In August of 2009, Barack was interviewed by Chuck Todd on the economy. When it came to the issue of raising taxes on the wealthy, Barack was asked by Scott Ferguson to: Explain how raising taxes on anyone during a deep recession is going to help with the economy. Barack answered that it would be a mistake to raise taxes at that time. He said that it would cost jobs:
Well, first of all, he is right. Normally, you don't raise taxes in a recession, which is why we haven't and why we have instead cut taxes. So I guess what I would say to Scott is his economics are right, you don't raise taxes in a recession. We haven't raised taxes in a recession. ... ...So he is absolutely right, the last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up — take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.
You heard, of course, about how the government is trying to get rid of standard incandescent light bulbs. You may have also heard that the Republicans in congress are trying to squash this part of the 2007 Energy Act. Bloomberg has an incredibly slanted view of this bill, and gives the Obama administration POV almost verbatim:
The legislation, which was debated on the House floor yesterday and is scheduled for a vote later today, would cost Americans $6 billion in energy savings in 2015, the White House said in a statement yesterday.
So let's start here, with what H.R. 2417 is. H.R. 2417 would, according to the bill, repeal:
Sections 321 and 322 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007
to conduct research and development efforts related to lighting technologies, perform market assessments related to energy-efficient lighting products, and educate consumers about such products.
Sounds like a good way for us to save some money. Particularly at a time when we are trying to cut down on government spending.
Hilarious. The entire left just swallowed their collective tongues.
Remember how all during Bush's term, the left argued that Bush tried to connect 9/11 and Iraq through hidden speech? Or something like that? Well, Panetta straight out said it:
The reason you guys are here is because of 9/11. The US got attacked and 3,000 human beings got killed because of Al-Qaeda
Now if he were a Republican, every single liberal in the US would be talking about how he was trying to distort 'the truth'. But since he's working for a guy in the WH with a D next to his name...
I just wanted to keep a list of this, handy. Spending, of the US government, in trillions, per year: 2000----1.7 2001----1.8 2002----2.0 2003----2.1 2004----2.2 2005----2.4 2006----2.6 2007----2.7 2008----2.9 2009----3.5 2010----3.4 SOURCE
Santelli was the guy who made the original call for a new Tea Party. In the discussion about the debt, he gets it right yet again...
Yes, Santelli... stop spending! A few very relevant points are made in this video. But the most important one is this, as stated: In August, we will have $203 billion of revenue. We will also have $362 worth of bills.
Now lets just think about that for a second. Suppose you had a company, and you were taking in $2.03 for every $3.62 spent. Wouldn't you take a serious look at your spending? Of course you would.
Earlier, I wrote about how Jon Stewart can't admit that he was wrong about Fox News viewers being the most "misinformed" viewers. I did a bunch of research on one of Fox News' rivals, and applied the same standard that Jon Stewart did. Which I thought was kinda brilliant.
Shortly after that, a number of people all started using the same argument that Politifact used (a few of) the wrong studies. That there was a thin difference between being 'misinformed' and not knowing what the facts were. If one person had come to this conclusion, I'd chalk it up to one person splitting hairs. But it wasn't one person. It was a herd of Dems. So I googled, and came up with the FireDogLake post that seems to be the source of it all:
...The three Pew polls measure how informed viewers are. They don’t even belong in the discussion, because they don’t go to Stewart’s point.
Let's go back to Stewart's point:
Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? … Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.
If we constrain our definition of "misinformed media viewers" to the FireDogLake version of what Stewart meant, then we're not talking about 'every poll'. We're talking about one polling service: PIPA. Moreover, we're talking about what PIPA asked people, and what PIPA felt was 'misinformation.' I ran into this study before, which is why I wanted to focus on it. A lot of the questions are subjective, but no question was more wrong in my opinion then this one:
When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it
NOTE: the second vote, while not initially appearing to be connected to TARP, does have TARP bootstrapped onto it. Read the text.
Now keep in mind, PIPA said that Fox viewers were 'misinformed' if they believed that most of the Republicans were against TARP. How do they form that opinion? Wait. Let's do this. Suppose you asked viewers who supported TARP more, dems or reps? What do you suppose the vast majority of MSNBC viewers would say? I'm going to jump into the pool and suggest that their 'misinformation' rating would go way, way, way up, along with those who listen to NPR.
When President Bush made the same mistake during his campaign for President in 2000, he was roundly criticized as unintelligent.
Yet, Barack can continue to make gaffe after gaffe, and its not a reflection on him.
To be fair, I don't consider "The Internets" to be that big of a gaffe. But then again, I wasn't the one making fun of Bush for doing the same damn thing.
The Washington Post recently fact checked one of Obama's speeches on the debt, and gave him "Two Pinocchios." A sample of what they wrote:
The president’s claim of an “unprecedented” effort to trim federal regulations is laughable. And it would be nice to hear Obama acknowledge for once that, until a few months ago, his administration was eager to do business with Gaddafi.
They also take apart his efforts to blame corporate jet companies for robbing the public coffers of taxes. Read the piece. Its pretty good.
At least, according to Obama. Boehner asked the question of the president in his Twitter Town Hall. But Obama, according to the CNN video on Real Clear Politics, said:
Eventually, I'm sure, the speaker will see the light
Remember how Obama kept saying that most of his campaign contributions came from small donors?
Uh. Turns out its not true. Guess who actually is getting small donors? According to AP, Michelle Bachman.
...Bush and Obama depended more on thunderstorms of money — bundles of checks collected by big-money donors, each written for the maximum amount allowed by law. Bachmann's accounts are instead filled with small contributions sent by devoted supporters.
Cool for Michelle. Although that won't quell the liberal belief that she's being sponsored by corporations.
I've seen some ridiculous gaffes by Obama, but this one took the cake.
I need to start by introducing you to Medal Of Honor winner, Sergeant First Class Jared C. Monti. Jared lost his life in Afghanistan. According to the official website:
With complete disregard for his own safety, Staff Sergeant Monti twice attempted to move from behind the cover of the rocks into the face of relentless enemy fire to rescue his fallen comrade. Determined not to leave his Soldier, Staff Sergeant Monti made a third attempt to cross open terrain through intense enemy fire. On this final attempt, he was mortally wounded, sacrificing his own life in an effort to save his fellow Sohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifldier. Staff Sergeant Monti's selfless acts of heroism inspired his patrol to fight off the larger enemy force
The president presented his parents with the Congressional Medal Of Honor, after giving this 14 minute speech on Jared.
It is a moving ceremony, one which I'm fairly certain that the parents will not forget.
“First time I saw the 10th Mountain Division, you guys were in southern Iraq. When I went back to visit Afghanistan, you guys were the first ones there. I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously.”
This truly is the worst possible gaffe the president could have committed. Now granted, he did call the parents to apologize. But this fits under the heading of "imagine if Bush said this...?" Because if this were any other president, we'd still be talking about this today.
I hate, hate, hate when people can't admit when they were wrong.
No one is more problematic at this then Jon Stewart. Granted, admitting that you're wrong isn't as funny as sticking to the premise that you're right in lieu of the fact that Politifact screwed you to the wall.
So let's start here. 3 minutes in... Stewart says:
"Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? … Fox viewers, consistently, every poll."
Fox actually scored better than its two direct cable-news rivals -- MSNBC, which is a liberal counterpoint to Fox, and CNN, which is considered more middle-of-the-road. Also scoring lower than Fox were local television news, the evening network news shows and the network morning shows.
Ouch. Politifact concludes, after showing several different studies:
So we have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets -- such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks -- often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows -- such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show -- actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.
Of course, Jon Stewart admitted he was wrong, and moved on. Oh wait. He didn't. Ugh. Like the rest of the left, he doubled down instead of admitting that he was wrong. Stewart went on the air to say that if he was wrong, it was because he watches Fox News... whom he still claims is consistently wrong.
To keep his claim true, Stewart quotes a number of Politifacts.
Fox was never reviewed by Politifact, as a network.
They DO review individual people who have made statements on opinion programs, and then they find the statements to be true or false. In fact, if you notice, the very first quote that Stewart refers to comes from Glenn Beck. After that, he kinda doesn't mention/refer to the fact that the statements he's quoting are from opinion makers on Fox. However, Politifact does list them in one, handy, statement. What you'll notice is that Stewart is using statements from Beck, Palin, O'Reilly, and even Karl Rove as "Fox News" statements.
Now most people understand that if you list off a bunch of commentaries, you'll find people who have statements that aren't completely true. And if Stewart did that, he'd have to admit that the same thing happens on other networks.
Like... I dunno... lets do this with MSNBC.
Olbermann:
"Subsidies for oil and gas companies make up 88 percent of all federal subsidies. Just cutting the oil and gas subsidies out would save the U.S. government $45 billion every year."
Gov. Sarah Palin "got precisely zero support for her call for Alaska's Democratic Senator Mark Begich to resign because Ted Stevens' corruption conviction was overturned."
Under changes being debated, state employees in Wisconsin "who earn $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year might have 20 percent of their income just disappear overnight."
With his decision on whether to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal, President Obama "has to fix yet another problem he inherited from the Bush administration."
Now I'm not even on the staff of Comedy Central writers, and I came up with that 'short' list, from just 4 people who appear on MSNBC. Should I presume that Stewart did the same thing as I did, when he researched Fox? That he took the time to compare it to other networks?
Of course he didn't. Because like many people on the left, he can't admit that his premise was wrong. He will continue to look for evidence that proves him right, ignoring anything to the contrary.
There is a thin difference between ignorance and arrogance. Ignorance is not knowing. Arrogance is the presumption that you already know.
The biggest problem that we're going to encounter in the future is the money that the government has not allocated, for items they promised to pay for.
In a corporate environment, these are known as liabilities. Corporations have to use accrual accounting instead of cash accounting.
In cash accounting, its real easy to calculate your balance. You just indicate revenue - expenses. So if you spent $50,000, but made $60,000, you would indicate $10,000 of profit. Now here's where things get complicated. Let's say that you owe $200,000 to someone who billed you for services to your business, but you didn't have to pay the bill for another 2 years. In cash accounting, you still had $10,000 of profit. On paper, your business is making money.
Corporations can't use cash accounting for this reason. They have to indicate what their liabilities are on their balance sheet. Somewhere on their financial statement, they would have to indicate that they owe $200,000.
How does this relate to our government? Our government does what no business would ever be allowed to do: they put off obligations (money owed), often sell bonds to cover these expenses, and then indicate a balance that doesn't reflect this debt.
If I've lost you, you can always read this USA Today report that puts it into perspective.
The $61.6 trillion in unfunded obligations amounts to $528,000 per household. That's more than five times what Americans have borrowed for everything else — mortgages, car loans and other debt. It reflects the challenge as the number of retirees soars over the next 20 years and seniors try to collect on those spending promises.
Most people are familiar with the fact that we are currently $14 trillion in debt as a country, or that we are now running deficits of over $1 Trillion a year. In this post, I explained how the current administration is now running a deficit averaging $1.7 Trillion a year. But most people aren't aware of how much we truly are in debt.
So as you listen to congress talk about cutting $10 billion, or even $50 billion from the budget, and as you hear congressmen protecting their pet projects, remember that figure: $61.6 Trillion.
ABC News reports that Obama's 2012 campaign is trying to mislead its minions in their latest video. The video is reportedly a compilation of issues that the Republicans talked about in the latest debate. However...
...the video, which Messina calls a “highlight reel” and the DNC titled “What in the world are they talking about?” selectively uses clips from the 2-hour forum suggesting that the candidates were focused on idiotic issues, or battles from the past, when all of the topics the video hammers the Republicans for talking about were ones they were asked about at the forum.
Huh... the DNC is dishonest? When did that happen? Here's the video, below.
If you want to compare that to what they were actually asked about... watch the CNN video. The debate actually starts 2:15 in:
I'm not talking about those who have actual mental deficiencies. I understand that a child with a mental limitation or someone who has a severe and limiting disease is not capable of the thought process that we know as logic.
However, there are adult creatures known as 9/11 conspiracy theorists who actively ignore logical thought in order to come to the conclusion that a plane didn't actually fly into a building on 9/11. Or, alternately, that a burning building cannot collapse due to structural damage.
This idiot, the one who uploaded this video, is one of those tools:
Now naturally, upon seeing this video, I tried to explain to the idiot in question that elevators can fail if there is a plane that flies into a building. Because while all modern elevators have safety features, they all have limitations. They were not meant to keep an elevator from falling after the cables are cut and when tons of burning liquid kerosene are poured on top of them.
This idea was not acceptable to the idiot who posted this. He/she/it responded with:
Approximately eight 100-millionths of one percent of elevator rides resulted in an anomaly ..... that about sums it up. So right there your odds are 1 in 80,000,000,000. Now multiply those odds with all the other anomolies, like three steel buildings collapsing from fire in one event on the same, when a steel building has never collapsed from greater fires. NORAD off duty .... etc. The official story, with your fireball down shafts, is at least a billion trillion to 1, if even that
I wanted to reply to IranContraScumDid911. But not too ironically, they blocked me from posting anything else as a response. Which makes sense, because they also wrote this:
Four plane crashes disappeared in one event? What are the odds not one tail or wing would never be recovered? The black boxes disappeared?
I'm going to work backwards. The only way that the conspiracy theorist could believe that four planes did NOT disappear in one event is if they honestly thought that the bulk of New York who SAW the planes fly into the two twin towers were all lying. They furthermore would have to believe that the people in the Pentagon, who lost friends, were also lying. Finally, they'd have to believe that the people who were working in ATC, who literally dedicate their lives to the idea of planes not running into things, were complicit in this lie. Its kinda like believing that a hospital full of doctors were all involved in killing 400 patients on the same day. But I digress. The point is that when the writer says:
"What are the odds not one tail or wing would never be recovered?"
...They are actively denying that the four planes were witnessed hitting said items. They are denying that the video of the first plane hitting the first tower (taken by firefighters, no less) is real. They are denying that the second plane hitting the second tower (taken by scores of different news outlets) is real. The odds of you recovering a wing of a plane that hits a building while traveling at 600mph is approximately 0.0000001%. That's a guess on my part.
100% of cases where a commercial airplane has slammed into a building has resulted in elevator failures. The fact that you cannot grasp this (or that you believe that because the odds of non-airplane-related-elevator-crashes are so great) boggles my mind. Here's a parallel thought for you to ponder. Your chances of sitting in your office on an average day and having a plane plow into your building and immolate you in a gigantic ball of flame are 5,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.
The mere fact that someone can't believe that an elevator would fail in a building that was slammed into by an airplane hurts my brain. Its someone who believes in a perfect world.... where nothing fails, even under the most extreme circumstances. Again, if it were an actual kid, I'd have no problem. Kids have trouble grasping simple concepts. Adults shouldn't. Planes that smash into buildings are annihilated. Buildings that are hit by commercial aircraft suffer severe damage.
Elevators that have a plane fly through their shaft can fail.
The Obama administration approved 204 new waivers to Democrats' healthcare reform law over the past month, bringing the total to 1,372.
Neat. Now the Hill article makes it clear that they are only temporary, and that its just for one part of the health care law. However, how shitty can a law be, when you have to issue 1,372 temporary waivers for companies affected by it? For that matter, how fair can it be?
Great article by NBC. It turns out that Mayor Daley can keep 1 million worth of campaign contributions that he never spent. So the next time you pay for parking, allow yourself to wonder out loud about that parking meter scandal... and how Daley sold the rights to parking in the city to LAZ.
The other day, I found myself in another stupid Facebook debate with someone didn't know their facts.
I should be used to this by now. But it never fails to get to me when someone who leans to the left insists that I'm uninformed while saying something that's provably not true.
This all started when a friend posted a link to a Paul Krugman article. I called Paul an idiot (my bad) and then stated why he was an idiot: That all of the spending he championed failed to bring down the unemployment rate.
Now I'd reprint the debate verbatim if I could. But as it happens far too often, a friend of my friend kept using insults until the original friend blocked us both from her Facebook account. So by trying to correct the record with facts, suddenly, I'm the asshole. Even though I wasn't the one calling her other friend names.
I know. I know... I'm losing the point of why I wrote this. Paul Krugman was for spending shitloads of money through the government. We all agree on this. He believed that it would result in a lower unemployment rate. It is also true that Krugman was upset that only $787 BILLION dollars was being spent on the stimulus program. Krugman believed this to be small. Which makes sense. I mean, if you're going to be a Keynesian economist, why wouldn't you believe in spending more money? Ideally, by spending 50 Trillion Dollars, we'd go into a huge economic boom that would never be matched! Right?
My friend's friend insisted that Krugman was right. That the stimulus was too small... which is why it had no effect. He said that Krugman readers would know that Paul predicted that the stimulus bill would fail to reduce the unemployment rate. But Paul didn't say that. In fact, Krugman said:
Unemployment is currently about 7 percent, and heading much higher; Obama himself says that absent stimulus it could go into double digits. Suppose that we’re looking at an economy that, absent stimulus, would have an average unemployment rate of 9 percent over the next two years; this plan would cut that to 7.3 percent, which would be a help but could easily be spun by critics as a failure.
Wow. A 7.3% unemployment rate would be spun into a 'failure' of Obama's $787 economic plan. Presuming, of course, that the president didn't have a fawning media that would change his every failure into rainbows and unicorns.
In case you didn't know this (or were arguing with me on Facebook), the nonfarm unemployment rate for April of 2011 was 9.0%. I created this handy chart to show you what's the stimulus plan results have looked like, vs. the predicted results. Note that the uptick in unemployment in April has not been added.
A lot was made when a Fox affiliate accidentally put Obama's name in the screen crawl when Osama was killed. Keep in mind, it was an affiliate. But more importantly, they were not the only one to do so in the news.
