Sort of underlining the fact that the Senate stimulus bill lacks the broad, bipartisan support I was advocating in my Sunday column, note that 66.7 percent of GOP support is from one state: Maine. There's Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter.
And is Maine even a real American state? Somebody go check with Sarah Palin. I mean, it's got L.L. Bean, but otherwise isn't it almost like the same thing as Canada? And don't some people in Canada speak French? Must give us pause.
Seriously, this is disappointing. Now we have one of the two major parties invested in the failure of the stimulus. And that's never a good thing…
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And at least 2 out of 3 are thinking with their brains instead of listening to a testosterone overload (I’m willing to believe that the 3rd one is, too).
Maine is run by a handful of wealthy people, Democrat and Republican, who like to think of themselves as liberal and polite. They elect people who reflect whiners who reflect their desire to avoid conflict and pose as above the fray.
Senator Collins argued that by going along with Harry Reid to pass this spending monstrosity, the Gang of Three had actually cut $110 billion from what it otherwise would have been.
That’s like a gang member defending their participation in a mugging by saying that if they hadn’t been there, they victim would have not just been beaten and robbed, but killed.
That excuse doesn’t was in court, and it doesn’t was with Americans who are being robbed by this class warfare legislation.
Rahm Emmanuel speech on using crisis as propaganda
The Opportunities of Crisis
http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=_mzcbXi1Tkk
These tactics come straight out of communist agitation and propaganda training. Obama and his team of socialists are quite familiar with this training.
“And Not a Shot is Fired” by Jan Kozak , explains this entire strategy. Jan Kozak, who was then a member of the Czechoslovak
Communist Party Central Committee, explains how a free government was actually transformed into a totalitarian dictatorship – legally.
The creation of “emergencies” is a part of the totalitarian agenda. The creation of “emergencies” gives the government an excuse to “crack down”. Then the creation of tyranny becomes justifiable and inevitable.
Senator Collins argued that by going along with Harry Reid to pass this spending monstrosity, the Gang of Three had actually cut $110 billion from what it otherwise would have been.
That’s like a gang member defending their participation in a mugging by saying that if they hadn’t been there, they victim would have not just been beaten and robbed, but killed.
That excuse doesn’t wash in court, and it doesn’t wash with Americans who are being robbed by this class warfare legislation.
i’m sure that even les canadiens would recognize the gang of three as rinos.
Get over it, Spaceman Lee. Y’all LOST. And deservedly so.
I love the smell of stimulus in the a.m. It smells like victory to me.
Mr. Warthen is upset because I think he gets it. Obama has a good chance of making the Repugnant Party irrelevant for at least the next generation. Mr. Warthen is one of these people who think the parties should alternate winning.
Mr. Warthen understands the Repugs get back in power only if the world blows up or we sink into a depression. Repugs are upset with their leader, Rush Limbaugh, being impolite enough to spell out their wishes for this country to fail.
The only way Little Lindsey and his dumber, meaner Junior Senator from SC would have defined bi-partisan would have been a total tax cuts bill, that is, total capitulation by the winning party. This would have been true insanity which has never worked and failed miserably over the last eigth years.
We know what works in a major recession/depression. Republicanism doesn’t work and never has. Mr. Warthen should ‘fess up but that might upset the Repugs so he won’t.
Lee wrote: The creation of “emergencies” is a part of the totalitarian agenda.
After the last 8 years, I’d have to ask: isn’t that in bold type on page one of the rightwing playbook?
Concur with Mr. Guero here,
Bradley’s upset that his elephants will be in the trees for sometime to come I think (I hope, anyway) because Mr. Graham, Mr. DeMint and Governor Bubblehead and Mr. Warthen’s hero and personal savior John McCain are trying to dial us back Andrew Mellon’s 19th century idea of “redistributing assets to their rightful owners”
How? By either requesting no stimulus at all, or one so watered down that they can easily not vote for it and come off looking quite well in two years in stating that their reservations were indeed “valid”.
And that’s what the Republican Party represents now — the GOP (representing the top 1/10th of all Americans) versus the rest of us.
Judging from all of the naysayers here, their banks accounts must be very large indeed.
jessup thinks I’ve got elephants. He thinks our gov is one of them. Whaddayagonnado?
Karen would probably enjoy Nicholas Kristof’s column Sunday. I ALMOST picked it for tomorrow’s op-ed page, but ended up picking a Krugman instead (you know I love them elephants!). Kristof examines the possibility that one of Wall Street’s problems is that it’s so male-dominated.
An excerpt:
“We found that a trader’s morning testosterone level predicts his day’s profitability,” reported the study, published last year in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Higher testosterone meant more risk-taking and, usually, more money.
On its own, that might suggest that men have an advantage on the trading floor. Yet the same study also suggested that elevated testosterone levels could lead to greater assumption of risk; high testosterone levels “may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader’s ability to engage in rational choice.” In other words: when male traders crash … boy, they crash.
So could it be that the problem on Wall Street wasn’t subprime mortgages, but elevated testosterone?
Bravo James D for your comment. Unlike Iraq’s supposed WMD’s which were of course a fiction, this is a real and very serious situation we are facing. Probably most of you have already been impacted, and I’m sure many of us know many people for whom the impact has been severe (loss of job, loss of house, etc.) The economic crisis has already been devastating to numbers of people that dwarf the numbers of people who lost their lives on 9/11. And things might be getting worse. So, things are serious.
Also, Brad keeps dwelling on the partisan divide of this vote, but again let’s remember this is a vote to override filibuster. It’s not like the stimulus will pass just by 51-49. On another thread, pm reminded us that Reagan in 1984 won a landslide that dwarfed Obama’s margin of victory…Reagan’s margin over Mondale? 59-41.
So it seems to me a stimulus/spending program that passes 61-39 is therefore receiving a strong mandate from the Senate. It’s not Obama’s fault that the Republicans’ numbers have shrunk so badly at the hands of American voters. Once more, though probably with no response, I ask Brad: what kind of stimulus-spending package could have garnered even as many as 12-15 Republican votes?
Obama’s mistake was in naively believing that his charisma, charm, goodwill, etc., could have a snowball’s chance in heck of getting 80 votes in the Senate.
Well,
Maybe he didn’t mean REAL ONES. No joke about this last post to Karen though; I think you’re on to something. I’ll lay you odds that aside from Karen, most of the other posters (me included) are while, male, and over 30 (except for that guy named Lee who kind of reminds me of the old man who lived in everybody’s neighborhood and ran outta his house every day to tell all the kids to get the hell out of his yard).
Anyway, perhaps more women would be a good thing both here, and there. Take a look at the centrists cobbling out this stimulus plan. Of the 18 senators involved, three that were doing a great deal of the heavy lifting were women, Claire McCaskill, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
Though perhaps I speak gender treason, women do have certain advantages in the art of politics, which is truly the art of the possible, the art of compromise. More wealth than ever is now concentrated in their hands; they have quicker reflexes, in many cases greater stamina, higher manual dexterity, and (compared to many men, most notably those chest thumping Republican senators) their patience is a damn sight longer.
So let’s GIVE those three women senators the benefit of the doubt. They’re there and we’re here. If they can live with, I can too.
marconi, first you steal your intellectual superior’s (Tesla’s) patents, and now this. Of what collection of Amazons are you speaking and where are the facts, figures and numbers to back your claims? We’re already giving Lee leeway (scant applause…thank you, thank you very much!), so we barely can afford you similar consideration.
Why must the focus of this vote be gender? Logic is logic, regardless of sex or the physical makeup or its messenger.
Besides, focusing on such arbitrary divisions is following along with page two of the Republican playbook. More correctly, I mean their old rule book which is being rewritten as we type since the evil Empire never stays dormant for too long before extending its harried claws and forcing the Republic back to the brink of destruction.
Brad, isn’t it time to acknowledge the reality of the situation? Obama tried to secure bipartisan support. He tried to work with GOP in crafting a bill that 3/4 of congress could support. And where did his efforts get him? Nothing but a sharp rebuff. Worse, his approval rating has fallen a bit thus making it more difficult to use the leverage of his popularity for future initiatives.
The voters value a strong, decisive leader and sadly Obama has come across too soft in this exchange. I appreciate that he’s trying to be more conciliatory than Bush in dealing with the minority party but as Neville Chamberlain discovered sometimes appeasement is not the answer. Like Chamberlain and the world discovered in 1939 Obama is quickly learning that you can’t deal with a tyrant. The GOP tyrant just needs a good thrashing right now. The people will appreciate that and the country will be better off with a good stimulus package that is not watered down with a bunch of worthless tax breaks for the rich.
Goodness,
This last post seems a bit vicious doesn’t it?
Kind of plays into what that marconi was talking about a little, don’t you think?
Cap A’s comment, not buds
for clarification.
I’m not male either, Marconi. And that’s EXACTLY what Lee reminds me of.
Here’s a pretty simple way to look at tax cuts as a way of stimulating the economy. Only a portion of tax cuts will actually be spent. Be it 10% or 30% or whatever there is some portion of any tax cut that will not be spent. Instead, much of it will be saved, or, debt reduced. So the impact on the economy will always be less with a tax cut than for spending increases of the same amount.
If the tax cuts accrue mostly to the wealthy, as occured during the Bush tax cuts, the percentage actually spent is likely to be even smaller. That’s because they save a higher percentage of their income and are more likely to spend their money abroad on either vactions or expensive imports. That explains why the Bush tax cuts were so ineffective at increasing wages or preventing the current economic crisis. It’s true that economic growth was fair after the first Bush Jr. recession finally ended but that growth was not especially beneficial to middle and working class folks. Thus the housing market problems stemmed from stagnant wages trying to keep up with increasing housing prices. And of couse credit card debt soared as well. Throw in $4 gasoline prices and it’s easy to see how devastating the Bush economic policies were to our nation.
All this makes it even more critical that we don’t follow that sorry path again. Frankly, any compromises that include tax cuts for the wealthy should have been automatically rejected by the Democrats. Stunningly they were not rejected and the stubborn GOP still failed to provide any support.
So aside from those few people who believe bipartisanship is an end in itself it’s clear that the battle lines are drawn and all-out war needs to be waged. Either the pragmatic approach offered by the Democrats OR a repeat of the failures of the Bush years will prevail. There really doesn’t seem to be a realistic path to compromise. And frankly I don’t find that a problem. Just roll over the obstructionist losers in the Limbaugh party and move on. That’s the pragmatic thing to do and the American thing to do.
Here’s a pretty simple way to look at tax cuts as a way of stimulating the economy. Only a portion of tax cuts will actually be spent. Be it 10% or 30% or whatever there is some portion of any tax cut that will not be spent. Instead, much of it will be saved, or, debt reduced. So the impact on the economy will always be less with a tax cut than for spending increases of the same amount.
If the tax cuts accrue mostly to the wealthy, as occured during the Bush tax cuts, the percentage actually spent is likely to be even smaller. That’s because they save a higher percentage of their income and are more likely to spend their money abroad on either vactions or expensive imports. That explains why the Bush tax cuts were so ineffective at increasing wages or preventing the current economic crisis. It’s true that economic growth was fair after the first Bush Jr. recession finally ended but that growth was not especially beneficial to middle and working class folks. Thus the housing market problems stemmed from stagnant wages trying to keep up with increasing housing prices. And of couse credit card debt soared as well. Throw in $4 gasoline prices and it’s easy to see how devastating the Bush economic policies were to our nation.
All this makes it even more critical that we don’t follow that sorry path again. Frankly, any compromises that include tax cuts for the wealthy should have been automatically rejected by the Democrats. Stunningly they were not rejected and the stubborn GOP still failed to provide any support.
So aside from those few people who believe bipartisanship is an end in itself it’s clear that the battle lines are drawn and all-out war needs to be waged. Either the pragmatic approach offered by the Democrats OR a repeat of the failures of the Bush years will prevail. There really doesn’t seem to be a realistic path to compromise. And frankly I don’t find that a problem. Just roll over the obstructionist losers in the Limbaugh party and move on. That’s the pragmatic thing to do and the American thing to do.
This last post seems a bit vicious doesn’t it?
Kind of plays into what that marconi was talking about a little, don’t you think?
Posted by: jessup | Feb 9, 2009 3:27:17 PM
How were the comments vicious, jessup? The opposite, illogical reasoning to the one posited by marconi is to portray women as inferior to men as leaders due to their collective overly emotional natures.
If you don’t want to buy into a negative stereotypes, then you should not buy into “positive” ones, either.
I fail to see where urging consistent logic over tired, unscientific stereotypes is “vicious.”
If your reference is to my comments about Republicans, then you must be ignorant of the last eight years and Bushdaddy’s Administration, as well. One party consistently divides and weakens this country. The tale of America’s recent history is proof.
One party has failed consistently at its oft repeated aims, yet its mastery of the popular media has disguised those missteps even as an economy-addled public has struggled under the strains of that party’s abject futility.
Animal Farm…you may have read it? If not, you probably think bin Laden is still alive to threaten us, as well. Pfft…
Unfortunately, that aforementioned, inadequate party is a necessary evil to remind the rest of us of what we never want to become.
I’m reminded of Yossarian et al.: “I post everything twice!“
Here’s a Modest Proposal for you:
If there’s not going to be a single GOP vote in the House, and only two or three in the Senate… why not save ourselves $300 billion and NOT do the tax cuts?
As I wrote last month sometime, the tax cuts are less than useless — something like $9 or $10 a week per taxpayer. That’s not going to change anybody’s spending habits; it’s just going to be a waste.
Now if the cuts were TARGETED — say, if they were designed to encourage something good for the economy, such as investing in activity that produced jobs — it MIGHT be worthwhile. But Democrats won’t do that; they call it “tax cuts for the rich.” But better to do no tax cuts at all than to spread them so thin that they don’t do anybody any good.
And if you can’t even buy any GOP votes with it… what’s the point?
jessup,
The top 1/10th is no longer the exclusive peak occupied by Republicans alone. Their numbers have been surplanted by Democrat millionaires and billionaires. Check the list of the wealthiest members of congress. You might be surprised. Claire McCaskill of Missouri is worth at least $18 million possibly as much as $43 million. John Kerry is listed as the weathiest. Bill Gates is a Democrat. Warren Buffet supports the Democrats. George Soros is another. Mark Cuban, Democrat. So, the old class warfare depicting Republicans as being the party of the rich is no longer valid. Wall Street contributed to Obama by a large margin this time around. Do you think they made a good investment?
Bush inherited a recession from Clinton in 2001 and fixed that with a small tax cut.
The economy was very strong from 2002- August 2008.
The Republicans shared power with Democrats from 2001 – 2006.
2007 and 2008 were owned by Pelosi and Reid.
They doubled the deficit in 2007 and quadrupled it in 2008. Their crooked, racist mortgage schemes brought down the banking system and automobile manufacturing.
Now they turn to messing up the rest of the economy.
Funny how the libs never manage to notice that with the Bush tax cuts, just as with the Reagan tax cuts AND the JFK taxcuts, the amount of revenue flowing into the treasury INCREASES significantly;maybe all those “rich Folks” are using that money to invest in businesses that provide jobs and pay taxes; ah, but that’s outside the biased reporting and lib view isn’t it. It’s not “bipartisan” because every time the Repubs suggsted and amendment they got told “we won and you don’t have any say ( real americans those libs). Sadly the three “repubs” voting for this bill are RINO’s and three doesn’t make it “bipartisan”. Why all the rusah to pass this why not take your time get rid of all the “pork” and Earmarks ( Obama lies when he says there are no ear marks in it)and come up with a lan that will REALLY work and not this piece of excrement. Why not stop collecting income tax and FICA for 6months or a year, let the people buy what they want and need. Why not give every TAXPAYER a check for $2000; it would be cheaper in the long run and more effective too.
The GOP’s attitude of horror toward the additional spending in the stimulus package reminds me of former Sen. Saxbe’s (from OH, not the one from GA) comment about the White House during Watergate. It was to the effect that ‘these guys are all like the piano player in the w********e pretending they didn’t know what was going on upstairs’.
Too funny,
I say women should run things for awhile; I get branded as a “Republican” or engaging in “stereotypes” because I make a point
that you perceive to be a sweeping statement.
Jessup says that the comment seemed a bit in the attack mode, he gets accused of being a Bin Laden supporter.
Truth is I’m neither female nor Republican, and I haven’t voted for one since 1988. I simply stated that women, who make up over 50 percent of the population now, and who probably will outnumber men in the workforce in the next years need a bigger voice in Congress and a large share in the workplace.
The evidence both anecdotal and quantitative seems to back me up.
Women tend to be better than men at empowering staff.
Women encourage openness and are more accessible.
Women leaders respond more quickly to calls for assistance.
Women are more tolerant of differences, so they’re more skilled at managing diversity.
Women identify problems more quickly and more accurately.
Women are better at defining job expectations and providing feedback.
Seems like these would be pretty good for anybody in congress, which right now the Republicans mostly lack.
As does the response to my earlier post.
Who’s engaging in stereotypes now?
The small Bush tax cuts for everyone in 2001 immediately ended the Clinton Recession of 2000.
Even after the 9/11 attacks took $5 TRILLION out of the economy, the private sector continued the recovery in 2002, giving us the lowest unemployment in decades and generating a huge revenue surplus, enough to pay for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and still balance the budget.
But Democrat pushed for $600 billion deficits, and Republicans compromised with them to run $350 billion deficits, all for new social welfare programs.
Then, in 2007, the Democrats got control of Congress and ran a $500 billion deficit, even with reduced war spending.
In 2008, unemployment was 4.5% until August, when the corrupt Democrat mortgage scams started to come apart. Their $500 billion deficit ballooned to over $1,200 billion dollars. In 2009, the deficit will be over $2,000 billion.
Socialism and liberalism created this mess, and it is making it worse.
Lee …. re: “Maine is run by a handful of wealthy people” …
Um. Yeah. You got the poor people running your state do you?
“The Republicans shared power with Democrats from 2001 – 2006”
Huh? Where you been? Republicans took congress in 1994, and though the Senate was pretty evenly divided, Repubs set the agenda and decided what was going to get voted on. The last 3 out of 4 administrations have been republican. If anything the Democratic party has just rolled over on most everything. It’s about time they stood up and set things right. But over the last 20 years and numerous tax cuts later I never noticed jobs being added to our economy. I watched a lot of jobs go away. Saying our economy grew over the last eight years is like maxing out your credit cards and telling yourself you got rich.
Finally why we be hatin on the Mainers? At least they are thinking about solid policy and not stupid ideology. I mean hey, someones got to.
Maineah doesn’t know much about Maine.
Sunday column is very good to read regarding
republicans
Christena
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