Republicans: continued

[Hermit]

Rats.

[Sean Hayden]

Tell me why I should believe she meant anything about a four year increase in the midst of over 20 years of decline, and I'll consider it. Otherwise I'll just go on thinking she's doing what many do and assuming incorrectly that crime is always getting worse, and especially now that God is gone.

[Hermit]

Tell me why I should believe she meant anything about a four year increase in the midst of over 20 years of decline, and I'll consider it.

deVos mentioned neither the long term nor the short term time frame, so we're just speculating about that. What we can say, though, is that if she were referring to the former, she would have been wrong, if to the latter, she would have been right.

[Sean Hayden]

How?

[Seabass]

Nihilist In Chief—The banal, evil, all-destructive reign of Mitch McConnell
https://newrepublic.com/article/153275/ ... list-chief

In the midst of this January’s historic, senselessly protracted government shutdown, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided it was time to put forward his vision of how government should properly function. So he took to the Washington Post op-ed section to deride a modest set of Democratic proposals to institute election and voting rights reform. Instead of doing the right thing and bowing to President Donald Trump’s demand for the partial funding for a wall along the country’s southern border with Mexico, McConnell complained, congressional Democrats were trying to game America’s electoral system to their own permanent advantage.

McConnell’s litany of complaints spun off into labored assaults on proposals to reorganize the Federal Elections Commission (a bid to give “Washington a clearer view of whom to intimidate”) and to make Election Day a national holiday for federal workers, together with six days of paid leave for such employees to work in their local precincts to help get out the vote (or, in McConnell-ese, “extra taxpayer-funded vacation for bureaucrats to hover around while Americans cast their ballots”).

For actually existing ordinary Americans—including the 800,000 or so federal employees plunged into desperate economic uncertainty by the shutdown—this was a singularly bizarre spectacle to behold: The man in Washington arguably most responsible for prolonging the ordeal of the shutdown was now pronouncing that an effort to enlarge the sphere of democratic participation was a venal, bureaucratic power grab, and a brazen affront to the sacred liberty of big-money political donors and their legislative mouthpieces.

Just pan back a moment to savor the larger power dynamics in play here: As he was lecturing Democratic reformers on the folly of voting rights expansion, McConnell was crippling the basic operations of government to assuage the bigoted vanity of the Republican president. Recall that the continuing resolution to finance the government without wall funding at the end of the 115th Congress passed overwhelmingly in the chamber he leads, and that he vigilantly squelched successive House versions of the same funding plan throughout the monthlong shutdown drama for no reason except that he didn’t want to be the person to end it. This isn’t mere lefty hyperbole: At one critical juncture in the shutdown negotiations, Lindsey Graham, the Trump White House’s key Senate liaison, left a conference with the Senate majority leader to blurt the quiet part out loud to CNBC producer Karen James Sloan. Leader McConnell, Graham explained, is “going to let the White House figure out what move they want to make. . . . The Leader is waiting . . . to see what the White House wants to do.”

So much, in other words, for all the sonorous talk of the United States Senate as the world’s most august deliberative body: Its most powerful majority leader over the past decade is an errand boy for both an errant billionaire class of campaign donors, and an errant billionaire president.

What’s more, that’s just how Mitch McConnell wants it. Something of a journalistic cottage industry has sprung up around the recondite question of just what makes Mitch tick, but the uninspiring, mundane answer is hiding in plain sight. Mitch McConnell is the great avatar of the decades-long enclosure of our public life by money. He does not offer a stirring vision of conservative national greatness or even ends-justify-the-means rationales for Senate horse-trading that depart from the disheartening transactional version of our politics that reigns in the Citizens United age. In Mitchworld, you simply pay—and pay, and pay—to play.

continued:
https://newrepublic.com/article/153275/ ... list-chief

[Forty Two]

Actually, it's the reverse, Nazis were a right wing form of socialism, but socialists are rarely nazis, if only because it takes full blown communism to reach that degree of totalitarianism.

It clearly a distraction tactic to keep the political discussion focused on the moral impoverishment of the Democratic Party. The idea that the US Democratic Party are hardliners of any strip is, frankly, quite laughable.

What? Really? And, here I've been lectured many times that the Democrats are actually "far right" when you look at proper political spectra around the world....

No you haven't. Stop making shit up.

Oh, no. The US spectrum is to the right of the "rest of the world." Obama was really conservative - center right - in any other western industrialized country. Republicans are just like the radical extreme right wing in other countries. Right?

[JimC]

Actually, it's the reverse, Nazis were a right wing form of socialism, but socialists are rarely nazis, if only because it takes full blown communism to reach that degree of totalitarianism.

It clearly a distraction tactic to keep the political discussion focused on the moral impoverishment of the Democratic Party. The idea that the US Democratic Party are hardliners of any strip is, frankly, quite laughable.

What? Really? And, here I've been lectured many times that the Democrats are actually "far right" when you look at proper political spectra around the world....

No you haven't. Stop making shit up.

Oh, no. The US spectrum is to the right of the "rest of the world." Obama was really conservative - center right - in any other western industrialized country. Republicans are just like the radical extreme right wing in other countries. Right?

No one would have told you that the Democrats are "far right" - rEv is correct in that you were making that shit up. In the main, they have been pretty well centrist when compared to world politics, with the standard neoliberal economic position, but a few recently taking tentative steps towards the centre-left. It is simply true that American politics is, on average, more conservative than most western democracies. The republicans have always been conservative, but all the signs are that they are being encroached on recently by what can be reasonably described as the far right.

[Seabass]

"Encroached?" They've completely taken over...

[Animavore]

Lol.

[Forty Two]

It clearly a distraction tactic to keep the political discussion focused on the moral impoverishment of the Democratic Party. The idea that the US Democratic Party are hardliners of any strip is, frankly, quite laughable.

What? Really? And, here I've been lectured many times that the Democrats are actually "far right" when you look at proper political spectra around the world....

No you haven't. Stop making shit up.

Oh, no. The US spectrum is to the right of the "rest of the world." Obama was really conservative - center right - in any other western industrialized country. Republicans are just like the radical extreme right wing in other countries. Right?

No one would have told you that the Democrats are "far right" - rEv is correct in that you were making that shit up. In the main, they have been pretty well centrist when compared to world politics, with the standard neoliberal economic position, but a few recently taking tentative steps towards the centre-left. It is simply true that American politics is, on average, more conservative than most western democracies. The republicans have always been conservative, but all the signs are that they are being encroached on recently by what can be reasonably described as the far right.

Interesting article:
In Europe, the Only Choice Is Right or Far-Right https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/21/in ... far-right/

Under these conditions, the working class, which does not feel represented by the left, is giving its support to populist parties, and only the center-right remains to confront them. The European political spectrum has been reduced to the mainstream right and the populist right, with the mainstream gradually evaporating as it absorbs the ideas and rhetoric of the populists.

[JimC]

What nonsense to say that "the Only Choice Is Right or Far-Right". Britain's labour party will probably win the next election, Germany and France are ruled by centrists (not dissimilar to the Democrats) and all European countries have centre-left or fully socialist parties with considerable support waiting in the wings. The rise of the populist right has eaten into the voting base of centre-right parties more than others...

[Seabass]

Germany and France are ruled by centrists (not dissimilar to the Democrats)

This can't be. If it were true, they'd be exactly like Venezuela.

[Scot Dutchy]

Germany is a coalition. No definite stream as is this country.

[pErvinalia]

Actually, it's the reverse, Nazis were a right wing form of socialism, but socialists are rarely nazis, if only because it takes full blown communism to reach that degree of totalitarianism.

It clearly a distraction tactic to keep the political discussion focused on the moral impoverishment of the Democratic Party. The idea that the US Democratic Party are hardliners of any strip is, frankly, quite laughable.

What? Really? And, here I've been lectured many times that the Democrats are actually "far right" when you look at proper political spectra around the world....

No you haven't. Stop making shit up.

Oh, no. The US spectrum is to the right of the "rest of the world." Obama was really conservative - center right - in any other western industrialized country. Republicans are just like the radical extreme right wing in other countries. Right?

Yes, and that doesn't equate the Democrats being "far right".

[Svartalf]

What nonsense to say that "the Only Choice Is Right or Far-Right". Britain's labour party will probably win the next election, Germany and France are ruled by centrists (not dissimilar to the Democrats) and all European countries have centre-left or fully socialist parties with considerable support waiting in the wings. The rise of the populist right has eaten into the voting base of centre-right parties more than others...

Actually, macron is much farther to the right than he publicly admits, but the fact is that the right took over the Socialist party, back in 1971, and nobody noticed, or cared to make it public , it allowed politicians who had no career prospects in the traditional right parties to pretend pushing left wing agendas and then go on ruling the country as a well to right ruler, best example is François miterrand, but also the former Prime MInister Lionel Jospin who, although he was voted in as a socialist, just pushed chirac's agenda, and even françois hollande... macron just is more to the right than any of them, except maybe miterrand, and ready to acknowledge those leanings to get support from the official right wing.