GOP Failure Watch Part III

I've often wondered if gay men filibuster themselves the same way all of us straight men filibuster ourselves. My guess is that he watches different videos when filibustering.

 

It's real.

 

Great column. The NRA is terrible people, doing terrible things, with near inpunity, and wrath upon those who would point that out.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/the-great-gun-gag/#h

The GOP of course is not the NRA, but it's a massive enabler and there is no NRA Failure thread.

 

Well, it belongs on this thread because of this great line....

Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin, who are to reasoned argument what salt is to a slug...​

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Timothy Egan is a damn good writer. His history of the Dust Bowl is fantastic.

 

Yeah that was awesome, the article would have plenty good for that line only.

 

Tea Partiers love deficits like I love titties.

Good, thorough post, by the way. Prince William County? Ouch.

 

And the MSM has not bothered to report the insanity of GOP politics...

 

The GOP has moved so far to the right as to render useless the MSM's normal approach of finding the middle ground between Republican and Democrat talking points.

Take the election polls. The MSM took the middle position; the reality was in fact to the left of the Dem position. Or take climate science. The reality is also to the left of the Dem position.

Or take the fiscal cliff discussions. Obama's offer is of $4 trillion overall in deficit reduction -- $2.4 trillion in cuts, $1.6 trillion in tax increases. The means a 3-2 ratio of cuts to tax increases, which is slightly to the right of where American people line up in the polls.

But the mainstream press doesn't say this, instead once again it presents the truth as lying somewhere in the middle between the two "extremes." But Obama is not presenting an extreme. If he were, then he would present the equivalent of the GOP offer, that is to say he would put forward only tax increases and little if any spending cuts.

 

yeah, this is really starting to annoy me - even though I know better, this is the exact impression I get when I listen to local TV and radio news in the mornings on my way to work. They play almost exclusively republican congressfolk in their sound-bytes whining about a lack of spending cuts, mostly about those nebulous "entitlement cuts", and the media never seem to call bullshit on any of them.
I might assume entitlement programs are USDA and Defense Dept programs, but I suspect they are not

 

It's fair to call out Obama to be specific on the spending cuts, otherwise he might be pulling a bait and switch.

Otherwise, those congressmen can suck on eggs. The President's is a reasonable proposal and while the congressmen might live in a bubble where everybody acts and talks like them, in this country their views are a minority. They would do well to be more humble.

I don't like that term "entitlement." It's used in casual, nontechnical terms as meaning a feeling of deserving what one hasn't earned. People pay into Social Security and into Medicare. Using those services is a return on their investments.

 

IMHO, I always thought that is the reason why the word "entitlement" is being used. It makes it comfortable at being able to slash Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and a whole host of responsive programs that the government needs to address, whether they like it or not. Or deal with the repercussions later on down the road.

 

The problem is, most of those "repercussions later on down the road" are made-up nonsense. If there are any real problems, they are now hidden in ideological bullshit and how am I supposed to know the difference? So I apply the 'Boy Who Cried Wolf' logic on them and simply discount every single thing they say as pure nonsense. Likely only 90% of it is actually pure nonsense.

 

Oh yeah.. Now that you bring it up....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...40a4-11e2-ae43-cf491b837f7b_blog.html?hpid=z2

“I think we’re going over the cliff. It’s pretty clear to me they made a political calculation. This offer doesn’t remotely deal with entitlement reform in a way to save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from imminent bankruptcy. It raises $1.6 trillion on job creators that will destroy the economy and there are no spending controls.”
— Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Dec. 2, 2012

 

Nothing else you can do until they start trying harder.

Oh, and that's nonsense from Lindsey Graham. Let's hope it's posturing and that he doesn't actually believe that stuff.

 

Nonsense, posturing, beliefs... Who can tell them appart with the present state of the GOP?

 

He doesn't and neither do the GOP who are in charge. But they don't want the GOP to be seen by the entire country as the ones saying that Social Security, Medicare, etc. need to be cut or "changed". They want Obama to say it.

 

This is far, far from the stupidest thing Lindsay Graham believes.

 

Ezra Klein on how the big GOP idea for the fiscal cliff -- raising the age of Medicare eligibility -- is a fail. Not solely from a softie lefty socialist mindset, but from a hard-headed GOP business mindset. Because Medicare costs less than the private insurance that will replace it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-the-eligibility-age-for-retirement-benefits/

 

Wait, why do we have private insurance then? And the Democrats are now forcing us to purchase it with no price controls? Shit makes no ********ing sense.

 

ObamaCare couldn't have passed if it made sense.

 

Admitting an error hurts. Better to avoid the pain.