Tag Cloud See also My Widgets and My Animations
The idea that Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital qualifies him to ‘fix’ the U.S. economy and create jobs if silly in several respects, but particularly ironic in this regard:
He has experience from Bain at investing in companies and managing them. But his Republican ideology would prevent him from putting this experience to use as President — that would be ‘picking winners’ or ‘interfering in the free market’.
Grover Norquist, the tax-cutting champion, famously said he wanted to shrink the federal government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bath tub.”
With gargantuan deficits, that seems like a pipe dream, but it may be time to start running the water.
The new plan offered by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and approved recently by Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans puts the Republicans on record supporting a federal government that within a decade will consist of little more than national defense, entitlements and interest on the national debt.
Or, to put it slightly differently, if tax cuts actually increased revenues, then it would have been absurd for George W. Bush to propose tax cuts as a way of paying down the surplus. In that world, tax cuts would have made the surplus larger, and given the government even more of the people’s money. We would end up in a fiscal paradox, with the government constantly trying to give back its surplus, but ending up with an even larger surplus as a result. But that’s not the world we live in.
Would you say that you trust, don’t trust, or are unsure about scientists as a source of information about environmental issues?
When you ask Americans this particular question, and break the result down by political party, you find a dramatic asymmetry. 67 percent of Democrats trust environmental scientists, 26 percent are unsure, and only 6 percent don’t trust them. But then look at the Republicans: 42 percent trust environmental scientists, 35 percent are unsure, and 22 percent explicitly say they don’t trust them.
In an exciting new political development Republicans announced today that tax cuts cure cancer. In a series of probing questions reporters sought to determine which cancers will be cured first and how long it will take. Republican responses were a little vague on the details, but it was emphasized that cutting the capital gains tax was the most effective, immediately eliminating prostate cancer among the rich, with the effect expected to trickle down to the middle class by 2013.
A lone reporter asked why President Bush’s extensive tax cuts had not cured cancer. He was denounced as overly partisan by some Republicans, but others patiently explained that our debt was much larger now, and Rand Paul produced a chart showing that certain cancer recovery rates had improved during the Bush years.
Years of Shamelessness
In 1988, as a young representative, he helped drive House Speaker Jim Wright from office for allegedly violating House rules to profit from a book; at the same time Gingrich himself was skirting House rules to promote his own book. A decade later, in a separate matter involving a college course he taught, the Republican-controlled House made Gingrich the first speaker ever to be fined for violating House rules.
In 1989, he viciously attacked Democratic corruption at the House bank and post office. It turned out he was among those members overdrafting from the same House bank.
In 1994, he implied that liberals were at fault in the Susan Smith case, in which a mother infamously drowned her children. He later said the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech stemmed from the same “situation ethics” of liberals.
In 1998, he led the fight to impeach President Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair while he was already five years into an extramarital affair of his own — with a congressional staffer (soon to be his third wife) who was 23 years his junior.
In 2009, he called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” not long before he said the secret to understanding President Barack Obama was his embrace of the radical “Kenyan anti-colonial” mentality of his late father.
In 2011, he blasted the president for seeking the help of the United Nations instead of just bombing Libya unilaterally. After military action began, he said without blinking, “I would not have intervened.”
So let me get this straight, according to the Michigan senate bullying is ok on moral or religious grounds? Behavior that should be regarded as antithetical to moral or religious teaching is ok if it is motivated by moral or religious beliefs. Why can’t I get my head around that?
There’s not much pretense of intending to address the current crisis when your plan has as its cornerstone the passage of a Constitutional amendment.
Less than an hour after passing the so-called Protect Life Act to guard the unborn, the House of Representatives passed a bill that the EPA warns will kill thousands of people prematurely.
I continue to be baffled; do Republicans have their own air supply?
