Complaints About the Republican Party IV

[Shellhead]

http://thinkprogress.org/election/20...ipartisanship/

That's promising, because if the Democrats instead win the House, Senate and White House, it sounds like Mourdock might be willing to go their way. Yeah, right.

[Paradox]

worstblogever calls to mind older days:

That... that indicates to me he doesn't understand what bipartisanship is. It's "the other side caves and submits to the will of the other", in his mind.

I had a wife like that, to whom compromise meant "I get what I want".

[Spike-X]

So now that gas prices seem to be dropping while Obama is in office, suddenly the propaganda arm of the Republican Party (trading as 'Fox News') are trying to paint this as a bad thing.

"It was bad when they went up, now it's bad because they're going down. What? Because shut up, that's why!"

Note that Fox is now raising how worldwide economic factors are affecting gas prices, after spending weeks blaming Obama for the price increase since the president's inauguration. Fox won't explain that the extremely low price in January 2009 was a short-lived drop caused by the massive economic recession. In fact, last week on Fox News, Varney explicitly said with a straight face that the price increase since the bottom of the recession had "everything to do with" Obama, but the recent drop in gas prices "has nothing to do with" him.

[Iangould]

A study of economic mobility in the US by state shows a pattern that will probably be all too familiar.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/econom...ity/54866786/1

All the outperformers except Utah (7 of 8) are blue states.

All the outperformers except Florida (8 of 9)are red states.

So much for the idea of the liberal elite keeping the masses down and so much for the idea that Republican small government and deregulation creates a culture of opportunity.

[Shellhead]

One of the few things that I admired about the Bush Administration was their shrewd calculation that the Republican Party needed to court latino voters, on the basis of religion and family values. But many Republicans got more paranoid about immigrants after 9/11. But some Republican strategists still understand the importance of latino voters, understanding that their party is eventually doomed by demographic trends.

http://nbcpolitics.msnbc.msn.com/_ne...main=firstread

"With polling showing Mitt Romney getting crushed by President Obama among Latino voters, the presumptive GOP nominee admitted to donors last month that the data "spells doom for us” if the party cannot find ways to reach out to the crucial voting block.

"But with the election just six months away, the Republican National Committee’s Hispanic Outreach Director Bettina Inclan told reporters at a briefing Tuesday that the RNC has just begun its effort to find and persuade Latinos to vote for Romney and the rest of the Republican ticket in six crucial states."

I don't expect Hispanic Outreach to change many votes. Miami Cubans will continue to vote Republican, and most other latinos will vote Democrat. They're not stupid, they have noticed the racist tone of some of the Tea Party rhetoric and the ongoing bullshit about President Obama's citizenship. And when it comes down to it, many rank-and-file Republicans are simply more comfortable fighting hispanic voters instead of fighting for them. Republicans don't want diversity, they just want to associate with people who look just like them. Hell, they can't even be bothered to do a decent job of representing the interests of white women.

It seems likely that Obama will get elected. Rather than doing some soul-searching about how they have become such unpopular assholes, I expect the Republican Party to become even more extreme. They will say that Romney was a weak candidate because he was too moderate, and they will seek some shrill extremist moron to run for President in 2016. Since that would be a fair description of at least half their candidates this time around, I think this is a pretty reasonable prediction.

[Iangould]

A Republican Party publication in Virginia has published an open call for armed insurrection if Obama is re-elected.

Yes it's an obscure county newsletter and yes there's a disclaimer saying the views published in it don't represent the views of the Republican Party but consider the outrage Fox News generated over a Cuban flag in an Obama campaign office back in 2008.

[o1pickleboy]

Dick Lugar lost the primary, after six terms in the U.S. Senate. He wasn't extreme enough for the Teabagging section of the Republican Party in Indiana. Lugar warned voters about Republican nominee Richard Mourdock in his concession speech:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1501416.html

"If Mr. Mourdock is elected, I want him to be a good senator. But that will require him to revise his stated goal of bringing more partisanship to Washington. He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it."

That sucks. I'm not a Republican, but I always had respect for Dick Lugar. And Lugar was the biggest reason why my dad became a Republican back in '88. Now those Hoosier voters are going to have a partisan hack representing them, fighting doggedly against all the non-existent compromising that he perceives in D.C. Apparently it's true, people do get the government that they deserve.

Hopefully the democratic candidate for this senate seat gets a chance. This could very well be a repeat of Delaware.

[coveredinbees]

I'm horrified Lugar lost. It's impossible. How can we be so fucking stupid here?

[Iangould]

52% of Republicans polled say Obama's suppott for gay marriage makes them less likely to vote for him.

[the4thpip]

52% of Republicans polled say Obama's suppott for gay marriage makes them less likely to vote for him.

Yeah, they were going to either stay home or vote for Romney, and now they will stay home or vote for Romney with even more indignation.

[carabas]

52% of Republicans polled say Obama's suppott for gay marriage makes them less likely to vote for him.

Shrugs.

Close to 100% of Republicans wasn't going to vote for him even if there wasn't a Republican running against him.

[Tadhg]

I'm horrified Lugar lost. It's impossible. How can we be so fucking stupid here?

Have you seen your neighbors?

[Shellhead]

Michele Bachmann is beginning to pay the price for all of her hate-speech:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor...easonous_.html

"Bachmann Accused of "Treason" for Swiss Citizenship

"Michele Bachmann’s short-lived experiment as a Swiss citizen ended awkwardly this week, when her beloved philosophy of American exceptionalism came back to bite her in the tushy. It turns out the far right concluded that her brief bout of dual citizenship made her anti-American. Remember that this is the congresswoman who skyrocketed to fame on an accusation that Barack Obama was anti-American. Oh, the irony!"

Bachmann is a hypocrite and an idiot. And no longer Swiss. I wonder if she will ask her gay husband to renounce his Swiss citizenship as well.

[Shawn Hopkins]

Sen. Rand Paul thought this joke was hi-goddamn-larious.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/n...,7525076.story

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul remarked on President Obama's decision to publicly support same-sex marriage by saying, “Call me cynical, but I wasn’t sure his views on marriage could get any gayer.”

I hate this guy like poison. I had major surgery the Saturday before the 2010 election and had a tube very painfully taken out of my side that Monday, but even though I was sick and in pain I got up out of my bed Tuesday morning, put on real pants for the first time in a week and my mom drive me to the polls so I could vote against him.

[Matt Algren]

Even the WSJ admits it now: Austerity has harmed the US economy

Something sinister must be happening over at Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (could it have to do with the ongoing criminal investigation in the UK?). Somehow they've allowed the truth of the past year's government spending cuts to be written in one of their official WSJ economic analysis blogs. Without layoffs in local governments (eg, teachers, firemen, police officers, and other vital public services), the unemployment rate would be a full percentage point lower than it is today, at 7.1%.

There's also a handy chart:



Looking at the data, they come to the undeniable conclusion that spending cuts hurt employment:

In April the household survey showed that that there were 442,000 fewer people working in government than in March. The household survey has a much smaller sample size than the establishment survey, and so is prone to volatility, but the magnitude of the drop is striking: It marks the largest decline on both an absolute and a percentage basis on record going back to 1948. Moreover, the household survey has consistently showed bigger drops in government employment than the establishment survey has.

The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn't been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%. [my emphasis]

So if the government had stayed exactly the same size as it was on December 1, 2008, we would have significantly lower unemployment than we do now. If we had increased the size of the government more than we did with the stimulus--through, say public works projects, increased funding for schools, and other simple, intuitive measures---unemployment could be even lower still. But instead of taking steps we know to have remedied economic problems in the past, Congress started cutting government spending because of the GOP's irrational fears about temporary increases in our public debt--something we've known since the early part of last century has a negative effect on the economy in a recession.

This should be front-page news, and Paul Ryan and his fellow Rand-devotees (the whole Republican Party nowadays) should have to answer for it this fall. While economists and liberals have comprehended the fact that cutting government spending in a recession causes problems for the economy. But now we have data that directly invalidates their screw-you-I've-got-mine, libertarian ideology, evidence that is now so undeniably clear that even the pro-austerity Wall Street Journal can't deny its truth: Budget cuts increase unemployment.

This needs to be the mantra of every Democrat running for office this fall, and it should be repeated by every liberal on every Sunday morning talk show. Budget cuts during an economic crisis hurt the economy. This is a truth that liberals should not shy away from, and it needs to be something the Dems in Congress refuse to compromise on: Cutting government spending when we need it most just means people get fired from their jobs--that is its primary effect--and that is a terrible thing to needlessly inflict on a country that's still reeling from the deepest recession since the Great Depression.