This from Workers Independent News:
The primary media narrative is that voters were seeking a more conservative agenda and therefore they voted out Democrats in favor of Republicans, but is that true? Jesse Russell crunches the numbers.
If one looks at the Democratic losses by ideological caucus a different trend emerges. The Congressional Progressive Caucus only lost three of the 72 progressive seats that were up for grabs. Meanwhile, the moderate New Democrats Coalition had 45 New Democrats only seats up for grabs. They lost 15 of those seats. And the worst performing of Election Night was the conservative Blue Dog Coalition which had 29 seats up for grabs and lost 13. The current House of Representatives Democrat make-up is 30 percent Progressive vs. 39 percent moderate and conservative Democrats. If the next session of Congress were to begin today the Democrat composition would be 38 percent Progressives and 28 percent moderates and conservatives.
Nationally syndicated talk show host Thom Hartmann, says this could be the end of the Republican party:
As the money in this election points out, the party of (old republicans) is now the party of (CEOs). So how much does it cost to buy the House of Representatives? Try over $300 million dollars – $123 million of which came from anonymous donors. That’s how much money was funneled into this year’s elections by outside groups.
And now in power, they have to live up to their end of the deal – legislate on behalf of billionaires like the Koch brother who want massive tax breaks, freedom to ship jobs overseas, and freedom to irreparably pollute our environment – in other words, freedom to finish off the dismantling of the middle class.
And our very own John Nichols, says that the democrats owe big thank you to the \"tea party\".
With Republicans taking complete control of the U.S. House and most of the states, the only thing that kept the 2010 mid-terms from being worse for Democrats than the 1994 “Republican Revolution” was the GOP failure to take the Senate.
And for that the Democrats have the Tea Party movement to thank.
As Harry Truman once said “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time”
here is another great take by David Sirota: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/thank-you-dick-cheney-for_b_778981.html
The facts are painfully apparent. Though hundreds – if not thousands – of people in D.C. are professionally paid to pretend these facts require debate and analysis and parsing and speculation and press releases and pithy Tweets and Sunday Show roundtables and C-SPAN symposia and to-camera cable-TV rants and lengthy thousand-page books, they don’t require any of that. They are simple. They are obvious. They are undeniable:
1. The Democratic Party sh*t on its base with its policies, as noted above.
2. This demoralized the Democratic base, which responded by not turning out to vote. As CBS News notes, “Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections (but) turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels.”
3. In cause-and-effect style, the result of all this was, as the Washington Post reports, a freshman congressional class that is primarily made up of angry, white, lunatic-conservative a**holes.
So yes, all of you who are wasting all of our time pretending this isn’t the basic point-A-to-point-B story of the election – and there are a lot of you out there – please, if not for me, then for everyone else: Go f**k yourself.
We’ve got lives to lead, we’ve got struggles to struggle through, we’ve got bills to pay – in short, we’ve got to get through the sh*t you’ve created and continue to create. And clearly, as you bitch about the alleged scourge of those evil election-losing liberals in the cocktail and hors d’oeuvre paradise of TV studios and green rooms and congressional offices and party fundraising events, you don’t give a sh*t about reality – so at minimum, for the love of whatever god you worship, just stop wasting our damn time and go **ck yourself.
I don’t think that language was appropriate…
sorry to offend you Ed, i was copying from sirota directly. He always writes with more passion than most. the point i was trying to show was that the country did not send the message all liberals go and hide like the msm and the republican bloggers/pundits have been yelling…
“a freshman congressional class that is primarily made up of angry, white, lunatic-conservative a**holes.”
Why is it that when liberals were angry and fed up with Bush policies, it was an era of “hope and change,” but now that it is conservatives who are fed up with Obama policies, it is characterized as angry and bitter?
Have you seen these people?
http://www.cogitamusblog.com/2010/10/saloncom-the-10-most-terrifying-would-be-congressmen.html