Posts Tagged ‘congress’
Okay, his proper title is Representative Ryan, but I’ll call him “private” as he’s been enlisted in the battle to reclaim America. Plus, “Picking Private Ryan” had a better ring to it. (And that reminds me how even after all these years, I’m still pissed at Hollywood for giving the Oscar to Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan, but that’s for a different rant.)
Obama’s loyal henchmen and women in the Mainstream Media wasted no time blasting away at Romney’s pick of Representative Ryan – CNN’s Candy Crowley, who in her awesome impartiality, described the pick the day it was announced as a “ticket death wish.” If you were a real journalist, you could accurately describe picking a convicted child molester as a “ticket death wish.” Calling a Romney-Ryan ticket that by any objective prognosis will get between 47 and 53 percent of the vote as a “ticket death wish” exposes you as the partisan hack you are. And this partisan shrill actually got a gig as the moderator to one of the three presidential debates!
CNN’s Gloria Borger painted Paul Ryan as someone who “hasn’t always been popular among Republicans” and yet in the very same breath also got in another dig in describing him as “a polarizing figure.” So let me get this straight – he’s upset some of his own party by being flexible enough to vote across party lines, yet he’s been intractable enough to alienate the other side. Got it.
George Stephanopoulos on GMA intoduced him as as a “Former Prom King That Once Drove the Weinermobile.” That’s what ABC and their national morning news program considers an introduction worthy of the Republican nominee for vice president. If only I could find the clip where GMA introduced Obama as a former member of the Choom Gang who only lasted two weeks in the real world working for Baskin Robins, I’d silence my complaints.
It’s plain to anyone but the blindest of partisans that the members of the Obama State Media turned in their careers as journalists to work as political operatives. I wonder, are they as aware of this fact as the rest of us are?
Regarding what Ryan brings to the ticket, it’s true that Ryan made many votes that could be described as the antithesis of the Tea Party philosophy (the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, TARP, the auto bailout) but his embrace of some of the Bush-era big-government conservatism hasn’t made him a Tea Party target, far from it, he may have energized the Tea Party base more than any remaining viable candidate could have. Perhaps it’s the way he is a policy wonk who knows the budget numbers better than most anyone in D.C. and can articulate better than anyone just how crippling these runaway deficits will be on future generations.
But more than anything, the Ryan pick will shift focus of much of the debate to Medicare and what to do to keep it afloat. Ryan has offered a plan. Obama has only offered attacks against the Ryan plan.
There is not a member of Congress who isn’t full aware that Medicare is just a few years away from reaching the “iceberg dead ahead” stage. Every two years that Congress fails to act and passes the problem off to the next Congress, the iceberg looms larger and the impending doom more difficult to steer clear of.
Every year that the vast majority of elected politicians play it safe by putting their own re-election prospects above the needs of the country in refusing to propose or endorse any tough solutions, they prove themselves to be cowards, more concerned with their political careers than the future health of the nation. This is a perfect description of the man who cast “present” votes over “aye” or “nay” nearly 130 times in seven years in the Illinois State Senate and went on to be come the perpetual campaigner for president.
Paul Ryan will be demonized by Democrats as the candidate who wants to throw granny off the cliff by daring to address a problem that only gets worse the longer it remains unaddressed but with Romney knowing full well the furious medi-scare campaign the Democrats are going to be waging, it brings a new level of seriousness and focus on the issues to the campaign. The third rail of fixing the insolvency of senior entitlements will finally be addressed.
Barack Obama offers no plan, is unwilling to make any tough choices in addressing the senior entitlement plans heading for disaster.
Paul Ryan has offered a solution that strikes a balance between those who have already paid in and are collecting now and those who are still contributing and will never collect anything if some tough choices aren’t made.
What a stark difference now in the choice between the two tickets.
After finally defeating Hillary Clinton in one of the most drawn out and contentious Democrat primaries in recent memory and finally reaching the finish line, in his primary victory speech Barack Obama promised America this:
“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
source: HuffPo – Obama’s Nomination Victory Speech
So when the greatest wildfires in Colorado history hit, the obvious question was, where was the messiah in his duties of healing the earth and stopping the fires?
98% of the time Obama goes infront of the press, he reads prepared remarks from his teleprompter and then quickly leaves the podium before any questions can be asked, but were I given a media pass and afforded the opportunity to ask a question, here’s what I would ask:
Mr. President, your defense budget cuts 65 C-130 aircraft from our national fleet at a time when the available planes are stretched to their thinest by your escalated war in Afghanistan. These C-130 planes can be fitted to drop 3,000 gallons of fire-retardent material in 5 seconds and are our most powerful weapon againt raging wildfires such as the one in Colorado which has now become the worst in state history.
As the man who promised to America that he would be the president who would slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet, how do you explain the fact that your policies have actually made worse the attempt to slow the massive wildfires in Colorado?
To which I’m quite certain he’d reply something to the effect of:
Let me be clear, our administration inherited an unprecedented level of drought and high temperatures across the nation, which caused the unprecedented amount of dry brush in Colorado which has fueled this unprecedented firestorm.
Make no mistake about it, it was the policies of the previous administration that were responsible for the climate change in America, so to remedy this, our administration has created an all-powerful EPA which answers to no one. By bypassing and circumventing all existing laws and even Congress itself, this administration’s EPA has been given free reign to fine, harass and destroy any businesses that it deems as having contributed to this unseasonable pattern of hot summer temperatures and climate change in general.
The solution is clear. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks and false starts, but ultimately, we can borrow enough money from China to have all of my billionaire campaign donors receive lucrative government contracts to install solar panels on every building in America and end once and for all the scourge of dry brush and hot summers in America.
On a day known around the Internet as “Dump GoDaddy Day,” I received the following email from my own webhost, 1&1, an email that was both spot-on politically as well as being a well-timed effort to capitalize on the exodus of tens of thousands of domains from GoDaddy.
Dear Sir/Miss,
You may have heard about Protect-IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently under consideration in Congress. If passed, among other things, SOPA requires Web hosting companies like 1&1 to police websites in order to prevent them from communicating copyrighted information on the internet. We would like to make sure you are aware of 1&1’s official position on SOPA.
As a global provider of domains and hosting services, we oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or Protect-IP (PIPA) Acts currently under consideration. While we observe the concerns of those who are troubled by the potential impact on protecting intellectual property online, 1&1 feels there is an urgent need to strike a balance between dissemination of and access to information and protection against its illegal use within the public domain.
The US government is currently reviewing SOPA and PIPA as possible ways to prevent unlawful distribution of copyrighted materials available on the internet. These current proposals, if passed, would allow for significant interventions into the technological and conomical basis of the internet. This could put the vast benefits and economic opportunities of entirely legal and legitimate e-business models at risk. Generally, companies offering technological services should not be forced to be the executor of authority in such matters. If they were to act upon every implication of content infringement without any judicial research into the actual usage of its customers, the integrity behind their customer’s freedom of information and speech would be enormously harmed.
1&1 Internet, Inc. has worked through associations and with related companies to ensure that these aspects are taken into account. Thus, we welcome the serious consideration by the US Congress of the potential harmful effects on Internet freedom should SOPA and / or PIPA be passed as law, and hope the stability of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS) remains intact.
We encourage every Internet user concerned about these plans to contribute to the debate and to raise their voice with their local representatives in the House or Senate. One way to express your concerns could be to use one of the websites that emerged to protect user interests in the current legislative debate, such as http://fightforthefuture.org/.
At 1&1 we support you, our customer, and an open internet. If you find that you are supporting a company that encourages SOPA and wish to drop them as a provider, please follow the simple instructions contained on the website linked below.
Thank you for being one of our extremely valued customers, and for taking the time to read this.
Best regards,
Frederick Iwans
General Manager 1&1 Internet Inc.
No surprise that politicians who have been bought and paid for by the entertainment industry are behind these bills, and some of them may be so completely naive they might imagine fighting piracy is the only thing that these bills will enable, but there is a lot more to worry about beyond the unfair honus the bills would place on web hosts. Look into it deeper, and these bills also give the government the power of judge, jury and executioner to take down any website they find objectionable. If you give the government a kill switch for any website it deems objectionable, just watch the abuses ensue. Absolutely, positively, we do not want to allow our government to get on the slippery slope towards Chinese authoritarian control of the Internet.
If you browse the Internet, you’ll see a beautiful coalition of left-wing bloggers and right-wing bloggers all united against these legislative abominations. Here’s an article from Declan McCullagh where he makes 2012 predictions, and at the top of the list: SOPA opponents may go nuclear. Now there’s one apocalyptic prediction we should all help make a reality.
SOPA supporters are the 1%. Don’t let the 1% kill freedom on the Internet.
Source: ibtimes.com
Is it any wonder the MSM loves them so?
The Occupy Movement talks a lot about the 1% and the 99%, but the fact is, they’re targeting the wrong 1%.
Most of OWS puts the blame on Capitalism itself, the “banksters” and those greedy CEOs out to make ungodly amounts of money. You’ll find many Occupiers speaking about corporations putting “profits over people”, apparently oblivious to the fact that a large majority of the 99-percent are deeply invested in the stock market, either directly or through retirement accounts & mutual funds and the success of the investments of the 99% requires those greedy CEOs and board members to focus on company profits as their number one responsibility to the shareholders.
For all the Commies and Socialists coming out of the woodwork at these protests, blaming Capitalism is a joke. You want to talk income disparity, just look at the disparity between Capitalist countries and everything else that’s been tried on the face of the Earth. (Fun fact for the day: the poorest 5% of Americans are richer than nearly 70% of other people in the world.)
It also doesn’t make any sense to blame a banker or a business person for taking the bailouts or loopholes that were there for the taking any more than you would blame a regular tax payer of the 99% variety for trying to make use of all the tax breaks and deductions available to them.
We can’t even blame bankers or business people for lobbying the politicians, because you know that you and I both would do some lobbying in our own self-interests if we had the means to do it as well. (And ask yourself, did it ever stop a state union from lobbying hard for bigger pensions and better benefits every year even when it’s obvious that it’s more than the tax base can afford, that the pensions and benefits are bringing about levels of spending that are unsustainable and that they’re pushing the entire state into bankruptcy?)
There’s only one target OWS should be focusing their anger on and that’s the 1% in Congress and the White House, the 1% who make the rules, the 1% who dole out billions of dollars in stimulus funds to their biggest campaign donors, the 1% who have created an entire system where even an honest person could get elected, go to Washington and in only a of couple years probably find themselves corrupted to the point of selling out their ideals and whoring out their votes just like everyone else in D.C.
Businesses and business leaders making more money than you and I can possibly comprehend are not the problem, because no one from Apple is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy that latest version of the iPhone.
You want change? Stop wasting your time hating the rich and march against the government which makes the rules, or even better, stop justifying shantytown takeovers of public places by imagining you’re making a difference carrying signs around for an hour or two and instead, start talking about specific laws that need to be changed, ways in which the political system needs to be reformed and the kind of candidates we need to find to replace the current ruling elites in Congress and the White House.
Next time you see the Occupy Movement claim they are the 99%, consider this latest poll from WSJ/NBC:
Do you consider yourself a supporter of the Occupy Wall Street Movement?
28% Yes, 63% No, 2% Depends, 7% Not sure
source: WSJ/NBC Poll via The Washington Examiner
When 63% of America does not support you and only 28% does, you are NOT the 99%! You are the misguided people marching against business, industry and Capitalism in general when the real source of your grievances are all created by the 1% running the government and making the rules.
If you ever want to regain any credibility with the 99%, stop harassing the 99% just trying to make it to their jobs, stop making the 99% late to job interviews, stop making the commute home a nightmare for the 99% and start marching on the 1% in Congress and at the White House.
Cartoon courtesy of Nico at Endless Origami.