Tag Archives: Democratic

May 13, 2013 · 6:00 PM

Fifteen Differences Between Democrats And Republicans

According to…

Addicting Info

I’ve noticed over the years, there are some fundamental differences in the way Republican and Democratic politicians think. Here are just 15 examples.

Republicans fear that the government has too much control over corporations.

Democrats fear that corporations have too much control over our government. 

 

Democrats believe it benefits all of us to help the weakest and the poorest among us.

Republicans believe it benefits all of us to help the wealthiest and most powerful among us.

 

Democrats believe it benefits all of us to help the weakest and the poorest among us.

Republicans believe it benefits all of us to help the wealthiest and most powerful among us.

 

Republicans believe large corporations will always do what is best for the American people if the government stays out of the way. 

Democrats believe large corporations would disembowel you and sell your organs to the highest bidder if the government didn’t stop them.

 

Democrats believe everyone is entitled to health care regardless of their ability to pay.

Republicans believe everyone is entitled to jack squat if they can’t pay for health care.

 

Democrats believe too much of our money goes to crooked corporate executives who take government subsidies and pay themselves $80 million salaries. 

Republicansbelieve too much of our money goes to teachers who make $30,000 a year.

 

Democrats believe anything that helps the American people during a recession or a time of crisis is the true essence of patriotism.

Republicans believe anything that helps the American people during a recession or a time of crisis is the true essence of communism.

 

Democrats believe that we need to set high standards for clean air and drinking water.

Republicans believe that standards for clean air and water are burdensome over-regulation.

 

Democrats believe the President and Congress need to work together to create jobs during a weak economy.

Republicans believe that Congress should do nothing to create jobs and then blame the President.

 

Democrats believe that corporate polluters should be made to pay for the cleanup of their pollution.

Republicans believe that making corporations clean up their pollution is burdensome over-regulation.

 

Democrats believe our health care system exists solely for the purpose of making people healthy.

Republicans believe our health care system exists solely for the purpose of making a healthy profit.

 

Democrats believe Congress should be of the people, by the people and for the people.

Republicans believe corporations are the people.

 

Democrats believe that corporations have too much influence over Congress due to their lobbyists and huge campaign contributions.

Republicans believe the middle class has too much influence over Congress due to their voting and paying taxes.

 

Democrats believe we need to protect victims of corporate negligence by allowing Americans to file lawsuits against corporations.

Republicans believe we need to protect large corporations from lawsuits by Americans who’ve been victimized by them.

 

Democrats believe that the rich should be taxed more than the poor and middle class.

Republicans believe that the rich should be allowed to keep all their wealth, except for the millions in campaign contributions they give to politicians.

 

Democrats believe that too much money in politics produces corruption and destroys the American way of life.

Republicans believe that money and corruption in politics arethe American way of life.

 

These are just my observations from a lifetime of watching Democratic and Republican politicians. I’m sure some Republican will come up with their own clever list.

 

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May 9, 2013 · 5:04 AM

House Republicans and extortion for the sake of extortion

Pitch perfect assessment…

The Washington Post – Post Partisan

Today’s news is about Republican leaders in the House scrambling around to find something that they can blackmail Barack Obama and the Democrats with, so that they can threaten to crash the economy with a government default unless they get it.

Kevin Drum and Brian Buetler interpret this as Republican irresponsibility on the budget. Greg Sargent points out that it’s even worse — Republican leaders in the House, including Speaker John Boehner, have already admitted that they aren’t willing to really force default, so they’re refusing to negotiate for now because they’re waiting until they can threaten to blow up the economy even though they admit they really won’t.

House Speaker John Boehner (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Well, maybe.

I say: It’s worse than that!

As I read this, it’s not really about Republicans demanding debt reduction and using the best leverage they have available to get it. Nor is it about Republicans demanding tax reform — their other possible demand — and using the best leverage they have to get it.

No, it’s the other way around. The House crazy caucus is demanding not debt reduction, not spending cuts, not budget balancing, but blackmail itself. That’s really the demand: The speaker and House Republican leaders absolutely must use the debt limit as extortion. What should they use it to get? Apparently, that’s pretty much up for grabs, as long as it seems really, really, big — which probably comes down to meaning that the Democrats really, really don’t like it.

In other words: I think Greg is correct, and the speaker has decided that he doesn’t actually want to blow past the debt limit. But now he has to find some way to do it without losing his job. And that means satisfying the significant chunk of his conference who demand maximum nuttiness at all times, either because they really believe in it or because they’re terrified to allow any space at all between themselves and those true believers.

It’s the extortion that’s the point. Not the policy.

 

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April 30, 2013 · 2:39 PM

Governor Explains Away Poor Jobs Numbers: Most Unemployed People Are On Drugs

Unfortunately this sought of thing is group-think among certain politicians…

Seen on You Tube post:

Another Republican that stereotypes the less empowered and believes in “liberty” only for a ruling class. What a surprise.

Think Progress

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) is facing an uphill fight for re-election as he battles negative job approval ratings and a slow economic recovery. The state’s unemployment rate has dropped to 7.9 percent, but the “number of people working in Pennsylvania tumbled by about 14,000 in March, following a drop of 6,000 in February.” Private employment has remained flat for 13 months, “growing by a mere 1,000 jobs” and landing the state “49th in the nation for job creation during March.”

During an appearance on a local radio show this week, Corbett sought to explain away Pennsylvania’s less than stellar performance, arguing that the state gained 111,000 private sector jobs since he took office and is “doing better than other states.” But then he grew defensive and complained that “a lot” of businesses are still having trouble filling their ranks because too many Pennsylvanians use illegal drugs:

CORBETT: The other area is, there are many employers that say we’re looking for people but we can’t find anybody that has passed a drug test, a lot of them. And that’s a concern for me because we’re having a serious problem with that.

Watch it:

A Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll released on Monday found Corbett trailing potental Democratic opponents by at least nine points.

Earlier this month, a state senator introduced a bill requiring drug testing of all recipients and applicants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in Pennsylvania. The state is currently “conducing a pilot program in 19 counties of testing only those convicted of felony drug offenses.” Since January of 2012, just two people have failed.

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April 24, 2013 · 6:49 AM

Conservative Group Photoshops Out Minorities In Mailer Opposing Pro-Voting Legislation

Speechless…

Think Progress

A conservative group connected to Colorado’s Secretary of State has been sending political mailers — including a picture of a darker-skinned woman whose face was digitally removed and replaced with a white woman’s face — in an attempt to oppose a landmark voting bill that may soon become law.

Colorado is currently considering a major piece of legislation to improve the state’s voting laws by implementing Election Day Registration, automatically sending mail ballots to every voter, and creating a real-time voter database to detect and prevent fraud. It passed the House last week and will now be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a frequent speaker at True The Vote events who uses his perch to warn about the supposed threat of voter fraud, is leading opposition to the bill, which is supported by a number of Republican County Clerks and the Colorado County Clerks Association.

Now, a dark money group named the “Citizens for Free and Fair Elections”, which lists its address as that of Gessler’s former firm, the Hackstaff Law Group, is sending out photoshopped mailers in an attempt to pressure the election clerks into switching their position.

Here is the mailer:

The mailer’s background was taken from the following Getty Images photo:

Except for two key differences. The original photo included a darker-skinned woman in a white hoodie sweatshirt, but the altered version in the mailer took out her face and replaced it with the exact same face of the white woman standing alongside. In addition, a dark-skinned man standing behind her in the photo was removed from the mailer entirely.

ColoradoPols, the first site to catch the photoshop job, shows the two side-by-side:

Gessler, in a statement released Sunday evening, denied involvement in the matter.

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April 15, 2013 · 2:34 PM

What country does the Tea Party represent?

What country does the Tea Party represent?

Salon

House Republicans are no longer swayed by public opinion, imperiling the GOP and grinding government to a halt

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

With an assist from some long-term demographic trends, House Republicans have redistricted, propagandized and policed themselves into another country.

As a result, they have become unmoored from the political incentives that typically drive law-makers’ decision-making process. Public opinion no longer sways them, and that is creating a potentially insurmountable problem for the party establishment’s efforts to broaden the GOP’s appeal beyond angry old white people.

House Republicans may care about the GOP’s national fortunes in the abstract, but too many are impervious to what the public at large wants because of the nature of the districts they represent. At the same time, a steady stream of spin from the conservative media provides insulation from the realities of American politics, and deep-pocketed outside groups punish Republicans for any deviation from right-wing orthodoxy.

This isn’t just a serious problem for establishment Republicans. It’s ground our government to a halt, as Congress is virtually incapable of action, even on issues where there is something approaching a consensus among the public at large — like universal background checks for firearm purchases, for example. They’re supported by 80-90 percent of voters, but face a steep uphill climb in the House.

How did this happen?

The Great Gerrymander of 2010

In 2012, Democratic House candidates got 1.4 million more votes than Republicans, but came away 33 seats short of the majority – only the second time since World War Two that such a reversal has taken place. That was the fruit of a well-funded, multi-year plan by the Republican State Leadership Committee to take over state houses before the 2010 Census, and control the redistricting process that followed.

And they gerrymandered with a vengeance. As Princeton University scholar Sam Wang noted, “although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan offense… partisan redistricting is not symmetrical between the political parties.”

By my seat-discrepancy criterion, 10 states are out of whack: [Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin] plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Arizona was redistricted by an independent commission, Texas was a combination of Republican and federal court efforts, and Illinois was controlled by Democrats. Republicans designed the other seven maps. Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.

Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats [which] exactly matched the [proportion of the] newly elected delegation.

Democrats Are “Inefficiently Distributed”

But, as a number of observers pointed out after the mid-terms, even this aggressive effort to redraw districts in their favor wasn’t quite enough to lock in Republicans’ control of the House. This is where the organic trend comes in. Political scientists Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan and Jonathan Rodden of Stamford explain (PDF) that as a result of migration and urbanization, Democrats tend to be “highly clustered in dense central city areas, while Republicans are scattered more evenly through the suburban, exurban, and rural periphery.” This results in what the authors call “unintentional redistricting,” with “a skew in the distribution of partisanship across districts such that with 50 percent of the votes, Democrats can expect fewer than 50 percent of the seats.”

Hyper-Partisan Districts

Those two trends have resulted in a dwindling number of competitive districts. As the New York Times’ numbers-guru Nate Silver pointed out, the number of “landslide districts” – which he defined as those that went for one party by 20 or more percentage points than the electorate as a whole – has doubled since 1992, while the number of swing districts has fallen from 155 to just 64 over the same period.

When you look at the racial composition of districts, the trend becomes even more pronounced. According to the Census Bureau, 111 House republicans represent districts that are at least 80 percent white.

Continue below the chart, here…

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April 13, 2013 · 9:34 AM

Revealed: A progressive super PAC was reportedly behind the secret McConnell taping

Sen. McConnell called the tactics “Nixonian.”

I’ll admit I was way off base on this one.

My early take-away from Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s call for an FBI investigation was that it was a smoke and mirrors ploy to take the focus off the content of the tape which emerged on Mother Jones earlier this week.  Apparently, there may have been a serious criminal breach that is still being investigated by the FBI.

The Week

Members of a Democratic super PAC, Progress Kentucky, made the secret recording of a strategy meeting between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his top advisers, according to a local Democratic Party official.

The secret recording — in which McConnell and his staff were caught discussing how to handle a potential campaign against actress Ashley Judd — sparked an enormous backlash from the right, prompting endless comparisons to Watergate and accusations of “Gestapo” tactics from a McConnell campaign manager.

Jefferson County Democratic official Jacob Conway told local news outlets on Thursday that two members of Progress Kentucky had bragged to him about making the tape. According to Conway, the two said they were “just hanging around” McConnell’s new campaign office when they heard the conversation and decided to record it.

From local public radio station WFPL:

“‘They were in the hallway after the, I guess after the celebration and hoopla ended, apparently these people broke for lunch and had a strategy meeting, which is, in every campaign I’ve been affiliated with, makes perfect sense,’ says Conway. ‘One of them held the elevator, the other one did the recording and they left. That was what they told to me from them directly.’” [WFPL]

The station added that other unnamed sources had since corroborated the story.

In a subsequent interview with NBC on Thursday, Conway said he came forward to dissociate the state party from the unaffiliated super PAC. He added that he did not think they had any “sinister motives,” but that they were “inexperienced, and got excited.”

At the same time, Progress Kentucky’s former treasurer, who resigned right when the tape was published, is staying mum about why he left.

“At this time based on advice of both friends and counsel, I will be not be making a public statement available until everything has been reviewed by an attorney at this time,” the treasurer, Douglas L. Davis, told NBC News. “I have resigned my position as treasurer and did not and do not condone any allegations of illegal activity that might have taken place.”

The audio recording reveals McConnell and his staff discussing whether to use Judd’s past history of mental illness against her. Mother Jones published the audio earlier this week, leading McConnell to denounce “Nixonian” tactics and call for an FBI investigation to find out who’d made the recording.

The two Progress Kentucky members linked to the recording are Shawn Reilly and Curtis Morrison, the group’s founders. As of Thursday evening, neither had responded to multiple reporters’ requests for comment. Mother Jones’ David Corn, who first published the tape earlier this week, has so far also declined to comment.

“It’s a confidential source, until the source comes forward, we don’t comment,” he told Politico.

Launched last December, Progress Kentucky has one single mission: Unseat McConnell. Prior to the taping dustup, the group had already caught flak for a tweet attacking the senator’s wife, former labor secretary Elaine Chao, an incident which the McConnell campaign spun into its first ad of the 2014 elections. When news of the tape broke, the senator seemed initially to claim that Progress Kentucky had bugged his office, though he later backtracked, saying he’d only accused “the left in general.”

Some have questioned whether the recording constitutes a federal crime.

Again, from WFPL:

Kentucky law says it is a felony “to overhear, record amplify or transmit any part of a wire or oral communication of others without the consent of at least one party thereto by means of any electric, mechanical or other device.” [WFPL]

According to Gene Policinski, senior vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center, who spoke with the Washington Post, criminal charges would depend on whether there was “a reasonable expectation of privacy during the taping and whether physical trespassing was involved.” He added that as long as Mother Jones had no hand in making the recording, the liberal news outfit should be safe.

But Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer questioned on Twitter whether Mother Jones could still face legal action for publishing the tape’s contents, pointing to a misdemeanor statute prohibiting the publication of illegally obtained information. The Weekly Standards’ Daniel Halper posed a similar argument, saying that if Mother Jones or Corn knew the tape had been made illegally, “then Corn’s publishing of that illegally obtained information might also be a violation of the law.”

The FBI has launched an investigation into the incident, sweeping McConnell’s office, pulling surveillance video and, now that he’s come forward, contacting Conway for more information.

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March 23, 2013 · 9:37 AM

Pew Founder: Republican Party Estranged From America

Alan Colmes’ Liberaland

Andrew Kohut says the only other time a party was this far from the center was the Democratic Party of the late ’6o’s and early ’70′s.

The Republican Party’s ratings now stand at a 20-year low, with just 33 percent of the public holding a favorable view of the party and 58 percent judging it unfavorably, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Although the Democrats are better regarded (47 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable), the GOP’s problems are its own, not a mirror image of renewed Democratic strength…

The party’s base is increasingly dominated by a highly energized bloc of voters with extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues: the size and role of government, foreign policy, social issues, and moral concerns. They stand with the tea party on taxes and spending and with Christian conservatives on key social questions, such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage…

According to our polling, three factors stand out in the emergence of the GOP’s staunch conservative bloc: ideological resistance to President Obama’s policies, discomfort with the changing face of America and the influence of conservative media…

Race has loomed larger in voting behavior in the Obama era than at any point in the recent past. The 2010 election was the high mark of “white flight” from the Democratic Party, as National Journal’s Ron Brownstein called it — the GOP won a record 60 percent of white votes, up from 51 percent four years earlier.

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March 3, 2013 · 12:32 PM

David Gregory To Boehner: ‘Mr. Speaker, That’s Just Not True’

NBC News

I’m not a David Gregory fan, for too many reasons to write about in this post.  However, I must say in the last few weeks, he has called out a few MTP guests when they spew false talking points….

TPM Livewire

NBC’s David Gregory and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) butted heads during an interview when the speaker insisted that President Obama did not have a plan to replace sequestration and Gregory disagreed. The interview was taped Friday afternoon after Boehner met with the president to discuss sequestration and aired on “Meet the Press” Sunday.

“Mr. Speaker, that’s just not true,” Gregory said. ”They’ve made it very clear, as the president just did, that he has a plan that he’s put forward that involves entitlement cuts, that involves spending cuts. That you’ve made a choice, as have Republicans, to leave tax loopholes in place and you’d rather have those and live with all these arbitrary cuts.”

Boehner called Gregory’s objection “nonsense.”

“Well David, that’s just nonsense. If they had a plan, why wouldn’t Senate Democrats go ahead and pass it,” he said.

Boehner returned to this point throughout the interview, insisting that Democrats do not have a plan because the Democratic-controlled Senate has not voted on one.

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January 8, 2013 · 9:58 AM

Poll: 77 percent say Washington politics causing serious harm

Finally, someone asked the American people about the toxic politics going on in Washington.

The resounding answer should make pols and pundits alike take notice and work at fixing the problem…asap.

The Hill

A vast majority of Americans worry that politics in Washington is causing serious harm to the country, according to a new Gallup survey released Monday.

Of those surveyed, 77 percent said the way politics works is causing the nation serious harm, versus just 19 percent who say the effects were not serious. Republicans were most pessimistic, with 87 percent arguing federal politics was damaging the country. But support for the sentiment was broad — 79 percent of independents and 68 percent of Democrats responded in the same way.

“The finding that most Americans think politics are hurting the country fits with a number of additional measures showing that Americans hold the federal government in general and Congress in particular — the main instruments of how American politics work — in low regard,” said Gallup’s Frank Newport in a release.

“The 19 percent of Americans who do not feel negatively about the way politics are being handled is quite close to Congress’ current 18 percent job approval rating,” he added. “Confidence in Congress as an institution — the percentage with a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it — is at 13 percent, and 10 percent and 14 percent of Americans rate the honesty and ethics of members of Congress and senators, respectively, as high or very high.”

But despite a gloomy opinion of Congress and politics, Americans remain optimistic about the future. Of those surveyed, 52 percent said they believed the way politics worked would improve in Washington over the next 10 years.

That optimism is driven primarily by Democrats, who believed in a better coming decade by a 63-34 percent margin. By contrast, 56 percent of Republicans were pessimistic, believing politics would get worse over the next 10 years. Young respondents were the most likely to be optimistic, with 55 percent of those between 18 and 29 years old hopeful about the future. Older voters were more evenly split on whether things would improve.

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December 5, 2012 · 6:08 PM

ACORN Stole the Election For Democrats – Really!

Republican Elephant – Loser http://mariopiperni.com/

Mario Piperni

Life in the bubble continues undeterred for Republicans. They’re refusing to accept the truth that they lost the election for the simple reason that a majority of Americans did not accept their vision for the country. Here are the bubble numbers from the latest PPP poll:

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.

Damn. Despite ACORN’s best efforts to keep their existence a secret, they’ve been found out by right-wing idiots sleuths who know in their little hearts that God’s Party could never lose an election to a group that promotes hedonism and attracts the slackers and scum of society unless there was thievery involved. </snark>

Categorize the above numbers with the ones that indicate that 30 percent of Republicans still believe President Obama to be a Muslim…or the polls that show that more than half of Republicans believe that Obama was born in a foreign country.

Pathetic, but only slightly less so than this next set of numbers.

Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren’t sure.

Is it any surprise that the same PPP poll indicates that fewer Americans now identify themselves as Republicans than Democrats by a 13 point margin: 32 percent of Americans call themselves Republican compared to the 45 percent who identify themselves as Democrats.

Maybe there is hope out there.

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