I'm an agnostic non gun owner who doesn't give a $hit about homosexuals. So how does that parrot "Republican talking points"?Quote:
Originally Posted by Havakasha
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I'm an agnostic non gun owner who doesn't give a $hit about homosexuals. So how does that parrot "Republican talking points"?Quote:
Originally Posted by Havakasha
Every chance you get you pick up a right wing Republican talking point. Most recently it was the birth control matter for example.
That one really surprised me, but i quess your hatred of President Obama got the best of you.
I do remember you saying you were not in favor letting gays serve openly in the militiary.
Feb. 17, 2012, 12:23 p.m. EST
Congress approves extension of payroll-tax cut
By Robert Schroeder, MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — In a rare show of bipartisanship, House and Senate lawmakers voted Friday to extend a two-percentage-point payroll-tax cut for the rest of the year, sending legislation to President Barack Obama nearly two weeks before a tax hike would have gone into effect for about 160 million Americans.
ECONOMY AND POLITICS | Economy and Politics page
Thanks for the "Marxist" President (lol) for leading on this issue.
House lawmakers voted 293-132 on Friday to approve the bill, which will extend the current 4.2% payroll tax through the end of 2012, as well as extend prolonged jobless benefits and prevent payment cuts for Medicare doctors. The Senate quickly followed, approving the bill in a vote of 60-36. Read summary.
Bruised politically, Republicans earlier this week dropped their insistence that the payroll-tax cut be offset by spending cuts elsewhere.
“This is a compromise and not everyone likes everything in here,” said Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee.
The package adds $89.3 billion to the deficit over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said in an analysis. Read CBO analysis.
The bill gradually reduces the maximum duration of extended jobless benefits to 73 weeks from 99 weeks.
It wasn’t immediately known how many people would be affected by the reduction in benefits. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs analyst Alec Phillips said that the reduction would result in “slightly less drag” on economic growth from fiscal policy in the second quarter of this year, but a slightly bigger drag around the end of 2012.
Without a deal, the payroll tax would have reverted to 6.2% on March 1.
Many economists have assumed that the payroll-tax cut would be extended. Dean Maki of Barclays Capital said had it not been extended, his firm would likely have lowered its forecast of growth in the second and third quarter by 0.5 to 1 percentage point.
Some Democrats said the deal, partially paid for by cutting federal contributions to civilian federal workers’ pensions, was unfair to government employees.
“It is not fair to ask only one group in America to make a sacrifice,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly, whose Northern Virginia district is heavily populated with federal workers.
The pension provision raises $15 billion.
The bill is also paid for by among other things sales of broadband spectrum and a cut of $5 billion to a public-health fund that is part of Obama’s health-care law.
Robert Schroeder is a reporter for MarketWatch in Washington.
"For the very first time, a majority of likely 2012 Republican primary voters do not believe that Barack Obama is an American citizen. Fifty-one percent! I'm just so proud to have been born in a country where unsubstantiated rumors about people you don’t support become majority beliefs."
---Stephen Colbert
Nah, its not possible that Conservative Republicans have moved their Party far to the right. :)
Here is yet just one more example of the ugliness and polarization that people like SiriuslyWrong and the other Conservatives spew on a weekly basis.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1286649.html
By Samuel P. Jacobs
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum challenged President Barack Obama's Christian beliefs on Saturday, saying White House policies were motivated by a "different theology."
A devout Roman Catholic who has risen to the top of Republican polls in recent days, Santorum said the Obama administration had failed to prevent gas prices rising and was using "political science" in the debate about climate change.
Obama's agenda is "not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs. It's about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology," Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel.
When asked about the statement at a news conference later, Santorum said, "If the president says he's a Christian, he's a Christian."
But Santorum did not back down from the assertion that Obama's values run against those of Christianity.
"He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I'm not going to," Santorum told reporters.
A social conservative, Santorum is increasingly seen as a champion for evangelical Christians in fights with Democrats over contraception and gay marriage.
"This is just the latest low in a Republican primary campaign that has been fueled by distortions, ugliness, and searing pessimism and negativity - a stark contrast with the President who is focused everyday on creating jobs and restoring economic security for the middle class," said Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.
The campaign's response signaled a new respect for Santorum. Until this week, the Obama campaign appeared exclusively focused on Mitt Romney. Republicans are waging a state-by-state contest to pick a candidate to challenge Obama in November's election.
At a campaign appearance in Florida last month, Santorum declined to correct a voter who called Obama, a Christian, an "avowed Muslim."
Santorum told CNN after that incident, "I don't feel it's my obligation every time someone says something I don't agree with to contradict them, and the president's a big boy, he can defend himself."
SAT FEB 18, 2012 AT 05:00 AM PST
Bill Maher rips Republicans for their offensive treatment of Obama (updated with video)
byBruinKidFollow
Bill Maher had yet another excellent New Rule, blasting Republicans for their disgusting treatment of Obama to his face, and how this is completely different from how they treated all the other Democratic Presidents in our lifetimes. He again puts into words what many of us have been thinking.
From Bill O'Reilly interrupting the President 48 times in a 15-minute interview, to Joe Wilson heckling him in a speech before Congress, to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer sticking a finger in his face, something unprecedented is happening in the way conservatives disrespect this president.
....
Now, the deal we have always had with Presidents is that we smile and talk nice to them when they're in front of us. And then we cut them down and say horrible nasty things behind their backs. This has always worked for 8th grade girls, and it's always worked for the United States of America.
But there's something about this President that makes conservatives think it's OK to go apeshit in his presence. They didn't do this to Carter, an actual pacifist, or Clinton, who really did have a plan for universal health care, or LBJ, who actually made it easier for poor people to vote and eat. All of them clearly evil America-haters.
But they got treated with a modicum of respect, at least to their faces. Not Obama. What can it be that's different about him? (ponders for a moment to uncomfortable audience laughter)
It's either his race, or it's your brain chemistry, or it's something that happened when your dad spanked you and you liked it and you were looking at a box of Cream of Wheat. I don't know, I'm not a therapist. Maybe it's not race. I don't know what's in people's hearts. Except Newt Gingrich, I know what's in his heart: lust and cheese fries.
And finally, New Rule: If Mitt Romney really wants to win over conservative voters, he has to one-up Jan Brewer and spit on Obama's shoes.
From Bill O'Reilly interrupting the President 48 times in a 15-minute interview, to Joe Wilson heckling him in a speech before Congress, to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer sticking a finger in his face, something unprecedented is happening in the way conservatives disrespect this president.
And I'm not talking about mere words uttered hundreds or thousands of miles away. Sean Hannity can say whatever he wants. Nobody looks to him as a model human being, or even a human being. And I, of course, am very guilty or actually, proud, of innumerable insults to former President Bush, calling him:
· "a rube"
· "a cypher"
· "a shit kicker"
· "a yokel on the world stage"
· "a catastrophe that walks like a man"
· "the cowboy from Toy Story"
· "Drinky McDumbass"
· "President Larry the Cable Guy"
And then in Season 2....
But I didn't call him that to his face. Nor would I if I had the chance. And that is the difference.
Now, the deal we have always had with Presidents is that we smile and talk nice to them when they're in front of us. And then we cut them down and say horrible nasty things behind their backs. This has always worked for 8th grade girls, and it's always worked for the United States of America.
But this type of in-the-room, in-your-face, in-your-space disrespect is new. Admit that, and I will admit that, of course, something like impeaching Clinton was far more serious. But it was also at least in some ways more respectful. It was done with high pomp, through official channels, and was all about the rule of law, and the Chief Justice wore a special robe he got from a musical or something.
And somehow that is a lot more respectful than this.
Not that if Obama ever did anything like what Clinton did, he would even be alive. Can you imagine what they would do if they found out Obama had sex with the White House intern on Easter? Talk about colored eggs! He would have been impeached two times, one for each testicle!
This President has had to be the Caesar's wife of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Jackie Robinson of American politics, never reacting to the taunts from the stands. But after you do this...
...to try to get his goat, what's next? A wedgie? A purple nurple?
Governor Brewer said she did this because she felt "threatened". Right, like Obama ran his finger down her blouse and said, "Yeah, you my white princess."
But the Republicans had just won an election, and raising the debt ceiling was — and is — wildly unpopular. It is simple to imagine a world in which the administration refused to negotiate, only to see the debt ceiling breached, the economy fall into turmoil, and the White House stuck with the blame. Comparatively, the fact that Obama managed to persuade much of the country of what Scheiber and others consider to be the most salient fact of modern American politics — that the Republican Party has become so extreme that it would prefer Obama’s destruction to genuine compromise — can and should be seen as a major political accomplishment.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...R_story_1.html
More evidence of the moderate course President Obama takes on a whole host of issues.
U.S. in Accord With Mexico on Drilling
By JOHN M. BRODER and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: February 20, 2012
WASHINGTON — The United States and Mexico reached agreement on Monday on regulating oil and gas development along their maritime border in the Gulf of Mexico, ending years of negotiations and potentially opening more than a million acres to deepwater drilling.
The agreement, if ratified by Mexican and American lawmakers, would for the first time provide for joint inspection of the two countries’ rigs in the gulf. Until now, neither was authorized to oversee the environmental and safety practices of the other, even though oil spills do not respect international borders.
“Each of the nations will maintain sovereignty and their own regulatory systems,” Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, said from Los Cabos, Mexico, where the agreement was completed. “But what this signifies, and what may be the most significant part of the agreement, is that we’re moving forward jointly with Mexico to ensure we have a common set of safety protocols.
“As the Mexicans move into deepwater development,” Mr. Salazar said, “we want to make sure it’s done in a way that protects the environment and is as safe as possible.”
The Transboundary Agreement, as it is called, will make up to 1.5 million acres of offshore territory claimed by the United States available for leasing as early as June, though the leases will not become active until a pact is ratified. The Interior Department estimates that the area contains as much as 172 million barrels of oil and 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas, relatively modest amounts by the oil-rich gulf’s standards.
Continue reading here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/wo...n-gulf.html?hp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...y.html?hpid=z2
E.J. Dionne Jr.
Opinion Writer
President Obama as an alien
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: February 22
They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,” while the less adventurous say that he’s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.
Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.
Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.
True, some of this is driven by cable television (a venue in which I acknowledge regularly participating). Attacks designed to gin up the conservative base are quickly recycled to gin up outrage within Obama’s own base. Moreover, Obama is not the first president caught up in the rank unpleasantness of this particularly unforgiving political moment. A quick Google search will unearth references to George W. Bush as a “Nazi,” and Bill Clinton’s Republican opponents went so far as to impeach him in a shameful episode of extreme partisanship.
On those Hitler metaphors: Can we please agree to a voluntary cross-party ban on invoking the Fuhrer in the context of American politics? Only dictators who commit genocide against millions qualify for this odious comparison. It trivializes Hitler’s crimes to use Nazi references as everyday epithets.
But there is something especially rancid about the never-ending efforts to turn Obama into a stranger, an alien, a Manchurian Candidate with a diabolical hidden agenda. Are we trying to undo all the good it did us with the rest of the world when we elected an African American with a middle name popular among Muslims?
In my experience, even Americans who voted against Obama were proud that our nation showed friend and foe alike that we are a special place. We know it’s wrong to judge people by their race or lineage, and we so value religious freedom and openness that we elected a Christian convert who is the son of a Muslim father and an agnostic mother to lead us at one of our most difficult moments.
Yet many in the anti-Obama camp just can’t stop themselves from playing on fears that electing a man who defies old stereotypes was a terrible mistake. Thus did the Rev. Franklin Graham assert Tuesday on MSNBC not only that Muslims regard Obama as “a son of Islam” (because his father was Muslim) but also that “under President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries.” Graham slightly softened his comments on CNN Wednesday, but it remains troubling that he chose to turn a legitimate concern about the persecution of Christians into a slander.
Click on link to watch videos.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1296123.html
While the four remaining GOP presidential candidates debated once again in Arizona Wednesday night, Jon Stewart took a look at how Republican fear-mongering about Barack Obama in 2008 stacks up to what they're now saying will happen if he gets re-elected in 2012.
As "The Daily Show" proved nightly in 2008, the GOP's use of demonizing, "Socialist Islamic Dictator" rhetoric when discussing then-candidate Obama implied that he was all that stood between America and catastrophe. Now that his first term is almost over, how did all those scary premonitions pan out?
To those who said Obama was a Socialist, Stewart admitted that he did in fact redistribute billions of taxpayer dollars -- but to the banks. Remember when Rep. Steve King said al Qaeda would be "dancing in the streets" if Obama was elected in 2008? Stewart noted that if you replace "dancing" with the dodging of drone missiles, he might have been right.
Or how about when John McCain said gun rights would be at risk "without a doubt" if Obama were elected? Stewart wondered how Obama passing legislation to allow concealed weapons to be carried in parks and on Amtrak trains limits those rights.
"It appears Barack Obama has failed to keep many of the campaign promises that his opponents made for him," Stewart joked.
In part two below, Stewart took at look at what the current GOP candidates have been predicting about Obama's second term, leading him to say, "Y'all have lost your damn minds."
WATCH: Part two
President Barack Obama used his speech to the National Governors Association Monday to pitch education in investment — and take an indirect dig at Rick Santorum.
“I have to make a point here: when I speak about higher education, we’re not just talking about a four-year degree,” Obama said in his remarks to the bipartisan group gathered in the State Dining
Stumping in Michigan ahead of Tuesday’s Republican presidential primary there, Santorum over the weekend called Obama “a snob” for trying to get all Americans some level of college education.
Obama has said all Americans should go through at least some post-secondary training, whether for a liberal arts bachelor’s degree or a certificate in an in-demand technical field.
He defended that proposal Monday.
“We’re talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring somebody walking through the door handling a million dollar piece of equipment. And they can’t go in there unless they’ve got some basic training beyond what they received in high school,” Obama told the governors. “We all want American getting those jobs of the future, so we’re going to have to make sure they’re getting the education they need.”
That, Obama said, was why he was pressing the governors to invest in education, rather than making cuts.
Later, White House press secretary Jay Carney took a more direct shot.
"I don't think any parent in America who has a child would think it snobbery to hope for that child the best possible education in the future and that includes college,” Carney said in his daily briefing.
Obama’s plan includes getting states to participate in some of the Obama administration’s signature education policies, including the Race to the Top competition and the No Child Left Behind waiver program, which allows states to apply to be exempted from some of the toughest requirements of the Bush administration’s education law.
So far, 10 states have been granted waivers, and New Mexico is on the path to getting one. Obama said he hopes more states will be added soon.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories...#ixzz1ncru0pYp
http://nymag.com/news/features/gop-p...-chait-2012-3/
2012 or Never
Republicans are worried this election could be their last chance to stop history. This is fear talking. But not paranoia.
105 Comments Add Yours
By Jonathan Chait Published Feb 26, 2012 ShareThis
Newt Gingrich supporters listen to his stump speech at a campaign event in South Carolina.
(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)
Of the various expressions of right-wing hysteria that have flowered over the past three years—goldbuggery, birtherism, death panels at home and imaginary apology tours by President Obama abroad—perhaps the strain that has taken deepest root within mainstream Republican circles is the terror that the achievements of the Obama administration may be irreversible, and that the time remaining to stop permanent nightfall is dwindling away.
“America is approaching a ‘tipping point’ beyond which the Nation will be unable to change course,” announces the dark, old-timey preamble to Paul Ryan’s “The Roadmap Plan,” a statement of fiscal principles that shaped the budget outline approved last spring by 98 percent of the House Republican caucus. Rick Santorum warns his audiences, “We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority.” Even such a sober figure as Mitt Romney regularly says things like “We are only inches away from no longer being a free economy,” and that this election “could be our last chance.”
The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that “freedom” is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy.
Read the whole article. Click on link at top.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...INpE_blog.html
The shocking truth about the birthplace of Obama’s policies
Posted by Ezra Klein at 08:34 AM ET, 04/26/2011
Ezra Klein
Columnist
Obama revealed: A moderate Republican
By Ezra Klein, Published: April 25, 2011
America is mired in three wars. The past decade was the hottest on record. Unemployment remains stuck near 9 percent, and there’s a small, albeit real, possibility that the U.S. government will default on its debt. So what’s dominating the news? A reality-television star who can’t persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya.
Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.
Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
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If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.
Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early ’90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. “We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance,” he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans — including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and a few others still in office — had signed one individual mandate bill or another.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...fkE_story.html
According to SiriuslyWrong the Conservative wing has not gone extreme to the right in the last 4 years. I beg to differ
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1312736.html
il, Richard Cebull, Politics News
U.S. federal judge Richard Cebull. Source: U.S. government.
Montana's chief federal judge admitted on Wednesday that he forwarded an email comparing African-Americans to dogs and implying that President Barack Obama's mother had sex with animals.
Richard Cebull's email, obtained by the Great Falls Tribune, reads: "Normally I don't send or forward a lot of these, but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine."
A joke then follows: "A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?' His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'"
Cebull forwarded the offensive email from his official court account to six "old buddies," who then forwarded to others.
In an interview with the Tribune, Cebull maintained he did not send the email because it was racist, but because it was 'anti-Obama.'
"The only reason I can explain it to you is I am not a fan of our president, but this goes beyond not being a fan," Cebull said. He agreed the email was racist, but said he personally was not.
"This is a private thing that was, to say the least, very poor judgment on my part," he said.
SiriuslyWrong got all bent out of shape over President Obama' s policies on contraception. Amazing what the Republicans
are choosing to focus on when the Economy, Iran etc. are obviously WAY more important.
They refuse to pass an infrastructure and or transportation bill, but they sure know how to take action on contraception. Unbelieveable.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/politi...are/index.html
updated 10:18 AM EST, Thu March 1, 2012
NEW: The Senate is expected to vote to set aside the amendment
The measure would allow employers to opt out of some health care coverage
"This is about the First Amendment. It's about religious beliefs," Blunt says
The amendment was originally placed on a transportation bill
Washington (CNN) -- The Senate is set to vote Thursday on a controversial amendment pushed by Senate Republicans that would allow employers to opt out of health care coverage they disagree with on moral grounds.
The so-called "conscience" amendment, sponsored by Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, is the Senate Republicans' response to the simmering controversy over a recent Obama administration decision to mandate the kind of health care coverage provided by religious employers.
"This bill would just simply say that those health care providers don't have to follow that mandate if it violates their faith principles," stated an early February press release from Blunt. "This is about the First Amendment. It's about religious beliefs. It's not about any one issue."
The Senate is expected to vote to set aside the amendment.
While Blunt's amendment takes a broad approach, the main issue involves whether religious employers should have to include coverage for contraception in health plans offered to employees at affiliated institutions, such as hospitals.
Earlier this month, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius issued a directive that would have required all employers, including religious organizations, to include such coverage in health insurance offered to their employees. While churches were exempt, the mandate covered religious affiliated institutions.
Representatives from many faiths opposed the decision, calling it a violation of their religious conscience.
In response to the uproar, the White House backed off the directive and instead said that religious employers could opt out of offering coverage for birth control, but insurance companies would have to offer such coverage separately and at no charge.
Some critics say the White House's changed position does not go far enough.
Blunt's amendment states the president's health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, imposes requirements that infringe on the rights of conscience of insurers and plan sponsors. While the law exempts some religious groups, it does not allow all those with religious or moral objections to decline providing coverage, the amendment says.
Part of the uproar surrounded universities and hospitals affiliated with religions, which were not given the same exemptions as churches and other religious institutions.
The amendment would establish that an entity refusing coverage on religious or moral grounds is not in violation of the law.
Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.
Posted by Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake at 06:30 AM ET, 01/30/2012
Washington Post
President Obama ran — and won — in 2008 on the idea of uniting the country. But each of his first three years in office has marked historic highs in political polarization, with Democrats largely approving of him and Republicans deeply disapproving.
For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever. (The previous high was George W. Bush in 2007, when he had a 59 percent difference in job approval ratings.)
In 2010, the partisan gap between how Obama was viewed by Democrats versus Republicans stood at 68 percent; in 2009, it was 65 percent. Both were the highest marks ever for a president’s second and first years in office, respectively.
What do those numbers tell us? Put simply: that the country is hardening along more and more strict partisan lines.
While it’s easy to look at the numbers cited above and conclude that Obama has failed at his mission of bringing the country together, a deeper dig into the numbers in the Gallup poll suggests that the idea of erasing the partisan gap is simply impossible, as political polarization is rising rapidly.
Out of the ten most partisan years in terms of presidential job approval in Gallup data, seven — yes, seven — have come since 2004. Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.
“Obama’s ratings have been consistently among the most polarized for a president in the last 60 years,” concludes Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones in a memo summing up the results. “That may not be a reflection on Obama himself as much as on the current political environment in the United States, because Obama’s immediate predecessor, Bush, had similarly polarized ratings, particularly in the latter stages of his presidency after the rally in support from the 9/11 terror attacks faded.”
Our guess is that Jones’ latter hypothesis is the right one — that we are simply living in an era in which Democrats dislike a Republican president (and Republicans dislike a Democratic one) even before the commander in chief has taken a single official action.
The realization of that hyper-partisan reality has been slow in coming for Obama. But in recent months, he seems to have turned a rhetorical corner — taking the fight to Republicans (and Republicans in Congress, particularly) and all but daring them to call his bluff. (now that's effective lol - talk smack on the leaders of our country....)
Democrats will point out that Republicans in Congress have played a significant part in the polarization; the congressional GOP has stood resolutely against almost all of Obama’s top priorities (like Solyndra lol). And Obama’s still-high popularity among the Democratic base also exacerbates the gap.
For believers in bipartisanship, the next nine months are going to be tough sledding, as the already-gaping partisan divide between the two parties will only grow as the 2012 election draws nearer. And, if the last decade of Gallup numbers are any indication, there’s little turnaround in sight.
This gets you to the vote:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...kBbQ_blog.html
By Stanley Kurtz
February 18, 2011 9:09 A.M
American politics just keeps getting more polarized. Be assured that Obama wants it that way. I argue in Radical-in-Chief that Obama’s long-term hope is to divide America along class lines (roughly speaking, tax payers versus tax beneficiaries). Obama’s attack on the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union address, his offensive against the Chamber of Commerce, his exhortation to Hispanics to punish their enemies, and several similar moves were all efforts to jump-start a populist movement of the left. Like his socialist organizing mentors, Obama believes that a country polarized along class lines will eventually realign American politics sharply to the left. Yet the entire strategy is based on the need for an activated, populist movement of the left. So far, Obama has failed to create such a movement. His expensive economic agenda has provoked a populist counter-movement of the right instead: Obama’s nightmare.
Now, however, Obama may belatedly be getting his wish. The very success of the Tea Party is calling forth an opposing movement of the left. Obama’s exhortations may have failed to polarize the country along class lines, but his policies have finally provoked the long-sought battle. The once-dormant legions of Obama’s group, Organizing for America, have now been activated. This is the moment they were created for.
In Radical-in-Chief, I describe the “inside/outside” or “good cop/bad cop” strategy favored by Obama and his organizing mentors. The idea is that a seemingly moderate “good cop” politician works on the inside of government, while coordinating his moves with nasty Alinskyite “bad cops” on the outside. Reports that Obama’s own organizers helped put together the Madison protests fit the model. That coordination is necessary to achieve Obama’s real goal: kicking off a national grassroots movement of the left that he can quietly manage, while keeping his distance when necessary.
Obama’s good-cop role allows him the flexibility to occasionally criticize protest tactics that cross the line. Yet the reality is that our presidential good cop and his bad cop buddies are in this together. Intimidating protests at the homes of enemy politicians are par for the course with Alinskyites (and, yes, Alinskyites think of their targets as “enemies”). Obama understands all this, and you can be sure that he’s on board with the protests held at the homes of Wisconsin Republican legislators, whether he disowns them or not.
As I show in Radical-in-Chief, Obama began his organizing career planning and participating in just this sort of intimidating protest (a fact largely hidden in Dreams from My Father). As Obama moved into politics, he switched to the good cop role and funneled foundation money to his Alinskyite pals, while using their hardball protests to support his legislative agenda. Meanwhile Obama perfected his calm, post-partisan persona. It’s all a game developed by the president’s Alinskyite (and socialist) organizing mentors.
We are destined for still more polarization. Neither side can pull back, because the financial crunch is going to have to be resolved one way or another. We either scale back government and the power of public employee unions, or we move toward a structurally higher tax burden and a permanently enlarged welfare state. The very nature of the American system is now at stake. The emerging populist movements on both the right and left recognize this, and so cannot turn back from further confrontation.
Conservatives may win this battle, but they need to understand that the possibility of failure is real. As I’ve argued, Obama’s long-term strategy of class-based polarization and realignment can succeed. That is why he’s been willing to take tremendous short-term political risks. From Obama’s point of view, Wisconsin means that the risks have been worth it. With an activated movement of the left now ready to oppose the Tea Party, the permanent transformation of the country Obama has been after from the start is in prospect.
The best way to check Obama’s ambitions is to identify and expose his broader strategy . At any rate, as the country divides into opposing movements, most of us could soon be forced to choose up sides. Obama may succeed in putting some distance between his good-cop persona and his bad-cop friends. Yet the more likely outcome is that his radical intentions and alliances will be clarified over time. It’s happening now in Wisconsin. Years of widening political polarization may have been mere a dress rehearsal for what we’re about to experience. That is what our Organizer-in-Chief has been planning all along.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...-stanley-kurtz
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...cRwQ_blog.html
Obama: The most polarizing moderate ever
Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:04 AM ET, 02/07/2012
In 2011, Gallup’s polling showed that President Obama averaged an 80 percent approval rating among Democrats and 12 percent among Republicans, making his third year in office one of the most polarizing on record. For a candidate whose campaign promised an era of post-partisan unity, it must be a disappointing reality check.
But on Friday, political scientist Keith Poole released a study that probably cheered the White House. According to Poole’s highly respected classification system, Obama is the most moderate Democratic president since World War II. Which raises a question: How can Obama simultaneously be one of the most divisive and most moderate presidents of the past century?
(Keith Poole, VoteView.com)
Poole’s study is based on a system for sorting politicians known as “DW-Nominate.” But DW-Nominate doesn’t directly measure ideology. Instead, it measures coalitions. It’s got pretty much every roll-call vote taken between 1789 and December 2011. It looks to see who votes together and how often. The assumption is that the most ideological members of both parties will do the least crossover voting. And it works. Its results line up with both common sense and alternative ways of measuring ideology, like the scorecard kept by the American Conservative Union.
Over the past century, DW-Nominate has revealed a steady increase in congressional polarization. Democrats have moved to the left, while Republicans have moved to the right. But Republicans have moved a lot farther than Democrats.