kopphanatic wrote:"I'm sorry that it came to that, and I apologize if it appeared overly forceful, but I was concerned about Rand's safety."

This clown's "apology" for what happened. He was the county coordinator for the campaign.

Paul's initial apology was half-assed too fwiw.

These people have no shame.

the stomper dude is now facing police charges. And rightfully so. That statement above makes me question this guys sanity. A 98 pound woman being held on the ground by multiple persons, and he has to put his foot on her head to help protect the dude? the campaign is now saying the dude's help "will no longer be accepted".

TenuredVulture wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:A congressman has three main functions: voting, constituent services, and crafting legislation. For junior members especially, voting is the most important. The most important vote any congressman takes is the vote for speaker. In the House, party control, even by a vote, is enough to dictate the agenda completely if you have party discipline.

Runyan wouldn't be beating Adler in a normal year, but it would be a competitive race. He's a freshman Dem in a swing district that tends to vote Republican in non-Presidential races.

How smart someone is or how "good of a candidate" they are is only worth so much, because it's really not that big of a part of the job. It's not like Adler is going to be writing any important laws any time soon either. He votes for Pelosi, Runyan will vote for Boehner.

This ranking of a congressperson's main functions seems decidedly from the point of view of someone representing a political party, rather than participating in a political body.

I believe this is what you mean to imply when you say things like "In the House, party control, even by a vote, is enough to dictate the agenda completely if you have party discipline", but it may be worth clarifying.

No, in the House you don't need party discipline as much as you need a majority, because leadership controls the agenda.

We really need to strengthen political parties. I'm not sure if I entirely buy the "responsible party model" but strong parties are the only way a democracy can function. Our current system is messed up because parties are weak, and interest groups (which really are evil) have filled that vacuum. So go ahead and be all "independent" and "non-partisan" or whatever else you people do. But know this--you're basically handing power over to the US Chamber of Congress and #$&! agribusiness and Halliburton. Meanwhile, Jerseyhoya and I will labor in solitude trying save what's left of American democracy.

Do you have proof for this(I'm sure you do), but I'd like to see a decent argument made for political parties since it's become particularly fashionable to do nothing but bash them.

SK790 wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:A congressman has three main functions: voting, constituent services, and crafting legislation. For junior members especially, voting is the most important. The most important vote any congressman takes is the vote for speaker. In the House, party control, even by a vote, is enough to dictate the agenda completely if you have party discipline.

Runyan wouldn't be beating Adler in a normal year, but it would be a competitive race. He's a freshman Dem in a swing district that tends to vote Republican in non-Presidential races.

How smart someone is or how "good of a candidate" they are is only worth so much, because it's really not that big of a part of the job. It's not like Adler is going to be writing any important laws any time soon either. He votes for Pelosi, Runyan will vote for Boehner.

This ranking of a congressperson's main functions seems decidedly from the point of view of someone representing a political party, rather than participating in a political body.

I believe this is what you mean to imply when you say things like "In the House, party control, even by a vote, is enough to dictate the agenda completely if you have party discipline", but it may be worth clarifying.

No, in the House you don't need party discipline as much as you need a majority, because leadership controls the agenda.

We really need to strengthen political parties. I'm not sure if I entirely buy the "responsible party model" but strong parties are the only way a democracy can function. Our current system is messed up because parties are weak, and interest groups (which really are evil) have filled that vacuum. So go ahead and be all "independent" and "non-partisan" or whatever else you people do. But know this--you're basically handing power over to the US Chamber of Congress and #$&! agribusiness and Halliburton. Meanwhile, Jerseyhoya and I will labor in solitude trying save what's left of American democracy.

Do you have proof for this(I'm sure you do), but I'd like to see a decent argument made for political parties since it's become particularly fashionable to do nothing but bash them.

I too would like to revisit this realm of thinking under the tutelage of the abovenemed adherents (Jerz has not yet expressed solidarity with TV's pledge, but if history's a guide, he's sympathetic to the theme).

My views in this area are not very well thought through (surprise, I know) but I have a hunch that the arguments "for" are not fully informed by emerging ways in which people can organize themselves for action, and what they mean for the art of the possible.

Of course, hunches are frequently really really wrong, for what in retrospect can look like really obvious reasons.

so Obama's warmup for his Daily Show appearance is a Smerconish interview:

NY Times wrote:Before sitting down with Mr. Stewart, Mr. Obama will conduct an interview with Michael Smerconish, the conservative radio host from Philadelphia who broke with Republicans in 2008 to endorse Mr. Obama.

Aside from hearing his name in Gameday radio promos for his show, I know nothing of the guy. Times has described him as conservative. Truly?

A lot of times when listening to the post-game after Phillies broadcasts, I'll doze off and then wake up a bit later to his show. He seems sorta moderate in that he's quick to rebuff his callers when they get zany or conspiratorial, but he also seems pretty into the whole white man's burden thing himself.

drsmooth wrote:so Obama's warmup for his Daily Show appearance is a Smerconish interview:

NY Times wrote:Before sitting down with Mr. Stewart, Mr. Obama will conduct an interview with Michael Smerconish, the conservative radio host from Philadelphia who broke with Republicans in 2008 to endorse Mr. Obama.

Aside from hearing his name in Gameday radio promos for his show, I know nothing of the guy. Times has described him as conservative. Truly?

I listen to him quite a bit - usually switch between Morning Joe, Bill Bennett and Smerconish. Smerconish grew up politically under Reagan, but I'd consider him a socially moderate, fiscal conservative. He doesn't toe the party line like Limbaugh or Hannity, and his big national issue is 9/11. One reason he liked Obama was the fact that Obama was less interested in Iraq, and was willing to chase Al Queda into Pakistan, which was completely in sync with Smerconish's feelings.

Bucky wrote:

kopphanatic wrote:"I'm sorry that it came to that, and I apologize if it appeared overly forceful, but I was concerned about Rand's safety."

This clown's "apology" for what happened. He was the county coordinator for the campaign.

Paul's initial apology was half-assed too fwiw.

These people have no shame.

the stomper dude is now facing police charges. And rightfully so. That statement above makes me question this guys sanity. A 98 pound woman being held on the ground by multiple persons, and he has to put his foot on her head to help protect the dude? the campaign is now saying the dude's help "will no longer be accepted".

They're thugs. This is the type that's coming to Washington and will be "representing" us.

kopphanatic wrote:

Bucky wrote:

kopphanatic wrote:"I'm sorry that it came to that, and I apologize if it appeared overly forceful, but I was concerned about Rand's safety."

This clown's "apology" for what happened. He was the county coordinator for the campaign.

Paul's initial apology was half-assed too fwiw.

These people have no shame.

the stomper dude is now facing police charges. And rightfully so. That statement above makes me question this guys sanity. A 98 pound woman being held on the ground by multiple persons, and he has to put his foot on her head to help protect the dude? the campaign is now saying the dude's help "will no longer be accepted".

They're thugs. This is the type that's coming to Washington and will be "representing" us.

Yep - Rand Paul was out there in his motorcycle boots leading the stomping.

dajafi wrote:
I credit him as smart; I hope he's less extreme than he initially came off running against Crist, before Crist went indy. Will be interesting to watch him in the Senate (and how quickly he chooses to run; as you well know, there sure seems to be an inverse relationship between duration of time in the Senate and prospects of winning the White House).

He comes off to me as fairly arrogant. He talks as if there is nothing that we as Americans can learn from the rest of the world. "They want us to be like the rest of the world, instead of the other way around."

That's a fairly arrogant stance, IMO. I cannot stand the idea of American Exceptionalism. We are a country with strengths and weaknesses like other countries. We played an important part in the history of this world, and continue to do so. We might not always be that important. Also, we were at one point the place where every other country sent their rejects. (That's very much oversimplifying things, but you get the point.) We need to have some humility about ourselves.

Take it like this- imagine if I said that Christians were simply the nobler, more selfless, influential people. That's simply not true. There are jerks in the church just as there are jerks outside of the church.

This is the problem in our country right now- some want to believe, or hope against hope, that whatever categories we use to define ourselves, be it our religion, or our heritage, or even simply our nationality- makes us somehow superior to others by default. That is a fairly dangerous basket to put one's eggs in.

Now this guy is demanding an apology from the woman that he stomped on.

TenuredVulture wrote:No, in the House you don't need party discipline as much as you need a majority, because leadership controls the agenda.

We really need to strengthen political parties. I'm not sure if I entirely buy the "responsible party model" but strong parties are the only way a democracy can function. Our current system is messed up because parties are weak, and interest groups (which really are evil) have filled that vacuum. So go ahead and be all "independent" and "non-partisan" or whatever else you people do. But know this--you're basically handing power over to the US Chamber of Congress and #$&! agribusiness and Halliburton. Meanwhile, Jerseyhoya and I will labor in solitude trying save what's left of American democracy.

Just to clarify, since I didn't see it before, TV means the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation's largest business federation, or business membership group which does lobbying, among a number of other things. It has a fairly sizeable corporate business membership including Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, State Farm, FedEx and the like. (It does not include Halliburton, although that is not what TV was saying, I know.) Membership also includes local and state chambers of commerce, who are dues paying members and not chapters or extentions of the national org and trade associations such as NAM, the Nuclear Energy Institute, and the Aerospace Industries Association of America. Through these networks, the Chamber also represents small businesses, although less so in some cases because big business pays the big dues.

Full disclosure: I worked there for over three years, on NON-lobbying activities, and even got to know dajafi better because of it, since we worked on similar issues, including education reform. I left about a year ago, because I was disenchanted professionally and because I predicted (with 100% accuracy as it turns out) that my area of the Chamber would undergo a restructuring I was not jazzed about.

There are alot of things wrong with the chamber, in my own opinion: the leadership is old-fashioned and insulated from the rest of the bulding, the internal politics are every bit as disfunctional as you'd expect in a large organization in the nation's capital, and there is alot of duplication and wasting of resources that a new, leaner organization could make better use of through re-invention. It's the kind of place you get to do some things professionally, but not without countless layers of oversight and eventually, with a self-reflection that leads you to believe that most of what you did probably doesn't mean as much as you'd like it to, regardless of what individual members, who are by and large good people who care about free enterprise and their own membership's survivial (speaking more about the individual chambers and trades now), will tell you.

However, I disagree strongly with the Chamber being held up the kind of inherently evil organization that typifies what's wrong with Washington DC and politics. It does absolutely nothing that any other conservative, liberal, or even moderate interest group does - it assembles a member base and defends its core values. (One of the things I like about it is that it stays out of emotionally charged social issues, of which I care almost not at all). While the Chamber is busy criticizing card check legislation with tossed off facts and figures, the NRDC has set up a shop in its offices whose primary job is to call US Chamber members and encourage them to drop their membership, mostly by misinformation and informal polling (real Rovian stuff, if you like). It is no different than the Center for American Progress pursuing their left-leaning agenda while pursuing a drummed up controversy, hand-fed to the President that has been refuted by most major media outlets that have chosen to address it.

While special interests pose problems and present complications in the legislative process, the whole point of our representative democracy was to attach strings to politicians as to limit their overall power and keep someone who knew nothing about widgets from legislating endlessly about widgets. I don't think the problem is that parties are strong enough. In some ways, they're stronger than ever. I think the problem is more cultural, in that career politicians are protecting a (sad) legacy they think they're building and are now on the level with reality TV and other low level trash. The process is too difficult for the average citizen to learn about and the work too boring for most to care about, so it has become entertainment.

This, I'm pretty sure there's no way back from, regardless of who we restrain from the political process.

The last part of my post doesn't sound too good, mostly because I was about to hop on a conference call. I just see little reason to "strengthen" the two party system, but I admittedly don't know what "strengthen" means in this case, since we haven't defined it in the context of this discussion. While I'm sympathetic to the effect of corporations the fabric of local neighborhoods, I bristle at any notion that business is inherently bad. It's inherently capitalist, which is different.

I'd rather seem term limits, I think. Get rid of the careeer poltician track and return to the citizen representative. Sounds antiquated, I guess. It might work, it might not.

gr wrote:The last part of my post doesn't sound too good, mostly because I was about to hop on a conference call. I just see little reason to "strengthen" the two party system, but I admittedly don't know what "strengthen" means in this case, since we haven't defined it in the context of this discussion. While I'm sympathetic to the effect of corporations the fabric of local neighborhoods, I bristle at any notion that business is inherently bad. It's inherently capitalist, which is different.

I'd rather seem term limits, I think. Get rid of the careeer poltician track and return to the citizen representative. Sounds antiquated, I guess. It might work, it might not.

Totally get and agree with the point that it's "inherently capitalist." The problem i see is the sense now prevalent in certain quarters that "capitalist" always and invariably equals "good." The fundamental premises and objectives of capitalist enterprise are aligned with/supportive of many of our societal goals--but they don't work so well with others, including some of the big ones, and sometimes (e.g. gr's community fabric point) important elements are lost when we just let the market do its thing even when it doesn't "fail."

All this stuff is instrumental. It frustrates me to no end when extremists ascribe moral qualities to them.

Out here in the trenches, it seems that "capitalist" = "most profit". In my own uneducated, uniformed opinion, I believe that to be the fundamental backbreaker of the US economic system.

Very good Nate breakdown of how you should best think about the range of potential outcomes Tuesday. I might be the only person who cares, but whatever.

The problem with interest groups filling the role that parties used to fill is that interest groups bias the system towards interests that have resources, especially money. Interest group politics are inherently anti-democratic, and work against the public interest. Parties, by contrast, give interests that have nothing but numbers at least a fighting chance of being considered in policy debate.

Strengthen parties means just that--for instance, parties will have resources to run campaigns and individual candidates will not have the ability to go to interest groups to run independently of the party.

There is some hope, though Citizens United has diminished it, that real grass roots fund raising via the internet pioneered by Howard Dean and used effectively by Obama may reinvigorate democratic campaigns.

My position isn't so much that parties are good, but parties are far less an evil than interest groups.

Dunno so much about other general-purpose business associations, but The Chamber's Tom Donohue is in it for one thing, and one thing only:

Tom Donohue.

small businesses? ahhh, fuck 'em. The checks they write to CofC are much too small.

gr, I'd need lots of evidence to persuade me otherwise.

Anyone see maddow last night? She went to alaska and interviewed all three candidates; well, joe miller's was a two minute jobber on the way to his car. Shes in nevada tonight.

pacino wrote:Anyone see maddow last night? She went to alaska and interviewed all three candidates; well, joe miller's was a two minute jobber on the way to his car. Shes in nevada tonight.

Really a very good show last night. I loved the exchange with Miller. I don't know a lot about him but McAdams seemed like a good candidate. Only thing I didn't like about him was he looked like Chris Christie with a mustache. I didn't know she was in NV tonight; will definitely have to check that out.

you all probably want to check out the obama/stewart interview. it has been pretty good so far.