Democratic congressman says he wants to make Obama ‘a better president’
Veteran Democratic Congressman John Conyers voiced some disappointment in President Barack Obama — and said he wants to help the leader of his party to do better.
In a speech at the National Press Club on Monday, Conyers criticized Obama on a number of fronts — from his overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system and management of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to agreeing to Republican demands last year to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, was first elected to Congress in 1964 — three years before after Obama was born. He backs Obama, but says, “I just want to make him a better president.”
Conyers is not alone in his complaints. A number of Democrats in Congress have expressed frustration with Obama, particularly for what they describe as his failure to push harder on liberal issues.
“The recent debate on healthcare has allowed opponents of the new law to say we have gone too far — when the truth is we have not gone far enough,” said Conyers, a backer of “a single payer” approach that would have a greater government involvement in delivery of health care.
“We’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq for a decade and it’s time to leave both,” he said.
“Jobs cost House Democrats the election last year and could next cost (Democrats) the Senate and the presidency in 2012 unless we address the issue,” he said. “Pandering by giving Republicans more tax cuts is the wrong strategy that has not worked for the last 10 years to create jobs.”
THIS JUST IN — Conservatives Find Home in GOP
The term “conservative Republican” may seem like a truism nowadays. But a new Gallup survey answers some interesting questions about just who those conservatives are — and who they are not.
The GOP is growing more conservative. Seventy-one percent of Republicans and Republican-voting independents call themselves conservatives today. That’s up from 62 percent in 2000, when the Bush-Gore presidential election split the country down the middle and had to be settled by the Supreme Court. Conservatives accounted for 66 percent of Republicans in 2006.
The latest Gallup findings say only 29 percent of Republicans are moderates or liberals — yes, this implies the continued but perilous existence of the species known as Republican Liberals.
Conservatives are older — more than 40 percent are 55 years of age or above and thus belong to the American generation that once trusted no one over 30.
Only about one-third of Republican moderates and liberals are north of 55. Two-thirds to three-quarters of Republican conservatives are Protestant vs. 17 to 22 percent who are Catholic and 5 percent who follow a different religious tradition.
There’s probably no need to remind Democrats that older, church-going Americans tend to be among those most likely to vote in an off-year election. Otherwise, 90 percent of Republican conservatives are white, more than half are male and about 40 percent live in the South. Gallup based its findings on telephone interviews with more than 262,000 adults conducted Jan. 2 to Sept. 23. That gives the results an error margin of less than 1 percent.
“Bush-Gore presidential election split the country down the middle and had to be settled by the Supreme Court.” No, the Supreme Court took the election out of the hands of the people and the political branches of the government. The Constitution has a provision for handling elections that are essentially tied, but the radical conservatives on the Court wouldn’t allow that to operate because it would have given the election to Gore, so they cooked up a scheme whereby they would decide the outcome.
White House spokesman’s “professional left” comment bites back
If the White House was trying to fire up its liberal base ahead of the Nov. 2 elections, this was probably not the way to go about it.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs criticized the “professional left” for criticizing his boss, President Barack Obama, but the comment came back to bite him.
He’s talking about the various liberal cable TV talking heads and bloggers who complain the president isn’t living up to his promises to them.
“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said in an interview with The Hill. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
Reaction was swift and not kind from the liberal sector. For example firedoglake.com ran a post titled “Tribalism is the Last Refuge of Political Scoundrels, Including Robert Gibbs.”
Gibbs did a bit of backtracking, saying he had made those comments “inartfully,” and telling the Huffington Post, “I watch too much cable, I admit.”
His absence at the White House briefing also got tongues wagging that perhaps he just didn’t feel up to sparring about the issue with the media. Gibbs’ deputy, Bill Burton, who took his place at the podium said he was filling in because the press secretary had a pollen-induced “sore throat and sniffles.”
Mixing it up: Race, Tea Party, NAACP, Palin
The NAACP’s resolution calling on leaders of the Tea Party movement to repudiate “racist elements” within its ranks has set off a political firestorm. The civil rights group illustrated its accusations with photographs taken at rallies that show supporters carrying controversial signs criticizing President Barack Obama.
Sarah Palin, a star of the Tea Party movement, responded with a missive on Facebook saying she was saddened by the NAACP’s charge of racism and accused the group of using “the divisive language of the past.”
Critics of the conservative Tea Party movement have questioned whether it is a racist movement, citing the largely white turnout at rallies and some of the signs carried by supporters. Conservatives say the liberals are using a low blow to counter genuine criticism of Obama’s policies.
David Frum’s FrumForum, which is dedicated to the renewal of the Republican Party and conservative movement, points out a piece on Patheos posted last week that discusses the question “Is the Tea Party Racist?” and offers one conclusion that liberals “were always going to believe that a movement dominated by white conservatives is racist.”
Clarence Page, columnist for the Chicago Tribune, says “nobody is truly accountable for the national movement” which has advantages and disadvantages. He says the feeling of dislike is mutual between the NAACP and tea partiers. “In the universe of political activism, the two groups are ‘Alien vs. Predator,’ a battle of titans from worlds too far apart for them to see much of anything the same way.”
The heated discussion over the Tea Party’s character less than four months before the November elections does suggest the movement has gained ground in the political spectrum, but it won’t be absolutely clear whether it is a force to be reckoned with until the ballots are counted.
Stay tuned…
There is no evidence of racism in the tea party anywhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRJ2UmyHh xI
Coffee Party USA takes on the Tea Party
America’s conservative Tea Party movement may be on the boil, but the left is brewing up its own version in The Coffee Party USA.
The movement has launched itself on the social networking site Facebook where it has acquired more than 50,000 fans over the past month. You can see some news reports and commentary about it here and here and here.
Under the battle cry “The Coffee Party USA: Wake Up and Stand Up” it is asking people to host a Coffee Party event on their March 13 “kick-off.”
“What’s your favorite spot for a cup of coffee or Sunday brunch? Enter it here along with what time on March 13th you plan to meet, and you are a Coffee Party coordinator! We are volunteers, working to restore our capacity as Americans to engage a civil and respectful conversation about public policy. As with any disagreement, the first step is sitting down to talk,” it says.
Like the Tea Party — a conservative movement opposed to big government and President Barack Obama’s agenda which takes its name from an 18th century American revolt against British colonial rule — the Coffee Party claims to be “100 percent grassroots.”
“No lobbyists here. No pundits. And no hyper-partisan strategists calling the shots in this movement. We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire to forge a culture of civic engagement that is solution-oriented, not blame-oriented,” it says.
The coffee party will go nowhere because it is a goof on the tea party. The tea party will stay in the headlines because it has its own television network and the best corporate organization and financial sponsorship the Chamber of Commerce boys can muster. Plus, conservatives are not independent thinkers. They all do exactly what Rushbo tells them to do. I must admit I admire their ability to march in lock-step.
Democrats may face a new challenge: rising conservatism
The Democratic Party’s hopes of retaining control of Congress in November are already reeling from a spate of Senate retirements and the political flap surrounding last month’s failed bomb attack on a Detroit-bound airliner. Now comes a potential new hurdle: growing conservatism among the American public.
Gallup polling data show that conservatives became the biggest potential voting bloc in 2009. Forty percent of Americans called themselves ‘conservative’ last year, compared with 36 percent who said they were ‘moderate’ and 21 percent who described themselves as ‘liberal.’ The findings, which have an error margin of 1 percentage point, come from an aggregate of 21 separate Gallup and USA Today/Gallup surveys, spanning nearly 22,000 interviews.
Gallup polling data also show that the number of Americans calling themselves moderate has fallen over the past decade, while conservatives and liberals have gained ground.
“Since 1992, there have been only two other years — 2003 and 2004 — in which the average percentage of conservatives nationwide outnumbered moderates, and in both cases, it was by two percentage points (in contrast to the current four points),” the Gallup Organization says.
Political pundits have noted the growing prominence of the grass-roots conservative tea party movement named for the famous Boston Tea Party, suggesting it could some day become a major political force opposed to President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies.
Photo credit: Reuters/Joshua Lott (Tea Party demonstrators in Flagstaff, Arizona)
Pelosi tells Harvard students she read every page of healthcare bill
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told students at Harvard University on Friday that she had indeed done her reading.
Taking questions during the 90-minute event, Pelosi assured one skeptical undergraduate that she, and many other House members, had read “every page” of the roughly 1,900-page healthcare bill passed by the House.
She expounded on leadership qualities, healthcare reform, the impact of more women in Congress, troops to Afghanistan — oh, and healthcare reform.
Participating in the healthcare debate, so long a signature issue of the late Massachusetts political titan Ted Kennedy, was “humbling,” she said.
Pelosi said she would have had a hard time cobbling together enough votes for a healthcare bill without a public option to balance the influence of insurance companies.
And she sympathized with women’s groups fearful of the Stupak-Pitts anti-abortion amendment contained in the House bill.
But of all the heavy legislative lifting in Congress this year, passing supplemental funding for the war in Afghanistan was the hardest, Pelosi said.
It’s criminal what congress is doing against the wishes of the American people.
Gallup poll: conservatives outnumber moderates and liberals
What’s in a political label?
Well Gallup has found that more Americans identify themselves as conservatives than those who call themselves moderate or liberal.
On the question of political ideology, 40 percent of those surveyed said they were conservative, 36 percent were moderate, and 20 percent liberal.
“This marks a shift from 2005 through 2008, when moderates were tied with conservatives as the most prevalent group,” Gallup says.
Wonder what this means for the 2010 midterm elections that everyone’s watching for signs of political shifts…
Apology accepted sir.
I guess I don’t really judge these people on a personal level, if someone is an a-hole and they’re a great president I’d much rather have that than a nice guy who sucks at it.
Just my personal belief.
U.S. conservative talk radio: little fondness for Kennedy legacy
Ted Kennedy’s polarizing political legacy was on full display on Wednesday as some U.S. conservatives showed little restraint in their hostility for the veteran liberal senator who died late on Tuesday.
Conservative talk radio hosts blasted away at the policies of Kennedy, a towering figure in the Democratic Party and a standard bearer of liberal causes who died at age 77 after a lengthy battle with brain cancer.
Nationally syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh said the political left was “exploiting his death and his legacy” to advance President Barack Obama’s agenda for healthcare reform, which was also one of Kennedy’s signature issues.
“The greatest tribute would be that every American would get the same healthcare option that Ted Kennedy got. Ted Kennedy did not have to face death panels,” Limbaugh told his listeners, referring to persistent but incorrect rumours that, under the reforms now being debated, “death panels” would have a say in whether ailing senior citizens would get life-saving care.
Others took issue with a range of liberal causes linked to Kennedy, saying his policies had sullied his legacy in the conservative heartland.
“The entire Kennedy family was right on civil rights in the 1960s but ever since that it’s been about the perpetuation of the racism that is affirmative action,” said Mark Davis, a conservative talk radio host in Dallas.
To bensdemise:
I did my homework and it appears that my gut recollection regarding the uncritical coverage in the two weeks following Reagan’s death was exactly right.
An exhaustive analysis of media coverage by Fairness and Accuracy in the Media shows that the mainstream media tiptoed around any potential landmines of Reagan’s legacy including the support of Right Wing governments in Central America in spite of their murdering of tens of thousands of their own citizens, his silence during the early part of the AIDS epidemic, his honoring of Nazi soldiers, his involvement in trading arms for hostages (which his mind, if not his heart, admitted to on TV), his passing on of huge deficits (doubling the existing deficit) to future generations, etc. All of these things were given a pass in the mainstream news by former friends–including the media elite reporters themselves.
Compare this to round table discussions on Fox on Kennedy’s legacy accompanied by video reminders of Chappaquiddic and the lack of reticence of any of the networks to mix criticism along with praise of Kennedy.
Clearly, Reagan’s death was politicized (Nancy wanted to support stem cell research) just as Kennedy’s was regarding health care. Reagan supporters also jumped at the chance to mythologize his life, and ensured a glowing and uncritical legacy in the American mind.
And what’s the counter evidence? Mike Malloy and Alex Bennett and an article in the Huffington Post? If you want to be honest, provide a link and explain how these guys (never heard of them) are representative of the mainstream media (e.g., ABC NEWS, CNN, FOX) echo chamber that represents what most Americans actually hear or read on a given news story.
Here’s my link to some people who actually did extensive research on this point.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald _Reagan/Reagan_Myth_Lives_On.html
