Massachusetts senate election
There is a light snow at the moment. While the snow and icy roads are cleared here from yesterday, we shall see what kind of weather unfolds throughout the day.
The phone has been ringing steadily over the week end and Monday, with volunteer or robo calls from both senate candidates Martha Coakley and Scott Brown. Sometimes the political ads during the day ran consecutively from different funding sources. The ceremonies for Martin Luther King took a backstage on this holiday.
There appears to be a lot of attempts at figuring out what is going on concerning the meteoric rise in the polls of Mr. Brown. I assume most readers have a bit of background on this race, so I will not offer that here. Of course, without the super-majority bar being pushed and accepted in the US Senate and a contentiously fought health insurance bill, this race would have less national coverage.
One needs to remember Massachusetts (is that spelled correctly? I spell it MA) has an electoral mind of its own. It has 51% registered independents out of the pool of registered voters. Even though there are three times the number of registered Democrats than registered Republicans (roughly 36% to 12%) we have had a Republican govenor for 16 years since William Weld took the position in 1991.
The state legislative bodies are overwhelmingly Democratic.
The 1972 national election saw MA being the only state going for George McGovern, DC not being a state. The 1980 national election had MA split the vote 41.90% Reagan to 41.75% Carter, over 15% going to the Independent.
Whether this special election is a bellwether for a national trend or just a reflection of MA voter quirkiness and bad timing for any election to reflect a trend in overall voter sentiment (low turnout might make it more of a comment on political machine effectiveness and preparedness) is not something I feel comfortable expounding on from a knowlegeable perspective.
I am going out to vote, and await results and implications. So this is a topical thread I believe.
Update: Heavy turnout at the polls
Update 2: Martha Coakley concedes 9:24 tonight.
“bellwether” Think bovine anatomy.
Is there a one minute rule on correcting spelling?
This may be a reflection on how the health bill has/is been/being handled by Congress, and not the fact that people are opposed to a national health plan. People are opposed to their lack of influence, teh Democrats ramming through any POS bill, and lobbyists controlling teh content of teh bill.
Maybe voters in Massachusetts, who already have a health care system similar to the current federal Health Care Reform legislation (insurance mandates and insufficient insurance cost controls), do not like the system that the Democratic candidate supports.
Complicated….our health insurance bill is a result of Mitt Romney (Repub), BC/BS, and the hospital consortium.
All the ads I’ve seen or heard have had one thing in common with Brown: Milton Friedman econ theory. If health care is an issue it is only in relation to the over all, primal thought that money is tight and a smaller less taxing government sounds like I’ll have more of it in my pocket if carried through.
People really just don’t get it that the lack of money in their pocket is the results of smaller governemnt, privatization and freer markets because they don’t see the wizard behind the curtain.
I think MA is a vulnerable to an emotional protest vote as any state.
Couple issues here. First Coakley is an incredibly flawed candidate. Couldn’t the Dems find someone competant to run for the People’s Seat? Then she ran a horrible campaign – especially in the last few weeks. As one Dem pundit said,”What would be different if she was trying to lose?”
Brown is running on a populist platform and showed himself very adept at taking advantage of Coakley’s missteps. He is also a good, solid candidate and handily won the debate.
Lastly Brown has been running against the horrible health-care bill in congress and has rode the populist outrage at both the bills contents and more paticularly the process. Obama’s luke -warm indorsement of Coakley at the last minute now made it into a semi-referendum on the health care bill which will help Brown. I think Obama flying in at the last minute will actually hurt Dems chances, not becuase he’s not popular himself, but his policies are not popular and it looks like desperation. (Well it was desperation).
Considering voter fraud in Dem machine politics I expext Coakley to win in a squeker with lots of “found” ballots. See Washington State and Franken’s win for examples. Only way Brown wins if its a blow-out (cheating only works if it’s close). I also suspect to hear about voter intimidation at the poles from ACORN/SEIU/Black Panther types, maybe even some violence. What will be the worst will be some people will justify the fraud and violence….
Islam will change
When people are angry, they strike out and the target is not always rational.
Believe me, people are angry. Everything – everything – these days is a sellout, from our money going to banks to the breathtaking reversal of ‘health care reform’ into a policy of mandatory insurance.
Obama, unfortunately, deserves this.
Speaking from the ground here, the last part of your message is a little wacko.
I voted this morning at 7:20am in Cambridge. Unlike the presidential election there was no line to get a ballot. On my way out I maybe saw 1 or 2 people walking toward that building that looked liked people going to vote. Guess who I voted for.
I used to be registered as an independent (and before that as a democrat). In a previous election I wanted to vote in the republican primary and had to declare myself a republican to do so. After that I never saw a good reason to switch back. A lot of the independents Massachusetts were raised in democrat households so they are a little uncomfortable calling themselves a republicans. I think this bias means they are actually a little less independent then they way they’ve registered.
I also think what appears as quirkiness is really a parochial or provincial attitude. In my opinion Massachusetts voted for George McGovern in 1972 because Nixon had challenged John F. Kennedy back in 1960. And in the same way many voted against Carter giving Reagan the state in 1980 because Carter defeated Teddy Kennedy in the primaries (I voted for Carter since I was not ready for Reagan at this point).
A last point is that Massachusetts democrats have a lousy history of voting from Women for high office.
Buff,
Considering voter fraud in Dem machine politics I expext Coakley to win in a squeker with lots of “found” ballots.
That only works for the democrats when the margin is less then half a percent.
If Mass votes for Brown, the admirer of Palin, the lover of Wall Street banks, the hater of medical care for all, and most of the rest of the rightwingnut agenda, you will know that mental derangement has occurred in the Bay State. Or that plutopropaganda is so powerful it can dupe almost anyone into obedience. Massachussets=Massadupedachussets.
Rdan – Good to here that. I was hopeing the people of MA (my spelling also!) wouldn’t tolerate that crap. Anyway’s it will be interesting. Eitehr way the fact that Brown is even in the running in such a blue state bodes ill for Dem chances in November.
Islam will change
Islam will change=I don’t understand the world very well. Probably never will.
Now Cantab that was actually a nice comment. Keep working on it…
🙂
Thanks for explaining that the voters for Brown are not rational. I agree. On the other hand most of the rest of your post shows how expertly the plutocracy can bend brains to their will. Obama wants, for example, the banks to return the money to the public. Brown doesn’t. So how does Obama “deserve this”?
see Buff
you do agree with me.
I was gonna say that people don’t appreciate the power of the Republican permanent campaign.
Or that the health care plan offends lots and lots of people whow would have liked a health care plan that did not have a requirement that they buy insurance from criminal corporations and pay a tax to pay for the poor people to be covered by those criminal corporations.
i don’t know from Coakley. But Obama is incompetent at meeting the Republican permanent campaign, and from where I sit he seems to be in the same pocket of the rich as the Repubs.
as for vote stealing, that is a function of who is the local power. don’t forget Ohio and Florida.
Buff,
Most of my comments start nice and it’s the fault of our left leaning argument buddies when it goes down hill.
Cantab
something else the repubs are better than the democrats at. they can steal an election where the margin is more than half a percent.
Margery
Buff changed his slogan after he got yelled at by us. he had been saying that islam must change.
in my racist ignorance i agreed with him, but i knew i’d get killed by the racists on the other side (they call themselves pc) if i said so.
i don’t think Buff knows as much about islam as even i do (not much). he is thinking about the terrorists, and the guys who throw acid in the face of women who go outside without their veils and a strong man to protect them.
i guess he is saying that islam will get tired of that. my guess is that it will take them about another five centuries, just as it has taken Christians the last five centuries to achieve a degree of the Christianity as taught by Jesus of Nazareth.
Cantab – MM comment above is a perfect example…
MM – Can you tell me what solar system your beaming your comments in from?
Islam will change
Margery
you can’t beat me in the “people are stupid” department. but it is stupid to think that the people of Massachusetts aren’t trying to say something that is important to them. i don’t know from Brown. I agree that Palin is stupid (i like that word), but i don’t think you can assume the people voting for the Republican know all that much about his “policies” or really care… they all lie anyway. They are voting against an incredibly inept Democrat show in Washington. The Dems appear to me to be inept because they are sold out to the same people the Repubs are sold out to.
when you see propaganda succeeding, it would be “not stupid” of you to look at the why of it, and not just comfort yourself with smug observations of the stupidity of the electorate. from what i have seen stupidity is an equal opportunity employer of both sides.
MA is not kind to women candidates. I do agree with Cantab.
You still have a way of saying “What you really meant…” or repeating a talking point a lot. Doesn’t mean you can’t add more analysis or do more legwork yourself. None of us is paid to do this writing, and regulars should be adding to information.
If Brown wins, it will be very hard to interpret the results as NOT a repudiation of Obama. I mean this is MA, the bluest of the blue – I would have assumed the D’s could win with virtually anyone. And if 0 is too far left for MA, imagine how the rest of the country feels.
Well, my personal opinion is that this is a great attempt by the media to make a completely lack-luster election into something marketable. It’s also an attempt by outside money to get some points in for the Republican party.
I seem to remember this same sort of spin on the Boston mayoral campaign, and it ended up not even being close. From the ground, and locally, I can tell you a couple of things: my family wasn’t going to vote. They are now and they’re expressly going to vote for Martha. They’re REGISTERED Republicans too and always have been. After the Bush fiasco and the whole Palin thing, they’re done with the party. So read that anyway you want. Also most of my friends weren’t going to vote, and are going out now. They’re also voting Democratic.
So in the end, I think the same thing is going to happen here: a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. As just as a point of disclosure, I’m going out to vote too and I wasn’t going to. I’m also a registered Republican and I’m voting for Coakley after discussing the race with friends and family.
Buff, stop feeding the trolls! But, I do agree with your analysis. Some folks are just incapable of accepting thought providing alternative views than their own.
Dal, stupid is a pejorative term most often unsupported by evidence, and almost always wrong. Ignorance, however, is almost always a better term, and more often supported by the individual’s commentary.
MM shows sign of both afflictions, closed minded and unable to accept any alternatives, and ignorance bordering on stupidity (because of the breadth of the ignorance.)
Spam alert!
What if I do the social security spreadsheet (no promises) would you put a link to it from the website?
Spam alert!
From the ground, and locally, I can tell you a couple of things: my family wasn’t going to vote. They are now and they’re expressly going to vote for Martha. They’re REGISTERED Republicans too and always have been
…
I’m also a registered Republican and I’m voting for Coakley after discussing the race with friends and family.
Legit, not! (she may win though — Brown has fallen to only a 2 to 1 favorite on intrade)
MA voted for Hillary in the primaries (not me…).
Coakley is IMHO a very bad candidate. I had a degree of trouble deciding in the primary because it was clear that Coakley was the anointed-one. There was an air-of-inevitability about her that doesn’t play well here (Northern New England) for the most part. That might have been why Hillary won here, actually.
Ultimately I voted for Capuano because I felt like we needed someone with some fire in the job. Coakley seems to let other people do her talking for her, and the things they say don’t always seem to be well-informed when they aren’t straight-up callous. Even when you’re telling the factual truth, you have to have some consideration for the audience (a hard lesson that I’m still learning).
This isn’t a machine-region the way that Chicago or Philadelphia have been known. Menino has his cult-following (god only knows why, I think he’s getting the same kind of old-people vote that the Kennedys used to get…kiss enough babies and you can do whatever you want.)
Brown’s spokeswoman on the other hand comes off as a complete off-her-rocker lunatic. She’s obviously a true believer and loves to spin for the sake of spinning, which I find repulsive, but that sort of attitude resonates with the Fox News crowd (there are a lot of them here, my parents literally leave the television tuned to Fox News all day, and it just poisons your mind, you hear the same insane crap over and over and eventually you believe it).
I think that Kennedy (libertarian of sorts) might end up with a fair sized vote based on his mistaken-name-ID. Brown is going to have really big suburban numbers particularly in the north shore and south shore. Worcester will go hard to Coakley (that’s a REAL machine-town). I think that the urban vote will go Coakley for the most part, with a lot of people just holding their nose and filling in the oval for Coakley because Brown and Kennedy are so much worse.
One can only hope.
And the national health insurance reform has little in common with the system in Massachusetts as I understand it. The reform process here was open and transparent by comparison (and it wasn’t). There’s way more distrust because the Republicans have managed to spin insurance reform as a reform of healthcare delivery. The stimulus plan did more to change the way that healthcare will be delivered in this country than the insurance bill will.
I just have a really bad feeling about this in general. This might be a classic case of the winner in the primary being acceptable to a majority of the people willing to declare themselves Democrat and just being totally unacceptable as a personality on a wider basis. Meanwhile you’ve got Brown standing next to his pickup truck playing up his military background (which is absolutely ridiculous, since when does that play here? 1956 when Eisenhower carried the entire state (except Boston…weird)?
In fact this election seems to have a lot in common with that one. Eisenhower was standing by the fear vote with McCarthy (at least implicitly), and so is Brown. This election could end up the same way, Brown pulling every suburban and rural district and the more urban districts going Coakley…(Boston, Worcester, Lowell, Lynn, maybe Brockton).
If Republicans get this seat, it will clearly all be Coakley’s fault.
we did give Hillary the majority vote…
The ‘primary’ was a dismal affair between the four democratic candidates, and made little news even here. Neither did the campaign till now. Turn out will clinch the deal probably.
Well when people just lash out and vote stupidly, it is hardly something to be proud of. The fact that Brown voters would vote for him with his record makes it clear I think how easy it is to dupe them. They have little idea of what they are doing. Easy dupes.
Properly vetted and constructed. Remember the figures used here are also vetted by people who know their stuff (ss actuary and NASI)…it took me awhile to follow the numbers as well. I am going to post on my take on the issue…that way this thread remains on topic.
What the “terrorists” are doing is precisely what the Vietnamese, the Africans, the Indians, the Indonesians, and other colonial peoples did earlier. They fought to free themselves from colonial domination. The US, UK and Israel have been colonizing and trying to dominate the Muslim world now for decades and the victims are fighting back. Did the Vietnamese, the Africans, the Indians, etc., give up? NO, they kept at it until they got the Western colonizers OUT and so will the Muslims. “Terror” people seem not to understand is simply a method of war. You can fight against “terror” any more than you can fight against dive bombing. It is however a convenient red herring of a term to cover up and disguise what is going on. If people realized this was a neo-colonial war of liberation they would probably stop and have doubts about its validity. But by using this red herring term the warmongers/neo-colonialists can obfuscate the situation and suck people into supporting them.
meant “you cannot fight against…..”
I come from the world of reality and truth. I don’t fall for plutopropaganda or right wing lunatics, etc., etc. Far too many Americans have lost touch with reality.
PS I’d be very responsive to intelligent arguments. I haven’t found any from buffy at all. He has a mind twisted by the propaganda of the ruling class (plutocracy and their rightwingnut dupes). Why should I “accept” his nonsense?
If Brown wins it would be an endorsement of Wall Street bankers and their exemption from responsibility for what they have done, it would be an endorsement of keeping the lower classes from getting affordable medical insurance, and it would be an endorsement of other politicians like Palin. Is that what Mass. voters want? If so, let them screw themselves. They would have only themselves to blame. But (PS) the evil effects would spread out to the rest of the nation since his election would probably stop any shred of decent health care reform, and would probably make Wall Street even more arrogant, irresponsible and nose-thumbing toward the nation at large. So it is a crucial election.
Obama’s not nearly left enough in my view. Part of that has to do with the fact that he’s the president, and therefore shouldn’t act in an extremely partisan manner, and part of it has to do with the political reality of having a caucus that includes people who don’t belong in it who will hold up legislation on the foundational issues of his agenda (Lieberman, I’m staring at you and wishing that my eyes were lasers that would strike you down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger).
In any case, it is what it is. The reactionary vote against Obama isn’t to vote for looney Republicans (this guy isn’t even a centrist Republican like the Republicans who held the governor’s office during the past couple decades) or total whackjob libertarians (who are at least ideologically pure, I just don’t agree with anything they say or do).
JGoodwin
Excellent comment. Helps people like me lost in a sea of Red to understand the politics of a supposedly true Blue state. Good to see, though, that people in MA understand that their votes are important and that they do not hesitate to let their elected reps know it. NO
When Kennedy learned he was dying he could have stepped aside at a time advantageous to choosing a successor, but apparently the ego wouldn;t let that happen. This seems common in the Senate.
Last I heard Robert Byrd, another Senate hanger-on, could go at any minute.
Ain’t this interesting boys and girls.
Kharris–FYI. A wether is a castrated male sheep. Thus, nothing to do with bovines. NO
There is an article (link on Economist’s View) in which the author posits that “terrorism” could be solved with social benefits: giving them SS and health care, etc., etc. It is written by an “intelligent” person but it is nonsense, sadly enough. A U of Chicago professor, whose name I don’t presently recall, made a very detailed study of terrorist activity and concluded that in EVERY case it comes from anger at intruders trampling over the terrorists’ territory. It is a territorial struggle, as were the movements of colonial liberation. Get the intruders OUT. It is quite simple, but so simple many either can’t or don’t want to understand it. It applies to us in spades. Americans don’t seem to understand that they (and their Israeli darlings) are trampling on Musllim territory. The Muslims want us OUT. So simple, so difficult to grasp.
Here is the U of Chicago professor I was referring to:
http://political-science.uchicago.edu/faculty/pape.shtml
I have a somewhat different idea why he is not “left enough” [about which I agree with you]. My take is that he knows he is “on approval” as the first black President, know that intense racism still lurks just beneath the surface of US politics, and that as a result he must not be conventionally “black” (ie radical) but act as if he were just another white middle of the road guy. He’s trying in short to be a Democrat Colin Powell, black but not scary, an “establishment” black who is friendly to Wall Street (up to a point) and who tried to soothe and placate even the loony Right.
Well Coakley may not be an ideal candidate, but one has to put her in context. It’s either she or Brown. In spite of all her faults I would think sensible people would prefer her to Brown. One is a rightwingnut, the other a flawed liberal. Trashing Coakley in this situation seems to me to be not the right thing to do.
Yeah, let;’s see how well plutopropaganda works in West Virginia with all the poor hillbillies LOL.
The biggest factors in the Mass election , first, are that Coakley has been much less than inspiring – with a miserable campaign; second, that Scott Brown is running against the status quo; and third, that Brown is surging as an unknown at just the right time, before people know much about him.
It is certainly something of a testament on the state of the Mass democratic party that they managed to nominate someone who doesn’t know Curt Shilling was a Red Sox player, rather than a Yankees Fan, and who allowed an unknown opponent to make three times as many campaign visits between the primary and the election as their nominee.
CoRev,
Yea – Your right I’ll stop feeding the troll. I think I hit you up on that the other day…my turn.
I still expect Coakley to win. Mostly becuase of machine politics. Can’t wait to see ballets being ‘found’. But it really doesn’t matter. The message has been sent and every blue dog Dem in the house will be wondering if he has less than a year left in his political career. Heck, Sen Reid is not expected to survive even with the disarray the Nevada GOP is in. The fact that Obama had to come up to MA showed just how devastating the backlash has become.
Should be interesting.
Islam will change
STR – Yes he should have, but to be honest Kennedy was nothing without that Senate seat. Same with Byrd. Two excellent arguments for term limits.
Islam will change
Rdan,
The point of making a spreasheet is to enhance transparency. The social security administration had someone make their own tool using a proprietary software but in my opinion is not usable.
On vetting, the first step would be to reproduce what the social security administration uses as their base case.
Buff,
Cantab – MM comment above is a perfect example…
Of what?
Nancy
dunno. from my experience i would say that sheep are even more bovine than cows.
margery
throwing acid in the face of a woman is freeing yourself from colonialism?
Cent21,
Brown is surging as an unknown at just the right time
Everyone voting in Massachusetts knows that Brown does not support the current healthcare legislation and will vote with the republicans on this issue. He’s not a stealth candidate.
What self respecting liberal really wants to vote the top cop into office anyway. And one that does not know who Curt Shilling is.
Margery
Obama’s tax on the banks is a political fig leaf the tax is one tenth of one percent. even a good liberal (Robert Reich) could see throuht it. the health care plan is a dogs dinner. even I think that, and i like dogs.
voters are humans. therefore not rational. elections are not about rational.
buff, see
i agree with you again, but i didn’t want to say so to Cantab because as a left leaning buddy that would have started him downhill.
http://www.babylon.com/definition/bos_(bovis_)/English
sheep are ovine.
Coberly,
as for vote stealing, that is a function of who is the local power. don’t forget Ohio and Florida.
Yes, I remember that after the initial count Bush was ahead in both states. In Florida the democrat from Chicago tried to bring a little bit of Illinois to the sunshine state but came up short. If you can’t steal an election with a name like Daley I don’t think you were meant to win.
Or maybe those voters like what they have and just don’t want to pony up money for poor people in other states.
You have to wonder how many of the “kill the bill” folk on the left have handy insurance cards in their own wallets.
CoRev
you will note that i am, sort of, on your side today. i haven’t seen any trolls here today. Margery is doing her best to prove that irrationality votes for both parties.
i know that “stupid” is not pc. but i am not pc. don’t mean to hurt feelings. mean to make you strong. please remember that i am a proud member of stupid myself.
“i guess he is saying that islam will get tired of that.”
With a little assist from the Strategic Air Command. Which is where Buff and I diverge on this issue.
margery
because I say so.
I disagree with Buff more often than I agree with him, at least in public. i don’t see that he has said anything unreasonable here (that i noticed). you on the other hand are giving us a text book example. and i agree with you.
Buff,
Islam will change
Whatever you post your last line is always like a Federico Fellini ray or hope.
Margery
that is the first sign. i can’t tell you how hard it is for me to convince people that I alone am the posessor of reality and truth.
Margery
Sammy is wrong that it is a repudiation of Obama being too far left. It is a repudiation of Obama being too far right to offer an honest health plan, the voters, as you point out, are too stupid to uderstand that. they are just mad about the health plan and they blame the democrats… as they should. but they don’t know the democrats are too far right to be honest or rational.
you and they are making the same mistake Democrat = good Republican = bad in your case. In theirs it is just the opposite, that is, just the same.
“A last point is that Massachusetts democrats have a lousy history of voting from Women for high office.”
Three of the last five lieutenant governors were women. And Coakley herself was elected state-wide. Is that really out of line with other states?
hell of an analysis.
or maybe he just went to harvard (was it?) and has the view of the educated moneyed elite?
Rdan,
According to the press over 100K absentee ballots are out there. Any bets they fall heavily for Coakley? I will go on record and even predict they go AT LEAST 80% for Coakley. From reading around Brown probably has to win by 5-6% to overcome expected voter fraud, maybe more.
I expect Coakley to win in a close one purely on voter fraud. There is just no way the Dems will let a Rep in the People’s Seat….
Islam will change
Insanity
cent21
The Schilling thing was an attempt at a joke. It not only fell flat but backfired badly. But I really really doubt that Coakley doesn’t know who Schilling is particularly since he is politically very active.
Buff,
She’s something.
Bruce,
She may have equated all things bad (such as republicans) to the NY Yankees. An honest mistake.
MA isn’t the only Blue state like that. Illinois is similar, with suburban Chicago and downstate leaning right to heavily right, and the more traditional urban areas and college towns leaning more to the left.
I can’t speak to other places in the country (haven’t lived there).
The view from Boston is often that if it doesn’t happen inside the 128/95/93 belt, then it didn’t happen and isn’t important, and the rest of the state resents it. Meanwhile you have the suburbanite aspirational plutocrats buying into the American Dream bullshit on a daily basis.
buff,
All political junkies should have a link to this site.
http://www.intrade.com/
If you follow it then you know on the Sunday talk shows when they make a prediction where they got the magical information from.
Kennedy was never going to step down while the one issue that he’d spent so much of his career on was finally coming to the hill. That’s like getting Dian Fossey to help you destroy Rwandan forests.
Cantab at a minimum I will promise to put up anything on Social Security you like over at the Bruce Webb which would allow you to link to it in comments here.
And Coberly is working from Social Security numbers and in fact took the trouble to put the Current Law numbers into spreadsheets to serve as a base for the ones used in the plan:
OASDI 2009 Current Law: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rjyg2yaQ_6kj_AAXoLsA0sQ
OASI 2009 Current Law: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rCwPA-HCtmqSGy6neoFNhuw
DI 2009 Current Law: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rckNH41TQyi31ucuLmJ7jlg
If it became necessary we could supply them in .xls or .cwk format.
But a warning you have a habit of reading the SS Report too narrowly. Just because the Trustees use the word “immediately” that doesn’t mean that is the only workable alternative. What the Trustees are doing in the summary is presenting the outside choices: immediate increase in taxes to deliver 100% of scheduled benefit, immediate cut in benefits to restore actuarial balance, ultimate increase in taxes to deliver 100% benefit if TF is allowed to go to depletion, ultimate cut in benefits if TF is allowed to go to depletion and no fix imposed. That is why it is called a summary. Which is also why it doesn’t mention the range of economic and demographic outcomes that would change those numbers and dates. In order to understand how the fix could be modified you need to examine the tables which break everything down by year or sub-period. For example this table shows you that the actual actuarial imbalance for the first 25 year sub-period is just 0.17% of payroll. While the total imbalance over the first 50 years is 1.51%. Which is why implementing an initial 0.3% fix allows one to delay to 2026 the start of a more comprehensive fix that puts the whole system back on a PayGo basis over the whole span of years and not just as an aggregate as the immediate 2.01% would do.
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2009/VI_OASDHI_payroll.html#131183
But really you need to do more than cut, paste and underline from the summary as if Dale and I just overlooked those passages. We didn’t.
But yes I’ll cross-post anything you like at my site and do the vetting and deconstructing post-facto.
Rdan and all,
I got the comment below from Megan McArdles site at the Atlantic from a poster named ‘blighter’. Its really performance art at its finest and everyone should find the humor in this over-the-top irony/sarcasm etc. Heck I read Megan’s blog alf the time just for blighter’s comments.
blighter January 19, 2010 11:34 AM
Megan writes: “But if you want to rage, rage against the universe that provides us too little information, and too limited brains, to make perfect choices every time.”
You see, here again you prove that it is in fact you who needs to “get out more”. Have you never met a progressive technocrat? They have, if anything, too much information, too huge of brains and make if not perfect choices every time, then certainly very good choices and far better than the teeming unwashed masses make for themselves. The reason it’s easy to hate people who oppose having compassionate progressive geniuses re-order society from top-to-bottom (well, let’s be honest, from bottom-to-middle. The top is already largely populated by the progressive elite and thus can probably just keep-on keepin’ on…) is because people who oppose progress are indisputably evil.
So, supporting politicians who will oppose Obama et al’s efforts to usher in a new golden age, one that this time will benefit the poor, the hungry, the ill, children, puppy dogs with droopy eyes and everyone else who suffered terribly under George W. Bush’s reign of terror is also indisputably evil. The thing is, though, that most of the left is far too kind. They make excuses for these idiot voters, they say, “it’s not their fault, the Republicans have tricked them. We must still be compassionate and respectful of their opinion and right to express it.”
Happily, more and more progressives are realizing that kind of hogwash is a road to nowhere. What we need is less participation by the bigoted, barbaric masses and more firm leadership by the enlighened elite. After the world has been made better, everyone will be a progressive and there will be no opposition, but until then it’s probably best if we ignore or repress the hatefully atavistic ‘conservative’ half of the population. It is clearly in the best interests of everyone, even the hateful haters themselves.
Lastly, I have to disagree with you, Megan, here:”Life is too short for me to spend any time manufacturing hatred for strangers.”
Proving that you are a better, more moral person than others by hating people who refuse to see the clear wisdom of your preferred policy & lifestyle choices is among the most satisfying experiences in life. It’s why I go on about how much more refined my food-choices are — and more moral too as I avoid the gruel that the common brute slops up from factory farming. It’s why I spend so much time preening about how much more I care for the downtrodden as evinced by my earnestly expressed desire for the government to spend lots of other people’s money on them. It’s why I go on and on about how oppressed are various groups like gay people, polyamorous people, short people, tall people, handi-capable people, and so on.
But then the brutish commoners have to come along with their ignorant support of “freedom” and other euphemisms for hatred and spoil everything with their infernal “right to vote”. That’s the biggest problem facing us right now.
Hopefully this ‘election’ will be the wake-up call our progressive leaders need to stop their dilly-dallying and cram through as much goodness and light as they possible before the evil bigots claw their way to any more of a toe-hold of power. Barring that, I think we’ll have to […]
“I also suspect to hear about voter intimidation at the poles from ACORN/SEIU/Black Panther types, maybe even some violence. What will be the worst will be some people will justify the fraud and violence…. “
Yeah I suspect you will hear about that too. The only problem is that all of that turned out to be mythical. There was one guy in Panther regalia. They made him go away. One guy slipped and fell while sparring with some SEIU guys, showed up the next day in a wheelchair (even though video showed him jumping right up) and for a few days you couldn’t turn on Fox without seeing Gladney. But nothing came of it because there was beating of poor Rodney Gladney. It was all a sham. And Acorn has been cleared of any vote rigging or registration fraud and the video ‘documenting’ Acorn workers given tax advice to a pimp and a hooker turns out to have been heavily edited after the fact with a whole new soundtrack.
But of course Fox is better at spreading misinformation than correcting it, some people still kneejerk to ‘panther, SEIU, Acorn’.
Link: http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/both_sides_now.php#comments
And once again – its PARODY…
Islam will AND must change
A pilot who goes into flight training right out of college is nothing without his Wings. If you discount his flying record in between.
Anyone who thinks that during Kennedy’s time in office that he was just warming a chair is kind deliberately residing in an alternative reality.
http://usliberals.about.com/od/liberalpersonalprofiles/p/TedKennedy.htm
And the same with Byrd. It wasn’t all about getting money for bridges in W. Virginia.
Don’t bet on it buff. The usual suspect conservative commentators (AM radio is full of them, including the two morning drive guys on the major sports station) in this area have been pushing absentee balloting hard in this cycle.
True. (Ow.) Sometimes I get distracted from the big picture by the (ow) details. (Ow.)
Or maybe we are thinking too narrowly. Bad economic performance usually costs the incumbent party. The whole bailout thing remains unpopular. No need for this to be a reflection of just the health care deal. In fact, we may be substituting consequences for causes. It is pretty well understood that a GOP win will put the health care bill at risk. The doesn’t necessarily mean the vote is more “about” health care than other issues.
JG, C’mon man, the whole country is like that. Urban = more liberal and more Dem voters. Rural = more conservative and more Repub voters. As more move to the major cities the national elections are being controlled by a handful of urban areas. From your comment, I assume you live within the boundaries you described.
As to who wins/loses in this election, if Coakley wins pundits and pollsters lose, big time. Many Dems breathe a sigh of relief, and the administration gets on with its agenda.
If Brown wins, the many Dems begin running in earnest tomorrow or reconsider running at all. The administration rethinks its current agenda and implementing strategy.
Of the 30 Senators up for election, ten are in tossup districts (6Ds & 4Rs), if Brown wins it is possible to see all the tossup districts go conservative, plus possibly a handfull of the remaining twenty. That means Dems lose the Senate.
Current estimates are for as high as 28 House seats going conservative. If the same trend as the Senate continues then the 28 seats will be a low estimate, and the Dems lose the House.
What I find intriguing is how insulated are the liberals from the depth and breadth of political feeling in the country. MM is the poster child representing this. It may be the case as JG said, that outside their immediate locales nothing else exists.
Buff, now that was funny!
Bruce – I never meant to imply these two never did anything while in office. Heck Kennedy’s sponsership of NCLB was a leading reason it got passed. BUt there comes a time when these guys should resign rather than being rolled out on a gurney. Kennedy stayed to long as has Byrd. I am in favor of term limits just to turn over the power more often.
Islam will change
For the GOP, it works when it’s Florida or Ohio. Democrats really need to get better at cheating to be competitive.
Scott Brown’s position is that he supports the Massachusetts health care reforms but opposes the current Federal bill. Given the analyses I’ve seen that state that the current bill is more or less the same as the Massachusetts law, scaled up to the rest of the country, I’d like to see how he distinguishes between them. I haven’t seen anything from him on that subject.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31637.html
Basically they are saying the voters are too dumb to tell the candidates apart. May be true.
I officially declare that a Freudian Slip. 🙂
I think the problems with the Mass health care plan magnify the issue as well.
Legit yes. Just came back from the polling place, and it is VERY crowded. Was standing next to a group of older ladies who were saying “God I hope she wins” and talking about how they came out to vote for her.
So we’ll see. But my bet is that this is a lot of noise from forces outside the state.
Bruce
of course they are. lost their b…’s.
Bruce
i am not a kill the bill person. But I was insurance free for twenty years until a kind reader took me in hand and got me on Medicare. And the only reason I had insurance before that was because I had a kind boss who got a tax break.
Yes.
probably right. but AND is a word that comes to mind here.
you were expecting logic?
well, yes
but we take these things one step at a time.
Cantab
what is so wonderful about you is your amazing selection of facts. the repubs were ahead because of some dubious vote counting. and since when is the initial count more important than the final count?
cantab
nothing you have shown us suggests that putting your idiocy into a spreadsheet would make it any smarter.
And once again – its PARODY…
I thought it was REAL. It certainly could be!
co rev
darn. i agree with that too.
i’d add a thought that just occured to me. back in those dear ol’ antebellum days, the north was industrial and the south war rural (speaking very broadly).
i think we had the same political division between industrial and rural then as we do now.
what elected Lincoln was the fear that the South was on a roll to extend it’s domestic institutions all over the country, and free labor and small farmers knew they could not compete with slave labor. no love for blacks implied, just their own survival.
today, much of the urban population understands what it takes to run a diverse population of strangers. the rural population thinks the rest of the country would be just fine if they all lived on farms and loved their neighbors as long as the nearest neighbor lived a mile away.
oh, heck Buff
i can’t agree about that. as long as kennedy thought he would live long enough to shape health care, he “needed” to stay in the Senate.
buff
now you are going too far. there may be fraud, i don’t know. but to start crying sour grapes before the vote is counted is just cheating.
Shyman,
So we’ll see. But my bet is that this is a lot of noise from forces outside the state.
So put your money where you mouth is. Open an account on intrade, wire them some money or use paypal, your credit card, or whatever else might work. Then corner the Coakley futures contract market, buy them all. You can pick them up now for a price of around 20 dollars versus Brown at around 80 dollars.
http://www.intrade.com/
The part of what you said that was not legit was the story that your’re from a family of republicans and you all decided to vote for the democrat this time because she is such a great candidate. They is a typical lie told by fly by people from both sides.
Here is a very interesting article about corporate pay and corporations that has some relation to the Mass. election and what happens to Wall Street bankers.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/01/is-it-time-for-obama-to-pick-a-fight-with-the-banks.html
Sammy,
blighter is really, really good at this parody. He catches people all teh time who think its not a parody. Very funny. Usually just one of these per post there, but they are always hilarious.
Islam will change
Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) — U.S. stocks rose, boosted by a rally in health companies on speculation Republicans will block an industry overhaul, while Treasuries fell for the first time in three days and the dollar strengthened.
Pretty clear to anybody with a brain. Health care stocks up because failure of reform will fatten profits at the expense of the insured. Companies will be able to take in more in premiums and pay out less. And there will be no effective competition. I do adore all the righwingnuts who sing the praises of competition but never if it will cut into corporate profits of the insurers.
Sen. Joe Lieberman has gotta be pulling for Coakley. If Brown wins, the Lieberman becomes the 59th senator, which is another way of saying that he becomes an irrelevance. They guy’s toast if Brown wins. I would expect Harry Reid to remove Old Joe from his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee…especially after Reid’s comment that Lieberman “stabbed him in the back.”
Sen. Joe Lieberman has gotta be pulling for Coakley. If Brown wins, then Lieberman becomes the 59th senator, which is another way of saying that he becomes an irrelevance. They guy’s toast if Brown wins. I would expect Harry Reid to remove Old Joe from his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee…especially after Reid’s comment that Lieberman “stabbed him in the back.”
Here is the wrong headed article I alluded to a while ago. Well being has little to do with “terrorism” as Pape demonstrated. It is a colonial/territorial question. And I should have added that it is amazing how few Americans can understand the issue. After all territoriality is what drive a lot of ghetto violence, gangs defending their “territory.”. Animals are territorial and fight to drive out intruders from “their land”. What the Vietnamese wanted as did the Indians, and all the rest was to get the imperialists out. It is so simple benighted Americans can’t grasp it. So they continue to intrude on other nations, invade them, kill their people and then wonder why they retaliate. Amazing, simply amazing.
Sorry forgot the link:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/01/the-economics-of-terrorism.html
Buff is dyslexic, what he means is ‘ilsm will change’……………..
I have not tilted with buff in a while, I don’t blog from my job.
Margery,
Being a New Yorker by birth I have to say that Mass residents’ “mental derangery” is fact since my youth when I had to suffer the Celtics’ dynasty (or the Bruins with Booby Orr) which is a fraction of the Yankees’ dynasty, I might add.
MM,
buffy blogs from his job as a defense contractor in Texas, he is a retired Air Force pilot. B-52’s he could put his mind around slaughtering millions from his 8 engine airplane. So, do not question his sanity, he has been certified sane inthe nuclear war games.
I suspect he is now sweating losing a cushy job where he can blog as SS and health reform are going to compete for his blogging time paycheck.
Also the F-35, shoddily assembled in Texas is about to prove itself not worth the money even with folk like buff saying the world will end without the failed piece of high tech trash.
Shilling is getting chubby that is who he is!!
Like many former pitchers.
Well Brown takes it. The stupido who admires Palin, who thinks Wall Street bankers are abused, who doesn’t want any more Americans to get health insurance, etc., etc. It is so bizarre one can only laugh. But also wish for bad things to happen to America as punishment for its stupidity. I have no doubt they will come: a budget out of control, massive tax increases needed, runaway inflation, a war without end for Israel, an angry underclass and best of all, this would be the icing on the cake, Palin as President in 2012. That would be my wish for Uncle Sam: an idiot and moron at the helm of an idiotic and moronic nation. It’s the way we are going so bring it on.. bring it on…..
Here’s something coming round the bend to slap Uncle Sam in the face: a defiant China that won’t bend or budge. The US has no way to punish China at all and China is unassailable with its 2.4 tillion dollars of reserves. The Google affair was symptomatic. Google thought getting into a snit and threatening to leave would bring China to its knees. No way. China in effect, said, if you want to go fine and close the door on your way out. The US will gradually be pushed out of the western Pacific as well as Asia in general, Japan will cozy up to China of necessity and the US imperium in the Pacific will fall back to the line of Hawaii, mid-Pacific. Yes Uncle Sam is going to get a lot more slaps in the face and there will be nothing at all that he can do but take them.
link to above story
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e9306da0-0461-11df-8603-00144feabdc0.html
Might be part of it. War is not nice you know. I even believe colonial Americans killed British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. I am sure that shocks you.
That’s going to be costly to the voters. You would at least expect them to have a GENERAL sense of where their interest lies. If they don’t what use are elections at all? Perhaps the Chinese do things better. They don’t bother and as a result probably have much more competent people at the top than we do.
His Islam will change screed is stupid and indicative of someone who doesn’t really know much about the world or world history.
That explains a lot. I though he was educated and perhaps had a job that informed him about the world in general.From what you say I can guess that he knows no history, probably didn’t have much of an education, etc., etc. Perhaps I am picking on a mental midget. My bad???
I by no means am the lone possessor of truth in general, but here amongst most of the commentators my hold on the truth is definitely above the norm. I would defer to Krugman, to Stiglitz, to Mearsheimer, and lots of distinguished intellectuals. Sadly they don’t come here to tell us what they think. We’ve got only buff, sammy cantab and their ilk.
Not quite. I agree that Obama has drifted to the right to a disconcerting degree and I have given my ideas why he has done this. I won’t keep repeating them. But we have two parties. The Democrat that is flawed but light years better than the GOP that is comfortable with crazies like Limbaugh, and O’Reilly and other assorted lunatics. So it is really no mistake to say that relatively speaking the Democrats are far far better than the Republicans. That’s simply a fact at the present time.
He went to Harvard Law and graduated but I doubt his natural viewpoint is that of the “moneyed elite”. But as President he knows they have all the levers of power in their hands so he has to placate them if he wants to get anywhere.
Why do you keep up you stupid refrain that constantly reminds us how little about the world you understand?. Defense contractor….that says it all. Warmonger no doubt too and imperialist….a lovely combo.
AP, 0923 PM just projected Scott Brown as the winner!!!
Update, coakley has called Brown to concede.
Wow…
we’re already there…
Game changer
As I understand it, there are ~49 House seats in districts won by McClain. Plus some of those who have already announced retirement (and those now or soon to be considering it), makes the possible losses in the House higher than in 94.
This note is for the Dems/Libs still reading, the anger and frustration with your policies is both deep and wide. If they do not change very soon, the 2010 elections will be a bloodbath. One last thought, I have heard the words riots in the streets and revolution more in the past few months than in any other time in my now long life. These words are not from young and inexperieced voters, but from older and widely experienced and passionate voters. Heed the message from this election.
Well, I missed on Lowell.
Otherwise, it was prety much urban vs suburban. Boston and the other near cities went 60s to 70s for Coakley (84 in the “people’s republic of cambridge”). Near Amherst (western college town) and surprisingly way out west it also went Coakley. But my parents neighborhood (north shore) went pretty much 2/3rds for Brown.
Talk about huge mistakes.
Huge mistake? Yes, but not Coakley’s. We’re already hearing how bad a campaign she ran and candidate she was. But, except for the zealot Dems, for the majority of voters the truth is very different. Their truth points back to DC, and the backrooms of the WH and Congress.
Well, I think that the astigmatism or myopia (I grew up pretty close to the Myopia Hunt Club) if you want to put it that way is more pronounced in the general Boston area than it is in other places that I’ve been. Certainly more so than Chicago. I do live in Boston, but I grew up on the North Shore, and we had a similarly parochial view there (I rarely went to Boston even though it was less than 20 miles away). I went to school in OKC and even though there was a strong Oklahoma bias, they were still tied to DFW (or Denver for people from the western part of the state) culturally, and through things like sports teams.
Local takes on entirely new meanings in the greater Boston area, I think. Places that would be considered edge suburbs in Chicago are pretty much “outside the commuting area” in Boston (like Worcester or Lowell, even though they and Nashua NH are certainly commutable). Once you’re 100 miles away, you might as well be in a different country, and you could be two states away. Five hours by car will get you to an actual different country where they speak an actual different language.
People from someplace like Gloucester, Brockton, Salem, Lynn (in particular) or Lowell might well never go particularly far from their town. I have younger friends who are in their 20s who had never been out of the state (let alone to another country) except when they moved to another state, and then they got tired of it there and moved back here. One friend had never been to a concert in Cambridge even though he grew up in Salem and Dorchester (a named neigborhood of Boston).
I don’t know what the “depth and breadth of political opinion in this country” is. I regard the stuff that goes on on Fox News and AM talk radio as brainwashing people into accepting an aspirational reality that they can never have, stoking the fires of bigotry and hatred in the process. I’m a pretty strong protectionist, and I don’t have any issues with locking down borders, but I reject the kind of posturing and rhetoric that is used to bring a lot of the population around to that position, and I particularly reject the homophobic agenda that’s out there. Coberly’s description is the right one in my opinion, you have these people who literally live walled off from their neighbors, in their own McMansions, or on farms or whatever, and then you have people who live in apartments and duplexes, people who can walk the streets at night largely without fear because their neighborhoods have street lights, where violent crime is low on a per capita basis, and there are strong police and fire infrastructures.
I’m not talking about the suburbs when I describe such an idyllic place, I’m talking about the city.
84 in the “people’s republic of cambridge
So that puts me in the elite 16. I can live with that. (are you sure it was 84 percent).
Well, thus the phrasing “mistakes.”
“Mistakes were made,” lots of them, by lots of people.
I did my part, I voted the punch. Now the nation is going to have to deal with this joker for three years until we can take him down with a candidate that doesn’t suck.
I mean it starts in all sorts of places. The law could have been changed back so that the governor could have appointed the replacement senator, that might have saved months of deadlock in the senate and would have entirely end-ran this election.
Then you have Coakley, who was a bad candidate, but who got support from the party and the money.
The list is too long to enumerate. I’m already annoyed that I looked at the results before going to bed because now I’m likely to have trouble sleeping without some kind of pill.
That’s what the popup on the infographic on the Globe’s website read when I looked at it earlier, it still does say that as of this typing:
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2010/senate_race/
Actually if you click the “Margin of Lead” you get a really nice graphic that shows clearly that Coakley basically won the urban areas (except Lowell) outright, and the suburbs and eastern rural areas went Red. Looks like the west was pretty much a tossup, despite the other graphic looking all blue.
J. Goodwin,
Thanks. That’s what it shows.
The political blame game will be all over the map for the next few days.
I have one question:
How could the Democratic Party leadership from top to bottom take their eye off the ball at any stage in the election process in Massachusetts and lose their 60th vote in the U.S. Senate?
Pathetic.
The Democrats are Losing the Independent Voters.
“Democrats’ loss in Tuesday’s race for a Massachusetts Senate seat is a stark illustration of their collapsing support from independent voters, a phenomenon that’s prompting party leaders to revamp their playbook for this year’s midterm elections.”
“Independent voters—typically centrist, white and working-class—backed President Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2008. But Massachusetts is now the third Obama-won state in the past three months where independents have swung decisively Republican.”
“Polls in the days leading up to the vote suggested the lead for Republican Scott Brown came about largely because of his advantage among independents over Democrat Martha Coakley.”
“The independents are the fulcrum of the American electorate,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted the Journal survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “Simply put, for the Democrats and Barack Obama, the arrows have been pointing down.”
“In Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans won governorships in November by winning independents by two-to-one margins. In all three states, polls showed that independents were anxious about the economy and the rising jobless rate, with health-care a less important issue.”
“This is a strong wake-up call for Democrats across the country,” said Andrew Whalen, executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party.
“Democratic campaigns across the country began rethinking their 2010 playbooks as Ms. Coakley slid in the polls. Strategists say they plan to play down health care as an election-year topic and shift to a populist message taking Wall Street to task for causing the country’s economic woes. Democrats also hope to blame Republicans for the economy, and align GOP candidates with their unpopular national leadership.”
“The message needs to be on jobs, fiscal responsibility, and reminding people that if you turn back the clock, you’re going to get the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), chairman of the Democrats’ House campaign committee. “You can talk about health care in that context, but clearly not leading with health care.”
Independent Voters abandon Democrats
To Win Back Vital Bloc, Party Plans to Retool Midterm-Election Message to Focus on Economy and Play Down Health Care
JANUARY 19, 2010, 10:06 P.M. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704561004575013411330904680.html?mod=WSJ-hpp-LEADNewsCollection#project%3DMASSELECTTIMELINE100119
Best lines of the night:
10:46 p.m. — Brown said his campaign started small, but “ended with Air Force One making an emergency run to Logan. And I didn’t mind when the president came here and criticized me. … But let me tell you when he started to criticize my truck, that’s where I draw the line.”
10:57 p.m. — Brown: “I know I have a lot to learn in the Senate, but I know who I am and I know who I serve. I’m Scott Brown, I’m from Wrentham, and I drive a truck. And let me just say in conclusion… I am nobody’s senator but yours.”
Live coverage of the US Senate race
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/01/live_coverage_o.html
.
Movie Guy,
First time I’ve heard the guy was tonight. He is very charming. But people don’t cast their vote on the basis of “I disagree with his stand on the issues, but he is charming so I will vote for him.” This is a repudiation of Obama, and government health care, pure and simple. If losing Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in MASSACHUSETTS (is there an “E” after the “T”?) isn’t a wake up call, they are indeed toe-tagged.
Quiz: do you know what the percentage of registered Republicans is in MA?
12% R, 36% D, 52% Un-enrolled.
Is it true that buffy is a “defense contractor?” If so I would like to do a rapid characterization to see if I understand where he comes from. First of course “defense contractor” like “Defense Dept” is a nice joke since it should be “Imperial War Dept” and I presume “eimperial war contractor.” Now here is my thought train: defense contractor=war profiteer=warmonger=Pentadupe (dupe of the Pentagon). I now understand why he persists in not undderstanding the world very well, because he has a big monetary interest in not doing so. His monetary interest lies in the endless war on Islam since war for him=profits for him. So he doesn’t want the war to stop for any reason. Have I been unfair? Or am I on his button?
Very close. Official voter registration numbers and percentages are found here:
Massachusetts Election Division
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/
Voter Registration Breakdown as of 10/15/08
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepdf/st_county_town_enroll_breakdown_08.pdf
.
He has the bullsh*t down very well. “no senator but yours” and Wall Street’s and the plutocracy’s and Palin’s and Limbaugh’s and the extreme right wing in general. I’m just a simple guy who drives a truck and who has sold out to the superrich as their ever willing tool. LOL
Who cares. Considering the low turnout, this “election” was a farce and useless tidbit into represenative democracy(how pathetic it is).
Movie Guy, who cares about “independent” voters. No party will ever have them and in this day and age, they will flip on a dime.
One thing I had to go to the UK Daily Mail to discover is that Brown previously posed nude for the cover of Cosmopolitan. I do think it would be wonderful to have a porno star as Senator and even President. It would so well express the nature of the USA. Has Uncle Sam ever posed nude for anything. Isn’t it about time?
Already we are hearing about the political fall out with several Dems abandoning the health care bill.
The real question now, is this administration as smart as Clinton’s. Those who want him to move even further left are just plain disconnected from what the voters in this country want. Clinton moved to the center and salvaged, and if you are a Dem, created an exemplary presidency.
We work best when we are truly bipartisan, working together with wrangling and compromise, gets us to laws that are supported by majorities. Clearly this administration wanted to make its own path, and the voters and republicans were not invited to help. So what we have today is wrangling, compromise and vote buying within the Dem super majority. Thus alienating nearly everyone, groups of insiders and those already forced outside. Bad, bad move!
Well, he’s a simple guy who is a lawyer. He just happens to also own a beat up pickup. All hat and no cowboy.
The turnout was in the neighborhood of 50 to 55%. That’s actually huge for this area for any election. Much higher than the primaries (the primaries were badly scheduled for a different week than the local elections, I’ve been to the polls four times in the last few months).
The bipartisanness of the insurance bill (why do you keep calling it a health care bill?) is exactly what made it so terrible and what dragged it out so long.
My prediction at the moment is that if the Democrats do manage to hold a senate majority (50+) after the elections this fall, they’ll implement a rule change immediately to drop the 60 votes for cloture.
The rule as it stands has been in place since 1975. It doesn’t take much to show how it changed the balance of power. No senate has ever been so effective at succeeding on cloture as this one, and none has ever had as many attempts at cloture as this one on a prorated basis other than the previous one.
That will in itself be a disastrous move (probably, IMHO), but that’s what I figure will happen.
http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/cloture_motions/clotureCounts.htm
CoRev,
I am still shocked that Coakley won. I just could not imagine the Dems losing in Deep Blue MA. The reverberations will swallow the Blue Dogs and probably kill the HCR bill (Yea!). Also probably kills Cap and Trade and any lunacy in trying to “fix” SS. (Yea!).
The fall-out will be impressive. Now I wonder if the Rs can actually capitalize on this and we can get back to divided government.
Islam will change
CoRev,
One note to put some damping on this otherwise great day. The R’s are not looked on favorably either. Its the ‘remove them all’ crowd that’s winning…
Islam will change
And Coakley doesn’t suck? Have you read up on her on the DEM sites??? I read about her on sites where they planned to vote for her and still trashed her. She was a poor campaigner and had a poor message. Brown just ran circles around her.
Islam will change
JG, it is a healthcare reform bill, not an insurance company reform bill. You have bought into the demonization of the HC Insurance industry.
As far as changing the cloture rules, I think it takes a larger vote than a simple majority. Regardless, if the Senate dropped the cloture rule, then we would have filibusters. IIRC, cloture allows the Senate to contiune deliberations on other bills, filibusters stop all work but that carried out in the committees. We didn’t like the filibuste alternative in the past, and will not like it if that’s the fall back.
Buff, in my many years and many years of study, I don’t remember a more significant change. It is much bigger then 1994. Now if “O’s” administration is able to read the tea leaves, we may get back to a workable Govt. If, however, he relies on his left base, then they will go over the cliffs in Nov.
There is enough support now to implement a bipartisan HC bill, but if they refuse, then it will just be another campaign issue in Nov.
Why the silence from the thinking AB Dems? This election is important for all.
What it does is show how completely the plutocracy of Wall Street (and their dupes) control America. A grip like that of a python that squeezes out anything that might help the public at large, especially the poorer groups (ie many hated blacks). I would call it a disgrace. People who have no Christian charity or compassion of course are happy.
War profiteers=warmongers
CoRev,
Its time for a new thread if we continue this topic. Plus the thinking Dems are trying to realize that the Deep Blue voters of MA just handing Kennedy’s seat to an R.
I think voter rage is really starting to roll. And the Dems own it all…
Islam will change
We’re thinking about it instead of crowing our losses from the rooftops.
I just happen to think out loud most of the time. If you guys want punching bags, me and Margery are probably all you’ve got for now.
I don’t think this is good by a long shot. If someone honestly believes that there is going to be any kind of bipartisan movement now that there are 42 people in the Republican caucus, then I’d have to say that person is probably delusional. It’s much more likely that things will go into 100% gridlock mode, the way that the previous congress was.
I mean, aside from the cowboy persona, all that Brown was advertising here was that he was going to be the 41st No vote on any number of issues. He’s not going to Washington to get anything done or to bring proposals to the table, he’s going to be a roadblock. Presumably that’s what people intended when they were voting. If it isn’t, they’re going to be unpleasantly surprised.
The ONLY legislation he’s ever cosponsored in the MA senate was the previous governor’s stupid sales tax holiday (even Republicans who think need to agree that’s a dumb idea, because you’re just depriving the state of the income without stimulating spending because you’re shifting sales of durable goods from one day to another).
Theoretically you should see a pricing effect (stores should raise their prices by say three percent for that day, leaving the perception of a discount), but you’re not going to see increased sales over any appreciable period. Stimulus program without stimulus.
Buff,
I think voter rage is really starting to roll.
I don’t see any rage. When you clean out your garage, getting rid of all the trash and excess clutter do you do it out of rage? I certainly was not grinding my teeth as I voted.
JG, your assumption is wrong! You just saw for the past year how a super majority operates. Little to no regard to/for voter wishes.
For all the talk about Coakley being a bad candidate the proof is that “O” is the worse. Unless he changes direction he will go down in history as the worst modern Prez., beating even Carter.
It is time to hit reset on the HC bill. The voters will accept a smaller (not 2500-4500 pages), less costly, simpler (fewer special interest concessions) and cost curve reducing bill. There are several items that make sense for this issue: 1) Tort reform, 2) Consolidation of small business to expand the risk pool, 3) Providing HC insurance for the truly needy, 4) Allowing insurance across state lines, etc. An exchange may even be an acceptable way to implement several of these items, but all the payoffs must be removed. Funding these items through a FICA increase is also acceptable.
J,
“He’s not going to Washington to get anything done or to bring proposals to the table, he’s going to be a roadblock. “
That’s EXACTLY what he was elected to do. De-rail the HCR. Stop the left-wing swing of government. His job, and what he ran on, is to say No. Also the voters sent a clear message repudiating Obama’s policies.
I expect Congressional Dems to run to the center in an attempt to avoid seeing another 1994 event in 9 months. Their #1 priority will be saving THEIR jobs.
Gridlock is good. We need more divided government.
Islam will change
Cantie, rage may be slightly hyperbolic for some voters, so choose your own personal word for explaining your vote.