Well, the Republican committee members demanded and got lots of concessions, then didn't vote for it anyway. If Obama had exerted a bit of leadership, the Democrats could have delivered just about any bill they wanted.
Depending, of course, on how much influence he might have on the Blue Dogs, who vote like Republicans and would have been needed for a filibuster-proof bill. But that's still Democrats being slackers on this issue.
We have a very arrogant social class who think they are the only ones doing anything for the country, and are thus the only ones entitled to get anything out of it.
The rest of us are just scum that might be worth just a little, if squeezed hard enough.
This is the great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.
-Hillary Clinton, 1998, talking about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Uh, no, Hillary, your husband simply wanted to bang women that weren't you.
I guess you forgot the whole 7 years of Whitewater investigations, which the right wingers immediately lost interest in the moment they found something else they could impeach him for.
Are you sure they are feigning ignorance? Have you considered the possibility that they really ARE that mind-numbingly stupid?
I think 30 years ago they were all just pretending. But they've been pimping themselves to the stupid for so long that a lot of the genuinely stupid have had time to be born, grow up, and start working their way up through the party ranks. So now you can't tell which ones are an act (Bachman?), and which are the genuine article (Palin).
The fun thing about American politics that republicans have discovered is this: It doesn't matter is a smear is true, it definetly doesn't matter if it's hypocritical, as long as you repeat an ambiguous one or two key accusations, they'll stick.
The average Republican politician has *far* more political savvy than the average Democrat politician.
I agree. Someone please tell me: which is the anti-bailout party? Which one says, "Yes, I'm willing to risk a supposed economic upheaval rather than be perpetually held hostage to plutocratic, incompetent banks that want to keep our society in the dark ages of entrepreneurship by having privileged access to ultra-cheap loans and government backstops."
From what I've read, We the People have actually turned a profit on the TARP funds that went to banks.
We don't need a government that won't bail anyone out; we need a government that will restore the regulations that were formerly there to prevent exactly this kind of crisis.
Also, we should ask ourselves whether it's in the interests of a republic, even a capitalist one, to *allow* any corporation to become so big that we can't afford to let it fail.
And we should ask ourselves why we like to bail out the Big Boys while ordinary folk are swirling down the drain. Especially when bailing out the ordinary folk would have kept the Big Boys from going bust in the first place, at least this time around.
And that is why my insurance premiums went up 20+% last year.
You insurance rate is going up because the Evil Liberal Democrats couldn't be bothered to provide provisions for competition in their Evil Liberal Bill.
Heath insurance companies, like major league baseball, are exempt from anti-trust law. They can jack up their prices without worrying about you taking your business somewhere else, because there's no one else who isn't doing the same thing.
IMO, they should repeal "Obamacare", repeal the exemption to anti-trust law, and establish a public option; that would cure far more problems than "Obamacare" ever will.
But of course, then shareholders wouldn't be getting the advantage of your 20% rate increase, and the politicians in our Wallstreetocracy aren't ever going to let *that* kind of disaster happen.
The Democrats have done plenty of nasty stuff, to be sure, but I honestly can't think of anything they've done lately, all on their own, that's so blatantly anti-American as this.
I'll take a shot: Have you heard of Obamacare?
It's beyond bizarre to hear you compare passing a bill that not everyone likes - the absolute norm for every bill - with the scumbaggery of a politician whining about how hard it is to make ends meet when he makes three times what his constituents make - and is trying to squeeze them even harder - and now wants to get a court to help him hide the evidence of his folly.
And speaking of social services! I know that I voted for the bastards - 'cos they bribed me with the promise of paved streets and a fire department.
And you foolishly believed them...
I wonder what would happen if someone pointed out to the rank-and-file TeaPartiers that paying the same amount of tax and getting reduced public services is in fact a tax increase.
The politicians like it because they can pretend it isn't, and count on FOX "news" to back them up on it.
Obviously not. Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio currently are passing union busting bills left and right. If the unions were paying for votes, these things would not be happening.
ISTM that what happened is that normal people turned out big in 2008 as a result of the excesses of the Bush Administration, but when the Democrats got control they were slackers for two years and failed to look after the interests of the people who put them in office, so a lot of people couldn't get excited about getting out to vote in 2010. Now a lot of them are paying the price for that folly.
It irritated me at the time.. they made the thing seem like a poorly-designed money sink that barely worked. It really makes me wonder, though, what would they get out of saying stuff like that if it weren't true? If Tesla has the records and they really did stage breakdowns and dead batteries, to what purpose? It's a show about ridiculously expensive cars that most of us ill never even see, much less drive. Tesla is definitely in that category, and considering the drooling they do over some pretty ridiculous (and ugly) cars.. why pick on them? They made plausible claims, mostly, but the one where they ran out of power after 55 miles I thought was weird. The others (overheating, brakes) could have happened, but there seemed to be a LOT of problems for what is basically a straight-from-the-factory Lotus with an electric drivetrain. (In the show they raced it against a Lotus, you can barely tell the cars apart without looking at the badges).
Anyway, just makes me wonder if they made it seem like crap (assuming Tesla is telling the truth) in order to appease the old-school dream car companies so they'd keep sending them toys to play with, or maybe Tesla was being a pain in the ass and they wanted to tweak them, or if they just thought it's be funnier.
My intuition tells me Top Gear will turn out to be right.
When an overhyped product gets a bad review and the maker threatens to sue, you know which way it usually turns out. I'm going with the odds, until the evidence says otherwise.
If they do in fact have evidence, they're welcome to present it.
Parent wasnt talking about just one issue; he was trying to pin basically all of the world's ills on a single political party.
If you're referring to my post, no I was not. I was responding to one specific observation in another post, which you can identify because I quoted it.
If you ever start thinking your political party is the answer to all of the world's ills, you know that youve really gone off the deep end.
FWIW, I have a very low opinion of Democrats. I don't think I've ever said anything positive about them, unless you count "aren't running the country into the ground quite as fast as the Republicans" as a positive observation, or "the only use for a Democrat is keeping a Republican out of office".
So, MSNBC like to deride FAT CATS, in spite of their GE ownership. That to me sounds like a news corp that isn't fully bought. You appear to be suggesting otherwise. ?
Contrary to popular opinion, MSNBC isn't particularly liberal.
Sure, they have liberal commentators on in the evening... but they also have Chris Mathews and Joe Scarborough.
They just stand out because most networks don't carry any liberal content at all. And because people want to believe the myth of the Liberal Media.
In fact, this is one thing I cannot fathom. How the RNC and big business (which are essentially one now - with the other party quickly being subverted as well) have managed to still get support from the very people that they shaft over and over again.
That's why they brought us the Southern Strategy, the bedding-down with the Religious Right, and the new Southwestern Strategy.
I.e., they figured out that if they can make someone's knee jerk, they can make their finger twitch in the voting booth.
We've got a country full of citizens who will gladly vote away their freedoms, their privacy, their financial well-being, and their health, for the chance of foisting their prejudices and religious scruples off on the rest of society.
If Republicans ran on their real platform - making sure the rich get richer faster than they would without a Federal government - they wouldn't draw 1% of the votes. There just aren't enough rich people to get anyone elected, so they appeal to the basest instincts of the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the Republican committee members demanded and got lots of concessions, then didn't vote for it anyway. If Obama had exerted a bit of leadership, the Democrats could have delivered just about any bill they wanted.
Depending, of course, on how much influence he might have on the Blue Dogs, who vote like Republicans and would have been needed for a filibuster-proof bill. But that's still Democrats being slackers on this issue.
but when George W. Bush rolled into Washington DC, he viewed the rule of law as garbage and disregarded it.
There; I've fixed it for you.
That, and the free UNICES turned out to be so useful as servers that Microsoft was not able to pwn the internet with its own "standards".
Once the genie escapes theres no putting him back in his bottle.
Yeah, but you can always call more attention to it by trying!
If you want quality talent, and people more difficult to bribe/influence, you MUST pay them well.
Fortunately, we don't want quality talent and resistance to bribery among our school teachers and other public employees.
I typically vote Republican for the simple reason that they tend to screw me over a little bit less
Wow, I didn't realize that we had billionaires posting to Slashdot.
Rich people don't create jobs
But a lot of them think they do.
We have a very arrogant social class who think they are the only ones doing anything for the country, and are thus the only ones entitled to get anything out of it.
The rest of us are just scum that might be worth just a little, if squeezed hard enough.
The article is a sad, revealing story of the hypocrisy of the Tea Party and it's members...
I don't think of the rank and file Tea Partier as a hypocrite. They've just been played for fools by FOX news and Republican astroturf money.
Let's see what they do when they've had a chance to see what is really going on.
It's OK if you use FOIA to threaten academics, but it's not OK if the GOP gets caught with their pants down?
It's perfectly fine, if your goal is winning rather than providing good, just governance.
This is the great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.
-Hillary Clinton, 1998, talking about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Uh, no, Hillary, your husband simply wanted to bang women that weren't you.
I guess you forgot the whole 7 years of Whitewater investigations, which the right wingers immediately lost interest in the moment they found something else they could impeach him for.
Are you sure they are feigning ignorance? Have you considered the possibility that they really ARE that mind-numbingly stupid?
I think 30 years ago they were all just pretending. But they've been pimping themselves to the stupid for so long that a lot of the genuinely stupid have had time to be born, grow up, and start working their way up through the party ranks. So now you can't tell which ones are an act (Bachman?), and which are the genuine article (Palin).
The fun thing about American politics that republicans have discovered is this: It doesn't matter is a smear is true, it definetly doesn't matter if it's hypocritical, as long as you repeat an ambiguous one or two key accusations, they'll stick.
The average Republican politician has *far* more political savvy than the average Democrat politician.
I agree. Someone please tell me: which is the anti-bailout party? Which one says, "Yes, I'm willing to risk a supposed economic upheaval rather than be perpetually held hostage to plutocratic, incompetent banks that want to keep our society in the dark ages of entrepreneurship by having privileged access to ultra-cheap loans and government backstops."
From what I've read, We the People have actually turned a profit on the TARP funds that went to banks.
We don't need a government that won't bail anyone out; we need a government that will restore the regulations that were formerly there to prevent exactly this kind of crisis.
Also, we should ask ourselves whether it's in the interests of a republic, even a capitalist one, to *allow* any corporation to become so big that we can't afford to let it fail.
And we should ask ourselves why we like to bail out the Big Boys while ordinary folk are swirling down the drain. Especially when bailing out the ordinary folk would have kept the Big Boys from going bust in the first place, at least this time around.
In the immortal words of Jesus, "I got mine so screw you, Jack!"
You deserve a Post of the Day Award.
And that is why my insurance premiums went up 20+% last year.
You insurance rate is going up because the Evil Liberal Democrats couldn't be bothered to provide provisions for competition in their Evil Liberal Bill.
Heath insurance companies, like major league baseball, are exempt from anti-trust law. They can jack up their prices without worrying about you taking your business somewhere else, because there's no one else who isn't doing the same thing.
IMO, they should repeal "Obamacare", repeal the exemption to anti-trust law, and establish a public option; that would cure far more problems than "Obamacare" ever will.
But of course, then shareholders wouldn't be getting the advantage of your 20% rate increase, and the politicians in our Wallstreetocracy aren't ever going to let *that* kind of disaster happen.
The Democrats have done plenty of nasty stuff, to be sure, but I honestly can't think of anything they've done lately, all on their own, that's so blatantly anti-American as this.
I'll take a shot: Have you heard of Obamacare?
It's beyond bizarre to hear you compare passing a bill that not everyone likes - the absolute norm for every bill - with the scumbaggery of a politician whining about how hard it is to make ends meet when he makes three times what his constituents make - and is trying to squeeze them even harder - and now wants to get a court to help him hide the evidence of his folly.
Party of Personal Responsibility, indeed.
Personally, I wish the GOP would/could jettison their theocrat wing.
If they did they might as well close up shop and go home, because their election-winning days would be over.
And speaking of social services! I know that I voted for the bastards - 'cos they bribed me with the promise of paved streets and a fire department.
And you foolishly believed them...
I wonder what would happen if someone pointed out to the rank-and-file TeaPartiers that paying the same amount of tax and getting reduced public services is in fact a tax increase.
The politicians like it because they can pretend it isn't, and count on FOX "news" to back them up on it.
Obviously not. Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio currently are passing union busting bills left and right.
If the unions were paying for votes, these things would not be happening.
ISTM that what happened is that normal people turned out big in 2008 as a result of the excesses of the Bush Administration, but when the Democrats got control they were slackers for two years and failed to look after the interests of the people who put them in office, so a lot of people couldn't get excited about getting out to vote in 2010. Now a lot of them are paying the price for that folly.
Can everyone say, "O Teh Irony"?
It irritated me at the time.. they made the thing seem like a poorly-designed money sink that barely worked. It really makes me wonder, though, what would they get out of saying stuff like that if it weren't true? If Tesla has the records and they really did stage breakdowns and dead batteries, to what purpose? It's a show about ridiculously expensive cars that most of us ill never even see, much less drive. Tesla is definitely in that category, and considering the drooling they do over some pretty ridiculous (and ugly) cars.. why pick on them? They made plausible claims, mostly, but the one where they ran out of power after 55 miles I thought was weird. The others (overheating, brakes) could have happened, but there seemed to be a LOT of problems for what is basically a straight-from-the-factory Lotus with an electric drivetrain. (In the show they raced it against a Lotus, you can barely tell the cars apart without looking at the badges).
Anyway, just makes me wonder if they made it seem like crap (assuming Tesla is telling the truth) in order to appease the old-school dream car companies so they'd keep sending them toys to play with, or maybe Tesla was being a pain in the ass and they wanted to tweak them, or if they just thought it's be funnier.
My intuition tells me Top Gear will turn out to be right.
When an overhyped product gets a bad review and the maker threatens to sue, you know which way it usually turns out. I'm going with the odds, until the evidence says otherwise.
If they do in fact have evidence, they're welcome to present it.
Parent wasnt talking about just one issue; he was trying to pin basically all of the world's ills on a single political party.
If you're referring to my post, no I was not. I was responding to one specific observation in another post, which you can identify because I quoted it.
If you ever start thinking your political party is the answer to all of the world's ills, you know that youve really gone off the deep end.
FWIW, I have a very low opinion of Democrats. I don't think I've ever said anything positive about them, unless you count "aren't running the country into the ground quite as fast as the Republicans" as a positive observation, or "the only use for a Democrat is keeping a Republican out of office".
And some of them aren't even any use for that.
I know he's a Democrat. But my assessment is based on the views he expresses on his program, not on his club membership.
He's got a really bad case of "Beltway Narrative" syndrome.
So, MSNBC like to deride FAT CATS, in spite of their GE ownership. That to me sounds like a news corp that isn't fully bought. You appear to be suggesting otherwise. ?
Contrary to popular opinion, MSNBC isn't particularly liberal.
Sure, they have liberal commentators on in the evening... but they also have Chris Mathews and Joe Scarborough.
They just stand out because most networks don't carry any liberal content at all. And because people want to believe the myth of the Liberal Media.
In fact, this is one thing I cannot fathom. How the RNC and big business (which are essentially one now - with the other party quickly being subverted as well) have managed to still get support from the very people that they shaft over and over again.
That's why they brought us the Southern Strategy, the bedding-down with the Religious Right, and the new Southwestern Strategy.
I.e., they figured out that if they can make someone's knee jerk, they can make their finger twitch in the voting booth.
We've got a country full of citizens who will gladly vote away their freedoms, their privacy, their financial well-being, and their health, for the chance of foisting their prejudices and religious scruples off on the rest of society.
If Republicans ran on their real platform - making sure the rich get richer faster than they would without a Federal government - they wouldn't draw 1% of the votes. There just aren't enough rich people to get anyone elected, so they appeal to the basest instincts of the masses.