It took them 40 years, a new strategy of insinuating themselves into the existing power structure, and the perfect storm of GOP excess and a polished, true-believer front man of the right hue and temperament to play to Americans’ desires for novelty and “change,” but the New Left — a group who once openly despised bourgeois “liberals” but who now claims to represent them (erroneously, of course: there is nothing “liberal” about the progressive ideology, as I others have been at lengths to reveal) — has finally arrived, their hair trimmed, their radical ideas painstakingly (and dishonestly) repackaged to appeal to moderates, Democrats, low-information voters, and those who have been conditioned to look to government for the solution to every problem, their philosophy having won the internecine battle within the Democratic Party for control (beating out the Clinton-era Democratic Leadership group). And come January, they could control all 3 branches of government — giving the US a “liberal” (read: progressive authoritarian) supermajority.
From the WSJ:
If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.
Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven’t since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.
The nearby table shows the major bills that passed the House this year or last before being stopped by the Senate minority. Keep in mind that the most important power of the filibuster is to shape legislation, not merely to block it. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.
– Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.
Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.
The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.
– The business climate. “We have some harsh decisions to make,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the “Issues and Legislation” tab on Mr. Waxman’s Web site for a not-so-brief target list.
The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.
– Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is “card check.” Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The “Employee Free Choice Act” would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.
The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union “contract” after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.
– Taxes. Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for “the rich,” substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.
– The green revolution. A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority. Cap and trade would hand Congress trillions of dollars in new spending from the auction of carbon credits, which it would use to pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. Huge chunks of GDP and millions of jobs would be at the mercy of Congress and a vast new global-warming bureaucracy. Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.
– Free speech and voting rights. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the “community organizer” left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress — Democratic, naturally.
Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.
– Special-interest potpourri. Look for the watering down of No Child Left Behind testing standards, as a favor to the National Education Association. The tort bar’s ship would also come in, including limits on arbitration to settle disputes and watering down the 1995 law limiting strike suits. New causes of legal action would be sprinkled throughout most legislation. The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the end of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts. Google and MoveOn.org would get “net neutrality” rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time.
It’s always possible that events — such as a recession — would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn’t turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama’s agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton’s was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore’s BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.
In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today’s left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for “change” should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.
[my emphases]
Is this really the “change” we’ve been “hoping” for?
At at rate above 8 to 1, Americans polled continue to insist that they support a strong economy as a way to generate revenue over any redistribution schemes. And yet at least 30% of those don’t seem to understand that a vote for Obama is precisely a vote against their own interests.
A large part of this has to do, of course, with a willingness on the part of the media to softpeddle just how “progressive” (read: far left) are many of Obama’s policy beliefs; but another part of this has to do with the decades-long effort on the part of the New Left to reinvent itself — to dress itself up in proper clothes and appear “mainstream.”
In this sense, “honorary Eagle Scout” and “educational reformer” Bill Ayers is more that just a guy from Obama’s neighborhood. Instead, he is the living embodiment of a radical Eliza Doolittle.
Socialism in the US. Wouldn’t it be lov-urly!
(h/t Terry H)
****
More, from neo-neocon.
Look at the bright side: We’re finally using the S-word again.
Liberally.
“Infidelity in its broadest sense, under the name of philosophy, is fast spreading, everything that ought to be dear to man is covertly but successfully assailed.”
A spirit crystal in every living room! Viva la Gaia!
There is no Dana only Zuel.
I hope that this election writes the epitaph for the repugs. I would like to see a new party emerge that will be a good counterbalance to the dems. I have no desire to see one party in power, but I do want to see the repugs gone.
sashal wants to return to the shit hole it came from without the trouble of booking a flight.
How can you say “I do not want to see one party rule but I want the opposition party destroyed.”? Really your intellect amazes me.
Hubris brought down the best of em. Ain’t over yet sucka.
what amazes me is your inability to read even in your native language
addendum to the tax thing, Jeff, there is insidious side effects (or design features) to Obamessiah’s proposal to let people withdraw, penalty-free, from their 401k or IRA.
1) it will still be taxed as income
2) it will drain the person’s retirement funds, meaning that come retirement time, more people solely dependent on Nanny Government who can be controlled by a mere mention of “well, if you don’t vote for us, we cannot guarantee you your life.”
sashal
shut up you disengenious schmuck
Where are the bones on that one?
What if the cure is worse than the disease?
Serve me up some pretty, pretty people
Serve me up somebody I can believe.
Don’t feel sorry for me
I hate that look on your face.
You say, just let go
You say, come back home
I say, I’m just fallin’ from grace…
— Joan Osborne
If they’re guy-with-a-business guys, or guy-with-a-decent-job-at-guy-with-a-business-guy’s-business guys, yes. That’s not a lot of us anymore.
Government employees and contractors, state-dependent professionals (in media, law, medicine above the level of the single-doctor practice, academe, etc.), already-licensed actors in regulated sectors, favored actors in soon-to-be-further-regulated sectors, union bureaucrats, institutional and corporate paper-pushers and regulation-minders of every sort, all but the smallest players in “finance,” everyone who runs or works for or contracts under any “NGO” on any level above volunteer, the crazy-rich-beyond-your-understanding, boards and syndicates of the earth, everyone who’s been made dependent on any of the previous, every lobbyist or activist for the previous or their dependents, and every black marketeer who guides the dwindling rest of us around all of them — all are well-served by “progressive authoritarianism,” (Marxoid conception of) “interest”-wise.
That’s a huge majority — who also get deep satisfaction from being on one end or another of the lash.
Boned. Find it amusing.
No no no God damn America. We are all Jeremiah Wright is the goal I think. Baracky and his media are half way there.
I’m most worried about the whole Civilian Conservation Corp or whatever the hell Baracky called it. The article didn’t touch on his “No more missile defense, no future combat systems, etc” but that’s really where a lot of the money for his whole socialism is gonna come from. He’ll tax and tax and be mugged by reality that the gov’t kills the creative engine, laffer curve, etc, then be like AHA, $500 billion/yr for the armed forces, HA. Fuck were gonna be fucked by the fucking socialists.
a vote for Obama is precisely a vote against their own interests
JeffG, because a vote for Obama is a religious experience. This is cult behavior.
I’m serious. Look at destructive cult behavior … anyone outside the cult that says to a member “but don’t you know fasting every other day is going to be destructive to your health?”, the cult answer will be “so what? I believe it really helps me and I don’t believe you anyway.”
Obamabots can’t argue facts or logic or reality. There are in the grip of a Historical Experience. It is their religion.
Who is John Galt?
actually, majority of Americans realize that voting for Obama IS in their interests.
You must be kidding, right? GOP is protector of middle class? After it fucked it in the mouth, ears, ass and armpits last 8 years?
On hulu, they now have commercials with teh children montage all singing saying “tick..tick..tick..time…is…running…out….we…must…stop global warming.” Projection projection projection false consciousness arghhhhh it’s like all their Chomskyite fantasies about the right are dry runs so they can say they have clean little hands when they propgandize the masses. Arghh, and the whole fox news bit in the above post, these clowns just can’t allow dissent. Whatev, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia anyway.
The key part I think is Baracky and Harry and Nancy and Baracky’s media will move fast and hard so they can blame Bush for the consequences. Sashal he will play that game too cause it’s a fun game and they people what get hurt will be all the right people.
oh. *the* people I mean
Dear thor + commie, er, sasahl,
Marginal tax rates will go up 3-5%. I know they didn’t believe in Adam Smith and all that in the USSR, but gosh, really? I guess Kansas is actually filled with rubes and all that.
That card check thing is really one of the scariest. I can’t believe democrats are supporting it. Some are – George McGovern has an ad out against it which I heard the other day. I dare one of you Obama supporters to defend that piece of shit.
Geez, sashal got banned at neo-neocon and I still can’t figure out how she could do that to such a sweet character, a fellow with nothing but the most mellifluous manner in making his simple yet profound views of the world known? A puzzle it is.
some aren’t. I mean.
and Sashal, I just need to mention what an idiot you are for wanting to see the Republican party go away, but gosh-oh-gosh would it be nice if another party eventually took it’s place.
My point proved. Obamabots are cultists.
added, baldilocks gets it.
@23
Its brilliant, no? Whatever Baracky does they’ve got their all purpose BOOOOOOOSH card, “O no, we swear its just the birth pangs of the Baracky plan shedding off all the Bush fellating of the rich and evil oil companies.”
Sashal and thor what is your prefferred endstate for this country? what would you want to have done if you had total control?
sashal —
You are completely out of your depth at this site, so much so that you don’t even recognize the audience you are talking to.
Take it elsewhere. You can’t understand the most basic of arguments, and you have shown a profound inability to respond to anything other than the cartoons rolling on a continuous loop in your head.
You bring nothing to the table here. Go back over to balloon juice where you can cavort with those more in your iq range.
Buh bye, sash. He was an unbelievably stupid version of thor. Now, that is a losing combination if ever there was one. In honor of the little dope, vodka spritzers for everyone.
With the triumvirate of Obama/Pelosi/Reid we’d be LUCKY to only have Jimmy Carter’s second term.
This can easily be the Hoover/FDR pre WWII era, since so much of the radical Left’s agenda is a repeat of those arbitrary policies.
Come on Sashal, Thor … defend it. He’s your guy and he’s supporting it- promised to make it law of the land. You always say we don’t talk issues. Go ahead.
Central Florida 7th grader called racist for wearing Palin t-shirt
“Some of the students were calling me racist because I was Caucasian,†she said. “I wanted the Caucasian man to win. And I told them that’s not true. It’s my freedom of speech, it’s my opinion.”
h/t lgf
Here.
Dear ignorant confused clueless Dash,
here is the gift for you, and note the line about A.Smith as well
You all are welcome for Jon Swift’ masterpiece..
Ooo, I feel so proud. Been called out twice today by the two talking piles of shit.
Ya know what they say, catching flak and targets and all that.
Sash when your around people that agree with you what do you talk about? I really want to know.
It’s nuggets like this that make me ignore what you link, Sashal:
It turns out that Joe is right. The idea that the wealthy should pay more taxes than the less well off, which economists call a “progressive tax system,†was proposed by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, and he got the idea from socialist economist Adam Smith, who is also not American.
Oye.
I want sashal to defend the card check thing. Go ahead. WE NEED TO TALK ISSUES.
37,
they are boring
bore us.
Well what do boring people talk about in your neck of the woods?
Red Sox, and crumbling republican economy.
43 :)
my name in Russian means “The One”
“Who has sent this new serpent into our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence — unless innocence be our age’s neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference — something that Kekulé’s Serpent had come to — not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of . . . we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others . . . we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps — but the Serpent whispered, ‘They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given. . . . ‘ Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come — who knows?”
–Gravity’s Rainbow
The Cowboys acquiring Roy Williams, that’s not proper universality people!
Unfair talent added at WR for a team that already has more pro-bowlers than any other!
I’m hungry and I have no idea what you people are on about. Kekule whatever and I hate bowling cause the food always sucks.
You know how like they make their cheese sauce from a powder and the jalapenos are the kind that taste like pickles.
My name is Russian means Hopeshaftoidak.
O! is the Tsar 1!
They prob are pickled jalapenos. Socialism will probably have an infinite supply of such. Best to just drink the beer, but not the water cuz they never fully rinse the glasses so you get soapiness.
Call them “Obamatons”.
“Gravity’s Rainbow? What the fuck does that mean?”
— Freeman Dyson
Racist!
“A screaming comes across the sky.”
From what, encroaching Socialism? I’d tend to agree. From bug spray? From old donuts?
Oh, from life? Name the enumerated responsibility for central American government, idiot, to manage your life. Oh. Right.
Or is it that democracy thing, comrade, that so promises you all you desire? Maybe you could take to the streets and reclaim whatever fevered fantasy the Pubbies so neglected for the last eight that’s got you so miffed at them. Remember the mob is the leftist’s best friend until suddenly, poof, it’s not. Authoritarianism is like that: What it dispenses it owns, whether pre or post-revolution.
But you’re not smart enough — literally: not intelligent enough and without a doubt too intellectually dishonest — to see it.
Which brings us to thor’s limp defense of your rot on grounds, wait for it, that asking you to exit the private company of your obvious mental betters is tantamount to abridging free speech.
SUPPRESSIONIST!
Both premises and four bucks won’t buy you another wódka, tools. The fact you both show your naked rosy asses day in and day out about just that speaks volumes. Be proud.
The Golden Wings!
“A Dog who counts minutes and pennies,
a desperate sensual Dog,
who grunts like a pig.
A pig with golden wings,
who falls and falls,
always belly side up,
ready for caresses,
that’s him,
our Master.
Come,
and kiss me.”
Celine
————————–
Dear Editor, why is Celine a great writer? “Because he pisses on everything!”
Down the urinal with it all! You great flusher of great words! Pull the handle! Do that! It’s why God gave you thumbs!
:)
I would like to find out the numbers of these bills, find out who blocked their passage, and send every one of those senators a fruit basket. I hate their everliving guts most of the time, but blocking these abominations was truly good work.
I know you love me by Smoking Popes
Comment by SevenEleventy on 10/17 @ 1:21 pm #
I know you love me by Smoking Popes
Damn, wrong thread! Aaaaaarrrggh!
Huh? Are there ritual assassinations planned for Scalia, Alito, Kennedy, Thomas, and Roberts? Or, are you alleging show trials followed by executions?
I mean, as much fun as it is to watch you guys hyperventilate over Democratic rule over Washington, let’s try to keep the panic within the realm of semi-reality (a place I always figured you people lived anyway) instead of far-fetched, the Cubs will the Series, crazy, otherworld reality.
Just like reactionaries in the 30’s, you’ll still have the Court to block the “New New Deal.”
But, while y’all are panicking, could someone tell me why you STILL care so much for the 60’s? The New Left couldn’t win more than state with a war hero in ’72. It is as thoroughly discredited as Tom Delay capitalism, yet you people are still cowering under your beds!
Get a grip. In two years you can Gingrich them and in four you can nominate Palin to Reagan them. It will all be okay, even if Lucy Ledbetter can file a lawsuit.
Wrong boards, Herb. You mightn’t have learned how to decipher blunting ‘bat baselessness with counterbalancing rhetoric — one must go to equivalent extremes, no? For the entertainment. Fish and barrels. Picking on the underdeveloped.
I mean, nobody having the actual Audacity of Precognition, instead peeking, from time to time, only at history.
Or the wall-to-wall sarcasm of skeptics anchored by the gleaming titanium spike of overstatement. You really missed that one.
Jeff G,
Actually, Ayers would be Henry Higgins and all of our indoctrinated youth are the Eliza Doolittles…
Indoctrinated youth as useful idiots: “The proles best function, when they own the me-ans of production…”
Ayers: “I think they’ve got it!”
O! is more like Elmer Gantry, I think…
But Axelrod is definately channeling Goebbles…
Read up on your history.
Ayer’s agenda remains unchanged, it’s just being pursued sans explosives.
It’s incredibly easy to describe how to prevent what’s described above: simply take Joe the Plumber to the next level. Get a list of tough questions, go to a BHO appearance, and try to ask one of them on video. Then, upload it to Youtube. And, the person questioned doesn’t have to be BHO: it could even be some minor House member on CSPAN. The bottom line is to get a damning response from someone and then have a lot of people see that through Youtube.
Details at my name’s link, but I need others to help push this.
Ayer’s agenda remains unchanged, it’s just being pursued sans explosives.
Yeah, apparently he had a bad experience with those.
Too bad he didn’t have a REALLY bad experience with explosives, IYKWIMAITYD.
Ayers ain’t God; he’s an outhouse fuse.
– shut up thor.
“But Axelrod is definately channeling Goebbles…”
It’s Gorbbelian.
Or maybe Orwellian.
They ain’t Tellian.
Goe darn laptop.
Uh, Mark, the fascinating and correct Wikipedia article article you linked to noted FDR attempted to pack the Court after it ruled against New Deal programs for his first term! It also notes the bill failed and FDR was aubale to pack the Court.
So, my comment on how the Court fought the New Deal was correct.
My observation that the author is nuts if he thinks the Court is controlled by liberals and thus represents a hysterical error in his paranoid screed was apparently to clever for most of you dolts to understand.
You forgot reparations.
if he thinks the Court is controlled by liberals
It’s 5-4, and Scalia is 72 years old.
Next.
FDR attempted to pack the Court after it ruled against New Deal programs for his first term! It also notes the bill failed and FDR was [unable] to pack the Court
I am very glad that the bill failed and that FDR could not pack the court.
However, the fact that an attempt to screw with Constitutional checks and balances (or to screw with the Constitution at all) failed during one crisis point in U.S. history is only partly comforting.
FDR’s attempt to pack the court is so blatantly anti-democratic that it hurts, and yet he had the audacity to try it. If better men had not stopped him, he’d have done it.
To prevent the Obama/Pelosi/Reid junta from doing similarly crazy things (such as those enumerated in the WSJ article), good men and women must also stop them, if they can. If the Dems get 60 or more seats in the Senate and a majority in the House, the junta will have legislative carte blanche.
True: the court is currently 5-4 in the conservative camp. But how long will that last? The next president will end up appointing several justices to SCOTUS, and if that president is Obama, SCOTUS rulings will hew to the “living document” theory of the Constitution, which is another way of saying “we’re not going to let a bunch of dead white slave owners tell us what to do.”
It is the height of insanity that the DEMOCRATS are proposing this card-check thing IN PUBLIC! Tell me, when was the last time such a thing was even thinkable, let alone proposed?
Dude, the crazies are taking over the asylum. These are people who will tell you with a straight face that ACORN’s activities, the Rev. Wright, Wm Ayers, and multiple bald-faced lies and denials are no big deal. Either you’re too young to remember when such a thing would have sunk a candidate, D or R, in no time flat or you’re not paying attention to what the far left fanatics are capable of.
The article also states that the bill’s failure was a near-run thing. You appear to believe that such a stunt will always fail; I believe that it would have a very good chance of succeeding if tried again.
It is normally a mistake to believe that your opponents do not learn from their own failures.
I should call you a fool, too, just to keep your level of civility going.
[…] THE MAINSTREAMING of Bill Ayers …. […]
Okay, that does it. If Obama wins I’m moving to Wyoming.
…
Oh, wait.. I already live in Wyoming.
We’re so screwed.
Seriously though, I’m not sure it’s as bad as all that. The dems would not hold a majority in either chamber were it not for the blue dogs. It’s not as if all democrats were evil socialists, just most of ’em.
I’m thinking that the repubs could get enough support from the fiscally conservative dems to sustain a filibuster of the worst of this. I’m really more worried about the fiscally liberal republicans who’ve exhibited the ability to outspend most dems when given half a chance and a little cover. Seems we’ve got a bunch of repubs who can’t — or won’t — distinguish between free markets and the sort of crony capitalism that Bush is pushing with this idiot bailout scheme.
Putney Swope!
So, “almost passed” by the most popular president of the 20th century with a 200 vote majority in the House and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate means you’re in danger in Obama’s first term?
Yeah, I doubt you have too much to fear.
Meanwhile, Dicentra calls the bill “unconstitutional,” which it most certainly was not. Stupid, a power grab, disgusting, and a loser, these are adjectives which apply. There is no where within Article 3 of the Constitution which enumerates how many justices comprise the Court (hint: the number has changed since the founding).
But “good people” have to stand up and make sure Lucy Ledbetter can’t file a lawsuit, or the most profitable companies in America will have to pay a higher tax, or prescription drug prices will be controlled! This is a bill of particulars to undermine American democracy?!?!! Have you seen what you dupes and your president and Congress and Supreme Court have done the last eight years?
Oh, and Mark, unless you haven’t noticed, Protein Wisdom is Thunderdome. Civility is not exactly fashionable here.
Ask Sashal
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