If you think the President is actually a secret lizard person, I have a a large number of magnetic healing bracelets I’d be happy to sell you.
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
“Are you threatening me?”
– Bevis, aka Cornholio
The amount of agreement I have with what Martin is currently espousing scares me.
And all along that has been the President’s position. Pass a clean CR, raise the debt limit, and then let’s talk. Not until then. Not with a gun to the head of the American people, put the gun down first. Modified to a good faith offer of making that clean CR and/or debt limit raise time limited items.
To the degree that they have not yet accepted the terms that they must accept before the next stage can happen. They will and they are idiots for not doing it sooner rather than later.
Yet amazingly the minority that is the majority of the majority in the House, representing that 18% of America that agrees with them, thought that it might play out otherwise. (They need to listen to some other radio than Beck and Hannity.) Or perhaps feels that torpedoing the GOP will serve their longer term interests … the House members most likely to lose seats over this are in point of fact the more centrist ones who still consented to this tactic by their silence and initial votes. The hardcore TPers are not in too many of those 24 potentially swingable districts. Thus the shake-out may be a bigger voice for the TP in the House than before … unless the House actually flips (might but still less than a coin flip chance) or their overplay incites successful primarying from the center Right more traditional conservative Republicans.
After the hostages are released the parties should sit and talk. Each will have to give and take some. Yes, the GOP will end up getting some of they want and Obama will get some of what he wants. That sort of horse trading is the way things should work. The GOP tactic throughout Obama’s years of “No. No. No.” to everything he wants, obsessive focus on undoing what they were unable to say no to before, threatening to blow up the country to get their way, and then claiming that poor them are being oppressed by the tyranny of the majority … is how this Congress has successfully not worked.
Funny enough a follow up to that last of Martin’s pointsin the Sunday New York Times.
Boehner gets enough pressure from the business class to allow a clean bill. He pisses off the tea party, and probably loses his speakership if not his seat because he is only 90% republican.
Clean debt limit extension, clean CR. The Democrats are now talking about undoing the sequester, which is spooking the Republicans.
At this point, just folding and keeping the sequester is the best outcome possible.
Seems that since Iraq, Republicans still don’t know which wars to fight and which not to fight.
Given the Republicans are starting to cave, I can now agree that Obama probably doesn’t need to cave and will end up looking good. I don’t understand how the Republicans allowed the Tea Party to rope them into this folly when everyone could see from the beginning it wasn’t a fight worth having or that could be won.
Obama and the Democrats just need to be careful not to push for too much and overreach.
From your lips to the Ears. My only criticism of this analysis from Rose E. Scenario and her academic partner Marge N. Overra is that the premise relies on reasonable and rational behavior. Which does not exactly lie thick upon the ground.
I am not remotely pleased to present this case, but it is unavoidable. If Obama is convinced that surrendering to the Insane Clown Posse is very bad, but nothing else will avoid the default, which is catastrophic, he may have no option but to cave. You can’t play chicken with a tree.
Going back to the OT, I figure each side will claim victory and blame the other side’s intransigence for making it necessary and lasting so long. And there’ll be a strong “Vote them out in 2014” flavour on both sides.
Obama is at heart a Reagan Republican. He WANTS to cave. He is EAGER to cave. He LUSTS to give the Republicans a chunk of Medicaid or Social Security. He can’t give up Obamacare, but watch what his left hand is doing while his right hand waves the “no fold” on Obamacare card.
Not a chance. I think at this point he understands that if he loses this battle, he loses the war. The Republicans will just become emboldened and take every battle to the brink expecting him to fold, and his own team will question his leadership at ever turn.
I think The Money is going to weigh in rather heavily behind the scenes this week.
This week? They weighed in *last * week! Bounced off the Insane Clown Posse like a BB off a rhino!
I’m wondering if the dumfucks have fallen prey to their own propaganda, The Kochs and other unindictable co-conspirators have been funneling money to them by way of populist sounding front groups for so long, they really believe that all their money is coming to them from The People. So they don’t really realize who is writing their checks.
What is the Insane Clown Posse?
The Tea Party idiots in the house.
I think you should go ahead and stop wondering.
Ah, the Tea Baggers.
Money talks.
It will get a lot louder and more urgent as the week wears on.
Yep, thats all I meant. Unconditional surrender of the hostages. They don’t get ANYTHING in exchange for releasing the hostages.
This is called the normal budget process. You can blame the lack of a budget for the first two years of Obama’s presidency on Democratic cowardice, you can blame the last few years on Republican refusal to go to conference on a budget.
So there needs to be at least the threat of hostage taking?
You realize that there is a regular order to things in the budget process, right? And the threat of hostage taking is not part of it.
The Republicans don’t want to impact the budget, they want to dictate it. Thats the problem. They won’t go to conference.
Why do they HAVE to give something? I happen to think they SHOULD, but Obama is such a wimp (and I voted for him three times), I suspect he will not punish them for their hostage taking.
How about just making the sequester less of a meat cleaver and being a bit more selective about where you cut the funds. Heck, both sides want it.
[quote=“computergeek, post:149, topic:670088”]
Given the Republicans are starting to cave, I can now agree that Obama probably doesn’t need to cave and will end up looking good. I don’t understand how the Republicans allowed the Tea Party to rope them into this folly when everyone could see from the beginning it wasn’t a fight worth having or that could be won.
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The Republican party is in danger of fracture. There are about 30 hard core tea partiers in the house and none of them took their seats away from a Democrat. They are a constant reminder to every other Republican in the house that they risk losing their jobs if they don’t toe an ideological line. There is a lot of money out there that is backing these primaries from the right.
I am frankly shocked that Obama hasn’t caved already and offered to kill school lunches and food stamps in the process. I’m starting to think that maybe he’s not such a terrible President after all.
They don’t have to convince the tea partiers that they have to stop. They just have to convince the other Republicans that they will not get primaried.
Right now Wall Street seems to think that this is a very good turn of events. The lower the Republican approval rating goes the better the market does. They are hoping this is the end of the craziness.