.
There ought to be a ‘Southern Strategy’ variant of Godwin’s Law. It’s traditionally considered unseemly for the professional Beltway media to point out the Confederate revanchists, but Washington is a company town and the current GOP terrorists are damaging the company product. So Harold Meyerson gets to highlight “The Permanent Republican Minority“:
… What’s behind this two-decade drive to employ the obstructive power of a governmental minority to undo the policies that a majority enacted or to unseat an elected president? Plainly, the gap between the Republican Party and the rest of the nation has widened. And as that gap has grown, Republicans have become more insular and more desperate — a toxic combination for a functioning democracy.
The Republicans who swept to power in 1994 were the first House and Senate delegations that reflected the party’s new center of power in the white South. For the first time in Republican history, most of the party’s top legislative leaders came from former Confederate states, where resistance to minority and worker rights was an established tradition. Even today, this resistance remains key to the GOP’s hold on power; the voter-suppression efforts in Republican-controlled Southern states make this clear.
Since 1995, the demographic and cultural changes transforming this nation have deepened the Republicans’ marginality… this leaves only two ways that Republicans can affect public policy at the national level: They can embrace minority rights (through, say, immigration reform) and accept a legitimate role for government in the nation’s economic affairs (which, polls show, millennials strongly support) — that is, they can move to the center. Or they can try to maximize the power of their minority status by trying to disrupt the nation to the point that the majority will be compelled to support Republican positions.
Rationality dictates the first choice, but rationality doesn’t hold much sway in today’s GOP. Insularity is largely to blame. Right-wing media fuel support for Republican lawmakers’ most obstructionist tendencies. And Republicans in safely GOP districts don’t have to concern themselves with voters who may blanch at their radicalism.
Is this course sustainable? Ultimately, no. Eventually, the number of millennials, voters of color and fed-up moderates will rise to the point that 218 sufficiently white and conservative House districts can no longer be crafted. How much havoc Republicans can wreak until then, however, is anybody’s guess.
***********
What’s on the agenda for Day Three of America Held Hostage by the GOP?
Mustang Bobby
We had about 10″ of rain in this part of Miami yesterday afternoon and evening.
I blame Obama.
OzarkHillbilly
GO CARDS! Cole is going to be horribly heart broken and utterly inconsolable after the Cards beat the Pirates like the red headed step children they are. But he should look at the bright side: He can always blame Obama.
R-Jud
Waiting for my mom to call so I can let her rant cathartically after her visit yesterday to her wingnut sister. Also read this amazing story:
OzarkHillbilly
I will say tho, that PNC park has been the Hall of Death for the Cards this year. If we split the first 2, we could be in trouble.
Linda Featheringill
Oh, goody! The South will rise again!
I’d like to see the entire MSM grab that story and run with it.
third of two
Going to brush up on my html coding skillz, maybe check my calls. Or not.
amk
BS. There is no ‘going there’ in that wapo pundtwit piece. It’s just a minor rap at best. The same idjit would excoriate the dems if they were the terrorists.
Cermet
When that day occurs, the ability to prevent thugs from ever having control of either house, we must not forget how they had, did and would have continue to treat us – then we must drive them and the 0.01% into the sea like the animals they are and will always remain. Also the entire police state structure and its ass lickers (aka cops and other such thugs) as well.
OzarkHillbilly
Jennifer Lawrence is fat.
“They brought in pictures of me where I was basically naked, and told me to use them as motivation for my diet. They thought that because of the way my career had gone, it wouldn’t still hurt me.”
“If anybody even tries to whisper the word ‘diet, I’m like, ‘You can go fuck yourself,” she said.
I love that girl more and more every day.
geg6
Well, if the GOPers are thinking today’s youth are low information voters who will not turn out in an off year no matter how insane the wingnuts are and how much they hurt the country, I have anecdotal evidence that they may have awakened a sleeping giant. I had a steady parade of students into my office yesterday asking if the Republicans were going to hold up their student aid with their shutdown shenanigans. They are well aware of what is happening, who is at fault and what is at stake. And they are pissed.
Schlemizel
@OzarkHillbilly:
OMG! What a pig, I bet she has ballooned up to 119, 120 at least! Nobody would want to see something that disgusting in a movie.
I just don’t get the variant of sociopath that operates out of Hollywood. The amount of damage they do to the individual actors is pretty impressive to say nothing of the message they send to the rest of us.
robotswillstealyourjobs
Repost from last thread:
Republican incompetence in messaging is something to behold. As I see it they’re trying to sell three contradictory narratives at once right now:
Narrative 1: “Obama and the Democrats are shutting down the government and hurting America by refusing to accept our minor and not at all unpopular demands!”
Narrative 2: “Hey, this shutdown business isn’t so bad. Everyone knows government bureaucrats just sit around playing Angry Birds all day… it’s practically a government slimdown! Slim is good right? Everyone wants to be slim!”
Narrative 3: “WE MAKE OUR STAND HERE AGAINST COMMUNIST TYRANNY MY FELLOW SONS OF LIBERTY!!!! SHUT IT ALL DOWN TILL AMERICA RISES UP!!! MR OBAMA, TEAR DOWN THIS LAW!!!”
Various differing right-wing media outlets and spokespeople are pushing one (sometimes more) of these narratives, but trying to hold two of these narratives at once causes too much cognitive dissonance for the average person. So the right has lost the messaging war already.
Mino
Joan Walsh posted a similar opinion piece yesterday. I’ve been re-reading the father and son Killer Angels books. Reminded me just what a personal connection those of that era felt with God. Every loss/every success was seen as an up or down thumb from him.
Botsplainer
Conservatism in a nutshell.
http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/gop-stands-firm-against-funding-bill-will-link-to-debt-ceiling-fight/article/2536750
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemizel: Every time I read stuff like that, I just don’t get it. What kind of a lens must one look thru to even think that?
WereBear
Republicans, 2013.
What happens when your brain is still spinning, but NONE of the gears engage.
jibeaux
@Botsplainer: I had fun thinking of responses to that one. How about, “well, I can ask Biden nicely to not run you over with his Camaro” or maybe “how about a big fucking slap upside the head, does that work for you?” Or am I the only one with parents who used to say “I’ll GIVE you something to cry about?”
Linda Featheringill
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/norquist-cruz-pushed-house-republicans-into-traffic-and-wandered-away
Norquist says that Cruz lied to the House GOP radicals. If that is so, then it adds a new layer to an explanation of the situation.
It hurts when someone you trust lies to you but it can be educational. I’m sure that other charlatans have lied to the same group of True Believers. Maybe they can examine those as well.
If Cruz lied to them and they fell for it, then they were disrespected.
agrippa
“it seemed to be the thing to do at the time”.
GOP plans then; GOP plans now.
Waspuppet
At the risk of setting off some kind of blog trip wire, it should be mentioned that Sullivan has gone there on national TV, pointing out that Romney’s areas of support included “the former Confederacy.” Feathers were ruffled.
Kay
@Linda Featheringill:
There is a part of this that is directed at hurting vulnerable Senate Democrats who are up for re-election. Maybe that is the leverage that Cruz was (mistakenly) relying on.
Linda Featheringill
@Kay:
So you’re saying that maybe Cruz was mistaken?
In fairness, I must admit that I’ve been [pleasantly] surprised at how much unity the Dems have shown.
Waspuppet
BTW, that’s a little flip. Right now Washington resembles a small Midwestern town with one factory in it that just announced it’s moving out.
Bill E Pilgrim
So even a lot of the Villagers are finally calling them nutcases and extremists, their own party’s “moderates” who used to be the extremists are calling them know-nothings and out-of-control idiots, virtually every major newspaper editorial board even Fred Freaking Hiatt is calling them misguided, ignorant fanatics, and they come up with “We’re not going to be disrespected”.
They’ve descended into that honor-based society realm, where people become obsessed with one thing, usually some perceived slight to their manhood, and utterly blind to all of the self-destructive, embarrassing, or self-debasing things they do in trying to rectify what’s essentially an imaginary threat.
Message to the Tea Partiers: John Boehner and others may be afraid of you, but no one respects you.
kindness
I’m really enjoying the good stories coming out of the ACA opening. I saw one yesterday over at ThinkProgress about the 62 yo retired (republican) contractor from Arkansas that can now get health insurance for $13,000 a year less than what he had been paying and it’s a hugely better policy. I’d gloat but I have no TeaHaddists close enough to do so.
Kay
@Linda Featheringill:
Well, they think that there was anger that Senate Democrats had to run on Obamacare again and Obama himself was “safely” re-elected.
I actually think that’s nonsense, so I hope Senate Democrats don’t believe that. I hope they’re not still cowering before Obamacare. I don’t see ANY anti-Obamcare energy here. It’s really sort of curiosity more than anything. People think it’s here to stay.
This whole beltway conversation debating the “merits” of Obamacare isn’t what people are talking about. They’re all talking about the shut down. Obamacare launch was treated as “is this finally it?” I don’t think it’s a “debate” at all.
I think Norquist is a completely paid-for person, purchased, so I don’t believe he’s concerned about the GOP. I think he’s concerned because he sees his influence waning, and that hurts his bottom line. Still, maybe he’s telling the truth about the background facts. Could be.
OzarkHillbilly
@Linda Featheringill: If Cruz lied to them and they fell for it, then that should be expected. FTFY.
the Conster
@Waspuppet:
Yeah, he’s been pretty great the past couple of days, credit where credit is due and all that.
gene108
Looking up some info on the Silk Road story a few topics ago, I cam across somethings I had not heard of before.
One is the Deep Web, which normal search engines like Google and Yahoo cannot find in web searches.
Second is the TOR browser, which apparently makes it hard to impossible for your location to be found and seems to be a gateway to the Deep Web.
TOR, from some Google searches, is apparently real and there are some search engines that say they can find Deep Web websites.
My issue is how “real” is the Deep Web? Is there really this huge underground virtual world that most folks don’t dare to tread, but is somehow larger than the World Wide Web.
Found the whole thing fascinating.
Also, I didn’t bother trying to search for Deep Web websites, because I figured if it is for real and as shadowy as all that, there are probably a lot of websites more than happy to dump viruses and other malicious things onto my poor little laptop.
cvstoner
That may be true. But he gap between the Republican Party and our corporate masters has not.
Insularity is just a tool. The real blame is a corporate oligarchy that has no love for a representative democracy, unless that democracy exclusively represents them.
Botsplainer
Right now, the regular House GOPers are wishing that Raphael was just another second generation Cubano of that certain class eagerly awaiting the opportunity to return to Habana in glory to be handed back a business and a hacienda on a beach from a grateful Cuban people…
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
I think that as an ideologue in his own right, he’s just jealous. I mean, HE never got the gov’t shutdown over too high taxes.
cvstoner
@gene108:
It is very real, and the majority of it is used for legitimate business. However…
…is probably a good strategy, because most of the “deep web” is by invitation only.
OzarkHillbilly
Joyce Karam, Al-Hayat (Arabic newspaper based in London)
“The whole concept is little surreal for our readers, trying to understand why the No. 1 country in the world cannot pass a budget. I come from Lebanon and our parliament is very ineffective, but ludicrous as it sounds, it is better than U.S. Congress when it comes to passing budgets.”
MattF
@Linda Featheringill: I’ll allow that Norquist has a gift for metaphor:
WereBear
@cvstoner: Yes, but this also explains why Republicans (the chosen tool of Corporations) are so dead set against Obamacare in ways they can’t even explain.
The threat of ugly death was what kept people working for Corporations. Now that threat is gone.
Walker
@gene108:
One is the Deep Web, which normal search engines like Google and Yahoo cannot find in web searches.
That is not entirely true. Google has done a lot of research on searching the deep web. My wife has a published research paper from when she interned there.
It is not perfect. It is not complete. But they have not given up.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
He’s hired to cut entitlements. That’s his job.
To me, he’s like some immune-impaired delicate flower variety who survives completely and exclusively sucking on DC. He’d wither and die anywhere else.
I also wish they’d all stop using the word “reform”. Jesus Christ. Pick up a dictionary. If you’re hoping to cut Social Security say “cut”. It’s insulting to the people they’re targeting with the cuts and so cowardly. If they don’t even have the balls to say it they probably shouldn’t do it. Weasels.
weaselone
@OzarkHillbilly:
Even the foreign press seems to have a sort of “both sides do it” vibe. 9 out of 10 of those excerpts comment and polarization and the distance between the two parties. Only a couple come straight out and say that one party is essentially bonkers.
Baud
@gene108:
I get a little scared when I leave Balloon Juice. Do not get out of the boat.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Walker: Oh well jeez if you can intern there, it can’t be all that hidden.
Baud
@Kay:
I think he’s reflecting the fears of the rich people who donate to him. They are afraid of their own monster.
Waspuppet
@Bill E Pilgrim: Funny – if any nonwhite people act that way, they call it the gangsta ethos that’s ruining our great nation. Somehow it’s different when they do it, though.
I so hope that quote penetrates the mainstream consciousness. The degree to which conservatism is about feelings deserves much wider mockery. Particularly given their own derision of the concept.
Waspuppet
@Kay: one of my first lessons in journalism was to never use the word “reform,” exactly because its a vague concept that everyone believes in but doesn’t describe specifics that maybe not everyone does. Which is why activists use it, but I get all “get off my lawn” when journalists fall for it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
I know. But I never pass up an opportunity to mock him. Doesn’t make him any less dangerous, but if more people did it, maybe more people would realize what a silly little man he really is.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Waspuppet: Yeah but they’re talking about a lot of stuff when they do that.”The pants, the whole bit”. The honor-based aspect is something shared by all sorts of groups, down to the Hatfields and McCoys. In certain places it actually makes sense, depending on geography and whether you’re guarding little patches of land against constant intruders and so on.
When it’s most extreme it can become myopic, and it definitely has with these guys. Not going to be “disrespected”, good grief. They couldn’t be less respected by the population as a whole if that had been their goal.
cvstoner
@WereBear:
Indeed. Also, things like a living wage and some sense of job security. The corporate strategy has always been to make us replaceable serfs chained to our desks.
geg6
@OzarkHillbilly:
This. Mock away! That’s exactly what needs done and what I do. I also love doing this to Randians. They get so pissed when they find out that the queen bee was a parasite in the end, too.
Ash Can
@MattF:
And if anyone would know anything about that, it’s Norquist.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how they handle the complete cognitive dissonance of the Leading Libertarian being a life-long DC lobbyist.
If Big Government didn’t exist he’d be living in his mom’s basement. Why are they always so puffy, too? Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich look the same way. Like they’ve been inflated with hot air. One can’t imagine them walking further than from the SUV to the hotel fundraiser. They’re like pale, exotic creatures of that specific environment.
Emma
@gene108: If we’re talking about the same thing, it’s been around for a while in libraries: http://www.amazon.com/The-Invisible-Web-Uncovering-Information/dp/091096551X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380803780&sr=8-1&keywords=invisible+web
There’s nothing terribly mysterious about it. It has to do with indexing/keywording and the deficiencies of web search engines.
Emma
@Botsplainer: There’s no such animal. Cubans are undergoing pretty much the same transformation as every other immigrant group.
Emma
@Kay: If they say “cut”, the SS and Medicare dependent Tea Baggers will grind them into dust, set fire to that, and then scatter the ashes over the city dump.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
Nail? Meet Hammer.
gene108
@Emma:
There was a paper published in 2001 (a href=”http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0007.104″>Linkthat I found, which made the inference that the World Wide Web is like the ocean surface and the Deep Web is like the rest of the ocean, which most of can’t see but actually contains the most stuff on the surface of the Earth.
I just find it hard to believe that this “invisible” internet is larger than the WWW that we use and what purpose it serves.
I understand there are peer to peer file sharing systems still up, but I thought they were a tiny portion of the internet traffic.
The way the Deep Web gets written about it sounds like me and everyone I know just sees the tip of the iceberg and somewhere out of site of the rest of us is the remaining 75% of internet content.
Conceptually it is hard to wrap my head around how something, like the Deep Web, can purportedly be so much more vast than the World Wide Web, but I don’t know anybody who has used it.
And in this day and age everyone I know has gone on the World Wide Web, at least once ;-)
fidelio
My sympathies to Sonnergrnt and everyone else who is being expected to work without knowing when and if they’ll get paid, and to everyone who’s been sent home until sanity descends from the heavens. If nothing’s sorted out by a week from tomorrow, I’ll be joining you all, as the state can only come through with 9 days of funding for us.
For anyone who missed it in the other threads, here’s the White House webpage on how different agencies are affected by this maneuver. Food stamps and school lunches are good through the end of this month, WIC and other food programs are not, VA hospitals and clinics are open until the end of 2013 at least, VA benefits should be paid through October at leat, and Social Security retirement and disability payments should continue. SSI payments should be good for a few months at least.
Given the food benefits issues, if you can help your local food bank out, please give it some serious thought.
Also, GO CARDS!!!!!
gene108
@gene108:
Link to paper I found.
Sorry, missed some “punctuation” in the HTML line, when I went to edit the post and can’t edit again.
Nethead Jay
@gene108: Oh, it’s real. But don’t believe everything that’s written about it. Same as with the Silk Road story, some of what’s been publicized so far about that is just bunk or quite distorted.
Also, what @cvstoner said. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t go looking too much.
Honus
@OzarkHillbilly: Lost 4 of 5 there last August, before winning the s day game 13-0
TAPX486
Over on the Daily Beast there is an article by a Prof. L. Lessing about the rights and responsibilities of political actors in our constitutional system. In a nutshell he says that just because the system allows you to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. In order for our system to work there are limits that can not be crossed. The election of 1800 was a major milestone in American history when power was transferred peacefully from one political faction to another without violence. There was no attempted coup by the losers of the election in 1800. While it’s true that the GOP hasn’t reached for their guns (at least not yet) but they are still trying to overturn the elections of 2008 and 2012.
The following is a quote from the good professors article:’This is a point scholars of Congress have been making for a long time. The Framers gave us a unique design for a democracy. That separation of powers design depends upon members respecting the norms of institutional ethics. Freedom needs responsibility. And political responsibility in a republic demands that a party not use its power to force changes in existing law when it can’t with honesty say that it represents a majority.’
For whatever reason the GOP can not accept the unofficial and informal limits on what a party can do in order for the overall system to work. You fund the government and raise the debt limit. They are the basic responsibilities of responsible governing. Only then do you argue the merits of various policy options using what Nancy Pelosi referred to as ‘regular order’. If you don’t have the votes then you lose, in the short term. The option still exists to go out and convince enough people that you have the beater idea and thus should be elected. Once you have the majority then, again under regular order, you enact your agendas/ The new minority then accepts the outcome, in the short term, and tries to go out and win the next election.
What the GOP is trying to do is a coup without the tanks.. If Obama and the democrats give even an inch then they deserve what they get and might as well just pack up and lease Washington because the ransom demands will never stop
Emma
@gene108: Of course you have used it. In college, at the public library. A lot of it is simply blocked from retrieval. Westlaw, Lexis, ProQuest, all the other for-fee databases are simply three-quarter invisible to the search engines, as are corporate and government intranets. There are some tools to track down some of it. Google Scholar is a fantastic tool to find a lot of material that won’t surface in regular Google until page 4 of the results. Sometimes all you get is a citation, but you’re aware that the material exists. So is Google Books.
The new academic trend of open access digital repositories is increasing visibility to academic materials.Try this http://network.bepress.com/arts-and-humanities/history/
Citizen_X
@Linda Featheringill:
[Nelson Muntz]
Hah ha!
[/Nelson Muntz]
catclub
@gene108: “websites more than happy to dump viruses and other malicious things onto my poor little laptop. ”
Should be no problem. You are running some version of Open BSD, right?
NotMax
@gene108
Tor has been around for a long, long time, digitally speaking.
Even was a Torpark version of Firefox (compact enough to run well from the first thumb drives). May still be, but have not kept up with whether it has been updated and made current or not.
What seems to have stalled (though may well be mistaken as stopped tracking developments some time ago) were plans to piece together discrete www2 and www3 webs with less accessibility and transparency.
As for search engines which don’t co-opt your data and history, Ixquick has been getting better and better.
NotMax
@catclub
Just avoiding going to sites with a .ru domain in their address cuts down on the nasties considerably.
Original Lee
@Bill E Pilgrim: Yet once somebody gets into that whole “save my honor” mode, it’s extremely difficult to get them out of it. Is there some sop the Dems can throw the Goopers? Perhaps instead of defunding Obamacare, they could pay for a feasibility study for that Big Wall Near Mexico the anti-immigration folk have been asking for?
catclub
@Original Lee: “Yet once somebody gets into that whole “save my honor” mode”
I will run out my old fashioned ideas. Pride is noted as the first sin, and all this honor stuff is simply pride writ large. Meanwhile, humility is the first (Christian) virtue. These people who no longer know these things, and pretend to be Christians, can get off my lawn.
gvg
If you don’t want to disrespected, don’t behave like an idiot in public, repeatedly. Duh.