The Republican Thread

[NorthSideSox72]

People keep talking about the fracturing of the GOP, but why isn't anyone talking about the breaking apart of the Dems? Heck, they just lost one of their most moderate voices in Washington in Evan Bayh. He was a guy who routinely fought with the left wing of his party. They can't even keep their own people in line to pass their own agenda.

 

Those divides have been in the GOP for a while, and this schism still hasn't happened.

The Dems have nothing to fracture, they're already a dispersed bunch. The news with them is if they actually got some cohesion.

 

And those divides have not been, before, what they are like now, in the GOP.

 

[Balta1701]

And those divides have not been, before, what they are like now, in the GOP.

And yet, there have been what, 2, 3 Congressional/Senatorial Republicans to vote for anything Obama proposed in the last year? And 1 of them flipped parties afterwards.

[southsider2k5]

http://nwitimes.com/news/state-and-regiona..._medium=twitter

 

Gov. Daniels opens door to 2012 presidential run

 

INDIANAPOLIS | Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels says he's keeping the door open to a possible 2012 presidential run - but only by a crack.

 

The Republican told The Washington Post over the weekend that he has spoken with former president George W. Bush and others in recent months and has agreed to keep an open mind about the idea.

 

But the two-term governor told The Journal-Gazette of Fort Wayne on Monday that his focus is on Indiana for the next 18 months. He says he'd be willing to listen then if Republicans aren't happy with their field but that it would likely be too late to launch a presidential bid.

 

He says he's trying to recruit other people for a White House run.

[NorthSideSox72]

And yet, there have been what, 2, 3 Congressional/Senatorial Republicans to vote for anything Obama proposed in the last year? And 1 of them flipped parties afterwards.

Like I said, the only rally point is really just "Obama sucks". Which as I said, does buy you some votes - just not a monumental amount. The GOP will still be the minority party.

 

[Balta1701]

Like I said, the only rally point is really just "Obama sucks". Which as I said, does buy you some votes - just not a monumental amount. The GOP will still be the minority party.

Not if you believe current polling and if nothing changes before Nov. If things go as they are now, there are legit projections that the Dems will lose the House and be lucky to retain 51 seats in the Senate.

[NorthSideSox72]

Not if you believe current polling and if nothing changes before Nov. If things go as they are now, there are legit projections that the Dems will lose the House and be lucky to retain 51 seats in the Senate.

I just don't see it. But of course, a LOT depends on how the economy changes (or doesn't) between now and November.

 

[Balta1701]

I just don't see it. But of course, a LOT depends on how the economy changes (or doesn't) between now and November.

FWIW, here's the guy I was noting saying they'll take the House. It's washington post. Is that ok? I'm not sure what the citation rules here are any more.

Political handicapper Charlie Cook said that it was "very hard to come up with a scenario where Democrats don't lose the House" in an interview with National Journal late last week.

 

Cook, who, in the interest of full disclosure, gave the Fix our first job in political Washington, went on to note that while House Republicans have their fair share of problems but "you could triple the Republican Party's problems and I'd still rather have their problems than the problems facing Democrats."

 

Cook has, of late, been extremely down on Democrats' chances -- an attitude born, he argued in the interview, of "fundamental, total miscalculations from the very, very beginning" by the White House about the direction to take the country. Cook added that the White House's miscalculations in terms of their agenda were "of proportions comparable to President George W. Bush's decision to go into Iraq."

 

Stu Rothenberg, another noted political handicapper in Washington, has pegged Democratic House losses as between 24 and 28 seats. He writes: "We currently expect Republicans to fall short of the 40 seats they would need."

[southsider2k5]

Not if you believe current polling and if nothing changes before Nov. If things go as they are now, there are legit projections that the Dems will lose the House and be lucky to retain 51 seats in the Senate.

 

Honestly the Dems not being able to get together is starting to put a hole into the old "It's all Bush's fault" excuse machine.

[kapkomet]

Honestly the Dems not being able to get together is starting to put a hole into the old "It's all Bush's fault" excuse machine.

 

 

Yet, they still do it, day after day, after day, after day, after day...

[Kyyle23]

 

interesting.....

[Cknolls]

http://michellemalkin.com/2010/02/23/the-o...th-race-issues/

 

 

 

 

Can't wait for Olby to cover this. Will Donny, BTW, what 40 something year old calls himself DONNY, what are you f***ing't racist two? Worst person in the world..... How long before Crist either switches parties or tries to run as an independent? Either way he will be crushed.

[DukeNukeEm]

You cannot attack one of the Democrat hacks after linking Michelle Malkin.

[southsider2k5]

You cannot attack one of the Democrat hacks after linking Michelle Malkin.

 

Right because no one ever attacks a Republican by linking left wing hacks... Oh wait, that is called the Democrat thread.

[Cknolls]

You cannot attack one of the Democrat hacks after linking Michelle Malkin.

 

 

Waits for NBC to cover story...............

 

 

 

 

How is someone linking to a television show not credible?

[DukeNukeEm]

Michelle Malkin has absolutely zero credibility. She almost to the Chris Matthews level of ubsurdity.

[lostfan]

lol, Duke has a point, Michelle Malkin is a ridiculous screeching weasel, but this is the Republican thread and she's a popular conservative blogger so that is what it is.

[Cknolls]

lol, Duke has a point, Michelle Malkin is a ridiculous screeching weasel, but this is the Republican thread and she's a popular conservative blogger so that is what it is.

 

 

I linked to a story from her website. IS THE STORY WRONG? What is the problem? How does linking from her website make the underlying story untrue? I do not believe i was defending Malkin. Chill out! Now I know what Balta feels like.

[lostfan]

I linked to a story from her website. IS THE STORY WRONG? What is the problem? How does linking from her website make the underlying story untrue? I do not believe i was defending Malkin. Chill out! Now I know what Balta feels like.

I didn't say there was a problem, just that I agreed that Malkin is ridiculous

[Balta1701]

Now I know what Balta feels like.

I said nothing...

[Cknolls]

I said nothing...

 

 

I am referencing your use of sources...

[Balta1701]

I am referencing your use of sources...

I know, I was trying to figure out an amusing reply to your remark.

[southsider2k5]

This whole health care summit is garbage. They are sitting in front of the cameras to try to get their talking points out and to get their gotcha moments for their partisans to spout off about. This is a complete waste of time and money.

[Controlled Chaos]

This whole health care summit is garbage. They are sitting in front of the cameras to try to get their talking points out and to get their gotcha moments for their partisans to spout off about. This is a complete waste of time and money.

chicagotribune.com

Obama to deliver health care The Chicago Way

John Kass

 

February 25, 2010

 

President Barack Obama will star in his very own televised entertainment spectacular on Thursday — let's call it Federal Health Care Kabuki Theater.

 

The Republicans wanted to dance. Now they'll have to step lightly. They were foolish to get trapped in his so-called summit on national health care. Or did they actually think they could outperform the skinny fellow from Chicago?

 

The president is taking this one last chance to push his health care agenda, which by his own estimate will cost about $1 trillion over 10 years. That's money America doesn't have, but he could probably just print some more.

 

Obama will be in his element, talking and lecturing, the law professor framing the debate. He'll spend hours being seen as reasonable. The Republicans will balk and the president will shrug. He'll sigh and say he tried to reason with them but they refused.

 

Then once the cameras are turned off, he'll take out the baseball bat and explain how things get done The Chicago Way.

 

It's all about muscle. As an acolyte of the Chicago Democratic machine, he's seen muscle at work in Daleyland. Now he's in the White House, and he's going to use muscle too.

 

Thursday's entertainment spectacular should be great TV for political junkies, a little singing, a little dancing and panels of media experts. They'll chatter on in their little boxes on the TV screens, each trying to be more clever than the other guy.

 

Someone will probably repeat that ridiculous Washington storyline about Obama, courtesy of the legions of Hopium smokers, which suggests that our young president is just not mean enough.

 

He's too intelligent, they say, too virtuous, too principled to be ruthless. Sure, it's complete nonsense, a story for children and true believers, but they repeat it, again and again, desperately, like some secular prayer.

 

Without ruthlessness, how will he get his health care plan passed? Especially as some Democrats back away and the Republicans say no.

 

Though Americans generally support some aspects of his agenda — covering the uninsured, protecting those with pre-existing conditions — a majority are opposed to Obama's overall health policy.

 

That's because they're reasonably nervous about two things:

 

Those two claws of the federal leviathan grabbing one-sixth of the national economy.

 

On the eve of Obama's Health Care Kabuki, The New York Times desperately cleaved to the conventional wisdom about the president:

 

"Ever since his days as a young community organizer in Chicago, Mr. Obama has held fast to the belief that by listening carefully and appealing to reason, he can bring people together to get results, an approach that in Washington has often come up short."

 

Oh, please. That approach comes up short everywhere. After the Hopium smokers nod off to pleasant dreams, what counts is who has the muscle. Obama knows this. So Thursday might mark an epiphany for many.

 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Democrat from Nevada, foreshadowed how the White House will use force — through a parliamentary trick known as the "nuclear option."

 

Formally, it's called "reconciliation." It would allow Senate Democrats to pass national health care legislation with a simple majority, without Republican support, by bypassing Senate rules that require 60 votes to stop a filibuster.

 

The Senate of the United States was explicitly formed to slow down legislative passions and let them cool, not heat them up as in the House of Representatives. The Senate was not born as an institution where a simple majority rules.

 

But we Americans don't read history much these days, do we? Instead, we watch "American Idol," and vote for our favorite performer.

 

"They should stop crying about reconciliation as if it's never been done before," Reid said of Republican outrage. "It's done almost every Congress, and they're the ones who used it more than anyone else."

 

Reid's right. And Republicans have problems crying about it now.

 

Yet what Reid, Obama and others avoid is that a few short years ago, they were shrieking. Republicans sought rule changes so a simple majority could approve then- President George W. Bush's judicial nominees who had been held hostage by Democrats.

 

"(Bush) hasn't gotten his way, and that is now prompting, you know, a change in the Senate rules that really, I think, would change the character of the Senate forever," said then-Sen. Obama in 2005.

 

Sen. Joe Biden, now Obama's VP, gave the best sound bite of all.

 

"I say to my friends on the Republican side, you may own the field for now," Biden speechified with dramatic pause, lip bite, shake of head, "but you won't own it forever. I pray God that when the Democrats take back control, we won't make the kind of naked power grab you are doing."

 

Obama needs a victory. He must claim momentum before leading nervous Democrats toward November midterm elections. Either that, or he faces irrelevancy and insurrection.

 

Americans won't know exactly what's in that federal health care bill that will change our lives. We won't know how much it will cost us, or which insiders get rich, until after it's all done.

 

Naturally, the insiders will know. And after it becomes law, they might let the rest of us in on it.

 

That doesn't sound much like a man transcending the politics of the past, does it?

 

It sounds as if The Washington Way is just like The Chicago Way.

 

[email protected]

 

Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune

 

 

[Rex Kickass]

The "nuclear option," as it was opposed by the Democratic Senate in 2005 was not reconciliation. It was changing the rules of the Senate in mid session to eliminate the filibuster so that three Judicial nominees could be muscled through the Senate.

 

Reconciliation, is a practice that has been commonly used for bills that involve budgetary process and only certain portions of a bill can be affected by Reconciliation. A lot of good things have come out of reconciliation, among them the COBRA insurance program. The R in COBRA stands for Reconciliation.

 

The 2010 "nuclear option" as the Republicans are now calling it, is really just a regular Senate parliamentary procedure that isn't used very often. The 2005 model "nuclear option" would have changed parliamentary procedure. They are two different things.

 

And maybe people should learn that if you call two different things by the same name, they do not magically become the same thing.

[kapkomet]

The "nuclear option," as it was opposed by the Democratic Senate in 2005 was not reconciliation. It was changing the rules of the Senate in mid session to eliminate the filibuster so that three Judicial nominees could be muscled through the Senate.

 

Reconciliation, is a practice that has been commonly used for bills that involve budgetary process and only certain portions of a bill can be affected by Reconciliation. A lot of good things have come out of reconciliation, among them the COBRA insurance program. The R in COBRA stands for Reconciliation.

 

The 2010 "nuclear option" as the Republicans are now calling it, is really just a regular Senate parliamentary procedure that isn't used very often. The 2005 model "nuclear option" would have changed parliamentary procedure. They are two different things.

 

And maybe people should learn that if you call two different things by the same name, they do not magically become the same thing.

 

The Democrats use it for "good purposes" and the Republicans use it for "bad purposes". We get it, Rex.