quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Obama crushed his old fundraising record in September with an over $150 million haul. That's not far from twice what McCain was allotted for the entire Fall campaign. In addition, the DNC netted almost $50 million too, somewhat negating the usually strong RNC totals that help pad the candidate's real total spending bottom line.
I suspect with strong Obama fundraising, much of the DNC's money will go towards the ever competitive Senate races. If they feel like Obama has it in the bag, they'll want to make sure he has a Congress he can work with.
True story, but this talk, (not yours mind you) of a filibuster proof senate seems unlikely. I'd probably say its undesirable to be honest. Republicans didn't enamor me a whole lot to the idea.
I'm kind of torn on the issue. On one hand, like you, I think giving one party the presidency and a senate super-majority is a bit too much power. On the other hand, I'm worried that some important changes won't get made.
Maybe it'll be for the best though, if the dems only have 58 or 59 seats in the senate. Obama's supposed to be good at consensus building after all. Wooing one or two Republicans shouldn't be outside the realm of possibility. I hope.
EDIT - ToPP! Included BB's post.
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
I'm usually all for balancing the pwoer between the two parties -- one with congress, one with the executive branch -- but the trouble is that the Republicans have had free reign for many years and, IMO, it is a time for changes to be made. A balance of power does not usher in chaneg.
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When it comes to the state of affairs as we come up to this election, the most damning argument you can effectively make against the democrats is that they have been out of power so long that we don't know how they would handle power, necessarily, and through some distrustful logic you can say that for many intents and purposes they are an unknown quantity. You can be a pessimist and basically say that because of what the Republicans did with free reign of legislature, we shouldn't give either party free reign of legislature because the Democrats might fall to the same levels of graft, corruption, and incompetence. After all, they're an unknown quantity, right? They could suck.
However.
The Republican party, in contrast, a known quantity at this point. And — guess what? — they suck. They are a known suck. We already know what they do with power: they abuse it, and they fail with the associated responsibilities. When one party has their way with the legislature for over half a decade and they have made pretty much everything worse, the solution is not to opt for 'bipartisan' legislative paralysis as the comfortable new option.
You hand it to the other guys and see if they can fix it, you don't get worried enough that you want to let the Known Suck party cling on to enough power to ensure that they can obstruct anyone who tries to change things back away from the disastrous crap they implemented and still believe in. They worked very hard to make things just the way they like it, and damned if they'll change that just because it doesn't seem to be working.
Don't worry. If party 2 sucks as hard as party 1 in a country where you only get two parties, we didn't stand a chance anyway.
The cousin argument to this argument is to point out that you should never think that 'bipartisanship' or 'moderacy' necessarily makes something better when it gets plunked out of the business end of our representative democracy. Just because something is in the middle of two viewpoints does not make it a better or smarter position than what the two pure viewpoints would have ideally advocated.
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I agree Christine. The last 6 years of the Bush administration when the republicans held both the legislature and the executive branch severely disrupted the balance of power in our government and I desperately think that balance needs to be restored. However, I'm not certain that the last 8 years reflects a general pattern of having one party control the executive and legislative branches or if it is something more specific to this particular era. Several things were part of this change in addition to the fact that one party controlled both branches.
1. The republicans took the majority in the house and senate in the 90's by uniting behind Newt Gingrich's contract with America. This put a disproportionate number of republicans in power who were committed to the idea or party loyality and helped shore up a culture that favored party unity.
2. Prominent members of the Bush administration like Dick Cheney believed that the power of the executive branch had been dangerously eroded following Nixon and considered it their mission to fix this problem by wresting power from the other branches of government.
3. External threats, like the 9/11 crisis, generally cause people to rally around a leader. The administration players who favored expanded executive powers, capitalized on this human tendency and the new republican culture of party loyalty to expand executive power.
I don't see any of those things happening during the next administration. Liberals tend to come from a culture that questions authority and values independent thinking and are therefore in general harder to unite behind a leader. If you don't believe that, you've never been involved in progressive politics and watched movements destroyed by internal fighting over and over again.
Although we are currently facing an economic crisis, it just isn't the kind of external threat that gets people to unite, we've already seen that play out during the last weeks as Bush's bailout plan was greeted with nearly the opposite reaction as his post 9/11 war on terror plans.
Anyway, I'd actually be more concerned about the democrats controlling both branches of Government if Clinton had won the nomination. I know that reflects a personal bias against Clinton as power hungry which may be unjust. Obama seems much more genuinely interesting in serving the people. I hope that isn't just a good act.
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Samprimary, The problem is that there are some Americans who like the shape of the last fifteen years of their life. They've watched their kids grow up. They've gone to school. They have fallen in love, bought houses, gotten jobs. And in a way, throwing out the government under whose auspices all of this happened would render all of it meaningless.
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quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: The problem is that there are some Americans who like the shape of the last fifteen years of their life. They've watched their kids grow up. They've gone to school. They have fallen in love, bought houses, gotten jobs. And in a way, throwing out the government under whose auspices all of this happened would render all of it meaningless.
I'm not following this logic...
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posted
Irami. Read what you just posted. Do you really think anyone is going to consider their spouse, child, home, or job "meaningless" based on which political party is in power? That's absolutely ridiculous.
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quote:The problem is that there are some Americans who like the shape of the last fifteen years of their life. They've watched their kids grow up. They've gone to school. They have fallen in love, bought houses, gotten jobs. And in a way, throwing out the government under whose auspices all of this happened would render all of it meaningless.
???????
Maybe I'm missing your point. I know a lot of conservative republicans but don't know any of them who feel that their education, marriage, family, home and career would be rendered meaningless by an Obama presidency or a democratic government.
In fact, I myself for the most part like the shape of the last 15 years of my life. I have a loving husband, a decent career, I own a house, have accumulated savings in the bank and am working hard to improve the problems of poverty, violence and environmental degradation in the world. Despite the fact that I personally am doing OK, I think the government policies during the past 15 years have seriously eroded my security and my ability to make a difference in the things I consider important.
I can't imagine that anyone except republican career politicians would feel that the last 15 years of their life was meaningless unless the republicans stayed in power. Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
The only way I can figure out Senator McCain's strategy, from the Convention on, has been a out and out race to the base. He seems more afraid that not enough good Republicans will vote, so he's turned his entire campaign around into scaring his base of voters not to dare miss their chance to stop the monster Obama from getting elected.
Then there is some attempts to disrupt the Democratic base, either by lulling them into a sense of victory (you don't need to bother with voting, there are enough Dems rushing to the polls as it is) or possibly scaring some Dems from voting (Voter Fraud is a crime. If you didn't do all the paperwork 100% correct, and you dare to vote, we will throw you deep in jail. Don't even think about it. ACORN must be stopped and we will do it, so don't risk getting in our way, stay home.)
That is the only way I can explain some things like, "I like being the underdog. They are ahead, and we've got them right where we want them."
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Obama crushed his old fundraising record in September with an over $150 million haul. That's not far from twice what McCain was allotted for the entire Fall campaign. In addition, the DNC netted almost $50 million too, somewhat negating the usually strong RNC totals that help pad the candidate's real total spending bottom line.
I suspect with strong Obama fundraising, much of the DNC's money will go towards the ever competitive Senate races. If they feel like Obama has it in the bag, they'll want to make sure he has a Congress he can work with.
True story, but this talk, (not yours mind you) of a filibuster proof senate seems unlikely. I'd probably say its undesirable to be honest. Republicans didn't enamor me a whole lot to the idea.
I'm kind of torn on the issue. On one hand, like you, I think giving one party the presidency and a senate super-majority is a bit too much power. On the other hand, I'm worried that some important changes won't get made.
Maybe it'll be for the best though, if the dems only have 58 or 59 seats in the senate. Obama's supposed to be good at consensus building after all. Wooing one or two Republicans shouldn't be outside the realm of possibility. I hope.
EDIT - ToPP! Included BB's post.
This is precisely how I feel. I am wary of granting any party that much power, but I feel that the projects that need to get done stand a better chance of getting done with one party control. Unfortunately lets say I was told, "With a filibuster proof senate, a workable universal health-care plan will emerge, as will progressive education based reforms that will push our students into the forefront of educational standards. Finally, with enthusiastic controlled government investment in alternate energy, the United States will be leading all other nations in energy development."
With that said, what else will happen if one party controls both branches? I'd like to think that with all three points of my above statement happening there can't be much that could realistically happen to make those gains unworthy. But the last 8 years have made me sufficiently cynical.
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posted
From my perspective, McCain's strategy since the convention suggests that he is acting out of desperation. Either that or he has completely lost his marbles.
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See, I think one of the major changes that needs to be made in our government is getting our leaders to actually negotiate and be willing to give up some of their wants for national needs. Having a single party in absolute control is not going to make that happen.
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Boris, I think we largely agree but I would have expressed it differently.
I think that one of the major changes that needs to be made in our government is that our leaders need to listen and try to appreciate the concerns and needs of all sides and then to seek innovative solutions that balance all those needs and concerns rather than pursuing an narrow ideological agendas.
I think that over the past decade the republican party as a whole has shown an unwillingness to do that. Rather than trying to understand the opposition, they have sought to demonize liberals. Many democrats have done the same thing. Our elected officials as a whole have become more concerned about who gets credit, who takes the blame and consolidating power than they have in solving the nations problems. Compromises have been achieved by buying people off with pork barrel line item bridges to nowhere rather than the hard work of persuasion and understanding. We have to completely break that cycle.
I support Obama in part because I see in his writing a sense that he can do that, that his real gift is for being able to understand the complexity of issue and appreciate all sides of problems.
I don't think it would be a good thing to have a democratic super majority in congress, but I am less afraid of having the house, senate and President of the same party under Obama's leadership than I am of the same old games.
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quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: Samprimary, The problem is that there are some Americans who like the shape of the last fifteen years of their life. They've watched their kids grow up. They've gone to school. They have fallen in love, bought houses, gotten jobs. And in a way, throwing out the government under whose auspices all of this happened would render all of it meaningless.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Zero. This is not actually how people work and it is not actually what is going on and it is not why people attach themselves to parties.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
Maybe there isn't a sentimental attachment to political regimes or slogans or ideologies, I tend to agree with this insight.
quote:The preparation of victims and executioners which totalitarianism requires in place of Montesquieu’s principle of action is not the ideology itself racism or dialectical materialism-but its inherent logicality. The most persuasive argument in this respect, an argument of which Hitler like Stalin was very fond, is: You can’t say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet. Here, the coercive force of logicality seems to have its source; it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves....The coercive force of the argument is: if you refuse, you contradict yourself and, through this contradiction, render your whole life meaningless; the A which you said dominates your whole life through the consequences of B and C which it logically engenders.
posted
Wow. That paragraph is very, very badly written. And it also doesn't apply, unless you think everyone living in this country would consider themselves either a victim or an executioner in this model.
The "A" which dominates my life has not been the Bush administration.
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posted
I'm not sure how likely a 60 seat majority is percentage wise, but I'd say there's a chance. Dems have a lock on six or seven seats new seats. And they have a good chance at one or two more, and then a longshot chance at another one or two. They need huge turnout, especially from new voters in a lot of unusual places, but it's possible. I'd say 58 is likely. 59 or 60 are possible. The DNC and the DSCC are throwing millions of dollars into races in Georgia and Kentucky that before they had left for dead. Can some serious money change the outcomes in just two weeks? I don't know, but I suspect we're going to find out.
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posted
Oh, good. The Rev. Wright will make a comeback in the last few weeks after all. Anyone not see this coming?
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If you go here and go to blank slate, you can cook up your own electoral map. It would be a great game if everyone did the map in the way of a March madness pool, saved it as a file, then set it to a moderator.
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"The low-hanging fruit, ie idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking," he wrote. "These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government," he said.
"All of this behaviour supporting the aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I honestly thought he'd leave it alone and keep harping on Ayers and Rezko, for several really good reasons:
1. Do you really want to have a war of crazy preachers when there are multiple videos of your VP candidate in a church that has equally if not more crazy sounding rhetoric than Wright? I've seen some of the video, and I think it'd spook a lot of people, to say nothing of the guest speakers they've had at their church. Obama has laid off it, but if McCain bring Wright back, who knows?
2. Bringing up Wright also I think would serve to emphasize McCain's own past associations with divisive religious figures.
3. Liar liar pants on fire! McCain said that Wright was off limits and then after a despicable offensive of robocalls that several prominant Republican have called on him to stop doing (and I've seen the script they use, it's vile and repulsive), he's going to use an insanely thinly veiled reason to bring him back in? Lewis has nothing to do with Wright, and for that matter, no affiliation with Obama. I think the hypocrisy problem will come back to bite him in the butt.
4. We've already been through Wright, how many minds will it really change? His attacks on Ayers have ticked up his support in red states, but it's cratered out his support among independents who deplore his methods. Going after Wright will look like beating a dead horse.
I think it'll reek of desparation, and that's because it does.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: Lyrhawn,
If you go here and go to blank slate, you can cook up your own electoral map. It would be a great game if everyone did the map in the way of a March madness pool, saved it as a file, then set it to a moderator.
For the Senate race or for the General? I'm assuming you mean for the General, and that's an interesting idea.
If people actually want to do that, I'll be the moderator. How exactly would the scoring work? One point for each electoral vote you get right? Would you save it as a screen shot?
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posted
I just heard that Obama will be leaving the campaign trail to be with his ailing grandmother in Hawaii. They're saying her condition is "very serious."
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: I'm not sure how likely a 60 seat majority is percentage wise, but I'd say there's a chance.
fivethirtyeight.com has it at ~32% if you count Sanders and Lieberman (Independant, but caucus with the Democrats). If you want 60 Dems outright, that's ~12%.
Posts: 254 | Registered: Apr 2005
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60 outright means winning 11 seats. I don't see that happening. I mean that's possible too, but I'd be very surprised. 10 would only surprise me a little bit. 9 wouldn't surprise me at all. Anything less than six would surprise me.
I think Nate isn't giving Georgia enough of an edge given a lot of factors outside of what polling show. I think Chambliss is in more trouble that it looks like. Wicker might be too if Mississippi registration and turnout is anything like what Georgia's is looking to be.
I think it's better than 32%. But that's a gut feeling based on a lot of random information, and a little bit of biased hope.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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"Thank you George W. Bush for our Freedom." "I was like WTF DOES THAT MEAN?"
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." And Dubya has certainly done his best to make sure that the average American is left with nothing.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Oh come now. He could have done much worse. I don't assign the man malicious intent. I think he's tried to do what he thinks is right, but that he's just disastrously wrong. If he had actually wanted to destroy the very fabric of American life he could have done it a lot more effectively, long lastingly, and faster than what he's done over the last eight years. The messes he has caused can be fixed, even if it takes a couple decades. He could have done far, far worse.
America has always been a fantastically lucky country when it comes to awful leaders followed by fantastic ones. After Pierce and Buchanan we got Lincoln. FDR provided a similar radical change in national direction after the Great Depression set in. America hasn't always had the right man at the right time, for as often as not, the right man would have prevented such problems from ever occurring, but whenever the national really hung in the balance, the right guy HAS been there. 9/11 was the big crisis of the last 30 years or so. Bush was the wrong guy. If history repeats itself again, the next president will be the right guy, and we'll transform again. Into what I don't know, but the precedent is there, and it's been repeated, and I have faith it can happen again.
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posted
Whoa. I think Jon Stewart was just the teensiest bit hacked off with all the "real" America rhetoric.
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I actually tend to not like Stewart as much when he's not on his show. He comes at every topic obliquely without just saying what he thinks. And he keeps doing this "aw shucks I'm not an important person" thing that looks totally insincere. He's either highly ignorant of his own power and position, or he's intentionally pretending that he's just some comedian. I'm not really sure what is going on in his head, but Colbert out of character is a lot more realistic and open about his effect on viewers.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Colbert also did considerable research on how to form and control cults ^-^
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quote:The preparation of victims and executioners which totalitarianism requires in place of Montesquieu’s principle of action is not the ideology itself racism or dialectical materialism-but its inherent logicality. The most persuasive argument in this respect, an argument of which Hitler like Stalin was very fond, is: You can’t say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet. Here, the coercive force of logicality seems to have its source; it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves....The coercive force of the argument is: if you refuse, you contradict yourself and, through this contradiction, render your whole life meaningless; the A which you said dominates your whole life through the consequences of B and C which it logically engenders.
This is a weird construct and it only really applies to extreme circumstances where the affiliation in question is hyperinflated to being the core of one's being. It could — could — apply in rigorously controlling, totalitarian cult-like circles like Scientology or something akin to the DPRK.
It sounds like it was applied to the mentality forced on people during the reign of Nazis in Germany. Unsurprisingly, it is talking about a much different time and a much different scenario from our democratic republic. It does not apply to most anybody's lives in the United States over the subject of who gets to be president/majority party. It's a ridiculous extrapolation.
Also, that was ... hideously written. It's not Heidegger bad, but it's getting close.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: Whoa. I think Jon Stewart was just the teensiest bit hacked off with all the "real" America rhetoric.
I know how he feels.
If Obama's people are smart, they'll jump on this. This is far more offensive to a lot of people than some associations or comments about lipstick; this implies the people who want to rule the country think some people "belong to it" more than others. If any comments deserve demands for a retraction or a refutation, this would be it.
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posted
Biden did a little bit, and Obama will be gone at the end of the week to visit his grandmother, but I suspect you'll start seeing big cities and suburbs hit with ads saying McCain says they unpatriotic and not part of "real" America, and I suspect it'll resonate.
I can't believe that one women didn't qualify her statement when the interviewer gave her a chance to restate herself when she said that Northern Virginia wasn't part of "real" Virginia. He said something like 'I'll give you a chance to fix that before you have to go' and she repeated herself and stuck to it! I don't think she realized what she was saying.
I bet when Obama gets back on the trail he'll hammer away at this though. It'll only serve to illustrate his point that he's an inclusive uniter whereas McCain's camp is literally starting to label American and unAmerican parts of the country.
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posted
Palin has offered a really half hearted apology for what she said:
quote:Originally posted by Sarah Palin: "I don't want that misunderstood," Palin said. "If that's the way it came across, I apologize."
I think we understood you quite clearly Governor.
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
To double check Barack Obama meets stipulation to qualify for the Office of the President of the USA yes? On my guild's vent some guy claimed that there was some technicality or stipulation that he wouldn't be able to prove hes an American citizen or something because his mom gave birth to him at age 18 or something involving some 5 year limit.
This was this morning so I am shakey on the details so maybe someone who does know something of constitutional law would be able to piece together what I may have heard and confirm to me that Barack Obama meets every stipulation to qualify to run for president.
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It's been checked, double checked, and triple checked. I'm not sure on the specifics of the law, but from the early to late 1900's, the law stated that for children who were not born on US soil, they had to have at least one parent who was a US citizen, and if that parent was under the age of 18, had to of lived in the US for 10 years and five of those had to be after you were 18. Something like that. Anyway, many are claiming that since she left for Indonesia when Barack was a kid, that negates his natural born citizenship status.
But the whole thing is a moot point because he was born on US soil, and is thus automatically a natural born citizen. To defeat that you have to listen to the conspiracy theorists who say that secreted off in the middle of the night to give birth to him in Kenya.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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There has been a lot of talk about Obama's tightly organized and controlled campaign. I'm trying to figure out if the left has turned monolithic or if people are being silenced out of fear. It's spooky, and I don't know what it means. Where are the peace-niks? Where are the anti-death penalty people? Where are the immigration activists? Where are the unabashed liberals? Are they all tired from the long primary? There is world that's left of Obama, are they going to resurface after the election? ___
I'm thinking about this because I don't throw around American as an empty concept, or even a legal definition. The idea is freighted with controversal intuitions, and that means I do consider some people pro or anti-American, or more manifestly American than others. While I don't agree with Palin's crew about content of the concept, I can't imagine I agree with Obama's conception either, except his "unifying" vision tends to smother dissent in a different and subtle way. Republicans nakedly use fear for votes. I'm not sure that Obama's campaign doesn't invoke a different kind of fear to keep the campaign in line.
posted
Irami, seriously, it's bad when Blayne is scoring points off you.
quote:Where are the real liberals?
I think that depends on your definition, of course. Are you defining "real liberal" in a way that excludes 50% of the people who'd call themselves liberals, and 90% of the people who'd be called liberals by others?
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Offended or Complimented... Offended or Complimented... Offended or Complimented...
quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: There has been a lot of talk about Obama's tightly organized and controlled campaign. I'm trying to figure out if the left has turned monolithic or if people are being silenced out of fear. It's spooky, and I don't know what it means. Where are or hereor here the peace-niks? Where are the anti-death penalty people? Where are the immigration activists? Where are the unabashed liberals? Are they all tired from the long primary? There is world that's left of Obama, are they going to resurface after the election?
Or a thousand other places in the US. The far left is still out there and still every bit as vocal as they have ever been. They are not intimidated and have not become part of some monolithic Obama mania. They are still doing exactly what they've always done and getting just about as much press as they've always gotten.
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Blayne
