The Boston Globe sent a reporter out to the lovely confines of the Puget Sound region to do a story on Dave Reichert, as an example of House Republicans walking a careful line between opposing the recently passed "stimulus" plan versus just saying "no" to Obama outright.
Notable passage:
Reichert believes voters have grown more skeptical of the stimulus as they have learned more about it. On the day of the vote, as the phones in his Capitol Hill office jangled with constituent calls, Reichert started answering them himself: Not one of the dozen callers asked him to support the bill. (Aides told him the total tally ran 10-to-1 against the bill.) Last week, when he held a "tele-town hall," more than 5,000 people joined the conference call, more than 10 times the usual, and he could not find a stimulus proponent to engage.
In a maddening twist for the netroots, the MSM coverage paints Reichert as an independent and a moderate, not the partisan hack our friends on the left side of the blogosphere so earnestly insist that he is. Maybe those stories keep describing him that way because it's true?
Posted by Eric Earling at February 24, 2009 09:05 AM | Email ThisSince off year elections tend to favor the party out of power Reichert's 2010 prospects look good. The worsening economy will cost the D's some seats next year, though probably not enough to lose control.
Posted by: Kato on February 24, 2009 09:04 AMHowever he's been on the right side of every vote of this crap since Sept.
Posted by: Andy on February 24, 2009 10:05 AMSo Congressman Reichert is in very good company, since there are far better reasons than political ones to oppose an obscenely expensive grab-bag of goodies that benefit Democratic constituencies, at the expense of the country as a whole for two generations.
The P-I really outdoes itself in Pravda mode. PUBLIC STRONGLY BACKS OBAMA - OBAMA VOWS TO SLASH SHORTFALL - OBAMA'S DEFICIT GOAL NEEDS PERFECT BALANCE - DEMOCRATS TARGET REICHERT OVER HIS NO VOTE ON STIMULUS
The paper does show a vestigial half-percent of shame for its over-the-top fawning. There is a photograph of Obama, carefully framed so that the Presidential seal forms a perfect medieval halo over his oh-so-pious demeanor (normally his nose is high in the air, but this graphic is in competition with paintings of Renaissance saints). The paper humbly placed it on page A4, instead of its rightful position front and center on A1.
There's one other hilarious article on A4, headed HOUSE DEMOCRATS PROPOSE $410 BILLION SPENDING BILL. Wonder how that will affect Obama's "Perfect Balance"? Tune in to his governing-from-the-center address tonight and see him rip the Dems a new one for jeopardizing it.
NOT.
Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive on February 24, 2009 10:26 AMPee Eye's 60 days end March 9th-can't come fast enough.......
Posted by: Hank on February 24, 2009 11:54 AMFrom 2000 to 2006 G.W. Bush, never met a spending bill he didn't like. He was the President of Pork!
Someone please tell me this is just an innocent bizarro world joke.
Posted by: diamondshards on February 24, 2009 02:04 PMWhat was the budget deficit for FY2006, the last year of the GOP and President Bush's budget? It was $162 billion.
FY2008 had a $438 billion deficit. And FY2009 is shaping up to be around $2.3 TRILLION.
So you're OK with the Slavery Party and Obama expanding the budget deficit by 14 times? And then proudly trumpeting it'll be $1+ trillion a year for the next 3 years, and hopefully down to "only" $533 billion after 4?
Factless,
You mean that Hannity and Rush have 10 listeners for every listener to Err Amerikkka and Blova-M? You mean that "evil conservative talk radio" is 10 times more popular than idiot "progressive Marxist" talk? Maybe the nation is NOT so Marxist as you believe, Factless...
Posted by: Shanghai Dan on February 24, 2009 03:00 PMt a 3 trillion dollar war
Citation please. This is a simple lie.
Posted by: Shanghai Dan on February 24, 2009 03:04 PMMeanwhile the party in power went about reducing taxes (aka reducing revenue) while spending on Mega-Pork like mad. One lone politician called them out and was shunned by the party, he later went on to be that parties nominee...but the damage had already been done.
Could it be the same President who said:
"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system"
Guess that's what happens when you let the free-market run wild and you put foxes in charge of the hen house. They eat all the revenue generators leaving with you with no revenue.
If you're referring to Franklin Raines, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, you're correct.
And Obama's solution to out of control deficit spending? EVEN MORE out of control deficit spending. Hope-n-change!
Posted by: Palouse on February 24, 2009 03:23 PMPeople really could care less about your ultra-right wing radio led by an overweight drug addict. What people choose to listen to (right or left) is really none of mine or anyone else's concern.
The "Fairness Doctrine" is just some BS they make up to keep the ratings up and make the base freak out. Even if such an item ever did make it to the floor of Congress it would die a swift death.
At least he's trying to prevent the Bush recession from getting worse. I'm still waiting for the GOP plan (let me guess more tax cuts for the rich?).
Do tell me how would your hero Caribou Barbie solve the fiscal crisis? You want to talk about Govt. waste, Gov. Palin's home state actually has to pay people to live there. What a crock.
I suppose it was this one, but the one that I heard had some mention about Boeing and jobs in it.
In any case, it motivated me enough to call and tell him to absolutely *not* vote for that garbage.
You're using a well-debunked story from two people - the only two who have come close to that claim. It's not at all close to reality (which is $550 billion, 17% of your number), as it uses a lot of "what ifs" and "what could be" assumptions.
But if you're willing to accept such tenuous assumptions, then you must surely accept the CBO's own estimate that the stimulus bill has a real cost of at least $3.1 trillion.
Posted by: Shanghai Dan on February 24, 2009 06:25 PMGuess which President finished his term with a budget surplus which some misguided President after him decided that the Govt. should never run a surplus (even a minimal one) and proceeded to bribe every taxpayer in America with that money.
I know you Slavers like to talk about Clinton, but the debt increased each year because the budget was not balanced; projections are not reality.
So to answer your question, I think the last President who ended his term with a surplus was Andrew Jackson; I know the last President to have a balanced budget was Eisenhower in 1957. That was the last year the national debt went down.
Here's the truth of the matter:
When surpluses occur in modern times, they tend to be short-lived. Only once since World War II, in 1947 through 1949, did the federal government have three consecutive budget surpluses.1 The only other postwar back-to-back surpluses came in 1956 and 1957. By contrast, before the Keynesian Revolution of the 1930s, on three occasions the U.S. ran 10 or more years of consecutive budget surpluses: 1825-1836 (12 years); 1866-1893 (28 years), and 1920-1930 (11 years).
Now read the bolded section again - BEFORE Keynesian idiots took over (like the Marxist Messiah), we ran long term surpluses; it was only after the disaster that was FDR - and the Marxists who came after him - that our deficits have consistently strangled this nation.
But to get to your fundamental point, just to make sure:
$162 billion deficit is bad
$2+ trillion deficit is good
HOPE AND CHANGE!
Posted by: Shanghai Dan on February 24, 2009 06:42 PMGive him a gold star! What a crock. The porkulus is just government expansion that puts us even further in debt. Even the nonpartisan CBO says it will have a negative impact on GDP.
I'm still waiting for the GOP plan
They proposed a real stimulus. An alternative plan that was promptly dismissed by Democrats because it didn't include the massive pork.
Posted by: Palouse on February 25, 2009 07:24 AM