Political Quotes of the Day

[kwlyon]

PWNd!!!!....by a 12 year old teeniebopper.

[Dardedar]

"New rule: Stop calling it Obamacare. It's not like Obama will be the doctor for
your next prostate exam. That's just a common fantasy of Republican men."
-- Bill Maher

[L.Wood]

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HUCKABEE GETS HIS ASS HANDED TO HIM BY JUDGE NAPOLINTANO on DOM ACT:
......
Judge Napolitano gave Huckabee the first word on the Freedom Watch debate, asking Huckabee whether he believed President Obama’s decision to not really enforce the Defense of Marriage Act was legally correct. “I’m not a lawyer,” Huckabee admitted, adding, without skipping a beat, “he was legally wrong.” He went on to explain that, to him, “the most basic form of government is the family… Mother and father raising children, that’s government.” Changing the definition legally, he adds, would be a slippery slope towards polygamy.

That argument doesn’t quite fly with Judge Napolitano, who then employs what is possibly the rarest argument against preventing same-sex couples from marrying, throwing Huckabee for a bit of a loop: “It’s a contract,” he notes, “an agreement between two people whose hearts have joined together. What business is that of the government?” He further adds that nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government given permission to become involved in marriage, making it difficult for him to see how a federal legal definition is constitutional. Huckabee contends that the government wastes extraordinary amounts of money subsidizing single parents, and that the poverty levels for unmarried parents are unacceptably high.

“But none of that has anything to do with the same-sex couple down the block being allowed to live together and be married,” Napolitano counters, asking Huckabee why he seems so keen on wanting “to get into their bedroom.” Huckabee, with a look on his face that indicates he just had a mental image he really didn’t want to see, quips that conservatives “don’t want to see what’s going on in that bedroom,” and then resorts to arguing that natural law overrules the Constitution (again, Huckabee is not a lawyer). “This is the preacher in you, not the governor,” Napolitano advises. Huckabee tries to rebut this claim but ultimately notes that marriage is between a man and a woman to him “and to God.”

Rest of Mediatite ishere

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[Dardedar]

The Hollow Cry of ‘Broke’

“We’re broke! We’re broke!” Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday. “We’re broke in this state,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said a few days ago. “New Jersey’s broke,” Gov. Chris Christie has said repeatedly. The United States faces a “looming bankruptcy,” Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
It’s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more “broke” than a family with a mortgage or a college loan. And states have to balance their budgets. Though it may disappoint many conservatives, there will be no federal or state bankruptcies."

New York Times

[Dardedar]

"And like it or hate it, it [Al Jazeera] is really effective. And in fact viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners."
--Hillary Clinton, telling us (correctly) that our news is shit.

"Ryan Grim wrote about Al Jazeera and the fact that it is unavailable to most homes in the U.S.

Media critics have begun to push for Al Jazeera's inclusion. "It is downright un-American to still refuse to carry it," wrote Jeff Jarvis on Sunday. "Vital, world-changing news is occurring in the Middle East and no one-not the xenophobic or celebrity-obsessed or cut-to-the-bone American media-can bring the perspective, insight, and on-the-scene reporting Al Jazeera English can."

Huff Po

[Dardedar]

[Dardedar]

George Will rips Huckabee and Gingrich each a new bumhole. Nice:

"A spokesman for Huckabee dutifully lied, saying his employer "simply misspoke": "The governor meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia." Obama did not really grow up there - he spent just five of his first 18 years there and the other 13 years in Hawaii. But obviously Huckabee, with his dilation on the Mau Maus, was deliberately referring to Kenya. Unless Huckabee thinks the Mau Maus were Indonesians, which he might count as another "one thing that I do know."

Wash. Po

[Dardedar]

"America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true."

Michael Moore speech

UPDATE: PolitiFact rates as TRUE Michael Moore's claim that 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

[Dardedar]

A bit more on this "America is broke" theme I am regularly knocking down.

America isn't broke because America's assets vastly out weigh its debt. If America is broke, than I am broke and many people doing very well are broke because they have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt (usually mortgage). But I'm not broke. Like America, my assets exceed my debt. And even if they didn't, that is future debt, a debt that will be paid off in the future with earnings as they come in (however, unlike America, I am not on an unsustainable debt to earnings trajectory).

This claim about America "being broke" needs some further context. I thought it would be interesting to look up per capita debt among our peer nations and see how we are doing. I was quite pleasantly surprised.

First, here is the list of nations sorted by public debt as a percentage of GDP. The US comes in 36th. Not sure how important that category is compared with external debt. It seems to me external debt may be a more important picture. But apparently it isn't all that important because most of our very successful peers, have much more external debt as a percentage of GDP and are doing quite well. Here is the top ten:

1) Luxembourg (debt is) 4636% of GDP (also the wealthiest country per capita. Apparently they borrowed most of it)
2) Ireland... 1224%
3) Norway... 861%
4) Liberia... 606%
5) United Kingdom... 410%
6) Switzerland... 364%
7) Sao Tome and Principe... 349%
8) Netherlands... 344%
9) Belgium... 322%
10) Denmark... 274%

Where other peer countries rank (skipping lots):

Sweden... 241%
Hong Kong... 233%
France... 188%
Greece... 165%
Germany... 159%
Spain... 157%
Australia... 131%
Italy... 124%
Eurozone... 120%

38) USA... 97%

40) World... 95%

50) Canada... 75%

76) Japan... 51%

China... 4%

List of countries by external debt

More from a CNBC analysis (which doesn't include many smaller countries):



LINK

MORE. Excerpts from an article in Bloomberg.

“The U.S. government is not broke,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy for Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. “There’s no evidence that the market is treating the U.S. government like it’s broke.”

The U.S. today is able to borrow at historically low interest rates, paying 0.68 percent on a two-year note that it had to offer at 5.1 percent before the financial crisis began in 2007. Financial products that pay off if Uncle Sam defaults aren’t attracting unusual investor demand. And tax revenue as a percentage of the economy is at a 60-year low, meaning if the government needs to raise cash and can summon the political will, it could do so...

A person, company or nation would be defined as “broke” if it couldn’t pay its bills, and that is not the case with the U.S. Despite an annual budget deficit expected to reach $1.6 trillion this year, the government continues to meet its financial obligations, and investors say there is little concern that will change.

The cost of insuring for five years a notional $10 million in U.S. government debt is $45,830, less than half the cost in February 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, according to data provider CMA data. That makes U.S. government debt the fifth safest of 156 countries rated and less likely to suffer default than any major economy, including every member of the G20.

Creditors regard Venezuela, Greece and Argentina as the three riskiest countries. Buying credit default insurance on a notional $10 million of those nations’ debt costs $1.2 million, $950,000 and $665,000 respectively...

Less Likely to Default

CMA prices for credit insurance show that global investors consider it more likely that France, Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Australia or Germany will default than the U.S.

Pacific Investment Management Co., which operates the largest bond fund, the $239 billion Total Return Fund, sees so little risk of a U.S. default it may sell other investors insurance against the prospect. Andrew Balls, Pimco managing director, told reporters Feb. 28 in London that the chances the U.S. would not meet its obligations were “vanishingly small.”

George Magnus, senior economic adviser for UBS Investment Bank in London, says the U.S. dollar’s status as the global economy’s unit of account means the U.S. can’t go broke.

“You have the reserve currency,” Magnus said. “You can print as much as you need. So there’s no question all debts will be repaid.”

Bloomberg article

[L.Wood]

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IMPORTANT ANNIVERSARY DATE:

Edward R. Murrow:
A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
See it Now (CBS-TV, March 9, 1954)

Murrow: Good evening. Tonight See it Now devotes its entire half hour to a report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy told mainly in his own words and pictures. But first, ALCOA would like you to meet a man who has been with them for fifty years. (Commercial break.)

Murrow: Because a report on Senator McCarthy is by definition controversial, we want to say exactly what we mean to say, and I request your permission to read from the script whatever remarks Murrow and Friendly may make. If the Senator feels that we have done violence to his words or pictures and so desires to speak, to answer himself, an opportunity will be afforded him on this program. Our working thesis tonight is this question: If this fight against Communism is made a fight between America's two great political parties, the American people know that one of these parties will be destroyed, and the Republic cannot endure very long as a one party system.
....
No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

Entire See it Now transcript at UC Berkley archives

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[Dardedar]

Are America's Best Days Behind Us?

"...most Americans operate on the assumption that the U.S. is still No. 1.
But is it? Yes, the U.S. remains the world's largest economy, and we have the largest military by far, the most dynamic technology companies and a highly entrepreneurial climate. But these are snapshots of where we are right now. The decisions that created today's growth — decisions about education, infrastructure and the like — were made decades ago. What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and '60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies. Look at some underlying measures today, and you will wonder about the future.

The following rankings come from various lists, but they all tell the same story. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), our 15-year-olds rank 17th in the world in science and 25th in math. We rank 12th among developed countries in college graduation (down from No. 1 for decades). We come in 79th in elementary-school enrollment. Our infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, well behind that of every other major advanced economy. American health numbers are stunning for a rich country: based on studies by the OECD and the World Health Organization, we're 27th in life expectancy, 18th in diabetes and first in obesity. Only a few decades ago, the U.S. stood tall in such rankings. No more. There are some areas in which we are still clearly No. 1, but they're not ones we usually brag about. We have the most guns. We have the most crime among rich countries..."

TIME magazine

[Dardedar]

Kudlow, listening to a report about the global stock markets doing well in the wake of the quake. "All in all, the market taking this in stride," his co-host said to him.

"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that," Kudlow responded. "And the human toll is a tragedy, we know that."

LINK

[Dardedar]

"The House Committee on the Judiciary is scheduled to vote March 17 on H. Con. Res. 13, a measure “reaffirming” In God We Trust as the national motto and encouraging its display in all public buildings, including public schools. Said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, “This is divisive and a diversion from important national issues. No wonder public opinion of Congress is so low. We face a dire economic situation, the threat of a government shut-down and world instability, and House members are wasting time on symbolic religious issues.“ Millions of Americans believe in God and millions do not,” Lynn continued. “I doubt if any of them will make their decision about religious belief based on a politician’s non-binding resolution.” Lynn said the real reason for the resolution, introduced by Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), is to curry favor with Religious Right leaders who are increasingly anxious for their Republican allies in the House to act on social issues.“ This resolution is an easy way for House Speaker Boehner and his friends to try to mollify religious conservatives,” said Lynn. “It’s shameful and disrespectful to use religion as a political tool.“ If members of Congress want to get into the decorating business, I suggest that they promote the posting of the Bill of Rights in public schools and buildings,” said Lynn. “That’s artwork that all Americans should be able to agree on.” Lynn noted that “In God We Trust” was only adopted by Congress as the national motto in 1956 during the Cold War when American leaders wanted to distinguish the United States from the communists running the Soviet Union. A better motto for America, Lynn said, is “E Pluribus Unum,” the original one adopted in 1782 as part of the national seal. “E Pluribus Unum is Latin for ‘Out of many, one,’” said Lynn. “That’s a good description of America, one nation made up of people from many lands and faith perspectives.”

As seen on Skeptic Money

[Dardedar]

The Right-Wing Nutjob Quote-O-Matic

LINK

First three samples I got when set on "Dumbest Quotes of All Time":

''This was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.''
—Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, rewriting history while speaking at a Connecticut fundraiser about the war in Afghanistan, which President Bush launched following the 9/11 terrorist attacks (July 2, 2010)

''God is giving a plan I think to me that is not really a plan. ... The problem is that I think the plan that the Lord would have us follow is hard for people to understand. ... Because of my track record with you who have been here for a long time. Because of my track record with you, I beg of you to help me get this message out, and I beg of you to pray for clarity on my part.''
—Glenn Beck, ''The Glenn Beck Program,'' April 20, 2010

''The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and left out there. It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is.''
—Rush Limbaugh, on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, May 3, 2010

[Dardedar]

Obama kicked some serious right-wing, bullshit, budget, butt today:

***
"Now, to their credit, one vision has been presented and championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that.

These are both worthy goals. They’re worthy goals for us to achieve. But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.

A 70 percent cut in clean energy. A 25 percent cut in education. A 30 percent cut in transportation. Cuts in college Pell Grants that will grow to more than $1,000 per year. That’s the proposal. These aren’t the kind of cuts you make when you’re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget. These aren’t the kinds of cuts that the Fiscal Commission proposed. These are the kinds of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America that I believe in and I think you believe in.

I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them.

Go to China and you’ll see businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean children are outpacing our kids in math and science. They’re scrambling to figure out how they put more money into education. Brazil is investing billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on high-priced gasoline, but on biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a vision that says the American people, the United States of America -– the greatest nation on Earth -– can’t afford any of this.

It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that 10 years from now, if you’re a 65-year-old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the insurance that’s available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck -– you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.

It’s a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. Who are these 50 million Americans? Many are somebody’s grandparents -- may be one of yours -- who wouldn’t be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some of these kids with disabilities are -- the disabilities are so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.

And worst of all, this is a vision that says even though Americans can’t afford to invest in education at current levels, or clean energy, even though we can’t afford to maintain our commitment on Medicare and Medicaid, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about that.

In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That’s who needs to pay less taxes?

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right. And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President."

Crooks and liars

[Dardedar]

For X3:

***
"After reading your divorce proposal, on behalf of all liberal progressives, I accept. In fact, we don’t even need to equally divide the territory. We’ll take the blue states and you can take the red states. We’ll take the Pacific and North Atlantic regions. You can have Middle America, the South and the Gulf of Mexico (if you still want it).

We’ll develop wind/solar/bio-diesel power. You can have what’s left of the oil, and continue to power your economy from a nonrenewable, dwindling energy source. When your oil runs out, we might even let you have some of our “commie” technology.

You can have our giant, over bloated military and start as many wars as your heart desires, and we’ll spend our money on health care and education.

We’ll take those liberal bastions of communism, such as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley. You can have Bob Jones University and Ole’ Miss.

We’ll take the liberal pinkos like Warren Buffet, Larry Page, Bill Gates and George Soros. You can have Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and what’s left of Wall Street.

We will gladly take the ACLU and our liberal judges. We’ll take our dirty, liberal legislation like the Civil Rights Act, and you can have Jim Crow laws. We’ll take equality for all people regardless of ethnicity, race, sexual orientation or gender. You can discriminate against the [minorities] and begin a new era of McCarthyism . You can also have Thomas, Scalia, Alito, and Roberts. We’ll take the UN and international law.

We’ll take our socialist allies such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands. You’ll be in the oil business, so you can take our Middle Eastern allies such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kuwait, and Egypt. Once you’ve gotten rid of that unnecessary separation of church and state, you guys will find you have a lot in common. Since we took the UN, we feel we should warn you that the Security Council will no longer be vetoing resolutions critical of Israel or America’s illegal wars.

We also need to divide up America’s history. We’ll take the notoriously liberal founders such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Ben Franklin. You can have George Washington and James Madison. We’ll take all those writers who pollute America’s history with radical, liberal dissent and humanistic ideas such as Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Noam Chomsky, and Kurt Vonnegut. You can have Ayn Rand and Bill O'Reilly. You can have your war loving “National Anthem” and we’ll take Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Our Land.”

[Dardedar]

"Discussion in the media has centered on economics -- on the President’s budget policy compared with the Republican budget put forth by Paul Ryan. But, as Robert Reich immediately pointed out, “Ten or twelve-year budgets are baloney. It’s hard enough to forecast budgets a year or two into the future.” The real economic issues are economic recovery and the distribution of wealth. As I have observed, the Republican focus on the deficit is really a strategy for weakening government and turning the country conservative in every respect. The real issue is existential: what is America at heart and what is America to be."

Obama Returns to his Moral Vision: Democrats Read Carefully!

[Dardedar]

"Trump behavior is exactly what it looks like when there is very little frontal lobe activity and a person is driven almost entirely by lower brain function. All nasty, reactive, knee jerk, angry emotion and they can't for the life of them get their facts straight. Because discerning facts and reality require properly functioning reasoning skills. And the lower limbic "rat brain" portion of the human brain doesn't do that very well (see a rat).

An excellent candidate for the republican party indeed!"

--Me

[Dardedar]

The great budget debate

Posted by Max Brantley on Sun, Apr 24, 2011

Stunning, too, has been the noisy defense of the comfort-the-rich plan from Tea Partyers, some of whom have boasted here of their own wisdom and financial acuity as they deride the less fortunate as parasitic welfare cases.

With that as a setup, I want to call attention to a post TAP added on our open line last night.

I went to check out a couple of those blood-sucking Entitlement Seekers for myself today. The old man left the Louisiana bottoms at 12 and spent 50 years working two jobs, factory by day; janitor by night. The woman started cleaning houses in the Heights once her youngest went off to first grade—worked for one family nigh on thirty years.
It's their own fault they didn't save much for retirement — foolish choices in their youth like buying World Book and Childcraft encyclopedia for their kids instead of making shrewd stock buys. The old lady should have known the various Heights Ma'ams weren't paying Social Security. Besides, who knows how many half-days of work they missed to attend every parent-teacher conference for each of their four kids. No reason we should have to pay for their bad decisions.

Now they are in poor health—sitting around gobbling up Medicare funds and draining the Social Security trust fund. Well, not entirely — the old man still works as a janitor three hours every day, although he's 83.

Plainly they are bloodsuckers, but it's hard to think of them that way.

And not just because they are my parents.

ARK Times

[Dardedar]

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