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Throw this in Cheney’s face next time he or anyone associated with the word neocons opens their mouth….
Beside Biden’s this is one of the best predictions ever made of the Mid East……
Anyone who reads this blog knows that comments are where the action is.. The best writing is usually below the canal, where smart minds give and take and dissect the others points of view… Having spent an inordinate amount of time on one such comment, I thought today’s epistle would be, something that in the olden days would have been titled: “Comment Rescue… ”
(Since I didn’t garnish another’s permission, I’m not naming him or her, but if they want to come forward on their own, they most certainly are welcome… They probably will, because their comment is not that hard to find.. But I thought the overall give and take was done well enough to showcase to others how all argument should take place on blogs, and use this as a measure upon which all other future commentary can be judged…)
“Bush is the person who fought a war in which Americans died for oil.” Where was Congress? I seem to remember they voted to send troops but that can’t possibly be so, can it?
There are two ways an administration can approach Congress… One is to say look at all the evidence and come to your own conclusion… The other is to say, take our word, we have the intelligence that says this will happen, we need your support as a fellow American… The latter was the path that was taken… Today, trying to pin Congress in on the instigation of the Iraq War, is nothing but a cowardly attempt to shift blame… Those of us who know human nature, chuckle at each such attempt, because we know that is done only by people who KNOW they are guilty… The act of blaming Congress actually drives home our point that Republicans were guilty and got caught! The proof is there. Cheney constructed the threat of Iraq and sold it… We found out too late it was nothing but a contrivance…
“Bush is the person who bankrupted our nation by spending every dollar of the surplus and then ran our nation on deficit spending for 8 years…Let our children pay for it!” So you’re a deficit hawk then. Great. Please direct me to the post where you go bananas when Obama takes a mere 143 days to surpass Bush’s 8 years of spending which included not one but two wars.
There are two kinds of deficits. one is flagrant spending of favors to bolster the Republican party’s power; the other is to borrow to save a nation… Deficit spending saved us during WWII… The deficit spending that was spent recently, is an investment that saved the entire financial global network. The government of the United States of America, absorbed the stupid Republican-caused collapse. We now own shares of the banks. When the economy grows, we can cash those shares in at a profit. Your deficit argument is like castigating a well-meaning American homeowner for going into debt for a house… After all, someone signing a $250,000 note while making $30,000 is scary. But it is a good thing for the rest of us, that a lot of homeowners have balls, isn’t it..
Republicans obviously don’t have balls or brains. … Their wimpy whinings are no more relevant than the naive advisor who says “don’t buy a house, rent… You don’t want to go in debt.” Bottom line, the deficit of saving a nation, worked.. or has so far. The previous administration’s deficit, of making the wealthier even wealthier, didn’t work. Instead it fucked up this nation….
“Bush is the person who pushed the Medicare Reform that first tripled the cost of pharmaceuticals and then reimbursed drug companies three times over what the drugs originally were worth.” Cite please. I agree that the program was ill conceived and even poorly executed but I’ve not seen anything approaching these numbers.
If you bought drugs over the counter and paid $40 dollars for your supply before the Medicare pharmaceutical supplements came to be passed by the Republicans, today those same drugs cost $120 dollars, and the government covers $80 of those dollars and you pay….. $40 dollars… What has changed for you? The pharma companies are now getting $120 dollars for the same drugs they once got $40 for…. you pay the same $40, and your children and grandchildren pay the $80, which assuming interest will accrue, could amount to about $240 dollars depending on how long we allow the debt to continue unchecked…… The sacrilege comes from the fact that the $80 dollars part, was added to the deficit, so the wealthiest 1% could receive a tax cut… We doubled the cost, while cutting the revenue stream in half…
Smart Republican policy… WE are all paying for our nations stupidity now, aren’t we? As for citation… go to you own bills or ask you parents… That is far better citation than I could ever give… Go look.
“Bush is the person who deregulated our finance industry, so it collapsed on his watch.”
Nope. Bush warned three times that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were headed for trouble and he was rebuffed three times. Misregulation was the cause not deregulation. The largely unregulated hedge fund industry (Cerebrus Capital notwithstanding)skated through while the very tightly regulated insurance and banking were devastated.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not the problem although Bush was right to warn us of their unwieldiness… No, they were secondary symptoms caused by the main problem which was in Phil Gramm’s Commodities Act, a clause he inserted which allowed all derivatives to be unregulated. Insurance on these derivatives, was also unregulated… When the time came for AIG to cough up? There was no money! It had all been spent on bonuses… and when the Feds coughed money to save AIG, they tried again to spend it on their bonuses… such malfeasance among our corporate brethren, can only happen on a Republican’s watch… “do what you want… we Republicans won’t interfere.” The Democrats would have been all over that before a crises had occurred…
“Bush is the person who sent your manufacturing jobs overseas.” Really? Did he put them in boxes or…? Labor and regulatory costs sent them overseas. Blame our high standard of living.
No, our jobs went overseas because it was cheaper under the tax codes made up by Republicans to make something in another country and bring it back over… Under a better tax package this would not have occurred, we would not have had as deep of a deficit, and we would have had a much healthier economy. As pointed out in the Kavipsian theory of economics, the difference of only 5% in our top rate, is all we needed to keep our economy steaming forward as it did during the Clinton years.. Pure and Simple. It is the Republican financial philosophy that caused us to experience what earlier this week became official: 0 % real job growth over the entire Republican presidency… That is just plain sick.
“Bush is the person who tried to remove your social security.” If remove = privatize then yeah he made a half-assed attempt and then quit.
Facts are in: Had Social Security been privatized.. as of around somewhere in November 08… It would not have existed. I call that getting rid of Social Security.
“Bush is the person who tried to get rid of Medicare.” By increasing funding?
Medicare has always been on the Republican chopping block. Bush was nothing new at putting lip service into eradicating it… The increased funding you mention, was passed on to future generations… That shows real responsibility… “Here, spend as much as you can on your health… Don’t worry! Your children and grandchildren will foot the bill…”
“Bush is the person who came close to nuking Iran.” Define close.
As for defining usage of nuclear weapons upon Iraq, that is what all were saying… In fact, one ranking officer said he would refuse the order if given to bomb Iran… Everyone who wasn’t a neocon, received a sigh of relief…
“Bush is the person whose policy made the US hated around the world.” Really? How’s Barry’s Charm Offensive going? Poland hates us, he snubbed the King of Norway and the UK, our closest ally isn’t returning our calls. Bang up job there Barry. Oh, and Muslim terrorists are still trying to blow up our airplanes.
As for Barack, I haven’t seen the evidence you mention… I do know, however, that the entire globe breathed a sigh of relief to see the former president step down…
“Bush is the person who destroyed the economy…” Please keep it straight. Is he a dunce or an evil genius. He can’t be both. (I’ll give you a hint. Liberals typically make Bush the dunce and Cheney the Evil Genius.) YMMV.
So say what you will about Barack… He is no Bush and for that, every American can be thankful…..
Since taking office, he has saved this nation several times… Bush in eight years… with help from all Republicans, mind you… destroyed it… At the rate were are currently on, (knock on wood) we should be in good shape to remove the rest of Republicans from office by this November…
With lies about Barack circulating about, yes, we do have some work to do, but then again, everything wonderful that ever happened to this nation, has always had some work behind it….
Sussex Green pulled this into our collective atmosphere. My thanks, for I would have missed it.
While the U. S. was reeling from oil prices and hooting calls of “drill, baby, drill” and our blind leadership from “that other party” was calling for oil rigs off the coast of Rehoboth, our chief competitor, China, was busy doing something about burning coal more efficiently.
This has been totally off the radar screen.
First let me tell you why it is important. As an advocate of clean efficient wind power who has crunched the numbers, I can tell you coal will be around for a long time. Therefore, finding ways to burn coal more efficiently does much for reducing global warming as well, as lowering the cost of producing electricity.
Therefore if it were theoretically possible to burn coal with no carbon emissions, that would be a good thing. Even if were possible to burn coal with just slightly less carbon emissions, that too would be a good thing by moving us in the right direction…
Face it. The U.S. has done little, primarily due to the myopic vision that the oil saturated past administration had…..
Here is the synopsis…
China now uses more coal than the United States, Europe and Japan combined.
China has emerged in the past two years as the world’s leading builder of more efficient, less polluting coal power plants.
China has begun building a more efficient kind of coal-fired power plant that uses extremely hot steam, at a rate of one a month.
China has already approved equipment purchases for a new generation of low-pollution power plants that turn coal into a gas before burning it.
China has begun requiring power companies to retire an older, more polluting power plant for each new one they build.
China’s most efficient plants achieve an efficiency as high as 44 percent. In the United States, the most efficient plants achieve around 40 percent efficiency, because they do not use the highest steam temperatures being adopted in China.
China’s improvements are starting to have an effect on climate models. I.E.A. cut its forecast of the annual increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases, to 3 percent from 3.2 percent.
China has just built a small, experimental facility near Beijing to remove carbon dioxide from power station emissions and use it to provide carbonation for beverages. So far, it has no plans to make this a national policy.
China is poised to pass the United States as soon as this year as the world’s largest market for wind power equipment. China is building considerably more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined, and these do not emit carbon dioxide after they are built.
It now can cost a third less to build an ultra-supercritical power plant in China than to build a less efficient coal-fired plant in the United States.
One might wonder how a nation so far behind us just after Tienanmen Square, could now be the next superpower while we languish in the backwaters of a subsistence economy.
The answer should be obvious. China has no Republicans.
As we race toward tomorrow, and blue maps of the US are on every blog, and if you want to find the Republican party these days, you must search the bars….. it would be wise to remember that we faced the same jubilation in 2004, when even as late as 17:00 hours on Election Day, we were ecstatic over what we assumed would be the outcome….
We face the same confidence in 2000, that a cocky Republican stalwart would be slapped down by the greatest human being to ever walk the planet…(lol, I kill me)….
And to be honest we are there today…. again… waiting in trepidation… hopefully anticipating our nation’s move past the doldrums of Reaganomics and Phil Gramm’s destruction of the global economy…
We have one reason to be optimistic… Eight years of failed Republican policy which took a nation, poised to do great things, and bankrupted it… Eight years of failed Republican foreign policy, which took a nation esteemed and emulated…. from Communist China to Pitcairn Island…. and turned its reputation into that of a crazy old Uncle Sam…. Eight years of failed Republican moral leadership, who scrambled to play footsie under bathroom stalls….or romp with underage Congressional pages… or prostitute their agencies at the bidding of corporate giants….have given us a distaste for all incumbents who we once esteemed… We can change it this year for good….
Bottom line: everything Republicans have promised they got to implement… their tax philosophy, their foreign policy, their moral superiority…..
And we are much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much worse off.
So perhaps Americans will be a little wiser this time around…. Republicans they will say?..”Forget about it!”
But there is hope for Republicans this time around as well.. Actually Republicans have a very good chance of winning every seat they want… For you see, while we were campaigning and chanting “yes, we can”; while we were scrambling to find new voters, while we were canvassing neighborhoods, while we were combating the misstruths told on Republican blogs with cold hearted truth, our nation, under its fringe Republican Leadership, was using the powers enabled by the Patriot Act, to splice into fiber optic lines under San Francisco, where Yahoo, AOL, Google, all intercept, store and monitor every single phone call and or electronic data transmission, and be able to change whatever comes in………..into what they wish to go out……… We have that potential. They can do it………. I’ve seen it done……
It’s simply a question of “Will they?”
I think we saw with Dick Cheney’s endorsement of John McCain just lately….. that all the processes are in place and that at least that Dick Cheney believes, he has the capacity to change the totals irregardless of what every voter thinks…
From the news sources, this one from the Boston Globe, we see that an plot to stay forever in Iraq has been hatched by this administration. How?
Essentially if a treaty is made with the Iraqi government outlining the number of troops staying and for how long, it is a treaty and by the Constitution, responsibility falls directly into the hands of the Executive Branch.
The treaty must be ratified before the Senate where it can still be voted down, but based on today’s alignment, it will safely pass 68-33 with Cheney casting the winning vote.
All the politics against the war, may be for naught.
kavips 