People have been amazed at the Republican reactions to the stimulus packaged proposed by Obama and supported by most Democrats. It's one thing to have differences of opinion about where stimulus spending would be best directed and how to best manage a stimulus effort, but it's another to deny that we should have any stimulus spending at all. The Republican decision to almost unanimously support dropping all spending provisions in favor of nothing but tax cuts which benefit primarily the rich has been described as "insane," but that's wrong I think.
This move makes plenty of sense in the context of contemporary Republican principles and values and is in fact entirely consistent with a wide variety of Republican positions. Everything should come into focus if you look at one fundamental, underlying principle: fear. Specifically, it's all about creating, promoting, and sustaining fear in what's left of America's working and middle classes. A general, ambiguous, amorphous sort of fear is great because it can be directed in just about any direction which politicians need, but the particular fears which are at issue here are the fear of losing one's job and income, fear of losing health insurance, fear of losing one's home, fear of losing one's social status, etc.
Keep reading: http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2009/02/republican-stimulus-package-motivate.html
WaPo business columnist Steven Pearlstein really lets the Senate have it. Go read the whole thing:
As long as we're about to spend gazillions to stimulate the economy, I'd like to suggest we throw in another $53.5 million for a cause dear to all business journalists: economic literacy. And what better place to start than right here in Washington.
In September 2005, there were 128 prisoners on hunger strikes. Now that Obama has taken office there are 50, and that's deteriorated?
by tristero
On some New York Times server, Tobin Harshaw wastes valuable hard drive space rounding up, and lightly discussing, the opinions of some of the people who were dead wrong about everything in the past eight years. And it left me with the question in my title: What on earth is the appeal of conservatism?
I only have the stomach to go through a little of it. Harshaw types;
Defeat tends to bring out the best in so-called movement conservatives, the ideologues like William F. Buckley who provided the intellectual framework for the Reagan ascendance.Is that the same oh so cultured William F. Buckley whose "intellectual framework" for dealing with the scourge of AIDS was to tattoo the buttocks of every sufferer? And who later changed his mind only when he found out his pal. Roy Cohn, had contracted AIDS, a world-class sleazebag who was screwing as many guys as he could and never told them he was infected? We're supposed to believe there is a "best" side to a man like Buckley who was so morally bereft he would have branded the diseased, and who enthusiastically drew to his bosom some of the most odious men who ever disgraced America? What healthy political discourse would ever take the opinions of a lamebrain like Buckley seriously?
It's only the latest in an ever growing list of such outrages from the Afghan legal system. See here and here and here and here.
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Uber-skank being investigated for voter fraud: ny dailynews
Check out the size of the hands
I have to say that one of the best quotes I've ever heard about Coulter was when George Will was asked about her and he said, "The less said about him the better."
Or The Daily Show's Jason Jones while doing the Pundit School segment: "That guy's got great hair."
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Marysville, north of Melbourne has been all but wiped off the map and ambulance authorities say there are not enough vehicles to reach all the injured in nearby Kinglake, a town which is also feared to have been destroyed. - abc melbourne
This nifty link lets you peruse what each city wants as part of what the mayors' organization is calling Mainstreet Economic Recovery.
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If a U.S. Senator votes against the "Main Street Job Creation Act" (BuzzFlash's name for the "stimulus" bill), their state should lose half the funding from the bill. If both U.S. Senators from one state vote against the bill, the state loses its entire allocation from the legislation.
This may sound Draconian, but it might induce the people out of work and with piles of bills to tar and feather the "economic kamikazee" Republican Senators who got America into this mess -- and to run them out of the country.
After all, most of the GOP Neo-Confederate opposition to the "Main Street Job Creation Act" comes from Senators who represent states that already receive more money from the federal government than they pay into the treasury. With the exception of Florida, most of the Old South is still poorer than most of the rest of the nation, and needs massive federal aid to survive economically.
Stepford Republican Senators who believe that you can stop a house from burning down with a tax cut for the rich -- like Chatty Kathy dolls who just repeat the same line over and over again -- should suffer the political consequences of being so profoundly treacherous to the nation. And nothing would get them off the nearly 30-year-old message point of tax cuts for the rich like a good tar and feathering.
So let Mitch McConnell and John McCain lead the Anti-job, Anti-economic recovery "Stonewall Jackson" brigade of GOP rebels who would do the Union harm. But let their states hold them responsible for not receiving any funds to help improve the employment and economic prospects that comes with the "Main Street Job Creation Act."
It's fair and just, because otherwise the Confederate holdouts and their co-horts in the GOP Senate caucus can claim that they are defending the legacy of Ronald Reagan (a cratered economy, in reality) without consequences.
Let's have some accountablity here.
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The stimulus bill in perspective:
Now someone please tell me why the Iraq War, a war sold to us with lies, a war in which billions of dollars disappeared and more billions went to a company so corrupt it electrocuted and poisoned American troops, is a justifiable expense but a package to get people working again is not.
I mean other than because you want the economy to fail to enable some kind of grand Republican restoration in 2010, that is.
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So once again, the southern conservatives of the Senate have managed to all but gut another piece of legislation because - oh my God - it smacks of almost being moderate.
When has that ever happened? Other than every damn time in history.
Is there any group that has been more responsible for holding back progress, who has ever been more consistently wrong about everything in the history of the Republic than the "Southern Conservative"?
WRONG. ABOUT. EVERY. F***ING. THING. From holding back the economic development of the early nation, to slavery, to the Civil War, to Jim Crow, to Segregation, to the minimum wage, to maximum hours, to workplace safety, to workers compensation, to food safety, to child labor, to isolationism, to the FDIC, to Social Security, to the union movement, to Red Baiting, to woman's suffrage, to anti-intellectualism, to workplace discrimination, to State's Rights, to the Voting Rights Act, to equal pay, to religious fundamentalism, to loving guns more than life itself, to anti-Catholicism, to anti-Semitism, to Vietnam, to the War on Terror, to birth control, to not taxing while really spending, to homophobia, to clean water, to environmentalism, to making the rubble bounce on brown people, to supporting torture, to police abuse, to global warming, to outlawing precious and blessed foreplay between consenting adults, generation after generation, they've been the assholes of the nation.
I'm sure I forgot something, it's a long list. It has gotten so bad that they are now ruining legislation they still don't vote for.
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