Ummm....you guys? The Republicans just filibustered Hagel. A first for a Defense Secretary nominee.

[patrice]

50. Oh, I understand that much. What I don't know is how to parse it all out & I wonder if those

who are, possibly, gaming one another in this situation have parsed it out amongst themselves too, so that they've decided who gets thrown under the bus and when.

Are they being honest enough to even agree amongst themselves what the priorities are?

I'm not sure how that's even possible with all of the secret corporate personhood money floating around out there.

As I said, I can't parse it all out, but a few hypothetical and rather obvious examples would be:

Will overturning DOMA be the easiest, least expensive, project to abandon, since many in that cohort may be perfectly satisfied to fight it out as a states' rights issue anyway and loser states be damned because, of course, everyone can just move to whateer state that has the culture they like? and anyone who can't, well, that's just too bad, but it's their own fault anyway, so it doesn't REALLY matter whether some folks get their rights and others don't.

Will ERA 2.0 and pay equity for women and all of the issues attendant to that like defending Roe v. Wade and propagating any chance of universally accessible child-care, be the hardest project to abandon, since women are half of the population and represented by all 2+ political parties?

In between easiest and hardest to throw under the bus are tiny shades of probabilities, but, obviously, alternative energy development is going up against the deepest pockets of all domestically and internationally, so that one's going to be pretty easy to dump or drag their feet on.

All with plausible deniability, btw, a HIGHLY MARKETABLE COMMODITY that has been ever so effective in the past.

All of which brings up the issue of time: do we have time to pull alternative energy development out from under the bus and resurrect it? Will American business, especially quality sensitive techs, survive without the right to organize defending it against severe downward pressure on American wages? How much longer can we withstand rising health care costs without just pencil-whipping a whole bunch of elderly and disabled folks, and whatever unknown values they actually do represent, right into the grave?

Yeah, I know conjecture, all, but I'm just not sure that whatever's going on, amongst those you mention who will exact retribution against Democrats, is coherent enough to have even admitted any of this stuff to itself, let alone to have made any effort to identify what plans B, C, D etc. are as whoever gets thrown under the bus, step by step, can no longer be counted on to commit to those who do the throwing.

But then, perhaps, the generational wars are worse than I know and the balance of power, or at least the inertia, has already tilted irretrievably toward those who have more interest in reducing the sizes of various things, rather than actually helping solve any of these problems. That's reducing the sizes of various factors to scales that can be more easily controlled by the, not so new, but definitely more scalable made-over powers that be that take root amongst the "citizens of the archipelagos" wherever those cohorts turn out to be.