Cite?
Certainly nothing “weak and feckless” about GeeDubya, by golly! There’s somewhere north of a hundred thousand Iraqis who can testify to that, or would, if they weren’t hindered by being dead.
But, that’s what Reagan did. Remember Bork? You mentioned him in your post.
My vote has never been in question, but my fear of a Romney administration got worse when he made his stand against Lyme disease in Virginia.
Let’s be clear what this is: Romney is throwing the weight of his campaign and promising to throw the weight of the federal government behind complete woo at the behest of a single wealthy donor. (Lyme disease exists, of course, and it does exist in Virginia, but “chronic Lyme disease” and the ridiculous years of IV antibiotics that the donor in question advocates for treating it–and which Romney’s promise about protecting doctors from lawsuits refers to–are utter bullshit.)
That scares me in particular because I believe that in the next few years medical costs are going to come to the point that we’re going to have to prioritize what we spend our health care dollars on. And those priorities need to be rooted in science. I know Romney won’t be on the committees that do that sort of thing, but he’ll appoint the people who are, or at least the ones who appoint those people.
Of course, that re-writing of history really does nothing to explain what might happen if Romney were elected.
Obama’s “I won” comment was not uttered on January 20, 2009. It was uttered months later after he had listened to multiple senior Republicans publicly announce that they would do everything in their power to stonewall every proposal he made to ensure that he would not be re-elected, and after his second or third attempt to actually meet with the Republicans on specific issues, only to have them tell him to his face that they were only there to explain to him why he could not hope to pass any legislation that was not written to their specifications.
Obama was willing to compromise on pretty much everything, (as any reasonable review of the health care act will demonstrate), to the point that he has earned the distrust of the Democratic Left for being a lackey for the corporations. Any claim that Obama was not willing to compromise pretty much substitutes baseless Republican talking points for facts.
Yeah, and the budgets really came together under those two…
I don’t know about Obama disliking most Republicans. I know that many former Republican voters dislike many of the GOP crowd that followed Gingrich into Congress in the 1990’s. Gingrich was a nasty unpleasant person who inspired a lot of people to embrace an ethic of hostile partisanship. So I’m not convinced the source of the hostility is Obama. Some people are very hard to get along with.
I agree that many Democrat pols resent Obama’s success and see him as a relatively young guy who jumped ahead of his elders.
“Feckless”? Compared to Dubya or Mitt? Obama’s mild-mannered, but those guys exude brashness and incompetence.
I don’t think we disagree much in these cases. It’s the extrapolation to national policy regarding mineral reserves and public services that I take issue with. A risk is that private sector interests will get a cheap deal on public lands and mineral rights, and not take the cost seriously because they take it for granted. And of course privatized transportation and medicine systems are less efficient for the end consumer because of the additional for-profit cost centers.
The difference is that Bush was dealing with a period of general economic expansion and created deficits for no good reason; Obama is trying to mitigate a depression. That said, I still think Obama should have raised marginal tax rates on entering office and done FDR-style stimulus through hiring, not tax cuts and feckless wishes for private spending.
That would be Romney’s “grow the pie” fallacy. No, to the extent you’re right about Obama following this, he’s wrong as the Republicans are. There are limited resources, and the 1% want more growth for themselves than there is available to the whole economy. We have to redistribute wealth at this point, or condemn a nation to bankruptcy and peonage.
Yeah, one of my best friends is a Mormon. It’s still a young religion, and not immune to hero-worship.
Less competitive in what sense? The USA is an extraordinarily rich country, and we don’t require foreign investment. We need rather more to claw back some of the wealth unspent by our own multi-billionaires.
And pointing to Canadian and British budgets as a model doesn’t work that well anymore. How many budgets has Harper balanced? And the UK is doing quite badly in this depression. Maybe they should have tried stimulus spending over tax cuts and austerity.
Unions, minimum wage and child labor laws will be struck down. Immigration enforcement will be ramped up against low paying wages so that Halliburton’s prisoners can displace them at $0.23/hr (of course, Halliburton will be contracted for such labor at minimum wage and pocket the difference)
The tax code will be gutted so that Wall Street and investors pay nothing while the middle and lower class pick up the cost of new military actions throughout the globe to ‘protect’ (force?) US business interests.
The military will suddenly find all sorts of new fighting grounds (how else will Xe, CSC, and the like make back their campaign investments?)
A National ID will finally be forced through, then the ID will be used (free of charge) by banks, retailers and anyone else who donates to the right campaign, for their loyalty cards, debit cards, etc. That way, the federal government will take on the expense of managing the programs while businesses get a free ride.
The Koch brothers will rule our energy policy. Drilling for what ever, where ever will be patriotic. Self-reliant forms of energy (solar, wind, home-made biodiesel, etc) will be taxed into oblivion in order to hand more ‘incentives’ to the Koch brothers for our ‘energy independence’.
All forms of social assistance to the sick, poor and elderly will be dumped onto the states who won’t be able to afford it and will dump it onto the Churches who will suddenly become King of their local fiefdoms and the benevolent rulers the lower class population.
As someone that certainly won’t be voting for Romney, I don’t see much, if anything, in Enkel’s post that I think is very likely to happen. Perhaps the tax code stuff, depending on what you mean by “gutted” - I actually don’t think the cap on deductions is that terrible an idea (although coupled with huge rate cuts it is).
Related changes: we’re unlikely to hear widespread conspiracy theories that the President is a foreigner, a secret Muslim, a former “radical activist” whose church supports racism*, a pawn of foreign potentates, etc., nor will we likely see many caricatures of Romney as a monkey, a turban-wearing terrorist, or an African native with a bone in his nose, and I’m willing to bet we won’t see a single bumper sticker advising that we not “RE-NIG IN 2016.”
- despite the fact that it did until recently, if not still does.