by Jack
Looks like the old republican moderate, Sen. Richard Lugar, may be on his way out the door after almost 40 years in the Senate.
Thanks to the Tea Party and a rock solid republican candidate, another career politician is finally about to be removed. His republican opponent (Richard Mourdock) accused Lugar of being too cozy with democrats and being part of America’s debt problems. He’s promised to uphold conservative principles and stand firm against the overspending that has the nation near bankruptcy. Lugar is 10 points behind in the polls and he may have to turn to democrat voters if he is to salvage the election.
The Tea Party is alive and well and working at the local level!
Moderate Dick Lugar is running an ad against his more conservative (Tea Party) opponent, Richard Mourdock. It features a woman whining that Mourdok will cut Social Security. Lugar is using the Democrat lie, without saying it directly, that the Ryan budget cuts SS for current recipients. He voted for Ryans budget but a lot of voters won’t know that either.
Should serve as warning to those who seek Republican seats. America can’t take any more people who serve big government instead of the people.
Ryan’s budget does nothing to current SS recipients but does plan on making big changes for future recipients.
I’m not a fan of the Ryan budget personally. I think it is a lot of bluster that will never pass, but he looks real tough. I don’t see how we can keep giving tax cuts when they don’t equal the entitlement cuts. And I don’t see how there is no fat to trim in the defense department or Department of Homeland Security which added tens of thousands of public sector jobs during the Bush administration.
If it weren’t for the Tea Party we wouldn’t be having any of these conversations and I thought it was interesting that Ron Paul won the Maine caucus this weekend. 21 delegates is pretty amazing when the race is supposedly over. Mitt is a complete failure of the RNC, but we have to focus down ballot and as they say at Free Republic “POUR ON THE TEA”
Princess we give tax cuts because we have witnessed in the past, under president from both parties, that tax cuts spur production and economic growth. This does two important things: 1) Creates jobs and 2) Increases the tax base and therefore revenues to the government.
Future SS recipients will have better returns on their investments under Ryan’s plan. It isn’t as draconian as the left would have you believe.
http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=8521
Many legislators have suggested across the board cuts in the budget of 1 or 2 percent…you would think they could do that standing on their heads..but even that isn’t acceptable to the tax and spenders!
Some in the Republican Party have been talking about these things since even before the Reagan years. The ideas have lacked sufficient support in the populace and of course, have been demonized with scare tactics from tax and spenders that believe government knows better how to spend our money.
Ron Paul is doing very well in Nevada too!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/ron-paul-wins-majority-of-nevada-delegates/2012/05/06/gIQA1An15T_blog.html
There is a webpage that I like to visit. It shows that overall our military spending is not outrageous given it is constitutionally mandated. A lot more is spent on education, health, pensions and welfare combined…none of which was intended to be done by the federal government.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_2008USrn
This is truly a definitive time for our country. Will we be a country of free, productive, cheritable individuals served by our governments or will we continue down the path toward a socialist state where citizens become slaves to the state?
I saw what happened to my 401k when the economy started to tank in 2007. I’m glad I wasn’t depending on surviving on it because it took years to recover.
Princess, from where I sit, we’re still in recession. My stock account sucks, nobody is able to borrow much to buy homes, unemployment is still way too high…and there is more bad news coming our way soon from Europe that could plunge the stock market.
Hey Jack, You forgot the recession ended during the summer of 2009. JOKE JOKE JOKE!! Sad, no one is laughing.
Did any sane none-liberal person believe it? Just go to the grocery store and gas station or try to get a job to prove it was just another lie the libs will keep repeating.
It’s official…Mourdock won and Lugar is out:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/mourdock-defeats-lugar-in-indiana/
“Makes the program permanently solvent according to the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] by combining a more realistic measure of growth in Social Securitys initial benefits, with an eventual modernization of the retirement age.”
If you’re going to quote the CBO on Ryan’s plan, you shouldn’t only quote the good parts. Yes, it would make Social Security solvent, but at the cost of making seniors and the poor pay more for their health care.
But mentioning that would require a degree of honesty that you’ve proven to be pathologically incapable of.
Please refrain from lectures, Chris; I didn’t sign up for your class.
I provided a link so that anyone that wanted more information about any aspect of the bill could find it.
The reality is that everyone should pay a little more out of pocket for healthcare. It will help bring cost down and return some dignity to the process.
But before you turn all sanctimonious on me do please remember that Obama dipped into Medicare to pay for part of Obamacare…and then accounted for it twice to make it look less expensive. This means that he was willing to take healthcare dollars from the aging who are more likely to need medical care to pay for a lot of young healthy people who don’t. (Like Harvard students that can afford to go to that prestigous school but can’t pay $9.00 a month for birth control)
The REALITY Chris is that America cannot pretend that the programs that were started years ago can be delivered as promised without creating unmanagable, menacing debt and high taxes for EVERYONE WHO WORKS. Something has to be done and we’ve known about it for a number of decades.
Instead of tackling the problems in these unsustainable programs Democrats did what they always do; they doubled down and created another unsustainable program, Obamacare, that they can’t possibly deliver as promised. they continued to block all attempts to reform SS or MCare. And they lied about what it would cost:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=50220
When it comes to managing the people’s money Democrats fail miserably. They fail miserably at designing bills that are practical and reasonable. They are very good at making promises to people can never be delivered as promised. (And the really sick thing is they are too cheap to help people with money they have earned themselves…they prefer to spend other peoples money)
Ryan is the adult in the room.
Obama, Reid and Pelosi are the collective candy man, the sugar daddy, and like all such characters they couldn’t care less about the damage they leave in their wake.
They are creating a BOMB in your future, Chris and you are too young or ??? to realize that the adult in the room is attempting to make your future better while still maintaininga good program for grandma.
Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Tina, the claim by Human Events that the cost of ObamaCare has double is, like almost everything published by Human Events, a ridiculous lie.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/293932/no-obamacare-s-costs-didn-t-double-patrick-brennan#
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/conservatives-distort-cbo-data-to-claim-obamacare-costs-have-exploded.php
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/21/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-health-reforms-price-tag-has-doubled/
“But before you turn all sanctimonious on me do please remember that Obama dipped into Medicare to pay for part of Obamacare…and then accounted for it twice to make it look less expensive. This means that he was willing to take healthcare dollars from the aging who are more likely to need medical care to pay for a lot of young healthy people who don’t.”
This is also untrue. All of the money Obama cut from Medicare was taken out of wasteful bureaucracy. Under the ACA, benefits for seniors under Medicare CAN NOT be reduced. It is prohibited by the law.
“The reality is that everyone should pay a little more out of pocket for healthcare. It will help bring cost down and return some dignity to the process.”
This is fantastic. I beg you, Tina, to encourage your elected representatives and candidates to trumpet this idea from the rooftops. See if you can get Romney to go out there and tell Americans that their real problem is that they aren’t paying ENOUGH for their healthcare. That if they just paid a little more out of pocket they could get their “dignity” back. Please, please make sure that everyone knows this is the Republican message before November. I can’t imagine a greater boon to the Obama campaign.
Tell me, is the Bizarro World you occupy, in which the rich are suffering from persecution and the poor need to start paying up, nice this time of year? Because it sounds terrible, and I don’t think it’s a place most Americans want to live.
Right on Peggy…we’re still in deep kimche’.
Chris I only looked at the National Review article because it was sufficient to show your notable point.
However, your nasty summation of the Human Events article was not only unnecessary but unfounded as a later paragraph in the NR article shows:
Which was the point of the Human Events article.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE CONGRESS WERE FUDGING WITH THE NUMBERS TO SELL THE PROGRAM AS AFFORDABLE…IT IS NOT!
We had to pass it before we could find out what was in it!
The extremely bad news is that year from now it will cost even more than these projections show. I have posted the projected cost of Medicare and the actual cost years down the road…it isn’t pretty.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/18/health-programs-have-history-of-cost-overruns/print/
“All of the money Obama cut from Medicare was taken out of wasteful bureaucracy.”
Chris we posted the video where Kathlene Sabelious admitted that they had accounted for the $500 million twice.
“I beg you, Tina, to encourage your elected representatives and candidates to trumpet this idea from the rooftops.”
I’m expressing an opinion based on what would be economically smart to keep health care costs down overall. What do you have against getting costs down?
How about you tell me where in any world (of honesty and integrity) the majority of citizens should expect someone else to pay for their personal healthcare expenses.
Talk about a greedy, ignorant position. Living like a begger has more dignity than providing for oneself?
Take your position to it’s logical conclusion and you will find a world of beggers in search of someone that has the ability to offer a handout…healthcare will devolve back to packing yourself in snow when you have a fever.
THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH…WAKE UP!
Chris: “Tell me, is the Bizarro World you occupy, in which the rich are suffering from persecution and the poor need to start paying up, nice this time of year? Because it sounds terrible, and I don’t think it’s a place most Americans want to live.”
Chris, I hope youll add David Mamets book, The Secret Knowledge to your summer reading. Below is a link that provides a free preview, and a couple of articles with their links for full content.
The book looks very interesting to me and thought it would to you too.
http://davidmamet.com/
The Secret Knowledge
On the Dismantling of American Culture
The dismantling of the Left to rationalize its positions as an intolerable Sisyphean burden. I speak as a reformed liberal.
What Turned Filmmaker David Mamet From Liberal to Conservative? by Tiffany Gabbay
In a now-infamous op-ed for The Village Voice in 2008, Why I am no Longer a Brain Dead Liberal, Mamet revealed that essentially, he had been living a lie for most of his life, as the liberal beliefs he held fast to in his mind were not actually reflected in his day-to-day words and deeds. He wrote that after being prompted by his rabbi to engage in dialogue with those who sit on the opposite side of the ideological aisle, he recognized that he held two opposite views of America: One of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the otherthe world in which I actually functioned day to daywas made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting). After this revelation, Mamet realized that the time had come to acknowledge he was in fact part of the latter version of America.
After reading the works of economists Thomas Sowell, who he called our greatest contemporary philosopher, and Milton Friedman among others, Mamet found that he agreed with them.
a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
In The Secret Knowledge, Mamet writes that when faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, people can succumb to a belief in the power of the state and those who dub themselves experts, as means of rectifying the nations ills. What results, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winner, is a contingent besieged by Stockholm Syndrome.
He adds that the essence of Leftist thought is a devolution from reason to belief, in an effort to stave off a feeling of powerlessness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/david-mamet-talks-about-his-shift-to-the-right.html
David Mamet Explains His Shift to the Right
By ANDREW GOLDMAN
Published: May 27, 2011
Q: While reading your new book, The Secret Knowledge, I thought, My God, in crucifying liberals, this guy is going to infuriate a huge chunk of the people who pay money to see plays. Are you concerned that youre alienating your public?
A: Ive been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When American Buffalo came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, How dare he use that kind of language! Of course Im alienating the public! Thats what they pay me for.
Q: Years ago, you described American Buffalo as being about how we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business. In this book, you defend enormous payouts to C.E.O.s working for failing corporations. You seem to have changed radically.
A: I have. Heres the question: Is it absurd for a company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a C.E.O. if the company is failing? The answer is that it may or may not be absurd, but its none of our goddamned business. Because as Milton Friedman said, the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. Because when the government starts deciding whats absurd, youre on the road to serfdom.
Q: Dont you have to denounce your early, anticapitalistic work then?
A: Of course not. At that time in my life I didnt have a penny, and I was glad to be working at entry-level jobs. Having lived for quite a while longer, I see life from a different perspective. What am I going to do, go on denouncing capitalism all my life?
Q: I gather youre not subsisting on a diet of Rachel Maddow and The New York Review of Books. What do you read on a daily basis?
A: I went to a consultant a few years back, and he said, You want to make your life better? I said, Yeah, sure. He said, Stop drinking and dont read the newspapers. So I did both.
Q: Theres an anti-intellectual flavor to your dismissal of the liberal arts, saying the only thing an M.A. in English can do is bag groceries. You dont consider yourself an intellectual?
A: I dont know. If you look at Paul Johnsons or Thomas Sowells description of the term, it would be a guy whos not aware that he doesnt know anything.
Q: So if your son wanted to study sociology at Columbia, you wouldnt pay?
A: Id go check the birth records, because Im told that 17 percent of kids get given to the wrong parents.
Q: You wrote that Karl Marx never worked a day in his life. But how is his writing Das Kapital fundamentally different from the way you make a living? You realize youre not a plumber, right?
A: Jesus Christ. Listen, heres the thing about an English degree if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.
Q: Sometimes in the book I thought you were just trying to anger some of your liberal friends, like when you wrote the West sees the Middle East conflict as entertainment.
A: No, I think that its true. There has always been a different standard for the Jews. Were like honorary Aryans, as Hitler said of the Japanese. That means that were human beings only when it suits the world to treat us as human beings. Theres a pretty good book on the subject the Torah.
Q: You also wrote about hating every wasted, hard-earned cent I spent in taxes. What cent did you hate the most?
A: All of them gall me the most. Listen, Shelby Steele and I were on a panel, and some white woman asked, What can we do for the African-American community? There was a long pause, and he said, in the saddest voice Ive ever heard, Leave us alone. Its appalling what the government has done to the great African-American community in the last 50 years.
(Continued in link)