It may seem too simplistic but the replacement of broadcast news with cable news may be a significant part of the problem.
With so many news sources to choose from, it’s easy to find one that tells you what you want to hear; this leads to polarization. It isn’t just cable news that leads to this problem; Internet and Twitters lead to the same effect. And in old-fashioned culture where you knew your neighbors, you experienced diversity of opinion just going outside your front door. Now you’re as likely to exit via the garage in a sealed car en-route to like-minded people.
The domination of media and campaigns by big money is also a big problem, exacerbated by recent changes in the law. It wasn’t long ago that America felt media monopolies were bad, and nothing approaching the size of Murdoch’s empire was permitted.
Yes, one uses real ones and one makes them up. BTW, Kos makes no pretense about its partisanship. Fox not only clings to its “fair and balance” lie, but claims to be a “news” organization.
Obama faces nothing comparable to a special prosecutor like Starr colluding with a privately-financed hate organization like Scaife’s Arkansas Project to find means to personally destroy him, the country be damned. All Obama has to face is a party and a “news” network devoted to politically destroying him, the country be damned.
That same shit went on with Clinton, and even more loudly and instantly.
You can still get your own copy of The Clinton Chronicles somewhere if you want, I’m sure. And did you never get your inbox polluted with the Clinton Body Count glurge?
The Antichrist shit was prevalent with *both *Clintons as targets.
There’s nothing new here except the race aspect, and a whole lot that hasn’t even a real possibility of occurring. Not that that’s good news, really.
Sam, your desperate, projective attempts at false equivalence and simple Democrat-blaming are usually much more articulate than that.
And as you yourself seem to recognize, the Democrats had control of the house and Senate from 2006 on.[?quote]Not in the face of your guys’ decision to make *everything *require 60 votes in the Senate. Control devolves to the minority there, and makes the other house effectively powerless. Really, you do need to learn the mechanics of our system sometime.
Yes, I’m sure you can find somebody on the CATO payroll who says it didn’t, and that would make it “mixed” by your standards. But you could also point to the power industry, the mortgage industry, the simple dereliction of enforcement endemic to his administration … You say regulation “went up all over the place” under Bush. Perhaps a few key examples, to support your credibility on that point?
A requirement that corporations not lie? That’s “massive”?
You don’t even know what the fuck that is, do you? Perhaps you should know that it forbids the government from participating in the free market for medications - and the free market is one of our sacred icons, is it not?
Ah, yes, the time when the Fed chair had to warn against “irrational exuberance”.
You state that as fact. It could be more realistically stated that the Euro has stabilized what would otherwise be worse problems, problems stemming from the US financial collapse that began under your guys.
Wrong. It used tax-cutting for the rich as the answer to all problems, in all conditions. Bush took office, as you may have filtered out of your memory, on the promise of cutting taxes because the economy was so strong we could afford it. Your party’s attitude now is that government spending is the cause of economic collapse, not a solution to it, reality and experience notwithstanding. Keynesian approaches involve letting the vast majority of consumers have more money so they can consume more, not letting a few who aren’t going to consume more stash it away somewhere.
(going right past the alt-history stuff explaining how it’s all the fault of the Democrats, except when Bush made the mistake of following Democratic policies … I ain’t got all day … but the usual part about how it’s the fault of Clinton’s home ownership improvement program that somehow collapsed over 20 years later has stopped being amusing and is now pathetic).
Their “solution” to the “problem” they identified was the usual “drown government in the bathtub” stuff. I do like the part about how the real estate bubble was due to too little regulation under Bush, while somehow avoiding assigning any blame to Bush for it.
Compared to Bush’s? Really?
Do you really still cling to the falsehood that they were not giving the people what they want, as responsible public servants? That it’s really only popular with a minority? You’ve been corrected on that enough. Out with it now - why do you repeat that?
Do you really not know where the term originated?
Cite. Now. Something from the last half-century, please.:rolleyes:
As you also know, there is quite a bit of truth to that.
Hint: You’ll find quite a bit more of that than anything from “the unions” you hate.
Facts, Sam. Facts.
Then how do you explain the hyperpartisanship of your party in the boom times of the 90’s?
They’re doing what the people want done, in short. Your party is obstructing it, in the interests of its much-narrower base and the ideology that traps it, and you.
Worse for Goldman Sachs and Halliburton, that is? Maybe so. But that’s not a bad thing.
Nobody is. What influenced you to make up *that *latest strawman?
You’re going to have to start to make a case for that, using that “facts” stuff, if you want to be taken seriously.
I’ll let someone else point to the list. Suffice it to say that your assessment of it as “nothing to be proud of” is based on which party did it. And it wasn’t yours. Deal with it.
SOX is a good deal more than a requirement that corporations not lie. If you don’t know anything about a subject, you should refrain from posting in a way that demonstrates it.
He hasn’t been corrected, and it isn’t a falsehood.
A clear majority favors repeal of Obamacare. This has been the case since it was passed. Cite.
You should probably not use words unless you know what they mean.
First off, in all sincerity, I thank you for making a succinct, concise post founded upon an empirical basis, rather than offering a wall of text founded in opinion. It’s much more useful to a debate, and provides a clearer context for evaluating claims.
Now, the issue at hand is whether people are angry at the “ramming through” of healthcare by the Democrats. I agree with you that Rasmussen’s synopsis would be consistent with that position. However, it might be helpful to take a look at the broader scope of evidence on the subject that is available at PollingReport.com.
Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll. July 13-18, 2011. N=1,201 adults nationwide. Margin of error ± 3.
“As you may know, a health reform bill was signed into law early last year. Given what you know about the health reform law, do you have a generally favorable or generally unfavorable opinion of it?” Options rotated
2010: “As you may know, a new health reform bill was signed into law earlier this year. Given what you know about the new health reform law, do you have a generally favorable or generally unfavorable opinion of it?”
Date Favorable Unfavorable Unsure/Refused
7/13-18/11 42 43 15
“What would you like to see Congress do when it comes to the health care law? They should expand the law. They should keep the law as is. They should repeal the law and replace it with a Republican-sponsored alternative. They should repeal the law and not replace it.” Options rotated
Date 7/13-18/11
Expand 33
Keep as Is 20
Replace with GOP Law 16
Repeal and Not Replace 21
Unsure/Refused 10
Bloomberg Poll conducted by Selzer & Company. June 17-20, 2011. N=1,000 adults nationwide. Margin of error ± 3.1.
“Turning to the health care law passed last year, what is your opinion of the law? It should be repealed. It may need small modifications, but we should see how it works. It should be left alone.”
Date 6/17-20/11
Should be Repealed 35
See how it works 51
Should be left alone 11
Unsure 3
**CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. **June 3-7, 2011. N=1,015 adults nationwide. Margin of error ± 3.
“As you may know, a bill that makes major changes to the country’s health care system became law last year. Based on what you have read or heard about that legislation, do you generally favor or generally oppose it?” If oppose: “Do you oppose that legislation because you think its approach toward health care is too liberal, or because you think it is not liberal enough?” Combined responses
Date 6/3-7/11
Favor 39
Oppose: Too liberal 36
Oppose:Not liberal enough 14
Unsure 10
In sum, I think that it’s very hard to conclude that majorities of people are angry for the Democrats ramming through healthcare as an unwanted expansion of government. Instead, majorities appear to either be happy with it or want it to be broader. Many appear to be unhappy with it because it was insufficient to address the problem.
This accords with responses to questions about who Americans trust more on health related legislation, where people clearly do not trust Republicans relative to Democrats or Obama specifically.
I’m sorry if that read as if I was calling all conservatives racist. I don’t mean that Obama scares the pants off of conservatives simply because he’s black. I mean that some people definitely respond to that, but others responded to his heavily working class rhetoric/radical background doing community organizing and so-forth, and that scares conservatives too. And I think some found the nerve that he touched with many of the American people to also be unsettling. Some of the rhetoric sounded revolutionary. I guess in the conservatives’ place I would assume that the only thing to follow such a campaign would be radical change, (indeed, that’s what many liberals wanted) though that hasn’t been the case in reality.
You may also note in my original post that I blamed liberals too.
Sure they were, and yes they did. Well, actually, the wrecking started in the Clinton Administration with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. But George Bush pushed through tax cuts that led to the present deficit, and started a COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY AND POINTLESS war in Iraq that cost billions. It’s not the root cause of the economic crash, but it has GREATLY EXACERBATED the problem.
In a word, no, they do not. They offered a great cost-cutting and revenue raising package that would have helped a lot. They tried to get through a stimulus that would actually help revive the economy, but against Republican opposition, were not able to get through enough of a stimulus. The most you can say is that they have not been able to solve the problems created by the Republicans fast enough to suit everyone, especially Republicans.
Oh, really? And what economists would that be? The Faux News Crew? It’s widely recognized that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was what allowed the creation of mortgage-backed financial instruments that became the basis of the financial shell game that totally fucked our economy. The repeal of Glass-Steagall by its lonesome is all the deregulation it took to destroy the economy, and although it was not a Bush Admin. program, it started out as a Republican initiative (I will grant you, the Dems got bought by the financial industry as well).
The free market approach that lets the Chinese peg their currency’s value to a fixed relationship to the American dollar has not helped. The Dems have been as guilty as the Pubbies on that one.
Well, it’s easy to criticize after the fact. Greenspan might have prevented a hard landing, and that would have been costly. Would you have advocated that? Should governments simply let economic devastation happen?
It wasn’t 9/11 that hurt the economy, it was the ridiculously outsized response to it that happened, spurred on by Bush and Repubs who saw this as an opportunity to expand their political power and push through some pet projects (like the needless war in Iraq). All Republican’s fault. Dems who opposed anything Bush wanted to do at that point were castigated as “traitors” … remember? I do.
I would like to see a cite that the Democrats knowingly embraced lowering risk standards for loans as part of their policies. Sounds very right-revisionist to me. You are right on the political considerations … both parties fell for the ownership society, for their own reasons, plus of course incumbents of both stripes liked all that money the financial industry offered, which I suspect was the real motivator. However, the root cause of the collapse was all the bad loans the banks knowingly made to people who had little or no prospect of repaying the loans. I think that was just greed. And I will agree … Greenspan was an idiot here.
Agreed on the bad behavior of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But it was the repeal of Glass-Steagal that allowed them to create those mortgage-backed securities that were at the heart of the real estate debacle. Without that bit of dereguation, such financial instruments would have been illegal.
Bwuh? Cite.
Everybody knew it was a shell game, almost from the beginning. There were warnings about ARMs (adjustable rate mortgages, one of the chief methods of making bad loans) almost since the product was created in the 1980s. But as you cited, no one would be left holding the bag but the taxpayers, so no one cared. I think all the amazement over how this happened on the part of real estate pros and government officials was sheer hypocrisy.
Corporations are awash in cash. The stock market is more volatile than it used to be, but it recovered from its initial crash. It could be argued that the stimulus saved corporate America while leaving ordinary Americans floundering. Funny how all those banks we saved as “too big to fail” can’t manage to loan, but CAN manage to foreclose at record rates.
Ahem. The Dems made every effort to end the Bush tax cuts and increase revenues but were unable to in the face of rabid Republican opposition.
The Dems have come up with some pretty good solutions: strong stimulus, raise taxes to increase revenue, make reasonable adjustments in entitlements. The Republicans have fought them like rabid wolverines.
No, it’s not. The Dems got thoroughly bought by the financial markets, just as the Republicans have always been, but the Repubs contributed MUCH more to the financial mess than the Democrats did, and they have been total idiots in their opposition to any rational attempts to deal with it. So … no, it really IS mostly the Republicans’ fault … there is NO equivalence. Republicans are mostly to blame for our economic problems.
No, it isn’t. The question is whether or not Obamacare is really only popular with a minority. Evil Captor claimed it was not; he was wrong. That’s why his opinions are worthless. They are based on fantasy.
Donkey shit. The Democratically-controlled Congress voted to extend the Bush tax cuts. Not only did they not make every effort to end the Bush tax cuts, they took positive action to retain them.
You are working under a cloud of misinformation. The Bush Tax cuts were extended as a concession to Republicans who were adamant that they would obstruct everything unless they were extended for the wealthy.
The Democrats didn’t have the votes to extend the Bush Tax Cuts for the middle class and below. And during the recession, it would have been catastrophic for the economy if it were raised on the already struggling middle class.
So you have to factor in to your argument that the Republicans were trying to hurt the vast majority of the populace, and the only way they could be diverted off their self-destructive course was to allow the high end tax cuts.
I suspect that this level of nuance isn’t really something you’ll accept, but I had to try.
Facts are stubborn things, and are hard to mish mash, try as you might.
See, Evil Captor didn’t even post in this thread until post #91. On the other hand, Sam Stone posted the following in post #64:
In turn, ElvisL1ves rebutted this assertion in post #86, and you posted the following in response, in post #87:
I posted several clarifying points of data.
So, why you bring up Evil Captor at all is not clear whatsoever. You then try to further twist the original point altogether.
Please try to keep a simple line of argument straight. I mean, I praised you for being concise earlier. One of the reasons to be concise is to keep a line of argument as clear as possible.
This quote from Sam Stone is a good example of fact-free bullshit that continues to be perpetuated by the right, but is in fact entirely at odds with any empirical examination of the matter. Paul Krugman recently highlighted some more in-depth analysis of the situation done by David Min. You should check it out – it even has easy to read charts to illustrate the complete absence of evidence that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were particularly to blame for the meltdown.
I invite Sam Stone to rebut this, and failing that, to discontinue spreading falsehoods about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
This provides the best answer to why hyperpartisanship is so rampant. It explains how politics is rooted in human psychogy better than anything else you will ever read.
I’d love to see Sam make a post that used actual facts and evidence to back up his claims about Fannie and Freddie. Sam, you keep on making these claims but when asked you never actually back your claims up with any evidence. And that’s because there isn’t a single study or paper that makes the case, because the case can’t be made. it’s only empty rhetoric by the right to try and blame the economic meltdown on “government”.
Go on Sam, show us some actual facts and evidence that show F and F caused the meltdown. I bet you’ll do what you normally do and refuse to answer.