Thread: The GOP in Meltdown

^happily married and has two sons according to his bio.

Originally Posted by Bugs

Obama porkulus package

do you regularly parrot lines from rush limbaugh?

Originally Posted by raycarey

Originally Posted by Bugs

Obama porkulus package

do you regularly parrot lines from rush limbaugh?

I don't listen/read Limbaugh on any kind of regular basis. I haven't heard his show in nearly ten years, and I have not checked his web-site since some time during the election. So I would find it rather difficult to parrot his lines on a regular basis.

so i guess you using 'porkulus' at least twice today is just a coincidence.

sorry for the misunderstanding.

Originally Posted by Bugs

I hope that race did not play a part in why he was selected.

of course not

you seem a bit naive, bugs, despite your well reasoned arguments

It's probably just a coincidence that the Democrats ran a black man for President after a Republican President nominated a black man to the Supreme Court and after another Republican President nominated a black woman as Sec. of State.

Originally Posted by raycarey

Originally Posted by Bugs

I hope that race did not play a part in why he was selected.

it's probably just a coincidence that the RNC selected a black chairman in the same year that obama became president.

...

Originally Posted by raycarey

Originally Posted by Bugs

I hope that race did not play a part in why he was selected.

it's probably just a coincidence that the RNC selected a black chairman in the same year that obama became president.

btw, in the end it came down to two people....a black guy (steele) and a white guy who because of this election, had to quit his country club because it didn't allow blacks.

Originally Posted by attaboy

It's probably just a coincidence that the Democrats ran a black man for President after a Republican President nominated a black man to the Supreme Court and after another Republican President nominated a black woman as Sec. of State.

Originally Posted by Milkman

Originally Posted by attaboy

It's probably just a coincidence that the Democrats ran a black man for President after a Republican President nominated a black man to the Supreme Court and after another Republican President nominated a black woman as Sec. of State.

The Democrats did not run anybody for President.

That's not how American politics work. Parties don't runa candidate.

A candidate will get the nominee in primaries (some of which are open primaries) and caucuses in 50 states, and the leader gets the nominee.

And yes, it's a coincidence. To suggest otherwise, is stupidity.

Originally Posted by attaboy

Originally Posted by raycarey

Originally Posted by Bugs

I hope that race did not play a part in why he was selected.

it's probably just a coincidence that the RNC selected a black chairman in the same year that obama became president.

...

you really need to choose your battles more wisely attaboy.

all you've done here is further expose your ignorance.



but please feel free to expound on your theory that 'the democrats ran a black man' for president in 2008 because clarence thomas was nominated to the supreme court nearly 20 years ago.

and then you can further explain how you can compare one the highest voter turnouts in the nations history to the 91 votes Steele got from a group of republican insiders who were probably sitting in a stale conference room at a hotel near the airport.

i'll be happy to provide more details on how the two finalists for the RNC position were a black man and another guy who had to recently quit his country club because it didn't admit blacks......in a year when the overwhelming majority of blacks registered to vote as democrats.

again, you need to learn how to exercise a bit of self control attaboy.

putting aside attaboy's copy and pasted photo,and the stolen joke.....these points remain unaddressed.....

Originally Posted by raycarey

(attaboy) please feel free to expound on your theory that 'the democrats ran a black man' for president in 2008 because clarence thomas was nominated to the supreme court nearly 20 years ago.

and then you can further explain how you can compare one the highest voter turnouts in the nations history to the 91 votes Steele got from a group of republican insiders

i'll be happy to provide more details on how the two finalists for the RNC position were a black man and another guy who had to recently quit his country club because it didn't admit blacks......in a year when the overwhelming majority of blacks registered to vote as democrats.

attaboy, if (as i suspect) you're going to run and hide from this, you would do well to choose your battles more wisely in the future.

I see my post was deleted. ray, I don't know whether to take the time to respond to your post or to only refer you to Milky's post.

Originally Posted by Milkman

And yes, it's a coincidence. To suggest otherwise, is stupidity.

I do need to ask what you mean by saying I stole a joke? It needs clarification.

& They're just MSNBC wannabees, Atta. Don't waste your time.

Conservatism is Dead

Is it dead? Is it diminishing? This is a long article but worth a scan:

The New Republic
Conservatism Is Dead by Sam Tanenhaus
An intellectual autopsy of the movement.
Post Date Wednesday, February 18

In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory. In 1954, the movement's first national tribune, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was checkmated by the Eisenhower administration and then "condemned" by his Senate colleagues. But the episode, and the passions it aroused, led to the founding of National Review, the movement's first serious political journal. Ten years later, the right's next leader, Barry Goldwater, suffered one of the most lopsided losses in election history. Yet the "draft Goldwater" campaign secured control of the GOP for movement conservatives. In 1976, the insurgent challenge by Goldwater's heir, Ronald Reagan, to incumbent president Gerald Ford was thwarted. But Reagan's crusade positioned him to win the presidency four years later and initiate the conservative "revolution" that remade our politics over the next quarter-century. In each instance, crushing defeat gave the movement new strength and pushed it further along the route to ultimate victory.


Today, the situation is much bleaker. After George W. Bush's two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive "culture war" waged against liberal "elites." That these precepts should have found their final, hapless defender in John McCain, who had resisted them for most of his long career, only confirms that movement doctrine retains an inflexible and suffocating grip on the GOP.
More telling than Barack Obama's victory is the consensus, steadily building since Election Day, that the nation has sunk--or been plunged--into its darkest economic passage since the Great Depression. And, as Obama pushes boldly ahead, apparently with public support, the right is struggling to reclaim its authority as the voice of opposition. The contrast with 1993, when the last Democratic president took office, is instructive. Like Obama, Bill Clinton was elected in hard economic times and, like him, promised a stimulus program, only to see his modest proposal ($19.5 billion) stripped almost bare by the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, even though Democrats had handily won the White House and Senate Republicans formed nearly as small a minority as they do today. The difference was that the Republicans--disciplined, committed, self-assured--held the ideological advantage, which Dole leveraged through repeated use of the filibuster.

Today, such a stratagem seems unthinkable. There is instead almost universal agreement--reinforced by the penitential testimony of Alan Greenspan and, more recently, by grudgingly conciliatory Republicans--that the most plausible economic rescue will involve massive government intervention, quite possibly on the scale of the New Deal/Fair Deal of the 1930s and '40s and perhaps even the New Frontier/Great Society of the 1960s. All this suggests that movement doctrine has not only been defeated but discredited.

Yet, even as the right begins to regroup, it is not clear that its leaders have absorbed the full implications of their defeat. They readily concede that the Democrats are in charge and, in Obama, have a leader of rare political skills. Many on the right also admit that the specific failures of the outgoing administration were legion. But what of the verdict issued on movement conservatism itself?

There, conservatives have offered little apart from self-justifications mixed with harsh appraisals of the Bush years. Some argue that the administration wasn't conservative at all, at least not in the "small government" sense. This is true, but then no president in modern times has seriously attempted to reduce the size of government, and for good reason: Voters don't want it reduced. What they want is government that's "big" for them--whether it's Democrats who call for job-training programs and universal health care or Republicans eager to see billions funneled into "much-needed and underfunded defense procurement," as William Kristol recommended shortly after Obama's victory.

Others on the right blame Bush's heterodoxy on interlopers, chief among them Kristol's band of neoconservative warriors at The Weekly Standard, who beguiled the administration into the Iraq war and an ill-starred Wilsonian crusade for global democracy. But here again the facts are complicated: Bush's foreign policy owes no more to the neoconservative vision of exportable democracy than to the hard-right "rollback" philosophy of the cold war years. Bush's preemptive war against jihadists, with its promise to "take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge," echoes Goldwater's assertion, in 1960, that "given the dynamic, revolutionary character of the enemy's challenge, we [must] ... always try to engage the enemy at times and places, and with weapons, of our own choosing." And it was Reagan, the hero of the movement's putative golden age, who, in 1982, called for a worldwide "crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation."

Perhaps, then, the explanation lies not in the Republicans' ideas but in the defective marketing of them. This is the line taken by party strategists who think Karl Rove and his team of operatives grew complacent after their victories in 2002 and 2004 and failed to update "the brand" to suit changing demographics in Sunbelt states like Colorado and Nevada, with their socially liberal white professionals and economically liberal blue-collar Hispanics. But this thesis evades a big question: Does the movement have anything to offer such constituencies apart from a plea for their votes?

What conservatives have yet to do is confront the large but inescapable truth that movement conservatism is exhausted and quite possibly dead. And yet they should, because the death of movement politics can only be a boon to the right, since it has been clear for some time the movement is profoundly and defiantly un-conservative--in its ideas, arguments, strategies, and above all its vision.

What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to its originator, Edmund Burke, who, in the late eighteenth century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the "organic" unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval. Burke's conservatism was based not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on distrust of all ideologies. In his most celebrated writings, his denunciation of the French Revolution and its English champions, Burke did not seek to justify the ancien regime and its many inequities. Nor did he propose a counter-ideology. Instead he warned against the destabilizing perils of revolutionary politics, beginning with its totalizing nostrums. Robespierre and Danton, the movement ideologues of their day, were inflamed with the Enlightenment vision of the ideal civilization and sacrificed to its abstractions the established traditions and institutions of what Burke called "civil society." They placed an idea of the perfect society over and above the need to improve society as it really existed.

At the same time, Burke recognized that governments were obligated to use their powers to meliorate intolerable conditions. He had, for example, supported the American Revolution because its architects, unlike the French rebels, had not sought to destroy the English government; on the contrary, they petitioned for just representation within it. Had King George III complied, he would have strengthened, not weakened, the Crown and Parliament. Instead, he had inflexibly clung to the hard line and so shared responsibility for the Americans' revolt. "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation," Burke warned. The task of the statesman was to maintain equilibrium between "[t]he two principles of conservation and correction." Governance was a perpetual act of compromise--"sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil." In such a scheme there is no useful place for the either/or of ideological purism.

The story of postwar American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America's pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare.

How did this happen? One reason is that the most intellectually sophisticated founders of postwar conservatism were in many instances ex-Marxists, who moved from left to right but remained persuaded that they were living in revolutionary times and so retained their absolutist fervor. In place of the Marxist dialectic they formulated a Manichaean politics of good and evil, still with us today, and their strategy was to build a movement based on organizing cultural antagonisms. Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy--"statist" social programs; "socialized medicine"; "big labor"; "activist" Supreme Court justices, the "media elite"; "tenured radicals" on university faculties; "experts" in and out of government.

But, if it's clear what the right is against, what exactly has it been for? This question has haunted the movement from its inception in the 1950s, when its principal objective was to undo the New Deal and reinstate the laissez-faire Republicanism of the 1920s. This backward-looking program mystified one leading conservative. Whittaker Chambers, a repentant ex-communist, had passed through a brief counterrevolutionary phase but then, in his last years, had gravitated toward a genuinely classic conservatism. He distilled his thinking in a remarkable sequence of letters written from the self-imposed exile of his Maryland farm, and sent to a young admirer, William F. Buckley Jr. When their relationship began, Buckley--a self-described "radical conservative"--was assembling the group of thinkers and writers who would form the core of National Review, a journal conceived to contest the "liberal monopolists of 'public opinion.'" Buckley was especially keen to recruit Chambers. But Chambers turned him down. He sympathized with the magazine's opposition to increasingly centralized government, but, in practical terms, he believed challenging it was futile. It was evident that New Deal economics had become the basis for governing in postwar America, and the right had no plausible choice but to accept this fact--not because liberals were all-powerful (as some on the right believed) but rather because what the right called "statism" looked very much like a Burkean "correction."

Chambers witnessed the popular demand for the New Deal firsthand. He raised milch cattle, and his neighbors were farmers. Most were archconservative, even reactionary. They had sent the segregationist Democrat Millard Tydings to the Senate, and then, when Tydings had opposed McCarthy's Red-hunting investigations, they had voted him out of office. They were also sworn enemies of programs like FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Act, which tried to offset the volatility of markets by controlling crop yields and fixing prices. Some had even been indicted for refusing to allow farm officials to inspect their crops. Nonetheless, Chambers observed, his typical neighbor happily accepted federal subsidies. In other words, the farmers wanted it both ways. They wanted the freedom to grow as much as they could, even though it was against their best interests. But they also expected the government to bail them out in difficult times. In sum, "the farmers are signing for a socialist agriculture with their feet.

Entire & Link: Conservatism Is Dead

Originally Posted by attaboy

I see my post was deleted. ray, I don't know whether to take the time to respond to your post or to only refer you to Milky's post.

Originally Posted by Milkman

And yes, it's a coincidence. To suggest otherwise, is stupidity.

I do need to ask what you mean by saying I stole a joke? It needs clarification.

so let me get this straight....... attaboy's post from over a week ago was deleted and now he wants me to remember what i was referring to? jesus, get over yourself, i don't have the slightest recollection of the joke you posted...but by what i posted, i'd wager it was far from 'original'.



so attaboy if you're still not going to respond the questions posed directly to you in post #61 and #62 why not go to the games room to enjoy a thrilling game of yahtzee!

Juicy! This is just what the Republicans don't need, right on top of being slam dunked (yet again) by Obama on the Bailout package. They've emerged from that looking churlish and partisan, whilst Obama has both gotten his way and emerged looking squeaky clean and the 'good guy'. He really does seem to have the Rep's number.

And now this- allegations of financial impropriety with campaign funds -

Steele's Campaign Spending Questioned

Agents Contact Sister After Ex-Aide's Claims


Michael S. Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed, his finance chairman from that campaign has told federal prosecutors.
Federal agents in recent days contacted Steele's sister, a spokesman for Steele said yesterday.

The claim about the payment, one of several allegations by Alan B. Fabian, is outlined in a confidential court document. Fabian offered the information last March as he was seeking leniency for himself during plea negotiations on unrelated fraud charges. It is unclear how extensively his claims have been pursued. Prosecutors gave him no credit for cooperation when he was sentenced in October.

Steele spokesman Curt Anderson said he did not know what information the federal agents were seeking, but he dismissed Fabian's allegations as patently false. "It's from, what, a convicted felon? And it has no substantiation in fact," he said.

Fabian's claims emerge as Steele begins his new role at the RNC, where he oversees the raising and spending of hundreds of millions of dollars in party money. The former Maryland lieutenant governor has faced questions about his handling of campaign money in prior elections and was twice fined for missing filing deadlines.

Full Article:- washingtonpost.com

Well, the first line of defence is that the allegations come from a former Aide, convicted on unrelated fraud charges. But the Fed's are investigating- looks like they think there is something fishy.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

This will go down nicely with the flag waving Right- and from their favourite rag, the NY Times no less :-

"This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt."


"The biggest mistake he [Obama] can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either."


"In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15rich.html


Not much good news to report from the 'white Southern male' party right now.

Originally Posted by sabang

Steele's Campaign Spending Questioned........... It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

yes, it will....but i don't think enough will come of it to force him to resign.

Originally Posted by Milkman

Conservatism is Dead

Not hardly. After this recent passage of the Generational Theft Act, conservatives will be back in strength at the 2010 elections. The folks will see just how naked & bereft BO and his socialist policies are...

^ he's kidding?

This should also be posted in the “Obama Stimulus Package” thread,……..where more people might view it.

Republicans Wake Up, Find Themselves In Bed With Idiots

By: Scarecrow Monday February 16, 2009 1: 15 pm


It's starting to dawn on conservatives that their party just screwed itself into political irrelevance. While they've conned Village pundits into reporting how clever Eric Cantor was pretending he's Newt Gingrich in 1993, NRO now realizes that "No, nothing" is not a credible economic recovery policy in 2009.
From The Corner's Bruce Bartlett:


An even better approach, in my opinion, would have been to focus on the details of the stimulus plan and argue that its provisions were not very stimulative—even under Keynesian assumptions. A lot of the money will be wasted without offering any meaningful stimulus. A strong case could be made that waiting a few weeks while a better plan was devised wouldn’t have hurt and might have helped deliver more effective stimulus. But for Republicans to make that argument they would have had to concede that the basic principle of fiscal stimulus was sound.
In the end, Republicans preferred to reject the principle of stimulus, thus taking themselves out of the game. I think that was a mistake, both politically and substantively.


No kidding? Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg suddenly realizes what Obama and Nancy Pelosi's team pulled off:


The real significance about the pork wasn't that it was in there, but that it symbolized the Democrats' effort to fulfill long-term ambitions without having to endure the hassles of debating them. The health-care and welfare provisions as well as the baseline-bloat ploy are much more significant than the porcine nuggets.


Of course, the Beltway still hasn’t fully grasped what just happened. By having their Chairman and Committee staffs essentially write the stimulus bill as a series of budgetary reform bills, and then getting the WH to adopt that process as its own, the Democrats pulled off a stunning redirection in US spending priorities. If you sort out what’s in the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act you’ll find it is many Acts:


1. An Education Reform and School Funding Act, with over $100 billion


2. An Energy Alternative and Efficiency Investment Act, with $21 billion


3. An Unemployment Compensation Reform Act, increasing benefits, making more people eligible, with $78 billion.


4. A Medicaid Reform and Augmentation Act with $87 billion


5. A National Infrastructure Investment Act with $120 billion scattered in various Acts.


6. A Science and Technology R&D Act, with about $29 billion


7. A Middle-Class Tax Relief Act, $100+ billion, not counting AMT fix.


The single “simulus bill” was in fact many bills, each one of which would have been a struggle to pass, but they all passed at once, collectively restructuring US budget priorities (except for defense).


John Boehner threw the bill on the floor Friday night, not because he didn’t know what was in it but because he did. As they read their local papers announcing all the spending that's about to start in their home districts over their objections, the Republicans are waking up to the fact they just screwed themselves on national television, and their embarrassment is showing.


But not to worry: they can redeem themselves by adding spending earmarks in the budget reconciliation bill.


Link: http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/3692

Republican Congressman Says Republicans Will Cancel Stimulus Bill If They Retake Majority in 2010



It's good to have dreams and aspirations, isn't it? Too bad that the Republican party's aspirations appear to be centered on destroying the country. After two decades of nearly unfettered access to run the nation, the Republicans are trying their damndest to obstruct and torpedo the stimulus bill and any success that President Obama might have.


And they actually think this will win them supporters. Astonishing. Even David Frum, who hasn't seen a really bad idea he wouldn't cheerlead, as long as it came out of the mouth of a Republican, thinks the GOP is "brain dead".


Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) goes on FOX News and vows that the Republican Party will cancel the stimulus bill if they retake the majority in 2010.
All I can tell you, buddy, is that you just keep talking like that. Keep proving how out of touch with what's really happening with Americans right now. Keep showing how petty and petulant and how you place party over country. We'll see about that majority in 2010 with that attitude.


Link: http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/republican-congressman-says-republica

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) goes on FOX News and vows that the Republican Party will cancel the stimulus bill if they retake the majority in 2010.
All I can tell you, buddy, is that you just keep talking like that. Keep proving how out of touch with what's really happening with Americans right now.

That's the whole point, SL, it's happening RIGHT NOW.

^^ the GOP is desperately out of touch....they should get ready for at least several more years in the wilderness, because americans aren't going to vote them back into positions of power anytime soon.

Originally Posted by raycarey

^^ the GOP is desperately out of touch....they should get ready for at least several more years in the wilderness, because americans aren't going to vote them back into positions of power anytime soon.

We'll see what happens. I think it depends on what the GOP tries to mold and change into.

During the GWB years, and 6 of it with GOP control of the House and Senate, there was rampant spending.

Now it seems the GOP is trying revert back to 1994, to the era of "fiscal responsibility' during the Gingrich lead.

I personally, don't believe the GOP can go back to the GOP of 1994 after getting so far away from it.

The question is, what will voters think?

We'll have to wait and see 21 months. Twenty-one months is a political life-time.