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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (32757)	2/16/2009 12:57:59 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

These people seem to refuse to process the data that does not conform to their world view. They can repeat your words right back to you, but seem to be unable remember them five minutes later and then revert to their world view as soon after purging the contradictory data.

To: KLP who wrote (32757)	2/16/2009 11:12:50 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

John McCain Thinks He's Awesome How to Lose Friends and Misuse Air Time Posted by Andrew Tobolowsky on 02.16.2009 411mania.com It's a time worn phenomenon, and one that is certainly bipartisan—the idea that even if you lose an election, as long as you've thrown yourself in the public eye, when you get back to where you came from you're going to be some kind of hero. I'm John McCain, people know me, I used to run for president---I have many leatherbound books. Why has this drawn my ire? Several reasons. 1) It was a bad beginning for Obama's presidency because he did not sit down bipartisanly. Let's be fair. It takes two not to tango. I feel confident that Judd Gregg resigned, for example, because Obama had very clumsily made him feel like he was only up there for show—on the other hand, he might have stuck it out and had a say, who knows? But really, I find it extremely hard to believe that only three republican senators actually felt we didn't need a stimulus package. I think the rest of them took what you might call the easy way out. They knew that if even just a few republican senators went for it it would pass—and the rest would be able to save their reputations, save themselves from any negative consequences, and still have what they know this country needs happen. I mean come on, guys. There are to date about two Republican governors who are explicitly against the stimulus, and one of those is the ever-brilliant Rick Perry who is also claiming that in addition to not wanting the stimulus at all, Texas isn't getting enough money for it. So everybody who is republican but actually has a budget to balance wants it—and we're supposed to believe something like 93% of Senate Republicans REALLY think it's a bad idea? It's not even a little bit possible that the Republican Senators know they have the luxury not to be in the line of fire for this thing--and still get it? 2) "We are committing generational theft…laying a huge deficit on future generations of Americans." Come ON, John. You know what we have? A huge deficit. I mean real huge. Yeah, this'll make it huger—but let's be honest. There is no one, not even the most diehard Republican, who can deny that the absolute best years to be the national deficit (presuming that, as national deficit, you would want to be fed) were the Reagan and Bush II years. This issue isn't even about whether Republican fiscal policy is good for the economy. This is just math. The deficit under Reagan and Bush II exploded like a fat man in a track suit on a Phoenix summer day. And NOW it upsets you, John McCain? 3) "Republicans were guilty of this kind of behavior….I'm not saying that we did things different. But Americans want us to do things differently and they want us to work together." You know what's the easiest thing in the world to do? To say other people are doing things incorrectly, and give vague statements about how they might be better. You know what there wasn't ANYWHERE in what McCain said? A suggestion about how to go about things. It is so easy to complain. Especially when you've been given so much more public eye-time than you're used to, it's easy to backseat drive. And it's really, really easy to cover your own ass when you're not going to be anywhere near the blame. I would respect him, I would respect anyone, who disagreed with me by saying "we should do things this way, because of x, x, x" except for all of you lovely "BUT IF PEOPLE COULD ONLY KEEP THE MONEY THEY EARN ETC" truthers. But I can't respect someone who wants to be in the way, simply because they have that luxury. So it goes, and not just for him. It's all positioning, and not much help.

To: KLP who wrote (32757)	2/17/2009 11:31:20 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

McCain's Vote Should Trouble Obama By the president's own standard of bipartisanship, he has failed. FEBRUARY 16, 2009, 11:28 P.M. ET "John McCain Was Right." That's one headline we ought to see when President Barack Obama puts his name to the stimulus bill in Denver later today. But we won't. And the reason points to a glaring double standard on bipartisanship. The Arizona senator is a bellwether of 'bipartisanship.' When Mr. McCain accepted the Republican nomination for president, he noted that while he and his opponent both spoke about moving beyond partisan divisions, only one of them had a history of working with members of both parties to get things done. "I have that record and the scars to prove it," he said. "Senator Obama does not." Only a month ago, with Mr. Obama holding a dinner in Mr. McCain's honor, it wasn't hard to imagine the two coming together on the big challenges facing our nation. But now Mr. McCain has come out strongly against the stimulus in a spirited dissent suggesting that the whole process was a "bad beginning" for someone who promised a new spirit of bipartisanship. That ought to give White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel pause, if only because it wasn't all that long ago that Barack Obama was speaking the same way. In a passage from his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope," he sounds like a Republican complaining about the stimulus. "Genuine bipartisanship," he wrote, "assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained -- by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate -- to negotiate in good faith. * "If these conditions do not hold -- if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs . . . are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so -- the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100% of what it wants, go on to concede 10%, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this 'compromise' of being 'obstructionist.' "For the minority party in such circumstances, 'bipartisanship' comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled, although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being 'moderate' or 'centrist.'" As a rule, complaints about the "lack of bipartisanship" generally represent the whine of the losing side. With regard to Mr. Obama's handling of the stimulus, however -- his first big test as president -- they have a more interesting subtext. For one thing, his promises of a postpartisan future in some ways became the substance of a campaign built on lofty but largely undefined invocations of "hope" and "change." For another, a stimulus package with strong bipartisan support was well within his reach. Even at full strength, the Republicans didn't have the votes to obstruct the stimulus if they had wanted to. And with a little imagination, a White House in search of bipartisan support might have easily picked off Republicans by exploiting differences within the party. Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter suggests, for example, infrastructure as one area popular with some of his fellow Republicans. Had Democrats added, say, a few more infrastructure projects, perhaps a half-dozen Republicans in the Senate and as many as 30 or 40 in the House might have signed on. But the White House went the other way. "President Obama has never been able to say 'No' to the left of his party," he says. "So instead of having Rahm Emanuel keeping Congressional Democrats in line, they left this bill to the most partisan members of Congress, starting with Nancy Pelosi." Mr. McCotter has a point. For all of Mr. Obama's eloquence on the need for Democrats to be more respectful of religion, more willing to confront the teachers' unions, and more open to the opportunities of the market, when it comes time for action it's a different story. On issues from abortion to free trade, Mr. Obama's votes suggest a man careful not to do anything to offend the Democratic Party's most entrenched interest groups. What does this mean for the next four years? We are told that when LBJ learned of Walter Cronkite's famous broadcast questioning U.S. policy in Vietnam, he said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." In a similar way, it might be worth asking what John McCain's strong dissent says about this president's commitment to lead us into a postpartisan future. That was the standard Mr. Obama promised during his campaign. Now that he's got his bill, it will be instructive to see if he will be held to that standard by an "exacting" press corps he says is essential to ensuring that a ruling party negotiates in good faith. Write to MainStreet@wsj.com online.wsj.com * Silencing your opposition with retorts such as "I Won" is hardly what anyone would call negotiating in good faith.

To: KLP who wrote (32757)	2/23/2009 9:05:36 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Is This the Change You Voted For? Scott Wheeler Friday, February 20, 2009 How will spending three quarters of a trillion dollars fix the economy? No one had read the stimulus bill before it passed Congress, including the one who said it was absolutely necessary. “I feel such a sense of urgency about the recovery plan before Congress,” Obama wrote in the Washington Post on February 5th. It must be just the mere magic of saying we are going to spend that amount that fixes the economy. I am not being facetious. No one had read the bill when the House and Senate voted on and passed it, yet we were told over and over that if Obama wasn’t given nearly a trillion dollars to spend immediately, the country as we know it would be finished. “Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse,” Obama wrote. It sounded more like an extortion racket, especially since Obama actually does have the power to tank the economy just by saying what he had been saying about how it was the worst economy in our lifetime. Obama has nearly a trillion dollars to pass out now to “fix” the economy and no one is bothering to ask the question “what qualifies Obama to fix the economy, and if merely spending money fixes it, then the economy shouldn’t be broken should it?” What experience does Obama have at fixing anything? He has never run a state, city, company or even a hotdog stand. The sidewalk vendors on the mall outside the White House have more business experience than Obama. Not that anyone would know that since the liberal media utterly ignored this lack of experience during the campaign and still failed to mention it while he was holding the economy hostage to get his $787 billion. In addressing a question about whether his stimulus bill increasing the deficit by nearly a trillion dollars would actually help the economy or not, Obama responded with a political attack on Bush referring to the deficit he inherited from the previous administration without explaining why adding a trillion dollars to it was going to help anything. Shameful, considering Obama faithfully voted to increase that deficit while he was in the Senate. So much for the politics of “change.” What this tells us is how Obama plans to use the economy he talked down before his stimulus package passed: if the situation improves he will take credit for fixing it and cite government intervention as the solution; if it worsens, he has already laid the groundwork to blame Bush, capitalism and free market economics. Revealing their true intentions, Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, freely explained to the Wall Street Journal how the administration intends to exploit the recession. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before." That sounds like an amateur’s conflation of Machiavelli and Hegel: semantically creating the crisis for drastic consolidation of power in their hands. Now they have all the legitimacy a trillion dollars will buy. If it was really necessary to bum-rush the largest spending bill in history through Congress, why wasn’t Obama standing by to sign it as soon as it passed instead of jetting off to his three day weekend in Chicago to be seen in all the trendy spots? Is it because saving the nation from economic disaster interfered with his social schedule? It’s because to Obama it is just all political theater, the words mean nothing -- it’s all part of the show. That is how he is able to tell you one day how America is going to be over soon if he doesn’t get nearly a trillion dollars to hand out and then go out on an excursion the next, using our Air Force and Marine Corps equipment as his personal amusement park rides. Mocking the very idea that tax cuts stimulate the economy and productive Americans should get some say over how their hard earned money is spent, Obama wrote, “I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.” But Obama doesn’t represent change; he represents the very essence of the problems that our economy suffers from now, an alarming expansion of bureaucratic, freedom-smothering government. The long march from lean liberty to fat slavery is now at a full gallop. This isn’t the change that productive Americans voted for. townhall.com