Three Votes, One Problem
This is the third time we’ve had to carry the weight of a compromise, because folks in the GOP just can’t stand, or can’t afford to compromise their lofty ideas. My question to them, is, with all their Constitutional expertise, do they just not get what the framers were going for? Purportedly, this is about showing the Republican’s strength, but when they can’t even pass a compromise without resorting to letting the vast majority of votes come from the other party, something’s seriously wrong.
The compromise that ended the attempt in Spring of 2011 to create a shutdown required Democratic help to pass. So did the compromise of the Debt Ceiling debacle. And this recent fiscal cliff compromise? The majority of yes votes came from Democrats.
Do you see a pattern emerging?
The GOP marketed its new membership, its new direction, on opposing Obama and his policies at all cost, but the irony for these supposed Constitutional experts, is that the founding document requires his approval for everything they want passed, which in many cases, they have no rational right to expect. Yet they keep promising that, keep saying they'll force that. And how? By taking this country over any number of cliffs? By threatening the stability of our economy?
The Republicans were able to turn the shock, the fear, and the shame that Republicans felt from the lost elections, and add it to the anxiety and uncertainty many folks felt on account of the economy, in order to win 2010. But even then, they were only able to take over the House of Representatives. the Constitution is clear, especially after this last election. Rafts of legislation meant to destroy the EPA, destroy Obamacare, do this, realize this, that or the other Republican fantasy are destined to go nowhere. Democrats aren't stupid, Obama isn't stupid.
Political power in Washington, in real terms, depends on winning votes. It depends on being able to deliver on negotiated deals. It depends on having the strength to wrangle your own caucus to get your priorities passed, despite what might be in the way.
Republicans had the numbers, nominally speaking, to pass their legislation. But nominally didn't show up. The Tea Party, whose involvement was the price of the Republican victory in 2010, that allowed the party to fool people into thinking it had fresh ideas and new energy, has sat out the three votes I described above, even though in real terms none of these votes would have been necessary without them.
What does that tell you? It tells you that when push came to shove, Republicans in the Tea Party caucus simply didn't have the power to pull things as far right as they wanted to, and worse yet, they didn't have the wisdom to admit that situation, nor the patience with the system to compromise.
Their benefactors have played a very nasty trick on their people. First, they bought a whole lot of redistricting. This helped them produce results in November that have put the GOP in an unenviable position: a large majority, put there by a minority of voters.
Think about that. They say you have a mandate, but do you? If Republicans were really in good shape, they would have won this election handily. Instead, they lost on every front. Where redistricting did not help them, as in the case of the Senate, they lost several seats they thought they had, and two on top of that. Not only did poster-boy (or is that centerfold ;-) ) Scott Brown fail to hold on to his seat, he lost it to Elizabeth Warren!
The nastiness of the trick is this: their clever redistricting has made it easier for them to win more seats than they really deserve to win, based on population, so rather than settle into a natural equilibrium, they're sat upon a wobbly, stacked-furniture, gravity-defying artificial advantage, which will disappear if Demographic changes go as they are projected to go. So, rather than see a gradual change that can be adapted to over time, Republicans are likely to see things either change in 2020, or change earlier because their Demographics have been undermined by much less forgiving changes, born of alienating folks with increasingly radical behavior.
You have to at least give President Obama the credit for trying to look like he learned his lesson after 2010. Republicans, though, have decided lessons are for weaklings.
The votes tell you how that's going to work out. The fact that any tax cut got passed over the objection of most of the party tells you where their political strength is right now. And rather than being helped by a pragmatic right wing in the party, looking to soften the impact, the Right Wing has put them in the impossible position of breaking their back if they do adapt, or putting them at odds with the last election results if they don't.
They think they're purifying their movement, and in a sense, they are. They're taking out the people with the brains and the common sense to actually play politics for advantage, than for purposes of display. You don't get John Boehner because Boehner is a master politician, you get him because Boehner is room temperature IQed enough, cowardly enough that he can get pushed around, made to promise all the right things, while the rest of the establishment tries to stay out of the way of the upstarts.
The honestly stupid thing about the whole political situation is this: This is all about Reagan.
Put simply, people got these ideals of government from Reagan, which he never really lived up to. But you don't remember what bills he signed into law, including three tax increases. You remember the speeches he gave, the fact he supercharged the military, and cut taxes. You conveniently forget the double digit percentage increases in government spending on his watch as he expanded the military bureaucracy and procurement of weapons. You conveniently forget that the largest tax cut in history was quickly followed by the largest tax hike. Hell, do any Republicans actually recall the top tax rates of that time?
George W. Bush didn't design his policy in a vacuum, nor his rhetoric. He was trying to be the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Everybody likes Ronald Reagan, holds him up as a hero to the movement. But despite what you may have heard, his first term only later becomes the economic dynamo he promised in his first election. Look at the unemployment numbers. They actually got worse than any Obama ever faced, 10.8%, and until sometime in 1983, he was still losing jobs. He was on the verge of losing his when the economy turned around. Some would credit taxes, and to do so they would have to ignore the relief of inflation, double digit interest rates, and the end of the energy crisis to credit it for that, and ignore the fact that Reagan's signature tax cuts were signed by him before the recession started.
But that's not what Conservative mythology says. Conservative mythology says the gradual, rather than sudden relief of the whole thing was because of tax cuts. They ignore the repeated tax increases, meant to stave off exactly the kind of catastrophic increase which came with Bush's last budget, the 2009. They just say, "Arthur Laffer was vindicated!" Conservative mythology then says that Bush lost basically because he violated his promise not to raise any new taxes, so essentially, nobody could ever raise taxes, or even allow them to lapse. You listen to Republicans, and they say Bush's problem was that he spent too much, but would you ever hear them say the same thing about Reagan? No, for the most part, and the reason for that is that Reagan ended his administration with rather greater popularity, and no humongous, immediate disaster like Bush.
Bush, in fact, utterly refused to raise taxes, doing the conservative legend one better, which is why he left behind the Nation's first trillion dollar budget deficit for Obama to clean up. That, and an economic disaster that made austerity, especially the more effective two-sided approach (where you actually actually acknowledge income [read: revenue] is important to a budget) a bad idea.
Republicans claim that we must make major cuts to avoid ending up like Greece, which is a faulty example on a number of levels. First, Greece has cut and cut again, with added taxes on everybody, wage earners in particular. Has it worked? No, not in Greece, nor anywhere else in Europe. Greece, in fact, was expected to recover economically as bond investors came back to it, thanks to the austerity measures. It registers the worst deviation from expectations, one that has left its economy in shambles, and a Neo-Nazi like party gaining popularity.
Sound familiar?
Republicans have been threatening to inflict a failure to raise the debt ceiling on this country, in order to teach us some sort of bizarrely counterproductive lesson in fiscal responsibility. They treat the debt ceiling as if it were supposed to be a limit, instead of, say, actual budgeting. If they were in complete control of Congress, they could just negotiate slimmer budgets themselves. Nobody would guarantee it would get through Obama, but after a while, he wouldn't have a choice. But Tea Partiers proved too strong a brew for voters at large, in the Senate elections, so they never had that chance, even at their peak in 2010.
And this is no longer their peak.
Will they punish this country, the world even with the collapse of America's creditworthiness and currency? They would if they could.
But here's what I think will actually happen, especially now: Republicans in Congress will get some guys coming down from the banking sector, asking them to explain why they're looking to screw up the economy yet again, and they'll find some way to arrange a vote where Democrats take up some of the slack yet again.
And the GOP will look weak, once again. Rather than make their stand on some issue where, if it failed, and they shot the hostage, the damage would be more ambiguous, perhaps nonexistent, they instead chose something that is objectively bad, for the whole country, for the world even. Is it any wonder Congress is so unpopular?
The problem for America is that we have a political movement, backed with considerable resources, which did its very best in the last few decades and the election before last year's to carve its political advantage in stone. It's so obstructed, district-wise, that Democrats could win the popular vote for the House of Representatives by several points, and still fail to take back the house.
What we have here is a political imbalance with the will of the people. One party has set itself as the arbiter of what the people want, no matter how many disagree with them. They've redistricted their states to such a ridiculous degree that in many states small majorities or even minorities in Republican voters translate to lopsided delegation majorities. Now I will not dispute that parties in the past, including the Democrats, redistricted to their advantage, and engineered such lopsided majorities.
But I think that just sets parties up for phase-change like wave elections, where many seats flip at once, only to set up an unsustainable political system that proves so resistant to voters that it inspires resistance from voters, who get fed up with dysfunction and unaccountability.
Which this Congress has delivered in no short supply. The Democrats of 2006-2010 were not the most functional bunch, especially with Republicans filibustering them at record rates, and their own ranks filled with legacies from the long period Democrats had in the wilderness, but they put in five hour work weeks, passed budgets when they could get past the Republican's filibusters, and did not play chicken with America's solvency and financial stability.
If you help us to elect a Democratic majority in Congress, you will not see Debt Ceiling standoffs, you will not see two day work weeks from the people we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to get things done. You will not see government shutdowns. You will not have to worry about this nation's ability to function. You will not have to worry that we won't get weather satellites up to replace the ones that are reaching the end of their operational life. You will see a fairer, better tax code put in place, which will reduce deficits, and you will see budgets that are less apt to have cuts in place at your expense.
If there is a disaster, a Democratic Congress will act, not obstruct so they can get budget cuts to compensate for badly needed emergency funds. If there are bridges to replace and highways to maintain, if you have an air-traffic control system that needs updating, you'll see them take care of business.
Why? Because Democrats have something to prove that meshes with getting all that crap done: we want to prove that government can function. Republicans have painted themselves into a corner, such that they have to prove otherwise. If government is a car, they have to steer it towards the ditch again and again to prove that it can't be driven straight. Democrats will try to prove otherwise, try to keep things together, even if the inevitable misfortunes a nation experiences tries to shove them off the road.
It's time to stop coddling those who obviously won't take care of their responsibilities. It's time to leave the Republicans in the ditch they got us into to, and get the nation back on the road to recovery, where it belongs.
Posted by Stephen Daugherty at January 9, 2013 12:11 AMwe want to prove that government can function.
And the last time that the Democrats offered up a budget as is legally required of them was…?
April 2009. Democrats controlled both houses in 2010 yet didn’t produce a budget, even one for public viewing.
Sorry Stephen, I know you want to convince everyone that the Republicans are bad, Democrats are good, all failings of the government are Republican’s fault and all good things are Democrat’s fault, that the Republican party is about to dry up and disappear from the face of the earth…
But that reality only plays in your own mind and in those in your echo chamber.
I wish that the Republicans would go away and be replaced by the Libertarians, trust me I wish what you say was even remotely true.
But it isn’t, not matter how much you wish it to be.
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 9, 2013 12:05 PMBTW, please explain this sentence…
This is the third time we’ve had to carry the weight of a compromisePosted by: Rhinehold at January 9, 2013 12:11 PM
Keep up the good work, Stephen.
I’m sure that in no time, you will have convinced everybody on the right to call their representatives and beg them to compromise all of their principles and rights away.
Just in time also, seeing how you all are really ramping up all your anti 2nd Amendment propaganda and rhetoric.
A few more of these Democrats perfect, Republicans evil threads, and I’ll be resenting the successful and wanting government to provide for me also.
Hell, I’ll probably even weepingly call government to come and get everybodys scary guns too. Damn the Constitution! Holy crap!!! It’s working already. Man, you are good.
Biden is starting his gun control talks… I wonder if he remembers saying this?
“I guarantee you Barack Obama ain’t taking my shotguns, so don’t buy that malarkey. Don’t buy that malarkey. They’re gonna – they’re gonna start peddling that to you. I got two. If he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem.”Posted by: Rhinehold at January 9, 2013 1:59 PM
Tell me Stephen, what ‘austerity measures’ are you discussing specifically…
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 9, 2013 2:03 PMDoughboy promotes more government debt, not satisfied with the $16.5 Trillion already owed. He says this is an emergency calling for, and justifying more, debt. Could “balloon boy” tell us about all the emergencies of the past that got us to the $16.5 Trillion we owe?
There is no longer a true debt ceiling. Successive congresses have overspent (exceeded revenue) for purely political gain for themselves, not the nation. Congress believes that excess spending will always be paid for by increasing the debt limit and borrowing more. And, they are right in believing this. The only solution is a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
“Thomas Jefferson’s favorite economist, Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), had some harsh things to say about government borrowing, and we’d do well to rediscover Tracy’s wisdom. In 1817 the Frenchman Tracy published a book on economic principles, which Jefferson liked so much, he oversaw its translation into English as A Treatise on Political Economy. Like many economists of his day, Tracy understood that the free market was a process rooted in human action, with which government spending interfered. And he grasped that such spending is not investment, the politicians’ self-serving statements notwithstanding, but rather consumption, which deprives the private sector of scarce resources that would have been used to raise living standards.
Yet Tracy was willing to ask, “When [government] expenses are very considerable, ought we to felicitate ourselves on being able to meet them by loans, rather than taxes?” He thought not.
Borrowing appears to be a voluntary form of funding government, but Tracy wrote that “this an illusion [because the lenders] force the government to raise, one day or other, a sum equal to that which they furnish and to the interest which they demand for it. Thus, by their obligingness, they burden without their consent not only the citizens actually existing, but also future generations… .”
Against Government Debt
By Sheldon Richman
Wednesday, January 09, 2013 “The Project to Restore America”
Rhinehold writes; “Biden is starting his gun control talks…”
Biden, obama and nearly the entire left want us to believe that we are one, if not the, most violent nation in the world and that we have to rid the nation of guns to solve the problem.
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States Table 1, (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1) violent crimes in the US have dropped by nearly 50% in the last twenty years. In 1992, there were 757.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people. In 2011, there were only 386.3 violent crimes per 100,000 people. That’s a reduction of 49%.
In the same Table 1, we also see that there were 9.3 homicides per 100,000 people in 1992 and that number dropped to 4.7 homicides per 100,000 in 2011. That’s a reduction of 49.4% in the homicide rate in the past twenty years.
In the same Table 1, we also see that there were 9.3 homicides per 100,000 people in 1992 and that number dropped to 4.7 homicides per 100,000 in 2011. That’s a reduction of 49.4% in the homicide rate in the past twenty years.
The politicians also want you to believe that assault rifles are responsible for many of the homicides that occur and that they need to be banned. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States Table 8, there was a total of 12,664 homicides reported in 2011. Of those, 8,583 were committed with a firearm. Of those, only 323 were committed with a rifle. Now realize that assault rifles are a subset of the 323, which means that they account for less than 3.8% of homicides committed by firearms and less than 2.6% of all homicides.
Let’s compare our violent crime rate to England and Wales.
The Home Office Statistical Bulletin: Crimes Detected in England and Wales 2011/12, reports that there were 762,515 violent crimes in the past year. The population of England is 53,013,000 and the population of Wales is 3,006,400. Do the math and you end up with 1,361.6 violent crimes per 100,000 people. In other words, England and Wales has violent crime rate 3.5 times HIGHER than the US.
Chicago, with some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, is now known as the “Murder Capital of the Nation”.
Read more: http://godfatherpolitics.com/8900/facts-anti-gun-advocates-dont-want-you-to-know/#ixzz2HVmGSDdp
Rhinhold
re Stephen - “Tell me Stephen, what ‘austerity measures’ are you discussing specifically…”
He wanted to raise taxes on “the rich”. He has not changed one of his ideas in the whole time he has been here. He just changes names. Things that are bad if Republican are good if Democrat.
I have never seen him say one good thing about any Republican except when they broke with the party.
Stephen
Obama got the taxes he wanted. He got the stimulus he wanted; he got the Obamacare he wanted. Just because these things don’t work the way he said he wanted, you cannot blame Republicans. Obama is just a bit stubborn and stupid. What did you call Bush when he pushed his will?
Posted by: C&J at January 9, 2013 4:12 PMWhat’s with this “Republicans Bad, Democrats Good” crap? Do you think I would be posting on this column if I didn’t have a significant preference in this direction, towards the Democrats? This is editorializing and opinion. Take it for what you will, but don’t start telling me I have to start digging around for complements I right now don’t feel like giving.
And really, what is your argument against me? Does it not tell you something that the GOP has forced three confrontations so far, with a fourth and perhaps a fifth to come, and in the majority of these cases, the Tea Partiers who lend them the majority have been unable to even find common ground with their own party?
The GOP has taken back the House of Represenatives on the pretext of restoring jobs, but their main contributions to the economy have been unambiguously negative. You may count to opposition to Obama as job-creating, but that’s self-serving and circular.
So now, what do the American people have to deal with? a majority most of them didn’t vote for, didn’t want, which now proceeds to make EVERY formerly regular feature of fiscal policy a ****ing ordeal that takes months to resolve, and throws a stumbling block before our economy.
If I were the people on Wall Street, if I were the Chamber of Commerce, I would yank my support for the Republicans, and let things go Democratic. Why? Because then you’d get actual stability, dependability. You know what to expect from us. You know we don’t want to crash the economy, because that makes Democrats look bad if it happens on our watch.
That’s the thing. If you ditch the fever-swamp rhetoric, and just take us at our word, we have no reason to crash the economy or waste political effort making the country socialist. It’s the Republicans who seem intent on testing our economy to destruction, with their neglect of infrastructure, their unwillingness to fund disaster relief to get those parts of the country back to business as usual. It’s Republicans willing, on the basis of their principles, to hold the nation hostage to get their way on the budget, where their numbers won’t afford them the power.
You might not like every decision we make, but our incentive is to preserve the system, on the whole, not destroy it.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 9, 2013 4:45 PMRhinehold-
The vote to pass the compromises that ended the budget showdown in 2011 was the first of the three votes. It required Democratic help to pass. (This crisis, by the way, was only made possible by the Republican filibustering of the 2011 budget by Republicans in the Senate, a filibuster Democrats couldn’t break, thanks to the loss of a single senate seat)
The vote to end the Debt Ceiling Crisis was the second of these. Again, insufficient Republican votes to pass, required us to step in and profer the remainder.
The vote to end the recent Tax Cut problem, so that middle income Americans weren’t weighed down by new taxes before the economy had recovered enough, is the third example, and this time, we had to put foward the majority of the votes.
Should this not reflect poorly on them? Should it not seem symptomatic of policy overreach on both the Tea Party and the GOP’s parts, since they only control the House?
And really, mister, even if Democrats were not able to pass that 2011 budget, thanks to Republican Obstruction, how does that even remotely make the Republicans blameless for their multiple failures to produce a cohesive budget? They’re still failures at that, even if you can allege that Democrats are also irresponsible. The difference is, Republicans have no procedural block keeping them from passing a budget. We did. We put together the legislation to pass a budget, and it only failed because of that procedural block. We took care of our end of things.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 9, 2013 4:56 PMBalloon Boy writes; “So now, what do the American people have to deal with? a majority most of them didn’t vote for, didn’t want, …”
Asinine comment. Majorities elect our reps.
Double Asinine comment…”You know we don’t want to crash the economy, because that makes Democrats look bad if it happens on our watch.”
I know for sure now that Doughboy is only interested in appearances rather than our nations future. He doesn’t want his donkey party to “look bad”. The economy can crash when the Reps are in charge and he will just love it, and blame them for it.
Posted by: Royal Flush at January 9, 2013 4:57 PMRoyal Flush-
Let me get this straight. You are a fundamental believer in honoring the intentions of the framers, right? Yet you, in the same breath, promote a balanced budget amendment. Correct?
The Framers did not have the luxury of abstaining from debt. They had financed a Revolutionary War with it! What they did, is they developed a sensible means for dealing with it, through the treasury.
But you? You pull this debt ceiling crap, acting like it was supposed to be this arbitrary limit. But it wasn’t. It was meant to be a blanket authorization of the financing of debt under Congress’s Framer-given power to take out debt on the full faith and credit of the United States. Congress was sick of having to authorize debt financing each and every time they signed spending bills when the budget was in deficit.
People make noise about it, but what it’s really about is paying for what Congress, even this Congress, has already required the government to pay for. Essentially, you’re arguing for America to start flaking out on the spending it’s authorizing this year, and every year for the forseeable future. Yes, over time we should reduce what we’re adding to what we owe. But this is like slamming on the brakes on a icy road and locking them up. It’s not a responsible act.
C&J-
I’m talking general austerity measures, for the most part.
I don’t know if you noticed this, but I got real quiet about the tax increases I was saying had to occure around 2008. Why? Because I recognized that the economic tides had shifted. It wasn’t a good time for either spending cuts or tax increases. Even now, though I believe we will have to eventually repeal the Bush cuts as a whole, and even go further to undo the deficit and debt, I still think its a bad time for the tax burden to go up for most.
The rich are mainly an exception because their spending habits will change less. They’ll still be clearing far more than they need to maintain their lifestyle, and because of that, they’ll keep spending what they are, lessening the impact. But if you did the same with the Middle class, especially now, it would cut into spending, because they pretty much spend what they earn. Spending cuts create a similar problem. You would replace a budget deficit with a consumer spending deficit, and that would feed back into an employment problem, and thus, again, a revenue problem.
We’ve seen the effects of attempted austerity in Europe. It just didn’t work.
As for what Obama wanted? Well, at the same time, Republicans got the Public Sector jobs and spending cuts they wanted, and that counteracted the Stimulus, which was actually less than Obama wanted, and which was never repeated despited continued weakness in the economy. Healthcare reform, which Obama likely wanted a public option of some kind for, was instead passed with an insurance mandate, which was a compromise with conservatives in his party.
And right now, he’s been forced by the Republicans to indulge in a whole bunch of spending cuts that we can be pretty sure he didn’t want. Funny how you forgot to mention those, when you said that the current situation is “What Obama wanted”.
As for calling him stupid? You support a Congress most people compare unfavorably to lice, which isn’t even able to get its prized Tea Party Members to support the party in brokering a deal with the President.
How many times, with how many deals, have the people on the far right howled about not getting what they wanted? Long story short, you should worry about your stubborn stupid people, before starting to diagnose the President or anybody else who has outmanuevered them, defeated them in an election, as the stubborn or stupid one.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 9, 2013 5:15 PMStephen, What austerity measures? I know you say ‘general’ but no such thing has even been talked about by anyone in Congress on either side of the aisle. Please be specific… OR do you just mean ANY cuts in spending is austerity and must be avoided?
What spending cuts are being FORCED on Obama, Stephen? Here’s a hint, THERE ARE NONE. No spending cuts at all. There may have been some reduction in projected spending, none of it is actually a cut in any way. So Obama isn’t getting to spend over a trillion of borrowed dollars like he wants to and can only spend a few billion less? That’s like me telling you you can’t go buy groceries with the 1,000 limit VISA, You’ll have to do with the 995 limit VISA instead…. We’ll have to do without one single latte in order to squeeze into those boots.
As for your previous response?
our incentive is to preserve the system
What system is that, Stephen? You’ve already displayed the typical progressive lack of understanding of what type of system we are supposed to be and how your group has worked to change that system into the exact opposite. That is, by definition, destroying it. Don’t worry, you had help with the right, but stop trying to pretend it is any different. If you were trying to ‘protect the system’ and tell us that the system under Clinton was great and what we should aspire to, why is Obama governing more like Bush than Clinton?
The problem is not that you have a progressive bias, that is beyond question. The problem is that you manipulate facts, try to change history and make statements that are blatantly false/ignorant while doing so. Instead of being even and honest, you spend your time trying to peddle a fantasy that I seriously believe you believe to be true. And when shown when and how you are wrong, you simply pretend it didn’t happen. Perfect example is trying to say ‘well, if we had just had 6% gdp growth for the past twelve years, our spending wouldn’t be a problem’ and thinking it means anything based on reality…
Your suggestion is that the Republicans just roll over and let the Democrats do what they want. Because, as you say, you aren’t going to do anything that will hurt the country. Unfortunately, too many times in the past this has been the exact result of doing just that. They are just supposed to not represent the people who voted them precisely for the purpose of providing a check against the current administration. You wouldn’t expect Democrats to do that, I could pull out many articles written by you when the Republicans were in charge of everything, none of them suggested just rolling over and letting the Republicans have their way…
You think that for some reason that Democrats should be able to just push through anything that they want without any opposition, never having to convince others to actually vote for what they want to implement. Reading bills is not necessary, just vote and move on.
That’s not governing or leading, that is dictating.
Democrats cannot lead, nor can they govern well. They are full of hypocrisy and guilty of saying one thing and doing another. There is such a long list that it doesn’t really do any good to rehash it here unless you want to.
BTW, tell me Stephen, when was the last filibuster? Not the last time there was a threat of one, when was the last time one actually happened. How many ACTUAL filibusters have their been in the last 20 years?
The Democrats could squash the entire filibuster threat once and for all if they wanted to. They don’t. They are playing the game for all that they are worth, have a scapegoat for everything that is not ‘good’, and people like yourself eat it up hook line and sinker.
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 9, 2013 5:30 PMBalloon Boy writes; “The Framers did not have the luxury of abstaining from debt. They had financed a Revolutionary War with it!”
The very next time we are fighting to protect our democratic republic against a foreign power I will be counted as one who believes in incurring debt to fight that war.
Thomas Jefferson grasped that such (deficit) spending is not investment, the politicians’ self-serving statements notwithstanding, but rather consumption, which deprives the private sector of scarce resources that would have been used to raise living standards.
Balloon Boy writes; “Congress was sick of having to authorize debt financing each and every time they signed spending bills when the budget was in deficit.”
AWWWW…poor darlings. It’s much better to just give them a credit card with no limit. That way, voters and taxpayers are lulled into believing that the cost of government is much cheaper than it really is. Daugherty no doubt lives on government debt too.
Those who do not have to pay for the debt have no concern about how high it gets.
Posted by: Royal Flush at January 9, 2013 5:35 PMAnd really, mister, even if Democrats were not able to pass that 2011 budget, thanks to Republican Obstruction, how does that even remotely make the Republicans blameless for their multiple failures to produce a cohesive budget? They’re still failures at that, even if you can allege that Democrats are also irresponsible. The difference is, Republicans have no procedural block keeping them from passing a budget. We did. We put together the legislation to pass a budget, and it only failed because of that procedural block. We took care of our end of things.
Republican Obstruction? Tell me, Stephen, where was the filibuster? I didn’t see one… I’m sure if there was one it would have aired on CSpan, seeing senators up there holding onto control of the floor preventing bills coming up for votes…
Oh, did you mean the THREAT of one? Where the Democratic leadership simply says ‘are you going to filibuster’? One Republican just says ‘I do’ and then the whole thing gets shelved? What could the Democrats DO??? They are powerless! They have the majority and are still POWERLESS. That’s telling, Stephen, unless Democrats have dictatorial control of our government, they cannot seem to get anything done…
Why does anyone vote for one knowing that they are that inept?
No, no budget has even been presented, been made publicly viewable. And guess what, that is AGAINST THE LAW. Not that Democrats care about that sort of thing, after all to them the law is just something that happens to other people.
Royal Flush-
The Majority of Americans voted for Democratic Party Representatives. Did you TLDR my explanation of how gerrymandered Conservatives made their local Congressional Districts, the money that conservative groups put into the process?
It’s not asinine at all, much as you would like to convince people otherwise.
As for the rest? My philosophy is simple: start with realities to build good appearances. They are the simplest way to build the complicated array of events that convince people things actually are going well. If the economy is prospering, you don’t have to lay the spin or the flack on thick. You can just point to the facts at hand, and other events will confirm your observations and claims.
That’s what the Republicans main failure over the last few years has been. In the attempt to keep a train wreck of bad events from ruining their publicity, they turned to a style of dealing with the media that ultimately curled in on itself, and turned appearances into the whole deal.
Unfortunately, this has lead to a GOP that is less concerned about winning on the merits, and more concerned about manipulating public sentiment to get what they want. Ironically, though, a lot of the things they do to make Obama look bad have, by virtue of the irresponsibility accompanying it, only made Republicans look worse.
It could have been otherwise. If the Republicans had proved industrious and cooperative, people could have quickly become comfortable with a divided government. Instead, they’ve made nearly every intereaction with the President a nightmarish ordeal, for him as well as the public. Hence the fact that people think better of Lice than Congress. Hence the fact that Obama, not to mention Congressional Democrats, come off much better than Congressional Republicans.
People like me don’t have to do much more than relate the facts. People find your party’s behavior in Congress horrifying and disgusting on its own.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 9, 2013 5:40 PMAnother fine example of do as I say, not as I do…
“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents — number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child.Posted by: Rhinehold at January 9, 2013 5:41 PMThat’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”
Stephen, you are right that the revolutionary war incurred debt. Here’s the difference though… THEY dealt with the debt and had it paid off in a few years. The idea of passing on debt that we incur to the next generation was an anethema to them. Pure Evil.
The fact is we can’t sustain the type of spending that the progressives want to keep spending. But instead of accepting that, they just say ‘borrow it and we’ll figure it out later’. No more, we need to figure it out NOW, not keep kicking the can down the road. The problem is, the current administration will simply not address it, which is why the Republicans are using anything they can to force the issue. Sorry they are making progressives appear to be responsible, Stephen…
You know, when Obama was first elected I wrote in these comments on this site that the Republicans should let him and the Democrats in control at the time have their way, do whatever they wanted. Once the country saw what that meant, it would be over for Democratic party and the progressives would try to blame them for everything that happened (or didn’t happen) if they tried to provide a counterbalance. They didn’t take my advice which IMO cost them having control of the president, senate and house this year. No, instead they acted their conscious and tried to do what their constituents voted them in to do.
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 9, 2013 5:46 PMBalloon Boy writes; “It’s not asinine at all, much as you would like to convince people otherwise.”
Please direct me to the house members who were not seated by a majority of voters in their district…or admit your statement is asinine.
He wrote; “As for the rest? My philosophy is simple: start with realities to build good appearances. They are the simplest way to build the complicated array of events that convince people things actually are going well. If the economy is prospering, you don’t have to lay the spin or the flack on thick. You can just point to the facts at hand, and other events will confirm your observations and claims.”
Daugherty, could you have your interpreter rewrite this so reasonable can understand? Gobble-d-geek is not a language I can read.
I did find it interesting that you wrote; “build good appearances”. Yup…that is very “simple-minded”…and the way of the left. We have the appearance of government costing much less than it really does by defraying nearly $17 Trillion of its true cost to some future generation. It sure as hell won’t be paid by “Balloon Boy” and his liberal, donkey-riding flacks.
Posted by: Royal Flush at January 9, 2013 5:57 PMRhinehold-
Apparently you didn’t get the memo: these days, the threat of a filibuster is all that’s necessary to obstruct. If you don’t pass the cloture vote, then that’s all she wrote.
If you’re going too accuse me of distorting facts, You should offer more than just the allegation as proof.
I know I must seem like a terrible idiot to you, but to me it seems like the modern right wing is full of people who know nothing else than the rumors and allegations their fellow members circulate.
I am quite happy to back up what I claim. I take pride in being right, even if I am not always objective.
But I’m not going to yield to buffoons who simply project some species of confidence and slander me on my ability to understand the world. To me, those people are just asking for it, and I will take an even fiercer and less forgiving edge to their arguments.
As for what I would suggest?
Let me blunt: Congress is a deliberative body. It was never meant by the Framers to be so firmly divided by party. Local interests were meant to suffuse into it. Ah, but not always win the debate! For that to happen, local interests had to percolate up to become national interests, national concerns, or at least find some way of gaining enough support so that enough people would say yes to it. Porkbarrel is the extreme of that, where a whole bunch of horsetrading goes into elevating special interests. However, some form of attention to the general good, to a common, rationally agreeable purposes was meant to happen.
Only extremists partisans believe that the system was supposed to work such that only the will of the majority, acting in lockstep, was supposed to triumph.
When I talk of the damage Republicans could have done, I’m pointing something out.
Think about it for a second: for the longest time, Democrats had big factions of moderate to conservative legislators in the House and Senate. Before the Republicans plowed through them to create their majority, they had people they could push and pull on to help them get bills passed, and to block bills they didn’t want passed.
Instead, under their new model, only the safest Democrats have survived, and those that come back are not eager to deal, or expecting the Republicans to deal. So, what happens? They’re more hardline. Since we’re talking about Democrats, we’re not talking Republican level of lockstep behavior, but we are talking a more disciplined, less reachable caucus for the Republicans.
They’ve traded Democrats they could deal with for Republicans they can’t get to stick with them! Oh, the ironies of a deliberative body.
I have always believed that real world Democratic Republics are messy things. Those who expect the crisp edges of party politics to translate perfectly to something like Congress are just kidding themselves.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 9, 2013 6:00 PMStephen
“but I got real quiet about the tax increases I was saying had to occure around 2008. Why?” Because Obama was elected. You attack Bush.
You also got quiet about torture, Guantanamo, drones etc. As well as stupid things FEMA does.
You are against Republicans no matter what and for Democrats, no matter what.
“The rich are mainly an exception because their spending habits will change less.” This is not true but also not the most important part of the equation. The rich can and will change their earning habits. Some will not bother working extra; most will shift their assets. Firms will not pay out dividends. Taxable income will shrink. That is why tax increased never bring in as much as proponents think.
Posted by: C&J at January 9, 2013 6:11 PMBalloon Boy writes; “Think about it for a second: for the longest time, Democrats had big factions of moderate to conservative legislators in the House and Senate.”
and…
“Instead, under their new model, only the safest Democrats have survived…”
What the hell…are you drunk?
Posted by: Royal Flush at January 9, 2013 6:13 PMRoyal Flush-
Let me see if I can digest this so even a moron could understand it.
The constitution gives Congress the Credit Card. Full Stop. It also, in a separate part, authorizes expenditures from the treasury only on Congress’s say so. Still with me?
The Debt Ceiling doesn’t have a thing to do with the authorization of spending. Congress does that separately. That’s what the budget deals have ALREADY OKAYED.
Still with me?
So, we’re not arguing about future spending here, we’re arguing about SPENDING ALREADY AUTHORIZED BY CONGRESS.
More to the point, you fail to even once observe a significant fact: that even if we were to cut the budget down to nothing, we would be paying back this debt for more than a decade.
And we still have a government to run. That government has to take in money to give out money, and your dumbasses in Congress have already okayed giving out more money. They’ve already promised people the money they are arguing about financing.
I’m sick of our government lurching from one crisis to another. It costs us extra, costs us credibility and debt ratings to do things in such a herky-jerky, uncertain way. It makes other people look at my country as if its lost its ****ing mind.
We have the economy to pay back our debts, and the interest folks are asking for that debt is moronically low. So there is no real reason to go into a Greek Style panic. We control our currency, we have the world’s biggest economy, and will remain a huge economic player for decades to come. People are very impatient with Greece, and it doesn’t have the economy to support its debt.
That’s not our problem. So, to put it simply, this whole Debt ceiling thing is BORROWING TROUBLE at its worst. We do not need to be doing this to ourselves at this point. The situation doesn’t demand it.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 9, 2013 6:20 PMApparently you didn’t get the memo: these days, the threat of a filibuster is all that’s necessary to obstruct. If you don’t pass the cloture vote, then that’s all she wrote.If you’re going too accuse me of distorting facts, You should offer more than just the allegation as proof.
I got the memo, as I have been the one on here reporting on it for years.
The facts are that in the 1990s, when the Republican congress was fighting with Clinton in much the same way as we see today (and resulting in an eventual *almost* surplus) the two parties got together and said…
“Hey, this filibuster stuff is annoying, whenever we filibuster it holds up all legislation and we can’t get home to our cushy lives. So, let’s just let a threat of a filibuster be taken as read and then we can table that legislation and move on to something else”.
So an agreement was struck. Since then, the number of filibusters has risen. First with the Republican minority in the senate with Clinton, then with the Democratic minority in the senate with Bush, then with the Republican minority in the senate with Bush/Obama. Each and every session, the numbers have increased. Because it is now too easy.
The Democrats have several options to eliminate the threat of the filibuster that are:
1) Renege on the agreement and make the Republicans actually filibuster. One or two of them would cause the Republicans to stop threatening as they are expensive, tiring and not something most senators WANT to do. Problem #1: if the issue galvanizes the public behind the Republicans the Democrats can take a hit. Problem #2: The Democrats want to make sure they can do the same thing when they are in the minority. Problem #3: Without the Republican scapegoat, they would not be faring as well in the polls and might start losing more elections.
2) Convince a small number of Republicans to vote their way. This would entail actually trying to work with a select few Republicans and potentially giving in to some of their demands, small as they are, as they did with Obamacare. Since the Democrats (as you are a prime example of) don’t think they should have to do this, it doesn’t get done.
3) Vote to eliminate the filibuster from the Senate laws. Now would be the time to do that as a new senate is being seated, rules changes are coming up for a vote… But of course, that won’t happen since as we saw with Problem #2 of the first option, the Democrats want to do it when they are the minority.
So, while the Democrats have ways around the issue, the least of which is courting a handful of Republican Senators to vote with them, they choose not to do that… And you somehow want to call that ‘leadership’?
I am quite happy to back up what I claim. I take pride in being right, even if I am not always objective.
Stephen, I’ve pointed out many times when you have been wrong and you have not once, ever, admitted it. Of course you take pride in being ‘right’, because in your mind you always are without exception.
Congress is a deliberative body. It was never meant by the Framers to be so firmly divided by party.
It was also never meant to have the power that it does. The framers knew that the government that governs best governs locally. That isn’t what has happened. The federal government has taken more and more power away from the local and state governments and is the largest reason that we see such a mess at the federal level. It has gotten worse and worse each and every session of congress… With little end in sight.
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 9, 2013 6:28 PMBalloon Boy explains…”So, we’re not arguing about future spending here, we’re arguing about SPENDING ALREADY AUTHORIZED BY CONGRESS.
More to the point, you fail to even once observe a significant fact: that even if we were to cut the budget down to nothing, we would be paying back this debt for more than a decade.
And we still have a government to run. That government has to take in money to give out money,…”
Bullshit…obama and reid and the donkey riders want more than just already authorized spending OH FOOLISH ONE.
Please don’t use the word “WE” when talking about decades to pay back our debt. You are most certainly not included in the payback…only the getting.
Your third comment is accurate. Government takes in money to give out money. And, WE taxpayers have every right to place a limit on the amount given out. Simply because Balloon Boy and his fellow freeloaders want more “free stuff” doesn’t mean that WE will pay for it.
Congress has proven it can not operate within a budget and can’t pass tax increases to pay for their spending. WE THE PEOPLE will help them reform by passing a Balanced Budget amendment to the Constitution.
Posted by: Royal Flush at January 9, 2013 6:31 PMRhinehold…applause for your last post. Right ON.
Posted by: Royal Flush at January 9, 2013 6:37 PMJust a few liberal slogans and what they really mean.
Gun Violence Prevention (Gun Control or elimination)
Estate Tax (Tax everyone twice who have a net worth over X dollars when they die.)
Affirmative Action (Free Stuff given to certain groups)
Women’s Choice (Subsidize women to abort babies)
Deficit Spending (Politicians too cowardly to balance a budget or increase taxes)
Excellence in Education (Unions protecting worthless teachers)
Fairness (My right to sit on my ass and have others take care of me…forever)
US Constitution (A bothersome document which is trumped by executive order.
Property Rights (All property belongs to government)
Elections (Feeding time for the ignorant, lazy, and malcontents)
Posted by: Royal Flush at January 9, 2013 6:56 PM
Stephen
The debt ceiling interpretation is not entirely accurate.
Even with all Obama’s borrowing, we still take in enough taxes to service debts. Not raising the ceiling would cause disruptions and drastic cuts, but not default unless Obama chooses default over cutting programs.
Posted by: C&J at January 9, 2013 7:32 PMFor the big spending liberals every day is Halloween. They demand a treat or promise a nasty trick.
Posted by: Royal Flush at January 9, 2013 7:33 PMConservatives on this site have become so extreme, it’s like watching the Whigs self-destruct, 2013 style. Keep it up.
C&J,
It’s hard to say what would be worse: default, or instantaneously cutting spending by over 40%.
If the Republicans force a default, it would immediately result in a lower credit rating, increased borrowing costs, and diminished confidence in American currency. And yet, even with default, US interest rates would rise, but they would remain low, investors would still treat Treasury instruments as safe havens, and and the dollar would remain the currency of choice, the currency of last resort. It would be a terrible idea, it would roil markets, and it would risk recession, but it might be preferable to spending cuts.
If the Republicans force enormous spending cuts, it would not just be political problem, the way default would be perceived- it would result in chaos. The choices would be horrifying. Would it be better to suspend Medicare and Social Security payments, or shut down almost every federal agency, including the courts and FBI? A spending cut of 40% or more would result in an immediate drop of 9% GDP, enough to ensure an economic depression. Not recession. Depression.
Obama would be absolutely right to refuse to negotiate. If the Republicans actually attempt to destroy the economy, the trillion dollar coin would be the best response. It’s a weird gimmick, but it would be legal, and it would work.
By the way, conservatives-
Your House majority is really knocking it out of the park. Don’t stop now! Michelle Bachmann opened the 113th Congress with her 34th bill to stop Obamacare. Not to be outdone, TN Representative Marsha Blackburn and others continued the War on Women with another attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. A number of states, including OH, have already introduced such bills, thereby continuing the sustained legislative assault on women’s health issues, aka The War on Women. It was such a winner in 2012, you know.
Oh, and make sure everybody understands you need those assault rifles and high capacity magazines. Maybe teachers- wait- no, don’t stop at teachers!- maybe EVERYONE should be packing, thereby catering to the deep suspicion of your fellow human beings with real dystopian boom and doom; and it might be necessary, after all, in order to keep people from getting free stuff- your stuff- typifying the contempt for the 47% that is called modern conservatism.
Posted by: phx8 at January 9, 2013 10:17 PMC&J-
If you’re that resentful about my criticism of Bush, that’s your problem. If you want to cynically criticize Obama for being soft with his policies one moment, then turn around and say he’s no different, that’s he’s followed Bush Completely, be my guest.
I’d say he’s maybe taken on more of the Bush policies than I’m comfortable with, but I see less of that destructive inclination to lead America to the dark side in the name of protecting it. He’s moderated our foreign policy considerably. You bring up drones. I think the policy could use some reworking.
As for the other part? I seem to recall folks making their millions and billions just fine in the Clinton years. But if you’re making millions and billions, and you have to pay a little more, it’s not going to cause a drastic downturn. We’ve seen this play out. Folks are few and far between who let tax policy in this country discourage them from making money, especially at America’s low rates.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 9, 2013 11:44 PMa large majority, put there by a minority of voters.
What the ………………
Makes absolutely no since at all.
War on Women with another attempt to defund Planned Parenthood.
I’m sorry, how is it a ‘war on women’ to defund an organization that was originally and should still be running entirely on private funding…? Nixon was wrong when he authorized it and it is still wrong today.
I’m a HUGE supporter of Planned Parenthood and have no problem giving them donations freely. Why do we expect that those who disagree with what they do must be forced, at gunpoint, to give part of the payment for their hard work to aid that organization? I certainly don’t want that, I respect my fellow citizens more than some apparently.
In addition to that, as soon as you start funding something with federal money, you allow politics to start getting in the way. If the organization operated without federal funding, they wouldn’t have to worry about Republicans getting into office and ordering them to change the way they function. With the federal funding, that is a real possibility, defunding removes that option.
Bush started using federal funding for religious charities, yet the Democrats have a problem with this (rightfully so). What is the difference? So if the funding for that were to be proposed to be cut, would that be a ‘War on the Poor’ since that is who they help?
BTW, Planned Parenthood is not just a place for women to go, so the gender bias is sad… :/
Do you honestly think that if Planned Parenthood were to lose federal funding that they would close their doors? That the slack wouldn’t be taken up to continue funding it? They already get the majority of their funding from private donations and grants already…
There is no federal law forcing people to give blood to blood banks, for example, even though everyone SHOULD, but they work fine without receiving public funding. I give blood and have seen how it has saved lives personally, but would NEVER consider making it a LAW to force someone to give blood. Don’t you think Planned Parenthood would continue on without forcibly taking money to remain open?
To be honest, the attempted fear based argument you are attempting to use, which is not only dispicable, but blatent in it’s obvious attempt to scare people into siding with progressives on the topic, is part of what is wrong with American politics today from both sides. It’s been working for decades, though, so I don’t expect to see anyone changing anytime soon I guess…
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 9, 2013 11:55 PMbut I see less of that destructive inclination to lead America to the dark side in the name of protecting it.
More fantasy comments from Stephen…
Let’s see, the quiet reauthorizaztion of warantless wiretaps just the other day, the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the continued use of Rendition, continuing to not only keep Guantanamo Bay open but continue using it, killing innocent civilians in drone attacks in countries we are not at war with, including Yemen, Somolia, Pakistan, etc, authorizing the use of torture on US Citizens, claiming the legal authority to kill anyone at anytime, including US Citizens without giving them a chance to defend themselves in court, claiming complete authority to spy on citizens without reprisal AND IMPLEMENTING IT…
No, we are far worse off now than we ever were with Bush in office, he at least had someone with some power (the left) pulling him back from the brink. Obama has no one anymore, thanks to the progressive abandonment of all things war.
BTW, Don’t think that the Democratic Party won’t be laughed at hysterically when the next Republican president is elected and wants to use these same powers and they stand up to try to stop them… I will try to stop them too but I sure will laugh at the people who have given them the power by acquiescing to a Democrat president having it.
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 10, 2013 12:05 AMa large majority, put there by a minority of voters.
What the……………
Makes absolutely no sense.
Ron Brown-
A 33 seat majority for the Republicans, despite Democrats having 1.4% more votes.
A large majority, put there by a minority of voters. It shouldn’t be hard to understand it, if you do more than just gloss over my sources.
Rhinehold-
I remember a time when we sent cruise missiles after folks. Those certainly aren’t as discriminating as a drone can be.
I also recall Obama trying to shut down the Gitmo prison, and getting blocked by Congress. Instead, he’s taken steps to empty it of some of the less threatening individuals, who were likely just swept up.
I also recall arguing against the notion that we couldn’t safely contain many of the criminals here on our soil.
As far as those on the left dissenting about this, do yourself a favor and get over to Daily Kos sometime. They’re not exactly overlooking the issues.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 10, 2013 7:52 AMOh, and make sure everybody understands you need those assault rifles and high capacity magazines. Maybe teachers- wait- no, don’t stop at teachers!
Do mean conservatives actually want to arm the same people they called “union thugs” just a short time ago?
Posted by: j2t2 at January 10, 2013 8:29 AM
Just a few liberal slogans and what they really mean.
And here is a report from the conservative utopia of Iran. You know the place where they don’t have the EPA and the church leaders run the government.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/tehran-pollution-crisis-thousands-dead-iran_n_2432637.html
Posted by: j2t2 at January 10, 2013 9:14 AMI remember a time when we sent cruise missiles after folks. Those certainly aren’t as discriminating as a drone can be.
I agree completely, I was against that action when Clinton did it.
I also recall Obama trying to shut down the Gitmo prison, and getting blocked by Congress.
Yep, that failure of leadership again…
Instead, he’s taken steps to empty it of some of the less threatening individuals, who were likely just swept up.
As did Bush for several years. But they both still sent/send prisoners there… Recently the administration talked about how good it was to have.
Of course, there are fewer prisoners to take there now that the President has claimed the power to just kill people.
As far as those on the left dissenting about this, do yourself a favor and get over to Daily Kos sometime. They’re not exactly overlooking the issues.
LOL, no there are a few who are actually not hypocrites. Anti-war protests still garner a few hundred people. Not nearly the millions that showed up when a different president was running the war though. Not nearly the harangue on the evening news, showing bodies of dead servicemen coming home.
No, except for the very small minority it has been effectively swept under the rug and this president given a pass that the previous one never got. At least the Republicans are consistent, war is ok to them no matter which party is doing it.
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 10, 2013 9:31 AMj2t2
X-D
lol.
Rhinehold-
I’m sick and tired of people using imperfections of people’s positions as an excuse not to do anything or move anywhere.
Oh, Global Warmings a problem, but Al Gore is a hypocrite.
Oh, the collateral casualties from Drone Strikes are a problem, but Obama is a Hypocrite.
Oh, the deficit is a problem, but guess what? I don’t ignore economic situations when dealing with the fiscal problems that often spring from them, so guess what? No attention to my point, either!
You can sit there smiling, being the only person in the world who doesn’t say one thing, but support another. Unless you count your unconditional support for tax cuts which have been a demonstrable problem for fiscal solvency.
Oh, really. I guess you don’t have a perfect position, then. So you’re not credible.
But neither is anybody else for that matter. We can hunt down all people who have exceptions to their beliefs, who nuance their ideas, who look at the situation and constrain their position based on it, and there won’t be anybody left who can have an opinion, then.
Me, I think a nice discussion on what we can agree on can do a lot more good than a constant, vicious need to assassinate character in order to pretend to defeat people, who in real life just continue throwing out their opinions, inconsistencies and all.
My positions on the war and everything might have had my characteristic black and white sentimentality, but the places where the lines were drawn betray a willingness to go to war, to win them, to do what it takes to defend the country, despite my dissent.
Oh, by the way, since the President has pretty much wrapped up Iraq, and is promising an exit by 2014, I think the real reason you see fewer protestors is that they see what they want in the process of coming true. Opponents of torture see a President, who while not clean, has shuttered a lot of the operations, and established a clear policy preference for normal interrogation methods.
People will settle for improvement after things have gotten worse.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 10, 2013 6:22 PMThe writer of this is still hung over from NY Eve. “Ron Brown-
A 33 seat majority for the Republicans, despite Democrats having 1.4% more votes.
J2t2
You know what else Iran doesn’t have. It doesn’t have a free market, which a key conservative tenet. In fact, you might say Iran is much closer to liberal ideals, since government sets “fair” prices and does not allow private individuals to gain wealth or power outside of the government purview. The government also owns things like oil companies.
So if you want to be more like the Iranians, you can demand price controls, advocate greater government control over industry, perhaps outright control. Of course, you have to think that the problems in the Middle East are caused by Israel. You may also want to push for global gun control and enact laws that limit expression of Christian religions. To the extent that these things are like American Republicans you are right.
But price controls, government control of energy, limits on free market, gun control and limiting expressions of Christianity in public sound more like a liberal platform.
Royal Flush-
Any impairment that lessens your appreciation for that short, succinct explanation of my previous comment is strictly your own.
C&J You confuse what conservatives say with what conservatives do. Make no mistake the Iranians Supreme leader is much more conservative than liberal. Who ever heard of a conservative wanting the EPA?
Posted by: j2t2 at January 10, 2013 10:30 PMStephen
Even with gerrymandering the majority still decides which party has the majority in the house.
You talk like you think gerrymandering is something that the mean old Republicans have just cooked up to keep the super nice Democrats out the majority. Well guess what? It ain’t nothing new. And the Democrats have used it to their favor just like the Republicans have. But then it’s OK for the Democrats to use gerrymandering to their favor, but it ain’t OK for the Republicans to.
I find it very interesting that the party that gerrymandering is being used against doesn’t like it. But when that party gets in power they think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. I’ve never been a fan of gerrymandering. It’s corrupt by nature.
What we need to start doing is electing the representatives at large just like the senators. Get rid of the districts and we get rid of gerrymandering. But it’ll never make it though the House regardless of which party is in the majority.
The writer of this is still hung over from NY Eve. “Ron Brown-
A 33 seat majority for the Republicans, despite Democrats having 1.4% more votes.
That just might be Royal.
Posted by: Ron Brown at January 10, 2013 11:19 PMj2t2
I know you hate conservatives. But perhaps you are just confused. I behave in my life according to my values. Most of my conservative friends do too.
Could you give me examples in the last thirty years of when American conservatives have consistently demanded price controls, advocated greater government control over industry, perhaps outright control. Of course. Are conservatives saying that the problems in the Middle East are caused by Israel. Are conservatives pushing for global gun control and enacting laws that limit expression of Christian religions?
The leader of Iran is not like an American conservative or an American liberal.
You really are not able to understand the differences, are you. You say you traveled internationally, but none of it affected you, did it? You still have that black and white outlook you picked up in grade school. At first I thought that you just do it to piss off people like me, but now I suspect it is your true opinion.
Let me share my true opinion. Anybody who actually believes that the leadership of Iran is analogous to elected American leaders, conservative or liberal, is too far below my standards of discourse for decent debate. I will continue negate some of your points to reach others, but I will no longer assume that you can be reached.
Posted by: C&J at January 11, 2013 6:30 AMC&J why not try rebutting Royal’s outright lies on the issue of liberals that led to the comparison?
BTW it’s not hate of conservatives it is a dislike of the misinformation half truths and outright lies they spew that I rant against. The sin not the sinner.
Posted by: j2t2 at January 11, 2013 9:11 AMI’ve never been hungover in my life, but if the headache of trying to relate simple ideas to some folks is anything like it, I am confirmed in my intention never to drink.
C&J-
What your party is doing is engineering safe districts for itself. Not only does this harm Americans, who vote in majority to get what they want, but don’t get it, but it harms the GOP in the long run.
We can pretend, you and I, that we can get our parties elected to offices with just the folks who believe exactly as we do. But if you take a real look at the way the real world works, neither of us have the numbers in our parties to achieve that.
When the GOP gerrymanders, it might cut districts up, it might carve cities, towns, swaths of country up, but it doesn’t change the real world social effects of the Demographics, nor does it prevent the natural, organic social activity of those cities and towns. It gets left behind quicker, as it doesn’t have to adapt politically to the direction all those cities and communities are going. And it allows Republicans to encourage their favored communities to be more insular, more lacking in connection to the rest of the culture.
The GOP strongholds become polders, rather than centers of political strength, walled gardens of political support.
People will not tolerate dilution of their votes, of their political power forever. They will respond, sooner or later, and the more the GOP’s walled its political fortunes up, the more it will suffer when the walls come down, and it has to compete for votes on more even ground.
It will be more like a phase change than a gradual shift, and the GOP will be worse off for it.
What the GOP needs to start doing now is figure out how to be both modern and conservative, how to persuade people, rather than attempt to force them to accept the GOP policy. As a person who sometimes lacks what they call the social graces, I can only look at the self-indulgent behavior of the right with pity. For me, my whole life has been about learning to connect and persuade, two things that my disability make less intuitive to me. So when I see people who just throw up barriers to everybody else’s ideas, everybody else’s realities, and deliberately remove themselves from a connection with them, I can only react with pity and disbelief.
It’s not enough to be right. If you want some change to come about in a Democracy, you have to get enough support over all to push it through and keep it there.
The Republican Congress has tried to act as if it was given a mandate to do everything it wanted to do, going far beyond the voter’s stated priority of jobs and the economy. They wasted an opportunity then, and waste it now. Maybe they can obstruct for a little while, but after a while, the fervor will die down, and people will want function. If they have to vote for Democrats to get it, they will.
The question is, will the Tea Party make that necessary? Will they be so uncooperative, force so many wasteful confrontations, that they ultimately drag down the brand of the GOP? I think they already are, given the election results. I think the Gerrymandering has acted like pads on a boxer’s body, keeping them from realizing how hard the voters were punching at them.
Republicans are trying more people’s patience than they realize.
The GOP wants to believe that it can boil itself down to essentials, rather than change any of its policy decisions. What it must realize is that a number of its policies have failed, and a number of them no longer have people’s sympathies. Rather than essentialize, and try to force those policies in their most undiluted form, Republicans need to find a way to take policy back down to principle, and then take a new look at the world.
It’s always been my opinion that you get the smallest sustainable government when you take care of problems well. People start clamoring for more regulation and more government when situations get out of control, when what was once nipped in the bud blooms in the full flower of trouble.
Republicans need to stop this rearguard action against any and all increase in regulation. They need to remake themselves as advocates for refinement of government, to make it more elegant, more effective. People need to be able to look at the GOP, and know that it won’t compromise the public’s interests for the sake of its ideology.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 11, 2013 10:20 AMI’m sick and tired of people using imperfections of people’s positions as an excuse not to do anything or move anywhere.
I am as well. Of course, you won’t see me doing that but I’m sure you will attribute that to me anyway since you have no other real response…
Oh, Global Warmings a problem, but Al Gore is a hypocrite.
The fact that Al Gore has made himself richer than Mitt Romney due to his Global Warming stance and selling his news organization to Al Jazera call into question his credibility on the topic. That doesn’t mean in any way that what he says is wrong or right by itself, but it does mean that anything he says about the subject has to be checked against verifiable facts. Coupling that with the fact that he has lied about certain Global Warming topics and knowing he has financial motives in the outcome of the subject, it pretty much means he is unusable as a reliable resource on it. Again, means nothing about the facts as they are… You confusing those two things is interesting though, as you had no problem using that very same tactic (money made) to suggest Mitt Romney was evil and broke laws, and shouldn’t be considered a viable option for President.
Oh, the collateral casualties from Drone Strikes are a problem, but Obama is a Hypocrite.
Yeah, Obama is a hypocrite. And no, not just on this specific instance. But the Hypocrites are those that screamed for eight years about the things that Bush did while DEFENDING worse actions by this president. It doesn’t change the facts of the situation, but it does call into question the motive and credibility of those being hypocrites, like yourself.
Oh, the deficit is a problem, but guess what? I don’t ignore economic situations when dealing with the fiscal problems that often spring from them, so guess what? No attention to my point, either!
No, you just ignore most of the problems because they would be counter to your politics. You suggest in some way that spending is not a problem, when it clearly is. You say that SS is ‘fine’, but it is not and is becoming an albatross around our neck. Yet, you don’t want to address it, touch it or consider it. You rail against ‘spending cuts’, when none have actually been suggested by anyone, use the word austerity because you like the way the word sounds I guess, no one has suggested anything of the kind. Even the ‘draconian’ cuts that you say the Republicans are wanting aren’t even actual cuts.
Your points are mostly invalid, as I have tried to show you but you refuse to listen to reason, logic or facts of any kind. That is why your ‘points’ are not listened to, they are invalid. That you are a hypocrite is just another subject that give some background as to why you won’t accept facts/logic/reason when discussing your positions. That doesn’t mean that all of your points are invalid, always. Only that when you are wrong, the hypocrisy shows as an underlying factor. Even a hypocrite can be right sometimes. Just not all the time. As you seem to think you are.
You can sit there smiling, being the only person in the world who doesn’t say one thing, but support another.
You think I’m smiling because we are in the mess we are in now because of staggering hypocrisies and partisism?
Unless you count your unconditional support for tax cuts which have been a demonstrable problem for fiscal solvency.
Again, you don’t have any clue about what my position on ‘tax cuts’ are, since you don’t actually listen to anything that anyone you disagree with says. In order to suggest that I have an ‘unconditional support for tax cuts’ shows me that you haven’t actually listened to anything I’ve said on the subject. Another example of the partisan and hypocritical attitudes you display here.
Me, I think a nice discussion on what we can agree on can do a lot more good than a constant, vicious need to assassinate character in order to pretend to defeat people, who in real life just continue throwing out their opinions, inconsistencies and all.
The problem is that that discussion cannot BEGIN until we remove those partisan blinders. Hypocricies are just a symptom of a greater underlying problem, fixing the views you want to have without concern for facts, understanding or wanting to admit that most times people just want things to be the way they think they should be and not be the way they don’t want them to be.
It’s like the ‘pro-choice’ person who doesn’t believe in people actually being allowed to make their own choices. Or the christian who wants to enact their morality into law but scream about the possibility of the Koran being used as a source of law.
Oh, by the way, since the President has pretty much wrapped up Iraq
Yet worked hard to keep 10,000 troops in Iraq indefinately, was only prevented from doing so by Bush…
and is promising an exit by 2014
Which the white house is already backpeddling from
, I think the real reason you see fewer protestors is that they see what they want in the process of coming true.
? The protests STOPPED in 2009. We weren’t ‘out of Iraq’ (even though we are still there, but we just call it something else) until 2011…
Opponents of torture see a President, who while not clean, has shuttered a lot of the operations, and established a clear policy preference for normal interrogation methods.
Only he hasn’t really. He TALKS a good game, but he facts are a different thing. Perhaps that is part of the problem, you have no problem digging into the actions of the Republican presidents because you don’t trust them, but take the Democratic ones at face value without doing any real investigation because you like them… It doesn’t matter that Obama has actually been WORSE on war, civil rights, torture, etc than Bush was, he SAYS he isn’t, so that’s all there is to know…
People will settle for improvement after things have gotten worse.
Problem is, they are not improving. In January 2011, President Obama signed a Defense Bill that stated that no more of the people we are holding at Gitmo will be released or moved. Period. None have happened since then. Meanwhile, more people are being taken there, rendition sites are still active, torture is still going on AND now including US Citizens, new powers have popped up that the president says he has, including unconstitutional wars, spying on Americans without ANY possible counter to it, killing people, including US Citizens, without any due process, increased use of drones to kill innocent civilians and then calling them ‘suspected terrorists’… There’s more but I’m sure you stopped listening by now…
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 11, 2013 11:19 AMWhatyour party isboth parties have been doing is engineering safe districts foritselfthemselves.
There, fixed that one for you.
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 11, 2013 11:24 AMit is a dislike of the misinformation half truths and outright lies they spew that I rant against.
But the misinformation half truths and outright lies of the progressives are A-OK!
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 11, 2013 11:38 AMStephen
The weird districts are made possible and sometimes even required by the 1982 amendments of the Voting Rights Act, designed to create “racial justice”. In order to ensure victories for blacks and Hispanics, districts are designed in strange ways. North Carolina 12 is so long and narrow that the incumbent can hit all his constituents if he just drives down the middle with both car doors open (sarcasm, BTW.)
This Voting Right disticting has a very pernicious effect. It perpetuates racism and fosters extremism.
Democrats are sure that black or Hispanic need to have this protection to get elected, and that seems to be true for Democrats. Maybe that is why Republicans have more minority officeholders in statewide offices more female governors and more Hispanic U.S. senators than the Democrats. Tim Scott of South Carolina will be the only black in the Senate — appointed by Nikki Haley, one of two Republican governors of Indian descent.
I say get rid of that Voting Rights Act. It was necessary in the past but now just does damage. Until that is done, you will not be able to do away with serious gerymandering.
The people who are losing their patience with the Republicans on this matter are just stupid or ignorant of what I explained above. I can explain to the ignorant, but you can’t cure stupid. They will continue to vote Democratic.
Posted by: C&J at January 11, 2013 12:34 PMSD:
“What your party is doing is engineering safe districts for itself.”
As pointed out by Rhinehold, both parties do this. You are being disingenuous, or naive (which I doubt), to imply gerrymandering is a one party issue. That’s why my congressional representative (Cathy Castor) has a district that includes City of Tampa (Hillsbrough County), south St Petersburg (black and in Pinellas County), south Hillsborough County (Hispanic) and north Manatee County (black). I’d be all in favor of district-wide or County-wide congressional seats. If you think that is OK, I’ll let you sell the idea to the (Democratic party) minority voters first. Good luck.
Posted by: Mike in Tampa at January 11, 2013 12:50 PMA few years ago, this protest would have drawn tens of thousands, at least…
Nearly four years ago, on his second day in office, President Obama ordered the Guantanamo prison closed within one year. Today it remains open with 166 detainees, and human rights violations in the name of “global war” have become the “new normal”. In fact, 55 of these detainees have been officially cleared for transfer by the Obama administration. These detainees continue to wait for justice. As President Obama prepares to enter his second term in office, we prepare to unite on January 11, 2013 - the day the unlawful prison opened 11 years ago - to remind President Obama of his promise to shut down Guantanamo prison and uphold human rights. In Washington, D.C., we’re staging an unforgettable demonstration - 166 individuals clad in the orange jumpsuits will march from the Supreme Court to the White House. Other demonstrations marking this important date will take place all over the country.Posted by: Rhinehold at January 11, 2013 1:42 PM
Rhinhold
Another protest dog that didn’t bark is the shortage of flu vaccine. Recall the outcry back when Bush was in office.
Or Karina and Sandy.
Posted by: C&J at January 11, 2013 3:27 PMDespite the talking today, the U.S. and Afghanistan have already entered a broad agreement keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a decade past 2014. As recently as two months ago, one Marine General told Congress troops would certainly have to stay past 2014 to present a “clear and compelling narrative of commitment” in Afghanistan. It appears administration officials would like to keep 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan past 2014.
As we all knew would happen.
Interesting how the 10,000 number is precisely the same number that Obama wanted to keep in Iraq…
Posted by: Rhinehold at January 11, 2013 3:32 PMOf note, while the Afghan president discussed how he would have to sell the idea of immunity and U.S. presence in Afghanistan to the Afghan people, there was no mention of the American people’s, or even Congress’, say on the future role of the U.S. in Afghanistan.Posted by: Rhinehold at January 11, 2013 3:45 PM
Mr. Daugherty’s myopic political views can be easily explained. He suffers from selective telescopic cognizance. His reading and comprehension comes only from selective liberal/socialist democrat sources and he then focuses on current political problems with such narrow peripheral vision that the origin of such problems is obscured.
Mr. Daugherty has “one-layer” solutions that might look good on the surface but peel back the layer and one finds political rot and corruption.
Posted by: Royal Flush at January 11, 2013 4:12 PMSooooo Stephen, the Republicans are the only ones that ‘breakup’ districts. Ain’t that interesting. I seem to recall back in the 70s when the Democrats ran the show there was a district that started up in Cobb County and ran South down trough Douglas County west of Atlanta, about 1/4 mile wide to Clayton County. The reason for this was because the way that district was drawn before the Republicans had an advantage in the Atlanta area by one seat. By redrawing the district that way the Democrats were able to pick up 2 seats in the House while the Republicans retained the one seat it already had. If it was left the way it was they wouldn’t have got either seat.
I reckon y’all should thank the Democrats here for that though. That was the seat y’alls buddy Newt held.
Mr. Daugherty has “one-layer” solutions that might look good on the surface but peel back the layer and one finds political rot and corruption.
Those are the kind of solutions that have been coming from politicians for the last 200 years.
Posted by: Ron Brown at January 12, 2013 12:33 AMIt might do some of the moral policemen on this site some good to do a little research on my position.
I said, I don’t care for any gerrymandered districts.
Second, on Al Gore?
Why do you folks start out from these sort of social and ad hominem arguments? You offer doubts, but these are doubts raised about things scientists have been dealing with for some time now, and successfully at that.
Meanwhile, so many of the “sound science” people talk about things without any clear alternative theory, any clear body of alternative observations. It’s no good enough, but it works because way too many people are ignorant of the facts at hand. I’m not, so it really ticks me off to hear the next conservative spout off about Milankovic Cycles, or Solar radiation, as if nobody thought of these things.
Trust me, you’re not that clever. You did not think of something most scientists didn’t already think of.
I wish people would stop approaching many of these subjects from a “politics first” direction.
I’ve talked to C&J about this before, and he acts as if its all inevitable. Will it do any good to explain that much of the supposedly inevitable warming is modelled with our activity, our carbon emission in mind, and that it is quite possible if not guaranteed, that we can avoid much of the warming, if we don’t continue to load the atmosphere with so much carbon?
For me, you have to start from the real world, and real world expertise. Politics MUST be secondary, or else people’s imaginations runaway with themselves.
Anybody who thinks I have a one layer appreciation for these things has a one layer appreciation for me. One of my chief concerns is that we push for the innovation, push for the switch to renewable energy before we incur both the costs of global warming, and the costs of having to scrape the bottom of an ever more limited supply of fuel. I’ve been through enough energy booms and energy busts not to take good periods for granted. I understand the inconstancy of the fuel, and I don’t want our nation’s economic fortunes to be perpetually at its mercy.
I want us for once in our nation’s history to get ahead of a problem, rather than have to be kicked in the ass by it to get motivated to get something done about it. I want us to be driving fuel efficient cars NOW, so we don’t have to be ever more austere with our fuel later. I want us transitioning now, so we can do so while energy is still relatively cheap and clean.
I want us to stop this insane habit that we’ve developed in the last thirty years, of looking at the third base the greatest generation put us on, and thinking that we’ve got a permanent home run. I want us to return to a sense that success and prestige must be earned, and that profitability in a company is more than just about laying off workers until your stock price goes up.
I want this to become a nations whose belief in its superiority is based on fact, and not merely a faith in its own boast. I want this country to return to being a nation where substance, and the understanding of substance are what what rule the country, rather than a whole bunch of empty imagery and appeals.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 13, 2013 9:56 PMDoughboy writes; “I want us for once in our nation’s history to get ahead of a problem, rather than have to be kicked in the ass by it to get motivated to get something done about it.”
Ya…Sure you do. Why not apply your advise to our national debt if you really believe what you write?
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