Ignoring completely the immediately obvious – and in some cases vastly better funded – parallels on the Left, the author quickly concludes that the only way to beat the nasty fiscal conservatives is to implement even more aggressive “campaign finance reform” efforts than those attempted in the past. He also seems oblivious to the fact this his fellow progressives managed to fund the most expensive presidential election in history when putting Barack Obama in office and that they are already crowing over the likely target of spending more than a billion next year.
As long as they continue to delude themselves in this way, the Tea Party is going to continue to “kick their butts.”
Should students have to pay to get a newspaper they don’t want to read? I know Pinch is in trouble, but this reeks of desperation. But then, it’s been a long time, if ever, that the paper had any interest in letting the market work. And now would be a very bad time for it to advocate it, given that “letting the market work” would mean a reorganization, in which one likely outcome might be a paper that people actually want to pay to read.
I don’t think that Donald Trump thinks that Obama is a Muslim. What he said (which which I agree) is that there is something on his birth certificate that he doesn’t want us to see, and that it might be that it says he’s a Muslim (I think it might also, or instead be that Barack Hussein Obama isn’t listed as the father Who knows, unless we can see it?). That doesn’t make him one, though. As I’ve said before, in order to be a Muslim (or a Christian) you have to believe in something greater than yourself. I’ve never seen any evidence that Barack Obama does so.
In general, I’ve never been impressed by Howard Dean’s political perspicacity, and I agree with this:
“This isn’t 1995,” Weber said. “Obama is not Clinton; Boehner isn’t Gingrich.”
There’s something else about it not being 1995 that matters. A lot of the blame on the Republicans was driven by the media, which was still in shock and angry that their political party had been repudiated at the polls (remember the late Peter Jennings’ comment about it being a “temper tantrum” of a “two-year old”?). As I was mentioning to someone on the phone this morning when the topic of a shutdown came up, Fox News didn’t exist in 1995. Neither did the non-leftist blogosphere. They won’t have a free-fire zone to shape the narrative this time. If the Senate holds up a budget, or the president refuses to sign one, over a few billion dollars in budget cuts, when the public is pretty clearly much more concerned about spending levels now than they were then, it will be a lot harder to get the public, and particularly the independents, to blame the Republicans.