Ya know, sometimes you do make some sense out of certain situations :)

Nuke 'em from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.

Don't we have drones for this expressed purpose of strategic assassination? j/k

I think we should take all the domestic terrorists that showed up at the Bundy Ranch and ship them to Somalia.

Ripley is that you?

Nah, I'm more like Hicks. Just a grunt.

I was thinking that you strafe with an AC130 but either way.

I think they're being sensible - once all the furore has died down, they'll move in take his cattle or whatever else is required to pay back the taxes owed .... no point making a fuss about it, if he's stepped over the line then the first he'll know about it is when he's arrested quietly out grocery shopping.

I love how fast some Republicans are backpedaling on this guy.

Rand Paul and other Republican leaders back away from Bundy

Cliven elaborated yesterday:


Looks like his vision of slavery comes from Song of the South.

Doubling down on the dumb.

No surprise.

Tripling down?

Martin Luther King better get off his lazy ass and get working again!

I have to assume Bundy's main point is that they shouldn't be accepting money given to them by the government, they should be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps by stealing that money from the government like he did.

A quiz:

Which Bundy Said It: Cliven, Al, Ted, or McGeorge?
Which Bundy Said It: Cliven, Al, Ted, or McGeorge? | Mother Jones

What, no King Kong?

took me way too long to get that.

5/10 for me.

7/10

5/10

Holy fuck.

10/10

I should be very afraid right now.

I don't envy the GOP strategists. I'm the type of guy that would say lets split and you guys are your own party but that would likely mean they would be the minority party for years to come.

What if the tea party decides to walk away from the GOP in 2016? It could happen.

I think the only realistic chance the Republicans have of getting into power is to face up to the crazy and let the Tea Party walk if they want to, otherwise rightly or wrongly they're going to be continually dragged down by their alienation of floating voters.

It'll be painful if they do it - but if they're going to the sooner the better as many Tea Party people will come back into the fold once they realise a Tea Party vote (outside of the major party) will have little effect.

I'd wager you're wrong on that. While I'm not really a TP'er by definition, I'm certainly sympathetic to their general position. I'd take the absolute worst of them over the the GOP establishment that would rather win via appeasement than lose by standing up for what's right.

To believe many would go back after a split underestimate the contempt those compromisers are held in. I'm a moderate compared to most genuine TP'ers I know ... and it's all I can do not to commit multiple felonies on those who reveal themselves as frauds. I can only imagine how hard it is for the more fervent true believers.

No wonder the temperature dropped over 20 degrees here today.

I believe a split will happen but instead, the Democratic centrists will merge with what was the Rpepublican establishment to form a more centrist third party that ends up becoming a dominant force 50 years from now.

I agree with you on the 'true' Tea-Partiers, however I think a lot of them are disaffected Republican voters who would fall back into the fold - for example my wife associates with the Tea Party but ultimately while she prefers their candidates given a choice wouldn't leave the Republican party, I'm presuming there are a lot more of the 'floating voter' style Tea-Partiers like her than there are committed people like yourself and those you know.

(I could easily be wrong tbh - my knowledge of American social culture and suchlike is rather limited)

Thats an interesting thought - not one I'd considered at all ...

The Modern Whigs are trying to be that party - a centrist third party I mean. But it's slow going for any third party.

Think its an overreaction but admirable I guess. Wouldn't happen here.

South Korean prime minister resigns over ferry disaster response - CNN.com

Honestly, off-hand I don't know a single person who claims allegiance/affiliation to the TP who is anything short of a "true believer" type.

Take the town where I grew up for example. Their Tea Party meetings seem to draw more people than the GOP and Dem party meetings combined. Now consider the political background of that once-solidly-D area for decades which has been even more solidly-R for the past two decades plus. I think it comes down to a matter of who is giving you the most of what you're looking for. Right now, for some folks, that's the Tea Party. A lot of those that I know are actually on the third party affiliation of their lifetimes, having switched when they felt a point of no return with the previous one had been reached. That's enormous,IMO, a real emotional core of why I don't see a lot of them ever returning. I'd put it along the same lines as remarrying an ex-wife, it happens but it's not exactly commonplace either. That take also fits pretty well with what the quoted snippet showed: a plurality of TP'ers self-identified as Independents rather than R or D. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.

Keep in mind to, by way of helping describe the mindset I'm talking about here, that I have never been a "card-carrying Republican" for a single day in my life. I have sided with them when their priorities & activities coincided with my own interests & beliefs, I'm just as willing to side with someone else when they have a consistently higher percentage of getting things right. For me, the TP gets at least as much stuff wrong than at least the remaining conservative wing of the GOP so I'm miles from being fairly described as anything more than "sympathetic" to them.

FWIW, I think the TP label/brand is about as coherent as several other minor party labels have been over the years. "Libertarian" comes to mind, as over 2-3 decades I've seen that tent used to cover everything from isolationist conservatives to granola munching neo-hippies. A TP adherent in Texas may not much resemble one in Maine that does not much resemble one in Georgia.

I'm sure Amazon does, too. He'd better not fall behind on his Prime payments ;)

SI

How many times do you cast that vote for the Tea Party if it basically fades into obscurity like the Reform Party or Ralph Nader? It's all fun and games to vote for them when you can get some opportunist fakes and even a couple of crazy true believers into office, riding on GOP money. However, the big donors doesn't want an "out of control" rabble running things any longer than they're politically useful. It's bad for business. So when the monetary support for the Tea Party dries up and they're pulling single digits, people will just fade away from them. Election and finance laws are such that it's really hard to get money unless you're already in power. However, maybe the loosening of campaign finance laws will change that.

SI

Wouldn't influence me greatly tbh. I'm already sitting out races on a regular basis for the absence of any candidate I can vote for in good conscience so a "wasted vote" wouldn't deter me if they were the only acceptable candidate.

edit to add: Electability is only an issue for me when there's more than one candidate I could swallow voting for.

I guess I already knew the answer to that question :)

But I suppose I wonder how many others are like that? How many others just start sitting it out?

SI

Again, I really only know one basic type of TP'er. They're so disaffected at this point that electability doesn't really come into play for virtually any of them ... and a pox upon me (from them) for occasionally mentioning it in the past.

I might be misinterpreting the latest news cycle, but is the reason for the latest good news from the employment numbers due to Benghazi?

Its escalating. Glad there is no red line statement on this.

I think Obama's only recourse is to work with EU, apply more sanctions and isolate Russia (who will probably then go to China) and maybe add more former eastern bloc countries into EU/NATO quickly.

Not sure if Ukraine should be doing this. If Russia gets involved and uses this as a pretext to help eastern Ukraine separatists, no way EU/NATO will intervene militarily.

Amid continued defiance, Ukrainian official vows: 'We are not stopping' - CNN.com

Context: Gallup began tracking this metric in 2008 (so this is the whole data set).

I guess this is political in nature. This is in regards to a segment on MSNBC in which, in celebration of Cinco de Mayo, showed a sombrero-wearing, tequila drinking sketch. The response:


Either Hugo Balta is engaging in purposeful hyperbole and he is totally ignorant of history. It is very hard to take activist organizations seriously if they say stuff like this.

Well I thought it was pretty unfair that it was a Caucasian college kid in the MSNBC piece. His serape was pretty great though.

This is a huge problem that needs to be resolved quickly. The restrictiveness of loan offers and refinancing has got to change. The overreaction by the federal government has left a lot of existing homeowners in a big pickle financially.

Why the housing market is suddenly struggling | Daily Ticker - Yahoo Finance

What "huge problem" and what "overreaction" by the federal government are you talking about?

I honestly couldnt handle the market getting any "better". As it stands I wont be able to afford a home any time soon because the prices here are stupidly high. I have a well paying job, money saved, good credit, and yet my options are to move at least an hour away from any job I might have in my life or to get a near million dollar home that still needs lots of improvements.

What exact federal government policy needs to change?

Opportunities to refinance for existing homeowners who were overrun by the housing crisis are critical to reviving the process, yet the government has made no options available for those people to refinance. People who did nothing other than follow the rules in many cases are now underwater or just barely above water and have no way to refinance at the current rates. If many of these people were simply allowed to shop their loans, billions would be injected into the economy simply due to savings on their monthly payments. Due to the overreaction by the federal government, many of these people have no way to finance out of their situation and are put in a position of defaulting on the loans or even bankruptcy. That only furthers the problem and creates more houses in the hands of banks who don't want them. It's just ridiculous at this point, yet the federal government has repeatedly followed the lobbying dollars rather than do the right thing.

HARP is still around, and had helped tons of people with mortgages that were underwater, and allows people to refinance with several lenders, not just the issuing lender.

I typically don't jump on the bash MBBF bandwagon but you're way off on this one. There are dozens of options for people to refinance. Some people are just too lazy to take the time to do it. It's a pain to work through the process but with just basic options you can do it and then you have the HARP program as well. People just expect these things to get done themselves. My brother needs to refinance desperately but simply won't take the time to do it. Same with my mom. They pretend that it won't be a problem later.

You are 100% wrong. I re-fied on an underwater house 3 years ago to lower rates with absolutely no problem specifically because there was a government program. My experience entirely refutes your post.

And I just sold my house in 5 days due to low market inventory (I had two full price offers) and bought one at full price. I also had zero problem with getting financing for the new home.

So what else ya got?

The HARP program doesn't achieve its key purpose because it only handles Freddie and Fannie Mae loans. There are literally millions that have the exact loans that would benefit from that program that aren't guaranteed under those two options (we'll call them the 95% LTV crowd). Outside of that, there are literally no options available. Max that most private loaning groups will go is 85% LTV. If there's something outside of that, please do tell. I'd love to find out that exists.


I'm assuming you're talking about HARP, which has nothing to do with the situation I'm discussing. I'm talking about the people who fall outside of those guarantors.