What a D!ck

 

From the man who built his life sucking on the teat of government, who wants to cut social security but spent his formative years collecting survivor benefits, wants to continue his assault on people who work for a living.  Speaker of the House and Alfred E. Neuman look-alike Paul Ryan has voiced his opposition to the Obama Administration's expansion of overtime raising the cap from $23,660 to $47,476 for those who work more than 40 hours a week.

WTF is a "Moderate" Anyway?

From time to time I hear people pining for reasonable "moderates", centrists, and bi-partisans to come together and solve the problems that our political parties won't.  These arguments are non-sensical, self-congratulatory, completely devoid of the political system we operate in, and in many ways...extreme.  There are many problems with the desire for "moderates", among them...

Moderates aren't that moderate

As mentioned in this piece by Ezra Klein, the policies moderates actually believe in aren't that moderate.  It's possible to be a "moderate" who believes in gay rights, supports internment camps for Muslims, wants universal health care, and wants to eliminate the IRS.  None of those policy positions are moderate, but by virtue of statistics, those voters would be considered moderates.

Even insofar as "moderates" exist in American politics, their positions are highly ideological, just not particularly partisan.  For example, there is a certain segment of both parties that embraces things like free-trade, education reform, entitlement reform, austerity, and exploitive immigration.  These are positions that are extremely neoliberal, corporatist, in many cases a divergence from the status quo, and not at all in the interest of most of the American people, but in the context of American politics "moderate".