5/01/2009

Republicans: The Doofs Of Haphazard

Let's see, between 2000 and 2006 we kept hearing about the death of the Democratic Party. Looks like the imminent demise of the Republican Party will be a major talking head conversation piece leading up to the 2010 elections. More proof of the "free market of ideas"...as in free to invert the previous talking points and point them at the minority party...


"Anyone who tells you the Republican Party is on its way back is smoking grass. For the party to win, they have to have a broad base. They've lost the broad base."

Frank Luntz
Gop Strategist


"...The conversation dominating Republican politics is how to rebuild. There are no neatly distinct schools of thought in this inchoate debate. In an important sense, though, the argument in Republican circles is the same one that preoccupied Democrats in 2005 — that is, whether the party’s priority should be to retrench ideologically or whether it is more important to fan out in search of a broader message and audience. These aren’t really mutually exclusive schools of thought — most influential Republicans will tell you they need to do both — but which approach you emphasize says a lot about what kind of Republican Party you would like to emerge from the ruins of Bushism.


The retrenchers see the Bush era principally as a cautionary tale in forgetting where you came from. In their view, Bush and the Republican Congress proved to be about as grounded in conservative principle, fiscally and internationally, as Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill — spending the nation into debt with patronage projects, going soft on immigration, passing a massive entitlement program for prescription drugs, piling up indictments and mismanaging the military. Republicans lost the public not because their ideology became less relevant or less credible, the retrenchers argue, but because it was twisted in the morass of governing. The only way back, then, is for the party to rededicate itself either to fiscal conservatism or social conservatism or some combination of the two, which means, first and foremost, exposing Obama and Democrats on the Hill for the elitist liberals they really are.


As a broad generalization, most of those talking the loudest about retrenchment and confrontation are in the activist wing of the party; they’re the death-before-taxes conservatives or the picket-abortion-clinics conservatives or the online conservatives who incline, like their liberal counterparts, toward ideological purity..."

by Matt Bai
New York Times
Read Newt Again



"The changing demography is not on the side of the Republican Party. Republicans seen to be waiting for the single to get married and the young to get old."

Kellyanne Conway
Republican Pollster

Did It Really Start In Mexico?


"On Friday, the U.S. disease-tracking blog Biosurveillance published a timeline of the outbreak containing this nugget, dated April 6 (major tip of the hat to Paula Hay, who alerted me to the Smithfield link on the Comfood listserv and has written about it on her blog, Peak Oil Entrepreneur):

'Residents [of Perote] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.'

...the possible link to Smithfield has not been reported in the U.S. press. Searches of Google News and the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal all came up empty. The link is being made in the Mexican media, however. “Granjas Carroll, causa de epidemia en La Gloria,” declared a headline in the Vera Cruz-based paper La Marcha. No need to translate that, except to point out that La Gloria is the village where the outbreak seems to have started. Judging from the article, Mexican authorities treat hog CAFOs with just as much if not more indulgence than their peers north of the border, to the detriment of surrounding communities and the general public health."

Read more @ Grist.

4/29/2009

Grover Kisses A Newt

It's statements like this that make me a little suspicious about the April 15 TEA Parties being non-partisan...


“If you were going to make a list of 10 potential Republican nominees, Newt would be on any list. He’s probably in most people’s Top 5.”

Grover Norquist

4/28/2009

Racist Swines Squeal From The Right

"In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile—and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep."

Hunter S. Thompson
The Great Shark Hunt, 1979



"Illegal aliens are bringing in a deadly new flue strain. Make no mistake about it."
Michael Savage


"I've blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the US as a result of uncontrolled immigration."
Michelle Malkin


"What happens if there's a rash of deaths in Mexico... and if you're a family in Mexico and people are dying and Americans are not, why wouldn't you flood this border?"
Glenn Beck

"What better way to sneak a virus into this country than to give it to Mexicans....then spread a rumor there there are construction jobs here, and there they come."
Neal Boortz



"It's time for Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele, to speak out against this virulent strain of looniness. Immigrants aren't responsible for infecting Americans with swine flu — but racist commentators like these are spreading a far more destructive disease: hate!"
Bonnie Fuller

4/27/2009

Washington DC -- Fantasy Island 2009



"The Republican fantasy was that tax cuts were the magic elixir that would solve every problem. Now that the public has rejected it, it's disappointing to see Democrats offering up the equally fantastic notion that Americans can have all the government they want while getting someone else to pay for it."

Steven Pearlstein
Washington Post
Read more...