Have you seen that electoral map? That is one scary sea of red. In actuality, not many House seats changed hands and the ones that are still in dispute this morning are mostly leaning D. This is what unlimited money will buy you – a lot of red.
And yet, this is a promising sign. Demographically, the Republicans have seen their high water mark and are now looking at an ebb tide. With all the money they threw at this election, this is the best they could do. Even the most carefully crafted legislative districts and poorly educated electorate probably won’t help them next time.
The bright spots last night happened in the Senate with the election of Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin. It looks like North Dakota will send Heidi Heitkamp to the Senate, bring the total number of women in the senate to 19%. It’s a shame we couldn’t hit 20% but I’ll take what I can get. Massachusetts has never had a female senator so this is a step in the right direction. I wonder if the Democrats couldn’t have won other races if they had run more female candidates.
As for the top spot, well, we were going to get Pete or RePete. It’s hard to tell which is which. I didn’t have a dog in that fight. But it looks like Obama lost a lot of popular support this year, about 10 million people’s worth of popular vote.
The Democrats will incorrectly assume that Americans want more Republican policies. I don’t think that’s what they want. I think they want more forceful Democrats who can cut through all the messaging money can buy. That’s going to be important going forward because the Republican base is going to start to die off in increasing numbers. Democrats and new parties must be ready to go on the attack. Why not start now? There is absolutely no reason for Democrats in the House or Senate to yield a nanometer on any kind of “reform” of the social safety net. The Republicans are stuck. This House can ram through any stupid thing it wants. It doesn’t have to go anywhere.
Now would be a good time for the left to get the band back together for 2014.
Filed under: General | Tagged: demographics, Election 2012, gridlock, House, Senate, Senator Elizabeth Warren. |
The Confluence 
I just hope that Sanders and Franken have enough new friends in the Senate that they can draw and hold a strong line where strong lines are needed.
Also, they say that California now has a Supermajority of Democrats in both houses. So, it will be interesting if anything can come of that.
That’s good. Maybe they can do something about the crazy tax system.
California voted for tax increases on election night, twice. One specifically for education won easily. Proposition 13 may at long last be unravelling.
Yeah, If Pelosi doesn’t lean on them to adhere to Wall Street’s agenda.
I expect to hear the Democrats spin this election into a mandate for Obama to keep shafting Joe and Jane Sixpack and the usual republican loons to continue their insane screeching.
Or Reid, I guess.
The results in California would suggest otherwise. The money only seems to work in US House races because they are so difficult to change. But I think we are beginning to see the end of the Republican domination there even though it looks deeply red right now. I am encouraged that women won in the Senate last night. Maybe because of the higher profile nature of the Senate, it’s easier to attract more Democratic and liberal voters.
I don’t know what it’s going to take to make voters turn on their Republican House members. How much you wanna bet they keep their heads down for awhile? They know they’re there on borrowed time.
As for Obama, well, Wall Street still owns the White House. If that weren’t the case, Tim Geithner would be gone.
Pelosi has ‘multiple’ homes and is in no hurry to abolish the Bush Tax Cuts…she was a Silver Spoon Baby which makes my head spin when she says she understand working people’s issues.
Well, Warren is worried about the Deficit and doesn’t mention Social Security or Medicare here:
http://video.today.msnbc.msn.com/today/49724600/#49724600
(NBC doesn’t play nice with their videos)
First, we really do need to bring down the cost of Medicare. Our side doesn’t want to talk about that because it’s dangerous. But there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. The right way is to force price controls on the providers. That’s the way every other modern developed nation does it. If we don’t, it won’t matter what they do on the other end, the cost of health care will continue to rise to unsustainable levels. All that will result is that more people will end up in the emergency room because they can’t afford the premiums or they’re in that no-mans land between being too young to get coverage and too old to get a job with bennies. That’s what Democrats are going to have to grapple with and I suspect that that is going to be very difficult. If they do it right, they could have generations of dominance in Congress and never have to worry about the creepy young Libertarians out there.
Second, there are many ways to cut the deficit. We could stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That right there will cut the deficit. We could put more people back to work. That would mean initial spending but then the deficit would come down once the economy starts to grow. We could stop giving oil companies big subsidies. We could stop bailing out the banks. Lots of options here.
Third, she also said revenue increases. It’s time to end the Bush tax cuts- permanently.
There’s no reason to touch Social Security. But now would be the time to re-form the left and push back.
They need to raise the salary cap Social Security, and also stop the ‘tax’ holiday via Obama which was a way to appease the working class people while keeping the Bush Tax Cuts for the RICH intact. I hope Bill Clinton preps Obama on the need to work past six pm, as many of us do and I can’t remember when I had a vacation.
He might try stopping by a National Intelligence Briefing or two, as well. Maybe they can move them to a golf course.
Rightwing rumors? There are plenty of things to criticize Obama about but this is not one of them.
First priority is forcing price controls on the INSURERS, not the providers (i.e., doctors, nurses). The best way to do this, IMO, would be to eliminate them entirely (i.e, single payer). If you don’t want to do that, the other option is essentially to turn insurance copanies into non-profits (i.e., the German model).
After that is done, you could work on forcing price controls on providers, but that can’t really happen without simultaneously lowering the price of medical education. You can’t expect doctors/nurses to run up hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans (that’s not an exaggeration for many specialties) and then not pay them.
I happen to agree with you on both points. If we can’t eliminate them, we need to make sure they’re regulated so that they can’t make an excess profit to split with their shareholders.
And yes, the cost of training health professionals needs to come down. And then there are the excessive hospital costs. My French colleague’s husband spent four hours in the hospital for a hernia operation and got billed…
….
wait for it
$70,000.
Yep, he didn’t even stay overnight. We’re not talking heart transplant. We’re talking about a fricking hernia. So, my colleague called the insurance company to say there must be some mistake. He wasn’t in the hospital long enough to get a tray of bland food. They looked it over and said she was right. It should have been only $40,000. The insurance company paid it.
They couldn’t believe it. That would never happen in France. And it wouldn’t happen in Germany either. That’s because there is a schedule of payment for those services and it is tightly regulated.
That’s what it’s going to have to take.
Ah, yes I agree. I should have lumped in private hospitals along with insurance companies in step 1.
That depends on your overall agenda. If you want to protect the retirements of millions of Americans, then you’re right.
If, on the other hand, you want your backers in the FIRE sector to get their greedy little paws on the $2.5 trillion currently in the trust fund (to say nothing of FICA revenues forever more), then there’s every reason to do so.
Because I am a Democrat, I didn’t vote for Obama. But I must say I am not unhappy with the election results. The country (for the most part) actually moved left and rejected the Tea Party and its associated rape experts. And we got some decent women.
Here in CA, we got badly needed school funding (Prop 30); we rejected the anti-union Karl Rove Prop. 32, despite its utterly misleading language and ad campaign; and in my district we got rid of the 80-year-old Pete Stark who, while a liberal, is one of the nastiest reps I’ve ever run across.
IMO, whoever is saying the Dems must move to the right has an agenda. The facts show a rejection of the right. In two years, if the Dems stand up for Social Security and Medicare (a big if, I know), they could take back the house easily. Will they? Not if Wall St. is still running the show. Still, when you get right down to it, the voters have more power than Wall St.
As for all that red, while it looks bad on a map, those areas simply do not have the numbers that the smaller blue areas have.
I don’t like the word “hope.” But, given what they had to work with, the voters did a decent job. It would be nice if the Dems actually listened.
I agree with you mostly. I’m very troubled by the ocean of red in my home state of Pennsylvania. The number of D districts is depressingly small, especially in the southwest of the state. Pittsburgh is the only area out there with a D congressman. It’s going to take at least another election cycle to see real improvement. But as you say, the signs are all there for the party to read. They could listen to the people who have an agenda and cut their own throats or they could win Congress for generations to come. This seems like a no-brainer but as we have seen before, politicians frequently have no brains.
The problem with Southwestern Pennsylvania is that the Democrats running in Districts 12 and 18 may as well have been Republicans.
I hope Obama fixes the over 123% health care increases, as it does no good to mandate people busy health insurance if you can’t afford it, which is a irritant for me…that Obama didn’t bother to read his own bill. HR676 was the way to go, we missed a great opportunity there. 😦
Why would he “fix” this?
First off, it wasn’t “his” bill. It was Elizabeth Fowler’s (former VP of Wellpoint) bill, introduced and championed by Max Baucus (the biggest beneficiary of health insurance company contributions in the Senate).
Obama never even proposed a bill.
The ACA is a bailout for the health insurance industry – the insurance increases are a feature.
He’s a lame duck who is going to be a lot more interested in arranging for a profitable retirement than anything else. He’s not going to “fix” anything – as far as he’s concerned, it ain’t broken.
The damage was done in 2008. We’re stuck with him now.
I agree that he’s going to try to “foam the runway” for his own life post term.
Exactly. Everything is going exactly the way he wants it – right down to the kill lists, drone strikes, and denial of due process. Privatizing Social Security will just be the icing on the cake.
I think what really horrified me this time around was the number of ex-PUMAs who drank the Kool-Aid.
But he sure worked hard to pre-kill anything distasteful to Big Insura. And who’s to say he didn’t go “hands off” and “not submit a bill” preCISEly in ORder to clear the field for the Fowler-Baucus bill?
That’s why I refer to the bill as BORomnecare (Baucus-Obama Romneycare).
I believe in checks and balances; I believe in a two party system, but how can you have a two party system if one of the parties is insane?
The sanity will start to come back gradually over the next couple of decades. The older religious conservatives, who never met a Republican propaganda technique they haven’t fallen for, will be going away to be replaced by a lot of younger, less religious, skeptical voters. They’re going to be coming into the majority with a lot of debt and a lot of anger at what the seniors did by spending so much of their time wrapped up with what women could or could not do with their vaginas. All that time, energy and money wasted while the wealthy and ruthless stole us blind? I’m thinking that the wealthy better start building higher walls because they’re going to need them.
RD, are you saying that fighting for a woman’s right to end an unwanted pregnancy is a waste of time?
I think it is the ONE ISSUE campaign that has held us back when that should be a given and women also care about HEALTH CARE in general (affordable) and yeah those JOBS. The Obama Health Care bill raised my premiums so high I was forced to get the cheapest plan and then got billed for ‘lab services’ because the Obama Administration didn’t bother to check for loopholes (I now think it was on purpose) and so I am getting screwed/paying more. Sorry about the language but in honesty, no one is listening, and Pelosi doesn’t care otherwise she would be working to pass Single Payer in California and she isn’t!
I just sent a check into my COBRA administrator for $942. I do this every month. My company bought a top of the line insurance policy for us. At the present time, I would prefer NOT to have to spend so much money on health insurance. Half that would still be a lot but more reasonable. Could I go with an HMO or some other less swanky plan? Um, yeah. But that’s not the COBRA plan I am offered. I grew up on socialized medicine in the military and it was fine for me. The dental could have been better but medically, I couldn’t complain. I’ve had perfectly lousy doctors with high class insurance so I know that paying more is not necessarily associated with better care. But I live in NJ and the rates are ridiculous here. That’s what I’m stuck with. Every else costs more.
That very same thing happened to my sister, then they were trying to back bill her? So, with luck (I have written a provision in my plan for no waiting time for any employees.) I added her onto the plan as I had given her 1% (Owner Option) of business years ago, otherwise she would be without insurance. Once the Obama premium hikes hit, she had to find a single plan for him as other wise her premium for the two of them were 1,110.00 at the bottom plan.
I just noticed that the press is finally interviewing Sandy Storm survivors and one many says he doesn’t think he will survive the cold, or another surge. The Sandy Storm people haven’t gotten the aid they need which is lamentable. 😦
That is right they were going to charge $555.00 a month for a HMO plan w/ $50 co-pay every visit for a five year old! So, no, I think Pelosi and Obama sold us down the river literally. I think if Congress and the President and the Supreme Court lost their Health Care benefits, then and only then would they move to do something for the working people.
Oh, for those of people that say…ah a business person…Elizabeth Warren has got it right, on average my yearly income is anywhere from 70- 45K a year…yes, even when it gets tough I hang in there (Don’t pink slip people) as my team is like family to me.
This election there was no interviews of people who needed health care or who no longer could afford health care (My brother a past Obama Big Supporter…no longer has health insurance…couldn’t afford it after the premium hike and in-between jobs.) and I think that was on purpose.
While we are clapping, don’t forget it was with Nancy Pelosi’s adoration that Obama signed the President Obama Stupak Executive Order, then they claimed they were working to give us coverage of reproductive health care when it was his executive order that took it away. So, maybe we need to ask Obama WHY he signed that!
Obama needed Stupak’s vote for ACA because Coakley was defeated.
No, I am saying that the older generation got distracted with abortion. They used to be in the vanguard of civil rights and they got completely derailed by abortion. So much time, money and energy was spent convincing them that what was between women’s legs was going to be the deciding factor in the survival of civilization. And where did it get them?? Former liberal leaning Democrats back in the 70s are now sour, mean spirited, judgemental pains in the asses that vote to cut their own benefits to prevent women from having unlicensed sex. Can you think of a bigger waste than that? We’ve had economic devastation on a monumental scale and a real lowering of our lifestyles and all they could think about was sex.
Likewise, there are an awful lot of babyboomers who were hoodwinked and bamboozled into voting for Obama in 2008 because THEIR generation seems to think we needed a teachable moment about race but, oddly enough, not gender.
And late boomers/gen Xers like me think that gender and economic equality are extremely important. In fact, we might reasonably argue with good evidence that you can’t get to economic fairness without more women in office. It’s that important.
So, I expect that we will be the next group that will be targeted by the wealthy and well connected to undermine our own interests. Will the next presidential nominee be a woman who will be funded lavishly by Wall Street to bring a kinder, gentler, feminist face to ubder capitalism on steroids? I wouldn’t be surprised. We must be on our guard.
Very spot on. Any woman must be examined with the same rigor as a man.
Lots of publicity that 20 women will be in the Senate. Not so much that only about 78 women (18%) will be in the U.S. House. That’s based on my hand count of results posted on CNN.
The results are highly regional. Lots of women were elected in New England, New York, and the Pacific Coast. Not so many any where else. Overall, 57 of the women elected to the House are Democrats (28.5%) and 21 are Republicans (8.9%). Five of the Republicans are from the Plains states, 2 from Washington, 2 from NC, 2 from Tennessee and 2 from Indiana.
In case you are wondering, that leaves 0 Republican women from the 11 state Northeast Several Republican women incumbents were defeated in NY.
Overall, nearly half of the Democratic women candidates were elected (57 of 115, or 49.6%) as opposed to 46.1% of the Democratic males running for the House.
I wrote years ago that Democrats were able to reclaim the House largely due to their advantage in electing women, Hint, hint. Even with gerrymanders the path remains the same.
I hear constant commentary that the Democrats re-elected Obama due to minority voting. Not much is said that he was elected due to the votes of the majority: women. There are none so blind as those who have eyes and can not see (FDR’s version is that a conservative is a man with two good legs who will not walk forwards.. Note: MAN)
If B0 runs true to form, he’ll try to hand as much over to Wall St. as he can before Elizabeth Warren and the other new people show up in January. (Am I feeling like a grumpy old fart today? Why, yes. Yes, I am. Why do you ask?)
I’d try to derive some comfort from old Boehner saying nothing should get done before the new Congress, but I’m betting he said that when he thought there would be Repub gains. In my liverish state, I’m seeing him working bipartisanly with B0 as fast as he can for the next two months.
I hope I’m as wrong as I was about expecting our Prop. 30 (taxes for schools) to lose here in California.
I don’t trust either Obama or the Republicans. They were elected so they could put an end to those annoying social safety net programs and the lame duck session may be the last time they get a crack at it. The wealthy want to go weightless. They don’t want to be tied down to certain citizenship statuses, or obligations. They don’t want to have to answer to anyone. They spent an awful lot of money this year making sure they didn’t have to. It didn’t pan out exactly like they planned so I expect they will start to threaten the Congresspersons and Senators who are leaving that they will never find a job again in their lifetimes if they don’t ram something through.
“the wealthy want to go weightless”
bwahaha. I am so stealing that!
I’m sure it’s not original. Can’t remember where I saw the reference to the “weightless corporation” but it’s already out there. That’s why I think the Obamacare program looks the way it does. The employee becomes responsible for footing the bill for healthcare insurance because it is a mandate. Therefore, the corporations lay off everyone they can and then hire them back as independent contractors. Bennies are not their problem anymore. The pharmas have gone first by laying everyone off. But you know and I know that they’re going to have to hire us back or they aren’t going to get new drugs. The startup costs for a boutique drug company are too high. So, they hire us back from the CRO’s or as independent contractors in my case, and they are totally weightless. They have a flexible, insecure workforce that they can hire and terminate contracts at will and if you want health insurance, well, you’d better find a way to pay for them.
The people who make out big in this scenario are the middle men who run the CROs.
It’s disgusting.
The pharmas did *not* go “first”. MCI was doing this stuff in the telecom business decades ago.
I stand corrected. Was it a bloodbath there too?
Yeah, they would basically send heavily armed Pinkerton security people through and haul people out of their cubicles and throw them out of the building. Then they’d bring them back as contractors a week later for less money and no benefits.
The contract agencies will be responsible for providing the health care. Thus, they’ll want a larger cut of your wages to pay for it.
Warren’s already been co-opted – she was mouthing the deficit party line on MSNBC today.
I’m not sure that’s strictly accurate. I think the Democrats will correctly assume that they can continue to get away with selling out their own legacy for the benefit of the .001%. All they have to do is lie convincingly about it. They don’t particularly care what “Americans” want, they care what they can be sold. They care about how much they can conceal their own corruption and ineptitude with personal attacks, fear-mongering, and bullying.
I think your 12:41 EST comment is spot on.
I’m pretty disgusted.
One thing the media isn’t talking about is Obama’s comment about “You made me a better President!”…yup, if we hadn’t pushed on LGBT rights and complained about his President Obama Stupak Executive Order which took away reproductive care, we would be stuck with old moldy policies and setting the clock back for generations.
I guess I am cranky too.
I wanted to make him a better President by making him a former President. 😉
Practically every pundit is calling yesterday’s vote a confirmation a majority of the American people want liberal policies. I agree with them. Too bad there is zero reason to believe Obama is going to offer those policies. That his first statement involves his standard call for “bipartisanship” ought to have been enough to confirm that; but that’s only for those still interested in reality, and that doesn’t appear to include much of the former Reality-Based Community.
Thank goodness there are still places like here.
I do not at all understand why so many of my family and friends think Obama is a Liberal who supports all the good things they do and was only defeated in his grand plans by obstructionist Republicans.
When I try to argue I can almost see their brains locking up.
You need to buy them Neil Barofsky’s book. Don’t argue with them. Just give them each a copy for Christmas. Say, “It’s supposed to be really good. What’s it about? Oh, some Eliot Ness type that goes to Washington to keep an eye on the bankers.” Halfway through, they’ll be so angry they’ll be sick about their vote for Obama.
I will. That is a good idea. And it means I won’t have to knit them anything. 🙂
You could knit book cozies.
!! I like that!
Also, why not tell them about the blogsites
The Confluence,
Naked Capitalism,
and . . . Black Agenda Report.
🙂 They know — and they read them.
And Corrente, and nakedcapitalism, and suburban guerrilla and firedoglake. We need to come together now and present a united front. We know who the enemy is now.
These kinds of epitaphs for the GOP have been written before (most recently in 2008–I mean, after Bush, this was a party that was supposed to be finished) yet they have enjoyed a resurgence and will enjoy one again, quite likely in two years from now. What keeps them alive is simply the fact that the Dems, if anything, are raring to cut the entitlements and cut other social programs. Plus, there are the as-yet-unanticipated political effects of Obamacare once the mandates kick in and who knows what the collective effect of US and EU austerity will be on the global economy. The GOP these days is kept alive by a combination of identity politics, disenfranchisement, and gerrymandering, but those wouldn’t be enough if it weren’t for the protest votes against Democratic pusillanimity.
Looks to me like they’re going to double-down on crazy:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/332862/nice-guys-finish-second-michael-walsh
Interesting. So the right is ready to throw off the religious with the crazy notion that their policies will carry the day. What color is e sky where they are? They needed the Christian conservatives precisely because they wer the easiest to deceive. As long as they had them obsessed with sex, they wouldn’t look at the Republican crazy policies. If you jettison the religious right, all that’s left is a bunch of loud mouth stupid white male libertarians and some rich white people who think they earned the money their parents passed down to them.
But hokay, let’s see how that works.
There are those 28 Democratic Senators who signed that letter claiming to reject any effort to involve Social Security in any “deficit and debt deal”. I voted for one of them (Stabenow) and she won.
This might be an opportunity for anyone who has one of those 28 Senators to call or write their offices thanking their staffers for the Senators’s view on that matter . . . and stating that they (I/We) will never vote for a Democratic Senator or Presidential candidate ever again if Social Security is touched in any way by any legislation.
It is not enough that the 28 Senators pretend to care and to try. They have to power to prevent the Senate from acting on anything at all whatsoever if they care to use that power. If they don’t use that power, that convinces me that they are a secret part of the conspiracy against Social Security. (The exception to that is if a coalition of Republican Senators and Catfood Democrat Senators and Doormat Democrat Senators and Vichy Democrat Senators get together to abolish the filibuster. Why would they do that at precisely this time in particular? To take away the most effective weapon the SSS (Save Social Security) Senators have to prevent any action against Social Security.)
We have to try preventing the government from attacking Social Security in the lame duck session. If we can prevent any action of any sort from taking place during the Lame Duck, the Republican House may save us by launching a Kamikaze Impeachment campaign against Obama . . . . hopefully long and vicious enough to tie him down and make it harder for him to pursue the Wall Street Conspiracy agenda which he slavers and drools even now to achieve.
That fits with today’s Glenn Greewald (which may have been mentioned above, but I missed it) :: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory?
I’m not going to copy it here but, he’s got a pretty depressing update already
Well, if the Tea Partyists see the SS doublecross as being a Democratic project, they might maybe decide to stop the music on it just to vent their spite and hate for the Democratic Party. Its a forlorn hope, I know.
Of course, the Democratic Six-Step could be killed at any one of those steps if there were any Mad Dog Democrats willing to kill it there. Are there any?
Officeholders respond to constituent threats but only if those threats are credible. I though every single one of the Hillary Primary Voters was going to vote against Obama one way or another. Did every single one of those 18 million voters end up voting against Obama? I wonder what the next few weeks of forensic autopsies on all layers and sectors of the Obama vote will turn up?
If Obama got any of the Hillary ’08 vote, any at all, that would show that threats from Democratic voters may be dismissed. And that would be an unfortunate lesson for us to have the Catfood Obamacrats learn.
Reid said today that he is planning to amend the rules to abolish the filibuster.
I think the fix is in.
I think you are right. If Reid abolishes the filibuster , with the help of the Republican- Catfood Obamacrat Coalition, the sole and only purpose of that would be to deny the Mad Dog Democrats from having the use of the filibuster tool to stop the Simpson-Obama conspiracy against Social Security. The Mad Dog Democrats (if there are any) would still have other tools.
But given that Reid wrote that “letter of 28” which 27 others signed . . . pretending to support not touching Social Security . . . if Reid after that turns around and abolishes the filibuster to prevent the pro SS Democrats from using it to protect us against Obama . . . that shows that Reid was lying right from the start in his pretense of supporting Social Security.
The question becomes: how will the other 27 proSS Dems respond? I remember some of Schumer’s statements seeming to show a crass but genuine anxiety over the trashing the “Democratic brand” would take from passing the Simpson-Obama Catfood Plan. Would any others of the “ProSS 27” share this crass but genuine anxiety? It would be worth calling and/or writing them to say that we hope that they do.
And just because a fix is in does not mean that a fix cannot be broken in mid fix. It can be hard but it might maybe can be done, at least in theory. And since SS would take a long time to bleed out if the Catfood Plan is passed, there would still be several years in which it could be rescued by repealing the Catfood Plan . . . in theory. A first step would be defeating, primarying/Nadering every DemSenator who votes for the Catfood Plan. And then voting against every Democrat who fails to become anything less than a Mad Dog Democrat on SS.
I’m looking for the bigger picture. Scott Walker won his recall. Most gay referendums have been won by the homophobes. Tea Party candidates did well in 2010 and won some primaries this year.
But our causes and our women did well this year — on a big ballot with a lot of juicy issues. So how do we ride on — or creat — this kind of turnout in future?
By the way, I notice that Digby’s Hubbalaboo still has no comments section. Just the way she and her little mini-me Atkins like it.
I remembered reading/hearing about “the Veal Pen” and about obedience-enforcement through money-withholding. I have stumbled across Yves Smith’s own comment in a NaCap comments thread linking back to articles about coordination between the Obamacratic Party and big Gatekeeper Liberal donors to enforce veal pen obedience. I will cutpaste some of that thread . . .
“Couterpunch” needs help. From a letter I got. When most of the progressive gliterrati, from The Nation, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Moore to Rebecca Solnit and Bill McKibben, turned tail and began frantically urging their readers to swallow their bile and support Obama, CounterPunch stood firm. And we’ve paid a savage price. We’ve lost big donors. We’ve lost subscribers. We’ve been rejected by liberal foundations. But we didn’t back down. We’ve never backed down. And you can count on us not to back down now that Obama and his neoliberal claque are returning for another four years of budget cuts, bailouts and kill lists. But we need your help. Now.” http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/Donations.html
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/11/links-11712-2.html#zYwAybUJPRtvmVcB.99
Yves Smith says:
November 7, 2012 at 5:35 pm
This has been going on from the beginning of the Obama administration, the kneecapping of anyone on the left that refuses to follow Administration messaging. Most leftie groups get a significant proportion of their funding either from big foundations (think Ford Foundation) or big individual Dem donors.
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/08/07/rahm-goes-apeshit-on-liberals-in-the-veal-pen/
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/09/06/van-jones-a-moment-of-truth-for-liberal-institutions-in-the-veal-pen/
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/11/links-11712-
2.html#zYwAybUJPRtvmVcB.99
Knowledge can be power, but only if it is weaponised and disseminated and used.
Well . . . I went to a Detroit-based web outlet called CrainesDetroit to see if it offered any Rocky Anderson vote totals. First I will give the website and then a little cutpaste of what I found.
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20121107/FREE/121109883/michigan-election-results
Michigan election results
By Associated Press
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President
4,720 of 5,099 precincts – 93 percent
x-Barack Obama, Dem (i) 2,338,334 – 54 percent
Mitt Romney, GOP 1,989,666 – 46 percent
Jill Stein, Grn 20,042 – 0 percent
Virgil Goode, UST 15,348 – 0 percent
Rocky Anderson, NLP 4,763 – 0 percent
As you can see, it appears to be a reprint of an Associated Press piece. But by the name Rocky Anderson, you will see a version of the mistake that a lot of people appear to be making. Note how it says:
“Rocky Anderson, NLP” “NLP” Did you get that? “NLP”.
“NLP” doesn’t stand for “Justice Party”. “NLP” stands for “Natural Law Party”. What that means is that even the mighty Associated Press didn’t actually read the name they were looking right at. They were looking at ROSS Anderson and thought they saw ROCKY Anderson. I bet every single one of those 4,763 votes for ROSS Anderson of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Party thought they were really votes for ROCKY Anderson of the Justice Party.
I sure hope that I am not the single one and only person in all of Michigan who noticed that the Anderson on the ballot was NOT! NOT! NOT! “Rocky” but was in fact “Ross”. I sure hope that one other Michigan voter besides myself wrote Rocky Anderson in.
On my ballot, he was listed as Ross “Rocky” Anderson, Justice Party. I even have a picture that I took in the voting booth.
I think that the Justice party had to get the cooperation of other loal parties in some states in order to get on the ballot. In some states, he was on the Peace and Justice party and there were others as well. Sooo, I don’t know why the NLP was selected in your state but it might have been the only option available. They had a ballot slot available and the justice party candidate took it.
Ahhh . . . I did not know that, if that is what it is. I especially did not know that Rocky’s real name is Ross. I know that the MaMaYogi Party has been on our ballot for many cycles now.
So hopefully all those votes for the Maharishi’s Party also count for the Anderson I hope they counted for.
Gridlock is our only defense these day….we have to hope that the “powers” want to vie for power more than they love their corporate masters. And that might be a tiny bit true still….just a tiny
these *days