US Politics Mega-thread - Page 379

On August 12 2013 06:12 DoubleReed wrote:


Uhh... what? Where did you get that Christie is liberal?

Did you think Romney was liberal because he ran in Massachusetts??

On August 12 2013 07:01 Sermokala wrote:

hes a liberal based on the policies that he preaches. Like obamacare pro gun control anti national republican pro obama. stuff like what people actualy vote for and what he says.

People are going to vote for mostly what the letter is next to a persons name more then anything else. the rest is just getting them out to vote and having yet another loser liberal canidate like christie isn't going to swing anything in the deep south florida or ohio which is where the election is decided.

On August 12 2013 07:10 DoubleReed wrote:


Yea... there's more to policies than just obamacare and gun control.

And commending Obama on his support during a horrible crisis is obviously just a completely unforgivable crime. It's Obama, therefore as a republican he can never say anything nice about him and he should never ever try to work with him, even during a horrible crisis that completely ravaged his state.

(by the way, that was sarcastic.)

You're silly.

On August 12 2013 08:43 KwarK wrote:
The President was involved in dealing with the disaster, he was supporting the efforts to help people. You want the governor to send the President and his aid away from his people in the middle of a disaster to make the President look bad for the good of the Republican party?

On August 12 2013 08:43 KwarK wrote:
The President was involved in dealing with the disaster, he was supporting the efforts to help people. You want the governor to send the President and his aid away from his people in the middle of a disaster to make the President look bad for the good of the Republican party?

On August 12 2013 09:13 Sermokala wrote:

No I just don't want him to stop being involved with dealing with the disaster so that they can have a photo op in the middle of the election to keep each of them in office instead of dealing with the disaster.

On August 12 2013 15:31 KwarK wrote:

You realise that the President doesn't personally hand out the aid, right? His role is as a leader. You are aware of this? That no less aid was handed out because he was busy shaking hands with important people in the process of doing it? Like seriously, I don't even know where to begin with this.

As bad as things get for Republicans -- with women, with minorities, with youths -- there's always been one group they can count on: the old. But now one Democratic pollster sees evidence that even seniors are starting to turn on the GOP.

Just 28 percent of voters 65 and older had a favorable view of the Republican Party in a national survey conducted last month by the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, versus 40 percent who had a positive view of the Democrats. That's a reversal from a poll Greenberg conducted in early 2011, when 43 percent of seniors saw Republicans favorably and 37 percent saw Democrats that way.

"It is now strikingly clear that [seniors] have turned sharply against the GOP," Erica Seifert, a senior associate at Greenberg's firm, wrote on the company's website this week. "We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens."

...

The economy is the biggest underlying factor in the shift, Seifert said. In November 2010, 49 percent of seniors said Republicans were the better party on the economy; just 34 percent said Democrats were. In the July 2013 poll, the parties were essentially tied on this metric, with 43 percent saying Democrats and 42 percent saying Republicans.

Seniors' approval of the GOP-led House has dropped from 45 percent in early 2011 to 22 percent today. They have gone from identifying more as Republicans than Democrats by a 10-point margin to identifying more as Democrats than Republicans by a 6-point margin. Fifty-five percent say the GOP is too extreme, and 52 percent say it is "out of touch" and "dividing the country."

In the July survey, large majorities of seniors agreed with progressive economic proposals, including protecting Medicare benefits (89 percent), raising working women's pay (87 percent) and expanding access to child care for working parents (77 percent). But seniors also took issue with the GOP on social concerns: slim majorities called the Republican Party "extreme" on aid to the poor (53 percent), immigration (53 percent), gay rights (52 percent), and gun violence (51 percent).

Greenberg is a Democratic pollster, to be sure. But his work is widely respected on both sides of the aisle. Republican pollster Whit Ayres didn't question the idea that seniors are souring on the GOP. "I don't think any Republican pollster who's looking at the numbers is sanguine about the state of the Republican brand at this point," he said. "You are going to see the impact of the damaged brand in every demographic group."

First off, we should acknowledge that this is a big deal! This is the first speech by any Attorney General calling for such massive criminal justice reforms. This is the first major address from the Obama Administration calling for action to end the mass incarceration crisis and reduce the racial disparities that plague our criminal justice system. In the same speech, the Attorney General committed to take on the school-to-prison pipeline and called on Congress to end the forced budget cuts that have decimated public defenders nationwide. This is great news.

The ACLU can proudly say that it has been deeply engaged in policy discussions with this administration, and Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Many of the reforms that we have long championed made it into the Attorney General’s speech, including:

1. Developing guidelines to file fewer cases

2. Directing a group of U.S. Attorneys to examine sentencing disparities and develop recommendations to address them

3. Directing every U.S. Attorney to designate a Prevention and Reentry Coordinator

4. Directing every DOJ component to consider whether regulations have collateral consequences that impair reentry

5. Reducing mandatory minimum charging for low-level drug offenses

6. Expanding eligibility for compassionate release; and

7. Identifying and sharing best practices for diversion programs

8. Calling into question zero tolerance policies and other policies that lead to the school to prison pipeline

9. Challenging the legal community to make the promise of Gideon (right to counsel) more of a reality

The Attorney General has assured us that this is just the beginning, and he is taking on the bipartisan spirit that has produced state level reforms and has fueled the reduction in state prison populations.  These changes are long overdue because the federal prison population continues to grow and is 40% overcapacity. What’s worse, as a soon to be released ACLU report will show, a stunning 2,074 federal inmates are serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), a longtime member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, recently brushed aside concern that the wildfires currently scorching across his state and causing millions of dollars of damage have anything to do with climate change. In fact, he told constituents at a town hall that "global warming is a total fraud," employed by liberals to "create global government."

In a video captured by Lee Fang of The Nation, Rohrabacher laughed off a claim made last week by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that the unusual intensity of this year's wildfire season should give rise to a more serious debate about how climate change is affecting the temperature and length of the dry season.

"Just so you'll know, global warming is a total fraud and it's being designed because what you’ve got is you’ve got liberals who get elected at the local level want state government to do the work and let them make the decisions," Rohrabacher said. "Then, at the state level, they want the federal government to do it. And at the federal government, they want to create global government to control all of our lives."

The friendly town hall audience seemed to agree with Rohrabacher's contention that humans were incapable of changing earth's climate, giving a collective chuckle. The congressman then appeared to make an offhand reference to Agenda 21, a set of UN-created sustainable development recommendations that the tea party and other Republicans have put forth as an example of how the government will use the threat of climate change to seize property and control the lives of its citizens.

On August 12 2013 21:53 DoubleReed wrote:
Surely not all republicans are this petty? Christie has been a vocal critic of Obama throughout his presidency. As far as Sandy, he was just trying to give credit where credit is due. Apparently, crossing party lines makes somebody a weak candidate to you? And now you're making me defend Christie? Ugh.

Anyway, my point still stands that it seems like nobody has any kind of memory about this stuff. Not to mention that we have three years...

Oh god can we not talk 2016 please? We just did this a year ago. Let's have a bit of election downtime...

WASHINGTON -- Midway between the 2012 and 2014 election campaigns, moderate Republican conservatives are beginning to foment a revolt of their own – a backlash to anti-spending tea party shrillness as budget cuts begin to significantly shrink defense and domestic programs.

Tea party forces may have dominated the House GOP's approach to the budget so far, but pragmatists in the party have served notice they won't stand idly by for indiscriminate spending cuts to politically popular community development grants, education programs and even Amtrak.

Voting in the spring for the tea party budget developed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who was Mitt Romney's vice presidential running mate last year, was one thing. But as long as a Democrat occupies the White House, Ryan's budget is little more than a nonbinding wish list – cutting Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps and slashing budgets for domestic agencies funded annually through appropriations bills.

Many tenured Republicans, particularly members of the House Appropriations Committee, have viewed Ryan's sweeping cuts as unworkable all along. When more than $4 billion in entirely new cuts came to the House floor in the form of an actual bill for funding transportation and housing programs, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, confronted shaky support from less ardently conservative Republicans and decided to pull the $44 billion package on July 31.

That sparked a frustrated outburst from the committee chairman, Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky. He called for abandoning the Ryan budget and starting bipartisan negotiations that would provide appropriators with "a realistic spending level to fund the government in a responsible – and attainable – way."

"Attainable" is code for something that can pass the Senate and get signed by President Barack Obama. That's rarely a recipe for tea party fun.

On August 13 2013 05:25 Danglars wrote:

Right on Dana! If politicians want the science, they've gotta learn not to leap at every opportunity to label a natural disaster or hot day on climate change. It just backs up even more that climate change is a vehicle for a political agenda first and foremost. Concern about the long term trend comes in second.

On August 13 2013 08:31 Stratos_speAr wrote:


Right. He didn't just call her out for supposedly using global warming as a political tool. The man specifically said that global warming is a fraud, when there is broad scientific consensus that global warming is in fact occurring. And you conservatives wonder why we mock you so much.