Open Thread

Tuesday Open Thread [10.29.13]

So last night I attended the Delaware Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. My thoughts:

1) Dem Party Chair John Daniello really hates the 21st Century. He hates the blogs. He hates social media. The venom that dripped off the word “blogs” as he said it was amazing. I looked across my table to a particular State Representative as he said and said “Boy does he hate me.” The Representative laughed. The point Daniello was making was that the people in that room are what is important, not blogs and Facebook or Twitter. I wonder if Daniello realized just how many bloggers and former bloggers and users of Twitter and Social Media were in that room.

2) Senator Carper needs to stop drinking caffeine around noon or so. The man spoke at warp speed and wandered around the stage with a microphone in his hand making jokes like he was Robin Williams. Too bad he wasn’t as funny as Robin Williams. Also, Tom, for the love of God, it is the DemocratIC Party. I know you just love love love your Republican friends (or should I say Republic friends), but you have been talking like them for far too long.

Come inside for more…

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Thursday Open Thread [10.24.13]

A conservative is sounding the alarm: Ross Douthat:

[W]hile conservatives think the Obamacare exchanges are overregulated and oversubsidized, they are actually closer to the right-of-center vision for health care reform than the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which is happening no matter what transpires with Healthcare.gov. So if the exchanges fail and the Medicaid expansion takes effect (and, inevitably, becomes difficult to roll back), we’ll be left with an individual market that’s completely dysfunctional and a more socialized system over all.

In that scenario, the Democratic Party would probably end up pushing, not for the pipe dream of true single payer, but for a further bottom-up/top-down socialization, in which Medicare is offered to 55- to 65-year-olds and Medicaid is eventually expanded even more.

Meanwhile, the task for serious conservative reformers — already not the most politically effective bunch — might actually become harder, because they would have to explain how their plan to build an effective, exchange-based marketplace differed from the Obama White House’s exchange fiasco.

Well, when you call a former Heritage Foundation idea of establishing a private market place for health insurance “socialism,” what are you going to call actual socialism? LOL. Poor Republicans. They are just the petulant temper tantrum throwing boys who cried wolf.

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Wednesday Open Thread [10.23.13]

Roll Call:

It’s hard to say which should trouble Republican Party leaders the most right now: the sour mood among GOP donors, or the money suddenly swelling Democratic campaign and super PAC coffers.

Not only have the Democratic campaign committees that back House and Senate candidates outraised their GOP counterparts, but unrestricted super PACs that support Democrats have pulled in close to three times what GOP super PACs have so far, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

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Tuesday Open Thread [10.22.13]

John Judis at the New Republic says the Tea Party has been with us a long time:

Since the late 1960s, America has seen the growth of what the late Donald Warren in a 1976 book The Radical Center called “middle American radicalism.” It’s anti-establishment, anti-Washington, anti-big business and anti-labor; it’s pro-free market. It’s also prone to scapegoating immigrants and minorities. It’s a species of right-wing populism. It ebbed during the Reagan years, but began to emerge again under the patrician George H.W. Bush and found expression in support for Ross Perot and for Pat Buchanan with his “peasants with pitchforks.” And it undergirded the Republican takeovers of Congress in 1994. It ebbed during George W. Bush’s war on terror, but has re-emerged with a vengeance in the wake of the Great Recession, Obama’s election and expansion of government, and continuing economic stagnation.

This monster, like a zombie virus, is eating the Republican Party alive and tearing the diverse, and often conflicting coalitions therein apart.

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Monday Open Thread [10.21.13]

The Tea Party is not unique to America. It exists in Europe and elsewhere too. The only problem is, due to our nearly unique Presidential system, it can cause more problems and damage here than elsewhere.

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