Aaron Strife
Banned
They're going to win the House. gg PDIAlso, Quinnipiac has a new poll out that shows the Democrats up by nine on the congressional generic ballot:
They're going to win the House. gg PDIAlso, Quinnipiac has a new poll out that shows the Democrats up by nine on the congressional generic ballot:
I think Obama and Democrats have really screwed themselves over with young people due to the NSA, because that's apparently all a lot of them can think about. There's going to be even more apathy than usual going forward.
I think Obama and Democrats have really screwed themselves over with young people due to the NSA, because that's apparently all a lot of them can think about. There's going to be even more apathy than usual going forward.
Chuck Todd said the WH believes the NSA hurt them more than anything this summer; it sounds like internal polling was mixed on the IRS nonsense but pretty stark on NSA. Personally it's a case of chickens coming home to roost. The administration has been horrible on civil liberties since the beginning, worse than Bush, but a lot of people were oblivious until Snowden. I really believe that ended Obama's long lasting appeal amongst many young people. There has also been a noticeable change in Jon Stewart's tone on the WH since then.And by young people you mean libertarians?
I think you overestimate how many people care about the NSA.
Chuck Todd said the WH believes the NSA hurt them more than anything this summer; it sounds like internal polling was mixed on the IRS nonsense but pretty stark on NSA. Personally it's a case of chickens coming home to roost. The administration has been horrible on civil liberties since the beginning, worse than Bush, but a lot of people were oblivious until Snowden. I really believe that ended Obama's long lasting appeal amongst many young people. There has also been a noticeable change in Jon Stewart's tone on the WH since then.
I've said it before but democrats are lucky as fuck that the other party is insane. A solid, non crazy/bigot could have given Obama a run for his money last year.
No one cares anymore.
Romney ran on a more extreme foreign policy than George Bush, advocated deep Medicare cuts, and supported SS privatization. If that's not "crazy" I don't know what is.Hm? In what world is Romney a crazy or a bigot?
Romney ran on a more extreme foreign policy than George Bush, advocated deep Medicare cuts, and supported SS privatization. If that's not "crazy" I don't know what is.
Bigot may be too strong of a word but the fact remains that his ignorant positions on gay marriage and immigration lowered his potential voter base. Obama has a lot of support simply due to being the only candidate who isn't questioning the rights of gay and brown people.
I don't want to re-litigate the past but Obama was quite vunerable last year. The problem is that republicans didn't have a candidate who could take advantage of it. Huntsman maybe, perhaps Christie. But even Christie is opposed to gay marriage, at least politically; I bet he privatelydoesn't care who gets married.
The foreign press greeted news of the first U.S. government shutdown in 17 years with dismay and bemusement, but little surprise. From Russia to India to England, newspapers zeroed in on partisan polarization as the root of the budget impasse, citing possible impacts on world markets, security, and tourism.
Asian markets held steady at the news of the shutdown on Tuesday, as global investors were already anticipating the Congressional stalemate. However, world commentators are beginning to worry Congressional gridlock will bring down other fragile economic recoveries with them.
India: The Indian press had strong feelings about the shutdown. World holds breath as US government shutdown imminent, The Times of India reported. Its business paper, The Economic Times, took a different tack: US faces shutdown, fiscal cliff: Its advantage India? But dont forget the home front: Forget US shutdown, India might be on the verge of a shutdown, fretted Shishir Asthana in the Business Standard. Indian business executives also told the Voice of America they could not understand how a developed country like the U.S. could shut down its government because of a legislative impasse.
China: Chinas state-run Xinhua news agency warned tourists heading to America that popular destinations, such as national parks and monuments in Washington, D.C., might be closed. The Voice of America, noting that the news of the shutdown was covered extensively by domestic media throughout Asia on Tuesday, collated Chinese reactions that ranged from worried to almost comically optimistic. VoA interviewed Professor Chen Qi at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing, who opined that if this had happened in another country, it might be more problematic, but he trusts that the maturity of the U.S. government and American politicians will have the wisdom to come to a consensus and solve this issue smoothly, especially since they have been down this road numerous times previously.
The United Kingdom: The British press, known for its arch reactions to crises, didnt disappoint. America shuts down, blared The Daily Mail, Britains most notorious tabloid. David Cameron warns on world growth as US government shuts down, The Independent reported. It is a risk to the world economy if the US cant properly sort out its spending plans, Cameron told BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday.
But perhaps the harshest coverage came from the stolid BBC. In a piece titled US shutdown has other nations confused and concerned, Anthony Zurcher wrote, For most of the world, a government shutdown is very bad news the result of revolution, invasion or disaster. Even in the middle of its ongoing civil war, the Syrian government has continued to pay its bills and workers wages. That leaders of one of the most powerful nations on earth willingly provoked a crisis that suspends public services and decreases economic growth is astonishing to many Now, as the latest shutdown crisis plays out, policymakers in other nations are left to ponder the worldwide impact of the impasse.
Russia: The state-run media, naturally, had a field day. The Moscow Times, an independent paper, summarized the reaction: The budgetary battle made headlines in Russian media on Monday. The Elephants Are Robbing the U.S. Government, read a headline in the government-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta, referring to the symbol for the Republican Party. The state television broadcaster Vesti cautioned, The U.S. government may be left penniless on Tuesday. The Times itself worried about the effect of federal government without money on the issuance of U.S. visas to Russians or support to cosmonauts on the International Space Station.
Germany: The German press erupted in criticism for American politicians on Tuesday. Der Spiegel Online proclaimed, A superpower has paralyzed itself, while The Welt predicted fatal consequences that could damage the U.S. recovery. The Zeit newspaper blamed a handful of radicals, stating, A small group of uncompromising Republican ideologues in the House of Representatives are principally responsive for this disaster. They are not only taking their own party to the brink, but the whole country. Unfortunately the leadership of this party has neither had the courage nor the backbone to put them in their place.
France: Frances Le Monde called the shutdown grotesque and noted that American cemeteries in France will be closed. On the editorial page, Le Monde dramatically lamented, Jefferson, wake up, theyve gone crazy!
Italy: Italy, mired in its own financial and political crisis, warned against the U.S. shutdowns serious economic consequences. The newspaper Corriere della Sera called the shutdown a huge blow to U.S. and global economic recovery, noting that sequestration has already done significant damage to Washington in particular.
South Korea: Seoul paper Chosun Ilbo ran a story assuring Koreans that the U.S. will not reduce its military presence in South Korea despite budgetary upheaval at home. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who is on a four day trip to South Korea, acknowledged that the Pentagon was under pressure to cut spending, but would maintain the 28,500 troops in South Korea regardless.
Global media may be less than shocked at this shutdown after watching Congress push the nation to the brink of economic collapse during the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations. At the time, foreign editorial pages lit up with criticism, denigrating Congress as dangerously irresponsible and a laughing stock. We can be thankful for one thing: not one of these papers covered the government shutdown as brutally as the American press would have if it were happening in another country.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/360040/bookers-lead-slips-six-points-alec-torresInternal polling conducted by New Jersey senatorial candidate Steve Lonegans campaign and obtained by National Review Online shows Newark mayor Cory Bookers lead slipping to six points, 48 to 42. A Quinnipiac poll released last week showed Booker leading Lonegan by 12 points, and even that poll was considered a positive sign for the former Bogota mayor, as the earliest tallies showed Booker ahead by over 20 points.
The latest internal numbers for Lonegan also show Bookers negatives inching up. Booker is 37-27 net favorable, a major shift from the 42-18 numbers he held two weeks ago, a memo from pollsters to the campaign reads. Nonetheless, the pollsters find significant advantages for the celebrity mayor, who, they note, is still getting a significant share of the suburban and Republican vote.
Regardless, it is clear that Booker who was expected to waltz to victory in this race now has a real competition on his hands.
Boom.
Obama is pissed.
PPP Dems + 5 on generic ballot
Thanks for the majority, Boehner.
2006While Republicans in the House are looking awful right now, we have to remember that midterm elections are over a year away, people who tend to vote democrat usually don't show up in large numbers during midterms, and the average American voter as the memory of a goldfish.
I highly doubt many of the Republicans are going anywhere for a while...
Democrats won the popular vote by 1 in 2012.thefro said:It needs to be about +10 unfortunately for them to pick up the Hosue.
+5 will just get them a few seats with how things are gerrymandered right now.
Seems House Rs are mulling program-specific CRs.
Thanks Obama.The Department of Treasury will be halting most operations, including brewery permitting and label approval.
If this doesn't get people to the streets, nothing will!Thanks Obama.
Those are called appropriations bills. They already tried to pass those! They couldn't get any through the House!
And by young people you mean libertarians?
Seems House Rs are mulling program-specific CRs.
It needs to be about +10 unfortunately for them to pick up the Hosue.
+5 will just get them a few seats with how things are gerrymandered right now.
Obama is pissed.
Er, no, these are like memorials, parks, veteran services, and so on. Not entire agencies.
Obama is pissed.
Er, no, these are like memorials, parks, veteran services, and so on. Not entire agencies.
That would still be an appropriations bill, just, like, for the Parks Services only.
Yup it would only serve to give the GOP some leverage.I guess Luther is out of a job.
That's going to be a non-starter in the Senate. Reid and Obama have no reason to agree to that.
@KellyO 5m
Senate Democrats say at this point they would not accept House GOP plan to fund Vets, National Parks. Full govt funding only.
It's not even close to just being libertarians. I can only speak from anecdotal experience, but I have a shit ton of friends here at college who were pretty damn enthusiastic about Obama before who have said they will not vote Democrat in future elections and regret voting for Obama strictly because of the NSA (Drones play a big part for a lot of them too). It's not like they are going to vote R, they just say they'll vote third party or, more likely, not vote (since the only third party that is ever on the ballot in Indiana is the Libertarian party). At least half of the people my age that I know voted for Obama have pledged to not vote Democrat again.
I'm sure a lot of them will change their tune in the next presidential election when directly confronted with the possibility of a batshit Republican getting the White House, but a lot won't. And, while young voters are notorious for not showing up in midterms, I expect apathy among my age group to be even worse this midterm specifically because of the NSA. I wouldn't underestimate the damage it's done for the Democratic party's reputation among young voters.
The Reign Of Morons Is Here
By Charles P. Pierce
Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up the the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making. For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing. With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.
Among other things, the Library Of Congress is closed as a result of what the vandals have done. Padlock study and intellect. Wander aimlessly down the mall among the shuttered monuments to self-government. Find yourself a food truck that serves monkey brains. Eat your fking fill.
@russellberman 6m
In House GOP meeting, Gohmert pushed for military pay bill in conf. committee; Boehner replied: 'Louie, that bill has already been signed'
Lmao. Gohmert must think the executive is as dim as he is, trying to pay the troops after the government shuts down.Clown shoes.