Political Quotes of the Day

[Dardedar]

...funny how two Arkansans found their way to Intrade...

Indeed. Actually I'm from Canada, but I've been here since 1987. Sort of a political missionary helping out the confused. Another fine point I see you making on intrade today (which we also posted on this forum last year):

Bush, Fiscal years 2002-2009:

Wars and Defense.........1.469 T
Tax Cuts.......................1.812 T
Non Defense Disc..........0.608 T
TARP and bailouts.........0.224 T
Medicare Drug Benefit....0.180 T
2008 Stimulus + other....0.773 T
No savings
---------------------------------------------
Total.............................5.07 T


Obama 09-17, includes projections

Stimulus........................0.711 T
Non Def. Disc.................0.278 T
Stim tax cuts.................0.425 T
Health & ent. changes....0.152 T

Savings, Defense...........(0.126 T)
-----------------------------------------------
Total.............................1.44 T

NYT's

[supak]

Indeed. Actually I'm from Canada, but I've been here since 1987.

I left for CA in 1986, right after I graduated.

My name, my uncle's name, and my grandpa's name are all in the sidewalks.

[Dardedar]

"Overall employment in the Obama years has been held back by mass layoffs of schoolteachers and other state and local government employees.
But private-sector employment has recovered almost all the ground lost in the administration’s early months. That compares favorably with the
Bush era: as of March 2004, private employment was still 2.4 million below its level when Mr. Bush took office.
Oh, and where have those mass layoffs of schoolteachers been taking place? Largely in states controlled by the G.O.P.: 70 percent of public job
losses have been either in Texas or in states where Republicans recently took control."
The Amnesia Candidate, by Paul Krugman

[Dardedar]

Clinton and Colbert at TIME 100

TIME magazine transcript of Colbert's comments

[Dardedar]

Extremism In Congress: 'Even Worse Than It Looks'?

April 30, 2012
Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein are no strangers to D.C. politics. The two of them have been in Washington for more than 40 years — and they're renowned for their carefully nonpartisan positions.

But now, they say, Congress is more dysfunctional than it has been since the Civil War, and they aren't hesitating to point a finger at who they think is to blame.

"One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition," they write in their new book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks.

Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, join Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep to talk about the book, which comes out this week.

Mann and Ornstein posit that democracy in America is being endangered by extreme politics. From the first day of the Obama administration, Ornstein says, our constitutional system hasn't been allowed to work.

"When we did get action, half the political process viewed it as illegitimate, tried to undermine its implementation and moved to repeal it," Ornstein says.

The authors make no secret of whom they blame for most of the dysfunction in Congress — the Republican Party. And Ornstein says some of his colleagues at AEI, which is known as a conservative-leaning think tank, "are going to be quite uncomfortable" with his position.

"...for Republicans currently inside Congress, you have a new set of litmus tests and a new outlook that leads them in directions where you can't say that there is such a thing as climate change, you take positions on things like immigration that are simply off the rails, and if you compromise, you are basically defiling what the party stands for," Ornstein says.

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/30/151522725 ... n-congress

[Dardedar]

Political Quote of the Day:

When I referred to a comment on Facebook by Congressman Womack, as "Partisan Pap," a Mr. Franks chimed in:

"Partisan Pap would be a great name for a Republican beer: brewed against the grain, colorless and tasteless, with an empty head.
If you get a taste of it, it will make you sick, and if you drink much of it, it will keep you sick. Unlike most beers seen in ads, this
one makes you antisocial. Of course, like all alcoholic beverages, it is especially bad for women, in ways too numerous to mention."

[Dardedar]

Paul Ryan now:

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and
it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,”
who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says."

Paul Ryan then:

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,"
Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

Crooksandliars

[L.Wood]

.

Ryan: “I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy.

Poor old Ayn Rand. Can't get any help. She died poor and dependent upon government programs to keep her alive.
It's election time and Ryan's planned destruction of Medicare isn't playing so well back home. Had his planned destruction
occurred back when Rand was living out her last years, dependent upon Medicare and Social Security she really wouldn't
have lasted as long as she did.
Glad Ryan is having his 'Come-to-Jesus' moment.

[David Franks]

Glad Ryan is having his 'Come-to-Jesus' moment.

Ryan will go nowhere near Jesus.

[Dardedar]

[Dardedar]

"The people who work for the wire services and the news networks are physically incapable of writing sentences like, 'This election is even more over than the Knicks-Heat series.' They are required, if not by law then by neurological reflex, to describe every presidential campaign as 'fierce' and 'drawn-out' and 'hotly-contested.'

> But this campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it'll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse. And everybody knows it. It's just impossible to take Mitt Romney seriously as a presidential candidate. Even the news reporters who are paid to drum up dramatic undertones are having a hard time selling Romney as half of a titanic title bout." Rolling Stone

[Dardedar]

[Dardedar]

Why We Regulate
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 13, 2012

Excerpt:
"...what JPMorgan has just demonstrated is that even supposedly smart bankers must be sharply limited in the kinds of risk they’re allowed to take on.

Why, exactly, are banks special? Because history tells us that banking is and always has been subject to occasional destructive “panics,” which can wreak havoc with the economy as a whole. Current right-wing mythology has it that bad banking is always the result of government intervention, whether from the Federal Reserve or meddling liberals in Congress. In fact, however, Gilded Age America — a land with minimal government and no Fed — was subject to panics roughly once every six years. And some of these panics inflicted major economic losses.

So what can be done? In the 1930s, after the mother of all banking panics, we arrived at a workable solution, involving both guarantees and oversight. On one side, the scope for panic was limited via government-backed deposit insurance; on the other, banks were subject to regulations intended to keep them from abusing the privileged status they derived from deposit insurance, which is in effect a government guarantee of their debts. Most notably, banks with government-guaranteed deposits weren’t allowed to engage in the often risky speculation characteristic of investment banks like Lehman Brothers.

This system gave us half a century of relative financial stability. Eventually, however, the lessons of history were forgotten. New forms of banking without government guarantees proliferated, while both conventional and newfangled banks were allowed to take on ever-greater risks. Sure enough, we eventually suffered the 21st-century version of a Gilded Age banking panic, with terrible consequences.

It’s clear, then, that we need to restore the sorts of safeguards that gave us a couple of generations without major banking panics. It’s clear, that is, to everyone except bankers and the politicians they bankroll — for now that they have been bailed out, the bankers would of course like to go back to business as usual. Did I mention that Wall Street is giving vast sums to Mitt Romney, who has promised to repeal recent financial reforms?"

New York Times

[Dardedar]

Now here's some rant:

***
An open letter to the people who hate Obama more than they love America

"I meet you all the time. You hate Obama. You hate gay people. You hate black people, immigrants, Muslims, labor unions, women who want the right to make choices concerning their bodies, you hate em all. You hate being called racist. You hate being called a bigot. Maybe if you talked about creating jobs more than you talk about why you hate gay people we wouldn't call you bigots. Maybe if you talked about black people without automatically assuming they are on food stamps while demanding their birth certificates we wouldn't call you racist. You hate socialism and social justice. You hate regulations and taxes and spending and the Government. You hate.

You like war. You like torture. You like Jesus. I don't know how in the hell any of that is compatible, but no one ever accused you haters of being over-committed to ideological consistency. You like people who look like you or at least hate most of the things that you hate. You hate everything else.

Now, I know you profess to love our country and the founding fathers (unless you are reminded that they believed in the separation of church and state), but I need to remind you that America is NOT what Fox News says it is. America is a melting pot, it always has been. We are a multi-cultural amalgamation of all kinds of people, and yet you still demonize everyone who is not a rich, white, heterosexual christian male or his submissive and obedient wife.

You hate liberals, moderates, hell, anyone who disagrees with Conservative dogma as espoused by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. You hate em.

Well, here are the facts, Jack. If you hate the Government then you are unqualified to manage it. If you hate gay people more than you love America than you should take your own advice and get the hell out. There are several countries that are openly hostile to gay people, but they are full of brown people and you don't like them much either from what I understand. It looks like you are screwed, but that's not what I am here to tell you."

More rant below the fold . . . Daily KOS

They were just getting warmed up...

[Dardedar]

Asked about comments he gave to conservative commentator Sean Hannity earlier this year, Romney responded, "I stand by what I said, whatever it was." Link

"So Dubya—or, as the RNC calls hims, “Who? Oh,That Guy Whose First Term Was All Clinton’s Fault & Whose Second Term Was All Obama’s Fault” Link

[Dardedar]

"If Mitt Romney is to win the presidency, he'll likely have to clear a high historical hurdle: Getting elected while losing both his state of residence (Massachusetts)
and his native state (Michigan)... The last person to get elected president while losing his home state and his state of birth was James Polk, in 1844."
Link

[Doug]

DOUG WRITES:
Have you seen this? It's a great summary of the myth of the rich as job creators. Just a few minutes long. A proposed TED Talk that they didn't allow to be released by TED.

See here.

[Dardedar]

"If the job of the federal government was to take over companies, load them with debt, make 20% of your earnings of a rigged tax code, raid the pensions which then have to be bailed out by the Pension Guarantee Corp, and then putting all the cash in an offshore account, I'd vote for Willard, because he's just great at that." --Supak on intrade

[Dardedar]

Lee Atwater on the republican Southern Strategy:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."--Lee Atwater LINK

[Dardedar]

Jay Townsend, GOP Spokesman: 'Let's Hurl Some Acid At Those Female Democratic Senators'

Jay Townsend, the official campaign spokesman for the freshman representative, went on a vicious online rant on Saturday, which he began by taunting a constituent who voiced criticism about an earlier post on gas prices. "Listen to Tom. What a little bee he has in his bonnet. Buzz Buzz," Townsend wrote.

"My question today... when is Tommy boy going to weigh in on all the Lilly Ledbetter hypocrites who claim to be fighting the War on Women? Let’s hurl some acid at those female democratic Senators who won’t abide the mandates they want to impose on the private sector."

Comments from outraged constituents quickly followed. "‎'Hurl some acid' Jay Townsend? Do you realize what that means?" wrote one person. "Acid attacks are particularly brutal, aimed almost solely at women, with the intent to maim and disfigure. I couldn't imagine a worse piece of invective from someone who puts the Republican war on women in quotes."

Another commenter: "Mr. Townsend, do you think we live in Afghanistan?"

LINK