2k+ Posts
By the way, I just noticed, this is the 2,005th post on this blog since we started in December, 2004.
posted by JimK at 6:01 PM
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Sunday, February 14, 20102k+ Posts
By the way, I just noticed, this is the 2,005th post on this blog since we started in December, 2004.
posted by JimK at 6:01 PM
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62 Comments:
Congrats TTF!
Happy Valentine's Day everybody!
Happy Valentine's day to you too, Aunt Bea. I hope everyone got to spend the day with someone they love.
Peace,
Cynthia
did you guys have a VD party at the funny farm, anon-Bea?
here's a post to commemorate the 2005th post
nice even number, btw:
"ATLANTA (Feb. 14) - The message on dozens of billboards across the city is provocative: Black children are an "endangered species."
The eyebrow-raising ads featuring a young black child are an effort by the anti-abortion movement to rally support within the black community. The "Too Many Aborted" campaign, which so far is unique to only Georgia, is drawing support from other anti-abortion groups across the country.
"It's ingenious," said the Rev. Johnny Hunter, national director of the Life Education and Resource Network, a North Carolina-based anti-abortion group aimed at African-Americans that operates in 27 states. "This campaign is in your face, and nobody can ignore it."
The billboards went up last week in Atlanta and urge black women to "get outraged."
The effort is sponsored by Georgia Right to Life, which also is pushing legislation that aims to ban abortions based on race.
Black women accounted for the majority of abortions in Georgia in 2006, even though blacks make up just a third of state population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nationally, black women were more than three times as likely to get an abortion in 2006 compared with white women, according to the CDC.
"I think it's necessary," Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue, said of the billboard campaign. "Abortion in the black community is at epidemic proportions. They're not really aware of what's actually going on. If it shocks people ... it should be shocking."
Anti-abortion advocates say the procedure has always been linked to race. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wanted to eradicate minorities by putting birth control clinics in their neighborhoods.
In 2008, Issues4Life, a California-based group working to end abortion in the black community, lobbied Congress to stop funding Planned Parenthood, calling black abortions "the Darfur of America."
Pro-Life Action League Executive Director Eric Scheidler said a race-based strategy for anti-abortion activists has gotten a fresh zeal, especially in the wake of the historic election of the country's first black president, Barack Obama, who supports abortion rights.
"He's really out of step with the rest of black America," Scheidler said. "That might be part of what may be shifting here and why a campaign like this is appropriate, to kind of wake up that disconnect.""
Uganda’s parliament is preparing to pass a brutal new law that would punish gay people with prison -- even death.
Initial international criticism drove the President to call for a review. But after a well-funded and vicious lobbying effort by extremists, the bill looks set to be passed -- threatening widespread persecution and bloodshed.
Opposition to the bill is rising, including from the Anglican church. Ugandan gay rights advocate Frank Mugisha writes, This law will put us in serious danger. Please, sign the petition and tell others to stand with us – if there’s a huge global response, our government will see that Uganda will be internationally isolated by the proposed law, and strike it down.
With the decision expected in days, only an irresistible wave of worldwide pressure will be enough to save Frank's life and many others. Let’s build a huge petition to stop the gay death law. Sign the petition
ut-oh!
"WASHINGTON (Feb. 15) -- Sen. Evan Bayh, a centrist Democrat from Indiana, announced Monday that he won't seek a third term in Congress, giving Republicans a chance to pick up a Senate seat.
"To put it in words I think most people can understand: I love working for the people of Indiana, but I do not love Congress," Bayh said at a news conference Indianapolis, where he was joined by his wife and two sons.
The departure of Bayh, who was on Barack Obama's short list of vice presidential candidate prospects in 2008, continues a recent exodus from Congress among Democrats, including veteran Democrats Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island.
The announcements have sprung up in rapid-fire fashion amid polls showing a rising anti-incumbent fervor and voter anger over Washington partisanship, high unemployment, federal deficits and lucrative banking industry bonuses.
Bayh, who won the seat to the Senate in 1998, attributed his decision to the bitter partisan divides that have dominated Congress in recent years.
His retirement from a Senate seat from Republican-leaning Indiana also adds to the struggle Democrats will face this fall to prevent an erosion of the 59 votes they have in the chamber."
MWAHAHAHA!
Bayh's move is the final nail in the Obama coffin.
When the Dems have massive losses in November, he'll say he tried to warm them to move to the center.
Then, he'll start his own campaign to challenge Obama for the 2012 nomination.
Bayh will win.
Not necessarily good news for Repubs but great news for America!
Bayh didn't move to the center -- he is one of the most conservative Democratic Senators.
And Bayh isn't leaving the Senate because he's fed up with Obama or Democrats either. He's leaving because he's fed up with working with the GOP members who then suddenly change their position 180 degrees the moment Obama supports it too. Lately some of the things the GOP has supported and then turned against as soon as Obama signed on include televised health care reform discussions, a jobs bill, pay-go, and the bipartisan deficit commission.
According to FOX News:
Bayh "has sounded an ever-increasing alarm about rising federal deficits, aligning with more conservative members of the chamber, for instance, to create a debt commission modeled on the military's base closure system. Bayh worked behind closed doors for hours with his colleagues trying to craft the legislation, only to have the rug ripped out by Republicans who once supported the idea but then abandoned ship at the last minute.
And yesterday Bayh himself said:
Two weeks ago the Senate voted down a bipartisan commission to deal with one of the greatest threats facing our nation -- our exploding deficits and debt. The measure would have passed but seven members who endorsed the idea, actually co-sponsored the legislation, instead voted no for short term political reasons.
"In fact, seven Republican members of the Senate voted against the [deficit commission] bill even though they originally cosponsored the bill:
Sens. Robert Bennet of Utah,
Sam Brownback of Kansas,
Mike Crapo of Idaho,
John Ensign of Nevada,
Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas,
James Inhofe of Oklahoma and
John McCain of Arizona.
All seven withdrew their names as cosponsors in the last week. "
dream on, anon-B
Repubs won't fall for the Obama trap
they'll agree to health care reforms talks and deficit reduction talks when the Democrats agree to start from scratch
what Dems want is the Repubs to concede that the Dems' flawed plans are right and help them polish them up for PR purposes
Bayh is disgusted with the liberal agenda of the Congressional leadership and he will challenge Obama from the right in 2012
Dems should be happy
their McGovern era will soon end
lot of people don't know that before Hitler got into politics, he was an artist in Vienna who lived with another male artist and that he was one arrested for homosexual activities
now, it turns out Freud had one of his paintings hanging in his waiting room:
"LONDON (Feb. 15) -- Since 1945, psychologists have pored over the paintings Adolf Hitler created as a struggling artist in the years before World War I, looking for insight into the murderous Nazi leader's young mind. Now a British auction firm is selling an early Hitler watercolor, which hung in Sigmund Freud's Vienna office.
The painting, due to be sold by Mullock's Specialist Auctioneers in central England next month, depicts a church and mountains, and is signed in one corner "A. Hitler - 1910." The back of the 8-by-4-inch watercolor is inscribed with a line of Italian reading, "Studio Medico Sigmund Freud Vienne," the name of the psychologist's medical practice in Vienna. (Several of Freud's patients and employees are known to have spoken Italian.)
Hitler was mooching around the Austrian city between 1907 and 1913, selling his third-rate daubs to tourists and locals, and Freud must have bought one from the Führer-to-be.
"This painting is exactly the sort of cheap piece of art you'd see hanging on the walls of dental surgeries and hospital waiting rooms across Europe at the time," says Mullock's auctioneer Richard Westwood-Brookes.
The auction house acquired the work from a respected Italian collector, who says he bought it from an American soldier who grabbed the painting from Freud's abandoned practice at Berggasse 19 after the Allies captured Vienna in 1945.
Mullock's says the watercolor is likely a genuine Hitler. "It's consistent with the sort of subjects Hitler was painting in those days," says Westwood-Brookes. "He tended to do four types of studies. There were landscapes and animal studies, which he sold to tourists. A bit later he did architectural drawings, which were not that bad. And he did these views of churches; he was obsessed with churches."
A continuing fascination with all things Third Reich means that the watercolor is expected to sell for about $12,500. It's possible to speculate that if the young Hitler had found a few more buyers for his mostly mediocre works, the horrors of World War II may have been avoided.
"One of the ironies of history is that Hitler wanted to be a proper artist," says Westwood-Brookes. "He was turned down by the Vienna Academy of Art on three occasions, because they said he wasn't good enough. If they'd have accepted him, who knows? The world might be very different today.""
here's an intersting topic of discussion:
"It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.
First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.
Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.
Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state."
But as Jonathan Leake of London's Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, "did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning."
The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the "transformation of natural coastal areas," the "destruction of more mangroves," "glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches," changes in the ecosystem of the "Mesoamerican reef," and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its "research" reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method.
The IPCC has also cited a study by British climatologist Nigel Arnell claiming that global warming could deplete water resources for as many as 4.5 billion people by the year 2085. But as our Anne Jolis reported in our European edition, the IPCC neglected to include Mr. Arnell's corollary finding, which is that global warming could also increase water resources for as many as six billion people.
The IPCC report made aggressive claims that "extreme weather-related events" had led to "rapidly rising costs." Never mind that the link between global warming and storms like Hurricane Katrina remains tenuous at best. More astonishing (or, maybe, not so astonishing) is that the IPCC again based its assertion on a single study that was not peer-reviewed. In fact, nobody can reliably establish a quantifiable connection between global warming and increased disaster-related costs. In Holland, there's even a minor uproar over the report's claim that 55% of the country is below sea level. It's 26%."
"Meanwhile, one of the scientists at the center of the climategate fiasco has called into question other issues that the climate lobby has claimed are indisputable. Phil Jones, who stepped down as head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit amid the climate email scandal, told the BBC that the world may well have been warmer during medieval times than it is now.
This raises doubts about how much our current warming is man-made as opposed to merely another of the natural climate shifts that have taken place over the centuries. Mr. Jones also told the BBC there has been no "statistically significant" warming over the past 15 years, though he considers this to be temporary.
***
All of this matters because the IPCC has been advertised as the last and definitive word on climate science. Its reports are the basis on which Al Gore, President Obama and others have claimed that climate ruin is inevitable unless the world reorganizes its economies with huge new taxes on carbon. Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby's regulatory agenda.
The lesson of climategate and now the IPCC's shoddy sourcing is that the claims of the global warming lobby need far more rigorous scrutiny."
Anon, why does this matter to you?
the solutions being proposed to alleviate this "problem" are so burdensome they would destroy our economy and cause massive suffering
things are looking up for the Tea Party:
"Fifty-two percent of Americans say that President Obama does not deserve re-election while 44 percent say he does, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted Feb. 12-15. And a lot of that sentiment applies to Congress as well.
It seems hardly a day passes without another poll asking the public if it is in a throw-the-rascals-out mood in this midterm election year. The CNN survey found that most Americans say they would like to see most members of Congress lose their seats.
Sixty-two percent said they would like to see most members of Congress lose their jobs, while 35 percent would send them to Washington again. Three percent were undecided."
The findings about Congress were similar to the results of a Pew Research Center poll conducted Feb. 3-9."
you'll notice that the poll adds to 100%, unlike some
52+44=96
some gay activity in Britain:
"(Feb. 16) -- A well-known British television reporter admitted on camera that he smothered an ailing lover. Police are investigating the extraordinary statement.
''I killed someone once. ... He was a young chap. He'd been my lover and he got AIDS,'' Ray Gosling, 70, said in a BBC documentary on death and dying. ''Maybe this is the time to share a secret that I have kept for quite a long time.''
After the BBC clip aired on national television, Gosling told reporters that he had killed his lover as part of a pact. He said he had promised to end his lover's life if the pain of AIDS symptoms became unbearable. He recalled asking the doctor to leave the room, and then smothering his companion with a pillow.
''He would have been so grateful for what I did," Gosling told the BBC.
Today, Gosling told The Guardian he would refuse to answer police questions or reveal the identity of the man he had killed, "even under torture.""
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI and the bishops of Ireland began a two-day, closed-door meeting to assess responsibility in the Irish church's handling of priestly sex abuse cases and explore ways to heal the wounds left by the scandal.
Each of the 24 bishops was scheduled to speak for seven minutes, in effect giving the pope "an account of themselves" and their own actions, Bishop Joseph Duffy of Clogher told reporters on the eve of the Feb. 15-16 summit.
The pope convened the bishops in response to the continuing fallout from the scandal, following an independent report that faulted the church for its handling of hundreds of sex abuse claims.
“we want some real hopey changey said”
Don’t forget about the extent of her foreign policy, “We win, they lose.”
She also thinks we should bomb Iran. Apparently, spending an unnecessary trillion dollars occupying Iraq wasn’t fiscally responsible enough.
"...in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces", U.S. forces captured "Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar,... an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago."
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"U.S. intelligence officials appear to have obtained access to what could turn out to be a significant trove of phone numbers, photographs and documents detailing the links between Al Qaeda's leaders in northwest Pakistan and the terror group's increasingly menacing affiliate in Yemen, two counter-terrorism sources tell Declassified.
In late January, an Al Qaeda operative headed from Pakistan on his way to Yemen was arrested in the Persian Gulf country of Oman, a U.S. counter-terrorism official confirmed.
There has been no public announcement of the arrest. But in a possible indication of the operative's importance, just a few days later, two postings on a jihadi web forum suggested that Al Qaeda leaders were worried and wanted their "commanders" to take immediate precautions.
The postings stated that the "captured brother" -- identified as a "field commander" named Abdullah Saleh al-Eidan who went by the name of "Barud"- - was "on his way back from Afghanistan" and had been turned over to Saudi authorities.
Even more noteworthy, the postings -written by a fellow Al Qaeda "brother" - reported that Al Eidan had with him 300 "important phone numbers" as well as pictures, names and documents from Afghanistan.
"The brother requested that this information reach the commanders in Yemen and Afghanistan as soon as possible," read one of the postings, which appeared on a web forum known as Fallujah Islamic Forum. "He also asked.the commanders to change their places of residence and mobile phone numbers as soon as possible.""
One year in, the evidence is clear – and growing by the day – that the Recovery Act is working to cushion the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and lay a new foundation for economic growth.
-According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Recovery Act is already responsible for as many as 2.4 million jobs through the end of 2009
-As a result, job losses are a fraction of what they were a year ago, before the Recovery Act began
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act:
-Cut taxes for 95 percent of working families through the Making Work Pay tax credit
-Cut taxes for small businesses
Provided loans to over 42,000 small businesses
-Funded over 12,500 transportation construction projects nationwide, ranging from highway construction to airport improvement projects
-Made multi-billion dollar investments in innovation, science and technology that are laying the foundation for our 21st century economy
-Provided critical relief for state governments facing record budget shortfalls, including help to prevent cuts to Medicaid and creating or saving over 300,000 education jobs
Economists on the left and the right have stated that the Recovery Act has helped avert an even worse economic disaster.
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Dollar Builds on Gains
The dollar extended its gains against the euro and the yen after U.S. housing starts in January hit their strongest level since July 2009.
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Stocks Open Firmer; Caterpillar Gains
U.S. stocks edged up after a flurry of economic data showed improvements in the housing market and industrial production. That supported Caterpillar.Deere jumped on strong earnings and a boost to its outlook.
the biggest reason the economy is recovering is that it's now clear that neither govt takeover of health care nor cap and trade will pass
also, the fact that its clear Democrats will lose seats in November is giving the econoy a lot of confidence
the biggest reason the economy is recovering is that it's now clear that neither govt takeover of health care nor cap and trade will pass
also, the fact that its clear Democrats will lose seats in November is giving the econoy a lot of confidence
A vast majority of Americans -- 80 percent -- oppose last month's Supreme Court ruling that lifted restrictions on corporate and union spending in political elections, according to a Washington Post/ABC News conducted Feb. 4-8. Though most other areas of national politics may be paralyzed by partisanship, the opposition to the decision cuts across Republican, Democratic and independent lines.
Sixty-five percent of those polled said they "strongly" opposed the ruling. Only 17 percent strongly or somewhat favored it, with 6 percent in the "strongly" camp.
Seventy-two percent favor action by Congress to reinstate campaign spending limits on corporations and unions (with 52 percent "strongly" supporting such a move) while 24 percent oppose doing so.
Seventy-six percent of Republicans, 81 percent of independents and 85 percent of Democrats disagree with the high court. The same is true across ideological lines, with 73 percent of conservatives, 85 percent of moderates and 86 percent of liberals opposing the decision.
I noticed the sign-the-petition entry above about the Uganda hate bill.
Jim, have you followed this? It is one of the most horrendous pieces of legislation against lgbt people in the world at this time, mandating prison sentences and death penalties for gay people, and all of their friends, pastors, family members and doctors who do not turn them into authorities.
I did a little web searching, and PFOX, our lovely local PFOX, appears to be fanning the flames of this inhuman legislation on their blog, spreading the lies that gay Ugandans are recruiting children. As far as I can tell, they certainly have not come out in opposition to this law.
This unequivocally qualifies PFOX as a hate group, and the websites listed on the flyers distributed in MCPS schools lead students to this stew of hate.
Even I was shocked.
Here's a link to their article:
PFOX fans flames of Ugandan "Kill Gays" movement
rrjr
"According to David Cay Johnston, America's premier tax journalist, newly released IRS data shows that the country's very wealthiest citizens -- the top 400 -- marked enormous income gains while paying less and less in taxes. For purposes of comparison, Johnston notes that the bottom 90 percent of Americans saw their incomes rise by only 13 percent in 2009 dollars, compared with a 399 percent increase for the top 400.
In a single year, between 2006 and 2007, the income of those top 400 taxpayers rose by 31 percent -- from an average of $263.3 million to an average of $344.8 million per year. Meanwhile, Johnston writes, "Their effective income tax rate fell to 16.62 percent, down more than half a percentage point from 17.17 percent in 2006, the new data show. That rate is lower than the typical effective income tax rate paid by Americans with incomes in the low six figures, which is what each taxpayer in the top group earned in the first three hours of 2007." He also notes that the IRS data probably understates the income of the top 400, because of deferral rules enjoyed by hedge fund managers (at least three of whom earned $3 billion or more in 2007).
Johnston's data comes from the latest edition of an annual IRS study of the top 400 taxpayers, which was first made public during the Clinton presidency. When Bush became president, unsurprisingly, he curtailed public access to the top 400 report for eight years. The Obama administration has made the report available this year, but such embarrassing statistics will no doubt be buried again as soon as the Republicans return to power."
Senator Inhofe, in fact, praised toxic super-fund cleanup spending in Oklahoma as part of the stimulus. He praised it as great news and necessary funds. Then he denounced the stimulus that provides those necessary funds as something that didn‘t work. He told the same outfit, CNS News, that the stimulus bill was nothing but social engineering and welfare. Oh, and those necessary funds that were great news for my state.
If you are both praising something as necessary and saying it doesn‘t work, you are a hypocrite. You may not want to be called a hypocrite, but the solution to that is: don‘t act like one. Don‘t just complain about people who accurately report how you do act, OK?
Same goes for more than a dozen other Republican lawmakers, singled out by “The Wall Street Journal” today. Congressional Republicans including Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Sue Myrick of North Carolina, Jean Schmidt of Ohio, Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, Bob Bennett of Utah—not to mention the entire Alabama congressional delegation. All of these Republicans have been caught on the record requesting stimulus money for ways they thought it could help their states and districts after voting against the stimulus, and trashing it as something that was useless.
You guys, it‘s either useless or it‘s useful. It cannot be both.
Now, “The Wall Street Journal” obtained letters that these Republicans wrote, requesting stimulus funds, and the evidence is amazing. It‘s certainly nothing short of damning.
In her request, for example, Jean Schmidt of Ohio writes, quote, “This project will not only save jobs but create multiple jobs within southern Ohio.”
Paul Ryan says, the funds will help, quote, “place 1,000 workers in green jobs.”
Alabama Senators Shelby—Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions, they write, quote, “This money would help provide jobs for chemical applicators, foresters and others who would be involved in the state‘s cogongrass eradication and control program.
Senator Bennett of Utah says, “The addition of federal funds to these projects would maximize the stimulative effect of these projects on the economy. These projects will help the economy of Utah.”
Sue Myrick of North Carolina—this is genius—the stimulus funding would, quote, “lead to solar energy-related jobs in an area hard hit by unemployment." She also calls it, “a critical step in bringing economic opportunities to my congressional district.” “We have an urgent need,” she says, “for a workforce that is truly prepared to contribute to the green economy.” So says, Sue Myrick, member of Congress, on her letterhead, writing and asking for these stimulus funds that are going to produce all of these useful things in her district that she simultaneously saying is a totally useless program.
These Republicans are acknowledging in writing that the stimulus is good policy, that it works—thus proving that they don‘t mean it when they denounce the stimulus as worthless.
It is worth noting that today‘s expose on this was published in the conservative “Wall Street Journal.” The other big expose on Republican hypocrisy was published in the last week in ultraconservative “Washington Times.” These are conservative papers calling out Republicans for hypocrisy.
This is the important thing. The hypocrisy epidemic among Republicans is trouble for them in politics this year, and that‘s not just because it energizes Democrats and liberals and reminds them of why they believe it‘s important to keep these guys from taking the majority again.
This is not hard to figure out. These Republicans figured that if the money is there for the taking, then they might as well take it. Why let all the libs take the money? And to take the money, you have to write phony baloney stuff about job saving and creating and stimulus. It's all a bunch of crap.
Just like...if the County wanted to offer a free car to everyone, I'd oppose it like crazy. However, if it passed, then heck -- I'd take the new car. If the criteria to get a new car included my writing a phony baloney essay on how a new car would benefit me, then I'd write the essay.
That being said...if they pulled the plug on the program and asked for my car back, I'd give it back gladly and cheer that the plug was pulled. In fact, I'd be actively working toward the pulling of the plug.
In addition, even if I took a car, I could still look at the statistics and say, "yep, everyone who wanted a car, including me, took the car but most people are still carless and the program didn't work after all."
The two concepts are not incongruous.
You could even say that the Republicans tried SUPER hard to make the stimulus money work by taking the money and putting it to work in ways that the liberal Democrats envisioned.
But still it didn't work. Sorry guys, they should say. We tried our best to help your stimulus plan work by taking all that money and putting it to good use in our states, but it still didn't work.
Big oops on the stimulus when you think about it!
The Washington Times, by the way, does some of the best reporting on the planet. They're old-fashioned journalists who report the facts, good or bad for Democrats or Republicans. Their editorials are conservative in thought, but their beat reporters are simply good journalists.
Most of you here would be delighted by reading The Washington Times, as they expose dishonest Republicans all the time on their front page. This is why the conservative movement is so strong....we need conservatives, not fake Republicans in office.
That being said...I see nothing wrong with Republicans taking stimulus money, once the bill passed.
but Democrats have to try to play the "hypocrisy" card as much as possible because their arguments otherwise have no merits
character assassination rather than rational discussion is their only hope
their only hopey for changey!
I've been involved in a Times story in which the facts reported were reported incorrectly, to match the editorial slant of the story.
When I called the reporter about it, he said, yes I know it wasn't accurate, but my editor changed it, and I need the job.
The Times, as we all know, is not really a newspaper, it just dresses like one.
Tell it Anone!
Lying, AKA "writing phony baloney stuff" about the expected good stimulus money created jobs is going to do for a Congressperson's constituents is just what all GOPers like you want their elected officials to do!
anon-B may not realize it but Barry does:
"The giant economic stimulus package enacted a year ago has not made much of a dent in the nation's vast unemployment.
The Obama administration is acknowledging that its program of spending cuts and tax breaks has yet to ease joblessness, and White House officials are increasingly engaged in shaping the details of new legislation to boost job creation.
"You can argue, rightly, that we haven't made as much progress as we need to make when it comes to spurring job creation," President Obama said Wednesday in marking the program's anniversary."
Bea -- The government is FORCING all of the states and elected officials to write phony baloney stuff! It's disgraceful, I agree.
so Barry is saying, effectively, my plan didn't work so give me another chance
a former two-term VP has made a interesting prediction about the OBAMA-BIDEN team's chances for re-election
his daughter, a TTF favorite (wink-wink), agrees:
"Former Vice President Dick Cheney told cheering conservatives Thursday that this was going to be a "phenomenal" election year for the movement and predicted President Obama would not be re-elected in 2012.
Cheney was a surprise guest at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and spoke briefly after his daughter Liz Cheney had given a hard-hitting speech.
Although the crowd cheered loudly and even rose to its feet to agree with her criticisms of the way the Obama administration has fought terrorism, nothing she said could have pleased the audience more than when her father emerged from behind the curtain.
"There is one man who taught me what it means to have the courage of your convictions," she said. "You know who I'm talking about. I often ask him for advice before giving a speech like this one, but today I brought him along."
The former vice president emerged from the side of the stage to the eruption of the crowd that began chanting, "Cheney! Cheney!"
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He smiled and said, "A welcome like that is almost enough to make me want to run for office again...but I'm not going to do it."
Cheney told the CPAC audience that it was time for his generation to step aside for a new generation of conservative leaders to step forward.
"The developments that we've seen over the last several months are enormously encouraging. When we can achieve what we have in places like Virginia and New Jersey and Massachusetts, the sky's the limit. I think 2010 is going to be a phenomenal year," he said of conservatives' chances in the upcoming mid-term elections, adding, "And I think Barack Obama is a one-term president."
After the roar of the audience subsided, Cheney finished by saying, "It's a remarkable time to be an American and a remarkable time to be a conservative. Good luck.""
a good luck to Barack Obama in his upcoming duties as a volunteer for ACORN!!
"You can argue, rightly, that we haven't made as much progress as we need to make when it comes to spurring job creation," President Obama said Wednesday in marking the program's anniversary."
How soon they forget. On February 17, 2009, when President Obama traveled to Denver to sign the stimulus bill Congress enacted, which was less than he requested, Obama made a statement which included the following excerpts [added emphasis is mine]:
"...We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive in our time.
Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles. Nor does it constitute all of what we must do to turn our economy around. But it does mark the beginning of the end - the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs; to provide relief for families worried they won't be able to pay next month's bills; and to set our economy on a firmer foundation, paving the way to long-term growth and prosperity.
He realized last year when his stimulus package was enacted into law that is was not "the end of our economic troubles" but only "the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans."
Bea -- The government is FORCING all of the states and elected officials to write phony baloney stuff
Give us one example of your false assertion.
so Barry is saying, effectively, my plan didn't work so give me another chance
No, he's confirming what he said when his "beginning" plan was enacted -- that plan was only the beginning, we need to do more to recover from the depression-like economic mess left by the Bush Administration
You can try to rewrite history all you want, but I will continue to correct your mistakes and document the facts as they occured.
former two-term VP has made a interesting prediction
Oh yes, I remember. Cheney said
(Videotape, March 16, 2003):
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct and we’re not treated as liberators but as conquerors and the Iraqis begin to resist particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s unlikely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.
Oops, wrong again, Dick! But you're right, that CPAC crowd was all aglow for the "good old days" of deficits-don't-matter Dick and his hand puppet, GeorgiePorgie.
One for Anone
Cold truths about the Northeast's harsh winter
Excerpt:
...Nor did it even cross my mind that our Snowmageddon, inconvenient though it might be, could meaningfully alter the political debate over climate legislation. That would be idiotic. As comedian Stephen Colbert pointed out, it would be like looking outside at night, seeing the darkness and concluding that "the sun has been destroyed."
As even Sens. Inhofe and DeMint surely are aware, the Earth is really, really big. (And it's not flat. It's shaped like a ball. Honest.) It's so big that it can be cold here and warm elsewhere -- and this is the key concept -- at the same time. Even if it were unusually cold throughout the continental United States, that still represents less than 2 percent of the Earth's surface...
I recommend this one to all the Anones
A primer on political reality
Excerpts
...But the birthers and Birchers, militias and nativists, racists and conspiracy theorists do exist. Some, having waited decades in deserved obscurity, hope to ride a populist movement like remoras. But there are others, new to political engagement, who have found paranoia and anger intoxicating. They watch Glenn Beck rail against the omnipresent threat of Saul Alinsky, read Ayn Rand's elevation of egotism and contempt for the weak, listen to Ron Paul attacking the Federal Reserve cabal, and suddenly their resentments become ordered into a theory. Such theories, in politics, can act like a drug, causing addiction, euphoria and psychedelic departures from reality...
...Every political movement is threatened by the impatient and irresponsible. William Lloyd Garrison called for the secession of the North to avoid the contaminating evil of slavery, while Lincoln worked to preserve the union. Malcolm X initially found the American tradition fundamentally corrupt, while the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. found vast resources of reform within that tradition. The heroes of America are heroes of unity.
Our political system is designed for vigorous disagreement. It is not designed for irreconcilable contempt. Such contempt loosens the ties of citizenship and undermines the idea of patriotism. "How can we love our country," asked Ronald Reagan, "and not love our countrymen?"
"You can try to rewrite history all you want, but I will continue to correct your mistakes and document the facts as they occured."
No one's rewriting history, anon-B. We're making and so are you. You're blazing trails of incompetence and misunderstanding, we're beginning the rebuilding of America.
Obama assured us that if the stimulus bill passed, unemployment wouldn't go above 8%. That extra 2% he was off represents a lot of people and a lot of suffering.
He didn't have to solve everything at once but Americans expect some progress.
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s unlikely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.
Oops, wrong again, Dick!"
Actually, at the time, he was right. That's how it began.
"But you're right, that CPAC crowd was all aglow for the "good old days" of deficits-don't-matter Dick and his hand puppet, GeorgiePorgie."
Actually, the deficts didn't really matter until Obama came along. His budgets make Bush's look balanced by comparison.
of the two links to yesterday's Post op-ed page by anon-B, the Eugene Robinson column is moronic, as his usually are
Michael Gerson's column was great, as his usually are- make sure and read the whole thing
here's one for anon-B:
"President Barack Obama's claim that his disastrous joke of a stimulus bill helped stave off a second Great Depression reminds you of another joke, the one about the guy dancing wildly on a street corner with the purpose, he says, of scaring away elephants.
But, someone points out, there are no elephants anywhere around.
"See," says our dancing trickster, "it works, doesn't it?"
That's about the only evidence for Obama's claim, you know. We do not have a Great Depression on our hands and so the stimulus bill sent it scurrying. He would therefore like everyone to quit criticizing a measure that cost as much as the war in Iraq, did precious little to justify its existence, could have been recast to do something important and is helping to shove us into an economic crisis that could make us wish for that second depression instead.
The facts are that unemployment went from something under 8 percent to over 10 percent after the bill's passage, and that the net addition in the number unemployed has been 3.3 million. In guessing how many jobs were meanwhile funded by the bill, the administration has treated us to alterations in nomenclature, miscalculation and recalculation in a public relations adventure fraught with malarkey. For the sake of argument, though, let's go along with one White House estimate of 1.5 million.
What that figure conveys is approximately nothing. It leaves out the economic reality that when you spend money on something over here, it is not available to be spent over there. The government paid for these jobs by borrowing money from the private economy. Left accessible to businesses, that money might have been spent for far more jobs than produced by politicians trying to impress you with their razzmatazz.
We do seem to be recovering from the recession right now (unemployment is down to 9.7 percent). That's what happens with recessions. You get past them, at least if the government refrains from too much wrongheaded intrusion. The bailouts, though poorly managed, may have prevented some ugly spills affecting more than just the bonus-prone few, and the Federal Reserve may have played a more positive than negative role.
But the stimulus? Give me a break.
It has not and will not stimulate much of anything, in part because it is more ideological than wise; the left cannot imagine government spending that does not make the world better or green projects that do not work. The bigger reason is that the bill afforded politicians a chance for what they love best: wasteful, foolish pork that furthers their careers even if there is that other problem, namely hurt to the nation. We therefore got stimulus-bill investments that may pay off in election results for some Democrats this November, but promise virtually no detectable economic return
There was a stimulus approach that could have worked – an array of tax cuts for expanding, revenue-producing businesses with little if any of the spending bluster – but that sounds oh-so conservative, and what we consequently have in front of us is a debt threat of a kind that is not only disturbing to tea party enthusiasts, but to a wide array of some of the most respected economic thinkers in the country, think-tank professionals and people who served in top government jobs during the administrations of Democrats and Republicans going back to Jimmy Carter in the 1970s.
This threat is mainly driven by the growing, unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but is hardly diminished by this extravagant, poorly considered, rush-job stimulus bill now estimated to have a total, end-of-the-road price tag of $862 billion. It's a major contributor to the possibility of a calamity almost bound to happen if this administration keeps putting on a happy face about past mistakes instead of figuring out how to do things right in the future."
Obama assured us that if the stimulus bill passed, unemployment wouldn't go above 8%.
He did not, you are lying. If you *think* you're not lying, then show us the quote by Obama that "assured us" of that in print or video.
Back on Jan. 9, 2009, a report called "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" was issued by Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein.
The chart on Page 5 or their report predicted the passage of Obama's economic-aid package would keep the unemployment rate below 8% but that rate would rise to 9.5% without it. (The bill Congress approved was *not* Obama's full economic-aid package.) Their report included plenty of disclaimers saying the predictions had "significant margins of error" and a higher degree of uncertainty due to a recession that is "unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity."
Also, in June 2009, "When asked about this discrepancy, one of the authors of the study – Jared Bernstein...said that “when we made our initial estimates, that was before we had fourth-quarter results [Bush's final quarter as President] on GDP, which we later found out was contracting at an annual rate of 6 percent, far worse than we expected at that time.” The bottom line, Bernstein said, is that without the stimulus the unemployment rate “would have been between 1.5 and 2 points higher...”)"
If you think I'm wrong, Anone, prove it. Show us an Obama quote that "assured us that if the stimulus bill passed, unemployment wouldn't go above 8%."
He didn't have to solve everything at once but Americans expect some progress.
Yes, and progress has been made to stem the hemorrhaging of jobs in the US after 8 years of the mismanagement of our economy by the Bush/Cheney Administration.
Several reports document this progress
The Vice President's Annual Report to the President on Progress Implementing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
The White House: Don't have to Take Our Word for it
"Take a look at what independent economists and economic observers from across the political spectrum have had to say about the success of the Recovery Act on its one-year anniversary..."
A CBO Report: Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output as of September 2009
"...CBO estimates that in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States, and real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.2 percent to 3.2 percent higher, than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA..."
And like Obama, who told us his first stimulus package was "just the beginning" and we may need another economic stimulus package to get us out of the deep hole Bush/Cheney left us in, the CBO similarly reports:
"...nearly all professional forecasters believe that the economy has begun to recover from the recent recession, many also predict that the pace of the recovery will be slow and that unemployment will remain high for several years. Concerns that the economic recovery will be protracted have prompted the consideration of further fiscal policy actions beyond those actions taken over the last year...CBO concludes that further policy action, if properly designed, would promote economic growth and increase employment in 2010 and 2011."
Nice double dose of Jay Ambrose editorials, Anone.
Here's a gem:
The facts are that unemployment went from something under 8 percent to over 10 percent after the bill's passage
Is he so stupid that he expected a sudden big turnaround in the unemployment rate that was tanking straight down like the Second Great Depression "after the bill's passage?" It may be slow and small, but the free-fall has slowed and the turnaround has begun.
And did Ambrose really give us this other gem?:
Left accessible to businesses, that money might have been spent for far more jobs...
ROFLMAO Who does he think he's kidding? We have seen what businesses *might* do with our tax dollars we lend them to them stave off their self-induced failures. Wall Street businesses took tax-payer bailout money (that Jay says "*may* have prevented some ugly spills") and paid their CEO's outrageous bonuses with it, while more Americans were laid off. And of course the GOP continued to sit on its collective hands to just say no when our President suggested those profits paid out as CEO bonuses should be taxed to pay back what the American tax payers loaned them.
Get a grip indeed.
"ROFLMAO Who does he think he's kidding? We have seen what businesses *might* do with our tax dollars we lend them to them stave off their self-induced failures."
sorry, anon-B
you live in a captalist democracy
you can snort at free market entreprenuership but it is the only thing that will save the country
even in Russia, I don't think anyone believes in the dictatorship of the proletariat anymore
we are aspirational not envious
try France
they love people like you over there
Once again Vigilance readers can see that when reasoning and facts fail him, Anone turns to the personal insult.
The CBO has found that the stimulus plan is making a good start on solving some of the problems Obama's predecessors left and that more stimulus money is needed because the problems they left are so severe.
the CBO report is fine, anon-B
it doesn't address, however, whether a cheaper and more smartly targeted package would have worked better
one of the many problems is that much of the Obamulus creates programs that will be hard to kill and threatens our well-being on a going forward basis
your attack on free enterprise, which is the default setting of our society, got the response it deserved
"The CBO has found that the stimulus plan is making a good start"
here's what the CBO said:
"...CBO estimates that in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States, and real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.2 percent to 3.2 percent higher, than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA..."
I don't any equivalent to the word "good" in there.
Obviously, you can create jobs if you have money to spend. The question is: did we get enough bang for the buck with one bill that cost more in one swwop than the total cost of the Iraq war over several years?
Common sense Americans say no!
Aunt Bea,
You may think it's stupid to predict that uemployment would stop so quickly after the stiumulus was passed, but that is exactly what Obama and his team promised. And the team acknowledged that it was wrong.
Here's an excerpt from PolitiFact:
The claim that the Obama administration "promised" the stimulus would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent is a popular talking point among Republican critics of the stimulus.
We've heard it from House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., as well as conservative talk show host Sean Hannity, to name a few. They all called it a "promise."
They are referring to a Jan. 9, 2009, report called "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" from Christina Romer, chairwoman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, the vice president's top economic adviser.
Their report projected that the stimulus plan proposed by Obama would create between three and four million jobs by the end of 2010. The report also includes a graphic predicting unemployment rates with and without the stimulus. Without the stimulus (the baseline), unemployment was projected to hit about 8.5 percent in 2009 and then continue rising to a peak of about 9 percent in 2010. With the stimulus, they predicted the unemployment rate would peak at just under 8 percent in 2009.
But in June, the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent.
In the past week, the administration has acknowledged its projections were wrong.
Here's what Romer herself said in a July 2 interview on Fox: "None of us had a crystal ball back in December and January. I think almost every private forecaster realized that there were other things going on in the economy. It was worse than we anticipated. What the private forecasters are saying now is that they do anticipate that the economy will start growing again in the second half of the year, and that usually, then, employment and unemployment start to respond shortly after that. So I think that is a realistic expectation."
Biden also acknowledged the discrepancies in a July 5 interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos.
"The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy," Biden said. "The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures in most of the blue chip indexes out there. ... And so the truth is, there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited. Now, that doesn't — I'm not laying — it's now our responsibility. So the second question becomes, did the economic package we put in place, including the Recovery Act, is it the right package given the circumstances we're in? And we believe it is the right package given the circumstances we're in."
Stephanopoulos correctly noted that projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office at the time were slightly less optimistic than the administration's. In January, the CBO projected the unemployment rate would climb to 8.3 percent in 2009 and peak at 9 percent in 2010. By February, the prediction was even higher — 9 percent in 2009 without the stimulus, and 7.7 to 8.5 percent with a stimulus.
In a White House news conference on June 8, 2009, Bernstein, the co-author of the February projections, said they were off because the fourth-quarter economic numbers weren't available at the time. When they were released a short time later, they revealed the economy was in more dire shape than economists realized.
Bernstein maintained in that June news conference that the stimulus is working, and that without it, the unemployment rate would be even worse.
I don't any equivalent to the word "good" in there.
Well if you don't *think* an increase in the number of Americans with paying jobs and an increase the GDP are "good," that's your problem. Maybe you prefer unfunded donut hole outcomes.
one of the many problems is that much of the Obamulus creates programs that will be hard to kill and threatens our well-being on a going forward basis
Bull-oney! Today’s deficits are mostly due to the profligate Bush years, with stimulus contributing little to the long-term shortfall because the spending is temporary.
Bush allowed PAYGO to expire in 2002 and Obama signed it back into law on February 12, 2010. Once PAYGO was gone, Bush signed into law the biggest *hard to kill* unfunded Medicare prescription drug expansion and refused to use Medicare's large numbers to negotiate drug prices down.
That unfunded retail price drug coverage expansion, which still left a gaping donut hole for seniors, could only lead to huge deficits, especially coupled with Bush's obscene tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. And here we sit, forced to dig our way out of the deep hole Bush/Cheney policies left us in.
You may think it's stupid to predict that uemployment would stop so quickly after the stiumulus was passed, but that is exactly what Obama and his team promised
No, they didn't "promise" any such thing, as PolitiFact.org stated. Your excerpt skipped the rest of what PolitiFact.org also said:
"We previously looked into the Republican claim that Obama "promised" the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent. We rated that statement Barely True. We found that administration economists projected an unemployment rate of below 8 percent, but they never called it a promise and included plenty of disclaimers saying the predictions had "significant margins of error" and the economic downturn was "unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity."
Incidentally, they added:
Finally, we also looked at a statement from Obama that is repeated in the report, that he came into office "with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. ... We came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade." We rated that statement Mostly True. While there is a little room for interpretation when it comes to calculating deficits, the sources we consulted indicated Obama was on solid ground with his numbers.
And what PolitiFact.org had "previously" said about what the Grand Obstructionists Party would like to call a "promise" included:
What we can rule on, however, is whether the Obama administration "promised" that unemployment rates would not rise above 8 percent if the stimulus were passed. We could find no instance of anyone in the administration directly making such a public pledge.
What we saw from the administration January was a projection, not a promise. And it was a projection that came with heavy disclaimers.
That sure doesn't sound like a full-fledged promise to us.
We think it's a big stretch to call an economic projection a "promise." The administration never characterized it that way and included plenty of disclaimers saying the predictions had "significant margins of error" and a higher degree of uncertainty due to a recession that is "unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity." And so we rule the statement by Cantor — and other Republicans who have said the same thing — Barely True.
LOL!!!!!! Oh, please Bea! The Obama administration wanted us to think of it as a promise -- until it went southl! LOL! LOL!!! LOL!! LOL!!!
Only in the "big stretch" of your imagination, Anone.
Obviously the rational folks at PolitiFact.org, which you brought into this conversation, have determined a "projection with plenty of disclaimers" is not the same thing as a "promise."
ROFL, Bea!!!!!
"Bull-oney! Today’s deficits are mostly due to the profligate Bush years, with stimulus contributing little to the long-term shortfall because the spending is temporary."
this is sad
does B realize how ironic her statement is?
"Bush allowed PAYGO to expire in 2002 and Obama signed it back into law on February 12, 2010."
pretty easy to sign something like that when you've already got the deficit jacked up in the trillions
at this point, it's kind of hard to think of new ways to waste money that aren't already being used
"Once PAYGO was gone, Bush signed into law the biggest *hard to kill* unfunded Medicare prescription drug expansion
That unfunded retail price drug coverage expansion, which still left a gaping donut hole for seniors, could only lead to huge deficits, especially coupled with Bush's obscene tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. And here we sit, forced to dig our way out of the deep hole Bush/Cheney policies left us in."
Deep hole?
If you and the dumb Dems would like to reverse either Medicare prescriptions or middle class tax cuts, you have a Congressional majority.
Truth is, Dems are in favor of the prescription benefit and know economists agree that Bush's tax cuts were perfectly timed. Things were pretty good in our economy until the Dems took over Congress in 2006.
Funny how a few insects can damage so much grain.
Before 2006, the vibrant economy created by Reagan and charged by Bush, shrugged off blow after blow that would have devastated other economies.
We'd be back on our feet now if a proper stimulus had been designed instead of the cynical non-waste of a crisis orchestrated by Obama-Emanuel.
Good news, though. Obama is considering naming himself to the Supreme Court with the next opening.
Biden will be as easy to roll as Clinton.
He won't be as content to wallow in failure as Obomba is.
pretty easy to sign something like that when you've already got the deficit jacked up in the trillions
Apparently PAYGO was not *pretty easy to sign* for George Dumbya Bush after he'd jacked up the deficit to ONE POINT THREE TRILLION DOLLARS along with EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS worth of debt over the next decade, as confirmed by Anone's favorite fact checker PolitiFact.org, which reported:
"... we also looked at a statement from Obama that is repeated in the report, that he came into office "with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. ... We came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade." We rated that statement Mostly True. While there is a little room for interpretation when it comes to calculating deficits, the sources we consulted indicated Obama was on solid ground with his numbers."
If you and the dumb Dems would like to reverse either Medicare prescriptions or middle class tax cuts, you have a Congressional majority.
Uh huh, and a GOP who apparently adores the status quo and would rather sit on their butts and filibuster than to undo the damages their party enacted under Bush's misleadership.
We'd be back on our feet now if a proper stimulus had been designed
We wouldn't have been knocked on our butts and needed any TARP or stimulus money if Bush/Cheney's policies of reckless unfunded spending coupled with huge tax cuts for their super-rich cronies enacted by GOP majorities in both Houses of Congress hadn't left us hemorrhaging jobs and on the brink of the Second Great Depression.
"Uh huh, and a GOP who apparently adores the status quo and would rather sit on their butts and filibuster than to undo the damages their party enacted under Bush's misleadership."
uh huh, and if Americans didn't agree with the Repubs, they wouldn't be sweeping every major election since Obama arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave
"We wouldn't have been knocked on our butts and needed any TARP or stimulus money if Bush/Cheney's policies of reckless unfunded spending coupled with huge tax cuts for their super-rich cronies enacted by GOP majorities in both Houses of Congress hadn't left us hemorrhaging jobs and on the brink of the Second Great Depression."
sure, you would
tax cuts, regardless of who gets them, stimulate economic growth more than the same amount of government spending
if Obama had cut taxes instead of building up a socialist agenda, we'd have a humming economy by now
again, are you saying you don't favor the Medicare prescription entitlement?
because, if so, it's hard to see how you can support Obamacare
or are you just arguing for its own sake?
anon-deluxe: If you and the dumb Dems would like to reverse either Medicare prescriptions or middle class tax cuts, you have a Congressional majority.
anon-BS: Uh huh, and a GOP who apparently adores the status quo and would rather sit on their butts and filibuster
Dear BS:
Republicans never had any trouble passing bills when they had a smaller majority than Dems have now.
Something's missing from the Democrat majority.
Yes, that missing something is a minority party that's willing to help govern rather than one that only wants to bring the opposing party's president his "Waterloo."
no, I think its a disconnect with the people
Obomba today unveiled the healthcare plan that he wants to discuss Thursday and, lo and behold, it's the same crap the American people have already rejected
Barry had a chance to do a Clintonesque pirouette but has decided to play king of the hill instead
sad thing is, he hasn't yet noticed he's not at the summit
that Obomoba plan sure has bombed
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