Posts Tagged ‘populism’
Bloomberg offers help to moderates against Tea Party
Bloomberg campaigning in Rhode Island for Lincoln Chafee
In an election year when anger and mistrust have upended races across the country, toppling moderates and elevating white-hot partisans, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is trying to pull politics back to the middle, injecting himself into marquee contests and helping candidates fend off the Tea Party.
New York’s billionaire mayor…is supporting Republicans, Democrats and independents who he says are not bound by rigid ideology and are capable of compromise, qualities he says he fears have become alarmingly rare in American politics.
Next month, Mr. Bloomberg will travel to California to campaign for Meg Whitman, the eBay entrepreneur and Republican running for governor on a platform of corporate-style accountability and fiscal prudence. He visited Rhode Island on Thursday to champion Lincoln D. Chafee, a Republican turned independent who is locked in a three-way battle for the governor’s office.
And, in perhaps the mayor’s most direct confrontation with a Tea Party candidacy, he will host a fund-raiser at his Manhattan town house for Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader facing an unexpectedly forceful challenge from Sharron E. Angle, a political neophyte backed by Sarah Palin.
Which is a humorous and untemporal bit of sophistry by Barbaro. Even the Democrat Party acknowledges that Harry Reid was unlikely to be re-elected – until the Republicans found themselves with Sharron Angle as their candidate. She’s a delightful nutball who says that federal government violates the First Commandment!
What will John McCain prove, today?
Anyone remember this?
1. Conservatives, Tea Party nutballs and even moderate Republicans mostly like the same lies. It doesn’t matter if they are lies. What the lies are may count a little bit – but, when it comes to cant and catechism, repeating today’s favorite lies gets you the votes.
2. When opposed for re-election by right-wingers, move as far to the Right as you can get away with. And, then, a little bit more. Don’t leave out bigotry. Everyone will forget you ever had a moderating position on any issue if you lie and say those positions never existed.
3. Deny you ever were a ‘maverick” – supported bi-partisan solutions to tough questions – ever strayed from bible-based hogwash on any of the issues where you might choose science and reason over superstition.
4. Doing all this gets you victory in today’s Republican primary in the great state of Arizona.
Alaskans whine about the Feds, feast on U.S. taxpayer dollars
Carl Gatto alongside federal highway project in Wasilla, Alaska
Backed by a blue row of saw-toothed mountain peaks, the Republican state lawmaker Carl Gatto finds himself on a fine roll.
Roll it back, he says, roll back this entire socialistic experiment in federal hegemony. Give us control of our land, let us drill and mine, and please don’t let a few belugas get in the way of a perfectly good bridge.
“I’ve introduced legislation to roll back the federal government,” he says. “They don’t have solutions; they just have taxes.”
And what of the federal stimulus, from which Alaska receives the most money per capita in the nation? Would he reject it?
Mr. Gatto, 72 and wiry, smiles and shakes his head: “I’ll give the federal government credit: they sure give us a ton of money. For every $1 we give them in taxes for highways, they give us back $5.76.”
He points to a new federally financed highway, stretching toward distant spruce trees. “Man, beautiful, right?”
Alaskans tend to live with their contradictions in these recessionary times. No place benefits more from federal largess than this state, where the Republican governor decries “intrusive” federal policies, officials sue to overturn the health care legislation and Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, voted against the stimulus bill…
Alaska has budget woes, and, more perilously, oil production is slumping. But its problems are not mortal; the ax falls on new police headquarters and replacement Zamboni blades rather than on teachers and libraries. The state avoided the unemployment devastation visited on the Lower 48 in part because federal dollars support a third of Alaskan jobs, according to a university study.
RTFA. It should surprise no one.
Alaska is the northern terminus of the Bible Belt – where populism and greed feed off ignorant voters to maintain a veritable army of freeloaders at the federal tax trough.
How the Gulf of Mexico became the nation’s ‘toilet bowl’
When Nazia Dardar looks at the seemingly endless lake of water behind her stilted bayou home, the 76-year-old sees what once was a farm. Cows roamed there, she says, back when the lake was land.
“C’est le jour et la nuit,” she says in French, the most common language down here on the farthest and swampiest reaches of the Mississippi River delta. “It’s day and night.”
Perhaps nowhere is the protracted death of the Gulf Coast more apparent than in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana, and other indigenous bayou communities where, decades before the BP oil disaster, the marsh started disintegrating and environmental problems washed in from as far away as North Dakota and New York.
The Gulf of Mexico became, in effect, the United States’ toilet bowl — known for its seasonal “dead zones,” high erosion rates, dirty industry, ingrained poverty and, now, for the biggest oil disaster in the history of the country. Compare that legacy on the Gulf Coast with the East Coast, with its wealth, and the West, with its more-sterling record of environmental stewardship…
These wetlands, a 20-minute boat ride from the stilted homes of Pointe-Aux-Chenes, provide nearly all the needs of people here. Shrimp, crab, fish and oysters spawn and hide in the protective grasses. Those creatures are the basis for the local economy.
They’re also what everyone eats…
Since 1932, more than 1,875 square miles of Louisiana have shriveled and died, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That’s enough land to nearly cover Delaware…
The Corp of Engineers – BTW – can take credit for the taxpayer-funded portion of the destruction.
Turkeys voting for Xmas: the American electorate
The Republicans’ shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US…
Only because of opportunist allegiance by both parties to anti-democratic rules in the Senate…
But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform – the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state – are often the ones it seems designed to help.
In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.
Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal…
If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.
They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.
There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots…
Even if the operative word is “ignoramus” instead of “idiot” – the result is the same.
