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House Majority Leader Defeated In Primary
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in United States political history, the House Majority Leader has been defeated in his primary election. Long time Republican congressman and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated by 10 percentage points in the Virginia primary by Republican Tea Party challenger Dave Brat. This shocking defeat is likely to upset the political balance of power in the United States for years to come."
Republican voting base has gone full bat shit, the party won't last much longer now.
This government is ineffective, and seems to be more about getting things for themselves than their constituents. They use the taxes we give them to spy on us and arm our police forces with tanks rather than give us nationalized healthcare. They take bribes from special interest groups. We need new blood in politics.
It's a safe republican district.
This is not unlike the reds that are elected from downtown SF. The real election is the primary.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Allowing all citizens to vote no matter what their label is, isn't fair? Interesting.
The Tea Party may be taking all the credit for this, but the reality is is far more grim than any political insider is willing to admit: this has been the most unpopular Congress since the Do-Nothing Congress of 1947-49.
And if anyone paid attention to history, what happened then is what will happen this time, too. The incumbents are in the crosshairs.
Reports of the Tea Party's death are greatly exaggerated.
My only qualm is it's been hijacked well beyond its initial namesake cause of shrinking the bloated spending into almost every old Republican grievance.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Alllowing democrats to vote in a republican primary - yeah, that's wrong.
Allowing independents, ie non-declared voters to vote in any primary - absolutely.
I'm pretty sure that's how McCain won the primaries. He was regularly booed at from the audience in his own rallies, especially when it came to amnesty or "path to citizenship" or whatever you want to call it. It makes me wonder if these types of primaries are a good idea or not. My state was thinking of doing away with letting undeclared voters pick a ballot on primary day and at the time I was against it, but I can certainly see now how it could be misused. Of course then it's a matter of changing your declared party well enough in advance and then switching it back. So I'm not sure changing it really solves anything.
Don't count on it. Only 14% bothered to vote, which shows a dislike for the party in general.
Really. The bottom line that I'm hearing locally is that Cantor was perceived to be arrogant and detached, uninterested in his voting constituents' viewpoints (hasn't had a Town-Hall meeting, for example, for several years). He was perceived as focused exclusively on his Leadership position, and not so much in his responsibilities as Representative of the people of his district. All this bovine excrement that you're hearing in the press about this or that red-meat issue is largely DC beltway perspective, which was Cantor's focus, and his problem anyway. It is important that Representatives are occasionally reminded who they are, and why they're in Congress, so I have no problem with what took place.
"Alllowing democrats to vote in a republican primary - yeah, that's wrong."
Why? What if the Democrat likes the Republican candidate and intends on voting him in?
Again, why should a label prevent you from voting in any election as long as you are a citizen and meet the criteria for voting rights?
Correct. Allowing outsiders to inject themselves as spoilers into an internal race isn't fair.
The Koch brothers (and others), many out-of-state- Super-PACs and their advertising campaigns would beg to differ with your opinion.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I will believe it when I see it. Money talks, and a good PR campaign can turn a psychopath into someone holier than $DEITY.
In the past, congresscritters had to survive on merit. Now, no matter what they can do, a couple million dollars can right -any- wrong.
-ANY- wrong, period.
The surge of people we're getting at the border right now are only showing up because they think they'll get amnesty. Its a related concept.
Really the sick thing is the whole immigration problem is driven by a shadow economy of cheap labor.
People say "oh I want these people to get US citizenship" but if they have it will they work for below minimum wage under currently illegal health standards with no insurance or legal rights?
Probably not. And the corporate interests that are pushing for amnesty are very strange in this regard as well because again if they actually get amnesty they're not going to show up for work. They're going to go get EBT cards and welfare because it pays better then those terrible jobs. Which is why most americans don't do those jobs. We're paid more to do nothing then we are to do that stuff.
By all means argue against the welfare state if that's what gets you going but the point is that the whole immigration issue is irrational.
Our society cannot survive open borders. We can't afford it. And if we did that all the cheap labor the companies think they're going to get would suddenly be gone because they'd just sit in subsidized apartments laughing about when they got up at 3 in the morning to go to work.
And that doesn't address how the whole thing depresses the wages of actual citizens or causes all sorts of other distortions of our economy.
The whole thing is sick.
The first thing that needs to happen is that hiring illegal immigrants needs to be something that is ACTUALLY illegal. As in few do it because you go to jail or suffer huge crippling fines.
Do that and most of the illegal immigration stops immediately without having to do anything at the border.
A really effective mean to police the thing would be to offer people a bounty for catching it. Say 10 to 50 percent of collected fines. So if you're fining companies 10 thousand dollars per illegal employee... and some of these operations employ thousands... you'll be looking at 10 thousand times thousands. Who wouldn't turn that in?
It would police itself. Sure, you'd get witch hunts and false positives etc. But I'm not saying you show up with SWAT teams either. Just a federal official with a camera, notebook, and badge. He goes in, sees what is going on, makes some notes, takes some pictures, and then goes back to the office to process the paper work. Nothing aggressive needed. You don't even go after the illegals directly. You go after their employers.
If they can't find work here they won't come. Just that simple.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/06/eric-cantor-dave-brat-what-happened
I love it how the free-market economist won a primary and now the Republicans are freaking out. Showing their true colors - not the hype they spout to fool ordinary small-government Americans.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Allowing outsiders to inject themselves as spoilers into an internal race isn't fair.
What isn't fair is taxpayers footing the bill for internal parties elections. Does the Libertarian party get to use the electorate? or the Tea Party? Why do the Democrats and Republicans get to?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
So would George Soros and any number of rich progressives and socialists. You don't need to single out the Koch Brothers.
That said, my issue isn't with money in politics, it is with the demise of Federalism as a governing principle. As a Virginian (and now as a Marylander), I don't consider it any of my business who represents people in say, California. I would never give money to a race in a state in which I don't live in, and have never really bothered with a district other than my own either. I can't vote in California (although they probably wouldn't bother to stop me), and I don't need representation from California.
When I worked in the political world, I used to have that argument all the time -- people wondering why I refused to get mad at, say, Nanci Pelosi for doing what she does. It doesn't matter if I like her or not, so long as she accurately reflects the will of her constituents. If she doesn't, then that's a problem for them -- not me over here on the east coast.
However, I also have an issue with people using the tactic of injecting themselves into their opponents primary in order to try and cause them to choose the worst candidate rather than trying to select the best candidate that their party can themselves. It's that kind of bullshit tactic that leads to polarization and animosity. Unfortunately, it seems as if that's the type of thing you need to do in order to have your voice heard, because if enough people are doing it then being honest becomes a liability. (And that, right there, is what is wrong with America today).
Most incumbents get reelected even when Congress's approval ratings overall are low, however, because people's approval ratings of their own Congresspeople are almost always considerably higher. People generally think Congress sucks, but they usually blame it on everyone else's Representatives.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I didn't complain. I just think its silly.
Run offs are also silly, why not just have people rank their choices in the first place and not bother wasting time with another run off election.
Voters end up with the exact same number of choices in the general election: two.
The party system itself is the issue there -- not open or closed primaries. The way to give more choices would be to do away with "primaries" and have every candidate on the general election ballot and have runoffs or a different method of voting (like a ranked system).
There are of course trade-offs for doing that.
WHAT??!
Brat is actually the poster child for "getting the money out of politics." Cantor had him outspent 4 to 1. He was the little guy in this race.
From what I've heard about him, he's also very libertarian leaning. I think libertarian leaning Republicans have a bright future. I think the old guard and the social conservatives will have a hard time against them in the future as well.
Because being a US citizen has benefits that are paid for by the US economy where as being a citizen of Mexico or Honduras or Guatemala has few benefits and Americans can't enjoy them even if they try to go through the legal process.
Riddle me this... which country do you think its easier to become a citizen in... The United States or Mexico?
Do you know what you have to go through to become a citizen in either? Compare them. The US has pretty much the loosest immigration policy in the Americas. I don't think there's any other country in the America's that even close... north or south America.
And yet as loose as our policies are it is we that are called the racists and monsters for having a policy more humane and inclusive and permissive then any other in in the Americas.
Explain the logic on that.
You want open immigration? Fine... no really... we'll do that. But understand this, if you do that and leave the welfare system intact the country will go broke very quickly.
The welfare state and open immigration are exclusive concepts. You cannot do both at the same time. The simple math on that should be obvious to anyone that thinks about it.
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A pure political story, with absolutely no geek angle whatsoever, has no place here. It brings in a lot of page hits, and a lot of comments from politically-frothy Slashdot posters, but long-term it rather undermines the credibility of the site.
to be fair, cantor is about as batshit crazy as they come.
However, I will be interested in seeing how brat does against the dem.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have no problem with this. Even though you would say my politics are on the Left part of the spectrum, I believe there is more of a chance of finding common cause with Tea Party people than with the Republican establishment. I've noticed a marked change in the way the Tea Party types talk about capitalism, crony capitalism, corporate power and the military. If the Tea Party decimates the establishment GOP that have been pushing neo-conservative foreign policy and neo-liberal economic policy (Austrian school), it can only be a good thing.
Citizens that are ready to get out into the street I can deal with. Politicians who are prepared to turn the keys of government over to corporate interests, I cannot. I've heard Tea Party types saying some of the same things about corporatism that you'd hear coming out of the Occupy movement. The cultural stuff doesn't matter, because ultimately, those issues (say, gay marriage) are going to be decided by society as a whole. The Tea Party can holler all they want, but if people start accepting gay marriage, it's going to happen, and by all accounts and polls, it's happening. Same with other issues. Women's rights? Good luck trying to convince women to go back to being subservient to men.
Of course, I have a problem with some of the racism and gun fetishism, but even that is starting to shift. The percentage of families in the US who own guns has gone down steadily since the beginning of the 2nd Amendment movement in the '80s.
But the mainstream GOP, the ones that loved creating the Surveillance State under Bush and (despite what they say) love it under Obama, are just evil. They will continue to promote the upward redistribution of wealth and the aggressive foreign policy that has exploded since the 1980s. They're the ones blew up the economy with deregulation. They're the ones dreamed up the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. They're the ones ready to attack Iran and do Israel's bidding.
Plus, despite the rhetoric, they support the policies of Barack Obama who (and I say this as someone on the Left) has been a wolf in sheep's clothing for corporatism, surveillance, and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a very few.
I will enjoy watching the collapse of the Party of Reagan. And (again, despite the rhetoric), the Tea Party is anything BUT the Party of Reagan. They have some hagiographic image of Ronald Reagan that does not match reality. That's OK, let them have their mythology.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Exactly. For me, this isn't about the Tea Party. This was about chucking a brick through the glass bubble that is DC. Fuck all 'em! May this election bitch-slap them back to reality in whom they really work for!
Life is not for the lazy.
Yeah.. THIS!! I'm an Independent voter in Nevada, up until the middle of BushyJr's second term I was a life-long Republican.. The Republican party has gotten so FAR from its roots, I couldn't remain a "member"... Since I am no longer a Republican, I'm prohibited from voting for ANY candidate in our primary yesterday other than the non-partisan races, like Judge, Sheriff, etc.. This is a crock of SHIT, so I now do not vote in primary elections.. There were several Republican candidates for state and national office that I'd loved to have voted for, but the State of Nevada has seen fit to prohibit me from voting for them, unless I attach a label to my name.. I'M NOT A REPUBLICAN NOR A DEMOCRAT, I'M AN AMERICAN....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Assuming "being productive" is passing laws.
Doing nothing might be the best thing.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
True, though Reagan was promised border enforcement in return for that. The deal as understood at the time was "I'll give you amnesty now as a one time deal and in return we fix the system"...
Reagan delivered his end and then fixes promised never happened.
Its something republicans are still extremely bitter about and one of the reasons they're not respective to the same idea all over again. We're being told "just give us amnesty now and we'll fix the border after"... well... one bitten twice shy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Thing is, just about all of those things you listed are so-called "wedge" issues that have very little bearing on most people, even if they deeply affect some consequential number of people. Remember that we are mostly talking about federal government here, which is supposed to be tackling things that make sense on a federal level:
- Public funding of stem cell research: While it might be promising, there aren't any real therapies as of yet and the republic will boldly march on in any event.
- Abortion: The republic will boldly march on.
- Same sex marriage: Almost completely inconsequential to the health of the republic.
- Discrimination based on sexual orientation: There is probably some meat to this one, as it is difficult to call yourself a democracy with a repressed minority.
- Flag Burning: This would probably have zero practical impact on free speech.
- Affirmative action (well, technically use of quotas): another inflammatory issue, but probably some meat to it as we do need to decide what criteria needs to be met to measure the success and need for these programs.
- Gun control: 30,000 traffic deaths per year shows that society can function perfectly well with a similar number of gun deaths.
Notably absent from your list are things like:
- Debt, government spending, taxes, budget, etc.
- Domestic spying
- Foreign policy
- Military policy
- The role of federal vs state government
- Using the federal government to alter people's behaviors.
And on those issues, I bet he looks surprisingly similar to his Democratic colleagues. Even on wedge issues, I'd bet he's not far off. For instance, I'd wager that for every politician you can find who supports curtailing free speech by restricting flag burning, I can find another who would like to ban hate speech. I'd argue those people are both the same kind of politician, even if they have different motives.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The reason you see a 95% retention rate, even when anti-Congress sentiment is high is because:
"*MY* Congresscritter is doing good. It's all those other assholes that are the problem."
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Except that a Senator or Representative from a state I do not live in can have a massive effect on the laws I must live under. Just because I live in California does not mean that I do not have a real and valid interest on who the people of Utah send to DC. I do. Thinking otherwise is simplistic and wrong.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
It also depresses automation that we would have put in place ages ago and of course removed labor that was traditionally done by teenagers.
My father worked in a California fruit boxing warehouse for a few summers. Not because he was poor but because kids were expected to get summer jobs back then.
We did just fine before the rampant illegal immigration. Those that think we can't survive without it either suffer from an unforgivable lack of imagination or are spinning tales.
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Political parties are not forced to hold primaries. They can hold a nominating convention if they prefer. That's what the Republicans did in the last VA governor's race. I don't see how open primaries are any more screwed up than having a winner-take-all vote that keeps out 3rd parties from having any substantial chance in most cases. It's past time we had ranked choice voting. If we did, then there would be no particular benefit to having open primaries. As it stands, open primaries at least give people a chance to vote in the election they think matters. The fact is, in many cases, the general election is a foregone conclusion and the primary is the real election.
I guess the progressives and socialists are given a pass, because they advocate for equality and peace, while the cocks advocate for vagina inspections, religious govt, and shooting brown people.
This, but only because of rampant gerrymandering.
"Just find me enough people that like me, and call that my district. I don't care if they're spread out all over creation. Just draw a line around everyone who voted for me last time, and call it done."
Politicians have been, for years, systematically altering their districts so that their particular flavor of nutjob are all in the same district. Be it birthers, gun nuts, 9/11 conspiracy folks, or whatever. Pick your favorite flavor, wrangle up enough people, wherever they may be, and reelections will take care of themselves. We can sprinkle the sane/moderate people around so that their votes are barely heard. Certainly not enough to cause a ruckus
The real problem, however, is just now starting to surface. If you wrangle up enough staunch believers of any one type in a particular area, a crazier candidate will surface and take advantage of that. We no longer get anyone with a hint of "moderate" in a general election, because they get destroyed in the Primaries by someone even crazier than they are.
This signature is false.
Just because I live in California does not mean that I do not have a real and valid interest on who the people of Utah send to DC.
The question really isn't do you care what they do, the question is do you have any right to help them select the people that they send to congress to represent THEIR interests. To that, that answer is a clear and resounding NO, you do not.
If you believe you do, then you should realize that your system would allow every voter in the country to vote on every senate and house race, and the Senate would become a body representing only the most populous areas of the country and not every state as it was intended to do. And the House would be the same. The voters in less populous states would effectively be disenfranchised. That's great if you live in and have the same views as the majority of people in the larger states.
Thinking otherwise is simplistic and wrong.
The simplistic and wrong thinking is to believe that because the people elected to represent others can vote on matters that impact your life that you should get to vote on those representatives, too. They represent other people; you get to elect the ones who represent you. Having one national election for the Senate and House would result in a stultifying homogeneity of ideas in a place that should have a plethora of views available.
And before you say "but but but the Koch brothers...", you need to realize the difference between campaign contributions and actual voting. As human beings, the Koch brothers have the same free speech rights that you do, and if you feel that you have the right to comment on elections in other parts of the country, then they have those rights, too. What they (and you) do not have the right to do is vote in other states or districts, and voting is how people get elected.
The idea of "open primaries" is based in large part on this demonstrated lack of understanding of this "fairness", and in large part on the dishonesty of wanting to "help" the other political party select a "better" candidate. The truth of the latter is that such voters are either trying to select a candidate for the other party who is "in name only" and is really one of their own philosophically, or select an unelectable candidate so their party's offering will have no real opposition. Both are dishonest and both are why open primaries should be abolished.
If you give them amnesty, they become legal then. Legal is what the law defines to be legal, no more and no less. Yet he has problems with that - in fact, a decidedly non-libertarian objection:
"Adding millions of workers to the labor market will force wages to fall and jobs to be lost."
(hey, what happened to free market? or does that not apply to labor somehow?)
As explained in the link in my previous post (did you even read it?), if you take a set of data that fluctuates noisily but has an long-term upwards trend, you truncate it carefully so that the beginning of your truncated subset falls near a high point in the random fluctuations, and you use that to deny the upwards trend, then you are using a trick called "cherry-picking". You can argue you're presenting "simply facts", but it's dishonest. Watt's also dishonest is failing to declare a rather blatant conflict of interest.
Also, your own post contains contradictions. You're saying "...OBSERVED warming trend is significantly less than the IPCC 1990 PREDICTED..." (implying there is still a warming trend), and then you're saying "it has leveled off". Only one of them can be true, and it's the first one. There is still a warming trend, and yes, it's lower than the low-end 1990 predictions. Scientists have been debating over why that is for a while now. Heat getting trapped in the depths of the pacific ocean seems to be gaining traction as the most prevalent hypothesis, which is worrisome because once this finite heat reservoir is saturated, the heating will pick up with a vengeance. More info here, here, here and here (the 3 first links are all discussing the study in the 4th; I'll let you pick which source you like best).
You do realize that George Soros was a major anti-Communist activist against the rule of the USSR and helped former quasi-occupied Communist sstates of the Warsaw Pact, like his home country, move towards liberal market democracies.
And Bill Gates? *Bill* *Gates*? A totalitarian Communist supporter? Really? REALLY? A hedge fund trader and a technology billionaires, now because they don't agree with some of the lunatic wingnuttery are now seriously considered to be a sniff away from Trotskyite madness? And people don't recognize how totally insane that thought is? And if some of the smartest leading hedge fund and capitalist technology billionaires are going for the (comparatively) *left* party then that may mean that the right-aligned party maybe could be hurtling into insane madness?
Do you know what a Communist actually acts like and what they do and want? Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro were socialist dictators.