Governor, lately you've been pitching, twitching and puffing a lot of hot air about secession.
Texas is a real unique place all right and the Governor is a major contributor to its uniqueness.
Come on Governor, put your money where your mouth is. Just do it. Leave already. You can take all of your worshipers, i.e. secessionists, teabaggers, Birchers, birthers, racists and xenophobes with you.
Hit the road dude.
Leave, dude. Voters are the meanest old women you will have ever seen. You won't be packing any of our money with you when you leave, either.
But you can, Sir, help yourself to all of the creationism, witchcraft and voodoo science text books that you and your supporters put in our schools in yet another endless crusade of right wing conservative efforts to dumb down the children of Texas.
I'm sure you all will find a cozy place to establish a new Republic, Governor. Hell, Sir, you could name your new territory the New Republic of Teabagistan, Secessistan or Birchistan in honor of your strongest supporters. Below is a little reminder to help you sort out the guiding principles of your new Republic.
This would be a perfect time for you to leave Governor. After all, Bill White, Houston's former and very popular mayor raised $2.2 million last month. So far he has over $9 mil in his war chest.
While voters in our groups gave the president higher marks on the economy after the speech than before, that was clearly driven by his new priority, jobs, and perhaps a clearer understanding of the difference between Bush era policies and the new one. Still, the president and the Democrats in Congress do not yet have a narrative or a framework to explain their economic policies in a period where the gap grows between macro and micro growth.
To make matters worse, there is the perception by some fairly smart people that there may not be a narrative to be found. We may be living in an America that is ungovernable.
System Failure Toward the end of the decade, as the establishment definitively rebuked Bush and sought to distance itself from his failures, the big-tent center-left coalition took on an influential constituency--the Colin Powells and Warren Buffetts--who didn't want reform so much as they wanted restoration. This was reflected in a strange internal tension in the Obama campaign rhetoric that simultaneously promised both: change you can believe in and, as Obama said at a March 2008 appearance in Pennsylvania, a foreign policy that is "actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father."
If the working hypothesis that bound this unwieldy coalition together--independents, most liberals and the Washington establishment--was that the nation's troubles were chiefly caused by the occupants of the White House, then this past year has served as a kind of natural experiment. We changed the independent variable (the party and people in power) and can observe the results. It is hard, I think, to come to any conclusion but that the former hypothesis was insufficient.
The Teabaggers, Sarah Palin, they are a natural outgrowth of the elemental , gut level perception that things have become fundamentally unhinged. The pain that this movement seems to represent is all to real. The fear that this pain spawns leads them to flail about for reasons, causes, ways out, and heaven help anyone who has the responsibility, the job of trying to fix the mess - which maybe in the short term unfixable.
Here in Texas, the fallout of misgovernance is all around us. Recall our rankings in education, child welfare, prisons, care for the mentally ill, juvenile justice. Don't forget our defective revenue system make worse and worse by the Governor's mindless mantra of cutting taxes.
To all of you who have written emails and comments, I really wish I could respond to every one of you. I truly appreciate your taking the time to write, even if we may be on different sides of the political fence. If there is one thing that my politically mixed San Francisco/Idaho background has taught me, it is benefit of continuing a discussion even if you don't agree. Too often these days, the Left and the Right immediately shut down if you are deemed to be from the opposing camp. Here's to good discussion even if we don't agree.
Since the Republican Party has obviously outsourced its legislative responsibilities to lobbyists, it seems that the GOP is no longer capable of anything other than sucking up to the demands of big moneyed corporate interests that apparently drive the power in Washington. Republican lawmakers obviously serve as mere tools for the Wall St. and every other fat cat that can and will conscript taxpayer dollars for its own purposes. Today Republicans seem capable of nothing other than complete and total obstruction. As Paul Krugman of the New York times writes:
Yes, the filibuster-imposed need to get votes from "centrist" senators has led to a bill that falls a long way short of ideal. Worse, some of those senators seem motivated largely by a desire to protect the interests of insurance companies - with the possible exception of Mr. Lieberman, who seems motivated by sheer spite. (The bold is mine.)
But let's all take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed - and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago. With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.
At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don't get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.
All of this would be paid for in large part with the first serious effort ever to rein in rising health care costs.
Get it folks? Republicans want to continue with the insurance company's agenda of either robbing us blind or killing us off by denying the care we and our employer's pay for.
The health care industry lobbyists are holding a gun to the heads of Republican lawmakers like Snowe, Blue Dog Democrats and sometimes D, sometimes I, sometimes R, whatever works best for him, Joe Lieberman, CT-IABMAV (It is all about me and my vendetta.)
Of course there is not a civil war brewing in the Republican Party. Someone just made it up. But a leading conservative has recently called the non-civil non-war an impending bloodbath.
After the havoc the Republican Party and its newly formed teabagger faction have wreaked on this country from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush and culminating with the horror of George W. Bush and his neocon policies, a bloodbath sounds just fine by me. Indeed, one is long overdue.
According to yesterday's Houston Chronicle, the teabaggers in Texas are fed up and want to throw all of the bums out. In Texas, the bums happen to be Republicans.
Even Rick Perry is a target of this group because he apparently is not conservative enough.
While it's too early to determine if the Tea Party movement will prove to be a durable political force, its candidates could prove a costly and unwanted distraction for establishment Republicans who would rather be aiming their fire at Democrats. Case in point: the GOP race for governor, where Tea Party ally Debra Medina of Wharton has announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination against incumbent Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, whom she dismisses derisively as "get-along-style politicians."
There are many ways in which the health care titans and their tools in the Republican Party manipulate and play upon the ignorance and fears of senior citizens and under-educated Americans. Most of its targeted base is the most vulnerable. It is older folks who are sadly, the easiest prey for utterly evil sharks and profiteers. Next up are under-educated and low information Americans. These groups provide a solid anchor in the crumbling GOP base and these supporters also happen to be Rush Limbaugh's frequent listeners.
But there is a third group and this is the one that is the most sinister and dangerous. They are not old folks who are fearful about losing their Medicare benefits. They are not the folks who are honestly confused about what health care reform will mean for them. As Paul Krugman wrote in his article The Town Hall Mob today.
Now, people who don't know that Medicare is a government program probably aren't reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they're probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they've heard about what he's doing, than to who he is.
That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that's behind the "birther" movement, which denies Mr. Obama's citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don't know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn't be surprising if it's a substantial fraction.
And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.
Does this sound familiar? It should: it's a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.
Indeed, this is the group of folks who despise President Obama and everything he stands for. They are the ones who attended Palin's hate fests in droves. They are the ones who screamed "Kill Him!" and "Arab!" at Palin's potential lynch mob scenes. These very same sick and twisted cretins listen to every hateful word spewed from the mouths of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other hate mongers on the right.
The crazed racists made their forceful presence known at a town hall in Tampa yesterday.
Introducing the corporate funded shills for health care lobbyists and the GOP.
Gene Green of Houston held a town hall meeting recently where he and a woman in the audience outwitted and shut down the teabagger looney tunes. It seems that the vast majority of the attendees either had Medicare or health care insurance. Only a handful had neither. Not all in attendance lived in Mr. Green's district.
According to a report in Think Progress, a Democratic Congressman was allegedly physically assaulted at a town hall meeting. This story is breaking and there are few details at this time. I will update this diary as more information is gathered.
As lobbyist-run groups encourage conservative activists to "rattle" members of Congress at local town hall events, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the president of the freshman Democratic class has revealed that "at least one freshman Democrat" has already been "physically assaulted at a local event." Connolly warned that conservative groups had taken things to a "dangerous level"
Diarist Rashaverakover at Daily Kos reminds us how committed leading Republicans are to these extremely angry and disruptive town hall meetings in which no discussion or dialogue is possible.
