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

you mean secretariat of the central committee needham

“People on the Hill are very much rubbed the wrong way by a former Giuliani staffer who is around thirty years old, running around and determining whether they’re conservative or not.”

i love the "running around" construction

like chill out son, put a few bottles of bordeaux on the expense account, enjoy life

But the elders were wrong to dismiss Needham and Chapman. Between throws of the football, they designed a brutally effective way to activate Heritage’s base of almost 700,000 donors, as well as to harness the diffuse Tea Party fervor across the country. In nearly every congressional district, they recruited Heritage Action “sentinels,” usually ordinary citizens with a surplus of time and enthusiasm, who were trained, outfitted with information kits, and asked to recruit and organize the local faithful. When Needham sounded the alarm, the sentinels and their infantries flooded the offices of their representatives with vitriol.

irl comment box trolling, amazing

that is kinda what move-on was like tho right? w/o the top-down order of it of course, heh

its pretty standard political organizing

xp yeah but that's pressure-group politics from way back (just watched the ken burns prohibition, which is awesome! and that period was the beginning of this kind of shit, amazingly enough)

if anything it seems like congresspeople have a really low threshold for being annoyed. touchy bunch, aren't they.

their job must be so annoying tbf

that prohibition series was really good for sure

loved how prohibition improved the bar scene

especially in the Harding White House

ended up having huge affection for al smith, i need to know more about him

yes! No major bios about him; without him no FDR.

every looney tunes gangster sounded like him!

everyone who said "boids" and "woikout"

Smith turned into a Liberty League dumbass by the thirties though.

Editorial in NY Times by Senate Dems Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/opinion/end-the-nsa-dragnet-now.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

part of it:

The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security. In spite of our repeated requests, the N.S.A. has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using a regular court order or emergency authorization.

They've convinced me. NSA, stop your secret spying this instance! Also, please provide proof that you have stopped your secret spying, thanks. And just in case you try to be clever, please provide proof that you have stopped all of your secret spying, even the super double secret stuff that we don't know about.

This instant, dah. I think I have typos built into my QWERTY.

what we need is some transparency from our secret state

Grant Wahl ‏@GrantWahl 17h

Fwiw, Toronto source says they've used native son Drake to try to recruit multiple TFC targets, not just one.

sorry wrong thread lol

it isn't

Alfred, I just finished reading Didion's Miami (after reading Political Fictions upon your encouragement). I was very taken with her observations and insights into the Cuban exile community of the time (circa 1950 to 1987). To what extent do you think this book still applies to the present day politics of that community?

Frighteningly accurate; it's the Miami I knew. As the feds cracked down on cocaine smuggling in the mid eighties the Contra operation opened another pipeline (read about Luis Posada Carriles and Southern Air Transport, with whom my dad did legit biz in the late eighties but fully aware it was a CIA dummy corporation). A lot of those Cubans are dead or aging: my grandmother's generation. In 2012 for the first time a majority of Cubans voted for a Democrat.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), pressed about what his majority had to show for its work in 2013, told reporters in mid-November that the GOP was most proud of putting a brake on tougher regulations on business and impeding efforts by President Obama to push a more liberal agenda on the country.

“Listen,” Boehner said, “we have a very divided country and we have a very divided government. And I’m not going to sit here and underestimate the difficulty in finding the common ground, because there’s not as much common ground here as there used to be.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/113th-congress-going-down-in-history-for-its-inaction-has-a-critical-december-to-do-list/2013/12/01/cf2b4808-57a0-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html

Boehner's doing his job and media helps him out with generic headlines about "Congress"

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/multimedia/interactives/2013/stats_images/Ch8House.png

numerator emptor obv

looks like those clowns in congress did it again

what a bunch of clowns

conclusion: republicans are cooler than democrats

How do you keep up with the news like that?

xp

we'll make those washington fat cats pay at the ballot box

A masterpiece of received thinking, ludicrous conclusions, and terrible prose.

Anyone who says "Call David Gergen for advice" deserves a bludgeoning.

david hey how are you oh good yeah im great thx listen do you know how to forward ports on a wireless router

lol otm

http://www.businessinsider.com/it-will-be-an-unhappy-new-year-for-the-long-term-unemployed-when-their-benefits-are-cut-off-2013-12#ixzz2mQLMSVaI

This will teach 'em

Cutting off unemployment benefits is justified in the eyes of conservatives, bcz the benefits are paid in the form of money, not whippings.

neoliberal arbitrage opportunity

bring back debtors prisons and indentured servitude i say

pres brown moving to nh? http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ex-sen-scott-brown-namechecks-new-hampshire-in-op-ed-bashing-obamacare

man Chuck Schumer is both useless and stupid, isn't he?

IC: You don’t think Elizabeth Warren makes a villain out of Wall Street?

CS: I am just going to leave it at what I said.

IC: Forget Warren then. Is this a problem for your party?

CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.

IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?

CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115689/chuck-schumer-interview-liberal-blogs-elizabeth-warren-ted-cruz

wow schumer asking for it bigtime

DINO. primary him.

lol he also bragged today abt taking pres brown out after he crossed him http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/schumer-recruited-elizabeth-warren-after-scott-brown-allegedly-rejected-deal

"I went to Scott Brown and said, 'If you give us the sixtieth vote for the Citizens United rollback, we won’t go after you,'" he told the New Republic. "I spent a lot of time lobbying him, and met some of his friends and had them lobby him. He said yes. Then he said no. So I wanted to recruit the strongest candidate against him, and I thought that was Elizabeth Warren."

I liked the part where he looked at the aide for support.

"You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them."

his corporate masters are relieved!

wall street are people, too, my friend.

you go after them for the sake of they need gettin after