http://www.gohunter08.com

That’s a sobering op-ed.

Krugman is arguing that Democrats shouldn’t shirk from a showdown with Republics. If you are a Democrat and find yourself wishing for domestic peace and hoping that we can all just get along, you will be disappointed, according to Krugman.

His evidence? He argues that if Norquist wing of the GOP can bring to heel a maverick (McCain) and a blue state country-clubber (Romney) — and they have — then there are no Republcs other than Huckabee who have anything in common with Democrats when it comes to fiscal policy (economics). When it comes to fiscal matters, Krugman (an economist) concludes that the GOP is now 100% in the pocket of movement conservatives.

It’s a very strong argument.

If you’re an Independent or a Democrat who would be willing to compromise if it’ll just bring domestic tranquility (ie, vote for a non-polarizing, “reasonable” Republic instead of a polarizing Clinton), you can’t: that peace doesn’t exist.

If you find yourself repulsed emotionally and intellectually by movement conservatism, then your only Republic choice (among the frontrunners) is Mike Huckabee.

Wow. If Krugman is correct, then this election is going to be “worst case” ugly.

No, it’s what makes it brittle. If you aren’t willing to bend a bit, you will shatter when enough force is applied. I realize you want to live in a universe of absolutes, but this one is built on probabilities. You can adapt to that, find another one or perish. You seem to have chosen the latter.

“While you libs say you want alternative energy sources, you are not willing to pay for it, at least not out of your own pocket.”

Need I remind you that we paid and paid out of our own pockets for promises from the energy companies that they were developing new energy sources. They chose to spend it on corporate jets and golden parachutes. All we want is what we paid for!

“The republican candidate that gets back on that conservative agenda, will be the most likely to win the nomination.”

The conservative agenda which once actually meant something has been taken to an extreme of absurdity not seen since the days of the robber barons. Yes, the candidate that most pleases the extreme right will probably win the nomination, but being tied to the horrendous Bush failures, is unlikely to win this election or many to come. The “Clinton” mantra you have tried to foist off on the public has become the “Bush” mantra. As a forgotten republican once said, “You can fool some of the people some of the time…….”

It is now only about money, but there was a time when it was responsible.

There was a time when the Republican Party understood that well paying jobs meant more customers and we could work our way out of poverty.

Then this new bunch starting attacking those paychecks through the utility companies.

At one time my phone bill was 6.50, water 3.00, electric 15.00 gas 3.00 and the sales tax was 1%

I also paid 14 cents a gallon for gasoline.

And no, incomes are not that much higher today.

Got to fire my bro’s M1 Garrand, his Chinese AK47, and his Romanian SKS.

Not a single gun has been confiscated under any Democratic president and never will be . . .

(There was a silly “assault weapons” ban but that won’t happen again . . . )

I worked with guys like that. Otherwise good, union all American guys.

But it ALWAYS came down to “the Democrats will take my guns away!”

Heh. I had one really good friend who I just could not convince how wrong he was. He spouted that line once in front of another co worker who happened to be a vietnam vet.

“Jack? Do you know how damned stupid you sound saying that?” the vet told him.

Of course, it wasn’t anything I hadn’t said a hundred times before.

Ya know what? The dems have had the house AND the Senate for almost a year! I’ve not heard of any massive gun grab.

The poorest counties in the US routinely vote for the Republic party.

They have gotten massively poorer under Reagan-Bush-Bush.

Maybe the Republics are right when they say that poor people are stupid and deserve to be poor.

A majority of them keep voting for Republics and they keep getting screwed.

But thank God! they’ve still got their guns.

I used to think as you do.

I voted for Ronald Reagan and a straight GOP ticket in 1984.

I was young and dumb and just outta high school.

Well, it didn’t take me long to start changing my mind. I won’t walk you through it but…

“when you have principles, you don’t change your mind based on the direction the wind is blowing.”

I read something like that and I just shake my head and chuckle.

Max? The Republican party is about one thing and that is money. Oh they pay lip service to other things. But if you boil down conservatism THESE days it always comes down to money.

Good article. Compromising with the Ann Coulter-Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republic party is like comprimising with Satan.

You don’t compromise with people like that. You crush them politically and hang up their dead corpses as a warning to others . . .

WOW! This from a Reagan-enabling “superpatriot” . . .

You know its bad when even the CONs are saying indirectly that our current occupant of the White House appears “obviously insane.”

Thanks for finally getting a clue, Stupid. Thanks to you people our beloved nation has endured eight years of WORST. PRESIDENT. EVER.

I think I speak for most of us when I say, “Huh?”

Perhaps you might restate your questions in the form of something rational.

Here’s a good background piece on John Edwards:

http://tinyurl.com/2ann6t

“A Fidel Castro rant?”

Wow. You’re even more insane than that poster who used to show up in this forum. What was his nym? “Kansas,” or something.

Yesterday The Times published a highly informative chart laying out the positions of the presidential candidates on major issues. It was, I’d argue, a useful reality check for those who believe that the next president can somehow usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation.

What the chart made clear was the extent to which Democrats and Republicans live in separate moral and intellectual universes.

On one side, the Democrats are all promising to get out of Iraq and offering strongly progressive policies on taxes, health care and the environment. That’s understandable: the public hates the war, and public opinion seems to be running in a progressive direction.

What seems harder to understand is what’s happening on the other side — the degree to which almost all the Republicans have chosen to align themselves closely with the unpopular policies of an unpopular president. And I’m not just talking about their continuing enthusiasm for the Iraq war. The G.O.P. candidates are equally supportive of Bush economic policies.

Why would politicians support Bushonomics? After all, the public is very unhappy with the state of the economy, for good reason. The “Bush boom,” such as it was, bypassed most Americans — median family income, adjusted for inflation, has stagnated in the Bush years, and so have the real earnings of the typical worker. Meanwhile, insecurity has increased, with a declining fraction of Americans receiving health insurance from their employers.

And things seem likely to get worse as the election approaches. For a few years, the economy was at least creating jobs at a respectable pace — but as the housing slump and the associated credit crunch accelerate and spill over to the rest of the economy, most analysts expect employment to weaken, too.

All in all, it’s an economic and political environment in which you’d expect Republican politicians, as a sheer matter of calculation, to look for ways to distance themselves from the current administration’s economic policies and record — say, by expressing some concern about rising income gaps and the fraying social safety net.

In fact, however, except for Mike Huckabee — a peculiar case who’ll deserve more discussion if he stays in contention — the leading Republican contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why? Because the G.O.P. is still controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy.

To see the extent to which Republican politicians still cower before the power of movement conservatism, consider the sad case of John McCain.

Mr. McCain’s lingering reputation as a maverick straight talker comes largely from his opposition to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which he said at the time were too big and too skewed to the rich. Those objections would seem to have even more force now, with America facing the costs of an expensive war — which Mr. McCain fervently supports — and with income inequality reaching new heights.

But Mr. McCain now says that he supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Not only that: he’s become a convert to crude supply-side economics, claiming that cutting taxes actually increases revenues. That’s an assertion even Bush administration officials concede is false.

Oh, and what about his earlier opposition to tax cuts? Mr. McCain now says he opposed the Bush tax cuts only because they weren’t offset by spending cuts.

Aside from the logical problem here — if tax cuts increase revenue, why do they need to be offset? — even a cursory look at what Mr. McCain said at the time shows that he’s trying to rewrite history: he actually attacked the Bush tax cuts from the left, not the right. But he has clearly decided that it’s better to fib about his record than admit that he wasn’t always a rock-solid economic conservative.

So what does the conversion of Mr. McCain into an avowed believer in voodoo economics — and the comparable conversions of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani — tell us? That bitter partisanship and political polarization aren’t going away anytime soon.

There’s a fantasy, widely held inside the Beltway, that men and women of good will from both parties can be brought together to hammer out bipartisan solutions to the nation’s problems.

If such a thing were possible, Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani — a self-proclaimed maverick, the former governor of a liberal state and the former mayor of an equally liberal city — would seem like the kind of men Democrats could deal with. (O.K., maybe not Mr. Giuliani.) In fact, however, it’s not possible, not given the nature of today’s Republican Party, which has turned men like Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney into hard-line ideologues. On economics, and on much else, there is no common ground between the parties.

I’m getting stronger and stronger for John Edwards almost every day.

He’s 54 and looks 34 which makes the “pretty boy” attacks seem more like jealousy than substantive criticism.

Perhaps the best analysis of this issue can be found here:

http://tinyurl.com/2tjzg9

Edwards is your guy huh?

Well maybe I will read more about him. It’s just he strikes me as kinda fake. So much money but says he is for the little guy. I don’t NEED for him to be poor but the money and the thing with the hair. I don’t know.

The guy who impresses me most so far is Dennis Kucinich. I also like how Senator Clinton is not afraid to talk about things the right does NOT want to hear.

I am off for now. Going to see if Homeland is open today, on Harry. The going out of business sales have been pretty good!

HAH!! Who said these people are rational??

And yeah, most entrepreneurs don’t want to limit competition. It’s the vested interests that do. On that, you and I agree.

Low tax rates encourage new businesses.

I don’t see very many entrepreneurs who want to “limit” competition. That is usually a fault of the larger, established companies, when we see it happen, anyway.

There is no rational reason for the “rich” in general, to want to keep others from becomming rich.

They have to sell their stock to someone else, some day. They have to sell their house to someone, someday. Why limit the market for what they, themselves, own?

The sad thing is that there were things about Romney and Huckabee that could have attracted me. However, they both seem to be running away from those things. Add to that Romney’s ‘religion’ speech in which he seemed to tell me to go away and I cannot support him.

My preferences are still those I have seen as ‘reasonable’ – notably Richardson. But, I doubt that they will make it to the time I caucus in February.

In theory, yep! But you and I know it doesn’t work that way. Many of the people who have theirs, do everything thing in their power to make sure no one else gets a piece of the pie.

It’s not a conspiracy thing, it’s just the way it is. It wouldn’t matter, except for one thing: Those “haves” have control of the government, and use the various powers of the government to keep new competitors from popping up or becoming successful. It’s kind of like the discussion on the Westar thread – the corporation wants the government to use it’s monopoly power to give them more money, but doesn’t want to suffer any competition from co-generators.