Youtube report on Tea Baggers in Washington, DC last weekend ...
24 comments:
Svend
said...
You know, it is fun and fine to have some laughs at the expense of these people. But we can't afford all this. We're broke. The wars, the bailouts, the entire Federal Reserve system. We're in serious trouble and the media seems confident that as long as they can marginalize any dissent there will be no day of reckoning. By the by, I was at the 2003 anti-war protests and the media ignored and/or mocked those too.
But it can't be. We can't afford all this. We can't afford universal medical insurance. We just can't. Just like poor-ass dysfunctional Miami can't afford a football stadium. The Feds could afford a larger safety net if we ended the empire but even Hope and Change is making no moves towards that. Maybe we draw down Iraq (while escalating the Afgan situation) but we have troops in more than 80 states, with significant bases in Korea, Japan, Germany and others.
We are a few failed bond actions away from developing country status. Final Answer. America has benefited from the Bretton Woods regime (#2) and that is unwinding now. It is time to think about the endgame.
The ones who were interviewed were total idiots...and they shouldn't be allowed to vote. They don't know enough to make an informed decision...Glen Beck for president...you have to laugh at people like that, or cry. I would rather laugh.
I spoke to a friend who went to the tea party. I said where were you when Bush was president? why didn't you complain then? He said "Well Bush protected us from the 9-11 attacks." I said even Bush admits now that there was no training camps or weapons of MD in Iraq -- my friend countered: "Iraq, Afghanistan, all those countries are the same, we should destroy them all...". End of conversation for me. Too stupid.
Bush totally fucks up the economy and now Obama takes all the heat. I didn't like giving money to all those corporations but they were too big (mergers) to all go under without taking us all under with them -- a lot of suction there. Doing nothing wasn't an option in my view.
People in the video said they were out of work: Well how are they going to get health insurance? Nitwits.
"Bush totally fucks up the economy and now Obama takes all the heat."
Bush certainly didn't help. The prescription entitlement, the wars, the first bailouts. But this isn't entirely on Bush. Look back to Clinton for the recent roots and to Nixon for the fundamental groundwork. We are still suffering the economic blowback from the Vietnam war.
Hope and Change ended the second Larry Summers entered the administration.
If the United States had anything nearing a sane sphere of public debate we wouldn't be talking about this. Obama made the decision to run for office and then won. This is his boat now. He has to actually fix it. The bailouts were a huge waste. I have an undergrad in econ and masters of finance and masters of accounting. Spent just under a decade abroad in industry. I'm no quack. Do NOT believe the propaganda that the bailouts were necessary. Banks fail. That's life. They fail. Unless they've bought Hope and Change, then they don't fail. They get your money.
Incredible. You don't allow my comments and then post comments under my name that I didn't write.
Do you know what the problem in this country is? I've been denying it to myself for a very long time. I used to defend Americans. Here is the problem:
Americans are complete idiots. Liberals, conservative, repbus, dems. All of you are complete idiots. I am a dual UK/CAD citizen, but have lived here since adulthood. You get the country you people deserve, and what you deserve is a nation run by the idiots, for the idiots and with the support of half the idiots (depending on which team is in charge).
Any debate about any issue immediately becomes about the president. This to me is the largest sign you are all idiots, as congress passes the laws, not the president. Good god, you idiots don't even know what to worship.
Looks like Miami Beach City Commission candidate Sherry Roberts is having some problems at her Condo (where she is President of the Board).
Sherry Roberts failed to seek residents approval for million of dollars in changes to the property.See link below. Wonder if she will blow of citizens like this when she is on the City Commission?
This blog has become so far left that it's no longer fun to read. Only Democrats are smart and perfect and you disparage anyone that doesn't think like you.
What a shame! It used to be so good before you became so partisan.
Gimleteye said... Let me address the partisan issue, since I posted the Youtube video. I call this the Age of Stupid, and the Age is bipartisan. For example, conduct of organizations like ACORN is indefensible. But on the other side, any group that mixes up demagoguery with the demolition of a civil society should be carefully washed out of the public domain. Unfortunately, one of the characteristics of the Age of Stupid is the apparent inability of the public to distinguish one from the other. From my point of view, the Obama administration had made a mistake in not clearly distinguishing and articulating for people the opposition's fact and fictions. President Obama needs to go further than simply saying, as he has, "Don't forget how we got here." Obama's predecessor refused to take up the challenge of speaking to Americans as adults. Obama now needs to explain, too, how we got to this place in time, connecting up to powerful forces and corporations who are investing heavily in keeping all Americans in the Age of Stupid. We have plenty of local examples: the Miami Dade Charter Review Commission where "parochial" interests were held up as virtues, or, the way that FPL is pushing around ratepayers while our county commissioners wallow in the idiocy.
Lastly, I appreciate the point of view expressed by Svend in the first post; that I partially agree with and partially don't. He's right on some points-- but the argument has been made well, that we averted a Depression a year ago by flooding the financial system with liquidity. The problem today is that there is so much fog around the issue of how we get out of debt and reform the economy, that issues like health care reform-- a necessity in my view-- are being subsumed in the undifferentiated mess.
I spent the better part of an hour earlier today scanning the various sites and blogs to try and understand what specifically the Fox-Pajamas tea parties are about. Having absorbed about as much of the literature as I can, I have to say I'm still befuddled.
Option 1: It's a protest of the bank bailouts orchestrated by Bush and now Obama. But surely these tea-partiers understand what would happen if we didn't bail the banks out. Are they advocating letting major banks fail? Or are they advocating a Krugman-style government take-over? No idea.
Option 2: It's a protest against tax hikes. But there have barely been any! Are they arguing that the planned return to Clinton era marginal rates is an outrage worthy of the colonists ... only months after an election in which the winning candidate ran on exactly that platform? Is that postponed future increase so radical that it demands a protest modeled on one in which people were taxed with no representation at all? Truly bizarre. And when you consider that we have gone through a very long period of relatively low taxation for the very successful, and a very long period in which their wealth has soared, and after an election where a majority of such people voted for Obama, the extremism seems unrelated to anything substantive underneath it.
Option 3: It's a protest against illegal immigration. Ok, so why the tea? Weren't all the original tea-partiers illegal immigrants?
Option 4: It's a protest against government debt. Yay! I will leave aside the somewhat awkward fact that Fox News and Pajamas Media barely covered the massive debt racked up by the Republicans during a period of economic growth. Instead, I'll proffer a simple point: If the tea-partiers are concerned about debt and concerned about taxes, one presumes they favor drastic spending cuts. But what are the tea-partiers proposing to do to Medicare, Medicaid, and social security?
I'd love to see a proposal that they support on any of these entitlement programs, but particularly Medicare which is the culprit for much of the debt burden. Where is it? Or are we really going to hear more diversions about "pork"?
As a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power, I guess I should be happy at this phenomenon. And I would be if it had any intellectual honesty, any positive proposals, and any recognizable point. What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.
These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.
I went to an anti war protest before the Iraq war, there was as many stupid wack jobs at that protest as there were at this one.Hell Nancy Pelosi and W could make most of these folks sound like genuises. Politics in this country is beginning to resemble a WWF or MMA event and that's scary. I definetely don't like the way this country is headed and I don't agee with Obama but he's not the only one responsible. Plenty of blame to go around, GWB wasted tons of our money both at home and abroad, Nixon spawned the EPA, Lyndon B Johnsons war on poverty is an abysmal and expensive failuure, FDRs alphabet soup of government programs were a boost to todays economic mess. Personaly I prefer my president to be the strong silent (Cal) types.
Bush protected us from another 9/11? Hell, it happened on his watch. Why didn't he protect us from the first 9/11? The video is full of anti-science mouth-breathers. I can hardy watch such stupidity, not because they have convictions but because they don't know why!
The FDR alphabet soup agencies that survive to this day are why we don't have bread lines and starving masses during this economic free-fall.
And to give a shout-out to an R: Nixon's EPA has saved thousands of lives, many of them elderly and children. Pollution in the 70s was so bad that you had to drive with your headlights on in Chattanooga TN, rivers caught fire, eagles nearly became extinct, and cancer went from a fluke disease to an epidemic.
I am bringing it back around to Svend's "can't afford" comment. Here are some "can't affords". Perhaps someone else will add on some more
We can't afford "too big to fail" and we are creating that when we bail them and then let the little guys go under. The little guys that need to go under, need to go under - ok - but we are just creating huge monsters. FDIC insurance is skyrocketing for the smaller banks, who are doing much better and needing less assistance than than the big guys. This is causing them to continue to loose their edge. Who the hell thought bigger was better. Greenspan - you have screwed us.
We can't afford to have states where 90% of the medical insurance is written by one company.
We can't afford to not regulate. Even Switzerland is in trouble, people. It's time to put some rules in place and move on.
We can't afford to let our military strength dwindle. If not now, then in the near future, we can't afford to not put missiles in Poland or the Czek Republic. Has anyone noticed what is going on with Russia versus Iran versus Venezuela. It's getting scary.
We can't afford to have pissy comments between the right and the left and not talk about the fact that in the very near future, our entitlements are going to be six times the GDP. We can't afford 77 trillion dollars.
We can't afford to get rid of the Fed, but we need to tame the beast. The reality is, this type of international banking control is the equivalent of nuclear armament. We have to have a Fed now because other countries have the equivalent of one and we will get squashed if we don't protect our own interests. However, talk about far over reaching authority...
We can't afford to not stand up to China now before the tiger is too large and too strong. It might get ugly. The tarrif talks are not going well. This is going to hurt - but hell, what do you do about it. We can't afford to not deal with it.
Sanity so in your opinion only the federal government is competent enough to fix these problems? The same folks that brought us FNMAE, Social inSECURITY, Welare, The Post Office, etc etc God Help Us (ooops I forgot Im a non believen heathen)
I never said I wanted NO government I just want a government that stays withing its bounds. -protects us from foriengn invasion (keep an eye on those tricky Canadians) -Manages the cuurency in a stable and sane manner (Not Like Greenspan or Bernahke) -Keeps our streets safe (like not letting crazy mayors knock on your door at midnight) -Builds and Paves the streets and highways(without using MASTEC or Church and Tower) That's about it the rest should be left for the rest of us to figure out Maybe I'm an optimist but me thinks we can handle it quite well (not perfect, but what is) Once you start down that slippery slope of government expansion you end up with Bailout and Ballparks financed by already overburdened taxpayers.
24 comments:
You know, it is fun and fine to have some laughs at the expense of these people. But we can't afford all this. We're broke. The wars, the bailouts, the entire Federal Reserve system. We're in serious trouble and the media seems confident that as long as they can marginalize any dissent there will be no day of reckoning. By the by, I was at the 2003 anti-war protests and the media ignored and/or mocked those too.
But it can't be. We can't afford all this. We can't afford universal medical insurance. We just can't. Just like poor-ass dysfunctional Miami can't afford a football stadium. The Feds could afford a larger safety net if we ended the empire but even Hope and Change is making no moves towards that. Maybe we draw down Iraq (while escalating the Afgan situation) but we have troops in more than 80 states, with significant bases in Korea, Japan, Germany and others.
We are a few failed bond actions away from developing country status. Final Answer. America has benefited from the Bretton Woods regime (#2) and that is unwinding now. It is time to think about the endgame.
No it is good to laugh at these people. too bad the video is so bad...It took forever to load.
"No it is good to laugh at these people."
What do you mean?
The ones who were interviewed were total idiots...and they shouldn't be allowed to vote. They don't know enough to make an informed decision...Glen Beck for president...you have to laugh at people like that, or cry. I would rather laugh.
I spoke to a friend who went to the tea party. I said where were you when Bush was president? why didn't you complain then? He said "Well Bush protected us from the 9-11 attacks." I said even Bush admits now that there was no training camps or weapons of MD in Iraq -- my friend countered:
"Iraq, Afghanistan, all those countries are the same, we should destroy them all...". End of conversation for me. Too stupid.
Bush totally fucks up the economy and now Obama takes all the heat. I didn't like giving money to all those corporations but they were too big (mergers) to all go under without taking us all under with them -- a lot of suction there. Doing nothing wasn't an option in my view.
People in the video said they were out of work: Well how are they going to get health insurance? Nitwits.
They are stupid but you should feel sorry for them. Pity goes a long way. Actually I do like Obama. I think he is principled.
"Bush totally fucks up the economy and now Obama takes all the heat."
Bush certainly didn't help. The prescription entitlement, the wars, the first bailouts. But this isn't entirely on Bush. Look back to Clinton for the recent roots and to Nixon for the fundamental groundwork. We are still suffering the economic blowback from the Vietnam war.
Hope and Change ended the second Larry Summers entered the administration.
If the United States had anything nearing a sane sphere of public debate we wouldn't be talking about this. Obama made the decision to run for office and then won. This is his boat now. He has to actually fix it. The bailouts were a huge waste. I have an undergrad in econ and masters of finance and masters of accounting. Spent just under a decade abroad in industry. I'm no quack. Do NOT believe the propaganda that the bailouts were necessary. Banks fail. That's life. They fail. Unless they've bought Hope and Change, then they don't fail. They get your money.
Incredible. You don't allow my comments and then post comments under my name that I didn't write.
Do you know what the problem in this country is? I've been denying it to myself for a very long time. I used to defend Americans. Here is the problem:
Americans are complete idiots. Liberals, conservative, repbus, dems. All of you are complete idiots. I am a dual UK/CAD citizen, but have lived here since adulthood. You get the country you people deserve, and what you deserve is a nation run by the idiots, for the idiots and with the support of half the idiots (depending on which team is in charge).
Any debate about any issue immediately becomes about the president. This to me is the largest sign you are all idiots, as congress passes the laws, not the president. Good god, you idiots don't even know what to worship.
Yep, you are not the same poster -- pretty obvious. Hey, Svend, make your name a hot button or people can steal your thunder.
I nominate glenn beck for Crazies Czar.
Looks like Miami Beach City Commission candidate Sherry Roberts is having some problems at her Condo (where she is President of the Board).
Sherry Roberts failed to seek residents approval for million of dollars in changes to the property.See link below. Wonder if she will blow of citizens like this when she is on the City Commission?
www.decoplageownersconnect.com
Swamp? Will someone please vet him first?
I hate to think he is not certifiable enough to be the leader of the Crazies.
This blog has become so far left that it's no longer fun to read. Only Democrats are smart and perfect and you disparage anyone that doesn't think like you.
What a shame! It used to be so good before you became so partisan.
Gimleteye said...
Let me address the partisan issue, since I posted the Youtube video. I call this the Age of Stupid, and the Age is bipartisan. For example, conduct of organizations like ACORN is indefensible. But on the other side, any group that mixes up demagoguery with the demolition of a civil society should be carefully washed out of the public domain. Unfortunately, one of the characteristics of the Age of Stupid is the apparent inability of the public to distinguish one from the other. From my point of view, the Obama administration had made a mistake in not clearly distinguishing and articulating for people the opposition's fact and fictions. President Obama needs to go further than simply saying, as he has, "Don't forget how we got here." Obama's predecessor refused to take up the challenge of speaking to Americans as adults. Obama now needs to explain, too, how we got to this place in time, connecting up to powerful forces and corporations who are investing heavily in keeping all Americans in the Age of Stupid. We have plenty of local examples: the Miami Dade Charter Review Commission where "parochial" interests were held up as virtues, or, the way that FPL is pushing around ratepayers while our county commissioners wallow in the idiocy.
Lastly, I appreciate the point of view expressed by Svend in the first post; that I partially agree with and partially don't. He's right on some points-- but the argument has been made well, that we averted a Depression a year ago by flooding the financial system with liquidity. The problem today is that there is so much fog around the issue of how we get out of debt and reform the economy, that issues like health care reform-- a necessity in my view-- are being subsumed in the undifferentiated mess.
From Andrew Sullivan's blog some that nails it:
I spent the better part of an hour earlier today scanning the various sites and blogs to try and understand what specifically the Fox-Pajamas tea parties are about. Having absorbed about as much of the literature as I can, I have to say I'm still befuddled.
Option 1: It's a protest of the bank bailouts orchestrated by Bush and now Obama. But surely these tea-partiers understand what would happen if we didn't bail the banks out. Are they advocating letting major banks fail? Or are they advocating a Krugman-style government take-over? No idea.
Option 2: It's a protest against tax hikes. But there have barely been any! Are they arguing that the planned return to Clinton era marginal rates is an outrage worthy of the colonists ... only months after an election in which the winning candidate ran on exactly that platform? Is that postponed future increase so radical that it demands a protest modeled on one in which people were taxed with no representation at all? Truly bizarre. And when you consider that we have gone through a very long period of relatively low taxation for the very successful, and a very long period in which their wealth has soared, and after an election where a majority of such people voted for Obama, the extremism seems unrelated to anything substantive underneath it.
Option 3: It's a protest against illegal immigration. Ok, so why the tea? Weren't all the original tea-partiers illegal immigrants?
Option 4: It's a protest against government debt. Yay! I will leave aside the somewhat awkward fact that Fox News and Pajamas Media barely covered the massive debt racked up by the Republicans during a period of economic growth. Instead, I'll proffer a simple point: If the tea-partiers are concerned about debt and concerned about taxes, one presumes they favor drastic spending cuts. But what are the tea-partiers proposing to do to Medicare, Medicaid, and social security?
I'd love to see a proposal that they support on any of these entitlement programs, but particularly Medicare which is the culprit for much of the debt burden. Where is it? Or are we really going to hear more diversions about "pork"?
As a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power, I guess I should be happy at this phenomenon. And I would be if it had any intellectual honesty, any positive proposals, and any recognizable point. What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.
These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.
I went to an anti war protest before the Iraq war, there was as many stupid wack jobs at that protest as there were at this one.Hell Nancy Pelosi and W could make most of these folks sound like genuises. Politics in this country is beginning to resemble a WWF or MMA event and that's scary.
I definetely don't like the way this country is headed and I don't agee with Obama but he's not the only one responsible.
Plenty of blame to go around, GWB wasted tons of our money both at home and abroad, Nixon spawned the EPA, Lyndon B Johnsons war on poverty is an abysmal and expensive failuure, FDRs alphabet soup of government programs were a boost to todays economic mess. Personaly I prefer my president to be the strong silent (Cal) types.
Bush protected us from another 9/11? Hell, it happened on his watch. Why didn't he protect us from the first 9/11? The video is full of anti-science mouth-breathers. I can hardy watch such stupidity, not because they have convictions but because they don't know why!
Cato: So you want a John Wayne prototype?
The FDR alphabet soup agencies that survive to this day are why we don't have bread lines and starving masses during this economic free-fall.
And to give a shout-out to an R: Nixon's EPA has saved thousands of lives, many of them elderly and children. Pollution in the 70s was so bad that you had to drive with your headlights on in Chattanooga TN, rivers caught fire, eagles nearly became extinct, and cancer went from a fluke disease to an epidemic.
I am bringing it back around to Svend's "can't afford" comment. Here are some "can't affords". Perhaps someone else will add on some more
We can't afford "too big to fail" and we are creating that when we bail them and then let the little guys go under. The little guys that need to go under, need to go under - ok - but we are just creating huge monsters. FDIC insurance is skyrocketing for the smaller banks, who are doing much better and needing less assistance than than the big guys. This is causing them to continue to loose their edge. Who the hell thought bigger was better. Greenspan - you have screwed us.
We can't afford to have states where 90% of the medical insurance is written by one company.
We can't afford to not regulate. Even Switzerland is in trouble, people. It's time to put some rules in place and move on.
We can't afford to let our military strength dwindle. If not now, then in the near future, we can't afford to not put missiles in Poland or the Czek Republic. Has anyone noticed what is going on with Russia versus Iran versus Venezuela. It's getting scary.
We can't afford to have pissy comments between the right and the left and not talk about the fact that in the very near future, our entitlements are going to be six times the GDP. We can't afford 77 trillion dollars.
We can't afford to get rid of the Fed, but we need to tame the beast. The reality is, this type of international banking control is the equivalent of nuclear armament. We have to have a Fed now because other countries have the equivalent of one and we will get squashed if we don't protect our own interests. However, talk about far over reaching authority...
We can't afford to not stand up to China now before the tiger is too large and too strong. It might get ugly. The tarrif talks are not going well. This is going to hurt - but hell, what do you do about it. We can't afford to not deal with it.
Any one else...
I want a Silent Cal prototype (Calvin Coolidge)
Sanity so in your opinion only the federal government is competent enough to fix these problems? The same folks that brought us FNMAE, Social inSECURITY, Welare, The Post Office, etc etc
God Help Us (ooops I forgot Im a non believen heathen)
For Cato:
Civilization and profit go hand in hand.
Calvin Coolidge
I never said I wanted NO government I just want a government that stays withing its bounds.
-protects us from foriengn invasion (keep an eye on those tricky Canadians)
-Manages the cuurency in a stable and sane manner (Not Like Greenspan or Bernahke)
-Keeps our streets safe (like not letting crazy mayors knock on your door at midnight)
-Builds and Paves the streets and highways(without using MASTEC or Church and Tower)
That's about it the rest should be left for the rest of us to figure out Maybe I'm an optimist but me thinks we can handle it quite well (not perfect, but what is)
Once you start down that slippery slope of government expansion you end up with Bailout and Ballparks financed by already overburdened taxpayers.
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