The columnist and radio host, who appears on this site every week, has issued a salty rant over the conservative Democrats and pundits who are already blaming liberals for their party’s losses. If you’re a progressive and find yourself frustrated by the election, be sure to read Sirota’s entire post for cathartic release. In the excerpt below, he explains what, in his view, really happened. David Sirota via Open Left: The facts are painfully apparent. Though hundreds – if not thousands – of people in D.C. are professionally paid to pretend these facts require debate and analysis and parsing and speculation and press releases and pithy Tweets and Sunday Show roundtables and C-SPAN symposia and to-camera cable-TV rants and lengthy thousand-page books, they don’t require any of that. They are simple. They are obvious. They are undeniable: 1. The Democratic Party shit on its base with its policies, as noted above. 2. This demoralized the Democratic base, which responded by not turning out to vote. As CBS News notes, “Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections (but) turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels.” 3. In cause-and-effect style, the result of all this was, as the Washington Post reports, a freshman congressional class that is primarily made up of angry, white, lunatic-conservative assholes. So yes, all of you who are wasting all of our time pretending this isn’t the basic point-A-to-point-B story of the election – and there are a lot of you out there – please, if not for me, then for everyone else: Go fuck yourself. Read more Related Entries November 3, 2010 Blue Dogs Get Taken to the Pound November 3, 2010 Rich Media, Poor Democracy
Continue reading …By Mr. Fish Related Entries November 3, 2010 Blue Dogs Get Taken to the Pound November 3, 2010 Rich Media, Poor Democracy
Continue reading …By Mike Luckovich Related Entries November 3, 2010 Blue Dogs Get Taken to the Pound November 3, 2010 Rich Media, Poor Democracy
Continue reading …The scariest guy Obama will have to face in the next two years won’t be John Boehner or Eric Cantor, but Darryl Issa, a Southern California congressman who will have a host of new powers : Here are the top three ways Washington will be different after this week’s midterm elections: First, President Obama will have to go through John Boehner and Co. to pass any bill. Second, Republicans will be held politically accountable for their actions in a way they haven’t been during their years in the minority. And third, Rep. Darrell Issa and his fellow GOP committee chairmen in the House will have subpoena power come January. What exactly does that mean? A congressional subpoena allows House committees to compel the administration and any federal agency to produce documents or testimony related to a broadly-defined “legislative purpose.” Courts have rarely interfered with this privilege and presidential administrations don’t often fight it. Subpoena power, in other words, means that Issa, who will soon be the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, can legally compel the Obama administration to hand over virtually any document it has. Issa is downplaying his new role, telling reporters, “My job is to make the president a success” by helping him eliminate waste and abuse in the executive branch. He is also talking up a series of relatively benign subjects as his top priorities heading into the next Congress: continuing oversight of the FDA’s food safety regulations, eyeing the Postal Service’s financial difficulties, and extending subpoena power to the inspectors general across all the federal agencies. In reality, Issa’s new powers pose great peril to Obama — and to Republicans, too, if they overreach. The GOP will need to pick their battles because the media will play every investigation as an overreach.
Continue reading …Jerry Brown won the governorship of California on an aggressive clean energy platform. Photo: SF Gate Throughout the 2010 midterm election cycle — and well before — most politicians dared not even utter the word climate change. Sometime after the House passed its comprehensive energy bill and the Senate stalled, clean energy and climate got written into the media’s horse-racing narrative as being dirty words in a political context; losing messages. The GOP lumping both in with cap and trade, which they falsely blasted as a tax, probably had something to do with that. Soon, clean e… Read the full story on TreeHugger
Continue reading …I like Michael Steele personally and supported his run for Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Continue reading …A special message to California voters – you must vote NO on Prop 25 if you have any hope of keeping the legislature from raising taxes and fees at will.
Continue reading …Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert, host of “The Colbert Report” spoke to the media following their Washington “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” (Oct. 31)
Continue reading …Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been asked to resign by opposition lawmakers after details arose that Berlusconi asked police to free a detained 17-year-old Moroccan girl called “Ruby”. “Ruby” allegedly had jaunts in Berlusconi’s home and has become yet another leading figure in Silvio’s scandal catalog. —JCL Reuters: Opposition lawmakers demanded that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resign after a paper on Saturday published what it said were details of him asking police to free a 17-year-old Moroccan girl detained for theft. The saga of the girl, a dancer who goes by the stage name “Ruby,” and her ties to the 74-year-old center-right prime minister have exploded into the latest scandal over Berlusconi’s private life. Newspapers have been awash with details of parties she allegedly attended at the media tycoon’s residence. Read more Related Entries October 27, 2010 Sex, Lies and Twitter October 11, 2010 Open Call: Obama’s Town Hall
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