Take a moment and reflect where we are now on social issues as opposed to 2008. Gay rights have majority support (and RI is going to join the future soon). The pro-choice position has majority support. Immigration reform will happen, maybe even the DREAM act, because Republicans looked into the abyss and realized Tagg Romney is not the electoral majority future. More states than ever have loosened marijuana laws. It’s now been affirmed that entitlements aren’t just handouts to takers.
And on and on. We’re winning.
Litlebritdifrnt
Yes we are John, and POTUS saw that and ran with it. Damn it feels good.
unfilteredhandle
Shit, coming from Wrong Way Cole (the guy who makes Bill Kristol look like Nostradamus), that must mean we are losing.
Violet
And President Obama says, “You must not know ’bout me.”
Yutsano
Yes. Yes we are. Just wait until single payer comes online in California. That’ll really kick this country forward.
@unfilteredhandle: Derp de Durf.
Brandon
Hmmm… weren’t Republicans thinking the same thing in 2004? Controlling all 3 branches of Federal govt, anti-gay marriage initiatives passing in many states, Bush re-lected, etc, etc?
LeftCoastTom
Well, sure, we’re winning for now, but we’re really not paying enough attention to the Overton Window, which keeps face-slapping us under the bus.
Trakker
And this is just the beginning of a new progressive age. Honest
lamh35
saw this headline and thought I was DougJ was posting something new. John Cole quoting Beyonce…wow. Love it
Litlebritdifrnt
@unfilteredhandle:
Would you please just fuck off and ditch this “wrong way Cole” bullshit because it is really getting old. I mean really really old at this point. If you don’t like coming to this blog then why do you keep doing it for gawds sake? Do you enjoy cutting yourself? Cause at this point we have to admit that you are here purely for self immoliation.
Lurker
@Yutsano:
Why wait for California? Vermont’s going single-payer in 2017.
Mike in NC
Santorum / Bachmann 2016!
/GOP
redshirt
LOL. There’s no escaping the Wingularity. Once you enter the Event Horizon, everything seems “normal”, when in truth you are quickly being sucked down to your doom.
Jeffro
I know we’re winning b/c more and more lately, all the Teabagg…er, I mean…Republicans have is trying desperately to make the case that their crazy positions have deep, deep similarities to the (wait for it)…civil rights movement.
Because limiting ammo clip sizes is just like Jim Crow, don’t you know.
And also too, because fighting the birth control mandate is righteous like ending separate but equal schools. Or something like that.
Either way I hope they just keep it comin’, it’s working really well for them…
Mandalay
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Have to love the polished hostility of the British.
Hillary Rettig
> We’re winning.
This can’t be said often enough. Too many on the left have a propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Zifnab25
@Brandon: The conservatives were a well-oiled machine in 2004. Less so in 2012. That’s not to say things can’t change. But the difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats tend to make good policy decisions and Republicans don’t. Democrats have been learning from their past mistakes and Republicans clearly haven’t.
I don’t think we’re going to see 2014 look like 2006 in reverse (if only because the Republicans already control the House and can’t get their act together when pursuing the Senate). And we don’t have two wars sitting like albatrosses around our necks.
The big question is whether John Boehner is going to maintain that staunch House discipline in 2012 that he managed in 2010 or 2008. If he can’t do that, you’re going to see more and more Republican defections in purple seats, and then there’s really nothing else keeping Obama’s policies from trundling on full steam ahead.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Litlebritdifrnt: FLOTUS had the only appropriate response to this crap.
amk
Yup, hopey-changey is working. Eat your heart out, tundra twit.
TheMightyTrowel
@Litlebritdifrnt: On the other hand, the repetition of stock phrases makes it really easy to spot, track and pie old trolls with new nyms.
BTW HI EVERYONE! tip to the wise: doing archaeology in 44 degree heat is stupid!
Yutsano
@Lurker: Vermont could indeed start a domino effect. But California is the eighth largest economy in the world. It fixes its healthcare system and that will spark a HUGE change in how this country sees a single payer system. Not that Vermont couldn’t inspire the rest of New England to follow suit.
amk
President Barack Obama is thanking White House aides and his re-election campaign staffers at the final celebration of his inauguration.
Obama told thousands of guests at his staff ball Tuesday night that they represent … his “deepest hopes for America.” He said he knows the nation’s future is in good hands.
gwangung
Well, in my community, it was “two suitcases and only what you could carry.”
trollhattan
@Yutsano:
Yup, and coincidentally about an eighth of the US population. Big enough that the auto industry has to design cars around our laws, so why should the insurance industry be any different? (We still owe y’all for the Reagan thing, however.)
Hill Dweller
The Twitter machine tells me purported intellectual Bobby Jindal is eliminating hospice care for medicaid recipients in Louisiana.
mai naem
Wayne LaPierre is a really ugly looking dude. I can’t believe the NRA picks him to be their head. He has a Hitlerish/Thuggish look about him. Not very likeable at all. Charlton Heston as a head made so much more sense.
Anya
Why am I listening to Wyne Lapierre’s supposed response to the president’s inauguration speech? Why is MSNBC preempting their program for this nutcase?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Hill Dweller: Just what Jeebus would do.
LeftCoastTom
@mai naem:
Ted Nugent, who is on their board, is a twice-convicted poacher, once in CA, and once in Federal Court from an AK case.
Why would likeability ever enter into the equation? The part I can’t believe is why, whenever the NRA talks about firearms and responsibility, we all don’t immediately respond with “…and poaching”.
Xenos
@TheMightyTrowel: I once spent a couple summers in Florida excavating a cemetery in the middle of a swamp. When it hits 100°F at 9:30 am, and you have to hurry up and get as much possible done before the rains come at 3:00 pm, you really wonder why you took that job.
mai naem
@Hill Dweller: You mean the same Bobby Jindal the brown skinned GOP wunderkind who knows all healthcare policy? That Bobby Jindal? Dumbass. Don’t mean to sound like a bean counter but hospice is a really efficient way to let people die in comfort. You stop with the very expensive non productive end of life care. I’m wondering if he’s cutting out medicaid hospice(where the states costshare) because they can be switched to medicare where it’s all federal money.
burnspbesq
An important caveat: “are winning” is not the same thing as “have won.” There is a lot that can still go wrong, starting with a half dozen or so pending Supreme Court cases. And we still can’t close Guantanamo.
Anya
@Hill Dweller: What is it with Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley? They try so hard to be even more douchey than other wingnut governors.
Maude
Yeah, us.
jayboat
A bit ot but still-
I’m having some lighthearted fun with an old friend from Kentucky who is so conservative and by the book predictable that I’m doing my best to be kind to her. I care for her a lot and don’t have the heart to be too harsh.
But I had a spark of an idea I plan to drop on her and wondered if anyone here has ever heard the esteemed senators from bluegrass state referred to as “The Tortoise and the Hair”?
Juss wunnerin…
amk
@Hill Dweller: Intended consequences voting out of stupidity and voting against your own interests.
Gin & Tonic
The RI marriage equality bill is far from a sure thing, unfortunately, in the most or second-most Catholic state in the union.
Frankensteinbeck
@Hill Dweller:
Liberals want to help people. In their mad tribal frenzy, conservatives have responded by supporting anything that fucks people over. The party appealed to assholes to begin with, so it’s only a change in degree.
TheMightyTrowel
@Xenos: So much this except swap FL swamp for 19th century Australian copper mining settlement – complete with contaminated soil/groundwater, scary sink holes and an utter lack of anything resembling rain. Yet there are still mosquitos.
the Conster
It actually is the Age of Aquarius. Also, too.
Yutsano
@mai naem: And of course that has limits, so even if you’re Medicare eligible you’ll still have problems. But hey, Piyush has to get his poor fucking cred in or he’ll never survive a wingnut primary.
trollhattan
@mai naem:
Please, please, please Republicans, run Bobby for national office. Kenneth the Page will be out of work and ready to go.
hitchhiker
Here’s what gives me hope: the next generation is just not buying into the religious rationale. Their turn away from dogma is important and real. Combine that with the coming minority status of Caucasians, and you have a new world where something like rationality and meritocracy might be possible.
We have the gold standard framework for a political and civil culture; I’m 60 so I might not get to see it take shape, but I believe it’s possible. And that makes me glad for my 20-something kids and everybody else who comes after us.
Mnemosyne
@Hill Dweller:
Reminds me of when our supergenius Governator decided to cut Medicaid costs by slashing the budget for home health care, not realizing that it would then put a few hundred thousand people into nursing homes where it would cost the state twice as much to care for them.
Apparently he was under the impression that if he took those patients out of the budget, they would magically vanish from the healthcare system.
Eric the Fruit Bat
Well, when the snipers who are supposed to protect the elected are scarfing down a banana while on duty…
CaseyL
I had kind of resigned myself to thinking of the 1932-1980 (very roughly; FDR to Carter) Liberal Wave as anomalous; an artifact of historical confluences that would not happen again, at least not in my lifetime.
I’d be over-the-top ecstatic to be proven wrong.
It will be fascinating to see how the new liberal era takes shape. The last one was as much a product of the Warren Court as legislative and executive action (though even the Burger Court looks liberal compared to the Rehnquist and Roberts versions). If Obama gets to fill three or four seats over his second term, that’ll be the gift that keeps on giving for a couple decades.
We need to elect a better Congress in 2014.
Hill Dweller
@Mnemosyne: Something similar is happening in Texas. The half wits running that state decided to slash family planning funding(destroy Planned Parenthood), which has ultimately led to increased medicaid costs due to more babies born to poor mothers. An increase in cost that significantly outpaced the savings from cutting family planning funding.
The Republican party is morally and intellectually bankrupt.
Roger Moore
@Lurker:
Because Vermont is a small, relatively homogeneous state whose largest city would be considered a small town in many parts of the country. If they make single payer work, it can be written off as something that depends on those factors. In contrast, California is huge, heavily urbanized, and extremely diverse. If you can make single payer work in California, there’s no excuse for why you can’t make it work anywhere.
Debbie(Aussie)
@TheMightyTrowel:
Oh no! Did you get sick? Where in Aus are you digging(unless of course you aren’t in Aus:))?
Linnaeus
I’m glad we’re winning on those things and I want that to continue. But my happiness about all that is tempered by the fact that on labor/employment/working issues, we don’t seem to be winning like we should. Lots of work to do there.
Roger Moore
@TheMightyTrowel:
Doing anything but lounging around in the shade drinking cool drinks is foolish when the temperature gets above 40C. I once made the mistake of trying to walk 2 1/2 miles on a day when it was about that hot, and I only survived by stopping a couple of times to lounge around in air conditioned stores and buy cold drinks. Mad dogs and Englishmen, etc.
metalgirl
@amk: Best post of the thread!! Congratulations!!
mclaren
This is intensely lame, John. Yeah, let’s talk about social issues, because they’re so much important than America turning into a goddamn militarized police state where drones are deployed domestically to surveil everyone and the president routinely orders the murder of U.S. citizens without even accusing ’em of a crime and where downloading the wrong scientific journal articles gets you hounded to death by federal prosecutors, and selling state-licensed marijuana in a legal state dispensary lands you in a federal prison for 15 years.
Let’s talk about gay marriage instead of trivial things like, you know, the fact that the Bush tax cuts are now cemented in permanently and Wall Street’s corruption is so gargantuan that we’re now gearing up for Global Financial Meltdown Part Deux, courtesy of those wonderful stock market high-speed trades that blew up two billion bucks in less than thirty seconds in just one rogue trade last year.
Let’s talk about the DREAM act instead of that unimportant stuff like more people without access to health care than ever before in history, including since the ACA was passed.
By all means, let’s talk about women’s reproductive rights instead of our collapsing economy — which three different economists including the ECRI (excellent track record, those guys) have just announced entered another recession. I’d really like to know how important women think those reproductive rights are when they’re starving on the streets because the economy has collapsed and single-parent families headed by women are taking the brunt of the economic hardship.
Let’s exult that “we’re winning” and celebrate so loudly we can’t hear the sound of our entire national wealth getting burned up by those endless unwinnable foreign wars that keep going…and going…and going…
Roger Moore
@Hill Dweller:
And anything that they get their hands on tends to head in the direction of financial bankruptcy, too.
Debbie(Aussie)
@Roger Moore:
Why oh why can’t it be seen that it ‘works’ in the rest of the developed world? (Rhetorical question.
PS: sorry mighty trowel. Missed your comment about copper mine.
Gretchen
It might look good nationally but it sure doesn’t look good at the state level. Sam Brownback here in Kansas got all the moderate Republican state legislators, the sane ones who worked with the Democrats, primaried by tea-partiers and pushed out. Tomorrow they’re going to vote on whether to make it illegal for public employees and their unions from campaigning in elections, so the teacher’s unions can’t fight the big school budget cuts he wants to push through . And look at the Virginia redistricting thing. All across the country ALEC is writing state laws and redistricting to cheat if they can’t win fair and square.
unfilteredhandle
@Litlebritdifrnt: Thanks for the advice. Don’t worry, it wasn’t a complete waste of time. It only strenthens my resolve to keep coming here and telling Cole what an idiot he is.
It’s also funny to read when you morons defend him and still think he has something productive to say about anything beyond what color hairball his cat coughed up and what some meaningless outcome to some sporting event will have on our lives. You people would probably continue to be amused even if all he did was give daily reports of what the color, consistency, and smell of his bowel movement was.
But feel free to try make salmon swim downstream if you must.
oh and wrong way Cole is always wrong. WRONG, that would be the Lance Armstrong defender, Fat Bastard Christie lover, Greenwald worshipper former Republican who still has that typical idiot Republican gene. They all do.
mclaren
I presume you’ve all seen the Lawyers, Guns and Money post about the massive Republican effort to rig the 2016 elections pre-emptively. This latest example is just the tip of the iceberg.
Another Halocene Human
@Hill Dweller: So he wants end-of-life care expenses in Louisiana to go up?
FISCAL CONSERVATIVE!
DEATH PANELS, also, too!
magurakurin
@trollhattan:
and Nixon.
Although, these days, Nixon looks better and better compared to the sick fucks that populate the GOP. Reagan, too, for that matter.
Another Halocene Human
@unfilteredhandle: Wow, that was special.
Plonk.
Love my firefox upgraded with pie filter. Shoulda done it months ago.
mclaren
@Debbie(Aussie):
That ain’t the problem, kiddo. Everyone in America knows single-payer is cheaper and better. Problem is, the only growth industries left in America are the military-surveillance-torture complex (so we can’t cut that), the health-industrial complex where doctors and hospitals make a fortune with fee-for-service billing (so we can’t cut that by shifting to a nationalized single-payer), and the prison-police complex (so we can’t cut that either).
America made the bad bad decision to outsource all our manufacturing in the 70s and shift to a knowledge/service economy. But by the early 2000s bittorrent + the internet was eating our knowledge economy alive, and a service economy is prey to Baumol’s Cost Disease.
So now we’re screwed.
Another Halocene Human
@Anya: Well, in Louisiana the (reichwing) idiots are in charge of the asylum so Jindal has to out-crazy them, plus there was never a corporate cock too stinky with environmental degradation and human misery for him to suck.
Nikki Nikki, though, has antagonized the SC lege and is busy being mostly irrelevant aside from rubberstamping their usually red state bullshit, I guess. She hasn’t put a finger on Rick Scott’s douchebaggery in Florida. Scott’s so toxic his teabaggin’ ultra-right GOP caucus took a pounding in the last election and the GOP supermajority is gone too, and it looks like N. E. Demonrat could beat Rick Scott in an election tomorrow so…
Yeah, Rick Scott wins.
Another Halocene Human
@jayboat:
+1
Another Halocene Human
@mclaren: “Kiddo”? You’ve got some nerve.
You don’t get why non-slave-owning rebs fought and died in the Civil War and you don’t get why red-faced teabaggers went ballistic when they thought Medicare for all might happen.
There’s more to human psychology than rational self interest, Hamlet.
AxelFoley
You know that’s Obama’s fault, right?
AxelFoley
@Anya:
Seems that minority GOPers go out of their way to prove their Republicaness to their peers.
Tonal Crow
@LeftCoastTom:
Obama’s speech yesterday was all about…wait for it…moving the f***ing Overton Window, so that what seemed impossible or undesirable yesterday seems not unlikely and rather pleasant today.
TheMightyTrowel
@Debbie(Aussie): Ha. I got a little sick (hooray for UTIs) but I did a lot of good work too – launching a major project, it looks like which is madness because I am NOT a historical archaeologist, but what the hell.
Debbie(Aussie)
@TheMightyTrowel:
(Never had one of those, smug I know ) wonderful about the project, hope the weather is more cooperative to future work at the site.
pr
@hitchhiker: Yeah, it’s really about being on the right side of the arc of history thing, particularly when that arc is being carried along on the wave of America’s changing demographics. But it won’t be easy because the rear guard isn’t going to just roll over, concede and then get up and say, “Congratulations,you won, Fair and Square, and it would just be So Wrong of us to continue to block and obstruct your efforts to create a fairer and more humane environment for the future.” As someone (might have been you) commented, we (or at least “I”) might not be around to check it out.
Xenos
@mclaren: Single payer is not the be-all and end-all. Many countries do just fine with multiple providers or a partially-nationalized insurance system.
The issue is profiteering in an industry where for-profit providers should be absolutely forbidden as a matter of protecting the public. Until relatively recently it was impossible in the US to operate a for-profit business selling insurance of any kind (there being a couple exceptions such as companies selling maritime insurance).
Baud
Thanks, John. This doesn’t get said enough.
Interrobang
@mclaren: You realise, don’t you, that women will care more about reproductive rights the more they get hit with a bad economy? Or did you miss the memo that the Talibangelicals are coming after birth control as well as abortion and emergency contraception? You apparently missed how one of the major drivers of the original contraception rights movement was because people were being driven into poverty by having more children than they can afford — which is precisely what Our Corporate Overlords would like, of course — an endless supply of wage slaves, and forget about agitating for anything like “rights” when your entire existence consists of work and childcare.
Telling people to “just stop fucking” works about as well now as it ever did, which is to say not at all, and it’s asinine to expect otherwise.
So yeah, abortion and birth control is an economic issue. For a lot of women, it’s the economic issue. It’d be a major economic issue for men too, if we didn’t have this ridiculous cultural notion that anything to do with sex and babies (which take two people of opposite sexes to create) was strictly for women…
mainmati
Agreed for now but the Rethugs continue to try to restrict the franchise and to de facto restrict it through gerrymandering (see VA on Monday) so our struggle will continue to be an uphill struggle for a very long time, IMHO.