Like the anti-choice movement ended when Roe v. Wade was decided?!
I seem to have missed the period when Sam Stone was NOT an idiot.
He often says perfectly reasonable things on subjects unrelated to politics, or even sometimes on political subjects that aren’t overtly partisan. If you accidentally push his conservatives-vs-liberals button, though, he just goes into his illogical-talking-points-regurgitation mode unhampered by rational thought.
It’s not that his core idiocy has changed, it’s just that he is usually a bit more savvy about giving it a thin veneer of sensibility. Enough anyway that a superficial read might not make one recoil at all.
The GOP’s craziness works at the state level and in off-year House votes, but fails spectacularly for presidential elections; so you have congressional and gubernatorial candidates pandering to the party’s old, white racists who have little understanding of the outside world, but that backfires in a presidential election where old white and racist isn’t enough anymore.
It was a Tuesday.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/polltracker/trump-muslim-ban-voter-support
Earlier in the week, some were calling Trump a fascist, or at least a proto-fascist due to his call to ban Muslims. See e.g.:
The poll I linked above shows that 2/3 of likely Republican voters support this position.
It seems to me that Trump is showing that rather than the dog whistles of racism and other horrific ideas we grew accustomed to from conservatives, one can just come out and say proto-fascist stuff and Republican voters will respond vigorously.
Yeah, his recipe for tuna-noodle casserole is to die for.
I liked Kiber’s post very much. I vote for Democrats and felt he captured my thoughts on all the issues.
I call myself a centrist or moderate because I usually am sympathetic to both sides of an issue. (I’m often indecisive. 
)
I come across as a “liberal” on this Board just because I find it so easy to ridicule the kindergarten-level black-and-white “thinking” of so many modern-day “conservatives.”
…Not really a great answer. We’re looking for politicians, and to be honest, I can’t find 'em either.
Steny Hoyer, Democratic Whip.
In previous discussions I noticed that proto-fascist response when I participated in discussions about coups in Latin America; many republicans just have a blind sport and consider in effect that right wing military coups are coming from “defenders of democracy” and are willing to drop any democratic ideals that they claim to have in favor of expedience and their dislike of their political enemies.
Two words, people: Karl Rove. He orchestrated the strategy of using the wingnuts to grab the White House. These are his chickens coming home to roost.
You had to be persuaded? Fucking wow man.
This.
In the past, Federal politics was a process of compromise between left and right, with some in the middle from both parties.
Now, the Christian right in particular has framed the debate in absolutes. Obama was not just wrong, he is the literal Antichrist. You don’t compromise with the literal Antichrist. No compromise. At all. Ever. The world is black and white with no shades of grey.
It is this that has completely poisoned the political well at the US Federal level. It has been incrementally creeping along for decades, but reached a fever pitch when Obama was voted in.
Well, this is belief on your part since there is precious little empirical evidence to support it. In fact, over the last decades, economic growth has been better under Democratic Presidents than Republican ones (see Want A Better Economy? History Says Vote Democrat! or Why the economy performs better under Democratic presidents | Fortune ). Yes, it might just be a fluke or have some other explanation, but it is pretty hard to make an empirical case that the truth is exactly opposite what the data seem to imply.
And, this is particularly bad for Republicans because all Republicans have (if you are not part of the upper few percent) is a claim that they make the pie bigger and thus help almost everybody. It is certainly clear that they don’t help the poor or middle class by redistributing the pie, since the direction of their redistribution is upward.
So, if Republicans can’t claim to produce significantly more economic growth than Democrats there is really very little economic justification for voting for them (unless you are one of the wealthy class or believe you are destined to become one).
Finding these replies in a thread about Republican ignorance and insanity may have done permanent damage to my irony-meter.
The delusion of “destined to become one” essentially defines the major Republican base, also known as the “Joe the Plumber Delusion”. Otherwise only about 1% of the population has an arguably rational if morally dubious justification for voting Republican, in that it benefits them financially while screwing everyone else. Although the economic mismanagement they bring tends to impact overall economic prosperity which isn’t great for anyone in the long run, and occasionally they manage to create total catastrophe, like Dubya did when he inherited a robust economy from Clinton and 8 years later handed over to his successor the worst economic wreckage since the Great Depression.
It kind of inspires me to draw up a quick summary of the highlights of the current Republican Party – we can title it “Republicans: What’s Not to Love?” …
[ul]
[li]1% of their base possesses vast wealth and is driven by avaricious greed to possess more[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]99% of their base is delusional[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]They tend to mismanage the economy[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]they are contemptuous of science, at least in matters of global warming, evolution, and much of economics[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]their current top two presidential candidates are both clinically insane[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]they are misogynistic and contemptuous of women’s rights[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]their favorite hobby is dropping bombs on other countries[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]they know that no matter what they do, God is on their side[/li][/ul]
You forgot to mention their overriding fear.