This Election 2012 Article Made Me Laugh

[p-branez]

This arena of the board needs life. I was just about to make a thread about how much the 2012 election debate sucked the life from other news, but in a certain way, this article almost made me appreciate the election coverage.

Here's an article that made me giggle when reading at the local bookstore. I always pick up a Rolling Stone to see if there's a new article by Matt Taibbi. He is one of the few journalists willing to take on, among others, Wall Street bankers.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michele-bachmanns-holy-war-20110622

The quotes that made me laugh:

"Michele took a job as a tax attorney collecting for the IRS and spent the next four years sucking on the tit of the Internal Revenue Service, which makes her Tea Party-leader hypocrisy quotient about average."
p 2

"Maple River was so out there that Minnesota's then-governor, Jesse Ventura, no slouch in the batshit-conspiracy department, dismissed the group as nothing but a bunch of people who "think UFOs are landing next month.'"
p 2

"The episode was classic Bachmann, whose political strategy throughout her career has mostly revolved around having her Little House on the Never-Existed Fundamentalist Prairie sensibilities rocked by something she has read (or misread) in the news, then immediately proposing a horseshit, total-waste-of-*everybody's-time legislative action in response."
p 3

"Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more "viable" boring-white-guy candidate."
p 4

[abbott]

I thought this rolling stone article about the election was good...
http://m.rollingstone.com/?redirurl=/politics/blogs/national-affairs/meet-gary-johnson-the-gops-invisible-candidate-20110615

[saz]

you already started a thread about gary johnson.

taibbi is arguably one of america's greatest journalists today. he treads in places and shines lights on things that most won't. he's fearless in going after wall street, religious zealots, the democrats and republicans and rips all of them to shreds while providing hysterically funny commentary, incredibly indepth analysis, themes and narratives. his coverage of wall street and in particular goldmann sachs was spot on in griftopia (http://www.amazon.com/Griftopia-Machines-Vampire-Breaking-America/dp/0385529953), as really all of his works are must reads.

[Bob]

he was also like the second or third guest on the colbert report (http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/25733/november-16-2005/matt-taibbi) back when it started in 2005

i didn't really get into taibbi's stuff until maybe 6 months ago, and i forgot that this interview was him until a little after that, but the question at around 2:10 was one of my fondest early memories of the colbert report, so good for him on that as well, even though watching it again now he seems a little nervous

[saz]

he was also like the second or third guest on the colbert report (http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/25733/november-16-2005/matt-taibbi) back when it started in 2005

"Dear Canada,

We're terribly sorry, but full episodes and various clips of The Colbert Report are not available."

damn, i'd love to be able to watch it.

[Bob]

ah, that sucks, i forgot about that. well, the question in question is:

"you covered the campaign in a gorilla suit for a while, and then after that you covered it in a viking costume while doing acid, and in between those two, you had a mental breakdown...how could you tell?"

[kaiser soze]

Well Bachmann is turning up the crazy - she's making Palin look rather moderate, oh wait - it's a setup

Palin will pop out of the blue to replace Bachmann's nutty and win the ticket for the teahadists!

This is going to be one of the worst elections to date

[saz]

Obama Doesn't Want a Progressive Deficit Deal

Matt Taibbi - Taibblog (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-doesnt-want-a-progressive-deficit-deal-20110711)
Posted: July 11, 11:31 AM ET

The blindness of the DLC-era "Third Way" Democratic Party continues to be an astounding thing. For more than a decade now they have been clinging to the idea that the path to electoral success is social liberalism plus laissez-faire economics – in other words, get Wall Street and corporate America to fund your campaigns, and get minorities, pro-choice and gay marriage activists (who will always frightened into loyalty by the Tea Party/Christian loonies on the other side) to march at your rallies and vote every November. They've abandoned the unions-and-jobs platform that was the party's anchor since Roosevelt, and the latest innovations all involve peeling back their own policy legacies from the 20th century. Obama's new plan, for instance, might involve slashing Medicare and Social Security under "pressure" from the Republicans.

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie.



http://youtu.be/n-B9un1jsg8


man, obama sucks. he's pretty much done everything half-assed and he's all too quick to adopt republican talking points, while doing nothing about cracking down on wall street. he needs a primary challenge in 2012 or there needs to be more political parties.

[p-branez]

... or Americans need a new voting system. But the British didn't even pass, in Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg's words the "miserable little compromise" of alternative vote, so Americans have no chance of changing the voting system.

I picked up "Griftopia" at the library yesterday and nearly checked it out. Maybe next time. I just have a hard time reading current politics/economics books when there are so many interesting historical titles I still haven't read.

Another Rolling Stone highlight is the David Foster Wallace article about the 2000 John McCain presidential campaign. But ever since Wallace died, it's nearly impossible to find his material online.

[saz]

america as well as canada and england desperately need proportional representation, and all this would require would be amendments to the main election act or law of each said country. although it might be much more difficult to achieve in the united states, seeing as the democrats and republicans conspired to keep ralph nader out of the 2000 presidential debates, when nader was polling at 5% and even higher, which is the threshold for participating in debates. the green party and libertarian party deserve to have their voices heard, and the two party lockdown and conspiring between the dlc and rlc is awful.

with two parties embracing right-wing policies, for several decades now, the american dream is in trouble (http://youtu.be/_pje5l7KZDw).

[saz]

Obama like FDR? Not at all, it turns out.

By Alexander Heffner,
Opinion
Published: July 22
The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-like-fdr-not-at-all-it-turns-out/2011/07/20/gIQAgSXYTI_story.html)


Remember when Barack Obama was supposed to be the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt?

As the president took office, historians and columnists reveled in the comparison. Historian William E. Leuchtenburg, the author of “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal,” told NPR that he heard echoes of FDR in Obama’s inaugural address. Before that, Time magazine featured the president-elect on its cover, smiling and, FDR-like, smoking a cigarette in a 1930s roadster. “The New New Deal,” the headline proclaimed. And in the essay inside, “The New Liberal Order,” journalist Peter Beinart likened Obama’s coalition to FDR’s and posited that “if [Obama] can do what F.D.R. did — make American capitalism stabler and less savage — he will establish a Democratic majority that dominates U.S. politics for a generation.” Just like FDR.

Since the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — which Obama and his advisers seem to have believed, incorrectly, would offer a self-perpetuating boost to the economy — Obama has experimented neither boldly nor persistently with programs on the scale of FDR’s initiatives.

Instead, he threw the stimulus money at the states to do with what they wanted. He has given in to prolonging the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy and is now considering more belt-tightening that would weaken entitlements. And he’s watched as the number of government jobs has shrunk by the thousands. In the budget negotiations, the president has signaled that he would sign off on cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

But we should have known all along. Unlike FDR, who vowed radical measures to fix the depressed economy during his presidential campaign, Obama offered vague bipartisan pledges.

“Obama’s efforts at reasonable, conciliatory rhetoric have been a failure in this political climate, and he has not yet persuaded me that he has it in him to take on his opponents with the same ferocity that they attack him,”




Barack Obama: The Democrats’ Richard Nixon?

By Bruce Bartlett
The Fiscal Times (http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/07/22/Barack-Obama-The-Democrats-Richard-Nixon.aspx#page1)
July 22, 2011


Liberals hoped that Obama would overturn conservative policies and launch a new era of government activism. Although Republicans routinely accuse him of being a socialist, an honest examination of his presidency must conclude that he has in fact been moderately conservative to exactly the same degree that Nixon was moderately liberal.

Here are a few examples of Obama's effective conservatism:

• His stimulus bill was half the size that his advisers thought necessary;
• He continued Bush’s war and national security policies without change and even retained Bush’s defense secretary;
• He put forward a health plan almost identical to those that had been supported by Republicans such as Mitt Romney in the recent past, pointedly rejecting the single-payer option favored by liberals;
• He caved to conservative demands that the Bush tax cuts be extended without getting any quid pro quo whatsoever;
• And in the past few weeks he has supported deficit reductions that go far beyond those offered by Republicans.

Further evidence can be found in the writings of outspoken liberals such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has condemned Obama’s conservatism ever since he took office.

Conservatives will, of course, scoff at the idea of Obama being any sort of conservative, just as liberals scoffed at Nixon being any kind of liberal. But with the benefit of historical hindsight, it’s now obvious that Nixon was indeed a moderate liberal in practice. And with the passage of time, it’s increasingly obvious that Clinton was essentially an Eisenhower Republican. It may take 20 years before Obama’s basic conservatism is widely accepted as well, but it’s a fact.

.

[saz]

... or Americans need a new voting system. But the British didn't even pass, in Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg's words the "miserable little compromise" of alternative vote, so Americans have no chance of changing the voting system.

thought this might be of interest:



The best way to fight the two-party monopoly

By Michael Lind
Tuesday, Aug 9, 2011 07:01 ET
Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/news/politics/democratic_party/index.html?story=%2Fpolitics%2Fwar_room%2F2011%2F0 8%2F09%2Flind_two_party)


Most of the world’s democracies have adopted one or another version of proportional representation (PR), an electoral system that more or less accurately reflects the diversity of political views among the country’s citizens. Unfortunately, from 18th century Britain the U.S. inherited the older, less representative system called plurality voting or "first past the post" voting.

Under proportional representation, third, fourth and fifth parties can be elected to the legislature (most democracies that use PR impose rules that prevent minuscule, extremist parties from being represented or holding the balance of power). But under American-style plurality voting, a vote for a third party is usually a wasted vote. Plurality voting means that the winner is the candidate who gets the most votes, even if those votes do not add up to a majority. So in a three-way race in which the Republican wins 40 percent, the Democrat 30 percent and the Green Party candidate 30 percent, the Republican will win, even though 60 percent of the electorate opposed that candidate. If most Greens would have preferred the Democrat to the Republican, by voting for a Green candidate they not only wasted their own votes but also ensured the election of the politician they liked the least.

America’s plurality voting rules impose a two-party system on a multi-party nation. Most Americans are neither consistent liberal Democrats nor consistent conservative Republicans. Two groups in particular are disfranchised by the first-past-the-post voting system: populists and libertarians. Populists, with their base among America’s working-class majority, tend to favor middle-class welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare but often have relatively conservative views on social issues. Libertarianism combines free market economics with liberal views on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

A small but growing movement (http://www.fairvote.org/) in the United States supports the replacement of archaic and unfair plurality voting with a more democratic system. But in a country that rejected the metric system in the 1970s as un-American, the replacement of our archaic, dysfunctional and undemocratic electoral system is not going to happen soon.

The progressive-liberal movement was a broad school of thought that included progressive followers of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and the New Deal liberals led by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. "Modern Republicans" like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon formed the right wing of the progressive-liberal consensus. While there were many differences among members of this movement, all agreed that the economic management functions of the national government had to expand in order to deal with the challenges of an industrial, urban society.

The conservative-neoliberal movement, which has dominated American politics since the Carter and Reagan years, has been similarly broad and diverse, including both Goldwater-Reagan conservatives and Clinton-Obama New Democrats. All have agreed with the theory that the economy should be organized chiefly on the basis of the "free market" and that government intervention should be viewed with suspicion and is legitimate only in cases of "market failure" and the provision of basic public goods. Obama Democrats and Tea Party Republicans represent the left and right wings, respectively, of the post-Nixon conservative-neoliberal consensus.

In both its Reagan Republican and New Democrat forms, the conservative-neoliberal school asserted that the beneficial results of "statist" progressive-liberal reforms could be achieved, at even lower cost, by "free-market" methods. You could liberalize trade, at no harm to American manufacturing, and encourage or tolerate the decline of unions, with no reduction in worker incomes. Competition, not regulation, would rein in healthcare costs. You could deregulate airlines and electrical utilities, with no loss in quality of service or danger of bankruptcies and monopoly concentration. And so on.

In the last 30 years, under Republicans and Democrats alike, the conservative-neoliberal approach has been tried. It didn’t work. The result of trade liberalization was not a boom in American manufactured exports, but perpetual trade deficits, the offshoring of production by American companies to low-wage, repressive sweatshop countries, and the targeted destruction of one American industry after another by mercantilist foreign regimes like Japan and China. The result of the decline of unions has been a combination of lower wages and fewer benefits for most American workers. The result of airline deregulation has been chronic bankruptcy, awful service, predatory monopoly and the worst airline system outside of the Third World. Deregulation of electricity produced blackouts in California and the crimes of Enron.

The failure of the conservative-neoliberal theory of how the world works is manifest, even if Tea Party Republicans and Obama Democrats persist in revivals of the old time religion, each according to their own denomination. Unfortunately, there is no well-developed alternative waiting in the wings to make an entrance when the failed actors are booed off the stage.

We can be certain that the next American reform movement will be more "statist" than Reagan Republicans and Clinton-Obama Democrats. No intelligent American can believe any longer that the answer to all economic questions is more deregulation and more tax cuts.