Tag: democrats

…granting ad arguendum that the 111th Congress engaged in liberal overreach, which Senators who win today would have lost had the Affordable Care Act included a public option linked to Medicare? The answer seems to me to be nobody. Which Senators who win today would have lost had the 111th Congress passed a cap-and-trade plan through reconciliation? Here, it looks like Patty Murray. Would a “scaled back” health care plan have saved Blance Lincoln? Clearly not.

Matt Yglesias makes a point that far too few will. They fail not because of some mythical “liberal overreach” (which really translates into “not enacting a GOP-approved slate of policies”) but because they operate from such a terrified, defensive crouch that every policy that emerges seems horribly compromised in some respect.
I’ve said all along that even one signature policy plus a bunch of spectacular failures at the hand of GOP obstruction is better than a whole passel of half-measures and partial, piecemeal victories that each require 25 minutes of explanation every time they’re brought up, and, of course, that most of the party ultimately just runs away from anyway.
For the thousandth time: It is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right. Maybe we’ll learn that over the next two years. Maybe not.

The Rodeo Clown

lemkin:

This is why you have to point out O’Donnell’s foolishness early and often: [paint other Tea Klanners with her foolishness, blah blah blah]

jasencomstock:

This is not true.  We are not having a constitutional debate between lawyers.  Rush Limbaugh is not going to change his mind on this, neither is O’Donnell- just as you are not going to change your mind on this, or the 2nd amendment, or the 10th.  For the most part, the vast vast majority of Americans are not going to change their minds either. 

“Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”

A large segment of the population wants to believe this and you cannot take it from them by pointing it out. 

This is indeed precisely where we disagree, but for different reasons (I think, anyway). We don’t need to convince (nor, as you point out, are we going to) the Limbaughs and Palins of the world; and but also I feel like these sorts of unreachable Tea Klan true believers are a relatively small fragment of the population; low-information voters, on the other hand, can be swayed by the red meat that those same individuals peddle, but (and more importantly) I’ve found that those low-info voters also deeply understand various foundational concepts implicit to the country or, more accurately, to our national conception of civics and civic duty. Importantly, they also make up most of the electorate. And these same low-information folks might well holler “hells yeah!” at a “Taxed Enough Already!!!” chant, but would recoil in horror if they really understood the full depth of the fundamental changes these folks want in how the country would operate and the foundational ignorance of many of its most prominent proponents.
You can pick off huge numbers of folks that are simply angry, but don’t buy the whole line; but to do so: you have to be having that conversation. Constantly, but also respectfully. Otherwise they’ve got nothing to compare these Tea Klan positions to. The Tea Klan is all fired up; the Democrats are sitting quietly talking about comparative top marginal tax rates over time. By consistently and firmly pointing out the idiocy, you begin to pick off topics near and dear to the Tea Klan. They simply can’t be mentioned anymore because the audience will tune-out, sigh, or laugh. Inoculation is key, though: people have to approach some new Tea Klan candidate armed with some basic and memorable information they’ve retained from the last time these folks were out on the hustings. Thus you progressively and inevitably marginalize and ultimately eliminate as a political force the Tea Klan (by taking away its rhetoric and, essentially by equating said rhetoric with foolishness or hard-hearted and ultimately unamerican concepts) and, in large part, you deeply wound the GOP itself for its role in enabling these crazies.
After all, we must never forget that polls show the GOP is (still) historically unpopular. There are reasons for that, and they extend well beyond “party of Bush” type recent history. We need to call attention to the darker veins of this stuff early and often. That the national party apparatus is constantly afraid to do so is precisely why they fail.

In their darkest moments, White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed, no matter how many bills he signs. Everything seems to conspire against the idea: an implacable opposition with little if any real interest in collaboration, a news media saturated with triviality and conflict, a culture that demands solutions yesterday, a societal cynicism that holds leadership in low regard. Some White House aides who were ready to carve a new spot on Mount Rushmore for their boss two years ago privately concede now that he cannot be another Abraham Lincoln after all. In this environment, they have increasingly concluded, it may be that every modern president is going to be, at best, average.

The Education of President Obama – NYTimes.com (via brooklynmutt)
Well, then, might I suggest all of you that feel this way: go do something else. Seriously, and right now. Because you’ve got at least two more years of a term to do something with up there, and it’s not going to get any easier. If you thought the GOP was going to greet you with a big palm parade upon your arrival to DC, you haven’t been watching. If you think a GOP-led House or (may the Gods forbid) a GOP Congress is suddenly going to get interested in policy, let alone serious policy of any kind, then you haven’t been watching. Maybe a life in politics isn’t for you after all, you self pitying, ever defeated children.
tl;dr: Better Democrats, please.
Source: The New York Times

What Anti-Foreclosure Deadbeats?

Today’s edition of What Atrios Said:

If Citi doesn’t own the mortgage then the woman doesn’t owe them any money. If Citi doesn’t own the mortgage then it isn’t the case that “perhaps” they shouldn’t foreclose on her, it’s the case that they have no legal right to foreclosure. Citi can’t just take possesion of a house, or decide someone owes them money, just because they say so.

And, yes, maybe one day Fannie will get around to a foreclosure process, but Citi cannot just assert control of the mortgage and the property on their say so.

[…] the [conventional wisdom] just seems to be “well, she deserves to lose her house so it doesn’t really matter who takes it from her.”

That this whole thing is so utterly small-c conservative just makes it all the more deadly to the GOP and their Tea Klan enablers. I mean it’s fundamental property rights, and a partial reason for the founding of the nation in the first place. It’s a political hydrogen bomb to use against the anti-modification crowd, which, not coincidentally is made up of the GOP establishment (but would be an issue that quite conveniently rends them from the arms of their anti-bank Tea Klanners) and the Blue Dogs that Rahm, back in his DCCC years, so lovingly forced down our throats without ever bothering to ensure they’d, you know, vote with leadership on key initiatives.
This is why you will never hear a Democratic candidate utter so much as a peep about it. It’s just too goddamned explosive. Wouldn’t want to get all shrill in a way that would make a few Blue Dogs uncomfortable, now would we? Once the GOP wins every available seat in the House and Senate, I’m sure they’ll be ready to work with the President on serious policy initiatives. And we certainly don’t want to irritate them prior to that coming to pass. Right?

What Anti-Foreclosure Deadbeats?

The Existential Nature of Foreclosure Fraud

It is a legal impossibility for someone without a mortgage to be foreclosed upon. It is a legal impossibility for the wrong house to be foreclosed upon, It is a legal impossibility for the wrong bank to sue for foreclosure.

And yet, all of those things have occurred. The only way these errors could have occurred is if several people involved in the process committed criminal fraud. This is not a case of “Well, something slipped through the cracks.” In order for the process to fail, many people along the chain must commit fraud.

That it is being done for expediency and to save a few dollars on the process is why the full criminal prosecution must occur.

Excellent rundown on the current meltdown in foreclosures. That these excesses (and the ones that preceded them) should be prosecuted is obvious. That they won’t be is both obvious and the reason our Republic is crumbling by the day. The oligarchs and their political cronies have established themselves as above the law. Until that system utterly collapses or a political will to clean it up arises, nothing will change.

And, psst: Democrats. You’re looking for a unifying and message that gets people to the polls in big numbers? You could do a lot worse than this one. Of course, delivering it means you actually have to, you know, back it up with some legislative action. So I guess that’s out. Back to the witchcraft angle.

The Existential Nature of Foreclosure Fraud

It’s easier for [Democrats] to believe that their liberal and progressive base is naïve than to acknowledge that we are not alienated for their failure to pass appropriate legislation, but for their failure to fight for such legislation. And our upset with Obama is not that he didn’t accomplish what he couldn’t accomplish, but that he didn’t do the one thing he could do: consistently speak the truth, tell us and the country what was really happening in the corridors of power and what the constraints are that he was facing.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Daily (via brooklynmutt)

Yep, yep, yep, a million times: YEP.

Obama’s secret assassination program against US citizens

jonathan-cunningham:

jonathan-cunningham:

At this point, I didn’t believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record.  In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims.  That’s not surprising:  both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality.  But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”:  in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

I never thought I could seriously type the title above.  It sounds crazy right?  The President running an assassination program where he can, without judicial or legislative oversight, kill any US citizen.  If Greenwald didn’t link to the legal document above, I wouldn’t have believed it.  Nothing can be done so long as the court sees it as a “state secret” so the only recourse is to elect another President in 2012.

Except that “electing another President” won’t help either. Implicit in the election of Obama (or any Democrat who ran in 2008, for that matter) was the notion that, leaving aside every other possible policy decision that might come up in their term, said Democrat would be working to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush/Cheney “Security State.” That this has not happened is an understatement. From what I can see, the Obama administration has largely embraced and extended the Bush/Cheney security state.
Electing “another President” won’t help either. Your choices come 2012 are going to be a) Obama (again, forgetting everything else that has happened by 2012: on the essential freedoms that were formerly implicit to citizenship he is a failure thus far and shows no sign of changing) or b) Palin/Romney/Pawlenty/whoever. Do you really think anyone the GOP runs is going to be to the left of Obama on basic freedoms and the rights of a citizen? I, for one, do not. Because, honestly, there is no way they let any Democrat seize the security state thing from them. It won’t even come up if they think they can’t get sufficiently far to the right of him.

One can only conclude that these policies are then, for all intents and purposes, permanent. You get one chance to roll them back: when the next person comes in. And Obama’s administration has decided they like them just fine. It would be one thing to charge and try Awlaki in absentia, and then issue the orders as something along the lines of “look, he’s a convicted criminal in a war zone; we’re bringing him to justice; he may well die in that effort, but we hope to bring him to face his sentence.” There are very few people who would argue with such a truly conservative approach. Instead: no charges, no trial, everything made a “state secret,” and not even a passing effort made at even implying that there’s a real, legal case that even can be made against this guy. He’s delivered some strident sermons. That’s the full case against him in five words. On those grounds, the future GOP-in-charge could choose to round up Jeremiah Wright. Is that a country we want to live in?

And yet the Tea Klan screams tyranny because they are still going to buy their health insurance from a private company come 2014 and the top marginal rates might rise slightly. Indeed they have their fingers on the pulse of The Founders’ deepest wishes.

Obama’s secret assassination program against US citizens

File under: graphs you will never see a Democrat use, talk about, reference, admit the existence of, or in any way shape or form build an electoral strategy around.
Quite the opposite. They’ll wholeheartedly adopt the goddamned “Pledge to America” come November 3, 2010.

And yes, I know when new members of Congress take office. I also know that President DeMint can be very impatient.

Why Does John McCain Want To Kill Soldiers?

Why does Susan Collins hate the military so much that she wants them to starve to death while those brave men and women are out there fighting and dying in harms way? How dare she endanger funding for even a second over procedural concerns.

These and other simple frames are things you will never hear from the mouth of The Democrat. They, after all, have the facts on their side. Why, this amendment doesn’t actually even end DADT at all, it simply creates a mechanism by which [blah de blah de blah blah blah]. Why, those little devils actually used the same mechanism to pass DADT when [blah de blah de blah blah].

Repeat after Lemkin: The Facts Do Not Matter.

John McCain hates soldiers. Period. There is no other possible explanation.
When asked to apologize, up the ante (not only does John McCain hate soldiers, I’m fairly sure he is committing an act of treason by blocking this legislation).

It’s this ceaseless inability to identify whatever policy the Democrat prefers and fight for it, whatever may come, that really poisons the electorate. As The Big Dog himself once said:

When people are insecure, they’d rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who’s weak and right

“Weak and right” so perfectly sums the modern Democrat that it really should have made the exciting new website redesign and bumper-sticker that we’re all so pumped up by.
And nothing, nothing depicts the modern Tea Klan GOP’s limbic politics more perfectly than “strong and wrong.”