Tag: Republicans
Why Virginia Democrats Need to Get Out the Vote This Fall in District 7
If you thought U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor’s views on the budget and other matters were bad, take a look at the guy Virginia Republicans in House District 7 chose instead. Mother Jones provides these nuggets about Randolph-Macon College (student population: 1,300) economics professor and tea party candidate David Brat.
It’s hard to imagine Brat denouncing white celebrities as he has Jay-Z and Beyonce, except everyone knows tea partiers are NOT racist
- His negative ads criticized Cantor for entertaining the idea of immigration reform and acting to end the debt ceiling crisis
- He wants to cut Medicare and Social Security assistance to seniors by two-thirds
- Climate change is not an issue because “rich countries solve their problems”
The Cat Video That Sums Up the Cantor Upset
If you don’t follow Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski on Twitter, then you probably missed this.
Andrew Kaczynski @BuzzFeedAndrew The Cantor campaign:
Boehner: Tea Party, Conservative Republicans Not that Different
I think the tea party has brought great energy to our political process. You get in these primary elections — they are hard-fought battles and sometimes — listen, there is not that much, not that big a difference between what you call the tea party and your average conservative Republican.
— House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), asserting the tea party and conservative Republicans are basically the same, CNN reports.
Republicans Never Saw This Coming: Sen. Kay Hagan Owns Her Support for Obamacare
You know what’s at stake. Only six wins this fall for Republicans leaves them to rule the Senate. If that happens, House-passed bills outlawing contraception and abortion, promoting guns, and cutting food stamps even for children will be the law of the land. And those 50 votes to defund and rescind Obamacare? Done deal.
That’s why states where Democratic senators seem at risk are drowning in dollars from those who profit if Republicans are in charge. Can you blame the Koch brothers for spending millions through their front group, Americans for Prosperity, on ads to tip these races? They’ll earn back billions if their legislation — like a bill to charge people for using solar panels instead of burning the fossil fuels that are heating our planet but lining the Kochs’ pockets — passes.
Pundits, at first stunned by a Democrat not playing by the GOP rules, are realizing the brilliance of Hagan’s move.
North Carolina, where Sen. Kay Hagan (D) is up for re-election, could be drawing the most outside money.
Voters in North Carolina have already been bombarded with 15,000 television political advertisements thanks to the U.S. Senate race…
The cost of those ads is a whopping $6.3 million, and nearly all of them have been paid for by outside groups, according to an analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project.
Many of the ads criticize Hagan’s vote for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a strategy chosen by Republican consultant Karl Rove and the Kochs after the healthcare.gov website’s rocky launch last October. But the overall success of Obamacare’s first enrollment period leaves fewer one-issue voters who will go to the polls just to get rid of the ACA’s supporters.
Odds Are, Even if You’re a Democrat, You Agree with Former First Lady Barbara Bush on This One Thing
For all the media attention bestowed upon the younger son of Pres. George H.W. Bush, most of us agree with his mom. A new poll shows we don’t want Jeb Bush to run for president in 2016.
The WSJ/NBC poll asked Americans if they agree with a statement by former First Lady Barbara Bush…In January, Mrs. Bush told C-Span that there are “more than two or three families” that should seek high office.
It turns out that most people agree – some 69%.
The desire for new faces runs stronger among Republicans than Democrats. Some 77% of Republicans agree with Mrs. Bush, compared to 67% of Democrats. But the desire for something different cuts across virtually all income levels and demographics.
While Mama Bush’s statements apply to the Clinton family as well, former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton polls higher within her base than former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush does in his.
Supreme Court to Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Drug Testing: ‘Talk to the Hand’
Florida’s public servants couldn’t be blamed for feeling that someone painted targets on their foreheads after Rick Scott (GOP/Tea) took over as governor three years ago. He eliminated many of their jobs, leaving the survivors with crippling work loads. He reduced their salaries by an amount equal to the state’s contribution to their pensions, so they have less money to spend each week and only the same amount they had before for retirement.
But treating public employees as guilty of taking illegal drugs until proven innocent is one of the most overt ways Scott’s contempt for the state’s workers has been evidenced. The new governor demanded that state employees line up and pee in a cup to prove that they’re drug-free, as if being willing to work for the government places them among the criminal class.
Obama’s Weekly Address Isn’t So Ho-Hum
Week in and week out, the president posts his “Weekly Address,” a reiteration of the best answer to the most pressing problem of the time, which will never see daylight because of Republican opposition to anything Obama-related. It’s easy to tune out Obama’s message, just to save a little heartbreak.
This week, in the wake of the proposed budget from Republicans (which will also go nowhere, since Democrats still rule the Senate*) the president again frames the sensible solution but kind of kicks butt with a little extra womp around the 1:17 mark:
The Republican budget begins by passing out massive tax cuts to the households making more than a million dollars a year. Then, to keep from blowing a hole in the deficit, they’d have to raise taxes on middle class families with kids. Next, their budget forces deep cuts to investments that help our economy create jobs, like education and scientific research.
What’s the bottom line, my president?
Policies that benefit the fortunate few while making it harder for working Americans to succeed — that’s not what we need right now. Our economy doesn’t grow best from the top-down, it grows best from the middle-out.
Wham.
* Be sure to vote in November! It really, really matters this time.
