Motley Moose – Archive

A deal is a deal.

Education has been the latest buzz for the past month or so. The Onion has an interesting perspective on the subject.

An Onion a day helps keep the apathy away? Hmmm.

Can I sic the Onion on this dude? I really want to keep him away.

Oh thank you tehglennbeck for explaining this. Actually, Palin and Beck scare me. They are smart enough, have certain skills and are the slickest snake oil sales people I have ever seen. They are truly dangerous people.

I guess tehglennbeck had a party last weekend in Washington. I am getting tired of The Koch brothers getting their way. Let’s show all of them a real grass roots movement and attend the 10-2-10 March on Washington

Thank goodness the polls are not supporting evidence that these folks are making an actual impact. They are, IMO riling up that segment of society they are able to rally. Unfortunately this is a shit load of people and I am not surprised that the marchy thing was a ginormous success in numbers. And if we let them, it could add up to big numbers for the republicans in November.

Earlier this week John Nichols from the Nation discussed the disappearance of the “Moderate Republicans” ie Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, Jacob Javits, Percy, even Reagan in 1976. IMHO this is the real problem in the United States right now.

The republicans learned more from George Wallace than from Eisenhower? Carter won the south and Ford got the north east. Wow. Seeing the historical movement of the Republican Party over the last 40 years is very interesting. The path it is on right now, is the ending of a once great Party. I wonder what will take it’s place?  

Last year I posted a diary at Daily Kos called Coalition Building 101 , calling for a massive march on Washington, using the image from the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  

Well, August has been a long and frustrating month of ‘made-for-media’ controversies and equally irrelevant prognostications on the likely outcomes of the upcoming midterm elections.  It would seem, from all the headline-mongering and talk show bloviating, that Democrats are in for a whuppin’ along the lines of 1994 but the polls don’t lie, very often, and things may not be what they seem at first glance.

Are Democrats going to lose seats?  Pretty bloody likely.  Are they going to lose control of the House and the Senate or both?  Hard to say but probably not.  Sound counter-intuitive given the current conventional wisdom, such as it is?  Lets take a closer look, it’s pretty clear that things have been headed the Republicans’ way recently, no argument.  But how much?:

We could obsess further over the consistent differences among pollsters, but what is far more important, is that the averages show a GOP lead that has been trending in the Republican direction all summer. That trend is consistent with the historical pattern identified here on Friday by political scientists Joe Bafumi, Bob Erikson and Chris Wlezien, the “electorate’s tendency in past midterm cycles to gravitate further toward the “out” party over the election year.”

Moreover, you see the same trend even if we drop all Newsweek and Gallup polls, plus all of the Internet-based surveys and automated surveys (including Rasmussen), and focus only on the remaining live-interviewer telephone surveys, as in the chart [shown here]. The margin for the Republicans is virtually identical (46.6% to 41.4%).

So while the “unprecedented 10-point lead” reported by Gallup probably exaggerates the Republican lead, any result showing a net Republican advantage on the so-called generic ballot is bad news for Democrats. Bafumi and his colleagues estimated their 50-seat gain for the Republicans assuming a two-point advantage for Republicans on the generic ballot, which they project will widen to a six-point lead by November.

Mark Blumenthal – Gallup vs. Newsweek on the Generic Pollster 30 Aug 10

Fifty seats is a shocker, to be sure, but trends away from the incumbent majority seem to also be unexceptional, historically, in American politics.  And since the cited post was written the generic ballot gap has apparently narrowed again slightly to 3%.  How determinate is the generic ballot polling to a large number of specific races?  And what are the issues affecting polling at this stage for a midterm election in both houses?

By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

Last year, former governor Sarah Palin famously campaigned on a theme of “real America.” This widely derided message implied that only “real Americans” vote Republican.

Yet there is something to Mrs. Palin’s theory. However unintentionally, it lays bare a fundamental truth of American politics.

More below.

For years progressives have assumed that the ideological trajectories of both the Republican Party, certainly, and to a lesser but substantive degree the Democrats themselves, have been aligned variously with the aspirations of corporations to wriggle free from government regulation and taxation.  This is arguably intended to benefit their profits at the expense, contrary to the ideological framework within which it is usually promoted, of the welfare and best interests of the citizenry.

Since the watershed election of President Obama ‘populist’ opposition to his policies has emerged, largely facilitated, if not actually inspired, by sponsorship from the Right-wing media, not to mention other less visible patrons.

Predictably the source of this ‘movement’ has been identified as disaffection with government spending and intrusion into the civil liberties of our citizens, but the truth may be more daunting to accept for those concerned with such issues, and seriously casts doubt on the ‘grassroots’ credentials of organisations like the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a significant Tea Party promoter:

Over the July 4th weekend, [an Americans for Prosperity Foundation] summit called Texas Defending the American Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin. Though [founder billionare David Koch] freely promotes his philanthropic ventures, he did not attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused … by a series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the organizer of the summit, warned that Administration officials “have a socialist vision for this country.”

Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

Jane Mayer – Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama The New Yorker 30 Aug 10

The Koch brothers, Charles and David, are both executives of Koch Industries, a major US petrochemical industrial giant, and have a long history of what might be termed ‘fringe’ Right-wing political beliefs and questionable spending of large sums of their considerable fortunes on politically oriented projects in the grey areas of electoral legality and scientific integrity.  Their influence, however, on our current political discourse is increasingly disproportionate.