Republicans

[Tero]

We are in charge now! We are going to do nothing, as we can only agree on taxes.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... ell-345662

[L'Emmerdeur]

[youtube][/youtube]

We are in charge now! We are going to do nothing, as we can only agree on taxes.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... ell-345662

That is a great portrait of McConnell. A bit unsettling though.

[Seabass]

[Forty Two]

[Tero]

America has a short attention span now in the social media era. Based on that alone, Trump only has 4 years. The public with a short attention span wants a different game show by then.

Republicans will lose with Trump, but will lose even worse with anyone else. The swing voters (not the party line right) only had loyalty for Trump, their hero. They will just stay away from polls.

[Tero]

Repulicans can shut down government because abortion trumps DACA:


The ideologue responsible for Trump’s budget, Mick Mulvaney, put it best to reporters at the White House on Friday. Mulvaney, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, was previously a South Carolina congressman. In that role, he was one of the chief proponents of the last government shutdown because he opposed Planned Parenthood and Obamacare.

Now he says the Democrats have no right to do what he did because, well, that would make them unprincipled.

“Keep in mind, go back and watch what they said about folks during the 2013 shutdown who wanted to talk about things like the Obamacare repeal at that time,” he said. “One of the criticisms they made of folks like me is that I was inserting non-financial issues into an appropriations process, which is exactly what’s happening now. So I recognize the fact that Washington does not understand the meaning of the word hypocrisy and irony. The truth of the matter is they’re doing the exact same thing they accused the Republicans of doing in 2013.”

As a matter of principle, it’s Republicans like Mulvaney who are the deficit hawks, caring deeply about the fiscal rectitude of the federal government. Right up to the point when one of them says the words “tax cuts”, which turn out to be far more important than balancing the budget or the national debt.

Thank goodness we have the Republicans in total control of Washington, after all those years of the Democrats failing to pass a real budget. Now we can watch the Republicans create an even more dysfunctional budget process with continuing resolutions that last just a few weeks at a time.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... t-they-sow

[Brian Peacock]

As a matter of principle, Republicans are the party closest to God, rallying the faithful at the March for Life rally by anti-abortion activists, who also love to rail against Planned Parenthood.

Thank God for the leadership of a conservative president whose lawyer paid tens of thousands of dollars to a porn star, through a shell company and false names.
Before she signed a non-disclosure agreement, the porn star disclosed the sordid details of her affair with the current president soon after his third wife gave birth to his third son.
For Christian conservatives, Donald Trump may be a sinner but he’s really doing God’s work. That’s a whole new definition of family values right there.

This is the kind of irony that Republicans ought to understand. After all, the first real shutdowns of the current era – the shutdown that set the tone for all that followed – was the product of Newt Gingrich’s war against Bill Clinton. The 1995 and 1996 debacles were ideological clashes over the size of government by a flame-throwing House Speaker who wanted to cut the president down to size.

That was the first salvo in a war over family values that led to Clinton’s impeachment for an affair with an unpaid intern that began during that same shutdown. Of course Gingrich himself had been unfaithful with another woman for a couple of years before that shutdown. Callista Bisek became his third wife, and is now Donald Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican. So there’s no irony or hypocrisy there at all.

[Tyrannical]

If the Democrats play too hard ball on the stop gap budget......

Trump backs the Republicans go nuclear and remove the 60 vote cloister rule. No Dreamers, Trump gets everything, Democrats get nothing.

[Tero]

Republican in charge of cool shutdown!!!

There are a couple things that are disturbing about Mulvaney’s remarks. First, a government shutdown isn’t particularly “cool.” During the last government shutdown in 2013, which lasted for 16 days, about 850,000 federal workers were furloughed, and in shutdowns, both furloughed and non-furloughed employees are unpaid. (They’re usually paid retroactively, but some people still haven’t been paid from the last one.) Shutdowns disproportionately harm more vulnerable communities — kids in the Head Start program, military families, janitors, security guards, and other low-wage federal contractors. And, obviously, none of this is good for the economy.
Vox

[Brian Peacock]

If the Democrats play too hard ball on the stop gap budget......

Trump backs the Republicans go nuclear and remove the 60 vote cloister rule. No Dreamers, Trump gets everything, Democrats get nothing.

Frankly it's a wonder they haven't overturned the super-majority rule already.

[L'Emmerdeur]

If the Democrats play too hard ball on the stop gap budget......

Trump backs the Republicans go nuclear and remove the 60 vote cloister rule. No Dreamers, Trump gets everything, Democrats get nothing.

Frankly it's a wonder they haven't overturned the super-majority rule already.

It's a double-edged sword and both parties are well aware of that.

[Seabass]

I'd say it helps conservatives more than liberals. It tends to be harder to enact change than leave things as they are. Liberals tend to want to change things for the better, while conservatives tend to favor the status quo. This means that Democrats often need a supermajority to get anything done.

[Tero]

Guy tells me we can't have recycling laws because rural recycling is too expensive. I told him:
Republican plan:
1: Cut taxes. 2 Cut funds for recycling. 3 Announce: recycling is too expensive! The country will go bankrupt if we recycle! USA will collapse. We will be climbing the wall to Mexico and driving to Canada with fake Canadian ID.

[Tero]

Fuck you Trump, you are no leader. Senate going alone:

Flake said the Senate needs to move independently of the White House at this point to resolve the confrontation that's produced the first shutdown in more than four years.

“The important thing is breaking with the White House on this and not relying on the White House to give its approval," Flake said.

Despite his public thaw after two days of lashing Democrats, it remains to be seen whether McConnell can provide enough reassurance to Democrats to win their votes. Some Democrats said they need to know the House would take action on an immigration bill, too.

“We have to have in our own mind some way to ensure that the House feels a need to bring up the issue as well,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... ate-354113

[Seabass]

Whip Dick