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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (77706)	2/19/2010 10:02:27 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Respond to of 90947

Krauthammer's Take By: NRO Staff The Corner On the first anniversary of the stimulus package: <<< The only hard number in all of this is the amount spent on the stimulus. That's the only real number, which the CBO has told us is now up to $862 billion. It will be $1 trillion with all the interest. And we know that that is going to have a real effect, meaning it's going to increase our debt payments -- interest payments -- and interest rates in the future. So that's a fact. Everything else is speculative. This idea of jobs saved or created -- the Bureau of Labor Statistics has hundreds of numbers and statistics. It does not have a statistic dealing with saved jobs. And the reason is that it can't be measured. It doesn't exist. It's a fiction. The administration repeats [that] it saved a million jobs, a million and a half, or two million. All we know for sure is that the huge expenditures that were given to states to bail out the ones that had overspent or were almost bankrupt did, for a year or two of the stimulus, keep a lot of bureaucrats of state governments employed. So, perhaps you could say, well, in the midst of a real recession you wanted to bottom out the trough -- but $1 trillion dollars is a high price for a very small and temporary effect. >>> On Ken Gormley’s just released book on the Clinton impeachment, The Death of American Virtue: <<< Senator Moynihan was once asked if he had read a book, and he said: "Yes, but not personally." So that's my relationship with the Gormley book. I do believe it's scrupulous. I have heard others say it covers a lot of this ground. But I think in looking at the whole affair, it's really a period piece. It's like reading Jane Austen. You have got to imagine what it was like in that era. The '90s was an incredibly strange era -- [there] was profound peace, prosperity. And only in that circumstance could you ever have had this high drama over what was essentially a trivial affair. I'm talking about his [President Clinton's] dalliances. There was a core issue here -- lying under oath. And it was a serious issue because, in fact, Clinton found that his license in Arkansas to practice law was suspended as a result of that. So that in and of itself is not a trivial issue. But for an issue like this to have risen to the point of only our second impeachment in the history of our country could only have happened in this "holiday from history" which we had between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the war on jihadism [that began] on 9/11. >>> corner.nationalreview.com