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Putting SS and Medicare on the table before the vote is leadership.
Obama offered real leadership the GOP walked away.
Putting SS and Medicare on the table before the vote is leadership.
I have said all along it's going to take the holy trinity of tax increases, discretionary and military spending cuts, and en lement cuts to seriously balance the budget.
That being said, IMHO the House IS NOT GOING TO PASS any tax increases.
Whatever deal gets done right now is going to have to be about spending.
Good answer, GG! Don't take no !
Offering to "means test" SS and Medicare benefits was just more class warfare. That was not a serious offer.
I think it was.
Missed opportun y fior sure.
Its foolish to think its going to be solved with one piece of legislation. That being said, Obama's offer was one of a starting place and there's no way around that. When the GOP rejected that, they took a whole ton of the blame if anything goes down.
So is GGA uninformed?
that's a nice way to put it...
that's a nice way to put it...keep digging cc..Weeks of negotiations led by Vice President Joseph Biden have identified deficit-reduction savings in the range of $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion in savings. But that leaves a gap of $400 billion to $700 billion to be filled, and Democrats have argued strongly that revenues must be part of the mix.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories...#ixzz1SCQ4WBsG
That's old news and off the table dumbass.
Also instead of continually regurgitating the 1.7 million number why don't you post an itemized list of the proposed cuts?
This morning Obama was asked to name some cuts he was proposing and he wouldn't even name one.
Anybody see yet what is to be cut to arrive at $Tx savings?
When we know, that's when the politics will hit the fan.
I'd like to see the list of proposed cuts that the GOP wants before raising any debt limit. I haven't seen that list either.
Does the name Paul Ryan ring a bell?
I mean, he WAS just recently demonized by Democrats and the mainstream media...
I'm not saying it was perfect but at LEAST he had the balls to put a real plan in play.
http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/
You're a funny man, and don't even understand the issue. We're not talking a govt shutdown, bubba, we're talking about an economic shutdown. The difference between what you referred to and what could happen is the difference between a pebble rolling down the concrete curb in front of your house, or several gigatons of rock fragments avalanching down a mountain. Nobody but Tea Party wants to see that happen.
A real plan? By eliminating medicare and medicaid, giving huge tax breaks to the rich, and not touching the defense budget? It's the right wing equivalent to Obama coming out and saying he wants to tax everything over $250,000 at 90% and give a Cadillac to every illegal.
Indeed
(beefed)
Come on, that 'real plan' isn't serious. Tax cuts?
The Journal Becomes Fox-ified
By JOE NOCERA
It’s official. The Wall Street Journal has been Fox-ified.
It took Rupert Murdoch only three and a half years to get there, starting with the moment he acquired the paper from the dysfunctional Bancroft family in December 2007, a purchase that was completed after he vowed to protect The Journal’s editorial integrity and agreed to a (toothless) board that was supposed to make sure he kept that promise.
Fat chance of that. Within five months, Murdoch had fired the editor and installed his close friend Robert Thomson, fresh from a stint Fox-ifying The Times of London. The new publisher was Leslie Hinton, former boss of the division that published Murdoch’s British newspapers, including The News of the World. (He resigned on Friday.) Soon came the changes, swift and sure: shorter articles, less depth, an increased emphasis on politics and, weirdly, sometimes surprisingly unsophisticated coverage of business.
Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line. The Journal sometimes took to using the word “Democrat” as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing. In her book, “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison recounts how editors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views. That’s half the definition of Fox-ification.
The other half is that Murdoch’s media outlets must shill for his business interests. With the News of the World scandal, The Journal has now shown itself willing to do that, too.
As a business story, the News of the World scandal isn’t just about phone hacking and police bribery. It is about Murdoch’s media empire, the News Corporation, being at risk — along with his family’s once unshakable hold on it. The old Wall Street Journal would have been leading the pack in pursuit of that story.
Now? At first, The Journal ignored the scandal, even though, as the Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff pointed out in Adweek, it was front-page news all across Britain. Then, when the scandal was no longer avoidable, The Journal did just enough to avoid being accused of looking the other way. Blogging for Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, the media critic, described The Journal’s coverage as “obviously hamstrung, and far, far below the paper’s true capacity.”
On Friday, however, the coverage went all the way to craven. The paper published an interview with Murdoch that might as well have been dictated by the News Corporation public relations department. He was going to testify before Parliament next week, he told the Journal reporter, because “it’s important to absolutely establish our integrity.” Some of the accusations made in Parliament were “total lies.” The News Corporation had handled the scandal “extremely well in every way possible.” So had his son James, a top company executive. “When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right,” he said. He was “getting annoyed” by the scandal. And “tired.” And so on.
In the article containing the interview, there was no pushback against any of these statements, even though several of them bordered on the delusional. The two most obvious questions — When did Murdoch first learn of the phone hacking at The News of the World? And when did he learn that reporters were bribing police officers for information? — went unasked. The Journal reporter had either been told not to ask those questions, or instinctively knew that he shouldn’t. It is hard to know which is worse. The dwindling handful of great journalists who remain at the paper — Mark Maremont, Alan Murray and Alix Freedman among them — must be hanging their heads in shame.
To tell you the truth, I’m hanging my head in shame too. Four years ago, when Murdoch was battling recalcitrant members of the Bancroft family to gain control of The Journal, which he had long lusted after and which he viewed as the vehicle that would finally allow him to go head-to-head against The New York Times, I wrote several columns saying that he would be a better owner than the Bancrofts.
The Bancrofts’ history of mismanagement had made The Journal vulnerable in the first place. I thought that Murdoch’s resources would stop the financial bleeding, and that his desire for a decent legacy would keep him from destroying a great newspaper.
After the family agreed to sell to him, Elisabeth Goth, the brave Bancroft heir who had long tried to get her family to fix the company, told me, “He has a tremendous opportunity, and I don’t think he’s going to blow it.” In that same column, I wrote, “The chances of Mr. Murdoch wrecking The Journal are lower than you’d think.”
Mea culpa.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/op...gewanted=print
Did you read the actual proposal or are you just regurgitating up what some blogger/boutons told you? I'm not saying it was perfect and would please everyone but he DID put a specific plan on the table.
The roadmap is a brutal read with the constant pla udes and long circle-jerk on laissez-faire economics and American exceptionalism. It makes me want to puke when right wingers act like it was some idolized form of capitalism that made this nation rich in the 20th century, ignoring the obvious factors of America having enormous amounts of productive land protected from the rest of the world by two oceans and not decimated by two world wars worth of destruction that the rest of the first world suffered through. Hearing this guy about government intrusion making health care expensive is laughable, as if all government policy is destined to make things more expensive. He has a point with the ridiculous employer-based system, but his solution to medicare is pretty much a handout to insurance companies, so I don't see where he has a leg to stand on. Meanwhile the rest of the first world has gotten its healthcare costs in line through either centralized public care (Canada, Japan, UK) or making healthcare non-profit (Germany). The roadmap reads like one big fantasy. I particularly hate his argument of public healthcare driving insurers out of the market, as if the public owes them the right to be profitable when there are far cheaper alternatives.
It blows my mind seeing Ryan on one hand complain about the lack of preventative care and then complain about clean air standards on the other. How two-faced can the guy be? As if breathing in an aerosol of heavy metals isn't a huge contributing factor to the allergy epidemic of the last 50 years. If the guy really wants a preventative solution, how about not allowing McDonalds to bribe kids with toys and get them sucked into eating french fries and drinking cokes? Or removing sodas, chips, fries and other assorted garbage from schools where parents can't monitor their kids' diets? Do something to ensure kids aren't bombared with tons of clever marketing that turns them into fatasses. Kids have always liked candy, but before TV I wonder how many of them drank sodas all day and ate 10-piece Chicken McNugget meals for dinner all the time.
And eliminating capital gains taxes so even more of the burden falls on regular workers? Spin that as anything but a direct handout to hedge fund managers. The Ryan roadmap reads like a stereotypical Republican fantasy: stick it to everything that benefits citizens, don't touch a cent of the enormous waste from our military empire and constant wars, throw in a few references to god and faith, kiss Friedman's and Hayek's asses, and push laissez-faire as the driver behind the nation's past wealth, turning a blind eye to other much larger factors. As if the people in the cess pools of American cities in the early 20th century were so well off by limited government.
Last edited by baseline bum; 07-16-2011 at 04:40 PM.
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