If you’re a Liberal or Progressive or just a vanilla Democrat who has been thinking about an electoral rout this fall, congratulations, you’re a member of the elite. I can’t really estimate how many of us there are, but the fact is that most of the nation did not really start paying attention to the 2010 election cycle until after Jerry Lewis brought his Labor Day telethon to a close.

Sure there was lots of polling that said people were pissed at the government, who wouldn’t be when there is nearly 10% unemployment and things don’t seem to be getting measurably better for millions of people? The “Throw the Bums Out!” sentiment is always strongest before the vast majority of the people start paying attention to the actual candidates they have to choose between. That is part of why the generic ballot polling is almost useless. We don’t get to pick between Democrat and Republican, we get to pick between two (or occasionally more) real people who speak and have a record we can judge.

This is where the political rubber meets the road. For all their structural advantages (bad economy, large majorities some of which are from very conservative districts, midterm election without the White House) the Republicans should be looking at a sweep. The thing is they still have not learned the lessons of the 2006 and 2008 elections. Americans don’t want rabid conservatives; they want some representation that will solve their problems. This leaves the Republicans out in the cold.

There is going to be a lot of analysis on the Republican Pledge to America today, and here is some more! Instead of going into the actual policy, which others can and will cover better, I thought I’d talk about the wording. There is a lot to be learned by how a group talks about its policies. Communication requires a certain tailoring to the audience to be affective but the choices one makes in that tailoring can often be as telling as the message.

The first thing that I noticed is unlike the 1994 Contract with America this document is just a pledge. A pledge is a lot weaker than a contract. Sure the Founding Fathers pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to establishing a new nation, but the march of time has warn down the meaning of pledge. People pledge to fund drives all the time but don’t pay; nations pledge to things like the United Nations Millennium Development Projects but they don’t come through with the money.

So a pledge is more of a weak showing of intent rather than a binding commitment. This is not a big surprise from a party that has played the Religious Right like carnival hucksters for more than two decades. There is also the way this will be rolled out. Unlike Old Newt Gingrich’s Contract, where there were over 100 Republicans standing on the steps of the Capital there will only be 12 Republican leaders at a hardware store to roll this pledge out. It is thought that this will make it seem less like the Republican establishment handing down marching orders from Washington by taking this tact, however it also makes the commitment less binding when nothing is official, just kind of a meeting of the minds around the cracker barrel.

(picture from Steve Wampler via Flikr)

Not much comes out of value comes from gangs. Oh sure there are some rap artists who started as gang members and I am not going to minimize the art that they have created, but really they are the exception not the rule. Gangs in history and in contemporary America are generally associated with criminal activity.

Given this basic premise it is hard to understand why a long time United States Senator would want to form a gang, but Sen. Lieberman really has a bit of a chubby for them. It was eons ago in blog time, 2005, but there was a show down between Democrats and Republicans over judicial nominees. The Dems where holding up 11 applet court nominees and the Republicans were talking about the “nuclear option” of ending the filibuster.

There are a lot of angry people in the American electorate. There are the Tea Party folks who think that there has been some kind of revolution and they are in danger of losing their country (even though the country they imagine they were part of never really existed). They are fired up and they intend to vote for some of the most radically reactionary candidates in decades. They have helped nominate folks like Sharon Angle who believes that unemployment insurance is a bad thing, and thinks that it is not a huge problem if conservatives resort to so-called “Second Amendment remedies”, basically armed insurrection.

Then there are another group of angry folks, this time on the Left. They were the ones who suffered through eight years of Republican lawlessness and were inspired by the promise of change the Obama campaign offered. Many feel betrayed by the fact that change has not been as intense as they imagined. They point, with good reason, to the promises made by the President on issues like Health Care reform and the reality of what the legislative process gave us. No public option, lots of compromise and a bill that while it does good things for some is not the kind of transformational change that the Left (myself included) wanted.

I always thought the change meme was a dangerous one. It suffers from a lack of operational definition. If you say change to ten people you will get ten different expectations of change. If you say “we’re going to have a change from the past but not a radical one” you still get different views of what that is. This led to wide and high expectations from many people (again myself included) and was always going to make the failures and compromises seem more galling than normal.

“What was it that hit us on 9/11…. was it Islam that did the dirty deed, or was it blow-back to US policy in the Muslim world?” asked by viruscauser via YouTube.

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

This is the second part in a two-part interview with Steve Osofsky, Director of Wildlife Health Policy for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). In this first part of the interview, Osofsky explains Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) and how small-scale farmers can benefit from the conservation of wildlife. To read the first part of this interview see: Finding Common Ground to Improve Livelihoods and Conserve Wildlife.

Dad, Uncle Otho, Uncle Kenny, all died before they were 70, Mom and my mother-in-law are both likely to die before that age as well. They all died relatively young for various reasons, but none of them lived to see the retirement age radical Republicans like Minority Leader John Boehner and his economic hit man Rep. Mike Pence want to make the new threshold for Social Security benefits. The specious argument that the tanned man and the ghost of budgets passed make is that if we don’t do something about Social Security spending the program will not be able to pay the (meager) benefits that are promised. It has exactly no basis in fact, like most radical Republican policy ideas it is not designed to address a problem but to advance a political agenda, this time to dismantle a program that has been loved by the public to the long term credit of the Democrats.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

The bland and faux tanned Minority Leader thinks that the issue is that people are living longer and so we have to pay Social Security benefits for a longer period of time, thus making it too expensive. So what is the simple (minded) solution? Raise the age that people can stop working. This way there is less time between our elderly citizens leaving the workforce and dying. That will keep the costs down.

The new Director of Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (OEMRE) (sheesh!) Michael Bromwich said yesterday that the Obama Administration is looking at the possibility of ending the deep water drilling moratorium “significantly” earlier than the Nov. 30 expiration date. This is in response to the uproar from Gulf State lawmakers (most from the radicalized Republican Party) that it is killing jobs.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

From the Washington Post article:

In addition to addressing the controversial moratorium, which several oil industry officials and Gulf Coast lawmakers have criticized for delivering an economic blow to the region, Bromwich laid out his vision for creating an assertive federal agency that will police offshore drilling across the country. He noted he has asked the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to lend him prosecutors and agents, respectively, and he is hiring from the private sector to staff an investigations and review unit of eight to 10 people that will explore allegations of wrongdoing within the agency and the drilling industry.

"We have a caseload already and we’re working on it," he said. "We will conduct an aggressive investigation of oil and gas company and enforcement of regulations, which has not been a hallmark of this agency in the past."

Bromwich’s agency — the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement — is also drafting new recusal rules for its employees to ensure an arm’s length relationship between regulators and those they oversee, he said, adding there is both the perception and reality that "especially in the Gulf region, there’s a limited pool from which we can draw from" in terms of regulators. "That’s problematic, for a variety of reasons."

Let’s start with an issue that comes up every time I do one of these Bodineism in the Republican Party posts, the complaint is I am doing Jethro a disservice by comparing him to the radical Republicans. I love Jethro. He is gormless in the extreme and while his lack of self-awareness and intelligence gets him in a peck of trouble, it is never ever done out of malice. That said, the ability of radical Republicans to spout the most blatantly stupid lines and say them with a straight face has no better analog in pop culture than dear old Jethro, hence the term Bodineism.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

There have been a couple of glaring examples of Republican Bodineism in recent days that I just could not let lay. The first comes from “The (Orange) Man Who Would Be Speaker” Minority Leader John Boehner. On one of the Faux News Sunday programs Rep. Boehner was asked by the host, Chris Wallace about the fact that several reputable economists are saying that we need more stimulus spending to bring the nation out of its jobless recovery. To which Rep. Boehner replied:

“"Well, I don’t need to see GDP numbers or to listen to economists; all I need to do is listen to the American people."

On the Left we often talk about the Republicans as conservatives. The assumption is that conservatives are generally Republican and Republicans are generally conservative. I am quickly coming to the conclusion that while this might have been true at some point, continuing to use conservative as a descriptor for Republicans is no longer accurate.

Dictionary.com defines conservative as follows.

con•serv•a•tive
Show Spelled[kuh n-sur-vuh-tiv] Show IPA
–adjective
1.
disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
2.
cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.
3.
traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit.
4.
( often initial capital letter ) of or pertaining to the Conservative party.
5.
( initial capital letter ) of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Conservative Jews or Conservative Judaism.
6.
having the power or tendency to conserve; preservative.
7.
Mathematics . (of a vector or vector function) having curl equal to zero; irrotational; lamellar.

Tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions or institutions, this is what I was taught as a kid was the really mark of a conservative. Unfortunately the modern Republican party is showing in its policy that it is not in any way conservative, but instead is radical.