calimary
calimary's JournalThe very WORD "Liberal" has been thoroughly trashed. We HAVE TO rehabilitate it.
That's why I like hauling this one out:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/21/1093478/-A-Day-in-the-Life-of-Joe-Republican
People now need to be reminded what it is to be a liberal, and how they surprisingly enough ARE. On ALL the issues that matter, whether it's a woman's right to choose, voters' rights, immigrants rights, workers' rights, public schools, the social safety net, income inequality and the minimum wage, marriage equality, marijuana legalization, defense spending, belief in climate change and support of science, you name it - clear and undeniable and unspinnable majorities of Americans are on the LIBERAL side. Earl G had a photo post about it a few days ago, running down all the issues and the percentages of Americans who are on the left on those issues. The lowest was 54% for a woman's right to choose. But that's not even a plurality, it's STILL a clear and undeniable and unspinnable MAJORITY. Everything else on that list rated even higher on the leans-liberal scale.
America is CENTER-LEFT. I don't care what talk radio says. OR Pox Noise. OR the teabaggers. Or the "think" tanks out there or their PR machinery or jim demint or kkkarl rove or grover norquist or limbaugh or reince priebus or romney & co or the Tundra Tart or ANY OF 'EM say. The NUMBERS, the STATISTICS, the METRICS on all the key issues say America is center-LEFT.
Oh believe me I haven't forgotten that, either.
I will NEVER forget all the people who turned on Clinton for that. dee dee myers - george stephanopolous - that means YOU!
Well, first of all, welcome to DU to YOU, TOO, ablamj!
Glad you're here. That's a GREAT question. I'd have to look at that seriously. However, it's hard to imagine any candidate who WOULD be pro-choice and bush-like on everything else. It just doesn't follow, at least in my experience. I've certainly not seen it. If a candidate is pro-choice, it is FAR more likely that they would NOT be bush-like in other things. There's a general mind-set working here. They would be far more likely NOT to stand with climate change deniers, they'd be far more likely NOT to support war-first/ask-questions-later. They'd be far more likely to support a social safety net. They'd be far more likely to support marriage equality, and income equality, and voters rights. I'd have to look. I'd have to look more closely.
Mainly - is there a D or an R after their name? If there's a D, it's more likely than not - that the mere fact of a D means that the Democratic caucus is increased by one. Unless they go stealth and change parties after they're elected. But adding yet another D means that might give our overall Democratic caucus that much more clout. Might make the difference between the Rs grabbing the majority or being kept out of power. When the Ds are in control, THEY set the agenda. THEY decide what gets voted on and what stays stuck in committee-hell. THEY determine what legislation advances and what doesn't. So I'd have to look at that.
I'd also have to look at - who's funding them? Who's endorsing them? Who appears with them at campaign events? Who's advising them? WHICH MEANS: who's coming into office WITH them if they win? Who will have their ear, or be their advisors, either on staff or behind the scenes. Who will influence them on policy issues once they gain power? Who will the winning candidate turn to for advice on the issues? WHO will get his/her attention, and get their calls returned or their requests acted upon?
Once I've done that, with any given candidate, I would decide. But if you say you're pro-choice, you certainly get my attention. And then I look deeper. But I've noticed a mind-set in operation here. Those who tend to think liberally on a woman's right to choose also tend to think liberally on other issues I care about when I go to vote. Granted, not always. For example, I supported Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota because I wanted another D in there. And I was happy to do so. And she won and she's a Senator now. But then she came out with that damn statement after the Newtown massacre about how the holy goddam second amendment meant nobody had the right to take away somebody's "right" to own massacre machines, and I had a FIT! I called her office in Washington and complained. And I had NO trouble telling them I was from California and I realize she's from North Dakota, so I'm not her immediate constituent - HOWEVER, she was VERY happy to take my California money when her campaign sent emails around begging for campaign donations. So I felt, AS AN UNDERWRITER OF HER CAMPAIGN (the kind of donations without which she might NOT be in that Senate seat today), that she STILL had to pay attention to what I want, and I DO INDEED have a say in how she votes in the Senate.
You just have to study and be aware of what is beneath the surface, and what's (and WHO'S) behind the curtain. And sometimes you win and sometimes you don't. You make the best and most informed decision you can. In her case, well, it's better to have a D in there than an R, and it helped us keep the Senate in the blue column. But I'm not happy about her love of wanton access to any damn guns you want, and I'm gonna have to think long and hard about that when she's up for reelection. And depending on what the dynamics are at the time (like, could we afford to lose a Senate seat because we're otherwise in solid shape - so I then don't feel compelled to contribute to her campaign?) I'd have to make a decision then. That said, Heidi Heitkamp is pro-choice. So, for me, that remains a big point in her favor.
And as superficial as it sounds - "they're losing the PR war" -
It COUNTS!!! BIG-TIME!!!! It makes a huge difference. Around the world! And like it or not, reasonable or not, they're losing the PR war with all the bombings. This is not good - especially for THEIR cause. If they want world sympathy, they're not playing this as shrewdly as they may think. And I support Israel's right to exist. But man they're doing themselves some serious damage here with their intractability. I get why they feel compelled to hold a very hard line here. But they're gonna pay a price for it. They risk a whole lot more than they may have expected. If you lose the PR war, you have a VERY serious set-back. As we've seen here in this country every time bush/cheney made a move and the entire media/PR machine backed them up monolithically. Democrats and liberals and progressives, unfortunately, lose the PR war more than anything else.
Which is why the Dark Side has gone so deep with the media, owning the radio airwaves, the limbaugh/Pox Noise machine, starving and outshouting liberal talk radio, etc. THAT is why. They know and understand very clearly how important the PR war is. That's how both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom got going and gained traction. It was a concerted, focused, well-orchestrated, well-organized, and well-funded, PR effort. And it worked. Remember that "poor young lady" from Kuwait testifying in Congress about babies being ripped out of incubators by invading Iraqi troops? Never happened. It was made up, and she was coached. I believe she was some ambassador's daughter from over there. And one of the big PR firms was in charge of the case, managing it. Managing it quite effectively considering the way it organized and led and manipulated public opinion in favor of those wanting war. I forget if it was FleishmanHillard or Hill & Knowlton. One of those.
You lose the PR war, you lose. Period. Seems awfully superficial, doesn't it!? But that's how it is.
This is SO INCREDIBLY instructive, guys!
Let's not forget this. The corporate mind, the boss-mentality, DOES NOT LIKE DRAMA.
Repeat - those in the controller positions DO NOT LIKE DRAMA!!! They will always want things simple, neat, done, over. No extra time wasted dealing with problems, no-hassle, no-muss/no-fuss.
I had this experience myself, managing the band. It was definitely my takeaway. The boys were touring, and we'd bought onto a tour with a bigger band. We'd paid for a first-of-three position - meaning our band was first up, then the direct-support band, then the headliner. But there were cities along the tour path in which the promoter decided independently to stick some local bands in between ours and the direct-support band, to fatten up the receipts at the end of the night. So the first-of-three position we paid for turned into first-of-four, and in a couple of cases, first-of-FIVE. We were screwed. And I complained. My boys were slotted in one case - BEFORE THE DOORS HAD EVEN OPENED!!!!! At its most basic, it wasn't what we paid for. I wanted to get what we'd paid for. PERIOD. And I complained. I called our agent and the headliner's agent and complained. Pointed out that this was not what we paid for. They conceded the point and said they'd try to fix it. They couldn't - didn't have any sway over the local promoters as it turned out. So they really couldn't fix it. It kept happening and I kept complaining. And I watched, incredulous, as the attitude of both our agent's and the headliners' agent's started souring - toward me. For complaining. For causing drama. For complicating what should have been simple and easy and no-muss/no-fuss. They both started complaining back at me - using such wording as "this is starting to take up too much time!" and "it shouldn't be taking this much time" or "we shouldn't have to deal with this..." or "it's not supposed to be this much of a hassle..." Simply because WE were getting short-changed. And they promised to fix it and stop it, and it never got fixed and it never got stopped.
But we learned a painful and expensive lesson. And I learned something very valuable and illuminating about basic human nature in this type of situation. They don't want the hassle. They don't want the complaints. They don't want the problems that they have to take extra time and trouble to try to sort out. They don't want the bother. This is the same dynamic we here are seeing play out with the limbaugh boycotts. It starts to become too much muss-'n'-fuss. It starts to become a bigger pain-in-the-ass than the financial returns and other "benefits" that MIGHT at one point have outweighed the hassles. Now the hassles are becoming bigger than they want to bother with. So - solution? Just fuck it all. Pull the whole damn format down. Or, as radio management always has said, in such tidy and "delicate" cosmetic wording - "we've decided to go in a different direction."
He's also the same guy who drooled "we're ALL Neocons NOW!!!"
While watching bush sashay around that aircraft carrier with his stuffed flight suit and his "Mission Accomplished" banner flying proudly. And nowadays, all Chris Matthews can talk about is how against the war he always was...
Welcome to DU, Blus4u!
Glad you're here. It's a mixed blessing at best. YES liberal talk radio got screwed. And has been pretty much destroyed on the air. But hey, anything that takes limbaugh down, even on ONE station, is a good thing.
Talk radio in general is on the ropes, corporately. Too costly, drama-filled, and hassle-prone. The noise of all the bad publicity and boycotts is becoming too problematic for management to sustain for long. Hit 'em in the pocketbook. Too bad it takes this long, though. limbaugh should have been yanked off the air YEARS ago. But because of broadcast deregulation and the abolishment of things like the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time provisions, this is what we got. You could put ANYTHING on the air with impunity and you didn't have to bother yourself with providing equal time to any opposing views. And the big money was with the conservative (read: corporate) mega-ownership (ALSO promoted by deregulation of the broadcasting industry and the removal of limits on ownership). Used to be that any one ownership entity, whether it was private or conglomerate, was limited to three properties in any one market. How it usually worked out was - ownership of ONE AM, ONE FM, and ONE TV outlet. And that was that. No more. That's why, instead of hundreds of owners - like at one point 600 of them across the country, reduced down to SIX. SIX uber-corporate entities that bought up and swallowed whole all kinds of mom 'n' pop shops. And this is what we wound up with.
ALWAYS a good tactic in war. Muzzle, disrupt, or otherwise hog-tie the enemies' lines of communication. That's what they did to us on the liberal end. We had little or no loud national voices spouting OUR side of things. And meanwhile, the big money supported the wrong-wingers and made damn sure THAT message got out all over the place - like ants at a picnic, or a rapidly metastasizing cancer.
Wouldn't be the first time UN inspectors were ignored.
Just ask Hans Blix and friends.
This. ^^^^
It just creates more terrorists.
That's why we HAVE TO find a solution in which the Palestinians get something significant. It cannot be one-sided, benefiting Israel ONLY. We're stuck. There's no other choice here, if we REALLY want a prolonged or (dare we even hope) permanent peace. We CANNOT try or support ANY one-sided solutions. As long as the Palestinians are shoved aside, or fed into some meat-grinder, or forced to accept some sort of hind-teat, Israel will always find itself painted into a corner, and will always face serious threats. We HAVE TO throw the Palestinians a bone if we're ever even to hope to bring all of this to a peaceful conclusion. And it's gonna have to be a pretty big one.
That will never be possible. It will only beget more sympathizers on their side.
Especially if THEIR side can translate this into a Holocaust against them. There will be others coming after them to seek revenge. All this stuff only guarantees that result. This kind of thing NEVER ends well.
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