Tag: Democrats

I’ll bet you any money that you didn’t see this on the TV news or in the traditional media. That’s because, unlike two years ago, these protests are Demograts.

Shouting “Stop Voting Against Jobs,” more than 500 Massachusetts residents converged outside of Senator Scott Brown’s $1,000-a-head fundraiser on the Boston waterfront August 10 — drowning out Brown’s speaking program. Join the fight at MASSIniting

While we were all engrossed in the fake deficit, raise the ceiling crisis, this is what was going on in hometowns of the tea party congress critters.

Dickenson, North Dakots

Berg meeting enflames tensions

FARGO – Divided economic philosophies enflamed a tense town hall meeting Thursday night with North Dakota Republican Rep. Rick Berg.

Some 200 area residents gathered to hear Berg answer for his political positions in Congress and to voice their own opinions on how to fix the nation’s fiscal situation.

Given the recent economic volatility, the federal government’s near-default and Congress’ subsequent debt package to avert it dominated much of the open-floor meeting.

Many residents disliked Berg’s support of the debt package because it failed to reduce long-term spending and to begin cutting the deficit.

Deer River, MI

Cravaack challenged on budget, economy in Deer River

Republican Rep. Chip) Cravaack said he wanted to bring down the tax rate to 25 percent for small businesses because higher taxes are passed on to consumers or result in layoffs.

Audience member Dave Garshelis of Cohasset said President George W. Bush tried that plan and it didn’t work.

“Is this an experiment or a concept or do you have information from somewhere that shows this works?” he asked. “I’m wondering when the jobs are going to happen.”

Cravaack said he wants reduced taxes with the addition of tax reform. He said jobs went to places like Mexico and China because of high taxes in the U.S.

Kevin Kooiker of Pequot Lakes wasn’t so sure of Cravaack’s answer and said the tax rate today is lower than it’s been in years. He said major corporations are known to be sitting on sizeable amounts of money instead of creating new jobs.

“People need to get more money in their pockets,” he said. “The stimulus bill was way too small.”

Tuscon, AZ

McCain deals with contentious crowd at Tucson town hall

TUCSON, AZ (KOLD) – Tuesday was a rough day for Sen. John McCain.

At a town hall meeting on the Northwest side the Arizona Republican took heat on just about everything, from the debt ceiling deal to the war in Afghanistan.

The venue was not large enough for all who wanted to attend and many were turned away. Those who made it inside expressed frustration with just about everything Congress is doing, or not doing.

There were people from across the political spectrum.

Before the town hall even started the senator laid out some ground rules to keep things civil, but had to keep reminding people what they were.

The town hall was contentious with audience members shouting at him and at each other and during one exchange, McCain was interrupted a few times.

Wilkes-Barre, PA

Small Group Protests ‘Lack of Jobs’ at Barletta Appearance

Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County– A group of protesters rallied outside a Chamber of Commerce breakfast attended by Congressman Lou Barletta in Wilkes-Barre Tuesday morning.

They say they were having a tough time getting Barletta to answer their questions directly– so they got creative.

The group of about 10 ralliers came armed with personal stories of their own hardships– and cardboard cutouts of the congressman.

They say the cut-outs haven’t provided any answers– in their opinion, just like the real lawmaker.

They chanted, “Lou…where are the jobs? Lou…where are the jobs?”

Silver City, NM

Pearce talk draws fire in Silver

SILVER CITY – A woman stormed out of Congressman Steve Pearce’s town hall meeting Tuesday night at the Silver City Senior Center, after calling Pearce a liar and saying “You’re just (BSing) everyone and we don’t buy it.”

“He got off on the wrong foot with me because he started to lie because he said the reason we got downgraded by S&P was because of our deficit,” said Anne Nitopi of Silver City. “That’s not the reason. Those very credit agencies approved junk bonds that turned out to not be worth the paper they were printed on, which created a financial collapse. The government’s inability to compromise is the reason they downgraded us. He took the debt ceiling debate and linked it to the debate about a budget and our deficit. They allowed the Tea Party extremists to threaten our country with default.”

Nothing happening here, move on this way

There are no more “normal” people in charge of government these days, nor are any of them reasonable:

Paul Krugman Not A normal Party:

But I’m unreliable and shrill, of course – you weren’t supposed to realize that the GOP had gone off the deep end that early in the game.

David Brooks: The Mother of All No-Brainers

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases.

A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.

The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

Richard Cohen: A grand old cult

Someone ought to study the Republican Party. I am not referring to yet another political scientist but to a mental health professional, preferably a specialist in the power of fixations, obsessions and the like. The GOP needs an intervention. It has become a cult.

To become a Republican, one has to take a pledge. It is not enough to support the party or mouth banalities about Ronald Reagan; one has to promise not to give the government another nickel. This is called the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” issued by Americans for Tax Reform, an organization headed by the chirpy Grover Norquist. He once labeled the argument that an estate tax would affect only the very rich “the morality of the Holocaust.” Anyone can see how singling out the filthy rich and the immensely powerful and asking them to ante up is pretty much the same as Auschwitz and that sort of thing.

snip

This intellectual rigidity has produced a GOP presidential field that’s a virtual political Jonestown. The Grand Old Party, so named when it really did evoke America, has so narrowed its base that it has become a political cult. It is a redoubt of certainty over reason and in itself significantly responsible for the government deficit that matters most: leadership. That we can’t borrow from China.

Time in House Could Be Short for Republican Newcomers

It is miles to go before the 2012 Congressional races begin in earnest, but already some of the 87 freshmen who helped the Republicans win back the House last year are bracing for a challenge from within the party. At least half a dozen potential primary challengers to freshmen are considering a run, and there is heated chatter about more.

In some ways, the freshmen are responsible for their own predicament. Many won their seats after successfully challenging establishment Republicans in primaries, proving that a combination of gumption and the right political climate could overcome the advantages of incumbency.

Now, to some of the impatient and ideological voters who sent them to Washington to change things, the new House members may be seen as the establishment, and they face the disconcerting prospect of immediately defending themselves in the political marketplace.

The White House and the Democratic leadership aren’t any better having dropped the ball and allowed a small “cult” of unreasonable people to dictate the game. Obama was suppose to be “the adult in the room” according to his fans. He could have easily had the upper hand in his first two years in office if he had listened to reason about the economy and put his “foot down” like an “adult”. There is little reason to think that the Democrats will listen to “normal” people now

George Carlin said it bluntly a few years ago, and it was dismissed as comedy by more than a few who saw that it wasn’t – who saw that he he was using the comedic stage as a platform to deliver a serious warning, to pass on the truth as he saw it clearly:

They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, they’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f*cked by a system that threw them overboard 30 f*ckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.

You know what they want? They want obedient workers – obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

And now they’re coming for your social security money.

They want your f*ckin’ retirement money. They want it back. So they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

Carlin was a unique talent – he had a stage presence that was fun to listen to and he had a way with phrasing and delivery that made the depressing message he had to pass on a little easier to swallow than dry facts would have.

But the dry and cold hard facts of the situation Carlin so eloquently described, unpleasant as they may be, are as much if not more important to know if anything is to be done, if the American people are ever to rise up, exert the power they have, and take back control of their country and their own destiny.

Big Tent Democrat commented earlier today at Talkleft in his post Policy And Politics: The Economy that:

Discussing E.J. Dionne’s column today, Booman makes some good points:

Considering that [the column] is supposed to be about [Dems] regaining the initiative, it’s pretty weak to lecture the White House about its tendency to defend itself and “the left” about never being satisfied. Those things aren’t going to change. We can be critical of that reality, but we ought not offer it up as something to fix so that we can get our mojo back.

In fact it is not something to fix. The White House should tout its accomplishments. They are in the politics business after all. And people dissatisfied with what the White House is doing should say so and work to make them do what they want. That’s how it works. But both Booman and Dionne miss the connection between the political problems Dems have and the economic policies of the Obama Administration.

[…]

And these failures explain almost all of the political trouble the Democrats are in. Booman writes:

There are two things that will help us get our mojo back: Speaker Boehner and Obama’s reelection campaign. That’s all we need. And improving economy would be nice, but realistically we are going to be fighting over who is to blame for high unemployment and who has a better plan to get something through Congress that will create jobs.

(Emphasis supplied.) If that is where the political battle is going to be fought, then the Dems’ political fortunes do not look bright.

“An improving economy would be nice but realistically we are going to be fighting over who is to blame for high unemployment”?

Booman of course and as usual has his finger on the pulse of reality, and like many strong Obama supporters knows deep in his heart that it’s far more important for them to “win” than it is to have the administration produce results, even if he has to lose to win.

So. the frayed ends finally rip and tear. It finally becomes clearer: most Democratic politicians aren’t interested in being courageous. They are, however, interested in cash, campaigns, and power. They love to wordsmith and dazzle progressives with fabulous politicSpeak: yes, they do. More and better words delivered by more, but not necessarily better, Democrats.

Perhaps it is just plain decency that Democrats lack… the decency to stop playing both sides of issues. The decency to stop exploiting Republicans. Yes. You heard me. The Democrats have been the minority, the majority, with and without a sitting president and STILL the fucking Republicans are road blocks? It’s always the Republicans’s fault? No matter how it is sliced and diced, the Dems are always having their hands tied by some outside force.  I’m not buying it.

cross posted at writing in the rAw and Daily Kos

As David Swanson noted on Wednesday:

You may have heard that our center-right nation got enthusiastic, formed a grassroots movement called a tea party, and overwhelmingly voted in a more rightwing party, sending hordes of nasty socialists packing as a result of their overly progressive performance, meaning gridlock between the righteous Congress and the infidel president for the next two years. There are some problems with this story, beginning with the fact that it’s completely false.

[snip]

As Karen Dolan blogged about immediately after Tuesday’s elections, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — over 80 members — lost only 3 seats. The Cut-Spending-Except-For-Killing Blue Dogs had 54 members and lost 26 of them, and those 26 were their true believers. Congress members, including one or two real progressives, didn’t lose by being progressive but by being Democrats. Alan Grayson was defeated by the largest investment of corporate money in any House race, but the obedient corporatist Democrat in the next district over lost too. And this was despite the Democratic Party funding and supporting the Blue Dogs, leaving the progressives to raise their own money.

Tea Party candidates, in contrast to progressives, did not have a successful day on Tuesday. Their nominees’ craziness cost the Republican Party control of the Senate. Yet the whole corporate-funded smoke-and-mirrors “movement” of the Tea Party pushed the Republican Party as a whole to the right, in a way that no well-funded institution has pushed the Democrats to the left or even tried to. And this is the key lesson: pushing the Democrats to the left would save them from themselves.

On Thursday Amy Goodman at Democracy Now spoke with CPC Co-Chair Raul Grijalva about the CPC not only holding it’s own with a loss of only 4 seats in the mid terms, but coming out of the elections holding the relative largest plurality of all groups in Congress.

The Democrats lost the majority in the US House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections, but what is the makeup of the new Democratic House caucus? The conservative Blue Dogs lost half their members, while the Progressive Caucus remains near eighty. We speak to its co-chair, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who appears to have retained his seat in a close election in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District. Over the past year, Grijalva has received numerous threats, including having a suspicious package covered in swastikas sent to his office and having a bullet shot through his district office in Yuma, Arizona.

Democracy Now – November 04, 2010

about 10 minutes

..transcript follows..

It now appears that in all likelihood republicans will win a congressional majority this coming Tuesday. Nate Silver’s projections of Friday October 29…

…found Republicans gaining an average of 53 seats, which would bring them to 232 total. Democrats are given a 16 percent chance of holding the House, down slightly from 17 percent on Wednesday.

Increasingly, there seems to be something of a consensus among various forecasting methods around a projected Republican figure somewhere in the 50-60 seat range.

Several of the expert forecasters that FiveThirtyEight’s model uses, like the Cook Political Report, the Rothenberg Political Report, and Larry Sabato, have stated that they expect the Republicans’ overall total to fall roughly in this range. A straw poll of political insiders for Hotline on Call found an average expectation of a 50-seat gain. And some political science models have been forecasting gains somewhere in this range for some time.

The forecast also seems consistent with the average of generic ballot polling. Our model projects that Republicans will win the average Congressional district by between 3 and 4 points.

The modeling also suggests that there is a 90% chance that after Tuesday Democrats will control at least 50 seats in the Senate, but that there is a 0% chance that Democrats will control at least 60 seats.

It’s not looking good by any stretch of the imagination.  

The truth is plain to see. It doesn’t happen quite so much here, but all across the blogosphere people sit in front of their computers all day and argue about which national political party is “better”. Which one is more likely to give the people what they want.

On the “left” blogs people talk about one party being tools of multinational corporations and the ultra rich, and say the other party is somehow “better” because it promises “hope” for the future somewhat in the same way religion promises salvation in some heaven, but only after death and only if you’ll “believe” (clap) hard enough, and don’t ask questions.

On the “right” blogs people talk about one party being tools of evil socialists and sex fiends and dopers who hate “freedom”, and say the other party is somehow “better” because it promises “freedom” someday in the future somewhat in the same way religion promises salvation in some heaven, but only after death and only if you’ll “believe” (clap) hard enough, don’t ask questions, and kill anyone who gets in your way.

The truth is plain to see. Big money did not take over any one party at all. Big money took over politics and the media so they could carry on happily while people unwittingly play their game by choosing between between coke or pepsi – and like a Vegas casino, the house always wins in the long run. Always.

There is no ‘reason’. This is not a ‘reasonable’ choice, and it is not ‘reasonable’ to get sucked into making it.

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)

they will have a trojan horse hard nosed ‘democratic’ president in the oval office who has let George Bush and Dick Cheney and most of the previous republican administration off the hook effectively pardoning them for torture and all their other war crimes, continued if not expanded the overseas occupations the republicans started, given tens of trillions of dollars to wall street and other republican corporate cronies like the health insurance industry while ensuring the Military Industrial Complex remains the most corrupt and profitable racket in the history of humanity [1], and then falls all over himself bending over backwards to give the republicans anything and everything else they demand and more while conning the democratic base into supporting an ‘incremental’ bipartisanship with batsh*t crazy republicans fantasy to coopt that base into supporting republican policies across the board while insulting that base [2] at every opportunity and generally just screwing the working classes every way possible, while sending out scare letters [3] to that democratic base demanding money and votes because republicans are scary.

Who I’m sure hopes to guarantee himself a lucrative post presidential career continuing this good work for his constituents.