Inflammatory rhetoric and pandering to special interest groups has been pretty successful for the GOP lately. Who can blame us for getting on that train?
:rolleyes:
Heads up, Evil: Howard Dean is no socialist. Not in any sense. Neither was LBJ, nor FDR. You seem to be coming from an ideological current that regards a tax-supported public library as an instance of “socialism.”
Not at all, BG. I am very much in favor of tax-funded public libraries. I think that education funding in general is a good thing.
However, as I have said elsewhere on this board, we Americans seem to want a socialist level of benefits on a capitalist tax base. It won’t work.
By socialist, what do I mean?
Income redistribution, commonly known as “their fair share” when talking about “the rich”. The democrats have been playing the class warfare game for decades. “We’ll soak those rich bastards and spend the money for you. Trust us…”
A national health care system. Unworkable unless a crippling level of taxation is introduced.
Restrictive environmental regulations that raise the cost of doing business and make the contruction of such “radical” ideas as new oil refineries prohibitive.
Social engineering for business and the military based on the premise that folks on the left know what’s best for everyone.
These are just a few of the highlights. I know that many of you feel like Howard Dean is a refreshing breath of clarity instead of a polarizing figure. However, the numbers aren’t with you. Feel free to bring this post back in November 0f 2006 or 2008 if I’m wrong…but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Funny how Canada/Europe/Scandinavia manages it without their society collapsing under its own weight.
Excuse us for wanting to be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water. We’ll get right on that genetically-engineered pollution-eating human project.
Because equal rights for all is just something we sell to the peons to keep 'em quiet, right?
Aw…you’re disappointing us…
Goodness sakes, what a litany of horrors! National health care! Gasp! Restrictive environmental regulations! No! No! Don’t they realize this might stifle entreprenuership? The iron jackboot tyranny of…[drumroll]…liberalism!
('luci waggles fingers magicly…)
I find your lack of faith disturbing…
It is to laugh. It is to bust a gut!
Nope, many of us just want them to actually pay “their fair share” as you put it. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have no desire to cap their income in any way. I just want the loopholes closed. I also want corporate America to pay their share, too, so cutting back on the tax breaks would be a start. If you plan on responding with the “but then they’ll go to another city” argument, if we eliminated the tax breaks, then the other city would not be able to offer a break either. Next up is the “then they’ll just go overseas” argument. If that were true, they’d already be over there. Tax incentives haven’t kept a lot of companies here that can profitably do their thing elsewhere, so why keep giving them?
Not only workable, but I’m guessing that within a decade or two will be a must for any party that wants to retain power. The Republicans might propose it in a different form, i.e., giving money to the uninsured to pay for insurance, as opposed to a government run health care system, but they will propose it. There are currently more Americans uninsured than ever before. That alone isn’t enough to drive the change, as the majority of those are not voting Republican anyway. There is a new problem being faced by middle class, fully employed people. That is underinsurance. I’m employed full time in a well-paid profession and I currently have very expensive private insurance. Not because my employer doesn’t offer insurance, but because they insurance they offer sucks big donkey balls. If I were to be on their best plan, and ended up in the hospital for a few weeks due to illness, I’d be broke and declare bankruptcy. The number of folks who are insured, but yet aren’t happily insured, is rising VERY fast. While you might not think it’s an issue, even the Heritage Foundation is currently in secret talks (not so secret anymore) with all sorts of unlikely allies. This is going to be a bigger issue than terrorism soon. Feel free to bookmark this post. 
A much more interesting question than whether we’ll all be covered or not, is what the structure will look like when it is in place. It’s going to happen. How is the more important part to me.
There’s a lot more to this (warning: PDF) than environmental regulations. Part of it is NIMBY, but another is that the oil companies like things just the way they are.
Want to be more specific?
I don’t have a clue how well he’s doing so far. I do know that I have no desire to see him “Republicanize” the party, which is what you seem to suggest. Once again, I know exactly how to win elections. The problem is that I don’t want to sell my soul to do so. If I have to fight against the rights of gays to win, for example, I don’t want to win. I’d rather change the minds of Americans than change the very core of what the Democratic party is now all about. We were the party of bigots in the past (before my time, or I’d have not been a Dem), and I don’t want us to return there for any reason.
If by special interest groups you mean Southern Democrats, then yes. Appealing to a broad base works. If ya’ll would choose a Vice President from a state that he/she can carry then maybe you’d have a better shot at it. Trying to remember which state Senator Edwards came from.
DOH!!!
Sorry, couldn’t resist a return volley shot when I saw your location.
I’d like to hear why that’s incident is good reason to treat him as a the second coming of Satan. It’s a goofily trumped up non-scandal. He’s clearly stated what his actual policies are on guns, and he’s the founder of a program that the NRA and two Republican Presidents once praised as the sensible, 2nd amendment friendly way to deal with gun crime. Meanwhile, whose guns are being taken away?
Of course, YOU and yours are never shrill or hyperbolic, never exploitative or dishonest in your selling of an issue or a policy debate. No no, see, those concepts can only ever apply to Democrats.
I didn’t say it was a scandal, Apos. I just said that there were things in Tim Kaine’s record that could cause gun owners some concern.
There is considerable evidence that Tim Kaine’s clear speaking on guns is of relatively recent vintage.
It is within the rights of the NRA to oppose Tim Kaine if they choose to. He has no constitutional right to their support or their money, you know. And if this opposition is unfair, Tim Kaine has a right to make his case directly to Virginia gunowners.
I’m a Virginia gunowner, so I’ll be listening.
DoctorJ: Inflammatory rhetoric and pandering to special interest groups has been pretty successful for the GOP lately. Who can blame us for getting on that train?
I can, for one, and I’m a lifelong Democrat. I think that conservative shrill partisanship will end up being a very bad thing for the Republicans—in fact, I think the intra-party tensions are already getting serious for them—and I do not want my own party going down that primrose path.
Aside from his occasional lapses into macho, Norquist-of-the-left posturing, though, I see a lot of positive things in Dean’s leadership. I’m pretty moderate on most party-partisan issues: I have a liberal Republican senator whom I cheerfully vote for when I think he deserves it, and I have no illusions about the Dems in general being some kind of liberal heroes.
However, I was getting awfully tired of the pre-Dean DNC’s obsession with remaking their party into “Republicans Lite”. The Democrats made some necessary centrist concessions in the '90s, but the leaders simply didn’t know where to stop, apparently feeling that if a little moving to the right is a good thing, more must automatically be better.
It had got to the point where, when the DNC sent me a fundraising appeal, I would just send their form back to them with a handwritten explanation that I was sending the money they asked for to the Congressional Progressive Caucus instead of the Democratic Party. (I did put my own stamp on the return envelope, though. ;))
Now that Dean’s in the chair, however, I have more confidence that the Dems are going to focus on their core liberal principles, so I’m willing to send them money again. I expect there are quite a few other moderate-to-left Democrats who feel the same as I do, which may account for some of Dean’s success in fundraising so far.
But yeah, he should definitely cool it on terms like “hate”. We can differentiate ourselves from Republicans without pretending that we actually hate them.
And cited the goofy screechy headline that always gets pulled up in regards to this issue.
But what is his record? His main actual record is project Exlie: a program that the NRA loved. He’s certainly not a gun control poster boy in a symbolic sense, because he has given an ear to the pleading mothers of victims of gun crime, but where is his history of banning guns? Where’s the plot to take away people’s weapons? No, his real crime is that he doesn’t support repealing the law against bringing guns into places where alcohol is served (safety of the jackbooted cops be damned), which the NRA has decided it’s time to repeal, and he’s probably not interested in pushing forward the new agenda on concealed carry and stand-your-ground laws. That’s what all the screeching is about. It doesn’t have anything substantive to do with Kaine being better or worse than Warner on guns.
Who said anything about this?
Holding my breath would be a bad idea I think.
Nice Vadar impression. I was amused. We differ ideologically, luci, but I appreciate your sense of humor. And I’m not worried about the iron jackboot tyranny of liberalism. I think my side of the aisle will do just fine in 2006.
Ah, I was missing this today, your assertion of your expectations regarding the next elections. Now I am sated. I look forward with relish to your post repeating this tomorrow.
Well then, let’s be fair here. You have claimed repeatedly that Tim Kaine “founded” the program, when he did nothing of the sort. The driving force behind Project Exile in Richmond was federal prosecutor David Schiller.
This makes sense, since the whole notion behind the program is aggressive federal prosecution for gun crimes. And it also explains why the most Tim Kaine will claim is that he helped implement the program.
Tim Kaine no more founded Project Exile than I founded the Million Mom March, and claiming that he did so is a distraction from his considerable and numerous other accomplishments.
Business Week would disagree with you on the effectiveness of Dean’s fundraising efforts.
Quelle surprise! The house organ of the Oligarchy is convinced that Dean is too liberal. yawn
Some of us would be quite happy to see corporate donations to political campaigns banned, so we’re hardly crying in our soup over the fact that the Dems might actually have relatively clean hands for a change…
And here I always thought it was about winning seats (or, gods forbid, the Presidency) so that you could DO something. I didn’t realize that it was about keeping ones hands clean (whatever that is supposed to mean).
-XT
And that’s the shame of it…one party has decided that winning at any cost was worth it. It wasn’t the Dems. That, in my book, is a plus for the Dems.
Once again their comparison is with current Republican dollars versus current Democratic dollars, with no historical comparison to determine whether this is a lot more than the usual disparity between the parties or not. There is no numerical comparison provided between Dean’s performance now and off-election year numbers from prior years.
Do you understand the difference?
Can you tell me whether the current disparity between the parties is greater or less than prior years, and how such a phenomenon might indicate that Dean is doing poorly?
The only folks I have seen do any sort of reasonable comparison which would allow one to evaluate Dean’s performance relative to his predecessors is the one I have linked to several times already, done by someone at the Daily Kos, using numbers taken directly from the Federal Election Commission, suggests that Dean is performing very well compared to prior comparable years. Have a look see and let me know if his numbers don’t pan out.
But once again, it is to wonder why this story keeps getting repeated, without any of these reporters running the numbers on a reasonable comparison? It smells like a calculated bullshit smear campaign to me.
One other aspect of the Business Week report that has yet to be mentioned in this thread is the fact that under Dean, the DNC has registered 20,000 new donors. Quite impressive. Until you compare it to the 68,000 new donors to the Republican National Committee. So to summarize, the Republicans have raised twice as much money and nearly four times the new donors over the same period as the Democrats under Dean.
Couple that with the remark that Dean made just today, trying to maintain the fantasy about the vote in Florida last year. He said that people were “forced to wait in line for up to eight hours and most Democrats couldn’t do it because they had jobs. Of course, Republicans could because most of them have not worked an honest day in their lives”. Please.
I hope Dean keeps up the good work, personally. However, I expect him to be shunted aside in about two years as the Democrats try to bankroll a 2008 presidential run.