I don’t think the people attending the Tea Party protests are making this a Dem vs. Rep thing. That’s for smaller minds. I disagreed with the big spending of the Reps and I disagree with the even bigger spending of the Dems. See if you can figure that one out.
Then where were they before Obama was elected? That the President is a Democrat is the only reason they’re freaking. And yes, the teabaggers have the smallest minds around.
This whole thing bothers me to know end. They are mad as hell and won’t take it any more, but seem to have no clue.
Deficits? Yep, they were made better when liberals were in offcec and worse when conservatives were, but all of a sudden now is the time to get upset. But, this is actually one of the few times it *makes sense * to increase spending. We are in a recession! We should have been paying down the debt when things were going well.
Spending more than we take in? Yep, because the conservatives cut taxes and increased spending.
Taxes? Well marginal tax rates are lower than they have been historically and the US pays far less in taxes than most countries.
Bailout of the car companies? Well pardon us for tring to save one of the largest industries in the United States, the failure of which would have had enormous ripple effects. We saved millions of blue collar jobs. You know, the kind of people you like that work hard and pay taxes.
The best part of the closed thread was when the OP complained that limiting CEO pay was interfering with the lives of Americans too much. Not warrantless wire taps, or laws against drugs, prostitution, and adult content. Nope, we have hundreds of thousands of people in the streets because they think that the govt shouldn’t limit CEO pay. Not because healthcare costs are going through the roof, or insurance companies are canceling insurance when people get sick, or the middle class is losing relative to the extremely wealthy, or unemployment is horrendus.
This country is loony!
Not for us to figure out. If you want to be taken seriously, you’ll have to dump the people screaming about how the President is a Communist/Socialist/ Nazi/Fascist/Kenyan/Indonesian/Muslim/All Of The Above, but you can’t… because all that will be left is three people waving placards saying, “small government!” and “stop mortgaging our futures!”
I might join that group of protesters, though.
Rachel Maddow does this at least once a week. It’s enlightening, to say the least, to hear how many of these “grass roots” organizations are run by lobbyists and huge corporations or industry groups.
For my part, I want to do a little research. I saw an interview with Thom Hartmann of Air America back in December 2008. He said that 28 years ago, when Reagan came into office, the U.S.A. was:
[ul]
[li]the biggest exporter of manufactured goods[/li][li]the biggest importer of raw materials[/li][li]the largest creditor[/li][/ul]in the world, while today, the US is:
[ul]
[li]the biggest exporter of raw material[/li][li]the biggest importer of manufactured goods[/li][li]the most in debt [/li][/ul]of any country on the planet.
I’m betting that Google will help me find a year-by-year breakdown of those three statistics when I go looking tomorrow (not tonight, dear, I don’t have a headache but I am sleepy!). I’m guessing that if the numbers support this contention, it means nothing good for the U.S.A., but I’m no economist.
Funny, ain’t it? Back when we were British colonies, one of our biggest gripes was that we weren’t allowed our own industries. Instead, we had to ship all our raw materials to Britain and get finished products back. And now we do it by choice (although I guess we’re shipping to Asia, these days).
Thank you for pointing out a great article.
And you, Plan B should really read the article cited above.
What you’re missing, Morgyn, is that in the global market, America has taken the dominant position in exporting credit. This is due entirely to the vibrant and regulation-free environment fostered by the innovative leadership of free-market thinkers. Why, we have come up with entirely new ways to package and sell credit nobody dared dream of before!
Its all too complicated for less minds, like ours, but rest assured, the financial wizards at Lehman Brothers and AIG have the situation well under control!
Of course not. Just as most of the people who marched on Washington to protest the Afghanistan war in 2001-2002, carrying anti-Bush signs didn’t get angry when Obama expanded it. Knee-jerk partisans abound. It still doesn’t justify the broad brush.
How do you know? I don’t know any of those people, do you? I didn’t even know there WAS a protest against the actions in Afghanistan. Most of the left was all for going to Afghanistan. If there was a fringe that was against it, can you provide a cite that a majority of those people are not also opposed to Obama expanding it?
During the Iraq war protests, I saw plenty of pictures saying Bush was a fascist/racist/murderer/etc., to say nothing of random Che/Free Mumia/Anti-Capitalism signs.
Should Iraq war protests not be taken seriously because of the presence of loons?
If you want to understand these kinds of movements, looking to partisan media like Rachel Maddow or Glen Beck is ridiculous. I’m reminded of CNN covering one of the protests, and carefully framing the shot to leave out the guy with the “Republicans suck too” sign.
People calling Bush a “fascist,” etc didn’t have their own radio and cable talk shows, didn’t own cable news networks and didn’t hold offices in the US Congress, or get selected as Vice Presidential Candidates.
Our loonies are out in the parking lot. Yours are on the stage, and running the show.
Not if they’re the ones orchestrating the movements in the first place.
The equivalence of Maddow and “Mad Dog” Beck is absurd. Ms Maddow of the swan’s neck is partisan, surely, and sarcastic, definitely. But nothing so vile as Becks accusation that Obama “hates white culture” has slipped through her lips. Beck is a venemous reptile who speaks to the worst of our natures, and offers to dignify what ought not to be dignified, we ought not even to pretend that such racist crap is worthy of honest citizens.
If a racist is to ashamed or afraid to speak publicly, then let them remain silent until they reform thier thinking or they die, whichever is most convenient for them. I am open minded and understanding, so long as they don’t spread their poison in public, I am content to let them simmer in it.
But people like Beck lend it dignity, as if such thought were worthy of Americans, he drapes that legitimacy over racism like a flimsy silk negligee over an aged and poxed street whore, the sores of her various diseases coyly shrouded.
And my words are only too kind.
Rachel has Pat Buchanan on and they giggle. Comparing her to Beck is like comparing Pee Wee Herman to Hannibal Lecter.
Hey, if you like female commentators with long necks you’ll love Ann Coulter!
It’s not hypocrisy. When Bush ran up the deficit he never planned on paying it back, hence no increase in taxes. Obama will raise taxes; Bush was just fiscally irresponsible. There is no comparison.
The teabaggers don’t care about government spending, they just don’t want to have to pay for it. What Obama should have done was increased spending AND promised them a tax cut.
I’m a conservative. But these tea party idiots, along with the birthers, and the “Obama’s a muslim!” people, and the death panelists idiots, and any moron that will call in to a radio show just to say “ditto!”, have pushed me to the point where now I’m a fucking blue dog democrat.
There’s a lot of things Obama has proposed that I don’t like. Bailing out Chrysler being only the tip of the iceberg. I’ll give him one thing, though, he’s never lied. But what really gets me, and I mean REALLY pisses me off is the fact that he increases troops in Afghanistan (which, if anybody cares to remember, is the more important of the two wars we’ve been fighting) and he gets criticized for it.
A liberal Democrat is criticized because he won’t cut and run when faced with Muslim extremists.
The fucking hypocrisy is breathtaking. I’m a blue dog, now.
About 30 years ago I came to the same position as your OP, without the detour through believing the GOP dogma. The world is not a black and white place, it has colors and shades and translucence and texture and tone. People who have a one sentence summation for their philosophy that leads to a doctrine on an issue really don’t have the slightest clue about the complexity of the universe and human relations. They get as far as that one sentence summation and cannot go any further.
An example is the Chicago School of Economics: let the markets sort everything out. Be free to choose. Well, bullshit. Why can’t people get together in corporations, unions and yes, governments to accomplish goals that are beyond anything markets left to boom and bust chaos can hope to create? If we value it, why can’t we do it? And in fact groups do that all the time. Every group action in the world can be described in economic terms. Just because some people don’t want give up boom and bust because they make money on it does not mean millions should go without healthcare, as just one example.
The not caring about deficits for Republicans came about in the 80s, when they finally got the executive power. They ran up huge deficits and only complained again when they lost executive power. Clinton brought those deficits under control after huge fights with Congress, shutting down the government. Bush took power and made the Reagan deficits look like nothing at all, dwarfed only by the obligations taken on during the last year of the Bush administration. And now we have teabaggers? Bitch, please.
Obama was very clear when running for pres that he was going to increase efforts in Afghanistan and get out of Iraq. I’ll agree that Afghanistan is where we need to be militarily if we are going to defeat the Taliban, assuming that they gave cover to Al Queda for running 9/11, which is the information I have. What the strategic center of the Taliban is, I don’t know, but I hope someone at the Pentagon is putting that together. If we don’t figure it out, it will be another Vietnam.