Posts Tagged ‘Politics’
October 20th, 2011 by John Feehery
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday: “It’s very clear that private sector jobs have been doing just fine, it’s the public sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about.”
He was talking about his plan to give more money to states so they can give more money to teachers unions and public safety unions.
Joe Biden breathlessly said yesterday that if you didn’t support this plan, the chances that you might get raped (if you are a woman) or held up at gunpoint (if you run a 7-11) will go up dramatically. He said yesterday in Washington:
“In many cities, the result has been — and it’s not unique — murder rates are up, robberies are up, rapes are up and folks, there’s a simple reason for it. There’s been a perfect storm out there — these God-awful Ponzi schemes that the last outfit allowed Wall Street to engage in resulted in this gigantic collapse of the financial industry. Housing — the bottom fell out. Foreclosures increased, particularly in poorer neighborhoods. Abandoned homes are created. Drug lords move in. Arson increases. Budgets fall because the property taxes fall. Cops and firefighters get laid off. Response times increase from five minutes to 30 minutes, and people die, and people’s homes burn to the ground.” Read more...
Tags: Bloomberg New, Economy, Federal employees, foreclosures, gigantic collapse of the financial industry, Joe Biden, Kevin Zeese, Politics, Ponzi schemes, President’s jobs plan, private sector, private sector jobs, Prosperity Agenda, public safety unions, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Silicon Valley, teachers unions, Wall Street
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, Government, Media, Politics, Promises, Unemployment, bad news, corruption, election, housing crisis, poverty, spending, taxes | 1 Comment »
October 18th, 2011 by John Feehery
Originally posted on The Hill: 10/17/2011
Rarely has such a positive story in The New York Times been so potentially damaging to a presidential candidate.
There was nothing in Sheryl Stolberg’s piece about Mitt Romney’s role in the Mormon Church that was in any way incriminating, disqualifying or threatening, unless, of course, you have an irrational fear of the Latter-day Saints taking over the world.
It showed Romney to be compassionate, caring, serious, resourceful and devout, qualities that Christian conservatives ought to find appealing. Unless, of course, they have an irrational fear of Mormons.
The Romney story wasn’t the only one making news on the religion front. Rick Perry’s wife made the head-scratching charge that her husband was the victim of religious persecution. This, after Perry has made his religious beliefs the centerpiece of his campaign and after preachers allied with the Texas governor have gone on the attack against Romney’s religious beliefs.
It was Thomas Jefferson who said: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Read more...
Tags: Politics, Religion, taxes
Posted in Religion | No Comments »
October 18th, 2011 by John Feehery
Wasting away again in Obamaville.
Looking for my lost shaker of salt.
Some people claim that George Bush is still to blame.
But I know.
It’s Barack Obama’s fault.
In the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, and in the depths of the Great Depression, shantytowns sprung up around America.
Called Hoovervilles, these itinerant communities came to symbolize the failure of the Herbert Hoover Administration to deal with the economic calamities of that bygone era.
We are now entering into Day 100 of the so-called Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City, and the movement has spread to other cities.
Doug Schoen, the Democratic pollster, did a survey of these protestors and he found that they didn’t represent Main Street at all. He wrote this morning in the Wall Street Journal that what he found instead is that the movement “comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in the radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and in some case violence. Half have participated in a political movement before, virtually all say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third would support violence to advance their agenda. The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed. What binds a large majority of the protestors together is a deep commitment to left-wing policies, opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.” Read more...
Tags: Democrats, Doug Schoen, Great Depression, Herbert Hoover Administration, Obamaville, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street protest, Politics, Wall Street Journal
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, Government, History, Politics, Protests, Theory, bad news, poverty, taxes | No Comments »
October 17th, 2011 by John Feehery
(Chicago, IL) Today, David Axelrod, the chief of the Re-elect Obama Campaign, today announced that it will formally join the Occupy Wall Street protests and start mobilizing against the policies endorsed by the Obama Administration.
Axelrod brandished a Tim Geithner bobblehead doll, which he stabbed repeatedly with a pen knife while chanting an indecipherable spell, which he later said he hoped would lead to the Treasury Secretary’s immediate departure from his office.
Axelrod, in announcing this unusual campaign, said: “We have decided that we aren’t going to defend the indefensible. Yes, we have terrible unemployment. Yes, Wall Street is getting away with murder. Yes, people have lost faith in the future. As much as I have tried, we can’t blame Bush for this anymore. We have to blame the Obama Administration.”
“I believe in Barack Obama, the campaigner. I have lost faith in Barack Obama, the President. So our campaign will basically run against the President and urge his replacement with the guy on the campaign.” Read more...
Tags: Barack Obama, Bush tax cuts, David Axelrod, expansion of NAFTA, Obama Administration, Obama Campaign, Occupy Wall Street protests, Politics, Presidential election, Re-elect Obama, Teacher’s Unions, Tim Geithner, Unemployment, White House, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney
Posted in Bad Decisions, Government, Liberal Media, Media, Politics, Presidential election, Promises, Theory, taxes | No Comments »
October 11th, 2011 by John Feehery
President Obama has made taxing the rich the centerpiece of his reelection campaign. He talks incessantly about it. It is a key part of his jobs package. So far, an apt summary of the Obama presidency might very well be: “He killed Osama bin Laden and he really, really wanted to tax the rich.”
The President is no dummy. He reads polls like any other politician, and he knows that the taxing-the-rich meme polls well. Most polls show about 70 percent of all Americans supporting higher taxes on wealthier Americans.
In fact, polls show that even wealthier Americans support higher taxes on wealthier Americans. One commissioned by American Express showed that nearly two-thirds of voters making more than $100,0000 support raising taxes on rich people. A CBS poll shows that 65 percent of voters specifically supported a millionaire’s tax, with only 30 percent opposing it.
You would think that the President would be making up some ground with voters because of his pleas to raise taxes on those rich suckers, but the more Obama attacks the rich, the more his poll numbers go down.
Why is that? Here are a few reasons: Read more...
Tags: American Express, Americans, Franklin D. Roosevelt, higher taxes, new tax increases, Obama, Osama Bin Laden, Politics, presential election, President Obama, reelection campaign, tax hikes, taxes, taxing the rich
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, Government, Politics, Presidential election, Promises, bad news, election, spending, taxes | 1 Comment »
October 10th, 2011 by John Feehery
Christopher Columbus
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
That was a long time ago.
It used to be that Christopher Columbus was a big deal in America. In 1892, the worlds fare in Chicago celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Italian sailor’s “discovery” of the new world.
These days, we don’t even get Columbus day off.
There is still a connection, of course, between the two.
Columbus was born in Italy, petitioned the Spanish monarchs to get money for his trip to the new world, and competed fiercely with Portuguese explorers. He reportedly also spent some time in Ireland.
If I could somehow find a direct connection with the Greeks, we would be all set with the PIGS meme.
Columbus traveled west in hopes of finding a quicker path to to the Indies. What he discovered was that the world was a lot bigger than he initially thought. When he made landfall in the Caribbean, he wasn’t in
India at all. He still had half a world to go.
What we are discovering today is that the world is a helluva lot smaller than we initially thought. When the Greeks, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Irish go bankrupt it greater increases the chances that
we will go bankrupt. Read more...
Tags: 1492, Christopher Columbus, Columbus Day, Irish, Italian, Politics, President, Spanish
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, Foreign Relations, Government, History, Politics, Theory, taxes | No Comments »
October 7th, 2011 by John Feehery
The Senate majority leader moved last night to cut off republican amendments to a Chinese currency bill, calling the amendments dilatory. In doing so, he changed Senate rules and caused a firestorm in the halls of the world’s greatest debating society (or so it thinks of itself).
I was in the Senate press gallery as this kerfluffle was unfolding, drinking beer at a going away party for Carl Hulse, the New York Times reporter who is moving off the hill beat and up the management chain at the old gray lady.
Had I been a Senate staffer, I probably would have really cared about this break in precedent, but I am now a civilian, and like most Americans, I now look upon the Senate as a vast wasteland of wasted opportunity, which leads me not to anger, but to ennui.
The upper body, as some call it, has put the fun in dysfunction. Well, not really. There is nothing fun about it. It hasn’t passed a budget in two years, it hasn’t passed an appropriations bill all year, it won’t pass a jobs bill that will actually create jobs, and right now, it doesn’t look good for any progress on the Super Committee, which was created precisely because the Senate is so completely dysfunctional. Read more...
Tags: Carl Hulse, Congress, House of Representatives, jobs bill, Politics, Senate Majority Leader, super committee, The American people, the Senate
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, Government, History, Politics, Theory, spending, taxes | 1 Comment »
October 6th, 2011 by John Feehery
We are all going to hear a lot of stories about Steve Jobs and his impact on our daily lives. How are kids can figure out the iPad before we can. How Grandma is truly hip with her new iPhone. And all of the other really cool family stories. (By the way, I am writing this on an iMac, which I love).
There are plenty of questions raised by the death of Steve Jobs:
- Why can’t we find a cure for pancreatic cancer?
- What happens now to Apple?
- Who is the next truly great American innovator?
All these questions can and will be answered by somebody else.
I want to talk briefly today about what the political class can learn from Steve Jobs.
Jobs’ central insight was that he believed that the technology had to be transformed to appeal to the mass market. He didn’t dumb down his technology and he didn’t require the public to somehow learn a bunch of new stuff so that they could use his products.
What he did do was connect cool products with average people in such a way as to elevate the lives of average Americans while still making products that were both innovative and earth-shattering. Read more...
Tags: American people, Android, Apple, Facebook, iMac, iPad, iphone, Politics, Steve Jobs, technology, twitter, Xbox
Posted in Foreign Relations, Government, History, Politics, Promises, Theory, bad news | No Comments »
October 5th, 2011 by John Feehery
Apparently, Radiohead couldn’t get its schedule straight with the Occupy Wall Street protesters and they didn’t play for the grungy crowd last week. I am not hip enough to know exactly what kind of music the band plays, but I do know that a couple of years ago, the members of the band came up with a brilliant marketing strategy to sell one of its albums. “Pay what you want or pay nothing at all if that is what you want to do.” The band never released how much money it made by letting its fans name their own price, but they chose to not pursue the same strategy for their next album.
Despite the scheduling snafu, Radiohead still has endorsed the protest movement that seems to be gaining strength every day. For example, all of the government employee unions are now on board with Michael Moore and assorted other left-wing radicals to protest the money that Wall Street financiers make every day.
These Wall Street financiers and their other colleagues, known collectively by the collectivists as “the rich” or the “one-percenters”, pay about 30 to 35% of the taxes collected by the Federal government. Having the government employee unions protest against these prodigious tax-payers is somewhat akin to the protesting against the goose because he is not producing golden eggs fast enough. Read more...
Tags: America, anti-capitalist, Barack Obama, Capitalism, Democrats, Federal government, immigrants, Jobs, Mexicans, Michael Moore, New York Times, Occupy Wall Street protestors, Old Gray Lady, Politics, Radiohead, spending, taxes, Wall Street financiers
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, Politics, bad news, spending, taxes | No Comments »
October 4th, 2011 by John Feehery
Originally posted on THE HILL – October 3, 2011
It might be too early to start analyzing what went wrong with the Obama administration in its first three years, but I am going to do it anyway.
Here are seven turning points that led to the president’s decline and fall, seven places where Obama or his Democratic allies made critical errors that forever altered the course of his presidency. He hasn’t done everything wrong, but he has made enough mistakes to make his reelection extraordinarily difficult.
1. Failed to veto the initial stimulus package: Imagine for a moment if Obama had vetoed that initial stimulus package. Imagine if he insisted that Democratic leaders take out all the pork and cleanse the bill of unworthy projects. Imagine if he had insisted that congressional Democrats work with Republicans to include their ideas, because we are all in this together. He would have immediately branded himself as a different kind of president, as someone above the fray, as a leader who cares first about the country, not the Democratic Party. And if he had done that, he would have had the Republicans hopelessly divided. Of course, he didn’t take that step, congressional Democrats were able to walk all over him and Republicans stiffened up their resolve and presented a united front against the president and his plans. Read more...
Tags: America, Barack Obama, Bush’s tax cuts, David Plouffe, Democrats, dollar, election, George W Bush, Government, healthcare, House Republicans, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Administration, Obamacare, olympics, Politics, Republicans, spending, White House
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, Government, Politics, Presidential election, election, health care, medicare, national security, spending | 1 Comment »
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