John McCain has finally had enough of his Republican teabagging cohorts, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.
In the latest expression of Republican frustration with conservative GOP colleagues, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) ...
Our friend, John Liming, wonders how God might deal with two conflicting prayers of a political nature.
I have been reading an article on the website, Raw Story, where it is ...
Item 1:
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It can be debated as to whether the filibuster came about as a political accident or was created to give minority parties a stronger say in opposing specific legislation they ...
While gun nuts sink a little deeper into madness with each passing day, Seattle is turning guns into bricks.
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Had enough of right-wing political crap and find yourself with a deep desire to get as far from the madding crowd as you can?
Read on...
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Here's the full quote from Charles P. Pierce.
If your "way of life" involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should ...
A guest post from James Fidlerten.
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When an enabler of sexual abuse directed at children sits on the threshold of sainthood, you know you're living in a world of screwed-up priorities.
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Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, ponders Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 presidential election.
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Barbara Bush on a Jeb run in 2016.
"We've had enough Bushes."
An entire planet concurs.
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Today we learn...
The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the ...
The above is in response to Maureen Dowd's ridiculous assertion that President Obama is incompetent for failing to get the 60 votes the Senate required to move the gun background ...
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The vote came in at 55 to 45 in favor of expanding background checks for gun sales. In most institutes of democracy, that would have been more than enough to ...
John McCain has finally had enough of his Republican teabagging cohorts, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.
In the latest expression of Republican frustration with conservative GOP colleagues, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Susan Collins (R-ME) excoriated Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) for persistently refusing to initiate House-Senate budget negotiations.
Their comments on the Senate floor Tuesday reflect a growing Republican schism over how to approach the tax and spending fights that have hamstrung Congress for years and dragged its approval ratings to historic lows.
“For four years, four years, we complained about the fact that the majority leader … would refuse to bring a budget to the floor of the United States Senate,” McCain said. “What [do] we on my side of the aisle keep doing? We don’t want a budget unless — unless — we put requirements on the conferees that are absolutely out of line and unprecedented.”
Thanks for the effort, John…but it won’t help a damn. Republicans are in self-destruct mode and nothing is going to stop the ticker from setting off the implosion. When a couple of clowns like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz are seriously considered by conservatives as contenders for the presidency in 2016, there’s not much more to say about the sad state of the Republican party.
It can be debated as to whether the filibuster came about as a political accident or was created to give minority parties a stronger say in opposing specific legislation they deeply opposed. Whatever the case, in the hands of Republicans, the filibuster has now become a destructive force being used with the single intent of bringing the Obama agenda (and with it normal governance) to a grinding halt.
Want a real Washington scandal — one worse than the (phony) Benghazi scandal and the (apparently real, but apparently limited) IRS scandals combined? Try the continuing, and possibly accelerating, obstruction of executive branch nominees by Senate Republicans.
Don’t think it’s a scandal? It’s pretty basic: Republicans, by abusing their Constitutional powers, are — deliberately, in several cases — preventing the government from carrying out duly passed laws.
…with virtually all nominees required to have 60 votes, one can accurately say that Republicans are filibustering every nomination…the worst are the “nullification” filibusters, in which Republicans simply refuse to approve any nominee at all for some positions — the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — because they don’t want those agencies to carry out their statutory obligations.
In doing so, Republicans are not breaking the rules of the Senate. They are, however, breaking the Senate itself, and harming the government.
From the beginning, Republicans were clear in their intent to obstruct Obama and Democrats by every legislative means at their disposal. Mitch McConnell speaking two weeks before the 2010 midterm election:
“[W]e need to treat this election as the first step in retaking the government. We need to say to everyone on Election Day, ‘Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job.’ [...]
The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president…. Our single biggest political goal is to give our nominee for president the maximum opportunity to be successful.”
That’s as clear an admission of guilt as you’re likely to find. Writing the day after McConnell’s 2010 statement, Steve Benen peeked into the future with what turns out to be astonishing foresight.
The obvious takeaway here is that GOP leaders have literally no interest in actually solving problems or passing legislation. None. But the larger truth is that President Obama, who’s spoken a bit lately about the need for “humility,” needs to realize that Republican obstinacy and extremist tactics aren’t going to get better after the midterms; they’re going to get worse.
McConnell and his cohorts have made abundantly clear that Americans’ welfare and the nation’s future pale in comparison to the Republican quest for power. The president stands in the way. If he’s not prepared for what they intend to bring, the showdown isn’t going to go well.
The President treats a dozen Senate Republicans to a two hour lunch and now there’s optimism that a deal on the deficit can be struck. Republicans want to deal again. Lovely…but John Liming sounds a warning bell. He’s seen the right’s deceptive cons once too often to buy into any of this. If Republicans are happy about anything then something’s up and it isn’t good.
Here, John will tell you all about it.
-mario
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To the best of my knowledge and belief, congressional republicans have been everything but optimistic about anything the president or the democrats have said or done since 2008 until the present time.
Pinch my left butt cheek if I am wrong and wake me up, but don’t I recall that the position of the Right and their Far Right counterparts has been to totally resist and obstruct and foil anything and everything “This President” has ever said, done or tried to do in his capacity as President? Have I been dreaming all that obstructionism stuff or is there something I might have slept though during all this damnable mess in Washington?
Well, it is obvious to me that the old standard once voiced by The House Minority Leader ( I forgot his name for the moment) (Mitch something or other, wasn’t it?) – didn’t this historic figure once regally proclaim in a somewhat Olympian tone, something to the effect that the number one priority of The Republican Party was going to be to make sure that “This President” – undoubtedly referring to President Obama ( In my humble opinion) was going to be only a one-term President?
It is pretty apparent even to someone as dumb as myself that particular “Number One Priority” kind of went to Hell in a hand basket when The American People voiced their total rejection of right wing crap-o-la and in fact did, indeed award President Obama his second term! I remember the descriptions being put forth by some media of a lot of right wingers after realizing they had lost the election they absolutely thought they had in the “Landslide Bag” – the media was saying things like, “They appear to have been “shell-shocked” by the news of their defeat at the polls.” Heh! Heh! Heh!
From some of the things that I have been hearing some that group of righties saying lately, I am still not convinced they understand that they lost the election. I think they simply are trying to ignore the fact and are trying to open up the same old bag of tricks again so they can run the clock until the mid-term elections of 2014 where I think they are hoping to get themselves re-energized and re-invigorated, but when people like me are hoping and praying that America will finish the job and cast their intransigent rear ends into the outer darkness of politics for eons to come.
One can hope! One can hope for a little more change!
So today, I get on the Internet and I fall upon this article from “The Hill” where it seems to be talking about some Senate Republicans ( Note that it did not say “House” Republicans) are expressing some kind of optimism that they might be able to work with the President and the Administration and actually get something “positive” accomplished about all this sequester and deficit and budget crap that has kept me and a lot like me on the edge of our seats for a few months now.
Well this revelation might seem like really good news to some people but it strikes a chord of dread and foreboding in my breast because according to the way I see things, if Republicans are acting happy about something the President has done or might do or has said, then I can only surmise that all this sudden joy and brotherhood is because they must expect the President to give them a little more of what they have been after all along – more cuts to Social Security and Medicare for starters. (Of course without any further talk about “Revenues” being put on the table! Of course!
And is there some kind of possibility that the President might actually give in to some of their demands to make further cuts to the social safety net programs and cause the cuts to be called something else . . . something like “Trimming the fat but retaining the programs for future generations?” What does that mean, I would like to know? I think that if fat gets trimmed at all then somewhere along the way somebody is going to get a few screws put to them in the process and I am guessing that would be the potential beneficiaries of these programs. Whadda ya wanna bet?
I have been hearing reports – but I don’t know how reliable they are – that maybe the President might have suggested he would be open to more “Trimming” (adjustment) of some of the “Entitlement” programs. I sure as Hell hope this is not the case because that is not what I voted for. But I have to ask myself, “If that is the case, what the Hell are you gonna do about it?” As far as I can tell, if something like that were to happen, there isn’t much the average “Little Guy” like myself could do about it except to suck it up and do the best I can with whatever is left once Righties get through virtually drinking my lifeblood.
John Liming looks at the sequester and where the blame lies.
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Some of the Right Wingers are losing no time in making sure America will blame any sequester and it’s consequences onto President Obama – and what else could any reasonable person who has watched the Right at work before expect them to do?
We do understand, I think, that if the sequester is allowed to kick in, much of the progress we have achieved in our economic growth and recovery will be undone and there is every possibility that we will slide back into a worse recession than the one we are just now working our way out of.
But the way I see it is that there are too many Republicans who simply do not care what happens to the economy. I think they are frothing-at-the-mouth angry because they couldn’t force their will onto America and grab the vast social security trust fund and other riches waiting to be grabbed and converted into privatized money makers for millionaires and billionaires.
Before any Right Wingers start pointing fingers about sequesters, they ought to recall that Congress passed the damned idea long before the president put his signature to it. It may have been the president’s idea originally (But I have nothing to use to back that up) as some Republicans are now whining, but I am wondering how anything this president ever thought might be a good idea got past the “We’re gonna make sure this president is a one term president” crowd?
They have obstructed on everything else – why didn’t they obstruct on the sequester?
Must have thought it was a helluva good idea or something – maybe they saw a future opportunity in the potential for exploiting it – I really cannot believe they were following the president’s “Leadership” on the issue.
We know that a so-called “Super Committee” was formed to address measures that would avoid sequester but Republicans reportedly could not bring themselves to close some tax loopholes for the rich or allow for any increased revenues that might cost as few dollars in taxes, so the Super Committee was a failure – Right Wing obstructionism plain and simple as I see it. ( The old, “Our way or the highway thing”?)
If a sequester happens I think it can rightly be called a “Gift from the right wing” because it was their well-documented refusal to work on compromise in the super committee that caused that thing to go down in flames and open the door to the fiscal tragedy which is scheduled to start on March 1st, 2013.
Ana Marie Cox has a great piece in the Guardian on the changing relationship between Fox News and the Republican party. She captures the essence of the current relationship in this wonderful observation on how Fox and the GOP play off each other in fabricating conspiracies – in this example, Benghazi.
Witness the coverage of Benghazi, where conservative outrage on the channel remains strident and forceful and in harmony with Republican officials, despite the willingness of most of the country to move on to matters closer to home. It’s a positive feedback loop that spirals into irrelevance: Republicans pursue a conspiracy that only Fox viewers believe, based on reports only Fox airs, and new information gets hammered into a shape that fits the existing narrative.
Exactly right. Cox’s entire piece is well worth the read.
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