Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

In the News 3/10: Republicans Are Revolting!

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Found on the Internets …



“I’m comin’ to get ya, tea party varmints!!”

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McConnell: We Will ‘Crush’ Tea Party Challengers ‘Everywhere’

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) believes that incumbent Republicans won’t have a problem holding their seats in the 2014 elections.

“I think we are going to crush them everywhere,” McConnell said about Tea Party challengers in a New York Times interview published Saturday. “I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.”

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E.J. Dionne: The Right’s New Clothes

Republicans truly are having the internal debate that [Rep. Paul] Ryan called “messy,” “noisy,” and “a little bit uncomfortable.”

But Ryan may have revealed more than he intended when he downplayed conservative divisions. “For the most part,” Ryan insisted, “these disagreements have not been over principles or even policies. They’ve been over tactics.”

In which case, this is not an argument over ideas at all, but a discussion of packaging.[…]

But what’s most troubling here is that it did not occur to Ryan to check the [brown paper bag lunch] story because it apparently didn’t occur to him that most kids on free lunch programs have parents who do care about them. They just can’t afford to put a nutritious lunch in a brown paper bag every day.

Ryan was so eager to make an ideological statement about family structure that he was not bothered by the implicit insult he was issuing to actual families of children on the lunch program. A little more empathy could have saved Ryan a lot of trouble. He apologized for the factual error but not for the insult.

… for now, I am inclined to respect [Sen. Ted] Cruz for giving us his views straight and not pretending he’s manufacturing new ideas. If conservative rethinkers such as Ryan have more than rhetorical and tactical differences with Cruz, they have yet to prove it.

(Bolding mine)

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More …

A little birdie told me …

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BooMan: I’ve Lost Interest in CPAC

Here are some examples of actual CPAC 2014 seminars:

– Fossil Fuels Improve the Planet

– More Guns, Less Crime: How Law Enforcement is Beginning to Embrace a Well-Armed Civilian Population

– Healthcare After ObamaCare: A Practical Guide for Living When No One Has Insurance and America Runs Out of Doctors

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Kentucky Southern Baptists Draw Crowds With Gun Giveaways

It’s an hour before suppertime, and the line outside Lone Oak First Baptist Church in Paducah, Ky., is wrapped around the building. The people are waiting for more than a Bible sermon; there’s a raffle tonight. Twenty-five guns are up for grabs.

“We’re doing two things here. One, we’re going to talk about the Second Amendment to bear arms. But that isn’t the primary thing,” [Sunday school teacher David] Keele says. “The primary thing is who Jesus is.”

Well … sort of.

“[If] somebody kicks your door down, means to hurt your wife, your kids, you – how do you turn the other cheek to that?” [God believer Tom] Jackson asks.

The Machaen family lives across the street from the Lone Oak Church. On a recent winter day, Cesar Machaen is lobbing snowballs with his wife and three children. He hadn’t read the signs promoting a gun raffle.

“Real guns? I don’t know what to say,” says Machaen, who was raised Catholic. “You go to church for peace, not to kill or fight.

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Republicans’ young-people problem

… a new study by the Pew Research Center on millennials – defined as those between the ages of 18 and 33 – suggests that Republicans will have another major demographic issue on their hands in future elections: Young people are more liberal and are more inclined to support Democrats than the generations that have come before them.

When millennial independents are asked which party they lean toward, 50 percent say they identify as Democratic or lean toward the Democratic Party. Just 34 percent identify as Republican or lean that way.

And, on the right role for government to play in people’s lives, a majority of millennials (53 percent) favor a bigger government that provides more services, while 38 percent find a smaller government with fewer services more appealing. That’s almost exactly the opposite of the other generations Pew tested; all three of them – silent, baby boomer and X – preferred a smaller government.

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Weather …

TheVane: What Does El Niño Mean for the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season?

Through three degrees of separation, El Niño years tend to dampen hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin. The strongest El Niño ever recorded occurred in 1997 and deep-sixed that year’s hurricane season. This isn’t an absolute certainty, though. Depending on when or even if El Niño conditions form this summer and fall, it could form too late (or too weak) to have a dampening effect on this year’s tropical cyclone activity. This was the case a decade ago. Despite a strengthening El Niño during the summer of 2004, the season saw 4 devastating hurricanes in Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne.

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Music …

Folk Alley Presents: Leyla McCalla

March 9, 2014 The cellist and folk musician balances original compositions with Haitian folk songs on her new album. Watch McCalla perform a song that gives musical life to words Langston Hughes wrote long ago.

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Editor’s Note: Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 21 Comments

21 comments

  3. JanF

    GOP Official On FL Special Election: ‘Are You F—ing Kidding Me?’

    National Republicans threatened to pull out of the high profile Florida 13th Congressional District special election after the Republican candidate, David Jolly, said he disagreed with an ad the national GOP was airing in support of his candidacy.

    “Are you f—ing kidding me?” the official said, according to Politico. The official then wondered if Jolly’s campaign would rather the NRCC stop spending money in the race.

    The new details about internal problems with the Jolly campaign come a day before the special election for the late C.W. Bill Young’s (R-FL) House seat.

    In the same write-up, Politico also reports that Jolly’s campaign managed to tick off House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) staff after he suggested that he might not support Boehner’s re-election as speaker

  4. JanF

    Tea Party Activists Aren’t Gearing Up For 2016 – They Want To Refight 1964

    The conservative movement’s choice for president believes that whites-only lunch counters should be legal. He believes that business owners’ rights trump civil rights, that Medicare should be undermined or even destroyed, and that workers simply have too much power to demand better wages and working conditions from their employers.

    I write this words today, two days after voters in the Conservative Political Action Conference’s straw poll selected Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) as their preferred candidate for president in 2016, but they could have just as easily been written in 1964 as Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater was consolidating the support he’d need to become the GOP’s presidential candidate.

    1960s concern trolling?

    After Johnson’s decisive victory over Goldwater, Republicans largely turned away from Goldwater’s hardline views. Though the party’s next presidential nominee, Richard Nixon, infamously embraced a “Southern strategy” seeking to appeal to white racists, he was careful not to go so far as to oppose LBJ’s landmark civil rights legislation. In a 1964 speech attacking what he called the “irresponsible tactics of some of the extreme civil rights leaders,” Nixon also praised the Civil Rights Act itself – predicting that “[i]f this law is effectively administered, it will be a great step forward in the struggle for equality of opportunity for all Americans.”

    IF IF IF … and IF someone like Nixon had not chosen to run on racism, maybe the struggle would have resulted in an equality of opportunity.  

  5. Portlaw

    to the vomitorium

    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/l…

    “Of course Sen. McConnell has shot a gun but as a matter of principle he’s not interested in helping the left bully people into revealing what protection they may keep in their own homes,” McConnell campaign spokeswoman Allison Moore told The Washington Examiner.

  7. HappyinVT

    Fuckin’ Sarah Palin was the keynote apparently at CPAC?!  While I’m worried about the Dem bench at least we aren’t recycling 2008 … oh wait!  We might be if Hillary is the nominee.

    (I really wasn’t headed there but as I typed I realized that we can make fun of Palin being in the spotlight all we want ’cause she’s and idiot but we have less of a leg to stand on when it comes to “reusing” 2008 candidates.)

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