Thursday, March 26, 2009

The GOP budget response

Rachel has them!

Republicans fudge the budget

Republicans revealed a budget today....with no numbers!

Republicans fudge the budget

Republicans revealed a budget today....with no numbers!

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Matthews Obama has coherent plan

Obama showed again tonight he wants to be a great president and that he must get his health care, education, and energy programs off the ground while he has a 65% approval rating.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Saturday, March 21, 2009

ACORN spokesman calls out Fox News for 'lies'

Why the words'Fox' and 'News' should not appear in the same sentence.

ACORN spokesman calls out Fox News for 'lies'

Why the words'Fox' and 'News' should not appear in the same sentence.

AIG bonus estimate grows


MSNBC.com

Protesters visit lavish homes of AIG execs
Letter urges support for higher taxes on families earning $500,000 or more
The Associated Press
updated 4:40 p.m. CT, Sat., March. 21, 2009
FAIRFIELD, Conn. - A busload of activists representing working- and middle-class families paid visits Saturday to the lavish homes of American International Group executives to protest the tens of millions of dollars in bonuses awarded by the struggling insurance company after it received a massive federal bailout.

About 40 protesters — outnumbered by reporters and photographers from as far away as Germany — sought to urge AIG executives who received a portion of the $165 million in bonuses to do more to help families.

"We think $165 million could be used in a more appropriate way to keep people in their homes, create more jobs and health care," said Emeline Bravo-Blackport, a gardener.

She marveled at AIG executive James Haas' colonial house, which has stunning views of a golf course and the Long Island Sound. The Fairfield house is "another part of the world" from her life in nearby Bridgeport, which flirted with bankruptcy in the 1990s and still struggles with foreclosures and unemployment.

"Lord, I wonder what it's like to live in a house that size," she said.

Another protester, Claire Jeffery, of Bloomfield, said she's on the verge of foreclosure. She works as a housekeeper; her husband, a truck driver, can't find work.

"I love my home," she said. "I really want people to help us."

Anger over AIG bonuses
News of the bonuses last week ignited a firestorm of controversy and even death threats against AIG employees. The company, which is based in New York, has received $182.5 billion in federal aid and now is about 80 percent government-owned, while the national housing and job markets have collapsed as the country spirals into a crippling recession.

American International Group Inc. has said it was contractually obligated to give the retention bonuses, payments designed to keep valued employees from quitting, to people in its financial products unit, based in Wilton, Conn. Congress began action on a bill that would tax 90 percent of the bonuses, and the company's chief executive urged anyone who received more than $100,000 to return at least half.

AIG has argued that retention bonuses are crucial to pulling the company out of its crisis. Without the bonuses, the company says, top employees who best understand AIG's business would leave.

Besides Haas' home, protesters on Saturday also visited the Fairfield home of AIG executive Douglas Poling. They were met both times by security guards. They left letters that acknowledged some executives, including Haas and Poling, are giving up the money but that asked them to support higher taxes on families earning more than $500,000 a year.

"You have a wonderful opportunity to help your neighbors in Connecticut," the letters said. "We ask you to consider the experiences of families struggling in this economy."

Afterward, the group protested at the office of AIG's financial products division in Wilton, where they waved signs and chanted, "Money for the needy, not for the greedy!"

There were no arrests.

Bonuses were ‘showered like confetti’
Mary Huguley, of Hartford, said AIG executives should share their wealth with people like her sister, who is facing foreclosure.

"You ought to share it, and God will bless you for doing it," she said.

The protests came amid new questions about the retention bonuses. State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Saturday that documents turned over to his office by AIG appear to show that the company paid $53 million more in bonuses to its financial products division than previously reported.

Bonuses were "showered like confetti" on AIG employees, Blumenthal said.

An AIG spokesman declined to comment.

AIG had previously disclosed that the company was contractually obligated to pay a total of about $165 million of previously awarded retention pay to employees in the financial products unit by March 15. It said another $55 million in retention pay already had been distributed to about 400 AIG Financial Products employees. That total of $220 million is about $2 million more than the figure disclosed Friday to Blumenthal's office, and Blumenthal said he's seeking clarification from the company on whether the new papers differ from what was previously reported.

"Unless the number can be explained," he said, "it will undercut any lingering rationale the company may have for these unjustified payments."

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29815906/


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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Limbaugh defends AIG bonuses

Discussion of Rush Limbaugh defending AIG bonuses

Sunday, March 15, 2009

New Movie Review By James Myers, The Entertainment Critic: Watchmen

Movie Review:  Watchmen

 

The Entertainment Critic Movie Review

http://jamesmyerstheentertainmentcritic.blogspot.com/

In Theatres Now Review

Opened March 3, 2009

By James Myers

 

Rating: 7 of 10

 

Director:  Zack Snyder

 

Writers (WGA): David Hayter (screenplay) and Alex Tse (screenplay), Dave Gibbons             (graphic novel illustrator), Alan Moore (graphic novel) uncredited

 

Release Date: 6 March 2009 (USA)

 

Genre: Action | Fantasy | Sci-Fi | Thriller

 

Malin Akerman ...        Laurie Jupiter / Silk Spectre II

 

Billy Crudup     ...        Dr. Manhattan / Jon Osterman

 

Matthew Goode           ...        Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias

 

Jackie Earle Haley        ...        Walter Kovacs / Rorschach

 

Jeffrey Dean Morgan    ...        Edward Blake / The Comedian

 

Patrick Wilson  ...        Dan Dreiberg / Nite Owl II

 

Carla Gugino    ...        Sally Jupiter / Silk Spectre

 

Matt Frewer     ...        Edgar Jacobi / Moloch the Mystic

 

Stephen McHattie         ...        Hollis Mason / Nite Owl

 

Laura Mennell  ...        Janey Slater

 

Rob LaBelle     ...        Wally Weaver

 

Gary Houston   ...        John McLaughlin

 

James M. Connor         ...        Pat Buchanan (as James Michael Connor)

 

Mary Ann Burger         ...        Eleanor Clift

 

John Shaw        ...        Doug Roth

 

Robert Wisden ...        Richard Nixon

 

Jerry Wasserman          ...        Detective Fine

 

Don Thompson ...        Detective Gallagher

 

Frank Novak    ...        Henry Kissinger

 

Sean Allan        ...        Norad General #1

 

Ron Fassler      ...        Ted Koppel

 

Stephanie Belding         ...        Janet Black

 

Chris Burns      ...        Dumb Thug

 

 

Produced by

Wesley Coller   ....       Co-producer

Herb Gains       ....       Executive producer

Lawrence Gordon        Producer

Lloyd Levin      ....       Producer

Deborah Snyder           Producer

Thomas Tull      ....       Executive producer

 

            Watchmen has been one of the more anticipated films of the early spring season.  There is always a tension in creating a film like this one, where the subject matter and storyline is well-know to the followers of the comic/graphic novels and engaging the members of the public that are not familiar with the comics and not cult followers.  This film succeeds on both levels; true to the original graphic novels of writer Alan Moore, artist, Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins, yet intriguing and engaging to those of us not as familiar with the story.  In this story of a parallel universe still stuck in the Nixon Administration, we are immediately drawn into this tale of retired and outlawed superheroes/vigilantes when one of the superheroes is murdered in the opening scene.  You have no pulse if you are not immediately drawn into the story of the personal development and struggles of the protagonists as an investigation into the murder of a government sponsored superhero pulls them out of retirement and eventually leads them to confront a plot by one of their own to stave off nuclear war by killing millions of people.  The secondary plotline is of course to find the killer of the fallen hero, The Comedian, who had plenty of potential enemies when he has was alive, who would want him dead.

 

            By 1985, only one Watchman, a masked vigilante named Rorschach, (Jackie Earle Haley) remains active. Investigating the murder of government agent Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Rorschach discovers him to be a fellow Watchman known as The Comedian and concludes that someone is trying to eliminate masked heroes. He goes off to warn his retired comrades: the emotionally detached Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), his lover Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman), the second Silk Spectre, Dan Dreiberg (Stephen McHattie), the second Nite Owl, and Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) Ozymandias, but makes little progress.

 

After Blake's funeral, Dr. Manhattan is accused of causing cancer in his former friends and colleagues from before the accident that turned him into the being he is now. Manhattan exiles himself to Mars, giving the Soviet Union the confidence to invade Afghanistan in his absence. Later, Rorschach's conspiracy theory appears to be justified when Adrian, who had long since made his identity as Ozymandias public before retiring, narrowly avoids an assassination attempt, and Rorschach himself is framed for murder.

Meanwhile, Laurie falls in love with Dan, having previously broken up with Manhattan, and the two former heroes decide to come out of retirement as they grow closer to one another. After breaking Rorschach out of prison alongside Nite Owl, Silk Spectre is confronted by Manhattan, who takes her to Mars and explains he is no longer interested in humanity, denying her request to intervene. Probing her memories, they both discover that The Comedian is her father. His interest in humanity renewed, Manhattan returns to Earth with Silk Spectre.

 

Investigating further into the conspiracy, Rorschach and Nite Owl discover that Adrian may be behind everything. Rorschach records his suspicions in his journal, which recounts the events of the story thus far from his perspective, and posts it to a newspaper office. Rorschach and Nite Owl confront Adrian, presumably now Ozymandias once again, in his Antarctic retreat. Ozymandias confirms that he is the mastermind behind The Comedian's murder, Manhattan's exile, and the framing of Rorschach; he also staged his own assassination attempt to place himself above suspicion. He explains that his plan is to unify the United States and Soviet Union and prevent nuclear war by destroying the world's main cities with exploding energy reactors he had Dr. Manhattan create for him under the pretense of providing free energy for the world. Rorschach and Nite Owl attempt to stop him, only to find his plan has already been enacted; the energy signatures are recognized as Dr. Manhattan’s and the two opposing sides of the Cold War unite to combat their “common enemy.”

 

Silk Spectre and Manhattan arrive at the ruins of New York City and realize Ozymandias plan. They arrive to confront him, only to agree that, with the cessation of hostilities around the world, this conspiracy is best left unrevealed to the public. Rorschach, however, is unwilling to cooperate, and allows himself to be vaporized by Manhattan as a means of stopping him from revealing the truth. Manhattan shares a final kiss with Silk Spectre and departs for another galaxy.

 

With the end of the Cold War and the transformation of humanity into a united front, Laurie and Dan return to the destroyed New York City, which is being rebuilt, and begin life anew together. Meanwhile, a newspaper editor in New York complains about how there is nothing worthwhile to print, and has a young employee look for something in a collection of crank letters in which he finds Rorschach's journal.

            This is a heavy, urban, graphic film, with earth shaking violence, cool special effects, and a little gratuitous sex thrown in for extra fun.  I like the film as a viewer, because it was done in such a compelling manner as to draw you into the personal lives of these remarkable beings.  The character development made the film worth watching, and the plot was a shocker, particularly after the assassination attempt.  The reoccurring theme of ‘who watches the watchmen’ was startling in light of the fact that much like real life politics, the people who are supposed to watch out for our survival may also become the authors of our destruction.  The drop of blood on the smiley face reinforces the uneasiness of the ‘who watches those in power’ theme that permeates this film, making it a contemporary parable for our modern times.  Costuming was well done in this film as well.  By updating and modernizing the original masks, the film takes on a contemporary point of view that makes it more realistic and acceptable.  The music in the film, Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'", which is played over the opening montage; Jimi Hendrix's cover of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower"; Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence"; the German version of Nena's "99 Luftballons"; a musak version of Tears For Fears' "Everybody Wants To Rule The World"; and Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" added to the alternative universe/contemporary for 1980’s feel of the picture.  This was a great superhero picture, not as jolting as ‘The Dark Knight’ or quite as engaging as the first ‘Spiderman,’ but this film was more an exploration into each characters motivation, background, and psychology than other flicks of this genre had attempted before.  This one is a striking, free for all, fun ride and thriller that jarred the sensibilities to thought and comparison with the universe of political philosophy we currently find ourselves engaged in.  Worth the money, go see Watchmen.  It is a film that will thrill you and give you more to think about then the liberals vs. the conservatives.

 

 

Movie Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3orQKBxiEg



Thursday, March 12, 2009

Meghan McCain on writing against Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter characterized as 'extreme.'


My Beef With Ann Coulter
by Meghan McCain
March 9, 2009 | 6:28am

Mark Mainz / Getty Images
As the pundit begins a series of national debates this week—including an event with Bill Maher last night—Meghan McCain says that having her as the face of the Republican Party is a recipe for disaster.
It is no secret that being a Republican isn’t the most hip political stance a person can take right now. President Obama has successfully established himself as the hippest politician around. You know you’re big when Katy Perry wears a dress with your face on it to host the MTV Europe Music Awards. To my fellow Republicans: I’m sorry, I wish I could be more positive about the current “hipness” of our party. But being a Republican is about as edgy as Donny Osmond. Granted, being “hip” is not a reason to join a political party, or a reason to agree with its ideals. But it is a way to get the attention of a generation—or, more specifically, my generation.
What was she thinking when she said Hillary Clinton was more conservative than my father during the last election?
To make matters worse, certain individuals continue to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Republicans. Especially Republican women. Who do I feel is the biggest culprit? Ann Coulter. I straight up don’t understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time. But no matter how much you or I disagree with her, the cult that follows Coulter cannot be denied. She is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most notable female members of the Republican Party. She was one of the headliners at the recent CPAC conference (but when your competition is a teenager who has a dream about the Republican Party and Stephen Baldwin, it’s not really saying that much).
Coulter could be the poster woman for the most extreme side of the Republican Party. And in some ways I could be the poster woman for the opposite. I consider myself a progressive Republican, but here is what I don’t get about Coulter: Is she for real or not? Are some of her statements just gimmicks to gain publicity for her books or does she actually believe the things she says? Does she really believe all Jewish people should be “perfected” and become Christians? And what was she thinking when she said Hillary Clinton was more conservative than my father during the last election? If you truly have the GOP’s best interests at heart, how can you possibly justify telling an audience of millions that a Democrat would be a better leader than the Republican presidential candidate? (I asked Ann for comment on this column, including many of the above questions, but she did not answer my request.)
I am not suggesting that extreme conservatism wasn’t once popular, nor am I suggesting I should in any way be any kind of voice for the party. I have been a Republican for less than a year. Still, even after losing the election, I find myself more drawn to GOP ideals and wanting to fight for the party’s resurgence. And if figureheads like Ann Coulter are turning me off, then they are definitely turning off other members of my generation as well. She does appeal to the most extreme members of the Republican Party—but they are dying off, becoming less and less relevant to the party structure as a whole. I think most people my age are like me in that we all don’t believe in every single ideal of each party specifically. The GOP should be happy to have any young supporters whatsoever, even if they do digress some from traditional Republican thinking.
I’m often criticized for not being a “real” Republican, and I have been called a RINO—Republican In Name Only—in the past. Many say I am not “conservative enough,” which is something that I am proud of. It is no secret that I disagree with many of the old-school Republican ways of thinking. One of the biggest issues from which I seem to drift from the party base is in my support of gay marriage. I am often criticized for previously voting for John Kerry and my support of stem-cell research. For the record, I am also extremely pro-military and a big supporter of the surge and the Iraq war.
More so than my ideological differences with Ann Coulter, I don’t like her demeanor. I have never been a person who was attracted to hate or negativity. I don’t believe in scare tactics and would never condone or encourage anyone calling President Obama a Muslim. But controversy sells and Coulter is nothing if not controversial. Everything about her is extreme: her voice, her interview tactics, and especially the public statements she makes about liberals. Maybe her popularity stems from the fact that watching her is sometimes like watching a train wreck.
I am sure most extreme conservatives and extreme liberals would find me a confusing, walking contradiction. But I assure you, there are many people out there just like me who represent a new, younger generation of Republicans. It took me almost two years of campaigning across this country and hanging out, on a daily basis, with some of the most famous and most intelligent Republicans to fall in love with the Republican Party. If it took that much time and exposure for me to join the party, how can GOP leaders possibly expect to reach young supporters by staying the course they have been on these past eight years? Where has our extreme thinking gotten us? President Bush will go down as one the least popular presidents in history. I constantly hear stories about Republicans who previously worked for President Bush and my father feeling ostracized, unable to get jobs in D.C. right now.
On Monday night Ann Coulter and Bill Maher kicked off a weeklong debate tour. Maybe they will prove me wrong, but this seems more like a traveling circus than a serious debate about the ideological differences between these individuals. I hope viewers understand Ann Coulter is not the woman we Republicans need representing us right now. The GOP is at a crossroads. I love the Republican Party, but if it turns out I am somehow not conservative enough to please its leaders, it makes me wonder—am I then not worthy of even being a member?
Meghan McCain is originally from Phoenix, Arizona. She graduated from Columbia University in 2007. She previously wrote for Newsweek magazine and created the website mccainblogette.com.

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-09/my-beef-with-ann-coulter/p/


Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Monday, March 9, 2009

Meet the Newt boss

Meet the Newt boss

Why Rush is Wrong
The party of Buckley and Reagan is now bereft and dominated by the politics of Limbaugh. A conservative's lament.

David Frum
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Mar 16, 2009
It wasn't a fight I went looking for. On March 3, the popular radio host Mark Levin opened his show with an outburst (he always opens his show with an outburst): "There are people who have somehow claimed the conservative mantle … You don't even know who they are … They're so irrelevant … It's time to name names …! The Canadian David Frum: where did this a-hole come from? … In the foxhole with other conservatives, you know what this jerk does? He keeps shooting us in the back … Hey, Frum: you're a putz."

Now, of course, Mark Levin knows perfectly well where I come from. We've known each other for years, had dinner together. I'm a conservative Republican, have been all my adult life. I volunteered for the Reagan campaign in 1980. I've attended every Republican convention since 1988. I was president of the Federalist Society chapter at my law school, worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and wrote speeches for President Bush—not the "Read My Lips" Bush, the "Axis of Evil" Bush. I served on the Giuliani campaign in 2008 and voted for John McCain in November. I supported the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in retrospect) the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I could go on, but you get the idea.

I mention all this not because I expect you to be fascinated with my life story, but to establish some bona fides. In the conservative world, we have a tendency to dismiss unwelcome realities. When one of us looks up and murmurs, "Hey, guys, there seems to be an avalanche heading our way," the others tend to shrug and say, he's a "squish" or a RINO—Republican in Name Only.

Levin had been provoked by a blog entry I'd posted the day before on my site, NewMajority.com. Here's what I wrote: President Obama and Rush Limbaugh do not agree on much, but they share at least one thing: Both wish to see Rush anointed as the leader of the Republican party.

Here's Rahm Emanuel on Face the Nation yesterday: "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican party." What a great endorsement for Rush! … But what about the rest of the party? Here's the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of "responsibility," and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as "losers." With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we're cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush's every rancorous word—we'll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership? Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise—and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important.

All of this began even before Obama took office. In his broadcast on Jan. 16, Limbaugh told listeners he had been asked by a major publication for a 400-word statement about his hopes for the new administration:

I'm thinking of replying to the guy, "OK, I'll send you a response, but I don't need 400 words. I need four: I hope he fails." … See, here's the point: everybody thinks it's outrageous to say. Look, even my staff: "Oh, you can't do that." Why not? Why is it any different, what's new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what's gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here … I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: "Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails." Somebody's gotta say it.

Notice that Limbaugh did not say: "I hope the administration's liberal plans fail." Or (better): "I know the administration's liberal plans will fail." Or (best): "I fear that this administration's liberal plans will fail, as liberal plans usually do." If it had been phrased that way, nobody could have used Limbaugh's words to misrepresent conservatives as clueless, indifferent or gleeful in the face of the most painful economic crisis in a generation. But then, if it had been phrased that way, nobody would have quoted his words at all—and as Limbaugh himself said, being "headlined" was the point of the exercise. If it had been phrased that way, Limbaugh's face would not now be adorning the covers of magazines. He phrased his hope in a way that drew maximum attention to himself, offered maximum benefit to the administration and did maximum harm to the party he claims to support.

Then, exacerbating the wound, Limbaugh added this in an interview on Sean Hannity's Jan. 21 show on Fox News: "We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president." Limbaugh would repeat some variant of this remark at least four more times in the next month and a half. Really, President Obama could not have asked for more: Limbaugh gets an audience, Obama gets a target and Republicans get the blame.

Rush Limbaugh is a seriously unpopular figure among the voters that conservatives and Republicans need to reach. Forty-one percent of independents have an unfavorable opinion of him, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll. Limbaugh is especially off-putting to women: his audience is 72 percent male, according to Pew Research. Limbaugh himself acknowledges his unpopularity among women. On his Feb. 24 broadcast, he said with a chuckle: "Thirty-one-point gender gaps don't come along all that often … Given this massive gender gap in my personal approval numbers … it seems reasonable for me to convene a summit."

Limbaugh was kidding about the summit. But his quip acknowledged something that eludes many of those who would make him the arbiter of Republican authenticity: from a political point of view, Limbaugh is kryptonite, weakening the GOP nationally. No Republican official will say that; Limbaugh demands absolute deference from the conservative world, and he generally gets it. When offended, he can extract apologies from Republican members of Congress, even the chairman of the Republican National Committee. And Rush is very easily offended.

Through 2008 Rush was offended by the tendency among conservative writers to suggest that the ideas and policies developed in the 1970s needed to change and adapt to the very different world of the 21st century. Here's what he had to say about this subject in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 28:

Sometimes I get livid and angry … We've got factions now within our own movement seeking power to dominate it, and, worst of all, to redefine it. Well, the Constitution doesn't need to be redefined. Conservative intellectuals, the Declaration of Independence does not need to be redefined, and neither does conservatism. Conservatism is what it is, and it is forever. It's not something you can bend and shape and flake and form … I cringed—it might have been 2007, late 2007 or sometime during 2008, but a couple of prominent, conservative, Beltway, establishment media types began to write on the concept that the era of Reagan is over. And that we needed to adapt our appeal, because, after all, what's important in politics is winning elections. And so we have to understand that the American people, they want big government. We just have to find a way to tell them we're no longer opposed to that. We will come up with our own version of it that is wiser and smarter, but we've got to go get the Wal-Mart voter, and we've got to get the Hispanic voter, and we've got to get the recalcitrant independent women. And I'm listening to this and I am just apoplectic: the era of Reagan is over? … We have got to stamp this out …

Here is an example of the writing Limbaugh was complaining about: The conservatism we know evolved in the 1970s to meet a very specific set of dangers and challenges: inflation, slow growth, energy shortages, unemployment, rising welfare dependency. In every one of those problems, big government was the direct and immediate culprit. Roll back government, and you solved the problem.

Government is implicated in many of today's top domestic concerns as well … But the connection between big government and today's most pressing problems is not as close or as pressing as it was 27 years ago. So, unsurprisingly, the anti-big-government message does not mobilize the public the way it once did.

Of course, we can keep repeating our old lines all the same, just the way Tip O'Neill kept exhorting the American middle class to show more gratitude to the New Deal. But politicians who talk that way soon sound old, tired, and cranky. I wish somebody at the … GOP presidential debate at the Reagan Library had said: "Ronald Reagan was a great leader and a great president because he addressed the problems of his time. But we have very different problems—and we need very different answers. Here are mine."

I wrote that in spring 2007. But you can hear similar words from bright young conservative writers like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, and from veteran Republican politicians like Newt Gingrich. Gingrich told George Stephanopoulos on Jan. 13, 2008: "We are at the end of the Reagan era. We're at a point in time when we're about to start redefining … the nature of the Republican Party, in response to what the country needs."

Even before the November 2008 defeat—even before the financial crisis and the congressional elections of November 2006—it was already apparent that the Republican Party and the conservative movement were in deep trouble. And not just because of Iraq, either (although Iraq obviously did not help).

At the peak of the Bush boom in 2007, the typical American worker was earning barely more after inflation than the typical American worker had earned in 2000. Out of those flat earnings, that worker was paying more for food, energy and out-of-pocket costs of health care. Political parties that do not deliver economic improvement for the typical person do not get reelected. We Republicans and conservatives were not delivering. The reasons for our failure are complex and controversial, but the consequences are not.

We lost the presidency in 2008. In 2006 and 2008, together, we lost 51 seats in the House and 14 in the Senate. Even in 2004, President Bush won reelection by the narrowest margin of any reelected president in American history.

The trends below those vote totals were even more alarming. Republicans have never done well among the poor and the nonwhite—and as the country's Hispanic population grows, so, too, do those groups. More ominously, Republicans are losing their appeal to voters with whom they've historically done well.

In 1988 George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis among college graduates by 25 points. Nothing unusual there: Republicans have owned the college-graduate vote. But in 1992 Ross Perot led an exodus of the college-educated out of the GOP, and they never fully returned. In 2008 Obama beat John McCain among college graduates by 8 points, the first Democratic win among B.A. holders since exit polling began.

Political strategists used to talk about a GOP "lock" on the presidency because of the Republican hold on the big Sun Belt states: California, Texas, Florida. Republicans won California in every presidential election from 1952 through 1988 (except the Goldwater disaster of 1964). Democrats have won California in the five consecutive presidential elections since 1988.

In 1984 Reagan won young voters by 20 points; the elder Bush won voters under 30 again in 1988. Since that year, the Democrats have won the under-30 vote in five consecutive presidential elections. Voters who turned 20 between 2000 and 2005 are the most lopsidedly Democratic age cohort in the electorate. If they eat right, exercise and wear seat belts, they will be voting against George W. Bush well into the 2060s.

Between 2004 and 2008, Democrats more than doubled their party-identification advantage in Pennsylvania. A survey of party switchers in the state found that a majority of the reaffiliating voters had belonged to the GOP for 20 years or more. They were educated and affluent. More than half of those who left stated that the GOP had become too extreme.

Look at America's public-policy problems, look at voting trends, and it's inescapably obvious that the Republican Party needs to evolve. We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message. It's health-care costs that are crushing middle-class incomes. Between 2000 and 2006, the amount that employers paid for labor rose substantially. Employees got none of that money; all of it was absorbed by rising health-care costs. Meanwhile, the income-tax cuts offered by Republicans interest fewer and fewer people: before the recession, two thirds of American workers paid more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.

We need to modulate our social conservatism (not jettison—modulate). The GOP will remain a predominantly conservative party and a predominantly pro-life party. But especially on gay-rights issues, the under-30 generation has arrived at a new consensus. Our party seems to be running to govern a country that no longer exists. The rule that both our presidential and vice presidential candidates must always be pro-life has become counterproductive: McCain's only hope of winning the presidency in 2008 was to carry Pennsylvania, and yet Pennsylvania's most successful Republican vote winner, former governor Tom Ridge, was barred from the ticket because he's pro-choice.

We need an environmental message. You don't have to accept Al Gore's predictions of imminent gloom to accept that it cannot be healthy to pump gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We are rightly mistrustful of liberal environmentalist disrespect for property rights. But property owners also care about property values, about conservation, and as a party of property owners we should be taking those values more seriously.

Above all, we need to take governing seriously again. Voters have long associated Democrats with corrupt urban machines, Republicans with personal integrity and fiscal responsibility. Even ultraliberal states like Massachusetts would elect Republican governors like Frank Sargent, Leverett Saltonstall, William Weld and Mitt Romney precisely to keep an austere eye on the depredations of Democratic legislators. After Iraq, Katrina and Harriet Miers, Democrats surged to a five-to-three advantage on the competence and ethics questions. And that was before we put Sarah Palin on our national ticket.

Every day, Rush Limbaugh reassures millions of core Republican voters that no change is needed: if people don't appreciate what we are saying, then say it louder. Isn't that what happened in 1994? Certainly this is a good approach for Rush himself. He claims 20 million listeners per week, and that suffices to make him a very wealthy man. And if another 100 million people cannot stand him, what does he care? What can they do to him other than … not listen? It's not as if they can vote against him.

But they can vote against Republican candidates for Congress. They can vote against Republican nominees for president. And if we allow ourselves to be overidentified with somebody who earns his fortune by giving offense, they will vote against us. Two months into 2009, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have already enacted into law the most ambitious liberal program since the mid-1960s. More, much more is to come. Through this burst of activism, the Republican Party has been flat on its back.

Decisions that will haunt American taxpayers for generations have been made with hardly a debate. The federal government will pay more of the cost for Medicaid, it will expand the SCHIP program for young children, it will borrow trillions of dollars to expand the national debt to levels unseen since WWII. To stem this onrush of disastrous improvisations, conservatives need every resource of mind and heart, every good argument, every creative alternative and every bit of compassionate sympathy for the distress that is pushing Americans in the wrong direction. Instead we are accepting the leadership of a man with an ego-driven agenda of his own, who looms largest when his causes fare worst.

In the days since I stumbled into this controversy, I've received a great deal of e-mail. (Most of it on days when Levin or Hannity or Hugh Hewitt or Limbaugh himself has had something especially disobliging to say about me.) Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don't agree with Rush, quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There's the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don't care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That's not the language of politics. It's the language of a cult.

I'm a pretty conservative guy. On most issues, I doubt Limbaugh and I even disagree very much. But the issues on which we do disagree are maybe the most important to the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party: Should conservatives be trying to provoke or persuade? To narrow our coalition or enlarge it? To enflame or govern? And finally (and above all): to profit—or to serve?

Frum, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of NewMajority.com.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/188279
© 2009

Limbaugh bad for GOP


Why Rush is Wrong
The party of Buckley and Reagan is now bereft and dominated by the politics of Limbaugh. A conservative's lament.

David Frum
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Mar 16, 2009
It wasn't a fight I went looking for. On March 3, the popular radio host Mark Levin opened his show with an outburst (he always opens his show with an outburst): "There are people who have somehow claimed the conservative mantle … You don't even know who they are … They're so irrelevant … It's time to name names …! The Canadian David Frum: where did this a-hole come from? … In the foxhole with other conservatives, you know what this jerk does? He keeps shooting us in the back … Hey, Frum: you're a putz."

Now, of course, Mark Levin knows perfectly well where I come from. We've known each other for years, had dinner together. I'm a conservative Republican, have been all my adult life. I volunteered for the Reagan campaign in 1980. I've attended every Republican convention since 1988. I was president of the Federalist Society chapter at my law school, worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and wrote speeches for President Bush—not the "Read My Lips" Bush, the "Axis of Evil" Bush. I served on the Giuliani campaign in 2008 and voted for John McCain in November. I supported the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in retrospect) the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I could go on, but you get the idea.

I mention all this not because I expect you to be fascinated with my life story, but to establish some bona fides. In the conservative world, we have a tendency to dismiss unwelcome realities. When one of us looks up and murmurs, "Hey, guys, there seems to be an avalanche heading our way," the others tend to shrug and say, he's a "squish" or a RINO—Republican in Name Only.

Levin had been provoked by a blog entry I'd posted the day before on my site, NewMajority.com. Here's what I wrote: President Obama and Rush Limbaugh do not agree on much, but they share at least one thing: Both wish to see Rush anointed as the leader of the Republican party.

Here's Rahm Emanuel on Face the Nation yesterday: "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican party." What a great endorsement for Rush! … But what about the rest of the party? Here's the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of "responsibility," and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as "losers." With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we're cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush's every rancorous word—we'll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership? Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise—and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important.

All of this began even before Obama took office. In his broadcast on Jan. 16, Limbaugh told listeners he had been asked by a major publication for a 400-word statement about his hopes for the new administration:

I'm thinking of replying to the guy, "OK, I'll send you a response, but I don't need 400 words. I need four: I hope he fails." … See, here's the point: everybody thinks it's outrageous to say. Look, even my staff: "Oh, you can't do that." Why not? Why is it any different, what's new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what's gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here … I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: "Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails." Somebody's gotta say it.

Notice that Limbaugh did not say: "I hope the administration's liberal plans fail." Or (better): "I know the administration's liberal plans will fail." Or (best): "I fear that this administration's liberal plans will fail, as liberal plans usually do." If it had been phrased that way, nobody could have used Limbaugh's words to misrepresent conservatives as clueless, indifferent or gleeful in the face of the most painful economic crisis in a generation. But then, if it had been phrased that way, nobody would have quoted his words at all—and as Limbaugh himself said, being "headlined" was the point of the exercise. If it had been phrased that way, Limbaugh's face would not now be adorning the covers of magazines. He phrased his hope in a way that drew maximum attention to himself, offered maximum benefit to the administration and did maximum harm to the party he claims to support.

Then, exacerbating the wound, Limbaugh added this in an interview on Sean Hannity's Jan. 21 show on Fox News: "We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president." Limbaugh would repeat some variant of this remark at least four more times in the next month and a half. Really, President Obama could not have asked for more: Limbaugh gets an audience, Obama gets a target and Republicans get the blame.

Rush Limbaugh is a seriously unpopular figure among the voters that conservatives and Republicans need to reach. Forty-one percent of independents have an unfavorable opinion of him, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll. Limbaugh is especially off-putting to women: his audience is 72 percent male, according to Pew Research. Limbaugh himself acknowledges his unpopularity among women. On his Feb. 24 broadcast, he said with a chuckle: "Thirty-one-point gender gaps don't come along all that often … Given this massive gender gap in my personal approval numbers … it seems reasonable for me to convene a summit."

Limbaugh was kidding about the summit. But his quip acknowledged something that eludes many of those who would make him the arbiter of Republican authenticity: from a political point of view, Limbaugh is kryptonite, weakening the GOP nationally. No Republican official will say that; Limbaugh demands absolute deference from the conservative world, and he generally gets it. When offended, he can extract apologies from Republican members of Congress, even the chairman of the Republican National Committee. And Rush is very easily offended.

Through 2008 Rush was offended by the tendency among conservative writers to suggest that the ideas and policies developed in the 1970s needed to change and adapt to the very different world of the 21st century. Here's what he had to say about this subject in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 28:

Sometimes I get livid and angry … We've got factions now within our own movement seeking power to dominate it, and, worst of all, to redefine it. Well, the Constitution doesn't need to be redefined. Conservative intellectuals, the Declaration of Independence does not need to be redefined, and neither does conservatism. Conservatism is what it is, and it is forever. It's not something you can bend and shape and flake and form … I cringed—it might have been 2007, late 2007 or sometime during 2008, but a couple of prominent, conservative, Beltway, establishment media types began to write on the concept that the era of Reagan is over. And that we needed to adapt our appeal, because, after all, what's important in politics is winning elections. And so we have to understand that the American people, they want big government. We just have to find a way to tell them we're no longer opposed to that. We will come up with our own version of it that is wiser and smarter, but we've got to go get the Wal-Mart voter, and we've got to get the Hispanic voter, and we've got to get the recalcitrant independent women. And I'm listening to this and I am just apoplectic: the era of Reagan is over? … We have got to stamp this out …

Here is an example of the writing Limbaugh was complaining about: The conservatism we know evolved in the 1970s to meet a very specific set of dangers and challenges: inflation, slow growth, energy shortages, unemployment, rising welfare dependency. In every one of those problems, big government was the direct and immediate culprit. Roll back government, and you solved the problem.

Government is implicated in many of today's top domestic concerns as well … But the connection between big government and today's most pressing problems is not as close or as pressing as it was 27 years ago. So, unsurprisingly, the anti-big-government message does not mobilize the public the way it once did.

Of course, we can keep repeating our old lines all the same, just the way Tip O'Neill kept exhorting the American middle class to show more gratitude to the New Deal. But politicians who talk that way soon sound old, tired, and cranky. I wish somebody at the … GOP presidential debate at the Reagan Library had said: "Ronald Reagan was a great leader and a great president because he addressed the problems of his time. But we have very different problems—and we need very different answers. Here are mine."

I wrote that in spring 2007. But you can hear similar words from bright young conservative writers like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, and from veteran Republican politicians like Newt Gingrich. Gingrich told George Stephanopoulos on Jan. 13, 2008: "We are at the end of the Reagan era. We're at a point in time when we're about to start redefining … the nature of the Republican Party, in response to what the country needs."

Even before the November 2008 defeat—even before the financial crisis and the congressional elections of November 2006—it was already apparent that the Republican Party and the conservative movement were in deep trouble. And not just because of Iraq, either (although Iraq obviously did not help).

At the peak of the Bush boom in 2007, the typical American worker was earning barely more after inflation than the typical American worker had earned in 2000. Out of those flat earnings, that worker was paying more for food, energy and out-of-pocket costs of health care. Political parties that do not deliver economic improvement for the typical person do not get reelected. We Republicans and conservatives were not delivering. The reasons for our failure are complex and controversial, but the consequences are not.

We lost the presidency in 2008. In 2006 and 2008, together, we lost 51 seats in the House and 14 in the Senate. Even in 2004, President Bush won reelection by the narrowest margin of any reelected president in American history.

The trends below those vote totals were even more alarming. Republicans have never done well among the poor and the nonwhite—and as the country's Hispanic population grows, so, too, do those groups. More ominously, Republicans are losing their appeal to voters with whom they've historically done well.

In 1988 George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis among college graduates by 25 points. Nothing unusual there: Republicans have owned the college-graduate vote. But in 1992 Ross Perot led an exodus of the college-educated out of the GOP, and they never fully returned. In 2008 Obama beat John McCain among college graduates by 8 points, the first Democratic win among B.A. holders since exit polling began.

Political strategists used to talk about a GOP "lock" on the presidency because of the Republican hold on the big Sun Belt states: California, Texas, Florida. Republicans won California in every presidential election from 1952 through 1988 (except the Goldwater disaster of 1964). Democrats have won California in the five consecutive presidential elections since 1988.

In 1984 Reagan won young voters by 20 points; the elder Bush won voters under 30 again in 1988. Since that year, the Democrats have won the under-30 vote in five consecutive presidential elections. Voters who turned 20 between 2000 and 2005 are the most lopsidedly Democratic age cohort in the electorate. If they eat right, exercise and wear seat belts, they will be voting against George W. Bush well into the 2060s.

Between 2004 and 2008, Democrats more than doubled their party-identification advantage in Pennsylvania. A survey of party switchers in the state found that a majority of the reaffiliating voters had belonged to the GOP for 20 years or more. They were educated and affluent. More than half of those who left stated that the GOP had become too extreme.

Look at America's public-policy problems, look at voting trends, and it's inescapably obvious that the Republican Party needs to evolve. We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message. It's health-care costs that are crushing middle-class incomes. Between 2000 and 2006, the amount that employers paid for labor rose substantially. Employees got none of that money; all of it was absorbed by rising health-care costs. Meanwhile, the income-tax cuts offered by Republicans interest fewer and fewer people: before the recession, two thirds of American workers paid more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.

We need to modulate our social conservatism (not jettison—modulate). The GOP will remain a predominantly conservative party and a predominantly pro-life party. But especially on gay-rights issues, the under-30 generation has arrived at a new consensus. Our party seems to be running to govern a country that no longer exists. The rule that both our presidential and vice presidential candidates must always be pro-life has become counterproductive: McCain's only hope of winning the presidency in 2008 was to carry Pennsylvania, and yet Pennsylvania's most successful Republican vote winner, former governor Tom Ridge, was barred from the ticket because he's pro-choice.

We need an environmental message. You don't have to accept Al Gore's predictions of imminent gloom to accept that it cannot be healthy to pump gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We are rightly mistrustful of liberal environmentalist disrespect for property rights. But property owners also care about property values, about conservation, and as a party of property owners we should be taking those values more seriously.

Above all, we need to take governing seriously again. Voters have long associated Democrats with corrupt urban machines, Republicans with personal integrity and fiscal responsibility. Even ultraliberal states like Massachusetts would elect Republican governors like Frank Sargent, Leverett Saltonstall, William Weld and Mitt Romney precisely to keep an austere eye on the depredations of Democratic legislators. After Iraq, Katrina and Harriet Miers, Democrats surged to a five-to-three advantage on the competence and ethics questions. And that was before we put Sarah Palin on our national ticket.

Every day, Rush Limbaugh reassures millions of core Republican voters that no change is needed: if people don't appreciate what we are saying, then say it louder. Isn't that what happened in 1994? Certainly this is a good approach for Rush himself. He claims 20 million listeners per week, and that suffices to make him a very wealthy man. And if another 100 million people cannot stand him, what does he care? What can they do to him other than … not listen? It's not as if they can vote against him.

But they can vote against Republican candidates for Congress. They can vote against Republican nominees for president. And if we allow ourselves to be overidentified with somebody who earns his fortune by giving offense, they will vote against us. Two months into 2009, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have already enacted into law the most ambitious liberal program since the mid-1960s. More, much more is to come. Through this burst of activism, the Republican Party has been flat on its back.

Decisions that will haunt American taxpayers for generations have been made with hardly a debate. The federal government will pay more of the cost for Medicaid, it will expand the SCHIP program for young children, it will borrow trillions of dollars to expand the national debt to levels unseen since WWII. To stem this onrush of disastrous improvisations, conservatives need every resource of mind and heart, every good argument, every creative alternative and every bit of compassionate sympathy for the distress that is pushing Americans in the wrong direction. Instead we are accepting the leadership of a man with an ego-driven agenda of his own, who looms largest when his causes fare worst.

In the days since I stumbled into this controversy, I've received a great deal of e-mail. (Most of it on days when Levin or Hannity or Hugh Hewitt or Limbaugh himself has had something especially disobliging to say about me.) Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don't agree with Rush, quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There's the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don't care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That's not the language of politics. It's the language of a cult.

I'm a pretty conservative guy. On most issues, I doubt Limbaugh and I even disagree very much. But the issues on which we do disagree are maybe the most important to the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party: Should conservatives be trying to provoke or persuade? To narrow our coalition or enlarge it? To enflame or govern? And finally (and above all): to profit—or to serve?

Frum, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of NewMajority.com.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/188279
© 2009

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Economy on slippery slope

Discussion that US Economy has not bottomed out yet

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Campbell Brown's Comment on Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh on tax cuts

Rush Limbaugh Still Wants President Obama to Fail

Rush Limbaugh on bipartisanship

THE DEATH OF NEO CONSERVATISM, THOUGHTS ON RUSH LIMBAUGH, AND THE REAL REASON FOR ALL OF THE RECENT BLUSTER-THE UPCOMING FIGHT OVER PRESIDENT OBAMA’S BUDGET



On Saturday, February 28, 2009, Mr. Rush Limbaugh gave a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He has been called the voice of the Republican Party and the heart of the conservative movement, and in my mind he is the apparent savior of the Neoconservative movement that dominated politics in the last 8 years, holding Ronald Regan as a sacred cow.

The focus of Mr. Limbaugh’s speech was for Conservatives to take back the Republican Party and the Nation. Punctuating by jumping up and down, chest thumping, fist pumping, and heart slamming, his talk was about staying the conservative course in the Republican Party and being proud of Obstructionism and non-bipartisan politics. The tone of the speech has been called “mocking, bulling, full of contempt, harsh, unapologetic”, and in some instances eerily “sinister.” As is his tendency, there was very little substance, and there was a lot more playing to the crowd, attempting to energize the group. Unfortunately, he had very little substantially to say and his angry, insulting, rude and unapologetic message, considering the mess the Bush Administration and the Neocons left the American People with, was in appropriate.
"We conservatives have not done a good enough job of just laying out basically who we are because we make the mistake of assuming that people know. What they know is largely incorrect, based on the way we're portrayed in pop culture, in the drive-by media, by the Democrat party," the neoconservative talk show host told a mostly-young crowd of energized supporters.
His basic premise in his speech based on some basic tenants of conservative philosophy, sprinkled with a combative, begrudging tone about the recent political losses the movement had suffered as a result of the Presidential election,
"We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independent. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom. And the pursuit of happiness."

That all sounds good Rush, but when you examine more closely what you had to say, the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is primarily reserved for the upper class, “achievers” and the rest of us will just have to wait. He went on to say that conservatives don’t hate anybody, and since all people are created equal, we all start out the same, but what separates us is our will to succeed, our desire to be the best. He went on to say, that we must succeed on our own, without any government interaction. The people who do not accept the government’s help are achievers and anyone who does is a loser. The losers fail because the government makes them passive people who do not strive to make their lives better and government intervention harms these people, making them soft, passive under achievers, that are done a great disservice by an overreaching, our of control government. Large, overextended government stifles our creativity, our entrepreneurship, and in doing so contributes to a welfare state, prolonging the war on poverty. Belonging to an American political party or movement makes you a contestant with the other guys, and the only choice is to pound them into submission, winners survive and losers be damned.

The problem with all of this is that the Neoconservatives have failed to recognize and take into account their role in our current situation, and according to Mr. Limbaugh have no need to apologize for it. Mr Limbaugh’s little talk failed to take into account that the Neocons version of government caused this mess by deregulating banks, inducing people to refinance mortgages to what was called a fixed rate from an adjustable rate, in an elaborate bait and switch scheme resulting in doubling or tripling our payments. It did not take into account the unfettered spending the Neocons engaged in when they financed the War in Iraq, which was sold to the American People on the basis of a lie; that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we must stop them or die. It failed to take into account how that lie lead to deaths of over 4,000 American, 100,000 Iraqis and the injury and mental maiming of 100,000 more American soldiers, then potential damages and costs of which we can only guess at today. It did not take into account the detainees at Guantanamo, who should have been afforded the rights of American citizens as we have allowed nationals in our country to possess in our criminal courts for years. It did not take into account the people in New Orleans who suffered from the natural disaster of Katrina, only to find their government uncaring, unconcerned and unresponsive to this plight. Nope, no apologies from old Rush; just more expressions of preserving wealth for the wealthy and yet another prayer than someday trickle down economics would finally save the day for the Republicans, the Neocons and disciples of Ronald Regan.

Mr Limbaugh instead said the democrat party (he refused to call it the democratic party) relied on big government to solve all of our problems, that we cannot rely on them to answer our prayers, because in doing so this makes us weak, mindless globs of underachievers, that blindly follow along to the beat of kindly, liberal fascists. Uh-huh? Here is what he didn’t say. He didn’t talk about how the Neocons had titled the table and screwed us. He didn’t talk about how they had changed the climate in which we live and left us with a mess. He didn’t talk about the tremendous costs of lie to us and leading us in a criminally fraudulent way into the War in Iraq, based of WMD. Not an expression of sorry we led you into that war, sorry about the trillion dollar costs, sorry about the loss of life and treasure. He didn’t say he was sorry about the bait and switch mortgage crisis, sorry about the con game, sorry about you being unable to pay for your car or mortgage because we took advantage of you and in doing so, we sold all of your bad paper all over the financial world, plunging the entire world in to a near depression. He did not say that he was sorry the Neocons caused a financial crash as a result of their greed by tilting the free market of capitalism to such an extreme, that it has plunged the world into a recession bordering on a near depression.
He did not say that he was sorry that the little financial tricks threatened the student loan system, making it more difficult to get a student loan and in turn threatening millions of college educations. He did not say he was sorry Neo-conservatism made it hard to get sick, go to the doctor, or enter a hospital because we don’t have health insurance. He did not say that he was sorry our last President had in effect suspended the Bill of Rights, wiretapping its citizens and insurgents alike, reading our e-mail, and violating our Right to Privacy. When Mr. Bush detained indefinitely insurgent suspects in Guantanamo, meaning on his whim and against any person he so choose to brand an enemy of the state, he in effect suspended all of our civil rights, like the right to bail, the right to know what you have been charged with, the right to counsel, the right to defend your self, the right to discover the prosecutions’ evidence against you, the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront and cross-examine your accusers, the right against self-incrimination, (didn’t Bush and Neocons say we don’t torture?), the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the right to be convicted only by a standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, the right to trial by jury and the right to appeal. No, no tilting of nature and natural causes there that underlies traditional conservative philosophy.

No acknowledgement of what they did to our civil justice system either. One of the last things Mr. Bush did before he ran out the door was to make it harder to sue a long term care facility for negligence or gross neglect of elderly patients. So the least of us in our society has no legal protection either, but instead face dismissals of their cases under the guise of federal preemption? No right to bring a negligence action, no right to compensatory/punitive damages, no right to a jury trial, no right to address grievances? No protection for these people against abuse? The old, infirm, ill and sick are losers too? No apology for Katrina victims or the Bailed out banks who instead of lending money, have tried to help themselves to the governments (our) generosity to save them from ruin. What can be inferred from his little talk is that Mr. Limbaugh is in effect saying that winners can take advantage of losers. This reminds me of a line from the movie, Animal House, where one of the pledges lends his car to a frat brother, who returns it to him a complete wreck, and afterwards says, “hey, you f_ _ _ _ _ up. You trusted us.”

No, there was no acknowledgement of the problems created by Neocons in the last 8 years, no admission of mistakes, no accountability, no apology and let’s move on talks. No, there was not even a bipartisan tone to the talk, in fact it was just the opposite.
"Bipartisanship occurs only after one other result. And that is victory," he said. "What they mean is we check our core principles at the door, come in, let them run the show, and then agree with them. To us bipartisanship is making them agree with us after we have cleaned their clocks and beaten them, and that has to be what we are focused on.” (emphasis added). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khxpmGLxPEM

So desperate are the Neocons to preserve what they believe is status quo, that Mr. Limbaugh once again reiterated that he wishes for President Obama to fail. Never mind that if the President fails, our country might fail too. Damn the torpedoes and the consequences, the Winners like Rush have to be in power. Comparing the remark to his desire to see the Arizona Cardinals "fail" in this year's Super Bowl game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Limbaugh defended his comment without denying it. "This notion that I want the president to fail, folks, this shows you a sign of the problem we've got," he said. "What is so strange about being honest and saying, I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? Why would I want that to succeed?" he said, bringing the crowd once again to its feet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6N1tTdpuAU

See the winning and competing thing is very, very big to Rush. Mr Limbaugh here is a clue for you. First of all given the situation we’re in, these are extraordinary times, which call for extraordinary measures. President Obama has said that these measures are not the norm, but immediate action needs to be taken, or the situation will get much, much worse. A lot of economists and experts agree with him. This is not a normal liaise faire, leave the market alone business cycle, but one artificially induced by the outside greedy forces the Neocons allowed to do as they pleased. Second, me thinks you protest too much. The American people made their choice in November; it is time for a change, the old trickle down, Ronald Regan theories of good government have not worked. Your movement has seen its day and it is over. You’ve failed. Take responsibility, be accountable for the wrongs and adjust. Comparing the outcome of the stimulus bill or the new upcoming budget that addresses many of the issues like employment, education, healthcare, and basic civil rights is not an athletic contest. There is much more at stake here. To argue to drag your feet, beat our brains in, win at all costs attitude is not helpful. Campbell Brown from CNN put it best in response to your article in the Wall Street Journal, and your criticism of the a reporter from that network who disagreed with you, “Mr. Limbaugh…the histrionics and the name calling, they undermine anything constructive that you have to say… our country is in desperate straights right now, and we need ideas. But what we don’t need is nasty rhetoric, and useless noise. This does not help anyone get a job, keep a job or feed their family. If there ever was a time to put the meanness behind us and focus on real dialogue and real solutions, this is the time.”

THE DEATH OF NEO CONSERVATISM, THOUGHTS ON RUSH LIMBAUGH, AND THE REAL REASON FOR ALL OF THE RECENT BLUSTER-THE UPCOMING FIGHT OVER PRESIDENT OBAMA’S
















THE DEATH OF NEO CONSERVATISM, THOUGHTS ON RUSH LIMBAUGH, AND THE REAL REASON FOR ALL OF THE RECENT BLUSTER-THE UPCOMING FIGHT OVER PRESIDENT OBAMA’S BUDGET

 

 

           

            On Saturday, February 28, 2009, Mr. Rush Limbaugh gave a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  He has been called the voice of the Republican Party and the heart of the conservative movement, and in my mind he is the apparent savior of the Neoconservative movement that dominated politics in the last 8 years, holding Ronald Regan as a sacred cow. 

 

            The focus of Mr. Limbaugh’s speech was for Conservatives to take back the Republican Party and the Nation.  Punctuating by jumping up and down, chest thumping, fist pumping, and heart slamming, his talk was about staying the conservative course in the Republican Party and being proud of Obstructionism and non-bipartisan politics.  The tone of the speech has been called “mocking, bulling, full of contempt, harsh, unapologetic”, and in some instances eerily “sinister.”  As is his tendency, there was very little substance, and there was a lot more playing to the crowd, attempting to energize the group.  Unfortunately, he had very little substantially to say and his angry, insulting, rude and unapologetic message, considering the mess the Bush Administration and the Neocons left the American People with, was in appropriate.

            "We conservatives have not done a good enough job of just laying out basically who we are because we make the mistake of assuming that people know. What they know is largely incorrect, based on the way we're portrayed in pop culture, in the drive-by media, by the Democrat party," the neoconservative talk show host told a mostly-young crowd of energized supporters.

            His basic premise in his speech based on some basic tenants of conservative philosophy, sprinkled with a combative, begrudging tone about the recent political losses the movement had suffered as a result of the Presidential election,

            "We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independent. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom. And the pursuit of happiness."

 

            That all sounds good Rush, but when you examine more closely what you had to say, the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is primarily reserved for the upper class, “achievers” and the rest of us will just have to wait.  He went on to say that conservatives don’t hate anybody, and since all people are created equal, we all start out the same, but what separates us is our will to succeed, our desire to be the best.  He went on to say, that we must succeed on our own, without any government interaction.  The people who do not accept the government’s help are achievers and anyone who does is a loser.  The losers fail because the government makes them passive people who do not strive to make their lives better and government intervention harms these people, making them soft, passive under achievers, that are done a great disservice by an overreaching, our of control government.  Large, overextended government stifles our creativity, our entrepreneurship, and in doing so contributes to a welfare state, prolonging the war on poverty.  Belonging to an American political party or movement makes you a contestant with the other guys, and the only choice is to pound them into submission, winners survive and losers be damned.

 

            The problem with all of this is that the Neoconservatives have failed to recognize and take into account their role in our current situation, and according to Mr. Limbaugh have no need to apologize for it.  Mr Limbaugh’s little talk failed to take into account that the Neocons version of government caused this mess by deregulating banks, inducing people to refinance mortgages to what was called a fixed rate from an adjustable rate, in an elaborate bait and switch scheme resulting in doubling or tripling our payments.  It did not take into account the unfettered spending the Neocons engaged in when they financed the War in Iraq, which was sold to the American People on the basis of a lie; that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we must stop them or die.  It failed to take into account how that lie lead to deaths of over 4,000 American, 100,000 Iraqis and the injury and mental maiming of  100,000 more American soldiers, then potential damages and costs of which we can only guess at today.  It did not take into account the detainees at Guantanamo, who should have been afforded the rights of American citizens as we have allowed nationals in our country to possess in our criminal courts for years.  It did not take into account the people in New Orleans who suffered from the natural disaster of Katrina, only to find their government uncaring, unconcerned and unresponsive to this plight.  Nope, no apologies from old Rush; just more expressions of preserving wealth for the wealthy and yet another prayer than someday trickle down economics would finally save the day for the Republicans, the Neocons and disciples of Ronald Regan.

 

            Mr Limbaugh instead said the democrat party (he refused to call it the democratic party) relied on big government to solve all of our problems, that we cannot rely on them to answer our prayers, because in doing so this makes us weak, mindless globs of underachievers, that blindly follow along to the beat of kindly, liberal fascists.  Uh-huh?  Here is what he didn’t say.  He didn’t talk about how the Neocons had titled the table and screwed us.  He didn’t talk about how they had changed the climate in which we live and left us with a mess.  He didn’t talk about the tremendous costs of lie to us and leading us in a criminally fraudulent way into the War in Iraq, based of WMD.  Not an expression of sorry we led you into that war, sorry about the trillion dollar costs, sorry about the loss of life and treasure.  He didn’t say he was sorry about the bait and switch mortgage crisis, sorry about the con game, sorry about you being unable to pay for your car or mortgage because we took advantage of you and in doing so, we sold all of your bad paper all over the financial world, plunging the entire world in to a near depression.  He did not say that he was sorry the Neocons caused a financial crash as a result of their greed by tilting the free market of capitalism to such an extreme, that it has plunged the world into a recession bordering on a near depression.

            He did not say that he was sorry that the little financial tricks threatened the student loan system, making it more difficult to get a student loan and in turn threatening millions of college educations.  He did not say he was sorry Neo-conservatism made it hard to get sick, go to the doctor, or enter a hospital because we don’t have health insurance.  He did not say that he was sorry our last President had in effect suspended the Bill of Rights, wiretapping its citizens and insurgents alike, reading our e-mail, and violating our Right to Privacy.  When Mr. Bush detained indefinitely insurgent suspects in Guantanamo, meaning on his whim and against any person he so choose to brand an enemy of the state, he in effect suspended all of our civil rights, like the right to bail, the right to know what you have been charged with, the right to counsel, the right to defend your self, the right to discover the prosecutions’ evidence against you, the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront and cross-examine your accusers, the right against self-incrimination, (didn’t Bush and Neocons say we don’t torture?), the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the right to be convicted only by a standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, the right to trial by jury and the right to appeal.  No, no tilting of nature and natural causes there that underlies traditional conservative philosophy. 

 

            No acknowledgement of what they did to our civil justice system either.  One of the last things Mr. Bush did before he ran out the door was to make it harder to sue a long term care facility for negligence or gross neglect of elderly patients.  So the least of us in our society has no legal protection either, but instead face dismissals of their cases under the guise of federal preemption? No right to bring a negligence action, no right to compensatory/punitive damages, no right to a jury trial, no right to address grievances?  No protection for these people against abuse?  The old, infirm, ill and sick are losers too? No apology for Katrina victims or the Bailed out banks who instead of lending money, have tried to help themselves to the governments (our) generosity to save them from ruin.  What can be inferred from his little talk is that Mr. Limbaugh is in effect saying that winners can take advantage of losers.  This reminds me of a line from the movie, Animal House, where one of the pledges lends his car to a frat brother, who returns it to him a complete wreck, and afterwards says, “hey, you f_ _ _ _ _ up.  You trusted us.”

 

            No, there was no acknowledgement of the problems created by Neocons in the last 8 years, no admission of mistakes, no accountability, no apology and let’s move on talks.  No, there was not even a bipartisan tone to the talk, in fact it was just the opposite. 

"Bipartisanship occurs only after one other result. And that is victory," he said. "What they mean is we check our core principles at the door, come in, let them run the show, and then agree with them. To us bipartisanship is making them agree with us after we have cleaned their clocks and beaten them, and that has to be what we are focused on.” (emphasis added).  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khxpmGLxPEM

 

            So desperate are the Neocons to preserve what they believe is status quo, that Mr. Limbaugh once again reiterated that he wishes for President Obama to fail.  Never mind that if the President fails, our country might fail too.  Damn the torpedoes and the consequences, the Winners like Rush have to be in power.  Comparing the remark to his desire to see the Arizona Cardinals "fail" in this year's Super Bowl game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Limbaugh defended his comment without denying it. "This notion that I want the president to fail, folks, this shows you a sign of the problem we've got," he said. "What is so strange about being honest and saying, I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? Why would I want that to succeed?" he said, bringing the crowd once again to its feet.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6N1tTdpuAU

 

            See the winning and competing thing is very, very big to Rush.  Mr Limbaugh here is a clue for you.  First of all given the situation we’re in, these are extraordinary times, which call for extraordinary measures.  President Obama has said that these measures are not the norm, but immediate action needs to be taken, or the situation will get much, much worse.  A lot of economists and experts agree with him.  This is not a normal liaise faire, leave the market alone business cycle, but one artificially induced by the outside greedy forces the Neocons allowed to do as they pleased. Second, me thinks you protest too much.  The American people made their choice in November; it is time for a change, the old trickle down, Ronald Regan theories of good government have not worked.  Your movement has seen its day and it is over.  You’ve failed.  Take responsibility, be accountable for the wrongs and adjust.  Comparing the outcome of the stimulus bill or the new upcoming budget that addresses many of the issues like employment, education, healthcare, and basic civil rights is not an athletic contest.  There is much more at stake here.  To argue to drag your feet, beat our brains in, win at all costs attitude is not helpful.  Campbell Brown from CNN put it best in response to your article in the Wall Street Journal, and your criticism of the a reporter from that network who disagreed with you, “Mr. Limbaugh…the histrionics and the name calling, they undermine anything constructive that you have to say… our country is in desperate straights right now, and we need ideas.  But what we don’t need is nasty rhetoric, and useless noise.  This does not help anyone get a job, keep a job or feed their family.  If there ever was a time to put the meanness behind us and focus on real dialogue and real solutions, this is the time.”