Tag: ek Politics

Oh, and about your phoney baloney jobs assholes-

Democratic Job Prospects Dim on K Street

By Anna Palmer, Roll Call Staff

Sept. 14, 2010, 12 a.m.

Help wanted on K Street. (Democrats need not apply.)

That’s the not-so-subtle message many Democratic Hill staffers say they are getting about their employment prospects this fall.

…

Limited job prospects have left some Democratic staffers, particularly those working for vulnerable Members, doing everything they can to be ready to start their job search on Nov. 3. In addition to readying their résumés for potential lobbying gigs, staffers are meeting with former colleagues who have already made the jump downtown.

…

Democratic aides may take a cue from their Republican counterparts. It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans found themselves in a similar position. After Democrats won the House in 2006, the job market significantly tightened, and many former GOP staffers left the Beltway completely.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Fear Factor

Be afraid.  Be very, very afraid.

A line of argument we’re mostly used to hearing from Thugs, but being pushed hard by the Institutional "Fuck You Retards" Democrats in the run up to this election.  Even my activist brother somewhat bought the latest variation- that re-districting might be effected by the results in November.

Not so much it seems.

Debunking the Redistricting Myth

by Dylan Loewe- Speechwriter, Author of Permanently Blue

Via Huffington Post, Posted: September 13, 2010 08:00 AM

Many have suggested that if Republicans are able to retake the majority in Congress this fall, they’ll be able to maintain that majority over the long-term, largely as a result of a subsequent redistricting process they expect to control. Some have even argued that Republicans could gain the power to draw as many as 25 congressional districts in their favor.

…

(Only) 23 states … will be at the center of the redistricting battle.

…

Democrats will be in a better position during this redistricting in at least 8 states, and, depending on the outcome in November, could very well be in better shape in as many as 11 states. Republicans, on the other hand, will find themselves in an improved partisan environment in just 6 states.

…

The states where Republicans are expected to be better positioned (Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and South Carolina) are midsized states, with an average of only about 8 congressional districts each.

The states where Democrats are expected to improve, on the other hand, (Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Virginia, and Michigan) include a significant number of very large states, with an average of about 17 congressional districts.

…

Over the last ten years, 80 percent of the population growth in this country has come from minorities, overwhelmingly in metropolitan areas. When states like Texas are awarded new congressional districts (they are expected to get four this cycle), those districts will have to be drawn in the same metropolitan areas where such high minority population growth is occurring. Barack Obama won 80 percent of the minority vote. He won every major city in Texas except Fort Worth. This means that these new districts are going to be drawn in areas that are going to be highly populated with Democrats, ones that are almost certainly going to send Democrats to Congress. This, of course, will play out beyond Texas. In fact, of the 10 new districts expected to be allocated, there is reason to believe that at least 8 of them will end up in Democratic hands.

I don’t mean to understate the power of gerrymandering. But even gerrymandering can’t solve this problem for the Republican Party. In the middle of last decade, when Tom Delay and state Republican leaders redrew the Texas state map in a way that removed half a dozen Democratic seats, they didn’t touch the minority districts already in place. Why? Because they were concerned that doing so would invoke the Voting Rights Act and send the newly drawn map to the courts, where it would likely be redrawn by judges. (If that happened in 2011, Democrats could gain as many as 10 seats in Texas.) During the 2011 redistricting, it won’t just be the already existing minority districts that Republicans will have to avoid. It will be the new ones too. With the vast majority of the population growth coming from minorities, the vast majority of the new districts are likely to require minority representation. And for the first time since the Voting Rights Act was passed, the Attorney General in charge of overseeing the process will have been appointed by a Democratic president.

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(E)ven if taken to the extreme–even if Republicans are able to ensure, in each case, that a Democratic seat gets erased, that still won’t do as much for the Republican Party as they think. Such a district is likely to be erased in predominantly white, rural areas, where population has declined over the last decade. That means that the Democratic districts that will be erased are more likely to be moderate ones, the kinds that Blue Dogs represent.

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By the time redistricting is over, not only will Democrats have secured for themselves a far more favorable map, they will have also gone through a process that will unify their caucus, increasing the number of seats where progressives can win, in exchange for decreasing the number of seats where Blue Dogs can win.

Folks, the only thing they’re really afraid of is losing their phoney baloney jobs and getting second pick at the choice offices and parking spots on Capitol Hill.

But her sister Peggy is an Obamacan, in this case meaning a Republican who voted for Obama.

What Peggy says–

Peggy thinks the president has done fine managing W.’s messes in Iraq and Afghanistan. And she lights up at the mention of his vice president, Joe Biden. But she thinks Obama has to get “a backbone” if he wants to lure her back to the fold. “He promised us everything, saying he would turn the country around, and he did nothing the first year,” Peggy says. “He piddled around when he had 60 votes. He could have pushed through the health care bill but spent months haggling on it because he wanted to bring some Republicans on board. He was trying too hard to compromise when he didn’t need the Republicans and they were never going to like him. Any idiot could see that.

“He could have gotten it through while Teddy Kennedy was still alive – he owed the Kennedys something – and then the bill was watered down.

“He hasn’t saved the economy, and now he’s admitting he’s made very little progress. You can’t for four years blame the person who used to be president. Obama tries to compromise too much, and he doesn’t look like a strong leader. I don’t watch him anymore. I’m turned off by him. I think he’s an elitist. He went down to the gulf, telling everyone to take a vacation down there, and then he goes to Martha’s Vineyard. He does what he wants but then he tells us to do other things.

Emphasis mine.

So yesterday we saw in real time the panicky Institutional Democratic strategy of scaring the “professional” Left into Clapping Louder! LOUDER!!! unravel before our eyes.  Yet this lefty among others was oddly unmoved.  Why is that?

Perhaps it has something to do with an analysis like this-

Why Should I Care? Leaders Lack Good Reasons to Vote For Democrats – or Against Republicans

By: Jon Walker, Wednesday September 8, 2010 6:45 pm

For the past two years, Democrats have at every turn repeated the completely fictitious “you need 60 votes in the Senate” myth to duck accountability and justify their wasteful corporate giveaways. Even if the Democrats do manage to hold on to the House and Senate, they will have only tiny majorities in both. With only 53 Democratic senators, there is no hope that Democrats can pass anything substantial-things on which they have already failed to act -as long as they are committed to giving the Republican minority some sort of quasi-parliamentary veto power.

On the flip side, there is no way Republicans can win the House and a 60-seat majority in the Senate (let alone the 67-vote majorities they would need to override an Obama veto). I’ve been told for two years a mere 59 Democrats in the Senate are powerless due to the filibuster; by this same logic, we have nothing to fear from Republican gains because they will never be able to get anything through a Democratic filibuster, and even if they do, Obama can veto it.

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Given the Democrats’ Congressional paralysis of the last year, and Obama’s veto power, the fear mongering over sweeping Republican changes is baseless. I’ve heard only two legitimate policy cases for why a Democratic base would really not want Republicans to take the House this year. The first is that Obama is a secret conservative who will happily join a triumphant Speaker Boehner in passing the Republican platform. (Note: claiming your president is secretly excited to work against the party’s own platform is not a good way to increase base enthusiasm.) The second is that if Republicans control the House, Obama won’t be able to take a piss without Darrel Issa subpoenaing the urinal, making it impossible for Obama to get anything done. Sadly, this argument would resonate better if Obama had used his powers during some part of the current session to bypass Republican obstruction and advance progressive goals (like quickly putting Elizabeth Warren in charge of the CFPB, for instance).

Rahm’s golden parachute is insufficient.  We need heads on pikes and changes in policy.

It’s always nice to be validated, especially by an Author I respect as much as Glenn Greenwald–

(P)erhaps the most significant result of Simpson’s candor is that Obama loyalists and Beltway media voices are now forced to publicly defend Social Security cuts, because Simpson’s comments have prematurely dragged out into the open what has been an open secret in Washington but was supposed to be a secret plot for everyone else until the election was over.  The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait recently decreed, in response to the Simpson controversy, that “liberals should be open to Social Security cuts as part of a balanced package of deficit reduction.”  And in The Washington Post today, both the Editorial Page and Dana Milbank  defend Simpson and call for cuts in Social Security (Milbank even defends cuts in aid to wounded veterans).  That Social Security must be cut is not only a bipartisan consensus among the GOP and “centrist” Democratic wing, but at least as much, among the Beltway media establishment.

But it’s not just good policy, it’s also good politics.  You see, unlike the Obamabots and Institutional Democrats, I actually care about electoral victory–

I certainly have not seen eye-to-eye with Bob Shrum on political strategies over the years.  So when we’re both beating the same drum with the same urgency at the same time, it’s somewhat unusual.

But we both agree that President Obama and the Catfood Commission threaten the electoral chances of every Democrat running for office this November.

Shrum has a piece in The Week in which he echoes Ed Kilgore and others Democratic strategists in pointing out that the Democrats don’t have an issue to run on this November.  Like them, he says that saving Social Security could be the issue that saves their seats as well.

But Shrum is willing to utter the uncomfortable truth that Kilgore ignores:  it is deeply, deeply cynical and unconvincing for the Democrats to be out there castigating the GOP for wanting to do the very thing that the White House is privately telling journalists they themselves plan to do by way of the Catfood Commission after the election.

They are just sycophantic liars.

So another Oil Rig has exploded off the Louisiana coast.  According to the latest TV reports all 13 workers are safe, though at least one is injured.

What makes this funny in that sad ironic sense is that not only did Judge Martin Feldman, the severely conflicted by his Oil Industry investments guy who blocked the Obama Adminitration’s initial deepwater drilling moratorium, just blocked the second one; but only yesterday Mariner Energy, the company running the rig, and its parent company Apache, which is purchasing BP’s Gulf assets to help BP meet its liability for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, staged a protest in Houston over the moratorium.

Good thing we have all those oil eating bacteria.  I’m sure 75% of it will be gone in no time.

Unfortunately, as dday observes-

With the White House’s commission on oil spills wavering in the direction of lifting the moratorium, and the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy hinting at the same thing, and now this tangle in the courts, I don’t think you’re going to see much more of a fight.

part 1

Background

GOP Tea Party Takes 10-Point Lead in Generic Poll

Taylor Marsh, 30 August 2010 6:00 pm

The Point

Obama just doesn’t get it

Unemployment is a catastrophe, the recovery is stalling, but the president says his priority is “debt and deficits”

by Joan Walsh, Salon

Monday, Aug 30, 2010 14:50 ET

It’s been written before: The Obama team seems to think 2012 will take care of itself, as long as they burnish that shining Obama "brand," which requires reaching out to Republicans and independents and ignoring the pesky left, with its old culture-war grudges and its subversive demand for greater economic fairness. I’ve heard some smart folks speculate that the White House may even welcome a Republican takeover, the better to “let Obama be Obama,” and continue to play out his fantasy of being a Democratic Ronald Reagan, creating a generation of what he used to call “Obamacans” and realigning politics for his lifetime.

If anyone in the White House still believes that, they are delusional. If Republicans win back the House, they will tie up the president in subpoenas and bogus investigations faster than you can say Darrell Issa. The president hasn’t created “Obamacans”; instead he’s created a phenomenon best described as “Obamacan’t.” And still he cozies up to Republicans like Alan Simpson, who’s determined to slash Social Security and its “310,000,000 tits” (in how many ways was Simpson’s statement wrong? Probably close to 310 million). And the problem with Obama’s milquetoast approach to the economy isn’t just political: If Republicans get to reverse or obstruct the Democrats’ inadequate but promising steps forward on healthcare and financial reform, while slashing government spending and extending the disastrous Bush tax cuts, we may yet see an economic collapse to rival the Great Depression — the one that an earlier generation of brave and visionary Democrats vowed would never happen again.

It is too late for anything Obama says or does to materially improve the economy, or ease economic suffering, in time for November. In an e-mail today to Politico, Time’s Mark Halperin laid out the list of Democratic problems that he says could lead to the party losing up to 60 seats in the House (that’s still unlikely): “the enthusiasm gap, the state of the economy, the failure to materialize of a lot of what Democrats were counting on (health care law getting more popular, and ‘recovery summer’ taking hold).” The only thing on Halperin’s list Obama and the Democrats have any real control over now is that so-called enthusiasm gap, the fact that Democrats are much less excited about the November election than Republicans are. Trust me, watching the president continue to mouth Republican platitudes about “debts and deficits” and a recovery built on “private investment” is only going to increase that gap, not narrow it.

Great job.  You have my policy prescription.

(h/t Corrente)

Well it seems that someone has stuck their size 15s in it again for the second time in a week.

Apparently Veterans are now “lesser people” sucking at the public tit.

I’m certainly not the first blogger to notice this story (though I did cover it yesterday- #20), there’s digby and Teddy Partridge and Oliver Willis for example.

My take is a little different.  I’m not in favor of his firing or resignation.  His honest exposure of the endless greed of our ruling class, that they would STEAL the benefits of the troops they so hypocritically and incessantly praise as well as food out of the mouths of babies and the elderly so that the richest one tenth of one percent can get richer by looting our public treasury, says everything you need to know about the morality and values of our “professional political class”.

If I believed in Hell I’d hope you’d rot in it for eternity you heartless, soulless bastards.

It will be interesting to see how Obama, who just last night wasted 18 minutes I’ll never get back, and his mouthpiece Bobby Gibbs handle this.

Apparently I’m not the only one.

Beck Blasts Obama’s ‘Perversion Of The Gospel,’ While Evangelicals Blast Beck’s ‘False Gospel’

“Jesus Christ’s Church has universally rejected Mormonism’s Anti-Trinitarian theology and its claim that mortals may become God,” David Shedlock, an evangelical blogger, wrote on a FreedomWorks forum earlier this month. “Beck asks Christian leaders to ‘put differences aside,’ but Beck himself daily peppers his broadcasts with Mormon distinctives because he cannot keep his beliefs to himself.”

Report: Warnings about e-mails went unheeded in Bush White House

By Ed O’Keefe, Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, August 29, 2010; 8:06 PM

Top aides to President George W. Bush  seemed unconcerned amid multiple warnings as early as 2002 that the White House risked losing millions of e-mails that federal law required them to preserve, according to an extensive review of records set for release Monday.

The review, conducted by the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, follows a settlement reached last December between President Obama’s administration, CREW and the National Security Archive, a George Washington University research institute. The groups sued the Bush White House in 2007, alleging it violated federal law by not preserving millions of e-mails sent between 2003 and 2005.

The settlement resulted in the restoration of 94 days worth of e-mail and the release of documents detailing when the Bush White House learned of the missing e-mails and how it responded. The restored e-mails are part of the National Archives and Records Administration’s historic record of the Bush administration, but presidential historians and others seeking information in the coming decades about the major decisions of Bush’s presidency likely will be starved of key details, including messages sent between White House officials and drafts of final policy decisions, according to CREW.

(h/t Corrente)