Barack Obama’s most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.
[…]
That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom have what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.
For gosh sakes, Photoshopper: Get the %$#@&! shadow angle right on the clown noses!
Geez.
[Why does everyone think I did the photo? I found it on the interwebitubes. — UD]
#65 – chuck,
But I don’t see why we were required to bail-out the too-big-to-fail institutions. FDIC insures the depositors (customers) of the banks. Not the banks. And only up to $100,000 (or is it more now?). And that’s just regular accounts. Stocks, derivatives, etc aren’t covered. And neither are huge pension plans.
It’s now $250K per account, which amounts to $1M/couple if done properly ($250K each in accounts for spouse 1 & 2, then $500K in a joint account).
But, you’re correct. We didn’t really have to bail them out. However, with both parties bought by Wall St., everyone who had any real say in the matter was all for bailing out banks instead of homeowners.
I say, reinstate Glass-Steagal first. Reduce the limit of the amount of leverage back to 12x instead of 44x second. (Ever try to get even 12 times your net worth in debt? It’s unheard of. Banks/brokerages get 44x. YIKES!!!) Then, any bank too large to fail should be broken up into smaller banks under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
That’d be a start.
#67 – Joe Hill,
@25
StoopidFlanders said:
“Bush was killing terrorists in the Iraq war…”
Oh, I suppose he was. Along with tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
Joe, Why the hell did you give in to that point??!!? How many Iraqis were involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11? 0. 13 Saudis and 3 Afghans, if I remember correctly. Though I could be mistaken on the exact number.
However, the Saudis are our friends. So, instead of attacking Saudi Arabia, or even questioning the members of bin Laden’s immediate family who were here in the U.S. at the time, we flew them back to safety (quietly) on 9/13 when no Americans were allowed to fly anywhere.
And, what about the 12 different reports from 12 different U.S. intelligence agencies stating that we are less safe since the start of the Iraq war and less safe from terrorism as a direct cause of the Iraq war?
(google break)
Oops. I apologize. I remembered incorrectly. It was 16 different U.S. intelligence agencies who concluded that the Iraq war was directly responsible for a reduction in safety from terrorism.
http://tinyurl.com/y86nffw
Daily Show 10/29/09 episode, funny as hell 🙂
Dare you to put you top 6 liberal leaders up there. Who would they be? For sure they wouldn’t need clown noses to highlight their incompetence.
Check this out!
The enemy of my enemy is my friend?
http://tinyurl.com/yzdjwb6
#71
“The report is a collection of the view of all 16 US intelligence agencies.”
That’s an ambiguous sentence to me. I don’t read it as saying every agency stated “…the Iraq war was directly responsible for a reduction in safety from terrorism”. That’s a real stretch.
#73 ” For sure they wouldn’t need clown noses to highlight their incompetence.”
You kid yourself. They would have to hang their heads in shame.
#75 – Loupe,
Perhaps I should have cited the original NY Times article referenced in the BBC article. The Times was clearer.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
A consensus view means that they were all in agreement.
http://tinyurl.com/gkxlu
Sorry for the ambiguous BBC article.
haha this is the biggest load of bs!!! this a-hole has no idea what he’s talking about! democrats are the ones on the edge of civil unrest. Obama’s ruining the dems and throwing every bluedog that doesn’t agree with his policies under the bus. bitter sweet and can’t wait to pick up seats in the upcoming elections by true conservatives. 🙂
Democrat leaders say ‘we tax everything that moves,’ and we want to expand government everywhere. Then California, run by a Democrat legislature and heading towards the Democrats Arnold, decides they are going to take more taxes in withholding from people’s paychecks, basically a forced loan, and somehow it’s the Republicans that are imploding?
When Ann Coulter didn’t get the candidate she liked, she announced,’Get drunk and vote for McCain.’ When the ‘moderate’ Republicans don’t get their way, they leave the party outright. Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter, and now Dede has endorsed the Democrat in her race. Is this how it’s supposed to work?
Even worse is Jim Leach endorsing Obama, after it was his stupid ban on online poker that cost Republicans the House to begin with.
CFR | CFR | CFR
_______________
CFR | CFR | ???
#72 – The0ne,
Really great Daily Show episode. You’re right. Among many other things, I can’t believe Faux Spews finally admitted publicly that they are not a news station.
Here’s a link to watch it online.
http://tinyurl.com/ylfm8p8
Funny that some of our best investigative journalism is now on the Daily Show.
#81 MikeN,
Republicans endorsing Democrats, is that how it’s supposed to work?
In a word, yes.
It’s refreshing to hear a candidate think for themselves and cross the party boundary. Without that, they’re just a bunch of good little soldiers toeing the party line. And, who even knows where that line comes from?
Most self-proclaimed republicans do not agree with most of the policies of the republican party. So, who is making the decisions?
The same is likely true of the democrats. The difference is that democrats cross the party line all the time. That’s why we can’t get health care, even with a democratic majority. They just won’t toe the line.
If a republican or two crosses the line as well, maybe we won’t be as polarized as we have been.
The Republicans are spitting in the face of the voters in this case. The wingnut they are so fervently supporting doesn’t even live in the congressional district. Doesn’t matter to them, they just want another wingnut in Congress. Screw the voters.
Shortly after Obama got elected, Bill O’Reilly said that depending on how good or bad Obama is in his first term as president, he felt that this would determine whether or not a third political party would emerge.
Through most of this year, I’ve heard Beck say more and more pro-Libertarian stuff.
As for Sean Hannity, he mentioned to a friend who called into his radio show a few weeks ago that he considered himself a social Libertarian.
If these guys are Libertarian, they’re certainly not progressive like Ron Paul.
2010 is going to be interesting.
The Liberals running the Democratic party are showing their true colors and turning off independents and non-liberal Democrats.
The Conservatives are trying to regain control of the Republican party.
And the Libertarian party is splintered between progressives (Ron Paul) and non-Progressives (Neal Boortz).
Whatever happens, 2010 looks to be an interesting year for congressional elections. Hopefully it will result in booting out more Liberals as they try to increase government spending and size.
#86 – Guyver,
Please name some liberals in government. I’m not sure whom you’d like to boot.
The only one I can name is Kucinich.
All the rest that you think of as liberal lean farther right than Nixon, an icon of conservatism from when conservative still meant resistant to change rather than radical right wing nut job trying to borrow every dollar available from anywhere and use it to bomb the fuck out of people abroad while taking away the social liberties and rights of people at home.
http://tinyurl.com/yz5fkbu
The fact that there are no liberals is why no one is even seriously suggesting a real solution to the health care mess, a single payer system.
Bring in the Libertarians.
Smaller government, more personal freedoms, no ridiculous welfare for people that keep farting out kids and can’t pay for them.
spoken like a true intellectual
#2 – “We are Nixon Republicans.” jeezsh. ‘nuf said.
#90 But they lie, they’re not Nixon Republicans, because they’re against the universal health care that Nixon tried to introduce in 1974. EPA and OSHA were created on his watch, for god’s sake. He might as well be a communist according to today’s wingnuts.
How bizarre that Richard Nixon is a flaming liberal by today’s standards. Strange times…
Jeez, the wingnuts run away… hey MrWindows, I’m calling you a liar. I’m saying Nixon was in favor of a lot of things you wingnuts despise. I’m saying you’re not any kind of true conservative, you’re radicals. Got anything to say to that?
Nixon had a lot of bad advice, and a few good ideas. In 1974 Nixon couldn’t get the snow shoveled from the White House drive as he was firmly embroiled in Watergate. The healthcare bill introduced then was offered up as a distraction to the Democrat-controlled Congress. The Democrats had their chance to broaden the scope of welfare in a major and profound way and failed to act on it. But true, Nixon wasn’t a perfect president, or even a perfect man. But he had a profound insight into world politics and how to get things done. My brother didn’t have to go to Vietnam because Nixon made peace happen.
Eisenhower was and is a beloved figure not only for Republicans. He was offered a Democratic nomination but declined. Again, his presidency wasn’t perfect, and in retrospect, much of the cold war hype that grew out of that era, and from the ‘Military Industrial Complex’, is laughable today. But in the 1950’s we just really didn’t know what the Soviets were going to do.
Even Reagan, God rest his soul, wasn’t perfect. In the later days of his presidency, he accepted compromises with Congress instead of pushing just a little bit farther.
There are those of us who want to be part of a more conservative Republican party. Somewhere closer to the promise of Reagan and the Newt Gingrich of the Contract with America.
I’m a lapsed catholic, I believe in God, but I don’t have any inclination to force you to believe as I do. Hell, I can’t say I believe in church doctrine 100%. Abortion is a sticky issue. I don’t like it, but I’m not gonna prevent some poor scared girl from walking into a clinic to get one. That’s between her and her doctor. My job is to instill a morality in my daughter that would help prevent her from needing an abortion.
I supported GW and our military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’ve let both conflicts drift into mini Vietnam’s, with no clear strategy, not with GW and certainly not with BO. I’m disappointed that we haven’t gone ahead and gotten out. Either let the Generals fight it no holds barred and give them what they ask for, or get the hell out.
Bailing out the banks and the automakers and all the rest, what the hell are we doing? We should have let them fail, and prosecuted every last one of those SOB’s for breach of fiduciary duty. And now that we’ve spent a couple trillion doing that, BO, Nancy and Harry want to spend another trillion or so THAT WE DON’T HAVE on providing healthcare, oh, sometime around 2019, partly by supposedly slashing 400 billion out of Medicare fraud and abuse. What it’s going to end up doing is making my 73 year old mother pay more out of pocket for less benefit. Now, there are a few good items in amongst the 1990 pages, like removing the antitrust exemption, but what about eliminating the in-state restriction? True, insurance companies are currently governed by each of the several states, but that is part of the inefficiencies of the system. You can’t get the same health coverage in neighboring states even if you work for the same company. It’s archaic.
Let’s look at what Hawaii is doing, Germany, Switzerland, etc. We can improve the system incrementally, and we can maybe someday have a national health insurance system that everybody pays into and receives quality services from.
Rushing through a healthcare plan just because you want to get something on paper before the holiday break isn’t the way to do it.
#93, Newt Gingrich of the Contract with America.
The Contract with America was nothing more than RINO neo-con mess. The CwA was a welfare state/big government monstrosity prettied up by conservative cliche’s.
A report released in 2000 showed that “the combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13%.”
http://tinyurl.com/yeqaxb6
Mr Windoze,
Eisenhower warned of the danger of letting the military industrial complex gain too much control in government. Now the Republican party has become the party of war. We have had wars under both Bushes and even a little one in Grenada under Reagan.
I too am disappointed with Obama for not getting us out of at least Iraq and preferably Afghanistan as well. In the case of the former, we had no right to go there at all. None of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis. No one has shown a connection between Iraq and 9/11. No one has found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Sodamn Insane was horrifically bad. The one thing we can be sure of though is that the mess we leave behind will be worse. Hussein was secular, which is more than we can say for our friends the Saudis, who were intimately connected with 9/11 and have Sharia law but escaped being blown to bits by us because the Bushies were too comfy being in bed with them.
Personally, I think W missed an enormous opportunity to find a more peaceful solution of going after the terrorists instead of starting full scale wars. Further, rather than take the opportunity to point out that the terrorists are funded by oil and that the best we can do to truly fight back is to implement a concerted effort to switch to renewable energy, thus cutting off the funding for terrorism, giving us clean air to breath (70-130,000 Americans die every year from air pollution), and giving us a strong new economy in new technologies.
All this while at the same time, keeping the sympathy of the world rather than making us the most hated nation in the world.
Our current state was completely foretold by Carter 28 years in advance. He also had the solutions. If you have the guts to think anew about things that you probably long ago solidified your mind on, read this great article.
http://tinyurl.com/99nye
#94 My brother didn’t have to go to Vietnam because Nixon made peace happen.
Now that’s ironic, because the Republicans sabotaged the Paris peace talks in 1968 because they didn’t want Johnson to get credit for ending the war, thus ensuring the deaths of many more Americans and Vietnamese until it was finally ended. Lucky for your brother he wasn’t one of them.
I will agree with one thing Scott said, the number one way we can strike back at terrorism is to remove our dependency on oil from that region. Nuclear, Solar, Natural Gas, Hydrogen, all of the above.
I searched for “Republican Jackoff” and this site was result #1!