US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

put a dollar in if you want the light to change from red to green.

How do these people even get out their front doors without dying?

Charity.

http://i.imgur.com/kSWLg.gif

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/04/18/brewer_vetoes_birther_bill.html

!!

Also vetoed the "Guns on college campuses" bill, but:

However, the senate and house both have a 2/3 veto-proof majority. Will they override the veto? Do they have the votes?

http://tucsoncitizen.com/in-the-aggregate/2011/04/18/breaking-jan-brewer-vetoes-birther-bill-and-firearms-omnibus/

Well, their most recent favorite son who ran for president was born 2500 miles away from the U.S. and the one they had before him was born in Arizona before it was even a state.

Neither one of them dealbreakers, but both of them even more unique than Obama's situation.

RT @SenJohnMcCain: Proud of @GovBrewer for her veto of the "birther bill" - it was the right decision.

GOP continues to court the Latino vote:

House Speaker John Boehner has scrapped plans to host this year's Cinco de Mayo celebration at the Capitol, abandoning a bipartisan tradition kept under the past two House Speakers.
Boehner has instead welcomed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to host the reception this year, according to HuffPo.
The speaker's office typically pays for the event, which in the past has included members of the House and Senate, wounded soldiers from Walter Reed and their families and Mexico's ambassador to the U.S.
The decision appears counter-productive to the GOP's efforts to woo Latino voters - who tend to lean Democratic - in 2012, a strategy spurred by explosive growth in the U.S. Hispanic population over the past 10 years. It also won't do anything to ease growing U.S.-Mexico tensions.
Boehner's office did not immediately return a request for comment on why he opted out of hosting the event the year.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/boehner-nixes-capitols-cinco-de-mayo-celebration-2011-4#ixzz1JzUZiNiQ

More House majority fun:

House Republicans plan to pay former Solicitor General Paul Clement and his legal team from King & Spaulding as much as $500,000 of taxpayer money to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) on behalf of House of Representatives, according to a document obtained by the Huffington Post.

"The General Counsel agrees to pay the Contractor for all contractual services rendered a sum not to exceed $500,000.00," the Contract for Legal Services obtained by The Huffington Post says. The cap could be raised "by written agreement between the parties with the approval" of the House, the document states.

The hourly rate that King & Spaulding will be receiving is $520 per hour -- which could actually be considered a deal. Some reports say that the firm's top attorneys receive as much as $900 per hour.

I have to give the GOP credit: the Dems never get this creative.

GOP continues to court the Latino vote:

Except for when the GOP grassroots keeps demanding "english-only" laws and howling that "illegal aliens" be shot on sight. Tends to undercut their other efforts.

it was a joke

The GOP really does keep eyeing all those latino voters and thinking they ought to do something about it, other than just touting their right-to-life cred. Seems like every couple of years you see trial balloons floated from conservative think tanks about how the GOP should seize this opportunity. Then the GOP pols consistently cave in to the racist wingnuts and pfffft!

They are a more reliable base

Es verdad.

Racist wingnuts helped to keep the Democrats viable for about a century, so, yeah.

boehner is losing the ween vote

US POLITICS: Buenos Tardes Amigo

the GOP today IS a Poop Ship Destroyer

Greenwald doesn't have his own thread apparently, so here's where I post a long interview with him published in Out Magazine. Please note: the magazine ran pictures of Greenwald smiling and having a good time.

In his early days as a blogger, Greenwald supported Democratic candidates who shared his pro–civil liberties views. But events of the last two years -- in both the White House and Congress -- have changed his mind. “I just don’t think meaningful change is possible through piecemeal reforms in either of the two political parties,” he says. As for the Democrats themselves, he can barely contain his disgust. “The Republicans,” he says, “have long lived by what they call the Buckley Rule: always support the furthest-right candidate who can plausibly win. That’s because they believe conservatism will work and want to advocate for it. Democrats [by contrast] prop up the most centrist or conservative candidates -- i.e., corporatists -- on the ground that it’s always better, more politically astute, to move to the right.”

One of his hopes for 2012 is that candidates will emerge to take on the red and the blue teams -- he is keeping an eye on Gary Johnson, a two-term Republican governor of New Mexico, who is pro-gay and antiwar, and who could run with a Democrat like former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold. He would also be happy to see a billionaire run without the help of either party, to “disrupt the two-party stranglehold.”

Greenwald believes the same manipulation of the two-party system is essential in the fight for gay rights. He says he is encouraged by the rise of the Log Cabin Republicans—not because he likes a thing the GOP endorses, but because “it sends a signal to Democrats that they can’t keep using gay voters as an ATM machine.”

“I think gay voters have been too gullible,” he says of their unwavering support for politicians who fail to keep promises. Being predictable, he says, offering advice to the gay community and an unwitting summary of his career, “is the best way to guarantee you’re ignored.”

LOL CARGO SHORTS & FLIP FLOPS

I would think someone like Greenwald would be perceptive enough to see the institutional impediments to breaking the two-party system but eh, maybe not

I'm pretty sure he does.

Greenwald: I was drinking a guarana tea on Ipanema beach; he was playing beach volleyball. His towel was near mine, and we started talking. I was 38; he was 19. I was established in my career; he was poor. I grew up in a South Florida suburb; he grew up an orphan in a Rio de Janeiro slum. So I was sure, especially in the beginning, that everyone assumed it was the classic midlife crisis type of relationship. But our love kept growing, and that made any concerns about what other people thought irrelevant.

Over time, we learned to turn the age difference into an asset, something that keeps our relationship vibrant and mutually stimulating. He prevents me from getting old, cranky, set in my ways, stagnant, and unspontaneous, and I keep him focused on career, future, responsibilities, and avoiding at least some of the bad mistakes of youth. It translates into this: I end up playing video games with a bunch of 23-year-olds until 3 a.m., and he ends up reading the Nietzsche I give him. Being young and from Rio, he’s still way ahead of me in the hedonism department. But I’ve been learning to give up control and be more spontaneous—something you can only do if you have absolute trust in the other person.

lol

had no idea he was gay tbh

greenwald has morbz's political instincts and gabbneb's fashion sense ... ermmmmmm

Okay...

(1) Lived in Broward County
(2) Wears cargo shorts and flip-flops
(3) Reads Nietzsche
(4) Positions beach towels close to Brazilian hottays playing volleball.

Hope for all of us.

greenwald has morbz's political instincts and gabbneb's fashion sense ... ermmmmmm

Admit it: you want it to reverse these.

*wanted

One of his hopes for 2012 is that candidates will emerge to take on the red and the blue teams -- he is keeping an eye on Gary Johnson, a two-term Republican governor of New Mexico, who is pro-gay and antiwar, and who could run with a Democrat like former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold. He would also be happy to see a billionaire run without the help of either party, to “disrupt the two-party stranglehold.”

just... smh

"I would think someone like Greenwald would be perceptive enough to see the institutional impediments to breaking the two-party system but eh, maybe not"

lol "I would think someone like Greenwald would be perceptive enough to agree with me"

i take back the morbz's political instincts a bit after reading this:

He would also be happy to see a billionaire run without the help of either party, to “disrupt the two-party stranglehold.”

been there, tried that and it failed -- see Michael Bloomberg and Jon Corzine.

also Ross Perot like duh

it just occurred to me that i had no idea greenwald was 44; he seems sort of ageless

Wait -- I must have missed the part when did Bloomberg try to run as anything other than a Republican...?

Perot as prez == disaster
Perot as candidate == not such a bad thing, really, given that he didn't win but did broaden the debate

(god, my grammmar's awful today)

lol "I would think someone like Greenwald would be perceptive enough to agree with me"

not exactly...? there are serious, huge, massive institutional barriers propping the two parties up. they are pretty obvious (winner take-all electoral college setup, existing party apparatuses, majority rule in both houses of congress, etc.) and a significant portion of them are WRITTEN INTO THE CONSTITUTION. This is not an ideological position I'm espousing, these are facts.

which is separate from Greenwald seeing hope in tactics that have been pursued and routinely failed over the last, oh, 150 years.

I say this as someone who does not regret voting twice for Nader, btw.

so when is hope confused with "This is what will happen"?

whatever the parties are, and whatever they advocate in contrast to each other (or not!! importantly!!) there are always going to be two of them.

a turn towards libertarianism or, lord help us, personal wealth, isn't going to crack the thing open.

the problems he describes day in and day out are sort of pre-political, whatever can be cobbled together by sourced quotes from the nyt or statements from the hill are only the aftereffects of it. i don't think the solutions he is gravitating towards match the scale of the problem.

Shakey, if you have any interest in serving as my secretary of defense, I need more moxie from you.

the biggest reason we have a two party system is not institutional, it's numerical (Duverger's law)

I think the movement of world history suggests that every structure thought permanent (owing to torts or contracts or founding documents or whatever) turned out in the long view to be extremely malleable

by all means, go ahead and love Russ Feingold (and I do!) and support him in whatever he does, but pretending like his or Ross Perot's or Bloomberg's or Trump's or Anderson's or Millard Filmore's or James Weaver's or Teddy Roosevelt's third party candidacies ever had or will have even the remotest prayer of undoing the essential two-party split of our system - that's just straight-up delusional

xp

like, first things first: amend the constitution

Joking aside, I don't care about GG's political remedies so much as his influence: I often use him as an example to students on how one can hold fast to political convictions, write well and rapidly, and still espouse the best kind of contrarianism. If he's getting his readers to parse a pol's statements, even if he or she's one of your own, then I don't mind his occasional rhetorical excesses.

convince large swathes of the country to just give up their power + privelege voluntarily. This happens all the time in history, right aerosmith?

xp