American Politics Thread 2013: I'm a cool Rodham grandma in the USA

http://mrkt.ms/18Bt2ZF

aw poor innocent centrist ceo everyone so mean to him

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/29/shame-on-us-how-businesses-brought-the-debt-limit-mess-onto-themselves

"This isn't just another bill," Bachmann continued. "This isn't load limits on turnip trucks that we're talking about. This is consequential.

well THAT's gonna piss off the turnip truck lobby, right there

(xxp) ^^^ from the surely non-partisan author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President—and Why They'll Try Even Harder Next Time

do they just want to get rid of goverment-paid healthcare for congress members?

First sensible idea I've heard in weeks.

Bill Kristol, sour and ornery, and a liar on "This Week."

ya call that news eh

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/09/26/the-promise-of-paul/

amazing

10 ways to hack the government using this one mean spirited unelectable ideologue

more and more anti hillary inevitability think pieces every day pieceshttp://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/is-hillary-clinton-our-only-chance-for-a-woman-president.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/is-hillary-clinton-our-only-chance-for-a-woman-president.html

unelectable vs ineluctable vs gabbneb

do think, and this relates to richs rand paul piece too, that if youre going to run an establishment figure its better if its not an out of date unpopular establishment

warren 2016

http://www.papermag.com/uploaded_images/patrotic_animated_4th-of-July-fireworks.gif

warren is v appealing in terms of her political philosophy, but she's premature in terms of her experience and training for the presidency. she'd try to do the right things, but she'd get all tangled up and fail. give her a chance to learn the ropes first and how an insider gets things done and she'd be a fine choice.

now or never sry aimless

I'm quite happy with a liberal senator voting in the Senate as a liberal.

and fwiw ive never seen anyone demonstrate any correlation between washington experience and avoiding 'tangled up and fail' as president

Something something Obama

because of course there is nothing that can train you for being president of the united states

xp
i'd be willing to ride with her into that swamp, but my expectations would be low

Insiderism only counts as a virtue if it turned her into Ted Kennedy.

I'm quite happy with a liberal senator voting in the Senate as a liberal.

― the objections to Drake from non-REAL HIPHOP people (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, September 29, 2013 2:34 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah sure ok tons of awesome voting

OH INSIDERS, OUR SAVIORS!

morbs, you ought to know that much power in DC flows in back channels and a familiarity with them gives you many more ways to get from here to there.

not anymore really, everyone used to hate smokey back room deals, now they hate partisanship

Morbs, may I?

"'Here' and 'there' are both shitty places."

How'd I do?

xp

yeah i still don't get that argument alfred -- great, one liberal vote out of 100 in the senate, the senate still sucks. why not have a real liberal in charge of an entire branch of government?

also in agreement with joe that "experience" probably doesn't mean shit -- you have advisers and aides to tell you what to do. fwiw warren will probably do shitty stuff as prez but she'd have to be better than fucking hillary

xp
oh, yes, surely back room deals are a thing of the past now

its true, for evidence see the multiple looming government shut downs

what you have now is an ideologically principled congress, just what we always wanted, and its still pretty horrible, lol

why not have a real liberal in charge of an entire branch of government?

because I'd rather finish a full Senate term first, although if it came down to it Anything But HRC.

morbs, you ought to know that much power in DC flows in back channels and a familiarity with them gives you many more ways to get from here to there.

tell that to Biden and Mitch McConnell!

Jonathan Rauch on why backroom deals are exactly what repel tea partiers:

I have interviewed many Tea Party supporters and leaders in the last few years. What comes across when they discuss their concerns is not just fiscal libertarianism and hostility to big government, though those are certainly defining strains. Nor, importantly, did I find extremism or radicalism as conventionally thought of; these are smart, successful people who have no interest in upending the social order as we know it. (In fact, they tend to think of themselves as seeking to protect the social order from government's efforts to usurp it.) They are not temperamentally opposed to compromise; in their daily lives, they do it all the time. Rather, they are ideologically opposed to compromise. They have made a reasoned judgment that compromise has served the country and the Constitution poorly.

It has served the country poorly, they say, by corrupting politicians who promise one thing and then go to Washington and do the opposite after being absorbed by the deal-making, log-rolling culture of politics as usual. Leaders who showed up swearing to master big government wind up serving it instead. Pushed to defend themselves, such craven politicians say "we didn't have the votes" or "at the end of the day, we had to get something done." This kind of Realpolitik, whatever its tactical merits, is a one-way ratchet toward ever bigger government. And it can hardly be rational to continue to support a counterproductive strategy, the very strategy that got us into the present mess. When you are in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. So compromisers should just stop. That is the only way to restrain the growth of government

many more ways to get from here to EVEN MORE FUCT

(close, WmC)

Dems & Repugs still agree on 98% of shit, esp since Our Freedom Was Hated (TM Crying Eagle)

imho back channel familiarity had more to do w favors owed than expertise, and favors have been highly devalued in todays congressional economy, always prob overrated tho

also warren was a pretty awful candidate out on the stump and managed to make a gimme race way more competitive than it should've been. her running would only go to 'prove' how unelectable her liberalism (as opposed to her persona) is, at a time when the party is slowly moving slightly left. any 'not so fast on the hillary inevitability' pieces are just filling space and fishing for hits. wake me when someone writes a credible piece taking cuomo or o'malley seriously.

morbs you really think the dems and republicans are more coaligned now than they were when they were reforming welfare, defending marriage, and repealing glass-steagall? show me the bills of comparable impact from this session that had bipartisan support.

smart, successful people

who apply only one litmus test to the usefulness of any idea, based on whether it makes government any larger than it already is? that is extremely simple in the older sense of: stupid (see simple Simon).

back favors vs some conception of purity in democracy/legislatin' is hamilton vs madison again right? in which case i'm siding w/ hamilton.

the problem with any Dem candidate in 2016 is how sequester, chained CPI, Simpson-Bowles, etc have inched the country towards accepting these conservative/DLC positions as normal even as the party itself moves left and socially the electorate does; a Dem candidate would have to first undo this thinking. That's how much ground libs hae lost.

also warren was a pretty awful candidate out on the stump and managed to make a gimme race way more competitive than it should've been.

― balls, Sunday, September 29, 2013 3:02 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not sure where youre getting this, brown was was popular in mass and warren won handily, she raised more money than anyone ever has in a statewide race there and developed a big national profile based largely on her stump speeches going hella viral on the nets

yeah that was not my recollection either

country was way more deficit hawkish in 92 when it gave nearly 20% of the popular vote to a lunatic munchkin whose platform and campaign was focused almost solely on deficit reduction. perot (and eventually clinton) hitting bush and by implication reagan over deficit was a factor in the race, though probably not nearly as much a factor as greenspan not lowering interest rates due to the deficit and obviously not nearly as much as bush agreeing to raise taxes to reduce the deficit after the dems shut down the govt over it in 1990.

fair question to be raised however is how well those speeches would have played on a national level vs in new england xp

the thing about a possible warren candidacy isnt that the democratic party has shifted left its that the values of the entire country have changed on some big issues (see frank richs rand paul piece http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/rand-paul-2013-9) particularly wealth inequality/the finance industry and forign interventionism, hillary represents the old outdated consensus on both of those

if warren is a credible national candidate then watch out cuz ted cruz is a juggernaut then.

ballsy:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/25/democratic-establishment-nsa