NCFocus

Whew.

I wasn't expecting the Dems to take the House and Senate - felt sure the Republican 'false flag' robocall dirty tricks - and the press's late, false-balanced, or absent coverage of them - would let the dirty tricksters walk off with the preponderance of the races in this election too.

Not so.
Welcome, and thank you. There's a lot of work to do.

Sauce for the gander?

I don't pay enough attention to political maneuverings to do anything more than pass this (from Markos of Daily Kos) along -

[during the Bush administration] Republicans in the Senate and House -- secure in their perpetual majorities -- instituted a long list of policies that dramatically discriminate against the minority party in both chambers. In the House, the minority is all but invisible. And in the Senate, the filibuster is all that's left keeping the minority party from utter irrelevance (and they tried to get rid of that).

Kos is - for the moment at least - relishing the idea of keeping these policies intact and giving the new minority party a taste of its own medicine. The commenters are all over the map* - some agree, some take the "Congressional Dems should do the Right Thing, shouldn't stoop to [existing Repub.] practice" high road.
A couple good points, e.g. this-

Political civility in the halls of Congress ... is self-executing. That means there's no judge to complain to. Good behavior is enforced by making sure that what goes around comes around. In this ['game'] the moral position is to make sure that someone who abuses the process gets punished by having done to them what they did to you. Otherwise they have absolutely no incentive ever to be civil to you because they know they'll pay no penalty if they're not.

and this -

what I really want... is for significant change, for positive things to get done, and that means removing a lot of the bad, bad legislation that has been foisted on the land under this Congress, as well as passing all those things that have been so needed and so brutally repressed.

And the fact is, those anti-minority rules the republicans put in place could make it easier to get things done off the bat - as well as teach the right a much needed lesson.

So...Serve them with a dose of their own medicine while getting the top things on the agenda DONE. Then think about magnanimously changing the rules back to the way that worked all those years. And think about it publicly, transparently, with plenty of examination of what went wrong. The American people could use a few civics lessons.

Sounds good, but all the same it makes me nervous. We've seen how one-party rule does corrupt*; so how, once the Dems had experienced the ease of 'getting things done' without effective Republican opposition, would they decide that it was time to give up that power?
it feels too much like Bush et al saying "we'll give you your civil liberties back a few decades from now, when the War on Terrorism is over".

On the other hand, the press could serve here; a press to whom Lewinsky was major news would likely pay much closer attention to anti-minority-party tactics if used by Dems, so would likely serve as a Fourth Estate check on the Dem majority much better than they did on the Republican one.
(yea press - better a good ump half the time than not at all.)

posted by Anna at 11/09/2006 11:22:00 AM | Comment

Sunday, November 05, 2006

why I'm not here

Russ Steele asked wtf is up here at NCFocus, besides, well, nothing.
("Tomorrow is 30 day of silence. Lets hear about what is being discussed at Java John's."*)

answer: I'm pretty much in overwhelm mode. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and there comes a point when even I can see that I'm preaching to exactly two congregations - the converted, and the unreachable.

via Xark (and former Republican Kos), "still think of myself as a Republican" conservative blogger John Cole:

...I think the whole party has been hijacked by frauds and religionists and crooks and liars and corporate shills, and it frustrates me to no end to see my former friends enabling them, and I wonder 'Why can't they see what I see?" I don't think I am crazy, I don't think my beliefs have changed radically...

I hate getting up in the morning, surfing the news, and finding more and more evidence that my party is nothing but a bunch of frauds. ...
Bush has been a terrible President. The past Congresses have been horrible- spending excessively, engaging in widespread corruption, butting in to things they should have no say in ..., refusing to hold this administration accountable for ANYTHING, and using wedge issues to keep themselves in power at the expense of gays, etc. And I don't know why my friends on the right still keep fighting for these guys to stay in power.

I don't know either. But they're still doing it.

-------

Russ, here's what you missed today at Java John's - one blogger, holding newspaper* up in front of face for privacy while fishing in pocket for kleenex, reading Tom Engelhardt's SF Chron article about Riverbend's blog in Iraq.

-------

The Republican "Hello, I'm calling with information about [Democratic candidate]" dirty-trick robocall scam is being perpetrated nationwide ("The calls are designed to appear to be coming from Democratic candidates and seem to be targeted at Democratic and independent households across the nation...")

Pathetic, desperate sleazebags.

extremely illuminating graph (from this post) showing overwhelming predominance of negative Republican robocall spending

And do not miss this piece from Lex, on what's behind the anger against Bush. (no, it's not personal animosity, nor "politics as usual".)

posted by Anna at 11/05/2006 01:46:00 PM | Comment

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