Where is that proposal in the ARRA? Show us the exact text.
Depends. If, say, Nancy Pelosi, had been fighting for funding for her pet project, ‘Misleading Republican Pyscology’ for 20 years, and then the bill included $8 billion for ‘Partisan Political Psycology’, and there were only 3 or for other studies waiting for funding, then it would not be misleading.
However, if it was just for ‘Scientific Reseach’, your statement would be misleading, because there are probably thousands, if not millions of scientific research projects that are competing for the funding.
Another example would be the ACORN thing. They are eligible for the money, but there are probably thousands of other organizations that are as well. So it would be misleading to imply ACORN is a priority in the bill.
I think we agree that there is some latitude on where funding will go, because, as stated, there is no specific language in the bill. But for me, if the amount of money is greater than $1billion, and I can count the number of eligible projects on one hand, then its not misleading to pick any one as an example.
Just like the Republican version of the bill…all tax cuts, all the time. Grover Norquist is still riding on the backs of the DC Republicans, cracking his whip.
Not to mention his problems with the GOP True Believers back home:
While you’re at it, Moto, please produce the statement issued by Reid’s office. I’d love to see a statement from a Senator that talks about getting a “big chunk” of funding. Unfortunately, it appears that others who have looked for it have been unable to find such a statement:
More debunking of the lie here:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200902180010
The AP is becoming more and more notorious for dubious reporting that tends to perpetuate right wing talking points and lies. Furthermore, the Washington Post was just discovered yesterday to have edited out a clause in an article about the field mice lie that called it into question. They preferred to pass along Republican lies without qualification.
As do you.
Really petty, but does the guy have some sort of speech impediment? Because he sort of whistled a syllable every minute or so. And once I started noticing it, I found it impossible to parse the sense of what he was saying because I was listening for the next whistle and trying to make out if it were certain sounds he was doing it on…
Anyone else notice this?
Nope.
I didn’t see it, I was in the car, listening. He sounds exactly like a mega-church preacher. Same rhythms, same emphases, same speech structure, same types of anecdotes, same way of building to his point and coming to a conclusion. A certain portion of the base is going to love what I heard. It’s comfortable and familiar, and speaks exactly to them in a way that they’re used to being spoken to. I’m not dismissing him at all.
Yup. He also said that some of the cuts he’d propose would piss off the Democrats, too. That if a program is wasteful and not helpful, out it goes, no matter which side of the aisle howls and stamps its feet.
Now, whether he can actually get a budget with slashes like that through Congress is another story, of course; but President Obama served notice last night that everybody’s ox is endangered.
Yeah, so I’ve noticed as well as many others. Anybody know what the “regards” happened?
Wow. I was stunned by how bad it was from an audio/visual perspective. It was as if he’d never given a speech before in his life!
A couple of years ago, a guy named Ron Fournier took over as Washington Bureau Chief and Political Editor for the AP. He’s a right winger and a buddy of Karl Rove who has slowly been moving away from the AP’s traditional objectivity and dry factual reporting into more and more overt pro-GOP political editorializing.
I really wish people would stop spouting this bullshit. Guess what percentage of the annual budget earmarks are. Go on, guess. 15%? 10%? 5%? No, sorry, earmarks are less than 1% of the annual budget, at least by any reasonable estimate. Plus, many earmarks are in the form of language directing agencies as to how they should spend money they’re already getting. So cutting out all earmarks would accomplish virtually jack shit. Thanks for playing.
Just to continue the tangent about Jindal’s chances: there’s also the disconnect between his Catholic-convert status and the conservative Protestantism of many Republican voters. If Christian conservatives overall were so suspicious of the Mormon Mitt Romney, I don’t think a lot of them are going to be much readier to warm up to a Death Cookie eater like Jindal.
(Okay, yes, I know that most conservative Protestants are not as rabidly anti-Catholic as Jack Chick. But there definitely is a significant level of anti-Catholic feeling in many conservative Protestant churches.)
But…but…but…John McCain RAN on earmarks! They must be important and vastly wasteful or else the whole Republican 2008 presidential campaign is empty air!
Ohhhh…never mind.
Don’t be silly, if you allow hoi polloi to select their own saviors they’ll likely come up with one of those terribly unsuitable types–simply Not Our Sort Of People, Lovey. We must tell them who to support, they’re such children, really… :rolleyes:
Such a perfect example for a “Lets turn the tables around” moment. The difference is that one of the end projects is useful and the other is corrupt nonsense. That sums up so much of our politics lately. Like discriminating against gays or destroying other countries (or our own, ftm). You’d do better with an example where the Ds objected to something that wasn’t transparently backward.
I’m disappointed that it took 44 replies for the semantic apologies and denials to begin. Our Rs are sleeping in lately! Can we just surrender and apologize for the unjust accusation of lying so that we don’t have to go on with 3 more pages of arguing what “such as” means? Then we can get back to what a [kitten riding a pony over a rainbow] Jindal is. Cuz even if the bill specifically included the new train, it’s still a pathetically small and stupid thing to complain about in the big picture. Kinda like “you’re technically inaccurate in your title!”
One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers likened it to watching Will Smith talk, followed by Urkel. Couldn’t agree more.
Read the rest of my post; that is exactly the point I was making. Neither side has the political courage to go in with a chainsaw and get this budget anywhere near balanced: this year (and no that isn’t advisable) or ten years from now.
I don’t buy this. He’s been around politics for a long time. Surely he has some broad idea of what type of programs that government should not be involved in. This idea that he has these massive cuts ready as soon as he explores the idea is laughable. If he hasn’t explored them yet, then how does he know there are trillions to be cut?
He just speaks in generalities about making Congressmen mad when he’s only been in office a month and passed an 800 billion dollar spending bill which has satisfied every special interest to the max. Almost his entire speech last night was a laundry list of new spending and new programs. Forgive me if I need more than a wink and a nudge to believe that he is serious about cutting spending.
Don’t pay any attention to the Las-Vegas-to-Disneyland bullshit. It’s the standard Republican tactic: frame the debate with an obvious lie, and you control the debate that follows.
Now the debate has become “is there a provision for LA-to-LV?” instead of “so what if there is?” By accepting the lie as the focal point for the debate, we implicitly accept that Las-Vegas-to-Disneyland train is wrong and wasteful. We argue that the provision isn’t there because we’re made to feel guilty that it might be there.
You want to complain about LA-to-LV? Great. Prove that it’s a bad thing.
For somebody who calls themselves “factcheck”, you’d think they might check up on the fact that we Anaheimians aren’t really that thrilled about being told that we’re in Los Angeles. :mad:
Well, the word I would have used was “frivolous.”