Time For Mitch McConnell to Get a New Hobby


McConnell realizes he can count to two.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) famously declared that the most important goal of the Republican party for the past few years was to make Barack Obama a one-term president.

But even after tirelessly obstructing each and every initiative put forward by the president; and with the economy improving despite every Republican attempt — including having rightwing CEOs threaten their employees that they would cut jobs if Obama won — to keep it in the Bush recession; and causing such inertia in Congress that its approval numbers nearly imperil democracy…even after all this, McConnell failed in his number one goal.

So with your help, we’d like to develop some new goals for Mitch. Please leave your suggestions in the comments.

  • Have surgery to remove turtle chin
  • Read a book on how to govern, and what the point of being in the Senate is
  • Announce you will not run for re-election in 2014
  • Announce that you will retire early to spend more time with your family
  • Announce that you are actually stepping down today and then go back to your old Kentucky home and never be heard from again

GOP Continues to Spotlight White Males

RubioPissed
Sen. Marco Rubio

Jeb Bush’s recent plea for his party to pay more attention to its Latino members seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Their selection of a white guy Midwesterner to perform the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union address ignored rising star sunbelt Latinos, including New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will give the speech, which according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, will deal with economics.

“Paul Ryan has spent the better part of the last two years explaining exactly why the Democrat agenda has been so bad for jobs and the economy, and why we need to ditch the government-driven approach in favor of creative, common-sense solutions that put the American people back in charge.

Maybe Gov. Bobby Jindal’s poor showing reinforced the natural Republican inclination to stick with white guys

Republicans apparently noticed the economic crisis after the inauguration of Pres. Obama. It slipped past them when they were voting to allow Pres. George W. Bush to run up the deficit to unprecedented levels in order to wage war on a country that had not directly threatened us. They also must have been confused when they voted for Bush’s plan to spend $700 billion to bail out banks and other large corporations that had invested in mortgage-backed securities. Bush signed that Republican-approved law on Oct. 3, 2008.

Rubio, like Rep. Michele Bachmann (GOP/TEA-Minn.), plans his own State of the Union rebuttal for the benefit of his followers.

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GOP Unveils Tax Plan That Would Double Deficit, Add Four Times More Debt Than Stimulus, Health-Care Reform Combined

Just days after the release of data showing that Pres. Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress had reduced the federal deficit by 13 percent — down $103 billion — over the past year, the Republicans have released a tax plan that the Washington Post says would increase the deficit by a multiplier of four, compared with the stimulus and health-care reform, policies the GOP voted against, claiming they were too expensive:

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GOP ‘Party of No’ Gambit Backfires — Voter Approval of Republicans at an All-Time Low

From the moment Pres. Obama took office, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the rest of the GOP leadership in Congress have engaged in a high-risk, gridlock-on-steroids strategy — a level of obstructionism that is unparalleled in U.S. history, particularly including a record-breaking number of filibusters in the Senate.

How bad is it for congressional Republicans? They’re even lagging behind Sarah Palin, whose approval rate is just 29 percent.

Their “party of no” strategy has been effective in two ways. First, they have used obstructionism to weaken legislation to protect the profits of their corporate donors. They have done this by sucker-punching the president and the Democrats on every major bill — first by threatening to vote no unless the particulars of the legislation were changed to benefit corporations and then by voting resoundingly against the bill anyway, despite getting everything they demanded.

That second part — the lockstep voting, gridlock-on-steroids tactic — was intended to slow things down unnecessarily as a way to frustrate voters who, more than anything, wanted to see progress in solving the multiple crises the country is facing. This was an especially neat trick because attentive voters were surely aware that the crises were caused by these same Republican senators and House members rubberstamping the Bush anti-regulatory, anti middle-class agenda when they controlled Congress the last time.

Frustrating voters with gridlock is a tried-and-true tactic the party out of power can use to drive up the negatives of the party in power. It has always worked as a zero-sum game in our calcified two-party system. When voters’ approval of one party goes down, approval of the other party goes up.

But it hasn’t worked out that way this time. While the Republicans’ “party of no” strategy has been effective in poisoning the well — the Democrats’ negatives are way up — according to the new NBC/Wall St. Journal poll, the GOP’s uber-obstructionism appears to have backfired. Big time:

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