I was right and Jon Stewart and Frank Rich were wrong. But they are rich and I am not. Go figure.
And there was this, from October 28th, 2010:
The key is that the Republicans did in fact become vulnerable in their own base. Republicans who showed any degree of reasonableness starting losing primaries. And the people winning those primaries, and the voters who fueled those victories, show every sign of believing the rhetoric rather than the reality. What started off as a stunt, turned into a monster that the Republicans could no longer control. So far, the damage has been electoral. While overall the juice from the Tea Party has ramped up enthusiasm in the base, there’s no question that the Republicans have damaged their prospects of winning a half dozen Senate seats. But really radical candidates are going to win a lot of House seats and at least a couple of Senate seats, and then they are going to expect the Republican Party to continue with their Party of No strategy. Anyone who stands in the way of total-obstruction-all-the-time is going to face a challenge from the loony right. They created a caricature of the president and they can’t very well compromise with the devil without infuriating their supporters.
Lee Drutman makes a lot of sense and I’ll be talking about his piece, but it’s a gruesome exercise in both-siderism. The culpability here is not equally shared.
It’s nowhere near equally shared.
They are rich because they are paid to lie, not tell the truth. Truth is of little value to the elite because it says they shouldn’t have nearly so much money. But lies – lies are of great value to them, literally trillions.
Jon Stewart is rich because he is a funny comedian. He doesn’t get paid to lie, he gets paid to entertain. And at a time when the real media was M.I.A., he provided some incisive commentary from that platform.
Is he a hero? No. Is he part of the great borg that distracts us from the real problems of the world? Yes.
But all he ever wanted was a few laughs…oh yeah, and also to be rich.
I disagree. they are not paid to lie, most of them. They are paid to tell the truth as they see it and be wrong.
Big difference.
Lying has a bad smell about it. Except in the cases of real lying virtuosi, people get that smell and are turned off.
Passionate belief in a position…no matter how full of shit that position may be when measured on something resembling an objective scale…will convince many people of its rightness.
And here we jolly well are.
Surrounded on all sides by “truth-telling” idiots who have been hired by quite conscious controllers.
Step away from the media with your brains in the air.
Please!!!
AG
Martin, you don’t have to constantly remind us how prescient you often are. We come here for that reason. In a way, you undermine your accomplishments by saying “Told you so.”
The Republican party as we knew it is dead. I’m not sure exactly what the next phase looks like because I don’t think Trump wins the presidency and I don’t think they can steal the nomination without splitting their constituency. Assuming Trump takes the nomination and gets crushed, movement conservatives will blame him and blame voters for abandoning the cause. But the thing is Trump showed what’s possible. He showed that the base doesn’t really give a rats ass about the interests of the wealthy. Other and better demagogues will come along to take Trumps place and split the coalition again. Meanwhile, those with the money who used to pull the strings won’t be able to co-opt that beast or tame it. I don’t see how they get out of this. At some point their coalition fractures and something new evolves.
I like when he does this, because I get something out of the way he rehearses the logic and follows the chain of causality.
It’s like in a textbook where the correct answer gets presented and then explained.
Doesn’t the wealthy Republican establishment slide on over to their cousins, the neoliberals, who are making the place ready for them?
Oddly, the Republican South at the state level gradually grew from ambitious Democrats who were unwilling to wait their turn. Saw a lot of that in Texas. Initial successes encouraged the others.
“The love of money is the root of all evil.” – Bible
“It’s only money.” – my grandfather
nah, $$ is not the root of all evil because the devil is a railway car
OT: OF COURSE, it was by design.
THURSDAY, MAR 24, 2016 12:37 PM CDT
What happened in Arizona wasn’t an accident: When states make voting impossible, it’s for a very clear reason
Arizona residents were forced to wait hours on line in order to vote in this week’s primary. Some were turned away. VIDEO
BOB CESCA
Once again, an American election was unnecessarily thwarted by long lines and not enough ballots. To say there’s no excuse for such nonsense, especially in a nation that prides itself on its representative democracy and, yes, its exceptionalism, is understating the problem. This time around, it happened during the Arizona primary where countless voters were forced to stand in lines for hours, while others were told they weren’t registered in the first place.
In Maricopa County alone, election officials infuriatingly reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent. Such a drastic reduction meant there was only one polling place per 21,000 residents of the highly populated Phoenix metroplex. Officials including County Recorder Helen Purcell (a Republican) said the cutbacks were due to budgetary concerns. Uh-huh. Of course, I doubt members of either party who were forced to wait in five-hour lines would’ve minded the additional expense to facilitate our most basic right as Americans. Elsewhere, independent voters who switched their registration to the Democratic Party were allegedly told they hadn’t registered at all, forcing them to sit out the closed primary.
Maricopa County, isn’t that the one with the sadistic sheriff?
I read that some dems found themselves listed as independents and hence ineligible to vote
i.e. it wasn’t just passive voter suppression, also active voter suppression by changing party registration from dem to independent
Donna Brzile has the solution (twitter twit copied from Naked Capitalism):
Donna Brazile ✔@donnabrazile
I’m trying but please stop whining. Let’s all get out to vote and stay in line. https://twitter.com/souldier_/status/712495961868787714 …
5:36 AM – 23 Mar 2016
22 22 Retweets 48 48 likes
You can’t make such bitchy, arrogant crap up. ‘Kids, don’t get out of line!”
These things (Tea Party, obstructionism, Trumpism, voter ID, etc.) are all symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease is not necessarily gerrymandering alone, but also gerrymandering without the ‘mandering: safe districts.
Safe districts are a short term only gain for the parties, which both sides DO engage in, but’s only in the GOP that it seems to trend toward self-affirmation and echo-chambering bubbles. We don’t really have districts clambering for extreme liberal policies, do we? It’s only on the conservative side that this occurs.
As the wingnuts are all corralled into the corners making up our congressional districts, only wingnuts are deemed worthy of representing them. This, of course, is not the path to representing the country as a whole and affirms the necessity of a strong opposition party. But “representing the country as a whole” is not part of the GOP madness, and it’s reflected in the words of its candidates when they con their base with fantasies like eliminating entire Federal agencies. Actually, not much of the eliminationist rhetoric you hear is based in reality. No president can act completely unilaterally, so what they really want is a king.
Something needs to be done about how district maps are created, and non-partisan districting committees are a good start. But it needs to be set down as the national standard.
Try to find a Republican in Chicago.
And what extreme liberal policies are they demanding in Chicago? Not to be screwed by The Man? The right to vote? A living wage? Contrast that with unrealistic Tea Party demands…
It’s not simply that safe districts are in themselves harmful, it’s that GOP safe districts for some reason lead to a race to the bottom.
Who said they were demanding anything/ you said gerrymandering was of only limited use.
BTW there is an anti-abortion Democratic Congressman in Chicago. His catholic constituents reelect him regularly.
Didn’t Chicago elect one mayor the last time out?
The ugly fact is that rural tea party districts serve as rotten boroughs for the Republican House.
I can’t watch the interview with Lindsey Graham enough, he just gives it up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPOOXp3S2UI
Yes he does!!!
AG
OT: FRIDAY, MAR 25, 2016 07:00 AM CDT
This is Ted Cruz’s last stand: Why the Wisconsin primary could be his final chance
If Cruz wants to maintain a credible shot at unseating Trump at the convention, he probably needs to win next week
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
So far, Donald Trump has won 20 primaries and caucuses. Nobody who has won so many has ever been denied the nomination in either party. If it were anyone but him, the political professionals would pretty much be going through the motions by now, continuing to wage perfunctory primary campaigns but beginning to ready themselves for the the next phase of the campaign against the Democrats. But because Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee the party is still flailing about, trying to figure out a way to wake up from their nightmare.
Right now, all eyes are on Wisconsin which votes on April 5th. The conventional wisdom says Ted Cruz has to win there in order to even sustain the argument that he might be worthy of taking the nomination on the second ballot at the convention if Trump comes up short. This is something of a desperate gamble, but it’s all they’ve got.
Yesterday, Governor Scott Walker said he planned to announce an endorsement “after Easter” and admitted that it will either be Ted Cruz or John Kasich. The smart money’s on Cruz, as members of the establishment are all already swallowing their bile to get behind him as much as it pains them to do so.
This in-depth report from the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel calls Wisconsin “the Masada of the Stop Trump movement” with millions of advertising dollars pouring into the state and the highly influential local right-wing talk radio hosts all pushing hard against Trump. He quotes WTMJ’s Charlie Sykes saying, “the GOP’s current dumpster fire was set and largely fueled by some national talk show hosts who have decided that their infatuation with Donald Trump overrode their commitment to conservative principles.” (And yet another fault line in the conservative movement breaks open …)
And even if Cruz does win Wisconsin? What then? They cannot manage to steal the nomination from Trump without losing a huge portion of their base.
Permanently.
I believe that…win or lose in WI…the convention will eventually nominate Trump. Why? Because if they don’t…and whether or not Trump starts a third party effort this year should he be robbed…a Trumpist-like party will arise soon after the election, and by 2020 the right will be so splintered that the whole ongoing two party fix will be destroyed.
The controllers don’t want that. The centrist fix has been working really well for about 50 years. Its only serious hiccup? Nixon. And they fixed that too.
If Trump really scares them?
They’ll fix him as well.
Old-school if necessary.
Watch.
AG