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GOP's Brown wins Mass. Senate seat in epic upset
Looks like the Liberals have awakened a sleeping giant and they really do not like what they see.
There is more carnage to come...Fall of 2010...get your popcorn ready!
Sorry Lloyd...had to put 1 more post just for your reading enjoyment!:p:p:p
If you look at everything he has said and think that he is a good candidate and has the residents of Massachusetts in mind to do a good job, you are an ideologue.
And I think, from what I have heard, that she was a bad campaigner. Which has nothing to do with her values or views.
You apparently have no such conscience.
Why don't you explain your fawning over an unqualified candidate; a supporter of his said during a recent appearance by Brown (paraphrase) let's shove a curling iron up her backside. He smiled and said, "we can do that". Afterward, he said he didn't hear the comment. When confronted by the actual words he did not condemn the comment.
We now know who YOU REALLY ARE.
Unfortunately you are missing the point! I never said that he was a good candidate...doesn't matter...the people of the most Dem/Liberal state in our great country...just elected a Republican to fill the Senate seat vacated by one of the Most Liberal Senators in our countries history...Are you kidding me...It has absolutely nothing to do with Martha Coalkey being a bad campaigner...It has everything to do with the Liberal Agenda!
Lest we forget...New Jersey and Virginia...Govenors elections...I guess that they were just bad campaigners as well...In both of those elections...The incumbent Liberal got CRUSHED!
The people are rejecting every aspect of Pres Obama's agenda...
Stay clueless my friend!
That light coming at you in Fall of 2010...is the people's revolt...and it's going to take out many incumbent Liberals...and probably...a few Republicans...
Oh and BTW...glad to see all those chicken shit Liberals deciding not to run for re-election...Gutless...DODD and Co. i will admit that it might give you liberals some hope...but in the end...the people will re-shape the House and Senate...and I can assure you...your super majority is going by the wayside.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atypical
Thanks for the reply.
I was going to respond that Mass is not one of the most liberal states in the country (see R. Maddow tonight - she lives there); pres Obama's agenda; let's see. Bailing out corporations that have, because of greed, and no real regulations on that greed come close to bankrupting the country. You do know that (mostly conservative) corporations privatize profit and SOCIALIZE losses, right?
Is that kind of socialism anathema to you?
Oh, and keeping Summers, Geithner, Gates, and a whole lot of conservatives at Justice, and the government attorneys around the country that were appointed by Bush.
Yeah, Obama is some flaming Liberal!
Healthcare. You mean the bills that healthcare companies wrote. Obama let that happen. As an investor (I assume) you've noticed that these companies stocks have risen recently because the proposed laws are not expected to cause profit to fall. Have you read any Wendell Potter? Probably not. Know who he is? Check it out if you think the healthcare bill is really good for citizens.
Peoples revolt. You mean the ones that show up wearing guns, carrying signs that show Obama as the Joker and as a Nazi. The people that carry signs saying "keep government out of my Medicare???. The birthers. Are these your heroes, those "people"?
There are no moderates in the Republican party. They have been kicked out by the wackos and religious zealots. Review CONSERVATIVE sources for evidence of this. I have a reading list for you that will tell you how the world really works. Ask for it. I will gladly send it.
But I won't bother with any of this (and there is lots more) because by your words and inferences you are clearly an ideologue. That means you want your side to win - **** the country! You want power to get only what YOU feel is right and to let greed rule. You actually believe liberals have nothing to offer. That's what an ideologue is - hates everything but his own opinion.
Sad but that's what conservatives are now. Robots ruled by ideology and emotion and hatred of someone different with a different view. Democrats are only, unfortunately, marginally better because uncontrolled capitalism corrupts everyone.
You did drink the kool-aid. Good, huh?
PS. Incidentally, you obviously believe that people always vote rationally - you say that it is a rejection "of the liberal agenda". Too simplistic. It doesn't work that way. Plus the voting machines are from companies that have been found to have manipulated past elections. I am NOT saying that the election could necessarily have turned out differently than it did but only to show that there are many variables to consider. Nothing is as simple as most people think. But thorough analysis is too much work for almost everyone. And those that think simplistically are almost always wrong.
Just Sirius,
Even i had more class than to celebrate in your face when Obama won the Presidency and the Democrats the Congress. Congratulations none the less.
30% (?) of the people of MA. have spoken and we move on from here.
I think they voted more against something than for something and no i dont think it was a vote purely against the "Liberal Obama Agenda". They know something is wrong in this country, terribly wrong in fact,and it has always been much easier to take your anger out on the people in power than to ask for solutions from the opposition. So far the Repubicans have presented none. What i think they may have failed to think through is that the Republicans put us in this mess and the solutions were never going to be so easy. I wish we could have done an experiment and put the Republicans in power in 2008 only if to see how they would have handled this mess we are in. I feel very confident they would have made a much bigger mess out of it all. Unfortunately we dont get the chance to do that test. Anyway it should be a very interesting year 2010 and i will continue to support health care reform, energy reform, education reform, immigration reform, financial regulation reform etc with all my heart because i am comfortable in the knowledge that it is the right thing to do to help this great country of ours to reach its ideals.
Good night.
Can Threats and Living in a State of Anxiety Push People to Conservatism?
By Lee Drutman, Miller-McCune.com. Posted January 18, 2010.
Over the past year, a conservative right-wing movement has found a loud political voice in the United States. Strongly anti-government, the movement seems largely oriented around a message that anything the Obama administration wishes to accomplish is an attack on American tradition, and it is up to them to stop this radical socialist agenda emanating from Washington to preserve the country.
This burst of activity has left some asking where such a rush of conservative energy might come from. Is it a response to the anxiety and uncertainty of tough economic times? Does having an African-American president have anything to do with it?
According to some new research on the cognitive origins of political conservatism, the answers may be yes and yes.
Miriam Matthews, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the Claremont Graduate University, Shana Levin, an associate profess of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, and Jim Sidanius, a professor of psychology and African-American studies at Harvard University, have found evidence that both general feelings of threat and specific anxiety about other ethnic groups sometimes do lead individuals to embrace two tenets of political conservatism — support for the status quo and a belief that there is a natural social hierarchy to society. These tenets provide a salve for uncertainties and anxieties by offering a belief system in which there is a strong order to things.
This theory was originally elaborated in a 2003 paper, "Political conservatism as motivated social cognition," by John T. Jost and colleagues. They posit that individuals embrace political conservatism to satisfy internal needs for order, structure and closure in the face of uncertainty, complexity and fear. The paper was based on a meta-analysis of numerous studies showing that people who were more uncomfortable with complexity and ambiguity generally tended to also be more conservative. (For more on Jost's work, see here and here.)
But correlation does not provide causation, and Matthews and colleagues wanted to know: Did conservative ideas make people more anxious or vice versa? To evaluate how this process played out over time, they analyzed survey data on almost 1,000 undergraduates at the University of California, Los Angeles, as they progressed through four years of college. The findings are reported in Political Psychology.
"The research is built on the idea that conservatism is an ideology that is in response to both motivations and cognitions, and that fear and uncertainty and threat stimulate certain motivations," Matthews explained.
The survey first measured students' threat perceptions by asking them how much they agreed with the statement, "More good jobs for other groups come at the expense of fewer good jobs for members of my group." And it measured something scholars call "intergroup anxiety" by asking students to evaluate the statement: "I feel uneasy around people of different ethnicities."
The survey also measured students' attitudes on something called the social dominance orientation scale (a measure of how much individuals believe in the superiority of certain groups over others and are thus unconcerned about inequality), and evaluated students' support for system justification (a measure of whether one believes that the current distribution of resources is fair).
Finally, the students were asked about their political identification: How strongly did they identify as being either a Democrat or a Republican?
By measuring how students' answers to these questions changed over the four years, the researchers showed that the higher a student scored on questions regarding threat perception and discomfort around other ethnicities as freshmen, the higher they scored on both the social dominance and the system justification scales as sophomores and juniors. (Not surprisingly, the two measures were highly correlated.)
And sophomores and juniors with high social dominance orientation and system justification scores became more politically conservative as seniors. In other words, there was a process in which threats and anxieties led students to adopt particular political beliefs that helped them to deal with those threats and anxieties.
"What makes it really interesting is that using very conservative methods, and looking at processes over time, we still found that there was a conservative shift in response to threat perceptions," Matthews said. "A lot of people just treat conservatism as a personality variable that doesn't change, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to be influenced by the situation, and it can be affected by threat perceptions."
Though this study looked only at individuals, it is not hard to extrapolate. Many studies have documented the extent to which national political moods shift rightward in response to external threats, such as 9/11. For example, one study found that, between 2001 and 2004, President Bush's approval ratings peaked in response to terrorism warnings.
Currently, however, with unemployment now topping 10 percent, economic uncertainty is probably weighing more heavily. And there is good reason to think that this kind of uncertainty might be one factor underlying the current conservative movement.
"There is a lot of research into the connection between economic threats and increasing conservatism," Matthews said. "And it makes sense because you've got this idea of resistance to changing the social system because the system seems so unstable, you want to stick with what you know, what seems familiar."
And then, of course, there is the tricky issue of race. America now has its first African-American president. And as the research described here suggests, there seems to be a direct link from "intergroup anxiety" to political conservatism. If having an African-American president makes this anxiety more salient for certain segments of society, it might indeed heighten their turn to system-justifying and social-dominance feelings and lead to increased conservatism.
In addition to offering some insights into the current political climate, the idea of conservatism as motivated cognition also points to some reasons why people tend to grow more conservative as they grow older. Fear of death may loom larger as a threat, as might a feeling of being increasingly out of touch with the world. This might lead individuals to worldviews that give them more security and stability, hence making them more conservative.
Not surprisingly, this study has not sat well with conservatives. But Matthews wants to be clear: "We're not saying that conservatism is completely crazy. We're just trying to figure out what are all the possible factors that contribute to conservatism. And there can be a shift toward conservatism when managing uncertainty gets to be a little more difficult."
Beck rips Brown: ‘This one could end with a dead intern’
Supporters of Senator-elect Scott Brown winced as he offered up one of his daughters as "available" in his victory speech Tuesday night.
On Wednesday, Glenn Beck took to his radio program to sharply criticize Brown's remarks. The controversial host suggested that Brown needed to be "monitored" because "this one could end up with a dead intern."
'"I want a chastity belt on this man," Beck said. "I want his every move watched in Washington. I don't trust this guy. This one could end with a dead intern."
"A dead intern?" co-host Pat Gray asked. "I wouldn't go that far."
Later on in the segment, Beck added, "I'm just sayin', congratulations, now let's monitor him, let's put an ankle bracelet on him, let's know where he is at all times."
During his victory speech Tuesday night, Sen.-elect Scott Brown introduced his daughters, Ayla and Arianna, to the world, thanking them for their help in the campaign.
"And just in case anybody who's watching across the country, yes they're both available," he said.
As a mixed chorus of laughter and boos roared up, Brown said: "No, no, no. Oo. Only kidding. Only kidding. ... Arianna is definitely not available, but Ayla is."
"No!" Ayla Brown responded, half-laughing.
"I can see I'm gonna get in trouble when I get home," Brown said.
Beck's "dead intern" line may have been a reference to the Gary Condit affair of 2001, when one of the House Democrat's interns, Chandra Levy, was found dead.
This isn't the first time Beck has expressed reservations about Brown. In a column he wrote for Fox News on Tuesday, he said: "I don't trust Scott Brown yet. Americans don't know him. He posed naked in Cosmopolitan magazine back in 1982. I mean — really? I question the judgment of man who thinks anyone wants to see the male body naked...."
Beck's comments may be a sign that some on the political right aren't entirely comfortable with Brown, despite his being portrayed by some newscasters, like Keith Olbermann, as being dogmatically right wing.
Although Brown believes the health reform package in Congress should "go back to the drawing board," he told a press conference Wednesday that he believes "it’s important for everyone to get some form of health care, so to offer a basic plan for everybody I think is important.” As state senator, Brown voted in favor of Massachusetts' health care reforms.
I can't help it...I just have to...HEHHEHHEHHEHHEHHEHEH...Oh, Oh, Phew, HEHEHEHEHEHE.
You beat me to it. I was goinig to post the Beck attack on Brown as a separate heading.
I did it here because it obviously refers to the Coakley loss.
And because I need the exercise.
Mixed Messages in Massachusetts
Still looking for meaning in the Brown-Coakley results
By Greg Marx
Now that the counting’s over in Massachusetts and the crying’s begun for Democrats, with a conservative Republican poised to take over Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat and health care reform still unfinished, the press is doing its best to sort out what it all means. And in the first round of election post-mortems, many outlets turned to the same idea: voters in the Bay State had “sent a message.”
Here, for example, is the opening of the “news analysis” story in The Boston Globe:
Angry Massachusetts voters sent Washington a ringing message yesterday: Enough.
Voter anxiety and resentment, building for months in a troubled economy, exploded like a match on dry kindling in the final days of the special election for US Senate. In arguably the most liberal state in the nation, a Republican - and a conservative one at that - won and will crash the Bay State’s all-Democratic delegation with a mandate to kill the health care overhaul pending in Congress.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of Scott Brown’s victory because so much was at stake. From the agenda of President Obama and the legacy of the late Edward M. Kennedy to a referendum on the Democratic monopolies of power on Capitol and Beacon hills, voters in a lopsidedly Democratic state flooded the polls on a dreary winter day to turn conventional wisdom on its head.
In other words: angry voters don’t like direction of change in D.C., take action to stop it. That’s clear enough, and seems to be echoed in the headline of the analysis piece on the front page of the Globe’s corporate parent, The New York Times: “A Year Later, Voters Send a Different Message.”
But probe that Times story, and a different picture starts to emerge, one that suggests maybe the message isn’t quite so clear:
Ms. Coakley lost in no small part because of what many Democrats viewed as a stumbling campaign against a sharp and focused opponent. There is a good argument that the outcome was as much an anti-incumbent wave during tough economic times as it was an anti-Democratic wave. And there is still time before the midterm elections for the economy to rebound in a way that benefits Democratic candidates, and for Mr. Obama to make a case that the health care legislation, if he finds a way to sign it into law, will benefit the hard-pressed middle class.
Still, Ms. Coakley’s defeat could easily be seen as evidence that the Obama White House is out of step with much of the American public — pushing through a health care plan at a time when many voters are primarily concerned about unemployment.
So, the result “could be seen”—by whom?—as a repudiation of D.C. Democrats. On the other hand, “there is a good argument”—advanced by whom?—that it wasn’t that at all. The message is starting to get fuzzy.
It isn’t much cleared up by the effort from the Associated Press. The AP story runs the interpretations that Democrats and Republicans are trying to push, then moves into analysis mode:
American voters rejected Republican control in the 2006 congressional elections and the 2008 presidential election. Democrats widely assumed that a top priority, and a winning political issue, was to make health insurance more accessible and competitive.
But now, just 14 months later, voters are snarling at the Democrats they put in charge, leaving them to wonder how to expand services without invoking public wrath.
John Triolo, a Massachusetts independent who voted for Obama in 2008 and for Brown on Tuesday, exemplified the confusing message.
“I voted for Obama because I wanted change,” said Triolo, 38, a sales manager from Fitchburg. “I wanted change, I thought he’d bring it to us, but I just don’t like the direction that he’s heading.”
Everyone should have health coverage, Triolo said, “but I think we should take the time to look at it, but not ram it down our throat.” (What the hell does that mean! Atypical)
So voters are sending a message with their electoral choices, after all. Unfortunately, it’s a “confusing” one. Make of that what you will.
There’s a reason why interpretive articles that make strong claims for the “message” of this outcome devolve into over-written cliché, and why pieces that attempt to grapple more honestly with the material descend to insider baseball or ambiguous mush. It’s because elections—especially one-off special elections—are ill-suited for that purpose. An election is the distillation of many, many factors—partisan affiliation, candidate and campaign quality, economic circumstances, political trends, etc.—into one choice: this person, or that person? Trying reason back from a result to its causes, and to divine a message from that stew, can be a fun exercise in informed speculation. But it’s rarely more than that.
Exit polls are the media and political world’s attempt to deal with this problem, and much has been made the absence of the leading exit poll consortium in this case, which has led some media outlets to turn to other sources for data. But while exit polls may have some uses, like helping to estimate the demographics of the electorate that turns out on a given day, reports about voters’ explanations for their choices should always be taken with a grain of salt.
That’s because, as research has shown, voters are not reliable reporters of their own mental processes. While journalists can offer speculation about why an electoral result occurred, voters may offer rationalizations. (For example, a voter who says he supported Brown because he opposes health care reform may have decided to support Brown because he liked his truck, observed that Brown opposed health care, and then, when stopped by a pollster upon leaving the ballot box and given a list of potential explanations, selected health care.)
The point is not that voters in Massachusetts actually, down deep, support health care reform, or approve of Obama’s performance; or that the outlook for Democrats in the mid-terms is not grim (it is, though we knew that already). The point is that the press can’t with any confidence discern a message from this outcome, and attempts to do so both misuse journalistic resources and suggest to readers that we know more than we do.
But while this election may not have a clear message, that doesn’t mean it won’t have consequences—starting, of course, with some real uncertainty about the fate of health care reform. We don’t need press speculation on that point, but we do need good reporting on the choices being made by key political actors, and the fall-out they will have. Hopefully, the press will get the “message” talk out of its system shortly, and focus on the political story that matters.
You Can Take "Visceral Comfort" In The White Man's Win.
Lost in the angst over Scott Brown's victory, is this small bit of comfort ... unless of course you're black, brown, a woman, or just not that good looking ... from the brain trust that gathered yesterday on MSNBC's Morning Joe:
Donny Deutsch got the ball rolling, suggesting that voters may be "going back to basics" after electing an African-American president and seeing "the female candidates and whatnot." Scott Brown, Deutsch added, "looks like the traditional view of a candidate," which may bring a "visceral comfort" to voters.
Mike Barnicle found value in the observation, saying that "there's something to it."
The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan added that Brown is "a regular guy" who "looks like an American."
What's next for Morning Joe? A discussion on the visceral comfort real Americans can take with the formation of the All-American Basketball Alliance, where only "natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play."
Whether covert or overt, it seems like racism is back in fashion.
And as Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly points out:
Tell me again media establishment, about how MSNBC is a liberal bastion that's shifted to the left, on par with Fox News being a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party.
http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/...White-Mans-Win
Robert Greenwald: "Shoot Anything That Moves": Brave New Films Interviews Coakley Campaign Pollster Celinda Lake and PCCC Co-Founder Stephanie Taylor [VIDEO]
Why did the Democrats lose this week in Massachusetts? Brave New Films put this question to Celinda Lake, pollster for the Coakley campaign, and Stephanie Taylor from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Forget the conventional wisdom about moving to the center versus moving toward the base: both parties have been bought and paid for by corporate special interests, Lake argues, and consequently, the Tea Party Patriots have become a more popular political force than either the Democratic or the Republican Party:
The Democrats didn't lose the Massachusetts Senate race this Tuesday. They lost it over twelve long and agonizing months ago, well before anyone even knew there would be a Massachusetts Senate race in January of 2010.
To put a rough date on it, this race was lost for the Democrats sometime between the 2008 election and the inauguration, whenever it was that the Obama administration made the fateful decision not to challenge Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, AIG and the rest of the white collar criminals that drove the U.S. economy into the ground, and chose instead to appoint Wall Street's most prominent boosters and apologists to his economic advisory team. It was compounded when the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership spearheaded a healthcare reform strategy rooted in the false notions that the opponents of reform are operating in good faith, that legislation directly challenging the profit motives of one of the biggest industries in America can be achieved by consensus, and that the era of political partisanship is over. And as the Afghanistan war grows ever more disastrous, the political swamp the Democrats find themselves in today will become an inescapable quagmire, in the 2010 midterms and beyond.
When voters look at the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats today, they see little of the 'change' they cast their ballots for last November. On healthcare, the White House has been outmaneuvered, out-organized, and outmatched by the health insurance industry from the very beginning, while the Democratic leaders in Congress have allowed the will of the caucus' majority to be flouted and marginalized by a handful of industry-bought pretenders like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman.
Failure over healthcare reform has been a shortcoming of political competence. Worse for the perception of voters in Massachusetts and elsewhere are the cases of the foreclosure crisis and re-regulation of the financial industry. In these cases, the administration has taken a timid stance, abdicating responsibility and even defending the status quo. These were failures not of competence, but of moral leadership. The upshot of this state of affairs in the minds of voters is the continuation of business as usual in Washington DC.
Ted Kennedy's seat was lost this Tuesday not because voters abandoned Obama's call for change, but because they continue to embrace it. The truth is that the mainstream of the Democratic leadership has forfeited its claims to that mantle. Voters continue to seek change, but they have found that the solution is not so facile as simply electing Democratic majorities to the House and Senate.
Obama famously instructed us that we are the change we are seeking. That message resonates now more strongly than ever, but only because we have discovered, to our dismay, that it is not to be found in Congress or the White House. This is the lesson coming out of Massachusetts this week: change will come, but its catalyst will not be found in Washington DC. It will have to come from us.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atypical
I love this, so let me get this straight Ted Kennedy after,
*getting drunk,
*running a car off a bridge,
*leaving a women to die,
*as he ran away,
was better then Coakley.
Excuse me, but as bad as Coakley was there is no way shape or form as bad as Kennedy. I cant remember at anytime that she was directly responcible for some elses death.
Hummm I should not have to mention she was your parties choice, SHE BEAT OUT 3 OTHER DEMOCRATS. So you are saying she was the best you had.
Pedophiles, Terrorists and the Massachusetts Senate Race
01/21/2010 by Jim Naureckas
An illuminating account of how conservatives won the Massachusetts Senate race (Washington Independent, 1/20/10) singled out an op-ed by Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal (1/14/10) as having energized citizens to vote against Martha Coakley. And, honestly, the piece does provide plenty of legitimate ammunition for the anti-Coakley side.
The op-ed centered on a case in which three members of the Amirault family, which ran a pre-school in Massachusetts, were sent to prison based on children's accounts of seemingly impossible sexual abuse. (Read the column if you want to see the grisly yet preposterous examples.) Rabinowitz, who has long written about the child sex-abuse witch-hunting that has put numerous people in jail based on bizarre and unverifiable accusations, pointed to Coakley's strenuous defense of the convictions as attorney general as evidence of her unsuitability for higher office.
It's refreshing to see a piece of conservative opinion journalism that is grounded in actual investigation and addresses a real issue (and doesn't mention ACORN even once). If it had an impact on the outcome of the Senate race, that's what political writing is supposed to do.
There's one false note that I want to point out in the op-ed, though, when Rabinowitz contrasted Coakley's enthusiasm for the dubious process that convicted the Amiraults with her concern over the treatment of prisoners rounded up in the "War on Terror": "It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo--her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence."
I think it's fair to say that the point of Rabinowitz's sarcasm is that Coakley's concern for due process is misplaced--that it should be reserved for the innocent Amiraults, and not extended to the terror suspects. This impression is confirmed by an earlier column from Rabinowitz (2/2/09) that attacked Obama for "issuing executive orders effectively undermining efforts to extract (from captured Al-Qaeda operatives) intelligence essential to the prevention of terror attacks"--i.e., preventing the government from torturing suspects.
Sexually abusing children and killing random people to make political points are both horrible things--which is why people are inclined not to worry too much about the rights of people who are accused of such crimes, and sometimes neglect the rules that are designed to separate the guilty from the innocent. Rabinowitz made a strong case that Coakley fell into this trap when it came to the Massachusetts pre-school charges--but she seems to have a similar blind spot for the possibility that some inmates at Guantanamo may have been equally railroaded.
Rabinowitz writes movingly about the heartbreak of being unjustly imprisoned and separated from one's family; she could write exactly the same story about many of the Guantanamo inmates--but provoking outrage against the politicians responsible for the tragedies might not be to her ideological taste.