Month: August 2011

Perry’s Christian Soldiers AWOL

Buck Banks

8,000

Number of people who pre-registered on-line to attend last weekend’s “The Response,” an event at Houston’s Reliant Stadium, a venue with a seating capacity of 71,000. Earlier this year, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) had called on Christians across the country to come to Houston for a prayer event to rescue a “nation in crisis.”

Obama, the Stealth Moderate Conservative

Buck Banks

In a recent column, I argued that Barack Obama has in practice governed as a moderate conservative. Right wingers were, of course, incredulous, and insisted that he is a far left socialist no matter how thin the evidence. The truth is that Obama has always been moderately conservative — a fact that has been obvious to liberals dating back to the beginning of the 2008 campaign. It would be clear to conservatives as well if they weren’t so blinded by their partisanship and occasionally got their news from an unbiased source.

— Bruce Bartlett, writing in Fiscal Times.

Rick Scott’s Unintended Consequences

Trish

8,418

Number of Florida public workers filing to enter the five-year phased retirement process known as DROP (Deferred Retirement Option Plan) after Gov. Rick Scott (Tea/GOP) signed a bill requiring them to contribute to their own pension plans. The figure is more than double last year’s, when 4,157 signed up, and means that Florida will lose senior public employees in record amounts in coming years.

A Double Blessing

Trish

Gov. Rick Scott is not only living the idea of being a conservative Republican, but he’s also a blessing to our party.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, introducing Florida’s governor at planning sessions in Tampa for the 2012 RNC convention. Democrats listening to Priebus call the Republican Florida governor – whose latest approval ratings are at 35% – a blessing for his party immediately thought, “And for ours, too.”

Conservative Columnist: GOP Extortion Politics Is Based on the Assumption That Dems Will ‘Always, Always, Cave on Taxes’

Jon Ponder

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat:

This is the reality that liberals need to face: Much of the Republican “intransigence” and “hostage-taking” and “terrorism” that they deplore is a direct consequence of the fact that Republicans assume that Democrats will always, always, cave on taxes. And so long as that assumption keeps getting vindicated by events, there’s no incentive for the G.O.P. to accede to sweeping compromises on deficit reduction. Why would you compromise with a party that won’t actually fight for the revenues required to pay for the programs it claims to want to protect? Why would you sign off on tax increases that your notionally pro-government opposition doesn’t want to sign off on themselves? … In the long run, you can’t have compromise without intransigence.

Source: The Dish

The Line: Standard & Poor vs. the GOP ‘Ransoming’ U.S. Economy

Jon Ponder
  • Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell last week: “[The U.S. economy is] a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”
  • Greg Sargent at Washington Post: “Even if you agree with McConnell’s assessment — as I’m sure many conservatives do — it’s still a matter of fact that the embrace of the debt ceiling as a weapon for policy ends is a primary reason S & P downgraded the U.S. credit rating.”
  • Dave Weigel at Slate: S&P “opens fire on Republicans”
  • Megan McArdle at the Atlantic: “I will take a lot of hell for saying this, [but] I’m afraid I think that the lion’s share of the blame goes to the GOP, which escalated to this completely unnecessary showdown…”
  • Jonathan Chait at TNR: “[When] you have a political party that does not agree that revenue levels must bear a relationship to outlays, and is willing to foment a systemic crisis in order to maximize its leverage, you’re in trouble.”
  • Steve Benen at Washington Monthly: “When U.S. policymakers are using the possibility of voluntary default as a political weapon, those policymakers make the nation fundamentally less stable and less trustworthy.”