LawTalkers - You (all) lie!

Feigned ignorant talk like that will get you shot from a hovering helicopter, you know.

But even absent her, FWIW people like George Will seem all mooney over Mitch Daniels, Gov. of Indiana, whom I can't really comment on since I have no fucking idea who he is.

1436	03-10-2010 03:17 PM

Re: Fuck you, Marc Thiessen.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gattigap (Post 418758)

Fuck you.

That is all.

Stewart was golden in that interview. The way he pulled apart Theissen's cherry picking of the facts was priceless.

The little bitch whining at the end was like icing on the cake. Although, Jon may have been a bit too deferential.

Tyrone Slothrop

03-10-2010 03:54 PM

Re: You (all) lie!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 418782)

Interesting how comparing one to the other, the "Strongly" and "Somewhat" percentages are inverse.

Indeed. The bill is a fairly centrist piece of legislation, so lefties have a hard time getting excited about it. And there aren't many centrist Republicans left.

Tyrone Slothrop

03-10-2010 03:56 PM

Re: Sea Change

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 418784)

That's why you need the mandate, and the mandate won't work not only because the penalty's too low, but because enforcement of that penalty is near impossible. How do you compel compliance or in lieu of it payment of a penalty in a country where 40% of people already pay no taxes? Garnish their wages? Are the Dems going to withhold people's unemployment benefits? Even if the answer there were "Yes," you know how much that process costs the govt? And how ineffective it is with child support and back taxes already?

This program is set up for the upper middle class and well-off to subsidize the lower middle class that makes too much for govt safety net health care programs and too little to afford private insurance. That's what's going to happen. And you know what that does in the immediate? Sucks a big pile of consumer spending out of the economy. Which keeps the lower middle class right where it is. Well, except that it keeps some of them alive longer, in poverty, at cost to the rest who might move upward in an economy allowed to be more vibrant.

It's too bad you don't see Republicans saying they'd sign on if the mandate were strengthened and the cost controls improved. It's the price of their obstructionism.

Cletus Miller

03-10-2010 04:03 PM

Re: Lee Majors

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gattigap (Post 418789)

Mitch Daniels, Gov. of Indiana, whom I can't really comment on since I have no fucking idea who he is.

He was the director of OMB when they scored the Iraq war/occupation/rebuilding as costing $50-60B.

Demonstrating with appealing clarity why anyone who relies on OMB projections is living dangerously.

1436	03-10-2010 04:05 PM

Re: Lee Majors

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cletus Miller (Post 418796)

Can't blame him. Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators. The post-win resistance was totally unexpected.

Cletus Miller

03-10-2010 04:05 PM

Re: Sea Change

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 418795)

It's too bad you don't see Republicans saying they'd sign on if the mandate were strengthened and the cost controls improved. It's the price of their obstructionism.

But the republicans are against the mandate, because it interferes with individual liberty.

They probably would be fine with applying the mandate to those incarcerated indefinitely by executive order, tho.

Cletus Miller

03-10-2010 04:10 PM

Re: Lee Majors

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1436 (Post 418797)

Can't blame him. Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators. The post-win resistance was totally unexpected.

A good 2001 profile of Mitch:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea....thompson.html

Explains why he's appealing to a segment of the repubs. But if he shoots the same gap as McCain did (w/o support from the soc-con wing), I'm not sure there wouldn't be a 3d party candidate from the "right".

sebastian_dangerfield

03-10-2010 04:19 PM

Re: Sea Change

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 418795)

It's too bad you don't see Republicans saying they'd sign on if the mandate were strengthened and the cost controls improved. It's the price of their obstructionism.

On the latter, agreed; the former, see my previous post. And I didn't even get into the constitutional challenges the mandate will face. That's an area where the Tea Partiers and the "I deserve handouts just for being alive" entitlement junkie class scream "No!" in perfect harmony.

Tyrone Slothrop

03-11-2010 10:42 AM

Re: You (all) lie!

Massa and Beck:

Quote:

Massa had come on Fox to out-Beck Glenn Beck. Armed with the very same weapons — a deep sense of victimhood, outrage at the powers that be and remarkable personal candor — the representative delivered a dizzying confessional. He admitted to sexless groping and tickling of his staff, sending inappropriate text messages and otherwise failing to behave like a Congressman should, all as he made his case that his fellow Democrats had really gone after him because of his previous no vote on health care reform. "I can't fight this. I can't fight cancer," Massa announced, in a classic stream of consciousness ramble. "I can't fight the White House. I can't fight the Democratic Party."

Beck, who is used to controlling the gravitational force of victimhood around him, kept interrupting to point out that he was a bigger target of even greater forces than Massa. "I have two unauthorized biographies coming out against me in the spring," Beck said at one point. Minutes later, Beck went even further. "Do you realize my family is at stake?" he said. "You've got a little scandal with your children in college. I've got one for all time now, because I am not going to resign. I'm not going to back down. I have come to a place where I believe at some point the system will destroy me."

But Beck could not compete with the oddity of the sympathy card Massa kept pulling. ... In the past Beck's opponents, as serious people who operate by the regular order of public debate, have played it straight and posed little challenge. ... But in Massa, Beck found a sort of liberal doppelgänger, a mesmerizing train wreck of a man who was impossible to undercut in the classic fashion. ... [A]s those 60 minutes came to an end Tuesday afternoon, the rabble-rouser seemed to recognize that he had fallen into a trap. The Beck big top has room for only one carnival barker at a time. "I think I have wasted your time," Beck said, staring into the camera at an audience he once spent weeks telling about fanciful FEMA prison camps. "I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time."

Michael Scherer (Time)

What does Massa do next? He's pretty much ruined his chances of becoming a lobbyist.

sebastian_dangerfield

03-11-2010 12:12 PM

Re: You (all) lie!

Capitalism: A Love Story was a surprisingly decent movie. Moore saved his sanctimony for the end, and kept it brief. The remainder was interesting and surprisingly even-handed. My biggest gripe, in fact, couldn't be aimed at Moore. The most preposterous moment in the movie is FDR's ridiculous speech outlining a "Second Bill of Rights." Gives credence to that recent book alleging that FDR was pretty much out of his mind for the last year of his presidency due to cancer metastasized to his brain. The laundry list of ludicrous feel-good items he claims we ought to have as rights makes Moore's complaints through the movie look reasonable, if not downright laissez faire. Definitely worth watching.

(But not half as good as It Might Get Loud, with Jack White, Jimmy Page and the Edge. That's a great documentary. And if you've ever wondered how Bonham got the crazy fat sound he did on Zeppelin IV, it gives the shockingly simple answer.)

Adder

03-11-2010 12:18 PM

Re: You (all) lie!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 418836)

They recorded him in a stairwell on a least on of the records, I think, although I don't recall which.

ETA: Regarding FDR's Second Bill of Rights , I think your reaction says more bout how dramatically the political discourse has moved to the right in the intervening years than about his health or mental state. Keep in mind that much of western Europe set out to meet very similar goals, and the belief that socialism - whether labled that ot not - was a means to fight fascism (by reducing inequity) were not uncommon at the time. At the risk of repeating myself, see Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier

Tyrone Slothrop

03-11-2010 12:28 PM

Re: You (all) lie!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 418836)

The most preposterous moment in the movie is FDR's ridiculous speech outlining a "Second Bill of Rights."

How odd that FDR's views during the Great Depression don't speak directly to the sort of don't-tax-me libertarianism that you like. Who would have thunk it?

sebastian_dangerfield

03-11-2010 12:42 PM

Re: You (all) lie!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adder (Post 418837)

They recorded him in a stairwell on a least on of the records, I think, although I don't recall which.

I never knew that. It seemed a shockingly simple explanation to me, being a simple guy.

sebastian_dangerfield

03-11-2010 01:13 PM

Re: You (all) lie!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 418839)

How odd that FDR's views during the Great Depression don't speak directly to the sort of don't-tax-me libertarianism that you like. Who would have thunk it?

It is. It's silly. Fucking ludicrous. The "right to recreation?"

The answer to wealth disparity is for the poor to fight back directly. No violent revolution, but strikes, sickouts, mass planned defaults. The poor are only poor to the extent everyone around them believes creditors can enforce the terms of their contracts. If a crowd of people who already can't get any credit decided to default on existing obligations en masse and it became clear the creditors couldn't hammer them all, people would notice, and they'd start to say even more than they already are, "Why not default? Nothing really happens." We'd have a nation of people behaving like real estate developers have forever. It'd drive lending to a halt, but if nobody felt obligated to pay anything, what would that matter?

Sounds crazy, right? Well, more and more people are doing it. Buddy of mine defaulted on a second home two years ago and his credit's already back up over 700. He's told other people, and everybody knows no bank chases a deficiency on a mortgage (even bottom feeders won't look at that debt). And why not run the credit card and walk away? Nothing happens. You think a FICO score's going to mean shit for 80% of the population in five years? 650 will be the new 700.

If the poor want to remedy gross wealth disparity, they should directly starve the rest of us of the things we bleed from them - labor and interest. DC is never going to help them. It's terminally broken. And really... Who needs to fight for redistribution via legislative fiat when the initial distribution that keeps the system going, creditors paying their interest, is never made? If the poor never give it, there's no need for the govt to give it back to them. Seems a damned fine way to eliminate an unnecessary middleman, no?

God bless them on the effort. It'd hurt people like me and you, but I'd admire the hell out of them for it.

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