republican party

Welcome to another episode of Republicans crying foul over nothing:

In a move that is rich in irony, President Obama agreed Tuesday night to sign an emergency deficit reduction bill that does almost nothing to rein in spending and then jetted out to Hawaii to resume his vacation at an extra cost of more than $3 million to taxpayers.

You can check out Memeorandum yourself to see all the right wing outrage over this.

But let's go back to March 2005, when we won't heading over the fiscal cliff. Instead the only thing the Republicans were worried about was one lady in Florida named Terri Schiavo. Congress was called back from recess to take up the late night measure. George Bush boarded Air Force One and flew from Crawford back to DC in the early hours of the morning, only to fly back out to Arizona later that day.

Now I have tried to hammer down an exact cost on all this, but haven't been able to find one. I have seen estimates that it cost between $5 and $7 million alone just for the congressional session. I wonder how much added cost was in there for Bush flying back and forth? Whatever the number, you can be damn sure it was higher than what the Republicans are whining about today.

This has to be one of the most idiotic things I have read in ages. Shouldn't be shocking, coming from a former Bush writer:

Barring a last-minute breakthrough, taxes will go up for every U.S. taxpayer on Jan. 1 — and that’s a development conservatives should welcome.

Don’t get me wrong: It would be better not to raise taxes on anyone, pursue pro-growth tax reform and cut the size of government instead. But that’s not what the American people voted to do last month. Americans cast their ballots for big government.

Now it’s time to pay for it.

Until now, the growth of government under President Obama has not hit the pocketbooks of most Americans. During Obama’s first term, federal spending grew to more than 24 percent of GDP — the highest it has been since 1946. Yet almost no one in the country (except smokers and those who frequent indoor tanning salons) saw their taxes rise. Quite the opposite: 160 million Americans saw their payroll taxes reduced from 6.2 to 4.2 percent.

This is another example of Republicans thinking that the people are a bunch of idiots. If anyone could pick one thing they knew that Obama stood for it was raising taxes on the rich. It was one of the clearest points he made during the election.

But how about the growth of government under George Bush, Marc Thiesen's former boss? Let's look at it in graph form:

PPP is out with a new poll that is very interesting:

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.

First off, Republicans really need to stop listening to Fox News. ACORN is no longer in existence, and it's just another boogie-man conspiracy that the right has manufactured.

Then we find our that the party that claims to be the "patriots" have such little love of our country that they want to leave it:

Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren't sure.

So a quarter of the GOP just wants to up and leave our country simply because their man lost. Tell me again how democracy works? That's right. To Republicans democracy means we hold elections but the winner damn well better be their person.

Welcome to the whiny "I'm taking my ball and going home" attitude of that party of Reagan.

But all this whining and bitching appears to be a sign of the last throes of the Republican Party. This number here is something that the left can cheer on:

The New York Times has a very interesting article today about Chris Christie and how the GOP has treated him since Hurricane Sandy:

A few days after Hurricane Sandy shattered the shores of New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie picked up the phone to take on a different kind of recovery work: taming the Republican Party fury over his effusive embrace of President Obama.

On Nov. 3, Mr. Christie called Rupert Murdoch, the influential News Corporation chief and would-be kingmaker, who had warned in a biting post on Twitter that the governor might be responsible for Mr. Obama’s re-election.

Mr. Christie told Mr. Murdoch that amid the devastation, New Jersey needed friends, no matter their political party, according to people briefed on the discussion. But Mr. Murdoch was blunt: Mr. Christie risked looking like a spoiler unless he publicly affirmed his support for Mitt Romney, something the governor did the next day.

Mr. Christie has been explaining himself to Republicans ever since. His lavish praise for Mr. Obama’s response to the storm, delivered in the last days of the presidential race, represented the most dramatic development in the campaign’s final stretch. Right or wrong, conventional wisdom in the party holds that it influenced the outcome.

Apparently in the view of Republicans, Christie should have let his own state suffer and die in the name of party. Perhaps they should have told Republicans there might be some pregnant women out there who could die, then maybe the GOP would have gone people first. No, I doubt it. After all, beating the black guy was more important than even that.

Make no doubt about it; Republicans absolutely despise democracy. That's not to say they don't love the sound of the word, but when it is in actual practice, well they only like it when their person wins. Evidence of that can be seen in the actions and words of Republicans in comparison to presidential votes.

Let's start off with Bill Clinton. In 1996 he won the presidency by a whopping 9%. Did the Republicans look at that as a mandate or "will of the people"? Nope. Instead they started a witch hunt to try and remove him from office by the most extreme method this country has - impeachment. Not since 1837, when Andrew Jackson was impeached, has this happened and Clinton was only the second time in our nation's history.

Now let's go to 2008. Before President Obama even took the oath of office, Republicans were starting to beat the impeachment drums. Republicans started looking for anything and everything they could throw at him. But again, Obama won that election by 7%. So to the Republicans, a majority of this country is idiots and don't know how to vote. Democracy be dammed!

So here we are now, just a little over a week since another Obama victory. Sure it wasn't as big this time, him only getting the popular vote by 3%, but still, the people elected a Democrat. So how does the Republicans respond to this?

People in four states — Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington — have reported strange political robocalls from a birther group called Conservative Majority Fund, saying that they “suspect” Obama may be “guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors,” adding “there may be grounds for impeachment as is laid out in the Constitution.”

Got that? They don't know what crimes, but they think there has to be some. But on what grounds? Is it PWB (Presidenting While Black)?

The Republican Party is on life support and needs serious help. Sure Democrats have reason to celebrate this week, but the left should be really concerned about what might happen if the GOP continues down their current path of self-annihilation.

This is something I have been talking about for years now and Nicholas Kristof hits on this very point in today's New York Times:

Schadenfreude may excuse Democrats’ smiles for a few days, but these trends portend a potential disaster not just for the Republican Party but for the health of our political system. America needs a plausible center-right opposition party to hold Obama’s feet to the fire, not just a collection of Tea Party cranks.

So liberals as well as conservatives should be rooting for the Republican Party to feel sufficiently shaken that it shifts to the center. One hopeful sign is that political parties usually care more about winning than about purism. Thus the Democratic Party embraced the pragmatic center-left Bill Clinton in 1992 after three consecutive losses in presidential elections.

The "Tea Party cranks" Kristof talks about is the biggest enemy of the right. Take a look at this last session in the House. When we were trying to avoid debt default, good ideas were being generated by Democrats and Republicans collectively. It wasn't until John Boehner got held hostage by the Tea Party members of his own caucus that things went down hill and our credit rating was lowered.

But the Tea Party isn't the only culprits in this mess. Again, here's Kristof:

Harry Reid is vowing to take on something that many of us have asked for - filibuster reform:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pledged on Wednesday to change the rules of the Senate so that the minority party has fewer tools to obstruct legislative business.

In his first post-election press conference, the Nevada Democrat said he wouldn't go so far as to eliminate the filibuster, which requires 60 votes for the chamber to enter and exit the amendment and debate process. But in remarks meant to preview a more combative approach during the next session, he warned Republicans that obstructionism as a tactic won't be tolerated -- or as technically feasible.

Now let's look at why this really needs to be done. Here's a handy graph showing how much the GOP has decided to abuse the filibuster in the past several years:

Of course the way the filibuster happens has also changed. It's not like the old days, where the cots are rolled out and the TV screen is full of senators reading from Shakespeare. Instead they basically say "filibuster" and the legislation is done. It has been twisted into a tool where the minority controls Senate, not the majority.

So how is the right responding to this? Well here's Drudge's headline on it:

This is one of the top stories Drudge is pushing right now:

Local Republicans went to court to have a judge order a mural of President Obama covered up at the Ben Franklin Elementary School polling place in the Northeast.

Republican Party of Pennsylvania Chairman Rob Gleason released the following statement regarding the Republican Party of Pennsylvania’s successful challenge.

To get away with their disgusting attempts to suppress Republican voices in Philadelphia,” Chairman Rob Gleason said. “Whether it’s blocking Republican Election Day workers form doing their job or violating Pennsylvania law by electioneering in the polling place, it is clear the Obama campaign has taken their campaign in the gutter to manipulate this election however they can. Based on the Obama campaign’s behavior today, it certainly raises the question: what are Democrats doing in the polls that they are working so hard to shield folks from monitoring this election?”

Here's a picture of the mural:

Funny how this is an issue, but what about voters right here in Hamilton, Ohio? Here's a statue outside my polling place: