It seems not to make sense. Major polls show the GOP getting control of one or both houses of Congress – while also showing that the GOP have a bad unfavorable rating. How can that be? All because the Democrats couldn’t turn around an economy that took eight years to break in 18 months.
Nearly 50 percent of likely voters prefer a GOP-controlled Congress, which is virtually unchanged from the poll taken two weeks ago; a plurality of all registered voters say it would be a “good thing” if Republicans were in charge of both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate; and almost two-thirds — including about half of Democrats — want to see a significant amount of change in the way President Barack Obama has been leading the country.
Republicans’ short leash
If Republicans gain majorities in Congress, they would so with a still-damaged brand. Thirty-four percent have a favorable view of the GOP, versus 41 percent who have an unfavorable view.
The Democratic Party’s favorable/unfavorable rating stands at 39 percent to 42 percent. The Tea Party’s score, meanwhile, is 32 percent to 40 percent.
Given the GOP’s low standing, McInturff says Republicans would have a very short leash with the public if they end up controlling Congress. Americans, he argues, will keep voting elected officials out of office “until somebody gets the message — which is fix the economy and get things done in Washington.”
It is going to be a bumpy two years as people vote away their social interests in order to try the old new GOP policy of giving welfare to the rich and making the working class as cheap in costs as possible. I mean, I would vote Republican if all I had to base my decision on was FOX “news” and the conservative bias of the main stream media that have been complaining for months that the Democratic polices haven’t worked.
The problem is the economic policies are working all be it slowly. I predict that the pace of recovery will pick up not by anything the GOP will do since anything too radical will be tied up in the Senate (should the Democrats retain control) and the GOP will try to claim credit for it in 2012.
Speaker Boner? Gives me the shivers. All because the Democrats couldn’t turn around an economy that took eight years to break in 18 months.
And yes I misspelled the Tan Man’s name on purpose…
Ispent Saturday afternoon watching the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” and enjoyed it for the most part. But reading some of the tweets from the pundit class showed some of them missed the point. The only problem I had with it, is the idea that the political insanity comes from both sides equally. That’s a false equivalency.
People like David Corn and Talking Point Memo’s Brian Beutler seemed under the wrong impression that the rally was a GOTV rally and complained throughout that no one on stage mentioned voting. Mainstream media outlets also assumed it was a partisan political rally because they tripped over themselves to ban their employees from attending or participating in it.
Jon Stewart made clear that it was a comedy show to point out the problem of our current rancid political debate in the country not a GOTV show. It was definitely not partisan.
While I do agree that we need more civility, the rancid aggressiveness is one sided and the side that is most aggressive is the Tea Party/GOP side. They need to tone down thousands of percent more than those on the left side.
That is where Stewart is naive. There are two (or more) points of view but NOT all are equally valid. Most from the right are based on complete lies.
I agree we should work on toning down the rhetoric but progressives and others on the left side should NEVER drop our guard and hope and pray the right joins us in working together. That’s why the President and the Democrats are going to take a hit on election day.
How many times do we need to be beat up before people like Stewart get it?
The Tea Party/GOP thinks you are stupid and want to keep you that way. How else could the Big Corporate world, who back the Tea Party/GOP, convince you to vote against your own best interests? How else could you complain about government run health care before going to a doctor appointment paid for by Medicare? Why else would the TP/GOP candidates complain about deficits yet want to give bail outs and welfare to the Big Corps. The Tea Party/GOP doesn’t care about you.
They hope you don’t remember we had tax cuts from President Bush in 2001 and they didn’t help the economy. Ask yourself – where are those jobs that Bush promised? Over 8 years he only helped create a net of 3 million jobs. President Clinton helped create around 26 million in his 8 years.
They hope you don’t remember that they blocked any attempt to hold the bankers that crashed our economy accountable for their crimes. If the banks hadn’t been allowed to do what they did by the relaxing and non-enforcement of banking policy (changed in the mid-1990s by the GOP), and if the banks hadn’t relaxed their own standards to keep up the housing bubble, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
They want you to forget they got us into an unnecessary war in Iraq based on lies. There were no WMDs and Saddam Hussein had NOTHING to do with 9/11.
That is why the GOP lost in a big way in 2008.
Voting for the TP/GOP or staying home means one wants to continue the failed Republican policies of 2001-2008, messing with programs that help real people like the Health Reform Act and Social Security, and electing someone who wants to deny reproductive rights for women, for a start. Not to mention the other rights and liberties they want to roll back.
Since President Obama took office the TP/GOP voted against the unemployed, health care reform, small businesses, against a bill that would prevent medical expenses to be included in credit scoring, against veterans, and voted against the 9/11 first responders. And they are doing it funded by anonymous and in some cases foreign big business interests.
The TP/GOP doesn’t care about YOU.
Two years is not long enough to fire the Democrats. Bush and the TP/GOP messed up the country over 8 years. We almost slipped into a depression. Although not the best results, the Democrats passed a health care reform package, fiance reform, equal pay rights for women, helping bring the promise of the Internet to the country side, rescuing the auto industry from collapse, and much more even while the cheap labor conservatives in the TP/GOP said “No!”. And they said “No!” about everything coming from the Democrats.
The TP/GOP doesn’t care about YOU. They only care to make the rich richer and middle class extinct. They want to GO BACK to what the world was like before January 20th 2009. They want you to forget what it was REALLY like back then. They want to create a fascist state where the merchant class owns and rules the nation while us regular people SERVE them. The top six laws the TP/GOP think need to go away help a majority of people in this country. Voting for them means you don’t want social security, Medicare, Minimum Wage, and Unemployment Benefits to start.
If that’s what you want, if you want to prove you are stupid, then vote for the Tea Party/GOP or stay home, but don’t complain when you are not better off then you in 2012 then you are today.
Ireally don’t get it. The recently released “Pledge for America” is a 45 page reheat of current Republican talking points which themselves were rehashes from the past 15 years. Do they not remember the Bush years? Does the media? If people accept the pledge and elect Republicans we can go back to those days of Bush when the banks collapsed, we were fighting two wars without end, and health care costs were a threat to national security.
What will the pledge do?
* It pledges to continue the same failed policies that brought us the worst recession since the Great Depression. (Think Progress)
* It is an oath to Big Oil. (Wonk Room)
* It is a backdoor path to bring in Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) controversial budget roadmap that privatizes Medicare and Social Security. (Wonk Room)
* It repeals the Affordable Care Act and replaces it with provisions from the Affordable Care Act. (Think Progress)
* It endorses Arizona’s deputization of immigration law. (Wonk Room)
* It embraces a radical “Tenther” view of the U.S. Constitution. (Think Progress)
What will it do to deficits and debt?
* American Progress’s Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden examined the “Pledge” and found that implementing the plan’s proposals would increase the federal budget deficit and accelerate growth in federal debt. (CAP)
I may have my issues with the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats but I sure as hell don’t want to go back to the Bush years when the GOP was in charge.
Former US Senator Mike DeWine was defeated in 2006 for reelection and pretty much disappeared from the political scene. This election season he decided he wanted to be the Ohio Attorney General. He is running against the current holder Richard Cordray. Looking at the first campaign ad DeWine has put out proves he has no idea what the Attorney General really does and he hopes voters won’t know either.
It starts off with a woman named Alice in a courtroom in front of an easel and poster board. Alice’s title says Assistant Prosecutor Greene County. She says Mike DeWine started in the same courtroom as a “Tough on Crime Prosecutor” and that he put rapists, pedophiles, and murders in prison.
He may have had quite a few cases that involved rapists, pedophiles, and murders as he worked in the Prosecutors office from 1972 to 1980. He was elected County Prosecutor in 1976. Greene County Ohio is in the Dayton Metro area and has Wright Patterson AFB and Wright State University but it also has some rural areas. Xenia, the county seat only has 24,000 residents now and back in the 1970’s the county had approximately 125,000 people. By comparison the city of Columbus Ohio – the state capital had approximately 550,000 people in the 1970’s. Even today Greene County only has two court rooms so I doubt DeWine had a heavy case load and if he did he probably had more thefts and domestic disputes to settle than murders and rapes. Not to mention that DeWine hasn’t been in a court room since at least 1980 when he moved to the Ohio State Senate.
In the next segment, Alice points out on the easel that DeWine would stop corruption. Yes, an attorney general is tasked in prosecuting corruption. Okay so he knows part of the job. Or maybe he doesn’t.
In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, DeWine indicated that Cordray should have gotten involved in the corruption probe of Cuyahoga County officials including former county Auditor Frank Russo and Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora.
“We had public corruption, which strikes at the core of the integrity of government, and for almost 10 months you sat on the sidelines,” DeWine told Cordray. “That is not my vision of how this office ought to be run.”
“There is nothing, Mike, you can identify that you would have done. . . that would have furthered the game or advanced the ball,” Cordray shot back, noting that the federal investigation was underway long before he took office. “They didn’t really want state or locals involved because they really weren’t sure where all of this led. I’ve conducted myself so as to be useful to these investigations, not to grandstand or score political points.”
Cordray could have convened the Ohio Organized Crime Investigations Commission to establish a task force to investigate county corruption — perhaps bringing charges under state ethics laws, DeWine suggested. “This is organized crime, he could have convened a task force, he could have said that we need to be involved in this,” he said.
So Mike DeWine would want the state to stick it’s nose into a Federal corruption probe and possibly mess up federal charges just so you can say “we did something”.
Next in the campaign ad, Alice says DeWine will fix the state crime lab. The Attorney General is responsible for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCI) that includes the main state criminal lab. DeWine is upset over an issue with delays in DNA testing.
DeWine called the state-run crime lab “the poster child for what is wrong with state government,” saying that there are “huge delays” in processing DNA evidence. He spotlighted a Marietta rape case in which it took 11 months for DNA evidence to be processed.
The problems “didn’t start with Richard Cordray, but they have not been fixed by Richard Cordray,” DeWine said, adding that he would call for an audit and bring in experts to troubleshoot how to improve the crime lab’s efficiency.
The Ohio edition of PolitiFact checked DeWine’s statement on BCI and said it was half true:
We find that DeWine’s statement is accurate when he states that the processing of DNA evidence is currently taking “up to six months,” as at least the Marietta example far exceeds that window. Even Cordray’s own statistics show that processing of DNA evidence stretches beyond six months in about 7 percent of cases, including at least three cases not shipped to an outside lab.
But the BCI statistics Cordray’s office provided show that more than 90 times in 100 the processing time falls somewhat short of “up to” six month mark cited by DeWine. Cordray’s staff also cites records that show that the turnaround time has dropped by about one-third. That’s clearly additional contextual information not given by DeWine that tends to undercut the clear inference of his statement — that DNA cases are dragging on for long stretches of time under Cordray.
Maybe DeWine thinks that the crime lab should operate as fast as the ones on TV. Also an issue with DNA testing doesn’t seem enough to complain that the whole lab needs to be fixed. The lab does a lot more than DNA testing.
Back to Alice.
Next she points out DeWine will “enforce the law” which is what an Attorney General does except in Ohio the AG is focused more on state wide civil crime, state wide commercial fraud, and state appellate cases not violent crimes. Local jurisdictions deal with violent crime. The video shows DeWine standing among police officers as if he is directing them. I would be shocked if any sitting Attorney General would show up at an active crime scene and direct law enforcement personnel unless they have been called in by a local prosecutor or a court and even if that happened the AG wouldn’t show up in person.
The Special Prosecutions Unit is composed of career prosecutors who, at the request of county prosecutors, prosecute serious felony crimes throughout Ohio. The unit may be appointed by the court to serve as a special prosecutor when the county prosecutor has a conflict of interest or may assist a county prosecutor when he requests additional resources. Areas of focus include homicides, child sex offenses, white collar crime, and alleged wrongdoing by public officials.
The day to day job of the state AG is not like a local prosecutor and what cases the office works on is limited.
Of course since DeWine is a Republican he throws in a bone about “protecting jobs”. Alice tells us he won’t “kill jobs or hurt small business with endless lawsuits…”
So let me get this straight. DeWine will enforce the law except if it kills jobs or hurts small business?
Yep he is a Republican – protecting the business interests over the interests of the state.
The commercial is a great example of a GOP candidate making his or her quest for an office more important than the actual day to day operation of the position. My guess is DeWine is hoping the low information voter will assume wrongly that the Ohio Attorney General is suppose to be a tough crime fighter putting away the criminal riffraff – unless that might hurt jobs or small businesses.
By the way, the woman named Alice in the ad is Mike DeWine’s daughter so of course she has no bias at all.
