What motivates Republicans? Winning. That’s all they care about. They play to win.
You can never turn your back on them.
The 2012 election may have illustrated where their high water mark is. They may never be able to capture the popular vote again in their lifetime. But they managed to gerrymander the House so it makes little difference anyway.
And why do they want to win soooooo badly? Why does anyone want to win? It’s power and control. When you win, no one can make you pay taxes. That’s the gist of it. It doesn’t really matter what happens to the rest of the country and all of the pitiful sob stories of downtrodden workers and students indentured for the rest of their lives. They don’t need to care about that as long as they got what they spent all that money to achieve and that is control. Control over their lives, completely unfettered from the responsibilities towards others. That is worth a small fortune.
So, the NYTimes seems a little baffled as to why the Democrats waited so long before explicitly spelling out what the sequester was going to mean to state and local governments. The NYTimes is surprised that the Democrats underestimated and misunderstood the Republicans- again:
The White House released warningsfor every state on Sunday in the hope that angry voters would besiege Republican lawmakers like Mr. McConnell and the House speaker, John Boehner, to stop the $85 billion in cuts, known as a sequester. President Obama wants to replace the sequester with a mix of tax increases on the rich and less damaging spending reductions. Republicans say they won’t consider any proposal that isn’t all cuts, so the sequester is all but certain to begin this week.
The White House strategy on the sequester was built around a familiar miscalculation about Republicans. It assumed that, in the end, they would be reasonable and negotiate a realistic alternative to indiscriminate cuts. Because the reductions hurt defense programs long held sacrosanct by Republicans, the White House thought it had leverage that would reduce the damage to the domestic programs favored by Democrats.
It turns out, though, that the defense hawks in the party are outnumbered. More Republicans seem to care about reducing spending at all costs, and the prospect of damaging vital government programs does not seem to bother them. “Fiscal questions trump defense in a way they never would have after 9/11,” Representative Tom Cole, a Republican of Oklahoma, told The Times. “But the war in Iraq is over. Troops are coming home from Afghanistan, and we want to secure the cuts.”
[…]
The White House should have released these kinds of details months ago, when there was more time to make a strong case to the public against these cuts. Instead, administration officials failed to discuss the consequences, fearing political blame while confidently predicting the Republicans would cave. The result of that miscalculation — and of the Republican disdain for the health of the economy and those who depend on government services — will become clearer in just a few days.
Ok, hold the phone for a sec. Isn’t it the mainstream press that is always encouraging, cajoling, mocking, screaming, insisting that the Democrats “compromise” in some mysterious “bipartisan” fashion with the Republicans?? Why is the NYTimes surprised that the Republicans insist on nothing but cuts? Why is that a shock at all to the paper of record? Hasn’t it been reading its own news? This is what Republicans do.
Republicans have made no secret about the fact that they want to cut their way out of any kind of shackles to the rest of the country. It’s been staring us in the face for decades now.
So, now they are going to force the president to cut. Duh.
And he’s going to do it. Because he’s not as smart as all the 25 year old male Democratic activist assholes thought he was. Oh, sure, he’s academic smart, sort of, but he’s not politically smart. He’s no Bill Clinton.
Oh, THAT’S right. We’re not supposed to like politically gifted people. I mean, why would we need a politician as president? That’s so 20th century.
And sure the public is going to get all mad and stuff at the cuts. But they’re not going to get mad at Republicans. Noooo, they’re going to get mad at Democrats. They’re going to get mad because there’s a Democratic president in the White House and the Senate is controlled by Democrats. The Republicans only own the House. Even the dullest Joey Bagodonuts out there can freaking count.
But Republicans are going to step it up even more. Yeah, they’re not stupid. They’re going to let go of their resistance to marriage equality. Of course they are. That’s a no-brainer. Sure their base is foaming at the mouth, offensively homophobic. But their base is dying. They only used their base so they could engineer as much power as they could in the form of the gerrymander. They don’t need them now.
How does that make you feel, you so-called Christians? How does it make you feel that you’ve compromised every Christian virtue and become the intolerant, vicious, judgmental, mean spirited, ugly people that the Republicans goaded you to become only to be discarded when the Republicans realized that you were a drag on them?
And now that they’ve embraced marriage equality for gay couples, that’s just going to highlight the problems that the Democrats have with women. And they DO have a problem. It’s massive. Why do you think Hillary Clinton is still popular in spite of all efforts by the party (and it’s her own party that’s doing it) to crush her? It’s because women are desperate for some kind of rational human being with ovaries to stand up for them. So, we can confidently predict that the next candidate for the Democrats is going to be female. But unless she’s Hillary, who already resisted the siren song of the financier class only to be publicly humiliated by them in 2008, the female Democratic candidate is going to be compromised by them. We’ll probably end up with some Kathleen Sebellius type who will continue to act like the presidency is some student council position where the status quo prevails and rocking the boat is not allowed.
I don’t even want to think about what is going to happen next year when the ACA kicks in and a whole new class of people are pissed off about what a mess healthcare reform is without cost controls. Not only that but I believe the the McKinsey report about employers using it as an excuse to lay people off. In fact, just signing the law was an excuse to lay people off far enough in advance so that there will be no obvious correlation when workers are hired back as contractors responsible for their own damn healthcare. It’s a corporate shareholder’s wet dream to go “weightless”. How conveeeeenient that it all happens during an election year and Fox News is not dead yet.
This is what you get when you put a bunch of 25 year old male activists in charge of the party and have them enthralled to the Machiavellian power brokers and Republican carpetbagging financier donors of that party. You get a president who doesn’t have a clue about how to play even one dimensional chess against the Republicans during the worst economic crisis in 80 years.
Thanks for nothing, guys.
Filed under: General | Tagged: ACA, budget cuts, Democrats, gay equality, Obama, Republicans, Sequester, state funding, winning, Women's Rights |
The Confluence 
Some of the Republicans may be a little brain challenged. We are told repeatedly that what House Republicans fear most of all is a challenge from the Tea Party in a primary. The fact is that in 2012, three Republican members were defeated by a Tea Party challenger in a primary while 16 lost in the general election. Redistricting played a big role in two of those three losses.
This was no fluke. In 2010 one Republican House member was defeated in a primary and in 2008 the number was three.
A mainstream/LBJ style comeback would in fact target Republicans with specific cuts that hurt them. That would be agricultural subsidies, subsidies to oil companies, and defense spending.
I spent some time looking at “defense” spending from 1940 to the present. The results are , frankly, weird. During WW II, defense spending soared from $6 billion in 1941 to $89 billion in 1945. It promptly came down again to $9 billion and peaked during the Korean war at IIRC $53 billion. During the Vietnam War it soared again to the same $89 billion. It was only under Jimmy Carter (after high inflation) that defense topped the WW II level in absolute dollars, soaring to $133 billion. Reagan ran it up in a low inflation era to over $300 billion and it stayed at that level or less until W and Obama took it to the current $700 billion.
What this says is that it has been far easier to raise defense spending than to cut it. Reagan, W, and Obama have done most of the damage inside of less than 20 years during a 70 plus year span. The presence or absence of a foe has little to do with defense spending.
We are currently on a program to slowly replace all 11 carriers in our force over the next 40 years despite the fact that no one else has more than two and none of them are as advanced as ours (just completed in 2005). The new carriers cost twice as much and handle fewer planes. Military contractors will suffer the most from the sequester as pay for the troops is immune. Good. You may remember the snipes about airforce carriers in the Presidential debates.
Nearly all the top congressional districts for agricultural subsidies are held by Republicans. California, which I though was the top ag state ranked tenth in subsidies; Texas was first. In 2004, California produced twice as much in crop value as Texas.
The voters are in fact pretty stupid if they blame Democrats and not House republicans for this mess. Target the hurricane districts heavily and peel away Republican votes in the House . Make then represent their districts and not the Koch brothers.
Target the do-nothing Republican Congress and challenge them to fix specific problems. They won’t. You win. By my count 37 Republicans won election to the House in 2012 with less than 55% of the vote. Four come from NY and one from Jersey. Two are from Florida. The rest are additional targets. Some may be dumber than a red brick and won’t act until voted out (or not). Many others will jump like a match has been lit by their heels.
If I can figure this stuff out easily than the “geniuses” in Obama land ought to have figured it out years ago. The Blue Dogs are np longer an issue (just 15 of them) so the excuses just keep dropping. Just do it.
How many people do you know are employed by the defense industry? I don’t know any.My brother in the Army doesn’t count because he won’t be affected.
How many people do you know are employed by school districts and other state and local governments?
More people than you think.
AND I know people who make their livings off of research grant money. {{Yo!}}
So, you know, it’s going to be bad, no matter how you slice it.
Yeah, I don’t think the public will make the connection to the Republicans, at least not right away and not with the present crew of Democrats providing them with cover.
Two. A cousin is a purchasing agent for the Department of Defense. Her father spent a career working as an aircraft mechanic at McGuire Air Force Base in south Jersey. The other is a logistics manager for the DoD in Germany who used to work as a civilian for Kittatiny Arsenal (also in Jersey).
I know several people who used to work as accountants for Grumman (now part of Northrup Grumman). I also know someone who worked with the Navy in Charleston, SC. He now works for the Department of State.
Going a generation back, I had aunts and an uncle who worked on military projects with the old Western Electric in the 1950’s through the 1970s and a cousin who worked in the 1960s, 70s and maybe the early 80s on defense projects.
However, for the most part you are right. I strongly favor lowering the defense spending back to the Clinton and Bush I levels of $250 to $300 billion per year and spending the money for work here in the US on the many things that need being done.
Paul Kennedy’s book, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” made a strong case that excessive military spending was the cause of collapse. In some cases, particularly Spain, that was combined with inadequate taxation. “The Royal Fifth” assessed on the loot of the conquistadors was not enough to pay for the costs of their empire. A Royal third or maybe a Royal Quarter would have been more than adequate.
I work DoD projects as a contract worker.
FYI, the USA does very little industrial R&D and the military does the lion’s share. Like that flat screen, thank DoD. IC Chips, LEDs, weather satellites…it takes hours to go through the list.
For me work is sporadic, long hours, tight schedules and in some pretty crappy buildings. Last year I worked in a place where fiberglass fibers were in the air and we had to wear masks if the wind outside was up…but one of the few places you won’t be outsourced for Chinese/Indian labor and they pay to prevailing wage.
As i said unless you have been in the biz you are clueless to the benefits of DoD spending. The money “saved” from DoD/NASA/NOAH/DoT cut will go to further tax deduction for the wealthiest Americans…play the cut government game and you do the Republicans work for them.
Democrats, not just Obama fans, always manage to look a gift horse in the mouth. Instead of pounding Republicans as UNPATRIOTIC, which is both true AND is perfect wedge issue to the Republican base…and has the advantage of preserving good paying jobs which helps the economy and weakens the Republican grip on the south…what do Dems do and say? Exactly what Repus counted on them to do.
Modify DoD spending into dual use technologies, then draw down* during good times.
*understanding that cuts will fall first on projects in Democratic states/districts and projects that have [duel use]/[long term R&D].
President Obama engineered the sequester together with his Republican allies to begin with. His goal was to use fear of sequester to extort cuts to Social Security and Medicare. What the President and his noise machine are agitating “the public” to demand now is to “fix” the sequester by cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Social Security and Medicare are what little old age survival I may have. I will live with the pain to State of Michigan government and reserach (which helps fund the academic hospital where I work) and the other good things in order to dealy (in hopes of prevent) Obama and the Catfood Democrats from working with the Republicans to cut my future Social Security and Medicare under cover of pretending to “solve the sequester”. Better sequester now than catfood later.
Which is the choice which Obama and the Catfood Democrats quite cynically and deliberately engineered on purpose.
Sorry for the typos. Microsoft is again blocking the screen so I can’t see what I type.
“Better sequester now than catfood later.”
Amen to that.
By all means feel free to take it and spread it around. I hereby “copyleft” the phrase “Better sequester now than catfood later”. Come one, come all. Anyone who likes it, take it and use it.
I’m very happy that the sequestration will very likely go into effect. It’s about time that the Democratic voters understood how inept The One is. The sequestration was the result of Obama playing “three dimensional chess with the GOP” and Obama got checkmated. I can’t be unhappy about that. Besides, the Pentagon needs to cut its budget.
The inept part of Obama is his inability to stand up to Republicans. Period
The sequester is/was/will always be the stupidest damn thing the powers that be ever devised. I think it’s time you got your head out of the ground and realized just how destructive the deficit obsession has been to the economy, DM.
There are always going to be people we know who don’t deserve free stuff. They come in both poor and rich varieties. The rich are not special people and just because they can commandeer the airwaves to yammer away on all the sacrifices the rest of us must make, that doesn’t make them a.) right or b.) virtuous at the expense of everyone else. You can live quite comfortably on a few million bucks. You do not have the right to confiscate every penny you see simply because the government refuses to protect an average american’s right to not be viciously exploited.
Or do you not agree with the Freedom from Exploitatoon idea, DM? Because that’s ultimately what we are talking about. Right now, we are being viciously exploited and the rich call it a debt crisis.
It’s wrong.
Obama’s problem is he’s stupid enough to get roped into sequesters because he and his advisors think this is a big fucking game. But that doesn’t mean the republicans should win anything because they are ruthless and cruel people.
Now, decide, DM. Which side will you stand with? The out of control wealthy and their republican lackeys who seem to hate America if we ask them to stop being assholes and start being responsible, or with your fellow Americans who deserve better than either party has been treating them lately.
This is not a game of tit for tat, to see how much we can injure the president. He’s doing a great job all by himself. This is about which side you are on. And if you are still playing revenge against Obama and the DNC by egging Republicans on, then you are on the side of evil.
There, I said it and I MEAN it. You are on the side of evil if you let Republicans get away with evil just because you can’t stand the corporate shmoozibg lightbringer.
This is your moment to choose. It’s us or those selfish, exploitative, cruel, heartless Republicans.
RD, I seem to recall that on the eve of the first debt ceiling “crisis” in 2011, Hulaballoo closed its comment section for the day, as did The Confluence. I’ve always been puzzled as to just what the reasoning was behind that decision, perhaps you could shed a little light on the matter?
We have never closed all comments on this site. Comments do close automatically after some number of days after the posting date.
Katiebird is correct. We do not close our comments manually. They close automatically after a coup,e of days regardless of the topic. I think I might have posted comment less posts twice but the topic was related to a death or something. It’s so rare that I can’t remember when it happened last.
There’s no way we would close it over the debt ceiling. However, we reserve the right to moderate comments to make sure that the site isn’t taken over by trolls.
Riverdaughter
Obama isn’t stupid. He is evil. He is not the problem (except for those of us who may have been trickerated by him since 2008). To the interlocking criminal enterprises who own/run this country, he is the solution. The Final Solution. The grinning, baritone-voiced shine-on artist who is enabling on their behalf the end of America as we know it. And that wrecking ball is coming straight at us fast! Helter-Skelter!
If Obama and his Catfood Democrats can be destroyed and purged out of the DParty, that may disinfect and liberate the purged-out and decontaminated DParty enough to where it can attack and beat down the deficit obsession overall. It the DParty can’t or won’t reject its recent obsession with deficit, then we will have to leave the DParty and hunt around for other parties or movements against the whole Reagan Revolution legacy.
But in the immediate now, we really have to try protecting our old-age survival Medicare and Social Security against Obama’s sinister plotting to use his sequester to extort cuts or destruction to our SS/MCaire. That is what I am focuing on for the immediate now. because the SS/MCare which the Catfood Obamacrats take away from us is the SS/MCare which we will never get back ever again.
Like others here, I’m still not convinced B0 is clueless or checkmated. He never seems to stop maneuvering to create crises whose only solution is — aw shucks what a shame — catfood for poor folks. The money involved gets diverted to Wall St which, in a completely unrelated move, puts him in the multibillionaire class once he’s done doing time as their frontman.
The only thing stopping him seems to be loony Republicans who are too gonzo to recognize the best deal Wall St. is going to get. Maybe that’s because the crazies are the only people left in Congress who aren’t in thrall to Big Money. The irony of it all.
Wouldn’t the ultimate irony be if the Tea Party becomes the sincere and genuine defender of Social Security against Catfood Democrat aggression?
“Keep the Government out of my Social Security!”
” fiscal cliff ” awhile back, now the buzz word is ” sequester” …next month there will be another the sky is falling buzz word.
I guess this is off topic…but I ran into an interesting article on
World Socialist Web Site… called
The intellectually bankrupt defenders of
Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty
http://tinyurl.com/bgccw35
We are often at a loss to explain the difference between a liberal and a progressive…okay, a big diff is progressives groove to violence. It seems ” Lincoln” , which I thought was great, is soooo boring to this crowd . But ” Django Unchained” , oh yeah baby , more blood please you know I like that
They don’t have to hold their nose to vote for a drone traget picker in chief…they are fine with that. I keep waiting for Progressives to mount peace protests…oops, my bad
I saw Django Unchained and loved it. Yep, it was bloody but if you can’t look past the blood to the story underneath then you’re an idiot. Christoph Waltz is one of the best actors on screen today.
I haven’t seen Lincoln yet but I’m sure it’s every bit as good as people say it is.
Once again, there is an unnecessary polarization. You can potentially enjoy more than one movie for different reasons.
BTW, no desire to see Zero Dark Thirty. I love Katherine Bigelow but the subject doesn’t interest me in the least. Not even a teensy.
If you find violence repugnant, you’re an idiot?
NOT one of your better days, RD. 🙄
As for me, I haven’t gone to a theater to see a movie in over 20 years. Hollyweird isn’t giving me any reason to spend my hard-earned and scant money.
There are a lot of pieces of great literature that are very violent. The odyssey-violent. The illiad- very violent. Tale of two cities- come on, the Terror?? Extremely violent. Let’s not forget Clockwork Orange which came with its own violent vocabulary.
Django unchained has some very violent moments. However, that being said, the bad guys get what’s coming to them. It’s divine retribution for the most part and the parts that are not are portrayed in a way to elicit the most revulsion from the audience. I’ve seen more senseless violence in STARZ Sparticus.
Tarantino uses violence and satire to achieve a sense of catharsis and a sort of setting the world right again. By the end of the movie, you have a pretty good understanding of what the bad guys did to merit their fate and the good guys triumph. That’s a moral message that is missed when the whole movie is written off as gratuitous violence. Yes, I think you’d have to be an idiot to go to django unchained and miss the point because you are clutching your hanky and smelling salts over the violence.
To each his or her own. I think I’d have to be an idiot to waste any of my money on the sordid offerings of Hollyweird. 😛
Especially now that my job has been outsourced into part-time pay levels, and I have joined the precariat, I would be a complete idiot to waste any money on the degenerate filth of Hollyweird.
I don’t think I’ve made myself clear.
If you went to see Django Unchained during a matinee and failed to see the moral of the story because of the violence, then you are not a very bright person. Stop listening to a bunch of whiny church lady progressives who get all in a tizzy over violence. There are times when violence is gratuitous and times when it is part of a plot device. Some people can’t tell the difference.
Do yourself a favor and get a subscription to Amazon Prime for $79 a year. That way, you can watch movies and TV shows for relatively little cost. I cut the cord a year ago and haven’t regretted it.
No.
I’m not saying 50 shades of grey Django Unchained is a bad movie. I’m sure it’s an excellent romp of blood and gore. But perhaps it’s not a role model for problem solving …in this case, slavery
No one should expect the progressives to march for peace…. ever….and people should stop expecting them to give a damn about drones.
To tell a liberal from a progressive: progressives are
more than fine with violence. They like it…( visited upon other people of course.)
Katherine Bigelow made her movie to make cheering for a torturer cool and the movie was made by a woman so the Left will be fine with that.
Much like a black guy was put in the White House in order to destory social safety net so Left will do nothing as he and Repugs do so…but powers that be didn’t need to worry… Progressives are fine with it all
Like I said, zero dark thirty is not an interesting movie to me. I don’t want to get used to torture.
Django unchained makes a very good point about slavery and violence is used to both illustrate the horrors of slavery as well as exact justice.
I would dismiss the progressive opinion on django and just go see the movie. You will be glad you did.
One thing that is becoming more obvious with time is that U.S> politics at present seems designed to avoid making choices. Instead of choosing to spend more at minimal borrowing rates or a flat out austerity program we waffle through with a mix that cuts everything just a little. The military chose to replace all sorts of weapons over a 30 to 50 year time frame with extremely low production and very high unit costs. Nobody gets cut off that way from the Pentagon funding.
Of course the osprey helicopter was specifically designed to prevent the problems associated with Jimmy Carter’s failed Iran rescue attempt. More than thirty years later we are early in the production cycle. We intend to replace all our nuclear carriers with new ones over 50 years
Agriculture and oil subsidies continue as the old policies play out at vastly higher costs some 60 to 80 years after first designed.
Thirty years after Ronald Reagan tried the mix of higher spending, particularly for the military and lower taxes, particularly for the wealthy and corporations, the same failed outline keeps getting offered.
Nobody thinks or at least acts outside the box because the players that count are all beholden to the box makers (something that the Supreme Court seems bound and determined to enforce). Yes, money is free speech but actual speech is not except in a free speech zone. Double or triple “duh”, RD.
We could use a man like Lincoln or FDR and not like Herbert Hoover, Grover Cleveland, George W. Bush. John Boehner, Barack Obama, or the Koch Brothers and Scalia and Thomas and Roberts.
So there. I guess that second cup of coffee fired me up.
… and radar let to the development of the micro-wave oven. Meanwhile back in the 1970’s in the aftermath of the Viet-nam war defense contractors told the public they would transition into manufacturing consumer goods. Only trouble was they couldn’t compete because they came from a business model of government bailout when R&D backfired into a POS product. I know I was there.
You don’t hear too mush about defense contractor cost overruns or corruption because one of the biggest offenders bought their own TV network. It’s no coincidence that the bogtrotters that work(ed) there did their best to torpedo the candidacies of three Democrats that might have made a difference.
It’s time for some sanity, so we either cut back on military spending or rename it the Department of Unlimited Aggression.
Could you give me your source for this line:
“Meanwhile back in the 1970′s in the aftermath of the Viet-nam war defense contractors told the public they would transition into manufacturing consumer goods.”
I don’t remember anybody saying this.
As a counterpoint, In the 1970’s we cut back on readiness, not R&D. Can you say B-1 F-15, F-16, F-18 V-22 M-1 et al.— all are 1970’s programs. However, many civilian programs were cut because liberals supported cutting programs…Nixon, Ford & Carter supported cuts. Southern/Western Democrats saw these job programs as essential to their states well being…Northern Democrats adopted your stance. Reagan played to this…and the FDR years came to a close. You ask for cuts, you’ll get them.
The reason new technologies are more readily adapted by foreign firms is because of their respective governments support of their market entry [Mercantilism has always worked…the USA used to be masters of it, that’s how we got to the top of the heap]. The USA now relies on Wall Street to fund technology development. Wall Street tries to maximize short term profit…a very bad fit for R&D. Just as an FYI, Japanese auto maker tried and failed on 2 occasions to enter the US market with government support, the third time worked. Samsung sought and got heavy support from both the South Korean AND US Governments in the late 70’s and 80’s in order to compete in electronics with Japans government supported industries. I go on to China, but it’s hopeless, liberals have swallowed Milton Friedman’s propaganda triumph…”Freedom to Lose”, were Americans were told to lay down their mercantilism and the rest of the world would follow. Too funny…really, I love to see Liberals apply that “game theory” at a gun fight.
As long as “liberals” ignore the nuts and bolts of industrial policy, the decline of the working class [or do you say 90% and below] will continue unabated.
For what it’s worth. Our government seems to have a bottomless wallet for defense contractors and other industries that grease the palms of the legislators involved but little for anybody else.
In the aftermath of WWII much of Europe and Asia looked like the content in bottom of a used Shake & Bake bag, their governments and the U S helped industry get back on its feed with massive amounts of aid. Something the American industrial complex didn’t need because it was flush with money from war contracts and then supplying need goods abroad. How those profits were used is the problem, most of it went to line the pockets of Wall Street and very little of it went back into maintaining and upgrading production machinery. Europe and Asia put the money to work.
The Japanese cleaned Detroit’s clock not because they were subsidized but because they brought a better quality product to market. The Big Three were still in the mindset that they were the only show in town and could foist their junk on the rest of the world. I have a 1964 Plymouth Sport Fury sitting in my garage, next to it is a 1998 Plymouth Neon, both cars represent opposite ends of the cost spectrum. Care to guess which one has better fit and finish?
Bottom line, government aid to 1950’s and 1960’s American business wouldn’t have made any difference due to the culture of greed.
“and other industries that grease the palms of the legislators involved but little for anybody else.”
Like Intel, AMD and all the other start up chip makers? What nonsense, those guys didn’t start lobbying until the 90’s a full 30 years after their creation.
Thanks for pointing out that war causes trauma, I suppose, you think to tar me with that brush and win your argument for tossing people out work by blaming me for disasters that preceded my puberty…thanks for sharing that senselessness…isn’t KOS the place for that type of argument?
I am well aware of US policy mistakes, our military was not the cause of them, war-loving draft dodgers, corporate press and idiotic politicians were. Both Obama & Bush share identical policy positions, on economics, trade & war. Putting slobs out of work and causing the US to go back into what amounts to a depression is not going to solve the war problem, quite the opposite, History is chocked full of examples where lack of opportunity leads to fascist governments.
So have you spent five minutes to find a source for?
“Meanwhile back in the 1970′s in the aftermath of the Viet-nam war defense contractors told the public they would transition into manufacturing consumer goods.”
but the subject doesn’t interest me in the least. Not even a teensy
That’s exactly how I feel about Django Unchanged—and, ZDT, too.
Essentially, the country is run by a cartel of private business interests. The establishment of the ACA is a case in point in how it plays out. The only reason health care was on the agenda is because a block of elite business interests no longer wanted to pay for employee health care; it has become too expensive, so they wanted to off-load the responsibility on to government. This put the politicians in direct confrontation with the Health Care Complex, which, of course, refused to accept expansion of Medicare as an option. So we got a private sector-based model with a mixture of subsidies and regulations whwiwithout truly addressing the cost control problem,
No one in DC represents the public. If we had a healthy democracy, health care reform would have looked very different from the present iteration.
Nothing will change until the population is sufficiently aroused and organized. It helps to have some courageous pols, but the system has a way of weeding them out and/or marginalizing them.
Well, thank goodness, “liberals” can agree with right wing nut jobs that cutting the federal budget with unemployment at near historic highs is a good thing…sure we argue about who of the low end government workers to lay-off in favor further tax cuts for the wealthiest…but at least we can agree that further cuts are needed to promote a higher wealth disparity.
Thanks to Republicans, I hate people I perceive to be liberals. – a “Republican lackey”
Thanks to Democrats, I hate people I perceive to be conservative. – a “Democratic lackey”
Thanks to Republican & Democrat Kabuki Theater, I get to thieve freely so long as tip my Democrat/Republican servant decently. – a “Wall street thief”
I half-heard on the news this mid-day before going to work that some of the House Republicans were rumoring trying to start on legislating a concept whereby Obama would be handed discretion to make the sequester’s-worth of cuts in places of his choosing, targetting, and discretion. Obama pre-rejected the whole idea out of hand.
Thereby giving his game away to anyone who is paying parsingly-close attention. The sole and only purpose of Obama’s sequester is to inflict so much pain on so many middle-to-lower class beneficiaries of tax-funded government programs and services that we will a all surrender and accept Obama’s GGrand Bargain Catfood Cuts. But if we know that is Obama’s game, will it make us ready to accept more pain in the medium term while working to obstruct the BS Obama Catfood Plan from ever passing? And if we can get that plan truly killed, can we then move to serious social class revenge against the Obama Class of people who seek the Catfood Cuts?
And will it unite the targets of today’s sequester with the targets of tomorrow’s Catfood Cuts in a shared hatred for Obama and his Catfood Democrats who conspire with the Republicans to pit us two groups of targetted demographics against eachother?
Here is a Naked Capitalism guest post about who the Catfood Democrats are and what they stand for.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/02/the-democratic-turncoats-behind-the-fix-the-debt-attack-on-medicare-social-security.html
LOL, RD. I enjoy reading your rants, even when your fury turns against me.
I’m not turning against you. I’m asking you to pick a side. Just because you despise Obama, and who doesn’t at this point, doesn’t mean you can’t be on the good side.
The Republicans are no good. I don’t know what the Democrats are right now but I guarantee you that the Republicans are a thuggish mob masquerading as a party.
Deep down inside, you know this or you wouldn’t keep coming back here. So, do you feel uncomfortable enough with the Republicans (you should) to do the right thing and go back to New Deal principles?
That’s all I’m saying. You don’t have to like Obama. I certainly don’t.
If you’ve lost David Atkins, who’s left? And where were his powers of observation 6 years —- 6 months —- ago??
His powers of observation were just as good when Digby brought him onto the blog as they are now. He knew every bit as much then as what he knows now. So what has led him to talk differently now?
My totally uninformed purely cynical spite-based supposition is that he suspects he will not get the big payoff or at least payout which he led himself to believe he was promised for supporting Obama when that support made a functional combat tide-of-battle difference. Now that he is no longer needed by ObamaCo Central, he suspects he will be cast aside like the worn out old shoe he always was.
Sucks to be you, eh Atkins? Ahhhh ha ha ha . . .
And I don’t think that Digby and her little dog Atkins will ever restore comments at their blog, either.
I doubt it too.
I had a weird dream a couple of weeks ago though that there was a back door to comments and people were actually posting them there.
Several weeks ago on this blog a commenter offered a link to a totally different looking version of Hullabaloo which appeared to have current comments on it. I don’t have the time to go back and look. I also don’t have the interest anymore in testing that odd looking version of that blog to see.
In fact, I vaguely remember maybe it was commenter Rangoon 78 who brought a current backdoor link to Hullabaloo comments here.