• Tag Archives Republicans

  • Go, Santorum

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                      Garden Planning Moon

    Hey, how about that Santorum?  Way to mix it up.  The longer the Republicans savage each other and the longer the nomination drags out without a clear victor the better.  If the  economy can right itself a bit more, unemployment come down and consumer spending go up (think those two are related?) the Democrats might look better in the fall.

    I’m working right here at home, filling up my day and working out at twilight, then reading.  A couple of tours tomorrow and I’m looking forward to them right now because I’ve been writing and doing Latin for 5 days in a row with a bit of a break on Monday.  The productivity feels great, but a change of pace will be welcome.

    Grandson Gabe has a bad cold or croup or something respiratory.  Grandma Kate got a chance to pass on some knowledge to Jon and Jen last night.  She’s a good one to have your corner if you have a kid.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Family Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • Speaking of Oscillations

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

    Gingrich wins.  Romney won.  Santorum won.  The longer and more divisive the Republican primary season, the better.  Let them shred each other.  It could give Obama a chance he may not deserve, but one I hope he gets.

    On the other hand.  A sharply divided and ideologically splintered opposition can make governing a real headache, especially if the Republicans retain control of the House and take the Senate.  This latter is possible, with seven Democratic seats up and only two Republican.

    The partisan in me wants to watch the Republicans blow themselves up, weaken their party back to the special interest group it used to be, but I know that’s not a good way forward for our country.  We need two parties, a more conservative, fiscally conscious and moderately bellicose one and one dedicated to justice, economic and social.  These are two legitimate strains of  thought when it comes to understanding and creating policy for our country.  The best governance comes from these two impulses fighting it out in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

    Given my druthers we would move toward the democratic socialism of  Europe, covering health care, creating affordable housing, solid support and aid for those who cannot find work, seeing that everyone gets as much education as they can tolerate, and providing solid retirement benefits.

    Martin Luther King said it best:  “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

    I believed that in 1964 and I believe it today.  We must keep working, not become faint-hearted or victims of despair.  Just when greed seems to have gained the high ground, just when hatred seems stronger than love, just when the 1% seem to obscure the 99, just then  will the high ground transform to common ground, love embrace hatred and the 99% become seen and heard and felt.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged

  • When Satire Seems Impossible

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain                            Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Republican presidential candidates.  Gingrich writes alternative history fiction, some of which I understand is very good.  As long he sticks to fiction, I’ll pay attention; when he blurs the line, taking the fictional world of alternative history into the day to day world of real politics, I shudder.

    Mitt Romney has the charisma of a cheese cloth, but hey, we Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis, John Kerry and Al Gore.  Combined they have the charismetrics of soggy diapers.

    Michele sees Romney, Gingrich and Perry as the same.  This might be one of those times when Michele and I agree.  Problem is, I’d lump her in right in there with those three.  Loony or boring.  Quite a combination of attributes.

    Right now, with the Iraq war ended, Osama dead, the economy showing signs of life and congress with a lower popularity rating than, than, well, than the Freshkills landfill, I can see a situation where Obama backs into a second term.  Might happen.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Politics US History 📎and tagged

  • The Deal. The Old Deal, Not A Big Deal.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mid-Summer                                                               Waxing Honey Flow Moon

    Apres deluge.  Drove into St. Paul this morning, a long chunk of the ride behind a pick-up with Louisiana plates.  Felt like the bayou during the tail end of a hurricane.  Driving in Minnesota seems to perplex our citizens when there is a significant amount of precipitation.  Makes the whole driving experience a little like pin ball.

    Big political news.  A deal.  Done on the backs of the poor and the K-12 education system.  Brilliant.  A Republican coup for which they need to be held responsible come 2012.  Of course, any election results next year may have a null effect if the world ends in December before the victors can take office.  I’m not counting on the end of the world however.

    The Star-Tribune ran an article that said, and I believe it to be true, that the Republican focus has shifted from balanced budgets to smaller government.  Evidence for this in the article was the Republican agreement to a Federal budget that didn’t balance for three decades.  The same tone has sharpened and polarized the budget debate here in Minnesota.  To the extent that this focus remains and clarifies for Republican pols the situation becomes a struggle over the meaning and purpose of government.

    It is arguable though, and I would agree with it, that electoral politics are so broken in the United States that our two parties are twiddle dum and twiddle dee.  That is, both parties have become lapdogs for the corporate oligarchy that runs America, bending policy and legislation to suit the flood of money that washes over each election cycle and that gets rinsed in the legislative session that follows.  Finally, the public is hung out to dry.

    Still, I find it important to engage party politics because there are so many short term issues effected by the differences between dum and dee.  Read the details of the budget compromise and you’ll see the kind of things I’m talking about.

    To engage party politics as a long term political solution, however, will not get us where we need to go.  We need to pick up the banner of economic justice and push equity in every venue we can.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Check My Logic, Please

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mid-Summer                                                  Waxing Honey Flow Moon

    “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Cicero

    Not sure where this is headed with gadgets like the Kindle, but Cicero and I have something in common.  In fact, this room in which I write has a lot of soul.  Piles of it.  Shelves of it.  Open and closed soul.  Big and little soul.  Profound and silly soul.

    Check me on my logic here.  Banks and hedge funds almost sink our economy, the largest in the world.  Through dogged work of two administrations, one Republican and one Democrat, the looming depression did not come to pass, but in the process the government had to shovel billions and billions of dollars (and as Everett Dirksen famously said, “A million here, a million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.) into the sink holes that so-called premier banks had become.  The banks took the money, then promptly began foreclosing on all the loans they themselves had sold, blaming the purchasers for making unwise investments.  Scroll forward a bit more than a year and the Republicans in Congress, with a straight face, demand a deal because of the sky-rocketing national debt.  Created by those very same bankers who bankroll the Republican party and, oh by the way, sunk the economy.

    How would we deal with the national debt created by the government bail outs?  Cut programs that help the poor and the elderly.  This whole scenario beggars the imagination.  It is the most corrupt, venal, embarrassing, immoral action possible.  Bail out the rich, then use the bail out created debt as an excuse for trimming Medicare, cutting back on social welfare programs?  The ninth pit of hell.  Dante’s inferno.  Look it up.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Humanities Politics US History 📎and tagged

  • Coping With Change

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                            Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

    A meeting with lobbyists and politically minded folks this morning, trying to suss out the impact of the Republican wins in the elections.  The energy in the room was good, nothing energizes political folks like a solid enemy.  enemy

    I did not get a ticket this time.  My patience was at guru on the mountain top level, except for that one s.o.b.  The road passed underneath me as a calm ribbon of stability in a changing world, something strange like that.

    I still don’t know these folks well enough to participate much and my knowledge level about the ins and outs of state legislative and administrative politics confines me, too.  Won’t last forever.


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • Sigh.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                        Waning Harvest Moon

    First the Vikings, now the Democrats.  Geez.

    As I said a while back, the political scene, long a part of my life, a passionate part, has begun to recede for me.  I see this by-election as a cyclical matter, not a rejection of Obama and progressive ideas, but a cry of pain from people injured the great recession.  An angry elephant has stomped through the polls this November election day, an elephant moving with great feeling, a powerful force in politics.  Yes, this will slow down Obama’s progressive agenda.  He will have to work in a more measured, less dramatic way, but, as I’ve read more than one place, that may well be to his advantage in 2012.

    (I’d be happier if I watched the election returns on Ka’anapali beach.)

    It is not so much a time to wonder what went wrong from a Democratic perspective, as it is a time to reconsider how communicating the gains of the past two years has fallen so far short.  It is a time to consider how to pursue the great issues yet unaddressed, like climate change and immigration, in the small ways that will lay the base for further work in the 2012 Congress.  I went into this election proud of my leftist politics and I remain so.  Over time movements toward greater equality erode the opposition, witness the number of conservative women running in this election.  Over time matters of mutual care and compassion like Social Security, Medicare and now the National Health Care legislation become new bricks in a solid foundation for all Americans, rich and poor.  The economy will right itself and the timing of recovery matters more politically than it should, because the tools used to massage the economy are gross and work only over time.

    So, we’ll have to learn how to work with a whole new legislative alignment.  That’s the nature of politics.  This is still a center/right country, so we have to be glad when we have the chance to make progress, philosophical when we can’t.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged

  • Poison Fruit

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                        Waxing Awakening Moon

    Spring has sprung, then it sprang back.  23 today.  Not prime gardening weather yet.

    The conservative embrace of right wing populists has begun to bear poisoned fruit again.  They referred to Obama and African-American congressmen as niggers, Barney Frank as a faggot and phoned in death threat to several members of the House who switched their votes on health care reform.  The great irony of the moral majority, Christian right, tea-party tea bags is that by all normal political calculation they should vote Democrat.  They are, in the large part, blue collar folks, some living on minimum wage, many no doubt eligible for the health insurance provisions just passed by Congress, but conservative strategists have intentionally chosen to underwrite their social prejudices against people of color, homosexuals and folks with a college education in order to collect them into the party’s ranks.

    This is not a deal with the devil; it is the devil making a deal.

    I know these folks because I grew up with them in Indiana.  They first came to national notice in Indiana when 30% of the Hoosier electorate voted for George Wallace for President.  They were first and second generation folks from Appalachia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee and worked in the automobile and other heavy manufacturing centers in the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio area, the area long since identified as the rust belt.  Union workers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, these constituencies voted a straight Democratic party ticket in line with their economic self-interest.

    After LBJ and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, George Wallace made an independent run for the Presidency aiming himself squarely at southern Democrats, the diaspora of southerners working in the north and those other bigots nationally willing to sign up.  This came to the attention of Kevin Phillips, then a strategist for Richard Nixon.  He conceived of the moral majority, corralling the Wallace voters and conservative Christians, sometimes the same group into a winning base for conservative Republican politics.  This was the time of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

    Right wing populism has a long and unsavory history in the US.  The KKK, anti-semite, homophobes, anti-Darwinists and love it or leave it patriots are just a few examples.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a career for Morris Dees and his compatriots filing suit against various organizational expressions of these folks.  When economic insecurity marries the all-too human propensity for discrimination, a violent firestorm will result.  It is no different now than it was in the post-Reconstruction days, the days during the Great Depression or the years after passage of the Civil Rights act.

    True conservatives should be ashamed.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Commentary on the news Memories Politics US History 📎and tagged

  • Red-Neck Socialism

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    62  bar steady 29.88  2mph  WSW dew-point 54  sunrise 6:40  set 7:42

    Waxing Crescent of the Harvest Moon   rise 1:14  9:58

    And they packed up their bags, had one more martini for the road and dispersed to the south, east and west.  The elephants have left the state.  From way out here in Andover it hardly felt like they were here, except for the occasional dissing of Minnesota on the Colbert show. “Could Minnesota be any more white?”  I suppose the event will go down as historic primarily for the introduction of the female rottweiler, Sarah Palin.  She’s a gun-totin’, moose dressin’, pro-oil drillin’ and wolf killin’, state trooper firin’, gubernator and conservative from the only socialist state in the union*.

    *”In the state of Alaska, … citizens possess the seemingly unlikely combination of a rugged individualist reluctance to have the government meddle in their affairs with a willingness to accept a nearly $2,000 per Alaskan handout from the Alaska Permanent Fund. I’ve heard this combination referred to as “red neck socialism” and it’s a very Jacksonian, very American attitude.”  from the Glittering Eye

    Here’s a red-faced son of the soil, a citizen of the Cherokee Purple Nation:

    tomatohead500.jpg


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Politics 📎and tagged

  • An Old Guy Observation

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    56  bar steady 20.00 ompn NE  dew-point 44  sunrise 6:28  sunset 8:02  Lughnasa

    Waning Crescent of the Corn Moon

    The Democratic convention.  Ironically for our family, in Denver where our clan has strong roots.  The Republican convention.  Equally ironical, here in St. Paul.

    Here’s an, oh my god I’m an old guy thought, but conventions aren’t what they were when I was a kid.  When primaries began to take the decision about party nominees out of the hands of power brokers and the politics of a particular convention, conventions became mass marketing.  No fun.  Not interesting.  In the past I watched convention coverage as eagerly as the final 4 in the NCAA or the Indianapolis 500.  No more.

    My gut tells me that Obama will sit down with his folks, figure out a strategy to focus his campaign on two or three issues-probably the economy, health care reform and energy independence.  He and Biden will punch those home.  They will be more dynamic, more thoughtful, and not Republican.  In the end this should be enough.

    Obama needs help, no doubt about that.  He’s a young, inexperienced politician running against a Washington insider, again.  I mean, Hillary was a prime example of an insider.  He’s black.  He’s smart.  He needed this non-incumbent race following an unpopular presidency to give his way outside the box personal situation a chance.  He has it and I think he’ll win pulling away.

    Gazpacho tomorrow and planting.  Gazpacho first.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged