Once GOP stronghold, West veers into Dems' column

This is an interesting piece from the Associated Press that speaks to the complex currents of political change. The same independent spirit that resists taxation also fuels "liberal" causes like reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and legalizing pot. Ultimately, we're all more complex than simple party labels.

It also includes this amusing quote from a libertarian: "The West is the most American part of America."

Once GOP stronghold, West veers into Dems' column - Associated Press, Jan 26, 2013

The Compromiser

BA posted what seems like ages ago, "Disappointed with Obama?" back in December 2009.  I must say that I am disappointed.  Governing IS different, much, much different than campaigning; that much is clear for the Administration.  But all the talk of being bipartisan and bringing the two parties together took his focus away from doing what is good for the country, or rather, doing what HE believes in.

Then again, what does Obama believe in?  Does he not believe in universal healthcare that is not a silly auto insurance version of mandatory purchase from a private insurer?  Does he not believe in regulating the excesses of capitalism?  Does he not believe in a tax code that is progressive and pushing it through Congress?  Does he believe in pushing his agenda through Congress?  He gave too much credit to the Democratic and Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, which led to the 2010 losses in the House.  He did not take full advantage of the Democratic control nor manage to fight off the obstructionist Repub strategy.  Was he unable or unwilling or something else?

Meanwhile, his jobs bill sits at a time when the economy added only 80,000 job in October and the longtime unemployed are starting to lose their benefits.  Are we seriously looking at a Carter "malaise" once again?  I know, Obama didn't create the economic crisis, but he definitely took his left wing base for granted.  But this ain't 1980 all over again, either.  See my Republican presidential field post...

It is said that politics is the art of compromise.  Is it really, and to this extent when the nation needs true leadership?  I cannot help the feeling of disappointment and opportunties lost.  Whither America?

They're Baaack! 2012 Presidential Elections, of course.

What goes around comes around, and here we go again.  The 2012 presidential election season has already started.  And we now have a blog to record our comments for posterity.

So, are ya ready for some football...I mean...Political Discourse?!  Looking forward to your contributions.

Fwd: The False Hope of Bipartisanship - BRM

Apologies to BRM as the article below (and others which I will post here shortly) had been stuck in our Google Groups site since Feb. Doh! And for some reason, I did not have email forwarded from that site, so I never received it. Since we don't really check that site, please post to our blog, not that we're "crazy go nuts" blogging all the time. ;-) Appreciate your support.

Thanks, BRM, for the article. I think this is quite telling and topical even months later, given the current health care debate, distortion and disinformation. More comments to come after reading the article more thoroughly.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Brian Menard" <brian_men...@hotmail.com>
Date: Feb 16, 11:05 am
Subject: The False Hope of Bipartisanship
To: AMoMaI Group

Friends:

Great piece by political scientiest Alan Abramowitz, from Larry
Sabato's Crystal Ball (see Sabato's Crystal Ball - Vol. VII, Iss. 6 -
SENATE 2010 UPDATE - @ Larry J. Sabato
<goodpolit...@virginia.edu<mailto:goodpolit...@virginia.edu>>).

In it, a not-by-any-measure-conservative academic argues effectively the point that is the source of great frustration with President Obama for conservatives like me. I disagree soundly - though not surprisingly - with Abramowitz's suggestion that we stop pretending to be bipartisan and just push the socialist agenda. I agree soundly, though, that President Obama is trying to push two incompatible rhetorical lines. To put my own priority in place of Abramowitz's preference for the abandonment of bipartisanship, I echo his essential point that you can't claim you want bipartisanship without being willing to make concessions to bipartisanship. I wrote an unpublished op-ed (after Senator Obama announced formally his candidacy on the steps of the Springfield Capitol two years ago) that argued his bipartisan/postpartisan appeal essentially said, "Hey, all you Republicans, if you would just join our left-wing socialist agenda and get out of the way, we could work together to do great things for the country." While I had the audacity to hope the new administration would prioritize its rhetoric pushing bipartisanship over its rhetoric pushing leftist policies, President Obama seems to dismiss the moderates who helped elect him and conservatives like me who didn't but nonetheless want to work with him on a truly bipartisan basis. As Newt Gingrich stated a couple weeks ago on ABC's "This Week", you can't bake the cake yourself and then write the other side's name in the frosting on top to call it a bipartisan effort. "We won" keeps getting shoved in the face of such folks like a scoop of misplaced doggie-doo to remind people that - contrary to claims of messianic Barack disciples - we should not repeat the mistake they made in electing someone who promised to change the tone of Washington. I argued during the campaing that McCain was the real candidate for changing how things are done in Washington. Obama made a much better case, though, disingenuous as it was. After the election I argued that President-Elect Obama had a special opportunity to make real change, not just partisan policy change, and that doing so would elevate him from being another partisan President to being a real statesman and leader. He has gone the wrong direction in this regard, and he is killing fast the good will that people like me have maintained. I will hold on to hope. Increasingly, though, whether because the President is too naïve/weak/insecure to lead the left-wing leadership of Congress or because his rhetoric of bipartisanship/postpartisanship is truly meaningless, what I see is just audacity without much cause for hope in the long run.

-BRM
---------------------------------------------------------------------------­------------------------
The False Hope of Bipartisanship
[from Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball: see Sabato's Crystal Ball - Vol.
VII, Iss. 6 - SENATE 2010 UPDATE - @ Larry J. Sabato
<goodpolit...@virginia.edu<mailto:goodpolit...@virginia.edu>>]

Alan Abramowitz

It's not a matter of "if." It's a matter of "when." As in, when will all of the feel-good rhetoric about Democrats and Republicans joining hands to solve the nation's problems come to an end and open partisan warfare resume in Washington? In fact, that time may already be here. Despite Barack Obama's efforts to reach out to Republican leaders and conservative intellectuals since his election and his willingness to modify his economic stimulus package to accommodate Republicans' desire for smaller spending increases and larger tax cuts, the President isn't getting much love from the other side of the aisle.

One day after Mr. Obama ventured to Capitol Hill to urge Republican lawmakers to support his $819 billion stimulus package, House Republicans voted 177-0 against the bill. And despite intense efforts to reach an agreement acceptable to moderates in both parties, only three Republicans ended up supporting the bill in the Senate--just one more than the bare minimum needed to avert a filibuster. Meanwhile, conservative pundits and talk-show hosts have been hammering the President's plan as old-fashioned pork-barrel politics or socialism in disguise, and some former Bush Administration officials, including Dick Cheney, have been suggesting that his orders to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and ban the use of waterboarding and other
"enhanced interrogation techniques" are jeopardizing the safety of the American people.

The new president is still enjoying a honeymoon with the public. According to the Gallup Poll, almost two-thirds of Americans approve of the job that he is doing so far. That's quite a change from his predecessor who left office with an approval rating of about 30 percent. Even among Republicans, Mr. Obama started his term with a 43 percent approval rating and only a 30 percent disapproval rating--which is why most Republican leaders and conservative commentators, with the notable exception of Rush Limbaugh, have been reluctant to criticize the new president too harshly, claiming that they wish him well despite their disagreements.

Don't expect the honeymoon to last very long, though. The more decisions the president makes, the more he is going to offend the Republican base and the more free Republican leaders and conservative pundits are going to feel to attack him. That's because many of the policies that Mr. Obama supports, from withdrawing American troops from Iraq and lifting the ban on American aid, to international organizations that provide abortion counseling, to expanding government-sponsored health insurance and making it easier for unions to organize workers, are anathema to the large majority of Republican voters as well as the large majority of Republican office-holders.

One of the most important characteristics of public opinion in the United States today is polarization. Americans agree that the country has serious problems but they disagree sharply about what needs to be done about the economy, health care, climate change, the war in Iraq, gay rights, abortion, and a host of other issues. Democrats generally line up on one side of these issues while Republicans generally line up on the opposing side. And the biggest differences are found among the most interested, informed, and active members of the public--the people whose opinions matter the most to political leaders.

Journalists and editorial writers tend to see partisan conflict as a product of petty rivalries and personality clashes. They assume that Democratic and Republican leaders could settle their differences if they really wanted to, and that policies with broad bipartisan support would be better for the country than policies supported by only one party. But the major reason why partisan conflict has been so intense in the United States in recent years is not that Democratic and Republican office-holders don't like each other, but that they have fundamental disagreements on the major issues facing the country.

Since the 1970s the Democratic Party has been moving to the left, the
Republican Party has been moving to the right, and the center has been disappearing. The conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans who once exercised considerable influence in Washington are almost extinct. There are so few remaining moderates, and the ideological gulf separating the parties is so wide, that bipartisan compromise on most issues is almost impossible. And rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans, especially those who pay attention to politics, have been moving apart as well. As a result, politicians who try to compromise with the other side risk antagonizing their own base.

Contrary to the claims of some pundits and editorial writers, there is no clear relationship between bipartisanship and good public policy. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 had broad bipartisan support. Twenty-nine Senate Democrats and 82 House Democrats voted for the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq; almost all of them ended up regretting it. And some very successful policies have been produced by highly partisan decision-making processes. In 1993, President Clinton's first budget passed Congress without a single Republican vote. Despite claims by Newt Gingrich and other GOP leaders that the tax increases included in that budget would throw the economy into a tailspin, the result was eight years of economic growth and shrinking deficits.

To win Republican support for his budget, President Clinton would have had to give up the tax increases on upper income Americans that were a critical component of his economic plan. Similarly, to win more than token Republican support for his economic stimulus package, President Obama will almost certainly have to agree to much larger tax cuts and much smaller increases in public expenditures than his economic policy advisors believe are desirable.

Barack Obama was elected on a promise of bringing change to Washington. But during the campaign he talked about two kinds of change: change in the content of public policy and change in the way Washington works and especially in what he described as the excessive partisanship of the Bush era. The problem is that these two kinds of change may be incompatible. Appointing a few Republicans to the cabinet and inviting some Republican members of Congress over to the White House to watch the Super Bowl may win Mr. Obama some compliments, but it's unlikely to win him any votes on legislation. That would require making significant concessions on the content of that legislation.

The last two elections have drastically reduced the number of moderate Republicans in the House and Senate, leaving the party more dominated than ever by hard-line conservatives who represent safe Republican districts and states. In order to win more than token support from congressional Republicans, therefore, President Obama would have to make major policy concessions to these hard-line conservatives--concessions that would almost certainly be unacceptable not only to the vast majority of congressional Democrats, but also to the vast majority of politically engaged Democrats in the country. Such concessions would require him to abandon commitments that he made to key Democratic constituencies during the 2008 campaign on issues such as health care, education, climate change, reproductive rights, and labor law reform.

Despite the President's rhetoric about the need for both parties to work together to solve the country's problems and his efforts to reach out to Republicans and conservatives, there is no indication that he is willing to make such concessions and he would be foolish to do so. It would only be seen as a sign of weakness and would lead to demands for even bigger concessions in the future.

Like it or not, in order to produce the kinds of policy changes for which he campaigned, Mr. Obama is going to have to depend overwhelmingly on the support of his fellow Democrats in the Congress and in the country. So expect more party-line votes in the House and Senate, more complaints from Republican leaders about being ignored, and more strident attacks on the president by conservative pundits and talk-show hosts. As a wise man once said, "politics ain't beanbag."

Same Ol' Dems: A View from the Left

Here's a decidedly opposite take on what Obama and the Dems might do, compared to what BRM wrote previously. I mostly agree with the author; however, given that the right and the left view Obama/Dems with suspicion, doesn't that kinda show that Obama will rule from the center? All the hubbub prior to him even being inaugurated certainly speaks to the excitement and opportunity that everyone feels and to what an intense microscope will be on the Obama administration. From Salon.com:
The Democrats of 2002 and 2007 haven't gone anywhere

Liberal Media Bias?

From: Brian Adamson
Subject: Liberal Media Bias?
Date: Monday, September 8, 2008, 11:37 AM

Hi: Really agree with this article. Let me know what you-all think?

We're Gonna Frickin' Lose this Thing (Adam McKay: The Huffington Post)

"Stop saying that!" my wife says to me. But this is not a high school football game and I'm not a cheerleader with a bad attitude. This is an election and as things stand now, we're gonna frickin' lose this thing. Obama and McCain at best are even in the polls nationally and in a recent Gallup poll McCain is ahead by four points.

Something is not right. We have a terrific candidate and a terrific VP candidate. We're coming off the worst eight years in our country's history. Six of those eight years the Congress, White House and even the Supreme Court were controlled by the Republicans and the last two years the R's have filibustered like tantrum throwing 4-year-olds, yet we're going to elect a Republican who voted with that leadership 90% of the time and a former sportscaster who wants to teach Adam and Eve as science? That's not odd as a difference of opinion, that's logically and mathematically queer.

It reminds me of playing blackjack (a losers game). You make all the right moves, play the right hands but basically the House always wins. I know what you're going to say " But I won twelve hundred dollars last year in Atlantic City!" Of course there are victories. The odds aren't tilted crazy, but there is a 51%-49% advantage. And in the long run, the house has to win. The house will win.

So what is this house advantage the Republicans have? It's the press. There is no more fourth estate. Wait, hold on...I'm not going down some esoteric path with theories on the deregulation of the media and corporate bias and CNN versus Fox...I mean it: there is no more functioning press in this country. And without a real press the corporate and religious Republicans can lie all they want and get away with it. And that's the 51% advantage.

Think this is some opinion being wryly posited to titillate other bloggers and inspire dialogue with Tucker Carlson or Gore Vidal? Fuck that. Four corporations own all the TV channels. All of them. If they don't get ratings they get canceled or fired. All news is about sex, blame and anger, and fear. Exposing lies about amounts of money taken from lobbyists and votes cast for the agenda of the last eight years does not rate. The end.

So one side can lie and get away with it. Now let's throw in one more advantage. Voter caging and other corruption on the local level with voting. Check out the article here on HuffPost about Ohio messing with 600K voters. If only five thousand of those voters don't or can't vote that's a huge advantage in a contest that could be decided by literally dozens of votes. That takes us to about a 52 to 48% advantage.

I'm not even getting into the fact that the religious right teaches closed mindedness so it's almost impossible to gain new voters from their pool because people who disagree with them are agents of the devil. I just want to look at two inarguable realities: A) we have no more press and B) the Repubs are screwing with the voters on the local level.

I'm telling you, we're going to lose this thing. And afterwords we'll blame ourselves the same way we did with Gore and Kerry (two candidates a thousand times more qualified to lead than W Bush.) Just watch.. McCain wins by a point or two and we all walk around saying things like "Obama was too well spoken." "Biden wasn't lovable enough." "I shouldn't have split those eights." "Why did I hit on 16? Why?!"

So what do we do?

1) We give definitive clear speeches like Biden and Obama gave the other day about how no one talked about any issues at the Republican Convention and how they outright lied. But we do them over and over again. 2) We use the one place where it's still a 50-50 game -- the internet -- as much as we can. 3) But most importantly we should bring up re-regulating the media and who owns it and what that conflict of interest is a lot more. By pretending there's no conflict of interest we're failing to alert the public that they're being lied to or given a looking at a coin at the bottom of a pool slanted truth. Every time a pundit or elected official is on any TV news program it should be a polite formality to mention that GE has made such and such billions off the war in Iraq by selling arms or that Murdoch is a right-wing activist with a clear stake in who wins and who taxes his profits the least. Disney, GE, Viacom, and Murdoch -- all want profits and the candidate and agenda that will get in their way the least.

Obama and Biden should also create a "master sound bite sentence" and repeat it hundreds of times. It should be so true that even the corporations can't screw with it when it makes the airwaves. Here's my attempt: "Katrina, four dollar gas, a trillion dollar war, rising unemployment, deregulated housing market, global warming...no more."

This race should be about whether the Republican Party is going to be dismantled or not after the borderline treason of the past eight years. But instead it is about making the word "community organizer" a dirty word and a beauty queen who shoots foxes from a plane. Someone is not in any way doing their job and it's the press. Or more specifically, that job no longer exists.

Probably the worst offenders are the pundits who take the position that it's all just a game and say phrases like "getting a post-convention bump" or "playing to the soccer Moms." This isn't a game of Monopoly or Survivor. There are real truths that exist outside of the spin they are given and have an effect on lives. 250,000 Iraqi civilians are dead because we let our reality be distorted by the most effective propaganda machine in fifty years, the corporate American press. Money and jobs are flying out of this country as our currency becomes worthless and we're talking about the fact that McCain is a veteran. If someone busted into your house and robbed you would you then forgive them if you found out they were a veteran? Of course not. So why are we forgiving McCain for selling out his country by supporting the Bush agenda?

This is it folks. If McCain takes power we fade and become Australia in the seventies: a backwoods country with occasional flashes of relevance. Except we've got a way bigger military and we're angrier. People will get hurt and we'll pay the bill for the bullets. I'm telling you, unless we wake up, we're gonna lose this frickin' thing.

How the Republicans Win

A quite thorough article about the roots and schemes of the Reps to win the presidency over the last 40 years, by Robert Parry of Consortium News: How the Republicans Win.

I found it educational and accurate. I blame the Reps, but I also blame the Dems for their choosing indirectly complicit silence over cries of outrage. I also blame all of us for blindly accepting the state of the nation as it was and is. This is how long the country has been on the wrong track. Wake up, America! The Revolution WILL BE TELEVISED!

Sarah's Big Night Palin Comparison to Obama

It's beyond laughable that the Reps insist on comparing Palin to Obama (ok, so I've been dying to use the "pale in comparison" pun ever since she came on the scene). She's hardly qualified to be VP, and they claim Obama does not have any experience to be president (O those haunting refrain of "Zero, zero, zero"!). It's also ridiculous how the media are now fawning all over her barely mediocre speech of no substance or content. And there's no doubt where the "fair and balanced" mouthpieces stand: see Politico article Media swoons over Palin's fiery speech. An AP article even has the headline, "Palin delivers star-turning performance at RNC". To be sure, there's no substitute for low expectations. Giuliani even said the presidency is decided not by the elite or Hollywood celebrities but by the American people. The elite and celebs who live in this country are not Americans? Yet another example of infrahumanization by the Reps. America doesn't want some Ivy League-educated president? That should've disqualified the entire Bush family by default. The Reps love to bash the liberal elite and the Hollywood celebs, but they love a lying political performance even more.

It was difficult to watch the typical elite-hating, media-bashing, liberal-baiting, flag-waving circus the Reps like to put on. I did love the part where she took credit for Alaska's budget surplus (boy, that's feat in pipeline country) and how she put the state jet for sale on eBay (this here Internet is somethin' else). As I've heard other people say, we are the laughing stock of the world. But, hey, the GOP will never apologize for America! Yeah, good luck with that.

At the Politico site above, I particularly enjoyed this rundown of RNC myths vs. facts by a Democratic responder:

PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."
THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

PALIN: "There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform _ not even in the state senate."
THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.

PALIN: "The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."
THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded. Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families. He also would raise income taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest. He would raise payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes rise.

MCCAIN: "She's been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America's energy supply ... She's responsible for 20 percent of the nation's energy supply. I'm entertained by the comparison and I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America," he said in an interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson.
THE FACTS: McCain's phrasing exaggerates both claims. Palin is governor of a state that ranks second nationally in crude oil production, but she's no more "responsible" for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, another oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to tax oil, which she did in concert with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest state in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state _ by population.

MCCAIN: "She's the commander of the Alaska National Guard. ... She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities," he said on ABC.
THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under "federal status," which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska's national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.

FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States."
THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.

FORMER MASSACHUSETTS GOV. MITT ROMNEY: "We need change, all right _ change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington _ throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin."
THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president for nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only since January 2007 have Democrats have been in charge of the House and Senate.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John McCain...is this the best the fascists on the right can do?

That last line is from the blogger, not me. It's the same ol' negative campaigning from the right. How could it be anything else, regardless of what Obama and even McCain try to do to keep it on the issues? Oh, right, I forgot:
"This election is not about issues," Davis told The Washington Post this week. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."

It's time for "It's the economy, stupid", part II.

Beware of Rove-ellian Trojan Horse

Here's a very interesting article from The New Republic I found. As I have mulled over the Palin pick in my head over the last few days, I believe the Dems and liberals are falling over themselves into the Rove-ellian political trap:
The Case Against the Case Against Palin

The article ends with this:
"Sarah Palin is a living reminder that the ultimate source of political power in this country is not the Kennedy School or the Davos Summit or an Ariana Huffington salon; even now, power emanates from the electorate itself. More precisely, power in 2008 emanates from the working class electorates of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Sooner or later, the Obama camp will realize that the beauty pageant queen is an enormously talented populist in a year that is ripe for populism. For their own sake, it had better be sooner."

The McCain camp has managed to re-define the theme of this election once again by re-invigorating the Culture War: Palin reignites culture wars

This is why they picked someone like her. She represents a lightningrod, a liberal flystrip, if you prefer, that will make all those left-wing liberals who attack her look like they're elitists alienating the working-class, heartland 'Mericans. Obama camp had better watch out and step around this political excrement-in-a-flaming-paper-bag that the Rove Sith-apprentices have put down on their doorstep. This is like "Bob Roberts" politics where an assassination (a character assassination in this case) is faked, and liberals are all too easy targets to fall for it.

Palin symbolizes the return to "God, guns and gays" political game at which the Reps are experts. This is a Simpsons' episode where the townfolk chant "Monorail!" in the Music Man cadence; a South Park episode where the townfolk misplace their anger shouting, "Dey took 'r jobs!" The Dems cannot compete in this game because the 'Merican public will never accept liberals as the defenders of their beliefs, values or culture. And don't forget the good ol' conservative whipping boy, the liberal media. McCain camp knows this and knows that this is the only way that the Reps can stranglehold the presidency.

It is truly despicable that they are going down this road again, but will the third time be the charm? I can officially declare that I have zero respect for McCain. Maverick? Hardly, just another opportunistic politician who will do and say anything to be president. Maverick McCain died a quick death prior the 2008 election season. It is also quite sickening to see the Reps pat themselves on the back for putting Palin on the ticket, as if they have accomplished something new and progressive, as if she somehow can even be a torchbearer for the "18 million cracks in the glass ceiling" that Hillary created.

The best course of action for Obama-Biden is to stay away from the culture war trap (as I saw Biden say repeatedly on C-SPAN tonight, "Children are off-limits!"), and let Palin be Palin. Looks like she's got a lot of political loose ends with which to fashion a noose for herself: See Campaign money hurts Palin's outsider image. I realize it'd be highly unlikely and a political suicide, but I'll go out on a limb to say that Palin's VP nominee days may be numbered.

Plus, the latest Gallup poll says Obama has hit the 50% mark. Mere post-convention bump perhaps, but thank the Lord at least half of the country is able to see through the Rove-ellian politics-as-usual smokescreen.

It's Obama vs. McCain

Just a short one to declare that Hillary is done. Stick a fork in it! It's only a matter of time before she unplugs her campaign, and Obama will be the nominee. Hallelujah! I said to Michelle last night that a big win in NC for Obama and a narrow victory for Clinton in IN are two losses for Hillary.

Now let's really get down to some Dem vs. Rep, liberal vs. conservative talk. BRM, I know it's been really quiet, but you have yet to respond to my earlier questions about what the conservatives have achieved for America. I refer to the Feb 28 post entitled, "Opportunity to come together?"

Obama '08! All the way to the White House!

Dems and Race

While I'm sure there are plenty of Republicans thrilled to see the intra-party self-destruction happening among the Democrats over race, and while I certainly see all sorts of opportunities for the Republicans to exploit this idiocy for partisan advantage, I'm so upset that it's happening and want to shake both the Clinton and Obama folks for the repulsive spillover this will have in society and our politics overall. What thoughts do you guys have on the factor of RACE in the Democrats' nomination race, and where do you think this will ultimately go?

One More Voter for Democrats

Just wanted to mention that after being in the U.S. for 20 years, Michelle is now a naturalized U.S. citizen as of March 10, 2008. I am also happy to say that she will most likely vote for a Democrat in November, although she is not a fan of Obama. I believe the gender factor is probably at play here. :-)

Infrahumanization

Interesting op-ed from an assoc. editor of Newsweek. "Infrahumanization"...I'll have to remember that...Bashing on Hillary or the Clintons or their supporters is certainly not new.

http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/03/07/the-real-problem-with-power-s-monster-remark.aspx