US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

kinda kidding here but only sorta (yes I know Monsanto is not Italian)

I don't know if this has been posted yet, but here's Cspan's vid of the event

But from 8 to 10 PM Eastern tonight, Rachel, Chris Matthews and I will be presenting a two-hour special report on the President's remarks (and answers) to the Republican Retreat (and wow did it live up to that name).

We will be aiming for analysis and perspective for sure, but not to the point of carving this up into little soundbites. We will be running, as they say, "large chunks" and then cutting back to the studio to see which one of our jaws can drop the closest to the floor.

Parenthetically, I always said the actual "Prime Minister's Question Time" on C-SPAN was one of my favorite tv shows but the thought of doing an American version gave me the mental image of all of our politicians running screaming into the streets after the first five minutes of questioning.

Apparently that would all but one of our politicians.

"if the way these issues are being presented by the republicans--'this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government'--in every aspect of our lives, what happens then is you guys don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me. . . . many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base"
trying to imagine bush having said something like that acute the democratic caucus

um, that acute to the democratic caucus

no need since the Democrats rolled over like puppies for Dubya on every single fucking thing of import

9/11! terror! hard to stand up to that 2001-03, -04, shakey mo

This is either blithering ignorance of the law or demagoguery of the worst kind.

— Bradley A. Smith is Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault Designated Professor of Law at Capital University Law School

TTT

Tonight the president engaged in demogoguery of the worst kind,

I have zero faith in him at this point but I can't front, I still love to see him smack these fuckers down - his first answer in the q & a part is fucking priceless

XP watching that at 8!

btw, that's exactly why I liked the SOTU address, the smackdowns

"i am absolutely committed to working on these issues with you, but it can't just be political assertions that aren't substantiated when it comes to the actual details of policy"

these need to happen on a monthly basis imo.

"that's not how democracy works"

last twenty minutes is heroic. fuck the haters

snap! Youtube age

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBuG2TdgMn0&feature=player_embedded

Ideology aside, this is a pretty brilliant political moment for Obama. If you check out drudgereport, his response is to bury the story, which is always a good sign.

i found myself wishing the meeting had been longer, with some real number crunching, and more in-depth analysis of the republican bills and simple-speak explanations of why they wouldn't benefit people.

fuck jeb hensarling

"the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign"

"that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true"

"a republican administration, a republican congress, two tax cuts that weren't paid for, a prescription drug plan passed . . . without being paid for, you had two wars that were done through supplementals"

This is pretty awesome

ducking meet and greet with paul ryan's kids on the procession out is sweet

I used to respect you, Don, but I have no idea what you believe in.

waiting for dick cheney's rebuttal

http://z.about.com/d/atheism/1/0/m/3/3/OK-Not-to-Believe-s.jpg

I have pretty strong conservative instincts, and have so little respect for the Dems that I couldn't bring myself to vote for them in the last two cycles, even dropping my party affiliation, but for you, Don, to act like Kathryn-Jean Lopez's intern posting twaddle that isn't entertaining, much less factually accurate, is really sad for someone of your purported intelligence. At least post an intelligent conservative rebuttal!

If you want, I can post Stevens' dissent, in which he acknowledges your argument.

apparently Fox News cut away before the Q&A section was over, another good sign.

alfred your post includes Kathryn-Jean Lopez and a word that sounds like "twat" in much too close of a proximity

party foul

stop this twattdle.

At 3:07 into the video, Pence says "Now Republicans offered a stimulus bill at the same time....costs half as much as the democrat proposal in congress, and using your economic analyst (sic) models it would have created twice the jobs, at half the cost."

Can anyone link to this proposal and to the models (CBO's? Is that what he means by "your" economic models?)

Hmm.

CAP, at least, found that the "plan would cost over $3.1 trillion over ten years — more than three times the amount of President Barack Obama’s plan — and be largely ineffective at creating jobs."

But I'm still curious what Pence means when he says "using your economic analyst models". What is he talking about? Is it just a lie or there an actual analysis backing it up?

I used to respect you, Don, but I have no idea what you believe in.

Not really sure if you respected me for what you thought I believed in or what. Either way, I didn't intend to lose any respect that I didn't know I had, nor is it my goal to have your respect. If I earn it, great. If not, well, you're just one of many who probably think my every utterance here is twaddle. I proudly voted for Obama and yet am dismayed to see him become everything I'd feared.

I really don't have the time to get into a long winded discussion (um, this is a message board) about whether or not Obama lied in his SOTU address (Linda Greenhouse's comments were pretty illuminating, to say the least), but coming from a former professor of ConLaw, Obama's statements were unbelievably misleading. Maybe they're not outright lies to you, but the kind of intellectual dishonesty I noted is far too close to lying for my taste. Stevens' dissent isn't something that can be boiled down into a sentence or two, and Obama's casual bullying of the majority isn't impressive when he devolves it into weak political theater. Calling the rejection of what amounts to two statues over the past two decades a repudiation of a century of law wouldn't pass the laugh test in the two ConLaw classes I took. That kind of redmeat campaign bluster works from the stump, but in the SOTU it comes off as hackdom. But what do I know, right?

As for my purported intelligence--not really sure what that means. We can discuss that over beers next time I'm in your town I guess.

If anyone wants to have some beers to discuss my purported intelligence sometime, just let me know, I am ready to go

I don't mean that as a diss, I just think it would be a fun theme for a night out!

I am always up for beers. Even with people who think I twaddle.

but the kind of intellectual dishonesty I noted is far too close to lying for my taste
really. that obama, he sure is shifty. w on the other hand, he may have stretched the truth sometimes, but

Don, you wrote:

how about the time that Obama lied about having HCR negotiations on CSPAN?

I don't have cable, but when I visited my friends and parents last summer CSPAN broadcast much of the House and Senate floor debates. Mind-numbing after a while, but there it was.

As for the dissent, here it is. I don't give a damn whether Obama broke protocol attacking SCOTUS or Alito was out of line in shaking his head; that's Kabuki shit of little interest outside the Beltway. As I've admitted several times on this and other threads, the decision confuses me; I have to resolve my pretty absolutist Hugo Black-esque reading of the First Amendment with the facts that McCain-Feingold was designed to address. If you read the Stevens dissent it acknowledges in part how "foreign" money is still subject to strict control.

My problem is your brittle, nasty tone that's straight from The Corner. You're not dealing with nimrods here.

And, hells yeah, if you're in the area, let's go out for gin and tonics. I'll show you where the boys are.

Calling the rejection of what amounts to two statues over the past two decades a repudiation of a century of law wouldn't pass the laugh test in the two ConLaw classes I took.

FWIW for close to a week I saw a zillion new stories presenting the case this exact way.

To be fair to Don, SCOTUS cases are often so complicated that newspapers are forced to go with the easy headline.

I mentioned how one hundred twenty years after Santa Clara it's still mischaracterized, because a politically motivated court reproter wrote misleading headnotes.

"A tone of civility instead of slash-and-burn would be helpful. The problem is we have a media that mainly responds to slash-and-burn type politics."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvwEjxDtwWs

opening speech

thought about polling these responses but one thread for this stuff is enough...anyway, who's your "favorite" among this bunch

http://www.redstate.com/brianfaughnan/2010/01/29/house-republicans-speak/

John Campbell makes me so mad I could spit, but Pete Sessions wins it for me by virtue of actually, on camera, kissing Tea Partier ass

uh. . . if "home" is washington, wouldn't the Atlantic Ocean make more sense, if you're going from IL - - > DC?

teele pledged that the party will compete in every state in the midterm elections. "We began 2010 in the back yard of President Obama, where he was born," he said. "We will end the year in Illinois taking his Senate seat. . . . Today, the old map is being thrown out. We're going to drop it in the Pacific Ocean on our way home."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012903261.html

It's a good thing too, because if anything can fix this country's financial/health crisis, it is complete deregulation of everything and tax cuts.

j/k, obv