applegrove
applegrove's JournalMany conservatives are people who don't like 'cheaters' and 'those who break the law'.
That is in their minds. A certain percentage of the population. The GOP has co-opted those people with their law and order agenda as well as painting the poor as welfare queens and such. And they have to keep feeding them stories about the 'cheaters' to keep them engaged with the Republican party. No wonder these people are paranoid. It is as it was planned. They take something in the minds of their base, rework their party to harness it, and repeat and repeat the narrative that they are being cheated. Now the paranoia extends to Obama who is actually trying to make life better for them and has succeeded in many ways (the economy, health care) with no help from the right wing congress. No wonder voters fear they are alone. They are alone: not allowed to connect to Obama, and led by the GOP who just uses them. They are alone. They should be afraid. Just not of Obama.
Obama lost the white male vote after the Henry Louis Gates
arrest incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy
Bill Maher did a new rule rant about pandering to the white vote. Got me thinking? What euphemism for "don't be sensitive about white people being racist" can we use to change the hearts of white republicans who live in a world where they do not wrong? Maybe something aspirational?
Obama uses "we're all in this together". He used "hope and change".
Odd Conservative Website Ranking Drop Right Before Elections
Odd Conservative Website Ranking Drop Right Before Electionshttp://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php/topic,151332.0.html
by AbaraXas at the Briefing Room
"SNIP.....................
Notice something unusual about the website rankings for most popular Conservative websites at a time when they should be going up?
*note on the graphs. Higher numbers = lower ratings. 1 would be the highest rating. This is why the higher numbers are at the bottom. The higher the number means the site is trending further and further down in ratings. Ranking data from Alexa.com
................
...you get the point.... and all at a time that ratings should be ticking up, in the months before an election. We have been watching web rankings closely to see the trend of our own site for the past few years and noticed the drastic drop in rankings almost over night. In comparing to the other major conservative political websites, they all experienced the same drop at the exact same time, well out of pattern.
.......................SNIP"
* go to the website to see. They also show democratic sites further down the comments section. Dems ratings went up. As one would assume during a political season.
My theory? The GOP sites have paid GOP bloggers who get moved to the important GOP Senate races in the last 6 weeks of the election. No other explanation makes sense. Conclusion: the GOP websites are mostly paid astroturf in non election season.
"Moral Relativism" and the GOP. The GOP hate the "Moral Relativism" in
liberals and democrats arguments. Moral relativism may be any of several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures. Descriptive moral relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral; meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong; and normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.(Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
But they seem to like it when it comes to justifying the GOP leadership using cult tactics to lead the herd that is their base. That is not morally wrong it seems, just different. It is an emergency after all - someone might get something from the government otherwise
They say their anti tax, anti mommy state policies come from a deep and authentic need for freedom within the souls of their base and is therefore equivalent to the democratic voters who want more equality in their lives. So are the GOP really saying that it is not alright for liberals to use moral relativism when arguing for the people's needs, such as the african american experience in America, but fine when used by the GOP to hide the jack boot tactics of GOP politicians and pundits, while Democrats try and lead to policies that will make Americans thrive, whoever they are. This is hypocritical and elitist as always. One set of rules for the people, a different set of rules for the powerful.
The GOP goes even further than that to say that the aims of climate scientists are selfish and about keeping their jobs, not about saving humanity. Anything to make the two sides of any debate equivalent in their selfishness or goodness, despite the reality that the GOP is a cult. It is projection when it is selfishness they imply the Democrats have as a motive.
Now It's Explicit: Fighting Inflation Is A War To Ensure That Real Wages For The Vast Majority Never
Now It's Explicit: Fighting Inflation Is A War To Ensure That Real Wages For The Vast Majority Never Growby Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute
http://www.epi.org/blog/explicit-fighting-inflation-war-ensure-real/
"SNIP...........................
Remember that episode of The West Wing when Josh Lyman announced a secret plan to fight inflation? That was great. Turns out that Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher has a secret paper telling us how to fight inflation: stop progress in reducing unemployment so that nominal wages never grow fast enough to actually boost living standards (or, never grow fast enough to boost real wages).
Last week, Fisher argued that a so-far unpublished (i.e. secret) paper by his staff showed that “declines in the unemployment rate below 6.1 percent exert significantly higher wage pressures than if the rate is above 6.1 percent.”
In the interview, Fisher mostly characterized this as a Phillips curve that is flat at unemployment rates higher than 6.1 percent, but which starts to have a negative slope below this rate, meaning that future declines in unemployment should be associated with higher rates of wage-growth. However, if you’re really thinking in terms of a stable Phillips Curve, this means that we can simply choose what unemployment/wage-inflation combination we’d like without worrying about accelerating inflation. Currently, nominal wage-growth is running around 2-2.5 percent. But as we’ve shown before, even the Fed’s too-conservative 2 percent inflation target is consistent with nominal wage growth of closer to 4 percent. So we have plenty of room to move “up” Fisher’s Phillips Curve before hitting even conservative inflation targets.
Also, the 6.1 percent threshold, beside being funnily precise, jogged my memory about something related—and relevant. In 2000, Larry Katz and Alan Krueger wrote a long paper on wages and unemployment. Among lots of other stuff, they estimated the lowest unemployment rate consistent with zero real (inflation-adjusted) wage growth for different parts of the wage distribution (which they label URZERCG in the table below). See the circled bits below, and focus in particular on the 10th percentile. This says that between 1974 and 1988, the 10th percentile had to see unemployment below 6.2 percent to not have their real wages fall. In the 1990s, wage headwinds were worse, and unemployment rates below 5.7 percent were needed. The deterioration of structural wage growth was even worse for the median. In the 1974-1988 period, they could see real wage gains with unemployment as high as 6.8 percent, but by the 1990s they needed unemployment to reach 5.4 percent to see any inflation-adjusted wage gains.
............................SNIP"
Boehner is saying the unemployed are just sitting around when in fact they are fighting inflation
by being unemployed and making it an employers market in the last 6 years. Wages go down. The middle class struggles. There is less pressure on the economy. Inflations goes down. And the rich don't do anything to fight it themselves (the US economy on the whole used to fight inflation with tight money policies, now just the unemployed do). What Boehner is really saying is he wants all the people who have given up back in the market, back trying for jobs, back being desperate, back lowering wages, back to making it an employers market. In fact, he wants them all back fighting inflation more than they are, which the rich do not fight themselves. Who is the lazy***? As usual with the GOP, it is projection and scapegoating all around.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/19/john-boehner-unemployment_n_5849742.html
value driven, stories with images and feelings, sounds like being
a human being to me. I guess that is the enemy of the NRA...being human.
I just don‘t think we should be weakening
what we have that is wonderful. That is the GOP‘s job. To take thing apart. We need the DU to be a safe place.
You did say “It seems odd to me“.... Which implies
a negative when in fact the anonymity of the DU allows for passion and honesty and really makes this site what it is... open to democrats to discuss authentically what they want in political leadership with no possible threat of retribution.
In Canada, I would say there is more respect for government itself than politicians.
Our motto is peace, order and good government. So we see government as good. Then again someone who has been a provincial premier is unlikely to want to be prime minister. Maybe governors in the USA often want to be seen as presidential? Maybe it is by design? Would the GOP up the prestige of executives and lower the prestige of the government relatively speaking? Yup. Would they try and institute fielty for the 'big man' psychology to change the way people vote/relate to 'big men' (CEOs, tv & radio pundits, politicians, the individual not the group)? Yup. Have they? I don't know.
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Member since: Mon Feb 7, 2005, 03:14 AMNumber of posts: 118,654