A pretty crude and ignorant statement there. :rolleyes:
What hasn’t happened yet, and which is what needs to, is for the Responsible Adult Caucus that still forms a strong majority to work out a deal themselves, leaving the Whiny Brat Caucus out of it. Nothing is going to pass a Dem-controlled Senate and a Dem President without Dem support being enlisted first. If that tears the GOP apart along the way, or even costs Boehner the nominal GOP leadership, well, that’s what choosing a public service career sometimes requires. “Country First”, as their last presidential nominee used to claim.
OK, maybe give them a cookie to shut them up. Agree to having a free-standing debate and vote in both houses on a balance budget amendment, by itself. Some good might even come of that.
I predict that this will likely be the compromise: Reid’s plan is modified for more cuts. I believe he current has $2.7 trillion (including the phantom war cuts). I think he ups that to $3.5 trillion and gets a deal that increases the debt ceiling past election day. Further, it is agreed that an up or down vote (no guarantee of passage) is held on the BBA.
It passes the Senate with a few Republicans in support (the ones that aren’t standing for reelection in 2012) and passes the House with a weird coalition of Dems and non-TP Republicans.
Looks like the deal that we’ll end up with will involve forming a committee to address the deficit problem in the future. Didn’t we just do that last year?
I don’t see how this whole fiasco is going to benefit the Republicans politically. I know they think it will (or at least the Tea Partiers do), but the non-TPers are going to have some 'splaining to do before the next election.
No, the FBI infiltrated a series of ongoing criminal conspiracies. That’s what they’re there for. It was simply happenstance that the various Klan groups were based around a right-wing ideology. Anyway, it wasn’t the FBI that “broke up” the Klan. It was the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In any event, the Klan is hardly a right wing analogue of the ACLU, is it?
For that matter, it’s not like the Klan has ceased to function since it was “broken up”.
David Duke (former Klan Wizard, felon, and Republican Louisiana state rep) claims that Tea Partiers are begging him to run, and he’s thinking about it, even though his felony conviction makes him ineligible.
(I’m linking to Wiki, because I don’t want to link to Duke’s site directly, but the direct links are there on wiki, if anyone wants to pursue them.)
They pretty much just hung up the robes and changed their name to Council of Conservative Citizens. Trent Lott (Republican Senate leader until pretty recently) is one of their supporters.
Heh. The whole robes-n-wizards thing is so lame, it doesn’t surprise me that they’d rather just wear their Brooks Brothers instead.
The wiki article I linked above says that the current Klan functions mostly as small groups, now which makes it harder to infiltrate. It also says that the Klan in general is more or less merging with the Neo-Nazi organizations. Stormfront was started by David Duke’s ex wife (and some other guy, whose name escapes me) and Duke posts there often.
As for Lott - he was hounded out of office for telling former segregationist congressman Strom Thurmond that life would have been better if he (Strom) had been president. It’s was Strom’s 173rd birthday party, iirc, and I always sort of thought that the reaction to the remark was a bit overblown. I didn’t regret the results, of course. Still, it doesn’t surprise me that Lott’s a fan of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Here’s a wiki like to the CCC, in case anyone’s wondering if they’re really anything like the KKK or if Elvis is just joking (spoiler: Elvis is not joking).
Even 50 years ago it was misleading to talk about the Klan. Since the Oberholtzer affair the Klan has been a bunch of loosely affiliated but independent groups, rather than one big one. The good thing about today’s stealth Klan is that they don’t kill lots of black people, and go to prison when they do.
I thought it was a make-up call. The Beltway Village media had known about Lott for a long time, but had failed to follow through with their professional responsibilities and knew it. Then the Thurmond incident gave them the opening to correct their failure.
The reaction wasn’t to the remark itself, but to Lott’s (and by extension that of the party which made him one of its leaders) embrace of bigotry, and if seen in that light was both seriously belated and still seriously underblown.
Because congressional republicans walked away from negotiations on a Grand Bargain on account of them all having signed pledges never to raise taxes on the rich, lest we forget. The committee form is to accomodate those who’ve pledged fealty to Grover Norquist - by not increasing revenues upfront.
No, I said they “bent over backwards to ignore the transgressions of right wing groups”. They go after right wing groups when they make too much of a violent spectacle of themselves to ignore. While, again, constantly spying on and harassing “left wing” organizations like the ACLU regardless of how law abiding they are.
Which is exactly why the whole “pledge” thing is nuts. To be elected to a lawmaking body MEANS that your** job** is to compromise, every day, all day long. (Any job, really, is about this, in one way or another..but for a legislator, it’s basically the whole job description.) If you can’t handle that, okay…but for God’s sake don’t run for public office.
If you ask me it’s only the latest sign that movement conservatism is by now a bankrupt ideology that lacks solutions to real world problems and is solely chugging along on faith, good messaging and powerful institutions.
These pledge things are indeed supremely counterproductive. Everything needs to be on the table all the time if you are going to be effective.
It’s one thing to hold that low taxes are the key to economic growth, but it’s another thing entirely to bind your hands and close your eyes regardless of what might happen in the future.