I would submit conservatives are spending a lot more time trying to find things to be outraged over than reporting the news and basic facts online from a conservative perspective.
-Erick Erickson on RedState
We have received another call to condemn one of our own, this time from Kirsten Hughes of the Massachusetts GOP. They are disgusted that Rep. Markey is attending a fundraising at the home of Eliott Spitzer’s sister, with Eliot Spitzer there. Rob Eno has heeded the call and condemned the misogyny involved. Mr. Eno and his audience at RedMassGroup are fairly new at the misogyny condemning business however. With a post titled, “Hughes: Markey shows ‘disgusting judgement in mysoginistic fundraiser host Eliott Spitzer”, it’s clear he can’t even spell it.
Now that’s putting the faux in faux outrage!
♦
From Gabriel Gomez’ letter to supporters we get a promising line:
Out of touch career politicians in Washington won’t solve our crushing debt crisis. We need new ideas.
Well, first off, it’s pretty “out of touch” to be complaining about the debt crisis which affects people in their everyday lives how exactly? So what are Mr Gomez’ new ideas? From the Fiscal Responsibility section of his issues page we read:
Washington, DC has a spending problem.
The Federal government has become a bloated organization with no budget, and runs at an annual loss. Today, we are $16 trillion in debt.
Meanwhile, career politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to kick the can down the road and print more money.
We recently raised taxes on the wealthy, and on every worker in America with the payroll tax hike.
It is time now to reach across the aisle and work together to enact meaningful spending reductions in a fair and equitable way, without hurting our military preparedness.
It seems that Mr Gomez’ “new idea” is to say what every other Republican has been saying since 2009. Very innovative!
Republicans have been talking about spending reductions for as long as I can remember — at least since 1980. When given the chance to ACT, they do just the opposite.
The GOP spent trillions of dollars in the few short years it took them to reverse President Clinton’s federal surpluses. The GOP held the Oval Office, the Senate, and the House — and launched not just one but TWO wars and a simultaneous ENORMOUS tax reduction (primarily benefiting the already-wealthy).
The GOP is historically the party of spend spend spend.
Not to mention the countless trillions of dollars on building a pork barrel vanity project for President Bush called a democratic Iraq. What an unrealistic fantasy purchased at the tax payers expense (and sadly with countless drops of Iraqi and American blood).
Republican economics are straightforward in this regard.
When there are too many Democrats in government, then it’s the time for austerity; when there are an adequate number of Republicans, then deficits don’t matter.
… frame on Clinton (without being explicit about it, of course), and the he actually made it work to the point that he had a surplus, must drive them to no end of batty.
If you’re really concerned about the deficit lets go back to and see when we were making progress on that problem and go back to those tax rates.
Don’t you love the convenient omission of the spending cuts in the fiscal cliff deal itself, and in all the prior showdowns, to the tune of $1.8 trillion over 10 years? The raised taxes on the wealthy are the ONLY new revenue in any of this. And the “tax increase” was no more than allowing, in part, the scheduled expiration of tax cuts that created the deficit problem to begin with and did nothing positive for our economy.
Gosh, even the Wall Street Journal and Goldman Sachs now are saying this is not the time to cut more. But let no Republican ever let economics or facts get in the way of a good fantasy.
The increase in income taxes was only on people earning more than $450K a year. For everyone else,the Bush tax cuts have been locked in and do not expire as originally legislated. As someone on Tom Ashbrook’s show today on NPR said, that’s only the top 0.7%. Overall, if you look at it this way, this was quite a win for the Republicans.
at the time. Looking at the graph to which I linked, the new revenues far outpaced the spending cuts in the New Year’s deal. At first glance, it’s by far the best of the post-2010 deals.
But when you look at it (1) in combination with all the other deals (which were 100% spending cuts), (2) considering the fact that the sequester cuts were not scrapped, but were kicked to now, and (3) taking into account the difficulty of getting any new revenues after that deal, I think it was a big win for the GOP.
It preserves low income tax rates up to an unacceptably high threshold ($450K after all the deductions), preserves low rates on dividends, capital gains, etc.
The Republicans manufactured outrage exists to blunt the impact of very real outrage on the part of Democrats and others, which true outrage is often a direct result of what is left of the conservative perspective: if the Republicans can keep up the noise level, real outrage gets lost and calm, rational, often independent, voters only see and hear a ceaseless rage-gasm from both sides of the aisle and are too sane to even try to differentiate the two…
Consider the rational independent who comes to BMG and sees this very post: they have the option to mentally floss and differentiate the real outrage, (KBusch, somervilletom) over the glaring difference between what GOP’ers say and what they do, from the fake outrage (Eno, et al) over the attendance of Elliot Spitzer at a Markey fundraiser. Or they could go look up stats of the Red Soxs’ hot new prospects. Even tho I’m invested deeply in the process, 6 times outta 10 I’m still going to go check the Red Sox roster, so I don’t blame them in the least for doing it 9 times outta 10, or even 10/10…
Outrage, on both sides, whether real or imagined creates a barrier to entry for those who are not invested in daily rage… and why would it not do so…? I blame the GOP for ginning up false outrage and muddying the waters, but I also blame on Dems for wallowing in the outrage, often impotently, expecting somebody else to do something about it: ref guantanamo, Iraq war, and why isn’t Cheney warming a prison bunk at the Hague?…
Nobody said democracy couldn’t/wouldn’t be gamed: the GOP has gamed it adeptly and the Dems religiously keep to the GOP rulebook… even as the GOP is constantly revising it.
Though I will say, if our side doesn’t match up the outrage factor, then we get our side not showing up – like 2010. Rage fuels action in a lot of respects. It also gets you press coverage. If you never get angry, but try to stay reasonable, in the face of the other side hopping up and down like a kid having a tantrum, you’re actually in a lot of ways worse off.
Anger at the stupidity keeps me getting up off my couch and knocking on the doors of the less-angry, to try and get them to the polls.