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Looking for a new direction via my blog…

He hasn’t changed his look much, but he is more and more in revision of the views and and vestiges of UndertheLobsterScope@wordpress.com.

Quote of the Day – How the Debate was Viewed

“My take-away? Perry has proved himself an extreme, inarticulate, incurious W clone. He doubled down on the vicious attacks on social security; and his rhetoric was off-key. Huntsman emerged as an actual candidate; Romney kicked ass. Bachmann is wearing thinner and thinner. Paul is Paul. Santorum is a Vatican crank. Gingrich is an angry old man. Cain has no business being up there. Perry’s poor performance gives Palin an opening.”

– Andrew Sullivan

Congress is back in session… don’t expect anything new.

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

– Mark Twain

So now there is a reason to find the day’s comedy on C-Span and C-Span2 once more. Unfortunately, this is no longer comedy, but the essence of our national tragedy.

Tragedies have tragic figures, of course, who fall into the inescapable fissure of their own inabilities. The tragic figures here are not Democrats, not Republicans, not the President,

Mitch McConnell LEADS the Ranks of the Inverted

not Mitch McConnell, not John Boehner, and for heaven’s same not the Tea Party.

We are the Tragic Figures: Americans. Americans who no longer vote because they have  been alienated by one party or the other with the marketing assistance of Corporations and that 1% of the population that controls 80% of the money. Americans who hear politicians say “Put America First” and “Put Americans Back To Work” – yet cancel each other out on their own votes in Congress. Americans who are bought off without even knowing it… have been since Reagan… and who attack their own state of well being while they think they are standing strong.

The major point of tragedies is that they prove their point, but don’t end well. The Tragic Figure dies, or has eyes pulled out, or loses everything necessary to maintain life.

In a recent  Truthout article called “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult”, Mike Lofgren shows the strategy that Republicans use to carry us further into unending misery:

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

“Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.”

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.”

…and, of course, the resulting action is that65% of Americans at a minimum no longer vote.

And that’s the real tragedy.

Related articles

• Summer’s over: Congress comes back to a plate full of issues – CNN.com (nicolemaschke1.wordpress.com)
• Taking Back Our Unions Our Country Fighting With Our President Standing With Him on Createing Jobs (strangerinapicture.us)
• Hagel Rips Republican Party (politicalwire.com)
• Congress returns to face the same old fights (capitolhillblue.com)
• Congress returns to fight over jobs, budget cuts (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Republicans have ZERO JOBS PLANS (Source: GOP.GOV) (garystlawrence.wordpress.com)
• Congress Returns to Session Amid High Negatives and Much Despair (news.firedoglake.com)
• Obama {Still Totally Clueless} Says Congress Must Pass Jobs Program (pobeptsworld.wordpress.com)
• Mean thoughts (canvassingmyself.wordpress.com)

Prediction: Obama will retake Presidency

Lichtman's Book

From Washington Whispers in USNews.com:

Allan Lichtman, the American University professor whose election formula has correctly called every president since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election, has a belated birthday present for Barack Obama: Rest easy, your re-election is in the bag.

“Even if I am being conservative, I don’t see how Obama can lose,” says Lichtman, the brains behind The Keys to the White House. […]

Lichtman developed his 13 Keys in 1981. They test the performance of the party that holds the presidency. If six or more of the 13 keys go against the party in power, then the opposing party wins.“The keys have figured into popular politics a bit,” Lichtman says. “They’ve never missed. They’ve been right seven elections in a row. A number that goes way beyond statistical significance in a record no other system even comes close to.”

Related articles

• Forecasting Model Says Obama Will Win (politicalwire.com)
• Never-Wrong Pundit Picks Obama to Win in 2012 (usnews.com)
• Never-Wrong Pundit Picks Obama to Win in 2012 (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Elections expert who’s called every presidential race since ’84: Obama will win (hotair.com)
• Book Review: The Keys to the White House by Alan Lichtman (ajbulava.wordpress.com)

So now what do you think of Obama’s “Leading From Behind” policy in Libya?

Remember when the Republicans had to run around in circles and find ways to downplay it when Obama took out Osama Bin Laden?

Well, now they will have to rethink statements they made about Obama’s Libya strategy as apparently his policy of dealing with the rebels has pushed Ghadafi out of power:

Rick (the Schmuck) Santorum

“As for Libya: It is a morass. If we were going to support the rebel forces, we should have acted swiftly in the early days of Benghazi‘s uprising by recognizing and arming the rebels and immediately enforcing a no-fly zone. Decisive action against [Qadhafi] would have been the end of him.” – Rick Santorum

“At a time of historic change and great opportunity in the Arab world, he’s hesitant and uncertain.” –Mitt Romney

—

“You have a spectator in chief, not a commander in chief.” – Newt Romney

… and things like that.

They’ll be running in circles today as well… since he carried out an apparently successful policy while he was on his much maligned “vacation.” I didn’t see Congress working on the legislation they should be crafting to provide jobs while THEY are on vacation.