The President has misstepped badly in his embrace of “changing entitlement programs” such as Social Security and Medicare to get the approval of Republicans before they give him teeny tiny concessions such as closing tax loopholes with no revenue increases. If the Social Security benefit cuts do go through along with Medicare and Medicaid cuts, this will be used against President Obama ad nauseum in television commercials, flyers, online ads by the Republicans. If you truly care about the President being re-elected, then please stand up now and say NO! to cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid!
Shorter slinkerwink: “If you love Obama, stop him for his own good.”
I think we can rule out any possibility of the Obots coming to their senses anytime soon. We need to stop them before they reproduce. The Cheetoville gene pool is in desperate need of some chlorine.
In June, FreedomWorks invited 150 Tea Party organizers to a planning session where participants were asked for their candidate of choice in the 2012 field. Only one Tea Party activist at the meeting supported Romney, [FreedomWorks president Matt] Kibbe said.
Tea Party conservatives remain outraged over Romney’s record on health care reform. In recent months, he has defended the plan he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts, in which residents are required to buy health insurance.
“Wary” isn’t the word I would use to describe the Tea Party’s feelings about Romney. “Despise” is more like it.
From a horse-race perspective, it looks to me like Allah is really right: Romney might actually eventually need former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin or Texas Gov. Rick Perry to enter the race, just to split the Tea Party vote, presently concentrated on Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who has steadily gained ground against Romney in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
To be sure, Romney still comfortably leads in fundraising (sans a Bachmann shocker — she hasn’t yet released her fundraising numbers for the second quarter) and in the polls. Perhaps he could win the primary without much support from the Tea Party and the so-called Christian Right. But he would absolutely need that support to win the general election. By the same token, to actually win the presidency, any strictly Tea Party candidate would need the mainstream support Romney seems most likely to garner.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
If Palin and Bachmann both run, at least one of them will drop out early, maybe even before the Iowa caucuses. Mitt won’t win Iowa and he’ll probably win Hew Hampshire. Then we get to see how much the GOP base dislikes him.
Mitt can raise a gazillion dollars and get all the establishment endorsements he wants, the base won’t care. The motivated voters will be the Tea Partiers – they despise Romney and hate the GOP establishment almost as much as they hate Obama.
If Romney wins the GOP nomination the base will do what they did in 2008 – stay home.
Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.
This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae – or no antennae at all – to all those who just don’t understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama’s aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.
To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?
No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn’t have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.
Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by Obama’s presence – not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence – to say it’s just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.
That is some seriously deluded shit. You don’t see his followers saying stuff like that anymore, do you?
But I will admit that Dick doesn’t cackle, at least not in public. Do you think that might have been intended as a subtle dig at Hillary?
Now he’s offering to cut Social Security. He really is a gravy train for the GOP, isn’t he? With Obama they get more than they ever dreamed of getting in terms of tax cuts, spending cuts, supply-side Reaganomics, bankster bailouts, destruction of the social compact—yet at the same time, they get to continue to play the part of aggrieved opposition party, rallying their base for donations so they can “take back the country.” It’s quite a little show.
She’s got a bunch of graphs and stuff to check out too.
But there is another reason to visit Violet’s blog. She needs surgery and can’t afford it. In a civilized country this wouldn’t be a problem but we live in the United States.
Violet is a friend of mine and a really good feminist blogger. Please help her if you can.
I was collecting and posting reactions to Obama’s Social Security dolchschloss when I found this from Booman:
For whatever reason, this is what the administration wanted people talking about when they sat down this morning with their Republican counterparts. This is how they wanted to control the political environment. Naturally, rumors that the president wants to cut entitlement programs, including Social Security, are going to make Democrats foam at the mouth with rage. But that’s apparently something the president doesn’t mind because he thinks he’ll get something valuable in return.
Leaving aside the prospect that the president might actually sign a bill with cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, he wants to leave that impression this morning. He wants his base angry and calling for his head.
And, I think, the only reason for him to do that is to shame the Republican leadership for their cowardice. Now, is this something that the administration sprung on Boehner at the last minute, or an announcement culminating from their private negotiations?
I can’t say. So, I won’t overreact.
What I know for certain is that the Republican are getting wobbly on their anti-tax pledge, and this will make it even harder for them to maintain their position.
What’s missing is a ton of detail. Most importantly, what unannounced goodies would come with such a package? How would it be sweetened for Democrats? And what’s the long-game and short-game?
There’s too much we simply don’t know.
Shorter Booman:
It’s eleventy-dimensional cheese! Obama is the smartest POTUS ever! He is a Jedi master of political Hu Phlung Pu!
HE TURNED WAFFLES INTO WHINE!!!
Well, I said he had a lot of potential,
he was only misunderstood.
You know, he really didn’t mean to treat me so bad,
he wanted to be good.
And I swore one day I would tame him,
even though he loves to run hog wild.
Just call me Cleopatra, everybody,
cause I’m the Queen of Denial.
Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee signed into law a bill that would require voters to show identification at the polls in 2012, with a photo required before casting a ballot in 2014, his office announced on Wednesday.
“Having reflected a great deal on the issue, I believe that requiring identification at the polling place is a reasonable request to ensure the accuracy and integrity of our elections,” Chafee, an Independent, said in a statement.
“Notably, I spoke with representatives of our state’s minority communities, and I found their concerns about voter fraud and their support for this bill particularly compelling,” he added.
Under the new law, poll workers will ask voters for identification beginning in 2012, and a number of non-photo documents such as a Social Security card or birth certificate will suffice for them to be allowed to vote.
In 2014, however, any identification will need to include a photo. The state will provide free photo identification, and provisional ballots will be made available to anyone without the proper documents.
Until three years I would have said fears of voter fraud were exaggerated. (By voter fraud I mean people who aren’t eligible to vote or people voting more than once. Rigging voting machines or tampering with ballots is a whole ‘nother topic.) But then some strange things happened in the caucus states during the Democratic primaries.
In this day and age there is nothing unreasonable about expecting people to show standardized photo identification before casting ballots. This enables us to verify that they are eligible to vote and that they only vote once.
I was a little disappointed by this statement from Bill Clinton:
Former President Bill Clinton Wednesday compared GOP efforts to limit same-day voter registration and block some convicted felons from voting to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes.
In a speech to liberal youth activists Wednesday, the former president called out proposals in battleground states like Florida and Ohio that could limit the voter rolls.
“I can’t help thinking since we just celebrated the Fourth of July and we’re supposed to be a country dedicated to liberty that one of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Clinton said at Campus Progress’s annual conference in Washington.
“There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” Clinton added.
That’s a pretty broad brush. Should someone convicted of drug possession or passing bad checks be permanently barred from voting? No – once they have completed their sentence and probation/parole they should have all their legal rights and privileges restored.
On the other hand, do we really want rapists, murderers and child molesters voting? Probably not. If you don’t want to lose your right to vote, don’t rape or murder anyone and don’t molest any children.
Should non-resident students be allowed to vote in the states where they go to school or where they permanently reside? If we give them the option of choosing either one, how do we ensure they don’t do both?
In 2008 Al Franken was elected to the US Senate by a margin of 225 votes. The presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were decided by the slimmest of margins. It wouldn’t (or didn’t) take a lot of fraud to change the outcome of close elections like those.
To maintain the integrity of our elections we need several reforms. Voter ID is one of them. We need standardized laws in all 57 states, and we need tamper-proof ballots and/or voting machines. We need to make sure that eligible voters are not prevented from voting while at the same time preventing fraud.
And we need to make sure that the will of the voters isn’t thwarted by corrupt party officials.
This WaPo profile [trigger warning for virulent gay hatred and misogyny] of GOP presidential wannabe Michele Bachmann (R-Etchinducing) and her husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann, Professional Gay-Hater, is one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read.
They are terrible people with miserable lives who make other people’s lives a misery because of their intensely stupid and exhaustively compassionless belief system.
If they weren’t such influential assholes, I’d feel sorry for them.
First of all let me say I don’t like Michele Bachmann and I don’t intend to vote for her. It bothers me that I keep finding myself in the weird position of defending someone I don’t like or support. I find myself in that position because people who ought to know better keep resorting to sexism and simple tribalism instead of focusing on what really matters – the candidate’s qualifications, record and political ideology.
Are Michele and Marcus Bachmann “terrible people?”
I haven’t seen a single allegation that they have killed or abused anyone. As far as I know they haven’t sent drones to blow anybody up. They don’t deal drugs or sell porn.
They have five kids and have provided foster care for 23 more. Dr. Bachmann has a Ph.D in clinical psychology and runs a Christian counseling practice.
From what I can see they aren’t miserable. In fact, they seem pretty happy and successful. As far as their “intensely stupid and exhaustively compassionless belief system” those beliefs are shared by millions of Americans.
I was raised in a evangelical/fundamentalist church. I have several close relatives and some friends who still attend those kind of churches. The people in those churches are not stupid or compassionless – or at least not anymore so than the rest of the country. In fact, conservative evangelicals are more likely than progressives to donate to charity.
It’s very common for progressives to be contemptuous of religious believers. In fact progressives tend to be contemptuous of anyone who doesn’t share their enlightened views. Ironically, they can’t seem to understand why these stupid, evil people don’t appreciate being told how stupid and evil they are.
There are plenty of good reasons to oppose Michele Bachmann. It is not necessary to demonize her and her husband.
One last thing – It appears to have totally gone over Melissa’s head but I don’t recall seeing any profiles discussing the religious beliefs of Ann Romney or Mary Pawlenty. Did anyone ever ask if Michelle Obama agrees with the concept of a “submissive wife?”
