(UPDATED BELOW)
Dear House GOP:
You may have noticed that America doesn’t like you anymore. And America now expects the worst from you.
I have an idea how you can change that – pass the debt ceiling increase quickly, without a lot of drama. You’ll leave the punditocracy speechless.
Ehhh, they’ll never do it.
UPDATE 1/19: Yikes, they did do it! Yesterday. For three months. And I’m guessing when it comes back in 90 days, they’ll pass it if the spotlight can be turned elsewhere.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 
Nice try, though.
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You’re sort of right. Americans don’t like them much, but it’s because they passed the last debt increase. Don’t mistake the desires of Liberals for those of Americans. We’re not the same thing. We’re not even close anymore.
But…Why should we want them to increase the debt ceiling without drastic spending cuts? Do you like sinking deeper and deeper into debt? We’re not going to end Wimpynomics until we say enough is enough.
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[We’re not the same thing. We’re not even close anymore]
jonolan, sometimes I wonder if you’re even from Earth…
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Earth, yes. Some Socialist, Equality-in-Squalor, Liberaltopia, no.
But tell me – do you find any common ground with what you call Conservatives? Any at all?
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Hmm, that’s an interesting question, and the more I think about it, a big question, not so easy to answer…
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Yes. People love to call me a radical and an extremist, but all I do is be honest and open about society as I and many, possibly most, see it but are are afraid to admit that they do much less speak of it.
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Jonolan ,
On this topic I think we should defer to someone that almost everyone on this board agrees is brilliant . In 2006 Barak Obama said ” Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that the buck stops here. Instead Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better .”
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But, Alan, that was when Bush, who happens to be White, was POTUS. It all changed when Obama was installed in the office, didn’t you know?
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And race has WHAT to do with congress and POTUS and the debt ceiling jonolan??
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Since Obama started his bid to be POTUS Race has been central to every issue and any dissent against whatever Obama wanted, Moe. Hence, it has a great deal to do with the debt ceiling argument.
Also, don’t you find that 4 years of Obama blaming Bush for everything carries with it the echos of “Don’t blame me. Blame the White Man?”
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No I don’t find that, not at all. I’ve never heard anyone – other than some fringee radicals maybe – express that sentiment either.
And by the way, when a prez – Bush – presides over a collapse of the global economy while entering into two wars (one of htem an invasion) on borrowed money while cutting taxes, I think it’s right and proper to never forrget how we got where we are. The banking collapse happened 30 days before the ’08 election. If we assign these things to presidents, it was Bush’s fault.
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I wouldn’t blame the crash on Bush–he was just the endpoint, the one standing when the music stopped. I’d blame it on 30 years of ideology-driven conservative devastation. They bled the economy dry, gutted the public sector, turned the government into an assembly line that transferred trillions in taxpayer money to private corporations, demolished, defunded, or simply handed over the regulatory agencies to the private interests they were supposed to regulate. FDA or SEC, e coli or credit default swaps–it’s the same conservative shit.
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Of course you would, just as you’d ignore the decades-long Liberal failures that set this whole situation up by forcing the financial industry, especially lending institutions, to ignore hard numbers in favor of racial makeup and demographics.
Please remember that it was a Dem-controlled Congress that coerced the entire banking industry to create and invest in those mortgage-backed securities.
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Interesting dispatch from The Bubble, yet nothing you say is true. The facts are these:
No law ever said mortgages were to be given to people who could not afford them. The Community Reinvestment Act never forced Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make loans they didn’t want to. Neither did any other law. If they made bad loans, it was because they expected a healthy profit.
The Community Reinvestment Act applied only to banks and thrifts, which wrote no more than 20% of all subprime mortgages issued. The other 80% were written by independent mortgage companies, subject to little or no federal oversight, and driven by nothing other than pure greed. How does your fantasy Democratic legislation explain the demise of Countrywide?
Mortgage payment defaults by individual homeowners in 2007 triggered the crisis, but the sheer size of it was caused by the snowball effect of massively leveraged debt held by issuers of (unregulated, thanks again to the GOP) credit default swaps, which at the time had been written in an amount equal to 10 times the size of the entire global economy.
The GOP pushed “home ownership for all” as much as Democrats. Remember George Bush’s “Ownership Society”?
Progressives have a saying, “The facts will set you free.” And it’s not true; conservatives prove them wrong every day.
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Actually, everything I said is true, you just refuse to believe it because it conflicts with your hatred of Americans.
You’re close to right on one point though. No actual law ever forced them to loan to sub-primes. They just threatened them with EOC suits if they didn’t do so.
Laws did coerce them into the mortgage-backed securities though. They set them at 80% of value for purposes of calculating a bank’s non-liquid assets.
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Yeah yeah, sure sure, I hate Americans, I blame America first, America Love It Or Leave It, I’ve heard variations of the same drivel all my life from those demanding mindless, unquestioning subservience to power as proof of one’s patriotism. Fuck that.
As for the rest of your response, what laws? How did a calculation for valuing assets “coerce” banks into buying toxic securities? I repeat, there was never any law, coming from Democrats, Republicans, or anybody else, that stated banks must issue mortgages to people who could not afford them.
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jonolan, you think ojmo hates America because he sees his country differently than you do, so since you see things . . . you must hate America too I guess. WE’ll all just a bunch of ‘Merica-hatin’ folk here.
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ojmo – I wish more people had a clue about how it really happened . Great summation.
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Thanks Moe, yet I fear jonolan’s narrative, false as it is, will be the one that gets into the history books.
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That’s a false equivalency, Moe. There’s a world of difference between seeing the country you’re lucky enough to be allowed to continue living within as a bad place filled with bad people and what I do, which is defend it against those who can’t stand it and want to change it into something abhorrent.
As for ojmo – he or she has a small subset of the facts and chooses to present them as the whole truth so as to keep blame off the doorsteps of his or her fellow travelers.
I choose to present some of the facts that ojmo has conveniently left out, useless as that is since I’m just some fool from “The Bubble” who just won’t ever see things like the Leftists tell me to.
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Of course I don’t have all the facts, but my worldview is at least grounded in reality. The conservative is scarcely in touch with facts at all; he’s filled with nostalgia for a 1950s Father Knows Best/Ozzie & Harriet world that never existed, never will exist, and he never experienced. Moreover, he projects his sense of entitlement outward; everywhere he sees the Other trying to take away what’s his, what he’s worked and struggled for. Most of all, the conservative is enraged at the injustice of a world that no longer accepts the privilege he once took for granted; he experiences the liberation struggles of the oppressed as oppression of him.
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At least you’re honest in hatred of Americans. That’s something that I can respect and is part of the reason I bother to engage with you.
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Well said, and likewise 🙂
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Hey Moe, Hey Moe, Hey Moe … (reminds me of a song) … just this is brilliant, … and agree, they will never do it … after all, according to them, they know what Americans want.
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Hmmmm, if jonolan’s point is right, then most people in America right now are not American. I wonder what we are. (Although as I’ve stated before, I consider myself firmly American…now that I have voted, more than ever before 🙂
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Actually not, eurobrat. The majority of people within America are Americans and hold to American culture and values. Only a fairly small minority – 20% or so – are Liberals.
Sadly, however, most are not very good Americans if we judge them by their willingness to get off their asses and do something about the situation. Voter turnout is perfect evidence of that.
Combine that with a perfidious MSM that solely jabbers the Liberal agenda, and you get the situation this broken and divided nation is in today.
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Hmmm, so then why did the majority vote for Democrats this year, including a popular vote majority for the House? Are we then just saying that the majority of American voters are not American?
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There are a few points to consider in that.
Firstly, only a slim majority (57% or so) of people voted in the 1st place and many of what you would call Conservatives made the mistake of not being among them because they saw no real choice between Obama and Romney.
Secondly, 80%+ of the counties in America voted in favor of Romney but population density and electoral vote allocation made that irrelevant.
Thirdly, there’s some fairly compelling if not conclusive evidence to suggest that Obama’s 2012 win was more due to voter fraud than actual votes. As I believe some of that is going to court, I’ll wait till it does to render an opinion upon it.
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[80%+ of the counties in America voted in favor of Romney but population density and electoral vote allocation]
Sheesh, somebody did some analysis and figured out that if votes are counted “winner take all by county”, Republicans would do better. So now they want to change the electoral system. And after that, if the demographics changed so that system no longer favored Republicans, they’d want junk that and come up with some other scheme. Why not just make the Republican Party the only legal party in the country and be done with the charade?
If we went to a straight popular vote system for national elections, I could get behind that; but this other crap is just more system hacking by the Republicans, like they did with the debt ceiling.
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Yeah, have heard of this and it scares me a bit, as it could mean multiple elections in a row in which the loser wins the election. There are a lot of us in the cities, but apparently we don’t think “correctly”, so…
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Conservatives are amazingly flexible; before they were so concerned about “States’ rights”; now what’s frightfully important is “Counties’ rights”.
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Pretty soon, townships and villages! Yay?
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Eurobrat doesn’t get it and ojmo reject it. Classic..And why America is being suborned and degraded by the Left.
People in cities have different desires and needs than those outside the cities. They are have a different set of things and actions that work where they live. Most all of the neo-Socialist programs – and a large % of the eco-Left ones – only work in urban areas.
Currently, the electoral system gives them too much say in matters and effectively ignores the desires, needs, and what works and doesn’t for the majority of America.
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jonolan – call it ‘people in cities’ and ‘people outside cities’, means nothing. Most Americans live in cities and suburbs. That’s where the American people are. Or is America just the 1/6 or so who ‘live outside’?
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Well, so that’s what I just said…that the majority of people who actually went out and voted are not American according to you 🙂 which still makes this a somewhat weird nation, then.
As far as the counties…well, yeah. I realize that territory-wise, the majority of counties are conservative. But those are indeed the counties that have fewer people living there, so…why does that matter?
I would have to see some kind of convincing proof as far as the voter fraud goes, because that claim is too predictable. I knew the moment Obama won that a lot of conservatives would go into complete denial about it, and that voter fraud would be one of their go-to theories.
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It’s a simple question of placing value upon people as the electorate. As urbanites have one set of priorities, by and large, and rural and suburbanites another, it isn’t really “fair” to weigh things in favor of one group or the other.
You actually hit on what I think is the proper answer – the popular vote minus all the electoral trappings.
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What we need to do is make official our actually existing system, “dollar democracy”–one dollar, one vote.
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I’ve a variant suggestion of that here: http://blog.jonolan.net/politics/warm-body-franchise/ It only offers money as one route to franchise though.
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I do get it, but I don’t want the country’s vote to be skewed too much in favor of rural areas. Since the beliefs of urban vs. rural people are so different, I sometimes think it might be better to go back to more local control (a splitting up of the country of sorts).
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Skewing the power of the vote in either direction will have negative consequences. However, I think that skewing that power towards the rural and suburban area would do less harm overall than the way it’s skewed towards the cities right now – at least when it comes to federal voting such as the House, Senate, and POTUS.
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As you can imagine, I would disagree on the less harm part. If we skewed things that way here in my home state of Oregon, there would be a whole bunch of practically empty rural/desert counties, and the needs of the hundred or so people living there would be weighted equally with the needs of the hundreds of thousands of people who live in my urban county–and the Portland metropolitan area just so happens to comprise the majority of the population of the state. That’s just crazy. Again, if we’re going to do things that way, let’s just scrap everything and have a straight popular vote.
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