How much worse does it have to get for voters to reject Republicans?

The economy sucks...It is great if you are in the top 1 or 2% of income earners. The cost of necessities doesn't really affect their livelihood. With the huge taxcuts and their investments, tehy are doing quite well, thank you. However, most of the folks in the bottom 50% are having a very difficult time. The credit card legislation was the knife in the back for a lot of these folks.

How many more people have to die in this war that everyone, including Bush, now says is being fought for different reasons than were initially defined. Since the religious nuts in Iraq seem to have won the last election and the dream of democracy seems very distant at this time, what will be the next excuse for invading Iraq?

And the huge debt and deficits created by Bush and the Republicans has put all of us into a deep hole for many years to come. Think of what we could have done. We could have made the lives of Americans so much better with the money that Bush spent and gave away to his wealthiest benefactors. But that is gone. What else has to happen for people to see the light?

it's whether they believe the GOP is responsible, *and* if they believe Democrats will be better. I've talked with more than one person who came right out and said that however bad things are now, it would be worse with Democrats in charge. However many of those people there are, they'll basically vote GOP no matter what disasters they cause.

so far the impression is that there is not much difference in competence or integrity between the two partys. A view that is even shared by some at DU.

if the Dems would define their message and then show some party discipline. With everybody going off in his, or her, own way, nobody knows what the Democratic party stands for, only that they are against the Republicans. That doesn't seem to be enough.

If the Dems are against the war, let them not only say so, but describe how they would get out. If they believe that now that the war is started it has to be seen through and won, but the Repukes are doing it wrong, they need to describe how they would do it differently.

In other words, stand for something specific. Something the voters can looks at and decide, "Yeah, that's the way to do it." Until they do, I think the Republicans will remain in charge, even if we manage to get the Diebold mess cleaned up. And we should.

Taxes: Describe who gets the tax cuts and who gets the tax increases. Social Security: a detailed plan on how we will keep it solvent,especially for the baby-boomers. Forthrightness on how much immigration there should be, who should be allowed to work in our country, how illegal immigration will be controlled. My analysis of the situation says this will be a big issue in elections for the next 10 years, so we have to decide what side we are on, and how to install our preferred policies.

Most of all, stop weaseling on the issues because we are afraid the American electorate will reject them. They might, at first, but if we are right, if we are forthright in our aims and honest with them, they'll come around eventually. The internet gives us a great weapon to spread the truth out there, something that can overcome the corporate, neo-con control of the MSM.

Under Reagan, the Democrats thought they could sit back and once the people saw the huge deficits that Reagan had, they would kick 'em all out. Of course, that didn't happen. We should have learned a lesson from those years.

something that Bush has only influence over like a simultaneous crash in housing and stocks.

"...we need to reject Keynes' flawed assumptions..." I don't think this will work - too radical. And besides, our basic model worked fine while Clinton was in office. We just need to get corporate corruption and the ME sink hole out of the picture, and we'll be OK.

Jeezum, that was the established conventinal wisdom during the most ecomomially successful decades of our nation's history, and had a lot to do with broadeningthe middle class. What is radical is the current Corporate CONservative climate.


And unfortunately, Clinton centrism helped to get us to the present sorry mess. Bush merely pushed the alreadyt undrlying process of growing inequality and Corporate Power of the 90's into overdrive.

The ethic of Profit Uber Alles that has become ascendent for the last 35 years IS the definition of corporate corruption and the dstruction of our very democracy and middle class.

knaves and rednecks.

They rarely change.

namely because they NEED to buy into it.

Americans have become (always have been?) crass and unsophisticated about these things. Being a repub voter, supporting the prez, cheering the war against scary brown people...for a lot of Americans is mostly just about winning. American politics has adopted, in large measure, the sports ethos of the Raider Nation. It's all about being the one on top.

If there's any justice left in this country, and the whole truth about the egregious gangsterism of the Bush party finally gets exposed, I believe there'll be conversions for the many, and quiet dark places to sulk and conspire for the disgruntled few.

Losers tend to support anyone who appears to be winning. Too bad there's so many losers here who still think they're winners because George Bush flatters their stupidity.

I'm just not sure the Dems (as an alternative) are up to the task of looking and acting like winners.

But we shall see...

:-)

They presume to know how the "red" states voted. They presume that someone counted the votes there, and that others could watch and verify. They just don't understand that this is no longer the case in any state (except Oregon--all mail-in paper ballot). The votes are now "tabulated" by two Bushite corporations (80% of the vote) using "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls. It is COMPLETELY NON-TRANSPARENT. And that isn't even the half of it. All of these electronic voting machines and central tabulators are extremely shoddy wares--insecure, unreliable and very hackable. One hacker, a couple of minutes. That's all it takes to change thousands--even millions--of votes, at the speed of light, leaving no trace. And the innards of these machines are a TRADE SECRET--so secret that no one, not even our secretaries of state, is permitted to review what goes on inside.

So, I would make no presumptions about how ANYONE voted. Frankly, I think many more Republicans rejected Bush and Bushitism than we realize--because Republican precincts would have been the easiest, least detectable assemblies of electrons to tweak into Bush votes.

The issue is not, "how much worse does it have to get for voters to reject Republicans?" You are looking at it upside down and backwards (as if you were in Alice's Wonderland, where everything is reversed--and that is, indeed, where you are). The issue is: Having been rejected by Americans in every other measure of public opinion, for egregiously bad policy--no-brainer type bad policy (for instance, a trillion dollar deficit, and torturing and slaughtering thousands of innocent people)--and having been consistently disapproved of by Americans, on every policy and on general performance, for several years, how is it that Bush and Bushites keep getting "re-elected"?

Do you see what I mean? The facts require a DIFFERENT question than you have asked!

In "Alice in Wonderland," the Red Queen insists that all the white roses to be PAINTED red. That's where we're at.

I have no doubt shenanigans and voter manipulation has gone on. However, the Repubs won the Congress and Senate before Bush ever came on the scene. Were those machines responsible then, also?

You have to understand that if * sends tanks rolling down the streets tomorrow AM, then by 10:00 PM Hate Radio and Cabal "News" will have convinced the Limbeciles that it's for their own good, and everyone in Kansas and Georgia and Mississippi will be calling WJ Wednesday morning and telling Brian how luck y we are to have such a brave man in charge.

IOW, we are long past the point when this would have happened if people were EVER going to be convinced.

As we have seen, * can let the country be attacked, sit in a daze while it happens, run away in the aftermath, then spend 1/2 trillion dollars attacking a DIFFERENT country, and spin in into a success story.

I don't see much more movement over to our side at this point, unless WWIII breaks out inside our borders.

we have to get a ticket to date, get married , have sex, sleep, eat, and take a shit!

they need to get a backbone speak up and speak out and stop worrying about the consequences of the vote, Unless: You are and undercover republican like Lieberman and Nelson. Do they care about the country none of them seem to. All seem to be worried about their jobs, at this rate there won't be a country if it keeps going on like this.

gets their political news from people magazine and watching american idol. They may catch a tidbit from a joke on Jay Leno. Which 99.9% of the time is a wisecrack about clinton's penis.