Kevin says……
I said it once I will say it again. The Republican Party as we know it is dead. It's a corpse, populated by old white men with dead ideas.
It is so dead that they have resurrected Cheney, Rove, and newt, what the hell is up with that. They look to Dick Cheney who I still think just might be the precursor to the anti Christ. We he any good at evil. He isn't as the Iraq war showed us.
And reaganomist is so silly that I can even start to describe the silliness of following a senile possible altzimers ridden president. Who wasn't that bright in the first place.
I mean he used to tell his staff that he wanted some thing done, and them they would try to figure out how to do it.
Doesn't any one read, this guy was out of it? You had not much government involvement because your president was semi stupid.
DO republicans even read……………..
And this same government this is a class thing an ownership thing a plantation thing.
What does that mean; it means we should allow states to make their own decisions
Meaning that some states might just reinstitute slavery
Where would people of color be without government?
What would have happened without the voting rights act?
Or troop intervention during the civil rights movement
Where would MLK have been with out the troops?
Republicans are simply selfish business folks, who use the working class slobs and small business owners to supplement their pillage of the country and its money.
Republicans can't figure out Obama because they can't figure out their selves
They have been co-opted by the Christian right, who wants to follow people who don't believe in birth control or evolution.
Sarah Palin, that house fray needs to crawl back into her igloo and make some more elk chili
What an embarrassment
This party ………………is done…………and it's about time
p>
april 29, 2009, 10:08 pm
The Off-Brand Presidency
He campaigned for activist government, a less confrontational foreign policy, a business-friendly way to a green revolution. A liberal. Or, to use the term favored by those who are afraid of the lingering toxicity of that word – a progressive.
As president, he sent truckloads of money to the rescue of a sick economy, gave most working people the biggest tax cut of their lives and told a foreign audience that his country's occasional arrogance was no excuse for reflexive anti-Americanism.
President Barack Obama is making it safe to be a liberal again – and showing how meaningless such labels can be. His first lap reveals not so much about him as it does the country he governs: a nation willing to follow a man whose policies they may not fully believe in.
He is as advertised. We are not.
When asked to pick a political label, barely one in five voters called themselves liberal in the 2008 election. Another 36 percent said they were moderate. And 38 percent self-identified as conservative. Those numbers are largely unchanged over the last two decades.
Given that makeup, the public might be expected to look harshly at a president who has all but nationalized the auto and banking industries, run up the national debt and shaken hands with a foreign leader reviled as a nuisance at best.
But there he is: with 68 percent job approval rating in the New York Times poll. This from an electorate with nearly half the voters saying Obama is more to the left than they are.
In other words, he's not fooling anyone. Nearly 60 percent in the NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll viewed him as "very or somewhat liberal." And, with a shrug and thumbs up, they're cheering for the new guy.
"It's not like anybody should be surprised," Obama said in Wednesday's town hall meeting. "We're doing what we said we'd do."
Obama's broad support points to an old American character trait – pragmatism. It can tilt conservative or liberal, as resilient as the times.
We are said to be a center-right country. In truth, we lean to common sense. If that means tying up the banks in ropes of new regulation to keep them from running amok again, despite cries about restraining free enterprise, most people are for it. If that means firing hack public school teachers to the wails of the educational establishment, the public is there as well.
In a recent Pew Center poll, Americans were asked to describe Obama in a single word; the top of the list was "intelligent." Not black, which is what historians dwelled on. Not socialist, which is what the pickled cranks of the far right have called him.
In his 100th-day news conference, Obama had a bit of my-burden-is-great tone, while going out of his way to reject cartoon liberalism. "I don't want to run auto companies," he said. "I don't want to run banks. I've got two wars to run already."
He seemed genuinely humbled by his meetings with average servicemen and servicewomen, and empathetic to the moral qualms presented to any woman considering an abortion.
What we are seeing is a president, though arguably more liberal than anyone since Lyndon Johnson, who is hard to dismiss in the shorthand of our politics – the caricature branding of left or right.
Karl Rove insists that Obama is a more polarizing president than George W. Bush, pointing to yawning approval gap between Democrats and Republicans. Nobody knows how to wield a wedge like Rove, but he's wrong on this one.
The gap is there because the Republican Party has shrunk to a raisin of its former self, baking in the sun of the old Confederacy. A mere 21 percent of people called themselves Republicans in a Washington Post poll. The vast majority of the country – Democrats and independents – are with Obama, given his high marks by both groups.
Rove's side was not exactly in hiding. Their ideas were well-known, tried and "rejected by the American people in an historic election," Obama said Wednesday.
Those who speak for what is left of the Republican Party diminish their ranks every time they do. On Rove's advice, they killed stimulus money for fighting pandemics like swine flu. They still follow the post-bunker missives of Dick Cheney, who has as much credibility on competent governing as the Octomom has on birth control.
And now there is the exquisite irony that nearly half the Republicans in the only big state left in the Party of Lincoln – Texas – say they favor seceding from the Union. So much for America first.
No doubt, 38 percent of Americans are still conservative, as they've been for the last 20 years. But a good portion of them are no longer Republican.
They are parked, for now, in a lane of open-mindedness, along with the 75 percent of Americans who see Obama as a "strong leader." If their president also happens to be a liberal, they don't care – so long as he succeeds.
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