Tag: Republican

There has been talk of the Republican Party becoming a regional party without much in the way of influence in the national debate, but until recently the Dog did not take this very seriously. After all, ours is a two party system. The few times where a third party has popped to anything like viability in the last 100 years it is has coalesced around a single presidential candidate (the Bull Moss with TR and Ross Perot with the Reform Party being the best examples) they have never managed to gain significant numbers of elected officials in State Houses or Congress.  

Rachel Maddow ‘SLAMS’ Republican North Carolina Senator Richard Burr because of his obstruction of confirming Tammy Duckworth to the Veterans Administrations

Cross-posted from Passive Ranting.

Read about it here.

Here’s the summary:

The crisis surrounding the American International Group was a near-tragedy that underlines the need for broad new government authority to regulate or even take control of financial institutions other than banks, the government’s top fiscal officials told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Geithner claims that if this power existed back in September, current measures such as endless bailouts and seven-figure bonuses for mentally-questionable financial fuck-ups would not have happened.

Democratic Spine ©2008 Emily Duffy Photo by Sibila Savage

Dimensions: 14″ x 14″ x 9″

Description: A mini coffin with a truncated human spine lays in a bed of velvet. The coffin is covered with quotes by Progressive, Democrats both recent and from history.

Materials: Wood, parchment reproductions of the Bill of Rights, burgundy velvet, metal hardware, paper, amber varnish.

Cross-Posted on my BLOG (where you can see larger images) and at DailyKos.

“Bullshit is the glue that binds us as a nation.”

George Carlin

Coup de grace is French for blow of grace.  It refers to the hunter’s final shot to the head – the grace being the end of suffering for the unlucky prey.   In this case, it is we, the American people who are the ill-fated quarry.  We are like the mouse that the cat is now tired of playing with.  We will soon hear the crunching of tiny bones.

I’m sorry, the language may get a little rough.

Corporatist War Monger President George W. Bush, in a pathetically desperate attempt to use an International speech to smear his domestic Democratic opposition as appeasers, quoted a Republican Senator as an example of American appeasement of Hitler prior to World War II.

While delivering an address before the Israeli parliament commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel, President Bush said that Sen. Barack Obama and Democrats favor a policy of appeasement toward terrorists. CNN reports that Bush was comparing Obama to “other U.S. leaders back in the run-up to World War II who appeased the Nazis.”

In his speech, Bush said, “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The Senator whom Bush quoted verbatim was Idaho Republican William Edgar Borah:

From 1924 to 1933 [Borah] was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, and his major interest was in foreign policy…. An advocate of disarmament and the outlawing of war, he suggested the Washington Conference of 1921-22 and promoted the Kellogg-Briand Pact; in 1939 he fought revision of the Neutrality Act.

Of course Borah was far from the only ‘appeasing’ Republican. Indeed, prior to WWII, the Grand Old Party was home to many of the fiercest advocates of appeasement.