You have it backwards. Catering to those for whom voting is mainly an emotional affair is what will make whichever is the more organized party remain a permanent opposition party. This is because emotion, while always relevant, is not something which can be transmitted, only evoked. If the center doesn’t feel the emotion, there is nothing to evoke.

The emotions of extremists are always a ripe field for moral hazard, in that the more you cater to them the farther they can go (if you give a mouse a cookie…) and the more alien they get from those of moderates. The more unified the party that does this, the more they drive the “ideologically impure” out of it. It becomes a race to the bottom, with each party’s extremists reliant on the extremists of the other for new extremisms of their own, for all they need is to try to appear slightly less ugly than their opponents.

The scary thing is that extremists never see how their extremism feeds on itself. The louder and more offensively they scream at those different from them, the more ideologically and intellectually inbred they become because they drive those people away. The more inbred their minds become, the more justified in their own minds they become from a lack of opposition and the louder and more offensively they scream. This is a symmetrical effect. It occurs equally on both left and right.

Ironically, the credit card reform bill has arrived DOA. Since credit card companies can arbitrarily cancel any card at any time, not only do the bypass the 45 day notification rule, they pretty much can reset their rates so if the consumer tries to get another card, it will be with inferior terms to what they had.

http://www.thecatwhoatechasebank.com

Maybe Republicans can learn something from Middle America, which seems to be regularly ignored by the Right and Left. For instance, yesterday Republicans shamelessly thwarted efforts by Democrat Senator Chris Dodd to help Middle America by freezing credit card interest rates on existing balances. At a time when people in this country are literally going hungry and without work, Republicans had the chutzpah to throw Middle America under the bus and instead line the pockets of credit card companies. Oy gevalt . . .

I understand the great plight suffered by credit card companies. The gravy train with biscuit wheels that they’ve been riding for years will soon be coming to an end.

As you may recall, especially if you’re an insomniac and have needed something on the nightstand to help you sleep, the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act enacted in May, prevents arbitrary interest rate, fee and finance charge increases on a consumer’s existing balance.

In response, credit card companies have been hiking credit card interest rates to 30% in a last ditch effort to take advantage of consumers before all of the CARD Act’s provisions take effect.

To stem the hiking of fees on Middle America, Dodd’s bill would have sped up some of the provisions in the CARD Act, which don’t take effect until February or August of 2010. But yesterday Senator Thad Cochran (R., Miss.) objected to the measure, and it only takes one senator to block a unanimous consent request in the Senate.

This missive has nothing to do with the fact that consumers have a responsibility to spend within their means and to pay what they owe, and everything to do with the fact that the credit card industry has a responsibility to deal with consumers honestly. There is nothing honest about what credit card companies are doing to consumers with these rate increases and fees, which are simply usury and legalized extortion.

Middle America is already frustrated with the political Left and Right for not providing relief on pocketbook issues, and this gets the peasants one step closer to grabbing their pitchforks. If you’re keeping score, let the record reflect that in keeping with its tradition of whoring for big business, Republicans have once again chosen big business over Middle America.

A. Muser
http://americanmuser.wordpress.com

No wonder they lost an empire.