pacino wrote:oh my, apparently the prez is stronger than appears:

Mr. Obama repeatedly lost patience with the speaker as negotiations faltered. In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn't reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.

At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr. Boehner told the president, "I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?"

"You get nothing," the president said. "I get that for free."

You can't put something on the table that is already on the table.

Obama is awesome.

Doll Is Mine wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:If anyone knows about threats to sanity, it's Andrew Sullivan

I'm surprised to hear you say that because Sullivan could very well be the gay version of, well, you.

In what way

Yes, I'd like to hear. Sullivan is a conservative.

gay != liberal, just FYI

Yes, I said Sullivan is a conservative. Thats why I'm wondering how's he's similar to jh.

Democrats are centrists, Andrew Sullivan is a conservative, and I'm not. Welcome to pacino butchers the American politics political spectrum.

You're a neocon/corporatist. Just embrace it.

And if you think more than 50% of democrats are liberals, I don't know what to tell you. Simply not hating those different than you is not the same as being liberal.

Your political insights never fail to amaze

It's not an insult. There's plenty out there.

It never ceases to amaze me at how much the GOP bet on President Obama losing this election. The Budget Control Act was passed in 2011, yet we saw no serious attempts to meet the guidelines to avoid sequestration. The ACA was enacted in 2010 and many states have yet to put in place the necessary infrastructure. It's just astounding.

Sullivan's point about conservatism is that its definitional adherents tend to favor empirically driven policies of incremental change. The majority of the current Republican Party is dogmatic rather than empirical: it's always wrong to raise taxes, there are no practical limits on American capacity to project force and impose our will abroad, the Constitution should be amended to outlaw abortion and gay marriage, torture is effective, righteous and totally cool.

Sullivan's conservatism is grounded in skepticism that public policy can sway hearts and minds and change human behavior too quickly or completely. He favors federalist approaches to divisive policy questions, and suasion rather than fiat (a particularly interesting case is watching him argue with himself over what SCOTUS should do re marriage equality). It boils down to what I see as a healthy doubt that any individual or faction ever really has a monopoly on wisdom in the public sphere.

None of this seems at odds with the conservatism of Goldwater, Buckley or even St. Reagan. But it's pretty divergent from Paul Ryan, Michele Bachmann and Sean Hannity, all of whom are utterly certain that they have The Truth, and none of whom seem the least bit concerned over the real world consequences of implementing their utopian visions.

It's neither a coincidence nor a misread that Norquist so often has been compared to Lenin. Absolutists tend to do a lot of harm in human terms. This Republican-driven farce over the austerity bomb is showing that yet again. That it could hurt them politically is somewhat satisfying but not remotely worth the larger damage.

pacino wrote:It's not an insult. There's plenty out there.

You're using them as pejoritives, and it's not clear you have any idea what either word means. How the hell am I a corporatist? Or a neocon?

jerseyhoya wrote:Democrats are centrists

I think it would be pretty difficult to argue that the Democrats as a party are not closer to the center of the electorate than the Republicans. The elections were the most obvious manifestation of this, but everything from opinion polling to the fact that Democratic primaries tend to produce Joe Donnelly while Republican primaries tend to produce Richard Mourdock, seems to support the point.

FWIW, I don't think you're a neocon or a corporatist... just a guy who likes an argument. My strong guess is that you would have voted for Lugar over Mourdock, Castle over Witchy Woman, Steelman over Akin, etc. If at some point there's a split between the psycho Republicans and those who were the mainstream of the party from the '70s through the '90s but are now castigated as squishes, I'm guessing you'd not side with the nuts. May it happen soon.

Do people even know what a neocon really is? They were largely New Deal Dems who didn't like the Great Society or hippies and really hated commies.

Anyway, the ideological map that worked pretty well from say the 1930s until the 1990s or so is pretty tattered at this point--the demise of the Soviet Union forced a reorientation regarding foreign policy that doesn't easily map onto today's ideological battles. Romney's talk about increasing defense spending in this environment just sounded weird to me--I don't think it won him too many votes, because there's simply no way to see terrorism or N. Korea or Iran or even China as the kind of existential threat the Soviet Union was.

But I think Dajafi misses the connections between say William F. Buckley and Paul Ryan. The Popperian conservative Dajafi describes has always existed in uneasy tension with the more utopian types driven by religious fervor. Alas, the religious fervor seems to have taken over. The mindset of the Romney campaign--they believed they were going to win--is exactly the mindset that can deny evolution, global warming, the fact that easy access to guns isn't such a great idea, that there's a war on Christmas, that we need guns to protect us from gov't tyranny, that Obama is a Muslim, that Saddam was behind 9/11, and on and on.

On the other hand--and this to me is the real puzzle--how long can the Republicans count on the support of social conservatives? Since 1980, they have gotten exactly nothing for their efforts--abortion remains legal, gays are marrying, you still can't pray in school, porn is everywhere, broadcast television standards are gone, and don't even mention cable (I mean I'm no prude, but there's plenty of stuff on basic cable I don't like my daughter watching). But again, maybe you can string along a mindset adept at denying reality forever. As long as Santorum and Huckabee and Bachmann continue to say the right things, results don't matter.

at this point, neoconservatism is the bush doctrine. overly-interventinist to meet our political ends

TenuredVulture wrote:... The mindset of the Romney campaign--they believed they were going to win--is exactly the mindset that can deny evolution, global warming, the fact that easy access to guns isn't such a great idea, that there's a war on Christmas, that we need guns to protect us from gov't tyranny, that Obama is a Muslim, that Saddam was behind 9/11, and on and on....

s'anyway, Tugg Jobney sez the reason his dad lost was he just didn't really even want to be President

What a tribe of pimpledicks

i wondered why i got extra food stamps from the romney campaign to vote for Obama

Glad we obliged him.

Republican Senator Crapo from Idaho got a DUI.