Some Guy's Blog: Happy Thanksgiving!
James Fallows has been posting on how our myopic media manufactured a failure out of Obama's China trip
Angry Bear: Another Reagan myth bubbling back to the surface
cab drollery: They Knew
The Sardonic Sideshow: Has the American Dream drifted north?
onegoodmove: The Right Side of History (h/t reader Geoff)
Mr. Tobacco Bribe issued so much crap on Saturday that it was hard to get the smell out of my keyboard.
I came here to renew the American Dream, so my kids and their kids have the same opportunities I had. I came here to fight big-government monstrosities like this bill that dim the light of freedom and diminish opportunity for future generations," Boehner said in a statement.
Freedom allows Boehner to hand out checks in the halls of Congress.
In late June of 1995 then-GOP Conference Chairman John Boehner handed out "about a half-dozen" checks from the political action committee of tobacco company Brown & Williamson Corp. to fellow Republicans on the floor of the House.
Boehner's chief of staff Barry Jackson stated, "We were trying to help guys who needed to get their June 30th numbers up, their cash-on-hand numbers up. All leadership does this. We have to raise money for people and help them raise money."
Boehner was forced to stop handing out the checks when two freshmen Republicans, "appalled by it," confronted him and voiced their displeasure. Boehner's reaction was one of tempered apology, "I thought, 'Yeah, I can imagine why somebody would be upset. It sure doesn't look good.'"
Now that's freedom.
Conservatives are so against President Obama that they actually hoped America would lose the 2016 bid for the Olympics. That would have been a huge stimulus package, but Republicans show their true colors about job creation for their own country.
Americans For Prosperity show their hatred for America.
During the Americans For Prosperity's "Defending the American Dream Summit," blogger Emily Marie Zanotti of American Princess interrupted a discussion about engaging the right online to announce that Chicago was out of the running -- and the room erupted in applause.
"If anyone cares, Chicago is out," Zanotti said. When the crowd asked what happened, she said, "The very first vote, they did not have any chance at even negotiating. They were out on the first vote." That news was met with more cheers and high-fives.
The Weekly Standard also embarrassed their publication with this one.
Soon after news broke that the International Olympic Committee had rejected Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics, which President Obama had personally lobbied for, Weekly Standard blogger John McCormack published a celebratory post on the magazine’s blog, titled “Chicago Loses! Chicago Loses!.” McCormack wrote that “Cheers erupt at WEEKLY STANDARD world headquarters.
--
But the post has now been changed. The reference to cheers have been removed and the title has been shortened to a non-exclamatory “Chicago Loses.” The current post neither acknowledges nor explains the changes that were made.
Rep. Alan Grayson had to remind the Republicans that they need to remember what country they live in.
"Someone should remind them what team they're really on"
And the money keeps coming in for Rep. Grayson.
(Above video clips supplied by Overture Films)
I went to see a preview of Michael Moore's new film: Capitalism, A Love Story at the Bruin Theater in Westwood last week with Howie and Digby and it was a very fun night.
Moore has an incredible sense of humor and it always translates well into his movies and Capitalism is no different. He makes you laugh throughout his new project with images of the Roman Empire to satirical caricatures of Bush and AIG, but then he can also make you cry a second later, which makes his movies all the more powerful. When you see people holding camcorders while the eviction police are breaking down their doors to remove them your heart cries out.
We know that Wall Street and the mortgage industry pulled a monster con game on Americans and the result was that hard-working families lost their most prized position and that is the message at the heart of his movie. What good is "Capitalism" if it can't fill the basic needs of our people? How has it served America? Not how has it served the top 1% wealthy population, but the remaining 99% of the country that is driven by the messaging that you too can become rich and famous if you just work hard enough.
Ahhh, The American Dream.
What Moore believes is that capitalism is an absolute failure and is actually evil because at its heart, it's missing a moral core. The core comes back to the American worker. Does capitalism translate into the kind of America his father was part of while he grew up in Michigan? A place where a person could work hard, earn enough to raise the family and then retire with a pension? To Moore, the answer proves it has been a failure. He doesn't say he wants socialism to take hold, but I thought he was arguing for a sort of Constitutional Capitalism since he liked Capitalism back in the days when he father was able to prosper working at one company his entire life. Corporations should have to take care of their employees just like they do their profits. An equal partnership, so to speak. Is it possible? Moore thinks the system has become too corrupted, too evil to succeed in delivering the promise of a good life for the vast majority of the country.
Corporations are beholden to their stock holders and must maximize profits at all costs, regardless of how that affects their workers. So, even if GM records a huge profit for a particular year, they could then cut thousands of workers from the company the following year just to increase profits. Destroying cities and people's lives in the process don't factor in even when there has been no financial shortfall for them. To Moore that is the real evil and the way he sees it, it may be too late to fix.
He attacks Wall Street and Congress and all the players you think he would over the bailouts and then he asks the viewer to come up with a solution to the problem as he sees it.
Can America survive without Capitalism? Where do we go from here? There is much to see in this new flick and much to like. The one thing that he does is also give his audience plenty to think about.
August 24, 2009 CNN--From The Cafferty File:
More good news from our government. Friday the White House said deficits would climb to $9 trillion over the next ten years bringing the total national debt to $20 trillion a decade from now.
The government also announced Social Security recipients will get no cost of living adjustments during the next two years. That hasn’t happened since automatic increases were put into place in 1975. We can find hundreds of billions of dollars for AIG and Wall Street, but we can’t give our senior citizens a small cost of living increase in their social security. When does the revolution start?
We’re in the midst of a recession not seen since the great depression. Millions of Americans are out of work, unemployment has soared to 9.4 percent. Millions of good paying jobs have been have been shipped overseas never to return. And the manufacturing base that was once the engine of our economy is on life support. We simply don’t make “things” anymore.
We are in debt up to our eyeballs to China and other foreign countries as we increasingly look to them to finance out deficit spending. And through it all have you noticed? There’s no talk in Washington of cutting expenses or reducing the size of government.
There are unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars for Medicare and Social Security; and no plan for how to pay for health care reform. Add in the drain of millions of illegal aliens and the fact that many states are bankrupt. We’re in serious trouble here.
Here’s my question to you: How is the American dream changing?
