Merica does it right!

[Ian]

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[Gawdzilla Sama]

Took me a second.

[Sean Hayden]

[JimC]

Some of the punditocracy are predicting a Tea Party sweep of Republican positions in the mid-terms and full on Tea for 2016. At which point their loss should be devastating and allow the normal Republicans a chance to regroup.

There are normal republicans?

[Robert_S]

Some of the punditocracy are predicting a Tea Party sweep of Republican positions in the mid-terms and full on Tea for 2016. At which point their loss should be devastating and allow the normal Republicans a chance to regroup.

There are normal republicans?

Actually there are. The party has been drifting into a Conservatism Plus direction for some time now, but there are still a lot of decent people who identify as Republicans. 99% of them live in Canada

[FBM]

46055_458608247538586_177271873_n.jpg

Nope. Not getting it.

[FBM]

Ftfy.

[Robert_S]

46055_458608247538586_177271873_n.jpg

Nope. Not getting it.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/dispatche ... m/1689269/

Party on Seth's lawn!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Some of the punditocracy are predicting a Tea Party sweep of Republican positions in the mid-terms and full on Tea for 2016. At which point their loss should be devastating and allow the normal Republicans a chance to regroup.

There are normal republicans?

[Tyrannical]

You hung a few negroes in premature celebration?

The KKK only lynched about 3500 niggers in it's history. And I'm sure the Negroes were glad to see them hanging because the condemned were brutal murders and rapists that primarily terrorized other Blacks. Over a period of eighty years, 3500 is a tiny number. Blacks murder many more Whites than that every single year, and 3500 is under ten years worth of Black on Black murder in the city of Chicago alone.

Can you explain clearly please why you use the word 'nigger' when pretty well everyone here finds it offensive?

I am genuinely interested, however as Ian suggest it won't make any real sense.

To make a distinction, I'll call White criminals white trash because that is what they are. Niggers are the criminally inclined element of the negro race. I don't like to use the term Black even though I do because dark-skinned Asians find it offensive. African-? is just as misleading as there is more to Africa than sub-Saharan Africans. The most correct term is probably Congoid and Capoid, but almost no one commonly uses those terms.

[Tyrannical]

Ty, I hope you stand trial for a capital crime and get a jury of YOUR peers. They'll be lynching you during the jury selection process.

I don't commit crimes, and would certainly never commit a capital crime. I'm a very law abiding racist. I think all criminals regardless of race (and I don't mean jay-walkers) should be executed.

[trdsf]

I've been wondering why the Republicans self-harm, by banging on about god and abortion and stuff.
After all, they simply cannot lose in their banker states, they are just preaching to the converted.
You would think that they would keep quiet, and try harder to con the voters in the swing states.

Moderate Republicans don't do that. Just the Far Right/Fundamentalists. Therein lies the problem. You have a bifurcation of the party that will, I think, eventually split it into two different parties.

Moderate Republicans are called Democrats anymore -- for that matter, in any other democracy on the planet, Obama would be considered a slightly conservative moderate. Thirty years ago, the stances of today's Obama would've been hard to distinguish from a traditional New England Republican -- a pre-Reagan Bush Sr, without the massive inheritance.

Simply put, there are no moderates in any positions of authority within the Republican Party; the leadership is all fully beholden to the religious extremists and Rush Limbaugh's talking points. Look what happened to NJ Gov Chris Christie for allowing himself to be seen with the President in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy without trying to make political hay out of the situation -- for daring to speak to and about the President as though he were a fellow human being, in short.

I agree that there will be a split in the party -- but not until after 2016 and probably not until after 2020. First, though, the inmates are going to take over the asylum, and that's already started. The calls are already going out that Romney lost not because he ran a stumbling and lackluster campaign, but because he "wasn't a real conservative"... or "wasn't conservative enough". The plutocrat wing of the party has been jollying along the theocrat wing for the last twenty years -- the money men couldn't possibly care less about what the religious wing wants, they're just an available pool of votes, and with back-to-back defeats of 'establishment' Republicans, I'll lay money right now that the candidate in 2016 will be essentially a 'movement' Republican in the mold of Bachman, Santorum, and Ryan.

Who will almost certainly go down to an epic defeat to whomever we choose to run -- Hillary, , Biden... heck, maybe we can even dredge up a junior Kennedy somewhere. It won't matter, just as a matter of demographics: a 'movement' Republican can do nothing to close the huge voter gaps the GOP suffers among women, younger voters, and as far as I can tell all minority groups. There's about a 10% gap favoring Democrats among women -- who are a majority of voters. Among Hispanics and African-Americans, the gaps are nearly unbreachable -- 50 to 90%. The Hispanic voter gap is the one that's particularly going to do the current form of the GOP in -- it's already made Florida a swing state with Arizona likely to follow soon, and will even likely do the same to Texas--yes, Texas--within the next ten to fifteen years.

So far, though, the GOP response to their demographics problem has been hype a non-existant "vote fraud problem" so that they can pass laws and regulations that effectively disenfranchise voter blocs they've given up on trying to reach. There've been something on the order of 600,000,000 votes cast over the last decade. Out of those, there have been somewhere around 50 cases of actual voter fraud -- for a fraud rate of something on the order of 0.000008%. Alternatively, that's 99.999992% clean voting. And that's around the entire nation. So there is no 'voter fraud problem'. There's just a growing demographics problem that the Republicans have given up trying to deal with.

The other chunk of the problem is that now, 20% of Americans define themselves as religiously unaffiliated -- not necessarily atheist or agnostic, but also not represented by the evangelical wing of the GOP, and more than likely very turned off by them. This number is growing fast as well, and this is another group that is unlikely to be receptive ground to Republican outreach efforts (if they even bother trying outreach to this group).

So, in rough outline, here's what I think is going to happen. In 2014, the GOP will be reduced to a razor-thin majority in the House, and may even lose their majority entirely. There will be no significant movement in the Senate -- maybe one or two seats will be GOP pickups, but the Democratic majority won't be seriously threatened. In 2016, the GOP runs a real firebreather, possibly even a genuine tea partier, with both candidates on their ticket coming from the religious/tea party wing--and the Democratic candidate's margin of victory will either be comfortable (303EV to 232EV), or a genuine landslide (Dems pick up states that haven't been blue in decades).

In the former case, the agony will be drawn out one more cycle and they'll try again in 2020. In the latter, there will be a feeding frenzy not seen outside of piranha-infested waters and the party will fracture into one party that's fiscally conservative and socially moderate, and one that's the wingnuts and knuckledraggers who will send fewer and fewer party members to congress every year until they become a regional party only.

At least that's how I see it playing out.

[MiM]

Ever the optimist

[laklak]

Ron Paul 2016!

I'm not serious, I don't think zombies are allowed to run. However, a True Libertarian would pull the fiscally conservative, socially liberal wing of the party (there are lots of them, actually). Wouldn't win, of course, but I think they would pull a significant enough percentage to be an effective voice in determining party policy.

[Ian]

trdsf -

I agree with most of what you're saying, but I don't think the schism within the GOP will wait until after 2016 or 2020 - I'm betting that it'll get going in earnest very shortly and we'll see a genuinely moderate candidate emerge from the GOP primaries in 2016 without having had to pander too much. I know, it seems ridiculous now, but I think it's a real possibility. Ultimately, there are more conservatives who prize electability than ideological purity, and the results of 2012 will give them a lot of potent ammunition to fire at the teavangelical types.

I also think the GOP will make gains in 2014 in both the House and Senate, simply owing to the nature of who shows up during a mid-term year vice who shows up during a Presidential election year.