TomCADem
TomCADem's JournalAbraham Lincoln on Political Extortion - Cooper Union Speech - Still True Today
To put this into context, Lincoln noted that at least 21 of the Founding Fathers -- a majority -- believed Congress should control slavery in the territories, not allow it to expand. Thus, the Republican stance of the time was not revolutionary, but similar to the Founding Fathers, and should not alarm Southerners (radicals had threatened to secede if a Republican was elected President). Sound familiar about folks not abiding by the results of an election and threatening to secede?
Finally, I love Lincoln's line: "A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm
If they had only pledged their judicial opinion that such right is affirmed in the instrument by implication, it would be open to others to show that neither the word "slave" nor "slavery" is to be found in the Constitution, nor the word "property" even, in any connection with language alluding to the things slave, or slavery; and that wherever in that instrument the slave is alluded to, he is called a "person;" - and wherever his master's legal right in relation to him is alluded to, it is spoken of as "service or labor which may be due," - as a debt payable in service or labor. Also, it would be open to show, by contemporaneous history, that this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.
To show all this, is easy and certain.
When this obvious mistake of the Judges shall be brought to their notice, is it not reasonable to expect that they will withdraw the mistaken statement, and reconsider the conclusion based upon it?
And then it is to be remembered that "our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live" - the men who made the Constitution - decided this same Constitutional question in our favor, long ago - decided it without division among themselves, when making the decision; without division among themselves about the meaning of it after it was made, and, so far as any evidence is left, without basing it upon any mistaken statement of facts.
Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"
To be sure, what the robber demanded of me - my money - was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.
A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.
HuffPo - "What Happened The Last Time A Major Western Country Defaulted" - Familiar?
As Republican debt ceiling deniers actively flirt with default, it is worthwhile to consider the consequences and similarities of the last default.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/14/what-happened-the-last-ti_n_4098078.html?utm_hp_ref=business
Germany unilaterally ceased payments on long-term borrowings on May 6, 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler was installed as Chancellor. The default helped cement Hitler’s power base following years of political instability as the Weimar Republic struggled with its crushing debts.
“These are generally catastrophic economic events,” said Professor Eugene N. White, an economics historian at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “There is no happy ending.”
The debt reparations piled onto Germany, which in 1913 was the world’s third-biggest economy, sparked the hyperinflation, borrowings and political deadlock that brought the Nazis to power, and the default. It shows how excessive debt has capricious results, such as the civil war and despotism that ravaged Florence after England’s Edward III refused to pay his obligations from the city-state’s banks in 1339, and the Revolution of 1789 that followed the French Crown’s defaults in 1770 and 1788.
Bloomberg - "California Obamacare Sign-Ups Exceed 28,000 in First Week" - Contradict RW Meme
The corporate media has been pushing Republican talking points trying to judge the effective of the ACA based on implementation difficulties at the federal level. Of course, the media repeatedly ignores that thousands have been able to gain access to health care coverage in just the first week alone. Indeed, the California, New York and Washington experience serve as excellent proof of concept implementations of the ACA.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-08/california-tops-28-000-in-health-exchange-enrollment.html
The numbers for California, the largest U.S. state by population, were for the Oct. 1 to Oct. 5 period and exceeded expectations, Peter V. Lee, executive director of Covered California, said at a news conference today in Sacramento. New York, the third most-populous state, said in a statement that its pace of sign-ups shows the exchange is “working smoothly.”
The Oct. 1 rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges has faced technical issues, with consumers unable to access parts of the U.S. government’s website that serves people in 36 states. California, one of 14 states running its own website, has fared better. Success is critical in California, where the Obama administration has sent almost $1 billion in exchange grants.
“Looking back at this one week, the response has been nothing short of phenomenal,” Lee said. “We anticipated we’d have very low enrollment in the first week.”
Salon - "The Inevitable Republican Collapse That Will End the Shutdown" - A Bit Optimistic
I do think that this piece by Noam Scheiber assumes a certain level of civic responsibility that I don't think is present in today's Republican party, which I think sort of wants to blow everything up for shits and giggles, but assuming there is an iota of responsibility, then perhaps this scenario could play out.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115171/shutdown-2013-deal-will-end-it?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=margin&utm_campaign=mostpopular
The problem for the GOP is that, as insulated as the House jihadis are from national trends, Senate Republicans and House pragmatists emphatically are not. When the approval rating for Republicans drops nationally, these people are badly exposed. They begin to fear for their jobs. They become desperate to cut a deal—any deal—that will end their political pain. And once they do—once there is a deal that a large chunk of Republicans either explicitly sign onto or tacitly endorse—then it is game over for the House. There is simply no House Republican leader who can resist a bill that many if not most Republicans want to see pass, a bill that has passed the Senate, and to which the only alternative is the complete annihilation of both the Republican Party and the global economy.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see how we ended up here: The Tea Partiers, high on their own apocalyptic fantasies, force the GOP down a strategically catastrophic path. For a few days, they are convinced that victory is at hand. The feedback they get from their constituents is overwhelmingly positive. The right-wing media urges them on. They are convinced providence is on their side. “This is about the happiest I’ve seen members in a long time because we’ve seen we’re starting to win this dialogue,” Michele Bachmann told Sean Hannity on Day Two of the shutdown.
At this point, the Tea Partiers are so convinced of their own impending success that sober Republicans, mainstream reporters, even liberals begin to wonder if there isn’t something to it—if they haven’t badly underestimated the public’s appetite for thuggery. At which point it all collapses. The polls trickle in and they are horrific. The pragmatic wing of the party is completely demoralized. It lashes out more violently than before. The national media both encourages and adds to their derision of conservatives. Suddenly every Republican in town is shopping his own terms of surrender. The biggest challenge for Democrats isn’t getting their way. It’s that there are so many offers, it’s hard to know which one to take. Politico labeled the spectacle a “buyer’s market” for Barack Obama, massively understating the point. It is a buyer’s market in the sense that the day after the Super Bowl is a buyer’s market for pork rinds.
* * *
What Costa doesn’t discuss is the Republican leadership’s incentives, which is the final, poetic wrinkle in all of this. McConnell and Boehner, in addition to understanding how badly the Tea Partiers have hurt their party, have yet another reason to sue for peace. McConnell is facing a Tea Party primary challenge in his re-election campaign. Boehner has been repeatedly embarrassed by the Tea Partiers in his caucus, who have actively sabotaged his leadership (egged on/manipulated by Texas Senator Ted Cruz). Both men know their side has lost. Both men also know their party’s fanatics are to blame. Do you think they don’t want to see the Tea Party humiliated before all is said and done? Do you think they might want to see the Tea Partiers stuck with all the blame?
Industrialists Bitten By Financial Support of the Radical Right - The Story of Fritz Thyssen
It might be worth while to consider the story of Fritz Thyssen who was liberated from a German prison by American soldiers at the end of World War II. Who is Fritz Thyssen? Why does his story sound familiar?
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2506&dat=19380320&id=CjRJAAAAIBAJ&sjid=mQgNAAAAIBAJ&pg=1631,4430822
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Thyssen
In 1923, Thyssen met former General Erich Ludendorff, who advised him to attend a speech given by Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party. Thyssen was impressed by Hitler and his bitter opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, and began to make large donations to the party, including 100,000 gold marks ($25,000) in 1923 to Ludendorff. In this he was unusual among German business leaders, as most were traditional conservatives who regarded the Nazis with suspicion. Postwar investigators found that he had donated 650,000 Reichsmarks to right-wing parties, mostly to the Nazis, although Thyssen himself claimed to have donated 1 million marks to the Nazi Party. Thyssen remained a member of the German National People's Party until 1932, and did not join the Nazi Party until 1933.
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Once the Nazi dictatorship took hold, however, Thyssen began to have second thoughts. Although he welcomed the suppression of the Communist Party, the Social Democrats and the trade unions, he disliked the mob violence of the SA. In 1934 he was one of the business leaders who persuaded Hitler to suppress the SA, leading to the "Night of the Long Knives". Thyssen was horrified, however, at the simultaneous murder of various conservative figures such as Kurt von Schleicher.
Thyssen accepted the exclusion of Jews from German business and professional life by the Nazis, and dismissed his own Jewish employees, but he did not share Hitler's violent anti-Semitism. As a Catholic, he also objected to the increasing repression of the Roman Catholic Church, which gathered pace after 1935: in 1937 he sent a letter to Hitler, protesting the persecution of Christians in Germany The breaking point for Thyssen was the violent pogrom against the Jews in November 1938, known as Kristallnacht, which caused him to resign from the Council of State. By 1939 he was also bitterly criticising the regime's economic policies, which were subordinating everything to rearmament in preparation for war.
Obama and Democrats, united by shutdown, looking for gains beyond it
Source: Washington Post
President Obama and congressional Democratic leaders, in their ongoing showdown with Republicans, now have a goal beyond protecting the health-care law, reopening the government and preventing the first-ever default on the nation’s debt.
They are gambling that if they can hang together and remain tough to the end, they stand a chance to break a dangerous cycle that has taken hold in Washington — one of legislating through brinkmanship, which has brought the government and the financial system to the edge of disaster at least four times over the past three years.
“This not just about Barack Obama. This is about the next president, whoever and whatever party it might be,” Obama told Democratic senators at a White House meeting on Thursday, according to Senate majority whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).
So far, the Democrats’ strategy of refusing to meet Republican demands — which is not without risk — appears to be working.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-and-democrats-united-by-shutdown-looking-for-gains-beyond-it/2013/10/12/143f1954-32be-11e3-89ae-16e186e117d8_story.html
It is nice to see an article that discusses one of the main goals of Democrats is to try to break this vicious cycle of manufactured crises. Republicans now just want to get something out of the crisis that they created even if they don't know what that is. The problem with that is that it allows them to rationalize that this was all worth it. Worse, they have not learned anything, since the great compromise offered by House Republicans is leaving the government shut down and extending the debt ceiling to expire just before the Holiday shopping season. Boehner as the Grinch anyone?
It is too bad that the corporate MSM seems to take it for granted that government by crisis is okay. This is part of the reason why Republicans have gotten a free pass for their deliberately destructive tactics.
House GOP furious with Senate
Source: The Hill
House Republicans were furious with Senate Republicans and President Obama on Saturday for trying to cut a debt ceiling deal that leaves them out in the cold.
Members emerged from a conference meeting saying Obama had double-crossed them by breaking off talks in order to shop for a better deal from the Senate GOP.
They said the deal, formulated by centrist Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine.), would never get House GOP approval.
“They are trying to jam us with the Senate and we are not going to roll over and take that,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said after a GOP conference meeting.
Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/328205-house-gop-furious-with-senate
Put another way, the Tea Party House is pissed that Republicans in the Senate won't let them engineer another debt ceiling crisis in just six weeks before the Holiday shopping season. The amazing thing is that House Republicans don't see why this is a terrible idea. It is as though everyone else has to save House Republicans from themselves.
The Nation - "Saving Face: Falsely Balanced Accountability Is the New False Equivalence"
The new MSM false equivalence as exemplified in this article, breezily acknowledges that Republicans are at fault for the shutdown and debt crisis, but then argues that the President now shares responsibility for ending it:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/why-obama-must-talk-to-the-gop-20131007
However, as noted by the Nation, this is still false equivalence, because it once again gives Republicans a free pass and encourages them to once again generate a crisis. The article above does nothing to explain why Republicans would not once again set a crisis and ignores the fact that Republicans are only offering a six week extension of the debt ceiling, thus guaranteeing another crisis.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176601/saving-face-falsely-balanced-accountability-new-false-equivalence#
I believe it would be false equivalence to say Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for the government shutdown and the possibility of a debt default. Republicans engineered the shutdown to protest a three-year-old health care law, knowing their defund-or-delay demands were unattainable.
But hold off on those Hosannas. For, whatever the public discourse has gained by this more honest and fair coverage of singular Republican intransigence, it’s not been matched in the press by concomitant demands for accountability from the GOP. This is perhaps not surprising. Decades of the media exercising just one set of journalistic muscles has left its others atrophied and increasingly incapable of rising to the task of speaking truth to power.
As a result, watching news coverage of the government shutdown reveals Capitol Hill reporters visibly struggling with how to “objectively” frame the obvious legislative misconduct of just one political party. Likewise, perusing a steady stream of op-eds about the debt-ceiling impasse demonstrates that most pundits literally have no concept of how to direct rhetorical outrage at or publicly apportion shame to just one ideology anymore. Thus, we’ve arrived at a surreal moment where the D.C. media’s conventional wisdom has moved past one version of false equivalence only to latch onto another—one that now doesn’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. Or, put another way: Yes, the Republicans are mostly to blame for getting us into this crisis, but all that matters now is holding both sides accountable for getting us out of it.
Atlantic - "Inside the Conservative Bubble, It Looks Like Ted Cruz Is Winning Big"
The crazy thing is that Ted Cruz won a straw poll at the Value Voters' summit, which just underscores how radical the Republican base has become.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/inside-the-conservative-bubble-it-looks-like-ted-cruz-is-winning-big/280532/
You might expect this news to put a damper on a roomful of conservatives. In official Washington, Republicans were in a full-on panic; commentators called the party suicidal, and lawmakers began scurrying toward a resolution to the standoff. But Senator Ted Cruz of Texas—the man whose adamant resolve and 21-hour filibuster had helped bring on the stalemate, earning him the loathing of many of his colleagues—was in a defiant mood.
Taking the stage at the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of religious-right activists, Cruz announced that they were winning the fight. “I am here this morning with a word of encouragement and exhortation!” Cruz said. A woman in the front row shouted a passage from Romans: “If God is with you, who can be against you?” “I receive that blessing,” Cruz said somberly.
The conventional wisdom that the battle to stop the health-care law cannot be won, to Cruz, was merely a “trick” perpetrated by the deceitful left. “Look, the Democrats are feeling the heat,” he said. Cruz has been huddling with the lower chamber’s most conservative members, urging them to pressure Speaker John Boehner, prompting some to declare him a sort of shadow speaker. “In my view, the House of Representatives needs to keep doing what it’s been doing, which is standing strong,” he said.
"Blind adherence to ‘balance’ makes the media dangerously dumb"
I am sure the media will holdup House Republicans' offer to extend the debt ceiling to just before Thanksgiving, but leave the government shutdown, as some great compromise on their part. Of course, this ignores the fact that this means that we would have another debt crisis right before the Holiday season starts. The fact of the matter is that this crisis is direct result of not only the Fox News right wing propaganda machine, but the false equivalency that is pushed by the MSM, which effectively protects Republicans from being held accountable for their actions.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/11/blind-adherence-to-balance-makes-the-media-dangerously-dumb/
On the other hand, according to the grassroots American Council of Liberty Loving Ordinary White People Propped Up by the Koch Brothers, the liberal media want to contaminate your precious bodily fluids and indoctrinate your children in homosocialism.
Haha, kidding. Of course, there’s no such group. But false equivalency in the news has been very much, in fact, in the news lately – thanks to reporting on the US government shutdown that characterizes the impasse as the consequence of two stubborn political parties unwilling to compromise on healthcare.
* * *
As an institution, the American media seem to have decided that no superstition, stupidity, error in fact or Big Lie is too superstitious, stupid, wrong or evil to be disqualified from “balancing” an opposing … wadddyacallit? … fact. Because, otherwise, the truth might be cited as evidence of liberal bias.
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