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blaseblasphemener
Joined: 01 Jun 2006
Location: There's a voice, keeps on calling me, down the road, that's where I'll always be
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 Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 9:22 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| In honesty, I don't care about the grades they got. |
Why? In the real world, you would. Does the president live in Candy land? |
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Gollywog
Joined: 14 Jun 2008
Location: Debussy's brain
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| Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 10:42 pm Post subject: |
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Say, would someone refresh my memory. What, exactly, is wrong with these "earmarks" McCain keeps ranting about?
| Quote: |
Earmarks defended: Not evil, just part of budget
By GARRY RAYNO
New Hampshire Union Leader Staff
Monday, Mar. 10, 2008
New Hampshire's senators and representatives in Washington are far from leaders in congressional "earmark" spending, but they still returned about $185 million in taxpayer money to the Granite State, a review by the New Hampshire Union Leader shows.
And they see the practice as good for their constituents.
"I'm perfectly happy to defend any of the earmarks I've gotten over the years," said the state's senior U.S. senator, Republican Judd Gregg.
►Who in NH got federal earmarks? (5)
Earmarks are found both in legislation and committee reports and have the effect of law, targeting funds for specific projects.
"The people's trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks," President George W. Bush said this year, promising to veto "any appropriations bill which does not cut the number and costs of earmarks in half."
Bush later issued an executive order directing federal agencies to ignore earmarks not voted by Congress.
Gregg views earmarks differently than President Bush.
"Congress has every right to prioritize how money is spent as the executive branch does," Gregg said. "If not, then you turn over a huge authority to embedded bureaucrats in the executive branch."
In the context of a "disciplined budget," some earmarks are good, as long as they are transparent so it's clear how the money is spent, who asked for it and who the recipient is, Gregg said.
Taxpayers for Common Sense reports the federal budget for 2008 includes 11,331 Congressional earmarks worth $15.3 billion.
A recent article in "The Hill," the newspaper that covers Congress, notes freshmen Democratic members of the House were "showered with earmarks" as the House leadership bids to retain its majority status going into the 2008 general elections.
New Hampshire's Democratic freshmen U.S. Reps. Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter were not the top freshmen, according to The Hill, but they were in the top third of their class.
Bringing money home
In this fiscal year's budget, Gregg's signature is on earmarks totaling about $75 million.
Gregg is seldom the only senator earmarking a project; rather he and Sen. John E. Sununu together request projects and contracts or work with one or both of the state's U.S. representatives, Hodes and Shea-Porter.
For example, the I-293 interchange project in Manchester will receive $1.7 million in an earmark that Gregg and Shea-Porter requested.
Gregg's singular earmarks total about $6 million based on information on the U.S. Office of Management and Budget Web site.
Many of those earmarks are for the state's colleges and universities.
Often earmarks translate to jobs for the Granite State.
Gregg was one of the signers on defense department earmarks that included $12.1 million for Insight Technology Inc. of Londonderry and $14.5 million for BAE Systems in Nashua. Sununu also signed the earmarks.
Sununu's earmarks total about $60 million.
He was alone in reserving $339,000 for the University of New Hampshire to expand business and high technology programs. His defense department earmarks were almost identical to Gregg's, totalling $58 million.
According to a news release from the two senators, the defense department budget included $66 million for research, development and production programs by New Hampshire companies.
Hodes signed on to earmarks totaling about $25 million. A review by the New Hampshire Union Leader indicates he is the sole signer for about $4 million in projects and contracts.
Hodes, who represents the state's second district, earmarked $400,000 for rail safety projects throughout the North Country.
Shea-Porter's earmarks also total about $25 million, excluding earmarks for Pease and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which had multiple signers.
Among her earmarks are $400,000 for the Avis Goodwin Center to build a new facility and $370,000 for the Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, which also includes the signatures of Gregg and Sununu.
She included several earmarks for nursing programs at Franklin Pierce College, the state community college in Manchester and at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Services in Manchester.
How earmarks work
Gregg said earmarks have to be viewed in the context of the entire federal budget and entitlements such as Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, which represent the real money.
Because there have been abuses like the infamous Alaska "bridge-to-nowhere" project, Gregg said the focus is on earmarks, which represent less than 1 or 2 percent of the federal budget. Gregg likened the situation to a town meeting where people "argue over a new (police) cruiser for two hours and then approve the school budget in 10 minutes."
Sununu said increasing transparency is good.
Any funding earmark should be part of the legislation and not just written into the committee report, should not be put into the conference bill at the last minute and should go through the House or Senate so they are thoroughly vetted, he said.
Sununu and Gregg cited land conservation efforts in the Great Woods and Lake Umbagog as projects funded through earmarks.
"All of those requests were vetted through the process and had broad support across New Hampshire," Sununu said.
Hodes' $432,000 earmark for developing a virtual trip to the Mt. Washington Observatory drew a rebuke from the state Republican Party's chairman.
Hodes notes that Gregg also earmarked the project, which will allow students in New Hampshire and the rest of the country to access observatory resources via the Internet.
"I certainly have seen how broken the system has been and it needs to be cleaned up from the waste and corruption and the bridges-to-nowhere," Hodes said. While more accountability and more transparency have been added, additional changes are needed, Hodes said.
Hodes said the state only gets back 67 cents for every dollar sent to Washington in taxes, while New Hampshire has very pressing needs.
"In the past, representatives and senators were allowed to insert earmarks into appropriations bills without having to put their names on them," Shea-Porter said. "Spending ballooned out of control, and we ended up with outrageous and wasteful projects like the bridge to nowhere."
She said she would like to see much less reliance on earmarks, even though many of them are for good causes.
"I regret that some politicians attack earmarks in press releases and then brag about their own projects and never admit that their projects are earmarks also," Shea-Porter
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more:
http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Earmarks+defended%3A++Not+evil%2C+just+part+of+budget&articleId=68085ce8-006a-49a0-9248-418a074a7012
George Bush has increased the national debt by trillions of dollars. Earmarks were not to blame. The spend and borrow policies of Bush and the Republicans are to blame.
Maybe McCain should try talking about the real issues. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2008 12:32 am Post subject: |
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Much of the reasons for for the debt are
The stock market meltdown of 2000 (started before Bush was in office)
The recession of 2000 (started before Bush was in office)
the drag of higher oil prices ( Is Bush to blame for increased use by China and India and peak oil)
The damage to the economy from the 9-11 attacks ( Planned before Bush was president)
Clinton was a fairly good president but he was also a lucky president. He was able to operated with low oil prices and with the Soviet Union out of the picture.
Bush was dealt a worse set of cards than Clinton ever was. |
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Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2008 12:05 am Post subject: |
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Will you let the guy alone, already?
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September 13, 2008
McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as Distortions
By MICHAEL COOPER and JIM RUTENBERG
Harsh advertisements and negative attacks are a staple of presidential campaigns, but Senator John McCain has drawn an avalanche of criticism this week from Democrats, independent groups and even some Republicans for regularly stretching the truth in attacking Senator Barack Obama�s record and positions.
Mr. Obama has also been accused of distortions, but this week Mr. McCain has found himself under particularly heavy fire for a pair of headline-grabbing attacks. First the McCain campaign twisted Mr. Obama�s words to suggest that he had compared Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to a pig after Mr. Obama said, in questioning Mr. McCain�s claim to be the change agent in the race, �You can put lipstick on a pig; it�s still a pig.� (Mr. McCain once used the same expression to describe Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton�s health plan.)
Then he falsely claimed that Mr. Obama supported �comprehensive sex education� for kindergartners (he supported teaching them to be alert for inappropriate advances from adults).
Those attacks followed weeks in which Mr. McCain repeatedly, and incorrectly, asserted that Mr. Obama would raise taxes on the middle class, even though analysts say he would cut taxes on the middle class more than Mr. McCain would, and misrepresented Mr. Obama�s positions on energy and health care.
A McCain advertisement called �Fact Check� was itself found to be �less than honest� by FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan group. The group complained that the McCain campaign had cited its work debunking various Internet rumors about Ms. Palin and implied in the advertisement that the rumors had originated with Mr. Obama.
In an interview Friday on the NY1 cable news channel, a McCain supporter, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, called �ridiculous� the implication that Mr. Obama�s �lipstick on a pig� comment was a reference to Ms. Palin, whom he also defended as coming under unfair attack.
�The last month, for sure,� said Don Sipple, a Republican advertising strategist, �I think the predominance of liberty taken with truth and the facts has been more McCain than Obama.� |
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/13mccain.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
The no good, stinking Eastern liberal media elite!
Who do they think they are, attacking a genuine war hero?
If John McCain says it's so, then it is so. You can count on it. He was a POW, after all. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2008 2:16 am Post subject: |
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Obama has done his own misleading ads against McCain.
By the way McCains ad about Obama and sex ed was a complete distortion .
I think Obama knew what he was saying when he said lipstick on a pig.
Before McCain's campaign made the add more than a few news outlets were reporting what Obama said about lipstick on a pig.
So shame on McCain for the sex ed ad . It was completely misleading but the other ad isn't . No one can no for certain what Obama meant and later Obama didn't say I meant nothing by it . He said Palin was the lip stick and and McCains policies were the pig. Obama I think knew what he said |
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Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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spliff
Joined: 19 Jan 2004
Location: Khon Kaen, Thailand
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| Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 3:08 am Post subject: |
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| bORE THEM TO DEATH, MORE LIKELY. |
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Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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huffdaddy
Joined: 25 Nov 2005
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| Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 3:29 am Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Bush was dealt a worse set of cards than Clinton ever was. |
8 years in office and it was all just a string of bad luck. I suppose the same could very well be said of Carter's 4 years. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 3:49 am Post subject: |
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| huffdaddy wrote: |
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Bush was dealt a worse set of cards than Clinton ever was. |
8 years in office and it was all just a string of bad luck. I suppose the same could very well be said of Carter's 4 years. |
9-11 exceptional no? Carter never got hit with anything like that. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 3:52 am Post subject: |
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Mr. Obama never learned to fly. It takes a lot more skill to fly a plane than to send an email.
If McCain is such a dolt then Obama never has shown that he has more skill than McCain. What does that say about Mr Obama? |
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Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 5:35 am Post subject: |
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Yes, you are absolutely right, far right, Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee. Every candidate for president should be required to know how to fly a jet aircraft. A Top Gunner would be preferred, but a Bottom Bomber will do in a pinch. What the nation needs is an amendment to the U.S. Constitution requiring that only trained jet pilots can run for president.
And now....
More rabid left-leaning attacks from the Ultra Liberal Left Wing Commie Eastern Media Establishment.
How dare they attack Sarah Palin's source, Westbrook Pegler, prophet and precursor of the modern Republican Party?
http://www.slate.com/id/2096673/
When the Republican-evangelical alliance takes power in the November election, people like Frank Rich are going to be very, very sorry.
Don't be a dummy. Be a smarty. Come and join the Republican Party.
| Quote: |
September 14, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket
By FRANK RICH
WITH all due deference to lipstick, let�s advance the story. A week ago the question was: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The question today: What kind of president would Sarah Palin be?
It�s an urgent matter, because if we�ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it�s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America�s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.
No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for �victory,� whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.
The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they�re wearing lipstick or not.
This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin�s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with �a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri� who �followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,� she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: �We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.� Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, �run our factories� and �fight our wars� and are �always proud� of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans � she didn�t have to name names � who are none of the above.
There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office. Just as striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. He was identified by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal as the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.
Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler�s too. He decreed America was �done for� after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a �guttersnipe,� and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (�geese,� he called them) were all likely Communists.
Surely Palin knows no more about Pegler than she does about the Bush doctrine. But the people around her do, and they will be shaping a Palin presidency. That they would inject not just Pegler�s words but spirit into their candidate�s speech shows where they�re coming from. Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, said that the Palin-sparked convention created �a whole new Republican Party,� but what it actually did was exhume an old one from its crypt.
The specifics have changed in our new century, but the vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay �cosmopolitan� urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear. |
Don't stop now, just when we're having fun.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/opinion/14rich.html?em=&pagewanted=all |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 5:40 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia |
Why does Frank Rich keep repeating things that are not true?
Iran has supported Al Qaeda.
Hizbollah has helped Al Qaeda.
Frank Rich is responsible for his own ignorance.
Far right?
PS voted for Clinton two times and Al Gore once. |
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aka Dave
Joined: 02 May 2008
Location: Down by the river
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| Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 12:06 am Post subject: |
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Iran is Shiite, Al Qaeda is Sunni. They are ideological enemies. Now, Iran might have used them as a cynical realpolitik in Iraq (I don't if you have some crappy, weak documentation, you can find anything on the web) but to link Al Qaeda with Iran shows a fundamental ignorance of the ideological dynamic.
This crap about McCain flying a jet; I mean, are you a six years old? How stupid is an argument asserting "well, my candidate can fly an airplane".
What about his policies? The same policies which have nearly destroyed the country over the past 8 years. The same policies that Allen Greenspan (Republican) says will bankrupt the country.
The trivial nature of the political discourse is beyond anything I could have imagined, especially given the importance of the election.
The obvious question is: how did it get this stupid, this fast? How did the most important campaign in a generation degenerate into a moronic farce?
Simple. The Republicans have nothing substantive to say. Their policies have failed miserably, but they march lock-step ideologically, they are incapable of self-evaluation or considering the worth of what they've done.
So they just propose more of the same, and say the other guy isn't a a real American.
It's pathetic. But unfortunately, there are millions of morons in the USA. I'm sure you've all met a few. So they gotta shot. |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 3:21 am Post subject: |
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I think the real side McCain is on, the real measure of this man can be inferred by his statement on the Boumediene decision --- that "the Supreme court made one of its worst decisions" and that "Kennedy had turned the Constitution into a suicide pact". (no, not THAT Kennedy).
Those are his words about a decision to make the constitution fit universal values and not just helter skelter application to some "Americans".
I sure hope this becomes an election issue. (Seeing how it clearly demarks the two men - Obama saying how the decision was a "new day").
It should be clearly stated that the guy who rejects torture (nobly), accepts that people can be caged away indefinitely without writ, without rights, without knowledge of what is accused or accuser. Shame on him.
Simpleton.
DD |
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