Re: Clock is Ticking as McCain Campaign Hides Palin from the Press

John Galt wrote:
Balanced View wrote:
John Galt wrote:
Balanced View wrote:
John Galt wrote:
Balanced View wrote:
John Galt wrote:
Balanced View wrote:
Winston wrote:
Balanced View <Nill@xxxxxxxx> writes:
Republicans are running against their own record,
pretending that for the last eight years they didn't run the whole show.

You seem to be forgetting that the Democrats have been the majority
party in both the House and Senate for the last two years. Not that
that's caused any big change in policies...
-WBE

What majority? The Republicans have broken all records for filibusters. The current crisis was set in motion
over four years ago with record debt, Iraq , and tax cuts.....

First of all, budget resolutions can't be filibustered. Senate rules. That said, let's put it aside and move on.

Second, although there's no question that the GOP has followed an obstructionist policy, this is still an excuse. The Senate is designed to work only when the majority party compromises enough to attract minority votes. So, you can reverse that "filibuster" argument right around and point out that the majority party, given the opportunity to govern effectively through compromise, failed to do so.


You cannot compromise with what negates what the very purpose of a bill stands for.

Granted. However, you'd have to go into each individual bill to determine if that in fact was what occurred. if you position is that ALL BILLS OVER TWO YEARS were in that situation, well, that position can be viewed as absurd prima facie. Bills are simply too complex to believe that there were no compromise positions that would pick off opposition.


Republicans have no intention of
compromising, when the republicans were in the majority democrats had difficultly even getting permission to get a meeting
room.

I'm not excusing the GOP behavior while in the majority. However, the record shows that for the most part, compromise was simply not attempted by the majority. Neither "side" has much to brag about by their behavior, but putting ALL the blame on one side, which "coincidentally" is the one you dislike? That's a partisan view, and not one that's rooted in reality.



(As an aside, there are occasionally calls to change the Senate rules to simple up and down votes. IMO, they should return the cloture rule to 66%. The Senate is not supposed to be about bludgeoning your opposition into submission -- it's supposed to be about compromise leading to effective legislation. Remove (or further weaken) the cloture rule, and the nastiness only gets worse.)

I agree with that


There is also a broader issue concerning this sort of argumentation. In that I get invovled in a lot of politicoeconmic discussions, there is a tendency for the "sides" to blame the other as long as one "side" owns at least one of the "big three" of the White House, Senate, and House. A partisan might claim that "The only time "my" party is to blame is if they have the White House, the House, and a veto-proof majority in the Senate." (IOW, it's never "my party's" fault.)


Again, it's a matter of history, which has shown us when Republicans are power the economy does not perform as well for
the majority of the population.

Depends one what stats you are using to define "the economy".

It's well documented and cites have been posted here many times. The economy and the market has historically performed better
under the democrats than the republicans by quite a margin.

Sorry, but it's NOT well documented, because "the economy" can be measured in multiple ways. It's not all GDP growth, and it's CERTAINLY not the stock market. Most people would say its GDP growth, employment, and inflation, but measures such as the GINI index, % under poverty line, wage inflation and deflation, etc. all matter. Whenever anyone makes a global statement about "the economy" using a subjective term, you simply have to get them to define what statistics are, IN THEIR OPINION, the "economy."

Partisans don't like to do that because the statistics, of which the above list is simply a subset, always show a mixed bag. The stats are never all negative; witness the uptick in US manufacturing exports over the current yet. Partisans tend to cherry-pick the stats to show what they want to show, which is risky business when they are suddenly confronted with somebody who understands macroeconomics.



Further, there is no logical reason for breaking up the economic cycles using artificial boundaries like elections. The economic cycle does not change for elections.

True enough, policies carry over, but the historical trend since 1927 shows a pattern of better performance under the Democrats.


Example. Is the "Bush" economy better or worse than the "Clinton" economy? Well, putting aside that there is a "real economy" which refuses to be bounded by presidential terms for a moment, most partisans wishing to slam Bush measure statistics from the last Clinton year (2000) to today. Looks pretty bad. Bush sucks, huh?

Most I've seen don't, there wasn't much change in the market under Bush until March 2001. The market closed at 10,587.59
on January 19th 2001 and didn't drop below 10,000 until March. There was no major drop until 9/11.

You're a year off. The Dow peaked in January of 2000, and at 11700 and change:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/charts/charting.asp?iax=1&Symbol=%24INDU


From there, there was a 16% pullback over the following six weeks, oscillation until a secondary peak of 11200 and change in August was hit. From there, a new low of 9500 in March of 01, a retest of 11300 in May of the same year, and from there a gradual decrease until the 9/11 crash.

You wanted the stats from when Bush took over and I gave them to you.

Actually, I was the one arguing that matching this sort of data to Presidential terms doesn't tell you anything. But, no matter. MY point was that the market peaked in the first Q of 00, and oscillated down from that point, corresponding to the burst of the dot-com bubble.

I was working in dot coms in 2000. I remember the timeline very well.

The day before Bush assumed office the
market closed at 10,587.59 and didn't drop below 10,000 until March, no major drop occurred in the market until 9/11.
The market on September 10th closed at 9,605.51, was back up to 9,410.45 within a month, and closed for the year
at 10,021.57. As for 2000 leading up to Bush taking over the market was quite stable, from mid September right through
to the end of the year.

Well.......... :-)

Forget Bush and Clinton. 2000 was the last year of an economic bubble we usually call the "dot-com" bubble. During that bubble, stats which measure personal prosperity hit highs they had never before seen. Very nice, but bubbles break.

The big dump was in the Nasdaq, the Dow remained quite high and as I said before made no real major dumps until 9/11.

Point here is that if you compare the current Bush year with the year PRIOR to the dot-com bubble (still a good economy in 1997) the picture looks very different, and in fact, many of the statistics used to compare personal prosperity would show that not much had changed since that time. In short, and to a large extent. what we've done from the "prosperity" standpoint over the last ten years is stay the same in real terms.

LOL The current year has been a disaster, where have you been? Since January the market has dropped 1611.95 points,
you have record foreclosures, Freddie, Fannie and several banks being held up by the Fed and unemployment @ 6.1%
In 1997 during the same period the market went up 1323.15 points the unemployment rate for 1997 was 4.9 %.

I didn't say the current year wasn't a MARKET disaster. The market's not the economy. The market is reacting some very real
issues, and bread and butter issues are very much under pressure.

You compared the current year to 1997, claiming things are pretty much the same, and they are in no way comparable.
Your claim of " The market's not the economy" does not hold water in this case, what has happened in the market this
past year has effected everyone.

I said nothing about the market -- you're the one who entered the market into the discussion, and thus you're making a straw man argument. MY point was concerning economic data such as unemployment, inflation,etc., and was simply pointing out that comparing data from the top of a one bubble to the bottom of another is misleading.

I think that's quite obvious, and not a particularly controversial statement in the least.

Business cycles occur, and investors are paying the price for some very stupid decisions made by some very smart people on Wall Street. This Too Will Pass. I didn't blame Clinton for the dot-com bust, I don't blame Bush for subprime. There isn't any discrete economic action taken by the Admin that can be shown to have led to this mess.

I don't know how you can actually believe what you wrote, your claim "There isn't any discrete economic action taken by the Admin that
can be shown to have led to this mess" is total denial. This administration has run up record debt and deficits, destroying the dollar,
forcing the Fed to keep interest rates artificially low to stimulate the economy. This caused the housing bubble, and the whole mortgage
mess.

Well, to be blunt, you're wrong. :-)

The subprime matter and attendant credit "crunch" was caused by loose lending standards starting in or around 1997. This began when certain Wall Street "financiers" realized that you could package risky mortgages that were outside FNMA standards with more stable bonds and create, under the accepted principles of Modern Portfolio Theory, a package of assets with a high expected ROI that S&P and Moody's could be induced (heh) to also rate highly.

Who wouldn't want to buy a package of assets returning 12-15% and rated AA+?

Unfortunately, the smart guys on Wall Street (you can use the word "greed" here, if you like) forgot that easy money mortgages are in and of themselves inflationary. The homebuilders got into the act, built like crazy since it looked like everone from Donald Trump to Joe Sixpack were going to want a second home or condo in Vegas or Miami or on a golfcourse in Scottsdale, the market got overbuilt, and, well, supply and demand took its natural course.

I am horribly sorry, but there's no government culpability here. Fannie and Freddie aren't it -- they continued to write mortgages the old fashioned way, which is why 99% of their portfolios are still performing, compared to much lower numbers at WAMU and Countrywide and such. The Fed, who you allude to, is an independent agency which didnt' change policy between the Clinton and Bush admins, and as to record debt -- well, that's bad policy to be sure, but trying to link that to an oversupply in housing? Well, good luck.



You can take the Truman position if you want, but the fact is that the economy is a machine with many moving parts, and not all of those moving parts are able to be manipulated by the government.

JG


The ones they could move they did, and with terrible results. You can't cut taxes, borrow trillions and run record deficits
and not have an effect on the economy.

Well, sure. Now, tell me how to fix it. You can't raise taxes enough to cover a 500B deficit without depressing the economy, inhibiting capital formation, and encouraging capital flight.
Canada was in the same situation during the early to mid 1990's, the Wall Street Journal was contemplating their bankruptcy.
They cut pretty equally programs across the board, and raised taxes, by 1997 they balanced the books. This was done by
a Liberal government I might add.

That leaves spending cuts, and.....remind me. Which candidate is talking about spending cuts and not increasing goverment programs?

The same bunch John voted with that have claimed they would do that since the 2000 election..... Why would you trust them again?



The last two years have been the least productive Congressional session in recent history, perhaps ever (I forget the exact numbers). It is the RESPONSIBILITY of the majority party, if they do not have a filibuster-proof majority on a vote, to use compromise to peel off the moderate wing of the opposition to the extent necessary to get measures passed. If they refuse to do so, they get to share the blame for the lack of productivity.

JG


With all due respect the Democrats didn't take over until the very end of 2006, and there is not much of a moderate wing in the
Republican party at the current time.

About six, I think. Your point as to the takeover date (Jan of 07) is well taken.

This should be obvious by the number of times the Republicans have used the filibuster,
even on issues such as supporting the troops they pride themselves on. Case in point, in one case fifty-six Senators, including
six Republicans, supported the resolution offered by Sen. James Webb, D-Va., and Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to guarantee
the soldiers fighting in Iraq adequate home rotations. This bill, supporting the mental health and readiness of front line troops was
blocked because the remaining Republican senators lined up with their leadership to filibuster it. It is clearly the Republican goal
to be obstructionist to discredit the small democratic majority.

Dude. All they had to do was throw the GOP a bone to get it passed. McConnell is only successful in the *** because he knows Reid is just as stubborn as he is, and a lot dumber.

If we weren't months before an election, the Dems ought to be able to get almost anything they want done. How? By offering to open the OCS for drilling, piece by piece, subject to a vote of the state controlling the shelf region. The public wants to drill, and if they find out the GOP is holding up a drilling package just because it's included with another reasonable-sounding democratic priority, they'll garrott their own senator if they obstruct.

Republicans have admitted to being obstructionist, they said it would be their tactic after the 2006 elections, and have already voted against issues
that will bit them in the ass in November when it's brought up in the debates. What makes you think anything the Dems would offer would make any
difference, the Republicans are still acting like they have a majority.

This close to the election, there's no compromises. Earlier, lots of possibilities. You do see the logical fallacy here, eh? "I don't think it will work so I won't try." Is that a philosophy worth a hill of beans? What happens if your kid told you "I don't think I can get a good grade, so I'm not going to bother to study?"


That's how leaders lead. Reid is no leader. Pelosi is much better, because she's shown the cojones to tell the far-left wingnuts to *** off regarding troop funding and presidential impeachment. Try either of those little tricks and the Dems would be a minority party for two decades, and she knows it. But, THEN, she hammers through stuff that's surprisingly agressive considering her small minority, and she's held together that coalition by manuvers such that her blue-dog democrats haven't had to make a vote that will get them fired. That's leadership.

Reid, OTOH, has no balls. Pelosi does all that great work in the House, and because McConnell saddles up Reid and rides him on a daily basis, legislation goes nowhere.

JG

I'm not fond of either one. What should have been done is blitz the media every time the Republicans blocked a " For the Troops"
bill and hung them out to dry.

That's what I'm saying, basically, execpt adding that your media blitz goes over a lot better if you can say you've made an attempt to find common ground.

JG

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