Stickybuffalo.com

Okay, let’s establish one basic, rock-solid point as the 2012 presidential campaign can now begin in (calendar-based) earnest.

Further empowering Republicans will not help. Period. Any commentary on contemporary American politics which ignores, fudges or contradicts this reliably-proven fact is simply engaged in imaginary make-believe, and should be disregarded completely.

This is not hyperbolic bias or partisan propaganda, this is a realistic description of the one entirely-safe given among all the variables of our society’s political options. This is certainly not spite-driven wishful thinking on my part; I don’t like the implications of this reality and wish that it were otherwise, but wishing won’t make it so.

And this is not an assertion that we, therefore, have no alternative but re-electing Barack Obama, nor is it an assertion that doing so would, by itself, automatically help with any of our nation’s challenges either. Those points are debatable, at best. The idea that America can achieve any kind of progress on its varied grievances by further empowering the Republican party of 2012, however, is just plain delusional.

The only possible exception is of very specific and exclusive relevance, limited to the modern Republican party’s very small real constituency of corporate barons and well-connected profiteers. They may experience significant benefits from giving more power to Republicans, though even that’s questionable at this point; in any event punditry or “analysis” which discusses the prospect of further empowering Republicans outside of an explicit context of this limited constituency will be nothing but noisy, unreal disinformation. (more…)

Over at The Economist, my BFF notes the strange and wondrously-transformed political context in which, suddenly, “corn-ethanol subsidies are going to expire this year, and [...] no one is defending them.”

Which is remarkable not only for itself, but for the timing, as just before reading the above link I was thinking of a post along similar lines, after seeing this on the homepage of Cleveland.com this morning.

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As long as I’m asking rhetorical questions and making futile pleas, I’d like to add one more. Please stop doing shit like this:

Jeff Darcy phones it in (like much of the media)

Seriously, I know it’s hopeless to call for anything else but that doesn’t change the fact that this is fucking bullshit.

“Congress” is not the cause of America’s debt-ceiling time bomb. Republicans in Congress are.

In its official editorial on debt politics, The Economist does everything it can to pick at Democrats on this issue, and then having made those token efforts acknowledges that “…Mr Obama and his party seem a model of fiscal statesmanship compared with their Republican opponents.” Their generally conservative-leaning Lexington columnist goes further, calling this whole farce

a problem entirely of the Republicans’ own making. The reason for this crisis is that instead of just raising the debt ceiling in the customary way so that the government can pay the bills Congress has already run up, the Republicans decided to point a pistol at the American economy and threaten to pull the trigger if they did not get the spending cuts they wanted.

Seriously, what the fuck are the Democrats supposed to do, here? (more…)