I’m offering a limited amnesty to Delaware Republicans
The deal isn’t going to be around for long, and once it is gone, it is gone.
If you renounce Trump in similar terms to Sen. Bob Corker (below) by acknowledge that he is never going to be decent human or a good President, and if you apologize for voting for him, and you work to try and rehabilitate your party I will give a pass for having voted for Trump with your fingers crossed.
I’m not holding my breath that any Delaware Republicans will step up and take the olive branch. You know why? Just like congressional Republicans, the entire DEGOP is cowed by a handful of lunatics.
Will Ken Simpler take my deal? No way in hell.
Will Rob Arlett take my deal? Clearly No.
Will Mike Harrington or Emily Taylor? I seriously doubt it.
The public feud between Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and President Donald Trump continued to escalate on Tuesday.
The GOP senator, who warned earlier this month that Trump’s behavior could lead to World War III, told CNN that he believes the president’s legacy will be the “debasement of our nation.”
“He’s obviously not going to rise to the occasion as president,” Corker said. “I think at the end of the day, when his term is over, I think the debasing of our nation, the constant non-truth-telling, just the name-calling ― I think the debasement of our nation will be what he’ll be remembered most for. And that’s regretful.”
Put down Mike Castle as a maybe.
Most likely prospects: Bob Weiner and Jim Spadola, but hardly anyone cares what they think.
Joe Miro might–if he runs again.
Is this like “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” where Quantrill offers amnesty to the Missouri bushwhackers and once they surrender their weapons he massacres them? Because that makes more sense.
I’m not interested in giving a voice to people whose only complaint about Trump is that he’s rude.
James Spadola has ingratiated himself with Castle as the Delaware Way heir-apparent. I don’t trust that guy one iota.
BREAKING: Jeff Flake apparently taken up Jason’s offer, announcing Tuesday he will not seek re-election.
Part of his statement: “Here’s the bottom line: The path that I would have to travel to get the Republican nomination is a path I’m not willing to take, and that I can’t in good conscience take. It would require me to believe in positions I don’t hold on such issues as trade and immigration and it would require me to condone behavior that I cannot condone.”
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/arizona-republican-senator-jeff-flake-announces-he-will-not-seek-re-election/
Flake doubled down on the Senate floor, criticizing Trump by name.
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/republican-jeff-flake-condemns-trump-as-a-danger-to-democracy-in-stunning-senate-speech/
Credit for this obviously belongs to Jason.
They can have amnesty when they resign, register as democrats, donate the remainder of their campaign accounts to the party, and then go away
You’ve made the “deal” entirely too easy. Throw tRump under the bus? The bar is too low. Better make them pledge to never never never try to pass “right to work” again. Now that would make them howl in pain!
Spadola does not have a clue. His claim to fame is hug a cop?
Give me a break dude .
Well, I’m not in Delaware anymore — I moved away in 2002 — but I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. Of course, I didn’t vote for the odious Hillary Clinton either; I cast my ballot for Gary Johnson, fully aware that he wouldn’t win. Between two despicable candidates, I chose the third option.
President Trump is an [insert slang term for the rectum here], but at least some of his policies I support. The (still too weak) crackdown on illegal immigration is the right thing to do, as is the loosening of the anti-business regulations of the Obama Administration. I support cutting taxes, but only after spending is cut. And the successful nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is, I hope, a harbinger of things to come, as, I hope, moderate squish Anthony Kennedy and hard-left liberal Ruth Ginsburg retire.
Senator Corker doesn’t like President Trump? Would this be the same Senator Corker who wanted to be Mr Trump’s Secretary of State? He knew what Mr Trump was then — we all knew — and yet he applied for a position of having the President as his direct boss.
“The (still too weak) crackdown on illegal immigration is the right thing to do”
How heartless of you. Like most conservative policies, this sounds far better in your living room than an “illegal” immigrant’s. I suggest you read up on what these policies have actually meant to those they have been applied to. If you still think “weak” is a proper word here, you are not who I thought you were.
“as is the loosening of the anti-business regulations of the Obama Administration”
Regulations are the price we all pay for industry’s unwillingness to clean up its own shit. They are not anti-business; they are pro-public. If business had any way to police its own, we wouldn’t have to, but they don’t, so we do. Sorry if your mileage varies.
“I support cutting taxes, but only after spending is cut.”
What an unintelligent way to run things. You are not overtaxed, whatever illusions you are laboring under.
“And the successful nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is, I hope, a harbinger of things to come, as, I hope, moderate squish Anthony Kennedy and hard-left liberal Ruth Ginsburg retire.”
Now you sound like an idiot Fox News consumer. Are you OK? Why would you want a bunch of anti-federal government, pro-corporate people running the laws of the country? Do you really think the problem in this country is it’s not business-friendly enough, even though our government supports private business more than just about any government on earth? If that’s the case, just go away. You’ve swallowed a lot of bullshit, and your breath proves it.
“Senator Corker doesn’t like President Trump? Would this be the same Senator Corker who wanted to be Mr Trump’s Secretary of State? He knew what Mr Trump was then — we all knew — and yet he applied for a position of having the President as his direct boss.”
And he has been called upon by those who were hired to help wrangle the dementia-suffering man-child president. He wanted the job for the same reason Mattis and McMaster have theirs — to try to hold the country together while selfish assholes like you (and if you support conservatism you are a selfish asshole, even if you think you aren’t) call for tearing it all down. So you can what — pay the private sector to take care of all the unprofitable stuff government does for you?
Smarter up, buster.
Alby wrote:
Perhaps it won’t surprise you that I do not care what it sounds like in an illegal immigrant’s living room. Illegal means just that: illegal! They have broken the law to come here, or be here.
CNN Money noted, last September, that business start-ups were at a 40-year low. Most Americans who work in the private sector work for small businesses, not major corporations.
Certainly I am overtaxed, because we way overspend. In FY2000, a pretty good year, the federal government spent 17.394% of GDP. In FY2007, last year before the recession, it had risen to 18.848%. In FY2014, it was at 20.118%, down from a peak of 24.397% in FY2009, and it has risen since then, to 20.686% in FY2016. Before FY2009, we had spent 20% exactly one time since the end of World War II. We spend too much!
The Supreme Court? Had we a conservative court, Obergefell v. Hodges would have been decided differently, Grutter v Bollinger would never have agreed to suspend the equal protection clause for 25 years, and the takings clause would never have been used to aid a private developer.
The Grutter case still astounds me. The Court said, directly, that Affirmative Action was a violation of the equal protection clause, but agreed to hold it in abeyance for 25 years — 14 of which have already passed — before its decision was no longer any good. What kind of cockamamie logic is that?
Alby wrote:
I’d guess that you’ve had the oh-so-pleasurable experience of dealing with the DMV in Delaware. In Pennsylvania, the state privatized the vehicle registration part, so rather than having to stand in interminable lines, you can go to a notary public and get your vehicle registration done, quickly and professionally, by people whose business it is to keep you a satisfied customer. For one of the more unpleasant things which people have to put up with in most states — and the Hampton, VA, DMV is so bad that I figured that they recruited solely among the mentally challenged — privatization in Pennsylvania made things a lot better.
There hasn’t been an interminable wait at DMV for at least ten years.
The customer service of that agency is top-notch all the way. And state-run.
A blowhard with an attitude. You’re not the first, and not the worst. But that’s all you are.
@D “privatization in Pennsylvania made things a lot better.”
What planet are you on?
The push for privatization has ALWAYS been about money… funneling it to the right people.
It has NEVER been about increasing quality or decreasing costs (which sometimes double under privatization).
Well, Mr Elite, whatever you believe the motive happened to be, it worked. I was able to get and renew my Pennsylvania plates easily, without waiting lines. I did live in a small town, which might have helped, but the local DMV office, where driver’s license renewals still had to be done, operated only on limited days, and had long lines.
Now that I’m back in the Bluegrass State, I had to do everything at the county courthouse. Fortunately, it’s a small county, so I didn’t have long lines. The only annoyance was that I had to have my Social Security card, which I had lost decades ago, to change my license. I would have expected my passport to be acceptable, but it wasn’t. Had I been in a large county, things would probably have been more of a pain.
Sorry, dude, but the DMV takes about 10 minutes now and you don’t even have to go face-to-face with anybody but the guy who hooks up the emission computer.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, forces everyone to private service stations for inspections. You can imagine how many cars are found to be in perfect working order.
I guess the reason conservatives like the private sector is they don’t know when they’re being fleeced.
Sorry, buddy. I said YOU were not overtaxed, not that WE were not overtaxed.
The percentage of the GDP has not a damn thing to do with you, and less than nothing to do with the DMV.
Congratulations for pretending to be reasonable for so long. Now you have revealed yourself to be just another little animatron of the conservative brainwashed brigade, unable to think outside the guidelines laid out for you by your programmers.
Just in case you’re curious, the “what part of illegal” assholery is what gave you away.
Having lived in PA for 7 years, the DE registration and inspection process is far superior. Unless you know the mechanic in PA, they will try to rip you off just about every time.
Hint for DE DMV users, go the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving. They open early instead of noon and there is literally no one there. I’ve gotten a full inspection and registration done in less than 15 minutes. They’re happy to see you.
Florida DMV is even better than DE. Make an appointment online and walk right in. Way more expensive, though.
Alby – Ego depletion always kicks in eventually. He always reveals himself sooner or later. It is now probably only a matter of days before he is banned for outright stupidity and uselessness.
alby wrote:
Now, what does that mean? Does that mean that you believe I should be taxed at a higher rate than other people? Well, if so, I was, because, before retirement, we had a six-figure income.
Mr Kneedog wrote:
This part is true enough. However, if your vehicle is obviously in good shape — new windshield wipers, brakes in good condition — most mechanics outside of dealerships quit looking hard for things.
I really want to humiliate the 45 supporters. But I guess vampires who have a negative moral and intellectual development score
can’t self reflect
No, Dana, I meant that we live in a country with lower tax rates than just about every other industrialized nation. You immediately responded with a bunch of blather about GDP, the sort of argument that your conservative overlords trot out when people point out the fact I just did.
You. Are. Not. Overtaxed. Nobody in this country is. Now if you want to argue that we get less for our tax dollars than citizens of other countries do, fine, because that’s true. But that’s not your complaint, is it?
Again, what surprises me here is that just two weeks ago you were acting like a normal human being, and suddenly you’re spouting Fox News boilerplate. Turn off the TV, dude, and act like a normal human being.
Our esteemed host wrote:
Uselessness? I’m the guy who provides this site with the most actual debate, vis a vis being an echo chamber.
Think of former NPR CEO Ken Stern’s article about having left the cloister and having actually visited the parts of America the left eschew. Y’all don’t know anyone like me, and seem to be stunned that people with whom you disagree exist. William F Buckley, Jr, once said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
Y’all were stunned when Hillary Clinton lost the election, to the point where there’s supposed to be a “scream at the sky” event on the anniversary of the election, because there is a large part of America that you not only don’t understand, but can’t believe actually exists. Mrs Clinton was supposed to sweep into office, in a landslide, and have coattails which would drag a Democratic Senate majority along with her, and the left actually believed that would (probably) happen. Stunning everyone, 53% of white women voted not for Mrs Clinton, but Mr Trump, and you guys are still befuddled by that. Mrs Clinton went on to say that the women who voted for Mr Trump “disrespected” themselves, as though they were somehow duty-bound to vote for her because she had a vagina.
There is a whole, wide country out there that you just don’t understand, and I’m not sure that you even want to understand it. You (plural) pounced on things like the North Carolina ‘bathroom bill,’ seeing allowing the transgendered to use the public restrooms of their choice as just obvious, never understanding that there were wide swaths of people who saw that as utter foolishness, and potentially harmful. When you disagreed with them, you thought them nothing but bigoted and stupid, never seeming to realize that calling them that was not very likely to persuade them to your side.
Of course, you have the authority to ban me if you choose: my freedom of speech does not require you to publish my comments. But it will be this site’s loss, not mine.
The tax rates from the feds and in DE are very low in my view. The tax cut the regressives are floating would give me an extra few hundred a year while taking funds from everything I need and my child will need.
No, Dana, it’s not that we don’t know those people or those parts of the country. It’s that we find most of them fearful and un- or mis-informed. And the truth is that the people you’re talking about are the ones in a harder-to-penetrate bubble.
The people you are talking about — I’ll call them “your people” just for ease of typing — are the ones who have no contact with people unlike them. In cities, you deal with lots of people unlike yourself. Not so in rural areas.
Your people are the ones who shudder in fear and revulsion every time something new is presented to them, unless it’s been deep-fried at the state fair. Your people are the ones who are shocked to find there are other views. We know other views exist — we just don’t understand why intelligent people like you would hold them.
Your comment provides the clue, though — you let your emotions rule you. The truth about the bathroom bill is that it applies to a vanishingly small percentage of people and isn’t worth politicizing in the first place — but it was invaluable in getting your people worked up over the fact that some people are transgendered. Even if you disagree with that, is that a valid reason to vote for retrograde economic policies by voting in Republicans?
And it’s pretty clear to me, at least, that what’s ruling your emotions is exposure to conservative media. You don’t care how the crackdown on illegal immigration is playing out in their homes? As I said yesterday, heartless. And that’s not you.
In short, I find your comment above full of projection. Urban Americans aren’t the ones who rally their supporters by claiming, “We, not they, are the real America.” Your people, not ours, are the ones seeking to divide, and they’ve done a damn good job of it, which has proved incredibly lucrative to the shitbags who devised the strategy in the first place.
It’s not that we don’t know those people or those places. I know them and I’ve been to them, and while I hold no ill will toward your people, they let me know right away that I wasn’t one of them, and I let them know that I don’t wish to be one of them. I find them dull, ignorant and just as smug as most liberals but without the credentials that would give rise to legitimate smugness. They are smug about clinging to a disappearing lifestyle and criticizing all those who move on, and they want to impose that on an entire nation that, quite simply, does not share its values.
Not that you care one way or the other, but if you want to keep commenting here, go easy on the Fox News hogwash. You’re much better when you comment as yourself than as a Fox News viewer. If I wanted to hear mass-marketed conservative bullshit I’d listen to the president, which I don’t.
For backup of the above comment:
http://www.rollcall.com/im-a-coastal-elite-from-the-midwest-the-real-bubble-is-rural-america/
That he concedes the fact that he is stupid is a refreshing surprise.
Alby wrote:
Do you think that perhaps, just perhaps, describing ‘my’ people as “fearful and un- or mis-informed” might just make them less willing to listen to you and your arguments? That was one of Mrs Clinton’s mistakes, labeling half of Mr Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables:” she wasn’t going to convert a single one of them after that, and she managed to offend a whole bunch of people who were on the edge at that point.
Donald Trump is vain, lecherous, a blowhard, rude, crude and socially unacceptable — except, of course, before he ran for President and had all of those pictures taken smiling with the Clintons — and yet your candidate ran a campaign so bad, which so turned off people who might have at least considered her, that she managed to lose a presidential election she was heavily favored to win. You may think that she was right about everything, but it doesn’t matter, because she isn’t President to act on any of them.
Kentucky’s Henry Clay once said, “I would rather be right than president,” and he got his wish: he was never President, despite having run for the office thrice.
Alby wrote:
Here is where you’ve taken a false assumption: for the most part, I don’t watch news on television at all. The reason? I’m partially deaf, and human voices are the hardest thing for me; it is much easier for me to read than to listen to television or radio. I do use the closed captioning feature, but that’s often very poorly done, especially on live broadcasts.
My news subscriptions? I pay for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, the Post primarily due to one economics reporter who is very good at reporting all sides of an issue.
“Do you think that perhaps, just perhaps, describing ‘my’ people as “fearful and un- or mis-informed” might just make them less willing to listen to you and your arguments?”
Oh, absolutely. We libtards are totally familiar with being dismissed, but then we’re usually dismissed by people who use words like “libtard.” If I had a nickel for every white male asshole who’d rather kick down than up I’d be a rich man. That said, this isn’t a “safe space” for conservatives, who supposedly are against the whole idea of respecting other people, at least when it’s phrased as “safe spaces.” I’m not trying to persuade you of anything. All that is written here is written for an audience.
Let’s look at the most famous example of this supposed snooty attitude we libtards hold, Obama’s line about “clinging to guns and religion.” This was purposely misrepresented, which is evident to anyone who knows the whole quote — which, by the way, isn’t easy to find, as even sites devoted to quotations clip is just as his critics did:
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
That’s not a person sneering at rural people. It’s a person trying to understand their view and explain it to a crowd of Marin County Democrats. He said he meant that voters in places that had been losing jobs for years expressed their anxiety at the polls by focusing on cultural and social issues like gun laws and immigration. I fail to see how this is anything but an accurate portrayal of the betrayal of the people in these places. Obama is right — politicians both D and R promise to do something for these people and places when it is beyond their power to change global trends in the economy.
(I will note here that the second-most-famous example, Romney’s 47 percent, also was misquoted. That both sides do it is not justification for it, and I do see it on both sides.)
(I will also note here that it wasn’t Republicans who first jumped on him for this, it was that avatar of rural America, Hillary Clinton.)
When someone tells me I’m uninformed or misinformed about an issue, I go look it up. Most conservatives are loathe, on the whole, to challenge their assumptions. So are many liberals, but not as high a percentage as conservatives. That’s why so many Democratic voters are pushing back on the emphasis on the rights of the transgendered — they think it turns off social-issue voters on the right. What’s the equivalent issue on the right? That some of you tell the KKK and Nazis to shut up? Hardly seems equivalent to me.
If you want to discuss assumptions, how about the one in which you think I actually support Clinton’s policies. I found her too hawkish (Trump pretended to be less so when campaigning), too bound to corporate America and Wall Street (Trump pretended to be less so when campaigning) and too ready to embrace neo-liberal economics while giving the left the sop of social-issue progress (but not the kind that would actually do some good, like demanding police responsibility).
Henry Clay, it should be noted, was a compromiser and a precursor of what today would be pro-business Republicans, though he was of course smart enough to see that public investment in infrastructure, though costly, would do more for business than all the cost-saving measures put together. He was right about that, and many other things besides, so in a historical view I think he was right to rather be right. 😉
@Dana: I do apologize for attributing viewership of Fox News to you, but I have noticed for years that the things offered up on Fox are repeated verbatim by lots of Republicans who don’t actually watch it. That’s the insidious effect of propaganda.
Again, both sides do it. Indeed, the supposed “both sides” of American politics has for the past 25 years boiled down to which group of corporate sell-outs you want to side with. The only thing they disagree about are things like abortion, gayitude, etc. — issues that used to be the province of religion, not politics — and they use them to divide us so we don’t go after them.
Alby wrote:
Oh, were I looking for a ‘safe space,’ I sure wouldn’t come here! I fully expect to be called names, and think that I’ve proven that such doesn’t bother me. Bearding the lion in his den is a lot more fun, at least for me, than being in a conservative-only echo chamber.
My favorite sites? The Pirate’s Cove, which is conservative, but has one hard-left, very persistent commenter; Patterico’s Pontifications, an anti-Trump conservative site with a very active comment section that includes anti-Trump conservatives, some Trumpelstiltskins, and some liberals, and The Other McCain. (Left out the hyperlink, so this comment doesn’t go into moderation due to too many links.)
This site is a good one, with just enough commentary to engage easily, without so much that everything gets lost in a cacophony, like The Lost Kos.
If you read my site — which you should, every day! — you’d see that I’m careful about my sources, using primarily The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNN Money, and The Washington Post. I do that for a reason: citing deliberately conservative sites all the time undermines the argument, because it makes the arguments too easily dismissable. Using the ‘enemy’ as a source undercuts claims by the ‘enemy’ that the sources are biased and unreliable.
That’s just it: conservatives did not believe that what Mrs Clinton said she would do was actually how she would govern if elected. What we worried about most were Supreme Court nominations and ever-more regulations on business, along with hard-left positions on the social issues.
I suspect that, on the economy, she’d have been not too different from Mr Trump in a broad sense, but in the narrow regulation sense, much worse. At a time when working class Americans are finding jobs hard to come by, her stated policies of admitting far more Middle eastern refugees simply meant more competition for low-skilled Americans.
But bound to corporate America? Yeah, and I approve of that. 83% of employed Americans work for private businesses, with 49.2% of them employed by small businesses, so supporting private enterprise means supporting jobs for Americans. A man’s best friend isn’t his old college buddy or his next door neighbor or the guys he golfs with; a man’s best friend is his employer! He can lose his golfing buddies without losing his home, but if he loses his job, well, his friends aren’t going to be able to make up his lost wages. To be the enemy of business is to be the enemy of the American worker.
At any rate, I’ll be leaving on a short personal business trip to the Keystone State early tomorrow, so I’ll be absent from this site for a few days, even if our host doesn’t give me the boot.
“A man’s best friend isn’t his old college buddy or his next door neighbor or the guys he golfs with; a man’s best friend is his employer!”
No, Dana, your employer is not your friend. He or she did not hire you out of friendship but out of a desire to take your labor and turn a profit from it. That’s it, and that’s all it will ever be — a transactional relationship.
Regulations do not cost jobs overall. They create jobs. Every regulation requires regulators. Many of the pollution-related regulations require equipment that must be manufactured. I have friends who work on filters for coal-fired power plants that recapture the mercury released from the burning coal. No regulations, no jobs at Gore for that.
Existing businesses always resist new technologies, unless they are owned by the existing businesses or can be purchased by them.
I have no idea what Mrs. Clinton said she would do, as I believe she will say anything. I am glad she lost the election only because had she won the Republicans — and probably you along with the rest of them — would be marching to the Russian drumbeat that it was a rigged election. She still wouldn’t have a cabinet.
Your people, not mine, have decided that if they can’t run the country the way they want to they will break it instead. Your people, not mine, will be seen that way by history.
Are you advising Delaware? They need your help!!!! Laughable…
mouse says:
October 25, 2017 at 10:23 am
The tax rates from the feds and in DE are very low in my view. The tax cut the regressives are floating would give me an extra few hundred a year while taking funds from everything I need and my child will need.
Dana – you can’t argue with the liberal left. If they had any guts or brains they would remove themselves from the Dem party and form a 3 rd party.
If you had any guts or brains you’d meet me for lunch. My treat. But you’re the coward, not me or anyone else here.
I thought you alternative reality bigots were forming your own Bannon party