The second round of GOP debates happens tonight, but there still hasn't been a single debate on the Democratic side of the fence. And it's not surprising - even Debbie Wasserman-Schultz knows that the lunacy being spewed by DNC candidates needs to be hidden from public view as long as possible.
As a case in point, consider the fact that "Democratic Socialist" Bernie Sanders is proposing government expansions which would cost taxpayers an additional $18 trillion over the next decade. Among these expansions are universal healthcare which is even more universal than Obama's universal healthcare, which we think involves having Stephen Hawking find pathways to universes with more than four dimensions.
Bernie is also proposing universal (Earth rules are so limiting) free public college for everyone. His goal is to use education to lift people out of $15 an hour minimum wage jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds so that they can eventually become the CEO of McDonalds and earn $15 an hour maximum wage after taxes.
Meanwhile, Hillary has released a new campaign ad which taxes our ability to believe how freaking clueless her handlers are...
Yes, the woman who for decades handled Bill Clinton's "bimbo eruptions" by destroying the lives of his accusers and inventing "vast Right wing conspiracies" is now claiming to have a sympathetic ear for the victims of sexual assault. Unless, as mentioned above, they happen to be treated as sex slaves and property in Middle Eastern countries which have contributed heavily to the Clinton Foundation.
And finally, we'd hope that any Democratic debate would also find room for Joe Biden on stage...
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23 comments:
Poor Joe. :( The only sympathetic character among the high-profile Democrats. I hope that he doesn't run, if only so that he has time to grieve and to live.
It seems that every election cycle the Democrats are all in for tax the “rich” even more. Many folks like my younger brother say; “Yeah, tax all those evil rich people!” I tell them that for most of the world he’s rich. Many like him just don’t get it until they see their own tax bill. But then the next election cycle they buy it again. I try to explain that the rich don’t just fill their basement with money to swim around in it like McScrooge Duck , but they invest the money in business, donate to charity and buy things. Their activities create and supports jobs for everyone. Of course with most of these low information voters, they just can’t get it. For them the “rich” is always someone else. Most people think that because they rent an apartment that a raise in property taxes doesn’t affect them.
Joseph ET
that much common sense and real world examples makes them shriek and run away, screaming the democrat mantra- 'the govt has plenty of money' and 'the govt can always print more'.
Too bad they never get to just what exactly that entails.
Like Margaret "Iron Lady" Thatcher said, "pretty soon you run out of other peoples' money".
@Joseph ET- Nice post. Per your last comment, in my experience all libs believe that anyone who makes one dollar per year more than they do is rich. And evil. A similar cognitive dissonance lets them believe that Slick Willie and Hellary actually were dead broke when they left the White House. I guess that's why they had to steal all of that stuff.
Hillary saying abused/raped women have the right to be heard? And they say she has no sense of humor!
Full disclaimer: Joe Biden triggers my Tourette's. That said, having just buried his son has to have taken more out of him, emotionally, than he is willing to acknowledge. Joe needs to take a serious sabbatical from politics and heal; he would not do the country or himself any good by campaigning for the presidency.
Between government subsidies and grants, which only serve to drive tuition up, college could be free at the same or less cost to taxpayers just as it is in many European countries:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/03/the-tuition-is-too-damn-high-part-vii-is-government-aid-actually-making-college-more-expensive/
On Hilarity, with all of her flip-flops and fake accents on the campaign trail, it is incomprehensible to me how anyone could still feel she has any credibility. The fact that many still do says volumes about the intelligence of voters on the left.
You can bet your next paycheck (if you're one of the lucky people that actually GET a paycheck) that Billary is actively petitioning the DNC to not have ANY debates at all. You can also bet that any debates they do hold will be as staged as a movie set, and will have most softball fluff and BS questions you ever heard. Not a big Trump fan, but I'd sure enjoy watching a Billary / Trump debate!
Ahhhh.... poor widdle Socialists.... Being closely related to one, I can vouch for the fact that they actually believe their own bullship. I forget the actual numbers, but as I recall, if they taxed the top 10% of rich people at a 100% tax rate, it would fund the government for a whopping 8 days or some such.
The debate tonight might be fun to watch. We'll get to see 9 people attacking Trump. I think these debates would be better if the RNC just put about 500 crème pies on the stage! Nyuk nyuk nyuk!
@Steve- I don't think Joe wants to run. I think he's being pressured so that the Dems will have a viable "Plan B" if and when Hillary flames out. And I genuinely feel real compassion for him regarding the loss of his son. I almost hated to make today's joke, but the fact that a death bed conversation has been entered into the campaign by Joe himself makes it fair game. I'll also note that today's gag wasn't mocking Joe's son, but Joe's own tendency to sometimes get things wrong.
@Joseph ET- What your brother needs to know is that your observation "for most of the world, you're rich" is not academic. Obama is a globalist and he thinks it's time for rich Americans like your brother to start paying out. Which is why Barry is flooding our country with illegals to "share the wealth," and pushing a climate change agenda to redistribute America's wealth and cripple our economy. Be watching in a couple of months when Obama goes to the U.N. and agrees to start paying "reparations" to poorer countries damaged by the "extreme weather events" theoretically caused by people like your brother using electricity, air conditioning, and a car. You read it here first.
@REM1875- I think the most useful meme on that subject is "Everything the government gives to someone, they took from someone else."
@Fred Ciampi- Bless her, she nailed it.
@TrickyRicky- It's the politics of envy, pure and simple. I will acknowledge that our current insane tax code makes it too easy for too many at the top to pay too little, and we need a fair or flat tax. But what the Libs like to ignore is that even under our convoluted tax system, it is the "evil rich" paying the great preponderance of all taxes, and tax revenues have never been higher.
@Bobo the Hobo- Hillary may be crazy like a fox for bringing up sexual abuse. After all, it marks one more day when we're focusing on her hypocrisy and her husband's genitalia rather than Benghazi, criminal mishandling of classified documents, and her role (as Secretary of State) in the wild destabilization of the Middle East.
Regarding Joe, I disagree with him politically about everything - but unlike Hillary, I don't think he's insatiably ambitious, and unlike Obama I don't think he actively hates America. He seems a likable guy and life has dealt him a tough blow with the loss of his son. Like you, my preference would be to see him bow out of the limelight gracefully and spend time healing.
@Geoff King- Bingo! Government loans have more to do with skyrocketing college costs than any other single factor. And it's long past time for us to move beyond the brick-and-mortar model for college educations - we now live in an Internet world. The evil capitalists at Apple offer iTunes University for free; pretty much every college course you could ever want to take. For those who are genuinely motivated enough to learn, online college options should be paired with standardized (and supervized) testing to give accredidation.
Of course, our nation is also long overdue in throwing out the notion that a "college education" is essential. In no small part because what passes for "education" is really indoctrination and self-esteem building.
Regarding Hillary, I don't know that she does have that much credibility with voters on the Left - but it doesn't matter. The ugly little secret of liberals is that they don't vote for who they "believe" in - they vote for the candidates that make them feel good about themselves for having cast the vote, whether it's the "first black president" or the "first woman president."
@Colby Muenster- I'm looking forward to any Dem debate, just to watch the candidates and the moderators try to avoid asking or answering any embarrassing questions. I expect a lot of Barbara Walters-style questions: "If you were a tree, what kind would you be?"
Bill Whittle ("Firewall") did a great piece some time ago which illustrated the point you're making. If we taxed the "evil rich" at 100%, it would only fund the government for a few days - and the next year there wouldn't be any "evil rich" left. Game over! But I, too, know otherwise rational people who think that the rich are sitting on some unimaginable amount of stolen wealth which could pay for everything, forever, if Bernie Sanders could just get elected.
@Mary in Texas- Sorry if the Biden cartoon seemed harsh. As I said above, I was reluctant to go there, but it's Biden himself who put the story on the table and framed it in a political way. That makes it fair game - but it certainly won't be anything that comes up often here.
Debates: Heard a radio ad from CNN for tonight's debate. You could be forgiven for mistaking it an ad for an upcoming prizefight. More and more, the media (and public) is cynically treating the future of our nation like a sporting event. And they wonder why the anti-establishment candidates remains so popular.
Bernie's $18-trillion and counting: It's interesting to note that while Bernie fantasizes about expanding government by another $18-trillion, his "destroy the rich" tax proposals only raise less than half of what will be necessary to fulfill his socialist dreams; $6.5-trillion. So, where will the $11.5-trillion dollar difference come from? Like they did with ObamaCare, in a few years clueless Progressives who are enthusiastic about Bernie today are going to be rather surprised when they discover they will be getting the bulk of the bill for their new "free" health care and college. Some people never learn.
As @Stilton points out above, we're going to have the best educated and highest taxed burger-flippers in the world.
Looking forward 5 or 6 years after we make "public college" free for everyone, what will be the next social injustice be? That only "the rich" will be able to afford the exclusive "private college" that the elites send their kids too. It never ends.
Hillary's Message to survivors of sexual assault: Ya gotta give her credit for having balls.
As I've mentioned before, Hillary is still stuck in the pre-Internet '90s when the first Clinton campaigns could easily pull this kind of hypocritical crap with the help of a monopolistic and sycophantic media that happily parroted whatever the Clinton campaign said while obligingly ignoring any and all inconvenient truths. Those days are long gone. Today, anyone pulling this kind of crap gets turned into a meme, and ends up on everyone's Facebook and Twitter feed in near realtime.
There's a whole generation of people today who weren't around for the first show. They're about to get educated, if they haven't been already.
Compare what happened to Bill Cosby to what happened to Bill Clinton. The cases are quite similar; Two high-profile and powerful men systematically abuse countless women. Their wives staunchly stand behind them, and accuse the other women of various nefarious agendas. The only difference is that when Cosby's victims started coming forward, the media listened, and sought out all of the other victims it could find.
Why the difference? Is it because it's 20+ years later and as a society we're more sensitive and intolerant to blatant misogyny? No, I don't think so, as @Stilton pointed out above. The left's blatant blind-eye tolerance of Muslim behavior and the recent box office sensation of "Straight Outta Compton" demonstrates that regardless of all the feminist rhetoric to the contrary, misogyny is not only alive and well, it's actually still hip to be a sexist pig, at least as long as you're "sophisticated" about it.
It can't be race either, since Bill Cosby is black, and Bill Clinton is white. Straight white males are held to a much higher standard of behavior than all others.
It could be ideological because Bill Cosby was a target of the left for his unapologetic stance regarding the current state of black culture in America, like that celebrated in the film Straight Outta Compton. Had Bill Cosby's scandal not come to light, no doubt he'd be on the circuit today hypocritically lamenting the treatment of women by the likes of Dr. Dre and his cohort the same way that Hillary now pretends to stand for sexual assault victims.
Or could it be that today where information travels to billions and the speed of light, it's just harder to get away with things like it was in the past. (unless, of course, your politics are "correct")
Biden: And again I assert that the more Joe Biden publicly laments the loss of his son, the more certain it is that he'll be the candidate. It's a lame reason for voting for an individual for President, but really no lamer that it was to vote for a guy who "feels your pain" or was a "articulate & clean black guy".
I have a half black, half Chinese, gay, paraplegic, transgender friend with a harelip who wants to marry a 426 Hemi Chrysler 300J. That should just about cover everything. I'm going to ask him/her/it if he wants to run for president. Hope I didn't piss off toooooo many nice folks out there.
@John the Econ- I haven't heard the CNN ad, but it's clear that we've transitioned to an era in which entertainment and politics are all the same thing. The debate is more or less a reality show hosted, again, by Donald Trump. The big question in too many minds isn't how our country can be repaired, but who'll be "fired" or "voted off the island."
Regarding "free college," here's an idea: let people attend, then require them to take standardized tests to prove they got a real education. If they pass, they get a diploma. If they fail, they have to pay in full for the college education that they wasted. This would discourage people from grabbing a "freebie" (and no doubt the government per diem to cover living expenses) unless they were serious.
Your Cosby/Clinton comparison is interesting. And I still remember how the Left did a complete turnaround during the Monica scandal. Instead of it always being sexual abuse when an office relationship involved a "disparity of power," suddenly alleged feminists were praising Lewinsky for using her feminity (if that's how you want to describe easy blowjobs) as a form of self-empowerment.
Finally, you bring up a point I'd skipped about the Joe Biden cartoon. In some ways, the "death bed" story is a callous deployment of the liberal "shield of victimhood" to preemptively deflect criticism, the same way Obama wields his alleged blackness, and Hillary her alleged gender. When conservatives agree to limit the dialogue according to the PC rules established by the left, we've already lost.
@Fred Ciampi- The good news is that you didn't commit any micro-aggressions...
On "Free College" and "Testing": The problem with "standardized testing" at the college level is that we'll just get the same problem we currently have with the rest of public education and the primary complaint about "common core"; Politically motivated academics & bureaucrats writing tests as propaganda, and then public schools just teaching the answers to the test instead of teaching people how to think. Is that what our economy really needs?
I've got a much better idea: Base a school's funding or loans a student can qualify for upon the salaries of their graduates. After all, what better test could there be than real life? All of a sudden, schools would be much more enthusiastic about teaching and graduating people in chemical engineering and IT development instead of community organizing and grievance studies.
The main problem with academia today is the near total lack of market accountability; They get paid up front no matter what happens to you and your future ability to pay back 6-figures of student loan debt. Of course, such a crass, market driven solution as mine has absolutely no place in academia, so don't expect to ever see such a simple solution. Without a doubt, they'll prefer the "free" & testing approach, which will only serve to expand the status quo.
The Problem with "Free": When I started college, like a lot of kids I was relatively clueless about where I was going in life, and didn't have the grades or money to go straight to a 4-year university. I started at a community college, which at the time was very affordable. In fact, beyond buying books, it was practically free.
The problem with "free" is that most people do not put much value into something that they don't have to sacrifice anything for, and ultimately treat such things with contempt. This is one reason that kids who attend private schools do better than those who attend public; it isn't necessarily because they're inherently smarter, but because their parents are making a sacrifice to send them there, and take the steps to help their kids succeed.
When I started at community college, to a large degree it felt like "5th-year high school". The low-level mandatory classes that everyone has to take at the beginning were largely filled with kids who's only motivation to be there was from parents who said "Go to school or get a job". (Fortunately, as one moved beyond the 100-level courses, these people seemed to disappear) I have no doubt that if we make all universities "free", the same will happen everywhere. I'd much rather go to back to school than be a burger flipper. And since the universities will now be funded by headcounts instead of affordability, they'll have even more incentive to lower standards in a race to the bottom. Public colleges will become just as useless and dysfunctional as public elementary and high schools have been for generations now.
"A right to be believed"
Unless you're 12...
http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/08/hillary-clinton-refuses-to-apologize-for-laughing-about-12-year-old-rape-victim-she-maligned-in-court/
This "person" disgusts me... I tend to feel that she's breathing my air, and I'd take it as a kindness if she'd stop...
Feminism post Clinton: Like the environmental, civil rights, and so many other "movements" that had evolved out of the '60s, by the '90s the officially recognized feminist movement had long since been absorbed as a wholly-owned division of the Democrat Party, with their only purpose left being to create professional-class jobs for otherwise unemployable women's studies graduates, and to drive votes to the polls for Democrats every two years.
The Bill Clinton and the feminist alphabets set the "feminist" movement back at least a generation when out of their blind fealty to Clinton and the Democrats, they continued to defend Bill, even when the story continued to go from bad to worse to unfathomable. First it was rumors of affairs. Then it was the "bimbo eruptions". Then it was the rape allegations. And then after months of denial, attacks on a formerly considered powerless underling and accusations about the "vast right wing conspiracy", we get Monica's blue dress with liquid Bill all over it. You'd think that after making such a big deal about signing a law that basically defined practically any superior who makes any advance towards an underling as "sexual harassment", that would have been enough. And yet, for the alphabets, it wasn't.
Of course after all of that, the feminist movement's dignity, "moral authority", "street cred", or whatever you want to call it was gone, along with most of their power in Washington. After all, if you're willing to unconditionally stick with the Democrats after suffering the indignity of Bill Clinton, what won't you hang around for? So outside of academia, (where they do remain relevant because academia seems to employ the vast majority of "professional" feminists) "feminism" has been largely politically irrelevant for the last 20 years. (In fact, they've gone from irrelevant, to confused, to over-the-cliff insane)
And yet today they still make the same mistake by insulting the intelligence of real women by lionizing embarrassing people like perma-student Sandra Fluke, Liz Warren, and Hillary Clinton; people who are raised up as examples of "self made women" who only got where they are because of working the system, or climbing to the top by riding the coattails of sleazy men. They continuously whine about the supposedly horrid and intolerable injustices women face living in 21st-century America while supporting politicians who turn a blind eye to the accepted slavery, institutionalized rape, and subjugation that real women face almost everywhere else outside of America.
"When conservatives agree to limit the dialogue according to the PC rules established by the left, we've already lost.
Exactly, which is the main reason that Donald Trump continues to destroy everyone else in the polls, even after repeatedly violating practically every PC rule in the book. The question is: Will the GOP squshies and their multi-million-dollar complex of consultants figure that out before it's too late?
Seriously, what are David Axelrod and Van Jones, both Obama operatives doing as commentators on CNN evaluating the GOP debate? Boy, there's some objective reporting. Does that mean we can expect Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to be commentators when Hillary, Bernie and the other Democrats debate?
Well, my prediction stands: Once again, the Federal Reserve has found enough excuses not to raise interest rates. This time, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen says largely due to “Global economic insecurity”, they won’t be raising rates right now. Maybe later this year. And again, I doubt it. As I’ve been saying for 6 years now, the banks, Federal government and Wall Street are addicted to cheap money, and like with any junkie, they will always find some reason not to give up their habit today, tomorrow, or any foreseeable time in the future. They only time they’ll quit is after it’s too late and the damage is irreversible. There will always be something called “global economic insecurity” to use as an excuse.
The only people their cheap money policy has worked out well for is Wall Street and the already wealthy who’ve watched their asset prices explode since 2008. The unseen victims are the faceless millions of Americans who have been making nothing on their savings over the last 7 years. Surprisingly, a reporter did ask Yellen the question I would have asked: How do you explain this policy exacerbating the "wealth gap"? Yellen said that the ultra-low interest rates have not widened the wealth gap.
Really? She can’t possibly be that ignorant. The wealthy, who have the bulk of their net work in equities have done fabulously well over the last 7 years. Those not well vested in assets, not so much. In fact, low interest rates have been stealing their wealth by paying nothing on savings. All the money created by low interest rates never made it to “main street”. It’s all awash on Wall Street inflating asset prices. That’s why there are record bidding wars on art, classic cars, and Manhattan penthouse apartments and relatively little on job creation. The rich have run out of good places to put all of this cheap money that the Fed has been pumping out for the better part of a decade, and unfortunately “job creation” isn’t yet considered a good enough place to invest.
Has anyone seriously argued that the DOW near 17,000 or the S&P 500 at near 2,000 is based upon “fundamentals”?
She said that the Fed is still trying to get people “back to work”. And how is that working? Over 7 years after the crisis, and workforce participation is at an all-time low. It’s not working out well.
But to add insult to injury, they re-affirmed the Fed’s goal to get us to 2% inflation. 25 years ago, any central banker who would have suggested 2% inflation as a laudable goal would have been tarred and feathered. But today they argue that this is considered an optimum. The Fed believes that nominal inflation will lead to wage growth and more jobs.
2% doesn’t sound like a lot, but look at it this way: Tack a $100 bill on your bulletin board. If the Fed is successful, (which it hasn’t been in 9 years) just sitting there on your bulletin board that $100 bill will be only worth $98 dollars a year from today. Does that make you feel good? If you keep it tacked up there for another 29 years, that $100 bill will be worth roughly $50; it will have lost half of its value. And you might as well leave it on your bulletin board, because sticking it in a savings account that pays practically nothing for 30 years will yield a similar result.
Again Ms. Yellen, tell me how this policy has no effect on “the wealth gap”. In my humble opinion, the more the central planners try to fix “income inequality”, they more they guarantee it.
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I think part of the problem is that these people, most of which came of age in the 1970s are thinking of “inflation” in Carter-era terms. This was decades before the mobility of money and the world of globalization we live in today. Today, money can be moved from one place or asset to another at the click of a mouse. We don’t have “inflation” anymore, which they think of as affecting all assets in an economy. Instead, today we have “bubbles” which only affect sectors of the economy, like middle-class real estate or college tuition, stock prices, commodities or Manhattan penthouses. The “inflation” is localized within these bubbles. The middle class isn’t awash in cash anymore, so middle class assets remain nominal. But stuff the wealthy tend to invest has been exploding.
This policy is also a gift to the Obama Administration, which for the last several months has been peddling the narrative that the Federal deficit (not debt) is at an all-time low, as though that’s a massive achievement after the massive spending binge Washington has been on for the bulk of the Obama administration. One of the only reasons they get to make that claim is because the Federal government will continue to be able to borrow at near-zero interest rates. As soon as interest rates do rise and the Federal government has to pay 2 or 3 times the interest they are today, the deficit is going to explode again. This is certainly something the Democrats certainly don’t want happening before November 2016, and unless interest rates stay at this level forever, this is going to be a bomb some a future administration.
The reality is that the Federal Reserve has become part of the problem it’s been trying to solve: Unpredictability and uncertainty. As part of their “dual mandate” to help in “job creation”, they are trying to solve a problem that they can’t possibly compete against; policy out of Washington. As a result, they only end up chasing tails, and making things less predictable and less certain. If Congress should do anything, it should relieve the Fed of the “job creation” part of its mandate and focus on currency stability based upon solid, understandable rules that the rest of the economy can count on. Until then, it will be a currency race to the bottom with the rest of the world, with tragic results sooner or later.
@John the Econ (and others)- My schedule has kept me from being able to respond the way I'd like to, but GREAT POSTS here.
$100 on the bulletin board? I see that and it's "Down to the corner bar boys, first round's on me!"
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