David Brooks is surprised that it turns out that Obama actually is a liberal after all:
Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”
This reality dawned on some of us back before the election (even if I confess to being a bit slow myself).
Is Brooks the only ObamaCon so far to be surprised by this?
Obama is a self confessed drug user. For 20 years he embraced a racist, anti-American minister who preached black liberation theology, which is at its essence marxism. When challenged about Rev. Wright, who he called his friend and spiritual mentor, who baptized his children, and whose words he appropriated as the title of one of his books, he delivered a speech on race that was heralded as more significant than the Gettysburg Address. He swore that he could no more abandon the hateful, race hustling reverend than he could abandon his white grandmother. Within days, when the good Rev. became too much of a political liability, Wright was promptly tossed under the bus (thumpity-thump!). Oh yes, and Obama spoke disparagingly of his grandmother in distinctly racial tones. We don't hear so much about the glory of that speech anymore, do we? And let's not forget that he lied about his association with Rev. Wright, at first denying that he ever heard anything inappropriate out of Rev. Wright's mouth in 20 years in the pews of his church, then sort of admitting it, then telling Bill O'Reily that in more than 500 visits to the church, he heard no discouraging words. Oh yes, and in the Obama/Wright relationship, money changed hands in both directions. It's the Chicago way.
Obama also intimately and politically associated with Bill Ayers, a terrorist lunatic, for many years, and lied repeatedly about the length and depth of his associations with Ayers and his equally murderous and vile wife.
More recently, Obama promised to let Americans review all legislation for at least five days before signing it. He promised never to hire lobbyists, he...oh, what's the point? I could go on and on. This is character? Brooks would tell his children to emulate this man? If this is what passes for exemplary character on the left, that would explain a great deal, would it not?
Is David Brooks lying, or is he really as stupid as he says he is?
If your attention was on substance, if you thought frankly about what the Wright and Ayres conections meant, if you love America and its military, if you value individual freedom, if you believe in American exceptionalism and if you had a real and not a politically correct education, you would have seen it too -- very, very easily.
"Yes, we can" is a socialist mantra. It is also reflective of what von Hayek called the "fatal conceit" of socialism.
There are no examples of Obama being moderate or Federalist at all! And before you start pointing out his avoiding nationalization, his drug policy, his shooting down Congress' attempts to pass gun and communications regulations, his taking longer than Bush would to leave Iraq, his trimming of his stimulus bill against Congress' wishes, his leaving of Gitmo open for at least year, and his invocation of the state secrets doctrine, allow me to note that all of those are just to lull the sheeple into a false sense of security. Then he's going to enact all the liberalism of of Conservative's worst nightmares! Ohh, the people calling us paranoid will be sorry then!
And soon after the socialism, Obama's gonna do the double-reverse/dipsy doodle and BAM! Sharia law!
On the other hand, some people are just naive or stupid.
Oh, and it should be "There go the Obamacons" not "goes." Sorry to go all grammar nazi on ya...
And last, nutjob.
Oh no! Now I'm dong it too!
OK, what are some signs that socialism is near?
I surmise it's because he's young, and from a privileged background, and really doesn't have much hard-won experience in the School of Sharp Elbows. I don't think he's ever had to cynically twist arms, especially among people (the Democratic Congressional leadership) who are nominally his allies. He really does feel if he just really listens sensitively to their concerns, throws them initially some stuff they want, maybe reminds them of Our Common Enemy (Rush Limbaugh, for example), they'll come around, play nice, share the toys. He doesn't understand the necessity of carrying a big stick when dealing with his "friends" in Congress just as he would when dealing with Ahmadickhead or Putin. More fundamentally, he doesn't realize the most powerful man in the world can't have friends in the normal sense, except for his dog (and, if Republican, his stay-at-home wife). It's the loneliness of command, as Jim Kirk or Jack Aubrey might have said.
He might find his feet, or conceivably the voters might have enough patience with him to purge Congress of Pelosi and company while not giving up on Barack. But I'd say the odds are against him, the longer it takes, and he is being badly mis-served by a media that totally shields him from reality. Poor bastard. I wouldn't have his job for love or money.
We have all heard about planned obsolescence. The auto industry does it with annual model changes. Intel does it with computer chips; Microsoft does it with every change in Windows. Hell, even razor blade manufacturer so it.
But planned impoverishment? To what end?
OK, how about this? Total dependence on Government.
The US stock market has dropped 20% since the beginning of the year, and it’s only the beginning of March. This is on top of the 40% drop last year. People are watching their savings and investments evaporate before their eyes. Plans for retirement, education, a home are being abandoned. The wolf is creeping closer to the door.
And what is our “Hope and Change” leadership doing about it? Having announced that Tim Geitner is in charge of the economy, they act as if that fixed the problem. And having proposed spending over three trillion dollars on pork this year, Team Obama has decided it’s priorities are nationalizing health care, making the world one, ending all war, freezing the earth’s climate and making Arabs and Jews love each other.
If I were a suspicious man, I would suspect that Team Obama is not unhappy that people are losing their financial independence. It’s much easier to control people when they don’t have “go to hell” money.
Is he cutting taxes on the rich? I've heard that's the ticket.
Or, he's busy running the country while conservatives debate whether or not Rush Limbaugh is their Great White Hope.
Could you point us toward documentation for one of those lies?
There, fixed that for ya.
Equity Analyst in Chief
That 40% drop in the stock market you cite last year happened under the watch of the Bush Administration. Perhaps Obama and Bush were really in cahoots to increase the size of government and decrease the size of Americans' retirement accounts at the same time. It's obviously a plan of one of those Ivy League secret societies and maybe the Trilateral Commission as well.
Ayers was just a guy in his neighborhood.
How about tax rates that applied during the Eisenhower administration?
The conservatives want to stage an intervention? Yes, bring back Bush, please! Save us from this disaster!
Even worse, tax rates that were in effect while Saint Reagan was in charge! We're DOOMED!
For virtually all of the Bush years following 9/11 the economy exhibited robust growth, low unemployment and a good recovery from both the puncturing of the tech bubble and the 9/11 attacks. It was when the red headed stepchildren of Frank, Dodd and Obama (I refer or course to Fannie and Freddie) collapsed under their leveraged subprime loans to people who had no business getting mortgage loans that the global economy tanked, taking all Western economies with it.
If you want to educate yourself about the cause of the financial crisis we find ourselves in, take some time to watch this video by the CEO of BB&T. We are in a perfect storm caused by stupid and greedy politicians who are now busy pointing fingers at everyone to shift the blame for this mess.
So Obama is a good political campaigner. Now he is president and has to lead there is no more voting present.
We will see what happens but the markets don't look to have a great deal of confidence in his ability to shift from campaigning to leading.
Bush 1 had a 90 % approval rating at one point, we all know how that turned out.
Now if only we had more tax-cuts on the rich (or as I call them "valuable-Americans") we could get out of this mess easily!
The world is really pretty simple when you think about it: my side is right, end the other side is the reason why things don't go well!
He was re-elected?
Right, because the problem with that evil Bush is he didn't run a big enough deficit, and Medicare Part D was foolish because it wasn't nearly gargantuan and complex enough, and No Child Left Behind didn't throw nearly enough Federal intervention and money down the public school rathole, and the problem with Fannie Mae and company was that there weren't enough layers of czars and Congressional oversight committees with their fingers in the pie, each contradicting the other, without a coherent plan in sight, and Bush didn't arrogate nearly enough emergency power to the Executive Branch, wasn't ambitious enough in how he'd tell each and every one of us what to do, how much money it's moral to make, whether to get a job or go to college, when to buy stocks, et cetera, and he didn't pass nearly as much hastily flung together God knows what's in it legislation after a crisis, e.g. 9/11, as would have been desirable.
Yep, that stupid Bush. He would have wasted such a beautiful crisis. Probably just sit around, drinking whiskey and playing cribbage with Dick Cheney, and let the country creep back to those dark days of the early 2000s, with that boring 4% unemployment and unmotivating 2% inflation. Where's the progress, man? Where's the imagination, the daring, the vision thing? How will we ever know it's really impossible to repeal the law of gravity, make water flow uphill, eliminate poverty and bad luck, and ensure all the children are above average, unless we spend the accumulated treasure of our grandparents really trying?
As for BHO's hidden agenda, it's not that far left. After all, he's been approved.
I actually hadn't read Splunge's comment about Obama's naivete carefully enough. Apparently Splunge thinks that if Obama weren't naive, he'd take on Nancy Pelosi and show her who's boss.
Splunge apparently isn't aware that Obama is a Democrat. Shoudl someone tell him?
Bildeberger!
Market volatility markedly increased in July 2007 when it first became clear that bad subprime loans were going to have a serious impact on the balance sheets of investment banks and major financial institutions. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 also really hit the stock market (and the credit markets) very hard.
For virtually all of the Bush years following 9/11 the economy exhibited robust growth, low unemployment and a good recovery from both the puncturing of the tech bubble and the 9/11 attacks.
According to the NBER business cycle committee, there were two recessions during the Bush years: March 2001 through November 2001 and December 2007 until present. You seem to be taking the John Hinderaker line: there wasn't a housing bubble during the Bush years and the Democrats were responsible for the housing bubble.
OK. Beginning or end of his presidency?
OK. So we're nowhere near socialism so long as the federal income tax tops out at less than 92%? If the federal government confiscates only 90% of a citizen's earnings, any mention of socialism is ludicrous? Good to know.
Are you quoting someone? Because you didn't use quote marks. And that sentence doesn't appear in the page you linked.
So what are those words supposed to mean? Who said them? And where is the proof that Obama lied about Ayers?
Bush publicly praised Fannie Mae for making loans to people with "bad credit." How odd that you forgot to mention that.
You also forgot to mention what Oxley (R) said: that Bush blocked reform.
Maybe you should take something for your amnesia.
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24:
That's a "major example" of you spending 1800 words saying nothing. Where's the proof that Obama lied about Ayers?
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And many people seem to not know that Reagan raised taxes repeatedly. And still managed to triple the national debt.
Bush 2 allowed the republican congress to send him bloated, pork filled spending bills. Signing those bills caused him and the republicans an immense amount of political damage.
Obama and the democrats run the same risk.
Consider me informed, you clever devil! Now you can go on to explain how becoming a Democrat takes over your entire cerebral cortex, so that you cannot think except identically to all other Democrats. Thus, it becomes contrary to the laws of physics and logic for Nancy Pelosi to have interests and goals that diverge -- possibly sharply -- from those of Barack Obama.
You know, I always suspected something like this. Being a Democrat these days seems so much like joining a cult. How do you pull it off? Hypnotic drugs in the Capitol drinking fountains? Do you put little mind-controlling alien worm creatures in newbie Democrat ears, like Khan did to Chekhov in Star Trek II?
Middle. The top rate was 50% in 1986 and then was cut to 28%.
But as was pointed out in another thread, the Reagan Revolution was really achieved when Clinton was President, and the top rate went up to 39.6%.
The lesser evil, of course. Duh. Or did you think the ballot had the name of more than two (serious) candidates on it? Exactly how long have you been voting? First time, this year, maybe?
I know that "Nancy Pelosi" is a dirty phrase in nutjob land, but to my ears she's just a liberal Speaker of the House. If you want me to think she's not doing a good job, you can't just say her name and have me nod along knowingly. You need to say what exactly she's doing that's bad and why that contradicts my values.
Well done working Star Trek II in there.
The Fannie Mae Gang
You mean the the Oxley in bold below
So there was no enthusiasm for Bush during the past 8 years, just fear that Gore and Kerry would take over, probably due to the trauma of the Clinton years.
Sorry, I wasn't actually born yesterday. Nice try though.
See, here's the game. Republicans know they can't block some of this stuff. They couldn't block the stimulus package; that would have been politically untenable. They won't be able to block the budget; there they'll also lack the power to do so. So they're trying to exact what concessions they can while making a political stand. They want to oppose these bills without really defeating them. The unanimous House vote on the stimulus bill should have been the giveaway -- that was a clear bit of political theater. Very clever, but disingenuous.
So -- knowing that the Republicans are going to snipe at any budget you put out that isn't essentially a Republican budget (that is, tax cuts for those who don't need them, spending cuts where we need more effective government, and a dollop of fiscal irresponsibility to cover up the cracks), what is the rational response? Do you come out with a center-left budget that gives up, say, effective and comprehensive healthcare reform? Why should you do that if you still won't get any support form a petulant congressional minority?
What Obama's doing here is he's exacting a penalty. You want partisanship? This is what partisanship is going to look like. Republicans had their chance to prove their good faith with the stimulus package, but they straight-up Rush-ed it. No socialism! No challenges to the American Way! We should be able to buy houses in an overheated housing market at the edge of what we can afford and enjoy our mortgage-interest tax breaks/subsidies indefinitely thereafter! But we won't pay irresponsible homeowners' mortgages for them! They don't deserve it!
You find yourself investigating appropriate tax rates for the other 116 elements.
I heard that Wright volunteered to join the Marines. And when he was done, he then volunteered to join the Navy. He even did surgery on the President of the United States.
It was all part of the plan, though, to sow the seeds of Communism and anti-Americanism in the ranks of the Marines and the Corpsman, and eventually, directly into the brains of our Presidents. First he got to LBJ, then he got to Obama.
And then after that, he started leading people in prayers - which is what the Ayotollah Khomeini did - and he started teaching little children to read - which is exactly what Communists do everywhere they go, from the Derg in Ethiopia, the SRS in Somalia, and the July 26ers in Cuba.
And his skin tone is a little bit like Archbishop Romero.
Yeah, my reading comprehension skills decline over the course of the day.
1) If the media doesn't do their homework, it is hard to tell who you elected. The MSM was so in the tank for Obama that he wasn't asked hard questions and wasn't tested. We are only now finding out who he is.
2) Obama is the most radical president since WW-II, if not longer. So far, he has signed off on or advocated every item that's been accumulating on the liberal wish list for the last 30 years. For the first time since WW-II, the projected budget will be 30% of GDP - and not just during the recession. That's up from a post-war average of around 20%.
3) Obama is a liar. Not just an exaggerator, but a liar. He said the "stimulus" bill contained no earmarks (hah!). The regular appropriations bill moving through congress even has earmarks put in by Senator Obama (with his name being scrubbed off as we write). He claims to only raise taxes on the top 2% of the population, but hides $700 billion of carbon offset taxes which will hit everyone in the US, has 1100% increases in cellular phone bandwidth fees, and who knows how many others in that 1400 page bill. He redefines "bipartisanship" to be "my way and only my way" and then crows about it.
4) Obama is either weak or totally irresponsible: did he let Reid and Pelosi shove that piece of excrement called the "stimulus bill" down his throat, or did he really agree to all the excesses in there?
5) Obama is more moderate on terrorism. He is basically maintaining the Bush policies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Extraordinary Rendition, coercive interrogation (torture?), and CIA missile attacks in Pakistan.
6) Obama is weak on national defense. He is dramatically cutting the military budget (by folding the emergency war appropriations into the regular DOD appropriations, with the total just the same as the regular appropriations). He is wobbling on whether to stop the missile defense against Iran, soon to be placed in Eastern Europe.
7) Obama is weak on foreign policy. Since his election, he has been blatantly challenged by Russia (Abkazian bases), Iran (satellite launch, critical level of LEU), and North Korea (planned launch). He has rolled over for all of these. He let Hillary beg the Chinese not to disinvest in the US, a sign of weakness and ignorance, since the Chinese in no way can afford to disinvest, anyway.
8) Obama is either utterly incompetent in personnel selection, or completely Chicago-style cynical. His "most ethical" administration has had the greatest number of nominees with scandals in recent history. Just one, Geitner, responsible for collecting our taxes, does not even intend to pay back taxes he owes.
9) He's clever enough not to let a crisis go to waste - so at least his appointment of Rahm Emmanuel appears to have been smart.
I can't quite give the Bush administration a pass on this.
The first big bank collapse was in England. Then the rot spread to other English financial institutions, followed by problems in Spain, the low countries &Iceland. Their problems had less to do with subprime mortgages in the US than with the market for CDOs backed by mortgages in England &Spain when real estate bubbles in those countries popped.
This ought to have given the Bush administration AND the Fed some warning of what was coming down the pike for the USA, where some local RE markets were just as overheated. Its not obvious either took any real steps at all to deal with the looming crisis. They counted on the managers of the big Wall street institutions to save themselves.
Kind of like they counted on Blanco &Nagin before Katrina.
I'm not aware of Dodd or Frank ever saying something like this: "the low-income homebuyer can have just as nice a house as anybody else."
It's nice to know that you think Bush said stupid things. Now you tell us. Where have you been? It's not just "bush's stupidity." It's the GOP's stupidity. Please show me any sign that anyone in the GOP complained when Bush said those stupid things.
If Bush and Oxley are villains, then why are their names always omitted from the list of names that chronically pop up in comments like this? Does it have something to do with the fact that they're both Republicans?
You go from conservatives were not very pleased by Bush (my actual implication) to there was no enthusiasm at all for Bush? Do you always careen from one extreme to the other? War is either glorious destiny or corrupt villainy? Politicians are angels or devils? You either think every thought in the DNC Handbook or you're not a Democrat at all? Only 1 bit per pixel in your colorspace? And yet you said you weren't born yesterday...
Whenever you were born, you certainly haven't been paying attention to what conservatives have said about George Bush over the past eight years. Or did you think his appalling popularity numbers just reflected the demographic fact that practically nobody was a conservative any more? Conservatives gave Bush full marks on terrorism, John Roberts and (after having Harriet Meiers knocked out of his silly little head) Sam Alito, and a strong B+ on Iraq, after he reversed course last year, but aside from those things, they had serious, serious issues with him. He was about as popular as Bill Clinton was with moderate Democrats just after the spooging on Monica came out. You'd know this, if "conservative" were a label you attached to real people, whose non-trivializable views you knew something about, instead of a contemptuous label, like "gook" or "kike" you use to mean subhuman trolls that shouldn't be allowed to vote.
If you want me to think she's not doing a good job, you can't just say her name and have me nod along knowingly. You need to say what exactly she's doing that's bad and why that contradicts my values.
You mistake me for someone who cares what you think, or, more precisely, for someone who believes what you think has any practical importance.
The point in my original, and subsequent, posts, is that I believe Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congressional leadership have agendas that sharply diverge from Barack Obama's, although -- here's one of those confusing shades o' gray! -- not as much as the agendas of Republicans do, and that he is basically getting rolled by Congress, because (1) he's a noob, and (2) people have protected his delicate little self against tough competition all his life, and are continuing to do so.
Yeah, yeah, I know you think being chosen editor of Harvard Law Review is tough. Nothing as easy-peasy as (say) running a big state in the black, or a successful counter-insurgency war with 140,000 troops, or founding Amazon.com or eBay and weathering the dot-bust, or even just turning a profit on your dry-cleaning store in the first year (because that's as long as the money you borrowed against your house holds out) while raising 3 kids. That's just stuff ordinary people do. Now, giving a killer speech on race -- that's the stuff of legend. There we have a Washington and Lincoln rolled into one.
You make payments on your 2005 Escalade to the Treasury.
Perhaps you need to understand just a little about how ABM systems work?
The missiles would go over Europe on the way here. The ABM system is positioned to stop them, just like the Pacific ABM system is positioned to stop North Korean missiles.
Doesn't that make them subject to the VAT?
You don't, Brian! Jump on over to Facebook.com. There's probably a new Linkin Park MP3 download for you, the cosmic signifance of which you can heatedly discuss, or you can "friend" some really hoopy froods who know where there towels are, watch your social network portfolio grow grow grow.
Don't waste your time with all these graying malcontents who can't grasp the glorious Forest of Hope And Change for all the niggling weedy little trees of insane deficit spending, financial chaos, and a rudderless ship o' state. They're just grumpy because their hemmorhoids are acting up.
I like how you seem to think you're not one of the ones i'm talking about. it tickles my funny bone when i think back and realize that all the things you complain about only became a problem once obama took office.
oh, and your hemorrhoids might get better if you stopped being an @ss. take it from me, i'm a doctor (or soon will be).
Speaking of gray, has anybody else noticed that Obama has started to go gray REALLY quickly?
It's probably because he inherited a healthy economy, and within 40 days he turned it into financial chaos. Those are grays of shame, Barack, grays of shame.
Racist.
the Reagan Revolution was really achieved when Clinton was President,
You mean government expenditures shrank more with Gingrich running the House than with O'Neill? There was less defense spending immediately after the Soviet Union imploded than immediately before? Merciful heavens. My world has been shaken.
But thanks for the straightforwardish answer. Socialism is a function of the top marginal income tax rate, and it doesn't exist until that rate reaches somewhere between 50 and 92%. Got it.
There's a bright side to socialized medicine: you'll be paying off those student loans until you're 105.
Let's try again genius. Even when Bush had a 28% overall approval rating, the majority of Republicans approved of him. Who were these Republicans? Were they socialist commie liberal Republicans? Or were they the backbone of the Republican Party? Bush implemented No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D in his first term, but conservatives didn't start jumping ship until after Hurricane Katrina and the bogdown in Iraq. You have no credibility here.
Another fail. Repeating your "point" over and over again does not constitute an argument. Where's the argument (not the assertion) that Obama should have a problem with what Pelosi is doing? Don't pretend that you don't care about showing this to me -- you've wasted your time writing ten thousand words in this thread! What's holding you back is plain and simple ignorance.
The Republicans went through the whole Porkulus bill and singled out spending on scientific research to monitor volcanoes. Fail fail fail. Oh, and no one's done more to shield Obama from tough competition than the Republican Party. Alan Keyes, McCain/Palin, and now Rush Limbaugh? At least the Dems put the Clinton machine in his way during the primaries.
Poor splunge. It's going to be a long eight years.
The Republican Party has had its own math, one where tax cuts (even to zero?) always pay for themselves, for too long. It's disappointing that even when so much other GOP nonsense has forcibly been marked to market, we still have to read this mistaken paean to the economic record of the past Administration.
Not what I said. But here's my answer: socialism happens when Obama raises the top rate back to 39.6%, exactly what Clinton (sorry I mean Gingrich) raised it to. And at that marginal tax rate, the American economy is doomed, just as all the Republicans correctly predicted back in the 1990s.
It should not be.
Obama supported the bailout of the banks while he was in the Senate. Now he signed a law bringing more bailouts.
He complained about bankers misusing the bailout money. What the fuck was he expecting? Would he expect homeless crack addicts to check into rehab if they were bailed out with a ten thousand dollars?
And his vice president said that paying taxes is patriotic, and yet he did not appoint a patriot to the position of Secretary of the Treasury.
At least he is not a completely lost cause.
It would help if he did not emulate Bush's less successful policies.
I thought they didn't. Work, that is.
Er...and this is supposed to contradict my assertion that conservatives had serious issues with George Bush? Did you not read the bit where I said conservatives gave him high marks on some important issues, and failing grades on others? Is this one of those shades of gray you just don't grasp?
Look, the fact that George Bush, near the end of his Presidency, could muster the approval of a bare majority of his own political party tells you the man had significant troubles with his base. Not fatal troubles. If the country were 100% conservative, I'm sure he could win against any Democrat. But he would not win against a more conservative candidate, which is the point.
Bush implemented No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D in his first term, but conservatives didn't start jumping ship until after Hurricane Katrina and the bogdown in Iraq.
No, I would say you're smoking some Democratic/MSM weed here. Conservatives were appalled by NCLB and the Medicare entitlement, and said so loudly. They thought (correctly) Katrina was an outrageous media smear job on the President, inasmuch as it's never been his job to rescue dysfunctional local and state government from a failure to prepare for, or effectively respond to, foreseeable regional disasters. I notice Obama didn't jump to rescue Kentucky from its ice storm hell recently. Quite properly, too. It's Kentucky's problem, for the most part. But the media response was, of course, far different.
Many paleocons did indeed loathe the Iraq War, but they loathed it from day 1, and many old Cold Warriors, like WFB, who were at best initially neutral, turned against it when it degenerated into Democratic-style "nation building." But once in, most conservatives were committed to victory, and Bush rescued his esteem in their eyes with the surge and his gritty ultimate victory. Overall, as I said, he got a B+ from them. It would have been a much lower grade if he had lost. Conservatives really hate losing wars, even wars they wouldn't have started in the first place.
Really, your understanding of conservatives is cartoonish, like you get all your information from MSM outlets and Democratic talking points. I'm sure it saves time, and you don't have to dirty yourself reading what they write themselves.
Where's the argument (not the assertion) that Obama should have a problem with what Pelosi is doing?
Right here, friend. Notice that steeply rising "strongly disapprove" curve for the President. Scanning down the page, you'll see stuff like Of the four major goals outlined by the President in his speech last Tuesday, the public sees deficit reduction ast he most important. That's also the goal seen as least likely to be achieved.
That's not good news for Obama, and it is entirely the result of the publicity Stimulusaurus got. If you believe, as I do, that the bill doesn't stimulate a damn thing, and is rather an effort to use the crisis to get a hundred random porky projects Democratic Congressmen want anyway, to pay off interest groups and donors, then this is majorly stupid in that the President blew his wad without achieving any news-bitey signature issue for the 2012 campaign.
There is, frankly, zero chance he'll be able to do his massive $10 trillion health care reform bill now, or network the country in maglev trains, or get us all driving solar-powered bicycles. He's had the one giant bite at the apple the voters were going to give him. Now it's over. He won't get another chance like it. What's he got to show for it? Only about a billion little projects that please 250 Democratic Congressmen.
Presidents don't live or die by shoveling out the pork. That's how Congressmen thrive. Presidents need big-ticket signature accomplishments. So, as I said, I think the President got rolled by a bunch of porky circus clowns in Congress.
I can understand, by the way, why you're pissed. You want to believe Obama is one of you. But I've never thought he was. He's an opportunist, and he looks out for Number One, and the way to build his career was by being a straight-ticket Dem, and the way to get elected was to tap the Angry Left energy while carefully sounding centrist to the majority.
I predicted last October that the people he'd stab in the back once he no longer needed them would be The Left, and he's doing pretty well so far. He's leaving Iraq about as fast as George Bush would, and on the advice of George Bush's SecDef and hand-picked Centcom general. He's adding force in Afghanistan, picking up the CIA drones, preserving rendition and, er, torture so long as we call it something else, and agreed to study how to begin to responsibly close Gitmo, ha ha. I doubt John McCain could have satisfied conservatives any better on these issues.
The Republicans went through the whole Porkulus bill and singled out spending on scientific research to monitor volcanoes.
Oh, of course they didn't, you idiot. Read something other than your own Pravda, would you? That's the action the partisan press highlighted, naturally, because it makes Republicans look childish, and that's the press's self-assigned role in our modern drama. But in fact the R's made all kinds of counter-proposals and substantive criticism. All unreported, natch. Can't have conservatives making good arguments on national TV, can we? People might get to thinking.
Oh, and no one's done more to shield Obama from tough competition than the Republican Party
Believe it or not, I actually agree with you. The Republicans have been absurdly enabling, historic first black President and all that. It's sickening. If I were Obama, I'd feel they'd treated me like an affirmative action President, and be pissed they didn't respect me enough to fight me with both hands. I can't explain this, except that I think (vide supra) eight years of "compassionate conservatism" demoralized them.
Poor splunge. It's going to be a long eight years.
Ha ha, pure projection I think. I'm enjoying myself. There are only two possibilities here: Obama continues to flail in the heedless flood of irresponsibility that is Congressional Democraticism, gets Dinkinized when the Democratic master plan trashes the economy, we replay the 1970s for a few years, and then the White House returns to Republican control for another two decades. I'm not so happy with this outcome, because the Republican Party needs a responsible opponent.
The other possibility is that Obama learns to swim, kicks the Angry Left and the earnest hipsters dreaming of free WiFi and Starbucks in every organic-cotton upholstered cubicle thoroughly in the nuts, and governs as a centrist, nimbly skipping over Bill Clinton's relatively few mistakes, e.g. adultery with precocious MILFs. In that case, he gets re-elected, the centrist Democratic Party of the 50s gets reborn, and the Republicans have to sharpen up if they intend to win any elections. This is good news for the country, but would make heads explode among the Hope 'n' Change crowd who expected 2008 to be the Singularity, man, The Day It Changed Forever. Well, we all have to grow up.
If you want to talk biased polls, why not the DKos one that puts Obama's approval at 71% with only 25% disapproving?
I think there's a third possibility that you allude to when you write "the Republicans have to sharpen up if they intend to win any elections": The ingrown toenail that is the current Republican party finally succumbs to Limbaugh-induced gangrene. In this case, all the Dems have to do is stand back and utter deeply heart-felt laments re the demise of a once great political party, etc. etc., etc. And go on to win more elections.
"You'd know this, if "conservative" were a label you attached to real people, whose non-trivializable views you knew something about, instead of a contemptuous label, like "gook" or "kike" you use to mean subhuman trolls that shouldn't be allowed to vote."
And there it is. The better part of 500 posts in a nutshell. The last legitimate bigotry.
Anyone else catch Obama's statement yesterday about the DJIA being "like a campaign tracking poll"? Did that strike anyone else as somewhat revealing?
I get the point that he was attempting to make: small, day-to-day movement in the Dow is mostly noise, and doesn't reflect anything about the broad economy. I don't disagree with that. I just think it's interesting that when he wanted to employ a metaphor, he went for one related to campaigning for public office. As soon as I heard it, I thought "of course Obama went for a campaigning metaphor: he hasn't done anything but campaign for the past five years."
I express no opinion on the biases of the Rasmussen poll or the DailyKos poll. However even a strongly biased poll can be helpful to the extent that it shows momentum. Does the DailyKos poll accurately reflect how the public feels about Obama? I have no idea. Does it accurately reflect how the public feels about Obama today as compared to a month ago? Definitely.
JHA
Here's what's "ludicrous:" pretending you don't understand the meaning of terms like 'marginal tax rate' and 'effective tax rate.' Which secret part of the Ike tax code empowered him to confiscate "90% of a citizen's earnings?"
If 1% of your income falls into the top bracket, and therefore only that 1% is taxed at the top rate, does that mean the government has confiscated "90% of a citizen's earnings?"
===================
splunge:
I hope you'll help me remember "what conservatives … said about George Bush" when George Bush publicly praised Fannie Mae for making loans to people with "bad credit." And when he said this: "the low-income homebuyer can have just as nice a house as anybody else." Surely there was a great outcry from 'conservatives,' right? I just need some help finding it.
"His appalling popularity numbers" reflected the fact that he had high approval among Republicans and low approval among everyone else. But it's charming to see how now suddenly Republicans want to disown him.
It's nice to hear you finally speaking plainly about the Bush years.
===================
moore:
Iran has, or is expected to have, missiles that can travel 6,000 miles? Really? Are they also planning a moon launch? I think you're confused in much the same way Bush was when he told us that we needed SDI to stop terrorism.
===================
money:
Yup, sure did. Here's yet another indication of how "robust" it was: during Clinton's term, the Dow more than tripled. During GWB's term, it dropped 25%.
If the Dow is above 6,000 on 1/20/17, when Obama leaves office, he will have exceeded Bush's performance.
===================
andrew:
strict was indeed being sarcastic. I think you haven't read enough of his other posts.
I'm not aware of Dodd or Frank ever saying something like this: "the low-income homebuyer can have just as nice a house as anybody else."
Maybe not specifically like that, but at the very least Congressman Frank was making the case for increased home ownership as recently as 2006:
"...we are dealing here with extending the ability to own homes to people who would economically not otherwise be able to make it. We have gotten to a pretty high percentage of homeownership. But if you look at the economics of land, of zoning, of building, if you look at what people earn, if we do not make manufactured housing more easily available to people, we will not be able to break out of the current percentage levels of homeownership. That is, significantly extending homeownership so we get to maybe an 80 percent range or so requires us to make full use of manufactured housing."
Clearly, Frank was advocating an "ownership society" that President Clinton touted, and which President Bush expanded. Whether Frank put it in the same terms as Bush is yet unknown.
Yeah, right J, this is surely a measured evaulation on the Mad Man's part:
I'll give you his disenchantment, but how about you grant me his hysteria?
He's always, shall we say, excited. But he's right about this.
Yup, that sure is "socialist." Sounds a lot like the words of this "socialist:"
In other words, "yes we can."
===============
fury:
Indeed. And pay attention to how he suggested we accomplish that:
In other words, he was encouraging the construction of inexpensive housing. Compare that to what Bush said: "the low-income homebuyer can have just as nice a house as anybody else."
Frank said we need to build more cheap homes that the poor can afford. Bush said the poor can live in "just as nice a house as anybody else." Which means there's no particular reason why poor people shouldn't buy an expensive house. Which of those statements is responsible, and which is irresponsible?
Let us know when you can find the place where Frank said what Bush said.
Let's let that infrequency remain that way. Oborg? Really? And I thought Obambi was lame.
Is a conservative someone who believes that when "businesses [are] capsizing under their own weight" that it's the job of the "administration" to "care," and to rescue them? I had no idea.
Seems like a likely scenario, for as far as you took it. But as someone with impulsively apocalyptic views, let me suggest that the large percentage of the country that can't stomach the Dem view (and it is close to 50%) will be a roiling, fragmented, and inherently destabilizing influence, and there won't be many elections after that. At least not free and fair ones, assuming you think that the ones we have today meet that description. The economy will collapse, the "rich" will flee overseas because they can, the cities will starve, the masses will riot. Inflation will drive oil over $300/bbl and transportaion will seize up. Medical care will deteriorate as professionals flee a government-mandated system that is little more than indentured servitude. The working class will return to barter to avoid pouring their earnings down the Social Security Ponzi scheme.
The Dems will resort (probably sooner rather than later) to adopting many of the domestic intelligence-gathering methods they so deplored, in a desperate attempt to maintain control. That will fail.
The Dems, whose economic policies can't produce anything of real value, will default to trying to redistribute the residual wealth of a dying society amongst the loudest and most demanding portions of their constituency.
The new de facto US currency will be 7.62mm ammunition.
Welcome to the American Balkans!
One of the VC posters nailed it before the election. Obama is a liberal. He just happens to be civil, interested in effectuating policy, willing to compromise (if there is anyone to negotiate with), and willing to change his mind. All of these characteristics are the opposite of what we got used to under W. It's taking the Beltway Village a little time to realize we are no longer a center-right country, because the Right had its chance and squandered it on voodoo economics to benefit millionaires and no one else.
Frank said we need to build more cheap homes that the poor can afford. Bush said the poor can live in "just as nice a house as anybody else." Which means there's no particular reason why poor people shouldn't buy an expensive house. Which of those statements is responsible, and which is irresponsible?
I think your reaching and equating expensive with nice. Someone having "just as nice a house as anybody else" is not solely or even primarily determined by cost. My home is 1/3 the size of the house next door, yet I've had people compliment that my house is "nicer" (as in better landscaping, better maintained, etc) than the house next door.
A note I've seen manufactured homes that I would call nicer with better workmanship, etc than stick-built homes.
President Bush was wrong to place as much emphasis as he did on the ownership (home) society, especially during these economic times.
But the Obama admin does care! They care very much, because they see the Golden Goose dying in front of them. They thought they'd gained the keys to the kingdom, access to the coffers of an economic engine second to none, and were going to be able to harness it to do whatever their little hearts desired.
Instead, they find the coffers are empty, the engine is sputtering on the last little bit of fuel in nearly empty tanks, and it's smoking and wheezing like its way overdue to be rebuilt. And no qualified mechanics in sight.
Not that any administration or political party has done any better in the past 30 or 40 years, since they all let it get to this point. (In case you can't tell, I think it the epitomy of stupidity, reading the back-and-forth on Bush I, Bush II, Clinton, Reagan, etc.)
But there is some schadenfreude to be enjoyed at looking at the current scene of chaos and false bravado going on as the realization hits home and the pols try to bluff their way through, printing debt as it has never been printed before. We've been playing economics musical chairs since the 1930's, and history has been kind to us in keeping the music going for a long time, but it's getting very quiet and there aren't any empty chairs.
Heck, there aren't any chairs at all; we burned the ones we had, borrowed money using the burned chairs as collateral; then we quit making chairs in the US and we bankrupted the only domestic manufacturer with excessive taxes and regulation. Now we're looking at how to steal the chairs that someone else made.
Tax rates for any given period tell us little unless we know the effective rates for those periods. It is possible the effective rate in a 90% marginal rate period is less then the effective rate in a 35% period.
Is a conservative someone who believes that when "businesses [are] capsizing under their own weight" that it's the job of the "administration" to "care," and to rescue them? I had no idea.
There's no reason to treat "care" (which Cramer said) and "rescue" (your word) as synonyms. The government can exhibit "care" for the plight of companies without rescuing them via a bailout. For example, Obama could show that he cares for the plight of struggling companies by not raising taxes during a recession. No bailout or "rescue" necessary.
It also helps to know where the brackets began and ended, in real dollars. Let's use 1955. The top rate (91%) applied to married couples with incomes of >$400,000, or about $3,100,000 in today's dollars. (I assume that's AGI, but it doesn't matter much.) If you had an AGI of $50,000 today, you would have had $6,500 in 1955, and would have been in the 22% bracket.
Not really trying to prove a point here, just throwing out some info.
Why does it matter what Jim Cramer is? The point of the post was prominent people (particularly pundits) who supported Obama and are now disillusioned. Your opinion of him is distracting, and even irrelevant, to THAT point.
When the government takes control of the means of production.
The funny bit of all the cries of socialism is that the Obama administration is so gun shy of the accusation that it is not doing what needs to be done in order to unwind this financial mess: nationalize the insolvent banks and clean house. Sure, some "conservatives" will cry socialism!, but there won't be any coherent response when people ask how putting Citi into receivership is different than the FDIC taking over Heritage Community Bank, other than the size of the institution.
Do you think the entrepreneurs and investors will maintain the same level of activity sfter the hikes as before? Does taxation effect the level of their activity?
It's not just the crazy budget, or the lousy stimulus bill. It's that he's being timid where he should be bold (e.g. with the banks, outsourcing the stimulus bill and health care reform to the congressional Democratic leadership) and reckless where he should be prudent (the budget plan). It's the worst of all worlds.
He got dealt a horrible hand -- no one should ever forget that. But I don't like the way he's playing it.
And what have we turned the comments thread into? A desperate attempt to relive the last three plus years to determine who is at fault and which level of the Dantean Inferno to place them in. Instead of, you know, what might be done to fix matter and prevent such things from happening again. It isn't necessary to assign blame to your enemies to offer a solution, but that's all we're doing here.
I feel like I'm paddling through the Okefenokee with a possum and an alligator.
I don't think I've mentioned it on this blog, but I highly recommend The Market Ticker for good advice on how to get out of this mess. Karl Denninger voted for Obama and he just won the Accuracy In Media award at CPAC. He doesn't play to party lines and tells it like he sees it.
Sarcastro, the target of your sarcasm is off. The claim is not that Obama has just associated with guilty people, but that his association with guilty people is fairly close. "Associating" with guilty people might not make him evil; having the guilty person be a close personal friend who performed his marriage, baptized his children and inspired a book, and ignoring his evil words for years, very well could.
A moderate-conservative is a long way from a moderate.
People's view of where others fit on the liberal-conservative spectrum depends on where they themselves fit.
To Brooks, a conservative, naturally the true moderate Obama looks like a liberal. Similarly, the more right-wing the observer, the more left-wing Obama appears to be.
To the radical left, Obama's just another right-wing appeaser.
Sure, like that other Socialist, P.J. O'Rourke
Sure, like the mantra of the Socialist Marine Corps, "Gung Ho!" (work together).
After eight years of Bush, we're used to having an out-of-his-depth President. The last six months of his presidency, where he gave up completely and started sucking his binky were particularly painful.
And yet right-wingers never apply this let's-look-at-what-people-actually-paid argument when discussing "the US's highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world."
Just look at Ireland. They have one of the lowest corporate tax rates and they are doing just fine!
You mean tax rates may be unrelated to fiscal health? Just when I was going to go John Galt because of the confiscatory 4% increase on the top tax bracket...
Unfortunately, even if someone came up with a magic pill to instantly cure the economy, but we fail to learn from history exactly why and how it happened, what good would it do for very long? And if we just toss a new crop of chickens into the now empty coop with essentially the same foxes in charge of security, how soon will it be before we have to do it again?
Regardless of our political differences, I think it is pretty evident that there is plenty of blame to go around in this fiasco. As a conservative, I am quite willing to assess a lot of the blame to the Republican role in all of this, mostly in their cowardice to live up to their own principles and sell themselves for votes. However, are those on the left, who so ardently support everything that those on their side have done that have contributed mightily to this too, willing to take a critical look their team as well?
I don't think so.
We've seen in the comments a lot of conservatives criticising Bush for his derelictions, and many of us have been very vocal in our dislike of Bush and the Republicans for all 8 years. But I have yet to see a leftist find any fault whatsoever in what their side has done.
A pox on all their houses. I'd say throw them all out, even if we just replaced them with new faces in the same party ratio as we have now, just to let the politicians know that there may be adverse consequences to themselves for their own actions. The way it's always been done, even when the other party takes power, the old faces just take a lateral transfer into the civilian side of the political process, where the lucre is real money instead of just power, and bide their time until their party gets back in.
This whole relationship between the "government" and the "governed" needs to be re-examined, but will probably not be until something very wrenching and perhaps violent takes place.
Tax rates and fiscal health are related, but not determinative. California should serve as a warning to the rest of the country about unchecked government expansion; instead, it's serving as a model.
It could also be considered as a "return to 39.6%" or an "expiration of tax cuts." Damn those Republicans for writing a bill that lets us return to socialism!
California should serve as a warning to the rest of the country about unchecked government expansion; instead, it's serving as a model.
Meh. I'm not going to defend California.
I don't think anyone can. If it weren't for the Mexican drug war, we'd be the failedest state in North America.
This whole relationship between the "government" and the "governed" needs to be re-examined, but will probably not be until something very wrenching and perhaps violent takes place.
I couldn't agree more. I hope it's not too violent.
CA's rates are high, but the actual tax burden is only about 17th among the states.
That said, I agree that our state government is completely failed. We need to re-do it.
Lefties: please go back to daily kos or firedoglake or democratic underground unless you can confine your comments to substance of the posts. If you do, I promise I won't go there and troll. Of course, if I did, I'd be banned a lot sooner than you all will be here.
Better now?
~
MarkField, it depends on how you account for the wacky taxes that aren't income or property taxes. The Tax Foundation puts California at #6 in 2008—but I've got my fingers crossed, hoping we can be #1 in 2009!
Also, we've been paying more than our fair share of taxes to the feds for years, so the coming bailout is our just desserts—I just hope they liquidate us instead of trying to prop us up as a bad-zombie-state.
PC: If you're not interested in the topic under discussion then why are you commenting on it?
Et tu?
You seem to be pretty seriously misreading the dynamics of this thread. The original post is about how some conservatives are starting to realize that Obama is a liberal. The first few comments about how Obama is not only a liberal, but he's a dangerous radical Marxist socialist. Then someone comes along and says that Obama isn't radical, just out of his depth. Then there's a painfully tedious back-and-forth about whether or not these criticisms of Obama are silly. Removing the lefties from this thread wouldn't leave you with a serious legal or policy discussion.
I've been reading and posting here for years, and there is no greater percentage of "lefties" on this thread or now on the blog in general than there has been in the past. Plus, "echo chamber" blogs are boring. Plus, you would expect that a President who is quite popular would have some defenders, right?
Now I see my mistake.
Threatening to go John Galt because congress is going to let the Bush tax cuts expire = "serious legal and policy discussion(s)"
Snarking about someone threatening to go John Galt because congress is going to let the Bush tax cuts expire = trolling
I apologize. Next time I'll limit my comments to calling the president a race baiting hustler that wants to turn the US into an Islamofascist, Marxist wasteland. That will surely raise the level of discourse to your impeccably high standards.
Agreed. Between that and the fact that the feds leave us with the costs of immigration, we get, well I'll be polite and say we get it from both sides.
I personally have an interest in the protection of bond holders. Not that that would affect my views or anything....
Thanks for the polite response to my comment.
My comment was directed at the blog in general and as an affirmation of the statements of a couple of the previous commenters, who expressed something that I have noticed for some time and was thinking about this morning: the comments on this blog have gotten much cruder than they were in the past and from my point of view much more Left (as opposed to liberal). It looks to me like a much higher percentage of the comments are not useful and are being made simply to either hijack the thread or drive out those of the opposing view.
I certainly don't want the comment forum to be an "echo chamber" but did value (and would value again) a forum for rational discussion. See the first paragraph of the Comment Policy. Or maybe, as some of the comments indicate, some of the posts have gotten less useful or more political than in the past. Or maybe I'm just looking back to a nonexistant "Golden Age" of VC.
Regards
We've seen in the comments a lot of conservatives criticising Bush for his derelictions, and many of us have been very vocal in our dislike of Bush and the Republicans for all 8 years. But I have yet to see a leftist find any fault whatsoever in what their side has done."
The problem with looking for equivalency is that the proudly declared conservative Republicans Bush/Frist/Delay controlled the government from 2000-2006. Nothing that Frank, Dodd or anyone else proposed or opposed was realized without Delay/Frist's sanction during that time. Advocating stupid things is not equivalent to actually doing them.
Frist supported Democrats' opposition to judicial nominees that were blocked?
That was in 1983. They work now.
@jukeboxgrad
I guess you are too busy posting to keep up on the news. Iran just put a satellite in orbit. It has, by now, traveled much farther than the distance to the moon. The weight of the satellite is more than a nuclear warhead. Hence Iran has the ability to launch a nuclear EMP attack, without warning, anywhere on earth - as soon as they have a nuke.
Cheers,
Well, there's a bullet dodged, then. Thank goodness I'll never have that to worry about again.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Drake, I'm with you. But it doesn't take much scrolling to find that the crudeness of the discourse is coming from both sides of the aisle here. As are the protestations about the crudeness of discourse.
Wrong.
The US Davy Crocket fission warhead weighed only 23 kg and yielded 1 kT [ref].
I'm sure the Iranians will never be able to do that.
US W-54 warhead (280mm projectile - simple HEU gun-assembly): 365 kg, yield 15kT
I hear that tax rates are low in Somalia. Send us a postcard.
Then again, maybe what you're saying is that you will escape an America that is (allegedly) turning into Europe by fleeing to Europe.
===============
fury:
I understand your point about how the word "nice" can be ambiguous, but consider the context. Bush was making a speech praising Fannie Mae for giving out loans to people with "bad credit histories." If Bush was trying to say 'poor people should buy a cheap house and make it nice by planting flowers,' he should have been encouraging Fannie to distribute seeds, not mortgages. Therefore I think "nice" was a euphemism for 'get a nice-sized mortgage so you can get a nice-sized house.'
There are exceptions to every rule. But as a general rule, prefab houses are inexpensive. That's the whole point of building them that way.
===============
video:
I understand the logic of your point, but that doesn't really address the core problem with what Cramer said:
By saying "thanks to an administration," he's saying that it's the government's fault (and this government's fault) that "businesses [are] capsizing under their own weight." Really? When companies fail, the proper response is to blame the government? That's the conservative philosophy?
===============
trad:
True. One more thing: he won with a big enough margin to be considered an electoral mandate.
===============
geo:
I guess it depends what you mean by "many." Most Republicans never stopped approving of Bush. Even when everyone else mostly didn't.
Republicans need to take responsibility for what Bush did, because most of them approved of him while he was doing it.
===============
drake:
Yes, I've noticed lots of crude comments by leftists.
===============
moore:
I guess you are too ignorant to realize that creating an accurate surface-to-surface missile is more difficult than launching a satellite. Iran's best long-range surface-to-surface missile has a range of 1,200 miles. That's only 4,800 miles short of NY.
#1 - It doesn't need to be accurate
#2 - It doesn't need to be surface to surface to launch an EMP attack
#3 - It takes less launch energy to put a warhead halfway around the world than to put the same warhead in orbit.
Maybe you should study a little physics.
Bush left office with something like a 20% approval rating.
"the "rich" will flee overseas because they can"
I hear that tax rates are low in Somalia. Send us a postcard.
Jim Rogers sold his town house in Manhattan and moved to Singapore. You see Europe and Somalia are not the only places in the world. There are lot of low tax places that will gladly admit rich Americans. Remember the very wealthly John Templeton? He moved to the Bahamas and gave up his American citizenship.
I've kept up.
Really fun when the opponents of SDI think they're talking to somebody whose idea of a map includes as much as five miles in any direction.
He-who is hoping we'll figure that our and Iran's technology will remain frozen at the current state. Presuming it hasn't already broken loose when we weren't looking.
I've had lots of experience with opponents of SDI over the years. One, which struck me as pretty much descriptive, was when the Sovs were cranking theirs up. I talked to a guy who claimed MAD was stable and our SDI would make things worse. Asked about whether he'd oppose the Sovs', he said no, he was tired, and besides, theirs wouldn't be destabilizing.
Not anti SDI. Just on the other side. Not alone, either.
If an opponent of SDI were honest, there are some reasons to oppose it which are themselves honest.
But it's mostly lies, planted axioms, and the insistence that, unlike in other areas of technology, if we can't do it now, we should give up.
BTW, ABM systems do work. They've been working since Jan 20. A Navy guy said we could shoot down the Norks' next effort, if we wanted to. People should try to keep up. After all, change started in late January. This is one of them.
Davy Crockett. Yup. Had a class on that. Big as a medicine ball. Problem was, we expected the Sovs to know where they were, and its range was less than the distance a Sov armored column could get while NATO was still waking up. So, by the time things got going, the Sovs would have them instead of us having them. So they were retired. To where, I was not told. Somebody knows, I expect.
Not if your income is over $100k. When California become all Mexican, it will have the lowest tax burden.
Really? The satellite they just launched was on a rocket that has a range "of about 155 miles" (pdf). If that rocket has more "launch energy" than what's required "to put a warhead halfway around the world," then why does it have a range of only 155 miles? That seems a bit mysterious. But you have a lot of expertise on this subject, so hopefully you can enlighten us.
You should also explain why they have been able to put a satellite into orbit while also not being able to demonstrate a missile with a range of more than 1,200 miles. That seems quite odd, if it's really true that "it takes less launch energy to put a warhead halfway around the world than to put the same warhead in orbit."
It's not just that Iran is not close to having an accurate 6,000-mile missile. They are also not close to having an inaccurate 6,000-mile missile.
You seem to be concerned about a high-altitude EMP pulse that is delivered via a satellite. But if the attack is delivered via a satellite, how does an ABM base in Poland help us? The satellite can travel around the Earth in the opposite direction.
By the way, people who worry about EMP, like the Heritage Foundation, realize we need to consider the risk of EMP delivered via "a Scud-type ballistic missile launched from a vessel in U.S. coastal waters." If Iran can put a nuke in orbit, they can also put a missile on a boat. Therefore it would be a lot smarter to deal with this issue by hardening critical assets (and preparing in other relatively simple ways, like making sure spare parts are pre-positioned). That's not cheap, but it's cheaper than continuing Reagan's Star Wars boondoggle. And it has the advantage of protecting against all EMP threats, regardless of how they're delivered.
What makes ABM very attractive to certain people (link, link) is that it's very expensive. It's mostly designed to deal with the threat posed by the end of the Cold War. The threat to certain people's income, that is.
Wow, that's entertaining. The people who have their panties in a bunch about the Fairness Doctrine are going to flee to a place that ranks slightly above Egypt and Syria for press freedom. More (see here, p. 293):
I highlighted the parts which help explain why Republicans might love the place.
Good riddance.
Ditto. I hope all the other true patriots follow in the footsteps of these true patriots.
====================
diversity:
Vapid, snarky comments are no substitute for saying something substantive. You should tell us your basis for suggesting that I lack "a sound, basic grounding in math and science."
And I always get a kick out of people who mock the use of external references while using no external references and while defending others who chronically avoid the use of external references. Welcome to the right, where unsupported factoids are always (if they lean in the right direction, literally) considered superior to documented facts.
And maybe what you're trying to tell us is that the folks at CPAC and Palin rallies who chanted "USA, USA, USA" are quite ready to modify their chant ("Singapore, Singapore, Singapore") if it means having a few extra bucks in their pockets. And I couldn't say you're wrong.
for a satellite to be placed in orbit, it has to attain a velocity that is greater than that of ICBMs. why do you need someone else to show you "external references" on the Internet for that simple fact? similarly for a rocket to go to moon, it needs attain the escape velocity which is greater than an orbital velocity. of course orbit velocity varies with the height of the desired orbit. takeoff your political hat and put on the highschool science one, you will see it clearly. anyone who puts a satellite in orbit already has an ICBM that can reach anywhere on Earth. what they don't have is a proper guidance system to drop the bomb where they want.
you know you can find almost anything you want on the internet; a link to something is not the same as "documented facts".
Shorter-range ballistic missiles (the old Thor, for example, or the SS 20)need less speed than the ICBM.
Of course, a factor in all this is how much mass is to be accelerated to the desired speed.
Re-entry at 15,000 mph is a hell of a problem, and the solution(s) add weight which would not be necessary on, say, a SCUD which is going far more slowly. And most satellites are designed to go on forever, or burn up in the atmosphere when the orbit decays. Some, more heavily built, may not burn up before impact and shooting them down is fun.
It is easier, up to a point, to miniaturize the warhead (China/Clinton/Loral)than to build a bigger rocket.
But, as has been said before, the genie is out of the bottle and nobody, but nobody, has to recreate the Manhattan Project. Just find the right blueprints, say from a computer Los Alamos lost, and you're good to go.
The idea that you can look at the technology of, say, five years ago and insist that, by planted axiom, no further progress is possible is a flat, deliberate lie.
You are trying to make it seem that Jim Rogers went to Singapore to seek out greater freedom of the press. He didn't. I don't know why he left the US, but his departure shows that rich people are willing to leave, can leave and can be happy somewhere else.
Singapore is well known as having an autocratic, but despotic government. That's not the issue. You keep flying off the topic and presenting all kinds of irrelevant Google results thinking that you have proved something. You haven't.
Velocity and range are not the same thing. An ICBM needs less velocity than a satellite launch, but it needs a lot more range.
By the way, the velocity difference is not that great. Escape velocity is 11 km/s, and an ICBM travels at about 7 km/s.
An ICBM without a guidance system is not an ICBM. What you're saying is the equivalent of saying that if my grandma had balls, she'd be my grandpa.
Anyway, you and moore are both ducking the key question. If the issue is EMP via a satellite, how is an ABM installation in Poland going to protect us? All they have to do is send the satellite around the other side of the planet.
I have presented a number of facts. Are you disputing any of them? Why don't you tell us which ones?
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zarkov:
You're missing the point. There are obviously some people who love money more than they love freedom. I think America can get along fine without them. In fact, I think America is better off without them.
You're warning us about the rich people who are going to flee to Singapore. I'm explaining to you why this is a good thing.
Lao-tzu
Note that Rogers has kept his US citizenship and thus is still required to pay US taxes (unlike Templeton, who renounced his US citizenship in 1962).
If I had to guess I'd say someone posted this laudable paean to humility in an effort to get someone else to stop kicking his ass.
What a joke.
The velocity spoken of is the speed at which the rocket motors cease burning. That is out of the atmosphere. The rest of the flight is coasting. About 15,000 mph and the right angle and the thing will go from Moscow to DC, the bulk of it ballistic (hence the term "ballistic", as opposed to, say, powered all the way), which is to say coasting with dead engines and the boosters all cut away.
Another 3000 mph and the right angle and the thing goes into orbit.
There is no "range" in the sense of wondering how long the thing can go on a tank of gas.
So velocity is the same as range, given a good aim.
Jeez.
It is you who is pretending to know that I lack "a sound, basic grounding in math and science." Here's my word for that: obnoxious. And making the allegation while refusing to substantiate it is this: cowardice.
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aubrey:
Yes, and my grandma is the same as my grandpa, given that she had balls. Tell us where the "good aim" comes from if you have no guidance system.
And since moore and sagar seem unwilling to do so, do you think you could be the one to explain how an ABM in Poland is going to protect us from a nuclear satellite that is traveling in the opposite direction?
We mock what we become.
~ Mel Brooks
Having shown yourself to be a complete ignoramus about basic ballistic physics, you switch topics - albeit to a reasonable question.
The ABM in Poland does not protect us from an equatorial-ish satellite launch.
So what?
You want to keep the discussion on today's Iranian capabilities (presuming you trust the CIA that told us all about the WMD's and how the Soviet economy would equal ours by 1990).
A real policy discussion has to include the future, and the probable Iranian future is to have both nuclear weapons and ICBMs. They have been making steady progress. They are a large country with a lot of very bright engineers (lots of them trained at US graduate schools).
So you can stick your head in the sand and ignore the threat, because it feels better politically.
When you adopt that posture, the part of your anatomy most elevated is that which best symbolizes your argument.
There are considerably more than one person who think that technology of today is all there will ever be...if saying so is politically convenient.
"We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge, doubt increases."
- Goethe
If you're willing to call me "a complete ignoramus" you should be willing to point out which of my statements are the statements of an ignoramus. Why haven't you?
You're full of it, as usual. I didn't "switch topics." The question you're finally answering is a question I asked you way back here, shortly after you suggested that the ABM in Poland would protect us from a satellite launch.
Now you tell us. Why were you implying otherwise? You said this:
And then you said this:
You have been defending the Poland ABM. You have been telling us it works, and you have been telling us we need it, even though Iran does not have missiles that can travel 6,000 miles, because "Iran just put a satellite in orbit" and "hence Iran has the ability to launch a nuclear EMP attack, without warning, anywhere on earth - as soon as they have a nuke."
Now, after I have pointed out several times that this argument is bogus, you are finally admitting that this argument is bogus. What took you so long, and why did you present a bogus argument in the first place?
If they are smart enough to develop nukes and ICBMs, they are also smart enough to develop a way to deliver a nuke that does not require tossing it over our ABMs in Poland. But I realize there are certain people (link, link) who will starve if we don't keep fighting the last war.
And you didn't just claim that we needed the Poland ABM to protect us from Iranian ICBMS. You suggested that we needed the Poland ABM to protect us from "a nuclear EMP attack" delivered via satellite. Now you finally admit that's bogus. Why did you say it in the first place?
And the pro-ABM crowd is a prime example, because it is (as I said) designed to fight the last war.
By the way, people who worry about EMP, like the Heritage Foundation, realize we need to consider the risk of EMP delivered via "a Scud-type ballistic missile launched from a vessel in U.S. coastal waters." If Iran can put a nuke in orbit, they can also put a missile on a boat. Therefore it would be a lot smarter to deal with this issue by hardening critical assets (and preparing in other relatively simple ways, like making sure spare parts are pre-positioned). That's not cheap, but it's cheaper than continuing Reagan's Star Wars boondoggle. And it has the advantage of protecting against all EMP threats, regardless of how they're delivered.
A 2004 report estimated the cost to harden components as follows:
"Hardening most military systems, and mass-produced commercial equipment including PCs and communications equipment, against HEMP or HPM reportedly would add from 3% to 10% to the total cost, if the hardening is engineered into the original design. To retro-fit existing military electrical equipment with hardening would add about 10% to the total cost."
So as you and the report note, the cost would be substantial to protect critical assets against EMP. But we need the total costs of ABM research and deployment to measure it against the estimated costs to harden the built environment, before we could conclude that ABM would be more costly than protecting critical components with hardening.
What makes ABM very attractive to certain people (link, link) is that it's very expensive. It's mostly designed to deal with the threat posed by the end of the Cold War. The threat to certain people's income, that is.
ABM is part of a solution among a multi-faceted approach to provide some form of protection against an EMP attack being launched via a ballistic missile. Another facet is also hardening certain components against EMP.
It's fair to claim that ABM might be "part of" some kind of solution, to some kind of EMP attack (like, say, an attack via a missile launched from a ship in our coastal waters). It's not fair to claim that ABM in Poland is going to protect us from an Iranian EMP attack via satellite. Trouble is, that's the claim that was made. And the important public discussion of important and complex matters like these is not helped when people make disingenuous claims.
It's fair to take into account all the different costs you mention. But the key point about hardening is that it addresses every EMP attack, regardless of the method of delivery. To the extent that we rely on some kind of ABM defense, clever people will find a way around that.
In fact, the point of Safeguard was to defend the Minuteman missile fields, not the nation as a whole or any particular part of it elsewhere. But by making it chancy that one leg of the triad could be taken out in a first strike, the Sov planners could be made nervous.
Second leg was boomers, and the Sovs were working on anti-sub stuff. They never caught up, but there was some promising stuff we had that they might have come to. One was the incredible--speaking metaphorically--prospect that the difference in water height caused by a submarine traveling SUBMERGED could be discerned by radar from satellites. Combined with a nuke-headed missile aimed more or less at that part of the ocean, there was at least a theoretical possibility of taking out our boomers. The Sovs never got there, but the possibility had to be considered.
Our bomber crews were a bunch of brave, doomed guys. There was no third leg of the triad, at least as the Sovs were concerned.
However, today, we don't face thousands of warheads. So far, not many MIRVs. Now, we're in a position to stop one or two, currently all the bad guys have or will have shortly, thus actually protecting CONUS against nuke missiles.
Different scenario.
No "last war" crapola here. Different scenario.
Sorry about the wording:
ABM is part of a solution among a multi-faceted approach to provide some form of protection against an EMP attack being launched via a ballistic missile.
should be:
ABM is part of a multi-faceted approach to provide some form of protection against an EMP attack being launched via a ballistic missile.
but your points are well taken on ABM capability to hit an orbiting? satellite.
A note on shielding. Depending on the weapon used and how it is configured, EMP field strengths can differ greatly. At some point, EMP protection costs probably become cost prohibitive due to the technologies needed to protect against EMP, and the challenges retrofitting that protection into the current built environment. It's a matter of assessing risk.
For civilian applications, if people made sure that protective packaging and enclosures are MIL-STD-1686 and MIL-HDBK-263 compliant, that would be a good start.
The second has relatively short range and is only of interest to military systems. HEMP, on the other hand, can affect areas 1000mi in diameter or more, with relatively constant amplitude throughout (the ground is in the near-field). HEMP is hard to protect against because of the very short rise-time of the pulse, which means that it has significant energy at frequencies well into the GHz range.
HEMP is the threat under discussion here, and it is very real and very dangerous.
Yes, provided the new bad guys are dumb enough and/or cooperative enough to make sure to deliver them exactly the same way the old bad guys were going to deliver them: by dropping them out of the sky. And not just that, but to make sure to toss them right over where our ABMs are located, like Poland.
Here's what's different about the "scenario:" the new bad guys are smart enough to get us to do to ourselves what the USSR did to itself: collapse under excessive military spending. We're going bankrupt because we spent money we didn't have ($3 trillion, once all the bills are paid) on a war we didn't need. We spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Military spending, when measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, is at its highest level since WWII. When our enemies can scare us into spending billions on exotic defenses that don't even work, they win without firing a shot.
And that's why Bush and McCain got high grades from Al Qaeda:
But I don't mean to suggest that those exotic weapon systems are totally ineffective. They are actually very effective at making sure that certain important people don't starve (link, link).
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moore:
Unfortunately you are running off in a different direction instead of taking responsibility for making a bogus claim.
I was simply providing a technical comment.
I have not made bogus claims nor avoided responsibility.
If you want to have a responsible debate, supply information that is relevant.
Then there must be more than one John Moore posting here. Because someone using that name suggested that we needed the Poland ABM to protect us from "a nuclear EMP attack" delivered via an Iranian satellite. That's a bogus claim. And no one using the name John Moore has taken responsibility for making that bogus claim.
If you want to have a responsible debate, then avoid making bogus claims. And when caught making a bogus claim, take responsibility for doing so, instead of bogusly claiming that you made no bogus claim.
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