Tag: politics

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.

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.

In which it is proved by the Republican House Majority Leader-to-be, Rep. John Boehner:

Why You Should Vote For Republicans

Americans are speaking out and demanding a new way forward in Washington. Republicans have listened and outlined a new governing agenda in the form of a Pledge to America focused on creating jobs, cutting spending and changing the way Washington does business.

A smaller government

At the core of the Pledge is an idea Washington just hasn’t tried before — that the path to recovery lies in making government smaller instead of making it bigger. To jump-start job creation, the economic uncertainty gripping small businesses has to be eliminated, and the spending binge in Washington has to be stopped.

The Pledge puts forth a clear plan to end the current uncertainty, starting with stopping all looming tax hikes so that small businesses can get back to creating jobs. This is followed by a blueprint for fiscal sanity that begins with cutting spending to pre-“stimulus,” pre-bailout levels, a move that will save taxpayers $100 billion in the first year alone.

Very well. Smaller government sounds good. Saving $100 billion in the first year alone sounds like a lot. Now, what was the federal budget in 2010? According to “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise” which is the Orwellian title for The United States Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 2010, the 2010 budget is $3.552 trillion. And according to the most recent estimate in July, the deficit alone is going to be $1.47 trillion instead of the $1.171 trillion originally forecast.

So, Republicans are going to cut 2.8% of the federal budget, or if you prefer, 6.8% of the federal budget deficit. In other words, if the nation were a car speeding towards a canyon at 70 miles per hour, the Republicans master plan for saving the passengers would be to slow the car down to 65.2 MPH! And let’s see if what Boehner’s plans are for addressing the four pressing issues I mentioned in today’s column:

1) The economy. He mentioned it. But repealing “the job-killing health care law and” replacing “it with common-sense reforms focused on lowering costs and protecting American jobs” is isn’t even going to begin solving the debt-deflation problem of $52 trillion in public and private debt.

2) The massive mortgage fraud. Nothing. I suspect the Republicans will come out on the side of the banks and sacrifice the rule of law for nothing. But who knows? Boehner didn’t mention it.

3) Immigration. Nothing, although there is just a hint of anti-Ricardian rhetoric detectable in the phrase “protecting American jobs”. Again, Republicans are more likely to be part of the problem than the solution here; Ronald Reagan was signed Ted Kennedy’s 1986 law.

4) The endless wars. Nothing. And they’re for it.

In conclusion, I see no reason not to vote Republican if it amuses you. They’re certainly not going to make things any worse than the Obama-Reid-Pelosi Democrats. So vote how thou wilt, because it will make no substantive difference in the material outcome of the nation’s fate.

It looks like the little mommmyblogger media whore got what she always wanted – TV!

Providing analysis and historical context will be ABC News contributors George Will, Cokie Roberts, Donna Brazile and Matthew Dowd. They will be joined by Ron Brownstein, Editorial Director for the National Journal Group and conservative commentator Dana Loesch.

Good for her, if that’s what she wants. But no wonder conservatives are so hapless. Look at their “opinion leaders”. I’d almost be tempted to watch, just to see the expression on George Will’s face when the mommyblogger makes one of her nonsensical attempts at a point.

That’s what Nate Silver says about the odds for Senate on October 29th. I suggested it would go Republican back on July 14th. Regardless, we’ll see what happens soon enough.

Senate: Republican chances of taking over the Senate are up a tick to 11 percent Saturday from 10 percent Friday.

Needless to say, with regards to the most important issues facing the nation, it doesn’t matter which of the ruling party’s two factions holds the legislative branch. Republicans are even more loyal to the banks than the bought-and-paid-for Democrats thanks to their ideological confusion of corporatism for capitalism. But speaking of my far-fetched predictions, here’s another very interesting poll.

“Half of Democrats Think Obama Should Face Primary. An AP-Knowledge Networks poll finds that 47% of Democrats think Presidential Obama should be challenged for the 2012 Democratic presidential nomination”

There is the evidence. It also proves MPAI, needless to say, as 92% of Republicans believe Congress or Obama are to blame for the current economic slump, (wait, aren’t we in a recovery?), and only around six percent understand that the bankers are to blame. The worst thing is that about 50% of them genuinely think Obama is to blame, when there is no possible way he can be held responsible for it. While he has most definitely exacerbated the situation by his Hooverian response to it, the die was not only cast, but the results were known before he even took office! We already know that the Republican elite has zero desire to force the banks to take responsibility for their criminal and economically destructive actions; this poll indicates that there will be very little grass roots pressure on them to do what they don’t want to do because the voter anger has been successfully redirected to date.

Remarkably, the Democrats are somewhat better in assigning the blame where it belongs. Nearly 25 percent of them hold the bankers responsible, although they clearly don’t recognize that their hero Obama is completely owned by Goldman Sachs. (When the guy is appointing ex-Goldmanites to administration positions outside the Treasury, you know it’s completely out of control.) And at least Bush was in office when the meltdown began, although if he can be blamed for pushing TARP, he can’t reasonably be blamed for the Fed keeping interest rates low and blowing multiple financial bubbles.

Anyhow, it is quite clear that the electoral devastation about to be wreaked upon Democrats by Republicans (which, you may recall, I was one of the first to predict), is not going to have a salutary effect upon the situation because the Republican Party and the greater part of the Tea Party insist on believing that the perpetrators of the primary causal factor were among the victims. They will surely dig in a different part of the hole than did the Democrats, but we can be confident that they will continue making it deeper. The battle between Republicans and Democrats is an internecine battle between the Keynesians known as Neo-Keynesians and the Keynesians known as Monetarists. Both sides subscribe to a false economic theory and both are beholden to the banks, and as both the names and the polls indicate, the Republicans are more strongly beholden to them than are the Democrats.

This means that Obama and the new Republican majorities, (or if I am only half-correct, House majority) will be eager to announce bipartisan cooperation in finding a means of saddling the taxpayer with TARP II, in which the cost of the fraudulent mortgage-backed security put-backs is shifted from the banks that committed the fraud to the taxpayer while their myriad of proven crimes are swept under the carpet. And the passage of that heroic, bipartisan, and much-publicized “reform” will mark the effective end of the Tea Party, even if its zombie corpse remains an animated political identity for decades to come.

It is ALWAYS wise to doubt any assertion made by a progressive, no matter how credentialed:

Jonah Goldberg quotes Robert Reich: “Bill Clinton never mentioned the words `health care reform’ after the 1994 midterms.” Reich’s claim is false — wildly false. A check of the database at the American Presidency Project shows that President Clinton used the phrase on 116 occasions after the midterm.

What’s remarkable is how being shown to be factually incorrect seldom slows them down in the least.