Plan B Forum

They are a mythical race who are rumoured to communicate with secret handshakes and codes based on the 3rd Illuminatus conspiracy. Weak and too frightened to try to re-take their own party they exist in the shadows.


_____________________________________

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... tless.html

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei report that Republican leaders are looking to purge their party of its most unsightly and off-putting elements. But the scale of the task is underscored by this darkly comic passage from their piece:

One high-profile Republican strategist, who refused to be named in order to avoid inflaming the very segments of the party he wants to silence, said there is a deliberate effort by party leaders to “marginalize the cranks, haters and bigots — there’s a lot of underbrush that has to be cleaned out.”

In order to purge a party of crankish and bigoted sentiments, you would need to identify what those sentiments are. Climate-change denial? Opposition to gay marriage? “Self-deportation”? Railing against food stamps? Supply-side economics? (Republican economist Greg Mankiw’s textbook once associated the view that tax cuts increase revenue as a myth promulgated by “charlatans and cranks,” but later excised the slur because of the political sensitivities it provoked.)

But the moderates in the party can’t openly challenge their crankish and bigoted ideas. Moderate Republicanism is a secret creed — a set of beliefs that is expressed anonymously, but lacks any public standing to openly engage in a battle of ideas within the party. There are plenty of Republicans who secretly disdain the crankish and bigoted ideas that flourish in right-wing media and have come to be accepted as gospel by the rank and file, but there is almost no public questioning of them.

The hilarity here is that the strategist felt he needed anonymity in order to denounce “cranks, haters and bigots.” Apparently, enough Republicans would hear a line like this and think, He’s talking about me! to make it a dangerous sentiment with which to associate oneself.

_________________________________________________\

yrs,
rubato

tick tock....

OK, let's take inventory here:

"Climate-change denial" - No elected Republican in national office, or in the Republican party itself denies that the climate is changing. The Party is fairly unified, however, in a belief that much of the legislative and regulatory activity addressing the "problem" (other than the encouragement of efficient use of carbon-based energy) is overblown, pointless, or needlessly self-destructive. These are not fringe ideas, but at the heart of the Party's positions. And regardless, to think otherwise is simply stupid.

"Opposition to gay marriage" - Dare I point out that opposition to gay marriage is the law of the land (DOMA), supported by more than half of the sitting Democrats in Congress when it passed not so long ago? If "opposition to gay marriage" is such an atavistic position to hold, why hasn't anyone in the Democrat-led Senate introduced legislation to repeal DOMA? Too busy preparing a budget?

"Self-deportation” - The phenomenon of "self deportation" is merely enforcing the EXISTING immigration laws with such vigor that it becomes problematic for any employer to hire illegals, and causing benefits accorded illegals to become insufficiently beneficial to encourage illegals to remain. Is this not good policy? Does believing this make one a "hater," or a "crank"? If so, you are describing a clear majority of the U.S. population as such.

"Railing against food stamps" - No one is railing against food stamps. Rather they are railing against the policies of a President that have resulted in the number of food stamp dependents to increase geometrically, while at the same time using this increasing government dependency to political advantage.

"Supply-side economics" - Again, not a fringe position at all in the Republican party. Indeed, we can point to numerous examples of increasing revenues in the face of capital gains tax reductions, and decreasing revenues when the rate was increased. Remember the tax on luxury yachts that was going to raise tens of millions, and instead caused tens of thousands of job losses in the boat building industry? Didn't think so.

I wonder if the rubato person could articulate even a single example of an actual policy articulated by the Republican lunatic fringe, other than those that he has created in his pathetic little mind.

dgs49 wrote:No elected Republican in national office, or in the Republican party itself denies that the climate is changing.

Right, they just vote against anything that might help the environment while dressed up as a concern for the poor businesses that might have to spend a little extra money reducing their pollution levels.

dgs49 wrote:The Party is fairly unified, however, in a belief that much of the legislative and regulatory activity addressing the "problem" (other than the encouragement of efficient use of carbon-based energy) is overblown, pointless, or needlessly self-destructive.

It's more self destructive and more expensive to sit here and do nothing while making things worse in the process. But again, you seem content with accelerating toward disaster.

dgs49 wrote:why hasn't anyone in the Democrat-led Senate introduced legislation to repeal DOMA? Too busy preparing a budget?

Because it wouldn't go anywhere with the Republican-led House of Representatives. You do remember how the US government works, don't you?

dgs49 wrote:OK, let's take inventory here:

"Climate-change denial" - No elected Republican in national office, or in the Republican party itself denies that the climate is changing. The Party is fairly unified, however, in a belief that much of the legislative and regulatory activity addressing the "problem" (other than the encouragement of efficient use of carbon-based energy) is overblown, pointless, or needlessly self-destructive. These are not fringe ideas, but at the heart of the Party's positions. And regardless, to think otherwise is simply stupid.
... "

You've been in a cave for 12 years? You never read anything, ever? You didn't know there was a Republican Primary where all the candidates denied global warming except Huntsman (who quickly recanted and said that the scientists really didn't know what they were talking about).

When I want to know what the completely ignorant think I can always call on you to fill me in.

yrs,
rubato

Rubie, you seem to have almost infinite time to dredge things up on the internet. Find a single Republican federal office holder who has ever denied that the climate is changing. With quotation marks, if you please.

I have heard many cite DATA that challenge the G/W data (recent years not relatively as "hot" as claimed and so forth), but data is data. Opinion is opinion.

Cite some Republican who has said that the climate is stagnant and not changing.

I had a little time on my hands this morning, so I thought I'd give this a try....

"Global warming is 'unequivocal'? It's just flat not true!"
19 March 2011

"... The science is not settled, and the science is actually going the other way. [...] We may in fact be going into a cooling period."
15 March 2011

--Joe Barton (R-TX)

"would it be fair to say then that there has been a cooling of global temperatures at least over the last 13 years compared to 1998?"
31 March 2011

--Mo Brooks (R-AL)

"That term now, because the globe doesn't seem to be warming up very much, has turned to climate change , and also because of some kind of falsely manipulated facts concerning global warming, the term has gone to climate change."
24 January 2011

--John Carter (R-MarsTX)

"In 2007, I released my first report detailing over 400 scientists who rejected the so-called “consensus” that global warming is causing a planetary disaster; today, that list stands at well over 700 scientists."
1 March 2011

"It's also important to question whether global warming is even a problem for human existence. Thus far no one has seriously demonstrated any scientific proof that increased global temperatures would lead to the catastrophes predicted by alarmists. In fact, it appears that just the opposite is true: that increases in global temperatures may have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives. "
28 July 2003

--James Inhofe (R-OK)

"Dr. Pielke, we have had some come before us and say it is a precursor to global warming; you are going to see the emission of greenhouse gases is a precursor to global warming. But yet, from my reading, your paper, Landsea's, Hal Lewis', and others have indicated that what they are finding in Antarctica, the Russian scientists down there, that the reverse is true."
8 March 2011

--David McKinley (R-WV)

"the greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming"
4 November 2009

"there is no consensus in the scientific community that global warming is getting worse or that it is manmade"
29 June 2009

--Ron Paul (R-Galt's Gulch)

"It is not only NOT getting warmer, hurricanes are at a 30-year low. [...] it has not been getting warmer for 8 years now, and it is hard for everybody to ignore that fact, especially as more and more scientists are pointing this out."
18 March 2009

--Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)

"we’ve actually had global cooling in the last ten years"
7 December 2009

--Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)

You forgot Paul Broun (R-Pleistocene), who not only claims global warming is "a hoax" (6-26-09), but also opined that evolution, embryology, and Big Bang Theory (presumably the science, not the TV show) are all "lies straight from the pit of hell" (9-27-12).

B-b-b-but... dgs49 wrote;

Find a single Republican federal office holder who has ever denied that the climate is changing

Every Republican quoted is married.

Neener neener neener!!

Every Republican quoted is married.

Exactly.
Don't know what being married has to do with their opinion on global warming.
'splain Lucy.

Sorry oldr,

dgs said to name one single republican and I very cleverly (not) exclaimed that they were all married - as in not single - to give dgs a way out...

(chuckle)

No problem, a lot goes over my head now-a-days. But it's better than getting hit in the head.

I got hit in the head once - very hard - by a sidewalk.

It seriously warped my sense of humor and I think it probably is the reason I like Marmite.

I fractured my skull when the road jumped up and hit my head way back in 1980. Lost my sense of smell on that "hit".

Well, I beat you to it. My basilar skull fracture robbed me of my sense of smell in 1972.

The doctor said the nerve that connected my nose to my brain was severed. He said it could grow back. I can smell some things now but can't distinguish things well. I can tell the difference between things like skunk spray and food but all perfume scents smell the same to me.

Is this topic drift?

I don't smell anything....

Joe Guy wrote:Well, I beat you to it. My basilar skull fracture robbed me of my sense of smell in 1972.

The doctor said the nerve that connected my nose to my brain was severed. He said it could grow back. I can smell some things now but can't distinguish things well. I can tell the difference between things like skunk spray and food but all perfume scents smell the same to me.

Is this topic drift?

I don't smell anything....

Same thing here (only halloween night 1980). Left or right side? Mine was on my left, just behind my left ear.
And here I though I was unique.
well I am unique, just like everyone else

Hence: Joe Guy's appreciation of marmite.