is being kept away from President Obama because Obama loves giving crazy people everything they want
h/t OTB
Uncle Clarence Thomas
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Ask not what your president can do for you – ask what you can do for your president.
.
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Svensker
@Tom65:
Yup.
El Cid
@wrb:
Which weak argument?
Did I deny the influence of a media environment?
No. I specifically focused on not ignoring measurably significant factors.
A media environment is one of them. Why would you suppose I’d exclude it?
But that’s not what I see here by so many here who appear to differentiate themselves from ‘the left’ or whatever.
I see a focus on right wing media and the whinings of “firebaggers” or whoever as determinant. As what’s worth talking about.
The reverse of talking about the dramatic effects of a right wing media dominant environment
But, go back to your mentioning of South America. Do you imagine that somehow those juntas and right wing tyrannies by fake election failed to have a right wing media domination?
Yes, they did. And it was hugely significant. And the very people organizing against them were quite aware of that. They were also quite aware of the presence of various dissenters or internal disruptors.
But just like organizers in rural impoverished American communities a few generations ago, they assessed what was affecting the people they were working with right then, and how people viewed this and how it shaped their actions, and so they had to act to aid those people and situations right then, and not wait for a next election.
Yet that’s not really that relevant here.
This is a fucking blog. People can talk about anything they want. This isn’t a national campaign, or a rural organizing effort, or party strategizing.
It’s where you’d think that when people are interested in talking about politics and how people vote and how to affect this or that, readers and commenters might be interested in all the factors we very well know are important.
And if something’s important, even if simultaneously something else is important, does only one of them matter?
Do I fail to express my hatred for right wingers here & abroad enough? Do I fail to mention pretty regularly the lies and class biases and so forth of the news media (don’t I usually call them the “billion dollar media”?) Do you think these comments here are in any way contradictory to these?
Corner Stone
@Loviatar:
Obama proved it prior to that with the extension of the Bush Tax Cuts. That whole deal was dead and a non-starter. Until Obama got involved and made it happen.
Corner Stone
@The Populist:
Hey fucko. Are you, or are you not making the claim above? Still waiting!
Danny
@El Cid:
Well I’m just pointing reality out to you, how it works.
Breitbart, FoxNews and all of Movement Conservatisms powerful institutions and message amplifiers decide to go after ACORN, because it plays to their bigoted base voters and it has the potential to hurt dem GOTV operation.
O’Keefe does a hit job on ACORN and the conservatives whip up a frenzy of race animosity.
Now if the picture O’Keefe painted in his hit job had been true, it should discredit any organization to some extent.
Because of the power of the conservative echo chamber and the MSM journalists not doing their job this got to a vote and fed funding was stripped by a bipartisan majority.
There are many people who with hindsight should have acted differently: the MSM, dem politicians, etc.
But the antagonists are O’Keefe, Breitbart, and Movement Conservatism and their minions. They targeted ACORN by race-baiting and they succeeded.
We need to lean on the mainstream media so they do their job, or do what we want them to. We need dems to learn from their mistake of not managing to salvage ACORN.
But we need to attack, to hate O’Keefe, Breitbart and Movement Conservatism, we need to discredit O’Keefe and Breitbart and make them pay. We need to make them hurt.
IOW we need to give them incentives for backing the fuck off and not pulling shit like this.
That’s where you and people like you get everything wrong. You’re further rewarding the perps by drumming up contempt for (some) of the victims. That gives the perps more incentive to keep up their fuckery.
El Cid
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I apologize. But it hurts even worse that I’m not embraced by my fellow firebaggers as a true emobagpwogwhatever, since I have not yet proven my dedication to whatever cause that whoever they are are for. Hell, I am even more ashamed to admit that I haven’t visited FDL outside of TBogg and DDay since like 2004 or ‘5 or whatever. I am surely due for party-line error denunciation. By someone. Probably when I least expect it.
Danny
@Loviatar:
I already adressed this in an old thread, but the problem here Loviatar is that you dont know what the fuck a progressive is.
Neither Keynesian economic theory or progressivism mandates that money has to be spent by the federal government in order to count as either “progressive” or “stimulus”. State Goverment spending is just (or almost – accounting for race to the bottom type situations) as “progressive” or “stimulative” as Fed spending. That’s pure ignorance and you should pretty much go hide in shame for posting something so dumb ass stupid as “block grants to the states (conservative)”.
Furthermore I went through pretty much all the tax cuts in ARRA and most of them go to progressive ends such as poor and the middle class, and clean energy. So “1/3 tax cuts (conservative)” is ludicrous as well.
Nied
@Loviatar:
Fun! From your own Link:
$116 Billion Payroll tax credit (this made up the overwhelming majority of the tax cuts and primarily benefits the poor it’s also highly stimulative)
$86 Billion In increased Medicaid funding (you know how much COnservatives love Medicaid!)
$25 Billion in Health IT spending (this has an added bonus of both being a down payment on the ACA, and infrastructure spending of a sort, obviously very conservative)
$53 Billion in aid to State Education Departments for hiring teachers (you know how much conservatives love teachers unions!)
$15 Billion for Pell grants (Federal money to send poor people to college is the height of conservatism)
$40 for increased Unemployment benefits (a program to do Ayn Rand proud)
$20 for food stamps (because conservatives proudly talk about how much they love buying young bucks t-bones)
$14 Billion for a one time $250 payment to SSI beneficiaries (Social Security the ultimate conservative program)
$3 Billion in increased Welfare payments (for the welfare queens conservatives lovingly speak about)
$105 Billion in infrastructure (obviously Liberal)
$27 Billion for alternative energy research and energy efficiency upgrades (for the rock ribbed climate hawks that form the conservative base)
$14 Billion for various low income housing projects (highly conservative)
$7 Billion for Scientific research (you know how much they love science down in Texas!)
$4 Billion for hiring more police and firefighters (not jails like the Liberals love)
$1 Billion to forgive loans to states for UI benefits (more for the Randroids)
All in all that’s $555 Billion for very liberal programs and stuff aimed square at the poor or nearly 3 quarters of the bill. Yeah it’s a republican wet dream right there.
Yet another move of the goal posts! “Well fine if it did that it wouldn’t be a giveaway but it won’t because… well… Obama’s going to sell us out! You’ll see!” never mind that the regulations have already gone into effect.
El Cid
@Danny:
O Jesus Fucking Christ. You’re right. People who were smart enough to get elected to office were simply helpless against following whipped-up right wing race-baiting, and had no choice but to act in such a way as to screw over their own party, and if I mention that, and its effects, and fail to focus exclusively on defeating such reptiles as Breitbart and the right wing media environment, then I’m part of the problem.
Let me tell you something, and you think about it yourself. Whatever your analysis of the overall situation was.
If you had been in Congress at that moment, how would you have voted? Would you have voted to defund and smear ACORN? Would you go on record to publicly spread such smears?
And if you had, what would you do afterwards?
Would you excuse your foolishness and venality as your helplessness in the face of Fox News? Tell yourself that your own vote didn’t matter, and wasn’t worth at all thinking about, because the real job was to fight the right wing race-baiters and media which forced you to act in the way you did?
And that it was okay that as an elected Democrat you didn’t have a clue about one of the major organizations helping Democrats to get elected?
Or, rather, that even on some fucking comments blog it’s simply too much of a right wing crisis for any such thing ever to even be mentioned.
To even mention such a real event is to rally people against The Cause, to sow division, to divert peoples’ attention from the real enemies, to subvert the Revolution from within.
You’re right. It it not yet time to criticize Fidel Castro, because, after all, the US Empire is an imperialist threat to the hemisphere and seeks to overthrow the Revolution. Those who insist on doing so at this time are objectively anti-Revolutionary imperialists.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
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Tuesday, August 2, 2011 – I am predicting here and now that balloonbaggers will never turn against President Obama, no matter what he does or doesn’t do.
Now I have to run over to Digby Downer and Glenn Greenwald’s houses to implore them not to make the same prediction, lest balloonbaggers become confused as to which “everything they say I must do the opposite” path they should take.
.
.
wrb
@El Cid:
El Cid,
I don’t know what past comments of yours you are defending, I must have missed them.
I assume they were not the deliberately dishonest or willfully stupid sort that have made up much of the anti-Obama propaganda, with which the last couple of days have been so redolent.
I strongly agree with you re: ACORN.
My disagreement was with the claim that such propaganda was without effect, and did not influence the 2010 election, and will not influence the election of 2012.
I can’t believe that you really believe such a thing.
danimal
I fear a President Romney more than I fear a President Perry. Romney will have to prove his crazy credentials ALL the time, while the dominionists will trust Perry implicitly.
Either way, we’d be living a nightmare, so it’s better to vote for the Democrat who got elected at the front-end of a national economic catastrophe than a Republican riding the heels of a mob.
OzoneR
@Loviatar:
Wait, so it’s the fault of a freshman Illinois Senator that Lieberman kept his chairmanship?
Loviatar
@334 – Danny:
I am fully aware that the Keynesian economic theory does not mandate “federal spending” as the only acceptable method of stimulus spending.
My point is that based upon the Stimulus framing; 1/3 was Tax Cuts which is a conservative policy point, 1/3 was block grants again a conservative policy point, 1/3 was for infrastructure which was a progressive policy point, thereby constructing the Stimulus of 2/3 conservative policy points.
Most states I imagine used the money in some form of stimulating manner (whether not laying off employees or state infrastructure spending, etc.) but the overall policy was still constructed to heavily favor conservative policy, which was not judged to be as stimulating to the economy as progressive policy.
Good for you you got another chance to yell FIREBAGGER.
Clap harder, reality calling and you’ve got to drown it out.
aisce
@ uncle clarence thomas
actually, yes. that’s precisely how it’s supposed to work. the president is ostensibly the head of the coalition, and the coalition’s job is to work to support him and him to support it. i can see how the concept of mutuality would confuse you.
OzoneR
@NR:
and an era of even more irrelevancy for you.
Loviatar
@342 – OzoneR:
go back and read your history. The junior Senator from Illinois was one of the most aggressive Senator’s pushing for Lieberman to keep his Democratic prerequisites. This of course was before Lieberman stabbed him in the back.
This was well know and written about extensively.
Danny
@El Cid:
It’s pointless with people like you because you run on a self-sustaining engine of outrage that wouldnt know how to strike the ultimate cause of your outrage if it jumped up and bit you in the face.
The point is that O’Keefe lied in his video. He lied. The votes were taken when the lie had yet to be exposed.
You’re perfectly free to complain about lack of spine among the dems when they took the vote. I agree, though I think the sad state of race-politics in the US plays a part.
But in order for me to consider you anything but a counter-productive know-nothing idiot, you’d have to give the dems a slap on the wrist and let them off with a warning and take your semi-automatic and go hunt yourself some O’Keefe, Breitbart and Hannity.
That’s having sane priorities. Anything else is lunacy and worthy of contempt.
If telling that like it is hurts your delicate feelings to the point that you go off on a rant about verboten speech, censorship etc, well too bad. Time to grow up and be of use.
OzoneR
@Loviatar:
um, do you really think Lieberman’s voting record would be the same? Seriously?!?! Are you for real with this?
OzoneR
@Loviatar:
As were the other 49 Democratic Senators. What’s your point?
Danny
@Loviatar:
This is useless. Stimulus spending through block grants to States is not a “Conservative policy point”. It’s progressive, keynesian stimulus to prevent teacher lay-offs and the like.
This is symptomatic of the nutrooters, 90% of complaining is based on pure ignorance.
NR
@Danny:
Wrong. We don’t know what 60 senators would have voted for, because Obama didn’t try for anything better. But we do know that what he went for was inadequate. And once again, this was two and a half years ago. People are interested in what Obama is doing NOW.
Oh my god! If some incredibly unlikely set of circumstances happens, maybe firebaggers will be able to throw the election! Let’s worry about that, instead of the fact that the economy sucks and people are pissed about it! Because firebaggers are a MUCH greater threat to Obama than that!
Really, you guys are just comical at this point.
Keith G
@Emma:
There are some liberals here that are saying some silly things, most likely borne of a very real frustration (and there are a few run of the mill wackos who call themselves liberals, but they are easy to spot); nonetheless, it still may be a bit early in the game to go calling them names.
Presidents get to take on a lot of responsibility and they get to own their decisions like no other folks. We chose presidents who we hope can think strategically, do difficult things, win the tough points and rally the people to a greater cause.
Obama needs to up his game and some feel the need to point that out.
As to this point:
The context was more than a bit foggy.
KXB
Democrats don’t realize that you have to keep selling a plan, even after it is signed into law. Here is something that Democrats are too dim to promote:
U.S. employers expand health benefits coverage under reform
Loviatar
@337 Nied:
oh I’m sorry it was 45% Tax Cuts (most at the poor), 20% Block Grants and 35% infrastructure. That worked out real well didn’t it, the economy is just rolling along.
The President and the Congressional leadership constructed a Stimulus plan that was heavily weighed towards conservative policies. These policies were noted to be less effective than an equal plan weighed towards progressive policies, they were also noted to be inadequate for the job.
It was also noted that the failure of the plan would come with political and economical penalties, because the failure would be seen as a reason to not follow up with additional stimulus as needed.
So yeah more stimulus was targeted at the poor, however overall the plan was failure because it was a conservative plan.
Obama got hosed into implementing a Republican plan thats costing him politically and the rest of us economically.
.
Do you notice a pattern.
sglover
@NR:
Correct, and well said. But not having a fucking clue is a hallowed tradition among Donk loyalists here. I remember how so many of them were confidently calling a Dem sweep last November, and the smug disdain they blasted at anyone with the effrontery to point out that Hope’n’Change wasn’t exactly delivering a whole helluva lot.
But I know — HE’S NOT A REPUBLICAN. So there!
Danny
@NR:
As I recall it he asked for it to be about 900B$ and it ended up 750B$?
But if you’re proposing a theory along the lines that “if Obama would have asked for 1,5T$ he would have gotten 1T$”, well that’s possible but it might as well have been the case that he got 300B$ or nothing at all.
He got a fairly progressive 750B$ stimulus through a filibustering Senate and it turned 800k job loss a month to positive job growth in the autumn.
Complaining that he should have gotten a 2T$ stimulus may be true on policy put is pie in the sky on politics.
What’s with all you guys and the “Oh my god!” high school level sarcasm? Is it because you’re just out of high school?
Anyhow, 8.3% unemployment in nov 2012 isnt incredibly unlikely, it’s quite likely. 250 k job growth / month is also quite likely. Either Romney or Perry seems extremely likely from where I’m standing. You don’t have to agree on any of those, but you should make a case instead of just assertions, otherwise you’re simply not credible.
kindness
As much as I might want to participate, when I come back and see 350+ responses….well that is a little too many for me to wade through playing catch up. Sorry. Maybe at home (although usually I’m just as occupied there) but not while I’m working.
Loviatar
@350 – Danny:
You’re making an assumption of a fact that is not there. My quote again on Block Grants, relevant portion highlighted.
Like I said, while I imagine most states used the money to stimulate there economy that does not mean all states did that.
– NJ decided to let their Millionaire Tax sunset and replaced the revenue with stimulus funds. This is a short term solution so now Gov. Christie is beating up the state unions (layoffs, pay cuts, etc.)to make up the shortfall.
– Texas flat out just replaced state funding with the stimulus and crowed about a balanced budget for two years.
Do you see a pattern, conservatives like Block Grants because it allows them to also play there silly Tax Cut games on a local level with Federal money. Maybe a different story if the money was managed from a federal by Democrats who actually cared about the economy instead of by Republicans playing games.
dollared
@El Cid: No, you got it all wrong! Killing ACORN inoculated democrats against all Republican attempts to demagogue “voter fraud” and strip voting rights away from poor people!
That inoculation thing is the greatest thing since Dr. Kevorkian’s machine!
El Cid
@Danny:
Listen to yourself.
Is this what you really believe? That there is one, and only one, point in understanding such an event?
__
How is this, then, not a failure of yours, a dangerous undermining, a refusal to recognize the true cause?
I think such a statement is the view of an immature lunatic who doesn’t understand who the real enemies are.
If people like you can’t realize that constantly screaming that Democrats are the enemy isn’t the issue, why, there’s nothing I can do for you.
[Hint: Parody.]
I don’t think you know the slightest bit about me. I don’t think you’re very aware of what I think about who should be elected, or what’s wrong and what’s so dangerous about today’s media environments, or whose among the enemies.
I think you believe that not even one mention, one comment, one point made on a blog comment area, can be issued, that in any way fails to focus entirely upon the promotion of a formulaic cause.
I wasn’t complaining about “censorship”.
I was noting the simplistic, ridiculous view of someone like you, for whom any single, solitary statement of strongly worded criticism of actions by the Democratic Party is harmful.
Did it even occur to you to ask me what I thought might have been the media context? Or racist biases contributing? (Not that either, of course, would be the slightest justification if I had voted in such a manner. Not if I had the least bit of integrity, self-respect, and honesty.)
You’re just so eager to find someone as a “firebagger” or whatever that it’s a parody.
A “counterproductive, know-nothing idiot” who mentions things which were real, which happened, and which you agreed with.
“Counterproductive,” presumably, meaning that I ever consider a though worth expressing which you don’t consider advancing a cause.
An actually counterproductive person would declare himself completely incurious about the entire context of what happens and seemingly why.
Trust me, I don’t consider any of you — i.e., people commenting on this blog — intimidating in the slightest.
Tedious, to the degree that I know that upon expressing certain points I might have to go round and round with thick-headed frightened idiots just so one or two would actually understand what I was saying. And/or represent it truthfully.
Just the other day one commenter began also lying about my firebagger views simply because I pointed out that his likewise condemnatory comments about an opinion piece revealed that he had no idea what the opinion piece had said, and actually the piece expressed the exactly opposite opinion. But the fact that I pointed out that someone was both ignorant and lying on what they were condemning prompted this anti-emoblah reaction.
For some idiots, it’s betrayal simply to insist that one accurately state what some essay said, whether or not that piece was written by presumed friend or foe.
But censorship? Of course not. Do I seem like the sort of person who would view such comments as yours as skeery and I better not say this stuff anymore or the bad man will be angry?
You’re among the various 3rd graders here who seem to believe that insults to you, or your way of thinking (at least some particular expressions of which here) are evidence of “winning”.
Or more particularly, an over-excited fearfulness and hatred of someone for one moment expressing opinions — or even empirical statements — about real world events which you don’t feel contribute to the cause.
I mean, you’ve been involved in grassroots organizing, among poor people and communities of color. They never, ever express the tiniest opinions no matter how true which might be divergent to the cause, not even amongst themselves, not even the tiniest whispers in a darkened closet, because that’s how they are. Right? I just imagined people bitching about stuff.
For such minds, events cannot be truly multi-causal, they cannot be discussed in any way other than developing from those causal origins which are chosen.
Just because I think someone is saying stupid things doesn’t mean I’m afraid of him or her in any way. Well, perhaps fearful of boring myself more of arguing with block-heads who simply refuse to grasp simple statements.
To be fair, not block-heads in general; just sometimes in particular arguments about particular subjects. Obviously a lot of people who do really valuable things can still be mud-headed on certain discussions. I would assume your energies are employed doing things which would help something, probably electoral organizing. But this sort of line of argument is dumber than dirt. People are complicated.
So, therefore, I surrender. You win. I will prove this by not continuing to discuss this any more, and this will of course be evidence of my fear of censorship.
spark
The only way out of the dead end we’re in is via some god awful disaster. Civil War, Great Depression, World War awful.
Danny
@Loviatar:
How? You cant just assert this.
The funds are meant to counter-act states cutting spending on different things in a recession (because of lost revenue).
We cant prevent any State from passing state legislation that further complicates their fiscal situation just like NJ did.
But Texas is in fact an example of how the Stimulus worked by improving Texas fiscal balance the last years, preventing layoffs. Texas didnt cut State spending or lay off people, but they got a new budget coming up where they will. Them not cutting spending or laying off people was exactly the point.
It’s of course unfortunate that Perry got to crow but the Stimulus worked exactly as planned.
Keith G
@kindness: Just type something random. That’s what many here do.
Danny
@El Cid:
Whoah, I actually read all of that defensive, pouting piece of flaming sophistry so you definitely owe me one.
But to summarize, you’re saying that while you agree on substance with everything re: priorities as applied to Breitbart and ACORN, you feel that I got you wrong and also I’m trying to intimidate you or something. Let me clear everything up then by quoting you from the place where you first committed the grave offense (irony):
There. All better now when you see what got me going? Pick yourself up man, it’s sad seeing such a Champion of Le Grand Outrage reduced to pouting about being persecuted by big ugly bullies like me.
Loviatar
@362 – Danny:
– Are Tax Cuts a core conservative policy point?
– Is Block Grant funding to the states a core conservative policy point?
– What percentage of the Stimulus plan consisted of Tax Cuts and Block Grants?
If the percentage is over 50% (and its well over for the combined policies) then its a plan constructed upon conservative policy points.
Then this is not a stimulus its a state Tax Cut for the wealth paid with federal funds. How is that stimulus. Thats why ita a conservative policy point.
Again, Texas did not use the money to stimulate the economy (prevent layoffs, etc.), they used it to replace state funding while cutting Taxes. The side benefit of course is that for two years they didn’t have to do layoffs, but now that they have to, its going to be extreme, because they won’t raise the taxes back to the level they were before the stimulus. Again, this why conservatives like Block Grants.
pluege
the only reason left for anyone sane rational person to vote for obama is the Supreme Court. obama is truly awful. But leaving lifetime SCOTUS appointments to the maggot republicans is even more intolerable than the insidious, duplicitous obama.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
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@aisce:
I understand mutuality perfectly. I also understand that you are the one who is confused about your own words –
Now, I know it’s got to be a lot of fun for any dipshit off the street to be president of History’s Greatest Country/Clown Car on Earth, but I believe that one-way support of a single politician’s personal dream of Ultimate Fame, Enrichment, Power and Authority is not the point of the exercise. If this incompetent asswipe (or cunning traitor if you prefer) fought like hell and acted in the best interests of the regular People of the United States and the world, I’d be singing his praises – and what decent person wouldn’t? But he hasn’t, and so I don’t. My advice to you is to get up off your knees, balloonbagger.
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dollared
@El Cid: Don’t stop. Seriously. These assholes simply are in denial.
Every progressive is going to vote for Obama. But he said himself that we have to make him do the right thing. Don’t stop.
And these idiots are not just fighting the last war, they are embracing the losing strategies from the last war.
The US needs massive change. The entire business model of the US is upside down. We are on a track to 25% U6 within five years. The baby boomer over 55 U6 will be 40%.
We desperately and urgently need: 50% cut in defense spending, health care removed 100% from employer responsibility, massively improved labor, antitrust and banking laws, higher severance taxes on natural resources, carbon tax, fair trade, and 35% higher taxes on the rich to pay for it all. Obama got less than 5% of the way there in the last 3 years, and he is looking like he will lose the election.
We need these Obots in the long run. But they true conservatives – the thing they want most is no change. Their denial of reality is frightening.
dollared
@Loviatar: Perfect response.
Danny
@Loviatar:
I took your statement to refer to the block grants specifically and my request was for you to support why block grants should be considered “conservative”.
But never mind. Tax cuts that make the overall tax structure more regressive is a sought policy goal of conservatives. Tax cuts that make it more progressive is a progressive policy goal. Tax cuts as subsidies to favored economic activity such as green energy is a progressive policy goal.
I don’t think that Block Grant funding to States is a Conservative policy goal. It certainly isnt a libertarian policy goal – they rather see there were no funding at all. You’re confusing the States Rights issue (which, granted, is usually championed by the republican party) with the issue of activist governing. Progressivism in general is about activist governing and doesnt really say much on the issue of the State-Fed split, so your point is moot. We progressives are for a strong federal government because some problems can only be solved by the federal government. But there’s nothing in Progressivism that mandates that everything must be handled by the Federal Government at all cost.
Well the question is – are we going to do something about teachers around the country being laid off or arent we? Without funding the States we arent so you make a choice. And you ventured one example (which wasnt supported by anything but your say so) and from there you extrapolated your dubious conclusion that (all of the block grants) are to be considered “conservative”. But the tax cut in NJ was enacted by the residents of NJs representatives and thats a matter for the voters of NJ to decide in their next election. The Stimulus has nothing to do with that. The votes of NJs legislature and Christies fraudulent book-keeping is a NJ issue.
The Texas Chronicle disagrees with you (Ten reasons why the Texas economy is growing that have nothing to do with Rick Perry #2) :
Loviatar
@370 @Danny:
I’m done you win.
The stimulus was a highly progressive plan.
Nied
Oh for FFS Loviatar now you’re being straight dishonest.
Less than $60 billion was in grants to states and all of them were targeted at highly progressive priorities. How is Unemployment insurance a Conservative program? Or Bonus checks to Social Security recipients? Or any of the other $251 billion worth of things that the ARRA spent on that weren’t infrastructure or tax cuts?
You are spouting pure bullshit as I noted above and in my last post. Here’s a real stumper for you: If grants to states are a conservative policy, why were they the thing that conservatives asked to be cut in exchange for their vote?
No Obama got hosed because the best he could get passed wasn’t enough to right things, especially when the economy turned out to be far worse off than most experts realized at the time. Despite this fact he was able to get another $450 billion of stimulus (in the form of Unemployment Insurance Extensions and the payroll tax cut) from Republicans in exchange for the temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts.
Also it’s nice to see you have decided you can’t argue my points on the merits of the ACA, and have just decided to ignore them and hope I don’t call you on it.
Danny
@Loviatar:
Oh you get to keep your outrage, bro, if it means much to you. But life is a struggle, every second of it ;)
Mnemosyne
Any of the “let it burn” progressives read Krugman today? He links to this:
Fears of far-right rise in crisis-hit Greece
Yeah, let’s put the right wing back in power in 2012 — what could go wrong?
dollared
@Mnemosyne: of all the goddamn strawmen. I thought you went to one of those schools were they train you in logical arguments.
Very, very, very, very few Progressives are going to vote for Republicans. 95% or more will vote for Obama.
Progressives are mad because Obama says things taht are objectively wrong and he supports things that are objectively wrong, like austerity during a recession.
And that makes it that much harder to ever have a healthy nation again.
And Progressives believe that it also makes it harder for him to win re-election, because the “inoculation” arguments are just stupid.
You may disagree, but to say they support Republicans – espeically the ones on this blog – is a flat fucking lie, and an insult to yourself, this blog, and your profession.
Marginalized for stating documented facts
Marginalized for stating documented facts
@dollared:
Mnemosyne?
Logical arguments?
Puh-lease.
They don’t teach that stuff at cosmetology school, dude.
Corner Stone
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
I thought that was a little odd as well. Capt Mnemo is the number one liar on this blog. Just brutal, unrepentant and shameless. It’s like a sickness of some kind. I don’t think she can help herself.
Suffern ACE
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
Liar. Seriously. Do you know what the Ryan plan is? How it specifically exempted defense, destroyed medicare for current workers, allowed an opt out for social security and then gave any “savings” away and more through more tax cuts in addition to the Bush cuts which were made permanent? Is that Anything at all like what just passed?
Danny
@dollared:
You aint paying attention. That ratfucker Jay Ackroyd who’s been running around on blog comments everywhere and floating his conspiracy theory that Obama wants to voucherize Medicare pitched Progressives for Romney right here a couple of hours ago.
That guy’s got some kind of internet radio show and has apparently been to at least one dinner with Kevin Drum.
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
I think you’ve confused my profession with someone else’s if you think mine is capable of being insulted — the Giant Evil Corporation I work for is in the entertainment industry (which means technically, in a very distant and roundabout way, Jake Tapper is a co-worker of mine like the other 50,000+ US employees — whee!) It’s pretty hard to claim I’ve insulted my profession when my profession includes the people who make “Jersey Shore.”
Anyway.
I think you may need to read back at how many people claiming to be “progressives” have been declaring in this thread that we need the Republicans back in charge to teach everyone a lesson. How about WP at #31 or El Tiburon at #59? How about just about everything NR or Loviatar have been saying?
You may want to read what the people you’re siding with are actually saying before you get all huffy about people calling them on it. Having President Romney in charge would be 100 times worse than President Obama, and you fucking know it.
Danny
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
Mask comes off?
Mnemosyne
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
I’d be making a hell of a lot more money if I’d gone to cosmetology school instead of film school.
But, then, you’re the same fucking idiot who thinks that Obama ended unemployment insurance while simultaneously whining because Obama extended the Bush tax cuts in order to get unemployment benefits extended.
Dollared
@Danny: Jay’s a front pager on Atrios. And yes, you are that dumb:
He’s suggesting a hedging strategy in case Obama is weak. Vote Romney IN THE PRIMARY so that we avoid the risk of President Perry. He is not suggesting that he will vote against Obama, he is suggesting that there is a strong chance that desperate voters confused by a DINO president will throw Obama out.
Just like they did in 2010.
buermann
If history’s any guide a GOP president and a democratic congress will send deficit spending skyrocketing and we’ll get fiscal stimulus instead of contraction. Hell, we even got that when all three branches were controlled by the GOP, if medicare part D is any indication our odds of getting medicare for all is better under that scenario than if we were under single party Democratic rule.
Dollared
@Mnemosyne: My bad on the profession. I truly hope you enjoy yours. BTW, I love Phineas and Ferb.
But nope, #59 is not saying he’ll vote Republican. He’s saying that Democrats are slow decline, Republicans fast. I’m inclined to agree.
#31: Nope, not that one either. Just says that Democrats do bad policy, Republicans worse.
There are 400 posts here. Find me 5 that advocate voting for a Republican in the general, and I’ll start listening.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Dollared:
Because there’s going to be any actual difference between Perry and Romney?
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@buermann:
History was the guide that led voters to thinking Walker, Kasich, and Scott wouldn’t be bad choices. How’s that working out for us?
Danny
@Dollared:
I dont read Atrios (anymore) and I dont give a shit.
I’m not reading him like that at all. Why would Dems for Romney be of any use in a republican primary; that would lose the guy votes not win them. He wants to make Bachmann the candidate? – good idea, but it certainly doesnt sound like that’s his plan. I read him as saying that Dems for Romney is a good idea for the general. This is the rest of his post that you didnt quote:
His argument is specifically that he thinks that we’ve gotten in his opinion progressive legislation with the republican Bush and that we’d gotten more progressive jobs legislation with the republican McCain. The guy’s a ratfucker and he’s front-paging Atrios. That tells you something about the dysfunctionality of the netroot left.
Corner Stone
@Danny: Damn, El Cid had you nailed. Everything has to be shunted into an adverse category for you.
That’s gotta be tough.
Danny
@Corner Stone:
You got your panties in a twist now that I insulted one of your heroes or something?
It’s just as amusing every time to see how fast you guys – who do nothing but post rants, complaints and poutrage 5 hours a day on the comments section of this blog – pivot to complaining about you being persecuted, everyone else are obsessed by you etc etc. Love to dish it until god forbid someone tells you to stuff it.
Jay’s a big boy. Like I said he’s been a busy bee floating his conspiracy theory about the president all around the intertubes so I’m sure he’s willing to take a little flack.
Corner Stone
@Danny: Hey man, I get it. It’s hard to get flayed open like what El Cid did to you earlier.
You can take it out on Jay if you want, he’s a big boy.
Just let it all out amigo.
Danny
@Corner Stone:
Flayed? I wouldnt know, his essays about huwt feelings etc was a bit much so I bailed out after the first 50 words or so. You got at least one virtue, you keep your nonsense short. But I’m glad you and Cid are internet BFFs. Too bad you’re both sorry fucks, but hey thats life.
Danny
And I’m bookmarking Jay’s ratfucking post for future reference btw :)
Loviatar
@370 – @Danny: / #373 – Nied:
The 4 Scariest Economic Graphs I’ve Seen This Year
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Clap harder guys, reality is really letting out some yells and you have to drown it out.
liberal
@El Cid:
Awesome comments, El Cid.
Not that it’s comparable, but in addition to Dems and ACORN, there’s that vote to censure MoveOn.