It seems that Obama’s re-election has broken the Tea Party’s ideological stranglehold on the Republican party.

Paul Teller is about as Tea Party as it gets.

Course, he’s also (apparently) the one who pulled the document.

I don’t know Derek Khanna’s personal politics but I know he’s from Massachusetts and he’s around 30.  Statistically he’s more likely to share my views on gay rights, women’s rights, and science than most of his party is.  A Massachusetts Republican ain’t so damn different from an Arizona Democrat, and I’ve voted for plenty of Arizona Democrats even when I found them less than ideal candidates.

However, if a Republican candidate could manage not to toe the party line on those subjects AND propose copyright reform, he’d have a shot at my vote.

The Democrats have set a fucking low bar.  Which could be their downfall if Republicans ever manage to notice how low it actually is.

But the Democrats have always been better on copyright than the GOP and pretending otherwise,

Yeah, because traditionally the GOP has been the party of Hollywood, artists, and various associated trade unions and guilds.  I’m sure the Dems deserve no blame whatsoever for the current state of IP law.

Lately, I’ve been trying to make some sense of the world view of conservatives. Among the few conservatives I know, through hobbies and whatnot, in the weeks leading to the election, I was mostly hearing economic populist complaints from them — that is, complaints about the federal government bailing out the banks at the expense of ordinary people, the lack of action on jobs, and the general propensity of governments to favor big business and financial giants over small businesses and ordinary people. This far in the conversation, I couldn’t tell the conservatives from the liberals, or either from the radical leftists. The distinction started to show up when conservatives tended to idealize the concept of the free market, which they identified both with capitalism and with small businesses, and insisted that small businesses needed deregulation.(Given that they think of “regulation” as “nightmarish volumes of paperwork” rather than actual pressure on economic entities to refrain from harmful actions, there’s a point even to that.) There are, of course, a lot of conservative ideas that I can’t stomach. But to my mind, “left” is defined as favoring a redistribution of power from the few to the many, and it requires mass participation in a movement to achieve this. So it’s pretty important to look at opportunities to build upon a broad trend of economic populism.

Getting back to the issue at hand, I suspect that some Republicans thought there may be an opening to satisfy some of the demands of their own electoral base for economic populism, at little cost to the Republicans and at considerable cost to the Democrats. But, that didn’t go over well with the Republican leadership, because while the Republicans may be less tied to the big media companies than the Democrats are, they’re still tied to them. There’s Fox and the Murdoch media empire, most obviously.

GOP scumbags take the cake when it comes to being unrepresentative corporate whores, hands down.

Anyone who denies this is living in an alternate reality.

It was Obama’s former colleague Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the Democratic Whip, who admitted in 2009 that “the banks own the Senate” and his statement is as true now as it was then.

A sane copyright initiative would draw a lot of young people to the party, too.

Who, coincidentally, are most likely to be Republicans.  

Huh.