Tag: politics

The Republican Iago strikes

The elders of the GOP show their de Gaullesque gratitude for the Tea Party putting them back in the driver’s seat:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is maneuvering behind the scenes to defeat a conservative plan aimed at restricting earmarks, setting up a high-stakes showdown that pits the GOP leader and his “Old Bull” allies against Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and a new breed of conservative senators…. By keeping a low profile so far, McConnell is seeking to avoid an all-out public battle among his GOP colleagues over earmarks before the new Congress starts. He also wants to avoid alienating the tea party movement and conservative activists who helped win six Senate seats for Republicans on Election Day, victories that dramatically strengthened McConnell’s hand as he plans to battle the White House over repealing health care reform, retaining Bush-era tax cuts and reining in federal spending.

Right, that’s why Americans turned against Obama and the Democrats. It wasn’t due to all the excessive taxing, borrowing, and spending, but because they wanted Republicans to do the excessive taxing, borrowing, and spending. I can’t say it’s unexpected, but it is impressively shameless.

Welcome to Washington, Tea Partiers. How do you like the feel of that dagger in your back? Kind of stings, doesn’t it.

Palin vs Bernanke

Now this is unexpected: the Wall Street Journal praises Sarah Palin’s economic acumen:

It would be hard to find two more unlikely intellectual comrades than Robert Zoellick, the World Bank technocrat, and Sarah Palin, the populist conservative politician. But in separate interventions yesterday, the pair roiled the global monetary debate in complementary and timely fashion.

The former Alaskan Governor showed sound political and economic instincts by inveighing forcefully against the Federal Reserve’s latest round of quantitative easing. According to the prepared text of remarks that she released to National Review online, Mrs. Palin also exhibited a more sophisticated knowledge of monetary policy than any major Republican this side of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan.

Stressing the risks of Fed “pump priming,” Mrs. Palin zeroed in on the connection between a “weak dollar—a direct result of the Fed’s decision to dump more dollars onto the market”—and rising oil and food prices. She also noted the rising world alarm about the Fed’s actions, which by now includes blunt comments by Germany, Brazil, China and most of Asia, among many others.

“We don’t want temporary, artificial economic growth brought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings,” the former GOP Vice Presidential nominee said. “We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It’s the only way we can get our economy back on the right track.”

Of course, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t consider Ron Paul a “major Republican”, but he’s the only national politician in either party, with the possible exception of his son, who fully groks what is at stake here. Still, it’s interesting to see that Palin clearly has some reasonably astute advisors on her staff. And it is downright astonishing to see a major player in global banking come right out and endorse “the barbarous relic”.

Bernanke must be sweating bullets these days. What people tend to forget to take into account when they imagine there are no limits to quantatitive easing is that in order for the Federal Reserve to monetize the debt, the Treasury has to issue it. So, it increasingly looks as if there may be an epic clash between the Fed and the Republican House majority in the works and it’s a little surprising to see Sarah Palin stake out a position against the bank.

Yeah, that’s convincing

It will take a lot more than suspending Keith Olbermann to convince anyone with more than one-quarter of a brain that MSNBC is an impartial media observer:

MSNBC TV host Keith Olbermann was suspended indefinitely on Friday for making campaign donations to three Democratic congressional candidates, apparently in violation of NBC News ethics policy. The announcement came in a one-sentence statement from msnbc TV President Phil Griffin: “I became aware of Keith’s political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay.”

So, Olbermann’s evening contributions in kind to the Democratic Party worth millions of dollars are fine, but contributing a few actual dollars to a few Congressional candidates are not. Olbermann is an ass, and a much less intelligent ass than he thinks he is, but this attempt by MSNBC to pretend it is anything but a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party isn’t likely to fool anyone.

Verse of the Day

“As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor. The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left. Even as fools walk along the road, they lack sense and show everyone how stupid they are.”
– Ecclesiastes 10:1-3

Keep that in mind the next time you speak with one of your Christian friends who inclines to the left. And it is, of course, intriguing that the Bible should not only correctly anticipate post-18th century political ideologies, but correctly identify the sort of individual who belongs to them as well….

In which the loss is regretted

Gail Collins makes the post-election case for Christine O’Donnell:

There were awful speeches from all sides on Tuesday night, but I liked Christine O’Donnell’s adieu. (“We’ve got a lot of food. We’ve got the room all night. So God bless you. So let’s party!”) That girl is so on her way back to cable TV.

You certainly have to admire Miss O’Donnell’s epicurean attitude towards defeat, if nothing else. On the other hand, some Kossacks are angry and bitter, counting down the days until America becomes a brown, third world country freed from the shackles of a constitution written by dead white sexist slave-owning men.

“We just have to be patient.

And wait for your hearts to stop beating.

And stop they will.

And for some of you, real damned soon, truth be told.

Do you hear it?

The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?

Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.”

It is interesting how many Americans, particularly white Americans, absolutely refuse to understand that immigrants do not want America to remain America. Mexican immigrants want America to be an improved version of Mexico. Turkish immigrants want it to be an improved version of Turkey. Even the descendants of involuntary immigrants want America to become an improved version of an imaginary Africa. None of them will get exactly what they want, of course, but the significant fact is that they will transform it by the mere fact of their presence and so whatever it eventually becomes, it will not be what it was before. It will not be America or even recognizably American. And it must be recognized that the end of America is not only something that the likes of the Kossack quoted are anticipating, but something they believe is directly connected to the objectives of Obama and the former Congressional majority.

Meanwhile, the NYT is spinning like a thirty-something married woman’s rationalization hamster after being unexpectedly hit on by Brad Pitt/Justin Bieber/the Twilight guy:

“Tuesday’s election was indeed a “shellacking” for the Democrats, as President Obama admitted after a long night of bad news. It was hardly an order from the American people to discard the progress of the last two years and start over again. Mr. Obama was on target when he said voters howled in frustration at the slow pace of economic recovery and job creation. To borrow his running automotive metaphor, voters threw the keys at Republicans and told them to drive for a while, but gave almost no indication of what direction to drive in.

Right, the people voted for Republicans because they so enjoyed “the progress of the last two years”. This isn’t news or analysis, this is a feeble attempt at revising history as it’s being written.

Hardly

Carrie Lukas thinks the election results prove that women don’t favor security over freedom:

Women voters have also defied traditional stereotypes about skewing liberal. While it will take some time to get complete exit poll data, polls taken shortly before the election suggest a major shift in women’s voting habits. Early reports suggest women split nearly evenly in this election. As Mary Kate Cary reported in U.S. News, a recent New York Times poll showed undecided women breaking heavily for the GOP. In fact, women went from favoring Democrats by 7 points last month to giving the GOP the edge by 4 points in the New York Times’ latest polls. In other words, the famed gender gap — which somehow always refers to women’s tendency to vote disproportionately for Democrats rather than men’s tendency to vote Republican, has vanished.

Pundits will spend the next two years debating the meaning of the 2010 Election. But a few things are clear. The conventional wisdom that women all prefer government-provided safety over freedom has been put to rest, and female political leaders do not come in one mold. There are strong, unabashedly conservative women throughout the country who are prepared to fight for limited government and greater freedom. And they can win.

This is amusing. Remember, the “limited government” for which these supposedly freedom-loving women are fighting is one that is all of 2.8% smaller. They cling to their entitlements and “national security” spending as firmly as Linus clings to his blanket. And perhaps more to the point, it is possible that it is finally beginning to penetrate through many women’s skulls that there is no reliable security in the government spending money it doesn’t have in the first place.

Either way, I tend to see this as less reflective of a positive evolution towards liberty in women’s political consciousness and more reflective of the larger societal trend towards matriarchy and grass huts. Insty notes in response that the Tea Party is majority female, which is one reason I believe it has been so easily coopted by the Republican establishment.

Don’t get me wrong. I would very much like to believe that for the first time in human history, women have genuinely begun to value freedom over security. I just don’t believe this is credible interpretation of the recent electoral events. (HT Dr. Helen.)

Adios California

Not to belittle the historic electoral landslide, which despite the Republican inability to regain the Senate was an even bigger political event than 1994, I suspect the most significant result of last night’s election occurred in California. It wasn’t the failure of Proposition 19, which would have decriminalized marijuana and marked the first roll-back of the thirty-year Drug War, but rather the passage of Proposition 25 by a ten-point margin.

Why was this significant? Because California’s Republican legislators can no longer prevent their Democratic counterparts from raising taxes and increasing spending now that the number of votes required to pass the state budget and spending bills related to the budget has been reduced from two-thirds to a simple majority. As Kevin Williamson noted on NRO: “This election means two things for California: 1. It is now more likely to end up needing a federal bailout, and 2. It is less likely to find Congress receptive to that idea.”

California is already more or less insolvent, it’s just shuffling its debts around to delay the inevitable. But the relaxed budgetary controls as a result of the change to the state constitution almost surely guarantee that the legislature’s attempts to respond to the problem will be counterproductive and make what is already a disastrous situation even worse. It is remotely possible that the second re-election of Governor Moonbeam could somewhat meliorate this structural change, as despite being a Democrat he had a better record for fiscal conservatism than either Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger. But since the veto is much less reliable than simple math, I wouldn’t count on it.

I would not be surprised if the eventual bankruptcies of California and Illinois become one of the more important issues of the 2012 election. If the bipartisan Republican-led bank bailouts were enough to inspire the Tea Party, who can imagine what effect a bipartisan, Democrat-led state bailout will have on the electorate? Rick Santelli asked us if we wanted to pay for our neighbor’s mortgages, but most Americans would much rather do that than pay for California’s teachers unions, prison guards, and imported Mexicans.

Election 2010

This is an open post. Please feel free to comment with any breaking news about the various exit polls and election calls. I’m going to stay up for part of it, but not the entirety, so someone else will have to fill in with the color commentary. But if nothing else, it will be amusing to see a bigger mid-term bomb than the 1994 one.

On the record

For future reference, the final generic ballot polls from the major polling operations:

For his final pre-election prediction, Nate Silver projects it as follows as of November 1st:

Hse: Rep 233 Dem 202
Sen: Rep 48 Dem 52
Gov: Rep 30 Dem 19 Ind 1

I do not pretend to be an expert on this subject, nor do I pay sufficient attention to it to even know who is running for what office in the various states in most cases.  But based on the macro socionomic trends, I think Gallup and Rasmussen will prove to be the more reliable polls and Republicans will win 51+ Senate seats tonight.  We’ll find out soon enough.

Now go out there and vote for libertarians who have no hope of winning because every vote matters and this is the mostest importantest election ever!  Unless you’re in Delaware, Kentucky, or Nevada, of course, in which case you absolutely must vote for Christine O’Donnell, Rand Paul, or Sharon Angle just to upset the mainstream media poohbahs.

Mailvox: the voice of optimism

RC contends that the Tea Party is here to stay:

You are reading this the situation incorrectly.

The TEA Party will (in 2 more years) oust more elected officials (even TEA Partiers) who have not supported the core conservative principles! We are in it for the long run. If you believe true TEA Partiers will be co-opted once in power, you are wrong. They know they will get the boot!

Good governance will not occur in one election cycle. It will take 3 cycles to fully purge the deadwood.

As you can see, powerful, lifetime politicians are struggling as never before to retain their seats. Do you REALLY believe they want that battle very often? No way! Do you REALLY believe the GOP believes it is in a position superior to the TEA Party? No way. No Money! Partiers give direct to candidates–no longer only RNC. Sure, they raise money. But, we can raise more. Say our numbers grow to a mere 40 million (from the about 20 million today). If each contributes $100 for targeted campaign contributions, that gives $4 billion to support 1/2 the Congress and the presidential race. Works out to about $15 million per candidate (if averaged). If more is needed, we kick in an extra $100.

My guess is that the GOP is happy that the TEA Party came along. Also, they realize that the Partiers are not stupid. There are TEA Party strategy sessions all the time. Even though from ground up, we all want the same core principles defended. Woe be to those that stray! Voting nationwide with our checkbooks or credit cards (and in massive numbers) is nothing to sneeze at.

Also, look at the increase in numbers of precinct delegates, poll watchers, candidates, etc. Training sessions, bill reviews, rallies, marches, e-mails, phone calls, etc.
Cannot agree with you. The synergy is great. We will prevail in restoring the republic.

Our greatest advantage? Passion for what is right. We have it.

It sounds good. It’s not impossible. But it is nevertheless highly improbable. I don’t hear any powerful Republicans showing much concern of the Tea Party turning on them, and more to the point, I see a lot of signs that the Tea Party has already been co-opted. When establishment Republicans are talking about gradual change and bipartisan consolidation while neocons like Sarah Palin and Dana Loesch are hailed as Tea Party “leaders”, it doesn’t take a genius to see that what has happened time and time again to rebellious conservative grass roots organizations is already happening to the Tea Party.

That being said, there is one X factor that could lead to the Tea Party growing up to become a viable third party and that is the next wave of the depression now taking shape. Historically, American parties have formed around the issue of the banks; the Democratic party was originally the anti-banking party of Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan while the Whigs and Republicans were pro-bank. But both modern parties have been wholly owned by the banking interests since Democrat Woodrow Wilson and a Democratic Congress pushed through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. (The Ilk will note the counterpush at work.)

So, there is a clear political vaccuum which the Tea Party could profitably fill. And indeed, it was the reaction to the bank bailouts that originally inspired the first Tea Party reactions although that has rapidly been transformed into an incoherent, anti-spending-except-for-the greater-part-of-the-spending movement. If, and only if, the Tea Party gravitates towards a genuine anti-banking, anti-immigration, anti-Republican party and forces the two factions of the ruling party to merge de jure as well as de facto, it can reasonably hope to succeed and effect change. But as yet, I see few, if any, signs of that.