[quote=“MikeN”]That piece by Rove was the most cheering thing I’ve seen all day. I certainly hope that Republicans follow his advice to…
B) Promise to deliver even more of Bush’s economic policies, because they’ve proved so popular up to now.
…
[/quote]
It will be interesting to see if the Republicans can counter the media’s fiction about the US economy. The media did this in '92 and it worked, but now we have the internet, so we’ll see. McCain needs to work hard to point out the positives after one of the Dem’s disappears and the real campaign begins.
[quote=“Groo”][quote=“MikeN”]That piece by Rove was the most cheering thing I’ve seen all day. I certainly hope that Republicans follow his advice to…
B) Promise to deliver even more of Bush’s economic policies, because they’ve proved so popular up to now.
…
[/quote]
It will be interesting to see if the Republicans can counter the media’s fiction about the US economy. The media did this in '92 and it worked, but now we have the internet, so we’ll see. McCain needs to work hard to point out the positives after one of the Dem’s disappears and the real campaign begins.[/quote]
I made that very case myself back in '92 when I was living in the U.S. and believe it was true then. It’s a bit harder to make that case now though when milk and gas are hovering around $4 a gallon and your supervisor at WalMart has just told you your health care is being outsourced to China because your wages are still too high.
While it’s true that unemployment is low and inflation is tame that might be more due to demographic shifts and the fact that somebody still has to do the laundry and clean the floors and the biggest components of inflation – housing costs and wages – are going opposite the costs of things that people eat, use to keep themselves warm with and otherwise need for day-to-day survival.
I could be completely wrong though. Maybe Americans really are better off now than they were eight years ago and just don’t know it. It would make for some fun John McCain campaign commercials though:
“Who You Going to Believe? The GOP or Your Lying Wallet?”
[quote=“spook”]
…
While it’s true that unemployment is low and inflation is tame that might be more due to demographic shifts and the fact that somebody still has to do the laundry and clean the floors and the biggest components of inflation – housing costs and wages – are going opposite the costs of things that people eat, use to keep themselves warm with and otherwise need for day-to-day survival.
I could be completely wrong though. Maybe Americans really are better off now than they were eight years ago and just don’t know it. It would make for some fun John McCain campaign commercials though:
“Who You Going to Believe? The GOP or Your Lying Wallet?”
I say go for it. What can it hurt at this point?[/quote]
Why would McCain make a incomprehensible commercial like that?
What do you mean by demographic shifts - are doing the laundry and cleaning floors not jobs now?
Most people vote for the future not the past. So who is going to be better for the economy in the future? A libertarian or a socialist?
[quote=“Groo”][quote=“spook”]
…
While it’s true that unemployment is low and inflation is tame that might be more due to demographic shifts and the fact that somebody still has to do the laundry and clean the floors and the biggest components of inflation – housing costs and wages – are going opposite the costs of things that people eat, use to keep themselves warm with and otherwise need for day-to-day survival.
I could be completely wrong though. Maybe Americans really are better off now than they were eight years ago and just don’t know it. It would make for some fun John McCain campaign commercials though:
“Who You Going to Believe? The GOP or Your Lying Wallet?”
I say go for it. What can it hurt at this point?[/quote]
Why would McCain make a incomprehensible commercial like that?
What do you mean by demographic shifts - are doing the laundry and cleaning floors not jobs now?
Most people vote for the future not the past. So who is going to be better for the economy in the future? A libertarian or a socialist?[/quote]
All good points. Maybe a fall back position for a McCain campaign commercial could go something like the following so even an idjit could comprehend it:
“We Don’t Feel Your Pain Because As Far As We Can Tell You’re Not Feeling Any”
Doing laundry and mopping floors are indeed “good jobs” in the U.S. these days with plenty of growth prospects. That and taking care of old people with good retirement plans. As a matter of fact I think that’s what the long-term GOP “health care plan” is. The 50 million Americans without health care insurance are going to find employment taking care of the 250 million Americans with health care plans. I think the official name for that plan is “Losers Can’t Be Choosers.”
It is good that Americans don’t look backward in order to inform themselves how to vote because they wouldn’t like what they see. As far as what the future holds I’m afraid my prognosis is “more of the same, only more of it” – not that that matters because we’ve already agreed that what happened in the past stays in the past.
[quote=“Chewycorns”]A pitchfork in one hand and a copy of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the other?[/quote]Will you please cut that shit out. For fuck’s sake.
Groo - learn this quick. In regards to Pres Bush, conservatives, the Republican party and things of this nature, reality and facts are items in scant use by certain members of this forum. These are mostly disgruntled US expats and non-USA posters over-impressed by themselves.
Not to say this about everyone of these persons. There are some in these categories who are able to make sound logical expressions of their views without resorting pretentious pomposity or condescending passive-aggressive flights of self-righteousness…a few. And it is a delight to debate issues with these persons.
Mostly you will see parrots expressing the usually irrelevant views of some icon of the liberal academia that they are scared sh!t-less to move on from.
Lovely plumage…Norwegian Blues…
Oh…and as for keeping on topic…[i]fuhgeddaboutit![/i]…defeats the parse, dissect and re-interpret MO they’ve been taught to use rather than actually making decisions founded on proof and truth.
I’d be happy to have a serious discussion with anyone here but I need something to work with. If the starting point though is slurs intended to thwart any honest discussion or, to me, obvious fictions, then things are essentially out of my control and the garbage-in, garbage-out factor takes over.
Unfortunately, when discussing the current government in the United States with its supporters it’s doubly difficult to have any meaningful discussions because it’s such a faith-based enterprise that even the rules of logic and evidence are regarded as adversaries and my choices for responding are even fewer.
My real shortcoming though is responding at all under such circumstances. I should have enough sense to know better. When your country is under occupation by a ruling junta of thugs and miscreants though it’s hard not to want to respond somehow, if only to stand and bleat into the abyss.
[quote=“Groo”][quote=“MikeN”]That piece by Rove was the most cheering thing I’ve seen all day. I certainly hope that Republicans follow his advice to…
B) Promise to deliver even more of Bush’s economic policies, because they’ve proved so popular up to now.
…
[/quote]
It will be interesting to see if the Republicans can counter the media’s fiction about the US economy. The media did this in '92 and it worked, but now we have the internet, so we’ll see. McCain needs to work hard to point out the positives after one of the Dem’s disappears and the real campaign begins.[/quote]
Which are
Bush has the lowest job creation rate of any president since 1960.
The median household has seen it’s income decline during an expansion for the first time ever.
Good luck with that selling point: Yeah, your life sucks, but aren’t you happy your CEO is doing so well?
Kennedy-Johnson 3.27%
Nixon-Ford 4.93%
Carter 3.06%
Reagan 2.06%
Bush I 0.60%
Clinton 2.38%
Bush II 0.59%
[quote]The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.
This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?[/quote]
McCain- for talking to Hamas before he was against it:
[quote]But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News’s “World News Tonight” program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:
I asked: “Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?”
McCain answered: “They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.” [/quote]
So, Bush has the lowest unemployment rates (except for B. Clintons II term). And people complain about job creation?
To use an analogy: when the (work-force) well is dry, it might be hard to get more (work-force) water from it.
So, I say more of the same! I like people to be employed, even if it’s those subhuman jobs like cleaning floors and doing laundry… Dam it! every week I’m forced to to humiliate myself!
Cut out what exactly? Buchanan’s supporters were called the “Pitchfork Brigade” in 1992. Fact. Buchanan has made a lot of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” type of diatribes against neoconservatives. Fact. Given’s Spook self-professed isolationism in foreign policy and given his conspiracy-theory tirades against Israel (ever read the USS Liberty thread? ), I don’t think what I am alluding to is too far fetched. Anyways, I did shape it in the form of a question.
It sure is interesting to see Buchananites and Chomskyites defending each other. Entertaining indeed.
For those of you who actually let your voting decision be determined by facts instead of partisan politics, please send this video to everyone you know:
For the rest, just watch and enjoy, content in the knowledge that I have already sent it to everyone on my extensive contact list, and hopefully numerous others will do the same!
Nice to see politics and religion getting a much needed, if unwanted divorce.
Throw preacher under the bus, part II
[quote=“NYT”]Senator John McCain rejected the endorsement on Thursday of the evangelical leader, the Rev. John C. Hagee, three stormy months after it was first announced as part of an effort to shore up Mr. McCain’s standing among Christian conservatives.
HageeThe Rev. John C. Hagee (Photo: Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times)
The rejection of Mr. Hagee’s endorsement occurred after another controversial sermon from the televangelist and pastor of Cornerstone, a mega-church in San Antonio, surfaced in which he argued that biblical verses made clear that Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust was part of God’s plan to chase the Jews from Europe and drive them to Palestine.
“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible,” Mr. McCain said in a statement Thursday. “I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well.”[/quote]
I’m glad McCain had the moral courage to ditch Hagee.
In this particular case, I think Hagee was just trying to tie historical events to scripture - not rationalizing the Holocaust as people seem to be perceiving. After all, he’s a big supporter of Israel.
I found his incitements to attack Iran and his talk of Katrina being pay-back for homosexuality far more disturbing.
[quote]A Tuesday fundraiser headlined by President Bush for U.S. Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign is being moved out of the Phoenix Convention Center.
Sources familiar with the situation said the Bush-McCain event was not selling enough tickets to fill the Convention Center space, and that there were concerns about more anti-war protesters showing up outside the venue than attending the fundraiser inside.
Another source said there were concerns about the media covering the event.
Bush’s Arizona fundraising effort for McCain is being moved to private residences in the Phoenix area. A White House official said the event was being moved because the McCain campaign prefers private fundraisers and it is Bush administration policy to have events in public venues open to the media. The White House official said to reconcile that the Tuesday event will be held at a private venue and not the Convention Center. [/quote]http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/05/19/daily77.html?surround=lfn
This, in Arizona.
And I’ll bet McCain prefers private fundraisers, and is concerned about media coverage.
I can hear him screaming now:
“Which fucking idiot staffer booked me for an event where I’d have my picture plastered all over the news standing next to George W.29% Bush?”
A pitchfork in one hand and a copy of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the other?
), I don’t think what I am alluding to is too far fetched. Anyways, I did shape it in the form of a question. 