People ask what’s happened to the ‘old Main Street GOP’?
I want to say, ‘they evaporated, along with small town banking, local markets, and relatively stable wages in a culture that was fairly egalitarian’.

All the hoopla over the demise of the old ‘Main Street’ GOP seems to me more rooted in economic disparities.

The only way that I see the old Main Street, sane GOP coming back is if we once again have a large middle class full of retailers, engineers, dentists, and others whose economic stability is not wedded to Wall Street-based financial accounting.

I don’t see the demographics for a GOP resurgence.
What scares me is the fear of what originated as the Pat Robertson wing, armed to the teeth by the likes of Eric Prince, and believing that wide economic disparities are somehow ‘natural’ and that the social order is fundamentally wildly asymmetrical.

In other words, conditions unstable enough to put a patina of respectability on extremist views.

The economic disparities skew to that scenario IMVHO.

Which is why the Dems need to get some guts, suck it up, send Geithner, et al into exile, and find some spine to clean up the mess in D.C.

The old regulatory structures are too fragmented to be workable from where I see it all — there’s too much chair-moving on the Titanic by the timid. Won’t work.

And it was nice to see him compliment her research staff ;-))

(I have no clue what passes for ‘research’ at Fox News.)

Nice to get your sense about Ratigan, as well.
We’re mostly powerless onlookers; if the people in the media fail to ask shrewd, informed questions then we all lose.

why is Dylan Ratigan one of the <very few people in the media who can ask the right questions these days?!

I agree with you about Dylan, and would add Rachel Maddow to my short list of media newshounds who know how to ask good questions. She even got a shout out from Al Gore today.

Bob in AZ

Well, it might be interesting to read the dissenting opinions.

Bob in AZ

Here’s how it goes: Like in NY-23, Palin galvanizes the Republican fringe extremists to back unelectable conservatives. This drags the right wing of the right wing party out to a new national Third Party– of the Conservatives & Libertarians. They’ll elect a few Representatives– just enough to give them hope, and encouraging all the tea-baggers to bolt from the Republican party. This will leave the actually electable Republicans, like Bob McDonald, in charge of the party, able to actualize Eliot Spitzer’s dream (nightmare?), leading an anti-bank populist movement attacking a Democratic Party so besotted with power that they like being in bed with Wall Street.

Bob in AZ

Geithner and Summers need to go into exile.

1. My local (Democratic) Council member cost me easily $45,000 from political fellatio to local develpers. So last week, in my ballot, I voted for the GOP son-of-a-bitch and I don’t give a shit who wins that race.

2. I didn’t have state races. I’m not sure that I would have voted.
My state has cut $700 million from education this biennium and someone told me today that a local school thought they had a budget of $68 per child (paper, library books, etc), only to discover today that they have only $24 per child. That has huge economic ripples, and that’s only one single ‘tea leaf’.

3. Last week, I looked at my mutual funds and some other ‘savings’ that have seriously declined despite moving them to ‘low risk’ activity in 2007. I’m not toast, but I’m not happy. Meanwhile, I get to read about bank bailouts, no one can figure out where $700 billion in TARP money went, and the concentration of wealth continues to escalate.

4. In 2006 and in 2008, I gave small political campaign contributions to Dems, Dems, and more Dems – so that the Dems could recapture control of Congress. Now, the GOP is intransigent and the Dems act like they’ve been politically castrated by threats of fillibusters. If some asshole wants to filibuster, they can damn well do it in public and be exposed as obstructionist, vain, dillatante shills.

5. I got home late today and clicked an online segment of MSNBC’s “Morning Meeting” today with Gentler of the Commodities Future Trading Commission as the guest. And the butt-covering bullshit that he shoveled out made me so angry that I was literally shouting at my computer screen – an unusual thing for me to do. His wankering on about how we have to wait for the US to coordinate with Europe sounds good in principle, but from what I can read between the lines in the biz news, Barney Frank is basically giving a legislative blow job to the banksters, and Gentsler doesn’t sound like he could stand up to a donut, let alone a bankster.

So I see teachers working their asses off, I see small businesses working their asses off, and I see butt-covering cowardice in government.

Eliot Spitzer may be an asshole, and he’s my kind of asshole.
Why is he the only guy who seems to ‘get it’?

God help me if the teabaggers take control.
The Dems are incompetent cowards, God help me.
But the teabaggers are flipping loons.

Can we clone Eliot Spitzer and morph him with Jim Webb and Sheldon Whitehouse?
Like, by noon tomorrow?

(Thanks for letting me vent; I’m so pissed at Gensler’s limp-wristed excuses and pallaver that I’m beside myself. Meanwhile, why is Dylan Ratigan one of the <very few people in the media who can ask the right questions these days?! )

I’d sure like for Gensler to go explain to all those teachers why their kids don’t have paper or new library books this year. And then, I’d like him to go explain to my local businesses (and my auto mechanic) why one single derivative or transaction is allowed any kind of ‘exemption’ from fully transparent reporting.

Sorry to vent….
But Spitzer is right on target.
Scarily so.

“…I don’t have a whole lot of patience with the “Alienated for Life” approach to all this. Politics is a life-long commitment in a democracy, and you need to learn to take the wins as well as the losses, and get back up and fight the next fight. Change doesn’t come as a magical silver bullet, it comes through making it clear you are not going away. ..”

i feel the same way.

on another tact,

it is a long-time nostrum in american politics (and probably in most all free-voting politics) that americans vote against candidates, not for candidates.

this makes sense in explaining new jersey – why elect a sleaze ball like christie on merit?

virginia is more of a puzzle, but i suppose the best answer there is more along the lines of “craig deeds ran a campaign with not a scintilla of light or heat in it.”

bloomberg, too, had trouble so i read, and he is a (nominal) republican.

democratic politicians are not meeting voters emotional “needs”; republicans exploit those needs solely to gain power.

at present our society is politically labile, if not just plain unstable.

After that, the relation of the reshaped R party to the banksters is an interesting question. One would assume that your basic moderate, professional, politician-for-life R type is the most natural ally of the bankster, but that’s exactly who’s getting decimated in the pogrom. Hardline Palinite purists not such an obvious ally from a doctrine POV, except for the small degenerate Galty parts scotch-taped to the side. But if those nutters eventually succeed in effecting a takeover of the R brand, and ever manage to re-grow party rolls and electoral successes, then I’m sure the banksters are smart enough to find a way to, and can most certainly afford to, effectively use those future New Rs as a hired front, maybe overt or more likely covert.