In a sort of continuation of 60 Minutes offering a platform for David Stockman to trash his former Reaganite colleagues, Stephen Colbert interviewed Stockman on Thursday night's Colbert Report. At the show's opening, the graphic was the lame pun “Reag Against the Machine” and Colbert said “I'll ask him what it was like when America had a budget.” Stockman quickly proceeded to trash supply-side economics and suggest most of our Pentagon budget is wasted in an ineffective war on terror. (He didn't repeat his call for a 15 percent national income surtax.) You can see why the liberals now love to put him on television. In this interview, Colbert actually kept up the conservative character in spots, but it was an another offering for Stockman to blame mostly conservatives for the debt problem. COLBERT: What do you think about extending the Bush tax cuts. You don think we should do that? STOCKMAN: No, I don't think we should do that, because extending the Bush – read more
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The curator elites at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery were happily abusing the trust of the American taxpayer, with radical gay activists pushing a gay agenda, replete with the religiously bigoted, sadomasochistic and homoerotic fare, all under the auspices of “art.” Then something happened. The public complained. Now these radicals are shocked – shocked! – that the “censors” are out to destroy their “artistic freedom.” It’s like a bad rendition of “Groundhog Day.” How many times must we relive this foolishness? The sponsors tell us that “Hide/Seek” is “the first major exhibition to examine the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating modern American portraiture,” and how these gay and lesbian artists have made “essential contributions to both the art of portraiture and to the creation of modern American culture.” But that isn’t enough. Theirs is a political message as part of a political agenda. To quote from their program, they want to strike a blow for “the struggle for justice, so that people and groups can claim their full inheritance in America’s promise of equality, inclusion, and social dignity.” read more
Continue reading …You hear the false meme everywhere: the overpaid public service employees are being vilified all over the media and blamed for the state of the economy . The nation’s public employees educate our kids, fight our fires, make sure our food isn’t tainted with toxic crap, provide services to the neediest and perform a thousand other vital tasks the private sector has no incentive to do. They earn less, on average, than their private-sector counterparts with similar qualifications. None become billionaires. But the government doesn’t engage in the kind of ruthless and relentless union-busting that corporate America has employed to make it virtually impossible for private sector workers to organize. That explains, in part, why public workers toil in the last sector of the U.S. economy where employees enjoy some job security, decent health care and the prospect of a dignified retirement. Now, the corporate Right has public sector workers in its cross-hairs. A viral email making the rounds in Tea Party circles sums up the charge, describing a dark conspiracy among “stinking, filthy libs” to use masses of sallow government bureaucrats to undermine America’s “capitalistic, independent, rugged individualists and entrepreneurs”: [Government workers] are supported 100% by the American taxpayers employed in the private profit producing sector [sic]. None of the gov. offices produce one red cent in profit–they are all parasites. Every 100 gainfully employed American tax payers supports 6.5 gov. employees 100% [sic]. Jonathan Cohn, writing in the New Republic, calls public employees, “the new welfare queens,” an easy target for the Right’s politics of resentment. And the comparison is apt. Just as there were no doubt a few welfare recipients gaming the system and living the high-life, a very small number of public sector employees — mostly the cops and firefighters to whom politicos don’t dare say no — have won lavish retirement packages. That small group of rather specialized workers is being held up as an example of both the perfidy of “big government” and the unbridled greed of public-sector unions. It’s manifestly nonsensical under even the most casual scrutiny. And the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees have decided to fight back : Public service workers are not the problem. Attacking public service workers will not create jobs. Attacking public service workers will not solve the problem of trying to save the vital public services that so many rely on. The only thing attacking public service workers does is divert attention from the real culprits of our country’s economic troubles and inequality: You, greedy Wall Street CEOs, politicians in Washington who turn a blind eye, and all right-wing talking heads who spin lies. When you attack public employees you are attacking the very folks whose work you benefit from — from providing basic public safety, to fixing potholes in the roads you drive on, to making sure clean water runs from your tap. No more. It’s time to stop the lies. You can sign AFSCME’s petition supporting public sector employees here .
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Boy, Paul Krugman’s really upset about Obama’s pay freeze on federal workers. Here’s what he has to say: The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications. And, anyway, employee pay is only a small fraction of federal expenses; even cutting the payroll in half would reduce total spending less than 3 percent. So freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It’s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don’t know anything about budget realities. The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit. Anyway, slashing federal spending at a time when the economy is depressed is exactly the wrong thing to do. Just ask Federal Reserve officials, who have lately been more or less pleading for some help in their efforts to promote faster job growth. Meanwhile, there’s a real deficit issue on the table: whether tax cuts for the wealthy will, as Republicans demand, be extended. Just as a reminder, over the next 75 years the cost of making those tax cuts permanent would be roughly equal to the entire expected financial shortfall of Social Security. Mr. Obama’s pay ploy might, just might, have been justified if he had used the announcement of a freeze as an occasion to take a strong stand against Republican demands — to declare that at a time when deficits are an important issue, tax breaks for the wealthiest aren’t acceptable. But he didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have. Could the upside be any more obvious? Now it’s our turn to play the “no no no” game! It’s so easy, even a Democrat could do it. All you have to do is bludgeon them with it every time they open their yaps. In fact, anyone who’s ever raised a teenager should already know the drill : POMPOUS POLITICIAN: But voter, we really, really need to cut Social Security to save the country! DEMOCRATIC VOTER: Um, no, we don’t. If you were so worried about the deficit, you shouldn’t have passed a $700 BILLION TAX CUT FOR THE RICH. POMPOUS POLITICIAN: Unemployment benefits shouldn’t go on this long, we need to end this freeloading. DEMOCRATIC VOTER: Well, I guess you should of thought of that before you passed a $700 BILLION TAX CUT FOR THE RICH, huh! POMPOUS POLITICIAN: All the other countries get to cut social programs…. DEMOCRATIC VOTER: I might have been willing to talk about it before you abused my trust and passed a $700 BILLION TAX CUT FOR THE RICH. Now you’ll have to work to regain my trust. See how easy it is? Go on, try it!
Continue reading …CBO: Dream Act would cut 1.4 billion dollars off the federal deficit. Please make some calls
December 3, 2010 No CommentYou know I’m not a deficit hawk in any way, but the CBO released a study that shows if Congress does pass the DREAM Act, it would save us $1.4 billion over ten years. This just in — a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of the DREAM Act shows that the legislation would increase revenues by $2.3 billion in the 2011-2020 period . After accounting for spending: CBO and JCT estimate that enacting the bill would reduce deficits by about $1.4 billion over the 2011-2020 period.The House is expected to vote on the common-sense measure next week. According to Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice: The new CBO estimate adds to what we already know. The DREAM Act is an important means of strengthening our economy , bolstering our military , and upholding American values of community, opportunity, and hard work. Both parties and both chambers of Congress should act to pass it immediately. Why does this matter? Because Republicans are screaming that they won’t vote for any legislation that doesn’t cut the federal deficit. Well, here’s your chance, so pass the damn bill. As bad as OFA has been, they’ve finally stepped up and asked for help in making calls to those senators who are showing signs of cowardice. Make The Call: Please call your Senators and your Representative, and tell the staffers who answer that you’re counting on them to stand strong and vote for the DREAM Act. Congressional Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 Here’s a target list of the Senators in question. AK-Murkowski KS-Brownback LA-Landrieu MA-Brown ME-Collins ME-Snowe MO-McCaskill NV-Ensign NC-Hagan ND-Conrad ND-Dorgan OH-Voinovich The following senators have indicated that they will not vote for the DREAM Act, but are still being targeted: AR-Pryor FL-LeMieux IL-Kirk NH-Gregg TX-Hutchison It doesn’t matter if the are D’s or R’s. Judd Gregg has been a deficit freak, so if he can’t vote for this simple measure to cut the deficit, then you can make the case that he’s a LIAR! Joan makes a good point. Good for Cantwell, Bennet and Boxer. Their weaker-kneed cohorts among the Dems–Max Baucus, Jon Tester, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad and Joe Manchin–need to understand the long-term consequences for the Democratic party, supposedly their party, if they fail on this most humane and basic of immigration reforms. I ask once again: Isn’t there any decency left in politics?
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In a Wednesday interview on BBC World News America, liberal FCC Commissioner Michael Copps told correspondent Katty Kay: “I think American media has a bad case of substance abuse right now ….we are going to be pretty close to denying our citizens the essential news and information that they need to have in order to make intelligent decisions about the future direction of their country.” As TVNewser reported on Thursday, after Kay asked about instituting a “Public Value Test” of media outlets, Copps replied: “What we've had in recent years is an aberration where we have had no oversight of the media. For years and years we had some public interest guidelines…they agreed to serve the public interest and that public interest to me right now is crying 'news and information, news and information, news and information.'” read more
Continue reading …Rich guy Glenn Beck lectures the rest of us on the virtues of Depression-era poverty
December 2, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media One of the real wonders of modern conservatism — as Thomas Frank explored in some depth in What’s the Matter With Kansas — is the way it manages to convince working- and middle-class people that looking out for the interests of America’s wealthy, in lieu of their own, is really their most important political undertaking. Their chief method for doing this is propaganda that convinces large numbers of people, mostly through culture-war-type appeals, to vote against their own interests. Glenn Beck put on a really perfect display of this Tuesday on his Fox News show, when he spent the first half telling his audience that the poor in America don’t have it so bad because they have TVs and microwaves, compared to what folks looked like back during the Depression. Then he came back with a segment extolling the virtues of Depression-era poverty, when people canned their own food and made their own clothes. Then he said: Beck: We think of poverty now as not having enough money for cable or high-speed Internet. So saith one of the country’s richest men — a guy who has never canned his own food or raised his own garden or even worked an honest day in his life. A guy who knows NOTHING about the conditions of Americans living in poverty today, let alone yesterday or any other day. But he sure can stand back and admire the character of people living in poverty from afar. FWIW, here’s a site, Poverty in America, dedicated to standing up for people living in poverty today. Their main concern today isn’t getting cable TV — it is, indeed, making sure there’s food on the table for their children. Just like in the old days. But Glenn Beck wants us to think there’s some nobility in all this — as in: “Get used to it, suckers! This is how you’re gonna live now!” Sounds about right for a rich guy.
Continue reading …In today’s Washington Post, the senior Republican statesmen appeal (again) for their colleagues in the Senate to ratify New START . Republican presidents have long led the crucial fight to protect the United States against nuclear dangers. That is why Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated the SALT I, START I and START II agreements. It is why President George W. Bush negotiated the Moscow Treaty. All four recognized that reducing the number of nuclear arms in an open, verifiable manner would reduce the risk of nuclear catastrophe and increase the stability of America’s relationship with the Soviet Union and, later, the Russian Federation. The world is safer today because of the decades-long effort to reduce its supply of nuclear weapons. As a result, we urge the Senate to ratify the New START treaty signed by President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev . It is a modest and appropriate continuation of the START I treaty that expired almost a year ago. It reduces the number of nuclear weapons that each side deploys while enabling the United States to maintain a strong nuclear deterrent and preserving the flexibility to deploy those forces as we see fit. Along with our obligation to protect the homeland, the United States has responsibilities to allies around the world. The commander of our nuclear forces has testified that the 1,550 warheads allowed under this treaty are sufficient for all our missions – and seven former nuclear commanders agree. The defense secretary, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the Missile Defense Agency – all originally appointed by a Republican president – argue that New START is essential for our national defense. Yeah. Even though three-quarters of the American public and more than 40 newspaper editorial shops agree, good luck with that argument, gentlemen. All the moderate Republicans have left the Congress. But I’m sure Godot is coming any minute now.
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Qatar was selected as host of the 2022 World Cup, beating out a bid by the United States to bring soccer’s showcase back to America for the first time since 1994.
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