It was during the health care debate that the essential building block of the Democratic majority – Independent voters – began to crumble. It was evident in the generic ballot. It was evident in the President’s job approval numbers. It was evident in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
What’s really amazing is the ongoing delusion (notoriously assisted by Bill Clinton) that once they passed it, it would magically become popular.
They used to say that Social Security is the third-rail of American politics, but given 1994 and this year, I think that health-care “reform” (at least democratic socialist style) is. And this time, the donkeys jumped on it with all four feet.
It isn’t the snarky first part of this statement that is interesting; that’s banal, and while revealing in its own way, it’s de rigeur for the sort of people we’re talking about to on the one hand demand no one reach conclusions on the basis of necessarily limited information when it comes to them and their mascots, but who feel free themselves to rush to entirely unsupported conclusions regarding their opponents and targets, and express them in the snarkiest way possible, all the while holding the self-conception that they’re stalwarts defending civil discourse. Of course, one commenter doesn’t control anything, any more than I “create the narrative” (If only!). But this comment will be a useful example for how those who do set the terms of debate do so, and a facet of the mindset behind it.
Be that as it may, the truly interesting part is the expressed definition of what qualifies as a “moderate Muslim.” Alchemist expressed what I suspect a lot of people on that side of things believe, without fully articulating it even in their own minds: For them a “moderate Muslim” is simply anyone who isn’t trying, either directly or indirectly, to kill them.
This truly does reflect having two standards, however. In normal discourse, this isn’t generally the standard for moderation: David Duke isn’t considered moderate just because he himself never engaged in a lynching and had learned how to express himself in such a way that it’s virtually impossible to find a statement where he openly and clearly encourages violence or terror. Yet people can get in trouble with the widely-respected SPLC for example,simply sharing a stage with him in a debate. We understand he’s not “moderate” in spite of the suit and tie, and the carefully couched statements.
Rauf is no moderate in my book. But then, I think that moderation is overrated. Goldwater had it right when he said that extremism in defense of liberty was no vice.
I just don’t get all this hate on uncovered boobage and Alan Simpson. If rights to seeing and saying tits aren’t constitutionally protected, what are? The very word is enshrined and embedded right there in the middle of “consTITution.”
In fact, I think that this invention, while not the worst one in the world, is right up there, and clearly unconstitutional (audio may not be safe for work).
…your education dollars. Part of the Republicans’ platform this fall should be to abolish the Department of Education. No one would be able to accuse them of going back to “Bush’s failed policies” with that one. Well, at least not credibly.
The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than in any other year in the nation’s history. The recession began that fall, dragging down stocks, jobs and births.
“When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University. “We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s, and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today.”
“It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added.
We know that when it comes to the high life, Democrats believe in partying hardy, sending taxpayers every bill they can while living lives of luxury the rest of us can ill-afford. We know, too, that Democrats cheat on their taxes and wrangle government deals for their relatives with a feeling of entitlement that is sure to put the term “public servant” in disrepute for the next century. Thanks to the growth of government on the Lightworker’s watch, we have seen public employees now eclipse the earnings and benefits of private workers, with the only end in sight the fate of Greece.
Praise to the Lightworker and his fellow Democrats for teaching us these essential lessons, which reinforce our will to throw them all on the unemployment lines posthaste.
I’m hoping that in a few weeks, we’ll be taking them to school.
It seems to have become my full-time job to correctthis kind of thing. As for the notion that the new space policy “ends human spaceflight,” I feel like I’ve been playing whack-a-mole with that nonsense since February.
This does not strike me as a story about how income inequality caused the financial crisis. Rather, this is a story about how policies intended to reduce inequality had the unintended consequence of precipitating America’s worst economic slump since the Depression. It’s very important that we’re straight on what the story is, since different stories may have very different implications for policy. If the story is that the level of inequality itself—and not our ideas about or political reactions to it—indirectly caused the crisis, then we may think that narrowing the gap is a matter of urgent necessity. But if the story is that an ill-conceived political attempt to reduce inequality—and not the fact of inequality itself—led to apocalyptic economic devastation, then we may well conclude that it is better to refrain from equalising initiatives unless we are quite certain they will not backfire.