Honestly, that is the only way that I can account for the out-of-completely-left field popularity of Donald Trump. He is not a notorious small-government libertarian like the Koch brothers, or has any previous political interests of any stripe to recommend him particularly; not even any detectable small-government, free-market and strict Constitutionalist Tea Party sympathies to recommend him. If anything, he has always appeared to me as one of those big, vulgar crony-capitalist, unserious reality-TV personalities; the epitome of vulgar architectural bad taste and in blithely using his money and influence to cheerfully run over anyone who got in his way. His campaign at first seemed to be a particularly tasteless joke a grab for publicity on the part of a flamboyant personality who never seemed to get enough of it, in a bad or a good way. So all props for having the sheer brass neck to start playing the game, and playing it with calculated skill.
Tea Party
“We Were Poised for Real Criminal Justice Reform”
Something similar happened in the early ’90s. It looked as though a political consensus favoring smaller government was taking shape. Republicans with a well-considered smaller-govt agenda took over the Congress and the Democrats started to cut deals with them. Then the Oklahoma City bombing happened, the Clinton Democrats outmaneuvered the Gingrich Republicans over the government shutdown, and the smaller-government impetus was weakened considerably (we did get cap-gains tax cuts, welfare and a few other reforms that did a lot of good in the subsequent decade).
But then Sept. 11, 2001 and the Middle East war kicked much of what was left of the smaller-government movement over the far horizon, and since 2009 a hard-Left executive branch has been extending and doing its best to entrench post-Reagan government expansion.
There are tides in the affairs of men. The problem with tides is that they can go out for a long time before they reverse and start to come in. Let’s hope that the statist tide has finally run its course and that we are near a reversal.
Is the Ryan budget the last gasp of the public employee unions ?
As usual. Richard Fernandez has a unique view of current events. He compares the present federal government to Boss Tweed’s Tamany Hall.
But in actuality the impetus for moderating political excess often comes from the elites themselves when mismanagement finally becomes so bad it threatens the survival of everyone.
Until things reach the point of failure mismanagement has the effect of leaving voters no alternative but content themselves with the opposition party. Republican voters may have been disappointed and outraged at the perceived sellout by a Paul Ryan-led Congress to the Obama administration. “It was another Republican “compromise” meaning Democrats got every item they asked for,” said the Drudge Report.
Paul Ryan has engineered a “compromise” with Democrats that gives them everything they wanted.
Today, he defended it on Meet The Press.
And in divided government you don’t get everything you want. So we fought for as much as we could get. We advanced our priorities and principles. Not every single one of them, but many of them. And then we’re going to pick up next year and pick up where we left off and keep going for more.
Is this true ? I doubt it.
About That Omnibus Spending Bill…
I guess we’ll need to keep replacing R’s and D’s with Tea Partiers until there’s too few of The Beholden to do this any longer. It’s gonna be a long fight.
And after passing that bill yesterday, I received this email today:
It included a link to this video:
The email also links to Speaker Ryan’s website, where the email and video are posted, and where the comments appear uniformly negative. There exists the very same disconnect and denial of reality between what’s written at the top of this email, and the Omnibus Bill, as can be found in any speech by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.
It is a new day in the people’s House. ~Paul Ryan
When Lobbyists Write Legislation, This Data Mining Tool Traces The Paper Trail
This kind of analysis looks like a step in the right direction:
According to the team’s analysis, seven states, including Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, and Kansas, all had similar laws on the books. Similar bills were being considered in states like Maryland and Oregon, and had already died in Florida and Minnesota. In total, very similar bills had been introduced 73 times around the country. The video below shows one of the earliest examples showed up in South Carolina in 2010.
Like a plagiarism detector, the prototype can detect similar language in different bills. Yet unlike in a college class, this isn’t always a bad thing. “We avoided using the word plagiarism,” says Joe Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and mentor to the Data Science for Social Good team. “If a bill can save lives, I would want that bill passed all 50 states.”
(Via The Right Coast.)