Welcome to the chickens coming home to roost. The GOP couldn't win elections without the evangelicals back in the 90's, and the crazy train has been rolling along ever since. Now, because they can't get elected dog catcher without the support of people who claim they want freedom so long as it's in a Christians-only no-immigrants country that's against the Illuminati and anything that resembles science, the only nominees that can hope to win GOP primaries are pretty much raving loonies.

garbage in, garbage out

That one always amazes me. Union labor is about 12% of the population. Of course, presenting minority groups as threats to America is a well-worn tradition.

Rove is scum, but 12 out of the top 20 all time political donors for the last 23 years are unions. So, yeah, "big labor."

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A

ignore that "all time" as it is inaccurate and silly.

I'd honestly never heard the term, and I thought it was supposed to sound like "big tobacco" or "big pharm." I realize now it's more like "big business," which while kind of snarky isn't as bad as I was hearing it.

I was just about to say.

The face of pure evil is awfully doughy.

His skin is trying to escape.

Yeah. As a Canadian, I get to experience all of the campaigning of American politicians without actually having a vote, so it's always really shocking to me that the Democrat voters whom I tend to agree with far more accurately complain about how downright awful Obama has been for liberal causes, but when election time comes along, they suddenly and shockingly start defending Obama because they hate the Republican candidate, even though he's been liberal in his policies to date.

If you guys don't agree with either party's platform, make sure you vote for someone who more closely resembles your political ideals. Voting for someone you haven't liked for four years because you dislike some other guy more is reinforcing the system you hate.

No, it isn't "reinforcing the system we hate". It's being an adult & realizing that we don't always get to vote for our ideal candidate, and that sometimes a vote for an imperfect candidate is necessary to prevent Dubya, Part 2: This Time, It's Personal.

Someday you'll grow up, and learn about all this.

Yes. Fear! Fear of the other corrupt guy! Definitely vote based on that.

I hope you've never complained about American democracy being a two-party system. Anyone that trots out the tired line about a vote for an independent is "throwing your vote away" is basically an enemy of democracy and in reinforcing that belief has reinforced the status quo.

Ralph Nader, in 2000, stood for something different than the two big political entities and managed to attract a substansive enough amount of the Democratic vote that the party had to do something. The obvious choice was to incorporate policies that Nader stood for to bring the votes back into the party. So they came up with another system: accuse him of helping the "we haaaaaate that guy" get elected. Everyone that participated in that narrative at any level unwittingly (wittingly?) surrendered their democracy.

Jesus. Are you 15?

OR you could exercise that attitude at a local election level, where over the long term you'd have ideal candidates working their way up to the federal level.

But having a tantrum and not voting because no candidate is perfect is the electorate version of TFL declaring that no woman is good enough for then so THEIR LOSS.

b-b-but surely if I boycott imperfect candidates the Democratic party will wake up and send a helicopter to my house delivering my shining knight!

Nrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, not really.

The last 30 years have been a wholesale and coordinated effort, stemming from the Southern Strategy, to essentially not only gerrymander a permanent Republican presence but to brainwash an entire segment of the American populace, the official kickoff point being the Nixon administration. It started with the realization that the Republican party will never receive more than 10% of the minority vote, and so the decision was to make sure that the minority vote is disenfranchised and minimized at every turn. Focusing entirely on the white vote, by means of fearmongering and the cult-like love bombing and isolation of the talk radio circuit, they were able to create a mentality whereby being challenged on an opinion is an immediate belief in your own correctness. They did this not only with talk radio and punditry, but by actively involving themselves in the churches themselves. This lead to the phenomenon of the mega church, which could isolate the white conservative even more by essentially filtering entire sermon programs to the ministers from the party line. Those who were too poor/invalid to attend these upper middle class enclaves were indoctrinated by the television preachers like Robertson and Falwell. At all costs, the mentality is "if you are questioned, you must be right". This is the mantra and the method of destruction of the conservative mind.

By the Reagan administration, everything was in play to start the Christian Coalition manipulation of the low end of the political scale... school boards, city councils, etc. The intellectual and spiritual gerrymandering began in earnest. By framing the debate of "us vs. the Liberal Elite," they were able to discount entirely the notion that their political opposition were people too, they began taking the books and teaching methods out of the schools. This is still in process, but the entire goal is to literally prevent diversion from their orthodoxy impossible. Now, the problem is that we have an entire generation since the Reagan Administration to whom the Republican plan is a spiritual solution, and the kicker is that they don't even have the intellectual tools to realize they're in a cult. We're in terminal phase now. There's no leaving, they've got the rest of the world, too.

I'm less pessimistic than you for these reasons:

1) The wealthy have been known to overreach before, and what usually happens is the common folk start waking up and supporting better government. Ohio and Wisconsin, for example.

2) The GOP is currently in such a state of disarray that they can't find anyone for their support base to get enthusiastic about. They are still trouble, but they are also vulnerable.

3) The generation that's starting to die off is hardcore Republican. The generation that's just turned old enough to vote is hardcore Democrat.

4) As you pointed out, minorities.

5) The notion of the 1% vs. the 99% is part of our political vocabulary now, in ways it never has been in my lifetime. That's a damn promising sign. Didja notice how Mitt and Newt are having to apologize for having a lot of money? That's an unlikely spectacle in a Republican primary.

So yeah, the GOP is playing all their cards right now, but they're anything but unbeatable. The biggest threat to progress is "Progressives" and how they are in love with disappointment: they'd rather take their ball and go home than occasionally utter sentences like "Yeah I strongly disagree with the Democrats about _____ but I'm still going to support them".