Category Archives: Elections

June 9, 2011 · 6:26 pm

Democratic Party Affiliation Grows

See what happens when the GOP declares War on Medicare?

If the Dems will only hold fast in defending Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security while the Republicans continue to try to destroy them, they will become the majority Party for the foreseeable future…..

As long as the economy doesn’t crash…

From Taegen Goddard’s Political Wire:

A new Gallup poll finds 45% of Americans identified as Democrats last month as compared to 39% who identified as Republicans.

The six-point Democratic edge is the largest measured since October 2009, when the gap was seven points.

via Democratic Party Affiliation Grows.

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June 8, 2011 · 9:54 pm

Dynasty 2012: The Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin Cat Fight

Sounds like they are going to try to play this like a dumber version of “Dynasty” with Palin and Bachmann trying to be dime store versions of Crystal and Alexis….

Linda Evans and Joan Collins, they ain’t…

And smart they ain’t either….

Still, “Dynasty’s” been gone for many years.  I guess it’s time for a pale imitation to emerge as the TV Remake:  “Dynasty 2012”.

Everything else is starting to look like the 1980’s (See Wall Street -the Movie), so why not redo this too?

Isn’t that how the entertainment world works?  Wait a few years then remake good, original ideas into a second rate remake?  Or is that GOP Politics I’m thinking of?

Since Reagan, it’s so hard to separate the two worlds.  But, god knows these two women are entertainers and not real politicians….

From Salon.com:

Poor Michele Bachmann! She’d been working the divisive culture warrior routine for years, to great success, when suddenly John McCain transforms a low-profile Alaska governor into the Queen of the Tea Parties. It’s enough to make anyone resentful. So it’s not too surprising that the Bachmann presidential campaign has begun its war with the Sarah Palin pseudo-campaign.

We live in a society that expects and sometimes demands that ambitious women battle each other for the limited number of slots available to them at the top of power structures, so the story of Bachmann “taking on” Palin would’ve been inevitable even if Bachmann strategist Ed Rollins hadn’t begun directly drawing contrasts between the two. (Yes, we also live in a society where Ed Rollins is working to get Michele Bachmann elected president and we just have to deal with that.)

The problem is, as Steve Kornacki explained, Bachmann’s campaign began gearing up when it looked like there was no chance of Palin entering the race. But Palin’s riding a bus across the country now for some reason, so Bachmann’s people need to make sure she remains a pseudo-candidate.

First, Rollins accused Palin of being unserious on talk radio yesterday, and he pointed out that Palin quit her job, while Bachmann is still an elected official. In an interview with Politico’s Ben Smith, Rollins laid out the Bachmann campaign’s official anti-Palin message: Bachmann is smarter than Palin but just as adorable:

Bachmann will “be so much more substantive,” Rollins said. “People are going to say, ‘I gotta make a choice and go with the intelligent woman who’s every bit as attractive.'” (See also: Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann size each other up)

“I’m not afraid of Palin,” he said, adding the strategy would have been the same for Mike Huckabee. (See also: Ed Rollins hops on Michele Bachmann bandwagon)

via Oh no, Bachmann and Palin are fighting – 2012 Elections – Salon.com.

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June 8, 2011 · 5:50 pm

Decline and Fall of the American Empire

A fascinating article in The Guardian from the UK  that is worth reading in it’s entirety.

Being a student of History, I have often wondered if we were at the beginning of the end of the American Empire.  Or maybe in the middle of it….

Like people, Empires have a finite life span.  Neither the Roman nor the British Empire lasted forever.  On my bad days, I wonder if we aren’t all living in a declining democracy on the way to being a third world country.

I particularly have this feeling when I travel by air or read too much about the Republican positions….

Don’t go screeching USA! USA! USA! at me…

Read the article and think if there are ways we can reverse this- or is it already  too late?

Talk amongst yourselves…

 

Let me put an alternative hypothesis. America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show.

The experience of both Rome and Britain suggests that it is hard to stop the rot once it has set in, so here are the a few of the warning signs of trouble ahead: military overstretch, a widening gulf between rich and poor, a hollowed-out economy, citizens using debt to live beyond their means, and once-effective policies no longer working. The high levels of violent crime, epidemic of obesity, addiction to pornography and excessive use of energy may be telling us something: the US is in an advanced state of cultural decadence.

Empires decline for many different reasons but certain factors recur. There is an initial reluctance to admit that there is much to fret about, and there is the arrival of a challenger (or several challengers) to the settled international order. In Spain’s case, the rival was Britain. In Britain’s case, it was America. In America’s case, the threat comes from China.

Britain’s decline was extremely rapid after 1914. By 1945, the UK was a bit player in the bipolar world dominated by the US and the Soviet Union, and sterling – the heart of the 19th-century gold standard – was rapidly losing its lustre as a reserve currency. There had been concerns, voiced as far back as the 1851 Great Exhibition, that the hungrier, more efficient producers in Germany and the US threatened Britain’s industrial hegemony. But no serious policy action was taken. In the second half of the 19th century there was a subtle shift in the economy, from the north of England to the south, from manufacturing to finance, from making things to living off investment income. By 1914, the writing was on the wall.

In two important respects, the US today differs from Britain a century ago. It is much bigger, which means that it benefits from continent-wide economies of scale, and it has a presence in the industries that will be strategically important in the first half of the 21st century. Britain in 1914 was over-reliant on coal and shipbuilding, industries that struggled between the world wars, and had failed to grasp early enough the importance of emerging new technologies.

Even so, there are parallels. There has been a long-term shift of emphasis in the US economy away from manufacturing and towards finance. There is a growing challenge from producers in other parts of the world.

via Decline and fall of the American empire | Business | The Guardian.

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June 7, 2011 · 11:30 pm

Heartless Hypocrite Eric Cantor Calls On Weiner To Resign

There are a lot of despicable politicians, but right now I can’t think of one worse than Eric Cantor, Republican Congressman of Virginia…

First he wants to destroy Medicaid and Medicare.

Then he only wants to help tornado victims in Missouri if he can cut money somewhere else in the budget.

Now, he’s jumping into the Anthony Weiner story and saying he should resign.

Funny, he didn’t say that about David Vitter or John Ensign.  But then, they were Republicans…

I don’t know how this man sleeps at night. Or how anyone sleeps with him….

He really should be left alone under a bridge like the troll he is…

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is now calling on Democratic New York Rep. Anthony Weiner to resign, in the wake of Weiner’s admission on Monday that he has engaged in online sexual exchanges with younger women, and that he had lied about the matter for the past week after accidentally posting a public Tweet, intended to have been a direct message to a college student, of a photo of his underwear-clad crotch.

“I don’t condone his activity. And I think he should resign,” Cantor said after a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Louisa, Virginia, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reports.

“We’ve got a lot of serious challenges in this country and a lot of work for Congress to do,” Cantor also added. “The last thing we need to do is get enmeshed in a discussion about Congressman Weiner and his Twitter activities.”

via Cantor Calls On Weiner To Resign | TPMDC.

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June 7, 2011 · 9:43 pm

Weiner, Vitter, Spitzer, Ensign, Edwards, Tobias: One of These Is Not Like the Others : Ms Magazine Blog

Great article, from Jodi Jacobson at MS Magazine Blog, about the differences between Anthony Weiner and the other recent sexcapades…

I could not agree more with this article….

Weiner’s mistakes were nothing compared to the other guys.

I’m frankly tired of this story and ready to move on, but our Puritanical country and the hypocrites in Washington have to ride this a while longer…

Anthony Weiner is a very ambitious man who has taken a big hit to his career and his ego.  But he is a good Congressman.

He is going to have enough to do to save his marriage and his career.  This has hit him hard and he’s going to have to pay a lot of penance and eat a lot of crow.  Let’s leave him alone to work through this so he can get back to doing the work he was elected to do.

This is all really none of our business….

Hat tip to Pam Spaulding at Pam’s House Blend where I originally saw the link to this:

 

Is it dumb and poor personal judgment for a politician to send photos of himself in various stages of undress and arousal to women who are not his wife? In my opinion, yes. Is it my business? Not really, unless he has, for example, been railing against “sexting,” faulting women, contraception, abortion, and gay people with the downfall of America and earthquakes in far-off places, or has been seeking to restrict people’s rights based on a bastardized version of morality. Is it even dumber to go on an “I-did-not-send-pictures-to-[that]-woman” pity tour to make himself look like the victim of hacking? Oh, yeah. He may yet be forced to resign for his stupidity.

But, I don’t necessarily think he should have to do so. As I have said here before, I really do not care in what sexual practices consenting adults engage or what agreements are forged between two consenting adults, especially if the spouse of a given Twitterer knows about and lives with her or his spouse’s preferences.

What I do care about is the “holier-than-thou” moralizing in which so many of these philanderers engage, and the fact that they both pretend to be better than the rest of us, and, even worse, attempt to legislate our private lives.

Weiner did none of this.

The others did.

via Weiner, Vitter, Spitzer, Ensign, Edwards, Tobias: One of These Is Not Like the Others : Ms Magazine Blog.

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June 7, 2011 · 9:30 pm

The GOP’s Dangerous Arrogance

Great article up at YahooNews…

Even I- no political innocent- am still shocked at how callous and blatantly Political the GOP is…

They really don’t seem to care about the Country, only about their political power and their wealthy campaign contributors.

Defaulting on the national debt is just unthinkable.  If they do not raise the debt ceiling, the entire economy will be thrown into chaos and Wall Street will go crazy.  I hope their Corporate owners force the Republicans to do the right thing, but I’m afraid they are too out of control right now even for the Wall Street moneymen to bring them into line.  This is scary stuff….

The Republicans have done everything they can to slow the recovery just so the economy will either collapse into crisis again or be so weak they can use it politically.

They have no interest in Statesmanship or in what is best for the Country.  All they care about is what is best for the GOP, the Rich and the Corporations who fund them…

I just hope the Rich and the Corporations still have enough control to stop the GOP from destroying the economy just for Political gain.  If they do play politics with the debt ceiling, even the Rich and the Corporations will feel the hurt.  But the Middle Class will feel it more.  As usual….

 

Nationally and globally, the economy is at a tipping point. The GOP, driven by invincible ignorance or cynical design – and perhaps both – is working overtime to trash the recovery with budget cuts that would drain demand from the economy – or a debt ceiling vote that could trigger a financial collapse equal to 2008, or perhaps unpredictably graver. For proof, all you had to do was listen to Mitt Romney’s announcement speech today. In it, he made a smarmy attempt to blame Barack Obama for the economic pain actually caused by the dereliction of duty by George W. Bush & Co., pain that was then prolonged by the obstruction of congressional Republicans. Those legislators contrived successfully to limit the stimulus package, block a second one, and forthwith blame the stimulus that saved us from another Great Depression for the slow climb out of the Great Recession. Never, of course, did they mention that the America’s deep deficits were generated by the fraudulent Bush war in Iraq and the unfair Bush tax cuts, which were founded on the false premise that they would pay for themselves.

The same tawdry spectacle has played out for two years and more in America’s capitol, a place that is still, despite recently fashionable worries about its destiny, the indispensible engine of the world economy. Indeed, the future of billions of human beings is determined by our elections, in which most of them have no vote. JFK once noted that the proudest boast of the ancient world was the boast of democratic citizenship: Civis Romanus sum: ‘I am a Roman citizen.’ The inescapable reality of the present world, for better or worse, is that people everywhere have to say, Civis Americanus sum. That’s strikingly clear here in Europe, in good times and bad. President Obama is a more popular, hope-giving figure than the leaders he recently visited; he’s the counterpoint to Bush and the redeemer of an American image carelessly disfigured during the first decade of the century.

And now the GOP that has moved decidedly to the right of Bush would compound his errors. Congressional Republicans could shatter the restored credibility of the United States by refusing to protect its full faith and credit by raising the national debt ceiling or by holding that essential measure hostage to the repeal of the New Deal – something that never even occurred to Ronald Reagan or either Bush president. In those Oval Offices, they regularly signed debt-ceiling increases.

via The GOP’s dangerous arrogance – Yahoo! News.

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June 6, 2011 · 7:41 pm

Anthony Weiner Admits He Tweeted Lewd Photos, Will Not Resign

Personally, I think this is much ado about nothing…

Not a real bright move, but no big deal since this was between consenting adults…

I also think Anthony Weiner is an incredibly effective Progressive politician, with an unfortunate name, who is going to be drug through the mud over this…

The Right Wing wants him out of the fight and they’re going to do all they can to bring him down.

To me, this is an issue to be handled between him and his wife.  This is the type of foolishness that, in the good old days, would not even have been reported.  (Remember JFK, among others….)

He needs to take the heat for a while and ride this out…

Thank god, he a represents New York City district and they’ll probably shrug this off…

Remember, Republican Senator David Vitter of Louisiana broke the law by playing with hookers and he is still in office….

There are also two probable side effects to this:

1.  This will put an end to the Gay rumors and innuendoes about Congressman Wiener-which I always thought were wishful thinking.

and

2.  Sarah Palin is probably standing in front of a web cam right now taking topless shots and sending them to Glenn Beck to get the media back to paying attention to her….

From Talking Points Memo:

Anthony Weiner admitted to lying about a lewd photo he sent to a college student in Washington state, telling reporters at a press conference in New York that he concocted a phony hacking story in a panic after deleting the public message.

“Last Friday night i tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle,” he said, fighting back tears. “Once I realized I had posted to Twitter, I panicked, I took it down and said I had been hacked. I then continued to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake.”

He added: “To be clear, the picture was of me and I sent this. I am deeply sorry for the pain this has caused my wife Huma and our family and my constituents, friends, supporters and staff.”

As for his own future, Weiner pledged to remain in Congress, saying he had not broken any law to his knowledge. “I am not resigning,” Weiner said, telling reporters he would try to convince his constituents this was a “personal failing” and did not alter his record.

via Anthony Weiner Admits He Tweeted Lewd Photos, Will Not Resign | TPMDC.

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June 6, 2011 · 7:45 am

Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show Ratings Soar, Fox News Slumps in May Ratings

Good news from the Media world…

Maybe Fox News’ audience is dying off faster than anticipated…or people are finally getting wise.

And Jon Stewart has been at the top of his game this year…

Another good trend for next year’s elections if it holds….

From Rawstory.com:

Comedy Central and “The Daily Show” both surged in the May Nielsen ratings, posting their best numbers yet. “The Daily Show” dominated its time slot across all of television, cable and broadcast, and boasted a very impressive 19 percent increase in viewership in May alone.

Meanwhile, according to Mediabistro’s TV Newser, Fox News suffered an overall decline in viewers in the highly sought-after 25-to-54-year old demographic for May, with total ratings down 10 percent. Bill O’Reilly’s viewership dropped 9 percent, Sean Hannity’s 6 percent, with Greta Van Susteren and Glenn Beck suffering the steepest losses with Van Susteren’s “On the Record” losing 12 percent of its audience and Glenn Beck sliding a whopping 17 percent.

Some of the fall-off in Beck’s numbers may be attributable to the fact that his show is going off the air, but it has been a consistent loser in the ratings for several months. The drop in public interest is echoed in ratings for radio shows hosted by Beck and Rush Limbaugh, which have each lost a third of their listenership in the last year, according to the radio polling group Arbitron.

The new Nielsen numbers show that “The Daily Show” averaged 2.3 million viewers, beating every program on Fox except Bill O’Reilly’s average of 2.8 million. “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” beat all other cable and broadcast programming in a number of categories, including having the most affluent viewers and the most active web-sties.

via Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show ratings soar, Fox News slumps in May numbers | The Raw Story.

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June 5, 2011 · 10:38 pm

Sarah Palin On Paul Revere Ride: I Didn’t Get History Wrong

Uh, yes she did…

It’s so hard to post this without an outburst of profanity…

She was WRONG and she can’t even admit it.

Facts are facts and she doesn’t know hers.

She is an ignorant simpleton who wants all the media coverage she can get, but only on her own terms.

I can’t believe people take her seriously.  Her being accepted as a “legitimate” candidate for President of the United States is just ridiculous.  It makes the entire country look bad.

That sounds so much nicer than what I’m really thinking….

WASHINGTON (AP/The Huffington Post) — Sarah Palin says she didn’t mess up her history on Paul Revere.

The potential 2012 presidential candidate was in Boston on Thursday as part of her bus tour when she was asked about the Revolutionary War hero.

Palin said Revere “warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms.”

Palin, a paid Fox News contributor, told “Fox News Sunday” that she was correct. She says there were British soldiers in the area for years before Revere’s legendary ride, and that he was warning them, as well as his fellow colonists.

“Part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there that ‘hey, you’re not going to take American arms, you are not going to beat our own well-armed persons individual private militia that we have.'”

She blamed her previous answer on the media, saying it was a “gotcha question.”

The Paul Revere House’s website says that on April 18, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren instructed Revere to ride to Lexington, Mass., to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them.

via Sarah Palin On Paul Revere Ride: I Didn’t Get History Wrong (VIDEO).

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June 5, 2011 · 10:28 pm

Prison Sentence Doomed John Edwards Plea Deal

Fascinating article from the News and Observer about the behind-the-scenes negotiations relating to John Edwards’ indictment…

Just before John Edwards was indicted Friday, prosecutors made a final offer: They would accept his guilty plea to three misdemeanor campaign finance law violations in the $925,000 cover-up of his affair.With the deal, the former Democratic vice-presidential nominee would avoid a felony conviction – and almost certainly keep the law license that had made him wealthy.But there was a catch.The government wanted to dictate a sentence that would result in up to six months of prison for Edwards, even with the plea to lesser charges.Edwards and his lawyers were concerned. They wanted the ability to at least argue to a judge for alternatives, such as a halfway house, weekend releases, home arrest or some arrangement that would allow Edwards to be with his school-age children. He is a single parent after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, in December.But the way the possible plea deal was structured, the Edwards lawyers believed they would be muzzled from advocating at all about Edwards confinement before a judge, according to multiple people who were involved in the negotiations. Those sources described the plea negotiations in detail on a condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.It was the last significant issue to be resolved for a plea. If Edwards didnt agree, he would be indicted on multiple felony charges.Edwards, 57, understood the risk. As a trial lawyer, he had sometimes spurned offers of settlements to take his chances with a jury, often winning big judgments. Would he do that again?The clock was ticking.

MORE:   Prison sentence doomed Edwards plea deal – John Edwards case – NewsObserver.com.

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