The Shutdown continues. The Washington GOP leadership is quaking in its collective boots. Boehner and his pet House buds went to the White House yesterday with a debt limit deal—give Obama everything he wants for two or three months. Obama, apparently told Boehner that only acceptable solution, to Obama, was complete GOP surrender on everything. No debt limit deal.
Now, Boehner has no idea what to do next. Obama will invite Senate ‘Pubs in for a meeting. He expects McConnell to kow-tow like he expected Boehner to do. Will McConnell? Perhaps. But he has no power either. All spending bills—budgets, fund allocations, debt limit increases, must originate in the House. All the Senate ‘Pubs can do is to cheer them on, like Cruz and Lee have been doing—cheering for change, cheering to defund Obamacare. On those issues, McConnell could not care less.
But, outside the beltway, people—voters, are watching and they don’t like what they see. They are seeing a complete power grab by Obama and Reid. They don’t like it. Neither do they like the aimless, wishy-washy, sometime leadership by the House GOP. Boehner is completely ineffectual as a leader. Given his preference, he’d rather just cave than actually put up a fight. A leader and a fighter, Boehner is not.
Scanning the internet headlines this morning, I found these three articles. All speak to change coming to the GOP, to politics-as-usual, to the country.
Gallap conduct a nation-wide telephone poll last week of 1,000 voting age adults. No one party was selected over the other. Sixty percent of the respondent said a 3rd party was need, neither party was responsive to their voters.
In U.S., Perceived Need for Third Party Reaches New High
Twenty-six percent believe Democratic and Republican parties do adequate job
by Jeffrey M. Jones, October 11, 2013.
This article is part of an ongoing series analyzing how the government shutdown and the debate over raising the debt ceiling are affecting Americans’ views of government, government leaders, political parties, the economy, and the country in general.
PRINCETON, NJ — Amid the government shutdown, 60% of Americans say the Democratic and Republicans parties do such a poor job of representing the American people that a third major party is needed. That is the highest Gallup has measured in the 10-year history of this question. A new low of 26% believe the two major parties adequately represent Americans.
The results are consistent with Gallup’s finding of more negative opinions of both parties since the shutdown began, including a new low favorable rating for the Republican Party, and Americans’ widespread dissatisfaction with the way the nation is being governed.
The prior highs in perceived need for a third party came in August 2010, shortly before that year’s midterm elections, when Americans were dissatisfied with government and the Tea Party movement was emerging as a political force; and in 2007, when the newly elected Democratic congressional majority was clashing with then-President George W. Bush.
A majority of Americans have typically favored a third party in response to this question. Notably, support has dropped below the majority level in the last two presidential election years in which Gallup asked the question, 2012 and 2008. Support for a third party was lowest in 2003, the first year Gallup asked the question. That year, 40% thought the U.S. needed a third party, while 56% believed the Republicans and Democrats were doing an adequate job.
The article continues with the statement that democrats and republicans equally felt the need for a new party(s). When voters from both sides feel the same way, the leadership of both parties need to heed the news.
Pat Buchanan has a column out at the WND website. Like most of Buchanan’s writings, he wanders around the world for half the column until getting to the point. He may be slow getting to that point but when he does, he is accurate.
Is red state America seceding?
Pat Buchanan covers many movements across U.S. to divorce from urban rulers
In the last decade of the 20th century, as the Soviet Empire disintegrated, so, too, did that prison house of nations, the USSR.
Out of the decomposing carcass came Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova, all in Europe; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; and Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia.
Transnistria then broke free of Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought free of Georgia.
Yugoslavia dissolved far more violently into the nations of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo.
The Slovaks seceded from Czechoslovakia. Yet a Europe that plunged straight to war after the last breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 this time only yawned. Let them go, all agreed.
The spirit of secession, the desire of peoples to sever ties to nations to which they have belonged for generations, sometimes for centuries, and to seek out their own kind, is a spreading phenomenon.
…
What are the forces pulling nations apart? Ethnicity, culture, history and language – but now also economics. And separatist and secessionist movements are cropping up here in the United States.
While many red state Americans are moving away from blue state America, seeking kindred souls among whom to live, those who love where they live but not those who rule them are seeking to secede.
The five counties of western Maryland – Garrett, Allegany, Washington, Frederick and Carroll, which have more in common with West Virginia and wish to be rid of Baltimore and free of Annapolis, are talking secession.
The issues driving secession in Maryland are gun control, high taxes, energy policy, homosexual marriage and immigration.
Scott Strzelczyk, who lives in the town of Windsor in Carroll County and leads the Western Maryland Initiative, argues: “If you have a long list of grievances, and it’s been going on for decades, and you can’t get it resolved, ultimately [secession] is what you have to do.”
And there is precedent. Four of our 50 states – Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, West Virginia – were born out of other states.
Ten northern counties of Colorado are this November holding non-binding referenda to prepare a future secession from Denver and the creation of America’s 51st state.
Nine of the 10 Colorado counties talking secession and a new state, writes Reid Wilson of the Washington Post – Cheyenne, Kit Carson, Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, Weld and Yuma – all gave more than 62 percent of their votes to Mitt Romney. Five of these 10 counties gave Romney more than 75 percent of their vote.
Their issues with the Denver legislature: A new gun control law that triggered a voter recall of two Democratic state senators, state restrictions on oil exploration and the Colorado legislature’s party-line vote in support of gay marriage.
…
If America does not get its fiscal house in order, and another Great Recession hits or our elites dragoon us into another imperial war, we will likely hear more of such talk.
Talk of secession has been around since the founding of the nation. Legally, it was settled by the Civil War—once a member of the union, the United States, always a member. No breakaway allowed.
That hasn’t stopped the talk, however. When the federal government and its leader(s) actively ignore, conspire to ignore, and violate the law and the Constitution, the illegality of secession loses meaning.
The South lost the Civil War for a number of reasons—lack of population, lack of industry, lack of capital and lack of allies…the South was outnumbered, out produced, outspent, and alone. The conditions today, are not the same. If the central government falls into turmoil and disarray, breakaways may succeed…for awhile.
Take that! You establishment buzzards!
Ann Coulter has a new book out, one written in her usual sharp and biting tongue. This time she’s aiming at the ‘Pub establishment, not the dems. The subject is a change for her. She has a reputation for being a GOP establishment shill—most of the income to her consulting company, comes from the GOP establishment. She won’t be winning new customers with this book unless it is from the Tea Party or the dems.
New Ann Coulter book rages at GOP with ‘change or die’ theme
By PAUL BEDARD | OCTOBER 11, 2013 AT 10:38 AM
Best-selling conservative author Ann Coulter, who has used her nine books to launch vicious attacks on Democrats, is turning her guns on Republicans in a new book out Monday, calling Florida Sen. Marco Rubio a hypocrite, urging donors freeze contributions to the GOP, and demanding that only governors or senators run for the party’s presidential nomination.
Her point in “Never Trust a Liberal Over 3 — Especially a Republican” is to shake the party out of its doldrums in time for the 2014 and 2016 elections.
“Elections matter. We’re trying to make the country a better place. But if our candidates don’t win, we can’t do that,” she writes. “This isn’t a game. We aren’t picking basketball brackets. Bad things happen when Republicans lose elections and Democrats have veto-proof majorities,” she adds in the book provided in advance to Secrets.
While she is most noted for skewering liberals in her weekly columns and nine previous New York Times best sellers, “Never Trust” puts her on a path for a head-on collision with the establishment Republican Party and even a favored 2016 presidential candidate as she urges the GOP to purge itself of failed tactics, lazy consultants, and gripless potential candidates.
Take Rubio. He is one of the party’s leading 2016 candidates, but Coulter dresses him down for promising effective immigration reform while campaigning for the Senate but spitting out a more liberal alternative once elected.
She quotes him slamming amnesty for illegal immigrants as a Senate candidate in 2010. “And then he got to Washington and his big legislative initiative was a path to citizenship for illegal aliens! Yes, Rubio’s plan to solve the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico is to bring them all here,” she scolds.
The fashionable pundit pummels the party for wooing untested politicians for president. “Why are any congressmen or businessmen showing up in our presidential primaries? They are never going to get the nomination,” she says.
The solution is a governor, just like four of the last six presidents. “I don’t care if it makes you feel good, conservatives: Do not ever, ever considering running a presidential candidate who has not been a senator or preferably a governor. No, not even our beloved Ben Carson. What are we concentrating on? That’s right: winning.”
What Coulter overlooks at this point is that our last two Presidential candidates met Coulter’s criteria. McCain was a US Senator and Romney was a Governor. Neither worked well for us.
And to grab that gold ring, she demands that musty political consultants be swept out of the GOP. She blames them for losing four Senate seats the Republicans thought they should have won in 2010 and 2012.
“Republicans were screwed by campaign consultants fleecing deep-pocketed candidates rather than doing the work of electing Republicans,” she says. “Republicans should refuse to give money to the party until we have the names of these people [failed consultants] and a blood oath that they will never be hired again.”
Coulter takes shots at Tod Akin and Marco Rubio alike. I didn’t vote for Akin in the Primary, I backed another. But, after he won that primary election, I backed him. Akin lost, not so much for what he said, but because his party turned on him and caused his campaign more damage than his opponent, Claire McCaskill.
Akin was betrayed by his party. The dems, if that had happened to one of their candidates, would have closed ranks and rallied around him. That, too, is another failing of the GOP.
Change is coming. It is coming to the GOP, to the central government, for better or more likely worse, and to the nation. Hiding from these trends, ignoring them, will not prevent those trends nor the coming events. The days of the ostrich response is over. The time to prepare, for any or all the scenarios, has come.