Really good post by Rick Moran today in which he details what the Democrats options are if Brown wins. That’s not a sure thing and many conservatives should remember this.
The panicked Democrats are thrashing about trying to come up with a way to save health care reform if Republican Scott Brown wins the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.
The first scenario involves challenging the results of the election, no matter how much Brown wins by. The Democrats have already deployed their crack team of election law lawyers who will attempt to muck up the process of counting the ballots, challenging machine counts, trying to force a recount if the result is close enough, and generally throwing a monkey wrench into the proceedings.
The Massachusetts Secretary of State must certify the results within 10 days of the election.
This means that he won’t be seated until the end of January at the earliest and unless he wins big, he will probably be delayed even further meaning the caretaker of that seat will remain there when ObamaCare is brought up for a vote.
Rick then quotes Jonathan Chait at TNR who gives 3 options. Hold the vote before Brown is seated, have the House pass the Senate version and then use a reconciliation bill to implement the bill, and the last option is to flip Snowe.
Rick again:
The Maine senator may very well end up voting for the revised package since, according to Chait, all of her concerns about the bill have been met. Her calculation now is purely political; how badly does she want to remain in the Republican party?
~~~If the Democrats were to employ reconciliation in getting health care reform passed, the Republicans would have no choice but to bring the senate to a standstill. If they didn’t, the Democrats would be able to ride roughshod over them for the rest of the year, not to mention destroying the principle of minority rights. It is a scorched earth option that the Democrats use at their own peril.
The only other option the Democrats have is to vote to get rid of the filibuster entirely. This, I don’t see happening. Saner heads in the party realize that they will not always be in the majority and that the filibuster is a useful tool to block legislation.
So don’t think for one minute that a turning tide in Massachusetts means we can just sit back and bask in the glory. There are still plenty of tricks up the sleeves the slimy politicians. The key will be when Brown is seated, and I see challenge after challenge coming from the fatcat lawyers the Dem’s are sending to the state.
But….the first thing that needs to be done is to ensure a large Brown victory, and THEN we will deal with the typical corrupt trickery from the Democrats.
See author page
B-Rob gets owned…. Again.
Chihuahua —
No matter how many times you put the same chart up, it does NOT stand for the proposition that we would be better off now than if nothing had been done. Those were two PROJECTIONS for the future posibilities. I am talking about where we are NOW. You are comparing apples and a bucket of water.
Even more notable — if you actually could find any economists who would have supported your thesis that the stimulus did not work, or that it made things worse, it would be easy to link to them. But I see that, unlike the article I linked to, you present no one saying, in plain English, what you contend. Not a one . . . .
Missy —
Chuck Percy was HARDLY a conservative by todays measures. Dirksen either. But name a single GOPer from south of the Mason Dixon line who voted for the civil rights acts.
“You desperately tag the racists of the past as conservatives, they were not, they were bullies that grouped together to prevent the freedom and rights of blacks.”
No, Missy, you miss the point . . . again. I do not consider Barry Goldwater a racist, nor George H.W.B Bush. But they WERE conservative. And they opposed the Civil Rights era statutes. Ditto the National Review set, Bob Bork, etc. That is their history and nothing you say here can change that fact.
The anti-black racists who BY DEFINITION did not want a change in laws, culture or customs relating to race were obviously conservative; because such opposition to changes in laws, culture and customs is CERTAINLY not progressive, is it? And the proof in that is to see where the progressives came out.
Progressives supported the civil rights acts. Be definition, the conservatives did not. And they all said so at the time! As Jonah Goldberg put it:
“Conservatives should feel some embarrassment and shame that we are outraged at instances of racism now that it is easy to be. Conservatives…were often at best MIA on the issue of civil rights in the 1960s. Liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race. And conservatives should probably admit that more often.”
I leave you with this:
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1543/article_detail.asp
“For the want of that nail, much was lost. Conservatives have spent half a century trying to overcome the suspicion that they are indifferent to black Americans’ legitimate demands, and indulgent towards people who are blatantly hostile to blacks. As a result, the party of Lincoln has become much whiter as it has become more conservative. Dwight Eisenhower got 40% of the black vote in 1956, the first presidential election after the Brown decision and the Montgomery boycott. Barry Goldwater got 6% in 1964, and in the ten subsequent presidential elections the Republican candidate’s performance has never been more than a slight improvement on Goldwater’s. As Ta-Nehisi Coates recently argued in the Atlantic Monthly, a sizeable portion of the black electorate consists of latent conservatives ‘who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention.’ Invariably, however, the black American who feels this way ‘votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him.'”
Wordsmith —
The “slandering” of the GOP as racist would not work if . . . well, you didn’t have so many fcukin racists in the party! Need I relink you to the Palin rally clips, the racist tea bagger posters, the various GOP party chairs sending racists e-mails and fliers, “Barack the Magic Negro” song, the Obama monkey t-shirts, etc.? The party needs to clean itself up rather than lean back on tired “we’re not politically correct” response when it is called on its racism. As I used to tell my kid when she was little: “An apology is just the start. Change the behavior.” Unless and until y’all get as pissed off at the racists in the GOP as the Dems are, the racists in the GOP will continue to flourish like a day-old-piss smelling mold. And the Dems will, rightfully so, continue to make hay of it, too.
@B-Rob:
Who are the racists in the party? Where on FA have you seen us advertise Obama monkey t-shirts and celebrate the “Barack the Magic Negro” song?
Wordsmith —
You wrote:
“Oh, I see: So race did play a role in the 2008 election. Fancy that.”
Poor reasoning. Let’s remember a few things:
Obama got slightly more Black voters, percentage-wise, than Kerry and Gore. They won the Black vote in the low 90s and Obama was in the mid-90s. The reason he won was because WHITE Dems stayed home and voted Dem at higher rates than in the past. This was a combination of anger at Bush, a poor campaign by McCain*, Susie Sunshine from Wasilla, and Obama running a good campaign. not to mention the extra boost from younder White voters, almost all of whom went Obama. Add on top higher Dem support from Asians and Hispanics (thanks, McCain, for turning your back on immigration reform) and that was the recipe for the blow out. Because if race was the end all and be all, he would be Senator Obama, not president. And he would not have won states with NO Black voting block to speak of, such as Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa . . . all take aways from Bush.
Obama winning, of course, has had a positive effect on how Black poll respondents think about America. Because some were convinced that he would never get White voters to vote for him. And, yes, your wingnuts did pull out the “scary stuff” — he’s a Muslim, he hates white people, he hates Jews, the “Whitey” tapes, etc. But the electorate heard it, said “Meh” and voted for him anyway. So, no, race did not really matter that much. Indeed, just ask Alan Keyes and Al Sharpton about that monolithic Black voter support for Black candidates! LOL!
* read David Plough’s “The Audacity to Win.” He explains how delighted he was, for example, that McCain challenged in states he had no chance to win, then failed to campaign in states Obama targeted.
@B-Rob:
Duh. I’m responding to your statement regarding
That’s great. Happy for the lot of ’em. I’ve known this to be true for some time now. And if Obama hadn’t won, it’d still be true. If these minorities couldn’t see it before, it’s because they’ve been held to that belief by listening to Democrats who have pitched the “America is racist” propaganda for the last few decades.
Obsessing over racial issues only keeps the issue alive…which is what your side wants.
I think the GOP was in trouble last election, due to some of the points you made. But the wild enthusiasm for Obama, the cult-rapture, the MLK-JFK comparisons, his face on t-shirts, the messiah-worship….what do you attribute that to? A big deal was made over “first non-white elected president”. A glass ceiling was broken. Wonderful. So what do you attribute that kind of energy to? Uh-huh….race.
Thanks for the caricature of the arguments put forth against Obama and for tacking fringies as our mainstream.
“You wingnuts” this, “You cons” that. Are you trying to convince anyone to listen to what you have to say, or turn them off from paying any attention to you?
Btw, B-Rob,
The historical importance of Obama’s election, on account of race, was celebrated by many on both sides, and duly noted. Even by those of us opposed to him on substance and issue. Time to move past.
@B-Rob:
Dude…no matter how many times you deny the facts in front of your face, the truth is that those two economists, by their own projections have proven that the stimulus failed.
According to their own figures, we would have been better off without the stimulus.
They, along with the remainder of the West Wing Brain Trust (such as it is) told us that everything would be just peachy if we poured just shy of ONE TRILLION DOLLARS down a rat hole.
Turns out they were woefully wrong on their predictions and the stimulus has done nothing positive for the economy whatsoever.
*********************
Yep, it’s really easy to find ’em and link ’em:
Stimulus Spending Is Making Things Worse Not Better
The Stimulus Didn’t Work
Why the Stimulus Failed
Creating jobs
Why Government Spending Does Not Stimulate Economic Growth: Answering the Critics
LOTT’S NUMBERS: Why Is Unemployment Rising Faster In the U.S. Than Other Countries?
The Dirty Secret About Our Unemployment Rate
I see braindead rob has hijacked another thread with his racism, extreme stupidity, and trolling.
FWIR the dems have other plans to punch HCR thru no matter what.
Reminds me of that scene in a movie where a cowboy is riding a nuclear missile into the ground and whooping as he does. That’s the dems.
Hard Right —
I know it hurts like hell for me to point out the pact withthe devil that conservatives made in the 1960s, when they were fellow travelers with the racist White Citizens Council and the KKK. And that sorry history is part of the reason why the GOP is in the piss-poor state it is in. Is that “racism”? Only under the weird definition of “racism” that Glenn Beck and fat Rush Limbaugh give us.
Braindead, I don’t even bother to read your posts anymore.
1) They are full of hate, stupidity, and your racism.
2) I know what you are doing.
You are sitting back giggling like a girl at how how easy it is to push “wing nuts” buttons. You THINK this makes you superior, but you have no midea how much of a fool Mata and others have made you look. BTW moron, I’m a Latino-NOT white.
Now little boy, stop pretending to be a paralegal.
I’m done responding to you.
I think R-Bob is taking all the info he gets from this site and comments on others so he can appear “smart”. Unfortunately, to appear smart, you do have to have a little common sense, which seems to be missing from this poor little Obama zombie.
Madalyn
B-Rob said; “I know it hurts like hell for me to point out the pact with the devil that conservatives made in the 1960s, when they were fellow travelers with the racist White Citizens Council and the KKK.”
Senator Byrd is no Republican. In fact, as a former KKK member, Mr. Byrd is not alone in the fact that a large fringe of his radical group of nut jobs is comprised of registered Democrats. This shouldn’t be surprising since racism and race baiting is a Democratic Party specialty.
@B-Rob:
Wow, such tolerance.
Such class.
Such dignity.
The idea that you write that, given the history of Jim Crow and segregation and discrimination and slavery and antimiscegination laws in this country, all of which had as a FIRST PRINCIPAL that “how you look” matters lays bare your inner rottenness.
The good news is that Rush has lost +/- 100 lbs.
The bad news is that nothing you say here can change the fact that on these pages you’ve exposed the shriveled, day-old-piss smelling, blackened mass that is your racist, bigoted, arrogant, elitist soul.
Then you have the unmitigated gall, the sheer nerve, the absolute shamelessness to step in here and point your gnarled, bony finger at us and call us “racist”, intolerant, bigots all while trying to offer us sage advice on how to be more like you and your side?
You must be kidding.
But I will say that I am kinda embarrassed for you right now. You have proven that you don’t have the basic human ability to see yourself as others see you.
You’ve also proven, once again, that education doesn’t equal intelligence.