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Democratic Super PAC Buys Newtgingrich.com
netbuzz writes "The purchase of newtgingrich.com by a Democratic Super PAC — and the use of it to highlight Newt Gingrich's political weaknesses — is either amusing or a dirty trick, depending on your politics and your view of the Republican presidential hopeful. In either case, however, it is a cautionary tale about the importance of controlling your brand online, a task that is about to get more difficult for everyone thanks to the impending expansion of generic top-level domains."
I think it's a bit of a dirty trick regardless of your politics.
"amusing or a dirty trick, depending on your politics??"
I am not a fan for Newt Gingrich but this is a dirty trick.
People who want to learn about the candidate will want to go to their web site to see their official stance on things. This is an attempt to keep the public misinformed by the opposition.
Mr. Gingrich has a sorted political past, and if you go to the others web sites they will tell all about it. You really need to hear his side too for people to get a full picture of who you should be voting for.
Lets all complain how stupid the voters are and they don't do their research, then in the same breath we reward and pat on the back members of your political beliefs their attempt to misdirect the public to only see their views.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Because real life has to compromise. In that though you should be a big supporter of those Tea Party Republicans who will vote down any tax raises. They are standing by their guns and sticking to their promises even though they are obviously bad for the United States.
For the most part politicization have a list of things they really want, a list of nice to get, and a list they can take it or leave it.
When they are compromising for a bill they will try to put it all out in the table (both sides) then they will slowly take out the lower priority items as the other side does the same, until you get a bill that both sides doesn't really want but it is better then nothing.
The US Government isn't designed to run fast, it is designed to be slow and offer small solutions.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Shortly before a San Francisco Mayoral election a friend by the name of Andy Hasse registered the .coms of all of the expected candidates. One such candidate, upon finding that his domain was cyberly squatted upon, asked what he could do about it. Andy pitched his web consulting services then was hired by that candidate to do his site.
Andy was at the time a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz and was living the Bohemian lifestyle in The Mission District. He was just starting out. Imagine his great surprise - and mine as well - when Andy made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle when the Willie Brown campaign discovered that willybrown.com was owned by one of the staff for a competing campaign.
That was a long time ago; I'm not sure that the article would still be online. Let me check... Ah! Here We Go!
Willie Brown is to San Frasncisco politics as the Kennedys were once to American politics. While Willie has many supporters in San Francisco, it's quite definitely old-skool big-city machine politices.
I suggested that Andy take advantage of his fifteen minutes by offering him some free hosting. The Willie Brown website is no longer online, with the registrant being hidden by a private registration service. But based on the creation date, that domain just has to still owned by Andy.
Let's ask The Wayback Machine... Service With A Smile.
Sometime later an incredibly right-wing guy by the name of Dan Lungren was running for California State Attorney General. "Did you register Dan Lundgren's domain?" I asked Andy.
"Yup," he replied. "Com, Net and Org."
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Just tried the link http://newtgingrich.com/ and up comes freddiemac.com
Looks like it is on a rotating forwarder. The briefest of examinations suggests that it sends people to a URL from this list:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/12/gingrichs-campaign-still-looks-awful-lot-book-tour/45977/
http://www.greektravel.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/gingrich-senior-aides-resign/2011/06/09/AGN77VNH_blog.html
http://www.tiffany.com/?siteid=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaZFfQKWX54
http://www.freddiemac.com/
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/09/11/60353/gingrich-porn/
http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=654836
I think it is great. I'd think it was funny if it happened to any politician, or any public figure really.
At a minimum it is funny because of all the people who will get their panties in a wad over it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
My assumption was that he was talking about tax raises on the wealthy. You can balance a budget by taking in more money or cutting spending, and one party is okay with doing both, while the aforementioned tea party is not.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Gingrich - isn't he the one that stole Christmas?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Is that per capita or total amount? Since the tax rate is the lowest its has ever been since the IRS was formed, I have my doubts about your statement.
Bush got us into two global conflicts consisting of large troop deployments, large expenditures on tactical support, AND large amounts of money going to infrastructure in the name of "nation building". During which the Bush administration lower the tax rate on a (*cough* *cough*) temporary basis which is unprecedented in US history. Normally we would sell bonds earmarked for the cause or raise taxes to pay for the war effort.
That my friend is no bullshit.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Representative democracy can be done right. The way the US is currently operating... isn't it. The problem is corruption, not the system. The system simply needs more checks to prevent the corruption in the first place.
Start with making campaign finance taxpayer-funded and make campaign donations illegal. That alone would cause a shift in the sort of people who want to be politicians because it would remove a lot of the profit motive.
The real problem is that in order to put these checks into place, we'd need our current, mostly corrupt politicians to agree to them.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I think (in the general election) that what Romney loses in extremists he will more than make up for moderates (including moderate Democrats who voted for Obama last time).
Of course, Huntsman would be an even better general election candidate, but he really is unelectable in the primary.
Finally, keep in mind that Gingrich more-or-less invented the ultra-adversarial tactics that are causing the gridlock in D.C. that lots of citizens (including Republicans) are so pissed off about right now. Hopefully, folks keep that in mind on election day.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The same could be argued against cutting Public Radio or the national endowment of the arts funding. Every cut you make will be a drop in the bucket. Every tax raised may also be a drop in the bucket. But, but collecting those drops into a bucket, it gets filled up.
There isn't a good argument to not raise taxes on the higher income brackets. Just hand waving and mumbling about "job creators".
Is it too much to really ask for compromise? Some Tax raises and some cuts?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
your scale here is way off. public radio and nea funding are ridiculously small drops. it's absurd to even talk about cutting their funding to help balance the budget.
people really need to start talking about the biggest money suckholes of them all: defense, medicare, and social security.
wasting your time talking about penny ante stuff like npr and the nea is pointless. you're missing the big picture, and will literally accomplish nothing trying to take care of this problem by going after the smallest budget items.
Her very first impression of the United States upon her very first visit here was the appalling condition of our roads. I was surprised at this, as I had always figured our roads were just fine, but upon my next visit to her home in Nova Scotia, I just had to agree. I later lived in Canada for several years and just had to agree that the roads everywhere I went were in immaculate condition.
Contrast this to the United States: in the October 1989 Loma Prieta quake, the top deck of the two-deck portion of Interstate 880 through Oakland collapsed onto the bottom deck, killing I think sixty-nine people. Some poor woman had her legs pinned under many tons of concrete. The only hope of saving her life was to use a power saw to cut both her legs off without the use of any anesthesia of any sort.
More recently the bridge on an Interstate highway between Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota collapsed, killing I think eleven people in an incredibly cruel way by dropping their cars from a great height into a deep river.
The authorized widely broadcast requests that anyone that had ever taken photos of that bridge turn them into the civil engineering authorities for their post-mortem. Careful examination found that some of the bolts in that bridge had been stretched noticably out of place as long as five years before!
I mentioned this to a friend who is a Professional Engineer - that's the proper term for a Civil Engineer. The fact that people get killed when people like him screw up is the reason that it would be a criminal expense for him to even claim to be a Professional Engineer without the proper license.
"That's impossible," he said. "Every bridge is inspected every two years."
I don't doubt that bridge was inspected every two years, but nevertheless it did fall down and kill a bunch of people.
If America were willing to tax itself enough to properly maintain its infrastructure, all those deaths and permanently crippling injuries just never would have happened.
I vastly preferred living in Canada for the specific reason that the Canadians are only too happy to tax themselves to provide for the common good. I always told people that Canada was the way America should be, and could be, but isn't.
I lost my immigration when Bonita divorced me. For quite a long time I wanted to return, and there are other ways I could still become a Canadian Landed Immigrant, and eventually a Canadian citizen.
One reason I don't, and chose eventually to remain in the United States, is so that I could work towards someday putting a stop to damnfool ignorant people such as yourself who are driving my Mother Country into the ground.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The only way raising taxes would work is to actually start having everyone pay income tax.
Great! So let's start paying people a living wage and let the wealth trickle-up. Our economy was at it's strongest when our middle-class was at it's strongest, after all.
Oh, wait, never mind, you meant let's squeeze more out of the people that are already struggling, didn't you? Yeah, good call. Then we can use the Michele Bachmann unemployment solution: dump the current minimum wage so that the "Job Creators" can move the sweatshops over here. It'll be great! No more unemployment, everyone can get a job for $2 an hour! And think of all the money the "Job Creators" will save not having to ship their crap over here from China! And once we get rid of those awful child labor laws, we finally can get back to the real American Dream of being put to work in grade school! Well, the poor kids, anyway, but who cares about them, right?
The whole "everyone should pay something" idea sounds fair on paper but will accomplish jack fucking shit in terms of improving the state of our economy. The phrase "A rising tide lifts all boats" is absolutely true. But taking more money from the people that have the least to give, just so we can continue keeping tax breaks on the books for those that can most afford them, is more of that trickle-down Reaganomics horseshit that has done nothing but harm our country since that corporate shill took the oath of office in 1980.
We're 30 years into this stupid fucking shit and the only times this country has done well financially was during the Dot Com boom, and as soon as that retard George W. Bush got elected they pissed all of the progress we made then right down the fucking drain so they could give rich people another fucking tax cut and continue the trickle down bullshit for another generation. Then, to make matters even worse, we get involved in a massive, nebulous war effort all over the middle east that costs us tens of billions of dollars a month to fund without raising taxes to pay for it at all.
It's not taxes and regulations that are responsible for the unemployment rate, despite what you hear over and over and over again on conservative talk radio and Fox News. It's the lack of demand for the goods and services these companies put to market. These companies aren't hiring because they don't need to hire anyone, they're making just as many widgets as they need to meet demand. The rich assholes aren't buying them; no matter how large their bank account is, they still only need one widget, just like everyone else. People are trying to make it seem like making it cheaper for these "Job Creators" to operate is going to increase demand for their product...how? Seriously, how is that even fucking logical? When everyone is poor, who the hell is buying a new car? Or a new home? Or going on vacation? Or going out to eat? Or going to the movies?
The same could be argued against cutting Public Radio or the national endowment of the arts funding. Every cut you make will be a drop in the bucket. Every tax raised may also be a drop in the bucket. But, but collecting those drops into a bucket, it gets filled up.
The problem is this: The budget is comprised of social insurance programs, the military, interest on the debt, and "Everything Else." If you cut the entirety of "Everything Else," you will not close the deficit. The deficit is not caused by NPR or the Department of Education. It is caused by foreign wars and Medicare. At the other end of the spectrum, raising taxes by the amount it would take to close the deficit would be (and this is the technical term that economists use) "very bad."
The reason why the Tea Party candidates are dishonest is that they have no plan. They don't want to raise taxes, but if you ask them what they want to cut, they either give you some completely useless answer because the thing they list is 0.1% of the budget, or they provide something even more meaningless like "[unspecified] pork barrel projects."
The Democrats are dishonest for exactly the same reasons. You can't balance the budget with just taxes. And it probably isn't worth cutting anything in the category of "Everything Else" -- most of that stuff is pretty important, and none of it is very expensive. But the Democrats don't want to be heard suggesting cuts to military spending or social insurance either.
The elephant in the room is that those are the only options. The only way to eliminate the deficit without raising taxes at all is to cut all military and social insurance spending in half. The only way to eliminate the deficit without raising taxes so much that the economy goes back into the recession is by cutting those things by at least 25%.
The final alternative is to just say fuck it and keep running huge deficits without cuts. Those are the options. There is no option that allows you to close the deficit without raising taxes or cutting anything important. There is no option that allows you to close the deficit without goring anybody's ox. So you have to pick an ox, you have to gore it, and that is very inconvenient for politicians, so they get on the TV and lie to you about whose fault it is and what is going to happen.
The truth is they're probably just going to keep running huge deficits, regardless of who is in office, because nobody is willing to take on the AARP or the defense industry.
At what point is anyone demanding you give your money to them? Your taxes go to paying for goods and services that are, for the most part, publicly available. The military doesn't stop Soviet tanks from rolling over your house but allow them to roll over mine because you're in a higher tax bracket. The CDC doesn't spend more researching cures for diseases that I have because I take fewer deductions.
All of this money goes to services for ALL of us, not just some of us. If you lost your job and became destitute, YOU TOO could apply for social assistance. If you go to the airport YOU TOO get to board an aircraft that travels down a runway and gets directed by air traffic controllers through safe airspace all paid for by me, you, and everyone else in this country.
Taxes aren't theft, they are part of our social contract. Hell, even posting on /. over the internet has been made possible by the tax dollars of our parents going to fund DARPA projects.
If you think this social contract amounts to stealing, then by all means, move somewhere else that is more suited to your personal desires.
Both parties are not the same. People keep saying "Democrats don't want to cut programs and they want to raise taxes", but consistently time and time again the party that both cut (or raised) taxes responsibly and cut programs have been the Democrats. Sure Obama passed a massive temporary stimulus, but unlike Bush he's also been cutting at fundamental programs in the budget as well, and he's been working to fix Medicare. You may not like the Obamacare bill, but remember rather than fix the problem the last Republican president passed a massive NEW entitlement without the ability to negotiate for lower drug prices. Democrats are not perfect and Republicans aren't all bad, but Democrats have definitely proven over the past couple decades that they are the party of fiscal responsibility.
It's especially hard to deal with Republican rhetoric since they are exactly the ones who are responsible for me knowing that a budget deficit in a recession is often cleared up once you get back into a boom time, and slashing jobs during a recession prolongs the recession. Republican campaign rhetoric taught me that. It's pretty obvious that the Tea Party has one goal and they're willing to give up things like payroll tax cuts to do it - "keep the economy bad so that Obama can't get re-elected". They're willing to keep millions unemployed to achieve that goal. And obviously there's a large part of the mainstream Republican party who doesn't think that way, but there's a strong enough faction of economic terrorists that do. And comparing them to Democrats or even mainstream Republicans is extremely disingenuous.
Social security is self-funding, and will continue to be as long as the politicians keep their grubby hands off it. It's not part of the Federal budget, and including it as though it were is dishonest at best.
Medicare WAS mostly self-funding until the drug cartels got their way with an enormous unfunded giveaway to their bank accounts. They spent a few hundred million buying both political parties, and the ROI has been astounding. I don't think they ever expected to do that well in their wildest dreams.
The military could get slashed in half and we'd still be spending more than the next five countries combined. We could cut the Pentagram budget by 80 percent and still be the largest spender on war toys in the world. Most years if you graph the military budget and the US deficit the two amounts are amazingly close.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
If you declared a law that everything over 200k a person makes would go to the government it would be about 2 trillion dollars or enough to run the country for less then 2 months
OK, there is a lot wrong with this statement. First of all, Federal outlays in the 2011 budget were $3.6 trillion, so the $2 trillion you cite would last 6.6 months.
But the $2 trillion is wrong (the other way). Those earning over $200k made 17.5% of the total US income of $7.723 trillion, or $1.35 trillion. That amount of money would last us 4.5 months.
But the most egregious part of your statement is the implicit assumption that taxing all of the income over $200K would replace every single other source of revenue for the federal government. No one is suggesting reducing the income tax rate for under $200k to 0%. Not only are those suggesting higher marginal rates for the very rich not suggesting lower marginal rates for the rest, they are also not proposing cutting non-income taxes and revenue.
Federal income tax makes up about 45% of total Federal revenue. Payroll taxes make up the second biggest chunk of revenue at about 36% (perhaps lower with the current holiday), while corporate income tax (which some say should be higher) makes up 12%. These other sources would continue if we raised taxes on the rich.
So, not only do you use inaccurate numbers to make your argument, you are arguing against a strawman.
A sensible debate on this issue would reveal that we need to have a comprehensive approach to solve the deficit and debt problems we face. Cutting spending alone, or raising taxes alone, will not solve the issue. The combination of decreased tax revenue (due to the Bush tax cuts and the deregulation of the financial industry which directly led to the bank bailouts [increased spending] and recession [decreased revenue], and the increased spending due to the War on Terror (not only Iraq and Afghanistan, but also DHS) has out us in a fine mess, and we need to reverse course on both those fronts to climb out of the hole we are in.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.