Update:It looks like Dave Dayen is on the same wavelength, although I don’t know where he thinks this outside movement is going to come from unless Democrats such as himself throw in the towel with their party to start one. If you don’t put your foot down or walk away *before* the convention, they’re going to think you’re onboard with whatever it is they have in mind. S^*( or get off the pot.
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I’m surprised that it’s necessary for me to be so explicit but those of you liberal/progressives who are running scared to Obama should slow down and think this through.
Because Obama is about to sacrifice you.
If my suspicions are correct, the GOP has elevated Paul Ryan because they want to push for a deficit reduction deal *before* the election. Expect it to get fast and furious now. Who knows, maybe they’ll come back to the House early to discuss what an emergency it is to cut the deficit. Cut it now, I say!
But they’re not going to hurt seniors or probably anyone 55 and older. That would be cruel, and besides, that’s the Republicans’ base. No, it will probably involve generational warfare, means testing, making the retirement age 85. Something like that. And Medicare for seniors? Also, probably safe. The rest of us will have to pay through the nose.
And then there is discretionary spending. You know, no one in this country is entitled to a higher education. Your parents don’t have to help you pay for it. My parents used to tell me this all the time. And food stamps. Why are so many people getting food stamps? Or unemployment insurance? Or SCHIP, for god’s sakes?? What are we running here, a government or a clinic?
Whatever the deal is, Obama’s going to cut it. The Republicans are going to want this to happen *before* the election. Maybe the bill will be passed during the lame duck session but the election narrative is going to focus around the deficit. The Deficit, and NOTHING BUT THE DEFICIT.
When the time comes, Obama will bow to the media narrative, hoping it will spare him, and he and the rest of the Confederacy of Dunces in the Democratic party will sell every one of you out.
Well, we’re only progressives and liberals after all. Who cares about us?
You heard it here first.
As for me, you couldn’t pay me enough money to vote for either party this year. There really *isn’t* a difference anymore and it’s time we stopped pretending there is. There hasn’t been a difference since 2008 when the bankers bought the Democrats.
On the surface, Romney’s choice of zombie eyed granny starver Paul Ryan as his VP running mate shouldn’t make any sense. This is the guy who is determined that everyone who isn’t wealthy or well-connected take a severe haircut in services, that we pay for, by the way, so that the wealthy and well-connected never have to pay us back for all the money we let them have in the past 30 years. If Romney was up against the *old* Democratic party, it would be a piece of cake to shoot this down.
But the fact that Romney even made this choice in the first place indicates something entirely different. For one thing, the Republicans have been saving their ammunition, and they must have a ton of it, while Obama has been burning through campaign money like a wildfire trying to cripple Romney and he hasn’t gotten much traction. Obama even threw the tax return issue out there, probably because he felt he had to. Romney can stonewall that from now until doomsday but the best time to have brought it up would have been just before the election. What do the Democrats have left?
There must be an advantage to Romney picking Ryan or he wouldn’t have done it. Republicans play to win. I’m going to guess that the deficit hawkery is really important to the GOP to ensure its wealthy base pays nothing in taxes. But it doesn’t want to necessarily kill the donor as long as there are still organs to harvest. You don’t want full scale insurrection on your hands. So, choosing Ryan might have been a safer choice. Let’s try to reason this out:
1.) By getting Ryan out of the House, the pressure is off the GOP to actually go through with any severely drastic cut his plan would have provoked the Tea Party lunatics to demand. The Tea Party won’t be happy until no one gets anything they PREPAID. It’s a power thing, not a rational objective. They’ll push the envelope because they can, not because it’s wise or good for the party. But with Ryan out of their hair, the GOP leadership can claim they now have a power vacuum and who is going to take his place for pushing and whipping like he did? They will look in vain for a replacement but all of the up-and-comers will fall short of Ryan’s brilliant political skills. Maybe they won’t be able to get all the way through Atlas Shrugged or they have a nugget of compassion that hasn’t been bred out of them. Who knows, but for some reason, they’ll be more self-effacing and compliant than Ryan.
2.) By getting Ryan in the VP spot for the election season, the GOP has a twofer: It can run on the deficit issue, which means that it will be all deficits, all the time on TV and in the papers from now until November, AND it can deep six Ryan in the VP position after the election where we will never hear from him again. The VP spot is where politicians go to die, er, not literally but functionally. Think about it, how many VPs have gone on to become president after running a successful campaign instead of after some catastrophic event? I can only think of one in the recent past- George Bush Sr. So, what Ryan stands for is important to the GOP message machine, but Paul Ryan himself is not so important or they would have left him where he was.
3.) It will force the Democrats to either out deficit hawk the Republicans, driving the election season narrative to the right, or it will give Democrats an opening to defend the American people from additional demands for sacrifice and economy killing cuts in government spending. Ehhhh, I’m going to guess that the GOP knows Obama really well and anticipates that he will continue to go right. It’s what he was hired to do. The bankers want him to get rid of all entitlements so they won’t feel obligated (do they even have feelings of obligation and responsibility?) to discipline themselves and not gorge on more than they can swallow. If Obama hadn’t come down so hard on the Occupy movement on the bankers’ behalf, he might have something to hide behind- a moral message about how wrong it is to hurt the 99% of us who work hard and play by the rules. But he did and now he can’t.
All in all, I’d say this was a win for the GOP. They know their message and propaganda machine is more than adequate to skew the Democrats’ counterpunch in their direction. Obama has done a lousy job and he can’t run on the things that are really important to the 99%. If unemployment were not an issue, the deficit problem wouldn’t be a problem, would it? If more of us were back at work, we wouldn’t be collecting unemployment benefits, we’d be paying our taxes. But because unemployment was NOT the focus of Obama’s four years in office, he’s not only allowed the little Depression to impoverish people, he’s added to the deficit because revenue has fallen off. Sure, running up a big deficit during a recession/depression is not a bad thing, but you’ve got to have a plan to replace the money you spent someday while jump starting an economic recovery and this is not an argument that Obama has chosen to make.
Krugman, Stiglitz, Romer, and some other economists have tried to convince him to do it in order to put people back to work, but he only wanted to listen to his banker friends and now he’s stuck. In order to turn this around, he’s got to grow a unibrow and become a FDR style Democrat on steroids. Cewl, swave and deboner will not cut it, especially when there’s more desperation than commitment behind the nasal stopped Chicago accented delivery. He had four years, two of them with his party in majority in BOTH houses of Congress, and he wasted them, falling right into the trap the GOP laid and the rest of us anticipated. Republicans wanted to make life so difficult that the only way to make it better would be to apply New Deal strategies, which they would try to oppose. A skillful politician would have gone bold and big. Alas, we got Obama.
For a guy who has so many political gifts {{cough, cough}} and plays a mean game of 11-dimensional chess, he should have seen it coming.
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One other thing that should be glaringly obvious: the *presumptive* lineup for both parties will contain…
four men
You know, this is the 21st century and it’s almost like the 20th never even happened when it comes to women. All of the other countries in the world are at least struggling with their females in government problem. Here, we act like there is no problem.
Even Pakistan has had a female head of state. Pakistan. But here? Not even on the radar.
I’ve always wondered why women stay in abusive religions where they’re not considered the equal of men. What’s in it for them? And why don’t women ask that question of their parties?
Just curious.
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And here’s a blast from the past. This goes out to Paul Ryan and his buds:
The Confluence 