Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Republicans Page 2 of 3

Cowardly Republicans attack woman

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On October 25, 2010

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One guy headstomps her while another one holds her down.  Wanna-be stormtroopers without the guts to take on someone who can fight back.  Find out their names, and publish them, so that they can be held up as the gutless wonders they are.

Update: The curb stomping coward turns out to be Tim Profitt who appears to be Rand Paul’s Burbon Country coordinator.  Charges have been laid, and an arrest warrant issued.  The guy who held her down while she was head stomped appears to have been Mike Pezzano. As far as I am aware he has not been charged with battery yet.

How the Next 4 Years Will Play out

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On October 24, 2010

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2010 – Republicans take control of the House.  The Senate remains in Democratic hands, but the margin is reduced.

2011 – Bush’s tax cuts are extended.  Social Security is slashed.  This is done at Obama’s behest, so that Dems get blamed for it.

2012 – The Republicans take the Senate (this is virtually guaranteed, 2012’s geography is awful for Dems). They retain the House.  They probably take the Presidency.

2013 – in charge of the judiciary, Congress and the Presidency, and with hard right crazies as a substantial caucus, the Republicans finally repeal the new deal.  SS is turned into privatized accounts (older folks will keep most of what they have), Medicare is slashed going forward, regulatory agencies like the EPA are cut to the bone, education is turned over to the private sector as the Feds withdraw virtually all support for public schools and move to a voucher system. A new bubble (the last one) is inflated at all costs by Bernanke.  Massive slashing of the federal civil service occurs, programs which are not slashed are transferred down to the States, where corruption is easier.

2014 – President Teabag starts a war somewhere to keep pump up the military Keynesianism.  Said war is used as an excuse to even further curtail civil liberties.

If the Republicans don’t win the presidency in 2012, no big deal, they’ll still control Congress and the Supremes, and they’ll get him in in 2016.  Obama will do much of what they want anyway, and get the blame.)

Liberals aren’t real people—or crazy

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On August 29, 2010

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As Bill Scher points out, Beck’s rally was pathetic:

Glenn Beck: 87,000,  Louis Farrakhan 837,000 ’03 anti-war protests 1,000,000

But the media chooses to massively highlight Beck’s pathetic numbers.  Why is that?

The two answers I see are as follows.  The media has a right wing bias and Beck’s followers include a number of crazies, his movement has the implicit cloud of violence hanging over it, and it’s smart to pay attention to idiot ideologues with guns.

How’s that Mid Term Looking ?

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On July 4, 2010

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Some fairly depressing news for Dems (via Digby):

Hart and McInturff then looked at the change among the most-interested voters from the same survey in 2008. Although 2010 is a “down-shifting” election, from a high-turnout presidential year to a lower-turnout midterm year, one group was more interested in November than it was in 2008: those who had voted for Republican John McCain for president. And the groups that showed the largest decline in interest? Those who voted for Barack Obama — liberals, African-Americans, self-described Democrats, moderates, those living in either the Northeast or West, and younger voters 18 to 34 years of age. These are the “Holy Mackerel” numbers…

And yes, I fucking told everyone so. (Notice that that post was left to die, because back then serious people knew that the Republicans were dead for a generation so it wasn’t worthy of front page space.)

Why are people so stupid?

During a base election year the smart thing to do is to demotivate the base.  Really. Honest.

Assuming, of course, your main goal is to restore the rich’s wealth, push corporate profits to record highs and to continue war as usual.  And you really don’t care that much what happens in elections, because you personally will be taken care of by the wealthy whose interests you served.

So maybe it’s not Obama and Dems who are stupid.

Another Progressive pundit clueless on the effect of unemployment on elections

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On May 11, 2010

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Um, dude, no, Boehner is right, and you’re wrong, when it comes to the real world (h/t Cujo)

That was odd, wasn’t it? The disconnect makes it seem as if GOP talking points are lacking in flexibility, unable to adapt to changing circumstances. When the economy was losing jobs every month, Boehner would say, “Where are the jobs?” Now that the economy has added more than 200,000 jobs in two consecutive months for the first time in four years, Boehner is still saying, “Where are the jobs?” It suggests the would-be Speaker isn’t paying attention to current events very well.

When The Economy Interferes With An Election Strategy

Ok, depending on how you count it, the economy needs to add about 140K to 150K jobs JUST to keep up with increases in the population.  About 8.4 million jobs were lost in the last recession.  At a rate of, say 250,000 jobs/month, it will take 7 years to both put everyone back to work, and to sop up population increases.

For people in the ordinary economy “where are the jobs?” is a perfectly valid question, and it is a perfectly valid election strategy, because even if the economy starts regularly producing jobs at over 300,000, when November rolls around, the vast majority of people who need a job, still won’t have one.

Here’s my prediction: as a percentage of population, employment will not recover before the next recession.  80%+ of all productivity increases will go to corporate profits, and wages will stagnate.

Boehner is right to ask “where are the jobs?”  Both as a matter of fact, because there aren’t enough jobs, and as a matter of electoral strategy.

An optimist and a damned fool are the same thing

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On January 20, 2010

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Back in April I noted that the fools (and yes, they were fools) who kept mocking the right for being dead, and believing their own propaganda, were full of it.

Enjoy mocking Republicans all you want, but in your cold hard calculating heart, take them very very seriously.

Of course, Huffington Post didn’t promote that piece, because back then those of us throwing the cold water of realism on the fevered delusions of Obamadom were out of favor.

So how’d that work out for the reality denying triumphalists?  Hmmm?

Mind you, Obama and the Democratic leadership screwed things up even faster than I, whom most people consider a pessimist, expected.  Leading me to conclude that the rule of Bush is now the rule of Obama.

“Obama is more incompetent than you think he is, even if you take this rule into account.”

Also, optimists and damn fools are the same thing, at least when it comes to analysis.  It may be good for your health to be unrealistic about the future, but it makes you bloody lousy at predicting the future.  Thinking back to major analytical mistakes I’ve made in the last 5 years, only two of them were due to negative expectations, and one of those was actually optimism in pessimism drag: I thought the Fed would not be so foolish as to keep the housing and financial bubbles going for as long as they did.

My grandmother told me that an optimist and a damn fool were the same thing when I was 5, and so far nobody has ever shown me otherwise.  Lord knows, Obama isn’t going to, and neither are any of his Obots.

Pessimism is usually, actually, realism.  Because most people have an optimistic bias.  Their optimism feeds them the delusions they need to get through their lives.

With Friends Like Democratic Congresspeople

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On December 24, 2009

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Well, well, well.  It turns out that Acorn broke no laws.  None.  In the last five years.

But the Democratic Congress still threw them under the bus, with an illegal bill of attainder, banning them from receiving any government money.  Very similar to how they censured MoveOn for daring to challenge Petraeus.

Can you imagine the Republicans doing the same?  When the Swift Boat Vets lied repeatedly about John Kerry, did the Republicans vote to censure them?

And for that matter, did Dems try and censure the Swift Boat Vets?

Democrats constantly throw their own supporters to the wolves.  It’s one of the reasons there is little real loyalty on the left.  On the right, someone may occasionally have to take a bullet for the team, but afterwards they’re well taken care of and even rehabilitated if possible.  And major conservative organizations aren’t repudiated, nor do Republican leaders generally speak of “conservatives” with the sort of contempt that Democratic leaders reserve for liberals and progressives.

Democratic Congresspeople, as a group are weak people without strategic sense or the ability to bargain.  The exceptions, the strong ones, are unfortunately mostly conservadems – Republicans in drag like Ben Nelson.

If 40% of Dems are thinking of not voting in 2010 it’s exactly because Democrats won’t stand up for their own base.  For their own people and what those people believe in and need.  They only stand up for Pharma, banks, insurance companies and other entrenched powers.

Loyalty.  It’s a two way street.  And neither the White House, nor Congress, have shown any.

Parliamentary Politics in a non Parliamentary System

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On December 12, 2009

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Yglesias begins to get it:

We’re suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure. It’s insane, and it needs to be changed.

I’ve been explaining this for going on five years.  The first time I tried to explain parliamentary politics to Americans was after the 2004 election (sadly, gone with BOP’s archives).  The most recent was in July, where I pointed out that without the possibility of snap elections, the US form is particularly virulent:

Now in parliamentary systems a majority government just does what it likes, and the opposition reflexively opposes but can’t stop anything.  In a minority government, the opposition can’t just stop everything because if it defeats the government on the wrong vote it’ll cause an election and you don’t want one of those till you’re sure you’ll win and the governing party won’t get a majority.  So the government can still get through a fair bit of its agenda, even if it doesn’t have a parliamentary majority.

In the US there’s no threat of a snap election, and the opposition can often hold up significant legislation, especially in a case like the current one where the governing party has unreliable members (something that’s very rare in most parliamentary systems).

So the Republicans have taken parliamentary opposition one step further.  Instead of just opposing everything but letting it pass, then running against it, they figure why not oppose everything in the hopes of weakening policy to the point where it doesn’t work?  The stimulus bill was compromised to the point where it didn’t do the necessary job.  The global warming bill likewise, and the health care bill appears headed for the same fate.

Lousy policy leads to lousy outcomes. Lousy outcomes make the population unhappy, and less likely to vote the incumbents back in.

What the Republicans are doing makes perfect sense from an electoral point of view.  Voters are not going to primarily blame Republicans for Democrats failing to govern effectively.

This is something that many Democrats, especially older ones who came from a more genteel era, or those who some sort of strange genetic disposition to compromise (Obama) don’t seem to get.  But Republicans get it in their limbic system.

Learn it.  Live it.

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