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REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS
Republicans secret meeting on Inauguration Day
Saturday, April 28, 2012 5:47 AM
NIKI2
Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...
Quote:Democrats have rounded on revelations about a private dinner of House Republicans on inauguration day in 2009 in which they plotted a campaign of obstruction against newly installed president Barack Obama. During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected. The disclosures – described as "appalling and sad" by Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod – undermine Republican claims that the president alone is to blame for the partisan deadlock in Washington. A detailed account of who was present at the dinner on that January 20 night and the plan they worked out to bring down Obama is provided by Robert Draper in 'Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the US House of Representatives', published this week. In his book, Draper opens with the heady atmosphere in Washington on the days running up to the inauguration and the day itself, which attracted 1.8 million to the mall to witness Obama being sworn in as America's first black president. Those numbers contributed to a growing sense of unease among Republicans as much the defeat in the White House race the previous November. The 15 Republicans were in a sombre mood as they gathered at the Caucus Room in Washington, an upscale restaurant where a New York strip steak costs $51. Attending the dinner were House members Eric Cantor, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and Pete Sessions. From the Senate were Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, Jim DeMint, John Ensign and Jon Kyl. Others present were former House Speaker and future – and failed – presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who organised the dinner and sent out the invitations. The dinner table was set in a square at Luntz's request so everyone could see one another and talk freely. The session lasted four hours and by the end the sombre mood had lifted: they had conceived a plan. They would take back the House in November 2010, which they did, and use it as a spear to mortally wound Obama in 2011 and take back the Senate and White House in 2012, Draper writes. "If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," said Keven McCarthy, quoted by Draper. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign." The Republicans have done that, bringing Washington to a near standstill several times during Obama's first term over debt and other issues.
Saturday, April 28, 2012 6:54 AM
GEEZER
Keep the Shiny side up
Saturday, April 28, 2012 6:56 AM
Saturday, April 28, 2012 9:29 AM
Quote:Originally posted by Niki2: How absurdly irrelevant. That has "jack and/or shit" (I love that!) to do with the issue, and is a truly feeble. Makes me not only disrespect your attitudes, but disrespect your intellect as well.
Saturday, April 28, 2012 12:45 PM
AURAPTOR
America loves a winner!
Saturday, April 28, 2012 12:48 PM
Saturday, April 28, 2012 1:27 PM
Quote: Yeah, sure Raptor; a bunch of politicians who got elected on the fear of the American people, and on their promises they would create jobs, who then proceeded to do NOT A THING about jobs except to KILL them and instead focused entirely on abortion, immigration, killing unions and putting more people out of work. We sure need lots more of those, you betcha.
Saturday, April 28, 2012 3:22 PM
Quote:Originally posted by Niki2: I do not believe for one minute that Democrats decided at any meeting to obstruct EVERY SINGLE THING any Republican President proposed, even if it was for the good of the country or the American people, just for the sake of bringing that President down.
Saturday, April 28, 2012 4:15 PM
6IXSTRINGJACK
Sunday, April 29, 2012 3:50 AM
HERO
Sunday, April 29, 2012 4:04 AM
WHOZIT
Sunday, April 29, 2012 7:01 AM
KWICKO
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)
Quote:Originally posted by Geezer: Quote:Originally posted by Niki2: I do not believe for one minute that Democrats decided at any meeting to obstruct EVERY SINGLE THING any Republican President proposed, even if it was for the good of the country or the American people, just for the sake of bringing that President down. Yet you apparently believe that seven Republican Representatives and five Republican Senators, very few of them with any seniority, had one four-hour "secret" meeting, including dinner, and molded the course of not only Republican, but national politics for the last four years. You must consider them pretty clever guys.
Sunday, April 29, 2012 7:20 AM
Quote:Originally posted by Kwicko: I probably give them less credit for setting their party's entire agenda than some here give "Obama's anti-bullying czar"...
Sunday, April 29, 2012 8:33 AM
Quote: Yet you apparently believe that seven Republican Representatives and five Republican Senators, very few of them with any seniority, had one four-hour "secret" meeting, including dinner, and molded the course of not only Republican, but national politics for the last four years. You must consider them pretty clever guys.
Quote:"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," Draper quotes McCarthy as saying. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."
Quote:the relationship House Republican leaders have with the Tea Party freshmen who swept into office during the midterm elections; the 87 new members of the House constitute more than a third of the 239-member Republican caucus and are the reason the GOP now controls the House. Nearly 40 percent of them are self-styled 'citizen politicians' who have never held office and who rode into Washington on the Tea Party wave. They ... constitute the most formidable power bloc on Capitol Hill.
Sunday, April 29, 2012 8:41 AM
Sunday, April 29, 2012 10:12 AM
Quote:Originally posted by AURaptor: Quote:Originally posted by Kwicko: I probably give them less credit for setting their party's entire agenda than some here give "Obama's anti-bullying czar"... That doesn't even make any sense. Dan Savage is truly colossal a-hole, and a whiney, arrogant, petulant brat. He said what he said, no matter how much you want to try to dismiss it or deny that he has strong ties w/ this administration.
Monday, April 30, 2012 3:16 AM
Quote:Originally posted by Niki2: Challenge on every single bill; screw whether it's good for the country, we gotta defeat EVERYTHING, so we can get power next time around. Yeah, I really respect that kind of cleverness. Talk about "ignoring what Americans wanted". The American people wanted HELP, and jobs, neither of which they had a snowball's chance in hell of getting from these guys!
Monday, April 30, 2012 3:18 AM
Quote:Originally posted by Niki2: Amazing, aren't our little right-wing "buddies"? Their responses are moronic for the most part, deliberately blind partisan idiocy for the rest. Obviously not worth bothering with further.
Monday, April 30, 2012 5:03 AM
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 6:21 PM
OONJERAH
Wednesday, May 2, 2012 2:55 AM
Quote:Originally posted by Niki2: Keep trying the "15 people". I'm sure it works for you; it doesn't for much of anyone else. Gawd forbid you should admit "15 of the most powerful people in the Congress".
Wednesday, May 2, 2012 4:52 PM
Quote:Originally posted by Oonjerah: Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem => http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Commu- nist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates. It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted. ...
Thursday, May 3, 2012 3:43 AM
Thursday, May 3, 2012 6:53 AM
Quote:We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. “Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach. It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct. The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post. What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. From the day he entered Congress in 1979, Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House: convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority. It took him 16 years, but by bringing ethics charges against Democratic leaders; provoking them into overreactions that enraged Republicans and united them to vote against Democratic initiatives; exploiting scandals to create even more public disgust with politicians; and then recruiting GOP candidates around the country to run against Washington, Democrats and Congress, Gingrich accomplished his goal. Ironically, after becoming speaker, Gingrich wanted to enhance Congress’s reputation and was content to compromise with President Bill Clinton when it served his interests. But the forces Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines, activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base — most recently represented by tea party activists — and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress. Grover Norquist, meanwhile, founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 and rolled out his Taxpayer Protection Pledge the following year. The pledge, which binds its signers to never support a tax increase (that includes closing tax loopholes), had been signed as of last year by 238 of the 242 House Republicans and 41 of the 47 GOP senators, according to ATR. The Norquist tax pledge has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible. For Republicans concerned about a primary challenge from the right, the failure to sign such pledges is simply too risky. Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.
Thursday, May 3, 2012 12:32 PM
RIONAEIRE
Beir bua agus beannacht
Thursday, May 3, 2012 1:19 PM
Thursday, May 3, 2012 3:03 PM
Quote:Originally posted by AURaptor: Cynthia WAS the cutest little communist in Congress, as Neal Boortz loved to say. I believe she even went down to Cuba once, and worked in the sugar cane fields for Castro. She does love her some communism.
Friday, May 4, 2012 2:26 AM
Quote:Originally posted by Niki2: Seniority, by the way, or length of time in Congress, has nothing to do with POWER.
Friday, May 4, 2012 4:36 AM
Saturday, May 19, 2012 4:26 AM
ANTHONYT
Freedom is Important because People are Important
Saturday, May 19, 2012 4:33 AM
Saturday, May 19, 2012 6:51 AM
FREMDFIRMA
Quote:Originally posted by ANTHONYT: I would be more shocked if a handful of people from a political party held a secret meeting where they discussed how best to serve the American people.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 5:52 AM
Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: It's either "this way" or "that way".... Meh... The only time our personal liberties are the most secure is when our President is the opposing party as our Congress, and that's how I vote, accordingly. When we get Mitt into the President's Chair (which is an inevatibility now), I will vote for Dems in the congress in 2014. The MOST damage done to all of us since 2000 was when Bush Jr had a Rethug majority congress and when Barry had a Demonocrat majority. Keep piddling about your BS issues and towing the party lines people... It's the quickest way to the 3rd world nation they seem to be wanting us to become on both "sides". Our Government serves the People best when they don't change a thing and when they spend 2 years in deadlock fighting each other. They're there to work, full time, making more laws to restrict how you live.... both sides.... I, for one, relish the times when an "X" President is constantly fighting a "Y" Congress. Nothing changes.... All I'm saying is that in the last 20 years that I've understood politics, and learning every day, that things have only progressively gotten worse with every new regulation and new government agency. The impotent man's (woman's) only weapon in their arsenal is to keep them fighting each other. We can only keep that up for so long though. I look forward to the day we call each other "comrade" and I'll know how to sniff you ratting bastards out from the true patriots who can take this country back.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 9:51 AM
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 12:43 PM
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 3:08 AM
Quote:Originally posted by Niki2: Why? I'm sure he's tickled pink that the Republicans planned from the very start to do nothing except oppose anything Obama or the Dems proposed. The logic of which escapes me, by the way. If the government had done "nothing", women still couldn't vote (which he'd probably love, too), Black people would still be counted as 3/5ths of a person--and still slaves--businesses could gleefully spout toxic EVERYTHING in every direction, and gazillion other things. Sure, they get carried away and some of it is bullshit, but do nothing at all? --well, but then, that's nothing new, is it? We've seen the results of government "doing nothing" since Obama was elected. Downgrading of our credit rating, massive gridlock over raising the debt ceiling, healthcare STILL not dealt with because the half measures the Dems were forced to accept benefit the insurance companies more than anyone (which now has turned into the lovely right-wing talking point that "Obama had a majority and didn't do anything...good for a laugh), and fights over every damned thing. Yeah, that's what we pay them for, good boys. ] The funniest thing about all of this slander against me today is that it's coming from the exact opposite people it was coming from when GWB was president. I can't fault, mainly you and Kwick, for that though since you weren't even here back when I posted regularly before though. Auraptor and a few others on the "right" side had a lot of words against my views back then too. If you haven't noticed by now, there's never been a single post of solidarity between the two of us the entire time I've posted here. I have nothing against him, and he probably doesn't have anything against me either, but we've got enough of a history that even if we see eye to eye on something we're not going to give each other handys for it. Really, if you look back, since I've started posting again, we've probably had ZERO interaction with each other on any single thread. The only reason we don't is because largely, I'm no longer posting things that he disagrees with. I'm just saying that because somebody doesn't agree with your mentality, that doesn't automatically make them a Republican. I sure as hell don't classify myself as a Republican. Kind of like today, when I post about things we can generally agree on, I don't hear anything from either of you. It's only when I post about things that I do agree with Righties about that you tear into me, throw feces at me and label me. Unfortunately for our friendships, we live under an administration that ensures that most of our conversations until early 2013 will continue this way. I look forward to being here with you both in 2013 and beyond, and we will be much more aligned in our answers to the relevant posts when Romney is President. I'm really looking forward to it, because you two are absolutely vicious in your posts. You're very mean spirited and hateful. As frustrated as I was with the "other side" when I was Bush Bashing, I never really felt hurt like I do after reading your posts. Whatever.... Here's looking forward to making sure Romney's only a 1 term President.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 3:24 AM
Quote:The funniest thing about all of this slander against me today is that it's coming from the exact opposite people it was coming from when GWB was president. I can't fault, mainly you and Kwick, for that though since you weren't even here back when I posted regularly before though.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 4:19 AM
Quote:Originally posted by Kwicko: Quote:The funniest thing about all of this slander against me today is that it's coming from the exact opposite people it was coming from when GWB was president. I can't fault, mainly you and Kwick, for that though since you weren't even here back when I posted regularly before though. Is that another one of those things you just "know", Jack, without any need for facts? I've been here longer than you have, unless you were using one of your other names prior to 2006. ;) "I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero "I've not watched the video either, or am incapable of intellectually dealing with the substance of this thread, so I'll instead act like a juvenile and claim victory..." - Rappy
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