Beckel: "Every Republican who's complaining about it now voted for reconciliation on George Bush's tax bills"
March 01, 2010 9:48 pm ET
From the March 1 edition of Fox News' Hannity:
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The spin on Fox goes round and round....
Obama wants to mandate minimum benefits of health insurance for all citizens and they attack him mercilessly.
My favorite argument for Republican hypocrisy is that Republicans will happily sign away trillions of dollars to kill muslims because, perhaps a few thousand radicals among a billion want to blow up our buildings. But to ask for 4% more tax on our income above $250K is blasphemy.
You will never end terrorism. There's no way to win. The day after we kill every last Al-Qaeda extremist, a new terror organization takes its place. We are the most powerful country in the world.. people are going to hate us.
Healthcare is something we can fix.
The stupid lady at the end asks, “Isn’t it true that Obama spent more in his first year than Bush did in his full eight-year term?” to which that dimwit Hannity responds, “Yes.”
Now, I don’t know where they went to school but they might want to look into taking a course in remedial math before they embarrass themselves any further.
Therefore, I will try to keep it simple for them:
The budget in Bush’s final year in office came in at $3.1 trillion.
The budget in Obama’s first year in office came in at $3.4 trillion. With me so far, Sean?
Now, are they suggesting that Bush only spent $300 billion in his entire first seven years as President?
And another thing: Bush never included the cost of the wars in his budget. Obama did, which means that Obama’s first budget might actually have been smaller than Bush’s final one.
OK, class dismissed (but Sean needs to do all the even-numbered problems for homework and be ready to explain them on the board tomorrow).
It used to happen to me too. After you cut or copy from Word, you paste the text first into Notepad (if you have Word then you probably have the no frills Notepad also), and then cut it or copy it from Notepad, before pasting it here. That eliminates any formatting that might have been in the Word text, including font size or font type or quotation marks issues or whatever. It works, it's sort of like money laundering I guess.
As for your post, I got it and agree completely.
Do you realize that the federal spending has doubled since President Clinton's last budget? True, his last budget had federal spending at about one and eight tenths trillion dollars, and the numbers you cite show how much federal spending increased during George W. Bush's administration. Why did federal spending increase so much during Bush's presidency? You already referred to IRAQ and Afghanistan, and it's defense spending in general that caused the doubling of the federal budget. In addition, the Bush administration's last year and a half was spent stealing a trillion dollars from America's banks and unregulated financial services companies, and much of that theft was covered out of the U.S. Treasury as you know. TARP accounts for much of the sudden budgetary 'balloon' that President Obama inherited.
That's enough of that, it's pizzing me off just typing it out... let's just note that defense spending is what's driving the obscene level of federal spending at present, and when it comes to discretionary spending (which is the only kind of spending that can be cut, versus mandatory spending, such as interest on the national debt), when it comes to discretionary spending where cuts can and should be made, defense spending is by far the single biggest item in the budget. More than ninety percent of defense spending is discretionary, that's nearly seven hundred billion dollars in this year's budget alone. No other agency or department comes even close to that level of discretionary spending, I think the State Department's budget has the next highest level of discretionary spending, at a measly sixty billion in comparison. So we know both where the obscene overspending is, and where it can be cut back, as only discretionary spending can be cut, and defense is more than ninety percent discretionary as I said. Lastly, and on a final aggravating note, I do not think at present that President Obama has it in him, to tackle this problem for us. He made defense spending off limits to cuts as you know. He seems not to have the courage or the intelligence (despite only he having the authority) to confront the Pentagon and it's looting of the U.S. Treasury in the name of George W. Bush's and Dick Cheney's "war on terror" (and in the name of Lockheed Martin and others too). Sorry, but at this early stage, the man seems completely insubstantial in this regard, he seems weak and appeasing, even cowardly. Sorry.
The fact is, Bill Clinton put his presidency on the line for real health care reform. Obama never did that. Bill Clinton was elected with 43% of the vote and had smaller majorities in the Congress, but governed as if he had a mandate for the CHANGE he promised in the campaign. Obama was elected with 53% of the vote and given big majorities in the Congress, and spent his first year acting as if he had won a disputed election and the Congress was controlled by the Republicans.
I wonder when Bill Press, Thom Hartmann, Stephanie Miller, etc. will recognize that Bill Clinton was a great progressive, compared to what we've seen from Barack Obama thus far?
There are things that I completely disagree with that Clinton did (trade policy, NAFTA), but I really don't think he completely understood the implications of those policies, or his advisors misinformed him of the potential results. Ultimately, he should have listened to Ross Perot, who actually read the tea leaves correctly with respect to US trade policy. That being said, if Bush I had won the election we would still be in the same position regarding trade (perhaps worse) because he too would have passed NAFTA and other crippling policies.
If Al Gore had embraced him more, He would have won by much more than he did and the Supreme Court would not be able to steal the election for Bush and September 11th would be just another day on the calendar and we would still have surpluses, Maybe even greener technologies. Certainly more American jobs for the 5 thousand people who would NOT have died in the two wars Bush started.
Yeah, I haven't gotten over it. Thank you Sandra.
You could have stopped right there...I hardly even bother with the details any more.
The only bill of nay significance that President Obama has signed is the Stimulus package for (recently revised) $800 billion dollars. One third of which were tax cuts!!!
The big lie is that to the GOP... Tax Cuts do not equate to spending.
The rest of the deficit increase is due to the recession and the reduced tax revenues due to a faltering economy.
And btw... the fact that President Bush didn't include his two wars in the budget is fraud.
See how effective the right wing shouting machine is?
What's disturbing is that on Sunday it was a journalist showing up a pol; here a pol is showing up a supposed journalist.
And what did that woman's remark have to do with the forgoing? Forget that it was a lie... where did it come from? Makes me think of some of the trolls one encounters here:
Poster: Beck/Limbaugh/Whoever just made a racist remark.
Troll: Yes, but where do you find communism in the Constitution?
Conservatives's love for Massachusetts is well-documented, going all the way back to the 1972 Presidential election.
ZERO.
Hannity is, well, Hannity.
And Beckel is a misogynist and known John.
When either comes on my TV, it's remote do your thing.