If they learn that lesson—to behave as Republicans have in political machination—it will finally be a blessing, but I won’t count on it. They seem so far (it’s only been a day out) most likely to stop governing.

Har har. You think the end game of crippling the Democrats is a return to an abstract dream of “constitutional principles”? No, you will be killing other people for gasoline, if they don’t get you first (more likely).

Why is this guy still in the White House? Where is FBI?
This isn’t going to fly with American People. Enough is enough. The Mass. election is only the beginning…

Now, it is possible that this was the result the voters of Mass intended: that they are siding with the far right in believing that every major Democratic proposal should be defeated. If that was the point, then fine – although it is tragic that one state determines that for the rest of the country.

How can the Democrats “get” this supposed message? There will be no bi-partisan cooperation. They can’t govern, unless they start to use reconciliation or other tactics that have been perceived to be hardknuckle. If they don’t govern, they definitely lose. Mass has deprived the Democrats of all options. They have no choice but to learn to behave as Republicans have for the last twenty years. It will be ugly.

No, back to the constitutional principles this rogue government took an oath to uphold.

“This means we’ll see a lot fewer control-freak socialist statists in government and we can re-ignite the Reagan revolution, thus working towards having a free market, capitalist, limited government society again.”

I agree – amnesty is right around the corner.

Will the Republicans in congress support legislation to increase jobs this Spring, or will they calculate that their odds of picking up seats in November get better if they can prolong Americans’ misery a bit longer?

For most of this last year, when legislation fails, it has been the Democrats’ fault. From here on out, it will be the Republicans’ fault, and the American public will very shortly tire of Republicans simply refusing to let anything pass.

I don’t think they’re prepared for that, and this may ultimately be a gift to the Democrats.

All Republican pundits and leaders seem to ignore the most important fact in all the polling of the last six months — the only thing the American people dislike more than a Democrat is a Republican, and by a large margin.

Additionally, if you want to be intellectually honest in your analysis, you have to include the uncomfortable fact that many of the disapproving constituents think Obama isn’t liberal enough.

The actual number of people that believe the country needs to execute a more conservative agenda is minimal.

Ignore these facts to your political peril.

The two are linked. There isn’t a means of attenuating the effects of serial bubbles on employment, etc without shifting the American economy and society onto more socially just grounds. That means a more just basis for distributing health care, and that involves some amount of increase of social democracy.

Anything else, well, that’s just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The stimulus, anyway, was too small. The money put into banker bailouts should have gone into the stimulus. The REAL root cause of the Obama malaise is the TARP (universally reviled by both the populist right AND left) and the whole bailout structure around that, and the REAL root cause of that is neoliberal trade orthodoxy and the refusal to protect American jobs from labour arbitrage.