“I consider President Obama to be in the situation of having inherited a burning apartment building. He proceeded to gather all the available fire trucks and douse the fires in half the floors. Yet his critics complain that the other floors are still on fire. Even worse, those critics are the ones who started the fire. And they want to withdraw the fire trucks.” — economist Larry Mishell
“I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No.”
— Craig T. Nelson on the Glenn Beck Show
Uh, coach? Where do you think those food stamps and welfare came from?
(Huffington Post, via Bob Cesca)
As a general rule, I can not stand sin taxes, but since I seem to have lost that debate long ago and our entire tax code is designed around placing incentives on desirable behavior, I am hard pressed to get upset about raising the tax on a product that kills you.
I managed to find a copy online. Click here to see it.
In a capitalist society we can’t have a situation where all you have to do to stay in business forever is get so big that whenever you screw up the government comes and bails you out.
- Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone columnist
Former top Cheney aide David Addington (whose prevarications and smug, arrogant attitude I’ve blogged about here) can’t seem to find a job in a post-Bush world.
Nice to see the Bush economy isn’t only affecting poor people.
My heart bleeds for him.
One of the most pervasive lies Republicans have told (and had perpetuated by their friends in the media) about Obama’s stimulus bill is that it contains an earmark for a high-speed rail between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. This is simply false, and they know it’s false, hence my use of the word “lie.”
The lie itself has even morphed into several new versions, including the latest by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly: “It’s a super railroad, of sorts — a line that will deliver customers straight from Disney…to the doorstep of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada.”
Pure. Unpasteurized. Straight-from-the-tap. Bullshit.
And Republicans have been plugging this bullshit for weeks. Ostensibly, they’re doing it to criticize what they view as “pork” in the stimulus bill. If there really is pork in the bill, why not simply point to it instead of making up lies about nonexistent trains from Disney to a brothel? The text of the stimulus bill is available online. Show us, page and paragraph, these alleged pork provisions. Show us the earmarks for this train from Disney to a brothel…for Nancy Pelosi’s marsh mouse…for ACORN.
They can’t. Because it ain’t there.
Here’s the kicker. Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, the Mr. Rogers of the GOP, has bellyached about pork (of the train, and non-train variety) several times on TV in the last week or so. In fact, in delivering the Republican response to Obama’s address to Congress, Jindal had this to say:
While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes … $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a ‘magnetic levitation’ line from Las Vegas to Disneyland.
Louisiana’s transportation department plans to request federal dollars for a New Orleans to Baton Rouge passenger rail service…The high-speed rail line, a topic of discussion for years, would require $110 million to upgrade existing freight lines and terminals to handle a passenger train operation, said Mark Lambert, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.
This is Jindal’s own state of Louisiana we’re talking about here.
Classic. Just fucking classic.
6 of the top 10, 3 of the top 5, and 2 of the top 3 earmark recipients in the FY2009 budget omnibus bill are Republicans.
Combined, the top Republican earmarkers (those in the top 10) total over $454-million, compared to about $313-million for the Democratic earmarks.
Silly me, I thought all Republicans thought earmarks were bad.
A CNN poll concluded that 82% of speech-watchers say they support Obama’s economic plans as outlined in the speech, with only 17% against.
As Bob Cesca put it: “That’s a crapload of radical communists.”
Bob Cesca asks a very good question:
There isn’t any mention of a high-speed rail project connecting Disneyland and Vegas in the recovery bill. Nothing. The Republicans made it up. We seriously have to ask at this point: have the Republicans said anything that’s actually truthful?
Just off the top of my head, I can think of three Republican talking-points about the stimulus bill:
None of those things appear in the bill. They are all lies perpetuated by members of the Republican Party and their friends in the media.
Makes me wonder…what else have they lied about?
