There is a weird irony in seeing the Republicans nominate a Medicare cheat to be their gubernatorial candidate in Florida. It pretty much says everything you need to know about the true nature of the GOP. They complain about Medicare fraud and inefficiencies but, in reality, they’d happily steal the money for themselves, and don’t see anything wrong with someone who did just that. But the fool actually got elected and now the Republicans are trying to deal with an ideological crook of a governor. Even with supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, the Republicans don’t intend to pass the governor’s budget, or anything even closely resembling it. What they will pass will be bad enough. And it should quickly destroy those supermajorities, along with any chance the Republicans might have of winning Florida in the 2012 presidential election.
The truth is, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle may have lost their U.S. Senate races, but plenty of Republicans just like them won their contests last November. And the Republicans are going to pay a price for it because the American people don’t like the kind of forcible sodomy these politicians seem intent on submitting them to. Part of it is just the difference between the midterm and general electorates. Midterm electorates are smaller, older, whiter, and more conservative than general electorates. But the more important factor is that the Republicans’ solution to everything is to screw the little guy. They dress up their ideas so they sound nice and proper, but when they actually have the power to do what they want, their policies don’t work and make people suffer terribly. George W. Bush’s presidency was a template for what your state can expect from the new governors of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida, and New Jersey. The very rich will do just fine, but everyone else will get raped. And when their terms are over, the state’s coffers will have been emptied…looted thoroughly by the powerful financiers of this idiocy.
It’s good for Obama’s reelection prospects, but it’s horrible for the people. Everyone is focused on Wisconsin, but I’d say that Florida is ground zero for Republican mismanagement. In 2012, I’m pretty sure that the Republican presidential candidate won’t even want to be seen with most of the GOP governors that were elected in 2010.
Yes. Case in point, Ohio’s new governor John Kasich. He killed the development of light rail and gave the Federal funding away. It would have been a big benefit to many areas, including my hometown, but he flatly refused it.
In todays paper, the headline stated that he plans to sell five state prisons and make cuts to childrens hospitals, programs for childcare, and others designed to help the poor find jobs.
He’s making all of these cuts to programs for the poorest, neediest people in our state. He’s also busy busting unions. It’s like a nightmare that has no end. He’s the king of privatization, even if the models show it doesn’t work. His next target is privatizing the school systems.
I’ve never seen anything like it here. It’s really frightening.
But that’s what people voted for. Will the residents of Ohio realize they’ve been played for fools?
Ohio voters were of the “vote the bums out” mindset at the last elections. It was misdirected anger as far as I’m concerned. The Republicans pushed hard against the employment numbers, which were dreadful, and they railed against the Democrats for not fixing everything in their scant years under Strickland.
The Democrats here sat on their hands, unwilling to fight back, and they avoided the polls. With the strength of the rightwing tax cutting idiots and the Teabaggers here, the elections were depressing.
So yeah, Ohio looks like the rest of the states who now seem like the biggest fools in the country, but I don’t expect a wake-up call by 2012. The stiff-necked pride of the red-necked population here will make them vote Republican no matter what.
I’d agree with you, except that Kasich and his idiots in the Senate have decided to attack cops.
This is going to kick them in the ass in 2012 – the cops in this state are reliable Republican voters and they’re not happy that they just got stabbed in the back by the people they helped put into power. And Kasich seems hell-bent to attack people who work for a living at every opportunity, which is a significant chunk of Republican voters in Ohio. The more he demonizes people who actually work for a living, the more votes the GOP here is going to lose.
I don’t know if it will help – they’re going to jerrymander the hell out of this state since they control all the seats at the redistricting table right now – but they’re shedding chunks of their base off in this ideological purity mode they’re in. And I can’t believe that King John is going to stop demonizing people who work for a living any time soon – he’s an asshole and it’s what assholes do these days.
I think the Neo-Feudalists expect the Elder Poor to quietly lie down and die, the Younger Poor to be systematically incarcerated into private prisons/slave labor camps and those with children to go willingly into privately owned “shelters” that will entice them with the offer of jobs. In an historical example, the adults could be trained to operate sewing machines, for instance; the children would be fetching & carrying, sweeping floors, etc. After deducting room and board, their wages would not be sufficient for them to ever save enough to escape these nouveau debtors’ prisons. I can’t think why else they would want to repeal child labor laws except to avoid the expense of a day care center while the adults work; it’s so much more economical to put the little beggars to some useful task. These people read Dickens and thought it sounded like an ideal society.
Boo:
I have a question. What is going on at the state level in a place like Ohio? Their parties seem as clueless as Pennsylvania. And second, why don’t we ever nominate Bernie Sanders types all over the place? The GOP does it all the time, and look what it gets them? Is it just that money has corrupted the party apparatus?
Compare how Michael Moore, Noam Chosky, Dennis Kucinich, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Cynthia McKinney, or any other people who have a loud voice from somewhere on the hard left are treated with how Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn are treated.
That’s all you need to know about why we don’t nominate many people from the hard left. In most cases, they’ll lose in statewide races.
So you blame the corporate controlled media? But if they never run, then you’ll never win. And besides, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell just serve to cover for the other ones(like Walker) who hide their true intentions until they are in power.
Look BooMan, they elected him.
a muthafuckin’ crook.
not a crook in the generic GOP sense.
I mean, an honest to god, scammed the federal government out of HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS kind of crook.
and then picked, as Lt. Governor, another muthafuckin’ crook.
not in the generic GOP sense either.
sometimes, you just gotta say – you get what you get.
of course, the DNC, if they had any sense, would just run political ad in a continous loop in 2012:
the visual – workers in other states on high speed infrastructure projects
voiceover- this could have been you, but your Governor turned away the money.
how many times must it be said that this mofo turned away 2.4 BILLION DOLLARS in infrastructure monies that WOULD NOT HAVE COST THE STATE ANYTHING.
let me repeat that.
WOULD NOT HAVE COST THE STATE ANYTHING, in terms of ‘shared paid’ for the project.
you get what you vote for.
Why would he turn down the high speed rail money? Well it isn’t like Medicare. He couldn’t figure out how to skim a bunch off for himself.
I agree with the sentiment but I hate to say the language seems a bit intemperate.
I’m from Florida so I hate to see this happen. At the same time the electoral coalition that brought Scott to power, or didn’t bother to vote against him, must see that his entire program is aimed at enriching the already rich at the expense of everyone and everything else. And indeed fulsomely congratulating himself for doing so. The open contempt for the environment and for public welfare is very difficult to take. It’s nauseating.
You’re probably being unfair to Branstad to lump him in with the firebreathers.
Didn’t he unretire to win his fifth term or something to keep the Tea Party guy from getting the nomination? He’s pretty throwback, all considered.
Branstad is old school but he will definitely bust some unions.
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/07/iowa-union-bust/
Isn’t the Iowa state senate still controlled by Democrats?
Boo, I understand (and agree with) the point, and I use off-color colloquialisms as much as anyone, but could you take it easy on the rape language? It’s not very appropriate or respectful to people who’ve experienced the real thing.