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 Post Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2012 11:26 pm 
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So there are a lot of meaty, interesting questions coming out of the '12 election cycle that I'm really quite interested in, and wanted to get some opinions from my fellow Sluggites about.

So here are the questions I find most vexing after hearing from the People:

1) If there's a demographics bomb that hit the Republicans in the last election, is there fundamentally any way for the current base of the party to come to an acceptance of reality in reference to their minority problem and to actually support Republican outreach towards the Hispanic and African-American voters? These are people that can't accept that for the most part illegal immigrants are not criminally inclined, regardless of their immigration status, and in many ways are integral to the American economy as a source of low income labor (see Georgia's problem after new immigration laws came into effect)?

2) And while we're on the subject of party bases, why are we even bothering to pander to the radicals in the base in the first place? Isn't the definition of the base the people you've already convinced of your cause and who can be depended upon to always vote your direction? Surely we don't need such red meat thrown at them to get them to the polls. Why start talking about *the forbidden topic* at all? Why did Grover Nordquist succeed in getting a "no new taxes, ever" pledge from so many elected officials on the right? Why can't a Democrat ever seem to get anywhere near a serious discussion about entitlement reform which has to happen if these programs are to succeed long term during election time? Why so much time spent taking on less sensible or flexible positions in the name of "energizing the base" when they're already on board and those positions will hurt you with people outside your base?

3) When will even the moderate promises made by Democrats in the last couple of election cycles start to become laws put through the Congress and Senate? Why in the name of He I Don't Believe In is Guantanamo Bay still in operation? What happened to putting in place legislation designed to keep "Too Big To Fail" from happening on Wall Street the next downward cycle? When will we get to hear a conversation about bringing military spending levels back down to even the year 2000 levels? I didn't hear a single promise to even stop spending at its current levels, much less decrease spending now that Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down. I realize that the Republican congress is greatly to blame, but is the Obama first term legislative record really the best that Progressives can expect in a second term?

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 4:50 am 
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The Austrian Freedom party managed a shift from a plain anti immigrant stance, to a anti muslim or black immigrant stance and started to activly court voters with Serbian origins. I suppose the Republican party will do something similiar, by promoting some minorities to good minorities and allies against the bad minorities.

Base voters will be very active in primaries. Swing voters, will propably not vote in primaries and rather wait, which party has the better candidate afterwards. You also need the base to have someone do all the low level stuff a party does, such as going from door to door and such. If you don't feel strongly about the campain, either because you can live with both parties or because your party does not care about you pandering the center, you will not be motivated to move your ass.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 4:55 am 
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I have a few thoughts.

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Is there fundamentally any way for the current base of the party to come to an acceptance of reality in reference to their minority problem and to actually support Republican outreach towards the Hispanic and African-American voters?

If you go back several years, the Bush administration actually did propose immigration reform - but the Republicans in his own Congress shot it down. The business wing of the Republicans has always been in favour of immigration reform because they need the cheap labour, but this puts them in conflict with working class whites, who don't want to compete with cheap labour. It's going to be very hard for the Republicans to court immigrants without alienating their base. They'll probably have to wait for the country's demographics to shift further before they're comfortable with jettisoning the nativists and outright racists.

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And while we're on the subject of party bases, why are we even bothering to pander to the radicals in the base in the first place? Isn't the definition of the base the people you've already convinced of your cause and who can be depended upon to always vote your direction?

The standard answer to this is the US primary system has got pandering built in by setting up the bases to pick the presidential nominees. Open primaries would resolve this problem, but I don't know if that's going to fly with either party. Candidates predictably run to the center in the general election. But this is true every election cycle.

This time around, I think the rise of the Tea Party really scared the Republican establishment. They must have thought that if they didn't pander hard to the Tea Party, they might really splinter off and vote third party.

More generally, I think they Republicans have been in some kind of self-reinforcing spiral where they kicked out or alienated their more liberal members, then the centrists, then the moderate conservatives, until only the extremists were left. The Republicans believed the polls were skewed because they refused to believe that there were so many Democrats in relation to Republicans, and assumed sampling errors. In fact, the number of self-identified Republicans dropped since 2008, because turned-off moderates started calling themselves Independents.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 7:30 am 
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baconbotsforever wrote:
2) And while we're on the subject of party bases, why are we even bothering to pander to the radicals in the base in the first place? Isn't the definition of the base the people you've already convinced of your cause and who can be depended upon to always vote your direction? Surely we don't need such red meat thrown at them to get them to the polls. Why start talking about *the forbidden topic* at all? Why did Grover Nordquist succeed in getting a "no new taxes, ever" pledge from so many elected officials on the right?


The answer to these and most of the rest of your questions are basically that the GOP has drunk its own kool aid. By attacking facts and fact-gatherers and fact-presenters as biased, they short-circuited their own ability to receive correct information instead of propaganda (kool aid), and by performing repeated purity purges, they've kicked out anybody who didn't drink deep. The result is that ideas that used to be bandied about to rile up the base (but never acted upon, because then they couldn't bandy them about), like [the forbidden topic], are now true goals that they are working towards and things anybody left truly believes. (Or they're part of a minority that fears that majority and will do what it says.)

In other words, they used to play the electorate, but now they're just playing themselves.

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Why can't a Democrat ever seem to get anywhere near a serious discussion about entitlement reform which has to happen if these programs are to succeed long term during election time?


When one side argues that we should destroy earned benefits* entirely, the other side is forced to differentiate their proposal in a broader fashion. If the Republicans say "Reform" but mean destroy, and the Democrats say "Reform" and mean reform, the decision for voters comes down to things voters are not good at--evaluating complicated proposals based on math they don't understand, proposals that they are being actively lied to about. So the Democrats are forced to say "No change", which is visibly different from "Change that might be good or bad".

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Why so much time spent taking on less sensible or flexible positions in the name of "energizing the base" when they're already on board and those positions will hurt you with people outside your base?


Since Bush won in 2000 by appealing almost entirely to his base, conventional political wisdom suggests that getting your committed supporters to leave the house and vote is easier and more effective than trying to actually sway minds. Part of the reason Obama won twice is that his organization is exceptionally good at getting out the vote. This is especially true in an election like the one we just had, where most people made up their minds relatively early in the campaign, leaving very little room for swings in the independent vote.

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3) When will even the moderate promises made by Democrats in the last couple of election cycles start to become laws put through the Congress and Senate?


As soon as they have power. Without a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and being the minority party in the House, they really aren't able to effectively push through their agenda, particularly against the most obstructionist Congressional Republicans in history. These are people who said that their number one priority wasn't governing but making Obama a one-term president--people who have consistently blocked judicial and other appointments--people who have consistently voted against legislation that represents any sort of compromise or even legislation their party proposed initially (Obamacare, for example, is virtually the Republican counter-proposal on health care during the Clinton administration.)

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Why in the name of He I Don't Believe In is Guantanamo Bay still in operation?


No state would take the prisoners.

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What happened to putting in place legislation designed to keep "Too Big To Fail" from happening on Wall Street the next downward cycle?


They did some of it in Dodd Frank, I believe, but stronger measures got watered down.

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When will we get to hear a conversation about bringing military spending levels back down to even the year 2000 levels? I didn't hear a single promise to even stop spending at its current levels, much less decrease spending now that Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down.


Obama has repeatedly suggested taking half of the money we will save from ending the wars and spending it at home; he's also talked about avoiding increases in military spending, which amounts to a cut eventually.

Quote:
I realize that the Republican congress is greatly to blame, but is the Obama first term legislative record really the best that Progressives can expect in a second term?


We'll see. I'm confident that the President is going to play the game a bit harder this time around. It also depends on what happens in 2014.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 1:20 pm 
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Kea wrote:
In fact, the number of self-identified Republicans dropped since 2008, because turned-off moderates started calling themselves Independents.

This is me. I consider myself conservative, but it's been a while since I was comfortable with being called a Republican, as I feel that the Republican party has abandoned the conservative ideals that they're supposed to cherish. Just as one example, fiscal responsibility is supposed to be one of the pillars of the Republican party, yet the last Republican-controlled Congress spent money like a thousand aircraft carriers full of drunken sailors.

Which brings me to the current issue on my mind: the so-called "fiscal cliff." I've been reading a lot about it, and the only thing people seem to agree on is that anything we do will suck. As crazy as it sounds, the more I look at it, the more I think the best course of action is to buckle up and go over the cliff. Yes, it may trigger a recession. But all other proposed approaches basically involve Congress doing exactly what they have done for every financial crisis that has come up in the last few years: kick the can down the road. Yet everyone agrees that we can't do that forever; eventually we're going to run out of road, and by then it will be too late to pull up on the flight stick. At least right now we have a course of action that will reduce the deficit if Congress does what they do best: nothing. So this time I'm kind of hoping that nothing is exactly what they do.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 1:44 pm 
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It isn't hard to imagine deals that would be better than that. I'm not confident that we can get them to pass.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 5:12 pm 
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The problem is that Congress is incapable of doing something that would actually help because doing so is political suicide. There is no way to reduce the deficit in any significant way without either raising taxes or making some hard cuts into major programs, and doing either ticks people off. If you say you're going to raise taxes, you tick people off. If you say you're going to cut funding from Medicare, the military, education, PBS, whatever; you tick people off. So a congressperson who wants to stay in office has only one choice: put off a decision. Anyone who has the cojones to say, "You know what, we're gonna have to do some things that are not pleasant, and things are gonna suck for a while, but it's what we have to do to get out of debt" will be voted out. This "fiscal cliff" situation only came up because of plausible deniability: any one congressperson can say, "Hey, I'm not in favor of actually going over the fiscal cliff, but I agreed to put it in place to help motivate my colleagues to come up with a real solution."

I can't picture any scenario in which Congress doesn't either sit on their hands or kick the can down the road yet again. Personally, given those two choices, I'd rather buckle up and go over the cliff; the alternative just makes the problem worse.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 5:51 pm 
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AlternateTorg wrote:
Kea wrote:
In fact, the number of self-identified Republicans dropped since 2008, because turned-off moderates started calling themselves Independents.

This is me. I consider myself conservative, but it's been a while since I was comfortable with being called a Republican, as I feel that the Republican party has abandoned the conservative ideals that they're supposed to cherish. Just as one example, fiscal responsibility is supposed to be one of the pillars of the Republican party, yet the last Republican-controlled Congress spent money like a thousand aircraft carriers full of drunken sailors.

Which brings me to the current issue on my mind: the so-called "fiscal cliff." I've been reading a lot about it, and the only thing people seem to agree on is that anything we do will suck. As crazy as it sounds, the more I look at it, the more I think the best course of action is to buckle up and go over the cliff. Yes, it may trigger a recession. But all other proposed approaches basically involve Congress doing exactly what they have done for every financial crisis that has come up in the last few years: kick the can down the road. Yet everyone agrees that we can't do that forever; eventually we're going to run out of road, and by then it will be too late to pull up on the flight stick. At least right now we have a course of action that will reduce the deficit if Congress does what they do best: nothing. So this time I'm kind of hoping that nothing is exactly what they do.


How can you consider yourself fiscally responsible and advocate something like that? By your own analogy, you're arguing we should crash the plane on purpose.

Did you not notice how painful and damaging the last recession was? How difficult things are still for millions of people? Why would you advocate policy that's going to shrink the economy in the name of fixing a problem whose best solution is growing the economy?

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 10:05 pm 
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There's a vast diffrence between a forced emergency landing and plowing nose-first into the ground doing 500 km per hour while on fire, to use the plane analogy.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 10:19 pm 
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If I wanted to "crash the plane," I'd do the exact opposite: cut taxes, increase spending on government programs, and accelerate borrowing. Now, if Congress can come up with a plan that will eventually get rid of the deficit without sending us into another recession, I'm all for that. But I don't believe for a second that they will do that. The only two courses of action I can see happening are: 1) Congress fails to come to an agreement about the course of action and we go over the "cliff," or 2) they agree to push the deadline into the future, which will simply allow more time for the existing debt to grow. Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I look at what Congress has actually done about the financial problems (nothing), and I cannot honestly say that I believe that this time will be any different. So given those two possibilities, the one that puts us through another recession but has us coming out the other side with far less debt seems like the better of the two sucky choices. The other simply prolongs and worsens the crisis.

What I really hope is that Congress will prove me wrong. I'm not going to hold my breath, though.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 11:57 pm 
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AlternateTorg wrote:
What I really hope is that Congress will prove me wrong. I'm not going to hold my breath, though.


Amen, brother. I'm in the same boat - hopeful, but not expecting it.

Malice wrote:
No state would take the prisoners.


Ahem. /rant on

The US took those prisoners, let them deal with them in a fashion that doesn't sound like illegal detention without due process or even bloody definable cause. It can be done, it has been done, it should be done again. To say that we should just let them rot without due process or legal standing is morally reprehensible and indefensible for a country whose citizens enjoy both of the above even when they don't really deserve it. Canada took its citizen, Omar Khadr, who was convicted of taking part in a battle at the age of 15 in a military court with significant public support. If people were just sitting in Guantanamo for a few months till their situation can be figured out that would be one thing, but it's like a roach hotel - they check in, but they don't check out. Sure, there would be issues but there is no defending a nouveau-style Gulag being operated by the US. Let's grab some balls and get it freaking done already.

/rant off

And as for the fiscal cliff, I'm actually in favor of letting this plane crash too. The thing is, Congress needs a swift kick right in the goodies from their electorate and maybe a glimpse at a double-dip would convince people to hold their representatives in Congress and the Senate responsible for the sort of obstructionist BS that's been going down lately. The Rethugs seem to have this idea that because they managed not to lose too many seats in the house elections (Yay Gerrymandering!) that their obstructionist regime has the approval of the public even though every Tom, Dick and Harry on the street thinks Congress is severely broken. Eight percent!!!! approval rating, people. Eight! As far as I'm concerned, the military cuts are worth taking the hit on social programs; there's no possible way of getting that sort of cut through Congress the way things sit right now. The only thing is I'd like to see is to have the under-$250k Bush tax cuts stick around to hopefully stave off any sort of double-dip actually happening.

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 Post Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2012 12:02 am 
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The detention is not illegal. Even if they were housed here in the CONUS. At least not according to US law.

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 Post Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:57 am 
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Not true. It is because they are being house on 'foreign soil' that their status as 'enemy combatants' is legitimate. Every SCOTUS decision regarding these prisoners has clearly stated that the outcome would be different if they were on U.S. soil.

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 Post Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2012 12:56 pm 
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Grillick wrote:
Not true. It is because they are being house on 'foreign soil' that their status as 'enemy combatants' is legitimate. Every SCOTUS decision regarding these prisoners has clearly stated that the outcome would be different if they were on U.S. soil.


Jorodryn wrote:
The detention is not illegal. Even if they were housed here in the CONUS. At least not according to US law.


Warning: Ranting may occur!

Sophistry and legal mumbo-jumbo is not what I am referring to. I am referring to the straightforward morality of the thing. Either the US is the land of the free or not; you can't take people into custody wherever you want to, whenever you want to, and toss them in a jail for completely undefined time periods and call yourself a free society. If you mean to hold yourselves up as the beacon of democracy and the rule of law that law must apply to the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq as well.

Let's be clear about something, too. I don't care particularly much about captured enemy combatants themselves. For the most part, they made their choices and must now live with them. What I care about is the rule of law in a democracy. This is such a fundamental concept that I just fail to understand how people don't instinctively understand it... If you mean to take your own laws and ideas seriously then you can't just leave them at the border of your own country.

If an enemy combatant is captured in a foreign country, and said country has a functional government, you hand them to the proper authorities in that country. Abu Ghraib is an ugly, ugly stain on the country it inhabits, but it's also the type of facility that the Iraqis choose to utilize. If you can't waterboard a US citizen, you shouldn't be waterboarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed in Gitmo either. It's torture, as anyone who has actually experienced it will be more than willing to attest. If the Pakistani gov't (who captured KSM) decides to waterboard KSM, well let that be on their heads, especially since even with KSM the debate still remains on the efficacy of waterboarding. If you capture Osama bin Laden in Pakistan (a moot point since they didn't get him alive), you petition the Pakistani gov't to release him to proper US custody and you prosecute his sorry rear end for terrorism, convict him, then stick a needle in his arm. They did it with KSM and it can be done again.

It's not about the individuals involved, it's about the sort of country you want to be part of. On that subject (among others), I find myself glad that the government of my country tries pretty hard not to do such things. Our hands as Canadians aren't completely clean on this since we have had troops in Afghanistan from the beginning, but I find it difficult to believe that we would have constructed Gitmo and let it operate in such a fashion.

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 Post Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2012 4:22 pm 
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Morally I agree, constitutionally I agree, but since we as a nation no longer follow the constitution except when it is politically expedient for the party in power, the law that is being followed dictates that they can be held indefinitely.

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