Posts tagged with gop

I don’t think you would ever see the Republican Party platform saying we are in favor of same-sex marriage.

Ed Gillespie, former RNC Chair — filed for claim chowder


[The Republicans] continue to shoot themselves in the foot on small symbolic things. So, a couple of weeks ago, Mark [Shields] and I were exercised about an attack on a treaty about the disabled abroad, a trivial thing in which they just looked like idiots. This week, Tom Coburn wants to defund political science. Well, defunding a university discipline is just — it saves you no money and it sends an anti-intellectual message. And so it’s these little symbolic things that makes you think, oh, those Republicans are weird. And so that remains a problem.

David Brooks on PBS NewsHour


#legislativeregret

#legislativeregret


[I]f you look beyond the rhetoric and focus on the policy, House Republicans are proposing much harsher spending cuts this year than they did last year. On fiscal issues, the party has moved far to the right since the election…That means that even as the party’s national tacticians try to move away from being the party of spending cuts, they’ll have even harsher and more dramatic spending cuts to answer for.


The sequester, not many people know what it is, but it sounds stupid and cruel. Therefore people think it’s a Republican thing.

James Carville, on issue ownership


Bubble Boys and Girls →

Barry Ritholtz in the Washington Post:

Large swaths of the conservative movement seem to live in a world of their own creation. The balkanization of media outlets allow people to read only that which they agree with. This selective perception and confirmation bias creates a self-reinforcing alternative universe. Facts don’t matter; data and science are irrelevant. You only hear exactly what it is you want to hear.

Is it true that more conservative activists stay inside a media “bubble” than liberal activists? Certainly the claim is tossed around a lot. I don’t think I have ever seen evidence of it though. This sort of asymmetry would be testable with individual level data from Pew or some other big survey.


If I hear anybody say it was because Romney wasn’t conservative enough I’m going to go nuts. We’re not losing 95% of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we’re not being hard-ass enough.


The truth is, it’s not fair to Dick Morris and all the other loyal REPUBLICAN PARTISANS to expect them to make accurate predictions. That’s not their job. Their job is to motivate their team, tell them that, sure, they’re behind and there are seconds on the clock, but I believe in you, so go out there and win one for the Gipper!


It turns out that there was no profound ideological conversion of the country two years ago. We remain the same moderate and practical country we have long been. In 2010, voters were upset about the economy, Democrats were demobilized, and President Obama wasn’t yet ready to fight. All the conservatives have left now is economic unease. So they don’t care what Romney says. They are happy to march under a false flag if that is the price of capturing power.


xkcd Does Congress →

Randall Munroe presents “A History of The United States Congress: Partisan and Ideological Makeup” using Poole and Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATE scores to illustrate the ebb and flow of ideological roll call voting in the House and Senate.