“Embrace the suck,” House minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi told fellow Democrats Thursday morning... “We need to get this off the table so we can go forward,” she added. It’s a way of telling her colleagues the budget deal negotiated with Republicans is the best they can get.
[I]n the war of ideas, the Senate deal is but a stalemate, one made almost entirely on conservative terms. The GOP now goes into budget talks with sequestration as the new baseline, primed to demand longer-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And they still hold the gun of a US default to the nation’s head in the next debt ceiling showdown.I'm surprised to read this, because I thought what I was observing — to the extent that I did not avert my eyes — was the liberal media doing the Democratic Party's work of declaring victory.* I'm interested in seeing The Nation peel off from that strategy. It's all propaganda of one kind or another, but the strategies of propaganda interest me. It's boring when they all do the same thing, which is the main reason I had my own personal shutdown during the shutdown.
Surrender? Any more “victories” like this and Democrats will end up paying tribute into the GOP’s coffers.
During the Vietnam war, [U.S. Senator from Vermont George] Aiken is widely believed to have suggested that the U.S. should declare victory and bring the troops home. Actually, what he said was that "the United States could well declare unilaterally ... that we have 'won' in the sense that our armed forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam," and that such a declaration "would herald the resumption of political warfare as the dominant theme in Vietnam." He added: "It may be a far-fetched proposal, but nothing else has worked."Anyone who knows what happened when we got out of Vietnam should be skeptical of propaganda in the form of declaring victory. Frankly, I'm surprised anyone attempts the "declare victory and get out" type of statement. In my book, it's on the list of things not to say, right after "I am not a crook."
Squirrels go nuts for First Lady's garden in shutdown...
...tomatoes are rotting
UNHARVESTED...
People. The Washington Monument is CLOSED. Quit posing with it!You know, last Sunday, I got out of the car to take this picture, and somehow it didn't occur to me until I got home that I should have walked around that thing just to be funny.
If you drive a car, I'll tax the street,ADDED: Meade reads this post and asks: "Was it even a federal highway?" Yeah, was it the interstate? Why don't they close down the whole interstate highway system? Obviously, they're not doing everything they can, they're just choosing particular things, trying to be annoying in just the right way to sculpt public opinion. They're poking at us. With orange cones. And we are annoyed. But which way are we annoyed?
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.
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I lived in South Dakota for five years. Orange comes don't stop anyone from doing anything in the land where every sign on a rural road has a shotgun blast in it.Hagar said:
Mr Obama, tear down your Barrycades!
This has to be State Highway 244 that goes by Mt. Rushmore. U.S. Route 16A is farther away, and, of course, neither has anything to do with the interstate system. However, South Dakota, like every other state, receives Federal money for their highway systems through the FHWA, and per Murphy's Golden Rule, whoever controls the gold gets to rule.That's not true in Wisconsin! Scott Walker resisted the pressure to shut down state parks.
No Federal money comes without strings, but in this case I think the FHWA would have to side with the Park Service, and I think it is not like they have any actual jurisdiction; all they could do would be to threaten to be difficult and withhold future funding for this road (and other projects?), I think.Yeah, that too happened in Wisconsin, after Scott Walker rejected the federal money for a "high speed" train. But let's remember that at some point, conditions on spending count as coercion and the federal government cannot force state government to do its work.
A young child was found in the car, the authorities said. It was not clear whether the woman was armed when the authorities fired on her.Here's what I thought when I heard about it: There's all this heated rhetoric around the shutdown. That's American politics, and we have freedom of speech. But there are always human beings out of balance. They hear what they hear and who knows how it sounds to them? It feels like a war or like existential desperation. We can't shut up just because there are people out there with distorted thinking, but let's contemplate what it takes for those of us who are sane to behave with good character.
“We have no information that this is related to terrorism or is anything other than an isolated incident,” Chief Dine said.
People in WI who supported the Capitol Disruptions back when Act 10 was passed should be reminded of that when they object to Republican instransigence on ACA. I don't see how the two points of view are any different."This is what democracy looks like" was the most prominent of the chants chanted by the Wisconsin protesters in 2011, as they tried to stop the GOP agenda. In the 2010 elections in Wisconsin, the Democrats had not only lost the governorship, they'd lost both houses of the legislature. That is, they didn't even have the power base of one legislative chamber — as the GOP today has in Congress — and yet they believed that their cause was founded in democratic principles and they were willing to do everything they could to prevent the state government from proceeding to implement policies of the party that had decisively won the elections.
This is what Democracy Looks Like, indeed.
I would love a Journolist to ask a Democratic Politician this very question when they complain about Republicans: Back in [2011], when Wisconsin Governor Walker passed anti-Union legislation, Democrats did everything they could to slow implementation. Did you think that was a good idea?
"I think blame can go around for everybody," Walker said. "The best way to resolve it? Look at what we did in Wisconsin. We had a $3.6 billion deficit; we now have more than a half-a-billion-dollar surplus. Every Wednesday — I did it this morning, before I came over here — I sit down with the legislative leaders and, you know, we figure out a way to solve the problems that face our state. We have an effective line of communication, and we get things done. I think not just in Wisconsin but in states across the country there's a lot of governors and lawmakers in both parties who wish the folks in Washington in both parties would act more like the states and less like our nation's capital."Blame Washington. Don't get caught up in the game of shifting all the blame onto one party or another. That's a good position for anyone to take. (It's the way I feel.) It's also the right position for a governor running for President, and it's especially effective here because it's backed up with specific accomplishments.
From Therapy Dogs To New Patients, Federal Shutdown Hits NIH.
[P]atients were told therapy dogs will no longer be able to come to visit them.
Except this time, of course, we cannot deny that race too is an added factor to the fathomless sense of entitlement felt among the GOP far right.Cannot deny... fathomless... I find it hard to consume these overstated certainties. I would be amenable to a discussion of the idea that the emotional process of human thought inevitably includes a racial element. But by saying "this time" and pinning the racial "factor" only on Republicans, Sullivan shows that he doesn't want any subtle understanding of race. He's doing polemic. So I'm only going to shine a light on his accusation that the Republicans are racist:
You saw it in birtherism; in the Southern GOP’s constant outrageous claims of Obama’s alleged treason and alliance with Islamist enemies; in providing zero votes for a stimulus that was the only thing that prevented a global depression of far worse proportions; in the endless race-baiting from Fox News and the talk radio right. And in this racially-charged atmosphere, providing access to private healthcare insurance to the working poor is obviously the point of no return.You saw it... We're being told that we saw it... or rather that we saw something, and Sullivan is telling us that what we saw had race in it. Why was voting against the stimulus a racial matter? There seems to be a fathomless sense that any opposition to a President who is black is opposition to a President because he is black. If that proposition were true, it would be an argument against having a black President in a democracy, because we absolutely need to be able to criticize and oppose the President.
... This is the point of no return [for the GOP] – a black president doing something for black citizens (even though the vast majority of beneficiaries of Obamacare will be non-black).Racist vandalism?
I regard this development as one of the more insidious and anti-constitutional acts of racist vandalism against the American republic in my adult lifetime.
If we cave to their madness, we may unravel our system of government....Well, I for one do not cave to madness, and this style of argument feels like madness to me. Sullivan has done well for himself penning polemic, and I've made it my thing to puncture polemic and yawn in the face of histrionics. Here's how Sullivan ends it:
This time, the elephant must go down. And if possible, it must be so wounded it does not get up for a long time to come.Remember when the meme was that Republicans were "eliminationist"? Look at the hatred, hostility, and outright murderousness in Sullivan. He's pushing the racism meme, but he's writing something that reeks of eliminationism. Like racism, eliminantionism seems to be something we're only supposed to notice when it's coming from those terrible Republicans.
