Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

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Memo to the US senate PASS SOMETHING

Posted: April 2, 2011 by datechguy in economy, politics
Tags: ,

Every day on the news the word concerning the budget has been, “The house is divided”, “Will the house compromise?” “Can speaker Boehner make a deal with democrats?”.

All of this is missing the point.

The house has ALREADY passed a budget deal, it was HR 1. It debated and voted and passed it overwhelmingly.

Normal process at his point would be the senate with its Democratic Majority and its Democratic leader Harry Reid to pass an alternative bill and then you go to a conference committee to work things out.

Yet the Senate has yet to manage even 50 votes (let alone 60) on any kind of bill and Harry Reid has shown no inclination to even try to move. This is no surprise, after all he was in charge of the senate with a huge democratic majority that didn’t pass a budget last year in the first place.

Have you seen a single news story this week asking when the senate was going to pass something? I haven’t (granted I spent yesterday in Bed sick) but I don’t see why it is up to the house which has already done its job to act again when the senate has been unable to do a thing and Republican senators do their country no favors by demanding compromise by the house before they have done their job.

Get something passed first, then we can negotiate based on the two versions available.

One of the most important things a pol can do is to learn from mistakes.

The key reason why John McCain managed to win the nomination was the division among those who opposed him. McCain was clearly one of the least popular candidates among conservatives but the division of the conservative vote allowed John McCain to win with small relative percentages of the GOP vote.

Whatever Mitt’s faults on the leadership front on the brains and strategy front he is certainly first rate. I suspect he identified early the dynamics that would hurt him most:

1. Sarah Palin is the single biggest threat to his nomination in terms of a candidate

2. Romneycare is the biggest threat in terms of a policy

3. There are still plenty of people who consider Mormonism a cult who would vote against him in primary states

He also identified one huge benefit:

The establishment GOP hates and fears any Palin-like candidate and likes him.

So how do you manage to use these facts in your favor? Easy:

1. Use the MSM to neutralize Palin: Romney knows that he will need Palin supporters to defeat Obama in 2012, thus he can’t attack Palin directly thus he has used GOP proxies who are ostensibly not connected to him to do so. The media who hates Palin even more than GOP insiders are happy and thrilled to promote them any chance they get. Thus you get the narratives concerning Palin established while not dirtying your hands. The best example is the silence on her India trip while her mispronouncing of “skirmish” was news.

2. Support the Ringers: One of the oldest tactics in politics is to run a “ringer” to siphon off votes from an opponent. Right now if you look at the people running or “exploring” running you see quite a few strongly conservative folks. Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Newt, perhaps Huckabee, Haley Barbour and of course possibly Palin. All are popular with tea party people, evangelicals and social conservatives. For Mitt Romney to win the nomination that strongly conservative tea party vote needs to be divided. With enough strong conservatives in the race the primary vote will be divided. There is always a danger that one of these people will “break out” (Herman Cain in particular is a danger to do so as I’ve not found a conservative or tea party person who dislikes him) and become a really big threat, but as long as that doesn’t happen it’s in Romney’s interest to keep the smaller or regional candidates in the game since very few of the votes they will siphon off would be from him

Expect Romney’s biggest donors to be approached to help fund any candidate that he thinks will drain votes early in the primaries. Once that happens and the damage is done, or if any of them get enough momentum to become a threat the spigots will be turned off.

As far as I can see this is the path to the nomination for Mitt since he certainly isn’t busy hitting the administration on its policies. Of course the nomination won’t be enough, he has to actually win the general, so when all is said and done he will have to copy McCain in one other way, picking a strong conservative as a running mate to keep the tea party and conservative wing from leaving in disgust.

For the last several days you have been hearing the media talk about how there is trouble in Republican Land. Harry Reid is saying how the speaker has to abandon the Tea Party (My latest in the Examiner on the subject is To Tea or not to Tea btw) Schumer is going on about “extremism” and CNN is going on and on about how unpopular or ineffective the Tea Party is.

Yet for all of the noise you are hearing what do we see?

Les Gosule at the Twin City Tea Party 3-28

Locally a good turnout at the tea party meetings to see Sheriff Lew Evangelidis talk about his first 100 days, Les Gosule on Melissa’s bill and a plethora of Tea Party activities in the works.

 

For a dying movement clearly in Central Mass things are still happening.

Meanwhile on capital Hill here come the cuts 33 billion:

Biden confirmed the new target on spending cuts, putting the best face on the deal for Democrats and in his trademark style, trying to add a little punch to the administration’s stance— still hampered by Obama’s detachment from the budget fight.

But I thought all of these cuts were “draconian” and “extreme“? If this is the public number where will the final one be? Yet it is democrats trying to put the “best face on it”.

Meanwhile in Wisconsin the Unions are leaning on small business:

Members of Wisconsin State Employees Union, AFSCME Council 24, have begun circulating letters to businesses in southeast Wisconsin, asking them to support workers’ rights by putting up a sign in their windows.

If businesses fail to comply, the letter says, “Failure to do so will leave us no choice but (to) do a public boycott of your business. And sorry, neutral means ‘no’ to those who work for the largest employer in the area and are union members.”

Hey, I thought the Unions were winning and the Governor was unpopular? If you are winning why play the “Nice business you’ve got there, shame if anything would happen to it.” card.

And the Democrats who are so sure publicly that the budget confrontation will roll back those 63 seats the republicans gained are suddenly not so sure:

NOW, THE DCCC HAS BEEN FORCED TO FOCUS ON ONLY 14 DISTRICTS: “The Democratic Party is taking aim at 14 freshmen Republicans in the House, of 87 elected, whom it deems the most vulnerable…We’re way too early in the cycle to start trying to predict what the results will be on Nov. 6, 2012. “But it’s pretty remarkable that we’re not hearing much talk about Democrats retaking the House in 2012,” Geraghty says.

14 seats they think the republicans and Tea Party folk are so unpopular they can pick up a whole 14 seats?

But why worry, after all President Obama is still polling well…isn’t he?

President Barack Obama’s approval rating and prospects for reelection have plunged to all-time lows in a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.

Yeah but he’s The one™. We in the MSM know republicans are in trouble and not democrats, because if Democrats were in trouble they’d have to receive open government awards in secret or something.

President Obama finally and quietly accepted his “transparency” award from the open government community this week — in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House on Monday.

How can this be? After all it’s not like he’s like Johnson or Nixon secretly putting the CNN into foreign countries to overthrow people or something?

And I’d be willing to bet that these CIA operatives aren’t the only American boots pennyloafers gators shoes of indeterminate structure on the ground in Libya. We’ve previously reported on the insertion of A-10′s and B-1′s into the conflict. Typically, such aircraft require some tactical assistance on the ground. That’s usually Air Force enlisted personnel; it’s a segment of the AF special operations called combat control.

I haven’t linked to Andrew Sullivan in ages, but his reaction is simply so funny that it deserves a link:

It’s so surreal, so discordant with what the president has told the American people, so fantastically contrary to everything he campaigned on, that I will simply wait for more confirmation than this before commenting further. I simply cannot believe it. I know the president is not against all wars – just dumb ones. But could any war be dumber than this – in a place with no potential for civil society, wrecked by totalitarianism, riven by tribalism, in defense of rebels we do not know and who are clearly insufficient to the task?

Andrew as a certain Time Lord once said: “you can’t be a successful crook with a dishonest face, can you?”

So to those in the GOP who are worried about fighting back because the media says we’re in trouble I say this:

“Ride right through them, they’re demoralized as hell”!.

Update: Here is the solution for democrats. Tax increases! That’s going to fly really well.