Delaware Dem

Saturday Open Thread [3.14.15]

Jonathan Chait has a great exit interview with White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer.

“The original premise of Obama’s first presidential campaign was that he could reason with Republicans—or else, by staking out obviously reasonable stances, force them to moderate or be exposed as extreme and unyielding. It took years for the White House to conclude that this was false… If you had to pinpoint the moment this worldview began to crystallize, it would probably be around the first debt-ceiling showdown, in 2011, when Obama tried repeatedly and desperately to cut a budget deal with House Speaker John Boehner only to realize, eventually, that Boehner did not have the power to negotiate. The administration has now decided that in many cases, even adversarial bargaining fails because the Republican leadership is not capable of planning tactically.”

Explained Pfeiffer: “You have to be careful not to presume a lot of strategy for this group. I’ve always believed that the fundamental, driving strategic ethos of the Republican House leadership has been, What do we do to get through the next caucus or conference without getting yelled at? We should never assume they have a long game. We used to spend a lot of time thinking that maybe Boehner is saying this to get himself some more room. And it’s like, no, that’s not actually the case. Usually he’s just saying it because he just said it or it’s the easiest thing to solve his immediate problem.”

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Friday Open Thread [3.13.15]

The Republican Governors of Alabama, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Maine, Kansas and Iowa are all going to raise taxes and user fees. They have no problem raising taxes in the end. They only care about who the taxes are raised upon. Their tax raises will be regressive, focused on sales tax increases and fee increases, which will hurt the middle class and the poor more. They have no problem engaging class warfare.

Only if Delaware had a Democratic Governor who likewise raised taxes and engaged in class warfare against the wealthy.

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Thursday Open Thread [3.12.15]

Republican senator and presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham (he can’t be actually running, this is a joke, right?) said in Concord, New Hampshire yesterday that his first act of business as President is to deploy the United States Military to Washington, DC to surround Capital Hill and the Capital Building and force the House of Representatives and the Senate to pass his overly inflated military budget that does away with sequestration.

Heil Hitler!!! Er ah, I mean Heil President Graham! You sir truly are a dictator. Or at least you want to be. You see Republicans, that is what a dictator would look like. You say Obama is a dictator? LOL, no. Actually deploying the military on US Soil (which is an impeachable crime itself under the Posse Comitatus act) to force Congress to pass your agenda. That’s a armed coup d’etat.

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Wednesday Open Thread [3.11.15]

“The U.S. Senate Historian’s Office has so far been unable to find another example in the chamber’s history where one political party openly tried to deal with a foreign power against a presidential policy, as Republicans have attempted in their open letter to Iran this week,” McClatchy reports.

That is because the letter is an act of unmitigated treason, designed to aid America’s adversary, Iran, and directly harm the United States. All those involved in the preparation, signing, and delivery of the letter must be detained.

One of the racist fucks at the SAE Fraternity at the University of Oklahoma has apologized. That’s nice. I would take that apology and burn it up right in front of him. Because who the hell cares if he is sorry? We are still going to destroy your life. Why? Because you are a racist. If you are a racist, you must be destroyed, no matter your latter regret. Racism must be made so forbidden that not only do you not say the racism you are thinking for fear that you will be destroyed, but you do not think it either.

If you notice that I am more strident than usual today in some of my opinions, blame the Philadelphia Eagles.

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Tuesday Open Thread [3.10.15]

Michael Tomasky describes President Obama’s speech at the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights: “It was the strongest statement about the liberal definition of patriotism I’ve ever heard a president deliver. It was also confrontational and challenging–an unapologetic manifesto for the values of blue America.” Abso-damn-lutely. It will go down in history as perhaps his greatest Presidential speech, and perhaps the greatest presidential speech since Kennedy’s inaugural.

That’s something we don’t hear a lot about, the values of blue America. No, it isn’t because we don’t have them. It’s that we don’t parade them in the public square quite as much as conservatives do, while conservatives aren’t exactly shy about caricaturing in public their version of liberal values (we love sodomy and baby-killing and so on).

But there are liberal values. Some, we all know about–tolerance, diversity, etc. But another central one has to do with the way in which liberals love our country, and it goes like this: Yes, of course this is a great country. But it is change that has made it so. It’s a country that was founded on the highest ideals of the day, many of which are eternal, but it was also a country where ownership of human beings of a certain race was legal. So no, it wasn’t so great. It had to be made great. And by the way it’s not really as great as it should be yet. That’s a process that, the human condition being what it is, will never have an end.

Tomasky says Obama defines those who are the truest Americans: “the protesters, the outsiders, and the agitators who read the words of the founding texts and forced the system to live up to them.”

What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?…That’s America!”

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