The Republicans regularly claim that the deficits and the national debt are the handiwork of the Democrats and Democratic policies. However, the Republicans have been and still are the architects behind our fiscal situation. They’re also a major barrier to resolving the country’s current fiscal situation. It’s amazing that Republicans can keep up this fiction. Via Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire:
New York Times: “The parties share blame for the current fiscal situation, but federal budget statistics show that Republican policies over the last decade, and the cost of the two wars, added far more to the deficit than initiatives approved by the Democratic Congress since 2006, giving voters reason to be skeptical of campaign promises.”
“Calculations by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and other independent fiscal experts show that the $1.1 trillion cost over the next 10 years of the Medicare prescription drug program, which the Republican-controlled Congress adopted in 2003, by itself would add more to the deficit than the combined costs of the bailout, the stimulus and the health care law.”
The federal government’s bailout of financial firms “provided taxpayers with higher returns than they could have made buying 30-year Treasury bonds — enough money to fund the Securities and Exchange Commission for the next two decades,” Bloomberg reports.
“The government has earned $25.2 billion on its investment of $309 billion in banks and insurance companies, an 8.2 percent return over two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That beat U.S. Treasuries, high-yield savings accounts, money-market funds and certificates of deposit. Investing in the stock market or gold would have paid off better.”
Also, Republicans who were opposed to the $787 billion stimulus bill requested funds from it. Via CBS News:
A rallying cry for many Republican candidates this fall is their fierce opposition to the $787 billion stimulus bill.
Texas Rep. Pete Sessions has been ripping the spending package, using such campaign lines as “no to budget-busting stimulus bills.”
Then there is this boast served up by Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann in an advertisement: “I fought against the Bush Wall Street bailout, the failed Pelosi trillion dollar stimulus.”
But it turns out no sooner was the ink dry on the stimulus bill than these lawmakers – and dozens of others from both parties – were reaching out behind the scenes for money to fund millions of dollars in local projects.
“When it came time to get a piece of the pie afterwards, people were writing letters by the dozens,” said John Solomon of the Center for Public Integrity.
That group says it collected nearly 2,000 letters from “scores” of Republicans and conservative Democrats requesting funds from a bill they originally opposed and many still criticize.
But that didn’t stop Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown from asking for $45.4 million in funds or stop Sessions from requesting $81 million in stimulus money for a Texas rail project, a grant he did not win.
CBS News video:
Stimulus Hypocrisy – The Center for Public Integrity says that many Republican and Democratic politicians who were outspoken in their opposition against last year’s stimulus package actually requested funds from that very same project. Armen Keteyian reports.
When it comes to politics, science, and social issues (e.g., the U.S. Constitution, evolution, and healthcare reform), it’s impossible to argue with people that blatantly espouse contradictions, maintain hypocritical double standards, and are content to wallow in their own willful ignorance. First, consider the issues of constitutional rights, poverty, race, and the views maintained by some Republicans and the Tea Party via the New York Times:
In the Tea Party’s talk of states’ rights, critics say they hear an echo of slavery, Jim Crow and George Wallace. Tea Party activists call that ridiculous: they do not want to take the country back to the discrimination of the past, they say, they just want the states to be able to block the federal mandate on health insurance.
Still, the government programs that many Tea Party supporters call unconstitutional are the ones that have helped many black people emerge from poverty and discrimination. It is not just that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for Senate in Kentucky, said that he disagreed on principle with the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that required business owners to serve blacks. It is that many Tea Party activists believe that laws establishing a minimum wage or the federal safety net are an improper expansion of federal power.
Critics rightly note that Dr. King spoke over and over of the need for this country to acknowledge its “debt to the poor,” calling for an “economic bill of rights” that would “guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work.” In Mr. Beck’s taxonomy, this would make him a Marxist.
Also, some Republicans and Tea Party members blatantly cherry-pick the portions of the U.S. Constitution that reflects their world view. However, despite the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution or even the plain language of some portions within the Constitution, there’s a lot in the Constitution that some Republicans and Tea Party members would like to change. Via the Associated Press:
Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia won his seat in Congress campaigning as a strict defender of the Constitution. He carries a copy in his pocket and is particularly fond of invoking the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
But it turns out there are parts of the document he doesn’t care for — lots of them. He wants to get rid of the language about birthright citizenship, federal income taxes and direct election of senators, among others. He would add plenty of stuff, including explicitly authorizing castration as punishment for child rapists.
This hot-and-cold take on the Constitution is surprisingly common within the GOP, particularly among those like Broun who portray themselves as strict Constitutionalists and who frequently accuse Democrats of twisting the document to serve political aims.
. . .
Sessions, who routinely accuses Democrats of trying to subvert the Constitution and calls for respecting the document’s “plain language,” is taking a different approach with the 14th Amendment. “I’m not sure exactly what the drafters of the amendment had in mind,” he said, “but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen.”
Other widely supported Republican amendments would prohibit government ownership of private companies, bar same-sex marriage, require a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise taxes, and — an old favorite — prohibit desecration of the American flag.
. . .
Holding up the 2nd Amendment as sacrosanct, for example, while dismissing other parts of the Constitution is “cherry picking,” said Kende, director of Drake University’s Constitutional Law Center.
Virginia Sloan, an attorney who directs the nonpartisan Constitution Project, agreed.
“There are a lot of people who obviously don’t like income taxes. That’s a political position,” she said of criticism of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the modern federal income tax more than a century ago. “But it’s in the Constitution … and I don’t think you can go around saying something is unconstitutional just because you don’t like it.”
Sloan said that while some proposals to alter the Constitution have merit, most are little more than posturing by politicians trying to connect with voters.
“People are responding to the politics of the day, and that’s not what the framers intended,” she said. “They intended exactly the opposite — that the Constitution not be used as a political tool.”
The good news, Sloan and Kende said, is that such proposals rarely go anywhere.
Thousands of protestors gathered over the weekend in Washington, D.C., to protest the Obama Administration’s agenda for the country. However, controversy over the number of protestors attending the rally ensued after several exaggerated estimates were perpetuated either negligently or purposefully by Michelle Malkin, Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, and careless Twitters.
As our colleague in Washington, Joe Markman, writes today, several conservative groups behind the march say that as many as 2 million people turned out to protest everything from Obama’s proposed healthcare overhaul to the legitimacy of his election.
Others, however, say the crowd was much smaller. A spokesman for the District of Columbia Fire Department made an unofficial estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 people.
Arguments about crowd estimates are, as Markman writes, “as much a part of Washington as its granite monuments.”
This one took a rather scandalous turn, however, when a photo circulated among conservatives as proof of a larger crowd was revealed to be a fake.
Thousands of protestors gathered over the weekend in Washington, D.C., to protest the Obama Administration’s policies. However, controversy over the number of protestors attending the rally ensued after several exaggerated estimates were perpetuated either negligently or purposefully by Michelle Malkin, Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, and careless Twitters. From David Weigel at The Washington Independent (emphasis added):
So, how many people showed up at the 9/12 taxpayer march on Washington? One signal of the confusion over crowd counts came from the stage. Speakers alternately thanked a crowd that numbered in the “tens of thousands” and the “hundreds of thousands.” The source of that confusion, however, seemed to come from Twitter. The plugged-in Tea Party protesters who watched their progress on the insta-blogging service found anonymous and semi-anonymous people claiming that their numbers were nearing 2 million. At one point, Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks got on stage and told the crowds that ABC News was reporting those high numbers.
Kibbe has walked that number back, crediting the mistake to misinformation on Twitter, and that leaves ABC’s estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters as the one that most media are using. Some conservatives are arguing for a bigger number; Robert Stacy McCain, in a post linked by Michelle Malkin, argues that “a people-meter at the intersection of Constitution Avenue and 11th Street” counted 450,000 people, and that some people made it late to the event due to traffic problems, so the media is undercounting it.
This dispute won’t end soon, as any veterans of anti-war protests could tell conservatives; it’s tough to get accurate crowd counts and tough to believe that something that felt massive was not, in fact, historically large. This was the largest march on Washington by conservatives in anyone’s memory. But Washington was home to one of the largest public gatherings of the decade just nine months ago, when 1.8 million people filled the mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial for President Obama’s inauguration, and that has given future protesters a barometer for their success. The reports of “2 million people” on the mall this weekend were always ludicrous.
Most arguments against the public option are based either on deliberate misrepresentation of what that option would mean, or on remarkably thorough misunderstanding of the concept, which persists to a frustrating degree: I was really surprised to see Joe Klein worrying about the creation of a system in which doctors work directly for the government, British-style, when that has nothing whatsoever to do with the public option as proposed. (Forty years of Medicare haven’t turned the US into that kind of system — why would having a public plan change that?)
. . .
Let me add a sort of larger point: aside from the essentially circular political arguments — centrist Democrats insisting that the public option must be dropped to get the votes of centrist Democrats — the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it’s bad because it is, horrors, a government program. And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.
In arguing against healthcare reform or government spending, the taxpayer and big government memes are frequently parroted and not thoroughly challenged by the media.
I’m a liberal, because I want to know the truth. To do this, I’m open-minded, and I do my best to consider issues objectively and from all viewpoints. However, the views of these 9/12 Project attendees clearly ignores reality, and it turns a blind eye to facts, so it ignores the truth. For example, the irony in the image below is so blatant that I wonder if these people suffer from a radical loss of touch with reality. Undoubtedly, special interests are counting on the gullibility of these people in order to keep the broken status quo in place.
Furthermore, these folks fail to understand that the federal government’s role is to keep its citizens happy and set prudent policy to solve some of our country’s biggest problems. A small or insignificant federal government will fail miserably, because the states failed miserably under the Articles of Confederation. The states could never replicate the consistency or cohesion that the federal government provides.
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Photo source for attribution here, here, and here. The authors or licensors of these images do not endorse my work or me and their images are protected under an attribution license.
More on Van Jones’s associations from the New York Times:
Mr. Jones’s involvement in the 1990s with a group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement had prompted recent accusations by conservative critics that he associated with communists. The group, according to a post-mortem written by some of its founders, was an anti-capitalist, antiwar organization committed to achieving “solidarity among all oppressed peoples” with “direct militant action.”
In stimulating the controversy over Jones, Fox News snake oil salesman Glenn Beck “seized upon Mr. Jones’s statements and associations.” Consequently, outrage ensued that triggered Jones’s resignation. However, considering Van Jones’s statements and associations, numerous Republican politicians subscribe to equally ridiculous and spurious causes. For example, the tea parties from earlier this year oozed hypocrisy, and the inaneness of the birther movement was nothing more but a continuation of the tea party movement, which then morphed into a bogus grass roots movement to thwart healthcare reform. Currently, the Right’s outrage over Van Jones, like the preceding shenanigans, is merely a frank Republican strategy to regain power in Washington D.C. In reality, and considering their own statements and associations, most Republican politicians probably don’t care about Van Jones’s past statements or associations—they’re simply using his statements as an opportunity to regain political dominance. Basically, Van Jones is a casualty of a political war that only one side seems to be waging—and it’s waging it very aggressively.
Where’s the outrage from the right over their own party’s shenanigans? For example, Glenn Beck routinely spews contempt for the federal government, in addition to conspiracy theories, on his show. Despite this, his show continues to draw record numbers. Consequently, too many Americans allow and condone worse statements and associations from our politicians and political pundits than Van Jones’s. From the Los Angeles Times:
An advertising boycott against Fox News host Glenn Beck has succeeded in keeping most major sponsors from running commercials on his show even as the controversial commentator’s viewership has grown.
Beck attracted 2.81 million viewers Monday, his third-largest audience since his show launched on Fox News in January, according to Nielsen Media Research data provided by the network. On Tuesday, nearly 2.7 million viewers tuned in, his fifth-largest viewership to date. And the conservative host got a plug from former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who urged people to watch his program in a post on her Facebook page.
“FOX News’ Glenn Beck is doing an extraordinary job this week walking America behind the scenes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and outlining who is actually running the White House,” she wrote Wednesday to her 800,000-plus supporters.
Additionally, there’s Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin—they routinely spew kooky statements about Democrats and the federal government. However, where’s the outrage from the right and their resignations (well, Sarah Palin did resign but not from politics)? No doubt Jones’s statements and associations compromised his credibility and raised eyebrows, but there’s undoubtedly a problem with—or lack of—equity in today’s politics. Consequently, considering Van Jones’s qualifications, were his past statements and associations worth his resignation? Has his resignation resulted in a slippery slope towards a new style of political maneuvering?
Jones published a book titled “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems.” In it, he argues that the best way to fight both global warming and urban poverty is by creating millions of “green jobs”—weatherizing buildings, installing solar panels, and constructing mass-transit systems. A percentage of these jobs—Jones is purposefully vague about how many—should go to the disadvantaged and the chronically unemployed. “The green economy should not be just about reclaiming thrown-away stuff,” he writes. “It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities.” Jones’s book was slated to appear in 2009, but during the Presidential campaign, when several of the candidates began talking about “green jobs,” he decided to advance the publication. The jacket of “The Green Collar Economy” features endorsements from, among others, the talk-show host Tavis Smiley; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the journalist Thomas L. Friedman; and former Vice-President Al Gore.
“I love Van Jones,” Gore told me. “I love his work. I love his heart and his commitment and his intellect. I love his mission. He has wisely picked a part of this set of interwoven challenges that should have been addressed much more forcefully by me and others long ago.”
“Van is a visionary,” Smiley said. “My grandmother had an old saying, ‘It’s just too much like right.’ What Van is saying is just too much like right. It just makes too much sense for us not to do it.”
“I think Van Jones is a big part of the future of environmentalism,” Gus Speth, the dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “He, more than anyone else, is bringing together a concern about the environment and a concern about social justice. And, if I had just one thing to say, it is that we in the environmental movement cannot fail Van Jones.”
As Republicans continue to stifle change, the country’s biggest problems—energy, climate change, and health care reform—continue to grow. If the Republicans do take over Washington D.C. again, they’ll fail as they did under the Bush II Administration, because their shortsighted, inadequate, and lazy remedies will fail to solve some of our country’s greatest problems. These so-called remedies peddled by Republicans include (1) the belief that cutting taxes is healthy for society, although it’s not healthy for state and federal government coffers; (2) the theory that the free market will cure serious issues such as our dependency on oil; (3) or that deregulation costs corporations too much, so voluntary regulation is a much better option; (4) or that the federal government should be small or nonexistent; (5) or that the so-called “trickle down” economic theory is best for the middle class, though corporations concentrate our wealth for themselves.
Ultimately, it seems that unless the Democrats sink to the depths where Republicans frolic, they’ll never beat the Republican disinformation machine, because too many Americans seem too willing to believe these lies and worry about issues that don’t really matter.
